shanks, noted.

Ian/Complete Finance, any other regulars, your about comments would be appreciated.

Shanks

follington21: yes, contact the company/ies directly as other poster did.

shanks: closing cr.cards should not adversely affect your rating. Now lenders (can) use balance and limit information, this would show you have limited your exposure. I've never seen a bureau characteristic about closing accounts that tells credit risk management anything useful about credit-worthiness. Maybe profitability, but I've not worked in that area. Again, affordability is often the key, so your total cr card exposures would reduce your perceived affordability (perhaps), which suggests to me its better to limit the number of cards you have open. I think your approach suggestion is sensible and lines up with mine, I work in retail credit risk. A large number of credit cards can affect your credit score, but many factors combine to give overall score. I think they may have been trying it on to retain you as a customer? Who knows.

Question to the forum re credit reports 'In the current climate'

I hav 3 credit cards and so does my partner. We don't really use them and considering we will be looking at buying another placein the next year would be better to reduce our available credit. We'd both keep 1 card (0% purchase card now as has not been used for a while).

When cancelling the guy at B.O.S started telling my girlfriend that it'd affect your credit rating etc. ow she's worried that when they pull our credit reports the banks will look adversley on the fact that our accounts have been closed, even though we closed them.

My understanding is tha this is not the case and should be better for us, we both have dd's etc and good credit ratings already.

Any comments,am i right or wrong on this?

Cheers,

Shanks

I had exactly this situation a couple of weeks ago, albeit with 1 card only. I called Halifax and told them the situation, giving my name, old address, birthday etc etc. They eventually accepted it was me and closed the account. Apparently it had about 26p to be repaid, which they waived. I'm surprised that the 26p wasn't showing up as a missed payment for the last 4 years!

I have two old credit cards showing on my experian report at an old address showing as active (0 balance etc), when they were shut a couple of years ago. If I wanted to remove these from there do I need to contact the companies directly (halifax and barclaycard)? I don't have account numbers or anything - can imagine its going to be a pain to get through to the right person etc....is it easy to get this resolved and worth doing?