Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Credit utilization is the factor I dealt with most directly in my tradeline business. When I add someone as an authorized user to one of my cards, what I’m doing — mechanically — is increasing their total available credit while adding an account with low utilization. Their score often moves within the next statement cycle. So when people ask me how to hide their credit utilization, I have a fairly specific answer, because the underlying mechanics are something I work with directly.
A lot of people find their way to tradelines after hitting a wall. Their score is stuck, they can’t get approved for the apartment or the car loan, and someone online told them that adding tradelines to your credit is the fast lane. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes people buy the wrong thing and get disappointed. Let me walk through how it actually works.
Continue reading “Adding tradelines to your credit: what actually works”
At some point while reviewing your credit report, you’ll probably see a list of inquiries — some labeled “hard” and some labeled with terms like “informative research credit inquiry” or variations on that phrase. The hard ones you likely recognize: those are from credit applications. The informative research ones are different, and understanding what they are (and what they aren’t) is worth a few minutes.
Buyers ask me this pretty regularly: does Chase actually report authorized users? The short answer is yes — Chase reports adult authorized users to all three major credit bureaus. But there’s a nuance here that most posts miss entirely, and it matters depending on why you’re asking.
People ask me this more than you’d think — not because I’m a debt expert, but because people who are cleaning up their credit to buy a tradeline often have collections sitting on their report. It’s a fair question, and the answer isn’t always “just pay someone.” Here’s how I’d think about it.
