At http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/008992.html , Stefan Daystrom wrote: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Never pay just the minimum payment; it reflects poorly on your credit reports. Instead, pay $1.00 more than the minimum payment. That's all it takes to make the difference, because the credit reports just have a binary (yes/no) bit of information of whether you paid more than the minimum or not. You get a much higher score for paying more than the minimum than paying only the minimum, but just $1/month on any credit card you're making payments on is what you need to improve your score. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have never heard this before...can anyone confirm?
Hi Dave, I went over and checked this out. If you're able to post over there, please ask Stefan to source this information. Thanks. .
Mine almost always report as "$0 recent payment" or "minimum" no matter what I've paid during the month.
Just FYI, Stefan replied in the thread posted above, and I just posted my reply...very interested in seeing where this might go.
The transaction record provided to the CRAs using either of the two standard formats doesn't actually have an on/off flag, it has two fields which contain the scheduled monthly payment and the actual monthly payment. Since those are out of sync by a month and the scheduled payment can change, the CRA would have to: 1. retain the information month-to-month 2. calculate the difference (last month the payment scheduled for this month was $X, the actual payment this month was $Y) 3. report it somehow So there isn't a flag set in the input record. This information would have to be derived by the CRAs (which they have the data to do), and if they did so, they could choose to show it as a flag or as an actual dollar figure, whichever they preferred. So if a lender claims that this infomation shows up on the reports that they pull, and that it shows as a simple flag, that could well be true. And the fact that it shows as a flag makes his $1 comment correct. I'd like to see a report showing this flag (since our consumer reports certainly don't show it), but in the meantime, for a buck a month extra per account, I'd say it's worth doing.
Excellent post reddevil. Your reasoning makes goos sense, explaining why and how Stefan Daystrom's CSR might have made the claim he did. I also agree that one can hardly go wrong paying the extra $1 as insurance. I'll probably start doing that here on out.
