Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Buyers ask me versions of this question more than you’d think: “I financed my phone — does that count toward my credit?” The honest answer is: it depends entirely on whether your carrier reports to the credit bureaus, and many don’t. Which means a lot of people are paying $50 a month assuming they’re building credit history when nothing is actually hitting their report.
One of the more disorienting credit situations people describe is checking their report and finding a collection account they didn’t see coming — no warning letter, no phone call, just a collection showing up on all three bureaus. It happens. Whether it’s a legitimate notification failure or a legitimate debt you genuinely forgot about, the outcome is the same: a collection dragging your score down and sitting there for up to seven years. This post covers what to do when you’ve been sent to collections without notice and what your rights actually are.
Continue reading “Sent to Collections Without Notice: What It Means”
Most posts about increasing your credit limit read like a credit card company wrote them — upside presented first, caveats buried at the bottom. I’d rather flip that and give you the actual tradeoffs. There are real disadvantages to increasing your credit limit, and a few of them are things I’ve run into personally. This gets simpler once you know whether the card you’re increasing is secured or unsecured, since the two work a bit differently — I laid out the differences in secured versus unsecured credit cards.
Most people don’t go looking for a credit limit increase — it just shows up one day. You log in, notice your limit jumped a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, and wonder what triggered it. The short answer: your issuer decided you’d earned it. The longer answer is a bit more interesting.
Update, September 2026: this post covers my first three years. For the full picture there’s five years of numbers here. In 2026 I also closed my direct store, so I now sell only through brokers.
In the past three years, my financial landscape has been significantly reshaped by an unexpected (ad)venture: selling tradelines. This journey wasn’t just a sideline hustle; it became a pivotal part of my financial strategy, offering insights into credit markets, personal finance, and the dynamics of credit score improvement. In this post, I’ll share my firsthand experience, the lessons learned, and the strategies that worked (and didn’t) in the world of tradelines. Whether you’re considering selling tradelines yourself or simply curious about this niche financial practice, join me as I unpack the layers of this journey.
