Turning the tables on junk-mailers

If you have one credit card, you probably get tons of offers for more in the mail. I sure do. Who needs all that junk? It's a waste of paper and time sorting through it all.

Green living guru Danny Seo has a wicked little idea for disposing of those unwanted missives.

Open up the offer and take out the postage-paid envelope. Take all the junk the credit card company sent you, and stuff it into that return-to-sender envelope. Pop it back into the mail. The company paid that postage, so it's paying to receive its own garbage back!

Maybe if enough people did this, credit card companies would think twice about spamming us with endless offers for cards we don't need.

Of course, you can also try to get off the lists in the first place.

Four of the major consumer credit reporting companies who are part of the offer-generating process have a free opt-out service. Register with that site, and in a few months, you'll see a decrease in your credit-card junk mail.

I signed up early this year, and I do receive fewer offers. But they're not completely eliminated by any means. So I'll be returning some letters to sender from now on.