Alright, on to the good stuff. Now that you’re ready to learn how to hack credit cards, we’ll need to teach you the basics first.

First: You’re going to need a good credit score to get good credit cards. And good credit cards are the ones you want, as they’re the ones that will offer you ridiculously good signup bonuses that let you travel all around the world for free.

What’s a good credit score? 750+ is good enough to basically get you approved for anything, and 700+ is enough to give you good enough odds to try getting approved for some good cards and see how you fare.

Credit Karma is a good resource for checking out what credit score you might need for any particular given card you’re attempting to apply for. They aggregate data from hundreds of users who have successfully applied for a given card, and map out the credit score distribution for that card.

Here are two examples, for the United Chase MileagePlus card, and the Citibank AAdvantage Platinum Select MasterCard.

MileCards has also done a good compilation of the average score approved for a given credit card here.

As you can see there, the average credit score of an approved applicant for ‘good’ credit cards runs somewhere between 700 and 725.

So having established what kind of credit score you’ll need to start hacking credit cards, the question now stands as to just how to achieve such a credit score. So:

How do you get a good credit score?

Typically, this is a process that takes years, if not decades. You open some really crappy credit cards and maybe get some loans, and over years of demonstrating responsible credit use, your credit score steadily increases.

That sucks. By the time you get a good credit score like that, these deals will probably be long dead.

Thankfully, there’s another way to get a good credit score that is shockingly unknown, and unbelievably effective. I used this method to get a stellar credit score above 800 when I was just 19 – cheating the system by about a decade before it’d be possible to get that kind of score otherwise.

How did I do it? Two secrets: joint accounts and authorized users.

In short, certain banks allow you to add joint account holders to credit cards that are already open. In my case, my mother had a stellar 18-year credit history, and had several credit cards she’d kept open for over a decade. By having her add me as a joint account holder on those credit cards, I instantly ‘inherited’ her entire credit history from those cards: 18 years of credit history, with zero delinquencies or derogatory marks of any kind. Unbelievable, but true – I now had a credit history that was as long as I’d been alive.

This hack has been whittling slowly over the years, as banks have discontinued allowing joint account holders. Thankfully, there are still several major banks that still allow it to this day, and so if you have a friend or relative with stellar credit who’s willing to add you as a joint account holder on their credit cards (make sure the credit card[s] they add you on have been open for a quite a while [5+ years], have zero late payments or any other delinquencies, and have very little utilization – and make sure you trust this person to maintain such a good credit record), definitely take advantage of this hack immediately, as it won’t be around forever.

Once you take advantage of it however – you’re good. Banks won’t retroactively disallow joint account holders on accounts they’ve already added you to. I’m still a joint account holder on my mom’s Chase and CapitalOne credit cards, despite the fact that those banks have since discontinued offering joint accounts. So jump on this opportunity as soon as you can.

What banks still allow joint accounts? Bank of America, Discover, US Bank, and Wells Fargo. So if you know anyone with any credit cards issued by these banks that have a good credit history with said card, and are willing to add you as a joint account holder, get them to do it as soon as possible before this opportunity fades away and you’re stuck having to arduously build your own credit score over the course of decades.

Okay – that’s all well and good, but what if you can’t find anyone willing to add you as a joint account holder on their fantastic credit cards, or that you trust enough to share their financial responsibility? After all, being a joint account holder is a significant financial decision for both parties – each person technically has full responsibility over the credit card, and if either person ends up defaulting on the credit card debt, the other person would be fully liable for it.

Then that’s okay. There’s a second slightly-less-effective-but-still-very-effective method of hacking your credit score that holds almost none of the risk and much of the reward of joint accounts. This is the authorized user hack, whereby a relative or friend with a credit card with great credit history adds you as an authorized user to that card. This, like joint accounts, will generally cause the entire credit history of that card to be added to your credit report.

As my mom had already added me as a joint account holder on all of her best cards, I used this method to successfully give my then-girlfriend-now-wife a stellar credit score of her own in just two months, despite her being a foreign national from Russia with absolutely zero credit history.

The trick is this: since the newest credit scoring system, FICO 08, came out, this hack works, but only when it appears to be a ‘legitimate’ authorized user, i.e., an actual family member of the owner of the credit card, such as a child or spouse.

Based on my personal experience doing this with my wife, who was at the time just my girlfriend with absolutely no familial connection to me, I’m fairly certain that this system is pretty straightforward to hack.

In short, what you’ll want to do is make sure that the person who’s being added as an authorized user has the same home address being reported on their credit report as the owner of the credit card. You can do this by first being added as an authorized user on an American Express issued credit card (known as an ‘additional cardmember’ in AMEX-speak), as AMEX requires you to input a ton of information about the additional cardmember being added, including home address and Social Security Number. AMEX then reports this information on your credit report, which is a very convenient way for you to add a home address to your credit report that matches that of the owner of the credit cards you want to be added on.

Once that’s done, you can be added on just about any other credit card and see that information show up on your credit report, so long as the name on those credit cards matches the name on your credit report.

Why is being added as an authorized user preferable in some cases to being added as a joint account holder? Two reasons:

1. There’s zero risk by either party. When you’re added as a authorized user, you’re not responsible for any debt that might be incurred on the credit card. If the owner of the credit card racks up a ton of debt and declares bankruptcy or some other catastrophic event happens, you won’t be financially liable (that said, one would hope that you’d choose someone who’s much more responsible than this to add you to their credit card). Conversely, there’s zero risk that you’ll go rampant and abuse your credit card privileges, as you never have to physically come in contact with the card. Once the owner of the credit card adds you as an authorized user, they’ll be mailed a new credit card in your name, ostensibly to give to you to use. However, they can just shred this credit card, never giving it to you, and consequently you’ll gain all the benefit of their credit score and they don’t have to worry about you being a horrible person and using up all their credit.

2. While not every bank allows joint account holders, just about every credit card allows authorized users. So even if you can’t take advantage of the joint account holder hack, you can almost certainly take advantage of the authorized user hack.

So how do you know when you’ve got a good credit score? And how do you check your credit report to make sure all of this is really working? Well – read on. (link this)