What caught my eye this week.

I debated a Tweet of Morgan Housel’s this week, after that excellent financial writer retweeted President Trump’s suggestion that Boeing should rebrand its 737 MAX after two fatal crashes. Morgan thought this good advice from the President. I wasn’t convinced.1

Here it is as a screenshot (I’m not sure if you can embed conversations from Twitter):

You’ll see Morgan has 132 Likes for his Tweet. And you’ll notice my pithy reply has zero.

Morgan replied to me with the example of Arthur Anderson, the scandal-struck Enron accountancy firm that was ultimately renamed Accenture.

A snappy riposte that eight people Liked – including me!

A couple of people Liked my subsequent comments, but really, I mean literally a couple. On the numbers, Morgan had won.

Here’s the thing though. I am right.

Edgy material

Whenever I wonder what my presumed source of edge is as an investor, ten minutes on Twitter puts me right.

It reminds me people prefer to be outraged. People prefer to be melodramatic. People emphasize the recent and close at hand to an insane degree.

Super well-read Morgan knows all this of course, and he could easily have written my reply to him on another day. But I suspect many of his followers cycle from one 24-hour crisis to another, every day watching the world come apart at the seams. Apparently.

So as I say, I’m right – people forget.

A few examples:

• In 2015 the US Mexican food chain Chipotle saw its shares crash from around $750 to around $250 in the wake of several E Coli outbreaks. Sales fell because people didn’t want to get poisoned. I heard numerous analysts repeatedly write the stock off as dead money. But last year’s revenues were Chipotle’s highest-ever, and it’s smashing expectations again. People forget.

• After being revealed to have cheated emissions tests, Volkswagen was condemned as having not just trashed its own brand but also that of German manufacturing writ large. It was a scandal! There’d be boycotts, big fines, maybe a restructuring. Yet 2018 was Volkswagen’s best year for car sales ever. People forget.

• In 1989 we had the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska – one of the worst in history – which trashed the environment and saw Exxon receive additional criticism for its slow response. Never mind, by 2006 it was the most valuable company in the world. People forget.

• Or how about the terrible behaviour of all the Wall Street banks in the run up to the financial crisis? So bad it almost brought down the global economy. You remember, that guy wrote that book they made into a film. Never again! The big banks had to be broken up! Even I ranted! But were they subsequently taken apart for their sins – by disgusted customers if not by regulators? Yeah, not so much. The biggest Wall Street banks are far bigger than they were before the crisis. People – boom – forget.

I could go on and on – these are just the examples that first popped into my head.

In fact it’s harder to think of companies that didn’t recover from a public relations scandal!

I know what you’re thinking – there was the Ratner jewelry debacle in the early 1990s, when the CEO Gerald Ratner told a business conference that his products were cheap because they were “total crap”. Hundreds of stores were closed in the aftermath. You won’t find a Ratner-branded shop on the High Street today.

True, but that’s because the company was rebranded Signet in the 1990s. It’s now listed in New York and is valued at well over $1bn. So it didn’t die – but it did feel the need to rebrand. I guess we can chalk this one up as a win for Trumpian thinking.

I’m not saying companies don’t fail. They do, all the time. But in my experience it’s rarely because of a one-time issue. They fail because their products or practices become out of step with their markets.

We have to remember survivorship bias – doubtless I’m forgetting companies that did disappear because they, well, disappeared.

But the general point stands – much of the time people forget. They forget the terrible thing that happened a few years ago. They forget who it happened to. They even forget bull markets follow bear markets, as the Of Dollars and Data blog explained well this week.

They forget that they forget.

There are many things eroding edge in the financial markets, but the collective wisdom of Twitter isn’t one of them.

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1. Aside: Wow, how little of that paragraph would have made sense a decade okay? Tweets, retweets, public debates, Boeing having a safety problem, and – yikes – President Trump. [↩]

We’ve not one but two of our favourite bloggers guest posting today. What’s more they’re going at each other head-to-head! Roll up, roll up, for a bare knuckle cage fight – personal finance style! Okay, not really, Mr YFG and Fire v London are too polite for that. But we hope you enjoy their gentle jousting nonetheless.

There’s a divisive issue that has been tearing the nation apart forever. Bloggers are at odds over it. Family members squabble over it. Maybe you’ve even put off retiring because of it.

No, we’re not talking about Brexit. This is a far more ancient disagreement than that mere whippersnapper!

We’re thinking of the age-old question as to whether your home is an asset and an investment. And even if it is, whether you should count it as part of ‘the number’ you need in order to declare yourself financially-free and able to retire early, should that float your boat.

Parliament isn’t getting a great rap at the moment, but we see merit in a serious debate. So let’s have at it!

At the end you’ll even get to give your (indicative) vote.

• Proposing the motion “This house believes it deserves to be included in your net worth” is FIRE v London, who is here to make the argument FOR including your home in your Financial Independence (FI) net worth figure.

• Opposing the motion is Mr YFG, who will make the argument AGAINST.

And are you sitting down, dear reader? Because there’s a twist…

Warren Buffett’s wise sidekick Charlie Munger once said:

“It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents.”

We’re going to put this to the test: Each debater is arguing the opposite of what they believe.

Let’s see if we change anybody’s mind. (Maybe even our own?)

We now call upon FIRE v London to get proceedings underway.

FIRE v London: Property should be counted in your net worth

Gentle readers, the argument I am putting forward today is nothing short of simple common sense.

Property is big!

Property is the biggest type of asset out there. In the UK it is 51% of our net worth, dwarfing all other types of asset.

Why would retail investors like us FIRE1 types ignore the biggest asset class?

Of course not all properties are residential properties. And not all residential properties are your home. But what we are discussing in this debate is your primary home – where the FIREr lives – and whether this home, and any associated mortgage, counts in the Net Worth calculation you tend to do for FIRE.

The average home in the UK is worth around £250k. In London it’s more than £480k.

For most people, the savings needed for Financial Independence are around £1m. So in that context, the house you live in is an important number – potentially half of the total assets required.

Why would we possibly exclude the most important asset from the calculation?

Big as an asset but also big as an expense

Of course, property is also the biggest cost for most households. It is around 22% of disposable income in the UK on average, and a lot more for #GenerationRent – who in London pay on average more than £1,600 per month to rent a home.

From the point of view on somebody on the FIRE path, this is important. To be Financially Independent one needs to be able to meet all your living expenses, and this obviously includes housing costs. If you own your own house outright, with no mortgage, you’ll have a significantly lower cost of living.

So, in fact, this house believes not only that your primary home, as an asset, should be included in your net worth, but that your housing costs should be included in your assessment of FIRE. You can no more disentangle your primary home, as an asset, than you can forget about paying for electricity and broadband.

So far, so much common sense.

Rent vs buy? An important side question

In fact once you move beyond common sense, there are good practical arguments for considering both your asset and your housing costs in your FIRE deliberations.

It may even be that – counter-intuitively – renting rather than owning turns out to make FIRE more achievable.

Certainly in parts of London with low rental yields, renting may prove significantly cheaper, especially if you can obtain decent investment returns on the freed up capital.

This house might be better off sold! But you won’t know if you don’t consider it in your net worth.

UK property has important tax benefits

But never mind the size of it, look at the quality. Property is not just a large asset, it is also – especially as your primary home – one of the best assets. Particularly here in the UK.

In the UK property holds a special place in the heart and mind of everybody – not just those Englishmen whose ‘home is their castle’.  In Britain, property investment is ‘safe as houses’. Property is a ‘one way bet’. Stocks and shares? That’s ‘gambling on the stock market’, whereas you can put your trust in ‘bricks and mortar’.

As you can see almost every week in the Sunday Times’ Fame & Fortune column, where successful people make these arguments all the time. And they are successful people, so their arguments must be right, right?

In the UK, the taxman agrees with Fame & Fortune. Property is taxed differently to other types of asset. Crucially, there is no capital gains to pay on your primary home. If you pay off your mortgage, live in your home rent-free, and ultimately have no capital gains to pay, your primary home – the single biggest chunk of wealth for most of us – attracts no tax.

As in most places, here in the UK property is also arguably the key asset that it makes sense to borrow to buy. This means that you can get leveraged returns on it. This means you’d be crazy not to – especially for your own home, where mortgage rates are particularly low.

So, property is different. It is a large and obvious asset for retail investors to buy. In owning it you eliminate rent as a housing cost. There is no tax to pay, and you can leverage up your returns. You’d be foolish not to invest in it.

Let’s hear no more nonsense about excluding it from your net worth. Property is too big to exclude, and too attractive to exclude. That’s why this house believes it deserves to be included in your net worth!

But now I turn to Mr YFG, who is going to oppose the motion.

My YFG: Does my asset look big in this?

Whilst my honourable friend is right to call our home big, the case for it being an asset is less clear.

That’s because our homely abodes don’t generate any income or cash towards our FIRE target.

As Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame points out, a home creates a negative cash outflow. For example, a mortgage, maintenance costs, bills and taxes. That makes it a liability!

My friend and rival also correctly points out that whether you should rent versus own your own home is a serious question to ask. This follows from the above. A bigger, more valuable house means you need to hold greater and greater amounts of other assets to balance out the cash outflow.

It also means leaving money on the table. The research shows that in the UK, investing in the stock market has beaten investing in property.  Money in your house is money out of the market. Money out of the market is the lost returns needed to finance FIRE.

Overall, the bigger your house, the harder it is to reach FIRE!

Alternative facts

Putting aside whether a house is an asset or not – can we even claim it’s big?

Valuing a home is very difficult. Unlike shares in an ETF (or FIRE bloggers), no two houses are alike. Sure, we can get a valuation from our local slick-backed-hair estate agent. But the ‘true’ value is only known when you come to sell.

Those mansions in Florida were quite valuable until they weren’t. Likewise the owners of former homes in Dunwich thought little was safer than houses… until the North Sea developed a taste for bricks and mortar.

This means that if you include your own home in your assets column the number is a little bit ‘fake news’.  It’s not a ‘real’ number like the cash in your bank account. It may never be realised.

Liquidity

The main point of our FIRE stash is to fund our living costs. All those craft beers and avocado on toast won’t pay for themselves! And this is very difficult with a house.

As mentioned above, a home generates negative cash flow. But even thinking in capital terms, it’s tricky to realise capital amounts, too.

Unlike stocks and shares, we can’t just sell piecemeal amounts of our own home into the market as needed. Nobody would be interested in buying a quarter of my guest bedroom, and not only because of the mound of bric-a-brac I’ve stored in there.

To realise money from our own house we have to sell it all or else take out big remortgages. That makes your own home a really bad investment for funding living costs.

Mums and their sons

My honourable friend is quite right: An Englishman’s home is his castle. I love my home. And this level of emotion makes it very difficult to stay rational.

My home is the best home. Just like my mum’s son is the best son in the world.

So when it comes to my home, I have a huge blind spot. I’ll always be tempted to bump the value of my home up in a way that I can’t with my index fund investments.

My home is more than a number in a spreadsheet. As a rational accountant I must guard against that, and discount whatever value I magic up for my home.

In summary my case is this: we can’t categorically say a home is an asset as it loses money. Whilst it’s a big expense, it’s hard to put a real number on it. Any number we do conjure up is contingent on a future star-crossed home we’re in love with making it rain in our bank account. And even that number is probably unrealistically high because who doesn’t love their home?

My case rests.

Who is right? You decide

Well, there you have it. Two opposing points of view on a key question facing any ambitious seeker of Financial Independence.

What do you think?  If you rent, is buying your own home part of your financial plan? If you own already, what will your financial independence look like in the future? What arguments are we missing?

Please vote in the poll and expand your thoughts in the comments below!

• You can read more from Fire v London and Young FI Guy on their own blogs.

1. Financial Independence Retire Early. [↩]

Warning: Brexit. My house, my opinion. Feel free to skip.

And so one of the finest dark comedies ever created has come to an end. But sadly, while we’ll see no more of Fleabag, we’ll get yet another season of Brexit Badly.

At least the schedulers are in on the joke. The new cliffhanger is set for 31 October – Halloween. Talk about comic noir.

You can’t make this stuff up. The last episode culminated with patriotic Brexiteers blaming the Queen for the dire state of Brexit. Nothing would surprise me now.

A polar bear strolling around Westminister? ERG members cooking meth in a taco truck on the South Bank?

Bring it on.

The Shining

Rising above another week of political misery, however, was one bravely recanting Leave supporter.

Peter Oborne – a former Brexit cheerleader for the Daily Mail – wrote:

Brexit has paralysed the system. It has turned Britain into a laughing stock. And it is certain to make us poorer and to lead to lower incomes and lost jobs.

We Brexiteers would be wise to acknowledge all this. It’s past time we did. We need to acknowledge, too, that that we will never be forgiven if and when Brexit goes wrong. Future generations will look back at what we did and damn us.

So I argue, as a Brexiteer, that we need to take a long deep breath. We need to swallow our pride, and think again.

Maybe it means rethinking the Brexit decision altogether.

Oborne presents a laundry list as to why Brexit has failed to-date – and why it was probably a doomed project to begin with.

Obviously I agree with him, but I’d rather buy him a pint than listen to Remainers asking what took him so long. Any Leave voters coming to their senses deserve a smile not “I told you so”.

After all, Oborne’s volte-face is what Remain voters daily expect from the Leave contingent. Surely with the empty promises of the Leave leadership revealed as student political fantasy, ever more will want to call the whole thing off?

You’d think so. Yet in reality – indeed faced with reality – few seem to be changing their minds.

Perhaps that was why Oborne’s piece struck a chord. It wasn’t so much what he was saying – the case against Brexit is plain enough. It’s what the rest of the 17.4m are not saying.

Much more typical is this response I received on Twitter to one of my (doubtless tedious) anti-Brexit tweets:

Brexit would have been easy if the Commission had acted in good faith, the PM believed in ‘Leave’ and understood how to negotiate, MPs honoured manifesto commitments and the civil service and metropolitan elites weren’t determined to undermine the referendum. So much 4 democracy!

Such sentiment is rampant on social media. But you also see it in newspaper interviews and on TV.

One Brexiteer debating with Oborne even said on live TV that she thought Oborne might be a plant or that he’d been bought off.

The same woman said “not a single person has changed their mind” while standing next to this man who had clearly changed his mind.

It’s Orwellian stuff.

The Thing

Then again – rounding up to the nearest million – perhaps she’s right.

Three years in and Leavers still don’t understand the EU is an extremely powerful trading bloc, doing the business on behalf of its several hundred million citizens. They still don’t admit that as one nation against more than two dozen we don’t “hold all the cards”. They still don’t admit they had no plan.

Instead we just hear claims that a True Brexiteer would have negotiated a better outcome. This despite the fact that Brexit extremists can’t even negotiate with their own party – and caved in to vote for a deal they lamented only days before as ‘vassalage’.

These are not serious people.

There’s also no admission Brexit has already cost the UK £66bn1 in lost economic growth.

As I’ve warned before, the economic price of any Brexit will show up mostly in a lower GDP like this, for the foreseeable future – maybe decades. It’s pretty much guaranteed by the laws of economics.

Not a bang, but a wimpier UK PLC.

It won’t be something you can photograph or stick on a bus though, so they’ll blame something else. Or someone else.

The Omen

Meanwhile the prophet Farage is readying his followers for a new political push to the sunlit uplands. The man who once told his followers to ignore the “clever people” who warn that smoking is bad for you will surely find plenty of credulous takers.

How is this still possible?

There’s little point reasoning with the Barry Blimps, of course. But I don’t believe there are 17m Blimps in the UK.

There are however plenty who believed what the likes of Farage said in 2016 – statements since revealed to be mostly at best fantasies and at worst lies.

Yet instead of thinking again, the more vocal Leave supporters are doubling down and calling for a no-deal exit. It’s profoundly depressing.

I do have time – as I’ve said repeatedly – for sovereignty-first Leave voters2 who accept the economic cost of Brexit and who own the motley coalition that made up the 52% rather than denying it. Such people are rare, however.

And while I personally want to see a new Referendum informed by everything we’ve learned over the past 30 months, I used to concede a soft Brexit might be better than no Brexit, for the sake of national coherence.

But I’m less sure of that today.

Most Leavers are willfully ignoring the unfolding evidence. They will never be happy. Any deal will be a ‘betrayal’ of the impossibilities they were promised, while a disruptive no-deal will be the fault of the other side for not landing a deal.

What’s the point in indulging them – and all of us paying for it?

As for the investing consequences, it seems to me everything is still on the table. Even a no-deal Brexit – hitherto dodged, both in theory and in practice – could yet come about, though that now seems the unlikeliest outcome.

I discussed the ramifications of different Brexits in a previous post. Have a look there for more.

Have a great weekend!

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1. According to S&P. [↩]
2. Even if I see such max-sovereignty as a hollow victory in practice, and Britain ultimately weaker post-Brexit in terms of most of the measures of power that matter in 2019. At least sovereignty is credible argument. [↩]