How to "vary my credit" and general advice

[xprodigy92]

I am currently 21. I have 12 credit cards and 1 student loan. The reason for the 12 credit cards is because I don't want to hurt my average age of account history. Currently, I don't need to take out any mortgages or car loans. Any money I borrow I can pay in full with my currently salary. What I have been doing is trying to get as many good credit cards as possible to establish relationships with the banks I frequent. (I also save a lot of money with the points I earn) I do have a lot of hard inquiries, but those will drop off. Basically my goal is to have as many accounts as I can while I'm young and keep them open until my 30's. I know this initially will trash my credit. (I'm at a 689 FICO right now which is considerably lower than I would like to be) I won't need to have any good credit until my late 20's though because I am not buying a house any time soon or a car. Do you think my logic in having all these accounts now, keeping them open and active, and getting credit limit increases every 6 months makes sense? If I have 15 accounts all with an average age of history of 5 years with 0 inquiries, taking out a loan or a mortage or another credit card will do little to nothing to hurt my account age. What are your thoughts?

Also, with varying your types of credit. What can I do to improve this area without taking a mortgage or an auto loan? I do have 1 student loan but I don't think that is enough to get the full amount of points from this category is it? Again, I can experiment with taking out additional accounts now because I'm still very dependent on my parents and will be at least another 5 years. Any advice to improve this category?

[NikoD]

I'm pretty new around here but since no one else has responded I'll tell you what I think. I wouldn't try to open any more/different accounts just to try to improve your score with different types of accounts. Since you have lots of time before you want to buy a house or car just let time work its magic. There are plenty of people, myself included, who have FICO scores over 800 with just CCs in their files. 

[Revelate]

I like your idea of having a bunch of random tradelines to establish history when your score doesn't matter: you're doing fine there.

What I don't think is quite as smart is to keep requesting CLI's on all the tradelines if they require HP's to do so; focus on a card or two that can increase limits rapidly over the course of a few years with SP's (Amex revolver, GE store card possibly, are two examples of such).   Build up whatever limit you need on that, then take strategic HP's on your other cards to increase their CL's in the future.  You get similar if not better results without the continual FICO penalty.

The only other advice I'd suggest is get a secured installment loan; if you have some cash savings, do something like stick it in a CD and take out a loan against that at some trivial interest rate.  Alternatively you can get a "Credit builder" loan which is where the bank loans you momey, but usually it's only for a year and you may want to do this for a longer timeline.  I used USAA personally for this, variable rate 3 year CD which I took a 100% loan-to-value loan secured against it on.  2% interest a year in my case which is pretty cheap for me.  I am probably going to roll it over into a 7 year variable rate CD and do the same trick again just to keep another open installment line on my reports when it's finished in a year.  It's a boring investment for a boring tradeline, but it counts for FICO.

Beyond that short of buying a house or a car in the future there's not too much which you can really do in my opinion other than keep your nose clean FICO-wise.