How Loyalty Programs Work, and Why They May Cost You More Money in the Long Run
Loyalty programs are designed to give you perks for sticking with a particular airline or store, but because of the way your mind works when making decisions you might end up saving more money by avoiding them all together.
Psychology Today has dissected how loyalty programs work, and they've found that we're often willing to spend more money in the name of accruing more points:
Because you may pay more for some flights on that airline in order to stick with the particular carrier, you may pay more for those simple comforts than you might be willing to pay if they were just offered to you directly. That is, you might not pay $40 for the opportunity to board early if it were offered to you at check-in, but you might pay $40 more for a flight on an airline where your loyalty club membership allows you to board early.
The idea of loyalty programs is to help you develop habits that include the companies offering them. The more you participate—meaning, the closer you get to a reward—the more you'll tend to appreciate the program and begin to form these habits.
Loyalty programs aren't inherently bad, however. So long as you don't let the draw of points lead you to spending a bunch of extra money, they can be used to your advantage without creating bad habits. For some tips, our guide to mastering airline loyalty programs is a good start.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
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How Loyalty Programs Work, and Why They May Cost You More Money in the Long Run
Loyalty programs are designed to give you perks for sticking with a particular airline or store, but because of the way your mind works when making decisions you might end up saving more money by avoiding them all together.
Psychology Today has dissected how loyalty programs work, and they've found that we're often willing to spend more money in the name of accruing more points:
Because you may pay more for some flights on that airline in order to stick with the particular carrier, you may pay more for those simple comforts than you might be willing to pay if they were just offered to you directly. That is, you might not pay $40 for the opportunity to board early if it were offered to you at check-in, but you might pay $40 more for a flight on an airline where your loyalty club membership allows you to board early.
The idea of loyalty programs is to help you develop habits that include the companies offering them. The more you participate—meaning, the closer you get to a reward—the more you'll tend to appreciate the program and begin to form these habits.
Loyalty programs aren't inherently bad, however. So long as you don't let the draw of points lead you to spending a bunch of extra money, they can be used to your advantage without creating bad habits. For some tips, our guide to mastering airline loyalty programs is a good start.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
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New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...
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New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...
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How Loyalty Programs Work, and Why They May Cost You More Money in the Long Run
Loyalty programs are designed to give you perks for sticking with a particular airline or store, but because of the way your mind works when making decisions you might end up saving more money by avoiding them all together.
Psychology Today has dissected how loyalty programs work, and they've found that we're often willing to spend more money in the name of accruing more points:
Because you may pay more for some flights on that airline in order to stick with the particular carrier, you may pay more for those simple comforts than you might be willing to pay if they were just offered to you directly. That is, you might not pay $40 for the opportunity to board early if it were offered to you at check-in, but you might pay $40 more for a flight on an airline where your loyalty club membership allows you to board early.
The idea of loyalty programs is to help you develop habits that include the companies offering them. The more you participate—meaning, the closer you get to a reward—the more you'll tend to appreciate the program and begin to form these habits.
Loyalty programs aren't inherently bad, however. So long as you don't let the draw of points lead you to spending a bunch of extra money, they can be used to your advantage without creating bad habits. For some tips, our guide to mastering airline loyalty programs is a good start.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
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Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser
New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...
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Today I am going to write about how to make money by buying an item or items, then flipping, or reselling the item.
I buy items to resell regularly. You can buy anything, and the basic concept and rules of flipping never change.
Here's the Rules of Flipping:
1. Never buy anything for market value. If you do, you will not make a profit when you flip it, or resell it. Make sure you have a profit margin of at least 40%. Sometimes finding buyers takes a while, and it has to be worth your while.
2. Never buy something you can't pay for because you think you're going to flip it and make more money. Sometimes you will get unlucky, and not flip it. I've heard of people buying a house with the intent of flipping it, without checking if they can make monthly payments for said house. The house does not sell, and the fool loses his shirt. Do not let yourself become this fool.
3. Never sell anything to a person that says he'll pick it up and/ or send someone to pick it up before he mails you the money. This guy is probably a scammer. He'll take your goods and run.
4. Don't buy something that's falling apart and expect to flip it for a large profit. Almost no one will buy something that takes extensive restoration work. There are exceptions that make the rule, but they're few and far between.
5. Don't expect to get a huge profit when you flip things that are not rare and/or antique. Things are only worth what people will pay for them.
6. Don't lie about the quality of your item(s) you want to flip. A potential buyer can change his mind quickly when he comes to your place of commerce and sees you have lied to him. He might even spread the story of his experience around to his friends or acquaintances, making it harder for you to flip things. No one wants to get taken and/or lied to.
7. Don't be pushy. People don't like to do business with people that rub them the wrong way.
8. Factor in travel costs when you resell or flip something you got that was far away. To make a profit, travel costs and the price you paid for an item need to be, when combined, less than the normal or standard price of the item.
Now that you know how to flip for profit, have fun doing so!
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Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser
New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...
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