Yakezie Carnival readers. Or Sarin victims.

If it’s Monday, it must be the CoW. The Carnival of Wealth, an agglomeration of personal finance blog posts from across the cosmos.

There are other weekly roundups. What’s so great about yours? 

Have you seen the other ones? Here’s a competing carnival that features 80 submissions this week. Are you going to read every capsule? Of course you aren’t. No one is. Not even the carnival host. He just copied the submission summaries word-for-word and added a couple of paragraphs at the start and end. That carnival’s not only unreadable, it’s unread. Each submitter just searches the post for his or her own contribution, then leaves a comment saying “Thanks for including me”, and the fundamental objective of engaging readers is sacrificed to the false god of link love. Control Your Cash doesn’t play like that. We try to keep you entertained and informed. Imagine that. Our method isn’t for everyone, and neither our readers nor us would have it any other way. Shall we begin?

Does Madison DuPaix at My Dollar Plan really carry all the credit cards she recommends? This week she’s applying for 12 cards so she can earn herself a bunch of airline miles and related sign-up bonuses. Don’t worry, Ms. DuPaix does mention that she cancels these cards before the annual fees kick in. She also mentions that she’s carried some of these cards several times. Hey, if Delta and American Express are dumb enough to keep giving Madison miles and get nothing in return, good for her. Keeping track of all these cards seems like a lot of work, but if the rewards weren’t worth it, she wouldn’t be doing it.

Tim Fraticelli at Personal Finance By The Book wins this week’s verbosity award. Extremely long story short, he discusses whether you should create a will or a living trust. His conclusion is…inconclusive. Also, it was helpful of him to explain what a will is, seeing as we all arrived here from Sirius β the other day and aren’t familiar with such earthly customs. This post is a literary example of Wadsworth’s Constant in action.

Life Insurance Quotes is a commercial site, but whatever. They discuss the same topic the previous submitter did, but in more gripping prose. (Reason #5 for getting a will? “You could end up brain dead.”)

(Post rejected because it was in the Neutral Zone. Awful, but not distinctive enough that it’s worth goofing on.)

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog is gold, as usual. He writes about the confounding practice of car rental companies levying surcharges – sometimes as large as 1,567% – to drivers who don’t pay tolls.

Which is unfair and illegal, because often those drivers don’t even have an opportunity to pay said tolls. Drive through a checkpoint on a cashless toll road, and there’s no basket for you to dump your coins into. Instead, the transportation authority will bill the car’s owner; i.e., the rental company. Which gets charged $3 or whatever, and passes the expenses onto you – plus as much as $50 for processing. Here’s the major culprit, and here’s its co-conspirator, the ominously named Violation Management Services. The latter are the ones tasked with tacking on the obscene fees. Just doing their superiors’ bidding, they’re the Rudolf Hess to Fox Rent-A-Car’s Hitler. Get a load of this line from the “About Us” page on Violation Management’s horribly written website:

We provid(e) results that promote customer satisfaction for our client and their customers.

Never mind the redundantly redundant use of “customer(s)”, nor the singular/plural confusion, what renter is going to have their satisfaction promoted by being stuck with a $50 surcharge for a $3 toll? May Violation Management’s CEO and the illiterate lackey who scribbled together that unreadable site both get the hantavirus, hopefully from each other.

Barb Friedberg has a new e-book about investing.

What’s the antonym of “retard”? Whatever it is, we nominate Dave of Dividends For The Long Run Blog for next month’s honors. This week he illustrates the foolhardiness of getting excited about dividend yields for their own sake. If you focus on dividend yields, rather than consistent raw dividends (or perhaps, you know, appreciation), you’re cheering for fractions. More to the point, you’re cheering for high numerators or low denominators. A large dividend relative to stock price often means instability. Apple spent 3 decades with a constant dividend yield of 0, and on balance, few of its investors are complaining.

Knowledge for its own sake from Edward Webber at TaxFix, who gives us a primer on income tax rates in the United Kingdom for 2012. Bonus: the post contains a picture of a £10 note, with a smiling Queen Elizabeth on it.

Queen Elizabeth gets our vote for most underrated person on the planet. Which seems impossible, seeing as she’s also the most famous person on the planet, but hear us out. Yes, she was born into the very archetype of wealth and privilege, but (in ascending order of notability):

• She and Prince Philip have stayed married for 64 years, or 11,787 times longer than Britney Spears and that guy.
• Her Majesty might have some loony family members, but her reign (indeed, her entire life) has been free of scandal.
• She’s in perfect health, and if she hangs on for another 12 years, which would make her 98 (and this is someone whose mother lived to be 101), she’ll pass Louis XIV as the longest-reigning monarch in European history.
• She’s a World War II veteran. And she didn’t have some frou-frou occupation specialty befitting a princess, like nurse’s assistant who folds towels and fills up the occasional syringe. She was a freaking tank mechanic. At the age of 19. We wonder how many of her loyal subjects know how to change the oil on their Vauxhall Corsas.

47% of you are carrying credit card debt? Well, certainly not 47% of you, but 47% of Americans en masse. Tim at Nerd Wallet exposes the depth and breadth of our collective indebtedness. Believe it or not, our cumulative credit card debt has decreased in the last couple of years – both the raw totals and the per capita numbers.

But that’s nothing to be proud of. It’s mostly chargeoffs – credit card issuers giving up on the deadest of beats. Also, Tim outlines the historic shift in the makeup of that debt. Student loan balances are now larger than credit card balances! U! S! A! U! S! A! Yeah, but you need an education because an investment in your fut…oh, put a sock in us. Small consolation that we predicted this scenario years ago.

Dividend Growth Investor tells the stories of 3 of the most successful dividend investors of all time. Warren Buffett and 2 ladies, none of whom were ostentatious but all of whom understood patience and consistency.

From the lovely Liana Arnold at CardHub comes news that could serve as the last paragraph in Groupon’s upcoming eulogy. Capital One, purveyor of some of the most annoying commercials and most voluminous junk mail of all time, has started offering daily deals along with its monthly statements. Now, cardholders barely have to breathe and blink to take advantage of short-term retail sales. It’s stuff you’d probably buy anyway, cheaper.

No.
(Karl Marrion at Wise Stock Buyer asks, rhetorically, if you should use stock-picking software. Also, the poor guy only has 15 Twitter followers, one of which is another account of his. Follow him, out of pity if nothing else.)

(Post rejected for CHILD TAX CREDIT its embarrassing use of CHILD TAX CREDIT search engine optimization “copywriting”, which is CHILD TAX CREDIT almost a perfect CHILD TAX CREDIT oxymoron.)

That paragraph flowed as smoothly as the rejected post. Also, CHILD TAX CREDIT.

Finally, this week’s most provocative post is from W of Off Road Finance. Heck, it might be the most provocative post we’ve ever run. Part manifesto, part dystopian prophecy, it’s a call-to-arms to secure your finances by not investing. Like, not at all.

I don’t want my family’s prosperity to be tied to stock or bond prices, the value of my home, the employment situation, the performance of rental properties etc.

Which sounds like it wouldn’t leave a whole lot, but W has a strategy in place. This post is labeled “Part I”, and you won’t want to wait to see what’s coming next.

And that’s it. New Anti-Tip tomorrow, new post Wednesday, new CoW Monday, and all sorts of goodness on Investopedia, Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, ProBlogger et al. Ciao.

Whatever part of the world you're in, it's probably less beautiful than this. Zion National Park.

That’s the temperature in Kanab, Utah as we type this. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, not even a white one. Weather.com says it’s 56º in Portland, Maine right now, making us wonder why anyone would live in a cold climate unless sentenced to do so by a court of law.

Which is as good a segue as any to this edition of the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from around the globe, organized and collated for your edification. If you want to submit yours, there’s a link on our site somewhere; we’re not going to just spoon-feed you. Now read:

Oh, for Christ’s sake. Post #452,489,293,877,258 on how to get out of credit-card debt from a 1st-person perspective. Is this what life was like when the Cro-Magnons invented speech? Did everyone tell the same damn campfire story every night until finally one caveman couldn’t take it any more, bashed that night’s storyteller to death with a club, and started the tradition of narrative drama?

Anyhow, Jefferson at See Debt Run brings us rationalization of the highest order – a post on how paying off your cards too early can be bad. This from a guy who incurred $22,000 in debt while fathering 3 kids. (Wait, you mean kids cost money? And thus make it harder for you to get out of debt? We had no idea!)

I didn’t cut up my credit cards– but I did put them in a drawer in my kitchen.  However, as I was recently looking for a way to save some money on life’s necessities, I decided to pull them out again.

Yes, because the credit equivalent of hiding your cigarettes always works. What are we, children? This is like lazy people who set their alarm clocks 15 minutes fast to trick them into thinking that that it’s later than it is. OMG I CAN’T SAY NO TO THAT THROW RUG AND PILLOW SET AT TARGET! If you can’t handle credit, you obviously shouldn’t have cards. But what you really shouldn’t be doing is telling other people what to do with their cards.

One of the ever-dwindling number of personal finance bloggers whom we’re on speaking terms with says, and this is paraphrasing, “Does your personal trainer carry 3 spare tires? Does your dentist have a mouth full of missing teeth? Then why would you take personal finance advice from someone who can’t get their stuff together?” Amen.

As if on cue, Dave at 6400 Personal Finance gives you the opposite perspective. The title says it all; “Discipline is Cheaper than Credit Card Debt.” But read beyond the title, please. This from a 20-something who manages to regularly update two excellent blogs (Dividends For The Long Run Blog is the other) while, oh yeah, leading soldiers into battle. We’re guessing he has little time for frisbee golf and navel-gazing.

Here’s another woeful story, albeit from a 3rd-person perspective. Ben DeMeter at Credit Card Assist laments the situation of a moron with $65,000 in student loans and 2 kids. This post is full of funny excerpts. This is our favorite:

Bob Johnson…took on student debt not once but twice in order to find work in an ailing market and (is) now struggling just to stay off welfare. After graduating in 1987 with a BA in journalism, the NYC native struggled to find work. By the time he got a job that paid about $800 a month, he had already been forced to defer his loans twice. When he was laid off in the mid-’90s, he decided to go back to school for his MFA in theatre management, believing that it would increase his chances for employment.

Journalism. Theater management (while already in the hole). It’s as if when Bob Johnson was applying for his loans, he said, “Awesome! If I keep this up, Control Your Cash will poke fun at me one day.” Wait, here’s a better one:

his student debt has grown from less than $100,000 to several hundred thousand dollars. “The money coming in is not great,” he says. “I currently have $700 or so in the bank, $400 in a drawer and $5K in a retirement account

But no, you keep believing that tertiary education of any kind is the key to your financial future.

Now this is what we’re talking about: Anisha at Nerd Wallet sees things correctly, which is to say, our way. She opens:

The Amex Campus Edition Prepaid card is about as useful – and expensive – as an art history degree.

Which tells you what her post is about, and what she thinks of said topic. Purchase fees? Charges for withdrawals above a tiny minimum? Come on. The Campus Edition Prepaid card sounds like something Suze Orman would endorse if she didn’t have her own terrible prepaid card. Why do we love Nerd Wallet? Because while they praise good products, they’re also happy to call out rotten ones by name.

Teacher Man appears at Young & Thrifty this week, discussing how to shrink your mutual fund fees. Which is important, if you’re Canadian and thus pay the highest fees in the world.

Another Canadian, Boomer (of “& Echo” renown) explains segregated funds. They’re like mutual funds, but sold by insurance companies. (There’s way more to it than that. You want a full summary in 3 sentences? Please. Just read the post.)

Ooh! Touchy-feely hippie blather! Welcome to Scott Vong, who explains that the best way to build wealth is…spiritually. Not that there isn’t a place for spirituality, but he’s looking at something that transcends being honest and giving value for service. Mr. Vong thinks “the best way to earn money is by doing what you love.”

Tell that to a Rookie League baseball player who gets released after one year as a pro, a year (more accurately, a summer) in which he made $1800 a month and lived in Pulaski, Virginia. The above paragraph’s sentiment has resulted in endless pain and frustration. Following your dreams is simple, puerile, fairy godmother advice that does nothing to enrich you. You build wealth by doing (creating, building, selling) what other people love and are willing to pay for. Your passions don’t mean anything, unless you can somehow find a way to sell to yourself.

Also, it’s “byproduct” and not “bi-product”, Professor. (The potential jokes on that misspelling are too easy. We’re leaving it alone.)

Let it ride! Don at My Dollar Plan wants to know if you should do so, or rebalance your portfolio. Our opinion? If you do the latter, you’re investing for proportionality, rather than for wealth building. If the stocks in your 70-30 stock-bond portfolio double in value, now you have an 82-18 portfolio and have to buy…bonds? You figure it out.

Make that 452,489,293,877,259 posts on how to get out of credit card debt. Simple Debt Free Finance, knock yourself out.

Look, here’s how you get out of credit card debt: live like a Dickensian pauper and put every dollar to your credit card bill. Better to suffer sharp, brief pain than dull, prolonged pain. None of you are going to do this.

And that’s only the 2nd-best way to get out of credit card debt. The best way is to figure out how much money you’re spending, and make sure it’s less than you’re taking in. Then you won’t get into credit card (or any other kind of) debt in the first place. Again, the vast majority of people aren’t going to do this, but there it is.

Please. That’s unrealistic.

Fine. You can say celibacy is too, but tell us another guaranteed way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STDs.

Steve Zussino at Grocery Alerts is relentless, we’ll give him that. Another pointless and derivative post designed to insult your brain, this one called The Ultimate Guide To Father’s Day Gifts On Any Budget.

First, he doesn’t literally mean any budget, we think. Second, good Lord. He breaks the gift choices down by personality type (gifts for the businessman, the “photo enthusiast”, etc.) Here are some verbatim gems:

For the businessman:

• Laptop
• Leather briefcase
• Dress shoes
• Suit
• Watch
• Pocket watch

What is this, 1954? How about a nice porkpie hat? A SUBMITTER SUGGESTED BUYING A POCKET WATCH FOR THE BUSINESSMAN IN YOUR LIFE. Or a suit, because he probably doesn’t have one and is about to get fired because he wears gym clothes to the office every day.

For the photo enthusiast:

• Polaroid camera
• Digital camera

You’re saying a “photo enthusiast” (who talks like that?) might like a camera? How about a car for a driving enthusiast?

• Lens cap mug (a coffee mug that looks like a lens cap)

Would it kill you to try? Just a little?

Movie tickets for the “TV/movie enthusiast”. Tickets to a sporting event for the “sports enthusiast”. “Musical instrument” for the musician.

“Dad, since you play the clarinet, I got you…a clarinet.” Or is the idea to expand the recipient’s horizons? “Dad, since you play the clarinet, I thought you could use this ocarina.”

It continues. Hunting, fishing and camping gear for the “outdoorsy man”…any mammal and most reptiles could have written a more interesting post. This is utter and complete garbage. And it stands to reason that a guy who refers to hunters and fishermen as “outdoorsy men” would post a picture of himself wearing a mother-loving papoose. There it is, right on top of the post, and he couldn’t look prouder (“essential for dads to carry their little ones”). Our fathers’ generation rolls in its collective grave.

Finally, Mr. Zussino is reduced to triply-strained pablum:

it really is the thought that counts. Think about what your dad enjoys and get him a gift based on that.

So I shouldn’t have read your post, is what you’re saying? Wow. It’s the rare bad blogger who’s self-aware enough that he knows his own advice isn’t worth reading. He continues:

If you don’t have much to spend, all you have to do is simply spend time with Dad. If he enjoys baseball, sit on the couch with him and watch a game.

Aside: The distaff half of Control Your Cash would like to know if there are any real, normal men left. On the one extreme, you have the wannabe alpha male UFC idiots with their Xtreme Couture shirts and neck tattoos. On the other you have the fancy fellows with their man purses, capri pants and papooses.

Guys, have a tool set and use it. Even if you do nothing more than unscrew and then immediately rescrew parts under your hood, at least you’re learning what size wrench goes on which component. Learn how to change a tire – the instructions are right there in your car’s owner’s manual, thus they’re written in a style that even Trent Hamm could understand. That drip under your sink can probably be solved by a 1/2″ washer and 2 minutes of elbow grease, instead of a call to the plumber. And yes, if you hire him to take care of that he’ll be laughing at you as he leaves. Turn the main off first. Know where the main is. Get your hands dirty. Grow your hair out a little. Listen to something with distorted guitars in it. Let your wife go to Sunday brunch with her friends instead of you; that’s what they’re there for.

Back to our program, already in progress:

(Another post on how to build an emergency fund. We’ve already discussed what a waste this is. In fact, a dog even figured it out.)

Odysseas Papadimitriou from WalletBlog says if your lender foreclosed on you, some good news might be entering your life along with the tiny sliver of natural light that hits your new basement apartment between 9:14 and 9:17 every morning. Yes, your lender might have falsified documents, and bureaucrats in the federal government think that your lender thus needs to make good. (Of course, if you lied about your income on your loan application, that’s the fault of someone other than you.)

Home stretch. 3 good ones, and then we’re done. The guys at DQYDJ (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) are chronically incapable of sucking. This week, PKamp3 and the gang discuss extrapersonal finance – what to do when your friends and acquaintances are spending like retards.

Mich at Beating the Index brings his trademark combination of insider knowledge and comprehensiveness with a piece on the Spearfish oil play in Manitoba and North Dakota. Technology has turned a formerly forgettable swath of the continent into a moneymaker. Mich explains who’s there, who’s drilling, and whose stock can enrich you if you play things correctly.

Finally, John Kiernan at CardHub dispels the mystery of the best credit card on the market. No, not the HiltonHonors American Express card, although it’s a dandy. John’s discussing form, not content. Specifically, the chip-and-PIN cards that prevail in Europe and Canada but have yet to catch on in the United States. They’re susceptible to fraud, so now you have something else to worry about while wondering if “bath salts” are available in your kid’s school. News at 11.

Thanks for coming. Read us on Investopedia, Forbes and Yahoo! Finance. Follow us on Twitter. Come back here Wednesday for a new post, and tomorrow for a new Anti-Tip of the Day. Au revoir. 

This nice lady said this nice thing about us. She gets it. And by “it” we mean what we’re trying to do here at Control Your Cash. Which isn’t hard to grasp. Maybe to swallow, but not to grasp. As you’re reading this, 8000 other personal finance bloggers are writing about emergency funds, and balance transfers, and how to prepare budgets (that they’ll never stick to), and trying to manage their credit card debt, and how to save money by using coupons, and all sorts of other boring and repetitive nonsense that goes down easily like strained carrots. Control Your Cash is different, as are our wonderful submitters.

Which brings us to another edition of the Carnival of Wealth. A collection of personal finance blog posts from across the globe. Some are great, some are awful, few are mediocre. If you’re a blogger who fancies herself worthy of being featured (or doesn’t mind running the risk of being mocked), submit here. And now, we commence:

Anisha at Nerd Wallet hits on one of our favorite topics, prepaid debit cards. Not one of our favorite products, one of our favorite topics. There’s still something unseemly about being charged money for the privilege of spending your money, but if you’re dumb enough to get into that situation in the first place that’s your problem. Anisha points out that the ridiculous prepaid cards endorsed by people like that hoyden Suze Orman are giving way to slightly less bad cards. It’s great to see actual pragmatism in a blog post – rather than whine about how debit card issuers are taking advantage of the poor, Anisha understands that commercial transactions (such as a poor person buying a debit card) entered into freely have a purpose and benefit both sides, however unevenly.

Another well-written post? On the same topic? No way. Michelle White at CardHub reviews the latest prepaid card from…well, it’s a joint venture between American Express and Zynga – the creators of FarmVille. The FarmVille prepaid card. The infantilization of America continues unabated. We’re sure it’s an awful card just on appearances, but Michelle breaks down the card’s worthlessness in greater detail and with more patience than we’d be willing to put on the task.

Last week we got an email from a personal finance blogger who lamented that nearly 100 people submitted to a similar carnival he’d been taxed with hosting. We pointed out that all he has to do is alienate the lousy submitters, and he’ll get that number down to something more manageable in no time. It’s about quality, not quantity. Meaning that we can devote expanded attention to informative bloggers like Andrew at 101 Centavos. Andrew has that fear we all have – peniaphobia. (Oh, grow up.) Richer people than him have ended up sleeping in flophouses, so Andrew’s taking steps now to take care of the downside. Best of all, he wrote this entire post without talking about the inanity of emergency funds, a fallback topic for most personal finance bloggers.

The formidable Οδυσσέας Παπαδημητρίου of Wallet Blog (that’s Odysseas Papadimitriou to you, Ace) returns this week, asking if tax evasion in Austria and Luxembourg affects investors in the United States. We wouldn’t have guessed that Οδυσσέας is in the pro-collection camp, but that’s just part of what makes the CoW interesting.

(Post rejected because it’s a throwaway English as a Second Language submission from someone with a child’s understanding of credit card rewards. We’re not going to let it ruin an otherwise perfect CoW. And we just jinxed it.)

New submitter this week, Dave at Dividends For The Long Run. Yes, he wrote about Facebook but a) he was self-aware about his choice of topic, b) he’s an active-duty Army officer, and c) the man can write.

(Got dang. On first pass, we merely scanned his post. Now we’re reading it in detail. This is the rare “we wish we’d written this” post. Every word is gold. We can’t even restrict ourselves to a particular passage to showcase here. It’s tough, but let’s try:)

Large numbers of retail investors tried to make a quick killing on an extremely popular social-media company without doing anything approaching due diligence prior to hitting the “submit” button on their discount brokerage’s website.  Predictable events (the stock price did not double, triple, or any other sort of -iple on the first day) and unpredictable events (the NASDAQ system had a stroke) conspired to part the fools from their money in a matter of hours.  Instead of taking the lesson to heart (don’t buy IPOs) these poor souls have resorted to a more instinctively American response: “It’s not my fault”.

We get the feeling Dave will be a regular feature around these parts.

(Rejected. A “back-to-school” post from last August. Even worse, they’re Canadian. No. We can’t accommodate any garbage this week. Things are going too swimmingly.)

We wrote a piece for Investopedia this week on the basics of investing. (That’s not the link, the piece hasn’t posted yet. That’s the link to our most recent Investopedia piece, which the San Francisco Chronicle picked up.) When the piece does run, it’ll bear an eerie similarity to Free Money Finance‘s recommendations for the novice investor. He simplifies it to a huge degree, but what he says is valid and worth remembering when you try to complicate things.

(Post rejected. Did you seriously think we were going to run something titled “The 8 Worst Exercises For Your Joints” just because it’s posted on a site with the word “insurance” in its title? Anyhow, it’s easy enough to find if you want to read it. And if you’re fat and need 8 excuses not to exercise.)

(“10 Ways Canadians Can Save Money At The Movies”. Good Lord. How about “7 Ways To Reject Banal Posts”?)

Sometimes we wonder if Dividend Growth Investor would be interested in any stock that’s guaranteed to double in value but promises not to pay a dividend. Ask Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett how they feel about dividends (from the perspective of the company that issues the stock.) Alright, you can’t ask Jobs because he’s dead and you can’t ask Buffett because he’s traveling the world with the surviving member of that odd little threesome he was once a part of, but you get the point. Dividend Growth Investor argues that you can make $1000 a month in dividend income if you pay enough attention. He also gives helpful descriptions of Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, Philip Morris and McDonald’s, just in case you’re unfamiliar with those companies.

Finally, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net discusses options. Even a bright guy like him admits that such first-order financial derivatives are too complex for his investing tastes. However, if you look at the prices of puts and calls, and their upcoming strike dates, you can plot where collective wisdom says the S&P 500 will end up. The accompanying graphs just add to the authoritative nature of this interesting take on the information that can be gleaned from options prices.

GOOD LORD. EVERY POST WAS A WINNER THIS WEEK. That has never happened before, and will never happen again. It’s as if an 8-planet conjunction bowled a 300 game, then spent a romantic night with Liz Claman.

Thanks for coming. Here’s our latest on Forbes. Forbes! Ghost Malcolm Forbes can barely pull away from Ghost Elizabeth Taylor long enough to look at the destruction left in our wake. We’re also on Yahoo! Finance, Investopedia, ProBlogger, etc., etc. New blog post here Wednesday, new Anti-Tip of the Day everyday, new CoW Monday. Sayonara.