If you ever want to rent a home, if you purchase auto insurance, if you want a j*b that requires a background check (including credit history), all of these can be negatively impacted by a "zero" credit score.
Yes, that's certainly chapter-and-verse from the FICO marketing materials, and that's obviously what they
want us to believe, but does it hold up to scrutiny?
I'm not denying that a
bad credit score can work against you in the situations you outline - but I do think that a
0 credit score is given special treatment.
That is, if you try to rent an apartment, and your prospective landlord pulls your credit, and it comes back as 640 with a bunch of delinquencies, then you're probably not getting that apartment. But if it comes back as literally "0", with no activity at all in the past 7 years, why would he/she reject you as a tenant? Wouldn't they at least *ask* you about such a curious thing?
Same thing for potential employers. I have a hard time believing that HR staff are really so stupid that they'll pull an applicant's credit, see a "0" score with an empty history, and just discard that applicant, regardless of their other qualifications. Surely they possess enough critical thinking capability to recognize the difference between an applicant with severe debt problems, and an applicant who simply lives debt-free.
As for insurance, again, I'm quite confident they can tell that there is a meaningful difference between "620" and "0," and that if you've been a faithful, accident-free client whose made every payment on-time for the last 20 years, they're not just going to suddenly dump you or hike your rates, just because your FICO score disappeared.