September 2019 – The Log House

Budgeting, Investing, Personal finance, Savings

FinTech – can you be immune to it?

Posted on September 22, 2019 by The Tortoise

Fin Tech – Financial Technology is everywhere now. From Internet only banks to robo-advisors to automated loan processing to auto-invest, auto-save, the automatic word has prevailed the personal finance world.

Gone are the days when people queued up in banks to deposit or withdraw money, fill up paper forms to open an investment account and wait for hot tips to buy that fateful stock.

With the financial world so much dominated by technology, there are some tools and techniques we should employ to make our personal finance more automated and efficient, thus leaving us more time to pursue real passions.

Here are a few areas of personal finance where I think we cannot avoid the best of automation.

Banking

This is a no-brainer, however people still flock to big mortar banks like Chase, Bank of America or Wells Fargo. If you read the reviews of these banks, there are endless complaints about non-explained fees, bad customer service and old style bureaucracy.

On the other hand, I bank with a Credit Union which does not even have branches in my state of residence, and another online savings bank which is linked to the checking account in the Credit Union.

In last two years in US (and same in India), I did not feel the need for a local branch. True, once or twice when I needed to withdraw cash more than the permitted limits in authorized ATMs, I could just go to one of their affiliate Credit Union branches in my city.

Thus moving your banking to completely Internet based and using mobile apps, you are in better control of your money than dealing with the brick-and-mortar banks.

9 Best Online Checking Accounts of 2019

Savings

All the internet banks provide goal based savings accounts, the one I use definitely has that feature. It makes it extremely easy to setup savings goals (5 minutes) and let it go automatic every month.

If you still don’t want to do the planning, budgeting etc. for saving money, check out Acorns or Digit, these are two advanced FinTech companies who help you save in the background.

Acorns helps you accumulate the spare change from your everyday purchases and siphons it away to an investment account.

Digit is a bit more sophisticated in that it analyzes your spending pattern from a linked checking account, and saves off what it can. Of course you can set it up in a way you like, but they also guarantee not to cause overdraft.

Before you try out these apps and link your account, please read through reviews and understand their fees. The fees has to be justified compared to the value it will add to managing your finances.

For example, I signed up for Digit but later decided to pull back, as I already know and have set up automated transfers for my savings goals.

There are other similar apps and the following link may help.

NerdWallet’s 4 Best Money Saving Apps

Investing

Like Acorns is a micro-investing app which pulls money out of your account and forces you to invest, there are robo-advisors for bigger and planned investment.

Wealthfront and Betterment are two companies that are revolutionizing the space of robo-advisors and has features like tax loss harvesting in your investments.

This can be a completely hands-off approach to investing and let the expert designed algorithms decide your asset allocation and investment product mix.

Here is a good discussion, again from nerdwallet.com.

How Betterment, Wealthfront and Wealthsimple Compare

Moreover, the brokerage companies like Schwab also has robo-advisor options.

Tracking

What gets tracked, grows. I don’t know who said that, but tracking your Net worth and investments is important.

While you can keep the overall numbers in your head if you check your accounts regularly, there is nothing better than having an algorithm do the data crunching and show your portfolio with all kinds of analysis and charts. It is even better if it can project future growth of Net worth with reasonable assumptions.

This can be done by plain old Excel sheets and I do the same before I could trust the online sites with a consolidated view of my personal finance.

Some of the websites and services are Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Mint and Betterment who aggregates all your finances and shows the analysis reports.

While this is very convenient and tempting to look at all the analysis available, do this if you are comfortable linking all your accounts to one of these services. Below is a detailed review of Personal Capital, but do your own diligence and research.

Personal Capital Review 2019 – Fees, Unique Features & General Overview

Real Estate Crowdfunding

This one is my favorite and real innovations are sweeping this field.

While real estate is the most lucrative (and hyped) investment of all, it comes with high degree of everything – risk, reward, hard work, expertise and complexity.

Traditionally real estate portfolio is built by acquiring houses and buildings with part cash and part leverage, and then managing the day to day affairs of keeping a tenant, fixing issues, chasing rent cheques, vetting and evicting tenants etc. You need a lot of knowledge, time, experience and most important of all, a team of real estate agents, lawyers, tax professional, property managers to run a successful business.

Simple investors who have a different passion than real estate (or loves their own job), do not have so much time and risk appetite to run a full fledged business of rentals.

This is where sites like Fundrise, Roofstock, Rich Uncles come in play. They are making it easier for small investors (even non-accredited) to get a flavor of real estate in their portfolios without the heavy lifting of managing rentals and tenants.

However real estate is an ill-liquid investment and may take 7-10 years to get back the principal. Proceed with caution and read the prospectus, investment style and restrictions carefully before diving in.

I have personally invested with Fundrise but less than 10% of my overall portfolio.

The main risk is once invested, you lose control of the principal as you cannot sell on your own. However the convenience outweighs the risks, if you know what you are doing. With Fundrise for example, your portfolio is invested all across the United States in commercial buildings. It is simply not possible to build such a portfolio directly, unless you want to be a full fledged real estate professional.

Similarly Roofstock enables you to actually own a rental property in different states of US but once invested, you own and manage it with the help of certified property managers.

Tread with caution, surely real estate crowdfunding is going to take off, unless it runs into a major scam or something.

Conclusions

With so much automation in the personal finance industry, it is difficult to stay away and not take advantage of these tools. At the same time, it is scary to lose control of your money and investments.

Many people are still skeptical of online finance and not without reason, given the recent data breaches at Equifax and CapitalOne. Another reason for skepticism is due to the perceived loss of control. For example, lot of investors still prefer to hold physical real estate than trust online real estate crowdfunding. It reminds me of the obsession in Asian countries (especially India) of holding physical gold (bars or jewelry), till paper gold ETF came along and created lot more gold investors.

On the contrary, we leave so much control of our lives to experts. When we fly, we leave it to the pilots and the airplane auto-pilot system. When we are sick, we let the doctors take over. When we are educating our child, we send them to good schools.

So why should it be different for personal finance, if FinTech frees you from unnecessary headache and lets you concentrate on your real passions?

Let the experts and machines do the job (for a fee of course) but you have to do your research so as not to run into dubious sites and services.

The new mantra of personal finance – Learn, Automate, Delegate, Track.

adult ambulance care clinic — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Disclaimer – I am not promoting any of the services mentioned in this post nor my opinion should matter in your choice. Do your own due diligence, as I have done in selecting my own set of services according to my needs and risk tolerance.

Personal finance

Five FAQs of personal finance

Posted on September 9, 2019September 8, 2019 by The Tortoise

Throughout my journey with personal finance, and through the mistakes and learning, I compiled a list of Top 5 questions that come to my mind, time and again.

So I decided to compile these as a FAQ and try to answer them to the best of my knowledge and experience.

Buy vs. Rent
How many accounts to have
How and where to invest
How to save more money
How to manage my portfolio

Buy vs. Rent?

One of the biggest financial decisions in everyone’s life is to buy a house. However there are pros and cons that need to be weighed against renting similar or better homes. There are lots of views and articles on Internet which give both a logical as well as emotional opinion to this question. In my opinion (just another), only You know better whether you are ready to buy a home.

To put it logically from what I know, there are few costs and factors that need to be considered.

Save up for a down payment of at least 20%.
Consider closing costs, it can easily be in the range of $4000-$5000.
Consider any rehab budget if you are not buying a recently updated home. You will pay for it either way.
Aggregate of all monthly expenses of home ownership should be less than the current rent paid. These expenses are:
- Mortgage payment
- Taxes
- Insurance
- Maintenance (1% of home value per year)
- HoA fees
- Lawn care and utilities
  - if you had paid these apart from rent, you need to make sure the costs are almost identical

Only after you have made the calculation above, and convinced yourself that total monthly housing expenses will be less than the rent, you can consider buying provided there is the cash cushion of down payment and closing costs.

One argument which is floated in favor of ownership is that rents are going to increase per year, whereas the mortgage will remain constant. However please consider that Taxes, Insurance and Maintenance will go up too year after year.

On the other hand, the mortgage will get paid down giving a little more advantage to the ownership since you are building equity and hence net worth.

The other factor is how long you are going to stay in the home to recoup the costs of mortgage interest, taxes, insurance, upgrades, maintenance etc.

One day (in a few years), you may want to move out and convert this house into a rental.

Will the rental numbers in the area completely cover all the expenses? You certainly don’t want to pay for new house as well part of the expenses for your tenant.

All of these factors should be taken into calculation before making the big decision.

The following post may help in setting up the calculation, but I suggest do your own homework too.

How to decide on a purchase – the P.V.T formula

If you are interested in scenarios of managing a mortgage or multiple properties, here are couple of previous posts on the subject.

The Paid Piper of Hamelin

Don’t twist your ARM, fix it !!!

How many accounts should I have?

There are many banks and financial institutions who are vying to keep your money, earn fees and lure you into a long term relationship. These marketing flyers and lure of higher interest rates or credit offers make us open many bank accounts indiscriminately.

The more you spread out without a purpose to each account, it will become unmanageable and have overlapping features. There are many cases where people (or spouses after the death of one) forgot about their accounts, and the money lies there idle never to be claimed again.

So bank and brokerage accounts all should be tied to specific goals and purpose in your regular financial picture. Typically the following should suffice:

A checking account and a debit/credit card
A savings account, if more than one, each should be for a specific saving goal
A retirement account (typically 401k or IRA)
An investment account (outside the 401k/IRA for medium term investments)
A special purpose account depending on needs
- 529 – Kids’ education
- HSA – Health Savings Account if you have high deductible insurance

Beyond this, it becomes fancy and unmanageable.

The following post shows a step by step guide to open and manage these accounts.

The Starter Kit

How and where do I invest?

One of the main hurdles of personal finance is to find out how and where to invest. There are many risk-return trade-offs from cash savings to mutual funds to real estate, and even exotic investments like art and commodities.

The simplest investment however is a balanced indexed fund, where there is an automatic asset allocation of stocks and bonds and which can vary according to your age and risk tolerance. These are also called Target date funds. Being an index fund, the costs are extremely low (0.0x%) and you get instant diversification.

Most portfolio should not need more that this. However if you are a little bit more knowledgeable, then you can create your own basket of index funds. For example, the three fund portfolio is very popular. Here is a good link: Three-Fund Portfolio

One of my previous posts mentions the various investment accounts that you can setup.

Investing in the High Five portfolio

Know yourself and your investments

How do I save more?

This is one of the questions which has many different ways of asking.

How do I spend less?
How do I pay myself first?
How do I increase my income?

The answer lies in all of the above questions. You have to do all to be able to save for emergency, goals, vacations and fun.

The topic on how many bank accounts to have, takes into account this aspect. It is very important to build a cash cushion along with your investments and lifestyle.

See below posts on why and how to do this effectively.

One essential comfort zone

Budget – Grow the tree upside-down

How do I manage my portfolio and reach my goals?

black mazda steering wheel — Photo by KML on Pexels.com

Managing your investments and financial system may not be a complex or time consuming task. It needs essentially three things.

Automation
Tracking
Learning

The following post describes a step by step process for managing and growing your personal finance system.

Five components of a personal finance system

All it takes is to first setup the automatic payments and investments, then a weekly tracking mechanism and weekly reading and exploring more.

With time, you will start flowing like a pro.

Shun that perfection

Conclusion

While the list of FAQs above is not exhaustive, these are questions that I have seen people struggle with or make irrational decisions on. Or to put it another way, I have done same mistakes and learnt that if you manage these aspects well, you don’t need to worry any more.

beard cafe coffee shop connection — Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Investing, Liabilities and Debt, Personal finance, Savings

The universal truth about Dave Ramsey’s 7 baby steps

Posted on September 1, 2019September 1, 2019 by The Tortoise

Who doesn’t know of Dave Ramsey?

Even my 10 year old kid has been taught about Dave in elementary school mathematics.

Dave Ramsey is America’s trusted voice on money and business.

Well he is popular for a solid reason. In this post, I will describe why he makes perfect sense to me.

When I immigrated to US in 2017, I did not know who he is. I was trying to quench my thirst for new personal finance books, especially on the US system. Then I stumbled upon Dave’s Total Money Makeover.

As I read the book, initially his rant against debt was a bit overwhelming to digest. However thinking deeply, I realized that coming from an Asian country, I have unconsciously followed the same principle for decades.

Why this coincidence? Because the principles are universal and extremely healthy for personal finance, no matter which economy you come from.

If you do not know yet, here is a recap link to the 7 steps from his website.

Dave Ramsey’s 7 baby steps

Here are few points where I found an one-one match with how traditional Asian (India) household finances worked.

Have an emergency/contingency fund (Dave’s baby steps 1 and 3)

There are many names to this – emergency fund, contingency fund, rainy day fund. In many Asian households, it goes by the simple name of savings. Savings is in-built into the culture and an emergency fund is a default choice.

In a way, if you don’t have debt instruments (HELOC, Credit card) available to you, how else will you pay up for maintenance, car breakdown, education etc.?

Answer is simple, money socked off into a separate bank account – lo and behold, by end of the year, you have an emergency fund.

Use Cash – or debit card at the most (Dave’s baby step 2)

Before moving to US, my only credit card was a HDFC Bank Premium card. I was sold this card citing lots of benefits like reward points, airline miles, premier lounge access etc.

The truth is that I used it only for big purchases like appliances, electronics or vacation. And that too, because I knew I had to pay it off at the end of the month and just deferred the money being taken out of a CD (Fixed Deposit as named in India).

If I look back, except for getting a few discounts at clothing stores, I did not reap the reward points. Never had the idle time or need to figure out how to access the premier lounge. Once I tried to book a holiday trip through the miles, I found that I could get it for lesser by buying a cheaper economy ticket. Yet I paid an annual fee (or had to spend a minimum on the card to avoid the fee) for those unseen benefits.

Credit cards may work better in the US, but it is also a double edged sword. Americans are saddled with trillion dollar credit card debt. (source: Dave Ramsey)

All my household daily expenses ran on either hard cash (lots of places in India do not accept any cards) or debit card.

Simply put, I never felt the absolute necessity to hold a credit card. Some people say its good for emergency situations, but then the previous step already solved that problem.

Oh there is one more reason – online shopping. In India, Flipkart has a C.O.D (cash on delivery) option. If that doesn’t work or not offered, you can pay using NetBanking which all online vendors provide with major banks. It is equivalent to using debit card, but without the card number. You are redirected to the bank website and you can authorize the transaction from your account, using login and password.

Retirement savings (Dave’s baby step 4)

There are government retirement plans like Provident Fund (equivalent to 401k), Public Provident Fund (equivalent to Roth IRA) and now the NPS (National Pension System).

The first two are effectively tax exempt with the Provident Fund being tax E.E.E (exempt on contribution, growth and withdrawal). The only drawback is that the investment options are traditional – debt based with an interest rate guaranteed by the Government. The option of Equities has only come up as an option in NPS.

The Provident Fund or the NPS is now mandatory in most organizations for their employees. The amount you can invest from your paycheck typically hovers around 12% (with matching grant from employer), and is close to Dave Ramsey’s recommended savings of 15%.

There are of course private options from brokerages/banks to invest in mutual funds and stocks, as also R.E.I.Ts are now coming up.

Children’s education – use cheaper (sane) options (Dave’s baby step 5)

There is hardly any concept of student loans. Education is still affordable, though it is becoming expensive each passing year.

And despite the huge competition (owing to large population), there are no Ivy League schools to lose your shirt on getting a degree. Even the premier institutes like Indian Institute of Technology, or Indian Institute of Management are well affordable with their excellent career prospects.

I don’t have all the education expenses data, but I have not heard of any student saddled by student loan debt or carrying it well into their adulthood and married life.

Moreover in recent years, the growing start-up culture in India has also made an expensive education pretty much irrelevant.

Pay off your house (Dave’s baby step 6)

In US, people hold their mortgages for 30 years, and do not need to pay back earlier.

And it is more helped by the low interest rate regime that is sweeping the news everyday.

However in India, average mortgages survive for 3-5 years, before they are completely paid off. Both my mortgages in India were paid off in less than 5 years.

What is the reason for this? There are several factors.

Interest rates are higher – typically 8.5-10%. This causes people to take mortgages with lower than 80% Loan-to-Value, to avoid big E.M.I (equated monthly installments).
Higher down payment earns good discount from builders. One of the main sources of home buying in India is from builders.
Floating rate mortgages – The interest rate by default is floating. Fixed rate mortgages have a much higher interest rate, typically 1-2% higher. Carrying a floating rate mortgage is risky, hence the tendency is to pay it off as soon as possible.
Last but not the least – its a debt-averse culture. You don’t feel good till you actually own your home, free and clear.

Buying a house in India is stressful owing to the sector’s corrupt practices, less regulation and random mismanagement of funds by builders. Hence keeping low to no debt is prudent not to add on to the crisis.

Building wealth and Giving (Dave’s baby step 7)

The last baby step in Dave Ramsey’s plan is the absolute bliss.

This is where a lot of well to do families will be. With the above steps explained and if followed properly – they will be living in paid for houses, driving paid for cars (some with chauffeurs), have a good retirement corpus that is growing, children graduating from college without student loan debt, and an emergency fund stashed out in some savings account.

Now they can buy more investment assets like real estate, stocks and entire businesses.

You start building serious wealth and enjoy true Financial Freedom.

As Dave says, “If you live like no one else, you will live like no one else”.

Now the last part is Giving. This may not be traditionally so popular in India, due to many factors. However lot of new initiatives are now trying to organize charity and reach to the real needy.

The huge wealth inequality throws up a lot of opportunities of giving. However if you are not careful and the non-profit organizations are not well researched, you will end up making some fraud people rich. I have ended up donating to NGOs (Non Government Organization), who started showing a suspicious pattern of corruption (sometimes irritating me with calls and messages for more). It becomes clear they want to milk you in the name of charity.

However with little diligence and online/offline research it is possible to select meaningful giving opportunities.

Thus Dave Ramsey’s 7 baby steps are definitely a recipe for success with personal finance. I have only drawn a comparison with what I have lived and seen in India.

Dave’s success in getting millions of Americans out of debt and living their dream life is a testimony to the sound principles that the 7 steps represent.

Live like no one else. If you are not forced by the system, be intentional about the 7 steps.