@captainsensation wrote:
I was in the same boat. i had a friend who had me as an authorized user of a $20K limit and he used all but $1k. At the time i only had only $20K of my own credit so my utilization was increased significantly. The good news was i was able to get all of those points back in a month (dropped 20 pts). The bad was i lost the history. Discover back dated the history from when HE opened the account. He got me on an American Express and they did not back date it but yeah, YMMV.
Also, if you are trying to improve your profile by becoming an AU on someone's account, American Express is poor choice unless you are just looking to have AMEX benefits. AMEX is the only lender I have ever heard of who uses the date the AU was added instead of the original opening date from when the account was established by the primary cardholder. If you don't need or want to use an AMEX card, it will only hurt you by lowering your average age of accounts.
High utilization on an AU account is easily remedied by getting "terminated" because it will ALWAYS update to a zero balance no matter the actual balance.
Also you extend the benefits of the AU account by being added back later if the utilization problem is resolved and there are no new lates (do no do this with AMEX). I recently did this with AU accounts that were terminated five or so years ago by adding me or my partner back as active authorized users and the account moves from the closed accounts section with the terminated notation, back into the open accounts and you now get, in this case, five more years of account age and all the payment history again. You can later terminate again, Rinse and repeat. I have done this with Capital One, Discover, Chase, BofA, Navy and BECU. It works in every single case.
