Shirley M. Mueller, M.D.

This easy approach to apartment hunting and booking in the US and abroad is what Trip Advisor and its associates can provide.

Click the button, receive the confirmation and you’re completed the apartment arrangements for your family vacation. You are happy. It seems flawless and brilliant.

This easy approach to apartment hunting and booking in the US and abroad is what Trip Advisor and its associates, including Flip key, Holiday Lettings and Niumba, can provide. The process is almost effortless. That is if you go as planned and the owner doesn’t cancel on you. If either of these occur, the story is different. 

I’ve had experience with both. What I learned primarily is the renter can be on the short end of the stick.

When the landlord of a vacation villa in Puerto Rico canceled our confirmed apartment (for which I had already paid) a week ahead of the 2016 Christmas holiday (before the hurricane September 20, 2017), I was beside myself. There was nowhere else suitable to stay near our daughter and her family whom we were to join on the island. I was left adrift and nothing offered by TripAdvisor to replace it was close to our daughter’s accommodation. It burned me and to top it all off, the money I paid TripAdvisor was slow to be refunded. 

Now, I’m on the other end of the agreement termination. I am canceling an apartment in London for May 2018 for which I partially paid. Though I made the reservation in December, and started the process of canceling two weeks later, my 1,824 British pounds would not be refunded according to the cancellation policy stated on the internet. When I contacted the owner via e-mail, he seemed to be conciliatory, however, and wrote, “I can’t cancel from my side, but you can ask them to contact me by email to confirm refund.” When I e-mailed TripAdvisor with this information, on both occasions, I received a return proforma memorandum that had nothing to do with the message I sent. It was as though a robot autogenerated it without a human on the other end. This, of course, may have been true. There is robo-investing; why not robo-reservation cancellations?

In between e-mail messages to the owner and TripAdvisor, I called the number indicated by TripAdvisor in the cancellation of booking, 1-855-785-9714. This number did not get me to human as well.  I continued to be in limbo. 

Finally, by searching the internet for a workable way to communicate with the company, I found this number: 1- 866-322-5942. It did get me to a human, Gil. He told me that TripAdvisor would take 410.00 pounds for my London booking if the owner were to forgive his part of my prepayment of 1,824.00 British pounds. Then, my refund would be 1,414 pounds. Indeed, the owner did cooperate, and I did receive my partial refund.

For me, after these experiences, I have come to this conclusion. Since plans do change, it is best for those who need more fluid arrangements, to not book through TripAdvisor. Additionally, those who don’t like having their plans altered by someone else (the owner), might want to avoid TripAdvisor as well. Booking directly with a hotel can alleviate either problem (depending on cancellation policy, usually much more liberal than TripAdvisor).

When figured in dollars and cents, the 410.00 pounds TripAdvisor took for booking only two weeks prior, and months before the reservation date, is about the equivalent of one night’s lodging in London. For a cost-conscious person, it might be better to book a hotel and cancel 24 hours ahead as required by most hotels, thereby saving this money or more.

Would Payment Protection (offered by TripAdvisor) Help?

Sadly, although it sounds like Payment Protection might solve these problems, it doesn’t cover cancellation by owner or renter. It is only beneficial if the tenant can’t get into the unit she contracted for or it is not as billed. For more on this, please see 

. Though Payment Protection makes this claim, “We've got you covered—Book a vacation rental worry-free with our Payment Protection,” in my mind, the worry would start when a renter couldn’t access her rental or if she found it misrepresented. Then, the burden of proof would be on her plus she would have to find yet another place to stay. 

Here's a handy Website regarding TripAdvisor: https://gethuman.com/phone-number/TripAdvisor. 

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TIAA Whistle Blowers and Me: What It Means to You

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	Several studies have shown that there is a direct inverse correlation between expense and return.

Sometime around the 2008 financial crises, I wanted a Monte Carlo simulation on the personal investments of my husband and myself. This computer program measures risk in a portfolio under a series of hypothetical conditions. It helps determine likely outcomes as well as not so likely, but possible. Since I didn’t have the software, I sought out a person whom I thought would be relatively neutral and not push me to invest with his company after the report was produced.

I turned to TIAA CREF (now known only by TIAA) which seemed ideal for the task. TIAA is the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association — College Retirement Equities Fund. It provides financial services for academic, research, medical, cultural and government industries. 

The session between the TIAA representative and I went well, and he produced the Monte Carlo simulation as requested. For me, I expected that to be the end of our association — wrong. This man was impossible to shed. 

Though it is true, I was appreciative for what he did, certainly I was under no obligation to him or his firm because of it. It seemed, however, he felt differently — it was as though I was being stalked. For two years, he called and e-mailed me, though I didn’t return either kind of message. I would guess he was hoping persistence would work &mdash; it didn’t. From my point of view, this man either didn’t have enough business, or he was desperate.

Just recently, I have reason to think some of it was the latter. 

 allege the company lost institutional business and then leaned on its personal advisors to make up the difference.  They were asked to sell high cost managed accounts. In addition, the fees associated with the funds or annuities into which the money would be directed were charged as well, which means the customer paid twice.

Before the Whistle Blowers, there was my Column in PMD

For me, this new news was old news. As it turns out, I had written about TIAA costs for 

. In that column, I was already concerned about their fees which I knew because I had been on faculty at Indiana University Medical School and invested with them through the institution.

After being trained in the financial industry, however, I learned their structure wasn’t such a good deal and wrote about it. The column was entitled, “TIAA-CREF: Not for Everyone.”  A segment is below —reading it, I believe, is helpful. It was published well before the whistle blowers brought this into light.

“Though TIAA CREF is low cost compared to many options, its charges are more than others in the low-cost category. For example, the CREF money market expense ratio is 0.47, almost one-half of a percent. Compare this to Vanguard’s Money Market Reserves (VMMXX) with an expense ratio of 0.28%. The return of each reflects the financial outlay from the client to the fund. TIAA-CREF’s yield as of 9/22/09 was .01%. Vanguard was 21 times that at 0.21%, as of the same date.

This relationship of higher expense and lower returns doesn’t stop at money markets. It permeates stock funds as well. Several studies have shown that there is a direct inverse correlation between expense and return.

Lower Expense Ratio Mutual Funds Outperform

Source: Stefan Sharkansy, "Risk Without Reward," July 2002, PersonalFunds.com; *Data for larger capitalization US mutual funds

Since TIAA-CREF stock funds are generally higher in expense than other low-cost options (just like the money fund), studies like the above have important implications to the TIAA-CREF client. In general, a lower expense ratio means higher returns. For example, if an investor puts $10,000.00 in a mutual fund that has an expense ratio of 1.5% and the return is 10%, he has $281,000 in 40 years. However, if the expense ratio is 0.2%, the investor has $421,000 at the end of the same time frame. This difference of $140,000 is what the higher expense mutual fund puts into its pocket instead of the investor.”

So, as the title of my 2009 article suggests, TIAA is not for everyone. Those who are invested in it may want to examine what they are receiving for their money.

As to TIAA itself, the recent whistle blower accusations makes more and more investors aware of its alleged policies. If there is a sufficient transfer of accounts from TIAA because of it, the pressure on the company to be more transparent and lower fees could effect a change, which would be good for investors.

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Since TIAA-CREF stock funds are generally higher in expense than other low-cost options, conducted studies have important implications to clients.

Under the UGMA, recipients do not need a special attorney to own the assets.

Seventeen years ago, my husband and I gave our granddaughter, then one year of age, a monetary gift under the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act (UGMA). The idea was that the money could grow tax-free up to a threshold and then be used by our granddaughter for her education.

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The level of earned income at which she would have to pay taxes in 1999 was $1,900.00 up to age 24. So far, our granddaughter has never had to pay any taxes. The reason is that her dividends and income have been small.

The money is invested in Vanguard funds with low expense and turnover. These include the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX), the Vanguard Total International Stock (VGTSX) and the Vanguard Short Term Bond Index (VBISX).   Though the stock investments are doing brilliantly now, as are all similar assets, this was not always so. From 2000 to 2009, our gift for our grandchild lost almost half its value twice, once in 2003 and again in 2009. Now, we have a sweet period, but we also have a continual rise in the indexes that can’t seem to quit. 

Of course, balloons always eventually drop to earth.  According to 

, we are way overdue for this same phenomenon in the market.  American Superior classifies a market correction as a drop of 10 percent or more.  It occurs twice every three years. A bear market, according to Superior, is a drop of 20 percent or more, which occurs every five years. 

The ups and downs of this UGMA demonstrate several principals of investing.

		In the short term, money can be lost. Retirees without a cushion other than invested monies, beware!

		But in the long term, stock market assets accrue to a higher value. Younger people can rejoice knowing they have time ahead of them.

An important feature of our granddaughter’s portfolio, or any similar investment, is that in the intervening seven years since 2010, it has changed in character. The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX) has increased considerably more than the Vanguard Total International Stock (VGTSX), while the Short -Term Bond (VBISX) remained stable. This brings up another principle of investing: rebalancing a portfolio when it is not in line with the objectives. In the case of our granddaughter’s UGMA, VGTSX AND VBISX should be brought back to their original percentages.

This column incorporates segments from two earlier columns I wrote about our granddaughter’s UGMA in 2010 and 

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In some U.S. states, the Uniform Gift to Minors Act allows adults to transfer assets to their children or grandchildren. Dr. Shirley Mueller and her husband utilized the UGMA to give a monetary gift to their granddaughter tax-free up to a certain age. To learn more about Mueller's experience, continue below. 

Lessons for Investing: The Uniform Gift to Minors Act

Making a paper trail for your investments is imperative to the success of your purchases 

In the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” the schizophrenic John Nash’s mind leads him to think, perceive and believe that certain events will happen. These confabulations ultimately have a negative impact on his professional reputation and personal life. There is a name for this occurrance: hindsight bias.

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Hindsight bias leads us to see an event as having been predictable even if there was no objective reason to support this feeling. The first step in the fight against hindsight bias is not only recognizing it when it occurs, but understanding that human beings are always susceptible to it. After that, the only thing left to do is act.

Record keeping is essential, so always have a notebook handy to write down buys and expectations for the stock, exchange traded fund, mutual fund or bond that is purchased. It should also include reasons for purchase. Then, when it is sold, creeping determinism is outweighed by the fact that the reality is recorded.

Did it meet expectation or not? If the answer is no, why and how could the shortcoming be prevented in the future? When there is a disconnect between the anticipated outcome and the reality, knowledge is gained through record keeping. This results in an updating of accurate information, which is less likely if memory alone is relied upon for recall.

An interesting corollary to hindsight bias is the role that experience versus deliberate practice plays in overcoming the bias. It is deliberate practice that is more important than trading experience. What works is accurate recording of successes and failures in order to learn from them.

This is because a fallible memory gets in the way of accuracy. There can be errors in initial impressions or in memory storage. As such, it is necessary to be cautious when believing our own undocumented recollections are correct.

These memories, by themselves, tend to be inaccurate, in part, because of our own need to demonstrate our self-worth to ourselves.

So, the next time you want to say “I knew it,” remember that this mentality can be your downfall when it comes to investing. Always do your due diligence in keeping track of your financial decisions. 

Discover more Dentist’s Money Digest® news here.

When it comes to investing, the knew-it-all-along effect can get in the way of acquiring actual knowledge. Also known as retrospective bias, this psychological phenomena leads people to overstate after the fact what they anticipated prior to their decision. This can happen when making investments, especially for novices who have not learned to monitor their decisions. Continue below to learn how to combat your biases and become a more successful investor.

How to Become a Better Investor by Counteracting Bias

A version of this first appeared on our sister website, Physician's Money Digest

. The cost? A lot — millions and millions and millions.

But, there is a way for us lesser beings to participate. By visiting the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. Its terrain is like the moon. The advantage to more minor mortals is that the price is minimal compared to a moon jaunt, plus getting there and coming home is easier (also safer, I assume).  

The desert is in Northern Chili just below Bolivia. As such it is West of Argentina and though farther from Peru than Bolivia, also South of it. This is what I found on my recent three-day trip to the Atacama Desert with family.

On our flight from Santiago to Calama, the entrance city for San Pedro where we stayed, I felt like we were flying into flatlands. Initially, we cleared the mountains surrounding Santiago, but soon began to distance ourselves from any elevation. The mountains leveled. We began to see a monotonous brown. This continued into our destination city, San Pedro, about an hour drive from the airport at Calama. It is composed of adobe houses on narrow, dusty and pot-holed roads. I had imagined our hotel, the 

, would be in an oasis, but that was not to be. It, too, was situated on an unpaved road with little to no hint on the exterior that the interior was appealing.

The altitude is high in San Pedro, about 9,000 feet. Most people tolerate this elevation without any trouble. But, some of the tours venture to above 14,000 feet. This is recommended only for those who have been in San Pedro for a few days and have adjusted to the altitude. Otherwise, altitude sickness can occur, a nasty side effect for anyone to experience during a vacation.

Our first trip was the evening we arrived, the astronomical tour. Experiencing this in the driest place on earth is the optimal way to see the sky at its most magnificent. The stars and planets are visible in all their glory. Our excursion consisted of a didactic and two on-site observations. One was outdoors observing the stars and planets, first with our naked eye and then with a 90x telescope. The second on-site was in the elevated observatory looking at the same stars and planets through a scope that magnified 500x. This tour was easy and informative.

This four-hour trip is a short drive from San Pedro. It is in the Salt Mountains with sand formations of exquisite colors due to centuries of wind and flood erosion. A particularly fun part of this trip was sliding down a sand dune, up to 750 feet high, in whatever fashion possible, on foot or derrière. Perhaps I should be ashamed to say, I chose the latter.

This valley has not seen rain in the last 100 years. As a result, the wind sculpts the sands making an other-worldly sight similar to that on the moon. This valley is known for its sunsets when all shades of mellow colors envelop the landscape. 

This half day tour is about an hour drive from San Pedro. The highlight is the variegated rock colors that reflect the minerals within due to years of geological weathering. It also included petroglyphs.

Services offered along the streets of San Pedro include tours, restaurants, jewelers and about anything else you can image as suggested by the sign on the establishment below. 

 near the village center. It is right next door to the 

Awasi Atacama, a Relais & Chateaux property

, and much less expensive. The tours we took were arranged through Micaela, the on-site tour director. She is sharp and on top of her game, though, I must admit I was discouraged by our initial conversation. We had hoped to take the flamingo tour, one of the most popular. Micaela told me (and I paraphrase), “The flamingoes are gone; they fly to Peru for the season.”  There is one thing I learned from this conversation. Don’t trust assumptions. Call or E-mail ahead to find out what really is available when you are thinking of going to the Atacama Desert.

On a similar note, I was told the San Pedro Museum was closed because (and again, I paraphrase), “The air-conditioning went off and the mummies deteriorated. They had to go to Argentina for restoration.” I took this literally, but now have reason to believe the rest of the museum remained open and we unnecessarily missed it.

As to the hotel, itself, Noi Casa Atacama is pleasant and the showers are fabulous. The service was good except perhaps meals for a larger group. One night at dinner, the six of us waited for two hours for appetizers followed very much later by our entrees. The whole dinner took three hours and we had two hungry teenangers with us. Everyone became cranky. We were the second to enter the dining room and the last to be served, only because there were six of us as far as I could tell. To the hotels’ credit, however, they did not charge for that meal. The food, itself, was very good. Another restaurant that I can recommend is the Baltinache, about a 10-minute walk from the hotel. Be sure to bring flashlight as the roads are very dark at night.

If I were to visit the Atacama Desert area again, I would do a few things differently. First, I would spend more than two full days. Secondly, I would take advantage of the free or less expensive attractions, for example the San Pedro Museum and the Meteorite Museum. Additionally, there are sights that require only a bicycle or are a short cab ride away from town and a tour isn’t needed. These include the Fortress of Pukara, roughly two miles from San Pedro. It is also possible to visit Aldea de Tulor, another archaeological site, on bicycle as well as the Valley of the Moon. I would consider the latter suitable only for the most fit individuals.

Another visitor at the Noi Casa Atacama told me that the Atacama Desert is 

the #2 choice of desirable places to travel in a recent 2017 New York Times line-up

. Who knew? Saving money and being trendy are now one, a positive for any traveler. We visited the moon and it was easy.

All photographs by the author, Shirley M. Mueller, M.D.

Elon Musk is saying trips to the moon are in order for civilians. But it will set you back a few million dollars. The good news is you can have a moon-like experience right here on earth.Check out the Atacama Desert.

Explore the Moon-Like Atacama Desert

Many dentists diversify their financial portfolios with art, wine or cars.

Often doctors are collectors. In fact, some diversify their financial portfolios with fine art, wine or cars. This begs the question, what are collectors aside from sometimes being dentists or physicians?

 (1929-2007), tackled this issue. Dewey was an American, Baudrillard a Frenchman. Both were seminal thinkers in the twentieth century. But, there the similarities end, at least in their concept of what collectors are and are not.

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Baudrillard claimed that it was only the desire to acquire that defined the act of collecting. This obsession, per Baudrillard, led to the repetitive seeking and then buying of objects, which the philosopher claimed released tension. Any satisfaction, though, was only temporary and the cycle had to be repeated.  Baudrillard called this a neurosis, normally a psychiatrist’s or psychologists diagnosis rather than one in a philosopher’s toolkit.

Dewey, however, had a different take. He raised collecting to a higher sphere. He saw the pleasure gained from it as “adventurous.”  Additionally, he linked collecting to the museum concept of art where it is elevated above the everyday.  Dewy believed this perception contributed to the placement of collector’s objects not only in museums but also in mansions and warehouses.  

 (1872-1951), Dewey’s friend, had a mansion.  This is the Barnes who was a millionaire by age 35 due to his discovery of a silver nitrate antiseptic solution marketed as Argonyl. Barnes assembled artworks in his Merion, Pennsylvania home that later were moved to Philadelphia and became the 

. The association of the two men, Dewey and Barnes, may have been what led the former to remark, “the typical collector is the typical capitalist.”

So, neither philosopher, Baudrillard or Dewey, had a particularly flattering concept of collectors and collecting. For the former, the motivation was a neurosis; for the latter, it was capitalist behavior.

Kevin Melchionne, a living philosopher, reviews these concepts in his paper titled 

. In it, Melchionne extends the ideas of Baudrillard and Dewey to something more. He advances the earlier philosopher’s concept of collecting.

Melchionne says, “Collecting is a means of the aesthetic cultivation of the individual.”  He then goes on to examine the meaning of cultivation as, “the practice of taking care of one’s self … essentially a process: We do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and reorganized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences.”

I daresay Marchionni’s philosophical definition of collectors is the one those who collect want to preserve. It dignifies the pastime and gives it respect. It also carries the motive past that of simple portfolio diversification to a higher plane — 

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Often doctors are collectors. In fact, some diversify their financial portfolios with fine art, wine or cars. This begs the question, what are collectors aside from sometimes being dentists or physicians? Two philosophers, John Dewey (1859-1952) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), tackled this issue.