I signed up for an American Express preferred Blue card and got approved for a limit of $25,000. I have a 830 credit score. I realized that the places I shop don’t accept that card and you have to pay for it yearly so I canceled it.

Then I decided I was going to get a Costco Visa. Once I signed up the credit limit was only $5,000. So I canceled that one. So I stupidly signed up for a Wells Fargo Visa and that was $4,000.

Don’t leave yet and please don’t make fun of me but I’m not done being stupid. I decided I wanted a different American Express card and when I signed up for it the credit limit was $2,000 so I canceled that one.

Again I know I’m fucking stupid but how bad did I just fuck up my credit?

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
    30·
    7 days ago

    You just tanked your credit score by a lot. There are two aspects about this that matter:

    Each one of those approvals required the credit card companies to pull your credit score from the major credit reporting agencies, and a lot of credit inquiries very close together will cause your score to go down. This is not so bad, as those will only weigh on you temporarily.

    The worse one, however, is account age. Opening so many lines of credit has lowered your average account age by a ton, as you now have many accounts on your credit history with 0 years, so you are going to see a big drop because a lot of what makes up for a good credit score is how long you’ve maintained good credit (which means using it and paying it off on time to prove you can actually handle being lent money) and how much credit diversity you have (mortgage, auto loan, credit cards, etc.) .

    The good thing is that both of these blunders will go away with time. How long it will take to get you back up to 830, well, I can’t quite say.

    Like, this isn’t as bad as a bankruptcy is for your credit score, don’t get me wrong, but you’re going to need to start reading the fine print on these very carefully moving forward, because you can’t afford to keep signing deals for credit cards and not knowing exactly what the terms are. If you didn’t know what the credit limit was up front, you probably weren’t paying attention to things like APR either and that makes a big difference. Why did you feel the need to get a new credit card anyway? It sounds like you had no issues building credit before.