Something like this happened to me about two and a half years ago. When my wife and I first got married(seven years in April) her family didn’t care much for me or my capabilities as a provider. They had her put on one of their cards as an “authorized user” and gave her a card attached to one of their accounts. “For emergencies” was what came out of the front of their mouth(what came out the side was another matter entirely). Well, as it turns out, I’ve been a very good provider and she never had to use it(she actually cut it up a couple months after we were married because she didn’t feel we’d need it and she recognized that they intended it as an underhanded insult, AKA “your marriage is going to fail and you’ll have to fall back on us. No daughter of mine is going to have to be dependent on a loser like him”(that second part is pretty close to an actual quote)).
After I took the job I’ve got now, we were applying for an apartment in the area and they called us back saying “there’s a couple of issues with your credit check”. We were both totally baffled. We had excellent credit, or so we thought. We had gotten a couple of lines of credit while we were in college and had dutifully kept zero balances and no late payments. We asked for some more info on exactly what we were being held up for. The apartment manager couldn’t give us specifics, she said it was illegal to share credit report info, even to the person the report is on, she just advised that we look at our credit reports ASAP and see if we could straighten out the issues. She did mention that there was one major red flag(that would have prevented the application from going through) and a minor flag that would not be a problem.
At this point we’re racking our brains trying to figure out what these could be. We ordered credit reports, but they were going to take a few days to arrive and we wanted to be more pro-active than that. We finally remembered a time when my wife had gone to a local department store and bought a pair of shoes(about fifteen bucks) and gotten suckered into getting a credit card for the store. When she told me she had gotten one of these cards I told her it would be her responsibility to get the bill and pay it on time. Normally I handle the finances in the family, but this was a card she signed up for on her own initiative, so it was her responsibility. She knows where the checkbook is and she’s never been shy about using it. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Well, she forgot to pay it. They sent a reminder notice, then another reminder notice, and finally a collection notice. She somehow managed to mislay or forget about every single one of them. Eventually she went to the store and paid it off, but it was certainly not a good thing.
We knew that would be on our credit, but could a fifteen dollar charge, that we did pay, eventually, really hose up our credit so bad we couldn’t get an apartment? We talked over all kinds of options. Making me the sole tenant on the lease(nope, not in Texas, not if you’re married), we talked about a larger than normal security deposit, a co-signer(my mother was willing, she had done it for us for our first place when we first got married, when we had NO credit, and she knew she could trust me not to trash her credit rating by defaulting if it was at all possible to prevent it), all kinds of things.
Finally the credit reports came. Mine was pristine. Nothing, not a single carried balance, no late payments, nothing. Hers was pretty much the same, it had the department store card on it, but it also had this other thing that we were pretty sure was the major red flag. It seems her parents had defaulted on their credit card account they had made her an authorized user on. Now my in-laws have never been very good with money, and after my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law as a widow has been even worse. She pretty much lived off her credit lines after her husband died and she has yet to find a decent job(he’s been dead ~five years). As a result, she’d maxed out lots of her credit cards and defaulted on them. Her mess right? Nope, not with my wife’s name attached to the account.
We were pretty annoyed. We called the apartment complex and explained that she had never used the card she was issued and was not responsible for any of that balance. They said take it up with the credit card company and have them remove it from her credit record and they’d re-process our application. We had a lovely chat with her mom and called the credit card issuer. They traced her card and agreed that no charges had ever been made from her copy. Her mother claimed sole responsibility for the card and the defaulted balance and the credit card issuer updated her credit record to remove that account as one of the lines of credit she has.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you’re not responsible for any of that balance, try getting your mom to call the bank with you and have yourself removed from the account. Not sure if that’s possible since it was a joint account, but they may.
Enjoy,
Steven
