I'm about to get my third in one year, is this to many??? I didn't plan on getting the third one but Discover came pre approved. The last two helped my score alot, since i've been paying on time and keeping my balances low. is three to many? ME
I would take every pre-approved that I could get. 1 - 2 years ago I added 8 - 10 pre-approved cards. I haven't had any pre-approved offers in about a year, and don't want to apply for more because I don't want to add more hard inq's. (I have some from increasing my CL's.) My advice is take all the pre-approved you can get, but don't use them just because you have them. In my case it give me a feeling of security to have a large CL., and I probably would be classified as a CC junky.
Having credit cards and having credit cards with balances are way two different things. As far as points go having any balance on 5 or more cards will start to impact your score even if you are under 15% utilization. As far as having cards just sitting their with no balance I don't think their is an upper limit. Maybe 20. What happens is that beyond the point drop from inquires, each time you get a new card you drop your average age of all accounts. Also the scoring systems keep track of things like how many accounts you have opened in the last three years and how many months it has been since you opened an account. The bottom line is each now account will cause a small and temporary point drop. If you space your applications for now credit 91 days apart you should be fine. The maximum number of revolving trades is about 6.
