This episode is brought to you by Network Rail.

It's easy to disappear into your own bubble when you're out and about,

whether you're lost in your thoughts or lost in nature.

The last thing on your mind is the danger of trains at level crossings.

Beware the bubble, stay aware, take care and help us keep you safe at level crossings.

It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show,

where our mission is to serve you and empower you to make better financial decisions in your life.

By the way, happy birthday to my brother, Neil.

Today's his birthday, he's 74 today.

Recently on this podcast, it was a discussion about online newspaper subscriptions.

It received a lot of comments, including some saying that I needed to support newspapers

and not telling people how to avoid paying for them.

So what's funny about that is I've been a newspaper columnist since 1990.

So I'm sure any paper that airs me is not happy about that conversation we had recently on the podcast.

Either, well, recently I read about how a lot of things that we were getting free now are costing us money in the world to tech.

And that's where the whole idea of getting everything for free came from was the technology industry that did the freemium business models on everything.

I'm going to talk about that first.

And later, financial literacy is something that people talk about a lot.

But it's hard to get the message through as people are trying to make sure that this generation grows up through school, understanding the basics of personal finance.

And it takes some special things to get the lessons to stick. I want to talk about that.

So technology industry used freemium business models is the way to get people to sample a service instead of so heavily having to advertise it to get people to buy the service.

And this is how it's worked for the last 20 years is you'd sign up for something for free, no credit card necessary.

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