The Everyday Financial Scams Pretending To Help You

In the final TGTBT episode of season 1, Julia and Ryan dive into the various predatory financial scams that seem like they're here to help, from debt consolidation to whole life insurance to everything in-between.

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[AyH]

My dad set me up with his financial advisor who was selling me on whole life and I don’t plan on having a family and I already get term life through my company. I walked away and now I feel so validated knowing that my gut was right. I have to give myself more credit for the knowledge i have Instead of relying on “older people” for advice who don’t necessarily know better

[kaw]

Turbo Tax is the biggest financial scam I've ever experienced. My husband and I went through the entire "free" tax service and we hit a paywall that stated if we received a certain pandemic assistance, we would have to pay for the "free" service. We spent 2 hrs working on it! So they preyed on people with the sunk cost fallacy.

[mottski]

My job does that "cost of living" raise. They USED to give merit raises and stopped. My raise this year? 55 cents USD, which means an additional $80/month ish. Meanwhile my rent alone went up $90/month, let alone the cost of food. It's absolutely infuriating.

[erima]

A tax preparation-focused episode would be great!

[dlm]

Y'all need to put in manual captions from now on. During the interview, when talking about unpaid internships, the auto captions say that they should be "absolutely legal, on paid internships shouldn't exist." But if I pause and go back to the second where she says this, it changed to 'unpaid internships.' If I hadn't thought to rewind, I would have gotten a very different message. This is quite common on Youtube actually, with some videos being totally incomprehensible.

[msg]

Many if not most people are desperately ignorant of the real life skills you need to survive, let alone thrive, in a capitalist society...they haven't been taught by their parents, often because they didn't know either, and real practical skills like these are almost never taught in high school, where it would count. I don't think this is entirely by accident, ignorant marks are more passive and easier to work. The business community would be up in arms if the economic realities of our lives were laid out for the young.

[jennysawyer]

It is worth noting that if you listening outside of the US (like the UK were I am the term "Financial Advisor " is a regulated term by the FCA

[Erica-enqz]

Had a couple of near misses with some "financial advisors." I thought they would help me get my finances straight and tell me what I could afford to do, but they mostly wanted to sell me insurance or get me to pay off my debt by incurring more debt. 🤦🏾‍♀️

[andreagordon]

I fell for the debt management scam almost 3 years ago. I hate what I’ve done to my credit score, but I’ve rebounded quite a bit and have saved enough to pay the program fees off to cut ties with the program and pay my outstanding debts to the creditors themselves.

[AyH]

LOL yeah I got like 2-4% raise this year when inflation was 8% . So dumb. But idk if any companies are giving annual raises much bigger than that.

[headed]

I identified with Daniella Flores in this episode my 20s were full financial anxiety which living in Canada was not as bad on the education front, but I also remember holding down 3 jobs to pay rent in a major city, I can't imagine going to school on top of that too. My heart goes out to them. Hope they are in a better place now.

They also opened my eyes on how the Internet is able to market to me so well.

[SarahWinstead]

Ugh the so called financial advisors my job brought in to talk with us about benefits pushed whole life insurance on me and I'm not happy.
I feel like so often people who work in education get terrible advice for financial stuff, especially for an underpaid profession. They literally made us sit through these presentations. It's so gross.

[Desbienvenido]

Great as always! Could you guys work on your audio a little bit? It seems like Julia’s voice is harder to listen than Ryan’s. In fact, Ryan’s voice can sometimes be a bit too high pitched and painful if my volume is up when trying to listen to Julia. I swear I love you guys! Please take the feedback!

[thejammiestjam]

Totally enjoying this podcast! Agreed with other comments: would love a tax prep episode!

[kiterafrey]

I work in class action, and in my experience both in my personal life and in my professional life, insurance companies will go above and beyond to NOT pay out anything. They will dig for loopholes for day, and often will just outright violate their own contracts leading to class actions later down the road, which to them a couple million is just a slap on the wrist compared to how much they actually scammed people out of in their violations.

[sarahwatts]

I'd like one on tax prep and one on casinos - those both sound pretty interesting

[middleagebrotips]

Whole life is used by very high net worth people as a tax shelter, after you maxed out your 401k and ira contribution

[BrokeMillionaire]

I’m looking forward to this. many scammers out there.

[WatermelonSugar]

I would advise all to be financially literate. I work in finance and I see how many products are a waste of money. You can avoid it by having basic knowledge of budgeting, retirement savings, investing especially passive investment in ETFs. Tax advise is definitely useful especially if you have any kind of special situation.

[barnabusdoyle]

The best thing about debt settlement companies is how they let people believe or convince people that what the service is. Most people think they are getting a consolidation loan.