The Wealth Builder Carnival #31

Welcome to the thirty-first edition of The Wealth Builder Carnival. The purpose of this carnival is to collect articles from the blogosphere on building, preserving and keeping enough wealth for a comfortable retirement. For reference, I have tried to keep the carnival content tightly focused on wealth building and did not include submissions that were off topic.

For reading convenience, the posts are listed with a brief summary or comment by the submitter and organized them into seven categories: Earning, Investing, Insuring and Protecting, Living Frugally, Retiring, Saving and Taxes.

And now onto the Carnival:

Earning

Gerry Sandis presents 79 Sample Job Interview Questions posted at RESUMEMag, saying, "Preparing and practicing for potential interview questions ahead of time can greatly increase your overall interview presentation. This post contains 79 typical interview questions you should be prepared to answer."

Insuring and Protecting

CreditCardGuru presents Credit Card Payment Protection Insurance Worth It? posted at credit card forum [the blog], saying, "Credit card companies are usually quite aggressive in peddling their payment protection plan. The reason why is because it's a big money maker for them (and probably a waste of money for you)."

Investing

Janet Russell presents Inferior Mutual Fund Performance No Load Mutual Funds Best No Load Mutual Funds posted at Best No Load Funds, saying, "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."

Dividends4Life presents 23 Stocks With A Vision Of Higher Dividends posted at Dividends Value, saying, "To succeed as a dividend growth investor you must identify and purchase stocks with sustainable dividend growth. Inertia is powerful force. Once a company has established a track record of growing its dividend over the decades and developed a shareholder base that expects higher dividends each year, it becomes increasing difficult for management to cut or fail to raise their dividend."

Mike Piper presents Picking Mutual Funds: Don’t Just Look at the Winners posted at The Oblivious Investor, saying, "When researching mutual funds, many investors only look for characteristics common among winning funds. But that's only half the picture."

Jim Yih presents Do You Have Any Global Real Estate? posted at Retire Happy Blog, saying, "The challenge is that once you invest in the real estate, deciding to sell may not provide you with instant liquidity. In addition, investing in real estate in other countries adds additional tax concerns as well as local laws."

2 Cents presents End of QE2 Marks D-Day for the Markets: Bill Gross posted at Balance Junkie, saying, "PIMCO's Bill Gross thinks the end of the latest round of quantitative easing will be significant for the markets. But will we see QE3?"

Dividend Growth Investor presents Dividend Champions - The Best List for Dividend Investors posted at Dividend Growth Investor, saying, "The dividend champions list is by far the most comprehensive list of dividend growth stocks available for free. It breaks down the dividend growth universe into dividend champions, dividend contenders and dividend challengers."

Living Frugally

Paul Foley presents Training at Night posted at Life and Times Living with In-Laws, saying, "Applying the Training at Night method to Personal Finance"

Jeffrey Weber presents 4 Reasons Retail Credit Cards Are a Bad Idea posted at Credit Card Wisdom, saying, "Retail credit cards are simply a bad idea in most cases. They encourage overspending (and increasing debt) while charging sky high interest rates and adding yet another bill to worry about every month."

Madison DuPaix presents Cheap Movie Deals from Groupon, Redbox, and Amazon posted at My Dollar Plan, saying, "Read about some great options for cheap entertainment."

David presents The Rundown on Foreign Transaction Fees Credit Card Offers IQ posted at Credit Card Offers IQ, saying, "Everything you need to know about foreign transaction fees."

Money Crashers Team presents Income vs. Wealth - What's the Difference? posted at Money Crashers, saying, "“Income” and “wealth” have incorrectly become synonymous in American culture. While the two concepts often go hand in hand, using the terms interchangeably is misleading. America’s most wealthy individuals don’t necessarily draw the highest levels of income."

Ryan @ MFN presents The Case for Automating your Finances posted at The Military Wallet, saying, "This articles makes the case for automating your finances to save time, money, and headaches. It is based on a missed credit card payment I had that occurred when I was relocating to a new state. The problem would not have happened if I had automated this account."

Odysseas presents Save Money on Food posted at Wallet Blog, saying, " I think your frugal readers will find my submission useful this week because I explain a few simple – but extremely helpful – do's and don'ts on how to save money when it comes to food."

Retiring

FMF presents Instant Gratification Killing Retirements posted at Free Money Finance, saying, "If you want to build up enough for retirement, you're going to need to sacrifice at least a bit during your working years. It appears that many Americans are not willing to do this."

Boomer presents Defined Benefit Plan posted at Boomer & Echo, saying, "The defined benefit plan (commonly referred to as a “gold-plated pension”) has been on the decline over the last two decades, but it still represents a fairly large sample of the Canadian work force."

Savings

None

Taxes

Tom @ Canadian Finance Blog presents TurboTax 2010 Review posted at The Canadian Finance Blog, saying, "A TurboTax review of TurboTax Standard 2010 tax software with a comparison to the Premier, Home & Business and Basic versions of TurboTax."

Ryan @ CML presents 7 Simple Tips to Legally Pay Less Tax posted at Cash Money Life, saying, "These 7 tips can help you legally pay fewer taxes when you file this year."


That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of The Wealth Builder Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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This is not financial, earning, insuring, investing, living, retiring, saving, tax, or wealth building advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

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