Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Let me be direct about something before we go any further: “primary tradelines for sale” is almost always a red flag phrase. If you’ve been searching for this and landed on a site actually selling what they claim are primary tradelines, read carefully before you hand over any money.
Continue reading “Primary Tradelines for Sale: What You’re Actually Buying”
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.
If you’ve typed this into Google, you’re probably at a point of genuine frustration. The credit system can feel impossible to navigate — you need good credit to get approved for things, but you need to get approved for things to build good credit. I get it. But I want to be straight with you about why the hacker route won’t work, and what the legal version of a “quick fix” actually looks like.
Continue reading “I need a hacker to increase my credit score”