Marie Antoinette would have found such displays of taxpayer-subsidized wealth distasteful.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the federal government to reduce spending by .3%, let’s start by cutting something unimportant, such as air traffic control. Because there’s nothing else – Centers for Disease Control anti-smoking programs, Department of Agriculture subsidies to tobacco farmers – that we could cut first. People really do get the governments they deserve.

We never give Andrew at 101 Centavos the opening slot, and have no excuse. He’s one of our 4 best contributors, week in and week out. This time around, have you ever wondered why the internal combustion engine refuses to go away? Among other reasons, gasoline is extremely potent (in terms of energy density, 2524 tons per square inch.) Also, even at $4 a gallon, it’s wicked cheap compared to any other means of powering a vehicle that can carry passengers and travel at a decent speed. Tell that to the investors who are convinced that renewability is the only criterion for judging a fuel. Bonus: Andrew’s post introduces us to a public company’s use of “derisking” in its official communications, and if the WordPress spellcheck underlines a word in red it raises some color flag. The phrase was “derisking our business on the regulatory front,” shorthand for “if we pay a former state governor and a former Secretary of State to sit on our board, it won’t matter that our product is unfeasible.”

Today’s featured image also pays homage to the perverse incentives that come with what’s rapidly becoming a command economy. Michael at Kitces.com shows us that with ever-increasing capital gains tax rates, not to mention Medicare surtaxes, the traditional tax planning strategy has inverted. Instead of deferring taxes on gains as long as possible, and harvesting capital losses, it can make sense to harvest capital gains instead. Land of the Free.

Most 1st person blog posts are awful, because most people’s lives are insipid and not worth sharing. Then there’s Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence, whose very existence reinforces the wisdom of living life on your own terms if you’re responsible enough to do so. The latest addition to her Guatemalan beachfront estate? A rooster and 9 hens. That keeps Pauline in eggs and possibly in arroz con pollo. Also, you don’t want to know what the poultry industry does with most male hatchlings.

Paula Pant at Afford Anything has the definitive argument against the naysayers who decry people such as Pauline (and Paula herself) for having the audacity to not work at a dismal and soul-crushing job. “If everyone did that, the economy would collapse.” Your point?

We knew this CoW was too good to be true. Edgar at Degrees & Debt continues the unbroken streak of blogs with “debt” in the title being endless complaints about how society is stacked up to take advantage of their, the bloggers’, bad decisions. We goofed on Edgar for this a few CoWs ago, but he’s back for more with a post on, and we quote, “methods to achieve student loan forgiveness.”

Well then. So you borrowed money, and you don’t feel like paying it back? Edgar has a point – paying stuff back sucks. Much better to keep the money, especially if being dishonorable is something you have no trouble living with. Aside from being male, Edgar is the stereotype of the overeducated and indebted blogger: he’s a graduate student who’s earning a master’s in project management. Beats working, as they say. This post contains loaded language, e.g.

The Obama administration recently improved on the student loan laws in the US.

By “improved on”, Edgar means borrowers can now get away with more than ever before.

[B]orrowers are only allowed to pay a max of 10% of their income as their monthly loan payment regardless of the amount the individual is earning.

He means “required”, not “allowed”, and means ”     ” instead of “a max of”, and threw the incorrect word “individual” in there in order to sound educated, but the gist of Edgar’s post is that the federal government has now institutionalized deadbeathood. Edgar has 5 student loans and is a quarter-million in the hole (reprise), but the good news is that he lowered his debt load by $1300 last month. Assuming he wants to continue lowering his debt, instead of taking his own advice and abusing a system designed for abuse, Edgar will be in debt for only another 16 years or so. Yes, that’s the kind of person who should be submitting to something called a Carnival of Wealth. Gold star. Also, Edgar’s writing style is equal parts plodding and pedantic, a telltale sign of overeducation.

Emily Guy Birken at One Smart Dollar has some easy if facile tips for incipient college graduates. Live within your means, blah blah blah. She also says

It pays to have a healthy emergency fund

Which we’ve exposed time and again as a dirty lie. First, an emergency fund doesn’t literally “pay”. Quite the opposite. Second, setting aside cash for purposes of inertia runs counter to what rich people do. They buy assets. Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah. Kids, do yourselves a favor. Ignore Emily Guy’s* advice and heed ours instead.

Darwin’s Money gave us his (correct) opinion on emergency funds last week, and follows it up with an even better post on the phenomenon of (bogus) early retirement. Sure, it’s empowering to be 40 and “retired”. But if in retirement you’re

• living ascetically because you can’t afford not to
• sponging off your spouse
• committing more hours to some other method of generating revenue than you did working,

Then you’re not retired.

Josh Dorkin guest posts at Free From Broke about how to invest in real estate while doing more than just burning incense and offering a prayer to Mammon. To be brief, cash flow is far more important than the hope of appreciation will ever be. We know this. We wrote about it here (in case you missed our earlier plug.)

Why are so many personal finance bloggers from Vancouver, that festering wet den of immorality and sloth? The Outlier Model is the latest to get our attention. Its authors, a husband and wife (or boyfriend and girlfriend, whatever) own an investment condo and are looking for someone to replace the presently departing tenants. That’s about all, except the authors are irrationally worried that they won’t find anyone to rent their condo. In one of the most overpriced real estate markets in the world. It’s fun to be paranoid!

You people who need anything larger than a car cupholder to carry your change – what the hell is wrong with you? There’s no excuse for having an industrial-size water bottle, vase, or even ashtray filled with coins. No human should ever possess more than 4 pennies, 2 dimes, 4 nickels and 3 quarters at once. If you’re patronizing establishments that give change, those are where you should be spending change. Yet CoinStar machines exist, and take the easiest 9.8% cut in all of commerce. Harry at Your PF Pro found a way to avoid that fee, while ignoring the larger problem of accumulating those absurd little metal disks in the first place.

No one is more shameless in his use of pro wrestling quotes than Jason at Hull Financial Planning. This week, he quotes the topical Million Dollar Man and ties it to the ultimate goal of many an entrepreneur. That goal isn’t building a better widget, nor changing the world, nor even being one’s own boss. Usually, it’s cashing out. If you’re thinking of doing so, Jason explains how to value your business objectively and without any input from that killer of financial dreams, emotion.

From new submitter Blogging Banks, an explanation of a term we hear so often that it’s easy to take for granted that everyone understand what it means – FDIC insurance. This post is short but informative. It’s the Jenna Lee of blog posts.

When governmental intervention creates or exacerbates a problem, by now we’ve all been conditioned to know what the solution is. Hair of the dog. Ross Garner at Wallet Hub explains how the Federal Housing Administration has spent the last 5 years backing even more mortgages that borrowers shouldn’t have incurred in the first place. Which would require greater mortgage insurance premia, except record numbers of defaults and foreclosures have caused the total balance of mortgage insurance funds to decrease. In fact, that balance is now negative. So you’ll now pay more than twice as much for insurance as you would have a few years ago. Which will likely send you to non-FHA loans, which will even further reduce the FHA’s effectiveness, etc., and someone explain to us again why the government is in the business of insuring loans in the first place?

Finally, from the consistently magnificent PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (if you’re new here, it stands for “Don’t Quit Your Day Job”), the latest in his series of handy calculators. This week’s calculates inflation between any 2 dates in the last century. The post also includes a sobering graph that shows how badly our dollar has depreciated relative to itself since World War II. PKamp3 continues:

I do intend on building [the calculator] into other tools in the future – including some calculators where you can figure out daily inflation adjusted returns for various assets classes.  I’m not sure that sort of information exists anywhere.  I intend to bring it to you.

And that, folks, is the difference between CoW-worthy excellence and another gaggle of rejected posts about digging one’s way out of student loan debt while still taking time to shop for shoes.

Thanks again for coming. We’ll see you tomorrow.

*Is her given name Emily, or Emily Guy? We’re going with the latter because it sounds funnier.

Put the whoopee cushion away while you’re at it. April Fool’s Day, like St. Patrick’s and New Year’s, is largely for amateurs. Instead, enjoy the wonder that is the weekly Carnival of Wealth, personal finance blog posts from around the world:

You don’t know what a brokerage account is, yet you want to enter the exciting world of market speculation? What the hell is wrong with you? Glen Craig at Free From Broke encourages you to step back, proceed slowly and understand the differences among accounts before jumping in.

Kristen at My Dollar Plan listed a bunch of hotel chains’ reward programs. She also used the expression “like a broken record.” Can’t we replace that with something more contemporary? Vinyl records aren’t just obsolete, the format that replaced them (and the one that replaced that) is too.

Every hotel and hotel reward program is different so be sure you know how each program works and what you have to do to earn points and use points.

A lie. The Baymont Inn in De Funiak Springs, Florida and the La Quinta in Snohomish, Washington are identical.

Did you know that Social Security benefits weren’t taxable before 1983? Fortunately, the people who were 65 then are 95 now and for the most part no longer part of our calculations. Michael at Kitces.com explains how in 2013, if you have enough investment income, your marginal tax rate with Social Security benefits can jump all the way to 46%. So allocate your assets better, and you’re probably going to want to do a Roth conversion somewhere along the way. Also, vote Libertarian.

Katrina Lamb is a CFA. She also blogs at Jemstep, and introduces the concept of a “liquidity event” to personal finance. Long story short, a liquidity event is when a company gets sold or goes public. The term is used only by lonely people who prefer jargon to actual human relationships. To Katrina, “liquidity event” has almost the opposite meaning at the micro level. It can mean going to college, buying a second home…basically anything that requires you to spend lots of money rather than receive it. She thinks you should save, gravitate from stocks to bonds as you get closer to a savings goal, and either keep your money in 2 accounts or more than 2. Great. Also, never say “is going to cost a lot of money” when you can say “will require a significant outlay of funds.” Makes you sound so much smarter.

With the market at all-time (current dollar) highs, Dividend Growth Investor reminds us that there are still some stocks that aren’t trading at levels anywhere near as high as they should be.

From Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence, confirmation of a theory we have yet to codify (it’s still just a theory.) Your behavior predicts your perspective, and thus your success. We read far too many personal finance bloggers whose disdain for productivity and common sense comes through in their writing. They end up in debt, focusing their indignation on a system they’re convinced is stacked against them.

Then you’ve got Pauline, who’s living the dream of an independent beachfront existence in a warm climate, complete with passive income and a staff. And this in her early 30s. Was she lucky? Yes, if you count working from an early age and taking a beneficial course of study in college as luck.

Pauline’s American equivalent, the stupendous Paula Pant (2012 Control Your Cash Woman of the Year!) returns with more of her pithiness and profundity at Afford Anything. Stop what you’re doing and just plow through her archives in one sitting. She’s easy to read, not because she’s simplistic but because she knows how to write. This week, she explains how money can buy you something infinitely more valuable than stuff.

A related point by CoW newcomer Mike Collins at Wealthy Turtle: income is not wealth. There’s a reason why politicians who want to increase income taxes don’t usually concern themselves with how higher taxes will impact their own incomes. (Because they have lots of untouchable wealth.)

Did we already use “brilliant” to describe Paula Pant? [checks] The brilliant PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net looks at price elasticity in his new post. Well, he doesn’t refer to it as such, but he examines and graphs how much people spend on groceries vs. outside food as income (and perhaps, wealth) rises. We’d love to see the results localized to New York City, where no one has an SUV to load up at the Walmart Supercenter and some people store clothes in their ovens. Also, graph does not include data from the Irish Potato Famine, which would skew everything.

Free Money Finance refers to his college education as a $5,000 investment that made him millions, but that was in a different century. These days tuition has skyrocketed in constant dollars while the return from an education has dwindled, the latter happening because a whole lot of degrees are a whole lot of useless. Also, it took us years but we finally noticed that Free Money Finance’s logo borrows liberally from the Dallas Stars.

Parents, let us paraphrase what FMF has to say about college: Stop indulging your little snowflakes. People aren’t supposed to go to college for the social fulfillment, for the exposure to people of other backgrounds, or any of that claptrap. You can get social fulfillment and meet unfamiliar people anywhere, and not even have to pay tens of thousands for the privilege. You go to college solely to increase your earning capacity. If the toddler whom you started a 529 plan for turns out years later to have little patience for the classroom but shows lots of aptitude with his hands, then congratulations, you wasted your efforts and your cash.

Eech. That’s so philistine and mercenary of you. 

Fine, you win. College is whatever you want it to be. It still costs money, unless you’re remarkable enough to have earned acceptance to a military academy.

Speaking of which, Jason (USMA) at Hull Financial Planning reminds us that having more money is better than having less. To us and hopefully you, that’s so obvious it hardly counts as knowledge. But to many, including at least one contributor whom we’ll feature later in the CoW, it’s anything but.

Money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you a big yacht.
-David Lee Roth

Everyone, without exception, stands to benefit from greater material wealth. Granted, someone like Amanda Bynes would just put the incremental dollars up her nose, but that’s neither here nor there. Feeling trepidation or reluctance about money is retarded, and for several reasons. First, it makes it easier for the people who don’t feel any trepidation; less competition for them.  Second, you’ve got to get out of this mindset that sees money as something tangible – represented by a wad of greenbacks or a handful of shiny gold coins, doubloons doubtless pilfered at the hands of the proletariat. Money is a vehicle. More to the point, it’s a working representation of value. Think of the collective total of wealth in the world – all the server farms, literal farms, CT scan machines, minivans, electric guitars and open-air entertainment venues in existence, along with the trillions of other goods (and services) that make life today preferable to life at any other time in human history. It’s tough to quantify them, or each of our individual contributions to the whole, so we use money to keep score. Being uncomfortable with or intimidated by money is like feeling apprehensive about abacus beads or tally marks. Grow up. More to the point, grow up and earn more.

Lynn B. Johnson at Wallet Blog tells us that the people at Sesame Street created a financial literacy thing for preschoolers. It features Elmo! (Bonus: Gratuitous attack on the Koch brothers, and if someone can explain why they’re evil without repeating talking points from the latest issue of Mother Jones, we’re listening.)

Look, the problem is stark: most teenagers and young adults (and middle-aged adults and old adults) know nothing about money. That’s why they make the minimum payments on their credit cards and their idea of increasing revenue is begging the boss for a raise every couple of years. Worse yet, they’ll get wind of the crooks and thieves who personify pop personal finance – the Ramseys, Ormen, and Trent Hamms – and start employing self-defeating measures such as debt snowballs and emergency funds.

But Elmo’s target audience doesn’t care about money. Elmo’s target audience cares about candy and bubble wrap. Still, Lynn’s premise is sufficiently socialistic, equality of outcome being the political objective of choice for most 4-year-olds:

In an era when the 400 richest Americans account for the same amount of collective wealth as 62% of the nation’s entire population combined and the United States is the fourth most wealth-unequal country in the world, something is grievously wrong with the way income is earned, saved, and distributed.

4th-most wealth-unequal country in the world? The inelegant phrasing notwithstanding, how are we measuring that? Also, is she serious? Every African nation at the bottom of the per capita GDP list consists of a bunch of subsistence farmers ruled by a plutocrat. In the United States, rich people populate every sphere from manufacturing to textiles to software. The barriers to entry are easy to hop over.

Furthermore, is equality of wealth something we should want? It implies that every person should have the same tolerance for risk, the same diligence, the same market for their disparate skills, and the same age (or do people not build more wealth as they grow older?)

When adult women are sponging off their grandparents and buying iPads, and FICA taxes are regressive, we need less equality of wealth, not more. We here at Control Your Cash are the first ones to say that there’s a dearth of sensible financial education, but there is such a thing as starting too young. Parents, educate thyselves first. Then teach your kids. You can start here.

Jamie’s Money Advice includes knowing how to calculate return on investment and several related metrics. CYC’s Blog Advice includes using a bigger font on your site. The man has 35 Twitter followers and 0 comments on that post. Help him out.

William, who’s either one of the leeches at Quote Me A Price or just a hired hand they pay to write blog posts, wants to buy your annuity payments. They keep submitting and availing the world of their noxious service, so it’s all we can do to help publicize it (and tell you that you’re an idiot if you patronize them.)

You haven’t funded your traditional IRA for 2012 yet? Tax day is a fortnight away, so put down the CoW and do it now. So says Michael at Financial Ramblings, who reminds you that the IRS doesn’t give 2nd chances. However, it will let you fund a Roth IRA whenever and wherever. That being said, the latter contributions aren’t tax deductible. Isn’t governmental complexity awesome?

YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES.

HELL YES.

Sorry, we were just reading the latest from Darwin’s Money. We’ll let the headline speak for itself: “Here’s Everything I’ve Done with my Money by NOT Having an Emergency Fund.”

Charles Davis at Wallet Hub gives a primer on the different types of mortgages available. We’ll simplify: there exist 1) fixed-rate and B) garbage. Alright, that’s not fair. Charles also includes home equity loans and VA loans in his analysis, but our brief analysis of his more detailed analysis concentrates on the mathematical makeup of mortgages – principal, interest, variability of same, etc.

Andrew at 101 Centavos is his old inimitable self. With artificially cheap money courtesy of the corrupt and criminal Federal Reserve, interest rates remain miniscule. Which means mortgages are inexpensive. Which means you should only mess with a short-term one if you have nowhere to invest the money you’d otherwise have on hand if you had a 30-year mortgage. So get a 30-year one and free up your capital for better uses. Also, eat your lutefisk.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro says you should bring your own food and drinks to the airport, and not pay for Wi-Fi.

And we’re done. Check us out on Investopedia (here’s a vintage piece of ours), and join us back here tomorrow for more foolishness.

He’s got the hair, clothing, demeanor, teeth, writing style and most importantly, obliviousness of a real go-getter. Also, he killed 5 hookers.

If you’re new here, every Monday we showcase the Carnival of Wealth. It’s an agglomeration of posts from various personal finance bloggers, ranging from the highly technical (such as Beating the Index) to the conversational (Len Penzo). The idea is to introduce you to some other bloggers who might be worth reading, and to give us a respite from devising original content 3 times a week. Some of the submitters engage us and promote the CoW on their own blogs, others send a submission every week and don’t care what we do with it. Why they submit, we’re not sure. The egregious ones will eventually clue in after a week or two of us poking fun at them.

Then there’s white-collar parody (except he’s serious) Peter J. Buscemi of FourQuadrant, the quintuple hooker-killer of our theme. 7 weeks ago, Peter J. sent us his first awkward post. We described him as “writ[ing] like a cloistered academic who can communicate with the outside world only via mutated and unintelligible Corporatespeak[.]”

Peter J. was just getting started. The next week he submitted anew, and after reading that dreck we wrote “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…huh? Looks like someone’s sat through his share of strategy meetings and now wants to spread the pain.”

The week after that, we fell asleep while reading another of his deathly submissions. Begging for mercy by his post’s final line, we wrote “How do people get to this point? Peter J. presumably grew up in a regular household, populated by ordinary humans. When does someone go from speaking/writing in English to restating everything in whatever neutered and unreadable language the above is? Does it happen suddenly, or gradually?”

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and Peter J. is nothing if not consistent. The following week we wrote, “Peter J. writes in a dialect…that makes his message impenetrable. Here, see if you can make it through this paragraph without slipping into a coma:

Go-to-Market Strategy is focused on how the organization will put offerings into the market to reach market penetration, revenue and profitability expectations. This charter is a superset of marketing strategy as it impacts all functions within an organization with the goal of preparing the entire company for market success.

Every Monday, we send a mass email to the submitters that includes a link to the new CoW. Maybe one of these weeks, Peter J. will take time out from his customer acquisition strategizing and brand positioning to bother clicking on it.”

We’re still waiting. Within 7 days he’d submitted yet another lifeless post, one that prompted us to write “the intrepid and relentless Peter J. Buscemi at FourQuadrant brings more of his insufferable business-school verbiage written with functional contempt for his, and by extension our, readers. If you think that’s harsh, give us a better description of this plodding and toneless excerpt[…]”

Our meta-references were becoming meta-meta-references. From last week, “This marks 6 consecutive submissions from Peter J. Buscemi at FourQuadrant, who didn’t say a word the first 4 times we skewered his somniferous prose. Then last week we gave him the coveted opening slot, criticized his work roundly, pointed out that he obviously doesn’t care where said work is being mocked, and yet he got back up on the horse again.We’d say that you’ve got to respect that, but Peter J. isn’t undaunted, he’s merely apathetic.
…

Where do we go from here? Every week we lambaste his droning and agonizingly wordy style, and every week he submits yet again as if nothing had happened the previous week. It’s not as if we’re doing this behind his back. The CoW is publicly visible, and we even send him an email every Monday with a link to the Carnival.”

That tied the record of 6 consecutive mocked posts. Would he reach 7?

Indeed he would, and has. Peter J. Buscemi is to bad blog posts what Nolan Ryan is to no-hitters and what Sir Georg Solti is to Grammys. This week, Peter J. explains how to write a cold calling script for your sales team. Of course it takes him 8 paragraphs to say as much, and we wonder if anyone could ever sell anything with a script written by the most loquaciously impotent man on the planet (who, by the way, was recently stopped with the decomposing bodies of 5 hookers in his BMW.)

The Inside Sales (Telemarketing, Telesales, Sales Development) Representatives also provide key feedback to the demand creation planning team on which programs are working. The Inside Sales (Telemarketing, Telesales, Sales Development) Reps provide valuable feedback to product marketing on whether messaging and positioning is or is not resonating with prospects. Inside Sales (Telemarketing, Telesales, Sales Development) Reps also share competitive insights gleaned, help keep FAQs current, and communication prospects’ perceptions on functionality and price.

The tin ear that writes this antiseptic garbage and expects it to enthrall an audience is attached to the head of a man who proves every week that he’s the opposite of perceptive. Peter J., it’s nothing personal, but your reach is so insignificant and your influence so nonexistent that we can say uncomplimentary and gradually more scandalous things about you every week yet it’s never gotten back to you. (Either that or it’s our site that’s inconsequential, and if that’s the case then why are you submitting to us every week?) Our conclusion? No one cares, because no one but masochistic us has ever made it to the second sentence of a Peter J. Buscemi piece.

An effective call guide for Inside Sales Training prepares Inside Sales, Telemarketing, Telesales or Sales Development Representatives with cold calling techniques to make cold calls

First of all, if you did a shot every time Peter J. wrote “Telemarketing, Telesales, (or) Sales Development” you’d be urinating on the Alamo and flashing passersby by now. Beyond that, let’s break down that last monstrosity of a sentence fragment. So a guide for telling employees how to make cold calls should “prepare (them) with cold calling techniques”? Whatever for? Oh, “to make cold calls”. Got it. Well, now that you put it so succinctly, how could we miss it?

Poor, redundant, passive, and just plain boring communication is society’s bane. We’re not saying everyone has to be J.K. Rowling, but holy Christ that Peter J. Buscemi can take a topic and turn it brown.  What is the point of writing if you have nothing to say and no capability to convey it anyway? This post has it all: subheadings, a chart with more dull subheadings, 7 sets of bullet points and a sad little supplicative entreaty at the end: “If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment…” Peter J. can’t even tell people to leave a comment without being indirect and sheepish about it. What really blows our mind is that he lectures at the University of South Florida. Those poor, helpless students.

Now onto the real submissions. The superb Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence has now officially entered a modified, financial version of the Tyson Zone. She could announce that she’s building a hoverbike factory or opening a chain of breadfruit restaurants and we wouldn’t blink. From her Guatemalan oceanside bunker, L’iconoclaste Français has now decided to invest in a coconut farm. Of course she has. 10 acres in Brazil. She ran the numbers (this is Pauline we’re talking about, she’s not going to invest on a whim) and is looking at a handsome profit if most of her investment goes according to plan.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro analyzes whether it’s worth it to move in with your significant other.

Living by yourself is expensive but you can immediately cut your rent in half by living with another person.

The rest of the post is more insightful than that quote, we swear.

[Post rejected because it came from OC-repair.com, which is Orange County (California) Appliance Repair. Here’s how the author pitched it to us:

The Electrolux UltraClean Washer has a 15kg capacity and comes in a top loader model. Ultrasound is a growing technology as it is eco-friendly. This means many products with the same feature may soon come out in the future.]

Off-topic, draws an inference between ecological benignity and popularity, and uses metric units. Yeah, we’ll run that.

“Bill Smith” may be a pseudonym, but at least he’s on topic. The man behind 2014 Taxes gives us a semi-literate post about claiming dependents.

Dividend Growth Investor looks at companies that pay uncommonly high dividends with respect to diluted earnings. Which is never sustainable, like a baseball player leading the majors with an .800 average one day into the season.

Who doesn’t like a series of “top tips”? From Betsy Fallwell at Blogging Banks, what to do when you’re buying your first home. Betsy sounds like the kind of rational woman who keeps her emotions in check, and doesn’t at all perpetuate the stereotype of the flighty and demonstrative female:

The first time my husband and I pulled into the driveway of what would ultimately become our new home for a showing with our real estate agent, I burst into tears. They were not unlike the tears I shed when I tried on the dress that would be my wedding gown for the first time

Note to Mr. Fallwell: Never watch Titanic with your wife.

Katrina Lamb, CFP, is presumably made of stronger stuff. The author at Jemstep borrows a quote we’ve never heard before, but like. Playing the market is like 2 mediocre tennis players facing each other. Whoever makes fewer mistakes will do well.

Is your 401(k) too restrictive? Are the fees killing you? Do you even know? Michael at Financial Ramblings explains how to get out of your retirement plan and into a better one. Max out an IRA, put remaining contributions in a 401(k), get the employer match if one exists (free money)…this post is roughly 4000 times better than the typical submission we get here at the CoW, which usually features the author’s first-person story about failing to pay down her debts.

We wouldn’t make fun of academics if they all had as much real-world knowledge as Charles Davis at Wallet Hub does. (And he’s a journalism professor, no less.) This week he explains what private mortgage insurance is, how it differs from mortgage interest premia, and why you might have little choice but to spend money on one or the other.

You want to know an easy financial decision you can make that will benefit everyone, especially you? Get your superannuated parents off the couch, and force them to go to the gym and start eating baked skinless chicken breasts and broccoli. Otherwise you could end up like Lynn B. Johnson at Wallet Blog and tens of millions of other Americans, changing adult diapers and wiping up drool. Her story about the hardships suffered by working caregivers makes at least one CYC author grateful to be estranged.

From the lovely Liana Arnold at Card Hub, the dangers of something sinister: tax fraud. Someone paying your taxes for you might sound like the most eleemosynary gesture imaginable, but not when that other person is using your Social Security number and making you the unsuspecting victim of fraud.

And we’re done. Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow.