It’s rare that a husband and wife will have similar credit scores. They each began their credit history as singles, long before they joined their lives together, and their numbers will sometimes be vastly different. Sometimes the man’s score will be much higher than the wife’s, and other times, it will be vice versa. I’ll use myself and my husband as an example, where mine has always been higher than his.
When we were first married, I was at 730, and he was at 650. He’d had a former roommate who ran up the phone bill (in my husband’s name) and then moved out without paying his portion of the bill. This, among a few other things, dinged my husband’s credit, so for the first little while of our marriage, we put everything in my name because I was the one with the better credit. We cleared things up with the phone company, and then we made a decision – we would sacrifice my good credit, just for a little while, to help improve my husband’s.
The first thing we did was get a joint credit card and put some purchases on it. Then, no matter what, we paid on it regularly and on time. We paid it off, waited a month, and then put a few more things on it. By this time, his score was starting to creep up a bit. Our first car died, so we bought another one, and this time we put him as the main buyer. As we made regular monthly payments on the car, his credit score rose.
I say “sacrificial” credit because there were times when my credit had to take the heat to keep his good. In order to make his payment on time, we occasionally had to be late with mine, or put groceries on my card to have cash to pay his card. Of course, that’s not ideal, but you do what you’ve got to do sometimes, right?
Today, his credit score is now in the 700’s. Mine has dipped slightly, but I’m still in the 700’s as well. We are working together to leverage our income to put us both in a good financial position, and when we went in to get a car loan in January, the bank approved it within half an hour because we’d been diligent in working hard on our status. My next goal is to get us both into the 730’s. As we continue to progress, I have no doubt that we’ll hit it.
So if you need to sacrifice a little bit of one spouse’s good credit in order to help the other out, go for it. You’ll find that both of you benefit in the long run.
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