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It's my pleasure to have you here with us on the Clark Howard Show. You know our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. And we're going to take time off next week to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends. I'm very grateful to all the Clarkies out there and you, Clark. Very grateful and thankful for you, Krista as well.
And you, Grace and Sally, that the Carkeys can't see in here. We really are so lucky to work with so many wonderful people. We do work with just the best people ever, which is something to really be thankful for, that you look forward to being at work.
with people who become your friends. Absolutely. So we're gonna play some of your favorite episodes while we're gone. How do we know favorites from number of downloads? It's really cool how you can tell that. And I hope that you take time for yourself and your family and friends take time for themselves next week as well. And if you wanna know what's coming up with all the deals,
Thanksgiving week, Black Friday week, what a deal week. Make sure you're subscribed to clarkdeals.com, our newsletter and the website will keep you up to date. You want to sign up for it? Go to clark.com slash newsletter or newsletters. And our team does not work on Thanksgiving because that would stink.
I think they'll send out a newsletter that's pre-done with the deals that are still going on, but that will be it, yeah. Right, because we'll know what the .com deals are, the cyber deals on Thanksgiving Day. Something else that stinks? Me!
me using that cheap deodorant I use. I get to hear about it today in our weekly Clark Stink segment. And later, gosh, people are annoyed about having to go to a kiosk to order now at more and more places. And to me, that's the tip of the iceberg of something that's good
not bad that I want to talk about straight ahead. But it is time to hear how I need to spend more on you. I never encouraged you to speak. You almost think I'm pretty stupid. You should be ashamed of yourself. Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you're right, pal.
All right, this first one was actually on YouTube. Nicole and our team flagged this one for me. It was a comment. It says, Clark, and it's from Wells Morehouse on YouTube. Clark, here's the advice that made me realize the importance of accepting compliments. When someone gives you a compliment, it may be the only thing they have to give. It's a gift.
So recognize every compliment with an expression of thanks. It doesn't mean you necessarily agree with their opinion, but saying thank you means you acknowledge the gift. On the flip side, responding to a compliment, i.e., I love your shirt with a denial, this whole thing rejects their gift, insults their opinion, and squashes their kindness. Don't be that guy. Just say thank you.
Thank you, and you're right, it's always been a character flaw of mine. As far back as I can remember that I have trouble accepting a compliment. I appreciate that guidance.
Clark advised the listener who got a ticket from Italy long after the trip was over that he knew of no adverse consequences for ignoring it. Having had this same experience, I think that advice stinks. When it happened to me, I did a lot of research and discovered that almost every American who rents a car in Italy gets one of these tickets months after returning home. The fine will double periodically when he has reached some astronomical amount
The rental car company will charge it to the credit card used to pay for the rental, which is what you agreed to when you signed the rental agreement that you could not read. Better advice, in my opinion, is just to consider this part of the expense of traveling to Italy, pay the fine, and walk away. Keith.
OK, Keith, I got to tell you a funny story. So anybody who's ever rented a car in Italy knows what Keith said's 100% right. There's no way you rent a car in Italy and don't get a ticket. Because just one more reason to not drive there. It is crazy. Oh, it's fun to drive. I would never, ever drive there. Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, so I got a ticket in the mail just a couple of days ago from March of last year.
Seriously, there's a little bit of English there, but most of it's an Italian. And they want like 60 euro from me, can't figure out what it is I supposedly did wrong. And I go online to try to figure out how to pay it because we had prior posts saying that I was really being an idiot and you should pay these tickets. So I say, okay, 60 euro. So I go to try to pay it. I cannot figure out how to pay the thing.
I can't. I mean, I'll work on it some more sitting on my desk and see if I can figure out how to pay the thing. I think replacing 401ks with the pension funded between the employee and employer is a bad idea. I had no choice on how my pension money was invested and had little choice at the time of retirement on how that pension would be paid out to me. It was so much a month whether I needed it or not.
I had that choice with my 401K and preferred to leave it invested until I had to make RMDs. I also had the benefit of my tax-deferred investments in my 401K earning a return on those deferred taxes until I started making withdrawals. 401Ks are a good alternative to pensions for many people.
And there's another one about this same topic. This one says, dear Mr. Clark, not quite bad enough for Howard, you stink more than moldy cottage cheese left in an abandoned house. You said the 401k system is broken. It's not. My wife and I were just above the IRS definition of poverty level for about the first five years of marriage. And we were both able to put some money away into a 401k every month. If a 401k isn't available, we would have set up a Roth with one of your favorites.
We knew people who were around our level of income but chose to spend $100 a plus monthly getting their nails done or other things. There are some situations where people can't and I feel sad for them and help as I can with food bank donations but it's fairly often being an adult and prioritizing. It's also a matter of education. I still have the six digits of pie memorized from my school about 25 years ago. 3.1415927.
but I didn't know anything about retirement accounts are investing until my first job out of high school, Ben. Ben, thank you. Okay, so to both of you, right, the problem for me with the 401K, we don't have all day to talk about this, but let me summarize as quickly as I can, is how often today's workers change jobs. And I just did something on television where I went to a park
and stop people in the parking rail having a good time and asked and not a single person could tell me what they were supposed to do with their 401k when they changed jobs. Not one had a good answer for that of the people I asked at random.
And these were all people who'd done 401ks and they didn't know what to do. We need to rethink how we say for retirement and how contributions are made by employers to an account that is owned by the employee, the person, rather than something managed by the company. And I've got a lot of ideas about how matches should be done. And then the hard part
that is the other thing I can't dig too deeply into is what happens at time of retirement, how do you manage that money? That's where people have even more difficulties doing. So we need to really think about the wider picture in an era where people change jobs so many times, how we make it possible and easy for them to save for retirement.
Clark stinks more than a ferret cage that hasn't been cleaned in months, and believe me, that is pretty stinky because ferrets are filthy. You're held a ferret? No. I have. Have you? Yeah.
You missed the mark on only talking about applicants' transgressions in the job search process. You failed to cover the other side that has their transgressions too. From personal experience, I have been ghosted by potential future employers for scheduled interviews, exclusion of benefits in the final job offer that were previously communicated, shown my name on the door and on informed I would be receiving a written offer than getting nothing.
and after I countered sensibly on an initial job offer, I was told they would talk and turn Lee and get back to me, but they never did even after I followed up several times. I should write a book as there are several other instances where in my experience, a company didn't act professionally or courteously. Cheers, Steve. Steve, thank you for that perspective of potential employers behaving badly. My beef with employers is when they post a job
and go through the motions of interviewing people when they've already decided before the job was ever posted who they were going to give the job to anyway and you use up your time and you have false hope about a job opportunity that you were never really a candidate for from the get-go.
Just some well-intentioned stinkiness, while I agree that all people should be advocates for their health, I'd recommend that they start close to home first. For many conditions, there are regional centers of excellence or local academic centers that a patient can be referred to, and these centers can also collaborate with the patient's local doctor to keep treatments close to home. This would save the financial and time costs of travel as well as the risks of having to pay out of pocket for insurers that won't cover a self-referral, Nikki.
Nicky, very good advice, absolutely valid.
Clark continues to confuse his listeners by conflating scams on Zell versus security concerns. He says things like, if a criminal gets into the Zell platform, there is no known weakness in the security at Zell. If a criminal got into vanguard of fidelity, it would be devastating as well. Security is not the problem. The problem is Zell is the same as the other peer-to-peer payment networks, the scams, and how the service handles refund requests from victims. There is no evidence of any of the scams being perpetrated by criminals breaking into the Zell service.
Please stop confusing the issue, Ben. Ben, thank you for that. All right. So why is Zell something that I call Big Bad Zell? Because it is embedded inside your bank account. And a number of financial institutions do something that's so dishonest and unethical. I mean, it way past stinks. It infuriates me where they bring Zell active and live without even telling you it's there.
And so if a criminal is able to get into your account, they can then use sell as a way to remove the funds from your account. And the bank's attitude is, well, I mean, you must have done something that they got into your account.
The difference that to me is significant with cash app and PayPal and Venmo, they are not embedded in your account. They have their own problems as well. And the real issue is that nothing in the law or regulations anticipated a creature like Zell or the other payment apps, and that's why they leave you wide open and vulnerable to having your money swipe from you.
Clark was asked about people advertising help with the FAFSA application, and Clark answered as if the question was about engaging a financial aid advisor. These are not the same. People advertising that they can help with the FAFSA steer families into manipulating income and assets to appear that they have more financial need than they do instead of actually providing guidance through the complicated web of federal and institutional private need-based and merit-based aid, Shannon.
Shannon, that's an angle I'm not familiar with, that there are people who hang out a shingle figuratively, that they are helping you manipulate your FAFSA so that you will appear more needy than you really are. And if that's going on, you just taught me something.
Hey Clark, smells like the milk is turned over there. Recently, you mentioned someone getting Bitcoin solicited to them on social media or something similar. Well, I agree that that sounded like an obvious scam. You seem pretty clueless about Bitcoin. At the very least, you should be familiar with the reputable exchanges like they mentioned one that do proof of reserves so that you don't run into an FTX type of situation again.
I'd recommend reading why Bitcoin is very different from every other cryptocurrency and Fidelity's report titled Bitcoin First. Finally, I'd invite you to consider reading one book on the subject, like the Bitcoin standard by Sifidin Emus. I think that's how they pronounce it. You may find it interesting to learn about MicroStrategy, a data analytics company who CEO Michael Saylor read that book and decided to put his company's treasury into Bitcoin.
Since that time four years ago, MicroStrategy has outperformed every other American stock, including Nvidia, and is still only worth 2% of Nvidia's market cap. Shockingly, Vanguard, which doesn't allow users to buy Bitcoin spot ETFs, has the second largest institutional stake in this company, along with many other banks and financial houses that have openly trashed talked Bitcoin.
To top it all off, the SPOT Bitcoin ETFs have had an incredible year as far as volume, assets under management and flows, even taking in more than VOO IVV some weeks and breaking many records. I think it's time to do some homework and take Bitcoin seriously, James.
James, thank you very much and I've been hearing from people unhappy with what I've said about Bitcoin for as long as Bitcoin's been around. Okay, so what's my problem with Bitcoin? Is it a speculative holding or is it a form of payment?
a form of money and Bitcoin because of its unique structure and the way it's manufactured and also the excitement in the marketplace has had a trajectory that is extraordinary.
It is not a modern money. It is, in my opinion, still, in my opinion, has not changed on this. The speculative holding that has worked out very well for the people who have speculated in it through the years. And James, I appreciate your passion. Obviously, you have benefited from it and are very excited you're in it. My son
is someone who loves Bitcoin and has had Bitcoin since he was an early teenager. And he's like, dad, you just don't get this. I do get it. It's just not my thing. I'm interested in things that invest in productive capacity, that invest in the future of the United States, the well-being of people, the world economy,
And Bitcoin does not do any of that. Bitcoin is a holding that people have, but it creates no productive capacity anywhere at any time. So we can talk about crypto and Bitcoin.
all you want. I want long-term prosperity for the great mass of people and cryptos. Don't do anything to support that. Just as gold does not either, and gold has had a phenomenal run-up as well as Bitcoin has had. If you look at the two of them, they have trended generally up together. For reasons
that are macro as well. People's worry about the value of government issued money and uncertainty in the world. Gold has always been a hedge and for many people Bitcoin is as well a hedge against uncertainty problems in the world. I'm going to leave it there. I probably should have said less.
But that will lead to more Clark stinks on a future edition. Coming up ahead, I want to talk about what creates economic growth, what makes people wealthier. It is productivity. That's what it's really about.
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So so much fuss has been made about what's going on in the fast food industry because we all got to eat and a lot of Americans consume fast food or quick serve food.
And now more and more places you go to, you walk in the door. And for example, Panera was very early in this with, instead of you going to a cashier, them trying to get you, when you walked in the door, see a bank of kiosk to order at. And they were very primitive early systems. They were very early on it. So many chains now,
When you walk in, they want you to go to a screen to order. They want you to use their app. I've talked about the advantage of the apps. And California went to the $20 minimum wage for chain restaurant workers. That led to big controversy about what that was going to do to employment and all that.
did nothing about employment, didn't kill employment at all. The reality is a lot of the jobs that automation plays a role, that technology plays a role, that is not replacing a worker because those businesses have trouble finding and maintaining a workforce anyway. And now, as I shared with you years ago,
from the annual CES in Las Vegas consumer electronics show that I used to cover every year and I retired from doing that from exhaustion five years ago. But at CES year after year there would be all these inventors
and companies showing new ways of doing things that right now humans have to do and have machines do. And nowhere would I see more stuff like that than for the restaurant industry.
And now forget the kiosk, you're going to see more and more working back of the house as robotics replace humans, preparing food, making food, salad chains. You know, when you go down a line and you tell them what you want in the salad, you're going to see robots doing that. And they'll equally measure, you know, they'll put in this much of this and this much of that.
And it will be totally integrated with the app you place your order or a kiosk place your order. If you do go to a human and you place an order, the robot will still be the one making the salad or flipping the burger or cooking the egg or whatever. And you're like, what about the jobs? The marketplace always innovates, always creates
new opportunity because the only way you make a society more wealthy the only way is by generating more goods or services for hours worked
That's the only way. That's what makes a society more wealthy, unless it's a, you know, a petro dictatorship that they're making money from oil coming out of the ground or natural resources of some kind for societies and the people in them to become more wealthy, to have better lives, to reduce poverty. It's all about productivity.
And so you can fear the robotics, and there's so much talk about robotics. And AI is the big buzzword, and it's tied right in in so many ways with technology like robotics. But this is how you make a society more successful. You know what else?
Other jobs come along. Other things need to be done. I don't believe it. I feel that that something is in the category that I know, that it's empirically true, that you should not fear for society the benefits of advances in technology that make work more efficient. Now, who has
a reason to fear, though, people in an individual job that that job gets mowed down by advances in automation, technology, robotics, AI, whatever, that is a fact. But that has always been part of economies.
that jobs that are valid and important today, maybe 50 years won't be there. It is completely common way before we talked about AI or robotics or automation, that the jobs that exist 20 years out will be very different than the jobs that exist today.
But if you go back and you look at 1950s or 1960s, United States, people live so much better today than they did those many generations ago. It's not even close.
You look like, oh no, there come the Clark Stakes from that. I honestly, I wish I could feel the way you do, but I can't think of a single job that won't be affected by AI and robotics. I was just talking to someone about this yesterday. The fact that they're actually doing things that humans do in a different way. And so I do feel like, I don't think society will have less money overall, but I think they're going to be way less jobs. That scares me for people's
like reason to live and you know I mean like I think there really will be less work. You know in the United States people have believed that going back into the late 1700s. Yeah but this is different. You know this is different. This is you know this is actually things that can replace human beings like in a different way I think and I'm sorry I wish I didn't feel that way. No but what you believe
is a valid feeling and a valid belief. And there are people as futurists that will look and say, this time is different. But the reality is, all through human history there have been, but really only in a big way since the early 1800s, there have been continuing things that have changed how life works in the work world.
and there have always been other jobs that have come along. You think about, through most human history, how brutal work was, how dangerous it was, how physically devastating work was. It was all extreme physical. The nature of work never stops changing in a modern era, and other things will emerge that we can't even see right now.
I hope so. I hope we're not just a bunch of zombies walking around with phones. That's what it seems like. We are a bunch of zombies walking around with phones right now. Okay, we'll go to questions. Jay in Florida says, is there any extra risk of losing money via scam or hack if one uses the same brokerage favorite child banking capability for day to day routine banking and for life savings investments? Does the simplicity and other advantages of the company outweigh
The added security of separation of having day to day relatively low balance checking account at a zero fee of carefully managed credit union or bank. Okay. Great question, Jay. All right. So let's talk about my favorite children, Schwab Vanguard Fidelity.
So what you want to look at, whichever one of the three you're at, if you're looking at banking, it's almost certainly Schwab or Fidelity. Go read the Schwab and Fidelity policies on what happens to your account if money is swiped from your account. And under what circumstances that they explicitly state that they will restore your funds.
They have written policies and you want to see if those policies make you feel at ease. Now for reasons that are complicated, I actually have a credit union account and I have money with all three of my favorite children. So I am diversified
with where my money sits. And it answers the question of all my eggs in one basket. I don't have that. It's not for the reason that you're talking about there are a variety of circumstances over the years that I've ended up with accounts at Navy Federal Credit Union and with Schwab Vanguard and Fidelity. So I think there are advantages that appear in your life to having more than one financial arrangement.
Troy in South Dakota says, you're the first podcast I listen to every weekday during my hour long morning commute. And I appreciate your advice. Thank you. I recently bought a 15 inch MacBook Air to browse the internet and check my financial accounts. Do you recommend using a VPN, antivirus software, ad blocker, password manager? And if so, what do you like?
Okay, so Troy, let me say this to you. All right. So with a Mac, you already have really nice security built into a Mac. I think that is an advantage. Macs have over Windows computers. They don't have it over Chromebooks. Chromebooks are very safe creatures from the ground up.
on a virtual private network. The real advantage of a VPN is if you're using public Wi-Fi. If you routinely travel a lot with that Mac and you're on a variety of networks, you're not sure their friend or foe, using a VPN is very much to your advantage. I don't feel any need
though with that advanced MacBook you have for you to add any kind of additional antivirus beyond what Apple already builds into the system. The third thing you said, password managers, I really like if you're not able to come up with a systemic way to create very exotic passwords,
to use a password manager for that. You can always have the risk like Krista had that her password manager was hacked into. That has happened on more than one occasion and then the criminals have a pretty useful entry possibly into your life and your passwords. But a password manager I find is worth that potential downside because we tend to be creatures of habit
and create passwords that are so patterned or the same that we're making it pretty easy for a criminal to get into our lives. I hope that you really enjoy using that MacBook. I'm the only one in my family who doesn't use a MacBook. I use only Chromebooks and the ad blockers
People do tend to like using an ad blocker many times. As far as the downside of using one, there are sites that won't function well if you've got an ad blocker on your computer.
But that's something you can do trial and error if you end up finding that the ad blocker makes your Mac less efficient going to various websites, you could disable the ad blocker. Okay, Jeff in Texas says, I know you don't like debit cards to make purchases, but are you comfortable with using the Fidelity debit card only for getting cash at a bank-based ATM machine?
Yeah, that's fine. And let me say this about debit cards. Debit cards don't have the protection of a credit card. A lot of people like using debit cards because they don't trust themselves with a credit card. And they know they're gonna run up balances that they can't afford to pay when the bill comes in with a credit card. So I've softened on this because of the consumer behavior about how people don't feel like they're really spending when they use a credit card.
All right, so we know there's greater risk using a debit card. You don't have the consumer protections because the banks manipulated Congress to not have the same protections on a debit card. You have on a credit card. So you're laying yourself wide open. If you're using it for small purchases, purchases you're doing at the time you're using it, the risk of the debit card
that you could have a problem, or potentially outweighed by somebody who knows consumer behavior-wise, they can't handle a credit card, use it. But your single-use purpose of that debit card to get ATM money, that's exactly what I do, is I have to have the ability to get money out of an ATM, and I have a debit card. I only
only use for that purpose and that's it. So I hope that you have a great weekend as we kick off Thanksgiving week. And I hope that this Thanksgiving week coming up brings great joy into your life and that you take a moment at some time and just think through. Thanksgiving is about gratitude and thanks.
And just take that moment to think about what you've got to be thankful for and what you're grateful for in your life. As I said earlier, we will be running best ofs next week for Thanksgiving as we take Thanksgiving week off. And I hope that you, if you're a workaholic,
that you try to shift into a lower gear between now and the first of the year through the Thanksgiving holiday, Christmas, New Year's, or whatever holidays you celebrate that you take time for yourself.
for your own relaxation, for your own enjoyment, because there's always more time for work. But a lot of us don't take enough time for ourselves, our time with friends, and our time with family. And in the end, that's what ultimately, I think we learned to cherish anyway. And we'll see you in 10 days.
