Earlier today, I reviewed the new book from The Motley Fool, Million Dollar Portfolio. I had the pleasure to interview author David Gardner at the end of December. This post contains excerpts from that interview. The complete interview will be included as part of the hypothetical future Get Rich Slowly podcast.
J.D. Earlier this year, you met with Stephen Popick, a government economist who writes for Get Rich Slowly. During the first part of your interview, you talked about teaching children about personal finance and investing. You talked about a long-term version of the stock-market game.
I like the idea of a stock-market game, and I’ve had some people ask me about similar things. They want to know if there are similar tools or methods for adults who want to learn about investing without risking their capital just yet.
David First of all, I enjoyed meeting Stephen a lot. He’s a very nice guy. I think at the time, he and I were talking about CAPS and about what we’re doing on our site with that, and that’s what’s coming to mind as you ask me the question.
I think the purpose of a site like CAPS is to enable people to score themselves. You know, to actually step up and instead of at a cocktail party saying “I think CROX is going down!”, if you think CROX is going down, type it in. Put it right into this transparent open platform where you thought CROX at this date at this price was going to lose to the stock market. And that’s what CAPS does.
The way I sometimes describe it is that it’s like one big stadium. All the world’s invited to sit, all the world’s invited to play right out on the field. Anything you do on the field, the whole world will see and will always know about from here on.
J.D. The Motley Fool in general and Million Dollar Portfolio specifically [are] about picking stocks. [The book] is written for the individual investor who wants to own individual stocks. Yet early in the book you write that, “If you’re a beginning stock investor, your portfolio should be built upon a sound asset allocation plan and a set of carefully chosen mutual funds.”
I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. What’s the relationship between mutual fund investing and investing in individual stocks? At Get Rich Slowly, as I’ve been learning about investing, I’ve stuck pretty close with index funds. But I’m wondering if you can talk about the relationship between mutual fund investing, or index fund investing, and investing in individual stocks. When do you make the transition from one to the other? Do you do both at the same time?
David That’s an excellent question. In fact, it’s really the question that each of us has to ask ourselves. Part of what we’re trying to do with the book is to show people that there are multiple ways to invest successfully.
The truth is there are innumerable ways to invest. It more comes down to figuring out what color your parachute is. That’s really largely based on three factors:
Factor number one is the degree of involvement that you want. If you’re going to spend no time at it, you’re going to want to invest much differently than if you’re going to spend all your time at it. Obviously most of us are somewhere in between.
The second thing that’s really important is something to do with your temperament or your mentality. It’s one part risk-reward — how much are you willing to take in both cases — and another part your intellectual curiosity (or lack thereof) — understanding how best to suit your investments to your own mind.
Number three is making sure your money is aligned with your own passions and interests. An analogy I’ve used a lot is that if and see the books on your shelf, I feel like I know you. I can say, “Okay, that’s what J.D. reads,” and I can probably make some guesses about who he is and what he’s interested in. I should have the exact same experience if I picked up your brokerage statement or if I saw your overall financial plan.
Number one is about your time, number two is about your psychology, and number three is about you, and making sure that your investment portfolio gives me a clear read on you.
J.D. Say you’re an average investor. You have a 401(k) through work and then a Roth IRA on the side that you manage yourself. I want to know how you go about investing in individual stocks in a way that makes sense.
I guess what I mean is, I think the book recommends 12 stocks and it also recommends 30 stocks for a diversified portfolio, but if you only have $5,000 a year for your Roth IRA, how do you approach this, especially so that transaction fees don’t chew away your capital?
David If I had $5,000, the first thing I would do is I would probably make five $1,000 investments. With one of those thousands, I would definitely buy an index fund. I would start right there.
We love the index fund. As much time as we spend talking about stocks, we tried to champion an index fund for 15+ years. In fact, we had Jack Bogle in our office just ten days ago talking to our employees. We’ve become good friends with Jack over the years. We have a huge degree of affinity and for the index fund.
Where we part with Jack is that we think of that as the benchmark. That’s the “you didn’t have to spend any time, you didn’t have to apply any brainpower, you just basically went autopilot”. The funny irony of that — as you well know — is that autopilot beats most of the other pilots out there most years.
We think, “Hey! I can beat the autopilot.” […] We feel as if — and I think our public record proves this — that we can beat the market. It’s not about never having any losers, and it’s certainly not about always beating the market every year. It’s about not paying anybody a management fee, and over time doing better than all those who are.
But you do have to put some time into this. If you’re going to try to beat Jack Bogle, you’re not going to do it by hiring somebody else to do it for you. You’re going to probably have to roll up your sleeves and learn over time. You’re going to have to bloody your nose a bunch of times, you’re always going to be humiliated by years like 2008, no matter who you are. You have to be willing to be that way.
A little bit of a blustery answer there. Yeah, so that was my whole key into the $5,000. I would take the other $4,000 and buy four different stocks.
J.D. But the one thing I worry about is that each time you purchase a stock, you’re paying $20 or whatever it is, so you’re sacrificing something right away.
David Actually, you can pay no dollars for it, pretty much. Or let’s just say five bucks.
J.D. I guess Sharebuilder can do that.
David Yeah, and have you looked at Zecco at all?
J.D. I haven’t actually used it, but I’ve looked at it a little bit.
David Well, there are some funny crazy models that can reduce your costs to almost zero. You can definitely pay less than ten bucks. In other words, if you were looking at a $1,000 investment, you’re paying less than 1% for your transaction in.
J.D. So as long as you’re holding it and not churning your stocks, you’re keeping your costs low.
David Yeah, that is certainly true, and that’s something we’ve advocated.
So, if you’re trying to answer that $5,000 question, I would take four stocks…and I would make sure they were from four different industries. I would pick companies that I’m personally motivated to follow, that I’m energized to learn more about, not something somebody told me about that’s somebody else’s industry I have no interest in.
That’s not the only way to answer that question. It’s also not the only way to invest. That’s just the “get started” approach, where you’re actually going to be able to earn more money over time.
J.D. I’ve been reading Roger Lowenstein’s biography of Warren Buffett. As I’m reading that, I’m just shocked at how over and over again the market will go through down periods like the early seventies or the late eighties. Again and again people proclaim “the death of equities” and how the stock market is no longer the place to be.
But Warren Buffett is waiting there patiently. As people are saying that, he’s being greedy when others are fearful.
David I don’t think the stock market is so much a thing to ultimately believe in or not. I just think of it as an opportunity to become a part owner of companies.
I think capitalism works. That’s one of my basic beliefs. And as long as capitalism is being practiced effectively by a culture (or by the world), there will always be good stocks. Therefor it’s always worth paying attention. But you don’t actually have to think in stock market terms.
“The stock market” as a label is too broad. It’s too broad a brush to paint. I don’t really think about “the stock market”. I think about my individual stocks. Some of them do better than the market; some of them do worse. In the end what you’re doing is becoming a part owner of things. And as long as you believe in ownership and capitalism in that sense, why wouldn’t you have a life-long love affair with the stock market? Or at least realize that it’s a really interesting place to learn?
Even if you didn’t invest, if you’re in business, or really in our culture and you’re trying to make good decisions about either the company you work for or if you’re trying to guess trends or anything like that, you absolutely want to become a student of the game of business.
That’s really all the stock market does. It scores and tallies what’s happening in the game of business over time.
I don’t quite understand somebody if they were to say to me, “I don’t even look at the stock market” or “You’re either in it or you’re not”. My opinion doesn’t change. The one way that I can say I’m Buffett-like is that my opinion of the purpose of it and the underlying system doesn’t change. I don’t jump in and out of the market over time.
J.D. Right. So long term, it’s a “weighing machine“, as Buffett would say.
David I didn’t have that in mind as I was speaking, but I’m glad you came up with it. You and I know it starts with “in the short term, it’s a voting machine”. The purpose of that line is simply to remind people to try to look past the present. That’s contrary. That’s hard to do. Most people don’t do that by nature. Some people are probably incapable of doing it. The reason he reminds us of that is you’re going to make better financial decisions if you can gain that ability.
Thanks to David Gardner and The Motley Fool for taking the time to speak with me. If you have suggestions for future people you’d like to see interviewed, please let me know. Also, please let me know if you have feedback on the interview itself. I’m still new to them.
“People want to make money fast, but it doesn’t happen that way.” — Warren Buffett
Over Christmas, I read Roger Lowenstein’s fantastic biography of Warren Buffett, one of my financial heroes. Because I currently prefer to invest through index funds, it was fascinating to read how Buffett has been able to make billions by purchasing individual stocks.
Next, I picked up the new book from David and Tom Gardner: The Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio. It was the perfect follow-up to reading about Buffett. “This book is about picking great stocks,” write the authors in the introduction, and it’s true. Over the subsequent pages, they describe a variety of techniques for finding individual stocks that are worthy of investment (and not just speculation).
Stocks that don’t suck I don’t write much at Get Rich Slowly about investing in individual stocks. For one thing, I have a pathetic track record in choosing good companies. In the past, I’ve been a speculator and not an investor. Some of my choices include:
CRA, at its peak
PALM, on the day of its IPO
WAMU in the autumn of 2007
SHRP, last January
Fortunately, I’ve never had huge sums to invest in these speculative bids. All the same, I’ve lost thousands of dollars in bids to get rich quickly in the stock market. Because of my experience, I’ve come to admire the virtues of indexed mutual funds.
All the same, I recognize that it is possible to build a great investment portfolio from individual stocks. Many GRS readers are interested in doing just that. And I, too, would like to allocate some portion of my money to buying stocks — now that I have the urge to speculate out of my blood. In their book, the Gardners write:
If you have the time, ability, and interest, individual stock investing is the single best way to build you own million-dollar portfolio.
Though the authors advocate picking individual stocks, they’re as wary of fees as any index fund investor. They believe active trading is dumb. They’re advocates of buy-and-hold. The Gardners also write that there are two components to investing well:
Picking the right stocks.
Building a balanced portfolio (i.e., diversifying).
“In the end,” they write, “you want 100% of your money invested in companies that don’t suck, and 0% in companies that do.”
Investment strategies Each chapter of Million Dollar Portfolio explores a specific investment strategy. The authors note that “each [strategy], practiced well, can and does beat the market.” Some of the methods covered include:
Dividend investing, which involves buying stocks that produce consistent income through the use of “dividends”. MDP argues that dividends are the investment world’s “allowance”. When you own a dividend stock, you receive a periodic payment just for investing.
Value investing focuses on buying companies trading for less than what they’re worth. It’s about buying good companies at a great price. “The excitement of blue-chip value investing comes from looking at long-term charts of what value stocks do as a group over a period of decades.”
Small-cap investing attempts to find “hidden gems” — stocks from smaller companies that tend to be ignored by large institutional investors.
Growth investing. Growth stocks are those expected to produce above-average earnings over the near future. Increased earnings lead, in theory, to increased profits, and to higher share prices.
International investing, which allows you not only to diversify, but also to find stocks in other countries that might be better than those in our own.
The authors lay out the basic techniques of each style, and then provide case histories. Along the way, they explain investing concepts like P/E ratios, book value, “market cap”, rebalancing, and more. Though they write about individual stocks and not index funds, much of the advice is familiar: buy and hold, diversify, etc.
Million dollar portfolio Million Dollar Portfolio includes more than just information about choosing stocks. The book also features:
A chapter about CAPS, the Motley Fool stock-researching tool (which Get Rich Slowly has covered before).
A discussion of asset allocation and diversification.
A short section on the financial collapse of 2008. The Gardners look at the causes, the reactions of big investors, and the prospects for small investors like you and me.
The Gardners also stress the importance of investing as soon as possible. They write that the biggest mistakes that American investors make are:
Never starting.
Starting too late.
Picking poor stocks.
As many have argued, the best time to begin investing is now, whenever now may be. Because of the power of compounding, time is the investor’s best friend.
I was ready to hate this book, but I didn’t. I found it fascinating. I loved the information about how to evaluate stocks. I’m not ready to abandon index funds, but I am eager to learn more about dividend investing, the method that seems best suited to my personality and goals.
I also like that the book doesn’t just tout successes. Each chapter describes a particular investment strategy, explains the method, and then illustrates it with two or three successes. But each chapter also includes a real-life mistake the authors have made. These examples of choices gone wrong are often more instructive than the picks that worked!
Note: I recently had a chance to interview author David Gardner. Look for an excerpt from that conversation later today.
“The first rule of investing is don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget rule number one.” — Warren Buffett
At the end of March, I asked you what topics you’d like to see covered during Financial Literacy Month. I received many great suggestions, and will continue to fulfill requests not just in April, but for months to come. One comment especially caught my eye. Kenneth F. LaVoie III wrote:
Never again will I be in a position to lose 50% of my money. There must be a way to see the Big Picture and lighten up on areas that are over-valued, but still enjoy an average return at least approaching that of the market as a whole…I’d love to hear some simple strategies that require a little thought, and don’t just focus on keeping a lot of money in cash and short term bonds.
It sounds to me as if Ken is asking about defensive investing, which is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. When I was younger, my investments were mostly speculative. They were gambles. I wanted to earn huge returns — and I wanted them today. Even two years ago, I was investing in Countrywide and The Sharper Image.
But as I’ve built wealth and become better educated about money, I’ve become a defensive investor. I’ve become less interested in quick gains. Last year’s market collapse was another shock to the system, not just for me but for many others. We’ve realized that our risk tolerance isn’t as high as we once thought it was.
Risk tolerance is the degree to which you, as an investor, are willing to accept uncertainty — and possible loss — in the investments that you make. If you have a high risk tolerance, you’re willing to accept large fluctuations in your investment returns in exchange for the possibility of large gains. If you have a low risk tolerance, you’d rather your return was constant.
More and more, I’ve become a fan of index funds — mutual funds built to track the broad movements of the stock market. They don’t outperform the market, but they don’t underperform it, either. To learn more about index funds, I’ve begun to attend the quarterly meetings of the local Diehards group.
The Diehards are fans of John Bogle, who founded The Vanguard Group, and who is considered the father of index funds. The Diehards mostly hang out in an internet discussion forum, but from time-to-time they meet in groups around the country to discuss investing.
At the last meeting, we took turns describing our current asset allocations and what we’ve done to respond to the faltering economy. It was no surprise that most people hadn’t done much to change their investing strategies. What was surprising is that although everyone was a fan of John Bogle, I was the only one whose portfolio was composed primarily of index funds.
Each member of the Portland Diehards group has his own approach to investing. Many focus on real estate. But one man’s choice especially appealed to me. Craig told the group that he has based his asset allocation on Harry Browne‘s “Permanent Portfolio”.
Asset allocation is the division of money among different types of investments. The classic example is the basic 60/40 split: 60% invested in stocks and 40% in bonds. “Asset allocation” is just a fancy way of saying “the things in which I’ve invested”.
After listening to Craig’s explanation of the Permanent Portfolio, I picked up Harry Browne’s little book, Fail-Safe Investing. Browne divides investment money into two categories:
Money you cannot afford to lose.
Money you can afford to lose.
For the former, Browne recommends investing in a “permanent portfolio” that provides three key features: safety, stability, and simplicity. He argues that your permanent portfolio should protect you against all economic futures while also providing steady performance. It should also be easy to implement. (For the money you can afford to lose, Browne suggests a “variable portfolio”, with which you can do anything you want — even invest in Beanie Babies!)
There are many ways to approach safe, steady investing, but Brown has some specific recommendations for his own Permanent Portfolio:
25% in U.S. stocks, to provide a strong return during times of prosperity. For this portion of the portfolio, Browne recommends a basic S&P 500 index fund such as VFINX or FSKMX.
25% in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, which do well during prosperity and during deflation (but which do poorly during other economic cycles).
25% in cash in order to hedge against periods of “tight money” or recession. In this case, “cash” means a money-market fund. (Note that our current recession is abnormal because money actually isn’t tight — interest rates are very low.)
25% in precious metals (gold, specifically) in order to provide protection during periods of inflation. Browne recommends gold bullion coins.
Because this asset allocation is diversified, the entire portfolio performs well under most circumstances. Browne writes:
The portfolio’s safety is assured by the contrasting qualities of the four investments — which ensure that any event that damages one investment should be good for one or more of the others. And no investment, even at its worst, can devastate the portfolio — no matter what surprises lurk around the corner — because no investment has more than 25% of your capital.
To use the Permanent Portfolio, you simply divide your capital into four equal chunks, one for each asset class. Once each year, you rebalance the portfolio. If any part of the portfolio has dropped to less than 15% or grown to over 35% of the total, then you reset all four segments to 25%. That’s it. That’s all the work involved.
Browne’s Permanent Portfolio is unlike anything I’ve ever considered before, but I have to admit: I like it. A lot. It has a distinct “get rich slowly” feel to it. That is, this portfolio is not designed to earn lots of money; it’s designed to not lose money.
What’s more, the Permanent Portfolio is based on the smart investment behaviors we’ve explored before. It’s a passive strategy built on diversification. It doesn’t use market timing. It’s a defensive investment strategy that also happens to produce a decent return.
Diversification is often mentioned with asset allocation, and for good reason. Diversification is the process of investing in many different things, of not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Studies have shown repeatedly that by investing in different types of assets that aren’t correlated (i.e. do not move the same way at the same time), investors can reduce risk while maintaining (and sometimes increasing) return. This is the power of diversification.
All of this is a long way of saying that, like Kenneth F. LaVoie III, I too am interested in reducing my risk while maintaining a decent return. I understand that, in general, risk and return are intertwined. If you want maximum possible returns, you must accept great risk. If you want no risk, you will receive meager returns. But as William Bernstein demonstrates in The Four Pillars of Investing [my review], diversification can lower risk while increasing return.
To read more about the Permanent Portfolio, check out the following articles:
I should also point out that there’s actually a mutual fund built around the concept of the Permanent Portfolio. PRPFX has an impressive record, though one based on less than a decade of data.
Note: Just because I am giving serious consideration to the Permanent Portfolio does not mean that you should do the same. Please base your investment decisions on your personal goals and psychology, not on my personal goals and psychology.
High above the Las Vegas Strip, solar panels blanketed the roof of Mandalay Bay Convention Center — 26,000 of them, rippling across an area larger than 20 football fields.
From this vantage point, the sun-dappled Mandalay Bay and Delano hotels dominated the horizon, emerging like comically large golden scepters from the glittering black panels.Snow-tipped mountains rose to the west.
It was a cold winter morning in the Mojave Desert. But there was plenty of sunlight to supply the solar array.
“This is really an ideal location,” said Michael Gulich, vice president of sustainability at MGM Resorts International.
The same goes for the rest of Las Vegas and its sprawling suburbs.
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Sin City already has more solar panels per person than any major U.S. metropolis outside Hawaii, according to one analysis. And the city is bursting with single-family homes, warehouses and parking lots untouched by solar.
L.A. Times energy reporter Sammy Roth heads to the Las Vegas Valley, where giant solar fields are beginning to carpet the desert. But what is the environmental cost? (Video by Jessica Q. Chen, Maggie Beidelman / Los Angeles Times)
There’s enormous opportunity to lower household utility bills and cut climate pollution — without damaging wildlife habitat or disrupting treasured landscapes.
But that hasn’t stopped corporations from making plans to carpet the desert surrounding Las Vegas with dozens of giant solar fields — some of them designed to supply power to California. The Biden administration has fueled that growth, taking steps to encourage solar and wind energy development across vast stretches of public lands in Nevada and other Western states.
Those energy generators could imperil rare plants and slow-footed tortoises already threatened by rising temperatures.
They could also lessen the death and suffering from the worsening heat waves, fires, droughts and storms of the climate crisis.
Researchers have found there’s not nearly enough space on rooftops to supply all U.S. electricity — especially as more people drive electric cars. Even an analysis funded by rooftop solar advocates and installers found that the most cost-effective route to phasing out fossil fuels involves six times more power from big solar and wind farms than from smaller local solar systems.
But the exact balance has yet to be determined. And Nevada is ground zero for figuring it out.
The outcome could be determined, in part, by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The so-called Oracle of Omaha owns NV Energy, the monopoly utility that supplies electricity to most Nevadans. NV Energy and its investor-owned utility brethren across the country can earn huge amounts of money paving over public lands with solar and wind farms and building long-distance transmission lines to cities.
But by regulatory design, those companies don’t profit off rooftop solar. And in many cases, they’ve fought to limit rooftop solar — which can reduce the need for large-scale infrastructure and result in lower returns for investors.
Mike Troncoso remembers the exact date of Nevada’s rooftop solar reckoning.
It was Dec. 23, 2015, and he was working for SolarCity. The rooftop installer abruptly ceased operations in the Silver State after NV Energy helped persuade officials to slash a program that pays solar customers for energy they send to the power grid.
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“I was out in the field working, and we got a call: ‘Stop everything you’re doing, don’t finish the project, come to the warehouse,’” Troncoso said. “It was right before Christmas, and they said, ‘Hey, guys, unfortunately we’re getting shut down.’”
After a public outcry, Nevada lawmakers partly reversed the reductions to rooftop solar incentives. Since then, NV Energy and the rooftop solar industry have maintained an uneasy political ceasefire. Installations now exceed pre-2015 levels.
Today, Troncoso is Nevada branch manager for Sunrun, the nation’s largest rooftop solar installer. The company has enough work in the state to support a dozen crews, each named for a different casino. On a chilly winter morning before sunrise, they prepared for the day ahead — laying out steel rails, hooking up microinverters and loading panels onto powder-blue trucks.
But even if Sunrun’s business continues to grow, it won’t eliminate the need for large solar farms in the desert.
Some habitat destruction is unavoidable — at least if we want to break our fossil fuel addiction. The key questions are: How many big solar farms are needed, and where should they be built? Can they be engineered to coexist with animals and plants?
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And if not, should Americans be willing to sacrifice a few endangered species in the name of tackling climate change?
To answer those questions, Los Angeles Times journalists spent a week in southern Nevada, touring solar construction sites, hiking up sand dunes and off-roading through the Mojave. We spoke with NV Energy executives, conservation activists battling Buffett’s company and desert rats who don’t want to see their favorite off-highway vehicle trails cut off by solar farms.
Odds are, no one will get everything they want.
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The tortoise in the coal mine
Biologist Bre Moyle easily spotted the small yellow flag affixed to a scraggly creosote bush — one of many hardy plants sprouting from the caliche soil, surrounded by rows of gleaming steel trusses that would soon hoist solar panels toward the sky.
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Moyle leaned down for a closer look, gently pulling aside branches to reveal a football-sized hole in the ground. It was the entrance to a desert tortoise burrow — one of thousands catalogued by her employer, Primergy Solar, during construction of one of the nation’s largest solar farms on public lands outside Las Vegas.
“I wouldn’t stand on this side of it,” Moyle advised us. “If you walk back there, you could collapse it, potentially.”
I’d seen plenty of solar construction sites in my decade reporting on energy. But none like this.
Instead of tearing out every cactus and other plant and leveling the land flat — the “blade and grade” method — Primergy had left much of the native vegetation in place and installed trusses of different heights to match the ground’s natural contours. The company had temporarily relocated more than 1,600 plants to an on-site nursery, with plans to put them back later.
The Oakland-based developer also went to great lengths to safeguard desert tortoises — an iconic reptile protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, and the biggest environmental roadblock to building solar in the Mojave.
Desert tortoises are sensitive to global warming, residential sprawl and other human encroachment on their habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated tortoise populations fell by more than one-third between 2004 and 2014.
Scientists consider much of the Primergy site high-quality tortoise habitat. It also straddles a connectivity corridor that could help the reptiles seek safer haven as hotter weather and more extreme droughts make their current homes increasingly unlivable.
Before Primergy started building, the company scoured the site and removed 167 tortoises, with plans to let them return and live among the solar panels once the heavy lifting is over. Two-thirds of the project site will be repopulated with tortoises.
Workers removed more tortoises during construction. As of January, the company knew of just two tortoises killed — one that may have been hit by a car, and another that may have been entombed in its burrow by roadwork, then eaten by a kit fox.
Primergy Vice President Thomas Regenhard acknowledged the company can’t build solar here without doing any harm to the ecosystem — or spurring opposition from conservation activists. But as he watched union construction workers lift panels onto trusses, he said Primergy is “making the best of the worst-case situation” for solar opponents.
“What we’re trying to do is make it the least impactful on the environment and natural resources,” he said. “What we’re also doing is we’re sharing that knowledge, so that these projects can be built in a better way moving forward.”
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The company isn’t saving tortoises out of the goodness of its profit-seeking heart.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management conditioned its approval of the solar farm, called Gemini, on a long list of environmental protection measures — and only after some bureau staffers seemingly contemplated rejecting the project entirely.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife show the bureau’s Las Vegas field office drafted several versions of a “record of decision” that would have denied the permit application for Gemini. The drafts listed several objections, including harm to desert tortoises, loss of space for off-road vehicle drivers and disturbance of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, which runs through the project site.
Separately, Primergy reached a legal settlement with conservationists — who challenged the project’s federal approval in court — in which the company agreed to additional steps to protect tortoises and a plant known as the three-corner milkvetch.
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The company estimates just 2.5% of the project site will be permanently disturbed — far less than the 33% allowed by Primergy’s federal permit. Regenhard is hopeful the lessons learned here will inform future solar development on public lands.
“This is something new. So we’re refining a lot of the processes,” he said. “We’re not perfect. We’re still learning.”
By the time construction wraps this fall, 1.8 million panels will cover nearly 4,000 football fields’ worth of land, just off the 15 Freeway. They’ll be able to produce 690 megawatts of power — as much as 115,000 typical home solar systems. And they’ll be paired with batteries, to store energy and help NV Energy customers keep running their air conditioners after sundown.
Unlike many solar fields, Gemini is close to the population it will serve — just a few dozen miles from the Strip. And the affected landscape is far from visually stunning, with none of the red-rock majesty found at nearby Valley of Fire State Park.
But desert tortoises don’t care if a place looks cool to humans. They care if it’s good tortoise habitat.
Moyle, Primergy’s environmental services manager, pointed to a small black structure at the bottom of a fence along the site’s edge — a shade shelter for tortoises. Workers installed them every 800 feet, so that if any relocated reptiles try to return to the solar farm too early, they don’t die pacing along the fence in the heat.
“They have a really, really good sense of direction,” Moyle said. “They know where their homes are. They want to come back.”
Primergy will study what happens when tortoises do come back. Will they benefit from the shade of the solar panels? Or will they struggle to survive on the industrialized landscape?
And looming over those uncertainties, a more existential query: With global warming beginning to devastate human and animal life around the world, should we really be slowing or stopping solar development to save a single type of reptile?
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Moyle was ready with an answer: Tortoises are a keystone species. If they’re doing well, it’s a good sign of a healthy ecosystem in which other desert creatures — such as burrowing owls, kit foxes and American badgers — are positioned to thrive, too.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, human survival is inextricably linked with a healthy natural world.
“We take one thing out, we don’t know what sort of disastrous effect it’s going to have on everything else,” Moyle said.
We do, however, know the consequences of relying on fossil fuels: entire towns burning to the ground, Lake Mead three-quarters empty, elderly Americans baking to death in their overheated homes. With worse to come.
The shifting sands of time
A few miles south, another solar project was rising in the desert. This one looked different.
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A fleet of bulldozers, scrapers, excavators and graders was nearly done flattening the land — a beige moonscape devoid of cacti and creosote. The solar panel support trusses were all the same height, forming an eerily rigid silver sea.
When I asked Carl Glass — construction manager for DEPCOM Power, the contractor building this project for Buffett’s NV Energy — why workers couldn’t leave vegetation in place like at Gemini, he offered a simple answer: drainage. Allowing the land to retain its natural contours, he said, would make it difficult to move stormwater off the site during summer monsoons.
Safety was another consideration, said Dani Strain, NV Energy’s senior manager for the project. Blading and grading the land meant workers wouldn’t have to carry solar panels and equipment across ground studded with tripping hazards.
“It’s nicer for the environment not to do it,” Strain said. “But it creates other problems. You can’t have everything.”
This kind of solar project has typified development in the Mojave Desert.
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And it helps explain why the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly has fought so hard to limit that development.
The morning after touring the solar construction sites, we joined Donnelly for a hike up Big Dune, a giant pile of sand covering five square miles and towering 500 feet above the desert floor, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The sun was just beginning its ascent over the Mojave, bathing the sand in a smooth umber glow beneath pockets of wispy cloud.
On weekends, Donnelly said, the dune can be overrun by thousands of off-road vehicles. But on this day, it was quiet.
Energy companies have proposed more than a dozen solar farms on public lands surrounding Big Dune — some with overlapping footprints. Donnelly doesn’t oppose all of them. But he thinks federal agencies should limit solar to the least ecologically sensitive parts of Nevada, instead of letting companies pitch projects almost anywhere they choose.
“Developers are looking at this as low-hanging fruit,” he said. “The idea is, this is where California can build all of its solar.”
We trekked slowly up the dune, our bodies casting long shadows in the early morning light. When we took a breather and looked back down, a trail of footprints marked our path. Donnelly assured us a windy day would wipe them away.
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“This is why I live here, man,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, in my mind.”
Donnelly broke his back in a rock-climbing accident, so he used a walking stick to scale the dune. He lives not far from here, at the edge of Death Valley National Park, and works as the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin director.
As we resumed our journey, the wind blowing hard, I asked Donnelly to rank the top human threats to the Mojave. He was quick to answer: The climate crisis was No. 1, followed by housing sprawl, solar development and off-road vehicles.
“There’s no good solar project in the desert. But there’s less bad,” he said. “And we’re at a point now where we have to settle for less bad, because the alternatives are more bad: more coal, more gas, climate apocalypse.”
That hasn’t stopped Donnelly and his colleagues from fighting renewable energy projects they fear would wipe out entire species — even little-known plants and animals with tiny ranges, such as Tiehm’s buckwheat and the Dixie Valley toad.
“I’m not a religious guy,” Donnelly said. “But all God’s creatures great and small.”
After a steep stretch of sand, we stopped along a ridge with sweeping views. To our west were the Funeral Mountains, across the California state line in Death Valley National Park — and far beyond them Mt. Whitney, its snow-covered facade just barely visible. To our east was Highway 95, cutting across the Amargosa Valley en route from Las Vegas to Reno.
It’s along this highway that so many developers want to build.
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“We would be in a sea of solar right now,” Donnelly said.
Having heard plenty of rural residents say they don’t want to look at such a sea, I asked Donnelly if this was a bad spot for solar because it would ruin the glorious views. He told me he never makes that argument, “because honestly, views aren’t really the primary concern at this moment. The primary concern is stopping the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis.”
“There are certain places where we shouldn’t put solar because it’s a wild and undisturbed landscape,” he said.
As far as he’s concerned, though, the Amargosa Valley isn’t one of those landscapes, what with Highway 95 running through it. The same goes for Dry Lake Valley, where NV Energy’s solar construction site is already surrounded by energy infrastructure.
What Donnelly would like to see is better planning.
He pointed to California, where state and federal officials spent eight years crafting a desert conservation plan that allows solar and wind farms across a few hundred thousand acres while setting aside millions more for protection. He thinks a similar process is crucial in Nevada, where four-fifths of the land area is owned by the federal government — more than any other state.
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If Donnelly had his way, regulators would put the kibosh on solar farms immediately adjacent to Big Dune. He’s worried they could alter the movement of sand across the desert floor, affecting several rare beetles that call the dune home.
But if the feds want to allow solar projects along the highway to the south, near the Area 51 Alien Center?
“Might not be the end the world,” Donnelly said.
He shot me a grin.
“You know, one thing I like to do …”
Without warning, he took off racing down the dune, carried by momentum and love for the desert. He laughed as he reached a natural stopping point, calling for us to join him. His voice sounded free and full of possibility.
Some solar panels on the horizon wouldn’t have changed that.
Shout it from the rooftops
Laura Cunningham and Kevin Emmerich were a match made in Mojave Desert heaven.
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Cunningham was a wildlife biologist, Emmerich a park ranger when they met nearly 30 years ago at Death Valley. She studied tortoises for government agencies and later a private contractor. He worked with bighorn sheep and gave interpretive talks. They got married, bought property along the Amargosa River and started their own conservation group, Basin and Range Watch.
And they’ve been fighting solar development ever since.
That’s how we ended up in the back of their SUV, pulling open a rickety cattle gate off Highway 95 and driving past wild burros on a dirt road through Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
They had told us Sarcobatus Flat was stunning, but I was still surprised by how stunning. I got my first look as we crested a ridge. The gently sloping valley spilled down toward Death Valley National Park, whose snowy mountain peaks towered over a landscape dotted with thousands of Joshua trees.
“Everything we’re looking at is proposed for solar development,” Cunningham said.
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Most environmentalists agree we need at least some large solar farms. Cunningham and Emmerich are different. They’re at the vanguard of a harder-core desert protection movement that sees all large-scale solar farms on public lands as bad news.
Why had so many companies converged on Sarcobatus Flat?
The main answer is transmission. NV Energy is seeking federal approval to build the 358-mile Greenlink West electric line, which would carry thousands of megawatts of renewable power between Reno and Las Vegas along the Highway 95 corridor.
The dirt road curved around a small hill, and suddenly we found ourselves on the valley floor, surrounded by Joshua trees. Some looked healthy; others had bark that had been chewed by rodents seeking water, a sign of drought stress. Scientists estimate the Joshua tree’s western subspecies could lose 90% of its range as the world gets hotter and droughts get more intense.
But asked whether climate change or solar posed a bigger threat to Sarcobatus Flat, Cunningham didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, solar development hands down,” she said.
Nearly 20 years ago, she said, she helped relocate desert tortoises to make way for a test track in California. One of them tried to return home, walking 20 miles before hitting a fence. It paced back and forth and eventually died of heat exhaustion.
Solar farms, she said, pose a similar threat to tortoises. And at Sarcobatus Flat, they would cover a high-elevation area that could otherwise serve as a climate refuge for Joshua trees, giving them a relatively cool place to reproduce as the planet heats up.
“It makes no sense to me that we’re going to bulldoze them down and throw them into trash piles. It’s just crazy,” she said.
In Cunningham and Emmerich’s view, every sun-baked parking lot in L.A. and Vegas and Phoenix should have a solar canopy, every warehouse and single-family home a solar roof. It’s a common argument among desert defenders: Why sacrifice sensitive ecosystems when there’s an easy alternative for fighting climate change? Especially when rooftop solar can reduce strain on an overtaxed electric grid and — when paired with batteries — help people keep their lights on during blackouts?
The answer isn’t especially satisfying to conservationists.
For all the virtues of rooftop solar, it’s an expensive way to generate clean power — and keeping energy costs low is crucial to ensure that lower-income families can afford electric cars, another key climate solution. A recent report from investment bank Lazard pegged the cost of rooftop solar at 11.7 cents per kilowatt-hour on the low end, compared with 2.4 cents for utility solar.
Even when factoring in pricey long-distance electric lines, utility-scale solar is typically cheaper, several experts told me.
“It’s three to six times more expensive to put solar on your roof than to put it in a large-scale project,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University. “There may be some added value to having solar in the Los Angeles Basin instead of the middle of the Mojave Desert. But is it 300% to 600% more value? Probably not. It’s probably not even close.”
There’s a practical challenge, too.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated U.S. rooftops could generate 1,432 terawatt-hours of electricity per year — just 13% of the power America will need to replace most of its coal, oil and gas, according to research led by Jenkins.
Add in parking lots and other areas within cities, and urban solar systems might conceivably supply one-quarter or even one-third of U.S. power, several experts told The Times — in an unlikely scenario where they’re installed in every suitable spot.
Energy researcher Chris Clack’s consulting firm has found that dramatic growth in rooftop and other small-scale solar installations could reduce the costs of slashing climate pollution by half a trillion dollars. But even Clack said rooftops alone won’t cut it.
“Realistically, 80% is going to end up being utility grid no matter what,” he said.
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All those industrial renewable energy projects will have to go somewhere.
Sarcobatus Flat may not be the answer. Federal officials classified all three solar proposals there as “low priority,” citing their proximity to Death Valley and potential harm to tortoise habitat. One developer withdrew its application last year.
Before leaving the area, Cunningham pointed to a wooden marker, one of at least half a dozen stretching out in a line. I walked over to take a closer look and discovered it was a mining claim for lithium — a main ingredient in electric-car batteries.
If solar development didn’t upend this valley, lithium extraction might.
On the beaten track
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The four-wheeler jerked violently as Erica Muxlow pressed her foot to the gas, sending us flying down a rough dirt road with no end in sight but the distant mountains. Five-point safety straps were the only things stopping us from flying out of our seats, the vehicle leaping through the air as we reached speeds of 40 mph, then 50 mph, the wind whipping our faces.
It was like riding Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds — just without the Yeti.
Ahead of us, Muxlow’s neighbor Jimmy Lewis led the way on an electric blue motorcycle, kicking up a stream of sand. He wanted us to see thousands of acres of public lands outside his adopted hometown of Pahrump, in Nevada’s Nye County, that could soon be blocked by solar projects — cutting off access to off-highway vehicle enthusiasts such as himself.
“You could build an apartment complex or a shopping mall here, and it would be the same thing to me,” he said.
To progressive-minded Angelenos or San Franciscans, preserving large chunks of public land for gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive dirt bikes might sound like a terrible reason not to build solar farms that would lessen the climate crisis.
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But here’s the reality: Rural Westerners such as Lewis will play a key role in determining how much clean energy gets built.
Not long before our Nevada trip, Nye County placed a six-month pause on new renewable energy projects, citing local concerns about loss of off-road vehicle trails. Similar fears have stymied development across the U.S., with rural residents attacking solar and wind farms as industrial intrusions on their way of life — and local governments throwing up roadblocks.
For Lewis, the conflict is deeply personal.
He moved here from Southern California more than a decade ago, trading life by the beach for a five-acre plot where he runs an off-roading school and test-drives motorcycles for manufacturers. His warehouse was packed with dozens of dirt bikes.
“This is my life. Motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles,” he said, laughing.
Lewis has worked to stir up opposition to three local solar farm proposals. So far, his efforts have been in vain.
One project is already under construction. Peering through a fence, we saw row after row of trusses, waiting for their photovoltaic panels. It’s called Yellow Pine, and it’s being built by Florida-based NextEra Energy to supply power to California.
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Lewis learned about Yellow Pine when he was riding one of his favorite trails and was surprised to find it cut off. He compared the experience to riding the best roller-coaster at a theme park, only to have it grind to a halt three-quarters of the way through.
“I don’t want my playground taken away from me,” he said.
“Me neither!” a voice called out from behind us.
We turned and were greeted by Shannon Salter, an activist who had previously spent nine months camping near the Yellow Pine site to protest the habitat destruction. She and Lewis had never met, but they quickly realized they had common cause.
“It’s the opposite of green!” Salter said.
“On my roof, not my backyard,” Lewis agreed.
Never mind that conservationists have long decried the ecological damage from desert off-roading. Salter and Lewis both cared about these lands. Neither wanted to see the solar industry lay claim to them. They talked about staying in touch.
It’s easy to imagine similar alliances forming across the West, the clean energy transition bringing together environmentalists and rural residents in a battle to defend their lifestyles, their landscapes and animals that can’t fight for themselves.
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It’s also easy to imagine major cities that badly need lots of solar and wind power — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix — brushing off those complaints as insignificant compared with the climate emergency, or as fueled by right-wing misinformation.
But many of concerns raised by critics are legitimate. And their voices are only getting louder.
As night fell over the Mojave, Lewis shared his idea that any city buying electricity from a desert solar farm should be required to install a certain amount of rooftop solar back home first — on government buildings, at least. It only seemed fair.
“Some people see the desert as just a wasteland,” Lewis said. “I think it’s beautiful.”
The view from Black Mountain
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So how do we build enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuels without destroying too many ecosystems, or stoking too much political opposition from rural towns, or moving too slowly to save the planet?
Few people could do more to ease those tensions than Buffett.
Our conversation kept returning to the legendary investor as we hiked Black Mountain, just outside Vegas, on our last morning in the Silver State. We were joined by Jaina Moan, director of external affairs for the Nature Conservancy’s Nevada chapter. She had promised a view of massive solar fields from the peak — but only after a 3.5-mile trek with 2,000 feet of elevation gain.
“It’ll be a little StairMaster at the end,” she warned us.
The homes and hotels and casinos of the Las Vegas Valley retreated behind us as we climbed, looking ever smaller and more insignificant against the vast open desert. It was an illusion that will prove increasingly difficult to maintain as Sin City and its suburbs continue their march into the Mojave. Nevada politicians from both parties are pushing for legislation that would let federal officials auction off additional public lands for residential and commercial development.
Vegas and other Western cities could limit the need for more suburbs — and sprawling solar farms — by growing smarter, Moan said. Urban areas could embrace density, to help people drive fewer miles and reduce the demand for new power supplies to fuel electric vehicles. They could invest in electric buses and trains — and use less water, which would save a lot of energy.
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“As our spaces become more crowded, we’re going to have to come up with more creative ideas,” Moan said.
That’s where Buffett could make things easier.
The billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway company owns electric utilities that serve millions of people, from California to Nevada to Illinois. Those utilities, Moan said, could buck the industry trend of urging policymakers to reduce financial incentives for rooftop solar and instead encourage the technology — along with other small-scale clean energy solutions, such as local microgrids.
That would limit the need for big solar farms — at least somewhat.
Berkshire and other energy giants could also build solar on lands already altered by humans, such as abandoned mines, toxic Superfund sites, reservoirs, landfills, agricultural areas, highway corridors and canals that carry water to farms and cities.
The costs are typically higher than building on undisturbed public lands. And in many cases there are technical challenges yet to be resolved. But those kinds of “creative solutions” could at least lessen the loss of biodiversity, Moan said.
“There’s money to be made there, and there’s good to be done,” she said.
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It’s hard to know what Buffett thinks. A Berkshire spokesperson declined my request to interview him.
Tony Sanchez, NV Energy’s executive vice president for business development and external relations, was more forthcoming.
“The problem for us with rooftop solar,” he said, is that it’s “not controlled at all by us.” As a result, NV Energy can’t decide when and how rooftop solar power is used — and can’t rely on that power to help balance supply and demand on the grid.
Over time, Sanchez predicted, a lot more rooftop solar will get built. But he couldn’t say how much.
Rooftop solar faces a similarly uncertain future in California, where state officials voted last year to slash incentive payments, calling them an unfair subsidy. Industry leaders have warned of a dramatic decline in installations.
As we neared the top of Black Mountain, the solar farms on the other side came into view. They stretched across the Eldorado Valley far below — black rectangles that could help save life on Earth while also destroying bits and pieces of it.
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Moan believes the key to balancing clean energy and conservation is “go slow to go fast.” Government agencies, she said, should work with conservation activists, small-town residents and Native American tribes to study and map out the best places for clean energy, then reward companies that agree to build in those areas with faster approvals. Solar and wind development would slow down in the short term but speed up in the long run, with quicker environmental reviews and less risk of lawsuits.
It’s a tantalizing concept — but I confessed to Moan that I worried it would backfire.
What if the sparring factions couldn’t agree on the best spots to build solar and wind farms, and instead wasted years arguing? Or what if they did manage to hammer out some compromises, only for a handful of unhappy people or groups to take them to court, gumming up the works? Couldn’t “go slow to go fast” end up becoming “go slow to go slow”?
In other words, should we really bet our collective future on human beings working together, rather than fighting?
Moan was sympathetic to my fears. She also didn’t see another way forward.
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“We really need to think holistically about saving everything,” she said.
The sad truth is, not everything can be saved. Not if we want to keep the world livable for people and animals alike.
Some beloved landscapes will be left unrecognizable. Some families will be stuck paying high energy bills to monopoly utilities, even as some utility investors make less money. Some tortoises will probably die, pacing along fences in the heat.
The alternative is worse.
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The easy choices have already been made: the low performers left many moons ago, the travel budgets have been slashed, and struggling branches have been sold to competitors or unceremoniously closed.
For the mortgage industry, more often it’s about making the very hard choices these days – exiting a channel, deciding which star performer to let go, etc. After all, the average retail lender lost nearly $2,000 per loan in the first quarter, and I expect losses to be similar in Q2 and elevated in Q3.
One consequence of mortgage lenders – and LOs, for that matter – being on the ropes is the lack of investment back into their business. I get it! Money’s tight and lenders are plugging holes in the boat, not buying a new engine.
In our quarterly HousingWire LenderPulse survey, we asked retail loan officers, branch managers, C-suite execs, brokers and others how they feel about the market, where they expect rates to be in Q3, and what they’re doing to reduce costs.
Interestingly, 57% of the 166 respondents said they do not plan to invest in tech, services or solutions in the third quarter. The rest of the surveyed pros were evaluating or still planning to purchase lead generation services and keep loan originations systems, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and services that maximize repeat and referral business for lenders.
While the respondents were split as to whether to invest or hold spending money in tech, when asked about what business cost reductions they plan to make in the future, 39% of surveyed mortgage professionals pointed to cutting their marketing spend/tools. Just under 25% of the respondents said they would cut down on production or origination-focused headcount, followed by operational software and solutions (18%); and originations software (8%). Other responses included cutting down excessive incentives, business trips, open houses and sponsorships.
Mortgage is famously an unforgiving, low-margin business. The lenders and LOs that saved their cash from the pandemic unicorn years and have been disciplined about maintaining their marketing strategy and investing in technology should see outsized returns in the years to come.
After all, as the famous Warren Buffett saying goes, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
James Kleimann Managing Editor, HW Media
In our weeklyDataDigest newsletter, HW Media Managing Editor James Kleimann breaks down the biggest stories in housing through a data lens. Sign up here! Have a subject in mind? Email him at [email protected]
I shared a list of my favorite books about money once before, but that was over two years ago. I’ve read dozens of books since then (and thumbed through dozens more). Here is a revised list of 25 great books about money.
These are all books that I found entertaining or influential. There are still many “big name” books that I haven’t read, such as “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” and “The Intelligent Investor,” and I’ve left off some perennial favorites such as “The Richest Man in Babylon” and “The Wealthy Barber.”
These books are grouped into sections, roughly following the financial progression of the average person (from debt to financial independence). I’ve linked to the Amazon page for each book, but, as always, I encourage you to borrow the titles that interest you from your public library. If you prefer to read on a device, get to know Overdrive, which allows you to borrow e-books for free.
Debt Reduction
For those in the first stage of personal finance, debt reduction is the most important task. I know from experience that this can seem like a long, lonely battle. But others have fought it before, and have lived to document the process. Here are three books that describe different approaches to winning the fight:
The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey — Ramsey is an anti-credit zealot. He made a $4 million fortune by his mid-twenties, and then lost it to bankruptcy. Now he runs a personal-finance empire. He takes a lot of criticism for his support of the debt snowball, which he describes in detail here, but the thing is, his methods work. If you’re struggling with debt, there’s no better starting place than this book. Ramsey’s advice is permeated with his Christianity, but you can get a lot out of this book even if you’re not religious. [My review.]
Debt is Slavery by Michael Mihalik — Debt is Slavery is a deceptively simple book. It’s short. Its advice seems basic. And it’s self-published, so how good can it be? Well, I think it’s great. In fact, I found myself wishing that I had written it. Mihalik’s advice is spot-on, and he covers a lot of topics that other authors shy away from, such as the effects of advertising, the weight of possessions, and the soul-sucking misery that comes from a bad job. This book may be short, but it’s sweet. Especially great for recent graduates, I think.
How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously by Jerrold Mundis — How to Get Out of Debt is built on the principles of Debtors Anonymous, a twelve-step program founded in 1971 to help those who struggle with compulsive debt. Mundis was himself a debtor, and he based this book on his own experience. This isn’t purely theoretical information from the mind of some Wall Street finance whiz who has never struggled; this book contains real tips and real stories from real people. If you’ve tried Dave Ramsey without success, read this. It’s 20 years old, but the information is timeless. [My review.]
Everyday Personal Finance
After you’ve defeated debt, you enter the second stage of personal finance, mastering the everyday habits that allow you to build wealth. The books listed here offer a wide view, discussing many aspects of money. They offer advice about saving, investing, and frugality. They don’t go into much detail about any one subject, but they provide motivation to get started. And that’s what’s most important.
Your Money or Your Life by Dominguez, Robin, and Tilford — A classic, and one of the foundation books for the simplicity movement. The authors play off the concept “time is money” in a very literal sense. They encourage readers to sort out priorities, to cut expenses, and then to seek passive income in pursuit of financial independence. A little New Age-y in spots. An excellent book, and a huge influence on many prominent personal-finance bloggers. I hope to review the new, revised edition of YMoYL soon.
All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi — I didn’t like All Your Worth when I first read it. The book takes a dim view of frugality and thrift, and it contains some wild assumptions (like 12% stock market returns). But with time, I’ve come to appreciate the strength of All Your Worth, not just for those struggling to shake off debt, but also for those of us who are beginning to build wealth. This book’s balanced money formula is probably the single most important part of my current financial plan. There’s good stuff here, though you may need to filter some of the authors’ rhetoric. [My review.]
I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi — This book is great, but it’s not for everyone. It’s targeted almost exclusively at young adults. If you’re under 30 and single, and if you make a decent living, this book is perfect. But if you’re 45 and married with two children, and if you struggle to make ends meet, this book is less useful. Plus, Ramit has a strong authorial voice. He’s bold, sarcastic, and even a little sassy. Not everyone likes this. If you’re turned off by his blog (or by his guest posts at Get Rich Slowly), you’ll be turned off by his tone in this book. These caveats aside, I Will Teach You to Be Rich is packed with solid advice, cites its sources, and provides scores of tactical tips for managing money. [My review.]
The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn — “The Tightwad Gazette” was a newsletter published during the early 1990s by Amy Dacyczyn (pronounced “decision”). Eventually the back issues were collected into a series of books, which were in turn collected as The Complete Tightwad Gazette. Dacyczyn wrote articles like: “Used Shoes: Are they Good or Bad?”, “Budget Bug-Busting”, “Tightwad Toys”, and “Saving Money on Your Mortgage”. Sounds just like a personal finance blog, doesn’t it? This book has thousands of tips, many of which were contributed by readers of the newsletter. (You won’t find any info on investing here. This book is about frugality!)
Investing
Learning to invest your money wisely is one important aspect of the middle stages of financial development. Wall Street is not friendly to the small investor. It’s designed to part you from your hard-earned dollars. These books can help you develop an investment philosophy that will let you improve your odds of retiring wealthy.
The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein — I’ve read dozens of books about investing. Of these, The Four Pillars of Investing is probably my favorite. Most investing manuals espouse one sure-fire method or another. Four Pillars does that to an extent, but the author provides a great deal of depth and color to support his argument. I love that Bernstein takes a comprehensive, holistic approach to the subject, not just looking at the theory and business of investing, but also looking at the history and psychology of investing. This is a great book. [My review.]
The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton Malkiel — Malkiel is best known for his classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street. This book is shorter, written in plain English (there’s no investing jargon), and easy to understand. But that doesn’t mean it’s simplistic. This is an excellent book, filled with advice based on sound financial principles. It covers risk tolerance, asset allocation, diversification, and even a little behavioral finance. An excellent guide for beginners. [My review.]
The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias — Andrew Tobias is an entertaining writer. His jocular, conversational tone will keep you interested as he describes mutual funds, bonds, and treasury bills. There’s a good section on how to handle a windfall (lottery, inheritance). My favorite bit from Tobias is his three-step budget: destroy your credit cards, invest 20% of everything you earn (and never touch it), and live on the remaining 80% no matter what. Awesome. This is a classic introduction to the subject of investing, though at times it seems a little dated. (You can read Andrew Tobias every day at his blog.
The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing by Larimore, Lindauer, and LeBoeuf — You want expert investment advice? You can’t beat the info found here. These devotees of Vanugard founder John Bogle are big on slow, sure investments like indexed mutual funds. They tap their decades of experience to teach about diversification, inflation, and asset allocation. It’s not nearly as boring as it sounds. This book covers a broad range of topics, though its primary focus is investing. Highly recommended.
The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach — There’s more to David Bach than just “the latté factor”. The system he recommends here is excellent — an automated approach to managing your personal finances. If you’ve been meaning to open a Roth IRA, but have never actually done so, then read this book! He’ll explain how to set it up so that it’s painless. The only caveat I’d note is that this book is several years old now, and because it contains specific recommendations for financial companies, it may be be in need of an update.
Financial Independence
This next group of books may be my favorite. These volumes cover topics related to Financial Independence — that magical point where you no longer have to work. This is the final stage of money management. For many people, this means retirement. But it doesn’t have to be that way. These books offer solid advice for how to create a future that matches your dreams.
The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko — The authors interviewed and surveyed a pool of millionaires, attempting to find common connections among them. They discovered that millionaires live below their means. They budget. They let their adult children make it on their own. This book introduces several key concepts, including degrees of wealth accumulation. It’s a bit tedious in spots, at least in the audio version. This is one of just a few books to cover both sides of the wealth equation: saving money and earning money. [My review.]
Yes, You Can…Achieve Financial Independence by James Stowers — Yes, You Can…Achieve Financial Independence is informative without being dense. It’s accessible without being condescending. Its advice is solid. The book is filled with investment advice, but it gives equal time to thrift and savings. Best of all, it asks as many questions as it provides answers. It prompts the reader to think, to evaluate her priorities. Its message is that yes, you can achieve Financial Independence, but you can’t get there overnight, and you can’t get there without setting goals and making sacrifices. [My review.]
The Incredible Secret Money Machine by Don Lancaster — This hard-to-find volume from 1978 looks like a get-rich-quick book. It’s not. It’s all about starting and running small businesses, especially craft businesses. To Lancaster, a “money machine” is any venture that generates “nickels”. Nickels are small streams of revenue from individual customers. If your goal is simply to earn a comfortable income for yourself by doing something you love, then this book can help you explore the idea of business ownership. One of my Dad’s favorites, and one of my favorites, too. [My review.]
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss — The 4-Hour Workweek is a frustrating book. A lot of the advice seems impractical and out-of-reach for the average person. But on the other hand, it’s filled with inspirational anecdotes and provocative ideas about how you can make the leap from desk jockey to the pursuit of your dreams. In my review, I wrote that this book “is like a kick in the head”, and it’s true. The flow of ideas is relentless. Despite its flaws, I think this is a great book. [My review.]
Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement by Bob Clyatt — While Financial Independence is my long-term dream, semi-retirement is my more immediate goal. Clyatt describes techniques for leaving the workaday world years (or decades) before the traditional retirement age of 65. Work Less, Live More includes sections on defining your goals, learning to live on less, putting your investments on autopilot, and more. This book is like a toned-down, practical version of The 4-Hour Workweek. I like it. A lot.
The Psychology of Money
I firmly believe that success with money is more about mind than it is about math. We all understand the arithmetic behind personal finance — to build wealth, you must spend less than you earn — it’s mastering the emotions and habits that causes us trouble. These books explore your money and your brain.
Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes (and How to Correct Them) by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich — In this short book, Belsky and Gilovich catalog a menagerie of mental mistakes that cause people to spend more than they should. What might have been a boring topic becomes fascinating thanks to an engaging style and plenty of anecdotes and examples. This book covers more than a dozen psychological barriers to wealth and explains how to prevent them from sabotaging you. [My review.]
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz — I just finished this book the other night, and hope to provide a full review in the next week. It’s fascinating. Schwartz argues that the vast array of choices available to us in the marketplace actually make us less happy. We’d be better off with two options for a wide-screen plasma television instead of twenty. Too much choice doesn’t just make us unhappy — it prevents us from making smart decisions. Fascinating stuff.
Kids and Money
Many parents are unprepared to teach their children about money. You needn’t be one of them. These books suggest methods for getting kids to understand how money works.
Living Simply with Children by Marie Sherlock — Sherlock offers tips for how to raise children that aren’t part of the consumerist culture. She encourages strong family ties as a counter to the relentless purchase to acquire “stuff”. Sherlock is also a proponent of using family rituals to replace consumer-oriented cultural activities. There’s some great advice here (the book is strongly influenced by Your Money or Your Life), but some readers may be put off by the author’s philosophy.
Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids by Gail Karlitz — Growing Money has good chapters on banks and bonds, but most of the book is devoted to stocks. The book also contains chapters on the history of the stock market, how investors make money, and how to buy and sell stocks. This is probably my favorite book for children, but it does have some weak spots. Only one page out of 120 is devoted to mutual funds. Because the book is aimed at children, taxes are barely considered. Still, its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. It’s the sort of book to buy for your nephew, but read yourself before you pass it on. [My review.]
What Color is Your Piggy Bank? by Adelia Cellini Linecker — This slim volume is a great choice for kids from 10-14 who are beginning to show an interest in entrepreneurship. Linecker covers the world of jobs, setting up shop, and how to manage money.
Financial Journalism
This final trio of books won’t help you get rich — at least not directly. These don’t contain overt stock tips or advice for frugal living. Instead, they tell real-life stories about certain aspects of finance.
Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart — It’s not just Bernie Madoff. Wall Street has fallen prey to all sorts of unscrupulous men over the course of its history. In Den of Thieves, Stewart takes us inside the high-finance worlds of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine. These men were embroiled in the insider trading scandals that shook the market during the 1980s, and through their stories were able to see just how corrupting the influence of money can be. A little dense at times, but a great way to learn about the market.
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein — It’s no secret that Warren Buffett is one of my financial heroes. In this biography of Buffett, Roger Lowenstein describes the events that shaped his life, starting as a boy in the early 1930s. As we follow Buffett’s growth, we learn about the development of investment theory. There’s plenty of information here about Buffett’s investment philosophy. Entertaining and educational.
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel — Writer Studs Terkel published Hard Times in 1970. It features excerpts from over 100 interviews he conducted with those who lived through the 1930s. Terkel spoke with all sorts of people: old and young, rich and poor, famous and not-so-famous, liberal and conservative. By including the perspectives of so many different people, Terkel is able to paint a richer picture of what things were like. [My review.]
Bonus! The Worst Book About Money
Over the past few years, I’ve read many bad books about money. But none can compare to to the idiocy contained in The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. This book promotes all of the wrong messages, and encourages readers to believe that if they simply wish for something, it will come true.
The Secret contains tips like:
“It is helpful to use your imagination and make-believe you already have the money you want. Play games of having wealth and you will feel better about money; as you feel better about it, more will flow into your life.”
“The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”
“Visualize checks in the mail.”
“This kind of crap is dangerous,” I wrote in my original review. “It’s get-rich-quick drivel of the worst sort. It doesn’t help people address their money issues. It puts them into a pattern of wishful thinking.”
This book is awful.
Final Thoughts
Few personal finance books are perfect. For most, you need to employ personal filters. Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover is a fantastic book on debt reduction, but if you’re not Christian, you’ll have to tune out the Bible verses. All Your Worth contains a great plan for achieving financial balance, but you may need to ignore its constant disparaging of frugality and thrift.
Because I’ve limited myself to 25 books, I’ve had to leave a lot of great titles off the list. Please feel to share your favorite books about money and explain why others should read them.
Most reader questions I share at Get Rich Slowly are meant to solve a problem — somebody has a financial dilemma they’re hoping you folks can help them fix. But Rita sent a different kind of question. She doesn’t want to solve a problem — she wants to stir debate. Rita writes:
I ask myself “How much is enough?” several times daily. My husband and I make good money — over $100,000 in combined income — own a home in an expensive city, have two large dogs, and are able to buy most of what we want. I don’t have a problem with normal spending, but I often feel bad when I purchase something really nice (such as a nice purse, a collectible book, etc).
On one hand, I can afford these things.
But on the other hand, I still feel that it’s somehow wrong that I continue to buy this stuff while many people in the world cannot afford clean water and food.
Just yesterday, I read an article on an entertainment site about Steven Spielberg’s $200 million personal yacht. I think that this a a crazy, immoral waste of money. He could make a HUGE difference by using that $200 million for charity.
I guess my point is: Am I really any better? No, I’m not buying a yacht anytime soon, but I do buy luxury items. And someday I’d like the satisfaction of being able to buy my husband a Range Rover. (He loves those damn cars.) My husband doesn’t feel guilt for having these things, but (if I’m being completely honest with myself) I do. Oddly enough, I majored in finance in college and am currently studying for the CFA exam, so the topic of “efficiency and equity” is really on my mind.
Four years ago, prompted by this thoughtful essay in the New York Times, I asked: What should a billionaire give, and what should you?
In this essay, philosopher Peter Singer discussed the magnitude of charitable donations from the two richest men in the world: Warren Buffett contributed $37 billion to charitable foundations, and Bill and Melinda Gates gave $30 billion. Singer wrote:
Philanthropy on this scale raises many ethical questions: Why are the people who are giving doing so? Does it do any good? Should we praise them for giving so much or criticize them for not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely wealthy individuals? And how do our judgments about them reflect on our own way of living?
Singer’s article discusses the ethics of giving, and tries to establish some guidelines. (It’s a fascinating read but it’s long, so budget half an hour or so.)
After years of dithering, I’m finally moving forward with philanthropy in my own life. I’ve been researching (and finding!) causes to support. I’ve been exploring the possibility of volunteer tourism. And one of my goals for Awesome People is to donate all profits to charity. (I’ll share more about my forays into philanthropy in coming months.)
But Rita’s question is about more than just giving. It’s also about consumption. When we buy things, there are ramifications across a vast economic web. This is why some people are willing to pay a premium to buy local or to buy organic. It’s also why some people insist on buying American and others boycott specific items. (Some people refuse to buy diamonds; my high-school social studies teacher refused to buy bananas.)
On a basic level, every time we choose to buy a comfort or a luxury, we’re also making the choice not to use the money to help somebody else — whether in our own community or in the world at large. To what degree is this acceptable? To what degree is this reprehensible?
xkcd tackles the morality of spending…
This goes beyond just the personal level, of course.
Today as I drove into downtown Portland, I passed the $37,000,000 Mercy Corps building. I winced when I saw it. Mercy Corps does great work, but how much more great work could it have done with the money it spent for its new headquarters?
Or what about the humble country church my family attended when I was in high school? About a decade ago, the congregation spent tens of thousands of dollars to pave the parking lot and to build a new kitchen, gymnasium, and office. Is this what Jesus would have done? Or would he have used the money to help the poor?
I used to think there were clear answers to questions like these. Now I’m not so sure. What is right and what is wrong?
[embedded content]
What are the moral implications of spending, especially on Wants? (I doubt anyone would argue that we shouldn’t spend on our own Needs.) If I spend $1500 for a pair of season tickets to the Portland Timbers, is this immoral? What if I also contribute $15 to a charity to make amends? $150? $1500? And at what point am I just “buying” a mental pardon?
Some of you will argue loud and long that there aren’t any moral implications to spending. Others will argue just as loudly (and just as long) that every economic act carries a moral and ethical component, that our financial decisions have meaning. I can see both sides.
What do you think? What are the moral implications of spending? When is it okay to buy a $200 million yacht? Is such a decision ever justifiable? Always justifiable? If Steven Spielberg also donates $200 million to charity, does that ameliorate this obscene expense? And what about on a more mundane scale? Are there any absolutes? How do you decide?
Note: Although this question is likely to stir more passionate debate than usual, let’s abide by the standard rules. You’re free to disagree with each other (and with me), but please do so respectfully. Keep things civil. As long as everyone’s polite, I think this could be a fine discussion.
As I mentioned in my missive from two weeks ago about the power of dividend reinvestment, I attended the Morningstar Investment Conference earlier this summer and heard from all kinds of mutual fund managers and investment professionals. However, the presentation that had the biggest impact on me — which is to say, it depressed the bejeezers out of me — came from Harvard professor David Laibson. His main point: From age 53 or so on, our cognitive skills begin to decline to the point where approximately half of people in their 80s suffer from some kind of impairment that could lead to significant financial mistakes. Recently, I grabbed a box of tissues and interviewed Dr. Laibson.
Robert Brokamp We all expect to slow down as we get older. However, your research indicates that the slowdown starts sooner than most people expect.
David Laibson There are two types of intelligence that are particularly important.
One is crystallized intelligence, which is accumulated through experience — think of wisdom, intuition, your familiarity with a set of problems that you have encountered many times. Crystallized intelligence rises over the entire life course; we keep getting better and better, but the rate of progress diminishes. We get better quickly as a young person, and then as we get older, the progress gets slower. Eventually we plateau, and maybe very late in life it declines. But mostly, it’s progress.
The other category is fluid intelligence, which is the capacity to confront a new problem and handle it very well. Fluid intelligence appears to peak around age 20 and then declines. When you put those two together, it looks as if we make the best decisions in mid-life — in our analysis, around age 53. Along with Sumit Agarwel, John Driscoll, and Xavier Gabaix, we find that the accumulation of wisdom and experience swamps the decline in fluid intelligence early in life. We are just getting better, even though our ability to solve novel problems is going down.
But around age 53, there is not a lot of additional crystallized intelligence year to year, while there is ongoing decline in fluid intelligence — so the decline in fluid intelligence ends up dominating. We peak around 53 and then start declining. That doesn’t mean that we fall off a cliff at 53. But as you get out to the 70s and then particularly the 80s and 90s, the decline becomes sharper and stronger. Decision-making in the 80s and 90s is significantly impaired for many older adults.
Robert Brokamp Is there anything people can do about it — exercise, a good diet, anything like that?
David Laibson Well, no, there is not a lot. Exercise and diet will reduce the odds of cognitive impairment a little bit, but those effects are modest. And so I think we shouldn’t be focused on avoiding the possibility of cognitive impairment. We have to recognize that no matter what we do, the risks are significant and hence we have to prepare for that possibility rather than naively thinking we can somehow avoid that outcome.
Robert Brokamp At what age should people start factoring this into their financial and estate plans?
David Laibson The second you form a family — even if you have modest assets — you should begin to prepare for this possibility. I say that because it is not just dementia that can be a problem. You can have a stroke in your 40s and not be in a position to make great decisions; you can get into a car accident and have a head injury. So the earlier, the better.
On the other hand, risks don’t really pile up until the 70s, so if someone told me, “Look, I am just not too worried about these issues; I am 45 years old,” I would say, “I think you are making a mistake,” but I wouldn’t get too agitated. For someone in their mid-60s, that is really when further delay is becoming irresponsible. By the time someone is in their mid-60s, there is no excuse for delaying the acquisition of the key legal documents that enable you to prepare for these transitions.
Those documents should include durable power of attorney, and would include — if you have significant assets — a living revocable trust as a way of protecting your assets, and would include, of course, a will. Then there are two health-care documents that are very important. There is a health-care proxy, which is the assignment of some person or set of people to make health-care decisions for you if you are incapacitated, and there is also a living will, which is a set of instructions to those individuals that expresses your preferences about the nature of medical care. If you are in an ICU, for example, what extreme measures should or should not be taken to prolong your life? Those are the five documents I strongly recommend that anyone who is part of a family have. By age 65, it is critical.
Robert Brokamp One of the solutions you propose is for older investors to buy income annuities, which provide income for as long as you live.
David Laibson An annuity is such a wonderful way of addressing a lot of the risks that older adults face. Let me go through the benefits of an annuity, and then I want to acknowledge that most people don’t want annuities, despite these benefits, so we can talk about that psychological resistance.
The first big benefit is that it addresses longevity risk — in other words, the risk that you might outlive your assets. Here we are at age 70; we could live five years or 30 years or even 40 years, so that is a big risk. If you live a very long time, and you are spending down your wealth, you face the possibility that you will run out. An annuity eliminates that risk, because the annuity pays out as long as you survive. If it is a joint annuity — owned by you and your spouse — the annuity pays out until the second member of the unit dies. So it is a great way of insuring against the possibility of living too long. That is one benefit.
Another benefit of an annuity is that it is very, very simple. The check comes every month in the mail. There is no need to worry about asset allocation. There is no need to worry about how much to spend, how much to save. The check comes, and that is your budget for the month. The chance of having some nasty person rip you off by getting you to invest in their harebrained scheme is reduced, because you don’t have your personal wealth sitting in a checking account. Instead, the annuity company, in essence, is holding your personal wealth for you. So in all these ways, the annuity is protective. It protects you against longevity risk, it simplifies your decision making, and it protects you from bad actors and from mischief. Terrific.
So why don’t people have annuities? Well, annuities, of course, have a bad name for many reasons. First of all, people perceive them as being complicated, and in some ways they are complicated legal documents, complicated financial contracts — particularly, a lot of the modern annuities have a lot of special clauses. People worry about fees with annuities, and it is true that the majority of annuity products are excessively expensive and not a good deal. And people like to have a sense of control; annuities mean passing control over to somebody else — in this case, the insurance company.
Now, I don’t want to dictate to people and say, “You have to have an annuity.” I hope that people can weigh the pros and cons, particularly while they are still highly cognitively functioning in their 60s, and figure out what is right for them. I do think people should think seriously about annuities and look hard for an insurance company that offers highly competitive rates if they are going to proceed with an annuity. But if at the end of the day, you insist on controlling your assets, and you want full liquidity, then an annuity is not for you.
The one thing I would consider is a partial annuity. You still have some significant fraction of your wealth in your own hands. You can decide what to do with it, and it is there as a bequest in the event of your death. You can spend a lot or a little each year, you have flexibility. Then take some other fraction of your wealth and annuitize that. Now, we have the best of both worlds: You have got some control, but you also have a nice amount of longevity insurance in the form of a significant fraction of your wealth annuitized.
Robert Brokamp It also seems that you don’t only have to worry and plan for your own possible cognitive decline but also for that of your spouse and maybe older relatives. Any advice on how to make protecting against age-induced financial mistakes a family affair? How do you broach that topic with older parents or other relatives who are getting up there in age?
David Laibson I think the key thing is that people recognize that when we recommend these things, we are not recommending it because a particular parent is showing some kind of cognitive impairment; it is a recommendation that is universal. All people — regardless of their vitality, regardless of their cognitive function — should execute the five documents that I described a moment ago. It is just how responsible people behave, and so I think the messaging has to be, “It is not about you, Mom, or you, Dad. It is not any judgment that anyone is making about your mind or your thinking, it is just the normal course of affairs for everyone who has a family, and anyone who has an estate.”
Robert Brokamp How do you respond to someone who says, “Well, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett is 80, and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger is 87, and they are still beating the market”?
David Laibson It is not that everyone’s fate is to have dementia at age 85; no one is saying that. What is being said is that the frequency of dementia increases with age to the point where one in five individuals in their 80s has dementia, and one in three individuals in their 80s has cognitive impairments that fall short of dementia. Put all that together, about half of people in their 80s have significant cognitive impairment. So half the population is going to be in a good position to make decisions and half is not. The problem is that you don’t know which half you’re going to fall into.
Looking for an effective way to improve the chances that you won’t run out of money in retirement? It’s easy: Just delay retirement.
That may not be the solution you wanted to hear. But by working just a few years more, you can greatly enhance your portfolio’s longevity, as well as have a higher Social Security benefit to rely on in the event that your money runs out. To illustrate these benefits, consider a 62-year-old who has saved $250,000 for retirement. In the past year, she earned $75,000 at her job, and contributed 15% of her salary, or $11,250, to her 401(k). She figures she could live on 75% of her pre-retirement income.
How long would her money last if she retired today as compared to later ages? We fired up the “Am I saving enough? What can I change?” calculator (found among the retirement calculators at The Motley Fool) to analyze her situation. Here are the results.
Retirement Age
62
64
66
68
70
Number of Years Portfolio Will Last
5.2
6.3
7.8
9.8
12.8
Portfolio Will Last Until Age…
67.2
70.3
73.8
77.8
82.8
% of Expenses Covered by Social Security
34.2%
39.5%
45.5%
52.8%
59.9%
With all those pretty numbers in mind, let’s discuss the benefits of working a few years longer.
Your portfolio will have more years to grow Our hypothetical retiree’s portfolio will last an estimated 5.2 years if she retires today, but its longevity increases with every year she puts off retirement, thanks to a combination of additional contributions and delaying the point at which assets are sold to pay for retirement. In fact, her $250,000 could almost double to $483,087 by age 70, assuming a 5% investment return and continued annual contributions of $11,250.
You’ll get a larger Social Security benefit A bigger portfolio isn’t the only reason our retiree’s prospects improve the longer she works. Her portfolio will also last longer because of bigger Social Security checks, which means she’ll need to withdraw less from her portfolio to cover expenses. According to the benefits calculator on the Social Security website, our retiree will receive $16,032 in her first year of retirement if she applies for benefits at age 62. However, the calculator estimates that her benefit would more than double to $36,096 if she can wait until age 70.
That increased benefit is due to two factors. First, for every year you delay taking Social Security, the benefit increases approximately 8% plus inflation. Secondly, the benefit is calculated using the 35 years in which you earned the most money (adjusted for average wage inflation); if you are earning a high income in your 60s relative to what you earned previously in your career, then the more years you work, the more the higher-income years replace the lower-income years in the benefits calculation, resulting in a bigger monthly check.
Finally, delaying Social Security benefits also provides a larger safety net in case your portfolio does get fully depleted. If our retiree stopped working at age 62 and later ran out of money, Social Security would cover just 34.2% of her expenses. However, had she waited until age 70 and her portfolio went kaput, Social Security would cover 59.9% of her bills. Not ideal, of course, but better than 34.2%.
Your portfolio’s potential expiration will be closer to your own The length of your retirement is the number of years between the day you quit work and the day life quits you. The older you are when you retire, the fewer number of years your money needs to last.
Of course, you don’t know exactly when you’ll exceed life’s mortal debt ceiling, but according to the Social Security Administration, the average 62-year-old male will live another 19.4 years and the average 62-year-old female will live another 22.3 years (apparently, pulling fingers reduces longevity). As you can see from the above table, if our retiree quits work at age 62, the calculator estimates she’ll run out of money at age 67. If she retires at age 70, her money is estimated to last into her 80s. This is still not ideal; most financial advisors recommend that retirees plan to reach age 90 to 95. But retiring later does result in her portfolio running out at an age closer to the average life expectancy.
The Bottom Line There several ways to improve the chances that you won’t run out of money in retirement, such as save more while you’re working, earn higher investment returns (though never guaranteed, of course), downsize your home, reduce your expenses (as exemplified by Akaisha and Billy Kaderli, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago), or marry Warren Buffett.
Delaying retirement is not the only option, but it’s likely the most impactful option for those approaching their 60s with insufficient savings. It can also benefit those who have already retired but are willing and able to return to work, even part-time. (If it’s been less than 12 months since you received your first Social Security check, you can withdraw your application for benefits, return any money you received, and then take a larger benefit later.) Whatever you do, run your own numbers to determine what will best improve your retirement security. Many people retire too early, only to figure that out too late.
For those fresh out of college and newer to the workforce, it can be challenging to figure out how to balance between managing looming student loan debt and saving for your future.
Student loans are a particularly burdensome source of debt, totaling $1.63 trillion — or $37,600 per borrower — in the United States, according to a recent WalletHub study. They’re the second-highest form of debt for Americans, second only to home mortgages. And after a three-year pause, federal student loans will resume accruing interest on Sept. 1, with payments coming due in October.
You may have heard of the 50-30-20 rule — dedicating 50% of your money toward needs, 30% toward wants and 20% toward savings — but there is more to post-college budgeting, Chris Briscoe, vice president and director of financial planning at Girard Advisory Services, tells CNBC Make It.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, especially for Gen Zers and millennials burdened with student debt, here are a few steps young professionals can take to start balancing loans and future savings.
1. ‘Take your time’ and establish your financial goals
Putting together a plan for financial success right out of college is not an easy or quick task, Briscoe says. College graduates do not have to find the perfect job right off the bat, nor should they feel the pressure to immediately know how to handle their money.
“You don’t have to take care of this all at once. Take your time,” he says.
Start by establishing a preliminary budget and outlining financial goals. There are a few simple questions you can ask yourself in this process, Briscoe says.
“[The budget] doesn’t have to be set in stone, but at least take some time to figure it out a few months after you get used to making money. What fixed expenses do you have? What do you like to do? What would you like to do for enjoyment? How much money is going in? How much money is going out?”
Additionally, “write down your goals. Where do you want to be in one year? Where do you want to be in five? Where do you want to be in 10 years? If you have debt, how do you want to tackle that debt?”
2. Always make the minimum payment
For those grappling with student loan debt, the most important thing is to stay on top of your minimum monthly payments, Andrew Meadows, senior VP of HR, brand and culture at Ubiquity Retirement and Savings, tells CNBC Make It.
“It costs money to owe money. It is a funny thing to say, but that’s the truth,” he says. “In order to not have that debt grow, continue to make the minimum payments.”
That’s because “if you get late on your payments, they add late charges on top of that,” he says. “The last thing you want when you’re facing debt is to face more debt.”
Ultimately, the sooner you can pay off your student debt — by making minimum payments and paying a little more each month if you can — the less you will pay overall.
3. Start building a savings buffer
While it might be difficult to immediately set aside a full emergency savings fund of three to six months’ worth of expenses soon after entering the professional world, at least build a cash savings buffer, Meadows says.
“Start taking a little bit of money away that will cover two months’ worth of your student loan debt and a couple of months’ rent,” he says. “This isn’t a full emergency savings. It’s just that buffer so that you have some breathing room and you can lower your anxiety overall.”
Some jobs are not forever, he reminds young professionals. It’s important to prepare while you can and have enough money to get yourself through periods without steady pay.
4. ‘It is never too early to save for retirement’
If you have a savings buffer and are making your minimum loan payments, it’s time to start putting money away for the future.
If given the opportunity, opt for a job that offers an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, Meadows says. “It is never too early to save for retirement.”
For working professionals, 401(k) retirement plans allow your money to grow tax-free, offer you an upfront tax break and can include employer matching. If your company offers a match, save at least that amount every month, Briscoe says. It’s part of your compensation, and basically “free” money.
If your company does not offer a 401(k), a Roth IRA might be a strong alternative. Roth IRAs are funded with post-tax funds, which you can withdraw tax-free in retirement, provided you meet all the requirements. They’re often recommended for early career investors because you’re more likely to be in a lower tax bracket early on than in retirement.
5. Maintain your ‘study mindset’ and continue to learn
When it comes to gaining greater financial literacy and learning how to effectively balance student loans and retirement savings, it is essential to learn all that you can.
“Be a sponge,” Briscoe says. “If you’re at your job and you have questions about your retirement plan, make sure you’re asking somebody that might be a little bit more experienced about what they’ve done.”
Recent college graduates should maintain their “study mindset,” Meadows says, and devote time to building their budget and financial resources. It shouldn’t feel like a burden — rather, it’s a chance to maximize your postgraduate experiences.
“Your retirement plan is the ultimate DIY project,” Meadows says. “You can’t rely on Social Security as your primary form of income when you retire. Many of us are not going to have jobs that provide pensions. The only thing you have left is your own personal savings.”
“You are working hard now, you’re out there making a living. But don’t forget to treat yourself a little bit,” he adds. “Just understand what your boundaries are so that you can be setting up your future self for the most comfort possible in retirement.”
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