It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. Today, I'm going to start by giving you new power when you're dealing with a hospital bill that is out of sight. And speaking of reduced bills, how about lowering your electric or power bills? There are some new innovations I want to make sure you know about to attacking these rapidly rising power bills. So hospital bills are crazy. I mean, unbelievable. I have a heart valve replacement and I had to have a test in early December to see how my what's known as a TAVR my replacement aortic valve is working so it's a test that I can't go to a third-party diagnostic center to have and so I see the hospital bill for this 30-minute test and it was $5,800. And it's so funny because it was the kind of test that if it was one that could be done at an outpatient place, not owned by the hospital, it probably would have been a couple hundred bucks. I mean, hospital billing is just bonkers. And the bills you get from a hospital are summaries. You ever get a really large bill? Most of us now have, if we have insurance, we still have a lot of out of pocket we have to pay. So this is in your self-interest and you're helping the insurance company, even though you probably don't care about that. But you win if you tell the hospital you want the full itemized bill. Because the itemized bill, if you have anything complicated is going to have so much stray, crazy stuff on it that you didn't have done, that you didn't receive, but it was just packed into that bill. So challenging it has been a business for billing claims specialists for years who represent consumers and you pay them a percent of what they save and they get money back in your pocket that would have gone to the hospital from an errant inflated bill. But now I've seen now three stories, two of them right here, about patients who used AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude or who else is there, Gemini, Grock, and they load the insurance bill in there and AI will find all the anomalies. Not everything that they think is an error is going to be an error. But one of the stories I saw recently was about, I saw it on HumbleDollar.com, a patient was able to reduce the hospital bill, get this, by 83%. 83 percent that's an extreme case that the hospital was billing for all kinds of things but what i want you to know never never not ever except that a hospital bill is right at face value and again we're paying more and more of this out of our own pockets and really if a hospital is billing inflated bills, we're paying, all of us are paying more because it's just jacking up the cost of healthcare improperly. So know that those chatbots that you fear taking your job someday or whatever, they also are valuable tools that can do things for you. And know that if you don't want to use one of them, you still want to challenge a large hospital bill because you will find things, even if you're doing it the old fashioned way manually, or you hire one of these patient advocates that will fight the bill for you and get rid of the errors for you. There will be errors in any complicated hospital bill. They're going to be. All right. I have an example that I'm going to start with from Matthew in Mississippi. Really? Several years ago, I went to the ER following a fall at home. A month later, I received a statement, not a bill, for the charges. I called the hospital to request a fully itemized bill, and when I received it, I saw that I was charged nearly $100 for a pap smear. Seeing as I'm a biological male, it wasn't hard to spot the problem with this. I called the hospital and got the charge removed, but this should be a warning to anyone who pays out of pocket for healthcare. Never pay a bill without an itemized statement and ask for clarification about any charge you don't understand medical billing mistakes happen and you should not pay for a service you didn't receive and i most certainly did not receive that love the show i've been listening for over 15 years keep up the good work oh man really i love it all right we're gonna go on to callie and maryland's question i received in the mail a letter from a home warranty company in in tiny print at the bottom of the letter it has that's what their name said that the tiny print the bottom of the letter was there. Okay. I'm looking. It has final notice and immediate response needed all caps at the top. It makes it sound like I have must have this home warranty protection in order to stay in compliance with my mortgage lenders requirements for my current loan. It needs my last mortgage company in the letter. However, my mortgage was paid off at least 13 years ago. I see that the better business bureau has many complaints about this company. I will not fall for the scam, but I want to make sure others are aware of it. All right. Thank you for taking the time to submit this. More often you'll get those alarming kind of letters about your vehicle and yes. And calls. Yeah. Calls and the TV ads are all over the place about it. And know that any company that does a misleading kind of solicitation like that automatically is a crummy company just period You going to try to mislead And what happens if you have a problem with even the supposed mainstream home warranty companies Getting a claim paid, you might as well be able to hike Mount Everest and Kilimanjaro both on the same day. Obviously impossible, right? I mean, it's so hard to get any of these people to ever pay a bill. Okay. Trevor in Georgia says, this is more of a tip for other listeners. My partner and I just got married and went to update our marital status with our auto insurance and it actually lowered our premium. So I got money back. Are there any other places where updating this information could yield additional savings? I'm trying to think. And first of all, congratulations to you on your recent marriage. so it is common with insurance because the insurance industry insists that people that are married end up having a better claims experience than people that are single and it's funny because your partner sounds like you were living together before you got married your risk profile really didn't change at all. But the insurance industry is so wedded to this concept. Very punny. That certain profiles of people are lower risk versus others. And I'm trying to think of any other industry besides insurance, where going from single to married or married back to single will change your price, what you're having to pay. And I can't think of one right now, but if you know something, well, taxes, depending on your tax situation, taxes cost you more or less when you go single to married or married to single. But if anybody's in an industry that uses marital status as a way of setting prices that just didn't occurring to me, please let us know. Yeah, some gyms, I guess, people are joining gyms this year, Most just require it to just be two people, but someone you'd be married to get the discounted rate. I didn't know that. I've seen it happen. All right. Lauren in North Carolina says, I want to share how Clark is saving me so much money on my cell phone service and encourage other listeners to do the same with real life numbers. We were with one of the big companies for 13 long years. We have three lines, one Apple watch, no cell phone payments with an employee discount. Over the last three months, our bill has crept up to $232. After Clark's podcast on cell phone service and the guide your team has created on the website, we are able to switch to visible in about 10 minutes with no interruption of service. After all the codes that we use and inner circle discounts, our monthly cost comes to $43 for all three of us and my Apple Watch. In the next year alone, we will save $2,127. Thank you for your encouragement and information to help us switch and save so much money. My goodness. I love that. You know, when you pay a bill monthly, you don't really extrapolate out what it's actually costing you per year. And that's why I always talk about how the monthlies are so central to money we throw away and probably no bill per month more than the cell phone bill, particularly with family plans where people are paying so much more than they have to. and you don't necessarily sacrifice in the quality of service now they went to visible and visible if you're not aware is one of verizon's brands they own it and the identical service on visible is a fraction of the cost of brand name verizon and you can be on plans that are like to like that it's there's network prioritization is the same the speeds are the same All this stuff is the same. The only thing that's different is the price. So thank you for taking the time to doing that. And congratulations on putting $2,000 plus a year back in your pocket. Speaking of something, we've got to get a good return on investment. That's what we're paying right now for utility bills. They're going bonkers. Electric bills going up, up, up and away. We're all experiencing it. But there's some things you need to know you can do that will help you fight back in the wallet. I'm going to talk about it straight ahead. So power bills, crazy. And a lot of it is because of the AI data centers and the political corrupt process in states where big organizations get where they want. And regular everyday people get squashed like a bug. And that's what's been going on in the states where, in states where the utilities are monopolies regulated by the state, the state regulatory authorities, some elected, some appointed, depending on the state, they are cost shifting the cost of all the power demands of the AI centers onto ordinary consumers and small businesses. And that's why power bills that have been pretty steady-eddy for a good while suddenly are going through the roof. So it's hard for us as just regular old people to control the changes that are happening in our prices because of a corrupt political process. So we can only change what we can change. and where you can make a difference is if you're a homeowner and the absolute demand for energy that your home uses but at the same time you don't want to freeze in the winter sweat in the summer and there are things you can do that are making a difference and there are things that that you wouldn't even think about necessarily but I'm going to talk about a couple of them that make a big difference with if you live in an area that gets really hot in the summer and you deal with really expensive energy bills a couple of things that are now in the United States one that's not here yet at least that I don't know of yet maybe it is and just not on my radar but the new roofing shingles that greatly reduce energy demand in homes by reflecting away the heat that the sun generates instead of it being absorbed into the house I first talked about this probably six or seven years ago when it first became something that an ordinary consumer, when it gets to the cycle where you have to put a new roof on your home, this is when you do this, is when it's time for a new roof, that you price out the roofs that are great for reducing your energy bills. And most of what you're paying, a lot of the cost is the labor involved with putting in a roof. The additional cost for the energy saving shingles is not that great of the overall thing of putting on a new roof. And I never see ads ever for roofing companies mentioning that you can use these energy efficient shingles. But you should when it comes cycle to replace a roof, especially if you're in a high cost area for energy. I mean, it's like you have to do nothing. Just having those shingles on reduces your bills. Second thing that has been spreading around the world, and again, I don't know if it's something commercially available in the U.S. yet. So I'm talking about something that may be vaporware for us at this point, but there are these new paints that people, when they paint a home, are painting with them, and they have a chemical in them that greatly, I know you're thinking, oh, I'm going to get some kind of tumor popping out of my head with this new paint. But the point of the paint is they greatly reduce the amount of energy that the heat that a building absorbs. It can be a commercial structure, a mid-rise. It can be a single-family home. That the paint itself can reduce the amount of energy that a house will have to have to keep it cooled. Now, let's talk about heating and cooling. This is something I mentioned like two years ago that now you're seeing these start to pop up in regular stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, places like that. There's now a window unit for people who live in rentals. and you're going to want something you can take with you that is a heat pump that can be self-installed by a consumer that reduces the amount of energy it takes to heat or cool an area of an apartment by a massive factor. Now, I know the sales stuff talks about reducing your heating and cooling bills by like 75% or something like that. I don't know that you save that much. But these new ultra-efficient window unit heat pumps that are starting to appear in the marketplace are phenomenal for a renter because you just take it out when you leave and go to your new apartment. You have to have a window style in the apartment that will take the window units, but they just slide in there and they provide essentially zone heating or cooling in your apartment at a much lower price. Why am I talking about stuff that's kind of out there? Because there's much simpler stuff I talk about all the time, about making sure you're properly insulated, that you have weather stripping, that you do all the things that will reduce the energy that your home is going to need to maintain a heated or cool temperature that you want. But the reality is, and the automatic thermostats, those are all things that are common. They're not expensive. Most of us don't get around to them, but we know those things. But what I want you to know is that there's things that are at the bleeding edge right now that make big differences in the amount of energy you need to heat and cool that are not mainstream yet, but they're coming. and there'll be the early adopters, people that are loonies like me, and then they will become mainstream. So we're at the pioneering stages of, let's say with the paint, but with the rubes, we were at pioneering stages when I first talked about it. Now they're out there, they're mainstream. People just don't know to ask for them. All right. We'll go to questions. Benjamin in California has one about his home. I recently received an envelope in the mail and opened it because it featured only the logo of my municipal utility district. Inside was a statement from an insurance company that it had been contracted by the utility district to offer private water line insurance coverage. Coverage is $3 per month, and the agreement requires permission to convert the required initial check payment data into recurring monthly electronic transfers from the bank account. The coverage proposes to cover multiple service calls annually up to $12,000 per service. According to AI, the cost of a line repair in my area is $1,000 to $5,000 with an average of a couple thousand dollars. Although we can easily afford to self-insure, in this case, the low fee means we'd have to pay the fee for over half a century to equal the cost of one line repair. Ours is an older home. What are your thoughts? Okay, Benjamin, this is happening all over America. Cash-starved utility companies, municipal companies, or private utility companies just trying to make money are contracting with these marketing firms selling you exterior waterline insurance. Now, this became a flashpoint big issue because of something called polybutylene pipe. Remember when we used to have the calls about polybutylene all the time? I guess we have to go back 40 years ago. It was a common product that was used for the yard service line for water coming into a house. And if you have polybutylene pipe as your yard service line it will deteriorate It will fail It not a may It will fail And it will cause these kind of problems You have to have your yard dug up have to put in the new water line You have to pay the water system for a huge water bill unless they have what they call mysterious water loss credit is what it's generally generically called. And so all that's true. So it would depend on the era your home was built. Your home inspection report from when you bought your home, if you bought a home built principally in the 1980s to early 1990s, you got a pretty good shot that you have polybutylene pipe. By now, most of it's already failed. The number of homes that would still have polybutylene pipe are much, much smaller now that a regular yard service line would fail made of a respected material much much less likely so the risk is there but it's an obscure risk unless you have a home built in the era i'm talking about principally the 80s and a little bit into the 90s all right nan in north carolina says hi clark you're one of my favorite human beings on the planet and i have so much confidence in your ability to advise me on the following question Thank you for that nice thought. One of the economics groups that I follow is predicting another Great Depression in the 2030s. Of course, it won't look the same as the Depression of the 1900s, but do you agree this is an accurate prediction? And if so, what can we do now to protect our financial futures for us and our kids? My son is 13 years old currently, and this could be during his college years. Yeah, so predictions of a Great Depression are so hard to make. I mean, you think about what happened from the banking scandals that came to a head starting in 07, and we did not recover until 2015 from all the financial fallout from the banking scandals. So we did not have, in fact, it was referred to as the Great Recession. It would have been as tragic and catastrophic as the Great Depression if the people running the Federal Reserve and others running the U.S. Treasury, other central banks around the world, other financial people in government didn't learn the lessons of the 1930s. And in spite of all the egregious, horrific conduct of the banks that led to the Great Recession, we never, in spite of the hardship people had, the foreclosures, all that, we never slipped into a depression. We never had mass starvation like in the 1930s. The question is, what could cause us to have another Great Depression? And the most obvious things that would do it would be war or a catastrophic plague or something like that. But as far as just economic mismanagement leading us into a depression, I don't see that. But it's hard to know that. I mean, nobody in advance knew that we were going to have a depression in the 1870s, in the 1890s, or the one in the 1930s, or that we'd even have the Great Recession, for that matter. So it's always possible economies go through ups and downs. It's always possible that we as human beings will act badly one country to another, and we could end up in a real calamity. But I would not expect that your 13-year-old should fear what's going to happen when they're done with college or anything like that or schooling because of what could happen with the economy. All right. On a very positive note, Art in California says, I'm getting close to paying off my mortgage in the next year or so. Congratulations. Congrats. Do I need to take any precautions? I've got a Credit Karma account and I monitor it daily. Is there anything else I should do? Well, first, congratulations. You're going to join nearly 40% of homeowners, highest percent in records I've ever seen, who own their homes free and clear. It's fantastic. Something you should do as someone with a mortgage, or particularly someone who's done with a mortgage, is your county in California, as most counties now do around the United States has a property registry where you're notified anytime any action is taking place with your title, anybody trying to take out a loan, anything like that. Because we do have an ugly crime in the United States that fortunately is very rare, but if it happens to you, it's the most ugly thing ever where people are impersonating you and taking out debt against your home or actually trying to steal ownership of your home. and so these county registries are a great defense and I wish every county and every state in the United States offered a free registry it's haphazard whether or not your county in California is offering one of these but if they do and wherever you live in America and you're a homeowner you want to register with your county registry and all it is is it's like an email service where They notify you when there's anything going on with your title. So you have early warning of somebody creating mischief. Much easier to unwind and deal with when you know it early, know it quickly, and act upon it right away. And again, congratulations on being at the end of having to write a bank of check every month for that mortgage. and I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I hope that you learned something that gave you something you could deal with in your life that you could put to work to save you money so you can save more and spend less and avoid getting ripped off. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll see you on Wednesday.
