I don’t get a great deal of junk post addressed to Christopher any more, and most of that seems to be from the car dealers that we bought our Mini from, trying to get him to upgrade. Fat chance! I have every intention of running that car into the ground and don’t expect to change it for years yet.
But this week I got some post addressed to him which really irritated me. The story started just weeks after he was made redundant in 2009. He got cold-called by a financial adviser offering advice on investing his lump-sum redundancy payment, and agreed that they should send him some initial bumf on what they had to offer. I was unhappy though. We were, and indeed I still am, subscribed to the Telephone Preference Service, which is meant to stop all uk-based cold calls, with threats of heavy fines for transgressors. I firmly believe that reputable companies should abide by the TPS rules, and I refuse to deal with anyone who doesn’t. And how did they know that Chris had a lump sum anyway? They claimed it was a complete coincidence, but I was suspicious. I did some searches on the Internet, and came up with pages and pages of people complaining about sharp practices from this particular firm. I strongly advised him to have nothing further to do with them. Anyway, his lump sum was far too small for us to need professional advice on how to deal with it.
Everything went quiet until this week, when he got a letter from a company I’d never heard of, Towry, inviting him to a seminar in Worcester on “Wealth Preservation in Taxing Times”. This included advice on inheritance tax planning, intestacy, wills, and powers of attorney. I did some digging, and it seems that Towry bought up the previous IFA company, and also have a load of people complaining about their sharp practices – including the Financial Services Authority who have fined them nearly half a million pounds for “providing incorrect information”. I saw red and scrawled over their invitation “It’s a bit bloody late for this. He’s DEAD. Remove his name from your mailing list forthwith”. I then took great delight in sending it back to them in their own reply-paid first class envelope. I sincerely hope that’s the last I hear from them.
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If you want my opinions they are just parasitic bastards, the lot of them, thats Financial advisers, bankers, and people who do these mailshots.
I dont give my mobile number to anyone, but recently gave it to several estate agents in order to get house details, guess what, I now receive junk texts, “want to claim back your PPI”, “had an accident”. If I knew which estate agent was responsible i’d be half tempted to storm in to their offices and threaten them.
Yes, we are registered with TPS and MPS.
Another thing you could try is collect a whole load of mail together and send it back in one of their envelopes so they have to pay excess postal charge.