Being able to buy a home depends primarily on two things: your income and your credit score. If either one of them isn’t up to snuff, you probably won’t find someone to give you a mortgage. The same holds true (to an extent) for buying a car as well. A bad credit score might force you to make a purchase from the small dealership down the street where the salesman has a gold tooth and he winks at you when you ask if there’s anything wrong with the car.

6%

Overall, only about 6% of people 35 and under (basically Millennials) have an excellent credit score of 780 or above according to credit reporting bureau Transunion. It usually takes an excellent score to get the best interest rate on a home loan, some auto lenders will give you the best rate with a slightly lower credit score. Additionally, about 50% of Millennials would be denied a mortgage today based on their credit score alone.

It’s not a stretch to see how rental prices have been shooting up quickly in both urban and rural areas in the U.S. What is slightly more surprising though is the fact that house prices are generally trending upwards as well, even as younger people are opting (or being forced) out of the real estate market more than ever before. At a point, something has to give. The population is growing, but the number of new residences being built is growing faster.

50 Points

Another somewhat strange fact is that according to Credit Karma, the average credit score of someone with a Yahoo.com email address is 617, which is 50 points lower than someone with a Comcast.net address. Older people are more apt to use an ISP-issued email address, skewing the numbers in that address’ favor somewhat, but Yahoo addresses are also fairly popular with people over 40 years old.

Hotmail users have an average credit score of 640, but someone with a Live.com address averages a 611 score. Gmail users do better at 635, almost as high as AOL.com users at 639. Keeping in mind this is from a website where people who want to find their credit scores frequent, you can factor in lower credit scores in general.

Still, 50 points between users of two different types of email addresses is significant. It probably doesn’t mean much other than giving us a good guess as to the ages of those who primarily use those services.

Credit score isn’t everything when it comes to obtaining a home or auto loan and you’ll still need to have the income to back up your loan application.