Dad Joke
Why don’t monsters eat ghosts?
Because they taste like sheet.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
The pitch always started with “this isn’t one of those pyramid things — the government looked at Amway in 1979”
It could be I’ve seen my share of people who were garage qualified — the ones whose “business” was cases of soap and vitamins and energy drinks stacked against the garage wall, bought on a credit card at the start of every month because the upline said that was how you hit your number, with a spouse in the kitchen who had stopped asking. What every one of those people had in common was a sentence they’d been handed at the recruiting meeting: Amway is the legitimate one. The FTC looked at it back in 1979 and let it stand. Every multilevel company since has borrowed that sentence, and for forty-seven years it did a lot of work.
Yesterday the FTC announced that Amway and two of its affiliates will pay $225 million — nearly all of it going back to the people who signed up — which the agency calls the largest amount it has ever recovered from a multilevel marketing company. The complaint alleges recruits were told they were likely to earn more than $40,000 a year, replace a full-time job, or retire early, while, in the FTC’s words, “most IBOs who joined WWG or LTD after 2020 spent more money on Amway products and training than they received from Amway.” It also alleges people were told to buy a set amount of product every month whether they could resell it or not, and to report sales they never made. Amway settled; the vote was 2-0; nobody has been found liable by a court. The refund program hasn’t been announced yet — the release says details come later, and I’ll carry them here when they do.
What caught my eye was the fix. Under the order, every distributor has to resell at least 70 percent of what they buy each month, an outside auditor checks the sales records, and nobody can be charged for training in their first year. Those are the exact safeguards the industry has claimed to live by since before I started doing this work. It took an outside auditor to find out whether anybody actually did.
Here’s the sentence I’d say across the table, and it’s the one thirty years bought me: in the MLM households I worked with, the debt wasn’t from the business failing — it was from the monthly minimum order, put on a card, for product that was still in the garage when they called me. The income claims get the headlines. The inventory is what puts people in my office.
Somebody you know has a garage like that right now — or a daughter-in-law who just got “a business opportunity” invitation from someone at church. The refund program will have a window and a list of who qualifies, and the people who never told anyone they signed up are the ones who will miss it. If that’s somebody you know, this is the one to send them.
To go deeper, I wrote the long version of when these programs help and when they hurt a while back: MLM Programs: When They Help and When They Hurt. And the one that still gets me, from 2010: a reader who put her retirement into one.
The car payment nobody does the math on
Damon and I got into it on the podcast this week over something that feels completely normal in most driveways: the car payment that never ends. A $500 a month payment, kept up from 25 to 65 — because there’s always a next car — invested instead would sit somewhere between $2 million and $3 million at retirement by Damon’s arithmetic on an ordinary investing account. A two-car household doubles it. I gave my daughter a 2006 Odyssey with 170,000 miles on it; Damon handed his son the Cadillac he inherited from his grandfather. Neither of us is against nice cars. We’re against the belief that the payment is the price. The episode is here, and the written version with the co-signing conversation — including the afternoon a salesman turned to my daughter’s boyfriend and asked if I was “the guy who’s going to co-sign,” and I laughed and walked out — went up on the site last night.
The lender approved the loan. That was never the same as you being able to afford it.
Twenty minutes in a finance office, a signature, and people walk out believing something that was never said: that somebody with a spreadsheet decided they could afford this. Yesterday forty-one state attorneys general put a number on how wrong that can be. Credit Acceptance, one of the country’s largest subprime auto lenders, agreed to $694 million in cash and debt relief over allegations that it made car loans it knew borrowers couldn’t repay and let dealers pack them with service contracts and gap coverage people didn’t want. The company settled without admitting anything, and no court has ruled on the claims. What it agreed to is specific: $60 million in cash to the people who got the riskiest loans, about $388 million in debt wiped out for people whose cars were already repossessed, $246 million more for people still driving theirs, for loans written between November 2015 and November 2025, all of it due by November 2 — and, according to the consent decree.pdf), a cap on how far above a car’s book value a dealer can price it from here on, plus a 95 percent write-off of the balance left after a repo on certain new loans. Indiana’s office says its people get checks with no claim to file; the multistate administrator handles the rest.
The phrase in the decree that stopped me was “Early Defaulted Accounts” — a category the lender itself had a name for. Thirty years of this work taught me that the loan that fails in the first year almost never failed because of the borrower; it failed because it was built to, and somebody was paid when it was signed. If a Credit Acceptance repo is still on somebody’s credit report and the deficiency balance is still being collected, the thing I’d want them to know is that a real settlement with their name on it may already exist, and that the “debt relief” call they get next month claiming to know about it is not the same thing.
One claims desk item, and it’s the rare one that comes to you
I’ve watched people pay $29 for a “settlement claims kit” to collect $11, so my rule for this section is that a claim earns a mention only when the money outweighs the hassle. This one has no hassle at all. Amazon will now pay out more of last year’s $2.5 billion Prime settlement automatically — the cap per person goes from $51 to $200, payments start October 1 by Venmo, PayPal or mailed check, and the release says there are no claims, no notices, no forms. It covers people who were enrolled in Prime without meaning to be, or who tried to cancel and couldn’t, and it now reaches a group left out of the first rounds. If the total accepted doesn’t hit the required threshold by February 2027, people who already got a refund get another automatic payment of up to $149. The thing I’ve learned about “automatic” is that it only works if the payment can find you — it goes wherever the email and payment details on the account still point, which for a lot of people is a phone number from two jobs ago.
What I published yesterday
Two more that haven’t reached the site’s email list yet:
They Said Your Credit Union Can Charge Whatever Rate the Market Allows
A Credit Report Error Is Blocking My Mortgage Approval. Here’s What to Do Right Now.
If one of these was news to you, it’s news to somebody you know — that’s the whole reason this exists. It’s free at yourmoneyactually.com, and I don’t sell the list. The places I actually use for my own money, and what I get out of telling you, are on one page where they’ll always be.
Nothing here is advice for your specific situation. It’s what I’d say across the kitchen table, and across the kitchen table I’d also say the details of your own life outrank anything I’ve written here.
One more thing. The garage-qualified people I knew got out. Not by winning the business — by the afternoon they let somebody else see the boxes. Every hole I have ever watched someone climb out of started with that: one other person who knew. If you’re the one who knows for somebody this week, that’s not a small thing. And if you’re the one with the boxes, you can be in the first group by Monday.
— Steve