01 Sep 2018

Is Boosting Your Credit Score Legal?

Remember when you were young and your dad would put you on his shoulders and run you around the yard? If that never happened to you, just imagine it for a moment. You’re tiny and someone big put you up high and showed you life from the top. So many possibilities from such a perspective.

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As adults, for us to have a proper playground where we play with the big toys, our credit scores determine the playground, determine the toys, but sometimes we have some bad luck and our scores take a tumble, so what can we do? Piggyback.

Piggybacking is when you are added as an authorized user to someone else’s credit card; a card with a long history, large balance, and perfect payments. It gets reported to your credit bureau as if it was yours all along, and your credit gets a healthy (sometimes drastically) boost.

But, the big question, is it legal?

The answer: Yes, it is legal. You cannot get in trouble for doing it. There are many sites that offer their services with piggybacking, and as Arnold of CardRatings says, it is legal, but he doesn’t care for it. “They do allow it. It’s a legal process. It is permitted. With a company like this you can admire their entrepreneurship, but they’re using a loophole in the system.”

Have you ever noticed that big corporations and governments operate by a different set of rules than the individual? With an even more dramatic example that has recently been in the news, if the government needs to borrow more money, they just raise the debt ceiling to be able to continue borrowing to pay the bills. How would you like to do that? Instead of being maxed out on your cards, just push a button and raise your limits by a few thousand dollars?

Of course, that isn’t allowed, but piggybacking is also something governments do.

“The U.S. government allows companies to piggyback,” says Tony Johnson, a senior client consultant at Seasoned Trade Lines LLC. “Corporations are able to do it by allowing other companies to piggyback on their credit profile. The banking system itself is a system where you’re leveraging other people’s resources and efforts. So if an individual who is a supplier has a good credit history, why can they not leverage their own credit history?”

And this is where you can take advantage of this method, by leveraging the good history of another credit profile. At BoostCredit101, there’s a 60-day money back guarantee so if it doesn’t work, you pay nothing. And with the perfect Better Business Bureau record, you know that it works and the guarantee is honored. It’s one of those instances where you can make it a little more fair for yourself, take advantage.