Too Many credit cards.

[Anonymous]

First I want to sent a big thank you to everyone on here in helping me build my credit......This is my first time writing to everyone, I needed some addvise. For the last year I rack up alot of credit cards, am up to 20,  and 18 inquries, 7 will fall off starting next year in March, the rest in 2017..I have a total of $52,000 in credit, some cards I dont even use, just got alot of pop ups...all of them are 0, except the Discover card which I used to do a BT. My UT is 9,  If I close 4 cards, will it hurt my credit score??  its 651 as of today..Thank you..

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

First I want to sent a big thank you to everyone on here in helping me build my credit......This is my first time writing to everyone, I needed some addvise. For the last year I rack up alot of credit cards, am up to 20,  and 18 inquries, 7 will fall off starting next year in March, the rest in 2017..I have a total of $52,000 in credit, some cards I dont even use, just got alot of pop ups...all of them are 0, except the Discover card which I used to do a BT. My UT is 9,  If I close 4 cards, will it hurt my credit score??  its 651 as of today..Thank you..

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Since you carry no balances on any cards other than Discover, all of your 9% utilization is on Discover. Closing 4 other cards will reduce your available credit and most likely push your utilization over 10%, which will probably impact your score.

[elim]

Utilization scoring doesn't really matter as you can manipulate it any month you like by paying down a CC and letting the new utilization report.   Trim the dead wood if it makes you happy.  My theory is to get the limits as high as possible before closing any card.  A 5k closed account may look better than a $300 closed account (for the next 10 years),  but this is just my uneducated guess.   I will also try to leave accounts open for 2 years before they get the axe but have closed 1 at the 1 year mark to move some limits around.

[kdm31091]

I am a big proponent of "if it's no longer useful to you, close it"; but it doesn't mean you have to rush and close them all immediately. I would suggest spreading the closures out over time a bit so it doesn't appear odd on a manual review. In the meantime, just throw the cards in the drawer and forget about them. If they have no fee, they aren't costing you anything.

Try and get a CLI or two on existing accounts, then gradually close the ones you don't want. I don't think it matters much if you wait til the accounts hit a year or not, because they continue to age when closed. I just think closing them all at the same exact time may not be good. Spread it out. But yeah, there's no reason to keep them just because.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

First I want to sent a big thank you to everyone on here in helping me build my credit......This is my first time writing to everyone, I needed some addvise. For the last year I rack up alot of credit cards, am up to 20,  and 18 inquries, 7 will fall off starting next year in March, the rest in 2017..I have a total of $52,000 in credit, some cards I dont even use, just got alot of pop ups...all of them are 0, except the Discover card which I used to do a BT. My UT is 9,  If I close 4 cards, will it hurt my credit score??  its 651 as of today..Thank you..

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You don't say what kind of cards they are, so that might possibly affect my answer, but my suggestion would be to avoid closing a lot of accounts, for several reasons:

1. each time you close an older account you reduce your average age of accounts (not a problem for those newer accounts)

2. each time you close an account you increase your utilization percentage

3. i have a vague impression which i can't document that having closed accounts is counted as a negative

4. i have a vague impression which i can't document that FICO scores actually look more kindly on one's having a lot of credit cards, than on one's having few... which is crazy in my book, but nevertheless appears to be the case

So as a general rule I would prefer to keep accounts active and use them little, as opposed to closing them.

But specifically you might want to consider:

1. combining accounts with the same lender

2. getting rid of the store cards you don't use, especially those opened recently

3. getting rid of bad cards you don't use, especially those opened recently

But do it all very gradually, and avoid hard pulls

And it would be just as reasonable a decision to just keep them all

I

[Anonymous]

If you have a lot of card you arent using you arent in trouble and that's what matters to them. They have hundreds of millions of months of millions of people's data to determine when you are on spending sprees, or really in the red. Stay out of their control groups and you will be the one in control

[Anonymous]

Thanks to everyone, I will hold to them for a year then cut them lose one at a time..