Dr. M I think you're pretty much on. I can't imagine you'll hurt your score too much by "churning" a few accounts, and even if you do, it should only take about a year to bounce back. Just be sure you're not going to need your credit score for anything big like a home loan in the next year or two.

I think churn is a relatively minor factor compared to things like ratio of debt to credit, total length of history (keep your oldest credit card open), and whether you've missed payments or had anything go into collection.

Missed payments and bills in collection are the biggest negative factors.

One other thing to remember with the ratio of debt/credit is that the ratio of total debt to total credit matters, but so does the ratio on individual accounts as of their last statement. So, for example, I took out a 0% card a year or two ago, transferred balances from my mileage cards to max it out, and payed only the minimum payment for a year. It was a nice free $14k loan for a year. But during the year while I was at >90% of my capacity on that card, my credit score was significantly lower than before I opened that account or after I paid it off--even though I was only using about 20% of my total credit capacity. The score bounced back a couple months after I paid off that card, and now it's very high.

The same thing would happen temporarily if you bought a $10k item on a card with $11k credit line. They measure your credit based on your most recent statement for each card. So even if you paid off that $10k bill a week after your statement, your score would be impacted until the next statement (Showing that you owe $0) issues.

One of the most informative articles I've read on this subject, btw, is here:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/...ing/P38052.asp