To close or not to close... That is the question :-)

[Anonymous]

Ok, I've been really good about paying all of my debt since my bankruptcy was discharged in 2006. The credit I opened was mainly to restart my business. My question is now that my need for credit is less not than in 2006, should I start closing cards? My thought is that If I have cards and use them very little, would that not be better. I always that that the more available credit you have, and the less you use it's better then haveing no open lines at all. For instance,having a total debt utilization (acroos all lines of credit) of between 10 to 20 percent was ideal. There are only 3 lines I would not shut down Office Depot, and my Capial One Mastercard and Visa would be safe.

[Anonymous]

Take the cards you don't use and put them in a sock drawer. Don't close them. You want to keep their available credit lines open.

I have 7 or 8 credit cards. I only use one every month at 1% and pay in full. This keeps my FICO up.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Ok, I've been really good about paying all of my debt since my bankruptcy was discharged in 2006. The credit I opened was mainly to restart my business. My question is now that my need for credit is less not than in 2006, should I start closing cards? My thought is that If I have cards and use them very little, would that not be better. I always that that the more available credit you have, and the less you use it's better then haveing no open lines at all. For instance,having a total debt utilization (acroos all lines of credit) of between 10 to 20 percent was ideal. There are only 3 lines I would not shut down Office Depot, and my Capial One Mastercard and Visa would be safe.

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Hi, welcome to the forums! Go, Tony Stewart!

Don't shut anything down unless it's costing you money, or you feel that you can't control your spending. Your best bet is to maximize available credit, but use hardly any of it. As you are recovering from BK, you will be helped by having a lot of healthy clean tradelines reporting every month.

You'll actually do better with your util under 10%, rather than 10% - 20%.

Check out fused's thread on closing credit cards stickied at the top of the CC forum.

[Anonymous]

I'm actually shredding the cards as I pay them off! I just don't want to start closing anything any potentially hurt my scores

[haulingthescoreup]

That will work, except that you generally need to use a card periodically to keep them from closing down your accounts.

For bank cards (Visa, MC, Discovery, AmEx, store cards with the Visa/MC/etc), generally once every three months will do it, although HSBC will close you down sooner.

For pure store cards, generally twice or even once a year will do.

So if you held on to the account numbers, you can order some pencils online or something every now and again.

Actually, if you opened a bunch at the same time (sounds like you did), as one gets an increase in credit limit, you can close down a low-limit card. That will keep your total credit limit about the same, or higher.