Even the pig is still 8000 times better than a child

Welcome to another stirring edition of the Carnival of Wealth, the only blog carnival you need to read this week. Every Monday, we feature personal finance blog posts that are either a) interesting and/or intelligently written, b) awful enough for us to make fun of, or c) necessary to get us to a certain length. For many of our readers, the weekly highlight is determining which post goes in which category. Seriously, that’s the highlight of their week. These people need to find companionship.

Which brings us to our theme. One of the very few charities we support here at Control Your Cash is Best Friends Animal Society. (Why? Because humans can take care of themselves, a point we reinforce every day on this site.) If you’re unfamiliar, BFAS is a no-kill* rescue group. It’s probably most famous for taking in the dogs abused and mutilated by that felonious piece-of-filth cretinous Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, the one who inspires us to get down on our knees every Sunday and pray that he falls victim to a blindside hit resulting in a crushed spinal cord and has to drink out of a straw with his head forever immobilized.

In addition to the adoption events BFAS holds throughout the country, it houses 1700 dogs, cats, horses and other animals on its gigantic spread in idyllic southern Utah. Many of the residents of the sanctuary are available to adopt. They’re just sitting there, waiting for you to pick them up. If you happen to be visiting Kanab, Utah, the folks who run the sanctuary will even let you take a dog or cat for the day, acclimating him or her to outside human contact. (Kanab is extremely pet-friendly). There’s no obligation to keep the animal permanently, either. Unless you want to. Best Friends does fantastic work and deserves your money and/or time: but if you really want to help out, instead of giving them something, take something away. Help them reach their stated goal of “No More Homeless Pets” by adopting one of the adorable life companions on this page.

(Note: Here’s another charity we support, the Boo Boo Zoo. Officially the East Maui Animal Refuge, it’s a sanctuary for injured, sick and disfigured animals. From the blind cow to the leukemia-stricken kittens to the dogs left to die in the street, the refuge is populated by some of the saddest but most grateful creatures you’d ever want to meet. We’ve visited and can vouch for the care that the owners/operators and volunteers give. The refuge operates on an extremely tight budget, which would be bad enough even if the owners weren’t simultaneously dealing with government agents trying to choke the animals and their caretakers in red tape. Give them money.)

One more commercial, and all this one asks of you is a couple of mouse clicks. Before we begin today’s show, your humble blogger entered an essay contest at The Daily Muse, knowing it was a site for career advice and stuff but not realizing how strongly the site skews toward ladies. They chose 6 finalists, and all the other ones are female. The entrants were supposed to write on the topic, “The Biggest Mistake I Made at My First Job—and What I Learned From It.” Each entry is only about 600 words long, but if you don’t want to read through them all just vote for #4, the only one that involves chainsaws. (And if you want to know the difference between men and women, note the first word of the title of each essay.) Okay, now let’s get started:

Our first submission is from the chairman emeritus of the Carnival of Wealth, the intrepid Shailesh Kumar of Value Stock Guide. How comprehensive is the founder of the CoW? He’s included 47 top dividend stocks (italics ours) for April. He even enclosed his data in a downloadable Excel spreadsheet. Sorry, lady who submitted a post on how to organize grocery coupons: we’re going with Shailesh’s post instead.

Did we say “dividends”? Indeed we did. Dividend Growth Investor is up next, with a discussion on 5 particular master limited partnerships. What’s a master limited partnership? We explained them a couple of months ago. He focuses on pipeline MLPs, which he likes because they’re natural monopolies. True. You have to be some kind of committed to run a pipeline next to someone else’s existing one.

Roger the Amateur Financier reviews a new book, Charles Richards’s The Psychology of Wealth. As best we can tell, the book isn’t so much about contrasting where rich people put their money vis-à-vis poor people, but rather the difference in mindset between the 2 groups. It’s worth repeating: what distinguishes rich people isn’t so much their ability to make smart decisions, but their insistence on avoiding stupid decisions. Poor people are poor largely because they decide to be.

As any Canadian emigrant to the United States knows, the Dominion is consistently a few years behind its southern neighbor. Everything from an all-sports TV network to diet cola debuted in America and then ultimately made it to Canada, usually within a decade or so. The latest example is Mint.com, the personal finance management site. It finally debuted in Canada last week, and JB at My University Money reviews it.

In case you think we’re needlessly bashing Canada, Boomer & Echo inadvertently brought up the same point in their submission this week. Free music services like Spotify aren’t available in Canada, either. Give it until 2017 or so. Why are we mentioning this? Because B&E list 10 fees that are worth paying. We agree with almost all of them, assuming that they were joking when they said it’s cool to pay a $99 annual fee for a credit card that can offer you 7 times that in rewards. (Keep looking. You’ll find similar rewards from a no-fee card, somewhere. Or you can just drop $69 a year for a Southwest Airlines credit card, at Stephen Vanderpool at Nerd Wallet recommends.)

Time for a post from a First World country. Mike Piper at The Oblivious Investor makes his majestic return to the CoW this week. He asks a question that could have spawned a dull answer in the hands of a less capable blogger, specifically “How Much Do I Need To Save Per Year?” Mike doesn’t give a definitive answer, because there isn’t one, but he does force you to think in different ways about a crucial question.

Net worth, cash flow and bullet points from Free Money Finance this week. The topics might be rudimentary, but they’re still important and someone, somewhere, was unfamiliar with them until clicking on that link.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog has 6 fun facts about credit cards. We love fun facts. Did you know Goldfield, Nevada holds the distinction of being farther away from an interstate highway than any town in the lower 48 states? It’s up to you to determine if John’s facts are more or less fun than that. Probably less, because that one was plenty fun.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) is clearly engaging us in a game of research one-upmanship. He wrote about (iconoclastically, for him) buying Mega Millions tickets. We wrote a little about the expected value of a ticket versus its likely value, now he’s taken it further with calculators and graphs. Two big takeaways (and you have to love a guy who opens a post with “If you don’t care, scroll down to the conclusion!”):

-At a certain prize level, the expected value of a ticket starts to decrease. We’d say “go figure”, but PKamp3 already did.
-2 comments so far. One is from someone who wanted a point of fact elaborated upon, which PKamp3 obliged. The other is from someone who says buying lottery tickets is cool because “it’s fun to pretend for a couple days that something wonderful might happen, and it only costs a couple bucks”, punctuated with 2 smiley-face emoticons. We’ll let you guess which is of which sex.

The lovely Liana at CardHub returns with a depressing post about greater credit card fees coming our way. And this has nothing, nothing at all to do with the Credit CARD Act passed by an activist Congress and signed into law by an activist president thanks to millions of whiny idiots who ended up on the hook for billions in credit card debt because they don’t know how to read a cardholder agreement.

We’re starting to get nostalgic for the rotten posts. There was a husky psychic who used to send us weekly posts about speaking to your dead ancestors. Which we’d run for the sheer ludicrousness (ludicrosity?) of it. Then people like Mich at Beating the Index had to spoil the party with their “expertise” and their “graphics” and their “staying on topic”. Like his most recent post, in which he analyzes the stock of a junior Canadian oil and gas company with interests throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan. It’s a company he believes in enough to have a position in, and a post both comprehensive and informative.

Why do exchange-traded funds beat mutual funds? Taxes, largely. There’s all the difference in the world between redeeming your capital for cash, as a mutual fund does, and redeeming for shares as an ETF does. Dan at ETF Base notes which is better, and don’t let the title of his site dissuade you from thinking he’s being objective.

From our “Reproduce a Page of a Textbook Most Convincingly” segment comes Paul Vachon at The Frugal Toad, who lists the advantages and disadvantages to taking retirement at different ages.

Just like that, it was over. Follow us on Twitter at @CYCash. Come back here every Wednesday and Friday for another, non-carnival-related post. And of course, the patented Anti-Tip of the Day is sitting in the right column, waiting for you to read and apply it. Plus we’re on Investopedia, constantly. (Toronto’s Globe & Mail found that one worth running.) And our 6-part series on ProBlogger is up to Part IV this week.

Is that enough? We thought so.

*If an animal sanctuary or shelter doesn’t specify that it’s no-kill, don’t kid yourself. It isn’t.

The lines start earlier every year

Welcome to yet another edition of the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading, the Carnival of Wealth. Where we showcase relevant blog posts from the past week or so and turn them into something approaching a cohesive whole. We didn’t give any tax advice this year – there’s plenty of it in The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written, plenty of which is relevant all year ’round, not just in mid-April – but we do have plenty of tax esoterica for you.

Did you know that April 15 has been the United States’ traditional income tax deadline only since 1955? It used to be March 15. Here’s another series of fun facts:

Federal income tax was instituted in 1861, to pay for the Civil War.
There was a basic personal deduction of $800 (that’d be 20,214 in current dollars) and a single, 3% (not a typo) rate on U.S. residents.
A year later, our first progressive tax: the deduction was lowered to $600, and income over $10,000 was taxed at 5%. However, the law specified that the tax would expire in 1866. (Apparently politicians in 1862 could predict when wars would end.) Fast forward 146 years, and no politician of either party would dare discuss eliminating the income tax. Alright, one. Then again, in 1866 our ancestors didn’t have an organization dedicated to “us(ing its) expertise to provide innovative solutions for our customers in support of their missions, and by so doing, foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people”, whatever the hell that means.

One more thing. 2 historical tax collectors are famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages; Simon Affleck and Jacob Gaón (the latter of whom may or may not have existed.) Do yourself a favor. Read their brief histories and see how previous generations handled tax collectors. On with the CoW:

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog recently wrote about fundamental security analysis vs. technical analysis (a/k/a alchemy). This week he delves into the former, explaining the differences among the 3 major financial statements and why you need to familiarize yourself with them before buying stocks.

Roger the Amateur Financier questions when and whether you should (help) pay for your kids’ college tuition. Should you start saving when your kid is barely a foul thought in its father’s head? Should you offer to match whatever your kids can save throughout their adolescence? Roger’s post is grammatically fantastic and tries to address some important issues, but there’s one gaping omission:

Cost/benefit analysis. Like most parents, would-be parents, and financial bloggers, he doesn’t address the single most important criterion. What’s Junior going to study? It doesn’t matter how you finance an English literature degree, whoever earns it is never going to be able to recoup the investment. Better to attend trade school, which doesn’t require any multi-decade savings plan (and gets you earning money 4 years earlier). If your kid wants to study medicine or chemical engineering, however, there’s at least a discussion to be had about how and when to start saving.

Isn’t the tax deadline in Canada April 1? If it is, get a head start on 2013 by reading this post from Teacher Man at My University Money on how to file your return without spending unnecessary money at H&R Block.

Speaking of Canada, Boomer and Echo have 5 critical questions to ask your employer about your pension plan. Knowledge is power, which means ignorance is weakness. Your boss has your body and mind for dozens of hours a week. The least you can do is determine whether they’ll have your retirement, too.

(Sweet Christ, another post from a “coupon mom”? How many of you are there, anyway?)

The stellar Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog strikes gold again. We received 2 posts this week on how to handle résumés. One of them was detritus, this is the other one. May we editorialize? Of course we may, it’s our carnival. Here’s the takeaway line from his post:

Personalize your cover letter 100%

When I say 100%, I mean 100%. First of all, employers can spot generic cover letters with a couple of customized fields a mile away.

We get generic emails every week here at Control Your Cash, idiots wanting “verry much to right a guestpost for your intesting website “ControlYourCash.com”” Has anyone ever responded positively to such blatant disregard? Swapping out one employer’s (or website’s) name for another in your template isn’t personalization, it’s laziness of the first order. Especially when you’re looking for a job. What better message to send to an employer than “I’m going to mail it in if you hire me. Here’s proof.”)

A couple of weeks ago we questioned the chart-formatting skills of Liana at CardHub. This week she showed us by offering 11 aesthetically pleasing charts, each with appropriate row height and column width.

Oh yeah, the content. Her post is an analysis of what’s happened to credit card interest rates, balance transfer rates etc. over the past year. Again, pay your freaking bills on time and those numbers will be merely of academic interest.

(Post rejected for using “needs” as a noun. Damn right that’s a droppable offense.)

Every week there’s a new entrant who doesn’t get what we do here, and thinks they can spend 30 seconds defecating out a post and we’ll run it. Sometimes, they get lucky. Consumer Grocery wants you to print out coupons, use them, and “share your goals and progress” on Facebook et al. Thanks, Consumer Grocery. Odysseas should consider himself flattered that his meticulously researched and comprehensive post shares a carnival with your recommendation to “make saving fun!”

Thanks again for stopping by. Our 6-part series on ProBlogger is now in its second week, and you can scarcely spend a day on Investopedia without reading us. We’ll be back here Wednesday with more goodness, and a daily Anti-Tip (located in the right column.) kthxbye

Jim Nantz broadcasting at the South Pole. Musical entertainment by Train, catering by Panera Bread

We’re temporarily out of facetious ideas, so here’s the first Carnival of Wealth without a theme. To recap: personal finance blog posts from around the world. Details at BlogCarnivalHQ.com. Send us something good. If you don’t have anything good, spare our readers. Let’s get started:

Dividend Growth Investor is not going to buy AT&T stock. However, he will give us a handy description of what AT&T does:

AT&T Inc. (T), together with its subsidiaries, provides telecommunications services to consumers, businesses, and other providers worldwide.

Thanks.

Never say “people” when you can say “individuals”. It makes you sound so much smarter. Geoffrey at Financial Highway writes about exchange-traded funds this week, and stretches the piece out to extreme proportions.

THIS is how you do it. Todd Tresidder at Financial Mentor either read or is of a mind with our recent ProBlogger piece on how to create products inspired by a blog. Todd writes about Roth IRAs vs. conventional, and when you should convert. If you like what he says and take advantage of his free e-book, he’ll sell you other books for $37. (You have to read to the bottom of the page to read the price, but we thought we’d save you the trouble.)

It took Matt at Rambling Fever only 8 months to start recycling content. But in the first 7 lines he refers to this piece as “mandatory reading”, “required reading”, and “a must-read”, so it must be worth recycling. It’s about compound interest and how awesome it is.

We can’t goof on Mich at Beating the Index, because he’s ungoofonable. This week, the Canadian icon breaks down Parallel Energy Trust, which just increased its monthly dividend but is carrying debt equal to 25 months’ worth of cash flow.

If you can’t afford to pay for a college education out of pocket, finance it! It doesn’t matter if what you’re studying has no real-world applications. Who cares? College isn’t about money. Well, it still is on the tuition end, but that’s not your concern if a 3rd party is footing the bill. Paul at The Frugal Toad lists handy places where you can find state and federal grants. Because that federal grant money comes from a magic well in Washington. It’s not as if it’s confiscated from people who pay taxes. Kids, learn a valuable lesson about how paying for a service is less important than receiving that service. College tuition – a good with a completely inelastic demand. (You learn about that in economics class. Or in a textbook.)

It must be Monday, because someone (Steve Zussino at Canadian Personal Finance) submitted an article on how to create an emergency fund. You know, for emergencies and stuff.

Check that, the post is from “Cassie Howard…a stay at home mom living in Mississauga, Ontario. She writes daily on her website dedicated to frugal living. She’s what many would call an extreme couponer and saves a minimum of 50% off her grocery bill every week by using coupons.”

We don’t have time to visit Ms. Howard’s blog, which we’re sure is fascinating, original, and less dry than her bio. But the idea of telling people to create an emergency fund is ridiculous.

Who is she writing for? People who haven’t saved for a rainy day, obviously. But if those people haven’t been persuaded to invest yet, how can you persuade them to sock away money that’ll sit earning zero in a savings account? You can’t. This post wasn’t written to spur behavior, it was written to have something legible to run next to the coupon codes on that page.

People who set aside thousands for an emergency are the mirror image of those idiots who waited in line for hours to buy lottery tickets a couple of weeks ago. It shows a gross ignorance of probability.

If your house burns down, you have insurance. A similar thing is in place for your car, and your health. (Oh, health insurance is too expensive for you? It’s a lot easier to buy if you aren’t socking away money for an “emergency” fund with such an ill-defined purpose.) The number of actual financial “emergencies” that strike the average person are amazingly low. But again, emergency funds are easy to write about. So here we are.

Then there’s Teacher Man at My University Money, who has actual insight on actual topics, rather than “here’s a thought that crawled out of my head, let’s transfer it to WordPress.” He argues that Canada shouldn’t have lowered its national sales tax by 200 basis points. Teacher Man seems to think that raising the tax to its original level wouldn’t have an effect on quantity, but many of his other points are engaging and well worth the read.

Jill at My Dollar Plan explains tax exemptions (in the United States), and what will happen to them over the next couple of years.

Counterpart to that nonsense about an emergency fund, sort of: Boomer & Echo discuss what a waste it is to buy mortgage life insurance. Echo thinks you should buy term life insurance, which isn’t much better. But at least the lucky people who die after buying the latter don’t get screwed by insurers as often as their counterparts who bought the former.

It’s a rare financial blogger who catalogs his own mistakes. John Kiernan at Wallet Blog admits that he paid for months’ worth of unnecessary overdraft protection before realizing it. Folks, read your freaking statements. It’s not the bank’s fault if you don’t.

Jesus H. Did PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net seriously drop $60 on Mega Millions tickets? He rationalizes his choice – and keeping one’s wife happy is not unimportant – but try as he might he just couldn’t get the expected value of each ticket to fall over $1. (Nor did he discuss median prizes vis-a-vis mean prizes, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The magnificent Liana at CardHub continues to avail us of how poor people operate with a great piece on “payment allocation”, a term we’d never heard before (or at least, hadn’t heard before in reference to credit cards.) Long story short, if your card balance is split among purchases, balance transfers and cash advances, the outlays with the lowest interest rates get paid first. That’s how it used to be, anyway. Then the federal government reversed the order, because God forbid consumers be forced to, again, read agreements. Also, if you’re getting cash advances on your credit cards (and carrying balances long enough that you can transfer them to a different card), you’re either a) crazy or b) the parent of a hostage.

Pairs trading! Twice the risk! Twice the fun! Darwin’s Money shows us how if you’re bullish on one stock and bearish on its counterpart, you can go long on one while shorting the other and rub it in your more conservative friends’ faces twice as hard. The example he gives is Apple vs. Research in Motion, and we can’t think of an apter one.

We all have a hazy idea that our credit card and debit card issuers won’t put us on too big of a hook for fraudulent purchases, but do we know the details? Anisha Sekar of Nerd Wallet does, and went to the trouble of listing them for us.

And we’re done. Our ProBlogger series is now in its second week, you can’t go a day or two without seeing us on Investopedia, and we’ll have a new post here Wednesday (not to mention a new Anti-Tip every day.) ‘Til then.