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One money move at a time, short enough to read in two minutes. Pick one and act on it today.
Two-factor authentication means a stolen password alone is no longer enough to get into your accounts. Turn it on for your email and every bank, card, investment, and payment account. At a few minutes each, ten accounts take about 30 minutes. Pick an authenticator app over text codes wherever a site offers both.
A small home insurance claim can raise your premium for years and cost you a claims-free discount. Before you file for minor damage, subtract your deductible from a repair estimate and compare what’s left with the extra premiums you’d pay. If the premiums come out higher than what’s left, pay for the repair yourself.
When a card terminal, ATM, or foreign website offers to charge you in U.S. dollars, decline and pay in the local currency. Saying yes lets the merchant or ATM operator set the exchange rate, and its markup routinely adds several percent to what your own card would charge.
Your property tax bill is your home’s assessed value, less any exemptions, times a rate you can’t change, so the assessment is the number to fight. Pull your property record, check the square footage, bedrooms, and basement against your actual house, and appeal any error before the deadline on your assessment notice.
If you’re unmarried, pay most of your home’s costs, and your child lives with you most of the year, file as head of household, not single. Compared with filing single, you get a bigger standard deduction and more income taxed at the lowest rates. If you’ve filed as single before, amend recent returns to get back what you overpaid.
Before you ask your card issuer for a higher credit limit, find out whether the request triggers a hard inquiry. Some issuers review requests with a soft inquiry that never affects your score, while others run a hard one. Read the request’s terms or call your issuer, and back out if the answer is hard, unless your balances run high.
Before you visit a dealership, get a car loan pre-approval from a bank or credit union. A dealer who arranges your financing can mark up the rate the lender approved and keep part of the difference. Walk in with a pre-approval, and the dealer has a rate to beat.
When the pay band caps your base salary, it doesn’t cap the rest of your job offer. Accept the salary limit out loud, then ask for the two or three other terms worth the most to you, such as a signing bonus or extra paid time off. Get each one written into the offer letter before you sign.
If you carry a credit card balance, your statement has a Minimum Payment Warning box. Besides the cost of paying only the minimum, it lists the monthly payment that clears the balance in three years, unless your minimum already does. Set autopay to that amount and keep it fixed as the balance falls.
Social Security figures your benefit from its earnings record, not your pay stubs, so a year that never posted can lower every check. Pull your record from a my Social Security account and compare each year with your W-2s. Fix errors fast, since a year gets hard to correct after about three years.
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