If you’re not watching Animal Planet’s Too Cute!, what the hell is wrong with you? It’s nothing but an hour of puppies, or kittens, or puppies and kitties, with the occasional goat kid sprinkled in. They frolic, they nuzzle, they remind us why Canis familiaris and Felis catus beat Homo sapiens 6 days a week (7 if Animal Planet is running one of its renowned Too Cute! marathons.) In other words, it’s the only thing on TV worth watching. (Pro football? Not even close. Not when Joe Buck and Jim Nantz are tasked with dulling the senses of tens of millions of sentient American minds every Sunday.)

Welcome to another edition of the Carnival of Wealth. The best personal finance blog posts from around the world, with the occasional exception. Let’s get started:

Oh, for Christ’s sake. The thought process of our newest entrant, Girl Meets Debt:

OMG, I have a great idea for a blog! I’m going to talk about how I used to spend money, but now I’m trying to save it! I’ll call myself a “shopaholic” too, because our society has become stupefied to the point that the only words we now understand are portmanteaux. I still believe “shopaholic” is cute and funny though, and if you think most women overuse the word “cute”, well, get a load of me! 

No way! A personal finance blogger with credit card debt ($13,000) and student loan debt ($45,000)? That never happens! Someone with so cuttingly original a story must have a correspondingly original blog, mustn’t she?

They say that the first step towards “recovery” is admitting you have a problem. It is actually very intimidating, yet liberating at the same time to say (or write!) that I have a debt problem. I’m ready to be proactive and tackle this debt on. This girl is ready to start acting like a financially responsible adult. It’s about time too since I will be turning 30 sooner than I would like to think!

Actual quote.

Ladies with a string of debt and a story to tell, leave us alone. (Guys too.) No one cares, and even if anyone did, Control Your Cash readers expect better than to have their busy days polluted by this relentless 1st-person self-aggrandizing flotsam that you’ve chosen to share with us. Are we making ourselves clear? Or should we be more, what’s the word, repetitive?

The Girl Meets Debt lady is so certain that she’ll pay off her debt. She even used all caps to accentuate that point. There’s no plan, nor is there any record of even starting on this task, just a general statement that she’d like to – no, will – be debt-free one day. Which is hard enough to take seriously, given that we’ve seen this a trillion times before, but especially so considering that she did a follow-up post about her pretty, pretty hair. Swear to God.

And women wonder why men think they’re dumb. (Sorry, gals. Most of the time, with most of you, that’s what guys are thinking. They’re usually smart enough to internalize it, though.) But yeah, let’s elect one of you President one day.

God, what a fecal stain of a post. It’s not the insipidity of it that bothers us, so much as how stinkingly tiresome it is. Who goes to the trouble of writing that post, or creating that blog, without stopping to think “Maybe this has been done before”? Fortunately though, the author equipped her post with icons that’ll let you share it with all your friends on Pinterest, Shareaholic, Tumblr et al. That the author thinks that between now and the end of the universe a solitary soul will share this post on Tumblr shows the kind of winning naïveté we’ve come to expect from our dippier contributors.

At least, the $45,000 in student loans was so she could become an aeronautical engineer.
Ha! Of course not. She’s a teacher. With 2 bachelor’s degrees, for some reason. College (or considering she’s Canadian, “university”): priceless because it’s priceless, and don’t you dare think otherwise. College might be about challenging assumptions, but the uber-assumption that college is a financial force multiplier no matter what must never be questioned.

The worst part is that all the attention we’re paying to this Newtown school massacre of a post means we’re taking away valuable time from showcasing other posts. We see PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net submitted again this week. His work is always concise, articulate, provocative, and funny, but here we are not paying his post its proper due while instead thinking of more unvarnished things to say about the verbal cat vomit that fell in our inbox in the form of this post from Girl Meets Debt.

No, wait. There’s something still worse. We already parodied this chick, 5 months before she wrote her post. Find something less demanding than financial blogging, Sister. Cosmetology school, perhaps. Wait, it’s a little late for that. Either way, if there isn’t a UN High Commission on Unreadable CoW Submissions, well, what exactly are our dues going toward? If we could go back in time, “killing Hitler” is now #2 on our to-do list. Seeing that Girl Meets Debt was never allowed access to a computer has moved to the top spot.

And then Paula Pant at Afford Anything has to come along and neutralize all our misogynistic bile. Paula, you’re making it really hard for us to wring our hands at the state of personal finance blogging when you keep sending us platinum-worthy submissions. Atlanta’s preeminent Nepali-American real estate maven/blogger shares correspondence from a pair of readers who question her recommendation that they only buy rental properties for less than 100 times the potential monthly income. Paula answered their question decisively, backed up her answer with data, and didn’t once make reference to her feelings nor her love of shopping, if any.

Michael at Financial Ramblings doesn’t blow chimp, either. This week he reports on the Federal Reserve continuing its dismal and illusory practice of hiding under the mattress the cash it receives from the U.S. Treasury. Is this legal? Ethical? Who cares? Ron Paul’s leaving Congress in a couple of weeks, and no one’s lining up to take the title of Ben Bernanke’s nemesis.

The FDA has not confirmed that there is no causal link between developing breast cancer and using the services of “Brad Jones” at Structured-Settlement Quotes. Furthermore, our own independent research into the possible criminal history of the company’s directors has come back inconclusive. Although we did find a Brad Jones who is a registered child sex offender. Are they one and the same? It’s not as if Brad Jones is a common name. (Hey submitters: If you expect us to run an ad for you, you get what you pay for.)

Apparently it’s going to be one of those carnivals. Moyo at Eden Life Mag lists handy tips for reducing your expenses. This post is a year and 9 months old, but why shouldn’t Moyo’s stale refrigerator remnants enjoy a prominent place in this week’s CoW?

Grab your most recent cell phone bills and look at them to see what you are actually paying for.

God is punishing us for something, but we don’t know what. (Other tips listed here include “clip coupons”, “drink water”, and “eat what you have”, yet the author didn’t say a word about not going to the bank to withdraw stacks of money and then setting said money on fire. How could he leave such a critical tip out? It’s not like he didn’t have 21 months to update his post.)

From the aforementioned PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, a beautifully illustrated and deeply resonant post about how a cumbersome tax system written and amended by a government that attempts to select future industrial winners is even worse than it sounds. As good as this post is, it’s not going to save our fated voyage this week.

Louis at Wallet Hub verbalized all over the page and gave us a list of all the major credit reporting agencies. And if you think Experian, Equifax and TransUnion are the only ones, you’re so wrong. Trust us and read only the first table in his post, and ignore everything else. You’ve already wasted precious seconds today.

Liana Arnold at sister site Card Hub takes it a little further, explaining how said agencies try to keep their reports free of errors, but necessarily can’t. Still, “we’re human, we all make mistakes” isn’t much satisfaction to a responsible borrower with an unfairly reduced score.

The fabulous (but in a totally straight way) Andrew at 101 Centavos writes about what to do if you get laid off. One of the many things we like about Andrew is that in the hands of just about anyone else, this post would have contained rote advice like stay current on your bills, start looking for a job, etc. But Andrew’s a big-picture guy, and looks at layoffs as an inevitable part of progress – both globally and individually, even though the latter might be hard for a recently laid-off person to believe. The money quote: “It’s not your job.” Get out of the mindset that says it is your job, and you’ll be happier and more productive.

Oh, like you didn’t know that the House Republicans were going to bow down to tax increases. A gesture that’s not only done just for show, but that won’t make a negligible impact on a runaway deficit with a solitary cause – unrestrained spending. Knowing that 2013 will probably feature at least as weak an economy as 2012, some companies have taken the step of paying out special dividends this month to avoid any aggravated tax bites for next year. Dan at High Yield Edge lists 10 of them. Still, you can keep your SiriusXM stock, thanks.

Sorry about the hiccup. Heck, sorry about almost the entire damn carnival. Carnivals are supposed to be fun. This one was sad. Like the Pyongyang County Fair. Still, thanks again for reading, and we’ll meet you back here tomorrow.

Whatever the fabulous Lauren Graham got paid for licking that disgusting man’s ear, it wasn’t enough

Buying stuff for Christmas is ludicrous, as we point out every year, but if you do insist on buying gifts, here’s the first of what will be several discreet but annoying plugs for our book in today’s CoW. (Also available on Kindle, of course.)

The CoW. It stands for Carnival of Wealth. It’s personal finance blog posts, ranging from the sublime to the unreadable. A lot of entries this week, so let’s get started:

Gripping writer, Certified Financial Planner® and relentless if obsessive champion of the mentally substandard Roger Wohlner at The Chicago Financial Planner says you should roll your 401(k) over to an IRA when switching jobs. Read the word “option”, do a shot. Also, performing repetitive actions with no payoff is surely a sign of some sort of cognitive dysfunction, isn’t it?

(UPDATE, 9:28 a.m. PST: He’s still not done.)

Do most personal finance bloggers get paid by the word? It’s amazing how many sites (or if you prefer, “site options”) need an editor. If wordiness is your thing, the 2nd half of this double shot of verbosity comes from Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro. He lives in San Diego, recently used a car-sharing service, and has exciting adventures to share with us.

Big Cajun Man at Canajun Finances reminds you that credit card balance interest doesn’t take vacations. (Or as they call it north of the border, “holidays”.) He spent at least 2 minutes writing the post, the least you can do is read it.

A new entrant? A new acronymic entrant, no less. ACYCWTTAOST. (That’s “A Control Your Cash welcome to The Art of Simple Trading.”) TAOST joins us in the middle of their series on trading rules, starting with #5: “Become a Loser”. Some of you are already there and presumably waiting for #6. Seriously though, TAOST suggests that winning leads to complacency more than losing does. We learn from our mistakes. To quote Charlie Brown, “…that makes me the smartest person in the world.”

Speaking of acronyms, the ingenious PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net reminds us of something most of our masters in Washington have yet to figure out: wealth ≠ income. A tax on the latter does not necessarily impact the former. Even that overrated and hypocritical multibillionaire Warren Buffet* calls for a higher income tax for no better reason than to accede to perceptions. (As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, Buffett isn’t calling for any kind of wealth tax. Any idea why?)

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog is the kind of guy we would want dictating our nation’s tax policy. This week our fellow small-government acolyte explains what sustainable competitive advantages are and how important they are when looking for companies to invest in.

We like investing. We like kittens. Do they go together, or will this be like combining sex with sriracha sauce? Let’s find out with this post from Megan Russell at Marotta on Money, an old CoW entrant with a new site. The post is less about kittens than it is about minimizing capital gains taxes, and we swear to God if we hear someone use “gift” as a verb one more time we might have to drown a couple of kittens to illustrate our anger, but this post stands on its own.

(Post rejected because it came with the following “tease”, written by its author:

One financial topic covered on virtually every personal finance blog is how to save money at the grocery store. That makes complete sense since it is where we spent a good chunk of our money each month.

In other words, “I’m going to write about something that I acknowledge has been run into the ground.” That’s great work.)

Somebody good? How about a sequence of good posts? Starting with Andrew at 101 Centavos, who demonstrates in undeniable detail what we’ve been railing about in general terms since the day we started this blog: your education needs to pencil out. Or even more fundamentally, you can make good money without spending 4+ unproductive years in a classroom. As usual his post is gilded from title to closing sentence, but this excerpt got the biggest share of our attention:

Harvard University’s graduates are earning less than those from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology after a decade-long commodity bull market created shortages of workers as well as minerals. 

Harvard grads make about $54K/year (when they get an offer), while bright-eyed future geologists come out with almost $57K.

“It doesn’t seem to be too hard to get a job in mining,” said Jaymie Trask, a 22-year-old chemical-engineering major who was offered a post paying more than $60,000 a year at Freeport- McMoRan (FCX) Copper & Gold Inc. “If you work hard in school for four or five years, you’re pretty much set.”

When your high school senior daughter talks about going to Mount Holyoke to “learn” drama, print out Andrew’s post, soak it in wet concrete, let it dry and hit her on the head with it until she realizes the error of her adolescent ways.

Ooh…look who’s in his 2nd week of repentance after months of steadfast refusal to join the CoW party! Joe at Timeless Finance has realized the error of his ways, and brings us yet another brilliant post (complete with a GIF of Vince McMahon at his McMahoniest.) Some seriously indebted and overeducated (see previous entry) dingbat – December’s (Financial) Retard of the Month frontrunner, in fact – took time out from questioning other people’s fiscal decisions to obtain a credit card with a $700 annual fee. Not only is she an imbecile, but the 50 and counting comments below the post reinforce why.

So mandating that Americans buy health insurance, coupled with letting 11-year-old tax cuts expire, is going to damage the economy? Wow, it’s not as if anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics couldn’t see that coming. (“Rudimentary” is something the chief executive aspires to.) Don at My Dollar Plan explains how to find a soft patch of mahonia shrubs to land on when we all go over the fiscal cliff, and how to avoid the jumping cholla cacti. God, what a depressing topic. And it’s not as if we couldn’t have avoided this. But yeah, Ron Paul was the crazy one.

How about more gold? Even if she couldn’t write, and she can (magnificently), Paula Pant at Afford Anything would still serve as a superb example of what to do with your money and how starting with ordinary means means nothing. The peripatetic Paula vowed to hold off globetrotting for 2012 and instead invest. Not just invest, but invest every penny she made. She’s 3 weeks away from finishing her task, and presumably 22 days away from visiting Iceland or Gabon or St. Helena or somewhere.

You want to learn about money, but you don’t know where to start? Financial professional Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim recommends you go slowly. Don’t read every financial blog out there, because the rush of information will overwhelm you. (That, and 99% of them are detritus.) Neal recommends you spend no more than 15 minutes a day reading blogs, maybe an hour a day reading personal finance books (here’s one to get you started), and no time at all staring at your feet and waiting for the Earth to turn.

Darwin at Darwin’s Money has lice, in a manner of speaking. And thinks “lice” is singular, but we’ve done enough remedial grammar instruction today.

Fun fact for American readers: How many banks are there in Canada? 5. Teacher Man at Young & Thrifty knows that there are advantages to a system with few players and little overextension. Canada’s conservative banks have been buying up distressed U.S. assets, too. And not a moment too soon. (Do a little research and find out what the acronyms stand for in TD Ameritrade and BMO Harris.) We Americans should have given Canada’s Big 5 the charred remnants of Goldman Sachs and Lehman for pennies on the loonie when we had the chance.

Michael at Financial Ramblings reminds you that if you’re looking to invest in dividend stocks, the date (or frequency) of payment should be the least of your concerns. Some people believe that a quarterly 2¢ dividend is better than an annual 8¢ one, for some reason.

Odysseas Papadimitriou at Card Hub makes some staggering credit predictions for the coming year. The fiscal cliff won’t splatter us all? Square and Isis won’t completely supplant whipping out our trusty MasterCards? We agree with most of his predictions, and have our fingers crossed on the one about credit becoming more available.

A few weeks back, John at Wallet Blog introduced us to the concept of credit card companies forcing binding arbitration on cardholders. (Again, read your agreement.) This week, John explains how we’re at the point where the courts or Congress might have to get involved. Agreeing to arbitration not only means ceding your class-action rights, but putting your fate in the hands of an arbitrator whose “impartiality” is best contained within quotation marks.

Finally, Charles at Wallet Hub teaches you how to buy a house. It’s basically Chapter VII of our book, distilled into a handful of helpful paragraphs. (You see? This is the concision we’ve been begging for from our wordier submitters.)

That’s all we got. Check us out on Investopedia, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.

*Everyone else misspells it, what makes us so special?

It’s hard to grease your palm with those gloves on

It’s December, therefore it must be time to read lighthearted but poignant “news” stories about how much it would cost to buy all the gifts given during the 12 Days of Christmas. Again. This wouldn’t be so bad if the same news outlets didn’t do the same piece every freaking year. And we’re pretty sure you can find some lords willing to a-leap for next to nothing.

That, and the other story about how much you should tip the service workers in your life. There’s always a recommendation to tip “your doorman” a certain amount. The New York-centric journalists who recobble these stories every year forget that well over 99.9% of Americans don’t have a doorman. CNN would provide a more helpful service if they told you how much to tip your emergency room check-in nurse, or the guy who installs your satellite dish, each of whom is a more central figure in most people’s lives than a doorman. Or an “elevator operator”, another totally relevant service worker in post-1950s America.

Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth, the greatest blog carnival in the history of the format. Personal finance blog posts in an easy-to-digest whole. Here we go:

Batting leadoff this week is Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog. Ken appeals to both hemispheres of your brain this week, telling us that there’s no greater risk to an investor than losing your principal. Ken believes there’s a good chance that if you invest more conservatively, you might increase your returns. But you won’t know until you read his post. (And try to ignore the homonym confusion. The man has an MBA.)

JB at Young & Thrifty says if you’re young and professionally mobile, you don’t need to buy a house. Say you close on a fixer-upper bungalow in Anchorage, complete with 30-year mortgage, and then get offered the job of your dreams in Key West. Now what? More closing costs, that’s what.

Why aren’t you just doing everything Paula Pant at Afford Anything does? Cut-and-paste her life onto your own and you’d be debt-free, building passive income, traveling the world and not destroying your life by having children. This week she graces us with a story about how she bought a rental property at 25% below asking price, spruced it up for a mere $6,000, and made it look so good that even we and our discriminating tastes would be happy to call it home (if we, you know, lived in Atlanta and wanted to rent.)

Paula’s cap rate is a hair under 12%, and that’s not even close to her highest-performing property. (She has 3.) She did some simple calculations to determine what rent she should charge. She got a fantastic rate on an interest-only loan from a private lender because, hey, her credit is good. In our book we bang on the concept of a “spread” – borrow money at x%, receive a return of x+y% and you’ll build wealth no matter how dumb you are. Paula discusses “arbitrage”, which is essentially the same thing (and, as she describes it, her favorite word.)

See how one good decision sets up the next several? If the rich get richer, it’s because they deserve to. Paula could have lamented her life station, decried the job market and lashed out at the world. She could have said “I hate math, it’s so hard! Especially since I’m a girl!” and not bothered figuring out the likely cap rate before buying the property. Instead, she’s buying assets, selling liabilities, and living about as exciting a life as one can lead without benefit of psychotropic drugs.

Hey, CYC!

Yes?

Did you trademark your gimmick of talking to yourself via italicized questions? 

No, it’s not copyrightable. Why?

Paula does it. Better than you, in fact. 

That’s OK. The great ones can borrow.

Speaking of buying houses, a new entrant: House Mouse, “a site with the aim to make home buying simple.” This week’s post is about how you can deduct mortgage interest from your federal tax bill. The deduction is supposed to give you incentive to buy a house (well, to finance a house) and turn us into a nation of non-renters. (JB at Young & Thrifty shakes his head. Then again, he’s Canadian.) We welcome House Mouse aboard, and remind its staff that they’re probably looking for comments from people who’ve had their interest piqued, not peaked, but it’s still early. Here to help.

Governments have certain legitimate duties – defending the country, providing courts of law, and not a whole lot else. Everything beyond that – making cars, selling insurance, running a television network and about a million others – is an intrusion onto that holiest of holies in a free society, the individual taxpayer’s wallet. From David De Souza at TaxFix UK comes a post showing where British taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars go; almost all of it in places where government functionaries have disenfranchised the private sector.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro buried the lede, and it’s a pretty shocking one. He claims that buying vacation days from your employer can have financial benefits.

Good God. We don’t go looking for this, we swear:

I only get 10 days of vacation a year… so (getting the option to buy more) definitely peaked my interest.

Ever visited Pikes Pique? You can see downtown Denver from there. Also, we used to use Quaker State motor oil at CYC World Headquarters, but that Pique brand is something else. It offers pique performance. Sheesh.

Alright, now the submitters are just screwing with us. At least “pique” and “peak” sound exactly alike. Teacher Man at My University Money writes about how college students can save money on food, and spelled pizza “piazza” 3 times. “Piazza” is not a typo. It’s not a phonetic approximation. Nor is it some variant Canadian spelling (cf. favour, offence, centre etc.) It’s a retired future Hall of Fame catcher, and the Italian word for “square”.

The grammatically capable Liana Arnold at Card Hub to the rescue. If you have a prepaid credit card because you applied for American Express platinum and they laughed at your single-digit FICO score, that’s one thing. If you have a prepaid credit card just because you want to improve said score, cancel it now. Get a secured card instead. It’ll help you build a credit history*, and it won’t line the pockets of manipulative celebrities like Russell Simmons and Suze Orman.

Neal Frankle has a special treat for you this week. The handsome and forthright founder of Wealth Pilgrim has a guest post from one of personal finance’s legitimate titans. It’s entitled “Why You Are Not Rich Yet”, and regarding both form and content, it fits perfectly with Wealth Pilgrim’s demanding standards of excellence.

It wouldn’t be a CoW without PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, who reminds us (well, not literally “us”, but rather “those of you who don’t understand how cash flow and wealth-building work”) that getting your debt as low as possible is not the ultimate objective of personal finance. Some people think that mortgages by definition are bad, because they involve borrowing a lot of money at a positive interest rate. These people don’t have to borrow to make their rent payments, and they’re also making their leveraged landlords rich.

Mark Twain said to put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket. Dividend Growth Investor has a more diverse investment strategy, but still acknowledges the importance of watching the basket(s). Whether you’re a dividend investor or one of some other stripe, don’t check your portfolio’s value every day, but don’t check it once a decade either.

Say your bank screws you over. You can sue it, right? If only. John Kiernan at Wallet Blog points out that if you have an account at any of the 100 largest banks in the country (or many of the smaller ones), there’s a decent chance you signed away your rights and left mandatory arbitration as your only recourse. Even better, should it get to that point you wouldn’t even unlimited discovery – the bank can conceal information from you until it’s time to present it to the arbitrator. And if you think the arbitrators are impartial…well, that’s adorable.

Finally, Free Money Finance bought some smoke detectors.

Check out our latest on Investopedia, too. And join us back here tomorrow. It’s never the same site twice!
*Assuming you use it wisely, but do we really need to say that?