Q: I opened a credit card in stores this week . If I never use it, will it still hurt my credit score
A: Opening a new credit card account can affect your short-term credit score, whether you use it or not. Indeed, most credit scores take into account any new credit you have open when calculating your score. Opening a new credit line is generally seen as having an effect slightly negative on your credit score. However , adding a new loan to your existing credit lines (other credit cards, etc.), you increase the total amount of credit available to you that can be a good thing. I'll explain below how it could actually help you in the long term .
Using the popular FICO score as a baseline of how credit scores are calculated, you can see from the chart below that there are 5 factors considered. What are your payment history (you make your payments on time), the amounts you owe, the length of your credit history, new credit and types of credit you use.
The two factors that come into play with your situation are "New credit" and "the amounts you need." Although applying for a new card credit can hurt your short term some credit score, increasing the overall amount of credit available to help you improve your credit utilization which can help your score in the long term.
for example, if you already had a total credit available to you $ 7.500 value and you used $ 5,000 tax credit, your credit utilization rate would be 67% ($ 5000 / $ 7500). But if the department store credit card added another $ 2,500 for the total amount of credit available to you and you were still only using $ 5000 of credit a month your new ratio would be 50% ($ 5,000 / 10 $ 000). Since you are now using only 50% of your available credit, this should help to improve your credit score over time. And since "amounts due" constitute about 30% of your total credit score this is a good thing.
The takeaway here is that while getting that big credit card store could ding your score for a month or two, if you never use your credit utilization will help to improve, which will help your credit score over time - a good thing. But if you use it, it will not help your credit score because your report will not really improve much.
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