Tradelines Archives - Kind of Lost

Tradeline Payouts: Why Per Spot Is the Wrong Number

A broker emailed me a rate sheet once and I nearly moved a card over it. Their number was $275 a spot. The broker I was already with paid $250 for the same card. Twenty-five dollars is twenty-five dollars, so I started filling out the paperwork before I bothered to read the rest of the page — and then I saw the cycle length. That is the thing nobody puts in bold: tradeline payouts are quoted per authorized user spot, but the spot doesn’t last the same length of time at every broker. Once I divided by the months, the $275 offer was worth barely half of what I was already getting.

So this post is about the arithmetic I wish someone had handed me at the start. Not which broker is nicest to deal with — what a card actually earns, per month, and which of the things you can change about your card are worth money.

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Which Tradelines Should I Buy? Age Beats Limit

The question I get more than any other is some version of “which tradelines should I buy” — usually from someone staring at a broker’s list with forty cards on it, sorted by price, with no idea what separates the $500 one from the $1,400 one. The honest answer is that most of what you’re looking at is priced on one variable, and it isn’t the one people fixate on. Buyers walk in wanting the biggest credit limit they can afford. The listings are priced mostly on age.

I pull live pricing from three brokers every hour, so rather than tell you what I think, I’ll show you what the market is actually charging today and where the same card costs meaningfully different money depending on who’s selling it.

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I’m Shutting Down My Tradeline Store. Here’s Why.

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.

Screenshot of the Kind of Lost tradeline store product listing page before it was shut down, showing tradeline cards for sale with pricing and add-to-cart buttons

Chase Sapphire Reserve Authorized User Benefits

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.

Selling Tradelines Update: Five Years, $30K Later

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.

Tradeline sales by credit card — 241 total sales and $30,603 in commissions across 18 cards