Just outside Island Park, Idaho

Final tally on the recent CYC wildlife viewing excursion:

Bears 1 (black)
Pronghorn too numerous to count
White-tailed deer 1 doe, 2 fawns
Elk too numerous to count
Bison too numerous to count
Moose 1

Fun facts about moose: The Shiras, 1 of 4 North American subspecies (the others are Alaskan, Western and Eastern), lives as far south as southern Utah and Colorado. In other words, within a day’s jaunt of Arizona and New Mexico, if you happen to be a moose. Sorry, that’s the only fun cervine fact we’ve got this morning. On with the show:

You’re not going to believe this, but there’s a personal finance blogger who took out student loans and is now drowning in debt. No really, there is. Her name is Kristen Kuchar and the folks at My Dollar Plan have deigned to let her write about how she’s paying them off. Oh, and her degree? Yeah, it’s in journalism, the stupidest “profession” known to mankind. Good thing she’s got that sweet My Dollar Plan money rolling in.

Robert Renaud at Time Trading Guru recites the same personal development advice you’ve heard 8 million times.

Another new submitter, Jeffrey James at Life in Charge, asks if financial newsletters are worth reading. In general, no. In particular, yes. Save yourself the aggravation and just scroll down to the last 3 paragraphs of Jeffrey’s post. Control Your Cash, getting to the point since 2010.

Dividend Growth Investor understands that there’s no more vital step on the road to building wealth than to check the prices of the stocks you invest in, and to do so every day. Ha ha jk LOL, of course not. He recommends the exact opposite of that, because he’s not insane. Obsessing over daily fluctuations is dumb enough to begin with, but especially if you’re long into companies that are established and profitable enough that they’re paying dividends in the first place.

Alright, we appear to have turned the corner. One of our favorite submitters is Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence, a French woman who escaped the land of government-mandated paid vacations to seek out a new life in a country with a far lower cost of living and a more consistently pleasant climate – Guatemala. Pauline wrote what might be greatest line in the history of the CoW:

[W]e live on about $1,000 per month with a full time staff, two cars, a motor boat and a couple of trips abroad during the year.

She also spends 0 hours a year in cubicles and a comparable amount of time in traffic jams. Think about that tomorrow morning, when heading to your job as an account executive or regional representative.

Michael at Financial Ramblings writes an infomercial for reviews a financial tracking service called Personal Capital. He describes it as Mint with an investing slant, and we have to admit that it looks both elegant and functional. Michael’s review of Personal Capital is fair, not fawning. As to whether you should pay for the service or not, Michael’s got your answer.

The Carnival of Wealth is supposed to be a compendium of other people’s blog posts. Occasionally it becomes a meta-compendium, as when it features posts like this one by Mike St. Pierre at Annuity Rates HQ. Mike lists the “Top 27 Annuity Articles From Non-Biased Sources.” Or “unbiased”, if you prefer the traditional antonym of “biased”. We’ll call it 25, because Mike included posts from 2 reprehensible blogs: The Simple Dollar and Financial Samurai. (We’re exceedingly non-biased in our assessment of said blogs.)

Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance deserves a larger audience, and we’ll do our incremental part to help that happen. Sandi, a fee-only financial planner with a bouncy ‘do and low tolerance for stupidity, maintains that while excitement might belong in your life – perhaps in the form of motorcycle racing or free solo climbing – it doesn’t belong in your investment strategy. Especially if you’re young. Sandi recommends mutual funds, not unduly hyped single stocks with weak or nonexistent fundamentals. If you’re Canadian, hire her.

We’re officially in the heart of the order. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net investigates the most absurdly outlying housing market in the United States, that of the Bay Area. Not only are homes in San Francisco and its environs expensive, PKamp3 argues that they might finally be unjustifiably so. In other words, bubblicious. PKamp3 and his staff somehow manage to put together an engagingly written blog, punctuated by charts and calculators of their own derivation, and update it multiple times weekly. While holding demanding full-time jobs, no less. Meanwhile we just write a couple of unadorned posts every Wednesday and Friday (when we remember) and host this goofy carnival every Monday.

Jason at Hull Financial Planning has lived that most regimented of lifestyles – that of the commissioned Army officer with unambiguous pay grade. Today he’s at the other pole, as an entrepreneur whose income derives largely from his ability to convince people to buy what he and he alone is selling. Jason also makes money by owning rental properties, which requires at least as much intellectual brawn as his day job does. Jason explains the concepts of alpha and beta as they pertain to return and risk, and does so in a detailed but readable fashion. He quantifies the downside, demonstrates the benefits endemic to real estate investing, and between he and PKamp3 we’re starting to realize the limits of our own brainpower (several levels below theirs.)

“Tips for a successful garage sale”? Come on. Do we look like Clark Howard? Adam at Money Rebound has grossly misunderstood what we do here:

[P]ut out some coffee and juice and/or set up a “kid zone” filled with coloring books and crayons where little ones can be occupied as mom and dad do their browsing.

Hold on a minute. No guy, or at least no guy we’d want anything to do with, refers to kids as “little ones.”

Upon further review, Adam was merely the submitter. The post was written by someone named Jen. Jen’s Twitter bio calls her a “reformed spendaholic” and “debt destroyer.” She had $14,000 in consumer debt, student loans, etc., etc., etc. See above. In fact, see just about every other personal finance blogger in existence.

Oh, what the hell. As long as we’re here, presenting Control Your Cash’s tips for a successful garage sale:

1. Acknowledge that it’s 2013, and we have eBay and Craigslist now. You don’t have to restrict your potential clientele to dull people who have nothing better to do on a Saturday than putz around the neighborhood contemplating your junk. If you then decide that you won’t be able to turn a profit on your Disney®-logo napkin rings once you account for shipping, do everyone a favor and throw them in the garbage.
2. Ignore Jen’s advice, which includes such gems as “buy those colored dot stickers at an office supply store and assign each group their own color. That way, when things get busy, you’ll have no problem knowing that lamp is Aunt Sally’s because it has the neon green sticker on it.”

Another masturbatory post that does nothing but achieve the writer’s required word count. Instead of reading about what color stickers to buy for a garage sale you’re never going to hold, read PKamp3’s or Jason Hull’s post twice.

Finally, the lovely Liana Arnold at Card Hub tells us that the money loaded on prepaid debit cards has tripled in the last 4 years. She cites a report from a research firm called the Mercator Advisory Group, which not only ranks 26 different cards, but offers its…wait for it…projection for the prepaid debit card market! (We can’t give away all the details, but let’s just say that Greenland and Antarctica will show up big.)

Thanks for coming. See you next time, preferably tomorrow.

The next day, the pilots’ real names were announced as Lee Gang-Kuk and Lee Jeong-Min. Yeah, very funny. Sure they are. Whatever you say.

Alright, here’s the video. Never forget that journalism, particularly broadcast journalism, is the most imbecilic line of work on the planet. Your average debt blogger is…not necessarily smarter than a news-reading talking head, but in the ballpark. “Wi To Lo” made us laugh like Mongoloids, but “Bang Ding Ow” just sealed it.

Welcome to another in the endless series, the Carnival of Wealth. Blog posts from other financial bloggers, collated and commented upon by us every Monday, saving us the trouble of coming up with something original. Here goes:

No, no, no, no, no. This is all wrong. From Rob at Financial Sprout, and we don’t even feel comfortable cutting and pasting the title of his post, “How to Get a Free Cell Phone (Obama Phone).” (Parenthetical clarification his.)

Great. So now our site has gone from a place where people can learn the finer points of personal finance and hopefully build wealth, to a place where they can get the taxpaying stooges down the street to finance their cell phones. We’ve written before about what a racket charity is, and how helping the helpless depends on how expansive your definition of “helpless” is. If you have a hand to hold a phone with, and an ear to hear callers with, you can work and buy your own damn mobile phone. Just like your great-grandparents did. Rob explains how taking advantage of the welfare state can be easy and fun:

Consumers in every state are eligible to enroll in the program if they have an income that is at or below 135% of poverty levels.  Consumers who participate in any of the following federal programs may also be eligible for the Lifeline program:

• Medicaid
• Supplemental Security Income
• Food Stamps
• Section 8 Housing
• Free Lunch Program
• Head Start
• TTANF

This is worse than anything Girl Meets Debt, Peter J. Buscemi or the Newlyweds on a Budget gal ever desecrated our carnival with. At least they weren’t encouraging our readers to participate in state-sanctioned theft.

How about this? If you’re getting food stamps, or living in Section 8, or getting whatever TTANF is, stop reading blogs and find a job. Rob, the CoW is for the aspiring, not for the downwardly mobile. Send that jetsam to someone who’s not going to mock it.

Michael at Financial Ramblings has a habit of picking challenging topics to write about. Fortunately, he has a skill for explaining them in layman’s terms. This week, how do you get your decrepit old relatives to qualify for Medicaid? If you answered “Give away assets until they fall below the threshold,” that’s cheating.

Here’s an idea, septuagenarians who need joints replaced and boils lanced: spend the previous decades eating healthily and exercising. Get off the couch. Do you really need to watch every episode of CSI? And hire a trainer. At a real gym. A 20-minute routine at your local Curves is not a workout.

Another new submitter, from a sporadically updated blog: Steven Chang at Support And Resistance Trading, who wants you to use his Excel worksheet (you won’t) to trade options via his strategy. In Chapter 7 we explain how you can’t even think about trading in derivatives until you understand trading in more basic securities, but tell that to Steven. Buying and selling securities, especially options, isn’t a game the way Steven paints it to be. Any investor who plans to make trades in increments of 10 is asking for poverty.

We don’t know the first thing about Dividend Growth Investor, except his sex (we confirmed it with him in an email once) and his fondness for small fonts. Well, that and his status as an authority on…dividend investing, of course. If you think you need to invest millions to enjoy comfortable dividend returns, or that dividend stocks are only for old people, or that paying dividends means that a company’s managers have run out of ideas, you really need to read this post and toss your misconceptions aside.

Uncle Sam will get his piece, whether you live in St. Paul or Sao Paulo. Amanda at My Dollar Plan reports that Americans living abroad have to file U.S. income tax returns – even if those Americans have to pay income taxes to their countries of residence, too. (Not unlike how “undocumented” immigrants in the United States mail tax returns to both the IRS and the Servicio de Administración Tributaria. HA HA HA)

[Post rejected because we like the website’s owner, who writes most of the stuff on the site, but who farmed this week’s post out to a freelance gal whom we’ve made merciless fun of over the years. Even though we’re thin this week we still couldn’t run it. Quality over quantity.]

Closing out with 4 of our favorites. Longtime CoW contributor Pauline Paquin has a new site, Make Money Your Way. Pauline compares building wealth via real estate to doing the same via investing in stocks, and says the former wins on a dozen different counts. For one thing, real estate can generate income while you’re waiting for it to appreciate. Yeah, some stocks pay dividends, but who are you kidding if you’re trying to legitimately compare the two? Of the 12 reasons she lists, #5 and 6 are the ones we swear by the loudest. (Chapter 8.)

We tell people over and again, don’t get an adjustable-rate mortgage when you can get a fixed-rate. The former is just asking for trouble and potential ruin. But we’re assuming that you’re not as diligent as Cameron at DQYDJ.net, who weighed the 5-year teaser rate of an ARM against how much he’d be paying with a fixed-rate. The increase in up-front cash is enough to make a difference to Cameron, and with the extra $10,000+ thus to invest, he should still come out ahead even if rates rise by a reasonable amount. Plus he’s young and his income will presumably rise over the course of the mortgage. We’d still like to know what his cap is, though.

Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance is the definitive Carnival of Wealth contributor. She’s articulate, funny, and thoughtful, but not so urbane that she’s above making “anus”/”onus” puns. Meanwhile, most debt bloggers think they’re sluicing comedic gold by noticing the similarity between “cents” and “sense”. Sandi discusses Canada’s Harmonized Sales Tax, which is in effect in 5 of Canada’s 6 easternmost provinces and which has become a bane of confusion and inconsistency for the humble small business owner. Or as Sandi puts it,

When you have to collect HST for the government:

1. Read the manual
2. Call the helpline
3. File and remit
4. File and remit the next year
5. Get penalized for not guessing that there’s a step 3½ that Revenue Canada doesn’t tell you about but you should be able to magically guess on your own.
6. Write a curmudgeonly letter to your (Member of Parliament)

Jason at Hull Financial Planning is in the coveted final spot yet again, partly due to his use of the words “eudaimonia” and “caudate”. Some people feel a need to dumb their posts down (some are already written as dumbed down as possible), and others try to raise the level of discourse. That’s Jason, who explains how the necessary transition from his parents gently bribing him to letting him find other motivators was almost seamless. There’s more to life than earning rewards: really, there is. That’s why “I ran 3 miles today, therefore I earned a jelly doughnut” makes no sense as a conditional statement (and why people who are really good at running don’t “reward” themselves with increasingly unhealthy foods.)

Thanks for coming. We remain on Investopedia, and elsewhere. ‘Til tomorrow.

And behold, I saw the 7 angelic trumpeters

End of the World? Naw, it’s just the end of our neighborhood. This was the sight from Control Your Cash headquarters last week as the Carpenter Canyon fire burned 3 square miles of forest, caused the evacuation of the nearby community of Mt. Charleston, and headed in search of fuel and oxygen. Will it engulf the entire area, leaving us to file a claim with our insurance company? Or will it just scare the woodland creatures and little else? Most importantly, will it impact our ability to create yet another Carnival of Wealth? Of course not. Here goes:

Dividend Growth Investor knows only one song, but he plays it to perfection. Investing in stocks with proven dividend records might not remove unsightly bathtub rings nor keep your cat from shedding, but he recommends it as the ideal gateway for young investors. As you might have heard before on this site, with most investments you make your money going in. A steady history of increasing dividends (and the concomitant stable price) is probably a safer bet than hoping for appreciation.

So you graduated high school, and by some measures you’re now what they call an adult. The world is your oyster, if not some other waterborne hermaphrodite. What to do with your life? With all that possibility at your feet, how about deferring meaningful existence for a few years while borrowing money you’ll never be able to pay back? It sounds brainless to us, but we’re apparently in the minority. Jen at Money Rebound assumes you’ve incurred such debt if you want to take up space on this planet and breathe its air:

In a world where education is prized and often a necessary catalyst for establishing a successful career, it can be a hard realization that mountains of debt might come along with the fancy new diploma.

False premise, but if Jen acknowledged that she wouldn’t have much of a post. Jen’s solution for slashing that debt include a) living cheaply and 2) earning more. Fortunately she doesn’t write much beyond that, saving you precious minutes.

Another false premise – in fact, practically the same one – from Kevin Mulligan at Free From Broke. As he puts it, “We want to do the best for our kids and pay for their college education. But should we save for college at the expense of retirement savings?”

Who’s this “we,” Kemo Sabe? Parents, stop feeling guilt or unnecessary obligation. Once they get past the age of majority, you know what you owe your kids? Not a thing. If you’re financially independent enough that you can afford to sock away a bachelor’s degree worth of tuition and books while your kids are growing up, more power to you and thanks for reading our site even though you presumably know all this stuff already. But it’s not a moral imperative to save for college. That’s what part-time jobs are for. Hell, that’s what cheap trade schools are for. To his credit, Kevin concludes that saving for Junior’s college loses out to saving for your own retirement.

How does homosexual marriage impact personal finance? Well, if you and your similarly endowed spouse wed in a jurisdiction where such unions are legal, and move to one where they aren’t, Michael at Kitces.com explains the tax (among other) implications. Even better, if you happen to be studying for a Certified Financial Planner designation, there’s a link to Michael’s latest newsletter, which will earn you 1 1/2 hours of continuing education credit.

By our unscientific guess, 70% of our CoW submitters are American, and 20% Canadian. Both countries celebrated their independence in the past week – America having defeated its overlords 237 years ago, and Canada successfully getting the “Request for Sovereignty” forms notarized and mailed back to London 91 years later – and thus it seems that most of the regulars took the week off from submitting. Either that, or they were so distraught by our unspeakable cruelty of a week ago that they’re never going to stoop to submitting again. Although we did have a paucity of submitters a year ago, too. It’s surprising to see how many of those robust contributors from the summer of 2012 have disappeared without a trace. If you were committing to spend hours reading this week’s CoW and feel you’re been shortchanged, there are ways around it. In the meantime, we’re still on Investopedia. And by the transitive property we’re also on Yahoo! Finance, although we only got paid once for that article. Maybe we should run it on here too, and triple-dip.

Whoa…we’re almost there. Finally! 800 words, including the few to follow. Our self-imposed minimum for blog posts. It’s also Rick Reilly’s minimum for his ESPN pieces, for which he’s grossly overpaid. Not as overpaid as we were for that Investopedia piece, but close enough.

Thanks again, and we’ll see you tomorrow.