How important is the age of held accounts

theburningcat

Thanks. For the current account (held for ~15 years), I'll pay in £60 and set up Spotify to leave that one, which will be that done for a year. Should I ask them to remove the £1800 overdraft or keep it?

For the credit card (held for ~2 years), I'm still unsure what to do. The card costs £3/month (123 Credit Card) and I don't expect spending more than £500/month on average on card-purchasable things in the next few months. I prefer to use my Amex charge card for that stuff as I get cashback and the website/app/service are much better. Putting any sensible amounts on it would be a nuisance, plus there's the card fee. On the other hand, the Amex is a charge card so it's the only revolving credit line I have.

Maybe it would be better to cancel the credit card..?

YorkshireBoy

You keep dropping in bits of additional info.

If you can't cover the £3/mth fee (my fuel spend alone well covers this on my 123 card) then you're paying for something you don't really know whether is helping or not. Maybe with this additional info, close it?

I'd leave the current account O/D facility in place...unless you've any additional info you'd like to throw in?

You never answered my question on whether the charge card gets reported to the CRAs.

theburningcat

Sorry - I appreciate your help

The OD is an interest and fee free postgraduate (i.e. student) overdraft. When I started my PhD, they changed my former current account to a 123 Postgrad account. I don't pay anything for it but it is supposedly subject to using the account as my main current account. I don't and haven't for a long time. It seems they haven't noticed but I guess they will at some point, or at least when my PhD finishes in ~2 years, and change it back to a regular account.

I have checked my files with CallCredit and Experian. The Amex charge card is on both but, if I recall, one of them had it under a different section, for charge cards, and the other had it as a credit card with a £0 limit.

I should add, I want to keep the Amex because I like their service, website and app, and I am sometimes able to put large/business purchases on it and earn a lot of cashback. However, the £140 annual fee is coming up soon, so if it's not doing my credit file any large favours then another possibility would be to close that and either keep the 123 CC (which earns me no cashback and costs me £3/month but held for 2 years) or get some other CC (obviously would not help the age of my accounts but would mean having a revolving credit line).

jamesd

It's not just the accounts you're closing but the ones that will be oldest once they are gone that matters.

If your alternative accounts are all for only a couple of years there would be quite a long time taken to recover the loss of the current account.

While views differ and the UK is not exactly the same as the US, a couple of accounts of each type is likely to do best. Types include loans, revolving credit like credit cards, mortgage, current accounts with overdraft facility. A current account with no credit facility will show up (unless exempt due to its age) but won't be credit with no overdraft facility, so keep something.

Maximum benefit under the US FICO system for account age is about 15% of the total score and the UK is likely to be similar. But those percentages aren't fixed and if you are left with only accounts with short lengths it could do more harm than that. There's a FICO score estimator that you might like to play with even though it's strictly not for the UK. Even the questions can be useful since they show what is considered to matter.

It suggests that I'd have a FICO score in the 680-730 range if I was in the US, the fair to good range, which is about right for a stoozer with quite high credit utilisation levels. If I cut my credit utilisation from the 70-89% range to the 50-69% range the score estimate changes to 690-740. If instead I change time for first credit card from more than 20 years to 5-8 years it changes to 655-705, illustrating the age of account effect. Of course I won't cut utilisation since utilisation is how I make money from stoozing.

Here's a possibly useful idea from FICO of how they score various things:

theburningcat

I will keep the 15yo current account. That's easy because I can set some random subscription to come off it just to have "some" activity".

I'm more concerned about the credit card. It's 2 years old but it's my only revolving credit line. I would struggle to use it much (>£100/month on most months) and any use would be at the expense of putting those through a better rewards scheme on my charge card (I have no idea what the charge card really looks like to a lender but it seems having a "real" credit card is important) and paying an "annoying" £3/month card fee.

It seems like I should keep the 2yo 123 credit card and just try to put what I can on it. I guess even if it's £100/month in petrol or whatever, it's better than nothing.

jamesd

Yes, even having the card and using it for a Pound beats not having it. Another one would probably also help even if that also gets only low usage. Under US scoring less than 10% of the credit limit as usage is what produces the highest scores so no need to worry about not using a card for a lot of spending.