Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Buyers who come to me about tradelines sometimes mention they’ve been using Sezzle for months, paying on time, and wondering why their credit score hasn’t moved. The answer is usually the same: standard Sezzle doesn’t report to credit bureaus. Your on-time payment record exists in Sezzle’s system, but Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have no idea it’s happening. There is a version of Sezzle that changes this — but it requires opting in, and most users don’t know it exists.
You’re looking at your credit report and one of the accounts says “consumer disputes reinvestigation in progress.” It showed up after you filed a dispute, and now you want to know what it actually means — how long it stays, what happens when it clears, and what you should be doing in the meantime.
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Every now and then someone asks me whether they should take out a personal loan just to build their credit. It sounds like a simple question — and the answer isn’t as clean as the advice sites make it seem. Do installment loans help your credit? They can. But the effect depends on mechanics most people don’t think about until something already went sideways. Related: asap credit repair — worth reading if this topic applies to you. I also cover how to build credit at 16 separately if you want a step-by-step look. Related: does financing a phone build credit — worth reading if this applies to you.
The short answer to which type of debt is most often secured: mortgages. By total volume and by prevalence, mortgage debt is the dominant form of secured borrowing. But the fuller answer is more useful than that — because secured vs. unsecured debt affects your credit profile differently, and understanding the distinction helps you make better decisions about what accounts to carry and how to build the strongest possible credit file.
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One of the most persistent myths in personal finance is that getting married somehow combines your credit scores into a single “married credit score.” It doesn’t work that way — and understanding why matters a lot when you’re about to make major financial decisions together. Your credit files stay separate after marriage. What changes is that your financial choices start overlapping in ways that can affect both of them. Related: credit repair for veterans — worth reading if this applies to you.
Continue reading “Married Credit Score: What Changes and What Doesn’t”