Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People google “best place to buy tradelines” and land on a lot of posts written by the same brokers they’re trying to evaluate. I sell tradelines directly on this site, so I have a bias too — but I also sell through brokers, which means I’ve seen how both sides of the market work. Here’s my honest take.
Continue reading “Best Place to Buy Tradelines: Brokers vs. Direct”
People ask me this one a lot — usually after they’ve already been turned down for a regular card and someone told them a secured card is the “first step.” It’s not wrong advice. But the honest answer to how much it’ll raise your score is: it depends, and it takes longer than most people expect.
Continue reading “How much will a secured credit card raise my score?”
The phrase “credit repair” gets attached to a lot of things — some legitimate, some not. Tradelines are real, legal, and can genuinely help in the right situation. But whether using tradelines for credit repair will solve your specific problem depends entirely on what’s actually dragging your score down. That’s the part nobody explains upfront, so let me do that — because the answer decides whether a tradeline is your first move, your last move, or the wrong move.
Every so often I run a coupon that brings any tradeline under $200 down to a flat $100. The code is 100TL — use it at checkout and the price drops automatically. I’ll explain the logic behind it, and what to actually look for when you’re picking a tradeline at that price. If you want to learn more about how to how to buy a tradeline, that post covers the process end to end.
People find my site looking for tradelines, and sometimes I can tell from the questions they ask that they’ve mixed up two very different problems. The most common one: someone has a delinquency on their credit report and thinks a tradeline will fix it. I wish that were true — it isn’t, and I’d rather say so upfront than take someone’s money for a product that won’t solve their actual problem.
Continue reading “Delinquency on Credit Report: What It Is and What Helps”