My fiance needs to build his credit score. He does not have a negative credit history, just a non-existent one. He's always paid cash for all purchases and living expenses, lived within his means and lucked out with his family covering some big ticket items. Overall he's very frugal but I think out of disinterest in spending and no need for financing for larger purchase so far (no car loan or student loans, his parents came into some money a few years ago so these were paid for), he basically has no credit history. He applied for a few cards but was declined. I think this due to no credit history and a relatively low income (he's in school full time and has a work study job, pulling in about 25K a year). He has no debt.
I'm considering adding my fiance as an authorized user to one of my credit cards. I have a couple of questions about the logistics of this, and if it will actually positively effect his score. So far I'm having a hard time finding concrete answers anywhere on the internet.
The card I'm considering adding him to I opened in ~September 2018. The credit limit is 10K but my utilization is generally 0%. I'm in the midst of a 0% APR promo period for the card that expires in December 2019. My credit score is okay (740) and I have no debt of any kind as I recently paid off all my loans (no card debt, student loans, or auto loans). I pretty much just use my credit cards for the perks, make about 1.5k in everyday purchases and payments on the card a month and pay off the full balance at the end of the billing cycle.
The reason why I want to do this is that ultimately we'd like to buy a house at some point, and I don't want his lack of credit history to impact our mortgage potential.
So my questions are this:
- Will adding him as an authorized user on my card actually positively impact his score? If so, is there a way to guesstimate how much, or to assess if the risk/benefit of this scenario is worth it?
- Does he actually have to use his card associated with my credit line for it to add to his credit history (what i mean is, if he doesn't use his authorized user card on this credit line, is he still going to get positive benefits to his score from me using mine?)
Submitted March 18, 2019 at 10:51AM by slinkypotato https://ift.tt/2ueZ54m
