TRADELINE
CALCULATOR

Read the instructions below to learn how the Tradeline Calculator works. For an in-depth article about How to Choose a Tradeline, click here.

How to Use the Tradeline Calculator

• Step 1: Get a recent copy of your credit report.
• Step 2: Calculate the age of each account on your credit report so that it can be expressed in a decimal format such as 2.5 years, 3.2 years, etc. Enter this data onto the calculator in the column titled “Age of Cards”.
• Step 3: This is optional, but you can enter the name of the card under the column “Card Description” in order to label and identify each of your accounts.
• Step 4: Enter the credit limit under the column titled “Credit Limit”.
• Step 5: Enter the current amount that is owed on each account under the column titled “Amount Owed”.

Once all the information is entered, the calculator will automatically display the current average age of accounts and overall utilization.

Next, you can begin entering hypothetical new accounts into the calculator to see how new numbers may affect the results.

**Please note that some credit monitoring services such as Experian.com, do not factor in authorized user accounts into their calculations of certain attributes (Average Age of Accounts, Age of Oldest Account, Overall Utilization Ratio, etc.). This is only a general tool and is not intended to promise any certain outcome of variables on your credit profile. To see our guarantees,click here.

A simpler approach is simply identifying the oldest account in your credit profile and naming that as your oldest tradeline. From there, you can judge a new tradeline as inferior or superior based on how much older or younger the new tradeline is. In general, age is the most important attribute of a tradeline and we believe older tradelines are superior to younger tradelines. If you currently have revolving accounts with high utilization, it is not a good strategy to buy higher limit AU tradelines with expectations of lowering your overall utilization ratio. Over many years, we have seen that this approach does not work well and have written an article about that here.