Do open credit card accounts affect my credit score negatively? Should I close those account not in use?

I have 7 credit cards but I currently use only two of them. the others are have 0 balance. I am trying to rebuild my not so good credit score. I am tryin to raise my credit score to buy a house within 4 years.

It depends. If you have a high available credit for your income, then it's bad. But if you get rid of cards you're not using, you increase the percent of available in use, which is bad. Number of cards is itself a factor. What looks better is two $10,000 cards than eight $2,500 cards.

You're just believing what you want to believe.

Prove that two cards are better than eight. I asked the credit bureaus that question for a year, and never got a straight answer.

http://www.creditscoring.com/p...

Too much available credit? Show the proof.

Disappointing. Report It

If you don't use the other cards you should probably close them to prevent possible identity theft or lost cards (2 are alot easier to track than 7). It shouldn't affect you credit. An easy way to build credit is to purchase your normal monthly needs on the card and pay it off with what you would normally spends in checks and cash (don't spend you normal bill money on something else, just set it aside) and pay the credit card balance every month before you get charged interest. You basically add no new costs to your income, but credit card companies see someone spending alot of money on a card and paying it off on time. Hope this helps.

As long as the cards are in good standing, you can leave them open. I would recommend closing them if any of them charge an annual fee (and you can't get it waived). No sense in paying money for cards you don't use.

Now leaving them open and not using them might not necessarily help your score. You might want to close four of them down so that you only have three open. Then start using the other one very sparingly, charging only what you can pay back (in full) at the end of the month. Your score *might* take a hit initially (because you are reducing your total line of credit), but it will go back up. That way you have gotten rid of four that you aren't going to use, and you can use the 4 years to really help raise your score.

Yes,Close the account immediately.

Well this is a yes and no kinda question. First having several open accounts may show as potential debt that a person could get into. This means even if you have no balance they may hold it against you because you could possible have debt there some day. The other issue is you need to have enough open credit for a bank to judge how you use your credit. I am the president of a bank and once I closed all but two of my credit cards and this made it difficult for even me to get a loan because I had no history of open credit to look at.

Open cards can hurt you if the balance to limit is too high. Need to be 25% or lower to help improve your score. Since they are open , do not close them as this would affect your debt ratios. At the same time do not add any more because having too many revolving accounts also hurt.

See the first link for how one guy went from 688 to 804 in 7 months.

"FICO High Achievers," the name the credit scoring company gives to those at 760 and above have a particular habit: 7% balance-to-limit ratio (second link).

Don't close any accounts until you get solid information about your score. Compared to just seven years ago, there is a ton more. One thing is that you can actually GET YOUR SCORE, AT ALL. The FICO company started allowing that in 2001, and the law changed in 2003, forcing access. The other is the Score Simulators at myFICO.com. Also: There seem to be noabsolute answers. Each person exists in one of ten "scorecards," so what is good for him might not be good for her, or for others.

So, the big question: Close, or not close? From the first link, at least in that guy's case, no. Having said that, one of the factors in the system is "Number of revolving accounts." Yet another is "Number of bank or national revolving accounts with balances" (third link).

And here is something else to add to the mix. Fair Isaac says, "In some cases, having a very small balance without missing a payment shows that you have managed credit responsibly, and may be slightly better than carrying no balance at all." Another of the factors in the system is "Too few accounts with recent payment information" (link 4).

For others reading this, depending on how low your score is now, you might need to start with easy-approval secured credit cards (fifth link). And, they'll force you to save money in an attached savings account.

Saving is not a bad thing, anyway. The U.S. Personal Saving Rate is a joke, today (link #6).

But, does saving have anything to do with credit scores? Not directly, but think about it: If you had $10,000 (and more, and more every month) in the bank because you disciplined yourself to save on a regular basis, you probably wouldn't have gotten behind. Saving is the big elephant in the living room-- the missing component in the credit scoring discussion.

Just keep your eye on the ball; check your FICO score every couple of months. You'll learn a lot in that process.

Shoot for a FICO score of 800. Why not? 13% have one.

Make sure you don't owe any money on the two you use. The other five are OK to keep because they show that you have had good credit on them for a long time.

Do not close these account, this can lower your scores.