It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life.

One decision we make every day, how are we going to pay for stuff when we're out and about?

So more and more, we're out and about. So more and more we're doing tap to pay with our phones. Gosh, I got

something crazy to tell you about tap to pay you're going to want to hear. Also today we're finally

seeing results of something I have talked about several times recently. It's how we want to do more in person and how it's

causing shifts in the economy you need to be aware of, also potentially creating some savings opportunities for you.

So speaking of the opposite of saving, it sure is convenient to go through a line somewhere or pay for a bill wherever at a retail store,

whatever it is and just go and pay with Apple Pay the most popular G Pay, there's Samsung Pay, you can pay with your watch,

and do all these things.

I use TAP to Pay on public transit around the world.

And I gotta tell you, it has changed things for me

in such a positive way because when you use public transit like I do and you'd have to go buy some

stupid ticket and figure out how to buy it from whatever machine it is, not user-friendly and you'd not know exactly how much money you were

supposed to put on it or anything like that. And then there'd be a service fee on top of it for

getting that ticket. Now you don't pay anything extra and you just tap to pay on more and

more if not most transit systems around huge convenience for me.

And you use tap to pay so many places quick and easy, but a new bank study finds why you're seeing such a push for you to use

TAP to pay with a phone.

When we use TAP to pay, we buy almost 10% more stuff than we would otherwise,

that it's so easy and it so doesn't feel like money anymore that we spend more by more and you think about

this progression because you know I've done the things with people who've been in trouble with spending money on credit cards,

where I put them on cash only, and an allowance only, and how incredibly fast people are able to reduce their credit card

...