So here’s the latest in what’s become a weekly series, our recycled Investopedia pieces. We still write for them, by the way. In fact, here’s our latest, give or take. But here’s a piece from many months ago. Still timely, mind you. Much like the nightly sports highlights can show only still photos from pay-per-view events, we’re allowed to show you no more than a sample paragraph from our vintage, nay classic, post. Here’s one that comes complete with a 96-year-old pop culture reference:

With an IRA, the world is your investment oyster. You can invest in just about any security or financial instrument whose value can be measured precisely and daily. What it doesn’t include is things like collectibles. Your mint-condition Inverted Jenny 24¢ stamp might be worth $925,000, but that’s only an estimate based on the price the most recent profligate rich person paid. It could take years to find a comparable rich person. One hundred shares of a stock, however, carry a value that you can calculate to the penny.

Here’s the original in its entirety. (We can’t explain the low-resolution stock photo. That’s Investopedia’s deal, not ours.) Enjoy.

You can’t kill a dead man, but apparently a part-timer can break his streak

If you missed last week’s Carnival of Wealth…well, you weren’t the only one.

First, the excuse: we use a couple of hosting services to organize the carnival submissions for us. One of those services has been down for a while now, the other one takes submissions and watches them disappear into the ether. So we should have been suspicious when Sunday night came around and we’d received posts from a grand total of 2 sites, one of them with only a tenuous connection to personal finance. Thank God we’ve developed the ability to filibuster. The next morning, many of our regular submitters asked where their offerings had vanished to. We couldn’t have been more embarrassed. (Shout out to anyone who has a site and wants to submit – from now on just email us.) In fact, we were so abashed by our sparse Carnival of Wealth last week that we punished ourselves with a 1-day sabbatical. So here’s how good our feature attraction, our carnival can look with an extra 24 hours of preparation behind it:

Let’s start with the man who’s done more to earn top billing at Control Your Cash than anyone, Jason at Hull Financial Planning. If you heard our most recent appearance on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, you’ll know how little we think of the “news” that high-frequency trading is a scourge created by the amorphous evil entity collectively known as Wall Street, designed to profit off everyday investors. Yes, high-frequency trading takes advantage of market inefficiencies in fantastically short time periods. The difference between buying XYZ stock at 19 and buying it at 18.999 can mean significant profits if you’re dealing in institutional-sized quantities. (It can also mean significant losses, but the kind of gullible septuagenarians who watch 60 Minutes aren’t interested in that.) For investors of ordinary means, minor discrepancies in price will have a negligible effect on the buy-and-hold strategy you should be using.

Or as Jason pointed out, high-frequency traders pocket a percentage of the total value of all stock market transactions. How big a percentage? .02. Or the equivalent of the price of Michael Lewis’s new book on an investment of $140,000.

How smart is Nelson at Financial Uproar? Too smart to have gone to college. (You people with 5-figure student loan balances didn’t think such a thing could exist, did you? What a shame that your post-secondary educations never afforded you the opportunity to exercise your imaginations.) This week Nelson pounces on some idiot ex-journalist who wrote a book about his discomfort working at a retail job, the man held me down, barely a living wage, insufficient health insurance, capitalism blows, etc., etc. Nelson, again not bogged down by a college degree and the unrealistic expectations that accompany it, managed to turn what could have been a dead-end retail career into unqualified success. Nelson also didn’t slap his ex-wife around, something the journalist should have thought of before it forced him to change careers. See how simple most of this stuff is?

Who likes uncompensated labor? Aside from every employer in the world, that is. Pauline Paquin at Make Money Your Way has plenty to say about internships; how they’re offered as an investment (12 weeks in the boiler room at Goldman Sachs will lead to a fast-track first-year salary) when the reality is something quite different. Pauline explains why you shouldn’t work for nothing to gain experience, save for very rare exceptions (specifically, what used to be called professions: medicine, etc.) Pauline is debt-free, owns multiple revenue-producing properties, and lives on the beach in Guatemala, so it might behoove you to listen to her. (Then again, she isn’t a college admissions officer or a corporate recruiter, so she can’t possibly know what she’s talking about.)

Two more submissions, both of them stellar. Justin at Root of Good retired in his 30s, and now has the rest of his life in which to trot the globe and raise his kids. Is early retirement with mouths to feed the way to go? Personally, we’d rather work and not reproduce (if forced to choose), although we do understand that we’re in a statistically insignificant minority. Justin explains how to balance the economic and parental parts of your life without compromise.

Finally, PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net shows us the ramifications of Poe’s Law in practice. The internet has desensitized us to sincerity, to the point where legitimately held extreme beliefs and parodies of the same can be hard to tell apart. If you’re a fan of horribly written blogs with uninteresting content, this post is for you, and please understand what we mean by that. (You’ll have to read his post to find out.)

Thanks for coming. Another Carnival of Wealth next Monday, we swear. And a new post later this week.

By 2011, pro football had metamorphosed from popular sport into national obsession. That spring, the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement had expired. The owners attempted to implement some draconian new measures, including an extended season (two additional chances to suffer a career-ending injury!) and a tight salary cap for rookies. The union decertified, several players filed an antitrust suit, and the league locked them and their teammates out. Within a month, a judge invalidated the lockout. By late July both sides agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, too late to save the first exhibition game, but guaranteeing a decade of labor peace.

Full version here. Enjoy.

Andrew and his best friend, Gord

That’s the problem with being selective. You accept only the good submissions, or the stupendously awful ones, and pretty soon the number of submitters dwindles to a trickle. Presenting another edition of the Carnival of Wealth, the only personal finance blog carnival worth a damn. Even with only 2 submitters. One of whom is one of the aforementioned awful contingent, the other of whom is a rookie. When you’re the only legitimate submitter, unbowed by threats of search engine optimization punishment, the least we can do is name a weekly edition of the Carnival of Wealth in your honor.

That warrants some explanation, and excuse us if this is a little too inside baseball. The majority of blog carnivals are nothing but collections of links. Just look at this garbage. 83 indistinguishable personal finance bloggers submitting synopses of their latest genius, which this week’s designated honoree then copies and pastes with so little quality control that he included a few duplicates. Of course, no one’s going to read such an agglomeration, much in the same way that no one reads a telephone directory from start to finish. But, the submitting sites end up getting linked to, and that’s all that matters: another instance of the URL BoringPersonalFinanceSite.com clogging up the internet, and thus ostensibly improving the site’s Google PageRank. Now, the site owner can charge a few pennies more for advertising.

That’s all such an inferior carnival is, a festival of recursion. You scratch my back with a link, I scratch yours when it’s my turn, everybody profits. It’s foolproof! Those losers like the Control Your Cash team are wasting their time trying to write something entertaining and readable when instead they could showcase an insipid parade of links.

You’d be amazed at how pervasive this is. Most of our contemporaries, and we use that term loosely, fixate on Google analytics to the exclusion of everything else. You think we’re making that up? We received the following email last week (click on it to embiggen):

He was serious, or doing a convincing impression of being so. The legalese was a nice touch. We were serious too (ditto):

Immature? Yeah, but he started it.

You’re not going to believe this, but the folks at Google – who created this almighty algorithm in the first place – have figured out that people are trying to game the system by rounding up links and putting them on display to artificially enhance their page rankings. So some red-handed bloggers – not all, but enough, and their ranks are growing – have decided to quit submitting to carnivals altogether. Case in point, the carnival we used as a bad example above used to get over 100 submissions a week.

Well, with a carnival like the CoW, which receives fewer submissions to begin with, losing submitters is somewhat more noticeable. Not that we’re accusing our absent submitters of disappearing solely for search engine optimization reasons, mind you. But it does make for a thinner carnival. One that we’re devoting to the intrepid Andrew Pohl this week, our only legitimate contributor.

Andrew is the brains behind Finance With Reason, a site we’d never heard of before. The title of his post is a rhetorical question, or at least we hope it’s rhetorical. “Should I Invest in Penny Stocks?” Ha, trick question. You can’t “invest” in penny stocks, because penny stocks aren’t an investment. They’re pure speculation. And it appears that Andrew is self-aware enough to see penny stocks for what they are:

If you want to get rich quick with no effort at all then penny stocks are for you.  If you think it would be a better idea to climb off of your unicorn and float down to earth instead of looking for a pile of gold at the end of a rainbow then you should stay far, far away from penny stocks.

There isn’t more to it than that. Yes, a stock that sells for 6¢ a share has an excellent chance of doubling in value. More than, say, Berkshire Hathaway stock, which is currently trading at $185,149 and won’t be making it to $370,298 anytime in the short term. Of course, the obvious downside to a stock trading at 6¢ is that a 6¢ drop in its price is fatal. Andrew knows this now, but didn’t know it when he was 18. He got educated the hard way, but it’s much better that he did so earlier than later. We won’t ruin his post for you, but will instead encourage you to read it. Ahead of all the other submissions this week.

Back for a second week is AccuTech, a company that we made fun of last week but whose representatives insisted on returning for a second visit. AccuTech’s Jim Brewer is proud to announce that AccuTech offers “the most comprehensive heating and cooling services available in Warrington, PA.” You know what else AccuTech offers? Lots and lots of the same SEO nonsense we whined about earlier:

We can clean your air ducts that are used for heating

our pledge to you is to provide superior heating and cooling services

Whatever climate control comfort needs you have, no matter how large or small, we can meet your requirements.

We are your go-to full-service company for central AC and heating

Enlist our help with air conditioning and heating services near Warrington PA today.

Not with a bang but a whimper. And we’re done, hopefully not permanently. Catch us on Investopedia. And on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, weather permitting. See you tomorrow.

“Qwirkle.” “Belfort.” “Ingenious.” These aren’t even real words!

The biggest problem with Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar – aside from his repetition, impractical advice, stubbornness in the face of evidence that proves him wrong, unhealthy love of adverbs, repetition, comical overuse of the word “wonderful,” and repetition – is that there’s just too much to make fun of. We can read him only in spurts, then have to take a few weeks or months off or we’ll find ourselves making our own deodorant or recording awkward YouTube videos in one take.

Earlier this month, reader Kevin brought Trent’s latest to our attention and sucked us back in. A post called The Last Bit in the Container, which might be the quintessential Trent Hamm work. As long-winded calls to skimp (and scrimp) go, this one is the Trentiest.

It happens over and over again in life. You’re using a tube of toothpaste and you’ve used enough so that it’s becoming difficult to squeeze out the remainder. You’re eating a bag of chips and all that’s left are a bunch of crumbs at the bottom. You turn over your shampoo bottle to get a little for your hair and find that it’s not coming out very fast at all.

The container’s almost empty.

How is it possible that the biggest cheapskate on the planet can have no concept of economizing when it comes to words? You could take all the superfluous phrasing out of The Simple Dollar and use it to make another site. Several sites. The man has devoted terabyte after terabyte to saying more than the situation calls for.

The effort that he should expend on editing instead goes to arithmetic that tests the limits of his calculator’s display. Our own shows quantities no smaller than ±10^-90. But if there’s a way to somehow save 10^-91¢, Trent will find it.

I get 35 uses out of that shampoo bottle. If I stop right then, the shampoo is costing me 5.7 cents per use.

Trent is clearly slipping. He ratiocinated these figures to only a single decimal place. The Trent of old would never have admitted to paying 5.7¢ per brushing (excluding depreciation of the toothbrush) when he could avoid rounding down and claim to be paying 5.714¢ instead. Carnival of Wealth stalwart Paula Pant at Afford Anything observed that Trent made an egregious mistake, too. How can he contemplate spending 30 additional seconds in the shower getting an extra serving out of his shampoo bottle, while not factoring in the water he’s consuming during that time? Maybe he turns the water off while squeezing. Which would seem likely, for a man who counts out 9 squares of toilet paper per wipe. (We included a link so you could see the original source, but we warn you that that linked story Trent wrote is more than a little unpleasant. Let’s just say that the family that defecates together, gets visited by Child Protective Services together. Or should.) Trent isn’t done with measuring bathroom product expense per use, either:

Let’s say a tube of toothpaste costs $3 and provides a maximum of, say, 60 uses. This seems about right, since Sarah and I can get through a tube in about a month.

As Kevin put it, “It appears that he and the unfortunate Mrs. Hamm only brush their teeth once a day.  I guess this probably saves about 37¢ a month or so.”

Wait, we’re missing the big story here. This is the same hypocritical fat man who once wrote a post about how to save money by making your own toothpaste. (We already showcased that nugget of resourcefulness and ingenuity here.) Add stevia, cinnamon, peppermint oil, baking soda and hydrogen peroxide; buy a “small empty travel squirt container”, insert the former into the latter, and…

As soon as we’re done going through our backlog of toothpaste (purchased in bulk), I intend to use this as my only toothpaste.

He wrote that sentence 3 years ago, so if he’s telling the truth, that means he had at least 36 tubes of toothpaste in his pantry at the time. For him and his wife. As for their 3 kids, presumably they’re on their own.

When I reach a point where a squeeze doesn’t produce enough toothpaste to use, I’ll usually go down to the end of the tube and spend a minute or so rolling it up. I can usually get another ten or so brushes out of that tube if I do it.

We would have used the word “uses” rather than the misleading “brushes”, but then again we’re not the featured attraction at Financial Times Press, and that’s officially the most depressing independent clause we’ve ever written.

What kills us about Trent, every time, is that he couldn’t be more derivative yet thinks he’s being original. He seems to believe that he stumbled across this revolutionary new method of getting more toothpaste out of a tube – rolling from the bottom – and that his readers would stand to benefit from such a discovery. Just read this. Just freaking read this:

With no extra effort, I can get 50 uses out of the tube. That means my cost per use is $0.06.

For the last ten uses, I need to spend a minute rolling that tube up carefully to squeeze all of the extra into the end of the tube. This saves me $0.06 per use and I figure I’ll get another ten uses out of it. That means the one minute spent folding up the tube saves me $0.60. Is it worth it? I think so, since $0.60 per minute adds up to $36 per hour after taxes, a rate most of us would love to achieve.

Hey moron: You can’t extrapolate these piddling quirks of yours like that. It doesn’t work that way. He brags about how it takes him just 10 seconds to squeeze out another 6¢ worth of toothpaste (again, assuming that his cinnamon-stevia-hydrogen peroxide-baking soda concoction is still fermenting in the basement, and we can only hope there are a couple of ingredients in there that can chemically bond and turn Trent’s house into a mustard gas factory.) That’s not a functional $36/hour, unless you have 360 almost-empty tubes on hand and more teeth in your mouth than the standard 32. By the same logic, picking quarters off the street (assuming 3 seconds per pickup) is an effective $300/hour job. Why would anyone ever do anything else for a living?

This is what happens when you take a kid in a tiny Midwestern town, introduce him to fantasy role-playing games instead of teaching him how to throw a g.d. baseball, and leave him alone with his thoughts. He ends up becoming fascinated by minutiae, and the more minute, the better. Assuming the wife and kids exist (we’ve been skeptical, and would like to see tangible proof of at least one family member in those YouTube videos), how is he still at this obsessive point? How does the wife put up with it? Why does she put up with it? Does she consider the glass to be half full? (“He’s not smoking, he’s not doing drugs. [Of course not, they cost money.] I’m pretty sure I don’t have to worry about him cheating. I can deal with this. I’ll spend far more in therapy sessions than he’s saving in toothpaste, but I’ll figure it out.”)

Trent lives in Huxley, Iowa. When we find out his address, we’re going to break into his house one night, pour all the perishables down the sink, open all the windows so he’ll burn another kilowatt-hour or so of energy, then stand across the street and rub our hands with glee.

One of our favorite Investopedia pieces is the one we wrote about different retirement systems throughout the world. Which countries are “generous” with redistributing wealth, which are less so. We concluded that in the short term, but absolutely not in the long term, Greece would be the place to live out your dotage:

Greece[‘s] government promised its citizens benefits that defy math. Greek retirement age can be as early as 50 (not a typo), depending on your profession. There’s a special category for “arduous and unhealthy work,” which includes the grueling physical demands placed on…wait for it…trombone players and pastry chefs.

If you want to read the rest of the post, here it is in its original incarnation. You can blame our Investopedia editor for removing all the profanity and sex jokes.

Includes an attachment for those hard-to-reach places

So the Malaysian government has determined that an airliner that was lost over the ocean did, in point of fact, crash into the ocean. Thanks for that. Next up, how was the Empire State Building erected: 1930s-era work crews, or visitors from Tau Ceti?

Excuse us as we go off on the absurdity of journalists in general. They deserve it. Last week a CNN anchor entertained the notion of Flight 370 being swallowed by a black hole. One localized entirely within a segment of the Indian Ocean. A Mother Jones writer blames the failure to find remnants of the flight on anthropogenic global warming. Sure, why not? How about this – be it resolved that it’s impossible to find a denser-than-water structure, the size of a baseball infield, in an area the size of Maryland? Oh, and let’s not forget the Fox News anchor who helpfully pointed out that the Indian Ocean is “one of the deepest oceans on Earth.” Well, it’s definitely in the top 5. And what does that mean: that it’s easier to find a plane in an ocean that averages 10,000 feet of depth than in one that averages 12,000 feet? The recovery effort, much like its Air France Flight 447 counterpart, represents millions of dollars spent purely for public relations without the intention of doing anything concrete. The proverbial needle in a haystack has a better chance of being found. The ocean is large. In Flight 447’s case, someone turned up some debris a year and 9 months after the crash. Not sure what the point of that was.

And now, the always awkward transition from a general knowledge topic to the Carnival of Wealth. We do this every Monday, in case this is your first time here. Personal finance blog posts from everywhere, varying in content from stellar to abysmal. Fortunately, most of the submitters whose posts are in the latter category have been shamed out of existence in recent months. What remains is the wheat. Let’s get started, shall we?

Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence asks if you’re richer than your grandparents. Even though they’re had the capacity for building wealth for decades, while you’re young enough to have grandparents who are still alive. Pauline explains the concept of division of labor better than Adam Smith himself could do it, illustrating how a society that’s progressed beyond subsistence agriculture lets its denizens multiply their productivity just by doing whatever the marketplace offers rewards for. If this sounds like nothing more than an academic economics treatise, it isn’t. For millions of us, any productivity advantage enjoyed over our grandparents just by virtue of us being born later is more than negated by our appetite for buying (and financing) stuff we don’t need. Pauline, by the way, is richer than her grandparents ever dreamed of – both in terms of net fiscal worth and of the freedom that said worth brings.

SAFEMAX sounds like a prison classification. “Once they catch Robert William Fisher, he’ll be looking at 40-to-life in Florence, Colorado at SAFEMAX.” Not quite. It’s an attempt to measure how quickly you can withdraw money in retirement without being stuck with too many remaining heartbeats and too few dollars to spend maintaining them. Jason at Hull Financial Planning found one glaring flaw in the methodology behind the calculation of SAFEMAX, one that its originator either never thought of or never thought important.

Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro wrote a book, The Ultimate Guide to Understanding your 401(k). How many of you have only a vague understanding of your 401(k), and think of it as merely a place where a portion of your paycheck disappears to every couple of months, returning so far off in the future that you can’t even comprehend it with your human brain that’s inexorably wired for the short term? Best of all, Harry is giving the book away. Plenty of tips complemented by plenty of royalty-free illustrations.

Finally, a company called AccuTech submits every few weeks, and doesn’t seem to understand how this whole personal finance blog carnival thing works. That’s OK, many of our regular submitters don’t. Anyhow, AccuTech has “up-front pricing and 24-hour service”, making them “your top choice for air conditioning and heating services near Warrington, PA.” Do you need your AC unit fixed or your heating ducts cleaned? They’re here (well, there) to help.

And we’re done. (Do you want quantity, or quality?) As for our other appearances, we wrote one article after another on technical analysis at Investopedia in the last few weeks, but encourage you to take such numerical alchemy for what it is. Also, we’re on the Stacking Benjamins podcast more often than not. Back here tomorrow with an Anti-Tip of the Day, new posts every Wednesday and Friday, and a new Carnival of Wealth every Monday. ‘Til then.

You see, kids, back in 1982, color photography hadn’t yet been invented

Humans are atrocious at assessing risk. That’s why there are mothers who won’t let their kids visit the house of a friend whose parents own a gun, but who have no problem allowing their friends to visit a house that features that child abattoir called a swimming pool, even though Junior is hundreds of times more likely to die at the latter house than the former.

Humans are also, for the most part, rotten at math. That’s why Quicken Loans can offer ONE BILLION DOLLARS (really, half a billion dollars) to someone who can select a perfect NCAA Division I Mens’ Basketball tournament bracket, and people will take it seriously. Here’s the truth:

You’re not going to win it, but on the other hand, nobody else will. That simple sentence alone isn’t enough to convince most people. They know that someone wins Powerball and Mega Millions every few weeks, so why should the Quicken Loans Bracket Challenge be any different?

(Note: Quicken Loans is offering the $500 million, but Warren Buffett is underwriting the promotion. He doesn’t need to underwrite it – your poor alcoholic cousin could do just as good a job, for the negligible risk incurred – but Quicken Loans is paying Buffett for the privilege of the insurance. $10 million. Yes, the one person who’s going to make f.u. money from this is the guy who already has $60 billion.)

The problem is that most people can’t distinguish between one large number and the next. After all, aren’t they all pretty much the same once you get past 1 million?

The odds of picking 64 games perfectly, straight-up, is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808-to-1. We can call that 9.2 quintillion-to-1 and it’s not going to alter our calculations significantly. The odds of winning Mega Millions are 258,890,850 to 1. It’s 36 billion times more likely you’ll win Mega Millions (which you won’t, but at least somebody will) than that you’ll fill out a perfect bracket.

Let’s say there’s a nationwide lottery in the United States. Every citizen gets one entry, and there are 2 drawings. The chance that the same person would win both drawings is about 1% of the chance that someone’s going to take Quicken Loans’ $500 million.

Some of you who are particularly sharp are thinking, “Come on. A 16-seed isn’t going to beat a 1-seed. That narrows the odds significantly.” And you’re right. Throughout history, the 1-seeds have won their opening games 100% of the time. The 2-seeds, 99%. If you take all the favorites in every round, the odds reduce to 7,419,071,319-to-1. Assuming not a single 9-seed beats an 8-seed. Which, you know, never happens.

Here’s Juliet Lapidos, a lady who works as a staff editor at the New York Times. Ms. Lapidos “holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University and an M.Phil. in English literature from the University of Cambridge,” so if you’re looking for someone perfectly innumerate, the closest thing to an anti-Peter Lax, she’d be close to an optimal choice.

ESPN has run a March Madness contest for the last 13 years and no one has ever completed a perfect bracket.

That’s like saying no one has ever been trampled to death by a left-handed female African elephant on the inside lane of the southbound Lake Pontchartrain Causeway while whistling Ennio Morricone’s “Ecstasy of Gold” and spinning 11 plates on sticks, 9 of them clockwise and 2 counterclockwise. Of course it’s never happened in 13 years. It won’t happen in 13 trillion. That someone felt the need to point this out is part of the problem.

We can’t understand why Quicken Loans restricted the contest to the first 15 million entrants. Keep in mind, all the entrants have to submit personal information in their quest for money they’re never going to win. That’s a database of potential borrowers that no company this side of Facebook can put together easily. (Bonus: Facebook somehow gets information from people without offering them a chance at any money. Mark Zuckerberg is even smarter than you thought.)

Even assuming the favorites were going to win every matchup, is $500 million worth your while? Not a ridiculous question. Given the odds on completing a perfect bracket under the condition that every favorite win, then $500 million would be a fair payout on a wager of 13¢. Your information as a would-be customer is worth more than that to Quicken Loans, even assuming that you probably won’t get a mortgage from them. One more time, and we’ll say this until you’re sick of it: look at every transaction from the perspective of the other party. Why would Quicken Loans feel like giving money away for no reason at all? Does Warren Buffett make it a habit of losing money on investments? (Especially when he can determine the probabilities in advance?) This is a way for Quicken Loans to combine market research and data mining into one campaign, and get the media, primarily Yahoo, to do the work of promoting it. It’s also a way for Warren Buffett to profit off someone else’s inability to properly assess risk. Bet the NBA instead, the lines are truer.

Admit it, your eyes glazed over when you saw the headline. You thought, “Great, this idiot is going to tell me to shop around for low fares and eat in cheap restaurants when I get there.” Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. There are plenty of other personal finance sites that’d be more than happy to do that, tie it to a 30-frame slideshow, and call the result groundbreaking. No, we thought we’d give our readers legitimate ideas that they wouldn’t find elsewhere. And now, we’re passing the savings onto you. Read the following enticing paragraph and you’ll understand why Investopedia made it their mission to beat Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha in the bidding war for our services.

Planning a vacation, or even a simple business trip, is far more complicated now than it was in the prehistoric area (before Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) You can compare hotels, rank them by price, rank them by amenity level, rank them by distance from the airport, cross-reference them with reviews on TripAdvisor and read the reviews of those reviews. Hopefully, you’ll still be in the mood for a vacation if you don’t succumb to paralysis by analysis first.

Here’s the original. Read the whole thing, click on all the sponsor links, and send an email to the editor saying how awesome our pieces are.

Now this is the face of a man who just loves killing Nazis.

Presenting the only World War II soldier confirmed to have killed an enemy with an arrow.

When the Krauts invaded Poland, Lt-Col Churchill reenlisted at the age of 34. He’d left the British Army years earlier, the peace of the 1930s unsuited to the mindset of a guy whose first name was “Mad.” He’d go into combat armed with a longbow and a claymore. Again, this was WWII, not the Crusades. It’s not as if Browning rifles hadn’t been invented. Mad Jack would fight his enemies with centuries-old weapons just for the fun of it. He carried bagpipes and grenades, simultaneously. These days, that’s part of a Halloween costume. For Mad Jack it was another day at the office.

He fought the Axis forces in Germany, Italy, and what is now Croatia. He escaped a concentration camp, forced his way out of SS control, walked 90 miles to freedom and then, instead of taking well-deserved leave, went to Burma to fight Japanese. Weeks later, when he heard the news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he uttered the single greatest quote we’ve ever heard:

If it wasn’t for those bloody Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years.

Jack died in 1996. Still, don’t piss him off.

Jason at Hull Financial Planning fought in Bosnia with an M16, but could probably have wrought havoc with stones and a sling. As it is, he’s the only person we know who can quote Ted DiBiase and Donatella Versace in consecutive weeks. This week Jason explains the Peltzman Effect, and how it applies to your retirement savings.

PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net knows how we feel about emergency funds, but also knows to put inert money to good use. He explains how using a Health Savings Account for contingencies and unexpected expenses makes more sense than the mindless method of putting thousands of dollars in a negligible-interest savings account. We’d explain why, but that would defeat the purpose of having you read his brilliant (ho hum, as usual) article.

Well, how about that. The illiterate guy who runs This, That and the MBA is back. This is an actual passage written by someone claiming to be a postgraduate degree-holder. You should read it aloud for the full effect. Not if there are other people in the room, though, the reason for which will soon be obvious:

Loans are always misunderstand as a mechanism for help in poor financial status. However, truth is different that is almost all wealthy investors repeatedly utilize loans to help themselves become wealthier.

Great stuff, Christopher. Thanks for dragging down the level of discourse in a way that few submitters can.

Benjamin Graham said that dividends are the investor’s secret weapon. Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar says that Benjamin Graham is dead and buried. Who doesn’t like dividends? Nelson, and his reasons for eschewing dividend growth stocks make a lot of sense. And intuitively, why would a company weaken its cash position by giving part of the store away? (Short answer: Because the managers control enough of the company that they can reward themselves from its coffers.) Graham’s mentee, Warren Buffett, has never paid a dividend in his decades at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway; which, by the way, last traded at $183,860. Dividends are awesome if you’re an opportunistic investor, maybe less so if you’re trying to build a lasting company. Nelson would prefer to invest in the latter.

We’re probably the only personal finance site that’s never read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, and that primarily because his previous effort Moneyball was such a pile of tailings. Yes, it was critically acclaimed and influential, whatever. The thing needed an editor like Chris Christie needs a personal trainer. That people can call Malcolm Gladwell a hack on a planet that Michael Lewis inhabits makes no sense. Anyhow, Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro did read The Big Short 4 years after its release, and has our sympathies. His review of the book is probably better than the book itself is.

A couple of years ago we explained how currency arbitrage can open up unexplored parts of the world to a savvy traveler. Justin at Root of Good not only agrees, but explains in great detail (with charts and everything) which country’s currencies have lost value against the greenback over the past year and are thus worth a visit. While Justin waits for the euro to lose value against the U.S. dollar (NB: Keep waiting), much of an entire hemisphere is on sale for him and his family. This is a welcome post, one that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand just for a single solitary sorry “chilly/Chile” pun. In some respects, the man had no choice.

Thanks again for reading. This is where we tell you to read us on Investopedia and listen to us on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. The end.