Fico ? on closing CC

[MadMonkey]

Today my wife and I pull her annual free credit reports. Her credit has always been great.

So were looking at her report and she has, and I kid you not access to $96,000 in unsecured credit. She has zero balances on all her credit cards.

I remember back in the mid 90's telling her to start getting rid of cards. She was collecting them like trophies, (lol). From Norstroms to Sears, she has them all.

There are a few of them that are closed and will naturally fall off in the next two years, however the majority of them are still open.

So after we did that we pulled her FICO scores and she was at 786. She was a little p.offed at that one because mine is over 800 and I was the one with the crappy credit history.

In reviewing FICO's info, they have a column that says "whats hurting your Fico score. WIth this statement in Red: You have too many credit cards carrying balances.

Funny thing is, of the 20 or so credit cards only two of them have balances. The first was around 1100.00. That card has a $8000.00 limit, and the other was $850 balance, with a limit of $3600. Even funnier was the later was my card which we did not even know reported on her credit. I had set her up to authorize the account, because she manages the accounting of our businesses, and apparently the idiots at Household set her up as signer. (I took care of that by the way)

Since neither of these cards are exceeding the 30% rule, would I be right in assuming that quite possibly the reason why her credit is not over 800 is because she has so many credit cards?

Were planning on buying more investment properties next summer, which brings me to my question. We want to get her FICO over the 800. Also she realizes that I was right some 12 years ago when I told her to get rid of all those cards.

So what are your recommendations for closing all these open accounts so her FICO will not take a huge hit. I figure now is a good time to start so that we can get are Ducks in a Row prior to next summer.

I know that one or two closed accounts will take a couple of months to recover but man she has a S load of cards that need to be closed.

Suggestions?

[hopelesscred]

With a score that high she is primarily competing with others in her scoring bucket...she is only 64 pts from a perfect score.. when u go beyond the obvious scoring categories, u are entering the realm of Fico's secret scoring algorithm.

With that said..u did ask a question..

what fico has on her report is basically meaningless and your wife will not have any problems obtaining prime rates....the only issue is keeping her from bringing the score down.

u will need to worry about two things: util% and u have that under control..keep it between 1-7%

AND...

History...ie average age of the accts...dont close any cards that will lower the avg age of your TLs

good luck and hopefully I will join u in the 750 club in 14-18 months