Financial-type adviceFollow

From my understanding of his situation, he would not pay any extra, though he wouldn't be making any credit score gain either. I assume he meant making minimum payments on an item.

Gbaji hit it right on the nail here. For a reasonable and sensible person a credit card is a useful convenience and can help build credit.



I have a single credit card which I use to buy practically everything. Because I don't do anything stupid and have made every single payment in full since receiving the card I have nearly the highest possible credit score for someone with my level of assets. I've never been charged a fee for using the card, and because of their silly rewards system I net paying about 99.2% of the cost of items. My checking account is set to automatically pay off my credit card in full each month as soon as I receive the bill, so I can't miss a payment unless I have no money in my checking account. Because all my spending is done on my card I can easily have the information entered into my Quicken file and see how much money I spent at the weeabootigue that month.

People have been making a lot of silly suggestions in this thread. I don't need to do anything ridiculous to build my credit score at no cost. I don't need to get some JC Penny card and then buy things just to have spent money. I don't need to purchase a big item and let the balance sit on the card. I don't need to do anything other than use it normally and responsibly.

Edited, Oct 11th 2010 5:48pm by Allegory

Best way to do it is to buy something on it, that you can buy at the same time in cash. Lets say a pack of smokes. Then you take that 10 bucks and put it on the credit card, each time.

The size of the purchase has no bearing on credit score, only if you pay on time and don't default. If you are trying to build credit it is the safest way to do it without shooting yourself in the foot. I was 18 when I got my first card, and could have got a 250K mortgage a year later, I didn't thankfully because when I was at school I lived on my credit card, now I owe them a lot of money and can't pay them. However because I got my rating so high the fact I have a relatively low default rate by comparison still lands my score around 800 or so (i think it was 795 last I checked).

Do not make large purchases if you only plan to build credit. Now if you have the card because you want to make a big purchase by all means do so, just be aware that paying just minimums gets you no where fast.

Agreed, hence why I added:


:D