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When I opened my Bank of America checking account back in 2001, they gave me a Visa for overdraft protection. I sock-drawered it, since I had several other credit cards. Well, got a SW alert last night indicating a 10 point drop in my score.
The SW alert said "you recently opened a new credit account", but this is not the case. In the "Changes to your credit report" section, however, it notes that the B of A credit card was "closed at consumer's request". Obviously, I did not request this account to be closed, but I had it coming. I'm not particularly upset about this.
However, the 10 point drop is still unexplained. Since this closed account will persist on my file for the next several years, my AAoA should not have dropped yet. My cumulative CLI is down by $7500, but my total utilization is still comfortably below 9%.
Hmm....thoughts? Maybe I do need to pull my EQ credit report.
Closed accounts can affect FICO and is the reason you wouldn't do so when apping for mortgage, etc. unless LO told you they wanted some exposure closed.
You should recover short term.
But, you have demonstrated the need to exercise them or lose them
Hmmmmm.......so I just pulled my report, and sure enough the "scales of FICO justice" shows a red block labeled "new account" on the "hurting your score" side. But, and there is, indeed a new account on my profile. But it's not that new - it was opened last May. So the reason given by SW just yesterday doesn't fit reality.
There's a couple reasons why I think my score went down. I do have more accounts reporting balances, which is intentional since I don't want any cards closed due to inactivity (oops, missed one ). That could have been good for a couple points. One of my cards had a big increase in balance, because I paid car and homeowners insurance with it last month. I have a new inquiry from Home Depot in January when I asked them to restore my credit limit to its prior level. But none of these generated SW alerts or resulted in a lower score. My util is at 6%, previously it was probably around 4%.
Anyways, my score is still pretty good (790) and I don't need any new credit in the near future (I hope). But it just goes to show that the reason codes that you get through SW are sometimes inexplicable.
Oh, my report also confirms that high limit HELOCs don't factor into the utilization calculation. But we knew this already.