Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
The question I get from buyers more than any other is some version of: “Will this actually work?” And the honest answer is: yes — with a caveat. Buying tradelines to boost your credit score works when the score problem you’re solving is age or utilization. It doesn’t fix everything, and sellers who tell you otherwise are overselling it.
Continue reading “Buy Tradelines to Boost Credit Score: What Works”
People ask me this constantly — where can I buy a tradeline? — and since I’m someone who actually sells them, both through brokers and directly on this site, I can give you a more honest breakdown than most pages you’ll find on this topic.
There are really only two routes: buying through a broker, or buying directly from a cardholder. Both are legitimate. The tradeoffs are mostly about price versus convenience, and which makes more sense depends on what you’re prioritizing.
Continue reading “Where can I buy a tradeline? (A seller explains the options)”
If you’ve been researching how to build or rebuild credit, you’ve probably run into the word tradeline. What is a tradeline, exactly, and why does anyone buy one? I sell them, so let me give you the straight answer — without the hype that usually surrounds this corner of the credit world.
Continue reading “What is a tradeline? Answered by someone who sells them”
There are many ways to use a credit card, probably as many ways as there are people using credit cards. And, just as there are no two people created equal, there are no two equal ways to use a card. We can’t really talk about each of those in detail so I just created this super-clever 7-level classification in the progressive mastery of credit card usage.
I ordered the seven levels by their increasing level of mastery, but not in the order people would go through them. Obviously, everyone will start at the “average” level (the third level in my arbitrary system). In a way, everyone has a shot at using credit cards in a clever way. From there, one would either go down to one of the first two levels (the “bad” ones) or up to one of the top four levels (the “good” ones).
So here are the seven levels:
Continue reading “The seven mastery levels of credit card usage”They say there are two kinds of people: those who pay interest and those who earn interest…. and there are those who know to open a credit card and those who don’t.
The above was just a general reminder not to forget as one thinks about opening a new line of credit. Below I will lay out the steps I follow when I open a new credit card.
