Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
No, a debit card doesn’t build credit. It’s one of those questions that sounds like it should have a more nuanced answer — and credit content on the internet loves to imply there might be one — but there isn’t. Debit cards pull from your checking account. Nothing gets reported to the credit bureaus. Your credit score doesn’t move. That’s the full answer to the core question, and you can stop reading here if that’s all you needed.
There’s a question I Googled for years before I stumbled on a real answer: can you actually monetize good credit? Not “save money with lower rates” — I mean generate actual income from a high score and a stack of seasoned cards. (I remember the hours I spent trying different search queries, not quite finding what I was looking for.) It turns out there is a genuine answer, and tradelines are the main one. This is the practical menu of what works.
Continue reading “Monetize Good Credit: What Actually Works (and What I Do)”
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 sold 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.
