Thanks so much for joining us on the Clark Howard Show Your Admission.
It's to serve you and empower you so you make better financial decisions in your life.
Want to know are you sick and tired like I am of having to remember passwords and getting
all these notices.
There's been a breach of this out of the other and you need to reset your password.
I hate all that.
I want to tell you there's change of coming because the criminals are on to us.
They're able to crack our passwords even when we use complicated passwords more and more.
And I want to tell you what's up that may in fact help you a lot.
Also the Memorial Day holiday period in my mind is already underway.
The real kickoff is supposed to be tomorrow.
I'm going to talk about summer travel and how in a year of record levels of travel you
might just might find a deal.
So the password thing everybody knows in computer security, internet security, passwords are
a patch that does not work well.
It's a game of cat and mouse with the crooks.
So the industry is working so hard to eliminate the password and I am using a system that Google
developed that works for both iPhones and androids.
That is Google's version of a passkey both an electronic one and Google sells a physical
key as well.
I use both.
I have both.
In my TV work we did a series of stories about what a problem passwords have become and why
security keys are central to you being able to protect yourself with all the stories that
have been running about the vulnerabilities that people on iPhones are having with when
their phone gets stolen all kinds of terrible things happen.
When Apple is working on it they just have not been able to stop all the theft of people's
identity and money when their iPhone stolen.
People aren't after the phone.
They're after you your information and that's why adopting one of these passkey systems
is one of the things you can do to help yourself to protect yourself.
The most respected from the tech community of security keys is the UBI.
The UBI security key is an actual key that you have that protects you.
Google has come up with this system that makes your iPhone or Android a virtual physical
key and in addition to that if you wish you can buy a Google security key as well.
We're talking about something that is relatively cheap and you can see the UBI keys at UBICO.
The UBI keys are not bad at all in cost for what they do for you.
They start at 25 bucks and go up and Google has their own security key that is not as
easy to use as the UBI.
I'm fully embedded in the Google system with an Android phone, a Chromebook, everything.
I chose to get the Google security key that knows Titan and their 30 or so bucks.
These things you got to go all in because financial site by financial site they're going
to become security key compliant and they're going to want you to transition from passwords.
Passwords will be eliminated to security keys.
In fact, I'm expecting brokerage houses where most money is in the country.
Most people aren't aware that very little of the country's wealth is in banks or credit
unions.
It's overwhelmingly in brokerage houses or mutual fund companies and that's where the
criminals really want to target because that's where most of the money is.
The modern bank robbers aren't bank robbers anymore.
They are brokerage robbers.
You're going to see offers where you'll be offered a security key for free potentially
and just take them up on their offer to have more security with your account.
My oldest brother, who's a retired lawyer, removed all the financial apps from his smartphone.
He no longer has bank account brokerage accounts on his phone because he knows about the problems
with the theft of the phones.
Anything though, in my TV stories, I asked one of the security experts, why is it that
the targeted thefts of phones are all iPhones and not androids?
He said, you know, it's an interesting thing because the security vulnerabilities are there
at being able to get at people's money who carry iPhones or androids and Chris, I bring
you in now for the guess, why is it that criminals are only targeting iPhones and not
androids?
They assume that people have more money.
That's right.
They assume that people have iPhones or wealthier and so that's why they target the iPhones.
Just know that you are greater vulnerabilities.
I shared on the podcast a few months ago, do not in a public space access your iPhone
by punching in a secret code, a pen code.
Only do so with one of the biometric methods because criminals are targeting you, they're
watching and they are scoping out getting your security pen so that if they steal your phone,
they instantly have access to the keys to the kingdom of everything on your iPhone.
Do not ever use for your device or for iTunes the same password you use for any financial
institution where you got serious money.
Now, if you want them to pay your debts, make sure that all the money you owe people get
in access to that.
They can pay money for you.
Just kidding on that.
All right.
You ready for questions?
I sure am.
This is from Matthew and Georgia.
I know that several years ago, Clark would regularly recommend the Fidelity Investments
Visa card due to his 2% cash back on all purchases which goes into your Fidelity account.
We have this card and love it, but I haven't heard him bring it up lately and it's not
on the list of cards and Clark's wallet on Clark.com.
Right.
Did something change with this card causing it to lose favor?
I've never carried the Fidelity card because even though I have accounts at Fidelity, they're
not my main financial house.
I have money with all three of my favorite children, Vanguard, Schwab and Fidelity, but
I have far and away the most money with Vanguard.
Vanguard doesn't offer the wonderful suite of banking type services that Schwab and Fidelity
do so I just don't have one of their cards, but the Fidelity 2% card remains one of the
very best credit cards to have in America.
It is on our list of the best reward credit cards.
It's just not one that I carry in my wallet.
Right.
We have a couple of stories on Clark.com.
One is the best reward credit cards and then they're also on the best credit cards for investing
rewards.
They're both, they're two articles.
Okay.
Thank you, Sally, our managing editor is in the room.
We write a lot about this topic of picking the right credit cards because most of us are
creatures of habit and we use, we use and I want to shake you that and make sure that
the money that you have worked hard to earn is working the hardest it can be for you.
Market North Carolina says I have a Wells Fargo active cash Visa card that pays 2% back on
everything.
Last month Wells Fargo sent me a message that they have given me a promotional deal of 0%
interest on any purchases until May of 2024 as long as I make the minimum payment on time
each month.
I called them twice and confirmed with two different reps that this was a legit deal.
I also see the 0% promotional balance on my statement.
I normally don't carry a balance but this sounds like free money.
So my plan is to make the minimum payment each month on my regular purchases and the
rest of what I would have paid to clear the balance goes into a monthly money market fund.
Then I will pay the entire balance in April of next year.
This works out to be an interest free loan that earns me close to 5% at current rates.
What do you think?
And so you're earning 2% on the Wells Fargo card.
You're earning close to 5% on the money market.
Those money market rates will decline but they're not going to collapse over time as
the economy slows.
So what could possibly go wrong?
The most important thing is to make sure that there's no balance on your card when
you start using it during the promotional period.
If there's any balance outstanding prior to the promotional period beginning then any
minimum payments you make go to the 0% and not to the balance that would be carrying
a very, very high interest rate.
But yeah, if Wells Fargo wants to give away the store for nearly a year, take their free
money.
I would also say pay that last month, like maybe a month early.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, that is such a good point.
Anytime you're in a, you know, same as cash kind of thing, no interest period, always
put in a buffer before that period ends where you pay that balance off.
Don't play cute paying it off too close to when that period expires.
Raquel in Georgia says we recently had a false alarm in our home and officer arrived 10
minutes after we resolved the issue.
A bill from an alert reduction program just arrived demanding payment of $100 for the
false alarm or police service will be suspended for our address.
Is this a legitimate bill?
Yeah, so let me tell you what this is about Raquel is that depending on whose stats you
believe somewhere between 97 and 99% of burglar alarm calls are false alarms.
And so police resources, it's the worst of all possible worlds.
You could have something really going on at your home or business.
And it's the lowest priority call by the time the police show up in most cases, the burglar,
if there was one, he or she, they are long gone.
And so the burglar did nothing for you.
Then you've got the enormous cost of an officer not being out on patrol or dealing with a
higher priority call who shows up on a false alarm.
So already it's the lowest priority call and they get there, you got to fill out a report,
blah, blah, blah, false alarm.
So what governments are doing all over the country, where it's allowed by state law,
is local governments are instituting these, basically their taxes.
That if you have a false alarm, you pay a fee that most often is around this $100 figure.
That's why a lot of police departments aren't charging the fee, require visual confirmation
that there is an intruder or they will ignore the alarm call or they do the fee thing.
And so it's all because of the false alarm.
So what I recommend most of the time that alarm is going to go off Murphy's law, you're
not going to be around.
Police are going to come, it's going to be a false alarm and they're going to bill you,
right?
So you want digital cameras appropriately placed around your home so that you can do
visual confirmation, everything's all clear or in fact there is an intruder.
When you tell a police dispatcher at 911, I'm looking, there are two perpetrators, they're
right now in my living room, blah, blah, blah.
Then it goes from being the lowest priority call to the highest priority call.
In the event you have the cameras, you're able to call 911, tell the police to disregard,
false alarm, you don't get hit with the charge.
Yes, it is a legitimate bill and it's designed to hit us over the head with a baseball bat
to get us to make sure that we don't waste precious police resources on false alarm calls.
So I hope I made the $100 bill a little less bitter for you because it is for a legitimate
reason that the police departments do this.
Growing up ahead, some of you feel like you got hit with a bat is when you go to buy
an airline ticket and you hear how much they cost right now, I'm going to tell you strategies
to save money in the roughest summer ever to save money on air travel.
It's time for the summer travel survival guide just about by every measurement, the busiest
summer travel ever.
And overwhelmingly, it's by road and you may have heard this triple A stat.
They expect 42 million plus Americans to travel by road just over the Memorial Day holiday
long weekend.
Huge number of people.
It's reporting record revenue per passenger right now because demand has been so strong.
First of all, let's deal with the automobile thing.
In more and more of the country, there are now alternates, four lane divided roads that
are alternates to using the traditional interstate system.
And this is one I've been an advocate for forever and some people roll their eyes when
I say it.
But when you look at a peak travel period like Memorial Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July, the
big three summer holidays, then you look at others like, gosh, especially Thanksgiving,
the worst nightmare of travel by car.
I always look on a navigation tool for alternate routes using a network of four lane divided
highways.
It has been such a time saver for me because the travel times on the traditional interstate
system, gosh, they're suffering from their own popularity.
And inevitably, as the traffic gets more and more congested, you're going to have more
more wrecks, more and more delays with that.
And so I'm a big believer on that road trip that you look at the alternate routes that
get you around the massive amount of traffic, particularly on interstates that end with
a five or a zero.
If you're not familiar with why the interstate system has the numbering it does, interstates
that end in a zero or a five are major interstates, those that end in another digit or more minor,
the fives are north, south freeways, you know, five, fifteen, twenty, five, thirty, five,
forty five, blah, blah, blah.
And then the evens are east, west freeways starting at ten going up to ninety.
And so those carry generally around the country be most traffic.
Air travel, the airlines are falling all over themselves, telling Wall Street how they can't
believe they're good luck.
That two things that have been a bad luck scenario for the nation's airlines are working
out just great for the airline's stockholders.
They don't have enough planes because of all the pre-existing operational problems and
management problems that Boeing is years and years and years behind on delivery of aircraft.
And airlines have older planes they've got to put out to pasture and they just don't
have enough aircraft.
Then you add on top of it, there's a severe pilot shortage that could go on for years.
So the airlines normally can't help themselves.
When they have planes and pilots, when times are good, they add too many routes, too many
flights.
And right now they can't, the demand is there, the planes are not.
So the airlines have been able to use dynamic demand pricing to run up the average cost
of a ticket the highest ever.
I mean, even if you inflation adjust, you'd have to go back before airline deregulation
in 1979, 80 to find a time that inflation adjusted airline ticket prices may have been
higher.
So what do you do?
Because I've told you the problem.
All right.
So I've got certain longstanding rules for travel and some modifications.
So let's start with the longstanding rules of travel.
When you pick a specific destination and a specific date, you want to go and return,
this is what you do.
You take your wallet and you hand it over to the airline because they own you.
When you lose that flexibility of destination and date, you lose almost all your flexibility
on pricing.
I got it.
If you're going to somebody's wedding and they're getting married on a specific date
and it's in a specific place, it gets a lot harder.
But use geography at least as your friend in that case.
Now there are so many parts of the country that have more than one airport within a decent
distance of where you're actually trying to go.
Use that flexibility.
Use tools like Hopper or Google.com slash flights to price out alternatives.
If you have any flexibility on date going or returning, you have flexibility on airports,
you can save money.
Those of you who follow me on social media, you just saw the video of when my wife and
I were in Southern California, I price all five area airports.
It's going to Los Angeles, priced all five area airports and ended up the cheapest was
flying into Long Beach.
Most people just look LAX, but there's Burbank, Orange County, Ontario and Long Beach in addition
to LAX, the more flexibility you have, the better.
Work for your fares one way, not round trip because one airline may have the best fare
one way, but not close to the best fare coming back.
You do one way airfare searches, you're going to do better.
Always look at Southwest on its own because Southwest doesn't participate in any of these
shopping engines.
So you miss their fares.
And there's always opportunity with some hazard if you look at the five deep discount airlines,
the two newer ones, a Vaylo and Breeze, the older ones, Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant.
You earn your savings with those three.
But the best savings go to people who want to take a trip, have flexibility about dates
and aren't zeroed in on a specific destination.
Then you let the deal and the date drive your deal.
And speaking of dates, airfares show a clear pattern of much lower prices any year around
the 15th of August when we technically still have almost six weeks of summer left.
If you can delay your summertime travel till the second half of August or later, you're
going to get better deals.
And the fall is going to present much better deals because business travel has not recovered
from the pandemic.
Airlines have to rely on leisure travelers to fill seats during a time leisure travelers
normally don't go, which is the fall.
And that's where you're going to find great deals.
Krista?
Okay.
And you know I could talk about travel for the next 10 hours, right?
I could too.
Okay.
James in Iceland, speaking of travel, he says, I bought a ticket on a major airline.
Later they changed the flight to over an hour earlier.
I cannot make my connection in the time allowed.
No other later flights are available on the sale line.
I was very surprised after over an hour of messaging with an agent online that they would
only issue an e-credit.
No refund.
I was very surprised they would not help me as they caused the problem.
They said the level ticket I bought did not allow for changes.
And you believe that this is what they said.
They changed it.
If it wasn't changeable, I would not have this problem.
I filed a complaint with the airline and they notified me that it could take over 30
days for them to respond.
What else can I do to get a refund?
The flight was under $100, but I really feel I'm being treated unkindly if not unfairly.
So James, you're in Iceland and I don't know if you're an American citizen or you're
Icelandic.
But the three full fare American airlines, Delta American and United, all went to something
called basic economy as a fare they could advertise, but they hope nobody ever buys.
That is as awful and mean spirit as it could possibly be to use it as just a way for their
fares to seem lower than they actually are.
If you buy one of those tickets, basically no matter what they do, no matter how they
do it, you lose the money.
Now the rules filed with the transportation department, the rules that the airlines file
and you can see a chart.
If you go to dot.gov and you go to the four consumer section under air travel, you'll
see what the specifics are that an airline considers a flight change to be a major flight
change.
In which case, the airline is required even with a non-refundable, non-changeable ticket
to offer you a full refund for that ticket.
An e-credit is actually more generous than they might have to be based on a one hour
schedule change.
But the reality is you should file a complaint when you're at dot.gov.
You should also post a complaint on social media.
Not all airlines, but most airlines respond much quicker than a month when you're complaining
on social media.
What you say simply is you don't get into a long story.
You just say, my flight changed.
There's no way I can make that flight now.
The airline will not refund my money even though they're the ones that had the flight
change.
And if he was on a connecting flight on the same airline, they would probably change
that, right?
Right, but he's not coming in from Iceland.
Who he's coming into?
Was he coming into BWI as I always said?
Yes.
No, it's the ticket was from Baltimore to Atlanta.
So he was coming into BWI, which means the only airlines will Southwest doesn't sell,
but this has to be a Delta flight, because Delta sells the basic economy.
So yeah, I would send a message out on social media, maybe Delta will direct message you.
And in addition, file that complaint with dot because it's Delta's schedule change that
made the ticket useless to you and a refund is proper in an order in such a case.
Tone in California says, I know Wayford Clark to achieve his goal of visiting all the continents.
There's a three year cruise, three years that visits 135 countries on seven continents,
and it might cost less than rent by life at sea cruises.
I'm definitely thinking about this when I retire.
Okay, so I think that I would be hit with a divorce for spousal abandonment, because
Lane's never going.
She's no way she's going on a cruise, even for 30 days, definitely not for three years.
I wonder if I would do that, being able to travel to seven seas and visit all over the
world.
I might be tempted by that.
And Liz in Florida says, I purchased a chicken wrap at Costco last week.
When I got home, I found one of the wraps had teeth marks where a bite had been taken,
and the wrap was laid down so it couldn't be seen.
Say what?
I called the store and they reviewed the video and confirmed a customer had placed the package
in the shopping cart, walked around.
It looked as though the customer took a bite and then placed the package back in the refrigerated
section.
The manager apologized and offered to give me my money back.
Okay, wait, wait, wait.
Costco did not do anything wrong in this case.
Right.
They did everything right.
And they had cameras.
They were able to track the customer.
Yes.
The manager apologized and offered to give me my money back for the wraps, about $14
and a new package for no charge.
He said the store has problems with bakery items that customers eat, cookies, they eat
cookies and return them or leave them in a different part of the store.
He said he hadn't seen this happen with the deli products.
He said he hopes it's not a new prank, like the ice cream licking stunt that the kids were
doing in the past.
I'll carefully examine all fresh products in the future and I wanted your audience to
be aware.
Wow.
So retailers have such sophisticated camera technology.
They probably with facial recognition know who that member was who took a bite and put
the item back on the shelf.
That's a member whose money they should say, here's your 60 or 120 bucks back.
You're done.
So do you know I got hit with an ice cream thing recently?
No.
What happened?
So you know how on Sundays my treat day where I eat whatever I want and I'm careful
the rest of the week and I'm an ice cream snob.
So I had a pint of Hagen does ice cream and I open it up and what somebody done, they
had taken a bite out of it, put the lid back on and put it back on the shelf and I was
the unlucky person.
That's gross.
That was gross.
Yeah.
So I took it back and went to the service desk at the supermarket.
I said, can you believe somebody did that?
And the person said, I could tell you stories.
Oh gosh.
Said, go get another pint and I did.
So this isn't just a Costco thing for sure.
It sounds like they handled it well.
But yeah.
I didn't get a free pint.
I just got a replacement for mine.
Costco gave the money back and gave a free one, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
So just don't do this.
I mean, it's not respectful to other people as a prank or whatever.
So grab an item and start eating it and then put it back.
That's what it is.
Obviously with the ice cream, somebody was just thinking they were being cute.
Yeah.
Well, that's what the samples are for a Costco.
I would ask them, can I, I would ask a manager, can I sample this?
And I bet they would let you there.
I bet they would pull one out, cut it up and let people sample it.
So I told you what Lane did when she was pregnant with Stephanie, right?
What?
My wife was a vegetarian.
And one day she was driving down the road.
She sees the supermarket.
She pulls off, parks in the supermarket, goes in the store, goes back to the package
meat section, grabs a thing, a package meat, rips it open and is shoving this processed
meat in her mouth.
And so store security comes right over because they think they have a shop lifter here.
And my wife said, I'm sorry, I'm pregnant.
I just had to have some meat.
And she's never been a vegetarian again.
She was just craving meat when our daughter is 23, about to be 24.
And she just had to have that package.
It was like packaged corn beef or something.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Did you do anything really crazy with either of your privacy?
I really wanted like spaghetti sauce when I was pregnant with Claire like tomatoes.
And I actually like my husband walked in one day and I was eating the spoon out of a jar
of spaghetti sauce.
Delicious.
Well, I'm sorry we digress there.
I just thought it was funny.
I want to thank you so much for being with us today.
Remember key principles.
Save more.
Spend less and avoid getting ripped off.
♪♪