Get a copy of your credit report (you can do so for free every year in the US) and see what actually gets reported. It’s a much higher-level view than you probably think it is.
For credit cards, it’s a revolving account type. That differs from the other major type, installment. The latter covers things like car/house loans.
Within that, the total balance on each statement is reported, along with credit utilization, and whether your payment was on time and as agreed. It does not include individual transactions, at all.
If you’re trying to use credit cards to build your credit, here is how you do it. Note that this takes a long time to help, and won’t help as much as you think.
Sign up for a bunch of cards, all with no fees, at the same time. Get the highest limits possible on all. Make sure they are all active and paid as agreed every month. In practice, that means a few small transactions on each, paid in full every single month. Do not pay any interest, ever. Keep this up for several years to help establish your reliability on repaying debt. You want your average active account age to be as high as possible.
After 2 years of this, you’ll overcome the hit you took to open them. After 5 years or so, your account age will be decent enough to make it worthwhile. But this all falls apart if you need to buy a car or a house or something in the meantime.
Get a copy of your credit report (you can do so for free every year in the US) and see what actually gets reported. It’s a much higher-level view than you probably think it is.
For credit cards, it’s a revolving account type. That differs from the other major type, installment. The latter covers things like car/house loans.
Within that, the total balance on each statement is reported, along with credit utilization, and whether your payment was on time and as agreed. It does not include individual transactions, at all.
If you’re trying to use credit cards to build your credit, here is how you do it. Note that this takes a long time to help, and won’t help as much as you think.
Sign up for a bunch of cards, all with no fees, at the same time. Get the highest limits possible on all. Make sure they are all active and paid as agreed every month. In practice, that means a few small transactions on each, paid in full every single month. Do not pay any interest, ever. Keep this up for several years to help establish your reliability on repaying debt. You want your average active account age to be as high as possible.
After 2 years of this, you’ll overcome the hit you took to open them. After 5 years or so, your account age will be decent enough to make it worthwhile. But this all falls apart if you need to buy a car or a house or something in the meantime.