NEED ADVICE ON PAYING DOWN CREDIT CARDS- make big payments or lots of small ones??

[l-bug]

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marty56 wrote:

 I dont know if closed accounts count as part of your available credit but if you maxed out every card and then closed the accounts, do you think that your utilization would be 0 and it would have no affect on your FICO score?

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I have several closed accounts with balances (went on a dmp & several credit grantors closed accts). As far as I can tell when reviewing my CR, closed accounts report "Largest Past Balances" whereas open accounts report "Credit Limit." However, on the closed cards with balances, the "largest past balances" are computing as if it was still an open credit limit.  On the zero balance closed cards, the "largest past balances" do not factor in with my CL.

My concern is when these closed accounts are paid off, and the "largest past balances" will no longer be included in my CL, and my overall utilization will go up.  Therefore my goal is to make sure my utilization is extremely low on my open cards before I completely pay off the closed accounts. I still want to pay as much as possible on both open and closed, but I want to pay the open accounts to almost nothing before I make that final payment on the closed accounts.

Almost there: 693 EQ

[Anonymous]

So you are basically where I am except I was uninformed and closed the accounts myself and cant get them opened again. So I just tried to pay a bunch on all of my cards whether they were open or not because I wasn't sure what would happen. My highest interest rates were on the cards that were closed so I had to pay some on those because the rate is outrageous. So now I am just waiting to see what happens to my credit score. Hopefully it will still go up!