Good credit is much like youth: you never really appreciate its significance until it’s gone, and then it’s all too tempting to try just about any scheme promising to restore it to quickly restore it to you.

I myself struggled in the past to erase bad credit, a consequence of the days when companies handed out credit cards as freely as Halloween candy. At the time, I remember feeling that the task of rebuilding my credit was almost overwhelming and painfully slow.

This, of course, has given rise to an industry designed to help people with bad credit repair by helping people systematically tackle the most credit-damaging incidents on their record, one at a time, while advising them in ways to re-establish good credit.

It’s also given rise to a number of other, less legal practices like “credit piggybacking”: allowing someone with bad credit to become an authorized user on the account of someone whose credit rating is superior. As shifty as that sounds, it’s a practice once recommended by MSN’s money experts.

It’s also a practice that, as Motley Fool predicted a year ago, is about to get clamped down on.

Fair Isaac Corp., the company that developed the formula used by lenders to calculate credit ratings, is preparing to change its methods. Under the new rules, the credit rating of an account will only reflect the actual primary account holder’s payment history; authorized users will no longer receive the “trickle down” credit boost that gave piggybacking its appeal.

As a result, around 3.3 million Americans will lose their credit ratings, since their scores were the result of being authorized users on others’ accounts. While the change in the rules is designed to prevent fraud and misrepresentation of a person’s ability to repay their debts, critics say its approach is like “using a shotgun to kills flies”.

After all, married people commonly pool their credit together under one spouse’s name with the other being an ‘authorized user’ on the account. Under the rule change that spouse won’t have any credit history if, say, the couple eventually gets divorced. Which means that even while newlywed couples pledge to spend their lives together, they’d better keep “his and hers” credit lines as a hedge against future trouble.

It also means, just as I learned after college, that the best way to go about establishing or repairing credit is not through quick and easy approaches like piggybacking. Doing anything right requires time and effort, and that goes for legal credit repair, too.

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