Family Issues
A marriage is more than a blending of life-styles, furnishings and families.
It’s a blending of credit scores. Sometimes this combination is for
the better; sometime it’s for the worse.
Your spouse has considerable ability to mess up your credit score with his
or her actions or debt, even if it occured years ago. This is a connection
that is unlike any other. Other family members—parents, children, siblings—aren’t
automatically connected to your credit. But your spouse is.
It’s rare for married people to have very different credit reports
or credit scores. Even though a husband and wife almost always have a slightly
different score, they usually end up within 50 points of each other after
several years of marriage.
But even your extended family can mess with your credit, if you aren’t
careful. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to be careful.
Next: Community Property |
