Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me whether joint credit cards build credit, usually right after I’ve explained how authorized user tradelines work. The two get confused all the time — both involve two people sharing a credit account. But the liability is completely different, and that difference matters a lot depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.
I sell tradelines, so I hear from a lot of people who are trying to rebuild credit after something went wrong. Divorce comes up regularly. The credit damage from a split isn’t always obvious at first — sometimes it takes months before the missed payments and joint account problems start showing up on your report, and by then you’re playing catch-up on multiple fronts at once. If you want to learn more about how to how to build credit to buy a house, that post covers the process end to end.
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.
A lot of the people who buy tradelines from me got there because they were denied for something — a credit card, an apartment, a car loan. The denial is what finally made the credit score real to them. Before that, it was just a number. After, it’s the reason they’re stuck.
If you just got denied for a credit card and want to understand why, there’s usually a fixable reason. The denial letter will tell you — issuers are required to give you a reason. But the letter uses jargon, so let me translate.
