A fool and his money are soon parted.
You’ve heard this expression, yes? Well, it’s as true now as it ever was, and only becoming truer. But you don’t have to be a fool to have someone take your money.
There are whole industries built around this fact, and this is the essence of the international 99% movement you used to hear so much about.
Today, you’ve got to have a lot of attention to give your personal finances, if you hope to keep them from people who would like to skim off the top.
Here are three of the most common ways that happens, and how you can keep those things from perpetuating themselves.
PPI
PPI, or Payment Protection Insurance, is a legitimate service offered illegitimately. PPI was tacked onto hundreds of thousands of financial contracts over the past decade or so.
Basically, it’s an extra fee that you pay to protect your assets in the event that you should suddenly stop making your payments, due to illness or injury or insanity or whatever.
The problem is, most of the people who have PPI don’t want it. The insurance was sold to them because it was buried in pages of fine print which did not bear much scrutiny.
Once the signatures were in place, PPI started taking monthly payments out of the bank accounts of thousands of people, making the insurers millions of pounds. It took a surprisingly long time for people to notice, and to put together the full ramifications of the situation.
Today a PPI Claims Company can help you figure out if you have this kind of insurance by accident, and how to get money back if this has happened to you.
Schemes Targeting Parents and Children
There are loads of financial schemes targeting the very old and the very young. For the older generations, it’s sweepstakes scams and televangelists.
For our elders, these scams can be very convincing, and it’s possible for unscrupulous people to eat up life savings in the cases of many. It’s important to help parents keep an eye on their own finances, as these problems can grow to affect yours as well.
For children, games are the biggest source of predatory cash-grabbing. Many games that are built into your phone have in-game buying options to unlock achievements and special abilities.
Some kids rack up big debts on these games, since they’re linked directly to the bank account of the owner. Talk to your kids about when and where to avoid expenditures like this.
Subscriptions that Don’t Cancel
Today you can subscribe to anything, from pasta sauce to internet movie services. Make sure that the ones you are subscribed to are the ones you want, and cancel all the rest. These things don’t cancel themselves.
It’s hard to make money, but it’s easy to lose it. Take a couple of hours every few weeks to review your finances and make sure that everything is running as it should. If you do this, you’ll catch your money on its way out the door, before it’s lost forever.
