Credit cards: Top 4 tips for retirees

3. Say no to services sold over the phone

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/File
Richard Cordray listens to remarks by President Obama after Mr. Cordray was appointed to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2012 in Cleveland. The board is monitoring credit-card practices to ensure that consumers are protected.

Many customer service representatives are experts in the art of selling extra products once they’ve got you on the line. Unfortunately, most of the additional products or services peddled over the phone aren’t worth the additional cost.

Save yourself the unnecessary expense and “just say no” to any service pushed over the phone. If you really do believe something like identity theft protection or payment protection insurance might be useful to you, take some time to conduct additional research online and review all your options. You can always call back and add the service at a later time if you’re unable to locate a better deal.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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