topic Authorized user accounts impact on credit score in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Authorized user accounts impact on credit score

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 20:23:26 GMT

My wife and I are going to soon start the process of buying a home and I wanted to get some clarification on a credit score question. Her mortgage score is 10 points shy of what we need to qualify for a down payment assistance program. Her middle score is 630 and we need 640. She has a couple cards that are over-the-limit due to some overzealous holiday spending and we're already working on paying them down a bit. But she's listed as an authorized user on a couple of my cards -- cards that are around 80-90 percent utilization at the moment. So my question is, would her score increase if I removed her as an authorized user for those accounts? It would reduce her total credit amount, but I would think it would help her credit utilization, thus raising her score, would it not? My score is already high enough to qualify. We're working on bumping hers as much as possible.

Re: Authorized user accounts impact on credit score

Revelate — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 04:07:17 GMT

AU accounts count fully on FICO 04 and earlier, which means all 3 of the mortgage trifecta scores.

Do the math on the before and after utilization and on the age factors but if you exclude negatives revolving utilization dominates FICO scoring, so I'd probably remove her and see... worst case if the score drops you can always re-add her.

Re: Authorized user accounts impact on credit score

DIYcredit — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 08:13:20 GMT

I agree with Rev's method ,but another method would be to pay down all cc debt,let one cc report a small balance below 10% and continue as an authorised user.