The only Australian animal that doesn’t carry 14 different kinds of lethal venom in its sac

Just look at this guy! Quokkas live in southwesternmost Australia and, it’s said, have no fear of humans. (Poor naïve little things.) They’re the size of cats, they’ll eat whatever you put in front of them, and we wish we could trade the scorpions that populate our neighborhood for a quokka or two. Now, let’s carnival up:

Are there really people who buy groceries with food stamps and then pile the groceries into a Bentley? Probably. Come to think of it, didn’t Notorious B.I.G. do it? Well, he got his. Carmen at Gajizmo calls out those people, and the ones who buy too much car even without sucking on the taxpayer teat. Just because you can afford an Infiniti, buying one with 80% of your income is a dumb idea regardless of how much you make. Leasing it is even dumber. Bonus: Map that shows that the most lucrative jobs in the country these days involve working for the federal government and thus producing nothing of value. (Don’t click on the “how to save money on gas” link contained therein, it’ll make your head hurt.)

First and presumably last submission from JeanNicole (no space) Rivers at 5 Star Student. She lost us with the post title (“Funny Things Kids Say #2”), and the subhead just killed it. (“Dollars and…”) Guess what? Guess freaking what goes in the ellipsis.

Sense LOL! Dollars and Sense! See, you thought it was going to be “Dollars and Cents”, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, you were sitting there reading along, minding your own business and then BOOM, JeanNicole messes your stuff up with the comedic cut fastball. On the other hand, she spelled every word without error and even punctuated “its” correctly, i.e. not at all.

Barbara Friedberg continues to fight the noble fight with her wealth-building guide for the financially illiterate. Who are not to be confused with the literally illiterate, whom you can usually see here every Monday. Yes, Barbara wrote a book about how to get rich entitled How to Get Rich. And she made a YouTube video. Please click on it, it had 38 views as the CoW went live.

Last week we ran a submission from a guy who advocated saving money by…not flushing the toilet. He’s now effectively dead to us, so we’re running movie reviews from hypnotherapists. Specifically a review of Jobs by Jon Rhodes at Affiliate Help.

Dividend Growth Investor must have gone on vacation a fortnight ago, but has returned with a description of the all-encompassing purpose of his investment stragety (he said in Bugs Bunny-like fashion.) The dividends themselves are secondary, a means to an end. Income, particularly increasing income, is what we’re after here. Getting all moist over dividend yields is stupid if you have to lower the denominator instead of increasing the numerator to get there.

(Did they just say “moist”? Nah, must’ve been a typo.)

Defending Control Your Cash Woman of the Year Paula Pant at Afford Anything again takes conventional wisdom and stands it on its head. Continuing the tiresome analogy, until the money falls out of its pockets. But only the bills, because Paula has little use for pennies and nickels.

To take an ever-so-slight tangent, we’ve made a cottage industry out of taking down noted pinchfist Trent Hamm. We spend a few thousand words doing so every couple of months, although our obsession makes it seem more frequent. But Paula managed to summarize the problem with Trent’s ilk in a single line:

I used to shuffle small sums of money between savings accounts because one offered an interest rate that was 0.5 percent higher than the other. (Total extra earnings: maybe $10 per year).

Trent’s likely response: “Good for you! Why’d you stop?”

Do fewer tasks with greater returns. If you’re instead doing more tasks with smaller returns, and patting yourself on the back for “staying busy,” well, that’s why you’re coming home from your sales coordinator job exhausted while Paula is sipping espresso in a café in either in Bulgaria or Guinea-Bissau.

Bigger Pockets is a new entrant this week (we say “entrant”, like it’s a race. Hell, maybe it is.) Guest poster Jason Hull has set a quantifiable goal: ensuring that half his retirement income derives from residential real estate. Which means that his retirement income should equal his properties’ rental income, given the site’s stated rule:

Over time, 50% of your real estate investment’s income will be spent on expenses, not including the mortgage.

What’s trippy and slightly depressing about this post is that Jason – a hale and sharp 40-year-old – has already factored his own senescence into the equation. It’s the exact inverse of YOLO thinking:

[A]t some point, [Hull and Mrs. Hull are] going to get to be too old to deal with rental properties…This will be particularly the case as our cognitive skills decline.

Jason has no kids to shove him into a nursing home in 2054, so he’s probably found a workaround there, too.

We allow a single CoW submission per customer per week, otherwise the thing would collapse in a miasma of debt-blogger diatribes. But when you’re Jason Hull, you get an exemption. On his own site, Hull Financial Planning, Jason critiques the continuum that has indulgence without regard for consequences at one end, and rigid deferral at the other. The sweet spot is the area where you have the capacity to enjoy things and experiences (“hedonic units”, if you will) while knowing that the credit card balance that’ll appear at the end of the month will be vanquished with a single payment. Your present enjoyment and your capacity for future enjoyment might not be perfectly correlated, but there’s a way to maximize both simultaneously. Learn your derivatives, kids.

Jim Jones at Critical Financial is a lumberjack, and he’s alright. Mr. Jones inadvertently found himself with 8 acres of marketable old-growth timber, but every means of removing it involved him breaking a sweat. Until he found someone willing to do the work and take a cut (LOL!) Jim farmed out the work, reasoning that 45% someone else’s labor > 100% of one’s own.

If you’ve got variables, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net has a corresponding calculator for you. This week, our most intrepid submitter lets you plug in your savings rate, income, net worth and ambiguous expectations, creating an output that’ll tell you whether financial independence is an achievable goal for you or merely a theoretical ideal.

Don (no further description, not even a surname) at My Dollar Plan says it’s never too early to look at your tax situation for a given year. Not literally, of course – reviewing your filing status and HSA contributions on January 2 does seem a little much. But late September is as good a time as any to boost your IRA.

Mike St. Pierre at Annuity Rates HQ changes gears this year, advocating a long position in several exchange-traded notes as a vehicle for retirement income.

Just kidding. He’s plugging annuities again, for the 4000th week in a row.

(Post rejected because it’s 4 months old. Come on, get it together.)

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro recently quit his job, thus he’s resorted to paid reviews of PayPal competitors to keep the lights on. We wish him the best.

Thanks again for reading. See you tomorrow. (® Applebee’s 2013)

Care to guess what the most expensive stock cell phone in the world is?

Has to be the forthcoming iPhone 5S, right? Particularly, the 64GB version. Fastest processor in the industry, most storage, highest resale value, most durable components, etc. An unlocked one without a contract will cost you around $900.

Not even close.

So the costliest phone in the world runs Android, then? 

No. It runs Symbian. An operating system that was officially discontinued more than a year ago but still runs the phones created by Vertu, a British firm whose business model is based on the principle of suckers being born more than one to the minute. Meet the Vertu Ascent X RM-589V:

Just look at this ridiculous thing. Why not add a rotary dial while they’re at it?

It can – get this – tell the time in 2 time zones at once! Honest to God, they list that as a feature. Encased in knurled titanium and rubber, it can be yours for just $2500. At least that’s what some moron on eBay bid for a used one. Again, it runs Symbian, the mobile OS equivalent of R-22 Freon. But, the phone comes with a 24-hour personal assistant. And it also offers “curated articles,” described as

Expertly written and independently sourced articles selected to inspire, inform and entertain. Reflecting your interests and location.

So the Ascent X RM-589V contains the same community newspaper that lands in your mailbox every Wednesday and has 2-for-1 taco coupons in it, only in electronic form. And for Dubai or Singapore instead of Fort Wayne. If only the rest of us could access articles, curated or otherwise, from our phones. Well, that’ll always be the dream. Onto the Carnival:

She didn’t submit last week, and we were worried that we did something to offend one of our frequent contributors. (Wouldn’t be the first time.) The magnificent Sandi at Spring Personal Finance is back, reminding you that you will hit a financial crisis sooner or later. Therefore, you need an emergency fund.

Just kidding, she wouldn’t waste your time nor ours with that kind of tiresome garbage. She does, however, recommend a budget. Because

revenue > expenses

is the Golden Inequality, the relation between differing values that separates the Sandis of this world from the self-made poor people.

Now, a post to keep Sandi’s post in balance. Edgar at Degrees & Debt has tips for dating on a budget. But first, he explains one of the subtleties of dating:

 You should date who you enjoy spending time with and vice versa

Now for Edgar’s advice. Use coupons, take walks in the park, get the person you’re inviting to pay half. Honestly, he recommended all those. The 3rd one is particularly effective, in that it will save you the trouble of having to pay for a follow-up date.

Do a bit of Googleing (sic) and you would be surprised how much fun you can have for little to no immediate cost at all.  Be creative!

“Be creative!” is our own advice for Edgar the next time he attempts to submit a post to the CoW. Speaking of (sic), Edgar also managed to get the word “your’e” wrong in a way we’d never seen before.

Are we going to alternate between dizzying heights and basal lows in this week’s edition? It looks like it. From Pauline Paquin at Make Money Your Way, how an approving parent is one of most important assets a budding entrepreneurial kid can have. Pauline didn’t grow up rich, but she did have a mother who figured that one way to keep her teenage daughter off drugs and out of the baby-making death spiral was to get her making as much money as possible. The high of a paycheck created an addiction that Pauline’s been chasing ever since – all the way to her current amazing life.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. From Richard Neil Adams at Frugality Magazine, and the serial-killer style triple-naming convention suits him, a list of ways to save water at home. Not that you need to worry about how much water you’re consuming, it being obscenely cheap. But water conservation is an easy topic to write about, so Richard Neil obliged.

A “hippo” is a bag that can be inflated and placed into your toilet cistern. In doing so, whenever you flush the toilet, less water will be flushed away.

He didn’t provide a link, and it appears that Hippo® is available only in the United Kingdom and Ireland anyway, but it’s cute that he thought that any of our readers are going to waste their time with this. What’s that, Richard Neil? You have more advice for us?

as flushing the toilet is likely your biggest source of water use, it’s one of the most useful ways of saving water. Just remember the phrase…

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”

“And we’ve reached yet another new low.”

Freaking weirdo. Who can now consider himself formally excommunicated from the Carnival of Wealth.

Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday quit his job and moved to a different part of California. And it’s not like he had been busing tables at IHOP. Harry is an engineer who wanted a change of lifestyle, and is using nontraditional means to make the cash flow. Everything from freelancing to landlording to…getting $10,000 in sign-up rewards in a single year? Apparently.

Paula Pant at Afford Anything returned from Burning Man, the annual celebration of self-expression and deferred hygiene held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert every year around Labor Day. She clearly got inspired on the playa, because she returned with one of the best posts we’ve ever read: The 4 Types of Retirement, and how working mindlessly for decades before entering a golf-and-grandkids routine isn’t the only plan of attack. There are 3 more, each more inspiring than the previous one. If you can simultaneously enjoy youth, money and freedom, why on Earth wouldn’t you do so?

Kevin Mulligan at Free From Broke thinks you need life insurance. You almost certainly don’t, but again, parroting conventional wisdom never hurt anyone. If you do insist on enriching an insurance company though, Kevin politely suggests that you not do so via your employer.

PKamp3 from DQYDJ.net remains the one guy on the internet who manages to combine beautiful prose with complementary graphics while offering actionable, worthwhile advice. Therefore his readership is smaller than that of this site that features the same played-out first-person debt updates that people apparently love to read and comment upon. You could waste your time at the latter site, or you could read PKamp3’s analysis on savings rates – the fraction of your income you need to sock away to enjoy a comfortable retirement. (He, like us, draws little distinction between the concepts of retirement and financial independence.) This is staggeringly simple math, but some people will remain steadfast in their determination to not understand it.

Something of a wildcard here, but the author was liberal in his flattery so we couldn’t say no. Erik Matlock at eponymous WordPress URL (“Life Lessons From A Formerly Abusive Husband”, and we’ll take that over “My Journey To A Debt-Free Life” any day of the week) writes about how to survive as the new kid on the job. (Clue: The old kids on the job were probably the new kids at some point.)

Or you could start your own business, as Jason at Hull Financial Planning did. Who, by the way, has yet to misspell a word on his site. We checked his entire archives. Jason is also one of the very few personal finance writers who seem to understand that time progresses in a forward direction only and that choices have consequences. In other words, the time to think about retirement is not when you’re at retirement age.

That’s it. See you tomorrow.

Tony Edwood has nothing interesting to say anyway

A couple of decades ago, “wearable computers” were given as an example of a futuristic technology that would render the computing of the day obsolete. Imagine being able to detach yourself from your bulky desktop, ganglion of cables and giant monitor. Why, you could organize your recipes on the go! No one at Discover magazine envisioned that the humble little telephone would end up doing the trick, but of course it did. No cords, relatively durable, etc.

So given that smartphones exist, why would anyone own a smartwatch? Let’s see…they took the one negative of a smartphone, the small screen size, and made it even worse. Then they took some of the biggest positives of a smartphone – its concealability, its inconspicuity – and eliminated them. Another beautiful feature of mobile phones, even the most basic geriatric models, is that they eliminated the need to even carry a watch. Think about how odd it is to adorn yourself with a strap that displays a certain piece of data on it. But in a world where Samsung’s Galaxy Gear is more than an oddity, you can look simultaneously awkward and dorky. Win-win!

(One day until Apple’s big announcement. Zero seconds until the CoW. Let’s go:)

Jason at Hull Financial Planning counters the standard (bad) personal finance advice that all spending is evil. The idea of dropping a dollar for a worthwhile or beneficial purpose never occurs to the hyperfrugal kooks who dominate this industry. Jason reminds us that every dollar you spend, you’re getting something out of. Economists call it utility. The idea is to maximize your utility per dollar spent. If you and your spouse need separate transportation, it makes more sense to buy two $3000 Kawasaki Eliminator motorcycles, even if they are cheap pieces of junk, than a single $6000 Ninja SuperSport that you’ll have to share.

Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday (he really needs to copyright that) quit his important and meaningful job. Then he went to Cabo San Lucas with his family, which seems equivalent to going to Disneyland for one’s honeymoon.

Hey Canadians! That magical fairy dust “free” health coverage stops at your borders. Jon Haver at Our Insurance Canada is here to remind you of that.

In our Hopelessly Naïve Headline category, there’s only one entrant this week. Joshua Rodriguez at CNA Finance, who writes “How To Make A Budget Spreadsheet That Makes Budgeting Fun!” It’s a 13-step process that will have you begging for a 14th step:

In the cell to the right, type “Saved So Far This Month”, to the right type “Need To Save This Month”, and to the right of that type “Total Savings/Invested”. Now, in the cell below “Monthly Savings Goal” type in the total you have after all expenses. As you put money into savings, update the “Saved So Far This Month” cell. In the cell below the “Need To Save This Month” title, type

And on it goes. Even better, he poses 3 “common budget spreadsheet questions” at the end, and only answers one of them. The answers he gives to the remaining two are “That really depends on what you are comfortable with” and “There really is no clear cut and dry answer to this question,” and congratulations to Joshua for managing to combine “clear-cut” and “cut-and-dried” into one all-encompassing über-idiom.

Earlier this year we told you that instead of cleaning out your closet, you’d be better off acquiring more possessions. But personal finance groupthink is a malicious beast, and such a contrary opinion as ours is never going to get much traction among the masses. Better to recycle the same old pap as FI Journey is doing. Our general rule here at Control Your Cash is to look askew at advice offered by a website that has a typo in its logo:

Anyhow, he discarded a bunch of stuff.

Babs Friedberg (we’re guessing no one has ever called her “Babs”) continues her brilliant “online MBA” class. The time value of money is something that a lot of people can’t seem to wrap their heads around. Observe any lottery winner who opts for the 20-year payout. Well, if you’re looking for rotten financial decisions you can observe anyone who even buys a lottery ticket. The difference between $10,000 now and $10,000 in the future should be obvious. $10,000 now and $12,000 in the future? That depends, and Babs explains on what.

Speaking of the 20-year payout, Mike St. Pierre at Annuity Rates HQ sends us the same post on annuities every week and we keep running it. Don’t buy an annuity, but don’t let us dissuade you.

Madison duPaix at My Dollar Plan wrote an article of her own this week instead of farming it out to one of her lesser contributors, which is always a good idea. If we could feature only practical suggestions such as the one Madison gives us this week, we’d rule the world. How to roll your 401(k) over into an IRA. Save time by starting at the 3rd subhead.

Michael at Financial Ramblings explains that dividends are not “free money.” A large corporation isn’t going to hand cash over to you just to be nice. Rather, it’ll give you the cash in order to make owning its stock more attractive than owning a similar stock with a lower (or non-existent) dividend. Dividends also discourage undue trading: why would you sell a stock if owning if means you’ll probably receive a check at the end of the quarter? (There’s only one answer. If you think it’s going to lose an amount greater than the dividend.) To accurately assess your investments, don’t separate the returns into appreciation and dividends.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net takes over the prestigious but purely ceremonial closer position. There’s a whole lot of dumb on the internet these days, and we’re not even talking about personal finance blogs. Some chick at Slate and another chick (named John) at Gawker have decided that because private schools are superior in almost every way to public schools, the latter should be discouraged if not outlawed. PKamp3 explains that if anything, we should be going in the other direction.

And we’re done. Another CoW every Monday, another blog post every Wednesday and Friday, another Anti-Tip of the Day everyday. Thanks for playing. Enjoy the games, everyone.