Shutting credit cards to improve score?

Hers1357

Currently trying to get a mortgage and my broker has said i should consider shutting my £10k credit card because I don;t use it and that closing will increase my score. Is this true? I keep reading conflicting things on this - shutting means less credit availability so it makes me safer, but keeping it open shows lenders trust me with that amount of credit. Thoughts?

[Deleted User]

Lenders don't use your score, so it doesn't matter if it increases it or not.

If you have huge amounts of available credit then you could consider it, but in most cases, you're better off keeping the lines of credit you have.

D3xt3r5L4b

Keep the card. 
Ditch the broker. 

ChrisLV

My understanding is that potential lenders evaluate you on two mutually conflicting measures (among many other measures):

1 Total credit available: The higher this is, the riskier you are as a creditor, because you can ramp up your debts at any time using this available credit. I think this is why the broker is advising you to close a CC.

2 Credit utilisation: The percentage of your total credit available that you're actually using. Potential lenders, I've read, generally like this to be in a sort of golden zone--not too high, but not zero either. This is where closing credit cards can hurt you, because as your total credit available goes down, your credit utilisation goes up. 

I addition, I get the impression that each lender can have slightly different metrics to other lenders, so how one lender weights up total credit available versus credit utilisation may differ from how the next one might weigh this up.

I'm just an amateur at personal finance, though, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable can give more details.

Thrugelmir

House keeping does no harm. Forget the score though. 

MalMonroe

Here's some information from Experian: 

https://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/credit-cards/guides/unused-cards.html

As others say, credit scores mean nothing.