Each finalist gets to wear a Best of Money Carnival uniform
If you’re looking for the Carnival of Wealth, you’re going to have to sit tight until Wednesday.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for the different-in-content but similar-in-form Best of Money Carnival, here ‘tis. We’re guest hosting, and you’re going to love it.
The Best of Money Carnival is the intellectual progeny of Free Money Finance, and it’s wonderful. Why? Elitism and discrimination, that’s why. The BoMC takes even fewer entrants than this blog’s regularly scheduled Monday carnival does. Dozens upon dozens apply, but only 10 make the final cut. That’s how Mr. FMF likes it, and that’s the dictum we’ve sworn to uphold. So here, in dramatic countdown fashion, are the finest 10 posts we saw this week. Mercifully, most of the submissions were chaff so it was easy to pick 10 good ones. Plus, we’re excited because this is the first time we’ve been asked to host someone else’s carnival since the guy at the Yakezie Carnival asked us to months in advance, then with 72 hours’ notice used an intermediary to tell us that he’d changed his mind. Anyhow, here’s the BoMC. Enjoy:
10. If you don’t read 101 Centavos, you’re missing out. An engaging personal finance blogger who can spell and punctuate? And who has opinions instead of regurgitations? Indeed. This week, that site’s mysterious namesake explains what common financial wisdom is actually so much folklore. BONUS: He uses “snoped” (past tense of “snope”, presumably) as a verb. Never seen that before. When you’re good, you can bend the rules.
9. Neal Frankle of Wealth Pilgrim claims that women make better investors than men. Gals, that means you can now unbunch your panties in the aftermath of Adam Carolla saying last week that men are funnier than women. (Which, by the way, barely counts as an observation. It’s like saying that men make better NFL players than women do.)
While we’re at it, women also make better engineers, scientists, mathematicians and navigators than men do, too. In fact, just the other day we met a woman who correctly pointed north on just her third attempt.
8. Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog lists everything you need to do in the event that you lose your wallet. A few of his recommendations aren’t necessarily obvious. Also, “if your keys are missing, you should also change your locks.” Not sure why, we’ll get our crack research team on that. (And if you’re dumb enough to list your passwords on a piece of paper in said wallet, as Odysseas posits, you deserve to lose it.)
7. Occasionally, all we need is the headline to qualify a submission for the top 10. Luke at Learn Bonds pulled that off this week in style, with a bold proposition that’s garnering more and more devotees as our economy continues to get rectally violated by a Treasury Department and a Federal Reserve Board Chairman beholden to someone other than their customers, us. Ron Paul’s fans used it as a rallying cry, Learn Bonds is using it as a blog post. End the Fed. Today.
6. John Kiernan at CardHub is another blogger who’s consistently money, week in and week out. This week he explains how big banks, their hands tied by regulation passed in response to bank customers not knowing how to handle their money, are going to new and exciting lengths to profit. They use such nefarious means as “payment protection”, which you have to read about to believe and which sounds preposterous from both ends – that banks would have the gall to offer it, and that customers would be dumb enough to “take advantage” of same. READ THE FREAKING AGREEMENT. That would solve 99% of the problems in the world.
5. This post isn’t revolutionary, it has little do it with its site’s name and ostensible field of interest, and on top of that it’s Canadian, but we loved the premise so much we had to include it. From Janet at Credit Cards Canada comes an argument that getting an apprenticeship is more valuable than getting a college education.
She could not be more correct. Unless you’re going to college (or as our northern friends say, to “university”) to learn the hard sciences, whether pure or applied, you’re wasting your and everybody else’s time. Throw a dart, preferably a poison-tipped one, and hit a random personal finance blogger. Chances are he (or she) will lament and publicize the avalanche of debt he accrued while studying English literature or philosophy. “My student loan balance is $69,348, which is down from $71,324. Yay me!” Whoever you are, your degree is probably useless. Your high school diploma is too – some of the dimmer bulbs among us like to joke about how they’ll never need to determine congruent angles or tell you how many stable isotopes fluorine has. But the high school diploma, you didn’t pay for. The college degree you did, and therefore have to justify. Whatever makes you feel smart, which is why most people go to college in the first place. That, and to defer real life. Check the Control Your Cash archives for more pontificating and grandstanding on education.
4. Got rejected for a home loan? Ha ha, sucker! If you’re determined to not take “no” for an answer, there is a workaround. Ben Demeter at Credit Card Assist espouses the wonders of “alternative credit”, by which lenders look less at your credit score and more at your ability to, you know, actually pay your bills on time. (Frankly, why shouldn’t your payments to the Lucchese family count at least as much as such minor criteria as the number of credit card accounts you have open? Paying a Mafia boss on time shows that you’ve learned how to budget properly and prioritize.)
3. Investing in consumer debt? No, this isn’t the same as lending money to your alcoholic deadbeat brother. Eliza Collins at Work Save Live has a better idea. P2P lending, which can pay excellent returns if you’re diligent about whom you lend to.
2. Did you know that your “local” credit union has tentacles that can stretch across the country? In other words, they’re just like those big nasty leviathan banks they love to contrast themselves with. Louis Garner at WalletHub has the details, explaining how cooperative networks operate and how they can benefit you.
1. If you have at least a 5th-grader’s understanding of grammar, you’ll probably make the 10 finalists. If you have a contrarian opinion that you can back up with data, you’ll move even higher. Thus Robert at The College Investor, who looks at the investment potential of…Zynga.
The FarmVille people? Seriously?
We were skeptical too, especially given how much money it’s lost since its IPO, but as Robert points out:
There are billions of dollars to be found somewhere in corporate filings at any given time. It just requires digging. Lots and lots of digging.
We talk about this exact topic in our e-book, The Unglamorous Secret to Riches. (Available now! For 3 measly dollars!) Your investment strategy needs to advance a little past “OMG FACEBOOK I SAW THE MOVIE I WANT IT” for you to build lasting wealth. (Damn, we just gave you the synopsis of the e-book and ruined the “secret”. Oh well.) Robert maintains that temporarily wounded stock prices can often rebound and then some, especially when the company’s underlying business has essentially zero marginal costs. You read it here first.
And we’re done. Thanks for coming, and thanks to the 234 rejected submitters who wrote about how to budget, and the 1,178 others who shared their first-person stories about struggling to get out of debt. Maybe one day we’ll get a post about how it’s important to set up an emergency fund.
The Carnival of Wealth will be here Wednesday, we’ll have another blog post Friday, and we’ll be on Investopedia (and Forbes, and Yahoo! Finance whenever those sites’ editors can fit us in.) Money Wise Pastor will host next week’s Best of Money Carnival. ‘Til then.
