Repair Your Credit Before Buying Authorized User Tradelines

In general, credit repair is about improving your credit report and all of the factors within it. This means fixing any problems regarding late payments, bankruptcies, collections, charge-offs, etc.. In addition, credit repair will often involve disputing inaccurate or harmful items present in your credit report that should not be present in the first place. Whatever the case may be, you can't build your credit and make it stronger until you finish catching up on delinquent accounts.

When planning how to repair your credit, it's best to have realistic expectations of what you’ll actually accomplish. It's not always easy to clean up errors or old debts, and since the goal is to ensure the most accurate and highest credit report possible, a good strategy is priceless. While you may be familiar with authorized user tradelines or how they work, it's important to repair your credit completely before exploring this process. If you jump into purchasing tradelines with unfinished business on your report, you'll most likely end up with very weak results.

Let's take a look below at some of the first steps you can make to repair your credit before buying authorized user tradelines.

List of items that can be removed from your credit report:

  1. Erroneous items are the easiest to dispute, and credit bureaus can fix them quickly. These items may include basic errors, like spelling mistakes or misreported amounts. These errors can cause confusion about the size of your debts and directly impact your overall credit score.
  2. Outdated items are also generally easy to investigate and fix. Most negative data can only remain on your credit report for a specific amount of time. Once these items reach their maximum age, they should be removed from your report automatically. Sometimes negative marks are not removed when they should be but you can always file a dispute to have them removed rather easily.
  3. Fraudulent items are mainly connected with the cases of identity theft and fraudulent accounts appearing on your credit reports. Filing disputes to have those accounts removed can be exhausting. They also may require some serious expenses or a lot of work on your behalf. Additionally, it can be time consuming for credit bureaus to investigate the case, come to a conclusion, and make the required repairs to their report data.
  4. Unsubstantiated items include accounts on your credit report that the information providers cannot prove. For example, if your debt or derogatory items cannot be confirmed as yours, the credit bureaus will have no option but to remove these items.
  5. Since each of the credit bureaus may track different records from different third parties - and due to the fact that not all creditors report your financial activity to all three bureaus - be sure to check all three of your reports.

A consumer is entitled to at least one free credit report once a year. Also, due to the COVID-19 crisis, all three bureaus are offering weekly credit reports for free through at least April 2021. UPDATE: Credit bureaus have entexted the weekly free reports through the end of 2023.

When considering credit repair, you should keep in mind that this is rarely a quick process. It can easily take at least a few months (or more) to go from initiating and submitting disputes to seeing the results reflected accurately on your credit report and score.

Again, if you're thinking of improving your credit score by adding AU tradelines to your credit report, and your report is bad due to inaccurate details or negative remarks, you may be wondering which to do first - buy tradelines or fix your credit? As mentioned above, fix your credit issues first. We have a lot of experience with this and the best route to take is not always the quickest, however, we'll always be transparent. Rather than urge you to buy tradelines today, we urge you to do things properly so we can deliver the results you deserve.

Depending on the seriousness of your credit problems, it should be mentioned that both strategies can be put into place simultaneouslly, however, we still always recommend starting with the credit repair process first. Adding tradelines means adding positive items to your credit report - but credit repair means removing negative items from your credit report. The best way to make your credit profile stronger with the least hassle and the best results is to repair your credit before buying tradelines. There's really no way around that.

Is it Time to Consider Buying Tradelines?

If you have a lot of debt or loans you haven’t paid off in a long time, buying tradelines won’t solve that for you. Your score will increase, yes, but you will still be in debt, negatively impacting your credit history. Your report will show untrustworthiness and unreliability because of all the money you owe. When you plan to buy a house or a car, your report will show that you’re in debt and the sellers (let alone financing companies) won’t be eager to work with you.

However, once your report is clean - especially after an extended period of past due debt - your credit score is still likely to be quite low. At that point you're in the perfect position to buy a tradeline, watch your credit score increase, and begin benefitting from the positive factors of having a good credit score.