This is the Mormon temple, the most noteworthy piece of architecture in Snowflake, Arizona, population 6000. Snowflake is 5600′ above sea level, and temperatures get down to the mid-20s in winter, thus it’s reasonable to assume that the town is named after the type of precipitation.

Except it isn’t. It’s named after its founders, Erastus Snow and William Jordan Flake. Count that as the mind-blowingest fact we’ve learned recently. And kudos to Mr. Flake for not insisting on top billing.

Justin McCurry at Root of Good steps into the top spot this week, where he explains how to reduce your auto expenses. Justin’s a recent and welcome addition to the CoW, largely because he doesn’t write obvious and repetitive dross. Over the years, we’ve received enough submissions with titles like “Auto Costs on the Cheap” that we know what they’re going to say before we read them. Carpool. Shop for inexpensive gas. Combine errands into one trip. Change your oil per the service manual recommendations. The kind of obtuse pap that Trent Hamm has made a living repeating. Justin digs deeper, first suggesting that you buy a car that’s good enough to last for 13+ years. Or in his family’s case, 2 such cars. We’ll also second Justin’s recommendation that you can save hundreds of dollars just by researching YouTube for step-by-step guides to intermediate vehicle repairs. Take it from us, you don’t need a pro to replace your alternator and serpentine belt. Well, depending on what kind of car you drive and how difficult it is to access certain components.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, which is the only explanation for following up Justin’s post with this one from Natalie and the unfortunately titled Debt & The Girl.

I am just another twenty-something girl struggling to navigate through the endless parade of bills that is all too common for most Americans. I have student loans, a mortgage, credit cards, and other priorities that I am trying to stay on top of

We’ve never, ever seen that sentiment before. Sister, maybe you shouldn’t be submitting to a carnival operated by a blog that considers debt bloggers to be slightly worse than child molesters. Both groups offer similar excuses: They just can’t help themselves. They have an addiction. They know what the right thing to do is, yet they don’t. Those hairless prepubescent buttocks are just too tempting.

Natalie, the CoW exists for one reason: to entertain our readers. Indulging you and your indebted sisters is of no interest to us. Nor is citing your 1st-person whining about your circumstances, unless it’s so we can goof on it:

I was one of those people who loved to spend. I would be more than happy to buy up the latest clothes in the department store as long as I could look trendy to my friends. The worst of this was when I was in college and I had constant barrage of pretty girls showing off their shiny purses in my classes. It made me feel foolish and insignificant compared to everyone else who I assumed were rolling in cash. A part of me knew this wasn’t the case but it hurt just the same. I became depressed and this only served to give me more motivation to spend and then spend some more.

Then by all means, create a blog and tell everyone about your mistakes. That’s a fantastic, original idea that no one before you had ever thought of. (Note: see Debt & the Girl’s blogroll, a compendium of indistinguishable debt blogs, most of which we’ve already had our fun with on this site.)

These blogs wouldn’t be so awful if the proprietors were more realistic and better at self-assessment. If Natalie’s About Me page began with “I was an idiot. Do the exact opposite of what I did and you should be OK”, we would have eased up on the gas. And in case you thought we were being sexist by referring to Natalie and her “sisters”:

[T]he credit card companies get really angry when you don’t send them a payment. They get VERY angry. Almost every one of the envelopes had contained a nasty letter saying that I was overdue on my payments and were now considering taking legal action against me. I think I cried for like twenty minutes as I had no idea what to do.

Emotional, jealous, easily manipulated. Yes, let’s elect one of you President one day. We can’t wait for the headline: “Putin Returns Home Triumphant After Driving Natalie To Tears/’He Was Really Mean,’ Says Inconsolable Commander-in-Chief”.

After what seemed like an eternity, I picked myself up from the tile floor

I am woman, hear me roar. Fearless, fabulous female. It’s not that we want to sound so misogynistic, but could you please stop giving us all this ammunition?

Also, the credit card companies don’t get “really angry”. They’re used to deadbeats like you. It’s a business. You stole from them, and they want their money back. The nerve. Natalie claims that she eventually paid all her credit card debt off, but that’s not the point. The point is that we’ve heard this story 463,282 times before. Go bore someone else with it. (Obligatory note: This isn’t personal. Stop sending us rotten posts.)

Barbara Friedberg doesn’t gaze at her navel, at least not in the figurative sense. She’s too busy teaching people how to build wealth instead of crying about how Visa and MasterCard refuse to validate her as a person. This week, the 2nd installment in her so-far-excellent series about how to create an investment portfolio that diversifies among asset classes.

Fresh off his PowerPoint presentation at the personal finance blogger convention in St. Louis comes Jason at Hull Financial Planning, who recently had an unpleasant encounter with a devotee of assets-under-management fee-based financial planning. Jason’s interlocutor justified his business model because he factored in the price of software. Seriously. Jason also dispels that there’s a linear relationship between assets under management and time necessary to manage those assets.

We learned a new word today, “spruiker”, courtesy of new submitter Colin Williams at Humble Investors. It’s Australian for blowhard, or tout. Colin explains the Rule of 72.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro is a AAA member.

The only way we’ll excuse any personal finance blogger from making the cents/sense pun is if that blogger is a decorated combat veteran. The rest of you can consult your thesauri and come up with something original. Jeff Rose at Good Financial Cents (groan) passes. The infantryman and certified financial planner wrote a book, which Paula Pant at Afford Anything reviewed and is giving away a signed copy of. Also, Jeff can deadlift what appears to be 3 times his weight.

Then again, Sandi Martin could change the name of her blog from Spring Personal Finance to Common Cents, My 2 Sense Worth, or The Centsory Deprivation Tank and we’d still feature her stuff. This week Sandi finishes her 2-part rant on how expense ratios don’t tell you enough about the true price of the mutual fund you’re buying a piece of. Or as Sandi delicately puts it:

You’re not an idiot for investing in mutual funds, although I’m sure you’ve been made to feel that way if you’ve ever lurked around on the internet before. You are an idiot if you continue to pay the cost blindly and never once think about what you’re getting in return.

Dividend Growth Investor reminds us of one of the most underappreciated reasons for failing to build a decent portfolio, one as bad as poor advice, insufficient preparation, and innumeracy combined: inertia. Long-term compounding doesn’t work when you restrict yourself to doing it over a short term. That’s science.

What if there were an airline whose base prices included only seat rental, and that charged a separate fee for everything beyond that? You can call it nickel-and-diming if you want, or you can save money by forgoing all the ancillary charges. Cameron Daniels at DQYDJ.net introduces us to the phenomenon that is Spirit Airlines.

And we’re done. Oh wait. Download the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Yeah, we’re on there. See you tomorrow.

According to the National Park Service’s website, which no one can access right now due to the governmental shutdown, although they can access the site of the NPS’s parent Department of the Interior for some reason, the U.S. National Parks are owned by the American people.

If “ownership” means determining how the real estate is used, who uses it, and when, then the parks are wholly owned by the federal government and its brownshirts. Some parks have state highways that run through them. For instance, Utah State Highway 9 goes through the heart of Zion National Park, concurrent with the park’s entrance road. The authorities thus can’t very well lock the gates, but the official word is that drivers can’t stop and take photos. Seriously. How they’re going to enforce this is anyone’s guess. Then again, a similar road runs through Yellowstone and last week park rangers stopped a bus full of tourists essentially at gunpoint and ordered the octogenarian tourists on board to proceed without “recreating”. They weren’t even allowed to use the bathrooms. You can look this story up yourself, it’s too nauseating for us to link to. As Mark Steyn points out, if the park rangers had done the same thing to captured al-Qaeda soldiers it would violate the Geneva Conventions.

The people haven’t risen up yet, and probably never will, but at least the bison have something to say about the shutdown:

On with the Carnival:

If you insist on riding the Birth-School-Work-Death treadmill, Justin at Root of Good explains how you can minimize your time in Category III. Spend less and save more. It isn’t much more complicated than that. The only thing we didn’t like about this post is that Justin named the 2 fictional people in his example Sam and Samantha, which is confusing. He should have named them Chris and Kris, or Terry and Terri.

Can you really outperform 70% of fund managers without having any experience? Barbara Friedberg says yes. The detailed answer is yes, assuming you know what asset classes to invest in. Barbara will walk you through the process in several parts, starting with this week’s post.

Paula Pant of Afford Anything just returned from Aruba.

I wish I could go to Aruba! She’s so lucky!

She’s not lucky. She just engineered her life to permit trips to Caribbean islands (and European capitals, and Australian livestock stations, and Indochinese villages.) And as Paula points out, even the most dismal of those is far more enjoyable than wasting one’s life away in a cubicle. She can get you started, assuming you’ve run out of rationalizations not to. We’ll overlook that while the normally infallible Paula cited that Aruba averages 30 traffic deaths a year, she neglected to mention that that makes its streets some of the most dangerous on Earth.

Harry Campbell at The 4 Hour Work Day has a counterargument of sorts. He recently ended a 3-month unemployment hiatus by taking a 9-to-5 gig similar to his old one.

How hard is it to sit behind a desk for 8 hours and browse the internet for part of that time?

Incredibly difficult, if you’re Paula. Less so if you’re Harry.

It would take 3 precious seconds to Google for confirmation, but we’ll attribute to Mark Twain the following quote: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.” Jason at Hull Financial Planning nods his head, making the point that there are times when diversification is a bad idea. Specifically, if you’ve got an aptitude for making money in a particular sector (e.g. residential real estate), use your information advantage to your…well, advantage. Diversification, such as the ultimate diversification of investing in mutual funds, is more about reducing the likelihood of failure than increasing the chance of success. Reinvest in yourself or your business first (assuming you and/or your business are indeed successful.)

Which isn’t to say that mutual funds aren’t for anyone. Otherwise there wouldn’t be $24 trillion invested in them worldwide. Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance begins a post series of her own, and reminds the prospective mutual fund buyer that like with a lot of investments, you make your money going in. Management expense ratios vary wildly, from firm to firm and from fund to fund. Paying too big a cut could turn your great returns into modest ones, or your modest ones into losses.

Finally, Cameron Daniels at DQYDJ.net illustrates the net present value of money, and does so without using jargon or even acronyms. Basically what it means is that a bird in the hand really is worth 2 in the bush. Or 1.5 in the bush, or 2.2 in the bush, depending on your tolerance for risk (among other factors.)

No awful submitters this week. Which is to say, no awful submissions. (Hate the sin, not the sinner.) Don’t worry, you can find plenty of those on the Yakezie Carnival. Meanwhile we’ll continue to provide you valuable, entertaining and eclectic content, regularly and frequently. In case you’re unfamiliar with our schedule, we do the CoW every Monday. We do full-length posts every Wednesday and Friday. We do an Anti-Tip of the Day every day, and we reserve our final non-Monday full-length post of each month for the (F)RotM. We use the acronym because we promised we’d play nice, at least temporarily. In related news, we’re now featured weekly on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, available on iTunes and something called Stitcher.

Thanks for coming, and for committing our schedule to memory.

Guys, and you thought removing a conventional bra was awkward

(EDIT: Aruba seceded from the Netherlands Antilles 27 years ago. Also, The Cosby Show is no longer on the air.)

Are you aware of breast cancer? It’s a disease whereby malignant cells multiply in a woman’s (and less often, a man’s) breast tissue. We weren’t sure if you’d heard of it, so in keeping with the spirit of the season we thought we’d tell you about it. There, now excuse us as we pat ourselves on the back for that little stint of “charity work.” CYC is all about others.

Other bloggers, that is! Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth, our weekly anthology of posts written by people who aren’t us. People like Mike St. Pierre of Annuity Hates HQ, who doesn’t seem to notice that we run his weekly posts in which he touts annuities as the singular path to financial comfort. We’re putting him in the top spot this week because he somehow managed to write the same post 100 weeks in a row. Mike, your commemorative bottle of armagnac is in the mail.

Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday (wonder why he hasn’t copyrighted that yet?) wrote about taking vacations from work, and as agreeable a guy as Harry might be we take exception with his opening line:

One of the perks of having a day job is getting paid when you go on vacation.

Poor, naïve, misguided Harry. Here, let’s try that again:

One of the perks many parlor tricks of you’ll be subject to while having a day job is getting paid watching your employer rearrange your pay so that it appears you’re still getting paid when you go on vacation.

Harry’s old employer used to sell vacation days to its employees, and people wonder why capitalism works so well.

One of our favorite publicly traded stocks is Realty Income, with the catchy ticker symbol O. The company pays monthly dividends, and unlike almost all other equities is openly engineered to produce cash flow rather than appreciate. Heck, it’s even mentioned in the name of the company. Imagine if Facebook called itself “Social Media Speculation.” Naturally, Dividend Growth Investor owns him some O. He also bought some British Petroleum (one of our favorites), and supplemented that with some British Petroleum options.

If you needed another reason not to be eligible for a tax refund, how about this one? Amanda at My Dollar Plan reports that while the IRS continues to levy and collect taxes during the government shutdown, the service’s accounts payable department is considered non-essential.

Let that sink in again. The federal government is happy to apply capital and labor to the task of taking your money during the shutdown, but not to paying it out. Just like the National Park Service is using more manpower to lock up national monuments than it takes to keep them open. But no, there’s no political grandstanding by the White House here, none at all. Anyhow, the way to take advantage of the IRS’s arcane rules is to owe money at the deadline, rather than to give the agency an interest-free loan throughout the year.

Quick, how should your nest egg assets be allocated between debt and equity? Everyone knows the 110 minus your age rule, right? Well, Jason at Hull Financial Planning knows it and has debunked it. Or at least come up with a counterintuitive result. Invest conservatively when you reach traditional retirement age and more aggressively beyond that? He’s crazy, right? No, he isn’t and when you digest his latest post you’ll agree.

Hire a pro like Jason, or go it alone? Marie Engen at Boomer & Echo cites the reasons most folks have for taking the latter course of action, not the least of which is the psychological high of beating the experts. Which is fine, except that the object here is to make the most money possible per unit of effort rendered, not to chase intangible feelings.

Go it alone like the people Marie cites in her post, or hire a pro like Sandi Martin of Spring Personal Finance? The Cottage Country Coquette projects the future of the Canada Pension Plan, reasoning that it’ll still exist when today’s young employeds are ready to retire. Regrettably, Ms. Martin delves into profanity in her latest post: we needed a couch and a cold compress after she referred to the prospect of the CPP going bankrupt as, ahem, “bull hockey.” She closes by asking you to not be “fashionably cynical”, advice that the world at large could benefit from.

Justin at Root of Good recently celebrated his .8333th anniversary as a retiree. Then he started writing about what his school-age kids have been doing and we lost interest.

We could never lose interest in Paula Pant at Afford Anything, who not only managed to visit 30 countries by her 30th birthday, but is lamenting how little she’s traveled. We should point out that she’s lamenting this from a sparkling private residence in the Netherlands Antilles Aruba, by the way. Paula’s got a point: about 85% of the globe is still uncharted territory for her.

We already joked about the uncanny similarities between Paula and Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence. This week the latter brushes aside the advice given by 5,134% of personal finance bloggers (scientific estimate.) You can only cut spending so much. The limits to how much money you can make, however, are considerably larger. So why doesn’t everyone concentrate on making more rather than spending less? You could ask the overextended student loan holders as they apply for cubicle jobs befitting their pricey educations, or you could ask the international woman of adventure who spends her time riding motorcycles from Turkey to Norway.

Finally, Barbara Friedberg has written the Grand Unified Blog Post. How to cope with money and life problems. Unsurprisingly, Barbara recommends common sense over fretting and letting your emotions dictate your actions. Please ignore her recommendation to create an emergency fund while heeding everything else she writes.

And we’re done. See you tomorrow.