A tradeline we shall define here as anything that reports to your credit report. Note that many things which you pay every month such as rent, phone bills, bank accounts, etc do not usually report to your credit file.

First off, it is better to have too many tradelines than too few. Having too few tradelines will mean you will have a low, erratic, or no credit score at all. Too few tradelines means that you have to spend time building credit, which takes a great deal of time.

How many tradelines is too many? Ideally you should have around 3-4 credit cards, 1-3 department store cards, 1-2 cars or other installment accounts, and 1-2 mortgages. Having more than these numbers doesn’t necessarily ruin your score, but when possible you want to keep as close to the ideals as you can. Negative tradelines (collections, judgments, etc) as best kept to a minimum, the fewer the better.

What should you do if you have too many? Any changes to your credit files is seen as negative. That is, opening and closing accounts hurts your score in the short term. Therefore all your changes need to be done one at a time, no more than one change per month. Furthermore, you want to keep the accounts which have been open the longest (especially if you haven’t had any late payment on the account) open.

Keeping the FICO scoring system happy is not an easy thing to do. Be careful what changes you make and ask an expert is you are unsure.