How to Cut Advertising Out of Your Life
Welcome back!
They’re not on your side.
Day after day, we are bombarded with thousands of advertisements a day; all encouraging us to spend money in some way. Some manipulate us. Some make us aspire to a life we don’t have. Some make us feel like shit for not having something or make you feel too fat or too skinny.
I could write a book on the wrongs advertising inflicts upon us. But that’s not what this post about. This post is about how to cut advertising out of your life, as much as possible.
It’s possible and I’m going to show you how to block advertising today!
Ad Blocking Software
If you use the computer a lot, you know that you are bombarded with ads to pretty much any website you go to (including this one…). Not only can they be annoying but they can be a major violation of privacy as cookies track your movements from site to site and target ads towards you based on your history.
For example, pretty much every website I go to has advertisements for the latest deals on flights to London. It’s no coincidence that I love England and would give my left foot to go there again. So, the ad networks track me when I price out dream vacations. They know what I want, sometimes more than I do.
So, how do block the ads out?
If you use Safari on the Mac, I recommend SafariBlock. If you use a PC, the Firebox browser has extensions such as Adblock.
There is not a simple solution to block ads in Internet Explorer. You’re better off switching to FireFox anyway, it’s much more secure and works a lot better anyway.
TIVO – DVR’s – Digital Video Recorders
While the TIVO may seem like an unnecessary gadget to have, especially with it’s ongoing cost (monthly fee), it’s a great thing to keep around. There is a TIVO remote hack that allows you to set the TIVO to have 30 second skip. This way you can skip all commercials.
If you don’t have a TIVO or want to invest in one, most cable companies offer a DVR now and charge a small monthly fee for it. While they aren’t as elegant as TIVO, you can still fast forward through commercials and skip them entirely.
Another solution if you want to go even further is to download your favorite TV shows over the internet. The commercials are usually removed and you can get almost any popular show for free via Bittorrent. Though, the legality of this is in dispute. You can also buy most TV shows from online stores like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon UnBox.
Life is so much better without loud and obnoxious TV Commercials.
RSS Feeds
If you are a regular reader of a website and just read the content, the RSS Feeds are your new friend. All you need is a RSS Feedreader like Newsgator or NetNewsWire, or even Google Reader and you can read the content on most sites without ads. Some feeds are starting to have ads, but they are not nearly as obtrusive as content on websites surrounded by ads.
Heck, though I’m shooting myself in the foot, you can even subscribe to the feed on this site and avoid my ads all together (but please don’t!).
Sunday Paper
The Sunday Paper can usually be a useful source for coupons and deals for the week. However, it’s best to just toss the sale paper section. It’s solely designed to get you to WANT. To get you to go out and spend money.
If you want the coupons, of which there are usually only a few and they aren’t worth the trouble of clipping, just take out the coupon ads and throw the rest away into the recycling bin. Your wallet will thank you.
Personally, I hate nothing more than being tempted with a new flat screen TV every time I read the sale papers. So, just toss ‘em. You’ll want for less and be all the better off for it.
Magazines
Pretty much avoid all magazines like the plague, especially more ‘popular’ ones. They perpetuate our society’s materialism. The ads and usually most of the content it written to manipulate you into wanting ‘stuff.’
There are some quality magazines out there that have unobtrusive ads and are renowned for their quality content. I recommend The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
If you want to avoid ads even in those magazines, they have websites where ads can be blocked. Most of them also have RSS Feeds.
Junk Mail
Junk Mail keeps the Postal Service alive so it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. There are, however, ways you can reduce your junk mail.
The Direct Marketing Association has a website where you can sign up to opt-out of getting most consumer catalogs. At one point I was getting 3 or 4 of the same Victoria’s Secret Catalogs every couple of weeks. We signed up for this and haven’t gotten one since.
Also, there’s a system to opt out of all those credit card offers you get in the mail. I hated nothing more than getting offers for scam credit cards. I don’t get them anymore.
For all other junk mail that keeps coming, just toss it in the recycling bin without reading it.
E-mail SPAM
The best way to battle e-mail Spam is to get a Gmail account. Their spam filters work the best out of any of the e-mail services I’ve tried. Gmail is free and secure and you can set it up with your usual e-mail reader (i.e. Outlook or Apple Mail) to avoid their targeted ads.
If you want to avoid Spam, avoid a Hotmail account all together.
Telemarketing
Thankfully, telemarketers are pretty much a thing of the past thanks to the National Do Not Call Registry. You can sign up online here. This is, by far, one of the easiest ways get rid of a common annoyance.
Branded Clothing
Is Nike or the Gap paying you to wear their corporate logos? No! In fact you’re overpaying them for the privilege. It is pretty easy to buy clothes without labels on it. I’m a t-shirt and jeans guy and nothing I wear has a corporate logo on it. Even the business casual clothes I wear to work lack ‘labels.’
If you have any tips on cutting advertising out your life, please post them in the comments!
Thought on the Six Truths of Personal Finance
I picked this up off the Consumerist today. They featured an article from The Street, which featured the 6 Unpleasant Truths about Personal Finance.
From the Article in summary they are:
1. You can’t have everything you want.
2. Financial institutions are not your friends.
3. Nobody is going to teach you personal finance.
4. You are your own worst enemy.
5. You need to stop watching TV.
6. Personal finance is easy.
These are some very insightful comments and many of them are some of the main philosophies behind this blog.
My wife and I have learned many of these together, probably the harshest reality of them all is discovering financial institutions are not your friend. It was difficult to wrap logic around the idea that they can treat their customers, the very people they rely on to exist, like such garbage.
I am definitely my own worst enemy and have succumbed to many materialistic sins in my day. After all, I own expensive Apple products and drive a newer car (worst mistake I ever made). But, after hitting ‘financial rock bottom‘ this past year, I realized what really mattered in life and how to take financial control of it. We are probably a month away from having the ship completely righted.
I would, perhaps add a couple items to the list of ‘harsh financial realities.’
7. You can live without it
8. Only worry about it if it will matter in 20 years
9. Credit Cards are, by nature, Evil.
10. Never by a brand new car. Ever.
11. You need a second job or second source of income
12. Don’t attempt to have kids unless you have maternity insurance and money put away.
Do you guys have any you ideas of what you think should be on the list of harsh financial truths?
The Sad Old Man
My wife and I were on our way to our second night job last night and saw a sight that really upset us.
As we stopped to get gas on a fairly busy highway, we saw a slow moving old man walking his bike along the highway. After we stopped and filled up we saw him approach the gas station, park his bike and proceed to go through all the garbage cans, looking for aluminum cans.
While the sight was rather sad, there is a lesson to be learned. This man was very old and probably grew up in a generation that was used to austerity. It’s sad that an old man has to dig through garbage to eat but this blog is not about social inequality.
What’s remarkable is that this man has nothing and instead of sitting around, letting his world collapse around him, he’s doing what he was raised to do. Earn money any way he could. Most people would not be willing to do what he was doing, they’d rather starve.
I think the man was very brave.
Besides, with commodity prices the way they are, those aluminum cans are actually worth the trouble. Think twice before tossing them out. Heck, don’t even pay someone to take them away from your curb on recycling day.
Take them to a recycler yourself and you’ll get some cash. You can also do what my wife and I have been known to do, gather cans up over many months and then drive up to Michigan to go eat out at Redamak’s. We don’t go to Michigan to cash the cans, we go to eat and use the cans to help pay for it.
