I got notified today from my credit monitoring service (free through AAA) that a potentially negative piece of information was reported. My father has me as an authorized user on his Shell gas credit card although I no longer have access to the account since high school, and I've graduated college now, so it's been several years- it's still on my credit report. This card has been reported overlimit, which my father made me aware of- my mother, another authorized used with a physical card, overcharged it.

I've heard that you can have the account owner call and remove authorized users from their account and it would come off their credit reports. Does anyone have experience with this?

In addition, this is a very old account, about 20 years and it obviously makes my credit history look much better. Does this outweigh the ding?

I've have credit problems in the past myself, but no late payments or overlimit or anything negative except inquiries in over 4 years now and my credit was just finally inching towards 700. Now I think I've been hit hard probably.

I think the risk of having your credit score tied to someone who is irresponsible with credit outweighs the ding you'll get from removing yourself from this account. You may take a hit initially, but you'll be able to erase that with time and responsible credit usage. You can't control your parents and their use/misuse of their credit, which means you don't know how many more of these surprises are in store for you and your credit score in the future.

I would sign up for your own card, and then have them remove you from their card. Your history may or may not still be there, but at least you are getting your own line of credit and kind of starting anew.

I'm sorry to hear this. I actually have the reverse problem, so I guess I could speak on behalf of the other side.

How receptive will your dad be to remove your name from the account? It may be a long process... to have your name removed, and then having to convince the CC company to remove the activity on your credit history. However, it still may not happen.

Just try to see if your parents are making plans to pay down that debt. If not, get yourself removed from the account. If they are, maybe just keeping your name there is okay for now. But like someone else said, maybe apply for your own card, that way your total credit to debt ratio is better, since I believe that plays more a role in your score.

I believe Suze Orman or Harvey Warren have written articles about something like this before... might be worthwhile for you to do a search for them.

I was about to respond and tell you to not worry about it, but it appears that would be bad advice.

A couple of years ago when I pulled my credit report for the first time I freaked out a little bit when I found out I had 2 credit cards on my account that I didn't know anything about. It took a little bit of time to understand that those were my parents CC's from back in HS when I was on their dime. At the time there was some big news that Fair Isaac was going to stop using accounts where you are an authorized user for calculating your credit score. Well, it turns out they changed their mind:

http://www.credit.com/credit_informatio ... anges.jsp/

so it turns out i'm in the same situation as you are and didn't even know it until just now! I've pulled my credit report since then but always glossed over those cards since I knew what they were.

Just to be clear, you are no way on the hook for paying the balance on those accounts. Your FICO is the only thing affected.

If it's any consolation I'll be calling my mom and dad as well to beg them "please take me off your credit card." Yeah.. sometimes it feels the umbilical cord is longer than you think!

On a scale of 1-10 how likely is this to happen again? If you're worried about it have you dad call and take you off the account. It might be worth the peace of mind alone. If you feel strongly that it's not going to ever happen again then don't worry about it.

My dad is usually very good about keeping his score high- paying everything on time, but they have been struggling lately with carrying balances. He is willing to take the steps to remove me off the account though and I think that may be for the best. I want my score to reflect me and me alone, without help from piggy backing on my parents. Thank you for the stories, advice and examples.