Month: June 2019

How much should you be saving for your kids’ college?

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Saving for college is a major issue when it comes to personal finance.  When I talk to people, it’s nearly universal that people say their financial goals are to “have enough to retire comfortably” and to “pay for their kids’ college so they don’t come out with loans.”

If that is your goal, that begs the question: How much should you be saving each month?

Obviously this is a very complicated question.  This is not a one-size-fits-all situation since there are so many details that make can make things vary substantially.  Probably the biggest one is how much the total cost of attendance will be for your kid’s particular institution.  That said, we can look at some broad averages.

The type of school

As you know, I actively question the value that colleges deliver in this day and age.  When I look at the costs of attendance, that just reinforces the idea that colleges are WAY OVERPRICED.  That said, let’s assume we have two broad choices for college:

In-state:  Parents will get a huge break if their kids go to a public in-state school.  The “top” state school in each state tends to cost about $25k for total attendance.  Certainly there’s a range—UCLA is about $34,000 while University of Massachusetts is about $19,000.  However, don’t think those lower costs are charity.  Your tax dollars are subsidizing those lower costs.

The cost of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in our home state, is about $24,000.  Also, that’s a number that easy to work with since it’s divisible by 12, so let’s go with that.  We’ll assume that in-state expenses at a good school are about $24,000.

Private/out-of-state:  If you don’t take advantage of that in-state subsidy, costs get higher very quickly.  Private schools can range from about $25,000 to as high as $70,000.  Since most of the schools that you think of when you think of private colleges—Harvard, Duke, Notre Dame, etc.—are in that $70,000 range, let’s use that as our number.

How much to save

Maybe time got away from you and you are getting a really late start.  Your child is entering college this year.  The math here is pretty easy.  Each month you’ll have to come up with 1/12 of the annual cost of college.  For a public school, that’s $2000 per month and for a private school that’s about $5800 per month.

Those are big numbers, but the good news is if you plan for it and are able to save sooner, those monthly contributions become a lot more manageable.

If we look at the other extreme, we can calculate what would happen if you started saving when the child was born.  This is a bit more complicated because there are two powerful factors at play. 

First, tuition costs for college are always rising (I’ll spare you my rant, but suffice it to say it’s ridiculous).  Let’s assume that on average college costs increase about 3% each year.  That means that $24,000 annual cost for a state school this year will be compounded 18 years by the time your child enters college.  That’s a big deal, increasing the cost from $24,000 to about $43,000.  Ouch!!!

Time doesn’t help us there, but it does help us in the way you probably expected.  Second, the money we save each year can be invested.  If we assume a 6% return, that becomes really powerful, as we all know.

The calculations aren’t easy and I do them on a spreadsheet.  At the end of the day, you’d need to save and invest $350 each month to pay for a child’s 4 year public college education.  If you go private, that number increases to a bit over $1000 each month.

Of course, real life probably puts most of us in the middle between those two extremes—starting when the kid is born and starting when the kid starts college.  This makes sense.  When the kid is born there are a lot of expenses and other things going on, so it’s not always easy to start right away.

Here is a table that shows how much you’d need to start saving each month based on the year you start.

Kid’s age you start saving Public Private
0 $351 $1,024
5 $460 $1,343
10 $650 $1,896
15 $1,070 $3,119
18 $2,000 $5,833

I don’t know if that chart fills you with optimism or pessimism.  Obviously the sooner you start the less you have to save.  I was a bit surprised by how much just a few extra years helps.  If you started saving when your kid is 15, you have to save about half of what you’d need to if you started when they enrolled.  That just shows that it’s never too late to start.

On the other side, if it takes you a few years to get everything lined up, and you don’t start saving until the child is 5 years old, you don’t have to come up with a lot more than if you started when the kid was born.  So that means you shouldn’t beat yourself up too much if you had to wait a bit.

Either way, if you decide that college is right for you child and that you want to help them pay for it, I hope this helps put those financial requirements into perspective.

What is causing all the crazy market swings (part 2)?

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Welcome back.  Last week I started listing off reasons we’re seeing so much more volatility in the stock market. In this blog I’ll take you home.

 “Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.” –Terminator 2 (1991)

Terminator 2 - 5

Computer-initiated trading drives a major, and increasingly larger, portion of the volume in stock markets.  It’s a good thing for a few reasons.  It gives people more options in their trading strategies, it offers precision that humans can’t match, it doesn’t get tired or forget or anything like that.  But it also leads to a lot of volatility.

One of the major types of automated trading is “stop-loss” trades.  This is when someone owns a stock like Nike and says something like: “I only want to sell it if it starts to fall.  Right now the stock is at $50, so sell it if it goes below $45.”  Emotionally it makes sense.  Everyone knows crazy things can happen with stocks and it can all go to hell in the blink of an eye (see: Enron or Worldcom or Blackberry).  So as the name implies, this stops your losses at some level you establish.  Awesome.  You have more control.

The reason this increases volatility is that this type of trade tends to compound the problem.  When stocks are going down these stop losses trigger which sells more stock which drives the prices down further which triggers more sell orders and so on and so on in a downward spiral.  The obvious flaw is that the computers which are doing this don’t have any idea of the intrinsic value of the stock they are selling; they just know they are supposed to sell when the stocks hit a certain level so that’s what they do.

When rational humans look at these types of situation (maybe like Boeing on July 12) and can “see” that the market is overreacting, things tend to go back to levels that make sense.  Probably the best example of this is the Flash Crash of 2010.  On May 6 of that year, probably the craziest 30 minutes ever of stock trading occurred.  In a matter of minutes the market fell about 10% (equivalent to about 1700 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average if this happened today!!!), and then just as quickly recovered nearly all the loss.

What made it so crazy was that no news drove it.  Maybe news of a nuclear war starting or a meteor on a collision course for earth would justify such a rapid move.  Of course there wasn’t that, but there wasn’t anything—no news from the Federal Reserve, no companies going bankrupt or countries defaulting on their debt, or a regional skirmish, or a refinery blowing up, nothing.

In the aftermath, the leading theories all ultimately pointed to automated trading.  Some sell order lowered prices slightly but just enough to started triggering stop-loss orders.  That started a selling frenzy that drove prices down, leading to more stop-loss orders and in an instant everything went to hell.  Once thinking people saw this and knew that something weird was going on, they started buying those shares which were selling at 10% or 20% or even 50% less than they were 20 minutes before and made things normal again.  Like so many examples here, we ended where we started, but we had a crazy ride in the meantime.  More volatility.

“We keep inventing better ways to kill ourselves”

The stock market is an evolving landscape.  There was a time long, long ago when it was just stocks.  Then derivatives like options and futures came along as well as buying on margin (borrowing money to buy your stock); and now we have stuff like credit-default swaps (I can’t say I fully understand those), virtual currencies, and other really exotic things.  Like a gun or a power saw or a car, these financial tools can be very useful when used correctly but they can be disastrous when used recklessly.

Generally speaking these investments lead to higher volatility because they tend to be very leveraged.  You can make really, really large investments without a lot of money.  To buy 1000 share of Medtronic would cost you about $75,000; but to “buy” that same amount using call options would cost maybe something like $2000.  Of course, derivatives like stock options are much more volatile, and can lose all their value really quickly.

All the sudden that means you can be a small-time investor who decides to throw a Hail Mary in the stock market.  Instead of needing a bunch of money to take a major position, you could do it with much less.  Realistically, I as an individual probably couldn’t take such a big position to impact the market, but certainly a small bank could.  There are dozens of stories where some trader at a bank took a crazy big position, often times using derivatives, that went bad.  Not only does it take the bank down, but when that bank falls, just like dominos, others fall with it.  Same story: increased volatility.

So we’ve covered a lot of ground and come up with a lot of things that make today’s stock market much more volatile than it’s ever been in the past.  But let’s remember that the stock market is ultimately about fundamentals.  How strong are the companies?  Are they coming up with new products?  Are they finding better, faster, cheaper ways to meet our needs?  Those are the things that make the stock market go up over time.  And I believe all those things are there in today’s stock market.

In fact, of all the reasons I cited for increased volatility, I think all of them are good for the long-term value of the stock market.  Information traveling faster is a good thing; a globalized economy is a good thing; computer assisted trading is a good thing; financial derivatives are a good thing.  They’re all good and they all are making stocks continue to be a good investment.  Remember, stocks have been on a relentless climb for over a century.  In 2015, despite all the craziness, we were still hitting new all-time highs.

Sure, sometimes people screw things up, and because of this new age, those mistakes make a big impact.  But that big impact fades, usually very quickly.  So Mimi, as always, I think the stock market has great prospects for the long-term future, and I’m putting my money where my muzzle is on this one.  Your daughter-vixen’s retirement money as well as your grandcubs’ college funds are fully invested.

What is causing all the crazy market swings?

Stocky 1 Comment

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0906_market-volatility_270x190

A couple years ago, th I did an a analysis that showed that the stocks market has gotten MUCH MORE volatile in recent years. Since then, it’s gotten even worse. That begs the question–why has the stock market gotten so much more volatile?

“Ready, Fire, Aim” –Tom Peters (1982)

Nearly everyone agrees that information is the lifeblood of the stock market.  Today, that information travels so much faster than in the past.  Something could happen in the most remote corner of the world, and you would know about it in everywhere in a matter of seconds or minutes.  Obviously quicker access to news is a good thing for society at large, and investing in particular, but it definitely exposes many investors to making big mistakes because they are acting so quickly.

marquee-787

A good example is July 12, 2013.  On that day a Boeing 787 caught on fire a Heathrow Airport in London.  Here’s some quick historic context: the 787 was Boeing’s next generation aircraft that was going to revolutionize air travel, a plane Boeing pretty much staked its entire future on.  In early 2013 two 787s caught fire, leading to the FAA and its counterparts around the world to ground all 787s until Boeing figured out the problem.  Boeing’s stock, as you would expect, got hammered.  It took Boeing several months, but they fixed the problems, got the 787s in the air again, and their stock recovered.

Then July 12 happened.  News broke that another 787 caught on fire.  Investors, understandably, concluded that the problems weren’t fixed after all and that the planes would be grounded again.  In a matter of minutes the stock cratered, falling from about $108 per share to $99.  Over the following hours and days, it became clear the July 12 fire had nothing to do with the previous problems; it was just one of those things that do happen every once in a while.  No big deal.  Two weeks later, Boeing’s stock was back to the pre-July 12 fire levels.  It was all like nothing happened; except it did happen and there was crazy volatility in the stock.

The morale of the story is that investors got the information so quickly and rushed to act on it so quickly, that they completely misevaluated the situation, and that led to a lot of volatility.  Had the news traveled more slowly, the world would have had more time for more of the facts to come out.  No matter how you slice it, the light-speed fast news makes the pace of investing faster, and when you do something faster, you tend to make more mistakes.

 “The chief business of the American people is business” –Calvin Coolidge (1925)

UNITED STATES - AUGUST 03: Official Portrait Of Calvin Coolidge On August 3, 1923, Then Vice President Who Succeeded Harding As President. He Was Elected In 1925. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

We Americans are probably a bit spoiled.  There have been no wars fought on our soil since 1865 (I didn’t count Pearl Harbor, which reasonable people can debate).  There has been a consistent government since 1787 (or 1865 depending on how you think about the Civil War) without any coups or revolutions.  There’s never been a military takeover of the government, and the US government has never defaulted on its debt.  You could go on and on.

The reason that is important is that today about one third of all earnings in the S&P 500 come from outside the US.  It’s hard to find out what that number was in 1950 or 1960, but suffice it to say that that number was much, MUCH lower back then.  So we have a lot more international exposure now than in the past.

That’s a good thing because of diversification.  But it does expose us as investors to some of the geopolitical challenges that I just mentioned, that the US has been blessed to have avoided.

Also, to President Coolidge’s quote, the US tends to be oriented towards business (and some, but not I, would argue too oriented towards business).  This has definitely helped us become the largest and strongest economy in the world.  But other countries have other orientations (I’ll try not to use too blatant of stereotypes to offend my international readers): the Middle East is very theocratic, Japan focuses on saving face (keeping it from writing off bad debts which has stalled its economy for two decades), China is very authoritarian, Europe is more socialistic.  That doesn’t mean any of those other perspectives is bad.  But it does mean they are less likely to drive greater business and productivity, and those are not good if your goal is to have your stocks grow.

If you’re exposed to those geopolitical landmines as well as those competing priorities, it shouldn’t be surprising that the road won’t be as smooth.  And that’s just French for saying more volatility.

“The world is getting smaller” –Mark Dinning (title of a song from 1960)

Somewhat related to the above issue, the world is getting smaller (don’t think the irony is lost on me that a phrase we use to describe how fast the modern world is changing came from a song two decades before I was born).  Everything is so much more connected now, whether it be products (your car is connected to the internet which depends on satellites and under-water fiber optic cable) or countries (the components for your phone probably came from a dozen different countries).

All that interconnectivity is a good thing.  It means people/companies/nations can specialize in what they do best, allowing us to get the best products and services at the lowest prices.  But that connectivity also means that when the stone falls in the pond in one part of the world, the ripples hit everyone in some way, big or small.

Back in the day when the US economy was largely self-reliant, and even local economies were fairly independent, if crazy stuff happened across the world or even across the country, it didn’t affect things at home that much.  That impacts volatility because something is always going crazy somewhere.  And of course, that carries over to stocks which react to that craziness.  Gone are the days when General Mills was a regional foodstuffs provider for the Midwest; now its stock is affected by the Los Angeles longshoremen striking, the drought in sub-Sarahan Africa, and the revaluation of the Argentine peso.  Once again, more volatility.

This seems like a good stopping point.  Come back on Monday, same fox time, same fox blog, for the exciting conclusion to “What the hell is going on in the stock market?”

How we came out ahead on health insurance

Stocky 2 Comments

Readers who’ve been following the blog for a while know that in early 2018 the Fox family had to go out on our own to get private health insurance.  I did a three-part post on it here and here and here.  It was a big change from always having had private insurance through our employers.  But we did it.

Here’s how everything looks a year later.  If you don’t want to read the whole thing here’s the punchline: We had our sickest year in the past 5 years, but we still came out ahead about $16k.

What we got

When we were looking at our different options, there were two broad choices that we had to make.  We could go with a full-blown Obamacare plan that provided comprehensive coverage for everything, similar to what we had when we got insurance through our job.

Or we could go with a much more stripped down plan that offered a high deductible, but put a cap on our expenses if some type of medical catastrophe happened.

All four of us had always been relatively healthy, and since the Obamacare plan cost about $2200 per month while the stripped-down version cost $600 per month, it seemed like a no-brainer.  We went with the stripped down version.

For a cost of $600 per month we got access to the health insurer’s negotiated rates.  Plus, there was a cap of $25,000.  If something horrible happened we wouldn’t be bankrupted.  And on we went.

Just like all things, the first purchase we made probably wasn’t the best.  At the beginning of 2019 we weren’t rushed like we were the first time.  I was able to shop around look at a lot of different options.  We found a similar stripped-down plan, but this one only cost $450 per month and had a cap of $3000—better coverage at a lower price.  We switched to that, and that’s what we have now.

How we used it

Of course, once we got on a stripped-down plan our two cubs conspired to make this year the year we consumed more healthcare than any since Lil’ Fox was hospitalized for four days with croup in 2012.

Foxy Lady and I had no health issues.  We just did our normal check-ups.  For the first few months everything was fine and we didn’t have to go to the doctor at all, but then the dam broke:

  • Mini Fox broke his leg at one of those trampoline places.  Total cost $1700
  • Mini Fox got a nasty cold and had to go to the doctor a couple times.  Total cost $200
  • Lil’ Fox was the only one who wasn’t sick in the family in December but then he came down with a NASTY case of strider.  We ended up going to the doctor about six times.  Total cost $600
  • One of the times Lil’ Fox was really struggling breathing we had to go to the ER.  They gave him breathing treatments and a steroid, but then sent us home in the evening.  Total cost $2300
  • We had to get an inhaleable steroid for Lil’ Fox that was not on generic so it was fairly expensive (this is one of the places we would have saved a lot by having a full-on plan).  Total cost $300
  • Lil’ Fox went to an ENT and found that his adenoids were very enlarged, and that was largely responsible for all the breathing issues he was having.  Plus, his tonsils were infected and were the perfect place for nasty bugs to hang out, likely allowing his cold to persist.  We took the adenoids and tonsils out.  It was considered an elective procedure so we had to pay cash.  Total cost $4000

Yikes!!!  Those are some big numbers.  And of course, the financial gods chose to humble our family by hitting us with all this the very first year we went on our own for health insurance.  Any one of those on its own would have been more than we paid in any of the previous five years.  I guess sometimes timing sucks.

Yet, we’re ahead of the game.

But as expensive as all that stuff was for us out-of-pocket, we actually ended up WAY AHEAD.  How so?

Sure, we had to pay about $9000 out-of-pocket when you add it all up.  But that’s over a whole year (14 months actually—from March 2018 to May 2019).  And the key was that the coverage we got that exposed us to those higher out-of-pocket expenses only cost about $500 per month instead of the $2200 that an Obamacare plan would cost us each month.

Do you see where I’m going with this?  Because I am a financial nerd, I track this stuff obsessively.  We paid $1700 less each month in premiums ($2200 – $500).  If we took that money and stuffed it in a mattress, after 14 months we’d have about $24,000.  Subtract that $9000 in out-of-pocket expenses (actually it would be less than that because Obamacare also has out-of-pocket costs), and you get about $15,000. 

If instead of stuffing the extra money in a mattress, we invested it in the stock market instead, so we ended up with $16k, rather than $15k.

That’s pretty powerful.  We got less insurance coverage but paid a lot less for it.  Now we have a $16k buffer to take care of any of those higher out-of-pocket costs.  Plus, our insurance does cover us for catastrophic expenses beyond $3000, so it’s hard to see how we lose this game now.  To use a gambling analogy (and isn’t insurance really just another form of gambling?), we’re playing with house money.