With such a great variety of tempting credit card offers with lucrative rewards and promo 0% APRs you can easily end up applying for credit cards you don’t really need. And sooner or later you’ll start thinking about closing your credit cards you no longer use. But think twice before doing so as this can hurt your credit score badly.

There are five major factors that affect your credit score, and these are payment history (35%), credit utilization ratio (30%), age of credit (15%), mix of credit (10%), and credit inquiries (10%). If you are determined to close some of your credit cards, consider age of your credit and your credit utilization ratio for all of your credit cards and for each credit card separately.

The higher your credit utilization ratio the worse. Before closing your credit cards reduce your existing credit card balances and/or ask your credit card issuers to increase the credit limits on your credit cards you want to keep. Close out your newer credit cards with low or no balances.

As for the age of credit, keep your old credit cards, do not close them as this will shorten your credit history.