Credit Trends

Trends by Domain

Our lives are full of numbers: Phone numbers, social security numbers, birthday dates, lottery numbers, lucky numbers... the list goes on. But, no number says more about us than our old favorite, the credit score.

Our credit scores speaks of our creditworthiness, gives potential lenders a peek into our credit history and even predicts our financial future. However, recent correlations have been drawn between credit scores and other factors... saying more about us than we'd ever imagined. Here are a few examples:

According to the Insurance Information Institute, drivers with lower credit scores file 40% more claims than drivers at the higher end of the credit scale.

Forget "red" state, "blue" state... certain states also have higher credit scores than others. The Dakotas and Wisconsin lead the country while Texas and Nevada have the lowest average credit scores.

We found another intriguing credit score correlation, email address domains. Based on a sample of 20,000 credit scores, our data shows that there is a difference of average scores based on what email service users prefer. Interestingly, Gmail and Comcast users came out the top with a higher average, while AOL and Yahoo users had the lowest average credit scores.

What does it all mean? Not much. Certainly switching email providers will not increase or decrease your credit score. It's more the case that people with a certain score have a greater likeliness to use a particular email provider. Why this happens is probably due to some demographic skew which then carries to the email domain. But that's not the point, we just thought it was interesting.

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I use gmail, my score is pretty high as well. But I have used yahoo and hotmail in the past - the amount of garbage cluttered on those sites makes them unbearable!

EVRYEDGE 1 year ago

What a fascinating graph... I'm no stats expert but can this be random from the sample sizing? I really doubt it can be, but this is just really interesting. Great job with the website guys!

frinxor 1 year ago

It is a very large sample. Mostly correlated to the demographics of the various user bases.

CK Moderator

I see one problem with this chart: grandfathering. I was on AOL as a tester before it was even called AOL. I even beta tested their satellite connection.

By the time faster ISPs became available (mine is now 20 MB/s down) I had so many businesses and friends with my AOL email address it would have been nearly impossible to change.

Sometimes, usage of a service does not reflect current preferences, but is just so entangled with you and your identity it's not worth the effort to drop it.

cpto 11 months ago

You should buy a domain (like myfoobar.com). I bought a domain for myself that's same as my last name about 10 years ago. Since then, I switched several countries, countless ISP providers, used several email providers, even some time had my own linux box in the basement be my mail server, and finally settled down on gmail. And all this time using same email address (which is of form fist-name@last-name.org).

Most registrars will**t your domain and forward all email to email provider of your choice for free. Depending on email provider you want to use, you might not even need this service from domain registrar.

Domains are like $10/year. More than worth it.

WoooHooo 10 months ago

I always use my Yahoo address because it remains constant, regardless of my ISP. I've had email from people who change their internet providers constantly, so it is better to have one address that is always the same. I have two other addresses, one for business and one through my ISP, but they bounce through to Yahoo. When I got my Yahoo address, I had never heard of gmail (maybe it didn't exist then). Oh, yes, my score is almost 800.

TriciaLee 11 months ago

I agree with you. My situation is almost identical to yours and I am pushing 30. I do have a gmail account too, but I chose to register with my yahoo e-mail b/c i get most of my personal business related e-mail like bills and such on yahoo. I personally think the e-mail address has nothing to do with credit scores.

rambalu80 8 months ago

I am a statistics major in undergrad and found that this graph was extremely interesting. But logically, it would make sense that this would be so.

People who have a Comcast email would be paying for their address. If they fail to make payments, the account is terminated (at least as far as I'm aware)...meaning that these people better have good credit or else they can't use their account.

Furthermore, everyone who uses GMail more or less switched to it from either hotmail or yahoo (stated in a simpler manner, those who use GMail made a choice, whereas those using Yahoo were just grandfathered in). People who changed over (including me) had a huge incentive IF they understood what their email account stats meant. I.e. what if someone doesn't understand what the difference between a MB and GB is? Why would ANYONE change over from 5MB (yahoo at the time) to only 1GB (Initial GMail).

Lastly, I rarely trust yahoo. Why would I? Almost all the "Nigerian scam" email I've ever either from Yahoo or some random server name, only a few from hotmail, and I've yet to see any from GMail. Still furthermore, maybe the lower score for Yahoo users (on average) is due to those who are more likely to fall for scams being on that service.

Of the 20 people I most commonly email, every single one is either using GMail or have their own Google apps service (meaning, they're still using Google).

Lastly, I wish this included age gradients. I'd expect that those ~20-ish would be mostly GMail, ~50+ would be mostly yahoo/AOL. The rest would be sprinkled about.

This isn't to say that there are NO exceptions...I'd just say a trend.

egyptor 10 months ago

I used yahoo email since the 90s, even before google exist, my score is 735. I think the email comparison is interesting but no facts what so ever in the numbers.

dhoanguyen 8 months ago

Yeah I agree with you. And as CK says this article is totally for fun, but I suspect this throws us into some thinking (hence we are wasting time here LOL)

madcrkrplane 5 months ago

702 with an @yahoo.com domain.

07kennebellg 7 months ago

All I can do is shake my head in disbelief, email address domains now?? When is enough enough?

Even though I have had a auto loan and paid off 3 years and 1 month early, and then got a house loan, and then needed another 400 dollar loan. I still HATE this scummy credit system. Why are they trying to make things worse?

idontknow82 7 months ago

This article is for entertainment. No one is using email domains to determine your credit score.

CK Moderator

Funny, I found something similar in my line of work (lead generation), where leads with broadband ISP email addresses outperformed Gmail, Gmail outperformed Hotmail/MSN, and Hotmail/MSN outperformed Yahoo.

Someone who has a broadband ISP provider email address like Comcast has money to afford the service in the first place. It would be interesting to see how much or how little the variations vanish between email domains if you could just look at the users' connection speeds when checking in from non-work IP addresses.

VizillaKarma 7 months ago

And while you're looking at email addresses, I suggest another item to look at: email names matching users' actual legal names. For example, does a match (i.e. John Smith with an email address johnsmith@gmail.com) do better than a non-match (i.e. Sally Jones with email address of prettypinkprincess924@yahoo.com)? I'm guessing that you'll find people with what I'd call grown-up email addresses (matches) have higher credit scores than those who don't.

VizillaKarma 7 months ago

That is an interesting theory.

CK Moderator

Totally disagreed. I believe more the people become accustomed to latest technologies like new emails, emails systems, online information storing systems, if one is intelligent and smart, they will be better off not to use their name matches in their emails ids. Hence the mismatch of ids could actually do better on credit score. So this basis is totally useless, with all due respect.

madcrkrplane 5 months ago

That a fine way to speculate how things may work in the future, mad, but currently older populations are far more likely to use their real names on the internet than younger populations. The reason being that they use the internet for maintaining and growing their real world contacts, either socially or for business reasons. Young populations are more likely use the internet for fun, and treat it more like a game.

zbeeblebrox 2 months ago