Back in 2005 I wrote a post called Cancel those “old” credit cards.
The post itself was a recap of what happened when I forgot to cancel an old CIBC credit card, in fact the exact quote is:
About a month ago I got my monthly CIBC Visa statement. Now, I stopped using this card about a year ago, in favor of a President’s Choice Mastercard (which gives me grocery points). I open the statement assuming my normal 50 cent credit balance (I like pissing off these folks by overpaying by less than a dollar, and thus their systems then send me monthly statements, costing them money), but NO, I owed $60!
The writing style is very much on the rant side of things, and for some reason I hadn’t figured out that bold might work just as well as overly capitalizing words for emphasis.
After a ranting explanation of how I got the fee taken off the bill I summed things up with:
The Moral of this Essay?
- If I had CANCEL‘ed this card, this would NOT have happened in the first place!
- ALWAYS check your credit card statements (I find at least 1 or 2 spurious charges on my cards EVERY YEAR).
- With all of the personal information theft going on (if you have GM Visa card, you are now a victim) having the minimum “points of attack†(i.e. credit cards) minimizes your possible damage in this kind of incident.
All of these points are valid (if not a little overly dramatically stated), I am impressed that I actually caught the whole identity theft angle on this as well, but it is important to cancel those cards that you are not using, or they can end up biting you in the butt.
