Adding an additional user who is brand new to credit no file

[Anonymous]

Yes!

[Anonymous]

I'm going to put him on a few, but definitely my Navy Cards and one or two of my Amex cards

[Anonymous]

Good for you and him.  Be sure to ask him to pull his reports (Karma would be a nice choice) to see the exact Date Opened being reported, once the accounts appear.  As you heard earlier, some CC issuers will give him a Date Opened of the date he was added as an AU, rather than the date opened being many years ago (assuming as I suggested that you are adding him to only very old cards).

What he really needs is one very old account.  That's the key.  If 1-2 other of his AU accounts are of age 0, these will sharply lower his AAoA.  Thus if that happens, remove him as an AU from those cards and work to get the AU account deleted, which I am told is not hard to do.

[jamie123]

Yes, AMEX will report the start date as the day he receives the AU card so they are definitely not a good choice.

When I added my son to my Bank of America Rewards card they would give him a card online without issues but it wouldn't report to the CRAs. If I wanted him reported as an AU to the CRAs they had to send me a form in the mail, I had to fill it out and send it back in the mail. (Yes, really. U.S. Snail mail!)

When I added him to my Walmart MC card it wasn't reporting. I called customer service and they asked for his birth date and S.S.# and said it would start reporting. It did start reporting then.

So if you do this, make sure to do some follow up to ensure that these cards are in fact reporting.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Nice response by Jamie.

What he writes is a specific instance of the more general advice to pull your reports -- and do so frequently.  (In this case, make sure your son pulls his reports.)  A trend I have been noticing this year is that we have more and more people asking questions about why their score is doing this or that -- and then we find out on post #34 that in fact they have never pulled their reports or certainly haven't done so recently.  My guess is that this has to do with the explosion of credit cards and/or web sites that offer free scores.  A lot of people nowadays therefore do not even know what a credit report is.