The Problem With A Retirement Based On The Stock Market

Posted on March 24, 2011 // 9 Comments

As far as retirement calculators go, the new one over at the Scottrade Knowledge Center is pretty nice. It does the whole Monte Carlo thing, running theoretical scenarios based on historical data. There are fancy interactive sliders that let you input your current portfolio balances, annual contributions, and your future expenses. The result is a pretty chart:

But the same problem always occurs whenever retirements depend heavily on market returns. If future returns are on the low side of history, I could end up broke* and eating dog food by age 90. If future market returns are high, then I could die with $10 million in the bank. What the heck do I need with that much money at age 90?

One way to avoid this is to have a very conservative portfolio of safe and short-term bonds (or TIPS). This has the slight inconvenient problem of requiring a very high savings rate. (Or lottery winnings, a large inheritance, or other windfall.)

Now, it would be nice to have a way to share the risk with others out over longer periods of time. Give up some of the potential upside, in return for some downside protection. This usually involves an insurance company (annuities) or the government (Social Security). Which do you want to trust with a big chunk of your hard-earned money? It’s a tough call. 🙂

* This isn’t technically true. I’m sure in reality, if my portfolio was doing so poorly, I would adjust my spending however I could. But I would have to decrease my standard of living.

Filed Under: Investing, Retirement, Tools & Calculators //

What Is A “Safe” Savings Rate? How About 16.62%

Posted on March 23, 2011 // 11 Comments

The term “Safe Withdrawal Rate” (SWR) usually refers to the amount of your portfolio that you can withdraw each year in retirement safely without running out of money. The “4% rule” is often used, which says that if you want $40,000 inflation-adjusted every year safely , you need $1 million as your target.

Reader Dave thoughtfully sent me an interesting Financial Advisor magazine article about an upcoming academic paper by Dr. Wade Pfau that takes a look at this from another angle. What if you wanted to figure out a “Safe Savings Rate”?

Let’s say you save for 30 years, and then retire (spend) for 30 years. The traditional SWR only depends on the 30-year period when you are saving reach that target number. Instead, what if you looked at the entire 60 year period together. This ends up smoothing things out, because periods of high return are often followed by periods of low return, and vice versa.

Here are the baseline assumptions. The goal is to withdraw 50% of current salary, inflation-adjusted, during retirement. You maintain a constant asset allocation of 60% stocks and 40% bonds (T-Bills). Results are in the chart below. The blue line is the saving rate according to the 4% rule, and the black line is based on the new 60-year test period using actual investment returns.

Based on market data since 1871, a savings rate of 16.62% would have worked every time. As you can see the black line is also much more consistent over time. Can everyone manage that? Maybe not, but few people are satisfying the 4% rule as well.

The given scenario is not one-size-fits-all, but it would be interesting if this research was expanded into some sort of retirement calculator. For example, all other things held the same, if you saved for 40 years, the safe saving rate drops to 8.77%. If you saved for only 20 years, the safe saving rate rises to over 30%. I’ll have to wait for the published paper to see what happens if you go a bit riskier into say 80% stocks/20% bonds, or if it accounts for changing allocations over time.

Update: Here is a link to the working paper [PDF].

Filed Under: Investing, Retirement //

Charles Schwab Buys OptionsXpress Brokerage

Posted on March 21, 2011 // 6 Comments

I got an e-mail this morning that my trading account with OptionsXpress is merging with Charles Schwab. Well, considering Schwab (SCHW) has a market cap over 20 times that of OptionsXpress (OXPS), it’s more like they bought OX for their options/futures trading platform and active-trader clients. The WSJ reports:

OptionsXpress shareholders will get 1.02 shares of Schwab stock in exchange for each OptionsXpress share. That values OptionsXpress at $17.91 a share–a 17% premium based on Friday’s closing prices. OptionsXpress’s stock jumped 17% to $17.90 Monday, while Schwab finished up 0.5% to $17.65.

That 17% premium works out to valuation of $1.0 billion. Looks like I’m going to be Schwab customer for the first time. What about commission rates? OX’s options rates are very competitive.

Schwab doesn’t “have any plans right now to take away the OptionsXpress platform” at this time, Bettinger said. The firm said it would try to implement across the combined company the lower of the merging companies’ commission rates.

OptionsXpress still has their $100 sign-up bonus offer live, so if you want a Chuck Schwab account, this way you’ll get a bonus for joining. Here’s a link to my perhaps-soon-to-be-stale OptionsXpress review.

Filed Under: Investing //

Net Worth & Goals Update – March 2011

Posted on March 2, 2011 // 23 Comments
Net Worth Chart 2011

Oh alright, here’s another net worth update. My last snapshot was about 9 months ago. I know people like the voyeurism, but hopefully my commentary will also provide some helpful insights as to achieving our goals.

Credit Card Debt
I used to take money from credit cards at 0% APR and place it into online savings accounts, bank CDs, or savings bonds that earned 4-5% interest (yes I know, much less recently), keeping the difference as profit while taking minimal risk. (Minimal in regards that the risk was only dependent on my behavior and not outside factors.) However, given the current lack of great no fee 0% APR balance transfer offers, I am currently not playing this “game”.

Most credit cards don’t require you to pay the charges built up during a monthly cycle until after a grace period of about 14 days. This theoretically provides enough time for you to receive your statement in the mail and send back a check. As this is simply a snapshot of my finances, my credit card debt consists of just these charges. I don’t carry any balances or pay any interest charges.

Retirement and Brokerage accounts
Since my last update, the broad stock indexes have risen significantly, about 25% including dividends according to Vanguard Total World Stock Index ETF (VT) that I use as a general benchmark. Although these high valuations make me nervous, I am still a believer in stocks for the (very) long run and rebalancing your asset allocation regularly. Don’t buy high and sell low.

Here is our target asset allocation. Being heavy in stocks, our portfolio bounced back significantly as well.

Our total retirement portfolio is about $360k or on an estimated after-tax basis, $318,000. At a theoretical 4% withdrawal rate, this would provide $1,060 per month in retirement income, which brings me to 42% of my long-term goal of generating $2,500 per month. These are all really rough numbers, but helpful to measure progress and visualize living off your portfolio.

Cash Savings and Emergency Funds
We are happy to hold a year’s worth of expenses (conservatively estimated at $60,000) in our emergency fund. According to my emergency fund poll, many of you readers also have substantial savings set aside, with most having at least 4 months of expenses. Very nice.

Recently I wrote about how I maximize interest in my emergency fund, including the specific banks and institutions I use.

Home Equity
I would like my house paid off in 15-20 years at most, so I’ve been putting some extra money towards the mortgage. Note that this is only after maxing out both our 401k plans, fully funding IRAs every year, and creating a one-year emergency fund. I’d like our mortgage pay-down progress to parallel our portfolio growth so that both are ready for at least partial retirement in about 10 years.

So there you have it. Mrs. MMB and I both earned a six-figure salary again last year, which combined is in the top 5% of households. We try to save a lot of it while it stays this way. 🙂 The future is hard to see, but we’re getting there a lot faster than we thought we could.

Filed Under: Banking, Credit Cards, Goals, Investing, Retirement //

Low Cost Stock Broker Alternatives 2011

Posted on February 28, 2011 // 7 Comments

If you’re thinking about switching online stock brokers, perhaps due to a price increase, here are some low-cost options. To avoid the common $50 to $75 ACAT transfer-out fee for moving your entire portfolio somewhere else, you can sell all your positions, transfer out the cash, and then have them close the account. You may be subject to capital gains taxes. Otherwise, look for a broker that will cover your transfer-out fee.

Still want free trades? WellsTrade still offers 100 free trades per year with assets of at least $25,000. They may be feeling squeezed as well, but with the ability to cross-sell with other Wells Fargo products like checking accounts and credit cards, they are probably still making money. Bank of America also offers free trades, but with a $25,000 cash balance only.

If you’re looking to build a low-cost, index fund portfolio, I would recommend opening a Vanguard Brokerage Services account with their unlimited free trades for all Vangaurd ETFs. Indeed, many other brokers offer some sort of free trades on a limited list of ETFs including Fidelity, Schwab, and TD Ameritrade. I personally like the selection at Vanguard the best.

If you want to trade individual stocks, the rock-bottom low-cost broker appears to be Just2Trade at $2.50 a trade. They never seem to do any promotions.

I also have an account with OptionsHouse at $3.95 a trade which uses the same Penson clearing firm. A FW member TheHimalayas posted that they were allowed to switch over to OptionsHouse with no ACAT fees because of this, but I haven’t verified this myself. I am happy with my OptionsHouse account, and the fact that they grandfathered us existing members at $2.95 a trade doesn’t hurt.

OptionsHouse also has a bunch of promos going on. If you open a new account with at least $3,000 and use the code FREE100, you’ll get 100 commission-free trades for stock or option trades executed within 60 days of funding the new account. Alternatively, you can get up to $100 in ACAT fees rebated to you when you transfer your account with a minimum value of $3,000 with the promo code ACAT100REFUND. They also have a 100 free trades + $125 in transfer fee rebates offer for IRAs with the promotion code IRAFREE.

Finally, another solid option at the $4.95 price point is TradeKing. TradeKing will credit your account transfer fees up to $150 charged by another brokerage firm when completing an account transfer for $2,500 or more when you send them a copy of your account statement with proof of the transfer charge.

Filed Under: General, Investing //

Zecco Trading Ends Free Trade Offer, Now $4.95 Per Trade

Posted on February 28, 2011 // 4 Comments

Discount brokerage Zecco Trading announced this weekend that effectively immediately, they will no longer offer 10 free trades per month for those with assets of $25,000 and over. Here is partial text from the e-mail:

Starting on March 30, 2011, our new commission rates will be:

* Equity trades: $4.95 per trade*
* Options trades: $4.95 per trade, plus $0.65 per contract

With this change we are no longer offering 10 free trades per month. As before, there are no minimum balance requirements or inactivity fees to open or maintain a Zecco Trading account.

The change is effective immediately for all new customers who have not fully opened their account.

Thus ends the final chapter of their “free trades” motto. Let’s not forget that Zecco stood for Zero Cost Commissions. Starting out in 2006, we got 40 trades per month for a balance of $1,000 or $2,500 (I forget). Then that was lowered to 10 free trades per month to balances of $2,500+. Then it was 10 free/mo for balances of $25,000+. I had a lot of hope for the business model behind the free trade community vision of Zecco, and it’s sad to see it end.

But here’s the harsh reality. If you’re going to offer free trades, you’re gonna have to make the money up elsewhere. Historically, a huge source of revenue for discount brokers has been earning interest on idle cash balances. With interest rates being so low, this source of income has dried up. Trading volume is down, so there are less people exceeding the 10 per month limit and paying up for additional trades.

Filed Under: Investing //

2011 TradeKing New Account Referral: $100 Bonus

Posted on February 28, 2011 // 4 Comments

Online broker TradeKing.com has brought back their $100 sign-up bonus for new accounts. If you get a referral from an existing account holder, open a new account with at least $1,000, and make a trade, both people will get $100.

TradeKing offers $4.95 trades (market & limit) with no minimum balance requirement. I’ve had an account for years now, and they’ve gotten the job done without issues. They were recently rated #1 in customer service by SmartMoney magazine in 2010. The details:

  • New customer must fund new non-IRA account with a minimum of $1,000 within 30 days of new account opening.
  • Must execute one trade in the new account within 180 days of new account opening.
  • The minimum funds of $1,000 must remain in the account (minus any trading losses) for a minimum of 180 days of new account opening or the credit may be surrendered.

If you’d like a referral just contact me, and I’ll be happy to send you one. I only need your e-mail address. There is no promotion code, but you’ll need to click on the specific link in the e-mail for tracking purposes. Offer expires March 31st, 2011. Update: Alive again from 9/1 to 9/30/11.

Also, if you want to move your stocks over from another broker… If you transfer an account of $2,500 value or greater over to TradeKing, they will also refund up to $150 in account transfer fees charged by your old broker.

Filed Under: Deals & Offers, Investing //

Stable Value Fund 2011 Interest Rate Announced

Posted on February 22, 2011 // 15 Comments

If you have a 401(k), 403(b), or similar retirement plan, you may have an investment option called a stable value fund. Sometimes it goes by a different name like Guaranteed Pooled Fund, but they are always marked as a conservative investment. The pitch is basically the higher interest rate of longer-term bonds, with the relatively liquidity and stable principal value of a money market fund. I explored the risks and rewards of stable value funds before and currently hold them as part of my bond allocation.

My specific stable value fund is run by Transamerica Financial Life Insurance Company (TFLIC) and offered an interest rate of 3.5% for all of 2010, which was much higher interest than any other similar bond investment was going to pay me. Then they told me that until February 28th, 2011, the interest rate would be 3.0%. Finally, I just received a letter that told me that the interest rate from March 1st to December 31st, 2011 would be lowered to 1.8%.

So, should I stay or should I go? Interest rates continued to drop in 2010, so I did expect them to lower their rate.

Online savings accounts like Capital One Consumer Bank are paying around a low 0.75% APY, and I have no access to something like that in my 401k. They recently announced a self-directed option through Schwab, although I need to find more details about how much transaction costs would be. The Vanguard Short-Term Treasury Fund (VFISX) is currently yielding only 0.66%. Taking a look at current Treasury yields shows the 2-year at 0.78% and the 5-year at 2.30%.

So the interest rate itself is still pretty competitive relative to other “safe’ investment options. My other bond alternative inside the account is the huge PIMCO Total Return fund (PTTRX) with a 3.12% yield and 4.8 year duration, which did pretty well for me when I had it but I worry about asset bloat with $240 billion is assets, manager risk, and interest rate risk.

In the absence of any significantly better options, it looks like I’m staying put.

Filed Under: Investing, Retirement //

Prosper P2P Lending 1% Cashback + Potential Market Inefficiency

Posted on February 21, 2011 // 9 Comments

I kinda missed the boat last Thursday 2/17 because peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com had a promotion going on for borrowers that stated that they would make a entire month’s loan payment for you. A quote from their e-mail:

It’s our fifth birthday, and to celebrate we have a special gift just for you! If you apply for a loan and submit a listing on our site today, February 17th, we will make your second loan payment (up to $300)*!

Astute borrowers realized that they could simply take out a loan and pay it back after 2-3 months since there was no pre-payment penalty. After all loan initiation and other fees, the borrower could still net a little over a hundred bucks. Not bad for “borrowing” money!

However, this also meant that somebody had to fund their loans. I’m sure some potential investors found it weird that Prosper suddenly had a lot of AA-rated loans from folks with very good credit and peculiar descriptions like “I really don’t need this money for anything, and intend to pay this loan off in 3 months.” 🙂 The requested loan amounts will also be very close to $3,500, the ideal amount for profit maximization.

To top it off, I just got this e-mail from Prosper regarding getting 1% cash back on any bids placed on Monday, February 21, 2011. Here’s the e-mail text. No special link or promo code was given, so I can only assume it is open to all.

This offer is as straight-forward as they come: invest in any listing on the site today, and you’ll earn 1.0% cash back*! With a cash back offer and returns averaging 10.1%**, why wait?

* The promotional period begins at 12:01 AM PT and ends at 11:59 PM PT on Monday, February 21, 2011. 1.0% cash back will be paid on all bids placed during the promotional period that ultimately become funded loans. Cash bonus will be deposited to your Prosper account by March 31, 2011.

Update: Promotion extended to end of 2/23:

* The promotional period began at 12:01 AM PT on Monday, February 21, and will end at 11:59 PM PT on Wednesday, February 23, 2011. 1.00% cash back will be paid on all bids placed during the promotional period that ultimately become funded loans. Cash bonus will be deposited to your Prosper account by March 31, 2011.

Now, if you could technically find and fund several of these high-quality borrowers who have an incentive to pay off their loan in 3 months, you could have an investment that would return around 1% in interest + 1% cash back over a period of just around 3 months. That’s a lot better than a savings account.

I know that some of you readers got in on this. If you’re still looking to get funded, share your loan listing below using your usual commenter e-mail. This is not risk-free as you are still lending money to strangers, but if you’re an AA borrower on Prosper who initiated a loan listing on 1/17th or shows as early on 1/18th for ~$3,500, then I am more willing to take the risk. I am relatively comfortable with P2P lending with certain criteria, and already have over a few thousand dollars in highly-rated loans on LendingClub.

Filed Under: Investing //

FDIC-Insured Bank Accounts Holding Chinese Renminbi (CNY) (RMB)

Posted on February 17, 2011 // 12 Comments

Reader Jonathan wrote in the tell me that the Bank of China (BoC) is offering FDIC-insured bank accounts that are denominated in renminbi, the official currency of China. Also referred to by the primary unit yuan, you may have heard about how China tightly controls this currency in the news. Since many sources view the yuan as being undervalued relative to the dollar due to artificial exchange rates, some people view holding yuan as a good investment. Here’s how the Bank of China news has played out in financial websites.

  • 1/12 – The Financial Times blog BeyondBRICs brings up the ability to open accounts in yuan, but says “No need to rush out and open a renminbi account just yet.” They note that this ability has actually been around since February 2010, but nobody in the media really noticed.
  • 1/12 – The Reuters blog by Felix Salmon picks it up and brings it a step further, pointing out that US officials have said the yuan is overvalued, so that “Chinese revaluation is going to happen at some point, and when it does, you’ll make money”, and “the downside is limited”. More excitement.
  • 1/14 – The Wall Street Journal blog ROI joins the fray, stating (1) It’s very unlikely to go down. (2) It’s very likely to go up. (3) You won’t miss out on a lot of interest elsewhere, as nowhere else is paying a lot of interest. (4) It will diversify your portfolio. (5) It may offer you and your family something of a hedge against the decline of the U.S. economy. Can you feel the buzz?
  • 2/7 – Time Magazine blog Curious Capitalist has another post on the topic a few weeks later. It provides more detail on what this account does not offer: interest, the ability to withdraw yuan, deposit yuan, write checks, or use debit cards. Basically you can speculate on the conversion rate of USD-CNY and that’s it. More below.

So, should you go out and open an account? Well, first you must go in person to a Bank of China branch in New York City, either at Madison & 48th St or in Chinatown. Some of the articles erroneously reported that you can open up an RMB account at the Los Angeles branch. According to the Bank of China website, this is not true. The branch does not offer FDIC-insured accounts, and doesn’t offer personal account of any kind.

The limit a U.S.-based individual customer can exchange is $4,000 a day. From what I have gathered, you open an account and “buy” RMB from Bank of China using your U.S. dollars. Your deposits are FDIC-insured against bank failure, but not losses from currency fluctuations. If you wish to withdraw, you must again exchange your RMB back to USD, leaving you again with dollars. You can’t withdraw any RMB, here or in China. The savings account earns no interest. So any difference will be due to the exchange rate.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Remminbi, academic studies have shown then yuan to be undervalued relative to the dollar using “purchasing power parity analysis”. The Treasury Secretary called it “substantially undervalued” a month ago. Per this article, the rate of 6.5855 CNY to 1 USD set just yesterday (2/16) is a record high, leaving the yuan up 3.6% since last June.

I honestly don’t pay enough attention to currency markets and all the politically-related news to really weight the pros and cons properly. Even if it does seem like the yuan is undervalued right now, but who knows when or how it will be corrected? China sets the exchange rate for the most part, so it could be years or more. During that time, its economy could experience high inflation as well which could make RMB even weaker relative to USD.

I see no sure bet here, just a speculative investment. But if you have a “play money” account capped at 5% of your portfolio like I do at times, this might be one idea that you could drop some bucks on. What do you think?

Update: You can get basically the same thing online at Everbank WorldCurrency Access deposit account. It doesn’t currently earn any interest, and unfortunately there are no interest-bearing CD options available right now either. But it does let you get it renminbi-denominated.

Filed Under: Banking, Investing //

Magazines Decoded: Best Mutual Funds of 2011

Posted on February 15, 2011 // 10 Comments

I’m catching on some personal finance magazine reading and find myself again rolling my eyes at their respective “Best Mutual Funds” lists. I’ve had subscriptions to all the major magazine for about 5 years now. Here’s how I translate them through my jaded eyes:

Best Mutual Funds of 2011

Here are our picks for the best mutual funds. We don’t chase performance like those other guys. We put tons of hours into finding the best mutual funds with good management skill and experience and other things that sound good in theory. Oh, and they have to have really good performance over the last several years. But again, no performance chasing here. Nuh-uh.

Where were we? Oh yeah, so to start we had to drop some funds from our list this year, due to their recent drop in performance. I’ll also add some other tangential reasons to hide this fact a bit. We really don’t know how that happened, sorry about that. It was completely unforeseeable.

Oh, but not to worry, we replaced them with other excellent funds that did some really smart things during the last crisis/boom/cycle. Now, if we could just have told you before they did awesome, instead of recommending those crappy funds we dropped in the last paragraph…

Finally, we decided to add more low-cost index funds to our list. For some reason, they keep performing well over long periods of time and are gaining customers as a result. The Vanguard Group recently became the largest mutual fund company in the world by assets, surpassing even Fidelity with their 401k monopoly and their famous Magellan and Contrafund-style active funds. Shh… here’s the secret that nobody else knows: low costs are important.

— Love, your favorite personal finance magazine.

Suggestion

Any magazine with a Top Stocks or Top Funds list should always have to include the same list from 10 years ago. So with the Top Funds of 2010 you’d have to see the Top Funds of 2000. That would be interesting.

I just realized I was similarly disillusioned a few years ago and wrote Anatomy of a Personal Finance Magazine Article.

Filed Under: Funny, Investing //

Better Inflation Chart with CPI Component Breakdown

Posted on February 10, 2011 // 8 Comments

In my last post, reader Greg shared a better chart that illustrates the components of the Consumer Price Index, which is supposedly to track what the average consumer spends and thus is used to gauge inflation. Definitely worth archiving for later.

Source: New York Times. Click to visit. It’s interactive, so you can zoom in and out to see all the little details.

Filed Under: Investing, Retirement //
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