Probably a Bad Idea

Years ago when I was a newly minted executive director of a professional association, I was mentored by a wonderful public official who had been on the board of the organization for many years and was the President/Board chair for a while too. During that time, we spoke every week. Her name was Elizabeth D. Puddington, but had been nicknamed “Sue” as a child by her mother for reasons unknown even to Sue and that is what everyone called her. She was the CEO of an Intergovernmental Risk Pool. Kind of a nonprofit insurance company for public entities. She had a lot of accumulated wisdom much of which I still draw on. Once, in a casual conversation, she gave me a rule of thumb that I still often apply today.

We were chatting and somehow the subject turned to rental cars. We started discussing the then new scam of the rental car companies to pre-sell you a full tank of gas at a reasonable price per gallon at the time you rented the car. This supposedly would have you avoid paying the car rental company to top off the tank at an absurdly high price per gallon, if you returned the car less than completely full.  The problem with this is that now if you returned the car with more than an empty tank, you were paying for fuel you didn’t use. The solution, of course, was the same as it had always been. Decline the pre-paid tank and return the car full. It is, of course a pain to stop on your way to the airport and fill the tank. But that 5 minutes of time could be worth $50 dollars to you or your organization. Of course, the car rental companies were pushing this pre-paid fuel hard along with the insurance that you probably didn’t need because it was provided either by the credit card you were using or covered on your own auto policy. Why? They make a lot of money on these “little” add ons.

Sue then said the prophetic words I remember to this day:

“If they want you to do it, it’s probably a bad idea.”

Say this to yourself the next time someone is trying to get you to buy something extra or to pay for it in some way other than, you pay in full and walk away with the thing you intended to buy and all business concluded.

Yes, I know good companies don’t just want a sale they want a “relationship” with you. They want to take you on a journey. But if I may be cynical for a moment here, the only journey that is being undertaken is the journey of money from your wallet to their corporate coffers, executives, and shareholders. Buy your books from Amazon (if you must) but get your love at home.

Here is my partial list of probably a bad idea.

• Pre-paying for gas (or anything) on a rental car.

• Paying for extra liability or collision insurance on a rental car Check your home auto policy or credit card to make sure you are covered so you are ready to decline if you can. Have proof of insurance with you. The rental company may ask for it.

• Leasing a car, instead of buying it outright (this almost never makes financial sense)

• Purchasing the “extended warranty” on a vehicle. Car companies make a ton of money on these, paying out just pennies on the dollar. The fact that they pressure you heavily to do this reflects exactly what a horrible deal it is! One time, I was buying a new car and refused the extended warranty which would have added $1,500 to a car that cost $12,000 (yeah, it was a few years ago). When I pointed out that my other car was more than 5 years old and I had never had an issue with it, the salesman actually told me that the car I was buying from them wasn’t as well made as my old car. Way to inspire confidence! I declined the extended warranty and drove that car for 22 years until pieces of it started falling off from rust. Never had an issue that would have been covered by the warranty.

• Buying or selling stocks or other securities in response to market conditions. Adopt an investment strategy you can live with and ignore the market. Brokers and money managers charges fees, sometimes hidden, when you trade.

• Paying someone a percent of your total assets to manage your money. How did this become a thing? Can you imagine if you went to an attorney to prepare your will and they wanted 1 percent of your total wealth to do it? Or you paid your car mechanic a percentage of the value of your car for each repair? If you must pay someone to manage your money for you, choose a fee for service type model. The percent of assets under management model can cost $100,000s or millions over the course of 30 years of investing. Find someone else. Better yet, learn to do it yourself. It’s not that complicated.

• Buying a house with less than 20 percent down and paying mortgage insurance. Yes, I got suckered by this one years ago. Horrible deal and a good chance that in a down market you will end up owing more than you can sell the house for and be stuck if you need or want to move.

• Buying a Whole Life or Universal Life insurance policy as an “investment” instead of just the term life you need. Insurance is a risk management tool. Not an investment. Buy inexpensive term life and invest the rest properly.

• Buy now, pay later. No! Do not! Save up for what you want and pay for it all at once. I don’t care how expensive it is.

• Adjustable rate mortgages, if you have one of these right now, you know what I mean.

• Cashing one of those idiotic checks credit card companies are always sending or taking one of those introductory no-interest for 6-month deals. (Shred these without opening the envelope.)

• Giving your email address or phone number in order to get a 10 percent discount on your first order. They will pester you incessantly until the end of time. It’s not worth it.

• All rewards credit cards except those offering simple cash back and then ONLY if you pay in full every single month without fail.

• Signing up for a credit card at check-out to save whatever percent. You have enough credit cards, don’t you? Many too many?  

• Almost any product that requires a subscription to use. Yes, I have a few of these. A cell phone, an emergency beacon for the backcountry, trail maps software, financial software. They are hard to avoid these days. Make sure you are reviewing them monthly or annually to make sure that they are still something you value. When my SOS beacon subscription came up for annual renewal, I checked what they were charging me against the website for what they were charging new customers. New customers were paying far less. I called the company and they lowered my price to the price on the website saving more than $100. Subscriptions are easy to buy and hard to cancel.

• Any item that is displayed on the aisle endcap at the grocery store unless that exact item is on your shopping list. ‘Nuff said.

• Product ‘protection’ for anything including AppleCare! AppleCare used to make some sense for laptops back in the days when they often broke at least once during the first 3 years. The cost of repair for a broken display or dead hard drive could be many $100s. I used to buy it and it paid off maybe half the time. Now Apple computers almost never break within the first 3 years unless you drop them. My MacBook Pro is in its 8th year. I have only ever paid to have the battery replaced in 2020.

iPhones are very sturdy these days. If you are reasonably careful, you won’t break it. They are even waterproof! A good case costs less than AppleCare and seems to me reasonable insurance. Some people hate cases and are just careful.

That is a short list. I can think of many more and I am sure you can too.

Generally speaking when someone asks you to add something to your purchase that is different from what you originally intended to buy, your first impulse should be to say no. If you are tempted, stop and do your research to determine if it makes sense. The more dollars involved the more research you should do. If you want to impulse buy the extra value meal because they pushed it or an appetizer that sounded good, well ok. But before you lease a car make sure you understand why they are pushing you to do it. What’s in it for them?

It’s all about that journey.

Truth Over Safety

My town of Washington Grove, Md. operates under a New England Meeting style of government, which though common in New England (as you might guess), is the only one of its kind in the state of Maryland. Every year in May the town gathers, (on Zoom once again this year) hears an address from the mayor, approves the budget (including tax increases) and receives reports from the many, many committees.

The meeting is always opened with an invocation (euphemism for prayer) and though I am not generally a fan of invoking religion, even in its most ecumenical form in a public forum, I was intrigued by something that our invocateur (a word I just made up) Joe Clark said when he opened the meeting.

“Thank you for life which offers us days never lived before so that we may spend and not hoard the one life we have. Let us choose joy over pleasure, peace before ease, truth instead of safety and love above all.”

I was intrigued by the idea that one might hoard one’s life and wondered what it might mean to choose truth over safety.

In Homo Deus, the sequel to his monster best seller Sapiens, Yuval Harari speculates that humans may one day solve the problem of death allowing individuals to live forever, at least as long as they don’t meet with an accident, commit suicide, or face another life-ending injury. Putting aside the whole question of whether living forever would be a good idea or not either for us or the planet, Harari suggests that in a world in which only physical destruction can end a life, humans could become completely risk avoidant.

“We mortals daily take chances with our lives, because we know they are going to end anyhow. So we go on treks in the Himalayas, swim in the sea, and do many other dangerous things like crossing the street or eating out. But if you believe that you can live forever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that.”

In other words, we are willing to take risk, to chance loss, because we know that in the long run we will die and lose everything anyway.

Steve Jobs put it like this in his famous address to the graduating class of Stanford University in 2005:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

When I think about life hoarding, it seems to me that in some ways, Harari’s fear is already materializing.

The fact is that in 2022, Americans (and most people in the world) have never in history been safer from disease, better fed, had more material wealth, and less likely to be victims of violence.

Yes, there many people who are not so fortunate. People who are hungry, homeless, living in war zones, or without access to healthcare. But the 21st Century is still the most prosperous time in human history by pretty much any measure.

And yet, in many ways we are more risk averse than ever! I am not just talking about people who still won’t leave their homes because of Covid. Although, yes, that. But there is a long list of things that people won’t do because they are afraid.

• Camping overnight in the woods

• Flying on an airplane

• Riding a bike or a motorcycle

• Rock climbing

• Traveling in a car

• Quitting a job that makes you miserable

• Taking the subway in New York City

It appears that as we have become safer and more secure, we have become more avoidant of risk.

Each person, of course, has to decide what risk is worth taking and at what potential price. Someone who is elderly or immune compromised might reasonably make different choices about whether to go to the market or have their groceries delivered than a 25 year-old would

But if we are not clear-eyed about how much risk we are avoiding and what we are giving up to avoid it, we can convince ourselves we are being prudent when we are really being fearful.

During Covid, I tried my best to stay as engaged with the world as I could. Even before vaccines were available, I went out every day. I continued shopping in the grocery store. I traveled twice to Colorado to see my kids, albeit by car not plane. When we visited them we hugged them and shared a living space with them.

Once vaccinated, I tried to return as quickly and fully to ‘normal life’ as possible. Since April of 2021, I have flown, taken trains and busses, eaten in restaurants, and attended weddings and concerts where few or none were masked. Sometimes, it felt scary. I did it anyway.

I accept that I might get Covid. I accept that I might die or even be sick for a long time. I might also die of the flu, in a car crash, or get eaten by a bear while camping in the woods at night. I am not willing to give up camping, car travel, or hugging my kids in exchange for deluding myself that I will live forever.

Life is a bit like money in this sense. You can’t enjoy it when it is locked away. You have to spend your life to have a life. And the only promise you can rely on (unless you count taxes) is that you will, in fact, die. We may try to hoard our lives by avoiding risk but we will just end up missing out on life entirely. And of course, then we will still die.

Being generous with your life is the opposite of hoarding it. Choose truth above safety and love above all. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

But only you and your heart knows where it wants to go.

Whip WHAT Now?

Gerald Ford was only President of the United States for about two and a half years. He was appointed vice president after taking over for Spiro Agnew who was forced to resign for being a crook. Ford soon after became president, completing the term of Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign for being a crook.  (“I am not a crook” notwithstanding.) The only thing I remember from Ford’s administration was that he wanted everyone to wear buttons that had the letters ‘WIN’ on them. The letters stood for ‘Whip Inflation Now.” At 12 years of age, I vaguely understood that inflation meant that candy bars were getting more expensive and that a soda that used to cost 10 cents now cost a quarter. What was less clear was how wearing a button would help keep prices down. Turns out no one else understood that either. In 1976, Ford lost the only election in which he ever ran for president. Jimmy Carter won, and inflation got worse until in 1979 Carter appointed this man the chair of the Federal Reserve and he whipped it good by jacking up interest rates until the U.S. economy went reeling into a multi-year recession and unemployment soared to more than ten percent. But a least the price of a candy bar stabilized.

The original OG candy bar

As a recent retiree, my new hobby is worrying about money. Did I save enough? Will Social Security still exist when I am ready to claim it? Will I have enough for the nursing home? If I run out, will they put me out on the street?

Now I have something else to worry about which I hadn’t even thought about since the Carter administration.  Inflation is back and badder than ever (though not worse than ever as we shall see).

During the pandemic the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, went berserk, lowering interest rates to near nothing and flooding the economy with money to prevent what one might think would be the natural effect of a world that was shutdown, a recession. It worked.

Magically, the economy of the U.S. and much of the world kept chugging along because although people weren’t eating out as much or going to shopping malls, they were doing plenty of food delivery and online shopping and thanks to Uncle Sam they had plenty to spend. People who couldn’t shift to online work lost jobs or worked and got sick, but many did just fine or even better than before. The stock market inexplicably soared.

During 2020 and much of 2021 fuel was cheap. Maybe after adjusting for inflation, it was the cheapest it has been in my lifetime. And the stock market climb made people feel rich though the gains (like this year’s losses) were mostly on paper unless you were smart enough to sell at the top or panic sold when you saw the drop.

But now with Covid seemingly over, at least practically speaking, all that money floating around combined with supply chain woes seems to have overheated things, causing inflation to ‘skyrocket’, causing the Fed to ‘tighten’, and causing investors to fear that higher interest rates will cause what we just spent the last two years trying to avoid, a recession. Is there a recession? No, not yet anyway, but people are afraid of one, which in some ways is worse than the real thing. So now the stock market is tanking and inflation is taking a bite out of people’s wages causing people to cut back on spending until recession becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But what I want to look at is how inflation is impacting the lives of average Americans. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to that data. What I do have is access to my data.

Let me tell you about my data. In 1987, my girlfriend and I had just returned from a trip around the world. On the first day of our trip we had formed a financial union combining all of our savings and now we were penniless having spent every nickel we had on a 16-month trip which took us to southern Europe, Egypt, India, Uganda, Thailand and lots of other places. Our budget was just $7 (about $18.50 today) per day and many days we spent less than half of that. Nonetheless, at some point the money ran out and we had to come home and go back to work.  When you added in our student load debt, our net worth was negative when we arrived home in May of that year.

Being the lucky man that I am, however, this girlfriend nonetheless agreed to:

1. marry me and

2. allow me to spend the entirety of our wedding gifts to buy our first computer.

We mostly got cash for wedding presents and many that were not cash went back to the store for a refund. Hence, we were able to purchase a new Apple Macintosh Plus with dual floppy drives (no hard drive), a staggering 1 megabyte of RAM, and a spiffy dot matrix printer.  At the time we had no furniture to speak of, no car, no TV. Our bookshelves were cinder blocks and plywood and we slept on a futon on the floor of a one-bedroom rental apartment without AC. We had a nice computer though, at least for its day.

Shortly after the purchase, my dad gave me an early personal finance program called Dollars & $ense and I have kept track of our expenses to the penny ever since. Sadly, some of the data was lost when I switched from that program to Quicken in 1995 but I still have more than 27 years of spending data in Quicken!

So today I want to look at inflation (at least in my experience) and see how bad it is. To do so, I created an inflation report in Quicken which compares how much I have spent on certain essential items (food, energy, whisky) this year compared to the same period a year ago. Not included are things that are highly variable like travel. We went camping down in Florida for a few weeks in January of this year but there was no similar trip in 2021 at the same time of year so we are excluding that kind of thing.

First up, Internet service. Our service through May 25 is identical to the penny as it was in 2021, $274 or $54.80 per month. Kind of a lot in my view since we have internet included as well with our cell phones but we are not paying for any cable or subscription services except for Apple TV+ which is included in my Apple Services bundle and is shared with my most of my family. We also get The Washington Post delivered old school on real paper every Sunday. Retro, I know. No inflation to see here.

Continuing on with utilities:

Electricity we have spent $399 vs. $509 last year at this time. Cooler spring, less AC, I guess? $110 less than last year.

Heating oil: 2021 $444 vs. 2022 $255! A savings of $189 this year! Damn, that’s why I was so cold all winter! We never turned the heat up past 62 F (58 at night). Admittedly, they haven’t filled the tank yet this spring as they usually do so this may change before the fall.

Cooking fuel (propane) $132 in 2021 so far this year… zero. Yeah, they also have not filled the tank this year. No idea why. I’ll probably run out of gas in the middle of making a pizza.

Cell phone cost has gone up! Last summer while my wife was trying to work on our vacation in Maine (yes, you read that right) she got sick of having our data throttled and we upgraded our plan for us and everyone on our plan (my mother, my father and his wife, my kids, their spouses, and a young man in Iowa who I just noticed on the bill) to unlimited data. The result is a cell phone bill year to date of $675, up $121 from last year. That is net of what my various family members are reimbursing us for being on the plan. Our cell phone service is more expensive than heating oil and cooking fuel combined. Maybe I should take a look at that Mint Mobile thing that Ryan Reynolds is always hawking on YouTube for just $15 a month. Anybody use this? Let me know.

Provisions is my Quicken category made up of groceries and libation (sounds better than booze). Since wine, beer and liquor can’t be sold in a grocery store in Maryland, it is easy to track the two things separately and I do.

The purpose of my life is to serve as a conduit to transfer wealth to Danny Wegman and his family.

I spend a lot of money at the grocery store. It is the single biggest item in our budget. We don’t eat out much, almost never order take out or food delivery and I only go to Starbucks for coffee if it is an actual emergency. As I consequence, I allow myself anything I want at the grocery store. I buy the best EVOO, lox at least once a month, and genuine Parmigiana Reggiano cheese at some shocking price per pound. Only the finest Irish grass-fed butter to scramble our organic, cage-free, pasture raised, pampered hen’s eggs. I buy organic fruits and vegetables. I also order insanely expensive coffee online from an outfit in California. (It works out to about $3.60 for a liter of coffee per day for me and my wife. More than the daily cost of electricity but way less than just one fancy coffee drink at Starbucks).  To be honest, I don’t look at prices when I shop. I buy whatever I want or whatever my wife wants and that’s it. Last year I spent $11,655 at the grocery store. That’s almost $1,000 a month! Holy crap! Now here we would expect to see an impact of inflation and yet somehow, I have spent $254 less at the food store than last year at this time. I am aware of only having made one change. I now eat lunch before I go to the market.  This little change has resulted in a lot less sushi in a box being purchased on hangry impulse.

My libation bill has also gone down by $342! In this case, I know exactly why. I no longer buy single malt scotch but rather bourbon which is less than half the price and which I like 86% as well. Seems a reasonable trade off.

Lastly, let’s look at the BFD that is grabbing all the headlines -- gasoline! Now before I share this number a few caveats. I don’t drive that much. I have no commute and nowhere in particular to go. If I go into DC, I take the Metro.  Otherwise, I go to the grocery story once a week, drive out to the AT for a hike, or go to see my parents who live an average of 1 hour away.

Also gas likely costs me half of what it costs you unless you have an electric car or a horse. My Honda Civic gets 47 mpg on the highway (better than my motorcycle got). I can still fill it to the tippy top for about $45 once or twice a month.

Finally, this does not count gas for road trips and travel out of town. I count that separately because it is irregular and doesn’t come at the same time year on year.

So, in 2022 I’ve spent $306 on gasoline for local use compared to $176 during the same period a year ago. This reflects an increase in the price per gallon to be sure, but I am also driving more. Still, that’s only an increase of about 90 cents a day, manageable even on my fixed income.

For everything that I am tracking here, I’ve spent $486 less than last year at this time. Yes, in spite of ‘inflation’ I’m spending less! In addition, not counted in the number above and thanks to Covid-inspired health care subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, my health insurance costs (which we pay ourselves since we have no employer plan) dropped by nearly 50% this year. I am paying less for health insurance now than I was when paying my share of my employer’s plan! Unfortunately, this won’t continue next year unless Congress extends the subsidy. I assume that won’t happen.

When I read the financial news, I learn that inflation is destroying me and threatening my ability to maintain my lifestyle and I cry but when I look at the actual numbers, they look pretty good.

Now, your experience may be different but before you panic that the sky is falling, check your own numbers. Your dollar may still be going further than the alarmists in the media would have you believe. Can’t examine your numbers because you don’t know what they are? Check out Quicken! It’s the OG personal finance software with the silly name. Or there are many other programs out there that can help you get a handle on your finances. You know you should.