Trying to find additional ways to increase my credit score?

I'm trying to increase my fico score so that I could lease a car in three months. I've been working on repairing my credit. I purchased another car with my husband over a year ago which has helped boost up my fico from 513-605 in 1 year! I've heard that piggybacking on someone else's credit card works very well. My mom has a card with a $500 limit with a $118 balance but has only been opened for 9 months. A mortgage broker told me that the card had to be opened for 2 yrs in order for the piggyback to affect my score for the better. But I'm not so sure about that. My fico went up almost 100 pts in a year when I purchased the truck. I've also read about the future changes of piggyback and am aware that this will no longer be doable as of September. What I'm most concerned with for now is, will having myself added to a 9 month old account with good payment history work? Any suggestions or input is greatly appreciated.

Public Comments

1. 605 is still fair to low on the credit scale not horrible at all but as you know it still requires a co-signer. It's best to pay your bills early or at least by the due date. Do you have a revolving line of credit at all? If not even trying for a small store and buying something at least once and paying it off right away reflects positive on your credit report. Have you found out what credit bureau the dealership is using? Have you obtained a copy of your report to make sure there is nothing against you not made by you? Sometimes you pay things off and they don't get removed without a push from you. If there are any questionable marks against you contact the credit bureau and dispute them. Anything in dispute cannot be counted against you while in dispute. Best of luck!
2. To really improve your score, you would need to piggyback on a card with a much higher limit, a much lower balance (as a percent of credit limit) and a much longer history. The balance on the credit card that your Mom has is 23.6% of the limit. This isn't really high, but to get the best score, the balance should be less than 10% of the limit. At $500, this is a very low limit card. Cards with limits of less than about $5,000 don't improve your score much, and may even decrease it. A 9 month history is very short - it could actually decrease your score if you have other accounts on your credit history that are longer, by lowering the average age of your accounts. The reason that the truck loan raised your score in less than a year is because it is a different kind of credit - it is an installment loan, which has a fixed payback period. A credit card never has to be fully repaid as long as the minimum payments are made, so they affect your score differently. If you really want to try to raise your score for the next 3 - 9 months by piggybacking, find someone with an account that is at least 7 years old, with a perfect payment history for that 7 years, a credit limit of at least $10,000 and an average balance of less than $1,000.
3. AJ nailed it.
4. I have never heared of such a thing, You have bills, pay them on time. It's being late that knocks your score down, also, if you have credit cards that has several thousand of dollars of usable credit, Mainly because you could run that up in no time, that to will keep a score down. a lot is based on the combined income of you and your husband.