During your college life, it might seem like your whole life revolves around your degree program. It may lead you to believe that GPA is the single most important number in your life. However, most students tend to overlook their credit score, a mistake that can cost them dearly. Here are five reasons why credit score is more important than GPA.

Credit Score is going to have a direct impact on how much you have to pay for future purchases. For example, if you’re planning to loan a car from a bank, you will have to pay higher interest rates if you have a bad credit score. After college while settling into your new life, money is going to be a problem. Don’t make it any harder on yourself than it should be by having a bad credit score.

A bad GPA you can recover from, recovering from a bad credit score is a much more daunting task.  If you get a bad GPA for a semester, or a really bad grade for an academic paper you submitted, you can hope to buckle down for the next semester and get back to the average you had before the disastrous grades. However, if you mess up your credit score once it results in a serious loss of points which is much harder to recover from.

Your GPA is only going to matter a few years after college. After that employers are much more likely to pay attention to your work experience. Your credit score however is going to stay with you for life. Meaning a bad GPA will be an obstacle to landing your first job after which you can put it behind you. Bad credit is something that will come up again and again throughout your career.

Shelter comes under basic human needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It’s simply important. Landlords check your credit score before leasing you an apartment. They mostly prefer people with a good credit score, a perfect GPA isn’t going to impress them.

It can affect your love life! This might seem like a stretch, but people are generally open to dating people with a bad grade, only if they like them. If you have a bad credit history, this means you’re carrying a financial baggage that not many people want to deal with. Finding love is hard enough without burdening yourself with an unnecessary turn-off.