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Are You Concerned About the Very Poor?

This article was written by Flexo in Society. 73 comments.

Whether you agree with it or not, the reason this country has supported programs like welfare, Social Security, the GI Bill, food stamps, Medicare, government-backed mortgages, FEMA insurance, and other social programs is because a modern society benefits when as many citizens as possible have opportunities to succeed financially. Social programs aren’t perfect and don’t always provide what they promise, and there’s always a small percentage who take advantage of the system.

The push-and-pull between the focus on the society and the focus on the individual existed even before the founding of the nation, and this particular Weeble that wobbles between left and right without falling down (yet) has allowed the United States to become the biggest economy in the world in a relatively short period of time, and that’s a good thing.

From an individual perspective, it might not be that intuitive that one needs to be concerned about the “very poor.” After all, with social safety nets, one might think that the “very poor” have little to worry about. Regardless of the existence of programs — both public and private — poverty is still an issue in this country, even if you don’t see it in your daily life as you shuffle in an office building from meeting to meeting or shuttle from city to city on business trips. It’s hard to be concerned about something if you aren’t faced with it every day.

If, however, you are concerned about the “very poor,” there are ways to help, even if you don’t believe that handouts are effective. The most popular rationalization for not caring about poverty is the idea that helping another individual teaches complacency rather than responsibility, interdependence rather than independence. The incorrect assumption is that families in destitute situations have no desire to work for their money like those who have built wealth for themselves and have earned the right to let their money do the work for them and receive income from dividends and interest rather than working in the middle-class and working-middle-class sense of the word.

The real problem is tied into that psychology 101 concept I turn to repeatedly, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If most waking minutes in your day are spent worrying about your shelter, your food, and having a safe place to sleep, “income mobility” is a fantasy. You’re a victim of “class warfare,” but in your reality, you don’t have time or energy for political arguments about class warfare.

If you are concerned about the very poor, there are options. Helping bring attention to poverty can form provide opportunities to those without them without much sacrifice from those with opportunities.

Give money directly to organizations that run programs focusing on providing opportunities. The top-rated charities focusing on poverty according to Charity Navigator are Direct Relief International (although International is in the name, they also work to eliminate domestic poverty, particularly in disaster-stricken areas), SOME (So Others Might Eat, focusing on the D.C. area), and the People’s Resource Center (based in Chicago). If you prefer to give a hand-up rather than a hand-out, focus on organizations that provide job training and placement, programs that expand the reach of educational opportunities, and programs that present positive financial role models.
Volunteer with the organizations that run these programs. Build houses. Build schools. Help at a food bank. When you are actively involved, you get to experience the results of your work much more closely than if you were to send a check every month. No, you won’t get a tax deduction for volunteer work, but that’s not the point.
Become a community leader. When people from poor communities manage to succeed financially, they often don’t return to be the role model their community needs. This is the reason financial illiteracy is a problem that will continue from generation to generation, keeping low socio-economic status communities from thriving.

Are you concerned about the very poor? Does paying your taxes and being satisfied with existing social safety nets relieve you from any other possible responsibilities for how the country fares as a whole? Do we even have any responsibilities to anyone other than ourselves and our families?

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Improve Your Child’s Cognitive Ability for Income Potential

This article was written by Flexo in Career and Work. 18 comments.

There’s a chance you could become a multi-millionaire after repeatedly slamming your head into other people and suffering through the resulting mini-concussions and minor brain damage, but not everyone can be a professional football player in the NFL. There’s a safer and less harmful path toward financial independence.

Cognitive ability is an important part of your human capital, and your human capital measures, among other things, how likely you’ll be able to support yourself financially, particularly through difficult economic times. Cognitive ability is important because many jobs requiring intricate skills and the best careers that offer opportunities for advancement require the ability to learn and adapt, and that’s the core of cognition.

The ability for the brain to process information changes throughout one’s lifetime, and without stimulation, cognitive ability can decline. When companies like Google or SAS ask puzzling interview questions, they’re testing, among other things, cognitive ability. To be hired as a software engineer, you would need to show that you have a strong command of whatever primary programming language is popular at the time, but in an industry that changes so quickly, strong cognitive ability will show that you can learn and adapt to the changing environment.

Rubik's Cube The key is instilling cognitive ability in children at an early enough age. As we get older, we can continue to refine cognitive ability, but only to a small extent. These tactics may no longer work for me; the best adults can generally do to keep cognitive skills sharp is to get enough sleep and exercise, and eat nutritious food.

If you’re interested in helping your child prepare for a life full of challenges, there are some tactics you can employ.

Learning a new language

As a child, I enjoyed learning languages. I never became fluent in anything other than English, but I enjoyed the process of learning the rules. As a kid, I was fascinated by languages, and spent time learning a little bit of as many as possible. Like many kids, I learned a little Spanish from Sesame Street. I learned Hebrew and tried to teach myself Yiddish. I studied Latin in middle school, was taken out of usual classes to study Greek independently, and took five years of German. I learned programming languages like BASIC, Pascal, lisp, and C. And as a younger kid, I dabbled with creating my own languages and codes.

Music and mathematics have features in common with languages, as well. Music, particularly learning to play an instrument instead of just listening to Mozart, has been shown to improve cognitive ability.

As an adult, learning a new language or a musical instrument is a time-consuming task. There are programs that help frequent travelers learn languages quickly, but you could get a bigger cognitive benefit by learning a language through a more academic curriculum or through immersion. Rather than focusing on key phrases that help you get by in a foreign land, incorporating a new language into the way you think can help keep your brain active. On the other hand, young children, even those learning their first language or languages, can often learn multiple languages concurrently without being confused. Language skills not only improve cognitive ability, but they can make someone a more marketable employee around the world or increase the chance of international success in their own businesses.

Completing puzzles

Elementary school is a great time to focus on solving puzzles whose solutions require thinking “outside the box.” I seem to remember this being called “lateral thinking” when I was younger, but I don’t know if that term is widely used today. These are the types of puzzles that stymie job applicants at companies like Google. But puzzle solving as an adult won’t have the same impact as puzzle solving when the brain is at its most impressionable.

Logic puzzles are kind of like the game Clue. You often have two or more dimensions to work with, and the goal is to pair each of the dimensions together based on a limited number of clues. A grid helps eliminate incorrect pairings to discover what’s correct. The more dimensions included in the puzzle, the more brain power necessary to solve the puzzle.
For a child, a Rubik’s Cube can be an engaging puzzle. While the answer now comes packaged with the toy, and there are numerous Youtube videos describing how to solve the puzzle in about twenty moves, the cognitive challenge is in working to find patterns of movement that move closer to the result.
Text adventure games open up a child’s mind to being able to control their environment. Video games have changed since I was a kid, but I enjoyed the early text adventure computer games like Scott Adams’ Adventureland. (Classic game lovers can play Adventureland here.)

Reading and writing

Reading and writing help develop important cognitive skills focused on processing information the same way they’ll need to make sense of problems as adults. Writing, particularly creative writing, improves the command of language and can help children find clarity when expressing their ideas. Writing is a skill that will easily set someone apart from the competition, as might be necessary in tough job markets. I’ve personally seen atrocious written communication among co-workers throughout the many jobs I’ve had. I will never say I’m a great writer, but these skills are lacking in my former non-profit and corporate environments.

When I compose a well-worded communication, the supervisors shouldn’t be surprised. Every employee with a college education should be able to express himself or herself somewhat eloquently.

These cognitive skills nurtured at an early age can help prepare children for financial success in life. The best careers need smart and flexible employees to take on unforeseen challenges. People often predict what the hottest careers may be one generation from now, but the specific opportunities are irrelevant if children are prepared today to handle any problem that presents itself.

What did you do as a child to improve your cognitive ability? If you have children, how are you helping them prepare for the future?

Photo: Don Wright

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My Future Investing Strategy

This article was written by Flexo in Financial Advice and Advisers, Investing. 27 comments.

Last week I met with a Certified Financial Planner for the first time. This was a free service provided by Vanguard, so it was a good opportunity to speak to a professional about my specific situation. For many years, I’ve been relying on mostly generalized advice, whether from books, large communities like the Motley Fool discussion forums (particularly the Living Below Your Means section), financial columnists, or a community of bloggers that has grown from fewer than a dozen to more than a thousand.

My financial planner and I started by discussing my goals. This was tough for me, as I’ve changed my long-term goals several times in the last decade. I’m trying to find the right mission for my life. I’ve made personal finance my passion since the creation of Consumerism Commentary in 2003, but long before that date I was passionate about other aspects of my life. I need to look at how I want to spend the next twenty, thirty, or forty years of my life and some of the more important developments along the way, like having a family.

From a financial standpoint, my next major expenditure will most likely be a house, though that purchase relies on making other choices in my life first.

With my current level of investable net worth — my assets outside of an emergency fund and money put aside for shorter-term goals like a house — I’m willing to give up potential returns in the stock market for less risk. We decided on a mix between 60% stocks and 40% bonds. Complicating the issue is the fact that almost all of my non-cash investments are in stocks. It will be important to look at my portfolio as a whole rather than analyzing my 401(k) separately from my IRA and separately from my taxable account. This is where tools like Quicken, offering charting and reporting across a variety of accounts regardless of where they are held, come in handy.

The 60%/40% split between stock funds and bond funds is more conservative than I would generally recommend for someone my age (thirty-five), but that might be appropriate based on my lower needs for long-term returns and need for maintaining value in the intermediate term as I determine the next steps for my life.

Before discussing specific investments, I made sure the planner was aware that I prefer index mutual funds rather than ETFs, managed mutual funds, or individual investments. The planner suggested that 70% of the stock portion of my portfolio be invested in the Total Stock Market Index with the remaining 30% in the International Stock Market Index. Half of the bond portion of the portfolio should be invested in the Intermediate Tax-Exempt Bond Fund with the other half in the New Jersey Tax-Exempt Municipal Bond Fund. I’m not sure how excited I am about the prospect of investing in New Jersey, but the tax advantage could be helpful.

I brought up the issue of tax efficiency. It was my understanding that tax-efficient investments, such as the bond funds recommended, should be invested in taxable accounts, while investments that did not offer any tax advantages should be invested in retirement plans like 401(k)s and traditional IRAs, where the tax is deferred until retirement. After analyzing my tax situation, the planner concluded the opposite would be true, admitting the idea seemed counter-intuitive. In today’s environment, the tax rate for qualified dividends, the result of stock-based mutual funds, is 15%, while income from bond-based mutual funds is taxed at ordinary income rates.

However, the bond funds he suggested to are federally tax-exempt, and one is also state tax-exempt as long as I continue living in New Jersey. The adviser’s suggestion to invest in bonds in my tax-deferred retirement accounts might make more sense if those investments were not tax-exempt. I think there’s a piece of discussion missing from my notes that might have explained this situation with a more satisfying rationale. I’ll seek a second opinion about this particular aspect of my planning.

With most of my portfolio in cash, the planner suggested moving these funds to stocks and bonds slowly, over the course of eight quarters. Leaving behind any amount I’d like to have let in cash at the end of two years, I would divide the remainder by eight to determine my quarterly investment amount. This method of dollar-cost averaging could ease the pricing risk inherent in investing a lump sum.

If my goal is only to have money for retirement, my time horizon would be long. Again, I’ll need to define some of my life goals to determine time horizons for specific pools of assets. That would be a topic for a later discussion.

In summary, these are the main points of our discussion:

Six months to one year of living needs in cash, including an emergency fund and any other spending needs.
With the rest, a 60%/40% split between stock funds and bond funds.
Using a dollar-cost averaging investing strategy over the next eight quarters for current funds.
Add the bond fund portion to 401(k) investments and stock fund portion to taxable investments.

What do you think of this strategy?

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Spirituality and Money: Knowing is Only Half the Battle

This article was written by Ellen Cooper-Davis in Consumer, Spirituality. 5 comments.

This article is written by Consumerism Commentary’s columnist, Ellen Cooper-Davis. Ellen’s column looks at the role of spirituality within the context of personal finance. For an introduction to this column, see Ellen’s first article, The Pastor and the Purse. Your feedback is welcome.

It’s time for a little geography lesson.

Look at the tag in your pants. Right there, below the strict instructions not to put them in the drier, which you, like me, probably ignore, it tells you where your pants were born. “Made in Mauritius,” my pants tell me. The magic Interwebs let me know that this is a tiny island nation off the southeast coast of Africa.

Pants Now I am curious. Because in my experience, small island nations don’t necessarily fare well where clothing manufacturing is concerned. So even though a part of me doesn’t really want to know…I check on the labor practices of the manufacturer. The results are not encouraging.

This means I will have to find a different source of pants. And since I’ve raised the question of ethics in manufacturing, it also means I’m more likely to intentionally seek out brands of clothing that have higher standards. Oh, sure, I could shrug and try to forget I ever looked that up, or pretend that sweatshop labor does not clash with my values at all… but it does. And I did. And that’s the problem. Once you know something, you can’t un-know it.

Most of us move through our consumer lives in blissful ignorance. We don’t know where our clothing, gadgets, trinkets come from, and frankly, we don’t care. We just want them to look good, work well, and entertain us. We don’t want to know about child labor or sweatshop labor or toxins. Because if we knew — if we really allowed ourselves to open our eyes and see the truth, and to notice the places where this truth grates against our most deeply-held truths — then we would have to change.

Ignorance isn’t really bliss. It’s just ignorance. As a society, we would never tolerate knowing nothing about where our food comes from. We want some reasonable assurance that it is safe to eat, that it will nourish us, that it is what it says it is. Why would we deliberately embrace ignorance when it comes to materials, labor conditions and sources of other consumer goods? After all, those are real human beings on the other end of our supply chain. To pretend otherwise is not only ignorance, but dangerous.

In some ways, this is the essence of any spiritual path. It is about taking the teachings and values of that path, and aligning your real, everyday life with them. This includes what we do, what we say, how we treat people, and what and how we consume. It isn’t easy, and no one does it perfectly, but we can all start where we are. I can start with my next grocery trip, or the next time I need new socks. I can start with rearranging my investment portfolio, or I can start by exploring fair trade gifts for this holiday season. Here, at the intersection of soul and money, there are hard questions to be asked. If I am who I say I am, what must I do?

What consumer goods do you research from a values perspective? What do you wish you could evaluate from that perspective, but don’t know how? What would you prefer to remain totally ignorant about? Are there any “lines in the sand” for you, issues or practices that you absolutely do not tolerate in your consumer choices?

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Citi ThankYou℠ Premier Card Review

by Flexo

One of the freedoms that credit card rewards programs can provide is the ability to redeem points for any reward. You might be able to use points to pay for a vacation if you believe the typical credit card commercials, upgrade your television from a tube set to high definition, or just pocket the cash. ... Continue reading this article…

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Platinum Card from American Express Review

by Flexo

Charge cards have always had a reputation of being not for the average middle-class credit card user, primarily because many come with high annual fees and offer perks that the typical American consumer can’t afford or doesn’t want to pay. While this may be true for most charge cardholders, as long as a consumer doesn’t ... Continue reading this article…

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Continental Airlines OnePass Plus Card Review

by Flexo

As I live not too far from Newark, New Jersey, many of my flights around the country are serviced by Continental Airlines, an airline with a significant hub at Newark Liberty International Airport. Like all airlines, Continental has been cutting services and adding fees to keep fares low, but I’ve never had a bad experience ... Continue reading this article…

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Move Where Cost of Living Is Low

by Flexo

When living on a budget, there are circumstances where it might make sense to move to a location that makes living more affordable. Living in Manhattan, for example, can be a struggle for anyone earning under six figures of income each year. It’s possible, of course, but other areas of the country offer better housing ... Continue reading this article…

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