Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me this mostly after the damage is already done — the car’s gone, the lender’s reported it, and now they’re trying to figure out how bad this is going to be. The answer is seven years, and unfortunately that part doesn’t have a workaround. But understanding what those seven years actually look like is more useful than the headline number suggests.
People google “best place to buy tradelines” and land on a lot of posts written by the same brokers they’re trying to evaluate. I sell tradelines directly on this site, so I have a bias too — but I also sell through brokers, which means I’ve seen how both sides of the market work. Here’s my honest take.
Continue reading “Best Place to Buy Tradelines: Brokers vs. Direct”
People ask me this one a lot — usually after they’ve already been turned down for a regular card and someone told them a secured card is the “first step.” It’s not wrong advice. But the honest answer to how much it’ll raise your score is: it depends, and it takes longer than most people expect.
Continue reading “How much will a secured credit card raise my score?”
The phrase “credit repair” gets attached to a lot of things — some legitimate, some not. Tradelines are real, legal, and can genuinely help in the right situation. But whether using tradelines for credit repair will solve your specific problem depends entirely on what’s actually dragging your score down. That’s the part nobody explains upfront, so let me do that — because the answer decides whether a tradeline is your first move, your last move, or the wrong move.
Every so often I run a coupon that brings any tradeline under $200 down to a flat $100. The code is 100TL — use it at checkout and the price drops automatically. I’ll explain the logic behind it, and what to actually look for when you’re picking a tradeline at that price. If you want to learn more about how to how to buy a tradeline, that post covers the process end to end.
