this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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I've heard of people getting their credit score up, taking out all their lines of credit, then dipping to Europe for 10 years to start a business. By the time they came back, their credit scores were fine again because it had been long enough to not affect it. Obviously planning to do this ahead of time is illegal, but if it just happens by circumstance and you're stuck in Europe and can't pay back the debt for 10 years then like…
Default judgment wants a word with you
My understanding is you can absolutely end up with a lien and other such things, so it wouldn't be a good idea unless you're ready to burn every financial bridge with the US for the foreseeable future. But if you're not coming back, then that's that I guess.
Then like…what? You have massive debt and can never return? Or we’re pretending Europe is a different planet and you can just “start new”?
“You’ve heard of people”. No, you haven’t.
nO yOu HaVeNt sorry for not including a link that took me three seconds to google, asshole
https://www.reddit.com/r/expat/comments/1bwy9qt
Europe doesn't use the same credit history system as the US; so yes, it quite literally is a different planet in that sense and you quite literally can start new. This is not financial advice.
Oh so you googled it now? Back down from having heard of people doing it?
Spoiler alert, hasn’t happened! And you haven’t heard of anybody for whom it has! So I stand by my statement.
It’s theoretical nonsense, and credit scores are not the same as creditors, but keep talking nonsense about this “one weird trick” you heard on Facebook!
You’re being unnecessarily aggressive, it’s a common expression that they heard of it on the internet.
They didn’t say they personally knew people who experienced it first hand. So he looked up the specifics when questioned.
Surprisingly enough it's incredibly technically feasible.
The biggest challenge is actually maintaining good standing with the federal government because over the last 20 years or so they've been racking on more and more income taxes on foreign income, and if you live abroad as a US citizen you're still legally required to pay income tax. Then once expats started renouncing their citizenship because of the rapidly increasing cost of maintaining a citizenship they no longer needed the federal government started throwing more and more barriers up to make it harde and more time consuming to renounce your citizenship
Just claim you are secretly mexican or something, I heard that works quite well.
Fun fact: the Big Three US American credit unions have a time horizon of seven years. This is set by law. This fucks me, because all my credit accounts are older than that. But the seven year horizon is good for this guy and folks who have declared bankruptcy.
Because of that time horizon my wife briefly had no credit score at all. She trashed her score at 18 then never tried to touch credit again because "I already know my credit is trash" then it all fell off (and whatever went to collections had already been garnished from her tax returns and whatnot) and she effectively had a clean slate with no credit history
Europe is a big place, are we talking flee to the UK or Albania?
I know a guy who skipped on nearly a million in debt. Moved overseas and we didn't see him for around ten years. Nice guy. I just wouldn't do business with him. His last check to me was good by the way. He called me and told me to cash it before a certain date and I did.