TL vs. Debt to Income Question

[HaHaHell]

We've just recently discovered that my father-in-law has my wife listed as an authorized user on 3 of his credit cards. These cards have very high limits ( one at $40,000). They've been open since about 1997. They are at about 80% utilization and have never been paid late. We are going to try to buy a house in about 2 years and need to get our credit scores up a lot. Will his utilization affect her debt-to-income ratio? What would be the better move? Remove her and loose these TLs with a long history of good payments or keep them and possibly have a problem with DTI?

[HaHaHell]

TTT

[haulingthescoreup]

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@HaHaHell wrote:

We've just recently discovered that my father-in-law has my wife listed as an authorized user on 3 of his credit cards. These cards have very high limits ( one at $40,000). They've been open since about 1997. They are at about 80% utilization and have never been paid late. We are going to try to buy a house in about 2 years and need to get our credit scores up a lot. Will his utilization affect her debt-to-income ratio? What would be the better move? Remove her and loose these TLs with a long history of good payments or keep them and possibly have a problem with DTI?

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Do they appear on her credit reports? If so, does the credit limit show?

Accounts with very high CL's are excluded from util, and it might be that they don't affect her, depending on the CL of each card and the different reports (the cut-off seems to vary by report, per posts here. )

Your best bet would be to have her pull her Equifax FICO score from here (she has to do this, not you! ), and look on screen two at the negative factors listed on the left. If high revolving utilization is listed first, then it might be better for her not to be on them. If not, I wouldn't worry about it.

In the end, the only really useful info you can get is by looking at a FICO score report and focusing on the negative reasons listed. While you can certainly get good info here on the forums, you'll find soon enough that what helps one person might not help another, and so forth. In other words, the deeply unpopular but pretty realisitc "It Depends" reply!

[HaHaHell]

Yes they show up. I'll have her to pull her score and see what it shows.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@HaHaHell wrote:

Yes they show up. I'll have her to pull her score and see what it shows.

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You can pretty much ignore the cute little boxes on the first page, and the positives on the second (although there can be useful info in the positives, like util and AAoA.) They're pretty much there for warm fuzzies and eye candy.

It's the negatives that drive the score. The positives are the less negative negatives, so to speak.