Raising Your Credit Score: Close or Not To Close…
…your credit cards? That’s the question!
In order to help raise your credit score, you need to kill off your 10-15 of your credit cards and narrow it down to around 2-3 cards.
“But cee.mo I like to shop at Macy’s and I have a frequent flyer card with so and so…”
What’s cool about credit cards today is that there are TONS of rewards type of cards. I don’t know about you, but I’ve managed to go from having 10 cards down to about 4 (Yea, I know that’s still a lot). Back in the day, I had cards for every occasion because they all had little perks [that's how the retail stores suck you in]. I was rockin’ Dell, PayPal, Amazon, Best Buy, NewEgg, you name it I probably had it.
After researching the tons of rewards cards out there, I’ve managed to “consolidate” those cards into cards that give me all-around benefits. Like I said before, I am a geek when it comes to technology and I had to have access to all of my resources [I was hooked on credit!]; I had balances on all of those cards. What I did to consolidate was to pay off every single one and kill them immediately until I narrowed down my card options.
“Why not just do a balance transfer?”
Balance transfers cost money and it really all depends on your situation. I remember a couple years back credit card companies were giving balance transfers away with incentives like “0% interest for 12 months” or “Free Balance Transfers and get 2% interest for 6 months”. Those days are long gone and balance transfers are not as good as they were a couple years ago. Using the balance transfer is another way of “extending” payments on your credit card debt. I would recommend using wisely and not relying on it on a constant basis because they do show up on your credit report.
Close off as many cards as you can and keep ones that actually have some benefit to you. I have a 2 Visa and 2 American Express cards now which all give me great reward benefits [plus you can get rid of that extra plastic in your wallet!]. However, I would highly recommend that you do NOT close off your oldest credit card. The oldest card is extremely important to the health of your credit score because when creditors look at your credit report, they want to see how far back your credit history goes. The longer your credit history, the better!
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