It Takes a Vigilance: Loyalty Programs that Steal Your Loyalty
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 10amBy John Friedman
Can you imagine what it would be like to support yourself by stealing money? Most people cannot.
Some companies can.
If you ever buy movie tickets online via Fandango — beware!
Because within Fandango’s online presence there lives a business — apparently separate from Fandango — which, as best I can tell, makes a good deal of its money by, in essence, stealing it.
The business, which has many names but legally is known as Webloyalty, worms its way into a person’s financial life by offering up a coupon at that single moment at the end of an online transaction when you’re about to hit the “confirm purchase” button.
The timing, we can surmise, is not by accident, because, at that “confirm purchase” moment, you are flushed with money-out endorphins (the rush you get when you buy something you want) and all stoked and in love with the power of your money-stored (to buy you things, to make you happy, etc.), at which point, if something pops up into your face and says I can save you $10 off your purchase if you simply click on me (or something along those lines), you are apt to agree to it and, especially if all the details are in very fine print and nicely hidden away, you are also apt to not notice that you are making an agreement with the devil which costs $12 a month, come rain or shine, whether you use it or not, and whether you wanted it in the first place or not.
Got’ch’ya! You just became a part of Webloyalty’s monthly cashflow, and it sounds like the odds are quite high that you had absolutely no intention of doing so.
The image that comes to mind is of Mr. Frodo, in the bowels of Mordor, having finally succumbed to Shelob, the giant spider’s web, being all tied up into a nice bundle of a meal to be consumed later on at will . . .
Not much fun that, eh?
* * *
Having not been hoodwinked myself, I cannot tell you exactly what the evildoing got’ch’ya coupon says, but, from what I’ve read, it would take a legalese-reading, scam-spotting genius to realize that the coupon automatically signs you up for a $144 a year program, billed at $12 per month under a nicely generic label of “Reservation Rewards” which just so happens to be the name of this particular offer from Webloyalty the company.
They got’ch’ya. And if you are one of the great numbers of people who do not look closely at your credit cards statements, they will go on getting you for a very long time, as in forever.
* * *
There are two ways (at least) to do business. One is with honesty. When you do business with honesty, you want people to pay you for value you deliver to them — nothing more and nothing less — so that you, in fact, take pride in the precise exchange of value delivered and compensation.
Another way to do business is with maximization. When you do business with maximization you want people to pay you as much as possible, period, and, hey, if they happen to be paying you for nothing, then, hey again, it’s a whole lot easier to sell a whole lot of nothing than it is to sell a whole lot of something, so money for nothing is your goal.
The problem is that most people aren’t all that happy to pay you money for nothing. So you have to either steal the money, or you have to trick them into paying it to you.
Webloyalty, it appears, is only too happy to do the latter.
Rather ironic, isn’t it, that a loyalty company finds it easy to steal and lie its way into building loyalty?
* * *
If you’d like to know more, here is a list of companies that have done a deal with this particular devil, and who may get’ch’ya if you ever do business with them.
And here, from the horse’s mouth, is a list of Webloyalty’s so-called “loyalty” programs.
And if you’d like to drink from the firehose, here is Techcrunch’s take on it all (and kudos to TechCrunch for doing some journalistic, blog-type heavy-lifting in the name of keeping the Internet honest as it repeatedly goes after scammers who sully the beauty that is, but need not be if left untended, the Internet).
* * *
In today’s electronic world, it is all too easy to never look at your credit card statements.
In fact, the Webloyalty got’ch’ya tactic described above simply cannot work if you pay attention to each and every entry on your credit card statement.
So it takes a vigilance and an awareness on your part to make sure that you aren’t paying some scoundrel company money for nothing.
* * *
So please do look at your credit card statements, and please do be careful of agreeing to anything online during a check-out transaction. And above all, beware strange coupons bearing promises . . .
‘Til tomorrow, then, here’s to your financial health, and may it continuously improve.
.
The Deviling Number in Some People’s Lives
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 10amBy John Friedman
Lots and lots of people have a devil in their financial lives.
This particular devil comes, not in a blue dress, but in pure, unadulterated numeric form, and is always in the double digits.
For many of these bedeviled people, if somehow that double-digit-devil number were to miraculously change into a single-digit number, then, quite literally, most everything in their financial world would be OK — they would, at the least, have much better financial health and, in many instances, they would be transported all the way from ill financial health to decent or even great financial health.
But, as is, what with this deviling number having a full complement of two digits — often with the first of those digits being a 2 or a 3 — these people have such dreadfully woeful financial health that bankruptcy may well be in their future.
And, yes, it truly is that black and white: if this number happened to be 9 or less, these folks would be OK, but with it at 20 or more, they’re often well-advised to seek bankruptcy counsel.
* * *
Have you guessed what the bedeviling double-digit number is?
For some readers it’s obvious, because they’ve previously walked down the forsaken path inhabited by the devil number, or, less happily, because they’re currently on it.
And for others this whole topic is a big mystery because it is just not anything that has ever even come close to entering into their lives. They’re fortunate — though perhaps with an outlook a bit more rose-colored than would be ideal, so that they just might be too far removed from most people’s reality to understand what life, in all its many aspects, truly is like.
* * *
Here are two last hints.
Hint Number One is that the devil number is, in some contexts, totally illegal. For instance, if you or I were to use this number in our life, it would [spoiler alert: do not click on any links from here on in if you want to figure this out on your own] probably be illegal in all 50 states and for sure would be illegal in California
But for the financial services industrial complex? For them it is 100% legal. They can use the number all over the place.
Hint Number Two is that the devil number and its ilk have been the stuff of essential moral discourse pretty much since the beginning of recorded history, what with it playing roles in both the Old and New Testaments, in the Qur’an, in papal decrees from the Middle Ages, and on and on. And then there’s that whole thing with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Got it?
If not, the next section just might jolt yo into it.
* * *
If you’ve ever wondered at the power of nine people in black robes to change our lives, you need look no further than the United States Supreme Court case of Marquette National Bank vs. First of Omaha Service Corp., 439 U.S. 299 (1978).
Likewise, if you’ve ever wondered why credit card company addresses tend to be in South Dakota (and, if not there, then usually in Utah or Delaware), you can trace the source right back to the decision of those same nine Marquette justices — back to that group of old’ish, 88.8888888888888888% white (Marshall became a justice in 1967) males (O’Connor became a justice in 1986) sitting in DC in the highest court of the land, all the while wearing polyester robes that, frankly, make them look quite as silly as barristers in the UK when they don their white wigs.
* * *
General purpose credit cards were born towards the tail end of the great baby boomer birthing, in the late 1950s/early1960s. Prior to then merchant-specific credit cards ruled the land.
The shift to general purpose credit cards was a big one, because merchant-specific credit cards were all about moving product, whereas general purpose credit cards were all about lending money (which, to a bank, is indeed moving product).
See here for a great article on the history of all this.
Back then there was BankAmericard, which we now know as Visa, and Master Charge, which we now know as MasterCard, both coming out of that hotbed of radical entrepreneurialism now (and then) known as California.
American Express, a company that can trace its origins as the FedEx of its day all the way back to the mid-1800s, got into charge (not credit) cards around the same time. Unlike credit cards, the AmEx charge card had to be paid in full each month; it wasn’t until 1987, not long after the Marquette 9 had had their say, that AmEx issued its first credit card.
* * *
So what did Marquette do?
In practice, it de-regulated credit card interest rates, as in you guys can go ahead and charge whatever you want.
The case came up when a Minnesota bank sued a not-quite next-door-neighboring Nebraska bank for coming into Minnesota and charging interest rates which, while legal under Nebraska law, were too high to be legal under Minnesota law. So it was a classic choice-of-law sort of case
Going back to a federal law that was more than 100 years old, called The National Bank Act of 1864 (yup, a federal law enacted during the Civil War, so you can just guess what all was going on when they passed that one), the Court said that the NBA of ’64 allowed a bank existing at the federal level (as opposed to a bank existing at the level of a single state) to charge whatever interest rate it could charge in the state in which it was headquartered, even if that rate was higher than the rate allowed by the particular, other state in which it was doing business.
The Marquette opinion was unanimous; Justice Brennan, revered jurist of the left, was its author.
Forevermore, then, in a classic case of having your cake and eating it too, a nationally-chartered bank could charge whatever interest rate it wanted to, so long as that rate was legal in the state in which it was headquartered. That meant that the big nationals could go out and roam in all 50 states, subject only to the interest-rate limiting usury laws of the single state in which each was headquartered. They were, at that point,then, free-ranging.
Before long, Walter Wriston, the legendary CEO of Citi, reached out to Bill Janklow, a fellow we now know to be a manslaughtering felon, but who was then governor of the great state of South Dakota, and, presto change-o and lo’ and behold, a state which was struggling to make ends meet suddenly decided to lift all restrictions on the interest rates rates a nationally-chartered, locally-headquartered credit card company could charge, after which Citi pulled up stakes on its New York credit card operations and moved the whole shebang, lock stock ‘n barrel, to South Dakota. Yeehah!
* * *
And the rest is history. Credit card companies — Visa, Mastercard (and the banks that operate through them), together with Amex, Discover and a few others — now rule over the land, all from their home bases of South Dakota or one of other follow-on states that came after it, each state with its particular charge-whatever-you-want way of saying, Hello, dear, dear credit card companies, please do come on in — we’ve set out the welcome mat just for you.
* * *
Credit card companies also rule over many, many people’s lives, at a very up-close-and-in-their-face level, because once they get their claws into somebody — and it’s an iron claw at that — they will mostly never, Ever, NEVER, EVER let go.
It’s clear how to avoid that iron claw: you must never take a loan from a credit card, i.e., if you use a credit card, then you must pay off the balance each month.
In that way, for a few weeks you have free use of their money , but you have never borrowed it in the sense of Well, now, my sweetie, now you have to start paying us interest.
So if you pay off your balance each month, the devil number of 20% or more doesn’t come into you life: no iron claw.
This, then, is key:
have no power over you if
you never carry a balance forward
If at all possible, then, you must never, Ever, NEVER, EVER carry a balance forward on a credit card — that’s how they get their claws into you.
Instead, use a credit card only as a great charge card and as a great accounting tool (one day I will write in here about ZTABS — the Zero–Touch Automated–Bookkeeping System — which helps clients keep track of their spending without any effort at all).
And always, Always, ALWAYS remember that a credit card is a truly devilish source of a loan.
And if you can’t remember that, or you can remember it but you end up taking out loans via credit cards anyway, then get ye out the scissors and destroy-eth ye credit cards. Be gone ya devil! Be gone!
* * *
So how about the numbers? What does the difference between a reasonable credit card interest rate and a devilish one look like?
Let’s say that you owe $10,000 on a credit card and it carries a 20% interest rate (not at all uncommon). Then to simply stand still, you need to pay $166.67 per month; if you do that for the rest of your life, and the interest rate stays the same, and you don’t incur any fees, then you will die owing that same $10k.
If the interest rate was instead 30%, the stand-still monthly payment would be $250.
If instead you wanted to fully pay off the loan in three years, at 20% your monthly payment would then be $371.64, while at 30% it would be $424.50 (note for the wonky: to calculate these numbers, you can use the PMT function in Excel, and it’s also quite easily done on an HP12C).
At 20%, your payments over those three years would total $13,378.89, while at 30% they would total $15,282.57
But how about at 10%? That seems like a pretty reasonable interest rate, doesn’t it — especially right now when interest rates are essentially nil for short term money?
What then?
First of all, your stand still payments would be a mere $83.33 (rather than $166.67 or $250 for the 20% and 30% loans respectively). And your pay-it-off-in-three-years monthly payment would be $322.67 (rather than $371.64 and $424.54 for the 20% and 30% loans respectively), for a total payment of $11,616.19.
So at 10% you pay the bank about $1.6k for the privilege of paying for borrowing $10k and paying it off over three years’ time — about 16% more than you borrowed. At 20% you pay about $3.4k over time, or about 34% more than you borrowed. And at 30%, you pay $5.2k more than your borrowed, or more than half.
* * *
For a lot of folks, then, the difference between 20% and 30% interest on their carried credit card debt can make all the difference. Unfortunately, once a credit card company has its iron claw firmly implanted in your gut, there’s not much you can do: they got’ch’ya.
It’s rather like the situation when someone has a health insurance policy in place and also has a pre-existing condition. They are stuck with that one insurer.
It used to be that it was possible to move your balances elsewhere, but lately, not so much, as about two years ago this alternative went the way of the dodo bird — right around the same time that credit card offers stopped choking off our mailboxes.
So now, if you owe ’em, they just plain ol‘ got’ch’ya.
And, even after the most recent legislation on credit cards, credit card companies can still choose to charge whatever interest rate they wish, so that, literally and technically, they could charge, say, 1,234% (at which point your standstill number for the $10k loan would be $10,283.33 per month, and your pay it off in three years monthly payment number would be $13,3878.89).
As it turns out, then, this South-Dakota-born, middle-class-decimating, financial-services-industrial-complex-fortifying, the-sky’s-the-limit interest rate milieu is a runaway train which not even the biggest legislative bank backlash in 80 years was sufficient to curtail, let alone abolish.
* * *
In the real world in which we live, this runaway train is the devil incarnate for millions of people, sucking the financial health right out of them the way dementors suck the life out of ‘arry Potter and ‘is buddies.
Wouldn’t it be nice, then, if something, as if by magic, caused the devil to go away?
Please don’t hold your breath.
Instead, remember, please do whatever you can to avoid using credit card companies as lenders.
Use them that way if you must for medial emergencies, life emergencies, etc. But for everything else, weigh the misery that the iron claw firmly implanted for years-on-end in your gut will cause you, against the momentary pleasure of using the plastic to obtain something you simply cannot afford.
After all, how much pleasure can it give you if you know, all the while, that hand-in-hand with that pleasure will come something which will wreak havoc — to the tune of 20% or 30% — upon your financial health for years and years to come?
Please do not use credit cards for loans.
S’alright?
S’alright.
* * *
I’ll be taking time off from writing until after July 4th.
The write-it-short experimentation has been a bit of a bust (entries are averaging over a thousand words, which is about twice my aim), but it’s also been a bit of a kick because there is so much to write about, and it’s a joyful thing to do, what with it gushing forth pretty much non-stop, which is a nice thing to have gushing forth pretty much non-stop, especially compared to something else, so much in the news these days, which is gushing forth totally non-stop.
‘Til July, then, here’s to your financial health, and may it continuously improve
.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 10am
By John Friedman
Lots and lots of people have a real devil in their financial lives. This devil comes in numeric form, and is always in the double digits. Sometimes, even, the double-digit-devil begins with a 2 or a 3.
And, for a lot of these bedeviled people, if somehow that double-digit-devil number miraculously changed to a single digist number, then, quite literally, everything in their financial world would be OK – they would have decent financial health. But, as is, what with this double digit deviling number havig a full complement of two digits, often with the first digit being a 2 or a 3, they have such dreadfully woeful financial health that bankruptcy is in their future.
It’s that black and whjite. If this number was 9 or less, they’d be OK. With it at 20 or more, they’re often well-advised to seek bankruptcy counsel.
* *
Have you guessed what the bedeviler number is? For some, it’s obvious, because they’ve previously walked down the forsaken path inhabited by the devil, or because they are currently on it.
For others this whole topic is a big mystery because it is just not anything that has ever even come close to entering into their lives. They are very fortunate, if perhaps a rose-colored-glass wearer).
* *
Two last hints: the devil number is, in some contexts, totally illegal. If you or I were to use this number in our life, it would be illegal. But for the financial services industrial complex? For them it is 100% legal.
Also, the devil number is the subject of passages in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an, papal decrees, and, perhaps most famously, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Got it?
*
Until The Great Deregulation of the late 1970s and 1980s, the interest rate which credit card companies could charge was a matter of state regulation.
tAnd the numb
is illegal if propounded by normal people. is a percen
Rathwer than play a game of 20 questions, though, let’s I will tell This partriculoar devil is also
Of all
The Indefatigable March of the Asset Gatherers — The Gallop Home of the Bad Horses
Monday, June 21, 2010 at 10amBy John Friedman
There’s been much talk lately of banks doing away with “free checking.”
The banks, the thinking goes, as a direct result of some of the new banking federal regulations stemming from The Great Recession, no longer have the un-checked ability to charge $35 and up as “insufficient funds” penalties (also known as “overdraft charges”) and the like, and are therefore going to be losing so much money that they have no choice but to make up the revenue from somewhere else.
And, the thinking continues, checking accounts are a likely place to make up that revenue because they are just not as profitable as they should be (for an inside-the-bankway view of checking account profitability, see here).
* * *
Pretty much all of us have a bank in our lives.
And pretty much all of that pretty-much-all-of-us have either BofA, Chase, Citi, or Wells in our lives. You can think of them as The Banks which are also known as The TBTF Banks, which stands for The Too Big to Fail Banks. And if you want to take the jargon up another notch or two, you can just go with the too-cool-for-school 2B2F.
As best I can tell (I’ve asked a lot of folks for their opinions on this), most of us are not all that fond of The TBTF Banks in our lives, though many of us are pretty OK with them, and though we rather like the convenience of their ATMs and such. This grudging acceptance is especially noticeable among those of us who have not, in a long time, had to actually to anyone at the bank to ask them to do something for us, because there’s a strong, positive correlation between our mostly-OK feelings towards the bank and the length of time during which we’ve not had to ask the bank to do anything for us. Because that might be asking too much — might be a bridge too far.
Now, it’s true that many of us view The TBTF Banks as evil, especially after they made out like bandits in The Great Recession.
But it’s also true that many of us are at peace rather than at war with our own particular bank — we have a perhaps easy/perhaps uneasy truce with it.
But it is in our lives, and we have figured out how to have it in there, so all is OK.
Our own too-big-to-fail bank, then, is the devil we know.
* * *
The devil-that-we-know too-big-to-fail bank is often one that we came to, not so much by choice, but by historical accident.
A lot of people, for instance, have Wells as their devil-they-know because Wells happened to buy another bank which served as their devil before then. Or some of us have, say, BofA in our lives because, when we were in college, it was the closest branch to where we lived, and we’ve been with them ever since (and, yea, we kinda like it when our ATM card shows that we have been a customer of theirs since the year 19-something’y something).
* * *
Banks are asset gatherers.
In fact, asset gathering is their main purpose in life, second only to making money, and it is their main purpose in life second only to making money because, for a bank, asset gathering is the closest thing to making money after making money. Capiche?
So they roam the landscape, vacuuming up assets, growing by gathering, and then growing some more.
It follows, then, that one of the primary ways a bank measures its own success is the size of the asset base which it has heretofore gathered, and that almost every dollar of profit a bank makes is directly correlated with the number of dollars it has heretofore gathered.
So the more gathered-dollars a bank has at its disposal, the greater is its power to make money. It’s that plain and that simple.
This is one circumstance, then, where bigger truly is better, without mitigation, negation, override, proviso, qualification, restriction or hem-haw.
* * *
But so far this bigger-is-better-when-it-comes-to-asset-gathering assertion has been just that — a bald assertion. Now let’s back it up with some explanation.
And let’s do that by taking a look at at a bank’s spread income and fee income — two of the many income streams enjoyed by a bank, and both of which are directly related to the number of assets the bank has gathered.
Spread income is part of the old fashioned world of banking — the George Bailey sort of banking — in which banks make their money by borrowing it cheaply and lending it out not-cheaply.
So a bank might borrow, say, $1 billion, and it might do so by having a great checking account product, which, say, requires a $2,500 minimum balance to avoid fees and which has, say, 1 million customers, and which, all told, therefore, can generate, say, an gathered-asset-base of $1 billion, free and available for lending out.
Are your curious how to get to that number?
Well, the arithmetic and further assumptions behind that $1 billion figure are these: assume that the bank has 1 million customers, and multiply that by, say, a $5,000 average balance per customer, to arrive at a total of $5 billion in total gathered assets, and let’s assume that 20% of those gathered assets is always available for the bank to lend out because the bank’s customers stay well above the $2,500 minimum balance requirement, and because that is what the reserve requirements placed on the bank allow it to lend out, so that, since 20% of $5 billion is $1 billion, the bank, based solely on the assets it gathered through this checking account product offering, has $1 billion of lendable gathered assets.
Nicely enough, the bank has borrowed that $1 billion at an interest rate of say, these days, anyway, considerably less than 1%, because today checking accounts pay zero or near-zero interest rates. But let’s say that, on average and over the long-run, the bank pays 1% to its checking account customers.
The bank then turns around and lends that money out at, say, 8%. So, even if the bank has to pay 1% on its borrowing of the gathered assets, it has a 7% spread, and that spread is plenty enough to cover loans that go bad while still generating a great profit to boot.
So spread income is the difference between what the bank earns by lending out money ($$$), minus its borrowing costs (¢) and minus losses from bad loans (¢¢¢), etc.
Spread income, then, depends on the size of the asset base the bank has gathered. More assets equals more spread income.
* * *
Up above, though, we left out one of those nasty minus numbers: we left out the cost of managing the checking account. Doing so requires big machinery and a tad of labor — in dollar terms, probably much more capital ($$$) than labor (¢).
For instance, let’s say that it costs the devil-you-know $100 million to have a back-office capability, consisting of a big ol’ computer system, a big ol’ automated check handling system, etc., plus a late-shift of twenty employees to do the overnight day-to-day processing of checks for the bank.
And let’s also say that that machinery and labor is sufficient to do the work so long as the bank’s gathered assets are no greater than $100 billion, and that after it crosses that threshold the bank would need to spend $250 million more on its back office to cover the next $100 billion in gathered assets (I am totally guessing about these numbers . . . but their accuracy is not important to the point) (but, think about it: four banks divide up, say, 100 million households, so each has 25 million households, and each household has, say, an average of $5k with the bank, so that right there is $125 billion, and that doesn’t include the business world) (and with a bit of looking, it appear that this is ballpark right).
Now, do you think the bank’s CEO is going to be happy if the bank has $75 billion of gathered-assets? Why gosh no, because, at that point the bank has the capacity to handle another $25 billion of gathered-assets, with no increase in its machinery costs or labor. And do you think the CEO will spring for the extra $250 million when the time comes to pay for it, to allow for even more asset gathering?
As Marge would say, You bet’ch’ya.
So, here, too, the bank sees a lot of gain from gathering more and more assets.
* * *
And what about the other revenue stream banks enjoy, as mentioned above, that of fee income?
Bank fees have become more and more important over the years, accounting for a bigger slice of the bank revenue pie since deregulation in the late 1970s, with bank “noninterest income” going from 20% to roughly 50% of banks’ overall income during the period 1980 through 2003.
And how do you increase fee income? Well, there are at least three ways. The first way is to increase the amount of the fee. After all, why charge a $10 overdraft coverage fee when you can instead charge $35?
And the second way is to have more customers.
And the third way? Why, the third way is to try to help your customers fall prey to the fee by, e.g., hiding the fee ball, or by designing the fee rules to catch more inattentive customers.
So, here again, asset-gathering reigns supreme, with a well-earned second place going to having the political clout to have Congress on your side, allowing you to do as you please, including raising fees to absurd levels — something that, of late, the banks, for a change after 30-plus years of constantly increasing deregulation, have not had.
* * *
Pretty much all financial companies are asset gatherers. And that is because, just like in the example above, the more assets they have gathered, the more money they can make. Period the end.
And that has a big bearing on how they behave.
For instance, if you want to move your stored-money from, say, Schwab to E*Trade because Schwab has treated you badly (it happens . . . ), then E*Trade will be very helpful in that process, while Schwab will be anywhere from mildly helpful to quite unhelpful (I once saw Merrill Lynch take a full year to let go of a pretty big annuity . . . ), because, for E*Trade, the assets coming in are an asset-gathering victory, so bosses and boss’s bosses at E*Trade will be happy, while at the Schwab end of things it is a defeat (unless Schwab sees you as a money-loosing customer, in which case it is a victory as well).
* * *
The imagery that I like to use here is that E*Trade in this instance is like a bad horse heading back to the stable, because anyone who has ridden a bad horse in a bad tourist-trap horse-renting place knows that the horse will plod along as you walk away from the barn, but that, just as soon as you turn the horse a quarter of the way around to start heading back to its home, you had better watch out, because that horse will finish the rest of the turn for you without asking permission and will then, before you know it, gitty-up and act like it’s in The Kentucky Derby, a neck behind the leader and closing, and proceed to full-steam-gallop you all the way back to where some hay and maybe even some oats lay, and definitely to where you are going to get off its aching back. Get off my back and gimme some food!
So, too, with asset gatherers. When money is coming to them, they will run fast, jump high, salute when queried, and in all other ways impress and best-behavior Eddie-Haskell you.
The trick, then, is to see what the asset gatherer does once its asset-gathered from you. Does it still treat you OK?
* * *
So, please remember: just about every financial services person you meet is, at heart, an asset-gatherer, and, remembering that fact and aided by that knowledge, when you first meet that asset-gatherer, please do ask that asset-gatherer to answer questions that can help you discern what that asset-gatherer’s true motivations are.
Does that financial services person just treat you well to gather your assets, or will that financial services person continue to do so long after your beautiful assets are gathered?
Or, as Carole King wrote, and still ever-so-plaintively sings:
Tonight you’re mine completely,
You give your love so sweetly,
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,
But will you love me tomorrow?
Is this a lasting treasure,
Or just a moment’s pleasure,
Can I believe the magic of your sighs,
Will you still love me tomorrow?
If you are of the age to know that song, I’ll just bet’ch’ya you can’t read those words without singing ‘e in your head. Am I right?
* * *
And what of the banks and their free checking?
You better believe that they are going to be very careful about driving assets away — un-gathering them — with unfriendly checking account offers.
But, gee, if there are only four of them, BofA, Citi, Chase and Wells, then what’s to stop the BCCW Cartel from doing a nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of communication — maybe even via stories placed in the popular media, using The Wall Street Journal and whatnot — to agree amongst themselves (though never speaking directly) that this would be a great time to un-do some of the freebies that have built up over the years in checking-account-land, like plaque on the walls of arteries, getting in the way of the flow of mega-dollar profitability.
So please keep your eyes out for the devil-that-you-know changing its checking account fee structure so as to coax more hard-won dollars out of you, but not so much that your dollars are likely to walk out the door and get on the nearest horse heading the other way.
‘Til tomorrow, then, here’s to your financial health and may it continuously improve.
.
The Wholly-Terrifying Risk of Non-Diversifiable Assets
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10amBy John Friedman
Most of the ways in which we store money are diversifiable.
For example, if you store some money in the stock market, you can own a bunch of different stocks. And these days you can even own a single investment which represents, to a very close level of approximation, proportionate ownership of each and every stock in the U.S.
Today a single share of that investment would have cost you about $57.
Think of it: for $57, plus a commission of, say, $7, you could have an ownership interest in pretty much the entire American stock market. Sixty-four bucks and you own the whole shebang.
Now that’s diversification: for $64 you can have an asset that is precisely as diversified as the $15 trillion U.S. stock market is diversified.
So even if something went drastically wrong with a single stock — take, oh, I don’t know . . . BP for instance, which, in a just-deserts sort of way, has lost $100 billion of its $200 billion market value since April 20th, when it, in an effort to spend $10 million less on safety measures for an especially deep well in The Gulf of Mexico, blew up a major portion of the Gulf, for an eye-opening 10,000-fold swing from money-saved to corporate-valuation-lost — the problem with the stock still wouldn’t have much impact on the value of your $57 share. That’s because your $57 share reflects the entire stock market, full of thousands of stocks, so that BP represents, all-told, less than 1% of your $57 investment (the arithmetic is that the $100 billion which BP’s value has fallen is two-thirds of a percent of the $15 trillion U.S. stock market).
So, all things being equal, the 50% downdraft on BP’s stock would impact your $57 investment by less than 1%, or about four dimes-worth.
That’s a hit you can afford to take, and that’s what diverisification does for you: it translates the 50% loss suffered by BP shareholders into a 0.5% loss for you and your shares.
And, remember: before the debacle BP was among the Top 20 most valuable companies in the world, so its fall has had a far greater impact on the overall stock market than most downdrafted stocks would, so all but two or three handfuls of stocks out there, if downdrafted, would hurt your $57 investment a whole lot less.
And for those of you wondering about thinking that all we’re talking about in here is idiosyncratic risk, and we’re ignoring market risk, you are right: market risk is a topic for another day.
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More scarily, though, there are also ways to store your money that pretty much are non-diversifiable.
For most, real estate is the ultimate non-diversifiable risk. Because the reality is that most of us will never own more than one piece of realty at a time. And that means that if, say, your house is in Guatemala City and it falls into a sinkhole, and if for some reason you do not have it insured against that risk, then your non-diversified risk has come home to roost, big-time. Ouch.
Or more presently, it means that, if you bought your house three years ago for 10% down, and if you find yourself now having to sell it because your job is taking you out of state, or if you lost your job and simply can’t any longer afford the house , then your non-diversified risk has also come home to roost, also big-time, and also ouch.
And if you had to sell now, you would probably have to put cash into the escrow to the tune of, say, two of the downpayments you put up when you bought the house. Imagine that: putting 20% down to sell the house. Ouch.
Here’s the arithmetic on where that 20% came from: figure that (a) the house cost $1 million, and that (b) the house has depreciated 25% ($250k), and that (c) you have an interest-only mortgage for 90% of the purchase price, so that (d) you owe the bank $900k, and also assume that (e) you will pay a 5% real estate commission for selling the house ($50k). In that case, you need to put $200k into escrow to sell the house, consisting of $150k to pay the bank its $900k (because you sold the house for only $750k), and another $50k to pay your broker (5% of $1 million.
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So how can a person be financially smart in the face of non-diversifiable assets like real estate?
It would be nice if we could buy derivatives that hedged the risk (i.e., you buy an investment which, theoretically, will increase in value if your house loses value, and vice versa), but all attempts at that thus far have failed, what with the DMM/UMM up/down housing twins busting at the end of last year.
I’m sorry to say, then, that, to date, the definition provides the answer: if the asset is non-diversifiable , then there’s not much you can do to diversify the risk emanating from the asset, and that means that there’s just not all that much you can do to smarten up the decision in terms of diversification. And that’s that.
True, you can also do your best to make sure that you’re not buying at the wrong time.
How to do that?
Well, there is no surefire way to do that. There just isn’t. It hurts me to throw my hands up in the air and shrug, but that’s the truth, and knowing that something is out of your control can be, in a way, freeing, and it definitely helps you be aware of what the risks are.
Yes, you can look at rent vs. buy charts and price trend charts, and, yes, you can call in the best economists and real estate agents, etc., but at the end of the day, I’m afraid, this is one of those situations in which you just have to hold your nose and dive into the pool, all the while praying to whatever it is to which you pray, and otherwise trying to increase your luck and alter an outcome which, sad to say, is subject to a terrifyingly non-diversifiable risk.
Instead, all you can rely on is luck: when it comes to non-diversifiable assets, you just have to be stone cold lucky.
Good luck then!
And, ’til Monday, here’s to your financial health and may it continuously improve,
.