It can’t be stressed enough: Credit cards are not to be used to purchase items that you cannot otherwise afford. In this day and age, a credit card can be very useful when used properly. You can pay your bills online with a credit card, send your mom some flowers or even get through checkout at the grocery store a little quicker. But a credit card can be a very dangerous thing. Student loans, car loans, mortgages and other loans can also be dangerous when not used properly. Only take on a level of debt that you feel comfortable paying. Find out how much your monthly payments will be and see if the total amount will figure into your monthly budget without a problem using the mortgage debt consolidation . And don’t make purchases that you simply cannot pay back in a timely fashion. Instead, set up a system to save enough money to make the purchases outright. These simple tips will allow you to stay out of debt in the long run and solve the credit card debt . You can have the consolidate debt and solve your problem. Be sure that you got your debt under control to prevent worries and trouble.Settle the debt as early as possible.
Let’s say you have $20,000 to invest. Maybe it’s sitting right now in a retirement account at work, and you think you might want to be more aggressive with the way in which you invest it—or some of it. Maybe you’ve just gotten an inheritance or a huge raise at a new job. Maybe you’ve just had this money sitting in a savings account, have felt for a long time that you could do more with it than leave it in that savings account, and suddenly decide: Now’s the time. Whatever the case, let’s say it’s $20,000, but it can in reality be more or even much less. Let’s see how to invest it.
So that you can get used to the investment waters, rather than investing 100 percent of it all at once, I want you to divide it up and start investing slowly over the first year, to see how it makes you feel. The chances, I think, are good that by the end of the first year you’ll be ready to plunge in.
Take 80 percent of what you have to invest, which in our example is $16,000, and put that money in a Treasury bill or note, or just leave it in your money-market fund, anywhere it will be kept safe for you for about a year. After that year is up, it will be up to you if you want to keep investing it so safely, invest more on your own, or if you want some professional help in investing it. Your inner voice will tell you which is best for you. Trust yourself.
If these are not funds you are investing within a retirement account, the best way to buy a Treasury bill or note is by contacting the Federal Reserve office nearest you and setting up what is called a Treasury direct account. This is where you buy your Treasuries directly from the Federal Reserve absolutely free of charge. You could also, if you wanted, buy your Treasuries from a broker, either a discount or full-service broker; but this would cost you about $30, and why spend $30 if you don’t have to? The other reason to buy your Treasuries directly is to get used to them and the way they work (they’re simple!). When it comes time to stop investing for growth, many people transfer some or all of their money from the market into Treasuries and draw the money they need to live on from the interest. This might be part of your overall plan, too, and it’s a great idea to become familiar with how they work right now.
So $16,000, or 80 percent, goes into Treasuries or is just kept safe. The other 20 percent, in this case $4,000, is what you’re going to invest in the market.
There is no harder question when it comes to the stock market. And there’s no single correct answer, because the market never stops going up and down. To answer the question of when to sell, don’t worry about what the market is doing. As always, just keep in touch with your inner voice and your time frame.
The answer will vary, depending on your individual circumstances. If you’re very lucky, you may never need to use this money or need the income it could generate for your retirement. If that happens to be the case, then the answer will be never. Let your beneficiaries inherit it. Not only will this money continue to grow tremendously, but no one will have to pay income taxes on the gains when you leave it to them. This is because when your beneficiaries inherit something from you, it’s valued at a cost basis of what it was worth the day they inherited it. So if you bought one thousand shares of duck feathers stock at $10 a share years ago, and over the years the stock splits and the price rises so that you now own eight thousand shares at $40, this means that your $10,000 investment is now worth $320,000. If you sell it, you will owe capital gains taxes on
$310,000, the difference between what you bought and sold it for. Now let’s assume that instead of selling it, you left it to your beneficiaries; because they inherited it and didn’t buy it, their cost basis is what the stock was worth when you died:
$320,000. If they then sold it for $320,000, they would not owe one penny of capital gains taxes.
In all likelihood, however, you’re counting on this money for retirement. This means you will one day want or need to switch some or all of your money from growth-oriented investments to an income-generating investment, such as Treasury notes or bills. In any case, you will need to keep a careful watch on that ten-year time horizon.
Let’s say that you have had your money diversified among several mutual funds for nine years already, and you know you won’t need it for another ten years, if then. As long as those funds are performing as well as or better than other funds that are similar to it, just leave it where it is.
Now let’s say you’ve had your money diversified among several mutual funds for seven years, but this time you know you will probably retire in about three years. At that time you will need this money to start generating income so you can begin to live off the interest that the principal will generate. You will have to make a change. With your eye on your timeline, it is time to start reevaluating right now. Let’s say, too, that you had a great run in the market over these seven years, and you’ve averaged about 15 percent a year on your money.
What do you do? It’s terrific that you’ve done well, hut don’t try to outsmart the market. You do not have ten years ahead of you in which you can leave your money just to sit there. Take your profits now.
It may turn out that the market suffers a setback, so that if you had ignored your nervousness, you would have been left back at square one. Or the market might skyrocket after you withdraw your money. Who cares? You have made your money. You have listened to your inner voice. You are far better off selling and ceasing to worry than you are letting your fear drain you and make you feel powerless. This is the money you intend to live on for the rest of your life, and you must trust yourself more than you trust others about where to keep the money safe that will keep you safe.
Plunging in Deeper?
Once you have invested for a year, you may decide, as thousands of other people have, that yes, you’re more than safe on your own. If you find it heady and exhilarating, if it makes you feel both safe and powerful, then by all means plunge in deeper. Watch carefully over what you are creating, keep in mind your time frame, and listen, always, to your inner voice.
If instead, after this first year of investing, you find you’re not comfortable with it, and your inner voice says that you would rather have professional help before you plunge in deeper, then again, you must listen to that voice. And you must find the very best help you possibly can.
If after I became a broker, any of my clients had ever asked me—and thankfully no one ever did—what I had done for a living before I went to work for Merrill Lynch, I would have told them the truth: Before becoming a broker, I worked as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, California. My dream was not to become a broker, but to open a hot tub and sauna place, with a restaurant and haircutting salon built right in: one-stop shopping if you happened to want a meal, a haircut, and a sauna. I would go on and on about this dream to my regular customers, and finally one day a man named Fred Has- brook gave me a check for $2,000 with a letter that read, “For people like you to have your dreams come true. To be paid back if you can at 0 percent interest in ten years.” I was stunned, and even more stunned as word got around and others of my regulars chipped in, too. Believe it or not, I soon had a $50,000 nest egg with which to start my business.
At the suggestion of one of my benefactors, I put the money
into an account at Merrill Lynch and was assigned to a broker,
a sweet guy whom I’ll call Rick. I told him I wanted to keep my
money safe, and he had me sign some papers that I didn’t even
read. Off I went, to have blueprints for my business drawn up.
I still have those blueprints.
To make a long story short, that sweet Rick—knowing that the money wasn’t mine, knowing that I wanted above all to keep it safe, and knowing that it was being held there so I could open my business—had me investing in these things called options on oil stocks, the most wildly risky and speculative investments I could have been in. I felt funny about this from the beginning, but I didn’t know enough, or trust myself enough, to understand why or say no to Rick’s grand schemes. In the end, I agreed because I trusted Rick. With his nice office and pin-striped suits, he was the closest I’d ever been to Wall Street or big money. At first we were doing pretty great. In those early weeks we were up $5,000. I couldn’t believe it! I had never made so much money without even trying, so I became totally intrigued with this new way to make money and thought that I had better study up on this great new moneymaking discovery.
This was in 1979, before anyone had computers at home, and I was trying to figure out about these options from reading the newspapers every day. I had stock quotes and options quotes pasted up all over my bedroom walls, trying to make sense of them. Finally I began to get the hang of it and understand what we were doing—and how what we were doing was very, very wrong for me. My understanding came too late, I’m afraid. The reversal of oil stocks happened quicker than you could say sauna and hot tub, and I lost it all, all the money I had put in and all the money I had made. Everything. My financial “adviser” had done me in, not to mention what he had done to all those people who had tried to help me.
It took me a long time to get a true understanding of what it takes to handle other people’s money. It is not like Monopoly, when after you’ve finished playing the game you simply take the houses off Park Place, pack up the money that comes with the game, and go on with your day. So much more is at stake.
Rick may have been my broker, and a reckless if not unscrupulous one at that, but I couldn’t have been luckier that he was at least with a reputable and nationally recognized firm like Merrill Lynch. Merrill came through in the long run and covered the losses in the account, after I demonstrated that he had misled me about the risks inherent in what we were doing, o in the end I was able to pay back all the money to my investors. I had picked the right firm, at least, if not the right broker at the firm—and both decisions are extremely important if you decide to go with a full-service brokerage firm.
Soon afterward, I joined Merrill Lynch.
Why would Merrill Lynch hire a waitress? They weren’t hiring a waitress. What they saw in me was that I would be an excellent saleswoman, and they were right.
At major brokerage firms, the brokers or financial advisers (which is what I became at Merrill Lynch) are mainly commission-based advisers who do not usually come up with the ideas of what you should buy or sell. Most of them take the recommendations of the financial analysts who work for the firm. Your adviser takes these recommendations, checks to see whether they’re suited to your needs and financial situation, and tries to sell these investments to you if they (and you) meet those criteria.
My story about Rick isn’t meant to frighten you out of asking the help of an adviser, if you feel that’s the way to go. Nor is it meant to suggest that all advisers are disreputable, because most do have your best interests at heart and, if the firm itself is reputable and you yourself trust the adviser, you will almost certainly be safe. By turning your money over to someone else, however, you must not give up feeling responsible for it, as I did when I signed those papers. The ultimate responsibility for your money must always remain in your own hands.
When you go to interview financial advisers, you are considering whether you want to hire each one: You are the boss, regardless of how much they know about money. You are the boss of your money, and when you hire someone to take care of it—just as when you hire a qualified gardener to look after your garden or a qualified child care worker to take care of your child—you are the boss of that person as well.
I set up my own, somewhat unusual, fee schedule with this in mind. When someone—rich, poor, doesn’t matter—calls my office for an appointment, that prospective client is first sent a letter stating what they are expected to bring along to the appointment and explaining my fee structure. About a week later my secretary almost always gets a call from them saying that the only thing they have a hard time with is how much I charge. My fee structure dictates that clients must pay me what they think my services are worth to them. At the end of our session, which runs on average two hours, they decide what my services are worth. My clients are the boss.
Apart from my way, there are a few ways that advisers charge for their services.
FREE CONSULTATION
An adviser who sees you for free is trying to convince you to hand over your money to him to invest for you—and reap rhc commissions for himself. Since mutual funds, if purchased through an adviser, carry heavy commissions, around 5 percent, most likely mutual funds will make up a hefty part of your portfolio if you go with this adviser. So if you go in to see an adviser for free, so to speak, and hand over $20,000 for him to invest in those loaded funds, then you will have paid $1,000 for that “free” session. The second that you Sit down in that officc and tell the adviser how much money you have to invest, he knows what it means for him. If you come in with $100,000 he’ll get about $5,000. Not bad for an hour or two of work.
FEE-BASED
This is where you simply pay the adviser an hourly fee to tell you what to do with your money. She does not do it for you.
FEES PLUS COMMISSIONS
You pay the adviser a fee to tell you what to do, to create a plan with your money. If you decide you’d like him to implement it for you, he’ll also get a commission.
Just as important as what you ask the adviser is what the
adviser asks you. Remember: People first, then money.
I have learned, in my practice, that I get a better understanding of my clients when I go over the topics on my questionnaire in person with them, rather than have them fill out the answers on their own. Sometimes people have a hard time writing things down or tend to leave things out, so talking through the questions enables me to find out more about my clients than simply reading through hastily filled out answers. Other advisers feel that this is too time-consuming, but this process is not about saving time. It’s about saving—and making__money.
Whether your prospective adviser has you fill out the form or talks you through it, it is absolutely essential that you feel this person wants to get to know you and your money, wants to understand your fears and anxieties about investing, understands how you feel about taking risks, has your best interests at heart. Advisers you interview must spend a lot of time, a couple of hours, getting to know you and your money. They can’t simply plug your answers from a questionnaire into a computer and give you a plan—at least not if it is to work well. What needs to be built is a responsible, respectful, and trusting relationship, and you must not settle for less.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
After his little chicken shack had burned to the ground, my dad was penniless. Because he wasn’t properly insured, everything was a total loss, and he had absolutely no money to start up another business. His health was suffering, too; he had gotten emphysema from all the smoke he inhaled in the fire. It was a very hard time in our family. My mom was already working full-time as she always had, and my brothers and I were doing whatever we could to bring in extra money. Still, for a long time after the fire, there was never enough. Everyone was saying how unlucky my dad had been, which started to bother me, so I went right up to him and asked him if he was unlucky. “Maybe yes,” he said, “maybe no.”
One day I heard him on the phone taking a call. “Really?” he was saying. “How can this be? Are you sure?” And then, “Great! I’ll take it!” I walked into the hallway where the phone was and he looked at me and said, “Honey, we are back in business!” I can remember to this day how thrilled he was. A salesman who had been one of my dad’s suppliers at the chicken shack told my dad that the meat-packing company was going to give him the start-up money to open a new place, and that they had found the perfect location for him as well. I said, “See, Dad? You are lucky after all, aren’t you?” Again he just looked at me and said, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
A few months later, Morry’s Deli (named after my dad) opened up on Chicago Avenue in downtown Chicago; my brothers and I worked there every day after school. From the beginning, there was always a line out the door, and this time I knew my dad was really going to make it. Then one day he came home looking forlorn, and said that Northwestern Medical School was expanding and taking over our space, so we would have to find a new location. This can’t be, I remember thinking. We were just starting to do so well. Just to check, I said, “I guess we’re not so lucky after all, Pops,” and he said, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
My dad began looking for a new place. When the word got out that he needed a new location, a landlord back in Hyde Park, where the original chicken shack had been, contacted him and said that he had the perfect spot and that, again, everyone would help with the cost of moving back to Hyde Park. He was so happy—in fact, we were all so happy since, for my brothers and me, it was a whole lot easier getting to Hyde Park than downtown Chicago from where we lived. The day he signed the new lease, I felt I had to set the luck record straight, so I said, “I guess this means our luck has changed for the better, right, Dad?”“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The new store was also a success from the day it opened. I loved it. My brothers and I would race around seeing who could make the sandwiches fastest, especially Dad’s corned beef sandwiches, a house specialty. Dad’s health was getting worse, but somehow we were able to manage. My brothers Gary and Bobby took turns running the store, and I would work all summer when I was back from school.
Only two years after the store opened, though, we had another fire. It happened at night, at least, so the blessing was that nobody was hurt. This time, I said outright to my dad that I thought he was the unluckiest man in the world, thinking that finally he would agree. “Maybe yes,” he said, “maybe no.”
It turned out that the fire was caused by an electrical short that had started in the apartments next door. The landlord, knowing that my dad had been doing such great business, put him on notice that he was going to triple the rent after he rebuilt the place. There was no way we could afford it, so, at the age of seventy, with his emphysema getting worse, my dad began looking, once again, for another location. When word got out, a representative from the University of Chicago, who loved my dad (not to mention his food), called up and said they had this place right on campus and would my dad like to open the first private business ever on the university campus? The spot was perfect, right by the bookstore and a hospital where thousands of people worked, and the rent was affordable. “Wow,” my dad said, “I’d love to!” Then he called up his old landlord to say he wasn’t moving back in. The landlord was in such shock that he offered him back his spot totally rebuilt, and for less rent than he had been paying before. Now my dad was the one in shock. He took both places.
Soon, with my brother Gary’s help, both places were up and running—and successful beyond my father’s wildest dreams. For the first time ever, there was enough money—more than enough. My dad knew, too, that my mom would be taken care of after he was gone, and he was so proud that Gary would carry on the family business. I went up to him one day as all this was happening and I said, “You know what, Pops? You are one lucky duck.”
This time, to my utter amazement, he said: “Yep, Suze, you got that right.”
Not long after that, on June 21, 1981, which was Father’s Day, my dad died—in his eyes a lucky man.
My dad’s gift was knowing that good luck and bad luck are always in the eyes of the beholder, and always cycling; neither rarely stops for long in any one place. He was able to see past the present situation, whatever it was, to the future. Another thing about Dad’s story: Many of the good things would never have happened if the bad events hadn’t happened first. If the second fire hadn’t happened, and the landlord hadn’t tried to raise the rent, Dad would never have found his store at the university nor gotten a better deal at the first store.
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If you’re in a domestic relationship, you must both go to see the adviser. (I won’t see clients who are married or living together unless they come in together.) Before you do, I urge you and your partner to have a talk about what you want to accomplish with the adviser and the fears about money you have and make sure you both have a thorough understanding of where you stand right now. After you’ve chosen an adviser, you must make all decisions as a team and both be kept up-to-date with what the adviser is doing.
I see so many clients, women in particular, who don’t have a clue what to do when their husband or partner dies or when they go through a painful separation or divorce. I also see how bewildered many people are when their parents die, leaving them an inheritance. When you have suffered a loss, you are in a state of grief, and this is not the time to make major financial decisions. Run as fast as you can from an adviser who suggests big changes at this time. My advice is to leave your money in a high-interest-bearing account for between six months and a year, until your inner voice feels okay about doing something with these funds. To be respectful of your money, you must give yourself time to heal.
If you and your partner are interviewing an adviser together, you must both feel comfortable talking to him inti. mately about your money. The adviser should address you both equally, give you plenty of time, and answer questions and explain fees in a way you can easily understand. You should also be comfortable with the kinds of investments he suggests and understand everything about them when he explains them to you. If he fails to meet any of these criteria, find another adviser.
When you interview anyone for a job, it is up to you to outline your requirements. For example, here are several expectations you should have for a prospective financial adviser:
That she will call you every time she makes a change in your account (unless she is an RIA).
That she will explain in thorough detail why she wants you to make every new transaction.
1 That she will tell you without your having to ask if she is selling something for you that’s not in your retirement account, fully explaining the tax implications.
That she will explain every commission. That she will never pressure you into doing anything that does not feel right to you.
I That she will send you a transaction slip from the brokerage firm that holds your money, telling you what’s been bought or sold. This slip must always match transactions you gave permission for.
That she will send you a monthly statement summarizing all that month’s transactions, including deposits, withdrawals, and current positions held. This statement must come directly from the brokerage firm that’s holding your money, not from your adviser’s office.
I That she will prepare both quarterly reports and an annual report that will tell you the exact return she is getting on your money, as well as all fees and commissions. The figure. on her report must match the report that is generated directly from the brokerage firm. These reports should also show you all the realized gains or losses (all the money you actually made or lost from selling an investment) and all the unrealized gains and losses (investments you own but have not yet sold and thus that have not yet realized a profit or loss). These reports should also include returns of the overall index, so you know whether you’re doing better or worse than the index. You want everything on paper.
That she will never ask you to write a check made out to her personally. All the money that is handed over needs to be pla’ced in an institution (Schwab, Merrill, or the like), and every check is to be payable to the institution. This is absolutely essential. More than one “adviser” has flown the coop with dozens of clients’ money.
%l That she will return your calls in a timely manner.
I That she will always get you the information you request about an investment and find out any answers to questions you have that she doesn’t know.
That she will keep you informed about your money, not just call you when she wants to buy or sell something. If a stock has gone down, or is not performing the way she expected it would, you are to hear about it from her, not read about your money first in the newspapers.
You should type up all these requests on a piece of paper and have your adviser sign an agreement to do all the above.
Another option is to hire a registered investment adviser (RIA), who will create, in effect, a personal mutual fund for you and serve as the manager of it. RIAs usually require a large minimum to start with, ranging from $50,000 to $5 million, with the average minimum being about $250,000.
An RIA manages your money for you on an ongoing basis, for a fee that is usually a percentage of the money you’ve given her to manage. This percentage can range from .25 to 3 percent a year, but you should not pay more than 1.5 percent including all commissions. Think about this. The amount you pay is a percentage of the money she is managing: Isn’t this a great incentive for her to make your money grow? If you gave her $100,000 initially, and by the end of the year you had
$200,000, if you were paying her 1 percent, she’d have made $2,000. (And I hope you would send her an enormous bouquet of flowers as well.) If you lose money, she loses, too. This is an adviser who is truly on the same side of the fence as you and whose compensation is attached to a real incentive to make money for you.
Most RIAs will ask you to sign what is called a discretionary account trading form, where you give the RIA permission to trade your account without getting your permission for every transaction. This is absolutely the only time you should even consider doing something like this. You must still make sure that your money is held in a reputable institution like Charles Schwab or Fidelity, for example, and all the RIA has the right to do is buy or sell, not withdraw money except for any fees she is owed.
Not many RIAs buy mutual funds because it does not make sense to pay the RIA 1 percent a year to manage your money and also to pay the full expense ratio of the mutual fund. If you decide to hire an RIA, please find out what she invests in before you sign on.