Advice on Authorized User and Credit Score

[burgh]

Hey everyone,

     About two years ago, we discovered that my fiance had two hospital bill collections ($50 each) that she never knew about. She paid them right away, but it had a negative effect on her credit.  We were still students at the time, so her relatively low income and those blemishes made her unable to get even citi student credit card.  Since then, her parents added her as an authorized user on one of their cards from 2005 (maybe older, i don't remember exactly) and I added her as an authorized user on my amex premier rewards gold card from 2011.  We checked her reports and her experian is in the 690s now.  We haven't gotten to check her equifax yet.  She is thinking about applying for a card, but would like to get her scores higher. I was wondering if it would help her score for me to take her off the Amex PRG card.  I thought that by taking her off, and thus making her average age of credit older, that it could help her score to go up. Does this make sense or would it be better for her to still have the Amex show up on the credit report? Thank you for any information that you can provide.

[ajh5408]

Part of this depends on the limit your PRG card reports, as well as the util on both cards. Someone can jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I also believe she would need to dispute the AMEX line to actually get it off her reports.

Generally, I would think showing 2-3 lines with decent limits and low util would be better than just having one really long line, so long as she's not bumping into "too much total credit" territory. You should also strategize this a bit... Some lenders (like Chase*, for example) tend to strip out AU accounts from consideration. Citi*, on the other hand, considers them... Keep that in mind while focusing on a new card, which is the only real permanent solution for her to build credit, even if AU's help in the interim.

*This was from a recent experiment, so I'm pretty confident those two facts hold true.