The two cards I cancelled in the last year - well, actually, 2 years now that I think about it - involved one that had migrated from one company to another until it ended up being the same lender where I held my other card. I don't like having both cards with one entity so I closed it.
The other card was a glorified employer travel card which amounted to being a credit card in my name that I could only use for employer purposes. Useless. When they switched from B of A to Citi, I let it expire and opened another card at another company.
My thought on closing out a card is to open another first, then close the previous one. It helps a great deal if you haven't used it in a while. I closed several idle accounts a few years ago since I wasn't using them. Penney's, Discover, and a couple of others - I hadn't used them in a number of years and yet they were shown to be open accounts on my credit report.
Speaking of credit reports, we are all entitled to get one free credit report from each of the 3 major credit rating agencies each years. You don't get the actual credit score for free, but you get to see how you stand with each acount that you have or have used in the past few years. Great resource - I would check one every 4 months so that you can utilize all 3 without fee and without having a long time span between checks.
Excellent points, meyer.
To emphasize on credit scores and non-credit bills: Some report to the bureaus, some don’t. Folks that are really hard up and have to make choices, should take into consideration who reports and who doesn’t when they prioritize their payments.
Which brings up your point about the free credit report. Very good recommendation.
As you said, you don’t get your score but you see what is reporting on what bureaus - and tackle errors early.
If someone wants to be serious about monitoring their credit and their scores, I recommend myfico.com. It’s run by FICO and gives you the FICO score. Which brings up another point: there’s lots of “credit scores” out there. Each bureau has their own version. But what the vast majority of lenders use is FICO. Folks should look for that.
appreciate your post..