dsmWealth: June 6, 2024

Workhorse or show pony? New pickups can be both.
BY STEVE DINNEN

The best selling car in America? It’s a pickup truck.

Year in and year out, Ford sells more than 700,000 of its F-150 Series pickups. The second-best seller is a pickup truck, too: the Chevrolet Silverado. And the third best seller is, yep, a Dodge Ram. Altogether, five of the 10 best sellers nationwide are pickup trucks.

So why not check out what’s new? During a recent browsing trip to the lot at Charles Gabus Ford in Des Moines, I was drawn to shiny gray F-150 Lariat. Salesman Miles Hall opened its doors (four, not two, to accommodate two rows of full-sized seats in the “crew cab”) and ushered us into a vehicle that bears not the slightest resemblance to the rust buckets I remember bumping around in years ago during hay-baling season in Missouri.

Those pickups had sticky vinyl bench seats, manual transmission, no air-conditioning, and windows you cranked up or down by hand. The sole “luxury” was a push-button radio.

In the new F-150, you can ease onto leather seats — heated, no less — and make use of power everything, including foot pedals that can adjust to accommodate the driver’s height. Some models even have power running boards, to help you step in and out.

On a recent trip to California to visit my business partner, I purposefully rented a pickup truck, to get a feel for how they handle. It had the two-row crew cab and was plenty roomy for four of us, plus my partner’s ever-present standard poodle. It rode quietly and smoothly, without the typical truck bounce, and had a great radio, cruise control, power everything and ample oomph to keep up with the rest of the freeway traffic. I didn’t pop the hood but assumed it had the smaller 2.7-liter engine. Ford offers two larger engines.

Here at the local dealership, Hall said those bigger horsepower units come in handy since a lot of people use their pickups to haul stuff. “That’s the first question I ask” of shoppers, Hall said. “How much are you towing?”

The biggest engine, a V-8 5.0-liter monster, can haul up to 14,000 pounds. That’s twice as heavy as a 20-foot speed boat and trailer, or a 20-foot tow-behind trailer. Ford, GM and Chrysler sell heavier duty trucks that will tote bigger loads, but that’s drifting into commercial-vehicle territory and away from the better-selling models of suburbia.

Hall said most shoppers come to him specifically looking for a pickup. They’re not just ambling around the showroom looking for a Mustang and are suddenly drawn to pickups.

The base price of an F-150 is around $38,765, according to the Kelley Blue Book. The model we viewed was $68,720. A Silverado starts around $37,445 and can shoot to $64,695, depending on the level of trim. For comparison, Tesla’s Model Y, the world’s best-selling car, starts at $43,990 and runs up to $133,000.

401(k) savings plans are doing well, but they could do better
BY STEVE DINNEN

So how are we doing with our workplace 401(k) savings plans? Well, better, according to Vanguard, the mammoth mutual fund and 401(k) plan operator.

Average account balances rose by 19% in 2023, which Vanguard credited primarily to the stock and bond markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 13.7% in 2023, while the S&P 500 Index climbed 24%. Bond market performance was positive, too, but in single digits.

The average account balance at the end of 2023 was $134,128, and the median account balance rose 29%. Among plan participants, 15% increased their payroll deferral percentage. And 28% had their deferrals increased by the annual automatic escalation, which many (but not all) employers offer. Vanguard says the percentage increases on deferrals are the best its analysts have seen in all the years the company has published its How America Saves report.

Even so, there is still room for improvement, for plan participants and sponsors alike. Not all plans offer automatic enrollment. They should. And for plans with an auto-enroll option, Vanguard said sponsors should monitor them in order to see how fast participants step into the 12%-15% deferral rate. The average deferral rate is around 11.3%, which is a combination of what the employee sets aside and what the employer matches.

Vanguard said sponsors could offer cost-efficient, high-quality advice and a platform that provides guidance on financial well-being, which basically would coax workers into setting aside more retirement dollars over competing financial priorities, such as student loans, home mortgages, health care expenses and credit card debt.

When companies ask for your Social Security number, try saying no
BY HEIDI MITCHELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

It seems like every time we have to fill in a form, we get asked for nine very valuable numbers.
Looking for a gym membership? A certification? A loyalty card at the supermarket? Very often, the business will request our Social Security number — and very often, we provide it without a second thought.

But in doing so, we leave ourselves open to cybercriminals. Thieves who get access to your Social Security number can use it to commit serious fraud, such as applying for credit cards, loans and government benefits in your name.

In many cases, there’s a simple solution to this: Just say no. According to privacy and security experts, in many situations we shouldn’t have to turn over our number. And if we refuse to give it, organizations often will back down.

“Skip it if you’re filling out something that isn’t a legal document, related to a loan or opening a financial account,” says Rachel Tobac, chief executive of SocialProof Security, which helps companies protect themselves from malicious hackers. “If somebody then comes up to you and says, ‘Unfortunately, it stinks, but we really need to get your Social Security number to verify you,’ you can simply ask them to access your records with some other form of ID and see what happens. Sometimes, they should be able to.”

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Alzheimer's takes a financial toll long before diagnosis, study finds
BY BEN CASSELMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.

A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.

What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2% more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3% more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.

“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.”

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