Hi,
I am trying to let my credit cards age and let all the inquries drop off. This will take 2 years, since my more recent inquiries were from this month.
Should I place security freezes on my credit reports to prevent any more access to my credit file for obtaining new credit / not resetting the gardening date? I actually use MyFICO to monitor my credit (3 bureau monitoring) and I also use creditkarma, credit union and credit score tools my current lenders provide as well.
I don't want to deny soft pulls, will a freeze affect those if they get placed?
Well, I know there's a lot of self-control involved in everything we do. We live our lives, and especially here in America, we sometimes live on credit. I am trying hard not to be one of those people that ever run up a lot of debt.
I opened 2 Capital One cards, 1 BCU card and 1 Barclay's card this month. That makes 2 cards from each of those lenders. I have taken all the cards I have (except for two) and locked them away and do not have access to them easily. There is no possible reason I can see for carrying around a card that has $10k of credit available to it, unless it's for some extremely large purchase and I plan ahead of time. I decided to carry around my "toy limit" credit cards as the majority of what I buy is $100 or less, and then I pay in full each month. This month, I happened to notice that I carried $46 balance between two cards. The sneaky thing is, $41 of that came from a sneak transaction the day the statement cut and BCU decided to include it in last month's statement instead of this month's. (grr.) I even paid for it as soon as it posted to my account.
Back on topic, as far as CRA freezes are concerned, I doubt I will be able to apply for any other credit cards and get approved, to start with. I applied for a Sam's card (got declined) and somehow a Chase card (probably Amazon, I didn't know they went through Chase....) and got declined. So, I know I already started getting declined.. some because of bankruptcy, some because of inquiries (there are apparently 18 of them on my report, thanks to inquiries from my credit union whenever I have requested an increase to my SECURED credit card....)
Can I trust myself to not apply for more credit? Possibly. I'm worried about the duration (2 years) and the time I put into it to allow all inquiries to expire. If I happen to decide to apply for something, because of boredom or a post I get jelly over (lol jk) tha'ts on me. I am sort of paranoid about someone else getting ahold of my information and using it to apply for credit. I don't want to lock my credit profiles just for the heck of it.. if I did lock them, there would be a good reason.. and right now I'm kinda iffy on if this is a good reason to lock them..
BTW I like Discover's new feature where you can suspend a card temp. and then turn it back on. I haven't used that yet, but it's still pretty neat.
