Carrying Business Expences personally

[Anonymous]

I am a consultant who has periodic assignments where I may work in a different state for 3 or more months, then may have a local assignment which does not incur the same level of expences.  My expences for housing, airfare, rental cars, etc may exceed $10,000 in a month.  I am re-imbursed for these expences and typically pay them off within the month, sometimes earlier.

This month, I saw reports on MyFico which showed amounts for a card near $8000 with a similar total for the prior month, but no mention that I had paid off both balances on time on MyFico.  Is MyFico only used to report the bad without the concurrent responsibility to also report the good.  Is there anywhere, with any of the credit bureaus, that I can attach a statement that I am a consultant and have business expences that are re-imbursed and used to pay the original charges. 

I guess I can change and plan all of my expences through my company travel company and pay them when I get my re-imbursements rather than carry the risk on my personal credit report.  Any comments from others with this situation?  Can I attach a statement to my credit report anywhere that will explain my line of business and why my credit balances fluctuate widely in a given month?

[MidnightVoice]

All a credit report does is report what the card companies are telling it.  Most card companies will report the statement balance and that is all.  So if you had $8K expenses one month, got the bill and paid it, then had $8K expenses the next month, got the bill and paid it, each month would show a statement of $8K owing, and it would be correct.

[Jazzzy]

Hi dgr, and welcome to the forums.

My husband is a sole proprietor, and we carry business expenses on our personal cards. We always paid our balances in full when we got our statements. We now pay off our balances online a few days before the statement cuts. We continue to use the cards after we pay, but that way only small balances (if any) report.

You can add a statement to your reports. From reading in these forums, however, it seems those statements aren't given much weight. They are not even seen or taken into account for FICO scoring. If you had a manual account review with human eyes looking at your report, it may help some.

We didn't start this payment process until we applied for a mortgage on a rental property. We reported that we had no credit card debt because we always paid in full. Loan officer begged to differ. Our credit report showed $6k+ in credit card debt, even though it had already all been paid off. We didn't want to deal with that again, so started paying before the statement cuts. For maximum FICO impact, you not only have to manage debt, you have to manage what reports.