Hilarious and horribly depressing

I woke up to this hilarious e-mail from my mother. She really ought to do infomercials:

"You got this great booklet in the mail. If you save 4,000,000 points you can get a Toyota Prius Hybrid. So go guy go cuz you have 21,554 points already!!!!!!

Or right now you can get some sugar bowls or a bottle of perfume or a cordless keyboard or an electric skillet, a salt and pepper set or a pouring rain shower head. I kid you not!!. Man the list is endless. You could even get a new toaster oven at just 18,500 points which still gives you enough for a knife set too!!

WOWZERS. Who would have known that for going into regular debt, you would benefit so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh and I forgot the professional food slicer to slice and dice your meat and cheese--- there are paper thin settings ( I can see an actual picture of the meat and cheese it must have cut ). You could start your own door to door meat slicing business. Plus the ice cream maker is only 14,000 points so I really don’t know how you would choose between that and your own meat slicer.

But wait Chris. If you can just wait and spend your heart out some more on that little piece of plastic, you could get to 30,000 points for your own espresso/Cappuccino maker and wouldn’t that be a dear reminder of Oxford days. Or better yet 45,000 points gets you an elegantly styled, classic black lamb skin jacket featuring a textured pebble finish.. Now wouldn’t that be worth killing a little creature for.

The book is just too heavy to send but if you go on RBCREWARDS.COM you can view all this and more booty with your very own eyes. And you can even redeem your rewards on line.

Note p.8 does have Chapters gift certificates for 3,000 pts for a $25 gift card. $175 worth of books when you get back would be great. I might have to get me one of these after all."

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Now, although I found my mom's e-mail highly entertaining, I find it frightening and somewhat disheartening when I consider that 1 point = 1 dollar. That means in the past 6 years I've spent over $21,000 on my credit card alone. Holy smokes! That averages out to 3 1/2 grand per year.... I know that recently some of it has gone to overseas flights and what have you, but what about the rest of it? It's shameful to think what a poor steward I've been over the years, and how much more I could have done for others with those funds. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that one aspect of my job entails adding interest to people's accounts, and it's amazing to see how much they make in a year just by letting their money sit there.

Now that I am more or less financially independent, I think I'm starting to get a better sense of the value of money (at least, more so than when I was in uni or high school), and I am giving away more than ever before, however this shows me that it's quite obvious that I still have a long way to go.

(As a postscript: It's pretty ridiculous that spending $3,000 gets you a $25 gift certificate. That works out to making back 0.00833 cents per dollar....not including the $35 annual fee. So in order to get that cappuccino maker 'for free,' i need only spend another $8,500 - or I could just buy one outright for a couple hundred)