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Identity Theft: Three ways to fight it

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A few years ago, SDXB and I learned separately that each of our credit reports said we had lived at an address neither of us had ever heard of, in Tempe, Arizona. Although neither of us was harmed financially, it indicated a type of identity theft known as “application fraud” or “true name fraud.”

It took about a year to get the fake address off my credit records. Once it was expunged, I pretty much forgot about it…until a couple of weeks ago. That was when Costco announced it didn’t have my current address and my membership renewal was overdue. When I went to customer service to pay up, the CSR happened to show me her computer monitor, and what should I discover but that my home address was listed as SDXB’s former address and my business address is now at that same fake address in Tempe!

The appearance of an unfamiliar address on your credit report is one of many possible signs of identity theft. Other warning signs are missing bills, unexplained charges to your accounts, the existence of accounts you didn’t open, denial of credit for no apparent reason, and dunning calls from bill collectors for items you didn’t purchase.

Undoing a mess some crook has made is very difficult. It can take years to persuade creditors and credit reporting agencies that you’ve been a victim of identity theft, and the crime can haunt you for a long time. Thieves have so many ways to steal your private information, many of which you have no control over, that you really can’t prevent it. But you can take a few steps to reduce your risk. I think of them in terms of three strategies:

1. Monitor

You’re entitled to free annual credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. Rather than having to go through the hassle of contacting each of these agencies separately, it’s now possible to order credit reports through a single source, annualcreditreport.com. Instead of ordering all three reports at once, take advantage of the federal law by revisiting annualcreditreport.com once every four months, so that you can spread out reports from the three agencies over the course of a year. This will allow you to monitor your credit reports steadily. Watch for any unexplained activity or accounts you don’t recognize.

Also, before you pay a credit card bill, remember to review the statement carefully. Check financial accounts and billing statements each month, looking for charges you didn’t make.

2. Prevent

Limit the number of credit cards you carry around. Keep no more than one or two cards in your wallet.

Pay in cash at restaurants and other establishments where you can’t watch what an employee does with your card after you present it for payment. This eliminates the use of a skimmer, a handheld device thieves use to swipe cards for later download into their own computers.

Don’t use debit cards. If you must, memorize your PIN; don’t carry a note with your PIN in your wallet or purse. Avoid using your birthdate, numbers of your address, sequential numbers, or four digits of your Social Security number as PINs. Never use a debit card for online shopping.

Photocopy your credit and debit cards, front and back, and keep the photocopies in a safe place. This makes it easy to contact issuers if cards are stolen.

Don’t allow anyone to write your credit card number on a check.

Always take credit card receipts with you. Carry them in your wallet or purse, and shred them before discarding.

Carry outgoing snail mail to a USPS post box or postal station. Don’t leave it in your mailbox to be picked up by the postal carrier. To protect financial information sent to you through the mails, install a locking mailbox.

Avoid giving out your Social Security number. Don’t carry a Social Security card or Medicare card on your person. You (or your parents) can photocopy a Medicare card, trim it down to wallet size, and cut out the last four digits of the SSN that appears on it. Take the original the first time you see a doctor; otherwise, store it in a safe place at home.

Opt out of marketing lists for the three credit bureaus, limiting the number of free credit offers sent to you in the mail. When you do get such offers, always shred them or scissor them into tiny pieces before throwing them in the trash. Also register your telephone number with the National Do Not Call List, to further reduce offers from hustlers.

And of course, never respond to phishing e-mails. Remember, a legitimate bank or creditor will not ask you for your account number or Social Security number.

3. Fight back

At the first sign of identity fraud, notifiy all three credit bureaus and place a fraud alert on your account. This is good for 90 days. This step entitles you to a free credit report; get one from each agency and review all three reports carefully.

Report the theft or fraudulent activity to the police in writing, using an identity theft report.

Once you have filed an identity theft report with law enforcement agencies, use that and your evidence of identity theft to extend the credit bureaus’ fraud alert for seven years.

Report the crime to the Federal Trade Commission, using the police report number you got when you filed a police report.

Learn what your rights as an identity theft victim are.

If an identity thief has opened new accounts in your name, contact these creditors immediately. Federal law allows you to block businesses from reporting fraudulent activity to credit reporting agencies; the sample dispute letter available here will come in handy for that purpose.

If the thief has used existing accounts that belong to you, report the fraudulent activity to the creditors. Arrange to close the accounts and have new accounts with new account numbers issused to you.

So…what am I going to do about the Costco situation?

Well, we have a fair idea where this came from: only one person could connect SDXB and me in quite that way (the phony entry showed my legal first name, which I don’t use socially; few people who knew the two of us as a couple know my real name). At the time the spurious address popped up in our credit reports, this person was engaged in an extramarital affair. We figured she and the boyfriend had forged driver’s licenses in our names so they could rent themselves a love nest.

More recently, the same someone, who has been in deep financial trouble for quite some time, likely ran out of cash about the time her Costco membership lapsed. So she dug out the fake ID, presented herself as me, and said she’d lost her card. If she went in and asked for a new card in my name, she might have been asked for an address. SDXB’s old street address was at the same number as my new street address; the only difference is that one house is on Erewhon Road and the other is on Erewhon Place. So if she gave his old address as “hers”/mine, it would be credible.

I guess what I will do is cancel my Costco membership. Then we’ll have M’hijito buy a new membership in his name, with me on his account as a secondary card holder. This will be a hassle, because they’ll have to issue a new Costco American Express card with a new account number.

But since she hasn’t done anything (so far) that’s cost me any money or damaged my credit rating, maybe I’ll just let it ride and keep a close eye on the credit reports. Who cares if she gets into Costco for free?

Reno loan GONE!

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Well, after two days, almost two hours of dorking around at the credit union, and a quiet stress attack, finally I managed to get someone to take my $21,000. 

At one point I thought maybe I should take it all out of the bank in dollar bills and sprinkle it around the floor of the credit union’s lobby. Let the janitor find a way to use it.

Lenders do not want you to pay off a loan. No. Bad. D-o-o-o-o-n’t take our interest payments away!

Just before the flu struck, Shibu (doughty manager of the credit union branch on the Tempe campus) obtained the precise amount that would be owing as of last Tuesday and e-mailed clear, understandable, easy(-sounding…) instructions for how to pay off the Renovation Loan, which is actually a second mortgage on my house. He said any teller should be able to perform the transaction. 

Then I got sick, in the middle of a vacation. So instead of schlepping to the main campus amid (chaotic!) commencement preparations, I decided to run over to the West campus, which also hosts one of the credit union’s branches. Since I had several other errands to run on the West side, this would work out OK.

So it seemed. 

Teller took one look at Shibu’s instructions and said, “This is something our  manager will have to do. I don’t know how to do it.”

Manager was in with someone else. She would, the teller thought, surely be free soon.

A half-hour later, I was still cooling my heels. The work I needed to do for a client was still waiting for me. The syllabi I’d promised to send to the chair of the department who proposes to hire me to teach three sections next fall were still waiting, yet to materialize even in draft form. The groceries remained to be purchased. The signature form for the locksmith was still to be delivered. My stomach was achingly empty. So, annoyed, I left.

The main campus’s branch is dead empty, the whole place having lapsed into a state of exhausted vacancy after last night’s 70,000-guest Presidential commencement bash. This, I imagine, should be easy.

I hand over Shibu’s written instructions to the teller. Fortunately, he’s in the offing.

She takes about 20 seconds to reach full flummoxhood. He has to come over and take her through the process, step by step. But even then, they make a couple of errors and have to back out and start over. Then they get mysterious error messages and have to figure a way around those. 

This procedure took almost 45 minutes! Then it took another ten or fifteen minutes to make Shibu understand that I wanted the monthly automatic payment that had been going from checking to the loan now to go from checking to money-market savings. Think that finally got settled. I hope.

Now, you know, being an inveterate cheapskate I experience the act of forking over $21,422 as stressful, even when it’s 21 grand that I saved up precisely so I could fork it over. Just hate letting go of pretty little dollars…you have to prize my fingers loose from them. So 45 minutes of repeated efforts to hand over a chunk of dough felt like 45 minutes of waterboarding. At one point as I’m standing there watching them and trying to remind myself that it’s their problem, not mine, my little heart started to pound, the metallic flavor of adrenalin to flood the tongue, the ears to ring, the room to spin. Damn!

From there I had the pleasure of visiting the gynecologist, whose nurse noted that my blood pressure was a shade high. 

No kidding? 

At any rate, the loan is finally paid off. And good riddance. Shibu said it was accruing interest at about $3.50 a day. If one paid it down at a stately rate over its thirty-year term, one would end up paying out exactly twice the original loan amount. What with the extra $200 a month added to routine savings, plus the net teaching salary, plus what I expect to earn freelancing, by the time I exit GDU’s ivied halls the credit union will be holding about $24,000 in savings, more than replacing the amount I earned last year for the express purpose of the pay-off.

Whew!

Debt-to-Income Ratio: Frugalist begs to differ

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So the Financial Wizard par Excellence is arguing that M’hijito, who earns a salary that is exactly at the median income for bankruptcy purposes, should be able to shoulder a great deal more of the Investment House mortgage than he agreed to. Our agreement was that he would cover one-third of it (having contributed a third of the down payment) and I would carry the other two-thirds. When we sell the chateau sometime in the future at an outrageous profit, we’re to divide our incalculable riches accordingly.

Fact is, he’s carrying more like 40 percent of it.

FW trots out the debt-to-income ratio to support his position:

The total debt-to-income, or back-end ratio, shows how much of your gross income would go toward all of your debt obligations, including mortgage, car loans, child support and alimony, credit card bills, student loans and condominium fees. In general, your total monthly debt obligation should not exceed 36 percent of your gross income. To calculate your debt-to-income ratio, multiply your annual salary by 0.36, then divide by 12 (months). The answer is your maximum allowable debt-to-income ratio.

Hm. Let’s think about that.

My gross income is $62,500. In theory, then, I should be able to tolerate a debt load of $1,875. A person with the state’s median gross income should be able to afford a total debt of $1,301.91.

And…uhm…what does such a debtor eat? Guess he doesn’t have to worry about dieting, eh?

My net monthly income is $3,000—actually, it’s more like $2,864 with the twice-a-month furloughs. The cost of operating my house and paying regularly recurring bills such as long-term care insurance and utilities comes to about $840 a month. In the winter it’s a little less, but one ignores the high summer bills at one’s peril. My house is paid off, so I have to self-escrow the costs of homeowner’s insurance and property tax, which when combined with the car insurance bill average out to around $350 a month. The combined cost of all other expenses—food, household goods, gasoline, car repairs, home repairs, pool chemicals, yard items, veterinary bills, medical and dental copays, and on and on and on—comes to about $1,200. I do charge these things on AMEX by way of collecting a couple hundred dollars in kickbacks once a year, but I pay the charge card bill in full every month.

I live pretty frugally: don’t travel, don’t subscribe to cable or cell services, rarely eat out, don’t buy many clothes (and none that have to be dry-cleaned), wash my own car, clean my own house, grow some of my own food, abstain from expensive hobbies, don’t even go to movies.The only debt I have is the $170 bill for the Renovation Loan (soon to be paid off) and my $800/month share of the house mortgage, for a total of $970. I presently put $400 a month in savings toward survival after the coming layoff. So…

  $840 monthly set expenses
  1200 all other living & unexpected expenses
     170 Reno Loan (second mortgage)
     800 Investment House mortgage
     350 tax & insuranceself-escrow
     400 emergency savings
$3,760

Tha’s funneh. Seems to come to more than I’m bringing home! Cut emergency savings to a more ordinary $200 a month, and we still exceed my net income by $696 a month.

Okay, I admit it: the $800/month is a drawdown from savings. So $3,760 – 200 – 800 = $2,760.

That’s right: a debt of a grandiose $170 a month brings my outgo to within $104 of my income…and that’s without any major bills: no pipes explode, no veterinarian proposes surgery, no dentist cries out for some expensive procedure, and the car’s transmission continues to run flawlessly.

If $1,875 of my income were committed to debt service, I would have a munificent $1,125 left to live on. But it costs $2,760 for me to live rather modestly (some would say “ascetically”) in a small middle-class urban tract house.

Is there any question why most people are up to their schnozzes in revolving debt? If my debt-to-income ratio were maxed, the only way I could possibly get by would be to live on the cuff!

Allow me to propose a different debt-to-income ratio, one that is based on net income, not gross.

Obviously, the amount of debt a person or family can afford is a function of the amount of money the household brings home, not a never-never-figure whose total is effectively meaningless. What matters, when calculating what you can afford, is how much you have in your pocket, not how much you putatively “earn.”

If you hope to live within your means and your net is, say, $3,000 a month, you need to subtract your known living expenses plus a little for emergency savings from your take-home pay. What remains is the amount you can pay toward debt. Let’s say I were not facing unemployment in a few months, so I put aside a more normal $200/month toward the emergency fund: my regular needs would come to $2,410 less the second mortgage payment: $2,240 (i.e., $2,410 -$170). This would leave $590 a month ($3,000-$2,410) available to pay toward debt. That is 19 percent of my net income.

On a “good” salary in my region, I can afford to commit about 20 percent of net to debt payment. Spend much more than that, and presto-changeo! My lenders get rich on the interest I owe now and forever, world without end, amen.

Take-home pay is typically about 60 percent of gross pay. So a person with Arizona’s $43,400 median income brings home about $26,040, or $2,170 a month.

That would make a reasonable debt load right around $435 a month (20% of $2,170). Yes. For your mortgage or rent, your student debt, your revolving credit-card debt, whatever you owe Mom or Uncle Ernie…

By this guideline, M’hijito, who has no other debt, is already contributing $165 a month more than he can afford to our combined real estate venture.

Figured traditionally, the debt-to-income ratio suggests he should be able to afford $1,301 a month, leaving him with a miserly $869 a month to live on!

Here’s what I think: the standard debt-to-income ratio calculation is utterly unrealistic and unfair to consumers. First, a number like 36 percent way too large. Second, figuring the amount of debt a person can carry according to his or her gross income works a complete disconnect from reality! No one lives on gross income. We live on our net income! Because net, not gross, is what we have available to spend, net income is the figure that should be used to calculate a tolerable debt load.

The take-home message: Figure the amount you can pay toward loans of any and all kinds according to your net income, not according to your gross. Obviously, if you want to spend no more than you earn, you need to keep the debt load low enough that it plus your total other spending and saving needs come to no more than your take-home pay.

debt-to-income ratio = (net pay – spending needs – saving needs) ÷ net pay

The decimal fraction you get from this formula is the fraction of your net pay you can afford to spend on debt.

How hard is this?

Well, of course, real hard: who do you know who’s paying $435 a month to keep a roof over his head? And how many own their cars free and clear? Not many, I’ll bet, who don’t have a roommate, a spouse, or a life partner.

Few exercises demonstrate more clearly that good financial health (at least on the household level) entails getting out of debt and staying out of debt. It means pinching pennies as tight as you can, creating more than one income stream to maximize net pay, and doggedly snowflaking down revolving debt first and then finally mortgage debt. Quite a challenge, this “getting real” business.
😮

Counterintuitive Advice: Borrow to the hilt

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Yesterday I called my investment adviser to discuss the possibility of buying a smaller house in a nicer neighborhood. I was operating under the assumption that I would apply all the proceeds from my present paid-off home’s sale to the new house.

He, however, urged me to finance as much of the new purchase as possible—80 percent—and invest the remaining cash in the stock market. The 5 percent drawdown (projected “take” for retirement income) from the increased amount in savings would cover the cost of the mortgage and, when combined with Social Security, would give me enough to live on. And then some, in his opinion.

Leveraging debt, as we know, is something that goes against my bourgeois grain. However, since this is a very smart guy with an MBA, I reckoned I’d better listen up.

So today I ran a bunch of figures, in an attempt to see the practical outcome of borrowing against real estate instead of paying it off. The fly in the proverbial ointment is the $1,000/month payment I’m making toward the house my son and I are purchasing as an investment, which we would like to hold until after the housing market turns around. That could be anywhere from two to ten years.

I assumed my monthly costs of groceries, clothing, gasoline, and the like will not change significantly, since I do not eat out and don’t have to buy special clothing for the office. Gas probably will drop a little, but not much, since the Valley’s sprawl requires everyone to drive from pillar to post just to accomplish ordinary errands. Monthly routine nonnegotiable costs such as tax & insurance, utilities, and the like probably won’t change if I move to the cute little house in Willo, but will drop sharply if I move to Sun City.

So: would I be better off to mortgage my home and add the cash to savings? Here’s what my calculations show:

In the first scenario, my real estate agent gets the seller to come down off his price by $10,000 and I get my full asking price of $325,000, netting a grandiose $274,100 after the Renovation Loan and closing costs are paid.

That’s depressing. Even without the cost of the Investment House, I can’t afford to move to the cute little house in Willo. Moving on…let’s suppose the guy is right, that carrying a mortgage on my house would allow me to leverage debt in such a way that I would have more to live on in retirement. Maybe that strategy would make it possible for me to stay right where I’m living. Suppose I did that right away, while I have a job, since no lender is likely to fork over 240 grand to an old lady on Social Security.

Wow! I profit by a fantastic $1,076. What keeps me in the black is my salary. In theory the positive balance is a bit higher, because I get a small income tax advantage. That notwithstanding, this does not look like it’s worth the effort, or the psychological stress of diving into debt up to my eyeballs.

Once all I have to live on is Social Security plus retirement savings, this scenario puts me deep in the red. Clearly I can’t afford to stay in my house using this strategy after retirement.

So, what if I pay off the Renovation Loan, leaving my house free and clear, and try to stay here after I retire. Can I afford that?

What with the ever-increasing property taxes and skyrocketing utility bills, it doesn’t look good. The only way I can stay here is to sell the Investment House prematurely, taking a loss on that. This will cause my son also to take a financial hit, which I would prefer not to do.

Ohh-kayyyy…. This leaves moving to Sun City as the last option. Costs there are much lower, because taxes are controlled and home and car insurance is much lower. Videlicet:

This represents a significant savings on the cost of living in my present (much preferable) home. So, what happens if I finance a sorta comparable house, which out there will cost around $260,000?

Lovely. I’m still in the red. Either my son has to come up with an extra $542 a month, or we have to sell the Investment House. This is getting depressing: so far, no matter what I do, I can’t afford to retire. Period.

But I can afford to pay for a Sun City house in full. What happens then?

OK! I probably could survive if I move to Sun City, buy a place for much less than I get for my present home, and continue to live frugally. The amount of play in my present budget is $29 a month, and so in this scenario my lifestyle would not change much. Except, of course, I would be enjoying the silence of the mausoleum in a ghetto for old folks.

In any event, this comparison suggests that paying off your debt is better than leveraging debt, at least in terms of providing you with cash to cover your living costs. Math is not my strong point, and there very well may be something in the logic that I just don’t understand. But if these figures are right, paying off all debt—mortgage included—is the sanest way for a middle-class earner to go.

Dealin’ with the devil

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Have you been following the “Debt Trap” series in the New York Times? Lordie! A couple of days ago they told the story of one Diane McLeod, who despite a modest lifestyle managed to sink so deep in debt she’s being evicted from her little two-bedroom home. The unholy combination of a divorce, a couple of unexpected medical problems (does one ever expect to get sick?), a job loss, and a habit of shopping to allay depression saddled her with interest payments alone that exceeded 40% of her pre-tax pay

The conversations this harrowing story generated are clustered in the usual two camps: the All-Her-Own-Fault side and the Damn-Greedy-Capitalists side. One letter to the editor in the print edition cattily remarks that if McLeod would quit smoking (she was shown with a cigarette in her hand), she’d save $100 to $300 a month. Hello? You can be a supersophisticated Easterner and never have heard “the quality of mercy is not strained”?

Rapacious Lending Practices

The point is, though, that the lenders who got their claws into this naive and unhappy woman really did not care whether she ever paid her debts. Lenders today make their money by charging usurious interest, at rates that used to be felonious. A loan is not seen as something to be repaid, but as a long-term earning asset. Says the Times:

Though prevailing interest rates have fallen to the low single digits in recent years, for example, the rates that credit card issuers routinely charge even borrowers with good credit records have risen, to 19.1 percent last year from 17.7 percent in 2005 – a difference that adds billions of dollars in interest charges annually to credit card bills.

Average late fees rose to $35 in 2007 from less than $13 in 1994, and fees charged when customers exceed their credit limits more than doubled to $26 a month from $11, according to CardWeb, an online publisher of information on payment and credit cards.

Mortgage lenders similarly added or raised fees associated with borrowing to buy a home – like $75 e-mail charges, $100 document preparation costs and $70 courier fees – bringing the average to $700 a mortgage, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These “junk fees” have risen 50 percent in recent years, said Michael A. Kratzer, president of FeeDisclosure.com, a Web site intended to help consumers reduce fees on mortgages.

A 17% interest rate is nothing other than usury. In my state, usury laws once limited the amount of interest a lender could charge to 11%-until big lenders’ lobbyists persuaded the federal government to override state usury regulations.

The issue is not that Ms. McLeod spent irresponsibly or diddles away money on her nicotine addiction. The point is that abrogation of laws and regulations that formerly protected consumers from unbridled greed is about to drive this country’s economy into the toilet, down the drain, and permanently out to sea.

The Big Picture

Again quoting the Times of July 20, 2008:

Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.

College debt has more than doubled since 1995. The average student emerges from college carrying $20,000 in educational debt.

Household debt, including mortgages and credit cards, represents 19 percent of household assets, according to the Fed, compared with 13 percent in 1980.

Even as this debt was mounting, incomes stagnated for many Americans. As a result, the percentage of disposable income that consumers must set aside to service their debt – a figure that includes monthly credit card payments, car loans, mortgage interest and principal – has risen to 14.5 percent from 11 percent just 15 years ago.

By contrast, the nation’s savings rate, which exceeded 8 percent of disposable income in 1968, stood at 0.4 percent at the end of the first quarter of this year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

More ominous, as Americans have dug themselves deeper into debt, the value of their assets has started to fall. Mortgage debt stood at $10.5 trillion at the end of last year, more than double the $4.8 trillion just seven years earlier, but home prices that were rising to support increasing levels of debt, like home equity lines of credit, are now dropping.

The combination of increased debt, falling asset prices and stagnant incomes does not threaten just imprudent borrowers. The entire economy has become vulnerable to the spending slowdown that results when consumers like Ms. McLeod hit the wall.

If you don’t think what happened to Russia can happen here, think again. Right now the world has one superpower with a (fading) supereconomy. It could very well end up with none, at least until China or the EU takes America’s place

And the Small Picture

As individuals in a megasovereignty run by entities with vast quantities of money, there’s little or nothing any of us can do about this, other than get out of debt and stay out of debt. I would suggest that far from being un-American, putting the brakes on your spending impulses and shucking off as much debt as you possibly can is the best thing you can do for your country. It may take us into some hard times, but a change in habits among consumers is about the only message that will get through to elected representatives who are supposed to speak for us, not for those who can purchase their attention.

On the individual level, avoid rapacious mortgages and watch your credit card spending carefully. If you agree with me that a credit card can be a useful tool, remember that every time you use it, you are entering into a deal with the Devil. Proceed accordingly

2 comments left on the iWeb site

!wanda

The graph on the NYT website depicting average savings vs. debts for all Americans really surprised me.Aside from a few years in the 1940’s, there has never been some mythical time when people were all prudent and frugal, making average savings exceed average debts.People are people, apparently; if you give them credit, they’ll use it.What’s changed in the past decade is how much credit people have been offered.

Why would lenders offer more and more credit to more and more people?One reason that lenders, particularly mortgage lenders, are repackaging loans and reselling them, so they don’t suffer the consequences if people default.By the time the loans were repackaged three or four times, no one knew what the real risks were.People were modeling risk based on historical models that weren’t accurate because people had never been offered such large loans before.The incentives for the financial companies were to encourage personal irresponsibility.

For individual people, I want to emphasize personal responsibility.After all, you’re the only one who can dig yourself out of your own debt, and people who take responsibility are generally more proactive about fixing their own problems.But, the financial system should also be changed to encourage more responsible lending.The system will partially fix itself- now we have better data on what people will do if you offer them dangerously large loans, and credit will tighten.We’ve begun to see this already.But there’s also a role here for regulatory changes.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 – 11:03 A

Funny about Money

Absolutely!

About regulation: We all could do without being treated like children by the federal government. However, it’s one thing when your own stupidity harms only you and your family; it’s another when mass stupidity and greed bring down the entire country’s economy. In “killing the beast,” the idealogues who acceded to power over the past two decades may have succeeded in killing America’s well-being. It is, in a word, inexcusable.

As more and more Americans retreat into enforced frugality, our economy will continue to suffer, because its operation has been based on a false perception of affluence. People have confused debt with buying power, with the predictable result.

Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 08:18 A

Pay off the loan vs. stash the cash

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About $23,900 is owing on the second mortgage on my home, which I took out at 6.1% to renovate the investment house. I could pay the principal down at the rate of $250 a month plus about $3,500 a semester from a side job, or I could put that money into savings so it would be available to pay off the loan when I retire. Or, if I decide to sell my house (which is otherwise paid for), that amount would refill my pocket after the amount owing on the second is engrossed from the proceeds of the sale.

I figure this will allow me to pay off the mortgage in about two and a half years, or, over the same period, to accrue $25,000 in an interest-bearing account. Either way, the amount put into some kind of investment instrument–real estate or mutual fund–will be about the same.

Which is better? I agonize, I wring my dainty hands:

Item. The payment is very low–less than $170 a month.

Item. Despite the sagging real estate market, neither my house nor the investment house is losing much, because they are both in fairly “hot” central-city neighborhoods. Neither has dropped in value below what we paid; in fact, each has apparently risen somewhat. One is holding its value at about $50,000 to $70,000 more than its 2004 purchase price. The other is within walking distance to but out of earshot from a brand-new light rail route. In comparable cities, housing values have jumped along light rail lines. Barring a major recession, it’s unlikely either house will depreciate significantly.

Item. A major recession is not beyond the realm of possibility. In that case, property values certainly could drop, or worse, my son or I could lose our jobs. If that happened, it would be better to have $25,000 in liquid savings, not tied up in a house I may be unable to sell or even, if I’m unemployed, borrow against.

Item. My son and I plan to sell or rent the investment house in three to five years.

Item. Assuming things go well, I plan to retire in about three years. At that time I will have to decide whether to keep my house, which has much to recommend it, or to move someplace smaller and more economical to operate. If I decide to stay, I could use the $25,000 cash savings to pay off the loan or, at an 8% return, to cover the mortgage payments. If I decide to sell, about $23,000 will disappear from my profit on the house. But the cash savings will make up for it. Either way, it looks like a wash. In three years, I either have 23 grand put back into the house or I have 25 grand invested in a mutual fund.

Personally, I hate having a debt hanging over my head, and I hate paying interest. Even though the payment is low, if it runs the entire life of the loan I’ll end up paying twice as much as I borrowed. Of course, that won’t happen, because the investment house will be sold long before thirty years are up and I’ll pay off the renovation loan with the proceeds. Still, it’s a psychological burden. On the other hand, with the economy unsettled it may be better to stash the money in liquid instruments. Or convert it all to gold bullion and bury it in the backyard.
So: which is better? Keep the money liquid or put it back into real estate by paying off the loan?