We’ve got a basket. Into it  goes all of the non-critical mail that isn’t junk that gets thrown away, but not stuff that we have to deal with right away. Once it starts to get full, I will go through the basket and file away everything that needs to get saved and then we start over again.

I realized, in doing so over the past couple of days, that there’s a ton of waste in that basket.

A ton of it comes from Edward Jones, our investment advisors. Back around May, we switched to a managed account, where they would take over managing our stock portfolio, because I was getting sick of doing it myself. We also had a bunch of stocks we’d inherited from my wife’s parents, some that we will be inheriting from my mother and some that we had just not had in their care for whatever reasons. Now, they have, or will have, everything and that has caused a lot of changes.

We talked about what kind of strategies we wanted and I went over what I had been doing, which they liked, but thereafter, it turned into a massive sell/buy fest, as our manager re-aligned stocks to the way he did things. At least a couple of times a week, for the past six months, we’d get a letter from them telling us what was sold, what was bought and a prospectus for whatever the new stuff was. It is required by law. That’s fine.

What wasn’t fine was the amount of pure garbage also included in those envelopes. It was one sheet of paper with information we needed and 20 sheets of complete nonsense, mostly things in 120 different languages, saying that if you don’t understand what any of this says, then go to their website to request things in your own language.

That is stupid, given that people have to sign up for this, they have to pay for it, and part of the package is giving your language preferences in the first place! Unless your language just mutates in the middle of the day to something else, it’s all entirely unnecessary and a waste of time, paper and postage.

Yet I’m sure this is something that the government mandates, right? You know, that government that wants people to be frugal and conserve resources? Yeah, that government.

It took me 3 days to go through the basket, just the Edward Jones stuff, pull the first sheet or two off, sort it, file it and throw the rest into the recycling bin and in the end, I actually needed about 5% of what we received. The rest was just government-mandated trash.

Of course, it’s not just them because all of the other stocks we were dealing with, they were sending their own useless mailings. In fact, we were getting the same things many, many, many times over. I can’t tell you how many different copies of the exact same documents that I got, mailed one day apart. Yes, I know what my federal tax ID number is. You don’t have to tell me, literally, 14 times. It was just ridiculous.

What’s worse is that I am paying for all of this junk, collectively, through the fees I pay them. Not only are they wasting resources and money sending this stuff out, but they’re charging me through the nose for the privilege.

I’m not mad at them though because it’s all stuff that is mandated by the supposedly liberal government, the one that is forcing people to conserve. The same liberals who want to control what I’m allowed to throw away, who charge exorbitant fees on gas in order to punish me for owning a car and who overcharge for smog checks because “it hurts the environment!” Yet they don’t seem to care that their own laws are forcing companies to send me 95% worthless paper that has to be disposed of, and multiple copies of everything, that the post office has to drive around endlessly to deliver, wasting gas and polluting their precious air.

Yes, I called Edward Jones. I talked to our financial advisor. She said there’s nothing she can do because the government forces them to do it. Lots of people complain. Nothing is going to change, even though they understand how wasteful it is. The government is just hypocritical. What else is new? I wish I could say I was surprised at any of this, but knowing how screwed up the government is, clearly I’m not. I’m just disgusted. The basket is going to fill up again and then, I’ll have to deal with the endless torrent of waste paper going out the door again, paper that isn’t useful to anyone but government busybodies who think they know what’s best for everyone.

Too bad they’re always wrong.