Citi closed credit card for inactivity- bad for credit report/score?

[celluloid17]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@celluloid17 wrote:

I'm kind of wondering this myself.  Just today, my Citi Double Cash card was closed for inactivity.

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Interesting that Citi gave you two years of inactivity but only gave our OP one year, and that your two closures came within days of each other.  I wonder if Citi is conducting an internal housekeeping purge of cards that haven't been used for a while.

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One of the reps I spoke with mentioned that it's in the Citi DC fine print that the account could be closed without activity for 25 consecutive months, so perhaps each card has its own inactivity threshold??

[Anonymous]

I don't see that specific 25 month claim mentioned anywhere in the Citi DC cardmember agreement.  Here's what is said, in section 7 of the agreement:

DEFAULT, CLOSING OR SUSPENDING YOUR ACCOUNT

Default.

We may require immediate payment of your total Account

balance, to the extent allowed by law, if any of the following occurs:

1.

You don’t pay at least the Minimum Payment Due by the due date.

2.

You have a Returned Payment.

3.

You file for bankruptcy or some other insolvency proceeding is filed

by or against you.

4.

You don’t honor the terms of this Agreement.

5.

You default under any other card agreement you have with us.

6.

You’re declared incompetent or mentally incapacitated, or in the

event of your death.

Closing or Suspending

Your Account.

We may close or suspend your

Account if any of the events listed above occur, or for any reason, or for

no reason. We may do this at any time, without notifying you, as allowed

by law. We may cancel your current Card and issue you a substitute

Card at any time. You also may close your Account at any time by

notifying us by telephone or in writing. If we close or suspend your

Account, or if you close your Account, you must pay us all amounts

you owe on the

Account, even if they post to your Account after it’s

closed or suspended.

The language Citi actually uses is stronger, as you see, which is the usual:

"We may close or suspend your Account... for any reason, or for no reason. We may do this at any time, without notifying you...."

If they had specifically called out 25 months of inactivity, it would imply that they don't close accounts after (say) 18 months of inactivity, which would be nonstandard.  Many cc issuers close accounts after 12, 15, or 18 months of inactivity.  24 months or even longer for a major CC can happen, of course, but it is uncommon.

[wiivile]

My mistake guys, I misread my credit report. It had been 2.5 years since I opened it, and 2 years since I used it. (aside from the annual fee, annual fee refund, and product change that happened 15 months ago). My last charge on the card was in April 2016. So the 25 months theory is probably accurate. I'm not surprised they shut it down after so long, I was just hoping that it wouldn't look bad on my credit report that an issuer closed my account. Anyway I'm really sorry for any confusion I caused.

I'm going to start doing some credit report cleanup, closing cards I don't use anymore except for my oldest few (which I always make sure to keep active so they don't get closed).

I sign up for a lot of credit cards in order to get bonuses (I know that's a controversial topic around here, but really my credit score has never been higher since I started signing up for more cards), then downgrade them to "no fee" products, and the accounts go idle... I should start proactively closing these cards because I don't like having 10+ idle accounts on my report and I also don't like having banks close them on my behalf.

[Anonymous]

It's hard to know whether in your case Citi considered your card inactive for 25 months or 15 months.  I'd lean toward 15 months, because a charge really did occur to it (namely an annual fee).  Any charge or payment is typically considered activity.  For example, if you made no charges to a card for 5 years, but simply spent that time slowly paying off a balance (always making on-time minimum payments) that would constitute activity.

Of course any CC issuer can have its own secret proprietary policies for this.  One almost never sees it spelled out in writing, whether it is what constitutes activity or how long before the closure is triggered or whether there are mitigating factors that give some people a pass.  I had a Chase card that had not been used for 25+ months and this was during the period after the 2008 financial meltdown when all issuers were trying to close all kinds of inactive cards.  My theory is that Chase saw that I had carried a balance on it (e.g. paid interest) in the previous 36 months and therefore I was flagged as a possible revenue machine.

PS.  As you begin planning to close inactive cards (because you are uncomfortable about the risk involved) be sure to see whether you can set up tools on the card itself to solve that problem.  Citi (for example) gives you a feature where you can lock the card to prevent all transactions.  A number of other issuer have that too.  You can also set up alerts with an extremely low threshold, e.g. text me and email me if my balance exceeds $5.

[MakingProgress]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@UpperNwGuy wrote:

No card should sit around unused for months at a time.  If it’s too hard to use your cards, you have too many cards.

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A little too sweeping IMO...    Some people may have a card that is of some value very occasionally.   So for me it's the eBates card, which I might use every 18 months or so.   Once I got about $200 more than I would with any other card I had, so that was worth it.

That said, I also have a lot of cards that are unused and will remain unused and probably should be closed, so I understand the sentiment. 

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DW just got a CLI on her Lowes card that we haven't used in almost a year.  I told her we need to make a purchase on it, let the balance post then pay it off.  

[Anonymous]

Do you guys have stuff at Lowe's that you definately need?  If you do, fine.  If you don't, then the Lowe's card has turned into a card with an annual fee.  All store cards have this as a possible drawback -- with a major CC by contrast you know there is always some easy purchase you can make that you absolutely need (e.g. gas, a gallon of milk, whatever).

[celluloid17]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I don't see that specific 25 month claim mentioned anywhere in the Citi DC cardmember agreement.  Here's what is said, in section 7 of the agreement:

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It might just be an internal thing that they now apply uniformly, but don't advertise it so as not to encourage inactivity.

[Anonymous]

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@celluloid17 wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

I don't see that specific 25 month claim mentioned anywhere in the Citi DC cardmember agreement.  Here's what is said, in section 7 of the agreement:

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It might just be an internal thing that they now apply uniformly, but don't advertise it so as not to encourage inactivity.

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That could be.  But the rep told you it was specifically listed in the fine print of the agreement, which it's not.  So I was just responding to that rep's claim.

It'll be interested if anyone knows of case studies of a Citi card being closed due to inactivity that is < 20 months.  The card would need to have been used at least once and the closure should have happened in the last couple years.  The 25 months period seem awfully liberal for major credit cards, but maybe it's actually Citi's true inside policy for all cards.

[NRB525]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Do you guys have stuff at Lowe's that you definately need?  If you do, fine.  If you don't, then the Lowe's card has turned into a card with an annual fee.  All store cards have this as a possible drawback -- with a major CC by contrast you know there is always some easy purchase you can make that you absolutely need (e.g. gas, a gallon of milk, whatever).

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They sell sodas and snacks near the check out stand, right ?

Who's hungry?