Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
(How I think about growing beyond my own credit cards)
Anyone who runs a tradeline business for long enough hits the same wall. The work is straightforward, the demand is real, and the income is decent — but every time you think about growing, you run into the same problem: you can only have so many cards, and every card you add for this purpose concentrates more risk on your own credit file. There’s no way around it as long as the business is entirely dependent on your own accounts.
A buyer emailed me not long ago asking about something she’d seen on her credit report: “remark code removed.” She’d been deep in a credit dispute and had no idea whether this was good news, bad news, or just noise. I’ve gotten some version of this question enough times that I figured it was worth laying out clearly.
Continue reading “Remark Code Removed: What It Means (Good or Bad?)”
The question I hear most from parents goes something like this: my kid is 16, how do I figure out how to build credit as a teenager without handing them a card they’ll max out at the mall by Friday? It’s a good instinct. The teenagers who start early — even just riding along on a parent’s account — tend to walk into their twenties with a file that’s already a few years deep, which is exactly the head start everyone else is scrambling for.
Everybody wants fast credit repair, and I get why — when a score is the only thing standing between you and an apartment or a car, “wait a year” is not the answer you’re looking for. So let me be straight about what actually moves quickly and what doesn’t, because the gap between those two is where most people get fleeced. I dig into the longer game over in how to add 100 points to credit score, but this post is about the stuff that can move in days or weeks.
Buyers ask me this a lot — usually when they’re a few months out from applying for a home loan and trying to clean up their file. The short answer you’ll find everywhere is “three tradelines,” and that’s not wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete enough that I’d want to walk through it before you take it as a hard rule. Related: cheap tradelines — worth reading if this applies to you.
