Credit Advice

Generally no. Lenders report delinquencies as 30, 60, and 90 days late so you have to miss a whole cycle.

Not in my experience...I'm usually a few days late for some reason.

For a debt to be recorded as late in your credit report, you must be a full 30 days late after the due date of your payment.  After that, it is reported in 30 day increments (i.e. 60, 90, 120 days late).  30 and 60 days past due on a bill can be forgiven and are less damaging to your credit in the long run as long as you maintain a healthy payment history after the fact.  However, 90 to 120 days late reflect poorly on your ability to manage credit and are harder on your score. Most companies will not discharge or reage your account if a payment is 120 days late.

I recently read an article (can't recall the source) that stated that some finance companies are considering beginning to report lates to bureaus as few as 5 days late.  Their goal is to use these as excuses to place the blame on the consumer for increasing interest rates - thus going around the laws/restrictions recently placed on them by Congress.  With computer systems doing the reporting, this will be an easy change for finance companies - just program it and be done with it. 

I predict that a credit score of 700+ will be a rare thing in 5-10 years, and that's exactly what finance companies want.