[...] Use Your Credit Cards to Avoid Cancellation by Madison, host of Money Hacks Carnival #3 [...]

[...] Use Your Credit Cards to Avoid Cancellation – This is happening all over the place, and your credit score could be damaged just because a bank closes an inactive card. If you have old cards, use them once and a while to keep them from being canceled! You don’t want to lose years of credit history just because a bank decides to close your inactive card. [...]

When I do use credit cards, we talk about how the card is connected to our bank. (Not quite correct, however, my oldest is only 3… we’ll get into more details as he gets a little older).

I’m very conscious of the kids, and I make it a priority to discuss what we’re doing with money when they see me doing various things.

Perhaps they are thinking if you do not use the account for more than 12 months and suddenly activating it, this may means you’re in some sort of finanial difficulty and utilizing the credit for help.

The credit card issuers are actively lowering credit limit to minimize their financial loss due to irrecoverable loss.

All these will somehow affecting your credit socre and rating. So do monitor them cloasely if you are affected.

Our Credit Limits: Over $1,000,000!

Our Credit Card Balances: $223,270

The vast majority of the cards are due to credit card arbitrage.

Essentially, using the 0% balance transfer offers and putting the money in a savings account to earn interest.

I’ve been running credit card arbitrage over 5 years. Balance transfer offers expired yearly in the past, so we would each get about 5-10 new cards per year to roll over to new cards.

You can see where we’ve racked up the cards over time.

I keep them open, because it helps to reallocate credit lines for the next offer; and keeps our credit score healthy (for utilization purposes).

In the past we’ve made about $12,000 over the course of a year, so even a little bit of time spent to manage the cards has an incredible payoff.

Not something that I recommend though!

Seriously, have you considered how much your behavior is being manipulated by the companies that issue these cards and by the credit industry in general? Exactly who is the customer here?

No offense, but some of us have plenty of other activities that we enjoy so we prefer not spending time worrying about keeping credit card accounts active.

I’m kidding around also, but seriously why?