Or as it’s unofficially known, the Super Bowl of Hunting

Hope you enjoyed the Big Game. (God, that was awful. We’re better than that. Are we? Probably not.) Without further ado (or as people who want to sound smart and end up failing like to say, “Without further adieu,”) onto the Carnival:

(First post rejected because it came from 2011tax.org, the same people behind last week’s 2008tax.org. They’re getting closer.)

First real post is from the magnificent Rob Aeschbach, a/k/a The Military Financial Planner. Rob served in the United States Marine Corps, and laments that his fellow servicemen and women aren’t that good with money. We can’t imagine that they’re worse than the civilians we’ve met, but we’ll defer to Rob. He doesn’t submit every week, but when he does it’s a treat. His candor and bluntness are something we need more of.

It’s safe to say that erstwhile Army officer Jason at Hull Financial Planning is not part of Rob’s sample. If Jason isn’t our best week-in/week-out submitter, he’s in the top 3. This week, Part I of a 2-parter on the placebo effect and how it pertains to (irrational) financial decisions. Psychological benefits are only beneficial if they work. Too often, people in financial trouble prefer the taste of a sugar pill without checking to see if it’s laced with bromotrifluoromethane.

We don’t have favorite posts; they’re like our children, ranging from good and conscientious to failing and inconsistent, but we love them all anyway. That being said, our favorite type of post is the one that indeed reads as though it was written by a child. Take it away, Chris at Easy Extra Dollar. (Folks, read this excerpt aloud for full effect):

Running a business is not that an easy task. You have to think carefully that you will be handling a big responsibility though it is not that a big business. You waited for how many years to earn money and with that; you have to make sure that you will be spending your money in a sure and 100% assurance to earn more and will add an additional extra income.

What the hell? Chris’s About page says he has an MBA. We’d joke about what clown college gave it to him, but Manti Te’o went to Notre Dame and was named an academic All-American.

If we put Chris’s post side-by-side with Pauline’s at Reach Financial Independence, and asked you to guess which was the native English speaker, you’d get it wrong. We only wish Mademoiselle Paquin had been born in the United States so she could run for President. While hundreds of thousands of American (and European) students love to complain about their financial situations, Pauline embraced hers. She bought assets and sold liabilities, or did the student equivalent of same, living in humble conditions while she was young enough to prudently do so. She took one retail job after another to pay her way through school, didn’t take on any debt, and today is a Central American real estate tycoon while barely past the age of 30.

I find it hard to see value in a $150,000 degree.

If only everyone else did.

We wish we could run the comments that DQYDJ.net‘s operator appends to his weekly submissions, but they aren’t for public consumption. This week, Cameron Daniels announced his deleverage plans. He’s the rare cat who did take on student debt yet doesn’t regret it. He also has a financial defense for that absence of regret. Cameron wants to pay off his debts as slowly as possible, which we can neither unequivocally agree nor disagree with until we know what the interest rates are. But we’re leaning toward “agree”.

(Another post from Easy Extra Dollar’s Chris, this one on a different site. Sorry, you don’t roast someone twice in one night.)

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro shares details of his upcoming honeymoon, as the Carnival of Wealth temporarily becomes Woman’s Day magazine. Alright, that’s only partially fair. He’s redeeming credit card points to visit Rome, Athens and Constantinople (it’ll re-Christianize one day, just you wait.) Good advice, but dammit Harry, you’ve got to get a bigger font.

A favorite urban legend from the 1990s was “The major tobacco companies have already bought vast swaths of marijuana fields in anticipation of its legalization.” Well, now look who’s laughing. While assessing the investment potential of several marijuana and ancillary stocks, Andrew at 101 Centavos crammed in not only plenty of worthwhile data, but every conceivable cannabis-related pun. Worth it just for the photo of Great Weed Pharmaceuticals’ quality control supervisor. Also, in classic Andrew fashion he forced us to reexamine our own viewpoint, in particular our Objectivist credentials:

Libertarian-minded types like to prattle on about the savings in the state resources and expenditures currently employed in enforcement and prosecution of drug offenses.  They would not be required if pot were legalized.  Sure, law enforcement officers’ time would be freed up to give the rest of us more speeding tickets.

In our own particular version of Galt’s Gulch, police would concentrate less on ticketing speeders and more on keeping slow drivers out of the passing lane.

This last one makes no sense, but his spelling and grammar are impeccable. From newcomer Dave at The New York Budget, a rationalization of living in The Worst City in America. This post attempts to draw parallels between different beers and aspects of personal finance. Dave keeps the specious blogger commandment to end off each post with a question, which is supposed to inspire people to leave comments. We’ve never seen a concluding query quite like this one:

What types of beers (or alcohol in general) remind you of personal finance?

Umm…Everclear and Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball? Because they’re both transparent ploys to destroy you? Sorry, we’re new at this.

Check us out on Investopedia and the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Adiós.

We frequent this little Italian joint on a side street in downtown Lahaina, replete with street seating. A neighborhood cat is always out there, politely waiting for table scraps, whom the restaurant has more or less adopted.

“So what’s the cat’s name?”

“Oh, we call her Mehitabel.”

“Is there an Archy, too?”

“¿Eh?“

“Archy and Mehitabel.”

“Yes, Mehitabel.”

“So what made you name her ‘Mehitabel?'”

“It’s her favorite food. She always eat Mehitabel.”

Mark Hanna at Debt, Dividends & Diversions bought a new refrigerator. (Is that adjective superfluous? Do people buy old refrigerators?) Which doesn’t sound like it would justify a blog post, except that Mark calculated how many kilowatt-hours said fridge would consume over its life, and how long it would take to break even on its purchase price. Of course, he had to factor in the $20 he spent on a power meter that gauges the electricity consumption of a single appliance. This analysis is somewhat Hammian, but at least Mark recognizes that.

In addition to being autonomous, entrepreneurial, inspirational, funny, and frighteningly intelligent, Pauline Paquin of Reach Financial Independence is trilingual. Actually, quintilingual – English, French and Spanish fluently, a couple of undisclosed languages not as well. Pauline explains how multiple fluency is more than just a party trick or a way to embarrass monolingual people who think you can’t understand them; she’s used her proficiency to make herself wealthier.

Andrew from 101 Centavos had better not take any more half-year sabbaticals without clearing it with us first. More brilliance, this time in the form of an analysis of old-school direct-sales cosmetics company Avon vs. multi-level marketing upstart Nu Skin. We can’t figure out how the latter is still a viable business model, nor can we figure out Andrew’s genius:

The post is mostly about how Avon should have hired a salesperson rather than an engineer for its new CEO (who happens to be a lady), but touches on the stratospheric rise of Nu Skin’s stock price. The very next trading day after Andrew wrote the post (January 14), Nu Skin began cascading. Like, 44% in 2 days:

The Chinese government accused Nu Skin of false advertising. Essentially, Beijing thought that a pyramid scheme operator was using some sort of…tetrahedral business model. This being America, a class-action suit came next. Andrew noted that few investors had been selling Nu Skin short. Those investors are now shopping for yachts and solid-gold patio furniture.

You guys are so mean, you never have anything nice to say about anyone. Did you read our summary of the last couple of submissions?

Somebody named Kali Hawlk (no, not “Hawk”) guest posts at Your PF Pro this week. She seems to have it together, having graduated college with a meaningless degree but managing to carry zero student or credit card debt while owning a house. Kali’s not big on spelling nor grammar, and has that annoying habit of using “gift” as a verb, but we can get with her sentiment regarding weddings:

You could spend something like 25 bucks to apply for a marriage license, or you could spend 25 thousand bucks and legally end up with the same result.

Kali spared a few expenses on her own wedding, but admits she could have spared more. BONUS: Comments from other ladies (and a couple of sensitive beta males) offering sympathy for the tragedy of Kali’s expensive professional photographer ruining the shoot. At least now Kali knows to use a friend with a camera to take photos at her next wedding.

(Guy who submits every week from the site 2008Taxes.org? We’d be much more inclined to run your stuff if you contemporized your site’s title a little.)

CoW mainstay and friend of the program Paula Pant at Afford Anything only looks infallible. This week she confesses to what was probably the worst financial decision of her life, one that cost her a staggering $3.60 hour of her time. (Paula measures these expenses in time, not money, as you probably should.) It might have been dumb, but as Paula points out, people make financial mistakes thousands of times greater than that every day. Even worse, they justify them. At least Paula realized after a minute that she screwed up, however minimally.

A new submitter, Brian Fourman at Luke 1428. We Googled it (sorry for not committing the complete King James version to memory, we’re not Protestants) and found this:

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it?

So far, so good. Brian can write, although we cringe at the topic of his debut submission: technical analysis, a/k/a trying to divine wisdom out of stock charts. Brian even admits that the positive 70-year record of the S&P 500 might continue for the next 70 years, or might not. Buy assets, sell liabilities, take past performance with great reservations.

Bryan Chau at Success Pen Pal reviewed a movie.

Two more and then we’ll call it a carnival. In his previous life, Justin at Root of Good helped build a billion-dollar, 20-mile toll road that requires long-term maintenance. Applying the same truths to his house, Justin annualized the costs that would maintain the house’s totality of features. And then factored those costs into his retirement budget because a) he should and 2) being retired, Justin has a lot of time on his hands. (Also, Justin’s dishwasher will last more than 8 years if he rinses every item and uses those high-efficiency pods.)

Last but never least, Jason at Hull Financial Planning goes full debunker this week. Don’t complain about inflation – a little of it is vital to the economy (see Chapter II of Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense.) Don’t cut expenses when you can increase revenue. Time is money (see Pant, Paula.) And 2 more truisms that we’d repeat here, but you’d be better off going to the original source.

We’ll be back tomorrow. The CoW will be back Monday. Check us out here and here. Thanks for coming.

Alyssa Lommel, no longer a double-fister

Dumbest college student on the planet? Find us a dumber one.

We’ve been following this story since its early December debut. The comfortable girl on the left went out drinking. Or as she tweeted (since deleted), “tequila shots tonight #Yuuuuuup”.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s worth a Google. She drank herself to the verge of unconsciousness, at which her point her friends drove her home to a house she shared with some other students. One was asleep, one was watching a movie while wearing headphones, and Ms. Lommel passed out on the porch and ended up with all 20 digits frostbitten by the time a passerby saw her the next morning.

The moral to the story is pretty evident, at least to us: don’t drink. Not “don’t binge drink”, just “don’t drink.” If you think that’s overreacting, a) think of all the people whose solution to peanut allergy reactions in schools is the absolute prohibition of peanuts, and 2) may we refer you to the amputated fingers and toes again?

Point: Alyssa Lommel is old enough to drive and vote, which would imply some level of adulthood and responsibility. Counterpoint: tequila shots tonight #Yuuuuuup.

By the way, the tweet was deleted the day the story hit the wires. How did she pull that off? She was comatose, hospitalized, and/or thumbless at the time, and couldn’t have had ready access to her Twitter account. No joke here – she must have had a pact with one of her sorority sisters. “Here’s my password. Use only if I ever do something colossally stupid that makes national headlines.”

Amazingly, wags have blamed Ms. Lommel’s friends who drove her home instead of blaming Ms. Lommel herself. One observer after another has said that the friends shouldn’t merely have driven her home (to a house with roommates, in a low-crime area), but should’ve waited in the subzero temperatures until she signaled her presence inside the house via a light or a semaphore flag of some sort. If they’d done all that, but then failed to tuck her in and give her a goodnight kiss, that would have been yet another level of negligence. The stupid broad should be happy that the friends didn’t make her find her own way home. That she never thought to kick in a window nor knock on a neighbor’s door is apparently society’s problem.

It’s the blaming of the friends that gets us the most. Hey sanctimonious observers, quick to point fingers at anyone but the most obvious transgressor – did you ever think that maybe the friends had each had a couple of pops, and weren’t in the best frame of mind for making decisions themselves? Cut them a little slack. (That point is 47% sarcastic, 53% sincere.) A secondary Monday-morning quarterbacking observation is that “this could happen to anyone.” No, it could happen only to someone who gets blackout drunk.

So now, two months later, the amputations have progressed slowly. The feet are mostly gone, and even though they might look big under all those bandages, the hands are next. From now on, Alyssa will have to drink her tequila through a straw. In moderation, of course.

Alright, let’s get started in earnest. Too frequently, we bury Jason at Hull Financial Planning deep in the CoW. Research shows that even the most intrepid Control Your Cash readers have trouble making it to the end of a post, which is probably our fault, so here’s Jason’s explanation of how an S&P 500 stock chosen at random will likely underperform the index. On Wall Street as in life as a whole, the losers outnumber the winners.

A few weeks ago we put Critical Financial on notice for running a post from a woeful guest blogger. Site founder Jim returns this week with a piece on how awesome he thinks Donald Trump is. Jim thinks the Donald gets a “bad wrap.” Maybe Jim is thinking of the job that the hospital did on Alyssa Lommel’s hands. Then again, if she’d worn 8 lbs. of tensor bandage on that fateful night, she’d still have fingers. “Bad wrap” is only our 2nd-favorite misspelling in this post, a very distant 2nd to the magnificent “hob-knobbing”.

On first glance, and repeated viewings, Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence would seem to have it all figured out. A budding real estate empire along with other entrepreneurial endeavors, the freedom to travel, a fantastic climate, no kids cramping her style. Unfortunately, not everyone in the 9-to-5 world that Pauline escaped from can comprehend this:

My mum always asks me if I am going to look for a job soon, or if I need money (I make more than she does)

Paradoxically,

My friends…conclude I am on a perpetual holiday, probably funded by my mum.

You know how as kids we’re told not to care what people think, just to be ourselves? That advice is of little use then, but can come in handy when you’ve reached financial independence at an early age. Otherwise you’d go insane:

Then, there are new friends. The ones who think I was probably a drug dealer or an escort to be able to retire so early.

Pauline refers to that subgroup of people who’ve excused themselves from the traditional track as a “tribe”, and she’s right. Non-members who don’t understand never will, and there isn’t much you can do about it. The price of freedom isn’t just eternal vigilance, it’s understanding that few others want to be along for the ride.

Joshua Rodriguez at CNA Finance looks at unsecured credit cards and possible alternatives to them.

Time is money, so Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro hired a “cleaning lady.” (Ours would break a mop handle over your head if you called her anything other than a housekeeper.)

No, hiring a housekeeper is not an undeniable waste of money. Some of us would rather spend time taking advantage of Ricardo’s Law of Comparative same than cleaning. Furthermore, a trustable housekeeper is invaluable during out-of-town emergencies. Heck, ours is technically a cat feeder first and a housekeeper second. That being said, we didn’t get her from an agency. Find someone you trust, or someone whom someone you trust trusts.

Good Lord, is that it? It seems so. While CoW stalwart Dividend Growth Investor remains on hiatus, Justin at Root of Good explains how much he earned in dividends last year and how he did it. In retirement, Justin has a lot of time to make aesthetically pleasing charts.

And we’re done. New post Wednesday, new Stacking Benjamins podcast later this week, and of course we’re on Investopedia. Thanks for coming.