How to fix credit score
I have a good credit score – around 700. My best friend has a really bad credit score – around 550. I have a Macy’s card that I use regularly and make the payments on time. She asked me to help her raise fico score by adding her to my Macy’s card.
I have two questions:
- Will adding her to my credit card really raise her fico score?
- Will it lower my fico? Will our combined FICO will be ~600? I don’t want my FICO to go down because of this.
Thank you
When you add someone as an authorized person to your credit card, that card’s activity is reported on both your credit report and hers. And if the payments are made on time – both of you benefit from it. However, these two credit reports are totally separated, and there is no connection between your scores. Each FICO score is computed separately and has no effect on each other.
Until a few years ago people did use this method for raising FICO scores. It even has a name – piggybacking. And the other person’s would have benefited from your on-time payments.
Credit repair clinics use to exploit this, and so, as off January 2009 the Fair Isaac Company (the inventor of FICO) change the rules. You now need to have legitimate relationship to the primary card holder such as parents, husband and wife or kids in order for their FICO score to benefit.
–Dan