And he’s a mime, too! Here he is doing “Stuck In Center Alignment On Control Your Cash”

Why can’t everyone be like the big man? Year after year of quiet excellence, and no desire to share his personality with the world at large. Consistency and aptitude still count for something, right?

We could give a damn who wins the NBA title; not that we’re not fans, rather that we have no emotional investment nor rooting interest in something that only tangentially affects us. But it’s hard not to pull for the stoic giant who forever redefined the power forward position. Would that everyone on the planet knew what they were good at, and didn’t waste their time trying to be something else. Besides, he could use one more ring for the thumb.

There are blog carnivals. There are personal finance blog carnivals, and most of them are horrible. Cut, paste, present. You can read one of those if you want – it won’t take long – or you can stay here and at least be entertained and possibly learn something. Doesn’t that sound better? Of course it does.

The Carnival of Wealth. A week’s worth of posts from around the personal finance realm. Some are great, some are not. None are average, or they wouldn’t be here. Submitters, go here. Readers, sit back and ingest:

Week after week, Ken Faulkenberry of AAAMP Blog has an uncanny ability to submit his post seconds before we decide we’re going to start writing the CoW. That’s why he’s usually at the top, and remains so this week. Ken argues that you do well in a bear market by losing less than everyone else does. That isn’t technically true, but his point is undeniable – understand the difference between a secular bear market and a cyclical bear market. You can start by guessing which we’re in now.

Here’s an example of what not to submit to the CoW. It’s someone’s middle school essay on investing in oil and gas. Someone going by the name “Lynn Jackson”, writing at One Cent At A Time. “Lynn” explains what you need to do before buying shares of, say, ExxonMobil:

You will be faced with evaluating different companies for their experiences, success rates, and their fits with your needs.

Using “needs” as a noun, -1 point. “Lynn” continues:

In turn, these companies will want to get a lot of information about you to assess your suitability. You will need to work with a lawyer, because this weight of investment requires a considerable amount of regulation and compliance.

Huh? A post written for the most novice of investors, claiming that a company you’re interested in buying a piece of will keep a dossier on you? There were 2 comments on this post last we checked, and neither commenter challenged “Lynn” on this falsehood. If you’re looking to do a hostile takeover, then yeah, this post might be valuable to you if you can get past the unspeakable liberties “Lynn” is taking with the English language. “Lynn”, we’re trying to delight readers, not scare them away.

Good Lord. Speaking of middle schoolers, this next one opens with the last resort of every 12-year-old who has a report due Monday morning and it’s now Sunday night: a dictionary definition!

Purpose – what does this word mean to you?

The dictionary defines purpose as ‘The reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists’

That’s from Savvy Scot. Have at it.

Someone at UPromise wrote an advertorial for Jason at One Money Design, and allowed him to put his name on it. Or maybe he really did write it himself. No way to prove it. Either way, he got paid. Oh, did we forget the link? Oops. Remind us to go back and insert it.

Does anybody proofread anymore? We’re not talking about an occasional typo slipping through. We’re talking about a post so replete with errors that it makes us want to find the college admissions officer who greenlit the submitter’s application and give her a Breathalyzer test. Sean at One Smart Dollar lists (bloggers love lists) 8 jobs that don’t require a degree. The funniest part of this post is that out of the millions of college dropouts who went on to wealthy and productive lives, the 2 Sean cites by name are Mark Zuckerberg and…Ryan Seacrest. Yes, with the right brand of hair gel and sufficient shiny teeth, you too can be a barely closeted no-talent. But don’t despair, because

While college can cost thousands of dollar, the cost to take a few classes to before a real estate broker is much less.

Read that aloud for full effect.

Keep in mind that being a real estate broker is not a 9-5 type of job.

Fine as far as it goes, but he follows that up with a Control Your Cash favorite – the utterly superfluous sentence:

Real estate brokers often work nights and weekends.

If you don’t read your own stuff, why should the rest of us?

(A post titled “How Many Keywords Should You Run On A Page?” Yeah, we can’t wait to run that.)

Did we run a submission last week on checking your credit score? You mean we missed a week? That won’t do. If the most overwritten topic in personal finance is “creating your emergency fund”, “checking your credit report” is a close second. We’ll let Squeezer at PF Success handle it from Oh God, we don’t even have it in us to write interesting comments on the inanity of this particular repetitive blog topic anymore.

Should we just tank at this point? If we run the worst carnival on the internet, do we get the 1st pick in next year’s carnival draft? Let’s try.

Complex Search lists 10 reasons the housing market won’t recover anytime soon. Most of the reasons are valid, even though the post is wildly self-contradictory. Opening line:

We’re all pulling for the housing market to recover.

Start of the next paragraph:

If you’re considering buying a home because you want to live in it for 30 years, this market is perfect for you.

So we’re not “all” pulling for the housing market to recover. Some of us want prices to stay low. You just said as much! Even better, this post was written by John Haller, the self-proclaimed founder of Fidelity One Credit Corp, “a socially responsible company.”

“We’re socially responsible” is like “I have a great sense of humor.” If you have to say it…

Socially responsible? Guess what Fidelity One specializes in. Car title loans! You can’t make this up.

At least one person’s going to send us an email this week saying, “Why do you have to be so critical?”, to which we’ll respond, “Click on the links in the CoW.”

And just like that, PKamp3 from DQYDJ.net has to come in and ruin everything. Original topic? Check. Readable English? Check. A little humor and lots of expertise? Check. And he slew at least one dragon of conventional wisdom, too. PKamp3 says you can’t look at a stagnant market level over a certain period and say you’d have been better off keeping your money in a mattress. Why? Because dividend reinvesting, that’s why. PKamp3 backs up his points with irrefutable data, too. Damn him. And we were doing so badly, too.

What’s this? Another good post? Now you’re just rubbing it in. Stephanie at Nerd Wallet shoots down a gimmick from C1 Bank. Buy a CD, get a Mercedes. Of course there’s a catch, and of course the smart folks at Nerd Wallet are happy to bring it to your attention. This post is so comparatively good, we’re not even going to point out the tired “car loses value the moment you drive it off the lot” mantra.

(sigh) From Liana Arnold at CardHub, an honest and critical review of the 3 latest travel rewards cards from Bank of America. Again, rewards are everything. Credit limit is close to everything. Interest rate is nothing. (Not “interest rate is zero”, but “interest rate is nothing.” Download our book if you think that’s a distinction without a difference.)

Now we’re in danger of squeaking into the playoffs.

And again. John Kiernan at Wallet Blog wants you to just buy a freaking house already, alright? Mortgage rates have a lower bound (zero). They’re rapidly approaching it. God, the universe, John Kiernan and the Control Your Cash principals all want you to buy a house. Just do it.

Andrew at 101 Centavos is back. He embodies all the traits we love here at Control Your Cash: strong opinions, original research, the ability to write without stultifying…he’s basically the opposite of a mommy blogger. This week he writes about institutional investors’ reluctance to include Walmart in their portfolios.

Did you know that only 31% of Walmart stock is held by institutional investors? You didn’t, and you probably don’t know what to make of that number because it’s meaningless without a frame of reference. According to Andrew, 60-80% of a typical stock that trades on the New York Stock Exchange is held by institutional investors. So we figured that maybe Walmart’s low number is a result of the company’s enormous market capitalization: there’s so much Walmart to go around that Ma and Pa Investor can’t help but own 70% of it. Andrew proves that that’s not the case, and explains why brokerage houses are largely insane.

(Seven Essential Navigation Tips for New Boat Owners? From something called BoatInsurance.org? That’s more like it.)

On balance, that was awful. Here’s your money back. The good news is we’re on Investopedia, all the freaking time. And you can follow us on Twitter (@CYCash). And we’ll have something of our own creation here on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

"Fine, here's my g.d. autograph. You're not a collector, are you?"

Vienna, 188 years ago today. Ludwig van Beethoven “drops” his latest, and ultimately his last, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor. If this isn’t the greatest piece of music ever written, it’s definitely in the top 7. Beethoven himself conducted the premiere, marking his first on-stage appearance in 12 years. The audience was speechless when he began, and remained so throughout the performance.

If you read methodically enough, and click on every link, today’s Carnival of Wealth should take you 66 minutes to get through. So go back to the top and start again, but not before clicking this link. The words and the music will sync perfectly, far better than The Wizard of Oz and The Dark Side of the Moon do. (Ode to Joy starts at 46:00 if you can’t wait.)

Ah yes, the Carnival of Wealth. A week’s worth of personal finance blog posts, distilled for your pleasure. Entrants submit here. Now let’s get started, the 2nd movement is about to begin:

We love heresy here at Control Your Cash. Not the sedevacantism kind of heresy, but something a little more on-topic. Ken Faulkenberry of AAAMP Blog thinks strategic asset allocation – that is, concentrating on the investor’s objectives rather than the opportunities available – is bunk. The man earned an MBA from USC; read it.

Madison Du Paix of My Dollar Plan recently refinanced Chez Du Paix, and is now applying for credit cards “to make some money!” 12 of them, no less. She claims she’ll earn $1,525 in signup bonuses, which wasn’t clear from the provided links. The only bonuses we found were for rewards, not cash, and were contingent on how much money you spent. Also, some of these cards came with giant annual fees, as high as $175 (albeit waived for the 1st year).

This deserves a more critical eye. 1st, these links are all sponsored, which a diligent blogger would have mentioned. 2nd, they include such juvenile sales pitches as

No annual fee for the 1st year – a $95 value!

We’ve talked about anchoring on this site before, but come on. That’d be like us saying, “We could set up a $40 monthly paywall on Control Your Cash, but we didn’t. You just made $480 this year!”

Another card Ms. Du Paix touts as offering a “$250 cash back bonus” really offers a $100 bonus, plus another $150 if you spend $5000 in your 1st 3 months.

It’s easy to manipulate numbers to take advantage of the innumerate, and the folks at Chase know this. Get a credit card with no annual fee and cash rewards (or rewards for items that you already buy, and don’t have to change your behavior to accumulate.) You can’t make a legitimate $1,525 from filling out credit card applications. Maybe in Shangri-La you can, but not here.

Are dividends the Cabbage Patch Kids of the early ’10s? Boomer and Echo look at some major Canadian corporations that have recently increased dividends, and try to determine whom those stocks are suitable for.

Free Money Finance lists 30 simple steps you can take to overhaul your finances. Yes, because people in need of financial overhauls are notorious for following directions, especially 30 at a time. Well, maybe if they receive said steps in pairs. This week, steps 1 and 2.

A new submitter this week, Curtez Riggs (USA, Ret.) of Life After the Army. He asks why so many returning soldiers have such awful credit, then gives a 1st-person account of how easily it can happen. If you’re a civilian, you can get some use out of this post. If you’re in the military, you can really get some use out of it. Read now.

Scott at the hopefully titled One Smart Dollar thinks there are certain items (paint sprayers) you should rent, while others (lawn mowers) you should buy. His litmus test?

A good rule of thumb is to look at the item.

How about that. What he means is, figure out how often you’re going to use it. He’s right. Home Depot and Lowe’s let you rent big-ticket items, and you’re crazy if you need one for a single big job and decide to buy the item outright.

Shawanda Greene of You Have More Than You Think is back from a long absence (2 whole CoWs or so) with a magnificent post about – well, we’ll let her describe it:

As a single, currently childless, woman, it bugs me that motherhood is a lifestyle choice that warrants special treatment in the workplace. It just ain’t right.

Congratulations, you spread your legs and got inseminated. Even better, you made the world incrementally louder, whinier, and more indulgent. Here, enjoy these perks that the zero-impact members of society don’t get to enjoy.

Also on our list of irregularly appearing yet noteworthy contributors is Nelson Smith of Financial Uproar, who writes about whole life insurance. Like us, he treats this useless product with the contempt it deserves. How contemptible is whole life insurance (and the people who sell it)?

uglier than Rosie O’Donnell making out with Ellen DeGeneres

No argument here, and one great thing about us disabling comments a few weeks ago is that no one can tell us that Ellen DeGeneres is actually quite beautiful and we shouldn’t be so closed-minded.

Mich at Beating the Index returns with a vengeance, offering his usual amalgam of deep research and practical advice regarding Canadian natural resource companies. This week he breaks down Arcan Resources. It’s an oil company whose stock Mich finds attractive, if you’re willing to wait for it to spend the next year resolving debt issues.

J.P. at Novel Investor gives us a refresher course on bonds, and how their prices and yields are more or less inverses of each other.

Go the search box and type “university” or “education”. It’s one of our biggest peeves here at Control Your Cash, the idea that the math works out on a heavily financed degree in a useless field. Teacher Man at My University Money references the latest incident of entitled brats whining about the unfairness life has thrown them; the Quebec student “strike”. (Don’t you have to be employed to be striking?) Basically, students who already pay low out-of-pocket tuition that’s heavily financed by taxpayers are whining about a $325 annual increase. Look at the pictures of the protesters, and you won’t find a civil engineering or chemistry major in the bunch.

For a different if not opposite perspective, W at Off Road Finance is a computer science major who’s actually gone to the trouble of determining how much colleges spend on what they provide, and what those colleges offer in return to their customers. W’s right – too many consumers of higher education ask “What do I want?”, and don’t ask “How much will it cost?” or “Will I be getting my money’s worth?” Imagine doing that with any other commodity.

The brilliant Mike Piper at Oblivious Investor writes about a 4-letter acronym you’ve likely never heard of – the SIPC. It’s the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, and it has your back if you get screwed by a crooked broker.

James at Short Road to Retirement reviews a book, Michael Dever’s Jackass Investing. The author debunks a number of myths, and the ones James references are spot-on. Is the book worth it? Beats us, we didn’t read it. But there’s a link to a free copy.

Stephen at Nerd Wallet lists the 5 most common investing mistakes. The 1st 4 are indeed common, but the last one caught our eye: “Investing too early”.

Huh? Isn’t earlier unequivocally better? Not if you don’t know what you’re doing. And as the author points out,

There’s no sense in beginning construction on an investment portfolio if you’re $10k in the hole.

It’s amazing how many people – hell, how many CoW submitters – don’t know that. Forget about your “emergency fund”, or even your 401(k), when you’re drowning in debt. Get up to sea level first.

By far our most verbose contributor is Todd R. Tresidder of Financial Mentor, who banged out 5235 words on paying off your mortgage early. How did he do it? Repetition, plus he repeated himself, saying the same things over and over again, multiple times. Here’s our one-paragraph summary:

Add a set amount to your payment each month, with explicit instruction that it’s to go to the principal (mentioned in detail in The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written.) Failing that, pay biweekly, or refinance, or shorten your term, or – and this is awesome – move to a cheaper house.

Given how long his post is, we’re impressed Todd R. found time to quietly contemplate life while sitting in a casual pose by a stream.

Liana Arnold at CardHub shares the details of Living Social’s affinity credit card. Her bottom line (which she got to considerably more quickly than our previous entrant)? Stay away unless you’re a Living Social addict. And if you’re a Living Social addict, there’s a world beyond coupons. Embrace it. (That’s our editorializing, not Liana’s.)

Kids, are you looking forward to making money this summer? Well, John Kiernan at Wallet Blog shows you how government can suck the fun out of it. Learn about withholding limits, tip reporting, and the endless fun of filling out W-4s. It only gets better as you get older.

So we’ve decided that maybe the most entertaining/educational post of the week should go last from now on. We’ll probably forget this by next week. But for now, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net declares, “Asking people to divide themselves into categories before determining the best style of investing for them – this can only go well!” He’s only semi-joking, but he does force you to think about how much of your mindset is emotional and how much is driven by cold calculation. Plus PKamp3 references the enigmatic Rob Bennett, whom we ran a guest post from a while back.

Wait. Sorry, PKamp3, but you’ve been usurped at the last second. The horrifying and otherwise largely indescribable Wizard Corpse has returned, asking the seemingly relevant question, “How was you (sic) Ipad (sic) made?” Seriously, this post and its site are worth stopping and staring open-mouthed at.

We leave you on that note. Come back tomorrow for another Anti-Tip of the Day, Wednesday for another original post, Friday for yet another, Monday for another CoW, and check us out on ProBlogger and Investopedia. Godspeed.

Next time, try flying

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival you need to be reading. A weekly roundup of the best and worst personal finance posts of the week. (Submit here if you’re interested.)

Fun facts about the Mayflower:

• She took 66 days to cross the Atlantic.
• 2 of its 102 passengers died en route. (Wait, that’s not a fun fact at all.)
• It landed with 101 passengers. One passenger gave birth on board. She named her kid Oceanus, which is fantastic.
• Despite there being hardly any room (there were also 25-30 crew members), some people brought their pets.
• 45 passengers died the following winter.

Puts that bad taco you ate on board the Carnival Dream in perspective, doesn’t it?

Alright, shall we get started? Let’s:

Green Panda Treehouse asks a (hopefully) rhetorical question: should you stick with one job for your career? The answer, of course, is yes. You should also vote for Eisenhower, see the new Martin & Lewis movie, take the streetcar to the Brooklyn Dodgers game (I hear they have a Negro patrolling second base now) and buy your wife that dress from Gimbel’s that she’s been going on and on about. Ladies love shopping, you know.

It never fails to surprise us how many people can break down every plot point of Mad Men but couldn’t tell you the difference between a Roth 401(k) and a traditional. Not that everyone should be as into personal finance as we are here at Control Your Cash, but the latter will affect your life far more profoundly than the former. Roger the Amateur Financier gives a 5-point method for increasing your financial literacy. We’ll reduce it to one point: spend $7 on this.

In that same vein, the tireless Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog explains mutual fund expense ratios. How much of your mutual fund payments are going to the manager’s 3-martini lunches and 4-line-of-coke nightclub visits? Understand that if your mutual fund’s value stays unchanged, you’ll still be losing money.

(Post rejected because apparently, discerning the difference between plurals and possessives isn’t all that important to some people.)

Teacher Man at My University Money knows the difference, he just wasn’t sure what side of the “s” the apostrophe goes on. Or maybe he was sure, but wrong. Anyhoo, he explains how to apply for scholarship money if you’re an incoming college student.

Can we add another tip? If you plan to study anything other than the hard sciences, do yourself and society a favor and withdraw your application. Go to a trade school instead, and become a productive citizen. Better yet, join the Navy.

Some guy got a Costco membership and wrote a boring story about it. Do you really care what he buys pine nuts for? (A: Pesto.) We figured you didn’t, and thereby saved you from reading about it.

A new entrant this week, who styles himself Chase DuMont, Rainmaker. Seriously. Never mind his self-appellation, Mr. DuMont appears to be the real thing. A Penn State business grad who now makes his home in Beijing, he’s written possibly the longest post we’ve ever run. It’s on why you shouldn’t rely on (too much) outside funding to start a business, and he’s absolutely right. (We speak from experience.) And his grammar is flawless, which will almost always get you included in the CoW.

Also, having a participant dubbed “Rainmaker” gives us an excuse to offer a musical interlude:

Treat your ears and buy this album (Dance of Death) and the 3 others Iron Maiden have released since Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson rejoined the fold (Brave New World, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Final Frontier.) Easily their best stuff, and the bar was pretty high to begin with.

Marie at Family Money Values spends more time on content than she does decorating the standard WordPress template that her blog came with. This week she explains how to cut expenses if you happen to own a rental property. Which you should, if you can, because it’s a great way to earn passive income without relying on the vicissitudes of the stock market.

Oh, for the love of Pete. Michelle at See Debt Run is yet another mommy blogger (that’s 5,438,239,102, by our count) who thinks she’s the first person in history to crank out a child and can’t wait to tell you what it’s all about. Here are some utterly unremarkable thoughts she had and assumed would be worth sharing with you:

Being a parent is one of the most rewarding experiences ever.  I love my children completely and unconditionally.

That’s the kind of penetrating insight we expect here at the Carnival of Wealth. Good for you, Michelle.

Even though I wanted to be kinder to the environment and pamper my baby’s bum with soft cotton and not silica gel filled plastic pants, I was overwhelmed by the finality of (my mother buying me $300 worth of cloth diapers)

At Control Your Cash, we have, ahem, cats. (Deliverable to the highest bidder!) They’re infinitely more rewarding than any child could be, and have yet to call from the county jail at 2 a.m. asking for someone to come down and bail them out. That being said, if we ever, ever, dared to write a 2000-word post debating the merits of Fresh Step vs. Litter Perfect, or referred to their hindquarters as “bums”, or thought that you’d find such tripe interesting, or wrote “I love my cats completely and unconditionally”, we’ll buy every last one of you a copy of Trent Hamm’s latest book. Oh, she also managed to jam in a paid link. SEE IF YOU CAN SPOT IT:

There are tons of cloth diapers online.  We went with a brand, Alva Baby,  with excellent reviews that only cost about $6 per all-in-one set, which includes an adorable, soft, sizable snap cover and one absorbent insert.  We spent about $80 and picked out some cute, girly colors and designs.

Again. Carnival of WEALTH. Not Carnival of Infant Feces.

Nobody knows anything, as Andy at Saving to Invest proves. Half the experts he cites say we’re in a bull market, the other half say bear. Andy has a few tips for preserving or maintaing any wealth you have in securities. Now if we can just get to tell people to act on his advice, instead of merely “consider(ing)” it, we’ll have something.

If you can get past the writing style (English for ESL students), Darren (no last name provided) guest posts about value investing at Faith & Finance. A brief history of the concept, of its patriarch Benjamin Graham, and of Graham’s intellectual progeny. Not just Warren Buffett, but others.

Barbara Friedberg of same Personal Finance lists 57 Habits to Build Wealth. Well, 58 but she listed “drink water” twice.

If she’s going to list them, we’re going to critique them. Most are valid, some are curious. Like “54. Own a pet.” It might be rewarding, it might be kind, but it’s not going to build wealth. Also, “3. Get a college education” and “40. Get an advanced degree” will destroy wealth, not build it, unless you’re more specific about what you’re going to study.

Our favorite is “18. Drink alcohol infrequently.” The CYC principals both teetotal, not for any moral reasons but because alcohol is a fertile breeding ground for bad decisions. It also costs money, which Barb was alluding to. Yet it’s interesting how even a seemingly obvious recommendation – don’t drink – can’t be explicitly stated in our alcohol-fueled culture. It has to be tempered, qualified. You can’t possibly tell people to stop drinking, that’s unrealistic. Just tell them to, y’know, curb it a little. You’ll still be squandering money, just less of it. You’ll still be numbing brain cells, just fewer of them.

God. What preachy douches you are. 

No. We aren’t. Nothing in that paragraph was a value judgment. Read it again. It’s all objective.

Hmmm…Theresa Torres at Credit Donkey wrote a post (complete with fancy infographic, and code allowing you to “embed on your own site”, for some reason) telling people to pay something more than the minimum monthly payment on their credit card balances. But she doesn’t say to pay the balances in full. Again, the “smoke low-tar cigarettes” advice. Should we run the post? Ah, what the hell.

The prolific Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet is back as always. Her posts are consistently informercialtastic, but not without content. Still, we’d much rather read a long post about why a Wyndham Rewards credit card is awesome (or in Laura’s analysis, awful) than see an out-of-place link in the middle of a paragraph about diapers. You know, like the Pampers you should let your precious little angel soil. That’s Pampers, brought to you by the good folks at Procter & Gamble.

Free Money Finance wrote 5 tips on how to succeed in the workplace. They’re exactly what you’d expect – work hard, be likable, etc., but #4 is awesome. Be attractive.

He’s 1000% right. There is no better advantage in this world than being pulchritudinous. Even the ugly among you can do something. You can at least get in shape, buy decent clothes and get a more flattering haircut. That won’t change the face God gave you, but it’s a start. It’s less work than developing your brain, too. Dumb people can’t get smart, but homely people can get good-looking. (Just ask Sarah Brightman.) Do you think an idiot like Tara Reid or Chelsea Handler would be as successful as she is without being somewhat easy to look at? Do you think portly schlub Newt Gingrich ever had a hope in hell of winning the Republican presidential nomination against a stud like Mitt Romney?

Some uxorious twit just had to chime in on FMF’s post, probably with his Gorgon of a wife standing over his shoulder. Here, we’ll repeat it:

FMF: I know you’re just trying to give people tips that will realistically help them, but as a man who respects his wife and thinks she is beautiful without makeup, I have to go off on a tangent…

Maybe instead of telling women to paint their faces, you could advocate against that type of misogynistic nonsense. Even if you had just addressed makeup in the same way as plastic surgery, that would have been a good start.

The suggestion to wear makeup is also counterproductive in this context, because the stuff is expensive enough that even if wearing it did help to increase your income, you have also increased your expenses. In addition, you increase your long term health-related expenses by smearing the toxic sludge on your face.

Our society thinks its so much better than those “backward” societies who force women to cover their faces, and then we turn around and do the same thing.

Yes, rouge = a burqa. Check out the link, at least for FMF’s brilliant takedown of this clueless and unrealistic commenter.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog hates prepaid cards and the people who pimp them, as do we. (Because Lil Wayne and George Lopez are whom you should turn to for financial acumen. We’ve already discussed Suze Orman. And if you think we’re going to spend 5 seconds researching to find out where the apostrophe goes in Lil Wayne’s name, we aren’t.) But John thinks regulators need to step in and put a handle on the fees these card issuers charge. We disagree. As always, read the freaking agreement. If you’re too stupid or lazy to read it, and you get screwed, you had it coming and are lucky they left you anything at all.

Three more home runs and then we’re done. We can always count on PKamp3 at DQYDJ for meaty analysis presented in a form lay people can understand without having it unnecessarily dumbed down. This week, diversifying your portfolio via the Kelly criterion. This post is so good it’ll make you forget that doggerel from the mommy blogger above.

No one knows anything like Mich at Beating the Index knows the Canadian natural resource market. This week he discusses the Viking Oil Trend, west-central Saskatchewan’s (although from the map, it appears to be south-central Alberta’s) answer to the Bakken Formation. A little inside baseball, but definitely worth taking your time and digesting to see which companies have the upper hand on exploring this rich region.

Finally, Liana Arnold at CardHub discusses the statute of limitations (actually, statutes of limitations, one for each state plus D.C.) for unpaid credit card debt. Don’t want to pay VISA? Wait them out! And good luck in court, you deadbeat.

That’s everything. Thanks again for coming. New post Wednesday, new Anti-Tip of the Day every day. Check our 6-part series on ProBlogger, our frequent goodness at Investopedia, and follow @CYCash on Twitter. ‘Til then.