First New Zealand, then Canada. Each time I arrived with no credit history and no record of anything, and started again. Then I went to work in credit card operations at a big-five Canadian bank, and watched the same questions arrive from the other side of the desk, from people who had already been given an answer that was technically correct and completely useless. Not long before, I had been the person asking them.
Rethink Normal exists in the gap between those two positions.
I paid every bill on time for six months. My score had barely moved.
It was BMO's newcomer package, a $1,500 limit, never a missed payment. So I applied for a second card, the Walmart Mastercard, because I was working there and it was the one in front of me.
Two things nobody had told me. A new application costs a hard inquiry, and I never asked my own bank about a higher limit first. And the balance the credit bureau sees is the one on the day your lender reports it, and that can be before you’ve paid it off.
It took forty-four months to reach 822. By my own calculation it should have taken about thirty. Those fourteen months are where this started.
Fifteen years across banking, telecom, retail and tech, in Canada and New Zealand. I started on the frontline. I ran the sites, took the calls and hit the targets, then learned the frameworks. So when I take a system apart now, I know where people cut the corner, because I have been the person cutting it.
Every article, script and diagram here is researched and written by me. Every claim is checked against a primary source on the day the page is built, and each step page lists its sources at the foot with the date.
The narration is an AI voice I named Sam. My own delivery is flat and monotone, and I would rather you learned something than fell asleep. The disclosure is on every video. When I get something wrong, it goes in the corrections log with the date.
What I write about: Credit Cards, Credit Scores and New to Canada.
