“Man. I was playing Rookie League compared to what they’re doing now.”

So the government acknowledges that it’s spying on you. Keeping your cell phone metadata (or as the [current] President called it, “megadata,”) at any rate. And that’s just what they’re copping to. Certainly there’s nothing beyond that, nothing else your elected representatives are authorizing that just hasn’t come to light yet. But hey, it’s for your own good and your own safety. We only hope that the National Security Agency deems Control Your Cash worthy of extra attention. Here, let’s give this a try: اللعنة قبالة، كنت التوابع القذرة من الشيطان.

Submitting to the Carnival does not imply endorsement, or something. Dividend Growth Investor independently chose to send us a piece in which he tears apart some blowhard on CNN Money who claims, or suggests, that the “dividend craze” is over. That’s almost too stupid to rebut, but then again it was CNN. The initial flawed argument was that dividend stocks, characterized as those with a high dividend yield, are becoming unattractive compared to “safe-haven” stocks (utilities, etc.) and bonds. Yes, because you should always buy or sell a stock depending on how other securities are doing in the marketplace. Dividend Growth Investor isn’t in this for anything other than the long haul, and especially not for as brief a period as that CNN article will be noticed.

New submitter this week, Kurt Fischer at My Money Counselor. His site’s logo is green, strike one. (You know, because green means money! Get it?) He turned the “s” in “Counselor” into a dollar sign, strike two. However, with an 0-2 count he lobbed one over the infield. Kurt can write: anyone who refers to his morning ablutions as his “toilette” is alright by us. Kurt is also frank enough to list the smartest financial decisions he ever made. All of which we heartily endorse.

The remarkable Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance has earned the right to submit her guest posts. This week, a piece that appeared on RIA Biz. Sandi did something we endorse even more strongly than Kurt’s aforementioned decisions–she quit her job at one of Canada’s 5 oligopolistic banks to become a fee-only financial planner in Gravenhurst, Ontario. If you’ve never heard of Gravenhurst, its only notable non-Sandi resident was a Communist who died 74 years ago. To quote Sandi, this post is about “how my husband and I worked toward the goal of my resignation from the bank, how I’m running my business without wasting money, and […] reaching for the life we want without tuning into the vibrational frequencies of the universe.” Sandi’s post summaries are better than most submitters’ posts.

Comparably remarkable and comparably rural is Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence, who’s smart enough to both a) not have kids and b) still have strong opinions on how to teach them about money. We won’t spoil it for you, but her one big rule is “Communicate.” There are few worse ways to prepare your kids for adulthood than by never speaking of money, then showing them the door at 18 and saying, or implying, “Okay. Time for you to budget, pay taxes, invest, etc. Good luck!” Ingest what Pauline has to say, and if this isn’t an appropriate place to stick a link to our book, nothing is.

WARNING: The next submitter spelled “foolproof” as “fullproof”. Unless “fullproof” is some MBA-level piece of investing terminology that we’re not familiar with. There are also some instances of its/it’s confusion, among other errors, but we’re not looking for miracles here. The submitter in question is Charles Yeaman at Tortoise Banker, who hopefully will make enough money in his banking career that he can one day afford his own URL instead of using a Blogspot one. Charles has some investing advice that’s easy to follow (allocate between stocks and bonds in a ratio contingent on how old you are) and some that isn’t, although it’ll likely benefit you if you heed it (check your portfolio for 10 minutes, once a year.)

What does it take to become a universally respected financial guru? Seriously, what does it take? Robert Kiyosaki passed off fables as truth, and still has a career. Clark Howard is a overly budget-conscious nerd whom some masochistic syndicator gave an unlistenable radio show to. Suze Orman got rich from little more than calling people “girlfriend” while having a sassy haircut, it seems.

Then there’s Dave Ramsey, who wraps his facile advice in a patina of friendly folksiness and mild Christianity. Dave Ramsey made a series of dubious assertions this week, some financial professionals called him out for them on Twitter, and he made the mistake of responding. Not with anything of substance, mind you, just the microblogging equivalent of “Sez you.” That’s not enough to satisfy Jason of Hull Financial Planning, who tears down Ramsey’s promises of 12% market returns and his conscious ignorance of investment fees so comprehensively that there’s nothing left. Jason’s article is long, detailed, and because it’s Jason probably took him 7 minutes to write.

We can usually count on at least one of those horrible structured settlement companies to send us a submission/advertorial each week. Unfortunately, none did this week, meaning that we can’t juxtapose it with the latest from Darwin’s Money. Darwin thinks you should NEVER, EVER, and capitalizes and repeats to stress the point, sell your pension. You’ll get pennies on the dollar, you’ll sacrifice future cash flow (in your non-earning years), and several other reasons, all of them more than valid.

Procrastinate your saving? Isn’t that anathema to everything we’re supposed to know about personal finance? Well, Michael at Kitces.com argues for delayed gratification of a different kind. Instead of paring your current budget to unsustainable levels, just maintain your current lifestyle, however indulgent it may be, through future bumps in income. And invest the difference, of course. Psychologically, Michael argues that this is easier than doing it the conventional way.

Jon Rhodes at Affiliate Help threw together a bunch of truisms about the differences between rich people and poor people. You’ve probably heard most of them before, but this one is far and away our favorite:

Poor people put all their focus into saving money and being frugal whereas rich people put most of their focus into generating wealth.

That summarizes this whole endeavor of personal finance advice as pithily as anything we’ve ever read.

If we had PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net‘s fondness for research, we would have graduated college with less stress and greater margin for error. Grossly simplifying what he wrote,

1. Most segments (by employment sector, not demographic) of the American workforce have remained largely static over the last 48 years, with one glaring exception.
2. That exception is manufacturing, whose ranks have shrunk in relative and absolute terms.
3. The result? Today, the alleged gap between male and female salaries is essentially nonexistent. “77¢ on the dollar,” or whatever it’s supposed to be, is a myth. Gals, you can now get in the kitchen and make us some sammiches. At the same wage the male sammich-makers are earning.

With the recent news that the IRS has become the national arbiter of prayer content and other minutiae that have nothing to do with tax obligations, the truth has become more apparent than ever: we need a diagonal tax. One standard deduction for everyone, a fixed ratio on the remainder. High earners would still pay proportionally more than low earners, and we’d free up hundreds of millions of man-hours of sheltering, avoidance and calculation.

The problem is, someone’s going to complain that their deduction is different and deserves special attention. What about my minor child, who comes with a set of expenses? What about our marriage, which strengthens societal bonds and thus deserves indirect remuneration? And of course, What about the house that I’ve bought, which implies permanence and thus justifies me getting a break on mortgage interest? Ross at Wallet Hub explains how various factions in Washington are calling for everything from eliminating the deduction to turning it into a tax credit. Whatever ultimately happens, we’ll predict only that the Internal Revenue Code will continue to increase in complexity proportionate with its age. Or the cube of its age, more likely.

Lynn at Wallet Blog has “money-saving tips for summer.” Since none of you are going to adopt our failsafe tip–quit drinking–you can look at hers instead. She suggests eating pasta salads. For real. She also says you should buy an aloe vera plant instead of manufactured extract. But while you can keep a $2 tube of GNC skin gel pretty much anywhere in your home, you have to keep an aloe vera plant away from your pets. And water and feed it. Which is not only so much easier than a drugstore visit, it’ll save you untold thousands. Easy street, here you come.

Finally, John Kiernan at Card Hub asks the experts whether we, meaning you, will ever get to retire. It takes a passel of academics to tell you that you need to save more and stop spending like imbeciles. The end.

Wow, that was a lot. See you tomorrow. Thanks for playing.

Photo taken on the Tropic of Cancer, where everything tilts exactly 90 degrees

We just discovered the greatest invention since the microprocessor. Elegantly simple, it’s a sports bottle with a detachable bottom (and top). No more E. coli down your throat! For bikers like us, it’s a godsend of sanitation. And costs only marginally more than the standard sports bottles they sell at the bike store. We haven’t contracted dysentery once since using it, so it must be working. Uncompensated plug over, now it’s time for the show:

Sandi at Spring Personal Finance submitted a winner 2 weeks ago, got cold feet last week (literal cold feet, she lives in the Ontario hinterlands), and is back with her tour de force. Retirement planning, Sandi’s trade, involves more than the stock photo of walking barefoot on an Aegean beach with your slightly graying but still attractive spouse. There’s a battery of questions you have to ask decades beforehand, ranging from the philosophical (What do I want?) to the quantifiable (How much money do I have? How quickly am I accumulating it?) Some people defer retirement planning because of the mundane work it requires. Sandi reminds us that: 

[I]f digging through a year’s worth of transactions is something you can’t find time to accomplish, it’s something I’m very, very good at.

She’s also a fee-only financial planner, the only kind you should even contemplate dealing with.

Emily Guy Birken at One Smart Dollar wanted to buy a rental home, rent it out, and enjoy the resultant cash flow. Then she decided that it’d be easier to buy a new home to live in and rent out its predecessor. We’re living proof that you can indeed make money doing the one, or the other, but your lender isn’t going to make it easy for you. Emily explains what you need to have in hand before going all-in on such an investment.

Next up is Michael at Financial Ramblings, the most inaccurately named blog in all of personal finance. Michael doesn’t ramble, he educates. In today’s case, explaining the benefits of holding a tax-exempt investment in a taxable account. Sound contradictory? It isn’t. Also, it’s amazing what you can learn when you divide listed yield by effective tax rate.

(3 quick rejections, all garbage. Save the story of your chocolate addiction for someone who cares.)

This one, on the other hand, might be the worst submission we’ve ever received. It’s so banal that we can’t just reject it. No, it deserves your attention. From “Nicholas Jackson” (a pseudonym if we’ve ever heard one) at Selling Your Structured Settlement. Here’s the opening sentence. Read it aloud to get the full effect:

How can we as “bloggers” and providers of the structured settlement annuity information most commonly found via the internet create higher quality information, less biased content than that most commonly found today, and make a larger push toward legitimate education?

The post boasts 55 footnotes, and was written 5 months ago. And oh yeah, it’s a front for a company that offers you pennies on the dollar for your annuity.

Paula Pant at Afford Anything to the rescue, yet again. In a world where we’ve encountered plenty of 29-year-olds who sponge off their parents, sponge off their grandparents, and/or go to school for a useless graduate degree, it’s encouraging to know that there’s someone out there who not only builds wealth but has fun doing it. How many countries have you visited? Probably fewer than her. “Well, I can’t go gallivanting across the globe whenever I feel like it. Unlike that lucky Paula, I have work responsibilities.” YES! Now you’re getting it.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net finally did it. He created a Grand Unified Theory of personal finance. It’s basically our book crammed into the space of a blog post, and it’s as awesome as you’d expect from one of our very few consistently great contributors.

You don’t need a job to build wealth – honestly, it’s probably going to hurt more than it helps (in that most jobs rob you of the opportunity to leverage your time.) In fact, you don’t even need a budget to build wealth. Just ask the amazing Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence, who’s a slave to neither a job nor a budget. Pauline said au revoir and Je ne veux jamais voir ton visage puant à nouveau to a skyscraper office in Paris and replaced it with real living on the Guatemalan coast. You can do it too, or something similar, if you’re willing to do a minimum of prep work. Pauline’s post involves some simple calculations, which on their own will be enough to daunt the less enterprising among you.

Dividend Growth Investor came in seconds ahead of the deadline, with a story about Warren Buffett that we’d never heard before. Everyone knows he’s superlatively rich, but few people know how he made his first few millions. Buffett started what was essentially a hedge fund, had 13 years of positive returns, and only then liquidated the hedge fund. Who says you can’t get rich overnight?

Buffett has been more than lucky, and Dividend Growth Investor has written more of consequence on Buffett in this one blog post than we’ve read in a long time. Buffett had a scalable business model, and used other people’s money to build his empire. It wasn’t until the 1970s that he developed his “moat” strategy, investing in businesses with unassailable competitive advantages. Unfortunately, to some of our stingy colleagues Buffett will forever be known only as The Guy Who’s Lived In The Same House Since Alaska Was A Territory.

Let’s round things out with a hat trick from the Evolution Finance sites. First, John Kiernan at Card Hub explains that, fairly or not, your credit rating could affect your employment. We have to admit, anyone dumb enough to incur $12,000 in credit card debt and make only minimum payments doesn’t sound like the kind of person we’d entrust with helping our business grow. Remove the plank from your own eye first, etc.

Lynn B. Johnson at Wallet Blog thinks you should sock money away in a Section 529 college savings plan. Offered by every state and the District of Columbia, Section 529s are a cumbersome if effective way to reduce the impact of a financial outlay that, let’s be honest, will probably never pay off. (You don’t need a Section 529 to learn how to become a carpenter, because trade school tuition is so cheap. Also, you’ll have close to a guaranteed job and a tangible skill once you graduate. But no, much better to spend hundreds of times more on a degree in French literature. You know better.)

Now here’s something we can get behind. Liberal arts major Ross Garner at Wallet Hub explains what equity is. No, it’s not a synonym for “equality”. This is actually the response to a reader question, rather than a full blog post, but we’ll let it slide because what Ross says here is worth remembering.

But what do you know? There’s another response to the reader’s question, written by none other than Jason of Hull Financial Planning. Jason also contributed a submission of his own, in which he self-nominates for (Financial) Retard of the Month. Jason recently underwent surgery after tearing up his knee a few months ago, and the Army veteran thought he’d save a few bucks by going to a VA hospital instead of a civilian one. Institutional inertia being what it is, Jason ended up trading 9 weeks of discomfort for $340. Jason explains that money isn’t the only commodity that can become a sunk cost: time can too, and throwing good hours after bad is no way to live your life.

(Trent Hamm: “Jason had to wait 9 weeks for surgery, but ended up saving $340? What a deal!”)

And we’re done. See you tomorrow. And on Investopedia. Possibly both.

If you see a veteran today…do what you’d normally do. Today isn’t to acknowledge those who’ve served our country and are still here, any more than usual. That’s what November 11 is for. We figured this was obvious, but it’s worth mentioning again: Even though Memorial Day now largely means barbecues and other hedonistic activities, its purpose is to honor dead soldiers. And sailors, airmen and Marines.

Has Dividend Growth Investor ever had the top spot before? Not as far as we can remember, and we’re too lazy to check the archives. This week he informs us that Clorox has raised its dividend every year since the United States reinstated the death penalty. (That was the most telling significant event we could locate from 1977.) Heck, we didn’t even know Clorox was a company in its own right, figuring it was just a brand owned by Procter & Gamble or somebody.

Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence will eventually be richer than all of us. Well, all of you, anyway. Pauline is that rare investor who actually does her due diligence before dropping money somewhere, instead of just crossing her fingers and hoping that things break her way. The universe helps those who help themselves, and Pauline helped herself by reading the contract on an investment that ended up not panning out all that well for her. By ensuring she was insured, she drastically reduced her potential losses. And she never would have made all the successful investments she’s enjoyed if she didn’t have the aggressive mindset that inevitably results in a few duds along the way.

Kit’-sees? Kit’-sis? Who the hell knows? Michael at Kitces.com hopefully does, seeing as it’s his last name. (Or as our Canadian friends say, “surname.” Michael is not Canadian.) If you’re unlucky enough to live in one of the 20 states with an estate tax, Michael has the trust for you.

Glen Craig at Free From Broke thinks you need an emergency fund that covers 6 months of expenses. We think 0 months ought to cover it. Agree to disagree.

Amanda L. Grossman at My Dollar Plan reminds us, starkly, that the rules have changed and that diligence and responsibility are for suckers. You probably know that Cyprus received a bailout earlier this year. But do you know where the money came from? Most of it came from taxpayers in the remaining European Union countries, but €13 billion came from Cypriot taxpayers. Which there only a few hundred thousand of, by the way. How do you confiscate $15,000 or so from each Cypriot adult? That’s easy. Punish saving. Just flat-out steal up to 10% of some people’s bank accounts. But that could never happen in the United States, because…well, the same way we would never submit citizens to unreasonable searches and seizures every time they board a plane.

New submitter? Sure. Rowan Wellington joins us from The Skilled Investor, one of those sites that features an avant-garde layout from the halcyon days of GeoCities. This article is short, and if Rowan had an editor it’d be even shorter. He wants you to buy his CD and/or his book(s).

Peripatetic financial planner Neal Frankle of Wealth Pilgrim returns after another of his hiati, and there’s nothing we love more than a blog post title that doubles as a rhetorical question. Should You Buy A Bigger House? Yes. But read Neal’s explanation and counterargument first.

We’re thin this week, long weekend and all that, so Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans made the cut. Indebting yourself for a degree that will almost certainly never pay for itself is an awful idea, but no one’s listening to the modestly affluent people with modest educations. Who cares what we think?

[I]f you owe $100k on your school loans…you may want consider (sic) doubling up on payments to decrease interest and lower investment funds until the loan is paid to a manageable amount.

Huh? We think he said that if you’re dumb enough to start your working life $100,000 in the hole, you should pay your debt off as quickly as you can. He used the unambiguous word “consider,” and even tempered that with “you may,” so you know Jon means business. Or you could just go to a trade school and start earning money out of the gate, but where’s the fun in that?

Wait, that was too dismissive. We need to critique that quote a little more. You don’t get to invest until your net worth is up to zero. Because you’re a college student (or recent graduate) who knows nothing. In fact, you don’t even know that you’ve incurred a debt that comes with an interest rate that’s going to make it exceedingly difficult for you to ever get ahead. And yet you want to get down on Zynga stock? Or maybe buy some silver from Rosland Capital? You’re even dumber than we thought.

Remember Todd R. Tresidder? The longest-winded contributor in CoW history is back in book review form. On another site. Wealthy Turtle, where Mike Collins has chosen to review Todd R.’s new book, How Much Money Do I Need To Retire? Todd R.’s book has 89 reviews on Amazon, and they presumably can’t all be from his friends and family members.

Holy crap. Some chick wrote 1900 words on her sparsely stocked fridge. No joke. Or an extremely layered meta-joke, one or the other. Her name is Krista Maroni, she shares a byline with her husband Jon, and their site is called 2-Copper-Coins.

Fun fact about an empty fridge: produce will actually last longer when it has more ‘breathing room.’

There is nothing fun about that fact, and its status as a fact is dubious. Krista/Jon is/are your typical frugality blogger, only a little more obsessive than most:

Studies have shown a well organized fridge makes the food in it look more appetizing, making it more likely you will eat what you have.

Whenever someone tries to sound authoritative by starting a sentence with “Studies have shown,” it reminds us of Initech auditor Bob Slydell:

“Studies have statistically shown that there’s less chance of an incident if you (fire people) at the end of the week.”

Studies have shown that exposing people to Krista’s fridge minutiae correlates positively with frequency of violent crime. After reading this, we now know more about this woman’s fridge than our own:

We stock up on basmati rice (we obsess over chicken tikka masala, but even in an ordinary recipe, basmati’s the best).

Jon is a champion left-over-eater. Seriously. He never even heats anything up.

I’m a bit pickier. I’m not a fan of bread items that sit in the fridge over night.

[W]e swing by Ray’s produce stand (a local place) on our way home and grab 2-3 types of vegetables, and one or two types of fruit max.

That’s just 4 representative samples. She goes on and on. Krista also reminded us of another crutch that unreadable writers use, right up there with liberal use of the word “experience” and the ever-loving gratuitous phrase “moving forward.” It’s adding the word “option” to anything. Her fridge also includes “a couple frozen meal options” and “wonderful fruit options,” and how those differ from frozen meals and fruit respectively we have no idea.

At press time 3 other lonely women (and one sad man) had left comments on that post, so maybe we missed something along the way, and writing about what’s in your fridge is now faddish. People listen to dubstep these days, so what the hell do we know? A look through Krista & Husband’s archives shows that they think Dave Ramsey is mean to people. Dave freaking Ramsey is too mean. In other words, don’t expect to see them submitting to the CoW again anytime soon.

Wait, we’re not done. We’re almost done, but there’s yet more nonsense to avail you of. 2-Copper-Cents and its authors love to talk about how they live and encourage readers to live “responsibly” and “generously,” which prompted us to continue excavating. Anyone who self-consciously attaches positive modifiers to his or her own activities is almost certainly living in a glass house. So we entered the word “debt” in the search box and found out that the happy couple has $25,000 of it. But that doesn’t stop them from dispensing financial advice, such as a post entitled “How to Form a Budget.” Contrast that with Pauline Paquin, who doesn’t yammer about how noble and holy her actions are. She’s too busy building wealth to bother.

Does it ever end? Most personal finance bloggers have 2 passions: a) being broke, and II) offering advice that they themselves would never follow. Don’t hire a fat personal trainer, don’t go to a doctor who smokes and drinks, and save yourself the counsel of an indebted couple. “Well-meaning” means nothing.

And now a company that wants to buy your annuity for pennies on the dollar. If you’re learning how to form a budget from someone with negative money, why not? Do whatever the folks at Quote Me A Price tell you to.

Did you catch last week’s Carnival of Wealth? It was awesome top to bottom. Read it again, and pine with us as we wonder what went wrong in just one week. The glorious Paula Pant of Afford Anything was there a week ago and joins us again, raising the average while simultaneously provoking thought and inspiring us. Paula says not to be swayed by people who got successful doing something risky. Buying a Powerball ticket is a brilliant financial decision, if you happen to win. Living beneath your means while putting extraneous cash into revenue-producing assets is a less sexy but far safer way of trying to get rich. Your money should make money. Run the numbers before you start. None of this is hard, yet few do it. Paula is one of the few.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro won’t admit it, but he was so obviously the kid who had Monday’s homework done on Friday evening. He’s always first to submit every week, and this week he begins a helpful series on how to create a no-fee Roth IRA via Lending Club. Harry’s even self-aware enough to know that his post was running long (slightly longer than today’s CoW, still shorter than that refrigerator contents post) so he separated it into 2 parts.

(Sorry, guy who submitted a post about the life of John D. Rockefeller. Your post was bad, but not so bad that we could make fun of it. It just contained the standard misspellings and mispunctuations, nothing interesting. If you’re going to fall, fall hard.)

Edward Webber at TaxFix tells his British readers how much they can earn without having to pay federal taxes. Looking at Edward’s charts, it’s good to know that the United States doesn’t have the only byzantine and perverse tax schedule in the civilized world.

We insist on doing delayed gratification here at Control Your Cash, which means that Jason at Hull Financial Planning often ends up in the caboose position. We open the submissions, banging through the weak ones and interspersing them throughout the CoW while leaving Jason’s unopened until the end, knowing it’ll be money. Looking in our inbox, it’s like eating a boldfaced dessert after suffering through one uninspired regular-font course after another. So here’s Jason’s latest, this one a dispatch to combat veterans.

We never would have suspected this, or even thought about it, but Jason informs us that soldiers who have seen battlefield horror firsthand are among the most conservative of investors. We’ll leave it to the Cornell academics and retired officers (like Jason) to discern the reasons for that, but if you happen to be a combat veteran and aren’t getting the returns you like,

1. Thank you for your service. That’s the standard gesture from civilians to the military, but it only begins to cover our particular gratitude. You went miles beyond. 
2. Talk to Jason. Or one of the other veteran financial professionals whom he recommends. 

And thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.