Credit boost from being added as authorized user to someone elses CC?

[Anonymous]

This seems to work.  I just added my wife as an authorized user to my secure credit card.  I have 15 months of good payments, and its been great.  And after I added her to it, she also got the full line and history from it on her report.  Her scores also jumped like 75 points.  I guess this works for all instances?

Anyone else do this or have experience with it?

[kugel]

Fico scores the one lenders use Dont count on au

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

This seems to work.  I just added my wife as an authorized user to my secure credit card.  I have 15 months of good payments, and its been great.  And after I added her to it, she also got the full line and history from it on her report.  Her scores also jumped like 75 points.  I guess this works for all instances?

Anyone else do this or have experience with it?

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This used to work all the time but because of various reasons (check some of my past post) the impact has changed and in some scoring models been taken away altogether.

Also some lenders don't report a line for the AU at all (again too many 'neighbors' from Craigslist 'paying' to ride the magic credit carpet for a few months to 'steal' approvals that shouldn't have happened)

Generally speaking if the rider or AU has the same last name and address and is a legit spouse or a young kid getting a boost to start their file no biggie but the 'all instances' situation is over

As for the OP ...Congrats for you and DW...get her scores up enough to app on her own and she will be approved ( now once she is established you or she can get the AU lines removed ...if you desire....but while it's a help to her use it ( remember a lot of UW is automated where the SCORE is the driver of an approval, she'll fly thru those no problem w/ AU based scores but once manual UW is in play...not so much...that's why you want 'some' credit for her as a responsible party...just so you know for future planning)

[Anonymous]

An authorized user helps with a different bank for example if youre AU on a Capital One account it won't help an application for your own Capital One account but it might report as a real account with the different bureaus...and that's the one you hit up that pulls just that one.

[RobertEG]

The "boost" from an AU may or may not help your ability to obtain new credit.

If a prospective new creditor relies primarily or only on a credit score in their lending decision, which happens when the amount of credit is low, and thus they dont invest in a more thorough review, yes it can clearly help.  It is a great building/rebuilding tool.

Howver, if the creditor does a more thorough manual review, the presence of an AU might actually be a detriment, even if it boosts your score.

Once an AU is incuded in your scoring, then any score automaticially is no longer representative of only your own risk assessment.

The creditor has no way to "back out" the effect of the AU and produce a score that represents a risk assessment based only on your own account history.

They thus may choose to discount the value of the score, or request that you remove the AU from your report, before they make thier decisicion.