@urbex wrote:I'm at that point in my life where I can start fine tuning my credit portfolio after seeing a high score, being stupid and bottoming it out to the point that I was getting denied for even lousy secured credit cards for a couple years, and finally back in the 750+ range with a mortgage, car loan, and 22 credit cards totaling over $125K in combined limits.
I've read in a few places that the CBIS car insurance scores take in to account the average credit card limits, meaning that having a bunch of low limit cards brings down my average limits and potentially causes a jump in car insurance rates, but I'm not finding much on this one way or the other.
I have way more cards than I can keep track of now, only using 2 of them on a regular basis, and mentally can't keep up with use this card for this perk, that card for that perk, etc. Rotating categories are just flat a no go for me, lol. I know at some point I'm going to risk having a number of these things auto close for inactivity, slamming my AAoA and UTL. Though the UTL could be mitigated easily, as most of it is sitting on 0% cards that I could pay off tomorrow if I had to.
My 3 oldest cards are a Cap1 and two Chase general cards that I can easily drop a montly bill on, but I don't enough monthly recurrings to keep all of the non store cards going like this. I have 7 store cards, 6 of which I haven't touched in years, and only got them for some sort of promo financing deals (number 7 being the Amazon Prime card which does get used monthly).
Would I better off focusing on keeping the highest limit cards active to increase the average card limit number, and either letting the low limit cards auto close or even just close them myself?
I'm going to tag @Thomas_Thumb on this because he knows something about insurance scores.
@urbex wrote:Oh, right...I keep forgetting that my oldest account still shows as a student loan that was closed a decade ago, though due to fall off at some point this year.
Not necessarily. Sometimes closed accounts continue to be reported for well more than 10 years. There's nothing magical about 10 years, it's just a typical duration.
Thankfully, my 3 oldest, though still open, cards are general Visa/Mastercard cards through Cap1 and Chase with decent limits. I know I have some older cards that I have closed in years past that will still on the report for several years - mostly my early secured rebuilder cards and a couple with AFs.
I also have a few $20K+ cards that I can easily hit a $10K average with slicing off a few of those LL cards.
Thanks much!
