Month: June 2018

Kids investing in real stocks

Stocky 1 Comment

For those of you who have been following the Summerfield Open, you know that those tests for 4th and 5th graders had a major focus on applying mathematical principals to personal finance.  Many of the kids got interested in investing because of those questions which led parents to ask me how their kids can start investing in stocks.  Here is how I would approach it.

Of course, remember this is just friendly advice.  I am not an expert and you should call the broker (I suggest Vanguard) or work with a paid advisor.  With that out of the way, here’s what you can do:

 

Fun or boring

We’ve talked ad nauseum on this blog about the best investing strategy being buy and hold index mutual funds.  This is a tried and true approach, but it’s boring.  When you’re thinking about how to get kids excited about and engaged in investing, that’s a conundrum.

You want investing to be exciting for the ankle-biters to hold their attention.  If you’re an ankle-biter who is looking to start investing, the point may be less to make a lot of money.  Rather, it might be to gain experience investing.  Yet, you want them to develop good investing habits that will pay dividends (haha, do you see what I just did?) for the rest of their lives.

With all that, I think you want to have a foundation of correct investing principals (boring), and then try to mix in some fun into that.  Let’s look at those investing principles and see which should apply to the padawans:

  • Diversification—This is a critical concept that you want to have early on. Investing in individual stocks might make it a bit more tangible for the munchkin (you’re investing in Apple which is the type of phone mom has), but I think you can do something similar with a mutual fund or more likely ETF (more on that in a minute).  Individual stocks will be more volatile which will translate to more exciting for a munchkin, but ETFs will definitely have plenty of action.
  • More diversification—As you look to diversify an important concept is “total coverage”. You want to have investments everywhere.  That might be a bit harder for individual stocks because it’s not always easy to know the exposure that a company has geographically (you’re investing in Ford because that’s the car dad drives, but how much of their business is in the Middle East?).  With ETFs you can overtly pick US funds or European funds or Pacific, etc.  That gives a bit of a built in geography lesson too, so there you go.
  • Minimize costs—We’ll have a whole section on this, but costs are especially important for the half-fries. They probably don’t have a lot of money to invest (remember, investing is probably more for the experience than the wealth creation).  With a smaller portfolio a $5 or god-forbid $15 transaction fee to buy some shares of stock would have an outsized negative effect on a $100 portfolio compared to a $100,000 “adult-sized” one (but even adults shouldn’t pay transaction fees).
  • Hold investments for long term—This is critical for wealth creation, but I think we sacrifice that for the tadpoles. Trading is “exciting” and keeps them engaged.  Fortunately, because of the Random Walk there’s no reason to believe that more active trading will negatively impact the portfolio beyond the transaction costs (mentioned above, and again below).  So here I say have a lot of fun and dip your toe in and out of the different investments somewhat frequently to keep it exciting.
  • Track your investments—This is probably even more important for the spuds. As an adult it’s actually a bad thing to be looking at your portfolio all the time.  However, here I think it’s good.  Everyday something will happen with the investments—it’ll go up a lot or down some or something.  There are amazingly great math lesson here—calculating returns, making graphs of what’s going on.  If you want, as a parent you could really dig in and make this a huge adjunct math course.

 

Setting things up

Fair warning, the advice I am giving here might be illegal.  I strongly recommend you talk to an investment professional as you do this.

Unfortunately, to set up a brokerage account that allows you to trade in stocks or ETFs or what ever, you need to be 18.  So that’s a problem for the half-pints.  As a parent you would need to take said half-pint’s money and invest it in your (adult’s) account.  Technically, the money will belong to the adult, but perhaps you can make a deal with your half-pint to “promise” it will go back to them.  Seriously, the IRS does allow gifts between people (I think the limit is $10,000 per year), so I don’t think it should be too big a deal, but do understand the technicalities.

All our investments are at Vanguard, and that is where I would go.  You can go to www.vanguard.com, select “Open an account”, say you’ll fund it with a check, and then pick a “general savings account”.

There will be a lot of questions that you’ll need to fill out and then with things like your social security number, a username and password, and other stuff.  Get all that done, and then you can call them up and ask for deposit slips so you can send them a check to fund your account.

 

Minimize costs

Once everything is set up and the money is in your account, you will get to the fun part which is picking your investments.  Here I would suggest ETFs, which basically act like stocks—you buy them in whole shares and they trade throughout the day—but they are really like a mutual fund in that they invest in hundreds of companies.

This is where Vanguard really shines.  You can open your account for no minimum and then invest as little as one share (each share is typically between $50 and $150).  If you invest in a Vanguard ETF (they have a ton of high quality ones—here) they don’t charge any transaction fee.  So you can trade and out of them as much as you want.  Obviously, you don’t want to be silly, but that works well for juniors who want to experience the trades.

If you want to invest in individual stocks or non-Vanguard mutual funds there is a fee (I think $7 per trade), but I don’t really think there’s any reason to do that.

There are ETFs for everything.  For a little dude, I would suggest equities, and here are a few that you might consider:

  • VTI—all US companies
  • VB—small US companies
  • VT—all companies in the world
  • VXUS—all international companies
  • VDE—energy companies (industry specific)
  • VHT—healthcare companies (industry specific)

 

As you know, I have a huge passion for investing and helping kids.  If you’re doing this and need some help navigating things, please let me know.

Top 5—Financial moves when the stork is coming

Stocky Leave a comment

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A lot of our readers are starting their families or have younger kids.  Foxy Lady and I have been so blessed to bring two wonderful little cubs into the world.  As you embark on parenthood and rearing little ones, what are the financial considerations you need to make?  Surprisingly, I don’t think there are all that many:

 

5. Set up your health insurance. Depending on when you find out your pregnant, the chances are you will have an enrollment period with your health insurance.  Foxy Lady and I screwed this up twice since both of our boys were born in October (we found out we were pregnant in February so we missed the open enrollment while pregnant), but let’s imagine that found out that we were pregnant in October and the baby was due in June.

When open enrollment comes around every December and goes in effect in January, we would have bought the primo policy that gives the best coverage.  Normally, we don’t pick the Cadillac policy that our work offers because we’re relatively healthy and don’t go to the doctor a lot.  Under normal circumstances we get a middle-of-the-road policy.  If we happen to have a medical issue (like with ‘Lil Fox in 2014) we know we’ll spend a little more in out of pocket, but that doesn’t happen very often so we generally come out ahead.

However, when you’re expecting you know for sure you’re going to spend a lot of time in the hospital and you’re going to have a lot of doctor’s visits, and that gets expensive.  If you know this is coming, get the insurance policy that has the higher premium every paycheck but then covers most or all of those expenses.  Had we done this with our boys, we probably would have saved $3000-4000 on each little guy.  As it is, I’ve told both boys they owe us that money and it should be treated as a loan accruing interest, but neither has acknowledged the righteousness of my claim.

 

4. Set up your flex spending account. Similar to #5, if you’re having a baby you know you’re going to have some medical expenses. Make sure at open enrollment you set up your flex spending account to pay for those.  With flex spending accounts you can pay for medical expenses using before-tax dollars.  So that $2000 you had to pay with pre-tax dollars only feels like $1300.

Also, once you have kids, you can use a flex spending account to pay for childcare.  The government allows up to $5000 per child to be tax deductible (I’m not a tax expert, but that’s my understanding) if you use a flex spending account.  Spending $5000 in pre-tax dollars instead of after-tax dollars is pretty sweet.  And for childcare it seems like a no-brainer that amounts to about $1500 per year.  Most of us know for sure that we’re going to have childcare expenses.  Why not spend the hour it takes to save that money (if $1500 isn’t worth an hour of your time, then I’d like for you to help me with my finances).

 

3. Steel yourself against crazy “baby” spending. Definitely when you are going to have a baby there is a lot of stuff that you need, and this is especially true for your first child.  But for everything item that you do need there are probably 5 that you don’t need.  Baby stuff has become a big business and the people who market this stuff are smart.  They know you want the best for your child, and they aren’t above pulling on your heart strings to let you think that you “need this to be a good, loving parent.”

We did get the diaper genie and are glad we did.  We never got the bottle warmer, and never missed it for a second.  We got a pee tent (when you’re changing your son’s diaper and keeping him from peeing everywhere between diapers) and never used them.  We got three strollers with our first—a regular that the car seat fits into, a jogger, and an umbrella stroller—and used all three but we never have really used the tandem stroller once Mini Fox joined his brother.  There are a million more examples but you get my point.

This isn’t a baby blog, so I’ll stop there.  Just understand my point is that you can spend hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on baby stuff, much of which you won’t need and none of which will make you love your baby any more.

 

2. Start a 529 account. If you are planning on paying for some or all of your child’s education (that’s a big “if” and one I covered here), a 529 is a no-brainer.  Basically, a 529 allows you to take after-tax money and invest it for your kid’s education.  That money can grow tax free so when you take it out you won’t pay any taxes on it.  In that way it’s very similar to a Roth IRA.

Doing back of the envelop math, if you saved $500 per month for your child’s education that would give you about $200,000 after 18 years.  Of that $200k, about $110k would be what you put in and $90k would be what you gained on your investments.  Without a 529 you would be taxed on that $90k gain; depending on your tax bracket that could be $30-40k you would owe Uncle Sam.  With a 529 you get to keep that.  Think about that for a second—basically the tax advantages of a 529 buy you another year of college.  It’s like buy three years, get the fourth year for free.

 

1. Love. This is a finance and investing blog so I always focus on money, but with your baby your love is a million times more important than anything you can do that has a dollar sign attached to it.  There will be some costs, a few of which we discussed above, but not as many as you’d think.  You’ll spend some on diapers and formula, as much or as little on clothes as your fashion sense (or lack thereof) allows, and you’re pretty much set.

Very often, somewhat to your chagrin, they’ll find more joy in the box that expensive toy comes in than the toy itself.  Library books are free, and children’s books in general are pretty inexpensive, so reading to your kids (one of the best things you can do according to child development experts) is pretty cheap and really rewarding.  And walks to the park and rides on the swings are still free.  As is keeping your cool when your kid puts one of his rubber balls under the treadmill, having it sucked into the motor so now it makes a funny noise.

As you embark on parenthood it’s a crazy rollercoaster.  Sure there are a couple financial bows you have to tie, but I don’t believe near as many as a lot of people would have you believe.

 

Happy parenting.  For those parents out there, what were the major financial items you had to take care of when your bundle of joy arrived?

Federal reserve makes markets dive

Stocky 1 Comment

Nothing gets stock markets so excited as the Federal Reserve.  Here is a chart of the S&P 500 yesterday.  Quick, when do you think the Fed announced that it was going to raise interest rates?  Everything was going fine—it was a pretty smooth day and then at about 3pm the Fed made its decision and the bottom fell out of the stock market.  Why is the Fed so important?  What is it doing that can make a calm market move to much so quickly?

Basically (and this is very basic, as there is a boatload of nuisance in this) the Federal Reserve, and for that matter the central banks of any country, control the core interest rate.  That single, yet enormously powerful tool, allows the fed to influence the economy in a major way.

The guiding mission of the Fed is first and foremost to maintain a healthy level of inflation.  In the US that is around 2-3%.  Being too low has some problems that reasonable people can debate, but pretty much everyone believes that when inflation gets too high, that’s when really bad things happen.  So more than anything, the Fed is tasked with keeping inflation low.  Then a secondary goal is to promote a healthy and growing economy that keeps unemployment low.  So basically the Fed has two jobs, keep inflation low and keep the economy strong.

 

How does the Fed impact the economy?

Let’s imagine a really simple economy.  There are ten companies named A and B and C all the way down to J.  Just like in real-life, not all companies are created equal, with some being much more profitable than others.  Here A is the most profitable (maybe like Apple) while J is the least profitable (maybe like JC Penney).

Interest rates will play a big part in the profitability of these firms.  As interest rates go up, the amount they spend on interest for all their debt goes up as well.  Because A is so profitable, it would only start to lose money if interest rates went really high, up over 10%; however J is much more vulnerable and will become unprofitable if interest rates go over 1%.  All the other companies have a similar situation as shown in the graph.

So this is where the Fed comes in.  Let’s say the Fed sets the interest rate at 6%.  Firms A, B, C, D, and E are all profitable even when the interest rates are that high; but firms F, G, H, I, and J are not.  Because of that things won’t look good for firms F-J.  Maybe it’ll be so bad that they’ll go bankrupt or maybe they’ll lay off people or put a hiring freeze on.

At 6% interest, you have five firms that are doing well (A-E)—growing, hiring more people, expanding, etc.—and five that aren’t (F-J).  And at 6% the economy is performing at a certain level.  But what would happen if the Fed lowered the interest rate from 6% down to 5%?  One more firm (F) would be profitable, and in general it would benefit all the firms.  The profitable ones would be doing even better, and the unprofitable ones wouldn’t be quite so bad off.  And that would lead to a strong economy: more “stuff” would be produced and more people would be employed.

So there is very clear relationship that lower interest rates led to a stronger economy.  Having a strong economy is one of the Fed’s goals, so that begs the question, “Why doesn’t the Fed push rates all the way down to 0%?”

This is where it starts to get interesting.  It’s my favorite topic: Inflation.  Remember that the Fed’s first job is to control inflation.  Let’s look at the Fed’s decision to move interest rates from 6% to 5%, but now look at it with an eye towards inflation.

In our pretend world, let’s assume at 6% interest rates the economy is doing well.  Things are growing and unemployment is fairly low.  When interest rates go to 5%, firm F will become profitable so they’ll want to hire some people—makes sense.  But remember that unemployment is low, so F is going to need to tempt people who are already working for A or B or C or who ever to come work at F.  How does F do that?  They pay them more.

F starts to pay people more, but A doesn’t take this lying down, so A starts paying more.  This wage increase trickles through the economy.  But A and B and even F need to make money, so the increase in compensation they’re paying to their employees gets passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.  When prices start rising, that’s INFLATION.  And controlling inflation is the Fed’s #1 goal.  So that creates the difficult balance for the Fed—they want the economy to do well but not so well that it triggers inflation.

So there you go.  You just completed a course in “Introductory Macroeconomics”.

 

What’s going on today?

Now that you have that little lesson under your belt, how does that relate to what’s going on with the Fed right now?  For the past couple years, the Fed has interest rates at historic lows, at about 0%.  Then about two years ago they started slowly raising interest rates to more normal levels, although even now the interest rates are still low by historical standards.  Obviously that’s super low, so shouldn’t the Fed be worried about inflation?

Remember the circumstances of how interest rates got that low.  At the beginning of 2008 the economy was going strong and the Fed interest rate was at over 5%.  But then the financial crisis hit, blowing up the banking industry, and sending the world economy into a very sharp recession.  A ton of people lost their jobs (unemployment went up) so prices stayed flat or even started to fall a little bit.

With all this going on, the Fed threw a life raft to the economy in the form of near 0% interest rates.  In the intervening years, the economy has rebounded and unemployment has fallen, but inflation has remained pleasantly low.  This is kind of the best of both worlds for the Fed—the economy is strong and there’s no inflation.  The two things they have to balance are both in happyland, so they have kept interest rates low.

 

What does it really mean when the Fed changes interest rates?

With all of this, are we just a bunch of idiots?  Should we really be so happy if the Fed is keeping rates low, and should we be so bummed if the Fed raises rates?

As the parent of two boys who one day may start sponging off Foxy Lady and me, I think the parent-child relationship is a good analogy.

Imagine you have parents (the Fed) who have a grown child (the US economy).  Times are tough for the child (the economy is doing poorly) so the parents help out (the Fed lowers interest rates).  The good scenario is that the child starts doing better to the point where he doesn’t need his parents’ help (the economy strengthens so it can withstand higher interest rates).  The bad scenario is the child becomes dependent on his parents’ help and is never able to make it on his own.

In this analogy the parents reducing the amount of help they give (the Fed raising rates) is a good thing, isn’t it?  It means that the kid is getting things on track and is standing on his two feet.  For this reason, I actually think it’s a good thing if the Fed raises interest rates because it means that the economy is strong enough that it doesn’t need insanely low interest rates any more.  Yet the markets react in the exact opposite direction.

I get it.  Just as the kid would be bummed if the parents said, “hey pal, since you’re starting to make some money now, we won’t be sending those monthly checks”, the companies are bummed that they can’t borrow money so cheaply.  But that isn’t sustainable.

I chalk this up to yet another of a million examples of how the stock market acts in a goofy manner in the short term.  And another reason why I NEVER try to time the market.  I just keep my head down and invest for the long term, regardless of what is going on with interest rates.  But watching everyone hang on Janet Yellen’s every last word does make for perverse entertainment.

 

As the current debate unfolds, what do you think?  Is the economy strong enough for the Fed to continue to take away the credit card?

Thinking about your home equity in retirement

Stocky Leave a comment

Sometimes my logic just doesn’t add up.  When ever I think about the Fox family’s retirement, or when ever I work with clients and discuss their retirement, I never consider the value of our/their home.  That seems crazy, especially when you look at national statistics.  The average American has a net worth of $80k, of which about $55k is their home equity!!!  That means that for the average American 70% of their net worth is in their home, yet that’s something I don’t incorporate when I think about retirement.  What gives?

 

Your home as an investment

To start, it’s worth thinking about your house as an investment.  As investments go, especially over the long-term, houses don’t perform nearly as well as other types of investments like stocks (I did a whole blog on this point).

You’re always going to hear stories about people who made a killing when they sold their house.  Like fish stories, you only hear about the “wins” and not from the people who didn’t do that well.  Also, a lot of people think about the “gain” of the sale, comparing what they originally bought the house for and what they sold it for, yet they don’t factor in all the maintenance and home improvements they put in.

The point is that I think most people and certainly the mass media tend to romanticize the idea of houses as an investment.  I think the performance is much more modest.

 

Your home as a shelter

Obviously, your home serves a very practical purpose as a shelter.  It keeps the rain off your head, protects you from the bad guys (as Mini Fox would say), provides storage for your crap, etc.  That’s the rub, and makes your home fundamentally different from other, more traditional investments like mutual funds or other securities.

Even in retirement you need that shelter, so it’s not like you can sell your home and use the proceeds to fund your lifestyle (actually, maybe you can, but there’s some deep water there that we’ll talk about in a few minutes).  So you’re stuck in the middle—you need the shelter your home provides, but your home represents a large portion of your savings nest egg.  What to do?

 

Options (and why they are problematic)

As we’ve discussed, you’ll probably need about $5000 to $10k per month in retirement to support a moderate, middle-class lifestyle.  That will go to food, vacations, healthcare, and all the other stuff you’ll need.  Oh, by the way, you’ll also need shelter—a roof over your head—so let’s think about how that would go.

Option 1—At some point, maybe when the kids leave the house, you can sell the home you own, take all the equity and put that into your investments, and rent for the rest of your life.  This isn’t a very popular option, yet I think it has a lot of really positive features (see my comparison of renting versus buying).   The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and very, very few retirees with at least a moderate investment portfolio do this.

Option 2—When the kids leave you can downsize, selling your larger family home for a smaller one that accommodates two older people rather than a nuclear family.  This allows you to get a less-expensive home, pocket the equity and put that money in your investment portfolio, and go forward.  This allows people to use that home equity to support their retirement, but the problem is still there, albeit smaller.  You still will own a home that ties up a bunch of your net worth.

Option 3—Do a reverse mortgage.  This is a bit of an obscure strategy with a number of complexities that probably deserves its own post.  Basically, you take your home equity and borrow against it—let’s say taking out $3000 per month to fund your lifestyle.  There are a lot of details here with a lot of fees (that make it less attractive), plus it “forces” you to stay in your home which may be a good thing or a bad thing.  That said, this solves a lot of the problems we discussed.

 

What does it all mean?

It’s clear there are some complexities with this, and I don’t think there’s a clear approach that you should take.  Counting your home equity in your net worth can definitely expose you to not having enough liquid funds to pay for things like food, healthcare, etc.

On the other hand, not counting that money at all seems to be really, really conservative.  After 30 years, our mortgages will be paid off and we’ll have an asset that is potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.  That needs to be incorporated somehow, right?

Basically, I calculate everything as though there is no home equity.  When I look at the Fox family’s financials or those of the clients I help, I know that what ever those numbers (just the investments) say, there’s some upside.  It’s a stupid game we play with ourselves, but that’s how I do it.  If our finances were so close (what I had was right at what I needed), I would definitely start dissecting the home equity value more.

Usually, though, I set the goal for myself and my clients that their investment accounts (brokerage, IRA, 401k, etc) should be enough to fund their retirement.  Then their house can be upside which gives a bit of a cushion for posher retirement or for unexpected expenses which may arise.

Sweet—a really important item in personal finance that defies an easy answer.  That’s how I do it.  How do you think about your home equity?