If you bought an authorized user tradeline and then got an alert from Credit Karma or your bank’s credit monitoring saying “a new tradeline has been opened,” that’s the notification you were waiting for. It means the tradeline posted. Here’s what it actually means for your credit — and a couple of things worth checking when you see it.
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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.
Continue reading “If one credit bureau removes an item, do the others have to?”
Somebody asked me once if buying a tradeline would fix a medical collection that had tanked their credit score. I told them probably not — not in the way they were hoping. But I also told them to look into whether the statute of limitations on that debt had already expired, because that changes what their options actually are. That question comes up more than you’d think, so here’s what the medical bill statute of limitations actually means.
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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”
