Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
I sold my last tradeline on October 29, 2025. A $139 order, one card, nothing remarkable about it. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last one — you never do.
The store has been sitting there ever since, quietly taking orders that don’t go through. So I’m closing it. Not the blog, not the posts — just the store. Here’s the whole reasoning, numbers included, because in all the time I’ve spent reading about this business I have never once seen anybody publish theirs.
Every year around this time I get a wave of people asking whether tradelines are still worth buying. “Are they still working in 2026?” Short answer: yes. Longer answer: it depends on what you’re buying and who you’re buying from — and that part hasn’t changed since I started doing this.
Buyers mention this phrase to me fairly often. They’ve pulled their credit report — or looked at the score breakdown in Credit Karma — and found “too few accounts with payments as agreed” listed somewhere in the factors holding their number down. The phrase sounds like jargon, but it’s pointing at something specific: your credit file doesn’t have enough accounts with a consistent record of on-time payments. Understanding why that matters, and what you can realistically do about it, is straightforward once you see what the scoring model is actually measuring.
An unscorable credit score means your credit file doesn’t have enough data for a scoring model to generate a number. It’s not a bad score — it’s the absence of one. And counterintuitively, that can be just as big a problem as a low score when you’re trying to get approved for a loan, a credit card, or even a rental. Related: why is my credit score not updating — worth reading if this applies to you.
People with unscorable profiles are often genuinely creditworthy — they pay their bills, they’ve never missed a rent payment, they just haven’t used traditional credit products. The problem is that lenders can’t evaluate what they can’t see. If there’s nothing in your file to measure, most lenders default to “no.” For a full explanation of prescreened offer for credit, I wrote a dedicated post on that.
When you check your credit score and get an “unavailable” message instead of a number, it usually means one of a few things. And in my experience talking with people who buy tradelines, the most common cause is the simplest one: there isn’t enough information on your credit report for the scoring model to work with. Related: informative research credit inquiry — worth reading if this applies to you.
