Taxes, investment costs and investment returns

High before tax returns may not be best …

If you accept the often repeated warning that past investment returns do not provide a guide to future performance, you would be smart enough to not select a fund manager based simply on their recent results.

But what if you knew for certain (which you couldn’t) that a particular investment manager would return 1% p.a. above their relevant market indicator, before investment costs and taxes, for the next 10 years. Would you select that manager in preference to one that guaranteed you the market return? As we demonstrate, not necessarily.

Your objective as an investor should be to maximise your investment returns after-tax, costs and inflation for the amount of risk you accept i.e. your net risk adjusted return. In this article, we will focus on the importance of taxes and investment costs (e.g. fund manager fees, transaction costs). We have discussed the risk issue extensively in our “Foundations of Financial Economics” articles and, excluding inflation indexed bonds, there is little an individual investor can do, directly, to take account of inflation.
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Is Rent Money, “Dead Money”?

Rent is the price of housing accommodation

The home building industry often promotes to potential young home buyers that rent money is “dead money” i.e. money down the drain. It encourages them to stop paying rent and, instead, use the money to pay off the mortgage on their own new home.

I became very aware of the power of this self serving message when my 24 year old daughter proclaimed that she wanted to buy her own property as soon as possible, as rent was “just dead money”. Although impressed by her determination to take on such an obligation, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give a basic economics lesson.

The reality is that rent is not dead money but the cost of purchasing housing accommodation. It is essentially the same as paying for a hotel room for an overnight stay or for a two week vacation in a luxury holiday resort.

We all pay the cost of housing accommodation, whether we rent from a third party or we own our home. And this is the case, regardless of whether or not we have a mortgage.
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