Your credit rating is important in today's lifestyle and a necessity. It determines what interest rate you can get on a credit card, house or auto loan. Your ability to obtain credit supports your standard of living.
The willingness of lenders to extend you credit is based on their assessment of you as a "credit risk" or not. Whether due to personal circumstances, unforeseen financial hardships, inattention to payment dates or other situations, you may be a "Credit Risk".
Your credit history accounts for about 35% of your Fico Scores which, if there are negative items such as late pays, bankruptcy, foreclosure, collections, chargeoffs, judgements or repossessions, will cause you to pay more in interest and in the long run will wind up paying double or triple the amount of what that loan may actually be. Poor credit is experienced by more than half of the United States and causes anguish & disappointment. But, this does not make you a bad person. Scores don't care about the people but, is rather a scoring system that lets lenders know your history of payments.