<prompt> Human: Now that there is no balance on the account, should I go ahead and cancel the credit card? We are pretty sure were not buying anything from them anymore, so there is no need for that credit card. Will it hurt my credit score if I do cancel it?Assistant: Its going to continue to add to your open credit, reduce your overall utilization, and continue to improve your AAoA. If theres no fee, theres really no reason to close itHuman: We can keep it open, and have a healthy amount of available credit right now through that line of credit. We only have 1 credit card through a bank, and this line of credit through Jared; youre saying keep it open and itll improve our overall credit, even if it has no balance?Assistant: Thats right, because you have credit available to you that you are not using your score goes up due to a FICO factor called credit utilization. The higher the utilization the lower this component of the score and thus youll have a lower overall score. Since you will have the credit open but wont have any balance, you will have 0 utilization for this card which will help your score.edit: The utilization factor of your score is determined by all of the revolving credit you have utilized divided by all of the available revolving credit. So if your other bank card has a high utilization rate having 0 on the Jared card may not impact your score significantly or at all. Human: Our capital one credit card is hurting us with high interest rates 24.99, and it is almost up to its max credit limit. We are planning on using our savings to completely pay off the debt and only charge around 40 a month on that card and pay it off immediately. My question is, in this scenario, wouldnt Jared hurt our credit since its utilization is 0 and my other credit card will be something like 5, so the average would be only 2.5?  <response>: Low utilization of your credit is not a problem, high utilization is. 