@kdm31091 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
Have you thought about just not using them? Your AAoA suggests you have a rather thin profile, if you don't have AFs, I would just lock them away somewhere instead of closing them. Eventually your creditors will close them for you but that will take some time and build up positive history on those accounts a while longer before they're closed. As far as your FICO is concerned, closed accounts have a positive effect on you for as long as they stay on your reports but in a manual review, it will look better to the person viewing to see more time on accounts being opened and also some lenders really don't like to extend additional credit later if you didn't keep their card at least a year.
While you shouldn't make a habit of opening and closing accounts, I don't see much point in throwing a card in a drawer for months/years until the lender closes it. How is that any better for the relationship with the lender? IMO It really isn't going to make a difference. You either closed the card, or didn't use it. As long as there's nothing negative associated with it (i.e. closing immediately after a bonus or something), I don't see the difference.
In this day and age of more and more fraud, I prefer simplicity and fewer accounts to track. If an account isn't giving me any benefit I just close it. Don't want to spend time keeping track of accounts that do nothing for me. Just my take on it.
I don't put much stock in the AAoA argument. I have yet to see someone post about their scores tanking because an old, closed account finally dropped off. AAoA itself is a fairly minor component of scoring and who knows what scoring models will even look like a decade from now?
There are data points that suggest that credit card issuers are less likely to dole out new cards to someone who didn't keep their cards long to begin with, something I myself have seemingly hit with Amex. The system is looking at me like a churner for a card I canceled before even getting. When I went to apply the second time, I was greeted with the lovely no SUB popup and then a denial with higher scores than I had for the first approval and a denial upon recon (the letter is coming today but I checked online and the reason code is my FICO score). It does happen and if those cards are Chase or Amex, its something to be concerned about.
You don't have to track anything, just lock it away and set alerts for any transaction activity. Fraud happens less frequently to sock drawered cards anyway but you will still pad another 4-12+ months of history on that card while it sits there.
The point about AAoA is one that I made myself recently that we don't know what scoring models will look like in the future - but what we can probably guess based on how they are now is that they will be ever more skewed in the favor of the lenders and not the consumers so we may see accounts fall off earlier when they're closed. Its a moot point in the immediate term though.
I still argue that for such low AAoA, its better to keep the cards open than close them though. OP may not have any credit applications on the horizon right now but as we all know, life happens.
