Patience = A high credit score

Impatient people have lower credit scores.
If you think about it, this is pretty self-evident, and if it wasn't obvious to you, it's probably news you could have used before last season's holiday-shopping onslaught, and not after you're in full-throttle bill paying mode. Nevertheless, a study in the January issue of Psychological Science shows that a trait may be shared by a lot of people with lower credit scores.
They're impatient.

Columbia Business School professors Stephan Meier and Regina Pitaro and Stanford University's Charles Sprenger came up with this conclusion, thanks to an experiment conducted at the Federal Reserve's

The study

The researchers were trying to find the reason some people default on their mortgages, but their conclusions, as you'll see, can easily be extrapolated to consider how people pay their credit cards, auto loans and any other bill. They found that people with low credit scores were more likely to select immediate rewards rather than waiting for a larger reward in the future.

How did they determine that? Meier and Sprenger went to a community center that offered tax preparation help and sought out 437 customers with low to moderate income. They were able to get all of them to agree to have their FICO credit scores accessed, and the customers were offered cash rewards ranging from accepting $22 in cash right away or waiting a month and then getting $50.

Many of the people took $22, and those who took that amount had the lowest credit scores in the bunch, under 620. The people who were willing to wait for their money generally had a credit score about 30 points higher.

What this means for the rest of us

Of course, what the study may have failed to consider is that when you're short of cash, it may not be impatience that is driving some people to choose short-term rewards, like not paying a bill and keeping the money, over longer-term rewards, like paying the bill and avoiding the late fees and stress that come with being late with a payment.
It may be sheer desperation driving the poor financial decisions, and desperate, cash-poor people might conclude that if they accept quick cash now, they may pay a bill off faster and avoid a late fee. Someone who accepts $22 now versus $50 later may need the money immediately to buy groceries and feed a child. A whole host of psychological and financial reasons go into why and how people spend money (especially those who don't have much), far beyond who is patient and impatient.
One of the researchers, Meier, stated as much in a press release Columbia Business School sent out. But he feels there is still something to the impatience factor, explaining, "There is a little bit of strategic defaulting going on, where some people make a cost-benefit analysis and choose to have more money now and deal with the repercussions later."


True enough, and it certainly makes sense that some people make foolish decisions, particularly with what they spend on a credit card, because they simply want something now, rather than waiting until later when they have the money to pay for it.
So if you went overboard in your holiday shopping and had to max out credit cards or take out loans to do it, you have been warned. You may have spent too much during the holidays not because you're lousy at math or because you have an overly generous spirit. You may have a low credit score because you're one of those people who reads the ending of a book before you start it.

Article found at http://money.msn.com/credit-rating/impatient-your-credit-may-suffer-cardratings.aspx