How To Flex Your Financial Rights As A Consumer & Citizen

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that we deserve to defend our spending choices and be treated as a worthwhile consumer. This is because some businesses tend to lean on those consumer rights with a little more audacity than they should. Anyone who has tried to cancel out of a mobile phone or broadband contract will likely know the feeling. Not only does it take a good amount of time to get the right department on the phone after contacting support, but you are given every trick in the book designed to make you stay and to force you into alternative plans in order to keep you.

From time to time, your rights as an individual citizen may be affected. For instance, using documented evidence from a dashcam and using services like GetDismissed to get out of an unwarranted traffic fine can be essential. It can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly where our rights begin, however, and how we can more readily defend them.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few measures you can use to strengthen your standing and feel entitled to defend your financial affairs, as is your right:

Know Your Rights

Knowing your rights is quite clearly the prerequisite to flexing them in a situation where this is necessary. For instance, understanding the contract terms when opening a bank balance or credit card can help you properly understand when charges haven’t been applied under the proper parameters. Wells Fargo, to use an example, were guilty of hitting their internal targets by granting many different clients additional current accounts they didn’t need, and signing them up for services they would never use. Those who were shrewd and focused on exactly how these were opened managed to sue the bank for that. You never know when this approach could aid you.

Read The Contract

It’s essential to get a good reading on any contract that relates to your financial management. Today, it’s not uncommon for those who wish for a given service to simply sign up and accept all terms and conditions, but if you have a limited idea of what this actually states, you have no bearing on how you could press your rights when necessary, or what protections you may be giving up. This may put in danger of undue fines or financial obligations you were unaware of.

Document Your Experience

Documenting your experience is a key measure to use when hoping to prove your case. This might involve the use of a dashcam to appeal against a fine when accused of running a red light, or it might prove to a company that actually, you were promised a deal from the emails a sales agent had sent and now you’re trapped in another service package, you feel that this goes against your rights as a consumer. Documenting your experience can provide you with the receipts necessary to prove your corner and defend your finances accordingly.

With this advice, we hope you can continue to flex your financial rights as a consumer and citizen.

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