My 5-year-old shredder is dying from all the junk mail I’ve fed it over the years. I’m totally hyped about buying a jumbo 12-sheet shredding beast. Coincidentally, I just ran across a free service called ProQuo.com that supposedly helps you remove your name and other information from a variety of different lists, including Coupons & Weekly Circulars, Snail-Mail Marketing Lists, Mail-order Catalogs, Telemarketing Lists, and Credit Card and Insurance Offers. From their FAQ:

How does ProQuo help consumers?
ProQuo helps consumers remove their personal information from marketing lists, data brokers, and other organizations responsible for a large amount of junk mail. ProQuo does this by helping people request removal directly from these sources. In many cases, ProQuo will send these requests electronically to the specific organizations that consumers select. For companies that don’t accept electronic requests, ProQuo helps consumers to print out forms for mailing or directs consumers to third party web sites.

I’ve been trying them out, and many of them do require you to print out and mail in a form to request removal. Still, many accept electronic requests, and I had no idea any of this was even an option. ProQuo also incorporates other removal services like the National Do Not Call List. Here’s a screenshot from their interface:

If the service is free, how does ProQuo make money?
In the future, ProQuo will allow consumers to request offers that they do want in addition to eliminating the offers that they don’t want. ProQuo will make money from the advertisers that provide these offers. ProQuo will only provide these offers when requested by consumers.

Hmm… I’m kind of skeptical but their Privacy Policy looks okay at first glance. “We will never release consumers’ personal information without their express consent – ever.”

It’s spring cleaning time. On top of the usual build-up, we are moving in a few months to a place where there (gasp!) probably won’t be a basement! I’m not the best at organization, but here’s what we’ve done so far:

Made two big boxes labeled Sell and Donate. If it has a chance of selling for $10 or more, I’ll eBay it. Hard-to-ship stuff will go on Craigslist. For clothes, we’ll do a run at Buffalo Exchange (used clothing store). Everything else will be donated. I might try FreeCycle, but to be honest I will probably just follow my neighborhood’s common practice of leaving a box outside labeled Free Stuff and let people go at it. We get a decent amount of foot traffic. Now that’s recycling locally 😉

Implemented the one-year rule for clothes. If you haven’t worn it in a year and it isn’t formalwear, it’s gone. That means you’ve gone through all four seasons, cold, hot, wet, dry, and not found a reason to wear it. This can be pretty painful for my wife, but she gets dibs on the clothing credit at Buffalo’s so maybe it’ll work out. If I could fit all my clothes besides winter coats into two large suitcases, that would be awesome.

As a certified pack rat, I really need to let go of certain things. I just have to accept that it’s okay to once in a while buy something again that I already owned once 15 years ago… Sure, keeping 500 ft of old ethernet cable might come in handy someday, but really, it probably won’t. I’m not the only one with 300 blank 4x CD-Rs that I got free after rebate ten years ago… am I?

I really want to simplify and de-clutter my life. Any other tips, if only psychological, to help me do so?