What the experts say

Buy used, not hybrid

With gas prices still hovering around $4 a gallon, switching to a fuel-efficient car seems like a no-brainer, said Mark Solheim in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. But before you trade in your gas-guzzler for a “fuel sipper,” do the math. Cars typically lose as much as half their value during the first three years off the lot, and these days the trade-in values for fuel hogs are laughable. In fact, many dealers won’t even accept SUVs or trucks for trade-in. You’d need to save quite a bit on fuel costs to come out ahead, especially if you still owe money on an old car and insist on having a hot new hybrid. Then again, such a swap could pay off. “If you buy an inexpensive urban warrior or a used car that is also fuel-efficient, you’re likely to come out ahead pretty quickly.”

Don’t count on the ‘float’

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Think twice before handing a cashier that debit card, said Kathy Chu in USA Today. A “growing number” of banks are charging clients hefty overdraft fees even before transactions overdraw their accounts. “Previously, you didn’t get charged this fee unless you were short of cash when the signature debit transaction cleared a few days later.” Many bank customers take this grace period—or “float”—for granted. They might, for instance, use their debit cards the day before payday, counting on the money to be there by the time the charge goes through. Now, however, banks are slapping customers with fees if they don’t have funds in an account at the moment the card is actually swiped. Banks say the practice “provides customers with accurate information about account balances.” Consumer advocates argue that it’s just another way for banks—which collected a record $45.6 billion in overdraft fees in 2007—to nickel-and-dime consumers.

In a bear market, it can be hard for investors to separate the “strong” mutual fund managers from the “meek,” said Chuck Jaffe in The Wall Street Journal. Investors often dump the managers whose funds take the biggest blows, but that can be shortsighted. “New research shows that there is a distinct benefit to sticking with a high-performing manager through a rough patch.” The study by Baird Advisory Services Research singled out more than 500 funds whose returns were at least 1 percentage point better than those of their peers, every year, for the past 10 years. “The key finding was that many of these top funds went through periods where they got killed.” Yet over the 10-year window the funds had superior returns. So have a little faith: What seems like a terrible market to you may be a buying opportunity for your manager.