It's my pleasure to welcome you here to 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. Now, I want to tell you something. There are certain tricks to the trade that I talk about with travel, but there's one that I've mentioned over the years that has suddenly become much more relevant than it used to be.
And I want to make sure you know when you're searching for a deal by air how to take advantage of these new opportunities. And later, my car spies on me every single second. And more and more, that's what's going to happen with cars. So you need to know what's up. And more important, who has access to that data?
So air travel goes through continuous change in the United States. And right now, especially because American United and Delta, the three full-fare airlines, are so large now and have concentrated their power so heavily in what are known as fortress hubs that it's changed the equation for people that are looking for a deal.
There's also a change in the competitive landscape that I want to make sure you are clued into. And it all starts with an airline that's been around for a while called a legion. A legion based in Las Vegas flies leisure oriented routes. There's some term for it, family and something like that. But they serve markets that are for vacation and family visits. That's what they do.
They may not fly to a place every day of the week. In fact, some places they only fly twice a week. To understand what I'm talking about, if you go look at a legion and pull up their map of where they fly in the country,
I promise you, there are a lot of cities they fly to you've never heard of or only know faintly of. And so what they're doing is they fly to places that the big three don't care about. So they have led to copycats. And now there's a Velo and Breeze, both which started four years ago
that are both growing around the country. But again, they go to places that you wouldn't think to look. One of the places that Avello is big and is New Haven, Connecticut.
Now let me tell you, somebody going into Massachusetts or going to Hartford or maybe going to the New York suburbs, you're never thinking of looking for a fair to New Haven, Connecticut. You don't even know anybody flies there. Let me tell you, the people in New Haven
no because now there's all these huge traffic jams around the airport because people who do know are getting fares that are usually one fourth of what the fair would be on american united or delta flying to the big city any of those three fly to
that are shouting distance from New Haven. There's also breeze air. Breeze does a similar kind of flying. Flying to places that the full fair airlines aren't really interested in.
And the advantage with a legion and breeze and a velo, all their flights are set up to be non-stops. There's no changing in any hub or anything like that. You just have to go on the days of the week they fly and the days of the week they return. This is just a tactic growing in popularity because these airlines are filling these planes.
because people are getting so much better deal. When is it not a deal? So you go to fly and your flights cancel. Now remember I said a lot of these routes, they're only flying maybe twice a week, four times a week, and the busiest ones once a day.
And that flight gets canceled. It's not a laughing matter. Because you're going to be stranded for a while, either going from where you're leaving, from to where you're going, or vice versa. So there is a big, big trade-off with this.
You've heard a lot about spirit being in bankruptcy and frontier heaven trouble making money and all that. What's different about those two is they decided it would be a great idea to go right after the big markets of the full fair lines and the same time treat people like dirt that are flying them.
Now, I don't know whoever thought it was a good idea to treat people like dirt, but that's been the problem with both of them. And I have a particular grudge against the CEO of Frontier, who has designed the relationship between his employees and the customers as an adversarial one.
where the employees get bonus for every time they can charge a ripoff fee to a customer. The interest of the employee and the customer should be aligned. At Frontier, they are diametrically opposed. I don't know what business school the CEO went to, but he was obviously sleeping through all the classes.
But this is something that does have to trade off if there is a flight problem. But I can tell you there's a general rule, a legion, breeze, and a velo have been running extremely reliable schedules and reliable airlines.
When you're looking to book somewhere, look where they go and know that the full fairs may at an airport nearby be offering certain deals on certain flight times that match up with the flights that Avello and Breeze and Allegiant are running to cities nearby.
And the frontier people are more than happy to have them come on the air because I am so unhappy with the company that from the executive suite looks at the customer as an enemy and not their customer.
Yuck. Okay, Ray in Florida says, my wife and I have both been victims of identity theft. I'm sorry about that. In her case, a thief broke into her car and stole her wallet, including ID. Several months later, they used her ID and probably the info out of a hacked database to call into a bank, transfer a bunch of money into one account, and then withdraw $1,400 in cash. It took us months to make the bank return the money. They should have never paid it out in the first place.
uh... before you go on a need to say something about that a bank only has ten banking days once you've protested something in writing to either restore your funds permanently restore them temporarily or tell you why they're not going to give you the money back they don't have an endless number of months to do so and
What's key to make this work is you have to go to a branch and put your dispute in writing. And that starts the 10 business day countdown, the two week countdown. And I hear your thing again and again where the banks just don't care what the law is. They don't care what the regulations are. They just take their sweet time.
and go on because I got more to say. I love the banks, don't I? A year later, something similar happened to me and another giant monster mega bank. The thief calls in, transfers $750 from two accounts into the main account. Then the thief attempted to withdraw it at a branch but was caught in the act.
Still, I had to go in and change all my account numbers and spent many needless hours in the bank. From my perspective, the banks don't do nearly enough to protect us. They allow people to call in and personate us, obviously not from our registered phone numbers, and obtain information and initiate money transfers. These banks could do so much more. They could require an SMS code for all transactions. If you can't give the code, you don't do business.
If it's an in-person transaction, they can mandate two forms of ID, a password in the SMS, or proof of online banking access. But these banks remain big and stupid. Who can I bank with that has a clue about security and will look out for my best interests?
Size alone is not the indicator, although I find that with the four giant monster mega banks, they're almost like a law unto themselves. Who are the four giant monster? Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. They are so large, so powerful.
that they pretty much do what they want. I think there's an advantage. I have such a bias. This is clearly a bias in you being with a local credit union. You're an owner. You have a board that you've elected if you choose to participate. There's accountability at a credit union.
imagine at a bank like Chase that has bigger size than the economy of many countries, getting them to respond. But one thing with any financial institution is
When you are being ignored, you file a complaint at consumerfinance.gov. It starts to clock ticking. Again, the banks don't like. And a lot of times I find with the banks, it's not that they're trying to cheat you. It's that they don't care. They just don't care. And the bigger they are, the less they care. So as far as the ID being stolen,
From that moment forward, you want to freeze your credit files, because a lot of the mischief the criminals are going to do is from taking over your identity through your credit, and if you have your credit frozen, it will eliminate a lot of the kind of hassles you would have. The second thing I'd say
is that if there was any information in your wife's wallet about having a relationship with the giant monster mega bank where the money was taken or the other giant monster mega bank where money was taken from your account
that that would be, for me, a direct call for you right after the while it was stolen to close your banking relationships with those banks and go somewhere else that may be harder for the criminals to figure out
where you have moved your banking or to whatever credit union you've moved it to. But these situations are so bad ugly and having to wait such a long time to get your money back after the giant monster would sloppy and allow the criminal to swipe the money is totally unacceptable behavior.
Dean in South Carolina says, my credit is frozen with all three credit reporting agencies and has been for years. So thank you for that. My question is, if I'm at one of those department store checkouts and the pesky clerk says, hey, if you fill out this credit app for our in-store card, you'll get 10 to 20% off today with this purchase. Would this affect my score like a hard inquiry since my credit's frozen? Thanks for everything, Clark.
Yes, so what would happen at most retailers, Dean, is they're going to reject your app. What will happen usually at the register, they'll ask you some basic information, punch it in, and it will come back as no rec or credit frozen, and you're not going to get that 10 to 20% off. It will not hurt your credit.
in any way because it will come back no wreck. There will be no credit that it will hit against. My attitude is store credit is junk credit. There's no upside to having store credit. And I know there are people who say to me all the time, but look, I got all these coupons at Macy's for having the Macy's card.
It's not worth it for those savings you get. Trust me. And I would worry, like if I had another credit card with the bank that underwrites the card for that store, it could go through. I never thought about that. Yeah, they're not offering you that percentage off just for applying. They're offering it if you get approved.
Yeah, so the thing is, you brought up a point I've not made in forever. If you have an existing relationship with a financial institution and you apply for something, even with your credit frozen, they're already aware of who you are and that app may be approved because a bank is allowed to transition you to a different form of credit and that could happen in this case.
Scotty in Tennessee says artificial intelligence saves the day. I thought you and your fans might appreciate this story. My teen daughter parked in a downtown parking lot and was only there for about 30 minutes. When she left, she said there was no parking attendant present and she left without paying. About a month later, we got a ticket in the mail for $65.
I looked up the parking lot and found that the charge for all day parking is $8. I was willing to pay a fine, but $65 for an $8 parking fee. I went to their website and was about to pay it, but then saw a dispute option. I went to chat GPT and asked it to write a detailed dispute based on the details of the incident. I must say the AI wrote very well written argument that was kind yet convincing. I then pasted that into the dispute box on their website. Clark, I received an email from the parking lot within 30 minutes saying they would dismiss the ticket.
Moral of the story, don't be afraid to dispute tickets and don't be afraid to use AI. Huge thanks to you and your team for all that you do from a Clark superfan in Knoxville, Tennessee. Scotty too. Hotty. Scotty too. Hotty. Okay. So did I tell the story about me getting the ticket from the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority? I don't remember if you told it on the podcast or not.
OK, so I get this ticket in the mail from the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority. I've never been on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It has a picture of this giant SUV. It was like an escalator, something. I've never owned anything like that. And it says it was my car and whatever. So I did what you did, Scotty. I went on the website for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And they have this thing where they say, the only way to dispute
The ticket is this weird affidavit and you got to do all this stuff and all that. Instead, I sent in a thing on their question form or whatever and told the story. And I didn't use AI like you did. I actually came up with my own words. And three days later, I got something saying, please excuse the error. That is not your ticket. We've removed it.
So just ignoring is not a good idea because what was funny on that is how much the fee went up that didn't pay within seven days under Pennsylvania statute, whatever, whatever, and ignoring is dangerous. But I love your AI suggestion. My son uses AI tools all the time, except where
College? College, because every professor knows every answer that chat GPT is going to give to anything that somebody tries to do that as a way of avoiding work. That's not going to work for college students. Coming up ahead, we're talking about AI and all that. What about your cars? What did they know about you more than you might like
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with this decorated soldier committing suicide in the Cybertruck, the Tesla Cybertruck, it was so sad that he felt like if he had sought help for his depression that he would have been bounced out of the prestigious unit he was in in the military. I just feel so bad about that when somebody feels like they lose too much
if they were to seek help, but in his case, he lost everything. And I just feel so bad about that. But you know, within two hours of when the soldier took his life, the law enforcement people in Nevada had every bit of information on that cyber truck where the soldier picked it up, where he stopped to charge, where he stopped to do everything.
And I noticed in people's reaction to the media coverage about how much Tesla knew
about what the soldier had been up to, that people are not aware that this is a common industry practice now. I had told you last year about GM tracking people's driving and then selling the information to insurance companies so they could cancel your insurance or charge you higher rates. And GM was like, well, it's in our terms of service.
then they would when there was such a backlash gm apologize they're being sued they're not doing it anymore whether or not sharing when you're not a good driver with your insurance company
But unless you really want an older analog vehicle, it's the thing where automakers are putting in this technology to track everything that goes on in your car, everything you do, because they're trying to monetize the data that they come up with. And so we don't, in most modern vehicles, have the privacy we used to.
And I know this is going to sound weird, but it bothers me that we still don't have a federal law with a right to privacy, that we should have with all the technology that exists today, we should have the ability, the right to choose not to have
information shared. Right now what happens is just as GM said, well, it was in the terms of service. We're written by some lawyer to write something that's 80 pages long. I don't know how many of the GM thing was. And in all the legal mumbo jumbo, you've signed away everything. This is not right. We're in a time where the technology is accelerating so quickly.
and we need to have more control over what others know about us. To me, it's pretty simple, it's pretty clear that the rights of an American citizen should outweigh the commercial desires of companies, both American and foreign, that are tracking everything we do. And with the cars, I can see there's gonna be a market
for people buying vehicles that are sold without all the advanced technology in it, that will not allow somebody to track everything you do. Obviously there are times, as an example, for law enforcement.
It was really useful that they were able to find out so much information so quickly after what at first appeared to be possibly a terrorist attack. But at the same time, we have this constant push and pull between your and my privacy and what right we have to it under the law and none, pretty much.
And then what others may misuse that information for to our harm or for their commercial benefit. Krista, you and I both drive Teslas and it knows all. It sure does. Yep. And there's some of that stuff that's great.
If it's cold, you can start the heat in your vehicle before you go to it. It's hot. If it's hot, you can put the air conditioning on way before you get to it. And that's just the most basic of things it does.
I love it. I have to say, but I'm also not giving up on privacy. What 15 years ago you said to me, there's no right to private. Yeah, no, it's over. Janice in Georgia says, I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying. Okay. Janice in Georgia says, Clark recently talked about going to a freestanding MRI CT scan, et cetera.
in order to save money and not have to pay his exorbitant hospital price. And I agree, but there's a catch. I had to do just such a thing with a scan. I got the freestanding scan. And when I sent it to the hospital, they said they can't read it. No, they didn't want to read it. They said they couldn't. Yeah. They said it's because they have their own system that doesn't read offsite information. I had to do it again and pay the exorbitant price just for listeners to be aware. It may not always work, although my ultimate results were good.
OK, that story is so disturbing to me. So you ended up having the scan twice, Janice, and being ripped off by the hospital system. For those of you who missed when I talked about me having an MRI of my knee without contrast, I went to a freestander after I took some work. I wanted to find out what does it cost at the hospital near me. It was $2,400.
So then I call a freestander and the same MRI without contrast was $300. My copay through my insurance would have been more than the $300 that I paid, I didn't have to pay $300. I had to pay $53, I think, $55, something like that, because I only had to pay my copay versus the bill.
And the hospitals hate this. They hate it that people are learning more and more about the free standards to go to. They treat you much better. They're on time and it costs a fraction. And this is a crazy story you're telling me that they said they couldn't read it. So what I did was I got the disc as well as the report. So any
hospital anybody could put that disk in their computer and they would see the results and it's just wrong that they would pretend that only their own scan was a valid scan well
And you know what, I bet you, Janice, any amount of money that hospital that cheated you this way is a nonprofit that's supposed to be doing things to benefit the community and avoid paying taxes that way, and then they lie and cheat you like that.
Byron in Kentucky says I recently upgraded my phone through my prepaid no contract service for $99. This didn't require plan upgrades, so I got to keep my $15 a month service. However, they collected tax on the full retail value of the phone, which was around $600. If I'm never charged full price for the phone and I'm not subsidizing it with monthly service fees, why do they collect so much tax? Does this just become extra profit when they file their tax return? So Byron,
I'm familiar with this because this came up before and there have been stories about this. Different state taxing authorities treat discounts that you receive differently. And what you're telling me is Kentucky is one of the states that's interpreted the sales tax code that you pay on the original price. And they treat it as a, I don't know if they call it a manufacturer's discount or what they call it.
But what you pay is not what's used in some states to determine the sales tax. And I find it just a crazy thing that the state would potentially take advantage of you that way. But if you want to verify that it's the state of Kentucky that's doing this to you and not the cell phone provider, cell phone carrier,
I would call the state sales and where they call it sales and use tax office and ask them the situation and ask them are you supposed to pay tax on the original retail price or what you paid. And you'd get the answer if that's Kentucky's interpretation or an error let's call it an error on the part of the cell phone carrier.
All right, and this is from Diana in South Carolina. I pay my credit card balances off entirely every month. Good for you. I try to do this before the next statement dates, so my statements show zero due each time. My credit score is excellent. So here's the question. When I receive an offer from my credit card company for a six month promo for a lower interest rate than the normal rate of my account, example, 9.99% for six months instead of 17%, should I accept these offers even though I'm never owing any interest? Is there a benefit in doing so?
No interest, Diana, at all. But if you do pay your balance in full every month, I hope that the card you have is paying you cash back or some other kind of reward because as a net payer, a payer in full every month,
You are in a position that a lot of these reward programs would work very well for you. Right now, it's like not even a heavy lift at all to get a card that will pay you 2% cash back on everything you do.
and you should be rewarded for your incredible payment habits of always having a zero balance. But taking the offer for the 9.99 for six months does nothing for you unless you're anticipating a really major expense in your life where you wouldn't be able to pay off your balance in full.
And with that, we conclude today's podcast. And I want to tell you, we got so much else available to you all week long. We've got one-on-one free advice available to you Monday through Friday from the Team Clark Consumer Action Center. We've been offering this free advice since February of 1993. You want to know how to get it? Go to clark.com slash CAC.
and whether it's free advice one-on-one, our newsletters, our websites, our social media, our podcast, our YouTube show, or if you live in a city where I'm on radio or television, I want to tell you it's always with the same purpose for you to learn ways to save more, spend less, and avoid getting ripped off. Have a great rest of your day.