A Little Trick

Here's something I like to do: If you're like me, and I know I am, you get lots of unsolicited credit card offers in the mail. You know the ones -- promising low introductory rates, low annual percentages on transfers from other cards, and blah be blah de fucking blah blah blah. Not to mention yadda yadda. Hidden in the fine print is often something about how the percentage rate swells to 93% and the blood of your first-born if you are a day late with one payment, ever, and how they will be happy to share all your personal information with every marketing company in the world unless you jump through a series of flaming hoops in the proper sequence. Lovely little pieces of correspondence, in other words.

To make it easy for you to apply, they always include a postage-paid envelope with which you are supposed to send back your filled-out application. By law, they must pay for delivery of that envelope, regardless of what's inside it. I've heard of some people taping the envelopes to a brick or something equally heavy and awkward, but personally I think this tactic only alienates your mail carrier, and makes it more likely that mail you are actually looking forward to receiving will somehow disappear in the future. So what I do is print up a page or two from my favorite political comic strip, Get Your War On, stuff it in the reply envelope and send it on its way.

And you know, funny thing, but since I started doing that, the number of unsolicited credit card offers I receive has dropped dramatically. Whether there's a direct correlation or not, I can't say, but... well, try it yourself and see what happens.