Why Your Small Business Could Benefit from Team Building

Even if you have a small business team, team building is still incredibly important. Your workforce needs to work well and be successful if you want to change your small business into something more. Within a small unit, it is even more important for all of your staff to know each other and work well as a team, as they will be in close quarters to one another and will see each other daily. If you own a small business, here is why your business could benefit from team building.

Improves Motivation

Although salary is important for many employees, this is not the only thing that they look for in a business. With small businesses being opened every day, you need to stand out to retain your employees. Employees also look for businesses who care and actively engage them to be part of a helpful and friendly team. Team building increases motivation, helping employees feel more enthusiastic about their role. This in turn ensures employees enjoy coming to work and will allow for increased productivity.

Improves Communication Skills

Both employees and employers need to be able to appropriately and efficiently communicate with one another for a small business to run smoothly. Team building often incorporates activities that will improve communication within teams and may help for different members to find their strengths and weaknesses around communication. Verbalising any issues in the workplace also allows for changes to be made. This could be done via weekly or monthly meetings and gives a chance for staff members to discuss concerns rather than quietly struggle.

Make Your Workplace Fun

Work doesn’t need to be boring and employees who are satisfied in their role will work better and want to stay. If you have some amazing employees that you do not want to lose, bringing a little bit of fun to the office will improve productivity. You can find team building activities  on offer from the likes of Team Tactics for both small and large businesses. If you want to incorporate some fun into your team building, Team Tactics run a treasure hunt in London. This activity can improve communication within your team and allow employees to work with other members of your workforce, who they may not usually have contact with. This can bring your small business team together and allow for a happier and more fun environment at work. If this sounds like something your team would enjoy, check out the following option: https://www.teamtactics.co.uk/team-building/treasure-hunts/.

Recognises Good Work

If your small business has some good employees who you want to reward for their hard work in getting to where you are today, team building exercises can be a great reward. This could be a staff night out or an activity of their choice. If your employees’ hard work is recognised, they will feel more like part of the team and will want to continue their solid work as they are seeing the benefit of this. Many employees are more likely to stay if good work is recognised, as they feel more appreciated. With a small business, you can easily notice how your employees’ work makes a difference and this is something that should be actively encouraged. Even if you do not have a large budget, little rewards can make a huge difference to staff morale.

Teamwork in a small business can bring big progress for a company. This also brings with it a nicer environment to work in. Rewarding your staff with days out and team building exercises will increase their motivation and communication skills and help you retain your staff. The happier your staff, the better the results for your business.

from Finance Girl http://www.financegirl.co.uk/why-your-small-business-could-benefit-from-team-building%ef%bb%bf/

Simple maths for investors

Maths is not my strong suit, but it doesn’t half¹ come in handy for keeping a grip on your investments.

In this post we’ll look at a few simple investing maths techniques to help you stay on top of your financial life.

Apologies in advance if you find it all too simple, or too hard, or too clumsy. When it comes to maths, I’m like a foreigner with an amusing accent.

Percentages

To do percentages on your phone calculator, first divide the percentage by 100 and forget the % sign. So:

10% / 100 = 0.1
1% / 100 = 0.01
0.1% / 100 = 0.001

Now you have the percentage as a decimal figure you can multiply with other numbers in your life to find percentage values.

For example, let’s say you hold £10,000 in a global index tracker that sports an Ongoing Charge Figure (OCF) of 0.1% and you want to know the cost in £££s.

Take the percentage figure, 0.1%, and divide by 100:

0.1% / 100 = 0.001 (the percentage as a decimal figure)

Multiply the decimal by your holding:

£10,000 x 0.001 = £10 (the OCF’s cost per year)

From there, you can decide if a 0.09% global tracker is worth switching to. First, find the percentage saving between the two trackers as a decimal figure:

0.1% – 0.09% = 0.01%

0.01% / 100 = 0.0001

How much does that save us on our £10,000 holding?

£10,000 x 0.0001 = £1 (saved per year)

Quick, call Martin Lewis!

To convert fractions to decimals: divide the top by the bottom. That is, divide the numerator by the denominator.

¼ = 0.25

⅔ = 0.667

Multiply the decimal by 100 to get the percentage:

0.25 x 100 = 25%

0.667 x 100 = 66.7%

Also handy:

x% of y = y% of x

So:

8% of 50 = 50% of 8

50% of 8 = 4

8% of 50 = 4

Gains

How much is a 20% gain worth to you?

First add your percentage gain to 100 then divide by 100.

So:

(20 + 100) / 100 = 1.2

Multiply this number by your holding:

£100 x 1.2 = £120 (your holding after a 20% gain on £100)

Losses

Losing money is not so much fun. Maybe the market has plunged 20%. Or the taxman is after you.

How much are you out of pocket?

Divide your loss by 100 to get the decimal: 20% / 100 = 0.2

£100 x 0.2 = £20 (loss)

Or you might wonder: What have I got left after the taxman takes his 20%?

Well, after a 20% loss you’ve got 80% left:

£100 x 0.8 = £80 (remaining)

Regaining losses

What gain do you need to recover from a 20% loss?

20% / 80% x 100 = 25% (gain needed to make good the loss)

Where 20 is the percentage lost, 80 is the percentage left after the loss, and 25% is the gain needed to breakeven.

Here’s the proof:

£80 x 1.25 = £100 (the amount we had before the 20% loss)

You can also use these calculations to work out how much tax relief you’re due. For example, a 20% tax-payer should get 25% of their net contribution returned to their SIPP in tax relief.

Play around with the numbers and you’ll see very big losses can be hard to recover from.

Picture a 75% loss:

75% / 25% x 100 = 300%

You need a 300% cumulative gain to climb back out of the hole. *shudder*

Compounding gains and losses

We rarely make a single gain or loss and that’s the end of it. Our portfolios are advancing and retreating every year, every day – every nanosecond if you check too often.

You can string a sequence of returns together like this:

£100 x 1.05 x 0.9 x 0.85 x 1.11 x 1.32 = £118

…where the returns are 5%, -10%, -15%, 11%, 32%.

Negative compounding can set you back quickly. Consider how your salary is corroded by annual inflation unmitigated by an offsetting pay rise:

£100 x 0.96 x 0.98 x 0.97 x 0.95 x 0.97 = £84

Now your salary buys 16% less than it did five years ago. Or it’s fallen to 84% of its former value.

You can also use this method to see by how much a tracker is lagging behind its index every year.

Returning to positive territory, those magic compound interest calculators work the same way:

£100 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = £161

Where a £100 lump sum accumulates 10% interest once a year for five years.

You can save on typing by multiplying your interest rate by the power of the number of years you’ll compound.

So 1.1 is multiplied by the power of 10 if you’ll earn the 10% interest for 10 years. (This is assuming annual interest payments – if interest is compounded daily or monthly then you’ll need to dive deeper into the formula.)

You can also quickly use this formula – or a compound interest calculator – to check the damage done by expensive funds:

Expensive active fund

£10,000 lump sum invested
£6,000 invested every year
40 years compounding
5% expected return minus 0.75% OCF = 4.25% return p.a.
Future value = £683,497

Cheap tracker fund

£10,000 lump sum invested
£6,000 invested every year
40 years compounding
5% expected return minus 0.1% OCF = 4.9% return p.a.
Future value = £809,781

Using our mad maths skillz:

£809,781 / £683,497 = 1.185
1.185 x 100 = 118.5
118.5% – 100% = 18.5%

You earn 18.5% more by avoiding high fees.

Weighted average

You might want to know how much each asset class contributes to your overall portfolio expected return, or to the overall cost of your portfolio.

Enter weighted averages!

Let’s say your portfolio breaks down like this:

Index fund	Allocation (%)	OCF (%)
Global index tracker	50	0.2
UK index tracker	10	0.1
UK bond index tracker	40	0.15

The weighted average will tell you the overall OCF of your portfolio, after taking into account how your money is allocated across the differently priced funds.

First, multiply each fund’s allocation by its OCF.

For instance, the global index tracker’s weighted OCF = 0.5 x 0.2 = 0.1%

Then add up each weighted OCF to find your portfolio’s total OCF:

Index fund	Allocation (%)	OCF (%)	Weighted OCF (%)
Global index tracker	50	0.2	0.5 x 0.2 = 0.1
UK index tracker	10	0.1	0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01
UK bond index tracker	40	0.15	0.15 x 0.15 = 0.06
Total portfolio OCF	100		0.17%

Go through the same process to estimate your portfolio’s expected return, but replace the OCFs with each asset class’s expected return figure.

How about if you have two different accounts on two different platforms and want to know your overall return?

Weighted average swings into action again:

Account one is worth £100,000 and returned 7%.

Account two is worth £250,000 and returned 5%.

Overall return = [(£100,000 x 7%) + (£250,000 x 5%)] / (£100,000 + £250,000) = 5.57%

Here’s the slow-motion action replay:

£100,000 x 0.07 = £7,000 (the return from account one)

£250,000 x 0.05 = £12,500 (the return from account two)

Add up your return and divide by your overall account total:

£7,000 + £12,500 = £19,500 (overall return)

£19,500 / £350,000 x 100 = 5.57% (the weighted average return of your accounts)

Pound cost averaging

Pound cost averaging can come off as some kind of witchcraft – shares go into free-fall and somehow you come up smelling of roses. But it’s the average price that counts.

En guarde!

You buy one share at £100
The market tumbles 50%
You buy two more shares at £50 each
You’ve paid £200 paid for three shares

£200 / 3 = £66.67 (average price paid)

When the market share price bounces back above your average share price then you’re in profit:

3 x £66.68 = £200.04 (back in the black)

Profit and loss

How do you calculate a profit or loss as a percentage?

Like this:

(Price sold – Price bought) / (Price bought) x 100 = profit or loss %

For example, the price bought is the amount you originally paid for the investment, say £100, and then we sold at £110:

£110 – £100 = £10 (profit)

£10 / £100 x 100 = 10% (gain)

You probably paid some trading fees along the way and maybe got a dividend, too:

((Price sold – Price bought) + Income gain – Costs) / Price bought x 100

£110 – £100 = £10 (profit as before)

£10 + £4 – £12 = £2 (after adding a £4 dividend and subtracting £12 in trading fees)

£2 / £100 x 100 = 2% gain.

(Welcome to The Investor’s life!)

Financial independence: How much do I need?

The big kahuna – what will it cost you to stick it the man?

First calculate how much annual income you need for financial independence (FI).

Let’s say you can live on £25,000 a year.

Now choose a sustainable withdrawal rate (SWR) that you’ll use to drawdown your wealth when you reach FI.

Let’s say 3%, which is 0.03 in decimal.

£25,000 / 0.03 = £833,333 (the stash you need to accumulate in today’s money to declare FI at a 3% SWR)

The proof:

£833,333 x 0.03 = £25,000
£25,000 / £833,333 x 100 = 3%

Side note: 3% SWR is a more conservative version of the ‘4% rule’ commonly bandied about. Because it’s more conservative, it’s safer. This is not a party political broadcast.

‘Multiply by 25’ is another way of expressing the 4% rule: 1 / 0.04 = 25.

Multiply your annual income target by 25 and you get the same result as dividing by 0.04. Multiplying by 33.333 is the same deal but for a 3% SWR.

The rule of 400 is a quick way of estimating how much capital you’ll need to support a monthly expense in your FI golden age.

Say you spend £40 a month on the gym:

£40 x 400 = £16,000 (the capital to support that spending during FI using a 3% SWR)

Now you can decide whether that gym is really ‘giving you joy’ or not.

You can work out the yield of an annuity using SWR maths, too. If the annuity company wants £833,333 in exchange for an income of £25,000 then they’re offering you a yield of 3%:

£25,000 / £833,333 x 100 = 3% yield.

You can compare that yield to your other investment options.²

Probability: Will you need all that money?

You and your significant other are planning a long and happy retirement. The longer you expect to last, the more conservative your SWR should be.

But you can be too conservative, if you’re not realistic about your survival chances in old age.

It’s easy to be squeamish about this but what are the chances of either of you surviving to, say, 100?

Jill has a 15.4% probability of living to 100 according to the Office For National Statistics (ONS) life expectancy calculator.

Jack has an 11% chance.

What’s the probability they’ll still need an income for two at 100?

0.154 x 0.11 x 100 = 1.7%.

Gosh. I don’t know who the hell Jack and Jill are but I’ve got a lump in my throat.

Quick, let’s get Vulcan on this!

The probability formula that determines our couple’s joint chances is:

p(A and B) = p(A) x p(B)

We need a different formula to figure the chance of Jack OR Jill surviving to 100… [I can’t look! – The Investor]

First, add their individual probabilities together:

0.154 + 0.11 = 0.264

Now multiply their individual probabilities together:

0.154 x 0.11 = 0.01694

Subtract the second number from the first:

0.264 – 0.01694 x 100 = 24.7% the chance of Jack OR Jill surviving to 100.

The or probability formula is:

p(A or B) = p(A) + p(B) – p(A and B)

This formula is used because Jack or Jill’s survival are not mutually exclusive events. They can both survive and that’s OK. They love each other.

When the events are mutually exclusive you’d use:

p(A or B) = p(A) + p(B)

There can be only one!

Chances of Jack and Jill not making it to 100? Just for completeness:

0.846 x 0.89 x 100 = 75.3%

If you’re dying to try this for yourself then the ONS publishes extensive life expectancy data for the UK.

Another side note: I’ll do a Monevator special on life expectancy soon. I don’t want to leave it too long in case I end up like Jack and Jill. Sob.

Back in the present, Jack and Jill are planning a 40-year retirement from age 60 with a 3% SWR. They’ve baked in a 10% failure rate.

The failure rate means that in 10% of their scenarios, they’d need to lower their income at some point because of a poor sequence of returns. But for the failure rate to matter, Jack and Jill have to be alive to worry about it at the time.

The probability of that is:

0.1 x 0.247 x 100 = 2.47% failure rate.

Where there’s a 10% chance of failure within 40 years and – from our sums above – a 24.7% chance of either of our two protagonists living to 100.

The two events are independent of each other³ so we multiply their probabilities together and end up with a 97.5% chance of success!

Of course success could mean that everybody is dead, but let’s set that aside for the moment.

The 10% failure rate only matters 25% of the time, which turns out to be a very small 2.5% probability of both events occurring simultaneously.

Adjusting for inflation

Earlier we calculated an FI target of £833,000 – but inflation is going to weaken the potency of your stash like an intestinal worm. This means every year your target will be less capable of delivering the purchasing power you require.

To maintain purchasing power, you must upweight your target by the inflation rate.

If inflation is 3% this year then multiply your target by 1.03 after 12-months:

£833,333 x 1.03 = £858,333 (adjusted for 3% inflation)

Next year, multiply £858,333 by year two’s inflation number.

Perhaps it’s 2.5%:

£858,333 x 1.025 = £879,791 (FI target after two years of inflation adjustment)

Adjust last year’s target by this year’s inflation rate every year.

If you stick to £833,333 then your portfolio will be like a puffed-up bodybuilder – it will still look good but isn’t really that strong because your returns are nominal. We live in today’s money, and inflation adjustments keep our returns real.

The same upweighting technique applies to your investment contributions and your target income.

The UK’s inflation figures are published by the ONS. Personally, I adjust for Retail Price Index (RPI) inflation because it contains housing costs and Consumer Price index (CPI) inflation does not.

Also RPI is always higher, and I’m a glutton for punishment.

RPI has come in for much official criticism, however, and so now there’s CPIH – the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs.

So you could use CPIH if RPI looks depressing and you’re not into government conspiracy theories about how they suppress the true inflation figures to keep us peons in our place.

[Editor’s note: Please don’t comment about inflation conspiracies below, this paragraph was permitted for leavening purposes only.]

Tax costs

Your effective tax rate is the total amount you pay in taxes, divided by your gross income.

Perhaps you earn £75,000 and pay £23,000 in income tax and National Insurance (NI).

£23,000 / £75,000 x 100 = 30.7% your effective tax rate.

After income tax and NI, each £1 of spending costs you:

£1 / 69.3 x 100 = £1.44

Your marginal rate of tax is the amount you pay on each additional pound of income you earn.

How much will I need to cover tax?

If you need £25,000 income to live on then:

£25,000 – £12,500 tax-free personal allowance = £12,500 (taxed at 20%)

£12,500 / 0.8 = £15,625 (the gross income you need)

The proof:

£15,625 x 0.8 = £12,500 after 20% tax.

I haven’t factored in ISAs and personal savings allowance and so on, but you get the idea.

Platforms: choosing the cheapest

To compare fixed fee Platform A with percentage fee-based Platform B, make the following calculation:

Tot up all the charges you’d incur with the most competitive of the fixed fee platforms you can find on our broker table.

Make sure you count any annual fees, platform fees, dealing charges, and other relevant costs.

Take your fixed fee cost and compare that against the most competitive percentage fee platform.

Total annual fixed fee platform costs divided by percentage fee platform cost = your breakeven point.

Here’s one we made earlier:

Fixed fees at Platform A = £80
Percentage fee at Platform B = 0.25%
£80 / 0.0025 = £32,000 breakeven point.

The breakeven point – £32,000 in this example – refers to your portfolio’s size.

In the example above, we’re better off with platform A if our portfolio is worth more than £32,000. Any less and we should bunk up with platform B.

A few notes:

• Subtract any fixed fees charged by Platform B from Platform A’s fixed fees before making the calculation.

• If one platform offers fund discounts, or doesn’t stock exactly the same products, then you can factor that in using the portfolio weighted average OCF technique detailed earlier in this piece. Work out your portfolio’s average return in £££s on both platforms and add to the fixed fees above.

• Add on entry and exit charges.

Switching platforms can be mucho hassle, and platforms periodically change their charges. Only switch when it’s seriously worth your while.

Withholding tax cost comparison

Okay, so we’re tempted by a tracker with a cheap OCF but which has a high withholding tax rate on dividends. We want to pit it against a higher OCF tracker with a lower withholding tax rate.

Find fund one’s dividend yield e.g. 2%. Then multiply the dividend yield by the withholding tax rate. E.g. 30%.

0.02 x 0.3 = 0.006 (the percentage cost of the withholding tax)

Add this cost to the fund’s OCF. E.g. 0.1%.

0.006 + 0.001 = 0.007 x 100 = 0.7% (OCF and withholding tax cost)

Fund two has the same 2% dividend yield, a lower 15% withholding tax, 0.2% OCF.

Going through the same process:

0.02 x 0.15 = 0.003 (the percentage cost of the withholding tax)

Now add the OCF:

0.003 + 0.002 x 100 = 0.5% (OCF and withholding tax cost)

Fund two is 0.2% cheaper than fund one – despite its higher OCF – because it has a lower withholding tax rate.

Rule of 72

The famed rule of 72 calculates approximately how long it takes to double your money at a given rate of return. Divide 72 by your actual or expected return rate.

For example:

72 / 4% = 18 (years to double your money if you earn 4% p.a.)

Rebalancing your portfolio

For a quick rebalance, multiply your total portfolio value by your target allocation for each asset class.

For example:

Target asset allocation
50% Global equity
50% UK gilts

Total portfolio value = £50,000

0.5 x £50,000 = £25,000 target value for each asset class.

Now subtract the actual value of each fund from the target value (assuming that each fund represents an asset class).

For example:

Global equity tracker
£25,000 – £30,000 = -£5,000
So sell £5,000 of this fund.

UK gilts tracker
£25,000 – £20,000 = +£5,000
Buy £5,000 of this fund.

Preference for lotteries

People love a bet. Long odds and big pay-outs are the stuff of dreams. Next time you’re counseling a relative on that lottery ticket purchase, here’s the math:

£1 ticket price
£1,000,000 jackpot
Odds of a win: 0.00001%

The value of the gamble is:

£1,000,000 x 0.0000001 = £0.1 or 10p. The value of your gamble vs the ticket price is -90p.

What if you have the opportunity to invest £1,000 for a 50% chance of making £1,500 vs a 50% chance of losing the lot?

(0.5 x £1,500) – (0.5 x £1,000) = +£250

That’s a better bet than buying a thousand lottery tickets if you can afford the potential loss.

The final reckoning

Obviously you can use a calculator to do all the work. There’s a Monevator page with a ton of useful financial calculators.

But calculators break. And I think it’s empowering to know how these things work, and to be able to double check the information yourself.

If you have a simpler take on the investor maths above or want to share any other techniques, please tell us in the comments below!

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

1. Or 50% or ½ or 0.5. Hmm, landing a maths joke is not easy.
2. Remembering to take into account the certainty of payment and myriad other factors.
3. Sort of, in theory with a constant SWR. In practice if one died the other might spend less of that annual withdrawal / allowance, saving a bit and reducing the chance of failure.

from Monevator https://monevator.com/simple-maths-for-investors/

How a Business Can Manage Technology Effectively from Beginning to End

Dealing with technology from acquisition through its use to eventual disposal is something that almost every business must go through. How to go about it effectively as a SME is a worthwhile question.

In this article, we provide some answers to help your business.  

Buying Technology from Reputable Suppliers

It’s important that businesses acquire technology equipment from reputable suppliers. While getting a bargain is always nice, it’s sensible to stick to reliable brands/suppliers that have a vested interest in doing right by their business customers.

It’s not necessary to buy every piece of technology new. Certainly, there’s some cost savings when selectively purchasing refurbished equipment. However, extra care must be taken if going this route.

In terms of a laser printer, for example, the risk is more about whether it’s going to offer value for money with its remaining lifespan vs the discounted price. However, with a refurbished laptop or desktop PC, there’s a greater risk of buying a compromised Windows operating system or malware lurking ready to steal away company account details. A full security inspection of a refurbished PC must take place, preferably along with a reformatting of the hard drive and installing a new Windows operating system too.

Getting the Most Out of Technology

Like any piece of machinery, technology might occasionally become faulty or wear out. Office equipment has a different average operational life depending on wear and tear. For instance, a server that’s rarely turned off will often have a shorter life than a desktop PC that’s only used a few hours on weekdays and powered down on weekends.

Maintenance is important with computing equipment. For printers, they require cleaning internally and the occasional replacement part. With PCs, the first thing to go wrong is usually the hard drive and with a laptop, the battery and power brick are significant vulnerabilities.

Covering for Equipment Redundancy

When relying on warranties where the PC may or may not be fixable with on-site coverage, it’s a good idea to have a few backup parts or replacement PCs available.

By sticking to the same brands and models, parts like a new power brick, power cable or laptop battery often can be replaced with almost zero downtime.

Safe, Legal Disposal of IT Equipment

E-waste in the UK is significant at over 44 million metric tons in 2017 alone. Businesses are legally responsible for protecting customer data by wiping the storage of computers, flash drives and external hard drives/SSDs before disposal.

The message is slowly being better understand across the business community yet over 40 percent of businesses still erase data before disposing of equipment often leading to significant data breaches. This risks substantial fines for failing to protect customer data.

EOL IT Services provides essential IT asset disposal services to businesses. Secure wiping of data storage using one of several methodologies ensures their clients meet legal requirements and protect company data. After all, it’s not just customer data that’s at risk; confidential company information might be on an IT technology asset too.

From the initial purchase through to eventual disposal, as long as businesses act sensibly towards both security and data records, technology will be far less of a headache.

from Finance Girl http://www.financegirl.co.uk/how-a-business-can-manage-technology-effectively-from-beginning-to-end/

Weekend reading: See why you should invest a lump sum now (and a scam alert!)

What caught my eye this week.

I am running late this week, so I’ll cut straight to the chase and suggest you check out this post on investing a lump sum over at the Of Dollars and Data blog.

Author Nick Maggiulli writes:

The main reason Lump Sum outperforms Dollar Cost Averaging [DCA] is because most markets generally rise over time.

Because of this positive long-term trend, DCA typically buys at higher average prices than Lump Sum.

Additionally, in those rare instances where DCA does outperforms Lump Sum (i.e. in falling markets), it is difficult to stick to DCA.

So the times where DCA has the largest advantage are also the times where it can be the hardest for investors to stick to their plan.

Nick made his bones with animated graphics, but he hasn’t done so many of late.

This post is full of them! The example below shows how the underperformance of dollar-cost averaging increases as the length of the buying period increases.

Our view is that deciding whether to invest a lump sum or put the money in over time is – and should be – an emotional decision, not an intellectual one.

Are you freaked out by the very idea of putting a life-changing amount of money into the market in one go?

Then don’t do it. But do make sure you have a strategy to get the money invested sooner rather than later.

As Nick vividly illustrates, most of the time you’ll pay a high price for leaving cash on the sidelines.

Important note: A long-time reader reports being cold called by an ‘adviser’ claiming to have gotten their telephone number from Monevator. I know nothing about these people and any such calls are not anything to do with this site. Please be careful! My personal rule is NEVER EVER to invest a penny as a result of a cold call. Ever. Unfortunately, people trading off the reputation of others is a growing problem, as Martin Lewis recently went to court to prove.

From Monevator

How did Warren Buffett get rich? – Monevator

From the archive-ator: They don’t tax free time – Monevator

News

Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!¹

What price pension freedoms? [Search result] – FT

[Surprisingly] Madoff trustee has recovered 76% of $17.5bn swindled – Reuters

Global dividends hit new record [Search result] – FT

First-time buyer numbers reached a 12-year high in 2018 – Property Reporter

London’s property flippers forced to sell at a loss [Search result] – FT

Africa is a real demographic outlier – Visual Capitalist

Products and services

Royal Mail to donate £60,000 to charity after breaking stamp price rise cap – Guardian

Households spend 10x more toasting bread than charging phones – ThisIsMoney

RateSetter will pay you £100 (and me a bonus) if you invest £1,000 for a year via my affiliate link – RateSetter

[Selective?] data shows rare winning fund returns fall when stars leave – ThisIsMoney

Seeing green: The Foresight UK Infrastructure fund – DIY Investor UK

Beware of a sim card swap scam that can empty your bank account – ThisIsMoney

Homes for sale that come with a perk [Gallery] – Guardian

Comment and opinion

Why do markets go up? – Factor Investor

Fast cars, low returns – Scalable Capital

The case for investing in international bonds – Young FI Guy

Time for Gen X to rally – Money Maven

You wouldn’t wish typical hedge fund returns on anyone – Evidence-based Investor

No-one wants to invest in your shit – Meb Faber

Rental DIY Step 1: Find a tenant – 3652 Days

Rich People’s Problems: I have bonus envy [Search result] – FT

If you love your spouse, FIRE them [Um…] – Financial Samurai

Warren Buffett’s brother from another mother – Abnormal Returns

My financial mistakes – Mrs Young FI Guy

First-mover alpha – A Wealth of Common Sense

What infrastructure has to do with investing – Oddball Stocks

Is HSBC worthy of investment, 10 years after the crisis? – UK Value Investor

Brexit

Holidays 50% cheaper the week after Brexit, due to uncertainty – ThisIsMoney

Three Tory ministers set to rebel to stop no-deal Brexit [Search result] – FT

What is the practical impact the next day if there’s no-deal? – Guardian

As Britain self-combusts, Ireland is seizing the opportunity – Fortune

Marina Hyde: The country needs Tom Hanks. We get Derek Hatton – Guardian

Kindle book bargains

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – £1.99 on Kindle

ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever by Jason Fried – £1.99 on Kindle

Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship by MJ DeMarco – £0.99 on Kindle

Off our beat

How it feels to win a lifetime’s supply [Of books, milk, KFC…] – Guardian

There’s only one thing to do with today: Seize it – Ryan Holiday

Tim Ferriss interviews Jim Collins [Podcast] – Tim Ferriss

How to build Atomic Habits – Rad Reads

Different kinds of stupid – Morgan Housel

Boy, 12, creates nuclear reaction at home [Note to self: Must try harder] – Guardian

And finally…

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
– James Clear, Atomic Habits

Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Friday!

1. Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”.

from Monevator https://monevator.com/weekend-reading-see-why-you-should-invest-a-lump-sum-now-and-a-scam-alert/

Are Company Cars a Worthwhile Investment for Your Business?

Giving your employees the use of a company car can seem like a great idea, particularly if their jobs involve travelling to several different locations on any given day. But, as always, offering a company car can be a lot more complicated than it may at first seem. As an employer, you’ll need to think about policies and procedures, legal restrictions, taxes, and your company’s reputation and profitability. If you’re thinking about offering company cars to your employees, here are some factors to keep in mind.

#1. Is It Worth It?

First of all, make sure that offering a company car scheme is worth it for your business. If you’re offering a car scheme that allows employees to also use their cars for personal use provided that this is funded by themselves, it may well be beneficial in terms of employee retention, satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty. But, will it help your company save or make more money? If your employees regularly travel for work and your company is regularly reimbursing their expenses, consider whether a company car scheme will make this easier, and whether any additional cost will be worth the investment – for example, company cars are usually more reliable than public transport and tend to look more professional when visiting clients, for instance.

#2. Consider Insurance Costs:

There are several different routes that you can take when it comes to finding the right insurance policy for your company cars. If you’re providing cars to your employees through your company that they are also able to use personally, then it may be worth instructing them to source their own, suitable business insurance that you can cover the difference for. If you’re arranging a fleet of company cars for several employees of your business, then it’s worth looking into fleet insurance. If you want to find the best fleet insurance quotes, take a look at the quotezone.co.uk website. Quotezone is a UK-based business fleet insurance comparison site that will connect you with suitable insurers for the best quotes. All you’ll need to do is enter the details of your company and fleet into their simple form, and they’ll do all the hard work for you. They will pass your details onto suitable fleet insurance policy providers, who’ll be in touch with a motor fleet insurance quote.

#3. Keeping Records:

Since company cars are a taxable business expense, it’s crucial that you are prepared to keep strict records of all company car use, and that your drivers will agree to do the same. This is especially important in the case of company cars that are used for both business and personal purposes and your company reimburses drivers for any business use. No matter who drives the car, if the lease or ownership is in the company’s name, then the lease payment or other expenses incurred will be deductible as business expenses. Ensuring that all company car drivers keep accurate records is important, as this will ensure that you are able to correctly reimburse driving expenses, prove business use for tax purposes, and deduct any depreciation expenses.

#4. Choosing the Right Car:

So, if you’ve decided that offering company cars to employees is the right step for your company, the next factor to consider is the type of cars that you are going to offer. There are several factors to take into consideration when choosing company cars for your fleet. First of all, you’ll need to consider what the car is being used for on a daily basis. For example, if they are for business purposes only and will only need to carry one or two passengers at a time, reliable hatchbacks are usually the way forward. But if the vehicles are going to be used for carrying more passengers, goods or equipment, you will likely require a larger car or even a van. Take the time to sit down with your drivers and consider everybody’s needs and requirements before making a decision. Don’t forget that fuel economy, reliability, age, and technical specifications should also be considered when choosing a type of company car.

#5. Measuring and Tracking Performance:

Last but not least, although every business that offers company cars would like to think that their drivers are committed to upholding their good reputation on the road, this is sadly not always the case. Consider using dashcam devices and telematics for each company car, to get a better idea of the individual habits of each driver and make it easier for you to work on improving driver performance before it becomes a serious issue. In addition, telematics devices can also make it easier for you to track your fleet without the need to directly contact the driver and distract their attention from the road. And, both telematics and dashcam data can be extremely useful to your insurance company in the event of an accident, regardless of the party at fault.

Is a fleet of company cars the best decision for your business? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

from Finance Girl http://www.financegirl.co.uk/are-company-cars-a-worthwhile-investment-for-your-business/

How to Make Your Time at University More Productive

Being more productive with your time while at university isn’t every students’ strong suit. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with so many classes to cover and coursework projects to complete.

Accordingly, here are some suggestions for you to manage a little better.

Fix Your Procrastination

Procrastination is a killer of goals and dreams. Left unmanaged, procrastinators see their university grades decline and college work submitted at the last minute. The sheer number of distractions has been growing for students in recent years as smartphones and internet use become ubiquitous. For male students, gaming on their console, smartphone or PC eats up untold extra hours too.

Work to allocate your time more precisely to make better use of it. Have dedicated times for classes, homework, and projects, play time and chores. Use Google Calendar to set reminders about classes and study times. It’s equally important to set stop times as it is start times. It prevents open-ended sessions without a sense of urgency that simply fills the available time.

Take Regular Breaks

Without taking regular breaks, concentrating for long periods becomes increasingly difficult. While deadlines for the submission of a college paper help to push you along (as do cans of Red Bull or coffee infusions), eventually you’ll run out of steam.

It’s necessary to take periodic breaks. You can use the Pomodoro system where you work for a period of 25 minutes and then break for a few minutes or devise something else. Some students prefer longer 90-minute sprints of focused intensity when getting into complex subject matter, where it takes time to get their head back into the topic after a break.

Find a system that works for you. That might mean trying a few out. Using study periods and breaks strategically, it helps to eliminate procrastination too. You’ll then be busy enough that you don’t have a chance to procrastinate.

Include Fun Things to Do Outside of Studies

It’s always good to have something to look forward to. It doesn’t have to be an expensive trip either. Perhaps it’s an hour of gaming or watching Netflix or hanging out with your buddies after your classes and coursework are complete for the day. It could be getting into the latest Michael Connolly thriller on your Kindle e-reader. Whatever it is, having something to look forward to later once your studies are finished makes for an excellent driving force.

Stay Healthy Through Good Nutrition and Effective Hydration

It’s easy to be so busy at university that you forget to eat sensibly and stay hydrated. When you don’t give your body the fuel that it requires, it impairs your functioning. This can be mental, with an inability to learn new information quickly and recall it when needed. It can also be physical with a lack of endurance to get through long lectures, get coursework completed, and still get enough rest.

Eat balanced meals. Plan for snacks if you need one between study breaks to keep you going. Also, look for drink dispensing machines on campus for healthy water beverages. If your university doesn’t yet have one, put in the suggestion and lobby for it.

Be Smart About Waste

This blog post from Bevi discusses the issue of campus sustainability, which might be of interest if you regularly drink soda in plastic cups. Bevi provides healthy drink choices that skip the high-sugar, less healthy hydration options. Follow the example of all the zero waste university campuses that play a key role in avoiding creating more junk to put into landfills. Adopt a zero waste policy in your student life. Don’t purchase what you do not need. Use a refillable water bottle rather than paper cups and canned drinks.

Also, consider the waste from product packaging when buying new items at college. Where will it go? Can it be packed down and put into a recycling bin on campus? If there isn’t a recycling option, go online to check local resources to dispose of the packaging in an environmentally friendly manner.

Freecycle, swap or donate useful goods that you’ve out-lived. Don’t just throw them out. Someone will find those items useful even if just for spare parts. That includes an old laptop that no longer starts up and has been since replaced.

Don’t Overschedule Yourself

While it’s certainly good to take on extra projects while at university to pad out your resume, you don’t want to overdo it. The same goes for trying to work all your spare hours too. It’s important to find a balance otherwise you’ll be burning the candle at both ends with your grades and body suffering as a result. If you think that you’re overdoing it now, find places to reduce your commitments.

Using the above tips, you’ll be a better student. Hopefully, you can graduate with better grades giving you increasing employability when going into the full-time job market. Many of these ideas work equally well in the world of work too, so they’re quite transferrable.

from Finance Girl http://www.financegirl.co.uk/how-to-make-your-time-at-university-more-productive/

Making Quick Money: 5 Methods for Students to Raise Some Cash Fast

Being a student is harder than people often realise, especially when you do not come from a particularly affluent family or if you want to make your own ends meet, without seeking help from your parents. You have to keep the grades up in order to ensure a better future for yourself while earning some cash on the side to take care of your own needs. Hoping to make matters a little easier, here are five proven methods to raise money for students that are not just effective, but relatively quick too.

Write Content Online

There is a constant and unending need for fresh online content and there aren’t enough writers doing it full-time to saturate the market yet. This creates the perfect opportunities for students to make some extra cash every week through writing content. In order to land good writing gigs, you will need to be at least a decent writer though and it is preferable if you stick to specific subjects such as the ones you are studying or have studied before. Just in case you are proficient in a few other languages such as Spanish, German and French in addition to English, you can expect to earn a pretty decent amount from online writing and translation jobs.

Drive with Uber

Uber drivers make quite a bit of money and students in the UK often sign up as part-time Uber drivers to make their extra cash. In order to sign up with Uber, be sure that you meet the following criterions.

• You need to be 21-years or older
• You will require a valid UK driving license
• You will need to have a permit to work in the United Kingdom

To find out more about how you can sign up with Uber in the UK as a student, check out this article.

Scrap Your Car

If the car you own has seen better days and you are likely going to need a better car soon anyway, it is time to scrap that car for cash. The Scrap Car Network makes scrapping your car super easy because you can get instant quotes for your vehicle right from their website. Head over to their site, enter the number plate and your postcode to get an instant cash quote on how much you are likely to get by scrapping that old car. They provide their services all across the United Kingdom, so once you enter the details and agree to what they are offering, they will even pick up the car from its parking spot, free of charge. When you are in need of quick and urgent cash, this could very well be the fastest way to get it.

Put that Camera to Use

If you are more than just a selfie enthusiast and take your photography seriously enough, there is seldom a shortage for photography jobs these days, as long as the student has at least a basic idea of what he/she is doing. Of course, this doesn’t apply to just everyone because you will need a basic understanding of camerawork, but you would be surprised how fast naturals pick up on the necessary basics by joining a short course. Even if you do not have the professional knowledge or experience to land a gig, stock photo sites are always on the lookout for quality photographs and pay a decent amount of money to amateur photographers for relevant clicks.

Tutor Others

If you are good at your studies, tutoring others can be an excellent way to earn money and a lot of people do it full-time as well. In fact, you don’t necessarily have to be good in class because all you need is a skill that others want to learn, and you are set. This could be anything from popular musical instruments like the guitar and the piano, to singing classes and teaching English to non-native students. On the flip side, if you know any other popular languages aside from English, you will probably find an even wider range of students. Spanish, French, Mandarin, and German are particularly in high demand at the moment.

These five methods should be enough to take care of most quick cash need that you may have, but just in case these are not enough, do not be shy to ask for help from your parents or guardians if you really need it. You can always pay them back later and since you are still in school/college, it isn’t anything to worry too much over either, as long as you do pay them back when you are able to. However, if the money required is a significant enough amount, it might be worth reconsidering whether or not the cause justifies the investment.

from Finance Girl http://www.financegirl.co.uk/making-quick-money-5-methods-for-students-to-raise-some-cash-fast/

Martin Lewis: A warning to every UK worker aged 22+ you’re likely about to get a pay rise – but it may cost you

On 6 April 2019, most UK workers aged 22 or over are due a hidden pay rise – but your employer needn't tell you. This is all about 'auto-enrolment', where your employer must contribute towards your pension. Now it'll have to give you even more, though then again, you'll have to shell out much more too. So I'm bashing out this blog to take you through it.

from Martin Lewis' Blog https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/Martin Lewis: A warning to every UK worker aged 22+

Martin Lewis: A warning to every UK worker aged 22+, you’re likely about to get a pay rise – but it may cost you

On 6 April 2019, most UK workers aged 22 or over are due a hidden pay rise – but your employer needn't tell you. This is all about 'auto-enrolment', where your employer must contribute towards your pension. Now it'll have to give you even more, though then again, you'll have to shell out much more too. So I'm bashing out this blog to take you through it.

from Martin Lewis' Blog https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2019/02/martin-lewis--a-warning-to-every-uk-worker-aged-22---you-re-like/

How did Warren Buffett get rich?

If the devil’s greatest trick was to make the world believe he didn’t exist, then Warren Buffett’s greatest ruse has been to make the world forget he was a hedge fund manager.

I very much admire Warren Buffett, both as a man and an investor, so don’t take my Biblical allusion too seriously.

Nevertheless, it’s remarkable how little credit you’ll find given to the way Buffett’s early partnerships turbo-charged his wealth, sowing the seeds for him to become the world’s intermittently richest man.

Most pundits have preferred to focus on how Warren Buffett got rich investing in Coca-Cola (and you can too!) or else how Buffett is really a businessman disguised as a stock trader, so you shouldn’t bother.

More recently academics have sought to explain away his market-beating achievements as a combination of factor investing and benefiting from cheap leverage.¹

But the truth of how Buffett got rich lies somewhere in between.

Stock picking certainly explains why he’s a millionaire. But his early business success in running money for other people is almost certainly why Buffett is a billionaire.

Secret 1: Buffett the City Slicker

From Buffett’s biography to the regular eulogies about his life, the fact that Buffett claimed a huge swathe of his partners’ gains to enrich himself is rarely mentioned.

That’s a bit like dropping the Wright Brothers from the history of flight, or omitting Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings.

It’s how Buffett’s wealth accumulation first entered the big league.

After a precocious childhood selling newspapers and investing in his first shares when he was 11 – so far, so fitting the legend – Buffett began his professional investing career on Wall Street as an analyst.

Yes, fans of folksy Omaha – Wall Street, the infamous hive of scum and villainy!

Buffett worked for Renaissance man and genius Benjamin Graham, his hero and the biggest single influence on his investing style.

His initial salary was $12,000, which sounds modest but is the equivalent of more than $110,000 in today’s money. Not bad at all for a 24-year old, even by the standards of modern trading floors.

Buffett’s high starting salary is the first aspect of his wealth accumulation that’s rarely dwelt on by stock pickers who dream of becoming a billionaire on £250 a month in an ISA.

On the other hand, the legend reasserts itself with the truth that Buffett did scrimp and save – he reinvested most of what he earned.

According to my thrice-read copy of The Snowball, by 1956 Buffett had amassed $174,000. He did this by compounding his teenage savings and his more recent earnings in a focused share portfolio – arguably the closest his life history comes to what his admirers say we should do to emulate his success.

Buffett grew his wealth by 61% a year since going to college. That $174,000 is equivalent to $1.6 million in 2019 dollars.

Secret 2: Buffett the fund manager

Buffett was a millionaire in today’s terms while still in his mid-twenties, and we certainly shouldn’t downplay this achievement.

But what laid the foundations for him to enter the ranks of the mega-rich were the private investment partnerships that he set up and ran, largely for family and friends, between 1956 and 1969.

The terms of these partnerships varied. For the first partnership, the seven other founding partners put in $105,000.

Buffett put in just $100.

Here’s his recollection of the deal, from The Snowball:

“I got half the upside above a four percent threshold and I took a quarter of the downside myself. So if I broke even, I lost money. And my obligation to pay back losses was not limited to my capital. It was unlimited”.

Buffett felt an obligation to pay back losses partly because his early investors were the closest people in his life. His wife’s father was one of them, and his sister another.

The stipulation that would see him out of pocket if his returns fell below 4% is far removed from the typical hedge fund of today.

Many still charge a 2% fee every year, regardless of performance.

And even today’s greediest hedge funds don’t claim “half the upside”. For years the standard deal was 2% annual and a 20% performance fee – and it’s been falling in recent times – as well as some sort of high water mark to theoretically protect investors from volatility that enriches the manager but not the customers.²

Buffett was looking to take 50% of the upside, not 20%!

True, Buffett’s upside came only after the first 4%, whereas most hedge funds today will take, say, 20% of anything they make at all (even interest on cash in the bank).

This is Warren Buffett we’re talking about here, though – and he doesn’t do miserly returns for long.

In 1957, the three partnerships he was operating gained 10%, against a market down 8%.

1958 was even better. Again quoting The Snowball:

The next year the partnerships’ had risen more than 40% in value. Buffett’s fees so far from managing the partnerships, reinvested, came to $83,085. These fees had mushroomed his initial contribution of only $700 – $100 contributed to each of the seven partnerships – into a stake worth 9.5% of the combined value of all the partnerships.

I hope you don’t need to bust out a compound interest calculator to see how well the partnership fee structure was already serving Buffett.

Sure, he needed to succeed with his stock picking to make decent returns for his partners.

The point though is that it was by leveraging other people’s money into those picks that Buffett made himself rich.

If Buffett had merely invested the $700 that he’d put into the partnerships over those first two years instead, then he’d have grown it to merely $1,078.

That’s $82,000 less than the money he made by investing for other people!

Gearing up his great stockpicking

My point is not that Warren Buffett isn’t a great investor – he is.

Nor am I saying he was ripping off his early investors. He made most of them into multi-millionaires, and they probably never realised how much the arrangement protected their downside.

Most people care more about losing money than making it, so I believe the terms weren’t sheer avarice on Buffett’s part.

Nevertheless, it was the fees generated by his investing talent through the partnerships that made Buffett rich, not those pure stock picks themselves. By January 1962, barely five years after he began, Buffett was a millionaire on paper, with his share of the partnerships’ assets valued at $1,025,000.³

The moral? If you want to get as rich as Warren Buffett, you don’t merely need to start early and grow old. Simply investing like Buffett won’t do it, either.

Instead, to get very rich as an investor, you need to invest like Warren Buffett on other people’s behalf, and claim a good portion of the gains for yourself.

Rich folk history

Ironically, Buffett recently won his 10-year bet against hedge funds partly on account of their high fees.

And in recent years he has championed index funds as the best solution for everyday investors like you and me.

Once you know how well he did from high fees himself in his pre-Berkshire Hathaway years, you can’t help thinking there’s an element of ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ to this.

(Which is certainly no reason to ignore his advice to invest passively. Quite the opposite!)

Some people have saluted how well Berkshire Hathaway has served its shareholders, compared to how most hedge fund managers milk their customers with the 2/20 structure.

The truth is more complicated. Just as Warren Buffett uses folksy analogies to make economic issues more understandable, his most ardent fans – if not the man himself – have also played us like a fiddle when it comes to seeing how he first got rich.

If Buffett was a private investor in his spare time, as per the myth – if he was a successful everyday businessman investing his excess cash, or maybe even a doctor or a teacher – then he’d very likely have become a multi-millionaire.

I doubt we would have heard of him, though.

Update: 7 December 2012

I don’t know if Warren Buffett reads Monevator – I’d be flattered for sure – but he was less coy about his early hedge fund days in publicity for his later book, Tap Dancing to Work, than he was for The Snowball.

Here he is discussing his old hedge fund with The New York Times:

Until 1969, Mr. Buffett operated a private partnership that was akin in some ways to a modern hedge fund, except the fee structure was decidedly different.

Instead of charging “2 and 20” — a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of profits — Mr. Buffett’s investors “keep all of the annual gains up to 6 percent; above that level Buffett takes a one-quarter cut,” Ms. Loomis wrote. […]

“If you want to make a lot of money and you own a hedge fund or a private equity fund, there’s nothing like 2 and 20 and a lot of leverage,” he said over a lunch of Cobb salad.

“If I kept my partnership and owned Berkshire through that, I would have made even more money.”

It was managing money for other people that enabled Warren Buffett to get very rich, very young.

And that early fortune gave him the capital he needed to compound to become a billionaire.

1. Leverage is basically borrowing to invest. In Buffett’s case he uses the ‘float’ provided by customers of his insurance companies as cheap capital to invest.
2. However one way this high water mark may in reality prove useless is if a manager simply shuts down any funds that are underwater.
3. Around $7.5 million in 2011 money.

from Monevator https://monevator.com/how-did-warren-buffett-get-rich/

Weekend reading: 29 quick rules about money

What caught my eye this week.

A few weeks ago we discussed whether investing blogs were running out of things to say.

Perhaps this reached ace writer Morgan Housel via Chinese whispers as a death cry of “FINISH HIM!”

Because as if to rub salt into the wounds, Housel has now condensed a whole blogosphere of personal finance wisdom into one short post.

My favourite sequence of his Short Money Rules:

3. Good investing is 50% psychology, 48% history, 2% finance.

4. Great investing is 40% skill, 20% luck, 40% inability to tell which is which.

5. Bad investing is 40% overconfidence, 40% fees, 20% denial that keeps it all going.

It’s all good stuff, so do check out Morgan’s complete article.

(With luck he’s dropped the mic, walked off the stage, and left the rest of us to keep on waffling these points into 1,000 word epics… )

Have a great weekend everyone!

From Monevator

Updated! Low cost index trackers that will save you money – Monevator

From the archive-ator: A mortgage is just money rented from a bank – Monevator

News

Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!¹

Research reveals who made the most from UK property [Search result] – FT

Property repossessions at lowest level since the 1980s… – BBC

…but property professionals still gloomiest in a decade – ThisIsMoney

Amazon to launch first checkout-free stores in London – Retail Gazette

The fashion models struggling with a life of debt – BBC

JP Morgan is rolling out the first US bank-backed cryptocurrency – CNBC

£25m car scrappage scheme for ‘low-income families’ in London ahead of 2021 air quality clean-up – ThisIsMoney

(Click to enlarge)

BOE: Business investment diverged sharply after the EU Referendum – Sky’s Ed Conway via Twitter

Products and services

Should you have to pay exit fees if your investing site shuts down? – ThisIsMoney

New site launched to help workers claim uncollected pay – Guardian

Could you make £150 a month selling unwanted clothes on fee-free Vinted? – ThisIsMoney

How to improve your credit score [Search result] – FT

Ratesetter will give you a free £100 [and me a cash bonus] if you invest £1,000 for a year – Ratesetter

Hargreaves’ own-brand funds under-perform [Search result] – FT

“Our MDF furniture brought toxic fumes into our home” – Guardian

Mews houses for sale [Gallery] – Guardian

Comment and opinion

When aiming for a target, consider the accuracy of the weapon – Portfolio Charts

What are the different measures of inflation, and are we being conned? – Guardian

Diversify when the upside is limited – The Market Cyclist

Budgeting with Cardi B – A Wealth of Common Sense

Do you like what’s in the tin of your global index fund? – DIY Investor UK

They Live [On big picture asset allocation biases] – Epsilon Theory

More evidence ‘tactical investing’ is code for ‘do worse’ – Capital Spectator

How to wreck a pension plan in three easy steps – A Wealth of Common Sense

Fund managers are still overweight cash and underweight shares… – Fat Pitch

…but other data suggests private investors have already piled back in – Dan Lyon

FTSE 100 dividend-based valuation and forecast for 2019 – UK Value Investor

Sovereign bond returns since Waterloo [research, via Abnormal Returns] – CEPR

Brexit

Britain is losing £40bn a year to Brexit, says BOE rate-setter – ThisIsMoney

Porsche is asking customers to commit to 10% price hikes if no-deal Brexit – ThisIsMoney

Dutch Brexit humour from outside the nuthouse – Simple Living in Somerset

Cambridge academic bares all in a bid to reverse Brexit – via Twitter

Kindle book bargains

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – £1.99 on Kindle

ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever by Jason Fried – £1.99 on Kindle

Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship by MJ DeMarco – £0.99 on Kindle

Off our beat

This man devised a formula for finding love, and followed it – BBC

Fun rant about our supposedly inevitable jobless AI future – Scott Locklin

The cognitive aristocracy – Of Dollars and Data

Water bottle signalling [Clearly I’m ancient, news to me!] – The Atlantic

“I stole £30,000 from my mum to make millions” – BBC

Would a $249 gravity blanket help you sleep better? – 1483

And finally…

“Superior investors are people who have a better sense for what tickets are in the bowl, and thus for whether it’s worth participating in the lottery. In other words, while superior investors — like everyone else — don’t know exactly what the future holds, they do have an above-average understanding of future tendencies.”
– Howard Marks, Mastering the Market Cycle

Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Friday!

1. Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”.

from Monevator https://monevator.com/weekend-reading-29-quick-rules-about-money/