Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
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.
Aged primary tradelines for sale show up alongside authorized user tradelines in a lot of the same places, and buyers sometimes ask me whether I offer them or where to find them. The honest answer: I don’t sell them, and I’d think carefully before buying them anywhere.
Continue reading “Aged Primary Tradelines for Sale: What to Know”
Auto tradelines come up enough in buyer conversations that I want to address them directly. The phrase gets used to describe a few different things, and depending on which one a seller is pitching, you’re either looking at something worthless, something fraudulent, or something that doesn’t exist in the form being advertised.
Continue reading “Auto Tradelines for Sale: Why Most Are Fake”
Of all the credit score factors that tradelines can influence, age is the one I think about most as a seller. You can open a new credit card tomorrow. You can pay down a balance this week. But you cannot manufacture a 12-year-old account. Aged tradelines — accounts with long histories — are the one resource in this business that genuinely can’t be replicated quickly, and that’s exactly what makes them worth understanding before you buy.
Continue reading “Aged Tradelines: Why Account Age Is Hard to Buy”
Buyers ask me this constantly: which tradeline is the best one to buy? And almost every time, the follow-up question is about issuers. Chase or Capital One? Amex or Discover? The honest answer is that picking by brand name is one of the most reliable ways to overpay for underwhelming results. The best tradelines to boost credit score have almost nothing to do with whose logo is on the front of the card.
What actually matters is three numbers: the credit limit, the age of the account, and the utilization rate at statement close. Everything else is noise.