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.
Buyers ask me this pretty regularly: does Chase actually report authorized users? The short answer is yes — Chase reports adult authorized users to all three major credit bureaus. But there’s a nuance here that most posts miss entirely, and it matters depending on why you’re asking.
Continue reading “Does Chase Report Authorized Users? (Yes, for Adults)”
I get messages from buyers who are confused — sometimes panicked — when a tradeline they paid for disappears from their credit report. “It’s gone” is usually how they put it. What they don’t realize is that there are two completely different things that “tradeline deletion” can mean, and the path forward is totally different depending on which one they’re experiencing.
Continue reading “Tradeline Deletion: What It Means and What to Do”
Buyers who come to me looking for a tradeline sometimes mention a derogatory public record on their report like it’s a death sentence. It’s not. But it is a serious item — the kind that stays on your credit profile for years and requires an honest understanding before you can figure out what to do about it. For a full explanation of public record on credit report, I wrote a dedicated post on that.
The question comes up a lot: does Carvana report to credit bureaus? It’s a reasonable thing to wonder before you finance a car through them, especially if you’re actively building or rebuilding credit and want to know whether those payments will actually count. Short answer: yes, your payments get reported — but not by Carvana directly.
When someone asks me if a tradeline will help their credit, one of my first questions is whether they have any public records on their report. It changes the picture significantly. Public records are the heaviest derogatory marks in the scoring model — they’re not like a late payment, which fades in a couple of years. The main one that still shows up, bankruptcy, can sit on your report for a decade.
Continue reading “What Is a Public Record on a Credit Report?”