Authorized user and credit increase ?

[Gmood1]

@voltiac What are your current FICO 8 scores and credit history length?

[Anonymous]

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@Gmood1 wrote:

@voltiac What are your current FICO 8 scores and credit history length?

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Equifax - 644 (Length - 119 Months)

TransUnion - 641 (Length - 118 Months)

Experian - 639 (Length - 119 Months)

[Anonymous]

It helps make your age of accounts look better and in my experience if you are an authorized user a TU puller like synchrony eats it up in comparison to lets say citi retail/gas cards.
Not just approvals on store cards but the dual-branded ones and Ebates visa.
Being an authorized user does not add the Boost that it did 10 or 15 years ago but it can't hurt if you find someone who honors it as if it was yours

[Anonymous]

Hey guys, let's not hijack the OP's thread.  @Anonymous, if you want to discuss your credit profile, it should be done in a separate thread.  Thank you for your understanding and cooperation

[Anonymous]

Okay so it isn't the best option then !? I'm trying to get mortgage loan with down payment assistance and the needed score is 640 I'm not sure about my scores credit karma shows I have 613, 621 and Experian shows 653 but the Experian mortgage fico score 2 is 619 ! Idk 😐 I'm in a really stuck place because I just payed all my credit cards down to less than 10% so Idk the lender told me to wait until the payments show up on credit karma ... this is beyond frustrating

[DeeBee78]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I asked my lender if I were to be added in my mothers credit card which has perfect payments and low utilization if it would help me increase my score to get approved for a loan and she replied with "The authorized user status no longer helps the authorized user with the scores" is this true ? Or maybe she doesn't want me to do that because I've been added a few years back as an authorized user and it increased my credit score a lot
If someone has any information please let me know! I been working on my credit score for about 5 months and i just really would like to know if it would help my score.

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Your lender gave you an oversimplification of being an Authorized User, but they're also partiallly correct. Being an AU on an account with long payment history and low utilization can boost your credit scores, but has much less of an effect on lending decisions than it used to. At one point Fair Isaac (FICO) said they were going to stop counting AU accounts completely in credit scoring algorithms. but there was a huge backlash from lenders and consumers. They backed off, but not completely. They put some secret sauce in their scoring models to prevent lenders from being taken advantage of by people who had terrible credit without AU accounts.

This article kind of explains it a bit: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/08/yes_you_really_can_still_piggy.html

However, when you apply for a loan or a credit product, a lender can see that the account is not really yours, so they can choose to ignore the good payment history and utilization, which most of them do.

[DeeBee78]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Okay so it isn't the best option then !? I'm trying to get mortgage loan with down payment assistance and the needed score is 640 I'm not sure about my scores credit karma shows I have 613, 621 and Experian shows 653 but the Experian mortgage fico score 2 is 619 ! Idk 😐 I'm in a really stuck place because I just payed all my credit cards down to less than 10% so Idk the lender told me to wait until the payments show up on credit karma ... this is beyond frustrating

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Pay ALL of the accounts off completely, except for 1. Pay that one down to 1-9% reporting. This will inflate your scores as high as they're able to go for now. 

Also, ignore Credit Karma. If you're house shopping, you should get a MyFICO report after all your balances have updated. This gives you your scores for all their scoring models. 

[Anonymous]

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@DeeBee78 wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:
Okay so it isn't the best option then !? I'm trying to get mortgage loan with down payment assistance and the needed score is 640 I'm not sure about my scores credit karma shows I have 613, 621 and Experian shows 653 but the Experian mortgage fico score 2 is 619 ! Idk 😐 I'm in a really stuck place because I just payed all my credit cards down to less than 10% so Idk the lender told me to wait until the payments show up on credit karma ... this is beyond frustrating

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Pay ALL of the accounts off completely, except for 1. Pay that one down to 1-9% reporting. This will inflate your scores as high as they're able to go for now. 

Also, ignore Credit Karma. If you're house shopping, you should get a MyFICO report after all your balances have updated. This gives you your scores for all their scoring models. 

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Can you go into more detail as to why that works?  I think that might help the person to better understand how credit scoring works.

[DeeBee78]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@DeeBee78 wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:
Okay so it isn't the best option then !? I'm trying to get mortgage loan with down payment assistance and the needed score is 640 I'm not sure about my scores credit karma shows I have 613, 621 and Experian shows 653 but the Experian mortgage fico score 2 is 619 ! Idk 😐 I'm in a really stuck place because I just payed all my credit cards down to less than 10% so Idk the lender told me to wait until the payments show up on credit karma ... this is beyond frustrating

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Pay ALL of the accounts off completely, except for 1. Pay that one down to 1-9% reporting. This will inflate your scores as high as they're able to go for now. 

Also, ignore Credit Karma. If you're house shopping, you should get a MyFICO report after all your balances have updated. This gives you your scores for all their scoring models. 

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Can you go into more detail as to why that works?  I think that might help the person to better understand how credit scoring works.

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There's no big secret that I'm privy to, that's just how the FICO scoring algorithms work. A lot of time and testing devoted to FICO scoring methods by this forum (and others), along with breadcrubs of information from Fair Isaac have allowed us to determine this is a factor in their scoring for FICO 08, and most other scoring models.  

Simply put, allowing one revolving account to report a balance of 1-9% utilization maximizes scoring. Each additional account reporting a balance will bring your score down a couple of points. In most cases that's negligible, but OP needs every point they can get. 

Hope this informaiton helps someone.