CALENDAR

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice
Basis: This voice delivers the opening introduction, repeated promotional breaks, and the closing station-style outro. The wording is distinct from the host’s first-person discussion.

Speaker 2 – Alan J. Cook – Host
Basis: The transcript explicitly introduces Alan J. Cook as the host, and he repeatedly identifies himself on air as Alan Cook while speaking from Rockville, Maryland.

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Welcome to the Junk Refund Show, hosted by Alan J. Cook, founder of 1-800-JUNK-REFUND. Have you ever paid those expensive junk removal companies to take away some of your stuff, only to say to yourself as the truck drives off down the street, “Some of that stuff wasn’t junk”? Did they try to sell it for you and give you some money back? No.

Well, now there is a company that can do just that. Listen to our weekly Junk Refund Show on BBS Radio TV to learn how one lady spent $375 on junk removal and got $3,200 back. 1-800-JUNK-REFUND represents the next generation of junk removal. Learn how to not only save money on junk removal, but also get some money coming back. Plus, purchase one of our radio vouchers during the show to save even more on your junk removal. Let’s get the junk out of your home and out of your life. Now, with your host, Alan J. Cook.

Speaker 2 – Alan J. Cook – Host:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to my favorite time of the week, Thursday, when we do the Junk Refund Show, which is the world’s longest-running junk removal radio show.

Let’s face it: there’s a lot of trash out there. There’s a lot of junk in people’s lives, both in their minds and in their apartments, driveways, and whatever. It’s simply a better life and a less stressful life if you can get that junk out of your life, your driveway, your backyard, or wherever it might be.

We are a junk removal business headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. We’ve done this for 20 years. We go all over the country. We have 63 affiliates around the country that also do jobs for us in various parts of the country. We literally have been around the country. We have gone from, I think, Brunswick, Maine, to Tampa, Florida; from Chicago, Illinois, to San Antonio, Texas; and from Seattle, Washington, to San Diego, California, doing junk removal jobs.

They’re almost always a lot of fun, with very, very rare exceptions where some kind of headache happens. Pretty much, it’s just a fun thing to do because you never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes you find hidden treasures, and you get paid to haul away people’s stuff.

Then you find interesting things hidden. Maybe you find some small change in the crease of a couch. Maybe you find dollar bills, $20 bills, or $50 bills hidden in people’s clothing. Or maybe you find who knows what else. We once found jewelry hidden under the top of a dresser. The family had gone through and taken everything they wanted, but they didn’t realize the top of the dresser lifted up. Underneath, there was a bunch of jewelry. It was basically a large jewelry-box kind of thing.

We have a lot of fun discovering things and getting paid to do it. The thing that’s unique about us is that if you have some good stuff that really should not be thrown away and should not be donated, we put it up for sale. If it sells, you get money back. We’ve sold everything from G.I. Joes to full-size Yodas, automobiles, magazine collections, jewelry, coin collections, and all kinds of other stuff you find when you’re cleaning out somebody’s home.

The idea is pretty simple. When I first got started doing this and would speak at real estate sales meetings, I talked about the typical business card. On the front, you have how somebody can get ahold of you: a number, cell phone, email, physical address, whatever. But on the back of a business card, many times it’s blank. I think you need to put three reasons on the back explaining why somebody should get ahold of you. Not how, but why. The why comes first. They have to have a reason to get ahold of you.

I listed three reasons. The first reason was: save 20% on the cost of junk removal. We checked some of the prices of some of the bigger companies out there and set our prices at about 20% below them. So we save you money. That’s reason number one. That just puts us on the map and says, “Hey, we’re trying to compete.”

Reason number two is designed to catch your attention and make you go, “Ah, that’s cool.” We give out Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or send electronic gift cards to Ben & Jerry’s when we do your job for you. We’ve done that for 20 years.

The third reason is what sets us apart: we put your good stuff up for sale, and you get money back. Nobody else does that. That comes from thinking “win-win,” from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I used to work for that company for a few years, and that’s kind of where the idea came from.

If you’re in business, the back of your card is a gold-mine area that probably is blank right now. If you can put three reasons back there that tell people why they should use you instead of anybody else, you’re in the game. Then you’re serious. The first reason basically says, “Hey, I’m serious about this.” The second says, “Here’s something cool that we do that’s unusual.” The third reason hopefully closes the deal. They get that card, look on the back, and go, “Oh, I’m an idiot not to use these guys,” right? That’s kind of the idea.

That’s one of the things we do. We have, I think, about 500 reviews on Groupon, with something like a 97% customer satisfaction rating. That’s been a good thing for us over the years. You can go to Groupon.com and look up 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, and you’ll have plenty of reviews to read.

On Facebook Marketplace, we use that to find people who want to get rid of metal of some kind, whether it’s a fridge, dryer, air-conditioning unit, pipes, computer equipment, small appliances, or whatever. People advertise things for free: “Come pick up my fridge. Free fridge.” We’ll go pick it up for free.

If you become a scrap-removal client, we give you a little card that gives you 20% off junk removal. Now you’re in the fold, and you can go on our email database list if you’d like to. Sometimes in the evening, we’ll go out and try to do five of those jobs in a day or evening, which gets us five more customers. Then we take the metal to a scrap-metal yard, where they pay us for the metal, and we go from there.

We did one of those jobs a couple of days ago, and it was fascinating. When you know a little bit about scrap metal, you know the golden word is “copper.” Right now, for every pound of copper you take into a scrap-metal yard in our area in Maryland, they’ll pay you $4.50 a pound. If you walk in with regular metal, like a toaster, they’ll pay you six cents a pound. Four dollars and fifty cents a pound compared with six cents a pound is about 80 times better, right?

A lady put an ad with a photo on Facebook Marketplace a couple of nights ago. It was for an air-conditioning unit—in fact, two air-conditioning units. There was a bunch of copper pipe, two or three feet long, sticking out from the tops of the units. All she said was that she would like them gone ASAP, first come, first served.

I saw the ad at about seven o’clock and sent a message back through Facebook saying, “Hey, I’m interested. I could come get it tonight, and I’ve got a truck with a lift gate that’s big enough to get it all. No problem.” We messaged back and forth for a couple of minutes. She gave me the address, and I went out and picked it up.

Her husband told me they got 100 responses from people who wanted to come and pick it up, and out of 100 people, they picked us. I think one of the reasons may have been that they saw our reviews. We have 170 or 180 reviews on Facebook Marketplace, again with about a 96% or 97% customer satisfaction rating. I think that’s pretty good, and that grows as we continue to pick up scrap metal from people and do some of these smaller jobs.

I was really pleased that, out of 100 people, we got picked. We weren’t the first ones to respond, but she obviously liked something about what we were doing. I went out by myself with the big truck and lift gate, loaded it all up, and lo and behold, the next morning I took it to a scrap-metal yard and got $318 for it.

In the scrap-metal world, that’s pretty good for basically a pickup-truck load of stuff. Most of that comes, of course, from the copper and what we’ll call the radiator-type screen that runs around the perimeter of an air-conditioning unit, which has copper in it. So that’s a pretty good deal. I made one stop one night and got $318 the next morning. That’s why we go out and pick it up for free.

Another thing happened recently. A guy named Dave in Kensington called us a couple of days ago and left a voicemail saying, “I’ve got this and this and this,” and he left a list of about 20 items. He asked whether we could come get it on Tuesday. I said, “Yeah, we can do that.”

When I got there, it turned out to be a $1,400 job. I asked Dave, “How did you hear about us?” He pulled out my business card, which I had given him when I came by months earlier and picked up an elliptical from him for free as scrap metal. On the card, it says 20% off junk removal. So his $1,400 junk removal job, because he’s moving, turned into a $1,120 job, and he was thrilled. That’s the idea.

We go out and pick up scrap metal for free. We get paid for the metal. We don’t get rich on it, but we do get something. More importantly, we get more customers we can add to our email database. We get known more and more, and people like us because we came and picked up something they needed to get rid of for free. That’s a little bit of the scrap-metal world that we do.

I did a job this morning for a Jewish preschool where these little kids went into school a couple of days ago, and we hauled off a bunch of their old tables. You know the old tables you’ll set up in a church gymnasium for a wedding or a funeral meal or whatever—some round tables, some big rectangular tables. Those tables have a lot of pressed wood in them, but they have metal frames.

I took them over to the scrap-metal yard, hoping they would be acceptable, and I threw off about 10 of those tables. It was 860 pounds of material we got rid of. One of the guys who kind of runs the show over there came out and took a look at it. He went back in, checked the metal framing just to make sure it was metal, and it was. He didn’t say anything else to me. So it was okay, and they paid for it, right? That worked. Anyway, that was good.

I enjoy this. It’s a lot of fun. I’ll tell you this, too: I take some of that cash that I usually come home with at night, and I have two little envelopes in my desk drawer for my granddaughters. One is two; one is almost one. I take $5 a day and stick it in each of their envelopes. That is their savings account for these little kids.

One of them has over $2,000 in her account now, and the other has over $1,000. The oldest one is just barely two. It’s one of the most fun things I do—to come home, pull out those envelopes, take $5 and stick it in for one child, then $5 for the other grandchild.

The rest of the cash goes to me, and I keep it as a little safety or emergency cash fund. That works out well for everybody. One of the ways to get the junk out of your mind when it comes to your kids’ or grandkids’ future expenses is to put time on your side and start saving for them now. You don’t need to save a lot now because you’ve got a lot of time to continue contributing and let the money grow.

If you start when a child or grandchild is born and put away $5 a day for them, by the time they’re 18 you will have contributed about $35,000 to their account. But if the money in the meantime grows at 8% a year, they’ll have $85,000 in their account when they walk across the stage to get their diploma as a senior. You can’t show me a lot of high school seniors who have $85,000 in the bank.

You’ll be able to do that in about, I don’t know, 16 years with my two grandkids, all things considered, if nothing changes. If all things stay the same, that’s a decent chunk of money. If the money grows at 10% or 12%, that’s over $100,000 easily. Warren Buffett, for decades, has been able to grow his book value and his shares at about 19% a year, and that’s astronomical.

So get the account set up, get them invested in the right stuff, and let it grow. The money can make more money on its own through compounding than you will make by contributions over the 18 years. It’s almost a three-to-one trade-off. Keep that in mind. That’s just a little tip from a young grandfather who is starting to save some money for his grandkids and putting time on their side, and on my side, to make it easier.

Having spent about nine years as a sales rep for the FranklinCovey time-management and productivity company, we used to teach people to take out their Franklin day planner and make a list of what they wanted to accomplish that day. I don’t necessarily do that every day anymore. First, I don’t have a Franklin day planner; it’s all electronic on my phone, iPad, or whatever. Second, I typically wake up and already have three or four jobs on the calendar, and that dictates where I’m going and what I’m going to do.

Today was a little different. I didn’t have anything on the calendar except for the radio show, which I was grateful for. So I got to sleep in a little bit, until about 10:30, and that always feels good. That’s a rarity, but it’s like a mini vacation whenever I’m able to do that.

With a little bit of extra time lying there in bed thinking about stuff, I thought, “Let’s see. What would I like to get done today?” I took out my phone and went to an app. This is my first official thing I want to talk about on the show today: an app called Todoist, T-O-D-O-I-S-T.

Todoist, I think, is free. It’s basically a red square box with some white check marks in the middle of it. It’s a task-management app for your phone. I use it because it’s simple. It allows me to sort and rearrange the tasks I want to accomplish. When I’m done with one, I click the round button on the left and it disappears. It congratulates me if I get five of them done.

All I do is clear my mind and think, “It’d be nice to do this today, or this today, or this today.” They can be totally unrelated things—some work, some personal, some church, some whatever. I just get it out of my head and into my phone.

I did that this morning. I probably had about a dozen items there. Then I looked at it and thought, “Okay, which one should I do first? Which one should I do second?” I prioritize them, and as I go about doing them, I check them off and they disappear.

It’s a simple procedure with a free app called Todoist, T-O-D-O-I-S-T, all one word. It’s like “to-do list” without the L: Todoist. I’ve had it for years, and it’s a great way to help you get some stuff done and organize what you want to do without having to buy a bunch of blank pages for a year and stick them in your day planner.

I’m going to take a quick break here for a minute and come back and tell you about what I’ve done over the last four or five days, which you won’t believe. But I’m going to tell you anyway because it was so much fun. We’ll also go into some more issues about junk removal and how to get the junk out of your home and also out of your life.

I’m your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland, on the Junk Refund Show on the BBS Radio Network. We’ll be back in just a minute.

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk removal companies and then wondered what they did with the stuff, especially the good stuff? At 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, we junk the junk. We recycle stuff like metal and wire, donate items and get you receipts, and put the good stuff up for sale. If it sells, you get some money back.

Cynthia paid $375 for junk removal and got $3,200 back. Would you like to know how she did it? Tune in to the Junk Refund Show with your host, Alan J. Cook, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time to get the junk not only out of your home, but also out of your life.

Speaker 2 – Alan J. Cook – Host:
Hey, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show. It is the world’s longest-running junk removal radio show. Say that three times quickly. We’re proud of that. We’re in our fourth year. We did our first year on CBS, which was a blast. We’ve been on the BBS Radio Network out of Texas for the last three years. These guys are great. We have a lot of fun with this.

The shows are recorded and turned into a podcast called the Junk Refund Show. You’re welcome to go pull that up wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll hear lots of interesting stories about what we do, what we run into, and how we do it. It’s just a fun thing to do. It keeps me busy and keeps me off the streets—well, it keeps me on the streets, I guess, in the truck—but it’s a fun thing to do.

We have a Wednesday-night Bible study class that I go to and, in some ways, oversee. After the Bible study class, we meet with these young missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the clean-cut kids with the black name badges, 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds.

We have 10 of them in our church congregation, and they’re constantly bringing new people in to learn about our church, get baptized in the church, and so forth. My job is to coordinate their activities each week so that we know who they’re working with and can make our resources as a congregation available. When people come to a new church, don’t know much about it, and want to learn more, we want them to feel welcome and comfortable.

Every week after our Bible study class, we have about a half-hour correlation meeting where we coordinate what the missionaries are doing with what our congregation is doing, so we’re all on the same page. I run that meeting every week.

Last night, as I often do, I gave them a little upbeat spiritual message at the end. I told them something I frequently tell people, especially in these kinds of meetings: there has never been a better time in the history of the world to be alive than right now.

I want to illustrate that by what I did in my life starting last Thursday night after the radio show. I drove up to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is about two and a half hours north of me. I hopped on a plane, flew to Denver, got there at midnight, and slept on the airport floor at one of the gates, which I’m amazingly able to do and actually find relaxing.

At 6 a.m., I caught the next flight to Salt Lake City, and I was in Salt Lake City at 7:30. The reason I went to Philadelphia was that the one-way airfare for that trip was $90. I have three airports in the Washington, D.C., area, but I fly on Frontier Airlines with their GoWild! Pass, which I talk about frequently on this show. The best deal I could find, saving hundreds of dollars, was to go out of Philadelphia.

I drove my SUV up there—an SUV somebody threw away at a hauling job about four years ago. They actually paid me to take it, and I’m still driving it. On the back of the SUV is one of those extended-carrier-type things where you can put luggage and other stuff. It’s like a little shelf that extends out from the back bumper of the car. That carrier was also thrown away at a hauling job.

I use the vehicle to go down into D.C. at night and pick up smaller scrap-metal items such as chairs, computers, file cabinets, and things like that. I can put that stuff either inside the SUV or strap it onto the carrier on the back, and my SUV turns into a mini pickup truck—or, as I like to refer to it, vehicle number three in our fleet.

Vehicle number one is the 16-foot box truck that we rent from Enterprise for the big jobs. Vehicle number two is a Dodge Ram pickup truck, which we use for medium and small jobs and can use for bigger jobs if we need to. Vehicle number three is the SUV with the extender going out the back, which can carry almost as much as a pickup truck if you really jam it full of stuff.

Vehicle number four, which we’re trying to bring online right now, is another SUV that was thrown away by a gentleman going off to serve in the military. He asked us to take care of it, pick it up, and do whatever we needed to do. We had a mechanic check it out and decided the thing can still run a little bit.

Last week, somebody also had us haul away a four-foot-by-eight-foot trailer that can be pulled behind an SUV. We have to put some sides on it, but we got a free trailer with the title. In fact, we were paid to take it. We can do some damage with an SUV hauling a trailer around town and picking up stuff. That gives us a fourth vehicle setup we can use, so we’re having some fun with that.

I went up to Philadelphia and flew out to Utah that morning. I met with my daughter and my two grandkids and went to the Draper Aquarium, which I’d never been to before. It’s a fabulous aquarium. It has sharks, manta rays, all kinds of fish, penguins, a boa constrictor, and some other stuff. It’s just a cool place. I’d never been there before, so we went to that. Then I took them to lunch, and that was a blast.

I dropped by my sister’s home. She just had it remodeled to put it up for sale. It looks great, she wanted me to see it, it has gotten an offer, and things are good there.

Then I went to see a couple of friends of ours from Washington who had gone out to Utah to visit family. The woman had a brain aneurysm while she was out there and had been there for a month. I brought some lunch from Subway to my good friend, her husband, expecting to see this lady in a bed or maybe a wheelchair. Instead, she was walking around and answering the door. I couldn’t believe it.

Her husband said, “Your prayers have been answered”—the prayers of our congregation out here that these people belong to. We hope to get these folks back in the next couple of weeks, and we’re grateful that she’s doing so well. I dropped some food off there.

Now it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I hit the BYU Creamery. If you guys haven’t done that, the next time you’re in Provo, Utah, go to the BYU Creamery.

If you know anything about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you’ll know that we teach our members not to drink alcohol, to stay away from addictive stuff like coffee and tea, not to smoke, and not to take harmful drugs. You have, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of people in that area who are members of the Church. So if we want to party, we drink chocolate milk, eat cookies-and-cream ice cream, or go for donuts, sweets, or something like that. That’s our go-to stuff to feel great at night.

The BYU Creamery is really good at making that type of food. They have these brownies that I swear are about four inches square, and they’re mint-chocolate brownies. They’re fabulous. They’re about a buck and a half each. The bakery is well known out there, and the ice cream is well known out there.

At BYU football and basketball games, they make a foot-long rectangular maple bar called a Cougar Tail, and they only sell it at the athletic events. It was recently ranked as the number-one collegiate refreshment sold at a basketball or football game in the country. I don’t know how many thousands of these they sell, but you can only get them at the games.

Anyway, we’re really good with bakery stuff, ice cream, chocolate milk, strawberry milk—whatever. We’re pretty good with that, and the BYU Creamery is the place. I stopped by and grabbed a brownie. I had to get a brownie because they’re just so good.

Then I went across the street to the Wilkinson Center, where my son-in-law was giving a presentation at seven o’clock during something called Education Week. It’s a week-long mini-school where they have about 250 people come and speak and teach classes. People, particularly members of our church from around the world, come because the topics being discussed mean a lot to the attendees.

My son-in-law is a high school teacher who has a fascination with The Lord of the Rings. He put together a four-night class talking about what you can learn spiritually from The Lord of the Rings. It was the first time that had been done at this event. Four hundred people packed the room each night, and I got there the final night.

I was thrilled to sit there and watch him teach. It was the first time I’d seen my son-in-law teach, and he’s brilliant. He’s really, really good. He talked about The Lord of the Rings and some of the spiritual things you can learn from it. That was a great connection for a group of church people who were there to learn more about all different aspects of life. He did a fabulous job. He knows The Lord of the Rings inside and out.

When we clean out a library for people and haul away their books, we take them to Wonder Books here locally, which is a massive used bookstore. They will either give us $2 cash for a banker’s box of books, which is not much, or about $6 to $8 per box in store credit. So I get three or four times the amount of trade value compared with cash.

I take the store credit, so I always have coupons that are good for store credit to buy things in the store. I go in and buy Lord of the Rings books, DVDs, or whatever, and send them to my son-in-law. I do the same thing for my daughter, getting her editions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. She has a large collection of different editions or copies of A Christmas Carol. I love to do that.

So Friday night, I was out there watching my son-in-law blow away 400 people with his knowledge, skill, and slides. It was brilliantly done.

I went back up to the Salt Lake airport and stayed at a hotel there. At 10:30 the next morning, I flew to Phoenix and then to Los Angeles. I went to Los Angeles because I wanted to go to one of our newest temples, which is in Yorba Linda, in the Anaheim area. I was there at five o’clock Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours. That was great.

Then I went back to LAX and caught a $16 flight. That’s not a typo: a $16 nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Orlando on Frontier Airlines. I’m a member of their GoWild! Pass, and that was the rate for GoWild! Pass members.

I was trying to get myself back to Philadelphia, but the flights from L.A. to Philly were $400 or $500. Then here’s a flight to Orlando for only $16. All I had to figure out was how to get from Orlando up to Philadelphia. That’s a lot easier.

So I took the $16 flight and ended up in Orlando at about 8:30 in the morning. I then caught another flight up to Charlotte, North Carolina, stopped off for a couple of hours, and then went on to Philadelphia. I got into Philadelphia Sunday night at about midnight, hopped in my SUV, and drove back home. This time it was only about two hours because it was a midnight run down the freeway and a lot less congested.

I got home at about two in the morning—Sunday night into Monday morning. At eight o’clock Monday morning, I was back out doing junk removal jobs, headed for my nine o’clock job.

I figured out that from Saturday morning until Sunday night, basically 36 hours, I was in eight different states. I started in Utah, went to Arizona, went to California, went to Florida, went to North Carolina, went to Pennsylvania, drove through Delaware, and ended up in Maryland. Eight states in 36 hours at minimal cost, crisscrossing the country—that’s life in today’s world.

I tell people that regardless of where your family lives, in my mind, you can live anywhere in the continental United States and it’s almost like they’re next door. You can be there. I can fly to Utah and see my son-in-law teach, and it was a joy. My sister was there with me. She was a professor out there, and she enjoyed it. We gave him a standing ovation at the end.

Show me a better deal. Think about people who lived in the 1800s, when the Pony Express was there, people were riding around in stagecoaches, and we didn’t have automobiles or cell phones. The world was a very big place at that point. To get from point A to point B, you did it on a stagecoach and it took days. It wasn’t necessarily the safest thing to do either, depending on what part of the country you were in.

I can get on an airplane in Los Angeles at, I think, about 11:30 p.m., sit in the exit row, have plenty of legroom, get a free carry-on—all of which was no extra charge—recline the seat, go to sleep, and a few hours later the plane lands in Orlando. I’m in Florida Sunday morning. Sixteen bucks.

As I said in a Facebook post shortly afterward, this is why I like the GoWild! Pass so much. It’s just so cheap to fly around once you have it. If you know how to use it and you’re willing to search for the right flight, it takes some effort—sometimes more effort than others—but it’s worth it. If you can fly across the country for 16 bucks, show me a better deal. I don’t think you can. I don’t think it exists.

From Thursday night to Sunday night, three days, I was able to do all of that stuff. It was terrific. A shout-out to Alamo Rent A Car, which rented me a car in Salt Lake and again in Los Angeles. I think they charged me a total of about 50 bucks each time. I don’t even think I paid a security deposit. I may have paid about $100 in Salt Lake; I can’t remember for sure. I’m not sure about Los Angeles, but you get that deposit right back.

That’s how great life is and how small this country is. If you can travel to eight states in 36 hours, I’m here to tell you this is a small world, like they say at Disneyland. It really is a small world.

I’m going to take a break there. That’s been my last few days over the weekend. It was very productive, it was great, there was lots of good family time, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I even got a mint brownie from the BYU Creamery, which I highly recommend you get the next time you’re in Provo, Utah.

You’re listening to the Junk Refund Show. We’ll come back in about a minute and do the last segment of the show. I’m your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland, on the BBS Radio Network.

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk removal companies and then wondered what they did with the stuff, especially the good stuff? At 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, we junk the junk. We recycle stuff like metal and wire, donate items and get you receipts, and put the good stuff up for sale. If it sells, you get some money back.

Cynthia paid $375 for junk removal and got $3,200 back. Would you like to know how she did it? Tune in to the Junk Refund Show with your host, Alan J. Cook, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time to get the junk not only out of your home, but also out of your life.

Speaker 2 – Alan J. Cook – Host:
Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Junk Refund Show, where we teach you all things about junk removal and how to get stuff done. I’m your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland, where we’re headquartered. We are a junk removal business. 1-800-JUNK-REFUND.com is the website.

We do lots of fun things. We travel around the country cleaning out homes for people in all different kinds of situations that you learn things from. We get involved in people’s lives when there’s usually some kind of significant change taking place. Maybe somebody got divorced. Maybe a college student is coming back home to live. Maybe somebody is moving across the country. Maybe they’ve been transferred by the government and they’re headed out of town, or whatever.

We go in and clean out the homes so the realtors can list the home for sale. In the process of cleaning out the homes, we find all kinds of cool things.

One of the cool things we found recently, last week, was a trailer. We had a gentleman who had bought a home in Arlington, Virginia. He is an engineer, and he took a home there and basically doubled it in size by adding a massive garage that was his workplace. He had all kinds of power tools in that garage, which we salivated over because we thought they were going to come with us and we would put them up for sale. Instead, they conveyed to the buyer because the buyer wanted all the tools.

We ended up not getting all those tools, but one thing we did get was a four-foot-by-eight-foot trailer that didn’t have any sides on it. It was sitting outside, basically as a large table, with many cases of miscellaneous stuff stacked on it.

We got the title for that trailer. If you put some sides on it, you basically have the equivalent of a pickup truck in the junk removal business, and it can be pulled behind an SUV. We have a couple of SUVs and a pickup truck, and that trailer can make you money, especially when you didn’t have to pay for it.

The trailer is rusty. We haven’t done any work to it yet, and it doesn’t have any sides. It needs some TLC, but it was free. It’s in one of our storage units right now. I have a goal to spend about half an hour a day on it whenever I’m over in that area, which is right by the scrap-metal yard. I can pop in there for half an hour, grind or sand all the rust off, repaint it, put some sides on it and a back that will fold down, and then send that sucker out to make money for us in the junk removal business doing small jobs.

I love getting free equipment. In fact, I love getting paid to take equipment that other people are throwing away and that we then get to use in our business.

This morning, I took apart a small air-conditioning unit. I used a cordless drill and attachments that were thrown away on another hauling job to unscrew it and take it apart. I took out the copper and the little radiator-type cooling system inside, basically gutted it, threw the shell away as scrap metal, and took the valuable material around to the back of the scrap yard. They paid us the copper price for it, and we made a few bucks.

The tools I use are, by and large, things thrown away on other jobs we do. We’re driving vehicles, pulling trailers, and using add-on attachments on the back of SUVs, all of which we were paid to take and none of which we bought. In fact, we got paid to take them. I just love that combination. I love that kind of thing, and it warms my heart.

Let me give you one other closing story about how to get some of the junk out of your life and how to make a difference in life. I’m a big believer that you have the right, and perhaps a little bit of a duty, to stand up and say something if you see something going on that is not right or that could be improved or made better.

If you’ve listened to these shows before, you know I talk a lot about the church work I do because I’m actively involved in it. One of the responsibilities I have is for the missionary work of our congregation—to let people know about what we have and how good it is.

Our church buildings, I’m going to say around the world, and certainly everywhere I’ve gone in the United States, are wonderful, awesome buildings. But one of the things we have not done well, in my humble opinion, is the way we position our signs in front of these buildings.

Too many times they are static, non-electrical signs. I don’t think we have any electronic signs in the whole world of the church, but I could be wrong. We have static signs placed in front of church buildings that face the street rather than the oncoming traffic.

If traffic drives by the building, people don’t see the sign unless they quickly turn their head to the side, rapidly read the name of our church—which has nine words in it—and then turn their head back to keep their eyes on the road so they don’t get in an accident. People don’t do that.

They need to turn the sign so that it is perpendicular to the highway and remains in the driver’s view for a number of seconds as he or she drives by the building. Our sign at our very expensive building that was dedicated in 2012 in Washington, D.C., is on a road where 30,000 cars a day go by the building and 20,000 more people go by every day on buses. That’s 50,000 people a day going by this building, and for some reason we stuck a sign there that faces across the street, so you don’t see the name of the church when you’re driving past the building.

Does that make sense? Imagine you’re on a freeway and you have to take an exit. How do you know where the exit is? You see a sign angled toward you, the driver, so you can read it as you’re coming down the street.

Suppose the sign were rotated 90 degrees and pointed directly across the highway, not at you. You would have no idea where your exit was. Unless you could read it really quickly while going 60 miles an hour past it, you would go right past the exit.

Which way do billboards along freeways face? They don’t face across the street toward each other because nobody would see them. They face the oncoming traffic so we all see them as we drive through Chicago or wherever.

The same principle applies to a church building, a business, a barbershop, a restaurant, or whatever. You put the sign up so people driving down the road can read it as they approach your business. You don’t put it up so that only people across the street can see it, because nobody is traveling toward your business from across the street.

This has been the case for about four years at this building, which we built about a dozen years ago in Washington on a very busy street. I kept wondering, “Why is the sign facing the wrong way? Why isn’t it illuminated? Why is it not electronic?”

If it’s electronic, we can change the messages. We can invite people to our Christmas program, our Easter program, our Wednesday-night Bible study class, or our English-as-a-second-language class. We have a Spanish congregation that meets in this building. We could make every other message Spanish and invite the Spanish community to come and join us. We could do all kinds of things.

You can’t do that with a static sign that just has the name of your church on it and that nobody sees because it’s facing the wrong way.

With that as a backdrop, I went out and had a couple of temporary A-frame signs made. They’re about three feet by four feet, something like that. They invited people to our Wednesday-night Bible study class, and I put them out in front of the church facing the oncoming traffic from both directions.

That Wednesday-night Bible study class, four years ago, had about 10 people in it, and half of them were the full-time missionaries, these young kids who are out teaching people about Jesus and so forth. We now have 40 people a week coming to this Bible study class, with a full dinner for everybody afterward. I bring the Krispy Kreme donuts, and that’s a big hit every week.

It’s a fabulous thing. We have people who show up at the class only because they saw it on the temporary signs I put out front, because the signs now face the oncoming traffic.

By coincidence, this afternoon I picked up two replacement signs for those first signs because one got worn out and, I think, got torn somehow. We just had them replaced. I’m probably going to go down tonight and put the new signs up, and we’ll have fresh signs that actually face the oncoming traffic.

The reason I’m telling you this story is that what we need, in my humble opinion, is an electronic sign replacing the permanent sign that’s out there. The electronic sign should be perpendicular to the street so the oncoming traffic can read it. That makes it better for everybody because now tens of thousands of people can be invited to come and worship with us every day.

We can use different colors to get their attention. We can change the messages. We can tell people what we’re going to be talking about that Sunday, the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that. We can invite them to Bible study and show them pictures of donuts or whatever.

I’ve talked to our local church leaders over the last couple of years about my suggestion to change that sign. One of them said, “Hey, I have no problem if you send a letter into church headquarters and tell them we want to change this sign. That’s fine.” That’s what our bishop said.

The man who oversees a larger geographical region here told me, “You’re doing the right thing. You should just take this up the chain of command and see who can do what for you.” I did that with a gentleman who is fairly high up in the regional leadership and has a lot of geographical responsibility in the area.

He visited our congregation. I went up to him afterward, told him who I was and what I was trying to do. He asked, “What is it you’re trying to get done?” I said, “I want to get an electronic sign out in front of the church to replace the permanent sign we currently have.” He started to laugh. He said, “There’s no way the church is going to give you an electronic sign.”

As soon as I heard that, I shut up, nodded my head, and thought to myself, “It’s not for me. It’s for Jesus, and he deserves better coverage than he’s currently getting.” I didn’t say that. I just thought it.

Just before I came on the air today, I dropped off at FedEx a letter to the top leader in our church globally. He is the president of the church. His name is Dallin Oaks. He’s a brilliant attorney. We believe he is God’s living prophet on the earth today. I sent him an approximately six-page, well-documented letter outlining the case for changing the sign and getting a better sign.

I sent a copy of that letter to one of the Twelve Apostles, Quentin L. Cook, who was here in 2012 and dedicated our building. He has a vested interest in this because he knows the building and dedicated it about a dozen years ago. I FedExed the letters and paid $37 per letter to send them to Salt Lake City. They’re supposed to be there before five o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

Those two copies of one letter are the culmination of four years of thinking about this, looking at it, filming other church signs as I go around town that are doing it right in my opinion, and comparing what I think we should have with what we currently have.

Out of frustration that another local church leader laughed at me when I explained what I was trying to do, I basically said, “Well, screw this. I’m going right to the top.” I’m one of those guys who has no qualms or hesitation about sending a letter to top leaders globally, because the implication is that this is not just an issue for our church building. It could have implications for thousands of church buildings around the world.

They’re being constructed in similar ways, and for some reason we’re putting the sign facing the wrong way. Frankly, we’re better than that. If you change the angle of the sign and make it electronic, you can use color to attract people’s attention. You can change the messages. You can change the language of the sign. You can go from Spanish to English and back to Spanish. It’s so much better.

I want to close with this. When I stepped out of the FedEx office about two hours ago, having paid about $75 of my own money to overnight an approximately six-page letter with photos documenting the case for why we need to change this sign, sent to the top people in the world in our church, I felt a burden lifted off my shoulders.

As the local guy who deals with this and can see the benefits of making a change, I have now done everything I can do in my power to make a change. I can’t just order a new sign. I don’t have the authority to do that. The people locally who could get it done laughed in my face. That’s a rarity, by the way. I was kind of stunned by that, but that’s what happened. That’s okay.

So I went to the top. I’m pleading the case at the top level to see if they can do something. It is now out of my hands. Regardless of what happens at this point, I have done my best from my position to make a change.

I have not sat back and silently wished that something would happen. I expressed my views in a well-written, documented letter that I’ve mentally thought about for years and probably done four or five rough drafts of before sending it off.

The reason I sent it off today is that, in a church meeting last night, one of our senior missionaries said, “Oh, by the way, the leader of our church, President Oaks, is going to be in Washington in three weeks speaking at the National Cathedral.” That’s right here. He’s going to be here.

Wouldn’t it be great if he could take the motorcade and come by our church building just a few miles away, see this issue, and say, “You know what? You’ve got a good point. Let’s change this sign.” If they change it here and it works, which I believe it will, they could start changing them around the world. Little Alan in Washington could actually have a global impact on his own church by simply making the case for improving the signage at our building.

I can’t tell you how great I felt once those letters were out of my hands and in the hands of FedEx, knowing they’re going to be delivered in Salt Lake City, Utah, tomorrow by 5 p.m. to the right people who can do something about this.

There’s nothing else I can do or should do. I’ve done my job times 10. I’m trying to make an improvement not only locally, but potentially globally, because the same issues apply wherever you’re located.

If one guy can step up and say, “Hey, we should change this,” and if our church listens and does it, then I legitimately will have had a global impact on my organization and my church as just a layman out here in Washington, D.C. That’s a great feeling.

The great thing is that even if nothing happens, or even if they come back to me with a phone call or letter that says, “Thanks for your input. We’re going to leave it the way it is,” at least I have peace of mind that I gave it my best shot and gave them my honest input, which I think is in the best interest of the person who owns this church, which is Jesus Christ. I think he wants more coverage, and he can get it simply. That’s all I’m lobbying for.

If there’s something you’re passionate about—something going on in your business, school, PTA, community, or whatever—that you see could be changed for the better, I encourage you to do what you can to make that change happen.

Even if you get to the point where you have given your input to the right people, you’ve done your job. Regardless of what happens, you can hold your head high because you tried, and you tried in the best interest of the organization you’re dealing with. That’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’ll keep you posted on anything that happens here. I hope that since he’s going to be in town in three weeks, he can drive by and I can meet him over there and say, “Hey, here’s the deal.” He already has photos of it in the letter I sent him, and he has plenty of documentation, which a lawyer by profession is going to like. We’ll see what happens.

It is a great feeling of accomplishment when you have the guts, after spending months and months thinking about something, to do something to try to make a change and not be afraid to go to the top to do it. Regardless of what happens, I feel great about my efforts.

That is one of the ways to get the junk out of your life: do something to make it better for what could be millions of people. That’s what happened today just before I came on the air.

With that, thanks for listening. I hope it’s been an informative show. It’s been a blast for me. I can’t wait to see what I do this next week, but I will be back here next Thursday at three o’clock on the Junk Refund Show.

Thanks again to the BBS Radio Network out of Texas for all the good work they do. Thanks for listening. Check out the podcast called the Junk Refund Show, and contact us if you have any thoughts, questions, or whatever. If you want to be on the show, let us know. We’re pretty flexible.

This is Alan Cook. Have a great week. I’ll see you next Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern on the Junk Refund Show. Thanks, everybody.

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Thank you for listening to the Junk Refund Show, the longest-running junk removal radio show on the air. Join us next week as we discuss innovative ways to declutter your home, your business, and your life using 20 years of junk removal experience.

Find out why we give out free ice cream gift cards to our clients, too. In upcoming shows, we will explore how to get the junk out of your relationships, your spiritual life, your waistline, and even your travel life. Plus, call in with questions and situations you would like some help with.

At 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, we are committed to bringing the next generation of junk removal, because not all junk is junk. See you next week on the Junk Refund Show, every Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, right here on BBS Radio TV.