Parents, this is what happens when you don't let your daughters play with Barbie dolls

Welcome to the newest edition of the Carnival of Wealth, and this one’s a doozy. Quick primer: the Carnival of Wealth features the most inspired, most inspiring, and occasionally most inane personal finance blog posts of the last week. Submit yours here. If you don’t have a blog, even better. Just read. Let’s get it on:

Another “year-end” meta-post? Hell, it’s almost 2013. Julie at The Family CEO Blog lists her most popular posts of 2011. If enough of you read this one, it might make her 2012 year-end list.

LaTisha Styles at Young Adult Finances asks if you remember Little House on the Prairie. If she’s talking about the TV series, not if you’re under 30 you don’t. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original book about the finer points of churning butter, voting Whig and dying of consumption is still available everywhere, however. Anyhow, LaTisha explains how futures contracts have helped many a farmer, even a modern-day one, avoid disaster.

Lovers of the English language continue to weep and gnash their teeth, yet Eddie at Finance Fox remains undaunted. He managed to cram two tired idioms into one sentence this week, reminding us that “the deals on vehicles are dime (sic) a dozen and they are selling like hot cakes.” No word on whether the dealers are giving the store away, or pricing everything to move.

St. Paul had the story of Christ, Dan at ETF Base has dividend stocks. Dan won’t rest until every heathen on the planet takes to heart the good news of companies that pay you just for owning a piece of them. This week he discusses covered call options. The post is only 2 paragraphs long, so don’t blink.

Paula Pant at Afford-Anything is always money, and she’s now taken to reviewing a book every Friday. (Hands up all of you who don’t even read a book a week, let alone review one.) The book she reviews this week is about building wealth, and hinges on the following premise: Sometimes, stock prices are justified. Other times, enthusiasm or fear carries the market away. When that happens, stock prices become silly and provide a rational investor with a chance to profit.

So if you’ve got a stock in mind after reading that, how to buy it? John at Buy Stocks Online Info saves commission fees by using direct stock purchase plans and discount brokers.

They have satellite radio in Canada? This is the country that welcomed the internal combustion engine only in 2005. Teacher Man at My University Money recently subscribed to SiriusXM, the company that gives radio shows to amateurs like Rosie O’Donnell and Martha Stewart’s daughter yet can’t figure out why it’s losing money. (Meanwhile, Phil Hendrie languishes on AM overnights, which is criminal.) Find out how Teacher Man wore a sales rep down and saved money on his subscription. And for our own hilarious SiriusXM story, read a CoW excerpt from last month.

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog asks a sobering question that you have to ask yourself if you’re serious about this: How much of your investment portfolio can you afford to lose? Ken explains the simple but critical math behind portfolio break-even analysis in the first of a series.

Why are you not subscribing to PK’s feed at Don’t Quit Your Day Job? Do you know how few personal finance bloggers actually take the time to write nothing but consistently worthwhile posts? PK is like a hairier, homelier version of Paula Pant. This week he defines savings for us, but with plenty of levels and nuance.

At the rate he’s going, by 2022 Your Finances Simplified and his family will have a net worth of $273,539,162.88. Their net worth more than doubled last year, and despite our estimates, it’s probably not a geometric progression. It’s still pretty impressive though. Find out how he did it.

NOTE: The word “coupon” doesn’t appear anywhere in his post, nor does the phrase “make your own deodorant”. In fact, YFS even admits “…our discretionary spending is off the charts to some.  We are far from a frugal couple.” We’ll say it again: stop counting pennies, stop thinking small.  

Whatever. Even using boldface isn’t going to make the slightest difference to some of you, so here’s a post from Kyle Taylor at The Penny Hoarder on how to hoard pennies by running your dishwasher at night and using laundry balls, whatever they are. Learn about a company called My Energy, and try to figure out how they make money, because we have no idea.

It took long enough, but savings bonds are finally going paperless. Jill at My Dollar Plan explains how the favorite investment instrument of grandparents and great-grandparents across the fruited plain is now available only via TreasuryDirect.gov.

(Aside: “Gift” is a noun. “Give” is a verb. Anyone who says “He gifted me an iPhone for my birthday”, please gift us a break and stop.)

The mysterious W at Off Road Finance would never do that. He’s too busy enjoying his new status among the moneyed. W officially left the middle class this year, entering the 80th percentile of income and maintaining the habits that got him there.

From deep beneath the Saskatchewan crust comes another (formerly) anonymous blogger, Nelson at Financial Uproar, with this week’s post that requires no description beyond its title: “Screw It. I’ll Just Masturbate Instead.” We’d make the “Ladies, did we mention he’s single?” joke but the post isn’t what you think, whatever whatever you think might be. Bonus: two women get into it with each other in the comments section.

After looking through the archives, we’re not sure which pronouns to use with Penny Pinching Professional, but we’re going to use feminine ones. Reasons con:

-she’s an engineer;
-the hand in the logo is a man’s.

Reasons pro:

-she submits under the name “Penny”;
-she tells a story about spending the weekend at a craft fair with her spouse (and indeed uses the unhelpful word “spouse”.) If Penny is indeed a guy, any guy who would admit to going to a craft fair isn’t going to mind being referred to by feminine pronouns anyway;
-she gives condescendingly basic advice.

This week, PPP is full of Trent Hammian goodness. She recommends that you include your name and your email address on your résumé. Also, you should include the area code with your phone number. And…you should list your relevant work experience (italics ours). And here you idiots were applying for jobs without giving your names. Now you know better.

Boomer of & Echo is among the 89% of Canadians who hasn’t been defrauded by a shady investment. This week, she tells you how to spot investment fraud. Most of it is common sense stuff, but it’s pretty comprehensive and it’s handy to have it all on the same page.

Thank God Ray at Financial Highway started writing his own stuff again. This week he reminds us that it’s once again the season for RRSPs, those curious little retirement plans our Canadian readers have. Canada’s banking oligopoly is after your business. Whom should you give it to?

One more Canadian post, but not before a Canadian joke:

Q: How do you get a group of 8 Canadians to stop loitering in a public area? 
A: Say “Please stop loitering.”

Credit Cards Canada is responsible for the most beautiful and colorful infographics we’ve ever seen on a blog. These put the USA Today charts to shame. This week, Janet explains the benefits of rewards cards, and how self-defeating they are if you’re dumb enough to carry a balance.

Money saving tips? Sure, why not. It’s a carnival. Bob at Christian PF encourages you to comparison shop, maintain your old stuff instead of buying new stuff, live in a smaller house, use coupons…pretty Simple Dollarish advice, except for Bob’s recommendation that you use a PerkStreet Financial cash-back debit card! That’s PerkStreet! Which we’re sure Bob would still recommend you use even if the link in his post didn’t go through LinkOffers.org before ending up on PerkStreet’s handy signup page.

Darwin’s Money was skeptical, as anyone should be, about companies that offer no-cost refinancing. He examined them from every angle, and decided to spring for such a maneuver. We still wouldn’t touch them with a 10′ pole (see Fox, Finance) but Darwin gives clear reasons for his decision.

Life insurance, on the other hand, we don’t see any sound arguments for. KT at Personal Finance Journey thinks otherwise, however, listing all the steps you need to take before committing to a plan (sorry, but we can’t call it an “investment”) that only pays if you die and that even then offers its beneficiaries worse returns than they could find elsewhere. But hey, protection and all that.

(Post rejected for crimes against grammar. Look, it’s swell that you’re attempting to write in your second language, but we have standards here. Develop some proficiency first.)

(Post rejected for its absurd premise. Sir, stop lying. No one is emailing you to ask where they can find coupons. Alright, for kicks we’ll include one line from your post:

Don’t forget to check at the local coffee shop like Starbucks or McDonalds for extra newspaper inserts or anywhere people buy newspapers. Often many people leave them behind.

Seriously? You call that content? You think that recommendation adds anything to anyone’s life? Enough. But congratulations on getting 18 mommy bloggers to link to you. We don’t do that crap here.)

Amanda L Grossman (we don’t know what happened to the period, either) at Frugal Confessions has a frugal confession to make: she got a bunch of cheap magazines at Magazines.com.

Kevin McKee at Thousandaire is back yet again. Kevin argues, quite reasonably, that the only investing strategy that makes sense is buy and hold. Short term investing, even for just one year, seems like a complete crapshoot. That is, of course, if you don’t plan on dying in one year. So unless you’re Zsa Zsa Gabor, read his post.

Ever live in a rotten neighborhood? Aloysa at My Broken Coin did. So did a friend of hers, whom she ended up embarrassing herself in front of. Find out how Aloysa backpedaled, and what her friend was doing in that trailer park in the first place.

Don at Money Smart Guides joins us this week, and we give him the standard CoW welcome. Don spent $500 eating out last month, instead of his normal $100, and while he didn’t get fat, he started down the path. Don will spend less eating out next month.

You have to love Erika at Newlyweds on a Budget. You have to love any blogger who takes heat in one week’s edition of the CoW, clearly doesn’t bother reading the CoW, doesn’t acknowledge that we included her (despite us emailing her to tell her the carnival was live), runs a guest post from an unidentified submitter, goes 6 days (and counting) without responding to a commenter who asks her who wrote the guest post, is possibly a registered sex offender, upon further review seems to have erroneously claimed the post was indeed written by a guest, might have a drug problem, can’t pay back her student loans, and even has high school student loans. How long before our next Retard of the Month?

At least Corey at 20s Finances writes his own posts.  Corey averaged a 3.7 in college despite a love for placing plural nouns with singular verbs and vice versa. Corey does helpfully define loans. “Loans require that you pay money back to them with interest.” Thank you.

Lynn Truong has encamped at Free Money Finance, with a guest post about how to avoid impulse buys. 8 billion other people have already written on this topic, but to Lynn’s credit, she comes up with some new if impractical suggestions. E.g., freeze your credit card in a block of ice. Which you’d think might be a joke, but the rest of her post is completely straight. It’s awesome when people suggest actions that they’d never undertake themselves.

Somebody named Jester at something called The Ultimate Juggle makes his CoW debut this week. Here’s a line that separates the unreadable bloggers from the all-time greats: “If you are thinking of investing in property, you should make sure to consider whether it is worth your time to invest in the property.” How thinking of investing in property differs from making sure to consider whether it is worth your time to invest in the property, we’re not sure. If you’re hungry, you should consider whether you want to eat. Food.

Passive Income to Retire is a little more detailed than Jester. PITR explains how he’s using rental properties as an income stream, and ultimately a source of cash flow for his retirement years.

This is quite the rocky patch. Yet another fortune cookie-length post, this one from Wayne at Young Family Finance who tells you how much you should tip at restaurants. Wayne concludes that you should pay 15% no matter what, and that you should use a calculator to tell you what 15% of your bill is. He says if you can’t afford to pay 15%, you shouldn’t be eating out. We’ll add that if you need someone to tell you to pay 15%, you shouldn’t be leaving the house. And if you need a calculator to tell you how to figure out what 15% of something is, congratulations for reading this far without drooling.

A Blinkin of Funancials is our favorite presidential homonym. (There are no others, we looked. Jim, Me Poke is as close as it gets.) This week A attempts to do a little reverse engineering of the FICO score. No one has ever managed to, but A summarizes it as don’t carry more than 30% of the card’s limit, and don’t close long-dormant accounts. We’ll take it a little further and say that 30% is 30% too high.

Shaun at Grammatically Questionable Family Finance Smart Family Finance writes about check “indorsements” this week. He thinks that using the right conjunction in the payee field on your checks can save you a lot of hassle, if you’re the kind of person who writes checks.

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff, save us. Daniel comes through yet again, this time with a post about how taking his car to a technician saved him money. Daniel got the shop to agree to give him a loaner, then drove away as fast as he could before they could change their minds. He returned to the shop 1000 miles later, his car none the worse for wear.

Every week, there’s one post that deserves the most attention. This week it’s from Briana Myricks at 20 and Engaged. To recap:

Populist financial guru Suze Orman apparently loves credibility as much as she loves penis. (Sorry. The pitch was right over the plate.) Ms. Orman recently lent her name to one of those prepaid debit cards created specifically for imbeciles. If you’re not familiar, it works like this: some fame whore – Kim Kardashian or Young Jeezy or whoever – emblazons their name and face on a particular brand of debit card. The cards are an unbelievable ripoff, with a regular monthly fee, a fee for calling customer service, a fee for failing to maintain a minimum balance, etc. This is the kind of product that a rational marketplace should have no room for, but again, people are idiots.

It’s bad enough to be a vapid generic celebrity and attach your name to such a card, but it’s something quite different if you’re a self-styled financial advisor. The Bancorp Bank is the institution that issues this steaming plastic cow patty, and whatever they’re paying Ms. Orman, it’s enough to get her to disavow her principles regarding building wealth and taking on debt.

Briana, and several other personal finance bloggers, called Ms. Orman out on Twitter. And they were relatively polite about it. Ms. Orman responded by tearing into whoever dared cross her path.

(Note to foul-tempered famous people: you do know Twitter is instantaneous, right? It’s also permanent if you don’t delete your tweets, which you probably don’t know how to do anyway. It’s amazing how many celebrities create a veer of propriety and then destroy it on Twitter. If you’re ever depressed about your place in the universe, read Keith Olbermann’s feed sometime and we promise you’ll feel better about yourself. It’s one venomous response after another to ordinary people, telling them how stupid they are. Why a rich and influential person would waste his time doing this beats us.)

The Bancorp Bank must have no problem with Ms. Orman getting confrontational with regard to the card in question, because she dug her heels in (well, her combat boots) and started straight-up insulting people who dared to point out the hypocrisy of her new endeavor. Not just Briana, but several of our other CoW regulars, too.

Purely from a business standpoint, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you go on Twitter and tell Nastia Liukin that the Subway sandwiches she endorses are horrible*, she’s not going to respond and tell you what a pathetic loser you are for not eating there. And if she did, Subway management wouldn’t let her do so for long.

Maybe Ms. Orman can’t live with the reality that she endorses a terrible product, and now she’s doing whatever she can to stop people from using it. Or maybe she’s just an angry hoyden. Regardless, the bottom line is that you shouldn’t care what other people think and you shouldn’t use a card that charges you for spending your own money. Both points are obvious, but again, see the part about the planet being populated with retards.

That was fun. Some slow going, but it really picked up at the end. See you next week.

*Don’t you dare. Nastia is a beautiful little tsarevna and doesn’t deserve your catcalls. 

See you in December, sweet things

It’s the least wonderful time of the year. The time when the 12 days of Christmas are officially over, and all that remains is frigidity. Those of us who use Coffee-mate now have to suffer through vanilla and unflavored varieties until the limited-release period returns. Why are there no mass protests outside Nestlé headquarters?

Enough venting. On with the carnival. If you’re new here, every Monday we showcase the most gripping personal finance blog posts of the previous week. If you want to submit, and you have an established blog (or even a nascent one), read the directions here. Otherwise, just read. No further ado:

Daniel at Sweating The Big Stuff said something nice about us last week, so he gets the coveted top spot. He avails us of something we never knew about, but think is a fantastic idea. Fee-free ATMs. (Or for the redundant among you, fee-free ATM machines.) How do the purveyors of these machines do it? The same way TV broadcasters, radio broadcasters, and this very website do.

We entered Financial Uproar’s stock-picking contest, and while that site’s Nelson is laughing too hard at our choice of Netflix to bother submitting to the CoW, another entrant did submit. Teacher Man at My University Money chose a temp agency, a quasi-mutual fund, an oil-and-gas driller, and the most overpublicized company on Earth.

(By the way, Netflix has moved from $71.40 to $86.49 in the week since the contest started. Yes, we’re the idiots.)

Back in August, Neo at Net Worth Protect wrote about how to manage your investment fund expenses. No one read it back then, so he gussied his post up with colorful charts and graphs and tried again. Neo argues that not knowing the difference between a passive mutual fund and a managed one can cost you dearly.

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog (it stands for Arbor Asset Allocation Model Portfolio) is back with a piece on gold as a suitable investment for 2012. This is NOT your standard piece on gold. Are you looking for returns, or are you looking to preserve? Answer before buying.

Hank at Money Q&A has 8 tips for how to save money on car repairs. 7 of them are pretty self-evident, but tip #5 is worth the price of admission all by itself. Buy a code reader. They’re easy to use, and with one you’ll never be at the mercy of an unscrupulous technician again. Thanks to Hank for popularizing that, and thanks to the beefy gal at the AutoZone in Douglas, Wyoming for selling us a cheap one last summer and helping us fix that evaporation leak.

Some of you are still carrying consumer debt, not really sure why. It’s like smoking. You can’t say you can “quit anytime (you) want” and expect people to take you seriously. Quit now. Your Finances Simplified gives a 6-point plan for doing to your debt what West Virginia did to Clemson in the Orange Bowl.

The phonetically frivolous A Blinkin at Funancials answers the fundamental question about Facebook that we’ve had for some time: Why do people willingly hand over the details of their lives?

Actually, he didn’t ask that. He asked how Facebook makes money, which is equally ponderous. Yes, the company receives fat checks from Zynga, but is that enough? If you’ve logged in recently you might have noticed a feature box above the news feed. A’s curiosity prompted him to click the box, and he ended up face-to-face with an Indian girl who introduced him to Facebook Ads.

Every now and then the founder of the Carnival of Wealth, Shailesh Kumar, likes to check in and make sure we haven’t completely ruined his brainchild. He resurfaced last week and is back again this week, guesting at Business Insider. Shailesh explains how big institutional investors on Wall Street aren’t necessarily at an advantage. In fact, their size can work against them. Institutional investors operate under constraints that create inefficiencies a smart small investor can exploit. You just need to learn where to look for these pockets of profits.

We welcome LaToya Jackson to the carnival this week. She’s writing under the pseudonym Amanda L. Grossman at Frugal Confessions. Here’s an excerpt:

I always believe that you should shoot for the heavens because when you miss you will still fall among the stars—and the stars are a beautiful place to be.

Man, that’s deep. LaToya started 2011 with the goal of saving half of her take-home pay. In this post, we find out if she pulled it off or not.

We welcome Shaun at Young Adult Finances this week. He comes over (temporarily, we think) from Smart Family Finance with an actionable post on how to time rental income for your taxes if you happen to be a landlord. Shaun points out that deferring income is a lot easier than accelerating it. Still, that doesn’t damper our enthusiasm for this line:

Congratulations! Congress has just passed legislation raising your tax rates for next year. You now have incentive to earn as much money as you can in the current year…

Aloysa at My Broken Coin details her accomplishments and failures of 2011. Like most people, she spent too much and didn’t save enough. Unlike most people, she’s candid enough to admit it.

We quoted the late Artie Lange in our awesome book, Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, the only personal finance volume you’ll ever need (and available on Kindle!) He mocked the absurdity of gift cards: “Instead of cash, which is good everywhere, I’m going to give you a special kind of cash that’s only good at one store.” Kevin McKee at Thousandaire shares a similar belief in his latest post, in which he hacks and leverages his way to something worthwhile out of unwanted gift cards.

(Dang. The streak is over. An unreadable submission with zero content and a bunch of platitudes. Normally we’d goof on something like that, but instead we’ll just delete it. This week we’re going to try to stay positive. We’d say “this year”, but who are we kidding? Enjoy our new leaf before it turns brown and falls off the tree.)

This week, Passive Income To Retire doesn’t offer a post so much as a solicitation for posts. He plans to retire in 2-3 years. If you’ve already done it, he wants to know how. Not surprisingly, passive income is almost certainly going to be part of it.

Corey at 20s Finances explains what to do if you fall behind in paying off your debts. His answer? Buy lots of lottery tickets! Alright, that’s not his answer. You’ll have to read his post.

If all of you were like Paula Pant at Afford-Anything, the Carnival of Wealth would be the greatest and most popular blog carnival in the universe instead of a collection of occasional insight punctuated by one-liners. Then again, if all of you were like Paula Pant, there’d be no need for a weekly roundup of personal finance strategies. You’d be too busy buying assets, selling liabilities, and enjoying life. This week, Mademoiselle Pant explains how she’s investing, ahem, 100% of her 2012 income. Read it to believe it. And hopefully, emulate it.

You’re not going to believe this, but there’s a blog written by a woman who fell into credit card debt. And who gained unwanted weight. And who wants to communicate better with her husband. And who started a fad diet. And who wants to have a baby. And who hits an average of 3 roadblocks a year while trying and failing to lose weight. And who loves to write authoritatively about marriage, despite being married for barely a year. And who “coupons”. (And who uses “coupon” as a verb.) The blog is called Newlyweds on a Budget, it’s hosted by Erika, and sweet Lord is it groundbreaking. Real uncharted territory. Erika doesn’t know it, but you can access her Twitter feed here.

These steps are easy and self-evident, but millions of people refuse to put them into action. Check your credit report, prioritize your debts if you were dumb enough to incur them in the first place, sell your unnecessary stuff etc. Philip Taylor at PT Money arranges them in handy list form. (Our inclusion of a post that advocates Dave Ramsey’s retarded snowball method doesn’t mean we endorse said method.)

Another post about cutting your expenses? Yes. The reduction of expenses is to personal finance blogs what trimming one’s tummy is to the front pages of those women’s magazines at the supermarket. Bob at Christian PF suggests that you brown-bag, clip coupons, drink water instead of liquids that cost money, and perform similar acts that you never would have thought of in a billion years had he not suggested them.

Ready for something useful and insightful? Because we sure are. Dan at ETF Base lists the top exchange-traded funds of 2011, both leveraged and non-. Most of them stressed conservatism: we’ll see if the same mindset still applies in 2012.

John at Buy Stocks Online Info is going to get rich off dividend stocks or die trying. His progress is slow, but he’s got time on his side. And a knack for details.

Darwin’s Money is here as always, with a post that needs no exposition beyond its headline: “The Most Expensive Coffee on Earth – From an Animal’s Butt. Curious How it Tastes?”

Another debutante is Nick at Step Away From the Mall, who encourages you to forgo the clear coat polish on your next car wash. Do that, save 19¢ by going with the regular-size fast food meal instead of the large one, and by Nick’s calculations you’ll be on your way to millionairehood.

One more rookie, and we’ll have reached our quota. Adam at Tax On Tax Off enters the arena, with a post on how to reduce your student loan obligations. He doesn’t recommend that you just avoid the collection letters or petition your elected representatives. Rather, Adam avails us of the IRS’s student loan interest deduction. It’s contingent on how much money you make, but it’s also a chance to reduce your tax bite if you’re paying attention.

Finally, Boomer of Boomer & Echo has a plan for you Canadians who want to want to turn your Registered Retirement Savings Plan savings into something that looks like an actual pension: a life annuity. It’s the perfect investment vehicle for those of you who’d rather have the certainty of fixed income than the potential of growth.

Wow, that more than makes up for last week’s brief carnival. Thanks for making it to the end of another one, and we’ll see you next week. And every Wednesday and Friday. And on Adaptu. And Investopedia. And ProBlogger.

If you're going to hire workers to submit to the CoW for you, make sure they don't sleep through the deadline.

Apparently the world shuts down the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Because the barrage of submissions we received for this week’s Carnival of Wealth is more of a trickle. Or an subcutaneous drip. There weren’t even any submissions to make fun of (not that we’d dare, at least not this week.) The good news is that the folks who did submit will receive special care and attention.

Again, the Carnival of Wealth is the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading. Dozens (or this week, units) of posts from every vertex of the internet, culled and collated into one easy-to-digest package. If you want to get in on next week’s action, or want to see if the submission link still works, click here. And now we begin:

The inimitable and fecund* Free Money Finance is back, with an excerpt from the book When Life Strikes: Weathering Financial Storms by Cal Brown. Mr. Brown is a certified financial planner and tax analyst who restates some universal axioms. Among them are Don’t quit your job without a plan, and Don’t think your employer will always be there for you. He couldn’t be more right, but lots of people would rather do anything than heed his advice.

We thought we’d already seen every wacky Canadian spelling there is (“flavour”, “programme”, and our favorite, “piezzoelectricity”), and then we remembered that we forgot about “manoeuvre”. But Teacher Man at My University Money didn’t. This week, he demonstrates the Smith Manoeuvre, which illustrates how to deduct your mortgage payments from your taxes.

(All the American readers are scratching their heads right now, just like they did during the mention of last week’s “Boxing Day” edition of the CoW. Yes, Canadians don’t have the luxury that we do of deducting mortgage interest payments from their taxes. Then again, Canada has that year-round pleasant climate, so it’s a tradeoff. Pleasant if you’re a musk ox.)

Teacher Man is unlike most personal finance bloggers in that he usually avoids talking about his personal situation. As you’ve probably seen, myriad bloggers are quick to bare the uncomfortable and embarrassing details of their own finances. Why does daycare cost so much, why won’t the bank forgive this useless but enormous student loan I took on, I can’t believe how much my bar tab was last weekend, etc. Teacher Man only goes into his own life when it’s relevant, as it is today.

Wait, in Canada you can get your company pension as a lump sum upon retirement, instead of monthly payments? Yes you can. Boomer & Echo break down the advantages and disadvantages to both strategies.

Death, taxes, and Darwin’s Money submitting to the Carnival. And speaking of taxes, this week Darwin explains how Social Security taxes will change for Americans this year. We can’t even classify the change as a “hike” nor a “reduction”, because it depends on your perspective, your profession, and your salary. Darwin gives the details, while the idea of a uniform and simple tax code continues to be ignored by politicians of every stripe. Well, every stripe but one.

Look who stopped by this week. Why, it’s the Chairman Emeritus of the Carnival of Wealth himself, Shailesh Kumar of Value Stock Guide. Shailesh handed the CoW off to us a few months ago and we haven’t destroyed it yet. This week he selects 32 dividend stocks for 2012. These stocks have great dividend yield, a history of dividend growth, and the dividends themselves are sustainable. The post includes a downloadable spreadsheet with even more data.

For our British readers, and we know we have more than a few, Adam at Magical Penny explains junior individual savings accounts. As their name implies, they’re a way to save money for your kids before they know what hit ’em. You can transfer junior ISAs between cash and stocks, you can avoid taxes on them, and they make great Christmas gifts if you’re Eastern Orthodox and aren’t celebrating until Friday.

Tim via Bob at Christian PF explains umbrella insurance, term life insurance, renter’s insurance, insurance against natural disasters, and other ways you can make bets with the insurance company. If you die, get robbed, or lose your house in an earthquake, you win!

Finally, Phil at PT Money reminds us that this year, 401(k) plan sponsors have to tell our functionaries at the Department of Labor how much those 401(k) fees are and what they go to. This is an immensely valuable post for those of you who never knew that 401(k) investment and administrative fees even existed.

Well, will you look at that? We stretched this truncated CoW out to a decent length, after all. We’ll do it again next Monday. See you then.

*Verbally fecund. We have no clue about his fecundity in other realms.