Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 01.10.25 Clark Answers His Critics on Clark Stinks / Find Your Best Phone Plan About this episode Friday - Clark Stinks day! Christa shares Clark Stinks posts with Clark. Submit yours at Clark.com/ClarkStinks. Also in this episode - cell phone companies tend to make their plan offers deliberately confusing. Clark offers resources to cut through the hype and zero in on the plan that is best for you, while potentially saving you hundreds of dollars per year. Clark Stinks: Segments 1 & 2 Back To Basics: Cell Phone Plans: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: Clark Deals - Today's Best Deals of the Day Why I Think Medicare Advantage Plans Stink - Clark Howard What Are Index Funds? // What Is an ETF? 3 Ways To Get a Free VIN Check Before Buying a Used Car Phone Plan Finder – Find and Compare Phone Plans - Clark.com Best Phone Plans: Get Exactly What You Want at the Cheapest Price 11 New Cell Phone Deals in January Amazon Haul: 4 Things To Know Before You Shop Should I Sell My House on My Own or Through a Real Estate Agent? How to Shop for Lower Car Insurance Best And Worst Homeowners Insurance Companies Clark.com resources Episode transcripts Community. Clark.com / Ask Clark Clark.com daily money newsletter Consumer Action Center Free Helpline: 636-492-5275 Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 You've spent your career building a retirement nest egg. Now, where will your monthly income come from? Meet the Simplify Target 15 Distribution ETF. Ticker XV. Designed to target a 15% annualized distribution rate, paid monthly. The target isn't guaranteed. Distributions may vary and the rate isn't investment return. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Carefully consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. The prospectus contains this and other information. Visit simplify.us/nestegg to learn more. Please read the prospectus carefully before you invest. Distributor, Forside Financial Services, LLC.
0:41 Speaker 01 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
1:01 Speaker 02 I'm so glad you're with us today on the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve you with advice and information so you make better financial decisions in your life. I forgot to say empowerment. We empower you every day. That's my goal. And today, I get empowerment from you and our first Clark, Clark's, Clark's, Clark's take. Woo. Rewind the computer, Clark, of the new year. And if you're new to the show, hopefully, you're in for a special treat. And also in this episode, you're going to hear me do various checkup items for you.
1:44 Speaker 02 Did one a few days ago about how to get your streaming life budget in order. Today, I'm going to talk about how to get your cellphone budget in order. But right now, it is time for Clark's take.
1:59 Speaker 03 I should have never encouraged you to speak.
2:01 Speaker 04 You must 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.
2:11 Speaker 05 Oh Clark.
2:12 Speaker 02 You didn't really do the Krista dance today.
2:16 Speaker 05 No, it wouldn't be special if I did it every time.
2:19 Speaker 02 Okay.
2:20 Speaker 05 Your advice stinks worse than my full garbage can left by the curb for a week in the July heat. This is a double stinky. You and Krista. On December 10th, Krista told a listener that LED bulbs may fail early if you put them in a fixture with a lower wattage rating than the LED's equivalent rating of an incandescent bulb. Not so. The equivalence is an imaginary number. What the manufacturer is trying to say is that the brightness of the LED is the same as such and such light bulb, but it's a made up number. If you want to know how bright a bulb is, look at the lumens. The fixture only cares about how much energy is actually running through it and how much heat it generates. Both are indicated by the actual wattage used by the bulb, not
3:00 Speaker 05 that fictitious equivalent wattage. You can put an LED that actually uses 15 watts in a 40 watt rated light fixture, no problem, and it will be as bright as a 100 watt incandescent, Greg.
3:13 Speaker 02 100% correct Greg on everything you said. And what's so phenomenal is how cheap LED bulbs are now for lamps, that kind of thing. Routinely, we have them on Clark deals. As little as a dollar, $1.25 a bulb. And what they save you in electricity over the years, I mean, it's a big number. And, you know what else? The light from an LED bulb is whatever you want it to be now. So, you know, you like soft white, a really soft white, a lighter white. Many of them will do all kinds of colors. Whatever you want,
3:56 Speaker 02 you're going to have that with an LED bulb and... The quality of them is still up and down depending on the manufacturer, but they are a deal.
4:07 Speaker 05 You stink like that musty old record you play over and over about credit card rewards. We get it. A person who spends $40,000 in charges would get an extra $400 with a 2% card versus a 1% card, and even a little bit more by cards with little stickers. But you don't listen when we want to hear the record about bank bonuses or brokerage bonuses that easily generate far more money. I earn $400 a month for less than an hour of work to open a new checking account and change my payroll direct deposit. A few alarms set on my phone and I do the same the next month and close out the account after the bonus is collected. And this is like coin purse change compared to the $18,000 I collected last week for moving IRAs and Roth IRAs last March without changing a single investment for my Schwab
4:50 Speaker 05 and Vanquish Intex ETFs. I can now switch and collect $20,000 a year for the next three years with a few account transfers. Please help your listeners by not playing credit cards so much and start informing them about the significant bonuses they can get. Joe.
5:06 Speaker 02 Joe, I want to thank you for this. And Joe, you are a nightmare for the banks and brokerage houses because you are so methodical about this. So why is it I don't talk about a lot of these bonuses? Because these bonuses, you know, I get them every single week from banks offering me 300, 500, even $1,000 to open a checking account with them. As long as I set up, as you talked about, Joe, direct deposit. So I'm a little flaky. I am not like you that, that I keep the perfect records and I know exactly when I should move the money again and all that.
5:48 Speaker 02 You have to be your kind of personality to make these programs work. Most of us fall right into the trap that the banks and the brokerages want, which is we move stuff over and then when the reward period is up, we just leave it there. You're playing a great game of hopscotch. And they all know in their business models, there's going to be 1% or 2% of people who are going to really wonderfully game the offers. And that's perfectly legal what you're doing. And keep doing exactly what you're doing. And thank you for sharing for others that are infinitely great at detail
6:33 Speaker 02 that they should be doing this too.
6:35 Speaker 05 I think I heard Clark say Medicare Advantage health plans are dumping patients in quotes, "back into regular Medicare at an expense on the average taxpayer." I always thought that the whole system, regular and advantage plans, is wholly supported by US taxpayers. This is why I get upset when I read about the hundreds of millions these plans make by denying care to seniors. Please let me know if I stink or if it's Clark. John.
6:57 Speaker 02 John, okay. So what happens in a Medicare Advantage plan is what you just said about denying care. So what will happen is somebody will be really, really sick who's in an Advantage plan. And the Advantage plan, one of the problems with them is they can work great for regular routine stuff. You can see how you might be saving money being in them versus being in traditional Medicare. But then when somebody gets a really, really complicated or expensive illness, that's when the problems with Advantage plans comes to the fore. Because they make their money by the money they get from the federal government. And what they keep is the difference
7:42 Speaker 02 between what they have to lay out for their Advantage members' medical bills. That difference is what they keep. So the incentives are set up so strongly for the Advantage plans to deny life-saving care for people who need expensive operations or need expensive ongoing cancer care. And that's why there's the patient dumping going on back into traditional Medicare. So someone who has a catastrophic illness costs a lot of money to treat. And so that then, the advantage plans were getting all this money from the federal
8:23 Speaker 02 government, and they were making nice money on you. Then suddenly you're expensive and they're like, "We're not gonna take care of you. I don't know why you thought we were gonna do that." And that's when people, to save their lives, if they have the family resources to do so, switch back to traditional Medicare.
8:43 Speaker 05 Clark, you mentioned on your podcast that you thought you were too old to donate your body to a medical school for research. I can attest that is not the case. My father was 75 when he passed away, and prior to his death, he completed the application to donate his body to UNC Chapel Hill's Medical School, and they accepted it. About a year after his death, UNC invited our family to Chapel Hill for a wonderful ceremony in which the medical students performed music to honor the people who donated their bodies. There were about 50 families in attendance, and it was very gratifying that my father had the vision to do that. He was a career academician, and his final wish was to benefit education in any way he could. John, he sounds like a wonderful man, his dad.
9:23 Speaker 02 That is really neat. And John, I'm gonna see if I can do the same, donating to a medical school, since I'm getting to the point that nobody's gonna want my organs for transplant. So, I love that, and I thank you for suggesting it.
9:41 Speaker 05 And what a neat thing that UNC Chapel Hill does with that program. That sounds lovely. What a nice tribute. On property taxes, Clark, you need to do your research on all 50 states before you pontificate. If you had studied the way Oregon does things, you would have learned that the assessed value of property in the state cannot increase by more than 3% per year. And unlike crazy California, property doesn't get reassessed upon sale. So there are no huge and unfair disparities. The only way property gets reassessed at a higher rate is if the owner does an addition or other major value-enhancing improvements, which is fair. Gordon, and lots of people wrote in about that.
10:15 Speaker 02 About Oregon, specifically?
10:17 Speaker 05 No, just about that.
10:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, so when I talk about something that affects all 50 states, obviously there's gonna be generalizations. And no one has figured out what the perfect solution is.
10:31 Speaker 02 To not driving people out of their homes as home values have risen. Several states have some methods like we're talking about with Oregon that caps the increase by a certain amount each year for residents. And Florida is an example, but I think they also use the 3% except for the many people in Florida who own property there that are non-residents. This is something we'll find our way to, and it's one of the advantages of federalism, is that all 50 states are learning laboratories about how to solve a problem.
11:10 Speaker 02 And right now, we have had a problem in many states that don't have a system like Oregon has or other states that cap how much property taxes can go up in a single year and then in turn not price people out of their homes. I want to thank you, Gordon, and all the others who wrote in about this. And I must have done a really bad job in my generalization about the property tax problem. And if I did a really bad job, I apologize for that.
11:44 Speaker 05 You don't stink, but I think you missed an opportunity to explain something. A 22-year-old young man wrote in to ask about where to invest. You said index funds, which in my humble opinion is correct, but you didn't explain why. You often talk about index funds, but rarely explain the rationale so listeners can understand the thought process and numbers behind that decision. Some concrete numbers would be helpful. Here's some I think would be helpful to put things in perspective. It's impossible to time the market. This has been proven time and time again. The market on average goes up 10% annually, but this is a long-term number. It only goes up 52% of the time daily and is up 69% of the time after one year, 81% of the time after five years, and 100% of the time over 20 years.
12:26 Speaker 05 The market always goes up, but you can't tell when and for how long. Active fund managers don't beat that market 94% of the time over the long term.
12:34 Speaker 02 Say that one again.
12:36 Speaker 05 Active fund managers don't beat the market 94% of the time over the Long term, they may beat it for a year or two, but long term, they don't. This year's winning managers are different from last year's. Market timing does not work, and this is the reason you should invest in the market as a whole in passive index funds. And that's from Linda.
12:55 Speaker 02 Linda, thank you. That was a perfect explanation of my obsession with index funds or the ETF equivalent is that you don't have to be exceptional. If you just ride the market, you'll do fine. When you look at active, people who go into active funds, they tend over time to trail the market by a significant amount of money. And the most important thing about being in index funds is that you stay the course. When we go into a bear market, which is a decline of 20% or more, we may be in a position
13:34 Speaker 02 that feels terrible for a year, year and a half, two years. You can't bail, you gotta stay in. Think about 2000, was it 2007 or 2008 that we were getting deluged from people that wanted to bail from their investments?
13:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I think 2008, yep.
13:55 Speaker 02 And what happened to those people? They missed the run-up.
13:59 Speaker 05 Yep, for sure.
14:00 Speaker 02 One of the greatest bear markets of all time that emerged from that time of panic from the banking scandals. And capitalism reforms, heals, and grows.
14:13 Speaker 05 You were talking about Walmart delivery service, and you mentioned that the tip was optional. It's my understanding that if you don't tip this driver that delivers from the store, in some cases, and it's really hard to tell with Walmart, how your item's actually coming, the driver will get shorted. So it's important to tip if they're coming from the store. It used to be DoorDash drivers were doing this run. I don't know if that's still the case. I think in some places Walmart has their own delivery service, but it depends on where you live, Pete.
14:41 Speaker 02 Pete, thank you for that. You know, Walmart for a while did all kinds of experimenting with how they did their store deliveries. They would ask employees, "Hey, on your way home, do you mind taking a couple of deliveries?" And the big advantage to the employee was they were getting tips. Obviously, if you have DoorDash doing it, it would be tips. Walmart, though, more and more is doing their deliveries with their own fleet of drivers and trucks. It would be the equivalent of Amazon delivering with its own drivers and trucks. Do people tip Amazon drivers?
15:14 Speaker 05 I don't know.
15:16 Speaker 02 I've not heard of that before.
15:17 Speaker 05 Clark doesn't stink, but I believe not long ago, he said it's okay to give out a VIN to someone who's interested in a vehicle for sale. Maybe there are stipulations, but I don't remember. I listed a vehicle yesterday. After Googling if it was safe, I gave my VIN to a couple of people who wanted to run a Carfax, but the requests kept coming. I went back online and further down in the search, and it said it wasn't a good idea due to VIN washing. Looking back at who received my VIN, these two individuals weren't local and had zero info or posts on their pages. Whoops, now my VIN is out there. Richard.
15:49 Speaker 02 Richard, thank you. All right, so this is a complicated thing. People are duplicating your listing for sale to con other people who then pay them a deposit, sight unseen for the vehicle. It's the most common thing that will happen with what you refer to. I've not heard the term before, VIN washing. I've heard it as VIN cloning. It's hard because if you look on AutoTrader, or you look any other car sale site, you'll now see that dealers of used vehicles routinely, automatically have there where you can see the VIN on the
16:28 Speaker 02 vehicle, and you can see potentially a Carfax report or something like that. It has become part of how people go about buying used vehicles because they don't want to buy trouble. Now you're talking about the other side of this, that people can have trouble from the actual VIN being supplied with the VIN itself, that you, as the seller, could have problems. I mean, it's, it's just... Hard to know what to say because it's really useful for a car buyer to have a VIN, so they don't waste their time with a vehicle that's been through significant damage.
17:10 Speaker 02 And while we're talking about damage to vehicles, I wanted to make sure you know about something that I had complained about, a problem I had buying a demonstrator vehicle. And somebody mentioned to me, "Hey, if you buy a demo unit from Tesla, they will not normally disclose unless you click deep into it, that the vehicle has been in an accident." So I went on Tesla's website after somebody told me that, and sure enough, I found a demo unit for sale that didn't say anything about the fact that the vehicle had been in a wreck, maybe on a test drive or something like that, till I clicked on a sub-menu,
17:55 Speaker 02 and there it disclosed that the vehicle had had $5,850 in repairs done to it before it was put for sale. And that brings up again, how important it is to do back grounding on any vehicle you're gonna buy. If it's a new car on a new vehicle lot, maybe not so much. If it's a vehicle that's a demo, or one or two years old, really important to know, not the mechanical of the vehicle, nearly as much as it is if it's been in any kind of accident that would mean you're buying a vehicle, day one to you,
18:38 Speaker 02 that already has a problem that's gonna make it worth a lot less, and maybe also cause you problems down the road because of whatever accident it was in. Coming up ahead, I want to talk to you about something that we waste crazy amounts of money on, and that's our cell phones.
19:02 Speaker 01 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
19:32 Speaker 06 UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG: HR, Pay, and Workforce Management. Welcome to the 50th Hunger Day. Witness the beginning of the revolution. Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start. Filmed for IMAX. Make them remember you. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.
20:18 Speaker 06 Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.
20:45 Speaker 05 As wish lists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tato One and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro, and more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Baumann, Clinique, or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in-store or at Ulta.com. Ulta Beauty.
21:13 Speaker 02 Industries don't like for you to find the lowest price. I'd say that's true today in the cellphone industry, not for your actual phone, but for the service. More true with it than most any other thing. They benefit from having you completely confused. I only get to see ads during football season. But during football season, it's one ad after another, after another, after another for T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. They are all trying to pull a game of three-card money on you.
21:54 Speaker 02 Trying to get you to think you're getting a deal when you're not. And make the plans so confusing that your eyes are just losing focus trying to understand what you're signing up for. And that's by design. They want you to overpay. And there are a few things I want you to think about. You know, this is a back-to-basics that we're doing right now. This is one you have to hear repeatedly to get you to do it. If you by inertia are allowing any of the three bigs to abuse your wallet and you have
22:33 Speaker 02 not shopped your cellphone plan for you as an individual or for a family group or whatever, if you haven't shopped it in six months, I guarantee you, you're paying too much. Not even a doubt in my mind. And something else that I've learned, looking at data...
22:55 Speaker 02 Is a lot of us are paying for unlimited data on our cell phones when we barely use any. I love that since I switched to Google Fi, which is an interesting service to be with, I'll say, from Google. It's one of the things that Google threw themselves in just a little teeny bit. They show me, I can look right now on my phone, and I can see through the billing cycle how much data each of us on my Google Fi plan are using. And there's a data cap with Google Fi. So it's important that you track. So we're not on unlimited plans because we didn't need an unlimited plan,
23:40 Speaker 02 except for my teenage son. For the rest of us, we use amazingly small amounts of data per month. So why pay for unlimited when we didn't need unlimited? That's just one example. But also, being with one of the big three, you can have multiple ways to be with one of the big three. And that's because each of the big three own their own captive discount brands. Nobody has more discount brands than Verizon. I cannot understand their strategy to save my life. But Verizon is almost like GM forever ago.
24:25 Speaker 02 What was it that you say, a different kind of car for every different customer? Well, that's kind of how Verizon does it now. Just examples with Straight Talk and Visible and Total Wireless. They own these brands and you have Verizon service on these brands, but for a fraction of the cost of being with Verizon. T-Mobile has a bunch of ones they own. AT&T's not done as much of this. They've got Cricket, but they haven't done a lot useful with Cricket. And they don't have a lot of these other brands. But you can be with a captive, one of their own brands and save a fortune. Or you can even go with an independent like I've done being with Google Fi.
25:08 Speaker 02 One of my daughters is with Visible and that's a Verizon owned brand. So I've got a couple of things for you. I have a phone plan finder tool where you can put in your situation, one line, two lines, three, four, five, and figure out what are the advantages of being with this company versus this company versus that company. The goal is for an individual to save you $500 a year. For a family plan to save you $1,500 a year. And so the question is, who couldn't use 500 bucks back in their pocket, or a
25:49 Speaker 02 family with 1,500? It's possible, just by not falling, for all the malarkey from the AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile ads. They may be cute, but they're not cute for your wallet.
26:05 Speaker 05 And you can find that tool at Clark.com/phoneplanfinder. We also have an article on the best phone plans, which is constantly updated. We'll go to questions now. This one's kind of funny. This is from Joe in Georgia. "Hi Clark, when you were talking about Amazon, did you say Amazon H-A-L-L, or Amazon H-U-L-L?"
26:25 Speaker 02 Okay, Amazon Hall. I never thought I should have spelled it H-A-U-L. So this is Amazon's competitive response to all the market share they're losing to Temu and Shein. So what you do is you have to have the Amazon app to access it. And then you type in the search box "Hall," and it takes you to the semi-secret Amazon Hall website, or app, where you see things that are crazy cheap. And instead of being shipped in, if you're a Prime member, in one, two, or three days, two weeks, three weeks, 10 days, two months,
27:08 Speaker 02 whatever. So if you absolutely want it in a short cycle, Amazon Haul, H-A-U-L, is not for you. But if you want to get these ridiculously cheap prices, it's a great source. Now, I have been looking repeatedly at the items available for sale on Amazon Haul, and comparing them to what's available on Temu. And Amazon's not there yet. Temu is a much stronger competitor.
27:41 Speaker 02 And Amazon's response so far is pretty weak, but with Amazon, give them time. And Amazon Haul, H-A-U-L, will almost certainly be a very strong competitor to the Asian websites, both Shein and Timu.
28:00 Speaker 05 Dan in Ohio says, "Long time, Clarky. I'm moving and selling my home. I hear ads for companies that will buy your house and you can just move. Are there legitimate companies that will give you a fair market price, or is it better to list it with a real estate agent and sell it the old fashioned way?"
28:16 Speaker 02 So Dan, for a while, I could say, "Wow, this has changed. There's great opportunity selling to these websites that were using algorithms to give you the opportunity to sell your home quick. No listings, no showings, nothing like that. You would just sell it to them. You'd move when you wanted to. You'd negotiate that as part of the deal." And they were offering a near market price. And what happened was they lost their shirts. And I remember Zillow was in it for a while. Oh, the write-offs they had to do.
28:57 Speaker 05 You sold a place that way.
28:59 Speaker 02 I sold a place, not through Zillow, but another one of these that doesn't do it anymore. I got a great price when I did it, the time I did. People thought that they were going to be able to use historical averages and mathematical formulas and squeeze out a nice profit and make people happy, giving them a guaranteed purchase of their home and bam, you were out. They couldn't make it work. And so I'm trying to remember, Open Door and Offerpad. Can you look, are they both still around while I'm talking about Dan's question?
29:34 Speaker 05 I know Offerpad is.
29:35 Speaker 02 Offerpad is. The offers for survival are not as generous as they once were. Now, there are others that particularly go after people who have a house that an elderly person may have moved into. So there's... Open Door, then the other big one at that time was Offerpad.
29:56 Speaker 05 I know someone who works for Offerpad, actually.
29:59 Speaker 02 Really? So I don't think either are gonna be as generous as they were during the frenzy of this activity, which really dates back four or five years when it was like a big buzz about this. There are still others out there making offers in addition to these two. A lot of them are looking for wounded duck kind of situations. An elderly person who's gone into assisted living, someone who's died and so the heirs are trying to sell. And they don't want to go through the hassle of fixing all the things that need to be repaired to put the house up for market.
30:38 Speaker 02 Those are offers from people who are willing to buy any house as long as the margin is good. They may be contractors themselves, they do the repairs, then they put the house on the market and they make money. You're not getting fair market price selling your home because they've got to have the profit incentive of buying the house as it is, doing the work, and then scoring money on a flip. So if you're just a regular old house, it doesn't hurt you to get prices from companies like Offerpad and Open Door.
31:17 Speaker 02 And then see how they sound and look compared to what you've seen neighbors put similar houses for sale and what kind of prices they got for theirs. But if you ask me, I think you also bring in agents to talk to you about how they would market and what they would expect your house based on comps to sell for before you would sign up with one of these companies that say, okay, this is what we're offering you. You want it? When do you want to move? And you're done. Certainty is a nice thing, right?
31:53 Speaker 05 Darla in Texas says, "Our car and house insurance is skyrocketing, but my teacher's salary is not. What can be done to decrease the cost? Do you have any company recommendations?"
32:04 Speaker 02 So there's no specific company, Darla, that I would recommend. I don't know where in Texas you live. I know that people in Houston and south of Houston along the coast are having the same kind of problems.
32:19 Speaker 02 With homeowners insurance that people are having along the Florida coast, and I think more than anywhere in Louisiana is getting just clobbered with insurance availability for home insurance and the premiums. If you're not in Houston or south, then it's a matter of thoroughly shopping the market. There is no one-it company that I would say, "Oh, go there, you're going to get a lower price." And when you do shop, it's good to get a quote for auto and home, and also auto or home with an insurer. Because there are times you will get a lower price doing what's called tying, putting both
33:03 Speaker 02 insurance products together with a single insurer. But there are other circumstances that that combined discount isn't worth it. And you want to see what is it for standalone from that company for auto, standalone for homeowners, and from other companies as well. It's going to take you some time. Make sure, darling, you're quoting the same coverages. And if you can stand it, raise your deductible on your homeowners to the max you're allowed to under your mortgage. And if you have a loan on your car, the highest deductible your loan company, your bank, credit union, will allow you to have, which is usually on a car, the highest you're allowed to raise
33:47 Speaker 02 it under your auto loan is $1,000. But you want to confirm that. Homeowners, as high as you can stand, you want to raise your deductible. So you never make a claim on your homeowners insurance, except in a catastrophic situation, a catastrophic claim. And I want to thank you for making financial sacrifices to be a teacher, to be there for our kids. And good luck with the shopping. Thank you very much for joining us. I'll be back at your service next week on Monday, answering your questions about your wallet.
34:27 Speaker 02 And all weekend long, you have our resources to serve you at Clark.com, great deals for you at ClarkDeals.com. And while you're at it, why don't you consider signing up for our free newsletters we offer? That will help you over time take much better control of your wallet. Know what we're devoted to, you, learning ways to save more, spend less, and avoid getting ripped off. Have a great weekend.
35:04 Speaker 01 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
Previous 01.08.25 New Year, New Job / Your Longevity Next 01.13.25 Booking Spring & Summer Travel / Amazon Brushing Scams Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
