Life insurance is one of the pillars of personal finance, deserving of consideration by every household. I’d even go so far as to say it’s vital for most. Yet, despite its nearly universal applicability, there remains a great deal of confusion, and even skepticism, regarding life insurance.
Perhaps this is due to life insurance’s complexity, the posture of those who sell it or merely our preference for avoiding the topic of our own demise. But armed with the proper information, you can simplify the decision-making process and arrive at the right choice for you and your family.
To help, here are 10 things you absolutely need to know about life insurance:
Permanent life insurance includes this same probability-of-death calculus, but also includes a savings mechanism. This mechanism, which is often referred to as “cash value,” is designed to help the policy exist into perpetuity. Whole life—the original—has an investment component much like bonds or CDs (but backed by the insurance company). Variable life offers investment options more like mutual funds. Universal life was designed as a less expensive permanent life insurance alternative with added flexibility, but increased interest rate risk for the owner. Although they tend to be more complex and expensive, there are financial dilemmas—often related to business planning and/or high-net-worth estate planning—for which permanent life insurance may be the only solution. There are a few select instances where permanent policies are engineered to maximize the tax-privileged growth of cash value. They are, however, only appropriate for a small number of people and still dependent on numerous other factors to work the way they’re intended.
Therefore, consider this simple but effective strategy for determining how much life insurance your household needs. Multiply a wage earner’s income by 15 and purchase a policy with an equivalent death benefit for a term that extends until the person insured would presumably retire. Why 15? Because it works. But it works because it results in a number that should re-create 75% of a wage earner’s income if the death benefit was conservatively invested to earn 5% (hopefully plus a bit more for inflation) annually. Here’s an example:
I suspect we don’t love talking about life insurance because we don’t like talking about death. No shocker there. But open and honest discussions about planning for an unexpected death can be surprisingly life-giving. And even if you don’t buy that, the chances are good that purchasing life insurance is still an important part of your long-term and comprehensive financial plan.
This commentary originally appeared January 5 on Forbes.com
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The opinions expressed by featured authors are their own and may not accurately reflect those of the BAM ALLIANCE. This article is for general information only and is not intended to serve as specific financial, accounting or tax advice.
© 2016, The BAM ALLIANCE
Eleven years ago, I needed a new bike. At the time, I rode a lot. I was in a big group of relatively competitive riders, and we’d often put hundreds of miles on our bikes each week. I agonized over what bike to buy, but I kept coming back to one made by a company called Moots, a Colorado company that builds titanium road and mountain bikes by hand.
The father of a good friend of mine had a Moots bike when I was growing up, and it made me salivate. The problem was, they were really expensive. Like, “far more money than I ever considered spending on a bike” expensive. Maybe $5,000 or so back then.
But the more I looked into it, the more I was convinced I had to have this bike. After putting myself through the painful process of shopping around, comparing prices and looking at models that I didn’t really want, I pulled the trigger.
Following weeks of buyer’s remorse that more closely resembled terror, I came to realize something that is going to sound crazy. Buying this incredibly expensive bike was one of the best financial decisions I’ve ever made. I understand that writing $5,000 and the words “bike” and “smart financial decision” all in the same sentence sounds absurd, but it’s not.
This was a fantastic, rational, smart financial decision. And I know that goes against everything you’ve heard from every personal finance adviser out there. They’re always telling you how to save money, how to reduce expenses, how to buy cheaper. Right? Cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. What I’m saying is, that’s a shortsighted message that we need to change. Here are the reasons.
So, I hereby give you permission to consider buying the things you really love — things that may be two, three or perhaps even four times more expensive than a similar product. I am asking you to consider the possibility that buying stuff you love, regardless of price, may be the best decision you can make.
Consider that if you love it and you’ll use it, you’ll save not only money but retain the cognitive and emotional energy you would have used to replace the thing once a year. You’ve heard of “buy nice, or buy twice,” right? Well this is a derivative of that idea. But don’t just buy nice, buy what you love. If you don’t, you’ll end up hating, and replacing, until you do.
This commentary originally appeared December 21 on NYTimes.com
By clicking on any of the links above, you acknowledge that they are solely for your convenience, and do not necessarily imply any affiliations, sponsorships, endorsements or representations whatsoever by us regarding third-party Web sites. We are not responsible for the content, availability or privacy policies of these sites, and shall not be responsible or liable for any information, opinions, advice, products or services available on or through them.
The opinions expressed by featured authors are their own and may not accurately reflect those of the BAM ALLIANCE. This article is for general information only and is not intended to serve as specific financial, accounting or tax advice.
© 2016, The BAM ALLIANCE
We just completed the second consecutive year where U.S. large-cap stocks outperformed most other asset classes, including U.S. small stocks, U.S. value stocks and international stocks. This development has led some investors to wonder whether diversification still works. We believe diversification should remain an essential part of a well-devised, long-term investment plan, and that investors should resist the temptation to re-allocate their portfolios toward strategies with high recent performance. Research shows that basing a current investment strategy on past performance typically leads to poor future performance because of the difficulty of successfully timing markets.
A REVIEW OF 2015
Figure 1 reports the 2015 performance of various equity asset classes.
Figure 1: Asset Class Returns in 2015
As Figure 1 shows, U.S. large-cap stocks (using the S&P 500 as a proxy) had substantially higher returns in 2015 than most other equity asset classes. This performance is at odds with longer-term historical returns data, which shows that both small-cap stocks and value stocks tend to earn higher returns than large-cap stocks. We continue to believe that portfolio tilts toward small-cap and value stocks are the most reliable way to enhance expected return. Such tilts, however, can go through periods of underperformance, in the same way that stocks can underperform bonds for extended periods of time. This underperformance of small-cap and value stocks is what investors experienced over 2014 and 2015.
Over the very long term, U.S. and international stocks have tended to have similar returns, although performance can diverge significantly over other periods of time. Figure 2 on the following page makes this point by looking at the returns of U.S. and international stocks over each decade starting in the 1970s as well as the period of 2010–2014.
Figure 2: U.S. vs. International Stock Annual Compound Returns (1970–2014)
In each decade, U.S. stocks have significantly outperformed international stocks or vice versa. Thinking more deeply about the data, many investors were clamoring for international stocks in the ’90s after their superior performance of the ’80s, only to see U.S. stocks substantially outperform in the ’90s. We now see some investors tempted to increase their allocation to U.S. stocks after a period of strong performance. But will the outcome be better than moving more heavily into international stocks after the ’80s? We don’t think so and would instead argue that the best approach is to maintain a long-term, substantial allocation to both U.S. and international stocks since no one knows which will outperform the other over the long term. Concentrating in only one country is not a prudent approach to portfolio diversification.
PERSPECTIVE ON MARKET TIMING
Market-timing decisions can take a number of forms, whether across stocks and bonds or across other asset classes like small-cap stocks versus large-cap stocks. The temptation is to believe that seemingly long periods of past performance tell us something about future performance. If U.S. has outperformed international for the past 10 years, shouldn’t we increase the allocation to U.S.? If value stocks have underperformed growth stocks for five years, shouldn’t we reduce the allocation to value? These are temptations investors face when looking over past periods, and there will no doubt be different temptations in future periods. What we know, however, is that it is very difficult for either individual investors or professional investors to successfully execute marketing-timing strategies precisely because past returns data tells us very little about the future.
“Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people in trouble investing.”
“Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.”
- Warren Buffett
To further Buffett’s points, we want to illustrate the historical ineffectiveness of one particular type of market-timing strategy based upon past performance. A common strategy is to look back over three- or five-year performance periods and re-allocate assets into strategies that have performed well over those windows of time. This behavior is referred to as “returns chasing” and, unfortunately, is still a common method investors use to make portfolio decisions.
Using returns data covering the period of 1928–2014, we can illustrate the performance of this type of strategy implemented across the asset classes of U.S. large-cap growth, U.S. large-cap value, U.S. small-cap growth and U.S. small-cap value stocks. Our hypothetical market timer’s strategy is to look back over the past three years of returns across the four asset classes and re-allocate all assets to the one asset class with the highest return over that period of time. Our market timer then repeats this process every three years. We then compare the returns of this strategy to the returns of simply splitting the allocation equally across the four asset classes. Figure 3 reports the results.
Figure 3: Market Timing v. Buy, Hold and Rebalance (1931–2014)
We see that the timing strategy earned markedly lower returns than the more straightforward approach of allocating assets equally across the four asset classes. Further, this simple example ignores the impact of taxes, which would further reduce the returns of the timing strategy relative to the equal-weight strategy.
SUMMARY
Although many investors have gone through a recent period of underperformance relative to market benchmarks like the S&P 500, we believe that broad diversification remains a crucial component of a well-thought-out investment plan. The long-run evidence shows that such periods will indeed happen, but investors are best served to avoid the urge to engage in returns-chasing behavior. Strategies that chase high recent performance tend to reduce — not increase — long-term performance.
Copyright © 2016, The BAM ALLIANCE. This material and any opinions contained are derived from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy and the opinions based thereon are not guaranteed. The content of this publication is for general information only and is not intended to serve as specific financial, accounting or tax advice. To be distributed only by a Registered Investment Advisor firm. Information regarding references to third-party sites: Referenced third-party sites are not under our control, and we are not responsible for the contents of any linked site or any link contained in a linked site, or any changes or updates to such sites. Any link provided to you is only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply our endorsement of the site.