Posts for August 2007→

(This is the 4^th post of the 8-part series An investing-friendly car buying guide.)

You want to buy a used car (why? because of this and this), and have a budget of $10,000. Which one car, among the several hundreds of different types out there, should you choose? For the sake of this discussion, we narrow the field down to the 4-door sedan cars in mid-sized segments. (Everything said here holds for most other types of cars as well.)
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(This is the 3^rd post of the 8-part series An investing-friendly car buying guide.)

So you are going to buy a used car. Great! You have made a smart decision. The next step is to pick a budget – how much you want to pay for your car. This step is important, because your choice will decide how old a car you are going to get. From the depreciation graph, tweaking the budget by a couple of thousand dollars can mean getting a car that is few years newer or older.
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(This is the 2^nd post of the 8-part series An investing-friendly car buying guide.)

We have seen in the last post how depreciation eats away at the asset value of a car. Still, there are surely other benefits of owning a new car? Let us start with the obvious one.
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(This is the first post of the 8-part series An investing-friendly car buying guide.)

Let us look into car depreciation more closely. Depreciation, as we all know, means gradual decline of the value of your car as time passes, due mostly to wear and tear. New car dealers do not want to talk about it, and new car buyers certainly do not want to think about it. On the other hand, those of you who want to buy a used car can get good benefit out of it.
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There is an important difference between the two biggest single expenses in your life (if you live in America): buying a car, and making down-payment for a house. While a house appreciates in value (price goes up with time, usually outpacing inflation), the value of a new car starts depreciating the moment it leaves the dealership lot. Thus, paying 20% down for a house (the median house price was $232,000 last year) is a sound investment, whereas forking out $20,000 for a family car is not necessarily so.
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US stock market has just closed for the day with all major indexes again taking big dives: Dow Index is down by 387 points (a single-day 2.9% drop, 2^nd worst of this year), S&P 500 down 44 points (3% drop), and NASDAQ down 57 points (2.2%). In the rest of the world, London’s FTSE Index was down 1.9%, Tokyo’s Nikkei up 0.8%, India’s SENSEX down 1.4%, and Australia’s ASX up 1.1%. These are the times when many investors begin to ask if they should jack up their stock holding in foreign markets. After all, the domestic and foreign markets rarely move in lockstep, and having a chunk of my asset allocated to foreign stocks should minimize any impact of a major domestic slump.
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Well, there is the handy “Rule of 72″, which says the number of years it takes for the money to double at x% yearly (compounded) rate is roughly 72 divided by x. For example, if you have $10,000 in a money market fund earning a sedate 5%, it will grow to $20,000 in about 14 (=72/5) years. By contrast, if the same $10,000 is invested fully in a stock fund that appreciates at a healthy 10% (not a fairytale), doubling your kitty should take only 7 years.
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If we look at the data for a broad stock market index, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or S&P 500 Index, three things jump out of the page. The first one is good news – there is a strong upward trend in market movement over the entire recorded history. This means that holding onto a diversified portfolio should fetch significant gain over long term – a popular retirement strategy for many who still have several years left before hanging up their boots.
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Now that the stock market has gotten into another volatile phase – swinging up and down in sync with jittery investor sentiment – the dooms-day forecasters and soothsayers alike have started coming out of the woodwork. There are as many advisers warning us “sell-off time is NOW”, as others saying “the bull market is still on, even though bull run may be over”.

This is also the time when a few market timers catch their lucky break. If stock prices fluctuate without any apparent regularity, by pure chance anyone can succeed once in a while in offloading just before a crash. But market almost always recovers as rapidly as it falls. Kiplinger recently noted that a timer has to be lucky not once, but twice – to get out at a high, and also to get in at the next low. Even that kind of luck is occasionally possible, but consistent market timing would be a rare feat indeed!

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