Personal blog on early retirement, tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Let me be direct about something before we go any further: “primary tradelines for sale” is almost always a red flag phrase. If you’ve been searching for this and landed on a site actually selling what they claim are primary tradelines, read carefully before you hand over any money.
Continue reading “Primary Tradelines for Sale: What You’re Actually Buying”
The short answer is yes — most collection agencies do report to the credit bureaus. But “most” does real work in that sentence. How quickly they report, whether they report at all, and what actually happens to your score when they do are all things worth understanding before you decide how to respond to a collection notice.
I deal with buyers who are trying to rebuild credit after collections all the time. The collection itself is often the least urgent problem — what matters more is what you do about your credit profile while you’re dealing with it. More on that below.
Continue reading “Does a Collection Agency Report to Credit Bureaus?”
If you’ve seen this listed as a reason your credit score isn’t higher, you’re looking at the age side of your credit profile. The scoring model is saying: your revolving accounts — credit cards, lines of credit — haven’t been open long enough to carry much weight. The fix sounds simple, but there are a few things worth understanding about how account age actually works before you act.
Continue reading “Length of time revolving accounts have been established”
One of the most persistent myths in personal finance is that getting married somehow combines your credit scores into a single “married credit score.” It doesn’t work that way — and understanding why matters a lot when you’re about to make major financial decisions together. Your credit files stay separate after marriage. What changes is that your financial choices start overlapping in ways that can affect both of them. Related: credit repair for veterans — worth reading if this applies to you. If the marriage is ending rather than starting, credit repair after divorce covers what actually helps.
Continue reading “Married Credit Score: What Changes and What Doesn’t”
Buyers ask me this one a lot — usually right after they’ve spent twenty minutes Googling tradeline companies and aren’t sure if the whole thing is legitimate. The short answer: yes, you can pay to be added as an authorized user on someone else’s credit card. That’s actually the entire business model I run at kindoflost.com.
But there’s a longer answer worth reading before you spend money, because not all AU tradelines are the same, and a few details can make the difference between a purchase that moves your score and one that doesn’t.