Tag: credit cards

Can I pay to be an authorized user?

Buyers ask me this one a lot — usually right after they’ve spent twenty minutes Googling tradeline companies and aren’t sure if the whole thing is legitimate. The short answer: yes, you can pay to be added as an authorized user on someone else’s credit card. That’s actually the entire business model I run at kindoflost.com.

But there’s a longer answer worth reading before you spend money, because not all AU tradelines are the same, and a few details can make the difference between a purchase that moves your score and one that doesn’t.

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Sell Credit Cards as Tradelines: How It Actually Works

People find this post after Googling some version of “can I make money with my credit cards” — which is also how I found my way into selling tradelines a few years back. (I remember to this day the many times I typed variations of “monetize good credit” into Google with zero useful results.) The short answer is yes, if you have the right cards, you can earn money by renting them out as authorized user tradelines.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.

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5 Minute Credit Score Trick: What It Actually Does

Every time someone talks about a “5 minute credit score trick,” they usually mean one of two things: paying down a balance quickly, or adding an authorized user tradeline. The “5 minute” part is actually accurate — the setup itself takes minutes. The results don’t. That distinction matters, and I want to be upfront about it before getting into what actually works.

5 minute credit score trick

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Adding tradelines to your credit: what actually works

A lot of people find their way to tradelines after hitting a wall. Their score is stuck, they can’t get approved for the apartment or the car loan, and someone online told them that adding tradelines to your credit is the fast lane. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes people buy the wrong thing and get disappointed. Let me walk through how it actually works.

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Informative Research Credit Inquiry

At some point while reviewing your credit report, you’ll probably see a list of inquiries — some labeled “hard” and some labeled with terms like “informative research credit inquiry” or variations on that phrase. The hard ones you likely recognize: those are from credit applications. The informative research ones are different, and understanding what they are (and what they aren’t) is worth a few minutes.

informative research credit inquiry

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