Our clients ask us on a regular basis what they should be doing to reach their financial goals. This piece helps to break the big tasks down based on age. It’s a good place to start if you or someone you know is trying to build a plan for reaching their goals.
NU Fixed Account Rate Declines
NU Retirees: For over a year, the interest rate for the Fixed Account in the 401(k) plan at Fidelity has been declining. The decline has continued into 2015 with the rate reducing from 2.25% to 2.0%. As we have mentioned in the past, we now view the fixed account as a proxy for cash.
We’ve written a lot over the past year about how to view cash in your portfolio – posts can be viewed here.
Are You Spending Too Much On Coffee?
If you’re like the average American who regularly buys coffee, you spend close to $1100 a year on coffee (Source). That breaks down to about $4 a day, every weekday. Over time, that really adds up. At the end of 30 years, you’ve spent over $30,000 on coffee.
Talk about too much caffeine! Will you look back and wish you did something different with that money?
Here’s what happens if you did: Instead of a daily coffee run that runs about $4 each weekday, you take that money and invest the savings every year for 30 years. At the end, you could have a portfolio worth close to a whopping $180,000 (assuming a 10% rate of return, which is fairly realistic, given the S&P 500’s arithmetic average rate of return was 11.29% between 1964 and 2013) (Source).
Can’t live without coffee? Try buying cheaper coffee. Or cut the donut. But even if you bought a coffee for $2 (instead of $4) and invested the difference over the same time period, you still end up with a respectable amount saved – $85,000.
Kind of makes you wonder if you don’t already have enough caffeine in your diet.
How Could You Have Missed This Story?
Sometimes you’re caught off guard about a developing issue in the world and need a good primer to catch up with everyone else and understand the impact of new developments. If that sounds familiar, bookmark this site
How ETFs Can Reduce Your Tax Bill
At the end of the year, many mutual fund companies distribute capital gains to shareholders. This causes a taxable event right at the end of the year and in some cases can be an unwelcome and costly surprise when it comes to tax time. Note: if you only have an IRA or Roth, you’re off the hook – this taxable event only applies to investors with individual, joint or trust accounts.
This year, we have seen some funds projecting capital gains that are as high as 11% of the value of the fund. If you had a $100,000 position in a fund that issued a capital gain of 10%, that would be a $10,000 capital gain. If taxed at 15%, you can expect to pay an extra $1500 in taxes.
In a lot of cases – this is unavoidable. Investors could face a much bigger tax bill if they sold out of the fund as they may have large capital gains as a result of holding the fund for many years. Either way, the investor is likely have to pay an unexpected tax.
That begs the question – how can investors build portfolios to minimize the pain of capital gains distributed by the fund company. One answer involves the use of passively managed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which tend to be much more tax efficient than mutual funds.
ETF.com posted a good article that helps to explain why ETFs can help avoid the unpredictability of capital gain distributions.
Too late for this year, but contact us if you’re interested in how ETFs could help reduce your future tax bills.
Gold, Silver, and Japan
Another deflationary impulse hit the global economies. Japan announced shocking news. After several decades of no economic growth, the Japanese government has piled up massive debt. They desperately need to get their economy going and just announced a desperate plan. After the Bank of Japan (their Federal Reserve) copied our grand growth experiment of flooding the economy with vast quantities of newly created money (QE), they are going all in. While our Federal Reserve tapered money creation, Japan is boosting their efforts to the equivalent of three times that of our Federal Reserve. Moreover, the Bank of Japan will be indirectly investing in the stock market (governments creating cash to buy stock … what next?). Of course, the Japanese yen crashed on this news.
So what does this mean for the U.S. economy? In a word: deflation. A cheaper yen means they will try to undercut their Chinese, American, and German competition and export more. They are debasing their currency to steal business from other nations. Competing economies will be forced to retaliate by cheapening their currencies. In a currency war, when everyone tries to fix their slow economy problems at each other’s expense, everybody loses. Currency debasement leads to the inevitability of instability and/or eventual inflation.
Therefore, for now, there is worldwide deflation. The price of gold and silver, which traditionally hedges against inflation and instability, has stagnated. However, in a world of currency debasement or, in other words stuffing the world with more and more currency from nowhere, precious metals are the last stable currency. Governments cannot create gold. Citizens of developing economies know this. That is why they are buying gold and silver at record rates. Even some of the foreign central banks are buying gold and building their gold reserves.
In the past, gold has held its value. Currencies run by desperate governments have not.
Your Pot Of Cash Has A Hole In It.
You, like many Americans, may have a sizeable pot of cash just sitting in a bank account earning next to nothing.
The goal in keeping cash in a bank account is safety.
But what if I were to tell you that you that there was a hole in your pot and you are losing 2-3% each year and not even realizing it? You might think twice about keeping high levels of cash in the account.
In a sense, that’s what is happening. Every year, the cost of goods and services increases by 2-3% but the cash stays the same. This cash in your pot has ability to buy a little bit less than it did the year before and the year before that. This is the conception of inflation.
$50,000 today will buy more than $50,000 5-10 years from now.
One option to get around this harsh reality is to invest excess cash in a balanced diversified portfolio.
Why Waiting For The Right Time To Invest May Cost You In The End
At least once a week, a client will give me a reason why they don’t want to invest in the US stock market. They mention the headlines (which are designed to scare investors), and talk about the crisis-du-jour, or reference the looming economic dark clouds growing in the distance.
And so they sit in cash, with its perceived safety, waiting for the dust to settle, the clouds to clear, and the right time to invest.
But will it ever come… will it ever be so clear to the investor as to when they should invest?
Perhaps not.
What Cheap Oil Means For The Shale Boom
Shale oil production is more expensive than traditional oil production – It costs more to get shale oil out of the ground. So when the price for oil drops, like it has, it hurts shale oil production a whole lot more than with other production methods. Bloomberg estimates that the price of oil needs to be over $80 a barrel for US drillers to make any profit. Oil is hovering right around that figure now.
For more reading:
Taking Advantage of Cheap Oil
With oil prices dropping, there are a few ways you can take advantage of it. Here are two great resources:
Find cheap home heating oil: Cash Heating Oil
Find cheap gas: Gas Buddy