Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Buyers ask me this a lot — usually when they’re a few months out from applying for a home loan and trying to clean up their file. The short answer you’ll find everywhere is “three tradelines,” and that’s not wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete enough that I’d want to walk through it before you take it as a hard rule. Related: cheap tradelines — worth reading if this applies to you.
Buyers mention this phrase to me fairly often. They’ve pulled their credit report — or looked at the score breakdown in Credit Karma — and found “too few accounts with payments as agreed” listed somewhere in the factors holding their number down. The phrase sounds like jargon, but it’s pointing at something specific: your credit file doesn’t have enough accounts with a consistent record of on-time payments. Understanding why that matters, and what you can realistically do about it, is straightforward once you see what the scoring model is actually measuring.
Buyers sometimes contact me having watched their Credit Karma score climb for months, then run into a wall when a mortgage broker pulls their actual FICO and the numbers don’t match. Sometimes by 40 points. Sometimes more. The question that follows — why is my VantageScore lower than my FICO? — is one I hear fairly often, and it usually comes with a side of frustration, because the free score on their phone every week isn’t the one that matters to a mortgage underwriter.
At one point I had around ten hard inquiries on my credit report. That’s what happens when you open cards specifically to season them for tradeline sales — you apply, they pull your credit, repeat. (I’m back down to around five now, which is more comfortable.) So I’ve thought about this question more than most: does removing hard inquiries increase your credit score? The answer is: technically yes, but probably not by enough to matter for most people. Related: When Do Credit Inquiries Fall Off — worth reading if this applies to you.
People ask me this all the time — usually after they’ve already tried disputing a collection account and gotten nowhere. The question is always some variation of: can I just pay this thing and make it disappear? That’s the core idea behind pay for delete credit. Whether it works is a genuinely complicated answer, so let me break it down honestly.
