Exotic Foods

Oliver Bell has a big challenge on his hands. T. Rowe Price hired the 42-year-old Briton in October from the asset-management arm of Pictet, a Swiss bank, to see if he could get the struggling T. Rowe Price Africa & Middle East Fund (ticker: TRAMX) back on track. Bell is the frontier fund’s third portfolio manager since its ill-timed September 2007 launch, on the eve of the world financial crisis. It’s lost an average of 5.82% a year since, and assets have slid to $135 million from $235 million at their peak; outflows have totaled $106 million since the beginning of 2009.

Despite the market’s recent abandonment of risky emerging-markets stocks, numbers suggest Bell can accomplish his task. He topped his benchmark by about 200 basis points a year managing an institutional strategy for Pictet that covered North Africa and Middle Eastern stocks from late 2008 through May of 2010, and he had similar success running a retail fund for the firm more recently.

Bell, who joined Pictet in the late 1990s to build its database of emerging-markets stocks, has accumulated a lot of deep-value plays. After the Arab Spring revolts decimated stock markets through the Arabian Peninsula and across the continent last year, Bell saw a chance to create a low-priced portfolio for his new employer. “No one is invested in this region. That is the huge opportunity. This will be the fastest-growing area in the world for the next 10 years. I am sure of it,” he says.

Once the global economy starts to heal, African countries will see more investment money flow back in as buyers feel more comfortable with risk again. In general, African economies are already well positioned, with low debt levels relative to gross domestic product—about 20% on average. Yet only die-hard long-term investors like pension funds, foundations and endowments—and Bell—stayed behind after hedge funds and retail stockpickers fled last year. He’s now holding many stocks trading at all-time lows and boasting better corporate governance than ever, thanks to improved management. Bell estimates earnings could rise 20% this year, which would justify healthier prices barring “a real crisis somewhere.”

Like Franklin Templeton’s Mark Mobius, Bell figures frontier markets like Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa have evolved to where Brazil, Russia, India and China were two decades ago. Investors shunned the original emerging-markets stocks because the companies weren’t shareholder friendly, and their stocks weren’t liquid or easily accessible through brokers. What’s more, local governments were often corrupt and changed rules on foreign investment to suit their own needs.

Continued trouble in Egypt and Syria is worrisome, but Bell notes there’s enough liquidity in the whole region to avoid hot spots and put money into unaffected areas. Still, “you’ve got to accept that these are frontier markets that, like emerging markets did in the 1990s, go from crisis to crisis,” he says.

Bell, who spent some of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, where his father imported goods from Britain to the Middle East and Africa, generally spreads his risk by investing in two regions where the local economies are driven by different forces. About 60% of the fund’s assets are in Africa, where an emerging middle class is facilitating growth, just as it is in China and India. And 40% is invested in the Middle East, where oil and gas predominate. He further diversifies risk by spreading investments out across 11 countries, ranging in size from South Africa and Saudi Arabia to Ghana and Zambia.

As a further precaution, Bell occasionally buys depositary receipts for a few African companies on the London Stock Exchange.

For all the frustration, Bell’s two predecessors didn’t do badly; the markets did. The T. Rowe Price fund’s loss of 16.10% last year beat 83% of the 429 emerging- and frontier-market equity funds that Lipper tracks. Since inception in September 2007, the fund’s annualized decline of 5.82% easily tops the MSCI Frontier Markets Index, which was down 11.09% a year on average, according to Lipper.

Bell has revamped the portfolio. He has put about 30% of the fund in South Africa, where corporate governance is strong and many companies derive their growth from investments in African countries that might otherwise be off-limits to foreign investors.

In November, the onetime chemistry major at England’s Exeter University bought Sasol (SOL.South Africa), a petrochemical outfit that converts coal into gasoline and has invested in several African countries. Because the technological process that Sasol employs is similar to that used to convert shale gas into liquid, he expects interest in Sasol to grow. The company has agreed to buy a share in shale-gas deposits in Canada.

He’s also picked up stocks that he discovered years ago at Pictet. One is Orascom Construction Industries (OCIC.Egypt), a fast-growing contractor and fertilizer maker. He first bought in February 2003 after the Egyptian pound was devalued, making its stock market very cheap. By the end of 2007, Orascom’s stock price had multiplied by 60 times. More recently, it has fallen, but he still sees tremendous potential. He expects the embattled Egyptian currency to be devalued by anywhere from 20% to 60% this year, and he’s waiting to buy more stock once it is.

Banks in oil-rich Nigeria are another favorite. He expects both loan growth and returns on investment to grow at about a 20% clip this year, thanks to financial reforms. The T. Rowe Price fund has bought Zenith Bank (ZENITHBA.Nigeria), which, like most Nigerian banks, is trading at book value, or what Bell says is about a quarter of their historical level.

Bell invests in some markets, like Saudi Arabia, where foreigners can’t, strictly speaking. There he bought Jarir Marketing (JARIR.Saudi Arabia) through a local bank that owns the shares on T. Rowe’s behalf. He was attracted to the book chain because it sells textbooks, iPhones and iPads on the same floor to appeal to young Arabs who are eager readers and avid technology users.

The money manager wants to invest directly in the stocks he likes and thinks the fund ultimately will profit from that approach. “We are transitioning from everyone believing the emerging markets are the risky trade and developing markets are the safe trade. That will play out over a number of years,” he says. And Bell intends to be on right side of the trade when it does.  

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By RUTH SIMON

We goofed.

That is the message Ally Financial is delivering to some of its customers.

The online lender mistakenly failed in December to credit year-end interest earned by some savers who hold its certificates of deposit. The company also provided these customers with incorrect tax information that didn’t reflect the interest they should have earned.

Ally spokeswoman Gina Proia says the company believes roughly 5,000 customers—or about 2% of the bank’s CD customers—were affected by the snafu.

“We regret that this has occurred and we will ensure that it is addressed promptly and completely,” she says. There is no indication that this was anything other than a simple glitch.

Ally is in the process of crediting the proper interest payments to customer accounts and is “communicating with” customers whose accounts were affected, Ms. Proia says. The company also is continuing to investigate “the root cause of the issue,” she adds. Ally customers can receive their interest payments monthly, quarterly, annually or at maturity.

Raul Etkin, a research scientist who lives in Sunnyvale, Calif., says he called Ally in January because he hadn’t received the annual interest payment on a five-year Ally CD with a 2.62% rate. The payment, which totaled more than $1,000, should have been posted in December. It was credited to his account in February, he says.

“I think if I hadn’t caught this error, the interest wouldn’t have been paid,” says Mr. Etkin, 38 years old, adding that he was told by an Ally representative that the problem was being addressed on a “case-by-case basis.” Mr. Etkin has several Ally CDs, but only one was affected by the problem. He still is waiting for a revised 1099 tax form and was told to expect it by the end of February.

“We obviously monitor our customer feedback regularly,” Ms. Proia says. “As soon as we became aware that this was a broader issue, we began a thorough investigation.”

Ken Tumin, founder of DepositAccounts.com, a deposit-rate comparison website, says he has never heard of a similar glitch that affected so many accounts. “I can’t remember an incident like this that affected this many people,” says Mr. Tumin, who has been tracking the deposit industry since 2005. He says he received complaints from five other Ally customers after posting a note from Mr. Etkin on his website.

The glitch is a reminder that it is important to monitor your account statements and check your 1099 tax forms, says Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

The incident comes at a time when interest rates have sunk to rock-bottom levels, leaving conservative investors with few options. Ally is one of several Internet lenders that offer above-average yields. Recent commercials have touted the bank’s customer service.

Ally offers a suite of savings products, including a 12-month CD that yields 1.01% and a five-year CD with a 1.74% yield. Those offerings stand out in comparison to the average yield of 0.35% on a one-year CD and 1.15% for a CD that matures in five years, according to Bankrate.com. Last year, the company introduced a new CD that lets savers raise their interest rate twice during its four-year term, assuming CD rates go higher.

“They are consistently among the top payers,” Mr. McBride says.

Ally doesn’t expect the issue to have a material financial impact on the company because it had already accounted for the interest payments and the problem affected only a limited number of accounts, Ms. Proia says. Ally Financial, formerly known as GMAC, has some $184 billion in assets and is majority-owned by the U.S. government.

The bank has $18.6 billion in CDs of less than $100,000, according to regulatory filings, though it won’t say how much retail customers have funneled into its CDs. Chief Financial Officer Jim Mackey told investors in February that retail deposits grew by 27% to $27.7 billion in 2011, which “exceeded our expectations for the year.” Ally has been able to retain 92% of its CD balances even as higher-yielding CDs mature in today’s lower-rate environment, and the number of customer accounts grew by 35% to 977,000 last year.

Write to Ruth Simon at ruth.simon@wsj.com

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

The small-business help desk is going corporate, with initiatives from companies like Apple Inc. bringing new competition to independent consultants who typically handle the IT needs of U.S. start-ups and small companies.

The move comes as the use of external IT support among small businesses is exploding. Information-technology services can include setting up new computers, upgrading software, protecting against malware and troubleshooting.

U.S. businesses with less than 500 employees spent roughly $23.5 billion on IT services last year, and are projected to spend $27.2 billion on IT services by 2015, according to estimates by research firm IDC.

Best Buy Co. sees “significant, untapped potential” in small business IT, a company spokeswoman said. The national retail chain in December bought Mindshift Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., provider of IT services to more than 5,400 small and midsize businesses nationwide.

Apple in June formed a partnership with OnForce Services Inc., an eight-year-old IT services network based in Lexington, Mass., to provide small businesses with IT help on their own premises.

“Everyone’s talking small business right now. There’s a huge opportunity,” says Peter Cannone, chief executive of OnForce.

Apple stores already feature a “Genius Bar,” where customers have their products serviced. A year ago Apple introduced “JointVenture,” a program providing small businesses with limited tech support offered by Apple employees in Apple stores and over the phone. That program starts at $499 a year for those who buy a new Mac.

But in-store support isn’t ideal for many business owners who may need to carry multiple computers or devices from their office into an Apple store.

While many small businesses and start-ups are still reluctant to hire new employees, spending on technology and IT services is seen generally as smart if it can help a company operate more efficiently, or make it possible for an owner who travels to manage his or her business from a remote location.

“I don’t have an IT department,” says Kevin Kay, owner of an Easley, S.C., health-care company with just 53 employees. “It’s not a luxury I can afford.”

Mr. Kay, who says he has been cautious in his overall spending in recent years due to the economy, sought Apple’s help in updating and transferring accounting software to three new iMac computers from older personal computers earlier this month.

Apple referred him to OnForce, which then dispatched a technician from its roster of more than 100,000 partners—independent IT-service providers nationwide who pay OnForce a referral fee of 10% of sales—to Mr. Kay’s business. Mr. Kay paid the technician $1,050, or $150 an hour, for seven hours of labor, an amount he describes as “costly but necessary.” That’s on top of the $5,600 he shelled out for computers, iPads, software and data backup.

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing, the options now available to small businesses go well beyond what was typical for a help desk just a few years ago. They include analytics, software customization, disaster recovery and video conferencing, for instance. Such options and others only recently became feasible to dispense on a widespread scale—and at prices the average small business can afford.

Spending on IT services by U.S. companies of all sizes has been growing at a rate of about 3.2% annually over the past five years, and reached $304 billion last year. That total is about 55% more than their spending on computer hardware and software sales combined, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

About 71% of small and midsize U.S. companies said they planned to increase their IT budgets by an average of 5.2% over the next 12 months, according to a July survey of 602 companies with less than 500 employees by the Computing Technology Industry Association, a trade group.

The small-business IT market is alluring to many in part because no single player dominates it, even though some large corporations have been in the space for longer than Apple and Best Buy, including International Business Machines Corp., Staples Inc. and AT&T Inc.

PlumChoice Inc., a midsize IT-services firm in Billerica, Mass., has signed partnerships with five large corporations in recent years to provide help-desk support to those outfits’ small-business customers. “When things don’t work, you can’t even run your business in many cases,” says Ted Werth, its founder.

There are roughly 300,000 independent IT consultants, and another 114,000 small IT companies, according to the trade group. Some independent consultants believe they can thrive despite potentially increased competition for mom-and-pop shops and other small-business clients.

“A college kid offers better pricing than I do but I’m able to give my clients the answers they need in ways they can understand,” says Allan Sabo, an IT consultant in Flushing, N.Y., who charges $100 an hour, or $500 a month, for service for clients who have one server and as many as five workstations.

Small-business owners “want to work with local people,” says Jason Comstock, an independent consultant in Marysville, Ohio, who says he visits his clients on site at least once a month even though he can assist them remotely with many IT issues. “They want to know who you are, where you go to church, are you a member of the local chamber of commerce, all those things. They’re really about the relationship.”

Best Buy so far isn’t planning to carve out dedicated space in its stores for Mindshift, as it currently does for Geek Squad, its tech-support service for consumers.

Rather, Mindshift will serve the businesses in most cases via remote access to a customer’s computer or over the phone.

“We can do 99% of the work remotely,” says Paul Chisholm, Mindshift CEO. “More and more customers want to go to the cloud, and the independents and small regional providers don’t have the financial capital and expertise to develop scalable cloud offerings.”

Keeping a team of IT professionals can be too costly for a start-up.

“The minute you bring them in, unless you spend a tremendous amount on training and keeping them up to date, their skills deteriorate,” says Rick Rodgers, co-founder of Tesaro Inc.

The two-year-old biopharmaceutical company, based in Waltham, Mass., paid Mindshift about $40,000 for all of its 2011 IT needs.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

By KELLY GREENE

Marky Olson, a 63-year-old Seattle blogger, hit rock bottom the day she sneaked eight photo albums out of her parents’ apartment and chucked them in a dumpster.

Already, she had spent two years trying to make a dent in the stuff crammed into her parents’ two-car garage at their retirement villa, finding a home for a boat, model trains and other objects large and small.

After her parents moved to an assisted-living facility and had to cull again, Ms. Olson reached her breaking point. A nurse tried to stop her, but she jettisoned the photos anyway.

“I just couldn’t handle dealing with all the stuff anymore,” she says.

As older parents approach death, they often leave lengthy to-do lists for their children. The tasks can be both physical and financial. Some children must deal with a tangle of arrangements—everything from heating-oil contracts to trusts—along with jumbled stock certificates, car titles or life-insurance policies for which there may be no backup copies. Others must sift through boxes or rooms full of belongings. Sometimes siblings get involved, complicating matters further.

When the chores become overwhelming, it can be difficult for family members to recover sentimental treasures or tie up financial loose ends. At the extreme, the sheer volume of stuff can clutter a house and weigh down its value—a problem if the home must be sold quickly.

It used to be much easier to dispose of estates, experts say. But the slow recovery from the recession has softened the market for antiques and collectibles drastically, according to more than a dozen professionals who handle estate sales and elderly moves. People have curtailed recreational shopping and aren’t moving into bigger homes, stifling demand for furnishings. At the same time, younger homeowners’ decorating tastes have changed in the past decade or so away from the traditional furniture, formal china and silver tea sets found in many older homes.

Julie Hall, an estate liquidator in Charlotte, N.C., says she is seeing people eschew stately grandfather clocks for utilitarian items—even cleaning supplies—they can pick up for cheap.

Here is how to deal with your parents’ stuff while preserving family harmony and finances.

Go Slow—but Don’t Stall Out

When a loved one dies, it is especially difficult to start sorting through his or her stuff quickly. Many families, hoping to avoid getting bogged down, hire a liquidator to clear out everything fast.

On the other hand, if your financial situation allows it, taking some time can help you deal with your grief. Arleen Stern, a geriatric-care manager in New York, spent four months with her family emptying her mother-in-law’s apartment after she died. “She was a Holocaust survivor, and she saved everything,” Ms. Stern says. “It let us reminisce about her life, and that’s a very important way for people to spend time together after a recent loss.”

The trick is to avoid stalling out—or becoming too paralyzed to start. Adult children inheriting a home could wind up on the hook for bills if the estate isn’t settled yet.

Jada Krall, a 41-year-old hospice nurse in Tampa, Fla., says that for several months last year she ignored the task of emptying her parents’ 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom home in Charlotte. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around it,” she says. Meanwhile, she and her brother had to pay the mortgage and other bills themselves.

When Ms. Krall hired an attorney to help her handle the estate, he urged her to hurry up and sell the house to stop the financial bleeding.

A real-estate agent connected her with Ms. Hall, the estate liquidator. In three days, Ms. Hall emptied the house, sending valuable pieces to an auction house. They didn’t bring much. Even an antique pump organ that Ms. Krall’s mother had painstakingly restored fetched only $125 at auction, she says: “I was shocked at how little things brought. You think that house is full of so much value, but in this economy it’s not.”

Many Different Options

Long-distance families, sibling rivalries and time pressure all are reasons to consider bringing in professionals to help sift through family belongings.

The question is which type of professional is best suited for your situation.

Estate liquidators, auction houses and consignors typically charge a percentage of the contents’ sale price—often 25% to 35%. Liquidators are the most likely to act as a one-stop shop, and they may bill in different ways for different services. Ms. Hall, for example, charges a percentage of the items that sell, and also an hourly rate starting at $110 for appraisals, clean-outs, and shipping items to auctioneers or charity. The American Society of Estate Liquidators (ASELonline.com), which she runs, provides local referrals.

If you want to sell select items and handle the disposal yourself, you could hire an auctioneer, preferably one who knows your specific merchandise and works well on the Internet, says Susan Devaney, owner of Moving Mavins in Westfield, N.J.

Consignment shops typically charge up to a 50% commission and put an item on their sales floor for 30 days. Find out upfront what happens if it hasn’t sold at that point. You might have 24 hours to a week to come get it—and if you don’t, it is theirs, warns John Buckles, president of Caring Transitions, a network of senior movers and estate-sale businesses.

Senior-move managers and professional organizers charge an hourly rate but typically offer more customized help. They can tap movers, reputable resellers, and auctioneers and charities willing to take books, clothing and home furnishings.

Their rates range from $40 to upward of $125 an hour, depending on where you live and the complexity of the job. Movers and organizers who have joined trade groups that provide training can be found at nasmm.org, napo.net and MoveSeniors.com.

Charles Naftalin, a partner at law firm Holland & Knight in Washington, hired Transitional Assistance & Design, a senior-move management company in Gaithersburg, Md., after his father died, and it quickly emptied his parents’ century-old Victorian house—including 20,000 books.

“We had a deadline,” he says. “We put the house up for sale, and my mom was moving to a one-bedroom apartment.” Mr. Naftalin says he was amazed at how much they accomplished so quickly. He hired the same mover when his mother moved from the apartment to an assisted-living facility.

Take Care of Financial Matters Quickly

In addition to dealing with the furniture and dishes, don’t forget to track down bills for monthly utilities, cancel credit cards, figure out if anything was on auto-pay from bank accounts that may be closed and tie up other bill-paying loose ends. Otherwise, the estate could end up paying late fees or bills for services no one is using—and if the estate hasn’t been settled yet, you could wind up on the hook for some of the charges ranging from utility bills and lawn service to homeowners’ association fees.

The same applies when your parents move to a long-term-care facility. When Jean Dorrell, a Summerfield, Fla., estate planner, traveled to Texas to clean out her father’s home after he moved to an assisted-living facility, she found stacks of mail and soon figured out that he was having $460 a month deducted from his bank account for magazine subscriptions and other purchases—a third of his monthly income.

Financial records can be particularly daunting. Caroline Yates, a homemaker in Rochester, N.Y., served as power-of-attorney for her octogenarian great uncle. She had to make room in his Westfield, N.J., home for health-care aides before a rehab center would release him, following an illness in 2010.

But she had to be careful not to throw out any uncashed checks or stock-sale records, since he had run a small financial business from his home with no computer records. After his death last year, she went through 16 filing cabinets searching for a set of stock certificates—before finding them in a bank safe-deposit box. She wound up hiring Ms. Devaney’s firm to help her clean out the house and sift through the important records.

Dole Out the Heirlooms Diplomatically

Some of the biggest family feuds erupt over the division of day-to-day objects. Those fights can become financial headaches if they hold up the settlement of the estate or, worse yet, drag the family into court.

The most foolproof strategy also is the most awkward: Parents and children discussing what the children will get while the parents are still alive and well, says Marlene Stum, a professor at the University of Minnesota who heads its “Who Gets Grandma’s Yellow Pie Plate?” project.

Aging parents and adult children often don’t realize which objects really matter to one another. Children might not know how the parents wound up with various heirlooms, and the stories might justify keeping what might otherwise seem like junk.

For their part, parents often are surprised to learn their children are more interested in everyday objects used while they were growing up—a pie plate or serving platter—than a coin collection with some monetary value, says Prof. Stum.

But what if a parent dies without talking with the children? First, the siblings need to agree on who is in charge, be it a family member or a professional, and give that person final say, advises Robert Spielman, an estate-planning lawyer and certified public accountant with Marcum LLP in Melville, N.Y. Next, they should determine who was promised something and who wants something that was important to him or her.

After that, they should consider giving everyone color-coded stickers to put on things they want, along with a number ranking it, and list it on a spreadsheet.

“By indicating how important a particular thing is to you in a way that everybody else can see, you’re much more likely to compromise,” says Francine Russo, author of “They’re Your Parents, Too!”

Document Deductions

Next comes the liquidation part. One option that can ease the emotional sting: making donations to charity. Doing so when your parents downsize “can make mom and dad feel good about who will get their stuff,” Mr. Buckles says.

After the second parent’s death, family members should choose the possessions they want, Mr. Spielman says. Next, the estate’s executor sells, or hires someone to sell, everything possible. (If the estate is taxable, estate tax is owed on those assets, whether or not they are sold.)

The children, as the heirs, typically get what is left after any tax is paid. They also get to claim a tax deduction for the fair-market value of any stuff donated to charity on the date of the donation, according to Mr. Spielman.

For donations, the Internal Revenue Service requires the item to be in good condition, and that you get a receipt.

“If the people at the Salvation Army think it’s worth $8,000, get a receipt for $8,000,” Ms. Dorrell says. “Your [accountant] can bring that number down if he needs to, but he can’t bring it higher.”

The IRS, Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries all post lists of suggested values on their websites. But if you have a higher-value item, such as designer clothing, take a digital photo to document it, Ms. Devaney advises.

Donations worth more than the IRS limit may require a formal appraisal, Mr. Spielman says.

Write to Kelly Greene at kelly.greene@wsj.com