Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
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.
The most common message I get from people who find this site isn’t “how do I buy a tradeline?” — it’s “is there a way to get one for free?” Fair question, especially if you’re not sure whether tradelines are even worth paying for. The short answer is yes, there are free ways to get tradelines. But each one comes with a real limitation that the generic SEO posts skip over, and knowing how to get free tradelines is mostly about knowing which limitation you can live with.
Continue reading “How to get free tradelines: what actually works”
Have you ever experienced the frustration of working on a large Excel spreadsheet, only to have Excel crash and display the message “Excel ran out of resources”? This message can be caused by several factors, and it can be a real pain to figure out which one is the culprit. In this post, we’ll provide you with a list of possible causes, explain how to check if those causes are the problem, and share some best practices to prevent this annoying issue.
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.
