New card forced closure of older card. Credit impact?
 

I recently got approved for the Delta Platinum Amex card. Later, I got a message from Amex saying that, after approving me for this card and looking at my existing accounts with them, they closed my old old Blue for Students card that was inactive for quite a while.

I've had that Blue card for over 6 years. I was given a much higher credit limit on my Delta Amex compared to the old Blue. Will this card closure negatively affect my credit score, or will Amex report this as a credit limit increase instead of an account closure?

- Jason

Amex can be kind of funny. You can have a sucession of cards with them and they will still report your account age back to the oldest card you had. When my wife got her US residency and we added her social security number to her account as an authorized user on my card, they showed her as having an account since 1995. However, since you have two different products (a pure Amex card and a co-branded card) that might not happen for you. There's probably not much you can do, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's not going to kill your credit score, at worst it should be a slight ding.

if that account is reported "closed by credit grantor" on your credit report, your FICO score will drop for 2 reasons:

1. The average age of your active accounts will become "younger".
2. The amount of total available credit will decrease, thereby hurting the credit utilization ratio.

Since you were given a higher limit on the new card, the credit utilization ratio will be fine. However, if you do not have many other older accounts, you may want to call Amex and get them to reactivate the old card, even with a low limit. This will keep your credit history "older" and preserve a higher FICO score. Even if they report the new account as being open since your "member since" date, you still want the old account active.

I believe redtop's point was that Amex continues to report newly opened accounts as having been opened since the time you got your first account with them. So if the OP's oldest Amex is 6 years old, Amex will report the newly opened Delta Platinum account as 6 years old. In that case the average age of his accounts would be unaffected since he would be trading out one 6 year old account for another 6 year old account.

+1

Your new Amex card will backdate to the opening date of your first Amex Card.
So your score would not drop.

OK, now that I think about it, I agree!

But if you manage to keep the older card active as well, and if that card is older than the average age of your active accounts now, your score will improve......