The CYC New Year’s Resolution Review

24 million more leap-kicks, and she'll be a hardbody in no time

24 million more leap-kicks, and she’ll be a hardbody in no time

 

We didn’t make any resolutions for January 1, 2013 (or any prior year), because new year’s resolutions are stupid. If you want to change/improve on/reverse something, why would you deliberately postpone doing so until an arbitrary date months down the road? What good would it do to hold off on implementing whatever behavior it is you want to adopt?

Aside: Thanks to all the fat tubs of goo who resolved to get in shape in 2014 by joining a gym. Today’s January 3, which means it’s another week or so before you “sprain an ankle” or “have a fibromyalgia flareup” and have to “take some time off” before “getting back into it.” It’s because of you that gym memberships for the rest of us are sold at a de facto 85% discount.

So, back to our non-existent resolutions and how we fared at accomplishing them.

Pay off $0 in credit card balances. 

Admittedly, this one was the easiest. Here’s the 3-part strategy we used to get our balances on every card from $0 all the way down to $0:

  1. Incur charges for everyday purchases, groceries, gas etc.
  2. Refrain from buying useless stuff, with or without the understanding that said purchase will reappear in statement form at the end of the month.
  3. Authorize AmEx to debit our bank account by the exact amount of the balance incurred each month, each month.

Wait, that’s all there is to it? Come on, there’s got to be more. Isn’t there a debt snowball strategy involved? Something about paying off the lowest balance first and then riding that intangible wave, which provides the impetus to pay off the next-highest balance, and so on, until 7 years later when we can finally begin attacking the $45,394.12 VISA balance that has since grown by a greater amount than the smaller balances we paid off in the interim?

No, that’s it. We wish there were more complexity to our method, because then we could come across as more ingenious than we are, but there isn’t any more to it. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Keep the student loan balance at 0, too.

We take it back: this one was even easier than the previous one. All we did was not incur any financing for further education. Again, there are no other steps involved.

Sure, you say, you folks are old enough that formal education is years behind you. Which is true. However, if we were of college age, we’d have run the numbers and concluded that taking out loans that we’d have no capacity to ever pay off given what useless field we planned to major in might not be the brightest way to start one’s adult relationship with money.

You know what’s odd? As far as we know, there are no blogs written by people who say “Damn, the money I spent learning how to become a diesel technician at UTI or a commercial driver at C.R. England was a total waste. I would have been better off paying twice as much to earn a humanities degree. Oh well, live and learn.”

Make money from something other than salary. 

Another win for us! After close to 500 posts, a lot of people still don’t seem to comprehend how this works, so let us spell it out for you again, as simply as possible. If this doesn’t work, we’ll incorporate puppet theater and line drawings instead and see if that leads to a breakthrough.

Reducing expenses and earning more is the easy part, or at least the easily understood part. Once you’ve done that, you’re left with a balance. So what do you do with the balance? Invest it, obviously. That being said, “invest” means more than “defer spending until you’re withered and gray.” The idea is to see returns while you’re still young enough to enjoy them. There are countless ways to do this. Yes, your company-matched 401(k) is a good start. But there’s so much more. As our fellow genius Paula Pant at Afford Anything points out, there are trillions of dollars and dollar equivalents on the planet, awaiting your claim. Buying a 2nd house and renting it out might not seem glamorous, but a) it’s a start and 2) how enchanting is your accounts payable/data entry job at the equipment rental shop, anyway?

So yeah, we did that. We also bought some undervalued stocks. Which brings us to our next resolution:

Don’t get caught up in the hype. 

Heck, this might have been the easiest one of all. We didn’t buy Facebook stock when it went on sale in 2012, and we didn’t buy Twitter stock when it went on sale 2 months ago. Was the latter a bad idea? Of course it was, the stock has risen 50% since its initial public offering. Did we have any reason to believe that that would happen? The company’s profit margins have been less than outstanding for the last couple of years. Does that justify a market capitalization that’s almost 60 times the size of shareholders’ equity? Not at all. To everyone riding the Twitter train right now, congratulations, you’re smarter than us. We’d bet that Twitter will sink below its IPO value before the year is up. That’s in bold so you can hold us to it.

On balance, not only was it a good year but the resolutions were easy to follow through on. Or would have been, had we chosen to come up with them a year ago. One more time: why isn’t everyone rich, or at least liquid and building? Must be because they haven’t read our book yet. Seven measly dollars.

 

 

“I Bought It On Sale” = I’m Probably An Idiot

Allow us the indulgence of quoting ourselves, since there are so few other personal finance bloggers worth repeating the words of. The man in this story sued Target because the store claimed that the $150 worth of luggage they sold him was discounted from $300, when in fact it was discounted from some smaller amount. In California, that gives you standing:

Hinojos is the philosophical descendant of every idiot housewife who came home with an overpriced and/or unnecessary handful of shopping bags.

“How much did that cost?”
“I got it on sale!”

That’s not an answer. Things cost what they cost, not the reduction by which they were discounted. 

Stating a discount is the least nuanced trick in the book, but it works. That’s why it’s lasted so long. It’s the equivalent of pretending to throw a ball while your dog turns around and chases nothing, except dogs don’t know any better and humans are supposed to be the masters of this dopey planet. Which of these 2 signs do you think will entice more customers?

 

SaleHeader imgres

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The one on the left will, because people are incorrigibly stupid.

Years ago, “I got it on sale” might even have been an acceptable defense, only because there was no universal standard, no platinum-iridium bar of comparison. This Curtis Mathis TV costs $1500, and the salesman at my friendly neighborhood Gottschalk’s store says that’s a $500 saving? Sounds good to me, I guess. What do I know?

People, it’s, as our grandmothers enjoy calling it, the Internet Age. You’re no longer at the mercy of an opportunistic merchant or a prevaricating advertising department to find out whether you’re indeed paying too much for your set of lawn chairs or set of lawn darts. Here’s a quote from some woman with a ridiculous job title (“retail strategist”) that makes us yearn for the day when almost everyone was employed in agriculture:

“The deal is not so special anymore,” says Alison Jatlow Levy, a retail strategist at consulting firm Kurt Salmon. “The deal has become the norm. And if the deal is the norm … it actually just trains the consumer to never buy at full price.”

Okay, that served the purpose of giving the USA Today writer a source for future use. But what does it mean? Taken on its face, it means “deals” and “sales” are irrelevant. But do you know what metric does matter when you’re trying to determine the price of something? Here, we’ll give you a hint. Put your PRedICtivE powers to use and try and glean what it might be.

Price, and price only. Once again, layers of sophistry administered over the years have turned a simple truth into something complicated that needs to be unearthed, rinsed off and decoded. Even then, plenty of people still won’t get it.

So how do you determine the appropriate price of something, if you can’t rely on retailers’ capricious figures? EBay. The auction site is more than just a place to get rid of your miscellany. It’s a valuable tool in its capacity as the definitive price list for just about anything.

Here’s Cuddles My Giggly Monkey, a toy that indulging parents are giving their kids this Christmas:

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It costs $85 at Hasbro’s own site. It’s unavailable on FAO Schwarz. $65 on Toys “Я” Us’s site. $75 on Target’s site, but good luck getting one by December 24. Those prices give some indication of how much you should pay, but not enough of one. There’s still the matter of availability. The Target price sounds tempting, but the toy appears to be out of stock at every location we could find.

Onto eBay. We didn’t think this required direction, but here goes. Once you’ve entered the name of what you want to buy,

  1. Look at the Buy It Now prices only.
  2. Look at the auction prices, ranked by time ending soonest.
  3. Ignore the ones without any bids.
  4. Buy accordingly.

As of now, eBay has 102 Cuddleses for sale, 90 of them available for immediate purchase. Among those, the best price we could find was $85, including shipping.

There are 2 dozen Cuddleses available via auction, so the total isn’t 102, but hey, it’s eBay. They used to have a female CEO, so math isn’t their strong suit. Of the dolls available via auction, the one ending soonest (11 hours as of now) has 7 bids, the last of those $61.

It’s important to mention that most of the remaining dolls available for auction haven’t been bid on yet. That means you should ignore their listed prices. Why? Because those “prices” aren’t prices at all. They’re just dreams held by the sellers. It’s like when the media reports that tickets to the Democratic National Convention or gold iPhone 5Ss are going for $20,000 or whatever, just because one deluded seller on eBay insisted that bids start at that wildly inflated and unrealistic price. No one’s going to buy a late-model Xbox for $20,000, and no one’s going to buy Cuddles My Giggly Monkey for $125. No matter how badly the eBay seller who wants that much kicks and yells.

As the end of the auction approaches, the bids increase and the prices increase asymptotically. A lot can happen to that $61 high bid in the remaining 11 hours, and we’d be willing to bet that the high bid will surpass $65 long before then.

So buy from Toys “Я” Us and be confident you made the right decision. Should someone else offer the same toy for $70 and bill it as “30% off!”, you’ll know what to do and how disdainfully to treat that “deal.”

 

Thanks to Paula Pant at Afford Anything for indirectly inspiring this post. Unlike us, she hasn’t yet run out of ideas, nor resorted to modifying other people’s.

How Big Should Your Tranquility Fund Be?

 

There are no emergencies, only stupid people who ask questions.

There are no emergencies, only stupid people who ask questions.

 

The word “emergency” doesn’t have a polar antonym, but “tranquility” and “calm” were the best candidates we could find.

Go pick a personal finance website at random. You can start with any of the jetsam on this list. Sooner or later, the purveyor of the site you selected will mention how important it is to have an “emergency fund.” You know, for emergencies. We’ve already explained how that’s among the laziest, least original, most derivative ways of telling people what they should be doing with their money. You don’t need an emergency fund for a million reasons, the most prominent of which are:

  • By definition, emergencies happen infrequently enough that if you earmark funds for them, those funds aren’t helping you and growing for you like they could be.
  • Almost any emergency you can think of, you can insure against.

Need cash in a hurry? Like, within the hour? That’s what your checking and savings accounts are for. More importantly, why do you need that much that fast? Now, whatever you answered for the previous question, answer this more fundamental question: “Do I need that much money that badly because I did something stupid months or years ago, either once or chronically, and now it’s catching up to me?” Did your engine seize and require a $2500 rebuild because you were too lazy to visit Manny, Moe & Jack and pay $20 for an oil change? Do you need to spend 50 large drying out at Betty Ford because of your continued failure to ever buy a $3 Diet Coke? True emergencies that can’t be insured are unbelievably rare, and focusing on their unlikely occurrence to the exclusion of more pressing and important matters is Reason #1 why most personal finance advice puts the “awful” in godawful.

Pressing and important? What’s more pressing and important than an emergency? 

Everyday life, Jim. Hence the idea of a tranquility fund. Modifying the definition of an emergency fund given at our other creative outlet, Investopedia, a tranquility fund is an account created for the purpose of setting aside money to be used during the unremarkable times that constitute the bulk of one’s life.

If that sounds vague, use your imagination. Personal finance, at its root, is as painfully simple a pursuit as there is. Collect $x. Spend $y. Then determine what you’re going to do with $xy, and you can start by ensuring that that quantity is as large as possible. That requires nothing more than making x large and y small, but if we had a nickel for every personal finance site that fixated on nothing but minimizing y, we’d have more x than we could spend.

Your tranquility fund is $xy. In other words, everything past necessary expenses. The money has to go somewhere. One of the starkest realizations any university economics student makes in intermediate study is yet another obvious one that’s been hiding in plain sight: every dollar has to be either spent or saved. And “saved” is just a synonym for “spending deferred.” You can have a little now, or a lot later. Delayed gratification is the carrot that makes the Charlie Mungers of the world. The evil cousin of delayed gratification, immediate gratification, has its devotees too. People like Len Bias and Vodka Samm. There are thousands of examples in the former category, billions in the latter. Faceless gamblers, both the casino/dog track kind and the “Take this side street, where no cops will breathalyze us” kind.

Incessantly pressing on the “necessity” (really a luxury) of an emergency fund would be like never shutting up about how important it is to have a smoke alarm in your house. You should test the smoke alarm every month, even if that means schlepping a ladder inside and inevitably banging it against a doorway and creating some cosmetic damage. Oh, and be sure to replace the batteries regularly. Again, that’ll require a ladder. You might want to invest in a battery tester, too. Don’t forget to have an exit plan and memorize which is the safest way to leave your house in the event of a fire. Also, be sure the smoke alarm has the label of a recognized testing laboratory. A smoke alarm with a strobe light is also handy if you have deaf or hard-of-hearing people in the house. Make sure you read the owner’s manual that came with the alarm, and store it in a safe place, but you should still get a professional to install the alarm. Also, remember to temporarily suspend the alarm’s sensitivity if it’s susceptible to cooking fumes. You’ll want to get an ionization alarm for flaming fires, but a photoelectric one for smoldering fires. For the best protection, get both and SWEET CHRIST ENOUGH ALREADY. THANKS FOR YOUR CONCERN BUT THE EXTREME IMPROBABILITY OF MY HOUSE CATCHING FIRE ISN’T WORTH THE AGONY OF SPENDING MY VALUABLE TIME HAVING TO LISTEN TO THIS ENDLESS SPIEL ABOUT SMOKE ALARMS. JUST INSTALL IT AND LET’S GO.

How is that any different than obsessing over emergencies and the funds that are supposed to fund them? There’s what, a 10,000-to-1 chance you’ll actually need a smoke alarm, or an emergency fund? Then you should spend .01% of your time thinking about it. Or one minute a week, and even that sounds like too much. Spend the remaining 99.99% of your time doing something valuable – creating and building wealth, rather than hoping your car gets hit by a meteor (with no “catastrophic astronomical event” coverage in your policy), just so you can withdraw the entire $493.67 from your sporadically stocked emergency fund and be able to tell people like us, “See? I told you so!”