Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me how to purchase a tradeline like it’s a complicated process. It isn’t, really — but the part most buyers get wrong isn’t the how, it’s the what. What you’re buying matters a lot more than where you buy it.
Continue reading “Purchase a Tradeline: What You’re Actually Buying”
As I was planning (daydreaming) about my always-postponed digital nomad life I watched, on a plane, of all places, the movie “Nomadland”. The movie is not really about a digital nomad but a “regular” nomad. It won the Oscar(!?) and it is an interesting movie. But it made me think again about life on the road and the movies that portray it. My two favorites by far are “Into the wild” (I also have the book but never read it) and “The motorcycle diaries”.
Piggybacking credit companies all sell the same basic thing: they add you as an authorized user on someone else’s seasoned credit card so that card’s age and limit post to your credit report. I know this because I’m on the other side of that transaction — I sell authorized user tradelines from my own cards, both through brokers and directly here. So when I look at the companies advertising this, I’m not guessing at how they work; I’ve listed cards with several of them and watched how they treat buyers and sellers. This is the honest version of what you’re actually paying for and how to tell a real operation from one that’ll waste your money. If you want the mechanics first, here’s how piggybacking credit actually works from the inside.
Continue reading “Piggybacking credit companies: what to watch for”
I have Italian roots, and for years I’ve had this persistent fantasy of working from a terrace somewhere in Tuscany or a flat in Bologna — laptop open, espresso at hand, pretending I live there instead of just visiting. So when I started seriously researching digital nomad visas, Italy was the first one I looked into. The short version: Italy was late to formalize this, but the situation has changed, and there are real options now.
At one point I had around ten hard inquiries on my credit report at the same time. That wasn’t recklessness — it was the side effect of opening new cards to season them for tradeline sales. But it made me think hard (no pun intended) about what inquiries actually do to a score, versus what people think they do. The answer is more nuanced than most posts let on. Related: does removing hard inquiries increase credit score — worth reading if this applies to you.
