Entry tags:

daily happiness

I forgot to mention the happiest thing yesterday! After waking up Thursday to find that I'd been slapped with a $49 fee on an old credit card because they've decided to charge a yearly membership fee if you don't use the card, I called to see if I could get it reversed. The guy gave me no trouble about reversing it, but said he would have to cancel the card to do so. Fine with me, since I'd been planning to cancel it anyway, since I have no plans to use it and there's no reason to keep it if they're going to charge me a fee to do so.

Anyway, this is the second time in the past year or two that this has happened, so it finally got me off my ass to go through our cards and cancel the old unused ones. You see, although this year we finally got ourselves out of debt, for many, many years we had $20,000+ in credit card debt and were constantly juggling it between cards to try and get lower interest rates. Which meant we signed up for a lot of new cards if they offered a cheaper rate for balance transfers. So the cards just sort of accumulated over the years.

Between the two of us, we called and cancelled about ten cards, leaving us with three cards each. Which I still think is overkill, but just in case we ever need them, they're there. We have two that we usually use and pay off immediately if we need to use a card for something, but I'll try to rotate them so that they all get used a bit and thus not hit with any fees if these guys decide to institute them as well.

It felt really good to get those cards sorted. I'd been meaning to do so for ages, because we really just do not need all of those cards sitting around. It also made me think about how happy I am to be debt free, really for the first time in my adult life. It's such a weight off my shoulders, especially considering less than two years ago I couldn't see a way out of it and thought I'd be crippled by that debt for the rest of my life.