Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsmeow
That would be unusual. My understanding is that accounts that are in good standing with no negative history generally stay on your credit history for 10 years. (Negative information on an account stays on for 7 years).
So closing an account doesn't take it off your report and doesn't shorten your credit history usually until many years have passed.
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I can personally attest to the closed accounts be removed. Both my lost visa card and my paid off mortgage were missing the history statistics from the paper copy of my credit report that was obtained two year later when seeking financing for a new house I was building. i.e. some, not all, of the closed accounts were still shown at the bottom, but no history data was shown for them. Just dashed lines where the zeros for late payments and such should have been.
The credit report specifically listed two reasons I was being dinged.
The first was short credit history. My wife is an accountant and stays on day to day billing like we are a business. Due to this and electronic automatic payments, we have a perfect payment history that goes back to 1985 on all accounts. But almost all of this was missing from our credit report. The paid off mortgage was listed with no data and the credit card was completely gone. The last time I used that card would have been in 2001 when I went to London, so my last activity on the card may have just been over 10 years when they dropped us. Maybe that's why it just vanished.
The second was card utilization. On this one we bought everything on the card (still do, cash back) and paid it off in full every month. We had been doing this since 92. However with the older card gone our total available credit dropped which made the utilization look just over 30% in some months. They don't even track anything that tells them paid in full every month, just that there are no late payments. So somebody that pays in full every time looks the same as somebody that makes minimum payments every time. I would think these two situations are very likely an indicator of how good or bad an individuals finances currently are. But credit reporting agencies don't currently share this opinion. To solve this problem I just called our remaining card company and asked for a limit increase. Today, I have a total of three cards with specific uses to stay away from issues like these. This means I have a silly amount of credit relative to what I actually spend. This is something I would personally consider a negative. But again, credit reporting agencies don't currently share my opinion.
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