Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 02.09.26 Gift Cards: Use Or Lose Them / Big Changes For Home Backup Power About this episode Significant numbers of both chain and independent restaurant closures are happening around the country now, and with that - Clark has a dinner bell warning for you. Also - As fierce winter storms ravage regions of the country with lengthy power outages, new tech is ushering in the rise of affordable home battery backups. Got Restaurant Gift Cards?: Segment 1 Ask Clark: Segment 2 Home Battery Backup Power: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: Why You Need To Use Your Gift Cards ASAP Why You Need To Print Out Your Online Billing Statements 7 Things To Know Before You Use Zelle - Clark Howard What Can I Safely Use for Peer-to-Peer Payments? - Clark Howard WSJ: Why I’m Getting a Home Battery Backup Before the Next Outage How To Open a Roth IRA Travel Alert: Requirement for UK Travelers Scams and Your Small Business: A Guide for Business Cheapest Way to Rent a Car: Expert Tips - Clark Howard 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
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1:05 Speaker 02 It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. So we're going through a really tough time for restaurant owners. You may have noticed a lot of restaurants closing that had been in your neighborhood or your area maybe for years and years. And there are very clear reasons why this is happening. And I feel so badly for these restaurant owners. I need to tell you what's important for you about it. An important task for you.
1:49 Speaker 02 And later, with the wave of storms we've had around the country recently, winter storms, animals falling out of trees in Florida from near record low temperatures. Man, there's a lot of things I want you to know about the power outages and that kind of thing, things you can do right now that have become more affordable. Technology is our friend in this and you can buy backup power for your residents at the lowest prices, well, for backup power pretty much ever. And I'll talk about that later.
2:31 Speaker 02 So the restaurant business is normally marginally profitable most years. Of late, it's just so hard. Okay, so average restaurant price up roughly seven and a half percent in the last year. Grocery prices average increase about three and a half percent over the last year. I'm not talking about the cumulative trend since 19 that it's much higher than that, about 30 something percent for grocery stores. But the cost pressures in the restaurant business are so great. And even at increased price for your bill of seven and a half percent approximately, a lot of restaurants cannot make it.
3:14 Speaker 02 They're in an impossible bind because if they raise prices, there are people who say can't afford to eat there anymore. Don't raise prices. The restaurant may bring customers in, but lose money on every one of them that they see. So the only ones that make announcements are with the chains closing so many locations. And then a company owns dozens of restaurants. It'll make the news potentially and they'll file bankruptcy and they liquidate a lot of the locations and try to survive with others. But the quiet closing of restaurants is really the bigger story. So many not making it.
3:59 Speaker 02 So I want to talk about indigestion for your wallet. When you have a gift card for a restaurant that you keep intending to use and you just don't get around to it, or you forgot you even got it this past Christmas, or who knows when, and the restaurant closes and that gift card goes up, poof.
4:24 Speaker 02 So that's why it's indigestion for your wallet because you didn't get to get any indigestion from the meal if it wasn't good. Use those cards. I always talk about in January, why you want to use the gift cards you got for retailers and all that over the holidays? They don't get better with time. Use them. Well, now here we are in February, I'm talking about gift cards again. And it's because I keep reading about the problems in the restaurant business. And so even though you should burn through the money on gift cards anyway, because there's nothing backing them up if a retailer closes or whatever, but this is
5:06 Speaker 02 especially a priority right now with the restaurant gift cards. So please, think about that. And I know, again, if I'm talking to you and you're an owner of a restaurant, I know how hard things have been for you for the last seven years. I'm just so sorry. It's been so hard. Krista, one of the surprises I read in a financial publication, I forget which one was, that people are confused. How did a restaurant make it through COVID? Make it these years? And now suddenly they're closing? Accumulated pressure, accumulated financial pressure. They may have borrowed money to keep the doors open. So they've got the cost of running the restaurant and they've got the cost of the loans, the labor
5:51 Speaker 02 costs have kept going up, the rents have gone up. So it's accumulated pressure that we're now seeing that so delayed from when restaurants were so disrupted during COVID.
6:05 Speaker 03 A friend of mine is in that exact situation. And I was talking to her about it yesterday. And when you have weather situations, you know, a cold snap, things like that in the winter, a lot of people might not go out as much too. So that's compounding it if you're already on very slim margins and all that. So yeah, it's tough, very tough. Okay, we'll go to questions now. Ellen in California says, my sister lives in another state and I want to send her flowers. What are the least expensive options for doing that? This is the time of year.
6:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. So the answer is the answer to every question.
6:40 Speaker 03 I know. Ding ding ding. I'm guessing it's going to be Costco.
6:44 Speaker 02 Sam's Club and Costco. They both do huge businesses now in delivery flowers. And if you were to guess what they charge for a robust bouquet delivered, what would you guess that Sam's and Costco have decided is the sweet spot for delivery?
7:06 Speaker 03 What's robust mean?
7:07 Speaker 02 Like, like a pretty nice display of flowers.
7:11 Speaker 03 Like two dozen roses, oh, just flowers. Well, now I see, because you, I see you pulled something out for me, so I can't say it. But normally, I can tell you, looking on other sites as I have, this one on the, the first one on the left there that is pulled up would be definitely $150 delivered.
7:28 Speaker 02 Right. The warehouse clubs sell arrangements so much cheaper. Typically, the sweet spot for Sam's and Costco on flower delivery is 50 bucks. Now, local florists will say, and I'm not an expert, and they are, that the flowers that they use in their arrangements are going to be higher quality than the flowers used in an arrangement at Costco or Sam's. But you get delivery usually with a vase included.
8:00 Speaker 03 A vase?
8:01 Speaker 02 On these.
8:02 Speaker 03 Vase vase?
8:03 Speaker 02 Vase. I say vase, you say vase. I say vase, you say vase. Which are you supposed to say?
8:09 Speaker 03 You can say either, but I think vase sounds a lot more fancy.
8:12 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, you are getting it from a warehouse club. So it is supposed to be the fancy one? And so, you asked me what's the most cost-effective way it's going to be from the warehouse clubs? And both of them do, and I don't know if BJ's Wholesale does this as well, they both do more affordable than normal deliveries through Valentine's Day as well. But you're too late now. One of the things with the warehouse clubs for their Valentine's Day things, they require significant advance ordering. They're not necessarily delivered on the day itself.
8:49 Speaker 03 Okay. Mike in New York says, "I check my credit card statement every month and compare the listed charges against all my savings." Saved receipts. This is getting harder and harder to do and also takes a lot of time. I'm charging more mostly because I use my card for the points. Some vendors don't print receipts and some don't even accept cash anymore, including our local pie bakery. Anyway, I find that the, at the end of the month, I may have documentation for about half of the charges and the others I just eyeball to make sure they look familiar. I'm thinking about ditching the practice of saving receipts and just looking at all the charges to make sure there isn't anything funny happening. I'm just wondering what you do. Do you compare every line item against receipts?
9:29 Speaker 03 Do you look at the statement only? What about Lane? Do you look at her statements as well for quality control? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
9:36 Speaker 02 Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. You don't know Lane. If I did that, she'd be like, what? You checking my work?
9:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, she is so thorough and so detailed. Lane actually-
9:51 Speaker 03 She's checking your statements.
9:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, she looks through every credit card statement, pretty much every statement brokerage credit union. She looks through all of those every month. She pays all the bills. So we no longer keep receipts. You're unusual in the use of, and that's the smart thing to do is to keep receipts. But what people do as an in-between is there are now apps you can download to an iPhone or an Android because we all have our phones with us and they are receipt apps. And so you just take a picture of your receipt, basically it scans it in and it keeps records for you.
10:35 Speaker 02 When your bill comes in, you can then go and look and you have all the receipts that you do get a printed one and you can throw away the paper receipt because that's a lot to keep track of.
10:48 Speaker 03 I kind of do something that's not as thorough as that, I guess, but I log into all of my credit card accounts at least every couple of days and look at the recent charges. So like, I mean, I remember what I spent within a couple of days, you know?
11:01 Speaker 02 So Lane checks credit cards on the first, 10th and 20th.
11:05 Speaker 03 Nice.
11:06 Speaker 02 She looks at all of them.
11:07 Speaker 03 All right. Chris in California says, "Before I understood the risks associated with Zelle, I sent payments to about a dozen different people over time. I haven't had any fraud so far, but I'm concerned about whether I've exposed myself to future risk. What should I do now to protect myself? Is it enough to call my credit union and have Zelle disabled? Or should I consider closing the account entirely and starting fresh elsewhere? I've been with this credit union for decades and would prefer not to leave if there's a safer way to handle this."
11:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I hope there's no reason for you to dump your credit union. Depending on the financial institution, you may be able to go on their app and turn Zelle off and on. And that's what I recommend that you do. If your credit union is any size, they should have the on/off button and you shouldn't have to call. Zelle has so much danger with it that you only want to use Big Bad Zelle when you have manually gone into the app, turned it on, sent the payment, go back and turn it off. Zelle,
12:17 Speaker 02 if you're not aware, is owned by a consortium of the banks. They were terrified about losing control of people's wallets and freaked out when Venmo and Cash App became popular. And so Zelle, if I read the stats right, is now more popular than Venmo or Cash App. The reason Zelle has more risk is it's embedded in your checking account. And if somebody cracks into it, they then have the keys to the kingdom to swipe money out that's unrecoverable through the Zelle app. And the banks have never, in spite of all the focus that was
12:59 Speaker 02 put on them in hearings in Congress, and they made some mealy-mouthed promises about how they were going to offer consumer protections, they've never done that. Now, are Cash App and Venmo safe? No. None of these have consumer protections by law behind them.
13:21 Speaker 02 With them, so we use Venmo.
13:24 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
13:25 Speaker 02 Because there are people who want to be paid through one of these apps. So we have a separate account at a credit union. It's the only account we have at this credit union, so it makes us a bad member. And we deposit money into it. I just did this the other day, deposit money into it. And we use it to pay the various things we pay by Venmo. So the only money at risk is what's on deposit at that time.
13:53 Speaker 03 I have to admit something. I have an account for my Venmo and Zelle. At one of the big banks I have a credit card with, so I have this free checking account with them. And I just deposit, because there are two people in my life that I have to pay with Zelle. Like, they don't accept anything else, and they're doing services. And I just feel, I feel pretty comfortable with it, just because there's really nothing for anyone to take. It's just what I pay these guys every month. And I don't have it attached to my other checking account, my other institution, or anything. I just have direct deposit money put in there every month for those services.
14:32 Speaker 02 And, so you brought up something, I'm sorry, we're beating this to death. It is not a protection if you go into a bank and say, "Well, I'm going to open a separate account"
14:42 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
14:43 Speaker 02 "to do Zelle," or Cash App or Venmo. Because banks, their lawyers have all written these cross-default clauses into your account structure with the financial institution. So if a crook gets ahold of your account for Zelle, and they're just sending themselves money, and that account zeroes out, what the bank does is it goes in and grabs money from your other checking account you have with them, or savings account, or whatever funds you have, you have overdraft, they're going to grab it. And the bank will not care about what's happened with the money being swiped from your account through Zelle.
15:27 Speaker 02 That's why you have to set up an account elsewhere that you cordon off, that you do nothing else there, the credit card's okay. But you do no other deposit account, savings account, CD, checking account, because this is the Wild West.
15:46 Speaker 02 With Venmo Cash App and Zelle. Again, the greatest danger with Zelle because it is embedded in your account. Enough said about big bad Zelle. Coming up ahead, big bad power outages. We're going to talk about how much more affordable it's become for you to deal with a power outage. I'm going to share the good news with you.
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18:30 Speaker 02 So, power outages are something that is no fun at all. Lane and I, through the recent winter storms, lost power twice. Fortunately, the total power outage was two hours and changed the first time, three hours the second time. We never opened the refrigerator freezer and, gosh, they're insulated well enough. Nothing went bad. But that's one of the things I know has happened to my oldest daughter and her husband. They're in an area where power lines are above ground and every time there's a storm,
19:12 Speaker 02 it seems, the power goes out and the stuff in the refrigerator freezer ruined because of the time it takes to get the power back on. This was something that used to be you either got a generator that was a partial whole house, whatever, and it would run on most often natural gas, propane, something like that. Well, what's changed gradually, but much more so in the last year, is the affordability of power backup with batteries. Either batteries that you use for a rental property or in your own home, the same kind
19:54 Speaker 02 of batteries, or one that plugs in to your power supply like a generator would, you know, one running on natural gas or on propane. But those require a lot of maintenance over the years. The big change that's happened... Is as a general rule for most dwellings, somewhere between a seven kilowatt and 12 kilowatt system will provide a decent amount of power for your home. And these batteries can either be on wheels. This is for a renter. You plug a bunch of stuff in, you can plug
20:36 Speaker 02 the refrigerator in, you can plug the microwave in, you can of course, charge your phones, that's nothing. And you can have lighting that operates from these. And the prices of them are a fraction of what they were even two years ago. You will be able to buy one that is not a whole house solution. These aren't, don't pass out and hit your head when I talk prices. And you'll be like, that's cheap. But now we're looking at people being able to buy one that provides decent backup power for somewhere around 3,500 bucks for
21:15 Speaker 02 one not hooked into your panel, to around five to $8,000 for one that does. And you'll be able to run a lot of stuff in your house. And depending on what you're trying to run, it can handle a multi-hour outage to multi-day. The advantage of a traditional natural gas powered, or propane powered, that's that is hooked into your panel, is there's no end to how long it can run on natural gas, propane, you might need another tank. But the reality
21:54 Speaker 02 is they're for different purposes. If you know power outages where you live, tend to be measured in days and hours, or no more than a day. The battery backups are a much more efficient, affordable option. And they don't make that lousy noise that all your neighbors hear. My middle brother is putting in a battery when hooked up to a panel, and putting in solar panels for it. So that it extends the length of time.
22:30 Speaker 02 That the unit will be able to supply power. These units that range from really small ones that run just a few things in your home that are measured under a thousand dollars to buy. These units, what they do is you plug them into an outlet in your home, most basic ones. They charge up and then they're just standby power if the power goes out. But this is a huge shift because of the worldwide minus the United States. Move to electric vehicles. It's led to such enormous improvements in the efficiency of batteries and lowered the cost of batteries by 95% from where they were 14 years ago.
23:14 Speaker 02 And that's why this is becoming a viable alternative. You can buy them so many different places. You can buy them from the big hardware stores. You can buy from, if you're hooking it into a panel, you can buy them from an electrician or electrical contractor who specializes in backup power to homes. You can buy them from the warehouse clubs. You can buy them so many different places. But the point is it's not going to provide multi-week replacement power. This isn't for that, which you can only do at this point with most often natural gas backup. You have natural gas backup.
23:58 Speaker 03 I do, yep.
23:59 Speaker 02 Yours is natural gas, not propane?
24:01 Speaker 03 Natural gas whole house generator.
24:03 Speaker 02 So you can run your air conditioning, your heat? You can run everything in the house?
24:08 Speaker 03 Yep.
24:09 Speaker 02 That's pretty good. But you have to do maintenance twice a year and you gotta pay for the gas.
24:13 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. There's a monthly, I pay a monthly fee, like $35 for them to test it every week and all that stuff, so. Okay, Adrian in Texas says, Clark, I always hear you and others saying you should never use your Roth IRA as savings. What if I'm not able to max out my Roth? Shouldn't I just put all I have, as much as I can, into the Roth? And if, God forbid, I have to take money out, then so be it? Again, I'm not able to max it out, even if I do put as much in as I can. So Wouldn't that be better than having a designated savings account where it'll grow less? What am I missing? Thanks for all you and the team do.
24:46 Speaker 02 Okay, I love this because now we're talking about, if you just look at dollars and cents, you're right. You would take every penny, including what normally might be in a puny interest earning savings account. I don't mean the amount and it's puny, but the interest you earn. It's gonna be so much less than what you'd earn over time in a Roth IRA and the money in the Roth IRA grows tax-free, you spend it tax-free. So, from just that perspective, 100% right. Here's the problem. When people historically develop a pattern of using a 401k at work
25:29 Speaker 02 or an IRA, Roth IRA is like a piggy bank for unexpected expenses. The transmission goes out in your car, the air conditioning goes out at your home, whatever, and you don't have that money sitting around. That rainy day savings account you have doesn't exist. The money's in a Roth. So you develop a pattern, because in a Roth, you can always pull out your contributions. You can't pull out earnings. That it becomes this thing that you feel like you're going forward with saving for the future, but you keep having to take detours and U-turns, pulling money back out.
26:09 Speaker 02 So, I like for people to think of a 401k or a Roth IRA is where you stash money that stays there and grows there for way down the road for financial security. And that having a separate savings account, even though you're gonna lose money you would have earned in the Roth, is worth having so that the Roth becomes like a fortress of money that is not touched, not breached, and you use the rainy day account for the unexpected.
26:47 Speaker 03 All right, this is from Lynn in North Carolina. Lynn says, can you clarify if we now need visas to travel through Heathrow Airport? The UK website is confusing and says if you're going through security, then they are required. We always seem to have to do that in Heathrow when continuing on to other European destinations. We are US and Canadian citizens.
27:06 Speaker 02 Okay, so there's a technical answer and a practical answer. The technical answer is Heathrow, where you've got terminals 2, 3. Is it 2, 3 and 5? 2, 3, 4 and 5? Whatever. There's no Terminal 1. When you change from Terminal to Terminal, a lot of people go through immigration, then take a free train to the other terminals. If you do that, you have to have the UK ETA, the Electronic Travel Authority. Costs, depending on the exchange rate, about 22 bucks. It's good for two years. If your flight connection, you miss it. Your flight's canceled.
27:50 Speaker 02 You could be marooned in the Terminal if you don't have an ETA. And you're just sleeping on the floor. It's almost like an insurance policy to get the ETA. You can technically come in, let's say, to Terminal 2 and take an airport shuttle bus to Terminal 5 and stay in what they call sterile, where you are not actually entering the UK technically. You're only an in-transit passenger. I think it's worth it to get the ETA because you never know with a flight. Flight has a mechanical, you miss the connection, whatever it is.
28:35 Speaker 02 Just pay the 22 bucks.
28:38 Speaker 03 Oh, my gosh, yeah.
28:39 Speaker 02 And have the ETA. Now, when you're buying an ETA for the United Kingdom, when you're buying one for any country, Australia requires them, so many countries require them now. The EU keeps delaying theirs, but sometime in '26, supposedly you're going to have to have one to go across the European Union. Make sure you're not being tricked. If you do a Google search... All the results are going to be phony websites. And people keep getting ripped off. You read one of those a while back from somebody who got ripped off. So make sure that you go to the like UK.gov, whatever the Australia one is, any of these countries.
29:22 Speaker 02 You want to make sure you're at the actual government website. And I'm going to go on a huge tangent from that. If you own a business and you have to do corporate filings with your state, you need to know that there are phony baloney organizations that will send you a notice of renewal for your filing with your state for an LLC, S corp, whatever. And they are not your state government. These are cheats, ripoff artists, con artists. They're not trying to steal your identity. They're trying to steal your money.
30:04 Speaker 02 And they will charge you many times what the state registration fee is. It can be an annual or every third year or whatever. They'll charge you way in excess as a business owner what it should be. So know that emails you get saying your renewal with the state is overdue or whatever, unless it's from your state, it's totally not where you want to go. You want to go to the state corporation commission, secretary of state's office, whatever it's called in your state. And make sure that's where your registrations are up to date and pay your fee that you have to pay the state. That had nothing to do with the ETA.
30:49 Speaker 03 With Lynn's question, that's okay. But Lynn, I mean, seriously, like Clark Howard's saying, pay the 22 bucks. Like definitely, like, can you imagine? I'm just, when you said that, I was envisioning myself laying on a bench in Heathrow Airport, trying to sleep because something happened going, why didn't I pay $22? I would pay a king's ransom right now for a hotel room or something.
31:11 Speaker 02 So Krista and I have a friend named James, who hates Heathrow Airport so much.
31:19 Speaker 02 What would he do if he didn't have an ETA and he got stranded in Heathrow?
31:24 Speaker 03 I don't know.
31:25 Speaker 02 He says he's never, the rest of his life, no matter what, ever going into or through Heathrow Airport.
31:33 Speaker 03 That's funny. All right. Brian in Texas says, "I usually rent a vehicle off airport to avoid the extra fees and to receive a car since the airport facilities lack enough cars. I recently rented a car in Orlando and was told that since the facility was close to the airport that I would be charged the extra fees, and this is the rental car company's protocol. I complained and the fees were removed, but is this a common rental car practice?"
32:00 Speaker 02 Common? To call it common, it is something that first came on our radar probably eight years ago, that there were so many travel bloggers and YouTube video people talking about how much, and I've done it too over the years, talking about how much money you save off airport with a rental car versus on airport. And I remember my middle brother I talked about earlier was on a trip to Austin, Texas, and the rental car at the airport was four times the cost of him taking an Uber to an off-airport location and getting
32:42 Speaker 02 the same car. Four times the cost. And this can often be true, particularly in cities that have big sports events or a lot of conventions that rotate in and out, that you'll have a much, much higher cost at the airport. So, within a certain radius that car rental companies decide, within so many miles of the airport, a neighborhood location will... Charge you the same fees as an out of stater is you would have paid at the airport to try to prevent people from diverting. And so this does happen. You saw it. You stood up for yourself.
33:26 Speaker 02 They removed the charge, which is ridiculous, because those extra charges for renting at an airport, this isn't about the rate, daily rate, this is about all the junk fees they had on, or fees they actually do have to pay to the airport authority. And if you avoided that by getting to that off airport place on your own, you shouldn't have to pay those fees. They should have been disclosed at the time you were doing the booking, you know, with all the, when they show all the extra junk fees. And the only good news I have about the car rental business is car rental rates are so much cheaper than they were even a couple of years ago. It's
34:11 Speaker 02 crazy. So it really pays to shop around. And there are so many ways you can save money that I love sharing with travel. With that having been said, I hope you have an absolutely great rest of your day. We serve you all week long, so many ways, including if you live in a market, where I'm on the evening news on TV, or news through the day, or radio. I hope that you enjoy the advice you get from me that way. We provide this as a YouTube show. And if you watch the YouTube show, I really appreciate you doing that. You listen to it as a podcast, wherever
34:51 Speaker 02 you like downloading podcasts, our newsletters, our websites, all about you being able to add knowledge, however you wish. You prefer social media, we got that for you, too. So whatever way you best like receiving information, getting knowledge, so you're empowered to save more, spend less, and absolutely never, never, never, not ever get ripped off. That's what we're about, is serving you. Have a great day. We'll be back with you on Wednesday.
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