@Anonymous wrote:
@HeavenOhio wrote:To do "true" AZEO, I'd recommend cutting a very small positive balance on one major card (not a store card), maybe between $5 and 4% of its limit. After you do that, you can play around a bit with larger balances to see what you can get away with without a ding or to see how much ding you find to be acceptable.
I agree with this.
AZEO is very difficult to do if you don't actually have the money to PIF everything all the time. I don't think AZEO is worth doing if you're actually using credit to get to next payday versus using credit to maximize rewards/cashback.
I don't charge anything on a card unless I already have the money in the bank, so I use credit cards more like a debit card than a way to extend me money until my next paycheck.
If you do practice AZEO, it's just so much easier to keep a tiny balance on one card and pay everything else to $0 so it reports that.
If you need credit cards to extend your paycheck, don't sweat AZEO as much, just try to keep balances under 28% on any one card, and if you can get aggregate utilization under 8%, do that too.
I think of AZEO as treating credit like debit. Honestly not a bad thing since it helps build (force) responsible spending habits in the long term. 
After all as you said, you can't do AZEO if you don't actually have the funds to zero out the cards.
@arkane wrote:
think of AZEO as treating credit like debit. Honestly not a bad thing since it helps build (force) responsible spending habits in the long term.
I get what you are saying generally here, but AZEO isn't really treating credit like debit. If I have 0 balances on 7 of my cards and on my 8th AZEO card I'm carrying a $3500 balance ($40k limit) from month to month, paying interest, etc. that isn't treating credit like debit. It certainly maximizes AZEO, though.
I think PIF is more like treating credit like debit, but even there one is floating a balance.
The only real way to treat credit like debit is to pay off every CC purchase right after you make it.
@Anonymous wrote:I have a one capital one, one amex and a few retail cards. I use the retail cards frequently and am trying to pay off my capital one without using it any further. My amex is new and has a high limit; I am using that for almost all of my expenses but I want the balance reported to be as low as possible so that my overall credit utilization is low.
Then you should let a small balance report on one, and have the others report at zero, to optimize your FICO scores.
