Okay, after spending months reading and improving my credit, I got carried away accumulating cards. Now I need help in closing some. Here is what I have. Capital One Plat Visa - $1200 limit (Oldest card ) Capital One Plat MC - $850 limit (Second oldest) Orchard Gold - $800 (Late 2003, I think) Bank of America - $1000 (Sometime in 2003) Orchard Silver - $500 (July 2005) Macys Plat Visa $1000 limit (Dec 2005) Bloomingdales - $1000 (Jan 2006) Target - $200 (Jan 2006) Kay Jewelers (Feb 2006) - $1700 (@$@#$ dont report limits) New Approvals: Chase Platinum $2000 (April 2006) Amex Delta Skypoints - $1000 (May 2006) Amex Blue - $2000 (May 2006) Obviously I dont want to axe the capital one cards, since they're the oldest. But what would my best strategy be? I think I'll kill 1) Target 2) Orchard Silver 3) Kay Jewelers? Any suggestions? Thanks in Advance
What are your limits and what are your balances? You have already taken a FICO hit for the inquiries, and for having a lot of recently opened accounts. What hit are you taking for your debt to total available credit ratio?
Since you have hardly any history, you should keep them open. Closing them will freeze the short term in for seven years and lower your average time.
jwk, I did not know that average age was calculated even on closed accounts! That is good to know, so I will definietly not close them. Thanks
Keep them open, use each one every few months so they stay active. Just buy a tank of gas or something and pay it off when the bill comes. You don't want to kill your ratio of available credit to debt by closing them, either. You didn't say what your balance was on each. Some things take both open and closed accounts into consideration, some don't. The problem is that we don't know which is which!!
I'll post Balance/Limit Capital One Visa 980/1200 Capital One MC 500/850 Orchard 100/700 Macys 500/1000 Chase 1400/2000 Everything else is zero balance. I know I'm utilization is pretty high. I can offset that by paying off some balances I guess. I do usally charge everything up on the card and pay off every month (Maybe not completely, but at least half)
