I received the July issue of the Reader's Digest  today.  We subscribe to the large print edition and love it!  I'm only 53 years old, and have pretty good eye sight (with mild reading glasses)  but I do love this large print edition.  It's so easy to read.  

Anyway, there was an interesting article called "9 Money Rules of Thumb".   I was particularly interested in the very first entry that says NOT to close credit accounts you no longer use. 

Their advice is to cut up the credit cards, but keep the accounts open.  The explanation for this is that part of your FICO score is determined by how much of your available credit is actually being used.  The smaller the ratio, the better.  In other words, if you have total credit available of $20,000 but are only using $3,000... you are using 15% of your available credit.  If you closed several  accounts reducing your available credit to  $10,000, your $3,000 of credit debt now totals 30% of your available credit.  Lenders look at this ratio to see if you are close to being over-extended. 

I thought this was a good point to make.