How To Stop Credit Card Offers
Learn how the Credit Card industry works, and how you can get rid of those wasteful, unsolicited credit card offers you get in your mail day after day, once and for all!
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Step 1:
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Credit Card Companies
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Let's face it, the credit card industry is huge. Banks are making record breaking profits from credit cards every year. Credit card companies even target people with bad credit because those people are more likely to get even more debt, which means more profit from interest and late payments.
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Step 2:
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The Figures
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In 1991, the amount of credit cards per 1,000 people, in the United States alone, was 2,370. That's 2.73 credit cards for every man, woman, and child in just the United States.
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Step 3:
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Like Candy On Halloween
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Even worse is the number of preapproved credit and debit card offers we receive in the mail. Do we really need these offers? No. Banks are handing out credit cards like candy on Halloween. Anyone can get one at any time if they want to.
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Step 4:
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Hidden Numbers
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Tossed out unsolicited mail is a prime target of Identity Thieves. There's enough information to get whatever they want to steal your identity and ruin your credit. How much unsolicited credit card offers go out in the mail each year? The real number of offers is a closely guarded secret by the industry.
Just try to do a search that shows you the actual numbers. You can't find the information. They don't want you to know. How many offers to you get in your mail every week?
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Step 5:
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Weigh Your Mail
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Let's be conservative and say that each person gets just one ounce of credit card offers in the mail. Multiply that by 52 weeks. Divide that by 16 to get how many pounds of mail that is. Divide by 2,000 to get the number of tons. That's 487,500 tons of unsolicited mail each year. You can bet the real number is a lot higher.
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Step 6:
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Impact On The Globe
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Think about how many trees it takes to make a half-million tons of paper. Add in the fuel cost for manufacturing, printing, transporting, and delivering that mail, and you'd begin to see that these mailings use an unbelievable amount of our precious resources.
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Step 7:
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Solution One
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What if we could stop that mail? Well, we can. We can stop it dead in its tracks. One way is to write to the four major credit reporting agencies and request that they freeze them. [The four company names appear on the screen: Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, Innova]
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Step 8:
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Solution Two
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Here's a simpler way. Go to OptOutPrescreen.com and click the button at the bottom of the page. In less than one minute, you can choose to opt out of all credit card offers, plus insurance and mortgage offers forever, or for five years if you prefer. You can always change your mind at any time, and opt back in using the same website. But, do we really need to? No, we don't.
And, that's how you can make a huge impact on global warming and energy conservation right here and right now. All it takes is one minute to make our world a cleaner and better place for ourselves and our children. Think about that.
