Check your cards agreement before you decide to transfer your balance.

In How many credit cards is too many? I talk about how creditors look at your credit and what effects your scores. Definitely keep your oldest cards open even if you do not use them. You want a long credit history and closing this account will shorten it.

Although I don’t care what my credit card APR’s are because I haven’t had to pay any interest yet, it’s always nice to know if I do use it, it will be low.

first, find out ur rate (cause they do increase it w/o ur knowledge sometimes) and ask them to give u a better rate cause u just got something “in the mail” that looked like a pretty good rate (don’t mention APR or they’ll try to sell u into another one of their cards and thus cease ur current card account and its history/length of account member). You want them to reduce your current interest rate. APRs are great at first, but if u keep on revolving/switch accounts, even if its with the same CC company, but different accounts…then your history is only as long as the time frame of account “ownership”.

second, ask them to increase your line of credit. If you increase ur credit on the SAME account and have it for quite a few years, your FICO score will go really high and thus return you with better interest rates on future CCs/loans/mortgages/etc….

Another thing to be aware of when transferring balances. Payments are applied to lower APR’s before higher APR’s. This means if you have 0% APR for balance transfers, and a regular purchase APR of 15%, any payments will be applied to the balance transfer first. So if you had a purchase on there, you are getting hit with interest on that at 15% for as long as you have a balance transfer.