Ladies like them non-threatening, and nothing says non-threatening like a scarf.

Lately we’ve been chided for our attitude. It appears we routinely hurt some people’s feelings with the Carnival of Wealth. Those people aren’t all female, but they certainly exhibit the traits. That being said, most of our distaff readers seem to like us. And we all know all the fellas do. But for the benefit of the easily offended, this is the Nice Guy Edition of the Carnival of Wealth. If we can’t say anything nice, we won’t say anything at all.

The Carnival of Wealth is a weekly collection of personal finance blog posts. You can submit your post here, but we’d prefer it if you just read. If you are going to submit, don’t forget to read the submission guidelines, which no one ever does. Especially not this week, when we’re pitching on only 5 days’ rest. In the words of Mills Lane, “LA GA I OE!”

We’re wondering if Financial god plans on running for office. We’d vote for him, and that we live in a different country is just a technicality.

Minimum wage laws raise unemployment, that’s unmistakable. What we didn’t know was how badly they do in some instances. An increase in the minimum wage, mandated by Washington, has torn an irreparable hole in the American Samoan economy. Find out how big in this brilliant post.

LaTisha at Young Adult Finances says that if you’re indeed a young adult, part of the fun of adulthood is doing your taxes. Use TurboTax if you hate spending money, a tax preparer at H&R Block if you love it. Better yet, derive most of your income through capital gains and hire a professional. Costs more, but worth it. Make sense? Maybe not yet. But it will.

If you’re not quite there yet, Jason at Work Save Live explains the difference between deductions and credits. Handy to know if you plan to avoid being audited.

We thought Luke at Learn Bonds was being sarcastic when he said

Stocks were up big today. All three major stock indexes were (sic) rose between 0.96 percent and 1.51 percent. The DOW had a triple digit gain rising 123 points. Is the economy recovering? YES!

Unfortunately, he wasn’t. We touched on this on Friday. Relax.

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff wonders whether a high health insurance premium is better than a high deductible. This will all be moot in a couple of years anyway, when the federal government starts giving it to us “free”.

Laura Edgar at Nerd Wallet lists the 10 highest-earning online savings accounts. “High-yield” is a relative term here. #7 on the list is from EverBank, which pays .76%. And you have to maintain a $5000 balance with that account, or pay $9 a month. To earn $3.17 a month. Good thing Ben Bernanke is still keeping interest rates so low, and the economy is thus bouncing back as strongly as it is. <cough>criminal<cough>

Hear, hear. If you really want to earn money in a de facto “savings” account, forget about parking 5 large with EverBank and put it somewhere else. Anywhere else, except with Uncle Sam. Phil Taylor at PT Money says you’re just lazy if you like getting a tax refund every year, and he’s right. Pay yourself first, indeed.

Jeremy Waller at Personal Finance Whiz is the guy who missed the Super Bowl because he didn’t “care about either of the teams”, which apparently is a prerequisite for watching pro football crown its world champion. That, or the late February 2012 clubhouse leader for “line that if we didn’t identify the sex of the writer, you’d swear came from a lady.” Anyhow, Jeremy’s back with an exposition on the different kinds of financial risk that exist. No, they aren’t all the same.

Your humble blogger used to sit on the board of directors of a Canadian mining company, and assures you that few industries are as exciting. And few bloggers know as much about it as Mich at Beating the Index. There’s one particular driller that’s caught his eye, and his money.

A Blinkin at Funancials asks if your perception clouds the value of things. It does, and he illustrates his discovery with a couple of examples.

Is this a “lost decade” in stocks? Dividend Growth Investor says no, because stocks were valued way too high to begin with – Dow components going for 27 times earnings, etc. He lists a bunch of companies with consistent (and consistently increasing) dividends, hopefully a few of which can make your portfolio do magical things.

Οδυσσέας Παπαδημητρίου at Wallet Blog is one of the few people who can write about how to choose a credit card without making it sound like he’s in anyone’s back pocket. He compares no-balance transfer fee cards this week, which you shouldn’t need anyway, because you don’t have a balance, because you pay your bills on time, right? This is easy.

Liana at Card Hub wondered how credit card issuers process chargebacks. Her information is solid, despite her summarizing it in the most cumbersome pair of 6-column charts ever created.

In a recent post, John at Married With Debt tipped us off that he’s part of Tim Ferriss’s (of The 4-Hour Work Week fame) cult. How did we know this? Because John said he’s started reading Stoic philosophers, and the only other non-academic alive who admits to reading the Stoics is Mr. Ferriss. This week John is a little more blatant in his hero-worship of the confirmed bachelor lifestyle design maven with the piercing gaze and fondness for man-purses.

Aloysa at My Broken Coin arrived in Salt Lake from Lithuania 12 years ago with barely any money and even less English. But you’d never guess that English is her 3rd language by reading her posts. This week she lists 50 Things No One Told (Her) About The United States. Many are what you’d expect, but #30 depressed us to no end.

Eddie at Finance Fox tried to negotiate his way to lower car insurance rates. Eddie’s lucky enough to live in Ontario, a province with an actual car insurance market.

What do you mean? What province doesn’t have a car insurance market? 

British Columbia, at least. In the 1970s the provincial government – Canada’s first socialist one – decided that the insurance companies were profiting off the backs of the downtrodden. The government took over, created a single-payer system, and if you want a new paint job in Vancouver, all you have to do is scratch your car and say that someone vandalized you. Hey, it’s free! Who cares where the money comes from, we’ve got legal pot to smoke.

The Ultimate Juggle’s Indian remote assistant spent 2 minutes defecating out a post about how shopping online is good for the environment because…well, do you know why? It’s because you don’t have to get in your car and burn fossil fuels to shop online. There’s also a link to some British company that sells voucher codes. Make sure you click on it, so The Ultimate Juggle can afford a more expensive Indian remote assistant who doesn’t write in such a stilted manner.

(sigh) It’s happening. We knew it would soon enough. Best laid plans, etc.

Wayne at Young Family Finance farmed out his post too, tasking his Indian remote assistant with the following assignment: write 6 paragraphs on the most overdone topic in personal finance, i.e., creating an emergency fund. Spelling doesn’t count, just write something. The more sections you break it into, the better. See how ridiculous you can make it: tell people to give blood – literally, give blood – as a way to sequester some cash. No one’s actually going to do this, of course – if you need money for your blood, your emergency has already started. Also, use “individual” instead of “person”. It’ll give the post a pretentious, scholarly kick that using plain English never does.

Don’t consciously spend. Don’t consciously invest. Just do whatever. That seems to be the underlying message from Amanda L Grossman at Frugal Confessions, who recommends that you

accept where you are in life.

Which makes us wonder why she submitted to the CoW. Why expend the effort to get a few more readers? Why didn’t she just accept where she was in life, i.e. not scheduled to appear in this week’s edition? Unclear.

Accepting where you are in life. It’s what made America great, and what continues to propel the human species forward.

An obese fortune teller named Erin Pavlina used to submit every week. She’d write about auras, crystals, past lives…basically anything but personal finance. Not only that, her posts were weeks, sometimes months old. But she can’t compare to Tushar at Free Small Business Resource, who actually had so little respect for you that he sent us a post that’s 3 years and 3 months old.

Even better, his submission consists of nothing but a cut-and-paste of someone else’s work from The New York Times. The December 2, 2008 New York Times.

The vein is starting to throb. Yes, it’s throbbing. Face turning purple. In the words of Phil Hendrie via Lloyd Bonafied, “Alright, that tears it.”

Here’s what we hear every day, so much so that we finally created a CoW around its theme:
“Why can’t you be nice? Why do you always have to be so negative?”

THIS IS WHY. Because 3 times a week, we write entertaining, actionable, informative, not unfunny, grammatically sound, well-researched, lengthy posts that explore personal finance and its countless subtopics. Sure, our attitude is awful, but our content, value and honesty are beyond reproach.

And then some worthless jackball tries to foist this crap on us. Someone whom we’ve foolishly given space to in the past. And for what? A plagiarist who can’t even stay in the right decade. Damn you, Tushar, for taking a perfectly good Nice Guy CoW and turning it into the Carnival of Appropriation of Antiques. Any deviance from the previously considered nice-guy path will now be laid squarely at your feet.

But at least Tushar’s theft is of something non-monetary. For actual literal theft, we go to the presumably able-bodied Jeffrey Trull at Money Spruce, who collected food stamps last year.

You’re calling the guy a “thief” for being poor? God, you really are a monster. 

There is no earthly excuse for a healthy person collecting food stamps. Rob a bank instead. At least that takes some guts.

It’s the utter nonchalance of it that gets us. Jeffrey remarks in his submission that he doesn’t think it’s right that millionaires can theoretically game the system and get food stamps of their own if their incomes are low enough. Maybe it isn’t right, but who is he to be the one complaining about it? 

Where’s the shame? Why isn’t there any? Adam Carolla, who would make an awesome 3rd-party presidential candidate, has noticed the phenomenon of people who suck at the public teat being the ones who complain the loudest about the teat’s dryness and inability to produce more milk. The ones who pay taxes don’t complain at all, at least nowhere near as forcefully as the ones on the receiving end of all that largesse.

Just read the comments on the post. It gets worse. Fellow CoW submittees are collecting food stamps too, and it isn’t to their liking, either. Simple Island Living didn’t submit the post, but she incurs collateral damage for commenting on it:

The only reason I qualify for state health is because I am pregnant and my son is a minor. If those weren’t the case, I would be shelling out $800 a month for healthcare for the two of us.

The one thing I do disagree with you about is the use of food stamps for organic food. When it comes down to it, getting organic milk for my son is extremely important for me because he is 19 months old. When a child is that young, if it is possible to get milk that is free of hormones it is, to me, one of our higher priorities. It’s just that their bodies are so fragile and while he’s so young, we want him to be as hormone and pesticide free as possible.

Apart from that, if you’re talking millionaires who are on food stamps and getting their organic truffle oil, well then, perhaps a touch of reality would be good for them.

If these aren’t the end times, they’re never coming. Apparently beggars can be choosers, and that choice involves organic milk.

She lives in Hawai’i, where organic milk costs NINE DOLLARS A GALLON. That’s not an exaggeration. And for most of the rest of us, who actually work for a living and don’t believe it’s our fellow man’s job to take care of us, organic milk and the organic truffle oil she decries are two symptoms of the same disease. Nor were our bones compromised from a childhood of drinking non-organic milk. Nor did we buy into the ludicrousness of the loaded adjective “organic”, which means “comes from living things.” You know, like cows.

Oh, and did you catch that she’s pregnant? Of course you did, and of course she is. Because when you’re collecting food stamps, that’s a great time to spread your legs open and take on another kid. Then again, why not? It’s not like her out-of-pocket expenses are going to be big. Collecting taxpayer money while pouring liquid gold down her children’s throats will give her more free time to blog about personal finance. Jesus Mary & Joseph.

Let’s not lose sight here. A guy who spent a year on food stamps is blogging about personal finance. Is this what we’ve degenerated into? Maybe there’s a lifelong smoker in a hospice somewhere who just got a lung removed and can blog about health and fitness. Sure, we’ll run it. Why not? It’s the Carnival of Wealth! Anything goes! If your experience is the exact opposite of what a prudent, conscientious person would have done, all the better! We’ll mix it up a little bit, show the other side for a change!

We’re so not done. Do we even need to mention that he’s got a master’s degree? Of course he does! Because an education is the most important thing in the world, and the more time you spend in school, the greater your earning power! With only a bachelor’s, he couldn’t have afforded the -$154 a month he was taking in food stamps. And if he’d only had a high school diploma? God, he’d be destitute.

Wait, he was destitute with all that edjumacation. He’s also a national service volunteer, which means we’re taking care of him on both sides. We didn’t retain anything about student loans, but would anyone like to wager that he left college with zero debt?

Read those last few paragraphs and give us one good reason why this country should have any right to call itself an economic titan. Our healthy, educated, articulate 20-somethings are sitting on their posteriors with their hands out, collecting money placed there under force of law by the productive, taxpaying members of society. Leaving the former group to, again, write about personal finance. He could write about any other topic in the universe and it’d make more sense.

I have been attracted to the topic of personal finance by my desire to improve my spending and savings habits.

Yes, and it shows.

Some of you are going to complain, saying that we tore someone apart for no good reason. We have plenty of reason, illustrated above. Also, read this before you comment.

A “nice guy” CoW. Like socialism, a bad idea in theory that worked even worse in practice. See you next week.

Happy Humpday

This week only, the Carnival of Wealth jumps ahead 48 hours. Daylight Saving Time, you know. That and the Totally Money Carnival, which the delightful Harri was gracious/naive enough to let us host Monday. Two successive carnival posts are verging on a little much, so on Friday we’ll post something of our own derivation. And this coming Monday, the CoW will return to its regularly scheduled time.

Ah, the CoW. The finest blog carnival of its kind. Personal finance blog posts from across the universe, selected for your reading pleasure. If you have a blog and would like to submit, do so here. READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES, NOT THAT ANYONE EVER DOES. Or just read and enjoy. Starting now:

This might be the last-ever installment of the Carnival of Wealth, because a bullet between the eyes seems like the only way to deaden the pain after hearing that that hyperfrugal, inconsistent, parsimonious, self-parodying lunatic Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar might have sold that awful blog of his for a 7-digit sum. That’s the estimate from Jeffrey at Money Spruce. Thanks for that, Jeff.

Carnival of Wealth founder Shailesh Kumar, the Cliff Burton to our Jason Newsted, guests on Boomer & Echo this week. Shailesh reached the inevitable conclusion that our politicians have yet to share with us: in a few years, there simply won’t be enough money. If you think anyone but you is ultimately responsible for your own retirement, you’re as naive as they want you to be. Find out how to avoid spending your dotage praying for the sweet release of death.

We can’t very well host Harri Pierce’s Totally Money Blog Carnival and not run a submission from her 2 days later, can we? The Totally Money maveness explains how to use social media to look for employment. There’s actual content in this post: she didn’t just write “tell your Facebook friends you want a new job”, which is how most bloggers would have handled this subject matter.

Darwin’s Money tells the incredible story of a graffiti artist who got some equity in Facebook years ago and is on the verge of being dirty rotten filthy stinking rich. Instead of kicking himself for not playing with spray cans when he was a kid, Darwin wisely reasons that almost every other graffiti artist on the planet is either sleeping on someone’s floor or in a jail cell. It’s called survivorship bias, and it’ll save you aggravation if you apply it to your life.

We love stories about how to ensure that Uncle Sam has a little bit less money to squander on light rail, hush payments to hostile foreign leaders and welfare for losers who refuse to work. Nathan Kim at Everyday Money Info debuts in the CoW this week with a brilliant post that explains how donating stock instead of cash can help reduce your tax bite. Nathan is yet another of the disproportionate number of smart personal finance bloggers who work as engineers. Hey, maybe developing your left brain really does mean something.

This week’s (1^st, there will be more) English usage pet peeve: writing that your readers should “consider” something. “Consider buying a house in a cheaper neighborhood.” “Consider shifting to a Roth 401(k).” Grow a pair already and have the strength of your convictions. Your dental hygienist doesn’t tell you to “consider” brushing and flossing, she tells you to brush and floss. “Consider”, used in this sense, is a pusillanimous and miserable word that should be put to death. Stop using it.

Jeremy Biberdorf at Modest Money wants you to consider buying an e-reader, a subject we know a little about. (He also used “needs” as a noun, which is even worse than “consider”, but one thing at a time.)

Apple couldn’t sit on the world’s largest pile of cash forever. Dan at High Yield Edge announces that now that Steve Jobs is dead, the company is finally looking at paying a dividend. Find out when and how much.

One of our favorite topics in the marketplace is anchoring. Teacher Man at My University Money demonstrates how “I got it on sale!” is possibly the single dumbest thing you can say after buying something.

Another upper-deck grand slam from Paula Pant at Afford-Anything, who recommends that you live like no one else, so you can live like no one else. If that sounds too Zen to be actionable, you’re reading it incorrectly. Click on the link and find out why she’s figured out in her 20s what most people never do.

Phil Taylor at PT Money is one of that smart minority of people who pay their credit card balances in full every month. So for his efforts, the credit bureaus are punishing him and making it more difficult for him to get a mortgage. All because of a quirk in the calendar, and the reporting bureaux’ inability to account for it. Sound insane? Believe it.

Get out of blue chips? Really? Ken Faulkenberry at AAAMP Blog (Arbor Asset Allocation Model Portfolio) is leaning towards doing so and focusing on…small-cap value stocks. A little too speculative for our tastes, but not for this seasoned investment advisor who’s using every method at his disposal to counter inflation.

Do you like detailed analysis? CoW newcomer Karl at Cult of Money has some for you. It’s somewhat technical, and a glimpse into the mind of someone whose investment strategy goes well beyond reading the business headlines and seeing what’s popular.

The Six-Figure Investor reviews a 20-year-old book at Dividend Ninja, which is a better idea than you might think. The guy who wrote the book (on value investing) hasn’t published since, but he still invests and still makes his results public. See if his strategy remains valid, and if it applies to your life.

At some point, American high school seniors (or better yet, their parents) are going to wake up and say, “Wait. Maybe we should do a cost-benefit analysis before cramming 4 more years of school into Junior’s already addled brain.” Until then, we’ve got the overwhelming problem of student debt to deal with. Shaun at Smart Family Finance knows that an easy fix is to consolidate your loans, if by “easy” you mean “disastrous.”

Instead of indulging your little 18-year-old punk’s fantasies of obtaining a degree in cinema studies or political science, have her open a Roth IRA instead. That’s what Ryan at Early Retirement Investments recommends. Ryan himself started at 21, and wishes he’d done so earlier. Find out why.

(Post rejected for its insulting premise. Save money on vacations by…vacationing close to home. Or going camping. Here’s an idea: save even more by spending your vacation in your living room. Submitters, if you’re going to write something that offers nothing of substance, save it for a less demanding carnival.)

(Post rejected because the submitter wrote a total of 3 paragraphs about switching car insurance, then dropped an inelegant link to 21st Century’s website in the final paragraph. They don’t publicize this, but do you know what 21st’s parent company is? AIG, the most horrible private corporation in the universe. R.J. Reynolds is less destructive to humanity than AIG is.)

(Crap, is it shaping up to be one of those carnivals? One with more rejections than acceptances?)

This week’s misleading post title comes from Jen at Master the Art of Saving: “The Downside of Using Credit Cards Responsibly.” Jen went on vacation with one card, which has a $600 limit. You can guess what happened.

Shaun at Young Adult Finances says if you’re not ready to buy an investment property yourself, take on partners. Or not.

Speaking of property, Amanda L Grossman at Frugal Confessions found a too-good-to-be-true daily deal hotel stay in New Orleans. The catch was that it was a timeshare, complete with mandatory 2-hour presentation.

(Post rejected for its opening sentence:

“I was looking at my credit card today [the one with the nearly $18,000 balance])

Alright, fine. We haven’t included a horrible example in some time. It’s from the perfectly titled American Debt Project, guest posting at Personal Finance Whiz. The author, whatever his name might be, talks about credit cards “enabling” him and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about himself and looking in the mirror. So yeah, if you think anyone who’s $35,000 in debt has the authority to talk about personal finance, you might as well kill a few minutes and read his post.

A Blinkin at Funancials writes about how “Loyalty is for Losers”. From the title we hoped he was talking about being an employee, but he was referring to being a consumer. Either way, his observations are more than valid.

When Alexander the Great was 26, he’d already conquered Asia Minor and most of the rest of the Middle East. 26-year-old Kevin McKee at Thousandaire dresses up like Spider-Man and loves to watch a TV show about a high school dance team, or something. In a completely unrelated tangent, Alexander’s sexual proclivities were open to question, too.

One of the funniest things (and there are many) about Canada is how it’s always a few years late to the party. MTV debuted in 1981; MuchMusic, in 1984. A similar deal with ESPN and TSN. Canadians were still drinking Tab when Diet Coke had made it into every corner of the United States. And now, in the late winter of 2011-12, Eddie at Finance Fox has discovered extreme couponing. Eddie’s proofreader apparently threw up her hands and ran out of the room screaming after a couple of weeks at the helm, quitting to leave him to his own devices and thesauri. Read this one slowly, because there’s no other way to.

(Look. You may think that you’re putting one over on your readers by getting an Indian remote assistant to write your posts. You aren’t. If this were a 1st-grader’s book report, we’d give it a gold star. But it’s supposedly coming from an adult, so it gets a black star, with one of its 5 points broken off. Thanks for the insight, Jester at The Ultimate Juggle.)

Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff is incapable of letting us down. He starts with a legitimate topic (his investments.) He quantifies like crazy. He gives details. He doesn’t employ the tired ritual of ending his posts with a couple of questions, allegedly to inspire commenters. If everyone was like him, the CoW would be much more informative (and our commentary considerably more subdued.)

Mich at Beating the Index, too. Mich got his hands on BP’s Annual Energy Outlook, which discusses future energy trends. Read and invest accordingly.

Passive Income to Retire explains how it’s not enough to build a nest egg. (A classic mistake poor people make.) Cash flow is everything. Money is dynamic, not static; the idea is not to work for it. The meaning of the second half of that last sentence changes depending on which word is emphasized. We’ll leave you to figure out which one it should be.

It’s good to know that the United States isn’t the only English-speaking North American nation whose elected representatives decided to take on the responsibility of keeping people fed in retirement, and who never consulted an actuarial table along the way. The Canada Pension Plan is on ground as shaky as the U.S.’s Social Security, and Financial god gives all the depressing details.

You’re still getting a tax refund? Come on. You don’t want to get a check on April 15. You want to send little checks to the IRS on March 31, June 30, September 30 and December 31. But if you do get a refund, Larry at Krant Cents has an idea of what you can do with it.

Paul Vachon at The Frugal Toad has practical advice for college kids who finally graduated and can’t wait to incur some good old-fashioned debt. Of course they don’t style it that way, but it’s what they end up doing. Paul recommends several behaviors and multiple books, although for some reason he left this one out.

Money Infant recommends that you automate your savings.

Οδυσσέας Παπαδημητρίου’s name looks even more splendid in the original Greek. The Wallet Blog guru thought he knew everything there was to know about airline credit cards. He switched his allegiance from Star Alliance to the company that calls itself The World’s Favourite Airline, and paid the price. Bonus: audio.

This was moderately funny once. This is extremely funny. And this from Your Finances Simplified is somewhere in between.

The good news is, he’s attempting to create passive income by being a landlord. The horrible, miserable, bad news is that his tenants are Section 8. Worse yet, he appears to have the least competent property manager in the universe. These losers can’t cough up $150 of an $825 rent payment, yet spend time devising a litany of ridiculous excuses for their landlord. The property manager is supposed to be the one playing bad cop here, yet doesn’t seem to mind failing to collect his percentage of the rent owed.

Aside: financial relationships are different than personal relationships. The former need to be coldly logical and, in at least two senses of the word, completely impersonal. Always treat people who owe you money worse than they treat you.

We usually dig what the folks at Card Hub have to say, and this week’s contribution from Liana continues the streak. The lesson: read the fine print. Otherwise you might ask for a credit limit increase on your First Premier credit card, and be on the hook for a fee equal to one-quarter of the increase. There are mafiosi who give their lenders more favorable terms.

Melissa Batai would make an excellent infantryman. She keeps coming, despite fusillade after fusillade. The former Control Your Cash Retard of the Month posts at Personal Finance Journey this week, and claims that she’s a good negotiator. We’ll let you decide.

Not satisfied with presiding over a stagnant stock market and an underused workforce, The Smartest President This Country Has Ever Had has decided to declare war on in-state municipal bond holders. If you thought that financing your state’s public works could benefit both you and the state, think again when you start paying taxes on that bond income. Luke at Learn Bonds has the depressing details.

Anisha Sekar at Nerd Wallet is very proud of her site’s “award-winning technology.” We’d love to know what awards it’s won. A Tony? A Pulitzer? A Vezina Trophy? Read this post if you think that Suze Orman is the only one who’s plugging a financially unsound prepaid debit card.

You can whine about how hard it is to build wealth, or you can max out your IRA and 401(k). My Money Design (and Mrs. My Money Design) did the latter. You can probably guess whether that’s worth emulating or not.

Thanks for reading. A new carnival in 7 5 days.