SmartMoney had an attention grabbing headline yesterday. Why Cash Is the New Plastic exerted an irresistible gravitational pull on my mouse.
Could it be that cash, that archaic and germ-spreading form of money whose demise I have both lamented and encouraged, was making a comeback after all?
The first paragraph of the article reads:
Consumers are spending again, but gone are the days of swiping and signing for everything from lattes to lawn furniture. Shoppers are reaching for paper money, and as they do, stores and even credit card issuers are increasingly ready to reward them – with more cash.
So I guess slips of paper and metal disks are making a goal-line defense. Just when you thought that they would go the way of fax machines, the old school pulls it out in the end. Suddenly, consumers are coming to realize that swiping and signing is just a little too easy.
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As I have written a few times before, I consider the unpopularity of fixed annuities to be one of the larger personal finance conundrums.
Aside from the obvious problem of just not having enough money saved up, longevity risk is probably the number one challenge in planning a retirement. If you do not know how long you are going to live, how can you know how much of your kitty you can spend each year?
Annuities neatly solve this problem. You pay a lump sum to an insurance company and that company agrees to send you a check every month for as long as you are around to cash them. They even come in inflation-adjusting versions that will send you larger checks as the CPI goes up.
This sort of arrangement is practically identical to the defined benefit (a.k.a. pension) schemes that are often wistfully referred to as a part of the Good Old Days. And yet, as products, annuities are remarkably unpopular. They do exist, you can even get quotes for them online, but it is a comparatively tiny niche market. I have never seen firm numbers, but it seems safe to infer that something like only one or two retirees in a thousand buys one.
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A reader sent me a link to a tool published by ING. Ingyournumber.com asks for six simple inputs and spits out, with clever animation, your “number,” that is, the dollar amount you will need at the start of retirement.
The six inputs are your current age, martial status, current income, planned age of retirement, desired annual retirement income, and through what age you want to have income. (In other words, how long you expect to live.)
I can immediately see why they need the last three, but the first three are mysterious. My Money Blog wrote about this tool in September and attempted to reverse-engineer the inputs. His theory on the current age input is that it is used to work out how many years you have until retirement, which is then used to adjust your retirement income needs for inflation. Apparently, all inputs are assumed to be in 2010 dollars.
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How much would you pay to lend money to the government? Most of us have this arrogant idea that the government should pay us to borrow our money. And yet, last week a Treasury auction of $10 billion in 5-year bonds resulted in a price that will yield negative 0.55% to their new owners.
It is not quite as crazy as it sounds. These are Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (or TIPS) that will yield inflation plus some stated interest rate. So these bonds are set to return to their owners inflation minus 0.55% over five years. Given that normal unprotected five year bonds are currently paying only 1.18%, this implies a five year average inflation rate of 1.73%.
Annual inflation over the past five years has averaged 1.83% and over the past twenty five it has been 2.82%. If you think inflation over the next five years will be higher than 1.73%, then the TIPS, negative interest and all, are a better bet than the regular Treasurys.
So it is not crazy after all.
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Time to review the latest cutting-edge academic research, as discussed in our country’s leading business newspaper. A report in the Wall Street Journal from Monday brings us two items that expand our understanding of that mysterious beast known as the stock market.
The first item is a recently released report from the Investment Company Institute (the trade group for mutual fund companies) which revealed that the average mutual fund investor’s willingness to take risk is lower now than it was two years ago before the market experienced its well publicized unpleasantness.
It is a report that is just chock full of enlightening insights. A person only needs to skim the chart captions to learn a lot. Turns out, “Tax-Deferred Accounts Are A Popular Way to Hold Mutual Funds.” And “Fund Performance Is the Most Important Factor Shaping Opinions of the Fund Industry.” Further, “Mutual Fund Industry Favorability Rises and Falls with Stock Market Performance.”
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Credit Cards, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
November 10, 2010 12:59 pm | 
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