This is the biggest number on the list and the least visible, because it is never invoiced. The SEC's own worked example: $100,000 over 20 years at 4% growth ends at about $208,000 with a 0.25% fee, and about $179,000 with a 1% fee. Same performance, $29,000 difference.
Australia's Productivity Commission put it more starkly: a typical full-time worker in a bottom-quartile fund retires with a balance 54%, or $660,000, lower than a top-quartile one.
The bit Claude is genuinely good at: funds split their costs into admin fee, investment fee, indirect cost ratio and buy-sell spread, which means the headline numbers are not comparable as printed. Normalising them into one figure is fiddly arithmetic, which is exactly the kind of thing to hand over.
Attached are the fee disclosures for two funds [or paste the
fee sections of each PDS, prospectus or KIID].
1. Pull out EVERY charge from each one: admin fee, investment
or management fee, indirect cost ratio, performance fee,
buy-sell spread, platform or wrapper fee, exit fee.
2. Normalise both into a single total annual percentage, and
show me your working so I can check it.
3. Tell me plainly which charges are NOT comparable as printed
and why.
Then, using a balance of [amount] and contributions of
[amount per month]:
4. Project both fee structures at 10, 20 and 30 years using
the SAME assumed growth rate. State the rate you used.
5. Show the gap in dollars at each point.
Do not recommend a fund. I want to see the difference, and I
will take it from there.US consumers were charged $160bn in card interest in 2024, up from $105bn in 2022, per the CFPB. The average APR is 25.2%, and 31.3% on store cards, the highest in at least a decade. A $5,000 balance at 25.2% accrues about $1,260 of interest in a year if the balance does not move.
The UK's FCA has a useful definition worth knowing: persistent debt is when you pay more in interest and charges than principal over 18 months. They estimated fixing it would return £310m to £1.3bn a year to consumers.
Here are my card balances, their APRs, and what I can pay
in total each month: [list them].
Work out two schedules using the same total monthly payment:
1. AVALANCHE: highest APR first.
2. SNOWBALL: smallest balance first.
For each, tell me:
- The month I become debt free.
- Total interest paid.
- The difference between the two, in months and in money.
Then, separately: here is a balance transfer offer [paste it].
Work out the TRUE cost including the transfer fee, and tell me
what happens to the rate when the promotional period ends.
Tell me what monthly payment would clear it inside the window,
because that is the only scenario where the offer wins.
Show your arithmetic. Do not tell me what to do with my money.CFPB credit card market report
The World Bank tracks this across 358 corridors, which makes it the most genuinely international item here. Average cost of sending $200 is 6.65%. By channel: banks 13.40%, international money operators 6.56%, digital-only providers 4.24%.
On a real habit, sending $500 a month: about $67 a month through a bank, about $21 digitally. Roughly $550 a year on money you were moving anyway.
The trick: "no fee" marketing works because the cost is entirely in the rate, so nothing appears on the receipt as a charge. You have to back it out.
Work out what I was actually charged on this transfer.
I sent [amount and currency]. The recipient got [amount and
currency]. Any stated fee was [amount]. The date was [date].
1. Calculate my implied exchange rate: what I sent divided by
what arrived.
2. Compare that to the mid-market rate on that date.
3. Express the difference as a percentage. That is the spread,
and it is the part nobody itemises.
4. Add any stated fee on top and give me the TOTAL cost as a
percentage.
5. Tell me what that same transfer would cost, as a
percentage, through the cheapest channel type.
Then do the same for my card's overseas transactions: [paste
the statement lines]. Show me the total annual cost of the
spread on my typical spending.World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide
Regulators call this price walking: raising renewal prices specifically on customers who do not shop around. The FCA found that in one year, 6 million loyal policyholders would have saved £1.2bn had they paid the average price for their actual risk, roughly £200 each. Their ban on the practice was estimated to save consumers £4.2bn over ten years.
The UK banned it. Most countries have not, which makes this more relevant elsewhere, not less.
Attached: last year's insurance schedule and this year's
renewal notice.
Go line by line and tell me exactly what changed:
- The premium, in money and as a percentage.
- The excess, on every category.
- The sum insured or cover limits.
- Any optional extra that has been added, and whether I asked
for it.
- Anything that has been quietly removed, like no-claims
protection.
Then tell me:
- Has anything about MY risk actually changed, based on what I
have told you? If not, say so plainly.
- Where does my cover no longer match reality? For example a
contents value I set years ago, or two policies covering the
same thing.
- What should I ask them, in one short script, when I call?
Do not tell me which insurer to buy. Show me what changed.Australia's ACCC found households on the same plan for three or more years pay about $221 a year extra, and that 37%, nearly 2.5 million customers, are paying at or above the default offer, with over 400,000 paying more than 10% above it. Ofgem has published savings of up to £325 moving from a standard variable tariff to the cheapest fixed deal.
The genuinely useful part is not the switch, it is the read. Tariffs are built to be non-comparable, and the discount that expired is buried in the terms rather than shown on the bill.
Note: this only applies in deregulated markets, which means Australia, the UK, much of the EU, Texas, Japan and New Zealand. Not everywhere.
Attached: my energy bill, and my plan's fact sheet or terms.
Pull out and explain in plain words:
1. The peak, off-peak and shoulder windows, with the actual
rate for each.
2. The daily supply charge. Tell me what percentage of my bill
it is, because if my usage is low it may dominate.
3. Any demand charge, and how it is calculated.
4. EVERY conditional discount, and critically, its EXPIRY
DATE. Tell me if one has already lapsed.
5. Exit fees.
Then, using my actual usage from the bill:
6. Break my bill into: energy I used, supply charge, peak
premium, and anything I am paying because a discount ended.
7. Tell me the ONE change to my usage pattern that would save
the most, and roughly how much.
If anything in the fact sheet is ambiguous, say so rather than
guessing the rate.Freddie Mac's research is the clearest number here: borrowers who got five rate quotes could have saved more than $6,000 over the life of the loan. Two quotes saved as much as $600 a year, four or more over $1,200 a year.
The maths itself is one division: total switching costs divided by monthly saving equals months to break even. People avoid it because it feels like a project, not because it is hard.
The trap worth knowing: a lower rate on a reset 30-year term can raise your lifetime interest even while the monthly payment falls. Always compare total interest, not the payment.
Work out whether refinancing makes sense on the numbers.
Current loan: [balance, rate, years remaining, monthly
payment]. New offer: [rate, term offered, and every fee:
application, valuation, discharge, settlement, and any
mortgage insurance that would be re-paid].
Give me:
1. Total switching costs, all in.
2. New monthly payment.
3. Monthly saving.
4. BREAK-EVEN: switching costs divided by monthly saving, in
months. State the date.
5. TOTAL INTEREST over the life of each option. Compare a
like-for-like remaining term AND the reset term, because
these give very different answers.
6. If I sell or refinance again before break-even, what have I
lost?
Then tell me what I should ask other lenders to get a
comparable quote. Do not recommend a lender.Two costs stack here and neither shows up as a change on your bill. First, rolling past your contract end onto an out-of-contract price. Second, mid-contract inflation-linked rises that compound year over year.
The contract end date is not printed on the bill, which is the whole reason this works.
Attached: 3 to 6 months of mobile and broadband bills, plus my
actual usage if it is shown.
1. Work out my real usage: not the peak month, the 90th
percentile. Data, calls, and speed if it is available.
2. Compare that to the tier I am paying for. Am I over-
specified, and by how much?
3. Find every price change across these bills, including small
inflation-linked ones, and total the annual effect.
4. Tell me what to ask my provider to find my exact contract
end date, since it is not on the bill.
5. Draft the retention call script: what I currently pay, what
I actually use, and what I want.
If the bills do not show usage, tell me where to find it in my
account rather than estimating.A note on honesty: there are widely quoted regulator figures for how much out-of-contract customers overpay, but I could not open the source page to verify them, so I have deliberately left the numbers out rather than repeat something I have not checked.
The CFPB found overdraft and dishonour revenue fell from $11.96bn in 2019 to $5.83bn in 2023, a drop worth about $185 a year to the average household that overdrafts. The important part is the distribution: roughly 80% of all these fees are paid by under 9% of accountholders.
So this either barely affects you, or it is one of the biggest line items you have never added up. Worth ten minutes to find out which.
Attached: 12 months of bank statements.
Find and total EVERY fee, tagged by type: account keeping,
overdraft, dishonour or NSF, ATM, overseas transaction,
foreign exchange, paper statement, late payment, anything
else.
For each type give me:
- Total for the year, and the number of occurrences.
- Whether it is avoidable by changing account type, by timing,
or not at all.
- If it clusters, say when. For example if overdraft fees all
land in the three days before payday, that is a timing
problem, not an income problem.
Then: total annual fees, and the three changes that would
remove the most. Tell me which are worth the hassle and which
are not.The FDA states that a single generic competitor is associated with price reductions of about 30%, and five competing generics with drops of nearly 85%.
This one ends with a question, not a decision. Claude can tell you the active ingredient and what to ask. Your pharmacist or doctor decides what is suitable for you, and that distinction is not a formality.
Only relevant where you pay out of pocket, so largely not applicable in fully subsidised systems.
I want to understand my options before I speak to a pharmacist.
The medication is: [name], and I pay [amount] for it.
Tell me:
1. The active ingredient, and its generic name.
2. Whether generic versions of that ingredient generally
exist.
3. What "bioequivalent" means, in plain words.
4. The questions I should ask my pharmacist or prescriber.
Rules for you:
- Do NOT tell me to switch medication.
- Do NOT tell me a generic is suitable for me. You do not know
my history and neither does the internet.
- If there is a reason a specific formulation might matter,
say so, so I can raise it.
End with the exact wording of two questions I can ask at the
counter.Let me be honest about the size of this one, because most content is not. The US GAO found that pack downsizing accounted for under 0.1 percentage points of the 34.5% total consumer price rise between 2019 and 2024. It is small in aggregate.
But it is concentrated: 3.0 percentage points for household paper products and 1.6 for cereal. So it is real in the categories where it happens, and negligible everywhere else.
Attached: a photo of a supermarket shelf [or paste a receipt].
1. For every product and pack size shown, calculate the cost
per 100g, per 100ml, or per unit as appropriate.
2. Rank them cheapest to most expensive by UNIT price, not by
pack price.
3. Flag every case where the LARGER pack is worse value,
because that is the one people get wrong.
4. Where a pack size looks unusual (for example 380g where 400g
used to be standard), say so.
Then compare against this older receipt [paste if you have
one] and tell me whether any product has changed size while
keeping its price.
Give me the three swaps that save the most per shop, and say
roughly how much that is per year.