Personal blog on early retirement, tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
If you’ve seen “too many consumer finance company accounts” on your credit score reason codes, you’re looking at a penalty that most people don’t know exists — and that most credit advice sites gloss over completely. Here’s what it actually means.
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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.
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People throw around “credit card hacks” like it’s a category of internet tips you read once and forget. But some of these are genuinely worth knowing, and a few of them — specifically the ones involving authorized users and tradelines — I’ve been running as an actual side income for years. So here’s my take: the stuff that works, the stuff that’s more trouble than it’s worth, and the one thing I’d tell someone just getting started.
Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: turning 18 doesn’t give you a credit score. You don’t start at 300, you don’t start at 500, you don’t start at zero — you don’t have a score at all. FICO needs at least one account that’s been open for at least six months before it can generate a score. If you’ve never been on a credit account, your file is blank. Lenders who pull your credit will see a thin file or a “no score” result.
Continue reading “What Is Your Credit Score When You Turn 18?”
If you bought an authorized user tradeline and then got an alert from Credit Karma or your bank’s credit monitoring saying “a new tradeline has been opened,” that’s the notification you were waiting for. It means the tradeline posted. Here’s what it actually means for your credit — and a couple of things worth checking when you see it.
Continue reading “A New Tradeline Has Been Opened: What It Means”