In an effort to get rid of all debt and opportunities for debt I canceled my Discover card this morning.  First I called their toll free number and spoke to Penny in Utah.  After telling her that I wanted to cancel my card she asked why.  I asked her if she knew who Dave Ramsey was and she said, “No.” So I said that he was a financial adviser and I was closing my account on his advice.  She said she was sorry to hear that I wanted to close the account and that I would have to be transferred to someone else to close the account.  Apparently she didn’t have permission to close the account.  Right.  And monkey might fly out of my bum.  A recording told me I was headed to Arizona.

So I was on hold for a good while, just in case my patience would run out and I’d choose to keep the Discover card.  Diana in Arizona picked up the phone and began by re-assuring me that I was a valued card member since 2006.  She then asked me what she could help me with.  I told her I wanted to close the account.  She told me that closing out the account would take a bit of time and began her script/schpiel/drivel.  She had numerous reasons to keep the account alive.  At one point in time she was telling me that her dad earned $400.00 a year from Discover card.  Who is Diana’s dad?  Why does his financial practice of utilizing the card effect me?  Should I also have named my daughters Diana 1 and Diana 2 so that I could be even more like her dad?  What kind of car does he drive because surely I would want to be like this wise, older man!

Then the gasoline prices came into play: I could make money on gasoline!  Like my car didn’t have any expenses except gas and that Discover was going to pay me to have gas in my car.  Nope.  No dice.  Please cancel my card.

Ah!  Credit scores impact various things in life and I should keep this card so that my credit score could go up and the world would be a better place!  Nope, please cancel my card.

So I pulled out my big gun, the one that you’re looking at right now: I told her I was going to blog about this experience because it was abnormal and not customer friendly.  Miracle of miracles she said the account was closed and that I would still have 90 days to call back and ask them to re-activate it.  No thanks, I think I’ll avoid that headache a second time.

As a US Citizen, who is trying to be financially responsible, I am disheartened by the blatant abuse of debt that the federal government has displayed.  If you look at the current total federal debt you will see that the United States, at the time of this writing is in debt by over nine trillion dollars (which is their conservative estimate).  This debt has not been so severe historically and reflects the general attitude of the three branches of the United States Government.  They have had a paradigm shift as has been reflected by their constituents in some regards.

I would love to see the government try to operate on a genuine, limited by the amount of income, budget.   According to the latest information I could find (from 2005) the government received around $934,703,000,000.00 in taxes from US citizens [this does not include other debts that were paid to the US from other countries and returns on any federal investments].  That number should indicate a budget of around nine hundred billion dollars.  If the federal government were to spend one tenth of that (ninety billion dollars) to pay off debt and stopped accruing more debt it would take it one hundred years to pay off that debt!  That’s a long time, but its possible that they could pay off the debt with some major trimming.

This site is not about political activism, its about financial management, and so I don’t want to go into politics on a specific level.  However, I do think that the federal government and the state governments need to get their act together or the problem of debt will effect the US economy severely – worse than its current dollar value decline.  I don’t have an answer as to where ninety billion dollars can be trimmed out of the budget (plus the $536,550,000,000.00 a year of excess debt they’re accruing) but I think it is reasonable for the United States citizen to communicate with their congressmen to get things changed.

Of course if I were to try to live like the US government I would accrue  $147.00 a day in new debt.  Or to put that into perspective $53,655.00 a year.  And if I live for another 40 years operating like that I would have over 783 million dollars in debt.  I bet I would have the sweetest hummer, though.  Oh, and a great sized house.  And I would have every iPod ever made.  And a recording studio.  And interest payments like you wouldn’t believe!  I would have to pay 3.62 million dollars a month in interest [assuming a federally available 5% interest rate]. Sweet googly-moogly that’s just insane!

Be financially responsible, tell your government they should be responsible, and for goodness sake don’t run with scissors!