Avoid sneaky fees and demand fair treatment

3. Break free from cell-phone hell. Speaking of regrets, thousands of consumers are locked into long-term cell-phone contracts with draconian early-termination fees. That might not be the end of the world if your phone works well in your home, on your commute and at your place of business – but what if it doesn’t? “Cell phones are such a crazy product,” Bob said. “Everyone should have a chance to see if the darn thing works before they have to pay for it.” He offers the following recommendations – some extreme, some less so – for getting out of “cell phone jail”:

* Move to an area where your current cell-phone company doesn’t provide coverage;

* Swap your phone and your phone plan with someone else online through a trading site such as CellTradeUSA.com;

* Call a customer service representative – and/or his or her supervisor – and attempt to negotiate your early-termination fees in a calm, reasoned way;

* Avoid contracts altogether by using pre-paid cell phones.

Bob also cautions consumers to be on the lookout for hefty “handset updgrade” fees and to avoid “premium text messaging.” The fees associated with getting a new phone or subscribing to joke-of-the-day or special ring-tone services can be astronomical. Complain constructively about such fees or cancel such services if you’re shocked to see their impact on your bill.

4. Pause before deciding to switch – or not switch – area codes. If you’ve moved to a new part of the country, you may have kept your old cell-phone number with its old area code for the sake of convenience. But guess what? Those taxes on your cell-phone bill are based on your area code regardless of where you live – and the differences in taxes can be somewhat staggering. To avoid any surprises, visit sites such as this one to see what the taxes are like where you used to live and where you’ve relocated.

5. With mortgages, the interest rate isn’t all that matters. It’s also very important to compare the fees associated with different mortgages. Such differences in fees can cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. To spotlight just one example: Many people are so overwhelmed when buying a home that they fail to notice the hefty premium they pay for title insurance as part of their closing costs. Most buyers don’t ask any questions and simply go with the title company recommended by their real estate agents or banks. But it pays to shop around and ask for fee breakdowns from different title companies. You typically can haggle over a variety of discretionary fees – such as search fees, document-preparation fees, escrow fees, closing fees and courier fees – that can add hundreds of dollars to your closing costs. What’s more, it also pays to get Good Faith Estimates for mortgages from at least three lenders. Those estimates should be based on the same rate and terms – say, 30-year fixed – so that even more differences in fees and closing costs will become obvious.

Next week's 10 Tips topic Scoring big at garage sales Whether you’re a devotee of yard sales or the kind of person who simply gets dragged along to them, you can greatly improve the experiences you have at these events with a little bit of advance planning. Do you know how to bring home the gold from garage sales? If so, please   share your tips here.

6. Beware of the so-called “courtesy” of courtesy overdraft protection. Unless you say no to this innocuous-sounding service, you could end up paying as much as $39 for each overdraft from your checking account. Your bank will lie to you, in effect, by allowing you to withdraw cash from ATM machines and make purchases using your debit or check card even though you don’t have sufficient funds in your account. To avoid this downward spiral of badness, Bob advises consumers to link their checking accounts to their savings accounts, credit-card accounts or home equity lines of credit instead. “A credit card will cost you money, but it will still be pennies on the dollar compared with the (courtesy overdraft) fee,” he said. “Or if you link to a line of credit, you’d be borrowing from yourself instead of from the bank.”

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