Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Tradeline Supply Company was the first tradeline broker I ever used — and the one I’d point someone to if they asked where to start. I found them through a post on the Wealthy Accountant blog, which itself came from a thread on the Mr. Money Mustache forum. At the time I had no idea selling tradelines was even a thing. TSC was where I learned how the whole business works.
Continue reading “Tradeline Supply Company Review: My Experience as a Seller”
A tradeline is any credit account that reports to your credit file, so “a new tradeline has been opened” means one thing: an account that wasn’t on your credit report before is on it now. Credit Karma, your bank’s monitoring, Experian, whoever is watching your file — they all send some version of this alert, and it says nothing about whether the account is good news, bad news, or something you paid for on purpose.
Which one it is depends entirely on whether you were expecting it. If you bought an authorized user tradeline, this is the notification you’ve been waiting for and it means the card posted. If you weren’t expecting anything, it deserves ten minutes of your attention today. Below is how to tell the two apart, plus the one issuer whose version of this alert confuses buyers more than all the others combined.
Continue reading “A New Tradeline Has Been Opened: What It Means”
Short answer: no. If one credit bureau removes a negative item from your report, the others have no obligation to do the same. Each bureau operates independently — a successful dispute with Experian doesn’t automatically trigger anything at Equifax or TransUnion. You have to file separately with each one. I’ll explain why, and what that means in practice. There’s also a shortcut people pass around for filing these through Credit Karma — I tested it in the Credit Karma dispute hack.
Continue reading “If one credit bureau removes an item, do the others have to?”
Buyers ask me this more than you’d expect — usually right after they’ve added a tradeline and are watching Credit Karma every day waiting for the number to move. So let me answer the actual question and then explain the part that matters more: what Credit Karma’s score is, and when to trust it.
Continue reading “How often does Credit Karma update? What to actually know”
That phrase — “proportion of loan balances to loan amounts is too high” — shows up in FICO reason codes and on monitoring sites like Credit Karma as one of the factors pulling your score down. It sounds bureaucratic, but what it’s describing is actually pretty simple: your installment loans still have a lot of the original balance left to pay off, and that’s costing you points.
Continue reading “Proportion of loan balances too high: what it means”