Originally Posted by
brasov02
Oh, and one more important thing: try never to cancel a card. Especially if the card has a long and clean history. I made the mistake of believing the old "too many cards is bad for your credit" adage and canceled a couple of old cards I never used but then came to understand I just shot myself in the foot by losing a nice chunk of two of the most important things you can have in your credit report: History and Quality. It doesn't all drop off your report immediately upon cancellation of course but still, I could have had that nice history safely there for a lot longer.
Now the only reasons I will cancel a card is if I don't want to pay an exorbitant fee (which usually means there isn't even a year of history to lose from the card anyway) or if a credit card issuer tells me to close one in order to get another one I want or I know beforehand that that's going to be the case. Otherwise I keep all the good history I can for as long as I can. I'll even use an oldy, moldy card once in a while just in case the credit card issuer might get the idea of closing a card on their own due to it not being used in the last 10 years.
you are correct on this one. i will make one caveat to this though and that being you can cancel that oldest card as long as u replace it with a card from the same bank. my first cc card was a citi card. i called to cancel it and the csr advised me doing so could hurt my credit and she talked me into a citi dividend card and advised that way i would still continue to have the long history with Citi show up on my credit report. i just very recently decided to move my spending to ff cards. i am looking at opening a citi alaska card to replace my dividend card. i will talk to citi before cancelling the dividend card though to make sure things haven't changed in the past few years on this.