Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Aged primary tradelines for sale show up alongside authorized user tradelines in a lot of the same places, and buyers sometimes ask me whether I offer them or where to find them. The honest answer: I don’t sell them, and I’d think carefully before buying them anywhere.
Continue reading “Aged Primary Tradelines for Sale: What to Know”
Buyers ask me this constantly: which tradeline is the best one to buy? And almost every time, the follow-up question is about issuers. Chase or Capital One? Amex or Discover? The honest answer is that picking by brand name is one of the most reliable ways to overpay for underwhelming results. The best tradelines to boost credit score have almost nothing to do with whose logo is on the front of the card.
What actually matters is three numbers: the credit limit, the age of the account, and the utilization rate at statement close. Everything else is noise. Of those three, age is the one that costs the most to buy and the one you can never manufacture — I put numbers on how much more brokers charge for age than for limit using their live catalogs.
A buyer emailed me not long ago asking about something she’d seen on her credit report: “remark code removed.” She’d been deep in a credit dispute and had no idea whether this was good news, bad news, or just noise. I’ve gotten some version of this question enough times that I figured it was worth laying out clearly.
Continue reading “Remark Code Removed: What It Means on Credit Karma”
Buyers mention this phrase to me fairly often. They’ve pulled their credit report — or looked at the score breakdown in Credit Karma — and found “too few accounts with payments as agreed” listed somewhere in the factors holding their number down. The phrase sounds like jargon, but it’s pointing at something specific: your credit file doesn’t have enough accounts with a consistent record of on-time payments. Understanding why that matters, and what you can realistically do about it, is straightforward once you see what the scoring model is actually measuring.
Let me be direct about something before we go any further: “primary tradelines for sale” is almost always a red flag phrase. If you’ve been searching for this and landed on a site actually selling what they claim are primary tradelines, read carefully before you hand over any money.
Continue reading “Primary Tradelines for Sale: What You’re Actually Buying”