Many brokers have flooded the web with claims of adding primary tradelines or transferring seasoned primary trade lines into a new party's name. The concepts are vaguely understood at best. The truth is these companies have no business purporting these claims because what they're really doing is enticing a customer to pay them for a made-up payment history on an account that never existed, for a promissory note that was never signed.
"The best case scenario is that you get one of these made-up accounts on your credit report, and then it's quickly removed," says Garrick Broughton, a member of the Heritage Foundation and co-founder of Assumable Assets, Inc. "The real path to credit improvement isn't so difficult: you take over an actual financial obligation through a real financial intermediary or bank. The problem is, customers don't have relationships with banks and intermediaries that they can leverage to just walk in and ask to take over someone's account. That's where we come in."
Broughton goes on to explain that Assumable Assets, Inc. began as a debt buyer and seller, and has now set up relationships with multiple independent holdings companies that are willing to release original accountholders in exchange for a ready, willing, and able consumer who wishes to take over the account's obligation. "It's a matter of dollars and cents," says Broughton, "Instead of selling an obligation for say, 3-5 cents on the dollar, they can recover much more of the obligation's face value by replacing the defaulted accountholder with a new, and potentially more motivated one."
Assumable Assets, Inc. has rolled out a program for $550 that allows a consumer to take over an obligation where someone else left off. More importantly, the banks are even willing to settle and restructure these accounts to make these transactions work. So far a few hundred people who the staff lovingly refers to as "guinea pigs" have seen the results over a six month time frame. With all of their credit score increases tallied, they've experienced roughly 25,000 points worth of score increases, even though Broughton insists they're not in this business to be a credit repair company.
"Credit repair isn't what we do, and it's not our end goal. If you diffuse market inequities by creating a balanced way to shift debt instead of writing it off, you have the potential to solidify the financial sector of the economy very quickly. The credit score improvements are not artificial, they're the result of a responsible citizen making a conscious decision to make on-time payments--giving them access to more financial opportunities and leverage."
Primary tradelines and seasoned primary trade lines once monopolized the credit enhancement industry, and now only a few sparse Craigslist postings remain. Meanwhile, the next generation of credit improvement--
