 TITLE: Can You Combine Credit Card Accounts? CONTENT: Benefits of Combining Credit Cards\n----------------------------------\nThere are several benefits of combining credit card accounts.\n*   **Tracking your finances**: More credit cards means more balances to track and more statement dates and deadlines to juggle. By consolidating your credit cards, you can manage your spending and payments more easily, which can also reduce your risk of accidentally missing a payment and racking up late fees and interest.\n*   **Lowering your annual fees**: Combining credit cards can also help you avoid paying annual fees on the ones you don't keep. That's an especially good strategy if there are cards with benefits you are not using to their fullest.\n*   **Preserving your credit score and limit**: Unlike simply closing a credit card, combining your accounts will usually preserve your total line of credit with the issuer, as well as the average age of your accounts. It's important to do so because those are two key factors in determining your credit score.\n*   **Fewer cards, more spending power**: By combining your credit limits from several accounts onto a single card, you can boost your spending power with the one you keep, and make it easier to charge large purchases.\n*   **Consolidated payments**: Combining credit card accounts is also a chance to merge balances you might be carrying with your various cards and concentrate on paying down the outstanding amounts. END