Opt out of junk mail

It took me a matter of about 10 minutes whilst listening to Abigor & drinking a hot chocolate to stencil the lettering for my sign, fill it in with a black pen, cut out the clear waterproof tape stuff & to go & stick it on our mailbox!

I moved here 2.5 months ago. The amount of junk mail that we have received has been OBSCENE as I stated in a previous entry. I never know why it is that us humans can take so long to acheive small tasks. Though this task is small it will be highly beneficial for the following reasons

*Saving trees – the more people that opt out of junk mail the less junk will be printed
*Simplifying my life – not having to sort it all out for recycling/rubbish collection day.
*Decluttering the house/a tidier lounge!
*Not being bombarded with consumerist advertising for products I do not want or need
*Knowing that I am no longer a part of this problem

Worth doing indeed!

So… on discussing this with the other side of my Brain it has been decided that rather than using a computer print out for our sign I am going to stencil it using this Old English Style font. I had almost forgotten that I own that stencil! Shall be a project for the weekend.

Ooh, just printed out a sign at work, now just need to waterproof it & stick it on the mail box. Hoorah!

I have been intending on making a sign, printing it & putting it on our mailbox. We have lived in our house just over two months, receive obscene amounts of junk mail yet somehow this still has not happened. The time is now.

What’s not to love about completing this entry? No more useless credit card offers, fewer catalogs, no more magazine subscriptions to materials I don’t have time to enjoy. I’m not tempted to mindlessly purchase things I don’t need, there’s less paper to recycle, and my postal carrier is less burdened by the excess. Best of all, now I can spend my time writing & receiving letters instead of sorting bulk mail.

You should try it, too. After all, aren’t we all really more interested in personal mail than junk mail?

I’ve contacted companies and cancelled about fifteen catalogues so far. I save them for a week, then contact the stores by email or phone. It doesn’t take very long-about 1/2 hour total each week-and I’m enjoying the side benefits:
1) I will no longer have to cart stacks of catalogues, every week, to my recyling box downstairs, then put them in my car trunk and dump them into the local magazine bin. That saves me time and sweat—good because I’m notoriously lazy.
2) I’ve mentioned it before, but not having the catalogues helps me avoid the desire to consume. Plus, I used to justify the catalogues as giving me ideas for holiday gift-giving. Now I’m actually going to have to think about what to give and have made a commitment to both spend less money on gives and to shop locally.
3) I think my postal worker like me better now. She smiled at me when I saw her and said she’s noticed I’m getting less junk mail.

I’ll give this one another week or so before I call it done and “worth doing” (it is, you know). But before I do…I ask all you folks on 43T: are there any other ways to opt out that I should know about?

Well, I filed my request to stop receiving so many useless credit-card offers. It may be my imagination, but it already seems like I get less mail. The next step? Contacting companies that send me catalogues. Don’t want ‘em, don’t need ‘em.

Another upside to all this streamlining—not being tempted into mindless spending. Whoo-hoo! That will help me achieve some of my other goals.

I get tons of junk mail, and I mean truly junk mail, every week. Credit-card offers, solicitations from charities, catalogs from companies I haven’t even heard of. I get angry about all the junk mail, especially when I think about 1) how much paper is being wasted 2) how these materials actually encourage me to spend money I don’t have, and 3) the possibility of my identity/personal information being ripped off by someone else who might steal this information. So I’ve started the process of opting-out of as much junk mail as possible. I think it will help me simplfy my life, a theme of many of my goals here.

If you’d like to opt-out too, you can start by visiting these two websites: The FTC’s information on consumer privacy, http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/protect.htm and the Center for Democracy and Techology site, http://opt-out.cdt.org/