Category: analysis

Top 5 investing highlights from 2018

Stocky 1 Comment

We’re all getting used to me going for extended periods without writing a blog post.  I’m sorry about that, but I’ve had a consulting job for the past couple months that has been keeping me busy.  It’s starting to wind down, so I should have more time to consistently write posts.  As always, thank you for sticking with me.

 

Wow!!!  It’s been a crazy few months in the stock market since I’ve been gone.  I figured for my first blog back I would give you my list of the craziest/most interesting things to happen in the investing world the past few months.  Some of these deserve their own post, so we can dive deeper into those in future posts.

Without further adieu, here are my Top 5 investing highlights since April:

 

5. Interest rates on the rise: 2018 has been the year of the interest rate increase by the Fed. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed cut interest rates to nearly 0%.  There they stayed for nearly the entire 8 years of the Obama administration.  It was only in December of 2015 that the interest rate was raised to 0.5%.

Since 2015, there have been 7 rate increases (including 3 so far in 2018), bringing the Fed rate to 2.25%.  This stuff makes finance nerds giddy, but it does have real-life impacts on the rest of us.

I think the biggest direct impact is that mortgage rates have started to go up.  Now a 30-year fixed mortgage is at about 5%.  A couple years back it was at 3.5%.  That’s a major change that could mean hundreds of dollars per month on a families mortgage.  This impact stretches to housing affordability (gets worse) and number of families refinancing (goes down).

 

4. Massive tax law passes: I know the big tax law passed in December 2017, but I feel a lot of the ramifications hit in 2018. By mid-year it seemed the impact was starting to hit the market—GDP growth was higher than it had been in a really long time, unemployment was lower, and because of the low unemployment inflation had kicked higher.

The immediate impact of the tax break had a major boost to the markets in late December and early January.  Then there was a huge market drop in late January and early February.  However, it seemed that the benefits of the tax breaks (higher GDP, lower unemployment) started boosting stock, with the US markets hitting all-time highs in September.

Obviously, since September stocks have been on a major slide, but we’ll leave that for reason #1.

 

3. US elections in November: Politics are different from investing, but obviously they are connected. The soap opera that is Washington DC hit a fever pitch on November 6, with an unusually high amount of drama for a off-election.

Republicans increased their majority in the Senate, while Democrats gained enough seats in the House of Representatives to take over that chamber of Congress.  The headline was obviously that the US would have a split government for the next two years.

Pundits spent innumerable hours debating the impact split government would have on the nation broadly and the investing markets in particular.  The common thinking is that split government is a good thing in that government can’t make major changes, giving some level of predictability for business.  I tend to agree with that.  In fact, when you look at the data, the stock market does best with a split government.

In case you were curious, the market was up 2.1% the day after the elections, so clearly the markets liked the outcome of the election.

 

2. America is #1: I had a blog on this a while back, but I’m still fascinated by this phenomenon. As of now, US stocks are down 2.2% for the year while international stocks are down 14.2%.  That’s a 12% difference!!!  That’s huge!!!

Curiously, they stayed fairly coorelated all the way through April.  Then, starting in May, they really began to diverge.

The reasons aren’t entirely known.  Many people have many opinions, and I imagine this will be examined for years.  However, my belief is it’s a combination of the US winning the trade wars, China’s economy slowing down, and Europe figuring out Brexit and the future of the EU.

Who knows if I’m right or wrong.  But certainly this is interesting.

 

1. The rollercoaster that is the stock market: It has been a wild ride all of 2018.

January started out on fire, then the stock market took a huge dump in February, rallied towards the end of the month, fell again in March, then plodded out a 8-month upward march that peaked in September, and has since fallen to its current levels.

Those a 6 distinct moves, all of which are major.  I’ve talked about how I think volatility is becoming more inherent in the market, so I think that’s a piece of it.  But the change of directions this dramatic is definitely an unusual twist.

And we still have a month to go.  Stay tuned.

First half of 2018—much ado about nothing

Stocky Leave a comment

I wanted to write a recap of the stock market in the first half of 2018.  It’s taken me a little while to get to it because I actually have a job that I’m working on.  Sorry about the delay, but here it is.

 

At first blush, you might think that the stock market has gone crazy.  I don’t know if you can objectively measure things, but it seems the media which has always been in a frenzy the past decade or so, has gone into overdrive lately.

Obviously there are the big rocks like: school shootings and gun control, the #metoo movement, the eternal Russia meddling probe, the North Korea talks, the retirement and impeding replacement of Justice Kennedy, and the separation of families of illegal immigrants.  There are probably more but those are top of mind.

Most of those are social issues, but they have major economic components.  The gun control debate will have a profound impact on gun manufacturers, many of whom are publicly traded.  #metoo has forced the resignation of several business leaders.  North Korea and Russia talks impact trade and possible war with mass destruction, which of course has a hugely negative impact on the economy.

And this misses the most exciting/depressing/entertaining news item (depending on your persuasion): President Trump.  He alone creates enough material to fill the 24-hour news cycle.

 

US Stock Market . . . happy yawn

So with all this, what has happened with the stock market.  Despite a few gyrations, it’s been fairly stable over a long-term point of view.  It had a  great January (continuing the really strong momentum from 2017), and then things peaked.

There are a few important takeaways.  First, there were a couple huge drops at the end of January and the end of March, but we recovered from those fairly steadily.  Second, we are now at where we were when the stock market peaked in January.  Third, remember that all this 2018 performance is coming on the heels of a spectacular 2017.

All things considered, that seems pretty good.  The market is up 4% so far for the year.  Maybe that seems a bit dissatisfying because it’s been flat since the peak in late January, but up is still up.  Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth on this one.

 

International Stock Market . . . interesting

What I think is most interesting is that since May the US stock market has marched higher while international stocks markets have gone the other way.  Look at the chart for 2018 so far.

Most of the time, US (blue) and International (orange) stocks tend to move in sync.  Sure, there are always small differences, but by and large when one goes up the other does too and vice versa.  That was the story for sure for the first part of 2018.  Then something happened in May; since then US stocks have marched upwards about 6% while International stocks have fallen about 3%.  That’s a 9% difference!!!

I’ve racked my brain, and I don’t have a clear reason.  Sure, the North Korea situation continues to be goofy.  Italy elected an anti-immigration government that turned a boatload of refugees away.  Brexit unfolds like a car wreck in slow motion.  Syria, Russia, Venezuela—all the usual suspects.  But what has changed in the past couple months that has been so good for the US and so bad for the rest of the world?

The only thing I can really think of is the trade war Trump has initiated.  Typically in these there are winners and losers, so maybe the market is predicting that the US will “win” this and the rest of the world (especially the developing markets since those stocks are down the most) will “lose”.  There are a ton of complications and nuances and a million different things could happen, but that’s the best I could come up with.  I guess we all need to stay tuned.

Either way, what is going on right now with such a disparity in the performance of major stock indices is not common.

 

If you put that all into the pot and mix it, things have gone pretty well for the investor.  That seems a bit different from the constant news stories about how the world is on the brink of disaster, but that goes to show you that long-term investing washes away a lot of those shorter-term swings.

As always we are and have been fully invested in this stock market.

Problem solved: Race Relations

Stocky 1 Comment

We are living in a country where race relations are at a multi-generational low.  Despite decades of approaches and policies meant to improve things, up to this point it doesn’t seem to have gotten better (it actually seems to have gotten worse).  Maybe personal finance can move the needle?  Admittedly, personal finance isn’t going to solve every issue, but I think it is uniquely positioned to make a major impact, all the while without redistributing wealth in a way that makes it a dead-on-arrival policy.  Let’s dig in:

 

Income (and net worth) inequality

Data show that there is a huge difference between the haves (whites, Asians) and the have-nots (hispanics, native Americans, and blacks).  Just for simplicity, for the rest of this post we’ll contrast the black/white differences, although this entire post could easily be about black/Asian or hispanic/white or hispanic/Asian and the concepts would be nearly identical.

Race Income (2015) Net worth (2013)
Asian $80,720 $112,250
White $61,349 $132,483
Hispanic $46,882 $12,458
Native American $39,719 N/A
Black $38,555 $9,211
TOTAL $57,617 $80,039

 

The median income for whites is $61k and the median income for blacks is $39k.  That’s a big difference, but the difference becomes even more pronounced when you look at net worth–$130k for whites and $9k for blacks.

The income disparity gets A TON more press than the net worth disparity, and that’s a big miss.  You don’t eat income or use income to buy a house or pay for college: you use net worth for that.  Obviously they are closely related, yet they are different, and the data shows just how uncorrelated they are.

Racial challenges are multi-dimensional, very complex, and nuanced.  There’s no single path to address all of them, but I think you get the biggest bang for your buck by closing the income/net worth gap.  Obviously, by definition, closing the income gap addresses the income gap (incredible insight there, Stocky) and also goes a long way in addressing the net worth gap.

It also addresses a lot of other racial issues: interactions with law enforcement—police have infinitely fewer negative interactions with rich people than poor people. Education—rich people have much better access to high-quality education at every level than poor people.  Healthcare—exact same statement as education.  Political voice—exact same statement as education.  And on and on.

So the challenge is how to increase the income, and more importantly the net worth, of blacks to get it closer to the levels of whites?

 

Net positive, not sum-zero

This becomes a delicate subject.  An obvious solution is wealth distribution based on race.  To address the net worth issues, we as a society could tax white people and give those proceeds to black people.  This actually has a name: Reparations.

Michigan congressman John Conyers had introduced a reparations bill in every Congress since 1989.  Every single time, the bill never came to a vote and “Died in a previous Congress”.  Given it didn’t even have the support to come to a vote it’s hard to imagine having the support to pass both houses of Congress and get the President’s signature, plus withstand the legal challenges.   I would certainly be opposed to such legislation.

While people can have a lively debate about reparations in particular, they are extremely unlikely.  Broadening that out a bit, I think the idea of punishing/taxing/taking away from one race of people to give to another just isn’t realistic or moral.

That speaks to net worth disparity (give net worth from one race to another), but there is a similar train of thought on income disparity.  We could take certain high paying jobs and force companies to employ blacks but not whites.  This again causes similar challenges.

Actually, this played out in real life recently at Youtube.  Allegedly, they excluded white and Asian men from consideration for some roles.  I’m not certain to the legality or illegality of this, but from a PR perspective this is a practice that Youtube (they are owned by Google) vigorously denied.  They said they hire “candidates based on their merit, not their identity.”  If a private-sector company in an at-will state won’t publicly say they do this, there’s zero chance such a practice would be codified with legislation.

Getting back to the task at hand, that means we can’t address the income and net worth gap by taking from whites and giving to blacks.  We have to find a way to increase the income and net worth of blacks that has no impact (or dare I say a positive impact) on whites.

 

It’s what you do

If you read this blog, you know I am an enormous advocate of personal finance, and “doing the right thing” with your money, whatever that means.  We live in a country with very low financial literacy, which means that people don’t really understand concepts of compound interest, appropriate asset allocation, tax avoidance strategies, and much more.  That applies to all races.

That ignorance comes at a huge cost.  Take two twins, Bill and Jill.  Bill represents your average American who isn’t too financially savvy, while Jill knows the best ways to invest her money.  If they are identical in every way—same job, same salary, same income growth, etc.—Jill will end the game much, much wealthier than Bill.

Just to put numbers to it, let’s assume they each start at 22 with a $50,000 job that grows to $150,000 over time, and they save 10% of their income.  At age 60 Bill would have $630,000 and Jill would have $2,640,000.  Read that again!!!  Jill ends up with a full $2 million more than her twin.

How does such a thing happen?  They both made the same incomes, and they both saved the same amount.  The short answer is Bill wasn’t smart and Jill was.  Bill saved all his money in a brokerage account with a mix of stocks and bonds.  Jill saved her money in a 401k (tax avoidance), got the match (free money), and invested in all stocks (asset allocation).

Those are all fairly simple strategies for personal finance, certainly they are ones we have talked about on this blog quite a bit.  Those couple gems translate to millions of dollars, literally.

But what does this have to do with race?  Unfortunately in our country, personal finance participation is much lower among blacks than whites.  That’s short hand for: blacks tend to act more like Bill than Jill.  “Personal finance participation” is a tricky term that loosely means having investment accounts, having retirement accounts, investing in stocks, and generally doing what personal finance theory says you should.  Make no mistake, it’s an impossible term to define and calculate (which is probably why it’s such a hard problem to tackle).

Certainly you can look at the difference in “personal finance participation” as a function of wealth.  Whites are richer than blacks so of course they are going to have more brokerage accounts and 401k’s and all that other stuff.  That’s true, but even when you control for jobs and income and the other factors like that, black “personal finance participation” is significantly lower, 35% lower by some estimates.

That impact is ENORMOUS and devastating if your broad societal goal is reducing net worth disparity.  If you believe the studies, and use our example of Bill and Jill, the average black person is getting 35% less of the investment gains that Jill got.  That’s could easily be a difference of $600k (in reality is probably even more) and that’s HUGE.

GOAL 1—Increase black “personal finance participation”

 

It’s what you know

Education is a pretty powerful tool, and one that certainly plays a role in the black “personal finance participation” issue as well as the broader income inequality issue.

In college there is a striking disparity between the majors that black students and white students pick.  Statistically, black students tend to pick majors which lead to much lower salaries than their white peers.  That alone can address the income gap in a major way.

However, we’re going to go deeper into the world of finance.  Finance is a pretty good college major, as majors go.  I proudly earned my bachelor’s degree in finance from Pitt.  The average salary for finance majors is $120k.  In a country where the average income for the whole population is $58k, being a finance major seems to be a pretty sweet deal.

Breaking down that by race tells a profound story.  About 14% of all college students are black, in line with the total population—that’s a good thing.  A similar 14% of all business majors are black—so far so good.  However, only 2% of finance majors are black—Houston, we have a problem.  Similar to the issue a couple paragraphs above, finance is a high-paying major and black students are picking it way too infrequently.

That leads to two major problems:  First, those classes for finance majors are a great way to learn the skills critical to “personal finance participation”.  Remember, that accounted to $2 million that Jill had which Bill missed out on.  If you take finance courses, you’re much more likely to be a Jill than a Bill.

Second, finance majors get high paying jobs—remember the average salary is about $120k.  More to the point of this post, finance majors can become investment advisors (much, much more on this in a second).  Data is hard on this, but most estimate that only about 1% of investment advisors are black.  As it is, the decisions black college students are making when choosing a major are cutting them off from all of this.

GOAL 2—Black college students major in finance

 

It’s who you know

Let’s start bringing all this together, shall we?

About 45% of blacks are in the middle class.  Add rich blacks to that as well and you’re talking at least 20 million people.  That’s a lot.

Based on the “personal finance participation” statistics we know a lot of those people aren’t investing the way they should, and they are missing out on a lot of money because of that.  This is true among all races.

I am a financial advisor (I passed my series 65), and my experience tells me that the vast majority of highly-successful professionals, independent of their race, aren’t doing near what they should be doing with their finances.  On a scale from 1 to 10, I see a lot of 3s and 4s among people who are incredibly smart and successful.

Fortunately, those people who would be a 3 or 4 on their own can hire someone, and for a small fee bring them up to a 9 or a 10.  Jill showed us that being a 9 or a 10 can be worth $2 million (and really it’s a much, much larger number), so if you aren’t there on your own hiring someone to help you seems like a good idea.

Understandably, if you hire a financial advisor, that needs to be an incredibly trusting relationship.  Personally, all my clients I knew for at least 5 years before I ever started advising them; also, they’re all white and my age, plus or minus a couple years, and live in my time zone.  Once you start working with a client it becomes a very intimate relationship.  You learn all sorts of super personal things about your clients—what they spend money on, what are their goals, what do they try to do but fail at, etc.  I think it’s even more intimate and personal and trusting than a doctor or a lawyer or a minister/rabbi.

The point of all this is: who are those rich and middle-class blacks going to go to for financial advice?  It’s reasonable, and not racist in any way whatsoever, that they would have a preference (possibly unconsciously) for a black financial advisor.  Not because of skin color per se, but because of shared experiences and understandings.  Someone who grew up how you did, had a similar family dynamic, have similar likes and tastes, prioritizes things in a similar way—those are all really good reasons to pick one advisor over another.  Those all correlate strongly with race.

A black person is probably going to have a lot more in common with a black financial advisor.  It’s not that you can’t pick someone from a different race for your financial advisor, but there’s an undeniable level of comfort for many.  Here’s the rub, at least based on my experience, if you don’t find a financial advisor you’re really comfortable with you don’t often pick the “next best thing,” but rather you don’t use anyone.  “Not picking anyone” tends to lead to “not doing anything” and you start to look much more like Bills than Jills.

Let’s be clear, a good financial advisor of any race can help a client of any race.  No question.  But we live in the real world, and here those personal relationship and trust dynamics are powerful.  This isn’t racism, it’s just being comfortable and having a trusting relationship with someone who is dealing with an incredibly personal part of your life.

Clearly the data show this is happening.  Blacks participate in personal finance at much lower rates—they’re closer to Bills.  And that costs them millions.

GOAL 3—Black financial advisors to work with black clients

 

Everyone wins, no one loses

Black college students become finance majors and then financial advisors.  Because they can relate to middle-class and wealthy blacks better, they get those clients and increase their wealth (becoming Jills instead of Bills).

We wanted to close the income gap.  We just found thousands of really high paying investment advisor jobs for blacks.

We wanted to close the net worth gap.  We just converted millions of black families from Bills to Jills by connecting them with highly skilled financial advisors.

Clearly, those are two winning cohorts, but there are no losers.  As blacks become better investors, that really doesn’t impact the investment returns of whites.  The stock market is more like a club with room for everyone, than it is like a high school basketball team where there are only so many spots and if you get a spot that means I don’t.  Also, those black financial advisors aren’t taking clients away from white financial advisors; those black clients weren’t using anyone before so it’s all upside.

 

My local plan

I’ve been trying this with very limited progress so far.  I haven’t gotten past step 1, but I’m not giving up.

  1. Find a couple black college seniors from UNC-Greensboro or North Carolina A&T who are finance majors. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, there aren’t a lot of these and I haven’t had luck so far. But I’m still trying.
  2. Teach the protégés the ins and outs of investing, not necessarily investment advising but just investing. Actually, it would really just be telling them “read all the posts I’ve done in my blog, understand the concepts inside and out, and then come to me with questions.” We’d work together and get them extremely financially literate.
  3. Go to a large gathering of rich and middle-class black people (a church, an NAACP meeting, fraternity alumni meeting, whatever) with my protégés . Tell the audience the story of Bill and Jill, and say I’m here to help.
  4. Work with a couple clients, taking my protégés to every meeting. Legally, the protégés wouldn’t be able to talk or do anything since they aren’t certified, but they could observe and build a non-investment advisor relationship with the client.
  5. Protégés would graduate, then pass their Series 65 or Series 7, and get a job with some investment company. Completely out of left field ?, the clients I had been working with in the presence of the protégés would leave me for them.
  6. Protégés would take my clients to their new firms. Given most financial advising jobs are meat grinders where getting new clients is the toughest part, my protégés would have a HUGE head start. That would translate to a higher income, faster promotions, and altogether a better career.
  7. Rinse and repeat.

BREXIT—when experts were idiots

Stocky Leave a comment

On June 23, 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU—Brexit.  The outcome of the vote was unexpected and EVERYONE freaked out.

As it turns out, nearly all those dire predictions were totally overstated.  A more objective view shows that the UK and the broader world are doing JUST FINE, probably even better than fine.  This is a good lesson that just because experts say something, especially in this world of 24-hour news cycles where crazy proclamations get the headlines, doesn’t mean they’re going to happen.

Brexit is a really good example were most experts, at least the loudest experts, got it totally wrong.

 

Let’s everyone totally freak out

The general consensus among mainstream media was this was an unmitigated disaster.  The imagery of UK self-inflicting a fatal wound was pervasive.

CNN described the impending “Brexit hangover” as though the British were a bunch of youngsters who did something immature and thoughtless like vote to leave the EU (or go out on a drinking binge).  In the light of day they would realize their error and suffer economically for their folly (hangover).

CNN also had the headline “Brexit + Deep Uncertainty = Market Chaos”.  The first line claims, “One of the foundations of the political world was thrown in disarray.”  The world in disarray????  Maybe a bit melodramatic on that one.

Magazines and newspapers had provocative headlines and covers.  The Economist called the vote “tragic”; the New York Daily News called it “foolish”; the New Yorker equated it to a suicidal leap off a cliff.  Let’s be serious for a second.

Even President Obama lent his voice to the echo-chamber chorus, warning Britians before the vote that Brexit would put them at “the back of the queue” when doing trade deals.  Clearly this was meant to scare British as a threat to their economy and livelihoods.

Making it more local, my Facebook feed was filled to the brim with dire Brexit predictions.  Nearly all these posts are from graduates of the University of Chicago’s business school.  These are people who have studied economics MUCH MORE than your average Joe.  Look at some of those comments.  Equating Brexit to World War II???   Really???

The point is Brexit was fairly universally acknowledged as a total disaster in the making by the loudest (but not necessarily the smartest) voices.  It’s easy, just based on the volume and frequency, to imagine there was something to that.  It’s been almost two years, so let’s look at what has actually happened to the UK since its citizens voted for Brexit.

 

Just the facts

For all the talk that Brexit was going to tilt the ENTIRE WORLD into financial disaster, let’s be real.  First, the UK isn’t that important.  It’s 21st in terms of population (a country with 0.9% of the world’s population), and it’s 6th in terms of GDP (3.4% of world’s GDP).  Let’s not overestimate the impact, ambiguous at best, that such a political move might have on the world.

In case your curious, the world’s GDP grew about 2.5% last year.  Equity markets are up about 25-30% since the vote happened.  That seems pretty darn good to me.

Looking at the UK in particular, it seems like things are going okay too.  There’s no totally objective way to assess the “strength of an economy”, especially among people whose political views predispose them to think one way or another.  That said there are some widely accepted metrics to look at.

 

UNEMPLOYMENT—UK unemployment since the vote has fallen pretty much in lockstep with the rest of the EU.  In June 2016 it was at 4.9%, and now it’s at about 4.3%.  That’s very slightly above Germany (widely regarded as the strongest economy in the EU), and much lower than the other major EU countries who have embraced EU-ism: France (9.2%), Italy (10.8%), and Spain (16.4).  VERDICT: not total disaster.

 

GDP GROWTH—UK GDP growth has been at about 0.4% quarterly since the vote.  That’s fairly middle of the road.  As usual, Germany’s metric is a bit better (0.6% growth), while France’s and Italy’s are in line (0.4-0.5%), Spain’s is higher (0.7%).

GDP growth is a very fickle metric in that it looks at changes, not absolute values.  Were Spain’s higher numbers because it is doing well now or that it was doing so poorly a few years back, and today’s number just look favorable compared to crappy numbers.  You can see the challenge.  Either way, it’s pretty clear that the UK isn’t performing at substantially worse level than the other major EU players.  VERDICT: not total disaster.

 

STOCK MARKET—The UK stock index (FTSE) is up about 20% since the vote.  That’s a bit less than the US (33%) and Europe (26%).  Maybe that’s evidence that the stock market thinks the UK made a mistake.  First, being up 20% definitely defies the idea that the UK is a disaster.

Second, just like GDP growth, there are a lot of factors that make it a bit challenging on how exactly to interpret it.  Right after the vote, the UK’s stock market well outperformed the others, and then it decelerated.  I chalk it up to general market gyrations.  VERDICT: not total disaster.

 

EXCHANGE RATE—After the Brexit vote, the exchange rate for the British Pound to the Euro fell from about 1.25 down to its current rate of 1.12.  Definitely you can see a clear move down.  Often times a depreciation in your exchange rate reflects negative circumstances for the country’s economy (see Venezuela).  Yet, that’s way too simplistic a view.  In the past year, the US dollar is down about 15% compared to the Euro, and I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the US economy is in a state of disaster compared to the European economy.

Also, if you look at the Pound/Euro exchange rate over a longer time period, the 1.15 range is actually where it has spent most of its time.  It was there in the early 2010s (when the UK was part of the EU), then it rose dramatically in 2015 when Greece’s drama unfolded as it nearly toppled the EU’s common currency (hmmmm . . . maybe that’s a reason why the British voted for Brexit).  Now it has fallen back to those previous levels.  VERDICT: not total disaster.

 

The point of all this is that it’s definitely not CLEAR that the UK’s Brexit vote was a total disaster.  Despite the incredibly smart people with a firm grasp of macroeconomics at CNN and the New Yorker among many, many others (I’m totally being sarcastic here—I think they’re idiots), just because they say something doesn’t mean it’s true.  They have the loudest voices in media today, but that doesn’t mean they have the smartest.  Remember, I am smarter than a Nobel Prize winner, and I do think Robert Schiller is really smart.

If you were Rip Van Winkle and slept through the last two years, and then upon waking were asked which Top 20 economy voted on an economic policy that was tantamount to “Tragically foolish suicide that pulled the world into chaos”, I’m not sure you’d zero in on the UK.  Actually, you’d think things look pretty good there, not nearly as horrible as that description would lead you to believe.

There’s a bit of a lesson here.  Keep this in mind when everyone in the media and on your Facebook feed starts talking about how obviously good or obviously bad something is.  Quick things that come to mind are: economic impact of Trump’s tariffs, inevitability of China overtaking the US in GDP, the impact/harm of the Trump tax cut.  These things are highly complex and very nuanced; rarely are they unambiguously good or bad in the manner that grabs headlines in our oversaturated media landscape today.  Don’t be a sucker.

Final Four—Savings rate v. Tax optimization

Stocky Leave a comment

Basketball hoop

Welcome to the second game of the Final Four of my investing strategies tournament.  Here we have Savings rate taking on Tax optimization.  In the first round, Savings rate beat Mortgage just on the sheer power that saving more money can have on the ultimate size of your nestegg.  Tax optimization squeaked by Starting early due to the enormous value created with minimal sacrifice by setting up the accounts to minimize your taxes.  As always, give the disclaimer a peek.  With that out of the way, let’s see who wins.

bracket-game 5

 

Reasons for picking Savings rate:

Savings rate is a simple but overwhelming force, maybe like Patrick Ewing when he dominated the Final Fours during his years at Georgetown (I don’t mean to call Ewing’s game simple, but you’ll see what I mean).  Ewing just owned the basket—any shot you put up he blocked, if you did get the shot up he got the rebound, when he got the ball you weren’t stopping him.  It all revolved around Ewing, and his dominance on the inside covered up for his shortcomings (outside shot, passing) as well as those of his teammates.

patrick_ewing

In the investing world, the sun really rises and sets with Savings rate.  Without any savings, you can’t invest so it really doesn’t matter what you do with things like Index mutual funds, Asset allocation, or Free money.

Also, unlike any other investing strategy, Savings rate can make up for any other mistakes you make along the way.  It’s a lot like Ewing protecting the rim on defense; if your guy beat you, you could be pretty confident that Ewing would bail you out by blocking his shot.  You could completely screw up Asset allocation and stuff all your money in a mattress—just crank up your Savings rateand there’s no problem.  Don’t participate in your 401k and walk away from the Free Money—save a little more and you’re okay.  You get my point.

Let’s use the same example of Mr Grizzly starting out at age 22, making $50,000 which will eventually rise to $100,000, and who wants to be a millionaire by the time he’s 60.  Let’s say he does everything right, plus he has a horseshoe growing out of his rear end, and over his investing career he averages a 10% return; he would only need to save about  3% of his income.  That’s probably a breeze.  Now, instead he has an average investing track record with returns of about 6%, he would need to save about 9% of his income.  So Savings rate was able to make up for his lack for tremendous luck.  Keep going down that path and let’s say he put all is portfolio in a local bank earning 1% interest, which I think we would all agree is a pretty terrible investing strategy, and he still becomes a millionaire so long as he saves about 24%.

 

Return Savings rate
10% 3%
6% 9%
2% 20%
1% 24%
0% 29%

 

So you can see that Savings rate can make up for all manner of investing sin.  Pretty much any other investing strategy has its limits to how far it can take you before you exhaust its benefits.  But of course there are no free lunches.  Increasing your Savings rate comes at a much higher cost than other investing strategies, namely all that money you’re saving means you can’t spend it on other things.  So when Mr Grizzly needs to crank up his Savings rate, that money has to come from somewhere—he passes up on that salmon fishing trip, or buying Mrs Grizzly some artisan honey from the farmer’s market, or getting some detangling shampoo for his coat.  We can debate whether those purchases are worth the money, but to Mr Grizzly they are (cut to Lady Fox nodding and pulling out a Pottery Barn catalog).  Sure, you can start by cutting away the layer of winter fat, but the higher you make your Savings rate the more you start cutting into muscle and eventually into bone.  That, my friends, is the rub with Savings rate.

 

Reasons for picking Tax optimization:

Taxes are to investing what water damage is to a house—unwelcome, can really ruin stuff if not attended to, and it gets into everything.  The tentacles of taxes traverse tremendous territory to touch your total transactions (I challenged myself to see how many “t-words” I could use in a sentence).  Seriously, taxes pretty much affect everything in investing.

There are the obvious big rocks, some of which we’ve already discussed, like a 401k and an IRA; using those accounts to defer taxes can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Medium-sized rocks like 529s and tax-deductible interest on your mortgage can save you tens of thousands in taxes over a shorter time span.  Then there are tons of small rocks which can certainly add up—flex spending accounts and dependent care spending can save you thousands.  Add all that up and that’s a lot of clams (if you didn’t read yesterday’s post, I am trying to use as many slang phrases for money as I can).

And then you can get into the really obscure Tax optimization strategies.  “Loss harvesting” is when you sell investments at a loss so you don’t have to pay taxes on your winners.  “Dividend location” looks to put your high-dividend investments in tax deferred accounts like a 401k, so you don’t have to pay taxes on the dividends during your high-income/high-tax rate years.  There are millions of these little loopholes and strategies that allow you to pay less taxes.  A major part of the accounting industry is based on this fact.

Just to illustrate the point, I’ll share a story from Medtronic.  If you’re a high-compensation employee (I do not qualify, so I can’t take part in this) you can participate in the Capital Accumulation Program (CAP) which allows you to defer a portion or all of your bonus into a tax-advantaged account—think of it like an extra 401k without the match.  This is a veritable tax goldmine, and sadly very few of the people I talk to take advantage of this.  Let’s assume Mr Executive makes $300,000 per year, with $100,000 of that being his bonus; and assume that he’s working hard to build his nestegg, so after maxing out his 401k he saves $50,000 in his brokerage account.  That’s probably pretty close to the people I’m describing.

What Mr Executive could do but probably doesn’t is defer his entire bonus.  He’s already saving $50,000 per year and since he’s in a pretty high tax bracket, that’s probably pretty close to what his take-home would be on that $100,000 bonus.  However, by deferring his bonus he avoids paying the 40% on taxes now and only pays 5% in taxes when he pulls the money out in retirement.  If you do the math, that’s a potential savings of $35,000 ($100,000 x (40% – 5%)) on top of what he’s already saving.  When I ask executives why they don’t do CAP they tend to say they never thought of it or they didn’t understand it.  When I show them the math says they’re leaving at least $35,000 on the table, their eyes bug out and they need to sit down.

That’s just one example of the power of Tax optimization that is out there that goes largely unutilized, even by really successful people, even by those who have tax advisers helping them out.  And there are thousands of other examples like that out there.  That’s $35,000!!!  That’s a lot of money, even if you are pulling in $300k.

My point with this and the others is that in the US (and probably every other country) the tax code is super convoluted.  Add to that that when you’re making more and more money, you pay more and more in taxes, so the stakes start to get pretty high.  That’s a perfect recipe for hidden 1% coupons; some of them are easy to find, some a little hard, and some require serious digging—but they’re there.

 

Who goes on to the championship game?

Just like in the Elite Eight, I think Tax optimization pulls out a squeaker over Savings rate, 71-68.  While Saving rate has unlimited potential, it comes at a real cost of foregoing purchases today.  Tax optimization isn’t necessarily unlimited.  There are only so many wrinkles and loopholes you can take advantage of, but there are an awful lot of them and I bet you’d run out of time and energy before you’d run out of tax strategies.

bracket-game 6

But what tips the scale is that most of the Tax optimization gambits are free.   You’re already going to save for your retirement so why not do it with a 401k and not pay taxes on it right now?  You’re already going to save for your kids’ educations so why not use a 529 and not pay taxes on the appreciation?  You’re definitely going to need to pay for childcare so why not use a Flex spending account and do it tax free?  You and the family are going to get sick so why not use a Flex spending account for that, too?  None of those cost any more than you would have paid already, but you’re cutting Uncle Sam out of his 40% (legally, of course).

Thursday we will see who wins it all, Asset allocation or Tax optimization.

Final Four–Asset allocation v. Index mutual funds

Stocky Leave a comment

Basketball hoop

Welcome to the first game of the Final Four of my investing strategies tournament.  Here we have Asset allocation taking on Index mutual funds.  In the first round, Asset allocation blew out Diversifying mostly due to the higher returns that younger investors can get by investing more in stocks early in their investing career.  Index mutual funds upset Free money on the strength of lower management fees that can apply throughout an investor’s career and across every account type.  As always, check out the disclaimer.  With that out of the way, let’s see who wins.

bracket-game 4

Reasons for picking Asset allocation:

Last round we saw how being too conservative with Asset allocation can really reduce the returns of younger investors who aren’t as heavily invested in stocks as they should be.  If you go to the other end of the investor’s time horizon, when he or she is older and nearing retirement, you can make equally harmful mistakes.

On one end of the spectrum older investors can become way too risky.  As the years tick by and people get closer to retirement, they begin to take stock (pun intended) of where they are probably a little more closely than they did in their 20s or 30s.  If they aren’t quite where they want to be, knowing that on average stocks have higher returns than bonds, one natural response is to allocate more of their nestegg to stocks to “catch up”.  According to generally accepted investing theory, this is the exact wrong thing to do—as we get closer to retirement you should be reducing your allocation of stocks to lower your risk, not increase it.  Here you’re stepping away from the world of investing and into the world of gambling.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and ride a bull market up to get your portfolio back to where you want it, but you’re definitely putting yourself at risk of hitting a market pothole and putting yourself further behind.

On the other end of the spectrum, they can become way too conservative.  Some people have the natural instinct to want to get completely off the investing train in retirement because they don’t want to have any risk, so they put all their money in bonds or cash.  This is understandable because they’re going to be depending on that nestegg, so it’s got to last.  But the problem is that even in retirement, many people still need the higher returns that stocks provide to balance out the relative safety of their bonds.  This is especially true in a world where people are living longer and it’s not unreasonable to expect retirement to last a few decades or longer.  And actually, that time element also makes the case for stocks being a significant part of your retirement portfolio—you have time to ride out the storms, just not as much time as you had before.

These are what make Asset allocation one of the harder investing strategies to get right, because it’s changing over time and there are shades of grey (at least 50 shades of grey).  Other strategies like Diversification and Free money are much simpler because your strategy is absolute.  Diversification—you should be diversified at all times.  Free money—you should get as much of it as you can at all times.  But with Asset allocation, the right thing to do gradually changes from being mostly in stocks during your early years, and then slowly switching to more bonds and cash as you start to near retirement, but never shifting completely to bonds.

There’s no strict rule on what your Asset allocation should be at different stages of life, but I always look at Vanguard target retirement funds as a bit of a guide (although I’ll write about some of my issues with these types funds in a future post).  With 40 years until retirement, right around when you’re first starting out, Vanguard suggests about 90% stocks and 10% in bonds.  Once you hit retirement Vanguard suggests 40% stocks and 60% bonds.  Notice that even in retirement a very significant portion is still in stocks.

Vanguard target date funds % in stocks % in bonds
2055 (40 years to go) 90% 10%
2035 (20 years to go) 85% 15%
2025 (10 years to go) 70% 30%
In retirement 40% 60%

 

So what does that all mean?  Well early on Asset allocation done properly can get you higher returns over the long run, historically about 3-4% higher than if you completely screwed it up.  Later on, it’s going to help protect you from any market crashes, market corrections, or general market zaniness that occurs.

 

Reasons for picking Index mutual funds:

We know from the Elite Eight round, that one of the major advantages of Index mutual funds is their lower management fees, which are on average about 1% less than actively managed mutual funds.  We also know from The power of a single percentage that saving 1% of your portfolio year after year can lead to some serious ducats (I’ve decided to use as many slang terms for money over the next few posts, so prepare yourself).  But we’re in the Final Four now so we need something more than that.

Not above a little chicanery, Index mutual funds is going to steal a page from Asset allocation’splaybook.  Often with actively managed funds, they keep a significant portion of the fund’s assets in cash so they can buy an investment when the opportunity presents itself.  Of course we know from above that holding cash over the long term leads to lower returns than holding stocks.  Index mutual funds are able to be almost 100% invested in stocks (or whatever asset class you want) because they aren’t picking investments so much as just following the index.  Just doing some simple math, if actively managed funds have 5% of their assets in cash, and over the long term stocks return 6% more than cash let’s say, that comes to a long term benefit of about 0.3% (5% x 6%).  That’s not going to change the world, but even those little bits compounded over decades can make a huge difference.

Index mutual funds is also copying Tax optimization.  When your mutual fund sells shares there are tax implications on that (death and taxes, baby).  That’s why you get that statement every year from your mutual fund telling you what you need to report to the IRS. The more frequently your mutual fund trades stocks, the more likely it is that you’ll have short term gains which are taxed at higher rates.  But with Index mutual funds, trading is minimized because the fund is only following an index like the S&P 500 which doesn’t change that often.  That leads to lower taxes which we know can add up to some serious cheddar (see, I did it again).

There are also people who argue that Index mutual funds do better than actively managed funds because they take the human element out of it.  This is pretty controversial, and if you believe in the theories from A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which I unabashedly do, then shouldn’t active managers do just as well as a passive index?  Hmmm, that sounds like fodder for another post.  People debate this all the time and I’m not convinced that this really drives the needle.

The final major benefit of Index mutual funds is that they’re super easy, especially compared to some of the more difficult investing strategies like Asset allocation.  You can go to a place like Vanguard (that’s where the Fox family’s money is) or Fidelity or a dozen other places and sign up for one of their index funds, then as Ron Popeil says, “you set it and forget it.”  That means you’re getting pretty incredible value for a relatively small amount of work.

 

Who goes on to the championship game?

Index mutual funds pulled out all the stops, but in the end Asset allocation was just too strong.  Index mutual funds will definitely help build your nestegg, probably juicing your returns 1% compared to actively managed funds and maybe even 1.5% if you’re feeling charitable.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but we’re talking about punching your ticket to the Championship round here, people.

Let’s say you completely abandoned the idea of Index mutual funds and went totally with actively managed funds.  How bad would that be?  It wouldn’t be ideal (just my opinion and one not shared by my good friend Mike), but you’d be fine in the end.  Actually this is what millions of people do all the time and it tends to work out.

Compare that worst-case scenario to Asset allocation’s and you see why they won.  Screwing up early on and investing too much in bonds and cash instead of stocks can cost 3-4% on your returns.  That dwarfs what Index mutual funds bring to the table.  Screwing up closer to retirement can put your whole financial plan at risk.  Ask near-retirees who were to heavily invested in stocks before the 2001 or 2008 crashes what they think.  In the immortal words of Winston Zeddemore “I have seen s%$t that will turn you white.”

bracket-game 5

With Asset allocation the stakes are just too high.  I have Asset allocation pulling away, 68-59.  Be sure to come back tomorrow to see who they take on in the final, either Savings rate or Tax optimization.

First Round: Mortgage versus Savings rate

Stocky Leave a comment

Basketball hoop

After a thrilling contest between Index mutual funds and Free money yesterday, we are now pitting Mortgage against Savings rate.  As always, I am not an expert on these matters.

bracket-game 2

 

Reasons for picking mortgage:

For most families, their Mortgage payment on their home is the single largest expenditure they have.  Also, due to its nature as a commodity, it’s also one of the easiest places to really save a lot of money pretty painlessly.  For a lot of products there’s a trade off between price and quality.  A BMW 325 owner could pay $20,000 less and drive a Honda Civic, but there is a trade-off, either real or perceived, between those two cars.  Sure you’re saving a lot of money, but you’re also getting not nearly as nice a car.

Mortgages are very different because money is a commodity, so there’s no difference.  If you get a Mortgage from Bank of America it acts pretty much identically as the Mortgage you get from Roundpoint (incidentally, the Fox family used to have our mortgage with BofA and now we’re with Roundpoint).  Money is money so here you want to go with whoever can give you the lowest rate (there are some features that might be important like prepayment penalties or ability to refinance within a certain period of time, but in my experience those are pretty rare).

Here we’ll use the Grizzly family as an example; they owe $400,000 on their home.  One of the easiest ways to save money on a mortgage is by refinancing when interest rates go down.  In the past few years, rates have been at historic lows and that means Mortgage interest rates have been similarly low.  Let’s say the Grizzlys got their mortgage 8 years ago with a rate of 6%, but now they can refinance at about 4%.  That alone would reduce the interest payments over the life of their mortgage about $175,000!!!  That’s an incredible amount of money for going through a process that takes maybe a month from beginning to end, and probably about 5 hours of work on your part.  As easy as this is, there are millions of homeowners out there who haven’t done this yet.

You can move a little up the difficulty spectrum and save even more.  Some Mortgages are sold with “points” which is basically prepaying interest; for example you might pay an extra $5000 when you get your loan and for that you would have an interest rate of 3.5% instead of 4.0%.  Points aren’t very well understood and because of that a lot of people tend to stay away, but if you are planning on staying in your house for a long time, they can be the best money you ever spent.  Using that above example, paying the $5000 to get the lower interest rate would net you a savings of about $35,000 over the life of the loan.

Kind of the opposite of points are adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).  Instead of a 30-year fixed loan (the interest rate stays constant for the 30 year life of the loan) you could get a 5-year ARM where the interest rate is fixed for the first 5 years of the loan and then adjusts based on market conditions for the remaining 25 years.  The benefit of these is ARMs tend to be about 1% less than fixed rates, but the major concern is that rates could rise after the 5 years is up and that could increase the cost of your Mortgage.  In my opinion ARMs make sense if you don’t think you’ll be in your home for very long.

In fact the Fox family got a 5-year ARM when we relocated to North Carolina.  In the here and now we enjoy a rate about 0.8% lower than if we got a 30-year-fixed (our rate is 2.2% and it would have been about 3% with a fixed).  That’s worth about $300 each month.  Rates have been rising, so in 2020 when the ARM starts to float (rates can move) we can either pay a higher rate (remember, we’re still ahead of the game so long as rates stay below 3%), refinance to a fixed mortgage and pocket five years of monthly $300 savings, or just pay off the entire mortgage.  We’ll see.

  What it does?
Refinance Take out a new loan at a lower interest rate to decrease the amount of interest you pay
Buy points Pay more in closing costs to get a lower interest rate
ARM Get a lower interest rate that is fixed in the beginning but then becomes adjustable (usually after 5 years)

 

So all these seem to be pretty big numbers, especially since you aren’t really giving anything up to achieve them.  But they aren’t going to be quite that big because interest on mortgages is tax deductible, so saving $100,000 in interest on the life of your mortgage may only put you ahead $60,000 because of the tax deduction.  On the other side of the spectrum, you might end up with significantly more if you took those savings and invested them.  Either way, your Mortgage is a great way to pad your nestegg.

 

Reasons for picking savings rate:

Savings rate is probably the most fundamental element of investing.  You can’t really invest until you have saved some money to invest with (Gee Stocky, thanks for that tremendous insight into what we already know).  And certainly, the more you save, the more you can invest, and the larger your nestegg will become.  But how much can saving more really move the need?

savings rate

The impact can be pretty staggering.  Over a 38-year period, from 22 when most of us enter the workforce, until we turn 60 and hopefully retire, if you invest $100 per month (assume a 6% return) you will end up with about $175,000!!!  It’s not that $100 isn’t a lot of money (it definitely isn’t chump change), but that seems pretty incredible that such a modest amount every month can lead to such a large number at the end of the run.  Over those 38 years, you would have invested a total of about $47,000, and because of investing returns you would have ended up with about 4 times that amount.

And the math works so if you save $200 per month, you end up with about $350,000; $1000 per month, you end up with $1.75 million.  Ladies and gentleman, say “hello” to the power of compounding.

 

Who wins?

Mortgage gives it a good fight, but in the end Savings rate is able to generate numbers that are so much bigger.  Also, while refinancing at a lower rate is a pretty sure-fire way to save money with your Mortgage, the more complicated maneuvers like buying points or using an ARM do entail some risk which could cost you serious dollars if you move too early or too late.  On the other hand, there is really no way that saving more can hurt your nestegg.  In the end Savings rate crushes Mortgage 65-51.

Come back on tomorrow to see the final match of the first round, Starting early against Tax optimization.

 

bracket-game 3

First Round: Asset allocation versus Diversification

Stocky 2 Comments

I’ve got my tickets to the Regionals in Charlotte, thanks to my neighbors Mr and Mrs Nittany Lion.  In honor of that I am kicking off the investing strategy tournament to determine which is the single best investing strategy if you could only pick one (which fortunately isn’t the case–you can pick all these).  As always, I am not an expert.  So without further ado, we’ll start with the contest between Asset allocation and Diversification.

bracket-begin

Reasons for picking Asset allocation:

Asset allocation is picking the right mix of stocks, bonds, and cash which maximize your investment returns while also limiting that chances that you hit a bad patch of time which cripples your portfolio beyond recovery.  The basis of the concept of asset allocation is the fact that as your expected investment returns increase, so does its volatility.

So for example, cash (or money market accounts) are the least volatile investments around where the chances of you losing money are nearly zero, but they also offer the smallest return at about 1-2%.  On the other end of the spectrum are stocks which historically have averaged about an 8% return, but where about one-third of the years you lost money.  Bonds are between those two, both in terms of returns and risk of losing money.

In my experience screwing up Asset allocation, especially among young investors, is one of the most common missteps.  The conventional wisdom is that you want to take more investing risk when you’re younger because you have more time to “recover” from any market downturns (as was the case with me in 2001 when I was just starting out).  That means that typically (and of course, each individual is different) younger people should allocate more to stocks than bonds or cash.  However, so often I talk to younger investors who have a significant chunk of their 401k in bonds or worse yet, cash.

Why is this so bad?  Well, over a period of decades, the investment horizon when you’re in your twenties or thirties, you end up leaving a lot of money on the table.  Using historic averages, if the 25-year-old you invested your 401k in stocks and your twin invested in bonds, when it comes time to hang up the spurs, it’s no contest—you’re so far ahead of your twin.  Remember that historically, stocks have returned about 8% while bonds have returned 5% and money markets (cash) have returned about 2%.  Just doing some really simple math, the historic difference between stocks and bonds has been about 3%–that adds up to huge differences over an investing career (remember from “The power of a single percentage” how big a difference 3% can make?).  Who knows if it will be like that in the future, but based on history that could lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over time.

Of course, you probably read A Random Walk Down Wall Street, so maybe you’re saying, “but when you invest in stocks you’re only getting a higher return because you’re talking on more risk.”  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and right you are.  That argument is exactly why Asset allocation is so important.  If you were 60 years old and getting ready for retirement, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to risk losing a big chunk of your portfolio by investing the majority of your money in stocks.  But if you’re 20 or 30 years old, then you can invest in stocks to get the higher return knowing you’re at less risk of a catastrophic loss because you have three or so decades to ride out any storms.

 

Reasons for picking Diversification:

Diversification is the strategy of picking multiple investments so that you can reduce the volatility of your portfolio.  When some of your investments are down, others will be up.  This is really Investment 101 stuff, and I don’t think you’ll find many legitimate investors who would not say it’s a good thing.  But if you think about it, how much is Diversification really doing to help you achieve your financial goals?

The fact of the matter is that Diversification does not increase your investment returns, on average (“on average” is a critical phrase here).  If that’s true, then why does everyone make such a big deal about Diversification?  Because by diversifying with several stocks you even out the highs and lows that would occur with a single stock.  As an example let’s look at investing in an S&P 500 index mutual fund which is considered highly diversified, and compare that to investing in a single stock.  Here I picked Catepillar because from 1980 to today, it and the S&P 500 had largely the same performance (they were both up about 2300% over those 38 years).

Over that time both investments had their ups and downs, but the difference was that Caterpillar’s ups were much higher and its downs much lower.  Since 1980 (38 years), the S&P 500 index had eight negative years with its worst year being 2008 when it was down 39%.  It also had 13 years where it had a return of 20% or better with its best year being 1995 when it was up 39%.

Now compare that to Caterpillar over the same time, remembering that over the entire 38 years they both had total returns fairly similar to each other.  Caterpillar had 17 years with negative returns, the worst being 2008 when it fell 55%.  On the other side, it had seven years where returns were over 55% (16% better than the best year of the S&P 500 index), with the best year being in 2010 when it increased 90%!!!

So think about that.  If you decided not to diversify and put all your money in Caterpillar back in 1980, you would have ended up in pretty much the same place as your twin who diversified with the S&P 500 index, but you would have had a much crazier ride.  2008 would have sucked for both of you, but much more so for you than your twin.  Also, almost half of your years would have been negative (15 out of 34 years) where it was only about 7 out of 34 years for your twin.  Of course, that would have been offset by some real “bumper crop” years (I had to get a farming analogy in) like 2010 when your portfolio would have almost doubled.  No one is complaining about a year like that, but it that a good thing?

Even recently, with Caterpillar you would have had 2014 and 2015 which were down over 10%, but that was made up in 2016 and 2017 which were both up over 60%.  Meanwhile, the S&P 500 was trudging along at double digit gains.  Holy Cow!!!

How do you plan for something like that?  Pre-2010 you were probably figuring you’d have a moderate retirement, and then 2010 rolled around and life all the sudden got a lot sweeter.  Exact same story after 2015.  Just look at the graph—far and away the most common annual return for the S&P 500 index was the 0-20% bucket; for Caterpillar the returns were all over the board and the most common was -20% to 0%–a loss!!!

And of course, I picked Caterpillar because over the 38 years it was pretty close to the S&P 500.  Remember that if you picked a single stock randomly from a broad index like the S&P 500, you would expect the stock to do just as well as the index, because the index is just an average of a bunch of those stocks.  And it’s true that on average a single stock will do as well as an index, but what if I randomly picked United Airlines which went bankrupt just like many, many other companies do every year (there’s no real chance that the value of the S&P 500 would go down to zero in a similar way)?  Or if I picked Medtronic (one of the greatest companies ever) which outperformed the S&P 500 some 8x?

My personal preference with investing is that I want as much predictability as possible, and that is even tough to come by when you’re highly diversified; when you aren’t diversified, there’s no chance.  Maybe if you like those types of thrills that putting everything into a single stock brings, you may want to think about BASE jumping or free diving.

But assessing it honestly, Diversification does not lead to higher returns on average.  It just reduces the crazy swings up and down.

 

Who wins?

Asset allocation wins this one pretty easily, 86-59 (I just made that up to look like a basketball game score, but it seems about right).  Diversification definitely helps smooth things out, but Asset allocation can undeniably increase your returns which translates to real money.

bracket-game 1

So Asset allocation moves on to the Final Four.  Make sure you come back tomorrow to see Free money take on Index mutual funds.

Investment returns on our solar panels

Stocky Leave a comment

If you are a loyal reader, you’ll remember that two years ago this month we made a 5-digit purchase.  Foxy and I installed solar panels on our new North Carolina house.

Two years later, let’s look at how that “purchase” has performed as an “investment”.  To save you the suspense (Hey, I appreciate you’re busy and may not have the time to read this whole post), I’ll give the investment a solid mediocre to slightly below mediocre—about a 4% return.

 

Sweet, free electricity

We bought an array of twenty 265-watt solar panels.  At the time, when we were talking to the sales guy and we factored everything in—the number of sunny days in our area, the pitch and direction of our roof—we thought we were going to be getting about 550 to 600 kWh each month.  As it turns out, we’ve averaged slightly less than 530 kWh per month.

That’s a bit of a miss that translates to real money.  With our electric utility in North Carolina (Duke Energy), when you factor in taxes, fees, and everything we pay about $0.10 per kWh.  Quick math shows you our panels save us about $53 each month.  However, that’s 20 to 70 kWh less than we thought, and that translates to about $2 to $7 less per month that we are getting than we expected.

That said, we’re generating a lot of “free” and green electricity each month.  As you would expect, our electricity varies widely with the seasons—higher in winter because of the furnace and summer because of air conditioning and lower in spring and fall.  If you average everything out, we use 1,100 kWh each month, so those panels are addressing about half our usage.  That actually seems pretty decent.

 

By the numbers

But you know me—words like “pretty good” and “decent” don’t cut it when we’re talking about real money and investments.  Let’s dive into the nitty gritty to see how this works has an investment.

The whole set up cost $17,700, however our net cost was significantly less.  For paying in cash we got a $1,100 discount.  We also played credit card roulette, and that knocked our price down another $1,400.  Finally, the biggest discount was the federal tax credit; solar panels allow for a 30% tax credit so that knocked another $5,700 off (we only got that when we filed out taxes the following year).  Net all that out, and our panels cost $9,700.

For a $9,700 “investment” we got our electricity bill reduced by about $53 each month.  If you do the math, that’s right at 4.0% return.  If you’re curious, without the $1,400 credit card roulette the return would have dropped to 2.8%.

A 4% return isn’t very good.  It’s a far cry from the 20%-ish annualized return the stock market has blessed us with these past two years, so that’s a bit of a miss.  However, that’s not entirely fair to compare something like solar panels to the stock market.

Probably a better comparison would be a bond—we pretty regularly use electricity and those solar panels pretty consistently generate 530 kWh each month (the highest we get is in June at about 800 kWh and the lowest is in January at about 200 kWh).  That 530 kWh is worth $53 each month, so that “feels” a lot more like a bond.  Given the warranty on the solar panels is 25 years, I think it’s safe to assume we’ll continue to get that electricity generation for a really long time.

So we bought a $9,700 bond that pays us a monthly dividend of $53—a 4% return.  That’s where I’ll give it a solid “decent”.  In this market, 4% is a fairly decent return for a government or corporate bond: long-term Treasuries are yielding about 2-3% and investment grade corporate bonds maybe 4-5%.  We’re right in that mix, so that’s okay I guess.  Of course, I would have liked more (and thought we were going to get more), but that’s the way it is.

There is a bit of an ace in the hole that makes this a bit brighter.  That 4% assumes that electricity rates stay at $0.10 per kWh, which is where they’ve been the past two years.  Electricity rates have historically risen in the 2-3% range (although they didn’t this year specifically, I believe, because I invested in solar panels and the investing gods wanted to humble me).  If you assume a 2% electricity rate inflation that return bumps up to 5.6%.  That seems a little bit better.

As an aside, when I run for government office I am going to propose a nice little tax break financed solely by increasing electric rates.  Between solar panels and LED lights, we can definitely reduce our electricity usage with minimal sacrifice.  I cringe when I see incandescent light bulbs at someone’s house or in a store.  A 5-watt LED bulb can generate the same brightness at a 60-watt incandescent bulb.  Over the 20 life of an LED bulb, there is a electricity savings of about 1,000 kWh ($100).  In case you’re curious, that’s a 251269% return (I’m not kidding, that’s a real number) on investment just changing your old bulbs to LED bulbs.

 

The intangibles

So as an investment I think the solar panels are a bit mixed.  We’re getting 4% with the chance that it increases a bit.  It’ll never be anything magical that rivals the stock market.

However, there is another piece that is important—the “green” perspective.  In these two years, our solar panels have generated a total of about 12,000 kWh of pretty much pollution-free electricity.  Given that Duke Energy still generates most of it’s electricity from coal plants, that has a positive carbon footprint.

Using back of the envelope math, that’s about 7 TONS of carbon dioxide that isn’t in the atmosphere.  Basically, we’ve offset both of our cars, plus two of our neighbors’ cars.  I don’t know how you personally value that, but that’s what you’d have to do to make the solar panels make sense in your head as a good investment.

 

The other day Foxy Lady and I were chatting about home improvements (she desperately wants a pool), and the solar panels came up.  She asked me what I thought about the decision.  I thought for a few seconds and said I regret doing it.  The electricity generated was a bit short of what I had hoped, and the return was therefore below expectations.

I do think solar panels are the wave of the future.  Right now, unless you are totally green, the federal tax incentives are a must for them to even be a consideration.  You never know when they will end, and back in 2016 I think I had a bit of “get on the bus before it leaves” mentality that made me pull the trigger maybe sooner than I should have.

I know panel prices have gotten better (more kWh per panel) and prices have fallen, so I think if I was able to do it at current prices the return might be a bit better, but it’s still going to be in the 5-6% range.

 

Driver-less cars impact your decisions now

Stocky 2 Comments

I don’t think there’s any doubt that driverless cars are going to change the world.  They’ll be safer, cleaner, more efficient, eliminate/reduce traffic jams, and on and on.  The future looks bright . . . but what does that have to do with today?

The big question isn’t if but when.  A few years back Google and Uber and GM and everyone else were figuring out prototypes, and putting them on the road in a very limited way.  They told us not to get too excited—driverless cars wouldn’t become mainstream until way in the future: Think 2030 or 2040 when they became standard fare.

Yet that seems to have inched significantly closer.  Tesla today has driveless cars.  GM claims it will sell cars without steering wheels and pedals in 2019—THAT’S NEXT YEAR PEOPLE!!!

But back to the question at hand: what does that have to do with today?

 

Buying a car has big financial implications

Purchasing a car is a big deal that can greatly impact your personal finances (finally, Stocky, you’re getting to the point).  Getting that right or wrong can mean hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.  Let’s really simplify the world to two scenarios:

  1. The Stocky method: You buy a car new, finance it at the teaser rate, and drive it until it goes to heaven.
  2. The Ocelot method: You lease a car and then turn it in after 3 years.

Certainly there are other options (1a—you buy a three year old car and drive that into the ground), but let’s just look at these two.

As you would expect, from a financial perspective option #1 wins big time.  A “typical” car like a Honda Accord costs about $22,000.  You could buy it for $2,500 down and then take advantage of 1% APR financing so you’ll have monthly payments of $332 for the next 5 years.  Or you could lease it for $2,500 down, and then pay $200 per month for the next three years; after which you turn the old car in and start it all over again.

Cars are engineered incredibly well, so let’s assume the car you buy lasts 24 years (I am the proud owner of a 1998 Toyota 4Runner).  If you run the numbers, buying a car comes out ahead to the tune of about $90,000.  That’s astounding considering the original purchase is only $22,000.

Bear in mind that’s $90,000 per car each time you make a purchase/lease decision.  For a married couple, it comes to about $800k over their investing horizon.  Remember that the average American has a net worth of about $80,000.  Heck, if you didn’t save a dime in your 401k or do any of the other stuff we talk about, just the car purchase decision could fund your retirement.

Of course, it’s not a perfect comparison.  The major advantage of a lease is you get a new car every three years—that’s a safer car, a nicer car, plus the option to change the car as your situation changes.  But $800,000 is $800,000 after all.

The point is that financially it makes a lot more sense to buy a car than lease.

 

Driverless cars completely changes the car purchasing decision

Let’s bring this full circle now.  We’re on the brink of driverless cars changing everything.  Once they come out, you’d be crazy not to go with that option.  In fact, I think car insurance will make it much more expensive not to use driverless cars, and before too long human-driven cars will be banned (the same way horse carriages are banned on highways today).

We’re definitely in the kill zone.  Foxy and I are wondering how much longer the 4Runner has—I say many more years but I think she secretly tries to put sugar in the gas tank to kill it when I’m not paying attention.

If we had to get a new car today, what would we do?  Normally it’s a no-brainer: you buy a new car and drive it forever.  However, for that decision to make sense you have to drive that car for years.  Actually, the breakeven point is at about 8 years.  Is there any doubt that by 2026 we’ll have really good driverless cars?  At the rate things are going, we’ll have them in 8 months, not 8 years.

Futurists make a really exciting debate about what the future of cars will look like.  Personally, I think ‘Lil Fox and Mini Fox will never own cars.  Rather they’ll subscribe to a service similar to your cell phone: for $300 per month you get your 16-mile work commute (with up to 2 other commuters, 2 minute max wait time) plus 500 miles of other driving in a 4-person sedan (with up to 100 miles in a minivan or SUV).

That will fundamentally change things like car insurance, garages (both at home and parking structures), and a million other things.  And I bet it’s a lot sooner than we think.  Bear in mind, 5 years ago, everyone was saying driverless care are decades away; now GM says it’s a year.

In the meantime, we have to still get to work and pick up groceries and take the kids to baseball practice today.  How does all this impact what you want to be a sound financial decision if we have to get a new car today?

 

The verdict—lease your next car

While this pains me to say, I think the best financial move for your next car is to lease.  Who would have thought I would ever type those words?

If you buy, in 10 years or so you’ll be just getting ahead on your financial decision, but you’ll be sooooo behind the times plus be a bit of a hazard on the road.  Imagine hanging out with your friends as they take selfies and you pull out your Blackberry.