No wonder they went extinct, their eyes were too small to see predators. Wait, what preys on a mammoth?

Here’s our mind-blowing fact of the day. Mammoths were still roaming the Earth while the Pyramids were being built. Specifically, the mammoths lived in a couple of Arctic islands that aren’t even close to each other: St. Paul Island in Alaska’s Pribilof chain, and Wrangel Island in Russia’s Chukchi Sea. The latter island is not to be confused with Wrangell Island, which is adjacent to the Alaskan panhandle and is home to nothing bigger than moose. Both islands are named after Ferdinand von Wrangel, chairman of the Russian-American Company. He’s as extinct as mammoths. Ave atque vale, and onto the Carnival.

We referenced our own car-buying strategy in last week’s CoW (the full version is here.) Andrew at 101 Centavos offers his version, with plenty of flavor and admonition. For buyers of used cars he offers a smart suggestion that we never thought of, which is to offer the prospect of working on said car to your local shop in exchange for a reduced-price inspection.

Tony Robbins was the first one to bring this to our attention, but the truism has probably been around forever: Humans err conservatively. We do more to avoid pain than to embrace pleasure. Thanks for that tempting bush offer, but we’ll take the bird in the hand. (Note: Rule does not apply to poorly hydrated visitors to CYC’s hometown.) Jason at Hull Financial Planning argues that young investors could afford to take on a little more risk in exchange for the possibility of greater returns.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net (here’s our sporadic reminder that that’s an acronym for Don’t Quit Your Day Job) tells a story about how he went into debt getting his PhD, struggled through getting a job, ran up 6 figures of debt, and used emoticons in his work emails. He’s now trying to decide how many months of expenses to keep in his emergency fund before paying down his credit card debt.

Just kidding, PKamp3’s not your typical personal finance blogging imbecile.
Instead, he was a little more ambitious than that. He merely rewrote the tax code and remade the U.S. welfare system. We still find the idea of a negative income tax reflexively nauseating, but alas, the real world gives us only real world options.

Where has she been? Everyone’s favorite Ontarian fee-only financial planner, the lovely and talented Sandi Martin at Spring Personal Finance, returns after too long of a hiatus. Sandi doesn’t believe in starting off with a soft headline and then luring you in. Read “A Little Discouragement To Start You On Your Way” and see how committing yourself to a budget is more necessary than it is fun.

Oh, grow up. You eat vegetables, right? Maybe you even exercise regularly. And perhaps floss. It’s called being an adult. Sandi explains how forbearance and delayed gratification are your friends.

Remember when the Carnival of Wealth used to be an anthology of non-researched, grammatically abhorrent id spewings from illiterate bloggers looking to optimize their sites for search engines (and not, you know, for readers)? Whatever happened to those days? Justin at Root of Good continues this week’s hit parade by telling us what he’s going to do this summer. If that sounds self-indulgent, it isn’t. He can afford to take the family to Indochina (is that even a geographical term anymore?), Central America, or somewhere even more exotic. All because he lived beyond his means while actively earning income, and is now letting passive income do the heavy lifting. Traveling the world also contributes more to general utility than does the practice of law.

There’s a series of websites called 20xxTaxes.org, the x’s representing the last 2 digits of the year. They usually send us submissions from some of their vintage model sites, 2009Taxes.org, 2010Taxes.org, etc. This week Kelly Dean sent us one from 2014Taxes.org, so we figured we might as well run it. If you’re semi-literate and live in the UK, you can probably find something of value there.

New submitter Liquid at Freedom 35 Blog watched a TV show about the children of vapid rich people. Liquid ends just about every sentence with a smiley emoticon, which adds much gravitas to her work.

Jay Wilner at Bobby Finance has some recommendations for entrepreneurs, which he states in pretty strong language:

Consider using Intuit’s Quickbooks for your business and Quicken for personal accounts

Consider a debt consolidation loan

Easy there, Generalissimo. Can’t you finesse that a bit, instead of being so blatant?

And we’re done. Started strong, then a precipitous dropoff. New blog post Wednesday, new Anti-Tip of the Day every day, frequent but irregular appearances on Investopedia, and we’re also on the panel for the Stacking Benjamins podcast. ‘Til then.

It’s about time we started with a Fun Fact®. Here’s the Bahamian dollar note, featuring a picture of Queen Lady Bird Johnson:

and here’s the Bermudian dollar, with an image of Bermuda’s Queen, Mr. T:

Each is worth exactly 1 U.S. dollar. Makes life much easier, in small countries (or in Bermuda’s case, territories) that are so near to and whose economies are so dependent on the United States’. Alright, onto the CoW:

It’s 2014, and some people still smoke. Hundreds of millions, in fact. If only there were some scientific basis for believing that purposefully damaging one’s lungs (on the body organ importance hit parade, they’re near the top) with tobacco residue, carbon monoxide and other inhalants might be unhealthy. The President of the United States smokes. The Speaker of the House smokes. Again, this isn’t 1938. These are superficially intelligent people. A legitimately intelligent person, Jason at Hull Financial Planning, demonstrates that while even free cigarettes will kill you, cigarettes aren’t free. And they aren’t really $7 (in New York City, $10) a pack, either.

Joshua Rodriguez goes for comedy at CNA Finance, with a post mostly about quantitative easing, but initially about this very site and the “D&*# Head” (his carefully punctuated epithet, not ours) who runs it. Which is fine, gratuitous name-calling is hardly a big deal. The only thing we took exception with is his criticism of our use of the English language. He cited a line from a previous CoW as an example of our bad grammar. Not only was our sentence perfect, but Joshua misquoted it, adding at least one typo. Even better, the typo he added was in the name of his own site. It’s “CNA Finance,” Slugger, not “CAN Finance.” Next time stick to whatever it is that you’re passable at, and leave the higher-concept stuff to us.

The lovely Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence explains why despondent debtors aren’t as common in her native France as they are on this side of the Atlantic.

I remember the first posts I read from US personal finance blogs, and the amount of debt people were in was mind boggling. I often thought ok, only fat people would start a diary about their weight loss…

If only. Speaking of which, Jillian Michaels and Tony Horton were never fat, were they? So why is it that people will take workout advice from lifelong hardbodies, but want their personal finance bloggers to be in the red? (Update: Apparently Jillian Michaels was indeed fat in high school. Never mind.)

You’re not going to believe this, but in France they don’t just issue credit to whoever wants some. Pauline also cites family tradition, crediting her grandparents who lived through World War II for instilling her with frugal habits and a fear of reckless spending. So it’s partly cultural, but it shouldn’t take invading Nazis to convince people that borrowing money they can’t afford to pay back is wrong.

Alright, if we keep talking about Pauline’s great post our words become less a summary of the post and more a partially formed blog post of our own. We should save this and expand upon it later. In the meantime, read Pauline’s post at least twice.

Rob Aeschbach at the recently renamed The Military Financial Planner is on our short list of favorite contributors, even when he defends a position that we disagree with. Rob thinks that buying gap insurance, whereby you spend a few bucks a month in the event that your car gets totaled before you’ve paid it off, proves that you can’t afford your vehicle. Rob is right as usual, but*.

More excellence, which means next week’s CoW is bound to suck. Today we find out that Andrew at 101 Centavos has a home solar system. With a basketball representing Jupiter and a marble representing Mercury, no doubt. Andrew looks at some journalistically vetted ways to save money, and determines whether they’re worth your while. (Note, especially to all the Simple Dollar readers reading this, assuming there’s any overlap between that site and this one: If it takes you 4 hours to save a nickel, then it cost you 4 hours to save a nickel.) Also, the folks at Mother Earth News must have the world’s most enviable conversion rate during any-legal-weapon season. That sentence makes no sense out of context, you need to read Andrew’s piece.

Harry Campbell at The 4-Hour Workday (still too long) weighs entrepreneurship vs. a regular job. Harry might not be the most objective source here, because 1) he’s an aerospace engineer and will never be unemployed, b) his own entrepreneurial dreams are on hiatus, and iii) he’s got 2 blogs to fill every week, which probably take a lot of his time and pay him only modest rewards.

This might be the longest post we’ve ever run. 6000+ words from Billy Murphy at Forever Jobless. It’s also from last summer, which we would normally dismiss or make fun of, except that his topic is timeless. A retired professional poker player, Billy submitted to the CoW once before, a year and a half ago, and struck gold then too. This time he writes about expected value, and why sometimes what seems like a gamble is anything but. That 50-to-1 longshot is a fantastic deal if it pays out 60-to-1. We can’t even summarize this post any further than that, it’s so intricate and long, but it’s worth your time. No wonder the guy submits so infrequently, it must take him months to write each post.

You know what dollar-cost averaging is, right? Oh God, you don’t. Stop and read our book before proceeding. Then read PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net, who throws a scenario at us that we had to read and re-read before realizing that its surprising conclusion is in fact true. Take an investor who blindly dollar-cost averages his way into a mutual fund on a monthly schedule over 26 years, contrast him with an investor who times the market perfectly every month when buying the same fund, and see what happens. The latter investor wins, but not by enough to justify the effort he put in (or the risk he incurred while lucking out every month.)

No, this deserves more attention. This is a historic finding, on a par with Bill James’s discovery that batting order means almost nothing. Read PKamp3’s post and then encourage him to find a publisher and write a book of his own. Damn, this is a good CoW so far.

Another figurative heavyweight, Paula Pant at Afford Anything. Paula lives in the heart of the “wintry mix” color field on this week’s Weather Channel maps, Atlanta. While shivering her way through Valentine’s Day she shows what happened at her neighborhood grocery store when news of snow, one inch worth, hit the populace. The shoppers cleaned out the shelves, and as Paula points out, how much coconut water do you need to ride out the Book of Revelation, anyway? While the answer is none, that doesn’t stop people from thinking that panicking is the smart thing to do in the event of a minor crisis.

Also, go to Costco, you dummies. Buy 3 months’ worth of supplies at a time for less than you’d pay on a typical visit to TJ’s Markup Emporium.

It’s an erudition extravaganza. The seldom seen Vicky Hay at Funny-About-Money returns with a jeremiad about the prospects for America in a post-recessionary world of insufficient aggregate demand and lots of income disparity (you know, as opposed to that income equality that’s served its subjects richly wherever it’s been tried.) We disagree with just about every one of Vicky’s political opinions, but she writes splendidly and will at least force you to think about issues in a way you might not have expected nor wanted to.

The prolific Bryan Chau at Success Pen Pal explains a few important financial ratios. Loan-to-value, return on investment, etc. Depending on your starting point, this is either a good refresher or vital reference data.

Justin at Root of Good is finding out that retirement, although awesome, provides the retiree with daily challenges and plenty of time to attack them. Why pay professionals to fix your broken stuff when your time exceeds your money? Of the appliances that recently breathed their last in Justin’s household, a couple of them were cheaper to replace than fix. However, most of them were broken as the result of the most destructive force in the universe, children. We’re still waiting for the Control Your Cash cats to do anything more damaging than vomiting on the occasional carpet.

Time for a wildcard. A dizzying, fascinating wildcard. Something called Holy Potato graces our doorstep, and is unlike anything we’ve seen. Here’s what we know about Holy Potato. The fella’s name is John Robertson, he has a Ph. D. in medical biophysics, he lives in Toronto, and he explains that no matter how you plan your retirement plan’s trajectory, you need to account for deviation. You know what personal finance needs? Fewer bloggers whose About Me pages contain phrases like “My hubby and I woke up and found ourselves $67,000 in debt. This is our journey”, and more bloggers who can’t remember which of their home computers is the one with Maple on it. Great, now we have to read through Holy Potato’s 3-year archives and see what other gems we missed.

Read us on Investopedia, where we’re considerably more polite than we are here. Listen to us on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, where the opposite is true.  And come back here every day for thrilling new explorations into personal finance. The end.

*This is footnoted because we didn’t want to distract from Rob’s organized and logical post. But from personal experience, gap insurance makes sense under some circumstances. When we bought CYC’s most recent new vehicle, we went into the dealership with a number in mind and reached a mutually agreeable price with the salesman. (This is Chapter VI in the book.) Then, the salesman offered us 0% financing over 3 years. We said, “If we bite, that’ll add up to 36 monthly payments totaling $x. Cash in hand is worth more than cash down the road, so what number $x-y would you be willing to take instead, right now? The salesman either didn’t understand the question or didn’t want to, because he offered us no discount for paying up front. Well, forget that. Given the choice between paying a certain amount today, and paying that same amount over 3 years, you’d be crazy not to go with option B. GAP insurance cost us $3 a month over that period. $108 to protect against a colossal accident? More than worth it to us. 

As you can see, half the international visitors to Sioux Falls will have no problem driving on the left side of the road

South Dakota’s largest city boasts a metro population of almost a quarter-million people. Crimes occur at about half the rate they do across the country, and from personal experience we can attest to the friendliness of the locals. Hotel chains include Staybridge Suites, Holiday Inn Express (2 of them!), Residence Inn, Hampton Inn, Candlewood Suites and dozens more.

The local animal control treats dogs and cats with what we can only assume is traditional American compassion. Toilets in public places are of the single-fixture-to-a-stall variety.

In other words, Sioux Falls is a far better place to hold the Olympics than the site the principled, honorable, incorruptible International Olympic Committee ended up selecting without any regard to payoffs or bribery. Sioux Falls even has a skiing venue, kind of. The Olympics in general are the worst thing ever – cost overruns, Palestinian terrorists, the 1972 men’s basketball gold medal game, pretending the Republic of China doesn’t exist, wishing Israel would disappear, Matt Lauer. Each time, it’s 7 years’ worth of obscene capital expenditures for 2 weeks’ worth of glorified track meet. The U.S. could set an example by bailing out, given that we’re already home to the world’s most elite leagues in several sports. We could leave the Olympics to Cameroon, Niger, Malaysia…nations whose pride really is contingent on this overblown biannual get-together. If the Olympics really are important to your country, your country is thus by definition second-rate.

Onto the submissions. Last week we ran a post from Chris, the semi-functional Mongoloid who runs Easy Extra Dollar. This week, he sent us the exact same post. The blame lies with us, because we failed to notice last week that the post is a year old: it celebrates its birthday on the 20th. The excerpt we ran in the previous carnival was the best illustration we could find of his profound illiteracy, so it’s all we can do now to show you the 2nd-best example of such:

Part times jobs before were hunted by many people who don’t have any stable job. So, these people use to have 3-4 part times jobs and use it as their source of income for them to pay their household bills. With this reason, many of the plentiful part time jobs were already not able in your locality.

Chris claims to have an MBA. He also has a wife and 2 kids, both of whom would be better off being raised by feral dogs than having this moron for an authority figure.

It’s not that he’s stupid. There are plenty of stupid people. It’s that he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even know his role. If he’s smart enough to know to put a picture of his face on his About Me page, as opposed to, say, a picture of his elbow or a rhododendron, how is he not smart enough to think, “Maybe writing down my incoherent thoughts and paying a web hosting service to help me share them with the world is not something I should be doing”? How does he remember to feed himself? Or to alternate inhaling with an exhaling, instead of doubling up on one or the other? Alyssa Lommel loses all 10 fingers, but Chris is still able to pound away at a keyboard with impunity until sort-of words come out. If this is a just universe, Chris will end up frozen on his doorstep while 10 shots of tequila course through his bloodstream. At least he doesn’t need alcohol to feel no pain in that overmatched brain of his.

(Post rejected because it comes from 2009Tax.org. Another guy whom we berate every time for making a mockery of the proceedings, and yet he continues to mock away. Why do we do this again?)

We’re still deep in the woods. Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans sends us a month-old post about how to stretch out your loan payments to 20 years. Loan methadone.  Government programs to mollify the effects of the other government programs you took advantage of to get in this mess in the first place. The bureaucrats win on both ends, as do the mindless millions who indirectly support them and thus help perpetuate this nonsense. You’ll never get out of student loan debt. Stop pretending that you ever might.

Joshua Rodriguez at CNA Finance discovered thin air, the substance that the Federal Reserve creates “quantitative easing” out of. And can we stop using euphemisms? QE is the name of the process under which the Fed trades cash reserves to banks for bonds. The Fed isn’t printing money so much as it’s creating liquidity. The problem is, it isn’t working. You know, this really warrants a post of its own rather a hastily scribbled paragraph in what’s supposed to be a summary of Joshua’s post.

Mark Ross Canaoay at Money Saving Dude reviewed The Millionaire Next Door.

Time for the heart of the order. Paula Pant at Afford Anything received an email from an ambitious emailer. Instead of giving him* general advice, she asks him to assess his life situation, income potential etc. first. Paula also recommends creating an emergency fund, but we’ll gloss over that.

Every week, we can count on Jason at Hull Financial Planning to fit at least one $10 word seamlessly into his post. This week that word is “psychophysical”, used to explain why humans become perversely more numb the greater the tragedy. Honestly, which affects you more – a paper cut, or the conflict in the Niger Delta? (Google it.) Also, we’re better at addition than we are at division:

When asked whether they wanted to pick from a jar that had 1 winning red jellybean and 9 losing white jellybeans or 7 winning red jellybeans and 93 losing white jellybeans, people invariably chose the latter bet.

We are a dumb, dumb species.

Are you saving too much for retirement? Or to rephrase the question, are you too hopeful about how long you’ll live? PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net dispels the idea that advice created for the masses must therefore apply to the outliers, many standard deviations from the norm.

Justin at Root of Good explains that reaching any financial goal, particularly full independence, isn’t a discrete event. It’s a process, hopefully one that takes less than most of your life.

Finally, Harry Campbell at The 4 Hour Work Day asks how much your time is worth. He doesn’t call it such, but his post demonstrates Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.

When I was young, my dad’s favorite line to get me to do something that he didn’t want to do was, “You’re young, your time isn’t worth as much as mine.”

Then why are old people so damned slow? They should be driving faster than the rest of us, and trying to get through the checkout lane as quickly as possible. Come on, is time precious or not?

Did we mention we’re on Investopedia? Because we are. The Stacking Benjamins podcast too. See you next time.

*We don’t know what sex the emailer is. We would have assumed female but that means we’d have written “Instead of giving her general advice…”, which makes it sound as though Paula, the presumed antecedent of the pronoun her, has a reservoir of general advice that she taps to answer every emailer’s questions with.