Logo used with permission, more or less

Every week, we appear on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Host Joe Saul-Sehy (we don’t know how to pronounce it any better than you do) manages to temper our abrasive personality and mesh it with those of co-panelists Paula Pant (see below) and Len Penzo into a coherent whole. Plenty of personal finance advice, occasional yuks. Highly recommended, if we do say so ourselves. Onto the Carnival:

This time, let’s mix things up and start with a good submission. PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net took time out from his loaded regimen of 3 a.m. feedings and irregular screaming to create the Wilshire 5000 Dividend Reinvestment Calculator. Pick any 2 dates since the release of King Crimson’s Lizard, and it’ll tell you how much a basket of stocks invested in America’s most comprehensive index would have done between said dates. Adjusted for inflation, if you want. Further evidence that dividends are indeed what Benjamin Graham styled as “the intelligent investor’s secret weapon.”

Justin at Root of Good is now 4 months into retirement, with plenty of years ahead of him assuming that fate coöperates. (Pretentious umlaut use is in retaliation for Justin referring to food as “fare”. Now we’re even.) Justin has learned a delightful truth, which is that your schedule fills up quickly even (nay, especially) when you don’t have a workplace to check into 5 days a week. Graphs at the post’s conclusion show that Justin is saving a healthy ratio of his income, although we’re curious what constitutes the $5 “gift” entry among December’s expenses. Is that a Christmas present from a great-grandmother, given for Justin to spend on penny whistles and moon pies? Unclear.

Circumlocutory block of text from Stacey at the overhyphenated Plastic-Card-City.

Dammit, and now we’re back to zero. Lisa Park at Secrets 2 Save thinks that you’re interested in learning about companies that conduct online surveys, and that pay the respondents a small stipend. As CYC honoree Paula Pant of Afford Anything points out, so you want to make money. Great. Is your time worth nothing? Doing mentally undemanding tasks at someone else’s behest from your couch isn’t going to pay much, by definition. (See Demand, Supply and. Also Scarcity.) Leverage your own time, rather than being the vehicle through which others – in this case, survey companies – leverage theirs. Although we do have to credit Lisa for her nice touch with the “http://www.” before every URL she listed. Makes her look very technologically savvy. Just be grateful we chose to make fun of that and not of her attempts at spelling and grammar.

Whatever you do, no matter what your financial situation is, never, ever, ever, ever start an emergency fund. We’ve written about this time and again. Among other reasons, there are very few “emergencies” that you can’t insure against. Most of the authoritative personal finance blogging idiots who recommend creating an emergency fund seem to think that socking money away in a low- or non-interest-bearing account and letting it stagnate there should be a higher priority than paying off debt or investing. Encouraging an emergency fund is facile, inoffensive (except to us) advice that doesn’t help anyone’s financial situation, but does let the blogger in question think he’s somehow educating the masses. It’s the first resort of the unimaginative dolt who never had interesting things to say in the first place.

Jack at eMoneyLog thinks you should start an emergency fund.

“Why do you guys make fun of the bad posts? Why not just discard them instead?” Because then the CoW would be 3 sentences long. Mark Wang at The Money Mail sent us a paid post for the UK version of Boost Mobile. People with bad credit shouldn’t be granted access to the wireless spectrum.

Nothing says “I disdain the readers of Control Your Cash” quite like sending us an uninspired post, having us make blatant fun of it, then submitting the exact same post a week later. Thanks, Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans, for showing an unmatched level of care and creativity. Send us the same post next week, we dare you. Even that long-ago CoW submitter who killed 5 hookers never pulled that sort of nonsense.

However, this guy did. Easy Extra Dollar has now submitted “Avoiding Scam Online Job” thrice in 4 weeks, and with every passing CoW that post’s original release date of August 2013 looks more and more ludicrous. Still, this post does contain one of the all-time unintentional comedy bits in personal finance blogging history (sic‘d, all of it):

It is in your best interest not to reply to jobs that offer outrageous salaries or that are not written in a professional manner. You ought to even be weary of job ads that contain lots of punctuation, spelling, or grammar mistakes, as plenty of individuals who do not speak proper English conduct untraceable foreign or abroad scams through the use of job sites.

We’re definitely “weary” of such mistakes. Did we use that joke during one of the previous submissions of this same post? Probably. Why should the submitters be the only ones to have the fun of repeating themselves?

More sediment from May at Messy Money, who did the masochistic courtesy of thanking us for making fun of a post of hers in a previous CoW. That one was dismal, but this one is intricately so. She starts with a tired enough premise:

Money is a frequent cause of conflict in relationships.  This conflict can be exasperated (sic) by poor communication.

This post is so awful that her confusion of “exacerbated” and “exasperated” isn’t even the worst part of it. Here’s May’s surefire method for solving such communication problems:

The shower exercise. A 6-part method for taking a shower together and discussing your money problems while the bathroom mirror fogs up. Here’s Step 4:

After the opening, each person takes a turn to talk about what they believe is the most pressing financial issues for them and why.  After the person states their pressing issue, the other partner needs to ask, “What do you need or what needs to happen to improve this situation.”

What did we do to deserve this? All we tried to do with this site was provide an unorthodox, helpful, entertaining place to offer sound and practical personal finance advice. Instead we’re besieged by kooks explaining that you should talk about money woes while lathering up and loofahing. Should you have wet and sweaty sex in your accountant’s office, then? Fortunately, May didn’t leave us hanging after Step 4. Here’s Step 5, which you couldn’t have figured out unless she spelled it out for you: 

Address the answer to the question about what needs to happen and negotiate the next step to move towards the solution.

Whore. Do you know what advice is? It’s “Insist on the employer match for your 401(k) contributions, that’s free money.” Or “Never trade your car in with the dealer, sell it on eBay Motors instead.” It’s not “Here’s a moronic exercise that no one, sane or otherwise, will ever, ever do. I just needed to fill some space because I’ve never had an actionable thought.” Messy Money, never darken our doorstep again.

Paula Pant? Yes freaking please, and not a moment too soon. One paragraph from the Afford Anything proprietor can make up for all sorts of lower-level nonsense. Paula took a random walk down Wall Street, or a random toss, anyway. A blindfolded Paula chose 10 stocks to invest in for 2014. Includes a video, featuring her bouncy new highlights. (Although to be fair, we didn’t see duds like JC Penney and Teradata on her dartboard.)

Chris at This, That and the MBA tells the story of a roofer he claims to know, who had extra tiles after finishing a job and offered to patch up people’s houses in the neighborhood. They told him to take a walk because they didn’t know who he was. Moral of the story: let people know who you are. 

Pauline Paquin at Make Money Your Way to the rescue. Again.  The Franco-Guatemalan land tycoon lists multiple ways you can rely on your existing body of talents and skills to make money. Listen to her. In fact, do everything she does and you’ll almost certainly be farther ahead than you are now.

Where the hell has Michael Kitces been? The longtime CoW contributor returns after [checks archives] 5 months. We’re glad to see that in the interim he adopted our suggestion to use a bigger font. This week, Mr. Kitces looks at human capital: some of us have a “bond-like” capacity for generating income, while others are more “stock-like”, and Michael argues that your investment strategy should serve as something of a counterbalance. This post is written primarily for financial planners, and it’s a little jargonized, but well worth your time. Welcome back, Mikey.

Kurt Fischer at My Money Counselor regales us with the story of an intellectually compromised Canadian couple who signed a car loan authorizing a 25% interest rate, then cried foul when the lender starting charging 25% interest. Oh, and did we mention that the couple had declared bankruptcy in 2010? They should consider themselves lucky they didn’t have to pay 40%. Hell, they should consider themselves lucky they didn’t have to take the bus. Kurt essentially says everything we would have said about the couple in question.

We’ve officially turned the corner. Andrew at 101 Centavos with more gold, and we’re not saying that just because he references us in his post. In fact, we disagree with his premise – that gym memberships are a waste of money. But Andrew’s so deft a writer that it doesn’t matter. (Side note: Can Amazon create a drone with sufficient lift to deliver kettlebells? Can we order said kettlebells to be dropped on the houses of people we don’t like?) Includes the word “pullulate”. Damn he’s good.

Like, Jason Hull good. Hull Financial Planning asks if spending more time at work is worth the salary increase. We’d argue that it depends on your station in life – the younger you are and the more you like your job, the more likely we’d answer “yes.” That being said, Jason determines that extra hours have a non-linear (concave) relationship to increased utility. Even worse, the benefits don’t kick in until the 48-hour-a-week mark, which we’re proud to say we did our best to avoid approaching in the first place. Just enroll in Jason’s Winning With Money course instead (link to the right).

Finally, Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro pimps some credit card.

Thanks for reading. See us on Investopedia, and oh yeah, on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. ‘Til next time.

(Not shown – CYC winter headquarters, where it’s currently 79º and sunny)

Just look at those numbers. Even the Bahamas is experiencing sweater weather. You people who live where the minus signs and single digits are, are you masochistic in every aspect of your life, or only the ones that involve exposing your body to the elements? Our favorite number on there is the 26º in Dickinson, North Dakota. “What did we do to deserve this lucky torrid fortune?”

Onto the Carnival. Please Jesus, let the submissions be better than last week’s. Let’s start with Easy Extra Dollar, with a piece on how to earn money online:

Many people have problem in installation and application of software’s. If you have a knowledge about the installation and usage of soft ware’s. Then you can make money online.

We’re not sure whether “soft ware” is one word or two, but at least we have a knowledge that its plural takes an apostrophe.

Anyone here play poker? What do you when you’re holding an unsuited 2 and 8, and three Aces come down on the flop? Do you stick around to the bitter end, or do you fold? Yet here we are, unswayed and not backing out of the CoW immediately as we probably should.

Repetition is the key to something or other, and Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans enjoys writing about the niche topic of paying one’s student loans. Jon says you can beg your creditors for forgiveness. Failing that, you can beg for a lower interest rate. Either way, you’ll still be confronted with the overarching question of why you wasted 4 years of productive life studying something of negligible or even negative economic value. Jon uses our least favorite word, “consider”, as in “consider refinancing your student loans.”

If something’s worth advocating, then advocate it. Telling people to “consider” something isn’t advice, it’s verbal busywork. This post is 6 paragraphs, 17% of which is pure cut-and-paste. Oh, for the days when we’d host other people’s carnivals, then get lambasted by the carnival operator for saying true if uncomplimentary things about the submissions.

It’s going to take an ocean bigger than the Atlantic to keep us away from the mediocrity. For our British friends, Mark Wang at The Money Mail lists questions you should ask when taking out a mortgage. One of them is “Can I transfer this mortgage to another property?” Really? If you can, we’d like to switch ours to Fairfield Pond in the Hamptons. And then rent it out. (Of course we wouldn’t live there, it’s [checks map] like -2º right now.)

The pain continues. Lisa Park at Secrets2Save noticed that if you start saving money at an early age, that’s better than waiting until a later age. She also uses outdated 2012 numbers for 401(k) matching contribution limits. There’s nothing technically wrong with this post, unless you count “uninspiring” as a subset of wrong.

And Mark Hanna at Debt, Dividends and Diversions finally ruins our streak. Intelligence, originality, engagement…what’s he trying to prove? Mark asks if looking at a day’s or week’s worth of market movements can bode anything for the year. You might be skeptical, but Mark explains that the correlation is stronger than you’d think. That being said, even he admits that you shouldn’t take the implications to incorrect conclusions.

Two more good ones, both CoW veterans of great distinction, and we’ll call it a carnival. Let’s start with Jason at Hull Financial Planning. Be a hard-money lender, or buy rental properties to increase your net worth? Jason opted for the latter, and not just because the wind was blowing a particular way that day. As usual, he gives a litany of logical reasons (coupled with incisive commentary from his wife.) Go to his site and read his archives, he’s almost certainly smarter and more successful than whomever you’re talking to right now.

Finally, Cameron Daniels at DQYDJ.net— HEY! Looks like we’re not the only ones to have spent the Christmas break gussying up our site. Among other enhancements, the DQYDJ team has incorporated a new font, one in which tildes and minus signs look somewhat similar. We were wondering why Cameron was so happy about seemingly saving -38% of his pretax income.

Also like us, the DQYDJ crew understand the folly of new year’s resolutions. This is the part where we casually ignore Cameron’s admission that he’s carrying $34,000 in consumer debt and bought a house while holding $56,000 in student loans and car loans. Includes a comment from Cameron’s co-author, which is kind of like the Beatles playing on each other’s solo albums.

Once again, we came from behind to rally. Check us out on Investopedia and the Stacking Benjamins podcast. And of course, every day here. New posts Wednesday and Friday, some filler the rest of the week. Thanks for playing.

And here we were buying multiple home theater components like a bunch of idiots.

It changed our lives for $99. Full report later. Onto the Carnival:

We’re all struggling this time of year, at least creatively, thus this English-as-a-Second-Language submission from Jack at E-Money Log. Also, it’s 3 months old:

If you become prior-prepared about the methods of your spending, then it will also help you to plan your living for your future years. Health is another factor to consider; your current health situation shall decide on your health levels during your retirement lifespan.

We think we know what that means, but re-reading it would take valuable seconds away from finite beach time.

Here’s one that’s a month older than that, from Easy Extra Dollar. It’s titled “Avoiding Scam Online Job” (sic). Does that sound familiar? It should, we ran it 2 weeks ago. Thanks, guys. Way to step it up. So we’ve got illiteracy, repetition, and tardiness. Anything else, gentlemen?

Do any of these submitters read our freaking site? And/or understand what little patience we have for laziness, socialism, unrepentant borrowing and useless college degrees, among other things? Not Jon Haver at Pay My Student Loans. who every week gives incipient graduates tips on pre-empting any future productive behavior. This time, how to beseech your creditors for partial forgiveness. And if your creditor is the collective of your fellow state or federal taxpayers, all the better.

Anti-capitalism polemic ripped from the pages of Quotations From Chairman Mao? Sure, why not? That fits in seamlessly with what we’ve been advocating on this site since Day 1: work hard, leverage, build wealth, let the other people be the suckers, etc. From Fred Goldstein at something called PEGAB, the Political & Economic Global Analysis Blog, and let’s not enrich the web hosting bourgeoisie when we can have a state-of-the-art Weebly.com site instead, a piece called “Capitalism and the roots of inequality.” It opens with the line “Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World,” and that’s not even us attempting comedy. It gets worse from there. “Class struggle,” “exploitation of labor,” etc.

Kenneth Long at Finance Penguin is yet another CoW rookie, one from a site that seems to think a 5-month old post is exactly the sort of contemporary content our demanding readers have come to expect. Then again, his is the most practical post we’ve received so far. Should you hire a consultant for your fledgling business? Kenneth is a consultant, the kind who can write a post with zero conclusions. “Check references, interview multiple consultants and ultimately choose the best.” For those of you who never would have thought of that otherwise.

How ridiculous can this get? How about a 7-month old post? ¡Sí se puede! From Christopher at This, That and the MBA, how to handle a financial windfall.

Hmm…should you pay off your debts and invest what remains? Nah, that’s too facile. He wouldn’t dare waste our and your time with that.

If there is any high-interest debt, this should be made a priority. Furthermore, an emergency fund is always recommended. It is advised to have at least three months of emergency savings on hand.

Great. Advising people to create an emergency fund is the single most insipid piece of advice we’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t stop someone from repeating it every freaking week. And we’ve now used the same pseudo-curse twice in this CoW already. Also, nice touch with the passive voice, really brings the piece to life. That is, the piece is really brought to life by the passive voice which was used there.

Are we done yet? And just like that, the endlessly stellar Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence has to come in and snap our streak of ineptitude. She’s bright, she’s enterprising, she’s the kind of independent thinker (and more importantly, doer) we need more of. We’ve already written one paean after another to her on this site, and this might be her magnum opus. Pauline is self-tithing, giving away 10% of her blogging income for scholarships that’ll go to deserving kids in her Guatemalan village. Not only that, one of her readers matched her first $2000. That’ll go far in Central America. Seriously, this is a beautiful story, and a remarkable initiative by a remarkable woman.

If the no-hitter’s over, we might as well give up another double, let a run score. (Wait. We’ve used that analogy before, only with a CoW full of good entries that was ruined by consecutive bad ones. But what the hey. Blogger’s prerogative, we’ll call it.) Jason at Hull Financial Planning opens with an intriguing question: How Black Should Your Box Be? What is he talking about? He’s asking how you should mesh the sometimes conflicting goals of a) letting your customers know you can help them via gestures and 2) still turning a profit. For instance, Wall Drug gives ice water away and sells coffee for a nickel, but indirectly gets plenty of gains from those loss leaders. Same deal with software companies that offer free bare-bones versions to the public while charging for the full-featured counterparts. As for Jason’s own company, it “demonstrate[d] how to solve general problems, but never to solve someone’s specific one,” and that’s about as good a definition we could give as to where you ought to draw the line.

Now this is what you call end-loading. Another CoW luminary, the consistently superb Andrew at 101 Centavos. He recently wrote about Limoneira, the publicly traded California fruit company. This week, Part II. It’s a holistic look at retail markups of foodstuffs, perishability, and more. Farm-to-table and beyond, on both ends. Even better, Andrew’s left this series open-ended. Will we get a Limoneira trilogy? A tetralogy? We can only stay tuned.

Finally, Justin at Root of Good looked and looked until he found a negative to early retirement. Why, that just means all the more decades for you to potentially lose it all in! Seriously though, Justin assesses prudently what could happen if he ran out of money while still in the front nine of life. But if he flexes the same muscles that got him to early retirement in the first place – intelligent budgeting, finding secondary sources of income, not falling into the idiocy of consumer debt – he’ll be more than fine.

Catch us on Investopedia. The Stacking Benjamins podcast. And here, every day. Thanks again for coming.