Bills and Banking

A company going under does not take your pension with it. That is the first thing to understand, because most people assume the opposite and never look.

This is the one decision in your retirement paperwork that cannot be undone. Not after a year, not after a week in most cases. You sign the election form, the payments start, and…

Read the annual statement when it comes. All of it, not just the number at the bottom.

Your bank shows you two numbers and only one of them is real money you can spend today. Confusing the two is behind a large share of the declined cards and surprise fees I dealt…

An account you are not using can still cost you money, and in a small number of cases it can be emptied and handed to the state. Both of those things surprise people, and both are…

A pension is taxable income. The tax is not deducted automatically at the right rate, because nobody at the plan knows what else you have coming in, and the amount they hold back…

I have explained an overdraft fee several thousand times, and I would guess a quarter of those were fees that should never have been charged.

Nobody reads the second page of a cable bill. The companies know that, and the second page is where the money is.

The business model is not complicated. Charge a small amount monthly, make cancelling slightly inconvenient, and rely on the fact that people do not audit their own bank…

A water bill is one of the few bills that will tell you something is physically wrong with your house, if you know which number to look at.

The letter arrives with a new logo on it and a friendly paragraph about improved service. Somewhere in the third paragraph it mentions that your pension is moving to a new…