The trail you leave on the Internet

There’s an article in the Washington Post with a headline of “As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with”. In addition to the bad grammar, my first impression was “Tell me something that I don’t already know.” But I decided to give it a quick look.

Here’s the paragraph that struck me:

Consumers might find even bigger surprises when an entire business fails. Bookseller Borders this year auctioned its customer database, including purchase history, in bankruptcy court. Information about users on defunct gay youth site XY were put up for sale, too, until the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to prevent the sale.

Not a new moral of the story, but reinforcement of an old one: Don’t share any information that you wouldn’t want your mother/spouse/children/employer to see.

Regulations? What regulations?

I was disappointed in the response by Congress to the behavior of the financial segment as they brought the economy to its knees. The Dodd-Frank regulations that they passed were less than I expected based on what happened. But there were a lot of folks who didn’t want even these changes, including the heavy-hitting lobbyists from the big banks.

Well, they’ve won. According to an article in the Washington Post,

A year and a half has gone by since the Dodd-Frank financial reform act was signed into law, but barely a quarter of the rules in the legislation have been finalized . . .

As of Dec. 1, regulators have issued 154 proposals, finalized 74 of them and missed 200 deadlines . . .

How to get good customer support

In honor of all those people who will be unpacking new computers or new software in a little under a week . . .

Want to get the best customer support? OK, here’s the secret: Put yourself in the shoes of the customer-service person and figure out what you would want to know if the roles were reversed.

This isn’t as easy as it might seem.

It means that you actually have to do a little work. You might need to actually understand a little bit about the product you’re calling about.

It doesn’t mean you need to be a programmer, or know the detailed internal operation of the product or system that’s failing. But you need to be able to give the customer service representative enough information to intelligently research the issue.

For example,

• What, exactly is the problem. “It doesn’t work” won’t cut it.
  
• If there are error messages, what are they?
  
• What were you doing immediately before the error? Exactly. If the support person can reproduce the problem, you’ve made a huge leap.
  
• What is the environment? Operating system? Hardware? Version of product?
  

These simple steps won’t guarantee you good support. Some companies simply are unwilling or too clueless to offer good customer support. But if you don’t follow these recommendations, I can guarantee that you’ll get nowhere.

Companies juggle their 401(k) plans

This article suggests that regulations that go into effect next year requiring 401(k) plans to clearly disclose management fees are motivating firms to juggle their 401(k) plans.

The article brought back a memory. Many years ago when I was still actively investing in my 401(k), there was an anomaly in my statement. I compared the interest payment in a specific fund with the amount on my wife’s statement for the same fund, and the amounts didn’t jibe. We had almost the same amount in the fund, had made almost the same contribution during the period, but one interest payment was twice as large as the other. I was never able to get anything approximating a reasonable explanation, but I was offered the opportunity to remove my money from the 401(k) and put it into an IRA, and I still don’t understand how this was lawful.

One would think that companies would put special effort into getting the best deal possible for their employees in the 401(k). It’s a benefit that is important to the employee and costs the company nothing except due diligence. But the number of changes to 401(k) plans and falling fees (.11% between 2007 and 2009) suggest that it took the pressure of impending regulation to make this happen, and recent class-action lawsuits based on excessive fees support that idea.

I hope that most companies pay attention to how well their 401(k) plans work, but statistics in the article suggest otherwise. I expect there’s a full spectrum – from companies that find the absolute best deal for their employees, through companies that are clueless, into companies that actively skim money out of the 401(k) that should be in their employees’ pockets. What I don’t know is the distribution. The fact that 64% of firms changed their 401(k) last year compared to less than 20% in 2009 doesn’t prove that there was a problem but the quotes and statistics in the article suggest it.

Are these changes happening because regulations take effect next year? That’s the assumption in the article, but there are other possible explanations. A few high-profile lawsuits can motivate companies to do what they should have been doing anyway; more hard-to-answer questions from better-informed employees can do it. Changes in the economy or the investment environment could even be part of the explanation. But whatever the cause, lower fees and more transparency in 401(k) plans are good.

Check your source. Then check again.

I like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. I saw his segment on the “Tree Fighting Ceremony” and enjoyed it. I did think it a bit odd that Congress would be in session on Christmas during the early history of the US, but stranger things have happened.

This provides us with a fine illustration of how sources that we trust can lead us astray. I consider the History Channel, the ACLU website, and an actual published book to be reliable sources; as an individual I wouldn’t go any farther in checking out the “fact”. Perhaps we should hold national TV shows to a higher standard, but I’m afraid that if I had been the fact checker for The Daily Show I would have missed this one.

PolitiFact Rhode Island didn’t miss it. They awarded Stewart, the ACLU and the History channel a collective Pants On Fire after doing additional research and discovering that the claim was completely bogus.

Oops.

Want to loan Uncle Sam some money?

I knew that rates on Treasury instruments were low, but the actual situation was illustrated when I visited the U.S. Treasury Department’s Daily Real Yield Curve page. I discovered this little gem while reading an article at Slate.

As of yesterday, if you loaned money to Uncle Sam for five years, your interest rate would be about -1%. That’s a negative sign. If you let him keep it for ten years, he would give you back almost as much as you loaned (interest rate -.01%). These are inflation-adjusted rates and we don’t know what the rate of inflation will be, but the point is clear. As the author of the Slate article puts it,

People take out mortgages, for example, rather than buying houses with credit cards. When mortgage rates fall, there’s a rush to refinance. Cheap money is better than expensive money. But what you never get is an offer of free money. The idea, always, is that someone will give you some money today and in exchange you have to give him back more money later on. Unless, that is, you’re the government of the United States of America, and lenders are willing to pay for the privilege of lending you money.

I downloaded a bit of ancient history from the Treasury Department and found rates over 15% in the early 1980s. This too will pass, just as that did. In the meantime, I won’t be buying any Treasury instruments.

To the New York Times: You blew it.

Way back in September 2009 I blogged about newspapers charging for content. In March of this year, the New York Times implemented a “paywall” – unless you were a subscriber, your access was limited to twenty articles a month.

I decided to put my money where my mouth was and subscribe. As I said in 2009, I don’t mind paying for something when it’s worth paying for, and I want the traditional newspapers to survive. You don’t get decent reporting for nothing; those people have to be paid and those of us who consume their product should pay for it. So in March I signed up for an electronic subscription to the New York Times for $10.50 a month. That was about the upper limit of what I was willing to pay, but I felt that it was worth it.

In September, the subscription went up to $12.75. I wasn’t happy – especially that I got no notice of or explanation for the increase – but I left things alone.

This month the bill came in for $15. Again, no explanation or warning. That was above my threshold. So I went to their web site to cancel my subscription. I logged in, found the “cancel my subscription” link, and clicked on it. I was presented with a blank screen. I tried different routes through the web site and experienced the same behavior. So I went back to the original documentation, used that URL, and was treated to a 404 – page not found.

At this point I decided to try one last tactic and I accessed the page using Internet Explorer on a Microsoft platform. This time I didn’t see a blank screen – instead, one that told me that if I wanted to cancel my subscription I had to do it by telephone.

So I called the number. When I explained that $15 a month was above my threshold for the value of the New York Times, the customer service representative offered to drop my rate to $7.50 a month. I declined. I feel that that is an unethical business practice.

But here’s the bottom line: If you have an online subscription to the New York Times and you call their customer service and threaten to cancel it, you can get your rate cut in half.

I remain convinced that the only way that traditional newspapers will survive is by charging for online access. But not this way.