Closed accounts help or hurt?

[Anonymous]

Without going into the sorrid details, Amex sucks. In any event, they are closing my mothers 40 year old account, despite having offered to keep it open and current, and despite having showed that GC who they gave it to has violated every FDCPA provision on the books.

Our choice now is to 1) Pay GC payments and be eligible for optima 2) Pay Amex payments and not be eligible for payments (!!!???) and in either case the card is closed AND if we don't pay the (disputed) balance by 2/15 the card will be reported Charged Off/Delinquint.

I had asked late December to be taken off of AU reporting, called Amex's # and told them I hadn't been AU for months and please stop reporting. They said in any event (AU still or not) all I had to do was read them the current account # from current report and they'd remove me at my request, and I did so and they said fine, next cycle you'll be gone.

So questions are;

1) How long does that take?

2) Can they/will they simply reverse that decision?

3) If I decide I don't want to take the reporting CO'd account and decide to pay my mother's account in full before that date, will the closed/PIF 30 year old account do me any good in terms of age, AA, score or simply still hurt me as well?

[Tuscani]

The only area of scoring where closing an account can hurt you is in the revolving utilization calculations. While a closed revolving account with a balance is included in utilization, a closed account with a zero balance is not.

In the area of length of credit history, closed accounts are treated no differently than open accounts. That is, the length of history on a closed acct still gets counted right along with the rest of the closed account's history. In fact, the length of credit history gets counted for every trade line on your report, regardless.

So, the only harm by closing a revolving account is to the utilization percentage, while, in the long run, a closed account will be removed from your credit file after 10 years, which could lower your score at that time due to the loss of that history.