Do a Google Image Search for Carnival of Wealth and this guy pops up for some reason.

Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth, yet again. This is our first presentation as your permanent monthly guest hosts, thanks to Arohan at Personal Dividends. We are the Joy Philbin to his Kelly Ripa*. We’ll be back with another CoW a month from now, and every month, until the end of time. Now let’s get started.

Money Crashers nailed it. The next time someone tells you about how high-income people should pay their fair share of taxes, rub this post in their face and remind them that being rich and earning a lot of money are different things.

Don’t let Zoe’s typos at Mind of Z get in the way of a valuable lesson about a similar topic – how you shouldn’t mistake ostentatious displays of wealth for wealth itself.

Congratulations to Mark at Stock Pursuit, this week’s early bird winner. He set an unofficial Carnival of Wealth record by submitting a post that pimps TradeKing a week before the deadline.

Both the lousy budgeter and the ESL student in your life will enjoy the journalistically trained Miranda Marquit’s latest contribution at Pinyo’s Moolanomy, detailing how to pay your federal taxes via an installment plan.

Neal Frankle at Wealth Pilgrim knows that working for the man sucks on wheels. That’s why he’s listed 9 tips for the aspiring or incipient small business owner.

Boomer and Echo are well aware that passive investing is a far more agreeable way to earn money than sweating is. Here they drop the details of some of Canada’s biggest low-risk investment vehicles.

Madison DuPaix at My Dollar Plan self-styled this as a “great post”, and who are we to disagree? Here she shows how to analyze your spending and ensure your finances are in line with the use of handy visual aids.

The extremely comprehensive Free Money Finance road-tested (or more accurately, got his readers to road test) some of the latest income tax prep packages. This week, he gives us the results for Complete Tax PremiumMVP.

Read this post from Credit Card Guru at Credit Card Forum about using credit cards for car rental insurance. Better yet, go back in time and send the post to 20-year old me who used a fake ID to rent a car from a crooked Polish immigrant, brought it back with an imperceptible nick in the windshield and spent the next year paying off an American Express card.

101 Centavos shares his random thoughts on money. Warning: 101 Centavos likes to work blue. This post contains the word “scuzzy”.

You read your mortgage documents, signed them, then decided you wanted out halfway through? No problem! Your fellow taxpayers are here to cover your dishonor. Consumer Boomer gives details and doesn’t even attempt to pretend that personal responsibility is important anymore.

Yo, dude! Tired of, like, going to BankRate to compare interest rates? Bromoney has your back, bro, with a FireFox add-on to track rates automatically.

Add PT at PT Money to the list of people who will tell you: you don’t need to be overly capitalized to start a business. But you do need to start a business if you ever want any hope of tasting financial security coupled with freedom.

It wasn’t easy, but we stayed awake to the end of Janet Russell’s jeremiad against bad mutual funds at Best No-Load Mutual Fund. Here’s a synopsis, quoted in her gripping prose: “The investment research literature does provide some modest evidence that substantially inferior past mutual fund performance is more likely to lead to inferior mutual fund returns in the future. Excessive costs and high management expense ratios are the likely culprits, when explaining sub-par diversified investment fund returns.”  Read her post in Ben Stein voice for extra giggles.

Don’t spend $200 on a gym membership when you can spend $2000 on liposuction. And don’t spend $2000 on liposuction when you can finance it with a medical credit card and end up paying $5000. Tim Chen at Nerd Wallet shows us an exciting new way to squander your money.

Do we dare run a post from something called Fast Payday Cash Advance Loans? Only as a warning. Warren Stephen apparently thinks that’s the kind of thing we’d endorse. We only wish he’d sent us the post on that page entitled “Can You Use Payday Loans for Gambling?” Seriously, it’s on there.

Craig Ford at Money Help for Christians offers the greatest money-back guarantee in the history of commerce. If you buy his book and don’t like the way he spells his name, he’ll refund your money. (Whereas if you try to get a refund on your copy of Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, not only will we not grant it, we’ll send your email address to any number of animal porn sites.)

Who gets an IRS Form 1040 in the mail these days? Fewer than 8% of us, according to (a different) Craig at Free From Broke. So where can you get yours if you can’t print your own? At your local library, among other places. (No figures available on what percentage of us still use libraries.)

Think you’ve uncovered every tax deduction available to you? Our system is so unnecessarily arcane, you can always dig a little deeper. Just ask Matt Jabs at Debt Free Adventure, who’s discovered 10 deductions you didn’t know existed.

Our Australian friends at Pepperstone are dropping American dollars like Pacman Jones at Spearmint Rhino. Read what these foreign exchange mavens have to say about other major currencies in the short term, and why.

Apparently ladies are part of the workforce these days. And according to Create A Cash Flow Show, some of these gals who work in direct sales were named among the top 30 in their field. How do we know? Lady #18 told us. Read about DebB and the other 29 women who needed to fill time while their husbands were working and kids were at school honorees here.

Patently obvious advice? We’ve got it! More specifically, Charles Chua C K has it at the repetitively named All About Living With Life. Louis’ brother suggests that you budget, set aside contingency funds, and, to lower medical expenses, you should…(wait for it)…maintain robust health.

2¢ at Balance Junkie examines passive investing and whether it’s for everyone. (As usual, her post is thought-provoking and comprehensive. This layered, detailed post is NOT for ESL students.)

Credit Donkey came hard with the exclamation points this week, with a helpful post on how never-before-conceived stratagems such as brown-bagging and walking to the corner store instead of driving will make you a trillionaire in zero seconds flat. Thank you, Credit Donkey.

Robert at The College Investor is flying with neither a net nor a proofreader. He explains investing in petroleum stocks, exchange-traded funds and oil futures this week.

Meanwhile, Krant Cents explains how retirement can be as dismal as work if you don’t prepare, and Paul Foley at Living With In-Laws says something about a TV show and how it ties into earning money, or something.

Roger Wohlner is a dapper gent with a can-do attitude and a blog about financial planning. And a big fat “I told you so” to all the people who panicked when the market hit its nadir 2 years ago. Guess what? It bounced back. Like that wasn’t eventually going to happen. And now that stocks are high again, guess what people are doing. #weneverlearn

For all your reading-about-tax-preparation-software needs, Steve at the contemporarily titled 2009 Tax has a gripping, thrill-a-minute post about…well, we couldn’t make it all the way through but there were no obscene images on the page so we’re running with it.

Jeff Rose, CFP and all-around badass, brings worthwhile posts week after week. This time is no exception, as he gives tips on how to file an amended tax return at Good Financial Cents.

It just wouldn’t be a Carnival of Wealth without at least one entry written by an Indian remote assistant working from a list of SEO keywords, would it? Thanks to Rajit “Alex” at FinancialTreatment.blogspot.com for a technically accurate if woefully uninteresting post about personal financial planning. Show this one to the kids back in Bangalore and maybe one day you’ll have your own URL. (There were worse entrants than that this week, but we didn’t want this turning into the Mongoloid Olympics.)

Our favorite post of the week? Mike Piper at Oblivious Investor wouldn’t make a good zealot, because he has the annoying habit of looking at issues from every conceivable angle. For instance, successful entrepreneurs have a set of characteristics that most people don’t. Well, what if unsuccessful entrepreneurs have that same set and we’re only exposed to the winners? Same goes for mutual funds, and Mike explains why.

And finally, from yours truly, a reminder of our contest that’s going on AS WE SPEAK and concludes later this month. Tons of Amazon gift cards, copies of TurboTax, books and even cash to give away. Click here.

Thanks again, and we’ll see you next time. Join us on April 3 for another exciting edition.

*Pop culture reference courtesy of Google.