Have you ever been enticed by store merchants that offer extra discounts on your purchase if you open a department store card.  It happens all the time.  At some stores, they ask every person who comes up to the cash to pay.  Don’t get sucked into this constant upselling by retailers to get you to fill out a credit card application to receive a “whopping 10% off” your purchase today!!  It’s really not worth it!

I had a client that did this all the time with one department store and then rather than cancelling the new cards, just let them go dormant and inactive.  When this client applied for a line of credit increase, she was shocked to get a decline.  It turned out that she had 14 HBC cards – all inactive, reported to her credit bureau, and had dropped her score from a 655 to a 585 in 18 months.  Most Big Banks won’t lend if your score is below 600, so we had to get another loan at a much higher rate.  Be careful with these “so-called deals.”  Do you really need another card and a hit to your credit?

Your credit is the only thing that the banks are measuring your future repayment history on – so don’t damage your credit and handcuff your ability to use the banks in the future.