Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
I sold my last tradeline on October 29, 2025. A $139 order, one card, nothing remarkable about it. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last one — you never do.
The store has been sitting there ever since, quietly taking orders that don’t go through. So I’m closing it. Not the blog, not the posts — just the store. Here’s the whole reasoning, numbers included, because in all the time I’ve spent reading about this business I have never once seen anybody publish theirs.
Chase Sapphire Reserve authorized user benefits come up a lot when someone wants to share their travel perks — or quietly hopes adding a family member will lift that person’s credit. Both are reasonable goals, but they pull in different directions, and the answer to “is it worth it” depends entirely on which one you’re chasing. I sold authorized user tradelines for years, so people still bring me the credit version of this question all the time, and the honest answer is more interesting than the card’s marketing.
The biggest card I ever had in the tradeline business was a $40,000 Bank of America card — right up until BoA noticed what I was doing with it and closed it (a story I tell partly as a warning and partly because it still stings). So when people search for a $20,000 tradeline, I know exactly what they’re picturing: a big limit landing on their credit report and doing big things. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they’re about to overpay for limit they don’t need. This post is the math and the shopping advice I’d give a friend.
When I wrote the first version of this post I had sold 59 tradelines and was somewhere between encouraged and beaten up. eBay had just banned me. Bank of America had just closed my $40,000 card. The direct sales experiment was going nowhere fast (it never did recover — I have since shut the store down for good). I called it “year three” even though I kept going.
This is the update. It’s been about five years now, 241 tradelines, $30,603 in commissions. The eBay ban still stings when I look at the data. The BoA closure still stings more. But the numbers are growing and I have enough of them now to actually say something interesting — so here we go.
People who sell tradelines don’t talk about the setup much. Most of the content out there is aimed at buyers — how tradelines work, how much they cost, whether they’re worth it. But the seller side has its own logic, and once I had it figured out I realized the whole thing clicks together in a way I didn’t plan for. The most common questions I get are from buyers, but sellers are starting to find me too, and this post is for them.
Continue reading “The Full Circle: How I Set Up My Tradeline Business to Run Itself”