AARP: Not Just For Retirees Anymore. But Is It Worth It?
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Thank you to enterprising reader Meredith for flagging a recent WSJ piece about the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons (the AARP). The AARP has rebranded and removed its age requirement, and for $16/year (or less with automatic renewals or a multi-year commitment), anyone can become a member. But is it worth it?
The vast majority of AARP member benefits are discounts for various retailers, and for $16/year, it’s pretty easy to justify as long as you use one or two of them. The most notable discounts are for:
Travel & Hotels - 10% discounts at a variety of hotel chains, including all of the major Hilton brands, as well as discounts on car rentals, cruises, and one airline (British Airways). A membership will pretty easily pay for itself if you use it on one trip.
Restaurants - 10% discounts at several chain restaurants. If you’re a regular at any one of these places, this is likely a good deal.
The remaining benefits are fairly modest, so if you don’t benefit from one of the discounts above, an AARP membership probably isn’t worth it unless you really, really like AARP Magazine.
And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
Some good tips if you need to buy your own health insurance policy from an exchange this year.
Also:
“CVS is being sued for asking customers to donate to the American Diabetes Association when they check out. Those donations are in fact *not* sent to the ADA, but instead reimburse the CVS for a legally binding obligation of $10M that CVS promised earlier”
And, How To Speak Honeybee (via The Browser):
A statistically significant number of bees would follow the RoboBee’s dance and then fly to the specific location that Landgraf had coded into his honeybee robots. He had created, in essence, a bio-digital equivalent to Google Translate for bees.
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.