Card cancellation and FICO Score

[PastorH]

My wife has a FICO Score of 820. She just received a letter from Sears saying that, since she hadn't used it in 41 months, it would be cancelled if she didn't.  We have better cards and long ago decided not to use the expensive Sears card.  Will letting Sears cancel the card affect her credit score?

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Not immediately. The card will remain on her reports for 7-10 years along with the history of the card.

[SouthJamaica]

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@PastorH wrote:

My wife has a FICO Score of 820. She just received a letter from Sears saying that, since she hadn't used it in 41 months, it would be cancelled if she didn't.  We have better cards and long ago decided not to use the expensive Sears card.  Will letting Sears cancel the card affect her credit score?

Thanks.

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1. It might affect her credit card utilization percentage, since the denominator will be decreasing.

2. After a while it will disappear from her credit report, thus losing an older account which helps with aging.

3. If it were me I'd probably use the card once in a while just to keep an older card in play.

Of course with an aristocratic 820 FICO score, your wife doesn't need to worry about small matters like this.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not immediately. The card will remain on her reports for 7-10 years along with the history of the card.

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I had 5 closed credit card accounts which dropped off of my Equifax reports in less than a year.

[Anonymous]

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not immediately. The card will remain on her reports for 7-10 years along with the history of the card.

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I had 5 closed credit card accounts which dropped off of my Equifax reports in less than a year.

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Learn something new everyday....thanks for that...makes me more careful about commenting on this type of situation....

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Not immediately. The card will remain on her reports for 7-10 years along with the history of the card.

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I had 5 closed credit card accounts which dropped off of my Equifax reports in less than a year.

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Learn something new everyday....thanks for that...makes me more careful about commenting on this type of situation....

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Me too. Until that happened to me a few months ago I was repeating to everyone the MyFICO meme that closed accounts stay on your report for 10 years.

I learned that was not the case.

What really hurts is that one of the disappeared accounts was one of my oldest. I never voluntarily closed it; it was taken over by another bank card.

[Anonymous]

Hi SouthJ.  I'd love it if you could remind us more about what happened.  I somehow remember that this may have been with one bureau only (was it EQ?) and that it may have been when that bureau was going through a really bizarre period where its database was doing all kinds of weird stuff to different people.

Also... did the five accounts have anything in common?  Were most of them from the same issuer or were most of them closed within the same period of time?

When exactly did the accounts disappear?  How long had they been closed for?

[Anonymous]

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@PastorH wrote:

My wife has a FICO Score of 820. She just received a letter from Sears saying that, since she hadn't used it in 41 months, it would be cancelled if she didn't.  We have better cards and long ago decided not to use the expensive Sears card.  Will letting Sears cancel the card affect her credit score?

Thanks.

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Is the Sears card her oldest card?  If so how old is it, and how old is her next oldest card?

You mention that the card itself is expensive.  Does that mean there is an annual fee associated with it?  If so, when is that AF due next?

Regardless this is a helpful datapoint, since it helps to confirm (a) that store cards can go for VERY long periods of time without being closed and (b) that eventually they do get closed.  Curious that Sears warned her too: often people never get a warning.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hi SouthJ.  I'd love it if you could remind us more about what happened.  I somehow remember that this may have been with one bureau only (was it EQ?) and that it may have been when that bureau was going through a really bizarre period where its database was doing all kinds of weird stuff to different people.

Also... did the five accounts have anything in common?  Were most of them from the same issuer or were most of them closed within the same period of time?

When exactly did the accounts disappear?  How long had they been closed for?

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It was EQ only.

I don't know what EQ was or wasn't "going through".

The accounts disappeared from my EQ reports around 4 or 5 months ago, I think

None of them had been closed for more than a year.

1 was a store card issued by Comenity.

1 was a Barclays card

1 was a Capital One card

1 was an American Express card

1 was an Alliant SSL

[Anonymous]

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hi SouthJ.  I'd love it if you could remind us more about what happened.  I somehow remember that this may have been with one bureau only (was it EQ?) and that it may have been when that bureau was going through a really bizarre period where its database was doing all kinds of weird stuff to different people.

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It was EQ only.

I don't know what EQ was or wasn't "going through".

The accounts disappeared from my EQ reports around 4 or 5 months ago, I think

None of them had been closed for more than a year.

1 was a store card issued by Comenity.

1 was a Barclays card

1 was a Capital One card

1 was an American Express card

1 was an Alliant SSL

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I am not sure what EQ was going through either.  I don't think anybody here knows for sure.  There's no question, however, that they were going through some kind of internal data management weirdness, with accounts vanishing and other freaky stuff like that.  Lots of of people posted about it in Feb and March.

Have you thought about asking any of the creditors with whom you had exceptionally old accounts to resubmit the account data to EQ? 

Glad to see confirmed that this is not something that happened at all three bureaus.  It sounds more traceable to some strange period of database disasters happening at EQ.  In general what you have told people in the past is indeed true.  Any particular account they have that is closed stands a high probability of staying on their reports for about ten years (assuming they don't get into a fight with a creditor, which can sometimes cause premature account removal).