Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
When someone asks me if a tradeline will help their credit, one of my first questions is whether they have any public records on their report. It changes the picture significantly. Public records are the heaviest derogatory marks in the scoring model — they’re not like a late payment, which fades in a couple of years. The main one that still shows up, bankruptcy, can sit on your report for a decade.
Continue reading “What Is a Public Record on a Credit Report?”
Buyers come to me after Chapter 13 discharge more than you might expect. They’ve just finished a multi-year repayment plan, their credit took a real beating, and they want to know two things: where does my score stand right now, and will a tradeline help? The honest answer to both questions is more nuanced than what most posts on this topic give you.
Continue reading “Average Credit Score After Chapter 13 Discharge”
Fraud in personal finance usually makes you think of someone stealing your identity — a stranger opening a credit card in your name, draining your account, the whole nightmare scenario. That’s third-party fraud. First-party fraud is different, and in some ways more interesting: it’s when the borrower IS the fraud.
Continue reading “What Is First Party Fraud? How It Works and Who Does It”
Veterans come back from service with a lot of things to sort out. Career transition, benefits enrollment, housing. Credit often ends up last on the list, which is understandable — but it tends to matter fast. The VA loan program, for instance, can get you into a home with a competitive interest rate, but it still requires a qualifying credit score. If your credit is thin or damaged, that opportunity closes down until you fix it.
Credit repair for veterans isn’t fundamentally different from credit repair for anyone else, but there are some specific angles worth knowing about — particularly around disputes involving military-specific accounts and the options available for building credit history quickly.
Continue reading “Credit Repair for Veterans: What Actually Helps”
The honest answer to “how long does credit repair take” is: it depends on what broke it. A few late payments from two years ago is a different project than a bankruptcy or a wave of collections. People underestimate the first scenario and overestimate how bad the second one is. Both can be worked through — they just run on different clocks.
I’ve talked to a lot of people trying to fix their credit — mostly buyers who are trying to get ready for a mortgage or a car loan. The expectations are usually off in one direction or the other. So here’s a realistic breakdown by issue type.
