Update: Unfortunately American Express no longer backdates any of their credit cards, regardless of whether you’re trying to backdate from an international card or not. Read more about this here.
One of my favorite things about American Express is that they back date your new accounts to the year you first were approved for a credit card. This means that if you first AmEx card was from back in 1998, all new accounts will have the opening date of 1998 as well. This is important to us because one of the scoring factors for the FICO score is something known as average age of accounts (AAoA), having American Express backdate credit cards helps us keep our AAoA nice and high whilst we open new accounts. I’ve written about this before and this tip is nothing new.
I recently received an e-mail from a reader that had immigrated to the U.S, in the e-mail he let me know that he was able to get a credit card with American Express without any credit history because he had a credit card with them in his home country. It’s interesting that the different American Express departments that are responsible for countries share this information, but what was more interesting is that when this person pulled their credit report his new American Express card was reporting an age of 6 years and he was already showing credit score of 766 according to Credit Karma.
Obviously this won’t really help you unless you’ve had an American Express card elsewhere in the world, but it is a useful trip for recent immigrants.
