credit cards Archives - Page 4 of 25

What Is an Unsecured Credit Card?

An unsecured credit card is the type most people are already carrying in their wallet without thinking much about the name. It’s a standard credit card that doesn’t require you to put down a security deposit — the issuer extends you a credit line based on your creditworthiness alone. No upfront cash held as collateral. Just an application, an approval decision, and a credit limit that reflects how the issuer views your risk as a borrower. Related: minimum income for credit card — worth reading if this applies to you.

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How to Build Credit at 16: What Actually Works

Most 16-year-olds can’t open their own credit card. That’s just the law — the CARD Act requires applicants to be 18, and under 21 without independent income, most issuers won’t approve you anyway. So if you’re 16 and wondering how to build credit, the options are narrower than the internet makes them sound. But narrower doesn’t mean impossible, and the option that actually works is worth understanding in some detail.

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Consumer Disputes Reinvestigation in Progress

You’re looking at your credit report and one of the accounts says “consumer disputes reinvestigation in progress.” It showed up after you filed a dispute, and now you want to know what it actually means — how long it stays, what happens when it clears, and what you should be doing in the meantime.

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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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