Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Linear programming is a mathematical method that is used to optimize the allocation of resources. It can be applied to a wide range of problems, such as maximizing profits or minimizing costs. One of the key concepts in linear programming is the shadow price, which can be used to determine how a change in one of the constraints of a linear programming problem affects the optimal solution.
Fair warning: I wrote this post after a genuinely frustrating afternoon dealing with Vanguard. I’ve kept it up because the complaints are real and I still hear them constantly from other investors. Take the title at face value—it’s rant-y—but stay for the part where I acknowledge what they actually do well, because that part is also true.
Continue reading “Vanguard Sucks”People ask me some version of the guarantor vs cosigner question more often than you’d expect — usually because they’re trying to figure out if buying an authorized user tradeline is similar to having one or the other. It’s not, but explaining why forces you to actually sort out what these two terms mean, because even landlords and lenders use them interchangeably when they shouldn’t.
Buyers come to me asking for old tradelines specifically. “I want the oldest card you have” is something I hear a lot, and the logic is right — the older the tradeline, the bigger the lift on the age component of your score. But how that age actually shows up on your report depends entirely on which issuer the card is from, and that part catches a lot of buyers off-guard. Seasoned tradelines are worth understanding before you hand over any money, because two cards that look identical on paper can do very different things to your report.
Most people frame this as a dollar-amount question — I owe three thousand, or eight thousand, or fifteen thousand — and want to know if that number is the problem. From a credit score standpoint, the raw dollar amount is almost irrelevant. What matters is the ratio: how much of your available credit you’re using. That ratio is utilization, and it’s the real answer to how much credit card debt is too much. Related: do installment loans help your credit — worth reading if this applies to you.
