Last week I got a replacement card for one of the Mastercards I'd had since college. I hadn't used the account for more than a year (maybe even two), and I looked at this very generic-looking card (it was silver with small black pinstripes), and I realized this was originally my UNM alumni card. Something happened along the way (probably during all those banking consolidations in the last five years), and it wasn't an alumni card anymore, it was just a plain jane, run-of-the-mill credit card that I didn't use.

I rummaged around my desk and found the old card and the other two credit cards I'd stopped using at about the same time I stopped using the former UNM alumni one. I looked at this small stack of plastic and wondered what it was worth.

Flash back to a few years ago, just after I decided to stop producing Lies--an underground magazine that was focused on weird ideas and stories rather than a music movement or anything very specific. It was a lot of fun--the best job I ever had--but I went into debt producing the bad boy. The three credit cards I still had (but didn't use anymore) were the ones that made it happen. They were my expense accounts as well as my way of keeping the joneses away.

Before getting a low interest loan to pay all of them off, I would routinely transfer large chunks of my debt from one card to another. It was a way of paying on the cards without actually paying money on any of them. There are a few other tricks you can do when you're in this kind of debt, but in the end they don't work because the balance never gets smaller.

So now, with my loan in its last year of payments and a job that covers my expenses plus some extras, I was looking at these cards that got me where I wanted to be for a time. Why did I still have them? Why didn't I close them way back when I paid them all off?

The answer was simple to me. I was making sure I was out of trouble. If not, then I might need them again. They were a safety net that, thankfully, I never needed.

Yesterday I looked at this stack of cards again and sat down at the phone to cancel all of them. They were remarkably similar in look. All of them were silver (even though only one began life as a silver card), plain and had little personality. If there is one thing about the credit card I still use, I can always say it's not completely silver. It's got pretty little designs on it, it's got a bit of personality. I had one Discover (the first card I ever got) and two Master Cards. And they were about to become completely useless pieces of plastic.

Saturday afternoon is a pretty good day to call the credit card 800 numbers, apparently, because I got through relatively quickly to an operator for two of them. They made passing attempts to keep my business (this is the training call operators get--retention policy), but I kept my resolution and canceled. The first card was worth a little over $6000 in credit. The second, $5500.

And then came the former UNM alumni card. It took about fifteen minutes to get through to the operator, after I laughed through the account check (this one was worth a bit more than $15,000 in credit) and the extension where you can get a pamphlet explaining how credit cards work, but when I did finally talk to a person, she was the quickest worker of them all. No attempts to keep my business, just a few quick keystrokes and the account was closed.

I hung up the phone and got the scissors. In a few quick snaps, I cut up close to $27,000 in credit.

There was a bit of relief in this action. Since getting the replacement card a few days earlier, I wondered about the three accounts I never used. They didn't weigh heavily on my mind, but I did a few what ifs. What if they are stolen--I wouldn't even suspect their loss for a month before a statement showed up saying that I'd spent my credit limit or more.

And then there's the creepier one. What if I looked at those three cards and realized that they could, in essence, buy the production of a movie like "Clerks," which was financed entirely on credit cards for about the same amount of money these three cards were worth. So under the slicer they went. No temptation for me. For every "Clerks," there are 100 crappy movies that never do anything. Maybe 1000 crappy movies. Risk versus reward, baby, risk versus reward.

There will be bigger relief when I finish paying off my loan. It will mean a big chunk of my paycheck is suddenly going to me instead of someone else. It will mean that the job is done paying back the sins of other jobs and other lives. But mostly it will mean that the lesson is over and I can get around to screwing up my life in different ways.

Ahhh, financial freedom. The smell is so sweet.

Matt Worley got a neon slinky when he opened his UNM alumni card account back in the early 90s. The slinky left for parts unknown a long time ago.