Last year I wrote an update on selling tradelines. It was the first year I’d done it. You can read about it here. It’s been another year, so I thought I might as well write another update since I’ve still been keeping track from the start, and things have been going good.
It’s nothing to retire on, but the extra income compared to the amount of work involved is great. For those of you who may have come across this post before reading the original and may have a few questions about what a tradeline is, here’s the short answer. A tradeline is a line of credit.
When I’m talking about tradelines here they are always going to be with a credit card. When I talk about selling a tradeline, it’s basically a fee I’ll receive for adding an authorized user to my account for a couple of months.
I know, it sounds pretty risky, but there are safeguards. You can read a more in depth article about selling tradelines on my original post here.
So let’s get on with the update. I only use 2 cards to sell tradelines, maybe in the future that will grow, but for now I’m happy with the results. Here are the stats from the time I started selling tradelines.
In 2020 I started selling tradelines. With each card you can sell 2 tradelines at a time so there’s a potential for 4 tradelines during each period. Each period last for approximately 60 days. This is the amount of time that it is estimated to take to start boosting the credit score of the tradeline buyer. For 2020 I sold a total of 9 tradelines. I had the opportunity to sell one additional, but there was an error in getting things set up on my part. Each tradeline paid $275.00 and so in 2020 I earned a total of $2,475 in passive income. Not bad for a partial year, (I started selling them in May of 2020)
2021 was my first full year of selling tradelines. During this year I sold 20 tradelines and had 4 extensions. An extension is when the tradeline buyer wants to extend the term from about 60 days for an extra 30 days.
There are a number of reasons to extend. It might be because the person is not completed with the transaction they were trying to do with the higher score, like purchasing a home or car or something. It could be anything. Regardless of the circumstance, an extension just lengthens the time of the contract and I don’t have to do anything except leave them connected to my credit card as an authorized user for the extended period of time. For each extension I make $137.50. So selling 20 tradelines earned $5,500 and 4 extensions earned $550 for a total of $6,050.
Now we are into 2022. It’s only been about half a year, but here’s where I am so far. This year I’ve sold 9 tradelines so far. Not all of them have paid yet, but I expect they will. There are 3 of them that are scheduled to finish up this month. There haven’t been any extensions this year. So as it stands I’ll have made $2475, when the payments come through.
So far I’ve been selling tradelines for just over 2 years and during that time I’ve sold 38 lines, 4 of which had extensions added on. The total for the 2 year period adds up to $11,000. Not bad!
At this point I’m averaging about $5,500 per year give or take a bit. This amounts to just over $450 a month. It’s not a lot, but if you are needing a little more cash flow in your budget is makes a big difference.
One thing to note about selling tradelines that I should mention. Not all tradelines will sell for the amounts I show above.
There are a number of brokers out there who put together the sales. From what I’ve found they all have a little different pay scale depending on the credit card, the time the card has been open and the total credit limit of the card. In all cases I have come across though, the higher the limit and the longer the history the better the payment to you will be.
If you want to read how I got started selling tradelines, you can read about it here.