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Subject:  Re: question about credit cards Date:  6/26/2007  10:22 PM
Author:  SeeFoolRun Number:  254915 of 308881

Not sure what you mean by "renew" it. As long as neither you nor the creditor cancel the account, it will remain an active account - even if you don't use it. At some point, they might cancel it for inactivity - depends on their policy I guess.

As far as your FICO score, it depends on a lot of variables if that would have a positive or negative impact.

If you have too many revolving accts open, closing it might help.

Generally, it will help leaving it open & unused though. If it's an older acct, it is increasing the average age of your accts. If it has a $0 balance it is lowering your revolving utilization rate. These are good things. If it's from a bank that does other things like mortgages & car loans it might help later on having a long & positive relationship with them.

If it has no annual fee and isn't a huge temptation having the credit available, I'd leave it open.

If it does have an annual fee, might make sense to close it. I posted in another thread about how i goofed carrying 2 cards w/ $0 balances & annual fees. 2 Capital One cards. The fees were billed the month I moved. Didn't get the statements or think anything about it as I had a $0 balance on both for a long time. So by the time the statements caught up with me, both were 30 days late, resulting in 2 bad marks on my credit report. I called them right away & they waived the fees but said they couldn't do anything about the "30 days late" negative entry on my credit report. I kept them open because they're my oldest active accts thinking the annual fees would be worth it for a while to help bring up my avg acct age - ironically I did much more harm than good. But it was my own & learn i guess. I still have both accts open, but am aware of when the annual fees are due. If they won't waive those, I'll cancel them both. Almost everything else I have that's active is less than 2 yrs old - mortgage, car loans, other CCs, etc are all 2 yrs or less, so I think having these two 10 y/o accts helps.
