New immigrant - looking for advice on how to get started with banking, especially CCs

[Anonymalous]

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@K-in-Boston wrote:

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@Anonymalous wrote:

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@K-in-Boston wrote:

<snip>it's important to note that most financial institutions have their own internal scoring and underwriting that will often wholly discard authorized user accounts.  For the American Express Platinum card, two important things to note are that you will not inherit the account history </snip>

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A FICO score does require 6 months of credit history, but an AU card's history counts. I became scorable after 5 months (not 6) when I was added as an AU to an old card. You're correct that AUs can give a major bump to your score, but they're not a pancea. A lot of lenders discount or ignore AUs. Someone with scores approaching 800 but less than a year of personal credit history is still someone with less than a year of credit history, to most lenders.

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Anonymalous, my mentioning of the AU card's history not counting was specific to the American Express Platinum Card.  Since about 2015, American Express reports the date that an authorized user was added to any Amex account as the account's opening date and, unlike other lenders, any history on the account prior to this date is not furnished to the credit reporting bureaus.  They are the sole lender that I am aware of that does this and this change happened at the same time they stopped backdating new accounts for primary cardholders (i.e. Member Since 1980 opened a new Amex account in August of 2010, Amex reported the opening date to the bureaus as August 1980).

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I've heard about AmEx, that's good information, I wasn't disputing that. I was referring to the part where you said "Being added as an authorized user on any of your husband's cards would be helpful with generating files and scores, although that will take some time (I believe it's 6 months of file activity to generate credit scores)". An AU card can shortcut that 6 month requirement, and make her scoreable instantly when it reports with all the back history (so presumably an AmEx card wouldn't count, but that's an exception). Happened to me, last year.

[sellingpineapples]

Just wanted to thank you all for your invaluable input a few months ago.  It's certainly been a bit a journey, but it's interesting to learn as I go as things do seem to move differently in the US vs all the places I lived previously.

Thought I'd update this thread with what I ended up doing and how it's going:

Ended up setting myself up with Navy Fed first of all - checking/saving account, husband added me as an AU to one of his Navy Fed CCs (Go Rewards) and I opened a secured card with them whilst we were at it.

Then got myself an Amex Platinum through Global Transfer (which btw was incredibly fast and seamless - both approval as well as card delivery. I was shocked how quickly it got all the way to HI), which I've used loads the last few months to make the spend for the intro offer they gave me at the time. Travelled quite a bit this summer so it worked out well with lounges and airline/hotel credits and whatnot.

When our tax return including my stim payment hit in April I used that money to set up a $3500 pledge loan over 60 months with Navy Fed using some of the guidance in the forums. Now that's just a small auto payment each month that I don't even have to look at to keep the thing going for the term.

This week I've finally hit a little milestone - my secured card graduated to an unsecured with a $2000 limit (cashRewards). At the same time I saw within the Navy Fed app that my FICO Score 9 is supposedly at 760 now.  Don't quite know how or why... it's not even been close to a year, but hey I'll take it.

Not quite sure yet where this leaves me on my journey to perfect credit scores, accumulating points and all that fun. Back to dive into some more reading to flesh out next steps. Thanks again