Tag: authorized user

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.

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Buyers ask me this pretty regularly: does Chase actually report authorized users? The short answer is yes — Chase reports adult authorized users to all three major credit bureaus. But there’s a nuance here that most posts miss entirely, and it matters depending on why you’re asking.

Continue reading “Does Chase Report Authorized Users? (Yes, for Adults)”

I get messages from buyers who are confused — sometimes panicked — when a tradeline they paid for disappears from their credit report. “It’s gone” is usually how they put it. What they don’t realize is that there are two completely different things that “tradeline deletion” can mean, and the path forward is totally different depending on which one they’re experiencing.

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If you pulled your credit score and saw “lack of recent revolving account information” listed as a reason code, you’re looking at one of the more fixable items on that list. It means the scoring model doesn’t have enough recent activity from credit cards or lines of credit to fully assess your creditworthiness — and there are a few straightforward ways to address it.

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A tradeline is any credit account that reports to your credit file, so “a new tradeline has been opened” means one thing: an account that wasn’t on your credit report before is on it now. Credit Karma, your bank’s monitoring, Experian, whoever is watching your file — they all send some version of this alert, and it says nothing about whether the account is good news, bad news, or something you paid for on purpose.

Which one it is depends entirely on whether you were expecting it. If you bought an authorized user tradeline, this is the notification you’ve been waiting for and it means the card posted. If you weren’t expecting anything, it deserves ten minutes of your attention today. Below is how to tell the two apart, plus the one issuer whose version of this alert confuses buyers more than all the others combined.

Continue reading “A New Tradeline Has Been Opened: What It Means”