Piggybacking

[webhopper]

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@CHBH wrote:

I added her as a joint applicant on my Visa 2 weeks ago.I'll go ahead and add her as a AU to the walmart card later this evening when she gets home.The loan officer wants to re check her credit tomorrow.She seems to think that just by adding her on the visa should be enough to get it up.Im a little skepticale myself,especially in such a short time frame.

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Do not let him repull credit until you are sure that the new cards are REPORTING for her.  LOs tend to be an impatient bunch and very pull happy.  You will be able to tell when they start reporting by checking your wife's credit report... in some cases It can take up to 4 weeks for it to report, since card companies only update the reports once per month.

I would send the LO an email letting him/her know that you and your wife are NOT authorizing a repull of credit until further notice.

Every inquiry will drop both yours and her scores so he is actually hurting you by pulling too early

[dddewdrop]

To figure it out, look at your statement dates for your credit cards. Can you get the AU to be in effect before the next statement dates? The CRAs should take a snapshot of your cards then for your scores and report based on the situation then. So if you can complete the AU process as soon as possible then they should report as such as the statement dates come and go. Either way, do it as soon as possible. As soon as she is listed on her credit reports as an AU her scores will fully reflect it. It doesn't take time for the scores to slowy adjust, they should move immediately as soon as the AU account is on her reports. Make sure that your bills are paid down before the statement dates as well as util% is crucial to good scores. Good luck...

[scenery_guy]

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@CHBH wrote:

I added her as a joint applicant on my Visa 2 weeks ago.I'll go ahead and add her as a AU to the walmart card later this evening when she gets home.The loan officer wants to re check her credit tomorrow.She seems to think that just by adding her on the visa should be enough to get it up.Im a little skepticale myself,especially in such a short time frame.

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Hold on a second... another credit check on the wife will effectively lower her FICO up to 5 points. The loan officer should know that. You need to be proactive in this and ask for a delay so you two can see the increased benefits from AU accounts actually reporting. Also be aware that if you and/or her apply for more credit cards you will take another point loss on your FICO. The positive bump from adding her to your account might be diminished by multiple mortgage pulls and new card pulls. Be careful. 

Wow Webhopper is fast... I agree with what he said!

[CHBH]

I plan to give her a call first thing in the morning to let her know that we aren't ready to repull credit.When my wife gets home this evening,we are gonna order her credit report and see if the visa is reporting on her credit yet.The visa CL is 3500 and has a blance of $200 and the walmart has a CL of 3800 and has a blance of $120.

[webhopper]

There are free credit services such as CreditKarma.com that you can use to pull her report... pay no attention to the scores from that site because they are garbage, but you can use CreditKarma.com and Quizzle for free to see if the card is reporting yet.

[dddewdrop]

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@scenery_guy wrote:

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@CHBH wrote:

I added her as a joint applicant on my Visa 2 weeks ago.I'll go ahead and add her as a AU to the walmart card later this evening when she gets home.The loan officer wants to re check her credit tomorrow.She seems to think that just by adding her on the visa should be enough to get it up.Im a little skepticale myself,especially in such a short time frame.

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Hold on a second... another credit check on the wife will effectively lower her FICO up to 5 points. The loan officer should know that. You need to be proactive in this and ask for a delay so you two can see the increased benefits from AU accounts actually reporting. Also be aware that if you and/or her apply for more credit cards you will take another point loss on your FICO. The positive bump from adding her to your account might be diminished by multiple mortgage pulls and new card pulls. Be careful. 

Wow Webhopper is fast... I agree with what he said!

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multiple pulls by mortgage lenders in a brief period may get grouped together and not have a marginal effect on fico score.

[cashnocredit]

I agree with webhopper and most of the other suggestions however I;d like to add some cautions re "piggybacking"

What you are doing isn't piggybacking.

The term "piggybacking" is generally used to refer to people that buy someone else's LOC history thorugh a third party. It's unethical because there is no financial expposure -  the piggybacker doesn't get the card info and can't actually use it. This resulted in many score providers, including FICO 08 and VantageScore 2.0 to stop using AUs. However, the Fed did a study which concluded that AUs were a legitimate correlate to risk even when piggybackers weren't excluded. Eventually both scores reversed their original decisions to exclude AUs but have included some unspecified ways of detecting AUs that are potentially not legit.

There is another risk that people selling their LOC history take. A much higher fraud risk score. This is a score sold by IDAnalytics based on any association with known fraudsters. People that purchase piggybacked cards may be more likely to be involved in fraud than your average person and when someone has rented their LOC history to many people the odds of their being linked go up. A lot. The problem with fraud scores is that no bank wants to tell a that to a customer and there is no way someone is going to get an AA letter openly stating it is based on a high fraud risk score.

So this caveat to stay away from fraudulent piggybacking - as either an AU or AU seller - is really aimed at people googling this and considering it as an easy way to credit. A 730 FICO won't help at all if your IDAnalytics score is red hot.

[scenery_guy]

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@dddewdrop wrote:

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@scenery_guy wrote:

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@CHBH wrote:

I added her as a joint applicant on my Visa 2 weeks ago.I'll go ahead and add her as a AU to the walmart card later this evening when she gets home.The loan officer wants to re check her credit tomorrow.She seems to think that just by adding her on the visa should be enough to get it up.Im a little skepticale myself,especially in such a short time frame.

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Hold on a second... another credit check on the wife will effectively lower her FICO up to 5 points. The loan officer should know that. You need to be proactive in this and ask for a delay so you two can see the increased benefits from AU accounts actually reporting. Also be aware that if you and/or her apply for more credit cards you will take another point loss on your FICO. The positive bump from adding her to your account might be diminished by multiple mortgage pulls and new card pulls. Be careful. 

Wow Webhopper is fast... I agree with what he said!

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multiple pulls by mortgage lenders in a brief period may get grouped together and not have a marginal effect on fico score.

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Grouped together like auto loan applications? That's a line of poppycock spread by banks and lenders wanting your business. I saw it with my mortgage and I saw it with my auto loans. It may be gathered for FICO scoring sometimes but in the real world each application (auto, mortgage, credit card etc) is a single HP and will lower your score. At some point you will be explaining all of those HP to another type lender (if you are lucky and get the chance to recon). You might just get declined for excessive pulls - because you were told they all count as one. 

Guard your precious HP and don't give them up for nothing. Pull the trigger when you are ready, not a day before. Especially under the request of a loan officer or lender who is anxious to close a deal. It's not their credit report they are dinging for a commission. Monitor the report via free services and you will know when it's time. 

[dddewdrop]

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@scenery_guy wrote:

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@dddewdrop wrote:

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@scenery_guy wrote:

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@CHBH wrote:

I added her as a joint applicant on my Visa 2 weeks ago.I'll go ahead and add her as a AU to the walmart card later this evening when she gets home.The loan officer wants to re check her credit tomorrow.She seems to think that just by adding her on the visa should be enough to get it up.Im a little skepticale myself,especially in such a short time frame.

---

Hold on a second... another credit check on the wife will effectively lower her FICO up to 5 points. The loan officer should know that. You need to be proactive in this and ask for a delay so you two can see the increased benefits from AU accounts actually reporting. Also be aware that if you and/or her apply for more credit cards you will take another point loss on your FICO. The positive bump from adding her to your account might be diminished by multiple mortgage pulls and new card pulls. Be careful. 

Wow Webhopper is fast... I agree with what he said!

---

multiple pulls by mortgage lenders in a brief period may get grouped together and not have a marginal effect on fico score.

---

Grouped together like auto loan applications? That's a line of poppycock spread by banks and lenders wanting your business. I saw it with my mortgage and I saw it with my auto loans. It may be gathered for FICO scoring sometimes but in the real world each application (auto, mortgage, credit card etc) is a single HP and will lower your score. At some point you will be explaining all of those HP to another type lender (if you are lucky and get the chance to recon). You might just get declined for excessive pulls - because you were told they all count as one. 

Guard your precious HP and don't give them up for nothing. Pull the trigger when you are ready, not a day before. Especially under the request of a loan officer or lender who is anxious to close a deal. It's not their credit report they are dinging for a commission. Monitor the report via free services and you will know when it's time. 

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       I disagree with this. Shopping around for the best rate for a mortgage or loan represents a different level of risk when it comes to the likelihood of someone paying back a debt than inquiries for separate credit cards or lines of credit. When the CRAs started moving to newer versions of credit scores like tu08 they provided guidance that scores would be grouped together and only count as one inquiry in the calculation of fico scores. When you buy s csr for example and the financing department shops your loan to a few different places, that is essentially several inquries relating to one application. It doesn't take a genious of a loan officer to recognise when looking over a credit report that several inquires at the same time to say 4 firms with names like citi car loan dept, allied car loans and capital car loans are related wherease say 3 separate inquires to credit card companies over 3 years represent a different sort of risk. i certainly agree that using the many resources online to soft pull information should definately be preferable to having a hard pull on your credit reports, but there is just too much evidence, both empirical and through guidance from the people who produce fico scores themselves to just not believe that groupings of scores together over one mortgage loan or car loan are not treated as one inquiry by the model. How an individual loan officer will interpret this information is up to that person.

      Furthermore, that other poster has an excellent point that piggybacking is a bit of a misnomer as a subject here. Selling of "tradelines" by firms for thousands of dollars in my opinion is immoral and is a loophole which threatens the integrity of the system and the legitimacy of fico scoring. Places offer for thousands of dollars to AU a person for hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card and even installation debt tradelines to boost a score. This is often coupled with creating a new identity for someone and is a very different thing than a husband adding a wife as an authorised user to his credit card as is the case here.