Junk Mail

Now here's something we can all agree on.  We all get way more junk mail than seems even remotely necessary.   Here is, quite frankly, an appalling statistic.  100 million trees are cut down every year to satisfy junk mail.  Junk mail!  The stuff we all hate to get and throw away as soon as we see it come out of the mailbox.  There are a lot more impacts as well, but that should be staggering enough.

There is some hope, however.  Rather than duplicate all the methods in the following  website, I'll just direct you there.  http://www.obviously.com/junkmail/.  It has a lot of great tips.  My favorites are:

• Don't sign up for things like contests if you don't want to get junk mail.
  
• Don't fill out the warranty cards every time you purchase a product unless it's actually required to make your warranty void.  In most cases it's really a marketing technique for data gathering.
• Ask charities you deal with to not share your information.  One trick they share is to put in a fake middle initial and keep track of which organizations you give the fake initial to.  This may be very revealing.
• The three main credit bureaus actually sell your information to people wanting to extend you credit, such as all those annoying credit card mailings.  You can get them to stop doing this by calling 1-888-5 OPT OUT (or 1-888-567-8688).  We called this number a few yeas ago, and it cut our junk mail significantly.  Although the current economic crisis did its part to cut down on this type of junk mail, it's probably still worth it to do this.

Also, you can petition to stop mail with congress http://donotmail.org/ and reduce today at http://donotmail.org/form.php?id=50.

Although it is not explicitly junk mail, you can eliminate most of your paper utility bills and bank statements as well.  Most of these companies actually prefer to send you a monthly email to view your account rather than having to stuff an envelope and mail it to you.  Simply sign up for paperless statements.

Save some trees or there may not be any left to hug.

Jason