Here's a Top 10 ranking San Antonio could do without: Bexar County, along with four other South Texas counties, made the nation's list of places where residents have the lowest credit scores.
The San Antonio, Brownsville, McAllen, Corpus Christi and Laredo areas had average credit scores below 600 in 2004, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. Lenders consider a sub-600 score the riskiest credit rating.
The dubious distinction stems from reasons including thin credit files, low rates of medical insurance, and even failure to pay health club dues.
From there, finances just keep going downhill.
"Without a doubt, consumers with those scores are paying more for credit cards," said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.
The report should be a wake-up call, experts say.
"In a quiet, Brookings way, they are saying, 'Yikes! Something must be done,'" said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer advocate at the Texas Public Interest Research Group.
In the Brookings study, Bexar County dropped from 613, a "C" rating, in 1999, to 597, which carries a "D" rating, the lowest credit score. Nationwide, scores dipped from 661 to 655 during the same period. But the local area declined four times as much as the rest of the country.
"What sets San Antonio apart is this fairly dramatic drop in credit scores," said Matt Fellowes, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution.
The low credit scores reflect a historic lack of knowledge and access to credit in minority communities. It's also the backlash of spreading credit to communities that had been marginalized.
"Credit scoring brought credit to high-risk areas, but now there are a lot of thin credit files with one or two pieces of information," Fellowes said.
Borrowers often don't have a clear understanding of which commitments are considered debt that will be reported to credit bureaus, said David Keller, president of Texas Transportation Federal Credit Union. Keller said his staff frequently reviews credit reports that show on-time payments for mortgages and car notes but delinquencies for health club memberships, apartment leases and cell phones.
"When they borrow for a physical object and can see beginning and ending payments, the debt is clear," Keller said. "They don't realize leases are official lending documents."
Some lenders question how the scores are generated.
For instance, a big factor in the low credit scores is unpaid medical bills, lenders say. South Texas may suffer from a higher level of unpaid bills because of the high percentage of uninsured residents. More than 26 percent of San Antonio residents, or 372,000 people, don't have medical insurance, according to health data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Removing medical claims can generate a more accurate measure of whether a borrower will repay a loan, said Carolyn Ozcan, Fannie Mae communications director.
"A lot of times, when you take medical claims out of the picture you see a willingness to pay on everything else," Ozcan said. "Not paying your medical bills on time is not a measure of whether you will pay your mortgage on time."
San Antonio's steady but slow growth in home prices also may have contributed to the drop.
"On the East and West coasts, people could count on property values going up 20 percent after just one year, and so could hide their financial problems by selling their houses and using the cash to pay off debts," said Gregg Stanley, owner of Real Estate Foreclosures. "San Antonio didn't see that level of appreciation."
As a result, South Texans were stuck with more delinquent mortgages. In the Brookings study, mortgage delinquencies were 3.3 percent in Bexar County in 2004 compared with 1.4 percent nationwide. The study was based on scores and data supplied by major credit reporting bureau TransUnion.
