“It expresses myself and I think everyone else can wear it, so I wear it as well,” said the boy who can still be saved with military school

Yes, he’s a minor, but that would make it all the more satisfying. Skyler (and there’s another reason) Davis got suspended for toting a purse to school, and between him and the reporters who wrote the story it apparently bears mentioning that the purse in question is a Vera Bradley®. The principal told him to remove it, Skyler refused, and then his indulging mother came to his defense instead of strangling him with the purse strap. She even invoked that word that’s now being used to categorize everything from name-calling to shunning:

Skyler is only 13 years old. He’s just a child. And if this isn’t bullying, I don’t know what is.

No, you dopey broad, it’s called discipline, something that’s clearly lacking in the Davis household. Check that: the Willis household. As a rule, a disproportionate number of society’s problems (starting with insolence, and moving to the petty crimes that we’re willing to bet are in Skyler’s future) are perpetrated by people who grow up in homes where everyone has a different last name. Skyler is a Davis, his mother is a Willis, his brother is a Haight. And the brother’s name is Dakota:

He gets kicked out for a purse? That doesn’t make sense. It’s not right.

Ms. Willis (we’re going to go out on a limb and guess she’s not married) deserves to be suspended from something for her horrendous choice of names.

Football players of Anderson County Senior-Junior School, where are you in a situation like this? Why has no one shoved anyone into a locker yet?

Parents, beat your children. For the greater good. They’ve certainly done something wrong, you just don’t know what it is. Onto the Carnival:

How deliciously appropriate. Jason at Hull Financial Planning asks how you plan to get around in your dotage if you haven’t reproduced. Ms. Willis will have Skyler and Dakota to take care of her, assuming at least one of them is out of prison at any given time. But what about you, if you’re childless? Jason has the answer, or at least a few suggestions.

Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday is finding out that most jobs are their own punishment. Took him long enough. Fortunately, he’s discovered the wisdom of passive income (and of having a doctor for a wife.) Comes with a twist ending.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net returns with a challenge to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. The 1st in a series, this post discusses whether an efficient market can even exist, or is just a construct for human understanding, much like a Euclidean line. What Nobel laureates haven’t yet figured out, and how you can potentially use it to your advantage.

Though he’s still 4 years and 11 months or so removed from effectual retirement, Dividend Growth Investor continues to espouse the wisdom of relying on dividends for one’s passive income. A method that doesn’t require you to grovel at a boss’s feet, make conspicuous displays of your commitment to the company, or constantly keep your résumé updated. Most importantly, you need a strategy. One germane to your life station, but a strategy nonetheless.

Even though he has plenty of kids to take care of him years down the line, Justin at Root of Good puts his present efforts toward retirement planning. He also explains in one succinct sentence why budgeting is often more trouble than it’s worth:

I never put together a budget while working.  We were naturally frugal and always managed to save half our paychecks or more.

If you’re naturally frugal, a budget is probably going to be redundant. If you’re naturally profligate, you’re not going to stick to a budget anyway. And you’re probably not going to be reading this site, either. So stop committing to absurd goals (“I’m going to save 80% of my income for retirement!”) Either do it, or don’t. If that makes no sense, read our book. Oh, and buy it, too.

Paula Pant at Afford Anything, in her usual brilliant way, explains what true rebellion is. If you think that drinking to excess, listening to Pitchfork-approved music, or going to school with a Vera Bradley purse makes you exceptional and proves your uniqueness credentials, you’re an idiot. If you want to rebel against something, rebel against the notion that our lives are confined by spending beyond our means, spending a fixed number of hours a day doing something we hate so that someone else can profit off us, and sitting on our growing posteriors while limiting our physical capabilities. Get your growing butt out of debt as fast as possible, the faster to develop other sources of income with. Stop complaining. Live instead of being lived.

Ward Carson of The Happy 401(k) is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, and uses capitals to emphasize the point. This week, he writes about how ladies should save for retirement. Ward’s writing is about as dry as the Atacama Desert (Did we use that metaphor before? Probably somewhere in the archives), but he makes some valid points about how women not only live longer than men but make less money. The former is due to biology, the latter is more of a comment on how few men gravitate toward jobs in child care and library sciences.

Finally, new submitter Tim McAleenan at The Conservative Income Investor has that rare post that needs no summary because its title is perfect on its own: How to Create a Circle of Poverty and Die Broke.

Thanks for coming, as always. New posts every Wednesday and Friday (weather permitting), new CoW every Monday, Anti-Tips daily, etc. You’ve been warned.

Some photos defy any attempts at captioning

Why won’t someone give her a chance? Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and we quote, says “hold me accountable” for the catastrophe that is ObamaCare.

The awesome thing about offering to be held accountable, or saying “I take full responsibility”, is that overuse has reduced those phrases to platitudes. Much like you don’t really expect God to bless someone who sneezes, you probably don’t expect anyone to hold you accountable when you say you want to be held accountable. At least if you’re the cabinet secretary tasked with implementing the single biggest public policy calamity in American history. That’s not hyperbole, either: ObamaCare even beats Social Security for sheer misappropriation and ineptitude. Alright, on to something less depressing, the Carnival of Wealth:

When Ben Franklin said “Time is money,” he wasn’t doing it in the hopes that people a quarter of a millennium down the road would marvel at his pithiness. He was making an irrefutable point that existence itself is wealth, and is necessarily precious because, well, our time is finite. So you’d think we’d each be doing as much as we can to save time, rather than treat its passage with less importance than we do our more tangible assets. Jason at Hull Financial Planning relates a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that shows how people (or at the very least, test subjects) have the same distorted views of their time that they do of their money. Like all of Jason’s posts, this one is organized and written beautifully. It’s also nowhere near as bleak as we’re making it sound.

Some facets of American life are difficult for foreigners to comprehend. Free non-alcoholic drink refills at restaurants are one example, a lack of Gypsies is another. But the United States’ oddest quirk is its college athletics. Try explaining to a Dane how certain universities’ football and basketball teams vastly outdraw their professional counterparts, generating revenue that enriches the schools’ general funds and enables some coaches to be among the highest paid public employees in the country; yet the idea of the players who make the whole thing possible earning market rewards for their time is anathema. Oh, and a school can be sanctioned if a coach buys one of his players a sandwich. Sometimes, the transgressions are so great that the governing body of college athletics rewrites history. (“Those games you won? You didn’t really win them. No, the other team didn’t either.”) PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net has plenty to say as the hypocrisy of college athletics finally seems to be reaching a crossroads.

Imagine an unpaid internship that you took because, well, you didn’t have any other options.  In this internship, you must start when you are 5-8 years old and stay unpaid until you are around 21 years old if you want to even have a shot at a job.  In the last three years of your internship, you are forced to attend classes which have no bearing on whether or not you get your dream job.

Yeah, but you don’t have to pay to attend the classes! What’s the problem?

Justin at Root of Good is one of the rare personal finance bloggers who understands risk. He knows that it’s hypocritical to prohibit your 10-year-old child from walking home from school alone, while ordering that same kid to get in your own car and head to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. (Of course it depends on the relative distances traveled, but the chance of Junior dying is far greater in the latter scenario.) Further to Justin’s point, don’t buy comprehensive insurance policies, as a rule. Read the agreement, and determine whether what you’re signing up for is worth it.

We can always count on Dividend Growth Investor for meticulously calibrated investment advice suggestions. This week, Part IV of his retirement strategy. You’re not going to believe this, but dividend income is poised to make up the bulk of his retirement earnings. Details of his 401(k), IRA and even SEP IRA contributions abound in this week’s post. He claims he’s 5 years away from no longer being strapped to a desk, and we wish him luck.

If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait for the Twitter initial public offering because it’d be so cool to own a piece of a big social media company with tens of millions of users and an adorable bluebird logo, Barbara Friedberg would like to slap your face until some sense finds its way through your cortex. Investing isn’t supposed to be exciting, any more than cooking or exercising is. Think of it as a necessity–a task undertaken to benefit you now and in the future. Also, start early and by extension, don’t be timid. That doesn’t mean you should go long into risky securities, but rather that you should quit procrastinating and take the next step.

It’s no great revelation that attending college is an “investment” that doesn’t pay off. Obviously, aerospace engineers like Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday are exceptions. In that rarefied place where a university education can translate into something marketable, does which college you go to make a difference? Harry says yes, and that paradoxically, going to a respected school can be a negative.

Oh, and check us out on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. ‘Til next time.

Earlier this week, a visit to the dentist meant the inevitable clichéd exposure to our local lite rock/soft hits/Best Variety of Yesterday and Today radio station. On which played an ad for a communal Halloween get-together at an outdoor mall. The ad encouraged responsible parents to bring their kids along for some “safe” trick-or-treating, the implication being that taking your chances in your own neighborhood means risking exposing your kids to death, injury, and poisoning. Presenting that bane of helicopter parents, now in its 4th decade or so, the weaponized Granny Smith:

The razor blade inserted in an apple is the single least plausible urban legend of all time. The rankings go like this:

1. Someone is indirectly tearing kids’ mouths apart.
2. David Stern suspended Michael Jordan for gambling, hence the latter’s baseball career.
3. Everything else.

Let’s start with the assumption that there’s indeed a psychopath who’s shoving razor blades into apples and handing them out in lieu of candy bars or, if you’re a dentist, miniature toothbrushes. This would be the ultimate imperfect crime. If only there were a way to determine where the modified apples were coming from. You know, some method of tying the apples to a particular address. “We’re stumped,” say local police. “It’s a shame that not one of these kids whose mouths now open vertically happened to pay attention when someone placed an apple in their trick-or-treat bags. We’ll remain at the mercy of a monster whose location just cannot be pinned down. If this were Boston, we’d put the city on lockdown for good measure.”

Meanwhile, the true criminals are the people who give out Mounds® and Almond Joy®. Coconut tastes like drywall.

Barbara Friedberg’s multi-part series (a phrase that is gallopingly redundant) continues. Barbara maintains, quite correctly, that you can’t invest until you determine your tolerance for risk. If you’re the kind of person who takes your kids to a communal Halloween event because you’re concerned about safety, put options are probably not for you.

The remarkable Paula Pant at Afford Anything isn’t afraid of anything, least of all the idea that you’ll dismiss her implorations to stop living your life timidly. Paula figured life out in her 20s, or about 50 or 60 years earlier than most of you do. You don’t have to spend your days doing something you hate, at the mercy of a boss whose life is just as miserable as yours except that he advanced one additional step up the ladder and can thus order you around. Most people refuse to believe in personal autonomy on principle, so much so that they’ve already concocted excuses why it can’t work. Paula can’t hear you, because she’s too busy sipping lattes on the Left Bank and fraternizing with the hippies at Burning Man. If there were ever a CoW submission that you decided to just read our summary of, and not the submission itself, don’t let it be Paula’s. All her stuff is awesome, but especially this.

We’re not sure if Jason Hull compared notes with Paula before submitting, or the other way around, or neither, but he writes something similar at Hull Financial Planning. Jason, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, points out how the military has less tolerance than the civilian world does for excuses. Intentions matter less than results do. “No excuse, sir,” is always preferable to citing the name and breed of dog that ate your homework. Unfortunately, our brains are wired to justify and to rationalize. More to the point, excuses directly hamper your ability to build wealth.

Justin McCurry at Root of Good preaches something we’ve been harping on for years. The stark and unjust truth is that our circuitous tax system is that way for a reason. It’s designed to screw wage-earners for the benefit of the small fraction of people who derive their income via other means. That’s one reason we’ll never have meaningful tax reform, the other being that most of our influential politicians are attorneys. Justin not only pays an effective tax rate of less than 1% (not a typo), he shows his work. Even better, his conclusion puts a dollar value on the existence of his children. A price still too high for our tastes, but thanks.

Kurt Fischer at My Money Counselor cites a study that claims rich people behave less ethically than poor folk. A quick check of your local police blotter will prove otherwise; unless domestic violence, crystal meth sales and home invasions indicate something other than unethical behavior.

You know what else rich people are good at? Holding onto their money. If that sounds tautological, it isn’t. After a well-deserved brief hiatus, PKamp3 returns to the director’s chair at DQYDJ.net with a chart that illustrates several truths, several of them unexpected. For instance, savings proportionate to expenses seem to level off asymptotically at a certain income level. As to whether savings rate indeed approaches a de facto limit less than 100%, or instead diverges like the harmonic series, you’ll have to read the article.

Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance is convinced that large banks’ (and in Canada, there’s no other kind) business model is flawed. Not that the banks aren’t making plenty of money, but rather that the strategy of exercising car-dealerish sales pressure on clients does more harm than good. Sandi knew that the CEOs of Royal Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce only have a perfunctory interest in others’ opinions, so she outlined her plaint to them in the form of an open letter. A frank and unapologetic open letter:

[W]hile you’re mulling over customer satisfaction reports that analyze “length of time spent waiting in line” or “accuracy of transaction” to the fourth decimal point […] you’re missing the signal for the noise.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro is circumventing banks in his own way, by using Lending Club and looking for notes to invest in. He even went so far as creating a Lending Club Roth IRA, and so far has no or minimal regrets. Lending Club isn’t the high-risk, junk-bond-quality venture you might think it is.

Let’s see…ObamaCare is extremely difficult to access, has cost hundreds of thousands of people their insurance, is tripling and quadrupling premia across the country, turns health care from the ultimate private concern into a public one, requires a massive redistribution of tens of billions of dollars, is rife with perverse incentives regarding prevention, and is being implemented without a concern for remedying any of those issues. Aside from that, awesome program. It also puts health care under the purview of the Internal Revenue Service, previously known as a tax-collecting agency. Steve at 2014 Taxes points out that TurboTax now incorporates a calculator that shows how big of a swig you can take at the taxpayer teat while calculating the subsidies you’ll be eligible for under the new scheme.

Thanks for coming. Check us out on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, this and every week barring further notice.