You sure about that? You’re welcome to sweep our chimneys, Missy

We read this week that 100 million Americans are on taxpayer-funded assistance of some sort. Even if you take away the personal finance bloggers, that still leaves 99-something million. Cool! A few more months and our work here at Control Your Cash will be done. All that stuff we write about building wealth and creating your own destiny? It’s all lies. Wait for a check from Washington instead.

(sigh) Laying off the sarcasm for a second or two, here’s the Carnival of Wealth. An anthology of personal finance blog posts of varying strength, presented for your reading pleasure every Monday morning, at least in most of the Western Hemisphere. Let’s get rocked:

Just one look at his confident demeanor and his freshly polished shoes, and you know that Neal Frankle was the kid in high school who had Monday morning’s homework done on Friday night. This week the estimable founder of Wealth Pilgrim was first to submit, so we’re letting him lead off the CoW. If you’re joining the masses and getting out of stock funds and into bond funds, a) Do you hate appreciation? and b) Neal points out that rising interest rates (which will have to happen, sooner or later) will destroy your bond fund and everything else you hold dear. If you want income from your investments, you need capital. Sounds obvious, but a lot of people unnecessarily handicap themselves out of the gate. Don’t be them.

Teacher Man posts at Young & Thrifty about the difference between mutual funds and hedge funds. To be brief, hedge funds aren’t for you. They require up-front costs that every reader of this blog either already knows about or can’t afford. With no overlap. Bonus: comment from a personal finance blogger with a hackneyed lament about how the rich get richer and the poor, etc., then admits that he doesn’t know the difference between the 2 types of fund. Not that you need to concern yourself with hedge funds anyway. Double bonus: Teacher Man calls himself a “bad Canadian” for preferring the National Football League to the Canadian Football League. You know, in the same way that any good South Korean prefers his TG Sambo AVERATEC N1200 to an Apple MacBook Air. Wow. How do you Canadians make it through the day without drowning in your own inferiority complex?

Speaking of mutual funds, specifically index funds, J.P. at Novel Investor reminds us that they aren’t all the same. Fees and portfolio turnover are two of the most important criteria in evaluating funds, and most people can’t be bothered to pay attention.

(Deathly boring post about how location is important when shopping for a house. Also, the writer called himself a “fist-time” [sic] homebuyer, which is wonderful.)

We already know that the Olympics are a giant money hole for London, as they’ll be for Sochi in 2014, Rio in 2016, and that South Korean city whose name we can’t be bothered to look up the spelling of in 2018. But one entity that’s benefitting from the global track meet is official credit card sponsor Visa. John Kiernan at CardHub gives us the details on which visitors to the Games are spending how much and on what.

Charles Davis at CardHub’s younger, attention-seeking sister WalletHub combines academic rigor (he’s a college professor, and not at DeVry either) with a deep knowledge of finance. This week he explains reverse mortgages, a way for an illiquid old person to confirm that yes, indeed, I made a lifetime of mediocre financial decisions and now must borrow against the equity in my house. Most of the private reverse mortgage companies got out of the business recently, leaving the market to the federal government. Just in case you thought there was a single aspect of American life that doesn’t deserve Washingtonian intervention.

From Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog, a wonderfully rhetorical question: “Should We Be Worried About Corruption & Ineptitude With Student Financial Aid?” It seems that debit card issuers are charging college kids exorbitant fees for the most mundane of activities.

Hey, college kids: taking classes once you’ve graduated high school doesn’t designate you as smart. If you think someone’s taking advantage of you, and you never bothered to read an agreement that you signed and that authorizes your own impoverishment, maybe you should do something less intellectually demanding with your early 20s.

Speaking of college kids, both current and overgrown, here’s an example of what not to submit to the CoW if you want to be taken seriously. From Lance at Money Life & More,

Debt is no fun. I think everyone can agree with that! Before we get into our strategy of paying our debt down I feel like you need to know what our debt consists of. My girlfriend and I have over $100,000 in debt but honestly I’d say we’re pretty lucky.

We know you didn’t want a diatribe. That’s not what you come here for. Sorry, but you’re getting one.

That tears it, right there: “I feel like you need to know what our debt consists of.”

Stop treating your “personal finance” blog like group therapy. Unless it is group therapy, in which case keep it the hell away from the Carnival of Wealth. We’re trying to do something productive here. Introspection and related empty activities don’t help.

The submitter and his girlfriend are “over $100,000” in debt. It’s actually $126,000, and maybe it’s that refusal to see a significant difference between $100,000 and $126,000 that caused their problems in the first place.

Guess what they owe money on? Of course, student loans. But it’s OK, because an education is not only priceless but translates into increased earning power. For proof of this, note the financial windfall it’s provided for Lance and his girlfriend.

We’re this close to cursing, something we try to avoid here at Control Your Cash. Look, if you want to keep a journal of your awful financial decisions, go crazy. Why do you have to share it with the world? Oh, that’s right, misery loves company; plus the inevitable comments telling you how great you are. Why trade in money when you can trade in compliments? Aren’t the latter more valuable?

First comment:

Awesome job, Lance!

Further down the page:

I think it’s really sweet you are already planning to contribute to your GF’s student loan debt. Great post!

No, horrible post, but that’s beside the point.

It looks like you are doing pretty well.

Well, Lance and company aren’t $127,000 in debt, so there’s that.

I think you have a great plan for getting rid of the debts.

Very next comment:

 it sounds like you’ve got it all under control.

They couldn’t have it less under control, but facts aren’t important here. Two more comments, consecutive:

Sounds like a good plan and good luck with it.

It sounds like you’ve got a pretty decent and well thought out plan here!

Never mind the stunning creativity from the commenters (and you wonder why we disabled comments on this site), does anyone want to point out the problem with the emperor’s (and empress’s) wardrobe? Wait, maybe one of the very next two commenters do:

I think it’s great that you’ve got a plan.

Sounds like you have a good plan.

Then, still further down the page:

I like your plan – sounds pretty good.

It looks like you have a plan that works for you and your GF. Good luck…it looks solid!

And about 20 more just like that. The worst part is that these comments all come from other personal finance bloggers. These people know that they have nothing to say, but think it’s important to leave comments to make incremental improvements in their PageRank.

By the way, this failsafe “plan” referenced ad nauseam above is to employ that ridiculous Dave Ramsey snowball method, debunked here. Yes, because a lifetime of financial indiscipline (which got you to -$126,000 in the first place) is going to reverse course immediately.

Here’s another quote:

my girlfriend is aggressively throwing every extra penny at her debt. She has a budget that allows for some fun money

If you’re going to contradict yourself, could you at least not do it in consecutive sentences?

Again: unleveraged debt is cancer. It infects neighboring cells if left untreated. The analogy is almost perfect. The commenters are patting Lance on the back (in between his own pats) for cutting back to 2 daily packs of low-tar cigarettes after getting a lung removed. His remaining fingernails are yellow, and he coughs up juicy black sputum every morning, but because he says he wants to get better, it’s all good.

Maybe, just maybe, the Stage III oncology subjects aren’t the people you should be listening to. Maybe – and this idea is just crazy enough to make sense – you should ignore everything they have to say, and instead listen to the folks who engage in regular aerobic exercise and keep their lungs nice and pink.

Then again, what do we know? If Control Your Cash ran a post similar to this week’s from Money, Life & More, it’d read something like:

Well, we’ve got a $1,176.23 balance on our American Express this month! We bought some things, and now we have to pay for them. Our debt payment plan is to write a check to American Express for $1,176.23 by the end of the month. Then we’ll have a balance of 0, and next month we’ll do it all again. Commenters, what do you think of our debt payment plan?

Alright, back to the non-horrible submissions. Last week we pondered whether prices will rise sharply, or not at all. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net looks at the market (specifically, several yield curves) and has concluded that the value of a dollar will remain largely intact for the next 30 years. Amazing what you can do with an inquisitive mind and a little reasoning, isn’t it?

As a general rule, when pretty newscasters are reporting on commodity prices, any attempt to cash in has already ended. The CNN mouthpieces have recently taken to mentioning America’s impending corn crisis. Andrew at 101 Centavos says that if you wanted to speculate in corn, there are several logical reasons not to. Fun Fact: Did you know that 40% of the nation’s corn crop is legally required to be used for ethanol? Regardless of what other economic value it might have (or what havoc it plays with food prices?) FARMERS OF AMERICA, REPORT TO YOUR LOCAL POLITBURO REPRESENTATIVE FOR THIS SEASON’S QUOTAS. Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!

He didn’t submit it, but we found it and had to post it. Dave at 6400 Personal Finance strikes gold yet again with a piece on why you don’t have to patronize a company to own a piece of it. As usual, it’s difficult to choose one representative quote from Dave, but after much cogitation here’s our favorite:

Feelings are for stuff like relationships and rooting for the home team.  They have no place in anything that has to do with managing your money.

Contrast that with the thousands of personal bloggers and lay people who use phrases like “stressed out”, “excited”, etc. when talking about money. Turn off the right hemisphere of your brain before doing anything financial. There should be zero emotional component to finances. The moment you add one, you’re losing.

Wait. Turns out Dave submitted a post after all. If anyone ever earned the right to have 2 posts in one edition of the CoW, it’s him. It’s an expansion on the sentiments raised in the previous post. Your feelings indeed don’t matter, and if you think they do, you should hand your money over to someone more objective than you and just collect a stipend.

Finally, this post was so awful we had to include it. From California bankruptcy attorney Susan Salehi at BK Help Now, an infomercial post that lists the 1,484 California towns that she does business in. It’s SEOtastic! Ms. Salehi is using not only an HTML template from 1996, but a headshot of similar vintage. Maybe next time she’ll learn to either not crop half her head out of the picture, or trade out the placeholder photo that comes with every new WordPress account.

And we’re done. Check us out on Investopedia, Yahoo! Finance and elsewhere. New blog posts every Wednesday and Friday, new Anti-Tip of the Day every day, new CoW Monday. Aloha.

The only man in America who has any business earning a living by holding a clipboard

Journalists are morons, that’s a given and doesn’t require an explanation. (If you’re not convinced, here.) And there’s nothing a journalist likes better than a poll.

A poll. Typically, it consists of asking 1000 adults (if that) “Who will you vote for in the presidential election (assuming you’ve self-identified as a ‘likely voter’, however you’d like to define that)?” Yes, we took probability classes and know that a 1000-person sample can give a reasonably accurate assessment of what a population of 130 million will do. However, in this instance a 1000-person sample is useless.

You probably know that the United States doesn’t elect a president just by asking qualified voters to pick somebody. First, we don’t vote for a president; we vote for a 2-person presidential ticket. Second, even that is bounded as we and our fellow Connecticutians, or Vermonters, or Hawai’ians, have our votes tallied separately from those of voters in other states. In other words, we don’t hold a presidential election so much as we hold 50 different elections, each weighed by population and each counted as winner-take-all, after which we tabulate the results.*

Which is a roundabout way (sorry, we’ve been reading a lot of Trent Hamm lately and it rubs off) of saying that a poll result like this:

means nothing. So 47% of Americans say they’ll vote for Obama. This is meaningless for several reasons:

• He’s who they merely claim they’ll vote for.
• 8% of respondents either claim allegiance to someone else or say they won’t vote. Considering that that’s a sample 4 times the size of the difference between the candidates, it invalidates the poll.
• The poll is conducted without respect to the importance of the state (election) that the poll respondent will be voting in. A respondent who says she’s going to vote for Obama has greater impact if she lives in lightly populated swing state Nevada than if she lives in populous, Democrat-friendly California.

Implying that Barack Obama will get 47% of the popular vote means nothing because we don’t elect our head of government by popular vote. As far as we know, no free country of decent size does.

If you want to waste time, read a poll. If you want to learn something, read the betting lines. Once again, oddsmakers come to the rescue and tell us more about our opinions than we ourselves can glean. A number of betting sites (at least those not shut down by the U.S. Department of Justice in the ostensible home of the free) will take your wager on the outcome of the presidential election.

SportingBet.com

Bovada.lv

SBGglobal.eu

On SportingBet, a $222 wager on Obama pays $100. On Bovada, you only need to wager $170 to win that $100, and on SBG Global, a mere $155 will do the job.

Meanwhile, a $100 Romney wager on SportingBet pays $155. On Bovada it’d pay $140, and on SBG Global $150. Thus, Obama is a clear if not overwhelming favorite. If this were the NFL, Obama would be favored by about a field goal. 3 points is the industry standard home field advantage in pro football, at least as far as gambling is concerned. Home field is analogous to incumbency here, kind of. Thus without it, the election would be a tossup of sorts.

When a book takes someone’s bet, they’re polling that person. But rather than the simplistic “Who will you probably vote for?”, the book is asking 2 far more relevant questions:

• Who do you think will win the election? and
• How strongly do you hold that opinion?

Ask several people that brace of questions – even as few as 2 people – and you have a line. The more people who think Obama will win, the less you’ll win if you bet on him. The odds don’t discriminate. Taking bets is far easier, cheaper and more direct than the only other valid method of trying to determine a winner: conducting statistically unbiased polls of sufficient sample size in each of 50 states.

Of course, favorites of Obama’s magnitude lose all the time. Not as often as they win, but as often as the lines would indicate. The median poll above, if translated into a ratio, gives Obama about a 70% chance of winning the election.

And now, onto the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts, read, organized and collated for your benefit. Let’s begin:

Free Money Finance shopped around for insurance and discovered that AAA was giving him a better deal than Allstate, State Farm or Costco was willing to.

Is your 401(k) going to save you from a retirement of sponging off your children and working behind the counter at a McDonald’s? John Kiernan at Wallet Blog says don’t be so sure. If you think your 401(k) contributions are a “free” way to earn tax-“free” returns, you’re forgetting that whomever your employer farms its 401(k) management out to has its own interests at heart, not yours. That provider might only sell funds for which it receives a cut, or mete out huge penalties for trying to terminate early.

Liana Arnold at CardHub tells us that a new government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is doing what a government agency does best – fining people and thus justifying its own existence. The CFPB was created because credit borrowers were too dumb/lazy to read the fine print on their agreements. Then again, its latest round of fines hit Capital One, who deserve some punishment for clogging America’s mailboxes. It seems that Capital One was enrolling cardholders in paid services without telling them. If so, Capital One deserves those fines. Still, read the agreement anyway.

This is why Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim is awesome. He can take the same advice that you’ve heard elsewhere, and that should be self-evident, then he digs a little deeper. Sure, you should budget if you’re broke. But what are the actual steps you should take to do it? And yes, there’s such a thing as opportunity cost: Neal is one of the few writers who’ll tell you what you’re missing by squandering your money.

Habeeb at BestDividend-Paying-Mutual-Funds (no, you’re thinking of haboob) writes about Fidelity New Markets Income Fund, a $5.5 billion fund pays a monolithic 5.2% dividend. Is that good? More importantly, is it sustainable? Habeeb analyzes the fund and then some.

There’s an antidote to the poison that infuses the interminable parade of “personal finance” blogs run by young women who alternately curse circumstances for their financial position and then justify their continued bad decisions. That antidote’s name is Paula Pant at Afford-Anything, and she goes down deliciously. This week, Paula asks (and answers) the often rhetorical question, “How Would Your Life Change If You Had Millions?”

Here’s how almost every other personal finance blog would answer it:

• Live simply, not let the money go to my head, pay off debts, give some to charity, buy a house for my parents, start a college fund for my kid, etc., etc., anything but show a little imagination.

Not Paula. She’d continue doing everything that got her to this point (20-something budding real estate tycoon with minimal debt, passive income, and an enviable lifestyle), just on a larger scale.

You mean she’d continue working? Whatever for?

No, she’d delegate. And hire. And leverage. She’d handle the big picture, while letting others do the actual work. She wouldn’t do like those two Canadian simpletons who whittled an $11 million windfall down to $200,000 because they didn’t think they could handle all that money.

You see? This isn’t hard. Money is a tool, not a curse or a temporary fix or the root of all evil. You can use money to build something substantial – which we’re certain Paula will do (is doing) – or you can use it just to put out fires. Read one paragraph of Afford-Anything and you’ll have a better handle on money than if you read the entire archives of some of the high-maintenance whiny dingbats who pollute the internet.

This is a paid post, but it isn’t horrible. It’s about the fine print behind a financial standby notorious for sounding too good to be true, no-medical-exam life insurance. It comes from Boomer & Echo via Glenn Cooke, a life insurance agent from small-town Ontario. Although “Canadian life insurance agent” sounds like the very personification of dullness, Glenn actually has a sense of humor and a decent writing style.

(A post from a guy who runs a blog that sounds like it’d be useful [Money Life & More] but instead just offers more first-person stories about mundane activities. This week, our entrant bought a new smartphone. Seriously, that’s the entire post. He tells us about what features he uses and how while he hasn’t used the camera yet, he probably will when he goes on vacation later this year. So there’s that.)

The submitter is also naïve enough to think he got the phone “free”. Can we put a stop to this already? There still exist people who seem to believe that Sprint, AT&T etc. just give their products away. You can compare it to paying for a new Nissan Sentra without any money down, and calling that a “free” car. Yeah, there’s a monthly payment that will run for several years, but the car itself is free! What a deal! Chinese bankers continue to rub their hands with glee at our ignorance.

Our admiration for Dave at 6400 Personal Finance continues unabated. Here at the CoW we usually summarize each post with a paragraph or so, but Dave’s output is so consistently good that we can’t summarize his posts for fear of leaving something notable out. We’ll use Dave’s own quote instead:

It’s time to take a look at just how much of a debt successful individuals owe to the public in return for using public services……apparently beyond the taxes they already pay and jobs that they create.
If we all use public roads then doesn’t it follow that we should all be rich?

There are a hundred things to like about his submission this week, but after much deliberation we’ll single out his disdain for the semantic crutches of referring to “we” and “the rest of us”, among other descriptors that serve to obfuscate rather than enlighten. “We” didn’t build the interstate highway system, the one that enables the more enterprising among us to amass fortunes transporting goods on it. Our grandparents built it, and only a few of them. “Our” taxes might go to maintain it, but Larry Page’s taxes pave a lot more surface than do yours. And no, “we” didn’t fight a war in Afghanistan. Dave and a few thousand of his fellow soldiers did, while the rest of us stayed stateside and at best, didn’t get in their way.

Iconoclasm prevents us from putting all the good posts at the start of the CoW, instead of interspersing them throughout. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net has a new party trick, looking at option prices to predict the movement of the S&P 500. You know how you can tell this post is interesting? Only 3 people (as of press time) have commented on it. #generalstupefaction

W at Off Road Finance would be delighted to know that a vice president at PepsiCo told us that he loved reading W’s series entitled “A Speculative Alternative to Investing”. The series concludes this week. In a convoluted market, with financial instruments getting ever more complex, W gives us the recipe for one that he synthesized and is using. But the series doesn’t really conclude, as there’ll be an epilog next week. (Assuming he continues to submit to the CoW.)

Finally, Dividend Growth Investor reminds us that established companies that pay dividends don’t have to plow all their profits back in the business. Because they essentially spend less than they earn (hey, what a novel idea! Wonder if it really works), such companies share the difference by paying back their shareholders.

And that’ll do it. We update the site every day, we’ll do another CoW Monday, and you’ll see us on Investopedia and Yahoo! Finance before then. Aloha.

*Except in the freakish states of Maine and Nebraska. Each congressional district in either state holds a presidential election (2 in Maine, 3 in Nebraska), plus a statewide one that counts twice as much as a congressional district election.

Our co-ed relay team, if we had one. Taken at United States Olympic headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Every 4 years (well, every 2 years), a bunch of cities awash in something between pride and desperation mortgage their citizens’ children’s futures for a chance at hosting a glorified track meet. Thus the Olympics, which the London organizing (excuse us, “organising”) committee assured us will put their town on the map and in the global public consciousness.

Yes, because no one around the world has ever heard of London or visited it. But now they will. The Games of the XXX Olympiad already acknowledge a 101% cost overrun, again for a shindig that lasts 16 days.

The most ridiculous part of the Olympics is that it’s billed as a way for the nations of the world to cast aside their political differences and play nice. Except the Olympics are just about the most political thing on Earth. Let’s see:

• Taiwan competing as “Chinese Taipei”, complete with an artificial flag, so as not to irk the Red Chinese.
• Macedonia competing as the mellifluous “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, because Greece has a neighboring province called Macedonia. This would almost be like New Mexico insisting that Mexico change its name to Former Spanish Protectorate of Mexico.
• Palestine, which isn’t even a country, competing as one.

Every single Olympiad, with the exception of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, has lost money. (That Olympiad’s chairman, Peter Ueberroth, slapped corporate logos on everything and saved taxpayers untold millions.)

And let’s not forget the 1972 USA basketball team getting jobbed out of a gold medal, the same thing for Roy Jones Jr., and…well, basically everything non-drug-related on this list.

Still, this was pretty awesome.

Alright, the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from around said world. Some good, most awful, none dull. Shall we?

Lance at Money Life & More spent a few seconds writing a post about why should ask for more, but not be greedy.

Now here’s an idea we can get behind, for a post-2012 America whose chief executive will be either a guy who imposed socialized healthcare on the entire nation, or one who imposed it just on a single state. From Cameron at DQDYJ.net, a modest proposal: taxing fat people.

A wonderful recommendation whose time has come. The slow, aesthetically unpleasant, lazy, corpulent legions who infringe on our airplane seats, keep us waiting in the grocery aisle, and take up unwarranted mils in our field of vision have had their way long enough. If they ate intelligently and exercised, no one could make political hay out of a problem that wouldn’t need fixing. There are people who eat donuts for breakfast in this country.

(Wait. It was satire? Never mind.)

We were looking forward to Part IV in W at Off Road Finance‘s series on alternatives to investing. Instead, we’re treated to an interlude about correlation in the stock market. (“Correlation” in the mathematical sense, using the Pearson product/moment method.)

Did we lose some of you? Correlation, a way to boil two sets of corresponding data down to a single value between -1 and 1. Take two quantities like height and weight, and you’ll have a correlation close to 1. Alcohol consumption and brain function, that’d be more like -1. Years of education and number of pets owned? As far as we know those are unrelated, which means a correlation near 0. And movements in the S&P 500 and in Microsoft stock, .76 by W’s calculations.

(A post about why it’s important to have an emergency fund. We wish all the people who write about this would incur legitimate emergencies, just to see what would happen.)

We didn’t know there was a name for this, but Free Money Finance talks about the phenomenon of “showrooming.” You look at something in a store, then buy it cheaper online. Thankfully, most of the showroomers who went to the trouble of leaving comments on his post were unapologetic about doing so. A few sanctimonious Luddites whined about the shuttering of Main Street. And you wonder why we don’t allow comments, only trackbacks.

(Indian remote assistant-penned post. Thanks, but we’ll pass.)

Favour! Cheques! And other colonial forms of spelling! Check out Teacher Man at Young & Thrifty, who’s solved the rat race by going straight at the first turn and heading for small-town Canada. You know, for the folks who think that Winnipeg is too cosmopolitan.

Visited Winnipeg once. In winter. -50º without the windchill, and at that point the scale doesn’t matter because that’s so cold that the Celsius numbers are greater than the Fahrenheit ones. The women had sideburns, a genetic adaptation similar to black skin in the tropics or oversized lungs in the Himalaya. There was a story that teenagers would pass the time by walking without head coverings, to town from the suburbs, then go into a heated indoor area and see whose motor skills would warm up first and allow them to touch their fingers to their noses. Winnipeg. Great place.

Heard of Bitcoins? Sooner or later, you will. And Charles Davis at Wallet Hub has the most understandable explanation of them we’ve seen so far. Let the Yap Islanders use giant round stones for money. We in the First World are better than that.

From the indomitable Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim comes a post on how to create income using mutual funds. Not just appreciation, income. The growth/stability trade-off, subjected to quantification. Comprehensive and easily understood, with actionable advice and no endless first-person whining. Why can’t every post be like this?

In our book (available on Amazon!) we bemoan parents’ refusal to discuss money with their kids. Kids get the sex talk, the alcohol talk, maybe even the drugs talk, but never the money talk. David Marotta at Marotta on Money shares our lament, and implores you to stop what you’re doing and at least discuss Roth IRAs with your precious little snowflake.

Or you can just let your kid take out a student loan to study something useless and then spend decades paying the loan off. Your call.

We just read David’s bio. We’ll have to check the records, but we’re pretty sure he’s our first submitter to have played chess with Edward Teller. Apparently, the U.S. State Department has a chess team. Also, David’s favorite number is e. We’re big Euler-Mascheroni constant people ourselves.

John at Nerd Wallet asks, rhetorically, if you should open a personal joint checking account. Here’s a handy, not-at-all obvious summary culled from it:

Do NOT open a joint bank account with anyone that you do not completely trust.

(Boldfacing and italics his.)

Andrew at 101 Centavos is another guy with a permanently reserved table at the CoW. His directive this week is to RTFC. The c stands for “contract”, the rt for “read the”, and if you bought a house without taking into consideration what might happen if you failed to make your mortgage payments, you deserve to lose it and should thank your repossessing lender for saving you from subsequent failure. Just about every economic misfortune we’re suffering, individually and in the nation and world at large, could be cured if people went to the trouble of understanding what they were getting into.

But it’s complicated!

Then hire a professional to decode the documents for you before you sign. And understand that attaching your signature to something is more than just a way to show off your penmanship.

John at Wallet Blog is infamous around these parts for giving us the heads-up on portentous news. This week, he illustrates how an upcoming reduction will shrink the gift tax exemption from $5 million to $1 million. Yeah, yeah, what do you care, that’s for the Mitt Romneys of the world, whatever.

You’re missing the point. We should make it as easy as possible for rich people to move capital around. That way, they can do something productive with it, instead of looking for tax shelters that add little to the world stock of value. The Cayman Islands didn’t ask to be an offshore haven: countries like the U.S. prompted the Caymans to fill that role.

And just like that, it was over. Again, we’re after quality here. If you want a carnival with lots of entrants, none of which you’re going to read, there are more inclusive ones out there that are easier to find, if not to digest.

As for us, we’ll be back with new posts every Wednesday and Friday, a new CoW every Monday, and occasional fits of genius on ProBlogger, Investopedia and elsewhere. See ya.