Credit Rating - Credit Card Accounts

Scotslad87

Good Morning All,

Looking for some quick guidance from people in the know.

I currently have 10 active Credit Cards (some dating back 5 or 6 years), however I only actually use 2 of them.

My total Credit Card utilisation is 47% and dropping fast.

My question is, am I better to keep my old (now redundant) Credit Card accounts open for my credit score, or would I benefit from closing them now? I will never use them again so I was purely keeping them open to try and keep my credit score high.

Thanks

martinbainbridge1975

keep the oldest cards as they show stability, also consider if your utilisation rate will go up by closing some of the cards

[Deleted User]

Credit score is meaningless, nobody but you ever sees it

If the cards have use / perks / offers then worth keeping them but I would question if you really need lots of them, depends how much of a limit they have.

I'd echo Martin above and keep the oldest ones, spending every few months to keep them active but maybe close 3-4 if they have low balances (under £1000) might be worth chucking as you'll have to keep using them all in rotation in order to keep them active

Ebe_Scrooge

Ignore your score as it's not used by any lender.  But yes, long-running lines of well-managed credit are viewed as a positive.

If you're never going to use the cards then you may as well close some of them - if you don't use them for an extended period of time, the lender will usually close the account anyway.  It's better to put some transactions through every so often (and always repay in full every month!) to keep them active.

The only slight downside with closing old accounts is that a lender won't know why it was closed - they don't know whether you voluntarily closed it, or whether the bank closed it because you were mis-managing the account.  So it can be viewed as a slight negative - but closing a couple of them would have a negligible impact.

Utilisation percentage is also irrelevant as long as you're paying in full every month - despite what the CRAs would like you to think.  It's only if you're carrying a balance from month to month that it becomes an issue.