“You Never Have To Pay The Late Fee”: 24 Loopholes People Are Not Gatekeeping For Themselves

If you are looking for a job and you have your resume on CareerBuilder or Monster just delete it every week and upload again. When employers do searches, resumes appear by date they were uploaded.

Walk with good posture and confidence: just watch, people will treat you with more respect.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (and probably lots of other museums) has free admission. But they have a "suggested donation" that everybody *thinks* is the admission fee. So if you are poor but still want to be sophisticated, when the cashier says "Is $25 okay?" just say, "No, I can only give $10 (or $5) today." You'll still get in.

Also, because it's really a donation, any amount you pay for admission is tax deductible.

If you need to cancel a hotel room last minute, you can avoid paying the late cancellation fee (which can sometimes be just paying for the room) by just calling and requesting to move your reservation to a few weeks in the future. This is completely free. Then, once it's moved, you can cancel it without the penalty.

Didn't get any scholarships? Call the Financial aid office a month into the semester and request a list of all the school based scholarships to which no one applied. Many schools will receive a scholarship the following year if no one applied this term as donors get fussy and upset no one wanted their money.

Apply to everything you might even slightly be eligible for. The school will be so happy someone applied and they can keep the scholarship (hence saying X number of alumni donate or whatever) they will almost always give you the $$$. Sometimes each one is only $300 or so (hence why no one applied when you needed to write an essay about your connection to South Eastern Monaco's swim team) but apply for a bunch and suddenly your meal plan is free....

The answer to, "What are you thinking?" is always, "How much I love you, girl." **A L W A Y S.**.

If you are at a theme park like Six Flags, and it is really hot, you can ask any booth for a small cup of water, and they need to give it to you by law.

If you're in a city and desperate, and there either aren't public bathrooms or there might as well not be, just go into a hotel and walk with purpose toward the back. Don't look around - you belong there, you're a guest, the bathrooms are for you - don't think twice.

Also, I moved to a new city recently, and when I have a question about something local I call up a local luxury hotel and ask for the concierge and say "hi, I'm a hotel guest and I was hoping someone could help me figure out something to do tonight/ a salon/ a nice place to walk around/ bus times" or whatever. They never ask any personal questions, and are usually pretty helpful.

Here's a slightly specific one. Delta charges $25 for each checked bag. If your bag is small enough to fit in an overhead bin and can get through security (no water bottle, etc...), you can act as it will be your carry on. At the gate, they almost ALWAYS ask if anyone would like to check their bag to save space on the plane, except it's free. I don't know if other airlines do this, but it has saved me some money in the past.

If you want to get into college and you're worried about being accepted, apply a couple weeks before the semester starts. All schools, regardless of prestige, have enrollment goals - meaning they need X students to start school so they can depend on that tuition revenue for various budget things. If they're still advertising "classes start soon!" that means they more than likely haven't hit their goal. The admissions standards lower a LOT the closer the start date - trust me, I've seen some crazy things.

Also, if you're applying to an undergrad program and the department you want into has requirements you're worried you won't meet, apply to another college with more lax standards (it's typically the college of liberal arts) and once you're in it's way easier to transfer between departments.

Never buy accessory equipment in stores, the relative markup is huge. A TV might cost 50$ more than its real price, but at 2000$, who cares. A pair of audiophile headphones at an electronics store will cost 90$ but be worth 45$ online.

If you receive a ticket on private property that is not issued by a Police Officer, you don't have to pay.

When you get an automated phone message with keypad options to reach different extensions, zero almost always gets you to an operator.

It's actually written *on* parking tickets nowadays (at least where I live, WA), that you can go 5 mph above the speed limit. This applies up until 40mph, when you can go up to 10 mph above it. They call it a "speed zone" now.

Anyone can open a business bank account. You don't have to have a registered business. The lines are much shorter and they put on extra tellers at lunch time.

Bring flight attendants candy, we will treat you better (possibly get free things from us).

I have two:

* Need to send a letter, but don't have a postage stamp? Send the letter as normal, just without a postage stamp. But this time, put the destination address in the return address, and the return address as the mailing address (in essence, just flip flop the addresses). When the post office goes to "return" the mail to the sender for not having a postage stamp on there, it will go to the place you wanted it to go to all along.

* Did your expensive smart phone just break, and you don't have insurance to get a new one? Instead of paying full retail price for a new one, add a second phone line to your plan. You will, at most, pay $10 extra a month (typically the price for insurance anyway), and have a new phone you got discounted.

You **never** have to pay a late fee at Family Video. The sales associates are trained to ask for the total with the late fees included to begin the transaction. It's a tactic to make the customer feel obligated to pay off the late fee. Just tell them you can't afford to pay the late fee today. Offer to put the movies back on the shelf. They'll always rent you the movies without paying on your late fee no matter how big your late fee is. It's company policy.

Hire a Lawyer for any ticket you get. Most are pretty cheap, and they get the ticket dismissed, in my area Seattle metro, they charge about $200 per ticket. Saves a lot of time ans sometimes money, my last ticket was $580, lawyer got it dismissed for $200.

Depending on your job, if you walk around with a clipboard, you can do pretty much nothing at work.