very few people want to purposefully fk up their credit. Most find themselves in a dilemma to take care of very important things in life vs. good credit and forced to allocate their finances towards the very important things in life vs. good credit to buy house or a fancy car. For eg, someone might end up in emergency room an end up with thousands of dollars in bill when they get out, so rather die than to ruin credit? bad things happen to good people all the time unfortunately, no one knows how this bro ended up 8k on debt but i sure hope he did not pile the debt smoking weed and watching tv all day. That is there is bankruptcy law, there is 7 years of bad credit to fall of law, credit card companies can not renew cycle, illegal and harassing debt collection practices are forbidden and punishable harshly. Credit card and loan companies are aware of the defaults too and most of the time are willing to work with you. They have their business model build such way that defaults are only a very small percent of the loss and they make up such loss by other charges such as overdraft fees, high interest charges etc etc. Worse come worse they get govt bail money which is guess what our tax dollars. But all this does not mean you should purposefully fk up your credit. you definitely want to be upstanding citizen and having good credit will improve your quality of life. but if you somehow have to live with bad credit it's not the end of the world. there are lots of ppl in US who religiously or due to their moral principle chose not to get any credit and they do just fine.