AAoA for an AU

[masscredit]

I have a friend who filed for BK about 7-8 years ago. She didn't establish any credit after that so at this point even her good accounts from years ago have aged off. EX lists her as unscoreable.  She was able to get an auto loan through Cap 1 a few days ago (17.4% ouch!). She'll have an installment loan so that will help.  Now it's time to work on credit cards. I'm thinking about adding her to my two oldest Cap 1 cards. Each are 5 years old. I believe these accounts will report on her CR. She'll have 3 cards if I do this and she gets a secured card on her own. Two at 5 years and one at 0. Will this give her an AAoA of 3 years 4 months?   This should give her some momentum in the rebuilding process if it does. 

[gdale6]

AAoA would be 40 months so yes 3 yrs 4 months.

[Anonymous]

FICO has a secret "anti-abuse" alogorithm that looks when a person has been added as an AU and makes some kind of decision is to whether that person should be considered a "legitimate" AU for scoring purposes (i.e. getting all the benefits of an increases to profile age, etc.).

At one end of the spectrum (totally legitimate) would be a close legal relationship between card holder and AU: e.g. wife adds her husband as an AU, father adds his son as an AU, etc.  At the other end of the spectrum would be perfect strangers.  FICO can't always detect when two perfect strangers are actually close friends, significant others, etc., though people have speculated that a common address might help.

The anti-abuse algorithm sometimes makes mistakes -- so all of this is to say that you cannot be certain in advance that it will help your friend's score.  But it can't hurt to try it, assuming that you keep both cards reporting with very small balances (one balance can be $0 but not both).

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

FICO has a secret "anti-abuse" alogorithm that looks when a person has been added as an AU and makes some kind of decision is to whether that person should be considered a "legitimate" AU for scoring purposes (i.e. getting all the benefits of an increases to profile age, etc.).

At one end of the spectrum (totally legitimate) would be a close legal relationship between card holder and AU: e.g. wife adds her husband as an AU, father adds his son as an AU, etc.  At the other end of the spectrum would be perfect strangers.  FICO can't always detect when two perfect strangers are actually close friends, significant others, etc., though people have speculated that a common address might help.

The anti-abuse algorithm sometimes makes mistakes -- so all of this is to say that you cannot be certain in advance that it will help your friend's score.  But it can't hurt to try it, assuming that you keep both cards reporting with very small balances (one balance can be $0 but not both).

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It may or may not count on FICO 8 to your excellent point, but with the rise of internal scoring algorithms by major lenders, and the fact the mortgage space is all on older versions, and one can cherry pick CU's that likewise underwrite on models prior to FICO 8 where the anti-abuse algorithm doesn't exist, I'd argue that any beneficial AU is absolutely a good AU.

[masscredit]

The goal is to get her EQ04 score to 680 so she can refinance at DCU's lowest rate of 1.99%. I need to sit down with her to go over all of the reports. I believe scores are in the mid-500s so it's going to be a long road.   I only have one card reporting a balance most months so it will be easly to keep utilization low on these two cards.