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Well one caveat to the above -- they are both big banks of the "we want all your banking" variety, like I suppose BoA/CITI/Chase/Wells Fargo, etc, where they would love it if you give them your banking, retirement account, credit cards, insurance, etc., and so maybe these big banks keep open my credit cards forever hoping that I'll one day get additional products with them. I once upon a time banked with all of them once upon a time but my accounts are all long since closed or dormant since I moved my regular banking elsewhere (to credit unions and online banking companies).
@Anonymous wrote:What I am not looking for on this thread is general advice on how to prevent cards from being closed: e.g. "charge something small on it every 2 months." Yup, that would work, but I am looking more for concrete evidence about how long a protracted period could go on. rather than general CYA advice. Hopefully if we could assemble some definite data we can use that to tweak the general advice, but one needs the data first.
Good luck with it but policies on closure due to inactivity can and do vary by creditor and everyone does not use the same set of creditors. If one wants to verify then one should verify directly with each creditor rather than relying on the hope that one broad generalization will apply in all cases. If one does want to generalize then one will need to use the creditor with the shortest timeframe for closure due to inactivity of the creditors that one uses.
Yes, interesting regarding my Cap One but I'm fine with it as it gives me a 20 year history As for the store cards, yes, I'd say the close date was around the same time as the last status update.
@Anonymous wrote:Thanks JB! Is this a store card or a major credit card?
It is a store card for a jewelry company. And while my payment history is blank and my "last reported" is 2010, I don't want to contact them and realize they need to close my account I'll keep milking that account for AAoA since my 10 year drop off date hasn't started yet!
@Anonymous wrote:
I have a card with Sterling Jewelers (Kay/Jared/Belden etc.) which I last paid off about 2 years ago. It's still open and earlier this year they auto-bumped my CL from 4k to $6,400!
I'm not sure how much longer they will keep it open. Does anyone have any experience with them?
I'd like to know this also since I just paid off the Jared card and have no plan to use it again anytime soon.
YupYup and Eddie raise a really interesting point: how does somebody insure that a store card stays open when he doesn't want anything at the store and what they do sell is damn expensive?
I know almost nothing about jewelers, but do any of them sell anything analogous to a pack of gum? (Not literally that of course.)
My guess is that a jeweler will keep an inactive card of a proven customer open for a very long time, longer than even a lot of the other store cards we've heard about thus far. (I welcome of course anyone who knows specifics.) The reason of course is that the business model of a jeweler expects that a customer might go for long periods without making another purchase -- very different from (say) Target where a typical customer uses the card several times a year (or more).
From a practical perspective, however, I'd say that YY and Eddie would probably be OK even if the card was cancelled at some point. The real reason to worry about a premature cancellation of a store card you never use is if it is (a) your oldest card and (b) many years older than all your other cards. Even then its cancellation would have no impact on you for ten years, at which point all the cards you have now would be much older.
Curiously (and I am now moving off the main topic of this thread) there may be a silver lining to having a store card cancelled. This is because some industries pull your credit reports and give you a lower rating because of the presence of, among other things, store cards -- the insurance industry is an example. So there may be an actual advantage for the credit cards in your profile to be chiefly (or almost entirely) major CCs rather than store cards. Obviously the exception would be a store card that really gives you a huge benefit over any major CC.
I'd bet jewelry stores would sell jewelry cleaner or some doo-dad for <$10. Not quite a pack of gum, but better than a tennis bracelet to keep it for util/AAoA.
I'm carrying around my Living Spaces card hoping I can go in and find a lamp or pillow when I'm near one, just to keep it open. DH may or may not have a mattress store card account still open. That one, I won't worry about since I'm sure we won't return.
My closures have all been store cards. Macy's, Talbots, and most of the rest would be stores that are out of business long ago.
Just updated this thread with a summary in the first post. I hope to hear some more hard cases if there are any new readers.