Legislation


Did you know that you can withdraw money from your 401k to cover the funeral expense of your parents, spouse, children, dependents?

I was watching the PBS Frontline episode on retirement, goofing off and decided to look up 401k on Wikipedia. Per the documentary, did you know the 401k clause was written for executives of Kodak and Xerox to protect compensation for their executives? (Found the documentary through another PF blog, but now I forget which one.)

From wikipedia (which is kind of unreliable and I’ll have to stop using it):

# Funeral expenses for the employee’s deceased parent(s), spouse, child(ren), or dependent(s) (as of December 31, 2005)

Pay your fair share by paying an annual fee? NO WAY.

I admit, I carry a balance, but I don’t like this line of argument at all. Why should someone pay an annual fee because some other dum-dum can’t pay their bills ontime?

Sorry, but that’s crap.

Credit card companies make money EVERYWHERE. They make it in annual fees. They make it in interest on card balances. They make it on EVERY TRANSACTION. Even if you are paying the bill in full, as long as you generate transactions, they make money.

POOH on paying an annual fee.

There’s only one card I pay a fee on, that’s my AMEX. Guess what? They have a grace period on late payments. You used to be able to tell them that you put your check in the mail and there was no penalty. (I haven’t used this feature in years so I don’t know if it still exists.)

You can search out no annual fee credit cards at places like Interest.com.

DISCLOSURE: Interest.com is the exclusive ad sponsor of this blog. And no, they didn’t ask me to write this. I wrote it myself because this is an incredibly stupid, non-free-market notion. Geez. Might as well tax me to bail out financial institutions. Oh wait. They already did that. Harumph.