Time for a Friday Flight- our little sampling of the week’s financial news and what it means for your personal finances. There are a lot of headlines out there, but we boil them down to specific takeaways that will allow you to kick off the weekend informed and help you to get ahead with your money. In this episode we explain some relevant and helpful stories like: two weeks left to find a Mint budget alternative, Bitcoin booming, 401k millionaires, political investing, tax refund robbers, bought and paid for reviews, bogus bag fees, goldilocks travel window, financial literacy on the rise, pay up if you’re tardy, & late fee caps on credit cards.
Additional links:
- Investing – Our comprehensive guide on how you can get started investing for your retirement… and while we’re at it, a comprehensive guide on how to buy index funds.
- Backpack – Avoid paying bag fees with the Cotopaxi Allpa 28L – it’s the best!
- Security – Here are the best practices to keep your financial information secure and avoid digital pickpockets!
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Been a listener for about 4-5 months now. I appreciate you bringing to light the concept of “paid” reviews. The hard part of hearing that story of the brewery review example is that you were comparing a 5 star with a 4.6 star business and that anecdotally you felt “confident” the 4.6 star brewery was probably better than the “false” 5 star brewery. (ouch) Why not instead bring to light (a concept you mentioned in a previous episode of a “numbers” driven culture) that if you are trying to find the “best” brewery and deciding between a place with .4 stars difference, that it’s ultimately the system of reviews and the customer perception of how to use them that is flawed; not a business incentivizing their current customers to try to help them be successful in a cut-throat capitalist driven society that might dismiss them for .4 stars. I feel confident that there are way better examples out there of companies genuinely attempting to defraud customers with false reviews.
As a small business owner for over a decade, a lot of start ups and small businesses rely on reviews to compete for views and SEO and all sorts of other ways of getting customers to help keep their business going. I feel most small businesses are most likely too poor to pay bots and other sites to stack false or paid reviews. A good follow up for this might even be the shady practices of companies like Yelp and their direct involvement in perpetuating that toxic review culture and how they even spam businesses for money to help their “ratings” or tell them if they don’t “claim their business listing” for their business on yelp someone else could claim it and ruin their reputation. Which again, has probably led a lot of business to try to figure out how they can compete with that. Thanks for letting me share on this.