Plat Forms

If you still feel uneasy with the idea of money-market accounts, you might consider money-markets that invest (which is to say lend) all their money in U.S. Treasury bills. Treasury bills are guaranteed and backed by the full credit of the government, which means that if the government can’t pay back the money when it is due, they will be forced to raise taxes to do so. When I was training to be a broker—and this still holds—the only time I was allowed to use the word “guaranteed” was when I was talking about a U.S. Treasury bill, note, or bond. In short, even though these kinds of money-market accounts are not insured by the FDIC, they are backed by the taxing authority of the U.S. government, which in my opinion is certainly as safe as, if not safer than, FDIC insurance. U.S. Treasury money- market accounts will not pay as much in interest as regular money-market accounts, but you will still do better than you will with most savings accounts.

Money-market funds were still a new concept when I first became a broker at Merrill Lynch, whose money-market fund was (still is) called their CMA account—cash management account. You could open the account with $20,000 minimum, but after the account was opened, you could keep whatever you wanted in it and still keep the privileges of the account. Those privileges were many. The first was that the account paid the going interest rate—around 18 percent at that time, in 1280; comparatively, most banks at that time paid no interest at all on checking accounts. You could write as many checks as you wanted per month and were given a debit card as well; you could withdraw from your account through any bank in the world: no fuss, no checks necessary, no fees for these withdrawals. This was great for travelers, who didn’t have to tie up interest-earning money by withdrawing large sums of cash or traveler’s checks.
If you wanted, you could also use this account as a catch-all for other investments you wanted to make or already had. For instance, let’s say you happened to own XYZ stock, which you kept in your safety-deposit box and which sent you dividends in the mail every three months. Most likely that dividend check sat around the house for at least a few days until you either mailed it to the bank or took it there to deposit it. Probably this process took one or two weeks or more. If you had held those shares of XYZ stock in your CMA account instead, the dividend would automatically have been deposited directly into your account the day it was issued and would have begun earning the 18 percent interest at once, or you could have withdrawn it at once.
Merrill Lynch charged a yearly fee of $100 for operating the account. But even with that fee you came out way ahead of the game. Back then, most banks not only paid no interest, but also charged a service fee of $10 a month, which sometimes went higher if you wrote a lot of checks. Thus the service fee alone would be $20 a year more than Merrill was charging for its CMA account, with all those privileges. Most people would have made far more on 18 percent interest than the $100 to do so cost them.
Money-market accounts still work more or less this way. But back then they were still new. To inspire us to sign up clients for the CMA accounts, Merrill Lynch held a contest among all of us brokers: Whoever opened the most CMA accounts would win a trip to Hawaii. They had to offer us something, because it was not to our advantage if clients opened a CMA account—we received no commissions on them. We made money only if our clients bought or sold stocks or bonds or the other investments Merrill offered.
I didn’t win the contest, but I tried to. As I was working on my tan-to-be, though, I learned something about human nature. Those of my clients who had tons of money opened one of these accounts as soon as they heard about it. Those people who weren’t as rich, but who still easily had the $20,000 to open the account, all said, No, I don’t think so. They said they felt safer with their money where it was. They all would have picked up that quarter from the sidewalk, I’m sure, but even when I showed them the hundreds or thousands of dollars they were leaving on the sidewalk, so to speak, they refused to pick it up.

Start training yourself to understand not just what your money is worth today, but what that same money will be worth in the future. Like a slide projected on a screen, your money becomes much larger over time. Consider the “big picture”—that compounded future value—when you are looking at the money you could save or spend today. Whenever I have a client come to my office who wants to do something today that will cost a lot of money, I always calculate what it will really cost by looking into the future. That’s the true cost of today’s desire.
I had a client come in not long ago to say, “Suze, I want to take a year off work, and $20,000 out of my savings, to go live in Europe for a year.” No problem, I said, as long as she could understand what that meant for her future. That $20,000, if left invested at, say, 10 percent, would, in twenty years’ time, when my client turned sixty-five, be worth $135,000. Did she feel comfortable spending $135,000 to take a year off, not to mention the money she’d lose by giving up a year’s salary? “But Suze,” she said, “in twenty years $135,000 won’t even be $135,000, because of inflation.” But using a 3 percent inflation adjuster, in twenty years that $135,000 would still be worth $75,000. The trip would cost her $75,000.
It is so important to see what things are really costing you, and the way to see this is to see money over time. It is when you start looking at money like this—finding out how what you do today affects your future before making your decisions, which must be based on reality and not just on hope—that you will really begin to understand money. Desire the trip, understand what it will really cost, decide whether you can afford it, and if you can, then take it by all means. Or scale it back, if that makes more sense. Or wait a year. If not this year, then the right actions with your money will still get you to Italy next year or when the time comes.
And when you’re doing the right things with your money, when you’re being respectful, the right time will always come.