Whatever part of the world you're in, it's probably less beautiful than this. Zion National Park.

That’s the temperature in Kanab, Utah as we type this. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, not even a white one. Weather.com says it’s 56º in Portland, Maine right now, making us wonder why anyone would live in a cold climate unless sentenced to do so by a court of law.

Which is as good a segue as any to this edition of the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from around the globe, organized and collated for your edification. If you want to submit yours, there’s a link on our site somewhere; we’re not going to just spoon-feed you. Now read:

Oh, for Christ’s sake. Post #452,489,293,877,258 on how to get out of credit-card debt from a 1st-person perspective. Is this what life was like when the Cro-Magnons invented speech? Did everyone tell the same damn campfire story every night until finally one caveman couldn’t take it any more, bashed that night’s storyteller to death with a club, and started the tradition of narrative drama?

Anyhow, Jefferson at See Debt Run brings us rationalization of the highest order – a post on how paying off your cards too early can be bad. This from a guy who incurred $22,000 in debt while fathering 3 kids. (Wait, you mean kids cost money? And thus make it harder for you to get out of debt? We had no idea!)

I didn’t cut up my credit cards– but I did put them in a drawer in my kitchen.  However, as I was recently looking for a way to save some money on life’s necessities, I decided to pull them out again.

Yes, because the credit equivalent of hiding your cigarettes always works. What are we, children? This is like lazy people who set their alarm clocks 15 minutes fast to trick them into thinking that that it’s later than it is. OMG I CAN’T SAY NO TO THAT THROW RUG AND PILLOW SET AT TARGET! If you can’t handle credit, you obviously shouldn’t have cards. But what you really shouldn’t be doing is telling other people what to do with their cards.

One of the ever-dwindling number of personal finance bloggers whom we’re on speaking terms with says, and this is paraphrasing, “Does your personal trainer carry 3 spare tires? Does your dentist have a mouth full of missing teeth? Then why would you take personal finance advice from someone who can’t get their stuff together?” Amen.

As if on cue, Dave at 6400 Personal Finance gives you the opposite perspective. The title says it all; “Discipline is Cheaper than Credit Card Debt.” But read beyond the title, please. This from a 20-something who manages to regularly update two excellent blogs (Dividends For The Long Run Blog is the other) while, oh yeah, leading soldiers into battle. We’re guessing he has little time for frisbee golf and navel-gazing.

Here’s another woeful story, albeit from a 3rd-person perspective. Ben DeMeter at Credit Card Assist laments the situation of a moron with $65,000 in student loans and 2 kids. This post is full of funny excerpts. This is our favorite:

Bob Johnson…took on student debt not once but twice in order to find work in an ailing market and (is) now struggling just to stay off welfare. After graduating in 1987 with a BA in journalism, the NYC native struggled to find work. By the time he got a job that paid about $800 a month, he had already been forced to defer his loans twice. When he was laid off in the mid-’90s, he decided to go back to school for his MFA in theatre management, believing that it would increase his chances for employment.

Journalism. Theater management (while already in the hole). It’s as if when Bob Johnson was applying for his loans, he said, “Awesome! If I keep this up, Control Your Cash will poke fun at me one day.” Wait, here’s a better one:

his student debt has grown from less than $100,000 to several hundred thousand dollars. “The money coming in is not great,” he says. “I currently have $700 or so in the bank, $400 in a drawer and $5K in a retirement account

But no, you keep believing that tertiary education of any kind is the key to your financial future.

Now this is what we’re talking about: Anisha at Nerd Wallet sees things correctly, which is to say, our way. She opens:

The Amex Campus Edition Prepaid card is about as useful – and expensive – as an art history degree.

Which tells you what her post is about, and what she thinks of said topic. Purchase fees? Charges for withdrawals above a tiny minimum? Come on. The Campus Edition Prepaid card sounds like something Suze Orman would endorse if she didn’t have her own terrible prepaid card. Why do we love Nerd Wallet? Because while they praise good products, they’re also happy to call out rotten ones by name.

Teacher Man appears at Young & Thrifty this week, discussing how to shrink your mutual fund fees. Which is important, if you’re Canadian and thus pay the highest fees in the world.

Another Canadian, Boomer (of “& Echo” renown) explains segregated funds. They’re like mutual funds, but sold by insurance companies. (There’s way more to it than that. You want a full summary in 3 sentences? Please. Just read the post.)

Ooh! Touchy-feely hippie blather! Welcome to Scott Vong, who explains that the best way to build wealth is…spiritually. Not that there isn’t a place for spirituality, but he’s looking at something that transcends being honest and giving value for service. Mr. Vong thinks “the best way to earn money is by doing what you love.”

Tell that to a Rookie League baseball player who gets released after one year as a pro, a year (more accurately, a summer) in which he made $1800 a month and lived in Pulaski, Virginia. The above paragraph’s sentiment has resulted in endless pain and frustration. Following your dreams is simple, puerile, fairy godmother advice that does nothing to enrich you. You build wealth by doing (creating, building, selling) what other people love and are willing to pay for. Your passions don’t mean anything, unless you can somehow find a way to sell to yourself.

Also, it’s “byproduct” and not “bi-product”, Professor. (The potential jokes on that misspelling are too easy. We’re leaving it alone.)

Let it ride! Don at My Dollar Plan wants to know if you should do so, or rebalance your portfolio. Our opinion? If you do the latter, you’re investing for proportionality, rather than for wealth building. If the stocks in your 70-30 stock-bond portfolio double in value, now you have an 82-18 portfolio and have to buy…bonds? You figure it out.

Make that 452,489,293,877,259 posts on how to get out of credit card debt. Simple Debt Free Finance, knock yourself out.

Look, here’s how you get out of credit card debt: live like a Dickensian pauper and put every dollar to your credit card bill. Better to suffer sharp, brief pain than dull, prolonged pain. None of you are going to do this.

And that’s only the 2nd-best way to get out of credit card debt. The best way is to figure out how much money you’re spending, and make sure it’s less than you’re taking in. Then you won’t get into credit card (or any other kind of) debt in the first place. Again, the vast majority of people aren’t going to do this, but there it is.

Please. That’s unrealistic.

Fine. You can say celibacy is too, but tell us another guaranteed way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STDs.

Steve Zussino at Grocery Alerts is relentless, we’ll give him that. Another pointless and derivative post designed to insult your brain, this one called The Ultimate Guide To Father’s Day Gifts On Any Budget.

First, he doesn’t literally mean any budget, we think. Second, good Lord. He breaks the gift choices down by personality type (gifts for the businessman, the “photo enthusiast”, etc.) Here are some verbatim gems:

For the businessman:

• Laptop
• Leather briefcase
• Dress shoes
• Suit
• Watch
• Pocket watch

What is this, 1954? How about a nice porkpie hat? A SUBMITTER SUGGESTED BUYING A POCKET WATCH FOR THE BUSINESSMAN IN YOUR LIFE. Or a suit, because he probably doesn’t have one and is about to get fired because he wears gym clothes to the office every day.

For the photo enthusiast:

• Polaroid camera
• Digital camera

You’re saying a “photo enthusiast” (who talks like that?) might like a camera? How about a car for a driving enthusiast?

• Lens cap mug (a coffee mug that looks like a lens cap)

Would it kill you to try? Just a little?

Movie tickets for the “TV/movie enthusiast”. Tickets to a sporting event for the “sports enthusiast”. “Musical instrument” for the musician.

“Dad, since you play the clarinet, I got you…a clarinet.” Or is the idea to expand the recipient’s horizons? “Dad, since you play the clarinet, I thought you could use this ocarina.”

It continues. Hunting, fishing and camping gear for the “outdoorsy man”…any mammal and most reptiles could have written a more interesting post. This is utter and complete garbage. And it stands to reason that a guy who refers to hunters and fishermen as “outdoorsy men” would post a picture of himself wearing a mother-loving papoose. There it is, right on top of the post, and he couldn’t look prouder (“essential for dads to carry their little ones”). Our fathers’ generation rolls in its collective grave.

Finally, Mr. Zussino is reduced to triply-strained pablum:

it really is the thought that counts. Think about what your dad enjoys and get him a gift based on that.

So I shouldn’t have read your post, is what you’re saying? Wow. It’s the rare bad blogger who’s self-aware enough that he knows his own advice isn’t worth reading. He continues:

If you don’t have much to spend, all you have to do is simply spend time with Dad. If he enjoys baseball, sit on the couch with him and watch a game.

Aside: The distaff half of Control Your Cash would like to know if there are any real, normal men left. On the one extreme, you have the wannabe alpha male UFC idiots with their Xtreme Couture shirts and neck tattoos. On the other you have the fancy fellows with their man purses, capri pants and papooses.

Guys, have a tool set and use it. Even if you do nothing more than unscrew and then immediately rescrew parts under your hood, at least you’re learning what size wrench goes on which component. Learn how to change a tire – the instructions are right there in your car’s owner’s manual, thus they’re written in a style that even Trent Hamm could understand. That drip under your sink can probably be solved by a 1/2″ washer and 2 minutes of elbow grease, instead of a call to the plumber. And yes, if you hire him to take care of that he’ll be laughing at you as he leaves. Turn the main off first. Know where the main is. Get your hands dirty. Grow your hair out a little. Listen to something with distorted guitars in it. Let your wife go to Sunday brunch with her friends instead of you; that’s what they’re there for.

Back to our program, already in progress:

(Another post on how to build an emergency fund. We’ve already discussed what a waste this is. In fact, a dog even figured it out.)

Odysseas Papadimitriou from WalletBlog says if your lender foreclosed on you, some good news might be entering your life along with the tiny sliver of natural light that hits your new basement apartment between 9:14 and 9:17 every morning. Yes, your lender might have falsified documents, and bureaucrats in the federal government think that your lender thus needs to make good. (Of course, if you lied about your income on your loan application, that’s the fault of someone other than you.)

Home stretch. 3 good ones, and then we’re done. The guys at DQYDJ (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) are chronically incapable of sucking. This week, PKamp3 and the gang discuss extrapersonal finance – what to do when your friends and acquaintances are spending like retards.

Mich at Beating the Index brings his trademark combination of insider knowledge and comprehensiveness with a piece on the Spearfish oil play in Manitoba and North Dakota. Technology has turned a formerly forgettable swath of the continent into a moneymaker. Mich explains who’s there, who’s drilling, and whose stock can enrich you if you play things correctly.

Finally, John Kiernan at CardHub dispels the mystery of the best credit card on the market. No, not the HiltonHonors American Express card, although it’s a dandy. John’s discussing form, not content. Specifically, the chip-and-PIN cards that prevail in Europe and Canada but have yet to catch on in the United States. They’re susceptible to fraud, so now you have something else to worry about while wondering if “bath salts” are available in your kid’s school. News at 11.

Thanks for coming. Read us on Investopedia, Forbes and Yahoo! Finance. Follow us on Twitter. Come back here Wednesday for a new post, and tomorrow for a new Anti-Tip of the Day. Au revoir. 

This nice lady said this nice thing about us. She gets it. And by “it” we mean what we’re trying to do here at Control Your Cash. Which isn’t hard to grasp. Maybe to swallow, but not to grasp. As you’re reading this, 8000 other personal finance bloggers are writing about emergency funds, and balance transfers, and how to prepare budgets (that they’ll never stick to), and trying to manage their credit card debt, and how to save money by using coupons, and all sorts of other boring and repetitive nonsense that goes down easily like strained carrots. Control Your Cash is different, as are our wonderful submitters.

Which brings us to another edition of the Carnival of Wealth. A collection of personal finance blog posts from across the globe. Some are great, some are awful, few are mediocre. If you’re a blogger who fancies herself worthy of being featured (or doesn’t mind running the risk of being mocked), submit here. And now, we commence:

Anisha at Nerd Wallet hits on one of our favorite topics, prepaid debit cards. Not one of our favorite products, one of our favorite topics. There’s still something unseemly about being charged money for the privilege of spending your money, but if you’re dumb enough to get into that situation in the first place that’s your problem. Anisha points out that the ridiculous prepaid cards endorsed by people like that hoyden Suze Orman are giving way to slightly less bad cards. It’s great to see actual pragmatism in a blog post – rather than whine about how debit card issuers are taking advantage of the poor, Anisha understands that commercial transactions (such as a poor person buying a debit card) entered into freely have a purpose and benefit both sides, however unevenly.

Another well-written post? On the same topic? No way. Michelle White at CardHub reviews the latest prepaid card from…well, it’s a joint venture between American Express and Zynga – the creators of FarmVille. The FarmVille prepaid card. The infantilization of America continues unabated. We’re sure it’s an awful card just on appearances, but Michelle breaks down the card’s worthlessness in greater detail and with more patience than we’d be willing to put on the task.

Last week we got an email from a personal finance blogger who lamented that nearly 100 people submitted to a similar carnival he’d been taxed with hosting. We pointed out that all he has to do is alienate the lousy submitters, and he’ll get that number down to something more manageable in no time. It’s about quality, not quantity. Meaning that we can devote expanded attention to informative bloggers like Andrew at 101 Centavos. Andrew has that fear we all have – peniaphobia. (Oh, grow up.) Richer people than him have ended up sleeping in flophouses, so Andrew’s taking steps now to take care of the downside. Best of all, he wrote this entire post without talking about the inanity of emergency funds, a fallback topic for most personal finance bloggers.

The formidable Οδυσσέας Παπαδημητρίου of Wallet Blog (that’s Odysseas Papadimitriou to you, Ace) returns this week, asking if tax evasion in Austria and Luxembourg affects investors in the United States. We wouldn’t have guessed that Οδυσσέας is in the pro-collection camp, but that’s just part of what makes the CoW interesting.

(Post rejected because it’s a throwaway English as a Second Language submission from someone with a child’s understanding of credit card rewards. We’re not going to let it ruin an otherwise perfect CoW. And we just jinxed it.)

New submitter this week, Dave at Dividends For The Long Run. Yes, he wrote about Facebook but a) he was self-aware about his choice of topic, b) he’s an active-duty Army officer, and c) the man can write.

(Got dang. On first pass, we merely scanned his post. Now we’re reading it in detail. This is the rare “we wish we’d written this” post. Every word is gold. We can’t even restrict ourselves to a particular passage to showcase here. It’s tough, but let’s try:)

Large numbers of retail investors tried to make a quick killing on an extremely popular social-media company without doing anything approaching due diligence prior to hitting the “submit” button on their discount brokerage’s website.  Predictable events (the stock price did not double, triple, or any other sort of -iple on the first day) and unpredictable events (the NASDAQ system had a stroke) conspired to part the fools from their money in a matter of hours.  Instead of taking the lesson to heart (don’t buy IPOs) these poor souls have resorted to a more instinctively American response: “It’s not my fault”.

We get the feeling Dave will be a regular feature around these parts.

(Rejected. A “back-to-school” post from last August. Even worse, they’re Canadian. No. We can’t accommodate any garbage this week. Things are going too swimmingly.)

We wrote a piece for Investopedia this week on the basics of investing. (That’s not the link, the piece hasn’t posted yet. That’s the link to our most recent Investopedia piece, which the San Francisco Chronicle picked up.) When the piece does run, it’ll bear an eerie similarity to Free Money Finance‘s recommendations for the novice investor. He simplifies it to a huge degree, but what he says is valid and worth remembering when you try to complicate things.

(Post rejected. Did you seriously think we were going to run something titled “The 8 Worst Exercises For Your Joints” just because it’s posted on a site with the word “insurance” in its title? Anyhow, it’s easy enough to find if you want to read it. And if you’re fat and need 8 excuses not to exercise.)

(“10 Ways Canadians Can Save Money At The Movies”. Good Lord. How about “7 Ways To Reject Banal Posts”?)

Sometimes we wonder if Dividend Growth Investor would be interested in any stock that’s guaranteed to double in value but promises not to pay a dividend. Ask Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett how they feel about dividends (from the perspective of the company that issues the stock.) Alright, you can’t ask Jobs because he’s dead and you can’t ask Buffett because he’s traveling the world with the surviving member of that odd little threesome he was once a part of, but you get the point. Dividend Growth Investor argues that you can make $1000 a month in dividend income if you pay enough attention. He also gives helpful descriptions of Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, Philip Morris and McDonald’s, just in case you’re unfamiliar with those companies.

Finally, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net discusses options. Even a bright guy like him admits that such first-order financial derivatives are too complex for his investing tastes. However, if you look at the prices of puts and calls, and their upcoming strike dates, you can plot where collective wisdom says the S&P 500 will end up. The accompanying graphs just add to the authoritative nature of this interesting take on the information that can be gleaned from options prices.

GOOD LORD. EVERY POST WAS A WINNER THIS WEEK. That has never happened before, and will never happen again. It’s as if an 8-planet conjunction bowled a 300 game, then spent a romantic night with Liz Claman.

Thanks for coming. Here’s our latest on Forbes. Forbes! Ghost Malcolm Forbes can barely pull away from Ghost Elizabeth Taylor long enough to look at the destruction left in our wake. We’re also on Yahoo! Finance, Investopedia, ProBlogger, etc., etc. New blog post here Wednesday, new Anti-Tip of the Day everyday, new CoW Monday. Sayonara.

No one is looking for you

It’s a social networking site! A venerable one! And the most heavily advertised one in existence, if our web history is any indication. Just wait until its initial public offering. People will be clamoring to get a piece of…

Oh, we’re running out of jokes. No one cares. Just like no investor will care about Facebook in a few months’ time. That’s not literally true, and Facebook will still exist and even flourish, but the idea of its stock as a golden ticket will seem laughable long before then. Never in the history of the world has prolonged hype led to investing riches. Is that an unduly general statement? Fine, give us a counterexample.

Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth, the finest blog carnival known to man. A new edition every Monday.

7½.

Huh?

That’s the over/under on the number of submissions we’re expecting to receive whose topic is the Facebook IPO.

If you’re new here, the CoW is a collection of personal finance blog posts from around the globe, annotated, collated, and commented upon by us. Lots of people don’t like that. They can go die. If you want an inoffensive blog carnival, one where all the host did was cut and paste the submissions without even correcting for punctuation…well, there are several such carnivals and they’re easy to find. We found one competing carnival that presented 83 entrants in just that manner this week. As if any of you are going to sift through that. By virtue of alienating lots of people, we’ve gotten our numbers down to something a lot more workable. Let’s get readin’:

Sure enough, Canadian Personal Finance writes (indirectly) about Facebook’s IPO. The post is more about how a big advertiser chose not to spend $10 million on a site whose primary purpose is to give dull women a place to comment on each other’s baby photos:

Glad you gals have so much to say.

Will someone please tell Sean at One Smart Dollar that “et cetera” is abbreviated “etc.” and not “ect.”? This is about as generic a personal finance blog post as you’re going to read. An explanation of credit limits written for simpletons, with other bloggers leaving comments telling the author how brilliant he is and hoping that he’ll leave comments on their blogs. “Link love”, they call it. An extension of the principle that the lay reader means nothing.

How about a post from a blog with an obsolete title? Exactly what are you supposed to do, in 2012, with the URL 2010Tax.org? Somebody named “George Gallagher” (a pseudonym if ever we’ve heard one) is using it to write about people who’ve tried to argue that the United States income tax is unconstitutional. What should be unconstitutional are “George’s” random capitalization and wayward punctuation.

(Seriously, submitters. This is getting ridiculous. Tim Ferriss told you to hire Indian remote assistants, and you did, and for the $4.50 an hour you’re paying them to write your blog posts you’re getting…well, $4.50/hour-worthy work. Why not hire a Bangalorean to make hot sweet love to your significant other while you’re at it?)

Steve Zussino, the guy from Canadian Personal Finance, insists on submitting multiple times every week. Even his wife (or maybe it’s his sister or mom) submits on occasion, too. We’ve run maybe 1 of the 180 posts he’s submitted, but what the hey, let’s indulge him for a second time. Take it away, Steve:

With all the new bells and whistles available in BBQs – grill shopping can seem more like luxury car shopping. We wanted to share these tips to save money on your next barbeque purchase.

That is a lie. No, you wanted to collect money from Napoleon Grills, the Canadian manufacturer that sponsored your post.

Buying a grill all depends on your needs.

Here are some tips to help choose what is best to suit your needs:

No one reads stuff like this unless it’s being goofed on here in this milieu, right? Two links from Napoleon Grills, and an interview with a company spokesman. Stellar.

Jason Steele might be a pseudonym too, but at least we found a (grainy) photo of the Smart Balance Transfers writer. And boy, does he know how to get your attention with a gripping opening sentence:

Credit cards are remarkably transparent financial products as Federal regulations require that card issuers disclose almost all rates and fees before cardholders begin to fill out their application.

It’s like you’re trying to bore people. We’ll spare you the task of reading it, but Mr. Steele – as his website’s name indicates – is sharing the unnecessary details of the stupid procedure of transferring balances from one credit card to another. Do we even need to say at this point that you shouldn’t be carrying a balance? Great, so your new BBVA Visa charges you 17.9% while the Chase MasterCard you’re escaping from charged 19.9%. Really getting one over on the banks, aren’t you?

BBVA bought your debt from Chase. Do you think they did so because they like losing money? Of course not. They’re paying off your balance because they know you’re undisciplined, and that you’ll spend the next few years amassing thousands of dollars on your new card, money you won’t be able to pay.

Balance transfers. Please.

Dividend Growth Investor is back with his arid pronouncements on companies that have recently increased their dividends. It’s his descriptions of the companies that amuse us. This week they include:

Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST) operates membership warehouses that offer a selection of branded and private label products in a range of merchandise categories in no-frills, self-service warehouse facilities.

In the last few CoWs, we’ve been spending so much time making fun of the awful posts that we get mentally fatigued and just string together the good ones at the end before cutting out and sniffing some glue. This week is no exception. Unlike many of our submitters, John Kiernan at Wallet Blog can type a sentence without feral dogs forming into packs and sniffing for the blood of infants. This week he tackles the opacity of medical professionals. When was the last time you walked into your doctor’s office, even for a standard checkup, and asked “How much will this cost me?” The big bills you’re paying are your fault as much as anyone’s.

With all due respect to the Smart Balance Transfer guy whose name we already forgot and can’t be bothered to go back and check, this is how you get a reader’s attention with an opening sentence:

Do you guys know what rhymes with debate? Masturbate. HEY. I NEVER CLAIMED TO BE MATURE.

Sudden all caps © Drew Magary, 2012. That’s the work of Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar, who finalizes the debate on 30-year mortgages vs. the 15-year variety.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net is playing chess while most of the rest of the submitters are still trying to figure out the complexities of nim. Don’t Quit Your Day Job gives us another impassioned, reasoned piece; this one on the incongruity of stock analysts having little incentive to downgrade the weak stocks of companies they might want to do future business with. When only 4.11% of analyst ratings are negative, we should acknowledge that those ratings say more about the analysts than the underlying companies.

There is no reason why the United States can’t, and shouldn’t, have a grossly simplified tax system. A basic personal deduction of $x, and y% on the rest. Once they agree to that in principle, the various factions in Congress could argue all day about what x and y should be. This will never happen, because it eliminates interest groups to curry favor with and collect tribute from. Roger the Amateur Financier looks at a slightly more complex system, but one still exponentially simpler than the morass we have now.

Veteran Curtez Riggs of Life After The Army returns with a post on how to get civilian employers to hire you. Straightforward, worthwhile advice. Although it’s hard to imagine that any employer would hire a civilian applicant over an otherwise equally qualified one who’d served in the Armed Forces. If you’re a vet, Mr. Riggs does suggest that you create a Facebook page in addition to any LinkedIn page. We’ll defer to his expertise, but giving employers access to a potential drunken photo depository seems like a questionable idea.

Free Money Finance is one of the few seasoned financial bloggers who doesn’t despise us, but we’d run his posts anyway. We often poke fun at the abominable practice of using “needs” as a noun (did it earlier in the CoW, in fact), but we’ll excuse FMF’s use of it here because he did it correctly. It’s germane to his topic; how to distinguish needs from wants when spending your money. Although we couldn’t disagree more with his assessment that “spending, not earning, is the key to financial security”. That’s like saying the head of a coin is more important than the tail. (Line stolen from Bill James’s 1983 Baseball Abstract.)

Holy crap. Walmart’s prepaid debit cards cost $236 annually? That’s an incidental finding from Anisha at Nerd Wallet, who analyzes the relatively cheap (just $59!) Chase Liquid prepaid card. If you can’t think of a way to avoid spending $59 for the privilege of spending your own money, a) all is lost and b) given that all is lost, you might as well read this post. Also, this week’s winning lottery numbers are 5, 6, 7, 8, 23 and 33. Make sure to play them when you’re buying your Camel unfiltereds in the soft pack. Heck, buy 2 packs and you’ll save yourself a walk to the AM/PM. Less work for your lungs, which you can then cram more carcinogens into. It’s win-win!

Finally, Liana Arnold at Card Hub discusses VISA’s and MasterCard’s latest attempts to futurize payments – digital wallets. There can’t be a downside to making spending faster and more secure, can there?

Thanks again for sitting through another CoW. Glad you could join us. New Anti-Tip of the Day tomorrow, new post Wednesday, new CoW Monday, and probably something good on Yahoo! Finance and Investopedia before then. Peace out, as the kids say.