aah the monthly e-penis credit card / credit score thread.
Like everything, it depends and it depends on how you use it. I've probably got... 6 or 7 credit cards or rolling credit lines under my name, 2 more for my business, but realistically, I only have 1 credit card that I actively use... A rewards card.
I don't normally close old accounts. In the 15 years of getting lines of credit, I've closed 2... both of them were cases where I'd rather the card gone and the peace of mind than the minute bump it would give to my credit to keep it open.
OP, to your question, you don't want to have X many cards, but you read it's good for old lines of credit. You are right. It's good to keep old credit lines open and to have a relatively small usage of your lines of credit... This is good for your credit score. But don't put your credit score over everything. In so many credit threads, people will flash their credit score e-penis... "I have an 812!" "Oh, that's cool, I have an 831!" First, it's probably wrong (PSA: You're getting your credit score from a company that is selling you something or selling you to someone) or they're lying for some reason. But second and most importantly your credit score is almost always meaningless.
The obsession with credit score is a marketing scam started in the 1990s with "FreeCreditReport.com" and the million other sites/services that popped up that have you pay $20/mo to get an arbitrary number. Now a days, sites like CreditKarma or the billion others aren't as scammy as FreeCreditReport.com was, but they're all operating on the same business plan: Let's make you worry about your credit score and then make you proud of your credit score for us to make money. CreditKarma, and the others, make money off of selling anxiety. They make you anxious that your credit score is bad or not good enough or you could improve it, and then they either sell the service directly to you, or they mine your personal information and sell that to advertisers. Even if your bank or credit card gives you a free credit score a month, remember, they're not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts, they're providing you that because they want to keep you as a customer and use credit score anxiety as one of the hooks.
If you have "good credit" and you're applying for a mortgage, the difference between 792 and 801 is not going to make a difference in your mortgage APR... you're already going to get virtually the lowest that the bank will give any customer based on your credit history. If you're applying for a mortgage and some bank decides to give you a shitty APR because you cancelled a credit card then they're a shitty, scam-artist bank, and you should go elsewhere. By and large, lenders don't do that. Maybe the used auto lot down the street selling lemons tries to do that, but legitimate lenders do not.
So the true answer is this:
Do you get more peace of mind from closing an old, bad credit card, or do you get more peace of mind from having an arbitrary e-penis number?
Some people may get more peace of mind from the e-penis number. They're not getting a car, they're not buying a house, they're not making any credit-worthy decisions for years, but knowing that in December 2016 their e-penis number was 792 makes them feel good about themselves. And that's totally legitimate. If an arbitrary, meaningless, marketing scam number makes you feel good about yourself or makes you happy, then that's a legitimate reason to keep old credit cards open.
But if keeping an old, bad, highAPR credit line open makes you feel anxiety, unless you are applying for a line of credit (mortgage, house, another CC) tomorrow, then fuck it, cancel the old cards, the infitessimal drop in your e-penis number is not going to have any tangible affect on your life, while the peace of mind to be able to sleep at night will be worth a lot more.
For me, I kept the old cards open (except 2 of them) because having old cards doesn't give me anxiety, and so the fake number that scam companies are using to scam me is worth more to me than the non-existent anxiety I get from having open lines of credit. However, I did close two of those cards. One of them was a store card I got when I bought my first set of suits outside of college. It gave me ~20% off or something, and the APR was ridiculous and horrible after the introductory period. When I paid those suits off, I cancelled the card. I knew I never wanted to use it again and the peace of mind of canceling that card gave me more joy than the arbitrary e-penis number. The other card I cancelled was one of my oldest lines of credit, but it's one that I rang up a large amount of debt on just after college... I got a lot of debt on that card, and when I paid it off, it was cathartic for me to call the CC company and cancel the card. Cutting that card up and putting it behind me was an emotionally positive experience, so I got more from cancelling that card than from the arbitrary bump or drop in a meaningless number. Now a days, 10+ years later, I don't have credit card anxiety, so I leave my lines of credit open.
