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The Clark Howard Podcast
10.08.25 The Quest To Spend Less / WARNING: Fake Medical Pitches Online
00:23:18
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Foreign.
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It'S great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. If you haven't checked out our free newsletters, I hope you will because not only are they free, they're full of content of information that you can use that you can act on to save more, spend less and avoid getting ripped off. How do you get to them? Clark.comnewsletters and speaking of saving more, there's a trend in how people are shopping to save money. And later I want to talk about why all those medical ads that you're seeing online are not necessarily what you think they are right now. I want to talk about something that is a clear trend and that is people of income levels that never really used to walk into a dollar tree or a Dollar General are now doing so that across income levels people are really feeling stressed buying everyday consumer goods. Because a lot of the everyday kind of items are the ones you may have noticed have been popping up in price lately. And sales of the dollar oriented stores have been going up, up, up. But the big shocker is who's coming in spending a lot more in them. And that is people of various income levels that are feeling the heat of inflation and tariffs. And so look at the cars. When you go buy or you shop at a Dollar tree or Dollar General, you'll see cars of all different years and you'll see luxury cars, you'll see beat up cars, whatever. Because there are times people talk about bargains, there are times people seek them out and this is one of those times because having been through six years of an inflationary cycle and now adding on top of it the kind of invisible impact that tariffs have been having, where it's been kind of haphazard item by item and category by category. The net impact is that your dollar just is not going as far wherever you shop. And that's why people are rethinking where they're shopping and where they're buying the things that are everyday kind of items. And so there are people who, who mix and match who might be really into fashion and they're still going to wherever fancy place they like to buy fashion. But everyday kind of stuff, they're being much more price conscious. I mentioned a couple months ago how Walmart had seen a clear Trend that the Walmart.com shoppers, a lot of them, the people who subscribe to Walmart plus are people who had never really been Walmart shoppers but they're buying more and more stuff there for delivery because it's cheaper than what they were paying before. So we are in a cycle that is an unhealthy cycle economically, but a healthy cycle in your own household where we're being more careful with the money that we've got and how we spend it. And the dollar stores are certainly part of that. And, Krista, you want to start with a question about Dollar Tree, is that right?
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I do. Sybil in Washington sent this in. Sybil says, I walked into a Dollar Tree today and found that maybe half the prices of items were $1.75, $3 or more. And the store is very poorly stocked. A lot of shelves were bare. Have you gone into any of these types of stores lately? And what is the future of these stores with the tariff situation?
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Yeah. So Dollar Tree says in their last report to analysts that most items are still. I call it $25 tree now.
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A
Right.
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There's still a $25, but there's more and more items that you got to pay attention on the shelf that are marked at higher prices. They can be three bucks, like you said. They can be five. I think there are seven dollar items in Dollar Tree now. I mean, it's. It's not what it was where you just count up the number of items you had and however many you had, that was how many dollars you had to pay.
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Remember, you had your kids convinced that was the toy store. I'll never forget that.
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Yeah, my. All three of my kids, till they were probably five, thought that Dollar Tree was the dollar store and I'd let them go.
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Toy store.
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Yeah, toy store. They could go in and they could buy two items.
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Two toys.
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Two toys. And I mean, they thought they were cleaning up. They did. And then when they figured out that wasn't the toy store.
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Yeah. Like how. I wonder how that. That must have been traumatic. Like if a friend's parent, like they're with a friend and they happen to go to Toys R Us or something, they're like, wait a second, that happened.
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To one of my kids who went with. It was on a play date with a friend and they went to Toys R Us to buy a gift for another kid for a birthday. Oh, that was a bad day in my life. But what's going on is the pressure cooker, because Dollar Tree operates on a system of markups. So even though things were a dollar, their markup was actually pretty good on every item. And then inflation pushed them to the buck 25, and then they broke the 125 with having a variety of prices throughout the store. And that's just the heat from it. Also, Five Below has been through the same thing. Five Below. It used to be everything was $5 or less, and now it doesn't work that way at 5 below anymore because the price pressures were just too intense. And the tariffs, as the cost of the tariffs filters into products very heavily in 26, you're going to see the continuing pressure of prices on the shelves. And what will happen is retailers will decide items that are truly discretionary, but also at the same time have price sensitivity to them. They may not sell them anymore. So you're going to see some reduction in the amount of selection that's available for us in retail stores.
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All right, Leslie in North Carolina says, I recently married the love of my life and he moved into my home. Should I add my husband to the homeowner's insurance policy? I'm so afraid my insurance company will raise my premium if I do.
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B
So it's standard operating procedure that if you do remarry, your spouse comes into your house and it's your house, you own it, you do add them to your insurance policy. It means that he probably brought some possessions of his own into the house and that's how they end up being insured is under the homeowner's policy should. Cause there may be a state somewhere where that could change underwriting on premiums, but I've never heard of that being a problem.
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This one's from Chris in Iowa. My wife and I are buying a new house.
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Congratulations. One American family buying a house.
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We can comfortably do a 10% down payment, but getting to 20% would really drain our cash reserves. Considering we're moving to a house from a condo, we'll have many purchases we need to make. Yard equipment, furnishings, etc. My natural instinct is to get to 20% to avoid the PMI. But also cash is king. We have excellent credit. So PMI is less than $200 per month. What are your thoughts?
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So what you can do if you don't want to drain all your cash and put yourself right on a tightrope dealing with unexpected expenses is talk to the mortgage broker you're dealing with or lenders. You're getting quotes from about an 8010 10. So what an 801010 is. Is something I don't hear talked about as much as it used to be. But you take out a first mortgage for 80% of the purchase price of the home, you put your 10% down payment and then you take on a second mortgage for the other 10%. And that way you've met underwriting to avoid PMI. And over time you pay off that 10% that you take on in that second mortgage. And that is a much more efficient use of money than having to pay PMI since you're, since you've already got that 10% you can put down. Coming up ahead, people are using con artist crooks are using AI and other manipulative tools to con you into thinking there's medical remedies that will fix what ails you. I need to give you a full bore warning about this. It's common. We're used to seeing all those drug ads and all the things like those very humorous. I think they're for Crest ads with you're just walking around somewhere and suddenly you're thrown into a dental chair and the dentist is working on your teeth. And you know, it's a pitch for Crest. And so this is just part of our lives that we've got these constant pitches for medical products, medical remedies. But what's different now is online crooks, con artists, are using AI and one of the things they're doing is they're taking real medical researchers, real doctors, and using AI to get them saying things they haven't said, endorsing products they haven't even talked about, and giving it a seal of approval. That's completely fake. Completely fake. And so this is one of the areas that AI is scary bad is you can make it appear that anybody has said anything or done anything. So just know I've talked recently about all the fake pitches for investments and now I'm talking about your body, that you've got to know that the crooks are out there trying to get in your wallet every which way, doing the pitches for things that if you've got something that ails you and traditional medicine has not been able to help, you're desperate for answers. You're desperate to get well or to feel better. And that's when you're opened up to vulnerability of being kind with fake endorsements, fake recommendations. And there will be these things that you watch that'll talk about how I've never felt better in my life. I mean, I started taking blah, blah, blah, and I'm feeling better. And it can be a bunch of hooey, but the reality is we want to believe it and the crooks take advantage of that. So I know there's a lot of people who are having difficulty trusting traditional medical researchers. I still trust When I read what's going on in medical research and go to the sources, go to the medical publications like Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical association to see what's going on cutting edge for whatever condition ails you. But because the problem is you don't know if this remedy is just going to cost you money or if it actually harm you, taking whatever is being pitched by phony AI of somebody speaking very authoritatively about how this thing or that thing or the other thing is going to heal you. It's only going to help their wallet. Who knows what it'll do to you.
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Okay, you ready for some questions?
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Sure.
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Emily in Kansas says hello Clark, I've always assumed that an HSA would not be beneficial for me, but after listening to a lot of your podcasts over the past few months, I'm starting to question that. We have a family of six and are fortunate enough to have an employer pay 100% of our health insurance premiums as part of the benefit package.
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That's awesome.
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We always meet or exceed our $2,000 family deductible each year for out of pocket expenses and have assumed we stay with this type of insurance because we have a good amount of medical expenses today and for the foreseeable Future. We have $1.4 million in investments and fully fund our Roth IRAs 403 and 529s. Are we really missing out by not selecting an HDHP so we can fund an HSA?
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Okay, so right now your deductible is 2000 and be eligible for an HSA have to be 3300 for a family plan, you're easily meeting the deductible. The big thing you want to look at is what is the coverage limit that's available to you with your employer option of an HSA eligible plan that would meet the deductibles required to be HSA eligible? What's the ceiling of coverage versus what it is with the current plan you're under? You said you easily meet your deductible. You have a lot of medical expenses in your family where the advantage that you have right now of the lower deductible can become a disadvantage is if someone hopefully this won't happen. But if someone in your family developed a really bad illness that required extensive medical care, often that's where surprisingly enough, a high deductible health plan can end up being better than the traditional plan because of the coverage limits available when you end up with large expenses. HSA eligible plans work the best when people have minimal health expenses over a year or when people have extremely high medical expenses over the year. People kind of in the middle. It's a mushy middle that you may be better off continuing to do what you're doing now, but instead of looking at the deductibles, look at the high coverage limits. That may be better with the employer provided.
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HSA eligible plan M in Connecticut says I've enjoyed your program and podcast for many years. Your information has been very beneficial to my financial well being. However, as a retired dentist, I was surprised by your answer when asked about having a dental implant. This could be a Clark Sticks. When you had your cardiac valve surgery, I doubt you looked for the cheapest doctor or facility.
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I did not.
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I don't think you flew to Mexico to save money.
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That's true. Although I would say this is that I've talked in the past about people who need a life savings heart operation who can't afford to get it because they don't have coverage or don't have coverage that's good enough. And I've talked about the possibility of actually going to Thailand or potentially India to have those procedures done that the alternative is you don't ever get them done. I'm sorry, I shouldn't interrupt you thoroughly.
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Research various alternative surgeons and facilities. Why shouldn't your listeners do the same? When I need surgery on my body requiring skin and experience, I don't look for the cheapest. I look for someone with excellent training and knowledge to do my surgery. Dental implants require extreme skill to avoid vital structures such as nerves, arteries and sinuses. Ill placed implants require surgical removal, bone grafts and replacement, which can be very costly as well as painful. Stick to subjects you know about.
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B
Okay, you're right. I have repeatedly said I am not at all knowledgeable about medicine. Certainly dentistry, no doubt you're right. When I talk about this, the financial thing and I it was bad that I interrupted you because I'm basically reiterating the same point. A lot of people to their great harm don't get help because they can't afford it. And so if we're talking about somebody who isn't going to get the care and they're deteriorating dentally or generally health wise, then looking at an alternative of medical tourism or dental tourism to me is a is a viable alternative versus doing nothing. If I had not been in a position to afford my heart operation, I would have been long dead by now. While we're talking right now, I would have been gone. And so that's the stark choice that some people face when it comes to medical or dental.
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And Beth owensconsin says I heard Tim's submission on the show. He tried using an individually generated credit card number for a subscription but was charged past the set daily allowed amount. When Tim asked the service why it allowed the overcharge, he was told limits don't apply to subscriptions. Clark's immediate takeaway was to no longer recommend using individual generated credit card numbers for subscription trials. I'm writing to say that privacy.com, a service I learned about on the Clark Howard show, does work for subscriptions. I use it all the time for trials and has saved my bacon numerous times when it refused to allow a company to keep charging me even after I canceled the subscription. Just this month, I had several accounts auto renew at higher prices and every single one of them was blocked until I changed the allowed spending amount or canceled the subscription. I don't know what service Tim was using, but Privacy.com is an amazing solution to to subscription or other online payments that will protect your wallet. Last tip. When I sign up for quote, unquote free trials that require a credit card, I set my privacy.com limit to $1 to give them a card number and then set an alert on my calendar to cancel the subscription. Almost any time the service tries to bill me for the free trial, but privacy.com stops them. This is not a commercial for privacy.
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No, but it's funny. We talked about on the, on the show, we talked about privacy.com as a way to protect your personal information, your credit card numbers, all the rest, I mean, long ago. And here we've got someone who, Beth, who's been doing it and has been so effective with the free trials. And you said when this came up that you have been really not doing well at handling the free trials.
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No, I'm okay. I just basically I have to put an alert on my calendar, the same thing to cancel it. But I've been doing a lot of funky stuff because my parents are currently living with me. My dad has certain things he likes to watch and so I've been doing a lot of this maneuvering around, but I've. I've been okay so far. The thing that I really messed up was when I got a new bank account and then moved the money and set it on the air week early. You were lost $600.
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600 down the drain. So free trials I don't like, Period. I just don't like him. And so I'm gonna throw my son under the bus.
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Oh, sorry, Grant.
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So there was some football game, college game that Grant wanted to watch, and we had no streaming thing because, you know, I got rid of YouTube TV and all that, and so we had nothing he could see it on. Then all of a sudden, he signs up for thing was Fubo, because that had the game. And I said, grant, I don't want any more streaming service. Oh, well, it's a seven day free trial. I'm gonna cancel right after the game. Did he cancel after the game?
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I'm guessing no.
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No. And then there was a bill for like 89 or something like that for it. Do you think I was happy?
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I really. I don't think anyone thinks you were happy.
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No way do I despise the free trials, because the free trials are a trap. And you got to be able to handle it like Beth does where she sets it up on the Calendar, uses her privacy.com, makes sure they got nothing they can charge money to. I mean, you got to be. You got to be really on top of this to keep that money in your wallet. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I love the follow up. You know, we heard from the. The dentist who's unhappy with me. We heard from Beth who's like, hey, Clark, why didn't you talk about what you used to talk about? And I never stopped learning. And I pour so much stuff in here that I forget things, too. And so it's so great to have the constant teamwork of all of us working together to help each other along the way. And so thank you for joining us on Today's podcast and YouTube show. And what we're about is you. It's all about you being empowered with knowledge so you can see, save more and spend less, and absolutely, positively never, never, never, not ever get ripped.