@Anonymous wrote:
Yeah, sorry, there was that one piece of wording that I meant to respond to and did not. That is what it means to carry a balance.
So we were clear earlier, right, about what it means for a card to report a balance, right? That just means that the statement prints and it has a positive balance on it. Some amount that you owe. That amount gets reported to the three credit bureaus, typically the day after the statement prints. (If the statement shows $0 that also gets reported.)
To PIF or pay in full means to pay that amount in full, sometime in the 25 days after the statement prints. (25 is a rough figure -- each issuer will give you its timeframe.)
To carry a balance, by contrast, means to pay some of the amount owed on the statement, but not the full amount. Thus if the amount owed is $400, and you pay $100, then $300 is carried over to the next statement.
You will find occasionally that newcomers to this site will often say carry when they mean report. They will say they always carry a balance, but they really just mean that the card is always reporting a balance that they pay off in the three weeks following the statement.
Given that, would you say that you never or almost never carry a balance? I think that's your situation, though in your last post you say that 4/5 cards are carrying a balance -- and I am pretty sure that's not what you mean.
You are correct in that not being what I meant. Now that I have a correct understanding of the terminology with regards to reports and such, I have 4/5 cards "reporting" a balance, but I never "carry" a balance. The total reported utilization is ~3%
