Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to MD, founder of the personal finance website Studenomics.

MD talks with Tom about topics such as his inspiration for Studenomics, how he got through college without having to pay off student loans, and also about things that people in their early twenties need to consider if they’re thinking about buying a home.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with MD
– [00:53] MD’s inspiration for Studenomics
– [02:22] The focus of Studenomics
– [03:14] MD’s college years
– [03:53] Starting off at a community college
– [06:00] The start of the blog
– [08:31] Paying for college
– [13:32] Buying a home in your early 20s: Income considerations
– [15:26] Considering your savings
– [16:37] Taking into account your relationship status
– [18:42] The need to be somewhat handy
– [20:51] MD’s current projects
[23:53] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 146: Buying a House In Your Early 20s, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Jenny Kerr, founder of The Jenny Pincher.

Jenny talks with Tom about how married women can better prepare themselves financially for a divorce. Some of the items she discusses are keeping individual checking accounts, knowing where the money is and being prepared to start a new job.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:38] Interview with Jenny Kerr
– [00:49] Jenny’s inspiration for article
– [03:15] Individual bank accounts
– [05:34] The need for a joint account
– [06:13] Funding the individual account
– [07:33] The individual account for emergency access
– [08:57] Know where the money is
– [10:27] Keeping your resume current
– [12:06] Part-time work
– [14:21] Understanding the necessities
– [15:24] Knowing what benefits are tied to your spouse
– [16:40] Identifying policies your spouse could benefit from
[19:13] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 145: Protecting Individual Finances in a Marriage, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan J Busch talks to Andrea Woroch, consumer savings expert.

They discuss when and why it can be smarter to shop for certain items during the winter.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Andrea Woroch
– [00:51] Big appliances
– [02:42] Christmas wrapping, decorations and lights
– [03:18] Using and selling gift cards
– [05:06] Linens and bedding
– [05:45] Motorcycles
– [06:28] Suits, prom dresses and spring formal dresses
– [08:28] Video games and TVs, and consider ditching cable for a Roku player
– [12:55] Winter coats and winter sport essentials
– [13:50] Jewelry
– [14:58] Furniture
– [15:45] Don’t shop for the current season at the beginning of the season
[16:36] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 144: Best Things to Buy During Winter, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan J Busch talks to Kathy Pickering, Executive Director of H&R Block’s Tax Institute.

They discuss the difference between smart investments vs. emotional decisions, the importance of financial planning, and how most people are better off just buying an index fund and ignoring investment gurus.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Kathy Pickering
– [00:48] Do an annual review of life changes
– [01:26] Extending the Payroll Tax Holiday
– [02:43] Federally declared disasters and casualty losses
– [04:39] Energy efficiency credit (check the list at energystar.gov)
– [05:51] American Opportunity Credit for college students, tuition and fees deductions, and the Lifetime Learning Credit
– [08:16] Tax credits for adoption
– [11:10] Credit for some plug-in cars
– [12:10] Brokers are now required to report cost basis of the sale of stocks and securities
– [12:59] Health care reform affects on individual and small business taxes
– [17:59] Expired hiring credits
– [18:55] Changes to be aware of for 2013
– [21:31] E-filing is heavily encouraged and improved
[23:56] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 143: Tax Law Changes in 2012, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Consumerism Commentary founder Flexo about New Year’s resolutions.

Flexo discusses several tips to addressing New Year’s resolutions including performing an honest self-assessment, setting goals that are meaningful to you and breaking them down into more manageable chunks.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:35] Interview with Flexo
– [00:46] New Year’s resolutions
– [02:05] Setting the wrong resolutions
– [03:00] Self reflection and assessment
– [05:42] Setting meaningful resolutions
– [07:43] Staying away from “S.M.A.R.T.” goals
– [09:02] Creating smaller goals
– [10:51] Rewarding yourself
– [12:44] Visualizing your goals
– [15:00] Taking action
– [16:43] Tom’s & Flexo’s resolutions
[21:19] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 142: New Year’s Resolutions, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan J Busch and Flexo speak with Carl Richards, author of the book The Behavior Gap.

They discuss the difference between smart investments vs. emotional decisions, the importance of financial planning, and how most people are better off just buying an index fund and ignoring investment gurus.

Carl has offered ten 8×10 prints of one of his most relevant sketches to Consumerism Commentary readers and listeners. The sketch explains who to determine what issues are the most important, whether in financial planning or in life. It is a Venn diagram emphasizing the intersection of things that matter and things you can control. The print is on high-quality, thick card stock.

Here’s how to get a free 8×10 print of the napkin sketch

In order to receive a free print, email book@behaviorgap.com with a subject line indicating you’re participating in the giveaway from Flexo or Consumerism Commentary, and include in the email a proof of purchase. The proof can be a copy of your order notice from Amazon, a picture of your receipt, or anything else that shows you’ve purchased the book. Carl’s team will contact the first ten people directly to ensure the prints find their way to the winners’ hands.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Carl Richards
– [00:57] Explaining financial planning through napkin sketches
– [02:45] The behavior gap between smart investments and emotional decisions
– [05:08] Past performance really doesn’t predict future results
– [09:13] Start with a plan instead of a product
– [12:39] Paying off debt is a great investment, maybe even before funding a 401(k)
– [16:21] Follow Warren Buffet’s advice and buy an index fund
– [21:25] Ignore all investment gurus
– [23:42] More money doesn’t solve money problems
– [25:31] Financial plans are much less important than the process of creating one and being flexible with them
– [27:17] Tools for avoiding making financial mistakes
[31:15] End

Free Webinar

Carl is also presenting a free webinar on building the perfect investment on January 5th at 3 p.m. Eastern time.

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 141: The Behavior Gap, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Rudy DeFelice, founder of the financial management tool for children and parents, Kidworth.

Rudy discusses several topics about Kidworth including what it does, what inspired him to found it, as well as how Kidworth can help children save towards different financial goals.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:37] Interview with Rudy DeFelice
– [00:49] Inspiration for Kidworth
– [01:22] What Kidworth does
– [01:53] Using Kidworth
– [02:59] Saving, spending and sharing
– [04:29] Telling friends and family
– [06:25] Choosing the gift
– [06:59] Making the contribution
– [08:46] Combining a physical gift with a contribution
– [13:48] Children using the website
– [14:31] How Kidworth makes money
– [16:19] Changing monetary behaviors
[18:44] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 140: Kidworth, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan J Busch talks to Jonathan Zschau, author of the book Buying and Owning a Mac: Secrets Apple Doesn’t Want You to Know.

They discuss the staggering frequency of commercials in daily life, how it’s easier to avoid than resist the temptation to shop, and the convincing argument that money and possessions don’t make people any happier.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Jonathan Zschau
– [00:46] The right time to buy a new Mac, and good reasons to choose an older model
– [06:16] AppleCare isn’t a good idea for everyone
– [11:25] Methods for preventing theft or retrieving a stolen device
– [15:17] Never hesitate to ask Apple to fix a problem
– [19:27] When does the Lemon Law come into play?
[22:54] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 139: Buying and Owning a Mac: Secrets Apple Doesn’t Want You to Know, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Scott Gerber, co-founder of the startup accelerator and investment company Gen Y Capital Partners.

Scott talks about the mission of Gen Y Capital Partners, their relationship with the Young Entrepreneur Council and their recent partnership with the White House on their “Pay as You Earn” program.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:37] Interview with Scott Gerber
– [00:50] Gen Y Capital Partners
– [02:32] The Young Entrepreneur Council
– [04:10] Gen Y entrepreneurs as a target audience
– [05:17] The market sectors being targeted
– [05:58] Being an entrepreneur in today’s economy
– [07:12] Who should be an entrepreneur
– [09:42] Funding for entrepreneurs
– [11:18] Finding capital
– [13:19] Applying for funding with Gen Y
– [14:08] Funding in exchange for business equity
– [14:56] Partnership with the White House
– [18:25] Accomplishments so far
[21:00] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 138: Gen Y Capital Partners, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan J Busch talks to Dr. James Roberts, author of the book Shiny Objects.

They discuss the staggering frequency of commercials in daily life, how it’s easier to avoid than resist the temptation to shop, and the convincing argument that money and possessions don’t make people any happier.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Dr. James Roberts
– [00:45] According to science, happiness doesn’t increase with spending or owning things
– [04:16] The media encourages us to shop, and it’s effective
– [05:12] Instead of being frugal or wasteful, try to be unconflicted
– [07:10] Commercials, product placements and unrealistic portrayals of life
– [09:48] Credit cards make you overestimate your available wealth
– [12:12] Perceived obsolescence
– [15:31] Several ways to avoid temptation instead of resisting it
– [21:39] Convince yourself that money and possessions won’t make you happier
[22:46] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 137: Shiny Objects, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Paula Pant, journalist, entrepreneur and founder of the personal finance website Afford Anything.

Paula talks about several landlord-related topics, including what to look for when purchasing a property, how tenants see properties different than landlords and the kind of work a landlord should expect.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Paula Pant
– [00:54] Owning rental properties
– [01:51] Analyzing a property’s profitability
– [03:04] Expenses involved
– [04:08] Things to look for in a property
– [05:19] Renting to professionals
– [06:54] The affect of the number of rental units
– [08:39] Paula’s experience
– [10:19] Fixer-uppers and meeting the needs of the tenant
– [12:25] The costs of fixing up a house
– [16:40] Income tax implications
– [19:26] Being a landlord
– [21:54] Finding good tenants
– [23:05] What tenants look for
– [23:38] Tasks to outsource
[28:17] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 136: Becoming a Landlord, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan speaks with Dinah Sanders, author of Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff.

Discardia is a holiday, a philosophy, and now a book that explains why life is more stressful as a result of having too much stuff, or the wrong kind of stuff. The book is filled with advice and soundproof logic that can help you make room for awesomeness.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Dinah Sanders
– [00:45] Discardia’s origin
– [02:37] Being in the mood for cleaning
– [03:41] Have more by getting rid of stuff
– [05:35] Why we keep stuff we don’t use
– [07:25] Finding a favorite place to reconnect with yourself
– [11:06] Clean in chunks, not stacks
– [14:31] Releasing potential with an empty drawer
– [16:36] Financial motivation for making a happier home
– [18:31] Avoid retail therapy
– [20:22] Keeping stuff because of guilt
– [23:19] Selling vs. donating
– [24:24] Deciding which books to keep
– [28:01] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 135: Discardia, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Ryan Bales, founder and CEO of the personal finance website and software Budgetable.

Ryan talks about how he founded Budgetable with his brother, how the software works and what he feels are the shortcomings of traditional budgeting methods.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Ryan Bales
– [00:48] The founding of Budgetable
– [04:06] Shortfalls of existing budget software
– [04:50] How Budgetable works
– [05:50] Budgetable’s user interaction
– [11:08] Failures with current budgeting methods
– [13:23] Using Budgetable
– [14:01] Smart phone app plans
– [14:21] The Financial Blogger Conference
[16:56] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 134: Budgetable, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan talks to Chris Camillo, author of Laughing at Wall Street: How I Beat the Pros at Investing (by Reading Tabloids, Shopping at the Mall, and Connecting on Facebook) and How You Can, Too.

Chris advises avoiding standard Wall Street advice and focusing on social networks, personal shopping research and pop culture for discovering investment ideas.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Chris Camillo
– [00:51] Technical analysis and fundamental analysis
– [04:49] 401(k) plans
– [07:17] Finding money for investing
– [09:26] Missing Snapple
– [11:11] Information arbitrage
– [14:40] Applying the scientific method
– [18:42] Rewarding your network of helpers
– [19:42] Performing analysis research
– [22:52] Investment ideas surround us every day
– [25:33] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 133: Laughing at Wall Street, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan speaks with Kristen Christian of Bank Transfer Day about why she got tens of thousands of people to agree to move to a credit union.

They discuss why banks keep adding fees after posting significant profits, clearing up misconceptions about who can join a credit union, how to find one and what to expect.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Kristen Christian
– [00:46] Bank Transfer Day goals
– [01:24] Involvement with Bank Transfer Day
– [01:57] Credit unions vs. neighborhood banks
– [05:01] Why banks are adding fees
– [08:07] Benefits of credit unions
– [09:53] November 5
– [12:19] How to switch from a bank to a credit union
– [13:48] Responsible lending and lower interest rates
– [15:22] Causing a disturbance
– [16:48] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 132: Bank Transfer Day, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan and Flexo talk with Sarah from The $60K Project about how she and her partner Mike paid off many thousands in debt in less than a year, what they learned along the way, and what they want to do now that they can afford to take some risks.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Flexo and Sarah
– [00:53] Living paycheck to paycheck, starting the $60K Project
– [04:08] Pay off $60,000 in just ten months
– [05:10] Choosing debt payoff goals
– [07:04] Higher education expenses
– [08:45] Emotional aspect of paying off debt
– [10:48] Creating a website about paying your debt
– [12:46] Switch from debt repayment to saving
– [14:26] Creating a 12 step program
– [15:39] Drawbacks while cutting costs
– [16:12] The 12 Steps to Financial Freedom
– [25:34] Financial freedom after paying off debt
– [28:29] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 131: The $60K Project, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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On today’s Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek speaks with Richard and Linda Eyre, authors of the book The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership. Richard and Linda discuss several concepts in the book including the definition of entitlement, the five family laws and reversing the behavior of a spoiled child.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Richard and Linda Eyre
– [00:54] Definition of entitlement
– [01:54] The measurability of entitlements
– [02:46] The difference between generations
– [04:15] Instant and delayed gratification
– [05:52] Nurturing self-esteem
– [06:58] Valuing effort over results
– [09:12] Giving children “ownership”
– [11:47] When children can perceive ownership
– [13:54] Five family laws
– [14:53] Positive reinforcement and entitlement
– [19:32] Money and the “family bank”
– [22:28] Avoiding focusing too much on money
– [23:14] Reversing bad behavior in children
– [26:18] Helping children set goals
[29:52] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 130: Richard and Linda Eyre, The Entitlement Trap, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s Consumerism Commentary Podcast features two interviews. In the first segment, Tom Dziubek talks with Philip Taylor from PT Money: Personal Finance and Consumerism Commentary founder Flexo about this year’s Financial Blogger Conference.

In the second segment, Tom speaks with Jon Stein, founder and CEO of the online investing service Betterment. Jon discusses recent survey results about how young people have been financially planning for the future as well as Betterment’s new financial planning tool.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:43] Interview with Phillip Taylor and Flexo
– [00:59] The 2011 Financial Blogger Conference
– [01:54] The choice of Chicago
– [02:37] The conference itinerary
– [04:00] Funding and sponsors
– [06:04] Attendees of the event
– [07:00] The Plutus Awards
– [09:23] What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago
– [11:31] Flexo flies first class
[14:42] Interview with Jon Stein, Betterment
– [14:58] Explaining Betterment
– [16:04] Expected return on investment
– [17:47] Betterment’s survey on people’s financial planning
– [20:32] Betterment’s goal-based investment tool
– [22:30] Future plans for Betterment
[24:12] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 129: Financial Blogger Conference, Betterment, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan talks with Robert Steven Kaplan, the author of What to Ask the Person in the Mirror.

Rob Kaplan has spent his life studying leadership and the qualities of a great leader. He and Bryan discuss the three questions any organization needs to ask itself before it can succeed, and the best ways to coach the people on your team.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Robert Steven Kaplan
– [00:49] The MBA Oath
– [03:16] Definition of leader
– [04:35] Being willing to keep learning
– [05:00] Vision, priorities, and coaching
– [07:52] Apple Inc.
– [09:44] Creating a learning environment
– [12:08] Why people quit
– [14:53] Coaching’s effect on the bottom line
– [16:07] Hiring great people
– [19:17] Designing the organization and hiring differently
– [20:49] People’s great potential to learn and adapt
– [24:34] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 128: What to Ask the Person in the Mirror, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan talks with Mike Egan, the author of Your Stronger Financial Future.

In the book, Mike details several popular myths about social security, saving, and investments, and then explains the truth about each one, giving the reader solid knowledge and formulas about how much to save for retirement.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Mike Egan
– [00:47] Misconceptions
– [02:37] Social Security isn’t a ponzi scheme
– [07:37] Raising the retirement age
– [10:11] Contributions to Social Security?
– [11:40] Retirement savings
– [14:05] Good debt as an investment
– [15:48] 7-year mortgages
– [17:31] Emergency fund
– [23:12] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 127: Your Stronger Financial Future, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan talks with Truett Cathy, the founder and CEO of Chick-fil-A, about his book Wealth: Is It Worth It?.

Truett lived through the Great Depression and worked behind a counter until he started Chick-fil-A when he was 46. Never comfortable borrowing money, he now believes in giving generously to charity, and that you always get back what you give away.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:36] Interview with S. Truett Cathy
– [00:58] Is wealth having enough to take care of your family?
– [01:59] Victory is what you do with the money, not the fact that you have it
– [04:17] Make donations anonymously
– [05:06] Tithing
– [05:40] The Golden Rule in business
– [09:00] Being brought up during the Great Depression
– [10:15] Keeping Chick-fil-A employee turnover low
– [11:16] How wealth is worth it
– [13:08] The right amount to give away
– [16:22] Being prepared for the slow times
– [17:13] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 126: Wealth: Is It Worth It?, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast Tom Dziubek speaks with Gerri Detweiler, personal finance expert at Credit.com, about her series of articles dealing with underwater mortgages. Gerri goes into detail about each of the six options including home loan refinances & modifications, doing a short sale and declaring bankruptcy.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:35] Interview with Gerri Detweiler
– [00:46] The criteria for someone to be considered “underwater”
– [02:19] Stay and pay
– [04:43] Emergency home owner loans
– [05:20] Refinancing a mortgage & the HARP program
– [06:52] Home loan modification & the HAMP program
– [09:16] The popularity of home modifications
– [11:38] Short sales
– [13:59] Cancellation of debt and its affect on your income taxes
– [16:21] Walking away from a mortgage
– [19:59] Declaring bankruptcy
– [22:37] Misconceptions about bankruptcy
– [23:43] Credit rating recovery after a bankruptcy
[27:20] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 125: Underwater Mortgages, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast Tom Dziubek speaks with Deron Weston, Principal, U.S. Banking and Securities at Deloitte Consulting, about Deloitte’s recent survey on first-time credit defaulters. Deron explains what constitutes a “first-time defaulter” and discusses several topics relating to them such as major causes of defaulting, the bank’s overall response to the defaulters and the different products banks have been offering them to help them recover their credit rating.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:38] Interview with Deron Weston
– [00:50] The people sampled in this survey
– [02:29] Defining a first-time defaulter
– [03:12] The differences between the two Deloitte surveys
– [04:02] The credit groups affected the most
– [04:48] Major reasons for people defaulting
– [06:09] The connection between unemployment and health care
– [07:50] Customer service experiences & relationship with their banks
– [11:31] Products being offered by banks to help customers improve their credit rating
– [12:40] Poor response to secured credit cards
– [14:03] New reports about fewer delinquencies
[16:51] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 124: First-Time Credit Defaulters, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks with Mint.com‘s Vice President of Product, Aaron Forth, about Mint’s new bill reminder feature. Aaron also discusses ways the smartphone app can help you acquire a more accurate bank account balance and also talks about what savings and spending trends they’ve seen.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Aaron Forth
– [00:46] The Mint.com service
– [03:09] Bill reminders
– [06:31] Tracking customers who have problems paying bills
– [07:19] Using data to help improve the service
– [08:16] Tracking spending and saving behaviors
– [09:39] Other new features at Mint / adding manual transactions
– [13:50] New projects in the works
[15:17] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 123: Mint.com’s New Bill Reminder Feature, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Bryan talks with professional penny-pincher Clark Howard about some of the more than 250 ways to save money from his new book, Living Large in Lean Times.

Bryan and Clark discuss car purchases and insurance, saving on printer ink, college loans, getting free medications and the many new ways to enjoy music online.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:32] Interview with Clark Howard
– [00:53] Buying a new car
– [05:07] Amica car insurance
– [07:45] College education savings plans
– [09:24] Extending the life of printer ink
– [11:55] Music streaming and sharing services
– [16:17] Prescription medications
– [20:33] Effect of the S∧P downgrade
– [23:08] Starting saving
– [23:53] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 122: Living Large in Lean Times, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek speaks with Adam Levin, co-founder of Credit.com and former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs about the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Adam discusses the goals of the bureau, how it’s an improvement over what was in place before, and some of the challenges that it needs to overcome.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Adam Levin
– [00:50] The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
– [01:48] How it’s different from what was previously in place
– [03:17] The priorities of the CFPB
– [04:53] Financial literacy & creating new policies vs. enforcing the old ones
– [07:48] Elizabeth Warren vs. Richard Cordray as director
– [12:43] Republican criticisms of the bureau
– [17:58] The CFPB’s effectiveness
[22:13] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 121: Adam Levin, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Flexo turns the tables and interviews the podcast host Bryan J Busch about his so-called “Television of the Future.”

Bryan developed a moral objection to paying for cable, because it also includes advertising, and you can’t pay for just the channels that you want, so a little over a year ago he canceled the cable, but still manages to watch all the shows that he likes through the Internet, on a normal TV screen (video of his set-up). Most of them are even through legitimate channels.

Flexo talks to Bryan about how the decision changed his viewing habits, what he misses and what he doesn’t miss, and whether television is just a huge time-drain away from more productive activities.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Flexo
[00:34] Interview with Bryan J Busch
– [00:55] Is watching television just a drain on your resources?
– [03:19] What’s the role of entertainment in modern life?
– [05:24] Changes to the TV of the Future hardware in the last year
– [07:34] What about shows that you can’t find (legitimately) through the Internet?
– [09:44] How has the software changed in the last year?
– [11:09] Finding new shows without a TV guide or ads for shows
– [12:03] Are you still saving $70 a month, and does the eight-day delay force spoilers on you?
– [14:05] Special features and true high-definition are mostly still limited to DVDs and Blu-Ray
– [16:53] Multiple reactions to the Netflix price hikes
– [19:34] Leaving cable TV on all the time might influence spending behavior
– [21:22] Will the ability to skip normal ads lead to more product placements?
– [23:06] Is the TV industry making the same mistakes that record companies made ten years ago?
– [24:04] What do you do with the extra free time?
[27:18] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 120: Television of the Future, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Leslie Dawson, partner of the accounting firm Glenn & Dawson and member of the California Society of CPAs.

Leslie talks to Tom Dziubek and discusses the IRS’s waiver of the two-year waiting period for people applying for a certain type of innocent spouse relief. Leslie and Tom also discuss what an “innocent spouse” is, the criteria needed for innocent spouse relief and also the difference between an “innocent” spouse and an “injured” spouse.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Leslie Dawson
– [00:50] Explaining an innocent spouse
– [02:16] Innocent spouse relief
– [03:26] The frequency of innocent spouse relief
– [06:34] The criteria that people must meet
– [07:48] Whether spouses benefit from relief if couple still files jointly
– [09:22] The relief process
– [11:10] How far back the IRS can go & seeking tax counsel
– [13:08] Keeping yourself from becoming an innocent spouse
– [14:24] Online resources
– [15:58] Handling of outstanding cases
– [16:12] “Innocent” spouse vs. “injured” spouse
[19:02] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 119: Leslie Dawson, IRS Innocent Spouse Relief, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is consumer savings expert Andrea Woroch. Andrew frequently appears on television to speak about retail trends and provide advice for shoppers to break bad buying habits. Visit her website for more information.

Andrea talks with Consumerism Commentary Podcast host and produce Bryan J Busch about the negative effects and deceptive production of the “Extreme Couponing” TV show and how stores have been compelled to change their policies to stop aspiring extreme couponers from clearing shelves and causing a ruckus in the checkout aisles.

They also discuss year-round coupon tips and other ways to save in the supermarket.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Andrea Woroch
– [00:50] Is the “Extreme Couponing” TV show giving normal coupons a bad name?
– [04:22] How are stores changing their policies as a result, especially with stacking?
– [06:45] What if I can’t find the coupon policy on the store website?
– [07:28] Is the “extreme couponing party” over?
– [09:34] People are stealing newspapers more often just for coupons
– [10:14] Andrea’s advice for finding and dealing with coupons responsibly (e.g. Cellfire and Coupon Sherpa)
– [14:18] What is up to the store manager’s discretion? Always read the fine print and check for expiration dates.
– [16:42] Tactics for saving in addition to coupons
[19:47] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 118: Consequences of Extreme Couponing, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Yaron Samid, founder and CEO of the personal finance security service BillGuard.

Yaron talks to Tom Dziubek and discusses how BillGuard works, fraudulent credit and debit card transactions, how BillGuard detects these potentially fraudulent transactions and how it notifies their customers.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Yaron Samid
– [00:49] About BillGuard
– [01:26] Card fraud
– [02:58] How BillGuard learns about potential fraud
– [06:00] Other examples of fraud or unexpected charges
– [07:44] How and when BillGuard notifies people
– [10:44] Tricks used by unscrupulous merchants
– [13:41] Getting help getting refunds
– [15:11] Never use your debit card to reserve hotels or rent cars
– [18:14] BillGuard’s security
– [19:03] BillGuard’s funding
[21:05] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 117: Yaron Samid, BillGuard, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Kevin McKee, a personal finance blogger who uses humor to educate young people at Thousandaire.com.

Flexo and Bryan talk to Kevin about the costly mistakes that forced him to learn how to manage his money, whether student loans are good debt or bad debt, and why he makes music videos and movie parodies to explain finances.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Kevin McKee
– [00:51] What is a thousandaire?
– [01:56] Why young people have different attitudes toward money
– [03:43] Kevin’s financial mistakes
– [07:52] Engineering education influence on financial decisions
– [09:30] Kevin’s novel definition of good debt
– [12:15] Blogging for a young audience
– [14:56] Talking about money shouldn’t be taboo
– [17:17] The five steps to becoming a thousandaire
– [18:56] Kevin’s custom budget spreadsheet vs. mint.com
[19:57] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 116: Meet a Thousandaire, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek speaks with LaFoy Thomas, attorney, investor and author of the book Generational Wealth: Business & Investing Guide to Building an Empire. LaFoy discusses the concept of financial sophistication and many other topics such as economic indicators, REITs (real estate investment trusts) and how to understand financial statements.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with LaFoy Thomas
– [00:50] Financial sophistication
– [02:24] LaFoy’s financial background
– [04:10] Economic indicators
– [05:12] Understanding the GDP report
– [06:21] The employment report
– [07:07] Weekly jobless claims report
– [07:53] Retail sales report
– [08:20] Consumer price index
– [09:02] Existing home sales report
– [09:50] S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index
– [10:37] Where you can find these reports
– [11:22] Real estate as an investing strategy
– [13:08] Getting home loans
– [14:39] The 1031 exchange
– [15:54] REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts)
– [16:38] Reading financial statements
– [17:26] The balance sheet
– [17:39] The income statement
– [18:28] The Four P’s
– [20:35] Sole proprietorship and other business entities
– [23:09] Setting up an LLC
[24:52] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 115: LaFoy Thomas, Generational Wealth, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek speaks with Steve Rosenstock of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) about tips to cool your house in the summer. Steve discusses many ways to cool your house down, including giving your air conditioning unit a checkup, using a programmable thermostat and several cheap and easy methods which people may not have considered before.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:37] Interview with Steve Rosenstock, EEI
– [00:51] Insulation
– [03:36] Cheap ways to make your home more energy efficient
– [07:41] Keeping a second refrigerator in the garage
– [09:40] Consider replacing an older air conditioner
– [11:00] Caulking and weather stripping
– [12:11] Replacing windows & the federal tax credit
– [16:03] Fluorescent bulbs
– [21:35] Using programmable thermostats
– [24:00] Using fans
– [24:53] Checking your local utility’s website
[27:00] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 114: Summer Cooling Tips, Steve Rosenstock, EEI, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guests on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast are Scott and Bethany Palmer, also known as The Money Couple. The Money Couple talks about many topics in their book, First Comes Love, Then Comes Money: A Couple’s Guide to Financial Communication such as financial infidelity, money personalities and how couples can better understand each others’ money quirks in order to have a happier relationship.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:34] Interview with The Money Couple
– [00:50] How Scott and Bethany met
– [01:26] How soon financial discussions came into their relationship
– [02:33] Financial infidelity
– [03:39] Financial infidelity in Scott & Bethany’s relationship
– [05:41] Having a financial relationship
– [07:49] Transparency in a financial relationship
– [09:25] Financial infidelity vs. sexual infidelity
– [13:27] The money personalities
– [16:49] Whether people with different personalities can have a successful relationship
– [21:50] When a couple should start discussing finances
– [23:35] Financial philosophies that Scott and Bethany have disagreed on
– [25:13] Fighting fair
– [27:55] The Financial Infidelity Quotient
– [28:54] The stress that health issues can place on a relationship
[33:56] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 113: The Money Couple, Scott & Bethany Palmer, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Megan Wurm, the 2011 teen ambassador for the Money Matters: Make it Count program operated by the Schwab Foundation and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Flexo joins Bryan on this follow-up to Episode 100, when Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz introduced us to the program which Megan won, granting her a $5,000 scholarship for college. Even more impressively, Megan was able to take the skills she learned and save up enough for a car and an iPad.

Megan even got to meet Senator Harry Reid and tour the east coast to help promote financial literacy.

Flexo, Bryan and Megan also discuss findings from the Schwab Foundation’s 2011 Teens and Money Survey.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:35] Interview with Flexo and Megan Wurm
– [00:57] Money Matters
– [02:03] Megan’s role as ambassador
– [03:18] Financial priorities change from age 14 to 18
– [05:30] How Megan taught herself and her parents how to budget
– [07:22] Spending with a debit card
– [08:19] How adults can reach teens about money matters
– [09:59] Teens know less than they think they now
– [11:41] Naturally inclination to spend more?
– [12:42] Having a job and trying to save for college
– [13:18] Megan’s overall plan to pay for college and books
– [15:11] Mobile phone family plans
– [15:54] Advice for teens and their parents who want to learn about money management
[18:13] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 112: Megan Wurm, Money Matters Ambassador, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Tom Dziubek talks to Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, also known as The Money Coach. Lynnette discusses many topics including how to set financial boundaries with friends and family, written and unwritten rules about credit and also tips on how to teach children the value of money.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:34] Interview with Lynnette Khalfani-Cox
– [00:48] Financial boundaries with friends and family
– [02:09] How less assertive people can establish boundaries
– [07:49] The three basic rules of credit
– [10:40] The five unwritten rules of credit
– [11:25] 1. You must play by their rules to win
– [11:47] 2. The playing field is more level than you think
– [12:30] 3. Every transaction counts
– [15:04] 4. The credit industry prefers to work without you
– [19:56] 5. The rules always change
– [20:14] Tips for people who are in a lot of debt
– [24:08] Making children aware of the value of money
– [26:00] Offering money choices to kids
– [28:07] How money choices for kids can be fun
[33:01] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 111: The Money Coach, Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is George Hobica, president and founder of the travel comparison website Airfarewatchdog. George discusses Airfarewatchdog, how the site works in finding low air fares, several great deals many people don’t know about and offers many airline travel tips.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with George Hobica
– [00:48] Airfarewatchdog
– [01:52] How it differs from other fare comparison websites
– [03:27] Frequency of air fare changes
– [04:14] How Airfarewatchdog interacts with other websites
– [07:39] Frequent Flyer programs
– [08:24] Their functionality with changes to flights
– [08:51] The impact of the price of gas on travel
– [09:27] Fares to Europe
– [11:16] Surprisingly cheap travel destinations
– [13:46] The impact of mergers
– [15:04] Getting refunds in the case of a price drop
– [16:59] Using a travel agent
– [20:06] Avoiding fees
– [23:08] Wi-fi charges
– [24:07] Summer travel advice
– [27:02] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 110: George Hobica, Airfarewatchdog, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Dr. Maggie Baker, PhD, author of Crazy About Money: How Emotions Confuse Our Money Choices and What To Do About It. Dr. Baker has been a practicing psychologist for 30 years, focusing on financial therapy and ADD/ADHD.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:33] Interview with Dr. Maggie Baker
– [00:50] Our attitudes about money start in childhood
– [02:57] Spending decisions rooted in emotions
– [04:44] Become aware of and fixing self-destructive behavior
– [06:30] Gambling without emotion
– [07:54] Overriding aversion to loss
– [09:06] Brains make bad decisions
– [11:30] Mental accounting
– [16:40] Good debt and bad debt
– [18:18] Couples going through therapy together
– [21:15] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 109: Crazy About Money, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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On today’s Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Donna Freedman returns to the show. Donna Freedman is a columnist for MSN Money and staff writer for Get Rich Slowly. Donna also writes for her own blog, Surviving and Thriving.

Today, Bryan, Donna, and Flexo discuss extreme couponing.

Table of contents

– [00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
– [00:36] Interview with Flexo and Donna Freedman
– [00:52] What is extreme couponing?
– [02:22] How much effort is involved? Where do you find the deals?
– [06:17] Are people buying things they don’t need?
– [08:21] The role of social commerce like Groupon and LivingSocial
– [09:49] Know what stuff costs
– [10:09] Are coupons still inconvenient?
– [11:12] Loyalty programs vs. invasion of privacy
– [12:40] Is it possible to swap coupons?
– [14:08] Where do I store all this stuff?
– [15:28] Delaying other customers & store clerks who don’t know everything
– [18:06] Free items you don’t need make great donations
– [19:18] If coupons become more popular, will the deals go away?
– [20:46] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 108: Extreme Couponing, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is J.D. Roth, author of Your Money: The Missing Manual and the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly. A few weeks ago, J.D. gave a presentation at an Oregon public library about building and maintaining a budget that works. He adapted the presentation into an article.

Today, J.D., Bryan J Busch, and Flexo talk about roadblocks in the budgeting process and how to design an effective budget.

Table of contents

– [00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
– [00:33] Interview with J.D. Roth
– [00:53] “Do what works for you,” and try again if it doesn’t work
– [02:13] The Balanced Money Formula
– [03:10] Budgets with too many categories seem oppressive
– [06:39] Only spend what you can carry
– [08:07] Some people literally can’t keep their Needs under 50% of their net income
– [11:33] What turns a Want into a Need?
– [12:43] Paying off debt isn’t a Need or a Want, it counts as Savings
– [13:37] For some, giving to charity is considered a Need
– [15:38] Annual budgets are more accurate
– [18:51] Moving from normal salary to full-time freelancing
– [22:22] J.D.’s new project: AwesomePeople.com
– [26:56] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 107: Building a Better Budget, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Kate Levinson, author of Emotional Currency: A Woman’s Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money. Among the topics discussed, Kate talks about the differences between masculine and feminine approaches to money as well as the importance of emotions in financial decisions.

Table of contents

– [00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
– [00:37] Interview with Kate Levinson
– [00:53] The masculine and feminine approaches to money
– [05:40] Discrimination against women
– [06:48] Emotions as currency
– [07:50] Why emotions are important in financial decisions
– [10:14] Tapping into your childhood financial experiences
– [12:45] The importance of financial independence
– [14:13] Overcoming fear
– [17:06] Being ashamed of money
– [19:23] The connection between love and money
– [23:27] How each personality can improve their relationship with money
– [27:33] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

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The original version of this article, Podcast 106: Emotional Currency, Kate Levinson, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

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Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Paul Puckett, author of Investiphobia.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:34] Interview with Paul Puckett
– [00:51] Should I keep up with the Jones’ investment decisions?
– [04:02] When and how much research is necessary?
– [07:36] The fear of losing access to money
– [11:51] Disappointing parents or children
– [17:16] Removing emotional influences from investment decisions
– [20:00] Practical resources for finding an advisor
– [22:40] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

The original version of this article, Podcast 105: Investiphobia, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Kim McGrigg, Manager of Community and Media Relations for Money Management International (MMI), which is sponsoring Financial Literacy Month. MMI is the largest nonprofit, full-service credit counseling agency in the United States.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:35] Interview with Kim McGrigg
– [00:54] Financial Literacy Month
– [04:04] Cleaning up financial clutter
– [05:45] Start Financial Literacy Month at any time
– [07:30] Stopping calls from debt collectors
– [10:13] The dangers of co-signing a loan or owning any joint account
– [13:07] Skipping a mortgage payment
– [14:22] Depleting savings to bring down debt
– [16:56] Lending to friends or relatives
– [18:06] Repairing credit
– [20:28] Creditors making unusual decisions about interest rates or credit limits
– [22:21] What happens if borrowers don’t pay off debt
– [24:39] #FinLit on Twitter
– [25:15] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we mark the 30 days of Financial Literacy Month, and get answers to the most common credit counseling questions.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Bryan J. Busch. My guest today is Kim McGrigg, the manager of Community and Media Relations for Money Management International, which has declared April Financial Literacy Month. Kim, thank you for joining us on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

Kim: Well, I’m really happy to be here today.

Bryan: Money Management International has declared April to be Financial Literacy Month. What are some symptoms of financial illiteracy, and what have you prepared to help people learn better?

Kim: Some of the symptoms of financial illiteracy are the inability for people to make decisions that are in the best interest of their family. What I mean by that is when someone is not fully informed about all of their options, they can’t make decisions that really benefit them for the long term.

I really feel like the biggest problem with financial illiteracy is that it really holds people back; it keeps them from reaching their potential.

Bryan: Since April is Financial Literacy Month, you’ve got 30 steps prepared on your website for people to improve their lives. What are you hoping a person will be able to accomplish in that 30-day period.

Kim: That’s a great question because just like a crash diet isn’t going to make someone healthy for a really long term period, I know that 30 days of financial literacy is not going to set someone up for long term financial success. However, what the 30-step program can do is to really get someone started on that path to financial wellness.

The idea is that after taking these 30 simple steps, you’re going to have a really good understanding of where you are today, where you want to go in the future, and some idea of how you’re going to get there.

Bryan: Could you give us a few examples of what a person would be doing on say, day 4, or day 16?

Kim: Absolutely. The first week of Financial Literacy Month is really about getting your financial house in order. Things like pulling your credit report, for example, making sure that there aren’t errors on that report, and if there are errors, how to fix them.

Step Three, for example, is talking about clearing the clutter because everyone would agree that financial clutter blocks a clear path to financial success. It talks about clearing the clutter, and then setting up a financial system.

The next couple of days, then, are really focused on where you are today. Again, you’re looking at those credit reports. You’re figuring out who you owe, how much you owe, determining your net worth. There are a lot of calculators, and things, that make this much simpler then it sounds.

From there, you start thinking about where you want to be. You know where you are, now where do you want to be? You talk about retirement savings, and emergency savings, all of those kinds of things. How to set realistic goals. How to remind yourself of those goals.

The last few days of Financial Literacy Month are really about setting up that plan. How are you going to move forward? For example, gathering a team that you might need to support you. Maybe it’s an accountant, maybe it’s a financial planner, or maybe it’s a credit counselor depending on your situation.

Bryan: Okay. Now when you talk about financial clutter, what sort of thing do you mean by that?

Kim: Financial clutter, I don’t know if you have ever experienced a time when you had a desk full of paper where you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Bryan: Oh, certainly.

Kim: I certainly have experienced that. A lot of times, that’s what people’s financial drawers look like, as well. They keep a shoebox full of receipts. It comes to be tax time, and you’re trying to prepare, and you can’t find what you’re looking for. These are all things that keep you from moving forward. It’s like, “This is too much trouble. I can’t make any sense of this.”

It’s talking about what do you need to have, what can you toss, how should you keep the important papers that you need to keep, do they need to be in a safe deposit box, or can they just be in a file in your desk drawer? Getting that all together, that organization, really just takes that barrier away so you can really start to think about things clearly.

Bryan: We talked with the founder of Debt Wise a little while ago, and he found that a majority of the time when he was analyzing people’s financial situations, they actually ended up with more debt then they thought they had.

Kim: Absolutely. I think that’s very true. We really do recommend that people take the time to figure out who they owe, and how much they owe. I would say from personal experience in talking to consumers that that’s the case; they’re not sure who they owe.

It’s really hard to develop a repayment plan if you’re not sure about those things. Coming to terms with your current situation is a really important part of this process.

Bryan: When this show is airing, April is almost half over. It’s not too late to start the 30-day plan, is it?

Kim: Absolutely not. April is the perfect time to talk about financial literacy, because it’s Financial Literacy Month. This program is available any time, because financial education is important all year round. Any day that you start the 30 days is a good day.

Bryan: Okay, great. It looks like you’ve still got some webinars going live through the end of April. Could you tell us about some of those?

Kim: We offer webinars all year long, actually, on a variety of topics about budgeting and money management. We have some about frugality. This month we’re doing some that are very specific to some of the steps of Financial Literacy Month.

For example, we have one coming up on Setting Goals and Getting Organized. We have webinars about your credit report and score. All of them are free, so I do really encourage people to take advantage of this very under utilized resource.

Bryan: It looks like there are also some free eBooks at the financialliteracymonth.com website.

Kim: We do. We have two free eBooks on the website. One is we had gathered a series of tips from consumers, their greatest financial tips, as well as from some financial experts. Some bloggers that you would definitely recognize have all contributed to this tips eBook. If you just want some little ideas on how to make some changes, that’s a great eBook.

The other one is the 30 Step Plan in eBook format, if you’d prefer to download it or print it out.

Bryan: Oh, excellent.

Kim: Yes, and those are free of charge, as well.

Bryan: You’ve got a section on your website called Ask The Experts.

Kim: Yes.

Bryan: If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over some of the more popular questions.

Kim: Yes, absolutely. I have been answering questions on the website for at least ten years. Over that time I’ve answered tens of thousands of consumer questions. It’s a really wonderful resource. It’s one of my favorite things that I do.

Bryan: Wonderful. To start with, what are my rights when it comes to debt collection? How can I make them stop calling me at work or at home?

Kim: That is one of the most frequently asked questions. What I say is that I have answered tens of thousand of questions, but in reality I’ve answered the same handful of questions thousands of times over. This is definitely one of them, because a lot of consumers feel very intimidated when they’re starting to receive collection calls.

What I like to tell consumers is that they absolutely do have rights. Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which anyone can read in full on the FTC website. That act allows a consumer to notify the debt collector in writing that they wish to cease further communication. When that collector receives that letter, they must comply.

The only time that they can reach out from that point, is if they are furthering the collection process. For example, if they are going to institute a lawsuit against you, then you will be notified of that.

Doing something that simple, of writing that letter and sending it off, is really all a consumer needs to do. That is including at work, because a collector’s not supposed to call you on the job if they know that your employer disapproves.

Bryan: Right. The letter doesn’t have to be in a certain format, or use magical words? You just express your intent clearly, I imagine, and send it to the right person?

Kim: Yes, that’s exactly right. There are examples of Cease and Desist letters on the Internet if someone’s unclear about what to say. You’re absolutely right, it just needs to say that under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, I have the right to request that you no longer contact me. It doesn’t have to be more complicated then that.

I do like to remind people that taking this action does not alleviate them of their responsibility, and that the collection process can escalate further. At least it will be much quieter. [Laugh]

Bryan: What is it important to know if I’ve co-signed a loan?

Kim: This is a good question that I love to get, because I feel pretty passionately about it. I really feel that there are very few situations where someone should co-sign a loan for someone else.

I know that that sounds… I realize there are no hard and fast rules, and there are exceptions, however the number of letters I’ve received from consumers with problems related to co-signing is really astonishing.

A lot of boyfriends signing loans for girlfriends, parents signing loans for children. What it basically means when you co-sign a loan is that you are responsible for the debt, period. The creditor doesn’t even have to seek repayment from the other person before they contact you. They’re going to try to get payment from who they think is more likely to pay.

I have a lot of people who are just really unsure about what their responsibility is when they sign that dotted line. I tell them that if they are not willing to repay the debt in full, assume total responsibility, then don’t.

There are other ways you can help someone if they need it. For example in a parent/child relationship, often this is about a car. I would say to the parent, “You could purchase the car, make the payments, and then collect from your child.” That protects you, your credit report. It makes you aware of everything that’s happening on the account. That’s one thing I would say.

If you’ve already co-signed a loan, to contact that creditor, make sure that you are getting statements. A lot of people aren’t aware that an account is in arrears until they get a call that they’re being sued.

I feel strongly about it because I’ve seen how much damage it can do. People just say, “How can I get out of it?” There is not a simple solution. You have to repay the debt.

Bryan: I believe the same is also true with your average checking or savings account. If a parent is listed as an owner, and they get a bounce or something, the bank can go after different accounts that the parent has.

Kim: If the accounts are linked, absolutely. I think that it’s really important, if you’re combining accounts in any way, that communication is so crucial, and that both parties are getting the statements.

Now when you have access to accounts online, it is so easy to see what’s happening, and to set up an alert the instant something’s going wrong. It’s amazing how many people are not taking advantage of that.

Bryan: Another popular question revolves around mortgage payments. What can a person do if they just can’t make them?

Kim: Absolutely. These are the hard questions to get because people are in really dire need of assistance when they’re facing foreclosure. It’s a very, very stressful process.

I like to tell people that there are many alternatives to foreclosure through loss mitigation. There are a lot of things that consumers might not be aware of, because they’re starting new programs all the time.

Unless this is something that you do all day, every day, it’s very, very hard to keep up with what’s available to you. Which program do you qualify for? Which one makes the most sense to you? Are there things specific to your state? It’s a complex situation.

I really encourage people to work with a HUD certified housing counselor. The appointment is free, it’s confidential. Just to have someone on your side that is really aware of everything that’s going on in housing. It’s their job to know what all the programs are, and what will work for your situation. That is the number one recommendation that I can give.

Bryan: Your organization deals, quite often, with credit counseling. This is maybe the number one question when it comes to all kinds of debt, really, but probably most of the time credit card debt. Should a person attack their savings account first just to make as big a dent as they can?

Kim: I actually just answered a question about that this morning. We definitely discourage people from borrowing or tapping their retirement money because if you cash your retirement money early, you have to pay taxes, plus a penalty for money withdrawn. It’s definitely not the wise financial move here. Not only that, then when you have to retire, and you don’t have the funds set aside, that’s going to be equally if not more stressful then what your facing today.

An emergency savings, for example, this woman wrote me today and she said, “Should I use my emergency savings to pay my credit card?” That’s not an easy question to answer. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on your job security. It also depends on what your interest rates you’re paying on your credit cards. I could see if you’re up in the 20%. You’re definitely not going to earn that in a savings account, so I could see how that would make more sense to you.

Another thing, it also depends on your comfort level. A lot of people really need to have a nest egg just to feel like they can comfortably recover from any kind of minor setback, a car repair, for example. Other people feel like they’ll be fine for a few months.

I really would like to talk to people about how do they feel, because so much about money—obviously, it’s all numbers and cents, but there’s a whole other side to it, and it’s all emotion. That part is very important to consider as well.

In the credit counseling industry, we really talk to a lot of people about what caused their situation. What do they hope to do in the future? It’s not just about taking down numbers. I know how much financial problems can affect a person’s entire life. It’s not just about their financial life. It impacts their ability to perform well on the job. It impacts their relationships with their friends and their family. It can even impact their health if they’re not sleeping well.

Bryan: How do you recommend people approach giving a loan to a relative or a friend, and do different levels of formality come into play when it comes time to make a loan or not?

Kim: This is a really common question of people who lent money, and now they’re having to be collectors themselves. Yes, I think there does need to be a level of formality in the loan process.

I know that people asking and giving loans all have the very best intentions. However, things happen, circumstances change. I believe because it’s dealing with money, to protect the relationship which is probably priceless, that you make the loan process a little more formal.

You would actually type up an agreement with someone. I am lending you this money. This is how and when it will be repaid. This is the interest rate, if there is one. Here are the steps that we will take if it is not repaid on time. That way there are no surprises on either side.

Bryan: What are some steps you recommend for people to repair their credit if they find it needs repairing?

Kim: I hear that word a lot from consumers, the word repair. I’ve been in the financial for a long time, and it conjures up some days when people would try to dispute things that shouldn’t be disputed, and all sorts of unscrupulous things. That’s really not the case today.

Today when consumers are talking about repairing their credit, they’re usually talking about improving it, or getting rid of errors on a credit report. That is something you do not need help with. That’s actually very, very simple.

Consumers are entitled to receive free copies of their credit reports from the three major bureaus annually from annualcreditreport.com. If there is an error on those reports, they can simply dispute it with an online form.

When they do it that way, the burden is on the creditor to prove that the item is correct. What will happen is the bureau will contact the creditor. The creditor will then have to prove that the item is, in fact, correct. If they are unable to do that, the item will be removed, and you will get an updated version of your report.

A lot of people mistakenly try to just call a creditor and say, “This is on my credit report. You need to take it off.” While that might work in some cases, in the most part, that’s not really using the system to your advantage.

When you fill out that dispute form, there’s a process. They have to investigate within 30 days. They have to send you an updated report. That’s really the way to go.

The other piece of advice when you’re talking about improving credit is to be patient, because as old information ages, and new positive information is added, your credit reports slowly improve.

I had a personal experience recently with a cable provider. I can’t tell you how many letter and phone calls later before the problem was resolved. A lot of these things take a lot of time and organization on behalf of the consumer.

Bryan: At the start of the Great Recession in 2007-2008, we noticed a lot of creditors doing things that didn’t really make much sense to the consumer. What are some reasons why a creditor might raise an interest rate, or close an account, or reduce a person’s limit?

Kim: I receive a lot of questions about that. I’ve been a great customer, why is this happening to me?

A lot of creditors had to really rethink who they were lending money to, and how much. Even if you were making payments on time, and as agreed, some times the terms change. Often times it has to do with how much credit is available to you.

Let’s say you have three credit cards with $5,000 limits. You might only be using $500 actively every month, so you would wonder why would they reduce my limits if I’m nowhere near them?

The creditor has to assume that you could max out those three cards if you wanted to. There’s always the potential for that. A lot of times, that is what will cause them to lower a limit. It does impact your credit score some, because the percentage of credit used versus credit available is taken into consideration. I’m not sure it impacts it enough if you have great credit for a consumer to be really concerned about that. However, sometimes a phone call to the creditor is all it takes. If that’s your situation, you might ask yourself, “Why do I need additional credit if I’m not even using it?”

Bryan: That’s a good point.

Kim: Yes.

Bryan: In a worst-case scenario, what are things a creditor can do if I don’t pay my debts?

Kim: When you miss a payment, and the creditors start calling, that can be a really very, very stressful situation. What a creditor can do really depends on state law. Each state sets laws as to what and how a creditor can collect on a delinquent account.

For example, some states permit a creditor to garnish wage and others don’t. Some states exempt just about all assets a debtor has from seizure to satisfy the payment for a debt, and other states can force you to sell some of your assets to satisfy a judgment.

I really recommend consumers find out what is and is not possible in their state.

Bryan: It’s based on the state that the consumer lives in, not the one that the creditor’s registered in?

Kim: That’s right. I encourage them to contact their local consumer protection office. You can get a list of those consumer protection offices on the Federal Citizen Information Centers website. Their address is consumeraction.gov. There they have a list to all of the local offices that can really help you understand what the laws are in your state.

Bryan: That’s great. I don’t think I’ve come across that one before.

Kim: Yes, it’s a wonderful resource. There’s things that we can tell people generally what happens. Generally, when you miss a payment the creditor will contact you, you’ll get a late fee, your interest rates possibly will increase, if it goes further they’ll send you to the collection department who will initiate collection calls and letters, fees continue to build up. If this continues, it will go into legal action, possibly, which is a judgment.

Above that, exactly what can happen to you at that point, it really depends on your state. For example, Texas is not a wage garnishment state, where Colorado is.

Bryan: I notice that you’ve been using the hash tag #finlit on Twitter.

Kim: Yes.

Bryan: Is anybody allowed to use that, or what’s going on there?

Kim: Oh, yes. I really encourage anybody to use that. I wasn’t going to do a hashtag this year, and I had some people reach out to me and say, “So, what’s our hashtag this year?”

Bryan: That’s fun.

Kim: Yes, it’s great. I have noticed that there are many people using it. I just think it’s a great way to pull together everything related to Financial Literacy Month. Yes, please, I encourage you to use it.

Bryan: Speaking of which, where else can we keep up with you online?

Kim: We are all over, and I would love to connect with people wherever they are already. If you’re a Facebook user, Money Management is on Facebook. The quick way to find us there is moneymanagement.facebook.org. It will redirect right to our page.

Bryan: Great.

Kim: I’m at moneymanagement on Twitter. We have a YouTube account, as well, and a Flickr account. Our advice column and blog are on moneymanagement.org.

Bryan: Thank you, very much, for joining us on the show today Kim.

Kim: I really appreciate that you had me here, and Happy Financial Literacy Month to you.

Bryan: That was Kim McGrigg of Money Management International. You can find all the tools and resources we talked about today at financialliteracymonth.com and moneymanagment.org. Join us again next week for more great personal financial advice and information.

The original version of this article, Podcast 104: Financial Literacy Month, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Geneen Roth, author of Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money.

Geneen has appeared on national television shows including The Oprah Show, 20/20, and The NBC Nightly News. Geneen is the author of eight books, including The New York Times bestsellers When Food is Love and Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. Lost and Found is her newest book, published in March.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:37] Interview with Geneen Roth
– [00:51] Initial impressions about money
– [03:15] Investing with Bernie Madoff
– [06:38] When it started to seem too good to be true
– [08:17] Avoiding a downward spiral of depression
– [12:29] Enough isn’t a quantity
– [16:30] People spend money the same way they eat
– [20:11] Buying fun things or saving to fill a hole
– [24:38] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we take a step back and look at the belief systems that influence our behavior with money.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Bryan J Busch. My guest today is Geneen Roth, author of Lost & Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food & Money. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

Geneen: Glad to be here.

Bryan: In my experience, people think there are only two way to act around money; you can either be smart and save what you need to or you can be foolish and not save enough, but from your book I gathered that our money decisions can date back to our very childhoods and that it’s not enough to attach education about saving to our existing beliefs. What’s really going on in our brains when we are making bad decisions?

Geneen: I don’t think it necessarily has to go back to early childhood; although because money was a factor and it was a daily part of life when we were growing up even though a lot of adults can’t remember hearing about money until they got to a certain age, because of course when you’re really young you don’t know what money is.

By the time you figure out what money is, what’s going on in your family with your parents or caretakers and your siblings depending on their particular situation, that is something that you understand. They get that across, so it’s gotten across to you even on a non-verbal level in terms of if there is enough, not enough, if there is a fear around it, if there is a sense of scarcity, whatever the issues are about money you imbibe somehow and those lay down some kind of structure or a blueprint, or a foundation for subsequent money beliefs and decisions that you make.

What I’m saying in Lost & Found is that all the good financial advice in the world is great; except that the problem is that for so many of us there is something that keeps us from following that advice. In my own case, I was told to diversify, diversify, diversify. It didn’t matter how many people told me to do that, I had a particular set of attitudes towards money beliefs about money and myself and that allowed me to block out all the good advice in the world.

Bryan: What were those beliefs that stopped you from diversifying? Just for our audience’s benefit, I’ll let them know that you were forced to examine your relationship and beliefs about money when 30 years of savings got wiped out in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Geneen: Right. I think it would be good to say at this point, because this came up in a book reading I did recently. Somebody stood up and asked me, “Didn’t you need to have millions of dollars in order to invest with Bernie Madoff?” I realized that people have misconceptions about the range of investors that were involved with him.

We had people in our fund that could invest anywhere from $5,000; I think $2,000 was the lowest and then as much as you wanted to up from there. It wasn’t only rich and mega rich people who could invest with Bernie Madoff. Our friend whose father had been involved with Madoff for 30 years felt as if he was doing something kind and generous when he invited his friends into a family fund, which is what we were involved in.

Yes, he and his family had put all their money with Madoff because they had been invested for 30 years and had done quite well, although it seems as if Madoff made a subjective decision about the kinds of returns he gave to whom. People who invested a lot of money with him seemed to have gotten 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% return on their money. When you were invested as a part of a feeder fund; which is what they were called, depending on how much money they had of that fund put in we’re finding out now resulted in the kind of returns you got.

We got about 6% or sometimes 8% on the money and that seemed better to somebody as financially unaware as I was and as financially unaware and unconscious as I really wanted to be, because truthfully, I didn’t really realize this but I didn’t want to think about money.

I wanted it to be easy. I wanted somebody to be able to make decisions for me. It’s much like how people feel about food. Just tell me what, when and how much to eat and I’ll do it. Give me rules to follow and so the people around me, the people in my immediate world, all, it turned out, I didn’t realize this when I first met them, had all invested with Madoff through this particular fund and so I did too.

I didn’t listen to diversify because it would have really meant doing some investigation. I investigated the fund but really investigating into why I didn’t want to diversify and what was it that I wanted to be unconscious about.

Bryan: Was there any point at which you thought, “This seems too good to be true?”

Geneen: Getting 6% didn’t seem too good to be true. The only time it seemed too good, because we’ve got 6% when other people were getting 15% and 20%. When it started feeling like it was too good to be true was when everything started to crash in September and October of 2008, but that’s what Richard had said to us for many years, “The great thing about investing in this fund is when the market is doing great, you don’t get the highs but when the market is not doing great, you don’t get the lows either.”

It seemed a bit too good to be true and that point, we put in our request in to get our money back but it took a couple of months to get the money back and we were slated to get it back on January 1st and of course Madoff confessed on December 11th, a month before.

Yes, and it was devastating. It was terrifying and devastating to hear that we had lost; my husband and I had lost 30 years of life savings and I know many people are experiencing this now to a lesser degree. My husband and I; he likes to say took the express elevator down to the bottom in one fell swoop and many people are going through this kind of discomfort, pain, suffering, fear, terror in smaller or larger amounts now, but we’re all feeling it.

Bryan: Now, you were in a fortunate position or more fortunate than others when it came to experiencing that terror. Could you tell us how you were able to bring yourself back from spending all day being mad?

Geneen: Well, I was no more fortunate than anybody else. What I did, every single person can also do. I thought I was going to go mad. I didn’t see how I was going to live inside my own skin because I had no idea how we were going to survive. I thought there was a chance we would be homeless.

A friend invited us to move in with her; my husband and I and our 60 lbs dog in their 6 x 8 dining room, which of course would have been a pleasure and an amazing gift to have gotten, so I don’t want to put that down at all the fact that somebody was willing to have us move in with her was incredible, but I didn’t know how we were going to live and I realized that the only way to live through that was to focus on what I hadn’t lost, on what I could find on a day-to-day basis in my immediate environment.

It was very simple, concrete things. The kind of things that we take for granted every day; things like being able to take a hot shower, things like being able to drink tea from my favorite blue tea cup with the big red rose on it, things like being able to watch my dog still play, being able to see the hummingbirds flock to the feeder outside the backdoor or to actually take steps to breathe, to have a body, to still have a roof over my head for that moment.

Those were things that were necessities for me to focus on and those are things which most of us take for granted every single day and I hear a lot of people saying to me, “That’s easy for you to say. What about the fact that I’m scrimping and saving?” or somebody wrote to me the other day and said, “What about single mothers who have three children are scraping to get by?”

This is true across the board and the reason it is is because focusing on what you do have instead of what you don’t have allows you to maintain some kind of equilibrium and it allows the brain chemistry; all that work on neuroscience that’s being done right now shows that when you begin focusing on positive things, we’ll call this positive, then your brain chemistry changes.

When your brain chemistry changes, you’re actually able to make more objective decisions about what you can actually do instead of focusing on that old run or fight or flight mechanism that we get into. That’s a case of absolute survival hypervigilance. And in that case, your whole body is geared for a fight and geared for an emergency; but if you have to make decisions that are objective, decisions over the long run, that kind of state of emergency and terror and fear that’s so negative we’re living in right now doesn’t actually help, doesn’t help us have any clarity about our situation and certainly it’s utterly lacking in joy.

Bryan: I learned in the book that our survival instincts; coming from the lizard brain, actually have a direct relationship with things that you wouldn’t except. For instance, let’s say that lately I’ve been wanting to get an iPad 2. I don’t need one and I can’t afford one but I want it anyway. Why would my brain do that to me?

Geneen: First of all, we are living in a consumer culture. We’re living in a culture in which your self-worth is pretty much defined by your net worth, so to speak, or the amount of stuff you have. It’s very difficult. It takes awareness to disengage from that. If you think you’ve got to have one for what? The question is, what do you believe would happen if you had one?

We associate happiness or a feeling of sufficiency with a quantity or a thing and really, it turns out that it comes down to is that enough isn’t quantity. It’s not in anything you can touch or buy or have. It’s really a relationship to what you already have.

If you made a list of the ten happiest people you knew, it probably wouldn’t be the ten richest people you knew. In fact, financial advisors across the board have told me when I interviewed them for Lost & Found, my book, that no matter what somebody had, no matter how much money somebody had, when they ask their clients what they would need to feel safe, comfortable, relaxed, happy, it was invariably twice as much as they already had.

And then, when they got to that twice as much mark for those fortunate, for those financially fortunate ones who did; and they were asked the same question again. They wanted twice as much.

I think it’s important to know off the bat that once you got the iPad, it would be something else. It’s not the iPad. It’s not the money. It’s not an amount. It’s not the thing itself, and I think that is so hard to get. It’s so hard to understand. It’s so hard to believe, but anybody who’s had what I call in Lost & Found a deathbed moment, a crisis moment and I’ve had a lot of them; I had a medical test a couple of years ago and I almost died. In fact, I did die for about two minutes and when I came back I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was. I lost all of money, I was in a car accident a couple of years ago where I ended up in a wheel chair. I’ve had disasters.

I’ve of course written about my relationship with food in Women, Food & God forever about how I gained and lost 1000 lbs and how I was anorexic and then hugely overweight, so I’ve really taken it to the extremes in terms of my life and have gone to the extremes because of situations I’ve been in, and in each of those crisis moments; those deathbed moments or crisis moments, I’m aware of what’s really, really important and yet, which is right here right now, what do I see? What do I have? What does my life depend on? And yet, it is so easy to forget and just to want that iPad and believe your life would be good if you had iPad.

Bryan: You talk in the book about stealing pleasure. What does that mean?

Geneen: Some of the chapters in the book have to do with our relationships with food and money because I’ve always said in my work with food that people live the way they eat; that if you really want to know what a person believes about life, about scarcity and deprivation and joy and pleasure, happiness, what they are allowed to have or not allowed to have, whether they’ve given up on themselves or not given up on themselves, all you have to do is look at the food on their plate.

What I now understand; which I didn’t get before, even though I’ve studied the relationship with food and my students’ relationships with food for 30 years, I didn’t understand that people also spend the way they live or spend the way they eat, but our relationships with food and money are almost exactly the same. This was staggering to me to discover, staggering to me to see that in the same way that we diet and binge or some of us do, we also are strict with money and then splurge, or we rationalize about food; broken cookies don’t count because when the cookies break the calories break or anything eaten with a diet soda doesn’t count because it cancels out the calories; same thing we do with money.

If I can amortize it over 20 years and it only costs me two cents a day; well then, how could I afford not to buy it? Or if it’s on sale, I can’t afford not to buy it. Those are some of the patterns and the feeling of never having enough food, the stuff that we really, really like to eat or money.

One of the patterns I see with food and money is that we feel like we don’t deserve to have it. If we’re overweight, we don’t really deserve to enjoy food so we better eat salad without dressing and dry toast in front of other people, and then steal pleasure while nobody is looking and I think the same is true with money.

We have this set of beliefs about money; unconscious beliefs for the most part, we want it, we want it, we want it. We can’t have enough of it, we don’t have enough of it, we believe our life would be better if we have it and yet, many of us without knowing that we believe this, believe that money is sleazy or dirty or it’s the root of all evil or responsible for all that’s wrong and we don’t want to be like one of the bad guys who rip people off and slice and dice up those crazy mortgages where people ended up losing their houses because they signed on for it, things like that.

And so, because we have this money split we end up feeling like we’re not supposed to have but we really want it and if we want it, I call it stealing it. We have to get it behind our own backs and that’s where all the subversive behavior around money comes.

Lots of women tell me, for instance, they go shopping but they run into the house and put all the stuff under their beds before their partners get home and it’s not that they couldn’t tell the truth; it’s just that there is this whole subversive game, this belief that if we’re going to give it to ourselves and we feel like we’re not supposed to, we’re going to have to steal it in some way which means eating and/or buying it behind our own backs and behind the people we live with backs.

Bryan: You mentioned earlier that enough isn’t a quantity; meaning, I’ll never have a number where I can look and say that’s enough, so there is a hole somewhere in my soul, so to speak, that I try to fill with saving or with buying gadgets and I have to accept that that’s never going to work? What will work instead?

Geneen: I think that’s a really good question and I think the first thing to understand, even before we get there, is to understand that more financial advice isn’t going to help you fill that hole, so to speak. The only thing that’s going to help is to actually address what’s going on, because financial advice is like when you’re not actually addressing what’s actually going on, it’s like I tell my students it’s like putting whip cream on a piece of wood and trying to make it edible. It doesn’t work.

If you don’t want to listen to the advice because you’re trying to fill something that you desperately believe needs to be filled and that you feel as responsible for the pain or discomfort or hurt or suffering in your life, then you’re going to get that thing regardless of whether you can afford it or not, or you’re going to keep wanting it whether you can afford it because you believe that if you have it you’re going to be happy. So it’s important to start there, to realize that the reason why we don’t want to follow a lot of this advice is because we’re using money for emotional reasons that we’re not acknowledging or addressing.

As long as you’re doing that all the good advice in the world is not going to be able to work for you, and so the first thing to do is acknowledge it. The second thing to do is to see if you’re feeling empty — let’s just say there is a hole there. It’s like, “That’s interesting, you believe there is a hole there.” Somebody said to me recently, “Well, I’m using money to fill the emptiness and it’s not doing it.” Somebody else wrote to me the other day and said, “I was feeling empty so I ate a piece of cake and that didn’t work, so I bought a pair of shoes and that still doesn’t work.”

Right, of course that’s not going to work. Those things don’t actually address why you’re doing what you’re doing. Let’s just go directly to what you’re feeling before you eat the thing, buy the thing. And if you’re feeling empty, and this is the other thing that people sort of say, “What?” I say, “What’s scary about just letting yourself feel empty?”

People feel like if they let themselves actually feel their feelings of what is going on they are going to dissolve, they are never going to be able to get off the bed, they are going to fall apart, they are not going to be able to take care of their kids. That’s not true. Emptiness; if you just let yourself feel it, feels like a lot of space. That’s all it feels like.

We react to our feelings without actually letting ourselves feel them. And if you actually feel them and sometimes it takes doing it with somebody and with support if you haven’t ever done this, but if you do do that you’ll find, “I’m running from my own shadow here.”

I had a friend who tells a story about her 6-year old friend who would say to her, “Imagine you’re in a room filled with tigers. What would you do?” And she said, “I don’t know. I would try to run or I would get a gun or I would hide or I would try to chase the tigers out. What would you do?” And the 6-year old friend said, “I’d stop imagining.” And I think that’s what most of us do.

We imagine that these feelings will kill us instead of stop imagining what the feelings are going to do for us which then all that imagining leads us to buying and eating and doing all these things we can’t afford instead of just stop imagining. Just notice, “I’m feeling sad. I’m feeling lonely. I’m feeling empty.” Okay. Feelings pass, they come and they go. They are like clouds.

Bryan: That’s a nice way to put it.

Geneen: I know. That’s a novel approach.

Bryan: Thank you very much for spending time with us on the show today.

Geneen: Thank you so much.

Bryan: That was Geneen Roth, author of Lost & Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food & Money. Find out more about Geneen and her several books at her website, geneenroth.com. She is also interacting with people every day at Facebook at Facebook.com/geneenroth. Join us again next week for more great personal financial advice and information.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. We’re looking for feedback. Please email us at podcast@consumerismcommentary.com. To subscribe to the podcast or listen to this or other episodes, visit us at ConsumerismCommentary.com/pod.

The original version of this article, Podcast 103: Lost and Found, Geneen Roth, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Consumerism Commentary Podcast host and producer Tom Dziubek returns this week, in the role of a guest. Tom has spent the past few months working for a financial services firm focusing on preparing and filing tax returns for clients. Today, Tom is joining me to speak about common and uncommon issues households experience with their taxes.

Tom will be returning as the podcast host and producer later this month.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Flexo
[00:39] Interview with tom Dziubek
– [00:54] The path to financial services
– [02:20] Keeping busy during tax season
– [03:29] Tips for procrastinators
– [05:14] Typical clients using tax services
– [08:16] Getting a bigger refund, outsmarting the government
– [13:13] Tax tips for people on Social Security
– [14:54] Homebuyer and energy credits
– [16:08] Representing clients with IRS audits
– [17:05] Dealing with cancellation of debt
– [19:15] Options for paying large tax bills
– [20:08] After the tax deadline
]– [22:15] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

Full transcript

Flexo: Welcome to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast for Sunday, April 3rd. I’m Flexo. It’s tax filing season and our guest today is Tom Dziubek who has been spending the past few months completing tax returns for clients.

[music]

Welcome to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Flexo. My guest today is Tom Dziubek who has been taking a hiatus from his duties as producer and host of this podcast. Thanks for taking some time to speak today Tom.

Tom Dziubek: Hey, no problem Flexo. Good to be back.

Flexo: Tom, the last time we talked you spoke about your experiences working behind the scenes at a bank. I understand you’ve moved on from the bank. What are you doing these days?

Tom: We’re going to have a whole kind of recap of Tom’s career here. Well, as many of you know I worked at a major publishing firm for years. I worked in IT. I got laid off in 2008 and I was kind of working while I was looking for employment. Flexo had me graciously doing the podcast for Consumerism Commentary. Last year I found out I basically had no luck finding an IT job.

I was presented with an opportunity to do a complete career change and work at a financial firm. This is primarily doing taxes, tax preparation work. But the person they wanted me to replace had also done a lot of things with insurance and what not. I’m gradually getting myself up to speed with everything that this guy had done before. Fantastic opportunity and I’ve been spending the last few months doing taxes.

Flexo: So what kind of training have they put you through so far?

Tom: There is a pretty big financial firm out there who offers tax preparation classes. I took that class last October knowing I was going to need to take it to prepare taxes. That was pretty much the bulk of my training. I think it was about two months long, three days a week. Very interesting.

Flexo: And so how busy has it been there?

Tom: Oh, nightmarish. Well, you know it’s refreshing. You spend a year and a half or almost two years completely unemployed and you’re getting thrown into a work week of about 70 hours a week. Some days I’m coming in at 9:00 and working until 8:00. Then that’s pretty much I’m there every day. Even on days when we have reduced hours, down to about eight hours a week, I’m still there. Then on Sunday I come in for about four or five hours to get caught up on the stuff I couldn’t get done Monday through Saturday.

Flexo: And is it getting worse as we’re getting closer to the tax filing deadline this year?

Tom: It’s getting kind of steady. It’s been steadily busy since I would have to say mid-February. For me it’s just been hectic. People have appointments. They get on our calendars. Some people actually mail in taxes. Some people will drop them off if we can’t see them. So if I can’t see clients or if I have a break between clients then I grab me another drop-off. You know, grab me somebody else’s taxes and start doing them. So it’s been pretty busy. I’d have to say it’s been pretty steady.

Flexo: According to Turbo Tax, Philadelphia is the 16th most procrastinating city when it comes to taxes. And we’re near Philadelphia so I thought that was appropriate. I think Houston was the first and they’ve been the first for a while, but Philadelphia is pretty high on this list. Is that what you’ve seen a lot this year?

Tom: Our clients have been pretty good. I have to say this. I really stepped into a fantastic situation where the tax firm I work for, the financial services firm, has been pretty – they’ve been around for at least 20 or 30 years, so they have a steady group of clients. These people all seem to know what time to get on the schedule. People have been calling up since early January to get themselves on the schedule. I think that you are starting to get a few people who panic this time of the year, and we kind of take that into account.

What we do is if we know they’re going to be late, if we can’t get them on anybody’s schedule we just tell them to file an extension. Because as long as you can look at somebody’s history and we always have somebody’s history if they’ve done business with us before. We can tell whether or not they’re going to wind up owing or whether or not they’re going to get money back.

If you’re going to get money back there’s really nothing wrong with filing an extension because the government doesn’t care. They know that they’re going to have to give money back to you so they figure there’s no real harm in waiting a little longer.

Flexo: But if you owe money to the government…

Tom: Yeah, that’s a little – that’s one of the great kicks in the teeth with the federal government. Even if you owe money and you figure, “I can file an extension and owe it later,” guess what? You don’t. You still owe that money on April 18. It’s just that you had to fill out the paperwork later on.

Flexo: And that’s April 18th this year but it usually is April 15, right?

Tom: Right, usually it’s April 15th and there’s a – I believe that there’s a local holiday in D.C. this year on Friday the 15th which is why they’ve moved it to April 18th this year.

Flexo: Okay. So you were talking about your clients. They seem to be pretty proactive. How would you describe your typical client at this firm?

Tom: Well, you know, it’s a great slice of society. You pretty much see everything with your clients. The typical client I’ve seen I would have to say are middle class, small family. Usually people making about, I would say about $150,000 for AGI, adjusted gross income. So wages are roughly about that. But of course you still have a lot of people who are single, a lot of people who are filing head of household, single parents and things like that. Also quite a few senior citizens as well I get.

Flexo: Would you say that most people should come to a professional service like yours?

Tom: Yeah. I think that most people should. I’m not just saying that to be self-serving but there’s a lot of opportunities for people to get Turbo Tax or to file themselves right through the federal government. Of course, even if you file free through the federal government many people still have to file state income taxes as well. So you’d probably have to do both.

The one thing about going to a professional tax firm is that they know what questions to ask. They know what kind of breaks you can get, things that we can help you with if you have a particular situation. Things that if you’re actually just using Turbo Tax to fill it out yourself you may not have thought of.

Flexo: Right. Even though the software like that is pretty good at guiding you through and giving you all the possible things that could come up it still helps to speak to a professional who understands what your specific position is and what your specific needs are and be able to tailor their advice to you.

Tom: Well, let me give you an example to that. Husband and wife came in. They must have been about in their late 60’s or early 70’s. Both their kids were still living with them. I think they had both recently gone through divorces. I was asking questions. They brought their kid’s taxes in to do. And the kids are in their 40’s. I started asking some probing questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “So has anybody been paying out any alimony to anybody?” They both looked at each other and said, “Yeah, one of our sons has been paying alimony for like three or four years now.” I was like, “Really?” I’m looking back at his returns for 2009 and 2008. I was like, “I don’t see any alimony on here because you could actually write off alimony that you pay to your ex-wife.”

It turns out they went home and got the information about his ex-wife, how much he’d been paying to her, and I was able to save him some money because there was stuff that they didn’t know that they could write off.

Flexo: That’s great. My tax accountant was able to find quite a bit of money just based on the way I was filing as a business. So there’s definitely lots of opportunity that would not be present if you were to just go and file your taxes using online software.

Tom: Right.

Flexo: So the other day I was speaking to a reporter for TheStreet.com and Yahoo and she was putting together a story about suggestions for people who would like to get a bigger refund. Obviously people get refunds or they owe the government when they file their taxes. People who receive refunds are never quite happy with what they’re getting. They always want more. Right? So they’re putting this story together about how to get a bigger refund. What do you suggest for that?

Tom: Just like you said, most people want big refunds. But if you think about it all a big refund is, is that you’ve given more to the government than you’ve owed during the course of the year, and they’re just giving it back to you. So you’ve essentially used the IRS as a bank account that earns no interest.

Flexo: You’re basically giving the government an interest-free loan.

Tom: Exactly. That’s all you’re doing. It would make more sense to try to figure out how close you can get to zero, how much you can do to either get minimal – like less than $100 – back or maybe even a couple hundred dollars back, or even owing a couple hundred dollars. There’s no shame in that. If you’re in a position where you’re getting $5,000 to 6,000 back regularly find out a way, figure out your federal withholdings, whether or not you should be filing single-1, single-0, married-0, married-1. You can find that stuff on the internet. This way you can kind of track down and say, “Look, this is how much I’m giving to the government right now and how much I’m getting back. Maybe I should if I’m filing single-1, maybe I should file single-2.”

Take that extra money and if you look at the withholding table you can see how much the difference is. Take that and a lot of companies will let you go and split your direct deposit, if you have your paycheck direct deposited to your bank account. Split that extra amount of money and put it into a savings account. Create another savings account. Put it into a CD. Put it into something that bears interest. Make that money work for you. This way at the end of the year you can pretend that’s your refund.

Flexo: Yeah, and I think that really is the key, is being able to automate that. A lot of people look at those refunds and they understand that they’re giving the government an interest free loan but the rationale is that it’s kind of a forced savings because if that money were to appear in their paycheck every other week or twice a month, whatever their pay period happens to be, then they’re not going to save it. It’ll be part of their spending.

So a lot of people do look at this refund as if it were kind of a forced savings. Once they get the check in April or March, whenever they file their taxes they can just put that in the bank account. Of course also that relies on them to actually save that money and not to go spend it on a new audio surround system in their house or something like that.

Tom: Yeah. And you know, of course that is the optimistic view of society there as well too. I mean, there’s also another half where they say they want a bigger refund and what they’re really looking to do is to try to find a way to maximize their write-offs. To an extent the government will catch them. So that’s another aspect too. Let me go back to refunds too, because some people simply do want big refunds. One thing that you have to remember too about refunds is like I was saying, it really is just giving – it’s basically a determination of whether or not you paid the government enough money.

When you think about it, it is six and one half dozen the other. How do you want your money? Do you want it in your paycheck or do you want it at the end of the year. So if you do want a bigger refund, if you have no self control and you really do need to use the government as a bank, I recommend trying to withhold about – for the average client that I would see with roughly about $100,000-150,000 AGI, I’d say try to go single-0 in your paycheck. Withhold about 15%. Try to aim for that. Usually if you withhold 15% of your gross earnings in your paycheck you’re going to be okay.

Now, if you start getting into a higher tax bracket and you start making closer to $200,000, you start finding yourself in a range where you’re no longer being taxed at 15-25%. If you’re starting to drift up in the 33% tax bracket you need to withhold even more. It’s as simple as that. You’re just going to get hammered.

Flexo: So you would suggest just basically doing single-0 with an additional withholding amount?

Tom: Single-0, $50, 100, trying to find out what works best for you. And again, like I said, it’s six and one half dozen the other.

Flexo: So do you think that based on your conversations with clients, do you think people are trying to outsmart the government a little bit?

Tom: I think you get a little bit of both. I think you get a little bit of both. I think it’s kind of funny because you find some of the more – you do find that a lot of the more people that you would expect to have more of a, I don’t want to say pious outlook to society, sometimes it’s kind of shocking to find out that they’re really also trying to get a little more back from the government than you would expect them in their position to do. I won’t elaborate on that.

Flexo: I think that’s fair. What do people who are earning income from Social Security need to understand about their taxes?

Tom: Well social security is kind of a trick one. Social security, the way that that is handled is that the more — it’s kind of considered the way the big picture of your income is. If you have a lot of other pension money and a lot of other monies coming in from annuities and whatnot, and social security is just a small portion of what you get than the government will tax it to the maximum. They’ll tax it up to 85% because they know that it’s just supplemental income to you.

However, the less other income that you have and social security becomes more or basically the bulk of your income, then social security becomes less taxable to the point where if social security is your only source of income it’s not taxable. There’s no tax at all for it. So it’s one of those things, and sometimes when I give estimates to people they come in and they give me their taxes and we don’t do the taxes in front of them. I just kind of write everything down and we have people in the back who actually go and enter it into a computer.

When I give estimates to people I tell them it’s kind of tricky when they have social security. I say, “Look, it really depends on what’s changed in your profile.” I’ve had people write off losses. They’ve had a business and they would write off $3,000 the previous year for business losses and they wouldn’t have that the next year. Suddenly their social security is basically more taxable.

Flexo: Right.

Tom: So they were kind of upset about that because I give them one estimate and just because of the change of the rate in which social security was taxed my estimate was off. So it’s kind of tricky with that.

Flexo: Have there been a lot of questions this year about the home buyer credit?

Tom: Yes, a little bit. We saw more of the first time homebuyer last year. We got more of the energy credit. We’ve had a lot of that this year.

Flexo: Really? So what’s involved with the energy credit?

Tom: The energy credit, as long as you’ve made an energy efficient improvement to your house – windows, doors, things that match what you see on EnergyStar.gov, they have a list of everything that’s energy efficient. You can write that off and get up to 30% of your cost for having that installed.

Flexo: Is it up to the tax filer to determine whether their improvement will qualify or do you file for it and then…?

Tom: We try to do some probing questions just to make sure things are okay, that it does match. We try to get as much information as possible but you’re in kind of a dicey situation where you don’t want to also play like a real jerk because these are still your clients. So we ask questions. We tell them and give them basically the bottom line. We take it from there with whatever they decide to tell us. I don’t demand – we don’t usually demand receipts. If they have them, that’s good because we at least get an exact estimate off of them. In the end it really comes down to whatever you can prove.

Flexo: Have you had to deal with any audits yet and do you represent the clients?

Tom: Not yet I don’t. I fortunately have to say that this is my first year doing it. I haven’t had any audits yet. I hope not to have any audits. But, I mean, audits do happen. Most of the time the IRS will contact the person via mail and the client will call us up. We’ll kind of coach them through it.

Flexo: Okay.

Tom: You know, in many cases the government says, “You owe this.” We double check our work and if we feel that they have a ground to stand on we give them the reason why and sometimes it just kind of ends there. Other times we’ve had cases where somebody makes an error. It happens. Somebody types in a number wrong and we’ll just tell them to pay it and we’ll cover any kind of interest or whatever that was incurred by that. In other words, if somebody owes $100 and the government’s asking for $108 a lot of times we’ll just go and say, “Sure, no problem. Pay the money you owe and we’ll cover the difference because it was our fault.”

Flexo: So what’s one of the worst stories that you’ve had to go through so far this year?

Tom: People will give you different forms to do their taxes. 1099-INTs, 1099-DIVs, basically talking about your dividends and interest that you have to report to the government. The worst thing I’ve seen is the dreaded 1099-C, which is the cancellation of debt.

Flexo: It sounds like that would be a good thing.

Tom: It sounds like it would be a good thing but it really is, it’s just kind of similar to owing the government money on April 15 or April 18 and not being able to do an extension to delay it. An even bigger kick in the teeth is about forgiveness of debt. Once you have debt cancelled, and you can have debt cancelled multiple ways. It could be debt consolidation, you could find a credit card debt cancelled or written off, and even worse is with a home mortgage when you basically sell a house at a loss and the mortgage company says, “Screw it, we’re going to cancel $60,000 worth of debt.” It sounds like a fantastic thing. “Woo hoo, I no longer have this big debt.”

But guess what? The government considers that taxable income which means that let’s say you’ve made $50,000 over the course of the year. You withheld $7,500 to the government. This is essentially an entire year’s paycheck in some cases. I had one person that had to write off I believe it was $86,000 that was cancelled. $86,000 of cancelled debt. So imagine an $86,000 year-long earning that you never withheld anything to the government for. You’re going to get hammered.

This person wound up owing — I think in the end they wound up owing somewhere between $17,000 and 18,000. It was horrible because the case was they had a house and it was a secondary house that they sold. They took a huge loss for it and got the cancellation of debt. So it wasn’t bad enough that they sold the house at a huge loss, but now they had to pay taxes on this cancellation of debt. In some cases that can be forgiven, such as if it was your primary residence, if you were in foreclosure or if you were going through bankruptcy. But if you were in the cases where it was just an investment that went sour on you, you can be essentially screwed.

Flexo: So what options are available for someone who has a $17,000 tax bill that they weren’t expecting?

Tom: Well, I mean the IRS isn’t completely heartless. I mean, what you can do if you know you’re going to owe a lot of money you can pay the IRS some of it. Throw them $1,000. Throw them what you can afford. What they’ll do is they’ll come back to you and say, “Thank you for the payment. Here’s how much you owe us now.” You can even work out a payment plan with them.

So it’s not the end of the world in many cases. I mean, obviously some situations are going to be different but in many cases, and especially when you owe that much to the government and not – you don’t see it too often. Most people owe the government money $2,000, $3,000. Not uncommon. So in those cases you can work something out with the government and it shouldn’t really kill you.

Flexo: So Tom, in a few weeks tax season is going to be over and your workload, will that decrease?

Tom: Oh yeah, it should decrease. There are a couple other things I’ll be picking up. I’ll be picking up and learning life insurance and health insurance, doing things like that so that it’s not just one of those three month jobs. I need to sustain some other sort of income through the course of the year.

Flexo: Because this is a full financial services firm, right?

Tom: Right. I shouldn’t say full financials. It’s mostly personal in that we don’t really do any kind of corporations or anything. So it’s mostly personal. But, you know, during the course of the year there’s going to be amended returns. There’s going to be people who filed extensions. So you’ll have a little bit of that during the course of the year, but yeah, I’ll have a severe – I shouldn’t say severe reduction of hours but I’ll probably be there about 20 hours a week still.

Flexo: Okay. That’ll leave you more than enough time to come back and be the host of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

Tom: And I look forward to that.

Flexo: All right, well thanks a lot, Tom, for joining us.

Tom: No problem, Flexo. Good to be back.

Flexo: Absolutely. That was Tom Dziubek, host and producer of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast who’s been working some other jobs recently.

Be sure to look for more podcasts here hosted by Bryan J. Busch who’s been helping us out, and by Tom Dziubek once he returns. You can find more at consumerismcommentary.com. Thanks for joining us today for the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

The original version of this article, Podcast 102: Tax Preparation, Tom Dziubek, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Dr. Guy Winch, author of The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem.

Guy received his doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University in 1991 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in family and couples therapy at NYU Medical Center. Guy authors the blog The Squeaky Wheel for Psychology Today.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:37] Interview with Dr. Guy Winch
– [00:50] How we complain
– [02:02] Venting or strengthening the problem
– [04:39] Ineffective complaints on the Internet
– [08:13] Creativity is better than anger
– [09:10] Outsourcing to GetSatisfaction
– [10:21] Most effective complaints
– [11:10] Companies that annoy consumers
– [13:27] Complaining effectively
– [15:08] Complaining to friends
– [18:20] Effective complaining in personal relationships
– [19:14] Complaining correctly about overdraft fees
– [24:18] Creating a Complaint Sandwich
– [28:42] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we talk about complaining, but we talk about how to do it correctly.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Brian J. Busch. My guest today is Doctor Guy Winch, author of The Squeaky Wheel – Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self Esteem. Doctor Winch, thank you for joining us on the program today.

Guy: Thank you for having me.

Bryan: So your book is about complaining, but that activity has mostly negative connotations associated with it. The first I thought of was Doug and Wendy Whiner from Saturday Night Live. Do you think that the act of complaining deserves its bad reputation?

Guy: I think the way we complain today, it absolutely does. Today we complain more than ever before in history really, and we’re just terrible at it. We don’t get the results that we want, and in many cases we’re not even trying to. We’re complaining prodigiously and getting very little from it. The reputation for being an annoyance or a nuisance is deserved.

Ultimately I think that it’s a shame that it is like that because we could complain differently. Complaints used to be transactional tools. They used to be ways we would communicate our desires and needs for change. Right now we’re not using them in that way when we should. We’re using them really just for defense most of the time.

Bryan: Okay.

Guy: The reputation is well deserved at the moment, although I think it’s really time to change that.

Bryan: Sometime last year I think I saw on the TV show Mythbusters that they scientifically proved that verbally expressing your pain can reduce the actual amount of pain that you feel because it’s all in your head. Is complaining sort of like that too when it comes to just using it as a venting tool?

Guy: I think it’s a little different. I didn’t see that show. What happens with pain is that when we divert attentional resources to a different activity like verbally expressing our pain, it takes away the amount of attention we pay to our pain. It makes the pain or the experience of pain reduced. For example, now with burn victims they’re using video games to distract them while their wounds are being changed. That really eases the amount of their pain.

I think with pain it’s about diverting our attention because we have a finite amount of attention. If we can divert some of it away from the thing that’s causing the pain we will experience the pain less. Not the case with complaining. With complaining, by venting or by voicing our complaints we’re actually experiencing some kind of emotional release. We are letting out bad feelings. Really there are different payoffs we have when we vent. The full payoff is just to say it. The mutterers muttering about what it would be or muttering to their dog when they get home in the evening about how his boss was annoying.

The real payoff with venting is emotional validation, which is to vent to someone who truly gets why we’re feeling and what we’re feeling and can convey that back to us. When we complain to someone and they can actually look at us and go, “My goodness, so that was really, really frustrating. I can imagine you were so upset.” That feels good. When we give the same presentation to someone who just looks at us and says, “Oh, bummer,” less good.

The power of venting is to do it to someone who can emotionally validate our experiences and really make us feel understood. Then there is a significant relief in it. Now, in part this is what therapy is all about. I’m a psychologist so I know this more than most. People go to psychologists – people often say, “I can just complain to my friends.” Psychologists are trained in many things but one of them is to be very good in active listening and reflecting back to the person that they truly understand and can empathize with the complaints and the feelings being expressed. That has a therapeutic value.

Bryan: In the book you talk about how complaining has largely moved from real space to the internet, and become even less effective as a result. I noticed, myself that most of Twitter and Facebook seemed to be complaints until I decided to pay attention to individual patterns and unfollow the people who were using it as an outlet for venting. I may have been doing something that not a lot of people do. Is that what you mostly see when you look online?

Guy: When I look online I mostly see really a repetition of what happens in the real world. That is a lot of people are complaining, but they’re doing it really ineffectively. In other words, even on Twitter there are many companies now that monitor Twitter feeds for complaints and will respond. But if you’re going on Twitter and you’re Tweeting to, say, Delta Airlines, they have a hash tag deltaassist and say, “Delta Assist, my flight got cancelled, need confirmation tomorrow, please help.” You’re likely to get a response. If you’re just going on there to go, “Delta sucks,” not.

Unfortunately most people are the “Delta sucks,” variety, not singling out Delta by any means here. Most people are just going on Twitter and Facebook and other social media to just vent, slam or fling comments about companies and not to request assistance. This is the fundamental problem we have in terms of our understanding of how complaints should be utilized. When we’re complaining, by definition, we are asking someone for help. We are asking someone to resolve something, to assist us, to give us some kind of response that we would find helpful and that would resolve the matter that we are complaining about. We don’t perceive of our complaints as requests for help, so we come at it with aggression and with anger and with hostility.

If you’re asking for help for someone and you’re coming at them with anger and hostility and aggression, you’re not going to get much help. On the other hand, if you come at them with kindness, with civility, with respect you will. So if people used the online venue to complain effectively, to really realize that they’re reaching out to people in a request for assistance, and to do that nicely I think that the online venues could be really helpful in that way.

There are many message boards online where people can voice complaints about companies. When I was researching my book I started looking at some of them. Some of them are really just hateful message boards. Not hateful in that they’re hateful, but they’re just about hating certain companies. This company sucks kind of message boards. I went on them to see that there must be terrible stories there of what these companies have done to these poor people that would lead them to invest huge amounts of resources and time to create whole websites devoted to hating the company.

When you go onto these websites all you see are the really standard complaints about getting overbilled, or the reception wasn’t good or my bank gave me too many fees. They’re the most standard complaints ever. Instead people are so busy hating and being angry and frustrated and antagonistic, they’re forgetting that if they spent a fraction of that time just being constructive, civil and respectful, they could actually resolve their issue and they wouldn’t have to start whole websites just to document how angry they are.

Bryan: Speaking of Delta, I think that was the airline that accidentally broke a man’s guitar and he decided to write a song about it and create a YouTube video.

Guy: Was that Delta? Yes, I know the song. I just forget, was that Delta?

Bryan: I don’t know for sure. It could have been. But certainly you’re not suggesting that a person needs to be quite that creative in order to get a company’s attention.

Guy: Well actually, you know what? I’m actually thinking that creativity is better than the anger. He actually did it in a way that was funny, that was amusing, that was interesting. Yes, he was annoyed but he channeled that. As a psychologist when you take the raw anger you have and you channel it into something creative there’s obviously something good there. That’s what that person did. He didn’t just start nasty websites about how terrible the company was. He did something creative, fun, interesting, and I assure you he enjoyed doing it. So he turned that experience for himself from one that was negative into one that was quite positive.

Bryan: I’ve seen a lot of companies halfway outsource their customer support and service calls to Get Satisfaction. Have you seen that one?

Guy: Yes, yes.

Bryan: Part of the usefulness is that the customer is not relying wholly on the company to respond. They can get answers from fellow customers as well. Does that seem helpful to you?

Guy: What Get Satisfaction does, which I think is terrific, is first of all the company was started by a person called Thor Muller and his idea was that he wanted to create a dialogue between consumers and companies that was civil. This was one of the most important things that had guided him at the beginning. He wanted not just to have a regular message board, but he wanted to create an ongoing dialogue between companies and consumers. Now, of course, it’s developed into having a general dialogue even among consumers. He wanted the tone to be civil. He wanted it to be constructive.

That’s why his company has become so successful. They offer all these services for people to have dialogue within groups and so consumers can help one another. Companies will sign up and will be very responsive, but they really make sure that the tone is constructive.

What I advocate most in my book is that we have forgotten that complaints should be really civil, transactional, business communications. It would not occur to us in a business communication, otherwise, to be furious and angry, cursing, putdowns. We would not consider that businesslike. But as consumers our complaints are business communications. They should adhere to these rules. If we made them civil and respectful and businesslike, again, we would get results rather than just get frustration, which is what happens most of the time at the moment.

So yes, Get Satisfaction I think is doing a really important thing, not just by creating this vehicle for communication and dialogue but also by making the tone of it so specific.

One thing that really still surprises me in some way about companies, is that companies – although consumers have a huge misuse of complaints, companies are not on the ball yet either. To them, when a consumer has a complaint, this is the moment the consumer most wants to talk to the company. This is the moment where the company can communicate with their consumer, if they elicited and listened and responded to these complaints.

This is where they can perform the service recovery that will make the consumer satisfied. Rather than lose the customer, create even greater customer loyalty within that person because they feel like, “Oh, I had a problem. The company listened, they responded, that’s a company I’m going to stick with.”

Complaints are huge opportunities for everyone. They’re huge opportunities for consumers to really take care of their problems and, by the way, save a significant amount of money. All these refunds and disputes that we have that annoy us, all these products that are sitting in our garage shelves because they arrived broken and you did nothing with them, there is a lot of money we’re leaving on the table because we just feel like there’s no point, it won’t help. Well, we could actually be getting refunds and returns and replacements.

It’s a huge opportunity for consumers and it’s a huge opportunity for companies to engage their consumers, to educate them, to inform them about products, to perform service recoveries and turn them into loyal customers, to create the kind of dialogue at the moment the consumer wants to have that dialogue most. The amount of companies that do that is still exceedingly small. There are still way, way too many companies that have things called planned inconvenience. They actually make it difficult for the consumer or for the customer to communicate with them when something goes wrong. They’re missing out on the most crucial opportunity they have to increase their customer retention and to really change the feeling of the customer about the company.

So the education needs to go all around. These complaints are valuable, valuable tools to everyone if we use them correctly. If I may just one more thing on that line, I always think about someone said, “My husband is the one who complains when something goes wrong in our family,” she said, “Because he has the power.” She said it truly as if she meant he has the super-power. It’s a special ability. It’s like leaping tall buildings now or being faster than a speeding bullet to be able to complain effectively because it’s such a rare commodity.

To me, it’s like the complaints are the spinach that would make Popeye strong, except most people don’t eat the spinach. They stuff it in their pipe, smoke it and get emphysema. So the use of complaints is just completely the opposite of what it should be. We are losing when we should be gaining.

Bryan: That’s particularly interesting. We just had a show with a man who believes that women are actually more hard wired to be better negotiators.

Guy: People have to believe that they can get a result, that it’s worth speaking up, that they know how to do it in a way that is effective and that it is worth their trouble to speak up, to dialogue with a company, to dialogue with a store, to mention it to the manager, etcetera, and get a result.

What prevents people from doing that now is this general feeling of learned hopelessness, essentially, which means that people are convinced there’s no point, that they will fail. People are convinced the company is not interested in listening to their complaint. People are convinced that it will be too much time and hassle to complain to the company.

Here’s the irony. In some cases 95% of consumers will walk out of the store dissatisfied with a purchase because it was the wrong color, the wrong size, it didn’t do what it was supposed to do, etcetera. 95% of people who feel that way and are strongly frustrated and want to complain will not complain to the store or company in question because they are convinced that it will require too much time and effort to do that.

However, they will then go, these very same people, and voice this very same complaint to up to 16 of their friends and family. In other words, they will spend hours complaining about something that truly frustrates them and not spend ten minutes making a phone call or writing an email because they’re convinced actually that will take too much time. They’ll spend far more time complaining to everyone else, none of whom can do anything to actually resolve their problem.

Bryan: Yikes.

Guy: That’s our psychology of complaining, which is so problematic. It’s a self-defeating prophesy that just has us convinced there’s no point. And so we don’t try, which just reinforces our perception that there’s no point. People around us see that, “They had a complaint and they didn’t complain so I guess I shouldn’t even try either.”

I use this example in the book of someone who had a problem with their big screen television. When the big screen TVs came out they had this huge thing mounted on the wall. It had a problem within a short amount of time. They called the cable company twice and twice the technicians seemed to have repaired it but weren’t successful. Then they stopped calling. It prevented them from being able to watch the television. A year later this huge thing was hanging on the wall but not working.

Bryan: A year, wow.

Guy: A year. When I said, “Why don’t you call a third time? Surely you can speak to someone higher up. Surely there are tiers of technicians and you can get somebody more competent.” “Nope. It won’t help. They just don’t know what they’re doing.” They truly believed that there was no one in the company that could possibly fix whatever tiny glitch was wrong with the TV. They just stayed with that on the wall. Can you imagine walking in and out of that room several times a day starting at that monstrosity on the wall that does nothing and not feeling completely aggravated and frustrated and upset and defeated by it?

There are so many things like that in our lives. The child’s toy. The dollhouse which arrived with everything except the roof but we were too busy. We never took care of it. Every time you pass by that child playing and the roof missing we just look at it and feel bad for her and bad for us, but, “Oh, there’s no point. The company really doesn’t care.” In part what happens is that the frequency of these occurrences, because we have so many of these small complaints that add up – and some of them are more meaningful than others – it really has an impact on our self-esteem, on our mental health, on our quality of life.

I should mention the same thing, by the way, happens in our personal relationships. We are equally convinced that complaining to our wives and our husbands will be ineffective and just start an argument so we squelch those complaints, too, and just go and tell our buddies at the gym. It’s the general psychology of complaining that we have right now that is so defeatist and fraught with hopelessness and helplessness when it truly doesn’t have to be. That’s not the reality. It’s only the reality that we create in our minds.

What was surprising to me when I got into this topic about complaining was that it seemed to me that this terrible thing was happening with our mindset, with our complaining psychology if you will, and no one was paying attention. No one noticed. I wrote the book to say, “Hello, start paying attention. This is really impacting your quality of life and it doesn’t have to.”

Bryan: So it sounds like when we approach a problem with angry feelings we’re likely to get worse results. As an example, could you teach me a better way to complain if say I had overdraft fees that I didn’t feel like I was really responsible for and I wanted to call the bank and get them reversed?

Guy: Yes, well let’s start with your feelings about it. The paradox of complaining is that we feel the urge to complain most when we’re at our most frustrated. Yet to complain effectively, we have to be calm and reasonable. That’s a tricky proposition. One of the most effective things that we can do in those situations is using a psychological technique called reframing or reappraisal it’s called as well in which we reframe the problem in our heads to make it less emotional and volatile for us.

One of the ways to do that with complaints is if we’re going to try and see whether we have the capacity to complain effectively and get a result, then we can reframe the current situation. Rather than, “Let me see if those people at the bank really care about me,” to, “Here’s an interesting puzzle. Let me see if I can use the tools I’ve acquired in terms of effective complaining to get the result I want. Let me see if this can really work. This is really an experiment.” When we’re doing an experiment we are focused again, back to the pain example with Mythbusters, our focus goes from the visceral experience we have to thinking. It draws away attentional resources and we feel less angry just the way we feel less pain when we’re playing a video game. We have to present this to ourselves as a puzzle.

One really important thing to remember that will also help you with your frustration in that moment is that the person you’re calling at the bank is a front line employee. They are low salaried. They work in very difficult conditions. All they do all day is deal with angry customers. They are not the ones that are living off the fat of the lambs and enjoying huge dividends. They’re really minimum-salaried employees. They did not cause the financial collapse. They did not come up with these rules and regulations. They’re only there to try and help you.

If you can remember that the person that you’re talking to might be a representative of the bank, but they’re probably not even in the same state or the same city as the bank is, that they’re just these simple mothers or students or people working a second job trying to get by, and not take your frustration out on them because I assure you it is never their fault. They’re not the ones that made the mistake. They’re only the ones that have to clean up the mess. So if we treat them nicely you’ll be much more likely to get the results.

The question that you should have is you would say hello and explain your situation, and then explain that, “I want to dispute this amount of money. Are you authorized for those amounts or do I need to speak to someone higher up?” The person who’s answering the phone is often authorized to clear, say $25 or a dispute of $30 but not more. If it’s more they would have to speak to somebody higher up. If you’re nice and civil and you’re aware of that, they have to go through their procedures because they are not allowed to independently chat with you. They have very rigid procedures they have to follow on their screens. It tells them, “Now ask about this. Now if they say this you go here. If they say this you go there.” Their job depends on their following those prescriptions. Their leeway is limited.

If you understand that if it’s going a certain way it’s not them being difficult, it’s them following a computer program which is being difficult, then you can say to them, “I get the sense that you’re not authorized to help me with that amount. Can I ask you, I really feel I shouldn’t pay that because,” and you mention the circumstances. “Could I ask you what you might suggest that I should do?” Or you can say, “Can I ask to speak to your supervisor? Really you’ve been very helpful and I really appreciate your time but I think I need somebody who can deal with the amount that I’m trying to dispute.”

Bryan: Instead of the more common technique of making them feel like they’re helpless and not doing what you want them to do.

Guy: Well, that would be a nice version of it. Actually what the research shows is that these kinds of people deal with ten hostile calls a day. By hostile I don’t mean somebody suggesting that they don’t know what they’re doing. I mean somebody cursing them, threatening them, belittling them, yelling at them, shouting at them. This is what we do to these people. They’re really on the lines and they really have to put up with a huge amount of hostility from the public that just feels if I’m frustrated with a company, that’s the person I’m going to take it out on, even though that person had nothing to do with the problem. Of course they find then that that person’s not very helpful. Really? You just cursed them. Why would they be?

Bryan: In the book you talk about creating a complaint sandwich, the first part being an ear opener. What is an ear opener?

Guy: The idea with the complaint sandwich is that we all have a very natural default response to complaints when we’re on the receiving end of them, which is that we get defensive. This is probably an evolutionary thing. I doubt when we were in the caves any discussions that started with, “Hey, that’s my mammoth pelt you’re wearing,” was followed by some kind of discussion of community property. It was probably dealt with a spear in the heart. So we naturally get defensive when somebody is about to complain to us. It’s a natural thing.

Since we want them to really be able to hear what we’re saying and if they’re too defensive they’ll be too busy planning their rebuttal than to listen to the actual content of our complaint. We want our first statement to be one that is positive so that it relaxes their defenses as much as possible. I call that first layer of bread in the complain sandwich the ear opener, because it is a positive statement, the purpose of which is to make the person less defensive and more open to the meat of the sandwich which is going to be our actual complaint that is going to follow. It’s important to start with something positive, or at least neutral.

Then we should deliver the meat of the sandwich. The goal of the meat is to keep it lean. In other words, just stay with a specific incident that happened. If this happened before with the bank back in 1993, it doesn’t matter. That’s not relevant. Just stay with this is what happened in a very simple, reasonable, civil presentation.

Then the last slice of bread in the complaint sandwich, the second slice of bread, is the digestive. The idea there is to end again with something positive. If you end with something positive, for example on the phone with the contact center employee by saying, “Here’s the situation. I really appreciate your help and advice and I’m really glad that I was able to get through to you.” You’re telling them, number one, it makes them easier for them to digest the meat of the sandwich you just gave them. It motivates them to want to help you because they know that you’ll be grateful if they do as opposed to still being angry or hostile.

The idea of the sandwich is to create somebody who will listen without getting defensive, who will hear the content of what you’re saying of the complaint without getting distracted by your tone or your anger, and who will then be motivated to do the best that they can to resolve it for you.

Bryan: Now this may not be true of everybody with better memories than I have, but it sounds like it may even be helpful to plan and prepare a complaint sandwich, and even write it down before calling.

Guy: It’s really true. When I talk about the complaining sandwich with people they go, “That’s simple, just a positive statement, then the complaint, and then a positive statement.” But when they’re in the moment it’s sometimes a little difficult to come up with that positive statement. This happens more actually when somebody’s complaining to their spouse or to a loved one. They think it’s easy but it’s actually a little bit challenging.

In the book I give numerous examples of that, but it is worthwhile spending literally two minutes – it shouldn’t take more – to jot down what an ear opener can be and what a digestive can be, what those two slices of bread might be just so that you have them at the ready. Usually you have a couple of minutes on the line listening and going through menus or listening to some kind of tune or message, so you have a little bit of time to write that down. I do think it’s worthwhile homework. It takes very little time but again, the difference this makes is it will make your call effective. The payoff of being able to get off the call that was a pleasant one for you, that was a pleasant one for them, that was productive all in all and that actually got the fees reduced is significant.

I’ve had people write me emails since the book came out saying, “I had this thing lying on my desk that I’d given up on but I decided I’m going to try the complaint sandwich. We went and we did it and it was remarkably easy.” People are always shocked that it works because we are so used to complaining in hostile tones that it’s shocking to us that when you actually just do it politely and use civility and kindness it gets you further.

Bryan: That’s great. Well, I enjoyed reading the book and I wish you the best of luck with it. Thank you very much for being here on the show with us today.

Guy: Thank you for having me Bryan.

Bryan: Join us again next week for more great, personal financial advice and information.

The original version of this article, Podcast 101: The Squeaky Wheel, Guy Winch, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, President of The Charles Schwab Foundation, which is sponsoring the National Financial Capability Challenge as well as the Make Change Count program.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:38] Interview with Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz
– [00:52] About the National Financial Capability Challenge
– [01:57] What do educators need to know to help students pass the test?
– [02:35] Why the challenge exists
– [03:18] Winning prizes for passing the test
– [03:49] Who is allowed and encouraged to participate?
– [04:18] The Charles Schwab Foundation’s history with the challenge
– [05:19] Which teachers are supposed to work with their students on the test?
– [07:15] More resources at Schwab MoneyWise.
– [07:46] About the Make Change Count Teen Pledge and its four tenets
– [09:58] Previous successes with the partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
– [11:59] The Schwab Foundation’s efforts at financial coaching
– [12:50] Young people really do want to learn about managing money
– [13:59] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we talk about the National Financial Capability Challenge and how to make change count.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Bryan J Busch. My guest today is Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, President of the Charles Schwab Foundation, which provides education, volunteerism and advocacy toward lifelong financial well being. Thank you for joining us the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

Carrie: Thank you for having me.

Bryan: Your foundation is sponsoring the National Financial Capability Challenge. Tell me about what that is.

Carrie: The National Financial Capability Challenge is a test. It’s administered by teachers to test the financial savvy of high school students nationwide and it’s sponsored and administered by the US Department of Treasury. It’s a 40 question online test and the whole idea is really to encourage teachers to teach kids financial literacy and financial basics and also to get kids excited about the whole topic.

The actual test is available between March 7th and April 8th. So, we really want to encourage teachers and parents who teach their kids at home to go onto Challenge.Treas.Gov and have your teenagers take the test and there is an educator tool kit for teachers as a resource to help your kids get prepared.

Bryan: Tell me about some of the things that are in the educator tool kit. I imagine all of the information in there is going to help you pass the online test.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a tool kit that was designed by leading experts in financial education and it’s ready made material for a teacher to teach the kids the basic skills. There are topics such as earning and income, spending wisely, also saving and investing, borrowing, credit cards, which is a big deal today and then protecting your money.

Bryan: Did this idea come about because we found out that high school students are currently ill prepared to deal with financial matters?

Carrie: Well, all of America really has been ill prepared for financial matters and the last couple of years has really brought this to the attention of all of us as an issue really to the strength of America and really the best way that we can change this course is to give the kids basic knowledge, so that when they do go into college or go into the work place that they have the tools to live within their means and beginning to save and have sort of a financially healthy life.

Bryan: That’s great. Now, are there potential prizes for passing the test?

Carrie: Yeah. The Charles Schwab Foundation is sponsoring 25 $1,000 scholarships for the top winners of the challenge. We also are giving another $1,000 grant to the teachers of the schools in which these winners have come from really as a way to promote and thank them to continue to teach kids the basic of financial education.

Bryan: Who is allowed to participate? Just any high school student in America?

Carrie: The challenge is available to all high school kids, but it has to be administered by an adult. So, it’s available to all teachers and schools across America; for public schools, private schools. It’s also available to parents who home school their kids and again, you want to go to Challenge.Treas.Gov.

Bryan: Okay. I saw that this is the fourth year that this program has been going on. Has your foundation been involved the whole time?

Carrie: Yeah. We’ve been very involved. My father was the Chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy and so, Schwab has been sponsoring the challenge since the beginning days. In fact, we’ve had about 200,000 kids go through the program and now I am serving on the Council myself, both on the Youth Committee and the Partnership Committee, again to help Americans become more financially literate and to bring the public/private sectors together to really make a change in this country.

The Charles Schwab Company has always been about helping Americans become financially fit and we do it not only with our clients every day, but also our foundation has been extremely focused on helping Americans, primarily from underserved populations to get the skills to, again, have a healthier financial life.

Bryan: Are teachers of certain subjects being encouraged more than others to work on this with their students? I remember not having any kind of economic education in high school. I think we had one home economics class in seventh grade, but we really didn’t talk about checking or credit cards or anything like that.

Carrie: There are about nine states in the United States that require personal finance as a subject for graduation, but the bottom line is because it’s a state by state decision on whether to teach it, it comes in all forms. So, there’s no particular teacher that’s encouraged; however, the most obvious teachers who are probably in a better position to teach it without a lot of training is an economics teacher or a math teacher, but I have to tell you there’s this one teacher in Florida who had – I guess it was last year – and she had probably like three or four kids get perfect scores on the exam and I’ll tell you.

I took a look at the exam and it is very hard and I’ve been in the business for 30 years. Very hard test and what we found out from this teacher is that she’s teaching it before school even begins. Sort of like driver’s ed was before school started and she’s finding that this demand is more than what she has seats available to teach these kids.

So, what we’re finding is that kids really do want to learn and it’s just really up to the teacher who’s inspired to do so.

Bryan: I was looking at some of the example questions and one of them was about the fact both the employer and the employee make contributions to Social Security. I don’t think I learned that until two years ago. One of them was about car insurance, which I didn’t get the right answer to.

Carrie: There you go and it’s a hard test, but it’s important for all of us to know and I think the earlier we know, the less likely we’re going to get into trouble like some people did a few years ago.

In addition to the Department of Treasury’s educator took kit for teachers to help their kids develop the personal finance knowledge; we also have a resource at SchwabMoneywise.com. It’s available for teachers, students and parents to help them find the details about the scholarship awards, additional tips, tools and resources for teaching the ABC’s of personal finance.

So, that’s another resource for adults to help the next generation.

Bryan: Now, this isn’t the only program that you’re currently involved in. There’s also a thing called the Make Change Count Team Pledge. Can you tell me about that?

Carrie: We have a national partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of America where we created an after school financial education program for their four million kids and in fact, we’ve had probably at least 300,000 kids go through the program. We felt that we’ve had such success in changing the mindset of these young kids in terms of starting to open up savings accounts and starting to save and really think about college within their sight, which for some of these kids, it just never would be an option.

We wanted to take this beyond the Boys and Girls Club and create sort of a movement among teenage kids to really make a commitment to themselves and to their families to have better financial skills and behaviors.

So, we created this Make Change Count Challenge in which we’ve asked kids to go to the MakeChangeCount.com and commit to four personal steps. The four steps that we have asked them to commit to are save their money, so in other words, if they don’t already have a savings account and aren’t saving, to start doing so. Spend wisely, again what we found in America, adults and children, that we’ve been living beyond our means. So, we’re trying to encourage kids to think about their needs versus their wants before spending on anything that comes their way.

The third area that we’re asking them to commit to is planning for college and what we’re asking them is to explore the opportunities of paying for college because there are a lot of ways to do that and they can start right now and then lastly sharing what they know. We want kids to encourage their friends and their families to really start thinking about the basics of their finances and commit also to saving and spending wisely.

So, again, we’re trying to create a sort of movement, more awareness around the need for good financial habits.

Bryan: How has the success of either of these programs been measured so far? In addition to I think you mentioned opening savings accounts has gone up.

Carrie: Yes. We don’t have metrics necessarily for Make Change Count, the pledge for teenagers yet. I know we’ve got thousands of kids that have taken the pledge, but of course we’d like to see hundreds of thousands of kids make the pledge. In terms of the Boys and Girls Club Program that I mentioned, we’ve had such success in terms of where we’ve actually looked at kids change, whether they’ve changed their behaviors due to the financial education program and we did find those kids who go through the program are starting to track their spending.

They’re opening up savings accounts, which by the way, there’s millions of Americans who are unbanked, particular in the underserved populations and being banked or having a relationship with a bank is really the first step to getting into our economic system and the chances for better opportunities financially.

We’ve also found that kids are opening checking accounts and they’re actually exploring ways to get to college and we have a lot of anecdotal stories of kids who never thought they could ever afford college and they start saving a little bit of their after school money and sure enough they have maybe $5,000 within two years saved to go toward college.

Bryan: It must be awfully tempting for a young person to want to spend that.

Carrie: It’s very tempting, but I think when they see how money can -– just putting a little away at a time and making it so it’s painless in a sense and for forgetting about it how fast it can grow. These kids are teaching their parents too. Again, a lot of stories we hear through Boys and Girls Clubs. Kids that are sharing what they learn with their parents and getting them excited about opening up retirement accounts and saving for themselves.

Bryan: What other sorts of things is the foundation working on?

Carrie: The national partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs has been something we’ve been focused on for about seven or eight years and it’s a very integrated program in terms of not only giving these kids financial education, but providing scholarship opportunities as well.

We also have some regional partnerships with some organizations in San Francisco, Indianapolis and Austin in which we’re helping the more underserved population with what we call financial coaching, where our employees – similar to Boys and Girls Club – are volunteering and they’re actually sitting down with people to go over their budget and attract their spending and look for ways to save and build assets.

Bryan: I have to tell you I really could have used some of this when I was in school.

Carrie: We all could. I think like you mentioned, we took home economics and we learned how to sew a button or I guess shop, auto shop and so forth, but none of us learned how to budget and what I’ve found from our research – we do a fair amount of research on teenagers and actually 20 something year olds and they all say that they really want to learn about money and managing money and investing.

I think that a lot of adults think that these kids will think it’s boring, but that’s absolutely not the case. They really want to learn and I think we need to look for different ways to do that. By having families talk about the basics of money management, having the schools more involved and that’s what’s so great about the challenge. The challenge is more – it’s not a mandate for states to do it. It’s really an encouragement and it’s a sense of fun. So, hopefully we’ll create more awareness around schools as well and to sign up for the exam, you want to go to Challenge.Treas.Gov.

Bryan: That’s wonderful. Thank you again for joining us on the podcast today.

Carrie: Thanks Bryan. It’s been a pleasure.

Bryan: Join us again next week for more great personal financial advice and information.

The original version of this article, Podcast 100: National Financial Capability Challenge, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Preeti Vissa, community reinvestment director of The Greenlining Institute, an organization whose mission is to empower communities of color and other disadvantaged groups through multi-ethnic economic and leadership development, civil rights, and anti-redlining activities.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:37] Interview with Preeti Vissa
– [00:46] About the Greenlining Institute and community reinvestment
– [03:11] The debate over interchange fees
– [04:14] The effect of interchange fees
– [04:48] Are we being overcharged?
– [06:07] How merchants might change if fees are reduced
– [06:49] The current proposal to regulate swipe fees
– [07:23] What banks are saying about the proposal
– [09:41] The need to increase checking account costs
– [12:06] Unbanked and underbanked Americans
– [13:26] Different banks and bank products are affected differently
– [14:32] The new rules for overdraft fees
– [15:15] The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau
– [17:32] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we talk about swipe fees and the possible end of free checking.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Bryan J Bush. Today I’m joined once again by Preeti Vissa, the Community Reinvestment Director for the Greenlining Institute. Thank you for joining us the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.

Preeti Vissa: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure.

Bryan: Could you tell us a little bit about the Greenlining Institute and your responsibilities there?

Preeti: Sure. Greenlining Institute is a policy research and advocacy organization and really our mission is to ensure all communities have access to the American dream. We really look at or at least under community reinvestment we look at asset building through the life course. That will be everything from what do student loans look like for communities and communities of color. Are there any discrepancies in what kind of interest rates a student would get and what does that have on the impact of your ability to gain wealth over the course of your life? That sort of large student debt in your back pocket.

What does homeownership look like across the country? Who has access to that wealth building opportunity and what does it mean for your financial stability and for that of future generations and today, of course, with the foreclosure crisis, who got impacted the hardest? What’s being done to fix it and how can we make sure that we’re being as efficient and effective as possible?

The other thing we talk about is creating jobs. We know that small businesses create the vast majority of jobs in our country and particularly so in communities of color. What’s being done to support small business growth and how can corporations and the government be supportive of small business growth by providing contracts to those very small businesses that could benefit the most from them?

Finally we look into consumer protection issues such as overdraft fees, interchange swipe fees and the federal legislation and regulations. Something like 200 regulations are going to be put into effect as a result of the financial reform bill. We want to make sure that the folks who are making those decisions are doing so with an eye toward how it’s going to impact all of our consumers.

As the Community Investment Director, my role is then to really engage with the financial institutions to ensure that all communities, but particularly communities of color have the same access to wealth building opportunities. That would include everything from homeownership, right now dealing with the foreclosure crisis, small businesses and jobs and then regulatory reform in general. Are the decisions that are being made in Sacramento and in Washington really reflecting the needs of all of our consumers across the country?

Bryan: Now there’s a debate in Washington about how best to regulate interchange fees. Now, is that synonymous with swipe fee? Are those the same thing always?

Preeti: Interchange fees are particularly – at least the debate right now is specifically about the debit card swipes. So, I don’t know if it’s synonymous, but they are the same thing.

Bryan: Okay. So, walk us through the process of how an interchange fee comes into existence and where it goes.

Preeti: Sure. If you were walk into your local grocery store, for example, and you bought say $30 worth of food for your weekly grocery needs. What happens is when you use your debit card to swipe and to pay for your $30, a small portion of that goes back to the banks and it’s called an interchange or a swipe fee. That money is used to literally create the transaction of you swiping your card. For the convenience of swiping the card, they charge the merchant a fee and the merchant in turn takes that fee and tacks it into the cost of your groceries.

Bryan: The fact that merchants are increasing prices because they are themselves charged for this service, are they just increasing prices across the board on everything or are they trying to target it only toward customers who use debit cards?

Preeti: That’s a great question. My guess is that they’re just raising fees indiscriminately. They wouldn’t be able to tell you, “Are you going to use a debit card? Then I’ll charge you $.50 extra.” We all know when we go to the checkout line we’re all paying the same amount for our bananas.

The issue right now is is that a fair number? Is that a fair amount that we’re being charged?

Bryan: What is an average interchange fee that the merchant is being charged and therefore the consumer is being charged?

Preeti: It depends on the type of transaction and it depends on what kind of merchant, but on average it’s about $.44 per transaction.

Bryan: Okay and how does that compare in the US to other countries who have similar systems setup?

Preeti: Other countries – so, the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, a lot of the other larger countries do regulate swipe fees. Some don’t have a swipe fee at all and other have a much, much lower one than the one that we have today and even a lower one than the one that we have proposed in our new regulation.

Bryan: Is it safe to assume then that the people running the networks are overcharging the people who are enjoying the convenience of using a debit card?

Preeti: That’s exactly the debate right now and Greenlining’s position has generally been we’re not the experts. We don’t know how much it costs to create that swipe. What we do know is that no matter what happens today with regulated fees, we know that the consumer is bearing the brunt and what we want to know is whatever changes come about through this regulation, how are consumers going to be impacted? Are the savings going to come to the consumers?

Bryan: Is that do you think likely or do you think that they would just hold onto their profits instead?

Preeti: All of the merchants right now are paying interchange fees for when folks swipe a card, but the vast majority of all of those fees are paid by a small number of really large merchants. So, this is the Wal-marts of the world or the Costcos of the world and I would imagine that it’s substantial. It’s millions and millions of dollars that they would be saving every year if the fee were to be reduced.

I can’t predict the future, but I would be really surprised if all of that savings went back to the customer.

Bryan: Sure. What was it that was in the financial regulation law that was recently passed that affects interchange fees?

Preeti: What happens now is fees are going to be kept per transaction to between $0.07 and $0.12. So, that drastically cuts it. It’s almost about a fourth of what we’re being charged today. The concern, however, is if the merchant is paying $0.07 versus the $0.44, does that mean that we as customers are going to have $.30 less on our bill or does it mean that the merchant is going to pocket that money.

Bryan: What are the banks saying about how the law is going to affect them?

Preeti: They’re saying that this law is going to make it impossible for them to provide affordable services for low income customers. They’re saying it costs them a lot more than $.07 to $.12 to allow us the ability to swipe our cards and so, if they’re losing money on a transaction, then they can no longer have free checking accounts or low cost checking accounts for customers and that’s a great concern for us.

Bryan: If we know that in other countries it costs less for the banks to operate this sort of service, I don’t want to make any accusations because I’m not an expert either, but that seems somewhat disingenuous or maybe things just always cost more in America.

Preeti: That is a point of confusion for us. It’s such a complicated world out there in the banking industry. It’s really hard for me to be able to say actually it does cost $0.44 to swipe the card or maybe it costs just $0.20 and the $0.20 was an extra profit, but what I do know is that it’s the banks responsibility to be very transparent and honest with us as consumers.

They should be telling us what the swipe costs and how much it’s costing us as consumers to use that product and then when they’re advocating for higher fees, they’ve got to show us that those higher fees are resulting in a benefit to the consumer, not just with the swipe, but in terms of the services that the bank is able to offer us all across the board.

Bryan: So, what specifically are they saying they might have to change as a result of losing the income from interchange fees?

Preeti: They’re saying they’re going to have to increase the fees for a basic checking account. It’ll be a very rare occurrence for you to even see free checking. All of the rewards that come with certain debit cards, they’re saying those are going to be a thing of the past. Basically it’ll just be more expensive and what we don’t even know is if we’re able to pass this, will it be cheaper on the other end in terms of when we buy products with our card.

Bryan: Now, I’m a scant 35 years old, but I can barely remember a time that I didn’t see a bank offering free checking. At the same time, I know that more and more people have debit cards every year and I don’t remember it being all that common for people to be using them at a supermarket when I was a kid.

So, banks are claiming that the fact that they receive income from merchants via the interchange fee, that’s what enables them to offer free checking accounts.

Preeti: Right. So, what they’re saying is that when you use the card to swipe, it costs more – the costs that are associated with that swipe are far more than just running your card through the machine. They’re also including fraud prevention. They’re including how much it costs for them to maintain your checking account. They’re taking into account a much larger version of you as a customer at the bank have this checking account and now you’re using the debit card to access money from it.

So, that’s where some of the disconnect comes in terms of costs versus what you’re paying for.

Bryan: Given that a corporation’s primary goal is just to keep increasing shareholder value, do we suspect that maybe banks are just trying to make up for lost profits?

Preeti: We’re seeing with regulation, with the financial reform and with other regulation that passed. Last year we talked about overdraft fees and how they’ve been curbed slightly. We know that the banks are getting squeezed all across the board to be much more transparent and accountable to their customers.

So, I can imagine that right now they’re scrambling to find other ways to make up that profit and they’ll fight hard to make sure that the venues that they have today are not going to be taken from them.

Bryan: So, hypothetically, if they weren’t able to convince people that they’re going to have to drop free checking accounts, could they turnaround instead and maybe raise auto loan interest? That would seem off topic, so to speak, but it’s another method they have for making up for that lost profit.

Preeti: Absolutely. I can imagine that the banks are going to find every way to increase their revenue and to increase profits, particularly as some of those chunks are getting taken out from what they’re used to doing, but I don’t think it’s going to be an either/or. I think we have to remain vigilant about where are fees increasing and most importantly how does this impact consumers.

Right now we have 7.7% of American households are unbanked. They don’t have a checking or savings account. Another almost 20% are unbanked. So, they’ve got an account, but they’re not using it and this results in billions and billions of dollars being lost from consumers because they’re going to the payday lenders and the check cashers across the street, which cost a lot more.

So, it’s the impact that it’s going to have on consumers. If we sort of take for granted that it will be more expensive, so we won’t have low income customers. What’s happening to them? What’s happening to the members of our society that might benefit the most from safe banking systems?

Bryan: Are we afraid then that there might be a rise in the use of payday lenders?

Preeti: Absolutely. I’m afraid that we will have a much larger unbanked population or under-banked population and with that a resulting loss of wealth for certain communities.

Bryan: How might that cascade downward? I’m not asking you to predict the future necessarily.

Preeti: When we see a rising wealth gap, when we see poor people in America having less and folks who are still going to be able to access sustainable and responsible banking products, being able to continue to do so, we know that that bodes ill for the rest of our society.

Bryan: Is every kind of bank affected by this proposal or maybe the smaller community banks or credit unions, are they going to be affected as well?

Preeti: There are three exemptions from the rule. It’s financial institutions with less than $10 billion in assets, reloadable prepaid debit cards and cards that use electronic transfer benefits from government agencies. So, yes, a lot of the smaller community banks, a lot of the credit unions, they would be exempt if they were smaller than $10 billion in assets.

That might cause another unintended consequence in that now we’ve got a skewed perception of what is affordable. Again, if I got into my local grocery store and they say, “Well, if you use this big bank debit card, we’ll charge you a lot less than if you use the small community bank or credit union debit card because they’re going to charge me a much higher fee.”

Now, we might disincentivize folks from going to their smaller community banks or credit unions.

Bryan: One of my favorite parts of the financial reform bill was the fact that you could opt out of overdraft fees. Have you seen people taking advantage of that a lot?

Preeti: We have. There are some studies by the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, that show that folks have opted out of overdraft fees and that they will be dropping over the next couple of years. On the other hand, you may have seen that there have been some really aggressive campaigns from some of the largest banks to persuade and/or scare people into keeping their overdraft coverage.

Bryan: We do what we can at the website to spread the good news.

Preeti: Absolutely and information and sunshine are the best ways to counter all of this and there are two parts of the financial reform bill that I think I’m most excited about. One is the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. So, the CFPB or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is charged with protecting us on exactly the very issues that we’re talking about today.

They are charged with having oversight on all financial products and their impact on consumers. Hopefully we’ll be seeing in the future, as this agency gets put through the ground, they’re very open to having customers and consumers come straight to the agency and say, “I think I’m getting charged way too much for my overdraft fees or I signed up for a checking account here and I don’t understand why I’m suddenly losing $200 every month or my auto loan started off at $500 a month and for some reason now I’m paying $3,000. I don’t understand.”

They will be charged with looking into all of those and making sure that the people who are providing us with financial services are doing so in a sustainable and responsible way.

Bryan: Do we know what the bureau is working on right now?

Preeti: Their priority is to let folks know that they’re there and to let folks know that they want to hear from us, from consumers, what our priorities are, so that they can set the agenda up accordingly, but I also know that today we can’t really talk about consumer protections without talking about the foreclosure crisis, so I know that they’re working very hard on disclosures on homeownership. Looking into different products and how we can make them easier for folks to understand when they’re signing on the document.

Bryan: How would a person go about talking to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and letting them know what problems they’re having?

Preeti: Sure. You can go straight to their website. It’s ConsumerFinance.gov.

Bryan: That’s easy to remember.

Preeti: So, if you go to ConsumerFinance.gov, they have a blog. You can sign up for their updates. You can actually even create a YouTube video and submit your questions or concerns straight to the agency.

Bryan: It’s good to see things moving into the 21st century.

Preeti: Yes. I’m part of it, but not quite sure if I’m going to be able to make a YouTube video any time soon.

Bryan: Where can we find out more about the Greenlining Institute?

Preeti: Well, www.Greenlining.org where you can find a lot more information about everything that we talked about today as well as our recommendations on a lot of the consumer product issues.

Bryan: Thank you very much for joining us on the show today.

Preeti: My pleasure. Thank you.

Bryan: Join us again next week for more great personal financial advice and information.

Theme music by Mindcube.

The original version of this article, Podcast 99: Swipe Fees and the End of Free Checking?, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Mark Brundage, co-founder of Adaptu. Adaptu is an online financial life planning and management service.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:38] Interview with Mark Brundage
– [00:59] What is Adaptu?
– [02:26] Using Adaptu for planning and budgeting
– [03:54] Advice from regular people vs. financial planners
– [04:31] Adaptu’s focus on transparency
– [05:46] Unbiased platform, offering different perspectives
– [07:48] Community member reputations
– [09:08] Privacy and security at Adaptu
– [09:46] Users’ blogs and videos
– [11:28] Adaptu’s communities vs. groups
– [13:40] Getting started with investing and crowdsourcing the best ways to use Adaptu
– [14:37] The advantages of adding your friends
– [15:32] Connecting to other people in your city
– [17:17] The finances of Adaptu’s own employees?
– [18:13] Future enhancements to Adaptu
– [18:59] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Full transcript

Bryan J Busch: On today’s episode of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast we talk with one of the co-founders of the Adaptu, a new online money management and community tool for finding the answers to life’s financial questions.

[music]

Bryan: Welcome back to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. I’m Bryan J Busch. Today I’m joined by Mark Brundage, the co-founder of Adaptu, which is found at adaptu.com. It’s a free online financial planning and management service with a strong emphasis on engaging with educated community members. Thank you for joining us on the show today.

Mark: Great. Thank you for having me.

Bryan: So let’s start here. What is Adaptu?

Mark: Adaptu is a free online service for people to use to help make better financial choices around their everyday lives.

Bryan: So little things like shopping and maybe gas prices or car insurance or are we talking bigger decisions like investments and things like that?

Mark: Probably a little bit bigger decisions. But everyday we’re making different financial choices and one of the things that inspired us to create Adaptu was the need to see not only where your money is going and where it’s being spent but how do you start making better choices going forward and what does the data tell me about my spending habits and what are my different options available to me so I can become a better and smarter shopper, a better, smarter investor and at least understanding there’s multiple ways to get to the solution that I want to maybe achieve and what are those different options.

Then everyone’s financial situation is different so what is going to be then the best choice that fits my unique situation and works for me?

Bryan: Could you give me an example of the sort of pattern one might uncover by looking at their data on your website and then how they might go about choosing a different option at that point?

Mark: Sure. One of the things that we see a lot of people doing is more around family planning and budgeting. So one of the things that we felt was missing in the marketplace today was the ability to families and couples to use a different service.

So we have a big discussion right now going on around with a bunch of moms talking about how much they should really be spending for a kid’s allowances and that’s probably one of the big advantages that Adaptu brings is not only does it have the financial aggregation tools and so forth that people are almost coming to expect from institutions, but now we also have a community around that so people can actually have discussions and conversations around what their data is telling them.

One case might be moms are looking at how much am I spending on allowances or around just child support and supporting my children and then how do I make better choices around that. So they’re having a conversation around allowances and looking at what is the right incentive for that.

Bryan: I imagine an interesting side conversation might be which chores should I expect my child to do in order to get this money?

Mark: Exactly. And some people are trying to even figure out at a certain age what is the right amount you should be paying for children? In some cases it’s hard to ask certain questions of a financial planner.

One, not everyone has access to the financial planner. Two, sometimes a better choice and options actually comes from people who are living and breathing the same situation that you’ve done. So that’s where the power of the community comes into play is you can ask questions and maybe seek guidance from financial advisors who might be on the site but you can also ask questions from people who have been there and done that and then really figure out which solution best fits your specific need.

Bryan: When you’re on the site asking questions about your situation and you’re getting answers from different people, is it obvious in the answers which people are professional financial planners and which people are just civilians, for lack of a better term?

Mark: One of the things that is really important to us is to help bring transparency into this marketplace and one way that Adaptu provides that is through people’s profiles.

We don’t force you to complete the profile beyond really just an email address, a password of your choice and your own community user name that you choose. But a lot of people that we’re seeing are starting to fill out more and more of their profiles.

So when you receive answers you’ll be able to see the profile of the other people who are commenting. Now, a lot of times if you are a contributor of Adaptu, we’ll actually disclose that so you’ll know if it’s an Adaptu employee or one of our contributors.

Outside of that, if the other person who is responding to your questions or engaging in conversation with you had filled out their profile data, you’ll at least be able to see if they have any licenses or certifications or if they’re at least someone that maybe has already been through a different situation similar to yours.

Bryan: It looked to me, poking around the site, that most people were using their full name when contributing to the website, which brought an interesting question to my mind. For better or worse, it seems like most people are sensitive to sharing financial habits, especially online.

I’ve found that it’s very helpful when a group of friends isn’t so touchy about discussing money matters. Is it a goal of yours to encourage people to be more open and helpful?

Mark: Absolutely. One of the things that Adaptu wants to provide is really to be an unbiased platform. We’ll help bring in different conversations and at least what we want to do is be able to offer different perspectives and not from our own perspectives but bring in individuals who have different points of view because as a true consumer you want to figure out what are all the different angles and then make a better choice and more educated choice because of what you’ve learned.

So we feel that people are comfortable using their first and last names. One of the new features that we will be rolling out is the ability to use your real name or, if you aren’t quite as comfortable using a name, you’re able to just use a community profile name.

But the important things is really that you’re not alone out there with the questions that you have and people are finding the ability to connect with other people to find and work together to figure out what their overall solution is. It’s really helpful.

It’s like starting a diet. It’s really easy to start a diet. It’s hard to stick with it and that’s the power of this community within Adaptu is it’s really letting you know that you’re not the only one out there and that through engaging with other people you start to learn that your question might not be, for a better term or not, a dumb question because there’s a lot of other people that still have that same question and now you have a support group to help you think through that and to share your experiences.

Bryan: That sounds really good. In addition to looking at the profiles of people who are answering our question, are there other ways of knowing which advice to consider more strongly than other advice?

Mark: As part of the user’s profile, besides for the information that they’ve already filled out, you will be able to see — there is a point system. So the more you contribute into the community you will be able to see the different user ratings that they’ve gotten.

You, as a user, can also rate the feedback that you’ve received. So it’s up to your personal interpretation whether you felt that that comment was helpful or not helpful.

For example, you can go in and on certain discussion threads there might have been several discussions or comments made around a discussion but that user who asked the initial question felt that their answer quite hadn’t been fully explored yet.

You might see that this is still not answered, meaning that that person who asked the original question is still looking for a little bit more of a deeper knowledge.

It doesn’t discount that comments and suggestions people gave were helpful but it’s not the exact solution they were looking for. So it’s really empowerment to all the individuals who use the community side of Adaptu to rate and judge how they felt their question was being addressed and whether they got the right answer that they were looking for.

Privacy is very important to us. Security is very important to us and we want to make sure that we adhere to and follow to the strictest guidelines within those. So we won’t disclose information outside of what you personally choose to disclose within Adaptu and within the community.

Your financial data and information only stays private just to you. We don’t encourage anybody to share personal information outside of just conversation such as account numbers and passwords and so forth. Adaptu staff will never ask for those pieces of information either.

Bryan: In addition to simply commenting on situations, it looks like you encourage your community members to create blog posts and videos. What do you find that people are generally creating such content about?

Mark: A lot of them are creating content around just sharing their own story. So there are a lot of blog posts being put up just around their own question or maybe an experience. We’ve actually recently had a blog post that’s gunned some activity around — one of the Adaptu community members shared a situation about one of their parents had passed away.

Just the eye-opening experience — there’s a lot of complexity that unfortunately goes around an eventful situation such as that that most people don’t really think about and understand until they get thrown into that situation.

So this person just shared some of their stories around that and started getting a lot of conversation around that. There’s a lot of conversations happening and people sharing their ideas around budgeting tips and tricks.

Even though Adaptu has its own automated tool, we also have people sharing some of their favorite budgeting spreadsheets because everyone is going to budget just a little bit different. We want to make sure that people have the best tools and best information that fits their specific needs.

We also have a lot of people that are creating discussions. So, again, budgeting really seems to be on everyone’s mind but also family planning and family budgeting is a big conversation that we’re seeing a lot of people have within the community as well.

Bryan: Adaptu has support for communities and for groups. What are the differences between those?

Mark: We have a support for groups, meaning people tend to find answers through others. So if you have a group you can actually probably receive support for your questions if you band together with other folks.

It’s not a technical support per se in an interpretation for using groups. It’s more of an emotional support, being able to find your answer collectively with other people who are going through the same situation as you.

Technically, we do have support for our communities and people can go down into the bottom footer of Adaptu and click on Help and we actually have a whole community support area where people can give us feedback, tell us what they like, tell us, maybe, some suggestions that they want to see improvement upon.

But we also want our users to feel very supported in terms of if somebody has a technical problem on Adaptu, we have a very supportive help forum where people can go in and ask a question technically and a lot of times you can search first to see if somebody else has already asked that question and what the responses were.

If you don’t see the immediate response or the solution that you’re looking for, you’re able to send a direct link into our help desk and we have a very active community manager who is constantly on the site, so rest assured that you’re going to get some response in a relatively quick, timely manner.

We also want to give the opportunity for feedback. So our users are also very active in telling us what they like about the site and praising it for certain things. They’re also pretty active in telling us some of the things that hopefully that they want to see going forward because we want to make sure we’re adding value continually for the users.

We want to make sure that they have a chance as the users to help guide the future direction of functionality in the site.

Bryan: What are some of the more active groups right now?

Mark: The more active groups right now is we have a beginning investor group that is taking off. There are a lot of people — once they have figured out budgeting and are able to save a little bit of extra money, now they want to know, “Well, what should I start doing with that money?”

So this group is having conversations around how to start looking and learning about investing and where do I even start and how do I get moving forward.

We also have a pretty active group just around since the overall site and community is still relatively new, the Welcome to Adaptu group is pretty new, which is really people helping each other find the best parts and functions of the site that they like and how to even utilize those features and options to the fullest and understand here’s all the great things that are available to you as a user inside the community of Adaptu.

Bryan: There’s a social networking aspect to the site. What are the advantages to adding your friends on Adaptu?

Mark: The conversation that people are already having — if you’re already having these conversations with friends and family, sometimes your friends might have the best answers and sometimes your friends might not have the best answers because they haven’t been through your specific situation.

But there is a sense of trust and familiarity with your friends. The ability to at least have conversations with your friends and sometimes your friends might not have the answer but a friend of a friend might be able to get you connected through there.

Again, that’s just another power of the community within Adaptu is to help you at least start filtering out and finding where are some of the best sources but where are some of the sources that I trust that then bring value and meaning to me?

Bryan: Does it look like people are seeking out other people based on location, maybe city groups or would it even be helpful to do that sort of thing?

Mark: Absolutely. I think within Adaptu, users do have the ability to start seeking out others in their same city and we’re starting to see that with some of the family planning and budgeting, so people in similar areas are starting to look for each other in the same geographic area.

I only expect that to continue growing, especially as the communities get larger and larger.

Another component that we have is I know that a previous interview that you’ve done before is with Adam Baker and Man Versus Debt. Adaptu and Man Versus Debt have actually partnered up together and Man Versus Debt is using Adaptu for his nationwide tour, which just started last week.

So Adam Baker is going around the country visiting different cities talking about his challenge of helping people crush $1000 of debt. If you don’t have $1000 worth of debt then find $1000 in savings that you can then use to start investing.

As he’s going through city-by-city, we’re creating different groups within Adaptu that people will start being able to not only pledge, “I want to take the challenge,” but then continue with it and help each other out.

So that’s just now starting to take off and as Adam Baker and the Man Versus Debt tour keeps rolling through different cities, you’ll start seeing even more groups popping up, specifically around different cities but around the same goal of helping reduce debt.

Bryan: How has running Adaptu changed your own household finances?

Mark: Running Adaptu has affected everybody that’s worked on this project. Probably the best comment that I get from anybody on the team or any partners that work with us — the one unanimous comment that I get is the fact that they’ve never really thought about their finances in this type of way until they started working on this project or with our team.

It’s great to hear that we’re bringing value but also helping people change their behavior. No matter where you’re at financially, if you’re in debt or even if you’re not in debt, everybody wants to move from one point to a better point.

Adaptu is starting to bring that kind of value to people and help them begin to put the roadmap in place to make those changes.

Some of the exciting things that we have coming up is Adaptu will be looking at continuing to grow out the different communities. We’re looking at adding a mobile device, so currently today we don’t have a mobile experience but that is in the works and we’re looking to be rolling that out relatively soon in the near future to support our users.

I think that people will be pleasantly surprised with the robustness of the automated aggregation tools and also, then, the value that the community can bring and then we’re going to be adding some pretty unique features and functionalities to the site going forward this year that will even help people make better financial choices going forward.

Bryan: Thank you very much for joining us on the show today.

Mark: Great. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Bryan: Thank, again, for listening. I have been your host, Bryan J. Busch. Join us again next week for more, great personal financial advice and information.

Theme music by Mindcube.

The original version of this article, Podcast 98: Introducing Adaptu, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.

Today’s guest on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast is Dr. Doug Hirschhorn, author of 8 Ways to Great: Peak Performance on the Job and In Your Life. Doug and podcast producer Bryan J Busch discuss goals, risks, and what it takes to be successful, based on Doug’s observances through his unique background.

8 Ways to Great is available in the Consumerism Commentary store.

Table of contents

[00:00] Introduction from Bryan J Busch
[00:39] Interview with Dr. Doug Hirschhorn
– [00:54] Doug’s path from baseball, to stock trader, to performance coach
– [05:51] Who is 8 Ways to Great for?
– [06:11] The upside and downside of strengths and weaknesses
– [08:42] Resources for people who are bad at assessing themselves
– [09:31] How does a person improve if they’re not competitive?
– [10:35] Setting more effective goals with the CHAMP system
– [13:18] Punishment and positive reinforcement
– [14:30] How to make more objective decisions by using risk/reward analysis
– [16:15] Women are hard wired to be better risk-takers
– [18:38] It’s not just about the odds of winning or losing
– [21:06] Baseball from a philosophical perspective
– [22:16] End

We always welcome feedback from listeners. If you have any comments for this episode or for any other, or if you have suggestions for future episodes, please leave us comments here or email us at podcast at this domain name.

Theme music by Mindcube.

The original version of this article, Podcast 97: 8 Ways to Great, Dr. Doug Hirschhorn, is copyrighted by Consumerism Commentary.

If you enjoyed this article, follow @flexo on Twitter and visit Facebook for more updates.