Carnival of Wealth, Happy Monday Edition

Six Brits walk out of a tanning salon...

Happy Monday, and welcome to another Carnival of Wealth. A roundup of personal finance blog posts from around the world. If you want to submit yours, do it here. Read the requirements. They’re not “guidelines”, they’re requirements. For the rest of you, enjoy.

Before we start, everyone’s asking why we disabled comments. We did it because 96% of the comments said nothing of consequence. It’s an experiment. We’ll try it for a while, see if it affects readership. But it won’t. If you want to say something, tweet us. (Or is it tweet “to” us? Is “tweet” a transitive verb?) Okay, now let’s get started:

The accomplished PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) examines the difference between public and private sector wages. The dollar difference is small, the benefits difference larger. You can probably imagine which side holds the advantage.

A new entrant this week is Squeezer at PF Success, who recommends ways to save on gas. We included this because it isn’t the same old hackneyed garbage (shop around, combine errands, inflate your tires until they’re about to burst.) Squeezer also debunks the myth about Giant Retailer A’s gas differing in any way from Giant Retailer B’s.

Echo of Boomer & Echo offers data to prove that there’s no correlation between how big a fee a mutual fund manager takes, and what kind of result you can expect.

Amanda at My Dollar Plan compares refundable tax credits with non-refundable ones, in her trademark brief fashion.

Imagine if every time your doctor checked your blood pressure, she said “Now, the very act of putting the cuff around your arm is going to negatively impact your numbers by a few points.” And that’s how credit scoring works. Jim Wang at Bargaineering compares soft credit checks to hard ones; the latter include things like applying for a card or shopping for a mortgage. The solution? Live at home until your parents die! See, that was easy.

If everyone was as articulate about his subject of choice as Mich at Beating the Index is, well, we’d be a much smarter planet. Did you know natural gas prices are taking a pounding? Mich thinks they’re only going to get lower, and has the data to reinforce his belief. Also, beautiful charts. USA Today-worthy.

Kevin M of Out Of Your Rut guest posts at Christian PF this week, and asks if refinancing your mortgage is always a good idea. It’s amazing how many people don’t bother to look at closing costs or length of term remaining until they’ve already committed to a tantalizingly low new rate. Do the math before, not after (assuming you’re doing it at all.)

Credit card issuers, understandably, are going to be interested in your income before they give you a card. Liana at CardHub points out that that puts stay-at-home mothers in a difficult position. Unless they’ve somehow figured out how to monetize doing laundry and watching Oprah. (UPDATE: Apparently The Oprah Winfrey Show went off the air 10 months ago. How about that.) Get a secured card, or latch onto your money-earning spouse’s.

Someone knock on J.P.’s door and tell him the rookie hazing is about to commence. Another CoW newcomer, Novel Investor decries how American investment strategies have gotten unduly conservative since 2008. As J.P. puts it, “Nobody has gotten rich earning <1% on their money. Yet 8 times more money has been put into savings accounts than into stock and bond funds, since the market crash.” So why are people actively taking steps to avoid getting rich? 4-letter word, starts with “f”.

From our “Preach it, brother” files: John Kiernan at Wallet Blog puts the kibosh on that notion that getting a college degree necessarily helps you earn more money. The oft-cited statistics (“You’ll earn x% more than someone with only a high school diploma”) conveniently lump all college graduates into an amorphous group. Yes, someone with a chemical engineering degree will make more money than a high school graduate who works in golf equipment sales or drives a truck. But we’ll take either of those last two over someone who earns an English literature degree and pours lattes for a living.

Paul Vachon at The Frugal Toad discussed the Home Affordable Modification Program, yet another government construct created to distort the market and prolong the inevitable pain that comes with rewarding people for getting in over their heads “keep hardworking Americans in their homes.” One more time: every last one of these programs costs money. The money comes from somewhere. That somewhere is the pockets of taxpayers who were prudent and diligent enough to have earned the money in the first place. It’s then given to people who weren’t defrauded and weren’t stolen from. They simply bought too much house, and now want someone else to fix the problem. Because personal responsibility, to say nothing of playing the cards you’re dealt, is for suckers.

Teacher Man at My University Money and his long-time girlfriend don’t want to have kids. Of course he can’t come flat out and say that, because he’s afraid people will call him a monster. So he has to vacillate and say, “Well, maybe not now” and offer secondary reasons for not doing so. (It’s good for the environment, etc. It’d thus be best for the environment if humanity collectively decided to die out.) Or maybe that’s just the Canadian in him, not wanting to ruffle feathers. Anyhow, he offers the convincing economic reasons for leaving the task of reproduction up to other people. Bonus: helpful comments from people who tell him that a) having kids is a personal decision and b) it’s OK not to. And you wonder why we disabled comments on Control Your Cash.

Phil Taylor at PT Money lists a bunch of ways to save money when eating out. He left out our surefire method, which is “date somebody small.” Tiny dining partner = more leftovers and partially eaten entrées.

Phil didn’t know he was going to be part of a point/counterpoint dialogue when he submitted his article, but here we are. Matt at Rambling Fever believes that when you dine out you should dispense with caution and spend as much money as possible, or so it seems.

If you’re one of these frugal diners and tip only 15% of your measly bill, you’re no better than somebody who doesn’t leave a tip at all!

That’s obviously false, but Matt uses hyperbole to argue that spending money in restaurants (or more specifically, not being stingy when you do take the plunge and eat out) helps the economy circulate.

We’re assuming you want our take, which you’re now going to get anyway.

Bad service deserves a bad tip. Also, bad customers deserve bad service. Case in point, the group of 4 idiots we recently saw at a local sports bar who received their check after a couple of hours of drinking, then requested that the waitress go back and give them separate checks. This table couldn’t figure out, or be bothered to figure out, who owed what. Which tied the waitress up for several minutes, while a low-maintenance table of 2 (Hi!) sat there waiting so they could pay, get out, and free up their table for the next customers.

Simple rules for dining out, which we just created:

1. If you’re using a coupon, fine, whatever. But you can’t possibly be so cheap as to think that this excuses you from leaving a tip on what the full price of the meal would have been.

2. Appetizers, and particularly alcohol, have gigantic markups. (Yeah, no kidding.) That doesn’t mean that you should obsess over the restaurant’s cost of goods sold, but rather how the prices affect you. If you’d rather numb a few brain cells with a $6 beer than spend a couple of bucks on a soda with free refills, knock yourself out. If you’d rather do the opposite, the restaurant isn’t at fault for offering cheaper alternatives to alcohol.

3. If you’re just going to order a couple of entrées (“mains”, for our Commonwealth friends), because that’s all you want, don’t apologize for it. The restaurant’s welcome to set minima for how much you have to order. Besides, it’ll probably get you out of the restaurant faster anyway. If you’re a waitress, is it better to get a $6 tip for a half hour of work or a $10 tip for one hour of work?

That being said, be an adult. Don’t be the squeaky wheel who retards the process with irritating questions like “Do you use peanut oil?”, “Are these free-range chickens?”, “Can I get mine cooked in margarine instead of butter?” and “Can I get half chicken and half beef?”

When the hostess seats you, pause your conversation and read the menu. It’s not that hard to pick up where you left off. Figure out what you want as soon as possible so the waitress doesn’t have to make multiple visits and ask “Do you need more time?” And if you know you’re not going to order anything else once your entrée comes, that’s a great opportunity to ask the waitress for the check.

Seriously? 

Yes, of course. Why prolong the inevitable? You can still take your time eating, but asking for the check (and having your payment ready to go when it comes) actually gives the waitress something to do when she comes around and asks if there’s anything else she can get you. She can process the check, take your money, and by the time you finish eating you don’t have to wait around for her. You can leave at your leisure, and the next party can be seated all the more quickly.

There. Now you know how to behave at restaurants. Glad we could help. See you next week.

Carnival of Wealth, Valentine’s Day Edition

Another Carnival of Wealth? This is getting to be a habit. Here’s our usual Monday goodness, with a caveat. Next week, we’re guest hosting another blog carnival, the Totally Money Carnival. (Unless the gal who runs it yanks it from us 3 days before it’s supposed to go live, like a certain previous blog carnival host did after we’d agreed to take the reins. But we’re all adults here, right?)

That means the next Carnival of Wealth will run February 22. A Wednesday. The following week, it’ll be on Monday as always. Deadline remains the same.

Two fun facts, keeping with the theme:

-St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers.
-The Eastern Orthodox church celebrates Valentine’s Day on July 30, which makes sense, because FTD doesn’t jack up their prices then.

The Carnival of Wealth is a weekly roundup of personal finance blog posts. Submit yours here. READ THE FREAKING SUBMISSION GUIDELINES. Otherwise, just read the Carnival. On with the show.

Financial god leads off this week, sporting a fancy new logo treatment that includes a drawing of what appears to be Emperor Wu. Fg talks about how the media and some politicians have commandeered and vilified the word “capitalism” to suit their goals, taking our monetary system along for the ride. If you have something I want and I have something you want, and we exchange them, whether zero, one or both of the things being exchanged are money, that’s capitalism. Distort that – i.e., have a third party put controls on the exchange, under force of law – and you’re on the road to economic chaos.

“Junk bonds” have a bad rap, and a bad name. They’re not junk, and they’re not necessarily bonds. They offer high yields, and like any high-yield investment, they come with high risks. Dan at the aptly named High Yield Edge explains how to invest in them.

A few weeks ago we wrote about how just because you can divide one quantity by another, that doesn’t mean that you should. Free Money Finance has ratios galore in this week’s post, as he wonders whether your liquid assets match up significantly with respect to your monthly expenses, your retirement savings to your yearly income, et al.

Time for a crazy post, this one from Jeremy Biberdorf at Modest Money. It’s about how Walmart and Starbucks are “anti-competitive”, the former because it undercuts competitors (the very definition of “competitive”), the latter because it does the exact opposite. (Got that? Because we didn’t.)

Mr. Biberdorf is yet another one of the myriad people to remark about how expensive Starbucks makes its products. Which are non-essential, and which you can live quite happily without buying, which he doesn’t mention. Biberdorf manages to equate Starbucks with drug dealers, but stops short of calling Walmart a bunch of pederasts. He writes “think about how the aggressive (Starbucks) marketing may be suckering you in.” Yes, because where you choose to spend your money isn’t really a choice, it’s a command from the elders in the coffee-industrial complex.

We’re thinking Teacher Man at My University Money must be a Howard Stern fan, one inspired by sidekick Robin Quivers’s recent avowal to no longer “emasculate” her coworkers. Teacher Man wonders whether people are serious when they claim that men feel inadequate when they make less money than their wives.

Guys, the power to earn money is gender-neutral. Don’t feel emasculated if she makes more money than you. Feel emasculated if she can lift more weight than you, or knows more about home repair than you do. And if you’ve ever pushed a stroller or worn one of those papoose deals, you’ve already lost.

(Steve at 2010Tax.org submitted a post. We’d run it if he’d put it on 2012Tax.org, another domain that he owns. Why it appears on the former, or why the former is still being updated, we don’t know.)

Paul Vachon, a/k/a The Frugal Toad, thinks you should eat a snack before grocery shopping. Okay, fine, but what if you’re fat and you spend too much? Then what, smart guy?

Amanda L Grossman at Frugal Confessions thinks you should save money by saving money. Zero out your entertainment budget, clean out your pantry before buying groceries, etc. The best part about this post is Amanda repeating yet another sob story from the plus-size Financial Retard of the Month emeritus at So Over Debt “who had to miss work once because she did not have enough gas money for the commute.” Of course she did. (NB: Technically, Amanda L didn’t call her a plus-size Financial Retard of the Month emeritus. She was thinking it, though.)

(Post rejected because the author clearly spent less time on it than we would have spent recapping it.)

Ah, somebody good. Darwin’s Money points out that Dow component Pfizer has lowered its profit expectations thanks to a problematically stronger dollar. A weak dollar (relative to other currencies, not to its historical self) is wonderful for companies that sell a lot of their products overseas. Unfortunately, the president who tells the American people that he wants to pursue a “weak-dollar policy” has yet to be born.

You don’t know what’s in your 401(k), do you? Of course you should, and Don at Money Smart Guides gives you an even more compelling reason to: tax law changes that could well lead to your company making wholesale changes in its 401(k) investments.

Only 8? That’s the number of financial behaviors that irk Kevin McKee at Thousandaire. All of them are dead-on, and if you know someone who exhibits behavior #1, you have permission from us to kick that person as hard as you can in the reproductive organs.

Congratulations to Eddie at Finance Fox for hiring a proofreader. Some stuff is still slipping through, but not as much as before. Eddie tells you how to get a free credit report. From his post, we learned that Experian doesn’t have a presence in Canada; only Equifax and TransUnion. The United States doesn’t have Swiss Chalet, so everything evens out.

Will that proofreader please give Corey at 20s Finances a call? Until then, Corey recommends that you buy secondhand furniture on Craig’s List. Or get new stuff at IKEA.

Jim Wang at Bargaineering explains the difference between hard and soft credit checks. The former can impact your score. The latter hardly mean a thing.

Jeremy Waller at Personal Finance Whiz thinks you should buy health insurance. Jeremy is a big user of health insurance, his wife having just cranked out a couple of kids to the tune of almost $40,000. Of course, in a couple of years’ time you might not have a choice in the matter. If you’re American, that is. A nominally free people.

Melissa Batai at Personal Finance Journey is either masochistic or oblivious. Very few personal finance bloggers outside of Control Your Cash have any original ideas, and she’s perpetuated that by deciding to follow the herd and use Dave Ramsey’s idiotic snowball method of reducing debt. Hey, it’s easy to explain (for him) and it gives debtors the illusion of thinking they’re doing themselves good. Melissa thinks you can raise little bits of money by:

  • selling stuff around your house
  • getting a part-time job.

We included those suggestions because if you were in such a situation, selling your junk and taking another job never, ever, would have crossed your mind. Did we mention Melissa has a master’s degree?

Tim Ferriss talked about reading Stoic philosophers, therefore every blogger who fancies himself a life coach has taken to reading the Stoics, too. Including John at Married With Debt. John has recently taken to farming out his posts, but he wrote this one in which he gives people tips for what to do when they get fired. At no point does he suggest starting a business and taking a gamble. Of course not. Like most people, he’d rather be defensive. (It’s cool, he’s not going to read this and we’re not attacking him personally anyway.)

But come on. Check out this excerpt:

INSTANT MONEY SAVERS IN CASE OF JOB LOSS:

  • Cancel unneeded subscriptions (magazines, wine of the month, gym, cable, home phone)

  • Cancel childcare

  • Cancel planned vacations or purchases you’ve been saving for

  • Sell items on Craigslist, eBay, or have a yard sale

  • Sell an unneeded vehicle

  • Downgrade vehicle insurance

  • Move children to public school

  • Rent a spare room out if you have one

  • Sell your house

  • Donate plasma or “other” fluids

  • Max out credit cards (if you need to eat, this should be an option)

  • Radically downsize grocery budget

  • Sell stocks, precious metals and other equities (might want to wait on this)

  • Tap your 401k or retirement (it’s an emergency, remember)

This advice, like most in the personal finance blogging world, comes in two categories:

  • glaringly obvious
  • unhelpful.

If you lose your income, obviously you’re going to think about cutting expenses. John thinks you might resign yourself to selling illegal drugs, get sentenced to 30 years with no possibility of parole, and then around year 14 think, “Damn! Why didn’t I take my children out of that private school? I could have had a few thousand bucks without committing a federal crime. Can I have a do-over?”

Sell an asset (your house). Incur gigantic debts with huge interest rates by maxing out your credit cards. Masturbate into a cup. Yeah, all of those are fantastic. John, would it kill you to self-edit your every thought? John also gave us this prevarication:

people who would generally not have to fear job loss are waking up each day wondering, am I next? This includes teachers, firefighters, police officers, government workers

Find us a government worker or firefighter who’s been fired recently. Government is the only growth industry in this awful economy. And to get fired from your position as a cop…well, we’d say you’d have to kill an innocent civilian but we live in Las Vegas, where the local cops treat everyone the way the LAPD treats black people.

So yeah, that’s our bizarro Post of the Week.

At least John doesn’t suggest getting a master’s degree, which is foolishness writ large unless you’re majoring in something worthwhile. Jeffrey at Money Spruce has multiple engineering degrees, and even he isn’t getting full value out of them.

(Post rejected because the author simply recapped what she spent money on this month. On the 19th, she went out with a friend for sushi. Let’s see if we can’t find a slot for that on the Who-Gives-A-Sh*t Channel.)

If you want to guarantee yourself a permanent place in the CoW, either write something horrible or something really good. Mich at Beating the Index has chosen the latter. Mich has a niche – Canadian resource stocks – and he knows his stuff. This week he regales us with a fish story about Aroway Energy and a couple of other promising stocks.

If you’re not quite ready for Mich, check out Your Finances Simplified with a primer for investing in stocks. Hey, we all have to start somewhere.

Shawanda Greene at You Have More Than You Think is simultaneously raw, hilarious and insightful with this week’s post in which she compares herself to a honey badger (an actual honey badger, not Tyrann Mathieu) and suggests that you do the same if you’re serious about reaching your financial goals. Note: This post is rated PG.

A Blinkin at Funancials clearly wrote this week’s post on a dare.

“I can tie anything into the financial markets. Any topic. Give me one.”
“Uh, farming.”
“Pfft. Give me a hard one.”
“Okay. How about…snowboarding?”
“Done. Watch me.”

Read it. It’s funny and relevant.

Need more useless advice? Jester at The Ultimate Juggle can help. Kiss ass and keep an eye out for open positions so you can get a raise. Our favorite line?

A general rule of thumb is that with more responsibilities, you will have a higher income.

Thanks.

Bob at Christian PF has found some places that’ll let you file your state taxes for free. He means “free”, not “for free”, but we get his point. Of course, if you lived in Nevada you wouldn’t have that problem in the first place.

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff points out that the Federal Reserve has admitted they won’t be raising interest rates anytime soon. Not this year, not next year. Daniel thinks that this isn’t necessarily a good idea if you want to get a mortgage. We don’t necessarily agree, and not surprisingly, Daniel inspired a lively debate in his comments section. An intelligent debate, too. A respectful one. No one compared anyone else to Hitler.

Luke Bonds (sure) at Learn Bonds writes about the 4 types of bond the U.S. government issues. Well, “Luke’s” Indian remote assistant did. After a couple of Kalyani Black Labels, we’re guessing.

Dividend Ninja thinks that an undervalued bond market means that this could be a great time to strike. He recommends that you look at more than yields (dividends, duh) before jumping into bonds. This is a comprehensive post – in fact, it’s the first of 2 parts. Read slowly and purposefully. And…we’re done.

Not too bad, huh? We’ll give that CoW a 7. Join us next WEDNESDAY. ’til then.

Carnival of Wealth, miserable cold edition

The Midway in the Pacific isn’t as dismal as this one

 

So, what shivering part of the Northern Hemisphere are you reading this from? Have you resorted to making a fire out of seldom-used furniture yet? It’s sunny and 80º here at our undisclosed location, a perfect situation for a) rubbing it in your faces and b) presenting the latest installment of the Carnival of Wealth. Again, these are personal finance posts from the genre’s most prominent bloggers, arranged in handy mini-paragraph form. Get readin’.

Remember the good old days, when every time you bought something with a credit card, you gave a minimum-wage clerk your credit card number and a copy of your signature? Boomer and Echo do, and argue that security has since gotten worse. They regale us with the tales of prospective tenant Amy Adams and theft victim Bill Brown, the least plausible pseudonyms we’ve ever heard. Tune in next week to see how Carmine Cappuccio, Don DeLillo and Edna Everage combat identity theft.

Marjorie Rochon at CardHub tells us that there are a few things you can count on every non-denominational holiday season that alienates neither Jews nor Muslims Christmas: time off from school; an overweight, bearded out-of-towner breaking into numerous houses in the neighborhood via chimney; eating too much; and gift cards. Learn how to handle that last one.

Some people pride themselves on not shopping at Walmart, as if low prices are somehow gauche. Odysseas Papadimitriou of Wallet Blog is not one of them. He bought a loved one an electronic Walmart gift card for Black Friday, because nothing shows you care like cash equivalents do. You’d think delivery of an electronic card would be simple, but for Odysseas it was anything but. For a company whose logistical prowess is world-renowned, Walmart dropped the ball this time.

We hadn’t heard from Jim Wang at Bargaineering for a while, but he’s back with a post on credit scores and how they impact the interest rates you might pay. Until Fair, Isaac & Co. make the credit score formula available to the public, we’ll have to keep guessing as to what makes a good score.

The recondite Paula Pant at Afford-Anything brings it again. Go to her blog, now, and subscribe to her feed.

Here’s why she’s good. She wrote about wealth vs. happiness this week, and unlike the 805,394,217 other people who have written on this topic, she doesn’t offer up some pablum about how money can’t buy you happiness, be thankful for what you have, no dollar amount can compare to the smile on a little child’s face, etc., etc. Instead, happiness is correlated with…well, if we don’t tell you here it’ll force you to click on the link and read her post.

Aloysa at My Broken Coin claims that “the best things in life should not cost you a thing.” But they do. Or, as a former Control Your Cash Man of the Year put it:

 

Turning 180º, you can’t accuse Daniel of Sweating the Big Stuff of breaking out clichés. He argues that doing what you love for a living could be a bad thing.

At Control Your Cash, we’ve distilled the secret to wealth into two sentences: Buy Assets. Sell Liabilities. Do that often enough and you can’t help but build wealth. Free Money Finance did the same thing, with different (but equally valid) sentences. Check his version out here.

Tim Fraticelli at Christian PF thinks it’s possible to negotiate without losing your soul, or your shirt. We’d add “determine what the other party wants” to his list of 4 tips.

Suba at Wealth Informatics thinks Christmas gifts are a waste of time and money. She’s right, and we write basically the same post every year, but hers has way prettier graphs.

This week’s Trent Hamm Memorial* Obvious Sentence Award goes to Kevin McKee at Thousandaire:

My mother has four siblings (my aunts and uncles). 

Thanks, Ace. Anyhow, Kevin hits on one of our favorite topics this week: whether entrepreneurs have it better than corporate employees do.

Darwin’s Money comes with something so depressing, we almost didn’t want to run it. We wanted to fly to his house and give him a hug. He and a partner bought a rental unit, dotted all their j’s and crossed their x’s, then had their parade rained on by a zealous (and we’re thinking, extortionate) insurance company.

Time for our in-depth deconstruction of the week. Our victim is Hank at Money Q&A, who offers advice in “Four Places to Find Great Stocks To Invest In” that swings between curious and horrible.

I routinely can look on my desk and the desks of my coworkers to find the products of great, quality companies to invest in.

Hank also thinks you should look for investing ideas from your kids’ toys, your kitchen, and the mall, which is not only a careless way to write a post, but insane. This is Barbra Streisand’s investing strategy. (She once said, “We go to Starbucks every day, so I bought Starbucks stock.”) Hands up, every GM vehicle owner who bought GM stock in 2009. Here’s Hank’s best line:

Have you seen the explosion of True Religion jeans? If you had, then you would have been in on one of the great growth stocks of the past year or so.

Really?

Yes, TRLG’s stock has risen 50% in the last year, so you can add Hank to the list of retroactive stock market millionaires. But does he think we should buy the stock today? It trades at 19 times earnings. The company lost $44 million (on revenues of $364 million) last year. And in a recession, $300 douchebag jeans are among the first things people cut out of their budgets.

Corey at Money Reasons goes confessional this week, acknowledging that his wealth plan might not be unassailable. He’s got at least a couple of backup plans ready to go, and an irrational fear of being defrauded by someone like Bernie Madoff. (If someone like Bernie Madoff has even partial control over your money, you’re already rich.)

Alright, back to the horror. Miranda at Financial Highway has 4 ideas for earning extra income, all of which are impractical and none of which any sane person will ever try. Wait, didn’t we goof on this submission already? Yes, we did. She sent it in 2 months ago, and we tore it to shreds that time. If she wants to come back for more, who are we to deny her masochistic fantasies? Anyhow, her idiotic suggestions:

1. Offer to deliver pizza, sodas and cookies to college students between the hours of 10 pm and 3 am. Yes, because the kind of students who are awake to eat junk food in the middle of the night are rich enough that they’ll pay someone else to bring it to them.

2. Scrapbooking for other ladies. As Miranda puts it,

They can bring over their photos, and you can put them together, in an attractive and memorable presentation.

We average only half a vagina between us, but we thought the whole purpose of scrapbooking was to immerse yourself in an activity while your husband’s at work and your kids are compromising your sanity. Are we at the point where we’re now farming out hobbies? Why not hire someone to golf or fish for you while you’re at it?

3., and this is the most ridiculous one of all:

(Y)ou can purchase portable toilets that can be rented out. Instead of just renting them out, though, you can make them a little bit nicer. Clean them up. Add air fresheners, include nice soap and lotion, fluffy hand towels, and decorate the inside. These nicer portable toilets could be rented out for upscale outdoor events like weddings, company parties and special receptions.  

A free copy of Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense to the first person who can show us evidence of a portable toilet whose purveyor lined the inside with decorations and “fluffy hand towels.” (Miranda: “You see? That’s my point. No one else is doing it! The market is all yours!”)

Portable toilets run about $800 apiece. To do this you’d need to buy multiple ones, and you’d need somewhere to store them. And a way to transport them. And…oh, for God’s sake, we could write another 326-page book just on what’s wrong with this idea.

Let Miranda’s post serve as a warning: if you’re going to submit to the Carnival of Wealth, step your game up. Merely writing the first thing that pops into your head will either get you rejected (if you’re lucky), or will get you published as an example of everything we’re not looking for.

That might be the single worst piece of advice we’ve ever seen. To truly grasp the absurdity of her post, don’t just read our summary. You really need to behold it in its original splendor.

And once again, thanks for letting us put this together. Let’s do it again next week, y’all.

 

*No, he’s not dead. But he is overweight.