I think this post belongs in this forum, because of the relationship between credit scores and successful card applications.

My wife has great credit, a good job, owns her own home - and just emigated to the USA. She got her immigrant visa in November, and her SSN, driver's license, and green card are less than a month old. She was an AU on several of my cards, and had her own USA-based Amex card (Delta Skymiles) since last July.

Once we got her SSN I called Amex and had them add the number to her file. And a week later I accessed her profile on CreditKarma and her score was... 756.

Not bad for someone who probably didn't even "exist" to the USA credit reporting system two weeks earlier. And I can't even acess her actual credit report on annualcreditreport.com.

Digging down on it a bit, it is clear that they have confused my credit history with hers. Her "oldest account" shows the same age as mine, and her average age of account is close to mine She doesn't have the same number of accounts. I won't go into too many other details.

I'm certainly happy about it, but it doesn't exactly increase my confidence in the accuracy of the credit reporting system.

Is she an authorized user on some of your older accounts?

If she's an AU, she probably inherited the age of account (AoA) on those accounts. If you get a full credit report, it may show the accounts on her report.

There are more variables in the system than just score. Creditors may have their own internal records, they look at income and other factors besides the score, but score and other discrete numbers allows computers to make decisions that humans used to.

Credit Karma is a fake score anyway. You need to know a FICO score, such as the free one members of DCU get each month.

i did the same thing u did for my wife when she was new to US, added her as joint account member on 2 of my cards and her score was about the same as mine when i checked a month later. In one report it shows both she and I have same credit length which is also good and she has been receiving lots of card offers in mail.

Yes credit scores can be very inaccurate for a number of reasons. That what you want to monitor it. Also that is how you can easily improve your score by challenging anything negative on your report.

Did we really need to bump this thread from 2 1/2 years ago?

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