Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Most people searching for this have a specific situation in mind: they’re trying to lease an office, a retail space, or a commercial unit, and someone at the landlord’s office asked about their credit. What type of credit are they actually looking at? The answer is a bit messier than “just get a good credit score” — commercial leasing can involve personal credit, business credit, or both, depending on who’s signing and what the landlord requires. Let me break it down.
People ask about income when they should really be asking about credit. Dealers care about both, but your credit score and credit history do more work in a lease approval than your paycheck does — especially for the terms you get. I want to break down what the income side actually looks like, and then explain where tradelines come in for people who have the income but are getting tripped up by their credit profile.
I sell personal authorized user tradelines, not business tradelines — so right upfront, I want to be clear about that distinction, because the two get lumped together constantly and they work in completely different ways. What I can offer here is an honest explanation of what business tradelines are, how they differ from what I sell, and where the authorized user tradeline fits into the picture for someone who also runs a business.
People ask me all the time how to increase their credit limit — whether there’s a fast way to get a higher number. The honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no — and the “yes” cases are usually the ones where someone already understands how credit limits actually get set. Let me walk through what’s worked, what’s a waste of time, and where authorized user tradelines fit into this.
AU tradelines — authorized user tradelines — come up constantly in conversations about building or rebuilding credit. The concept is simple enough: someone adds you to their credit card as an authorized user, that account’s history posts to your credit report, and your score reacts to the new data. But “simple concept” and “no nuances” are very different things, and there are enough quirks in how this actually works that it’s worth going through them properly.
Continue reading “AU Tradelines: What They Are and How They Work”