A few years ago my sister added my Husband as a Authorized User on her AMEX account. She has great credit and has had this card since 19934 without ever being late. I have read that recently they are not using these account to impact the score on the Authorized User's account. My question is.... is this hurting my husband's score? I just checked his score and the balance on her card is $2,500.00. We had applied for several car loans a few months ago and were denied at a credit score of 632. I know it isn't great but figured he would be approved somewhere. He only has 3 credit cards, 2 balances are at below 50% and 1 it near the credit limit. Is her card and balance hurting my husband's score? Should I have her remove it? Thanks for the help 
@Anonymous wrote:
A few years ago my sister added my Husband as a Authorized User on her AMEX account. She has great credit and has had this card since 19934 without ever being late. I have read that recently they are not using these account to impact the score on the Authorized User's account. My question is.... is this hurting my husband's score? I just checked his score and the balance on her card is $2,500.00. We had applied for several car loans a few months ago and were denied at a credit score of 632. I know it isn't great but figured he would be approved somewhere. He only has 3 credit cards, 2 balances are at below 50% and 1 it near the credit limit. Is her card and balance hurting my husband's score? Should I have her remove it? Thanks for the help
Welcome to the forums. I will give my 2 cents.
I don't know if Amex reports AU's to the CRA's. Others can answer this.
You say the balance on the card is $2,500. What is the credit limit? If the limit is very high then perhaps the utilization is not hurting your husband. But try as much as possible to make sure all the CC's maintain a utilization of <9%. Have only one of his cards report a balance each month remembering to keep 9% util or less and pay in full before the due date to avoid any interest charges.
For the other cards pay in full before the statement posts each month so that a zero balance shows. FICO likes to see less than half (some say right at 50%) of revolving accounts showing a balance every month. If you can get those util ratios down and keep them down your scores should improve. By how much is hard to say. Everyone's situation is different.
Good luck to you.
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In all honesty, I am not really sure what the limit is. I will need to check with her and see. I would hate to have her take him off and then see his score drop even more but at the same time they are using this $2,500 as debt owed and it isn't his debt so I am unsure on what to do. Thanks for the advice
@Anonymous wrote:
In all honesty, I am not really sure what the limit is. I will need to check with her and see. I would hate to have her take him off and then see his score drop even more but at the same time they are using this $2,500 as debt owed and it isn't his debt so I am unsure on what to do. Thanks for the advice
At a balance of $2,500 the CL would need to be $25,000 to have the util at 10%. But..........having an account that old might be worth keeping if it's much older than any of his other accounts. The AAoA (Average Age of Accounts) needs to be taken into consideration.
@Anonymous wrote:
A few years ago my sister added my Husband as a Authorized User on her AMEX account. She has great credit and has had this card since 19934 without ever being late. I have read that recently they are not using these account to impact the score on the Authorized User's account. My question is.... is this hurting my husband's score? I just checked his score and the balance on her card is $2,500.00. We had applied for several car loans a few months ago and were denied at a credit score of 632. I know it isn't great but figured he would be approved somewhere. He only has 3 credit cards, 2 balances are at below 50% and 1 it near the credit limit. Is her card and balance hurting my husband's score? Should I have her remove it? Thanks for the help
If you have a copy of your husband's credit report, you may be able to see what the credit limit is on the card, if there is one. Look at the details that are given on the report. If she ordinarily carries this high of a balance, it could be hurting your score by impacting your utilization ratio.
In my experience AmEx does report authorized users. We were authorized users on our son's AmEx gold. He typically charges a few thousand a month and pays it off each month after he gets the statement. He's got great credit. His card does not have an upper limit, so one of the credit bureaus was using the highest usage month as a credit limit for their calculations. That was killing our utilization, so we had our son remove us as authorized users. Also, in our situation, we didn't need the age of his card. We have a long history ourselves.
As has already been said, there are a few factors to consider. Utilization, in my mind, may be the biggest. High utilization can sink a score, and this card may be doing that to you. Age is a factor...if you really need the age.
If you post a few details (such as your husband's AAoA, your other credit cards with their balances, etc.), it might help people here to give advice.
@Anonymous wrote:
A few years ago my sister added my Husband as a Authorized User on her AMEX account. She has great credit and has had this card since 19934 without ever being late. I have read that recently they are not using these account to impact the score on the Authorized User's account. My question is.... is this hurting my husband's score? I just checked his score and the balance on her card is $2,500.00. We had applied for several car loans a few months ago and were denied at a credit score of 632. I know it isn't great but figured he would be approved somewhere. He only has 3 credit cards, 2 balances are at below 50% and 1 it near the credit limit. Is her card and balance hurting my husband's score? Should I have her remove it? Thanks for the help
Before you even get to the AU this looks like it could be crushing his FICO score. High UTIL is very damaging and fully under your control. Two of these three card need to be PIF and the other one brought down so that his total UTIL is <= 9%. On top of that the AU may or may not be a problem. Do not jump to conclusions. If the AU is his oldest reporting account removing it could damage his scores even further. Address his UTIL first and see what happens.