You can use the cards, just don’t carry a balance. If you don’t use a card ever, it’s likely going to get cancelled.
The easy thing you can do is set recurring bills only to a credit card and then set that card to auto pay the entire balance each month. Something like Netflix or even your electricity bill.
Put the bill on the card, and if you don’t have the willpower to shove the card in the back of a drawer and never use it, cut it up. The card doesn’t go inactive, you don’t rack up debt or interest, and you can maintain a high credit to debt ratio.
Yep. This was a big part of my strategy when I rebuilt my credit. I have a pile of cards, several of which have a single bill associated with them. I wanted to cancel because now I have a great score and a couple of really high limit cards, but that drops my length of history.
So I’ll be sitting on these low end cards forever probably. They’ll pay a single bill, get paid off before it closes for the month (that’s the number that gets reported to the bureaus) and every month from now until I decide I never need credit they’ll report $0. Just like they have the last 5ish years.
Don’t want to set here and repeat TexasDrunk, but yeah, that’s largely what i do.
Though my solution for most cards is to buy a candy bar with each card towards the end of June every year (I have a handful of niblings who were all born end of June through July, so makes a good little treat for when I come to visit)
You can use the cards, just don’t carry a balance. If you don’t use a card ever, it’s likely going to get cancelled.
The easy thing you can do is set recurring bills only to a credit card and then set that card to auto pay the entire balance each month. Something like Netflix or even your electricity bill.
Put the bill on the card, and if you don’t have the willpower to shove the card in the back of a drawer and never use it, cut it up. The card doesn’t go inactive, you don’t rack up debt or interest, and you can maintain a high credit to debt ratio.
Yep. This was a big part of my strategy when I rebuilt my credit. I have a pile of cards, several of which have a single bill associated with them. I wanted to cancel because now I have a great score and a couple of really high limit cards, but that drops my length of history.
So I’ll be sitting on these low end cards forever probably. They’ll pay a single bill, get paid off before it closes for the month (that’s the number that gets reported to the bureaus) and every month from now until I decide I never need credit they’ll report $0. Just like they have the last 5ish years.
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Don’t want to set here and repeat TexasDrunk, but yeah, that’s largely what i do.
Though my solution for most cards is to buy a candy bar with each card towards the end of June every year (I have a handful of niblings who were all born end of June through July, so makes a good little treat for when I come to visit)