Next time, try flying

Welcome back to the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival you need to be reading. A weekly roundup of the best and worst personal finance posts of the week. (Submit here if you’re interested.)

Fun facts about the Mayflower:

• She took 66 days to cross the Atlantic.
• 2 of its 102 passengers died en route. (Wait, that’s not a fun fact at all.)
• It landed with 101 passengers. One passenger gave birth on board. She named her kid Oceanus, which is fantastic.
• Despite there being hardly any room (there were also 25-30 crew members), some people brought their pets.
• 45 passengers died the following winter.

Puts that bad taco you ate on board the Carnival Dream in perspective, doesn’t it?

Alright, shall we get started? Let’s:

Green Panda Treehouse asks a (hopefully) rhetorical question: should you stick with one job for your career? The answer, of course, is yes. You should also vote for Eisenhower, see the new Martin & Lewis movie, take the streetcar to the Brooklyn Dodgers game (I hear they have a Negro patrolling second base now) and buy your wife that dress from Gimbel’s that she’s been going on and on about. Ladies love shopping, you know.

It never fails to surprise us how many people can break down every plot point of Mad Men but couldn’t tell you the difference between a Roth 401(k) and a traditional. Not that everyone should be as into personal finance as we are here at Control Your Cash, but the latter will affect your life far more profoundly than the former. Roger the Amateur Financier gives a 5-point method for increasing your financial literacy. We’ll reduce it to one point: spend $7 on this.

In that same vein, the tireless Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog explains mutual fund expense ratios. How much of your mutual fund payments are going to the manager’s 3-martini lunches and 4-line-of-coke nightclub visits? Understand that if your mutual fund’s value stays unchanged, you’ll still be losing money.

(Post rejected because apparently, discerning the difference between plurals and possessives isn’t all that important to some people.)

Teacher Man at My University Money knows the difference, he just wasn’t sure what side of the “s” the apostrophe goes on. Or maybe he was sure, but wrong. Anyhoo, he explains how to apply for scholarship money if you’re an incoming college student.

Can we add another tip? If you plan to study anything other than the hard sciences, do yourself and society a favor and withdraw your application. Go to a trade school instead, and become a productive citizen. Better yet, join the Navy.

Some guy got a Costco membership and wrote a boring story about it. Do you really care what he buys pine nuts for? (A: Pesto.) We figured you didn’t, and thereby saved you from reading about it.

A new entrant this week, who styles himself Chase DuMont, Rainmaker. Seriously. Never mind his self-appellation, Mr. DuMont appears to be the real thing. A Penn State business grad who now makes his home in Beijing, he’s written possibly the longest post we’ve ever run. It’s on why you shouldn’t rely on (too much) outside funding to start a business, and he’s absolutely right. (We speak from experience.) And his grammar is flawless, which will almost always get you included in the CoW.

Also, having a participant dubbed “Rainmaker” gives us an excuse to offer a musical interlude:

Treat your ears and buy this album (Dance of Death) and the 3 others Iron Maiden have released since Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson rejoined the fold (Brave New World, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Final Frontier.) Easily their best stuff, and the bar was pretty high to begin with.

Marie at Family Money Values spends more time on content than she does decorating the standard WordPress template that her blog came with. This week she explains how to cut expenses if you happen to own a rental property. Which you should, if you can, because it’s a great way to earn passive income without relying on the vicissitudes of the stock market.

Oh, for the love of Pete. Michelle at See Debt Run is yet another mommy blogger (that’s 5,438,239,102, by our count) who thinks she’s the first person in history to crank out a child and can’t wait to tell you what it’s all about. Here are some utterly unremarkable thoughts she had and assumed would be worth sharing with you:

Being a parent is one of the most rewarding experiences ever.  I love my children completely and unconditionally.

That’s the kind of penetrating insight we expect here at the Carnival of Wealth. Good for you, Michelle.

Even though I wanted to be kinder to the environment and pamper my baby’s bum with soft cotton and not silica gel filled plastic pants, I was overwhelmed by the finality of (my mother buying me $300 worth of cloth diapers)

At Control Your Cash, we have, ahem, cats. (Deliverable to the highest bidder!) They’re infinitely more rewarding than any child could be, and have yet to call from the county jail at 2 a.m. asking for someone to come down and bail them out. That being said, if we ever, ever, dared to write a 2000-word post debating the merits of Fresh Step vs. Litter Perfect, or referred to their hindquarters as “bums”, or thought that you’d find such tripe interesting, or wrote “I love my cats completely and unconditionally”, we’ll buy every last one of you a copy of Trent Hamm’s latest book. Oh, she also managed to jam in a paid link. SEE IF YOU CAN SPOT IT:

There are tons of cloth diapers online.  We went with a brand, Alva Baby,  with excellent reviews that only cost about $6 per all-in-one set, which includes an adorable, soft, sizable snap cover and one absorbent insert.  We spent about $80 and picked out some cute, girly colors and designs.

Again. Carnival of WEALTH. Not Carnival of Infant Feces.

Nobody knows anything, as Andy at Saving to Invest proves. Half the experts he cites say we’re in a bull market, the other half say bear. Andy has a few tips for preserving or maintaing any wealth you have in securities. Now if we can just get to tell people to act on his advice, instead of merely “consider(ing)” it, we’ll have something.

If you can get past the writing style (English for ESL students), Darren (no last name provided) guest posts about value investing at Faith & Finance. A brief history of the concept, of its patriarch Benjamin Graham, and of Graham’s intellectual progeny. Not just Warren Buffett, but others.

Barbara Friedberg of same Personal Finance lists 57 Habits to Build Wealth. Well, 58 but she listed “drink water” twice.

If she’s going to list them, we’re going to critique them. Most are valid, some are curious. Like “54. Own a pet.” It might be rewarding, it might be kind, but it’s not going to build wealth. Also, “3. Get a college education” and “40. Get an advanced degree” will destroy wealth, not build it, unless you’re more specific about what you’re going to study.

Our favorite is “18. Drink alcohol infrequently.” The CYC principals both teetotal, not for any moral reasons but because alcohol is a fertile breeding ground for bad decisions. It also costs money, which Barb was alluding to. Yet it’s interesting how even a seemingly obvious recommendation – don’t drink – can’t be explicitly stated in our alcohol-fueled culture. It has to be tempered, qualified. You can’t possibly tell people to stop drinking, that’s unrealistic. Just tell them to, y’know, curb it a little. You’ll still be squandering money, just less of it. You’ll still be numbing brain cells, just fewer of them.

God. What preachy douches you are. 

No. We aren’t. Nothing in that paragraph was a value judgment. Read it again. It’s all objective.

Hmmm…Theresa Torres at Credit Donkey wrote a post (complete with fancy infographic, and code allowing you to “embed on your own site”, for some reason) telling people to pay something more than the minimum monthly payment on their credit card balances. But she doesn’t say to pay the balances in full. Again, the “smoke low-tar cigarettes” advice. Should we run the post? Ah, what the hell.

The prolific Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet is back as always. Her posts are consistently informercialtastic, but not without content. Still, we’d much rather read a long post about why a Wyndham Rewards credit card is awesome (or in Laura’s analysis, awful) than see an out-of-place link in the middle of a paragraph about diapers. You know, like the Pampers you should let your precious little angel soil. That’s Pampers, brought to you by the good folks at Procter & Gamble.

Free Money Finance wrote 5 tips on how to succeed in the workplace. They’re exactly what you’d expect – work hard, be likable, etc., but #4 is awesome. Be attractive.

He’s 1000% right. There is no better advantage in this world than being pulchritudinous. Even the ugly among you can do something. You can at least get in shape, buy decent clothes and get a more flattering haircut. That won’t change the face God gave you, but it’s a start. It’s less work than developing your brain, too. Dumb people can’t get smart, but homely people can get good-looking. (Just ask Sarah Brightman.) Do you think an idiot like Tara Reid or Chelsea Handler would be as successful as she is without being somewhat easy to look at? Do you think portly schlub Newt Gingrich ever had a hope in hell of winning the Republican presidential nomination against a stud like Mitt Romney?

Some uxorious twit just had to chime in on FMF’s post, probably with his Gorgon of a wife standing over his shoulder. Here, we’ll repeat it:

FMF: I know you’re just trying to give people tips that will realistically help them, but as a man who respects his wife and thinks she is beautiful without makeup, I have to go off on a tangent…

Maybe instead of telling women to paint their faces, you could advocate against that type of misogynistic nonsense. Even if you had just addressed makeup in the same way as plastic surgery, that would have been a good start.

The suggestion to wear makeup is also counterproductive in this context, because the stuff is expensive enough that even if wearing it did help to increase your income, you have also increased your expenses. In addition, you increase your long term health-related expenses by smearing the toxic sludge on your face.

Our society thinks its so much better than those “backward” societies who force women to cover their faces, and then we turn around and do the same thing.

Yes, rouge = a burqa. Check out the link, at least for FMF’s brilliant takedown of this clueless and unrealistic commenter.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog hates prepaid cards and the people who pimp them, as do we. (Because Lil Wayne and George Lopez are whom you should turn to for financial acumen. We’ve already discussed Suze Orman. And if you think we’re going to spend 5 seconds researching to find out where the apostrophe goes in Lil Wayne’s name, we aren’t.) But John thinks regulators need to step in and put a handle on the fees these card issuers charge. We disagree. As always, read the freaking agreement. If you’re too stupid or lazy to read it, and you get screwed, you had it coming and are lucky they left you anything at all.

Three more home runs and then we’re done. We can always count on PKamp3 at DQYDJ for meaty analysis presented in a form lay people can understand without having it unnecessarily dumbed down. This week, diversifying your portfolio via the Kelly criterion. This post is so good it’ll make you forget that doggerel from the mommy blogger above.

No one knows anything like Mich at Beating the Index knows the Canadian natural resource market. This week he discusses the Viking Oil Trend, west-central Saskatchewan’s (although from the map, it appears to be south-central Alberta’s) answer to the Bakken Formation. A little inside baseball, but definitely worth taking your time and digesting to see which companies have the upper hand on exploring this rich region.

Finally, Liana Arnold at CardHub discusses the statute of limitations (actually, statutes of limitations, one for each state plus D.C.) for unpaid credit card debt. Don’t want to pay VISA? Wait them out! And good luck in court, you deadbeat.

That’s everything. Thanks again for coming. New post Wednesday, new Anti-Tip of the Day every day. Check our 6-part series on ProBlogger, our frequent goodness at Investopedia, and follow @CYCash on Twitter. ‘Til then.

Even the pig is still 8000 times better than a child

Welcome to another stirring edition of the Carnival of Wealth, the only blog carnival you need to read this week. Every Monday, we feature personal finance blog posts that are either a) interesting and/or intelligently written, b) awful enough for us to make fun of, or c) necessary to get us to a certain length. For many of our readers, the weekly highlight is determining which post goes in which category. Seriously, that’s the highlight of their week. These people need to find companionship.

Which brings us to our theme. One of the very few charities we support here at Control Your Cash is Best Friends Animal Society. (Why? Because humans can take care of themselves, a point we reinforce every day on this site.) If you’re unfamiliar, BFAS is a no-kill* rescue group. It’s probably most famous for taking in the dogs abused and mutilated by that felonious piece-of-filth cretinous Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, the one who inspires us to get down on our knees every Sunday and pray that he falls victim to a blindside hit resulting in a crushed spinal cord and has to drink out of a straw with his head forever immobilized.

In addition to the adoption events BFAS holds throughout the country, it houses 1700 dogs, cats, horses and other animals on its gigantic spread in idyllic southern Utah. Many of the residents of the sanctuary are available to adopt. They’re just sitting there, waiting for you to pick them up. If you happen to be visiting Kanab, Utah, the folks who run the sanctuary will even let you take a dog or cat for the day, acclimating him or her to outside human contact. (Kanab is extremely pet-friendly). There’s no obligation to keep the animal permanently, either. Unless you want to. Best Friends does fantastic work and deserves your money and/or time: but if you really want to help out, instead of giving them something, take something away. Help them reach their stated goal of “No More Homeless Pets” by adopting one of the adorable life companions on this page.

(Note: Here’s another charity we support, the Boo Boo Zoo. Officially the East Maui Animal Refuge, it’s a sanctuary for injured, sick and disfigured animals. From the blind cow to the leukemia-stricken kittens to the dogs left to die in the street, the refuge is populated by some of the saddest but most grateful creatures you’d ever want to meet. We’ve visited and can vouch for the care that the owners/operators and volunteers give. The refuge operates on an extremely tight budget, which would be bad enough even if the owners weren’t simultaneously dealing with government agents trying to choke the animals and their caretakers in red tape. Give them money.)

One more commercial, and all this one asks of you is a couple of mouse clicks. Before we begin today’s show, your humble blogger entered an essay contest at The Daily Muse, knowing it was a site for career advice and stuff but not realizing how strongly the site skews toward ladies. They chose 6 finalists, and all the other ones are female. The entrants were supposed to write on the topic, “The Biggest Mistake I Made at My First Job—and What I Learned From It.” Each entry is only about 600 words long, but if you don’t want to read through them all just vote for #4, the only one that involves chainsaws. (And if you want to know the difference between men and women, note the first word of the title of each essay.) Okay, now let’s get started:

Our first submission is from the chairman emeritus of the Carnival of Wealth, the intrepid Shailesh Kumar of Value Stock Guide. How comprehensive is the founder of the CoW? He’s included 47 top dividend stocks (italics ours) for April. He even enclosed his data in a downloadable Excel spreadsheet. Sorry, lady who submitted a post on how to organize grocery coupons: we’re going with Shailesh’s post instead.

Did we say “dividends”? Indeed we did. Dividend Growth Investor is up next, with a discussion on 5 particular master limited partnerships. What’s a master limited partnership? We explained them a couple of months ago. He focuses on pipeline MLPs, which he likes because they’re natural monopolies. True. You have to be some kind of committed to run a pipeline next to someone else’s existing one.

Roger the Amateur Financier reviews a new book, Charles Richards’s The Psychology of Wealth. As best we can tell, the book isn’t so much about contrasting where rich people put their money vis-à-vis poor people, but rather the difference in mindset between the 2 groups. It’s worth repeating: what distinguishes rich people isn’t so much their ability to make smart decisions, but their insistence on avoiding stupid decisions. Poor people are poor largely because they decide to be.

As any Canadian emigrant to the United States knows, the Dominion is consistently a few years behind its southern neighbor. Everything from an all-sports TV network to diet cola debuted in America and then ultimately made it to Canada, usually within a decade or so. The latest example is Mint.com, the personal finance management site. It finally debuted in Canada last week, and JB at My University Money reviews it.

In case you think we’re needlessly bashing Canada, Boomer & Echo inadvertently brought up the same point in their submission this week. Free music services like Spotify aren’t available in Canada, either. Give it until 2017 or so. Why are we mentioning this? Because B&E list 10 fees that are worth paying. We agree with almost all of them, assuming that they were joking when they said it’s cool to pay a $99 annual fee for a credit card that can offer you 7 times that in rewards. (Keep looking. You’ll find similar rewards from a no-fee card, somewhere. Or you can just drop $69 a year for a Southwest Airlines credit card, at Stephen Vanderpool at Nerd Wallet recommends.)

Time for a post from a First World country. Mike Piper at The Oblivious Investor makes his majestic return to the CoW this week. He asks a question that could have spawned a dull answer in the hands of a less capable blogger, specifically “How Much Do I Need To Save Per Year?” Mike doesn’t give a definitive answer, because there isn’t one, but he does force you to think in different ways about a crucial question.

Net worth, cash flow and bullet points from Free Money Finance this week. The topics might be rudimentary, but they’re still important and someone, somewhere, was unfamiliar with them until clicking on that link.

John Kiernan at Wallet Blog has 6 fun facts about credit cards. We love fun facts. Did you know Goldfield, Nevada holds the distinction of being farther away from an interstate highway than any town in the lower 48 states? It’s up to you to determine if John’s facts are more or less fun than that. Probably less, because that one was plenty fun.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) is clearly engaging us in a game of research one-upmanship. He wrote about (iconoclastically, for him) buying Mega Millions tickets. We wrote a little about the expected value of a ticket versus its likely value, now he’s taken it further with calculators and graphs. Two big takeaways (and you have to love a guy who opens a post with “If you don’t care, scroll down to the conclusion!”):

-At a certain prize level, the expected value of a ticket starts to decrease. We’d say “go figure”, but PKamp3 already did.
-2 comments so far. One is from someone who wanted a point of fact elaborated upon, which PKamp3 obliged. The other is from someone who says buying lottery tickets is cool because “it’s fun to pretend for a couple days that something wonderful might happen, and it only costs a couple bucks”, punctuated with 2 smiley-face emoticons. We’ll let you guess which is of which sex.

The lovely Liana at CardHub returns with a depressing post about greater credit card fees coming our way. And this has nothing, nothing at all to do with the Credit CARD Act passed by an activist Congress and signed into law by an activist president thanks to millions of whiny idiots who ended up on the hook for billions in credit card debt because they don’t know how to read a cardholder agreement.

We’re starting to get nostalgic for the rotten posts. There was a husky psychic who used to send us weekly posts about speaking to your dead ancestors. Which we’d run for the sheer ludicrousness (ludicrosity?) of it. Then people like Mich at Beating the Index had to spoil the party with their “expertise” and their “graphics” and their “staying on topic”. Like his most recent post, in which he analyzes the stock of a junior Canadian oil and gas company with interests throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan. It’s a company he believes in enough to have a position in, and a post both comprehensive and informative.

Why do exchange-traded funds beat mutual funds? Taxes, largely. There’s all the difference in the world between redeeming your capital for cash, as a mutual fund does, and redeeming for shares as an ETF does. Dan at ETF Base notes which is better, and don’t let the title of his site dissuade you from thinking he’s being objective.

From our “Reproduce a Page of a Textbook Most Convincingly” segment comes Paul Vachon at The Frugal Toad, who lists the advantages and disadvantages to taking retirement at different ages.

Just like that, it was over. Follow us on Twitter at @CYCash. Come back here every Wednesday and Friday for another, non-carnival-related post. And of course, the patented Anti-Tip of the Day is sitting in the right column, waiting for you to read and apply it. Plus we’re on Investopedia, constantly. (Toronto’s Globe & Mail found that one worth running.) And our 6-part series on ProBlogger is up to Part IV this week.

Is that enough? We thought so.

*If an animal sanctuary or shelter doesn’t specify that it’s no-kill, don’t kid yourself. It isn’t.

The lines start earlier every year

Welcome to yet another edition of the only personal finance blog carnival worth reading, the Carnival of Wealth. Where we showcase relevant blog posts from the past week or so and turn them into something approaching a cohesive whole. We didn’t give any tax advice this year – there’s plenty of it in The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written, plenty of which is relevant all year ’round, not just in mid-April – but we do have plenty of tax esoterica for you.

Did you know that April 15 has been the United States’ traditional income tax deadline only since 1955? It used to be March 15. Here’s another series of fun facts:

Federal income tax was instituted in 1861, to pay for the Civil War.
There was a basic personal deduction of $800 (that’d be 20,214 in current dollars) and a single, 3% (not a typo) rate on U.S. residents.
A year later, our first progressive tax: the deduction was lowered to $600, and income over $10,000 was taxed at 5%. However, the law specified that the tax would expire in 1866. (Apparently politicians in 1862 could predict when wars would end.) Fast forward 146 years, and no politician of either party would dare discuss eliminating the income tax. Alright, one. Then again, in 1866 our ancestors didn’t have an organization dedicated to “us(ing its) expertise to provide innovative solutions for our customers in support of their missions, and by so doing, foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people”, whatever the hell that means.

One more thing. 2 historical tax collectors are famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages; Simon Affleck and Jacob Gaón (the latter of whom may or may not have existed.) Do yourself a favor. Read their brief histories and see how previous generations handled tax collectors. On with the CoW:

Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog recently wrote about fundamental security analysis vs. technical analysis (a/k/a alchemy). This week he delves into the former, explaining the differences among the 3 major financial statements and why you need to familiarize yourself with them before buying stocks.

Roger the Amateur Financier questions when and whether you should (help) pay for your kids’ college tuition. Should you start saving when your kid is barely a foul thought in its father’s head? Should you offer to match whatever your kids can save throughout their adolescence? Roger’s post is grammatically fantastic and tries to address some important issues, but there’s one gaping omission:

Cost/benefit analysis. Like most parents, would-be parents, and financial bloggers, he doesn’t address the single most important criterion. What’s Junior going to study? It doesn’t matter how you finance an English literature degree, whoever earns it is never going to be able to recoup the investment. Better to attend trade school, which doesn’t require any multi-decade savings plan (and gets you earning money 4 years earlier). If your kid wants to study medicine or chemical engineering, however, there’s at least a discussion to be had about how and when to start saving.

Isn’t the tax deadline in Canada April 1? If it is, get a head start on 2013 by reading this post from Teacher Man at My University Money on how to file your return without spending unnecessary money at H&R Block.

Speaking of Canada, Boomer and Echo have 5 critical questions to ask your employer about your pension plan. Knowledge is power, which means ignorance is weakness. Your boss has your body and mind for dozens of hours a week. The least you can do is determine whether they’ll have your retirement, too.

(Sweet Christ, another post from a “coupon mom”? How many of you are there, anyway?)

The stellar Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog strikes gold again. We received 2 posts this week on how to handle résumés. One of them was detritus, this is the other one. May we editorialize? Of course we may, it’s our carnival. Here’s the takeaway line from his post:

Personalize your cover letter 100%

When I say 100%, I mean 100%. First of all, employers can spot generic cover letters with a couple of customized fields a mile away.

We get generic emails every week here at Control Your Cash, idiots wanting “verry much to right a guestpost for your intesting website “ControlYourCash.com”” Has anyone ever responded positively to such blatant disregard? Swapping out one employer’s (or website’s) name for another in your template isn’t personalization, it’s laziness of the first order. Especially when you’re looking for a job. What better message to send to an employer than “I’m going to mail it in if you hire me. Here’s proof.”)

A couple of weeks ago we questioned the chart-formatting skills of Liana at CardHub. This week she showed us by offering 11 aesthetically pleasing charts, each with appropriate row height and column width.

Oh yeah, the content. Her post is an analysis of what’s happened to credit card interest rates, balance transfer rates etc. over the past year. Again, pay your freaking bills on time and those numbers will be merely of academic interest.

(Post rejected for using “needs” as a noun. Damn right that’s a droppable offense.)

Every week there’s a new entrant who doesn’t get what we do here, and thinks they can spend 30 seconds defecating out a post and we’ll run it. Sometimes, they get lucky. Consumer Grocery wants you to print out coupons, use them, and “share your goals and progress” on Facebook et al. Thanks, Consumer Grocery. Odysseas should consider himself flattered that his meticulously researched and comprehensive post shares a carnival with your recommendation to “make saving fun!”

Thanks again for stopping by. Our 6-part series on ProBlogger is now in its second week, and you can scarcely spend a day on Investopedia without reading us. We’ll be back here Wednesday with more goodness, and a daily Anti-Tip (located in the right column.) kthxbye