What happens if I don activate a newly issued credit card?
As others have said, the card is not the same as the line of credit. In some cases you can have multiple (an arbitrarily large number, in fact) of physical cards linked to and drawing against a single line of credit. This is common for business accounts. Typically you don’t see lines of credit designed for a credit card without a credit card associated with it, but by not activating the card that’s what you almost certainly have right now. You can of course be sure of this by pulling your credit report — you are entitled to a copy once a year from the major reporting bureaus, so you might as well take advantage. Here is the FTC’s official site on free annual credit reports. (Most sites offering “free” credit reports, including the one with the obnoxious TV ads, are not really free!) If you get one you will see all your open revolving lines of credit. If you have no plans to use the card, ever, then I would get rid of it. Yes, it might lower
your credit will take a hit if you do close the account I was about to chime in on this, then I found this page, from Fair Isaac themselves: How changes in “available credit” can affect FICO scores If everything else remains the same, we would expect that a reduction in available revolving credit (or the closure of a revolving account) will either have no impact on the person’s FICO score or will cause it to decrease. In reality, the information on credit reports seldom stays the same. People use their credit accounts and they pay their creditors, leading to changes in their reported balances. At the same time consumers also open or close accounts, their existing accounts continue to age, and so on. To restate what’s on the page, they’re taking all the credit limits on accounts and totaling them. They’re taking all the amounts owed on accounts and totaling them. Consider the total amount owed a
“Activating” the credit card just confirms to the issuer that you received it. Some issuers won’t allow transactions on the account until that “activation” happens; other issuers treat the activation step as optional. In either case, activating the card has nothing to do with opening or closing the account in terms of your credit score. Your credit account is already open, regardless of what you do with the plastic the issuing institution sent you. ” It’s my guess that I applied for a credit line, the account is already active at this point and the card is merely the means to access that credit. ” That’s fairly close to what the reality is.
