I’m finding myself increasingly obsessed with watching CNN and reading post after post on financial and credit matters.  In fact as I write this post, I realize CNN has replaced my Ipod as back ground “music”. While I’m trying not to allow the Wall Street woes affect me too much, it’s nearly impossible.  We have a few credit cards (thankfully we don’t have high balances), a mortgage and 3 kids pre-college age. So in my quest to ingest as much credible information as possible on the credit crisis today and the steps I should be taking, I discovered a really neat new website, CreditFYI. 

My favorite thing about CreditFYI is they speak to you in laymen’s terms.   The other thing that I love is it’s interactive.  Just submit a question on any financial topic and one of their credit and ID theft experts will answer it.  It’s a “one stop shop” for all of your credit questions, up to the minute financial news, mortgage calculators, car loan providers, how to guides and credit reports.  They also provide you with some pretty cool tools such as estimating your credit score, because in this time of limited lending you really need to know your score and work on ways to improve it.  You can also do some credit card comparison shopping (it’s a really good time to consolidate and lower your interest rates) but I think I’ll just stay away from that one for now!

There are many informative videos and podcasts and I particularly liked this article on reasons NOT to close out your unused credit cards .  I didn’t know closing your credit cards could actually hurt your credit rating.  With my spending temptation I’m on a mission to cut up my cards as soon as I have zero balances!   Guess I’ll be hiding them in a drawer moving forward. 

And there’s one other benefit of CreditFYI that no one else offers - a free identity theft monitoring service that doesn’t require you to give out your personal data.  ID theft is growing every day and with today’s economy it’s an even greater concern.