• FDIC insurance covers $100,000 of your money with each bank. To avoid the potential for stress (being a creditor in receivership is not a lot of fun), avoid putting more than $100,000 with any one bank. With high-yield savings accounts from banks including EmigrantDirect, E*Trade (NASDAQ: ETFC), Capital One (NYSE: COF), and ING (NYSE: ING), you should be able to find enough banks to spread out your savings, unless your last name happens to be Rockefeller.
• Already, a well-meaning friend who works at a bank told me about the NetBank meltdown, and explained that "These high-yield savings accounts are very risky. It's much better to go with a brick and mortar bank, even if the interest rate is 1% instead of 5%." Many retail banks will start trying to use that logic to trick customers into saving with them. It's a bunch of crap! Never trust your bank!

FDIC shuts down NetBank originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 30 Sep 2007 09:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The "Heard on the Street" column in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (registration required) talked about a growing trend of companies borrowing large amounts of money to pay dividends. When I started writing for BloggingStocks several months ago, one of the first pieces I wrote was called A rally of declining yields: Should you care? If you read that piece, you will get a good idea how I feel about dividends.

Let's take a logical look at the idea of borrowing money to pay a dividend: A company borrows money at an interest rate which, however low, will likely be substantially higher than what an investor would earn with a savings account (even if it is a high-yield account such as those offered by EmigrantDirect and ING Direct). So, assuming the investor puts the money in a savings account, he is effectively borrowing money at X% to invest it at X-2%. This is not a good deal.

But let's assume that the investor doesn't put it in a savings. Let's say he decides to put it in his favorite stock that he considers to be undervalued. Let's say he puts it in the stock that paid the dividend. If he does that, he will essentially have been charged a hefty tax to plow the money back into the company. This is also not a good deal.

In cases where a company's management believes the stock is undervalued and the company is financially stable, borrowing money to buy back shares can be a good way to increase shareholder value. But, in my opinion, borrowing money to pay a dividend never makes sense.

Borrowing money to pay a dividend: What's wrong with that? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.