#1 in your hearts, #85 in the Periodic Table

A few weeks ago some Japanese chemists synthesized a new chemical element. That element existed only in their lab, and only for the duration of their experiment. Yet there’s a naturally occurring (somewhat) element that’s about as rare. Astatine, discovered in the 1940s and whose most stable isotope has a half-life of barely 8 hours. They say that at any given time, less than a teaspoon of astatine exists on the Earth. That compares to francium, which is even less stable but slightly more common: up to an ounce of it exists terrestrially.

Welcome to another rendition of the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival clinically proven to regrow hair. (And whose themes are getting more and more arcane.) Personal finance blog posts from all 4 corners, reduced to their essence in a hopefully entertaining fashion. Let’s get it on:

Anyone catch Friday’s post? Don’t say in 100 words what you can say in 16. Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro shopped around for flu shots and found $17 ones at Costco. But if you happen to work for Harry’s unidentified employer, you can get one for only $3 more and not have to go to Costco. This post is an early candidate for our Self-Contradictory Line of the Week Award:

I know there are some arguments against getting a flu shot, but if you can get it for (sic) free, there’s really no reason not to.

Make sure you read the comments for fascinating descriptions of other personal finance bloggers’ flu shot-getting strategies.

A couple weeks ago we piled on and helped tear into that idiot college professor who thinks learning algebra is a waste of time. This week, the formidable Dave at 6400 Personal Finance assails him as only a liberal arts student-cum-U.S. Army field artillery officer can.

Okay, this is 3 in a row from the folks at Becoming Your Own Bank, who insist on selling us on the virtues of whole life insurance – one of the dumbest “investments” you can make. Today, instead of praising mutual funds, the Becoming Your Own Bank crew (no author name given this week) assail 2 targets – mutual funds, and the English language. Whoever wrote this is convinced that mutual funds are wastes of money, but doesn’t say why.

Oh, what the hell. They didn’t get the gentle hints in prior weeks, so it’s time to ratchet our critique up. This post is embarrassing. Here’s the closing line:

I prefer much more intelligent ways to invest my money. Mutual funds…. no thank you.

And those much more intelligent ways are? Undisclosed. So what was the point of this cow pie of a post? Here’s another brutal excerpt:

Have you ever heard of someone that made millions by investing in mutual funds? Of course not. I’ve been in the financial planning world for 5 years now, and not one person I know of has made their millions in mutual funds.

Careful, you don’t want that straw man to catch fire before you finish assembling it. No kidding, no one makes millions in mutual funds. Mutual funds are conservative investments intended to preserve wealth, not to make you rich. This is like saying “No one made their millions by shopping at discount stores”, or “No one made their millions by putting 20% down on a house.” Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Enough with the content. Now let’s attack the form of this unreadable piece of detritus. We’ve got the ever-popular and ever-redundant “$800 dollars”, questions ending with periods, it’s/its confusion, and the author even choked on the their/there homonym. Twice. How do you make it out of the 4th grade without knowing this stuff?

For the Bizarro version of this post we go to Andrew at 101 Centavos, a conscientious contributor who actually knows how to evaluate investments. His latest focus? Industrial material handling! That, and the funeral industry. Even when we’re mired in a prolonged recession, there are no such things as people who are too poor to die. Andrew even knows the difference between “funeral” and “funereal”, having mastered there/their/they’re several decades ago. Buy Hillenbrand, and step gingerly around Andrew’s dreadful funerary puns.

Big Cajun Man at Canajun Finances is back, and is mercifully once again writing his own stuff. This week he offers a brief if spirited lament against people who tell you not to worry about debt. He’s right, more or less, but with a qualification. Consumer debt is the ultimate financial idiocy, or at least on the short list along with gambling and smoking. Leverage – incurring debt to achieve greater returns than you would just by using your own wherewithal – is not only brilliant if done correctly but the only way most of us are ever going to get rich. It’s consumer debt that Big Cajun Man tells you you’re a moron if you incur, and he couldn’t be more right.

No you can’t. Roger Wohlner at The Chicago Financial Planner asks you, rhetorically, what his clients ask him – Can I retire? If you want the answer to be “Yes”, read the questions Roger lists and don’t draw more than 4% a year from your principal.

Our Awkward Hyphenated Word of the Week goes to “quicksand-like”, courtesy of Teacher Man at My University Money. He created a color-coded budget for college students (that’s a “colour-coded budget for university students” for all you mouth-breathing Canadians), ready for you to download. Over/under on people who will download and use this budget? ½.

Adrienne at My Dollar Plan not only fought city hall, but won and now carries its left ear on her belt as a trophy. She thought that the local functionaries charged with assessing the value of her home were too liberal in their estimates, fired back with data, and ended up saving $900 over the next 3 yeras.

Continued verbosity from John S. at Frugal Rules, who explains why high-frequency trading bears some of the blame for Facebook’s dropoff from its IPO levels. Well, that and Facebook’s ridiculously high IPO price. Or have we forgotten that Facebook is a glorified scrapbook and photo album? High-frequency trading doesn’t explain why Facebook has lost half its value in its 5 months of existence as a public company, nor why it’s still trading at a preposterous 66 times earnings.

Dividend Growth Investor slaps the negativity out of you this week, if you’re one of the people who think that dividends are an awful investment because they get taxed at 15%.

Some people say, “Look at Berkshire Hathaway. They’ve never paid a dividend.” Yes, and you also need $13 million or so to buy a standard lot of their stock. How about concerning yourself with more relevant financial topics? Also, Warren Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham said that dividends are the investor’s “secret weapon”. Buffett knew, and knows, that it’s better to be on the side of determining who receives dividends than on the side of begging for same.

[“Dividend losers”, as Dividend Growth Investor defines them] hate to have to research a company, formulate a strategy and execute that strategy however. Reinvesting the dividends from their income portfolio seems like too much work for dividend losers.

Aside: Good thing that we’re now 2 debates in and neither presidential candidate has said a word about reforming our cumbersome ganglion of a tax system. God forbid we eliminate capital gains taxes, like the Irish did. Instead, let’s continue to implement double taxation, burn billions of man-hours a year on tax preparation, and do anything other than encourage productivity.

If we give you the title of W at Off-Road Finance’s post, you’ll groan and go on to the next submission. What the hell, here it is: The Difference Between Academic Econometrics and Quantitative Finance. But don’t groan. Like most of W’s stuff, it’s brilliant. Here’s the takeaway:

[E]conometrics is the mathematical art of being right about financial matters only when lots of other people are also right whereas quantitative finance is the mathematical art of being right when everyone else is wrong.

He continues: it’s no good to be on the right side of a bet if there’s no one to take the opposite side. Being contrarian for its own sake is stupid. You need a compelling reason. Damn, this is turning into one of those posts that’s so good we end up quoting almost the whole thing:

[The] more valuable…sort of education is to start being right when everyone else is wrong. That’s where the power is. If you you have the wacky belief that people will pay to feed virtual cows, everyone will think you’re an idiot. But when you happen to be right, you become Mr. Billionaire Idiot which is more than suitable compensation for the scorn heaped upon you.

Zynga founder, take a bow. As for W, he suggests that you deliberately troll people on the internet who’ve taken a position popular, incorrect, and opposite yours. W says you’ll build mental muscle this way. At the very least, you’ll build toughness.

If you want to make a lot of money, unpopular and right is where you must live your life.

Sure enough, this provocative and inspiring post has zero comments. Meanwhile, the latest mommy blogger pumpkin spice latte recipe has 300 comments from yentas saying, “Sounds so yummy!!! Can’t wait to try this with my fam!”

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog talks about how to minimize risk in your stock portfolio. Determine how much you’re willing to lose, allocate your assets tactically, and lower your personal tolerance for stupidity. There’s more, including a link to his 32 Investment Rules and Strategies.

Free Money Finance writes about “The Difference 1% Can Make”. Alas, this isn’t a post about those of us who are keeping those filthy Occupy Wall Street cretins down, which would have been great. Instead, this post is about how consistent 100-basis point increases in your raises can make a gigantic difference in your net worth.

Speaking of raises, Michael at Financial Ramblings says you should commit half of every raise to your retirement.

If you can get past the trite opening in Charles Davis’s piece on Wallet Hub, “Purchasing your first home still represents the embodiment of the American Dream®”, as the homosexuals say, It Gets Better. Professor Davis tells us that start-up costs are probably more than you think, but that you shouldn’t let that dissuade you. And you shouldn’t. There are dozens of government programs available for first-time homebuyers, because – never forget this – there is no aspect of American life in which the federal government doesn’t reserve the right to poke its nose.

Reverse redlining is a thing? We’ve all heard of redlining, the process by which lenders won’t lend to folks who live in more, uh, “bargain” neighborhoods. John Kiernan at Wallet Hub’s bohemian sister Wallet Blog explains reverse redlining, which sounds like it’d mean offering lower rates to people in fancy ZIP codes, but isn’t. Rather, it means offering horrible rates to those same downtrodden people from the first example. Long story short, Morgan Stanley offered subprime loans to a bunch of people who were somewhat likely to default. The ACLU is suing Morgan Stanley, who were probably just following federal lending and housing laws to the letter anyway. Either that, or Morgan Stanley would have been forced to offer low rates to people who’d default, which means Morgan Stanley would be carrying more risk with less potential for reward. Bottom line, the ACLU already shook down Bank of America and Wells Fargo for half a billion dollars via settlement. Then again, Bank of America could stand to be taken down a peg after receiving a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. See? Conflicting regulation and state capitalism make everything better!

Finally, Liana Arnold at Wallet Hub’s sexy cousin Card Hub takes us into the unseemly world of debit card swipe fees. Banks, card companies, the Federal Reserve and major retailers are all on different sides and occasionally the same side as a multibillion-dollar settlement withers. It’s the 1990 Yugoslav Wars of swipe fees, factions allying and breaking apart with little discernible logic.

And we’re done. No, we’re never done. We’re on Investopedia, we’re on Twitter, and we’re back here with new posts every Wednesday and Friday. And a new CoW Monday. See yez.

Fall in Seychelles. Or possibly spring in Seychelles. Like it matters.

You can keep your pumpkin spice latte and your wooly scarf and the sound of fallen leaves crunching underneath your boots with insulated socks inside. Fall (or if you’re less literal, autumn) is the worst season in the universe.

Summer is awesome, and anyone who disagrees is insane. Maximum sunshine and daylight, minimum clothing, etc. Spring is equally fantastic, because anticipation is often as enjoyable as the thing it precurses. And winter is death. Which means the season that precedes it is as depressing as spring is hopeful. One day we’re going to have to do a series about how to live 6 months in the Northern Hemisphere, move to the Southern every September 21, and never have to deal with fall nor winter again.

Welcome to another Carnival of Wealth. A collection of personal finance blog posts from around said globe, most interesting and some awful. (Which is a vast improvement. It used to be the other way around.) Let’s begin:

We’ll start off slowly. The Thompson family is officially on the clock. Last week we ran and poked fun at their submission about what a fantastic investment whole life insurance is. (It isn’t.) This week, the brain trust behind Becoming Your Own Bank is back again:

Whole life insurance is one of the least understood financial products, and it’s been given a bad reputation by talking heads on television and radio.

Don’t forget the talking heads at Control Your Cash, slugger. The Becoming Your Own Bank team sells whole life insurance for a living. We’ve called it “actuarial rustproofing” in the past, and that might have been too kind. We also criticized their unreadable book on this very topic, a book they sent us to review. Hopefully they’re more diligent about selling their noxious financial service than they are about reading the CoW.

Speaking of last week, that’s when we ran a post from longtime CoW contributor Canajun Finances. Except he didn’t write it, he farmed it out to a woman who’s the closest thing North America has to an Indian SEO link factory. He referenced our critique on his site, the commenters commented, we responded, and before it turns into flame Armageddon we encourage you to read his response.

If you don’t know the first thing about financial literacy, and how to build wealth instead of having your money dominate you, buy our book. If you don’t have time to read 326 action-packed pages filled with thrilling charts and subheadings, read Odysseas Papadimitriou at WalletBlog instead. Odysseas reviews the ESPN documentary Broke, about such athletes, which we still have to get around to watching but can’t wait to. Incredibly, some of the most handsomely paid people in our society manage to fall the hardest. We were going to add an extrapolating paragraph, but this deserves an eventual blog post of its own.

From Odysseas’s partner in crime John Kiernan at CardHub comes an analysis of the Bluebird prepaid credit card, a joint venture of mass retailer Walmart and ostensibly elite financial services company American Express. Pros include the easy avoidability of monthly fees, and the global assistance AmEx is famous for. Cons include…well, nothing, as long as you enroll in direct deposit.

Slavery, bloodletting and alchemy aren’t quite as popular as they were in centuries hence. So why hasn’t the absurd custom of the engagement ring joined them on the Altar of Obsolescence?

Most people are in their 20s when they get married, i.e. as poor as they’ll ever be. (Yes, they were poorer as children, but someone else was picking up the tab.) So who better to spend a few thousand precious dollars on a trinket of zero utility and the wedding to showcase said trinket? Teacher Man at Young & Thrifty had a general lament about weddings last week, and this week focuses on the particularly idiotic idea of the engagement ring.

However, in vacillating Canadian fashion, Teacher Man suggests you buy your engagement rings on Amazon instead of paying more at a retailer.

This is what we here at Control Your Cash call the Low-Tar Cigarette Argument. Don’t smoke the Pall Malls, smoke the Winston Lights instead. Much better for you, as is the Amazon-bought engagement ring. (Is it that important to you to lower your net worth? Really? Then why are you pretending to have an interest in personal finance?)

Old participant, new website. Roger Wohlner at The Chicago Financial Planner tells you why financial planning is important, in much the same way that Justin Verlander will tell you that throwing a baseball is important or Holly Halston will tell you that having sex on camera is important. This isn’t really a post, just a long and colorful if not grammatically sound graphic. It cites some survey results (e.g., “39% of U.S. adults have ZERO non-retirement savings”) designed to shock, amaze, and get you to hire a financial planner; preferably Roger.

That being said, Roger’s a fee-only financial advisor: the only kind you want to hire. An advisor who takes a cut is both advisor and salesman, which is no less a conflict of interest than a car salesman who insists that you let only his dealership’s service department diagnose and treat your vehicle.

The always entertaining and occasionally ribald Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar ruminates on “early retirement”. More precisely, he laments how easy it is to claim a disability and have your fellow citizens prop you up, even in his relatively free province of Alberta.

That’s so insensitive. My mom has restless legs syndrome. She can’t work. 

Oh, bollocks, as the Brits say. See here for our opinion of people who have at least a single functioning limb and would rather have a handout than be productive.

Dividend Growth Investor reminds us that wishing won’t make anything so. A portfolio that creates enough income to let you live comfortably isn’t just going to fall from the stratosphere. Start with the end in mind. How much are you going to need? How big an outlay do you need to get there? This post also contains our favorite feature of Dividend Growth Investor’s, whereby he explains what certain famous multinationals do:

PepsiCo, Inc. (PEP) engages in the manufacture and sale of snacks, carbonated and non-carbonated beverages, dairy products, and other foods worldwide.

No one else finds his explanations amusing? Fine, whatever.

Advantages to living in California:

• Sun
• Ocean, depending on where you live
• Beautiful people, again depending on where you live

Disadvantages to living in California:

• Fundamental constitutional rights ignored (try finding a sheriff who’ll grant you a concealed weapons permit)
• Beautiful people, who can be a curse as often as they’re a blessing
• Regulations so onerous that they spill over into the 49 less crazy states. Like the difficult-to-remove tag on every hair dryer that reminds you that the State of California has determined that touching the cord could result in residual lead poisoning, thus you shouldn’t let your kids lick said cord.
• Gas approaching $6/gallon

From Andrew at 101 Centavos, a detailed explanation of why gas costs so much in California. One big reason is that California has the 2nd highest gas taxes in the nation, 50¢ a gallon. That was enacted by the same legislature that requires retailers to sell a summer blend that allegedly reduces particulate matter, which means wholesalers can’t buy from neighboring states with less onerous requirements, and…why do 38 million of you live there, again?

Your unemployment benefits are taxable. Blame Michael at Financial Ramblings for the wonderful news.

From another planner, Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog, the Fundamental Question of Investing: How do I break down my portfolio by asset? Buy stocks and bonds, and you have to watch their movements. Buy a mutual fund, and you might be so spread out that your returns will be low. Buy our $3 ebook and we’ll explain how to avoid the tedium that comes with buying individual stocks.

Mouth-breathing people on the street aren’t the only ones with uninformed political opinions. Check out the people Divya at Nerd Wallet quotes in her piece on the presidential election. From the chairman of a venture capital group:

Romney is a private equity guy, so his experience lies in outsourcing jobs and sending them overseas—that’s the private equity model.  Obama, however, has always tried to keep jobs in the USA, as evident with GM and Chrysler.

This from a man whose own biography tells us that he’s sent over $5 million overseas to educate foreigners, instead of keeping that money right here in the USA. (That last clause is sarcasm. Obviously his money is his to do what he wants with, but would it kill him to not be a hypocrite?)

Let’s not forget what the federal bailout of GM and Chrysler was – taxpayer funds, confiscated from the middle class, to prop up formerly formidable companies dying from incompetent management. Chrysler wasn’t, and isn’t, even a public company. At the time it was bailed out, Chrysler was owned by a private equity firm. To have a piece of Chrysler, you had to be a billionaire or something close. The Obama administration gave those owners $7 billion of your money, and today the United Auto Workers union owns 1/3 of Chrysler.

As for General Motors, the former largest corporation in the world filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy under the Obama administration. When a public company goes bankrupt, the process is pretty straightforward: bondholders get paid first, then preferred shareholders if any, then common shareholders. (We didn’t make up that hierarchy. Go ask the federal government’s own Securities and Exchange Commission.) Instead, the Obama administration changed the rules and compensated the unions first. The federal government flat-out purchased General Motors with your money, because creating automobiles is something elected officials should have under their purview.

Here’s another of Diyva’s quotes, this one from a tax consultant:

(Romney) has no concept of what small means, therefore the only interest he has and will always have is in big business.

Is she serious? Mitt Romney, what a cad. It’s almost as if he’s the presidential candidate who authorized using the taxes of millions of ordinary Americans to bail out two multibillion-dollar corporations.

Finally, a quote from a “marketing consultant”, whatever that is:

Romney is so far skewed to the Fortune 100 and can be expected to completely ignore entrepreneurial businesses. Romney’s economics are skewed toward moving money out of my middle-class and working-class customers and into the hands of the already-rich.

That’s the narrative, but whether it’s true is irrelevant.

20 years ago, independent Ross Perot garnered 19% of the vote in a presidential election despite a) running against an incumbent, b) quitting the race with a few weeks to go, then jumping back in, and c) selecting an unelectable running mate. Perot was 10 times richer than Romney is today, but no one decried Perot for his wealth. Far from it. His one major selling point was that he was a businessman, not a career politician. In the America of 2012, lots of people regard lots of money as something to apologize for.

So yeah, make sure you register to vote.

From Cameron Daniels at DQYDJ.net, a guaranteed 348,000% return on equity.

Really? Really. The only catch is that you have to start with $1. Cameron is goofing on the principle of leverage, which is the one way most of us can build lasting wealth – i.e., with other people’s money.

Finally, this week’s head-scratching excerpt comes from Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro, regarding real estate prices:

Here in San Diego, it’s a seller’s market but the prices have still remained low

Still, Harry’s got some worthwhile information about real estate investment trusts and whether they’re worth buying if you don’t have the resources to invest in real property.

Check us out on Investopedia. And again. New content here every day, too. New CoW Monday. Goodnight now.

“It’s just a popularity contest.” “No kidding.”

And we’re back, regular as clockwork. Another compendium of the least average personal finance blog posts of the week, summarized and arranged for your reading pleasure and education. We call it the Carnival of Wealth, and it beats that unreadable and insipid Yakezie Carnival every day and twice on Mondays.

When inspired, we try to find an encompassing, somewhat universal theme for each week’s CoW. Not all of you are into college football or guns, so we have to broaden our purview a bit. Thus this week’s theme, the series of presidential debates that are somehow going to explain the candidates’ positions better than months of sound bites and ads (and years of endorsed and vetoed legislation) have.

Seriously, the debates are more a contest of the candidates’ ability to keep cool than anything else. For whatever reason, photogeneity and the appearance of confidence (whether said confidence even exists) have become prerequisites for the highest office in the land. Thus two visually appealing, resonant candidates. Hook noses and contralto squeals never had a chance.

The guy on the left, our left, won the first debate unambiguously. If you believe the polls, that changed a few people’s minds. If debate performance is the one criterion you use to determine your favorite between two candidates whom you otherwise consider indistinguishable, well…thanks for registering, we guess.

That introduction went absolutely nowhere and served no purpose, not unlike the debates themselves. Let’s start this thing:

The remarkable Dave at 6400 Personal Finance has earned top billing even when he doesn’t submit to the CoW. We picked this piece from his recent archives. He explains how a government can’t be expected to exercise fiscal discipline when the elected representatives who comprise it carry giant credit card balances and negative net worth of their own.

Sometimes (all the time) it seems as though the Internal Revenue Service goes out of its way to make the tax code as arcane as possible. The good news is that since Ron Paul didn’t win the Republican presidential nomination and, let’s be honest, probably won’t get the 50 million write-in votes he needs to win the presidency, the tax code promises to be even more complicated 4 years from now than it is today. Regardless of who’s in the White House. If you’ve heard stories about people winning cars or boats in raffles and then having to sell them because they couldn’t afford the taxes, never fear. Michael at Financial Ramblings explains that credit card rewards aren’t taxable income. But because they’re rebates, you have to deduct them from your income. Having this situation accounted for is a far more productive use of bureaucrats’ time than implementing a flat tax (and a basic standard deduction) would ever be.

Look who’s back! It’s the chairman emeritus of the Carnival of Wealth. Founder Shailesh Kumar at Value Stock Guide makes an all-too-infrequent appearance with his piece on The Boston Consulting Group Growth Share Matrix. What is it? Nothing less than the Grand Unified Theory of investing. What Stephen Hawking has attempted to do for the universe, The Boston Consulting Group has done for managing your portfolio. The Share Matrix is actually less complicated than you might think.

(Post rejected because it’s written for those who are “Looking for frugal eateries while traveling to Hyde Park in Chicago? We cover five such places.” Not only is it off-topic, anyone who uses the word “eateries” is a jackball.)

Oh, snap. Another “frugal” blog? With a green logo (you know, the color of money?) And big, boldfaced paragraph headings and a series of questions at the end of the post (Blogger 101)? John P. Schmoll at Frugal Rules enters the CoW with a post on how to roll your 401(k) over when you switch jobs. This post actually isn’t bad, although the news that 15 million people have left their 401(k)s with their old employers is. (Oh, and John? It’s “principles”, not “principals.” No worries. Here to help.)

The definitive authority on Canadian resource investing, Mich at Beating the Index, returns after a mysterious layoff. Maybe he was enjoying Canada’s 13 weeks of federally mandated vacation. No wait, that’s Denmark. Easy to confuse, they both have red-and-white flags. This week, Mich discusses exploration in that notorious hotbed of oil deposits…Trinidad & Tobago.

Didn’t know that Trinidad & Tobago was 7 miles north of Venezuela, did you? Nor that Trinidad & Tobago lowered the profit tax on petroleum this year. Mich met with the principals of a junior explorer that’s staked claims in that part of the world, and sees promise.

Free Money Finance is unapologetic about building wealth and wanting to build more. Which shouldn’t be noteworthy, except that for some reason lots of people feel guilt or ambivalence about doing so. If you don’t believe that, check out the commenters whom our contributor felt the need to clarify himself to. Everyone has certain advantages, the idea is to capitalize on whatever gifts you’re blessed with and have developed. Do that, spend less time emailing personal finance bloggers to tell them how unreasonable they’re being, and maybe you can be less of a failure too.

One of our favorite regular contributors, the erudite and hilarious PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, found a subject that hits an even more sensitive nerve than usual:

We’ve spoken time and again on this site about what an utter waste of time and money a college education is unless you major in the hard sciences, math, applied science or finance. If you’re really committed to throwing your life away and being unproductive, you can keep collecting degrees (and debt) until you become a fully tenured professor in your useless discipline of choice. Like a certain political science professor at the City University of New York whom the New York Times gave some column inches to so he could ruminate on a rhetorical question too stupid for a site like Control Your Cash, “Is Algebra Necessary?”

He argues as follows:

1. Math is hard.
2. Studying it in high school makes kids drop out, or at least impacts their grades enough that they can’t qualify for college.
3. So let’s drop algebra.

Hey, any high schooler who happened to read the professor’s opinion piece and is now reading this (you never know): if you’re too dumb to solve x + 3 = 7, learn to drive a bus. You’ll be more productive than if you’d squeezed into an undemanding college, and you won’t carry any long-term debt.

The professor says that the vast majority of students won’t need math in their careers. A) Bullcrap, and B), as PKamp3 put it:

(W)e should cancel physical education because most people sit at their desks.  Let’s cancel literature since most of us don’t read classics at work.  In fact, let’s cancel everything except lunch(.)

Herbert Hoover was the only engineer to serve as President, back in the ’20s. Since then it’s been a largely unbroken line of attorneys, most of whom couldn’t find a first-order derivative if their lives depended on it. No correlation, of course.

Speaking of unbroken lines, the lovely Liana Arnold at CardHub returns with a piece on organizations busted for credit card fraud. Liana doesn’t mean merchants slapping cardholders with unfair charges, she means card issuers that signed cardholders up for payment protection and other nonsense without the cardholders’ consent. The good news is that Discover, American Express et al. had to pay up. Was this straight-up fraud, or just misleading statements? Either way, read the agreement and save every email. (Also, Liana attempted a sports reference. Adorable!)

John Kiernan at the closely related Wallet Blog writes about the phenomenon of banks changing the ways they disclose terms and conditions. Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the biggest charitable funds in the world, recommended a simple and streamlined 1-page disclosure form for banks to use that will help accountholders answer variants on the question, “How much is this going to cost me?” Incredibly, many major banks adopted it. See, you folks using Bitcoins are missing out on the fun new transparent standard banking industry.

A couple of years ago, we tore an unreadable book to shreds. (Figuratively. We have Kindles.) The author and his army of relatives are persistent, however, sending us the occasional CoW entrant. So here’s Jack Thompson (regrettably not the former Bengals quarterback, or even the lunatic disbarred lawyer in Florida who loves to sue Howard Stern and video game manufacturers) of Becoming Your Own Bank. He writes about the wonders of…whole life insurance.

Whole life insurance is almost as big a waste of money as a humanities degree is. The author’s boss sells whole life insurance for a living. Do your research. Buy our book and don’t get screwed.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro backed away from last week’s ill-fated toe dip into Chipotle ordering strategy, and returns with a vengeance. This week, Harry discusses the nefarious tax called inflation. It hits all of us, and it hits the poor (i.e., people who have relatively more of their wealth in cash) particularly hard. Thus Harry recommends I Bonds, which include both a fixed rate and an “inflation” rate.  They protect against inflation, which the Federal Reserve says is currently negligible but which anyone who buys or sells anything knows isn’t. Harry’s post includes a smart, easily actionable strategy for buying I Bonds (when to, how much to etc.) that you can…(can’t use “take to the bank”, that’s too trite an idiom)…implement.

Darnell Brown at Excess Return (killer name for a site, by the way) is the guy holding his palm vertical and saying “Halt” when everyone else is telling you to buy gold. Darnell reminds us that precious metal prices aren’t wholly determined by supply and demand. (Thank you, central bankers!) If you’re set on buying gold or silver, listen to what Darnell says about the methods of doing so (bullion, exchange-traded funds etc.) before committing.

Big Cajun Man had an even bigger layoff than Shailesh Kumar, we think (have to check the records.) The former returns with a…oh wait, it’s a guest post by “journalistically trained” Miranda Marquit. Take it away, Miranda:

keyword keyword incredibly basic thought keyword SEO phrase link to sponsor keyword keyword pap keyword SEO phrase pablum keyword pabulum keyword keyword insultingly rudimentary advice keyword SEO phrase unnecessary adverb to keep the word count up keyword

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Teacher Man guest posts at Young & Thrifty and asks if you should invest in a consumer electronics (mostly) company that’s trading 80% up from its 52-week nadir and that has a price-earnings ratio of about 15. Oh, and that’s sitting on more cash than most national governments.

Carlos Sera of Financial Tales loves to write. Paragraph after paragraph of unedited prose that, with some distillation, can get to a valuable and important point. Bring your favorite caffeinated beverage and plow your way through his post on risk, reward, and the Mar ratio. Again, there’s something worthwhile in this post, it just takes forever to get there. That’s why we saved it for last.

And we’re done. New blog posts every Wednesday and Friday. New CoW every Monday. Anti-Tips of the Day, daily. Investopedia too. Take care.