I still have the oldest card and I use it on groceries (approx $300 a month). I have another primary card and 2 other cards not used for a long time now.

However, I haven’t heard that the credit card companies could close the account (with prior notice) if it was not used for long enough.

:)

To whom I could make a complain about this. Is there any other remedies I have for this. Any ombudsman to make a complaint? Please who ever have this info let me know.

Thanks

Identity theft. Put a ‘hold’ on your credit. Each credit reporting agency has a different process to do this. But what this means is that no one (not even YOU) can get any credit in your name until the hold is removed. So if you have open lines of credit, if hold is put on getting any credit in your name, no company will allow credit to be issued to someone with a hold on their account.

My husband and I have been paying off our cards. We are leaving our credit lines open to better our debt to credit ratio as well. Are we worried about using them again?

Nope – we shredded the cards :) Can’t use what you don’t have. We didn’t shred all of them – still have our oldest card. And that one, while kept in a save place at home for emergencies, isn’t carried in our wallet.

My rentals were in Baltimore, a city with very low rental vacancy rates and very high drug/alcohol dependancy rates. It is estimated about half the adult population are alcoholics and drug addicts. In a social climate where most potential renters have chemical dependancies, not verifying information on applications is financial suicide.

Checking credit histories has nothing to do nitpicking over several canceled credit cards. It has everything to do with deciding which applicants are most likely to pay the rent in a timely manner. Financially responsible tenants are more likely to keep the property in good condition and not convert it into a meth lab or crack den. Unfortunately for most landlords, the best renters soon become home owners – thus the search for good tenants begins anew.

I think you’re both saying about the same thing. I don’t think Trent said 1 or 2 cards; in fact, he emphasized “only have a few cards to begin with”.

I don’t claim to be a pro at this game but I have done my best to maintain good credit and have followed a methodology pretty close to the one recommended here (beginning before I began lurking here). I’m currently sporting a 770+ score; a recent home purchase bumped me up 20+ points. I wouldn’t say Trent is giving extremely poor and misguided advice. You sell Trent short with such an offhand statement. Many folks would do well to heed what they read here.

Credit card companies used to be much more conservative. My father said that he was so proud when he was 30-something and Amex finally decided he was credit-worthy enough to sent him an application for a card. I’ve been getting them in droves since I was 16. Has the market changed, or have credit card companies just figured out how to make more money off of people in debt?

Indeed, my boyfriend and I been applying for apartments lately in a very competitive market (San Francisco), and landlords always ask for our credit reports. Our FICO scores are not as high as they could be, since we always pay off credit cards and we’ve never had any other type of debt, but it turns out that’s OK because nearly all of them are happy with the free credit reports that you can get over the internet, which don’t have scores. I guess landlords are happy with that, since we’ve been offered two apartments so far, which is pretty good when you consider that maybe 10 people apply for each one.

I’m sure this is affecting my credit score– but I don’t know how to resolve it (other than being ad frugal as possible and praying for business to pick up). Any comments would be welcome!!!

Instances like that make me want to cancel all my unused credit cards. Fortunately my oldest is one I still use frequently – so it won’t be cancelled. But the others I am going to cancel one by one every 2 months or so. It shouldn’t reduce my score too terribly. Besides, I just refinanced and I have no other loans outstanding (and won’t be taking on any). So at this point my FICO score is irrelevant to me and should be for a few years.

I don’t disagree, but how does canceling a credit card make me a “deadbeat”? I have perfect credit with 10+ year credit history, not a single late payment (nor judgment, payoff, bankruptcy, etc.), almost no debt (less than 1% of available credit), and many open accounts of different types. If canceling a credit card caused a prospective landlord to even raise an eyebrow because it dropped my score by a few points, I will look elsewhere (my city has very high vacancy rate so I can be very picky) because I would take that as a major warning sign: unwillingness to dig into a credit report and just blindly look at the score, probably indicates a landlord who will just put some paint over the ceiling to make a leak go away.

It seems as that it is as difficult to cancel them as it was easy to get them.

Best Wishes,
D4L

That’s, uh, exactly my conclusion. I guess you didn’t read the post. My last bolded sentence was “the best thing you can do is to only have a few cards to begin with and, most importantly, don’t put a lot of money on the cards.”