Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Let me be direct about something before we go any further: “primary tradelines for sale” is almost always a red flag phrase. If you’ve been searching for this and landed on a site actually selling what they claim are primary tradelines, read carefully before you hand over any money.
Continue reading “Primary Tradelines for Sale: What You’re Actually Buying”
Figuring out how to add 100 points to credit score is one of those goals that sounds like a gimmick until you’ve actually watched it happen. It’s real — but it’s realistic mostly for a specific kind of file: thin, or banged up, with obvious problems to fix. If you’re already at 780, there’s no 100 points left to find. I cover the quick-hit version of this in fast credit repair; here I want to walk through the bigger swing.
If you’re trying to figure out how to get tradelines for your business, the first thing worth knowing is that business credit and personal credit are two different animals — and a lot of the advice floating around blurs them together. I sell authorized user tradelines on the personal side, so I’ll be honest about where they help a business and where they don’t. For the consumer version of all this, my post on primary tradelines is a good companion, and I get into the numbers in how much will a tradeline boost my credit.
Buyers sometimes contact me having watched their Credit Karma score climb for months, then run into a wall when a mortgage broker pulls their actual FICO and the numbers don’t match. Sometimes by 40 points. Sometimes more. The question that follows — why is my VantageScore lower than my FICO? — is one I hear fairly often, and it usually comes with a side of frustration, because the free score on their phone every week isn’t the one that matters to a mortgage underwriter.
A 611 dispute letter is one of those credit repair tools that gets oversold in online forums. People treat it like a secret code that unlocks automatic deletions — send this letter, watch the bad stuff disappear. The reality is more modest, but it is a genuine legal right, and in the right situation it can matter. Let me explain what it actually does and when it’s worth your time.
