We’re Not Above Doing a List Post

March 19, 2014

Well, not on this site, but certainly in our other life on Investopedia. Our latest CYC Classic piece comes from 2011, and is titled “5 Overlooked Vacation-Planning Trips.” We wrote it for the Christmas season, but it applies at any time of year. That’s why you’re reading it now, in winter.

Admit it, your eyes glazed over when you saw the headline. You thought, “Great, this idiot is going to tell me to shop around for low fares and eat in cheap restaurants when I get there.” Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. There are plenty of other personal finance sites that’d be more than happy to do that, tie it to a 30-frame slideshow, and call the result groundbreaking. No, we thought we’d give our readers legitimate ideas that they wouldn’t find elsewhere. And now, we’re passing the savings onto you. Read the following enticing paragraph and you’ll understand why Investopedia made it their mission to beat Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha in the bidding war for our services.

Planning a vacation, or even a simple business trip, is far more complicated now than it was in the prehistoric area (before Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) You can compare hotels, rank them by price, rank them by amenity level, rank them by distance from the airport, cross-reference them with reviews on TripAdvisor and read the reviews of those reviews. Hopefully, you’ll still be in the mood for a vacation if you don’t succumb to paralysis by analysis first.

Here’s the original. Read the whole thing, click on all the sponsor links, and send an email to the editor saying how awesome our pieces are.

Filed Under: Investopedia Tagged With:

Click Here To Claim Your $3,658

March 14, 2014

No, of course not. This is an article about online scams and how to avoid them. You already found your way to our site with minimal difficulty, which means you’re smart enough not to fall victim to a scammer in the first place, but maybe you can print this out and mail it to your grandmother before she wires money to a sweet-talking man on the other side of the globe. This is part of our Lazy Friday series, in which we link to an old Investopedia article of ours, and update it if warranted. This one didn’t warrant it.

Here’s the attention-getting introductory paragraph, the maximum that our agreement with Investopedia allows us to reproduce here:

You may already be a winner. But, not if you go through your spam folder, responding to everyone who offers you money. Fraud is one of the most dynamic online “industries,” continuously changing to keep pace with an ever-more-skeptical population. According to a report from the National Consumers League, in the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its nascence, the most common way to steal money online was to sell services and never deliver them. Today’s scammers are more indirect, if just as diabolical.

Great stuff, no? Click here for the original.

Filed Under: Investopedia Tagged With: ,

The CYC Wayback Machine Revisited

March 7, 2014

 

They don't build tsunamis with past generations' money, do they?

They don’t build tsunamis with past generations’ money, do they?

 

A couple of years ago we wrote a piece for Investopedia about the inevitable self-destruction of Social Security. Here are the opening couple of paragraphs:

Ben Franklin’s most enduring axiom states that only death and taxes are inevitable. The byproduct of the two, Social Security, might not be.

Social Security, officially the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program, was founded in 1935. Like many political disasters, Social Security began with the best of intentions. President Franklin Roosevelt created it to guarantee workers an income once they retired. The rationale, if unspoken, was straightforward: private citizens couldn’t be trusted to save for retirement, so a forced savings plan administered by bureaucrats would do it for them.

Now if that doesn’t lure you in, nothing will. Go there and read it, and thank us for overworking ourselves to the point that we have to recycle old posts in between bouts of writing groundbreaking new pieces that will forever change public attitudes concerning personal finance. This really is God’s work that we’re doing. Thanks for reading it. 

Filed Under: Investopedia Tagged With: ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »