No, removing her as an AU shouldn't hurt her scores. "Amount of debt" accounts for more of a FICO score (30%) than "Credit Age," (15%) so IMO, she may actually gain a small boost from being removed. It would be as if the account never happened.
Also, it's not true that closing an account automatically hurts your score. In general, closing an account shouldn't affect your scores much unless the account being closed represents a significant portion of your total credit limits and a utilization threshold is crossed. As far as closing an account and age, AAoA remains unaffected because closed accounts in good standing remain for up to 10 years, if not longer.
@Anonymous wrote:Thanks for any assistance. When my wife's credit was limited I added her to a couple of my credit cards as an authorized user to help give her some more history. Since then she has built up a good bit of positive credit history and the only negative thing on her profile shows to be high utilization and it's based off of the balances of those cards. She has much older accounts so this doesn't effect her overall account age much but maybe a little. If I remove her as an authorized user it'll eliminate about 30% of her existing utilization. My question is does taking someone off like this hurt their credit the same way closing an account does or does the account just disappear as if it never existed? I don't want to do anything negative now that she has a good credit score. Also does this seem like it's worth it generally? I don't think the account age negative will outweight the balance positive but I'm not sure.
It would be better for her to be off of those accounts.
