Effect on credit rating if the bank closes your credit card?

[Amethyst]

We have a Sears card but don't use it at Sears, since our other credit cards give us cash back and Sears card doesn't. Just got a letter from CITI Sears Cardmember Services:

"After a recent review of your account, we noticed that your credit card has been inactive for over 3 years. In order to keep your account from being closed due to inactivity, your Sears card must be used to make a purchase or other transaction by September 30, 2013."

Should we give a darn? Any risk to our credit rating if the bank closes the card?

Amethyst

 

[Htown Harry]

According to Credit Karma's data..

The total number of cards has a low effect, age of credit history (with 8+ years avg. age being the max score) has a medium effect and the total credit line utilization has a high effect.

Unless Sears represents a big % of your aggregate credit line and /or it's a very old account compared to your others, I doubt you'll see any effect.

If you set up a free Credit Karma account, you can simulate such changes on a trial basis. FWIW.

Sears was my first or second credit card way back when. I let it lapse years ago.

 

[JOHNNIE36]

I would not close any credit card. You should try to use all your cards at least quarterly. The best things you can do with a credit card is to use it, don't abuse it, pay it on time and try to get the credit limit increased at least once a year. The ratio of available credit to credit used at any given time is ultra important.

I love it when they tell me my credit score would be higher if I had a mortgage to show I was able to make payments on time. Those credit bureaus slay me. I am always trying to get my score above 900 but to no avail. I would rather talk to the IRS than to talk to a credit bureau. I've talked till I'm blue in the face about the emphasis they put on mortgage payments while giving you no credit for paying it off. "It's their policy". You are at their mercy.

 

[Sittingduck]

Was wondering about this the other day. Paid off the mortgage a few years ago, and have no other debt. We pay for most of our living expenses with a Discover card to get the 1% rebate (Hey it adds up!) but that is the extent of our credit activity.

I dont want to loose my $100K Home Equitly Line of Credit so I have been debating using it to pay for something even though I dont need it. (Want to keep it for future emergencies after I retire next year). Afraid the bank will downgrade my credit score for inactivity.

Hey - maybe I should buy a boat and tell DW that I am excercising our credit to keep a good rating....

 

[JOHNNIE36]

To be fair to the credit agencies, when you pay off a mortgage, that record of payments stays on your report for some period of time (7 years?). This is probably fair but they make it look like you are being dinged for not having a mortgage. Maybe the mortgage record should go on for some longer period of time.

Wonder if anyone knows more about the scenario of how a paid off mortgage affects your credit rating/score.

Then again, I get confused by information from the credit bureaus that the FICO scores they create are not what insurance/mortgage/loan companies use. I'm told these companies have their own credit scoring models. What to believe?

 

[Alan]

Unless the card is a large portion of your unused credit then it won't make much difference if you close it as it won't change your credit utilisation much.

 

[Bestwifeever]

I would go ahead and charge something while Sears still exists.

 

[mpeirce]

I know many here are still striving for FIRE, but one of the great satisfactions of achieving financial independence is that you can pretty much ignore "credit ratings".

I do have two credit cards (strictly for convenience), but beyond that, absolutely no loans or other credit. FICO score? Who cares...

 

[pb4uski]

I would think that the simplicity of having one less credit card would trump the small, temporary ding to my credit score.

I actually don't care much about my credit score as I don't anticipate borrowing or adding to my credit capacity anytime soon and I pay off my bills every month so any effect of my credit score on interest rates I pay is a moot issue.

 

[harley]

I know many here are still striving for FIRE, but one of the great satisfactions of achieving financial independence is that you can pretty much ignore "credit ratings".

I do have two credit cards (strictly for convenience), but beyond that, absolutely no loans or other credit. FICO score? Who cares...

I agree. For me the only real reason for having a good FICO score was to able to refinance my mortgage. But without an income (pension, SS, whatever) it's pretty much impossible to get a mortgage these days, so why bother. We still have credit cards, I use Discover for everything and get the points, but it's Efor our convenience and I don't pay attention to the score anymore.

Edit: I just checked it, and even without paying any attention we're right at 800 (Fair Isaacs), so I suspect being a person who competently uses credit cards and who doesn't have non-mortgage debt will result in a good score anyway.

 

[JOHNNIE36]

I would think that the simplicity of having one less credit card would trump the small, temporary ding to my credit score.

I actually don't care much about my credit score as I don't anticipate borrowing or adding to my credit capacity anytime soon and I pay off my bills every month so any effect of my credit score on interest rates I pay is a moot issue.

Some other folks in your life do care like home and auto insurance companies. Every time you ask either of these folks for a quote, they want to check your credit rating. Just a couple of the things I care about.

 

[RunningBum]

Put me in the camp as one who doesn't care much about credit rating.

As far as the mortgage goes, I look at it more as people who have and pay mortgages on time as getting a bump up in their rating, rather than those not having a mortgage getting dinged. Besides, a credit report doesn't look at assets (as far as I know, anyway), so it's tough for them to tell me with a paid off mortgage apart from my son who doesn't have a home.

 

[Amethyst]

These are the "folks" we care about. Our insurance rates are ridiculous as it is (and shopping around hasn't uncovered enough improvement to make it worth changing companies). So anything which could cause the insurance rates to rise is cause for concern.

Amethyst

Some other folks in your life do care like home and auto insurance companies.

 

[pb4uski]

These are the "folks" we care about. Our insurance rates are ridiculous as it is (and shopping around hasn't uncovered enough improvement to make it worth changing companies). So anything which could cause the insurance rates to rise is cause for concern.

Amethyst

While I concede that the insurance carriers use credit score in underwriting, do you really think that if my credit score is high to begin with (775-800) and I kill my Sears card that I never use and has a $12k credit limit that my home and auto insurance premiums will be adversely affected? I wouldn't think so.

 

[gozer]

About five years ago my longest held credit card dropped me for non-use. It cut my credit card history in half. When I built a new house two years ago and was setting up the mortgage, the mortgage lender brought this up. Additionally, I owned my previous home and had no mortgage. These two things combined, made my credit history less than they liked to see. My FICO was 815 and my wifes was 820 at the time, and they were still giving me hassle. I have never had so much trouble arranging financing. So they do look at more than just the credit rating. (The reason I bothered with a mortgage was that rates were too good to pass up by paying cash. If the yield on my municipal bond falls about 1% from where it is now, I'll just go ahead and pay off the house. Right now I am being paid about $2500 a year not to pay the mortgage off. Fund earnings vs mortgage cost. When I first got the mortgage it was twice that.)

Like any one that retires early, all of our credit ratings will probably drop as we switch to a mostly cash up front life style, but it is unclear how much. It's so strange that doing things "right" has a negative impact. I suspect we mostly won't care since we won't use credit for many things, but as some posters have mentioned, other things like insurance do look at this.

 

[Alan]

These are the "folks" we care about. Our insurance rates are ridiculous as it is (and shopping around hasn't uncovered enough improvement to make it worth changing companies). So anything which could cause the insurance rates to rise is cause for concern.

Amethyst

I really doubt it would affect you that much, but if you let your card lapse you will always be left with a niggling doubt, so since you shop at Sears anyway I would go ahead and use your card to keep it alive.

 

[scrabbler1]

We have a Sears card but don't use it at Sears, since our other credit cards give us cash back and Sears card doesn't. Just got a letter from CITI Sears Cardmember Services:

"After a recent review of your account, we noticed that your credit card has been inactive for over 3 years. In order to keep your account from being closed due to inactivity, your Sears card must be used to make a purchase or other transaction by September 30, 2013."

Should we give a darn? Any risk to our credit rating if the bank closes the card?

Amethyst

I received two of these form letters back in 2009 for credit cards I had not used in at least 10 years. I did not care one bit. In fact, I was glad because I could now get rid of all the paperwork I had been getting from those banks over the years (i.e. privacy policies, change in card agreement terms, etc.). One of them (Discover) keeps sending me letters trying to woo me back. Yeah right.

None of this stopped me from getting a new CC (my first cash-back one) from my local bank which has my checking account. My credit score was nearly 800, I was told.

 

[nwsteve]

Another option which I understand gets interpreted different by the credit gods is for YOU to formally request your account. It is my understanding that your credit report will display "closed at request of owner" instead of "closed by issuer".
You still get rid of the card but without the red mark of shame for bank closure.
I would do via snail mail, return requested and not online.
Nwsteve

 

[Ready]

I would not give Sears my business just to keep them from closing my account unless I just happened to need something there. I don't understand why people bother with store branded cards anyway. Asides from getting the occasional 10% Macy's discount, I rarely see a store branded card offering any kind of points or rebates like the Visa/MC/AMEX/Discover cards do.

Unless you are maxed out on all your traditional credit cards (which I would imagine few people on this forum are), it would seem like carrying store branded cards is just a waste of time and effort.

 

[Katsmeow]

About five years ago my longest held credit card dropped me for non-use. It cut my credit card history in half.

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.

That said, many people don't understand that closing a credit card can have a negative effect if it increases your credit utilization.

Imagine someone who has a lot of accounts with total credit available of $100,000 and is spending $8,000 a month which is less than 10% of their credit (this doesn't mean carrying a balance. If you have $10,000 credit available and charge $5000 which is billed to you that is 50% utilization for that month even if you then pay it in full). Now, assume that person continues to charge the same amount each month (even assuming they pay in full each month), but closes a bunch of accounts so that the total credit available is now $50,000. Now, that $8,000 spending is 16% utilization which will likely have a negative impact on the credit score.

On the other hand if the person's utilization was didn't significantly change with closing the account then the account closure would have no negative effect. It is the change in utilization which causes the problem, not the closing of the account per se.

 

[Walt34]

Hey - maybe I should buy a boat and tell DW that I am excercising our credit to keep a good rating....

I like that idea! With me it would be photography gear. Only... if your wife is like mine she won't buy into it either.

We just don't give much thought to credit scores any more since we have no debt and haven't for many years. Although we use them frequently the three credit cards are paid off every month. About the only loans I see in our future is perhaps a car loan if the interest rate is 0% or 1% or something like that and doesn't add to the price of the car.

 

[gozer]

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.

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.

 

[Rustward]

While I concede that the insurance carriers use credit score in underwriting, do you really think that if my credit score is high to begin with (775-800) and I kill my Sears card that I never use and has a $12k credit limit that my home and auto insurance premiums will be adversely affected? I wouldn't think so.

I cannot answer your question directly, but after we paid off our mortgage about 10 years ago, my auto insurance agent called unsolicited and lowered our rates. When I asked why, I was told that this particular carrier put people into five tiers of credit rating and we had recently moved to the top tier, and that is how we got the lower rate.

 

[Rustward]

Unless you are maxed out on all your traditional credit cards (which I would imagine few people on this forum are), it would seem like carrying store branded cards is just a waste of time and effort.

Store cards can be useful for someone who is trying to establish or reestablish a good credit history. They are generally easier to qualify for than bank cards.

Many retailers offer discounts of 10% or more when you apply for and use their store card for the first time. If you are making a large one-time (or infrequent) purchase, you can save some money by opening a store card.

Having said all that, feel free to not use store cards -- in fact, do whatever pleases you -- with credit cards or anything else.

 

[Walt34]

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.

Apparently this has just recently changed. According to this article the reports now do show payment history and whether the balance is paid in full or carried forward month to month:

Credit reports now show your credit card bill-paying habits