A CYC First – We Mail It In

February 19, 2014

Which is a bad idiom. Sending a piece of mail is a huge pain.

In addition to this particular clearinghouse of personal finance knowledge that you happen to have stumbled across, we also write for Investopedia, where the exposition is greater and the sexist vitriol scarcer than here. The folks there recently let us start recycling old posts, so here’s the very first one we wrote for them. This one was so groundbreaking, so elemental, so indicative of genius to come, that Forbes picked it up too. Best of all, it’s only slightly dated. Here, see if this opening paragraph doesn’t take you back to the days of AOL startup discs and music videos on MTV:

Even in today’s depressed housing market, you might have trouble scrounging up the $10 to buy a somewhat functioning house. (Pro tip: if you’re going to exchange one Alexander Hamilton for a house, put at least two bucks down so you can avoid having to pay private mortgage insurance. That could easily add another 18 cents to the price of the house.)

Try to ignore the grammatical error in the headline. The former editor inserted it.

We’ll do this every time we’re pressed for ideas. Enjoy.

Filed Under: Investopedia

Carnival of Wealth, Political Overload Edition

September 10, 2012

The Hulkster wants you to say your prayers, eat your vegetables, inject your androstenedione and stop listening to all the political nonsense

 

2 political conventions in, and we’re collectively dumber. Let’s see if this week’s Carnival of Wealth doesn’t continue the trend. Again, personal finance blog posts from around the world, mostly the U.S. with a smattering of Canada. We start now:

Charles Davis at WalletHub says you need to take an inventory of your financial records, which is a capital idea. He also says you need to “consider” a safe deposit box, which is a 20th-century idea. Or a fire-safe box. A, we have these things called scanners now and 2, the next time we hear of someone saying, “I lost my house in a fire, but thank God my marriage license is still intact” will be the first. It’s almost easier to go down to the county office and request a copy than it is to buy a box and stick documents in it.

We shamed Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog back into submitting this week. Ken’s an investment planner, but hear him out. He stresses that much of managing a portfolio is not taking undue drawdowns from your clientele. That is, learn how to preserve your capital even when the market is in the toilet. Sounds easy in theory, yes. Ken explains the idea in considerably more detail.

We’re going to go with “Yes.” From Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim:

you probably ask yourself, “When should I retire?” Is it simply a matter of finances? Or do you retire when you’ve “had enough” and are simple unwilling to take it anymore?

It starts with running the numbers. Well, that’s not true: it starts with knowing what numbers to run.

Thanks, I’ll just keep working until I collapse. 

That’s the spirit! Neal cites the example of a rich nonagenarian he knows who still goes into the office every day. Maybe he loves working, or maybe his wife’s just difficult to spend time with.

From PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (Don’t Quit Your Day Job), a recommendation to…sit and wait. Those dividend stocks you were all set to load up on? Their value is largely contingent on what will happen this November. Furthermore, dividends are subject to the absurdity of double taxation – they’re taxed at the corporate level, as profits, and taxable again when distributed to shareholders.

There’s a trickle-down effect here, too. Rich people, the ones who lots of dividend stock, will rearrange their purchases to combat taxes. Smaller shareholders, like it or not, will dance to larger shareholders’ tune. And it’s in 15/9 time, with a drummer who only knows 2s and 4s.

Counterpoint: Dividend Growth Investor. He recommends that you find a basket of stocks with a 3% dividend yield (easier said than done, but whatever), and enjoy fat dividend income 24 years from now. Reinvest the dividends, and you’ll be even further ahead.

Save money by being friendly? Free Money Finance has an anecdote that illustrates how being friendly isn’t just less strain on your liver, it’s good business. It saved $50 for no incremental effort on what would have been an ordinary transaction.

Save money by not being friendly? Dave at 6400 Personal Finance reminds you that you’re not the sales clerk’s pal, you’re his mark. Dave and his girlfriend went to Maui for the weekend (you can do that when you’re stationed on O’ahu), rented a car, and chose not to buy all the useless add-ons, saving them serious cash in the process. The kind of money it took Dave a few seconds to save, it would take Iowan heartthrob Trent Hamm a year’s worth of strategic toilet flushing to pull off.

Like ours, the brain of John at Wallet Blog has been saturated beyond recognition by endless political grandstanding and rhetoric the last few weeks. As a practical matter, John would like to know what will happen to mortgage tax relief under a Romney administration or under Obama Part II. As it stands now, people who failed to make their payments weren’t taxed on any financial break their lenders cut them. You know, because responsibility sucks on wheels. Should that tax relief run its course, plenty of people who lost their houses would get a tax bill for their troubles. This is justice, but to some folks it’s unfair.

From the running-out-of-adjectives-to-describe-how-awesome-she-is Liana Arnold at CardHub, another parable about unintended consequences.

To recap: not to be confused with the mortgage slackers above, a bunch of people didn’t like their credit card balances and decided to complain about them rather than pay them. The government intervened, forcing credit card issuers to cap rates and limiting how much they could charge in swipe fees.

YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS, but the people who run the credit card companies aren’t stupid. They didn’t throw up their hands and say, “Damn. The feds foiled us at our own game. Guess we’ll just make less money now.”

No, the responsible people got punished. Banks started raising fees on everyone, and slashing benefits left and right.

Alright, that was a rant only barely related to Liana’s post. Today, she cites the prospect of merchants charging fees for customers wanting to pay with credit cards. It’d be the ultimate result of a settlement that derived from a class-action suit filed by merchants who claimed that Amex, VISA et al. overcharged them by billions of dollars.

Harry at Your PF Pro has some interesting ideas and could use an editor. Harry thinks you should diversify by country of origin. A 70-30 mutual fund balance (international and U.S., respectively) should make your holdings as stable as possible, assuming you’re locked into mutual funds. Of course, “international” covers a lot of ground, so to speak: there’s a difference between investing in Canadian companies and in Burundian ones.

One more on dividend investing and then we’re done. Dave Scott at Excess Return joins the CoW this week with his methods for evaluating and selecting dividend stocks. While we’re not sold on the importance of dividend yield to the extent that Dave is, this article is tremendously well-written, perfectly formatted, and contains a pretty chart.

Alright, one more. The comprehensive Andrew at 101 Centavos breaks down the 2 publicly traded firearm manufacturers: Sturm, Ruger and Smith & Wesson. (That’s a company called Sturm, Ruger and another called Smith & Wesson: not a company called Sturm and another called Ruger and Smith & Wesson. Companies with commas in their names are reprehensible.) Andrew’s post gives credence to our observation that the better and more thought-provoking a post is, the fewer comments it inspires. Andrew is a Ruger shareholder (unlike us, mere Ruger customers) and illustrates the stark difference between the companies’ management styles. Also, for you ladies looking to be stereotyped, a mention of how “pink guns are becoming more commonplace.”

We kind of miss the bad submissions. This week’s were impossible to make fun of. Well, there’s always next week.

Wait. One more. Serial submitter and avowed masochist Lance at Money, Life & More maxed out his Roth IRA.

Oh, did we mention we’re on Investopedia? Yahoo! Finance, too, once in a while. New blog posts here every Wednesday and Friday, new CoW every Monday. Anti-Tips every day. See you tomorrow.

 

 

Filed Under: Carnivals, Investopedia Tagged With:

Carnival of Wealth, Investopedia Edition

April 2, 2012

A Forbes Media Company. Steve, we loved your work on Saturday Night Live

 

Folks, did you know that Investopedia regularly features our work? Articles that you CAN’T get here on Control Your Cash? The fun thing about writing for Investopedia and its trillions of readers is that it forces us to phrase everything in a somewhat less incendiary style than the one we’re comfortable with here. It’s like when Vinnie Moore has to lay off the shredding and just play the notes when he’s touring with UFO, but can still whale on the whammy bar on his solo albums. For the 99% of you who didn’t get that analogy, here’s another Investopedia/Yahoo! Finance link.

Onto the Carnival. Personal finance blog posts from across the globe. If you’re a blogger, submit yours here. Send us garbage at your peril. For the overwhelming non-blogging part of the audience, you folks who are just here to learn a little about personal finance and maybe get entertained in the process, just keep reading:

If you turn at least 77 this week, live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and/or are blind – and we’re not sure which of those is worst, probably living in Northern Ireland – Edward Webber at TaxFix.co.uk tells you how you can avoid paying taxes (in the UK, duh) in 2012.

Teacher Man at My University Money thinks credit cards, like single-malt scotches, are perfect for college kids. His point is that you need to build credit, and the sooner the better. If you can’t handle your liquor, as it were, grow up. Enjoy Teacher Man’s curious admixture of insight into the human condition and up-and-down grammar.

Yeah, living in Northern Ireland is far worse than being blind.

Ryan Souza at Your Life For Less joins the parade this week, and reminds you not to be a lightweight with regard to comparison shopping. Don’t stay with a trusted brand just because it’s comfortable, especially if an acceptable substitute can save you serious cash.

Case in point? Your humble blogger reluctantly admits that throughout his early 20s he never bought groceries at Walmart because, well, that’s where the poor people shop. The ones made fun of on that People of Walmart site. I can’t be seen shopping with them. Besides, it’s filthy in there. (As far as I knew. I’d never actually been in one.)

Then it dawned on me: I am poor. Partially because I’ve been buying groceries at more expensive stores. The first time I sucked it up and bought groceries at a Walmart, not only did I not catch bubonic plague, I saved about 40% off what Albertson’s was charging. And never (or at least, hardly ever) went back. Walmart became this shopper’s trusted brand.

Until WinCo showed up a few weeks ago, in her slutty makeup and 9″ heels, smiling and complimenting me on my broad shoulders and tiny waist. She started running her acrylic nails through her frosted hair and I was hooked. I still can’t figure out how WinCo sells red peppers at 48¢ a pound, but that’s someone else’s concern. Walmart, if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be back.

As usual, Tim at Faith and Finance put less work into this week’s submission than we did into that previous paragraph. Tim lists 8 jobs for recent MBAs, who presumably have already thought about what they’ll be doing after graduation and don’t need a blog post to remind them that

If information technology or management information systems is your specialty, you can command a great salary at a strong company, especially with an MBA.

Thanks. He basically lists 8 positions, and ends each description by telling you that your chances of getting hired for any of them are greater with an MBA. Tim also encourages people to get jobs working in human resources, which is the most loathsome career path in the world.

Parents, if your children have the right equipment, encourage them to get into porn instead of HR. We’re not kidding. At least porn actors don’t live to make other people’s lives miserable. Then again, what’s more fun and professionally satisfying than reciting the list of company benefits and denying employees’ requests for vacation days? HR administrators are the evolution of the insufferable little girls in elementary school who reported even the most miniscule infractions to the teacher. Bad, bad people. All of them.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net would be one of our favorite contributors even if he only submitted his aesthetically pleasing charts. Or if he only submitted his clever, informative prose. Put them together and you have a personal finance blogger most folks can only aspire to be like. This week he asks “Who gambles in Canada?”, a country where people were buying $10 lottery tickets back in the 1970s (not adjusted for inflation).

Speaking of Canada, apparently Rob Carrick of the Toronto Globe & Mail stole our idea and wrote a personal finance book for people who know nothing about money. Is his available on Kindle? For $7? No, it’s $17 Canadian, and that on undercutter extraordinaire Amazon. So you can order it and wait 10 days to receive it, or click the above link and be reading ours in less than a minute. Ours which actually applies to you if you’re American, like most of our readers are. Anyhow, Boomer & Echo reviewed Mr. Carrick’s book.

Did the guy behind Free Money Finance sell his site? Just wondering, because it’s changed radically. This week he lists a few simple actions for building wealth. Driving 70 miles out of your way to wait 4 hours to buy lottery tickets isn’t on the list.

Joe Morgan at Simple Debt Free Finance boils it down even more. He thinks you should increase your income and reduce expenses if you want to build wealth. We’ll try it out, see if it works, get back to you on that.

Every week we get posts that offer pointless advice. It’s rare that we get one that recommends you do something that’s dumb from every angle, but then we’d never heard from Jeffery (sic) Weber at Smart Balance Transfers before. Jeffery thinks you should use a credit card to pay your income taxes. Which is insane because, as Jeffery even admits, the IRS requires you to go through an intermediary that will charge you 2-4%. But hey, double miles.

We’re due for something good. John Kiernan at Wallet Blog reminds us that plenty of people don’t know who their health insurer is. If you have a vague idea that your insurance is handled by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, or some combination of the above, you might be surprised to know that those names refer to multiple insurers whose coverage can differ wildly from state to state. Your acupuncture treatments for that nasty bout of shingles might not be covered in Delaware after all.

We buried Liana at CardHub deep in the mix this week, only because that way it’ll mean something when we put her in the leadoff spot again. She gives the stark details of Chase’s practice of overstating past due consumer debt, which it then can sell to third parties. Chase is essentially rolling back odometers on debt collection, and we can’t understand why this isn’t a bigger story.

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog brings it every week. This time, an important discourse on one of our favorite topics – fundamental stock analysis vs. technical stock analysis, a/k/a alchemy.

In a similar vein, Mich at Beating the Index shows how to identify that scourge of the market, the emotionally invested shareholder. Understand that being emotionally invested in the market is like being emotionally invested in the weather. You can’t control it, all you can do is intelligently anticipate what it’s going to do. Wishing and hoping are wastes of time. Mich’s posts are usually fairly advanced, but this one’s easy (and useful) for everyone.

There are hundreds of corporations that don’t understand Twitter. And then there’s American Express, which doesn’t necessarily have an entertaining feed, but is using Twitter’s structure to expand its business. And it’s gloriously simple. Use a hashtag, get a credit from a specific participating retailer. Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet gives the details.

Finally, the craziest post we’ve ever received. This one makes Erika the passive-aggressive wife at Newlyweds on a Budget seem normal. Everything about this – the font choice, the graphics, the errant spelling, the long-windedness, the name of the blog (Wizard Corpse?) – screams out for help. Let’s all join hands and pray for the anonymous lunatic who sent it to us. And if he doesn’t cast a spell on us, we’ll see you here next week.

Filed Under: Carnivals, Investopedia Tagged With: ,
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