Thursday, November 1, 2007

Cutting Off the Credit Card Offers at the Pass

This summer, after a long hiatus, we started receiving credit card offers in our mail. This includes my 19-year-old. They are pre-approved and ever cheekier. My husband received a check in the mail yesterday, which when you cash it, activates a new credit card. Creepy!
That did it. I spent about one minute researching and found an opt-out site for these pre-approved cards. Companies check your credit and if you're worthy (no good deed goes unpunished) you are "eligible" for a flood of junk mail offers. This site removes your name from the data bases from which the credit companies glean info. If you input the form electronically it's removes you for five years; if you download the form, sign it, and mail it, it's permanent. I suspect last time I did it electronically and the recent deluge is probably from the 5 years running out. This time I am going with the mail-in form for each of our household residents.
Eliminating these offers from our mail is all upside: fewer wasted resources, no time wasted in shredding them, and no chance of their selling our names to yet other companies, generating even more junk mail.
It takes 5 minutes - seems well worth it to me.
(photo by Squarehe.com - I'm going to attempt to credit the image makers from now on.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I registered for this about s years ago and I still get some offers. I deffinately get less but I still get some.

Anonymous said...

Was there supposed to be a link in this article?

Betsy Teutsch said...

here's the link. perhaps the burgundy color for the link makes it less obvious.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t