The most tanned people in Seattle

No, we’re not celebrating Halloween a week early. We’re just testifying to the resilience of this curious little carnival that we’ve chosen to foist upon the universe every Monday. If you run a personal finance blog, you can join in the carnage by submitting a recent post here. Submit more than once per carnival, and you’ll join the ranks of the undead. Same goes for submitting during the dark period (which starts at midnight Eastern Time Saturday, and stops when we go live Monday.) You ready? Here goes:

First out of the gate, the ubiquitous Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim. If you’re about to call it a career, the last thing you want sent your way are retirement problems. You spent years socking away your hard-earned cash, so you’d better be sure it’s there for you when you need it. Besides employer fraud, there are several retirement program pitfalls you need to avoid. Neal gives his top 5.

If you have no clue what a mutual fund is, no worries. It’s not like we’re born with that knowledge; you have to have picked it up at some point. Consumer Boomer explains what they are in reasonable detail.

Infomercial masquerading as a blog post? Oh yes, we do. Jeri Ford at the ungrammatically titled Help Me Travel Cheap asks which credit card has the best 50,000-mile signup bonus.

You see, we’re so dumb that we’d never notice that Jeri Ford and Craig Ford submit minutes apart every week. And that they happen to write on similar topics. And that Jeri’s above submission has Craig’s byline on it. From the masculine half of Papua New Guinea’s favorite missionary couple comes Money Help For Christians, in which Craig demonstrates how much free and seriously discounted travel he enjoyed in the last year, just by taking advantage of credit card promotions.

He’s right. When credit card companies offer gigantic rewards – loss leaders, if you will – the issuers understand that most people who take the bait will incur enough debt to pay for the travel many times over. So if you’re one of the conscientious few who know how to pay their freaking bills on time, you’ll be a free rider. In this case, literally.

The folks at Nerd Wallet are diligent about submitting every week. This week, Laura Edgar pits the Chase Freedom card vs. the Capital One Cash card in a plastic-on-plastic battle to the death. Which card is better? We’ll spoil it for you. The Chase Freedom. Capital One Cash’s biggest selling point is its low interest rates, which we’ve explained time and again are the least important criteria for getting a card.

(An aside, and a new requirement for submitters: stop getting your Indian virtual assistants to write your stuff for you. They’re supposed to help only with time-consuming, menial tasks that no one has yet programmed a robot to perform. If you consider writing blog posts to be in that category, then you’re insulting Control Your Cash’s readers. Don’t pull that crap around here.)

Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog is one of the very few guest bloggers whom we allowed to contribute to Control Your Cash. You need to subscribe to his feed, and read what he says this week about usury laws. Odysseas seems to believe, as we do, that there’s no such thing as gouging. No one’s obligated to sell you a service or product at a price that you like, and in the event of a shortage, high prices serve to put a good in the hands of the people whom that good is most important to.

Personal finance bloggers are finally starting to reexamine and get off that ridiculous frugality kick, realizing that pennies and nickels aren’t saved instantaneously. And in the end, they’re still just pennies and nickels. Suba at Wealth Informatics explains how if you value your time, it’s cheaper to eat at P.F. Chang’s than attempt to cook their signature dishes yourself.  Furthermore, those people waiting at Costco to save 11¢ a gallon on gas would be better off paying a little more at the empty gas station across the street. Also, Suba claims that there are people who wash and reuse Ziploc bags. We hope to God she’s joking.

There are people who actually refer to themselves as being members of “Generation Y”? Apparently there are, and Teacher Man at My University Money is one of them. You’ll be happy to know that he’s not only bought into marketers’ jargon, but that he thinks young employees should give their bosses uncompensated labor. Nothing makes a boss happier than hearing that. (“You’ll work for me, and I get additional bang for each buck without even asking for it? Count me in.”) This post contains a comment from a Brit who includes the phrase “dog’s bollocks”, which it turns out is complimentary.

The above post represents the lower threshold for crimes against the English language that we’ll accept in a submission. TM didn’t hire an editor, so we’ll help out in our capacity as carnival masters:

• It’s “shy”, not “shed”.
• A person is “who”, not “that”.
• By “different from”, you mean “different than”.
• A left parenthesis needs a right parenthesis.
• Every time you use an adverb unnecessarily, an imp gets his horns and tail. You’re welcome.

We finally figured out why Dave Ramsey calls his debt reduction strategy a “snowball”. It’s because it’s a deadly combination of cocaine, heroin, and other opioids that people can easily develop an addiction to. The latest victim is Tim at Christian Personal Finance, who cites this mathematically confounding strategy as a way to pay down multiple student loans. It remains a mystery why you’d take out multiple loans in the first place with no guarantee (or even likelihood) of a job that’ll not only cover the loans, but provide a better income than you’d have had if you’d just gone to trade school in the first place.

Drat. We hate it when Free Money Finance counters the point we’d made one second earlier. He swears that the debt snowball works with people who are clueless about money. He noticed this while working as a debt counselor, so we’ll take his word for it.

Phil at PT Money is thinking entrepreneurially. Why sell your old house while buying a new one, when you can rent out the former and increase your cash flow passively? He ran the numbers, and more to the point, isn’t looking to get rich by exchanging his time for a flat sum of money. Phil’s decided to hire a property manager because he’s a rookie. (Pro tip: the more experienced you get at this landlord thing, the more call you’ll have for a property manager.)

Finally, there it is again. The eternal quandary of time vs. money. Ben Franklin equated the two quantities, but Barb Friedberg knows that there’s more to it than that.

And we’re done. Same time next week. You comment now.

Mostly O+, plus a little AB- to give it that oomph

We get submissions from the same posters every week. It’s time to introduce some Carnival of Wealth rookies, whom we’ll be showcasing in today’s edition. Again, the Carnival of Wealth is a weekly rundown of the most thought-provoking personal finance blog posts of the week. If you’ve got an established blog, submit your posts here. One per customer per week. Stay on topic. Of course, you’re welcome to just read. In fact, we encourage it. Got that? Let’s get started:

The Carnival welcomes Joshua M Schultz of RiskAdjusted.Wordpress.com, with an academic and readable post entitled “Forecasting Equities With Yield Analysis.” It’s about how to identify overvalued and undervalued markets. He uses the words “granularity” and “pentile”, correctly no less, which is awesome. Seriously, this is the best post we’ve read in weeks, even though it does require a familiarity with Student’s t distribution. Hopefully Joshua M will keep contributing. Read and subscribe so the guy can one day self-host his site.

At the mellifluously titled Credit Cards For No Credit Resource, Sandra Adams argues that while the federal funds rate is near zero, consumer credit card interest rates are too high to end the recession. They’re “usurious”, she says. She’s out of her mind, of course – consumers financing their purchases is a dumb idea at any rate – but her grammar’s pretty good.

How Does Rent To Own Work is suspiciously similar to Credit Cards For No Credit Resource. Awkward URLs, identical layouts, same imprimaturs from an organization with upside-down words in its logo, and authors with impossibly white-bread names. Fine. This week, “Jennifer” says you should budget and keep track of your expenses. Thanks for joining us, as the Carnival of Wealth slowly transitions into the Carnival of Glaring Obviousness.

(Okay, two is our limit. Better luck next time, First Credit Card Resource.)

(Next post deleted for crimes against the English language. Ahem. You do know proper nouns take capital letters, right? And that “a”, “at” and “are” are not synonyms? My nephew’s kindergarten class described this post as “puerile”. If it’s any consolation, the content was garbage, too.)

CYC welcomes Craig Ford of Money Help For Christians to the 21st century. He works as a missionary in Papua New Guinea and, after having his faith tested time and again, made a dramatic announcement:
After much soul-searching, he’s finally given up on the book. It just no longer resonates with him the way it did in his younger days, when he accepted it unquestioningly – largely because he didn’t know any better.

That’s right, he went digital. Craig discovered how much more enjoyable reading is on a Kindle or a Nook, especially when you live in a country where it costs $42.51 to ship a 5-lb. package from the United States (and takes 10 days to get there.) Heck, that’s most of the price of a Kindle. We welcome Craig to the e-reading community.

Hell yes. Corey at 20s Finances says that not only should you invest in real estate, but you should hire a property manager. The 8-10% you’ll pay her will give you peace of mind, and it’ll be covered by the historically low prices and interest rates we’re seeing.

Is Shawanda Greene of You Have More Than You Think old enough to run for president? Is it too late for her to formally file? We like what she says, particularly this week’s post about hitting up your friends for money if they’re going to treat you like a renewable resource.

Technically this guy isn’t a rookie, but close enough. Kyle Taylor at The Penny Hoarder pimps a site named Sumballo that pays you to post Groupon-style online deals. You don’t even have to create the deals yourself, you just have to find them. How does Sumballo make money? There’s a handy schematic on their landing page.

The official CYC position is that you can never have enough elbow room. The literate vh at Funny-About-Money graces us with a rare visit as she explains how downsizing from a single detached house into a compact apartment won’t necessarily save you money.

(Post deleted because the author can’t spell nor punctuate. Which is a shame, because his post on moving from a 30-year to a 15-year mortgage was full of convincing arguments for doing so.)

Last week someone on Twitter, can’t remember who, described Bank of America as being like a man who gets rescued from a burning building then hoofs the fireman in the testes. First a bailout, now $5 monthly debit card fees. That’ll happen when the government mandates that banks make their debit cards less profitable. Laura at Nerd Wallet shows how you can fight back against the inevitable unintended consequences of the lamentable Durbin Amendment, by putting your money in a credit union, for instance. If enough of us do this, Bank of America will lose billions in deposits. And have less to lend out. And will lose money. And will ask for another bailout. And will get it, under an Obama or a Romney Administration. (Ed. note: But never under a Paul Administration.)

Same topic, differing strategy from Philip at PT Money.

This week’s infomercial masquerading as a blog post is from Everything Finance, which recommends you stop everything and spend $495 on a VISA black card. In addition to putting you out of pocket, the card enables you to a) get laughed at by American Express Centurion cardholders, and b) pay an extra 3% every time you use it out of the country.

As of this writing, Barb Friedberg Personal Finance ranks a mere 396 places better than us on Alexa. Now that you’re here, if you read our encapsulation of her post without clicking on the link, we might pull ahead of her. This week she writes about her findings from FinCon, the financial bloggers’ conference in Chicago that we sat out because most of our peers hate us. Barbara offers the first part of a trilogy in which she gives workable methods for granting yourself autonomy. (A subject we know a little about.)

The entire federal income tax system, distilled into a few paragraphs? Not quite, but Mark Roberts at Tax Brackets attempted it. At the very least, you’ll know if you can get away with using a 1040EZ form (which you shouldn’t want to, unless you’re a kid, but that’s a post for another time.)

Let’s make room for a wily veteran. Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim tells kids entering the workforce to weigh criteria beyond who’s offering you the biggest paychecks out of the gate. (Near the end he suggests working for yourself, a position we couldn’t agree with more.)

If you’re really sold on the concept of working for other people, Free Money Finance explains how you can shape up your résumé; what to focus on, what to omit. (Hint: no one gives a damn that you enjoy spending time with family and friends.)

God, this is thorough. Mike Holman at Money Smarts Blog lists seemingly every discount brokerage available to our Canadian readers, and gives their positive and negatives (including such minutiae as average phone wait time) in handy chart form.

Madison at My Dollar Plan sold this week’s submission with the subject line, “Can you save time and money by only shopping for groceries once a month?” Our first reaction was that she must live on a planet where pasteurized milk lasts twice as long as it does on Earth, and that she either doesn’t eat certain vegetables or prefers them moldy. By the final paragraph she admits that that’s the case, but you can solve the problem of sour milk and rotten tomatoes with a “mini-trip” to the grocery store! Yes, because a regular trip and a “mini-trip”, whatever that is, are infinitely more convenient than two regular trips.

Time for a Boomer doubleshot, as Twofer Tuesday comes early to the Western Hemisphere. First, Boomer & Echo list their money rules of thumb. Some of them are good (save for your retirement first, then your kids’ education), some you’d never think of in a million years (buy low, sell high), some are self-defeating (if you carry a credit card balance, find a card with a low rate.) If you smoke, try a low-tar cigarette. Makes the tumors appear more slowly.

Meanwhile, Consumer Boomer says it’s never too late to plan for retirement. Even if you’re 64 years and 11 months old. You’re also supposed to take a “collective” approach, but we’ll go out on a limb and assume he means “collected” instead of endorsing the Marxist-Leninist way of doing things.

And, we’re done. Thanks again for visiting. Check out the archives before meeting us back here next Monday.