closing old 'poor' credit accounts

yksi

Ben8282 wrote: »

Credit available is £40k
Credit in used £8k
So im at 16% usage to availability

This contradicts your earlier statement that you have £25k available credit as 40 - 8 = 32 not 25 and I believe your utilisation % is 20%, not 16%, which is relatively high
£25k (or is it £32k) unused credit on credit cards is not high. 20% utilisation however is. You are obviously not repaying in full every month. The existance of the £8k balance that you are not able to repay is more likely to cause you to get a higher APR on a loan or have the loan declined than the existance of available credit.

8K in use, 40k available on top = 8 / 48, or 17%. It had me scratching my head too for a bit there. But it still doesn't match the earlier 25k mention.

I'm going to go against the grain and say close one of the cards. That long term unpaid 8k balance is probably a bigger factor in not being offered anything tasty, but we do not KNOW when lenders panic at too much availability - I was specifically told by two lenders that I had too much, but my income is lower than yours, and to be on the safe side, I closed enough credit so that my income was 15k over my total availability (probably overkill but it's done now).

I would also echo: do not reduce the limit on the Amex, reducing makes it look like you couldn't be trusted. Choose a card and close it instead - close the younger of the Vanquis or Aqua, would be my vote.