“Oh my God, look at you. Was anyone else hurt in the accident?”

It took us decades to realize what a genius this man is. The nonpareil insult comic of all time, still bringing it at 87. Check out his Twitter feed: he comes from a different era, one when people could spell and punctuate. Also, when they could exchange affronts without anyone placing a call to the Diversity Promulgation Bureau of the local police department and throwing the offender in lockup for thoughtcrime.

Why are we honoring Don Rickles in this week’s edition? Because like many of his fans, some of our submitters want to get in on the masochistic fun. It’s a hoot to be the target singled out by Mr. Rickles, and Girl Meets Debt must feel the same way about us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have submitted 7 months ago and taken a verbal grenade to the thorax. Our takedown of her back then is too long to run in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:

God, what a fecal stain of a post. It’s not the insipidity of it that bothers us, so much as how stinkingly tiresome it is. Who goes to the trouble of writing that post, or creating that blog, without stopping to think “Maybe this has been done before”? Fortunately though, the author equipped her post with icons that’ll let you share it with all your friends on Pinterest, Shareaholic, Tumblr et al. That the author thinks that between now and the end of the universe a solitary soul will share this post on Tumblr shows the kind of winning naïveté we’ve come to expect from our dippier contributors.

We don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of constructive criticism that would propel us to resubmit. Which she did, 2 weeks ago. Or as we said back then,

As we’ve said before–and unfortunately, we’re forced to repeat ourselves often–as a rule any blog with “Debt” in the title is going to be awful. […] We’re trying to entertain our readers and maybe teach y’all something, not bore you into unconsciousness with an indiscriminate series of links. So, [we’re] putting as much effort into our synopsis of Girl Meets Debt’s submission as she put into the submission itself [.]

Our intrepid heroine came back yet again, thus we really have no choice but to give her what she wants. Hell, we goofed on this character 7 weeks in a row before he finally deigned to pay attention, so maybe Ms. Meets Debt will eventually figure it out.

If you read our archives, or even stumble across an article at random, you’ll see our palpable disdain for debt bloggers. Anyone who’s ever started a blog with the intention of tracking her (or occasionally, his) debt is what we here at CYC like to refer to colloquially as a…what’s the word? Oh yeah. Loser. There are hundreds of them, and they’re as indistinguishable as blades of grass. Blades of languid, underachieving grass. Every last one carries student loan debt, student loan debt that went to finance a humanities degree. We can guarantee there’ll be credit card debt too. More often than not, there’s a weight problem as well. And a reluctance to use one’s photograph, or at least one’s full-body photograph. If there’s a significant other, it’s usually a “hubby” (their word) who’s discussed in varying stages of emasculation. Tying it all together will be a shocking lack of self-awareness, illustrated by such maneuvers as creating an emergency fund while the credit card and student loan debts continue to amass interest. These people aren’t interested in improving anyone’s finances (except for the folks at Sallie Mae and VISA), they’re interested in having their egos stroked by a comparably stupid readership. What makes Girl Meets Debt different is nothing, but if we had to pick something we’d choose her desire to be considered the archetype. Or as she herself sold this week’s post to us:

I envy people who naturally love to exercise and people who pay off their debt like a BOSS! I struggle like mad. But through trial and error I have found some tips that have helped me stay motivated to exercise and pay off debt. Today I’m sharing them.

So yeah, she’s fat in addition to carrying a negative net worth. We’re a personal finance site, not a health-and-fitness site, but we feel it’s our duty to explain to Ms. Girl Meets Debt that no one “naturally love[s] to exercise.” It’s a bitch. For at least the first 15 or so hours, lying in bed is always going to be more tempting than getting off one’s posterior and breaking a sweat. What motivates people to adopt the latter course, of course, is acknowledging that you can’t get in shape without doing uncomfortable, disruptive things to your body. By the same token, no one likes paying bills, and very few of us would go to work if we didn’t have to. But again, the long-term goal: It’s more fun to have food and shelter than to give into temptation and ignore one’s responsibilities. Ms. Girl Meets Debt just discovered this universal truth (about time, seeing as she went into hock to earn 2 degrees) and thinks it’s worth sharing.

For years, I thought exercise meant just going to the gym (which is actually very boring) or playing sports which isn’t really my thing but there’s so much more out there! I’ve recently discovered that I enjoy hiking and biking! Apparently, nature rocks my socks! I’m also interested in trying out yoga or jazzericse [sic] but waiting for an opportunity to try it out free first before committing.

Speak for yourself, sister. Going to the gym is like a BASE jump compared to reading your blog. Also, can you stop writing like an adolescent girl? A lifeless point of fact – e.g. that you can burn calories while neither visiting a gym nor playing an organized sport – doesn’t warrant an exclamation point.

Jazzercise? What are you, 60?

Regular readers, you may not comprehend that there’s a large sector of the blog-consuming population that finds such tidbits tasty. One woman proclaims her love for yoga – or in this case, her interest in possibly doing yoga at some point if she can scrape together $12 for a mat and a magazine – and other women pretend to care if it means pageviews for their own rotten blogs.

When I’m being extra ambitious I even walk up the escalators instead of passively standing! 

And when some Navy sailors are being extra ambitious they apply to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school, but to each her own. Wait, here comes the passive-aggressive shot at the “hubby”, or in this case a proto-hubby:

Sometimes I picture myself slim and wearing a beautiful white dress on my special day to keep me motivated…(J are you reading this?) 

The emoticons came with the original, not that we need to remind you of that. Her post is actually a synthesis of both workout advice and personal finance advice. From the latter category:

Hearing success stories of people who have paid off their debt or people who are currently on the same debt-free journey I am on is such an inspiration for me. I use to feel so alone and ashamed of my massive debt but knowing that I am not the only Girl out there in this situation has been a huge kick in the butt for me to work hard and one day be a “success story” myself of someone who has paid off over $50K of debt on a modest salary.

She started losing grammatical rigor and veering off into inscrutability near the end there, but she’s right in that she’s certainly not hurting for companionship among the equally clueless, indebted, self-absorbed and dull.

I haven’t had many milestones yet, but when I hit below the $50K which I haven’t been in years, I was literally so excited I did a little dance!

Again, more power punches to the solar plexus of comprehensibility, and another exclamation point for good measure, not to mention a superfluous use of the word “literally” (which beats an incorrect use any day), but that quote gives us the chance to share some wisdom. Honey, we’re at the point where our (positive) wealth can increase in $50,000 increments. Which we don’t celebrate by doing a little dance (!) Because we haven’t really accomplished anything. You’ve accomplished even less. To paraphrase Chris Rock, “Oh, you got closer to zero. You started at zero. You’re supposed to be above zero, low-expectation-having motherf***er!”

When I feel a little debt fatigue coming on, I treat myself to something nice that won’t break the bank like a manicure/pedicure. Nothing is wrong with that and don’t feel like it is a deterrent to your debt-free journey.

1. Sister, you see that earlier blockquote? The one about how you “feel so alone and ashamed of my massive debt but knowing that I am not the only Girl out there in this situation has been a huge kick in the butt for me to work hard and one day be,” etc.? If you knew what commas were, that paragraph would have come closer to making sense.

Your fear of commas rendered the current blockquote unreadable, too. We assume you meant that a mani-pedi is an example of “something nice that won’t break the bank,” to quote an original saying; and not that your readers should avoid spending their scarce resources on services that will, as you wrote, “break the bank like a manicure/pedicure.”

2. Of course something is wrong with that, dingbat. It’s money that you’re giving to the Vietnamese lady at the salon, for an utter non-necessity, that you could have given to your creditors to reduce your debt a little more. Keep justifying, keep being poor, and keep ignoring the advice of the people who have been there, done that, and the positive net worth to prove it.* When you’re in the red, you don’t get mani-pedis. Or trips to Cancun. Or custom rims. You get nothing but thin gruel and Ross Dress For Less clothes until you’re in the black. If that sounds harsh, we’re not the ones who asked you to incur all this debt in the first place. Our way works. Yours doesn’t and never will. You’re an idiot. Stop submitting. Today’s post is already twice as long as the CoW of 3 weeks ago and we haven’t even gotten to a second submission yet.

[M]y greatest tip for both exercise and paying off debt is to start NOW. Not tomorrow, not after you watch an episode of Game of Thrones but NOW.

Or if not now, then after the mani-pedi and the search for a free yoga mat.

Can anything wash off the stink of that last submission? Let’s start with the 1-2 punch of color, counsel and attitude personified by Jason Hull and Sandi Martin, a couple of professionals whom we can feature in complimentary terms here week after week and no one’s going to think we’re being sarcastic. First Jason, he of Hull Financial Planning. Jason invokes the Efficient Market Hypothesis (short definition: The sum of all players’ knowledge is in the price of the security, or will be momentarily. You can’t arbitrage, or take advantage of price discrepancies, because there are no price discrepancies.)

The problem is that irrationality is common, and lasting. Gaining an asymmetrical edge? Kids, absorbing what’s on Yahoo! Finance does not create asymmetry. Anyone can read it. Barrick Gold’s insider dealings are plenty asymmetrical, however, and taking sensible advantage of them would thrust you up against society’s draconian privileged information laws. So what to do? Read Jason’s post, that’s what.

Now Sandi, the Bizarro-Girl Meets Debt, of Spring Personal Finance. Girl Meets Profit, if anything.

One of your CYC principals is an ex-Canadian, and used to take great pleasure in sharing fictional quirks of Canadian life with unfamiliar Americans. For instance:

• Canada has 2 types of stop sign. There’s the standard red octagon, but also the red octagon with a white border. That second type is optional: if there are no other cars at the intersection, you can proceed right through. 
• The province of Quebec has an armed police unit whose job is to fine businesses whose signs are in English (Canada’s primary official language.) They’ll waive the fine if the sign is also in French, but the French sign has to be at least a certain ratio larger than the English sign. And yes, they carry rulers.
• In Canadian mutual funds, embedded commissions are illegal. 

Alas, 1 of those is true and 1 is on its way to being true. As a fee-only financial planner herself, Sandi explains that the noble phrase “fee-only” can be distorted by the unscrupulous. Advisors at Canada’s 5 major banks may not take a cut of your investment, but they do get paid for hitting sales targets. And those advisors get more for selling actively managed portfolios than they do for selling simple money market instruments and mutual funds.

So blatantly taking a commission isn’t so bad. But if embedded commissions were to be eliminated, as some regulators are proposing, it’d hurt some honest financial planners. But it’d help true fee-only planners such as Sandi. Or planners could just disclose their fees, which would seem to benefit everyone. Sandi’s research cites the example of an investor who didn’t know that the funds his advisor bought came with huge and undisclosed expenses.

Speaking of financial advisors, and Canada, Big Cajun Man at Canajun Finances returns after a hiatus of God knows how many months. And features a guest post from…the very investor Sandi was citing. The investor stuck with his advisor, temporarily, even though their meetings were just one giant emergency beacon.

A new submitter, probably not Canadian although he looks it, is Bryce Fowler at Save & Conquer. Bryce recently returned after a 4½-year blogging hiatus. Lucky bastard. He said you shouldn’t borrow money to finance something unless it has the capacity to appreciate. Your grandmother’s porcelain doll collection is not going to appreciate. It will only cause intergenerational misery.

Unless you’re Derek Jeter (Hi, Captain!), your life is probably not as awesome as Paula Pant’s is. The Renaissance gal behind Afford Anything travels the world at her leisure. Latest stop, Paris. Paula figured out that being alive in 2013 means she can, as she puts it, “not so much ‘[vacation]’ as [live] my normal everyday life, with this new city as the backdrop.” Thousands more people could do this than actually do it, but then they remember that the cubicle farm is warm and safe. And it’s Monday, so there might be bagels.

Kristen at My Dollar Plan explains why you didn’t get a tax refund. You shouldn’t want one anyway, because getting one means you let the government enjoy your money interest-free all year long, but you definitely won’t get any quarter from the IRS if you’re bad at math. Which you probably are, which is why you’d otherwise be eligible for a refund in the first place.

(Groan) Here’s another new submitter, Christine at The Pursuit of Green. What makes Christine so interesting and distinctive? Let’s let her bio speak for itself:

I live in the crazy city of Los Angeles! I moved out here after college, started working, and found the love of my life! Who I recently just got married to! Yes we are newlyweds!

I also love to cook and to eat! Food is seriously one of the most wonderful things! It nourishes you, brings people together, and is so diverse!

That looks like fun. Mind if we try?

In this week’s post Christine explains what net worth is! Your assets minus your liabilities, in case you didn’t know! However, we here at CYC wrote a whole book about how the traditional definitions of “asset” and “liability” are so misleading that you could spend your life trying to maximize the former and minimize the latter while getting no further ahead! Christine writes like a 5-year-old who just discovered the Wikipedia entry for “Net worth”! She also has no comments nor Feedburner followers, and maybe that’s for a reason!

God, that was exhausting. Although she has a point, food is indeed one of the most wonderful things (!)

Bryce Heston at The Skilled Investor has a great URL and a site whose HTML hasn’t been updated since the Blaze Bayley years. (Long-suffering Iron Maiden fans nod their heads.) We’d tell you what this post was about but all we saw was fonts of varying sizes.

Bryan Chau at Success Pen Pal watched a movie. That’s pretty much the extent of that.

Finally, Lynn B. Johnson at Wallet Blog compares Roth IRAs to 529 college savings plans. If you absolutely insist on funding your kid’s future college tuition, knowing that it’s probably not going to pay off, Lynn explains which of the 2 vehicles listed above is better. More importantly, she gives a definitive answer instead of just listing pros and cons for both and not saying anything decisive.

God, that was exhausting (reprise.) Thanks for reading. See you next time.

*That sentence is dissonant, but it’s syntactically sound. Specifically its second half: “…the people who have been there, done that, and the positive net worth to prove it.” In other words, the people who have been there, who have done that, and who have the positive net worth to prove it. See? It makes perfect sense.

1:30 in Newfoundland (only our Canadian readers will find that amusing, and probably not even them)

Just 3 hours left to get this thing out the door! No time to waste:

The eloquent Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance returns with a stern assessment of retirement calculators. You know, this input plus this input divided by that input equals this amount I need to live with some sort of comfort in my declining years. To summarize her long and detailed post, don’t concentrate on the parameters you can’t do anything about (future interest rates, predicted returns, etc.)

While entering this next submission, we happen to be watching the pantherine Gerri Willis on the Fox Business Network (Hey girl!) She just presented a list of the alleged top 10 cities for worker happiness. San Jose was #1, if you care. Jason at Hull Financial Planning would argue that the premise is invalid, and that you find true happiness at the end of a business license. Jason cites a study that says that entrepreneurs are happier than the rest of us, and the reasons he gives are both undebatable and inspiring. If you’re thinking of quitting your job to venture out on your own, read Jason’s post. (Then read Chapter 10 in our book.)

Anton Ivanov at the curiously titled Dreams Cash True is back, explaining why attempting to time the market is a game played only by suckers and the extremely lucky. He padded his post to get it to an aesthetically suitable length, not unlike the high schooler who has a 1500-word book report due tomorrow and whose first draft contains only 400 words.  Anton still doesn’t have an editor, and thus our synopsis of his post contains pretty much all the same actionable advice that his post does.

Something of similar unnecessary length (or as they say in Canada, “lenth”) from Peter Jones at Money Bulldog, who’s not only an attorney but writes like one. How to invest. (Again, our book. This time, Chapter IV.)

Fitz Villafuerte has some standard-issue self-improvement advice for you: how you can be successful at anything in 7 steps. Anything? Anything. He must know what he’s talking about or he wouldn’t have written so authoritatively.

Dividends are just a special treat, aren’t they? Dessert after a well-balanced meal of capital gains, right? Not according to Dividend Growth Investor, who makes the remarkable point that dividend income has declined in fewer of the last 34 years than capital gains have. Of course you can’t separate the two, but that’s as powerful an argument as we’ve heard for investing in stocks with increasing, substantial dividends.

Emergency funds are stupid, self-defeating, an inefficient use of resources and a lazy person’s way of arranging money. We have occasion to say this every week, but almost every other personal finance blogger in existence claims to know better. This week Jen at Money Rebound joins the lunatics’ chorus; Jen who, of course, had 5-figure student loan and credit card debt. Which thus distinguishes her from the 2,987,332,445 other debt bloggers. She claims that if she’d socked $25 a month into an emergency fund in her early 20s her finances never would have fallen into disrepair, and you can probably guess what our assessment of that notion is. She also ends her post with 2 boldface questions posed at the reader, the sign-off of the truly original blogger.

Why do you think building an emergency fund is a better idea than paying off your consumer debt? Or never incurring it in the first place? Leave a comment below!

John Kiernan of Card Hub continues his “Ask the Experts” series, in which dozens of academics pontificate about a real-world financial issue. In this case, how to fix retirement at the institutional level. Some University of Wisconsin professor of Public Affairs and Consumer Science, which apparently is a field of study, thinks that universal health care coverage is the answer. If you read only one of the quotes, read our favorite; the one from Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University.

Hey, Canadian Budget Binder: this (‘) is called an apostrophe. Let us show you how it works, at least with respect to your opening sentence:

Some people like knowing what their friend’s financial numbers are, other’s don’t.

Awful. 0 out of 10. Well, 1 out of 3. You got the one in “don’t” right. Here’s our stab at it:

Some people like knowing what their friends’ financial numbers are, others don’t.

See how much better that was? The latter is in comprehensible, identifiable English. Actually, we can do even better:

Everyone would like knowing what their friends’ financial numbers are, assuming they’re available.

Come on, who wouldn’t? It’s not as if this is an opportunity that comes up regularly and that we can reject at our leisure. “Hi, I’m your neighbor. My net worth is —” BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH FINGERS IN MY EARS CAN’T HEAR YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW. Yeah, that’s a realistic scenario.

UPDATE: It turns out Mr. Canadian Budget Binder is not originally from Canada. Alright, we’ll sheepishly cut him a break on his punctuation.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: He’s originally from the UK. We take it back.

We’ve written before about welfare and what great disdain we have for anyone (yes, anyone) who collects it. But from a purely utilitarian perspective, it might make sense for plenty of low-income people to just give up and let their fellow citizens keep them afloat. Just ask Pauline at Reach Financial Independence, whose own sister is in financial doldrums but who has a French welfare state ready to make her life better than ever if she’d only quit her low-paying job and stretch her hand out.

(Holy crap. According to Pauline, the French government gives out Christmas bonuses to people on welfare. “Here you go. Thanks for helping out throughout the year, and congratulations on a job well done.”) No wonder she left for Guatemala.

Michael at Kitces.com reports that we’ve managed to stave off Social Security’s insolvency for at least one more year. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that within a decade Social Security will still be able to pay out 77¢ on the dollar. Franklin Roosevelt confirmed that retirement is not your responsibility, much like a later president did regarding health care. This will end well.

Adjustable-rate mortgages are wholesale craziness, right? Especially with fixed rates being as low as they are? Kevin Mulligan at Free From Broke says not necessarily: the introductory rate on an ARM is going to be tantalizingly low (that’s how they advertise them, after all), and there’s only so high it can rise. If you need any further convincing one way or the other, Free From Broke’s own founder wrote an addendum stating whether his own mortgage is fixed-rate or adjustable.

A post about a post? If you’re PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, you get that leeway. Especially since the post he’s writing about was written by Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar. Nelson thinks the Canadian real estate market is grossly overvalued, not unlike the American one was a few years back. PKamp3 seconds that opinion and Nelson’s idea to short the stocks of 4 of Canada’s oligopolistic banks. Bubbles will do what they do, but that doesn’t stop Nelson from getting attacked by a bunch of overextended mortgage holders who decided to buy in one of North America’s 2 most expensive housing markets (Vancouver) and don’t want to hear his cool logic. Even better, the attacks are ad hominem. You see, Nelson’s allegedly stupid because he didn’t go to college. Meanwhile, the liberal arts majors who laid into debt-free and erudite Nelson are putting their pre-barista degrees (and concomitant student loans) to diligent use.

(Post rejected because it’s from a domain called 2010Tax.org. Guys, would it kill you to pay a few dollars for a URL that shows you’re making an effort to stay current?)

That judge shouldn’t have punished Chad Johnson (né Johnson) for slapping his attorney on the posterior. No, according to Michael at Financial Ramblings, she should have done so for his staggering disdain for financial responsibility. A guy who once signed a $36 million contract is now spending money about 15 times faster than he’s bringing it in. And these days he’s only bringing in $3000 a month. If he were smart he’d cut out all his expenses (which he can’t, because most of them are court-ordered) and spend that $3000 on nothing but lottery tickets.

It’s not Chad Johnson-level stupid, but it only differs in degree: single mothers with limited income deciding to get away from the demanding world of watching soap operas and pressing buttons on a microwave so that they can attend college as mature students. Erin at Pay My Student Loans illustrates how such women can suck off the public teat and have federal and/or state taxpayers foot the bill for the same kind of useless degrees we made fun of 3 paragraphs ago. Post ends with a redundant chart that only a masochist would read through.

Bryan Chau at Success Pen Pal quotes Bruce Lee, who had a lot of truisms in his quiver for a guy who died at 32.

And that’s it. New stuff tomorrow, even more new stuff the following day. Thanks for reading.

Fortunately, the nearest brothel is much closer

The red star is on Control Your Cash world headquarters. Until a few months ago, the nearest Chick-Fil-A was in Flagstaff, Arizona, 250 miles away. This paucity of Chick-Fil-As, absurdly, in the Southern U.S. Chicken-Eating Belt. But even the Flagstaff Chick-Fil-A came with an asterisk, because said location is merely a kiosk in the Northern Arizona University food court and not a full-service, standalone restaurant. The nearest one of those was somewhere in California.

Until fate and franchising smiled on us, and Chick-Fil-A opened just up the road in St. George, Utah. Which cuts 100 miles off the trip to Flagstaff, but still makes getting the Chargrilled Chicken Club sandwich an all-day activity. Assuming that day isn’t a Sunday. Meanwhile, you people in Atlanta can rot in hell.

So can whoever invented socialized medicine, with its endless waits for some forms of treatment and its stifling of innovation. (Believe us, we’ve been there.) In the U.S. we’ve adopted only a proto-version of it, a version that Jason at Hull Financial Planning criticizes for an underreported reason: when all you think about is that small per-visit co-pay, it’s harder to make rational decisions about your health care. Because you don’t know how much it really costs, duh. In short, Jason argues that overinsuring oneself is a greater risk than underinsuring in The New America, so go with the cheapest state-mandated plan you can get away with. Also, put down the cigarettes. You’re an idiot.

Anton Ivanov at Dreams Cash True joins the agglomeration this week. First of all, what is that? Is “Cash” supposed to be a verb there, like “cashing in”? Or is it a noun, following up another noun? If it is, then what the hell is “True”? Anton’s post raises considerably fewer questions than his blog’s name does, given that the former contains the same personal finance advice we’ve already seen 85,343,227 times:

pick a career path that allows you to earn as much as possible during your lifetime.

When did adults all start writing like unimaginative 5-year-olds? It happened so suddenly that we barely noticed:

A million dollar net worth is still considered a significant accomplishment and is sure to make you feel good, along with impressing your friends!

He’s right. That latter one is the only reason we got into this. If you’re not going to be ostentatious and vocal about your wealth, you might as well live in a tar paper shack on the Wind River Reservation. But wait, Anton. Don’t I need an account that serves no purpose whatsoever?

Protect[…] your wealth with an emergency fund

There we go. It just wouldn’t be a derivative blog without a recommendation to do that. (If you missed it, here’s our take on emergency funds.)

How about a good post instead? And by good we mean “bleak”. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net couldn’t let the unveiling of our national surveillance state pass without clarifying the matter with some of his patented charts. Did you know that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approves 99.96% of the requests it gets (from its sole petitioner, the U.S. government) for physical or electronic surveillance? If you discount the modifications, the rulings where the court says “Yes, but…”, the percentage dwindles all the way down to 97.5.

(No, the post has nothing to do with personal finance. Write as well as PKamp3 does and we’ll grant you a waiver too.)

Congratulations to Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence, who crossed another psychological item off the list by paying cash for her Guatemalan villa (and the 90 acres it sits on.) A bank can’t foreclose on a piece of property that it has no lien on. Instead, Pauline and her boyfriend can sleep with the peace of mind that comes from living with one fewer creditor. Although the giant tropical scorpions might still keep them awake at night.

Timothy Mobley, of the eponymous blog, wants you to buy universal life insurance and preferably from him. He couches it as telling the IRS to go to hell upon your retirement, but there’s more to universal life insurance than that. It’s essentially a vehicle for rich people who are stuck in an uncomfortable bracket. Beyond a certain threshold, your premia go to investments that can earn money tax-free. But they have to be approved by your insurer, i.e. Tim. And in the example he cites, the investor takes money out of his IRA and puts it in his universal life policy.

Doesn’t that mean he has to pay taxes on it?

Yes, but Timothy solves that by having him borrow money. And the switch only works if you can guarantee annual returns above a certain, optimistic level. Still, this CoW newcomer isn’t bad if only for a chance to dive into its vast archives.

Gary at Gajizmo writes about where you should live to maximize the tradeoffs on taxes, climate, etc. It would have been a helpful post if he’d sliced away sentences such as:

[E]very place has some new culinary options you’ll want to explore. Therefore, your dining options should be considered

You’ve already heard us whine over the passive voice and use of the flyweight word “consider”. Let’s add the overuse and misuse of “options”. It doesn’t make you sound smarter, Jim. Also, thanks for pointing out that different parts of the country have different cuisines. This revelation came after the only useful part of the post, in which Gary details relative tax rates and provides a link to a more comprehensive breakdown. He also mentions that if you enjoy your family (some people do, for some reason), you should live close to them. Also,

Those with aging parents or relatives who need to be cared for might also want to live close to them, thus saving money on hiring a caretaker to provide them company in their ailing state.

On second thought, forget our misguided compliment. This post is awful.

Megan Russell at Marotta On Money (she used to be Megan Marotta, before becoming Mr. Russell’s chattel) joins Trent Hamm on the exclusive list of people who measure their dishwasher usage to the nearest penny. Although she’s a way better writer than Trent, if similarly obsessive. Her accompanying chart distinguishes between hand washing and “efficient” hand washing, and claims that the former costs 59 times as much as the latter. We’ll let her explain it.

Real, actionable data! From Michael at Dividend Growth Investing & Retirement, who fundamentally analyzes Suncor, the Calgary-based oil and gas company with huge revenue numbers and weak return on equity. Try to ignore that he starts by working backwards, showing us what Suncor’s done over the last decade. More importantly, Suncor’s increased its dividend in each of those years. How much of Michael’s figuring is investment grade, and how much of it is dividing one quantity into another just for the hell of it (dividend growth per [earnings per share growth]?), is yours to decide. But his work is voluminous and his mistakes are nonexistent.

Darwin’s Money translated a Cornell professor’s findings about restaurant tipping. It takes a professional intellectual to determine that:

• large-breasted waitresses get more than their less contoured sisters do
• women tip men better and vice versa
• drawing a smiley face on the check helps, unless you’re a guy, in which case you shouldn’t be doing it anyway

And one finding that really does refute logic; service really isn’t a criterion.

It seems he’s right. Your CYC principals tip in a narrow range. We hate to say it, but in our experience an attentive yet unobtrusive, attractive server earns only a few percentage points more than does an apathetic server who disappears at the wrong times. In the meantime, here’s an idea: don’t spend so many years waiting on tables that you can create sufficient data points for such a study. And if a party of Canadians comes in, or worse yet, Brits, slip a couple of dollars to the hostess so that she’ll seat the newcomers in someone else’s section. Trust us, it’ll be worth it.

Lynn at Wallet Blog has some lawn care advice for the non-Manhattanites reading today. If you have a lawn, and want to fire your lawn care company so you can save a few bucks, heed her advice. Especially the part about overwatering. The part about chipping in to share a communal lawnmower with your neighbors is something you can probably ignore, though.

The economy’s looking up! How do we know? Because people are letting their credit card balances build again! No wait, that’s the exact opposite. Perception trumping reality. That dreadful news comes from Liana Arnold at Card Hub, whose annual credit card debt study proves once again that we never learn a damn thing. If you’re one of the people keeping our per capita credit card debt as high as Liana says it is, then it’s not as if advice from a strident voice on the internet is going to make a difference. But here it is anyway. Read Liana’s recommendations, stop spending as if the mathematical operations of addition and subtraction somehow don’t apply to you, and forget about the emergency fund. Just pay your bills on time and eliminate as much of your credit card debt as possible as quickly as possible, given that you were dumb enough to have incurred it in the first place.

Thanks again. Same time tomorrow or thereabouts.

REGRETTABLE ADDENDUM: A last-minute submission from Girl Meets…(wait for it) Debt. As we’ve said before–and unfortunately, we’re forced to repeat ourselves often–as a rule any blog with “Debt” in the title is going to be awful. Let’s see what the titular girl has for us:

Learning how to look fabulous on a frugal budget sounds challenging – but not impossible! Here are some simple tips to looking trendy on a not so trendy budget…

 

We thought we made it clear to this submitter 7 months ago that there are more appropriate fora than this one for that kind of foolishness. We’re trying to entertain our readers and maybe teach y’all something, not bore you into unconsciousness with an indiscriminate series of links. So, putting as much effort into our synopsis of Girl Meets Debt’s submission as she put into the submission itself, here’s what we said back in September:

Oh, for Christ’s sake. The thought process of our newest entrant, Girl Meets Debt:

OMG, I have a great idea for a blog! I’m going to talk about how I used to spend money, but now I’m trying to save it! I’ll call myself a “shopaholic” too, because our society has become stupefied to the point that the only words we now understand are portmanteaux. I still believe “shopaholic” is cute and funny though, and if you think most women overuse the word “cute”, well, get a load of me! 

No way! A personal finance blogger with credit card debt ($13,000) and student loan debt ($45,000)? That never happens! Someone with so cuttingly original a story must have a correspondingly original blog, mustn’t she?

They say that the first step towards “recovery” is admitting you have a problem. It is actually very intimidating, yet liberating at the same time to say (or write!) that I have a debt problem. I’m ready to be proactive and tackle this debt on. This girl is ready to start acting like a financially responsible adult. It’s about time too since I will be turning 30 sooner than I would like to think!

Actual quote.

Ladies with a string of debt and a story to tell, leave us alone. (Guys too.) No one cares, and even if anyone did, Control Your Cash readers expect better than to have their busy days polluted by this relentless 1st-person self-aggrandizing flotsam that you’ve chosen to share with us. Are we making ourselves clear? Or should we be more, what’s the word, repetitive?

The Girl Meets Debt lady is so certain that she’ll pay off her debt. She even used all caps to accentuate that point. There’s no plan, nor is there any record of even starting on this task, just a general statement that she’d like to – no, will – be debt-free one day. Which is hard enough to take seriously, given that we’ve seen this a trillion times before, but especially so considering that she did a follow-up post about her pretty, pretty hair. Swear to God.

And women wonder why men think they’re dumb. (Sorry, gals. Most of the time, with most of you, that’s what guys are thinking. They’re usually smart enough to internalize it, though.) But yeah, let’s elect one of you President one day.

God, what a fecal stain of a post. It’s not the insipidity of it that bothers us, so much as how stinkingly tiresome it is. Who goes to the trouble of writing that post, or creating that blog, without stopping to think “Maybe this has been done before”? Fortunately though, the author equipped her post with icons that’ll let you share it with all your friends on Pinterest, Shareaholic, Tumblr et al. That the author thinks that between now and the end of the universe a solitary soul will share this post on Tumblr shows the kind of winning naïveté we’ve come to expect from our dippier contributors.

At least, the $45,000 in student loans was so she could become an aeronautical engineer.
Ha! Of course not. She’s a teacher. With 2 bachelor’s degrees, for some reason. College (or considering she’s Canadian, “university”): priceless because it’s priceless, and don’t you dare think otherwise. College might be about challenging assumptions, but the uber-assumption that college is a financial force multiplier no matter what must never be questioned.

The worst part is that all the attention we’re paying to this Newtown school massacre of a post means we’re taking away valuable time from showcasing other posts. We see PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net submitted again this week. His work is always concise, articulate, provocative, and funny, but here we are not paying his post its proper due while instead thinking of more unvarnished things to say about the verbal cat vomit that fell in our inbox in the form of this post from Girl Meets Debt.

No, wait. There’s something still worse. We already parodied this chick, 5 months before she wrote her post. Find something less demanding than financial blogging, Sister. Cosmetology school, perhaps. Wait, it’s a little late for that. Either way, if there isn’t a UN High Commission on Unreadable CoW Submissions, well, what exactly are our dues going toward? If we could go back in time, “killing Hitler” is now #2 on our to-do list. Seeing that Girl Meets Debt was never allowed access to a computer has moved to the top spot.