Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Authorized user tradelines, written by someone who has actually sold them since 2019 — how the market works, what the brokers really pay, and what to watch out for. No CPNs, ever.
You’re looking at your credit report and one of the accounts says “consumer disputes reinvestigation in progress.” It showed up after you filed a dispute, and now you want to know what it actually means — how long it stays, what happens when it clears, and what you should be doing in the meantime.
Continue reading “Consumer Disputes Reinvestigation in Progress: What It Means”
Buyers ask me this one a lot — usually right after they’ve spent twenty minutes Googling tradeline companies and aren’t sure if the whole thing is legitimate. The short answer: yes, you can pay to be added as an authorized user on someone else’s credit card. That’s actually the entire business model I run at kindoflost.com.
But there’s a longer answer worth reading before you spend money, because not all AU tradelines are the same, and a few details can make the difference between a purchase that moves your score and one that doesn’t.
I sold authorized user tradelines on my own credit cards, and one of the questions that kept landing in my inbox is about auto primary tradelines — usually from someone who’s been told they need one on their report before a car purchase will go through. An auto primary tradeline is an auto loan reported on your credit file with you as the primary borrower: your name on the loan, your payment history, your responsibility. That’s the simple part. The complicated part is the market that has grown around the phrase, because a lot of people typing it into Google aren’t looking for a definition — they’re looking to buy one. And that’s where I owe you a straight answer, even if it costs me a sale (it usually doesn’t — more on that below).
People find this post after Googling some version of “can I make money with my credit cards” — which is also how I found my way into selling tradelines a few years back. (I remember to this day the many times I typed variations of “monetize good credit” into Google with zero useful results.) The short answer is yes, if you have the right cards, you can earn money by renting them out as authorized user tradelines.
Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
Continue reading “Sell Credit Cards as Tradelines: How It Actually Works”
Every time someone talks about a “5 minute credit score trick,” they usually mean one of two things: paying down a balance quickly, or adding an authorized user tradeline. The “5 minute” part is actually accurate — the setup itself takes minutes. The results don’t. That distinction matters, and I want to be upfront about it before getting into what actually works.
Continue reading “5 Minute Credit Score Trick: What It Actually Does”