New House, New Junk Mail: How to Opt Out

August 29th, 2008

Within a few weeks of buying a new house, you should start receiving mountains and mountains of new junk mail thanks to the fact that you’re now considered “fresh meat” to a lot of marketing and mortgage companies. There appears to be good news and bad news about getting off of these mailing lists.

The good news is that you can opt out of most of them by spending two minutes filling out a couple of quick forms on only two sites. The bad news is that mortgage offers, specifically, seem to be immune to the opt-out lists. The reason is that when you take out a mortgage, your mortgage information is part of the public record, and solicitors routinely cull these records in order to generate leads for their mortgage refinance businesses. On the bright side, quantity of mortgage junk mail seems to start out high and then taper off as your loan becomes less and less fresh.

You might as well do what you can though by opting out of both direct marketing mail and also pre-screened credit solicitations:

DMAChoice.org gets you out of the former, and OptOutPrescreen.com gets you out of the latter.

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