July 19, 2011

The austerity program millions of Americans adopted at the onset of the Great Recession is officially over: consumer debt is on the rise again.

Before we run our personal debt back up to its ceiling, it’s a good time to examine the different ways people think about their credit cards.

First, the economists. They have a clear definition of credit cards. The act of buying something on a card and adding to a balance is known as “dissaving.” The opposite is also true. Americans, for example, cut up their credit cards with a vengeance after the 2008 recession. They paid down some $180 billion in revolving credit card debt between September 2008 and April 2011. This gave a big boost to their savings, as far as economists were concerned.

But regular folks naturally link credit cards to spending. Kim Cooper, a Philadelphia financial consultant, said she used to feel that paying down a credit card meant she could buy more shoes or shop at Lord & Taylor again – with her card. This common mentality indicates just how integral credit has become to our buying habits.

The problem comes when the bill accumulates and becomes a monstrous financial obligation. And according to new data, Americans are piling up debt: in May, revolving credit – primarily credit card debt – grew by $3 billion, or 5 percent, to $793 billion (still far below the August 2008 peak of $974 billion), according to the Federal Reserve.

Overall debt also increased, for the eighth straight month. This includes revolving credit as well as auto, student, boat, and other personal loans.

Cooper eventually paid off her cards, but understands why people get into debt. “When I paid down the bills, it was never part of my thinking that a zero balance was the goal,” she said. The goal for her was being able to afford the minimum payment. “That’s not the way to think about it,” she said. …Learn More

Money Culture

July 7, 2011

Julie Taylor-Cooper, who worked for decades as an accounting manager, now scrapes by on her late husband’s Social Security checks and a $145-a-week job.

Many baby boomers like Taylor-Cooper may not realize there are various strategies for claiming full Social Security benefits that can have a dramatic impact on their retirement security.

“There are eight or nine options for retirees, spouses, and widows,” said Stephen Richardson, spokesman for the Social Security Administration. (Full disclosure: SSA funds this blog.)

Julie Taylor-Cooper from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

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July 5, 2011

J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin – Madison

People often have a tough time deciding whether they would benefit from hiring a financial advisor.

J. Michael Collins, who specializes in consumer decisionmaking in the financial marketplace at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, attempted to answer some questions on the topic in an online interview by a Chicago money manager.

Most agree that fee-based advisors are preferable to those who earn commissions by selling products to their clients – being a broker or a salesman conflicts with giving advice. This troublesome conflict is eliminated by paying an advisor a fee for his or her work.

But even the prospect of hiring a fee-based advisor typically raises more questions than answers. What do advisors do? Is the service worth the fee an advisor charges? What exactly am I paying for?

Read here what Collins had to say on the topic.Learn More

Research

June 28, 2011

Most people think they’re above average when it comes to financial knowledge. And it’s not easy to educate people who think they know more than they actually do.

But hubris – or something like it – is what financial educators are up against, indicates research by professors Annamaria Lusardi at the George Washington School of Business and Olivia Mitchell at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Their paper used data from 1,200 respondents to a survey they conducted for the Investor Education Foundation or FINRA, the self-regulatory agency for the securities industry. It may be the most comprehensive study on Americans’ financial literacy.

Seventy percent of the survey’s respondents believe they know more about basic financial concepts than most other people. But they scored poorly on the survey’s three rudimentary financial literacy questions. One-third to one-half of them answered the questions incorrectly or indicated they didn’t know the answers.

The results “paint a troubling picture of the current state of financial knowledge in the United States,” the authors said.

Further, this low level of knowledge, when combined with overconfidence about that knowledge, does not bode well for attempts to educate people about money and their personal finances.

Before I provide more detail about Lusardi and Mitchell’s findings, take the quiz yourself. Here are the questions¹:
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Behavior

June 9, 2011

A 29-year-old Ph.D. candidate is challenging the belief that elderly women don’t prepare to take over the household finances after their husbands die and leave the task to them.

The stereotype about older women probably springs from pervasive evidence that women generally have lower levels of financial literacy than men.

But Joanne Hsu at the University of Michigan found that women prepare for the high likelihood that their husbands will die first by beginning to acquire financial knowledge.  Some 80 percent of the women in her sample are on track to catch up with their husband’s level of financial knowledge.  Her study controlled for low cognition, so her findings measure the wife’s improvements that are above and beyond her husband’s. …Learn More

May 26, 2011

To help retirees choose the best way to spend down the 401(k) savings they have built up over a lifetime, Nobel Prize laureate William Sharpe urged them to focus on a single outcome: the size of their monthly check.

This video was created by Professor William Sharpe of Stanford University.

Financial advisors should say to their clients, “Don’t worry about the strategy or model. Look at the outcomes that matter: what you can spend year by year in retirement,” he said.

Speaking at a conference this week at Boston University’s School of Management, which brought financial practitioners together with top minds in academic finance and Washington think tanks, Sharpe said advisors should present clients with various payout schedules and then explain the probability of success for each one they’re considering. Learn More

May 18, 2011

At a dinner next Monday night, finance professor Zvi Bodie at Boston University and his co-hosts will kick off their third conference geared toward educating financial professionals about cutting-edge thinking in the field. “The Future of Life Cycle Saving and Investing” will focus on serving low-income individuals. However, Bodie said in this recent interview that the conference lessons apply to all financial consumers.

SQUARED AWAY: Is this an annual conference?
BODIE: No. The first one was in 2006, the second in 2008. Truthfully, what inspired me to have these conferences, among other things, was the strong support of MIT economics professor Paul Samuelson. I decided I was sick of the baloney about personal investing that is served up on websites, brochures, etc. – all of which is designed for the benefit of the service providers rather than the customers. So much of it flatly contradicts what I teach. We’re dedicating the dinner to the memory of Paul Samuelson, who died last year.

SQUARED AWAY: What baloney?
BODIE: Say you’re a beginning investor. You go to any website – go to investor.gov. It’s a really nice looking website. This is the Securities and Exchange Commission, so you’d think, ‘Wow, I can trust this.’ But, actually, all this material was fed to the government by the investment industry. …
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