Category Archives: Financial

Economics, Financial

Leftist double-fail on economics

It is bad enough that most Leftists literally fail at basic economics, but to make it worse they deliberately implement counterproductive policies even on the rare occasions when they do understand a simple economic concept.  Via Leaked Podesta Emails Show Clinton and Co. Knew But Didn’t Care That They Would Hurt the Economy:

The head of the liberal Center for American Progress privately warned Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff against endorsing a $15-an-hour minimum wage, saying that it would be bad for the economy.Despite that, both the Clinton campaign and the center have since promoted state and local activists’ efforts to push a $15 rate, and Clinton has even said she would sign $15 federal legislation.

Go read it all.  It gets worse.

So the Leftist leaders promote causes to benefit themselves knowing that it will hurt those they claim to care about.  Because love and tolerance or something.

This is just like Obama dismissing capital gains tax cuts because they didn’t appear to be “fair,” even though they are known to increase tax revenues.  Even John Kennedy, that notorious right-wing extremist, understood simple concepts like that.

To recap:

  1. Tests show that Leftists literally fail at understanding basic economic concepts, and it drives their terrible policies.
  2. Even when the proverbial blind squirrel finds a nut and the politicians do understand a simple economic concept, they legislate against it because they know that their followers are economically ignorant (hello, government schools!) and they’d rather have votes than actually help the people they claim to care about.
Financial

Use camelcamelcamel.com to save more on Amazon

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Prices fluctuate more on Amazon than you might think.  Camelcamelcamel.com (odd name, great site) tracks prices for most products on Amazon.com.  It has two primary benefits:

  1. It shows the price history for products so you can see if they are likely to reduce in price.  I’ve seen prices drop 25% or more and then jump back up.
  2. You can set up price alerts so it will notify you if the price drops below your preferred threshold.  This is great for things you don’t need right away.

You can paste in Amazon URLs at the Camel site, or you can use a Google Chrome extension that will put a camel icon in your address bar.  Just click it when you are on an Amazon page and it will show you the price history and give you other options, such as setting the price alert.

This is a great tool to use to stock up on commodities when prices are at their low points.  Here’s an example of a simple product that has surprising variability in its price: Speed Stick Deodorant.  Over a short time frame a six-pack ranges from $12 to $20, with a lot of ups and downs.

camel

And I just saved $$ on a toner cartridge.  I had a price alert for $46 and it went from $47 to $41 in one day.

Bonus tips: If you don’t have an Amazon store credit card you should seriously consider it.  It gives you 5% off all purchases!  And if you use the Subscribe & Save feature, you can save up to 15% more on your basics.

Note: I receive nothing by posting about Amazon or Camel.  I just like to save money and time.

Financial

Quicken is back to their tricks, part 2

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Another update: I was forced to buy a updowngrade to Quicken 2016 to continue to use the transaction download feature.  That was bad enough.  But the incompetent software writers at Intuit somehow managed to make the product even worse.  The simplest things no longer work, such as Ctrl key shortcuts.  Example: Before you could hit Ctrl-B to backup, but now none of the shortcuts work.

And the default transaction categories no longer function.

And multiple credit cards no longer download, even though Quicken’s site insists that the problems are solved (e.g., Target Red Card).

I am embarrassed for these people and how badly they do their jobs.  If you are starting from scratch, try something besides Quicken.

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Update: Quicken did the same thing this year, only they made it worse by putting out a horrible upgrade in Quicken 2013.  Go to Amazon and check out some of the reviews.  So now you get to pay for a downgrade if you want to keep some of the features of the old product.  I’m amazed that they stay in business.  If you do have to upgrade, do it from Amazon and not the Quicken site.  You’ll save $$.

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The 2011 Netflix marketing plan will be referred to for a long time as a sure way to destroy shareholder value and irritate your customers.  Sticking it to your loyal customers is not a winning strategy.

Apparently Intuit, the maker of Quicken, hasn’t learned this lesson.  In order to “encourage” (read: “You can have your dog back once you send us some more money”) people to upgrade they are de-featuring their product.  Specifically, they will deliberately end the ability to download transactions from your credit card and banking institutions. But that isn’t a support feature, that is a core part of the product.

It is common for software companies to drop support for older versions.  I understand and accept that.  It is also common for software companies to significantly improve their products to entice you to upgrade.  Again, no problem there.

But this is a joke.  Once again Quicken throws in a few useless tools (A new cash flow graph is one of the four main reasons you should upgrade.  Woo-hoo!) and “only” requires you to pay the original purchase price again to get these great new features.  They aren’t even offering a discounted upgrade price.

Imagine if Microsoft said that if you don’t pay for an expensive Excel upgrade that you could still add, subtract and divide, but you couldn’t multiply.  Or if HP said you must pay for an upgrade or your sound system would stop working. That’s what Quicken is doing.

And it isn’t just the cost of the upgrade, it is the wasted hours installing and learning a new program to do the same things I was doing already.

I highly encourage people to use another software package.  Or if it is more cost-effective for you to give into the extortion then at least buy it on Amazon for less than Quicken charges you directly.

Please share this with others!

Side note to liberals: I think most will agree that this is a clear case of corporate greed leading to bad decisions and negative consequences for customers.  But do we need the government involved to solve our problems?  Not at all.  That would be an expensive disaster.  We just need competition and a free exchange of ideas.  Please keep that in mind.

Economics, False teachers, Financial

Because bankers consider a house and a Womyn’s Studies degree to have equal value as collateral . . .

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. . . uh, or in a more accurate sense, they don’t.  Unless Socialist and “Christian” Left BFF Bernie Sanders is your banker.

Source: Bernie Sanders Mercilessly Mocked for Posting ‘Economically Illiterate’ Tweet

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders asked in a tweet Saturday, “You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”

As if you needed more evidence that Leftists literally fail at basic economics, now we have Bernie Sanders publicly questioning how bankers could possibly consider those as different risks.  And this guy wants to be the leader of the free world — and the “Christian” Left thinks his economics ideas are great!

Do we really have to spell it out for the Left?  Apparently so.

If your job is lending money that your owners expect to get paid back, you decide whether to lend money based on those risks and you set interest rates according to risks.  In the case of a mortgage, there is a real thing — a house!! — that they can recover and sell to get money if you don’t pay.  And those silly bankers require you to make a down payment so that if they do have to repossess and sell the house that there will be enough money to cover their expenses.  Where do you they get these crazy ideas?!  How dare they try to keep their assets while providing a valuable service to the community?

With your Womyn’s Studies or whatever other degree you get, there is nothing to recover except your earning power, which, if you aren’t paying them back, is apparently not enough.  So Mr. or Mrs. Banker loses his or her job and the owners lose their money.

It is that simple.  I can teach that and more to an average group of 7th graders in a 30 minute Junior Achievement lesson.  Sanders and his followers are that economically illiterate.

Leftists should never be in charge of economic policies.  Never. Even my dog did better on economics tests than Leftists. 

Financial

The little things can cost you a lot

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Money won’t buy you happiness, but mismanaging it will buy you unhappiness.  Sometimes modifying some small habits can make a huge difference.  That $4 per day coffee may not seem like a lot as a percentage of your gross income, but it could be a big figure as a percentage of what is left over after all your other expenses.

For example, if you make $4,000 per month that coffee is 3% of your spending.  That is actually a fairly big number compared to the value you are getting for it.  But how much do you have left at the end of the month?  A few hundred dollars?  Zero?  Negative?  Now that $120 looks even bigger.  You can have some treats but be very careful with what you buy often.

Via How Much Are Your Habits Costing You? – The Simple Dollar.

Those Constant Money Drains

It is probably okay to splurge occasionally, but what we’re focusing on here are the constant money drains that you may not even notice. These daily or weekly habits could be costing you in a big way, while not really adding value to your life, which is why it is important to identify them and figure out a way to reduce their impact.

To see how much some of the most common habits cost, let’s look at a few different scenarios:

Example 1: John smokes a $5 pack of cigarettes every day. Over the course of one week, he will spend $35. In one year, he will fork over $1,820. And during his first decade as a smoker, John will spend $18,200!

Example 2: Mary refuses to brown-bag her lunch and instead spends an average of $10 to eat at a restaurant with her friends each workday. Over the course of one week, she will spend $50. After the first year, she will spend $2,600. And if she keeps it up for a decade, Mary will spend $26,000!

Example 3: Amy pays her credit card bill late every month, resulting in a $35 late fee. After the first year, she will have spent $420. If she continues this habit for a decade, she will have flushed $4,200 directly down the drain!

Read the entire article.  There is a lot of wisdom there.

Also read the Bible :-).

Hebrews 13:5–6 Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

Financial

Do you use the Amazon Smile program?

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If you use Amazon be sure you sign up for Amazon Smile and pick your favorite charity.  I love that every time we buy something from Amazon they give 0.5% to Stand to Reason.

About AmazonSmile

AmazonSmile is a website operated by Amazon with the same products, prices, and shopping features as Amazon.com. The difference is that when you shop on AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to the charitable organization of your choice.

Every item available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com is also available on AmazonSmile (smile.amazon.com) at the same price. You will see eligible products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” on their product detail pages.

If you represent a charitable organization and you would like to learn more about registering your organization to receive AmazonSmile donations, go to org.amazon.com .

For more information about the AmazonSmile program, go to http://smile.amazon.com/about.

Economics, Financial

We cut the cable! Woo-hoo!

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We finally did it:  We dropped cable TV and our land line phone, saving lots of money and not really giving anything up.  The only people who ever called the land line were solicitors and our parents, so we switched to mobile only.

We added HD antennas, so we still get the channels we want (we watch very, very little TV).  And we got a pleasant surprise: Our TIVO will record off the antenna.

We also bought Rokus.  Mrs. Eternity Matters found a few things she likes on the Roku, such as a Pilates channel, music channels, access to the Sirius account, and more.  And Netflix and Amazon streaming are way faster on the Roku than on TIVO.

I must say it was a lot of fun to return the TV hardware to Comcast.  We are keeping our Internet service with them.  I got a good deal for this year at least — a little less than U-verse for theoretically higher speeds, plus we don’t have to change email addresses.

Unlike Rat, I don’t care if I don’t have ESPN.
pearls cable

 

 

 

Economics, Financial

Timeless retirement investing advice: Use index funds and don’t get greedy

This is so simple but so important.  Trying to out-guess the stock market experts is for suckers.  I learned early in my career that even with loads of internal information that you still can’t predict what the market will do.  I never traded on it, of course, but there times when Compaq would release record earnings but the stock would go down because of some comments about future performance.

Just invest in broad index funds (mutual funds that mimic the overall market).  There is no need to chase stock tips or highly managed mutual funds.  The only exception would be if your employer sold you stock at a discount, which would mitigate the risk.  Just don’t be foolish like a lot of Enron employees were and put most or all of your retirement money in one company.  I knew way too many people at Compaq and HP who tried to time peaks and missed out.

As noted below, keep in mind the simple math: Index funds with minimal fees will yield 7%.  Managed funds will be more like 5%.  So you are 2 points behind, right?  No, it is much worse.  If inflation is 3%, then your net gain with index funds is 4%.  That’s double what you’d get with managed funds.

Via AAII: The American Association of Individual Investors.

Charles Rotblut CR: Since you founded Vanguard, would you explain why you think investors should use index funds?

John Bogle JB: Let’s start off with the obvious. Imagine a circle representing 100% of the U.S. stock market, with each stock in there by its market weight. Then take out 30% of that circle. Those stocks are owned by people who index directly through index funds. The remaining 70% are owned by people who index collectively. By definition, they own the exact same portfolio as the indexers do in aggregate, so they will capture the same gross return as the direct indexers. But by trading back and forth, trying to beat one another, they will inevitably lose by the amount of their transaction costs, the amount of the advisory fees they pay, and the amount of all those mutual fund management costs they incur: marketing costs, processing, technology investments, everything. When we look at the big picture of the costs of investing, including sales loads as well as expense ratios and cash drag, it is a foregone conclusion that active investors, in aggregate, will underperform index investors. It’s the mathematics.Borrowing a phrase from Louis Brandeis: It’s the relentless rules of humble arithmetic. The 30% of investors who own index funds capture almost all of the market’s return. In a 7% return market, indexing should deliver approximately 6.95% to investors. A typical Vanguard all-market index fund charges 0.05%. The remainder—those who are trading back and forth, hiring managers, and all that kind of thing—will incur costs, in round numbers, of about 2% per year. So, the indexers are going to capture pretty close to a 7% return in a 7% market, while the active investors, who also collectively own the index, are getting the same 7% gross return minus about 2% for all those fees and costs, a net return of 5%. It is definitional tautology that the indexers win and the traders lose.

I highly recommend Vanguard for their mutual funds.  They are very easy to do business with and have extremely low fees.