When should I close my oldest account?

[Anonymous]

In the OP current status. I don't think it will make a huge impact one way or the other. Cards are fairly recent. Now if the old account was 3 years or older, than I would advise keeping it. Leave this decision to the OP on this one.

[Anonymous]

Was able to get the credit card account set up with autopay from my BECU account. Closed the $3/m bank account. It did require time on the phone with CSR and the autopay may be useless since I may never spend another dime on that card, but it is peace of mind to have autopay there just in case some random charge shows up some day.

[Anonymous]

---

@Anonymous wrote:
Was able to get the credit card account set up with autopay from my BECU account. Closed the $3/m bank account. It did require time on the phone with CSR and the autopay may be useless since I may never spend another dime on that card, but it is peace of mind to have autopay there just in case some random charge shows up some day.

---

Very smart, C-I-S!  Great decisions all.  Especially good to set up auto-pay.  An additional feature you should consider setting up are strong alerts.  Most cards now you can customize the alert feature.  For a card that you are going to shoe box, I would add two alerts:

Alert me if any transaction goes through

Alert me DAILY if my balance goes over ____ (e.g. $10)

That way you are protected against a bad guy hitting your card and you not realizing it, resulting in an auto-pay to your bank account.

[Anonymous]

I know that it won't impact FICO, but would a manual underwriter look favorably on closing unneeded accounts?

[Anonymous]

That's a fascinating question, CIS.  I think a fair answer is this:

*  Some underwriters might look favorably upon someone reducing his credit exposure (a gigantic potential for revolving debt via a big total CL) as well as trimming his away several junky tradelines,

*  Even if an underwriter doesn't need a person to do that, almost no underwriter will feel the converse -- i.e. they won't look at a person with 30 credit cards and a 200k potential for CC debt and say Wow I Like That So Much Better (than a profile with 6 well managed cards and a 70k total CL).

So personally if a person feels like closing a few cards he doesn't like, and it makes sense to him and he knows he'll be fine keeping his utilization low, then no underwriter is ever going to be unhappy he did that.