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@jamesdwi wrote:
@MandaNic2005 wrote:So, in a few short months, my husband and I are looking to hopefully by a house of our own, and I want to do whatever I can to make my credit the best it can be. That being said, I have 11 credit cards, 4 major and the rest are store cards (kohls, home depot, lowes, childrens place, victorias secret, etc..). Is it bad to have too many CC's? All of my cards are in good standing... No late payments, most have a $0 balance, should I close some of them? I will say I do use them all though, mainly for the discounts I get while using them, but than I pay them off right away. Is this good or should I close out some of my accounts? Thanks for any feedback!!
Keep them open, with no usage, if the Loan officier has a problem with them he can ask you to close them. Why close them prematurely especially some of them will come in handy after you become home owners, lowes and homedepot for example.
+1, this is exactly what will happen IF the loan officer has a problem with the amount of credit you have. My SO was asked to close any and all AMEX accounts when getting a mortgage because of the NPSL looking too risky to the loan officer, but once that was done there were no issues. I agree with jamesdwi--wait and see what the loan officer asks you to close (if anything). It would be a shame if you closed a few cards and then the LO asked you to close other cards.
Good luck!
For me, I don't want any more than 5..7 is the max. Right now we have 4, and I can tell you their due date,statement date and minimum payment right off the top of my head..anymore and I don't think I can keep track!
@Anonymous wrote:For me, I don't want any more than 5..7 is the max. Right now we have 4, and I can tell you their due date,statement date and minimum payment right off the top of my head..anymore and I don't think I can keep track!
I have a calendar just for my bills, with each card written on its due date. This is what I've been doing for years, and I have no missed or late payments. This is also how I keep track of when utility and other bills are due.
IMO, 14 or more CC is too many.
Once the function
(approve card)/ (Hard pools)
approaches 0
No right or wrong answer to this one personally got 9 eventually i want 4 or 5 with nice CL's then I'll close the rest till then fine with what I've got.
The only time you really have too many is when you can't manage all the ones you have
I think there might be a limit as to what FICO likes to see, but it's not 11, and possibly not even double that.
Also I think there's a difference between having 30 credit cards (for example) at one year or less history on them, and something like 30 cards with 3+ years on every tradeline, and probably 5-7+ years on many of them.
We've seen it go both ways on this forum and undoubtedly some bucketing is involved: there are people with tons of credit cards and gold-plated credit scores, and there are others with tons of credit cards (the one example I remember clearly was 720+ anyway) who closed some and got a good bump immediately into the gold-plated range.
Any statistical outlier is fair game in the FICO model for risk analysis purposes, of course so is being in the average; however, the average is much easier to predict their actions on, and personally I'd rather be under the bell curve within the first standard deviation... I think 11 cards probably falls in that range as well.
Edit: spelling errors and I'd point out, being in the average is even more important for underwriting than it is for FICO. Needle in a haystack principle, I don't want an underwriter to glance at my report and think "oooh, that's interesting."
Someone may have mentioned this already but after you have 3-4 cards reporting, there is no real benefit (from a fico scoring perspective at least) to opening additional accounts. Of course there is no real detriment to adding more than 4 accounts from a fico scoring perspective either- other than inqs which are temporary in nature anyway.
As such, I think the answer to how many is too many is ymmv, but if you find yourself losing track of/forgetting about open ccs, you may have too many.