My mother handled the mail for her sister-in-law. When she died it took YEARS before the catalogues stopped coming. My aunt had been an avid collecter of two or three lines of angel figurines, and no matter how many times my mom would call and tell the the lady was gone, the mail kept coming.
One thing to keep in mind, bulk mail is not forwardable or returnable or whatever. At best it gets recycled but will never make it back to the sender. 1st class mail or periodicals returned to sender gets their attention, though, because they pay for the service.
They have caught on, sadly, to the mailing a brick back to the bastards return-to-sender scheme.
Mail order companies really don’t care that the addressee is deceased. Their perspective is that anyone may pick up the catalog and see something they want to order. Having a name on the catalog just lends it a little more legitimacy than 'Current Occupant".
we get mail for our landlord who hasn’t lived here for 25 years and their catalogs are "mr and ms . xxxxx or current resident …
He must have had a lifetime subscription, and the sender isn’t too good about checking up on death records!!
We still get junk mail addressed to so-and-so at such-and-such corporation - so-and-so was the former owner of this house, and they moved 14 years ago. Mostly we roll our eyes and toss it, but it came back to nip us in a surprising way a couple years back.
We were applying for a mortgage to buy a condo for the in-laws to live in. Shitibank pulled all kind of addresses that were somehow tied to our names, and all kinda names that were tied to our address. I had to write a letter saying that no, we were not running such-and-such business out of our house (said business being the employer of the then 12-years-gone former owner of the house).
Not relevant to THIS discussion, but as part of that same effort we also had to write a separate letter saying that “no, we do not have any businesses or property at xyz address” - that being an office address I had not used in nearly 10 years, had never received mail at that address, and which was never my official address - so I don’t know HOW it got associated with me.
I’ve seen underwriters ask for those clarifying letters when there’s a Government Sponsored Enterprise involved in the funding, like FHA/HUD/VA/Farm.
Her name is Kimberly M and mine is Kim L. My biggest concern is her credit will get intertwined with mine since we seem to be sharing the same address. I’ll have to check my credit report frequently. It’s just a pain.
It wasn’t a VA etc. loan, though it’s certainly possible it would later have been sold to FHA (I think that’s who our primary mortgage was sold to, some time after we took it out).
In our case, it was Shitibank really being anal. I really regretted my initial decision to NOT finance through a very large credit union, as their mortgages (for our scenario) were only 15 years and had a slightly higher rate. In hindsight that would have been cheaper and much less hassle - I vented about this at the time but Shitibank ultimately declined the loan within 3 days of the planned closing, for reasons that had been documented from day 1.
But that’s not really relevant to this thread, just me venting again about the moronitude of Big Banx.
They have leeway? I’m suprised. (I live in another country. Ours have a legal obligation to deliver mail to the mail address.)