Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 07.23.25 Assignment: Save On Home Internet / A Big Bank Restart About this episode To save more, it’s important to tackle the “monthlies” - those bills that come due month after month. Today, Clark discusses how the cable monopoly is weakening and now you have more affordable choices for home internet. Also, a big monster mega bank with a lengthy rap sheet, formerly referred to by Clark as “criminal enterprise posing as a bank” - seems to have emerged from the dark side. Save On Home Internet: Segment 1 Ask Clark: Segment 2 Wells Fargo’s New Start: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: Internet Price War: Why Now Is a Good Time To Threaten To Cancel How To Find the Best Deal on Cheap Internet Service in 4 Steps Internet Archives - Clark Howard Understanding Home Equity Agreements What Is an Annuity, and Why Does Clark Think They Stink? You Won’t Believe What Clark Howard Says About Wells Fargo Now Should You Make Your Child an Authorized User on Your Credit Card? Authorized User vs. Joint Account Holder: Understanding the Difference for Credit Cards 18 of the Best High-Yield Online Savings Accounts in July 2025 How To Open a Roth IRA 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 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
0:34 Speaker 01 It's great to have you here on 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. And one area where you can make a big difference in your life is I want to help you tackle your monthlies. Those bills that you just pay month after month. Today, I want to tell you one area you can pick up some big savings with not that much time to make it happen. Also, you're going to think, I've lost my mind. I got something to tell you positive about Wells Fargo.
1:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's really true. That's coming up later. Okay. What industry in surveys ranks the lowest of any industry surveyed or close to the lowest, depending on which survey and which year? It is internet service providers. They have a service reputation, well deserved and earned in the toilet.
1:54 Speaker 01 Where did that come from? Because for so long, most of us have only had the option where we live of maybe one company to provide internet. If we were lucky, two. And what happens is you take two industries that have dominated the availability of internet, that started life as monopolies, and they never got past that monopoly-minded attitude. If you wanted to see in the pictionary, next to customer no service, where it came from,
2:39 Speaker 01 it's from the cable guy! So, what's happening now is the big cable companies have so treated people with such utter contempt and dishonesty, with how they provide service and how they con you on the plans, saying, "Oh, we have this deal that is X number of dollars per month, but by the way, we didn't tell you, it's another 47% and made up junk fees on top of that. And by the way, six months later, or one year later, we're gonna double the cost of it on you, and you're gonna be happy we did that to you.
3:23 Speaker 01 And by the way, if we miss the appointment coming to your house, joke's on you." And guess what's happened? Now there's choice. This is like if you watch those old, old cartoons, where would you ever see them? With Wile E. Coyote running out, not realizing he went off the cliff and then looks down? That's what's happening to the cable companies. Because they were used to dictating terms to you, and you were gonna like it, and providing you horrific customer no service, and you were gonna like that too. And what are people doing?
4:04 Speaker 01 They're disconnecting the number of subscribers, say that word three times, to the cable companies for internet, think the two bigs.
4:16 Speaker 01 Which are Charter using the name Spectrum and Comcast using the name Xfinity? And why did the marketing geniuses come up with fake names for these two companies? Because the reputation of Comcast and Charter was so in the sub-basement down there with the rats that they had to come up with new marketing names rather than fix the problem, which is not being trustworthy service providers to you as a customer. So what happened is the cable companies didn't realize they weren't going to own the universe anymore.
4:59 Speaker 01 And interestingly enough, there's now competition coming from a variety of sources, from the sky, from the air, and even from, believe it or not, the monopoly, former monopoly, phone companies. So now, the prices are going two ways at once with the cable monsters. For your internet, they are going up to people who don't shop around, and they're going way down for people who do shop around.
5:38 Speaker 01 And you will find that now, more and more, you are no longer a captive. And so that is your assignment, to shop, whether it comes through a wireless provider, phone company, cable company, whatever. You now have power you have not had before. And I'm sorry, sorry, I have longstanding frustration with the cable monsters, and I think you need to change your names again. Start over a third time.
6:21 Speaker 02 All right. Well, get us some questions now. Kathy in Florida says, I'm seeing more and more companies offering an alternative to a HELOC or HE loan that they call a home equity agreement or home equity investment.
6:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
6:37 Speaker 02 Would you please explain how these work, whether they can be a good idea for some people, or whether they are outright garbage and to be avoided at all costs? If they're ever a good idea for some people, are there any companies you would recommend, or any companies you would definitely avoid?
6:51 Speaker 01 Thank you. This is definitely a trend because I'd say over the last year and a half, you have asked me this question different ways this is the third time.
7:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, people have so much home equity.
7:05 Speaker 01 Right.
7:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:06 Speaker 01 Right. So what this is, is where you agree to sign away equity in your home in return for cash. So when you take one of these out, where a home equity line of credit, or a home equity loan, line of credit's floating rate, a loan is a fixed rate, when you take those out, you've taken on a debt obligation against your equity. And when you sell your place, you pay that off, and you get whatever the net equity is of paying off your, if you have a first mortgage, paying that off and paying off the HELOC or the home equity loan.
7:48 Speaker 01 What you do with these products, and they're using a variety of different names in the marketplace, is they say, hey, we'll give you money. You never have to pay it back. What they do is they then not only get their money back when you sell, they also get from the date that they have lent you the money, and they've established a value on your home, whatever it's worth, five years, 10 years, 15 years from now, they get a portion of that. So they get their money back, and they get a portion of the increase in value. So
8:29 Speaker 01 who would this be potentially, I wouldn't say good, but the least bad option?
8:36 Speaker 01 If you are in a position where you cannot afford to maintain your home, it needs repairs, it needs a new roof, it needs something in order for you to continue to occupy it, and you can't do it, and you don't want to sell because you don't want to lose the house you own, then it is a least bad option to give up a portion of the value of the home essentially, and the future increase in value of the home to an investor. Is there anybody I recommend for this? No, it doesn't yet have a clear, established record of the
9:20 Speaker 01 good players, the mediocre, and potentially the sketch ones.
9:25 Speaker 02 All right, Chris is in London in the UK, but he's originally from North Carolina. He says, "Question for you, you always talk about people trading stocks too much, creating tax issues. I don't understand how that's an issue. If you start the year with $10,000 and end up with zero, your net loss was $10,000 and there are no taxes. If you end up with $30,000, your net gain is $20,000 and you would owe tax on $20,000. But you have $30,000, so it should be okay, right? I don't understand the math where it becomes a surprise to owe on taxes."
9:56 Speaker 01 Thank you, Chris, and I hope you enjoy living in one of my favorite cities on earth. Love the Elizabeth Line, by the way, if you go there as a tourist. Anywhere you can ride the Elizabeth Line, you want to do that. Anyway, so the tax code is set up to punish you if you buy a stock and hold it for less than a year. You are taxed at a punitive rate known as ordinary income tax. If you own it a year and a day, you're subject to what's known as long-term capital gains, which is a much lower tax rate, depending on income, in that year could be as low as a zero percent tax rate. So that's why it's
10:39 Speaker 01 designed to get people not to be speculators, holding things for very short periods of time, and get them to be investors. And by the way, you never want to buy something that's so speculative that in just a very short period of time, it goes from 10,000 to zero.
10:59 Speaker 02 And this is from Guillermo in Colorado. Our HR department recently invited employees to attend a new retirement option lunch and learn session. The product is offered through a major insurance carrier. It's billed as a new retirement plan option to help diversify your retirement planning options that provides a guaranteed annual income of 5% of your income base, starting at age 65 for the rest of your life, even if the market dips. I visited the website for this product and it's described as a collective investment trust, CIT, delivering benefits through a group fixed contingent deferred annuity contract with a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit. Word salad, anyone?
11:42 Speaker 02 I'm instantly suspicious, thanks to you, because of the word annuity in there. Am I right to avoid this?
11:48 Speaker 01 Okay.
11:49 Speaker 02 How confusing for most of us.
11:51 Speaker 01 Okay.
11:52 Speaker 02 Me, for sure.
11:53 Speaker 01 So, all this is, is for some reason, your employer is giving their kind of seal of approval through HR to allowing insurance people in to try to sell an annuity. Now, the idea of this one is these employer provided or sanctioned ones, they do a payroll deduction from you, they put money into the annuity, and you pay in for a number of years, whatever your account is worth later on, they then pay it out, annuitize it, for your retirement.
12:34 Speaker 01 The good part of this is that often these plans sold through employers don't have what are known as surrender periods, meaning you don't get punished for exchanging out of theirs into potentially another annuity elsewhere. What's the bad of it? The expenses involved on it are typically about 12 to 15 times more expensive in embedded expense fees versus what would be in a traditional employer 401K, or even having your own Roth IRA.
13:13 Speaker 01 The money is then taxed, the money you would get from this in retirement is taxed at ordinary income tax, which is the highest possible rate. Instead of, as an example, if you were putting money into your own Roth IRA, the tax on the money in retirement is taxed at exactly 0%. So this is an expensive product. Not only is it expensive on the administrative fees, it's also expensive in how you're treated later in retirement.
13:50 Speaker 01 Anything like this comes way after funding a 401K, fully at an employer, and fully funding a Roth IRA. And I think that it's bad judgment on the part of an HR department to make it seem like this is a benefit they're offering you. The benefit is to the salespeople, commissioned salespeople, that are being allowed to come in and have a pre-sale done by the company, saying, "Hey, this is a great thing we want you to know about," helping the salesperson sell you something that is really a way down the list choice, if ever. It's not a scam, just a bad deal.
14:35 Speaker 01 Coming up ahead, I'm going to say something not bad about Wells Fargo. I actually said that.
15:13 Speaker 01 Well, for more than a decade, I've referred to Wells Fargo as being a criminal enterprise impersonating a bank. And that's a really harsh thing to say about the fourth largest bank in the United States, one of the largest banks in the world. Why would I say that? Because Wells Fargo behaved like a criminal enterprise for a long time, cheating people so many different ways, I'm not going to rehash that. Wells Fargo was not given the death penalty, not destroyed as a financial institution. Almost nobody went to prison.
15:57 Speaker 01 But Wells Fargo was put, let's call it, on serious probation. Wells Fargo received treatment that is almost unheard of. They were not allowed, for about the last decade, to grow as a bank. All the other banks of whatever size, from the biggest to the smallest, what do they do? They try to go out there and get more deposits and do more lending and get people to sign up for their credit cards and blah, blah, blah, blah. Wells Fargo was put under a tight collar. They were not allowed to grow because of all the criminal behavior at Wells Fargo.
16:41 Speaker 01 So I have repeatedly warned you that with Wells Fargo, it was only a question of when, not if, they were going to do something dirty to you. Well, that was then, this is now. Wells Fargo, for the last several years, under new leadership, seems to have cleaned up its act. And the collar has been lifted, and Wells Fargo is allowed to be a regular bank again.
17:15 Speaker 01 And it's a shame that the people who engaged in criminal behavior at the bank overwhelmingly got away with it, did not go to prison. The people who suffered may have received compensation, but harm was done to them. The reality is, it's time for me to accept that they have changed. So you have heard me say for the last time, that phrase that I used for about the last decade. And products that Wells Fargo offers, if you like being with one of the four giant monster
17:56 Speaker 01 mega banks, you can consider them along with the other three, which are Bank of America, Chase, and Citibank. Those four banks control more than half of banking in the United States. All the other thousands of banks fight over the remaining market share because of the size that these four enjoy. So if you see a solicitation from Wells and it's really great, and you want to do it, I'm not going to say anymore, what are you thinking? It's only a matter of when, not if. That's over, unless they pick up old habits, they're in the clear.
18:37 Speaker 01 Now, one interesting thing, Krista, do you know who's bigger than all these big banks? Who? Schwab? Right. Fidelity? Vanguard. Vanguard. The money has moved overwhelmingly out of the banking sector to people who are the equivalent, let's call them modern financial centers, that as a general rule, offer much better deals to you.
19:05 Speaker 01 With your money than you get from traditional banks. And I am still obsessed with my love for credit unions because they're owned by you, the member, and it's a different kind of relationship with them. And I still love small, local banks. None of that has changed.
19:26 Speaker 02 Okay. Ronald in Georgia says, I work remotely for a company located in a high cost of living area, so my salary is inflated compared to a similar job that I could get locally. I have concerns that we may eventually go back to working in the office five days a week, meaning I would be out of the job. Would Clark recommend I take a hit of 10% to 20% in salary to secure an in-person job?
19:48 Speaker 01 Wow. That's a would you rather that is bad and bad. If you, if you work remotely and they're going to order you back in five days a week, and you're not going to do that, and you see an opportunity available to you local where you are now, and you can go ahead and transition on your terms, on your time schedule, I would do it. Because by your own telling, if you were forced to relocate to the high-cost area to keep a paycheck coming in, it would be a significant deterioration in quality of life for you. Yes.
20:30 Speaker 01 Reading the tea leaves, I would go ahead and find a job that's local, that gives you the quality of life and expensive living that you're more comfortable with.
20:41 Speaker 02 Daniel in Arkansas says, I've used your advice of helping our 16-year-old son establish his credit score when he started his first job by making him an authorized user on four of my credit cards, but not giving him the plastic. He's always used his USAA debit card for purchases and has never used credit. At 18, he needed a new, to him, truck for his new job and obtained an auto loan. His credit score was 810.
21:05 Speaker 01 Oh, isn't that awesome?
21:07 Speaker 02 Now, at 19, he's preparing to work traveling jobs. He will need a credit card for expenses and is going to apply for his own credit card. You've warned us that if we give him one of our cards and he mismanages it, the result could affect our score. However, we haven't heard if there's any impact to our score if he mismanages his own cards while still linked to our cards not in his possession. Should I remove him from my credit cards after he receives one that is solely his?
21:31 Speaker 01 You can do whichever you want to about that. His credit, let's say USAA gives him a USAA credit card. And at the same time, he's an authorized user on four of your cards. If he doesn't handle that USAA credit card, or whoever else's credit card well, that only affects him. Your cards that you're giving him authorized credit on, you're not affected at all by him, but he is affected by you. Let's say you were no longer able to handle those credit cards like you did, and he was still an authorized user. Your difficulty with credit would also become his difficulty with credit.
22:16 Speaker 01 So, in other words, his credit, with only it being his credit, does not affect you. Your credit affects you and him.
22:26 Speaker 02 Phil in Georgia says, "I'm 26 and a school teacher. I have very low expenses and am able to save about $2,000 a month even after I invest about 4% in a 403B and about 10% in a Roth IRA."
22:38 Speaker 01 Congratulations to you.
22:40 Speaker 02 It's amazing. "I have about $30,000 saved in a high-yield savings account as well. My question is, what should I be doing with my extra money? I have been saving it because I plan on paying for a house and wedding within the next few years, but should more money be going elsewhere? I've considered a brokerage account or more to the Roth, but the savings account gives me a 3.6 APY, so I've felt it's okay right now to be a big saver. Thanks for your help, and let's cross our fingers Michael Pennix gets it done this year."
23:09 Speaker 01 Hope springs eternal.
23:11 Speaker 02 That's amazing, a school teacher at 26 saving that much money.
23:14 Speaker 01 Isn't that wonderful? So Phil, this is your call, because you're doing all the right things. The 403B, you know, I'm not thrilled with generally the 403Bs available to school teachers. They tend to have very high costs. If there's no match from the school district, even if you left what you're doing right now, I'd rather see you, again, if there's no match from the school district, I'd rather see you take the 403B to zero. And increase the Roth IRA to 14%. So you're still saving the same amount of money, but it's in a Roth. I hope that you're doing the Roth with one of my favorite children, one of the ultra-low-cost
23:58 Speaker 01 companies, and putting your money in the target retirement fund based on your age for year 2065 or 2070. As far as the goals you have, and this is so great that you've already saved so much money, the goal you are trying to achieve, buying a house, paying for a wedding, you need a lot of money for that. So continuing to save in a high-yield savings account is just fine. Or you can boost what you contribute to the Roth to get to where you're contributing the max in a year. But you've got so much money available to save.
24:42 Speaker 01 Max out the Roth, keep piling money into the online savings account. So you've got the money you need for a significant down payment on a home and to pay for the wedding. And just so wonderful, as a school teacher, not making a lot of money, that you are saving so well, saving so much. That's going to change the trajectory of your life long-term. And I hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. You know what's coming up on Friday? We've got Clark Stinks coming your way. You hear me say something you don't like?
25:26 Speaker 01 You hear me say something you think I'm just flat-out wrong? I want to hear from you at Clark.com/ClarkStinks. As we end each work week with Clark Stinks most Fridays, and know what we're about every day is you being empowered with knowledge so that you save more, spend less, and avoid getting ripped off.
Previous 07.22.25 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss Next 07.25.25 Clark Answers His Critics on Clark Stinks / Save On Airfares Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
