The co-signer at seventy

When my grandson asked me to co-sign his car loan, he said it would be "just a signature." I have been a journalist long enough to know that the word just is where the story is.

Jenavieve wrote this morning about the file a lender's vendor assembles, and Tess wrote last week about the thin file that is really a split one. Both are right and both are writing for the borrower. I am writing for the person next to the borrower at the table, the one with the longer history and the better number, who is about to lend both of them to somebody who is twenty-three.

Here is what a co-signature is, in the plain language the CFPB uses: you are fully responsible for the debt. Not if he defaults. From the first day. The account goes on your report as your account, the payment counts against your income for anything you apply for afterward, and if he is late in March, you are late in March, and the thirty-day mark lands on a file that took you fifty years to build.

That is not a reason to refuse. I signed. It is a reason to sign with your eyes open, and at seventy the eyes need three specific things:

First, count the pulls. A dealership will shop his application to six lenders and every one of them has, under § 1681b, a permissible purpose to pull your report too. Six inquiries on a file that does not otherwise generate any. Small, temporary, but if you are refinancing the house in April, you want to know they are there and why.

Second, know your number before you lend it. If you have not pulled your own three reports this winter, do it before you sign anything. Jenavieve's advice from January applies with more force to a grandmother than to a first-time buyer, because a wrong item on my file does not just cost me; it costs him the rate.

Third, decide now what happens if he is late, and say it out loud at the table. Mikhail and I agreed that if a payment slips, the money comes from us that month and the conversation comes the same week. We wrote it on the back of the loan paperwork and both signed it. He thought that was funny. He is twenty-three.

The principle: a co-signer is a borrower who does not get the car. Everything a borrower must know, you must know, and you must know it first.

You have the better score because you have been careful for a long time. Be careful for one more afternoon.