May 2018 - The Outlier Model | The Outlier Model

45% of Americans Were Never Educated on Credit Card Use

Jeff Hoyt / May 31st, 2018 / No Comments

Most likely you are self-taught about personal finance: 45 percent of consumers were never educated on credit card use, according to a survey by the website Credit Cards Explained. Of those who received their credit card education in school, 22 percent were taught in high school, followed by 18 percent in college, and 8 percent in middle school. Approximately 7 percent of consumers got their education...

Posted in: Personal Finance

How to Get Money Back from Western Union Scams

Jeff Hoyt / May 29th, 2018 / No Comments

Act Before May 31 to Get Your Money Back Although Western Union has served as a reliable method for rapidly sending money over long distances since the late 1800s, the service is also used by scammers with increasing frequency. This has resulted the settlement of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that Western Union had not been doing enough to protect consumers from these scammers. The FTC has...

Posted in: Personal Finance

Why Your State Taxes Might Go Up

Jeff Hoyt / May 24th, 2018 / No Comments

What goes up must come down – when considering the effects of gravity. That principle doesn’t typically apply to federal or state taxes. In the rare cases where taxes do go down, other taxes tend to go up to compensate government coffers. Because state taxes are often linked to the federal tax code in different ways, changes in the federal tax law have ripple effects that are felt throughout...

Posted in: Personal Finance

New Tax Laws Should Lower Your Odds of Being Audited

Jeff Hoyt / May 22nd, 2018 / No Comments

The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) represents one of the biggest changes to the tax code in many years. Will the Internal Revenue Service be up to the challenge of enforcing these changes? For the last five years, the IRS has been examining fewer and fewer returns. In calendar year 2016, 1.1 million tax returns were audited (0.5 percent of all returns), down from approximately 1.7 million returns...

Posted in: Personal Finance