Will your investments last longer than a jet?

A few days ago I started reading the novel Airframe, written by Michael Crichton, whose books, which also include Jurassic Park, have sold over 150 million copies worldwide.  The thriller, published 15 years ago, examines what caused a commercial aircraft to make sudden, wild movements that shook passengers like dice in a cup and killed three during the flight. 

The author presents an argument that commercial jets are the most complex and best made commercial products.  And in a Q&A found on his website, Michael Crichton made this statement:


"We don't stop to think how little we use most devices. For example, if your car lasts 200,000 miles, you'd probably think it was pretty rugged. But at an average speed of 30 mph, that's only 6,600 hours of use. To get 100,000 hours, you would have to drive the car 3 million miles. You tell me if you're sure your car-or any car-would make it. But we are sure an aircraft will go that many hours. We rely on it as a matter of course, every time we board a plane.

In summary, if you're aware of any mechanical device that requires more than half a million man hours to build, that is assembled from more than a million parts, and that operates with absolute reliably for more than 100,000 hours, please let me know.

If you have additional questions on this subject, as a journalist you might want to call Boeing."  

http://www.crichton-official.com/qa-airframe.html


By coincidence, journalists in today's Wall Street Journal focus on the manufacturing of jet aircraft by Boeing from 15 years ago.  You may recall that earlier this month a Southwest Airline Jet was forced to land when the "airframe" of the jet tore open during mid-flight: 


"Investigators suspect that a manufacturing lapse at a Boeing Co. factory 15 years ago is why the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines Co. jetliner ruptured in midair this month, according to government and industry officials.

It is too early to draw definitive conclusions, the officials said, and further testing and data analysis could bring other issues to the forefront. But the federal probe increasingly is focused on some type of assembly-line lapse—a rare occurrence in modern aircraft production— that would explain an incident that stunned the airline industry and worried travelers. 

The Boeing 737-300, with 122 people aboard, had a five-foot gash rip open in the upper part of its cabin and suffered a rapid decompression while cruising at about 34,000 feet on April 1...

The incident prompted Southwest to temporarily ground and immediately inspect 79 of its oldest Boeing 737s and sparked a round of swift inspections of about 100 more aging 737s at other airlines world-wide. 

A big reason behind the manufacturing-related focus, according to government and industry officials, is that a number of the Southwest planes with fuselage cracks were built around the same time."  


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704123204576283370460150808.html


---------------------------------

This prompts us to make a suggestion to all investors: look at the quality of your investments.  How many hours can they give you?  

We think the best investments are ETFs, Exchange Traded Funds, made by Vanguard and a few other giant asset managers who offer the highest quality product at the lowest costs: 0.2% annual fees or less.   

Owning the lowest cost ETFs that you can reasonably keep for the rest of life is the way stop costs from wasting your wealth.  We explain why and how to make this happen in seminars, talks, and private consultations.  

We help investors learn how to cut costs deeply and permanently, keep the large savings, and measure how those savings can add from extra tens of thousands and up to extra hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.  

Learn how to build significant amounts of extra wealth over the rest of your life by cutting costs today.