Author: A.T.

"We have three kids and have decided to bite the bullet and buy a minivan this fall. This vehicle will enable us to carpool with another family (also three kids) to and from school, currently impossible with our 5-passenger Camry. I am considering not trading in the old car, keeping it around for my wife to use for non-carpool driving. This will save wear and tear on the van, but it means carrying insurance for an extra car (maybe $500 a year). Your thoughts?"

Wouldn’t pay-at-the-pump auto insurance have been great? On the theory that you can’t be behind the wheel of two cars at the same time, you’d pay primarily based on how much driving you did. In advocating this notion a few years ago, I found that I had the Rare Car Collectors of America (or whatever they’re called) firmly in my camp, wildly enthusiastic. These are the folks who own 12, maybe 15 or 30 cars and motorcycles. There are at least 200 such people — I think Jay Leno is their leader — and I had their full support. On the other side were 50 million insurance agents, the $50 trillion oil industry, 50 million trial lawyers, and Ralph Nader (because pay-at-the-pump was coupled with true no-fault insurance).

So you’ll just have to pay that extra $500 in insurance and not blame me. (The reason insurers charge for liability on the third car in this circumstance is that if it were stolen or borrowed and wound up injuring someone, you, as the owner, could still be sued.)

Now. More to the point:

Does the old car get better mileage than the minivan? If so, that will save some money toward the $500 in insurance along with the wear and tear to the minivan you mentioned. And there’s always value in having a spare for the day the minivan is in the shop, or the week your in-laws are in town.

Then again, if this old car actually has much value, you’d be sitting with three vehicles depreciating day by day rather than two. And you’d have not just the $500 insurance cost, but the opportunity cost of what you could have done with the $3,000 or $7,000 or whatever you would have gotten for the old car. (So: the more valuable the third car, the higher the cost of keeping it.)

One final thought: There’s more to life than money . . . so don’t let what I’m about to say bum you out . . . but from a strictly financial viewpoint, have you considered buying a used minivan? As someone once wrote (well, me, actually): That new-car smell is the most expensive fragrance in the world.

Coming Next Week:
10 Principles of Gift Recycling Top 10 Reasons to Buy (Multiple Copies of) My New Book

“Could you discuss offshore funds? I am an ‘ordinary’ investor, never invested in offshore funds, wouldn’t know how to do it, not sure that it’s ‘legal.’ Please don’t use my name.”

To an American, offshore is anything outside the U.S. To a Russian, offshore means anything outside Russia. Technically, Canada would be off our shore and Latvia off Russia’s, but some of these things do seem to be based on tax-friendly Islands. The Bahamas. Cyprus.

An offshore fund (to an American) is one that U.S. law prohibits being bought by or sold to Americans.

If the fund is run by American citizens, they are subject to U.S. laws on insider trading, taxes, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and so forth. But it is exempt from the Investment Company Act. That’s a law which severely restricts the ability of funds to sell short or to make big undiversified bets — betting half the fund’s assets on the collapse of some foreign currency, say. Offshore fund shareholders are not subject to U.S. taxation (though their American fund managers are).

Some Americans do invest in offshore funds, but they must perjure themselves to do so. Many use foreign trusts, with non-U.S. in-laws or non-U.S. institutions as administrators.

Perhaps the most famous offshore funds are George Soros’s Quantum funds. I’m told they were started as such because only foreigners would back him in his early days. In order to protect his original investors, Soros — an American and the world’s leading philanthropist — has kept the funds offshore. (His one attempt to do otherwise, Quantum Realty, was given assurances “at high levels” that its non-U.S. investors would be exempt from U.S. taxes. Politics then demanded this decision be reversed after the fund had been operating for over a year. It had to be disbanded to protect the non-U.S. investors.)

Should we feel rotten these are not just offshore but off-limits? Well, maybe a little but not much.

• The tax part of it is simple: all good American citizens pay their taxes. Those who outright cheat (municipal bonds and tax-sheltered retirement plans are anything but cheating) are just stealing from the rest of us. I know one wealthy businessman with a few million bucks hidden in foreign accounts. If Uncle Sam ever catches him, he could go to jail. But he likes having this separate stash the government doesn’t know about, appreciating tax-free, and long since seems to have stopped feeling guilty about it.

• The “foreign” part is also simple: There are lots of ways to invest abroad — mutual funds and New-York-Stock-Exchange listed stocks and ADRs (American Depository Receipts) prime among them. The “offshoreness” of an offshore fund comes not from where your money is invested — it may wind up heavily invested in U.S. stocks — but from the fund’s being exempt from the Investment Company Act and U.S. taxes.

• Even the short-selling and big-bets part is simple: You don’t need an offshore fund to take a crazy risk. You can do it all by yourself. Right now it’s legal for you to put everything you own into a short-sale bet against just a single stock or foreign currency. A good broker will “know its customer” and restrict you if you haven’t signed lots of forms attesting to your experience and tolerance for loss. But basically, you can do lots of crazy things all by yourself.

• What does chafe is not having access to George Soros’s brain. But it’s not U.S. law that will be your obstacle in this so much as the minimum chip he and other star hedge fund managers — both onshore and offshore — require. There are some baby hedge fund managers who might accept $250,000 or even $100,000. But many accept money in $1 million or $5 million or $25 million chunks. So most of us couldn’t hop on anyway.

• Just because a fund is offshore or called a “hedge fund” (restricted in the U.S. to wealthy “accredited” investors and allowed to take more risk than general public funds) doesn’t assure superior results. Typically, hedge funds charge “one or two and twenty” — 1% or 2% of your assets each year, plus 20% of any profit. Many have had spectacular years even after those fees, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t lose a real bundle in a bad year.

Tomorrow: Back-To-School Car Pooling: Keep A Third Car?

You may recall my recent advice to Terry, the D.I.N.K. (double income, no kids), who hates debt and wanted to know if it was dumb for him to continue prepaying an extra $500 a month on his 8.5% mortgage. I told him to keep it up. He’d be getting the equivalent of a risk-free 8.5%. Not stellar, to be sure, but not at all bad, either — and, based on his query, something that will, rightly, make him feel good.

(Note that the 8.5% would be the equivalent of “tax-free,” too, if he doesn’t itemize deductions, because he gets no tax benefit from the mortgage interest. Tax-free, risk-free 8.5% is a stellar return. Note, too, that this same notion applies even if he does itemize — to the extent his other deductions don’t fully exhaust the standard deduction that he would have been allowed to take anyway. Say the standard deduction for him is $6,700 and that other than mortgage interest, he has only $3,500 in deductions, leaving $3,200 on the table. On that portion of his mortgage interest — $3,200 — he gets no extra tax benefit beyond what the standard deduction would have provided anyway, so on that portion 8.5% is really 8.5%, tax-free, risk-free.)

Well, as usual, you went me one better. Wrote Doug from St. Louis:

Wouldn’t the “DINK” be better off refinancing that “high rate” 8.5% loan down to the current 7.25% rate available for 10 year fixed loans in much of the country? If he just pays an additional $500 per month on his current mortgage, he’s still paying the higher interest. Or am I off base in my perception?

No, you are exactly right. He would be lowering the rate as well as paying it off sooner. Excellent suggestion (so long as the points/fees involved in the refinancing are not too high and there’s little likelihood of his moving soon).

Similarly, from Dr. Brent Wurfel:

Freddie Mac reported on August 21st that 15-year mortgages are at an average of 6.99 percent. Perhaps the DINK could refinance his 20-year loan for a 15 year one. The principal and interest payment are almost the same! For $80k the payments come to $694 (20-year 8.5%) and $718 (15 year 6.99%). Of course there are the refinance charges, but my mortgage broker has a streamlined refinancing program and maybe his company or bank does too. From the letter it didn’t sound like he is moving, so I would expect that he would be ahead after a year or two. I did the calculation at http://www.smartcalc.com/cgi-bin/smartcalc/hom15.cgi.

Exactly. Same excellent suggestion.

Which then raises the question: at a 7% interest rate, does it still make sense to make extra payments to pay down the mortgage? And the answer is: maybe, but it’s obviously less compelling than at 8.5%.

Once the interest rate is low enough, it’s really kinda dumb to pay it off any faster than you have to. Just what “low enough” means depends on your investment alternatives, tax situation and your own personal preferences. And requires you to make some guesses about the future. There’s no hard-and-fast rule.

With a really low-interest-rate loan, a 30-year maturity might actually be better than a 10-or 15-year pay-off — especially if the mortgage were assumable. Imagine how nice it would be if, unexpectedly trying to sell the house 6 years from now, when mortgage rates had, let’s say, zoomed, you could advertise that your house came with an assumable low-interest mortgage.

Dr. Wurfel also reminds Terry to check to see whether he is paying mortgage insurance and, if he is and he can, get out of it. Many homebuyers have to take out mortgage insurance to get a loan. Once they’ve paid it down and/or the value of the property has risen enough to meet the lender’s requirements, they should be able to have this extra fee dropped. A lot of people forget to do so. (And a lot of lenders don’t make it easy.)

And here’s another idea. In refinancing, Terry should consider the lower rate he could get with an adjustable rate mortgage. Yes, they require somewhat shrewder shopping; there are more pitfalls to avoid. But basically, a good honest ARM is going to cost even less than a fixed-rate mortgage, because with the fixed-rate mortgage you are in effect paying the bank (which then lays it off on bond investors) to take the risk of rising interest rates. You can pocket that premium if you’re willing to take that risk yourself — and since you can afford to pay $500 a month more than you currently pay, you certainly could afford that risk.

Finally, a question from Berkeley:

Following up on today’s column, my partner and I are in the market to be first time home buyers. We are DINKS with a good investing plan in place. Here in Berkeley, CA, housing is, of course, ridiculously expensive. So I’m curious if you advise paying down a mortgage generally, or only if one can’t stand debt or has oodles of extra money. I’m inclined to invest the “extra” cash in the market, and see our mortgage as our never-ending housing cost. Am I on the right track here?

There’s no one right track in this situation, but you’re on a perfectly good one. Especially at today’s modest rates, and if you’re in a high tax bracket (which is all but unavoidable if you live in California), a mortgage clearly is not debt that needs to be paid down quickly. Unlike a car loan or credit card debt, the interest is tax deductible and the thing you’ve borrowed for may actually appreciate rather than depreciate (in the case of a car) or disappear (in the case of a dinner). But if you happen to be in one of those rent-controlled apartments Berkeley is famous for, and if the houses you’re considering are indeed ridiculously expensive (and don’t forget the cost of earthquake insurance, fire insurance, repairs and so on), maybe you should consider staying put and using the enormous savings to buy a vacation home someplace that’s ridiculously underpriced.

Tomorrow: Offshore Funds

Coming Soon: Top 10 Reasons to Buy (Multiple Copies of) My New Book

Gasoline prices should be dropping a penny or two pretty soon. The leaves should be turning up north. Time to begin planning one of those great autumn weekends.

When I took my Great Narthern Tar, I plotted the trip with the help of the Internet — www.theultimates.com/trip/. Quite helpful.

My good friend Kenneth Nolan recently went me one better. Where I had just entered city-pairs (if you can call Rangely, Maine, a city), he actually was able to get door-to-door directions. His report:

When I called Laurie and told her of my plan to come see their new home, she was thrilled and immediately started to rattle off the directions. “It’s very easy. You take I-95 all the way to . . . .” I interrupt, “Laurie I already have the directions, it’s all taken care of.” You see I had already logged on to one of my favorite Web sites, www.mapquest.com, and chose the TripQuest option. I entered my home address in New York City then Laurie’s on Heatherwood Drive in Madison CT. Then I clicked on calculate and in a few minutes my screen was filled with maps pertaining to the trip, as well as turn by turn directions to Laurie’s house, starting at the end of my block and ending at the turn onto Heatherwood Drive. The Magic of the Internet! I print it out, in color, boy won’t Laurie and Joe be impressed with this! Laurie still wants to give me directions. “It’ll take you a little over two hours . . . .” Once again I stop her. “I already know how long it will take.” My print out tells me it will take 1 hour 37 minutes. I think, Gee Laurie must drive really slowly!

The day, given the speed I usually drive (not exactly legal), I’m fairly certain that if I leave my house at 11:00 a.m., I’ll be at Laurie’s by 12:30, in time for lunch.

I set off, everything goes along smoothly, Henry Hudson, 684, I-84 . . . I’m making great time, I get off the highway it’s 12:15. According to TripQuest I have less than two miles to go! I don’t want to be too early, so when I see a car wash, I figure, Why not? I also fill my tank then set off again. But wait a minute. Newtown Road changes into White Street instead of Stony Hill Road. I must have missed something. I go back to where I exited the highway. I retrace my drive without going in the car wash. I still don’t see where I’ve gone wrong. I repeat this exercise about five times to no avail. Finally I give in. I’ll just call Laurie. She’ll explain what I’ve done wrong.

“I’m right near your house, but I’m having a problem,” I say. “Newtown Road is changing into White Street instead of Stony Hill Road.” There is silence on the other end. Then, “Where are you? I’ve never heard of those streets before.” I explain that I’m near Danbury. She tells me she lives an hour from Danbury. I think to myself not only does she drive really slowly, but she doesn’t have a very good sense of where her new house is, I’m practically around the corner! I tell her I’ll see her soon. Then I go to the gas station that I’ve now passed about ten times. I find out I’m headed the wrong direction on Newtown Road. I turned right coming off the highway instead of left.

It’s now about 1:15, a minor set back from my original plan but I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’m off again, a whole series of turns on country roads then, TaDaa!, I’m there. Heatherwood Drive. I turn and drive to the number of the house. All of a sudden panic sets in. I’m in the middle of a very lovely housing development, rows and rows of town houses, exactly the kind that Laurie and Joe lived in before they bought their new stand-alone house. I must have entered the old address into the computer when getting the directions from TripQuest. I check the print out, check my address book . . . no this is their new address. Could it be that there are actually two Madison Connecticuts? Either that or there is a glitch in the program that negated the town name and directed me to the 66 Heatherwood Drive, CT of its choice! Either way I’m now faced with the embarrassing task of calling Laurie and asking for directions to her house. She tells me to get to I-95 and gives me very simple and precise instructions from there. She thinks it should take about one hour. As I’m pulling into her driveway two hours later, I’m thinking Laurie must drive really fast!

It took me a total of four and a half hours to get to Laurie’s new house. The next day it took me one and a half hours to drive home.

“I’m an attorney, and I sympathize with your frustration with California trial attorneys as displayed in one of your recent comments. Practicing law is not a profession anymore in the large cities; it’s a cutthroat business. Combine that fact of economic life with the very traits that make trial lawyers successful — aggressiveness and thick skin — and the results in California should not be surprising. Although the law schools would lose a substantial amount of profit (and law schools are tremendous cash cows for most Universities), the country would be best served by a substantial reduction in the number of available seats available for each new law school freshman class.” — Thad from Texas

This is actually an interesting idea, although one hesitates to interfere with the free market — if an extra million kids want to become lawyers, and have the brains and resources to make it through law school, so be it. One even hesitates to cut off scholarship aid, as it would be unfortunate if only rich kids could get law degrees.

The alumni of Emery Dental School did a fascinating and, I think, enlightened thing several years ago. Basically they decided that the country was producing more dentists than rotten teeth and that it would be in everyone’s interest to right that balance. So they persuaded the university — bolstered by some substantial financial support, if I remember right — to close Emery Dental School. A fine institution — coincidentally, one of the best dentists who ever drilled inside my mouth was an Emery grad — it no longer exists.

I’m not sure how you cut back law school enrollment. (Might freezing new law-school accreditations be a small start?) A large proportion of practicing lawyers actually hate their jobs, and a large proportion make much less money than people imagine — but by and large, that’s not what kids see on TV or in the movies. They see Tom Cruise reducing Jack Nicholson to blubber so that justice triumphs in A Few Good Men. Or Sandra Bullock working late with Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill. They see LA Law (at least the current crop of law students did when they were growing up) and Arnie’s Lamborghini.

OK, maybe they hear some lawyer jokes, too. But maybe, like all the badmouthing smoking gets, it just serves to make lawyering seem all the more attractive. If the lawyers didn’t have money and power, the subliminal message may read, people wouldn’t be making all these jokes about them. And I want money and power.

Maybe what we need to do is lay off the lawyer jokes and start telling schoolteacher jokes. (And having schoolteachers tell kids they think smoking is cool.)

This is my 400th comment. Every 100th one, I indulge myself in some way. On my 300th, I told a couple of cheap lawyer jokes. It was a lapse in taste for which I apologize. You will find no hyperlink to that puerile comment here. This time, I indulge myself doubly: (a) by being brief so I can run out and play, and (b) by daring to edit Benjamin Franklin, everyman’s mentor, one of the five greatest Americans who ever lived. It was he who said: “Neither a borrow nor a lender be.”

(OK, it wasn’t Franklin, it was Shakespeare, although I’ll bet Franklin was sore Shakespeare got to it first. Thanks to Pam Reynolds at AmeriTrade Holding Corp.[parent company of Ceres] for pointing this out – I could have sworn it was Franklin – and for coming up with this nice Franklin quote instead: “He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.”)

I know what he meant of course. The surest way to lose a friend is to say “yes” when he asks to borrow money. But financially speaking, Franklin, which is to say Shakespeare (which leads some to say Bacon, but I don’t believe it) was all wet. “A creditor, not a debtor be,” is what he should have said. Maybe not a creditor to your friends (though an almost equally certain way to lose one is to say “no”), but apart from that, c’mon: far better to be a bank’s liability than its asset. (When you deposit money in a bank, it is accounted for as a liability of the bank, because they owe it to you. Your car loan is an asset of the bank — you are the debtor and it is the creditor.) Better to be owed than to owe.

May you bat .400. May you make (or not feel the need to make) the Forbes 400. May you encounter The 400 Blows only as a film classic and never on your backside.

And now, into the pool for a late-summer water volleyball game.

OK, OK. (And I want you to know I heard this one from a precocious ten-year-old.) “Why is New Jersey filled with toxic waste and California filled with lawyers?”

Give up?

scroll down . . .

scroll down . . .

“New Jersey got first pick.”

Hold the ball! I’m coming!

Monday: The Case Against Lawyer Jokes

“Thank you for the good advice on variable annuities. But here’s the tough question: 2.5 years ago I bit, I’m now in, unfortunately, it’s up 28% (not 100% as an index fund would’ve been), I’ve got about 15 years before I expect to start withdrawing, what do I do? Or, even, how do I go about analyzing what to do? I’m willing to take some risk; it’s not food & lodging money.” — Steve Lawrence

Well, that’s one of the key problems with annuities. Once you’re in, they’re hard to exit. You may have surrender charges to pay, along with ordinary income tax and, if you’re not yet 59-1/2, a penalty.

Off the top of my head (an even less reliable launching pad than deep within my brain), I’d suggest that unless the amount is large, you just not worry about it. You were smart to save money; it’s up a lot already (let’s hope the reason for its severe underperformance is at least in part more conservative investing that could cushion the blow of a down market); you made some sales person very happy. What’s done is done.

If the amount is significant, and you have the time and are willing to put up with the possible frustration and disappointment, check into the specifics of your annuity. Are you subject to surrender charges? If not, would you be better off switching to a different annuity? (The new one you choose will happily walk you through the government regulations that allow a tax-sheltered, Tarzan-like swing from one tree in the annuity forest to another.) But beware: don’t switch from a conservatively managed variable annuity to an aggressively managed one when the market is high, as it is now.

But in terms of withdrawing the money from annuities altogether to invest directly in the market — especially if you’re not yet 59-1/2 — I doubt it would make sense.

All other comments welcome.

From Kim Ness: “You have written in the past (via a printed medium) about frequent flyer programs where you can earn extra miles by using a certain credit card or long distance carrier. But I cannot recall the logic you used to explain when, if ever, it makes sense to use a credit card that charges an annual fee, instead of using a non-fee card that provides no flyer miles. Could you write about that? I am constantly getting offers that entice me… but so far I haven’t succumbed.”

The miles are worth about 2 cents each to most people, though it varies greatly based on how you travel.

• If you sometimes have to buy full fare tickets for last-minute trips, or wish you could, they’re worth a nickel. Likewise if you fly business class to Europe — now you can buy a super-cheap economy ticket and use 40,000 miles (typically) to upgrade, saving $2,000 — a nickel a mile.

• If you cash them in foolishly, they’re worth just a penny.

• And if it takes you five years to accumulate enough points to cash them in, you need to remember that 2 cents five years from now isn’t worth as much as 2 cents today.

So . . . if you figure you charge $2,000 a year, for which you get 2,000 miles, that’s $40 worth of miles, versus a $50 fee (or whatever) — forget it. But if you charge $20,000 a year, say, then it’s a no-brainer. You want the miles.