Another Blog in the Wall

The credit crisis is now affecting me. Unbelievable. When they said this crisis was going to affect everyone - I excluded myself from that pool of individuals. I don't like to lease things, but the one thing that I could rationalize was leasing our computer from Dell. We all know this technology essentially reinvents itself and doubles in capacity and speed every 18 months. So, owning this equipment would not make sense. We had a credit line with Dell Financial Services that would allow us to lease about 5 of these machines. Those were the good old days. I recently attempted to refresh our technology and turn in our two year old machine for a new one - which is faster and cheaper than our current machine.

Working with the Sales Representative we put the deal together and then he submitted the application to the finance people. My application for a new lease was declined. Do they know who I am? My credit score is good, we never missed a payment on the current machine - and even have it setup to auto draft each month from our checking account, and the new machine was going to be $10 cheaper per month. Somehow our line of credit went from a lot to zero. We no longer have a line of credit available through the financing arm of Dell. This is the kind of thing that really bothers me - how can several million bad credit folks ruin credit for the rest of us? How about simply reducing my line of credit by a third rather than completely wiping it out?

I basically thanked the Sales Rep in the nicest way I could - by telling him that we would be leasing an Apple and hung up.

Apple's are a rip-off. A similar machine to the Dell is 3 times as much and that does not include the investment in Apple software I would have to make. By the time we finished pricing this bad boy out I would need a second line of home equity - which of course is not available to me since we are in the middle of some crisis that involves the availability of credit.

I dislike people with poor credit scores. Have you no shame? My credit score might be the second most important thing to me since it dictates life. It basically allows you to buy a house, or a car, and in some instances it is used to determine if you are a good candidate for a job. The other interesting thing to note is that in order to develop a credit score, you have to have credit - but now people aren't getting credit so they can't develop a credit score. "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?!"