How many credit cards are too many?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a metric buttload of credit cards. I don’t know why honestly. I’m only 27 and I’ve managed to accumulate several.

Bank Of America - 3 different credit cards. Two of them didn’t start out as BoA cards but have been bought out since then by BoA. They all have different names too:

Bank of America Platinum Plus Visa
BankAmericard Cash Rewards Platinum Plus Visa
BankAmericard Rewards Platinum Plus Visa

Chase - 2 cards. Amazon Rewards and Southwest Rewards cards. The Southwest one has a $99 annual fee, but I get 6000 points at the same time, so it’s kind of just like forcing me to buy 6000 points for $99 dollars. According to the Southwest website, buying 6000 points directly from them would cost me $148.50, so, I live with it.

Note: These are the only two cards I actually use, because I get rewards points on them that are actually useful to me. I’ve gotten several free flights from the Southwest card and only had it for just over a year.

Citi - 1 card. It’s a reward card but it’s a crappy one just like the BoA cards with a horrible rate. I never use it anymore.

So that’s 6 credit cards, 4 of which I never use. The Amazon card only gets used when I buy things from Amazon. All my other shopping/eating out/whatevering gets put on my Southwest card and paid off immediately. I’m in the habit of logging onto the Chase website every 3 or 4 days and paying whatever balance these cards have. Haven’t once paid a dime of interest on either of them!

Here’re some questions. Does having 6 credit cards, 4 of which are never used, hurt my credit report in any way? Does it help? I’ve heard that the more credit you have but aren’t using the better, so I’ve kept them all open. If I closed out on the 4 cards I never use anymore my amount of “available credit” would plummet.

If I asked BoA to merge my 3 credit cards into one account, would they do it for me? It seems silly to have 3 different cards from the same bank, just because they happened to acquire the older companies that issued those cards to me long ago.

Should I request that the maximum balance allowed be increased on them, just to help boost my credit score? Does it make a difference?

Should I call up and complain to Chase about the annual fee, threatening to cancel the card to see if they’ll reverse it? I’ve only had the card just over a year and got my first annual fee charged about a week ago. Will raising a stink about it yield anything?

How many credit cards do you have, and why?

2

This is correct; keep them open.

For the cards you’re not using, you should still use them at least twice a year to ensure they’re active.

3

Perhaps. For the past 15 years, I’ve had two credit cards. Prior to that, I had one. I’ve had zero debt for the past 7 years; prior to that I had a mortgage for 8 years and zero debt going back to about 1975 or so. My credit rating has remained very high throughout, so I’m questioning the logic of having all those cards.

4

I see no point keeping all those cards. There may be a short term hit to your credit if you cancel them but that’s just going to be a blip in your long term credit score. Do you pay anything for any of those extra cards? If so, the decision is easy.

I keep one main card, one backup in case there’s a problem with my main card, and one for work.

5

How many credit cards are too many? In my book, the number is 1. My wife and I have managed to live without a credit card for about 15 years. If we can’t afford it, we dont buy it. In lean times, there were hard decisions to make, but we got through. There were times, admittedly, where I had to borrow a vehicle from my parents for a week or so until we could afford to fix ours. Having a good support structure around makes a huge difference!

I’m not as militant as all that, credit is a tool. Used properly, it can help you get things done more quickly. Used improperly it can inflict long term damage.

6

I closed cards I wasn’t using and now only have two. My credit score did not change much.

7

I have one credit card, which costs nothing since I always pay the full balance.

I don’t need a second one.

8

I have two. One is my regular use card, the second is a Best Buy card I only use about once a year for electronics purchases (18 months no interest on the larger purchases, like the computer I bought last spring). Don’t need or want more than that.

9

I’ve got my starter card (mastercard) from college, an amex for gas/groceries/amazon, a paypal mastercard for the rest of my online purchases, and a Visa for everything else. Only the Amex has an annual fee and I only really ever use the amex and visa with any regularity. I think that’s a fair amount of cards.

Most people a generation older than me seems to be perfectly content with 1-2 cards and cancel cards they don’t want any more almost immediately. People my generation seem content keeping accounts open but practice discipline in not using them. I don’t think either one is particularly wrong but I’m in the no harm no foul camp. Plus, there’s a marginal boost to your credit score if your usage ratio is low and that helps to have as much credit available to you as possible.

10

“Credit card” does not automatically equal “living in debt”. I have had credit cards for 35 years and for the last 28 or so have paid the full balance every month. I just use it as a convenience, not a way to buy things I can’t afford.

11

“If I can’t afford it, I don’t buy it”- good plan. But that in itself has no bearing on whether a person should have a card. We operate on the same plan but we pay the card off in its entirety every month. Having the card just allows us to go shopping without hundreds of dollars in cash in our pockets. Write a check? What is this, 1975?

We have one main card (a MasterCard with BarclaysBank, which used to be with Bank Of America) that we use for nearly everything, but we also have an AmEx that we only use when shopping at CostCo. A few years ago we went on vacation and booked a room at a Marriott for a week, and learned that we would receive two nights free if we charged $X on a Chase Marriott card within three months, or something like that. So we got the card, charged it up just enough to hit the minimum limit using it just for our regular purchases, and got our free lodging. We don’t use that card for anything anymore.

12

I think you need to strike a balance with the amount of credit available that you don’t use [pats on head] and the amount of credit available that you have available for you to completely fill up at the drop of a hat and be seriously in debt [creditors run away].

I remember reading at one point while researching this myself that if you have an enormous amount of credit available to you, that is quite beyond your means to pay off (say, $60k worth of credit and you make $40k a year) that creditors would not look kindly on that either.

The creditors could say “You have zero debt now, and I could loan you $150,000 for a house and you’d be $150,000 in debt tomorrow. But with all that open credit, you could actually be $60,000 in debt tomorrow on top of the $150,000 you’re in debt to me and suddenly not able to pay me. No go.”

I’ve actually applied for a card, with my very good credit score, and had the bank tell me no, I’ve got too much credit to my name. Granted, that was my personal cards on top of my company’s credit cards (I own the company) but still it proved to me that they look at that sort of thing.

So my personal path is to have a reasonable amount of credit available to me in the form of my oldest account (Bank of America, $20k) that I never use (but is there for emergencies and credit-worthiness) and my newest account that gives me points points points (Amazon Chase, $5k) that is my everyday card.

TLDR - maybe not so many cards if it means a ridiculous amount of credit is available to you. There is such a thing as too much credit.

13

I currently have 23 different accounts open between me and my wife. Most of those have authorized users, so probably 40 physical credit cards. I pay no interest and carry no balance and I have never been late in my life. Actually having lots of credit cards helps your credit score - Credit Utilization percentage is obviously going to be lower no matter how much you charge if you have an enormous credit limit. What hurts your score some when you start is that new cards bring down your average account age, and the hard inquiries also impact your score. But then as the credit cards age your score both goes up and is impacted less by new cards because having lots of old cards means a new one impacts your account age proportionally less.

Credit cards and debt are two separate things, and the credit card companies having been offering you thousands of dollars a year for the past few years, essentially for spending money you already would have spent and the time to find the best offers. If you have a high credit score with hardly any credit cards, it does nothing for you. Whore it out, make it work for you, and it earns big bucks for you.

Edit to add, always call and ask if they will waive the fee, but don’t “threaten to cancel/say you want to cancel” - just tell them something like “you are considering cancelling over the annual fee but really like benefit X of the card, is there anything you can do about the annual fee/to offset the annual fee”. For most banks you can get a least a partial waiver/credit or in the case of points cards an offer of miles or points instead of $.

14

Thanks for the info everyone. Seems like I’m on the higher end here, but at least one of you has more cards than I do! :smiley:

15

I see 3 negatives of having credit cards you never use:

  1. They might start charging fees in the future (so you have to keep an eye out for this).
  2. The number could get stolen (either physically or from a database somewhere) and someone runs up debt on it.
  3. The credit card company keeps sending you junk mail.

I just cancelled two unused Amex cards because of third reason–at least once a month they were sending an email about changes in conditions.

16

Oh yes, BoA is amazingly predictable about the junk mail I get from them. Every single month for each of my 3 cards, I get these little checks that I can use as a real check (who the fuck uses checks these days?) and it’ll get charged straight to my card at some low interest rate for 6 months.

Cancelling them just for that reason alone might be worth it.

17

I fucking hate banks and would cancel my BoA card except that I get miles for using it. My other card is from my credit union, but only gets used if there is a problem with the other one. Yes, I’m a mileage addict.

18

I have one credit card and one debit card. I pay off the entire balance of the credit card every month. For me this is the perfect number and way to use them.

My credit rating is very, very good.

19

This is a problem for the credit card bank, not you. Legally, CC users are only liable for the first $50 of fraudulent charges - and in most cases, if you threaten to cancel the card, the bank will happily eat that last $50 for you.

Wife and I have each had a credit card compromised. No idea how it happened, but in both cases the banks never even asked us to pay that $50.

I have two CC’s in my wallet: an Amex card that gets used most of the time, and a Visa card for the occasional purchase where an AmEx card is not accepted. I have a backup Visa in my desk drawer at home that hardly ever sees the light of day.

Recently I picked up an Amazon credit card that gets used exclusively for Amazon purchases, where it racks up pretty good points benefits.

A couple of years ago I picked up a Southwest Airlines credit card because it came with enough points for two free domestic round trip tickets on Southwest. I took my flights and cancelled the card ASAP after that.

So that’s four cards for me. Can’t see a reason to get more.

20

That doesn’t mean that credit cards don’t have their uses. Have fun shopping online if you intend to pay by check.

I have my share of credit cards, but the only time I don’t pay the statement balance in full is if I miss the E-mail reminding me that the payment is due (and that’s just on the one or two cards that don’t deduct the full statement balance automatically).

Maybe I misunderstood, and you use a debit card or something else that deducts from, say, your checking account without having to go through the bother of writing checks. I used to have most of my cards deduct from my savings, until my bank started imposing a $10 fee (and could cancel my account entirely if I did it twice in six months) if I made more than six online transactions (ATM withdrawals and transfers don’t count) on my savings account, including an automatic transfer to checking, in a 35-day period.