It's all about the timing. You probably charged on a card that was about to report to the credit bureau's. Most lenders report your statement balance. In order to avoid having balances report, you want to pay off a card before the new statement cuts. You want to leave 1 card reporting small balance of less than 9%. In order to do that, you don't pay off the card before the statement date, you just pay it down to the amount that you want to report.
I hope that makes sense!
@Anonymous wrote:Can someone tell me why a "negative" credit event is picked up immediately but a "positive" credit event seemlingly takes forever to show up with the bureaus?
My example: A charge on a specific credit card showed up almost immediately with my Experian and MyFico alerts...but I'm still waiting for two complete credit card "payoffs" to showup on the same E and MF alerts? Looking at the report for the recently charged card shows the company doesn't even report to the bureaus until month end. This makes no sense to me. I was assuming that my two "payoffs" would have shown up just as fast.
Which card did you add the charge to? Was that a Chase card that was at a zero balance prior to the new charge?
The addition of a charge on a credit card, regular spend, is not a "negative", it is simply a transaction that may reduce your score due to utilization percentages. A negative is a missed payment or some more severe form of missed payment.
