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40 credit cards

July 25th, 2016 at 04:06 pm

Over the years I've accumulated probably at least 40 cards. I am one of those people who never cancelled cards. As long as there wasn't an annual fee if we opened and tried it I left it opened. So this weekend I don't know why my DH started looking at our paperwork. When we moved we literally threw stuff into boxes because we didn't get to it. I had debit cards expiring in 2005 from Washington Mutual. 4 of those cards and papers I found in our box of paper. I also had debit cards from chase that expired in 2008. So this obviously a long term problem. We haven't had either accounts since 2005.

We got to the decluttering easy stuff like clothes, kid toys, etc. But older harder stuff we are still working on. I mean we still have boxes of unopened stuff to look through in the garage. But the reality is that we have a ton of cards that I have no idea when I opened them or what is going on.

So yesterday I started organizing some of the cards and calling to see if there were closed. I had over 40 cards and had I think over 20 that were closed so I started to shred them and the paperwork. I still have a few more to work on but now it's a small stack that fits in a box.

I can't close any that we don't use and are open still because we want to buy a house in the next year and I don't want to hurt our credit scores. I need to pull our credit reports soon to check and make sure everything is okay. My credit dropped from 835 last July to 804 this July. It says because I have too high credit loan balances to credit limit. This is from discover and not an actual score. But I'm worried of course. My DH is 816 but it says the same level of credit used to credit limit is problem. Ugh.

Some of this is because Uncle J passed. We're trying to be motivated to get more organized. We shredded and got rid of 200 pieces of paper. I'm up to 958 things I've gotten rid of this year. Perhaps I am on track to get rid of 2016. But seriously I know we have a ton of paperwork still.

Posted in Credit Cards | 8 Comments »

8 Responses to “40 credit cards”

  1. ceejay74 Says:
    July 25th, 2016 at 04:40 pm 1469464811
    1469464811

    Seems odd that you would be carrying a lot of credit compared with credit limit, if you had 20 cards. Are there more of them that might be closed that you haven't called about yet? Or are the credit limits on each card very small?

  2. LivingAlmostLarge Says:
    July 25th, 2016 at 04:44 pm 1469465076
    1469465076

    limits on those were probably $3-10k. I went and tried to raise limits on our cards we use today. So I've got $35k on Citi Costco, $30k discover, Citi $25k, BofA $20k. I would think that's enough?

  3. ceejay74 Says:
    July 25th, 2016 at 04:54 pm 1469465692
    1469465692

    I should think so; I don't know what the sweet spot is on debt-to-credit ratio.

  4. AnotherReader Says:
    July 25th, 2016 at 05:44 pm 1469468666
    1469468666

    Under 10 percent overall and under 30 percent on any one card is the rule of thumb. I try to keep every card under 10 percent and the total utilization under 3 percent. Credit scores are snapshots at a point in time of the most recent reported balances, so I am careful not to have any company report a higher percentage.

  5. creditcardfree Says:
    July 25th, 2016 at 07:32 pm 1469475179
    1469475179

    It's good to be cleaning up that paperwork and be clear where everything is!

  6. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    July 26th, 2016 at 12:35 am 1469493334
    1469493334

    I would think that as long as you kept one or two of the oldest cards open, it shouldn't hurt your credit to close most of them - at least those with small limits.

  7. VS_ozgirl Says:
    July 26th, 2016 at 10:10 am 1469527820
    1469527820

    That's a lot of credit cards!

  8. rob62521 Says:
    July 27th, 2016 at 08:34 pm 1469651651
    1469651651

    Good for you for cleaning up the paperwork. Want to come and help me? Smile

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