No, not that kind of turning the corner. (Sorry.)

The incompetent submitters are dropping off, week by week. Even better, a new roster of outspoken ones continues to gradually supplant them. Who knows, within a few decades the Carnival of Wealth might be good from top to bottom. We could hit some rough spots today, but the road looks smoother than ever. Let’s begin:

Newcomer Rob Aeschbach wins for most striking post title: Why You Should Be Doing Estate Planning at the DMV. And not just because you’ll have plenty of time on your hands. Rob regales us with a tale of Jenny, Stevie and Bruce, at least one of whom used to work on the docks/Unions been on strike/He’s down on his luck…

It’s tough. So tough.

(Note: CYC’s home state lets you renew your vehicle registration online, but doesn’t let you use PayPal. You can use something called Pulse Pay, and something else called NYCE, and you can pay via “e-check,” but not by using the largest payment processor in the world.)

Another ex-military guy with an aerodynamic haircut and a flair for both English composition and personal finance wisdom is Jason at Hull Financial Planning. You know how a car dealer would rather lend you money for the next 5 years than take a haggled-over check today? Jason says the same phenomenon happens in investment planning. If you honestly believe that paying 1% of your net worth to a professional every year is a better deal than paying a flat fee to someone with Jason’s skills and qualifications, the good news is that 1% of your net worth is never going to be all that much.

Do you think Canadians are boring and monotonal ciphers who don’t understand dynamism? Well, you’d be right. You’d also be unfairly stereotyping Sandi Martin at Spring-Personal-Finance, another long-overdue new visitor to these parts. As Sandi puts it, being frugal for its own sake is stupid. You don’t use coupons just so you can say, “Witness this 17¢ I saved.” Ben Franklin was a genius, but “A penny saved is a penny earned” was his 2nd-biggest clunker, right after “Rarely use venery* but for health or offspring.” Unless you can clip coupons at a rate that makes it more lucrative than a job, and derive some mental stimulation out of it while you’re at it. That sound you heard was the bruising of the egos of 10,000 repetitive bloggers, ready to call Sandi hurtful and worse.

Hey Sandi? Ask Paula Pant at the former Afford-Anything to tell you the story of how much it can cost to eliminate a hyphen. (UPDATE, 5/27/13: Sandi lost the hyphens.) Our defending Woman of the Year stops by to inspect her realm and to offer what she calls the weirdest personal finance advice on Earth: Paula thinks you should buy as many Powerball tickets as you can afford.

Just kidding. She said “weirdest,” not “worst.” Read for the details. (That’s what we in the business call a “tease.”)

More gold? Is this our birthday or something? PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net brings back one of our favorite features, one so brilliant we wonder why no one else had thought of it first. If you look at option prices, both call and put, for a particular stock then you should be able to figure out the stock’s eventual price. Is this the ultimate arbitrage, free money for the making? The answer seems more likely to be yes than no.

Glen Craig at Free From Broke explains credit scores. Which sounds like overly basic advice, until you remember that there are tens of millions of Americans whose awful payment histories indicate otherwise. In honor of the recently deceased Dr. Joyce Brothers, let’s mimic those asinine true/false quizzes that used to run in her weekly column:

1. When you have bills to pay and a deadline to do so by without incurring penalties, you should carry a balance. TRUE FALSE

We’re going to miss her.

It’s getting really hard to make jokes about the quality of the posts we’ve been receiving, and Dividend Growth Investor isn’t making it any easier. He defends himself against readers (his, not ours) who say he’d be crazy if he didn’t cash out when a stock undecupled in value. DGI gives his explanation and his long-term strategy. Comes with a chart!

From the splendidly named Fitz Villafuerte, how to grow your business and what sequence events should take. Don’t spend tons of money on a capital investment (say, an industrial quality pasta maker) if your clientele hates pasta. Or if your company does auto detailing. Because that wouldn’t make sense.

(Sigh) Dude, you’re a mechanical engineer. It’s people like you who are going to help us thwart the dawn of the Chinese Millennium. But Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans, stick to materials science and thermodynamics. Because your personal finance advice is terrifying. Jon thinks you should take out some 7.9% student loans and cross your fingers that the lenders (or federal legislators twisting the legislators’ arms) might forgive those loans sometime in the future. Apparently it doesn’t matter if you’re working on your M.A. in drama, borrowing money to finance your education may be swell. Not a word about getting an associate’s degree and learning how to fix refrigerators or do something else worthwhile.

Michael at Kitces.com questions conventional wisdom, and thank God because if no one did that we wouldn’t have human-powered flight nor Scientology. Michael wonders if financial planners are really serving their clients’ best interests when using “bucket” strategies – a bucket of bonds for the short term, money-market funds for the middle term, stocks for when you’re sitting around the retirement home wondering why your grandkids never call. But is it realistic to never touch the “long-term” securities just because of a plan you devised decades earlier?

Dammit. When a submitter singles us out for praise in his submission email, and indicates that he’s clearly a fan, we’ll try to find something positive to say about his post. (clenching teeth) Here goes. Paul Latta at Each Tiny Moment sends us something titled “Gambling is For Chumps”. Unfortunately, the title continues. “…Unless They Use This Secret.” Paul thinks you should join a players club and get cash back every time you play. It’s the casino equivalent of a Discover card, and we maintain that you’re far better off not knowing what a players club is in the first place.

Paul does give us an opportunity to bring up a related point, though. As CYC’s dry-season headquarters are in Las Vegas, gambling is something of a familiar activity to us. That doesn’t mean we partake, of course, but we’re surrounded by it. To the point where we’ll eat dinner at casino restaurants; and forgo the big discounts that they offer to players club members, because we aren’t. Yes, membership is free. So is that first childhood cigarette. We’d rather pay a few bucks more and not deal with the emails and direct marketing offers, thanks. Irrational? Perhaps. Or maybe that’s the price we’ve chosen to affix to not being in the database.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro explains how to build credit when you’re young and don’t have much of a credit history other than cards. His suggestions are sound, given that it’s 2013 and the Fair, Isaac & Co. credit scoring formula still hasn’t leaked. Incredible.

You’re too stupid to save for retirement. That’s not us talking: that’s from generations of politicians, dating back to history’s greatest monster, Franklin Roosevelt. Thus Social Security, the Ponzi scheme that will inevitably end up as such schemes do. Still, Social Security gives Kristine McKinley (now there was a president, except for the tariffs) at Social Security Retirement Income the chance to make an alluring infographic about how to maximize the post-career scratch you’re entitled to.

We’ll close things out with our Franco-Guatemalan heroine, Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence. (Not to be confused with Franco-Guatemalan heroin, which averages around $200 a gram and is even farther out of our reach than Pauline is.) This post is her usual great stuff, and we couldn’t summarize it any more pithily than she did. In her second language, no less:

I have been wearing the same jacket since October 2010. And my net worth has grown 87% since then. My friends don’t seem to see the correlation.

Thanks for coming. See you tomorrow.

*Venery = sexytime

Yes, the Antichrist makes an appearance on CYC this week. We can explain. That’s him, standing next to an felonious and unapologetic evil psychopath of a dog murderer.

That’s Rich Abajian, general manager of Findlay Toyota, which is a dealership near CYC headquarters. Last week a CYC acquaintance – a septuagenarian lady – had occasion to involuntarily do business with them. This is what happened.

The lady in question drives a 2002 Camry, which she keeps in impeccable condition and barely drives. Last week the check engine light came on.

For those of you who don’t already know this, here’s what you do when your check engine light comes on. You plug in your code reader, which is available for a reasonable price at AutoZone, and figure out what the problem is. If it’s something serious, you then take it ANYWHERE ON EARTH BUT TO A DEALER. You spend 5 minutes on Angie’s List and find a highly rated shop. We cover this in the book, in a chapter that today’s protagonist unfortunately never read.

So she hot-footed it to the dealer. Who wrote her an estimate and charged her $99.95 for the privilege. Yes, in 2013 an auto dealer attempted to charge a fee for an estimate (and succeeded, at least once.) Even the most rapacious dealer knows that’s not how you grease the suckers. You give a no-charge estimate, maybe throw in a complimentary cupholder or t-shirt, then frighten the mark with visions of gruesome death on the highway if she doesn’t consent to all the work you authorized. Even casinos don’t have the gall to charge you for your drinks before convincing you to drop thousands at the baccarat table.

But they charged her that much, and she paid it for some reason instead of standing her ground. That’s not even close to the climax of the story.

Findlay Toyota threatened not to let her leave the freaking service department without doing the work. Here’s the estimate, for $3304.28:

It includes the following jobs: onboard refueling vapor recovery valve, oil pan reseal, power steering flush, wheel alignment, front engine mount, dog bone mount, brake system flush, fuel injection service. None of which the Camry requires. Not “a little,” not “hardly any.” None. The oil pan is fine. The ORVR valve is fine. The power steering fluid isn’t contaminated at all. The front engine mount isn’t broken. Not a hairline crack, nothing.

We have a smog law here in CYC’s neighborhood. You go to a government-approved tester once a year, pay $30 or so to make sure your vehicle’s emissions fall below the threshold, and you can’t renew your registration unless your vehicle passes. The law exists mostly to cover pre-1980 carbureted vehicles, and well over 90% of the rest pass on the first attempt unless they have leaky O-rings or something. When she balked at the $3304.28, they told her “You’re going to fail your test.” After they shook her down for the $99.95, she went to the testing center and passed easily.

This dealer indeed hired Michael Vick to do commercials for them last year. Some animal rights people protested when he did an appearance at the dealer, in a vain attempt to rehabilitate an image that’s miles beyond repair. The amoral general manager and his sycophantic employees dug their heels in, talking about what a bunch of good that dog-killing feces discharge does for the community. How much it was court-ordered, Abajian didn’t mention.

Normally, we here at CYC are all for parting the gullible from their money. And we understand that like pawn shops and payday loan places, car dealerships survive by their lack of scruples. But this is 8 shades beyond reprehensible. If you happen to live in Las Vegas and feel like buying a Toyota, go here instead. And if you don’t want to mess around with a scanner tool, get your work done here.

Still homicidal. Let’s cool things down by starting this week’s CoW. We can always count on Darwin’s Money to be provocative, and this week he attempts to place a marketplace value on the worth of a stay-at-home mother. It’s a stunning riposte to those tiresome pop-news stories on how mothers are grossly underpaid and should command Kobe Bryant-level salaries, or something close. They shouldn’t.

Dividend Growth Investor keeps himself anonymous and with good reason, given the great details he gives about his portfolio. This week he looks at dividend achievers, defining them as companies that have increased their dividend in each of the last 10 years. None of them are glamour names, unless you consider Lincoln Electric Holdings and York Water to be glamorous. But no, keep spending money on crap like the Facebook IPO. That’ll make you rich.

Michael at Kitces.com returns after a brief layoff. You sure you want to use a 529 plan for college? A Coverdell Education Savings Account might make more sense. Michael explains the difference and the advantages for each.

If we can write about something that’s only of local interest (see above, and this time let our bile sink in), so can Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro. How to save money at Sea World. Tip #2, bring your own food. Harry, you’re making Trent Hamm blush.

The incredible Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence also returns, after a luxurious few days doubtless spent suntanning on the Guatemalan Pacific coast. Pauline reminds us that a government’s duty is to look after the health of its denizens, and that in France (Pauline’s country of origin) regular checkups and office visits are cheaper than a pack of cigarettes. Literally cheaper, not just figuratively cheaper in the sense that the cigarettes could cost you your life.

Pauline’s no dummy, and explains what the inevitable consequence is of artificially pricing a good below its market value. There’s a shortage of doctors in France, and a wait in the order of weeks for those inexpensive checkups. The good news is that the wait at emergency rooms can be measured in mere hours. Also, specialists (e.g. dentists) will try to upsell you on unnecessary stuff that actually makes a profit. Kind of like Findlay Toyota, only with the impetus of government behind it. Even better, abortions are free and surgical birth control is not. Why run the risk of never conceiving, when you can have the fun of crushing a baby’s skull and then vacuum its brains out instead?

And that’s what single-payer will be like, the ultimate goal of Obamacare. Good times!

It wouldn’t be the CoW without at least one post that consists of one blatantly self-evident line after another. Emily Guy Birken at One Smart Dollar to the rescue:

Spouses who decide to stay home with their kids know that they will be making sacrifices. It’s difficult to put a career on hold and easily be able to pick it back up again several years later. And losing one parent’s income means money is tighter

Didn’t know any of that, did you? How about this:

Before deciding to stay home, both spouses need to sit down and talk about protecting their finances and building for the future

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. She’s just being a mommy, that’s all. Now eat your vegetables and drink your juice.

Let’s wash that off with some DQYDJ.net, shall we? The singularly brilliant PKamp3 shows us that the Dow is finally rising in real terms. After 13 years of stagnation. Pop the champagne. But not before paying capital gains taxes and transaction fees. No wonder poor people hate the rich so much.

Finally. After an interminable length of time in which she never submitted to us, Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance has something to share. Alright, maybe the length of time was only a week since we discovered her and her tremendous blog. The Canadian financial planner explains why it’s foolish to ever hire one of her commissioned counterparts. They’re as crooked as the service writers at Findlay Toyota, though operating in a different realm. Read Sandi: she’s our best new submitter since…

This guy. Jason at Hull Financial Planning. Jason explains how online poker became more difficult to profit at once the distance between the best and worst players started closing. The same thing happened in the realm of financial planning too, and will do so in any endeavor in which information becomes democratized. That’s way too brief a summary of a layered and thoughtful (as always) post. Sheer genius, or a valid approximation of it.

Thanks again for coming. See you tomorrow.

It must be that time of year again. The Washington Redskins are being criticized for their allegedly offensive nickname. “Why, we white (and to a lesser extent, other-colored) people who have appointed ourselves the arbiters of propriety find fault with this. Although it’s a literal description of pigmentation, ‘Redskin’ must change.”

The arguments on either side of this issue are so entrenched that they barely need repeating, but here goes.

• Con: Any Indian-themed name is, by definition, offensive. I’m too stupid to draw a distinction between a college calling its teams the Hurons, and Chief Wahoo. It doesn’t matter than I’ve never seen an Indian, and wouldn’t know how to behave if I did, but I believe that anatomically accurate Redskins logo is part of the problem. You can’t honor an ethnicity by naming a team after it, you can only insult it. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish and their drunk Mick of a mascot don’t count because I’ve chosen to apply a double standard. White privilege and all that.

• Pro: No sports team would ever give itself a degrading name. There are no San Jose Jackballs or Kansas City Retards. Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, despite his thousands of other transgressions, sees Indians to be worth emulating and honoring. Same deal with Jerry Jones and cowboys, Zygi Wilf and Vikings, etc.

Why don’t we go right to the source and see how our Indian friends choose to name their own teams when free of interference?

Last week CYC went on the road, driving through the Navajo Nation, the semi-autonomous area that encompasses a large chunk of northeastern Arizona and parts of Utah and New Mexico. There are 12 high schools on the nation. They operate under the auspices of tribal government, and are attended and staffed almost entirely by Navajo. Here are what 5 of those schools have selected for their nicknames and logos:

• Red Mesa (Teec Nos Pos, AZ) Redskins.
• Window Rock (AZ) Fighting Scouts, whose logo is a stylized Indian complete with feather and headband.
• Tuba City (AZ) Warriors, again with a feathered human head for a logo.
• Whitehorse (Montezuma Creek, UT) Raiders, whose logo is a headdressed Indian atop a horse, brandishing a spear.
• Shiprock (NM) Chieftains, another Indian with a headdress for a logo.

The teams of the only college on the Nation, Dine College, are also named the Warriors.

That was a long preview, but it got us to an irrefutable point. Now to the good stuff that we can all agree on, the Carnival itself.

We’ll start with Catherine at All Things Finance, who says it’s important to teach your teenagers about credit cards and then writes like a teenager to emphasize her point:

Teaching your child financial responsibility is one of the most important tools you brace them with.

“Teaching your child financial responsibility” is not a tool, just like an adjustable wrench is not an abstract phrase. Catherine also graduated college with $90,000 in student loans, which means we can add her to the endless list of authorities on this tired topic.

Upon further review, it seems that Catherine was our Retard of the Month 2 short months ago. We didn’t catch it immediately because she’s writing for a different blog now. Still, kudos to her for getting back up on the horse. Now all she needs is an editor. Well, that and $90,000.

If the grossly indebted college graduate is the #1 stereotype among CoW submitters, the insurance salesman trying to increase his business by sending us a post is a close second. R.J. Weiss at WIA Group (it stands for Weiss Insurance Agencies) asks a fantastic rhetorical question, “Should my spouse have life insurance?” You’re not going to believe this, but the answer is yes. And you’ll never guess whom R.J. thinks you should buy your next policy from.

How much crappier can this week’s CoW get? How about a cut-and-paste Wikipedia job? Take it away, prince ade (sic) at Omobaone.blogspot.com, and if a site has a Blogspot URL you know it’s got to be good. Prince ade lifted a couple of paragraphs from the entry on Carlos Slim Helú. Great job, prince.

The remarkable Neal Frankle returns to the CoW, this time guest posting at Free From Broke. Neal has an opinion on life insurance too, and his is considerably less enthusiastic than that of that guy from a couple of submissions ago whose name we already forgot.

Bryan Chau of Success Pen Pal has submitted before, but needs to get the hang of this. One submission per, Ace. He submitted 3, which normally means we’d reject all of them on principle, but continuing with the inadvertent theme of this week’s CoW we decided to run it anyway. How to handle rejection and success, or something.

Ross Garner at Wallet Hub restores a little dignity to this fiasco with his piece on another Washington debate, this one the mortgage interest income tax deduction. Some lawmakers think the current deduction is too generous to wealthy people, others think the deduction ought to be eliminated wholesale because the federal government needs more of our money, no one whose opinion means anything seems to think that the income tax structure should be dismantled and started again from scratch with a flat deduction for everyone and a flat rate for everyone beyond the basic deduction, with no exceptions.

(Pro tip: “$” is called the dollar sign. It eliminates the need to use the word “dollars,” e.g. “$1 million dollars,” by reducing the word to one simple character.)

Speaking of deductions, Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro points out how you can deduct appropriately documented moving expenses from your taxable income. If you move at least 50 miles, or get audited by an IRS agent who doesn’t know how to measure distances on Google Maps, you might qualify.

Dividend Growth Investor brings quantity and quality every week. Last month he cashed out the index funds in his old 401(k) that was eligible for a rollover, putting them in an IRA. Then, he split the money among 20 dividend stocks. He also articulates his philosophy in a beautifully succinct manner. In the comments, no less, rather than in the article proper:

I would rather buy an outstanding company at a fair price, than a mediocre one at a low price.

Some contributors to the CoW put negligible effort into it, as referenced above. Then there’s PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, who returns with another of his trademark calculators. This week’s will determine the price change on a barrel of crude oil on any 2 post-May 20, 1987 dates you choose. (Both West Texas Intermediate and Brent.)

It was on that very day that the King, Jerry Lawler, sued King Harley Race for use of that honorific. A wrestling Battle Royal of a different kind, and a suitable segue for the latest from Jason at Hull Financial Planning.

We’ve spoken time and again – in fact, we wrote a book on the topic – about how you should focus on your net worth rather than your income. Jason takes it one step further, arguing that even a focus on net worth can be detrimental. To paraphrase Jason, if you measure daily changes in your net worth, you’re going to be happy twice and disappointed 29 times every month.

And we’re done. Thanks again for coming, and we’ll see you tomorrow.