You kids take only VISA and MasterCard? Then we’ll be taking our business elsewhere.

The day before yesterday was “Small Business Saturday,” a designation which sounds as though it might have originated organically, but is every bit the corporate invention that Hallmark’s brainchild Mothers Day is. Not that we fault American Express for this; if we were running a giant multinational financial services firm (as opposed to a local, neighborhood one) during the late-aughts crisis, we’d have done something superficial and meaningless to deflect public animosity, too. The “event” even came with its very own hashtag!

Of course, Small Business Saturday didn’t make a lick of difference and won’t. And shouldn’t. Exactly how many times in a given day, let alone one particular day, do you have a choice between patronizing a neighborhood store or a larger concern that happens to do business in your locale? If you’re buying dry cleaning or plumbing services, it’s going to be from a “small” business, however you choose to define that. If you’re buying air travel or a household appliance, it’ll be from a somewhat larger business. Where do you really have legitimate options? Restaurants, sure. Clothing stores? Yeah. But people shop their favorites anyway, don’t they? If you made a conscious decision to switch out what would normally have been a 7-Eleven/Citgo visit for a trip to Danny’s Discount Gas, what stopped you before? By the way, that 7-Eleven is probably franchised and owned by someone no richer than Danny.

If Small Business Saturday existed in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, it would have encouraged people to forgo shopping at Main Street-killing titan A&P so they could instead spend their money down the road at local fella Sam Walton’s little dry goods concern. Onto the CoW:

You’d think a guy would ask his readers if he should chase a career in financial planning, then name his site Your PF Pro, but who are we to tell Harry Campbell how to live his life? This week he sits down on the couch while his readers scribble notes and hypothesize that his problems have something to do with his relationship with his mother.

Our Franco-Guatemalan heroine Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence returns with a guest post from Spencer at MilitaryMoneyManual.com. If you think a military career pays too modestly to make a comfortable life out of, Spencer shows in great detail that you’re doing it incorrectly.

Justin at Root of Good gets it. He explains why asset allocation is so important to him and his investment strategy, and how to allocate one’s assets in an era when no one wants to sit down and calculate stuff, not when there’s the possibility that someone else already created an app for what ails you. It’s called the Personal Capital asset allocation tool, and we haven’t stopped playing with it since Justin introduced it to us.

Go back and read the story of our most recent (F)RotM, laugh at it, laugh at her, and that should be sufficient preparation for the latest from Jason at Hull Financial Planning. Jason once started a business, not because he “wanted to do something for (himself)”, but because he saw an opening. People wanted someone to plan their finances, Jason had the skills and knowledge to accommodate them, and he could charge a reasonable fee and still have something left after expenses, so he went into business. Simple as that, no?

Not at all. There’s still the matter of letting potential customers know that you exist. And turning those contacts into sales. It’s more than just handing out business cards, or worse, (groan) begging for Facebook likes or Twitter follows. Actively engaging people who can positively impact your business isn’t always pleasant, but it’s vital if you want to build something lasting. Again, this is obvious, but some people are just committed to overlooking the necessary steps.

[I]f I had to help someone else solve a problem first to get that awareness, then so be it. It was cheaper than advertising.

Jason goes into great detail on this, as he does. Comprehend his concept of a “4-point day” and you’ll understand that creating a successful business goes way beyond having a good idea and a disdain for the conventional workplace.

Thanks for putting up with our foolishness for another week. Remember when we used to receive multiple awful submissions that gave us an opportunity to make some of the easiest jokes in the history of the internet? Those days appear to be behind us, and thank God. Quality > quantity, at least here. Anyhow, if you can’t wait until Wednesday’s new post, or tomorrow’s Anti-Tip of the Day, check us out on Investopedia. We write practically all of that site or so it seems. We’re also on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, available for regular download on iTunes. You’ll get far more use out of the podcast than you will the latest Yo Gotti album (cultural reference ®2013, Control Your Cash, LLC.)

“I’m going to start by reciting a collection of my wife’s musings. ‘They say time flies, but with the way the airlines are these days, maybe time should take the bus. The bus.'”

The majority party in the United States Senate attempted to eliminate most filibusters this week, even though the Senate Majority Leader responsible for the parliamentary maneuver used to have the opposite opinion about lengthening debate indefinitely on controversial issues and appointments. (This was back when, purely coincidentally, his own party was in the minority.) So we’ve taken it upon ourselves to bark ad nauseam until we get today’s CoW up to a suitable length. Hey, it’s not our fault that we’ve scared off all the bad submitters at this point and sent them scurrying to less demanding blog carnivals. How to fill the Carnival of Wealth while still retaining your interest? For you newcomers, an explanation: this is a weekly feature here at Control Your Cash. Every Monday, we round up the good, the bad, and the indifferent blog posts throughout the personal finance realm and present them in annotated form for your pleasure. We used to get scores of submissions, but then when most of the submitters discovered that we weren’t interested in perpetuating the foolishness that is reciprocal link bait, most of them began to balk. Then we got dozens of submissions, then tens, now we’re down to ones. Nothing wrong with that. The Beatles wouldn’t have sounded any better with more members.

Justin McCurry at Root of Good thinks that being the first one to submit every week, often mere minutes after the previous week’s CoW goes live, entitles him to some sort of special recommendation. Fine, we’ll reward him by putting him in the coveted top spot. And with good reason. This week Justin, who retired at 33, explains how he allocates assets in his substantial portfolio. Also comes with a crude map that misidentifies Sarawak and Sabah, the Bornean parts of Malaysia, as Brunei.

Any manager with sufficient experience knows that you never fire someone without figuring out who the person’s replacement is going to be. Unless that manager is Jason at Hull Financial Planning, who generalizes and inverts the concept, reminding you to hire slowly and fire quickly. Jason does follow the conventional wisdom that firing people on a Friday is the prudent thing to do. Which makes us wonder how gun stores fire people. “OMG, Juan is in the parking lot. And it looks like he’s bringing a gun to work!” “Don’t worry about it. Just make sure he doesn’t take any guns away from work.”

Madison du Paix at My Dollar Plan returns after a several-week hiatus, with her fancy 2013 tax calculator. Enter your filing status, number of dependents, bracket etc. and see how unpleasant a surprise you’ll be in for. Also, incorporate and funnel your money via a pass-through entity such as an LLC and you’ll pay less in taxes than your salaried counterparts. (It’s all in here.)

Jack-of-all-trades, aerospace engineer and California gadabout Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro explains how you can intoxicate yourself, numb your brain cells, and dramatically increase the likelihood of you getting arrested or hospitalized for just 70¢ per serving. Home brewing is every bit as complicated and time-consuming as making your own toothpaste, with the added benefit of poison.

We tried to use the word “tetralogy” last week, and it landed back in our faces. Turns out that PKamp3’s series on stock market valuation at DQYDJ.net was a pentalogy. Moral to the story? Stay monosyllabic. This week, he wrote the 5th and last post on this, uh, thing, ’bout how to tell if stocks cost too much en masse or if they’re priced just right for you and yours to spend your cash on and buy a piece of, like for the time when you won’t have to work much more (if at all.)

Told you this would to be brief. Blame it on the Thanksgiving holiday or our uncompromising standards for the CoW. Or both or neither. How about some cross-promotion? Check us out on Investopedia, where we keep the snark to a tolerable minimum and try to elucidate folks on personal finance topics of general interest. There’s also the Stacking Benjamins podcast, in which we trade stories, advice and the occasional barb with copanelists Paula Pant of Afford Anything, Len Penzo of LenPenzo.com, and the semi-anonymous host of the podcast itself. Who perhaps will update his panelist list and put our names on there sometime soon. As for this site, we update it daily. New posts Wednesday and Friday, new Anti-Tips of the Day every day, and another Carnival of Wealth next Monday. Thanks for stopping by. Oh, and buy another copy of The Greatest Personal Finance Book Ever Written if you haven’t already. Christmas is practically here.

Pillbox hats will make a comeback, just you wait

Today, November 18, 2013, marks a historic occurrence. Because it was 50 years ago today that John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, had his very last extramarital encounter. With an anonymous hotel desk clerk in Tampa, Florida. He said he’d get his secretary to call her back next time he was in town, but of course he was dead 4 days later. When offered a similar encounter with incoming President Lyndon Johnson, the desk clerk resigned her position at the Floridan Palace and went home and cried.

Let’s the get the weak rookie submission out of the way first. Jon Brooks of Making Money Fast And Slow enjoys making conclusions, then working his way back to the premises, if any:

[I]t is worse to have more economic inequality than less economic inequality

So a better world would be one in which Pierre Omidyar, who’s done more to increase liquidity and make more goods available to more people at more mutually satisfactory prices than just about anyone who ever lived, is as rich as, say, this fellow, whose largest contribution to society seems to be that he went to historically unprecedented lengths to draw attention away from his monobrow.

It takes Jon only 3 paragraphs to contradict himself:

In my opinion working to become wealthy is a virtuous goal

Never mind that “working” is a process, not a goal. That’s only the 43rd-most egregiously wrong thing in this post. It’s followed with more nonsense about why taxing long-term capital gains less than ordinary income is bad. (It isn’t. Taxpayers need some incentive to take financial risks, rather than just collect paychecks, otherwise the economy would never grow.) That’s followed by some points that the author himself admits are scattered. What’s really disturbing is that he claims to be “an analyst at a large accounting firm” and the holder of a B.S. in finance from Virginia Tech.

We’re going to need at least a couple of good posts to wash that off. Starting with PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, whose “Is The Stock Market Overpriced?” tetralogy enters the home stretch. He includes an infamous cover of BusinessWeek, which leads us to wonder how often business magazines’ loaded headlines end up prophesying correctly. As an individual investor you can’t be full contrarian in a permanent bull market, but on the other hand going fully contra-contrarian (compliant?) doesn’t work either if you want to beat everyday returns. Finding the appropriate amount of conventional wisdom to discard is not an easy task.

No, still a little dirty. No CoW submitter brings practical market tips week in and week out quite like Dividend Growth Investor does. His passion, if you will, and if you can’t figure it out, is dividend investing. But investing in dividend stocks has huge up-front costs, doesn’t it? So how to do so if you don’t have thousands of dollars on hand? Via Loyal3, a company that lets you buy as little as $10 worth of dividend stocks with no transaction costs. One catch is that orders are executed in batch, rather than in real time, but there’s got to be a second catch. Which is that you have to spend money on a monthly investment plan. Loyal3 has an impressive management team and an interesting business model, the assessment of which we’ll leave to Dividend Growth Investor.

And another. Jason at Hull Financial Planning explains why he walked away from a job that a) was all but impossible for him to get fired from, b) would have guaranteed him a decent pension and c) he could have retired from at 42. Sound crazy? Not when working at that job defeats the very purpose of Jason’s greater goal; making enough passive income to live on. These days there are almost as many methods of deriving passive income as there are people wanting to benefit from same. Jason lists some of the largest ones and explains which he’s using in his own life.

We swear we don’t plan it this way, but the very next post we received this week was a guest appearance by Doug Nordman at Root of Good. It’s titled “Join the Military to Retire Early?”, and that question mark makes all the difference. Doug served in the Navy and explains how an active-duty member can enjoy a comfortable pension with still enough time to enjoy life. Yet only one of out every 600 Americans does so. As to why, Doug gives one of the frankest discussions of the positives and negatives to military life that we’ve ever seen. (Travel the world? But enjoy less personal space than a prisoner. Have job security? But run the risk of dying in combat. Assume tons of responsibility and leadership at a young age? Well, we can’t think of a counterpoint to that one. Just use the risk of dying in combat one again.)

Okay, time for another bad post. Just kidding, Afford Anything is incapable of featuring anything bad. This week, a guest post from Brandon Turner, who makes enough to live on via passive income from real estate. He’s also 28 and no longer broke. Brandon explains how one real estate investment enables the next. His portfolio now includes single-family homes, triplexes, even a large apartment building. Brandon’s even managed to find partners who give him way too large of a cut, but as he points out, they’re looking for someone to manage their investment and save them the trouble of doing work. There are so many methods of building wealth that it’s astonishing that poverty still exists.

Does anyone write their own posts anymore? Alexandra writes at Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance about how to save money. This post features various exclamation points, 2 instances of the word “needs” as a noun (for all our English usage criticism needs, presumably) and…we were waiting for this. A recommendation to start a motherloving emergency fund. You shouldn’t, as a dog explained on this site last year, but no one listens. This post also contains some adorable lady math:

Let’s say your goal for an emergency fund is $5,000. You want to have that saved up within a year. By dividing 5000 by 12, you realize you have to save about $417 per month to reach your goal. You could also divide your $5000 goal by 52, and you will see you have to save $96.15 per week to reach your goal.

Or you could divide 5000 by 26, and find that you need to save $192.31 every fortnight. Or you could divide 5000 by .01, and realize you need to save $500,000 every century. Damn, maybe we should have led with this post instead of the other crappy one. Because the byline just seals it:

Alexandra is the owner of Real Simple Finances, where she writes easy finance tips for real people. In addition to fighting off student loan debt, Alexandra is a university English Instructor and will be graduating in May, 2014, with her Master of Arts.

We decided to give Alexandra the benefit of the doubt and assume that she meant fighting off other people’s student loan debt. She didn’t. She has tens of thousands of dollars of her own, yet thinks it’s something other than ridiculous for her to be dispensing personal finance advice. These debt bloggers have no self-awareness, let alone originality, so we feel it’s our duty here at CYC to dispense stark reality checks that, again, their objects won’t pay the slightest bit of attention to. But yeah, if you want to know how to handle your money, by all means listen to the woman with the high-five-digits debt load who’s about to finish her 2nd useless degree and will die with a negative net worth.

Should we end it here, 2 awful posts bookending several great ones? Probably, but we have 1 more submission. Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro ruins our symmetry with his post on health savings accounts. Harry loves them, largely because they effectively work as IRAs if you never end up needing the money in your HSA. Harry thinks you should max yours out and never look back, and we agree. Low deductible, low out-of-pocket maximum…Harry’s employer’s HSA sounds so much better than a traditional plan that it’s almost worth having a real job.

Check us out on Investopedia, and on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. ‘Til next time.