In February 2019, I had no credit cards, and I'd had none for many years. In 2019, I opened:
- Citi secured
- Capital One secured
- Primor Green Dot secured
- Discover secured
- Amazon Store Card (unsecured)
- Credit Union unsecured card
- Amex Gold
- Amex Delta Gold
- Amex Hilton
- PayPay MC
- Apple Card
The ones in bold are the ones I still have (and I may close Apple ... and I was thinking about closing PPMC until the 3% PayPal thing). In other words, I closed most of them. I figure it doesn't matter for me since I still have many cards and they are all aging together. I post this mostly to say, closing cards won't hurt anything as long as you don't blow up your utilization. I have never gotten a negative "reason" or in any other way seen a negative consequence for closing these cards, though admittedly, I have a weird profile ... but so do a lot of people on this forum.
@Citylights18 wrote:I'm definitely considering closing a couple of my cards. I have 6 business credit cards now so my spend is not reaching as much of the personal cards.
AMEX Gold is on my chop list with the $250 AF. I've only had the account for 2 years (May 2020) so my average account length will go up.
Eventually may bump up my CSP to a CSR. First I should unload AMEX points and some of my other awards before I start buying hotels on it and I'm really not flying much where I can take advantage of priority pass.
Generally I'm a fan of trimming and pruning the lineup as a goal. My average account length is right around 5 years and my entire Chase card lineup was taken out from 2-3 years ago.
Closing an account wouldn't make your account age go up. It'll still stay on your reports and continue to age for up to 10 years, but your current age/average age of accounts won't all of a sudden go up.
I too closed my oldest card with capital one. It was my card of 15 years, and they refused to really give me any increases or product upgrades. It was the old capital platinum card that charged a 36 a year annual fee with no benefits to having it. It was only a 3k credit limit, so my strategy was to get an increase on an existing card of 3k + and then close the account which I did. Now all my cards have a cash back element to them. I only have one capital one card left (I once had 3), and that's the quicksilver. Felt good to get rid of that old card, it just didn't have any use for it.
Starting Score: 679
