@Anonymous I had some many cards to help my utilization numbers, but in December, I was able to pay off everything so now I really only have about 4 or 5 cards I will keep. None of my cards are secured.
Over the next year, I will begin to close the cards I don't need or use any more.
The cards I will keep are...
1) Ollo - Invite only, got it through Experian website. It has 2% cash back on gas, grocery, and pharmacy and no annual fee, 1.5% cash back on all other. They had a systems issue in late January but that didn't impact me because my card balance was zero and I was not affected.
2) Capital One QS and QS1 - Got a QS CLI from 1k to 4k last month. This card started in 2015 as a Platinum with $300 credit line. Product changed to QS sometime in 2017. I didn't try for additonal CLI at that time because my utilization was high. Recently I pumped through about 50% of the CL each month and paid it off before the statement. They increased the credit line due to that. The QS1 may be bucketed, not sure. It also started at $300 but is stuck at $1450 now.
3) Comenity MC - Started in 2019 with a shopping cart trick where I got a $500 CL Wayfair card with no hard pull. They converted this to a MC last summer with a CL of $1250, then increased it to $2000 last month.
The rest of the cards I really don't need and will be closing them over the next year. I use them enough to keep them open for now.
Yes, I have one baddie, a collection that is paid but I'm not able to get them to delete it. It was from about 3 years ago but they switched to a new collection company and posted it for the first time last June, so its fairly new. I should have tried to pull it back to the original company since the collection agency would not delete. GW letters not too successful with TSI/55.
Since I'm holding off for a mortgage app soon and working on mortgage scores, I really can't get any new better cards, so my strategy is to focus on increasing the credit lines of the best cards I have, then close others that I don't need.
@Anonymous Thanks, I will check into the age of that collection. The original bill was Oct 2018, went to collections in June 2019, but I don't think it was ever reported to the CRAs at that time. Then it was switched to another CRA in June 2020. I had forgotten about it. Unfortunately its a company that I can't find anyone on the forum whose had success deleting it. If this were aged to over two years old it would improve my score.