Posting Calories On Menus Makes People Eat More

Since 2008, fast food restaurants in New York have been required to post calorie counts next to items on their menus in an effort to get consumers to take more care over what they're eating. Great idea, and one I'm generally in favour of. Being more transparent about what people are shoving into their mouths, especially at fast food restaurants, should, logically, encourage people to consume less calories.

But, according to two research papers by NYU and Yale, consumers actually ended up consuming more calories after the changes were made. So much for transparency. I can think of a number of reasons why this might fail, but two spring to mind:

1. If you're ordering a super-sized anything at a fast food restaurant, worring about calories probably ain't at the top of your list of things you're worrying about.

2. I'm sure your brain is probably going - "wow, if I order the slightly larger one, my cost per calorie just fell. Score!".

A Sexier Stock Index From...Puma?

Great ad. Website, less so.

How Wealthy Should You Be?

I've just finished listening to The Millionaire Next Door - a book that covers how Americans get wealthy. There's a lot of good stuff in there and it's worth a listen (or read), but, instead of reveiwing the book, I wanted to write about a specific ideas - that of relative wealth and net worth.

You see, high income and high net worth are highly correlated - a fancy statistical term meaning that people with high incomes are more likely to be wealthy. But this is not always the case. If you drive expensive cars, live in expensive property, take lots of expensive holidays and generally live a high consumption lifestyle - what's left over at the end of the month, might not add up to a great deal.

Wealth & Weight

I've always thought the formula for wealth is very similar to the formula for losing weight: getting wealthy is about spending less than you earn and losing weight is about burning more calories than you consume. Both are simple formulas but deceptively hard to carry off consistenly and require discipline and sacrifice. (For the pedants - yes there is more to building wealth than just spending less than you earn - but not much).

Hong Kong Millionaires

Hong Kong has around 37,000 millionaires, (down 61% in this economy) or roughly 0.53% of the adult population. Given that 2.9% of households earn a monthly income of over HK$100,000, shouldn't there be more?

Which leads to the question of how wealthy should you be and are you on track to joining the ranks of the rich?

How To Calculate How Wealthy You Should Be

The smarty-pants Ph.Ds who wrote The Millionaire next door came up with a formula for determining how well you're doing on the wealth accummulation front. Using the formula:

(your age x realised annual income) / 10 - any inheritance money = your expected net worth.

Let's look at an example using the median household income in Hong Kong which is HK$18,400.

Age: 30

Annual Salary: HK$220,800 (before tax)

Investment Income: HK$17,000

Inheritance Money: HK$0

= 30 X 237,800 = 7,134,000 / 10 - 0 = HK$713,400

Now you have a basis for understanding how wealthy you should be on a relative scale. Having a US$1,000,000 is great, but if you're 50 years old with an annual income of HK$3.6M and only HK$7.75M net worth when you should be closer to HK$18M - then, in the parlance of the book, you are an underaccumulator of wealth, a UAW.

How do I stack up? I perform below average for my age and income. Bummer. It's not drastically below, but it has forced me to review certain goals and milestones and we're making changes in our life to try and close the gap. Certainly, some of it is to do with current investment values, so I'm not particularly worried at this stage. I would, however, like to prevent myself from becoming a UAW, sail past AAW (Average Accumulator of Wealth) and soar into the PAW camp - Prodigous Accumulator of Wealth.

How do you stack up?

Use the formula above to figure out where you should be and if you need some help calculating your current net worth, you can use this handy calculator.

How To Buy Life Insurance

Two great posts on how to approach buying life insurance over on A Private Portfolio.

Check them out if you're wondering how this works:

Life Inurance

Life Insurance - How Much?

As an added bonus, check out his peice on Estate Planning.

3 Reasons I Think The Hong Kong Government Is Great!

I've been dealing a lot recently with the Hong Kong Government and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and they frequently surprise me. This is heartwarming becuase it means that I feel that my tax dollars are being used to run efficient, friendly services.

This is in stark contrast to publicly traded companies like Three (Wikipedia) and PCCW (Wikipedia) who are horrible to deal with. I hate them!

Here are 3 things the Government have done to inspire these warm, fuzzy feelings.

Friendly Service

I have been applying for a work visa for an employee and the officer in charge of the case file was super. Very friendly; a pleasure to deal with on the phone and incredibly helpful at guiding us through the application process. We didn't have a huge amount of contact with her, but when we did, it was great.

Responsive

In my effort to reduce the amount of paper I receive, I thought I'd be a good citizen and sign up for eTax. This was thwarted by a technical error on their side (they didn't support my browser version)*.

I promptly emailed them, it was a Saturday, included a telephone number and recevied a call on Monday afternoon from their tech team apologising that I couldn't sign up and that my browser version would be supported in November. Brilliant!

Proactive

This is my favourite example. Last year I managed to pay my tax twice by mistake. I had set up a forward dated transaction in my online banking but had forgotten I had done this. I had another reminder set elsewhere to pay the tax bill and logged on and manually paid (if you were wondering how one does that).

When I realised my mistake about a week later, I gave the tax department a call. The voice at the other end informed me that they had spotted the mistake and had already issued a cheque for the excess and I should expect to receive it in the next day or two - which I did. Stunningly good!

I mean, it took Ikea 6 seconds to take my money and 6 weeks to refund it. A whole lot slower than our Government. I also imagine the same call to HR Revenue & Customs in the UK. I'm sure they would have been laughing down the phone for a week.

I'm sure that there are people who have had terrible experiences. So it goes, and I hope that you provide constructive feedback.

I have no motive writing this except that when you receive great service from any organisation...well, credit where credit is due. Great service is hard to get right and so far my experiences have been excellent. Long may it continue.

*Browser version was Firefox 3.5.3. They're currently only supporting version 3.1. From a technical standpoint there is no reason why this shouldn't be supported. I suspect it's a case of over-zealous standards enforcement. I was not going to try and argue it and was just pleased to see that it was on their radar to fix. Who needs to be in a rush to sign up to pay tax anyway?