Carnival of Wealth, Investopedia Edition

A Forbes Media Company. Steve, we loved your work on Saturday Night Live

 

Folks, did you know that Investopedia regularly features our work? Articles that you CAN’T get here on Control Your Cash? The fun thing about writing for Investopedia and its trillions of readers is that it forces us to phrase everything in a somewhat less incendiary style than the one we’re comfortable with here. It’s like when Vinnie Moore has to lay off the shredding and just play the notes when he’s touring with UFO, but can still whale on the whammy bar on his solo albums. For the 99% of you who didn’t get that analogy, here’s another Investopedia/Yahoo! Finance link.

Onto the Carnival. Personal finance blog posts from across the globe. If you’re a blogger, submit yours here. Send us garbage at your peril. For the overwhelming non-blogging part of the audience, you folks who are just here to learn a little about personal finance and maybe get entertained in the process, just keep reading:

If you turn at least 77 this week, live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and/or are blind – and we’re not sure which of those is worst, probably living in Northern Ireland – Edward Webber at TaxFix.co.uk tells you how you can avoid paying taxes (in the UK, duh) in 2012.

Teacher Man at My University Money thinks credit cards, like single-malt scotches, are perfect for college kids. His point is that you need to build credit, and the sooner the better. If you can’t handle your liquor, as it were, grow up. Enjoy Teacher Man’s curious admixture of insight into the human condition and up-and-down grammar.

Yeah, living in Northern Ireland is far worse than being blind.

Ryan Souza at Your Life For Less joins the parade this week, and reminds you not to be a lightweight with regard to comparison shopping. Don’t stay with a trusted brand just because it’s comfortable, especially if an acceptable substitute can save you serious cash.

Case in point? Your humble blogger reluctantly admits that throughout his early 20s he never bought groceries at Walmart because, well, that’s where the poor people shop. The ones made fun of on that People of Walmart site. I can’t be seen shopping with them. Besides, it’s filthy in there. (As far as I knew. I’d never actually been in one.)

Then it dawned on me: I am poor. Partially because I’ve been buying groceries at more expensive stores. The first time I sucked it up and bought groceries at a Walmart, not only did I not catch bubonic plague, I saved about 40% off what Albertson’s was charging. And never (or at least, hardly ever) went back. Walmart became this shopper’s trusted brand.

Until WinCo showed up a few weeks ago, in her slutty makeup and 9″ heels, smiling and complimenting me on my broad shoulders and tiny waist. She started running her acrylic nails through her frosted hair and I was hooked. I still can’t figure out how WinCo sells red peppers at 48¢ a pound, but that’s someone else’s concern. Walmart, if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be back.

As usual, Tim at Faith and Finance put less work into this week’s submission than we did into that previous paragraph. Tim lists 8 jobs for recent MBAs, who presumably have already thought about what they’ll be doing after graduation and don’t need a blog post to remind them that

If information technology or management information systems is your specialty, you can command a great salary at a strong company, especially with an MBA.

Thanks. He basically lists 8 positions, and ends each description by telling you that your chances of getting hired for any of them are greater with an MBA. Tim also encourages people to get jobs working in human resources, which is the most loathsome career path in the world.

Parents, if your children have the right equipment, encourage them to get into porn instead of HR. We’re not kidding. At least porn actors don’t live to make other people’s lives miserable. Then again, what’s more fun and professionally satisfying than reciting the list of company benefits and denying employees’ requests for vacation days? HR administrators are the evolution of the insufferable little girls in elementary school who reported even the most miniscule infractions to the teacher. Bad, bad people. All of them.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net would be one of our favorite contributors even if he only submitted his aesthetically pleasing charts. Or if he only submitted his clever, informative prose. Put them together and you have a personal finance blogger most folks can only aspire to be like. This week he asks “Who gambles in Canada?”, a country where people were buying $10 lottery tickets back in the 1970s (not adjusted for inflation).

Speaking of Canada, apparently Rob Carrick of the Toronto Globe & Mail stole our idea and wrote a personal finance book for people who know nothing about money. Is his available on Kindle? For $7? No, it’s $17 Canadian, and that on undercutter extraordinaire Amazon. So you can order it and wait 10 days to receive it, or click the above link and be reading ours in less than a minute. Ours which actually applies to you if you’re American, like most of our readers are. Anyhow, Boomer & Echo reviewed Mr. Carrick’s book.

Did the guy behind Free Money Finance sell his site? Just wondering, because it’s changed radically. This week he lists a few simple actions for building wealth. Driving 70 miles out of your way to wait 4 hours to buy lottery tickets isn’t on the list.

Joe Morgan at Simple Debt Free Finance boils it down even more. He thinks you should increase your income and reduce expenses if you want to build wealth. We’ll try it out, see if it works, get back to you on that.

Every week we get posts that offer pointless advice. It’s rare that we get one that recommends you do something that’s dumb from every angle, but then we’d never heard from Jeffery (sic) Weber at Smart Balance Transfers before. Jeffery thinks you should use a credit card to pay your income taxes. Which is insane because, as Jeffery even admits, the IRS requires you to go through an intermediary that will charge you 2-4%. But hey, double miles.

We’re due for something good. John Kiernan at Wallet Blog reminds us that plenty of people don’t know who their health insurer is. If you have a vague idea that your insurance is handled by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, or some combination of the above, you might be surprised to know that those names refer to multiple insurers whose coverage can differ wildly from state to state. Your acupuncture treatments for that nasty bout of shingles might not be covered in Delaware after all.

We buried Liana at CardHub deep in the mix this week, only because that way it’ll mean something when we put her in the leadoff spot again. She gives the stark details of Chase’s practice of overstating past due consumer debt, which it then can sell to third parties. Chase is essentially rolling back odometers on debt collection, and we can’t understand why this isn’t a bigger story.

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog brings it every week. This time, an important discourse on one of our favorite topics – fundamental stock analysis vs. technical stock analysis, a/k/a alchemy.

In a similar vein, Mich at Beating the Index shows how to identify that scourge of the market, the emotionally invested shareholder. Understand that being emotionally invested in the market is like being emotionally invested in the weather. You can’t control it, all you can do is intelligently anticipate what it’s going to do. Wishing and hoping are wastes of time. Mich’s posts are usually fairly advanced, but this one’s easy (and useful) for everyone.

There are hundreds of corporations that don’t understand Twitter. And then there’s American Express, which doesn’t necessarily have an entertaining feed, but is using Twitter’s structure to expand its business. And it’s gloriously simple. Use a hashtag, get a credit from a specific participating retailer. Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet gives the details.

Finally, the craziest post we’ve ever received. This one makes Erika the passive-aggressive wife at Newlyweds on a Budget seem normal. Everything about this – the font choice, the graphics, the errant spelling, the long-windedness, the name of the blog (Wizard Corpse?) – screams out for help. Let’s all join hands and pray for the anonymous lunatic who sent it to us. And if he doesn’t cast a spell on us, we’ll see you here next week.

Carnival of Wealth, Overrated Product Edition

We played with these side-by-side at Best Buy and couldn't tell them apart

 

An extra $100 for quadruple the pixels? Maybe, but we seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns with regard to display resolution. You need to be a great horned owl to appreciate the difference.

This week’s edition of the Carnival of Wealth, like all its predecessors, showcases the least average personal finance blog posts from around the world. If you fancy yourself worthy of submission, click here. Keep it on topic, of a decent length, and correctly spelled and punctuated. Send us dross and we reserve the right to mock it. Which we will. The safe thing to do is just read. So let’s do exactly that:

You see what we were talking about 4 sentences ago? Here’s an example. “Francine Ersery” at 2009Taxes.org has some tips for us on how to avoid getting audited. Given the timely title of her site, we should point out that in only 4 years the IRS can’t go after you for your 2009 taxes anyway. Also, Ms. Ersery claims to be “an accountant in the windy city”. (Uncapitalized, so it could be any city that has wind.)  It took 2 seconds to Google Ms. Ersery and find out that she’s also “a full-time writer and blogger with a passion for the web world and technology” and “a college student who enjoys spending Spring break in Florida.”

Look, we understand that honestly is optional online. But if you’re going to create multiple identities under which to write your unreadable link bait, can you at least come up with a different name for each one? Then once you’ve done that, don’t make your pseudonyms so generic that it’s obvious you’re lying (“Jane Smith”), but also don’t make them so particular that we can expose you for the fraud you are. Try something in the middle, like “Betty Kincaid”.

Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet is the antithesis of this. She gives us practical and useful advice, this week for Wells Fargo customers who don’t fancy having to pay fees for the privilege of letting the bank use their money. Depending on what state you live in, Laura recommends you bail out and try one of the other banks and credit unions she lists.

Did you know the filth-ridden layabouts of the Occupy Wall Street movement have something resembling a formed opinion on credit scoring? We didn’t say a “well-“formed opinion, just a formed opinion. Private enterprise being the devil incarnate, the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group wants credit scoring taken out of the hands of Experian, Equifax and TransUnion and placed in the hands of a body that never spends money unnecessarily, never treats people unfairly, and is renowned for its fast and efficient service – the federal government. Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog has a better idea, one that turns credit scoring from a closed oligopoly into something closer to fair.

Liana Arnold at CardHub lists the best credit cards for every life stage. She’s largely in step with what we’ve been arguing for years – rewards are more important than interest rates. In fact, nothing is less important than the latter.

Madison Du Paix at My Dollar Plan reviews a $50 book by Jim C. Otar, Unveiling the Retirement Myth. You’ll be paying for content, because Mr. C. Otar clearly doesn’t spend much money on cover design. (By the way, The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written still sells for $7.)

Barbara Friedberg tells a wonderful Schaudenfraude story about a timeshare developer who got overextended and ended up on the hook for 9, maybe 10 digits. See, they’re a bad investment for everyone! That’s not the crux of Barb’s post, just a delightful aside. She wants to know why people can have large incomes yet little wealth.

Dividend Growth Investor lists this year’s additions to the list of Dividend Achievers – stocks that trade on one of the 3 biggest American exchanges, have increased dividends each year for the past decade, and have an average daily cash volume of at least half a million dollars. We love his utter refusal to edit:

NIKE, Inc. (NKE), together with its subsidiaries, engages in the design, development, marketing, and sale of footwear, apparel, equipment, and accessory products for men, women, and children worldwide.

Thanks.

Roger the Amateur Financier reviews 1996’s The Millionaire Next Door.

Canada lets you hold your mortgage in your retirement savings plan? From the land of stubby beer bottles and ketchup-flavored potato chips come Boomer & Echo, who also give you the fine print. You need to hold sufficient cash or liquid assets, and direct the savings plan yourself.

What are better- actively managed mutual funds or index funds? Free Money Finance preaches the benefits of the one over the other.

No wait. Exchange-traded funds are what you want. That’s according to Teacher Man at My University Money, who wrote (and is giving away) an e-book about that very topic.

“Carrie Smith” (boy, there are a lot of people named “Smith” who write articles) at Ready For Zero lists ways to save on rent, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like owning a home. Her suggestions are…original, that’s for sure. Yes, becoming the building supervisor will almost certainly knock a few bucks off your rent. As will paying 6 months’ advance rent. If you’ve already got that money, why you’d put it towards rent instead of a down payment on a house is anyone’s guess.

In our “faced deadline and pulled 800 words out of his” category, Tim from Faith & Finance lists 5 business lessons he learned from playing Monopoly®. Except his comparison makes no cents.

Get it? “Cents”? A homonym for “sense”, which Tim couldn’t resist using. Here’s lesson #2:

2. No Such Thing as Free Parking

Landing on Free Parking can be nice, especially if everyone contributes to the pot every round.  But guess what…there’s no free parking in life.

First, doesn’t Monopoly teach the exact opposite? “There’s no free parking in life” sounds like a lesson you’d learn playing chess or mumblety-peg, rather than the one game that actually has a feature called “Free Parking”. Second, there’s plenty of free parking in life, both literal and figurative. Third, that thing about anteing up and someone collecting when they land on Monopoly’s Free Parking space isn’t in the rules. It’s just a stupid convention.

But no, his post was awesome. If you don’t believe that, just read the comments.

Ben Bernanke says inflation is at 3.1%, which is about average. Darwin’s Money says inflation is at 8%, which is awful. Who are you going to believe? We’ll take the guy who doesn’t have a professional history of lying and dodging questions.

Brief, but intense. Like a heroin high. Join us tomorrow for another Anti-Tip of the Day, Wednesday for another post, Monday for another CoW. Adios.

Carnival of Wealth, March Winds Edition

This never happens to Kenneth Brumley

 

Benefits meeting? Photocopier down? Angry customers calling who couldn’t get through on the weekend? Rain? Relax, because your Monday’s about to get tolerable if not good. It’s time for another edition of the Carnival of Wealth, featuring personal finance blog posts from around the world. If you fancy yourself as CoW material, submit here. If you want to be entertained and maybe learn something, read Chuck Klosterman’s latest at Grantland. If you want to kill a few minutes, continue reading here:

We bookmark 1 out of every maybe 1000 submissions we receive. That would include this one from Darwin’s Money. Do you know how to calculate an investment’s internal rate of return? It’s easy to do if you only buy one investment, once a year, in the same amounts. But what if you invest like a normal person? Darwin explains how to work around the variables.

Bernie Madoff might remain in prison until the next ice age, but there are still plenty of lower-level crooked investment advisors ready to steal your money. If you’re the kind of person who’s susceptible to that kind of thing Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog has you covered.

Oh, this one’s adorable. Barclaycard created the “Ring” MasterCard, the big noteworthy feature of which is that it lets cardholders vote on the card’s future. According to Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet, “[y]ou’ll get to vote anytime Barclaycard suggests raising fees (or) changing the APR…”

Let’s think about that for a second.

“Hi, I loved your card so much that I bought $43,293.34 worth of stuff on it. That 8% introductory annual percentage rate is killing me, though. I think you should change it to 0.”

Barclaycard will also let you “weigh in on marketing ideas”:

“Dude. What if Barclaycard like, took out ad space on the moon? That would totally beat any idea that Capital One has. And because it’s on the moon, you could, like, buy pot with the card and stuff. Because there’s no laws on the moon. That’s why one of the Apollo astronauts wanted to stay there. But the other 2 outvoted him. It’s true.”

There’s a reason no non-startup gets its customers to help design and market products. Barclaycard’s managers are obviously smart enough to understand that, so we’re curious only as to how naïve a cardholder would have to be to think that those managers care what he’d like the card’s APR to be. Or how Barclaycard should market the card.

We welcome Bobby Boughton at Ready For Zero to the CoW this week with his post on whether it’s better to invest or to pay off debt. His reasoning is sound and his conclusion worthwhile, but sweet God does it take him a while to get there. 2700 words of ornate repetition that we could have whittled down to 3 paragraphs. We’re too lazy to check, but are pretty sure it was Mark Twain who said, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one.”

Scott Skyles at Mortgage 1A writes about–

Wait a second. Consecutive posts, submitted minutes apart from each other, from unfamiliar names, one a homonym for a legendary college football coach, and the other a homonym for a current NBA coach? Neither of whom has any part of his name in his email address? We’re skeptical, but we’ll take it. Especially when Mr. Skyles has a human’s face for an avatar. He seems very earnest, especially in his dry recitation of how FHA loans work. Read it and tell us if you think he’s real.

Another one from a guy whose name is that of a sports figure? For those of you unfamiliar, Dave Hilton was a Canadian boxer and pederast. He molested his own daughters, if that’s worse than molesting other kids. It probably is. His namesake writes at Debt Black Hole about his father, whose life is a Hank Williams Sr. song. A veteran whose son supported him, psychological problems, wife walked out, went broke, etc. Plenty of which was his own doing. Dave talks about when to finally cut someone loose.

One wag (alright, it was Nelson Smith of Financial Uproar) recently stated that if the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, isn’t the 2nd-best time 19 years ago? Boomer and Echo remind us that every day you fail to start investing is one more day without compounding interest. No, you’re not going to lose all your money. Yes, it can be a little dry. No, you probably don’t know what to invest in. Yes, you need to read a book. Seriously, just do it.

Speaking of Mr. Smith, you’re not going to believe this, but he has an opinion on Greg Smith; the 12-year Goldman Sachs employee who quit the company and publicly complained about what a horrible place it is to work. Nelson’s entire post is one line of spun gold after another, so we’re not going to ruin it for you by offering lots of excerpts. But we had to include this stellar quote, in reference to the goyishly monikered Greg Smith bragging about competing at the Maccabiah Games:

I LOVE the fact there’s a Jewish Olympics. Greg’s first choice was to enter the money counting competition, but he knew he had no chance against the dominant Rothschild dynasty, who haven’t lost the event since 1874.

Now here’s a sentiment we can get behind. Eric J. Nisall at DollarVersity decries people who can’t spell nor punctuate. Which is bad enough, but it’s exponentially worse when you do it in your public correspondence. Eric J. shows an example of an error-laden flyer from a local pizza joint. Foisting sloppy English on the world isn’t a way to have potential customers take you seriously.

At least in theory it isn’t. Eric J. is correct, but

a) This is nothing. Every day, we see examples 10 times worse than the one he cites.
b) Eric J. should try sifting through the Carnival of Wealth submissions one of these weeks.
c) He’s got a long, frustrating life ahead if this stuff bothers him.

Seriously, he does. Heck, we complained about this very same thing on ProBlogger last year and people got defensive. How dare you tell me that spelling counts, etc.

Liana and CardHub had themselves a little single-elimination tournament. It’s what you do this time of year. They began with 32 credit cards, separated them into “regions”, and…well, you can probably figure out what happened next.

Dan at ETF Base has an interesting aphorism that we’ll have to expand upon in detail one day: “cost matters more than strategy when it comes to passive investing.” That’s a slight variation on the belief that “you make your money going in” an investment. Dan thus lists the ETFs with the lowest cost: why eat up your returns with fees?

Also, the post features this week’s grammar pet peeve:

any investor can find a cheaper mutual fund option with ETFs.

What’s the point of the word “option” here? There isn’t one. The sentence reads better without it. It’s like places that advertise “interior decorating solutions”. How is that different than “interior decorating”? It isn’t, it’s just wordier.

The Savvy Scot encourages you to judge a book by something other than its cover (another proverb that technology has rendered obsolete.) This isn’t necessarily a pure personal finance post, but its lessons apply. Plus TSS is self-aware, a huge criterion for getting his submissions included.

Chris McDaniel guest posts at Christian PF, where he explains charitable remainder trusts. Donate stock to a charity, get money for it every year, and when you die (or the arrangement expires) the asset reverts to the charity. Just in case the idea of dying doesn’t excite you enough.

Someone check between the legs of Tim from Faith and Finance and report back with what you find. A male who keeps coupons in a binder, and asks friends and family members to save the coupon inserts from the Sunday newspaper? (Aside: What’s a newspaper? You mean those cumbersome, filthy things our grandparents used for staying informed on what happened yesterday?)

He speaks with authority, so we thought we’d give it a try.

Betty’s Mother: Hello?
Betty: Hi, Mom? Do you have Sunday’s paper?
Betty’s Mother: Yes, why?
Betty: Can you save the coupon inserts from it? I’ll come by and pick them up later. Or can you mail them?
(dial tone)

Free Money Finance has another book excerpt. Matt at Rambling Fever explains mutual funds to the uninitiated.

Building to a big crescendo. PKamp3 from DQYDJ.net explains highly combustible leveraged exchange-traded funds. Yes, you too can lose money by some multiple of how fast the market at large is losing money.

And that’ll do it. Thanks for reading. New post Wednesday, new CoW Monday, new Anti-tip of the day tomorrow, and you can catch us on ProBlogger and Investopedia. Later.