Will too many cards give you a bad rating?

ricflairandy

Hi all,

In the past ive had cards with egg and marbles which i assume have been closed down, as i never used them atall, and havent heard from them in about 5 years.

Currently i have 3 accounts with mbna, 1 citibank, 1 halifax, 1 if and 1 capital one.

However i only actually use one of these , my mbna mastercard. The others have been taken out for various 0 percent deals at the time.

Im now looking for another 0 percent deal, and applied for the ge card yesterday, but was turned down despite having what looks like an excellent credit rating. So today ive applied for the post office card with 0 percent.

My main question is, despite not using any of the others, can they harm me? Should i cancel them or is that even worse?

Thanks

The_Boss

It can do you harm having too many - dont assume those old accounts are still open either - call and find out. They may even make you a 0% or life of balance offer.

Its more about the total available and used credit though - thats the big thing. So I'd close an MBNA account and one of the others too. At least.

ricflairandy

will closing them harm me in any way? Because if so, ill close most of them.

ricflairandy

Thanks. For some reason i was under the impression that canceling previous cards was a bad move for your credit score. Im sure i read it on this site somwhere.

The_Boss

ricflairandy wrote:

Thanks. For some reason i was under the impression that canceling previous cards was a bad move for your credit score. Im sure i read it on this site somwhere.

You might have heard it from me, but with you having all those cards, I'd cancel two if most of them are empty.

ricflairandy

Will do,

So i take it that it having a bad effect (canceling) isnt true?

The_Boss

If they are mostly empty, then it wont have an effect because of ratio of available to used credit will be pretty similar. It would be more of an issue if you owed more than half the balance of your other cards.

I myself ran into this problem when I closed cards - having closed 4, the ratio came right down and so caused me some grief.