You dream and dream about this day, but you never think it’ll actually happen. The anonymous protagonist of this story was doing 63 in a 65 zone:

Md. Woman Cited For Driving Too Slowly in Left Lane 

This was the first time she’d ever gotten a ticket [Ed. Note: Sure it was.] — but on Friday, she said, the area was experiencing heavy winds and she had slowed down to be safe.

“Sometimes when it’s dangerous, you have to do what you can to stay safe,” she said.

Yes, lady. That would include moving to the right so other cars can pass. 

Those signs that read “Slower Traffic Keep Right” aren’t for show. Move over. You can drive in the #2, 3, and 4 lanes as long and as slowly as you want without concerning yourself with other cars and whether you’re impeding the flow of traffic. Keeping traffic moving is important, and that’s why as a society we’ve decided that the lane farthest from the exits is the one that ought to allow the least clogged driving. Cruising in the passing lane, like our friend here was doing, serves only to make the driver stuck behind you ask, “Is this person in front of me oblivious to her surroundings, or is she being actively obstinate and trying to teach me a lesson about following the speed limit to the number?” Either way, cruising in a passing lane is aggressive driving whether you choose to accept that or not. If you’re doing 200 in the left lane, and the car behind you is doing 201, move over. That the ticket the woman received is even newsworthy is part of the problem. God bless that cop, whoever he is, and hopefully this will start a trend. Again, move over. Now onto the Carnival:

Harry Campbell of Your PF Pro is as diligent a contributor as we have. He submits every week, usually only minutes after the previous week’s CoW has gone live. So while we wait for his latest to hit our inbox, we present Harry’s take on whether you should buy a house during this unusual double nadir of both prices and interest rates. Harry got himself a condo with a 7/1 ARM at 3⅛%, his argument being that he probably won’t be in the condo more than 7 years. Also, his homeowners’ association is charging him $390 a month. California sounds horrifying.

If you’re the kind of person who likes selling assets for pennies on the dollar, give the predators upstanding businessmen at Structured Settlement Quotes a call. We make fun of them every time they submit and they still keep sending us their press releases every week, so you know they’re too busy attending to their clients to pay attention to trivialities such as blog carnivals.

What’s worse than being old? Being old and manning the counter at Wendy’s. What’s worse than being old and manning the counter at Wendy’s? Being old, manning the counter at Wendy’s, and losing some of your Social Security benefits in the process. If you think your age saves you from paying taxes on your income, Kristine McKinley at Social Security Retirement Income has depressing news for you.

The Carnival of Wealth featuring…ourselves? This is the best post we’ve run in a while, so it bears repeating here.

Why you should never have heroes, Volume 43,582. According to the self-penned biography of the brilliant Jason at Hull Financial Planning, he’s one of those pretentious Americans who refers to soccer as “football”. So disappointing. On the other hand, Jason’s a West Point graduate who served 2 tours as an armor officer in Bosnia, which means he can call soccer whatever he wants. We’re still going with “90 minutes of tedium and hypochondria, devoid of strategy.” This week Jason explains how to get a legitimate college education without bankrupting yourself, and throws in a subtle dig at Navy.

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. As you’ll be if you attempt to read this pastiche of business phrases that Peter J. calls a blog post:

Developing a qualified opportunity that is in the sales forecast is a time consuming and expensive task that plays a huge role in any successful go to market strategy. It only makes sense to develop a pragmatic, systematic and comprehensive approach to bring each opportunity to closed won status. In an effort to do so, the sales enablement team is chartered with supporting the sales team at each step in the sales process. In this role, they ensure that all relevant resources are known and leveraged by the sales team. Also, the sales enablement team keeps metrics on what was and what was not used in each sales engagement and the corresponding success rates. Finally, the sales enablement team removes, modifies and adds new resources to assure the sales team does not run into the same road block repeatedly.

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. How much longer can Peter J. do this? We’ve already compared him to a battered woman who refuses to walk away. Should we accuse him of fondling children? Operating as part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell? Listening to Nickelback? Peter J. Buscemi, you’re a master of willful ignorance. Promise us you’ll never stop not caring.

We also goofed on of Edgar at Degrees & Debt last week, in his inaugural CoW submission. (As a general rule, any site with “Debt” in the title is going to consist of little more than rehashings of financial decisions gone wrong time and again.) Edgar clearly doesn’t read the CoW either, even though we do him the courtesy of perusing his submissions. This week he wrote one paragraph, accompanied it with an infographic from an advertiser, and called it a blog post. Even better, Edgar’s site is written for Americans and the advertiser operates only in the United Kingdom. Great work, Edgar.

Then there are bloggers who would rather break down their assets than their liabilities. Bloggers such as Michael at Financial Ramblings, who explains which pies his fingers are in and to what extent. (Another general rule: People who fixate on the additive side of the ledger are probably going to be wealthier and more self-actualized than those who focus on the subtractive side.)

More in that vein from Free Money Finance, with the latest on his 2 real estate investments. Which will hopefully grow into 3 real estate investments.

For readers who are in the UK, Edward Webber at Tax Fix explains the basic personal deduction you can take before sending off your remittance to Uncle Sam, er, John Bull.

Why would you want a non-deductible IRA? Because of President Obama’s new 3.8% Medicare surtax on investment income, instituted because individuals’ health care is for some reason our collective responsibility. Michael at Kitces.com shows why you might have perverse incentives for losing money in a non-deductible IRA, as opposed to losing more in a deductible one.

We’re detecting an upturn in the quality of these posts. Next up is PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, the first person whom we’ve seen point out that the Dow’s current “record high” is 12% off the true constant-dollar record high. Also, why does the standard interpretation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average not include dividend reinvestment? Elegant charts, eloquent commentary, and the objective perspective of a professional engineer who isn’t ensconced on Wall Street. You really need to read DQYDJ.net, and not just our weekly encapsulations of it.

Darned if Dividend Growth Investor doesn’t bring up that same issue. The S&P 500 is currently at close to a “record high” of 1560 or so. Include dividend reinvestments and it’s more like 8000. Granted, that assumes you’ve been reinvesting dividends since 1957, but the point is made.

Andrew at 101 Centavos continues his series on business development companies, expressing his suspicions about one he recently discovered. Never underestimate the power of a dopey name.

Another home run from Paula Pant at Afford Anything, the refreshing antidote to bloggers who incur and then ignore debt instead of not getting underwater in the first place. This week Paula demonstrates how bending your financially draining urges is smarter than attempting to break them.

We can’t change our habits with Post-It Notes, pep talks and Top 10 lists. We can only change them by understanding our human psychology – what drives us? We can only change our habits if learn how to manage our urges, rather than fight them.

She’s exactly like Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar, except female, thin, adventurous, talented, consistent, erudite, not obsessive about every penny, and indifferent to board games.

Nelson at Financial Uproar thinks 2 words should be the maximum for a site’s name. Michael at Dividend Growth Investing And Retirement thinks otherwise. This CoW newcomer claims that past dividend growth rates can predict future ones. He even has a linear formula that illustrates, if not proves, his point.

[Some post about forex trading. We would have run it but the first few paragraphs were just filler. The worst thing a submitter can do is make his post not quite deficient enough. At least the truly awful ones get featured so we can point out how bad they are. Those in the second-from-the-bottom tier just get rejected. If you’re going to fail, fail like you mean it.]

Lynn B. Johnson’s parents must be ecstatic, especially if they’re Jewish. The Wallet Blog writer is married to a doctor! Well, a Ph.D. holder. In English. Who can’t seem to find a job that will pay off his giant student loan balance any decade soon.

As their numbers grow, unemployable liberal arts students are becoming more than merely disinterested towards reality. They’re becoming hostile to it. It doesn’t matter that my useless degree doesn’t pencil out, I heard that an education is invaluable and dammit, I’m going to continue to believe that. Meanwhile, Dr. Johnson will gladly prescribe treatment for that dangling participle you suffered. Also, read the comment from Courtney Barnett.

Some people don’t care if they’re in student loan and/or credit card debt, they need a vacation and who’s going to tell them they don’t deserve it? We suggest Pauline at Reach Financial Independence, who draws little distinction between work and play. Pauline lives on the beach in Guatemala, because she’d rather spend her days there than in a cubicle on the 14th floor of the Société Générale building. While she doesn’t necessarily vouch for one approach over the other, Pauline runs the numbers and shows how screwed you’ll be if you head to Busch Gardens while making minimum payments on your VISA.

I have never carried consumer debt, so I couldn’t judge the urgency to take a holiday while in debt. I would still express concern if someone on a diet had an urgency to eat a family sized pizza.

Unfortunately, fat people don’t like being reminded that they’re fat, stupid people hate hearing that they’re stupid, and indebted people aren’t interested in being reminded that they’re in debt.

This post has little to do with personal finance, but the site seemed interesting. Fearless Men on how to save money at the gym. (This is how we did it.)

Trading options? That’s a quick way to go broke unless you’re really good at it, and we can only assume that Steve Moses at Trading Academy is, or he wouldn’t be doing it. By the way, Steve’s college major was theater.

This week’s rhetorical headline winner is from Card Hub: Could Budgeting Actually Promote Overspending? This is part of John Kiernan’s series of interviews with academics, who give richly theoretical answers for why setting a price for something you want can backfire.

If you’re old, stop counting down the days to death and get a reverse mortgage instead. You can’t spend money once you’re gone, right? Ross Garner at Wallet Hub explains the advantages of trading equity for cash, and dispels some misconceptions.

Thanks for reading. Let’s do it again Wednesday.

America needs more passive-aggression.

A friend of CYC works for a national conglomerate that you’ve definitely heard of and have likely patronized. He forwarded us this “all users” memo:

Yesterday, we had an incident in our communal microwave where popcorn was burnt to an undesirable crisp state and exposed us to unhealthy fumes as well as a terrible odor. We must be careful when we use the microwave. Please follow the microwave instructions shown on your food packaging label.
If you use the microwave please clean it right after using it. Experts say microwave ovens — especially in the office — are a breeding ground for bacteria and require regular cleaning and airing.
To keep the microwave oven clean and smelling fine, please wipe it down after you use it. Damp paper towel with soap and water will do just fine and keep the microwave oven door open in between uses to help cut back on lingering odors.
Don’t forget to cover your food to prevent splatters. Use plastic wrap, resting it on top of the container — not touching the food or sealing the container — to create steam that heats food quickly and kills bacteria. Just be sure to create a vent, or your food will explode.
Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

And you wonder why we rail against the corporate lifestyle. Who would want to work under such conditions, where some human resources harpy is writing patronizing notes like that? Verbosity, condescension, every hallmark of the modern workplace is there. Why couldn’t the note have read:

If you make the microwave dirty, clean it.

And if she absolutely had to stretch it out to 2 sentences:

Apologies to the people who clean up after themselves: this email isn’t for you.

Wait, there’s more. The very next day, our friend forwarded us this:

With regards to the refrigerator, all employees are to put their names on their lunches, snacks, etc….and any food (or leftovers) that is unmarked and rotten will be tossed on Fridays at 5pm. Please do not take any food from the refrigerator that is not yours. Employees bring specific food for themselves and should be able to look forward to having it without worries.
On a another note, Patrick went out and bought a new microwave for the kitchen. Thank you Patrick!
I kindly ask that if you use the microwave please clean it and follow the tips mentioned in my previous email.
Thank you for your cooperation!

We offered our friend $50 to defecate in the new microwave.

A message to office parents (you know who you are.) You think everyone else is a child, and you write these prolix emails because you don’t want anyone to miss a single word of your disappointment, nor fail to grasp how you’re just so much more responsible and mature than everyone else. Go to hell. For the rest of you, onto the Carnival:

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net gets top billing today because he bought a copy of our book. He presents another of his renowned calculators: with this one, you enter the variables and figure out how long it’ll take before you’re objectively rich. We’re mature enough that we’re not intimidated by a blogger who’s way smarter and more talented than us. Don’t just read this post, read DQYDJ’s entire archives.

Emily Guy Birken at One Smart Dollar reinforces what we’ve been saying for…well, months that have turned into years. The combination of low home prices and mortgage rates is unprecedented. Buy some real estate. And get a 15-year mortgage. Pro tip: Fast forward past her first 2 pointless paragraphs, which serve no purpose. Head straight for the 3rd one, which is a rich buffet of tired phrasing. She wrote “no matter how you slice it” and “nothing to sneeze at” in consecutive lines. Hey, speaking of words we’ve read before…

After a few weeks’ hiatus, illiterate plagiarizer Eddie at Finance Fox is back for some reason. He took a trip to an auto show and thought that’d be worth sharing. It isn’t.

Plagiarizer? Yeah. Eddie lifts others‘ work, note-for-note. We haven’t checked, but that auto show post probably came from the pages of Car & Driver. We can almost sympathize with this: as a glance at Eddie’s non-ghostwritten posts will confirm, his original work is one level above throwing his feces at a piece of paper until some of the gobbets take the shape of Roman letters. (That’s our last scatological joke today, we promise.) But this is inexcusable. What’s really insulting is that out of the dozen or so people Eddie stole from, he didn’t crib a single word from Control Your Cash. What, we’re not good enough for him? Either that, or he had trouble comprehending our somewhat intellectually demanding posts. Probably the latter.

We’ve never formally banned someone from the CoW before. (And we’ve had some doozies submit, but at least their awful work wasn’t cut-and-paste copies of others’.) So congratulations to Eddie, recipient of the Carnival of Wealth’s first-ever death penalty. But unlike the NCAA, here you can never apply for reinstatement. Goodbye.

(Post rejected because this was how the submitter described it:

While Earning Money Online…Your Vegan Vegetarian Lifestyle Can Help Other People Become Healthier! I know that many of you already know that a vegan vegetarian diet is healthy for you, but did you know that you could also earn money online because of your healthy lifestyle, and help other people become healthier at the same time? Let’s talk about one of the ways you can do this.

Submitters, it’s the Carnival of Wealth. Not the Carnival of Flotsam. But points for trying to fuse diet tips with personal finance.)

You know what really makes carnival hosts feel like this is all worth it? When a submitter continues to submit post after post even after we make relentless fun of him every week. Peter J. Buscemi of FourQuadrant has submitted 4 weeks in a row and is as long-winded as the office manager cited above, plus Peter J. writes in a dialect of Higher Corporatespeak 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. Until then, keep ’em coming, you magnificent unreadable bastard.

The next 2 submissions in the hopper are a good one and a dismal one. Which do you want first? If we start with the good one, it’ll break the streak. But if we give you the bad one first, it’ll make you appreciate the good one all the more when you finally get to read it.

So it’s settled, then. Josh at Becoming Your Own Bank also submits every week, and every time he does we mention that his family’s business – whole life insurance – is a reprehensible one. We even trashed his dad’s (uncle’s?) book a couple of years ago. We didn’t do it to be cruel, but rather because it belonged in a landfill. Josh’s subject matter this week isn’t too horrible – the danger of fiat money and fractional-reserve banking – but he takes way too long to get to the point and, of course, ties it in to whole life insurance by the end of the post. Also, this post is an interview but it’s formatted so badly that it’s impossible to tell which voice is the writer’s and which is the subject’s. Aside from that, awesome post.

As promised, here’s the good submission. Remember good submissions? We do, faintly. Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence reminds us that the whole point of self-determination is having options. Mlle. Paquin moved to the Guatemalan coast and is leveraging things beautifully, taking advantage of low wages and prices to live in relative comfort with plenty of freedom. She explains what she chooses to spend money on, and what she elects to do herself – a solution to a linear programming problem that maximizes both her money and her time. We need more Paulines.

Back to the garbage. William at Quote Me A Price returns a mere 7 days after we told you to, and we quote, “avoid (his company) like anthrax.” After much introspection, we’ve decided to take his post this week as the compliment that it is. Clearly, he’s implying that the Carnival of Wealth is such a great place to submit to that it’s worth any verbal skewering. Anyhow, William wants to buy your annuity. He writes the same post every week, but at least he’s plagiarizing himself and not others.

Is this our worst CoW yet? Bottom 5, anyway.

A respite. Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro points out that you can add blood – actual human blood – to the list of commodities that your elected representatives control the price of, instead of allowing buyers and sellers to come to mutual agreement. The Food and Drug Administration (How is this under their purview? Is blood a drug, or food?) doesn’t allow compensation of more than $25 a pint. And then has the nerve to say that there’s a shortage. Even better, Harry’s local blood bank charges its customers 12 times that once they drain his veins.

Look who’s back! It’s Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim. Our resident genius Certified Financial Planner explains what proprietary funds are, what’s wrong with them, and why you might be invested in one without even knowing it.

Paula Pant of Afford Anything unveils one of finance’s fundamental truths, so obvious that most of you miss it. Emotion has no place with regard to money. None whatsoever. (We’re paraphrasing.) In that respect, personal finance is almost a hard science – organic chemistry and particle physics don’t care how you’re feeling or whether you’re “mentally in a bad place”, and neither does your money. Except Paula stated that more succinctly than we could.

From Michael at Financial Ramblings, why companies split their stock.

There are pros to payday loans? Not just cons? John Kiernan at Card Hub conducts an interview with an academic who tells a story of a payday lender attempting to sell a loan to a retard (a real one.) Yes, payday loans are stupid. That’s why you need the government to prohibit you from getting one, because you can’t be expected to do it yourself.

Another financial product/service to avoid is penny stocks, and if the reasons aren’t obvious, Kevin Mulligan at Free From Broke gives them to you but good. That Canadian mining stock that’s trading at 14¢ a share isn’t going to rise to $1, and in the unlikely event that it does you’ll be too greedy to cash out anyway.

From Ross Garner at Wallet Hub, did you know there’s a reverse mortgage crisis in addition to the conventional one? The Federal Housing Administration overleveraged taxpayers itself and has decided to suspend its most popular reverse mortgage program. There is nothing that government can’t screw up. But yeah, keep voting for the status quo.

Couldn’t the S&P have used another expression? Dividend bigwigs? Dividend bluebloods? Anything other than “dividend aristocrats”, which never fails to make us giggle? Dividend Growth Investor looks at Standard & Poor’s definitive list, and finds that it’s anything but definitive.

If any submitter could add a useful word to our vocabulary, it’s Jason at Hull Financial Planning. Apophenia is the phenomenon of divining patterns in random data where none exist. (That’s not the Virgin Mary’s face in a church window. This is the Virgin Mary’s face in a church window.) Jason argues that there’s too much information out there, and that you’re better off turning off CNBC or only watching in minute doses. (You can pronounce that ˈmin-it or mī-ˈnüt, it doesn’t matter which.) Besides, you should be watching Fox Business anyway, but mostly because of this.

Finally, from Lynn B. Johnson at Wallet Blog: the Paradox of Medicaid. She had to get her Parkinson’s-stricken mom into a nursing home, and to qualify for Medicaid (as opposed to the 3 but not 4 classes of Medicare that her mom qualified for) Lynn had to liquidate her mom’s assets and prepay some expenses. Our federal government’s functionaries made Lynn pay for her mother’s eventual funeral, just one of several ghoulish flaming hoops she had to leap through. (Lynn, that is. Her mother’s in no condition to jump through even a non-flaming hoop.) As Lynn puts it,

Medicaid…exists so that people who are stricken with disease and poverty can receive healthcare, but the stress and bureaucracy of negotiating the application process leaves you wanting to die.

A message to subpar personal finance bloggers. Create imagery as adeptly as Lynn does, while still giving full-time care to a mentally compromised mother:

The nursing-home financial officer, whom I’ll call Glinda for her magical powers of remaining calm in the face of bureaucracy,

And we’ll stop making fun of you.

Thanks for coming. Check us out on Investopedia. (Special cross-promotional treat, check us out in Nevada Magazine this week.) New post Wednesday. And Friday. ‘Til then.

Two things that should never go together – blizzards and Saguaro cacti

Photo taken this past week at the Accenture Match Play Championships. In Marana, Arizona, which is essentially a suburb of Tucson. Today’s lesson: you can’t get close enough to the Equator. Good God. Now, let’s anthologize. We’re going to do these largely in reverse order of when they were received, and see if that makes a difference:

Instead of taking on a second job or making his own clothes out of discarded fabric swatches, the guy at Free Money Finance bought a couple of small apartment buildings. He paid cash, too, for some reason. Maybe his credit is awful. He’s also hired a property manager, but has threatened to save the 8% and manage the buildings himself. (Note to FMF: Don’t manage the buildings yourself.)

Jason at Hull Financial Planning opens with a quote from Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, and it just gets better from there. Seriously, Jason gives an ironclad answer to the question that’s probably crossed your mind once or twice: Why are those Nigerian scam emails so blatantly ridiculous? In other words, why don’t the scammers dial it down a little so they can get more responses? Jason not only answers the question, but explains how you can use the scammers’ tactics to your own (hopefully honest) advantage. Read this man, and read his archives. He’s that rarest of personal finance bloggers; a good one.

From “Bill Smith” at 2013 Taxes, how to maximize your return with TurboTax. See our archives for why maximizing your return is a dumb strategy. But yeah, if your income is relatively uncomplicated, TurboTax is the way to go.

The secretive Wayne at Off-Road Finance is back after a long hiatus. We’d barely seen him since his magnum opus hexalogy on the alternative to investing. He returns with a piece on the senselessness of the modern portfolio manager’s compensation – all upside, no downside. We need antibonuses to make the thing work. Wayne also cites the institutionalization that stands counter to the idea of dynamic capitalism. The most widely held bonds are widely held (and thus offer low yields)…well, because they’re widely held. Which could mean opportunity for you.

So you reproduced, and after hundreds of filthy diapers and high-decibel screams, you’re regretting your decision? Take heart. Emily Guy Birken at One Smart Dollar explains the newly permanent (to the extent that these things are ever permanent) child tax credit and how it works. With the ever-diminishing likelihood of our elected representatives making our tax system simple, you might as well take advantage of the unpublicized credits where they exist.

2nd mortgages, home equity loans, and home equity lines of credit are interchangeable, right? Wrong. Charles Davis at Wallet Hub explains the sometimes critical differences. Why can’t all college professors write as clearly and comprehensively as the Chuckster does?

John Kiernan at Card Hub continues his “Ask the Experts” series by grilling a few academics on whether it’s possible to learn financial literacy at a relatively advanced age.

it would take 4-to-5 times as long to teach foundational concepts to a 12 year old than it would to ingrain them at an early age

That’s so depressing. Turn off Max & Ruby and park your toddler in front of the Fox Business Network.

For those of you who don’t work in soul-crushing office environments, you can thank Peter J. Buscemi at FourQuadrant for reminding you what you’re missing. He drones on about how to create a marketing plan:

Communication of the plan is critical and needs to take many forms including written, verbal, email, prints, social, web and physical formats.  Summarize the plan for functional areas and management so it is clear who is to do what and when, make it part of regular communications and engage executive sponsorship.  The plan is a live document that will need to be dynamic and responsive to the needs of the business and that increases the need for a clear, consistent, bi-directional flow of information.

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? Worst of all, 5 sad people have shared Peter J.’s post on LinkedIn. One extremely lonely woman shared it on Pinterest, where it should at least stand out among the cupcake recipes and scrapbook photos.

Still insisting on going to college, huh? Good luck, you’ll go far with that anthropology degree. Kyle and Justin at My University Money wrote a book about how to handle your post-secondary finances, entitled More Money For Beer And Textbooks. If you’re Canadian, young, and like to drink and study, you should probably read it.

Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence, already a seasoned real estate investor at the age of 30-something, found a way to live in a paid-for house, inexpensively.

1. Build it yourself
2. Do it in Guatemala.

Pauline and her boyfriend are living a more interesting and lucrative life than you are, most likely. They travel the world and own cattle. They also freed up money for their international investments by purchasing the Guatemalan house in a lump sum. Best of all, they have 90 acres to play with and develop. Think about that the next time you’re cursing your place of employment and/or the local weather.

The point is that you can do this. Enjoy freedom from a suffocating schedule, and live life on your own terms. It just takes a little foresight and confidence. You have at least one of those, right? Buy our book.

The only thing Pauline has in common with Control Your Cash Woman of the Year Paula Pant of Afford Anything is that they travel the world peripatetically, work on home improvement projects with their significant others, rely on real estate and investment income to finance their rich if not ostentatious lifestyles, aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, haven’t destroyed their happiness by having kids, and are unfailingly self-reliant. Well, that and they have the same initials. This week Paula explains how even a sophisticated financial maven like herself can still be swayed by anchoring. A coupon that offers you 70% off isn’t as good a deal as saving 100% if you were never going to buy the discounted good in the first place.  Or as Paula puts it,

Frugality is just another form of consumerism: it keeps your focus on consumption.

…when it should be on production. If we had Paula’s skill at concision, this post would have ended hours ago.

Too many good posts, so it’s up to William at Quote Me A Price to even the scales. William and his company want to buy your structured settlement. That’s the opposite of investing. (For you, that is. Not for William.) Does this really count as a free ad for William’s company if we’re telling you to avoid his company like anthrax? Oh, it’s not like he reads the CoW anyway.

There is no data that PKamp3 and his band of engineers at DQYDJ.net can’t analyze, manipulate, and present in handy graphical form. This week, geometric average trailing returns for periods of 1 to 40 years, using postbellum S&P 500 data. We also learn that PKamp3 is writing at an effective 88 words per hour, but it’s about quality, not quantity. And quality he has.

Excuse us. We’re going to step away from the CoW for a minute to play chicken on the highway, shoot some heroin and have unprotected sex with Magic Johnson. Why? Why not? YOLO! Glen Craig at Free From Broke reminds us how idiotic that acronym and its pursuant philosophy are.

Andrew at 101 Centavos accompanied his wife to court (she was facing a quadruple homicide charge) and got to see how losers live. It’s amazing how many people will do dumb stuff (e.g. acting belligerently toward people who have the authority to make their lives miserable, to say nothing of drinking and driving) and then not figure out why they fall behind. If you’re that loser’s friend, then that makes you the French Vanilla in the ice-cream-and-dog-feces analogy. A morality tale in one act, albeit one with an unhappy ending for Mrs. 101 Centavos.

Don at My Dollar Plan points out that (artificially) low interest rates make life hard for lenders and people who rely on investment income for a living. Thus Don says you should load up on blue-chip stocks and short-term bonds.

Speaking of which, you know how many stocks have appreciated in each of the last 25 years? Effectively none. But stocks whose dividends have increased in each of the last 25 years are somewhat plentiful. Dividend Growth Investor tabulates them, and discovers with the benefit of hindsight that a basket of such would have returned 33% over the last 5 years while the S&P remained almost static.

When you hear a bond fund brag about x% returns, look closely. Its returns might really be x – y%. Michael at Financial Ramblings explains the difference between SEC yield and distribution yield.

Finally, Michael at Kitces.com reminds us that it’s a woman’s world. Long-term care insurers are finally noticing that women live longer than men, and are thus selling women policies at discounts of 17% to 29% under what men pay. Add that to a lifetime of never having to buy their own drinks, and we wonder how women ever dare to complain that they’re treated as 2nd-class citizens.

We’re also on Investopedia. (That article’s from 11 months ago, but it holds up well. There’s more recent stuff on there, too.) New post here every Wednesday and Friday. New Anti-Tip of the Day, every day. See you tomorrow.