09.22.23 Clark Answers His Critics on Clark Stinks / New Online Privacy Choices

It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with knowledge that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. And it's Friday. So this is great because this is when I get to hear how I messed up. It's perfect lead end of the weekend when I have more time in my family. And they get to tell me how I messed up too. It's just great. So one thing that doesn't stink, our Consumer Action Center, Team Clark, where you can get one on one advice Monday through Friday, 30 hours each week. It's free. And we've been doing it for 30 and a half years. So you want to see how to reach a member of Team Clark, go to Clark.com slash CAC. And later I want to tell you we're being given much more control over our private information. And we're getting these notices that we don't understand. I'm going to explain to you what the backstory is and how you can benefit from having your information shared willy nilly much better than you could before now. But without further ado, it's time to hear how I stay good. I should have never encouraged you to speak. You know what you think? I'm pretty stupid. You should be ashamed of yourself. Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you're right, pal. What you got? You don't stink, but I have a feeling you're not being completely honest. You recently shared a story about a rental car company trying to charge you more to run a vehicle because they did not have the compact size you reserved. You said that you said, no, you need to charge me the rate we agreed on. Then the lady rolled her eyes and gave you that rate. Be honest. Didn't you follow up by saying, do you know who I am? I know. I drop your name to drive home a point. I'm certain if I were Clark Howard, I'd use it, Jefferson. Jefferson, the reality is I never, ever, ever, not ever do that. Never happen. And there's nothing worse than somebody who says, well, you can't treat me that way. Don't you know why I am? I remember there's an actress named Reese Witherspoon who in an inebriated stage pulled that number on a cop and it was on the, what do you call the body cam. And she says that the most embarrassing episode she's had of her entire public career. No, you never, ever, ever do that. It's just, it's not right. But for me, it's really important to experience the same customer, no service everybody else does. You always say that. If you're going through something terribly like, well, now I know when people complain about this company that it's legitimate, they're treating me terribly. So Jefferson, I'll tell you a little annex to the car rental thing. It just happened to me again in a different way, rented a car through Costco travel, get to the car rental counter and the rate that pops up on the screen is not, you know, where you're supposed to send it said, no, that's not the rate I was quoted. And she says, well, show me what you have. And I show her the Costco travel confirmation. She said, oh, well, we had a price increase. So we're not honoring that. So she was very nice, but we went back and forth. She said, you'll have to take that up with Costco. I go ahead and I leave and you never allow a hotel stay a rental or whatever to end without getting something resolved. So I call Costco travel and they said, well, we see you picked up the car, but we can't do anything about a rate dispute till you are done with the rental and we can see the prices and then we deal with it. So then when I return the car, they ask you that infantry question, where you happy with your rental. Yeah, everything was fine except I was charged more than I was supposed to me. He said, really? What were you supposed to pay? You know, I told him, he said, oh, well, I've just credited you back that difference. It was like, wow, but I never let go of it till it was solved. And then I did a review and thanked that employee by name for having fixed the problem. Very nice. All right. More back to how you stink. Okay. You talk about how to save on utilities, but you seem to leave out a commonly missed potential savings. I moved into a home that didn't have an attic fan. It would get well above 150 degrees up there in the summer, which even with insulation was causing my electric bill to be 30% higher in the summer. It took five summer months to earn my money back in savings. Please share with your listeners and have them check to make sure they have one that it's properly set. Melissa. Melissa, thank you for that. And you mentioned you have proper insulation in the attic. Most people would benefit from checking to see if they have adequate insulation like you do in addition to you using the attic fan. Insulation is a big factor in what those bills are going to be summer and winter. Clark spoke about some family living in the Nomad Renters lifestyle. He specifically stated that they moved every few months and do not own a residence. However, he failed to mention how they handle the logistics of mail, driver's licenses, insurance, filing taxes, etc. I used to contact form on this website to express my curiosity about all of these just mentioned logistical items and then they posted to us. For some comments on the YouTube video, I'm not the only person interested in this lifestyle, Charles. Charles, thank you. So what my brother and his wife do is they live in Florida. They rent a different place every year for seven months through the winter. So they establish legal residence in Florida and then they pay a woman to receive their mail. She then opens their mail, scans it to them and emails it to them. There are now a number of services that will do this where they receive physical mail and then scan it and send it. They are usually bonded, insured. So you don't have to worry about somebody seeing what your accounts are and they're off to the races. But now with the ability to have more and more statements come electronically, it's become easier to have a nomadic lifestyle. But having somewhere that's a base that you establish residency is an important part of this whole equation. And if you read online, you'll read why so many people established their domicile in Montana. Clark, your response and advice about trip insurance was a swing and a miss. Trip travel insurance is not simply about the cost of the trip. When traveling via crews or internationally, an illness or injury could put you in a potentially dire situation, travel insurance would provide you with medical care if necessary and if necessary, repatriation, Kelly. Kelly, thank you and that is a very good point. You know, I obsess so much about the question is a simple one. I paid this much for a trip. The money is non-refundable. I'm not going. How do I get the money back? And you bring up a potentially much more important aspect which is having a policy that covers evacuation if necessary and medical care if necessary outside the United States since most of us have insurance or Medicare recipients in their coverage. They're not covered outside the United States. And so you bring up a very valid point. If someone is semi-retired or retired and travels a lot during the year, they should look at buying a policy, this an annual policy for medical care outside the United States. It's much cheaper than per trip. Clark, you smell like a corpse flower. Ooh, what's that smell like? They don't smell good. Oh. We're called in about a MacBook that was no longer supported by Apple for security updates. I can't believe you recommended ditching this fully functional computer and buying another MacBook or at least a better option, a Chromebook. Why not recommend installing a Linux distribution to extend the life of this fully functional computer? I would recommend Ubuntu Mate or Linux Mint as examples. Both of these distributions have long-term support versions that provide several years of security update support, and they are free, Rick, and many other people who wrote in with the same thing. Many people. Yeah. Okay. So we did an experiment several years ago, and you hated me for it, where we experimented with Linux-based because of the security issues, and then we had a lot of trouble with them. But obviously, this is a very viable option for people who have some technical, you don't need a lot of technical ability, but you need some technical ability to be able to do so, and it's a great suggestion. I'm glad so many of you posted that suggestion. And another one you could have smelled a lot sweeter if you had told the person with the old Mac, if you had mentioned that Apple's recycling program exists. They will send a return label, and you can mail it in any other electronic equipment to them and safely dispose of it, both securely and ecologically. Laurel. Laurel, thank you for that. And Laurel has an old Mac too, right? Yep. Laurel said, I have an extra 2010 Mac still going strong. Clark, you stunk up this one worse than a what, I guess I was saying, fart on a hot humid day. Collar was asking about a child's life insurance policy and what to do with it. I too have the same issue because I purchased one of the Gerber Grove plans I'll just say because that's a big one for all three of my children. It was 25 years ago and very affordable at the time, $36 a year each. The policies were $5,000 that automatically doubled at age 21, so they're $10,000. You told the Collar to either cancel a policy or continue to pay it since it's only $36 a year. The better option which you failed to tell him was since he probably has the same plan as I have after 25 years, the cash value is approximately $1,200. I've elected to have them spend down the cash value at $36 a year, giving my kids the same $10,000 coverage for the next 30 years at no additional cost. I know you despised child life policies, but 25 years ago we were barely getting by in life and the thought of losing a child was bad enough, but the financial burden would have ruined us. $3 a month was worth a little piece of mind, Michael. Michael, thank you for that. I really liked the strategy you're talking about that you let the policy pay for itself through the cash value it has. You get an additional 10 years of coverage in the example given, so Michael, I appreciate that. Clark, in this context, your advice stinks like the flat of molded strawberries from Costco that we bought in excess. You advise keeping a 4.99% car loan in order to fund a 5% CD, but you totally failed to account for taxes. The winners here include the bank that holds the car loan, the bank that holds the CD and the government. The consumers just making themselves busy pushing money around in order to lose money or worse yet, the consumer also bears the risk of penalty due to failing to make timely payments. There is no scenario in your recommendation here in which the consumer comes out ahead. The best case is a wash and the worst case is worse. Love the show and appreciate the humility stinky pants. Love the good work, Aaron. Aaron, you are completely right. The only exception I would have to, how right you are, is if the person has the vehicle loan and they're basically trading checks except the, as you pointed out, so wisely, the 5% is taxable, the 4.99 for the vehicle loan is not tax deductible, so it's not dollars going in and out exactly. But if somebody ultimately needs cash and the money they have in CDs is the cash they have available to them, then it's better if they've got these two things to have the loan and to have the money in savings so that they do have a reserve they can draw on. But yes, overwhelmingly, you're right. Sorry to say it, but Clark is smelling like the laundry pal from his beloved Atlanta Falcons after a sweltering game day. You answer my question regarding having camping charges reclassified on my Chase Sapphire preferred card to the travel category so that we can get our two times rewards points. You told me to contact Chase and ask for this change. I did so and they were unable to make it. They said the categories are set by the merchant, not Chase. They suggested I contact the merchant to make the change, but even if I were successful in getting them to change it, the change would only be for future transactions, not previous ones. Chase charges merchants higher fees for travel category charges, causing some campgrounds to opt for possibly lower fees with a different categories. Tim. Tim, what's so amazing about what you just shared is how customer unfriendly the Chase customer no service was to you. I mean, that's ridiculous and excusable out of every hundred thousand Chase customers. How many would ever take the time to call and say, hey, this is miscategorized, I could have earned more. What you do in that case as a company is you do what used to be called internally a concession to customer and you just give them the credit for that. How dumb are the nation's banks? That is just a perfect example of inflexible stupidity. The way customers judge companies is when you have a problem, how do they deal with it? That's where the rubber meets the road and Chase, you got a big flat tire on the road. Clark, you don't stink, but on a recent podcast, you said dash cams are a must and I think this is good advice. However, listeners need to understand that dash cams can work both ways. If you have a dash cam and are involved in a serious incident that could be your fault, you must maintain all evidence. It is likely the police will obtain a warrant for the camera and another for the video content. That said, a dash cam makes me a better driver bill and several people also wrote in saying that the quality of the dash cam matters that some of the cheap ones you talk about are not great. You know, that's funny. You say that because I've had a number of under $20 dash cams and the video on them on the SD card is excellent. So I guess there are some in the marketplace that are junk. Now I drive an electric vehicle that has that all built into it. And so I don't have recent experience with ultra cheap dash cams. But I appreciate that the cheap ones may not always be the quality that you need. But the main point you made about that the evidence cuts both ways. Most of us are people who if we were at fault at something are going to own up to it. So if you're that kind of person, it doesn't hurt you that you have evidence that says what you're going to take responsibility for anyway, where it helps you is if you're dealing with an individual who is allegedly at fault, denies it, and then you got the video to prove it. And I do also think the dash cams do have a tendency to make the owner of a dash cam a better driver than they would be otherwise knowing there's always something watching when you make that left turn from the far right lane or you failed a signal or yield right of way or whatever it is. Maybe that dash cam just is a little thing saying, hey, hey, hey, shouldn't do that. Maybe. Coming up ahead, speaking of reminders, we're getting a lot of reminders now almost every day of new ways we can protect our privacy and most of us have put it on ignore. Reboot your credit card with Apple card. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account, a high yield low effort way to grow your money with no fees. Apply for Apple card now in the wallet app on iPhone to start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. Apple card subject to credit approval savings is available to Apple card owners subject to eligibility savings accounts by Goldman Sachs Bank USA member FDIC terms apply. Hastel Lust über Zukunft zu reden? Dann höre die Dialoge für morgen schon heute, bei der Zukunftswoche von DM Drogerie markt. Erhalte spannende Impulse in 5 Talks zur 5 relevanten Themen mit mehr als 25 Speaker nimm Livestream. Mit Ankatrin Schmitz, Richard David Precht, Luisa Dellert und vielen mehr. Die Zukunftswoche vom 25. des 29. September, ab 18 Uhr live aus Berlin. Alle Infos zum Livestream auf DM DEE, Slash, Zukunftswoche. I don't know if you've noticed this when you go to websites or even apps you use out of nowhere, they're offering you new choices to protect your privacy. Often you'll have something where it says, accept cookies or you can refuse and you can ask for only functional cookies or a variety of choices and you may think, who cares? Well, you should care because every time you just accept all cookies, you're allowing so much of your personal information to be available and with permissions often, you're giving permissions to do so many different things going after information that is used for other purposes on your phone or just imagine this, my wife has an Instagram account and she did an experiment for a while because you know Facebook with Instagram and Facebook they own both. Your permissions give them permission to spy on everything you go on in your life. So my wife started doing really wild things. She'd start talking with her phone sitting there, she's on an iPhone and she would talk and say, say something just random like, you know, I'm really interested in doing whatever. Within hours, sometimes quicker, ads start appearing for the thing that it overheard her saying and we assume is the Instagram Facebook spying thing but don't know for sure it could have been something else on her iPhone. But the reality is you ignore this opportunity to protect your information at your own peril. The reason you're seeing suddenly sight after sight or app after app asking you what information you're giving a permission to share instead of just taking it in the past is because of new laws, one in California and a much more important one in Europe. And here we are in the good old USA. What differences it make if you live in one of the other 49 states or obviously we're not living in Europe, what differences it make what the protections are for Europeans, what the protections are for Californians. The reason is so many of these apps, so many websites have customers around the world or particularly in Europe or all of the United States. So in order to not get in trouble, they're extending the same protections to us regardless of where we live. And so when you see new privacy permissions, don't click, just accept all whatever's. Go in and normally what it will say, you'll have a choice functional cookies only or some term like that. And that prevents them from doing all this general spying on you, packaging the data and using it. Who knows how and making your information so much more vulnerable to a hacker who might break into that database of that company or someone they've sold your data to. So it's a simple thing to do, takes just a second. And I know Chris, you've always taken the position that you've given up, that your information is everywhere anyway and you don't care anymore. Well, I care. I care. So if I have an option like that, I do opt out, but I do feel like there's so much out there that in general, like I know that my information is floating out there and our information is floating all over the place. Yeah. I mean, I don't just throw my social security number out there or anything, I just know that, you know, things are out there, unfortunately, but yeah, it's good to have choices like this. You know, if the life card calls out shark warnings, that's when you don't run in those things. Exactly. Yeah. Kurt, it Wisconsin says, I'm looking into a state planning with creating a will and trust for my kids. I've been quoted around $2,000 to work with some local attorneys. My employer offers a paid legal service that I can roll in for $17.95 per month. The paid legal services offers access to attorneys to establish wills and trusts. Would it make sense for me to enroll in the legal service for a year, do our state planning and then drop the legal service or should I just pay the lump sum to go with the local attorney? So Kurt, the big pitch for any of these legal subscription services is you're going to make the money back right away plus by just having one of the lawyers do a will for you. And if you feel the need to set up a will have a testimony trust or trust for your kids as part of it and you're hiring a lawyer who this is what he or she does for a living, pay the money. That's not what you're getting with any of the legal subscription services with the lawyer who you're going to hire. They cannot afford to spend the many billable hours doing a very involved will and if necessary trust arrangements for your kids, they're going to have to use some kind of quick computer generated program to generate a legal will for you. So if your situation involves any complexity at all, your strategy is one I advise against, just pay the lawyer. If your situation is very simple and you want to lower the cost doing that, well, I guess it would be okay to do one of the legal subscription services. But my feeling about Will's estates and trust is that if you have money you own your own business, you have complicated family situation, you want a lawyer that this is his or her area of expertise. Kyle in Pennsylvania, as I recently logged into my HSA account and noticed five small charges between $5 and $20 on my payment card that I haven't used in over two years. Altogether, $30 was reimbursed out of my HSA account for things such as HAT GPT subscription. I immediately reported my card stone and asked the company how my card could have been used when it's been in my house for two years. They refused to take any responsibility and simply issued me a new card. I normally don't check this account too often because I only use the automatic invest feature right now. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again in the future? So the debit card assigned to it may have a freezing option more and more because of the lack of consumer protections with debit cards, stored value cards. There's an often on switch you can do. In fact, I saw an ad the other day, one of the banks was pitching how you can turn your debit card instantly off and on since this is a card to use very infrequently. I would recommend because these usually have a visa mask card logo on them. See if you can turn this card off when you're not needing it, not using it. What you did not say is the money that was stolen, you said they didn't take responsibility but did they restore the funds. Even with a debit card where you have very few protections, the bank that administers that card for the health plan has a procedure where you should be able to dispute those debits as fraudulent debits and there's a very tight timeline on being able to do that and have the funds restored. But no doubt these cards are vastly inferior in terms of their consumer protections compared to a real regular credit card. It's a good reminder to all of us to check our HSA accounts. I never check ours either. I'm going to be going in and looking at it. People don't check HSAs. They don't check 401Ks. There was just a story I read about a ring that apparently cracked into 401Ks and was stealing money and you don't notice in a sufficient time. You lose that money and the greatest risk with this is old 401Ks from ex employers which is another reason why it's a good idea to consolidate old 401Ks because criminals are looking for any weak link in the financial system where they can steal money and there's a victim to the crime but the paper trail is not clear, low priority for law enforcement and just takes too many resources to prosecute these kind of things and that's why you have to be your own police officer on the job monitoring your accounts. Simon and Florida says Clark, you are always telling us what we do poorly in the United States to other countries when it comes to our money habits compared to other countries I think. Please tell us three things that we do better in the United States that other countries don't do. Thank you for everything and go Browns. Well, the Browns, there's hope for the Browns season this year. This could be a really good 17 game cycle for the Browns and we'll see how it plays out. As for the United States, I love this country. I am so grateful to live here and when you think about the things we have here that are so special that we seem to ignore right now because we're so busy not trusting each other and liking each other but the reality is you asked me what I love so much. That's our freedoms here number one, the fact that we can say whatever we wish without the fear that people face in so many countries around the world. You can say whatever you want to about other people in the United States that are public figures, you can put up billboards I was driving down and interstate the other day and there were these billboards that were a pretty off color about the president. And after another, think about if you did that in Russia, what Putin would do to you. This is a thing that is so incredible and wonderful that we don't appreciate enough. The freedoms that we do enjoy, the free elections that we carry out, the freedom to speak as you wish. How about our economic system that allows any individual regardless of where they started if they have an idea, they have an invention that the opportunity that's available to start your own business, bring your invention to life, build a company, we have story after story, we have more people in the United States who become enormously successful coming from modest means, modest backgrounds. I think it's amazing what people who have immigrated to the United States with varying little money and established roots in the United States, what they have been able to do, how hard they work and the successes they contribute to this great nation. I mean, there's so many things I could go on and on, but the rule of law that we hold to in the United States, private property rights, I could name thing after thing. So yes, we fundamentally are amazing here and then there are things we could do better. Now, I'm always going to point out areas where other places are further ahead of us on various things. Why do I do that? To draw perspective that the way we do things, we could do better. We can do better, just like I was talking about how Europe has better privacy protections than we do. Why don't we have them? Because the lobbying power, big companies in Washington that have prevented those kind of protections becoming part of the law in the United States. So yes, we can do better, but at base, we're pretty unbelievable here. So you didn't even mention one of your favorite things about the United States that we have that no other country has does not have. What's that? The NFL. Well, the only ones with the NFL, but the CFL Canadian football is, I mean, they've got to be more efficient than us. They've got to get it first down in three downs instead of four. So I love that and thank you so much for joining us today. It's an important thing. I hope you have an absolutely incredible weekend. And if in your financial and consumer adventures, you need guidance on the weekends when we serve you around the clock at Clark.com and at ClarkDeals, we'll keep you up to date on all the great deals day by day, hour by hour, where you can stretch every dollar. Have a great one.