Questions for Your 401K Plan Administrators

Not all 401K plans are created equal - some can be pretty good while others lack important features or impose ridiculous costs on participants. In my previous company I was involved in running my employer's 401K plan (read this post for that interesting story). In my current company I haven't done anything about our plan, primarily because I thought it was reasonable from the get-go, but also because I found my work as a new executive to be extremely interesting and challenging - quite frankly, I just didn't have the time. It has been almost two years since I started my current position (it's amazing how quickly time passes), and I am now thinking about pushing for some changes in our 401K plan. This week a plan representative will be coming to visit us for a "lunch and learn" session and I was planning on bringing up a few issues that I think we need to address. Here they are:

Roth 401K - my company offers only a traditional 401K plan. No Roth 401K. Given prevailing expectations that tax rates will only go up in the coming decades, being able to squirrel away retirement savings without having any future tax liability is a pretty attractive proposition. Alpaca and I "make too much money" to invest in a ROTH-IRA, but participation in a ROTH-401K has no income caps. The mission: get my company to adopt a ROTH-401K option.

Expenses - as far as I can tell, Fidelity has been pretty above board with their disclosure of plan expenses. Checking my 401K account the other day, I was able to find a line that stated very clearly a charge of $30 for plan expenses in 2009. Obviously, this charge is on top of any expenses charged by the mutual funds themselves. Nevertheless, 401K plans are renowned for having all kinds of hidden fees and charges. In my former company even the 401K committee (of which I was a member) did not have clear information about what our employees were paying in fees. We were simply unable to get that data from our plan provider. Fees are a major scourge of the long term investor. They can quietly leech away returns without a lot of evidence that this is happening. The mission: get full disclosure of plan fees.

Index Funds - most of my 401K money (70% of my allocation) is directed towards Fidelity's excellent total market index fund, with an expense ratio of only 0.1%. However, this is the only index fund available in the plan. International index? Nope. Bond index? Niet. REIT index? Better luck next time. Once again, it goes back to the issue of expenses. I don't believe that fund managers can beat their benchmark indexes in the long run, and if that is the case, why should I pay them for the disservice they are doing to me? The mission: Let's have more index funds and fewer fees.

Automatic Re-balancing - Fidelity offers automatic re-balancing of plan funds, but it only allows this on an annual basis. I re-balance my funds quarterly (I think it's particularly important after such dramatic asset price increases as we've had in recent months), but I need to do this manually. The mission: can we have quarterly automatic re-balancing options?

Opt-Out Enrollment - I am a big believer in the concept that employers need to nudge employees to make the best long term decisions. Automatically enrolling people in the 401K plan unless they opt out is a great way to send a signal to people that they should be thinking about saving for their retirement.

My company's 401K plan is run by Fidelity and overall, I am very happy with the plan. Documentation is plentiful and simple to understand, the website is easily accessible and manageable, and fund choices (for the most part) are reasonable. Still, there is always room for improvement.

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Guest Posters Wanted

For the holidays this year the family and I are going to Costa Rica for 10 days. Insanely expensive, but I am told that we only live once, so what the hell, right?

Anyway, while we are gone, I would hate for Money and Such to go completely dark, so I am opening the floor to anyone who would like to write a guest post on this blog. Of course, I reserve the right to accept, reject or edit submissions. Your post can include links to your own site or other external sites (all within reason). I will not be accepting any commercial posts.

If you have an idea for a post which is somehow related to personal finance, I would love to hear from you. Send me an email to shadox1 at the domain name gmail.com.

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The Benefits of Unhappiness

Last week I hosted an important customer visit for the entire week. This extended visit allowed me to get to know my customers well and to also chat with them about non-business issues. One day, one of my visitors told me how a few years ago he had to do a biopsy to rule-out the possibility of lymphoma. Happily, the biopsy came back negative, but for the few days he was waiting for the results, my customer was understandably freaking out. This experience changed his world view, at least for a little while. He realized that every day he was able to get out of bed was a gift to be cherished. However, after a while this new found perspective wore-off and he reverted his old, stressed and busy self.

So what?

Humans can't go-around being thankful and happy all the time. That's contrary to our basic nature. It's not a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that it's a pretty good thing. You can't go about your daily business, constantly being aware of your mortality and of your fragility. That way lies madness and depression. What makes us function as humans is our ability to ignore the inevitable. What makes us better as a society (and as a species) is the fact that we refuse to be happy with what we have. We must have more. It is in our nature to strive.

If we were all happy with what we have, we would all still be living in caves, subsisting off of random berries and spearing antelopes for dinner. Hey, I like living in a house. In fact, I like my own house, but that doesn't mean that I don't want a bigger and better one. I enjoy my work, but that doesn't mean that I will be satisfied with it forever. I am happy with who I am and what I have learned over the years, but that doesn't stop me from wishing for more knowledge and more learning. What's wrong with that?

Of course, as in everything else, moderation is needed. Being constantly thankful that you are not dying of cancer will make you a very strange person. Constantly obsessing that you don't make enough money will make you a very unhappy (and probably unpleasant) person. A moderate level of dissatisfaction is a good thing. It has many names, two of which are ambition and aspiration.

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How to be a Millionaire... Not!

Every personal finance, business and self help shelf in your local book store is filled with books that offer to tell you the secrets of how to become [insert desirable attribute here]. Good to Great offers to unlock the secrets of how to build the next great company; The Millionaire Mind promises to teach you to think like a millionaire, and so on and so on. I would like to direct your attention to another book I recently finished reading, called The Black Swan. I must admit that The Black Swan is written in a rather annoying way, but it contains a number of highly valuable concepts and ideas. One such concept, "looking at the graveyard", does a lot to discredit a vast range of self-help and "instant insight" books.

To understand this concept, let's discuss a non-existent book whose ambition is to teach readers how to become rich by looking at millionaires and identifying the characteristics that all of these individuals share. Let's say the author does a great job of collecting and sorting through information and comes up with a list of three critical attributes shared by all of these individuals: frugality, education and generosity. One of the points Nassim Taleb makes in The Black Swan is that this information is insufficient to draw the conclusion that the way to become a millionaire is to be frugal, educated and generous. Why? Taleb explains that to validate your theory, you would need to look at the population of non-millionaires and make sure that it does not contain a large percentage of individuals who share the exact same attribute, i.e. look at the population of "failed experiments" that does not support your theory. Taleb points out that people rarely do this - for example in trying to identify what made a certain company successful they fail to look at all the companies who did the exact same thing and failed miserably...

That's not to say that in my example above frugality is not a worthwhile pursuit. All I am saying is that in that hypothetical experiment the data collected is not sufficient to draw the conclusion that if you are frugal you will become wealthy. There are plenty of frugal people who never become rich.

So what's Taleb's point? Unfortunately his conclusion is somewhat discouraging. His book is primarily about the role that luck plays in the outcome of the game of life. We all like to think that we control our destiny, but Taleb points out that the real control we exercise is very limited... a sobering thoughts.

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A New Job for Alpaca

After about 7 months of unemployment - and just after she received her final unemployment check - Alpaca has landed a new job. I sort of let the cat out of the bag in a twitter posting last week, but now it's official, today she received and signed the offer. This is a very welcome development. The current job market is nothing short of demoralizing for job seekers. Jobs are few and far between, but at least in our case the story has a happy ending.

A few interesting pieces of information to share about this new job. First, the compensation package is a good one. Alpaca's salary will actually be about 10% higher than in her last full time position (which was over a year ago). Given the rotten job market, I was mentally bracing for a pay cut.

The company she will be joining is a public one, and they offer a range of benefits, including an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP). For those who are unfamiliar with the term, an ESPP is a program by which employees can purchase company stock for a discount - typically 15% - without any obligation to hold onto the stock. Previously when Alpaca participated in such plans, we sold the shares immediately after they were purchased, in essence getting a 15% boost on the amount invested. I am all for immediate and guaranteed returns... who isn't? We plan to use the same strategy.

Also, while my start-up offers medical coverage for my family, the cost of this coverage to me is about $200 per pay period or $400 a month. Being able to remove Alpaca from this plan will save us some cash, and depending on the cost of insuring the kids through Alpaca's company, there may be some additional savings possible.

Another interesting thing about this job: Alpaca landed it through... wait for it... an online job posting. No networking involved whatsoever. After all my talk and preaching about networking, it turns out that the lowly and much maligned online job board can actually help you land a job. Who would have thunk it? To be fair, Alpaca did a lot of networking, and even I was able to land a hand on a small number of occasions, helping her get some interviews. In the end, the swing that connected was a random job post response. It just goes to show you, in your search for a job you have to fire with every gun in your arsenal, and not rule out any options in advance.

Alpaca's first day of work is this Thursday. She is reporting a lot of nervousness about getting back to work and about having to prove herself in a brand new place. I can report that my stress level has gone down dramatically. While my company is financially solid for a few more months, we are a start-up, and are always reliant on fund raising to finance our operations. There are never guarantees that our investors will pony up the cash. Now, at least, the prospect of both my wife and I being unemployed simultaneously, seems to be more remote. Happy, happy, joy, joy!

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