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Comment by ic4l | Hacker News Reader

I opened my 5 cards across the span of 13 years, and was advised to have more credit cards as only having 1 was negatively impacting my credit score. According to Experian the average American has 4 credit cards.

Also chase incentivizes you to open up more than one card with their signup bonuses.

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> only having 1 was negatively impacting my credit score.

Is this a real thing? I've always had 1 card and highest credit score.

Having multiple cards seems like a risk of taking on excess debt.

your credit score benefits from having a history of managing more than one line of credit. it's debatable how much opening a bunch of credit cards helps with this (in the short term, it actually hurts). ideally you would have a mix of credit cards, a mortgage, and some other type of debt, all of which paid off on time.

it's only a moderate impact factor though. having an extremely long history of on-time payments and low overall utilization can still get you an excellent credit score. it just takes longer.

You should have at least 2 credit cards, and not both with the same bank, of course.

I had two credit cards with Chase (and an Amex with BoA) when Chase decided that I had died.

If it wasn't for the Amex, I would have had some big problems!

I have no debt except for one credit card that I pay off every month, and I've been in that state for years, but my credit score won't go past the mid 700s. I actually tried prepaying my credit card one month so that my debt to credit ratio would be zero, but that made my score drop. It's called a "thin file", meaning they don't have enough data to tell if I'm a risk.

Yeah, I've been banking for 25+ years, so that isn't really what I was asking about.

My main credit card has all sorts of incentives to open more lines that I don't pay any attention to.

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