Consumer Hacks with Wendy Knowler

Before you buy a car, look up how it performed in a crash test. Global NCAP has been crash testing cars sold in South Africa for years and the results are free on its website. The gap between models is enormous. Two cars that look alike and cost almost the same can stars apart when it comes to passenger protection. The dealership won't raise it. The advertising certainly won't. Search the model an...

Have you ever booked a photographer, a venue, or an event planner, and then had to cancel? You may well have been told the deposit was non-refundable - end of discussion. The Consumer Protection Act says otherwise. You may cancel an advance booking, and the supplier may keep a reasonable cancellation penalty. Not automatically the whole deposit. What counts as reasonable depends on how much notice...

A woman came to me wanting to sell gold coins she'd bought years earlier as an investment. Here's the thing about anything sold to you as an investment that you can hold in your hand: coins, collectibles, memorabilia. There are two prices: what a dealer will sell it to you for, and what a dealer will pay you for it. The gap between them can be enormous, and nobody volunteers it at the point of sal...

When something goes wrong, companies love to offer a voucher or a percentage-off-your-next-purchase as compensation, rather than money. One family was given 25% off future flights by SAA. Generous, until they tried to book and found there was simply no way to apply the discount at the payment stage because their foreign credit card wasn’t accepted. Before you accept a voucher as compensation, ask:...

A woman's husband had a stroke seven years ago and hasn't been able to use his phone since. She says the account was closed. The billing carried on anyway. This is the among the most common complaint I get. You phone, someone says they'll cancel it, and nobody does. Months or years later you're still paying, and getting the money back is very hard, because the company says it has no record of your...

Vet bills are brutal, and medication is a big slice of them. But you may never be told that a cheaper equivalent of what you're being dispensed exists, because nobody at the counter is obliged to raise it with you. So ask. Ask whether there's a generic or a cheaper alternative. Or whether the much-cheaper human version of the drug can be given to your pet. Some can!

A listener wrote to me about a phone account written off years ago. He doesn't dispute the money. What he disputes is what the listing has since done to him. Most people only find out they're listed when a loan or a rental application is turned down, and by then it's too late to fix quickly. You're entitled to one free credit report a year from each of the registered credit bureaux. TransUnion, Ex...

Selling something on Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace? The oldest trick in the book is still working beautifully for scammers. The "buyer" sends you a proof of payment, often a very convincing one, and arranges a courier to collect that same day. The money never arrives, the goods are gone, and your bank can't help you. Anyone can produce a fake proof of purchase. Firstly, if the “buyer” tries to t...

Mitch of Durban bought a second-hand phone from well-known national retailer. Six weeks later it failed. The shop refused a refund, refused a credit, refused a swap, and offered him a repair. That is not how the law works. Under the Consumer Protection Act, if something you buy fails within six months, you choose the remedy: repair, replacement or refund. Not the shop. And if they do repair it and...

A Discovery member took advantage of a free health check and then got a sales call offering her a three-month free Vitality trial. She agreed, on condition that she be contacted before the free period ended. Nobody contacted her. The membership rolled over into a paid one, and the fees came off every month, something she only discovered many months later. She got nowhere complaining, so she came t...

Store cards can quietly drain your wallet through monthly service fees, even if you have what you assume is a zero balance. Last month Woolworths raised its store card fee to R52.49 a month, applying it even to those customers who have a zero balance. That works out to R630 annually just to hold an idle account. While legal under the National Credit Act, this service fee is nearly ten times higher...

Nico Grobler and his wife bought two Grafton Everest leather recliners from Tafelberg Furnishers. A few years in, the leather on the armrests and leg rests began to wear and scuff – prematurely, in their view. But because the chairs were well out of their two-year warranty, the couple’s first thought was to pay for custom covers to hide the damage. But Nico still felt they should have lasted longe...

Home Affairs has launched a site that shows you the closest bank branch where you can apply for a Smart ID Card. It's at myhomeaffairsonline.dha.gov.za. There are 372 participating branches so far, and new ones appear on the site as they sign up. Since March, more than half a million people have applied for a Smart ID through a bank rather than a Home Affairs office. The reason to bother: the gree...

When you pay a company by EFT, where do you get the banking details? If they’re saved in your banking app, that’s worth a second thought. A Truworths account holder made debt repayments using saved beneficiary details, but the debt collectors had switched banks. Her money landed in a dormant trust account, and she spent months being chased despite having proof of every payment. Before making any p...

A couple flew from Joburg to Auckland, with the return journey via Perth, but were refused boarding because their Perth layover was longer than eight hours, meaning they needed an Australian transit visa. Being Sunday afternoon, it was too late to apply. They had to buy two Cathay Pacific tickets home via Hong Kong, costing R22 862. Neither the airline nor the booking site warned them, but visas a...

Balloon payments are appealing in that you get the car for a smaller “affordable” monthly payment, BUT a big lump sum awaits you after six or seven years. On a R350 000 car over five years, a 20% balloon knocks around R870 off your instalment. But here's the catch. You pay more in the end, roughly R18 000 more, and you're left with a R70 000 lump sum to find. And that lump sum feels abstract, unti...

Spotted a slick online shop with a South African-sounding name and great prices? Look twice. A lot of them aren’t local at all. They are fronts for sellers shipping from China. And those appealing pics are all AI. So, your “three-day delivery” becomes three weeks, the quality often disappoints, and you can return them – to China, at a massive cost. So, before you order from an unfamiliar site, che...

Why? Not because the Ombud is in bed with the insurers as many assume. Because many consumers didn’t fully grasp what they were and weren’t covered for, or hadn’t met their side of the policy in terms of the security or maintenance conditions. So don’t wait for a claim to find out that you were never going to win with an insurance claim. Dig out your policy and actually read the exclusions and the...

An awful form of bank fraud is on the rise – it’s called Business Email Compromise. Here how it works - a fraudster hacks into an email exchange, waits for an invoice, then swaps in their own banking details before it reaches you. You pay, in good faith, and your money is gone. And in this country the law often holds YOU liable, for not checking. AI has wiped out the old giveaways too, no more spe...

Here is a fast-growing scam - fraudsters copy your social media account, your name, your photo, even your videos, and set up a near-identical fake. Then they slide into your followers’ comments and messages, posing as you, to sell them something dodgy or fish for their money. It happened to me. So, every now and then, check whether a cloned version of you is out there. Tell your followers what you...

If you buy a used car on finance and it turns out to be a lemon, don’t spend all your energy on the dealer. The bank that financed it is on the hook too. Our Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed it recently: when a bank finances a defective car, it wears two hats, lender and supplier, so it is liable under the Consumer Protection Act. That means you can cancel the agreement and get your money back, n...

When you apply for vehicle finance through a dealership, the finance manager submits your application to multiple banks - and gets back a "podium" showing every offer, with different rates and terms. They're not obliged to show you all of them, and have every incentive to push the one earning them the highest commission - not the cheapest deal for you. The hack: say “Please show me the podium." Th...

When your cellphone contract expires and you haven't given 30 days' notice to cancel or signed a new deal, your network can move you onto a month-to-month rate — at a dramatically higher price. Nadene's MTN contract was R189 a month. When it expired at the end of May, she got an SMS telling her it was converting to R580 a month. She asked for immediate cancellation and was told she'd have to give...

When you search for a product category on a grocery app like Checkers Sixty60, the results aren't random — they're influenced by which brands have paid for keyword placement. Search "tea" and Five Roses appears first; the far cheaper Checkers own-brand equivalent – Forage & Feast - doesn't show up at all unless you search for it by name – and it’s currently R20 cheaper per 102-bag pack. Same produ...

Retailers - online and in-store - are experts at manufacturing urgency such as flash sales, "only 2 left," countdown timers. The antidote is simple: wait three days before purchasing any unplanned, non-essential item. Write it down if you need to, then revisit after 72 hours. Research consistently shows the urge to buy evaporates in most cases. If you still want it after three days, it's a conside...