Credit card offers clog the mail, the landfills and your credit report.

If you’re like most Americans, you get more than your fair share of junk mail. During the Fall, you get all kinds of catalogs from companies that want your money for Christmas. Then there’s the sale flyers for the local grocery and furniture stores. The most annoying, however, are the seemingly endless offers for credit cards. Low interest rates, no interest promotions, magic checks that you can use to transfer balances from one card to the other, free gifts or bonus frequent flyer miles and who knows what else are the enticements these companies use to try to get you to sign up. And they show up in your mailbox whether you want them or not. Is there any harm in getting these things? Do they hurt your credit score or report in any way? What can you do about it?

Every time anyone decides to offer you credit, whether you have requested it or not, they will check your credit report. Ordinarily, a check of your credit report involves a slight “hit” on your score, reducing it by just a little bit. These unsolicited inquiries are different, however. They don’t affect your score at all, but they do show up on your report as an inquiry. Companies that offer unsolicited accounts purchase names of eligible consumers from the credit bureaus and then send out offers by the thousands. They’re a nuisance, but they won’t hurt your score.

They can, however, hurt you if someone else intercepts them. A frequent source of identity theft is the discarded “pre-approved” solicitation for credit. If you throw it away, and someone else fills out the form and signs your name, you could be a victim of identity theft and that could definitely affect your ability to borrow in the future.

What can you do to reduce the risk and the amount of paper you have to throw away? You can remove your name from the solicitation lists by paying a visit to this Website: http://www.optoutprescreen.com. This site, put together by the major bureaus, is a clearinghouse for all requests to be removed from solicitation lists. All you have to do is visit the site, sign up, and elect whether you wish to be removed permanently or for just five years. 

Once you have done this, your offers for unsolicited credit or insurance should drop dramatically Not all offers will stop; some companies merely ask the bureaus for lists of eligible consumers without actually scouring the records themselves. In these cases, you will probably still receive offers. Still, they should be considerably fewer in number than they were before, and you’ll know you’re safer from identity thieves and you’ll know that you’re saving a few trees in the process.

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