Disagree. There's no intent to keep poor people out. Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.
Creditors these days tend to treat medical debt separately--someone who has only medical debt probably is someone who is responsible but something happened to them. Likewise, back in the era of the housing collapse and strategic default creditors would look at someone who had a foreclosure but nothing else far more favorably than someone who had a variety of debt issues.
Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.
No. Living within your means makes you wind up with no credit.
Utilities and landlords rarely report your on-time payments, after all. You have no history, and you need to prove yourself instead of the lenders assuming you are responsible.
And I'll mention here that different places hound folks with a recent bankruptcy, despite a variety of debt issues that led to bankruptcy.
And you can't even measure responsibility from whether or not it is medical debt. I struggled in my early to mid 20's because my then spouse wound up with a major mental health issue. He wound up on disability, and before (and sometimes after) would take money from our account or out of my purse. I know in hindsight that I should have taken different actions, but I didn't think about it in the midst of constant stress.
And at least I was finally able to leave, some years too late, but that shouldn't be required. I left due to unhappiness, not because of the illness. It would be worse if it were a child's sickness that caused the struggle - the bills might be in the spouse's name instead of yours. None of that would show up on a credit report.
Get a store card, use it for things you would have bought anyway. You can build from there. Note that your credit report doesn't really care about how much you borrowed, but how good you were about paying it back.
> Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.
No, that metric has nothing to do with it. The main things that affect your credit score are a) age of oldest credit line, b) on-time payment history, c) amount of available credit, d) credit utilization.
While "not spending too much" can be correlated to (b) and (d), it's not always a particularly strong correlation.
And even if you do all those things right, one bill -- even for $50 -- sent to collections (because your automated bill pay randomly stopped working and you didn't notice for several months -- this happened to me) can knock 50-100 points off your credit rating. Sometimes you can get this fixed, but the biller has no obligation to send a correction to the credit bureaus even if you pay the $50 and explain why you missed the bill. Enjoy waiting 7 years for that negative report to "scroll off" your score calculation. It just did for me a few months ago, and despite the fact that I have otherwise excellent credit, I was surprised how much my score went up after this was off my record.
Creditors these days tend to treat medical debt separately--someone who has only medical debt probably is someone who is responsible but something happened to them. Likewise, back in the era of the housing collapse and strategic default creditors would look at someone who had a foreclosure but nothing else far more favorably than someone who had a variety of debt issues.