Why yes, this is a bacon-wrapped turducken.
Another installment in the only blog carnival worth a damn*, the Carnival of Wealth. Here’s how it works. Every week, the top echelon of personal finance bloggers (and some from the subgroup that makes the top echelon possible) submit their gems for review. If we like their posts, or find them sufficiently entertaining or noteworthy, we post them here every Monday. If you want to get in on the fun, submit here. Or just sit and watch, that’s cool too. In fact, we prefer it. Now, on with the show:
The incorrigible Free Money Finance borrows an excerpt from Tony Steuer’s The Questions and Answers on Life Insurance Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Simple Answers for Your Complex Questions. Which, honestly, is a way more engaging read than you’d think. We’re not going to tell you not to buy life insurance (at least not in this post), but we will tell you not to buy life insurance until you understand the major differences among policies. Tony via FMF explains them clearly.
Ever wonder why a company, perhaps yours, announces layoffs well in advance? Darwin’s Money did, and his discoveries got our attention. Our favorite justification? “Give crappy raises, and you’ll be happy.” Hopefully you wage slaves are getting this all down.
Remember in 2009, when the Tea Party protestors used public areas and police cars as toilets, sold drugs, died of overdoses, endangered children, stretched civic resources, played unlistenable music, bitched about the inevitable aftermaths of the poor decisions they’d made, committed wanton vandalism, and just generally sat around being unproductive for months at a time?
Of course you don’t, because it never happened. There was barely a discarded gum wrapper at any Tea Party protest, as distinguished from the current gaggle of Occupy (City) protests throughout the United States and Canada. Aloysa at My Broken Coin wishes the current doylt of Occupy protesters would just go home, and you can probably figure out whether we agree with her or not.
Actionable and full of worthwhile advice; that’s what we’re talking about. Your Finances Simplified explains how to buy a foreclosed-upon house. You can’t just show up with a wad of cash and try to make things happen. Instead, read this killer post and learn how to profit off other people’s failure. Someone will. Why not you?
If you ever start or join an investment club, and someone mentions that the treasurer position is still open, just cut them a check and run like hell. Madison at My Dollar Plan didn’t get stuck with that job, but the person who did had to submit the club’s cost-basis reporting to its broker. Cost-basis reporting is another red tape hurdle that ordinary citizens have to clear in the modern U.S. economy, but no, that has nothing to do with stagnation. Nothing at all.
Wallet Blog advocates what we’ve been preaching for some time, and which a close look at the retards of the Occupy Wall Street movement will reinforce: an unspecified college degree is vastly overvalued. Too many degrees chasing too few openings makes a non-applicable college education less than worthwhile.
Boomer and Echo think you should hold onto your stocks. Unless you have a good reason to sell, in which case you should sell.
Kevin McGee at Thousandaire is supposed to be the most entertaining and/or funniest personal finance blog out there, so we’re curious as to what he had to say. This week he advocates buying precious metals for more than face value. Not just to hedge and to diversify, but in the event of nuclear war. In which case you can eat your silver. We’re glad that Thousandaire knew to use brackets inside parentheses, but puzzled as to his shorthand use of “$2.5k” for “$2500”. You save one whole character his way, but if you type out the digits instead you do have a double o in there, which means you’re barely expending any effort at all to type the numeral out in full. And yes, it took us well over 100 characters to point that out.
Another McGee? JT at Money Mamba joins the carnival this week, and we like what he has to say. First off, in his bio he espouses the use of hard and resolute numbers over the moral ambivalence of words. Also, he’s frank enough to admit that a restricted-calorie frozen meal tastes a lot better when topped off with a turkey sandwich. JT appears to live at home, given his liberal references to his mother and the fact that he looks about 15 years old. Anyhow, this week he explains why time is often a greater consideration than money. If you need to buy an asset now, good for you. If you can’t wait to get your hands on a liability, you’re going to end up going poor. Follow the kid, he’s going places. And returning home before curfew.
Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff clearly put tons of work into this week’s post, in which he asks his friends for one-line responses concerning what they like and dislike about money. One woman’s objection was that “it limits you”, whatever that means. Adam, on the other hand, “hates the taste”, which at least makes sense.
Hank at Money Q&A lists the 10 best personal finance books “that everyone should read”, which presumably means it’s a historical list, not just a current one. We’re assuming they’re not in order, otherwise Dave Ramsey wouldn’t be ahead of Benjamin Graham. Also, Hank forgot this one, but it’s all good.
Finally, Phil at PT Money rails against gifts that add to “the endless junk that we Americans have.” Which seems to imply that Swedes and Portuguese don’t amass stuff that they don’t need, but whatever.
Same time next Monday. Thanks for coming. Oh, and to our Canadian readers, happy upcoming Thursday.
*Excluding all the carnivals we submit to. Those are uniformly wonderful.
