Woody Tasch thinks "small local farms are the ultimate hedge fund," reports Stephanie Simon in the Wall Street Journal (9/16/09). Woody is a former venture capitalist who believes investors should "put some of their assets into businesses they can see, smell and even taste -- to measure growth not by the flashing numbers on a stock ticker, but by the slow ripening of a tomato." He doesn't pretend that "investing in sustainable local agriculture will yield an enviable return," maybe 3-6 percent over the very long term. He says the real dividend is "diversity."

As Woody sees it, investing in small farms is a way to introduce something different into a marketplace dominated by industrial farms, "where millions of acres are planted with the same variety of corn and millions of pigs are bred to be genetically similar." Small farms meanwhile "preserve heirloom seeds and quirky breeds; strengthen the soil with organic nutrients; create local markets that connect producer directly to consumer." A few investors are buying into the slow-money idea, although cautiously.

"I won't lie -- it's a scary thing," says Martin Lindstrom, a Rockefeller heir, who says that giving his money to a goat farmer feels like "jumping off a cliff." Even some of the farmers aren't so sure about they idea: "Specifically, they fear deep-pocketed local investors will demand a say in management decisions." They're also afraid that "small-sum investors" will swamp them "with requests for tours and samples." Some feel they're better off with a traditional bank loan. But Woody Tasch, who has written a book about his idea, "Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money," seeks a million people to join him. "We must bring money down to earth," he says.

Eight credit unions in Michigan are offering a novel program that's "a cross between a certificate of deposit and a raffle ticket," reports Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal (7/18/09). The way it works is, you put at least $25 into a one-year, Save to Win CD and "are entered into a monthly 'savings raffle' for prizes up to $400, plus one annual drawing for a $100,000 jackpot ... In 25 weeks, the program has attracted abut $3.1 million in new deposits, often from people who have never been able to set money aside."

Peter Tufano, a finance professor at Harvard came up with the idea, which is currently open only to Michigan residents. It's premised on a fairly basic reality: "In 2007, the latest year for which final numbers are available, Americans spent $92.3 billion on legalized gambling, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors; that same year, says the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), Americans saved only $57.4 billion." Peter's idea was that maybe more Americans would save money if doing so were "more exciting than just a dull deposit into a bank account."

This works for Takisha Turner, who doesn't gamble, but doesn't save, either. She put $25 into Save to Win CD, and promptly won $400. She took that money and put it into another CD, giving her a second chance at the $100,000 jackpot. As Hank Hubbard, president of one of the sponsoring credit union notes, "You are sort of betting, but there's no losing." Personal savings among Americans has risen lately, to 6.9 percent annually, but that's less than the 8-10 percent savings rate in the late 1980s, according to the BEA. As of 2005, American "households were spending 99.6 of every dollar they earned.

Former People's Bank ceo David E.A. Carson calls his Wellfleet, Mass., home "The Kolumns" because of "the pairs of dark-red steel K-shaped ceiling supports," reports Lisa A. Phillips in the New York Times (5/8/09). Back in the day, David "helped People's survive the banking crisis of the early 1990s" by expanding the bank's training programs and its credit-card business while others were cutting back. He thinks the current crisis is no different and points out that some banks are doing just fine simply by "lending money to the people who would pay it back."

After he retired, David's kids suggested he build a house on Cape Cod so they could, you know, come and visit. "I didn't want the house to be just mine," says David. "I wanted it to be a concept we all bought into." The result is a $2.3 million, 5,000 square-foot abode "set on a steep, wooded, one-acre lot." It is centered on a great room, but "it has several sublevels, with rooms and balconies separated from the main floor by a few steps ... Even when the house is full the layout offers privacy."

The design was supposed to recall an oak leaf, but David says it ended up looking more like a ship. This was perfect, because David's father was a merchant seaman and his father a sea captain. David himself had sailed to America from England as a child. "It's part of my DNA," he says. "The water and the things that border on the water ... are fascinating and a great stimulus and keep the mind active." Of Wellfleet, he adds: "It is incredibly beautiful, one of the first places settled by the Europeans ... You're part of the Northeast Corridor, but it's still the primitive land the Pilgrims arrived at" (images).

"Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions," writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book, "How We Decide," reviewed by Steven Johnson in the New York Times (3/22/09). Unlike Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," which also looks at "the boundaries between reason and intuition," this book "is an inside job, zooming in on the inner workings of the brain." It features experiments involving brain scans of people "in the process of making decisions," for instance.

Jonah uses anecdotes to set up key insights about decision-making, things like Tom Brady's "memorable pass in the 2002 Super Bowl." Along the way, readers "learn about the reward circuitry of the brain," and gain insights into "our pursuit of those rewards." For example, in explaining "the propensity of the brain to register bad news more strongly than good," Jonah notes that "in the average marital relationship it takes five compliments to make up for a single cutting remark."

Where creativity is concerned, he observes: "From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time." He also notes that we are "loss averse," but mainly in the short term, "making us more susceptible to the siren song of the LCD TV or the McMansion." As for our shopping habits, he says credit cards "fundamentally change the way we spend money ... When you buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss -- your wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract." ~ Tim Manners, editor.

American Express is offering some of its card-holders a $300 "gift card" to pay off their balances and close their accounts, reports Mary Pilon in the Wall Street Journal (2/24/09). "The intention is to help card-holders lower their debt and encourage responsible management of their credit," says Molly Faust, an Amex spokesperson. While Amex won't say how many of its card-holders have received its offer, Molly says, "It's a relatively small number of card-members who have sizeable balances and little spending and payment activity."

Amex started sending out letters to its targeted cardmembers "earlier this month." The letters included "an RSVP code that, when submitted online, immediately cancels that member's card. Members have from March 1 to April 30 to pay off their balances and receive the prepaid card. During that time, the balance is subject to the same interest rates and fees that it would be if they chose to keep their card. If customers don't pay off their balances by April 30, they will not get the gift card and their accounts will still be closed."

What's more (or less), customers who close their accounts "lose all Membership Reward points accumulated while they were customers ... That means customers should use up their points before agreeing to the offer." Curtis Arnold of cardratings.com says, "This is a huge paradigm shift," and says he expects other credit-card companies to follow Amex's lead. He adds: "It's a nice way of saying, 'We want you out and we want to entice you financially to get out' ... It's not about them handing out $300 out of the kindness of their hearts." And, oh, by the way, "closing a line a credit generally hurts customer credit scores, even if the customers do it themselves." ~ Tim Manners, editor.

The Dutch government may have shelled out $13.4 billion to bail out ING Direct, but the innovative, online-only bank remains in pretty good shape, notes Dave Kansas in a Wall Street Journal book review of "The Orange Code," by Arkadi Kuhlmann and Bruce Philp (12/10/08). The book consists of a conversation, of sorts, between Arkadi, the bank's U.S. chief and Bruce, who chairs its marketing operations. It features some "12 maxims for building a new brand and new business," but its organizing principles are simply that bricks are bad and saving is good.

The ING idea is premised on unremarkable insight that if it avoided the "costs related to a bricks-and-mortar business, it could afford to pay savers a higher interest rate than traditional banks." ING first tested this idea in Canada in 1997, and within two years "it had more than $2 billion in accounts and more than 250,000 customers." A year later it launched its U.S. business, and as of "the end of 2007, ING Direct had $62 billion in deposits and more than seven million customers." Sounds simple enough, although similar formulas didn't necessarily pan out for its competitors.

Arkadi and Bruce credit marketing with making a difference, such as its iconic "orange ball" ads "with catchy lines like 'More Piggy, Less Bank'." But its anchor is ING Direct's "reputation for being straightforward, democratic and even a bit schoolmarmish. It pushed the importance of savings at a time of profligate spending." It also fought a bill that made it harder for people to declare bankruptcy and refused to sell off its mortgages, burnishing its image while avoiding problems. That wasn't necessarily short-term profitable, but it left ING Direct positioned "as a champion of savers just as thrift is coming back into style." ~ Tim Manners, editor

"We have nothing at all as a competitive advantage other than our service and our people and their ability to identify needs and create solutions," says R. Michael S. Menzies, president of Easton Bank & Trust, in a New York Times article by Ron Lieber (7/21/08). Easton is a community bank, a distinction that is immediately evident in its lobby, where you will find "an old-fashioned popcorn machine, magazines for the children and work from local artists on display." The bank's vault is in clear view "and the tellers do not sit behind glass partitions." Michael wears pinstripe suits and wears black wingtip shoes, but his office door is always open.

More important, he has written about $10 million in loans to locals who couldn't get them elsewhere based on nothing more than his personal knowledge of the borrowers. "These are loans with challenged credit, but where we know why the credit is challenged," says Michael. "Health, divorce, a lost job. Stuff happens. But we know the people, we know they're honest and we know the families." In some cases these loans are made to younger people "who have a huge amount of credit card debt." The loans do come with tight conditions, "including no new card debt." Michael says he makes these loans with confidence for one simple reason: "If you miss a beat, I'll call your mother," he says.

He's not really joking because the bank's community -- Easton, Maryland -- is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody. He says the small-town culture helps explain why he's suffered very few bad debts over the past 15 years. Michael also makes his bank "relevant" to younger people via a "rewards checking account that pays a whopping 4.49 annual percentage yield on balances up to $25,000." But the main thing is his personal commitment: "The first loss we take here is my personal loss," he says. "It's my personal equity in the bank, my personal reputation in a community I've lived in most of my life. I'm not just dealing with other people's money, so it's a whole different level of responsibility." ~ Tim Manners, editor

Washington Mutual sees a retail solution to the "headache-generating home-loan side of the business," reports Bill Virgin in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (1/27/08). "There continues to be high-growth demand for our stores," says WaMu ceo Kelly Killinger because "there's still a propensity for customers to want to come in and talk to somebody in person." The thinking is that if WaMu can persuade more people to open checking accounts, then those people will be primed to come in and talk about mortgages, home-equity loans and IRAs, for example. "We look at the profitability of stores based on everything we're able to do there," says Kerry.

Notice that Kerry refers to WaMu's branches as "stores" -- "a term the industry increasingly uses." Some eight years ago, WaMu introduced "a new-age branch design" it calls Occasio. According to the WaMu website, the Occasio design was based on "two years of extensive customer research in which consumers said they like to do business in a comfortable setting with friendly, competent people." Did you ever? The format features "circular layouts which eliminate the high counters," a khaki-clad concierge and teller "towers" intended to encourage customer interaction. But the improved format alone isn't enough.

Consultant John McQuaig says you need staffers who know the community, for one thing, and consultant Seamus McMahon says location is equally important: "You've got to get in the back of a minivan and drive around until you're sick," he says, to make sure you have a grip on the neighborhood. WaMu currently operates some 2,200 "stores" coast-to-coast, and plans to up to 150 new locations in 2008 (up from 78 in '07). All of the new stores will open in markets where WaMu already has a presence -- the bank discovered that blitzing a new market with dozens of stores didn't work so well. WaMu will close about 40 stores in 2008, too (up from 28 in '07), and is said to be looking at a "next generation" of store design, as well. ~ Tim Manners, editor