That’s some mighty fine street theater, kids. Now snap out of it and buy our book. After all, it is Cyber Monday and we’ve got an urban myth to perpetuate. Link below, because WordPress won’t let us put it in the photo caption.

(Amazon link to our book. Or just buy it in the right column, whatever. In fact, the latter is better. A bigger cut for us, and we’ll include the e-book.)

Here at Control Your Cash we never, ever want to be part of that incestuous clan of personal finance bloggers who spend undue time patting each other on the back and telling each other what a great job they’re doing. You know where to find such, if you want: in the comments section of pretty much every other personal finance site in existence. That mutual bootlicking is overdone, and contributes nothing of benefit. Even worse, it tells the non-bloggers – i.e., the overwhelming majority of you – that there exists a clique that they’re not a part of. We don’t pull that kind of nonsense here, which is why we disabled comments months ago and have yet to regret it. If you want to say something to us, keep it brief and tweet at us @CYCash.

Still, there are a few other personal finance sites that we think are awesome. One in particular is Timeless Finance, whose founder once told us politely but unambiguously that he wasn’t interested in submitting to the Carnival of Wealth. But he came around. They always do. Which is why we’re leading off this week’s CoW with his inaugural submission.

When other personal finance bloggers write about frugality, it usually ends up saving pennies per hour. When Joe Wood at Timeless Finance does it, it saves him $134 per hour. All the homemade detergent and double coupons in the world can’t accomplish what Joe did when he recently got a boastful flight retailer to essentially comp his and his girlfriend’s trip from Toronto to Edmonton.

What were we thankful for last week? Our Canadian submitters, whose schedules saved this from being a thin carnival indeed. Mich at Beating the Index is back with a detailed analysis of the merger of 2 energy semi-titans: Spartan Oil and Pinecrest Energy. Mich sees the new company rivaling notorious income stock Crescent Point, which has profitable oil plays through the Great Plains/Prairies (depending on which side of the 49th you’re on.)

Neal Frankle isn’t Canadian, but he is back with a new and vital post on Wealth Pilgrim (which boasts a fancy new logo, too.) He’s writing to the 90% of you who hate your jobs and by extension, a significant portion of your lives. Yeah, you can’t leave. You have too much vested. Your family depends on your paycheck. You don’t want to risk your fortunes in an unforgiving job market (i.e. are scared.) Any rationalization you want. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to listen, Neal has an out for you. He explains that you don’t have to despise your contributions to the Gross National Product and all the time and effort associated with doing such. Life doesn’t have to suck, and acknowledging the truth of that assertion is the first step.

A post so good that it deserves no commentary. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net has cold reality for the dimmer among you who insist that health care is too important to be left to the market.

Go ask our Canadian friends what it’s like to wait 10 months for elective surgery. Those who aren’t crossing the border for routine appendectomies, that is. PKamp3 makes an argument that we’ve been making for years – if health care is so vital that only politicians can be entrusted to deliver it, then why don’t we nationalize food, which is even more critical?  (It’s a facetious argument. Please don’t take it on its surface.)

A new submitter this week, Nick at Making It In Today’s Economy, has a $25 monthly unlimited data and voice plan. How did he do it? Read the post, most of which involves paying for a phone upfront instead of getting a “free” or “discounted” one from a provider. (We wrote about this a while ago. The prices have changed, but the strategy still applies.)

Some wags at The New York Times think that you only need to save up to 16% of your earnings to guarantee yourself a cushy retirement. And there’s nothing you can take to the bank quite like a number concocted by a journalist. Free Money Finance says 16% is, well, a start. Make incremental differences in several realms, and you’ll be rich before you…well, not before you know it, but before you otherwise would have been.

New submitter Moyo Mamora is competent, debonair, and inspiring, and if you don’t believe us, then read his self-penned description underneath his photo on his site. Moyo wants you to spend less, and shows some fairly straightforward methods for doing so.

If there’s anything more fascinating than the kitchen setup of Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro, we have no idea what it would be:

As longtime readers may already know, I’m gradually upgrading the appliances in my kitchen to stainless steel.  The only items that still need to be updated are my electric range oven and dishwasher.

Here at Control Your Cash, we have a Bosch 300 series oven. Isn’t that exciting? Wait until you hear about our vegetable crisper, too. Also there’s a Brita filtration system, an off-brand toaster and…there appear to be a couple of cat toys on the floor, too. No, wait. One of them was a scorpion. A dead one, fortunately.

Michael at Financial Ramblings thinks health savings accounts are dandy. You don’t have to choose one through your employer, either.

We have our own reasons for hating minimalists (“Stuff is less important than experiences. Even if that stuff eases or enriches your life. I’m so much better than you for rationalizing this way.”) Andrew at 101 Centavos has his own, and they include a new candidate for CoW Line of the Year:

Ditch the TV and spend more time doing meaningful, soul-nourishing activities like blogging about ditching the TV.

This indirectly hearkens to the CYC mantra: Buy assets, sell liabilities; otherwise known as the only way to build lasting wealth. It isn’t Buy nothing, sell everything. That’s the Mother Teresa wealth-building scheme, and you should see how she lived.

2/3 of the Evolution Finance troika rounds out this week’s truncated but not diminished CoW. First, from Liana Arnold at Card Hub, mobile gift cards. Yes, standard gift cards are technically mobile as it is, but she means gift cards that purely digital. Liana says that one drawback to digital cards is that “a physical card is more appropriate when exchanging gifts in person”, which indirectly brings us to our 2011 recommendation for the ultimate Christmas gift.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog introduces us to a company, CloudeyeZ, that claims to monitor the sale of stolen credit card data. In real time, no less. Get your card stolen, or your number and signature compromised (as you do whenever you buy something in a retail store), and CloudeyeZ could give you the opportunity to find out about it as it’s happening.

Did you know we’re on Investopedia, too? Every single day, it seems. We’re also on ProBlogger. And we’ll be back here with a new Anti-Tip every day, new posts Wednesday and Friday, and a new CoW Monday. Chow for niao.

Oh, you think that’s his granddaughter? How delightfully naïve of you.

Every now and then we devote a post to a particular person. In this case, an Austrian businessman. Founder of the company that manufactures the greatest handguns ever made. A man who fended off a murder attempt in his 70s by using a mallet, rather than one of his namesake firearms. And since last year, husband of a woman half a century his junior. What have you done with your life?

Welcome to another Carnival of Wealth, what’s supposed to be a weekly personal finance blog carnival but often mutates into something else. We try to feature interesting blog posts from around the world, but the tastiness of the stew we make is conditional on the ingredients we receive. Let’s get started and see if we can keep things palatable:

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (for the acronymically challenged, that’s Don’t Quit Your Day Job) tore into collateralized debt obligations last week. And he’s not done. This week, he looks at a Nobel Prize-winning model that attempts to predict the prices of CDOs. The model ended up affecting the market more than the traders did, and havoc ensued. Improper valuation – thinking that there are empirical quantities than supersede freely agreed-upon prices – will be the death of us if exospheric deficit spending doesn’t kill us first.

If that’s too much for your cerebrum to handle, how about this misguided post from someone calling herself Suzanne Cullen at AuPair.org? We have to admit, these Indian remote assistants are getting more creative with their pseudonyms. First, everyone was Rajiv Malhotra and Indira Chatterjee. Then they went overboard in the other direction, every submitter a Bob Smith or a Judy Jones. Now, they’ve finally embraced less common but still unmistakably English names. Anyhow, this week “Ms. Cullen” lists 10 Tricks To Get Your Child To Eat Anything. Which has nothing to do with money, but don’t let that dissuade people from submitting.

(Another one, this one titled “How To Communicate To Your Nanny She’s Done Something Wrong”. Sorry, we only indulge one clueless submitter per week.)

(Two more. Good God.)

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro says that if you’re a 9-to-5 ham-and-egger, you should open a health savings account. Harry has one, and a corresponding rationalizing attitude:

I’m trading a little extra money in my paycheck for free money as long as it’s spent on medical expenses.

You need to read the entire post, but that line wasn’t taken out of context. Money, as in dollars in your paycheck, is of constant utility. Money specified for medical expenses is not. This is a 21st century version of company scrip. Harry’s argument is similar to the one the Cuban government uses to tout its homeownership program: Any citizen who wants one gets a free house, as long as he buys the material and builds it himself.

Dollar-cost averaging is far superior to lump-sum when putting money in an Independent Retirement Account, right? Joe Morgan at Simple Debt-Free Finance responds with a surprising “no”. (Assuming that the market declines, and/or that your time frame is long.)

(Another garbage post, this one from something called Fast-Bad-Credit-Loan.net. This site has every hallmark of awfulness – an incompetent writer, the default WordPress template, below-res photos, nightmarish punctuation, a URL with hyphens in it, the word “needs” as a noun…if it weren’t for that au pair post this one would have been our Bizarro showcase of the week. Instead it just gets a parenthetical comment.)

Enough. Could we please have something good, or at least something related to money and how to handle it intelligently? Fellow Paulite Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog to the rescue. You know what the most important objective in asset allocation investing is? Preserving your capital, according to Ken. A bear market will steal your food out of the canister you suspended between 2 trees, growl, scat, then slash you for sport, and the scars will take years to heal. (Hey! We think we just figured out where the expression “bear market” comes from.)

A new submitter this week, or at least, a relatively new one whose previous submissions we don’t recall. Unnamed author at Enhanced Dividend Investing says we’re going to enjoy years of lousy market returns, therefore dividends will become more important than ever. This post goes from basic to intermediate within the space of a single paragraph, and features plenty of homonym confusion, but his arguments are sound and his pessimism about the market justified.

Finally, the Evolution Finance trifecta. It starts with Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog, who explains how not just banks but plenty of other large businesses are adopting predictive analytics. Does your behavior indicate that you’ll probably default on your loans? Are you a big enough deal on Twitter that your consumer complaints are worth responding to? Are you dumb and/or poor enough that your doctor’s office needs to call to remind you to swallow the Prilosec instead of rubbing it into your eyes or letting it ferment at the pharmacy? We don’t know, but somebody does.

Charles Davis at Wallet Hub reminds us that although home prices (and just as importantly, mortgage rates) are at historic lows, it’s still not a buyer’s market in that buyers are still the ones who have to jump through lenders’ and sellers’ hoops to qualify and get approved to buy. Charles explains what you have to do before you can pull the trigger. (Explained in greater detail in Chapter VII here.)

And from John Kiernan at Card Hub, how hurricanes affect the economy. To the extent that you can create a model that attempts to reenact reality minus Hurricane Sandy but with every other variable unchanged, at least one academic calls it a $30 billion storm. Or maybe a $50 billion storm. The greater the range, the more likely it contains the precise value.

Did we mention we’re on ProBlogger? And Investopedia? Yahoo! Finance and Forbes on occasion, too. We’ll be back here with a new post Wednesday. Friday, too. We don’t take Thanksgiving off, not even the Canadian one.

James Buchanan played a killer flute

You heard it here first: Martin O’Malley, the guitar player, will be the 2016 Democrat nominee for President (assuming there’s still a Republic.)

Why? It’s easy:

1. To be the nominee, you almost certainly have to be a sitting governor or senator (or Vice President).
2. The current Democrat governors and senators are overwhelmingly ancient, physically unattractive, mired in scandal, or female. The current Vice President is the ridiculous Joe Biden. Besides, he’d be 74 on the day of a 2017 inauguration.

That leaves Maryland governor O’Malley, and almost no one else, even though 5 years ago he wiped his feet with the Constitution. No idea who the Republican nominee will be. The GOP has a habit of giving the nomination to the guy who finished 2nd the previous time, which would mean Rick Santorum.

Oh my God! Look at all those submissions! We couldn’t believe how many we received this week, after filibustering our way through the previous Carnival of Wealth.

Carnival of Wealth, you say? Yes. Personal finance blog posts from across the globe, organized into a cohesive if not coherent whole. Our prolog finished, let’s get started:

Andrew at 101 Centavos goes first, because his post made our blood boil the quickest. This post is so good it doesn’t deserve to be truncated into a synopsis, but here goes:

All you idiots who insist on not only going to college, but financing your education via Sallie Mae, take heed. And think about whom you’re enriching with each loan. Andrew’s post is about Sallie Mae’s investment potential, but he couldn’t help but pull back the curtain to see how the student loan company’s executives manage to make do when their customer base is a bunch of impoverished students. Exceedingly well, it turns out. Andrew includes a link to a Baltimore Sun story about the private golf course the company’s chairman is building:

[CEO Albert] Lord, 62, is steering $15 million toward Anne Arundel Manor, a 7,100-yard, par-72 course for him and up to 100 members in Harwood. During the past three years, the Annapolis resident has assembled about 335 acres with the goal of playing golf his way.

“I hate rules,” he said.

…

Wealthy enthusiasts across the country are putting up millions to build private sanctuaries. Few, though, are spending more than Lord…

What he has not liked is the hassle of waiting for several county and state approvals, although he understands the intentions of the inspectors. As in business, he said, instead of becoming frustrated, “I learned that I just have other people who interact with them.”

He has people. It gets even more detached and imperious from there. Read the article, in addition to Andrew’s piece. If you were to substitute “Mitt Romney” for “Albert Lord” in the narrative, the not-quite-Rhodes scholars at Money After Graduation would be assembling a lynch mob. Assuming any of them are handy enough to tie a hangman’s knot.

We’ll be the first to poke fun at bad English here at CYC, but only if the post comes from a native anglophone. Dutchman Stefan of Skuzet gets a pass. Stefan is in the middle of a series about the lives and philosophies of some of history’s greatest investors. This week his subject is Benjamin Graham, author of the indispensable Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, and mentor of Warren Buffett.

From J.P. at Novel Investor, the interest rate paradox. To simplify, bonds (and bond funds) have enjoyed decades of rising prices. The Fed now keeps rates artificially low, thus encouraging people to put even more money into bonds. Investors seeking returns thus look into lower- and lower-rated bonds, pushing their prices higher, and…your bond fund might not be as safe as you think.

Few things are as depressing as a rhetorical question from PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net. This week he asks what a rental meltdown would look like. Remember collateralized debt obligations, the financial derivatives that caused the housing market to bubble and then burst? Imagine the same concept applied to rental payments made on foreclosed homes. And watch the fun were rents to do what home prices spent the last 5 years doing.

Some (hopeless) people think that presidential campaigns should be funded by taxpayers. Don’t like a candidate? Disagree with every plank of his platform? Under such a scheme, you can give him your money anyway! Until we reach that point, Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog recounts the absurd amounts of money spent by the Obama and Romney campaigns to win a job that pays $400,000 a year. Treat your own funds a little more conservatively than the various political action committees and SuperPACs, and you’ll be on your way to greater self-determination and peace of mind.

New submitter Aussie Investor explains how a dividend reinvestment plan works.

JT at ETF Base looks at options, specifically the ratio of calls to puts in the market. If more people are buying options that allow them to sell a stock at a fixed price than are buying options that allow them to buy a stock at a fixed price, we’ll have one exceedingly unwieldy sentence. Seriously, the option ratio is a way to quantify investor sentiment. When people are loading up on puts, it’s a (stock) buyer’s market.

Zero. Teacher Man at My University Money asks how much you should borrow in student loans.

Sponge off family members, work, go to a trade school. There are so many college graduates, and such a tiny fraction of them with the capacity to understand that for the average one, that degree is a losing financial proposition. Stop reciting the mantra about how “college graduates earn x more over their careers than high school dropouts do.” Instead, compare yourself to the kids who graduate high school without going to college. Next, measure the median rather than the average. Which is to say, stop relying on each heart surgeon and chemical engineer who’s pulling up the value of x, and instead look at the corresponding dozens of retail salespeople and preschool teachers whose net worths are firmly in the red.

Of course, no one’s going to listen to this advice. Teacher Man himself even does the rhetorical trick of saying, “I don’t nominally approve of a certain thing, but here’s a way to take advantage of its existence.” In this case, it’s taxpayers covering debtor students’ losses. There’s a Canadian province that forgives student debt over $26,000. If you’re going to fail, fail big.

If someone owes you money that you formally lent them, the civil servants at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will see to it that receiving said money will be as hard as possible. That’s the news from Liana Arnold at Card Hub who tells us, long story short, that large debt collectors (that’s debt collectors that are large, not necessarily collectors of large debts) will now have to prove that they’re playing nice when contacting debtors. Keep records, etc. More work mandated by the federal government, only this time it’s redundant. After all, every state has similar consumer protection laws on its books. Freedom from tyranny doesn’t mean freedom from bureaucracy.

Speaking of artificial manipulation of interest rates (it was a few paragraphs ago. How short is your memory, anyway?), some needed advice from our philosophical sibling Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog. What do you do when the President, his lieutenants, the Fed chairman and complicit senators decide it’s time for taxpayers to own car companies and borrow money at rates divorced from supply and demand? This post is every bit as bleak, and as critical, at J.P.’s.

From our friends at Becoming Your Own Bank, a YouTube clip! It’s about what to do now that President Obama has won a 2nd term. We already did you the favor of adding a time code that incorporates the Wadsworth Constant to the video. It has 12 views as of this morning, so do them a favor and watch it.

Nelson at Financial Uproar has deigned to grace us with a submission this week. Even though he’s a lifelong bachelor (Ed. note: Not a euphemism for homosexual, as far as we know. He’s just never married), Nelson has decided to offer advice regarding prenuptial (or as they say in British Columbia, “prenupital”) agreements. It’s more education than advice, really. Don’t think that you can stash assets going into a relationship and assume they’ll be there once your marriage fails, which it probably will. Marriage as a “partnership” means exactly that. You all remember how Juanita Jordan won 3 NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls, right? And how Heather Mills wrote half of “Hey Jude”? (Well, one quarter, along with McCartney, Lennon and Ono.) The courts seem to think they did.

How do you find out about junior oil producers before the investing public does? The best place to start is by reading Mich at Beating the Index, a man who knows more about the Canadian energy industry than anyone alive (or at least, any of our submitters.) This week, Aroway Energy, a company trading at a miniscule 40¢ per BTU per day. If Aroway can continue drilling and striking oil throughout the winter, that price could rise.

Dividend Growth Investor tells us why he’s obsessed with dividend stocks. He checks his accounts daily, which isn’t something we’d normally recommend but in his case, it’s to free him from the inanity of a regular day job.

Our Extremely Tangential Submission of the Week? None other than this one from Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro, who reviews kitchen knives. That’s a personal finance topic, isn’t it? After all, knives are goods that can be exchanged for money. Not only does Harry have fascinating things to say about his new cutlery:

The set included: an 8-inch chef’s knife, an 8-inch slicer, a 7-inch santoku knife, a 5-1/2-inch boning knife, a 5-inch utility knife, a 3-1/2-inch paring knife, and six 4-1/2-inch steak knives, plus a pair of shears. Now the only knives I really use out of that set are the steak knives and the slicer(bread knife)

So do his commenters:

Due to allergies and a desire to not eat anything processed I cook 2-3 meals per day for my family.

So if you thought you knew everything there was to know about the physical constitution and eating habits of commenter thestarvingartistcanada, you didn’t.

We’re on ProBlogger this week, and Investopedia every day it seems. Join us back here next Monday. Well, join us here every day. You can’t stop the new content, because the new content never stops.