The Big Picture Is Revealing
Most folks wouldn't dream of sinking half of their wealth into a single investment or borrowing money to buy stocks and bonds. Yet many already are.
We all engage in "mental accounting," viewing our home, mortgage, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, bank accounts, auto loans and credit cards as totally separate from one another. But every so often, it's worth stepping back and looking at the big picture.
If you do that, you will get a better handle on how much risk you are taking -- and you may discover simple ways to boost your overall investment return.
Running Numbers
Let's say you have a $300,000 house, $180,000 of mortgage debt, a $15,000 car loan, $5,000 of credit-card debt, $100,000 in stock funds, $70,000 in bonds, $5,000 in a checking account and $25,000 in a savings account.
How do you make sense of all that? As a first step, add up all your assets and add up all your liabilities. Your assets would include everything you own that's readily saleable, including your house, stock funds, bonds, checking account and savings account. Together, they amount to an impressive $500,000.
But you also owe a lot of money, thanks to your mortgage, car loan and credit-card balance. Those liabilities total $200,000. If you subtract this amount from your $500,000 in assets, you have a net worth of $300,000.
Your true net worth may, in fact, be somewhat larger than $300,000. The reason: You will probably be eligible for Social Security and you might also get a pension from your employer. These two streams of retirement income are enormously valuable. How valuable? Think about how much you would have to invest in bonds to generate comparable income.
Leveraging Losses
You took out the mortgage to acquire your house, you might have run up your credit card to purchase furniture and you used the auto loan to buy your car. In your mind, there's no doubt some connection between these debts and the goods purchased.
And that makes some sense. If you defaulted on your auto loan, your car would be repossessed, and if you missed enough mortgage payments, you would lose your house. (By contrast, the credit-card company won't want the furniture back. Trust me, it will want cash.)
But assuming you don't plan to default, it is often more useful to think about your debts in aggregate. If you do that, you find you have $500,000 of total assets that have been partially paid for with $200,000 of debt. You might have borrowed to buy one particular item. But what you have ended up with is a leveraged bet on your entire collection of assets.
Borrowing money to buy investments is, of course, a risky strategy. Let's say your home drops 15% in value and your stock funds dive 30%. That would knock down the total value of your assets from $500,000 to $425,000, a 15% decline. But because you are leveraged with $200,000 in debt, your net worth would dive from $300,000 to $225,000, a more nerve-racking 25% plunge.
Most of the time, this sort of loss wouldn't pose any immediate financial danger. As long as you keep making your monthly debt payments, you can sit tight and wait for the markets to recover.
But suppose you lost your job tomorrow or suppose you died next week, and those unfortunate events coincided with a lousy moment in the housing or financial markets.
If you or your heirs moved to pay down your debts, some assets would have to be sold -- and suddenly your "paper losses" could become all too real.
Betting Big
It isn't just leverage that creates problems. Your overall financial risk is also driven by the mix of assets that you own. In the example above, you have 20% of your total assets stashed in stocks, 20% in conservative investments and a whopping 60% invested in your house.
Many folks fret endlessly over a stock-market downturn. Yet, if you add up your assets, you will likely find that you are far more vulnerable to a real-estate crash. Indeed, if you are in your 20s or 30s and you have just bought your first house, your home might account for 80% or 90% of your assets.
To make matters worse, you don't have a diversified real-estate play. Rather, you have a huge chunk of your wealth riding on a single piece of property.
To diversify that big bet, you might build up your stock and bond portfolio -- and you should think long and hard before increasing your real-estate bet by, say, trading up to a bigger home, buying a vacation property or investing in rental real estate.
Comparison Shopping
If you borrow money, you face a choice: Should you make the minimum required monthly debt payment or should you endeavor to pay back the money more quickly? As you weigh this decision, consider the after-tax cost of your debt and how that compares to the likely after-tax return on your various assets.
Take the $5,000 in credit-card debt that we assumed above. That debt might be costing you 12% a year, far more than the 2% interest you are earning on your $25,000 savings-account balance.
You might be reluctant to tap your savings account, because you view it as an emergency reserve. Still, if you are comfortable holding a somewhat smaller reserve, you could boost your overall financial return by taking $5,000 out of your 2% savings account and using it to pay off your 12% credit card.
Similarly, you could probably bolster your overall financial return by taking money out of your savings account and using it to pay down your auto loan and mortgage. That, however, would further eat into your emergency reserve.
What to do? You could use your savings account to reduce your auto and mortgage debts, while simultaneously setting up a home-equity line of credit, which would give you an alternative -- and potentially much larger -- source of emergency cash. 别算“心理账”
多数人不会考虑把一半的财富用于某笔投资或者借钱来买股票和债券。不过，也有许多人已经这么做了。
我们都在算“心理账” (mental accounting) ，就是说我们认为自己的房产、抵押贷款、共同基金、股票、债券、银行帐户、汽车贷款和信用卡完全互不相干。但有时候，退一步，海阔天空。
如果你这么做，你就会更好地了解自己的风险有多大－－进而可能发现简单的方法来提高总体投资回报。
假设你拥有一幢价值 30 万美元的房子，背负著 18 万美元的抵押贷款、 1.5 万美元的汽车贷款和 5,000 美元的信用卡贷款，并将 10 万美元投入股票基金， 7 万美元投入债券，而支票帐户有 5,000 美元，储蓄存款帐户有 2.5 万美元。
怎么理解所有这些数字呢？首先，分别计算总资产和总负债。你的资产包括你拥有的任何很容易变现的东西，包括你的房产、股票基金、债券、支票帐户和活期帐户。总共为 50 万美元，可真是不少了。
但同时，考虑到你的抵押贷款、汽车贷款和信用卡贷款，你也欠下了很多债。这些债务总计 20 万美元。如果将这部分从总资产中扣除，那么你的资产净值为 30 万美元。
实际上，你真正的资产净值可能要略高于 30 万美元。理由是：你可能符合社会保障的条件，你还可能从雇主那里获得一笔退休金。这两笔退休收入的来源价值非常可观。想一想你要投多少钱在债券上才能获得与之可比的收入吧。
你用抵押贷款来买房，你用汽车贷款来买车，而为了买家具，你可能已经用完信用卡额度了。在你的脑海里，这些债务和所购买的商品之间无疑存在著某种关联。
这种想法有些道理。如果你拖欠汽车贷款，你的汽车可能会被收回；如果你无法支付足够的分期付款，你可能会失去你的房子。（相反，信用卡公司可不想要回家具。相信我，它们只想要现金。）
但假如你没有拖欠贷款的打算，想一想你的总债务通常更有帮助。这样一来，你就会发现，在你拥有的 50 万美元总资产当中，一部分已经通过 20 万美元的债务融资得到清偿。你可能为购买某件商品而借钱。但最后你拥有对整个资产组合的杠杆作用。
借钱来投资当然一项高风险的策略。假设你的房产缩水了 15% ，你的股票基金下跌了 30% 。这会导致你的资产总值由 50 万美元下降到 42.5 万美元，即 15% 的降幅。但由于你有 20 万美元的债务杠杆，你的资产净值将由 30 万美元下降到 22.5 万美元，即 25% 的降幅，这可更叫人伤脑筋了。
大多数时候，这种损失不会造成直接的财务风险，只要你按时缴纳月供款，你就能稳坐钓鱼台，静候市场复苏。
但假设你明天就失业了，或者下周就要死了，而这些不幸的事件恰好发生在房地产或金融市场的低迷时刻。
如果你或是你的继承人要继续清偿贷款，那么部分资产就不得不被出售－－突然间，你“纸面上的损失”可能就会变成现实。
始作俑者不仅仅是杠杆。你的总体财务风险也与你所持有的资产组合密不可分。在上面的例子中，你将 20% 的总资产投入股票， 20% 投入保守的投资工具，而将非常大的比例－－ 60% 投入房产。
许多人对股市的低迷惶惶不可终日。然而，如果你把所持有的资产相加，你可能会发现你更容易受到房地产市场崩盘的影响。的确，如果你还只是二三十岁，刚刚买下自己的第一处房产，那么房产可能占到你资产的 80%-90% 。
更糟糕的是，你没有一个分散化的房地产投资组合。相反，你将绝大部分财富放在一处地产上。
为了分散这样大的赌注带来的风险，你可能要建立股票和债券投资组合－－而且你应该花时间好好想一想再决定是否增加你的房地产投资，比如说，换一所大房子，置办一处度假屋，或是投资出租房地产。
如果你借了钱，你就面临一个选择：应该按期支付最低要求月还款，还是应该努力提前还贷？在你斟酌权衡的时候，考虑一下税后债务成本，并与可能的税后资产回报相比较。
以上面假设的 5,000 美元信用卡债务举例说明。这笔债务一年的成本可能高达 12% ，远远高于你在 2.5 万美元存款上获得的 2% 的利息。
你可能不愿动用存款，因为你将它视为应急准备金。尽管如此，如果你能够接受持有一个金额较少的准备金的话，从存款中拿出 5,000 美元偿付信用卡债务，这可能会提高你的总体财务回报率。
同样，你也可以从存款中取出部分资金用来偿付汽车贷款和抵押贷款。不过，这样做会进一步减少你的应急准备金。
该怎么办呢？你可以动用存款来减少汽车贷款和抵押贷款，同时申请物业套现贷款，这将给你带来另外一个选择－－而且可能是大得多的应急现金的来源。
