Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Credit builder tradelines get lumped in with other credit building tools — secured cards, credit-builder loans, self-reporting services — and the comparison is worth making clearly rather than just assuming tradelines are obviously better or worse. They do different things, they work on different timelines, and depending on where your credit profile stands right now, one approach will fit better than another.
Continue reading “Credit Builder Tradelines: How AU Accounts Fit In”
Auto loan tradelines come up in my conversations more often than I’d expect, and almost always from buyers who’ve seen them listed somewhere and are trying to figure out if they’re legitimate. The short answer: the product as commonly sold either doesn’t work the way it’s described or involves a level of risk that most buyers don’t understand when they purchase it.
Continue reading “Auto Loan Tradelines: Why the Product Doesn’t Exist”
If you’ve looked at a credit report in any detail, you’ve probably seen accounts categorized as open or closed. Open tradelines are the active accounts currently feeding data into your credit score — and the health of those accounts, their limits, their ages, and their utilization is what makes up the bulk of what FICO actually calculates. Understanding what makes an open tradeline valuable is worth the time before you spend money trying to add one.
Continue reading “Open Tradelines: What They Mean and Why They Matter”
Tradelines for business credit — it’s a question I get from business owners regularly, and the answer depends entirely on which credit system you mean. and the slightly longer answer is that the two systems — personal credit and business credit — run on separate rails that don’t talk to each other as much as people expect.
Continue reading “Tradelines for Business Credit: Which Kind Helps”
Business tradelines for sale is one of those search phrases where the term means different things depending on who’s using it. In my experience, buyers searching this usually fall into one of two camps: people trying to build a business credit profile from scratch, and people who want to strengthen their personal credit to qualify for business financing. Those are genuinely different problems, and the products — if they exist at all — are different too.
Continue reading “Business Tradelines for Sale: What I Actually Sell”