Every time someone talks about a “5 minute credit score trick,” they usually mean one of two things: paying down a balance quickly, or adding an authorized user tradeline. The “5 minute” part is actually accurate — the setup itself takes minutes. The results don’t. That distinction matters, and I want to be upfront about it before getting into what actually works.
Continue reading “5 Minute Credit Score Trick: What It Actually Does”
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.
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.
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I get messages from buyers who are confused — sometimes panicked — when a tradeline they paid for disappears from their credit report. “It’s gone” is usually how they put it. What they don’t realize is that there are two completely different things that “tradeline deletion” can mean, and the path forward is totally different depending on which one they’re experiencing.
Continue reading “Tradeline Deletion: What It Means and What to Do”
