To close or not to close

[MrsCHX]

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@AverageJoesCredit wrote:
How long has your membership expired? If not long, reup another year that way youll have another year of at least considering keep it open to help with utilization.

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I have to vote for spending the $45 to keep the nearly $6k as padding. Only since you said you have "massive credit card debt" that you're paying off. 

What's your current balance/limits??

[MrsCHX]

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@kdm31091 wrote:

How many other cards do you have? What are their limits?

I wouldn't pay for membership just to keep a <$6k limit open unless it is one of only a few cards you have. I would just close it if it's not going to be useful to you, and go for CLIs on existing cards perhaps.

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I'm willing to bet "massive credit card debt" will prevent CLIs at least for the time being.

[MrsCHX]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have a Sam's Club MC.  I was under the impression that if your membership expired the card is no longer valid.  Don't have any clue why your store card would still be valid.

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Is this true? I could see for the store card but the MC??

[nursepower]

What i mean by Massive is over 40K in CC debt. My credit limits alone equal 125K 

I know....insane..... we are paying it down. We do have the income. I've never been late on a payment or missed a payment. 

[austinguy907]

40K is all about perspective though.  It's 30% of your TCL which isn't too bad considering.  Just to keep your numbers in your favor I would keep as many cards open as possible and just try not to use them while paying things down.  Maybe pick one that substitutes for "cash" and PIF each month on it to keep rolling in some cashback while paying things down.  As for Sam's though $45 is a drop in the bucket if you can call CS and get it bumped to a $25K limit to compensate for some more of the utilization.  

I'm thinking it might be easier to tame the balances with a higher score and a decent personal loan to consolidate things into a single payment.  Of course if you're shuffling 0%'s to keep down the monthly interest charges that helps too but, you're constantly going to be opening new cards to chase the 0% periods.  It doesn't sound like things are spinning out of control so there's no alarm bells going off but, 40K is a decent chunk of debt and more than some make in a year at work.