Links and Minifeatures 06 04 Monday

Credit-score "transplants" can create monster mess

Any thoughts on how this change is going to affect the FICO scores of spouses? Is it going to make it a better deal for a household to apply for two different credit cards with the same company, and each use their own or something? I agree people are vastly abusing the system, but I fear the fix is going to cause problems as well.

I read a similar article today, calling the process "piggybacking" In any case, the article "Improving Your Credit Score and Tradelines", describing precisely this, is one of my more popular articles.



As for how the fix will change the system, nobody can say, yet. They have to have some kind of standard modeling for it. Nor is it anything you should pay for, unless you don't know anyone who's responsible about credit - in which case, you need new acquaintances.



It's always something to avoid. Suppose your "benefactor" has a late payment or go over half their credit limit? Now there's a hit to your credit! Furthermore, it always hits your debt to income ratio, in that whatever the monthly payment is will be counted as a debt you owe. Since neither of these is something under your control, you want to avoid tricks like this unless there are no better alternatives

I have no interest in piggybacking someone else's FICO. But right now my husband and I share our credit lines, etc. So if "authorized users" no longer get credit for credit, I can easily see it getting to the place where one of us will have good credit and the other will have none, since they are just an authorized user on all the credit lines.

(And yes the credit cards do treat authorized users differently. the American express was in my husband's name and I was just an "authorized user" despite the fact that we are married! So they wouldn't let me order a new statement or look at the statement online (which was what they kept suggesting I do instead of ordering a new statement grrr) or any number of maintenance kind of activities. we ended up cancelling over it.)