I'm so glad you're with us 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.

Okay, we have a storage unit, something I didn't think I'd ever have in my life.

But over the last like eight or ten years, we have had three different occasions where we've rented a storage unit.

One in five Americans has one right now, apparently.

So there's a lot of bait and switch in the storage unit business. I want to talk

about that straight ahead. And you may have seen the really sad, disturbing stories about how

Jimmy Buffett's family is in a Donnybrook fight about his estate. This is something that you read about or hear about with famous people,

but it's happening with people every day now across all walks of life

that may have decent assets, not necessarily a huge amount, but they fight about it.

I want to talk about how to prevent those fights later in this podcast.

But right now, I want to tell you, I didn't know anything about storage units other than the

problems people have when a unit gets broken into or a unit has a rodent

infestation or a unit a lot of them are in floodplains and you think wow I'm getting a good

deal in that storage unit and then a flood comes along and everything you have in it is ruined.

Theft problems are rife.

So this is where my real knowledge had been in my TV work, the stories I do with people

whose stuff had been stolen or something else like that. Until I started renting storage

units myself, I wasn't aware about how the pricing works. Now I understand completely. It is a bait

and switch business. Oh, I should, before I get into bait and switch, I should say, what I learned over the years

and the stories I did on television is you got to insure that baby.

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