Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me this in the context of tradelines pretty often — they’re sitting somewhere in the 580–669 range, they know it’s not great, and they want to understand what they’re actually dealing with before deciding whether to do anything about it. So here’s the practical answer on what a fair credit score means, where it limits you, and what actually moves you out of it.
Continue reading “What Is a Fair Credit Score — and What Can You Do?”
“Set for Life” by Scott Trench is one of those books that’s more useful in your late twenties than your late thirties, which isn’t a knock — it’s just the honest audience. Trench built his framework from his own experience going from broke recent grad to financially independent relatively quickly, and the whole book is oriented around aggressive early-stage wealth-building. If you’re past that stage, you’ll still find useful ideas, but the action items are most relevant when you’re starting from zero.
I ported out of Google Fi after using it for a few years, and the process was smoother than I expected — once I understood what information I needed upfront. The main thing that trips people up is not having their account number and PIN ready before they contact the new carrier. Get those two pieces of information first and the rest is straightforward. This post is a companion to my Google Fi review for anyone who’s already decided to leave and just needs to know how.
There’s a specific question I get from people who’ve been dealing with an eviction on their record: they want to know if buying a tradeline will help. The answer depends on what’s actually rejecting them — because an eviction and a credit score problem are two different things, and they have different solutions. Here’s how to get an eviction off your record, and where credit fits into the picture.
Continue reading “How to Get an Eviction Off Your Record (What Actually Works)”
Buyers ask me a version of this question more than you’d expect: they’re trying to repair their credit, and they’re worried something in their past — a broken lease, an old landlord dispute — is still dragging them down. The answer is more specific than most articles make it sound. Breaking a lease doesn’t automatically hurt your credit. What happens after you break it is what matters.
