Personal blog on early retirement, tradelines, 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.
People ask me this constantly: is it worth adding someone as an authorized user on an Amex Platinum? Usually they mean one of two very different things — will the authorized user get the lounges and the travel perks, or will it help that person’s credit. The Amex Platinum authorized user benefits that matter for travel are not the ones that matter for your credit score, and confusing the two is how people end up overpaying. I sold authorized user tradelines for a living, so I spent most of my time on the half of that question the points blogs skip — the credit half.
Continue reading “Amex Platinum Authorized User Benefits: Worth It?”
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.
