Our co-ed relay team, if we had one. Taken at United States Olympic headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Every 4 years (well, every 2 years), a bunch of cities awash in something between pride and desperation mortgage their citizens’ children’s futures for a chance at hosting a glorified track meet. Thus the Olympics, which the London organizing (excuse us, “organising”) committee assured us will put their town on the map and in the global public consciousness.

Yes, because no one around the world has ever heard of London or visited it. But now they will. The Games of the XXX Olympiad already acknowledge a 101% cost overrun, again for a shindig that lasts 16 days.

The most ridiculous part of the Olympics is that it’s billed as a way for the nations of the world to cast aside their political differences and play nice. Except the Olympics are just about the most political thing on Earth. Let’s see:

• Taiwan competing as “Chinese Taipei”, complete with an artificial flag, so as not to irk the Red Chinese.
• Macedonia competing as the mellifluous “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, because Greece has a neighboring province called Macedonia. This would almost be like New Mexico insisting that Mexico change its name to Former Spanish Protectorate of Mexico.
• Palestine, which isn’t even a country, competing as one.

Every single Olympiad, with the exception of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, has lost money. (That Olympiad’s chairman, Peter Ueberroth, slapped corporate logos on everything and saved taxpayers untold millions.)

And let’s not forget the 1972 USA basketball team getting jobbed out of a gold medal, the same thing for Roy Jones Jr., and…well, basically everything non-drug-related on this list.

Still, this was pretty awesome.

Alright, the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from around said world. Some good, most awful, none dull. Shall we?

Lance at Money Life & More spent a few seconds writing a post about why should ask for more, but not be greedy.

Now here’s an idea we can get behind, for a post-2012 America whose chief executive will be either a guy who imposed socialized healthcare on the entire nation, or one who imposed it just on a single state. From Cameron at DQDYJ.net, a modest proposal: taxing fat people.

A wonderful recommendation whose time has come. The slow, aesthetically unpleasant, lazy, corpulent legions who infringe on our airplane seats, keep us waiting in the grocery aisle, and take up unwarranted mils in our field of vision have had their way long enough. If they ate intelligently and exercised, no one could make political hay out of a problem that wouldn’t need fixing. There are people who eat donuts for breakfast in this country.

(Wait. It was satire? Never mind.)

We were looking forward to Part IV in W at Off Road Finance‘s series on alternatives to investing. Instead, we’re treated to an interlude about correlation in the stock market. (“Correlation” in the mathematical sense, using the Pearson product/moment method.)

Did we lose some of you? Correlation, a way to boil two sets of corresponding data down to a single value between -1 and 1. Take two quantities like height and weight, and you’ll have a correlation close to 1. Alcohol consumption and brain function, that’d be more like -1. Years of education and number of pets owned? As far as we know those are unrelated, which means a correlation near 0. And movements in the S&P 500 and in Microsoft stock, .76 by W’s calculations.

(A post about why it’s important to have an emergency fund. We wish all the people who write about this would incur legitimate emergencies, just to see what would happen.)

We didn’t know there was a name for this, but Free Money Finance talks about the phenomenon of “showrooming.” You look at something in a store, then buy it cheaper online. Thankfully, most of the showroomers who went to the trouble of leaving comments on his post were unapologetic about doing so. A few sanctimonious Luddites whined about the shuttering of Main Street. And you wonder why we don’t allow comments, only trackbacks.

(Indian remote assistant-penned post. Thanks, but we’ll pass.)

Favour! Cheques! And other colonial forms of spelling! Check out Teacher Man at Young & Thrifty, who’s solved the rat race by going straight at the first turn and heading for small-town Canada. You know, for the folks who think that Winnipeg is too cosmopolitan.

Visited Winnipeg once. In winter. -50º without the windchill, and at that point the scale doesn’t matter because that’s so cold that the Celsius numbers are greater than the Fahrenheit ones. The women had sideburns, a genetic adaptation similar to black skin in the tropics or oversized lungs in the Himalaya. There was a story that teenagers would pass the time by walking without head coverings, to town from the suburbs, then go into a heated indoor area and see whose motor skills would warm up first and allow them to touch their fingers to their noses. Winnipeg. Great place.

Heard of Bitcoins? Sooner or later, you will. And Charles Davis at Wallet Hub has the most understandable explanation of them we’ve seen so far. Let the Yap Islanders use giant round stones for money. We in the First World are better than that.

From the indomitable Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim comes a post on how to create income using mutual funds. Not just appreciation, income. The growth/stability trade-off, subjected to quantification. Comprehensive and easily understood, with actionable advice and no endless first-person whining. Why can’t every post be like this?

In our book (available on Amazon!) we bemoan parents’ refusal to discuss money with their kids. Kids get the sex talk, the alcohol talk, maybe even the drugs talk, but never the money talk. David Marotta at Marotta on Money shares our lament, and implores you to stop what you’re doing and at least discuss Roth IRAs with your precious little snowflake.

Or you can just let your kid take out a student loan to study something useless and then spend decades paying the loan off. Your call.

We just read David’s bio. We’ll have to check the records, but we’re pretty sure he’s our first submitter to have played chess with Edward Teller. Apparently, the U.S. State Department has a chess team. Also, David’s favorite number is e. We’re big Euler-Mascheroni constant people ourselves.

John at Nerd Wallet asks, rhetorically, if you should open a personal joint checking account. Here’s a handy, not-at-all obvious summary culled from it:

Do NOT open a joint bank account with anyone that you do not completely trust.

(Boldfacing and italics his.)

Andrew at 101 Centavos is another guy with a permanently reserved table at the CoW. His directive this week is to RTFC. The c stands for “contract”, the rt for “read the”, and if you bought a house without taking into consideration what might happen if you failed to make your mortgage payments, you deserve to lose it and should thank your repossessing lender for saving you from subsequent failure. Just about every economic misfortune we’re suffering, individually and in the nation and world at large, could be cured if people went to the trouble of understanding what they were getting into.

But it’s complicated!

Then hire a professional to decode the documents for you before you sign. And understand that attaching your signature to something is more than just a way to show off your penmanship.

John at Wallet Blog is infamous around these parts for giving us the heads-up on portentous news. This week, he illustrates how an upcoming reduction will shrink the gift tax exemption from $5 million to $1 million. Yeah, yeah, what do you care, that’s for the Mitt Romneys of the world, whatever.

You’re missing the point. We should make it as easy as possible for rich people to move capital around. That way, they can do something productive with it, instead of looking for tax shelters that add little to the world stock of value. The Cayman Islands didn’t ask to be an offshore haven: countries like the U.S. prompted the Caymans to fill that role.

And just like that, it was over. Again, we’re after quality here. If you want a carnival with lots of entrants, none of which you’re going to read, there are more inclusive ones out there that are easier to find, if not to digest.

As for us, we’ll be back with new posts every Wednesday and Friday, a new CoW every Monday, and occasional fits of genius on ProBlogger, Investopedia and elsewhere. See ya.

You can call them “antelope”, and you can call bison “buffalo”. Doesn’t mean you’re right.

No reason, we just think they look incredibly cool. They have a taxonomic family all to themselves. Not quite deer, not quite elk.

And it is a crime that not a single one of the western and central states where the pronghorn lives has chosen to make it its state mammal. The desert bighorn sheep, while impressive, doesn’t captivate us quite like Antilocapra americana, the Western Hemisphere’s fastest land animal.

On with the show. The weekly Carnival of Wealth, a roundup of personal finance blog posts. Some good, some awful, none dull. Away we go…

(First 2 posts out of the gate were garbage. This bodes horribly.)

We usually save this guy to the end, but we needed some early fortification. Mich at Beating the Index returns with a breakdown of Renegade Petroleum, a junior producer that’s recently made some promising finds in the vastnesses of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This post is technical, it’s loaded with visually appealing charts, and like most of Mich’s work, it’s best inhaled in one concentrated sitting. Read it and learn something.

Come on. Seriously? Carol J. Alexander at Christian PF lists, and we quote, “7 Safe Places To Keep Cash Hidden In Your Home.” Yes, cash is technically a personal finance topic, but enough already. All 7 of them are insane, or at least on the list of the first places a thief will look, but nothing beats this one:

4. A package in the freezer.

Save a frozen vegetable bag. Fill it with a few packing peanuts and your cash in a zip shut bag. Twist tie it shut as you would any other half-used bag. Hide it in the back of the freezer—as though it was forgotten. No thief is going to want your half-bag of old broccoli cuts.

There are 115 million households in the United States, and presumably a similar number of freezers. NOBODY is using, or will ever use, Ms. Alexander’s inventive if crazy tactic. Even Trent Hamm would find this to be an egregious waste of a twist tie. BONUS: She refers to “ATM machines (sic)”.

(A post about traveling with your pet.)

(A post about how Warren Buffet [sic] is a genus [sic], and at this point we wonder why the old man doesn’t just elide one of the t’s in his name since most people misspell it anyway.)

(“Documents you need to travel to Canada”, submitted twice. Driver’s license and passport. Go figure.)

(A post on Roth IRAs.)

HEY! Finally, something on-topic! PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net to the rescue. Want to contribute $30,000 to your Roth IRA? You can, and it requires you to jump through only a couple of (wide, non-flaming) hoops.  Unless you’re one of those people who dig paying more taxes than they have to – and apparently, they exist – this post is for you.

Made up your mind that you’re going to college, huh? Nothing’s going to dissuade you? The financial lunacy of doing so* notwithstanding, Teacher Man at My University Money has a list of recommendations for incoming freshmen. He also references the “Freshman 15”, which we assumed Canadians would refer to as the “Freshman 7”. Thirty-five years of metrification and you folks still don’t weigh yourselves in kilograms? What are you waiting for?

Takeaways from Teacher Man’s post:

• like it or not, GPA is important
• party as hard as you can, as fast as you can, so you can get it out of your system.

That second one might sound crazy, but then so does playing rugby without padding. Or forcing your kid to smoke the entire carton when you catch him with a cigarette. If you look at the above radical ideas from a distance, they start to make sense. And God knows the routine of killing every Sunday by waking up hungover and swearing that Monday will be different doesn’t work.

Joe Morgan once said that

A lot of star players get booed in opposing stadiums.

His namesake at Simple Debt Free Finance is more profound. He asks if paying off your mortgage early is a good idea. Unless it’s a bad idea.

Wait, it’s more complex than that. Obviously, you want to look at your interest rate, opportunity cost etc. If you can find an investment that pays 5% while your mortgage is 4%, especially when the latter allows you to deduct your mortgage interest, Bob’s your uncle. But on the other hand, paying it off early will give you peace of mind that…

Joe never bothers coming to a conclusion (“Paying off your mortgage early is a personal choice and depends on your financial and emotional situation.”), so we’ll do it for him. Going into debt for an asset like a house makes sense if you’re going to do something with the cash it frees up. At least in today’s economy, with mortgage rates at historic nadirs, you can find something to invest in that’ll make it worth your while to keep your mortgage for its entire term. If this were 1976, and mortgage rates were at 18%, we’d have a different opinion.

We’ve been skeptical of Chris Guillebeau for a while, not because he follows his dreams but because he implores the unprepared and the unserious to join him on this adventure. It’s that whole Tim Ferriss-inspired call to live life on your own terms, screw The Man, drop out of society and see the world at your leisure. Which is fine, if you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t.

Free Money Finance thinks otherwise and has reviewed Guillebeau’s book. At least in this instance, Guillebeau’s talking about the fun ways to make money, rather than to spend it. Free Money Finance is sold, so much so that he took the rare step of reading a hard copy of Guillebeau’s book and making notes in it.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog has a knack for making even depressing news entertaining.

First, a diatribe. Don’t kid yourself that American politicians, at least the majority of them, care about entrepreneurism. The more oligopolies we have, the happier the politicians are. (After all, who would you rather solicit donations from – 100,000 neighborhood dry goods stores, or one guy at Target?)

This goes triple for banks. Small, community banks are hogtied by the FDIC to an extent that no major bank would ever stand for. And on the last day of 2012, the regulators could stop insuring some business deposits at small banks. They’ll do it at large banks too, but the obvious and intended result is that people will shift their money from First National of Butcher Holler to Citi or Chase. That’s the dystopian future that John foresees, and that neither a Republican nor a Democrat administration will bother to remedy. (Assuming we don’t see the mother of all political comebacks this fall.)

The lovely Liana Arnold at Card Hub warns us against what can happen if you go to binding arbitration against a credit card issuer. The Supreme Court ruled that card issuers can resolve issues via arbitration, rather than granting you the cardholder your day in court. That the arbiters are paid by the card companies is no reason to think that any decisions would be biased, not at all. But there is a way out, and it involves (oh God, here we go again) personal responsibility:

the only way to truly protect yourself from being taken to court or arbitration by a credit card company is to pay your bills.

Devastating concept, isn’t it?

British lenders let you miss a month on your mortgage payment. They just add it to the end of the term, of course with interest. Well, we’ll be dipped. Adam Buller at Money Bulldog center-justifies his way to a shocking conclusion regarding this shocking practice.

Almost there. Dan at ETF Base assesses a new exchange-traded fund, the AdvisorShares Global Alpha & Beta ETF. Mix 3 parts S&P 500 with 2 parts aggregate bond index, mix well. Except right now the proportions are more like 7-to-1. The fund incorporates a “death cross”, whereby its long-term moving average has outpaced the short-term one. Not necessarily portending a bear market, but you can smell one from here.

Finally, Greg Field introduces the new interest rate monitor at Nerd Wallet. It’s a list of deposit accounts that beat inflation by varying margins. It’s basically a bunch of links to some credit unions, but who cares? We’ve got an economy to keep alive here.

We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. We’re in Investopedia, on Yahoo! Finance (in the Philippines, no less!), and on ProBlogger. Tomorrow, a new Anti-Tip of the Day. Wednesday, a new post. Friday, another new post. Monday, another CoW. Repeat as desired. Thanks for coming.

*Unless you’re majoring in the hard sciences, of course.

The New York something are playing the Seattle somebody else right now (possibly pictured here.) They’re the perfect inoffensive background noise and images with which to devote our attention to preparing the Carnival of Wealth. Soccer as a productivity tool.

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading. A Monday staple featuring blog posts from around the world. It used to be that most of the ones we received were awful and only a few were worth posting, but finally that ratio’s starting to even out. Not a moment too early, either. It’s a long one this time, so let’s get going:

Prospective submitters, here’s an example of the kind of post that you should only send us if you want to be chided.

“Adam Williams” of PF Success asks, somewhat rhetorically, if your family could survive with only 1 vehicle. What makes this post substandard?

• The author’s name. PF Success’s owner farms out the actual job of writing content – i.e. the site’s primary function – to a virtual assistant in India. The virtual assistant doesn’t want the readers to know that he’s hired help, so he overcompensates by coming up with an impossibly white-bread English handle. Guys, mix it up a little. Throw a Fratelli or an Andruszkewicz in there and we’d be more apt to get suckered in.
• It’s written for Martians.

There is a feeling of independence when one is able to get into their car, and go places as he or she pleases.

Anybody reading this not know what a car is, and what it does? If that’s you, we apologize. As for the writer, if you’re going to state the obvious, do it somewhere else.

• Bad punctuation, awful syntax (in “Adam Williams”‘s defense, he’s not a native English speaker), and pointless repetition:

As already stated, it is nice to take your car wherever you’d like

Sounds like a winner to us.

Lance at Money Life & More enjoys playing Polish Roulette (it’s like Russian Roulette, except with a pistol instead of a revolver.) (Polish jokes? Are those still a thing? Or are they a relic from a different decade where ethnic humor wasn’t relegated to the outskirts?)

This week he tells us how he made $400 by buying a $4300 air-conditioning unit. The $400 was a signup bonus for a new credit card. The issuer activated the bonus when Lance bought $3000 worth of stuff.

Alright, our initial comment was exaggeration to make a point. The card has a $95 annual fee, so hopefully Lance will be smart enough to cancel the card sometime in the next 51 weeks. Lance probably won’t get screwed, unlike most other cardholders. Why? Because he read the agreement. He didn’t wait a year and then write a post saying, “Can you believe Chase charged me $95 for carrying their stupid card? So unfair!” Reading the agreement is guaranteed to make your life 147% easier.

Somebody named Don is the latest contributor at My Dollar Plan, and this week he breaks down one of the few investments guaranteed to fight off the relentless erosion of inflation. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, as their name implies, issue returns fixed to changes in the Consumer Price Index. Which brings up another set of questions, starting with “Can you trust the federal government’s inflation figures?”

Dividend Growth Investor isn’t just going deep on dividend stocks in the period before retirement, he plans to continue doing so in his dotage. His strategy includes looking at companies with wide “moats”, sustainable dividends, and a couple more dividend-related criteria you’ll have to read to understand. Dividend Growth Investor continues with his explanatory descriptions of major corporations, which perhaps no one else finds funny but we always will:

McDonald’s Corporation (MCD), together with its subsidiaries, franchises and operates McDonald’s restaurants primarily in the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

We’ve reached Part III in W at Off Road Finance‘s tetralogy on The Alternative to Investing. Try to ignore his one mathematical error (1985 wasn’t 37 years ago) and concentrate on his big picture – market inefficiencies exist, and there’s nothing preventing you from being one of the people to exploit them. Except your own indiligence.

We love these kinds of posts, like this one from PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, combining economics and psychology. He explains that the market will charge different people different prices for the same item, because it can.

This is freshman economics, the concept of utility. Say you walk into a gas station and buy a $1 bottle of water just because you need to use the bathroom and don’t want to feel guilty about doing so. Why’d you buy the water bottle, instead of something else? Probably because it was the cheapest thing you could find a) without bothering to check the price of every item in the store, while the clock ticks and your bladder expands, and b) that you’d end up consuming at some point anyway.

Would you be willing to pay $1.50 for the bottle? Maybe. $2? At that point you’d probably either look around for something cheaper, wonder if you could hold it in until you got home, or forget about decorum and just march into the bathroom anyway.

Now say you have a friend who’s just hiked through the Sonoran Desert in the middle of July. She gets to the trailhead, her water supply (and her) exhausted, and there’s a smiling man standing there operating a kiosk. Ice-cold Aquafina, $1. Last water for 50 miles. Does she buy it? Without hesitation. How much is the water worth to her? A lot more than it was to you. She’d gladly have paid $2. Heck, she might have paid $10. Because the water was worth so much to her, shouldn’t the seller charge her as much as possible (while still making the sale)? Especially if there’s another, fully hydrated passerby who’s thinking about buying the same bottle for $1?

That’s why there’s no such thing as gouging. If you don’t like the deal, don’t make it.

Here’s our Post of The Week Featuring Solid Advice That No One Will Follow. From Free Money Finance, how to write a résumé.

People love homogeneity. They don’t know how to stand out, and they’re not going to attempt to do so with something as potentially life-changing as a résumé. So they’ll repeat all the tired expressions (“was responsible for…”, “have excellent written and oral communications skills…”, etc.) Free Money Finance’s post is a book excerpt, but even the book gets it wrong. The authors encourage you to write lifeless nonsense like:

Developed a more customer-focused approach, providing outstanding service to a diverse clientele, resulting in a significant increase in customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.

Oh, for God’s sake. Find an employed person who says “Our approach isn’t really focused on our customers.” Or “The service I provided? Adequate, on most days. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘outstanding’.” Or “Our clientele was perfectly uniform. I couldn’t tell any of our customers apart.”

You don’t have to polish what doesn’t warrant polishing, kids. If you worked the counter at The Gap, just say that and nothing more. Everyone knows what a store clerk does, and what a clothing store is. “Provided apparel services to male and female customers in a fast-paced retail environment” just makes you sound like a Mongoloid. A literate Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid nonetheless. No personnel director wants to read through that interminable garbage.

Now “supervised 4 people”, “handled payroll”, “was honored by corporate for highest increase in year-over-year sales in the entire 3200-store chain” are legitimate accomplishments. If you did them, mention them. If you were just working there to pay the bills, waiting for something better to come along while not collecting welfare, that’s fine. Say so. Well, don’t say so, but don’t turn your stopgap job into something it isn’t.

So we weren’t hallucinating when we saw the PayPal logo on the swipe terminal at Home Depot last week. Charles Davis at WalletHub tells us that if you register with Home Depot, or several other retailers, you can save yourself the trouble of using your credit card to pay. Just type in your phone number and your PIN instead.

Is that easier than using a credit card? We’re not sure. Especially since PayPal doesn’t offer rewards. File under features to be added soon, perhaps.

Fractional-reserve banking isn’t the only means by which lending institutions risk overextending themselves. Just ask John Kiernan at Wallet Blog, who introduces us to the ominous world of shadow banking. Hedge funds and money market funds are among the quasi-banks that differ from conventional lending institutions only in that the former don’t take deposits. But they’re more than happy to lend, without being subject to the same regulations as their less umbral counterparts. If every creditor comes knocking at once, the shadow banking industry could do what multiple investment banks did in 2008. Good times!

Dan at ETF Base has a talent for looking at cemented truths from unusual angles. He starts with an observation that most people haven’t heard articulated before – the majority of stock market returns are dividends. So maybe we should start from that point while investing. Dan introduces us to a new form of exchange-traded fund, one that takes the “Dogs of the Dow” concept and applies it to dividends.

If you’re an optimist, you could argue that the United States is enjoying a 91.8% employment rate. Except you’d be lying, because it’s really an 85.1% employment rate. Darwin’s Money uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own numbers to show how utterly decimated the jobs market is. But yes, Mr. President, both houses of Congress, and the Federal Reserve, whatever you do, forget about applying the lessons of the Hayek/Friedman/Paul school of economists. Keep intervening instead. It’s never worked before, and always has the opposite of its intended effect, but this time it’ll be different. You know better.

From Liana Arnold at Card Hub, a list of the credit card issuers whom the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received the most and least complaints (per capita) about. TD Bank finished 2nd from the bottom. Told you those Canadians were nothing but trouble.

Card Hub didn’t link to its data, but we did find out that a total of 530 people have complained about their credit card issuers in the last 6 weeks. Which almost seems low, given how many dumb people there are who look to a government agency to save them from a mistake that’s probably their fault. Of the complaints, 21% were billing disputes. Okay, fine. But the next biggest topic of complaint was interest rate.

Not knowing the details, we’re willing to bet that the card issuers are completely exculpable here. One more time: USAA can charge you 4,589,289,982,113.9% APR and you need not flinch. Pay your bill on time and interest rates don’t and shouldn’t matter. This is not complex.

you want the credit card with the most lucrative rewards or the longest 0% interest rate

We’d have put a comma after “rewards”, and replaced the subsequent phrase with “and that doesn’t charge a fee.”

Teacher Man posts at Young & Thrifty this week, imploring you to be ruthless regarding negotiable fees. Much like we implore you to let other people pay your way when they’re willing to (case in point, the previous post about credit card interest rates. Let the other idiots pay interest on their credit cards, while you take advantage of 30-days-same-as-cash terms and simultaneously build credit and earn rewards.)

Teacher Man gets it – the big picture, that is. If you can get the other party to pay hundreds of dollars in fees during a house sale, do it. Most home sellers (and buyers) are dumb enough to think of closing costs in terms relative to the size of the house sale, rather than as absolute costs. In other words, if you as the buyer stand your ground on not paying $1500 in closing costs, the seller might think, “Oh, what the hell. It’s a $250,000 house. I’ll cut him a break here, just to get the sale and close it quickly.”

But as Teacher Man reinforces, that’s still $1500. All for a few minutes’ work. It’s astonishing to think of the effort people will put into clipping coupons, or turning off lights when exiting a room, while refusing to go for the big fish like this. Even when it’s practically jumping into the boat.

We run posts from Mich at Beating the Index just about every week, which only a few of you read because its subject matter is so narrow. His coverage is great, but unless you’re passionate about energy exploration and its corresponding investments, you might shy away. This week, we implore you not to shy away. Mich explains it better than we can –

We are years away from seeing (electric vehicles) capture high market share because it still doesn’t make financial sense to buy an electric car for 1 reason: (return on investment)

Even under Mich’s conservative estimates, it’ll take 9 years for your Nissan Leaf or Honda Fit to pay for itself.

Read the article, but don’t read the comments. They’ll just make your head hurt. Like the one that said that if electric cars don’t make financial sense, neither do luxury cars.

A big, powerful engine gets you where you’re going quickly. Meanwhile a Smart Car loses to a motorcycle on every metric. The latter has a larger range, is more fuel-efficient, doesn’t require a lunky battery to dispose of, is easier to maintain, goes faster, is no more dangerous, and is infinitely more badass. Why Harley-Davidson and Kawasaki don’t point this out is anyone’s guess. Unless they’ve determined that a bike is far too much machine for the kind of person who’d even consider a dainty little hybrid. Makes sense.

Thanks for coming out. Fewer qualifiers and far more entertainment that any other personal finance blog carnival, and if you disagree you’re lying. We’ll see you Wednesday, and don’t forget to check us out on Yahoo! Finance, Investopedia, ProBlogger and anywhere else good that’ll take us. Sayonara.