@bichonmom wrote:
According to the new laws, she can't. I believe the only exception is in Wisconsin.
You can add her as an additional cardmember, which will help her CR. However, if you ever removed her, it would go off of her CR. IMO the laws really need to be revisited. The reason they changed the law was because college students were including their parents' income and defaulting. But the law really makes it impossible for a wife/mother who doesn't "work" to build credit in her own name.
Actually, there was a little more to it than just college students. The goal of the law was to require lenders to confirm a person's ability to pay before issuing credit. Prior to the collapse, a number of married couples with one income were "double dipping", essentially using one income to obtain two complete sets of credit. As a result, these couples obtained more credit than they could possibly pay for, since the income only actually existed once. Many of these couples ended up filing for bankrupcy, at which point the courts discovered and reported these double dips (all bankrupcy filing statistics are kept and summarized each year).
While it may seem "unfair", the law does make sense. Each dollar earned can only be spent once, not twice. If both spouses use the same dollar of earnings to request credit, they can't both use that dollar to pay the debt. That is why the authorized user benefit was preserved: so that nonworking spouses could have credit cards in their name so that if the marriage dissolved, they could obtain credit once they began working.
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