It’s no secret. I have too many credit cards, opened to receive certain rewards or take advantage of limited time only offers. It has actually improved my credit score, which is now around 780. But it is hard to manage my wallet full of plastic.

Recently, I received an automatic phone call from GE Card Services, the company that administers the Gap store credit card. The robot kindly asked me to give them a call. I ignored it.

The next day, a bill came in the mail for my balance plus a late fee and finance charge. In total, I’d paid about $30 for my absent-mindedness.

I couldn’t believe that I’d forgotten to pay, but sure enough, no record existed of an automatic bill pay from my checking account.

So I called the Gap. I had no good excuse and decided to come clean. I told the customer service rep that I thought I’d paid my bill but hadn’t. Since I’ve been a good customer, I hoped he would reverse the late fee. Within seconds he agreed. Not only that, but within seconds, without argument, he reversed the finance charge as well.

The story acts as a reminder that it never, ever, hurts to ask. And if he’d have said no, it never, ever hurts to ask for a supervisor.

Have any negotiating strategies that have helped you lower your interest rate or waive fees?

And here’s an excerpt from Scott Bilker’s book “Talk Your Way Out of Credit Card Debt.”

Geez, I always feel like I’m apologizing for not updating poor Ka-Blog as much as I’d like. Believe me, the ideas are stacked to high heaven, but finding the time to write is always the challenge.

This week, on top of my writing for the paper, my parents have been in town in search of a house. They’ve decided that they’d like to retire near the grand kids and miraculously sold a house in the Detroit suburbs in little time. As an editor of mine said when I told him the news, “the housing market has hit bottom.” We’ll see….

So they’re searching for a new abode and told me something I found extremely interesting and annoying– lenders don’t like to make small mortgages. According to their mortgage broker, lenders will charge a higher rate for loans that are less than $70,000. So he suggested they take out a loan that big and invest the rest. Uh, no thanks.

The other thing they can do is “recast” the loan, which means pay off a chunk of the mortgage with some of the cash they’ll have from their home sale, and then have the lender re-amortize the payments so they have smaller payments based on the new loan amount. But the lender will charge for this, of course– a couple hundred bucks according to my Dad.

Any mortgage experts out there who can explain to me why a mortgage company won’t take out a smaller loan without charging an interest rate premium, except because they are greedy?

Another thing to complain about while I’m exercising that muscle? Those credit card checks that come in the mail. These checks are coming fast and furious to my address these days. Is that because creditors know that the more strapped Americans feel, the more they might be tempted or might need to use the checks? Or are creditors worried that people are going to charge less these days and want to entice with teaser rates?

I don’t know, but these checks to me are invitations for identity theft and credit scams, sitting there in mailboxes just waiting to be used. In a perfect world, credit card companies would have to ask me if I want these checks. My answer would always be, uh, no thanks!

I do most of my bill paying online, mostly because I hate having to rig up my ancient shredder when the credit card bills come (although sometimes I figure rolling it up in a dirty diaper is just as good a id-theft stopper– if you want my money and my life that badly, go for it).

But a new study from the Electronic Payments Association, an organization that admittedly has a vested interest in getting people to chuck paper statements, found that doing so can save trees.

Obvious? Yes. But did you know…

Every year Americans mail 26 billion bills and statements and 9 billion payments in paper form. The production and transportation of those paper bills, statements, and payments consumes the following resources:

· 755 million pounds of paper

· 9 million trees

· 512 million gallons of gasoline

You can calculate your own Financial Paper Footprint.

And check out additional resources at PayItGreen.org.

A poll by Creditcards.com found just 22 percent of participants opt out of receiving credit card bills in the mail. I’m not surprised. It’s called inertia.

How about you? If not paperless statements, what have you done to jump on the going green hay ride? And are you noticing a financial benefit?

I was talking last week with Carlson School of Management Professor David Hopkins about what it will take to get people to stop living beyond their means.

A branding expert, Hopkins said maybe we needed a public service campaign the likes of Smokey the Bear, or the crying Native American canoeing through dirty water for saving and spending.

Anti-smoking ads are the latest example.

I was proposing an ad featuring seniors digging through dumpsters or eating cat food because they have no money in retirement.

Have an ad idea that you think would scare Americans into saving? Then read on.

Students (including grad students) ages 14 and older can win $5,000 for school expenses if their public service announcement for so-called “debt disease” is picked as the winner. The web-based video contest at www.KeepItInYourPants.org–a site worth visiting even if you have no plans to enter the contest. The contest is co-sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the League of Young Voters.

You have until March 19th to send in your entry.

The sponsors say the contest is a response to readily available credit for college students:

“Credit card debt can ruin your life, spreading and growing like a disease,” said Stephen Lerner, SEIU Assistant to the President and Director of the Private Equity Project. “We’re warning young people of the dangers of ‘Debt Disease’—and urging them to protect themselves the same way they would against any other dangerous and contagious social epidemic.”

What do you think? Will such a campaign work?

I wrote my upcoming column (which is moving permanently from Friday to Sunday, by the way) on my experience with credit card rewards. In a nutshell, I have a lot of rewards cards and need to streamline my wallet. But bottom line, I’ve earned a nice amount of freebies with my cards. I’ll post the link to my column when it’s available.

I figured readers were thinking that I wrecked my credit score with my card collecting habits. Not so!

I checked my FICO score on Wednesday