does it really matter to pay more than the minimum?

[oracles]

 I also noticed on my Wamu online statements, they have a chart of your payment patterns.

It has no payment due, paid less than min, paid minimum, paid more than min.

I thought this was very interesting to have this on your online account.

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure if it matters. I haven't had to carry any balances in quite awhile, but when I did, my forumla for paying them off was to pay the Minimum, plus 100 on each card. When one card was paid off, I'd snowball the payments to another card, and so forth.

[Anonymous]

My wife has always paid more than her minimum, but she decided to just pay the minimum on her lower interest cards to pay more on the high interest, and her scores dropped by ten points. On her credit it was noted whether she paid minimum or more than minimum. So she started paying $2-5 more than the minimum and it shows her paying more than minimum again. Her score jumped right back up. Nothing else changed that could have caused the jumps. I am sure they look at it in a negative light if you are only able to pay minimum payments.

[oracles]

Wow Mchoffa

This is also very interesting what you state, howeer i think it has more to do with the Util% and not that she paid more than the min.  I definitely could be wrong since i dont know the equation for fico.

[Anonymous]

You mean the line that normally says "pays as agreed" is stating if you are paying minimum or more?  Im confused..

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@Anonymous wrote:
My wife has always paid more than her minimum, but she decided to just pay the minimum on her lower interest cards to pay more on the high interest, and her scores dropped by ten points. On her credit it was noted whether she paid minimum or more than minimum. So she started paying $2-5 more than the minimum and it shows her paying more than minimum again. Her score jumped right back up. Nothing else changed that could have caused the jumps. I am sure they look at it in a negative light if you are only able to pay minimum payments.

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[haulingthescoreup]

There's no way of doing a controlled experiment to know for sure, unless you have access to a parallel universe where you can try it both ways.

But I had a 0% BT with BofA, and the minimum was only 1%/ month. That meant starting off with an $82.40 minimum payment, but I always paid $250/ biweekly. I went from a $10K CL to a $15K CL to an $18K CL in less than six months.

I have decent scores, but not stellar, and my history is littered with lates, up to a 90 day. I really do think that paying way over the minimum made them willing to take a chance on nearly doubling my CL in a half a year.

[ChesterPDexter]

I have also noticed the WaMu chart and I keep it so that it says "pays more than the minimum" all the way across.  I assume other card issuers keep track of this even if they don't display it,so I pay more than the minimum at all times.

This is because I generally do the "snowball" whereby I am concentrating on one bigger debt while just making payments on the others and I need to rustle all the money up that I can just to attack the biggest debt.

I've always wondered, though, what is considered "more" than the minimum.  For example, $1 more might be considered "more" by some creditors but not by others.  So I make a rule of thumb to pay at least $5 more.  If the minimum payment required is $29, I pay $35 (adding $5 to the min. and rounding up to some nice increment, sometimes $10 increments and sometimes $5 increments.)  I have no idea if this makes me look better to creditors or not.

I've only gotten one CLD and it was one of my WaMu cards, and recently.  I had just put $960 on the card (for dental work) and took it up sort of near the limit.  As soon as the statement closed a few days later they CLD'd me and sent a letter telling me that.   I'll never know if this flagged my account and caused them to drop my limit from $4,000 to something like $3,788 (yes, they dropped me $212, and that did not correspond to what I owed them since I owed something like $3,600 at that point.)  I had always paid more than the minimum. I've had the card a few years with typically low-middle utilization and they have never offered a CLI.