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will cancelling a 9 years old visa hurt my credit file?

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Sr. Member
Dec 24, 2007
858 posts
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will cancelling a 9 years old visa hurt my credit file?

I have been keeping a cibc dividen for almost 9 years since university. After started working I have had many new credit cards applied and cancelled during the past years, but only this cibc visa I have kept that because I heard that keeping the oldest visa will help your credit file. Is that true? This card really becomes redundant and I don't want to keep it anymore..
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May 19, 2006
543 posts
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Not a big deal. A temporary blip especially if you have no recent activity on it.

Late payments and defaults will hurt alot more!
Large amount of available credit should be avoided as well because it increases risk for the lender.
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Aug 12, 2006
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pandorazw wrote: I have been keeping a cibc dividen for almost 9 years since university. After started working I have had many new credit cards applied and cancelled during the past years, but only this cibc visa I have kept that because I heard that keeping the oldest visa will help your credit file. Is that true? This card really becomes redundant and I don't want to keep it anymore..

I heard that too. It was on CTV, Pat Foran Consumer tips. For that reason I have kept my CIBC Visa and Amex still. Use once in a while.
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Sep 19, 2004
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maybe you could just call to decrease the credit limit to the minimum ($500?) and charge it once a year to keep it alive. I guess this is a better way.
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Jun 23, 2009
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Keeping a useless CC around has the same effect as staying friends with your EX. No point keeping them around if you're not getting something from it.
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Aug 12, 2006
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CRAZYBUBBA wrote: Keeping a useless CC around has the same effect on your credit report as staying friends with your EX.
...
lol, Nicely done.
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Sr. Member
Sep 15, 2005
585 posts
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This question about cancelling your credit card and the impact on your credit file/score seems to pop up in this forum every week, if not every few days (perhaps a FAQ should be created and stickied?). I've read a variety of opinions expressed in this forum and elsewhere, from regular folks and "experts," and most seem to say, "don't do it." I don't think, however, that there is one right answer that is applicable to everyone all of the time because it ignores an individual's particular circumstances.

The following article from CNN Money seems to make the most sense to me: "Don't sweat it: Canceling a credit card won't hurt your score." OK, that title is a simplistic "one right answer," but the editor who came up with it should get a slap on the wrist because it misrepresents what the author was trying to say. A more accurate title would be this: "Don't sweat it: Canceling a credit card probably won't hurt your score that much."

George Mannes, CNN Money wrote:But is this a real problem? Will indeed your credit score drop if you tell your card issuer to stick their plastic somewhere other than an ATM? Part of the problem is that the methodology of determining your credit score is a secret formula held by FICO, a.k.a. Fair Isaac, the company behind the most widely-used credit scoring system in the US. Yes, they do explain the ingredients of that formula in general terms. Getting the nitty-gritty numbers, however, is like asking Coca-Cola for their secret recipe: They'll admit it contains "natural flavors," but don't expect much more information than that.

Yet FICO was able to shed some light on the question. The most important point made by spokesman Craig Watts is that it's a myth that if you close a credit-card account, all trace of it disappears from your credit score. In fact, he says, the credit agencies from which FICO draws information used to calculate your score hold on to payment history for years -- the positive stuff for about a decade and the negative stuff usually for seven years. That information is used to calculate two parts of your credit score. One is payment history, which accounts for 35% of your score and which reflects, among other things, whether you made your payments on time and whether you welshed on any balance you may have owed when you chopped up your card. Another is length of credit history, accounting for 15% of your score, which reflects whether you're a newcomer to paying people back or not. All that stays, Watts says, if your card goes. You've read -- perhaps from well-meaning people on FICO's own message boards -- that you should never close your oldest credit card because your length-of-credit-history measurement will immediately plummet? Again, that's a myth, says Watts. (Dropping it might affect your credit score a decade from now, he grants, but the impact will be small potatoes compared to that of your credit-related behavior in the interim.)

Where you may get into trouble right now is in the "amounts owed" area, which accounts for another 30% of your score. One important element of that is what's called credit-card utilization -- that is, the size of the balances you carry on your credit cards as a percentage of the amount you could theoretically borrow on all your cards. Imagine, for example, that you have two credit cards with $5,000 limits on each, with a $500 balance on one and a zero balance on the other. If you close the zero-balance account, you've gone from using 5% of your available credit (the $10,000 total on your cards) to 10% (of the $5,000 on the remaining card) -- not a big deal in credit-card terms. In low-utilization situations such as that, closing an account should have virtually no effect on your credit score, says Watts. "No harm, no foul," he says.

But let's say instead that you have three $5,000-limit cards -- one with a $3,000 balance and the others with none -- and you drop your two zero-balance cards. In this case, your credit-card utilization rate will go from 20% to 60% -- a noticeable amount that will certainly ding your credit score. How much? Can't say, since we're back to the black-box credit-scoring system.

In any case, Watts says that if you already have a score in the upper half of the 700s or above -- that's about 40% of the population -- losing a few points shouldn't hurt you at all, practically speaking.

So if you want to chop up your credit card, start chopping. The downside is probably a lot smaller than you think.
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Nov 30, 2009
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sunvv wrote: maybe you could just call to decrease the credit limit to the minimum ($500?) and charge it once a year to keep it alive. I guess this is a better way.

That will hurt your score as well.

I tend to agree with CRAZYBUBBA and the excellent analogy lol

Honestly, with the time you spend carrying around unused credit, you could have probably rebuild the slight drop in your CC by then. No point keeping something just for the sake of credit longevity if you're not using it. Just keep a good debt:credit ratio, stable employment, and paying things off in full and you'll be fine.

FYI: I only just came to this solution a couple days ago as I was debating and reading various opinions like yourself lol.. With that I cancelled my Capital One $59 annual fee (although they made some excuse saying they could possibly waive the fee next year). I don't like to have a lot of cards, I'm very simplistic. :)

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