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Today is Labor Day. And today’s Carnival of Wealth is dedicated to the millions of hardworking executives who tell labor what to do. Managers, loosen your ties and enjoy a few hours away from the office. You earned it.

The Carnival of Wealth. Scores, then dozens, now singles of posts about personal finance. From the sublime to the passable. From around the world. Starting now:

The CoW welcomes Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro, who shares our method for figuring out what credit card(s) to get. He writes about reward points, cash back offers and other features, without saying Word 1 about interest. Why? Because, as we’ve pointed out time and again, every card charges an interest rate of 0 if you pay your balance on time. Harry’s advice is basic and straightforward, and some people will still overthink it and refuse to look at anything other than “LOW INTRODUCTORY APR” before willingly signing up to have the credit card issuers take advantage of them. Those people will never be self-determining, let alone rich.

The redoubtable Liana Arnold of CardHub returns with a post about the relentless mission creep of government agencies. Well, that’s not what she intended it as, but that’s how we’re interpreting it.

Last year, thanks to all you idiots who can’t pay your credit card balances on time (see above) and who failed to read the agreements that you signed when you got the cards, the federal government created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Somewhere to complain, and somewhere to fix prices. Today, the CFPB has added the oversight of credit reporting bureaux to its purview. Your tax dollars at idleness. (Alas, Liana cites “Bad Boys” as a Bob Marley song. It was Inner Circle. In Liana’s defense, reggae artists are not hard to confuse.)

From John Kiernan at Wallet Blog, a post that speculates on the challenges that might face the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. No, current chairman Ben Bernanke has not been drawn & quartered (yet), but John thinks that Bernanke might not serve past 2014. As Bernanke’s nemesis and erstwhile presidential hopeful Ron Paul passes from the spotlight this week, we’ll take up the torch and the battle cry – “End the Fed”, the institution that’s gotten in the way of economic recovery throughout its loathsome century-long history.

Recent guest poster W at Off-Road Finance tells us a gambling story. No, not about the fat jackpot he won, but about the money he left on the table. W actually relied on his brain, rather than his gut, but still didn’t capitalize on a golden opportunity. His point? You need to do more than think, however rationally, to make money. You have to employ a little risk, too. The final paragraph of his post is one of the best we’ve ever read on the art of making money.

Free Money Finance begins a series on how to make extra money. Unlike some less rigorous bloggers we could mention, he doesn’t suggest selling your extra stuff or unscrewing the bulb from your oven light. Instead, he recommends that you do what you know; specifically that you teach what you’re proficient at, whether in a classroom setting or informally. If you don’t mind being around children (some of us are masochists), knock yourself out.

Joe Plemon of Personal Finance By The Book, who’s apparently a lot older than he looks, tells the story of his daughter who recently had her home insurance policy cancelled.  She made 3 claims in 9 years, got dropped, and signed with someone else for twice as much. Joe doesn’t tell us what the claims were, but does give a few ideas on how to avoid getting in that situation in the first place. The story has a happy ending in that she didn’t have to move back home and sleep in Joe’s garage.

Jill at My Dollar Plan writes about the ultimate fate of the Bush tax cuts, set to expire in 2010 and then given multiple respites. The House wants to extend them for everyone, the Senate wants to restrict them to people under a certain income. This is the same Senate that’s gone 3+ years without creating a budget, so no hurry. Maybe, just maybe, businesses would be more eager to hire people and invest if they could estimate their 2013 tax bills. The Control Your Cash Obvious Tax Plan (standard personal income deduction for everyone, uniform rate on the rest, zero corporate taxes) still doesn’t have any adherents in Congress. They know better.

Dividend Growth Investor tells us his secret, not much of a secret. He invests in blue chips that pay consistent dividends, year after year. (You mean throwing all your money at an unproven company like Facebook isn’t the way to build lasting wealth?) He has a quantifiable if not numerical investment goal – have his dividend income exceed his expenses – and he’s well on his way. This week he explains his criteria for investments. He doesn’t merely invest in any blue chip that bats his eyes at him, but rather at ones that have large moats, customer loyalty, competitive advantages…well, read the post. We don’t want to ruin it.

Mich at Beating the Index knows the Canadian resource markets better than anyone, or at least better than anyone who contributes to the CoW. This week he breaks down Marquee Energy – a Calgary-based oil driller with operations in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Ray Kroc once said his company is in the real estate business; Marquee might be too, for reasons you’ll discover when you click the link.

Finally, unregistered sex offender Nelson at Financial Uproar took time out from his prurient post series about hot finance babes to write about investing in yourself. That means doing something other than motivating yourself. Motivating yourself is the easy part. Nelson has noticed, as have we, that as a rule the people who read the most self-help books accomplish the least. Kind of like how the people who have the most home gym equipment serving double duty as clothes racks are the fattest.

Self-help books are perfect for letting you feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’ve really just read a book.

A rousing chorus of dittos for that, and we’re done.

UPDATE:

A late addition from Lance at Money, Life & More, which slipped just under our clearly stated deadline. Actually it didn’t, it was late, but Lance insisted. This is the much-anticipated sequel to the post of a fortnight ago (Lance was on vacation last week), “How To Write A Check”. Remember that? Why he performed the intermediate step of submitting it to us instead of just forwarding it directly to the Pulitzer Committee, we’re not sure.

This week, Lance suggests that you Save Half Of Every Raise For Retirement! (exclamation point his.) Our conclusion? Some post is walking around with nothing, because this one has it all! (exclamation point ours):

1. Advice given that the writer would never heed himself, phrased as something he’ll do (i.e., won’t do) in the future

I Plan to Save Half of Every Raise for Retirement

2. Homonym confusion

The best part of combating lifestyle inflation is that you’re overall expenses are lower.

3. Facile observation posing as insight

If I save more money now I will have more money at my disposal when I retire.

4. Guest sentence by Emmitt Smith

When it comes to retirement you only need to replaces your expenses

557 words that the author defecated out in less time than it would to defecate something more literal. Oh wait, one more:

5. The obligatory italicized postscript questions, written to inspire comments

So would you consider saving half of every raise for retirement? Which effect do you like better, saving more for retirement or combating lifestyle inflation?

If this post were any more derivative, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz would be taking credit for discovering it. The record for consecutive joke posts submitted to the CoW remains 6 by the chick from Newlyweds on a Budget, the Cal Ripken of blog carnivals. Because Lance missed last week, his streak starts again at 1.

Okay, now we’re done. Check us out on Investopedia, again and again. ProBlogger, too. See you back here tomorrow with new stuff, too. ‘Til then.

Whiter and shinier than we remember

This week, no garbage. Yes, the awful posts are fun to mock, but it’s the kind of satisfaction that can leave you wanting if you partake in too much of it. Like that second bite of funnel cake at the county fair. We haven’t reached the point of diminishing returns yet, but for the sake of variety today’s carnival will consist of nothing but well-crafted posts.

If you’re new here, the Carnival of Wealth is our weekly roundup of personal finance blog posts from other sites. And as you can surmise, most of the submissions we receive serve only as bad examples. But not today, God willing. Let’s get started:

Andrew runs a site, 101 Centavos, that’s almost as entertaining as this one is. Andrew shows us where a flaw can lie in the Dogs of the Dow strategy. He also tells us that he used to be a project manager for, of all companies, Avon, in, of all places, Saudi Arabia. Avon is the focus of this post. Apparently there are some investors who think after online commerce has supplanted much of its brick-and-mortar predecessors, there’s still room for direct sales of cosmetics. Best of luck with that.

Ladies, if you’re too unattractive to marry someone rich, you’re going to need to save for retirement. Monette at Finance Guide Tips lays out all the important basics in one post – how much a typical 401(k) match is, what a summary plan description is, where to find the perfect pleated skirt, etc.

Entrepreneurship. Oh, you mean it wasn’t a rhetorical question? It’s our response to the title of Ted Jenkin’s post at Your Smart Money Moves: College Education or Entrepreneurship? Ted tells the stories of two adolescents who chased their dreams immediately instead of deferring life first. (Yes, it was the white kid who sold furniture and the Indian kid who ran a web hosting business. Racial stereotypes exist for a reason.)

Still sold on going to college, huh? If you’re not going to study the hard sciences (political science, despite its name, is anything but a hard science), math, the applied sciences, or the financial sciences, you’re wasting your time. And probably wasting taxpayer dollars too, not that that’s anything anyone cares about anymore. Free Money Finance reminds you to begin with the end in mind – figure out where you want to be 4 years from now, then tailor your college and major toward that. This is another one of those posts where it was hard to select just one excerpt to illustrate its brilliance, but here goes:

A relative told me her son was headed to college next year and asked if I had any thoughts on how he should decide where to go. My answer was something like “pick a college that has a good record of getting graduates good jobs in the student’s chosen field.” Her response was, “Wow, that’s a great idea. I never really thought of that.”

Speaking of college students getting in over their heads, Mike at Rewards Cards Canada lists a bunch of credit cards for aspiring debtors. There’s a table and everything. Here it is, reprinted with his implicit permission:

Take a big black Sharpie, and immediately cross out the entire 2nd column. Seriously, go ahead and do it, right now. Deface your computer screen, we don’t care.  One more time: interest rates don’t matter. They are the least important criterion when selecting a card.

Why? Because every card carries the exact same interest rate: 0. (You are paying the entire balance off every month, right? Otherwise, why are you in possession of a card? You’ve proven you can’t handle credit.)

Now cross out the entire 5th row, too. Because paying a company $19 when someone else offers a virtually indistinguishable product for nothing is stupid.

That leaves one informative column, the 3rd one. And one obvious choice for which card to get. God, personal finance is the easiest subject in the world. There’s no excuse for not being rich, or at least liquid.

Possibly. That’s the answer to another question posed in a blog post’s title: Is it Time to Refinance Your Mortgage?, courtesy of Charles Davis at Wallet Hub. Most people fail to take closing costs into account when refinancing, a necessary expenditure that lenders don’t like to publicize. But still, 15-year rates are at 3.04% right now. Your grandchildren might one day pay 18% and ask you to tell them stories about how awesome life was in the ’10s.

That’s Wallet Hub, not to be confused with the slightly different Wallet Blog. John Kiernan avails us of a infernal little number called the mortgage credit score, not to be confused with its more generic brethren. Who knew that paying your credit card bills on time while being consistently late with your rent might be a bad thing?

The chick at Young & Thrifty figured out that if an airline does a promotion, reading the fine print can be worth your while. She earned points for buying as little as $3 worth of gas at a time, so guess what? Yeah, she turned every fuel-up into multiple transactions. And saved an effective $80 an hour in the process. Not quite as awesome as The Pudding Guy, but still very impressive. Bonus: She spelled “paraphernalia” correctly, which no one ever does. Double bonus: She casually mentioned her boyfriend in the final paragraph, slicing the ribbon of hope from all her single male readers in one swift motion.

You know what your parents are going to leave you? Nothing. Boomer and Echo remind you to rely on yourself for your retirement, rather than on the miserly instincts of the previous generation. (Note: Boomer & Echo submit almost every week, and it’s usually Echo who writes the posts. This week it was Boomer. Boomer happens to be Echo’s mother, making this the single greatest passive-aggressive post in the history of the CoW. We can’t wait for next week’s submission from Echo, “Hospice Care In The Next Decade: Will Seniors Really Be Admitted Against Their Will?”)

Finally, in at least 2 senses, Part VI in W’s series on A Speculative Alternative to Investing at Off-Road Finance. You need to read the 5 previous installments to make sense of it, but that would be time well worth your while. This post is technical, but not at all unintelligible. W takes sophisticated concepts and illustrates them for the committed layperson who wants to be rich. Hopefully, that’s you.

Thanks again. New Anti-Tip of the Day tomorrow, new posts Wednesday and Friday, new CoW Monday. New Investopedia posts intermittently. See ya.

Homicidal rage burns in their hearts

Because kittens equal ratings. (The original quote from Howard Stern is “Lesbians equal ratings”, but we’re trying to keep things family-friendly here. Which sounds faintly heteronormative. Oh well.)

Welcome to another rousing edition of the Carnival of Wealth, America’s favorite blog carnival. Personal finance posts from around the world, ranging from the brilliant to the substandard. We do it every Monday morning, giving you something to burn your time on while sitting in your cubicle, waiting for the sweet release of lunchtime. Shall we start?

Every now and then, we get a submitter who thinks the Carnival of Wealth is just an unfiltered list of blog posts. An open blues jam, everyone welcome. Why put any effort into a post when the carnival host will run it anyway? This week, Lance at Money, Life & More sends us a useful little nugget entitled “How to Write a Check”. This is the same guy who wrote last week about how he and his girlfriend are “over $100,000” (actually $126,000) in debt, but he’s made progress on it so isn’t that awesome. A couple of weeks before, he told us that it’s important to ask for more whenever you get the chance but not be greedy when doing so, whatever that means.

Seriously, How to Write a Freaking Check.

There are six fields you will need to fill in and I have numbered them in the image below. Follow the instructions that follow the image to learn how to write a check!

It’s not a parody. It’s not self-aware. It’s nothing more than what the title indicates: a lesson on what to write in the date field (the date), what to write in the amount field, etc.

Damn. Now we’re giving this post far more attention than it deserves. You want another pointless, insulting quote? Why not, we’ve come this far:

Here you write out the amount of the check in numbers. For instance you’d write “1,542.63″ without the quotes for a one thousand five hundred forty two dollar and sixty three cent check. Since the dollar sign is already printed on the check you do not have to write another $.

The whole mother-loving post reads like that. And it includes comments from 19 (and counting!) other bloggers, which is far more important than, you know, giving the rest of us something worthwhile to read. Besides, this routine’s already been done by someone else, and better. On a planet where this exists, wasting everyone’s time with the most unbelievably rudimentary of “personal finance” tips isn’t even original. The master has spoken, countless times.

God, what an utter piece of sheep dip this post is. The flies buzzing around it think it’s too putrid to land on. How to write a check. This is what’s out there, folks; what personal finance blogs have devolved into. Writing something that requires research, originality, and assuming that your readers aren’t 4-year-olds is merely optional. Lance is now officially on the clock. The record for consecutive terrible submissions is held by the chick from Newlyweds on a Budget (6), with the guy from GroceryAlerts.ca one behind. But Lance is closing fast.

[pours stiff drink]
[pours another]
[now, Valium]

Would you like to read something not inane? Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim can write. In complete sentences and everything. He asks if you and your spouse should share a checking account. Well, that’s all contingent on whether she knows how to write a check, isn’t it? See above for handy tips on how to pull that off.

It’s going to take more than just a single good post to wash the filth away. From W at Off-Road Finance, Part V in his hexalogy on The Speculative Alternative to Investing. Parts I through IV have been tremendous, and Part V is the most fascinating installment yet.

Nope, still dirty. If Neal’s and W’s posts were a collective 19, the one on how to write a check is still a -20.

Dan at ETF Base to the rescue. He writes about which exchange-traded funds might be worth buying in the event that Mitt Romney becomes president. There are no comments on the post, of course, because leaving a comment would require reading and comprehending it. It’s so much easier to tell a lazy writer that it’s a great idea that he devoted a post to telling people how to write a check. No, we’re not going to let this go, at least not yet.

More gold, possibly platinum. Free Money Finance understands all about financial offense, as distinguished from defense. You need to score touchdowns to build wealth, not just prevent the other team from scoring them. This week, how to find a rental property. Then, once that happens, how to

• estimate gross income
• develop an income statement
• estimate a management fee
• set up an LLC to own the property

You mean you have to do work to make money? Can’t I just recycle my Ziploc bags and drive around the neighborhood looking for cheap gas instead? 

Yeah, that’ll get you there just as quickly.

(Post about what to do if a collection agent calls you.)

This post wasn’t necessarily horrible, but it’s the premise that has no place in the CoW. Again, we’re not here to help the lame walk. They’re already lame, and they’re slowing down the rest of us. Besides, taking the analogy as far as it can go, it’s not like they’re multiply sclerotic; they hobbled themselves. The whole purpose of Control Your Cash is to speak to the people who say, “I do everything right. I pay my bills on time, I don’t spend extravagantly. Any moron knows to do that. Now what?” The collection agent shouldn’t be calling you in the first place. If he does, come back and join us when you’re ready. And after you’ve learned how to write a check.

Speaking of which, risk is bad, right? It’s risky! Risk means danger. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net reminds you to please not be such a pantywaist and embrace risk. That doesn’t mean walking up to a moose and punching it in the face, it means acknowledging that “safe” investments, like bonds, could end up being the biggest risk of all – leaving you with modest retirement savings instead of what you could have amassed by buying stocks. (Post includes a Shakespeare quote and a reference to the normal distribution, because we needed some intellectual rigor in this week’s CoW.)

The United States isn’t the only country where incoming college freshmen, some of the least financially adept people in the world (at least those of them who haven’t read our book), are loaned a relatively gigantic amount of money and given the recommendation not to screw it up. Teacher Man at My University Money explains what you’re getting into if you’re Canadian and apply for a student loan.

Everyone’s favorite Canadian mother-and-son blogging team, Boomer & Echo, remind us that being approved to buy a house and spending money on it are different things. Echo qualified for a $300,000 house, but had his heart set on a $395,000 one. So he did a stated-income loan, went in over his head, got foreclosed on, ran away from his obligations and left his taxpaying neighbors holding the bag.

Just kidding. Echo had a wacky, irregular way of buying a house. Here’s what he did:

we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could afford this house.  Instead, we did something unconventional by today’s standard – we waited.

Financial responsibility? Get out! Echo applied it, and it worked. In fact, it always does.

John at Wallet Blog discusses targeted bank accounts for students and seniors. It’s not pandering, it’s marketing! Apparently there’s a difference. Or not.

Last but never least, Liana Arnold at Card Hub introduces us to the prepaid Liquid Card from Chase – or as she speculates, the check-cashing killer. It’s a card for what Liana charitably refers to as “the underbanked”, i.e., people for whom paying $4.95 a month to access their money would be a better deal than what they have right now.

Thanks for coming. Did you catch our Investopedia piece last week? There’ll be another one soon enough. We’re on ProBlogger, Yahoo! Finance and other places too. New post here Wednesday, and Friday, new Anti-Tip of the Day every day. See you then.