I know from this answer that having 1% utilization is better than 0%, but what about -1%? Is this even possible?
Every time I make a charge with my credit card, I pull up my bank's app and pay it down to be exactly 1% utilization. This creates a pending payment in the Activity tab.
Sometimes my payment will "post" to the account before the pending transaction that I was paying for does. When this happens, instead of showing a positive balance (which would indicate that I owe money,) it shows a negative one. It would appear from past months that that this is the number that gets reported to the bureaus, so what if it's negative at the exact moment when they report it?
If it is possible to report a negative balance to the credit bureaus, and this causes my computed utilization to be under 0%, how would this affect my credit score?
I'm going to overpay by 10% before my closing date this month, just to see what happens. I'll post my experiences as an answer after I pull a new report and score from CreditKarma. I'm curious to hear about others' experiences too though.
Edit: As quid pointed out my inference that "having 1% utilization is better than 0%" is very misguided interpretation of the data. This question is focused on the if/how the bureaus would accept/report a negative utilization. The question about how it would affect the score is secondary.