I can pay off the $39 balance I owe on the card today and have already transferred two small reoccurring charges I had on it which the vendors assure me will not appear on my AMEX bill for May or beyond.
The $64M question I have from your link is “If I cancel the acct, how will my utilization ratio be higher (and thus have the potential of lowering my credit score) if AMEX Gold has no utilization ratio (because they have no credit limit)?” Acc to the article, in my case it appears that the only way my FICO score can be “dinged” by my canceling the acct is if AMEX’s reporting of my cancellation to the credit bureaus make it appear as if I have a higher utilization ratio after cancellation.
If AMEX IS using some sort of (unknown and unquantified) utilization ratio when they report to the bureaus on a customer, then what if I asked my longtime Visa carrier to upgrade my credit limit, say, by $5K (not that I’ll use it but for the purpose of creating a higher “utilization ratio” for me on my credit reports)? I have a perfect payment record with them over ~15 years and so I would probably be successful. If I did this BEFORE canceling my AMEX acct, would this prevent my credit score from being lowered by the acct closing?
