It changed our lives for $99. Full report later. Onto the Carnival:
We’re all struggling this time of year, at least creatively, thus this English-as-a-Second-Language submission from Jack at E-Money Log. Also, it’s 3 months old:
If you become prior-prepared about the methods of your spending, then it will also help you to plan your living for your future years. Health is another factor to consider; your current health situation shall decide on your health levels during your retirement lifespan.
We think we know what that means, but re-reading it would take valuable seconds away from finite beach time.
Here’s one that’s a month older than that, from Easy Extra Dollar. It’s titled “Avoiding Scam Online Job” (sic). Does that sound familiar? It should, we ran it 2 weeks ago. Thanks, guys. Way to step it up. So we’ve got illiteracy, repetition, and tardiness. Anything else, gentlemen?
Do any of these submitters read our freaking site? And/or understand what little patience we have for laziness, socialism, unrepentant borrowing and useless college degrees, among other things? Not Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans. who every week gives incipient graduates tips on pre-empting any future productive behavior. This time, how to beseech your creditors for partial forgiveness. And if your creditor is the collective of your fellow state or federal taxpayers, all the better.
Anti-capitalism polemic ripped from the pages of Quotations From Chairman Mao? Sure, why not? That fits in seamlessly with what we’ve been advocating on this site since Day 1: work hard, leverage, build wealth, let the other people be the suckers, etc. From Fred Goldstein at something called PEGAB, the Political & Economic Global Analysis Blog, and let’s not enrich the web hosting bourgeoisie when we can have a state-of-the-art Weebly.com site instead, a piece called “Capitalism and the roots of inequality.” It opens with the line “Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World,” and that’s not even us attempting comedy. It gets worse from there. “Class struggle,” “exploitation of labor,” etc.
Kenneth Long at Finance Penguin is yet another CoW rookie, one from a site that seems to think a 5-month old post is exactly the sort of contemporary content our demanding readers have come to expect. Then again, his is the most practical post we’ve received so far. Should you hire a consultant for your fledgling business? Kenneth is a consultant, the kind who can write a post with zero conclusions. “Check references, interview multiple consultants and ultimately choose the best.” For those of you who never would have thought of that otherwise.
How ridiculous can this get? How about a 7-month old post? ¡Sí se puede! From Christopher at This, That and the MBA, how to handle a financial windfall.
Hmm…should you pay off your debts and invest what remains? Nah, that’s too facile. He wouldn’t dare waste our and your time with that.
If there is any high-interest debt, this should be made a priority. Furthermore, an emergency fund is always recommended. It is advised to have at least three months of emergency savings on hand.
Great. Advising people to create an emergency fund is the single most insipid piece of advice we’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t stop someone from repeating it every freaking week. And we’ve now used the same pseudo-curse twice in this CoW already. Also, nice touch with the passive voice, really brings the piece to life. That is, the piece is really brought to life by the passive voice which was used there.
Are we done yet? And just like that, the endlessly stellar Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence has to come in and snap our streak of ineptitude. She’s bright, she’s enterprising, she’s the kind of independent thinker (and more importantly, doer) we need more of. We’ve already written one paean after another to her on this site, and this might be her magnum opus. Pauline is self-tithing, giving away 10% of her blogging income for scholarships that’ll go to deserving kids in her Guatemalan village. Not only that, one of her readers matched her first $2000. That’ll go far in Central America. Seriously, this is a beautiful story, and a remarkable initiative by a remarkable woman.
If the no-hitter’s over, we might as well give up another double, let a run score. (Wait. We’ve used that analogy before, only with a CoW full of good entries that was ruined by consecutive bad ones. But what the hey. Blogger’s prerogative, we’ll call it.) Jason at Hull Financial Planning opens with an intriguing question: How Black Should Your Box Be? What is he talking about? He’s asking how you should mesh the sometimes conflicting goals of a) letting your customers know you can help them via gestures and 2) still turning a profit. For instance, Wall Drug gives ice water away and sells coffee for a nickel, but indirectly gets plenty of gains from those loss leaders. Same deal with software companies that offer free bare-bones versions to the public while charging for the full-featured counterparts. As for Jason’s own company, it “demonstrate[d] how to solve general problems, but never to solve someone’s specific one,” and that’s about as good a definition we could give as to where you ought to draw the line.
Now this is what you call end-loading. Another CoW luminary, the consistently superb Andrew at 101 Centavos. He recently wrote about Limoneira, the publicly traded California fruit company. This week, Part II. It’s a holistic look at retail markups of foodstuffs, perishability, and more. Farm-to-table and beyond, on both ends. Even better, Andrew’s left this series open-ended. Will we get a Limoneira trilogy? A tetralogy? We can only stay tuned.
Finally, Justin at Root of Good looked and looked until he found a negative to early retirement. Why, that just means all the more decades for you to potentially lose it all in! Seriously though, Justin assesses prudently what could happen if he ran out of money while still in the front nine of life. But if he flexes the same muscles that got him to early retirement in the first place – intelligent budgeting, finding secondary sources of income, not falling into the idiocy of consumer debt – he’ll be more than fine.
Catch us on Investopedia. The Stacking Benjamins podcast. And here, every day. Thanks again for coming.