Does Opening Credit Cards Hurt Your Credit Score

Credit Score Myths

One of the MOST common questions I get is – how many total cards can I hold before it affects my credit score – this is a myth and the number DOESN’T matter
With best practices, it’s super easy to keep your score high

Golden Rules for Keeping Your Credit Score High

I space my personal credit card applications by 90 days and my business card applications by 90 days. I will do less from time to time if there’s an elevated offer I want to snag. These are just general timelines I try to go by, but they aren’t hard & fast rules. One thing I want to point out is that if you and your spouse are both applying for cards – your applications don’t affect the other person. Their 90 days is their 90 days. Your 90 days is your 90 days.
There’s 2 reasons to always keep your card open a minimum of 1 year. First – the bank “could” claw back your welcome offer if you close it early. Second – you want to keep a good relationship with the bank which means not opening a card and closing it quickly.
Paying your credit card balances in full and on time every month is essential.
Length of credit history matters. So keeping your oldest card active helps with this.
Every time you open or close a new card, you get a slight bump in your credit score. But by downgrading to $0 annual fee card option, you avoid this. But like I said, if you do close one – it’s a slight bump and should rebound quickly by following the other 4 rules.

How many credit cards is too many?

There isn’t in a number. I know people with 20+ cards with 800+ scores.

I personally have over 10 cards and a 800+ credit score. The number of cards doesn’t affect your score. And it’s unfortunate that this misconception is so prominent.

How credit scores are actually formulated

My credit score has actually gone up since I’ve opened more cards.
Does that seem crazy?

Let’s look at the make up of a credit score:

35%: Payment history: Most Influential – pay on time & in full ✅

30%: Amounts owed: THIS is the one where it actually helps to have a lot of cards open. Because I have a lot of credit cards, I have a lot of credit available. So let’s say, I have $100K in available credit across all my cards. And at any given time I have $5K credit card balance. That means I’m only using 5% of my available credit.

But let’s say you have one card with a $30K limit and you have a $5K balance on that card – that’s 15% of your total credit that is owed/used up.

I practice all of these golden rules, as it’s imperative for me to keep my credit score high.

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