The Credit Card Reset

I just did a credit card reset. Basically I'm not really good with credit cards. I've basically been in debt since my first Discover card during my freshmen year at college. It took me a while to discover that credit cards was not the same as 'free money'. I have things relatively under control but it sure would be nice to not to have that minimum payment every month so I can have extra money to buy some stupid stuff that I don't need. Maybe even finally open a savings account.

The one lesson I learned is to not have a whole bunch of credit cards floating around. What I do is I take my the card with all the debt (Big Daddy I call him) and I'll transfer the balance around to 0% cards until the time period runs out and then keep switching it up. And I have one other card that I use to buy stuff. Anyway, I was looking at my credit card statement today and I realized I had a whole bunch of 'automatic' charges going thru every month. Some for stuff I don't even need. Some AOL membership that jumped to $23 a month somehow. I originally had signed up for the $5.99 5 hour a month plan for when I travel. Not $23! Screw that! I also have that stupid chat room on my site that no one ever goes into. $4.99 a month. Some spam protector service that I signed up to use on my home email. $5.99 here. $3.99 there. Some charge for like $3.75 that I don't even recognize. It just adds up and it gets annoying because I keep meaning to cancel or investigate that stuff. But I'm lazy and lazy. So month after month I'll make a mental note to cancel those automatic charges... but then I'll lose the mental note.

So today I got to the point where I got fed up and I did what I've done a bunch of times before, I called up the credit card company and told them I lost my card. What happens then is all these charges that are 'automatic' can't automatically go through anymore because the credit card number becomes void. Then I can take my time turning stuff back on one by one again if I want to. If I don't want to turn it back on I just don't give them the new number. It saves me the hassle of running around canceling everything.

It's a nice refreshing way to kind of clear the decks on credit cards plus it's probably safe to do anyway once in a while so no one can use your old credit card number that's floating around. Just my two cents. Maybe I'm the only dope who loses control over credit cards like that but that's what I do and the reset is what I do when I do it so then it's done.

ok bye!

tOdd