Make a right turn at Bechuanaland

Of course not, but that’s the kind of arresting headline that’s supposed to result in lots of page views.

Some of our superannuated readers might remember when Germany was 2 separate countries: the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic. Both names are unwieldy and confusing. So using First World ingenuity, society came up with de facto names for each of them. We called the western one West Germany and the other one East Germany.

Fast forward to 1997 (also 1960-1971, but we’re getting behind ourselves), and in a parallel to the German situation, there are 2 adjacent countries in Africa that share a name. Republic of the Congo, and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The latter was called Zaire until reverting to its neighbor’s name, for some reason. Imagine if Canada decided to call itself the People’s Republic of America. (Or if some southern states in the 1860s formed their own country and called it the Confederate States of America.)

Any sane person would distinguish Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo by calling them West Congo and East Congo. Yet no one at the Associated Press, The New York Times, or any of the hundreds of other media outlets that serve as arbiters of political nomenclature have taken this obvious step. Why? The unofficial answer is because it’s only Africa, and who gives a damn. This has been bothering us for years, and it has nothing to do with personal finance, but this is our outlet for this sort of thing.

Onto the Carnival. Shall we?

Harry at Your PF Pro is tired of certificates of deposit that earn femtoscopic interest. So he gave Lending Club a try – peer-to-peer lending that removes traditional institutions from the equation. How did it work out for him?

the loan has officially been charged off, I’ve lost my principal investment($25) and I’m pissed.

Remember that the next time you’re occupying Wall Street.

Why do people live in densely populated places? Is it the claustrophobia that you love? Or the constant interactions with Homo sapiens, God’s relentless and disgusting punchline? Maybe it’s the foul air and constant noise that turn you on. Pauline at Reach Financial Independence asks how a modular 250-ft² apartment grabs you. But hey, it’s in the self-proclaimed Greatest City in the World, where the weather is atrocious, the mayor is the definitive example of a tiny man drunk on power, and private citizens are at the mercy of any criminal with a weapon. But yeah, fantastic town.

Wait…she says you can’t invest for the short-term and expect lasting wealth? Well, she is a CFA. Katrina Lamb at Jemstep reminds us that clichés are important to your retirement strategy:

Retirement Planning is a Marathon, not a Sprint

And in case you missed it,

Retirement planning isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Somebody named Shaun Rosenberg has decided to adopt the look and content of Steve Pavlina. Mr. Rosenberg has given us a post he wrote 4 months ago. Even better, he included a donate button. Maybe we’ll send him some money in June.

It’s turning into one of those CoWs. If you joined us in the last couple of weeks, the Carnival is rarely as good as you’ve become accustomed to.

How about William at Quote Me A Price, with an inelegantly written infomercial for a company that buys annuities? No? You want something better?

Perhaps Steve at 2012 Tax has something good. His post is about how to file your taxes free, with the IRS’s blessing. Steve vacillates between writing in the 3rd and 2nd persons, and his advice is nowhere near as good as ours, and is name probably isn’t Steve, but whatever.

Short of journalistically trained Miranda Marquit making an appearance, this carnival can’t get much worse.

Let’s try Jon Haver at…oh God, it’s called Pay My Student Loans. Let’s see. Jon mistakes secondary for tertiary education and has a little trouble with punctuation, but on the other hand he’s a mechanical engineer – one of the few professions worth a college education. He also purchased an engagement ring, while at college no less, so he sounds like a guy who knows all about building wealth by buying assets and selling liabilities. Jon’s post explains to his weary readers the difference between private and federal loans, which is insignificant when compared to the chasm that exists between loans for worthwhile degrees and loans for degrees in interpretive dance.

Alright, there are some good posts in the hopper. But you’re going to have to wade through the foul-smelling filth to get there. Or you could just scroll down, but what’s the fun in that? Masochist Peter J. Buscemi (not to be confused with Peter W. Buscemi or Peter Q. Buscemi, we guess) at Four Quadrant is back for more fun:

At the end of the day, the sales team is responsible for the entire sales process and needs to orchestrate resources accordingly. Ideally, there is a clear and clean set of roles and responsibilities but bidirectional feedback is still required to make certain that the process is efficient and effective. Reps will harvest the installed base and hunt for new opportunities. Once engaged in qualified opportunities the sales focus will turn to presentations, business and technical discovery and proof of concept.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…huh? Looks like someone’s sat through his share of strategy meetings and now wants to spread the pain.

(Post rejected because it’s about nursing. Step your game up, submitters.)

David de Souza at Tax Credits lists how much of selected countries’ output is confiscated by their governments. Don’t read the numbing commentary, just look at the chart. This is the only metric by which Mexico doesn’t look awful, only because David didn’t control for gangland-style executions and bodies hanging from bridges.

(“Master Your Family’s Schedule with These 10 iPhone Apps”? What did we ever do to you? Rejected.)

We’re partially to blame for these bottom-heavy Carnivals. We save the proven commodities for the end, forcing ourselves to sift through the substandard submissions as some sort of penance. Which brings us to Andrew at 101 Centavos, who explains why the (post-5 p.m.) lines at the Cheesecake Factory are so long, and what you’re getting in exchange for desultory customer service at Walmart.

Dividend Growth Investor presents The World’s Best Dividend Portfolio. World’s best? D.G. gives us his standard melding of quantification with superfluous explanations of what businesses his investments engage in:

The Coca-Cola Company (KO), a beverage company, engages in the manufacture, marketing, and sale of nonalcoholic beverages worldwide.

Big Cajun Man at Canajun Finances summarizes his post better than we can: “If the only way you can get in your significant others’ pants is by spending $750, maybe it’s time to rethink your relationship?”

We actively solicited a post from Glen Craig at Free From Broke this week (it’s a long story), and he delivered. If you think your 401(k) will guarantee you deferred riches, regardless of its composition, rethink. Glen even suggests the drastic step of finding a new job if your 401(k) is legitimately awful. We’d go one step further (see our latest ebook, link above.)

Single American guys who can’t meet a girl, Canadian Budget Binder avails us of the phenomenon of single women buying homes. How they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and more. Also, if you can get past the accents, Canadian girls can be charming.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net joins the small but growing chorus of writers who understand that Dave Ramsey is selling an emotional bag of goods and not “personal finance” advice in any helpful sense of the term. Mr. Ramsey thinks it’s reasonable to assume 12% annual returns in the stock market over the next 4 decades. PKamp3 throws enough data at that assumption to make the remaining hair on Ramsey’s head stand on end.

From Darwin’s Money, mutual funds whose returns make those of your standard exchange-traded fund look puny. Why? Good old asymmetrical information. Darwin looks at funds that invest in “frontier markets”, an industry term for firms in countries that are somewhere between destitute and overextended; in this case, places such as Qatar and Kuwait.

Charles Davis at Wallet Hub explains FHA loans. If you’re poor, tired of renting, and don’t want to/can’t be bothered to earn more, you can buy a house with the help of the Federal Housing Administration, which will put the taxpayers on the hook in the event that you default. At which point another government program will doubtless help “keep you in your home”, and the process continues. U! S! A!

The higher tax rates get in the present, the more value there is in deferring taxes. (A blanket statement. Of course, to defer taxes you have to be in the market and thus risk exposure.) Michael at Kitces.com asks a non-rhetorical question. Should you invest in cheap variable annuities, purely to reduce your 2013 tax bite?

Lynn at Wallet Blog explains massive open online courses, better known by their acronym. MOOCs might revolutionize education, or maybe they’re just a glorified Wikipedia. Either way, they’re inexpensive and offer an opportunity to detach from the traditional lecturer/pupil dynamic.

For pedophobes like us (read it again, this time closely), there are few things more important than pet care. John Kiernan at Card Hub asked some industry experts on how to save money when vet bills get exorbitant. Or you could just walk away from the problem, you heartless bastards.

Wait, that was unnecessary. John explains the benefits of health insurance for pets, and ways you can economize – not cut corners, economize – while preserving Fluffy’s and Snookums’s long-term outlooks. (Here’s our contribution to the discussion.)

Free Money Finance continues its Real Estate 101 series, with a post by some cat named “Apex” summarizing the series’ previous posts. A long read if you click on each link, but absolutely worth it if you’re looking to let renters make you rich. It’s probably more work than investing in nothing but securities, but it’s also a lot easier to leverage. Other people’s money is awesome.

Jason at Hull Financial Planning also writes about Lending Club, which means we probably should’ve run his post next to Harry Campbell’s, but then we wouldn’t have been able to make those jokes about all the unreadable posts you had to sit through on the way to the crust of the CoW, here. Thanks for staying with this, by the way. Jason had 7 charge-offs among his 86 notes, and concludes that that’s too small of a sample size. (The solution? Gamble Invest more!)

Thanks again. New posts every Wednesday and Friday, new CoW every Monday. New Anti-Tip of the Day every day. Also Investopedia. See yez.

Home Depot (we’re not going to use the superfluous definite article that’s part of their name) is twice as profitable as Lowe’s, despite only slightly larger revenue and equity. Here’s how they do it.

We had to replace the blades on a standard indoor ceiling fan, probably because a renter’s kid decided to play with a broom or something while the fan was spinning. Children are awful. Anyhow, the fan is a Hampton Bay® model, Home Depot’s store brand. And these fans are cheap, like $35. Each of the 5 blades attaches to the hub with 3 screws, which meant all an enterprising homeowner has to do is measure the blades, buy new ones, unscrew the existing ones and replace them with the new ones, right? What could be easier?

If only. The blades appeared to be attached to the hub with hex screws (Allen screws for our Canadian friends), but no hex key (Allen key for our Canadian friends) of any size fit the heads. Upon closer examination, the screws had Torx heads.

Instead of a hexagon, a Torx head looks more like a Star of David. THE JEWS CONTROL THE CONSTRUCTION TRADES, TOO. Hex keys are easy to find, Torx screwdrivers not so much. Still, we eventually found one (well, several – they come in sets that encompass varying widths) and tried it. Nothing.

Upon further review it wasn’t a Torx head, it was a Torx Security head.

See the difference? That minuscule post in the middle of the pattern makes it a different head, requiring a different driver. Oh, and the local Home Depot doesn’t sell Torx Security drivers. Nor does Lowe’s. Nor did 2 of the 3 Ace Hardwares that don’t require a plane to get to. The 3rd Ace Hardware had one such driver left. $22, or $3 less than Home Depot’s cheapest indoor fan.

Torx Security heads are intentionally scarce. They were created for stuff like consumer electronics toys where the manufacturer doesn’t want you playing with the innards, or for things worth stealing. Hotel room safes, etc. Who the hell is going to steal a ceiling fan blade?

No one, but Home Depot is counting on you being trepid (the antonym of intrepid?) enough to give up searching for a Torx Security driver and just buy a new fan. Especially since the screw hole pattern in the new blades, with the same brand name, Home Depot’s own, didn’t match the pattern in the old blades anyway.

Screw them, in a manner of speaking. We reattached the old, beat-up blade and will leave it there until it falls off.

Now for the Carnival. Blog posts from hither and occasionally yon:

Newly 20/15 sighted Paula Pant at Afford Anything got LASIKed last week. In her honor, we’re going to summarize her post in this tiny font. Paula’s unusual among personal finance bloggers in that she thinks there exist objectives beyond frugality. If there’s one place you should spend profligately, it’s your health. Saving your co-pay means little when you’re spending your nights in an iron lung.

This post seemed good in theory, but is a soggy mess in practice. Peter Buscemi at Four Quadrant tells us how to create a marketing budget, and writes like a cloistered academic who can communicate with the outside world only via mutated and unintelligible Corporatespeak:

It’s important that the numbers associated with this plan are modeled out to document when they need to be designed, developed and executed and what they produce, when they produce trickled through the waterfall and what it will cost. Details here are critical. If there is a need to decrease expenses and program dollars come under scrutiny, this detail will allow the correlation of qualified opportunities and revenue dollars reduced by program dollar cuts.

Sure enough, he lectures at the University of South Florida. He clearly wrote his own bio, too:

Peter is a strategic and visionary marketing executive and brand champion who has leveraged his unique combination of classical training and entrepreneurial experience at start-ups and F500 companies to transform technology innovations into multimillion-dollar revenue streams.

Ace, we don’t have time for this. Our readers expect us to inform and entertain them, not bore them silly with buzzwords and an absence of commas. Come back when you learn to make your points concisely.

David DeSouza at TaxFix gives our British readers 3 ways to earn tax-free interest on their investments. It’s all about ISAs, R85 forms, and other details that sound exotic to unfamiliar ears here on the fun side of the Atlantic.

Last month, Abbott Labs spun off its research drug operations into a company with the preposterous name of AbbVie. Dividend Growth Investor now owns shares of 2 companies, and explains the surprisingly generous dividend payout scheme for both Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie.

(Post rejected because it was 6 months old. Which is a shame, because it looked good and timeless, but we’ve rejected posts for being younger than that.)

Two things we love here at Control Your Cash: Student loans, and tax refunds! Seriously, if you’re financing an education that will keep you in debt for decades, and letting Uncle Sam enjoy your money interest-free for months on end, you’re an idiot. If you are such an idiot, borrowing money and then loaning it to the Treasury at your expense, Kristen at My Dollar Plan thinks you should use the latter to pay for the former. Her opening line:

The best part about doing your taxes is to hopefully, be getting a large tax refund check when it’s all said and done.

“When it’s all said and done.” “At the end of the day.” “Once the fat lady sings.” “When the cows come home.” Kristen, stop writing and don’t start again until you read this.

Nick at Making It In Today’s Economy, spare us your posts about how to save money on rent that include helpless hints such as “find a roommate”. Take your SEO-rich claptrap and park it somewhere else.

Here’s a good way to save money renting: buy instead.

Got a structured settlement that you want to turn into a lump sum for pennies on the dollar? If J.G. Wentworth’s website is down, try William at Quote Me A Price. He explains the difference between such a settlement and an annuity, and gives several dozen links to where you can forgo future returns for the indulgent pleasure of instant if smaller gratification.

The good posts don’t just fall out of the sky, you know. The thoughtful and bright Andrew at 101 Centavos, and we’re not calling him that just because he quotes us in his post, tells us why he forwent investing in Dow mainstay General Electric so he could bet on Air Products & Chemicals instead. Why? Among other reasons, because GE treats its 3rd World suppliers like garbage, forcing them to store inventory for months until GE deigns to take shipment.

Excerpts From GECitizenship.com:

Good citizenship is not bolted onto GE’s commercial enterprise. It is embedded into the strategy and actions within our business on a daily basis.

GE is committed to maintaining a culture of integrity, transparency, ethics and compliance.

GE is aware of its constantly evolving responsibilities and its impact on a global scale. We develop measurable strategies that drive operational excellence even as we work to add value to society. At GE, Citizenship is a full-time commitment built upon cultural behavior and actions.

Plus several more pages of human resources tripe that looks like Peter Buscemi wrote it and that no one, least of all CEO Jeff Immelt, will take seriously or even read.

You still haven’t bought whole life insurance? Good, you’re not insane. It’s the worst investment this side of Fannie Mae stock, and we say that every week, but it doesn’t stop the intrepid Josh Thompson at Becoming Your Own Bank from Becoming Our Own Punchline and sending us his company’s sales literature time and again. Fortunately, at last check his site was offline.

Last week Card Guys gave us a post from longtime CYC punching bag, journalistically trained Miranda Marquit. This week’s Card Guys post has no byline, which means that either Miranda went Alan Smithee on us, or whoever wrote it is embarrassed by it. If it’s the latter, the writer should be. This post tells us to vacation close to home, use sunscreen (if you’re going somewhere warm, and if you have fair skin), and not buy souvenirs. On closer examination, this has Miranda’s smell all over it.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro introduces us to Betterment, an online brokerage. Why is Harry writing about Betterment?

Reader TA writes in:

I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything about the Betterment.com site?

How convenient. If we go any deeper in our analysis of Harry’s post, we’ll be one website writing about another website writing about a 3rd. Sorry, that’s at least one step removed from where we need to be. We hope you understand.

You think your parents are hopeless? Michael at Financial Ramblings‘ dad almost didn’t take the required minimum distribution from his IRA last year. And he wouldn’t let Michael borrow the car or spend the night at his girlfriend’s house. Seriously, though: if Michael’s dad hadn’t taken the required minimum distribution in time, he could be looking at a 50% penalty.

Cameron Daniels, DQYDJ.net‘s Boy Prodigy, doesn’t obsess over every nickel as do the debt bloggers whom we regularly make fun of on this site. He could afford a nicer apartment, daily restaurant lunches and maybe even a new work wardrobe, yet he manages to keep his lifestyle from creeping. And his credit card balance at 0. Why is this so hard for the rest of you?

(Still, Cameron: You own a watch?)

We never know what Jason at Hull Financial Planning (Jason Hull. It’s his company) will bring us every week, we just know it’ll be money. This week, Jason’s YouTube interview with Mark Kohler of What Your CPA Isn’t Telling You renown. (Just for the record, the CYC principals love their CPAs. And their choice of swimwear.)

If you have a Federal Housing Administration mortgage, you might qualify for refinancing. Louis at Wallet Hub explains what you need to do. The FHA actually wants you to be upside-down, and might not even demand that you get your home appraised.

Finally, John Kiernan at Card Hub continues his series of roundtable discussions with various college professors. This week John asks the non-rhetorical question, “Where Do We Get Our Spending Habits From?” No conclusions reached, but an entertaining cavalcade of pronouncements from high atop the Ivory Complex.

Thanks again. We’re back on Investopedia, too. (Search for “McFarlane”.) And back here with new stuff every day. Mahalo.

Ladies? Not sure how to break this to you, but he’s taken.

Before we begin this week’s CoW, here’s the single stupidest thing any personal finance blogger has ever said, and given the hundreds of dumb personal finance blog posts written daily, that’s saying something. (Boldface in the original):

From a purely financial perspective, it’s never a good idea to sell a car. One could just keep repairing pieces of it as needed in perpetuity and, over the long run, you’re going to end up saving money.

Where do you even start rebutting that? The falsehood in the excerpt is obvious to everyone in the universe except the person who wrote it.

Oh yeah, him. His name is Trent Hamm and he writes The Simple Dollar, the most repetitive and inane personal finance blog in existence. It has 100,000 Feedburner subscribers. The title of this particular post is “Putting a Value on Reliability: When Is It Time to Trade In Your Car?” A reader unfamiliar with The Simple Dollar would assume that Mr. Hamm might give maybe a formula, or some sort of numerical benchmark, for keeping one’s car vs. getting a new one. Projected miles remaining vs. projected miles remaining in a new car, divided by (new car price minus Kelley Blue Book value of existing car), or something.

But such research and discovery is not what Trent does. This is what Trent does:

To me, it comes down to your gut. If it feels like it’s time to replace a car, then replace that car.

Sorry to ruin the climax for you, but that was it. Here’s another profound insight from earlier in this Benghazi embassy attack of a post:

[A]s a car ages, the likelihood of a vital system failing grows. If the likelihood of a system failure is elevated, that means the car isn’t as reliable.

Wait, how do you figure?

Everything that comes out of this man’s keyboard is baseless, and often internally contradictory, drivel. His writing is beyond sloppy, his imagination is nonexistent, and his knack for repetition is without peer. Aside from that, awesome site.

Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from all 7 continents, none of which blow anywhere near as much chimp as Trent Hamm’s best work. Let’s get started:

Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence made her stunning debut in last week’s CoW, and returns this week to show us her fatalistic self. What if civilization as we know it crumbled? Can you barter and make fire? The people with the fireproof matches will hold untold power in such a world.

New submitter this week, Gary at Gajizmo, the first CoW entrant to feature the sequence “jizm” in its URL. Gary’s post is not bad, and not concise. 1600 words on whether you should pay your mortgage off early, the answer being “it depends on whether you could put the balance in an investment that pays more than your mortgage costs, taking into account the interest deduction you’d forgo.” (Details here, Chapter VII.)

Journalistically trained and perennially masochistic Miranda Marquit just can’t leave us alone. She returns at Card Guys this week, spreading herself even thinner than we’d previously thought possible. She titled her post “Would You Rather: Spend Less Or Earn More?” Disregarding the unnecessary colon, isn’t the answer obvious? Even Trent Hamm would rather earn more, especially since there’s only so much you can subtract from expenses while revenue is essentially limitless. So we’ve answered her question without reading the post. Then we read the post, and wished we’d stopped at the title:

Consider a combination of cutting out the unimportant spending in your life and adding more income.

Is that what journalistic training does to the human brain? Good Lord. TWO SENTENCES LATER:

[C]oncentrate on boosting your income so that you don’t have to cut the things you really enjoy from your life.

Look. We like running Control Your Cash, we love having you folks read us every week, and sitting on a couch typing into a laptop beats the hell out of going to an office. Still, if we could return to a pre-internet world, where CYC didn’t exist but neither did the scores of awful bloggers pretending that they have something to say, we’d do so immediately.

How about a post that look longer than 4 seconds to write? With the benefit of hindsight, Darwin’s Money explains what would have happened over the last decade had you dollar-cost averaged your way into the market vs. making a lump-sum investment. He concludes that a lump-sum at the start of the decade would have returned more than annual and monthly dollar-cost averaging combined. And then starts the next sentence with, “If dollar cost averaging is something you’re interested in…” We’ve been scratching our heads on that one so hard that the skull is showing.
Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about your stupid carnival” quite like submitting a post from a site that still incorporates the default WordPress theme. So thanks, guy at My Journey to Financial Independence. His handy tips for what you need to do before investing include:

1. Make a budget and track your income and expenses

2. Establish an emergency fund

3. Tackle your debts

Miranda Marquit thinks that’s useless and repetitive. Also, we’re going to murder the next submitter who recommends starting an emergency fund. You’ve been warned.

Somebody good? Please? Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog will work just fine. He introduces us to “dark pools”, the quasi-stock exchanges that operate in realms where the NYSE and NASDAQ fear to visit. Dark pools are operated by investment banks and brokerage houses, and they even have ominous names that sound like divisions of Blackwater – “Sigma X”, “Crossfinder”, etc. Still, they’re a place to go if you believe that regulation, and not its absence, was to blame for the financial crisis of 2008.

Ooh, even better. DQYDJ.net‘s programmer-in-residence, PKamp3, went to the trouble of creating a calculator that tells you what your T-bills return over any 10-year period since the Grant Administration. With coupon payments reinvested, no less. Would that every personal finance blogger cared this much about not just taking up space.

If Miranda Marquit is the CoW equivalent of a battered wife, continuing to come back for more abuse because she likes the attention, the Thompsons at Becoming Your Own Bank are an entire family of same. They treated us to their first YouTube video this week, which actually isn’t horrible until you remember what they’re hawking – whole life insurance, the worst financial good this side of betting red in roulette.

Another CoW rookie, and a promising one. Deirdre Morhet at BASC Expertise explains that April 15 isn’t the only tax deadline Americans need to concern themselves with. If you derive income from other sources, as we strongly encourage you to do, there are 4 other dates that should concern you. One of which already passed, so good luck with that.

Modesty prevents us from naming the most outspoken personal finance site in existence, but Canajun Finances isn’t far behind. Big Cajun Man says that if you’re overwhelmed with debt, you should look at transferring your credit card balances, clip coupons, and adopt other meaningless gestures to reduce that load.

Just kidding. He thinks you’re an idiot and says as much. If you’re adding to your credit card balance by buying an expensive lunch, yet still taking vacations and leasing a new car every 2 years, you deserve to be in the red and will hopefully stay there forever if the universe is just.

Jon at Novel Investor explains methods to weigh stock bundles. There’s the standard price weighing that you see in the Dow and other indices. Beyond that, there’s market cap weighing, fundamental weighing and more. Jon lists them all, complete with pros and cons for investing purposes.

Still going to college with no purpose and paying borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of deferring a finite life for a few more years? Well, you’re the boss. Lynn Johnson at Wallet Blog explains how to minimize your student loans debt. How? By letting the taxpayers bail you out! Now you can start from zero in your loser retail job that you never needed a B.A. for in the first place. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Carmen at My Best Car Insurance has more useless drivel for your reading displeasure, including:

[T]he age of a driver relates to their experience on the road and how responsibility (sic) they drive.

Even better,

[A] good, clean driving record is one of the most important factors companies take into consideration when calculating pricing. Drivers with a driving history where there is no record of accidents, tickets, moving violations, or claims will get the cheapest pricing.

Would it kill you to try? There’s also an infographic that seems to claims that men are one-third more likely to get into accidents than women are, which conveniently ignores that men drive far more miles than women do. (To paraphrase an anonymous Deadspin commenter, “Every time I see a woman driving a man, I assume either his license is suspended or he’s returning from LASIK surgery.”)

Mike at Reward Cards Canada calculated which of 10 credit cards gives you the most cash back for fixed levels of gas and grocery purchases.

Kristen at My Dollar Plan tells you how much of your medical and dental insurance premia you can deduct from your taxes if you’re self-employed.

You still don’t know the difference between marginal and effective tax rates? You shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near money. Michael at Kitces.com explains the crucial difference.

Some of us (hi there!) pay undue attention to price/earnings ratios. Dividend Growth Investor reminds you to look beyond one-time incidences that can have a huge impact on P/E, and instead focus on years’ worth of data.

Andrew at 101 Centavos warns us that this is not one of his best posts, which means it’s still in the 95th percentile. In the public sector, customer service and going the extra mile mean nothing.

State-mandated financial literacy programs are an unalloyed good, right? Maybe not, according to John Kiernan at CardHub. Half a dozen business school professors (big ones, too: Harvard, Penn et al.) say that they’re a waste of time. For one thing, information changes rapidly between learning it in a classroom (from a textbook that’s likely already obsolete) and being able to apply it in the real world. For another, if you have a proclivity for bad financial decisions, it’ll take more than mere education to get through your head. Seriously, this is one of the most thought-provoking posts we’ve ever had the pleasure of hosting in the CoW.

We saved the best for last. Jason at Hull Financial Planning returns with the most convoluted explanation ever of how he came to sit through a screening of a crowdfunded movie. On the other hand, we find that he went to West Point. (Boy, it’s fascinating what you can glean when you actually read the submissions instead of just cutting and pasting like every other blog carnival does.) And then he takes off. In one of the longest submissions we’ve ever received, Jason takes us from his military career to his soul-sucking corporate career to his first entrepreneurial endeavor to where he is today. Jason explains that the ability to have options in your life – real options, not “Hmm…should I leave at 5:00, or stay another couple hours and hope the boss notices me?” are what separate the rich from the rest of us.

We’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for coming.