Can we talk about people who pay their credit card bill late just because they think it helps their score...

So my buddy Brad, who lives in Phoenix, has been letting his payments slide by 3 or 4 days every month for like 2 years now. He heard somewhere that paying late builds character or something? I told him he's literally getting hit with late fees and probably hurting his utilization history. Last week he asked me why his score dropped 40 points and I just stared at him. Why do people actually think late payments help you?

3 comments

3 Comments

seth_singh201mo agoOG Member

Wesley, man, I had to sit my sister down last year because she was doing the same thing as your cousin. I showed her my credit report side by side with hers on my laptop and explained how on-time payments work, which finally clicked when she saw the late payment flags in black and white. She started setting auto-pay for the minimum on the due date and her score went up 60 points in 4 months, no joke.

wesley_jones1mo ago

Drove my cousin Kevin absolutely nuts about this last month. Bro was paying everything 2 weeks early thinking it would "supercharge" his credit. Found out he'd been taking out payday loans just to cover his cards before the statement even hit. Tried to explain that paying early is fine but you don't gotta starve yourself for it. He finally got it after his car got repossessed and he couldn't make rent. Some people just hear one piece of bad advice on TikTok and ride it straight into the ground.

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charles_mitchell1mo ago

Man @wesley_jones I feel your pain on this one. My brother-in-law did the SAME thing, maxed out a credit card to "build history" and ended up paying interest on interest for months before I got through to him.