Dad Joke
Why can’t the skeleton play music in church?
Because they don’t have any organs.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
Somebody built a fake version of a car dealership, and buyers are showing up to no car
The FTC put out an alert yesterday about something I had not seen before at this scale: scammers are impersonating car dealerships online. The FTC’s description is blunt about how it ends — you show up at the dealership and “the dealer has no record of your order or your payment. And that there’s no shiny car waiting for you.”
Sit with the shape of that for a second. This isn’t a Nigerian-prince email. It’s a professional-looking site for a real dealership that exists, in a town you can drive to, selling a car you actually want. You do the sensible thing and put money down to hold it. The money goes to a stranger.
Here’s what I’d do, and none of it is complicated. Never send a deposit to a dealership you found by clicking an ad or a search result. Look up the dealership’s phone number independently — a map listing, the manufacturer’s own dealer locator — call it, and ask a human whether your order exists. And if anyone asks for a wire transfer, a payment app, or a gift card for a car deposit, that is the end of the conversation. A real dealership takes a card. Cards can be reversed; wires and Zelle cannot, and the scammers know exactly which is which.
Forward this one to whoever in your life is car shopping right now. They are going to put down a deposit this month, from a phone, on a site they found by searching. If nobody tells them to verify the number independently first, they will find out the way the FTC describes it — standing in a real showroom, being told there is no order.
And the real dealership can take you too — that one just cost $4 million
Two weeks before that alert, the FTC and the Connecticut Attorney General settled with Manchester City Nissan for $4 million over what they alleged the dealership was doing to buyers of certified pre-owned cars. Per the complaint: advertise a certified car at a price, then charge hundreds to thousands of dollars in “inspection” fees — for the certification that was supposed to be included in the advertised price. Regulators also alleged charges like total loss protection were added without the customer agreeing to them. The money goes to the Connecticut AG for consumer redress.
Now, here’s the part almost everyone reads backwards, and it’s the reason this is in today’s issue at all.
People look at a case like this and think the fees were the crime. They weren’t. Dealerships are allowed to charge for things. The alleged violation was the advertised price — putting a number in front of you that was never the number. That distinction matters to you personally, because it tells you what to actually watch. Not “is this fee too high,” which you cannot really judge in a finance office at 7pm. But: does the price I was shown match the price on this paperwork, and if not, what changed and when did anyone tell me?
Under the settlement, the dealership now has to display the maximum total price as the most prominent item, and get express informed consent for every charge before it goes into your financing. That is a good description of what you are entitled to expect anywhere — so use it as your checklist even where no regulator has shown up yet.
Gas is 93 cents a gallon more than a year ago, and nobody announced it
I pulled AAA’s national average this morning: $4.12 for regular. A year ago it was $3.19.
That is a 93-cent jump, and it arrived so gradually that most people have absorbed it without ever doing the arithmetic. So let me do it. A household driving 12,000 miles a year in something getting 25 miles per gallon burns about 480 gallons. At 93 cents more per gallon, that is roughly $450 a year — gone, out of the same paycheck, with no decision ever made about it.
Four hundred and fifty dollars is not a catastrophe. It is also almost exactly the size of the gap that turns a budget that works into a budget that quietly doesn’t, and I have watched that specific gap start more debt spirals than I can count. Gas is the one bill you can’t opt out of. Rich or poor, you drive to work.
I’m not going to tell you to drive less; that’s useless advice. I’ll tell you the honest thing instead: if your money has felt tighter this year and you couldn’t name why, this is a real part of why, and it isn’t you being careless. Go look at what you actually spent on fuel last month versus a year ago. Knowing the number beats feeling the number.
And a practical note with a date on it: prices tend to firm up going into a holiday weekend, and Labor Day is Monday. Fill up before Friday.
Money you might actually be owed — two windows closing this month
CRST Expedited, $14.5 million. If you drove for CRST Expedited with a California address and were paid by piece rate between August 9, 2017 and April 10, 2023, you’re in the class. No claim form — payment is automatic unless you exclude yourself, and that deadline is October 5, 2026. Details here.
City of San Diego water rates, $40 million. Single-family residential water customers of the City of San Diego between August 14, 2014 and December 1, 2023 get a refund of the difference between what they were charged and what lawful rates would have been. No claim form to start, but you may need to confirm your contact details and pick a payment method through the administrator. The exclusion deadline is September 28, 2026. Details here.
Both of these pay out automatically, which sounds like good news and is actually the risk. Automatic means the money goes wherever the administrator has you on file — an address from 2019, a bank account you closed. If either of these is you, the ninety seconds that matter are spent making sure they can find you.
If you or someone near you just got laid off, the first 30 days decide most of it
The tech layoff numbers are moving again — Oracle is reported to be cutting up to 10,000 roles, and the tracking lists are long this year.
Here is the single most expensive mistake I see, and it happens in the first month, before anybody feels like they’re in trouble: people raid their 401(k) to stay current on credit cards.
Think about what that actually trades. You are spending retirement money — the one pot that is largely protected if things get worse — to protect a credit score. And a credit score is the thing that recovers. It rebuilds. Retirement savings you spend at 45 does not come back, because what you destroyed wasn’t the balance, it was thirty years of compounding on top of it. I’ve put the arithmetic at somewhere north of $400,000 for people who did this over a long enough stretch, and it is the quietest large loss in personal finance because nothing on any statement ever labels it.
If you’re in the first 30 days: protect the retirement account, protect the housing, protect the transportation, and let the unsecured credit be last in line. It feels wrong. It’s right. The cards are the only part of this that has a legal off-ramp built for exactly this situation.
What I published yesterday
I Just Got a Notice of Default on My Mortgage. Here’s What to Do Right Now.
The $117 Million Pork Price-Fixing Settlement — and what nearly every writeup got wrong
No, You’re Not Getting $10,000 From the AMN Healthcare Settlement
They Said My Cosigner Filing Bankruptcy Would Wipe Out My Half of the Debt Too
One more thing
If this was useful, forward it to one person. That’s the whole growth plan — no ads, nothing for sale. And if something here is happening to you right now, you can ask me directly. It’s free, it’s private, and I’m not selling anything on the other end of it.
I write a deeper Weekday Briefing over at getoutofdebt.org if you want the long version of any of this.
Nothing here is legal or financial advice for your specific situation. I’m telling you what I’d tell a friend, which is not the same as knowing your circumstances.
Look — a fake dealership, a real dealership with a fake price, and gas quietly eating four hundred and fifty dollars a year. That’s a lot of ways to lose money in one email, and I know it can read as though the whole world is set up to take from you.
It mostly isn’t. What’s true is that a handful of these things are worth knowing about, and knowing about them is nearly all of the defense. The people I’ve watched climb out of genuinely bad situations almost never did it with a windfall. They did it by looking straight at one thing they’d been avoiding, deciding one thing about it, and then doing that again the following week. That is unglamorous and it works, and there is nothing in today’s issue that changes it.
Back tomorrow.
— Steve
Bonus Section
A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.
I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.
Cash that actually earns something
Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)
Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.
And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.
Saving without having to think about it
Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)
And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.
Investing
Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)
And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.
Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.
A free conversation about your situation
Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.