Making Great Progress - Stuck Now!

[Anonymous]

Very quick backstory...about a two years ago my cards were maxed out, I could barely make my minimum payments and my credit score was pretty rough (low 500s). Opened a few new credit cards and slowly started to make progress on paying down debt.

Today- finally seeing some progress but interest rates were killing me. Was able to pull up my credit score enough to get an unsercured personal loan for $18,000 and transferred the rest, $7,500, on a Citi Simplicity card with 0% for 21 months. I was estatic that doing these two things lowered my monthly payments over $300 AND had me only having to keep up with paying 2 bills each month. 

Now I'm stuck...I have a LOT of old credit cards. I need to close some (I think?)...and also figure out a simple way to make sure the others don't close because I am not using them? Any suggestions? 

Here are my current cards, they all have a $0 balance

PNC $15,000 limit (5 months)

Wells Fargo $6,000 (8 months)

First Premier $1,000 I closed this one already LOL...monthly fee and 36% interest

Credit One $750 (2 years) - monthly fee

Credit One $1,000 (2 years) - monthly fee

Merrick $1,400 (2 years) - monthly fee

JcPenney $6,000 (5 years)

Lowes $8,100 (7 years)

Capital One $1,000 (10 years)

Walmart/Capital One $2,500 (10 years)

Capital One $5,500 (12 years)

Capital One $2,100 (14 years)

This is my first post but I have lurked for over a year when I was trying so hard to make progress. I finally feel like I am doing something right and have these forums to thank for it!

[Hopelives2]

Close the ones with fees (Merrick, Credit 1) because at their age of only 2 years coupled with low CL, your length of credit history won't be affected as you have the others with much longer history and higher CL.

As far as using the cards you've cleared the balances on, unless you can consistently charge a little AND PAY IT OFF each month, I would not use them.  Throw them in the drawer.  Maybe in 6 months if everything is a little better, then use 1 or 2 and pay them off.

What you don't want to do is max all the cards out again + that loan.  WSJ just had an article earlier this week talking about people taking out a personal loan to clear credit card debt then maxing out the cc's again.

Don't be that person

[dragontears]

Close every card with a monthly fee, doing this will not increase your credit score but it will help your wallet and finances > FICO any day of the week. Plus they are low limit cards

To keep a card from being closed for inactivity the common recommendation is to use it for a purchase every 6 months

[dragontears]

@Hopelives2
To be clear closing cards do NOT effect your length of credit history until they are removed from your reports which typically happens 10 years after the closing date

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much! I don't want to be that person...I never realized how much money problems can affect every part of your life until it happened to me. Off to close those pesky ones with the fees and I will not be using a card for at least 5 months at this point. Thankfully I now actually can cash flow so many areas that I wasn't able to do before that I don't need them and that feels great. Honestly it's thanks to people like you on this forum giving advice that has helped me actually make progress and feel more in control of my finances. Now let's see how much of a hard time Credit One is going to give me! 

[Anonymous]

I'm not making this up:

In the past they've offered a CLI of $37 to people to try and entice them to keep the card open. It's awfully tempting. Don't fall for it.

That is all

[Hopelives2]

Right but IF those were the OP's ONLY cards, it would affect the credit history...

[Anonymous]

It still wouldn't affect OP's history in terms of age factors since those closed accounts would remain on the reports for another ten years. It could affect OP's scores if there were significant utilization on other cards - the loss of those credit lines would drive up aggregate usage. History though would be unaffected.