How Credit Card Inactivity Impacts Your Credit Scores

It’s strange, but from time to time, I get a small pop in the volume of the same question. It happened to me last week. I was asked four times on the same day about the impact of credit card account inactivity on your credit reports and credit scores.

What this probably means is someone with a much more visible profile made some statement on TV or radio and their answer wasn’t believable enough.

So let’s tackle the question at hand: how does credit card inactivity impact your credit?

The knee-jerk answer is, “it doesn’t”, but that leaves too much meat on the bone. Account inactivity CAN have an impact on your credit, but it would be indirect.

Help Free Your Grad from Debt

by Kim Clark

Forget sheepskin. The way colleges are loading students up with debt, they should start printing diplomas on hankies.

Among 2012 seniors who borrowed for their education, the average debt load will likely hit a record $28,700, projects Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org. That amounts to a $330 standard monthly payment.

To handle that easily, he estimates, one would need a salary of $40,000. Unfortunately, half of all recent grads are either unemployed or underemployed, as an AP analysis found.

So what's a parent of a recent grad to do?

You don't want your offspring to suffer. But you've also got priorities of your own, like saving for retirement and paying back college loans taken out in your name. Experts suggest this three-step plan to help your children without hurting yourself.

Are Low Interest Rates Good?

In a perfectly succinct follow-up to Last Friday's Santelli-Kaminsky CNBC-aberration discussion of the now status quo financial repression (low interest rate/QE environment), this two-and-a-half minute clip asks and answers the seemingly simple question of whether low interest rates are good. 

Borrowing and saving are really about whether to consume more now or later (or more later and less now) and we agree with Professor Antony Davies that these decisions are best left to individuals - and not the nanny-state/Fed. Each person's judgment of what is best for them is replaced by the Federal reserve's judgment and the free market interest has become a thing of the past (for now). Lower rates don't mean more spending; they mean more spending now and less in the future.