I wish I’d put my D21 on my Amex sooner, but I guess it helped a bit. She was approved for $1000 limit with the Discover card (which is plenty for her spending for now) and religiously uses their credit monitoring tools. Her credit score is almost 800 now so hopefully will be even stronger by the time she graduates.
Any other tips?
I have our 2 cards on autopay, like most of our bills. About once a year I’d miss a due date and have to call and beg for forgiveness (which was always given). I might suggest that, making sure they check the statements on the app.
That’s the deal. 800 is high. She will get there. But ya gotta use the credit card. My kids paid when they set reminders or the cc emailed them before the due date and they paid in full each month. I wouldn’t set to autopay since the amounts will be different each months unless it pays off that’s month in full.
I have a question I’d like some clarification on. For a college kid who has their name on a card for a parent credit card account - they are building credit by having a card (and spending) on a parent account, even though they don’t pay the bill? (This is not intuitive to me.)
My autopay pays the exact amount, although I think I can change it. I get email and texts about upcoming auto payments, and then thank you’s. Bill paying is my job, I don’t think H knows how easy it is now!
Discover autopay has the option to pay the last statement balance each month. I think our Chase card does as well. Both of those are on autopay. Our credit union cards lack this option, so we pay online each month. My credit union at least has the option to schedule the payment transfer (on a specific date), while DH’s will only transfer on the current date.
We make it work.
My 24 and 26 year old don’t buy anything they don’t have the cash for. So if the cash isn’t in their bank account then they can’t afford it. They use the cc to build credit and incase of emergencies. I wish I had their control… Lol
Not always. My daughter had a card with her name on it but it was my account. Her SSN wasn’t on the account and she wasn’t building credit. I should have set it up differently but it was just a card she took for study abroad.
You have to make sure they are on the account with their own SSN on it too. You can pay it all if you want.
Just gave Citibank my kids’ ss #’s today. My 26 year old just came over so I asked how she pays her cc payment, she uses autopay as well.
We are an autopay family as well. It’s set up to pay the full amount of the statement bill. So it’s just like you would have paid it in full in the old days, but now you don’t have to think about it. Neither of mine are the kind to spend more than they have, but it’s easy to know where your balance stands with all of the apps/online stuff nowadays.
If she’s sharing apartment, have her add the utilities, phone, Internet in her name (and let the roommates reimburse).
PS: Nice side-effect of Amex charge card - she gets her own access to “her” account, pays her own monthly bill, etc. - but as the master account holder, I get to see “it all”. Very reassuring whenever she’s jetting across the country or overseas: steady streams of “sign of life” on my iPhone app, for a parent who has trouble letting go of a kid who is fiercely independent. 
I’m late in responding but in HS, our D had a credit card in her name but on our account. In college, she was able to open a checking account and get a credit card through the credit union on campus. It was a very low spending limit (like $500) until she had her first internship. Then they raised the limit substantially. We’ve been having her put everything in her name to build up her credit for the past two years.
FWIW, it definitely seemed harder for her to get a credit card than when we were that age. I remember getting cc offers in the mail at college regularly and even had info in my orientation packet.
Bit of a funny story. Both kids were put on one of out CC’s before college. We also established a savings account for each of them with me (mom) as a co-owner thus having my SSN on record. It made for easy transfer of funds from our checking to their savings.
Our business accounts are also with this particular bank.
Fast forward to D have accumulated some fees on her bank account due to too many withdrawals from a savings account. She goes into bank to ask if there is any wiggle room on the fees. The first line teller has kind of a ‘oh brother’ attitude. When D runs her ATM card as ID…up pop all of our business accounts under her profile. Teller says ‘please give me a moment’. And…out comes the premier banker and escorts D to the ‘good coffee room’ as she called it.
They were extremely solicitous and accommodating, able to reduce some of the fees. D just chuckled and asked ‘did they really think those all those funds were mine’?
When our dad passed, my sister and I opened a joint account at chase since we both had chase accounts. Once his account was settled we split it. My sister has a lot of money tied up with chase, so me being on the same account as her gave me access to some perks (like getting a CS rep on the phone quickly). We kept the account open with $100 so I could keep them.
My son has had very good experiences with getting credit cards. He got his first credit card (Chase Freedom Student) in his own name in his freshman year. During his four years in college, he applied for and got approved for the Amazon (Chase) Visa and the Apple (Goldman Sacks) credit card. He was given $10k credit line on his Apple card (much more than the credit lines Chase gave him (which were between $1-2k). Upon his graduation last year, he applied for and was approved for two more credit cards (one with $17k and the other $30k credit lines). His credit score was was just below 800 when he was a freshman (and now close to 820), so it definitely contributed to his good fortune in getting credit.
Looking back, I think the main reason he got a good credit score was because he became an authorized user on a few of my credit cards when he was very young. Some credit cards report authorized users to credit bureaus (which help build credit profiles for authorized users) and others don’t. It’s easy to tell which card does (or doesn’t): it reports to credit bureaus if it asks for their SSNs when you try to add authorized users. Choose the credit cards that report to credit bureaus when adding your kids as authorized users.
Another important tip when you add your kids to your credit card is to add them to one of your credit cards with a long credit history. That history becomes part of their credit histories. For example, in my son’s credit report, the length of his credit history is currently 35 years.
It’s also important to remind them that they shouldn’t use up more than 1/3 of their credit limit on any of their own cards in any month, or it would negatively affect their credit scores for a while.
For a student card with a $500 limit?
Yes, unfortunately. They shouldn’t use these cards on large purchases.
One of my kids has such a card (he got it himself) and uses it for his daily expenses. He easily will exceed half the limit in any given month, but has auto pay of some sort set up (I see his bank account spending). He thinks he is building credit. He is wrong?
Yes, it’s easy to monitor anyone’s credit score these days (the service is free on many bank products including credit cards). You’d see a drop in credit score when the so-called “credit utilization ratio” exceeds about 1/3 on any card. The higher the “credit utilization ratio”, the greater the hit on credit score.
Interesting, thanks. I’ll have him check it.