@Anonymous
Closing an account does not kill length of credit, as closed accounts count the same as open accounts do with respect to the age of accounts factors under FICO scoring. You said she has 2 cards. How old is the first and how old is the second? Let's say that the first is 6 years old and the second 3 years old. If she closes the 6 year old card today, her AoOA will remain 6 years, will be 7 years next year etc. for the next decade until her AoOA is 16 years and that closed for 10 years account drops off. At that time her AoOA would drop from 16 years to 13 years, as her currently second oldest account would take over as her oldest at that point. The point here is that closing her oldest account today would not impact her scores at all and quite possibly when the impact is felt in 10 years, it wouldn't be significant. Without knowing the age of those 2 accounts, it's tough to quantify the change of course, so I just offer that example above.
As for your final point above cards not being "the problem" for those that may have card-abuse issues, I think you need to recognize that their presence can be a trigger to abusive behavior. Would you stock the fridge/cabinet of a recovering alcoholic with an array of beer and liquor bottles? The alcohol isn't "the problem" here either, but certainly with it present it dramatically raises the temptation of the person that in fact has "the problem."
ere is enough of blame-someone/something-else going around these days.
One card is just over 6 years. The other is 2-3 years, I think. She wants to close the 6-year card.
Regarding the alcohol, no, I would not stock. But I have learned in life that it is a good idea to at least get into the habbit of pointing-out the true root cause of a problem. Guns, crotch-rockets, small aircraft, speedboats, chainsaws, Vicodin, Brazilian women, NASDAQ margin trading...all of these I have experienced under treacherous circumstances...all of these could be regarded as tempting...all of these could be regarded as the causes of (massive) problems, or they could be regarded as mere artifacts on my path of poor personal choices. I (re)-resolved a while back to start blaming myself, outloud, and explicitly, a bit harshly, whenever something went wrong, and the problem could be traced back to my doing something that I should not have done. The result is that I avoid a lot of non-sense that my friends/colleagues/family curentl y go through (wrecking new car unnecessarily in less than 3 weeks after being told that there is high-probability that you are going to wreck this car). I wake up each day feeling in control of myself and my destiny. I also prevent other people from telling me that I am a victim of some artifact if the problem was of my own making. It's liberating.
People in the MyFICO community who are on the "good side" of the credit mountain probably have a different world-view from when their credit score was 480. What changed? It's not knowlege. Knowledge is free. It's a kind of maturity, a recognition of the importance of self-restraint, a kind of slowing down and being in control instead of being controlled. In a way, we mature from getting pinched. Hard. I wish there were a way for young people to get this pinching artificially early-on so that they do not have to learn from experiencing. But truth be told, I could swim in a sea of "bad" artifacts and not make mistakes that I preivously made or almost made. And the reason is that I started blaming myself for 100%. I can think of 70% of my friends and 95% of my family, OTOH...give them $500,000; and it will be gone in under a year. They'll probably blame something/someone else.
