My wife and I currently have 6 credits cards between us, one of them being joint, so she has 3 active cards on her record and I have 4. Our 3 oldest cards (one hers, one mine, one joint) all have over 10 years of credit history but they're all worthless for travel hacking, and aren't from a bank (Bank of America and Capital One) that has a good program that would merit switching the card type. All our other cards are pretty young because we use them for travel hacking.
I'm considering closing two of our oldest cards (one mine, one hers), leaving only the joint card with over 10 years of credit history. It's a real pain in the ass to continue remembering to spends tiny amounts of money on these accounts to keep the issuer from closing them, and in general it just makes things more complicated when I'm already tracking other cards for travel hacking.
I'm not worried about the loss of overall credit. We don't come anywhere close to the 30% credit utilization where exceeding that dings your score. I am a little nervous about total credit history though. I've read that closed cards will stay on your record for 10 years before falling off. We plan to keep my wife's Chase Freedom Unlimited card, because that's the best no annual fee travel card right now so by then she'll have another card with 10 years history to replace hers. Of course we'll still have our joint card active that has over 10 years of history I plan to get a Chase Sapphire card eventually and then transfer that to a Freedom Unlimited card after the first year but right now Chase is denying my applications based on the number of recent open accounts.
Will I regret closing two of our oldest accounts that we don't use anymore?