Is your wealth dripping away?

As a spokesperson for the insurance industry, Loretta Worters often gives tips to homeowners on preventing water damage. Some of her knowledge comes from personal experience.

Worters says she had owned a home in Bellmore, New York, for only a month when she noticed the clothes washer in the basement was taking an awfully long time to fill.

“I went downstairs and I was up to my ankles in water,” says Worters, vice president of communications for the Insurance Information Institute.

Appliance and plumbing failures are a leading cause of household water damage, which is far more common than you may think. Homeowners are six times more likely to suffer property losses from water than from theft and seven times more likely than from fire, says Kelly Greene, a risk consulting manager from Chubb Personal Insurance who led a session on property damage at the Financial Planning Association NorCal conference in May. (“Water damage” is different from flooding, which is rising water that affects two or more properties.)

In my latest for the Associated Press, steps you can take to ensure your wealth doesn’t evaporate drip by drip.

Friday’s need-to-know money news

Today’s top story: Tax planning for beginners – 6 concepts to know. Also in the news: Credit score up? How to build your credit smarts too, why it’s time to find a safety deposit box alternative, and here’s how much money Americans say you need to be ‘rich’.

Tax Planning for Beginners: 6 Concepts to Know
Basic steps to shrink your tax bill.

It’s Time to Find a Safe Deposit Box Alternative
Not as secure as we once thought.

Here’s how much money Americans say you need to be ‘rich’
Do you qualify?

What “secret millionaires” can teach us

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailThis column first appeared on DailyWorth under the headline “Lessons from secret millionaires.”

Eugenia Dodson grew up on a Minnesota farm, the daughter of poor Swedish immigrants. Her childhood poverty affected her so profoundly that even in her old age, she refused to replace a stove with only one working burner — even though by then she was worth tens of millions of dollars. Dodson, who left nearly $36 million to the University of Miami when she died in 2005 at age 100, is just one of many secretly wealthy people who live quiet, frugal lives and then leave unexpected fortunes to charity.

I’ve been collecting stories of such secret millionaires for years now. Some are men, though the women interest me more, as females usually earn less, invest more conservatively and wind up poorer in retirement. These women break that mold. Here’s what we can learn from them.

They’re not born rich

Secret millionaires can be farmers, school teachers or, in Dodson’s case, a hairdresser. Dodson eventually opened her own beauty shop after she moved to Miami in the 1920s at the urging of a high school friend, according to her attorney, Donald Kubit. She made it through the Great Depression living simply and frugally, habits she continued through her life. “I had no idea when I met her that she was a woman of such wealth,” says Kubit, who met Dodson in her nineties.

Buy and hold works

Secret millionaires are often heavily invested in stocks — the one type of investment that consistently beats inflation over time. Many favored well-known, blue-chip companies. Margaret Southern, a retired teacher of special-needs children in Greenville, S.C., preferred household names like 3M, General Foods and Heinz that paid dividends, according to a story about her in the Greenville News. Southern reportedly liked having the dividend checks to buy whatever she wanted. When Southern died at 94, she bequeathed $8.4 million to the Community Foundation of Greenville to benefit children and animals.

Let it grow

Long lives mean that even small amounts invested over time have the decades they need to grow into real wealth. (As an example, $10,000 can grow to $100,000 in 30 years with an 8 percent average annual return, which is a typical long-term gain for stocks. In 40 years, that $10,000 would grow to $200,000. In 50 years, you’d have nearly $500,000.) You can’t control how long you live, but you can take advantage of long-term compounding by starting to invest as early as you can and leaving the money alone to grow.

These secret millionaires tend to be pretty vital, too: Elinor Sauerwein of Modesto, California, painted her own house, mowed her own lawn and harvested her own fruit from atop a ladder into her nineties, according to an ABC News report. Sauerwein left $1.7 million to the Salvation Army.

Don’t live too poor

Living below your means is essential to growing wealth, but it is possible to go overboard. Helen Dyrdal of Renton, Washington lived with broken furniture and wore tattered clothes, leaving her best friend with the impression she was impoverished, according to a KOMOnews.com report. Dyrdal was actually worth more than $3 million, which she left to Seattle-area charities when she died at 91.

Eugenia Dodson, meanwhile, was desperate to find a cure for diabetes, the illness that killed her two brothers. That’s why she gave two-thirds of her fortune to the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institution Foundation. (A lung cancer survivor, Dodson left the other third to the university’s cancer research center.) But she wasn’t able to give money away during her lifetime, Kubit says.

“She would have been treated royally by her charitable beneficiaries,” Kubit says. “But she was always afraid that she might need the money.” If Dodson, Dyrdal and other secret millionaires had been able to address their fears about money, they may have died a bit less wealthy — but they might have been happier. The best part of money is enjoying it while you’re alive, even if you want to benefit others when you die.

Please check out my other DailyWorth columns here.

 

Why millennials aren’t saving

DrowningSavings rates for adults under 35 plunged from 5 percent in 2009 to a negative 2 percent, according to Moody’s Analytics, and the consequences are potentially huge. Here’s how a Wall Street Journal writer put it:

“A lack of savings increases the vulnerability of young workers in the postrecession economy, leaving many without a financial cushion for unexpected expenses, raising the difficulty of job transitions and leaving them further away from goals like eventual homeownership—let alone retirement….Those who don’t save are unlikely to be wealthy in the future, meaning American angst over wealth inequality seems poised to persist if most millennials are unable to save or choose not to.”

Unfortunately, the two “real people” quoted in the story both have college educations and decent jobs. The first has credit card debt (a synonym for “frivolous spending”) and would rather spend on “her social life and travel” while the second finds investments “too complicated.” These two reinforce the narrative that the only reason people don’t save is because they don’t want to.

In reality, most people under 35 don’t have a college degree. They have a higher unemployment rate than their elders and much smaller incomes–the median for households headed by someone under 35 was $35,300 in 2013, down from $37,600 in 2010. As the WSJ article notes, wages for those 35 and under have fallen 9 percent, in inflation-adjusted terms, since 1995.

(Millennials, by the way, also don’t have much credit card debt. In the 2010 survey, the latest for which age breakdowns are available, fewer than 40 percent of under-35 households carried credit card balances, and the median amount owed was $1,600.)

Saving on small incomes is, of course, possible–and essential if you ever hope to get ahead. But any discussion of savings among the young should acknowledge how much harder it is to do in an era of falling incomes. Today’s millennials have it tougher than Generation X did at their age, and way, way tougher than the Baby Boomers. It may comfort older, wealthier Americans to imagine the younger generation is just more frivolous. But that does a disservice to millennials, and to our understanding of the real causes of wealth inequality.

 

 

 

Are you falling behind?

siblingsMore than half of Americans—56 percent—say they’re falling behind financially, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center.

That’s not surprising, given that a recent Census Bureau study concluded that most Americans are worse off financially than they were before the recession, despite gains in the stock market and home prices.

Which is why Donna Freedman’s latest piece for Get Rich Slowly, “Why I voluntarily slashed my salary,” is a timely read.

Like the rest of us who wrote for MSN Money, Donna faced a big drop in income when the site pulled the plug on original content. Rather than try to recoup what she’d lost, though, Donna made a conscious decision to live on a lot less.

Donna’s situation is Donna’s. Yours is probably quite different. But I’m always inspired reading what she has to say about the benefits of a more frugal, conscious life.

That doesn’t mean I think that status quo is okay. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is not okay. The huge debts young people take on to get educated is not okay.  The fact that most people’s finances can be seriously and permanently upended–by a layoff, a divorce, a death in the family–is not okay.

It’s also not okay to keep blaming individuals for what are clearly huge economic trends. Overspending on credit cards did not trigger the Great Recession.

But if you’re living with less, Job One is figuring out how to make that work, at least for now. Job Two may be pushing for change.

 

Do you feel richer yet?

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailWe’re richer than we were before the recession, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve. The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations is now a record $80.7 trillion, 14% higher than last year. The previous peak in 2007 was $76.59 trillion in today’s dollars.

If you don’t feel wealthier, though, you’re not alone. Most of the gains went to the country’s richest households, and older people saw bigger wealth increases than younger people. That doesn’t bode well for consumer spending, economists said, since younger and less wealthy households are more likely to spend their gains. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal includes this quote:

“Wealth inequality…has increased over time,” said William Emmons, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “So, there seems to be a disconnect: There are big wealth gains, but not much follow-through on consumer spending.”

Another study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the average family headed by someone under 40 has recovered only about a third of the net worth lost during the financial crisis and recession, while the average wealth of middle-aged and older families is about where it was prior to the crisis.

“Mommy, are we rich?”

Child and cashMy recent MSN column, “One way money is a lot like sex,” has to do with the questions our kids sometimes ask–and how much discomfort we can feel about answering.

I argue that we need to get comfortable talking about money with our children, because these are incredibly important teaching moments.

Psychotherapist Thayer Willis, who’s quoted in the column, recommended a terrific book for kids that can help these talks: “The Table Were Rich People Sit.” Here’s what Thayer has to say:

“While I would not deny the importance of money when answering the ‘are we rich?’ question, I do recommend taking every opportunity to broaden the subject and get kids thinking about additional kinds of wealth in their lives. This book is a lovely tool for that with younger children (ages 6-9).”

If your family does have substantial material wealth, I’d recommend checking out Thayer’s books, including “Beyond Gold: True Wealth for Inheritors” and “Navigating the Dark Side of Wealth: A Life Guide for Inheritors.” She’s an inheritor herself and has helped many people come to terms with can be a many-edged sword.

Spreading the wealth: the number of millionaires grows

More people have achieved a net worth of at least $1 million, not including their primary residences. The Spectrum Group, which keeps track of these things, said the number of millionaires climbed for the third straight year to 8.6 million in 2011 (or 7.5% of all U.S. households). The growth in millionaires follows a 27% decline in 2008. But we’re still not back to the 2007 peak of 9.2 million.

Spectrum said the ranks of all affluent investors increased in 2011:

  • Those with $100,000 or more in net worth sans primary residence reached 36.7 million from 36.2 million in 2010 (about 32% of U.S. households)
  • Those with $500,000 or more in net worth climbed to 13.8 million from 13.5 million in 2010 (about 12% of U.S. households)
  • Those with $5 million or more in net worth rose to 1.078 million from 1.061 million in 2010 (slightly less than 1% of U.S. households)
  • Those with $25 million or more in net worth grew to 107,000 from 105,000 in 2010 (slightly less than .1% of households)