Your Credit: The Fast Fix
Anyone who has ever tried to dispute an item on their credit report will tell you there are no fast fixes when it comes to your credit report. You can challenge every derogatory item. And after 6 months, your report may look a little better. But there is one loop hole most people don’t know about. I’ve been in the mortgage industry since 1998 and I only learned about it a year ago.
It’s referred to as piggyback tradelines. Each item on your credit report is referred to as a tradeline. And when you piggyback tradelines, you take a good tradeline with a low balance, high available balance, and perfect payment history and it to your report. And how do you do this? Find someone with good credit and have them add you as an authorized user to their credit cards.
What happens is that even though someone else has taken years to build up a perfect tradeline, when they call the credit card company and give them your name and social security number, within a few months all of that perfect history is added to your credit report too. It doesn’t always get piggybacked onto your credit report. But about 7 times out of 10 it does work.
Here are a few examples. A relative of mine was recently married. My relative had better credit than the spouse. Well the two of them wanted to buy a house in the near future and talked to me. After reviewing their credit, I said tradelines X, Y, and Z are perfect and have been open a long time. Call each of those companies and add your spouse as an authorized user. My relative did and a few months later, the spouses score had jumped and two of the three tradelines were now appearing on the spouse’s report. And it only took three phone calls.
One of my customers also recently used this method. I had done a loan for a woman and later did a loan for the woman’s mother. Now the mother had some bad luck a few years ago and had a lot of collections. She had worked very hard to pay everything off but her credit scores were still awful. So we talked to the daughter. We identified her 5 strongest tradelines and had the mother added to each of them. Now not all five showed up on the mother’s credit report. Like I mentioned earlier, not all companies will add the entire trade history to the new user’s report. But the mother got enough of a boost to qualify her for a great loan on a new house.
If this sounds like something that could benefit you or someone you know, here is the best way to proceed. First, make sure you only work with someone you completely trust and who completely trusts you. The FTC and various watchdog groups will correctly warn you to not trust all credit repair companies. Online you can find lots of groups like adatradeline.net or instacredittradelines.com who offer to add you as an authorized user to good tradelines for about $250 or more. But my advice would be to pay nothing and see if you can arrange something with a family member first.
So step one is find a family member with good credit and talk to them. Step two is to talk with them about which tradelines they have had for a minimum of two years with zero late payments and a balance that is 10 percent or less of the credit limit. Once you have identified all of their tradelines that fit all three criteria (two of the three won’t work), then have them call their credit company and add you as an authorized user. They can have the extra card mailed directly to themselves and not you. That way you never know what the account number is and, you never have access to the card and thereby the credit. In fact, in most cases I believe that when they add you as an authorized user, they can request that you not be allowed to even call in and make any changes to the account. This way everyone feels safe about the whole situation. The final step is to wait. The accounts may not show up on the newly authorized users credit report for several months.
After that the person with the original good credit needs to keep the balance on all of the accounts you were added to as low as possible. And all parties involved should monitor their credit regularly. I would suggest once a quarter. And then once all of that is done you get to start working with the three bureaus to fix any derogatory items. It may not be easy, but the good credit will be worth it!
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