Carnival of Wealth, Off-Calendar Edition

February 22, 2012

Happy Humpday

 

This week only, the Carnival of Wealth jumps ahead 48 hours. Daylight Saving Time, you know. That and the Totally Money Carnival, which the delightful Harri was gracious/naive enough to let us host Monday. Two successive carnival posts are verging on a little much, so on Friday we’ll post something of our own derivation. And this coming Monday, the CoW will return to its regularly scheduled time.

Ah, the CoW. The finest blog carnival of its kind. Personal finance blog posts from across the universe, selected for your reading pleasure. If you have a blog and would like to submit, do so here. READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES, NOT THAT ANYONE EVER DOES. Or just read and enjoy. Starting now:

This might be the last-ever installment of the Carnival of Wealth, because a bullet between the eyes seems like the only way to deaden the pain after hearing that that hyperfrugal, inconsistent, parsimonious, self-parodying lunatic Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar might have sold that awful blog of his for a 7-digit sum. That’s the estimate from Jeffrey at Money Spruce. Thanks for that, Jeff.

Carnival of Wealth founder Shailesh Kumar, the Cliff Burton to our Jason Newsted, guests on Boomer & Echo this week. Shailesh reached the inevitable conclusion that our politicians have yet to share with us: in a few years, there simply won’t be enough money. If you think anyone but you is ultimately responsible for your own retirement, you’re as naive as they want you to be. Find out how to avoid spending your dotage praying for the sweet release of death.

We can’t very well host Harri Pierce’s Totally Money Blog Carnival and not run a submission from her 2 days later, can we? The Totally Money maveness explains how to use social media to look for employment. There’s actual content in this post: she didn’t just write “tell your Facebook friends you want a new job”, which is how most bloggers would have handled this subject matter.

Darwin’s Money tells the incredible story of a graffiti artist who got some equity in Facebook years ago and is on the verge of being dirty rotten filthy stinking rich. Instead of kicking himself for not playing with spray cans when he was a kid, Darwin wisely reasons that almost every other graffiti artist on the planet is either sleeping on someone’s floor or in a jail cell. It’s called survivorship bias, and it’ll save you aggravation if you apply it to your life.

We love stories about how to ensure that Uncle Sam has a little bit less money to squander on light rail, hush payments to hostile foreign leaders and welfare for losers who refuse to work. Nathan Kim at Everyday Money Info debuts in the CoW this week with a brilliant post that explains how donating stock instead of cash can help reduce your tax bite. Nathan is yet another of the disproportionate number of smart personal finance bloggers who work as engineers. Hey, maybe developing your left brain really does mean something.

This week’s (1st, there will be more) English usage pet peeve: writing that your readers should “consider” something. “Consider buying a house in a cheaper neighborhood.” “Consider shifting to a Roth 401(k).” Grow a pair already and have the strength of your convictions. Your dental hygienist doesn’t tell you to “consider” brushing and flossing, she tells you to brush and floss. “Consider”, used in this sense, is a pusillanimous and miserable word that should be put to death. Stop using it.

Jeremy Biberdorf at Modest Money wants you to consider buying an e-reader, a subject we know a little about. (He also used “needs” as a noun, which is even worse than “consider”, but one thing at a time.)

Apple couldn’t sit on the world’s largest pile of cash forever. Dan at High Yield Edge announces that now that Steve Jobs is dead, the company is finally looking at paying a dividend. Find out when and how much.

One of our favorite topics in the marketplace is anchoring. Teacher Man at My University Money demonstrates how “I got it on sale!” is possibly the single dumbest thing you can say after buying something.

Another upper-deck grand slam from Paula Pant at Afford-Anything, who recommends that you live like no one else, so you can live like no one else. If that sounds too Zen to be actionable, you’re reading it incorrectly. Click on the link and find out why she’s figured out in her 20s what most people never do.

Phil Taylor at PT Money is one of that smart minority of people who pay their credit card balances in full every month. So for his efforts, the credit bureaus are punishing him and making it more difficult for him to get a mortgage. All because of a quirk in the calendar, and the reporting bureaux’ inability to account for it. Sound insane? Believe it.

Get out of blue chips? Really? Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog (Arbor Asset Allocation Model Portfolio) is leaning towards doing so and focusing on…small-cap value stocks. A little too speculative for our tastes, but not for this seasoned investment advisor who’s using every method at his disposal to counter inflation.

Do you like detailed analysis? CoW newcomer Karl at Cult of Money has some for you. It’s somewhat technical, and a glimpse into the mind of someone whose investment strategy goes well beyond reading the business headlines and seeing what’s popular.

The Six-Figure Investor reviews a 20-year-old book at Dividend Ninja, which is a better idea than you might think. The guy who wrote the book (on value investing) hasn’t published since, but he still invests and still makes his results public. See if his strategy remains valid, and if it applies to your life.

At some point, American high school seniors (or better yet, their parents) are going to wake up and say, “Wait. Maybe we should do a cost-benefit analysis before cramming 4 more years of school into Junior’s already addled brain.” Until then, we’ve got the overwhelming problem of student debt to deal with. Shaun at Smart Family Finance knows that an easy fix is to consolidate your loans, if by “easy” you mean “disastrous.”

Instead of indulging your little 18-year-old punk’s fantasies of obtaining a degree in cinema studies or political science, have her open a Roth IRA instead. That’s what Ryan at Early Retirement Investments recommends. Ryan himself started at 21, and wishes he’d done so earlier. Find out why.

(Post rejected for its insulting premise. Save money on vacations by…vacationing close to home. Or going camping. Here’s an idea: save even more by spending your vacation in your living room. Submitters, if you’re going to write something that offers nothing of substance, save it for a less demanding carnival.)

(Post rejected because the submitter wrote a total of 3 paragraphs about switching car insurance, then dropped an inelegant link to 21st Century’s website in the final paragraph. They don’t publicize this, but do you know what 21st’s parent company is? AIG, the most horrible private corporation in the universe. R.J. Reynolds is less destructive to humanity than AIG is.)

(Crap, is it shaping up to be one of those carnivals? One with more rejections than acceptances?)

This week’s misleading post title comes from Jen at Master the Art of Saving: “The Downside of Using Credit Cards Responsibly.” Jen went on vacation with one card, which has a $600 limit. You can guess what happened.

Shaun at Young Adult Finances says if you’re not ready to buy an investment property yourself, take on partners. Or not.

Speaking of property, Amanda L Grossman at Frugal Confessions found a too-good-to-be-true daily deal hotel stay in New Orleans. The catch was that it was a timeshare, complete with mandatory 2-hour presentation.

(Post rejected for its opening sentence:

“I was looking at my credit card today [the one with the nearly $18,000 balance])

Alright, fine. We haven’t included a horrible example in some time. It’s from the perfectly titled American Debt Project, guest posting at Personal Finance Whiz. The author, whatever his name might be, talks about credit cards “enabling” him and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about himself and looking in the mirror. So yeah, if you think anyone who’s $35,000 in debt has the authority to talk about personal finance, you might as well kill a few minutes and read his post.

A Blinkin at Funancials writes about how “Loyalty is for Losers”. From the title we hoped he was talking about being an employee, but he was referring to being a consumer. Either way, his observations are more than valid.

When Alexander the Great was 26, he’d already conquered Asia Minor and most of the rest of the Middle East. 26-year-old Kevin McKee at Thousandaire dresses up like Spider-Man and loves to watch a TV show about a high school dance team, or something. In a completely unrelated tangent, Alexander’s sexual proclivities were open to question, too.

One of the funniest things (and there are many) about Canada is how it’s always a few years late to the party. MTV debuted in 1981; MuchMusic, in 1984. A similar deal with ESPN and TSN. Canadians were still drinking Tab when Diet Coke had made it into every corner of the United States. And now, in the late winter of 2011-12, Eddie at Finance Fox has discovered extreme couponing. Eddie’s proofreader apparently threw up her hands and ran out of the room screaming after a couple of weeks at the helm, quitting to leave him to his own devices and thesauri. Read this one slowly, because there’s no other way to.

(Look. You may think that you’re putting one over on your readers by getting an Indian remote assistant to write your posts. You aren’t. If this were a 1st-grader’s book report, we’d give it a gold star. But it’s supposedly coming from an adult, so it gets a black star, with one of its 5 points broken off. Thanks for the insight, Jester at The Ultimate Juggle.)

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff is incapable of letting us down. He starts with a legitimate topic (his investments.) He quantifies like crazy. He gives details. He doesn’t employ the tired ritual of ending his posts with a couple of questions, allegedly to inspire commenters. If everyone was like him, the CoW would be much more informative (and our commentary considerably more subdued.)

Mich at Beating the Index, too. Mich got his hands on BP’s Annual Energy Outlook, which discusses future energy trends. Read and invest accordingly.

Passive Income to Retire explains how it’s not enough to build a nest egg. (A classic mistake poor people make.) Cash flow is everything. Money is dynamic, not static; the idea is not to work for it. The meaning of the second half of that last sentence changes depending on which word is emphasized. We’ll leave you to figure out which one it should be.

It’s good to know that the United States isn’t the only English-speaking North American nation whose elected representatives decided to take on the responsibility of keeping people fed in retirement, and who never consulted an actuarial table along the way. The Canada Pension Plan is on ground as shaky as the U.S.’s Social Security, and Financial god gives all the depressing details.

You’re still getting a tax refund? Come on. You don’t want to get a check on April 15. You want to send little checks to the IRS on March 31, June 30, September 30 and December 31. But if you do get a refund, Larry at Krant Cents has an idea of what you can do with it.

Paul Vachon at The Frugal Toad has practical advice for college kids who finally graduated and can’t wait to incur some good old-fashioned debt. Of course they don’t style it that way, but it’s what they end up doing. Paul recommends several behaviors and multiple books, although for some reason he left this one out.

Money Infant recommends that you automate your savings.

Οδυσσέας Παπαδημητρίου’s name looks even more splendid in the original Greek. The Wallet Blog guru thought he knew everything there was to know about airline credit cards. He switched his allegiance from Star Alliance to the company that calls itself The World’s Favourite Airline, and paid the price. Bonus: audio.

This was moderately funny once. This is extremely funny. And this from Your Finances Simplified is somewhere in between.

The good news is, he’s attempting to create passive income by being a landlord. The horrible, miserable, bad news is that his tenants are Section 8. Worse yet, he appears to have the least competent property manager in the universe. These losers can’t cough up $150 of an $825 rent payment, yet spend time devising a litany of ridiculous excuses for their landlord. The property manager is supposed to be the one playing bad cop here, yet doesn’t seem to mind failing to collect his percentage of the rent owed.

Aside: financial relationships are different than personal relationships. The former need to be coldly logical and, in at least two senses of the word, completely impersonal. Always treat people who owe you money worse than they treat you.

We usually dig what the folks at Card Hub have to say, and this week’s contribution from Liana continues the streak. The lesson: read the fine print. Otherwise you might ask for a credit limit increase on your First Premier credit card, and be on the hook for a fee equal to one-quarter of the increase. There are mafiosi who give their lenders more favorable terms.

Melissa Batai would make an excellent infantryman. She keeps coming, despite fusillade after fusillade. The former Control Your Cash Retard of the Month posts at Personal Finance Journey this week, and claims that she’s a good negotiator. We’ll let you decide.

Not satisfied with presiding over a stagnant stock market and an underused workforce, The Smartest President This Country Has Ever Had has decided to declare war on in-state municipal bond holders. If you thought that financing your state’s public works could benefit both you and the state, think again when you start paying taxes on that bond income. Luke at Learn Bonds has the depressing details.

Anisha Sekar at Nerd Wallet is very proud of her site’s “award-winning technology.” We’d love to know what awards it’s won. A Tony? A Pulitzer? A Vezina Trophy? Read this post if you think that Suze Orman is the only one who’s plugging a financially unsound prepaid debit card.

You can whine about how hard it is to build wealth, or you can max out your IRA and 401(k). My Money Design (and Mrs. My Money Design) did the latter. You can probably guess whether that’s worth emulating or not.

Thanks for reading. A new carnival in 7 5 days.

Filed Under: Carnivals Tagged With:

Totally Money Blog Carnival LV

February 20, 2012

 

We needed a theme, so we decided to celebrate the golden anniversary of Friendship 7. Fifty years ago today, future U.S. Senator John Glenn orbited the Earth, solo, 3 times in 5 hours. That means he was going about 40 times faster than your standard airliner. Glenn was America’s 1st non-chimpanzee to orbit the planet, which is something to think about the next time you don’t want to drive 2 miles to the supermarket because you’re too exhausted. Or if you don’t know how to drive a standard transmission. 

 

Note: If you’re looking for the Carnival of Wealth, your life is about to be pleasantly enhanced. 

Is it hubris? Is it plausible deniability? For whatever reason, some bloggers occasionally take it upon themselves to let Control Your Cash guest host their carnivals. Sometimes, months later, they realize their dreadful mistake and change their minds. Other times they just let it ride. Fortunately for us, and for you, the lovely Harri Pierce of Totally Money is in the latter category.

Presenting the Totally Money Blog Carnival, a roundup of personal finance posts from across the known universe. (By the way, did you get a look at that masthead? There are 7 attractive women in the entire UK, and 5 of them write for Totally Money.) It’s like the Carnival of Wealth, except with fewer enemies. Let’s get it started:

We’re supposed to list several of the submissions as Editor’s Picks. Drama would dictate that we leave them until the end. We hate drama, whether in queen form or otherwise, so let’s start with the Editor’s Picks instead:

My, where has Jennifer Derrick at Saving Advice been all our lives? She speaks frankly and uncompromisingly to people who want to know how they can afford to buy expensive items without, you know, spending a lot of money. The answer? First, get your priorities in order. Second, don’t be a retard. (We’re paraphrasing.)

Dan at ETF Base is back with his usual insight. Greece is burning, the PIIGS have been slaughtered, and no one’s saying a thing about what the NASDAQ is doing. Dan sees opportunity, not miasma. We get the feeling Dan is one of those people who’s naturally optimistic while everyone else is out on the window ledge smoking a cigarette and thinking about jumping.

Most sites have zero good writers. DQYDJ (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) has at least 2. Cameron Daniels explains automation and forced savings, telling you that if you can’t be disciplined enough to save, at least be disciplined enough to know you’re not disciplined enough and act accordingly.

Citibank wasn’t satisfied with merely being kicked off the Dow. The beleaguered bank is now sending tax forms to credit card holders who collected…frequent-flyer miles. This shocking development brought to us by John Kiernan at Wallet Blog, who asks a non-rhetorical question: Should you have to pay taxes on non-monetary rewards? If you think the Internal Revenue Service would be satisfied if you paid the tax on 180,000 frequent-flyer miles by offering them a Toledo-to-Cleveland coach seat, you’d be wrong.

The eloquent and forthright Paula Pant at Afford-Anything interviewed Jean Chatzky this week. After Suze Orman’s recent self-immolation, Chatzky has become the most respected mass media financial lady out there, by default. Paula asked probing questions, and if you read between the lines you can see that Jean has little patience for Dave Ramsey’s ridiculous debt snowball. Just when we thought we couldn’t love her any more than we already do.

Which makes these the Editor’s non-picks:
Do you hate money? That is, really, actively hate it? Do you ever go to your bank, withdraw a couple of thousand, then set the bills in a neat little pile and bring a Ginsu knife right down the vertical axis, laughing maniacally as you turn your assets into confetti? Then you’ll love Parenting Family Money‘s presumably serious take on buying life insurance for your children. An excerpt:
Children are the face of the future. 
No, hoverbikes are the face of the future.

Echo of Boomer & Echo explains how you have more options than ever for finding a way to put a down payment on that first house. The catch? You have to be Canadian. Give it a few more million years, and maybe there’ll be beachfront property in Saskatoon after all.

Free Money Finance gives us a book excerpt from Scrabble walk-off plays Zvi Bodie and Rachelle Taqqu, authors of Risk Less and Prosper: Your Guide to Safer Investing.

Don at Money Smart Guides has discovered that stocks sometimes go up, and occasionally go down. Therefore he wants you to invest in an index fund. By the way, if you’d bought a Dow index fund 5½ years ago, you’d have gained 0 since then.

Mutual funds get liquidated? Not often, but often enough, and FIRE Finance explains what to do when that happens.

Vancouver has changed a lot since your humble blogger lived there, many years ago. Young & Thrifty calls The City Without A Nickname home today, and remarks that it’s not a cheap place to live. Second on the continent to New York, by one estimate. (Some San Franciscans would disagree, but it’s her post.) The author explains how to save money by living somewhere expensive, and her ideas are truly groundbreaking – take in a roommate, ride the bus etc. (Note to the author: Just go to Wreck Beach already. You’re obviously thinking about it, just do it. For the calf workout, at least. Maybe you can get a blog post out of it.)

 

You New Yorkers really have it made. You get to live in a place with zero scenery and miserable winters, while surrounding yourself with 8 million insufferable blowhards. And you can never buy more groceries than you can carry. But hey, it’s the greatest city in the world. Barbara Friedberg shows how dumb you are by not living somewhere cheaper. (Paraphrasing.)

Nepotism? Yes, we do. Presented without judgment, Betty Kincaid offers 6 Reasons You’re Still Poor.

Someone named Simple Island Living guest posts at Married With Debt this week. The author’s identification with simplicity notwithstanding, she offers a complex method by which couples can eat at fine restaurants (or as the superfluous expression goes, “fine dining restaurants”) without spending the ride home yelling at each other over how much money they spent.

Congratulations to Kathie Lee Gifford’s and Roger Clemens’s kids Kody and Kolton Green for starting their very own blog. The creators of Financial Money Tips recommend that you not merely make money for its own sake, but build skills (with even greater future earning potential) while doing so. Here’s a fun game: if you read this post while counting all the cliches in it you’ll be killing two birds with one stone. Take your time with it, the playing field is wide open.

Karen Kerrigan, president and CEO of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, writes (or has a letter she wrote cut-and-pasted, one or the other) at Free Small Business Resource this week. She appeals to politicians of both U.S. parties to work together to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship. We wish her luck with that Sisyphean task.

(Post rejected because it consisted of nothing but 8 tips on how to dye your hair. Lady, it’s the Totally Money Carnival. Not the Totally Trying To Make Men Think I’m Younger Carnival.)

This week’s 1970’s Coca-Cola commercial fused to a campfire rendition of “Kumbaya” and masquerading as a blog post comes from Jill Suskind at Your Teen’s Money Skills.

We teach teens to give 10% of all the money they receive.

She’s referring to charity. May we editorialize?

Just about every teen on the planet except Dakota Fanning is a net financial negative. You come out of the womb incurring debt to your parents, and it only gets worse. Shouldn’t any extra money be going back to the family first?

Wait, there’s a reason for A owing money to B yet giving it to C. By doing so, teens can:

  • Explore the experience of knowing themselves as part of the whole of humankind.
  • Remember, always, that wealth building is not a competitive, individualistic competitive (sic) sport; rather, wealth is a tool that makes great things possible.
  • Lead the way to a world in which we take care of each other and our planet with love, compassion, and responsibility.
  • Lead the way to creating a world that works for everyone.

Never mind that comparing “wealth” to “wealth building” is like comparing salmon to salmon fishing, Angel Moya Acosta and the rest of the outspoken heroes rotting in Cuban jail cells appreciate your 15-year old “lead(ing) the way to creating a world that works for everyone.” Which will doubtless trickle down to them in no time.

There are differing opinions as to when adulthood starts, and Michigan State University has one of its own: sometime after freshman year. Money Beagle explains how the school now requires incoming students to have health insurance. What health insurance has to do with purchasing an education is anyone’s guess, but it does teach kids a valuable lesson: there will be little room for individual decision-making and responsibility in tomorrow’s America. Also, your humble blogger is glad to know that something other than his high school transcripts are preventing him from attending college in beautiful downtown East Lansing.

Jon the Saver at Free Money Wisdom needs to do himself a favor and let us know up front when he’s featuring a guest writer. We were a few lines into his post about name-brand vs. generic consumer goods when we came across this:

I have no qualms about seeking out the generic, or lower priced brand, on medicine, facial moisturizer, body wash, peanut butter (if you don’t go all natural), and my Greek yogurt.

Huh?

Jon is awfully fresh-faced and youthful. Debonair and handsome, too. Alas, he didn’t write that post. A palindromic interloper (female, fortunately) named Hannah did.

(Hannah, by the way, is one of those people who keeps her Twitter account locked for some reason. We can only imagine what she’s hiding.)

Thanks to the indomitable Erika at Newlyweds on a Budget for sparing us another story about her husband’s flatulence and inability to listen to his wife. (God, how we wish we were making that up.)

Alright, look. Not to blindside Erika, who probably thought our days of haranguing her on this site were over, but enough already. If you’re going to talk to your readers in the first person and share every intimate detail of your life – essentially turning your “personal finance” blog into your own little version of Facebook – we reserve the right to call you out. The author of this post is candid about the crushing 5-digit debt she and her long-suffering husband are living under, and then announces a monthly $515 one-time jump in her monthly income with an exclamation point. Congratulations, your debt is now 98.5% of what it was before.

That’s not even the worst of it.

I am still planning on going on a honeymoon.

Why do people stay poor again? That’s right, they incur overwhelming debt and then act as though it doesn’t exist. Sister, you don’t get a honeymoon. Just like we don’t get a Learjet, and Larry Ellison doesn’t get Japan’s entire GDP. It’s called living within your means. This post also contains what might be the most passive-aggressive sentence in the history of blogging:

Eric has been amazing this month with really making a concentrated effort to help around the house more.

Translation: He learned to flush! She posts pictures of the husband on the site, so presumably he has friends who can identify him. Friends who, if they have any self-respect, are mercilessly ribbing him about his wife’s gentle barbs as you’re reading this. Hopefully they’ve got a Doug Christie jersey picked out in just his size.

Speaking of overbearing spouses and how to deal with them, Marie at Family Money Values tells you how to travel when your significant other would rather sit on the couch. (Bonus: use of the words “experience” and “consider”.) We’re going to include a couple of excerpts. Here, try to guess if Marie has kids or not:

Whether you travel with someone or alone, you should care for your safety and security. Be aware of your surroundings. Plan your trip so that you stay in safe areas. Minimize your after dark excursions in unknown territory.

Keep extra cash and ids in a safe place – separate from your purse or wallet. Make sure you have written health information available in case you are involved in a medical emergency – allergies, medicines, blood types, known problems, doctor’s phone number and name and etc. Also carry emergency contact information (names/phone numbers/email ids) in your vehicle and on your person. Plan to keep in regular contact.

Look both ways before crossing the street. Eat your vegetables. Don’t talk to strangers. Wear a bike helmet. Better yet, walk. Do your homework. Stop pulling your sister’s hair. Stop pulling your sister’s hair. Don’t make me come back there. Stop pulling your sister’s hair. I mean it this time. 

Alright, the 3rd paragraph is fiction. (Also, if you have “extra” ids, welcome to a very select club. It’s you, Hugh Hefner, the members of Mötley Cruë and that’s about it.)

There’s such a thing as cancer insurance? Well, we’ll be dipped. Hank at Money Q&A lists it as one of the 5 types of insurance you don’t need. We agree with 4 of them, but strongly disagree with the other one – pet insurance.

If you happen to be reading this in a country with a major veterinary clinic chain that offers wellness plans, drop everything and buy one for your pet. (Technically it’s not pet “insurance”, but it’s close enough.) The sooner the better, as plans for puppies and kittens cost less than those for adult dogs and cats. You’ll save hundreds if not thousands of dollars, while preserving your pet’s life.

You take workout and diet advice from obese people, don’t you? Good, then you’ll love this post from Elizabeth at Broke Professionals, another of the countless overeducated, underperforming people who populate the personal finance blog milieu and the world as a whole. Elizabeth argues about semantic use of the word “broke”, and insists she isn’t, despite having a net worth of -$110,000. Maybe it made sense in the first draft.

Our SEO keyword-friendly post of the week comes from Colin Williams at Humble Savers, who uses “financial plan” 20 times and “financial planner” 21 times in his efforts to get you to patronize (he’s Australian, so “patronise”) a certain type of business. You’ll never guess what Colin does for a living.

There’s nothing more awesome than an ostensible personal-finance blog post that’s really an introspective song without melody. Aloysa at My Broken Coin shares her pain with us, remarking on how she loves to go shopping yet can’t seem to get out of debt. (We assume you’ve already detected the theme here.) In Aloysa’s defense, she grew up in Lithuania and didn’t discover sweet, wonderful consumerism until a late age. But still.

Andy at My Retirement Blog lists his tips for, appropriately enough, retirement saving. Most are straightforward (contribute to your 401[k]), but one sticks out: invest in defensive industries. We initially read that as “defense” industries, and thought he was encouraging us to go long on Raytheon and Northrup Grumman. But he means non-cyclical industries such as, his words, alcohol and condoms.

(We’ll save you the trouble. Andy’s sentiment might make sense as a throwaway thought, but it can’t be implemented in real life. Durex is made by Reckitt Benckiser, which trades on the London Stock Exchange. Reckitt Benckiser also makes French’s mustard, Mucinex, Clearasil, Frank’s Red Hot sauce, Calgon, Lysol, and dozens of other products that have nothing to do with contraception. Trojans are sold by Church & Dwight, which trades on the New York Exchange. The latter company also makes everything from Aim toothpaste to Nair to Arm & Hammer baking soda, so it’s not like you can invest specifically in their condom division. Nice try, though. B- for effort.)

There’s no bigger laughingstock, at least to us, than the person who drives an Audi, carries a giant credit card balance, wears Fioravanti suits and lives in a rental. The flip side of that is what Money Reasons refers to in this post, people who dress and behave below their financial level. It’s a wonderful place to be. There are few luxuries greater than not having to dress expensively, and refusing to embrace the absurd accoutrements that some people equate with having money.

Amanda L Grossman of Frugal Confessions believes in giving her keyboard a rest, which is why she wrote 103 words on how she read the manual that came with her vacuum cleaner and considers that to be a post. An excerpt:

We were gifted a wonderful Bissell vacuum cleaner about two years ago.

SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, CAN WE STOP THIS PRACTICE OF USING “GIFT” AS A VERB? We have a perfectly good word in English for transferring the possession of something to someone. Even Eddie at Finance Fox is familiar with it. Let’s try that again, shall we?

We were given a wonderful Bissell vacuum cleaner about two years ago.

There, was that so hard? By the way, our exposition of Amanda L’s post is 24% longer than the post itself.

Megan Durham guest posts at Yes, I Am Cheap, and explains how she and the other vultures in her family are busy picking her grandmother’s bones while she’s still breathing.

Alright, that’s a little dramatic. Megan talks about succession planning, which sounds a little distasteful on first appearance but is really a sensible, prudent way to figure out which survivors get what without resorting to ugly squabbles.

And just like that, it was over. Thanks for reading. Bookmark this site for more of the same. If you’d like to submit to next week’s Totally Money Blog Carnival, do so here. Our own carnival, the Carnival of Wealth, returns here Wednesday. Adios.

Filed Under: Carnivals

Carnival of Wealth, Valentine’s Day Edition

February 13, 2012

Another Carnival of Wealth? This is getting to be a habit. Here’s our usual Monday goodness, with a caveat. Next week, we’re guest hosting another blog carnival, the Totally Money Carnival. (Unless the gal who runs it yanks it from us 3 days before it’s supposed to go live, like a certain previous blog carnival host did after we’d agreed to take the reins. But we’re all adults here, right?)

That means the next Carnival of Wealth will run February 22. A Wednesday. The following week, it’ll be on Monday as always. Deadline remains the same.

Two fun facts, keeping with the theme:

-St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers.
-The Eastern Orthodox church celebrates Valentine’s Day on July 30, which makes sense, because FTD doesn’t jack up their prices then.

The Carnival of Wealth is a weekly roundup of personal finance blog posts. Submit yours here. READ THE FREAKING SUBMISSION GUIDELINES. Otherwise, just read the Carnival. On with the show.

Financial god leads off this week, sporting a fancy new logo treatment that includes a drawing of what appears to be Emperor Wu. Fg talks about how the media and some politicians have commandeered and vilified the word “capitalism” to suit their goals, taking our monetary system along for the ride. If you have something I want and I have something you want, and we exchange them, whether zero, one or both of the things being exchanged are money, that’s capitalism. Distort that – i.e., have a third party put controls on the exchange, under force of law – and you’re on the road to economic chaos.

“Junk bonds” have a bad rap, and a bad name. They’re not junk, and they’re not necessarily bonds. They offer high yields, and like any high-yield investment, they come with high risks. Dan at the aptly named High Yield Edge explains how to invest in them.

A few weeks ago we wrote about how just because you can divide one quantity by another, that doesn’t mean that you should. Free Money Finance has ratios galore in this week’s post, as he wonders whether your liquid assets match up significantly with respect to your monthly expenses, your retirement savings to your yearly income, et al.

Time for a crazy post, this one from Jeremy Biberdorf at Modest Money. It’s about how Walmart and Starbucks are “anti-competitive”, the former because it undercuts competitors (the very definition of “competitive”), the latter because it does the exact opposite. (Got that? Because we didn’t.)

Mr. Biberdorf is yet another one of the myriad people to remark about how expensive Starbucks makes its products. Which are non-essential, and which you can live quite happily without buying, which he doesn’t mention. Biberdorf manages to equate Starbucks with drug dealers, but stops short of calling Walmart a bunch of pederasts. He writes “think about how the aggressive (Starbucks) marketing may be suckering you in.” Yes, because where you choose to spend your money isn’t really a choice, it’s a command from the elders in the coffee-industrial complex.

We’re thinking Teacher Man at My University Money must be a Howard Stern fan, one inspired by sidekick Robin Quivers’s recent avowal to no longer “emasculate” her coworkers. Teacher Man wonders whether people are serious when they claim that men feel inadequate when they make less money than their wives.

Guys, the power to earn money is gender-neutral. Don’t feel emasculated if she makes more money than you. Feel emasculated if she can lift more weight than you, or knows more about home repair than you do. And if you’ve ever pushed a stroller or worn one of those papoose deals, you’ve already lost.

(Steve at 2010Tax.org submitted a post. We’d run it if he’d put it on 2012Tax.org, another domain that he owns. Why it appears on the former, or why the former is still being updated, we don’t know.)

Paul Vachon, a/k/a The Frugal Toad, thinks you should eat a snack before grocery shopping. Okay, fine, but what if you’re fat and you spend too much? Then what, smart guy?

Amanda L Grossman at Frugal Confessions thinks you should save money by saving money. Zero out your entertainment budget, clean out your pantry before buying groceries, etc. The best part about this post is Amanda repeating yet another sob story from the plus-size Financial Retard of the Month emeritus at So Over Debt “who had to miss work once because she did not have enough gas money for the commute.” Of course she did. (NB: Technically, Amanda L didn’t call her a plus-size Financial Retard of the Month emeritus. She was thinking it, though.)

(Post rejected because the author clearly spent less time on it than we would have spent recapping it.)

Ah, somebody good. Darwin’s Money points out that Dow component Pfizer has lowered its profit expectations thanks to a problematically stronger dollar. A weak dollar (relative to other currencies, not to its historical self) is wonderful for companies that sell a lot of their products overseas. Unfortunately, the president who tells the American people that he wants to pursue a “weak-dollar policy” has yet to be born.

You don’t know what’s in your 401(k), do you? Of course you should, and Don at Money Smart Guides gives you an even more compelling reason to: tax law changes that could well lead to your company making wholesale changes in its 401(k) investments.

Only 8? That’s the number of financial behaviors that irk Kevin McKee at Thousandaire. All of them are dead-on, and if you know someone who exhibits behavior #1, you have permission from us to kick that person as hard as you can in the reproductive organs.

Congratulations to Eddie at Finance Fox for hiring a proofreader. Some stuff is still slipping through, but not as much as before. Eddie tells you how to get a free credit report. From his post, we learned that Experian doesn’t have a presence in Canada; only Equifax and TransUnion. The United States doesn’t have Swiss Chalet, so everything evens out.

Will that proofreader please give Corey at 20s Finances a call? Until then, Corey recommends that you buy secondhand furniture on Craig’s List. Or get new stuff at IKEA.

Jim Wang at Bargaineering explains the difference between hard and soft credit checks. The former can impact your score. The latter hardly mean a thing.

Jeremy Waller at Personal Finance Whiz thinks you should buy health insurance. Jeremy is a big user of health insurance, his wife having just cranked out a couple of kids to the tune of almost $40,000. Of course, in a couple of years’ time you might not have a choice in the matter. If you’re American, that is. A nominally free people.

Melissa Batai at Personal Finance Journey is either masochistic or oblivious. Very few personal finance bloggers outside of Control Your Cash have any original ideas, and she’s perpetuated that by deciding to follow the herd and use Dave Ramsey’s idiotic snowball method of reducing debt. Hey, it’s easy to explain (for him) and it gives debtors the illusion of thinking they’re doing themselves good. Melissa thinks you can raise little bits of money by:

  • selling stuff around your house
  • getting a part-time job.

We included those suggestions because if you were in such a situation, selling your junk and taking another job never, ever, would have crossed your mind. Did we mention Melissa has a master’s degree?

Tim Ferriss talked about reading Stoic philosophers, therefore every blogger who fancies himself a life coach has taken to reading the Stoics, too. Including John at Married With Debt. John has recently taken to farming out his posts, but he wrote this one in which he gives people tips for what to do when they get fired. At no point does he suggest starting a business and taking a gamble. Of course not. Like most people, he’d rather be defensive. (It’s cool, he’s not going to read this and we’re not attacking him personally anyway.)

But come on. Check out this excerpt:

INSTANT MONEY SAVERS IN CASE OF JOB LOSS:

  • Cancel unneeded subscriptions (magazines, wine of the month, gym, cable, home phone)

  • Cancel childcare

  • Cancel planned vacations or purchases you’ve been saving for

  • Sell items on Craigslist, eBay, or have a yard sale

  • Sell an unneeded vehicle

  • Downgrade vehicle insurance

  • Move children to public school

  • Rent a spare room out if you have one

  • Sell your house

  • Donate plasma or “other” fluids

  • Max out credit cards (if you need to eat, this should be an option)

  • Radically downsize grocery budget

  • Sell stocks, precious metals and other equities (might want to wait on this)

  • Tap your 401k or retirement (it’s an emergency, remember)

This advice, like most in the personal finance blogging world, comes in two categories:

  • glaringly obvious
  • unhelpful.

If you lose your income, obviously you’re going to think about cutting expenses. John thinks you might resign yourself to selling illegal drugs, get sentenced to 30 years with no possibility of parole, and then around year 14 think, “Damn! Why didn’t I take my children out of that private school? I could have had a few thousand bucks without committing a federal crime. Can I have a do-over?”

Sell an asset (your house). Incur gigantic debts with huge interest rates by maxing out your credit cards. Masturbate into a cup. Yeah, all of those are fantastic. John, would it kill you to self-edit your every thought? John also gave us this prevarication:

people who would generally not have to fear job loss are waking up each day wondering, am I next? This includes teachers, firefighters, police officers, government workers

Find us a government worker or firefighter who’s been fired recently. Government is the only growth industry in this awful economy. And to get fired from your position as a cop…well, we’d say you’d have to kill an innocent civilian but we live in Las Vegas, where the local cops treat everyone the way the LAPD treats black people.

So yeah, that’s our bizarro Post of the Week.

At least John doesn’t suggest getting a master’s degree, which is foolishness writ large unless you’re majoring in something worthwhile. Jeffrey at Money Spruce has multiple engineering degrees, and even he isn’t getting full value out of them.

(Post rejected because the author simply recapped what she spent money on this month. On the 19th, she went out with a friend for sushi. Let’s see if we can’t find a slot for that on the Who-Gives-A-Sh*t Channel.)

If you want to guarantee yourself a permanent place in the CoW, either write something horrible or something really good. Mich at Beating the Index has chosen the latter. Mich has a niche – Canadian resource stocks – and he knows his stuff. This week he regales us with a fish story about Aroway Energy and a couple of other promising stocks.

If you’re not quite ready for Mich, check out Your Finances Simplified with a primer for investing in stocks. Hey, we all have to start somewhere.

Shawanda Greene at You Have More Than You Think is simultaneously raw, hilarious and insightful with this week’s post in which she compares herself to a honey badger (an actual honey badger, not Tyrann Mathieu) and suggests that you do the same if you’re serious about reaching your financial goals. Note: This post is rated PG.

A Blinkin at Funancials clearly wrote this week’s post on a dare.

“I can tie anything into the financial markets. Any topic. Give me one.”
“Uh, farming.”
“Pfft. Give me a hard one.”
“Okay. How about…snowboarding?”
“Done. Watch me.”

Read it. It’s funny and relevant.

Need more useless advice? Jester at The Ultimate Juggle can help. Kiss ass and keep an eye out for open positions so you can get a raise. Our favorite line?

A general rule of thumb is that with more responsibilities, you will have a higher income.

Thanks.

Bob at Christian PF has found some places that’ll let you file your state taxes for free. He means “free”, not “for free”, but we get his point. Of course, if you lived in Nevada you wouldn’t have that problem in the first place.

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff points out that the Federal Reserve has admitted they won’t be raising interest rates anytime soon. Not this year, not next year. Daniel thinks that this isn’t necessarily a good idea if you want to get a mortgage. We don’t necessarily agree, and not surprisingly, Daniel inspired a lively debate in his comments section. An intelligent debate, too. A respectful one. No one compared anyone else to Hitler.

Luke Bonds (sure) at Learn Bonds writes about the 4 types of bond the U.S. government issues. Well, “Luke’s” Indian remote assistant did. After a couple of Kalyani Black Labels, we’re guessing.

Dividend Ninja thinks that an undervalued bond market means that this could be a great time to strike. He recommends that you look at more than yields (dividends, duh) before jumping into bonds. This is a comprehensive post – in fact, it’s the first of 2 parts. Read slowly and purposefully. And…we’re done.

Not too bad, huh? We’ll give that CoW a 7. Join us next WEDNESDAY. ’til then.

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