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Hi, listeners. It's Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, credit scores and mental health.

Dr. Catherine Etman, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins,

joined Stephanie Desmond to discuss her research into how much credit scores matter for financial

health and how poor scores are associated with higher anxiety and depression levels. Let's listen.

Catherine Edmund, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

Today I wanted to talk about this link that you're seeing between financial and mental health.

And most recently, I saw that you have done some work regarding credit scores and mental health.

And I wanted to start super easy for our listeners, which is,

we know what a credit score is, but tell us a little bit about what goes into a credit score.

They're not just a number. Credit scores are used to calculate a person's financial risk.

Various factors feed into credit scores. They include payment history, so whether people paid their

bills on time, the amount owed, length of credit is history, so how long they've had accounts open,

new credit and mix of different types of credit as examples. Now, credit scores are just a number, but they are an important number. They

can influence a lot of different factors and financial opportunities for people. For example,

credit scores can determine the amount that people pay for loans. So people who have higher credit

scores get preferential rates,

whether it's mortgages or auto loans or business loans. Credit scores can also be used in employment,

so employers can do credit checks. They can also be used when screening tenants for rent.

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