Credit Scoring Expert speaks candidly about his personal growth and asks respected writers to share content to help others improve their life.

I regularly counsel people against letting their credit cards go inactive, but the repercussions of inactive credit cards can be a little bit of a mystery. Here are a couple of the reasons against it: First of all, the account may eventually drop off your credit report. Though this wouldn’t happen immediately, after seven to 10 years of inactivity, it simply won’t be included in the formula for determining your credit score. And some credit card companies might choose to stop reporting your inactive account even sooner, meaning it might drop from your credit report within a year or two of inactivity. Regardless, the length of time you have had credit comprises a big chunk of your score, so having it drop from your report will likely hurt your score. But the more important reason is that an inactive account can mess with your utilization rate (the account you carry in proportion to your limit). Let’s say, for instance, that you have a credit card with a $10,000 limit and a $3,000 balance. You have a 30 percent balance, the most you can have to tilt the scoring formula in your favor. Then you stop using the card, but you pay only the minimum required. Your credit card’s policy might be to drop your limit after a period of inactivity, so it reduces your limit to $5,000. Your balance, however, has only been reduced to $2,800. Now your utilization rate is 56 percent, which isn’t good from a credit-scoring perspective. The good news is that the solution is relatively simple. So long as your credit score hasn’t dropped since you opened the card, you can likely call and get the card reactivated. Be sure to specify that you want to reactive the account, not open a new one. That said, you might not receive the same limit you once had, so it is best to never let a credit card go inactive. Nowadays, this is easier than ever. You can create an automatic “bill pay” using the credit card to pay a regular bill (such as cable), and then create another automatic “bill pay” from your checking account to pay the credit card bill, which means you won’t pay interest, but will keep all credit cards active.