Don't Waste Money

What you save is the subscriptions you stopped using long ago but are still being charged for every month. Going through the automatic-deduction lists in Alipay, WeChat, Apple and Android takes less than 20 minutes. Under the rules, a business must remind you prominently before it deducts money, and must also give you a way to cancel at any time, one that is easy to find and easy to use.

These kinds of people usually get money back when they do it: those who worked only a few months of the year, those who changed jobs mid-year, and those who didn't fill in deductions such as children's education, mortgage, rent or support for elderly parents. It takes a dozen or so minutes on your phone. If your comprehensive income for the year is under 120,000 yuan, or the extra tax you owe is under 400 yuan, you can skip it.

The housing provident fund is not something you can touch only when you buy a home. The new regulations list nine situations in which you can withdraw it, and paying rent, renovating the home you live in, and paying property management fees are all among them. Once you submit an application, the provident fund center must tell you within 3 days whether the withdrawal is approved.

The old plan you're on is often a few dozen yuan more expensive than the ones on sale now. A few dozen a month adds up to a few hundred yuan thrown away each year. Under the rules, without a legitimate reason a carrier may not refuse to let you switch to another network with your number, may not drag its feet on doing it, and still less may it set up a separate fee scheme just for people who switch. If it holds on to you, file a complaint.

Under the rules, the money paid out as prizes for lotto and numbers lotteries is at least 50% of sales, and for Double Color Ball (双色球) it is 51%. That means for every 1 yuan you put in, over the long run you get back only 0.51 yuan on average, a steady loss of 49%. In 2024, 623.486 billion yuan of lottery tickets were sold nationwide, and 161.031 billion yuan of that went straight into the public welfare fund; that portion is not part of the prizes.

The regulators' own line is: a return above 6% deserves a question mark, above 8% is very dangerous, and at 10% or more you should be ready to lose all your principal. Legitimate wealth-management products are no longer allowed to promise guaranteed principal or returns. Money lost by taking part in illegal fundraising is, under the rules, borne by you yourself; when things go wrong, no one covers it for you.

The minimum payment is a loan with interest charged by the day, roughly 18% a year, and using it cancels your interest-free period. An installment plan labeled “0.6% fee per month” works out to about 13.8% a year, not 7.2%. That's because you pay back principal every month while the fee keeps being charged on the original amount. To compare which loan costs more, look only at the annualized rate, not the daily interest or the monthly fee rate.

In China, people who play games spend about 480 yuan each a year on games on average, and money spent is basically not recoverable. The law lets only money that minors spent without a parent's consent be refunded; there is no such rule for adults. The least effortful approach is to set up defenses in advance: turn off password-free payment, set per-transaction and daily limits, and unlink payment methods.

For money spent by a child aged eight or older, as long as the amount is clearly out of proportion to the child's age and intelligence, and the parent neither consented nor accepts the transaction, the transaction is invalid and you can ask for the money back. A child under eight cannot make spending decisions alone in the first place. If the parent never takes a position, in law it counts as not accepting the transaction.

These six types of scam each work differently, but the last step is always the same action: getting the child to use a parent's phone to transfer money, or to read out a verification code. So teaching one sentence is enough: whoever tells you to touch a parent's phone or read out a verification code is a scammer. Add one more: “If you get scammed, tell me first; I won't scold you.” Only if the child dares to tell you the same day is there a chance of getting the money back.

Extended warranties usually sell for 10% to 50% of the original price, and the margin for whoever sells them is more than ten times that on ordinary goods; that difference is the extra money you pay. For main components such as the motors of washing machines and refrigerators, national rules already require a 3-year warranty. If you come across a very cheap extended warranty, divide its price by the cost of one repair; the result is how likely it has to be that the thing breaks at least once in those years for the warranty to pay for itself.

In the second batch of volume-based procurement, drug prices fell 53% on average, and by as much as 93%. As of April 2026, 11 batches had been carried out, covering 490 drugs. When you are prescribed or buy medicine, ask one more question, “Is there a procurement-selected, generic-name one?”: the ingredients are the same, and you can spend a good deal less.

Link once, and the money in your employee medical insurance personal account can be used for your spouse's, parents' and children's medical care and medicines. If you don't, that money can be used only by you, and it just keeps sitting in the account.

Tap water in Beijing works out to 0.005 yuan per liter. Jug water for a dispenser, at 20 yuan a jug, is about 1 yuan per liter, more than 200 times as much. A household that drinks one jug a week spends a little over 1000 yuan a year; the same amount of tap water costs under 5 yuan. Tap water is covered by a mandatory national standard; normally, just boil it and drink it. When the water smells bad or looks cloudy, boiling can't make it clean; stop drinking it and report it.

The US households that traded most earned only 11.4% a year, while the market as a whole earned 17.9% over the same period, and the gap was almost entirely fees. In China, in the 2014 to 2015 boom and crash, the 85% of households with the smallest accounts traded too often. They made 250 billion yuan less than they would have by simply holding still, about three tenths of their principal.

When you borrow to buy stocks, once the price falls through the line and you can't put up more money, you will be forcibly sold out. The paper loss turns into a real loss on the spot, and you don't even get the chance to “wait for it to come back.” Regulations say that people who opened their account less than half a year ago, or whose average daily assets over the last 20 trading days are under 500,000 yuan, may not open a margin account. This threshold itself tells you it isn't meant for ordinary people.

Taken together, the stocks that active funds buy already come very close to the whole market. But the extra management fees they charge come straight out of the return you take home. When fund performance is recalculated over and over as if it were luck and then compared, very few funds earn enough extra to cover the fees they charge.

For every 1 percentage point higher in annual fees, you take home about 18% less after 20 years and about 26% less after 30 years. Picking the lower-fee fund within the same type is the only thing in this matter you can be sure of in advance.

As long as several things don't rise and fall in perfect lockstep, spreading your money across them leaves what you earn on average unchanged, but your account swings less. Conversely, if all your money is bet on one stock, one platform or one home, then the moment it runs into trouble, it is as if everything you have runs into trouble.

For every yuan you put in, the tax you save is “your tax bracket rate minus 3%.” Putting in the full 12000 yuan in a year saves 840 yuan for someone at the 10% rate, 2040 yuan at 20%, and 3240 yuan at 30%. For someone whose rate is only 3%, the tax saved is paid back when they withdraw, and the money is locked up until retirement for nothing. People who pay no individual income tax still have to pay 3% when they withdraw, a net loss.

In that three-year US dataset, members who chose contracts with monthly fees of $70 or more went only 4.3 times a month on average, which works out to more than $17 per visit. A 10-visit pass, by contrast, costs only $10 per visit. These people overpaid by $600 on average over their membership. Unless you already have a record of going steadily for more than a year, paying per visit or buying short-term passes is the better deal.

When a business takes prepayment from you, it must sign a written contract with you that spells out how refunds work. If the business runs into serious operating trouble, it should stop taking money, and if it is going to close or move, it must tell you in advance. At that point you can demand that it keep providing the service, or refund the balance you haven't used. A business that breaks these rules will be fined.

What you save is the things you no longer want by the next day. Goods bought online can be returned without giving a reason within seven days of the day you receive them. A few kinds can't be returned: items made to your order, fresh food and things that spoil easily, digital goods that have been unsealed, and newspapers and periodicals.

People judge whether something is expensive by the first number they see, and however much they adjust afterward, it is never enough. So “original price 999, now 499” makes you systematically overestimate how cheap it is. And under the rules, the only baseline a discount may be measured against is this store's lowest transaction price in the seven days before the promotion. That crossed-out price was not necessarily ever actually charged.

The dividends and the returned money are not guaranteed to you by the insurance company. The product prospectus must state in bold type that “future policy dividends are non-guaranteed benefits.” The extra premium you pay for the return amounts to handing money to the insurance company to save for you: the return is not guaranteed, and getting it out is not easy.

When you are at fault, compulsory traffic insurance (交强险) pays at most three items: 180,000 yuan for death and disability, 18,000 yuan for medical costs, and 2000 yuan for property damage. The three are calculated separately and cannot be shifted from one to another. Compensation for injuring someone easily exceeds these limits, and the excess comes out of your own family's pocket, so buy enough commercial third-party liability insurance.

Keep 3 to 6 months of living expenses somewhere you can withdraw them at any time. That way, when you lose your job or fall ill, you don't have to borrow the kind of money that charges 18% interest a year, and you don't have to sell your investments at a loss. Money in a bank is covered by deposit insurance, up to 500,000 yuan per bank.

Prepaying your mortgage is the same as earning your mortgage rate for certain. So ask only one thing: is the after-tax return you can get steadily over the long term higher than your mortgage rate? If it is higher, don't rush to prepay; if it isn't, or you can't say for sure, prepay. With equal monthly installments of principal and interest, interest makes up more of the payments in the early years, so the earlier you prepay, the more you save. The “prepayment calculator” in your bank's app can give you the figure directly.

If a merchant defrauds you, it pays three times the price you paid, and anything under 500 yuan counts as 500 yuan. A platform that knows a seller is infringing and does nothing has to pay compensation along with the seller. A deposit (定金, forfeitable) can be at most 20% of the contract amount; if you break the contract, the deposit is not refunded, and if the seller breaks it, the seller must refund you double. Faking orders and faking positive reviews in livestream rooms carries liability, and big-data price discrimination against existing customers is expressly prohibited.

When something bought in a livestream room goes wrong, the most common dead end is that you can't find out whom to sue. At that point you can directly require the platform to provide the information of the livestream room operator and the host who promoted the goods, along with the related business records. The platform must provide it.

If you buy food that is expired or spoiled, the item itself, its packaging and the receipt are your evidence, so don't rush to throw them away. You can claim compensation of ten times the price or three times your loss, and anything under one thousand yuan counts as one thousand yuan. Whether you go after the seller or the manufacturer is your choice; whichever party you go after must pay first and may not push you onto the other.

In 2024 the state spot-checked 25250 batches of products, and 14.3% failed. E-commerce channels were worse: of 7297 batches sampled, 23.5% failed; for physical stores it was 15.1%. Before buying a big-ticket item, spend a few minutes checking the spot-check bulletins, and then check whether the 3C certificate is genuine. Where an energy efficiency label is required, it must not be missing.

The price of these things already includes a slice of consumption tax: 20% for watches costing 10,000 yuan or more each, 5% for gold, silver and platinum jewelry and diamonds, and 10% for other jewelry, gems and jade, with value-added tax on top. You don't get this tax back when you resell. If you really like it, buy it as consumption; don't count it as an investment.

Certificates can be forged, so what you need to check is the institution that issued the certificate. A testing institution must be qualified to issue reports to the public, and the report must be printed with the CMA mark. The issuing authority publishes the list of institutions on its official website, and you can check for yourself whether this one is on it. In cases the authorities have investigated and punished, some of the “national inspection certificates” that came with the goods had been made by the sellers themselves through someone they found.

Merchants must display the draw rules, the draw probabilities and the number of limited-edition items prominently, may not manipulate the results behind the scenes, and may not include empty boxes. A guaranteed-prize mechanism and caps on spending and on the number of draws are things the document only encourages merchants to offer. For blind boxes bought online, if the merchant explained this clearly and you confirmed it, you cannot make a seven-day no-reason return once the box is opened.

The law requires only prepackaged food to label an ingredient list; bulk food is not required to. A bulk counter only has to label the name, the production date, the shelf life and who produced it. So “no additives listed” does not mean “nothing added”; it only means the law did not require them to be listed. If you care, buy the prepackaged version: the ingredient list and the names of the additives are printed on it.

People's instinct is to sell when they're up and to hold on stubbornly when they're down. In seven years of records from ten thousand US accounts, stocks that had gone up were more than 50% more likely to be sold than those that had gone down. The same people were also keener to add to their losing stocks. Yet over the following year, the losing stocks they kept did on average 3.4 percentage points worse than the ones they had sold.

Offshore brokers such as Tiger, Futu and Longbridge are no longer allowed to open accounts for people onshore starting May 2026. Those who already have accounts can, within two years, only sell and transfer their money out; they cannot buy anything more. Your foreign-exchange quota may not be used to buy overseas stocks either; anyone who breaks this rule cannot use the quota in that year or in the 2 years after. If you want overseas assets, go through QDII funds or the Southbound Stock Connect (港股通).

The premiums you pay will not all come back to you as payouts; part of them pays for the insurance company's costs and profit. So what is worth insuring are losses that rarely happen but that your household couldn't pay for if they did, such as a serious illness, injuring someone while driving, or the death of the family member who earns the money. Leave the small losses your savings can absorb to your emergency fund.

Term life insurance covers only a fixed number of years; if you die during those years, your family receives a lump sum. It is meant for family members who live on your income, for example when the mortgage isn't paid off or the children are still small. If no one depends on you for support, you don't need it. Children don't earn money, and for death insurance bought for a child, the law also limits how much can be paid out.

All personal insurance with a term of over one year has a free-look period (犹豫期). If you bought it at a bank, it is 15 days after you receive the policy, and canceling during this period costs at most a 10-yuan processing fee. If you cancel after the free-look period, you only get back the part of the money in the policy that is refundable, which is often less than what you paid. When the insurance company makes a follow-up call to ask whether you understand, don't say you do if you haven't understood.

Banks can sell insurance as agents, but may not present it as a deposit. The cover of an insurance contract must print “Insurance Contract” and the insurance company's name in large type, and the words “deposit” and “savings” may not appear. If the cover names an insurance company, this money is not a deposit, and canceling after the free-look period will lose you money. People over 65 buying at a bank can, in principle, only buy products whose returns are certain.

Those online shouting “full refund of premiums, no fee if unsuccessful” are mostly illegal proxy cancellation operations. They take 30% to 50% of the money refunded, and they also want your ID card, bank card and verification codes. Once the policy is canceled, your coverage is gone too. If you feel you were misled, go to the insurance company's customer service first; if you can't reach agreement, call 12378. It is free all the way.

If no beneficiary is named, or the beneficiary has died first, the insurance money counts as part of the estate and must first go toward the debts of the person who died. If the beneficiary is written as “wife So-and-so” and you later divorce, it counts as not named when something happens. Your family needs to know the policy exists: for life insurance, a claim must be made within 5 years of learning of the event; for other insurance, it is 2 years.

Virtual currency is not recognized as money in China, an individual's coin purchases can be ruled invalid, and the losses are your own. Someone bought Tether from other people and paid about 448,000 yuan; later the platform wouldn't allow withdrawals, and when they sued to get the money back, the court dismissed the suit. Having coins stolen is a different matter: the thief is still sentenced for theft.

For people without an employer who pay into employee pension insurance themselves, paying at the lowest tier and completing the required years is the best deal. Most of what you receive tracks the local average wage in the year you retire. Converted to wage levels at that time, paying at the lowest tier for 15 years and starting to draw at 60 takes about 10 years of drawing to break even, while the extra you pay in at a higher tier takes about 17 years of drawing to recoup. It is worth paying, but it is not paying in and instantly coming out ahead.