I canceled my credit card today for no other reason than I don't want or need it. Adam calls it the most un-American act one can perpetrate in the 21st century, which I think means he's impressed by my chutzpah. I think.
The guy at Citibank seemed surprised that I'd be so rash as to cancel! My! Account! that he offered to tack on an extra two! zeros onto my previous limit. I declined and asked him to please close the account, which he did with no other argument.
I'm free.
This could fall into the great simplification of 2007. Or this could fall into an unspecified anti-consumer-driven-lifestyle category. I haven't decided.
Cutting up the card was liberating. I'd opened that account ten years ago -- one of those "fill out this form for a t-shirt" snags that companies use on college campuses; thank God I only did it once.
I got in trouble with the card once, running up a debt of more than $600, which doesn't sound like a lot in the grand scheme of credit card debt, but I was trying to pay for tuition and housing and incidentals on a bare bones salary, and that debt printed on the line might as well have been all the money in the world. Hell, the minimum payment might as well have been all the money in the world. It took me a couple of years to pay it off, and then a few years more of using the card to make very small purchases I could pay off immediately, to increase my credit rating or some nonsensical thinking.
The specter of the old debt lingered. Every purchase I put on that card would make my stomach knot; even when it was a pound of coffee or tank of gas. So taking the kitchen sheers to the card really did feel like taking a shiv-fashioned-out-of-cafeteria-tray to the warden's soft belly.
Liberating.
The guy at Citibank seemed surprised that I'd be so rash as to cancel! My! Account! that he offered to tack on an extra two! zeros onto my previous limit. I declined and asked him to please close the account, which he did with no other argument.
I'm free.
This could fall into the great simplification of 2007. Or this could fall into an unspecified anti-consumer-driven-lifestyle category. I haven't decided.
Cutting up the card was liberating. I'd opened that account ten years ago -- one of those "fill out this form for a t-shirt" snags that companies use on college campuses; thank God I only did it once.
I got in trouble with the card once, running up a debt of more than $600, which doesn't sound like a lot in the grand scheme of credit card debt, but I was trying to pay for tuition and housing and incidentals on a bare bones salary, and that debt printed on the line might as well have been all the money in the world. Hell, the minimum payment might as well have been all the money in the world. It took me a couple of years to pay it off, and then a few years more of using the card to make very small purchases I could pay off immediately, to increase my credit rating or some nonsensical thinking.
The specter of the old debt lingered. Every purchase I put on that card would make my stomach knot; even when it was a pound of coffee or tank of gas. So taking the kitchen sheers to the card really did feel like taking a shiv-fashioned-out-of-cafeteria-tray to the warden's soft belly.
Liberating.
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