Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Auto tradelines come up enough in buyer conversations that I want to address them directly. The phrase gets used to describe a few different things, and depending on which one a seller is pitching, you’re either looking at something worthless, something fraudulent, or something that doesn’t exist in the form being advertised.
Continue reading “Auto Tradelines for Sale: Why Most Are Fake”
Buyers ask me this constantly: which tradeline is the best one to buy? And almost every time, the follow-up question is about issuers. Chase or Capital One? Amex or Discover? The honest answer is that picking by brand name is one of the most reliable ways to overpay for underwhelming results. The best tradelines to boost credit score have almost nothing to do with whose logo is on the front of the card.
What actually matters is three numbers: the credit limit, the age of the account, and the utilization rate at statement close. Everything else is noise.
(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.
