Please Help!?

Question

What is the diffreence between:
-a co-signer
-an authorized user
-an additional user
-a person who has got a joint account with sb

What is the financial responsibility and who pays for what? Whose credit score is changed? If i am one of the mentioned above, can my credit report improve?

Answer 1

A co-signer is someone who is financially responsible if the other person doesn't pay the bill. Usually this happens when the person applying for credit doesn't have a good enough score for the credit line so the company is basically asking someone else to vouch for them and if the other person doesn't pay, then the person who told the company that this was an on-time paying person is responsible for paying what is owed.

An authorized user can charge items, but is not financially responsible for paying the bill. This is usually used for older teens whose parents want to allow them to have a credit card. (A person has to be 18 to legally obtain a card that they are responsible for.)

An additional user is another term for authorized user. That means one person has the credit, but is allowing a second person to use that account. The first person is responsible for paying.

A joint account means that both people are equally reponsible for paying the bill or they will both be faced with the consequences for not paying the bill.

The authorized and additional user does not increase the score of the second person. A co-signer and both people involved in the joint account can have their credit impacted by the on-time or deliquent payments.