Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
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.
Buyers mention this phrase to me fairly often. They’ve pulled their credit report — or looked at the score breakdown in Credit Karma — and found “too few accounts with payments as agreed” listed somewhere in the factors holding their number down. The phrase sounds like jargon, but it’s pointing at something specific: your credit file doesn’t have enough accounts with a consistent record of on-time payments. Understanding why that matters, and what you can realistically do about it, is straightforward once you see what the scoring model is actually measuring.
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.
