Personal blog on early retirement, tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
If a lender cancels or forgives a debt — a credit card balance settlement, a short sale on a house, a personal loan they’ve written off — the IRS generally treats that forgiven amount as taxable income. That’s not intuitive, but it’s how it works: money you borrowed and didn’t pay back is treated as if you received it.
Continue reading “Insolvency Worksheet: How to Fill It Out for Taxes”
Buyers ask me this every week: can I get a tradeline for free? The honest answer is yes — but the free version comes with tradeoffs that the paid version doesn’t. Understanding what you’re actually trading off helps you make the right call for your situation.
Most of the people who find this post aren’t credit-card-averse on principle — they either got burned by one early on, can’t qualify for an unsecured card right now, or are just starting out and want to know what their options actually are. I get it. Here’s what genuinely works for building credit without a credit card, and what to expect from each path.
Continue reading “How to Build Credit Without a Credit Card”
No, a debit card doesn’t build credit. It’s one of those questions that sounds like it should have a more nuanced answer — and credit content on the internet loves to imply there might be one — but there isn’t. Debit cards pull from your checking account. Nothing gets reported to the credit bureaus. Your credit score doesn’t move. That’s the full answer to the core question, and you can stop reading here if that’s all you needed.
There’s a question I Googled for years before I stumbled on a real answer: can you actually monetize good credit? Not “save money with lower rates” — I mean generate actual income from a high score and a stack of seasoned cards. (I remember the hours I spent trying different search queries, not quite finding what I was looking for.) It turns out there is a genuine answer, and tradelines are the main one. This is the practical menu of what works; if you want the bigger-picture strategy and risk framing, that’s my companion post on leveraging credit to generate wealth.
Continue reading “Monetize Good Credit: What Actually Works (and What I Do)”