Warren Buffett is diving headlong into U.S. equities with a strong warning to cash-hoarders:

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts. [New York Times]

“Buy American”, he says. “I am”.

Well that’s good to hear, but the question is “Do I (and you) dare?”

But if you want to know your PAN number, you just go here: https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/knowpan/knowpan.do - and then enter just your Last Name and Date of Birth??!!

Heaven help you if you share your last name with someone else who was also born on the same day. My friend in India just got a different pan number on the site than on his physical PAN Card!

Not sure if the PAN number in India can be misused as much as the Social Security Number here in the U.S., but this site is just an open invitation to trouble-makers.

[Update: It gets better! Turns out it's quite easy to hack into any person's online tax-filing account.]

The deduction was legitimate; it was the underlying asset that proved to be the problem.

“We were going over their tax information and the tax manager asked the gentleman, ‘Now what about the mortgage interest deduction for the condo in Utah?’ Unfortunately, the wife didn’t know about the condo in Utah, where he had set up his mistress. It was a big ‘oops’ moment. There was this stony silence in the room. It was absolutely awful,”.

Read them all

These 9 rules were originally published in “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel“. In its original form Adams’ formula was apparently so heretical and so explosive that no major house would touch it when he proposed publishing it as a one-page book. After initial rejections, he announced sadly that “if God materialized on earth and wrote the secret of the universe on one page, he wouldn’t be able to find a publisher” either.

Dilbert’s Unified Theory of Everything Financial:

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

At 129 words, you just cannot beat it for simplicity. Thanks to Adams’ formula, the average irrational investor can ignore Wall Street:

“Everything else you may want to do with your money is a bad idea compared to what’s on my one-page summary. You want an annuity? It’s worse. You want a whole life insurance policy? It’s worse. You want to invest in individual stocks? It’s worse. You want a managed mutual fund instead of an index fund? It’s worse. I could go on, but you get the point.”

Which of these rules have you followed? Do they work for you? I am currently at 6/9 and pretty close to 7/9 (and if you are really kind to me, who knows, you might just make it into my will!)

-Via MarketWatch

Dilbert, Personal Finance, Dilbert’s Unified Theory of Everything Financial