Cleaning Up the Authorized User Accounts
I’m trying to prepare for the FICO scoring change I talked about in my Piggybacking on Good Credit Going Away post previously.
In determining what accounts my husband is joint on and which ones he is just an authorized user on, I started looking at our credit reports. Next to the account name on the reports I pulled from MyFico.com, it lists the account ownership status in parenthesis, such as Joint, Individual, Authorized, etc. You’d think that would be the Be All and End All source for this data, right?
Wrong.
For one credit card, Experian and Equifax list the hubby as a Joint Account holder. TransUnion lists him as an Authorized User. Great. This means that the ownership status isn’t entirely reliable on our credit reports. I. Am. Shocked. With all of the data verification processes that are in place with the Credit Reporting Agencies, how could a mistake like this happen??? (A little sarcasm. I can’t help it!)
There are three credit cards he is listed as an Authorized User on. Only two are important, one of which is my oldest account from 1995. I emailed one company to find out what is involved in changing an Authorized User to a Joint Account Holder. They replied back 5 minutes later (10:30pm at night!) to say that they are sending me an application for the new joint account holder to complete and mail in.
I guess the good thing is that for all of the important accounts, like the mortgage, student loans and past car loans, there is absolutely no question as to his ownership status; they are all joint.
I will let you all know what process the other credit card company I contact employs.
I’m going to urge you to get any ownership status changes done sooner rather than later. You never know how long it will take for the credit reporting agencies to reflect this change and what you might need credit for that could be impacted by the deletion of authorized user account history from your reports.
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June 25th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
This authorized user thing is for the birds. I just found out that I am listed as an authorized user on my wife’s Chase card, rather than a joint owner. I found this out because I was trying to make some changes and they would not provide any info to me, they had to speak with my wife. I asked my wife to find out how to have me listed as a joint owner and basically we would have to create a new account and do a balance transfer for this to happen. The problem there is we have a special promotional deal on this account as it is, 0% APR until Aug 2008, then 8% fixed after that. If we switch…bye bye promo. So essentially we have to wait until next year to have me added as a joint owner, and then I imagine that we lose out on the history for this card for Credit Reporting purposes. I sure wish we had been clear on this when we opened the account.
June 25th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Hm. That’s interesting. I just added the hubby as a joint owner on a Chase card that he was an authorized user on and they simply sent me a form to fill out to add him. They were going to pull his credit because effectively he was applying for credit, but that’s a relatively minor ding compared to the benefit he’ll get from being added to an old account with a good history.
I wonder if Chase is being jerkish because you have a special promotional offer.
By opening a new account, you’ll get dinged on your score for opening new credit. Your good history on your current card won’t go away but if it’s new, you got dinged a few points when you opened that one, too.
I don’t think Chase reports authorized users on your credit report unlike, say, Capital One and Citi, so that would mean the wife was the one who got dinged for opening the current account, by the way, not you.
It’s a rather complicated relationship, isn’t it?
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