I just bought a can of Folgers Classic Roast coffee from Costco and saw one of the most amazing marketing lies ever. I can understand companies that make packages smaller. We all know fuel and food is more expensive and we can accept paying more for the same products. We can understand when companies charge the same price but give you less. They don’t tell you it’s the same size, they just hit it with the shrink ray and are done with it.

Until today, no one flat out lied about it.

(Click to continue reading…)

With the recent spate of incredible shrinking product sizes, it’s important to double check your grocery store rack labels and their math. I know a lot of people use those white and yellow labels to help decide whether they’re getting a good deal, I use them all the time, but with producers shrinking products, there can often be a mismatch between the label and the product.

For example, Breyer’s recently lowered the size of their ice cream from 1.75 quarts to 1.50 quarts and didn’t change their UPC bar codes. This meant that a 1.75 quart Cookies & Cream had the same bar code as the 1.50 quarter Cookies & Cream. When you combine that with a supermarket staff not advised to change the labeling, you get bad math. Here’s an example:

I apologize for the poor image, I took it with my cell phone, but you can make out that the package size is 1.50 quarts (the new, smaller size). The label shows that the retail price is $4.99 and the unit price is $2.85 per quart.

The unit price is actually $3.33 per quart ($4.99 / 1.5) and the $2.85 per quart unit price applies to the older larger version ($4.99 / 1.75).

Grocery stores aren’t trying to trick you into thinking you’re getting a better deal than you are, they simply aren’t paying close attention – but you have to. Stay sharp!

If you have a student loan from Sallie Mae and recently opted for graduated or extended repayment plans, Sallie Mae probably reported your recent loan payment as a partial payment to Equifax and they marked it as delinquent. If all that happened, your Equifax credit score, one of the most important numbers of your adult life, took a big hit as a result of that reporting error (or “glitch,” as they would say) by Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae, based out of Reston, Virginia, happens to be the largest student lender in the United States and this mistake has caused a significant drop in credit scores, as many as a hundred points!

What happened was that Sallie Mae had offered a special payment payment plan (graduated or extended repayment plans) and accidentally reported those payment plans as partial payments to Equifax. Equifax, in seeing only “partial payments,” coded the accounts as delinquent. If you have any student loans, you probably recognize that they’re probably one of the largest debts you have and getting it marked delinquent is bad. Sallie Mae and Equifax discovered this last Friday and the problem was fixed by Tuesday, though approximately 10% of the 10 million Sallie Mae customers were ensnared by this coding snafu and saw their scores decline (according to their spokesperson).

Were you affected? No, unless you did two things. First, do you have a loan with Sallie Mae? If so, did you agree for a “graduated or extended repayment plan?” A graduated or extended repayment plans was an arrangement where you can stretch the typical 10 year payment period over 12 to 30 years, with smaller payments in the beginning.

Does this matter? No, unless you are planning on getting a loan in the next few weeks. I stand corrected, this will matter if an existing loan sees you delinquent on a loan and then jacks up your rates (smells like Universal Default clauses on credit cards), but outside that scenario you’re probably safe. If you don’t plan on borrowing money for a house or a car or anything else for a few weeks, I wouldn’t worry about it because your score will go back to normal once they sort things out.

What to do if your score fell and you need a loan? No problem, you can call up Sallie Mae at (888) 2-SALLIE and request a credit reference letter to indicate that the delinquent account is Sallie Mae’s fault and not your borrowers. You can take that letter to the lender and notify them that your account simply has a problem in it. You won’t need to pull your Equifax report and request a fix or anything, they’re working on it.

This underscores the importance of monitoring your credit history at all times, though they caught this particular error pretty quickly. Some people use myFICO to monitor their credit report (since it monitors your Equifax report, they saw it immediately) but I’m not sure it’s worth $89.95 a year or $8.95 a month. Do I really need my FICO score monitored on a weekly basis? I don’t know. Either way, the service is available or you could just rely on the one a year availability of free credit reports via AnnualCreditReport.com.

(Photo by Kato von Kiwi)