Southern Credit Scores

 The Washington Post reports...

"Almost every corner of America’s most populous region — every race, every income bracket — appears to have low credit scores. But why?

With precious few exceptions, it looks to be a neatly regional phenomenon. We spent hundreds of hours scraping Airbnb listings to determine the true extent of the American South, but we could have saved a lot of time if we’d just drawn a line around the contiguous places with low credit scores."

 

Alabama's average credit score is: 726.0 - 733.7

 

 

WHY??? The Post report continues.....

"With the obvious factors ruled out, we were stumped. Until we called economist Breno Braga at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan D.C. think tank. Braga, who studies how credit-ratings data quietly determines so much about our lives, took about 16 seconds to diagnose the problem.

“The reason why credit scores are so low in the South has gotta be connected to medical debt, because that’s the most common type of unpaid bill that people have,” Braga said. And the South, he said, easily has the highest levels of medical debt in the country."

So thank your Doctor and/or Hospital/Clinic.