You may call a few times. If it did not work out, book an in-person appointment to see whether it can get restored. If you really need it and there would be no way to restore it, you may apply for the card(s) again.
Since your credit score dropped, I guess you were carrying some balances on some of your cards and closing a card resulted an increase in your debt to income ratio. If you want to proceed to credit card application, I suggest to pay your debt first to restore your credit score.
To avoid having such issues in future, you may place a small charge of 1$ on the dormant credit cards in each quarter (online Amazon GC). Also, you may get credit cards from multiple lenders to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. It would help to navigate your way, in case that one lender decides to close or do any AA.
Fico8: EX~EQ~TU~840 (12 month goal~850).
@NoMoreE46 wrote:
@lhaymond wrote:I actually have a couple other zero balance cards with a combined limit of 17500 and a current balance on a "pay before x and zero interest" line with a $700 balance for a total UTI of 4%
Thanks for the clarification. That 56 point drop then really can't be as result of the closure if your uti is still low?
This is what I was thinking as I was reading through the thread. There either has to be another big factor happening, or this is a Vantage 3.0 credit score where minor changes like reporting a $2 balance can signal that you are an extremely high credit risk. Simply having an old account going from open to closed without another major factor (i.e. late payment, heavily increased utilization, previously open loans paid to $0, no longer have revolving credit account, etc.) is not going to cause that much of a swing in a FICO score.
If I remember correctly, VS3 often doesn't include some of the closed account metrics that FICO versions do, and if the rest of your cards are much newer for example, your age of oldest revolving account and average age of accounts could have taken a large hit with that scoring model. If that's the case, the good news is that this would likely only ever affect you if you needed a payday loan, wanted to rent-to-own some furniture, or were trying to rent an apartment from a landlord too cheap to pay for FICO scores.
@lhaymond wrote:Well that explains it then.... I have a couple retail store cards with 0 balances (both very new) and one Visa only a couple years old. I figured I had a $30k limit with a 0 balance - more than I would ever need. So my revolving credit went from almost 30 years history to 36 months. Do I understand you are saying this some how has a less severe impact on my credit? Thanks for the help
For up to 10 years while the closed card is still reporting, its age will still be factored into both your average age and your oldest account for FICO models so there should not really be much of a change (if any) on FICO scores as a result. With Vantage scores, they may only factor in open accounts. If those new accounts were just reporting for the first time, that could also show a noticeable change in scoring but certainly not 56 points for FICO.
Long story short, FICO shouldn't be affected for quite a while and I would definitely try to see if they can reopen the account.