Cleaning up credit report?

I recently printed out a copy of my credit report. It shows credit cards that I used years ago as paid but open accounts. Should I contact each credit card and have them changed to %26quot;paid and closed%26quot;? How does closing paid credit card accounts effect your credit?|||Contrary to logic, it%26#039;s not always best to close old, unused accounts. It can make the overall credit rating worse. Check out the linked article below. It explains how closing those accounts will affect a credit rating.|||having too many open credit cards will make it seem like you have access to way too much credit. it can negatively impact your credit score.





if they are all closed, they should have sent you letters indicating this. make copies and send to each credit bureau to indicate the closure. if you don%26#039;t have those letters, contact the bureaus and tell them of the discrepancy and make them verify the accounts. they should be able to figure out that the accounts are closed. all you should have to do is indicate that your report has errors. most credit report printouts have space to indicate errors or corrections.|||It will hurt your score. Before you consider closing them, go to the link below.





Here is why.





Part of your score relates to your debt to credit ration. That is the differance between how much credit you have, and how much you owe on it.








Take this example. You have 4 credit cards. Two of them have a zero balance, with a $5000 credit limit. One has a $7000 limit and $1500 balance, the third has a $1000 limit with $200 balance.





So that means you have $1700 in debt, with a total credit limit of $18,000. Your debt/credit ratio is an great looking 9%.





Now lets cancel those two empty cards and close them out. You still have a debt of $1700, but now you have a credit limit of $8,000. Your new debt/credit ratio is 21%. Reasonable, but nowhere near as nice looking as 9%. Your credit score will drop due to the change.





If you have a huge number of cards, consider canceling them 1 at a time over a few months. It%26#039;s fine to have 4-6 cards, that%26#039;s not going to hurt your score.





Go to the link below and read up about how your FICO score is actually put together. This site is from the folks to actually designed the system.