cutting up credit cards, trying to forget about them if they are paid off is also dangerous, because you should actively maintain any financial accounts you have. this ensures that you aren’t getting charged errant charges, someone isn’t using your card, the creditor isn’t changing terms on the account without you knowing about it too late, etc.

i agree that you should be maintaining your longest, on-time cards. If i had known that when I was in debt, I would have. however, i was naive about credit and credit scores. it has taken several years to repair and rebuild, which isn’t always that bad as it forces you to maintain good credit behavior.

normally creditors will cancel inactive accounts that have been inactive for 6-12 months. BofA closed my wife’s account without notifying us because it was inactive for 12 months (8 of those months was a result of a fraudulent charge and waiting for the account to be cleared). considering it was a $20k limit, that would have been a major ding on her report as it was her longest held card and had a high limit. As it is not her primary credit card now (hate BofA now), we use it once a month to buy something cheap that we needed anyways. we have been doing this with our other cards. the worst part about the closing, was that BofA, even though within the 6 month grace period for reopening (you normally have 6-12 months to reopen a closed account, and generally this doesn’t include a hard credit pull, but sometimes it does), still required its underwriters to reassess the account and pull a credit report. i have to wait a quarter to check the credit report to see exactly what happened with the age of the account as well as if it was a hard credit pull.

Some people go into credit card debt because they’ve momentarily suspended their brain’s function. With the proper education and responsible money habits, they can safely keep their accounts open.

However, some people are addicted to spending money. They might temporarily dig themselves out of debt only to repeat the cycle. Some people’s addictions to shopping are so severe that they’ll even re-open credit card accounts to feed their addiction.

To keep debt discipline while maintaining active accounts with long histories, you should consider putting one recurring bill (utilities, cable, telephone) on each credit card you no longer plan to use. You should check statements monthly to make sure no other charges were made (beware identity theft!) and to pay off the single bill on each card. Since you can set up bill pay online for almost any bill with almost any card, you should be able to put these recurring payments in place, then hide your cards so you can’t use them for anything else.