So marketing guru Seth Godin wanted to help everyone out with some spring cleaning. He suggested you call your credit card companies and threaten to cancel if they don’t lower your interest rates. It’s a good idea, but he suggests you’ll save a few hundred dollars.

That’s true–if you have credit card debt. If you don’t have credit card debt, well, it won’t save you anything until you get some credit card debt (which I don’t recommend). I realize credit card debt is pretty standard, especially among my generation. But that should be a bad thing.

Go ahead and get that interest rate lowered if you can, but don’t stop there. Mother-approved spring cleaning would mean paying off that credit card. It might take until the next spring cleaning (or the next one), but that would be worth rejoicing over. Boom.