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The Clark Howard Podcast

12.19.19 Commission-free investing; Social security scams; Getting rid of a timeshare

The Clark Howard Podcast

Clark Howard

Investing, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.65.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Clark's almost 33 years on the air, an unmistakable trend has emerged. In his first 15 years, there weren't questions about saving and spending in retirement. Since then, retirement questions have increasingly arisen. Why no questions early on? In the 1980s and 90s, people retired with pensions. Today almost nobody has a pension. People know it's up to them to make retirement possible. There are those in the financial industry that thrive on confusion surrounding retirement planning, offering their services to handle it for you. Don't be a sitting duck. Overcome your confusion. Many self-serve low-cost investment companies now offer various forms of service to help you plan. Fidelity has a virtual reality tool. Vanguard and Schwab have programs as well, making it easy for you to invest, commission free at ultra-low cost. You don't need a salesperson. There are wonderful low cost choices. The NY Post reports scams involving crooks trying to pry social security and other personal info out of you are up 23 fold in the last year. DO NOT ENGAGE anyone in conversation who claims to be from the social security administration. They're not calling. Crooks are, and they're calling people of all ages with all kinds of fish stories about why you need to cough up your personal info or pay them to protect your social security. Ignore, hang up, delete. When you own a timeshare you want to get rid of, you face a challenge. Most timeshares have basically no value in the marketplace once purchased from the developers. Marketing costs, commissions et.al. are costs down the drain. Think about the overhead involved in selling a condo unit 50 times vs. 1 time to 1 owner. Real estate value is eviscerated by multiple selling costs. So you're selling an obligation for the next buyer to pay around a grand a year for one week at a condo. Easier to pay hotels and have no obligation. If you no longer love your timeshare, there is the rare chance the original marketer/developer will buy it back. Big hotel chains in this business don't want want the word out about how little that week is worth. They don't want their timeshares on resell sites with you offering money for someone to take it, while they're trying to sell new weeks for $25- $30K. So if they're still marketing active weeks, they may be willing to buy back from you, likely at minimal cost. ResponsibleExit.com is the developers' preferred place for you to list your timeshare. It preserves value for them and helps protect sellers as well. If you're developer is gone, check out the Timeshare Users Group, a $20 a year membership co-op site with a selling forum allowing you to post a week. The best potential buyers are other timeshare owners looking for additional time. Do a traditional closing and have no further legal obligation on that property.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm so glad to welcome you here, the Clark Howard Show, where it's about you learning ways

0:11.3

to save more and spend less, and don't let anyone ever rip you off, speaking of rip

0:17.9

offs coming up in today's Clark Rageous Moment.

0:22.4

Scammers are targeting you regardless of age with cons trying to get your social security

0:29.8

number out of you.

0:30.8

I want to tell you what you need to know.

0:34.2

And coming up yet later, I think about how ever green has been, how it's gone on forever,

0:43.7

people calling me desperate to unload a time share that they bought that maybe at one

0:49.6

time worked really well for them.

0:52.1

And then it's not.

0:53.1

I want to talk about what you need to know to get rid of that time share and how to avoid

0:59.7

getting scammed.

1:02.3

Our main website is Clark.com.

1:05.0

And as we close in on Christmas, we're in the last week of Christmas shopping, I want

1:12.0

to tell you, Clark deals is there for you working around the clock to give you the best

1:17.9

last minute bargains for your dollars so you can get the right gift for the right person

1:25.0

at a Clark kind of price.

1:28.4

So I want to share something with you that in my gosh, almost 33 years on the air, there's

1:39.5

been a trend that has been unmistakable over this third of a century.

1:47.1

I went through the first probably 15 years.

1:53.5

I was on the air never taking a question about saving for retirement, spending in retirement,

2:03.7

anything like that.

...

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