“Ah, I remember taking that photo. I still had use of my legs back then.” -Troy Polamalu, 2032

Is it Monday already? Then that means it’s time for another Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from around the world. Are you ready? We’re ready. Read away:

Don’t just skim this post from Paula Pant at Afford Anything. Read the mouseover text on her comely picture that graces the header. Paula reasons that making assumptions about passersby, based on just their appearances and their possessions, is stupid. Not just in that you might be wrong, but that it’s a stunning waste of time. People’s Lexuses and Louis Vuitton accessories are, by definition, conspicuous. Their lease agreements and credit card balances are not.

Free Money Finance lists 10 ways to network. Listen to podcasts, join LinkedIn etc.

Starting with data accumulated over the last 85 years, Michael at Financial Ramblings used standard regression analysis to examine what happens when you create an investment portfolio consisting entirely of bonds, then turn it into stocks in 10% increments. If you think having a higher concentration in bonds means unequivocally less risk, you’d be wrong.

Things you could spend the next 24 minutes doing:

• Listening to side 2 of The Darkness’s Permission to Land 
• Yoga
• Watching the most recent DVRed episode of whatever sitcom, assuming you have that thing that eliminates commercials
• Foreplay (Editor’s note: If you’re doing it right, that is)
• Preheating an oven
• Listening to the Wealthonomics podcast, from the folks at Becoming Your Own Bank.

(See? They turned “wealth” and “economics” into a portmanteau. Isn’t that rich? Get it? “Rich”? Do we have to spell everything out for you?) The Becoming Your Own Bank posse has now submitted to the CoW for 5 consecutive self-unaware weeks. Every time they do we goof on their core (awful) business of whole life insurance, and every week they keep coming back for more. Time to raise the stakes. If they submit again next week, then what? Do we start accusing them of sexual crimes against nature? Poke fun at photographs of their kids?

This week, the Becoming Your Own Bank crew gave us an audio submission. Speaking of which…

Are we the only ones to notice that podcasts are almost all unlistenable? The very concept of a podcast is a loathsome thing. Yes, it’s great that in 2012 anyone who wants to can broadcast his opinion (“to a potential audience of billions!”) However, very few us can play the part of a radio host. You can’t just press “record” and expect people to care what you have to say. Most podcast hosts couldn’t keep a show moving to save their lives. Droning, uncomfortable silences, monotonal delivery…it’s as if getting people enthused isn’t just an afterthought, it’s something most podcast hosts are actively trying to avoid. Listening to 3 guys (who know each other, no less) awkwardly hemming and hawing their way through what’s supposed to be an enthralling conversation is difficult.

Tips for aspiring podcasters:

1. Fewer cooks spoiling the broth. Two voices, max. If you’re worried about having dead air to fill, see tip #4
2. Edit. This isn’t going live.
3. At least have an outline, some notes or something.
4. Don’t.

No one will listen to this podcast, not even the hosts’ significant others. The hosts could have announced the exact latitude and longitude of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine at the 23:46 mark and no one will ever hear. Which is a shame, because we like their topic. They tear into that pop-finance hoyden Suze Orman, who has as much business dispensing personal finance advice as she does telling her readers how to find a man. Except we already crucified Ms. Orman several months ago for her brazen attitude and love of misinformation. The Becoming Your Own Bank hosts play endless clips of Ms. Orman’s show, and deconstruct it. Suze’s voice is no day at the beach, either.

W at Off-Road Finance teaches you how to select a broker.

No, of course they aren’t all the same. Some brokers can access only the NYSE and NASDAQ: if you want to trade stock options on the Chicago Board of Trade, you’d be out of luck. And if you think E*Trade offers fantastic deals to its customers…well, you really need to read W’s post.

Even when the world around him is falling apart, Andrew at 101 Centavos manages to make us laugh and, more importantly, not want to slash our wrists. This week, Part II of his defensive strategies on how to be damaged as little as possible by the seeming inevitability of ObamaCare. Also, you’d never believe which $20 billion company’s executives had multiple hands in writing the ObamaCare bill. Andrew’s post is worth reading just for that.

Editorial: At Control Your Cash, we try to write about stuff that no one else has written about in detail. If we were being repetitive, echoing the same tripe everyone else has to say, we wouldn’t expect you to stick around. That’s one of the reasons we like 101 Centavos so much, because Andrew uncovers truths that the populace at large either consciously or unconsciously ignores. What we’re saying is, How did it take 3 years for someone to explain which corporate suits are responsible for writing the impenetrable ObamaCare law, and why did the answer come just from some guy we know who happens to submit to the CoW every week? CNBC and The Wall Street Journal have no interest in this? A rhetorical question, but you folks who’ve convinced yourselves that Mitt Romney can’t be president because he’s committed only to his rich friends in big business, keep believing that.

(sigh) Time for a drink.

And we’re back. Four more and then we crawl into that bottle and close the shades. Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro says to improve someone’s credit rating (other than yourself, that is), you should add that person to your credit card accounts as an authorized user. Whether you should give them the keys to your house is a different question. Harry added his girlfriend to his credit card account, her TransUnion score improved by 4 points, and most impressively they’re still together a month later.

(Shades of a serial marrier from CYC’s immediate family. Outgoing Husband #3, to Incoming Husband #4: “She’ll ruin your credit, too!” Which she did.)

Now, our weekly trifecta from the Evolution Finance crew. First, Louis at Wallet Hub explains secured credit cards and how they work. Just remember that secured cards are a stepping stone, like marijuana.

It’s bad enough that you chose to live in the New York/New Jersey area. If you did, and if you’re draining water from your basement as we speak…well, we admire your devotion. Bet you hadn’t thought about your credit card bills in the last few days, did you? From Liana at Card Hub, what each of the major banks are doing to accommodate everyone who didn’t/couldn’t make their minimum payments on time.

Finally, John Kiernan at Wallet Blog thinks the housing market is about to recover. (Well, Hurricane Sandy did reduce supply.) Seriously, though. Prices and mortgage rates remain historically low. The combined nadir is a buying opportunity if there ever was one. Gaining access to the capital to take advantage of it? Well, that’s your problem.

Wednesday’s post will be cheerier, we swear. Yes, Wednesday’s post. There’s a new one every Friday, too. Anti-Tips daily, a new CoW Monday, and sporadic goodness on Investopedia. Thanks for coming.

“The business of America is…business.”

First, an apology. We ran a paid post last week. It was garbage, but again, they threw money at us. We don’t normally run paid posts, not just because they’re awful but because they’re so dissimilar from the rest of our posts. Still, they’re called “paid” for a reason. Diminish the integrity of the site for a day so we can cash in? Absolutely. The problem is that this one turned out to be an unpaid post. Halifax Bank never squared up with us, so we yanked their post and will never acknowledge their existence again. They and the rest of Bank of Scotland’s subsidiaries can all go to hell.

Oh yeah, our topic: He rendered unto the states what was the states’, and disagreed with international alliances on principle. For our money, he was America’s greatest president. He didn’t serve all that long ago, either – within the lifetime of several people reading this.

Nor was he a plutocrat. Under his administration, almost all income taxes in the nation were paid by the richest 2% of the citizenry. Those taxes were modest, too. The remaining 98% paid nothing. He retired one-quarter of the federal debt, an idea so preposterous in 2012 that neither candidate even makes an offhand promise to do it. He had about as tiny an ego as you can have and still be President. He would have hated the idea of his face being turned into iconography. Most impressively, he stood down in 1928 even though he almost certainly would have won. Yes, there was a time in American history when substance alone could get a man elected President. How ironic, especially in this, the Age of Irony.

Alas, Calvin Coolidge isn’t on the ballot this time. Nor is anyone similar. Fortunately, we have another edition of the Carnival of Wealth to tide you over until it happens again. Personal finance blog posts from tout le monde. Enjoy:

John Kiernan at Card Hub gets top billing this week for banging the same drum that we’ve been banging since Day 1 here at CYC: financial education for college students. Every year our institutes of higher learning crank out graduates who can analyze ecosystems, read poetry, and diagnose schizophrenia. Yet balancing a checkbook and negotiating a car purchase don’t fit in the curriculum, for some reason. John shows us several schools (Texas Tech, Duke etc.) that are teaching kids something eminently practical. And if this isn’t an appropriate place to place a link to The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written, nowhere is.

You mean there’s yet another woman who blogs about how she’s planning to spend far more time paying off her student loans than she did incurring them? We thought we’d already seen all 349,221,270 of said bloggers, but apparently one slipped through the cracks. Kerry Lambeth at Frugal City Girl “works in money journalism” and loves to give monthly updates on her debt. She also talks about her expensive purchases – a $700 camera here, a $40 dress there (“to bridge the gap between home wear and pyjamas”), and oh God how to readers continue to digest this stuff? Perhaps it’s the same reason why every drama on television is about lawyers, cops, or lawyers and cops. People say they crave originality. People are freaking liars. The more repetitive and unchallenging something is, the more popular it is. Personal finance blogs are no exception.

Oh yeah, her submission. Ms. Lambeth went to Hampton Court Palace and saw how Henry VIII lived when he wasn’t decapitating his wives or his Catholic advisors. She also took pictures. This has nothing to do with personal finance, but she attempted to tie things together at the end when she pointed out that unhappy people who have the wherewithal to do so (like the King, presumably) spend a lot of money. So do happy rich people, but that doesn’t reinforce Ms. Lambeth’s point. A couple of pieces of self-justification, some sympathetic comments from like-minded debtors, and there’s your blog post. So easy a child can do it.

Help! Andrew at 101 Centavos to the rescue, with a fantastic title: Investing In Fatties, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obamacare (Part 1). Andrew agrees that ordering citizens to buy a service – and punishing them if they don’t – is what totalitarian governments do. The United States of the 21st century is such an animal, like it or not. Andrew’s making lemonade of the situation, figuring that at the very least he should be able to profit off the companies who will now be receiving the business of fat people who’d otherwise have been deemed uninsurable.

Try not to read the comments on this post, most of which repeat the old canards about how fat people are that way because the American “food system” (whatever that means) denies them healthy food and forces them to buy cheap, fattening food. We’ve proven that that’s a stinking lie, but most people don’t like even entertaining the notion of having their assumptions challenged and their minds changed. Just like most people aren’t, or don’t want to be, financially successful.

The relentless zealots at Becoming Your Own Bank have submitted 4 consecutive weeks now, even though we poke fun at their core business of whole life insurance every single time (and panned a book they wrote on the same topic.) It’s good to know that some of our submitters are too busy charging people for a noxious financial product to read our site. This week, BYOB confuses investing with insuring, yet again. Shall we pencil them in for next week, too? We have a feeling we’ll need to.

It seems that several collection agencies were making debtors feel bad. From Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog, news that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now enforcing politeness. Now, the collection agency that got involved because you refused to pay your credit card bill on time has to be nice to you while trying to collect what you owe. How long before a particularly sensitive debtor ends up suing a collection agency for shattering her self-esteem, and winning? Folks, whatever you do, don’t pay your bills on time. Keep ringing up purchases you can’t afford. It’s the sellers’ fault for making you want it so much.

You don’t have to live in the UK to appreciate this tip from TaxFix. You merely need to have done business there. Get your paperwork in by the end of the month to avoid penalties, and try to ignore that the hammer and open-end wrench (or as the Brits say, “spanner”) in TaxFix’s logo looks like it belongs on the Soviet flag.

Nobody knows the Canadian energy sector like Mich at Beating the Index. This week he avails us of Argent Energy Trust, a trust which though based in Canada operates oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma.

Something called Trading Academy debuts this week. This is one of those blog posts that illustrates the Wadsworth Constant. Here’s the entire post, reduced to 2 sentences: A lot of mutual funds’ fiscal years are ending right about now, therefore so is the annual practice of selling off to mitigate tax losses. Thus the S&P 500 usually rises this time of year.

From Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog, a breakdown of tactical asset allocation. Oh, relax. It’s more interesting than it sounds. What Ken espouses is that you should use despondency and other seemingly negative emotions to your advantage. Ride the trough of the wave, not the crest. Or as Ken puts it,

[L]ook for opportunities in assets that are experiencing extreme pessimism, and look to take profits in assets that are experiencing a buying euphoria.

What’s better than a 30-year obligation to a lending institution that can take your house if you don’t make your payments on time? 2 of them! From Charles Davis at Wallet Hub, what to watch for before getting a straight-up 2nd mortgage or a home equity line of credit. If you don’t know what the difference is, you need to read this.

(Sophomoric post about debt. We would have lambasted it, but the submitter is a retired United States Marine. So we’ll do him the courtesy of just not running it.)

The mysterious Dividend Growth Investor makes his weekly appearance, this time entertaining the argument that dividends might be worthless. Why? Because on the ex dividend date, the stock usually falls in value by some amount approaching the size of the dividend. But of course, a dividend is tied to a company’s fundamentals. A stock price is just the consensus of a bunch of wildly divergent opinions that can have little to do with reality. See an argument created, rebutted and destroyed all in one post.

Free Money Finance says it makes sense to think of annuities as insurance. Which they are, if you’re worried about living to 110 and exhausting all your other assets. The author also links (in a non-reciprocal manner) to a website that sells annuities and looks like it was designed in 1998. We mention the site because it goes to great lengths not to disclose the interest rates it pays out at. Folks, if you’re doing business with someone and don’t know the terms, you deserve to lose everything.

John P. Schmoll runs Frugal Rules. Schmoll is German for “pouting”, and you should have seen the email he sent us after we ran his inaugural CoW post with commentary. This week John P. gives 4 tips for saving money on taxes. Cut your stock losses, give to charity, etc. Which is good advice all around. Now if we could only get him to hire an editor. (3 instances of “needs” as a noun, egregious use of the passive voice, and a glaring example of RAS Syndrome [IRA account]. Aside from that, great post.)

Thanks for coming. Check us out on Investopedia, too. We update this site daily, with new long posts every Wednesday and Friday. And a new CoW Monday. Take care.

#1 in your hearts, #85 in the Periodic Table

A few weeks ago some Japanese chemists synthesized a new chemical element. That element existed only in their lab, and only for the duration of their experiment. Yet there’s a naturally occurring (somewhat) element that’s about as rare. Astatine, discovered in the 1940s and whose most stable isotope has a half-life of barely 8 hours. They say that at any given time, less than a teaspoon of astatine exists on the Earth. That compares to francium, which is even less stable but slightly more common: up to an ounce of it exists terrestrially.

Welcome to another rendition of the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival clinically proven to regrow hair. (And whose themes are getting more and more arcane.) Personal finance blog posts from all 4 corners, reduced to their essence in a hopefully entertaining fashion. Let’s get it on:

Anyone catch Friday’s post? Don’t say in 100 words what you can say in 16. Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro shopped around for flu shots and found $17 ones at Costco. But if you happen to work for Harry’s unidentified employer, you can get one for only $3 more and not have to go to Costco. This post is an early candidate for our Self-Contradictory Line of the Week Award:

I know there are some arguments against getting a flu shot, but if you can get it for (sic) free, there’s really no reason not to.

Make sure you read the comments for fascinating descriptions of other personal finance bloggers’ flu shot-getting strategies.

A couple weeks ago we piled on and helped tear into that idiot college professor who thinks learning algebra is a waste of time. This week, the formidable Dave at 6400 Personal Finance assails him as only a liberal arts student-cum-U.S. Army field artillery officer can.

Okay, this is 3 in a row from the folks at Becoming Your Own Bank, who insist on selling us on the virtues of whole life insurance – one of the dumbest “investments” you can make. Today, instead of praising mutual funds, the Becoming Your Own Bank crew (no author name given this week) assail 2 targets – mutual funds, and the English language. Whoever wrote this is convinced that mutual funds are wastes of money, but doesn’t say why.

Oh, what the hell. They didn’t get the gentle hints in prior weeks, so it’s time to ratchet our critique up. This post is embarrassing. Here’s the closing line:

I prefer much more intelligent ways to invest my money. Mutual funds…. no thank you.

And those much more intelligent ways are? Undisclosed. So what was the point of this cow pie of a post? Here’s another brutal excerpt:

Have you ever heard of someone that made millions by investing in mutual funds? Of course not. I’ve been in the financial planning world for 5 years now, and not one person I know of has made their millions in mutual funds.

Careful, you don’t want that straw man to catch fire before you finish assembling it. No kidding, no one makes millions in mutual funds. Mutual funds are conservative investments intended to preserve wealth, not to make you rich. This is like saying “No one made their millions by shopping at discount stores”, or “No one made their millions by putting 20% down on a house.” Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Enough with the content. Now let’s attack the form of this unreadable piece of detritus. We’ve got the ever-popular and ever-redundant “$800 dollars”, questions ending with periods, it’s/its confusion, and the author even choked on the their/there homonym. Twice. How do you make it out of the 4th grade without knowing this stuff?

For the Bizarro version of this post we go to Andrew at 101 Centavos, a conscientious contributor who actually knows how to evaluate investments. His latest focus? Industrial material handling! That, and the funeral industry. Even when we’re mired in a prolonged recession, there are no such things as people who are too poor to die. Andrew even knows the difference between “funeral” and “funereal”, having mastered there/their/they’re several decades ago. Buy Hillenbrand, and step gingerly around Andrew’s dreadful funerary puns.

Big Cajun Man at Canajun Finances is back, and is mercifully once again writing his own stuff. This week he offers a brief if spirited lament against people who tell you not to worry about debt. He’s right, more or less, but with a qualification. Consumer debt is the ultimate financial idiocy, or at least on the short list along with gambling and smoking. Leverage – incurring debt to achieve greater returns than you would just by using your own wherewithal – is not only brilliant if done correctly but the only way most of us are ever going to get rich. It’s consumer debt that Big Cajun Man tells you you’re a moron if you incur, and he couldn’t be more right.

No you can’t. Roger Wohlner at The Chicago Financial Planner asks you, rhetorically, what his clients ask him – Can I retire? If you want the answer to be “Yes”, read the questions Roger lists and don’t draw more than 4% a year from your principal.

Our Awkward Hyphenated Word of the Week goes to “quicksand-like”, courtesy of Teacher Man at My University Money. He created a color-coded budget for college students (that’s a “colour-coded budget for university students” for all you mouth-breathing Canadians), ready for you to download. Over/under on people who will download and use this budget? ½.

Adrienne at My Dollar Plan not only fought city hall, but won and now carries its left ear on her belt as a trophy. She thought that the local functionaries charged with assessing the value of her home were too liberal in their estimates, fired back with data, and ended up saving $900 over the next 3 yeras.

Continued verbosity from John S. at Frugal Rules, who explains why high-frequency trading bears some of the blame for Facebook’s dropoff from its IPO levels. Well, that and Facebook’s ridiculously high IPO price. Or have we forgotten that Facebook is a glorified scrapbook and photo album? High-frequency trading doesn’t explain why Facebook has lost half its value in its 5 months of existence as a public company, nor why it’s still trading at a preposterous 66 times earnings.

Dividend Growth Investor slaps the negativity out of you this week, if you’re one of the people who think that dividends are an awful investment because they get taxed at 15%.

Some people say, “Look at Berkshire Hathaway. They’ve never paid a dividend.” Yes, and you also need $13 million or so to buy a standard lot of their stock. How about concerning yourself with more relevant financial topics? Also, Warren Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham said that dividends are the investor’s “secret weapon”. Buffett knew, and knows, that it’s better to be on the side of determining who receives dividends than on the side of begging for same.

[“Dividend losers”, as Dividend Growth Investor defines them] hate to have to research a company, formulate a strategy and execute that strategy however. Reinvesting the dividends from their income portfolio seems like too much work for dividend losers.

Aside: Good thing that we’re now 2 debates in and neither presidential candidate has said a word about reforming our cumbersome ganglion of a tax system. God forbid we eliminate capital gains taxes, like the Irish did. Instead, let’s continue to implement double taxation, burn billions of man-hours a year on tax preparation, and do anything other than encourage productivity.

If we give you the title of W at Off-Road Finance’s post, you’ll groan and go on to the next submission. What the hell, here it is: The Difference Between Academic Econometrics and Quantitative Finance. But don’t groan. Like most of W’s stuff, it’s brilliant. Here’s the takeaway:

[E]conometrics is the mathematical art of being right about financial matters only when lots of other people are also right whereas quantitative finance is the mathematical art of being right when everyone else is wrong.

He continues: it’s no good to be on the right side of a bet if there’s no one to take the opposite side. Being contrarian for its own sake is stupid. You need a compelling reason. Damn, this is turning into one of those posts that’s so good we end up quoting almost the whole thing:

[The] more valuable…sort of education is to start being right when everyone else is wrong. That’s where the power is. If you you have the wacky belief that people will pay to feed virtual cows, everyone will think you’re an idiot. But when you happen to be right, you become Mr. Billionaire Idiot which is more than suitable compensation for the scorn heaped upon you.

Zynga founder, take a bow. As for W, he suggests that you deliberately troll people on the internet who’ve taken a position popular, incorrect, and opposite yours. W says you’ll build mental muscle this way. At the very least, you’ll build toughness.

If you want to make a lot of money, unpopular and right is where you must live your life.

Sure enough, this provocative and inspiring post has zero comments. Meanwhile, the latest mommy blogger pumpkin spice latte recipe has 300 comments from yentas saying, “Sounds so yummy!!! Can’t wait to try this with my fam!”

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog talks about how to minimize risk in your stock portfolio. Determine how much you’re willing to lose, allocate your assets tactically, and lower your personal tolerance for stupidity. There’s more, including a link to his 32 Investment Rules and Strategies.

Free Money Finance writes about “The Difference 1% Can Make”. Alas, this isn’t a post about those of us who are keeping those filthy Occupy Wall Street cretins down, which would have been great. Instead, this post is about how consistent 100-basis point increases in your raises can make a gigantic difference in your net worth.

Speaking of raises, Michael at Financial Ramblings says you should commit half of every raise to your retirement.

If you can get past the trite opening in Charles Davis’s piece on Wallet Hub, “Purchasing your first home still represents the embodiment of the American Dream®”, as the homosexuals say, It Gets Better. Professor Davis tells us that start-up costs are probably more than you think, but that you shouldn’t let that dissuade you. And you shouldn’t. There are dozens of government programs available for first-time homebuyers, because – never forget this – there is no aspect of American life in which the federal government doesn’t reserve the right to poke its nose.

Reverse redlining is a thing? We’ve all heard of redlining, the process by which lenders won’t lend to folks who live in more, uh, “bargain” neighborhoods. John Kiernan at Wallet Hub’s bohemian sister Wallet Blog explains reverse redlining, which sounds like it’d mean offering lower rates to people in fancy ZIP codes, but isn’t. Rather, it means offering horrible rates to those same downtrodden people from the first example. Long story short, Morgan Stanley offered subprime loans to a bunch of people who were somewhat likely to default. The ACLU is suing Morgan Stanley, who were probably just following federal lending and housing laws to the letter anyway. Either that, or Morgan Stanley would have been forced to offer low rates to people who’d default, which means Morgan Stanley would be carrying more risk with less potential for reward. Bottom line, the ACLU already shook down Bank of America and Wells Fargo for half a billion dollars via settlement. Then again, Bank of America could stand to be taken down a peg after receiving a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. See? Conflicting regulation and state capitalism make everything better!

Finally, Liana Arnold at Wallet Hub’s sexy cousin Card Hub takes us into the unseemly world of debit card swipe fees. Banks, card companies, the Federal Reserve and major retailers are all on different sides and occasionally the same side as a multibillion-dollar settlement withers. It’s the 1990 Yugoslav Wars of swipe fees, factions allying and breaking apart with little discernible logic.

And we’re done. No, we’re never done. We’re on Investopedia, we’re on Twitter, and we’re back here with new posts every Wednesday and Friday. And a new CoW Monday. See yez.