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Any ideas on which of these holds more weight in terms of scores? I have my husband as authorized on 3-4 of my cards, I'm wondering if switching him to joint user will increase his scores. I already added him as joint on one and had to fill out a special form for it, but that was back before I was monitoring his scores so I don't know how much of a difference it will make. Trying to get his score as high as possible! (aren't we all?)
Thanks!
Some scoring models weight AUs differently but it varies and I'm not sure how. The advantage to being a joint user is that certain banks, like Chase, ignore AU accounts.
More and more scoring models ignore AU accounts. To the best of my knowledge no FICO models do this, just various FAKO's, namely Vantage if memory serves. Upon a manual review joint is certainly better as your credit was taken into consideration which is not the case with AU accounts.
I looked it up on FICO scoring and AU accounts. Their 08 model initially wasn't going to count AU accounts but they changed their mind. If a new model releases, they could very well go back to not counting them. So in the future, yes, FICO MAY not count them but for now they do.
A joint account will at least look better on a manual review to more strict underwriters. An authorised user has no responsibility to pay the debt on the card, but a joint cardholder does.
Thanks for the advice! I had assumed an authorized user wouldn't carry as much weight. We are going to be in the market to purchase a home in about a year so I'm bring proactive to make sure we have no problems when the time comes.
I have a NFCU credit card with a 20k limit, he is an authorized user right now, I'd like to add him as joint, but not sure they will approve him for that (his FAKOs are about 625-640). The funny thing is they gave me a 20k limit and I don't even work, our numbers are based off of my husbands income!
Hope they will approve him!