This never happens to Kenneth Brumley

Benefits meeting? Photocopier down? Angry customers calling who couldn’t get through on the weekend? Rain? Relax, because your Monday’s about to get tolerable if not good. It’s time for another edition of the Carnival of Wealth, featuring personal finance blog posts from around the world. If you fancy yourself as CoW material, submit here. If you want to be entertained and maybe learn something, read Chuck Klosterman’s latest at Grantland. If you want to kill a few minutes, continue reading here:

We bookmark 1 out of every maybe 1000 submissions we receive. That would include this one from Darwin’s Money. Do you know how to calculate an investment’s internal rate of return? It’s easy to do if you only buy one investment, once a year, in the same amounts. But what if you invest like a normal person? Darwin explains how to work around the variables.

Bernie Madoff might remain in prison until the next ice age, but there are still plenty of lower-level crooked investment advisors ready to steal your money. If you’re the kind of person who’s susceptible to that kind of thing Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog has you covered.

Oh, this one’s adorable. Barclaycard created the “Ring” MasterCard, the big noteworthy feature of which is that it lets cardholders vote on the card’s future. According to Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet, “[y]ou’ll get to vote anytime Barclaycard suggests raising fees (or) changing the APR…”

Let’s think about that for a second.

“Hi, I loved your card so much that I bought $43,293.34 worth of stuff on it. That 8% introductory annual percentage rate is killing me, though. I think you should change it to 0.”

Barclaycard will also let you “weigh in on marketing ideas”:

“Dude. What if Barclaycard like, took out ad space on the moon? That would totally beat any idea that Capital One has. And because it’s on the moon, you could, like, buy pot with the card and stuff. Because there’s no laws on the moon. That’s why one of the Apollo astronauts wanted to stay there. But the other 2 outvoted him. It’s true.”

There’s a reason no non-startup gets its customers to help design and market products. Barclaycard’s managers are obviously smart enough to understand that, so we’re curious only as to how naïve a cardholder would have to be to think that those managers care what he’d like the card’s APR to be. Or how Barclaycard should market the card.

We welcome Bobby Boughton at Ready For Zero to the CoW this week with his post on whether it’s better to invest or to pay off debt. His reasoning is sound and his conclusion worthwhile, but sweet God does it take him a while to get there. 2700 words of ornate repetition that we could have whittled down to 3 paragraphs. We’re too lazy to check, but are pretty sure it was Mark Twain who said, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one.”

Scott Skyles at Mortgage 1A writes about–

Wait a second. Consecutive posts, submitted minutes apart from each other, from unfamiliar names, one a homonym for a legendary college football coach, and the other a homonym for a current NBA coach? Neither of whom has any part of his name in his email address? We’re skeptical, but we’ll take it. Especially when Mr. Skyles has a human’s face for an avatar. He seems very earnest, especially in his dry recitation of how FHA loans work. Read it and tell us if you think he’s real.

Another one from a guy whose name is that of a sports figure? For those of you unfamiliar, Dave Hilton was a Canadian boxer and pederast. He molested his own daughters, if that’s worse than molesting other kids. It probably is. His namesake writes at Debt Black Hole about his father, whose life is a Hank Williams Sr. song. A veteran whose son supported him, psychological problems, wife walked out, went broke, etc. Plenty of which was his own doing. Dave talks about when to finally cut someone loose.

One wag (alright, it was Nelson Smith of Financial Uproar) recently stated that if the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, isn’t the 2nd-best time 19 years ago? Boomer and Echo remind us that every day you fail to start investing is one more day without compounding interest. No, you’re not going to lose all your money. Yes, it can be a little dry. No, you probably don’t know what to invest in. Yes, you need to read a book. Seriously, just do it.

Speaking of Mr. Smith, you’re not going to believe this, but he has an opinion on Greg Smith; the 12-year Goldman Sachs employee who quit the company and publicly complained about what a horrible place it is to work. Nelson’s entire post is one line of spun gold after another, so we’re not going to ruin it for you by offering lots of excerpts. But we had to include this stellar quote, in reference to the goyishly monikered Greg Smith bragging about competing at the Maccabiah Games:

I LOVE the fact there’s a Jewish Olympics. Greg’s first choice was to enter the money counting competition, but he knew he had no chance against the dominant Rothschild dynasty, who haven’t lost the event since 1874.

Now here’s a sentiment we can get behind. Eric J. Nisall at DollarVersity decries people who can’t spell nor punctuate. Which is bad enough, but it’s exponentially worse when you do it in your public correspondence. Eric J. shows an example of an error-laden flyer from a local pizza joint. Foisting sloppy English on the world isn’t a way to have potential customers take you seriously.

At least in theory it isn’t. Eric J. is correct, but

a) This is nothing. Every day, we see examples 10 times worse than the one he cites.
b) Eric J. should try sifting through the Carnival of Wealth submissions one of these weeks.
c) He’s got a long, frustrating life ahead if this stuff bothers him.

Seriously, he does. Heck, we complained about this very same thing on ProBlogger last year and people got defensive. How dare you tell me that spelling counts, etc.

Liana and CardHub had themselves a little single-elimination tournament. It’s what you do this time of year. They began with 32 credit cards, separated them into “regions”, and…well, you can probably figure out what happened next.

Dan at ETF Base has an interesting aphorism that we’ll have to expand upon in detail one day: “cost matters more than strategy when it comes to passive investing.” That’s a slight variation on the belief that “you make your money going in” an investment. Dan thus lists the ETFs with the lowest cost: why eat up your returns with fees?

Also, the post features this week’s grammar pet peeve:

any investor can find a cheaper mutual fund option with ETFs.

What’s the point of the word “option” here? There isn’t one. The sentence reads better without it. It’s like places that advertise “interior decorating solutions”. How is that different than “interior decorating”? It isn’t, it’s just wordier.

The Savvy Scot encourages you to judge a book by something other than its cover (another proverb that technology has rendered obsolete.) This isn’t necessarily a pure personal finance post, but its lessons apply. Plus TSS is self-aware, a huge criterion for getting his submissions included.

Chris McDaniel guest posts at Christian PF, where he explains charitable remainder trusts. Donate stock to a charity, get money for it every year, and when you die (or the arrangement expires) the asset reverts to the charity. Just in case the idea of dying doesn’t excite you enough.

Someone check between the legs of Tim from Faith and Finance and report back with what you find. A male who keeps coupons in a binder, and asks friends and family members to save the coupon inserts from the Sunday newspaper? (Aside: What’s a newspaper? You mean those cumbersome, filthy things our grandparents used for staying informed on what happened yesterday?)

He speaks with authority, so we thought we’d give it a try.

Betty’s Mother: Hello?
Betty: Hi, Mom? Do you have Sunday’s paper?
Betty’s Mother: Yes, why?
Betty: Can you save the coupon inserts from it? I’ll come by and pick them up later. Or can you mail them?
(dial tone)

Free Money Finance has another book excerpt. Matt at Rambling Fever explains mutual funds to the uninitiated.

Building to a big crescendo. PKamp3 from DQYDJ.net explains highly combustible leveraged exchange-traded funds. Yes, you too can lose money by some multiple of how fast the market at large is losing money.

And that’ll do it. Thanks for reading. New post Wednesday, new CoW Monday, new Anti-tip of the day tomorrow, and you can catch us on ProBlogger and Investopedia. Later.

Kissing you where it hurts

We’ll spare you the details, but if today’s CoW seems a little sparse it’s because we had technical difficulties that we managed to overcome with little time to spare. This on the heels of the only CoW we’ve ever done where every single post was a good one, which is doubly ironic because that CoW followed the one in which we consciously decided to be nice and it went up in flames. God is obviously telling us to be true to ourselves.

As always, these are actual submissions from actual personal finance bloggers. If you want to submit, email us. But we’d prefer it if you just read. Let’s get crazy:

Liana at CardHub sent us a delightful note this week, so she gets to open up with a post about what credit cards to use overseas.

Jeffrey Strain guest posts at The Frugal Toad, where he lists 11 ways you can save money on your next ski trip. Timely, seeing as winter ends next week. Jeffrey thinks that if you borrow equipment and pack your own food instead of eating in a lodge, you’ll save money. Which you will, and if you didn’t know that before Jeffrey pointed it out you probably shouldn’t be propelling yourself down a hill at highway speeds. Again, we needed space to fill this week.

You’re darn right we’re going to include one of ours this week, especially since so many people left emails and tweets (instead of comments, which we no longer do) telling us how great it was. A review of a 140-year-old book by P.T. Barnum.

“People fear public speaking more than they do death.” “Your body is 98% (or whatever) water.” “Gambling is a tax on poor people.” Man, those aphorisms are so pithy, too. A shame that they’re all lies. PKamp3 at DQYDJ debunks that last one, proving that the higher your income, the more likely it is that you’ll claim gambling winnings on your tax return. He’s got charts and everything.

Could his study be unintentionally biased? Perhaps, if poor people aren’t claiming winnings on their taxes. (If you don’t know, when you win over a certain amount in a casino you can’t escape the taxes. And if you didn’t know that, kudos to you.) Or maybe richer people can afford to gamble in regulated places like casinos, whereas a sufficiently poor person in Iowa can’t afford to fly to Vegas to lose money. WARNING: The comments on this post are depressing. For instance:

chances of winning the lottery are less than 1%.  Chances at roulette is at best 50%.  Chances at poker are higher than 50%.

Let’s break that down. Yes, “chances of winning the lottery are” technically less than 1%. But that’s so misleading as to be unhelpful. It’s like saying that the sun is more than 1000 miles from the Earth.

Some of you are reading that and saying, “So what? The sun is more than 1000 miles from the Earth. What’s your point?” The point is that the chance of a random American living in San Diego is less than 1%, as is the chance of that same person being killed by a meteor. That doesn’t make the two possibilities equal, or anywhere near equal.

Also, the chance of winning at roulette is never better than 47.4%.

(Those same people are now saying, “47.4%, 50%, close enough. You’re splitting hairs.”)

We so aren’t. A game that gives you a 50% chance of winning (and that pays double your money) doesn’t exist, at least not in a casino. If it did, they wouldn’t offer it, because the house wouldn’t make any money. It’d break even, as would you. Go ask a candidate who won 47.4% of the vote in a 2-person election if that’s close enough to 50.*

And “Chances at poker are higher than 50%?” Where?

Also, this comment:

The Powerball will always be the best investment in the world.  I still think throwing $2 into a lottery is just about the best decision anyone can make.  Even if the odds are against you, a tiny $2 ticket every few months for the chance at $200+ million is a great deal.  I mean, without the lottery few people would ever have any exposure to really high-value opportunities.

The commenter was serious. At least we think he was. Here, read this.

Alright, back to the real world. Dividend Growth Investor explains how you can’t live off dividend income until said income exceeds your expenses. Also, helpful explanations of what Procter & Gamble, Chevron, Philip Morris and PepsiCo (“engages in the manufacture, marketing, and sale of foods, snacks, and carbonated and non-carbonated beverages”) do.

Peggy Hill Karen Bryan at Help Me To Save opens with “In my opinion, the fifties are a very important time for women’s financial planning” and it just gets better from there. (Reference lost on anyone who never saw King of the Hill. By the way, the show’s first 9 years were great. Everything after that was garbage.)

Whoever said “neither a borrower nor a lender be” had no imagination, no ambition, and probably died in squalor. You almost have to borrow money to build wealth, unless you have an unusually well-paying job. Boomer and Echo understand that, and this week they explain how getting indebted to invest is a bad thing if you don’t do your homework only.**

Mich at Beating the Index returns with a submission on offshore drilling. As the prices of oil and its distillates rise, it makes more economic sense to drill in hard-to-reach places. Like the ocean floor. Mich lists some companies that might show promise over the next investing cycle.

If you hate commas you’ll love Brandon Crombar’s post at Shared Financial Success in which he tells you how he made lots of money on eBay and how you can too if you just follow his advice which includes not setting a reserve price and also ending your sales on Sunday not to mention opening bidding at low levels like 99¢.

Colin Williams at Humble Savers opens by telling us that “Frequent Flyer miles programs can be difficult to understand”, and if you think that’s true, you should see his post that attempts to simplify them.

If you’ve got a British Petroleum*** credit card, John Kiernan at Wallet Blog recommends you find something better. BP’s card used to give somewhat easily calculable rewards. Now, the company is obfuscating its rewards program and reducing rewards by almost one-third across the board.

Finally, Paula Pant at Afford-Anything summarizes what we’re here for and why we’re doing this, as well as anybody could. The richer you are, the more options you have. People who say “money isn’t everything” are saying “I’d like less choice in my life.”

That actually wasn’t so short after all. A couple of diatribes, and it’s as if nothing ever changed. Join us next week for another exciting rendition of the Carnival of Wealth, along with updates every Wednesday and Friday on how to improve your finances, and daily Anti-Tips. See you then.

*Yes, we’re aware that George W. Bush won less of the popular vote in 2000 than Al Gore did. The United States presidential election isn’t a standard election. It’s 50 simultaneous elections, each weighted for population and then added. Civics 101. Thank you. 

**That sentence reads awkwardly because of the “only”, but that’s the one place it has to go to convey the intended meaning.

***The name is officially “BP”. Whatever. Sorry, but a 2-letter acronym doesn’t distinguish the company enough. “BP” could mean Bell’s palsy, boiling point, binge & purge, etc. The folks at British Petroleum are awfully confident if they think they can somehow commandeer that digraph for themselves. 

In fact, Wikipedia tells us that employees of Bletchley Park, the United Kingdom’s main cryptography center during World War II, referred to their workplace as “BP” so that outsiders would assume they were talking about British Petroleum. In other words, British Petroleum management knows that the “BP” moniker is ambiguous yet insists on using it. That and the Gulf of Mexico.