I think it should help your score a little bit to close it if it drives up the average age of your account.
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It’s really cool how no one knows exactly how this hugely important number works.
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Be well off and always pay on time and it will take care of itself. That first part is mostly sarcastic but seriously half the battle on getting any loan is not needing the money.
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Nobody knows the exact algorithms, but the basics about how to improve your score are well known. I mean if you use credit, pay your bills every month, and don’t utilize more than 25% of available revolving credit your score will be very good. And then once you have accounts that are old enough you will start racking up perfect scores.
The exception to this is the mortgage market. It is completely FUBAR because it is so heavily regulated that banks can’t really accept anything other than W-2 income. They don’t care how much money you have, only income that meets their narrow standard.
So I’m really really really fucked when I go to buy a house, right? Although I guess Schedule C income makes it onto a 1040, maybe that’s enough?
Make sure it’s under 30, not at 30. Lady was wrong/miscommunication
The answer is it depends. As JBro said, an increased average age of accounts will improve your score. On the other hand, if all of your spending remains the same, your utilization ( amount of credit used vs. the total amount of credit you have available) will look worse so your score would dip a bit. My guess is that unless the new card makes up a large % of your available credit lines, it will probably be neutral to slightly positive, and even if it’s negative probably won’t be enough to impact your future ability to get credit.
[One additional caveat, is that even if it doesn’t officially hurt your score, some banks like Amex have started keeping blacklists of people who open cards just to get the initial bonus airline miles and then quickly close the cards. So you might want to check up on your issuer to see if they have a reputation for those kinds of crackdowns]
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Just be a baller and buy with cash.
I wish. Nowhere near that rich.
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Use it for whatever you feel like using it for but pay it off every month (statement balance, don’t need to keep the current balance at $0). Utilization has no history, it resets every month, so there’s no lasting benefit to “carrying a balance.” Furthermore the balance reported to the credit agencies isn’t necessarily your statement balance or your balance after you pay, it could be reported any time during the month, so unless you want to do some detective work and figure out which day you need to pay to get your perfect utilization % you can’t strategize around it. Don’t miss payments, ask for a credit limit increase every 6 months whether you need it or not, and open new credit cards every year or two. Getting your available credit as high as possible (the denominator in utilization) is the best way to get your score up.
It’s going to pull down your average age of credit whether it’s open or closed. Keep it open for utilization unless it charges a fee.
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Damn, I didn’t know that. Okay. My utilization usually runs from 1-5% at its peak, but I guess no point in closing it if it’ll ding me either way.
I guess this goes here. I’ve tried to be a bit a miser with our money in the past. We don’t skimp that much, and we put over 10% into retirement plus my wife will have a pension - but, I’ve been spending more money since covid. We’ve been talking about going to Europe for years but I could never commit. We committed to it in January pre-covid, booked flights and AirBnBs, and will be cancelling the trip shortly (it was to be over Thanksgiving).
My wife had been whispering in my ear the last few years about maybe getting a camper because we’re inching close to 50 and sleeping on the ground in a tent is starting to hurt. I didn’t expect to do it for another 5 or 10 years but we pulled the trigger and bought one last month because fuck, who knows if we’ll both still be alive next year.
So, in short, I’ve been a bit freer with money as I’d hate to retire, have all these plans to do all this shit we put off, and then die 3 months later without doing any of it.
We’ll see if this continues once (if) we’re past Covid…
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The standard advice for credit cards that you’ve had for a long time is to not close them, as doing so will lower the average age of your accounts.
I don’t see how a closing short aged account and closing a long aged account can both pull down your average age. What am I missing?
I did a little reading on this and it looks like the following is true:
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FICO scores continue to age all accounts (open and closed) for 7 or 10 years until the accounts fall completely off your report. So closing any account doesn’t do anything to your FICO score (related to average age) for 7 to 10 years
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Vantage scores only use open accounts to calculate average age, so closing accounts will have an immediate effect on the Vantage score depending on how the specifics affect the average age
Yeah that sounds right. My understanding was of the FICO model. You certainly wouldn’t want to close your oldest account under either model because after it ages off the report it’s a significant loss. But closing a new account won’t change anything for 10 years (FICO), and after that it’s probably a net benefit, if not as an actual boost to your future AAoA, it’s probably at least close, and adding to both the numerator and denominator will make your score more resilient to new accounts.
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Well, I made get a chance to stick it to my shitty landlord company. Pennsylvania state law says that they must return my deposit to me in full OR make a list of all the stuff they’re withholding for and return that and the difference to me within 30 days of the end of my lease or when I vacated. I vacated on 9/25, and I have proof via e-mail from them acknowledging that I vacated. The lease ended 9/28.
I’m required to give them the forwarding address, I did so via e-mail and on the phone, but I have proof of the e-mail obviously. I actually gave it to them multiple times via e-mail and at least once over the phone.
I have received nothing, and we’re only a few days away now.
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Are they required to send this certified mail and is it required to be postmarked or received by 30 days?
When I was working in property management in WI we had to send these certified mail, but we would always send these pretty much immediately when someone moved out because we actually cared about not being shitty to our tenants. With our really good tenants we’d often pay them their security deposit as they were checking out and just have them sign off that they received it.
I once filed a claim against my landlord in small claims court in Santa Monica and it was legitimately fun. The judge was having none of their bullshit. Can’t guarantee a similar experience in Philadelphia, though most urban small claims courts seem pro-tenant.
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I assume it’s postmarked by, but I’m not sure. I don’t think it has to be certified mail.