This chapter covers:
- Measuring vague goals with recurring attributes
- Converting manual work to digitized data
- Using a floating reference period
Buying a house is one of the biggest moments in your life. You’ve scoured through endless property ads and gotten really excited when you found your dream house. It’s exactly what you’ve always dreamed of: the location is great, the structure fits you and your family, you can finally have your own board game room, you’re going to buy a projector instead of your old TV, you imagine yourself sitting by the kitchen window in your old bathrobe sipping a coffee after your morning shower, watching the sunrise. You decide to jump on this opportunity to live your dream.
Chances are you’ve been putting money aside for some time, but that money will not be enough to buy the house. It’s very likely that you’ll have to get a loan to cover the rest. When a bank or some other organization lends you money, they have to do a credit assessment to compute how risky it is to lend you the money — to see if there’s a chance that you won’t be able to pay them back. A credit assessment is all about collecting a lot of data and analyzing it. Back in the day, people went to the bank director, loaded with papers including pay-slips, other loans, tax reports, and whatever the director wanted. You’d go to these meetings dressed in your finest clothes to show how trustworthy you were regarding this loan.