Getting the Title to Your Car When You Have an Unsecured Loan

It’s a brave new world of auto loans out there with many customer-friendly features that traditional banks lack. Some of the new student loan companies for example will pause your payments if you’re out of work. How nice is that?

So when I was researching loans for a used car we wanted to buy, I looked at all my options. The Simple Dollar’s review of auto loans was especially helpful. We ended up with a loan from LightStream (aka SunTrust) because they gave us a great rate and would allow us to buy from a private seller which saved us a few thousand dollars.

Oddly enough we didn’t realize until after we registered the car that the bank gave us an unsecured loan. Normally a car loan is secured by the car, so if you don’t pay the loan the bank takes back (repossess) the car. But because our credit history and salary history is very good, they gave us an unsecured loan. Why? I don’t know, maybe it’s simpler and less expensive for them.

What this also means is they don’t have a lien on the title. And when we registered the car at our local New Jersey motor vehicles office they didn’t believe this because 99.99% of car loans are secured. The solution? We had to get a notarized letter from the bank to prove it the loan was unsecured and there was no lien on the title. Four DMV trips later we have the title!

Drugs I Like

I like how this School of Life video reframes what a drug is and encourages us to embrace the drugs that make our life better.

And that got me thinking about which drugs I enjoy. When I was younger I liked some which for several reasons we won’t mention. My needs are tamer now, I can think of

  1. Hot sauce, particularly sriracha and Tabasco.
  2. The sound of an intensely distorted electric guitar.
  3. Tickling my kids.
  4. My wife’s kisses.
  5. The light and sounds and smells of the Adirondacks and the beach.
  6. Moisturizer.
  7. A great pair of jeans.
  8. The sleepy, relaxed feeling from staying up late.
  9. Coming in from the bitter cold to a warm home, a glass of bourbon by the fireplace, and my cold face tingling as it warms.

Switching to Consumer Cellular with an iPhone 4s is GO; Bill Cut in Half

In my continued quest to simplify my life and reduce expenses, I discovered the MVNOs like Ting and Consumer Cellular that lease infrastructure from the big carriers have come of age. They have straightforward pricing plans that are a fraction of the cost, better designed websites, and better customer service as reported by Consumer Reports.

Although I like Ting better as a company, our GSM-network iPhone 4s’ would have slowed down on their network. By going with Consumer Cellular I stay on the AT&T network and cut my bill in half ($45 vs $90) for two phones. That’s even $10 cheaper than Ting.

The process is easy. Order online, swap in the free SIM card they send, and give them a call to activate service. There was a bit of fidgeting to get voice mail re-setup etc. but now it’s working just as it did before, but cheaper.

And here, in a single screen, is what makes them different. I hear usage alerts are available on AT&T. I’ve read articles about them. I’ve seen links to that effect on their customer website. But I (a software designer) was never able to set them up. But here’s what they look like on Consumer Cellular:

Screen Shot 2016-02-15 at 10.42.53 AM

Not only is the design clear as day, they default the alerts to ALL ON. They’d rather you be in-the-know and have plenty of notice before you go over your plan so you can decide to pay-per or change your plan. Love that.

By contrast, the number AT&T displayed on their website to cancel their account was only for new accounts. And when I tried to use the online chat instead I get this:

Screen Shot 2016-02-15 at 11.13.21 AM

And that number is actually only for reseller agents. I’d tell you how it all turned out but I’m still on hold with them.

Yes, You Can Upgrade The iPhone 4s to iOS9

OK, there’s not much info on the web about this so I can confirm that yes, you can run iOS9 (9.2.1 in my case) well on an iPhone 4S. It’s not slow, it’s not weird. That wasn’t always the case with old iPhones and new OSes. For me it’s the same speed, and some of the ‘new’ features are quite nice.

I was an iOS7 holdout for a while, because it worked and I had no reason to upgrade. Then my phone began spontaneously rebooting, and taking a long time to do so. I thought maybe the battery was fried, but Apple’s online wizard says to do a full restore. I was inspired by Rob Rhinehart’s How I Simplified My Phone to rethink how I use my phone. First off, I hold onto my phones until the hardware fails for minimalist and environmental reasons, so that helps me stay simple.

Software-wise, I thought it would be good to wipe the phone, start fresh, and only install stuff I need and stop falling into the abyss of the phone (love that phrase) with social network stuff, games, news, etc.

How? Follow the official advice: backup phone (to iCloud), then do full restore while plugged into a computer using iTunes. Only my music got screwed up, but I think I can just re-sync to fix that.

I Refinanced My Auto Loan

Last year we refinanced our home mortgage and saved a bunch of money, but at the time it didn’t occur to me to refinance my auto loan.

In preparation for replacing our second car I was reading The Biggest Lies Car Manufacturers and Dealerships Tell to Sell You a Car and I recognized one: You Don’t Have to Finance Through the Dealership. With our first car that’s exactly what I did, not realizing I had the option to shop around. So as preparation for finding a new loan, I decided to refinance the loan we had and in the process find out how it works and who has the best rates.

My current loan is with TD Auto Finance at 3.99%. Not horrible, but I’ll save a bunch if I can get down at least .75% on a 48 month loan. Here’s what I did:

  1. Contacted TD via secure website message to see if they would refinance me. They responded, “Unfortunately, as an indirect lender, TD Auto Finance is unable to offer a refinance option at this time.”
  2. Asked the local bank where we scored an awesome home mortgage rate, but they don’t offer auto loans.
  3. Tried LendingTree and received four “quotes” — two lenders that wouldn’t give me a rate unless I called them, one that gave me a range of rates, and one (CapitalOne) that gave me an actual rate of 2.99%. For the amount of personal information I forked over, the results were disappointing. Still, I was happy to get one rate in my green zone.
  4. Talked to Chase where we have our checking account. I don’t have any great love for Chase, but operationally they work, there’s a lot of branches near me, and there’s a convenience to both myself and them of paying the loan out of the checking account. I walked into the branch hoping for a better, high-touch service, but their rate using the quick calculator wasn’t great: 3.64%. They offered to submit a loan application to see if their actuaries might do better, so we did. The next day they offered me 3.09%. I asked if they could beat Capital One’s rate. They asked for some more information about the car and then offered me 2.84%. I accepted, and stopped by the branch to sign the documents in about 30 minutes.

The upshot is now we’re saving $60/month on the loan. Yay! I’m paying $85 in fees to the state for transferring the title, but I’ll recoup that in less than two months.

Balancing My Budget with My Desire

In my work on Nickel I want to avoid giving the same old tired advice that a lot of financial advisors give — manage your money well, then go out and life your life with whatever money is left. That’s not how most of us live.

For example, my family is planning on going on vacation this year. Does that mean we have excess cash because every other area of our financial life is tied up with a neat bow? Definitely not. But after working all year we need that time off, in our case to play on the beach, go swimming, and just enjoy being a family.

I was thinking of this because we’re about to replace one of our cars that is coming off lease. It would primary act as my wife’s way of getting to work, so she’s taken the lead on testing driving and figuring out what she wants. She narrowed it down to a few options:

  1. Buy the car we have if the loan payment is within our budget
  2. Buy a new car within our budget
  3. Buy a used car within our budget

We’re lucky to be in a golden age of automobiles where there are plenty of cars, used and new, that are attractive, affordable, and reliable. But many options can make it complicated. I love car research; my wife does not.

But “The Budget” is a constant factor there. And so my thought is we can just make that a constraint. And as I know from my design work, constraints actually make it easier to get things done because you can focus your creativity. In this case, we can focus on our desire, on what makes us really happy. So before getting lost in details and financial options I find it helpful to just set a simple financial constraint and then focus on fun.

So I proposed another approach to my wife:

How about you pick the model that will make you the happiest and then we’ll find one that fits our budget?

She replied,

Good call :)

Raise the Bar

Perhaps the single most useful thing a manager of a design/development team can do is to raise the bar of quality. By extension, I think this also holds true for clients of design agencies.

By ‘raise the bar’ I don’t simply mean saying, ‘This isn’t good enough’ or ‘work harder’, or this…

Raising the bar sounds simple but it’s not. To do it properly, the manager/client must first understand what is possible given their budget and timeline and resources. Once you know this, you can see when the output is short on quality and you can do something about it.

Second, you need to have a sense of what is currently keeping people from falling short. Is it a personality conflict? Too many meetings? Not enough coordination? Rushing into execution without generating enough good ideas?

Third, you have to have the guts to deliver the message in a constructive way. The Steve Jobs yell-at-people method worked for Steve Jobs, but unless you work at Apple it may not work for you. In my experience good people want to do well. They want to feel good about their work and themselves. They want awesome samples in their portfolio. So appeal to their work ethic, paint them a picture of how awesome the future is going to be when things are different, then set the bar of what you expect.

In sum:

  1. Understand what is possible in your situation
  2. Figure out where the obstacles are and remove them
  3. Constructively set the bar higher for the team by inspiring them

Docker and Containers Summarized

Just as container ships can carry more cargo because they use a standard form factor for storing the cargo, software containers can run more apps on each server by using a standard way to share the operating system without all the wasted overhead of virtual machines.

How?

  1. Containers bundle together all the pieces you need to run the app into one package.
  2. Containers make it easy to deploy apps to local servers and the cloud.
  3. Docker makes it easy to create containers.

Also check out Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ What is Docker and why is it so darn popular?.

Channeling my inner Edna Mode

Whenever I feel downtrodden and powerless I channel my inner Edna Mode and imagine it’s me, not Elastic Girl, she’s whacking over the head…

Confront the problem!

Fight!

Win!

Microreview of Financial Engines

Kevin Mercadante has a great review of Financial Engines on the Investor Junkie site. Here’s the key points I took away:

Founded in 1996, Financial Engines is a retirement plan advisory service for employees of participating employer retirement plans (which many online advisors work outside of).

They provide management services and advice so that either they can manage your plan, or you can do it yourself but armed with their information and input.

The service is made available through your employer plan, which is to say that it’s offered as an additional benefit — or in this case, a benefit within a benefit.

A very few employers make the service available to their staffs free of charge, but the range is between 0.20% and 0.60% of the value of your retirement portfolio, with the average being “just below 0.40%”. Based on the average, the cost on a $100,000 401(k) plan would be just below $400 per year. This is the fee you will pay to Financial Engines while using their service. It does not include administrative fees paid to your account administrator, or transactions costs to trade and maintain securities and funds. As far as account minimums, there are none.

Services:

Analyze your retirement plan saving options

Consider expense ratios, sales loads, asset turnover, transaction costs, management style of individual fund investments, among other services

Provide you with a Progress Report showing your account balance, the potential value of your account when you retire, and the adjustments they’ve made to reflect your situation and market conditions

As you approach retirement, you get detailed Retirement Checkups with expert advisor representatives who can help you stay on track

Their Social Security Planner is a tool that can show you how to maximize your income from that source.

Published
Categorized as Economics

Key Points from an Interview with Dr. Harry Moskowitz

aka the father of modern portfolio theory

“Perhaps the most important job of a financial advisor is to get their clients in the right place on the efficient frontier in their portfolios,” he told me. “But their No. 2 job, a very close second, is to create portfolios that their clients are comfortable with. Advisors can create the best portfolios in the world, but they won’t really matter if the clients don’t stay in them.”

In other words, MPT and behavioral economics have to work together. And Moskowitz figured that out early…

“There was a big difference in my views about how and why to use mean variance analysis (that’s academic-speak for MPT) in my 1952 paper and in my ’59 paper. In the ’52 paper the only portfolio constraints I was concerned about were to avoid negative returns. But by 1959, I was concerned about [how investors would react to] the portfolio construction: For the comfort of the clients, we put constraints on ‘risky sounding stuff,’ such as junk bonds, etc. We knew that might dampen returns, but it was better than if they chicken out in a down market.”

From an interview with Bob Clark.

Published
Categorized as Economics

Key Points from “Investor Behavior: The Psychology of Financial Planning and Investing”

“Policy-Based Financial Planning: Decision Rules for a Changing World” by Dave Yeske, managing director, and Elisa Buie, CEO of Yeske Buie. Based on their 2011 paper, Yeske and Buie provided a six-step process for creating effective financial planning policies for each client:

  1. Engage in the discovery process in which the financial planner learns about the client’s personal history, values, beliefs, goals and resources.
  2. Identify planning areas and best practices required by this client.
  3. Combine goals with best practices to create a proposed policy.
  4. Test the policy: Is this a good policy?
  5. Test-drive the policy with the client and listen to their feedback.
  6. Conduct periodic reviews and updates checking for changing circumstances.

“Advising the Behavioral Investor: Lessons from the Real World” by Gregg Fisher, founder of Gerstein Fisher. “While he cited common investor mistakes such as failing to rebalance, chasing yield and underestimating the impact of inflation, he also explored the less talked about failure to consider a client’s income stream as an asset; one that requires at least as much—if not more—offsetting diversification than their other holdings.”

“His unconventional approach is also evident in the considerable body of research he cited debunking the advantage of dollar-cost averaging versus lump-sum investments. Fisher suggested that “sub-optimal” investment strategies can also be the best investment strategies. “Instead of debating [whether MPT or behavioral finance strategies are better], an investment advisor should borrow from both. The result will be an investment portfolio and strategy that may be suboptimal from an MPT standpoint, but may be the right approach for the investors. In other words, sometimes ‘the right portfolio’ isn’t the right portfolio.”

He used an example that shows how “based on information about a client, as well as experience with other clients in similar situations, an advisor might conclude that this client would panic and sell equities at a major loss at the market bottom. As a financial advisor, the best case may be to recommend that this investor pay off their mortgage and student loans before investing in risky assets. Again, no financial optimizer would recommend this strategy.”

“Post-Crisis Investor Behavior: Experience Matters,” by Joseph Rizzi, president of Macro Strategies LLC. “The financial crisis of 2008-2009 with its 50% drop in stock market value is seared into the collective investor memory—especially generation Y investors,” he wrote. “[Younger] investors are more focused on reacting to macro developments than asset fundamentals. The shift from ‘return on capital’ to ‘return of capital’ underlies the move away from equities into perceived lower risk fixed income by certain investor groups.”

See also this interview with Harry Markowitz

* I haven’t read this book yet. I’m summarizing this book review. I do this so when I want to know more about this topic and find this post I know which book I should go to for more.

Published
Categorized as Economics

Why I’d Love to See Graded Interaction Design Problems

One reason I love bouldering is that it’s game-like. No matter how much experience a climber has, we’re all at a certain level with certain climbs (they’re actually called “problems”) that currently challenge us. It’s like playing a well-crafted video game: the levels you’ve finished are easy, the levels ahead of you are frustratingly hard, but the level you’re currently on is a good match of difficulty for your skill level; and you can feel the flow.

8wng7

I recently started learning a new programming language and I find it similarly game-like. Every new technique is a new challenge. Every new algorithm is a new challenge. The easy stuff is boring, the crazy theoretically stuff is frustrating, but the next chapter in my book is just right.

And like video games, in bouldering these problems are codified. So I can say, “I can do all the V0’s in this gym, and I’m working on the V1’s” and other climbers know something about my abilities.* Codified problems exist elsewhere too. Here’s some to help people improve their skills playing Go.

I’d love to see graded problems for interaction design. They would make it fun to solve problems, alone or socially, and communicate to each other our level of ability. “But Victor,” you might say, “interaction design problems don’t have a defined solution like a boulder.” Actually the boulders don’t either. People can solve the same problem different ways, but there are rules everyone must follow that give the game useful constraints. As long as you follow the rules and get to the top you’ve solved the problem. Some climbers are more elegant than others, and the same would be true in interaction design.

* The Moonboard is like graded problem-meets-Github, a single wall with over 800 bouldering problems contributed by various route setters.

Published
Categorized as Teaching

Report: Financial planning = happiness

Pulling out some highlights of the Household Financial Planning Survey:

  • people who plan feel more confident about their financial decision‐making, manage to save more money, and feel better about their progress
  • only about a third (31%) of decision‐makers today report having ever put together a comprehensive financial plan. And just 35 percent of decision‐makers report having a plan in place to save for emergencies
  • Fed: devastating effects of financial crisis on the middle class: The median family… had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010 compared with $126,400 in 2007… wiping out nearly two decades of economic gains.
  • the crash of housing prices has been the single biggest factor that has reduced people’s wealth
  • only a third (34%) believes they will be able to retire [at 65, down from 50% fifteen years ago]. More than a quarter (27%) think they will not be able to retire before age 70, if ever.
  • 55% say “it’s hard for me to know who to trust for financial advice.”; 52% say “to me investing seems complicated.”; 55% say “I’m worried about losing my money if I invest it,” a significant increase from 1997 (45%)
  • half of household decision‐makers believe they “just don’t earn enough money to save regularly.”
  • American families today are less likely to be saving for their financial goals and taking steps to keep their family financially prepared.
  • The only area where families are more prone to save is toward a major purchase, like a new car, vacation, or home improvement project.
  • two‐thirds (65%) of decision‐makers say they follow a plan for at least one of their savings goals.
  • Forthoseathigherincomelevels,plannersputmoreoftheir income into savings than non‐planners and report having built greater wealth.
  • Among those in the $25,000‐$49,999 income category, 46 percent of those with a plan say they usually pay their credit card bill in full each month, compared with 26 percent of non‐planners.