@Anonymous wrote:I was eliminating most of my old store cards soon but keeping the gas ones open because I use them frequently. I know you are supposed to have at least one store card for maxiumum fico scoring, so is a gas card considered a store card or do I need to keep an actual retailer card?
Likely yes as it is a retail account; however, wouldn't sweat it.
Under modern versions of the FICO algorithm there's little evidence to suggest keeping a store card or not matters in the slightest; FICO apparently did start playing with it with FICO Next Gen but that was 2001/2003 and it doesn't appear to have made it into the FICO 04 (2004) algorithm that was a mainline FICO release. At the time it was considered to be a negative presumably, much like a consumer finance account, lender of last resort. I don't subscribe to that personally but I don't make the rules.
It does not factor into mix of credit, that is known; however, we did get one report of someone's FICO improving after closing their last store card; however, it was such a small change as it could've been noise and we don't know the quality of the data TBH or at least I never saw any confirmation of it.
End of the day, if the card gets use and has a better rewards structure than what you can get on your national bank cards, keep it; if it doesn't have a better rewards structure then it's useless other than theoretical limits which are pretty easy to obtain on national bank cards these days.
