If you don’t carry a balance, therefore don’t actually pay interest, if cancelling the card will lower your credit score even more, if applying for a new credit card also affects your credit score, then isn’t cancelling the card because it “bugs you” really just biting off your nose to spite your face?
I have no idea what our interest rate is as we have never carried a balance on either of our credit cards.
OP - 30 points isn’t a huge drop. It sounds like you have excellent credit, so my guess is it will bounce back up in the next month or 2.
The whole credit score issue has gotten way out of control, IMO. People with excellent, long-term payment records still get dinged with no explanation.
It would bug me also (just on principle) that AE raised the rate.
That was my reaction. And if you aren’t pay;ng your bills in full every month, you are doing it wrong.
Ditto.
^ Just because you pay in full every month doesn’t mean you should ignore the fine print.
How many read every bit of every fine print on every website they open before clicking on “I agree”?
“^ Just because you pay in full every month doesn’t mean you should ignore the fine print.”
Why? What’s the downside to ignoring the interest rate when you pay in full every month?
Just as the OP noticed, changes in the rate could indicate other things may be going on with your credit.
What if you make a mistake and miss a payment? You might have to pay interest for 60 days (most cards do a balance over 60 days to determine interest).
I used my credit union card for most daily purchases. A 7% rate, but the most important thing is if I screw up, they always let me make the payment and than fix it. One month I thought I paid (and it was something like $2.13) but must not have pushed the right button and the transaction didn’t go through. When I went to the bank, the teller asked “Did you know you have a balance of $2.13 on your card that is overdue?”
I’m not sure if I still pay an 85 annual fee on my Marriott card, but it’s worth it, with one free night/year (which I do use.) I just saved $450+ in an expensive city by using points. Very worth it.
The amount they make on transactions at the register is dwarfed by the interest fees. Most Americans are carrying a balance from month to month. Those averages are not low, per media.
You can put a stop on a card, without cancelling it. There may be a time limit. But the old advice was never to close an account on your own. You can attach a letter to your credit score accounts explaining the drop was due to closing Sears and the other, noting your history of timely payments.
But per my financial guy, at our ages, not looking for a mortgage, etc, a perfect credit score vs very good is not a critical difference.
Btw, my D and I both lease cars, same models, sign dates within a week of each other, from the same place, and our costs are virtually the same, me with VG+ and she with just a good rating. I think she pays $8 more. So the credit score on a short transaction (shorter than a mortgage) does not cause big grief.
The fine print I am paying attention to is my billing cycle so I don’t have to pay interest, whatever it is. We just stick with our plain vanilla Costco Visa. Boring, not sexy, but we eat a lot of Costco produce and buy a lot of other stuff there to get back at least 10x what our executive membership costs us.
LOL! Should have said “cutting off your nose”. 
You can put that letter in the file, but it NEVER, ever ever gets sent out with the file. What gets sent (electronically) is the credit score and MAYBE a list of creditors. It also is very unlikely to make a difference because the person making the credit decision, whether to grant credit and at what rate, is so low on the depth chart that they can’t overrule the credit score. They are making a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision. Maybe for a mortgage it might be considered, but really unlikely.
Thanks, twoin. I see alot on letter writing and now find the proverbial "last paragraph " where they say computers don’t read letters and how rarely a great explanation changes anything by itself.
No thankfully. I’m not sure his estate will end up in the black. Time will tell… Turns out he never did taxes back to 2016 among other things. We don’t see where he was using credit cards though - just one attached to his bank account, so akin to a debit card. He had a pretty huge lien on his properties though - and one judgment from Discover Card that might have expired so be a non-issue if the collections agency didn’t renew it a couple years back.
There probably isn’t one, but for us with our travels, we sometimes keep a balance for a little bit. Then too, when we’re away I count on credit as our emergency fund if the car breaks down or we need emergency flights back or whatever. We’ve never actually needed huge amounts, but I like knowing we have a couple of cards with high credit limits - just in case. If we ever had to use a higher amount it could take me a bit to pay it all off based upon where we keep the bulk of our investments.
I keep our budget month to month in general with all extra (beyond a basic emergency fund) earning more money than a savings account would provide. I could tap home equity quickly if needed, but sometimes it’s just as easy to keep things on a low interest card. I’ve no intent to pay high interest - ever - so wouldn’t want to count on a high interest card for emergencies or have much we need to pay off on it to avoid interest - just in case.
Beware keeping a card and not using it. My two longest held cards cancelled me after over 25 years for not using them. I wasn’t given the option of using them to remedy the issue. My H was given notice by Bof A that if he didn’t use his card they would cancel.
I’m another who doesn’t know my interest rate. We pay in full each month. I’m filled with pride that my kids picked up the same habit. They pay in full each month and don’t understand their friends who have racked up thousands in debt on random purchases.
We are pretty much down to using just our Costco Visa and our Chase Sapphire.
I had this happen, 2 unused cards closed by the institutions, with minimal impact to score. For score issues, OP needs to speak with the scoring companies, not the card issuers.
Cards we don’t “use” we do actually pull out twice a year or so to use on gas or something. Otherwise they literally are just for emergencies if something expensive were to come up. Currently we have one of those that H takes with him when he travels - if he needs anything it’s an automatic “business” receipt. Now we’ll have two.
Keeping a higher amount of emergency funds as available credit gives me more actual dollars to put into investments. Most emergencies are covered by a couple grand. We have that in cash available. If we needed something higher - a new AC or expensive car repair - then we have higher limit cards we can use and I can decide how I want to use our funds based upon what is convenient at that time. When we travel for lengthier periods I plan in advance and pay all known expenses for the time period + allow for starting spending $$. Then we use credit on the trip paying that off when we return and can add more cash into our account. I’ve pondered having someone here enabled to deposit H’s checks, but so far we haven’t wanted our farm sitter do that. Our system works. Now that youngest is here we might. We’ll have to see. Long duration travel is curtailed with parent health issues for the near future, so we haven’t even thought about it lately.
Technically I could always transfer $$ from home equity into our bank account, but that depends entirely on wanting to trust the internet connection I have accessing our accounts when we’re away traveling, so I’m not terribly inclined to do that. To me, credit is safer.
Regarding not trusting the internet, one of our tenants had their account hacked recently and lost all their funds. It hasn’t been pretty trying to get it back. I feel fortunate that we’ve been able to tell them it’s ok to be a month or more late with their rent - no late fee required considering the circumstances and they are excellent tenants.
It is a big caution flag for me to beware of accessing my account anywhere that’s not secure. Credit is definitely safer.
“What if you make a mistake and miss a payment? You might have to pay interest for 60 days (most cards do a balance over 60 days to determine interest).”
Nope. I pay my cc online at least a week in advance and monitor payment (the cards I use show a pending payment you within 24 hrs) so it’s not possible to “miss a payment”. I also get alerts by text two days before if no payment was made.