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Having a credit card can be a good thing, as long as you are responsible with your card and don’t end up missing payments or carrying a balance. In fact, for many people, having multiple credit cards can make sense. If you have several, you can mix and match rewards programs so you get the most bang for your buck with all different kinds of spending.
But, if having one or two cards is good, is having tons of cards even better? Or is there such a thing as having too many cards?
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Here are the risks of having more credit cards than you can handle
Having multiple credit cards isn’t necessarily a problem, but you could definitely end up with too many. And there are some big risk factors associated with having a huge number of cards. Here are some of the downsides:
- You could end up deeply in debt: If you don’t have good control over your spending, you could find yourself with a substantial amount of credit card debt. The more cards you have, the more debt trouble you could potentially get into since you’ll have more credit available to you.
- You could forget to make a payment: If you have lots of cards to keep track of, the risk of a forgotten payment increases. If you miss a payment, your credit score could suffer, as payment history makes up the largest percentage of it.
- You could adversely impact your ability to collect credit card rewards: If you have multiple cards, it could be hard to keep track of which one provides the most rewards for a particular transaction. You could also end up having rewards expire before you can use them if you are splitting your spending among lots of different cards and you never earn enough on any one to redeem them.
- You could hurt your credit by applying for too many cards. Applying for many cards in a short period of time can damage your credit score.
