Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me this one a lot — usually after they’ve already been turned down for a regular card and someone told them a secured card is the “first step.” It’s not wrong advice. But the honest answer to how much it’ll raise your score is: it depends, and it takes longer than most people expect.
Continue reading “How much will a secured credit card raise my score?”
The phrase “credit repair” gets attached to a lot of things — some legitimate, some not. Tradelines are real, legal, and can genuinely help in the right situation. But whether using tradelines for credit repair will solve your specific problem depends entirely on what’s actually dragging your score down. That’s the part nobody explains upfront, so let me do that — because the answer decides whether a tradeline is your first move, your last move, or the wrong move.
Every so often I run a coupon that brings any tradeline under $200 down to a flat $100. The code is 100TL — use it at checkout and the price drops automatically. I’ll explain the logic behind it, and what to actually look for when you’re picking a tradeline at that price. If you want to learn more about how to how to buy a tradeline, that post covers the process end to end.
People find my site looking for tradelines, and sometimes I can tell from the questions they ask that they’ve mixed up two very different problems. The most common one: someone has a delinquency on their credit report and thinks a tradeline will fix it. I wish that were true — it isn’t, and I’d rather say so upfront than take someone’s money for a product that won’t solve their actual problem.
Continue reading “Delinquency on Credit Report: What It Is and What Helps”
People find my site searching for ways to monetize good credit, which is exactly how I found this business in the first place. I remember spending a surprising amount of time Googling “make money with good credit” before I stumbled onto a forum thread that mentioned selling authorized user tradelines. Once I understood the model, it made sense. You add someone as an authorized user on a card you already have, they get the benefit of your card’s history on their credit report for a couple of months, and you get paid for it. Nobody shares a physical card. If you’re wondering whether you can pay to be an authorized user on someone else’s account, the short answer is yes — and selling that slot is the other side of the same transaction.
Continue reading “Sell authorized user tradelines: what it’s actually like”