By David Meade
An organization called LendEDU recently compared financial information of towns across the state and ranked Williamston 48th out of the top 150 cities compared in the state.
The organization’s website stated, “We wanted to take a closer look at the financial health of South Carolina’s cities and residents, so here at LendEDU, we decided to pull the average credit score of each town and city from one of the original thirteen colonies; we viewed credit score as a fair gauge of financial health given its connection to debt repayment and credit history.”
After pulling the data, LendEDU compared the towns with each other to establish an overall ranking of SC towns and cities by credit score.
They relied on two different datasets for this South Carolina credit score study. The first, Experian’s Premier Aggregated Credit Statistics (PACS), provided the average VantageScore®1 3.0 as well as ZIP™2 codes. The other dataset, Onboard Informatics city level data, provided ZIP™ codes, location names (city, county, and state), and population by ZIP Code™ (used for processing).
Using ZIP™ codes, the Experian and Onboard data sets were joined together, matching VantageScores® 3.0 with respective locations in South Carolina. For cities with multiple ZIP™ codes, a weighted VantageScore® 3.0 was used to represent that location’s credit score; VantageScore® 3.0 was weighted by population. After each location had an individual VantageScore® 3.0, a population cut off of 5,000 was used to phase out lower population areas.
With this step done, the remaining cities were ranked according to average VantageScore® 3.0, and the top 150 cities were included in this report. Out of over 400 ZIP™ codes in South Carolina, about 350 cities were pulled, and only the top 150 cities made the list after ranking and population filtering.
How did other nearby towns fair?
Nearby Belton scored 49 while Iva came in at 50.
Other towns close to Williamston also did well including Travelers Rest at #34; Myrtle Beach at #28; Simpsonville at #10, Clemson at #9. The top ranked financially healty town in the state is Okatie in Beaufort County, coming in at #1.
