What does "ratio of open joint accounts to open accounts too low" mean?

[KatrinaE]

I am working on my husbands credit.  Mine has been the focus of these past few years and now that it is well established it is time to work on his.  We have (1) joint checking/savings account at a separate bank.  Other than that we do not share any credit cards or bank accounts.  The businesses are in my name etc....  One of his cards he doesn't use that often lowered his CL from $1500 to $500 and the letter listed the following reasons:

          Monthly Obligations are too high
          Ratio of open joint accounts to open accounts too low

Anyone know what they are referring too?

[pizzadude]

The "monthly obligations" reason sounds like it's related to his DTI - does he have other large outstanding balances or installment loans in his name?

The other reason sounds like they're saying he doesn't have enough open accounts?  Not exactly sure where they're coming from on this one.

How many revolving accounts are on his reports and what does the utilization look like?

[Anonymous]

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@KatrinaE wrote:

I am working on my husbands credit.  Mine has been the focus of these past few years and now that it is well established it is time to work on his.  We have (1) joint checking/savings account at a separate bank.  Other than that we do not share any credit cards or bank accounts.  The businesses are in my name etc....  One of his cards he doesn't use that often lowered his CL from $1500 to $500 and the letter listed the following reasons:

          Monthly Obligations are too high
          Ratio of open joint accounts to open accounts too low

Anyone know what they are referring too?

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Taken at face value it seems that they want, given the number of his open accounts, more joint ones!  (It sounds like just the bank account is joint).   But I don't know why that would matter, I can see if the ratio was too high it would mean that the joint info was swamping information about the individual....

[K-in-Boston]

I agree that line sounds like they inadvertently reversed it.  That is not a credit scoring negative factor reason code, so it sounds like this is an internal underwriting reason.  Is your husband an authorized user on a number of accounts, perhaps?  It's possible the financial institution may be lumping together joint and authorized user accounts, and if a large percentage of accounts on his reports are authorized user rather than primary that could be a potential issue.  Do you mind sharing the name of the lender?