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Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Market Making vs Market Taking (Quotes vs Orders) | This is too lengthy for a comment. The following quoted passages are excerpted from this Money SE post. Before electronic trading and HFTs specifically, trading was thin and onerous. No. The NYSE and AMEX were deep, liquid and transparent for nearly 75 years prior to high frequency trading (HFT), in 2000 or so. The same is true for NASDAQ, but not for as many years, as NASDAQ is newer, being an electronic market. The point is that it existed, and thrived, prior to HFT. The NASDAQ can be active and functional, WITH or WITHOUT high frequency trading. This is not historically true, nor is it true now: Without a bid or ask at any given time, there could be no trade... Market makers, also known as specialists, were responsible for hitting the bid and taking the offer on whatever security they covered. They had a responsibility assigned to them by the exchange. Yes, it was lucrative! There was risk, and they were rewarded for bearing it. There is a trade-off though. Specialists provided greater stability on a systemic level, although other market participants paid for that cost. Prior to HFT, traders who were not market makers were often bounded by, boxed in, by the toll paid to market makers. Market makers had different, much higher capital and solvency requirements than other traders. Most specialists/market makers had seats, or shared a seat on the NYSE or AMEX. Remember that market makers/specialists are specific to stock markets, whereas HFT is not. If this is true, then we are in trouble: HFTs have supplanted the traditional market maker Why? Because trading volume is LOWER now than it was in the 1990's! EDIT In the comments, I noticed that OP was asking about the difference between I suggest reading this very accurate, well-written answer to a related question, The spread goes to the market maker, is the market maker the exchange? That explains the difference between |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Is inflation a good or bad thing? Why do governments want some inflation? | The classic definition of inflation is "too much money chasing too few goods." Within a tight range, say 1-3%, inflation is somewhat benign. There's a nice inflation widget at The Inflation Calculator which helps me see that an item costing $1000 in 1975 would now (2010) be about $4000, and $1000 from 1984 till now, just over $2000. I chose those two years to make a point. First, I am 48, I graduated college in 1984, so in my working life I've seen the value of the dollar drop by half. On the other hand it only took 9 years from 75-84 to see a similar amount of inflation occur. I'd suggest that the 26 year period is far more acceptable than the 9. Savers should be aware of their real return vs what was a result of inflation. I'm not incensed either way but logically have to acknowledge the invisible tax of inflation. I get a (say) 6% return, pay 2% in tax, but I'm not ahead by 4%, 3% may be lost to inflation. On the flip side, my mortgage is 3.5%, after taxes that's 2.625%, but less than 0% after (long term) inflation. So as a debtor, I am benefiting by the effect of inflation on what I owe. Interesting also to hear about deflation as we've grown used to it in the case of electronics but little else. Perhaps the iPad won't drop in price, but every year it will gain features and competitors will keep the tablet market moving. Yet people still buy these items. Right now, there's not enough spending. I'd suggest that, good financial advice aside, people as a whole need to start spending to get the economy moving. The return of some inflation would be a barometer of that spending starting to occur. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Purpose of having good credit when you are well-off? | Because even if you won the lottery, without at least some credit history you will have trouble renting cars and hotel rooms. I learned about the importance, and limitations of credit history when, in the 90's, I switched from using credit cards to doing everything with a debit card and checks purely for convenience. Eventually, my unused credit cards were not renewed. At that point in my life I had saved a lot and had high liquidity. I even bought new autos every 5 years with cash. Then, last decade, I found it increasingly hard to rent cars and sometimes even a hotel rooms with a debit card even though I would say they could precharge whatever they thought necessary to cover any expenses I might run. I started investigating why and found out that hotels and car rentals saw having a credit card as a proxy for low risk that you would damage the car or hotel room and not pay. So then I researched credit cards, credit reports, and how they worked. They have nothing about any savings, investments, or bank accounts you have. I had no idea this was the case. And, since I hadn't had cards or bought anything on credit in over 10 years there were no records in my credit files. Old, closed accounts had fallen off after 10 years. So, I opened a couple of secured credit cards with the highest security deposit allowed. They unsecured after a year or so. Then, I added several rewards cards. I use them instead of a debit card and always pay in full and they provide some cash back so I save money compared to just using a debit card. After 4 years my credit score has gone to 800+ even though I have never carried any debt and use the cards as if they were debit cards. I was very foolish to have stopped using credit cards 20 years ago but just had no idea of the importance of an established credit history. And note that establishing a great credit history does not require that you borrow money or take out loans for anything. just get credit cards and pay them in full each month. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Is it accurate to say that if I was to trade something, my probability of success can't be worse than random? | The previous answers make valid points regarding the risks, and why you can't reasonably compare trading for profit/loss to a roll of the die. This answer looks at the math instead. Your assumption: I have an equal probability to make a profit or a loss. Is incorrect, for the reasons stated in other answers. However, the answer to your question: Can I also assume that probabilistically speaking, a trader cannot do worst than random? Is "yes". But only because the question is flawed. Consequently it's throwing people in all directions with their answers. But quite simply, in a truly random environment the worst case scenario, no matter how improbable, is that you lose over and over again until you have nothing left. This can happen in sequential rolls of the dice AND in trading securities/bonds/whatever. You could guess wrong for every roll of the die AND all of your stock picks could become worthless. Both outcomes result in $0 (assuming you do not gamble with credit). Tell me, which $0 is "worse"? Given the infinite number of plays that "random" implies, the chance of losing your entire bankroll exists in both scenarios, and that is enough by itself to make neither option "worse" than the other. Of course, the opposite is also true. You could only pick winners, with an unlimited upside potential, but again that could happen with either dice rolls or stock picks. It's just highly improbable. my chances cannot be worse than random and if my trading system has an edge that is greater than the percentage of the transaction that is transaction cost, then I am probabilistically likely to make a profit? Nope. This is where it all falls apart. Just because your chances of losing it all are similarly improbable, does not make you more likely to win with one method or the other. Regression to the mean, when given infinite, truly random outcomes, makes it impossible to "have an edge". Also, "probabilistically" isn't a word, but "probably" is. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Prepaying a loan: Shouldn't the interest be recalculated like a shorter loan? | A few years ago I had a 5 year car loan. I wanted to prepay it after 2 years and I asked this question to the lender. I expected a reduction in the interest attached to the car loan since it didn't go the full 5 years. They basically told me I was crazy and the balance owed was the full amount of the 5 year car loan. This sounds like you either got a bad car loan (i.e. pay all the interest first before paying any principal), a crooked lender, or you were misunderstood. Most consumer loans (both car loans and mortgages) reduce the amount of interest you pay (not the _percentage) as you pay down principal. The amount of interest of each payment is computed by multiplying the balance owed by the periodic interest rate (e.g. if your loan is at 12% annual interest you'll pay 1% of the remaining principal each month). Although that's the most common loan structure, there are others that are more complex and less friendly to the consumer. Typically those are used when credit is an issue and the lender wants to make sure they get as much interest up front as they can, and can recover the principal through a repossession or foreclosure. It sounds like you got a precomputed interest loan. With these loans, the amount of interest you'd pay if you paid through the life of the loan is computed and added to the principal to get a total loan balance. You are required to pay back that entire amount, regardless of whether you pay early or not. You could still pay it early just to get that monkey off your back, but you may not save any interest. You are not crazy to think that you should be able to save on interest, though, as that's how normal loans work. Next time you need to borrow money, make sure you understand the terms of the loan (and if you don't, ask someone else to help you). Or just save up cash and don't borrow money ;) |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Can an unmarried couple buy a home together with only one person on the mortgage? | It is highly unlikely that this would be approved by a mortgage underwriter. When the bank gives a loan with a security interest in a property (a lien), they are protected - if the borrower does not repay the loan, the property can be foreclosed on and sold, and the lender is made whole for the amount of the loan that was not repaid. When two parties are listed on the deed, then each owns an UNDIVIDED 50% share in the property. If only one party has pledged the property as surety against the loan, then in effect only 50% of the property is forecloseable. This means that the bank is unable to recoup its loss. For a (fictional, highly simplified) concrete example, suppose that the house is worth $100,000 and Adam and Zoe are listed on the deed, but Adam is the borrower for a $100,000 mortgage. Adam owes $100,000 and has an asset worth $50,000 (which he has pledged as security for the loan), while Zoe owes nothing and has an asset worth $50,000 (which is entirely unencumbered). If Adam does not pay the mortgage, the bank would only be able to foreclose on his $50,000 half of the property, leaving them exposed to great risk. There are other legal and financial reasons, but overall I think you'll find it very difficult to locate a lender who is willing to take that kind of risk. It's very complicated and there is absolutely no up-side. Also - speaking from experience (from which I was protected because of the bank's underwriting rules) and echoing the advice offered by others on this site: don't bother trying. Commingling assets without a contract (either implicit by marriage or explicit by, well a contract) is going to get you in trouble. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | What is inflation? | Inflation is basically this: Over time, prices go up! I will now address the 3 points you have listed. Suppose over a period of 10 years, prices have doubled. Now suppose 10 years ago I earned $100 and bought a nice pair of shoes. Now today because prices have doubled I would have to earn $200 in order to afford the same pair of shoes. Thus if I want to compare my earnings this year to 10 years ago, I will need to adjust for the price of goods going up. That is, I could say that my $100 earnings 10 years ago is the same as having earned $200 today, or alternatively I could say that my earnings of $200 today is equivalent to having earned $100 10 years ago. This is a difficult question because a car is a depreciating asset, which means the real value of the car will go down in value over time. Let us suppose that inflation doesn't exist and the car you bought for $100 today will depreciate to $90 after 1 year (a 10% depreciation). But because inflation does exist, and all prices will be 0.5% higher in 1 years time, we can calculate the true selling price of the car 1 in year as follows: 0.5% of $90 = 0.005*90 = $0.45 Therefore the car will be $90 + $0.45 = $90.45 in 1 years time. If inflation is low, then the repayments do not get much easier to pay back over time because wages have not risen by as much. Similarly the value of your underlying asset will not increase in value by as much. However as compensation, the interest rates on loans are usually lower when inflation is lower. Therefore generally it is better to get a loan in times of high inflation rather than low inflation, however it really depends on how the much the interest rates are relative to the inflation rate. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Canada discount stock brokers: Interactive Brokers vs. Questrade? | I have had accounts at both IB and Questrade. Whatever you've heard about Questrade, sadly much of it is true pertaining to 2007-2009. I have not had any issues with their service, and making the few trades I do with the QuestraderWEB service has been flawless. In the time that I've had the account, their service has constantly been improving (statements are easier to read, customer service is more responsive). You should read what FrugalTrader and Canadian Capitalist have to say along with the combined 1000+ comments before deciding. Interactive Brokers is a whole different world. Those guys are the definition of real-time. You can get daily and weekly statements, along with the typical monthly statements. Buying power, margin, etc, is all updated in real-time and viewable in their TWS software. Trading fees are definitely lower than Questrade unless you're routinely trading 800-1000+ shares. Most of my trades cost $1. Options have a lower limit before Questrade makes more sense. And nothing beats IB for forex. Ultimately it really depends on what you will be doing. Note that IB charges a minimum monthly fee of $10 ($3 if you're young and foolish). If you don't hit that with commissions, the balance is taken from your account. Also, all other fees are passed on to you (e.g. data, order cancellation). IB also doesn't have any registered accounts such as TFSA or RRSP, and doesn't plan to. If you'll be doing a bunch of hefty trading, IB offers a trading platform free of charge, but charges for everything else. Questrade instead has a monthly fee for its QuestraderPRO and QuestraderELITE services, but that includes data and flat rate commissions. If you're just looking for a place to invest cheaply without extra fees and plan on making a few trades a year, Questrade might be the right choice. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How much time should be spent on Penny Stocks Trading a day? | 1) Don't trade individual stocks. You expose yourself to unnecessary risk. 2) Pick a fund with low expenses that pays a dividend. Reinvest the dividend back into the fund. To quote Einstein: The greatest power on earth is compound interest. Something is wrong with the software of the site. It will not allow me to answer mark with another comment. So I have to edit this answer to be able to answer him. @mark No, I am not hoping the price will go up. The price is only relevant in comparison to the dividend. It is the dividend that is important, not the price. The price is irrelevant if you never sell. Dividend paying securities are what you buy and hold. Then you reinvest the dividend and buy more of the security. As I am buying the security with the dividend I am actually pleasantly surprised when the price goes down. When the price goes down, but the dividend remains the same, I am able to buy more shares of the security withwith that dividend. So if the price goes down, and the dividend remains the same, it is a good thing. Again, the site will not allow me to add another comment. @mark I profit from my investment, without selling, by receiving the dividend. I used to be a speculator, trying to get ahead of the market by 'buy low, sell high' but all that did was make money for the broker. I lost as much as I gained trying to do that. The broker made money on each transaction, regardless if I did or not. It took me decades to learn the lesson that 'buy and hold' of dividend paying securities is the way to go. Don't make my mistake. I now get, at least, 5.5% yeald on my investment (look at PGF, which forms the backbone of my investments). That is almost 0.5% per month. Each month that dividend is reinvested into PGF, with no commission. You can't beat that with a stick. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Strategies for putting away money for a child's future (college, etc.)? | Saving for college you have a couple of options. 529 plans are probably the best bet for most people wanting to save for their kids college education. You can put a lot of money away ~$300k and you may get a state tax deduction. The downside is if you're kid doesn't go to college you may end up eating the 10% penalty. State specific prepaid tuition plans. The upside is you know roughly the return you are going to get on your money. The downside is your kid has to go to a state school in the state you prepaid or there are likely withdrawal penalties. For the most part these really aren't that great of a deal any more. ESAs are also an option but they only allow you to contribute $2k/year, but you have more investment options than with the 529 plans. Traditional and ROTH IRA accounts can also be used to pay for higher education. I wouldn't recommend this route in general but if you maxed out your 401k and weren't using your IRA contribution limits you could put extra money here and get more or really different flexibility than you can with a 529 account. I doubt IRA's will ever be asked for on a FAFSA which might be helpful. Another option is to save the money in a regular brokerage account. You would have more flexibility, but lower returns after taxes. One advantage to this route is if you think your kid might be borderline for financial aid a year or two before he starts college you could move this money into another investment that doesn't matter for financial aid purposes. A few words of caution, make sure you save for retirement before saving for your kids college. He can always get loans to pay for school but no one is going to give you a loan to pay for your retirement. Also be cautious with the amount of money you give your adult child, studies have shown that the more money that parents give their adult children the less successful they are compared to their peers. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | What is the difference between equity and assets? | Equity does not represent production divisions in a company (i.e. chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla does not make sense). In Sole proprietorship, equity represents 1 owner. In Partnership, equity has at least two sub-accounts, namely Partner 1 and Partner 2. In Corporations, equity may have Common Stockholders and Preferred Stockholders, or even different class of shares for insiders and angel investors. As you can see, equity represents who owns the company. It is not what the company does or manufactures. First and foremost, define the boundary of the firm. Are your books titled "The books of the family of Doe", "The books of Mr & Mrs Doe", or "The books of Mr & Mrs Doe & Sons". Ask yourself, who "owns" this family. If you believe that a marriage is perpetual until further notice then it does not make any sense to constantly calculate which parent owns the family more. In partnership, firm profits are attributed to partner's accounts using previously agreed ratio. For example, (60%/40% because Partner 1 is more hard working and valuable to the firm. Does your child own this family? Does he/she have any rights to use the assets, to earn income from the assets, to transfer the assets to others, or to enforce private property rights? If they don't have a part of these rights, they are certainly NOT part of Equity. So what happens to the expenses of children if you follow the "partnership" model? There are two ways. The first way is to attribute the Loss to the parents/family since you do not expect the children to repay. It is an unrecoverable loss written off. The second way is to create a Debtor(Asset) account to aggregate all child expense, then create a separate book called "The books Children 1", and classify the expense in that separate book. I advise using "The family of Doe" as the firm's boundary, and having 1 Equity account to simplify everything. It is ultimately up to you to decide the boundaries. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Should market based health insurance premiums be factored into 6 months emergency fund savings? | The guideline for the size of an emergency fund is just a guideline. I've usually heard it expressed as "3 to 6 months," but everyone has a different idea of exactly how big it should be. The purpose of the fund is to give you enough cash to be able to pay for unexpected expenses that have come up that you have not budgeted for without you having to borrow money to pay for them. To figure out how big this fund should be, we look at the worst case scenario. Suppose that you lost your job tomorrow. What would you do? Cut your expenses. You'd probably be much more careful how you spend money. Secure health insurance. This would be done by either continuing your employer's policy with COBRA, or by purchasing your own insurance, likely through the Obamacare/ACA market. Keep in mind that most likely your employer is paying for a portion of your insurance now, so this expense will go up quite a bit no matter which option you choose. Look for another job. You'd probably begin your search for a new job immediately. The size of your emergency fund determines how long you will be able to go without income before you need to start a new job. Regarding cutting your expenses, it is up to you how much you would cut. There are things that are easy to cut temporarily (or permanently), such as restaurants, entertainment expenses, vacations, etc. You would probably stop retirement investing until you have income again. The more you cut, the longer your emergency fund would last. Things you don't want to cut are necessities, like housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, etc. I would also include health insurance in this list. Certainly, if you have a pre-existing condition, you do not want to let your health insurance coverage lapse. Your employability is also a factor. If you believe that you would have an easy time finding similar employment to what you have now, your emergency fund might not need to be quite as big as someone who believes they would have a harder time finding another job. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How do I know if refinance is beneficial enough to me? | When evaluating a refinance, you need to figure out the payback time. Refinancing costs money in closing costs. The payback time is the time it takes to recover the closing costs with the amount of money you are saving in interest. For example, if the closing costs are $2,000, your payback time is 2 years if it takes 2 years to save that amount in interest with the new interest rate vs. the old one. To estimate this, look at the difference in interest rate between your mortgage and the new one, and your mortgage balance. For example, let's say that you have $100,000 left on your mortgage, and the new rate is 1% lower than your current rate. In one year, you will save roughly $1,000 in interest. If your closing costs are $2,000, then your payback time is somewhere around 2 years. If you plan on staying in this house longer than the payback time, then it is beneficial to refinance. There are mortgage refinance calculators online that will calculate payback time more precisely. One thing to watch out for: when you refinance, if you expand the term of your mortgage, you might end up paying more interest over the long term, even though your rate is less and your monthly payment is less. For example, let's say you currently have 8 years left on a 15-year mortgage. If you refinance to a new 15-year mortgage, your monthly payment will go down, but if you only pay the new minimum payment for the next 15 years, you could end up paying more in interest than if you had just continued with your old mortgage for the next 8 years. To avoid this, refinance to a new mortgage with a term close to what you have left on your current mortgage. If you can't do that, continue paying whatever your current monthly payment is after you refinance, and you'll pay your new mortgage early and save on interest. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | I'm 23 and was given $50k. What should I do? | I would be realistic and recognize that however you invest this money, it is unlikely to be a life-changing sum. It is not going to provide an income which significantly affects your monthly budget, nor is it going to grow to some large amount which will allow you to live rent-free or similar. Therefore my advice is quite different to every other answer so far. If I was you, I would: I reckon this might get you through half the money. Take the other $25,000 and go travelling. Plan a trip to Europe, South America, Asia or Australia. Ask your job for 3 or 6 months off, and quit it they won't give it you. Find a few places which you would really like to visit, and schedule around them a lot of time to go where you want. Book your flights in advance, or book one way, and put aside enough money for the return when you know where you'll be coming back from. Stay in hostels, a tent or cheap AirBnB. Make sure you have a chance to meet other people, especially other people who are travelling around. Figure out in advance how much it will cost you a day to live basically, and budget for a few beers/restaurants/cinema/concert tickets/drugs/whatever you do to have fun. It's really easy nowadays to go all sorts of places, and be very spontaneous about what you want to do next. You will find that everywhere in the world is different, all people have something unusual about them, and everywhere is interesting. You will meet some great people and probably become both more independent and better at making friends with strangers. Your friends in other countries could stay friends for life. The first time you see Rome, the Great Barrier Reef, the Panama canal or the Tokyo fish market will be with you forever. You have plenty of years to fill up your 401K. You won't have the energy, fearlessness and openmindedness of a 23 year old forever. Go for it. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | What happens if one brings more than 10,000 USD with them into the US? | Bad plan. This seems like a recipe for having your money taken away from you by CBP. Let me explain the biases which make it so. US banking is reliable enough for the common citizen, that everyone simply uses banks. To elaborate, Americans who are unbanked either can't produce simple identity paperwork; or they got an account but then got blacklisted for overdrawing it. These are problems of the poor, not millionaires. Outside of determined "off the grid" folks with political reasons to not be in the banking and credit systsm, anyone with money uses the banking system. Who's not a criminal, anyway. We also have strong laws against money laundering: turning cash (of questionable origin) into "sanitized" cash on deposit in a bank. The most obvious trick is deposit $5000/day for 200 days. Nope, that's Structuring: yeah, we have a word for that. A guy with $1 million cash, it is presumed he has no choice: he can't convert it into a bank deposit, as in this problem - note where she says she can't launder it. If it's normal for people in your country to haul around cash, due to a defective banking system, you're not the only one with that problem, and nearby there'll be a country with a good banking system who understands your situation. Deposit it there. Then retain a US lawyer who specializes in this, and follow his advice about moving the money to the US via funds transfer. Even then, you may have some explaining to do; but far less than with cash. (And keep in mind for those politically motivated off-the-financial-grid types, they're a bit crazy but definitely not stupid, live a cash life everyday, and know the law better than anybody. They would definitely consider using banks and funds transfers for the border crossing proper, because of Customs. Then they'll turn it into cash domestically and close the accounts.) |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Can mortgage insurance replace PMI? | PMI IS Mortgage insurance. It stands for "Private Mortgage Insurance". This guy is just trying to get you to buy it from him instead of whoever you have it with now. Your lender would always be on the policy since it is an insurance policy they hold (and you pay for) that protects them from you defaulting on the loan. Don't think of it as insurance for you in case you can't pay. If that should happen, your credit would still be trashed, the bank just wouldn't be out the money. You don't really get any benefit at all from it. It is just the way a bank can mitigate the risk of giving out large loans. This is why people are keen to drop it as soon as possible. The whole thing about keeping the house in your estate after you die makes me think he is trying to sell you a different type of insurance called Mortgage Life Insurance. PMI isn't typically about that type of situation. Your estate will go into probate to work out your debts if you die and my understanding is that PMI doesn't usually pay out in that situation. If this is what he is selling, buying such a policy would be on top of your PMI insurance payment, not instead of it. Be forewarned, personal finance experts usually consider mortgage life insurance to be a ripoff. If you want to protect against the risk of your heirs losing the house because they can't make the payments, you are better off with Term Life Insurance. However, don't worry that they will inherit your debt on the house unless they are on the loan. If they don't want the house, they won't be obliged to make payments on it (unless they want to keep it). It won't affect their credit if they just walk away and let the bank have the house after you die unless they are on the note. Here is an article (in two parts) with a pretty good treatment of the issue of choosing your own PMI policy: "Give Buyers Freedom to Choose Mortgage Insurance" Part 1 Part 2 |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | What happens to all of the options when they expire? | Firstly "Most option traders don't want to actually buy or sell the underlying stock." THIS IS COMPLETELY UTTERLY FALSE Perhaps the problem is that you are only familiar with the BUY side of options trading. On the sell side of options trading, an options desk engages in DELTA HEDGING. When we sell an option to a client. We will also buy an appropriate amount of underlying to match the delta position of the option. During the life time of the option. We will readjust our hedge position whenever the delta changes (those who follow Black Scholes will know that normally that comes from (underlying) price changes). However, we lose money on each underlying change (we have to cross the bid-ask spread for each trade). That is why we lose money when there is volatility. That is why we are said to be "short VEGA" or "short volatility". So one way to think about "buying" options, is that you are paying someone to execute a specific trading strategy. In general, those who sell options, are also happy to buy options back (at a discount of course, so we make a profit). But when doing so, we need to unroll our hedging position, and that again incurs a cost (to us, the bank). Finally. Since this is "money" stackexchange rather than finance. You are most likely referring to "warrants" rather than "options", which are listed on stock exchanges. The exchange in most regions give us very specific and restrictive regulations that we must abide by. One very common one is that we MUST always list a price which we are willing to buy the warrants back at (which may not be an unreasonable spread from the sell price). Since an Option is a synthetically created investment instrument, when we buy back the Option from the investor, we simply unwind the underlying hedging positions that we booked to synthesize the Options with. Source: I've worked 2 years on a warrant desk, as a desk developer. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How to resolve imbalances and orphan transactions in Gnucash? | The GnuCash manual has a page with examples of opening new accounts. The tl;dr is: use the Equity:Opening Balance to offset your original amounts. The further explanation from the GnuCash page is: As shown earlier with the Assets:Checking account, the starting balances in an account are typically assigned to a special account called Equity:Opening Balance. To start filling in this chart of account, begin by setting the starting balances for the accounts. Assume that there is $1000 in the savings account and $500 charged on the credit card. Open the Assets:Savings account register. Select View from the menu and check to make sure you are in Basic Ledger style. You will view your transactions in the other modes later, but for now let’s enter a basic transaction using the basic default style. From the Assets:Savings account register window, enter a basic 2 account transaction to set your starting balance to $1000, transferred from Equity:Opening Balance. Remember, basic transactions transfer money from a source account to a destination account. Record the transaction (press the Enter key, or click on the Enter icon). From the Assets:Checking account register window, enter a basic 2 account transaction to set your starting balance to $1000, transferred from Equity:Opening Balance. From the Liabilities:Visa account register window, enter a basic 2 account transaction to set your starting balance to $500, transferred from Equity:Opening Balance. This is done by entering the $500 as a charge in the Visa account (or decrease in the Opening Balance account), since it is money you borrowed. Record the transaction (press the Enter key, or click on the Enter icon). You should now have 3 accounts with opening balances set. Assets:Checking, Assets:Savings, and Liabilities:Visa. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | What is the best resource for determining a specific age-based asset allocation? | Look into the asset allocations of lifecycle funds offered by a company like Vanguard. This page allows you to select your current age and find a fund based on that. You could pick a fund, like the Target Retirement 2055 Fund (ages 21-25), and examine its allocation in the Portfolio & Management tab. For this fund, the breakdown is: Then, look at the allocation of the underlying funds that comprise the lifecycle fund, in the same tab. Look at each of those funds and see what asset allocation they use, and that should give you a rough idea for an age-based allocation. For example, the Total Stock Market Index Fund page has a sector breakdown, so if you wanted to get very fine-grained with your allocation, you could. (You're probably much better off investing in the index fund, low-cost ETFs, or the lifecycle fund itself, however; it'll be much cheaper). Doing this for several lifecycle funds should be a good start. Keep in mind, however, that these funds are rebalanced as the target date approaches, so if you're following the allocation of some particular funds, you'll have to rebalance as well. If you really want an age-based allocation that you don't have to think about, invest in a lifecycle fund directly. You'll probably pay a lower expense ratio than if you invested in a whole slew of funds directory, and it's less work for someone who isn't comfortable managing their portfolio themselves. Furthermore, with Vanguard, the expense ratios are already fairly low. This is only one example of an allocation, however; your tolerance of risk, age, etc. may affect what allocation you're willing to accept. Full disclosure: Part of my Roth IRA is invested in the Target 2055 fund I used as an example above, and another part uses a similar rebalancing strategy to the one I used above, but with Admiral Share funds, which have higher minimum investments but lower expense ratios. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Is it a good idea to rebalance without withdrawing money? | Rebalancing has been studied empirically quite a bit, but not particularly carefully and actually turns out to be very hard to study well. The main problem is that you don't know until afterward if your target weights were optimal so a bad rebalancing program might give better performance if it strayed closer to optimal weights even if it didn't do an efficient job of keeping near the target weights. In your particular case either method might be preferred depending on a number of things: You can see why there isn't a generally correct answer to your question and the results of empirical studies might very wildly depending on the mix of assets and risk tolerance. Still if your portfolio is not too complicated you can estimate the costs of the two methods without too much trouble and figure out if it is worthwhile to you. EDIT In Response to Comment Below: Your example gets at what makes rebalancing so hard empirically but also generally pretty easy in practice. If you were to target 75% Equity (25% bonds?) and look at returns only for 30 years the "best" rebalancing method would be to never rebalance and just let 75% equity go to near 100% as equity has better long term returns. This happens when you look only at returns as the final number and don't take into account the change in risk in your portfolio. In practice, most people that are still adding (or subtracting in retirement) to a retirement portfolio are adding (removing) a significant amount compared to the total amount in their portfolio. In the case you discribe, it is cheaper (massively cheaper in the presence of load fees) just to use new capital to trade toward your target, keeping your risk profile. New money should be large enough to keep you near enough your target. If you just estimate the trading costs/fees in both cases I think you'll see just how large the difference is between the two methods this will dwarf any small differences in return over the long run even if you can't trade back all the way to your target. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | What are the options for a 19-year-old college student who only has about $1000? | At that sum, it essentially doesn't matter what you do, unless you just want to outright gamble the money. Let's look at some options: "High" interest guaranteed savings. A five year CD returns a sad 2% right now. That means if you invest all $1,000 into a CD, by 2016 you will have earned $105.08 in interest. Think about that: About a hundred bucks over the next five years. Of course, with 3% inflation, that $105.08 will be worth about $90.57. In fact, the total amount will be worth $953.25. Your "doing something with your money" did nothing. Stocks can return significantly more interest, but there is no guarantee. Even if you made 20% year on year, you would only make maybe $1,500 in returns or so in the next 5 years, and 20% every year is like Warren Buffet territory--totally unrealistic. That's also not taking into account inflation. And neither of these is taking into account taxes! However, if you go to a casino and gamble the $1,000, it is possible you could turn it into significantly more. It's very much unlikely, and I do not advise it at all, but it's possible. The point is, you need money to make money, and, in some sense, $1,000 is not money at all. I recommend you work on your skills, knowledge, and preparation for making money in the future, and by 25 or so you can really be cooking with gas. Don't waste your efforts trying to find a brilliant way to make a few hundred bucks over the next half decade. Save the money and find ways to try to double it by earning money on small projects. Then challenge yourself to double it again, and keep honing your skills. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Opening offshore account from UK | I think your best bet here would be HSBC. They will provide the required currencies, credit/debit cards, and very easy to use online banking transfers. This includes an online "Global Account View" which features all of your accounts on a single screen and allows you to "drag and drop" money between accounts. Regarding fees, I suspect you will need to be a "Premier Account" holder in order to avoid any fees imposed on transactions such as money transfers and exchanging money between currencies. In my experience HSBC offers extremely good exchange rates when exchanging "large" amounts of money ( greater than $10,000 / GBP 5,000 ). Exchanging small amounts will carry a larger spread but still much better than most banks offer. In my experience, exchanging GBP 5000 will have a spread of about 0.50-to-0.75 percent, while exchanging more than GBP10,000 will have a spread of as little as 0.10-to-0.20 percent. In order to qualify for a "Premier Account", if my memory of HSBC UK serves me correctly, you will need to have at least GBP 50,000 net across all of your HSBC managed accounts, including stockbroking and other investment accounts. In order to open a banking Swiss account, you will need to travel to Switzerland and apply in person. You cannot open a foreign bank account remotely. With a foreign investment account, I believe you can open accounts remotely. For example, I opened an account with Fidelity Switzerland using my Fidelity UK account directly from the UK, however obviously Fidelity does not provide banking services so this is not of interest to you. The simplest thing to do is to visit your local HSBC branch and discuss it with them in person. Other UK banks, such as Barclays, will also provide such services, but in my experience they are not as competitive on fees. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How do I determine ownership split on a franchise model? | There is no right and wrong answer to this question. What you and your business partner perceive as Fair is the best way to split the ownership of the new venture. First, regarding the two issues you have raised: Capital Contributions: The fact that you are contributing 90% of initial capital does not necessarily translate to 90% of equity. In my opinion, what is fair is that you transform your contributions into a loan for the company. The securitization of your contribution into a loan will make it easier to calculate your fair contribution and also compensate you for your risk by choosing whatever combination of interest income and equity you see suitable. For example, you might decide to split the company in half and consider your contributions a loan with 20%, 50% or 200% annual interest. Salary: It is common that co-founders of start-ups forgo their wages at the start of the company. I do not recommend that this forgone salary be compensated through equity because it is impossible to determine the suitable amount of equity to be paid. I suggest the translation of forgone wages into loans or preferred stocks in similar fashion to capital contribution Also, consider the following in deciding the best way to allocate equity between both of you and your partner Whose idea was it? Talk with you business partner how both of you value the inventor of the concept. In general, execution is more important but talking about how you both feel about it is good. Full-time vs. part-time: A person who works full time at the new venture should have more equity than the partner who is only a part-time helper. Control: It is important to talk about control and decision making of the company. You can separate the control and decision making of important decisions from ownership. You can also check the following article about this topic at http://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2012/04/05/what-every-founder-needs-to-know-about-equity/#726842f3668a |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How do I protect myself from a scam if I want to help a relative? | For some reason can't transfer it directly to his account overseas (something to do with security codes, authorized payees and expired cards). Don't become someone's financial intermediary. Find out exactly why he can't transfer the money himself, and then if you want to help him, solve that problem for him. Helping him fix his issue with his expired card, or whatever the real problem is, would be a good thing to do. Allowing him to involve you in the transaction, would be a bad thing to do. Possible problems which might be caused by becoming directly involved in the transaction: -The relative is being scammed themselves, and doesn't realize it / doesn't realize the risks, and either wants you to take the risk, or simply thinks there is no risk but needs administrative help. -The person contacting you is not the relative - perhaps they are faking that person's identity, and are using your trust to defraud you. -The person is committing some form of fraud, money laundering, or worse, and is directly trying to defraud you in order to keep their hands clean. -The transaction may be perfectly legal, but is considered taxable in one or more countries. By getting involved, you might face tax filing obligations, or even tax payment obligations. -The transaction may be perfectly legal and legitimate, but might accidentally get picked up as potential fraud by a financial monitoring system, causing the funds to be held, and your account to be flagged for further investigation, creating headaches for you until it becomes resolved. There are possibly other ways that this can go awry, but these are the biggest possibilities I can think of. The only possible 'good' outcome here is that everything goes smoothly, and it works exactly as well as if your relative's "administrative problems" were solved first, and the money went through his own account. Handwaving about why your account is needed and his is faulty is a big red flag. If it is truly just an administrative issue on his end, help him fix that issue instead. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Solid reading/literature for investment/retirement/income taxes? | You bring up some very high level stuff, each of which can be the subject of a life's work. For taxes, I first read J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax. I actually read it cover to cover instead of using it as a reference guide. I hit topics that I'd otherwise have never looked up on purpose. Once you familiarize yourself with the current tax code, keeping up on changes to the code goes pretty well. As far as investing goes, William Bernstein has two titles, “The Four Pillars of Investing” and “The Intelligent Asset Allocator”. Others have liked “Personal Finance for Dummies” by Eric Tyson. These are great introductory books, the classic is “Security Analysis” by Graham & Dodd. Warren Buffet was a student of Benjamin Graham and he did fine applying these principals. For retirement, The Number by Lee Eisenberg was a good read. I consider retirement an extension of the investing education, only the money flow is reversed, withdrawals, no new deposits. Of course this is an oversimplification. In my own reading list, I include books such as “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds” by Charles MacKay and “The Great Crash 1929″ by John Kenneth Galbraith. Understanding how these bubbles happen is critical to a complete education. I'm convinced that when it comes to investing if I can teach my daughter to understand the concept of Risk and Reward and to understand there are certain common alerts to such bubbles, the simplest of which is the term "this time is different" as though a hundred years of market dynamics can change in a matter of a few years. Last, there are books like "Stop Acting Rich" by Dr Thomas Stanley. Not quite investing, per se, but a good read to get an idea of how we have a distorted view of certain signs of wealth. Keep reading, no harm in taking books out of the library and returning if the first chapter or two disappoints. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Advice on low-risk long-term strategy for extra cash? | So, you have $100k to invest, want a low-maintenance investment, and personal finance bores you to death. Oooohhh, investment companies are gonna love you. You'll hand them a wad of cash, and more or less say "do what you want." You're making someone's day. (Just probably not yours.) Mutual fund companies make money off of you regardless of whether you make money or not. They don't care one bit how carefully you look at your investments. As long as the money is in their hands, they get their fee. If I had that much cash, I'd be looking around for a couple of distressed homes in good neighborhoods to buy as rentals. I could put down payments on two of them, lock in fixed 30-year mortgages at 4% (do you realize how stupid low that is?) and plop tenants in there. Lots of tax write-offs, cash flow, the works. It's a 10% return if you learn about it and do it correctly. Or, there have been a number of really great websites that were sold on Flippa.com that ran into five figures. You could probably pay those back in a year. But that requires some knowledge, too. Anything worthwhile requires learning, maintenance and effort. You'll have to research stocks, mutual funds, bonds, anything, if you want a better than average chance of getting worthwhile returns (that is, something that beats inflation, which savings accounts and CDs are unlikely to do). There is no magic bullet. If someone does manage to find a magic bullet, what happens? Everyone piles on, drives the price up, and the return goes down. Your thing might not be real estate, but what is your thing? What excites you (i.e., doesn't bore you to death)? There are lots of investments out there, but you'll get out of it what you put into it. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Can the beta of a stock be used as a lagging indicator for the stock w.r.t the market | Just to be clear to start, beta is a statistical property. So if your beta is 0.8 over a period of time. Stock X moved on average 0.8 for a point move in the index. We might hope this property is persistent and it seems to be fairly persistent (predictable) but it doesn't have to be. Also it is important to note this is not a lag in time. Beta is a measure of the average size of a move in the stock at the same time as a move in the index. In your example both the stock and index are measured at end of day. You can say that the stock "lags" behind the index because it doesn't grow as quickly as the market when the market is growing, but this is not a lag in time just a lag in magnitude. People do occasionally calculate betas between a stock and lagged in time market prices, but this is not the commonly used meaning of beta. This might actually be a more useful measure as then you could bet on the future of the stock given what happened today in the market, but these "betas" tend to be much more unstable than the synchronized version and hard to trade on. When you calculated beta you choose a time scale, in this case daily. So if your calculation is on a day-to-day basis then you have only tested the relationship on a day-to-day basis not, for instance, on a week-to-week basis. Now day-to-day and week-to-week betas are often related and are generally reasonably close but they do not have to be. There can be longer term effects only picked up on the longer scale. Stock X could day-to-day with a (average) beta of 1 to the stock market, but could have even a negative beta year-to-year with the market if the stock is counter-cyclical to longer scale trends on the market. So beta can change with the time scale used in the calculation. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | why is the money withdrawn from traditional IRA taxed at the ordinary income tax rate? | In a Traditional IRA contributions are often tax-deductible. For instance, if a taxpayer contributes $4,000 to a traditional IRA and is in the twenty-five percent marginal tax bracket, then a $1,000 benefit ($1,000 reduced tax liability) will be realized for the year. So that's why they tax you as income, because they didn't tax that income before. If a taxpayer expects to be in a lower tax bracket in retirement than during the working years, then this is one advantage for using a Traditional IRA vs a Roth. Distributions are taxed as ordinary income. So it depends on your tax bracket UPDATE FOR COMMENT: Currently you may have heard on the news about "the fiscal cliff" - CNBC at the end of the year. This is due to the fact that the Bush tax-cuts are set to expire and if they expire. Many tax rates will change. But here is the info as of right now: Dividends: From 2003 to 2007, qualified dividends were taxed at 15% or 5% depending on the individual's ordinary income tax bracket, and from 2008 to 2012, the tax rate on qualified dividends was reduced to 0% for taxpayers in the 10% and 15% ordinary income tax brackets. After 2012, dividends will be taxed at the taxpayer's ordinary income tax rate, regardless of his or her tax bracket. - If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. - Reference - Wikipedia Capital Gains tax rates can be seen here - the Capital Gains tax rate is relative to your Ordinary Income tax rate For Example: this year long term gains will be 0% if you fall in the 15% ordinary tax bracket. NOTE: These rates can change every year so any future rates might be different from the current year. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | How exactly do dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) work? | I think Wikipedia offers a very good explanation: A dividend reinvestment program or dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) is an equity investment option offered directly from the underlying company. The investor does not receive quarterly dividends directly as cash; instead, the investor's dividends are directly reinvested in the underlying equity. The investor must still pay tax annually on his or her dividend income, whether it is received or reinvested. This allows the investment return from dividends to be immediately invested for the purpose of price appreciation and compounding, without incurring brokerage fees or waiting to accumulate enough cash for a full share of stock. So essentially, a dividend reinvestment plan is offered by companies directly, allowing investors to bypass brokerages, and immediately re-invests dividends rather than paying them out in cash. Investopedia also gives a straighforward definition: A plan offered by a corporation that allows investors to reinvest their cash dividends by purchasing additional shares or fractional shares on the dividend payment date. A DRIP is an excellent way to increase the value of your investment. Most DRIPs allow you to buy shares commission free and at a significant discount to the current share price. Most DRIPS don't allow reinvestments much lower than $10. I had a hard time finding a comprehensive listing of companies that offered DRPs (or DRIPs), but MyDollarPlan.com offers these suggestions: Finding a Dividend Reinvestment Plan: Computershare offers one-stop shopping for hundreds of dividend reinvestment plans. They offer a searchable list that can be filtered to easily find a dividend reinvestment plan that fits your needs. You can also use OneShare. Probably the best way to find out if a company offers a dividend reinvestment plan is to visit the company website. Most companies have an Investor Relations area that will highlight the various options available to shareowners. For example: Coca-Cola, Disney, and Wal-Mart. Hope this helps! @YMCbuzz |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Why would a company sell debt in order to buy back shares and/or pay dividends? | My answer is not specific, or even maybe applicable, to Microsoft. Companies don't want to cut dividends. So they have a fixed expense, but the cashflow that funds it might be quite lumpy, or cyclical, depending on the industry. Another, more general, issue is that taking on debt to retire shares is a capital allocation decision. A company needs capital to operate. This is why they went public in the first place, to raise capital. Debt is a cheaper form of capital than equity. Equity holders are last in line in a bankruptcy. Bondholders are at the front of the line. To compensate for this, equity holders require a larger return -- often called a hurdle rate. So why doesn't a company just use cheaper equity, and no debt? Some do. But consider that equity holders participate in the earnings, where bondholders just get the interest, nothing more. And because lenders don't participate in the potential upside, they introduce conditions (debt covenants) to help control their downside exposure. For a company, it's a balance, very much the same as personal finances. A reasonable amount of debt provides low-cost capital, which can be used to produce greater returns. But too much debt, and the covenants are breached, the debt is called due immediately, there's no cash to cover, and wham! bankruptcy. A useful measure, if a bit difficult to calculate, is a company's cost of capital, and the return on that capital. Cost of capital is a blended number taking both equity and debt into account. Good companies earn a return that is greater than their cost of capital. Seems obvious, but many companies don't succeed at this. In cases where this is persistent, the best move for shareholders would be for the company to dissolve and return all the capital. Unfortunately, as in the Railroad Tycoon example above, managers' incentives aren't always well aligned with shareholders, and they allocate capital in ways advantageous to themselves, and not the company. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Online transaction - Money taken out late | When processing credit/debit cards there is a choice made by the company on how they want to go about doing it. The options are Authorization/Capture and Sale. For online transactions that require the delivery of goods, companies are supposed to start by initially Authorizing the transaction. This signals your bank to mark the funds but it does not actually transfer them. Once the company is actually shipping the goods, they will send a Capture command that tells the bank to go ahead and transfer the funds. There can be a time delay between the two actions. 3 days is fairly common, but longer can certainly be seen. It normally takes a week for a gas station local to me to clear their transactions. The second one, a Sale is normally used for online transactions in which a service is immediately delivered or a Point of Sale transaction (buying something in person at a store). This action wraps up both an Authorization and Capture into a single step. Now, not all systems have the same requirements. It is actually fairly common for people who play online games to "accidentally" authorize funds to be transferred from their bank. Processing those refunds can be fairly expensive. However, if the company simply performs an Authorization and never issues a capture then it's as if the transaction never occurred and the costs involved to the company are much smaller (close to zero) I'd suspect they have a high degree of parents claiming their kids were never authorized to perform transactions or that fraud was involved. If this is the case then it would be in the company's interest to authorize the transaction, apply the credits to your account then wait a few days before actually capturing the funds from the bank. Depending upon the amount of time for the wait your bank might have silently rolled back the authorization. When it came time for the company to capture, then they'd just reissue it as a sale. I hope that makes sense. The point is, this is actually fairly common. Not just for games but for a whole host of areas in which fraud might exist (like getting gas). |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | US sanctions against foreign citizens | Are most big US based financial institutions and banks in such a close relationship with USCIS (United States Citizenship And Immigration Services) so they can easily request the information about market traders? Yes. They must be in order to enforce the laws required by the sanctions. What online broker would you suggest that probably won't focus on that dual citizenship matter? "Dual" citizenship isn't actually relevant here. Nearly anyone in the world can invest in US banks except for those few countries that the US has imposed sanctions against. Since you are a citizen of one of those countries, you are ineligible to participate. The fact that you are also a US citizen isn't relevant in this case. I believe the reasoning behind this is that the US doesn't encourage dual citizenship: The U.S. Government does not encourage dual nationality. While recognizing the existence of dual nationality and permitting Americans to have other nationalities, the U.S. Government also recognizes the problems which it may cause. Claims of other countries upon U.S. dual-nationals often place them in situations where their obligations to one country are in conflict with the laws of the other. In addition, their dual nationality may hamper efforts of the U.S. Government to provide consular protection to them when they are abroad, especially when they are in the country of their second nationality. If I had to guess, I'd say the thinking there is that if you (and enough other people that are citizens of that country) want to participate in something in the US that sanctions forbid, you (collectively) could try to persuade that country's government to change its actions so that the sanctions are lifted. Alternatively, you could renounce your citizenship in the other country. Either of those actions would help further the cause that the US perceives to be correct. What it basically boils down to is that even though you are a US citizen, your rights can be limited due to having another citizenship in a country that is not favorable in the current political climate. Thus there are pros and cons to having dual citizenship. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Employer skipped payments, should I allow them to defer payment until Jan 2017? | TL;DR: The difference is $230. Just for fun, and to illustrate how brackets work, let's look at the differences you could see from changing when you're paid based on the tax bracket information that Ben Miller provided. If you're paid $87,780 each year, then each year you'll pay $17,716 for a total of $35,432: $5,183 + $12,532 (25% of $50,130 (the amount over $37,650)) If you were paid nothing one year and then double salary ($175,560) the next, you'd pay $0 the first year and $42,193 the next: $18,558 + $23,634 (28% of $84,410 (the amount over $91,150)) So the maximum difference you'd see from shifting when you're paid is $6,761 total, $3,380 per year, or about 4% of your average annual salary. In your particular case, you'd either be paying $35,432 total, or $14,948 followed by $20,714 for $35,662 total, a difference of $230 total, $115 per year, less than 1% of average annual salary: $5,183 + $9,765 (25% of $39,060 (the amount $87,780 - $11,070 is over $37,650)) $18,558 + $2,156 (28% of $7,700 (the amount $87,780 + $11,070 is over $91,150)) |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Why might a robo-advisor service like Betterment be preferable to just buying a single well-performing index fund like SPY? | The reason diversification in general is a benefit is easily seen in your first graph. While the purple line (Betterment 100% Stock) is always below the blue line (S&P), and the blue line is the superior return over the entire period, it's a bit different if you retired in 2009, isn't it? In that case the orange line is superior: because its risk is much lower, so it didn't drop much during the major crash. Lowering risk (and lowering return) is a benefit the closer you get to retirement as you won't see as big a cumulative return from the large percentage, but you could see a big temporary drop, and need your income to be relatively stable (if you're living off it or soon going to). Now, you can certainly invest on your own in a diverse way, and if you're reasonably smart about it and have enough funds to avoid any fees, you can almost certainly do better than a managed solution - even a relatively lightly managed solution like Betterment. They take .15% off the top, so if you just did exactly the same as them, you would end up .15% (per year) better off. However, not everyone is reasonably smart, and not everyone has much in the way of funds. Betterment's target audience are people who aren't terribly smart about investing and/or have very small amounts of funds to invest. Plenty of people aren't able to work out how to do diversification on their own; while they probably mostly aren't asking questions on this site, they're a large percentage of the population. It's also work to diversify your portfolio: you have to make minor changes every year at a minimum to ensure you have a nicely balanced portfolio. This is why target retirement date portfolios are very popular; a bit higher cost (similar to Betterment, roughly) but no work required to diversify correctly and maintain that diversification. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Will I always be able to get a zero-interest credit card? | After looking at the comments, and your replies it seems that your mind is made up: "You will always be able to obtain 0% credit, and nothing bad will ever happen". Credit cards that offer 0% on balance transfers are very rare. Most have a transfer fee of some kind, which acts like an interest rate. This is a change that probably happened 10 years ago without much fanfare. From this you can draw a lesson: what changes will come in the future? This site and others a full of "tales of woe" where people were playing musical chairs with credit, and when the music stopped, there was no chairs in sight. Job loss, medical expenses, unexpected taxes, natural disasters can all effect one's ability to make payments on time and happen. Once payments start being missed or are late, things tend to avalanche from there. It has happened to me, and loved ones. The pain and suffering is not worth it. Get out of debt. You claim that you are investing the money instead of paying on the debt, and you are making the delta between your prevailing investment rate 7%. Did you include the balance transfer fee in your calculations? First off your investments could lose money. While 2015 was mostly flat, we have not had a correction in a long time. Some say we are long overdue. Secondly, how much money are we really talking about here? Say there is not a balance transfer fee, you could be guaranteed 7%, and you are floating $10K. Congratulations in this mythical scenario you just made $700. If $700 changes your life dramatically perhaps it is time for a second job. This way you can earn that every two weeks (working part time) rather than every year. Now that will really change your life. By applying this amount of mental energy to make $700, what opportunities are you missing? Pay off the debt, you will be much better off in the long run. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Why would anyone want to pay off their debts in a way other than “highest interest” first? | In some cases, it might be rational to pay low-interest debt first, because the consequences of defaulting on that debt are worse. Consider this simplified example. Suppose you have two debts: a low-interest mortgage, secured by your house, and a high-interest unsecured credit card debt, both of which are within a few years of being paid off. There is a chance that sometime between now and then, something will happen to disrupt your income (e.g. medical problems), and it won't be possible to make the payments on either loan. Defaulting on the credit card loan will result in a lower credit score and calls from collection agencies. Defaulting on the mortgage will result in the foreclosure or forced sale of your house, at best forcing you to move, and at worst leaving you homeless, at a time when you are also facing other (e.g. medical) problems. So you might rationally judge that losing your house is much worse than bad credit. Therefore, you might rationally conclude that it would be better to direct extra income toward paying down the mortgage, to increase the chances that, if and when an income disruption might occur, the mortgage would already be paid off. In other words, you shorten the window of time where income disruption results in foreclosure. You might decide that this increased security is worth the extra interest you will pay, compared to the strategy where you pay the high-interest loan first. This is a fairly special situation, but you asked "Why might it be a good idea to do this?", and I am just giving an example where it could rationally be considered a good idea. (Of course, in a real-life version of this example, there might be other options available, such as refinancing the mortgage. If you like, you could imagine a more extreme example where the lower-interest debt is owed to Joey Knuckles the loanshark, who will come and break your kneecaps if you miss a payment.) |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | In the stock market, why is the “open” price value never the same as previous day's “close”? | It's almost like why don't you wake up in the morning feeling exactly like you slept the earlier night? yeah, once in a while that'll happen, but it's not designed to be that way. Stuff happens. The close of the stock is what happened at 4 PM (for US stocks). The "open" is simply the first price ever, or an open price auction like NimChimpsky said. Most things that trade have an open/close cycle, even what seemingly trades all the time (some markets trade 23 hours). Forex trades in different exchanges which have overlapping timing but each market will have an open, high, low and close for each day - for what is the same underlying currency. Also, it's not exactly true that close<>open. Take the GS chart, Oct 1 2010 and Oct 4 2010 (there was a weekend in between). The Oct 1 close was the same as the Oct 4 open. Note that Oct 4 was a down day so it's in red - the open is the upper end of the body (not including the wick), and Oct 1 was an up day so its close was the upper end too. (Candles are drawn so that the open ends of the wicks are the High and Low of the period respectively, and the lower end of the body is the open if it was an up-day, meaning the stock closed higher than it opened, and the body in coloured green below. If the stock went down that day from the open, the body's in red and the lower end is the close. Vice-versa for the other end) The way to get to this: Go to yahoo finance, choose a stock, go to historical prices, click download data (you should have about 10 years of data), paste into excel, insert a formula to check if prev day's close = current day's open, and I'm sure you'll see at least one instance per stock. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What evidence exists for claiming that you cannot beat the market? | Will the investor beat the benchmark for a given period will follow a Bernoulli distribution -- each period is a coin toss, and heads mean the investor beat the market for that period. I can't prove the negative that there is no investor ever whose probability function p = 1, but you can statistically expect a number of individual investors with p ~ 0.5 to have a sequence of many heads in a row, as a function of the total population. By example, my father explained investment scams and hot-hand theory to me this way when I was younger: Imagine an investor newsletter which mails out to a mailing list of 1024 prospects (or alternately, a field of 1024 amateur investor bloggers in a challenge). Half the letters or bloggers state AAPL will go up this week, half that AAPL will go down this week. In the newsletter case, next week ignore the people we got wrong. In the blogger case, they're losers, so we don't pay attention to them. Next week, similar split: half newsletters or bloggers claim GOOG go up, half GOOG go down. This continues for a 10 week cycle. Now, in week 10: the newsletter has a prospect they have hit correct 10x in a row: how much will he pay for a subscription? Or, one amateur investor blogger has been on a 10 week winning streak and wins the challenge, so of course let's give her a CNBC show after Jim Cramer. No matter what, next week, this newsletter or investor is shooting 50-50. How do you know this person is not the statistically expected instance backed up by a pyramid of 1023 Bernoulli distribution losers? Alternately, if you think you're going to be the winner, you've got a 1/1024 shot. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Why are US target retirement funds weighted so heavily towards US stocks? | Excellent question, though any why question can be challenging to answer because it depends on the financial products in question. At least, I haven't seen many target date retirement funds that include a high percent of foreign stocks, so below explains the ones I've seen which are primarily US stocks. The United States (before the last twenty years) has been seen as a country of stability. This is not true anymore, and it's difficult for my generation to understand because we grew up in the U.S.A being challenged (and tend to think that China and India have always been powers), but when we read investors, like Benjamin Graham (who had significant influence with Warren Buffett), we can see this bias - the U.S.A to them is stable, and other countries are "risky." Again, with the national debt and the political game in our current time, it does not feel this way. But that bias is often reflect in financial instruments. The US Dollar is still the reserve currency, though it's influence is declining and I would expect it to decline. Contrary to my view (because I could be wrong here) is Mish, who argues that no one wants to have the reserve currency because having a reserve currency brings disadvantages (see here: Bogus Threats to US Reserve Currency Status: No Country Really Wants It!; I present this to show that my view could be wrong). Finally, there tends to be the "go with what you know." Many of these funds are managed by U.S. citizens, so they tend to have a U.S. bias and feel more comfortable investing their money "at home" (in fact a famous mutual fund manager, Peter Lynch, had a similar mentality - buy the company behind the stock and what company do we tend to know best? The ones around us.). One final note, I'm not saying this mentality is correct, just what the attitude is like. I think you may find that younger mutual fund managers tend to include more foreign stocks, as they've seen that different world. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | 60% Downpayment on house? | Keep in mind, this is a matter of preference, and the answers here are going to give you a look at the choices and the member's view on the positive/negative for each one. My opinion is to put 20% down (to avoid PMI) if the bank will lend you the full 80%. Then, buy the house, move in, and furnish it. Keep track of your spending for 2 years minimum. It's the anti-budget. Not a list of constraints you have for each category of spending, but a rear-view mirror of what you spend. This will help tell you if, in the new house, you are still saving well beyond that 401(k) and other retirement accounts, or dipping into that large reserve. At that point, start to think about where kids fit into your plans. People in million dollar homes tend to have child care that's 3-5x the cost the middle class has. (Disclosure - 10 years ago, our's cost $30K/year). Today, your rate will be about 4%, and federal marginal tax rate of 25%+, meaning a real cost of 3%. Just under the long term inflation rate, 3.2% over the last 100 years. I am 53, and for my childhood right through college, the daily passbook rate was 5%. Long term government debt is also at a record low level. This is the chart for 30 year bonds. I'd also suggest you get an understanding of the long term stock market return. Long term, 10%, but with periods as long as 10 years where the return can be negative. Once you are at that point, 2-3 years in the house, you can look at the pile of cash, and have 3 choices. We are in interesting times right now. For much of my life I'd have said the potential positive return wasn't worth the risk, but then the mortgage rate was well above 6-7%. Very different today. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Who can truly afford luxury cars? | Approximately 25% of all cars sold last year were leased, which is the highest on record. When you are leasing you don't own the car, instead you are basically renting it for a fixed term, and turning it back to the dealership. It is very cost effective, because the manufacturers have a keen interest in making lots of cars. They are often subsidizing the lease by giving incentives to the dealer. They are gambling on the future value of their cars. They can lose on that gamble. The car business has turned into a financial nightmare for the car companies; they have huge development costs as the cars become more like mobile computing platforms loaded with sensors, and software that is constantly changing. They can't hold a model for 20 years like Mercedes was able to do in the past. Now they have to constantly update their products. The only way to survive as a car maker is to pump out volume, and the leasing programs, which are quietly being underwritten by the manufacturers help them increase the production quantities, which helps lower the fixed development costs. If only the defense contractors could do this! they are stuck spending billions to build 20 planes, and so each one has a staggering price tag. In the future, the car companies that will survive are those that have terrific credit, and low borrowing costs. That means Japanese and Germans will own the car business entirely in the end, and countries with higher borrowing costs (like America and Brasil) will not be competitive. Luckily Ford is so frugal, due to the lingering spirit of its founder, that they can hold out. One thing strongly in favor of leasing is that you have zero maintenance costs typically. The repair risk is significant in luxury cars. When you buy a 10 year old BMW, and when the tranny goes, it costs a fortune. Having a superb car for 30 months for a few hundred bucks a month is something a lot of people enjoy doing. Who can blame them? you spend an hour or 2 a day in your car, and why not live in a nice place? |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Electric car lease or buy? | Electric does make a difference when considering whether to lease or buy. The make/model is something to consider. The state you live in also makes a difference. If you are purchasing a small electric compliance car (like the Fiat 500e), leasing is almost always a better deal. These cars are often only available in certain states (California and Oregon), and the lease deals available are very enticing. For example, the Fiat 500e is often available at well under $100/mo in a three-year lease with $0 down, while purchasing it would cost far more ($30k, minus credits/rebates = $20k), even when considering the residual value. If you want to own a Tesla Model S, I recommend purchasing a used car -- the market is somewhat flooded with used Teslas because some owners like to upgrade to the latest and greatest features and take a pretty big loss on their "old" Tesla. You can save a lot of money on a pre-owned Model S with relatively low miles, and the battery packs have been holding up well. If you have your heart set on a new Model S, I would treat it like any other vehicle and do the comparison of lease vs buy. One thing to keep in mind that buying a Model S before the end of 2016 will grandfather you into the free supercharging for life, which makes the car more valuable in the future. Right now (2016/2017) there is a $7500 federal tax credit when buying an electric vehicle. If you lease, the leasing company gets the credit, not you. The cost of the lease should indirectly reflect this credit, however. Some states have additional incentives. California has a $2500 rebate, for example, that you can receive even if you lease the vehicle. To summarize: a small compliance car often has very good reasons to lease. An expensive luxury car like the Tesla can be looked at like any other lease vs buy decision, and buying a used Model S may save the most money. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How will a 1099 work with an existing W-2? | You can do either a 1099 or a W-2. There is no limitations to the number of W-2s one can have in reporting taxes. Problems occur, with the IRS, when one "forgets" to report income. Even if one holds only one job at a time, people typically have more than one W-2 if they change jobs within the year. The W-2 is the simplest way to go and you may want to consider doing this if you do not intend to work this side business into significant income. However, a 1099 gig is preferred by many in some situations. For things like travel expenses, you will probably receive the income from these on a 1099, but you can deduct them from your income using a Schedule C. Along these lines you may be able to deduct a wide variety of other things like travel to and from the client's location, equipment such as computers and office supplies, and maybe a portion of your home internet bill. Also this opens up different retirement contributions schemes such as a simplified employee pension. This does come with some drawbacks, however. First your life is more complicated as things need to be documented to become actual business expenses. You are much more likely to be audited by the IRS. Your taxes become more complicated and it is probably necessary to employee a CPA to do them. If you do this for primary full time work you will have to buy your own benefits. Most telling you will have to pay both sides of social security taxes on most profits. (Keep in mind that a good account can help you transfer profits to dividends which will allow you to be taxed at 15% and avoid social security taxes.) So it really comes down to what you see this side gig expanding into and your goals. If you want to make this a real business, then go 1099, if you are just doing this for a fes months and a few thousand dollars, go W-2. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Closing a credit card with an annual fee without hurting credit score? | The two factors that will hurt you the most is the age of the credit account, and your available credit to debt ratio. Removing an older account takes that account out of the equation of calculating your overall credit score, which can hurt significantly, especially if that is the only, or one of just a couple, of open credit lines you have available. Reducing your available credit will make your current debt look bigger than what it was before you closed your account. Going over a certain percentage for your debt to available credit can make you look less favorable to lenders. [As stated above, closing a credit card does remove it from the credit utilization calculation which can raise your debt/credit ratio. It does not, however; affect the average age of credit cards. Even closed accounts stay on your credit report for ten years and are credited toward average age of cards. When the closed credit card falls off your report, only then, will the average age of credit cards be recalculated.] And may I suggest getting your free credit report from https://www.annualcreditreport.com . It's the only place considered 'official' to receive your free annual credit report as told by the FTC. Going to other 3rd party sites to pull your credit report can risk your information being traded or sold. EDIT: To answer your second point, there are numerous factors that banks and creditors will consider depending on the type of card you're applying for. The heavier the personal rewards (cash back, flyer miles, discounts, etc.) the bigger the stipulation. Some factors to consider are your income to debt ratio, income to available credit ratio, number of revolving lines of credit, debt to available credit ratio, available credit to debt ratio, and whether or not you have sufficient equity and/or assets to cover both your debt and available credit. They want to make sure that if you go crazy and max out all of your lines of credit, that you are capable of paying it all back in a sufficient amount of time. In other words, your volatility as a debt-consumer. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Given a certain yearly savings, how much can I spend on a capital improvement? NPV of future cash flow | The question states :- Our insurance company is offering a 30% discount on an $8200/year commercial policy, if we install sprinklers. The insurance is paid in two installments. ... This appears to mean six-monthly payments, so I'll make some comparison calculations using six-monthly loan repayments to keep things simple. Without the loan or sprinklers the insurance costs $4100 every six months. Using this loan payment formula, the calculation below shows, with the 30% discounted insurance, sprinkler maintenance and loan repayment, you would be paying $4655.28 every six months. The discount required to break even is 43.5%. I.e. rearranging the equation :- Alternatively, with the discount of 30% you would break even if the six-monthly repayment amount was $1030. Solving the payment equation for s gives an equation for the loan :- So with the 30% discount you would break even if the loan required was $25989. Checking by back-calculating the periodic payment amount, a :- Likewise we can keep the loan at $40000 and solve for t to find the break-even loan term :- (Note, in this formula Log denotes the natural logarithm.) Now we can set some values :- So with break-even payments the $40000 loan is paid off in just under 65.5 years. I.e. checking :- This just beats the $4100 cost of proceeding without the sprinklers. Notes If your loan repayment was monthly it would reduce the cost of the loan slightly. The periodic interest rate is calculated from the APR according to the method used in the EU and in some cases in US. The calculations above were run using Mathematica. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Can I get my property taxes lowered? | You most definitely can appeal the county's appraisal of your property. How to do so, and your odds of success will vary widely by your location, but I have successfully appealed the valuation on one of my rental properties. I asked my realtor to provide me with recent sales of comparable homes in the neighborhood & provided them along with my appeal as evidence of what I felt a reasonable valuation should be. One of three things will happen: 1) Your appeal will be accepted, 2) It will be denied, or 3) you will be asked to come in & plea your case in front of the county assessor. In my case, the county accepted my appeal without needing to testify. Look around your county assessor's website ... you will probably be able to find the form necessary for filing an appeal. If not, give them a call & they'll tell you the procedure. The county generally uses a simplistic statistical model to do their valuations. Little to no human time is spent reviewing your home's value, so it's quite possible for their valuation to be unreasonable. An appeal can take a bit of time & paperwork, but can definitely be worth the effort if the county's valuation is way off. Hope this helps! @mhoran_psprep Your point is well taken that in practice the relationship between sales prices & tax assessments is a bit more tenuous. The waters get muddy when property values have a large swing (like the past 5 years). When tax assessor's started seeing large drops in property values during the recession (and consequent drops in their budgets), I'm sure there was considerable pressure to prevent wholesale decreases in tax valuations. It's politically easier to "prop-up" falling valuations than to raise tax rates. However, the fact remains that the models that assessors use in determining property values are based on sales history - thus, I believe (and have found) that recent sales can be a persuasive piece of evidence in a property tax assessment appeal. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How does anyone make significant money on very low volume stocks? | Because swing trading isn't the only reason to buy a stock, and it's not the only way to make money on a stock. I do not have the expertise to make advice one way or the other, but I personally I feel swing trading is one of the worse ways to invest in the stock market. To answer your specific questions: In the previous post, I outlined a naive trade intended to make $1,000 off a $10k buy, but it was shown this would likely fail, even if the stock price would have increased by 10% had I not placed the trade. Another way to state this is that my trade would disrupt the stock price, and not in my favor at all. So, that means I'd have to settle for a smaller trade. If I bought $100 worth of the stock, that size of a buy wouldn't be too disruptive. I might succeed and get $10 out of the trade (10% of $100). But my trade fee was $8 or so... To summarize, you are completely correct that even hoping for gains of 10% on a consistent basis (in other words, after every single trade!) is totally unrealistic. You already seem to understand that swing trading on low-volume stocks is pointless. But your last question was... So how do people make any significant money trading low volume stocks--if they even do? I assume money is made, since the stocks are bought and sold. I have some guesses, but I'd like to hear from the experts. ... and in a comment: Then if no one does make significant money trading these stocks...what are they doing there on the market? The answer is that the buying and selling is mostly likely not by swing traders. It's by investors that believe in the company. The company is on the market because the company believes public trading to be an advantageous position for them to receive capital investments, and there are people out there who think that transaction makes sense. In other words, real investing. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Hypothetical: can taxes ever cause a net loss on otherwise-profitable stocks? | The original post's $16 has two errors: Here is the first scenario: . Tax Liability($) on Net . Cash # of Price Paper Realized Value Time: ($) Shares ($/sh) Profits Profits ($) 1. Start with: 100 - n/a - - 100 2. After buy 10@10$/sh: - 10 10 - - 100 3. Before selling: - 10 12 (5) - 115 4. After sell 10@12$/sh: 120 - n/a - (5) 115 5. After buy 12@10$/sh: - 12 10 - (5) 115 6. Before selling: - 12 12 (6) (5) 133 7. After sell 12@12$/sh: 144 - n/a - (11) 133 8. After buy 14@10$/sh: 4 14 10 - (11) 133 9. Before selling: 4 14 12 (7) (11) 154 10.After sell 14@12$/sh: 172 - n/a - (18) 154 At this point, assuming that all of the transactions occurred in the same fiscal year, and the realized profits were subject to a 25% short-term capital gains tax, you would owe $18 in taxes. Yes, this is 25% of $172 - $100. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Taxes on selling stock | @BlackJack does a good answer of addressing the gains and when you are taxed on them and at what kind of rate. Money held in a brokerage account will usually be in a money-market fund, so you would own taxes on the interest it earned. There is one important consideration that must be understood for capitol Losses. This is called the Wash Sale Rule. This rule comes into affect if you sell a stock at a LOSS, and buy shares of the same stock within 30 days (before or after) the sale. A common tactic used to minimize taxes paid is to 'capture losses' when they occur, since these can be used to offset gains and lower your taxes. This is normally done by selling a stock in which you have a LOSS, and then either buying another similar stock, or waiting and buying back the stock you sold. However, if you are intending to buy back the same stock, you must not 'trigger' the Wash Sale Rule or you are forbidden to take the loss. Examples. Lets presume you own 1000 shares of a stock and it's trading 25% below where you bought it, and you want to capture the loss to use on your taxes. This can be a very important consideration if trading index ETF's if you have a loss in something like a S&P500 ETF, you would likely incur a wash sale if you sold it and bought a different S&P500 ETF from another company since they are effectively the same thing. OTOH, if you sold an S&P500 ETF and bought something like a 'viper''total stock market' ETF it should be different enough to not trigger the wash sale rule. If you are trying to minimize the taxes you pay on stocks, there are basically two rules to follow. 1) When a gain is involved, hold things at least a year before selling, if at all possible. 2) Capture losses when they occur and use to offset gains, but be sure not to trigger the wash sale rule when doing so. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What is the Difference between Life Insurance and ULIP? | ULIP insurance plan ULIP is Unit Linked Insurance Plan. The premium you pay, a small part goes towards covering life insurance. The Balance is invested into Stock Markets. Most ULIP would give you an option to choose from Debt Funds [100% safe buy low returns 5-7%] or Equity [High Risks, Returns can be around 15%]. Or a mix of both. ULIP are not a good way to save money. There are quite a few hidden fees that actually reduce the return. So notionally even if returns shown are great, in effect it is quite less. For example the premium you pay in first year, say Rs 10,000/- Rs 2,500/- goes towards commission. And say Rs 100 goes towards insurance. Balance Rs 7,400/- units are purchased in your account. Even if these grow by 20%, you are still in loss. Ofcousre, the commissions go down year after year and stop at 5%. Then there is fund management fees that you don't get to see. There is maintenance fee that is deduced from your balance. Thus the entire method of charging is not transparent. Life insurance from LIC There are broadly 2 types of Life Insurance plans Money Back / Endowment Plan. The concept here is again same, you pay a premium and part of it goes toward Insurance. The balance LIC invests in safe bonds. Every year a bonus is declared; generally less than Bank rate. At the end of the plan you get more than what you paid in premium. However if you had kept the same in Bank FD, you would have got more money back. So if you die, your nominee would get Insurance plus bonus. If you survive you get all the accumulated bonus. Pure Term Plan. Here the premium is quite less for the sum insured. Here if you die, your nominee would get insurance. If you survive you don't get anything. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Tax rules for United States citizens living in the US but being paid from outside the US | You can and are supposed to report self-employment income on Schedule C (or C-EZ if eligible, which a programmer likely is) even when the payer isn't required to give you 1099-MISC (or 1099-K for a payment network now). From there, after deducting permitted expenses, it flows to 1040 (for income tax) and Schedule SE (for self-employment tax). See https://www.irs.gov/individuals/self-employed for some basics and lots of useful links. If this income is large enough your tax on it will be more than $1000, you may need to make quarterly estimated payments (OR if you also have a 'day job' have that employer increase your withholding) to avoid an underpayment penalty. But if this is the first year you have significant self-employment income (or other taxable but unwithheld income like realized capital gains) and your economic/tax situation is otherwise unchanged -- i.e. you have the same (or more) payroll income with the same (or more) withholding -- then there is a 'safe harbor': if your withholding plus estimated payments this year is too low to pay this year's tax but it is enough to pay last year's tax you escape the penalty. (You still need to pay the tax due, of course, so keep the funds available for that.) At the end of the first year when you prepare your return you will see how the numbers work out and can more easily do a good estimate for the following year(s). A single-member LLC or 'S' corp is usually disregarded for tax purposes, although you can elect otherwise, while a (traditional) 'C' corp is more complicated and AIUI out-of-scope for this Stack; see https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/business-structures for more. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | I want to invest in a U.S.-based company with unquoted stocks, but I am a foreigner. How to do this? | The recommendation is not to make the investment. In general, a company does not have to sell their shares to you or allow you to become an investor, because, as you have stated, it is a private company not quoted on the stock market. If everyone were trustworthy, you could buy the tools for $11000 -- so that you own the tools -- and sign a lease of the tools to the company whereby they pay you $X/month. The lease should be reviewed by a lawyer before it is signed, and perhaps give the buyer the right to demand back the tools at any time. However, even this arrangement is very risky, because the "company" could simply steal or damage the tools and disappear. It is not an investment that I would make, because it sounds too good to be true. $2800/mo steady cash flow for $11,000 invested. No, I don't think so. The following information may also be useful, either to you, or future readers: If you still want to make this investment, then you should know that: The offering for sale of shares by companies located in the USA is subject to a wild array of complex laws. This is true in many other countries as well. These laws, called securities laws or regulations, can require certain disclosures, require that investors have a high net worth so that they can afford to lose the money or conduct their own investigations and legal actions, or require that the investors know the company founders personally, and can prohibit or limit resale by the buyer/investor. Promoters who say you can still invest and are ignoring or disobeying the securities laws are being at least negligent, but more likely are dishonest and probably criminal. Even if you trust in the investment, can you trust negligent managers to do a good job executing that investment? What about dishonest managers? What about criminals and thieves? |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | When is the right time to buy a car and/or a house? | My recommendation is to pay off your student loans as quickly as possible. It sounds like you're already doing this but don't incur any other large debts until you have this taken care of. I'd also recommend not buying a car, especially an expensive one, on credit or lease either. Back during the dotcom boom I and many friends bought or leased expensive cars only to lose them or struggle paying for them when the bottom dropped out. A car instantly depreciates and it's quite rare for them to ever gain value again. Stick with reliable, older, used cars that you can purchase for cash. If you do borrow for a car, shop around for the best deal and avoid 3+ year terms if at all possible. Don't lease unless you have a business structure where this might create a clear financial advantage. Avoid credit cards as much as possible although if you do plan to buy a house with a mortgage you'll need to maintain some credit history. If you have the discipline to keep your balance small and paid down you can use a credit card to build credit history. However, these things can quickly get out of hand and you'll wonder why you suddenly owe $10K, $20K or even more on them so be very careful with them. As for the house (speaking of US markets here), save up for at least a 20% down payment if you can. Based on what you said, this would be about $20-25K. This will give you a lot more flexibility to take advantage of deals that might come your way, even if you don't put it all into the house. "Stretching" to buy a house that's too expensive can quickly lead to financial ruin. As for house size, I recommend purchasing a 4 bedroom house even if you aren't planning on kids right away. It will resell better and you'll appreciate having the extra space for storage, home office, hobbies, etc. Also, life has a way of changing your plans for having kids and such. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Why do people always talk about stocks that pay high dividends? | Someone who buys a stock is fundamentally buying a share of all future dividends, plus the future liquidation value of the company in the event that it is liquidated. While some investors may buy stocks in the hope that they will be able to find other people willing to pay more for the stock than they did, that's a zero sum game. The only way investors can make money in the aggregate is if either stocks pay dividends or if the money paid for company assets at liquidation exceeds total net price for which the company sold shares. One advantage of dividends from a market-rationality perspective is that dividend payments are easy to evaluate than company value. Ideally, the share price of a company should match the present per-share cash value of all future dividends and liquidation, but it's generally impossible to know in advance what that value will be. Stock prices may sometimes rise because of factors which increase the expected per-share cash value of future dividends and liquidations. In a sane market, rising prices on an item will reduce people's eagerness to buy and increase people's eagerness to sell. Unfortunately, in a marketplace where steady price appreciation is expected the feedback mechanisms responsible for stability get reversed. Rapidly rising prices act as a red flag to buyers--unfortunately, bulls don't see red flags as signal to stop, but rather as a signal to charge ahead. For a variety of reasons including the disparate treatment of dividends and capital gains, it's often not practical for a company to try to stabilize stock prices through dividends and stock sales. Nonetheless, dividends are in a sense far more "real" than stock price appreciation, since paying dividends generally requires that companies actually have sources of revenues and profits. By contrast, it's possible for stock prices to go through the roof for companies which have relatively few assets of value and no real expectation of becoming profitable businesses, simply because investors see rising stock prices as a "buy" signal independent of any real worth. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What are some time tested passive income streams? | There are lots of different ways to generate passive income. What is Passive Income? Basically it is income you receive without having to consistently work for it i.e. paid to do your day job or get paid by the hour; instead you do the work once and then receive ongoing payments like a recording artist getting paid royalties or a book author etc... Online Passive income Also some online business models can be great ways to generate passive income, you set up an automated system online to drive traffic and sell products either as the merchant or an affiliate and get paid regularly without having to do any more work... You just need to use SEO or PPC or media buys or online advertising to generate the automated traffic to your website which will have special landing pages and sales funnels that do the conversion and selling for you. If you are an affiliate you don't even have to handle any products, packaging, delivering etc... And if it’s a digital product like software or information products they can be sent straight to the customers automatically online then you can set up a system that can generate true passive income. Time consuming or expensive! However the above mentioned methods of generating passive income tend to require a lot of work or special skills, talent or knowledge and can be expensive or time consuming to set up. Preferred Method Therefore for many people the preferred passive income method is fully-managed hands free property investing or other types of investing for that matter. But for people who want full ownership of the income generating asset then property investing is the best as they can sell and have control over the capital invested, whereas investing in a business for example will have a lot of other variables to consider, like the business sector, the market factors, the management team and even down to individual employee performance. So in my opinion, if you have the money to invest then fully-managed hands free buy-to-let property investing is one of the best types of passive income available to us today. Some of the most popular income generating property assets today in the UK include • Student property • Care Homes • Residential buy-to-let |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Do I need to start a 529 plan for each child (2 separate plans), or can I just open one 529 plan and let both children use it? | MrChrister makes some good points, but I saw his invitation to offer a counter opinion. First, there is a normal annual deposit limit of $13,000 per parent or donee. This is the gift limit, due to rise to $14,000 in 2013. If your goal is strictly to fund college, and this limit isn't an issue for you, the one account may be fine unless both kids are in school at the same time. In that case, you're going to need to change beneficiaries every year to assign withdrawals properly. But, as you mention, there's gift money that your considering depositing to the account. In this case, there's really a legal issue. The normal 529 allows changes in beneficiary, and gifts to your child need to be held for that child in an irrevocable arrangement such as a UTMA account. There is a 529 flavor that provides for no change of beneficiary, a UTMA 529. Clearly, in that case, you need separate accounts. In conclusion, I think the single account creates more issues than it potentially solves. If the true gift money from others is minimal, maybe you should just keep it in a regular account. Edit - on further reflection, I strongly suggest you keep the relatives' gifts in a separate account, and when the kids are old enough to have legitimate earned income, use this money to open and deposit to Roth IRAs. They can deposit the lesser of their earned income or $5000 in 2012, $5500 in 2013. This serves two goals - avoiding the risk of gift money being 'stolen' from one child for benefit of the other, and putting it into an account that can help your children long term, but not impact college aid as would a simple savings or brokerage account. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What is a typical investment portfolio made up of? | An investment portfolio is typically divided into three components: All three of those can be accessed through mutual funds or ETFs. A 401(k) will probably have a small set of mutual funds for you to pick from. Mutual funds may charge you silly expenses if you pick a bad one. Look at the prospectus for the expense ratio. If it's over 1% you're definitely paying too much. If it's over 0.5% you're probably paying too much. If it's less than 0.1% you have a really good deal. US stocks are generally the core holding until you move into retirement (or get close to spending the money on something else if it's not invested for retirement). International stocks are riskier than US stocks, but provide opportunity for diversification and better returns than the US stocks. Bonds, or fixed-income investments, are generally very safe, but have limited opportunities for returns. They tend to do better when stocks are doing poorly. When you've got a while to invest, you should be looking at riskier investments; when you don't, you should be looking for safer investments. A quick (and rough) rule of thumb is that "your age should match the portion of your portfolio in bonds". So if you're 50 years old and approaching retirement in 15 years or so, you should have about 50% in bonds. Roughly. People whose employment and future income is particularly tied to one sector of the market would also do well to avoid investing there, because they already are at risk if it performs badly. For instance, if you work in the technology sector, loading up on tech stocks is extra risky: if there's a big bust, you're not just out of a job, your portfolio is dead as well. More exotic options are available to diversify a portfolio: While many portfolios could benefit from these sorts of holdings, they come with their own advantages and disadvantages and should be researched carefully before taking a significant stake in them. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | For very high-net worth individuals, does it make sense to not have insurance? | There are 2 maxims that help make sense of insurance: Following those 2 rules, "normal" insurance makes sense. Can't afford to replace your car? insure it. Can afford to lose your TV? Don't insure it. People with a net worth in the low millions have very similar insurance needs to the middle class. For example, they might be able to afford a new car when they total it, but they probably can't afford to pay for the long term care of the person they accidentally ran over. Similarly, they probably need to insure their million dollar house, just like average people insure more affordable housing. "Very wealthy" people still have the same basic choices, but for different assets. If you are a billionaire, then you might not bother to insure your $30k childhood home or your fleet vehicles, but you probably would insure your $250m mansion, your $100m yacht and your more pricey collectible cars. It's also worth noting that "very wealthy" people are at much higher risk of being sued for negligence or personal injury. As such, they are more likely to purchase personal liability or umbrella insurance coverage to protect against such risks. Multi-million-dollar personal injury suits would never be filed against a poorer person simply because they couldn't afford to pay even the plaintiff's lawyer fees when they lost the court case. Insurance also makes sense when the insurance company is likely to (grossly) underestimate the risk they are taking. For example, if I am a really bad driver, but i have a clean record thanks to my army of lawyers, then insurance might actually be a good deal for me even on average. To take the "very wealthy" stereotypes to the extreme, perhaps my eccentric billionaire neighbor and I are in an escalating feud which I think will result in my butler "accidentally" running his car into my neighbor's precious 1961 Ferrari. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Should the poor consider investing as a means to becoming rich? | What could a small guy with $100 do to make himself not poor To answer the question directly, not much. Short of investing in something at the exact moment before it goes bananas, then reinvesting into a bigger stock and bigger etc, it's super high risk. A better way is to sacrifice some small things, less coffee, less smokes, less going out partying so that instead of having $100, you have $100 a week. This puts you into a situation where you can save enough to become a deposit on an appreciating asset (choose your own asset class, property in AU for me). Take out a loan for as much as you can for your $100 a week payment and make it interest only with an offset against it, distributions from shares can either be reinvested or put into the offset or in the case of property, rent can be put against the offset, pretty soon you end up with a scenario where you have cash offsetting a loan down to nothing but you still have access to the cash, invest into another place and revalue your asset, you can take out any equity that has grown and put that also into your offset. Keep pulling equity and using the money from the offset as deposits on other assets (it kind of works really well on property) and within 15 years you can build an empire with a passive income to retire on. The biggest thing the rich guys get that the poor guys don't is that debt is GOOD, use someone else's money to buy an appreciating asset then when you pay it back eventually, you own the growth. Use debt to buy more debt for exponential growth. Of course, you need to also invest your time to research what you are investing in, you need to know when you make the decision to buy that it will appreciate, it's no good just buying off a tip, you may as well drop your money on the horses if you want to play it like that. Fortunately, one thing we all have in common regardless of our money is time, we have time which we can invest. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Should I invest in the pre-IPO company stock offered by my employer? | Whether it's wise or not depends on what you think and what you should consider are the risks both ways. What are the risks? For Let's say that the company produces great value and its current price and initial price are well below what it's worth. By investing some of your money in the company, you can take advantage of this value and capitalize off of it if the market recognizes this value too, or when the market does (if it's a successful company it will be a matter of when). Other reasons to be for it are that the tech industry is considered a solid industry and a lot of money is flowing into it. Therefore, if this assumption is correct, you may assume that your job is safe even if your investment doesn't pay off (meaning, you don't lose income, but your investment may not be a great move). Against Let's say that you dump a lot of money into your company and invest in the stock. You're being paid by the company, you're taking some of that money and investing it in the company, meaning that, depending on how much you make outside the company, you are increasing your risk of loss if something negative happens to the company (ie: it fails). Other reasons to be against it are just the opposite as above: due to the NSA, some analysts (like Mish, ZeroHedge, and others) think that the world will cut back on doing IT business with the United States, thus the tech industry will take a major hit over the next decade. In addition to that, Jesse Colombo (@TheBubbleBubble) on Twitter is predicting that there's another tech bubble and it will make a mess when it pops (to be fair to Colombo, he was one of analysts who predicted the housing bubble and his predictions on trading are often right). Finally, there is a risk of lost money and there is also a risk of lost opportunity. Looking at your past investments, which generally hurt more? That might give you a clue what to do. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Understanding highly compensated employees within 401ks | HCE is defined as being above 120k$ or in the top 20 % of the company. The exact cutoff point might be different for each company. Typically, only the base salary is considered for that, but it's the company's (and 401(k)-plan's) decision. The IRS does not require HCE treatment; the IRS requires that 401(k) plans have a 'fair' distribution of usage between all employees. Very often, employees with lower income save (over-proportionally) less in their 401(k), and there is a line where the 401(k) plan is no longer acceptable to the IRS. HCE is a way for companies to ensure this forced balance; by limiting the amount of 401(k) savings for HCE, the companies ensure that the share of all contributions by below-HCE is appropriate. They will calculate/define the HCE cutoff point so that the required distribution is surely achieved. One of the consequences is that when you move over the HCE cutoff point, you can suddenly save a lot less in your 401(k). Nothing can be done about that. See this IRS page: https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-participant-employee/definitions Highly Compensated Employee - An individual who: Owned more than 5% of the interest in the business at any time during the year or the preceding year, regardless of how much compensation that person earned or received, or For the preceding year, received compensation from the business of more than $115,000 (if the preceding year is 2014; $120,000 if the preceding year is 2015 or 2016), and, if the employer so chooses, was in the top 20% of employees when ranked by compensation. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | How credible is Stansberry's video “End of America”? | Predictions, especially doomsday predictions, can go wrong quickly. I would be careful of anyone calling an "end" to a country like the U.S., especially, if they have something to gain and a history of being wrong. On the other hand, someone warning of something with a past of financial credibility can be quite useful. For instance, compare Frank Stansberry to Jesse Colombo (@TheBubbleBubble on Twitter). Jesse was one of the few who predicted the financial crisis in 2004 and is currently warning of new bubbles (ie: the higher education bubble) - even admitting to profiting off of some of them and encouraging others to do the same. However, his assertions can be investigated to verify accuracy, but they are hardly the end of the end (in fact, Jesse likes to boast that he's an optimist and thinks eventually we'll usher in a Golden Age). Frank Stansberry, on the other hand, doesn't seem to carry the credibility; a brief internet search generated some issues he's had with the SEC about misleading investors. (Completely forgot to add, Mike Shedlock - Mish - also has made some predictions that have come true and clashed with some other financial advisers over inflation vs. deflation. While people were screaming "HYPER-INFLATION" back in 2008-2009, Mish constantly attacked them for being wrong, and has continued to be right. Some of his political views, of course, aren't popular, but some of his financial predictions have been stellar.) Anyone who warns of anything should always be checked out for both what they've said, what they are currently saying, and what their agenda is. As one of my mentors warned me, everyone has an agenda and that's not always bad - their agenda may align with yours, just make sure it does. [On a humorous side note, my father has predicted the end of the world every six months since 1994.] |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Taxes: Sold House this Year, Buying Next Year | When you sell your primary residence, you are required to capitalize any loss or gain at that point; you do not carry over your loss or gain (as you might in an investment property). As such, the timing of the purchase of the next house is not relevant in this discussion: you gained however much you gained already. This changed from the other (rollover) method in 1997 (see this bankrate article for more details.) However, as discussed in IRS Tax Topic 701, you can exclude up to $250,000 (single or filing separately) or $500,000 (married filing jointly) of gain if it is your primary residence and meets a few requirements (mostly, that you owned it for at least 2 years in the past 5 years, and similarly used it as your main home for at least 2 years of the past 5 years). So given you reported 25% gain, as long as your house is under a million dollars or so, you're fine (and if it's over a million dollars, you probably should be paying a CPA for this stuff). For California state tax, it looks like it is the same (see this Turbotax forum answer for a good explanation and links to this California Franchise Tax Board guide which confirms it: For sale or exchanges after May 6, 1997, federal law allows an exclusion of gain on the sale of a personal residence in the amount of $250,000 ($500,000 if married filing jointly). The taxpayer must have owned and occupied the residence as a principal residence for at least 2 of the 5 years before the sale. California conforms to this provision. However, California taxpayers who served in the Peace Corps during the 5 year period ending on the date of the sale may reduce the 2 year period by the period of service, not to exceed 18 months. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | What to do with south african currency free fall | Use other currencies, if available. I'm not familiar with the banking system in South Africa; if they haven't placed any currency freezes or restrictions, you might want to do this sooner than later. In full crises, like Russian and Ukraine, once the crisis worsened, they started limiting purchases of foreign currencies. PayPal might allow currency swaps (it implies that it does at the bottom of this page); if not, I know Uphold does. Short the currency Brokerage in the US allow us to short the US Dollar. If banks allow you to short the ZAR, you can always use that for protection. I looked at the interest rates in the ZAR to see how the central bank is offsetting this currency crisis - WOW - I'd be running, not walking toward the nearest exit. A USA analogy during the late 70s/early 80s would be Paul Volcker holding interest rates at 2.5%, thinking that would contain 10% inflation. Bitcoin Comes with significant risks itself, but if you use it as a temporary medium of exchange for swaps - like Uphold or with some bitcoin exchanges like BTC-e - you can get other currencies by converting to bitcoin then swapping for other assets. Bitcoin's strength is remitting and swapping; holding on to it is high risk. Commodities I think these are higher risk right now as part of the ZAR's problem is that it's heavily reliant on commodities. I looked at your stock market to see how well it's done, and I also see that it's done poorly too and I think the commodity bloodbath has something to do with that. If you know of any commodity that can stay stable during uncertainty, like food that doesn't expire, you can at least buy without worrying about costs rising in the future. I always joke that if hyperinflation happened in the United States, everyone would wish they lived in Utah. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How to start personal finances? | A few practical thoughts: A practical thing that helps me immensely not to loose important paperwork (such as bank statements, bills, payroll statement, all those statements you need for filing tax return, ...) is: In addition to the folder (Aktenordner) where the statements ultimately need to go I use a Hängeregistratur. There are also standing instead of hanging varieties of the same idea (may be less expensive if you buy them new - I got most of mine used): you have easy-to-add-to folders where you can just throw in e.g. the bank statement when it arrives. This way I give the statement a preliminary scan for anything that is obviously grossly wrong and throw it into the respective folder (Hängetasche). Every once in a while I take care of all my book-keeping, punch the statements, file them in the Aktenordner and enter them into the software. I used to hate and never do the filing when I tried to use Aktenordner only. I recently learned that it is well known that Aktenordner and Schnellhefter are very time consuming if you have paperwork arriving one sheet at a time. I've tried different accounting software (being somewhat on the nerdy side, I use gnucash), including some phone apps. Personally, I didn't like the phone apps I tried - IMHO it takes too much time to enter things, so I tend to forget it. I'm much better at asking for a sales receipt (Kassenzettel) everywhere and sticking them into a calendar at home (I also note cash payments for which I don't have a receipt as far as I recall them - the forgotten ones = difference ends up in category "hobby" as they are mostly the beer or coke after sports). I was also to impatient for the cloud/online solutions I tried (I use one for business, as there the archiving is guaranteed to be according to the legal requirements - but it really takes far more time than entering the records in gnucash). |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | What is today's price of 15 000 Euro given 15 years ago? | What you are positioning as a loan was not a loan at all. Your father bought something to be delivered in the future. Your aunt does not want to deliver it, so she should buy it back at whatever the current market value is. What is the price that your dad believes her share of the inheritance is currently worth? Is that based on actual appraisals and some sort of objective audit? If so, your aunt doesn't have much of a case. If not, then she could seek an audit to bolster her bargaining position. How much did your aunt benefit from having a place to live for the last 15 years. Was that benefit greater than some larger amount of money at an unknown future date? That's probably why she sold her inheritance 15 years ago. Now that the inheritance looks like it is going to be available soon, she wants to trade back after having enjoyed the use of your father's money. That might be okay, but simply paying back the original sum with inflation, but without interest, doesn't seem fair to your father. She may not be able to afford to give any more than what she is offering, in which case, she might want to consider offering the original sum now and some portion of her inheritance as interest on that original sum. I'm not taking sides in this one. If it were one of my siblings, I'd be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and take a smaller amount back if I felt that the lesson was learned (and if I felt that he/she would make wise use of my gift to him/her). I have no idea what your father's current economic situation is, nor am I aware of any other baggage that might influence his feelings about his sister. It's as likely as not that money isn't really what is bothering him, in which case, the amount she repays may have little to do with bridging the divide between them. You might need to ask different questions in the Interpersonal Skills stack if you want to help your father feel better. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | How can I escalate a credit dispute when the bureau “confirms” the item? | I was I a similar position as you, and sometimes credit bureaus might be difficult to deal with, especially when high amounts of money are involved. To make the long story short, someone opened a store credit card under my name and made a charge of around 3k. After reporting this to the bureaus, they did not want to remove the account from my credit report citing that the claim was "frivolous". After filing a police report, the police officer gave me the phone number for the fraud department of this store credit card, and after they investigated, they removed the account from my credit. I would suggest to do the following: Communicating with Creditors and Debt Collectors You have the right to: Stop creditors and debt collectors from reporting fraudulent accounts. After you give them a copy of a valid identity theft report, they may not report fraudulent accounts to the credit reporting companies. Get copies of documents related to the theft of your identity, like transaction records or applications for new accounts. Write to the company that has the documents, and include a copy of your identity theft report. You also can tell the company to give the documents to a specific law enforcement agency. Stop a debt collector from contacting you. In most cases, debt collectors must stop contacting you after you send them a letter telling them to stop. Get written information from a debt collector about a debt, including the name of the creditor and the amount you supposedly owe. If a debt collector contacts you about a debt, request this information in writing. I know that you said that the main problem was that your credit account was combined with another. But there might be a chance that identity theft was involved. If this is the case, and you can prove it, then you might have access to more tools to help you. For example, you can file a report with the FTC, and along with a police report, this can be a powerful tool in stopping these charges. Feel free to go to the identitytheft.gov website for more information. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What is the best asset allocation for a retirement portfolio, and why? | It's all about risk. These guidelines were all developed based on the risk characteristics of the various asset categories. Bonds are ultra-low-risk, large caps are low-risk (you don't see most big stocks like Coca-Cola going anywhere soon), foreign stocks are medium-risk (subject to additional political risk and currency risk, especially so in developing markets) and small-caps are higher risk (more to gain, but more likely to go out of business). Moreover, the risks of different asset classes tend to balance each other out some. When stocks fall, bonds typically rise (the recent credit crunch being a notable but temporary exception) as people flock to safety or as the Fed adjusts interest rates. When stocks soar, bonds don't look as attractive, and interest rates may rise (a bummer when you already own the bonds). Is the US economy stumbling with the dollar in the dumps, while the rest of the world passes us by? Your foreign holdings will be worth more in dollar terms. If you'd like to work alternative asset classes (real estate, gold and other commodities, etc) into your mix, consider their risk characteristics, and what will make them go up and down. A good asset allocation should limit the amount of 'down' that can happen all at once; the more conservative the allocation needs to be, the less 'down' is possible (at the expense of the 'up'). .... As for what risks you are willing to take, that will depend on your position in life, and what risks you are presently are exposed to (including: your job, how stable your company is and whether it could fold or do layoffs in a recession like this one, whether you're married, whether you have kids, where you live). For instance, if you're a realtor by trade, you should probably avoid investing too much in real estate or it'll be a double-whammy if the market crashes. A good financial advisor can discuss these matters with you in detail. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Is the Canadian Securities Course (CSC) enough to get started in the finance industry in Canada? | Wikipedia says "The Canadian Securities Course (CSC) offered by the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI) is the initial course required for becoming licensed to work within the Canadian securities industry (outside Quebec) as a securities dealer or securities agent." Src: Candian Securities Course EfficientMarket Canada adds " You require it and further courses for other jobs in the investment industry. Generally some work experience is also required. All of this is governed by various self-regulatory agencies. The material in the course is strong on money making products, and fairly weak on material that would actually protect a consumer from harm. Passing the course is very little indication that you understand what's important about investing, for example, you won't be taught much of anything about the theory of investment, or the markets, or things like the efficient market hypothesis." Src: EfficientMarket.ca on the CSC So it appears that the CSC is necessary to work as certain types of financial agencies. That being said, I doubt it will be enough to get your foot in the door. This seems more like a prerequisite rather than a true qualification, so you'll be competing with MBAs/Finance students and other people who either have experience or training in the financial industry. I'd recommend you look into the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) certification as that will provide you with a rigorous knowledge of financial theory as well as asset management, which seems more appropriate for what you'd like to do. From there you'll have to network like crazy and leverage your experience to get in at a Canadian financial firm and eventually wealth management. So yes, I suppose a CSC is a good first step but more will certainly be required and I doubt it will be enough to land you a full time position. Another important factor is age - nobody expects undergrads to have extensive certifications or experience, but it's harder for a 35 year old to enter a new industry, especially finance. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Investment for young expatriate professionals | That's a broad question, but I can throw some thoughts at you from personal experience. I'm actually an Australian who has worked in a couple of companies but across multiple countries and I've found out first hand that you have a wealth of opportunities that other people don't have, but you also have a lot of problems that other people won't have. First up, asset classes. Real estate is a popular asset class, but unless you plan on being in each of these countries for a minimum of one to two years, it would be seriously risky to invest in rental residential or commercial real estate. This is because it takes a long time to figure out each country's particular set of laws around real estate, plus it will take a long time to get credit from the local bank institutions and to understand the local markets well enough to select a good location. This leaves you with the classics of stocks and bonds. You can buy stocks and bonds in any country typically. So you could have some stocks in a German company, a bond fund in France and maybe a mutual fund in Japan. This makes for interesting diversification, so if one country tanks, you can potentially be hedged in another. You also get to both benefit and be punished by foreign exchange movements. You might have made a killing on that stock you bought in Tokyo, but it turns out the Yen just fell by 15%. Doh. And to top this off, you are almost certainly going to end up filling out tax returns in each country you have made money in. This can get horribly complicated, very quickly. As a person who has been dealing with the US tax system, I can tell you that this is painful and the US in particular tries to get a cut of your worldwide income. That said, keep in mind each country has different tax rates, so you could potentially benefit from that as well. My advice? Choose one country you suspect you'll spend most of your life in and keep most of your assets there. Make a few purchases in other places, but minimize it. Ultimately most ex-pats move back to their country of origin as friends, family and shared culture bring them home. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Will I be turned down for a car loan? | Considering I'm putting 30% down and having my father cosign is there any chance I would be turned down for a loan on a $100k car? According to BankRate, the average credit score needed to buy a new car is 714, but they also show average interest rates at 6.39% for new-car loans to people with credit scores in the 601-660 range. High income certainly helps offset credit score to some extent. Not every bank/dealership does things the same way. Being self-employed you'd most likely be required to show 2 years of tax returns, and they'd use those as a basis for your income rather than whatever you have made recently. If using a co-signer, their income matters. Another key factor is debt to income ratio, if too much of someone's income is already spoken for by other debts a lender will shy away. So, yes, there's a chance, given all the information we don't know and the variability with lender policies, that you could be turned down for a car loan. How should I go about this? If you're set on pursuing the car loan, just go talk to some lenders. You'll want to shop around for a good rate anyway, so no need to speculate just go find out. Include the dealership as a potential financing option, they can have great rates. Personally, I'd get a much cheaper car. Your insurance premium on a 100k car will be quite high due to your age. You might be rightly confident in your earning potential, but nothing is guaranteed, situations can change wildly in short order. A new car is not a good investment or a value-retaining asset, so why bother going into debt for one if you don't have to? If you buy something in cash now, you could upgrade in a few years without financing if your earning prediction holds and would save quite a bit in car insurance and interest over the years between. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Are there any disadvantages to DHA Investment Properties? | Well, I am an investor/ Lessor under DHA properties. Oflate, DHA lost it identity as a Govt agency and try to imitate a worst (not the best) real eastate agent. Every year rental valuation is a drama or waste of time and money to lessor. They pull down the rent by 10 to 22% and ask for a secondary valuation for no reasons. They don't even agree with market evidence and start bullying or black mailing tactics to force you to aceept a below market rent or the threat of third review , a very expensive review shared 50% by lessor and rest the poor tax payers! The thir review also badly influenced by DHA by submitting biased valuations and thereby destroying the independence of valuation. The API appointed valuer neither follow the DHA gudie nor the API guide and also ignore the market reality and take the average rent for the area. You also losse 14 to 18% as management fees paid to DHA. Selling also a problem and its high time the CWG and the Minster in charge of the DHA must institute an independent investigation to expose the potential nexus between the valuers and the DHA and how the lessor (a self funded retiree, pensioners and others). I already lodged a complaint with Ombudsman and waiting for a reply. There are 14 Lessors all in a Private street (Only DHA leased property in that street) near 213 Ray rd Epping 2121 that are leased to DHA for more than 10 years. Please note most of those Lessors almost lost $10000 per year because DHA under cut the rent to them when they paid me the market rent for many years. DHA by mistake send the rent paid to all. We have called for the details of rent paid to all the 14 lessors in that private street from 2008 todate under the Freedom of Information Act and waiting. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | Relocating for first real job out of college? | If the job looks good, I wouldn't let having to relocate stop you. Some companies will help you with relocation expenses, like paying travel expenses, the movers, the security deposit on an apartment, etc. It doesn't hurt to ask if they "help with moving expenses". If they say no, fine. I wouldn't expect a company to decide not to hire you for asking such a question. I would certainly not buy immediately upon moving. Buying a house is a serious long-term commitment. What if after a few months you discover that this job is not what you thought it was? What if you discover that you hate the area for whatever reason? Etc. Or even if you are absolutely sure that won't happen, it's very hard to buy a house long distance. How many trips can you make to look at different houses, learn about neighborhoods, get a feel for market prices, etc? A few years ago I moved just a couple of hundred miles to a neighboring state, and I rented an apartment for about 2 years before buying a house, for all these reasons. Assuming the company won't help with moving expenses, do you have the cash to make the move? If you're tight, it doesn't have to be all that expensive. If you're six months out of college you probably don't have a lot of stuff. (When I got my first job out of college, I fit everything I owned in the back seat of my Pinto, and tied my one piece of furniture to the roof. :-) If you can't fit all your stuff in your car, rent a truck and a tow bar to pull your car behind. Get a cheap apartment. You'll probably have to pay the first month's rent plus a security deposit. You can usually furnish your first apartment from garage sales and the like very cheaply. If you don't have the cash, do you have credit cards, or can your parents loan you some money? (They might be willing to loan you money to get you out of their house!) |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Why bid and ask do not match the price at which the stock is being traded [duplicate] | Assuming that no one else has hit the ask, and the asks are still there, yes, you will fill $54.55 as long as you didn't exhaust that ask. Actually, there is no "current price at which the stock is exchanging hands"; in reality, it is "the last price traded". The somebody who negotiated prices between buyers & sellers is the exchange through their handling of bids & asks. The real negotiation comes between bids & asks, and if they meet or cross, a trade occurs. It's not that both bid & ask should be $54.55, it's that they were. To answer the title, the reasons why the bid and ask (even their midpoint) move away from the last price are largely unknown, but at least for the market makers, if their sell inventory is going away (people are buying heavily and they're running out of inventory) they will start to hike up their asks a lot and their bids a little because market makers try to stay market neutral, having no opinion on whether an asset will rise or fall, so with stocks, that means having a balanced inventory of longs & shorts. They want to (sometimes have to depending on the exchange) accommodate the buying pressure, but they don't want to lose money, so they simply raise the ask and then raise the bid as people hit their asks since their average cost basis has risen. In fact (yahoo finance is great about showing this), there's rarely 1 bid and 1 ask. Take a look at BAC's limit book: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ecn?s=BAC+Order+Book You can see that there are many bids and many asks. If one ask is exhausted, the next in line is now the highest. The market maker who just sold at X will certainly step over the highest bid to bid at X*0.9 to get an 11% return on investment. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Should the poor consider investing as a means to becoming rich? | Definitions are in order: These definitions are important. Someone making 1,000,000 a year who spends all of it is poor. Someone who makes 500K, spends 450K a year and has three million in stocks and a paid-for million dollar home may be rich but they can't retire. They need another seven to eight million to retire. Someone with a million dollars in assets who makes 40K a year through their job, can be Financially Independent and retire. This last example is important. In The Millionaire Next Door the authors share their discovery that the average millionaire accumulated their wealth with just a working income of around 50K (the book is a bit dated so the number should be elevated if you adjust for inflation). Finance Independent is a strange thing to wrap your head around and people with high incomes often fall victim to misunderstanding it. When figuring out how much a person needs to accumulate for their "nest egg", their working income is not a direct variable. Their spending and savings rate are. A doctor making 500K, who spends 450K needs to work for 51 years if they are planning to keep spending 450K/year (adjusted for inflation) forever. Someone making 60K starting at age 21 who saves 18K (30%), could retire at 49. Someone with a truly low income and poor, say 30K and under and living in a old developed nation, investing will help them a bit. Say they save 10% of their income, by the time they reach 65 (the typical age federal retirement pensions begin), they'll have enough money to live off of in perpetuity and in comfort. They'll actually have a higher retirement income than income while they were working. But, it is challenging at those levels to save 10% of your net income. Events like your car randomly deciding to break down one day can destroy an entire year's saving. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Evidence For/Against Real Estate Investing Vis-a-vis Investing in ETFs | Real Estate potentially has two components of profit, the increase in value, and the ongoing returns, similar to a stock appreciating and its dividends. It's possible to buy both badly, and in the case of stocks, there are studies that show the typical investor lags the market by many percent. Real estate is not a homogeneous asset class. A $200K house renting for $1,000 is a far different investment than a $100K 3 family renting for $2,000 total rents. Both exist depending on the part of the country you are in. If you simply divide the price to the rent you get either 16.7X or 4.2X. This is an oversimplification, and of course, interest rates will push these numbers in one direction or another. It's safe to say that at any given time, the ratio can help determine if home prices are too high, a bargain, or somewhere in between. As one article suggests, the median price tracks inflation pretty closely. And I'd add, that median home prices would track median income long term. To circle back, yes, real estate can be a good investment if you buy right, find good tenants, and are willing to put in the time. Note: Buying to rent and buying to live in are not always the same economic decision. The home buyer will very often buy a larger house than they should, and turn their own 'profit' into a loss. e.g. A buyer who would otherwise be advised to buy the $150K house instead of renting is talked into a bigger house by the real estate agent, the bank, the spouse. The extra cost of the $225K house is the 1/3 more cost of repair, utilities, interest, etc. It's identical to needing a 1000 sq ft apartment, but grabbing one that's 1500 sq ft for the view. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | What is the psychology behind the Dead Cat Bounce Pattern and how can it be traded? | You are correct, a possible Dead Cat Bounce is forming on the stock markets. If it does form it will mean that prices have not reached their bottom, as this pattern is a bearish continuation pattern. For a Dead Cat Bounce to form prices will need to break through support formed by the lows last week. If prices bounce off the support and go back up it could become a double bottom pattern, which is a reversal pattern. The double bottom would be confirmed if prices break above the recent high a couple of days ago. Regarding the psychology of the dead cat bounce pattern, is that after a distinct and quick reversal of prices from recent highs you have 2 groups of market participants who create demand in the market. Firstly you have those who were short covering their short positions to take profits, and secondly you have those who are looking for a bargain buying at what they think is the low. So for a few days you have the bulls taking over the bears. Then as more less positive news comes in, the bears hit the market again. These are more participants opening short positions, but more so those who missed out in selling previously because prices fell too quickly, seeing another opportunity to sell at a better price. So the bears take over again. Unless there is very good news around the corner it is likely that the bears will stay in control and prices will fall further. How to trade a dead cat bounce (assuming you have been stopped out of your long possistions already)? If you are aggressive you can go short as prices start reversing from the top of the bounce (with your stop loss just above the top of the bounce). If you are more conservative you would place your entry for a short position just below the support at the start of the bounce (with your stop above the top of the bounce). You could also place an order for a long position above the top of the bounce if a double bottom eventuated. A One Cancels the Other (OCO) would be an appropriate order for such a situation. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Can saving/investing 15% of your income starting age 25, likely make you a millionaire? | As others have shown, if you assume that you can get 6% and you invest 15% of a reasonable US salary then you can hit 1 million by the time you retire. If you invest in property in a market like the UK (where I come from...) then insane house price inflation will do it for you as well. In 1968 my parents bought a house for £8000. They had a mortgage on it for about 75% of the value. They don't live there but that house is now valued at about £750,000. Okay, that's close to 60 years, but with a 55 year working life that's not so unreasonable. If you assume the property market (or the shares market) can go on rising forever... then invest in as much property as you can with your 15% as mortgage payments... and watch the million roll in. Of course, you've also got rent on your property portfolio as well in the intervening years. However, take the long view. Inflation will hit what a million is worth. In 1968, a million was a ridiculously huge amount of money. Now it's 'Pah, so what, real rich people have billions'. You'll get your million and it will not be enough to retire comfortably on! In 1968 my parents salaries as skilled people were about £2000 a year... equivalent jobs now pay closer to £50,000... 25x salary inflation in the time. Do that again, skilled professional salary in 60 years of £125000 a year... so your million is actually 4 years salary. Not being relentlessly negative... just suggesting that a financial target like 'own a million (dollars)' isn't a good strategy. 'Own something that yields a decent amount of money' is a better one. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | US tax - effectively connected income | ECI is relevant to non-resident aliens who are engaged in trade or business in the US. For that, you have to be present in the US, to begin with, or to own a business or property in the US. So the people to whom it is relevant are non-resident aliens in the US or business/property owners, not foreign contractors. From the IRS: The following categories of income are usually considered to be connected with a trade or business in the United States. You are considered to be engaged in a trade or business in the United States if you are temporarily present in the United States as a nonimmigrant on an "F," "J," "M," or "Q" visa. The taxable part of any U.S. source scholarship or fellowship grant received by a nonimmigrant in "F," "J," "M," or "Q" status is treated as effectively connected with a trade or business in the United States. If you are a member of a partnership that at any time during the tax year is engaged in a trade or business in the United States, you are considered to be engaged in a trade or business in the United States. You usually are engaged in a U.S. trade or business when you perform personal services in the United States. If you own and operate a business in the United States selling services, products, or merchandise, you are, with certain exceptions, engaged in a trade or business in the United States. For example, profit from the sale in the United States of inventory property purchased either in this country or in a foreign country is effectively connected trade or business income. Gains and losses from the sale or exchange of U.S. real property interests (whether or not they are capital assets) are taxed as if you are engaged in a trade or business in the United States. You must treat the gain or loss as effectively connected with that trade or business. Income from the rental of real property may be treated as ECI if the taxpayer elects to do so. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Purpose of having good credit when you are well-off? | Credit is very important even if you are wealthy. One thing you may not realize is that rich people typically have comparatively little cash on hand. If they're smart, most of their assets are not liquid - they're tied up in safe, long-term investments. They use credit for their day-to-day expenses and pay it off from the dividends on their investments (which might only come in once a quarter). There are also tax advantages to using credit. If a rich person wanted a new car, he'd be smarter leasing it for his business (immediate write-off of the lease payments on taxes) versus buying it (depreciation over several years plus property tax liability in some states). There are more elaborate tax dodges but the point is that buying a car outright is the worst option in terms of tax avoidance. Another way the rich (mis) use credit is so that they don't risk their own money on business ventures. Let's say I have $1,000,000 in my personal bank account, and I want to buy a business that costs $1M. If I am dumb, I clean out my bank account and put all my money in the business. I get 100% of the profits, but I also bear 100% of the risk. If I'm smart, I loan 200K of my own money in the business and put the rest someplace safe, and get a loan from a bank for the other 800K. If the business succeeds, the bank gets their money back plus interest. If it fails, the business declares bankruptcy and the bank eats the 800k loss. If I structured the debt right, my personal loan to the failed business gets paid back first when the company is liquidated, and the bank gets whatever is left over (if anything). The most of my own money I can possibly lose is 200k, and probably it's closer to zero if I have a good accountant. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Can I prove having savings without giving out the account number? | Have you been rejected from a rental for a specific reason (leading to this question)? Landlords are in the business of exchanging space for regular payments with no drama. Anything they ask in an application should be something to minimize the risk of drama. The "happy path" optimistic goal is that you pay your rent by the due date every month. If your income is not sufficient for this, demonstrating you have assets and would be able to pay for the full term of the lease is part of the decision to enter into the lease with you. In the non-happy-path, say you fall off the face of the earth before ending the lease. The landlord could be owed several months of rent, and could pursue a legal judgment on your assets. With a court order, they can make the bank pay out what is owed; having bank information reduces the landlord's cost and research efforts in the event the story has degenerated to this point (in the jargon of landlording, this means the tenant is "collectable"). While of course you could have zeroed out your accounts or moved money to a bank you didn't tell the landlord in the meantime, if you are not the bad actor in this story, you probably wouldn't have. If you get any kind of "spidey-sense" about a landlord or property at all there is probably a better rental situation in your city. You also want to minimize drama. If the landlord is operating like a business, they're not in this to perform identity theft. If the landlord is sloppy, or has sloppy office workers, that would be different. In the event sharing your asset information truly bothers you, and the money is for rental expense anyway, you could offer to negotiate a 1 year prepaid rental (of course knock another 5%-10% off for time value of money and lower risk to landlord) if you're sure you wouldn't want to leave early. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Why would a public company not initiate secondary stock offerings more often? | Selling stock means selling a portion of ownership in your company. Any time you issue stock, you give up some control, unless you're issuing non-voting stock, and even non-voting stock owns a portion of the company. Thus, issuing (voting) shares means either the current shareholders reduce their proportion of owernship, or the company reissues stock it held back from a previous offering (in which case it no longer has that stock available to issue and thus has less ability to raise funds in the future). From Investopedia, for exmaple: Secondary offerings in which new shares are underwritten and sold dilute the ownership position of stockholders who own shares that were issued in the IPO. Of course, sometimes a secondary offering is more akin to Mark Zuckerberg selling some shares of Facebook to allow him to diversify his holdings - the original owner(s) sell a portion of their holdings off. That does not dilute the ownership stake of others, but does reduce their share of course. You also give up some rights to dividends etc., even if you issue non-voting stock; of course that is factored into the price presumably (either the actual dividend or the prospect of eventually getting a dividend). And hopefully more growth leads to more dividends, though that's only true if the company can actually make good use of the incoming funds. That last part is somewhat important. A company that has a good use for new funds should raise more funds, because it will turn those $100 to $150 or $200 for everyone, including the current owners. But a company that doesn't have a particular use for more money would be wasting those funds, and probably not earning back that full value for everyone. The impact on stock price of course is also a major factor and not one to discount; even a company issuing non-voting stock has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interest of those non-voting shareholders, and so should not excessively dilute their value. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | What effect would sovereign default of a European country have on personal debt or a mortgage? | This is a hard question to answer. Government debt and mortgages are loosely related. Banks typically use yields on government bonds to determine mortgage interest rates. The banks must be able to get higher rates from the mortgage otherwise they would buy government bonds. Your question mentions default so I'm assuming a country has reneged on its promise to pay either the principal or interest on government bonds. The main thing to consider is "Who does not get their money?". In other words, who does the government decide not to pay. This is the important part. The government will have some money so they could pay some bond holders. They must decide who to shaft. For example, let's look at who holds Greek government debt. Around 70% of Greek government debt is held outside Greece. See table below. The Greek government could decide to default only on the debt to foreign holders. In that case the banks in France and Switzerland would take the loss on their bonds. This could cause severe problems in France and Switzerland depending on the percentage of Greek bonds that make up the banks' assets. Greek banks would still face losses, however, since the price of their Greek bond holdings would drop sharply when the government defaults. Interestingly, the losses for the Greek banks may be smaller than the losses faced by the French and Swiss banks. This is usually the favored option chosen by government since the French and Swiss don't vote in Greece. Yields on Greek government bonds would rise dramatically. If your Greek mortgage is an adjustable rate mortgage then you could see some big adjustments upward. If you live in France or Switzerland then the bank that owns your mortgage may go under if Greece defaults. During liquidation the bank will sell their assets which includes mortgages and you will probably not notice any difference in your mortgage. As I stated earlier: this is a hard question to answer since the two financial instruments involved (bonds and mortgages) are similar but may or may not be related. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | What is the preferred way to set up personal finances? | simplicity and roi are often at odds. the simplest plan that also supports a reasonable investment return would have 3 accounts: if you want to get better returns on your investments, things can get much more complicated. here are some optional accounts to consider: besides the mechanics of money flowing between accounts, a budget helps you understand and control your spending. while there are many methods for this (e.g. envelopes of cash, separate accounts for various types of expenses), the simplest might be using mint.com. just be sure to put all your spending on a credit or debit card, and you can see your spending by category when you log into mint. it can take a bit to get it set up, and your bank needs to be compatible, but it can give you a really good picture of where your money is going. once you know that, you can start making decisions like "i should spend less on coffee", or "i should go to the zoo more", based on how much things cost vs how much you enjoy them. if you feel like your spending is out of control, then you can set yourself hard limits on certain kinds of spending, but usually just watching and influencing your own choices is enough. notes: if you have a spouse or partner, you should each maintain your own separate accounts. there are many reasons for this including simplicity and roi, besides the obvious. if you feel you must have a joint account, be sure to clearly define how it should be used (e.g. only for paying the utilities) and funded (x$ per month each). particularly with your house, do not do joint ownership. one of you should be a renter and the other a landlord. some of these statements assume you are in the usa. on a personal note, i have about 20 credit cards, 2 checking accounts, 2 ira's, 2 brokerage accounts, and 3 401k's. but i consider myself a personal finance hobbyist, and spend an absurd amount of time chasing financial deals and tax breaks. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | How can I determine if my portfolio's rate of return has been “good”, or not? | It's important to realize that any portfolio, if sufficiently diversified should track overall GDP growth, and anything growing via a percentage per annum is going to double eventually. (A good corner-of-napkin estimate is 70/the percentage = years to double). Just looking at your numbers, if you initially put in the full $7000, an increase to $17000 after 10 years represents a return of ~9.3% per annum (to check my math $7000*1.09279^10 ≈ $17000). Since you've been putting in the $7000 over 10 years the return is going to be a bit more than that, but it's not possible to calculate based on the information given. A return of 9.3% is not bad (some rules of thumb: inflation is about 2-4% so if you are making less than that you're losing money, and 6-10% per annum is generally what you should expect if your portfolio is tracking the market)... I wouldn't consider that rate of return to be particularly amazing, but it's not bad either, as you've done better than you would have if you had invested in an ETF tracking the market. The stock market being what it is, you can't rule out the possibility that you got lucky with your stock picks. If your portfolio was low-risk, a return of 9%ish could be considered amazing, but given that it's about 5-6 different stocks what I'd consider amazing would be a return of 15%+ (to give you something to shoot for!) Either way, for your amount of savings you're probably better off going with a mutual fund or an ETF. The return might be slightly lower, but the risk profile is also lower than you picking your stocks, since the fund/ETF will be more diversified. (and it's less work!) |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Why can't I short a stock that sells for less than $5? Is there another way to “go short” on them? | I think George's answer explains fairly well why the brokerages don't allow this - it's not an exchange rule, it's just that the brokerage has to have the shares to lend, and normally those shares come from people's margin, which is impossible on a non-marginable stock. To address the question of what the alternatives are, on popular stocks like SIRI, a deep In-The-Money put is a fairly accurate emulation of an actual short interest. If you look at the options on SIRI you will see that a $3 (or higher) put has a delta of -$1, which is the same delta as an actual short share. You also don't have to worry about problems like margin calls when buying options. The only thing you have to worry about is the expiration date, which isn't generally a major issue if you're buying in-the-money options... unless you're very wrong about the direction of the stock, in which case you could lose everything, but that's always a risk with penny stocks no matter how you trade them. At least with a put option, the maximum amount you can lose is whatever you spent on the contract. With a short sale, a bull rush on the stock could potentially wipe out your entire margin. That's why, when betting on downward motion in a microcap or penny stock, I actually prefer to use options. Just be aware that option contracts can generally only move in increments of $0.05, and that your brokerage will probably impose a bid-ask spread of up to $0.10, so the share price has to move down at least 10 cents (or 10% on a roughly $1 stock like SIRI) for you to just break even; definitely don't attempt to use this as a day-trading tool and go for longer expirations if you can. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | Taxes due for hobbyist Group Buy | From the poster's description of this activity, it doesn't look like he is engaged in a business, so Schedule C would not be appropriate. The first paragraph of the IRS Instructions for Schedule C is as follows: Use Schedule C (Form 1040) to report income or loss from a business you operated or a profession you practiced as a sole proprietor. An activity qualifies as a business if your primary purpose for engaging in the activity is for income or profit and you are involved in the activity with continuity and regularity. For example, a sporadic activity or a hobby does not qualify as a business. To report income from a nonbusiness activity, see the instructions for Form 1040, line 21, or Form 1040NR, line 21. What the poster is doing is acting as a nominee or agent for his members. For instance, if I give you $3.00 and ask you to go into Starbucks and buy me a pumpkin-spice latte, you do not have income or receipts of $3.00, and you are not engaged in a business. The amounts that the poster's members are forwarding him are like this. Money that the poster receives for his trouble should be reported as nonbusiness income on Line 21 of Form 1040, in accordance with the instructions quoted above and the instructions for Form 1040. Finally, it should be noted that the poster cannot take deductions or losses relating to this activity. So he can't deduct any expenses of organizing the group buy on his tax return. Of course, this would not be the case if the group buy really is the poster's business and not just a "hobby." Of course, it goes without saying that the poster should document all of this activity with receipts, contemporaneous emails (and if available, contracts) - as well as anything else that could possibly be relevant to proving the nature of this activity in the event of an audit. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | 2 houses 450k each or one 800k? | Because it appears you have in the neighborhood of 30 years remianing on your mortgage for the first house, If you can sell it you will likely be better off in the end. While renting has the potential for greater income it is a business. And like any business there are risks, expenses, and work required to make it successful. There will be times where you can not find a renter immediately and will be responsible for making both payments, maintaining both houses, the insurance(which for an owner is higher for a rental property than a domicile), and paying the applicable taxes. You need to look at your best and worst case numbers. If your best case numbers leave you in the hole 300/month then that is not the sort of business you want to run. Your investment should build your savings and retirement funds not deplete them. Further you are more likely to fall between your best and worst case scenerios. So you need to be able to thrive at that level. If something in the middle is going to take you into bankruptcy then sell the property. If you are not willing to put the time into your business that it will need (My rental home took about 10-30 hours a month despite renters being responsible for basic upkeep and maintenance. Finally your plan B: A home with 800k value will have higher costs and higer expenses and maintenance. If the 800k home is the home you and your family needs then by all means go for it. But if it can do just as well in the 450k Home then go there. Pay the home off early by making the payments you would be making for the 800k home. In this way you pay less in total cost of the home and set your self up for the greatest chance of success. Once that home is paid off the break even point for renting goes way down as well. So the rental option could be in the future. I would just aviod it now if possible. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | Monthly money transfers from US to Puerto Rico | Puerto Rico: Last I checked, the Puerto Rico banking system wasn't materially different than working within the US - though some Continental US banks exclude US Territories like Guam and Puerto Rico or charge more when dealing with them. I'm not certain as to why. However, most banks don't see them any differently than a regular US bank. Regarding Wire Transfers (WT): $35 for an ad-hoc WT within the US and Puerto Rico is for the most part average. Wires cost money for the convenience of quick clearing and guaranteed funds. If you have a business/commercial account where you are doing this regularly and paying a monthly fee for a WT service, $10 - $15 each may be expected. I had a business account with US Bank where I paid $15 a month for a WT transfer service and reoccurring template (always went to the same account - AMEX in this case) and the transfers were only $15 each. But, a WT as a general rule, especially when it's only a once a month thing from a personal account, will cost around $25 - $35 in the US and Puerto Rico. As others have said, you can simply mail a personal check just as you would in the US. Many people choose to use Money Orders for Puerto Rico as they can be cashed at the post office (I believe there is an amount limit though). ACH: If you want even easier, I would use ACH. Banks in Puerto Rico use this ACH (Automatic Clearing House) system as we do in the Continental US. It will take a little longer than WT, but as you said - this is fine. Not all US Banks offer free ACH, but a number of them do. Last I checked, Citibank and USAA where among them. Banks like, BAC charges a small fee. Much smaller than a WT! This post may be useful to you: What's the difference between wire transfer and ACH? |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How companies choose earnings release dates, & effect on Implied Volatility | I can't speak authoritatively to your broader question about stocks in general, but in several years tracking AAPL closely, I can tell you that there's little apparent pattern to when their earnings call will be, or when it will be announced. What little I do know: - AAPL's calls tend to occur on a Tuesday more than any other day of the week - it's announced roughly a month in advance, but has been announced w/ less notice - it has a definite range of dates in which it occurs, typically somewhere in the 3rd week of the new quarter plus or minus a few days More broadly for #1: Given the underlying nature of what an option is, then yes, the day an earnings call date is announced could certainly influence the IV/price of options - but only for options that expire inside the "grey area" (~2 weeks long) window in which the call could potentially occur. Options expiring outside that grey area should experience little to no price change in reaction to the announcement of the date - unless the date was itself surprising, e.g. an earlier date would increase the premium on earlier dated options, a later date would increase the premium for later-dated options. As for #2: The exact date will probably always be a mystery, but the main factors are: - the historical pattern of earnings call dates (and announcements of those dates) which you can look up for any given company - when the company's quarter ends - potentially some influence in how long it takes the company to close out their books for the quarter (some types of businesses would be faster than others) - any special considerations for this particular quarter that affect reporting ability And finally: - a surprise of an earnings call occurring (substantively) later than usual is rarely going to be a good sign for the underlying security, and the expectation of catastrophe - while cratering the underlying - may also cause a disproportionate rise in IVs/prices due to fear |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Withdraw funds with penalty or bear high management fees for 10 years? | Here's the purely mathematical answer for which fees hurt more. You say taking the money out has an immediate cost of $60,000. We need to calculate the present value of the future fees and compare it against that number. Let's assume that the investment will grow at the same rate either with or without the broker. That's actually a bit generous to the broker, since they're probably investing it in funds that in turn charge unjustifiable fees. We can calculate the present cost of the fees by calculating the difference between: As it turns out, this number doesn't depend on how much we should expect to get as investment returns. Doing the math, the fees cost: 220000 - 220000 * (1-0.015)^40 = $99809 That is, the cost of the fees is comparable to paying nearly $100,000 right now. Nearly half the investment! If there are no other options, I strongly recommend taking the one-time hit and investing elsewhere, preferably in low-cost index funds. Details of the derivation. For simplicity, assume that both fees and growth compound continuously. (The growth does compound continuously. We don't know about the fees, but in any case the distinction isn't very significant.) Fees occur at a (continuous) rate of rf = ln((1-0.015)^4) (which is negative), and growth occurs at rate rg. The OPs current principal is P, and the present value of the fees over time is F. We therefore have the equation P e^((rg+rf)t) = (P-F) e^(rg t) Solving for F, we notice that the e^rg*t components cancel, and we obtain F = P - P e^(rf t) = P - P e^(ln((1-0.015)^4) t) = P - P (1-0.015)^(4t) |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How are bonds affected by the Federal Funds Rate? | I'll answer your question, but first a comment about your intended strategy. Buying government bonds in a retirement account is probably not a good idea. Government bonds (generally) are tax advantaged themselves, so they offer a lower interest rate than other types of bonds. At no tax or reduced tax, many people will accept the lower interest rate because their effective return may be similar or better depending, for example, on their own marginal tax rate. In a tax-advantaged retirement account, however, you'll be getting the lower interest without any additional benefit because that account itself is already tax-advantaged. (Buying bonds generally may be a good idea or not - I won't comment on that - but choose a different category of bonds.) For the general question about the relationship between the Fed rate and the bond rate, they are positively correlated. There's not direct causal relationship in the sense that the Fed is not setting the bond rate directly, but other interest bearing investment options are tied to the Fed rate and many of those interest-bearing options compete for the same investor dollars as the bonds that you're reviewing. That's at a whole market level. Individual bonds, however, may not be so tightly coupled since the creditworthiness of the issuing entity matters a lot too, so it could be that "bond rates" generally are going up but some specific bonds are going down based on something happening with the issuer, just like the stock market might be generally going up even as specific stocks are dropping. Also keep in mind that many bonds trade as securities on a secondary market much like stocks. So I've talked about the bond rate. The price of the bonds themselves on the secondary market generally move opposite to the rate. The reason is that, for example, if you buy a bond at less than face value, you're getting an effective interest rate that's higher because you get the same sized incremental payments of interest but put less money into the investment. And vice versa. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | How to decide on limits when purchasing/selling stocks? | You said your strategy was to put it into a index fund. But then you asked about setting stock limits. I'm confused. Funds usually trade at their price at the end of the day, so you shouldn't try to time this at all. Just place your order. If you are buying ETFs, there is going to be so much volume on the market that your small trade is going to have no impact on the price. You should just place a market order. A market order is an order to buy or sell a stock at the current market price. A limit order is an order to buy or sell a security at a specific price. In the US, when you place a trade with any broker, you can either place a limit order or a market order. A market order just fills your order with the next best sellers in line. If you place an order for 100 shares, the sellers willing to sell 100 shares at the lowest price will be matched with your order (sometimes you may get 50 shares at one price and 50 shares at a slightly different price). If your stock has a lot of volatility and you place a market order for a small amount of shares, you will get the best price. If you place a limit order, you specify the price at which you want to buy shares. Your order will then only be filled with sellers willing to sell at that price or lower (i.e. they must be at least as good as you specified). This means you could place an order at a limit that does not get filled (the stock could move in a direction away from your limit price). If you really want to own the stock, you shouldn't use a limit order. You shouldn't only use a limit order if you want to tell your broker "I will only buy this stock at this price or better." p.s. Every day that passes is NOT a waste. It's just a day that you've decided investing in cash is safer than investing in the market. |
Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background. | How does the person lending shares to the short selller protect themselves if the short sellers are correct? | It is true, as farnsy noted, that you generally do not know when stock that you're holding has been loaned by your broker to someone for a short sale, that you generally consent to that when you sign up somewhere in the small print, and that the person who borrows has to make repay and dividends. The broker is on the hook to make sure that your stock is available for you to sell when you want, so there's limited risk there. There are some risks to having your stock loaned though. The main one is that you don't actually get the dividend. Formally, you get a "Substitute Payment in Lieu of Dividends." The payment in lieu will be taxed differently. Whereas qualified dividends get reported on Form 1099-DIV and get special tax treatment, substitute payments get reported on Form 1099-MISC. (Box 8 is just for this purpose.) Substitute payments get taxed as regular income, not at the preferred rate for dividends. The broker may or may not give you additional money beyond the dividend to compensate you for the extra tax. Whether or not this tax difference matters, depends on how much you're getting in dividends, your tax bracket, and to some extent your general perspective. If you want to vote your shares and exercise your ownership rights, then there are also some risks. The company only issues ballots for the number of shares issued by them. On the broker's books, however, the short sale may result in more long positions than there are total shares of stock. Financially the "extra" longs are offset by shorts, but for voting this does not balance. (I'm unclear how this is resolved - I've read that the the brokers essentially depend on shareholder apathy, but I'd guess there's more to it than that.) If you want to prevent your broker from loaning out your shares, you have some options: |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Advice for opening an IRA as a newbie | As other people have indicated, traditional IRAs are tax deductable for a particular year. Please note, though, that traditional IRAs are tax deferred (not tax-free) accounts, meaning that you'll have to pay taxes on any money you take out later regardless of why you're making the withdrawal. (A lot of people mistakenly call them tax free, which they're not). There is no such thing as a "tax-free" retirement account. Really, in terms of Roth vs. Traditional IRAs, it's "pay now or pay later." With the exception of special circumstances like this, I recommend investing exclusively in Roth IRAs for money that you expect to grow much (or that you expect to produce substantial income over time). Just to add a few thoughts on what to actually invest in once you open your IRA, I strongly agree with the advice that you invest mostly in low-cost mutual funds or index funds. The advantage of an open-ended mutual fund is that it's easier to purchase them in odd increments and you may be able to avoid at least some purchase fees, whereas with an ETF you have to buy in multiples of that day's asking price. For example, if you were investing $500 and the ETF costs $200 per share, you could only purchase 2 shares, leaving $100 uninvested (minus whatever fee your broker charged for the purchase). The advantage of an ETF is that it's easy to buy or sell quickly. Usually, when you add money to a mutual fund, it'll take a few days for it to hit your account, and when you want to sell it'll similarly take a few days for you to get your money; when I buy an ETF the transaction can occur almost instantly. The fees can also be lower (if the ETF is just a passive index fund). Also, there's a risk with open-ended mutual funds that if too many people pull money out at once the managers could be forced to sell stocks at an unfavorable price. |
Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open. | How are startup shares worth more than the total investment funding? | What littleadv said is correct. His worth is based on the presumed worth of the total company value (which is much greater than all investment dollars combined because of valuation growth)*. In other words, his "worth" is based on the potential return for his share of ownership at a rate based on the latest valuation of the company. He is worth $17.5 billion today, but the total funding for Facebook is only $2.4 billion? I don't understand this. In private companies, valuations typically come from either speculation/analysts or from investments. Investment valuations are the better gauge, because actual money traded hands for a percentage ownership. However, just as with public companies on the stock market, there are (at least) two caveats. Just because someone else sold their shares at a given rate, doesn't mean that rate... In both cases, it's possible the value may be much lower or much higher. Some high-value purchases surprise for how high they are, such as Microsoft's acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion. The formula for one owner's "worth" based on a given acquisition is: Valuation = Acquisition amount / Acquisition percent Worth = Owner's percent × Valuation According to Wikipedia Zuckerberg owns 24%. In January, Goldman Sach's invested $500 million at a $50 billion valuation. That is the latest investment and puts Zuckerberg's worth at $12 billion. However, some speculation places a Facebook IPO at a much higher valuation, such as as $100 billion. I don't know what your reference is for $17 billion, but it puts their valuation at $70.8 billion, between the January Goldman valuation and current IPO speculation. * For instance, Eduardo Saverin originally invested $10,000, which, at his estimated 5% ownership, would now be worth $3-5 billion. |
Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering | How to get information about historical stock option prices for a defunct company? | Though you're looking to repeat this review with multiple securities and events at different times, I've taken liberty in assuming you are not looking to conduct backtests with hundreds of events. I've answered below assuming it's an ad hoc review for a single event pertaining to one security. Had the event occurred more recently, your full-service broker could often get it for you for free. Even some discount brokers will offer it so. If the stock and its options were actively traded, you can request "time and sales," or "TNS," data for the dates you have in mind. If not active, then request "time and quotes," or "TNQ" data. If the event happened long ago, as seems to be the case, then your choices become much more limited and possibly costly. Below are some suggestions: Wall Street Journal and Investors' Business Daily print copies have daily stock options trading data. They are best for trading data on actively traded options. Since the event sounds like it was a major one for the company, it may have been actively traded that day and hence reported in the papers' listings. Some of the print pages have been digitized; otherwise you'll need to review the archived printed copies. Bloomberg has these data and access to them will depend on whether the account you use has that particular subscription. I've used it to get detailed equity trading data on defunct and delisted companies on specific dates and times and for and futures trading data. If you don't have personal access to Bloomberg, as many do not, you can try to request access from a public, commercial or business school library. The stock options exchanges sell their data; some strictly to resellers and others to anyone willing to pay. If you know which exchange(s) the options traded on, you can contact the exchange's market data services department and request TNS and / or TNQ data and a list of resellers, as the resellers may be cheaper for single queries. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Do I need to file a tax return as a student? | In the U.S., Form 1040 is known as the tax return. This is the form that is filed annually to calculate your tax due for the year, and you either claim a refund if you have overpaid your taxes or send in a payment if you have underpaid. The form is generally due on April 15 each year, but this year the due date is April 18, 2016. When it comes to filing your taxes, there are two questions you need to ask yourself: "Am I required to file?" and "Should I file?" Am I required to file? The 1040 instructions has a section called "Do I have to file?" with several charts that determine if you are legally required to file. It depends on your status and your gross income. If you are single, under 65, and not a dependent on someone else's return, you are not required to file if your 2015 income was less than $10,300. If you will be claimed as a dependent on someone else's return, however, you must file if your earned income (from work) was over $6300, or your unearned income (from investments) was over $1050, or your gross (total) income was more than the larger of either $1050 or your earned income + $350. See the instructions for more details. Should I file? Even if you find that you are not required to file, it may be beneficial to you to file anyway. There are two main reasons you might do this: If you have had income where tax has been taken out, you may have overpaid the tax. Filing the tax return will allow you to get a refund of the amount that you overpaid. As a student, you may be eligible for student tax credits that can get you a refund even if you did not pay any tax during the year. How to file For low income tax payers, the IRS has a program called Free File that provides free filing software options. |
Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited. | Should I prioritize retirement savings inside of my HSA? | You would want to prioritize Roth and retirement over HSA. As the HSA is only for health and dental expenses, which you will always have, overfunding it will put you in a bit of a pickle for all of the life involved. For example, even if you or a loved one develop a strange & expensive ailment, the HSA will only cover the medical costs, but not any travel to specialists, hotel stays, home alterations, special vehicles, or lifestyle alterations (food, clothing). However, you will eventually stop working even if you are healthy throughout your life. I would suggest that you treat the HSA as a part of your overall emergency fund, giving it a cap the same as you would normal non-retirement savings. Since you stated you have three young children, small and large medical expenses (such as braces, trips to the emergency room) are something that are almost guaranteed, thus having fairly large amount in the HSA would be very beneficial throughout their time with you. Once the children have left however, if you still have an overwhelming balance in your HSA, you may not want to add anymore to the HSA. Setting a cap for the HSA based off a certain number of years of deductible payments for medication would be a good place to start. Roth accounts, whether it be within your company's 401k plan or the IRAs for yourself and your spouse, are single-handedly the best location for your money for long-term savings. Roth money grows tax-free, is immune to Required Minimum Distribution provisions, and will avoid estate escrow when going to one's beneficiaries. Even if you tap into the funds prior to age 59 1/2, you would only pay taxes on any investment growth, in addition to the 10% early withdrawal penalty. If you have established Roth IRA accounts and have an AGI that disallows you to further contribute to them, there is still a provision to get Roth funds contributed via conversion through what is commonly called a "back door" Roth. |
Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input. | Should I pay off my car loan within the year? | First, don't owe (much) money on a car that's out of warranty. If you have an engine blow up and repairs will cost the lion's share of the car's bluebook value, the entire car loan immediately comes due because the collateral is now worthless. This puts you in a very miserable situation because you must pay off the car suddenly while also securing other transportation! Second, watch for possible early-payment penalties. They are srill lokely cheaper than paying interest, but run the numbers. Their purpose is to repay the lender the amount of money they already paid out to the dealer in sales commission or kickback for referring the loan. The positive effects you want for your credit report only require an open loan; owing more money doesn't help, it hurts. However, interest is proportional to principal owed, so a $10,000 car loan is 10 times the interest cost of a $1000 car loan. That means paying most of it off early can fulfill your purpose. As the car is nearer payoff, you can reduce costs further (assuming you cna handle the hit) by increasing the deductible on collision and comprehensive (fire and theft) auto insurance. It's not just you paying more co-pay, it also means the insurance company doesn't have to deal with smaller claims at all, e.g. Nodody with a $1000 deductivle files a claim on an $800 repair. If the amount you owe is small compared to its bluebook value, and within $1000-2000 of paid off, the lender may be OK with you dropping collision and comprehensive coverage altogether (assuming you are). All of this adds up to paying most of it off, but not all, may be the way to go. You could also talk to your lender about paying say, 3/4 of it off, and refinancing the rest as a 12-month deal. |