Credit Scores, Subscriptions, & Claiming FREE Money

Mindy:
Hello, hello, hello and Happy New Year, my dear listeners. Welcome to this very special episode of The BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and joining me today is my financial rockstar co-host, Kyle Mast.

Kyle:
Hey, Mindy, it’s good to be here. This is going to be a fun episode, kind of rapid fire, go through some cool financial tips here.

Mindy:
On this special series of the show, Kyle and I will be here every Thursday sharing six money tips that we’ve learned throughout the years, and we think these tips can tremendously upgrade your money game in the new year. That’s 24 Money Tips for 2024. Let’s get started, Kyle. If you haven’t already done so, do a money review of 2023. It doesn’t have to be a record every little detail that you map out in Excel kind of thing, but ask yourself, “What did I do well in 2023? What did I need a little bit of improvement on last year?” And make a one-year, a five-year and a 10-year money plan based on your reflection?

Kyle:
Well, that’s a really good one, and we’ll just piggyback right off that one for the next one. A lot of times it’s good to just take a look at the last three months of your bank and credit card statements. Sometimes a year can be a little intimidating, so just look at those last few statements and look for any unused subscriptions that you are paying for. There’s a huge trend in the last 10 to 20 years of businesses realizing that the recurring revenue model is the way to build a sustainable business. You think of Microsoft, they used to sell their software to you as one price, and now you have to pay annually or monthly for it.
There’s a lot of this out there, from streaming services and everything, so just take a look at your statements, see what you’ve got on there, see if there’s anything you need to get rid of. One hack with this is privacy.com. This is something that I found a while back where you can create unlimited digital debit cards basically, and you can use them for specific vendors for specific time periods, and you can set an expiration date on them. Just check it out. I won’t go into detail here, but it’s a great thing for free trials. They link basically to your bank account, but it creates a expiring debit card number that if you sign up for Netflix and you forget to cancel it, it will cancel on its own because it can’t draw anymore because the debit card is no longer valid.

Mindy:
Well, that’s a money tip that I just learned. Thanks for that, Kyle. I love that, privacy.com. I’m going to go check that out, ’cause yeah, I don’t want any of these subscriptions that I don’t really pay for. In fact, I just paid for one, and I could think to myself, “I should have used that privacy.com.” All right, tacking on to your comment, order a free credit report. Credit is a huge part of your money story, and it doesn’t help anyone if you’re too afraid to look. Now, there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. You are entitled to one free report per reporting credit bureau per year.
There’s three bureaus, so you could in theory get all three reports in January, or you could spread it out over the course of the year, like every four months, so you’re getting a more ongoing look at your credit report. If you do everything all at once in January, then you get to see what every bureau has on you. But if you spread it out, you can keep more of an ongoing look at your report. Spreading it out, all three bureaus essentially report the same thing. Each bureau will have a little bit of a different report, but essentially, it’s all the same report, so multiple things are going to show up on each report. But I prefer to stretch it out over the year just so I can keep an eye on it all year long. Go to annualcreditreport.com to get a copy of your free credit report.

Kyle:
The next tip, mark your calendars and plan for your money dates. Oh, so exciting, just what everyone wants to do in 2024, but make these exciting. Do make these exciting. Try to find, if you like the food carts in the local town and that’s where you like to hang out, maybe you can make your money date an excuse to do a little date out together. Work on your communication. These are not going to go smoothly all the time, and especially at the beginning, it’s going to be hard to know how to communicate.
But the more you can communicate, even if it’s terribly at first, but you progress, it’s just going to help your entire financial situation so much more. I would say along with this too, try to do some of these other tips that we’re talking about, year-end items, maybe at the beginning of the year have a little bit more of a meeting that includes some planning for the year, not just this month, but maybe what do you want to do? What are your goals for this year? Just so you’re on the same page from a financial standpoint.

Mindy:
If you need help with starting money dates, Episode 157 of The BiggerPockets Money Podcast features Scott Trench and I sharing how to have a money date from the perspective of somebody who wants to have it and doesn’t know how to broach it with their partner or who wants to have it and maybe their partner is a little resistant. So excellent tips in Episode 157, if I do say so myself, on how to have a money date if you’ve never had one before.

Kyle:
If you’re single, if you don’t have a spouse, if it’s just you, it’s just as important to put aside time to plan for your money for the coming year and do your own, quote, “money dates” or money planning, on a regular basis. I’ve talked about it before on this podcast, I do planning retreats by myself for goals and our finances and where we’re headed as a family. Then I have a planning retreat annually with my wife after I’ve done my own retreat. But if you’re single, you can do the same thing, and it’s just as valuable to do that as well.

Mindy:
Somebody might owe you money. Did you know that? You can check every state you’ve lived in to see if your state owes you money. Just Google Unclaimed Money, and then the state that you’ve lived in. I live in Colorado, so if I was going to look this up, I would type in Unclaimed Money Colorado and then follow the prompts. Chris Hutchins shared this tip with us in Episode 355, and while nobody owed me money, it turns out somebody owed Scott’s wife some money. Chris says he does this every time he goes to a friend’s house. He’ll just type in their information, find it and share that with them as a housewarming gift. What a great gift.

Kyle:
That is so awesome. Along with that, if you have any sort of task management system that you keep track of recurring things that you need to do, stick that in as an annual recurring thing. Every year, annually check and see if some escrow from some property, something random got held up at the state, it’s just something to check regularly, not just one time. The next one, evaluate your home. What projects need to be done in this coming year? Start getting quotes and preparing a timeline for those projects. Which ones are necessary? Which ones are might be nice to have? Which ones can you push off a little bit maybe until some other income comes in? Which ones need to happen right away? You can plan for a lot of this housing stuff, but along with this too, you need to probably plan for the unexpected things to come up.

Mindy:
Yeah, and some of those projects can be done off season or outside of the normal time that those contractors are working on those projects to save you a little bit of money.

Kyle:
Oh, I was going to say, don’t be afraid to ask for that discount, that if there’s someone who is a painter in the summer and they are not very busy in the winter, they’re looking for an interior paint job and you don’t want to do the painting, feel free to ask for a deal and shop it around. That’s a good time to save some money for sure. It’s a good tip, Mindy.

Mindy:
All right, this was a lot of fun. That is all for these tips today, but we will be back with more tips next Thursday. In the meantime, if you have a money tip for us, we want to hear it. You can share it with us in our Facebook group, which is found at facebook.com/groups/bpmoney. All right, Kyle, should we get out of here?

Kyle:
Get out of here. That was a good one.

Mindy:
That was awesome. We will talk to you next Thursday. Thanks, guys.

Kyle:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. If you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.

Mindy:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kailyn Bennett. Editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.