Happy Holidays!

My goodness, it's been a busy month. So much for my good intentions of posting at least once a week! I can't say I've had any exciting financial news to report. Here's some off-the-cuff items!

At Thanksgiving, I got one final check for a couple hundred dollars that was the final settlement of my great-aunt's estate.

I've been finding that my cash balance in Pocket Money /Quicken is often way off, by several dollars or more. I'm still pretty good about tracking every penny of my spending so this is starting to make me paranoid. Is there a bug in the program? Is someone stealing money out of my wallet? It's weird.

My year end net worth goal of $600k just isn't going to happen. I'm still saving a good portion of my earnings, but the stock market has been so up and down this year.

I've done all my holiday gift shopping and probably have spent a bit less than usual, though I haven't totaled everything up just yet. I gave small gifts to a few people in the office. I bought my niece and nephew each a sweater, two books, and some wacky wax stuff you can make little sculptures with. My sister and I will give our mom an iPhone for Xmas. I'm not giving my extended family any gifts as I won't see them this year. Sweetie and I are taking a little trip over the holidays that is basically our present to each other. Though of course there have also been veiled mentions of "a few other little things" that have my all anxious about how little those other things are compared to the other little things I bought! But I guess holiday gifts are no fun if you take ALL the surprise element out of it!

Best wishes to all of you and your families for a happy, healthy New Year!

Is There a Point to Being Frugal and Trying to Save?

A commenter left this question on my last post, and I thought it was worth answering separately:

Can I ask you a question, in regards to some long term investments?

I recently did some calculations and the results are very much frustrating, to be brutally honest.
Have a look yourself - they are all published.

If you invest $ 40, 000 a year over 35 years, at modest inflation rate of 2% and administration fee of 1-2% you need stock market to perform at 4% just to preserve value of your money and higher to gain anything.

This means that you are only preserving money you are investing at a very high risk. So it is just plain wisdom - is there a point to be frugal and try to save, if you ended up loosing money?

Feeding financial industry and no living your life in full?

I definitely understand the concern about feeding the financial industry, which seems more and more rigged in favor of the rich and well-connected. And yes, investing has risk. You could look at the scenario this person describes and say "well, historically, the stock market has performed better than 4% on average during many periods," and you could also observe that it has performed much worse during other periods.

But here's my analysis:
If you save and invest $40,000 a year over 35 years and the market totally tanks beyond all expectations and inflation skyrockets and you trust a Bernie Madoff, you could end up with ZERO.

But if you DON'T save and invest $40,000 a year over 35 years and instead spend all that money on "living your life in full," you will DEFINITELY end up with ZERO.

Of course, "ZERO" is your cash balance and doesn't factor in comfort and pleasure and memories. As always, I advocate a balanced approach between using some of your money to enhance your life now, and saving some to enhance it later. If your definition of living your life in full depends on spending every penny you earn, maybe you should stop and think about all the rewarding, memorable things in life that are free. Those are things you'll still cherish 35 years later, more than all the stuff you spent money on.

And I know keeping that balance is never as simple as it sounds-- I've spent money on traveling, and 35 years from now I think I'll be glad I have those memories and not be wishing I hadn't spent the money. I'd hate to be 80 years old and have regrets about not having spent a few thousand dollars to go somewhere I'd always wanted to go. But I'd have even more regrets if I was 80 years old and homeless because I'd blown all my money when I was young. None of us can avoid making choices that we might regret later, but when it comes to saving money, I think it's pretty clear which way you should hedge your bets.

Net Worth July-October 2011

Another belated net worth update. (I was trying to post updates on NetworthIQ but the site doesn't seem to be working and their security certificate is expired. What's up over there?)

Anyway, it's been an interesting few months-- some big ups and downs in my investment accounts. Mostly downs, unfortunately! After hitting a high of $591,390 back at the end of April, the stock market has been very cruel to me. I had a nice recovery in October, but I'm still down quite a bit from where I was.


Not much else of interest to report, other than moving a few thousand dollars from cash into mutual funds and some more I-Bonds at Treasury Direct. My credit card balance is in about the range it usually is, so no unusual levels of spending (and as always, I'm paying it in full every month). I've already maxed out my 401k deductions for the year, so any further changes in the retirement accounts will be due to investment gains and losses alone. At some point in the next few months I'll probably pay some extra principal on my mortgage and increase the home equity amount.

Stay tuned for a long overdue update on my spending and budget categories. Onward and upward!

Just Bought Some I-Bonds

Jim at Bargaineering has a great post explaining why now is a good time to buy some Series I Bonds. It reminded me I hadn't bought any bonds in several years, and hadn't even checked how much interest I'd earned in quite a long time. So I went through the lengthy log-in process at Treasury Direct (it's set up to be extremely secure, with various access codes and security questions required), and was pleased to see I had over $140 more interest than I had the last time I checked, and I also moved $5,000 out of a couple of savings accounts to purchase additional bonds, bringing my purchases up to $8,000 in online-only bonds, and a $1,000 paper bond sitting in my fireproof box at home. The total value of these is currently $10,196.80 with the interest I've earned. I think I may start buying these a bit more aggressively, as I'm sitting on too much cash earning almost zero interest. I now have bonds that are old enough to redeem without penalty, so I could access the money if I needed it. Earning over 3%, and even more for the next few months, is very attractive right now!
If you haven't bought bonds before, check out TreasuryDirect.gov for more info.

Net Worth Jan-June 2011

I've been very bad about keeping up with my monthly updates, but here's some summary numbers I ran a while back looking at net worth shifts for the first half of this year:


I moved some cash into my investment account in March, which explains cash going down so much that month. (Though cash went down by less than investments went up because I also received my bonus that month.) My credit card balance is fairly consistent most months, except in March-- not sure what happened then, I don't remember being particularly frugal that month! (Just as a reminder, I do pay my credit card in full every month, but I count whatever's outstanding at the end of the month as a liability.) My overall net worth rose nicely over the 6 months, but you can see that May and June were tough, due to the stock market.
I'll be posting another update soon to bring things up to date for the 3rd quarter. It's not going to be pretty, I'm afraid. Back in April I was thinking I could hit $600k by the end of this year, but the market has been crazy and I don't think I'll even be close...

New Productivity Features in iPhone OS5: Email Flags and Reminders

In the almost 15 years since I've started using electronic devices to manage my life, there's one thing I've wished for: the ability to read and FLAG emails and synchronize that with Outlook.
Flagging emails, and sorting my inbox so they remain at the top, is my number one tip for staying organized at work and making sure things I have to do don't slip through the cracks. But when I first had Palm Pilots, I either couldn't sync my email, or they didn't have a flagging option. I have had Blackberries issued by my employer, but until the most recent one, flags weren't supported-- and I really hate the Blackberry screen, so I've avoided using it since I got an iPhone. But the iPhone email app isn't that great, and didn't show flags at all... until now!
I just upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 3GS, and now the flags synchronize perfectly with Outlook! I can read my email on the go and not have to mark it as "unread" if I want to remind myself to follow up when I am back at my desk. Unfortunately, the iPhone email app still lacks a lot of features I'd love, like being able to filter the view to only unread messages, or sort the inbox so flags are at the top.

The other feature I'd been looking forward to in iOS5 was the "Reminders" app. I've used other 3rd party To-Do list apps-- Toodledo is pretty good, but the problem with that was that syncing to Outlook was always a bit dodgy (and the app I used is no longer even supported)-- and that was when I was able to actually install the needed desktop program on my work computer. When I was upgraded to a new computer, the IT department totally locked down our ability to install any non-approved programs, so I completely lost my Outlook syncing.

But now that I've got iOS5 and Reminders, the problem is solved! After upgrading, Reminders was automatically added to the apps syncing with my Exchange account, and the first time I opened the app, my tasks were there and syncing worked perfectly in both directions. Unfortunately, there are a couple of major features missing again! First of all, my tasks are not sorted in any order I can figure out in the iPhone app list view-- they aren't by date created, they aren't alphabetical, they're just totally random. There are no options to determine your preferred sorting method. You can sue the date view to see tasks due on a particular date, but you can't see more than one day at a time, so that seems pretty useless.

The other issue is that I can create multiple task lists on the iPhone, and all the tasks in those lists will sync with Outlook-- but on Outlook all the lists are merged. There is no way to map your Outlook task categories to your Reminders lists. So much for my idea of going back to having multiple task lists on Outlook for Business, Personal, Grocery List, etc. Yes, I can have these lists on my phone, and I can recategorize tasks on the desktop, but it will be annoying to have to maintain this somewhat manually instead of having it automatically sync.
I have yet to come across any other reviews that address these issues, but I can't believe I'd be the only one to want these features, so here's hoping they add them later! I won't hold my breath, though. But I can at least loop this back to the topic of money by pointing out that these kinds of productivity aids help me manage my job and hopefully get ahead in my career and make more money... and the iOS5 upgrade was FREE!

Does anyone else have any good iPhone productivity tips?

Refinancing a Mortgage

As you've no doubt heard, mortgage rates once again at historic lows. I've thought about refinancing, but I think I may just leave it alone for now, as it just may be too much trouble. The background on why relates to the story below.

A friend of mine, who I'll call Maud, is currently in the process of refinancing a property. In the course of talking to her about this, she told me all this interesting stuff about the history of her home-ownership. This all starts about 30 years ago, when Maud's parents sold their share of a small business and suddenly had some cash to invest. They decided to buy an apartment in NYC, figuring that their kids might rent it from them while they were students, and they could rent it to other tenants as well. After one of those other tenants left, Maud decided she wanted to settle in the apartment long term, but the problem was that she wanted to buy rather than rent, but the apartment was too expensive for her at that time. Meanwhile, her parents had also decided to buy another property elsewhere as a vacation home. They ended up inviting Maud to buy a share in the vacation home at a level she could afford.
Now this sounds weird, but it all ended up being part of some complicated tax shelter scheme, which allowed Maud to swap her part-ownership in the vacation home for shares in the NYC apartment over time. There was a big tax advantage for her parents, and for Maud the advantage was that she borrowed privately from her parents and stretched out the purchase in a way that made it more affordable. Over time, Maud's income increased and she was able to pay off the loan from her parents early, leaving her in full possession of her apartment. This all sounds kind of odd, but Maud insisted that she paid her parents the full appraised value of the apartment plus interest. As a real estate investment, it didn't turn out that well for her parents since the market crashed after they first bought the place, but I guess they at least saved on paying some capital gains taxes. This would be an example of the sort-of-rich getting sort-of-richer based on hiring good lawyers!

Anyway, a few years after Maud paid off the apartment, she was doing very well in her career and had saved a lot of money, since her monthly costs were quite low without the mortgage. She started thinking about real estate investments herself. She looked at properties outside the city and came across an inexpensive, very small, but charming house. It was so charming, in fact, that she decided she wanted it for herself and bought it to use on the weekends. She admitted that it was a rash decision and not exactly the kind of "investment" she'd had in mind! But she loves having the house as a retreat, especially since her city apartment is also fairly small and she can use the extra space, which seems cheap compared to buying a bigger apartment in the city.
When she bought the place, she got a fixed-rate mortgage of about 6.5%. So of course the rates we've been seeing in the last few months were very attractive to her, and she decided to refinance. But here's the reality of what's happened in the last couple of years: banks are actually being a lot more picky about who they'll lend to these days. Because the market value of her house was down since she bought it and because there were some other complicating factors, the bank that held her existing mortgage didn't want to refinance it, and it was unlikely any other bank would either.
(At this point, my question to Maud was why the same bank would ever want to voluntarily lower the rate on a mortgage from 6.5% to 4.5%-- sounds weird, doesn't it? But aside from not wanting to drive you to their competition, and benefiting from the fees that the refinance transaction generates, Maud pointed out that the rate itself is a wash for the bank, as they are always pricing the mortgage as a spread from the prevailing rate set by the Federal Reserve.)
Back to the problem with refinancing: Maud was a bit dismayed, but her very sharp loan officer came up with a great solution: instead of refinancing the weekend house itself, why not take out a new mortgage against the paid-off apartment and use that cash to pay off the house in full? The apartment had gained a lot in value over the years, so she had way more equity there than the value of the house. She'd be nowhere near the usual loan-to-value ratios banks would require for a mortgage. All in all, it was a brilliant solution, so Maud forged ahead with the application.
As the process went along, I began to compare her updates with the process I'd gone through to get my mortgage at the height of the real estate boom. It was amazing to me how exacting they were being about every little detail, verifying addresses she'd lived at 30 years ago, asking for all kinds of documentation on the monthly costs of both her homes and the finances of the co-op. An appraiser came and did a whole report with photos and floor plans of every room attached. And this is all for someone with a high income and a perfect credit score, whose apartment is in an established building with other recent sales. This was definintely not a "liar loan!"
Maud also said that the good faith estimate and other application paperwork she received was very clear in its disclosures of the terms. So if anything good has come out of the economic crisis, it may indeed be that our real estate market will now have more stable underpinnings, with mortgages only given to people who can afford them, for properties that are actually worth it.

But back to my situation: I put 20% down when I bought, and I've paid off some extra principal over the last couple of years, but I'm not confident that my apartment would be appraised high enough if I tried to refinance now. It might also be a concern that the developer still owns some of the units in the building. I'm also wondering about selling the apartment in the next few years-- I think I'll be renting it out soon and moving in with Sweetie, but I don't want to be a landlord forever. So it's a dilemma... I may make some inquiries anyway, so I can assess this based on real info rather than my own gut feelings. I'll of course keep you posted when I do!