Why closing an old card can hurt you.

It feels responsible to close a card you no longer use, but it can quietly work against your score in two ways.

• It can raise your utilization. Closing a card removes its credit limit from your total. The same balances now use a bigger share of less available credit, which pushes your utilization up.
• It can shorten your history. Older accounts help your average age of credit, and a longer history generally helps your score. Closing your oldest card can chip away at that over time.

There are better options if the card is just sitting in a drawer:

• Keep it open with one small recurring charge, like a streaming subscription, paid off automatically each month.
• If the card has an annual fee, ask the issuer to downgrade it to a no-fee version instead of closing it.

If there is no annual fee, there is usually little reason to close an old account.

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