Got Wealth?

There is little doubt that the overall wealth of a significant percentage of Americans has grown like a weed in your garden over the last 10 years. There are a variety of reasons for this growth. Real estate appreciation has set historical records. Stock options are creating massive paper wealth, while also creating tax nightmares. Demographically, a bulge in our population, the baby boomers, are reaching retirement age. Regardless of the reason, wealth planning is becoming a big issue for many people.

Wealth planning strategies tend to be very detail oriented. They also tend to be an option only for certain situations. As a result, you need to speak with a professional regarding each particular strategy to determine if they are of assistance to your situation. These techniques are not universal solutions like stuffing money into a 401k, so don’t take them as such. Let’s take a look at one popular strategy.

Once wealth planning strategy that is very popular deals with real estate. The strategy focuses on making a fixed asset, the equity in your home, grow. Many homeowners do not realize that the equity in their home is not growing. Instead, it is the value of your home that grows, which creates ADDITIONAL equity. Let’s look at an example.

Assume I own a home worth $1,000,000 and have $500,000 in equity. The equity is just sitting there. It does not grow. If the value of the home drops to $900,000, I still have the same amount of equity. If the home appreciates by $100,000, I get an additional $100,000 in equity because the house increased in value, not because my original $500,000 grew in any way. If you can get your mind around this concept, you will realize the problem.

The strategy for this situation involves turning the equity in your home into a growing asset without taking on any additional risk. The process is very simple, but a masterful one. You refinance the home to remove as much of the equity as possible. The equity is then put into no risk custom life insurance product. It grows tax free in the product, which is based on the performance of the stock market. If the stock market has a negative annual return, the insurance policy is tailored to eliminate the risk by setting your annual gain or loss at zero. Put another way, if the market loses 10 percent this year, you lose nothing.

This simple strategy is a tremendous way to double the wealth you gain on your home. Instead of just being happy with the appreciation, you get both appreciation and the tax free gains in the insurance policy. In laymen’s terms, this lets you leverage your property for double gains.

Wealth planning strategies are very subject specific. The above one works with real estate, but no other subject. To identify the best solutions for your situation, you should consult with a top tax attorney, financial planner or accountant.

You many know many wealthy individuals make lots of money using options and you can try too.

Stock and Bond trading strategies run the gamut from the simple ‘buy and hold forever’ to the most advanced use of technical analysis. Options trading has a similar spectrum.

Options are a contract conferring the right to buy (a call option) or sell (a put option) some underlying instrument, such as a stock or bond, at a predetermined price (the strike price) on or before a preset date (the expiration date).

So-called ‘American’ options can be exercised anytime before expiration, ‘European’ options are exercised on the expiration date. Though the history of the terms may lie in geography, the association has been lost over time. American-style options are written for stocks and bonds. The European are often written on indexes.

Options officially expire on the Saturday after the third Friday of the contract’s expiration month. Few brokers are available to the average investor on Saturday and the US exchanges are closed, making the effective expiration day the prior Friday.

With some basic terminology and mechanics out of the way, on to some basic strategies.

There are one of two choices made when selling any option. Since all have a set expiration date, the holder can keep the option until maturity or sell before then. (We’ll consider American-style only, and for simplicity focus on stocks.)

A great many investors do in fact hold until maturity and then exercise the option to trade the underlying asset. Assume the buyer purchased a call option at $2 on a stock with a strike price of $25. (Typically, options contracts are on 100 share lots.) To purchase the stock the total investment is:

($2 + $25) x 100 = $2700 (Ignoring commissions.)

This strategy makes sense provided the market price is anything above $27.

But suppose the investor speculates that the price has peaked prior to the end of the life of the option. If the price has risen above $27 but looks to be on the way down without recovering, selling now is preferred.

Now suppose the market price is below the strike price, but the option is soon to expire or the price is likely to continue downward. Under these circumstances, it may be wise to sell before the price goes even lower in order to curtail further loss. The investor can, at least, minimize the loss by using it to offset capital gains taxes.

The final basic alternative is to simply let the contract expire. Unlike futures, there’s no obligation to buy or sell the asset – only the right to do so. Depending on the premium, strike price and current market price it may represent a smaller loss to just ‘eat the premium’.

Observe that options carry the usual uncertainties associated with stocks: prices can rise or fall by unknown amounts over unpredictable time frames. But, added to that is the fact that options have – like bonds – an expiration date.

One consequence of that fact is: as time passes, the price of the option itself can change (the contracts are traded just like stocks or bonds). How much they change is influenced by both the price of the underlying stock and the amount of time left on the option.

Selling the option, not the underlying asset, is one way to offset that premium loss or even profit.