You can call them “antelope”, and you can call bison “buffalo”. Doesn’t mean you’re right.

No reason, we just think they look incredibly cool. They have a taxonomic family all to themselves. Not quite deer, not quite elk.

And it is a crime that not a single one of the western and central states where the pronghorn lives has chosen to make it its state mammal. The desert bighorn sheep, while impressive, doesn’t captivate us quite like Antilocapra americana, the Western Hemisphere’s fastest land animal.

On with the show. The weekly Carnival of Wealth, a roundup of personal finance blog posts. Some good, some awful, none dull. Away we go…

(First 2 posts out of the gate were garbage. This bodes horribly.)

We usually save this guy to the end, but we needed some early fortification. Mich at Beating the Index returns with a breakdown of Renegade Petroleum, a junior producer that’s recently made some promising finds in the vastnesses of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This post is technical, it’s loaded with visually appealing charts, and like most of Mich’s work, it’s best inhaled in one concentrated sitting. Read it and learn something.

Come on. Seriously? Carol J. Alexander at Christian PF lists, and we quote, “7 Safe Places To Keep Cash Hidden In Your Home.” Yes, cash is technically a personal finance topic, but enough already. All 7 of them are insane, or at least on the list of the first places a thief will look, but nothing beats this one:

4. A package in the freezer.

Save a frozen vegetable bag. Fill it with a few packing peanuts and your cash in a zip shut bag. Twist tie it shut as you would any other half-used bag. Hide it in the back of the freezer—as though it was forgotten. No thief is going to want your half-bag of old broccoli cuts.

There are 115 million households in the United States, and presumably a similar number of freezers. NOBODY is using, or will ever use, Ms. Alexander’s inventive if crazy tactic. Even Trent Hamm would find this to be an egregious waste of a twist tie. BONUS: She refers to “ATM machines (sic)”.

(A post about traveling with your pet.)

(A post about how Warren Buffet [sic] is a genus [sic], and at this point we wonder why the old man doesn’t just elide one of the t’s in his name since most people misspell it anyway.)

(“Documents you need to travel to Canada”, submitted twice. Driver’s license and passport. Go figure.)

(A post on Roth IRAs.)

HEY! Finally, something on-topic! PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net to the rescue. Want to contribute $30,000 to your Roth IRA? You can, and it requires you to jump through only a couple of (wide, non-flaming) hoops.  Unless you’re one of those people who dig paying more taxes than they have to – and apparently, they exist – this post is for you.

Made up your mind that you’re going to college, huh? Nothing’s going to dissuade you? The financial lunacy of doing so* notwithstanding, Teacher Man at My University Money has a list of recommendations for incoming freshmen. He also references the “Freshman 15”, which we assumed Canadians would refer to as the “Freshman 7”. Thirty-five years of metrification and you folks still don’t weigh yourselves in kilograms? What are you waiting for?

Takeaways from Teacher Man’s post:

• like it or not, GPA is important
• party as hard as you can, as fast as you can, so you can get it out of your system.

That second one might sound crazy, but then so does playing rugby without padding. Or forcing your kid to smoke the entire carton when you catch him with a cigarette. If you look at the above radical ideas from a distance, they start to make sense. And God knows the routine of killing every Sunday by waking up hungover and swearing that Monday will be different doesn’t work.

Joe Morgan once said that

A lot of star players get booed in opposing stadiums.

His namesake at Simple Debt Free Finance is more profound. He asks if paying off your mortgage early is a good idea. Unless it’s a bad idea.

Wait, it’s more complex than that. Obviously, you want to look at your interest rate, opportunity cost etc. If you can find an investment that pays 5% while your mortgage is 4%, especially when the latter allows you to deduct your mortgage interest, Bob’s your uncle. But on the other hand, paying it off early will give you peace of mind that…

Joe never bothers coming to a conclusion (“Paying off your mortgage early is a personal choice and depends on your financial and emotional situation.”), so we’ll do it for him. Going into debt for an asset like a house makes sense if you’re going to do something with the cash it frees up. At least in today’s economy, with mortgage rates at historic nadirs, you can find something to invest in that’ll make it worth your while to keep your mortgage for its entire term. If this were 1976, and mortgage rates were at 18%, we’d have a different opinion.

We’ve been skeptical of Chris Guillebeau for a while, not because he follows his dreams but because he implores the unprepared and the unserious to join him on this adventure. It’s that whole Tim Ferriss-inspired call to live life on your own terms, screw The Man, drop out of society and see the world at your leisure. Which is fine, if you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t.

Free Money Finance thinks otherwise and has reviewed Guillebeau’s book. At least in this instance, Guillebeau’s talking about the fun ways to make money, rather than to spend it. Free Money Finance is sold, so much so that he took the rare step of reading a hard copy of Guillebeau’s book and making notes in it.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog has a knack for making even depressing news entertaining.

First, a diatribe. Don’t kid yourself that American politicians, at least the majority of them, care about entrepreneurism. The more oligopolies we have, the happier the politicians are. (After all, who would you rather solicit donations from – 100,000 neighborhood dry goods stores, or one guy at Target?)

This goes triple for banks. Small, community banks are hogtied by the FDIC to an extent that no major bank would ever stand for. And on the last day of 2012, the regulators could stop insuring some business deposits at small banks. They’ll do it at large banks too, but the obvious and intended result is that people will shift their money from First National of Butcher Holler to Citi or Chase. That’s the dystopian future that John foresees, and that neither a Republican nor a Democrat administration will bother to remedy. (Assuming we don’t see the mother of all political comebacks this fall.)

The lovely Liana Arnold at Card Hub warns us against what can happen if you go to binding arbitration against a credit card issuer. The Supreme Court ruled that card issuers can resolve issues via arbitration, rather than granting you the cardholder your day in court. That the arbiters are paid by the card companies is no reason to think that any decisions would be biased, not at all. But there is a way out, and it involves (oh God, here we go again) personal responsibility:

the only way to truly protect yourself from being taken to court or arbitration by a credit card company is to pay your bills.

Devastating concept, isn’t it?

British lenders let you miss a month on your mortgage payment. They just add it to the end of the term, of course with interest. Well, we’ll be dipped. Adam Buller at Money Bulldog center-justifies his way to a shocking conclusion regarding this shocking practice.

Almost there. Dan at ETF Base assesses a new exchange-traded fund, the AdvisorShares Global Alpha & Beta ETF. Mix 3 parts S&P 500 with 2 parts aggregate bond index, mix well. Except right now the proportions are more like 7-to-1. The fund incorporates a “death cross”, whereby its long-term moving average has outpaced the short-term one. Not necessarily portending a bear market, but you can smell one from here.

Finally, Greg Field introduces the new interest rate monitor at Nerd Wallet. It’s a list of deposit accounts that beat inflation by varying margins. It’s basically a bunch of links to some credit unions, but who cares? We’ve got an economy to keep alive here.

We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. We’re in Investopedia, on Yahoo! Finance (in the Philippines, no less!), and on ProBlogger. Tomorrow, a new Anti-Tip of the Day. Wednesday, a new post. Friday, another new post. Monday, another CoW. Repeat as desired. Thanks for coming.

*Unless you’re majoring in the hard sciences, of course.

The New York something are playing the Seattle somebody else right now (possibly pictured here.) They’re the perfect inoffensive background noise and images with which to devote our attention to preparing the Carnival of Wealth. Soccer as a productivity tool.

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading. A Monday staple featuring blog posts from around the world. It used to be that most of the ones we received were awful and only a few were worth posting, but finally that ratio’s starting to even out. Not a moment too early, either. It’s a long one this time, so let’s get going:

Prospective submitters, here’s an example of the kind of post that you should only send us if you want to be chided.

“Adam Williams” of PF Success asks, somewhat rhetorically, if your family could survive with only 1 vehicle. What makes this post substandard?

• The author’s name. PF Success’s owner farms out the actual job of writing content – i.e. the site’s primary function – to a virtual assistant in India. The virtual assistant doesn’t want the readers to know that he’s hired help, so he overcompensates by coming up with an impossibly white-bread English handle. Guys, mix it up a little. Throw a Fratelli or an Andruszkewicz in there and we’d be more apt to get suckered in.
• It’s written for Martians.

There is a feeling of independence when one is able to get into their car, and go places as he or she pleases.

Anybody reading this not know what a car is, and what it does? If that’s you, we apologize. As for the writer, if you’re going to state the obvious, do it somewhere else.

• Bad punctuation, awful syntax (in “Adam Williams”‘s defense, he’s not a native English speaker), and pointless repetition:

As already stated, it is nice to take your car wherever you’d like

Sounds like a winner to us.

Lance at Money Life & More enjoys playing Polish Roulette (it’s like Russian Roulette, except with a pistol instead of a revolver.) (Polish jokes? Are those still a thing? Or are they a relic from a different decade where ethnic humor wasn’t relegated to the outskirts?)

This week he tells us how he made $400 by buying a $4300 air-conditioning unit. The $400 was a signup bonus for a new credit card. The issuer activated the bonus when Lance bought $3000 worth of stuff.

Alright, our initial comment was exaggeration to make a point. The card has a $95 annual fee, so hopefully Lance will be smart enough to cancel the card sometime in the next 51 weeks. Lance probably won’t get screwed, unlike most other cardholders. Why? Because he read the agreement. He didn’t wait a year and then write a post saying, “Can you believe Chase charged me $95 for carrying their stupid card? So unfair!” Reading the agreement is guaranteed to make your life 147% easier.

Somebody named Don is the latest contributor at My Dollar Plan, and this week he breaks down one of the few investments guaranteed to fight off the relentless erosion of inflation. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, as their name implies, issue returns fixed to changes in the Consumer Price Index. Which brings up another set of questions, starting with “Can you trust the federal government’s inflation figures?”

Dividend Growth Investor isn’t just going deep on dividend stocks in the period before retirement, he plans to continue doing so in his dotage. His strategy includes looking at companies with wide “moats”, sustainable dividends, and a couple more dividend-related criteria you’ll have to read to understand. Dividend Growth Investor continues with his explanatory descriptions of major corporations, which perhaps no one else finds funny but we always will:

McDonald’s Corporation (MCD), together with its subsidiaries, franchises and operates McDonald’s restaurants primarily in the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

We’ve reached Part III in W at Off Road Finance‘s tetralogy on The Alternative to Investing. Try to ignore his one mathematical error (1985 wasn’t 37 years ago) and concentrate on his big picture – market inefficiencies exist, and there’s nothing preventing you from being one of the people to exploit them. Except your own indiligence.

We love these kinds of posts, like this one from PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, combining economics and psychology. He explains that the market will charge different people different prices for the same item, because it can.

This is freshman economics, the concept of utility. Say you walk into a gas station and buy a $1 bottle of water just because you need to use the bathroom and don’t want to feel guilty about doing so. Why’d you buy the water bottle, instead of something else? Probably because it was the cheapest thing you could find a) without bothering to check the price of every item in the store, while the clock ticks and your bladder expands, and b) that you’d end up consuming at some point anyway.

Would you be willing to pay $1.50 for the bottle? Maybe. $2? At that point you’d probably either look around for something cheaper, wonder if you could hold it in until you got home, or forget about decorum and just march into the bathroom anyway.

Now say you have a friend who’s just hiked through the Sonoran Desert in the middle of July. She gets to the trailhead, her water supply (and her) exhausted, and there’s a smiling man standing there operating a kiosk. Ice-cold Aquafina, $1. Last water for 50 miles. Does she buy it? Without hesitation. How much is the water worth to her? A lot more than it was to you. She’d gladly have paid $2. Heck, she might have paid $10. Because the water was worth so much to her, shouldn’t the seller charge her as much as possible (while still making the sale)? Especially if there’s another, fully hydrated passerby who’s thinking about buying the same bottle for $1?

That’s why there’s no such thing as gouging. If you don’t like the deal, don’t make it.

Here’s our Post of The Week Featuring Solid Advice That No One Will Follow. From Free Money Finance, how to write a résumé.

People love homogeneity. They don’t know how to stand out, and they’re not going to attempt to do so with something as potentially life-changing as a résumé. So they’ll repeat all the tired expressions (“was responsible for…”, “have excellent written and oral communications skills…”, etc.) Free Money Finance’s post is a book excerpt, but even the book gets it wrong. The authors encourage you to write lifeless nonsense like:

Developed a more customer-focused approach, providing outstanding service to a diverse clientele, resulting in a significant increase in customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.

Oh, for God’s sake. Find an employed person who says “Our approach isn’t really focused on our customers.” Or “The service I provided? Adequate, on most days. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘outstanding’.” Or “Our clientele was perfectly uniform. I couldn’t tell any of our customers apart.”

You don’t have to polish what doesn’t warrant polishing, kids. If you worked the counter at The Gap, just say that and nothing more. Everyone knows what a store clerk does, and what a clothing store is. “Provided apparel services to male and female customers in a fast-paced retail environment” just makes you sound like a Mongoloid. A literate Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid nonetheless. No personnel director wants to read through that interminable garbage.

Now “supervised 4 people”, “handled payroll”, “was honored by corporate for highest increase in year-over-year sales in the entire 3200-store chain” are legitimate accomplishments. If you did them, mention them. If you were just working there to pay the bills, waiting for something better to come along while not collecting welfare, that’s fine. Say so. Well, don’t say so, but don’t turn your stopgap job into something it isn’t.

So we weren’t hallucinating when we saw the PayPal logo on the swipe terminal at Home Depot last week. Charles Davis at WalletHub tells us that if you register with Home Depot, or several other retailers, you can save yourself the trouble of using your credit card to pay. Just type in your phone number and your PIN instead.

Is that easier than using a credit card? We’re not sure. Especially since PayPal doesn’t offer rewards. File under features to be added soon, perhaps.

Fractional-reserve banking isn’t the only means by which lending institutions risk overextending themselves. Just ask John Kiernan at Wallet Blog, who introduces us to the ominous world of shadow banking. Hedge funds and money market funds are among the quasi-banks that differ from conventional lending institutions only in that the former don’t take deposits. But they’re more than happy to lend, without being subject to the same regulations as their less umbral counterparts. If every creditor comes knocking at once, the shadow banking industry could do what multiple investment banks did in 2008. Good times!

Dan at ETF Base has a talent for looking at cemented truths from unusual angles. He starts with an observation that most people haven’t heard articulated before – the majority of stock market returns are dividends. So maybe we should start from that point while investing. Dan introduces us to a new form of exchange-traded fund, one that takes the “Dogs of the Dow” concept and applies it to dividends.

If you’re an optimist, you could argue that the United States is enjoying a 91.8% employment rate. Except you’d be lying, because it’s really an 85.1% employment rate. Darwin’s Money uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own numbers to show how utterly decimated the jobs market is. But yes, Mr. President, both houses of Congress, and the Federal Reserve, whatever you do, forget about applying the lessons of the Hayek/Friedman/Paul school of economists. Keep intervening instead. It’s never worked before, and always has the opposite of its intended effect, but this time it’ll be different. You know better.

From Liana Arnold at Card Hub, a list of the credit card issuers whom the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received the most and least complaints (per capita) about. TD Bank finished 2nd from the bottom. Told you those Canadians were nothing but trouble.

Card Hub didn’t link to its data, but we did find out that a total of 530 people have complained about their credit card issuers in the last 6 weeks. Which almost seems low, given how many dumb people there are who look to a government agency to save them from a mistake that’s probably their fault. Of the complaints, 21% were billing disputes. Okay, fine. But the next biggest topic of complaint was interest rate.

Not knowing the details, we’re willing to bet that the card issuers are completely exculpable here. One more time: USAA can charge you 4,589,289,982,113.9% APR and you need not flinch. Pay your bill on time and interest rates don’t and shouldn’t matter. This is not complex.

you want the credit card with the most lucrative rewards or the longest 0% interest rate

We’d have put a comma after “rewards”, and replaced the subsequent phrase with “and that doesn’t charge a fee.”

Teacher Man posts at Young & Thrifty this week, imploring you to be ruthless regarding negotiable fees. Much like we implore you to let other people pay your way when they’re willing to (case in point, the previous post about credit card interest rates. Let the other idiots pay interest on their credit cards, while you take advantage of 30-days-same-as-cash terms and simultaneously build credit and earn rewards.)

Teacher Man gets it – the big picture, that is. If you can get the other party to pay hundreds of dollars in fees during a house sale, do it. Most home sellers (and buyers) are dumb enough to think of closing costs in terms relative to the size of the house sale, rather than as absolute costs. In other words, if you as the buyer stand your ground on not paying $1500 in closing costs, the seller might think, “Oh, what the hell. It’s a $250,000 house. I’ll cut him a break here, just to get the sale and close it quickly.”

But as Teacher Man reinforces, that’s still $1500. All for a few minutes’ work. It’s astonishing to think of the effort people will put into clipping coupons, or turning off lights when exiting a room, while refusing to go for the big fish like this. Even when it’s practically jumping into the boat.

We run posts from Mich at Beating the Index just about every week, which only a few of you read because its subject matter is so narrow. His coverage is great, but unless you’re passionate about energy exploration and its corresponding investments, you might shy away. This week, we implore you not to shy away. Mich explains it better than we can –

We are years away from seeing (electric vehicles) capture high market share because it still doesn’t make financial sense to buy an electric car for 1 reason: (return on investment)

Even under Mich’s conservative estimates, it’ll take 9 years for your Nissan Leaf or Honda Fit to pay for itself.

Read the article, but don’t read the comments. They’ll just make your head hurt. Like the one that said that if electric cars don’t make financial sense, neither do luxury cars.

A big, powerful engine gets you where you’re going quickly. Meanwhile a Smart Car loses to a motorcycle on every metric. The latter has a larger range, is more fuel-efficient, doesn’t require a lunky battery to dispose of, is easier to maintain, goes faster, is no more dangerous, and is infinitely more badass. Why Harley-Davidson and Kawasaki don’t point this out is anyone’s guess. Unless they’ve determined that a bike is far too much machine for the kind of person who’d even consider a dainty little hybrid. Makes sense.

Thanks for coming out. Fewer qualifiers and far more entertainment that any other personal finance blog carnival, and if you disagree you’re lying. We’ll see you Wednesday, and don’t forget to check us out on Yahoo! Finance, Investopedia, ProBlogger and anywhere else good that’ll take us. Sayonara.

How hot is it this summer? This is a picture of Juneau.

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival worth a damn. Submissions from around the world, most good, some dreadful, none boring. We do it every Monday. Let’s get started:

Last week, W from Off Road Finance gave us the 1st post in a series on the alternative to investing. He’s not kidding. He maintains that there’s a better way to build wealth than the conventional method of doing what everyone else does, and through 2 installments of this series, his logic holds up. Read this one slowly – lots to digest.

Anyone who admits to drawing inspiration from Control Your Cash is going to figure prominently in any Carnival of Wealth. Dave at 6400 Personal Finance reached the same conclusion we did about the absurdity of buying gas anywhere other than where it’s most convenient to.

Dividend Growth Investor gives us 5 stocks that make it a point of increasing dividends, something Facebook and Google have yet to do.

So you’re saying that committing to life in the ultimate comfort zone isn’t as comfortable as you thought it might be? No way! Young & Thrifty gives us a first-person lament of her career path, that of teacher. She’s thinking entrepreneurship might be more professionally (and financially) satisfying. We don’t usually publish diary posts, readership-as-therapists posts, but this one’s somewhat different.

Aside:

Despite what anyone tells you, teaching is not a difficult nor a demanding job. In fact, it’s hard to imagine an easier occupation. We each spend our first 12 years in a classroom, right? How little ambition do you have to have to think, “Well, that’s done, plus I did another 4 years in a classroom for a total of 16. Now, with the world as my oyster, I think I’d like to…spend my life in a classroom.”

Most of us have coworkers. Vendors. Clients. Counterparts whom we interact with more or less as equals. But teachers have charges. Minors, who have to respect your seniority. Teaching is a facile way to find a position of authority for oneself without having to do anything. Even a teacher on her first day on the job has a few dozen underlings. There’s no other line of work you can say that about.

There’s more. A teacher’s life is filled with rehashed subject matter. Committing to education as a profession means abandoning discovery. And growth. A 2nd-grade teacher who spends her workday explaining the difference between “to” and “too” is not what you’d call intellectually stimulated.

That tears it. This is the most offensive thing you’ve ever written, and that’s saying something. If it weren’t for teachers, where would you be? 

Thanks for missing the point. If it weren’t for train engineers we’d all be stranded at home without any gas in our vehicles, but no one genuflects in front of those guys. Almost everyone contributes something tangible to the general well-being of society. Teachers are no better nor worse in that respect.

Summers off, little possibility of being fired, and the least challenging of atmospheres. What’s not to love about that? Oh yeah, the atrocious pay and the feeling of commiseration among your fellow teachers.

Still not done. It’s not a tough job. Army Ranger is a tough job. Do you know what the attrition rate for teachers is? Close to 0%. If you want to be a teacher, you can and will be one with a minimum of effort. No one drops out of an education program because the coursework is so demanding.

And can we stop referring to teachers as heroes? They aren’t, unless you mean the ones who attempt to teach math to girls.

Teacher Man at My University Money argues for passive investing. Find (and fund) your 401(k) (or in his case, RRSP), then sleep on it. Teacher Man thinks that if you don’t, you’re probably going to lose because you’re up against smart people and supercomputers on the other side of every trade.

Huh?

Investing isn’t a zero-sum game. Yes, you could argue that any individual trade is, in that the buyer wants the price to rise and the seller doesn’t, and thus cumulatively investing must indeed be a zero-sum game. But is it?

No. The seller doesn’t necessarily want the price to fall. The seller could have a million reasons for selling. Liquidity is often as important as wanting to get off the roller coaster.

Also, Teacher Man stumped us with this discovery:

during a recent 20 year stretch the S&P 500 returned an average of 9.1%…yet the average investor only realized gains of 3.1%!

On first glance his claim might sound impossible, but it isn’t necessarily. For one thing, the S&P 500 contains different components than it did 20 years earlier. But how did he arrive at that 3.1% figure? Does he really have data on every single person who invested in S&P stocks since 1992? Does he mean median, rather than average? Whatever the answers, the allegation is an effective excuse for just buying mutual funds. (Which are managed by professionals who use computers. How that’s an advantage for Teacher Man’s investments, we’re not sure.)

(UPDATE: Teacher Man informs us that he meant 3.9%. We’re still scratching our heads, just not as hard.)

Don’t read anything into how this paean to passive investing was written by a teacher. Our favorite part of the piece was a comment (ignore the writer’s homonym confusion and pay attention to his point):

I don’t believe it’s about being “smarter” than the other guy. It’s about being willing to doing your homework and research the companies you are considering buying. Valuation is the key. There are many great companies that should not be bought because there valuation already reflects what everyone knows. But there are ALWAYS good companies that are out of favor and priced below there intrinsic value. You may have to look at 200+ companies instead of 10 to find them. You don’t have to accept “average” unless you are unwilling to put the time and effort into your investment portfolio.

Habeeb at the unconventionally hyphenated BestDividend-Paying-Mutual-Funds breaks down Wells Fargo’s Advantage Growth Fund. It’s up 10% per year over the last decade, and its biggest component by far (more than twice as much as any other) is Apple. Again, past performance is not a predictor of blah blah

Lance at Money Life & More learned how to divide by 30.

From PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net:

Once again I dropped the ball and neglected to give you folks a post on option contract divined predictions over the next few months (and years).

Yes, you’re a crushing disappointment. For shame.

Seriously, what he means is that he’s a little late with his self-imposed homework assignment: using put and call prices to predict the level of the S&P 500. PKamp3 speculates as to where the markets are heading, and what impact it’ll have on the presidential race.

John Kiernan at CardHub explains how getting your credit card numbers lifted is a lot easier than you think. Folks, change your passwords regularly and often. (This coming from someone who had his Yahoo! account hacked into twice. Fortunately there was nothing valuable in there, but it demonstrates the wisdom of using “123456” for a password.)

Free Money Finance has another book review, this one of Stephen L. Weiss’s The Big Win: Learning from the Legends to Become a More Successful Investor. FMF lists 7 traits of “the perfect investor”:

• Strong emotions
• A powerful ego
• Concentration on the short term
• Permissiveness
• Not being hung up on research
• Effortlessness – taking time to relax
• Lethargy

Please, please be scratching your head right now. If you’re not, get out of the market immediately and give your money to the homeless. We lied: the above contains the opposites of what the perfect investor embodies. Read the link for the details.

Odysseas Papadimitriou (YES! Finally spelled his name without checking it) at Wallet Blog has a political rant this week. Not a sectarian one, but rather an argument for direct democracy. No, he’s not talking about getting rid of the electoral college, or turning the nation from a republic into something else. Rather, Odysseas is examining something we weren’t familiar with: Project Madison. It’s the brainchild of U.S. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), and it’s essentially crowdsourcing for legislation.

Read that again: a member of Congress had an original and workable idea that isn’t obscenely expensive.

Finally, for every 100 morons online who complain that Walmart hurts women and kills jobs, JP at Novel Investor reminds us that brand loyalty is hugely important. Coca-Cola and Apple can, and have, withstood the occasional hardship but bounced back largely due to extraordinary public awareness and devotion.

And we’re done. You know the schedule: continuity and reliability are important. New post every Wednesday and Friday. New Anti-Tip daily, new CoW next Monday. Check us out on Investopedia, Yahoo! Finance, and we should have a new post up on ProBlogger any minute now. (And this has nothing to do with personal finance, but we’re in Nevada Magazine this month, too.) See ya.