Dear Liz: Yesterday I lost my wallet along with four major credit cards. I called the card companies to report the loss. They canceled the cards, created a new account for each and are sending me new cards. They told me the new accounts would be exactly the same as the old ones in all aspects. But will this closing of old accounts and creation of new ones hurt my credit scores?
Answer: Typically, no. The information from your old accounts usually is just transferred to your new accounts at the three major credit bureaus. If you pull your credit reports from http://www.annualcreditreport.com, the only site that provides your federally mandated free look at your credit reports, you’ll see that the opening date for your accounts is the date you opened the original accounts, not the date the replacement accounts were opened. Your history of payments, credit limits and other details of the accounts will also show up under the new account numbers.
If for some reason this is not the case, you can call your issuers and ask them to export the data for the old account into the new one.
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