How to Keep Your Credit Score High While Opening Cards for Points

Credit Scores

How to Keep Your Credit Score High While Opening Cards for Points

If you follow these tips, your credit score can actually increase.

To keep your credit score high while opening cards for points, follow these steps:

1 Keep your oldest credit card open if at all possible. This helps lengthen your total average credit history.

2 If you want to cancel a card because it has an annual fee, ask if you can downgrade it or product change it to another card that has no annual fee. Chase, for instance, will allow you to downgrade a Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card ($95 annual fee) to one of the Freedom cards ($0 annual fee). Again, this helps keep your credit history longer.

3 Open business cards when possible. These generally don't report to your personal credit report as open accounts. Because of this they won't affect your length of credit history at all.

4 Always pay your bills on time and in full.

How to Keep Your Credit Score High

Keep Your Oldest Card Open

This helps lengthen your average credit history.

Downgrade, Don't Cancel

Downgrading to no-fee cards helps lengthen your credit history.

Best
Strategies

Open Business Cards

These generally don't report to your personal credit report, so they don't impact your length of credit history.

Always Pay Bills in Full and on Time

Doing this will help your credit score more than anything else.

Since part of your credit score looks at recent credit inquiries, you will probably see your credit go down a few points after a new application. But you might not.

Credit Impact Example

In January 2021, my TransUnion and Equifax credit scores were 795 and 810, respectively. At that point I had opened 13 credit cards in the past 24 months. Slowing down with card applications increased my score — but the whole time I remained in the excellent range.

In March 2022, my TransUnion and Equifax scores had increased to 815 and 824, respectively. I had opened 6 credit cards in the past 24 months.

My Real Credit Scores

January 2021

13 cards in 24 months

795

Excellent

TransUnion

810

Excellent

Equifax

14 months later

March 2022

6 cards in 24 months

815

Excellent

TransUnion

+20 pts

824

Excellent

Equifax

+14 pts

Even while opening multiple new cards, my scores stayed in the Excellent range — and actually increased as I paid down my oldest balances.

Helping

On time payments
Low credit utilization

Hurting

Low average age of accounts
9 hard inquiries

Here's a look at our current credit scores and the factors that impact our scores.

Our Current Credit Scores

Katie

Micah

Want to Go Deeper?

For a longer discussion on credit score, you can also listen to this episode of my podcast.

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