Grander than Grand

Thanks for reading the greatest blog carnival of its kind, the Carnival of Wealth. That’s not autohype, either. It’s science. Try sifting through another interminable edition of the godawful Yakezie Carnival if you don’t believe us.

This week, the CoW comes to you live from Montrose County, Colorado, home to one of the least appreciated national parks in the system. Black Canyon of the Gunnison was made a national park in 1999, part of the new class of parks that inflated the country’s total to a bloated 58.

Most of the newer parks are garbage. That is, they don’t have the grandeur of their earlier counterparts. In 2003 the Department of the Interior drew a border around 41 square miles of South Carolina swamp and called it a park. Go to Yellowstone, Zion or Denali and there’s no question that you’re somewhere remarkable and spectacular. Go to Cuyahoga Valley National Park (founded 2000) and you’ll think, “How far away are we from that river that caught fire?” Cuyahoga Valley is the only national park to contain a toxic waste dump and a demolished NBA arena. That’s not a joke. Then again, in northeast Ohio’s defense it’s hard to find a plot of land there that doesn’t include something rusting, festering, or decaying.

But Black Canyon of the Gunnison, they got right. The park isn’t big, but it’s stunning. Its most salient feature is its namesake, which for much of its course is twice as deep as it is wide. 2700′ down, and a quarter-mile from north rim to south. Best of all, it takes some effort to get to.

As always, this is a collection of a week’s worth of personal finance blog posts from around the world. Enjoy:

We’ll make fun of the awful submissions later. Let’s start with somebody good. Paula Pant at Afford-Anything reminds us that you shouldn’t let either inflation or mankind’s fascination with the base-10 numerical system fool you into thinking that a $100,000 annual salary or $1 million net worth means what it used to.

W at Off Road Finance is on our short list of bloggers whose blogs we look forward to reading every week, and not for any unintentional comedic value. This time he asks why, if our national debt has quintupled, is inflation stable and gold’s surface tension starting to max out? Believe it or not, there’s a logical answer. It’s the same answer to “How can T-bills pay negative real returns, yet people still buy them?”

And we’ll assume that he added this out of pure sarcasm, which we appreciate:

If there’s one thing the financial blogsphere knows, it’s that debt is bad.

Sure it does.

Speaking of inflation, Cameron at DQYDJ.net says that inflation isn’t just a good thing, it’s a wonderful thing. In moderation, of course. Cameron’s co-writers disagree, but if there’s a hole in his argument, we couldn’t find it.

From Liana Arnold at CardHub comes another intriguing post, this one on the best prepaid cards for various instances (kid’s allowance, alternative check cashing, etc.) We’ll pretend that she didn’t recommend Suze Orman’s awful card.

Sweet Mary Mother of God, Joseph, and all the saints and angels. Jon Rhodes is back with another URL that has nothing to do with personal finance. Last week we emailed him, telling him that his submissions on bass fishing and home dressmaking were wasting everyone’s time. He acknowledged that in his response, then not 48 hours later sent us one from his new site, HypnoBusters.com. It’s about how to quit smoking. Tard.

Do we have any old people who read Control Your Cash? If you’re out there, set your font size to 36-point and get a load of John Kiernan’s latest at Wallet Blog. To summarize, with every marble you lose, you’re losing concomitant control of your finances, too. John thinks you should be forced to put less into your 401(k) and more into Social Security, because you’re too simple for hands-on management. We’re paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.

Dave at Financial Conflict Coach says that 90% of all conflict is caused by…we were going to guess “not reading the agreement correctly”, but that’s only a subset of the correct answer. Which is “expectations not being met”. Thinking about it, he’s right. The solution? Lower your standards! (We’re kidding. He has a different, more practical solution.)

(Thank you, InsuranceQuotes.org, for a post about 8 questions to ask your doctor [none of them even remotely related to finance.] Does anyone read the submission guidelines? Here they are, yet again.)

Last week we wrote the following:

Steve Zussino at Grocery Alerts is nothing if not quixotic. Week after week he sends us off-topic and pointless posts, which we tear up and down, and yet he keeps submitting. (And clearly doesn’t bother reading the CoW, nor even the weekly emails we send saying that we accepted his submission, so we might as well continue.) That chick from Newlyweds on a Budget holds the current CoW record, submitting 6 consecutive pieces of doggerel before finally pulling out, but her mark is in serious jeopardy after we received this submission about the supermarket items most often stolen.

Sure enough, he submitted again this week. No one ever said that being self-aware was a requisite for submitting.

How much further can we take this? In the prior week’s post we made fun of his papoose. Should we start accusing him of crimes against children, just to see if he’ll still submit? Alright, we’ll save that for next week. In the meantime here’s more off-topic tripe, this piece about how to save money at some theme park in Toronto. Why Steve Zussino cares so little about the 99.4% of you who don’t live in southern Ontario is something only he can answer. And just for the record, that’s 5 consecutive swings-and-misses from him. One more ties the record.

Free Money Finance thinks you should use smart power strips and cancel your subscription to Redbook. (“5 Tasty Salads To Freshen Up Your Summertime Table!”)

As Dan at High Yield Edge points out, certificate of deposit rates are awful. Or at least the traditional ones offered by lending institutions are. But not the ones offered by other major corporations. They’re called floating rate demand notes, and they’re issued by companies such as General Electric, Caterpillar and Ford. If you’re wondering how these are better than corporate bonds, Dan has the details.

Here’s another piece of homespun sage advice that people take at face value, for some reason. “Beat the market.” Dave from 6400 Personal Finance explains that if your portfolio loses 19% while the market loses 20%, congratulations. You beat the market. Here at CYC we embrace the mantra “It is not enough that I succeed, others must fail”, but don’t ignore the first clause in that sentence. As Dave points out in his famously delicate fashion:

I could give a damn about how your investments did this week.

Indeed. Dave’s not an investment advisor, so why should he? But the point he’s making is that you’re supposed to do well in absolute terms, not relative ones. Rankings mean nothing, and wealth isn’t graded on a curve.

Greg Field at Nerd Wallet lists some of the best credit unions to stash your money in, and the requirements for joining each. They include the Detroit Metropolitan Credit Union, open to:

anyone employed by the City of Detroit, as well as anyone who lives, works, worships or attends school in Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties.

If that’s you, you have our sympathies.

Guess what? You can’t build wealth without researching your investments. Well, you can, but that’s leaving an awful lot to chance. Dividend Growth Investor doesn’t screw around. He spends 15-20 hours researching each of the 30 securities that he owns at a given time. Yeah, this is comprehensive if not necessarily “hard” work. DGI’s prose can be dry, but this passage illustrates his point beautifully:

I would much rather spend the time I spend on my investments, than pay 0.5% annually of my net worth to an investment adviser, while I feel clueless about my financial situation.

(Post rejected because it used the word “needs” as a noun. We’ve rejected posts for way less than that.)

We all have our pet peeves – irrational hatreds of seemingly unimportant bugbears that other people don’t mind that much. For one of the CYC principals, it’s the music of Train. For the other, it’s hotel bedcovers (mustn’t touch them.) And for Darwin’s Money, it’s pharmaceutical sales representatives’ remuneration packages. A bunch of sales reps demanded overtime, for some reason the case went to the Supreme Court, and got shot down 5-4. Darwin sees it as comeuppance.

(Okay, here’s another pet peeve of ours, which has mutated into something larger. Post rejected because the author made the “cents/sense” pun yet again. His site’s logo proclaims that it’s “Making Cents of Personal Finance.” We’re done. Any more exploitation of the cents/sense homonym gets you disqualified, no matter how good your post is. We had to take a stand.)

Finally, JT of Money Mamba offers a great guest post at Boomer & Echo. He maintains that professional fund managers don’t have a monopoly on finding value. Quite the contrary, in fact. Many fund managers miss out on underpublicized, promising stocks because those managers’ primary objective isn’t to build wealth, it’s to keep their jobs. Too many unfamiliar stocks in a professionally managed portfolio means too much “risk”. Risk, in the sense of “none of my colleagues are doing this”. Homer Simpson: “I can’t wear a pink shirt to work. I’m not popular enough to be different.” JT argues that the bigger a company is, the more likely that it’s priced rationally. Outperformance can only come from greater risk.

Alright, one more. We were somewhat lean this week, what with the scaring submitters off every week with our candor and high expectations, so here’s one we know is good. From the CYC archives, our manifesto.

Thanks again. Catch us on ProBlogger, Investopedia, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes and more. New CoW Monday.

We’ve done this before, hosting our own Carnival and someone else’s back-to-back. Like any good helicopter parent, we don’t trust anyone else with our baby, so here’s what would normally have been Monday’s Carnival of Wealth, postponed 2 days to fit with our regular schedule.

Like the Best of Money Carnival we ran 2 days ago, this is a collection of personal finance blog posts from around the world. Unlike the BoMC, ours isn’t restricted to the 10 best posts we received. A truth that will manifest itself momentarily.

Aside, prelude and life lesson:

The CYC principals took their cat to a local bookstore the other day, part of pretty much the only national chain still in existence. The cat, who’s extremely docile and laid-back, loves to be held for hours on end and loves to be in public. Her favorite store is Home Depot, but a bookstore will do in a pinch. The principals are cognizant enough not to take her to restaurants and supermarkets, but will take her just about anywhere else, other conditions permitting.

Also, the cat’s been to other locations of this same bookstore chain and has never had a problem. Until running into the miserable crone who manages the West Charleston Boulevard, Las Vegas location.

We were immediately “greeted” with “We don’t allow cats. Because of the café.” (There’s a Starbucks in the bookstore. Our plan to sneak behind the counter and wipe the cat’s backside against the assorted pastries and sandwiches was thus foiled.) We didn’t plead our case, the woman’s mind was clearly made up and as we walked out she repeated her mantra about the café. The store has no sign prohibiting pets, by the way.

Did we mention she was unattractive? (This is relevant.) Maybe 60 but looked a good deal older, with the regulation sensible housewife haircut, unfashionable glasses, amorphous body and turkey neck. The cat wasn’t the only sour puss in this little melodrama. Free Money Finance wrote a post a few weeks ago in which he argued that being attractive is good for your finances. It’s good for the world at large, too.

A few weeks earlier, we went to the bank (we don’t do everything together, this is just coincidence) to get a document notarized. Simple, straightforward stuff. Between us we’ve probably had 50 documents notarized at this small, community bank. The document went for several reams, so we just brought in the final page; the one with a place for a signature.

The notary was probably 100% overweight (which you’d figure would make it more likely that she’d wear support garments, not less, but whatever) and had the kind of posterior that wasn’t merely fat, but misshapen. Like, one cheek was the size of a watermelon but the other was the size of an engine block. Our conversation went like this:

“Could you notarize this?”
“What is this? Where’s the rest of the document?”
“1, it’s a questionnaire from the Canadian Securities Institute, and 2, at home. Can you notarize this?”
“Not without seeing the rest of it.”
“Why not? All we’re asking for is for you to confirm that the signature indeed belongs to the person who’s about to sign it. Which you will then have a record of, in the unlikely event that the law ever needs to get involved. The content of the document shouldn’t matter.”

Then the inevitable staredown. Then the battle cry of the unthinking loser who’ll never advance in her chosen field: “I’ll ask my supervisor.” Why help a customer when you can inconvenience the customer instead?

She has no supervisor, at least not with regard to her duties as a notary public. What she meant was that she was going to go into the back for a couple of minutes and shove another cruller in her face, which we encouraged because we wanted to see if she could get out of the chair without using her arms (she couldn’t) and what her asymmetrical waddle looked like from behind (indescribable, you really needed to be there.)

On her return you could see the powdered sugar on the corners of her mouth. “My supervisor won’t let—“ Yes, whatever lie you need to save face. As if that’s a face worth saving.

We went across the street to The UPS Store, where Willow Palin’s 23-year-old doppelgänger smiled and said, “Sure. That’ll be $5.”

The moral? There’s a reason why “ugly” means both “physically unattractive” and “objectionable”. An ugly person watches the attractive people enjoying life – which makes sense, as they’re healthier, happier and more positive – and decides that instead of emulating them, it’s time to ratchet up the jealousy. The ugly people won’t admit as much, but it’s palpable.

It’s not like we’re dismissing these people based on the body God gave each. Everyone can do something. There’s no excuse for being fat. You don’t have a thyroid problem, you have a diet and (absence of) exercise problem. You can buy less dowdy clothes. You can do something with that hair. Or you can say, “Looks aren’t important, I don’t have to fit into your predetermined beauty standards” and keep on not only being miserable, but sharing that misery with the rest of us.

Given the choice, always seek out the attractive person – whether in retail or at the bar. Which will increase the attractive person’s already healthy self-esteem, widening the gap between them and the unattractive people even further. This is how it should be. The uglies can’t impact us if we don’t let them.

Epilog: After being kicked out, we went to another location of the same bookstore a couple of miles away. At least half a dozen employees saw the cat, and none said boo.

Alright, on with the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from other people. Some great, some awful, few in-between. Let’s read:

Nothing says “originality” and “dedication” like a WordPress blog that uses the default theme. Marie at Family Money Values wants to know where people with $1 million – $5 million in assets go for investment advice. (Let’s just say we had plenty of chairs at the table this week.)

Steve Zussino at Grocery Alerts is nothing if not quixotic. Week after week he sends us off-topic and pointless posts, which we tear up and down, and yet he keeps submitting. (And clearly doesn’t bother reading the CoW, nor even the weekly emails we send saying that we accepted his submission, so we might as well continue.) That chick from Newlyweds on a Budget holds the current CoW record, submitting 6 consecutive pieces of doggerel before finally pulling out, but her mark is in serious jeopardy after we received this submission about the supermarket items most often stolen. Actually, he just summarized someone else’s article, but that counts as research these days.

Kevin at Christian PF thinks you should max out your 401(k) contribution and pay off your debt. Groundbreaking, yes.

Drew Custer at Nerd Wallet enjoys soccer, but don’t let that stand in the way of this post about why you shouldn’t use a credit card to pay your tax bill. Now if we can just get the active voice to be used by Drew.

Lance at Money Life & More got himself a Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket “free”. Obviously that doesn’t include the price of the contract, but paying 0 out of the gate is still good if other people are paying upwards of $150. Lance worked his way into a deal that he wouldn’t have gotten had he not asked for it. We’re willing to bet the sales rep he dealt with was physically attractive, too.

Are there really people who buy cars on Craig’s List? “David Singer” (no way that’s his real name) at Auto Insurance Quotes says yes, and a quick look at our local classifieds confirms it. Seems risky, which “David” seconds and which he shows us ways to minimize the risk of.

Are we just naïve? It seems that from a legitimate seller’s perspective, selling on eBay would make a lot more sense. Yes, it costs money to place the ad, but eBay’s auction format would seem to imply that you could get more money for your vehicle. And from a buyer’s perspective, you’d be less likely to get scammed.

Habeeb at Best Dividend-Paying-Mutual-Funds breaks down a different such fund every week. This week’s subject is the Yacktman Mutual Fund, named after 5-star mutual fund manager Don Yacktman.

Hey, here’s an idea: instead of looking at one facet of return, look at total return. Thus Dividend Growth Investor, who makes that very lament this week. Of course you should consider dividend yield to be merely one component of whatever you’re investing in.

It’d be like the Oklahoma City Thunder saying last Thursday, “Great news! Kevin Durant scored 32 points and pulled down 11 rebounds!” Yes, and you got blown out in a game that looked far worse than its 15-point difference, and your opponent won the championship. DGI continues with his helpful synopses of some of the world’s best-known companies:

The Coca-Cola Company (KO), a beverage company, engages in the manufacture, marketing, and sale of nonalcoholic beverages worldwide.

No one, at least no one we know, knows the Canadian energy markets like Mich at Beating the Index. He analyzes Shoreline Energy, which is a natural gas producer with operations in Alberta and which has been trading for barely a year. Shoreline paid awfully generous dividends, which they recently scaled back thanks to the vicissitudes of the natural gas market. See what Mich envisions for Shoreline’s future.

Finally, Liana Arnold at CardHub breaks down the positives and drawbacks of UPromise’s new MasterCard. You can use the card’s rewards to fund a student loan or 529 plan.

Wait. Can’t you do that with any card?

Yes, which Liana points out.

And that brings us to the end of another thrilling Carnival of Wealth. Thanks for joining. We’ll see you tomorrow with another Anti-Tip of the Day, Friday with another fresh post, and Monday (not Wednesday) with another edition of the CoW. Cheers.

Not that kind of speed

It’s 2 hours to our (self-imposed) deadline. Let’s see if we can get this out on time and still make it readable. We’ll start with our usual filibuster/welcome: Greetings, and behold a brand new Carnival of Wealth. Every Monday morning, after we’ve spent a week scouring the internet, we bring you said week’s least boring personal finance blog posts. Actually the submitters come to us, but whatever. Shall we get started? We’d better, the clock is ticking:

A Dutch entry? That’s what .nl is the country code for, right? Stefan at Skuzet has a tetralogy on the discount model of evaluating assets. This is about as uplifting as a page from a corporate finance textbook, but we’ll take its tasty exotic flavor. As best we can tell, the English translation of “skuzet” is “skuzet”.

A post from a site called TherapeuticReiki.com? Come on, we’re trying to rush though this. The submitter writes:

After doing all that financial analysis and planning, doing your marketing, social media, and reading that latest self-help book for business, here is finally something FUN you can do, that well, actually works. Works for me. Try it: make a crystal grid and charge your crystals with your intentions for abundance.

And a sample:

Emerald
The Emerald is the Queen of the Heart with deep connections to Gaia (the sprit [sic] of the Earth) and several of the Archangels.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. Even better, the post is 4 years old. The writer’s crystal grid is almost old enough to attend preschool. And you’re not going to believe this, but it’s a woman.

How about a post from someone relevant and on-topic? Roger the Amateur Financier says that having money, particularly gaining lots of money quickly, can sometimes cause problems if you don’t know how to handle it.

Roger seems like a nice fellow, so we’ll let him down easy. You should spend as much time wondering about rich people’s problems as rich people spend wondering about your problems. Roger admits to tons of credit card and student loan debt – problems we’ve never, ever, seen any other personal finance bloggers mention – and emphasizes his post’s point by quoting 2 of the most permissive and clueless personal finance bloggers in existence, Finance Fox and Financial Samurai. Both of whom agree that yes, it’s better to earn money slowly than quickly.

Because why not eat as many meals as possible out of an oblong box with a Kraft® logo on it? The longer you live with a frayed carpet and a beat-up Toyota Tercel from another century, the more you’ll appreciate what you do have when you eventually get it. The perfect scenario would be to save and deny yourself until your 99th birthday, finally cash out, indulge yourself for one glorious hour and then die.

No offense, but even the recommended, tempered version of this is several steps beyond nonsensical. And it illustrates why, as we’ve said before, poor people are poor largely because they choose to be.

One thing we harp on here is to examine every transaction from the other party’s perspective. That goes for buying, but it also goes for selling whatever it is you sell – your time, your expertise, etc. If you get rich, it means people chose to buy lots of what you’re selling and you kept lots of that after expenses. This is something to embrace, not to lament.

Who gives a flying one about Paris Hilton? So she didn’t earn her money and seems to enjoy squandering it. Why is this important to anyone else? Look, you’ll eventually get to witness her schadenfreude, but is that really going to be that satisfying? Wouldn’t you rather build your own wealth while not caring if she lives or dies? No, not if you can lather up in a nice big steam bath of self-pity and justification.

Wait, we’re not done. This is the mindset that plagues far too many people: thinking small. Not to mention, having immature hangups about money. Is there anything else good in this world that people bemoan having too much of? Too many loving family members. Too healthy children. Too tasty a steak dinner. But God forbid you amass more money than an unimaginative person would know what to do with.

The American school system is renowned for producing illiterates, some of whom even go on to fancy their words worthy of presenting to the world at large. But never fear, we’re not the only country to churn out people with a hazy command of their native tongue. Savvy Scot brings his heterodox spelling and grammar to the CoW with a piece on how some enterprising Brits are selling authentic Olympic torches on eBay for huge prices. Each person who actually carries a torch can opt to buy it for £295, which is £200 less than cost. (And to think that every Olympiad loses money. Who’d ever guess that? The citizens of Chicago should thank the heavens that Rio de Janeiro got stuck with the 2016 games.)

Anyhow, the torch bearers are turning around and hawking the torches for giant profits. £150,300 for a “momento”? (sic) That’s not just the buyer’s asking price, either. Some idiot actually bid that much.

Blogging 101 requires its pupils to be pusillanimous and not have opinions, so Savvy asks whether it’s “morally OK” to cash in like this. Again, let’s all think small and apologize for obtaining money through means other than theft. We don’t deserve it. Someone else should have it. Profit is bad, even at the personal level. Enjoy your rainy island, kids.

Or as the brilliant Dave at 6400 Personal Finance puts it,

Building wealth is about offense.

God, that’s pithy. Read it again. He continues:

It’s fundamentally easy to play financial defense: work at a job that pays you a decent wage, spend less than you earn, pay your credit card bill in full and on time, and contribute to your 401(k) and IRA.  If Americans could just manage to accomplish those four things we would have a completely different societal relationship with money.  Unfortunately there are idiots among us and they are legion so such wishes are futile.

It’s like Dave’s collating and typing our most profound financial thoughts, the ones that even we refrain from sharing on a blog that has enough enemies as it is.

Which works both ways. We touted the American Express Blue Cash as the best all-purpose credit card in our book, and it remains at or near the top. Dave wanted to know if his USAA credit card was a rip (it was), if the Military Star Rewards MasterCard was better (it is), and if there’s anything still better out there (see above). Most people would stop there and then choose whichever card had the most appealing advertising campaign. Dave does things differently:

How about crunching the numbers and getting the answer that way instead of tossing words around to solve a 5th-grade math problem?

Dave is 20-something. He’s our early favorite for the 2042 presidential election, unless you know someone better.

Free Money Finance doesn’t apologize for his wealth, either. He reviews a personal finance classic that he’d never read before, Your Money or Your Life. We haven’t read it either, but FMF’s review (Part I of II) makes it sound tantalizing.

The steadfast and headstrong Liana Arnold at CardHub continues her exposé of the Durbin Amendment, the U.S. Senate’s intervention into private debit card markets. To summarize, because a bunch of irresponsible morons couldn’t keep their credit card debt in check, the rest of us got punished when Congress rammed through a law that limited the amount that banks can charge for each debit transaction (“swipe fees”).

You’ll never guess what happened. With politicians hampering banks’ ability to make money on debit card transactions, those banks responded by increasing checking account fees, eliminating debit card rewards programs, and encouraging us to use (unregulated) credit cards and prepaid cards instead. Everybody loses! But it gave a superannuated Illinois senator a chance to claim that he was doing something for the poor, which is far more important than increasing the flow of capital.

Another entry from the Hub family this week. Ross Garner at WalletHub (CardHub’s sassy younger sister) tells us to stop whining about the high cost of medical care (a legitimate gripe, by the way) and embrace telemedicine. Maryland just became the 14th state to require that insurers cover virtual doctor visits. Hopefully we’ll one day reach a place where Congress no longer forbids insurers from operating in one state and having clients in another.

This is the future Jules Verne envisioned. Never mind 60,000-mile trips under the sea, M. Verne dreamed of a day when he could use his smartphone at ATMs. That is, if he hadn’t died 75 years before the latter was introduced. Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog tells the story of NCR, the erstwhile National Cash Register and likely maker of the most recent ATM you used. The company’s developed a smartphone app that lets you withdraw money without a card. Odysseas is observant enough to ask what good such an app is, and gives a convincing answer.

Dividend Growth Investor discusses his dividend crossover point, the mark where his dividend income equals his expenses. In other words, where he can now rely on dividend income for his financial independence. He’s not there yet, but it’s in view. See how he’s getting there, and how you can too.

A URL loaded with hyphens is a sign of a likely link farm, but this post from Habeeb at BestDividend-Paying-Mutual-Funds at least has some content to it. It’s drier than Zsa Zsa Gabor eating beef jerky, but you can plow through it if whatever work you have sitting at your desk is particularly unappealing. As to why they didn’t include a hyphen between “best” and “dividend”, ask Habeeb.

Teacher Man at My University Money made it through college without knowing the difference between average and marginal tax rates. Now that he does, he explains how understanding your estimated marginal tax rate can make it far easier for you to plan your financial future. Mitt Romney pays what seems like a small effective income tax rate for one reason – he’s smart enough to take advantage of a complex system created specifically to screw wage earners while benefiting people who derive income via other means.

We take it back. There are Brits who can write. His apostrophed plurals notwithstanding, CoW rookie Ash at Sterling Effort has a merciless opinion of people who loaded up on Facebook stock (and people who did the same on Groupon stock, and whoever at News Corp told Rupert Murdoch, “It’s called MySpace. All the kids are on it. It’s gold, and for $580 million it can be ours.”) If you think Facebook’s majority shareholder gives a damn about you and your retirement,

Zuckerberg decided to spend the entire year’s profits on (Instagram,) a company that has never turned a profit and doesn’t have a clear way of producing any kind of return.

Opinions, data, and disdain for the stupid. Welcome aboard, Sterling Effort.

Paula Pant at Afford Anything clearly thinks she’s superior to us, or she’d deign to hold court at her permanently reserved CoW table more often. She is superior to us, that’s not the point. Greater Atlanta’s Favorite Nepali-American Personal Finance Blogger is back and better than ever, demonstrating the foolishness of justifying sunk costs – throwing bad money after worse, if you will. Read her, she’s wonderful.

Jill at My Dollar Plan goes to, by her estimation, 3-4 weddings a year. Which sounds slightly less appealing than having 3-4 reconstructive knee surgeries a year. It made her think about who’ll handle the finances when she theoretically gets married – her future husband and his big masculine brain, or Jill herself. Jill knows enough that she knows she wants to be in charge, which is wonderful but should be unremarkable. Ceding control of your finances to someone else – your boss, your government, your spouse – is juvenile. Literally. It’s what kids do. Grow up and take control. Buy our book if you have no clue where to start (link at the very bottom of the CoW.)

Credit Card Chaser was kind enough to run a guest post of ours when we were just starting out, so it’s only fair that we return the favor. Mac Hildebrand has common-sense, implementable tips for small business owners trying to make things work. “Buy assets, sell liabilities” applies here, too. Don’t commit yourself to larger borrowing costs than you can handle. Be a technology whore, it’ll save you in the long run. And true to his blog’s name, exploit the rewards that credit card companies offer and that dumb (i.e., most) cardholders end up paying for over and over again.

Ang Lloyd at 2012 Taxes tells you what to ask for in a small-business accountant. Particularly helpful if you live in Australia.

Ted Jenkin at Your Smart Money Moves opens by telling us that

There is an old saying that history has a way of repeating itself.

Like we’re supposed to tell our homosexual high school friends, it gets better. Ted explains risk vs. timeframe, diversification, and other exciting topics rendered even more exciting by Ted’s use of a tiny font.

Finally, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net buried the lede. He mentioned that he got dropped by his car insurer (Progressive) when he attempted to make them his home insurer. Why?

Because of this truculent, bloodthirsty monster, that’s why:

PKamp3 (and his American Staffordshire terrier) went with Farmers instead. Thanks again, idiot pit bull owners with your cans of Full Throttle and Xtreme Couture t-shirts, for getting every dog who looks like yours blacklisted. Nice going.

And that’s it. A new post Wednesday, another new one Friday, an Anti-Tip of the Day everyday, another CoW a week from today, plus we’re on Investopedia and ProBlogger and all sorts of other places – Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, etc. Basically we’re a one-stop content machine. See you then. Get our feed here. And as long as you’re clicking links, buy our book.