Is AAoA a weighted average of accounts??

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

Just had a quick question to understand if AAoA is a weighted average or not.  For example, if I have 2 cards with a 10 year history and combine them, will my overall AAoA go down or is it just based on solely the first account opened?

Basically, wondering if I should keep 2 cards with relatively low limits or combine them into one...LMK your thoughts.

Thanks,

GL

[Anonymous]

AAoA is the average of your accounts. 

You have a 10 month old account and a 2 month old account, for example, your AAoA is 6 months. 

If you close an account, your AAoA continues to grow until the account is removed by the credit bureaus up to 10 years later. 

AAoA only is affected by adding or removing accounts from the report, not closing them. 

In your case, your AAoA would remain the same. The impact wouldn’t be felt until the closed account falls off the credit report. 

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much, explains everything.

GL

[Anonymous]

No problem, happy to help!

[Anonymous]

AAoA was a new term to me, so I did some research and found this AAoA well explained.  It's a very long and indepth explaination of this and in my opinion it's very good and makes more sense to me now.  It goes into past, present and future of AAoA.   You may find this helpful.

I did not see in the guidelines/rules that you cannot post links to other information, so if I'm in violation here, please advise.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just had a quick question to understand if AAoA is a weighted average or not.  For example, if I have 2 cards with a 10 year history and combine them, will my overall AAoA go down or is it just based on solely the first account opened?

Basically, wondering if I should keep 2 cards with relatively low limits or combine them into one...LMK your thoughts.

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How many open credit cards do you currently have?  If you have exactly two (as per the example above) combining your only two cards would be the wrong choice.  Because then you would have only one open card.  That won't hurt your AAoA (you would have exactly two CC accounts, one closed and one open, both continuing to age) but reducing your total number of open cards to 1 is a bad choice for many other reasons.