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Dad Joke
I had to fire the guy I hired to mow my lawn.
He just didn’t cut it.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
Loyalty is expensive
I’ve learned in life that loyalty often is expensive.
Just shop for a new cell plan, car insurance, and internet service. Often better deals are waiting while we pay for loyalty.
This week somebody put a number on it. An Xfinity customer who called themselves “a loyal customer for 20ish years” posted that their gig internet was going from $80 a month to $110. The same plan for a new customer is $50, with a five-year price guarantee. The Cool Down has the story. Twenty years of paying on time, and the reward is paying $60 a month more than a stranger. That’s $720 a year. Same wire. Same house.
It isn’t a glitch. It’s the plan. The low price is for people who might leave. The high price is for people the company has decided won’t.
Britain made this illegal for car and home insurance. Since January 2022, UK insurers have had to offer a renewing customer “a price that is no higher than they would pay as a new customer.” Their regulator even had a name for what it was stopping. The loyalty penalty. Over here it doesn’t have a name. It’s just the renewal notice.
The comments on that post were a list of how people got the $50 price anyway. One walked into a store and asked for the price lock. Others cancelled and signed right back up. Not one of them got it by waiting.
Somebody you love has had the same internet, phone, or car insurance for ten years and has never once asked. I’d forward this to them. The new-customer price exists right now, and the only people paying it are the ones who asked or left.
The line, not the work
When someone files a tax return in your name, the IRS says it aims to sort it out in 120 days. The Treasury’s own watchdog reported this week that victims have waited 20 months on average.
The detail that got me: in the cases it checked, the average was 655 days, and 533 of those days the file sat in a queue nobody had picked up yet. Three cases waited more than two years and were fixed the same day someone finally opened them.
The wait is in the line, not the work.
And the line is quiet. The audit estimates more than 50,000 people got no status letter. When the IRS spots the fake return itself, it doesn’t send one at all, so some people never learn their refund is stuck behind a flag.
The cheap fix is on the front end. The IRS will give anyone with a Social Security number a six-digit Identity Protection PIN. A return filed under your number without it gets rejected. It’s new every year and it costs nothing. The people I’d most want to have one are the ones counting on a refund. For anyone already stuck in that line, the Taxpayer Advocate Service is an independent office inside the IRS whose whole job is being your voice there. I wrote about what a delayed refund really costs earlier this year.
The tariff refund went to Costco
If you shop at Costco, you helped pay the tariffs. Now the refunds are coming back, and Fast Company reports they’re going to Costco.
The company got $184 million in tariff refunds last quarter, about a third of what it expects. Nothing went out to members as a check. CEO Ron Vachris said it went “predominantly through price reductions” on produce, meat, beverages, and some home furnishings and hardware. Yahoo Finance adds that after those price cuts, the refunds still added 15 cents a share to the quarter’s profit.
Credit to Costco for saying anything at all. Most companies collecting these refunds haven’t. But that’s the part of the story the headline skips. A tariff refund goes to whoever wrote the check to Customs, not to the shopper who paid the higher shelf price. I wrote back in April about why that money isn’t coming to you, and nothing since has changed it.
A price cut you can’t see is a hard thing to check. A check in the mail would have been easier to believe.
The 401(k) you left at an old job
Toys “R” Us is opening 120 stores nine years after its bankruptcy, and 24/7 Wall St. makes a point worth knowing for anyone who ever changed jobs. A 401(k) is held in trust, apart from the company’s own money, so it doesn’t vanish when the company goes under.
The Labor Department runs a free Retirement Savings Lost and Found that searches for old workplace plans from private employers. It’s an information database. It won’t pay you anything itself, but it tells you who to call. It takes a Login.gov account to get in.
On the podcast this week
Damon Day and I started from a title I stand behind: Budgets Suck. They usually don’t work. What matters more is cash flow and what’s left at the end of the month. We got into the “emergencies” that aren’t, like tires and home repairs, spending to impress people, and what debt settlement and credit counseling can do to someone living on Social Security.
Also on the site yesterday
The CFPB just stopped publishing consumer complaint stories. Here’s how to still vet a debt company.
Credit Acceptance’s $694 million settlement: what borrowers actually need to know
The $96.5 million generic drug settlement is open, and how to register for your claim
An early-season nor’easter is hitting the coast. Three lines in your insurance worth checking.
Damon Day made $141 in one night stacking three gig apps at once
If any of this was new to you, somebody you know hasn’t heard it either. 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 tell a friend over coffee, and I’d tell the same friend that the details of their own life outrank anything I’ve written here.
One more thing. Loyalty isn’t a flaw. It’s one of the best things about people. It’s just a bad pricing plan. The same steadiness that keeps someone with one company for twenty years is exactly what gets people out from under almost anything, one phone call at a time. If you’re not where you wanted to be by now, that steadiness is still yours. It’s just pointed at the wrong bill. Have a good weekend. I’ll be back Monday.
— Steve