Managing Credit Cards

I recently paid off all my credit cards. Now I’m wondering if I should close some. I know about the debt/credit ratio, but have heard that TOO MANY ACCTS, even if all paid to 0, hurt your score. Is this true? Or should I leave them all open. Most of them have high credit limits around $10K or more. (There are about 12.) YOUR SITE IS GREAT!!

Ray

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Hello Ray,

With twelve cards, you probably have a couple with the same institution and may want to consider consolidating some.  For example, if you have three of the twelve with Bank of America and a $10k limit on each, then you might want to request that BOA provide a $30k limit on the card that has the longest history and close the other two.

Alex, our resident credit card king, has 140 or so open accounts and is still going strong.  It’s more a function of the usage and less a function of the number of cards.

Thanks for the questions and hope this helps.

Paul