How much will it affect my credit score when I cancel credit cards?

Answer 1

About 35% of your credit score is based on the revolving debt to available limit ratio. When you close credit cards, you decrease your available limit. This would make any balances you carry on other credit cards a much higher percentage. Anything more than 30% of you limit, hurts your score.

Also when you close credit card accounts, you close that history which also impacts your score.

Some folks will tell you to keep all the credit card accounts open forever. However, you have to secure and monitor all those credit cards and that's just asking for problems.

I recomend that you pay off all your credit cards BEFORE you start closing any accounts. Keep your two oldest major credit cards that do not have annual fees. Only keep store or gas charge cards if you have some special reason.

Answer 2

It is difficult to know for sure. When applying for credit, creditors will see on your credit report that you have closed credit accounts and the approximate date of closure. Most times it will say by client request. They might question why you would do that, but that may depend on the rest of the report.

If you have other credit accounts that are above 75% of their maximum, it might be better transfer off those balances to bring balances below 75%. Your credit score will definitely suffer if you have used above 75% of your credit on any account. This is not cumulative over all your credit available.

Also make sure you are never over 30 days over due on any credit balance. If you are, this gets flagged and could take a minimum of 3 years to come off your credit report but upto 5 years. The smallest incident, as innocent as it might be will hurt, especially when applying for a mortgage.

Best regards,
Marco
http://www.directworld.net
Direct World Prepaid MasterCard

Answer 3

You don't put out enough information here to properly advise you. Go to the website below and read it ALL. In particular, there is a section called "how credit scoring works" that will be helpful to you that they explain better than I can!

This site is great and these guys know what they are talking about. I had my credit score go from 480 to 709 in one year with help from this site and a couple of the sponsored links there.