Archives for July 2012

Carnival of Wealth, Soccer’s On TV Edition

July 16, 2012

The New York something are playing the Seattle somebody else right now (possibly pictured here.) They’re the perfect inoffensive background noise and images with which to devote our attention to preparing the Carnival of Wealth. Soccer as a productivity tool.

 

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading. A Monday staple featuring blog posts from around the world. It used to be that most of the ones we received were awful and only a few were worth posting, but finally that ratio’s starting to even out. Not a moment too early, either. It’s a long one this time, so let’s get going:

Prospective submitters, here’s an example of the kind of post that you should only send us if you want to be chided.

“Adam Williams” of PF Success asks, somewhat rhetorically, if your family could survive with only 1 vehicle. What makes this post substandard?

  • The author’s name. PF Success’s owner farms out the actual job of writing content – i.e. the site’s primary function – to a virtual assistant in India. The virtual assistant doesn’t want the readers to know that he’s hired help, so he overcompensates by coming up with an impossibly white-bread English handle. Guys, mix it up a little. Throw a Fratelli or an Andruszkewicz in there and we’d be more apt to get suckered in.
  • It’s written for Martians.

There is a feeling of independence when one is able to get into their car, and go places as he or she pleases.

Anybody reading this not know what a car is, and what it does? If that’s you, we apologize. As for the writer, if you’re going to state the obvious, do it somewhere else.

  • Bad punctuation, awful syntax (in “Adam Williams”‘s defense, he’s not a native English speaker), and pointless repetition:

As already stated, it is nice to take your car wherever you’d like

Sounds like a winner to us.

Lance at Money Life & More enjoys playing Polish Roulette (it’s like Russian Roulette, except with a pistol instead of a revolver.) (Polish jokes? Are those still a thing? Or are they a relic from a different decade where ethnic humor wasn’t relegated to the outskirts?)

This week he tells us how he made $400 by buying a $4300 air-conditioning unit. The $400 was a signup bonus for a new credit card. The issuer activated the bonus when Lance bought $3000 worth of stuff.

Alright, our initial comment was exaggeration to make a point. The card has a $95 annual fee, so hopefully Lance will be smart enough to cancel the card sometime in the next 51 weeks. Lance probably won’t get screwed, unlike most other cardholders. Why? Because he read the agreement. He didn’t wait a year and then write a post saying, “Can you believe Chase charged me $95 for carrying their stupid card? So unfair!” Reading the agreement is guaranteed to make your life 147% easier.

Somebody named Don is the latest contributor at My Dollar Plan, and this week he breaks down one of the few investments guaranteed to fight off the relentless erosion of inflation. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, as their name implies, issue returns fixed to changes in the Consumer Price Index. Which brings up another set of questions, starting with “Can you trust the federal government’s inflation figures?”

Dividend Growth Investor isn’t just going deep on dividend stocks in the period before retirement, he plans to continue doing so in his dotage. His strategy includes looking at companies with wide “moats”, sustainable dividends, and a couple more dividend-related criteria you’ll have to read to understand. Dividend Growth Investor continues with his explanatory descriptions of major corporations, which perhaps no one else finds funny but we always will:

McDonald’s Corporation (MCD), together with its subsidiaries, franchises and operates McDonald’s restaurants primarily in the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

We’ve reached Part III in W at Off Road Finance‘s tetralogy on The Alternative to Investing. Try to ignore his one mathematical error (1985 wasn’t 37 years ago) and concentrate on his big picture – market inefficiencies exist, and there’s nothing preventing you from being one of the people to exploit them. Except your own indiligence.

We love these kinds of posts, like this one from PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, combining economics and psychology. He explains that the market will charge different people different prices for the same item, because it can.

This is freshman economics, the concept of utility. Say you walk into a gas station and buy a $1 bottle of water just because you need to use the bathroom and don’t want to feel guilty about doing so. Why’d you buy the water bottle, instead of something else? Probably because it was the cheapest thing you could find a) without bothering to check the price of every item in the store, while the clock ticks and your bladder expands, and b) that you’d end up consuming at some point anyway.

Would you be willing to pay $1.50 for the bottle? Maybe. $2? At that point you’d probably either look around for something cheaper, wonder if you could hold it in until you got home, or forget about decorum and just march into the bathroom anyway.

Now say you have a friend who’s just hiked through the Sonoran Desert in the middle of July. She gets to the trailhead, her water supply (and her) exhausted, and there’s a smiling man standing there operating a kiosk. Ice-cold Aquafina, $1. Last water for 50 miles. Does she buy it? Without hesitation. How much is the water worth to her? A lot more than it was to you. She’d gladly have paid $2. Heck, she might have paid $10. Because the water was worth so much to her, shouldn’t the seller charge her as much as possible (while still making the sale)? Especially if there’s another, fully hydrated passerby who’s thinking about buying the same bottle for $1?

That’s why there’s no such thing as gouging. If you don’t like the deal, don’t make it.

Here’s our Post of The Week Featuring Solid Advice That No One Will Follow. From Free Money Finance, how to write a résumé.

People love homogeneity. They don’t know how to stand out, and they’re not going to attempt to do so with something as potentially life-changing as a résumé. So they’ll repeat all the tired expressions (“was responsible for…”, “have excellent written and oral communications skills…”, etc.) Free Money Finance’s post is a book excerpt, but even the book gets it wrong. The authors encourage you to write lifeless nonsense like:

Developed a more customer-focused approach, providing outstanding service to a diverse clientele, resulting in a significant increase in customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.

Oh, for God’s sake. Find an employed person who says “Our approach isn’t really focused on our customers.” Or “The service I provided? Adequate, on most days. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘outstanding’.” Or “Our clientele was perfectly uniform. I couldn’t tell any of our customers apart.”

You don’t have to polish what doesn’t warrant polishing, kids. If you worked the counter at The Gap, just say that and nothing more. Everyone knows what a store clerk does, and what a clothing store is. “Provided apparel services to male and female customers in a fast-paced retail environment” just makes you sound like a Mongoloid. A literate Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid nonetheless. No personnel director wants to read through that interminable garbage.

Now “supervised 4 people”, “handled payroll”, “was honored by corporate for highest increase in year-over-year sales in the entire 3200-store chain” are legitimate accomplishments. If you did them, mention them. If you were just working there to pay the bills, waiting for something better to come along while not collecting welfare, that’s fine. Say so. Well, don’t say so, but don’t turn your stopgap job into something it isn’t.

So we weren’t hallucinating when we saw the PayPal logo on the swipe terminal at Home Depot last week. Charles Davis at WalletHub tells us that if you register with Home Depot, or several other retailers, you can save yourself the trouble of using your credit card to pay. Just type in your phone number and your PIN instead.

Is that easier than using a credit card? We’re not sure. Especially since PayPal doesn’t offer rewards. File under features to be added soon, perhaps.

Fractional-reserve banking isn’t the only means by which lending institutions risk overextending themselves. Just ask John Kiernan at Wallet Blog, who introduces us to the ominous world of shadow banking. Hedge funds and money market funds are among the quasi-banks that differ from conventional lending institutions only in that the former don’t take deposits. But they’re more than happy to lend, without being subject to the same regulations as their less umbral counterparts. If every creditor comes knocking at once, the shadow banking industry could do what multiple investment banks did in 2008. Good times!

Dan at ETF Base has a talent for looking at cemented truths from unusual angles. He starts with an observation that most people haven’t heard articulated before – the majority of stock market returns are dividends. So maybe we should start from that point while investing. Dan introduces us to a new form of exchange-traded fund, one that takes the “Dogs of the Dow” concept and applies it to dividends.

If you’re an optimist, you could argue that the United States is enjoying a 91.8% employment rate. Except you’d be lying, because it’s really an 85.1% employment rate. Darwin’s Money uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own numbers to show how utterly decimated the jobs market is. But yes, Mr. President, both houses of Congress, and the Federal Reserve, whatever you do, forget about applying the lessons of the Hayek/Friedman/Paul school of economists. Keep intervening instead. It’s never worked before, and always has the opposite of its intended effect, but this time it’ll be different. You know better.

From Liana Arnold at Card Hub, a list of the credit card issuers whom the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received the most and least complaints (per capita) about. TD Bank finished 2nd from the bottom. Told you those Canadians were nothing but trouble.

Card Hub didn’t link to its data, but we did find out that a total of 530 people have complained about their credit card issuers in the last 6 weeks. Which almost seems low, given how many dumb people there are who look to a government agency to save them from a mistake that’s probably their fault. Of the complaints, 21% were billing disputes. Okay, fine. But the next biggest topic of complaint was interest rate.

Not knowing the details, we’re willing to bet that the card issuers are completely exculpable here. One more time: USAA can charge you 4,589,289,982,113.9% APR and you need not flinch. Pay your bill on time and interest rates don’t and shouldn’t matter. This is not complex.

you want the credit card with the most lucrative rewards or the longest 0% interest rate

We’d have put a comma after “rewards”, and replaced the subsequent phrase with “and that doesn’t charge a fee.”

Teacher Man posts at Young & Thrifty this week, imploring you to be ruthless regarding negotiable fees. Much like we implore you to let other people pay your way when they’re willing to (case in point, the previous post about credit card interest rates. Let the other idiots pay interest on their credit cards, while you take advantage of 30-days-same-as-cash terms and simultaneously build credit and earn rewards.)

Teacher Man gets it – the big picture, that is. If you can get the other party to pay hundreds of dollars in fees during a house sale, do it. Most home sellers (and buyers) are dumb enough to think of closing costs in terms relative to the size of the house sale, rather than as absolute costs. In other words, if you as the buyer stand your ground on not paying $1500 in closing costs, the seller might think, “Oh, what the hell. It’s a $250,000 house. I’ll cut him a break here, just to get the sale and close it quickly.”

But as Teacher Man reinforces, that’s still $1500. All for a few minutes’ work. It’s astonishing to think of the effort people will put into clipping coupons, or turning off lights when exiting a room, while refusing to go for the big fish like this. Even when it’s practically jumping into the boat.

We run posts from Mich at Beating the Index just about every week, which only a few of you read because its subject matter is so narrow. His coverage is great, but unless you’re passionate about energy exploration and its corresponding investments, you might shy away. This week, we implore you not to shy away. Mich explains it better than we can –

We are years away from seeing (electric vehicles) capture high market share because it still doesn’t make financial sense to buy an electric car for 1 reason: (return on investment)

Even under Mich’s conservative estimates, it’ll take 9 years for your Nissan Leaf or Honda Fit to pay for itself.

Read the article, but don’t read the comments. They’ll just make your head hurt. Like the one that said that if electric cars don’t make financial sense, neither do luxury cars.

A big, powerful engine gets you where you’re going quickly. Meanwhile a Smart Car loses to a motorcycle on every metric. The latter has a larger range, is more fuel-efficient, doesn’t require a lunky battery to dispose of, is easier to maintain, goes faster, is no more dangerous, and is infinitely more badass. Why Harley-Davidson and Kawasaki don’t point this out is anyone’s guess. Unless they’ve determined that a bike is far too much machine for the kind of person who’d even consider a dainty little hybrid. Makes sense.

Thanks for coming out. Fewer qualifiers and far more entertainment that any other personal finance blog carnival, and if you disagree you’re lying. We’ll see you Wednesday, and don’t forget to check us out on Yahoo! Finance, Investopedia, ProBlogger and anywhere else good that’ll take us. Sayonara.

Filed Under: Carnivals Tagged With:

The Streisand Effect, Revisited

July 13, 2012

Maybe she should invest in Revlon

 

To quote one of America’s dippiest celebrities on her investment strategy:

We go to Starbucks every day, so I bought Starbucks stock

Your humble blogger drives a Ford every day, and wouldn’t touch Ford stock with Ms. Streisand’s nose.

This is the stupidest way imaginable to invest. Equating the utility of a company’s products with the strength of the company’s finances is like saying “Brett Myers can throw a 91 mph fastball, therefore I bet he’d make a great husband.”

But back to the mentally deficient celebrity at hand. Ms. Streisand is more fortunate than you in that she can get rich (and did, and does) off active income. She’s one of those extremely rare people in that her talents alone made her a multimillionaire. She didn’t have to leverage her money and time, defer spending, and research investments in order to get rich. Her voice and acting chops did it for her. Furthermore, she can afford to lose millions in the stock market and not flinch. Depending on how big Ms. Streisand’s Starbucks position is, were the stock to tank, there’s a corresponding number of nights she can perform at the MGM Grand Garden Arena that will wipe the losses away.

 

Other companies we patronize daily include Nevada Energy (stock trading at close to a 52-week high) and Nestlé (makers of Friskies cat food, stock in a similar position to Nevada Energy.) Two companies, one a utility, one a multinational leviathan, both of which have something of a ceiling on their short-term growth. We need better reasons for investing in something.

Our investments include the following:

  • Netflix stock. Despite never being a member, and never wanting to. Your humble blogger hates both movies and subscriptions. But tens of millions of other people feel otherwise, and investing is more about considering what those other people are interested in, rather than what the investor is interested in.
  • Altria stock. It’s hard to imagine a stupider activity than smoking, but tell that to the billions of people around the world who see inhaling tobacco fumes as a perfectly normal thing to do. Hell, if it’s good enough for the President of the United States, why not?

If other people are going to behave irrationally (e.g. by smoking, or gambling, or drinking, or incurring credit card debt), and no one’s going to convince them not to, why not profit off them? It’s the responsible thing to do. Until mankind wakes up one morning and collectively decides, “You know something? Maybe actively introducing carcinogens into my respiratory system isn’t a bright idea. Time to stop now,” which it won’t, we’re going to continue to be indirectly responsible for selling them their poison.

  • Houses in lower-middle class areas. Because, as always, the price was right. Is right. “You make your money going in” is one of personal finance’s all-time great truisms. An inexpensive house that requires a minimum of upkeep (no lawn maintenance company to hire, no pool to clean) is easy to rent. The renters make the mortgage payments (and then some), leaving the landlord with a profit that requires just a little paperwork to maintain.

That’s exploitation of the poor.

Sure, if you say so.

Now that we’ve got the reactionary simpletons out of the room, let’s resume. Renting out comfortable shelter to people is the opposite of exploiting them. It’s providing for them – meeting the most basic of their requirements, no less. For a fair price, one made even more fair by the fact that these renters can’t afford to buy a house. We advocate home ownership on this site, multiple home ownership if you can do it, but not everyone’s in a position to buy. And we might as well make money off some of those otherwise disenfranchised people. Because someone is going to. So why not us?

It’s the same principle as that advocated by buying Altria stock. Say we were to wrap ourselves in righteous indignation and decide, “This is a travesty. Smoking kills 135,000 Americans every year – an entire Topeka or New Haven – and we won’t be a party to the wholesale genocide any longer.”

That position isn’t going to save a single life. And even if it did, why should we care? Altria customers gladly sign their own death warrants, in exchange for rich and mild satisfaction. On a far smaller and more benign scale, the same goes for Netflix customers. If they want to pay big markups for a service that we have no interest in, why should that be our concern? It might not be our business, but we’re making it our business. To the tune of increased returns (and in Altria’s case, years of ever-increasing dividends.)

Umbrage never made anybody rich. It’s a childish emotion…actually, that’s not fair. It’s an adult emotion. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an emotion. Any of which – anger, joy, trepidation – gets in the way of the subject at hand, which is earning enough money via our financial acumen that we can escape our unfulfilling jobs and subservience to The Man.

“Cold” is never intended as a compliment when attributed to a human, and “rational” isn’t regarded much better. But coldness and rationality are critical if you want to grow your money. If you’re going to get excited about a stock, do so because it’s grossly undervalued and no one else seems to notice. Not because its IPO is coming up and you think it’ll be fun to invest in it. Otherwise, have no emotions whatsoever.

Another company we have a big position in is Tesco, a name unfamiliar to most people on our continent. It’s the UK’s largest retailer, their answer to Walmart, with a smattering of stores around Asia and the rest of Europe. We’d say we’ve never patronized Tesco, only looked at the company’s financial statements, but it turns out that indeed we have given them our business.

Tesco also operates a few grocery stores under a different name in the United States: Fresh & Easy. If you’ve never been to one, and if you don’t live in the Southwest you probably haven’t, Fresh & Easy is one of the most self-righteous and condescending places we’ve ever patronized. When you shop there you make a statement, something along the lines of “Slap the word ‘organic’ on a package and I’ll nod my head in brainless approval. Plus I don’t have the budget for Whole Foods.” (If you’re wondering, the statement we made was “We’re stuck in Phoenix, we need milk, and this is the closest supermarket.”)

The parking spaces closest to the door are reserved for…well, here’s a picture:

 

 

(Aside: That’s not a handicap sign. It carries zero legal weight. Yes, we parked our 18 mpg SUV there and didn’t flinch. Besides, if management really cares about ecology, they’d let us park as close to the door as possible instead of forcing us to burn fossil fuels looking for a space somewhere else in the lot. A point we never got to share with the scrawny, disdainful man in the Nissan Leaf who gave us his approximation of a death stare when we disembarked and entered the store. A, You don’t know what’s under the hood, Slugger. B, No, we’re not going to pop it for you. Take it up with management. Guy looked at us as if we were ordering napalm strikes on the Amazon rainforest.)

The point is that this Tesco subsidiary is the kind of place we’d only spend money at under rare circumstances, and would rather make fun of. But the money rolls in, and as an investment, we love it. Tesco carries minimal debt, continues to build tons of market share, and has a history of dividends (even though its American operations are struggling – the company’s recently closed over a dozen stores.)

Smarmy environmentalism isn’t our thing, but again, this isn’t about us. It’s about the market. What other consumers want to buy. What producers, in this case Tesco management, want to offer. And that’s a far more sound investment strategy than “We visit ESPN.com every day, so we bought Walt Disney stock”, any day of the week.

Filed Under: Capitalism, Investments, Making Smart Choices Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Who’s Worth Reading?

July 11, 2012

There is a respite from all the drivel you’ve been reading. Enjoy.

 

Almost no one.

Today we’re recommending the tiny fraction of personal finance bloggers other than ourselves who, for lack of a more convoluted expression, get it. This isn’t one of those reciprocal-link things where we compliment other bloggers so they’ll return the favor and thus improve both parties’ Alexa rankings. We’re just trying to avail you of other sites that reach the same conclusions we do, though not necessarily from the same starting place. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and we’re qualifying it as such only because we’re bound to inadvertently leave someone off. Our apologies in advance. Here’s who you should be reading, if you’re going to read anyone:

Afford-Anything. The brainchild of Paula Pant, an Atlanta 20-something who has all the pluses of a journalist (inquisitiveness, a respect for the English language) with none of the drawbacks (self-righteousness, naked agendas.)

Her writing is crisp and forthright, and her subject matter is original. Like everyone else on this list, she practices what she preaches. She’s a freshman real estate investor who understands that you can either complain about your station in life and look for scapegoats, or you can take uncomplicated steps to build wealth. Paula isn’t hung up on frugality, but she’s also not going to waste money for the sheer enjoyment of it. She likes to travel, but she hates the idea of financing it. Our kind of girl. (Sorry fellas, she’s taken. By a guy who knows his way around a tool box, no less.)

 

Financial Uproar. Nelson Smith is a 29-year-old “chip guy” in Drumheller, Alberta, a little town 50 miles northeast of Calgary. His job is to ensure that the requisite number of bags of Doritos (or pretzels, or whatever) find their way into the retail store with the corresponding point-of-sale display. It’s not particle physics, but it’s a way for Nelson to make a nice living without committing undue time.

Which frees up hours to write one of the funniest sites in any subject. Nelson has opinions, and believes he’d be wasting his time if he wasn’t sharing them with you. He thinks (or rather, knows) that certain investment strategies are stupid while others aren’t. Most bloggers would rather do anything in the world than take and defend a position. Nelson does, every week, peppering his findings with a humor that’s part venomous, part juvenile (our description of which is intended as a compliment.)

 

6400 Personal Finance. Another 20-something, Dave is an army officer stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawai’i. He recently returned from Afghanistan, where he handled more responsibility than do most civilians twice his age. If you didn’t know what Dave did for a living, you wouldn’t need to be too smart to figure it out from his martial and uncompromising style.

Dave means business. All it takes is one paragraph, sometimes even one sentence, for you to perceive his disdain for fools and foolishness. He does have a sense of humor, but it’s an acerbic one buried under a broad compulsion to snap people out of their bad habits.

We’d bet that Dave has never used the word “consider”, as in “consider adding an extra $20 to your monthly credit card payment.” He’d tell you to quit screwing around and pay the thing off in its entirety, but not before pointing out how irresponsible you were to have incurred said debt in the first place.

The site is named after the number of mils in a circle, a mil being a unit of angle. (A professional marksman requires greater calibration than that measured by the relatively coarse 360 degrees of a civilian circle. And thus for personal finance, too.)

 

Timeless Finance. Our newest discovery is the work of Joe Wood, a “purchasing specialist” in Toronto. Forget every stereotype you have about obsequious, mousy Canadians. Joe spells out what many people don’t want to hear about the banality of consumer debt and the cost of inaction. Timeless Finance is an antidote to the homogenous mass of personal finance blogs that usually consist of nothing more than an overextended writer lamenting her situation and not taking any of the obvious steps to fix it. (And let’s just say that if Joe’s posts ever become half as brazen as his emails, Timeless Finance could one day knock off Control Your Cash as the most hated personal finance blog in existence.)

 

Len Penzo. The only blog on the list whose founder we’ve met in person, the namesake of the site is an engineer who lives in Southern California with his beautiful wife and 2.3 kids in a house that we can only assume is surrounded by a white picket fence. The senior entrant on our list (a comment on the site’s age, not necessarily its founder’s), Len writes in an easily digestible, matter-of-fact style that’s both engaging and amusing. His blog isn’t overly technical, but rather contains common sense observations about both the micro and macro levels of personal finance. (The latter of which means, in so many words, that his political views are in lockstep with ours.)

Len’s blog is family-friendly, rarely delving into even PG territory. You can share his posts with your grandmother, something you probably wouldn’t want to do with a random entry on Financial Uproar.

Len is also so unfailingly courteous that you wonder what deep family horror he’s hiding beneath the surface. Except that we met his parents, and they were a delight too.

 

DQYDJ.net. It stands for “Don’t Quit Your Day Job”, and it’s the work of PK and his crew of like-minded writers. He’s a software engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, and who maintains the most technical of the sites on this list. Sample topics include everything from basic economic concepts like the income effect, and minimum wage laws (and why they’re bad) to more practical matters like the role of gold in your portfolio and the perfect credit card spending strategy. PK is a polymath who complements his pieces with killer interactive charts and other visual aids, as opposed to the stolen photos with cryptic captions that we like to use here. DQYDJ also includes occasional detours into pop culture and other non-financial topics.

 

Sterling Effort. The work of another software developer, this site is the antithesis of the coupon-clipping and balance-transfer nonsense that you can easily find by swinging the proverbial dead cat. Honestly, how many ways are there to tell people how to save miniscule amounts of money?  27-year old Ash Willis (and a partner) are based somewhere in the United Kingdom (sorry we can’t narrow it down any more than that.) Their driving directive is eerily similar to ours, although delineated in a refined British vernacular that we couldn’t hope to duplicate:

Children go to school. They learn how to interpret poems and solve differential equations, but at no point are they taught about money. Sterling Effort was created to stuff some financial knowledge into those of us who grew up without being taught how money really works; how to make it, save it and grow it.

 

The Oblivious Investor. Mike Piper is a 28-year-old CPA (although he looks like a middle-school student) who lives in St. Louis. He’s advanced way beyond the theoretical arguments (“Should I employ Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball?”) that have already been decided, instead focusing on nuts-and-bolts matters. For instance, Mike breaks down funds by category and objective, telling you what’s worth investing in and what isn’t. He takes what could be dreary subject matter and summarizes it beautifully. Mike manages to do this because he refuses to communicate in the pointless and counterproductive corporatespeak that plagues every realm of modern life and that wastes countless hours.

All these sites’ authors have the following in common:

  • Originality.
  • Curiosity.
  • An interest in knowledge, if not for its own sake then for how it’ll benefit them financially.
  • Literacy.
  • An engaging writing style.
  • An ability to get to the point quickly.
  • An understanding that being responsible helps you build wealth, and that there are common habits that are guaranteed to keep you poor.

…all of which distinguish them from the swamp of boring and repetitive personal finance sites that litter the internet. None of the above will ever regale you with stories about how much debt they’re choking under, how difficult it is to get out, or how they’re going to start applying themselves to good habits as soon as they take that expensive vacation they’ve been dreaming about and thus deserve. Anytime any of our favorite bloggers shares a first-person story, it’s to illustrate a point, rather than to assuage their own egos.

If you can’t stomach Control Your Cash (and lots of people can’t, although they don’t typically make it this far into a post), subscribe to all of the above sites and you’ll learn more about building wealth (and thus freeing up your time) than you will just about anywhere else.

Filed Under: Healthy Living, Making Smart Choices, Newsflash
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