If you have that many cards it won't hurt that much at all to shed a few. keep the oldest ones that don't have an annual fee. If some of your old cards are issued by chase and you are going to be applying for chase cards I would cancel those as Chase will only let you have so many and so much credit. probably goes for the other banks as well. I would start with each you and the wife getting the Citi 75k AA visa and Chase Sapphire 50k. That will be a total of $9k spend over 3 months or so, if that is going to be a problem I would stretch it out some.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. I didn't figure it would be a huge deal. You've got to shed some of those at some point, right? I've actually been looking at those exact cards, so good to know my thoughts fall in line with someone else's.
What's the max number of cards that would be acceptable to apply for in a relatively short amount of time? Was also looking at the Southwest RR Premier Visa (Chase, I believe) since we are looking at going to Vegas in March (direct from KC). Wife needs some points to put her over the top for free flights, and I'm far behind her. There's no required spend on that and it would be churned prior to the annual fee. That's our first planned trip as of right now, so I'd like to take advantage of that, but also don't want to miss out on the 75k AA and Sapphire points. But, don't know if it would be advisable to hit 3 or 4 new cards in a short time frame.
