Part of the deal when you participate in a carnival is that you link to it from your blog. My weekly Carnival of Personal Finance links have been getting less perfunctory lately, to the point where I thought I would try making a proper post of it. It’s an excuse to discuss a lot of personal finance advice from several blogs at once, which certainly fits into the theme of BMA. So here goes.
The carnival is hosted by Suburban Dollar this week with a delightfully kooky theme, the beyond vintage video game Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
One of four editors picks this week was Happy Rock’s post 16 Year Old Skips The Last Two Years Of High School To Play Proffesional Baseball. The gist of the post is that this is a bad thing. It is about Bryce Harper, a 16 year-old from Nevada recently featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, who dubbed him the "Chosen One". He plans to skip out on 11th and 12th grades in order to enter next year’s baseball draft. This is a maneuver that will probably net him a sum in the high seven figures.
How could this possibly be a bad idea? I know guys who would pay in the high seven figures to play professional baseball. And some of them would pay extra if they could’ve avoided the second half of high school. Granted, Bryce’s education will suffer. He might, for example, not learn how to spell "professional" or the difference between "to" and "too" or (gulp) "beat" and "beet".
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On Monday a guest post at I Will Teach You To Be Rich disclosed the secret formula to saving $71,000 in mortgage interest payments.
There are things I like about I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Ramit Sethi, its owner and usual author, is anti-Latte Factor and even more obsessed with 
Suze Orman than I am. And he’s often quite funny. But the blog also awfully gimmicky. And the scheme to save on your mortgage is a classic gimmick that’s been knocking around for years now and should probably just be put out to pasture already.
The very specific sounding $71,000 mentioned in the post’s title turns out to be an arbitrary estimate of what you could save in interest, assuming a particular rate and principal amount. The way you do this is through bi-weekly payments.
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The other day in my post on Marotta Asset Management’s posts on Free Money Finance I mentioned a maneuver that could make a person some money that involves converting from traditional to Roth IRAs. It’s a fairly obscure strategy. Google and I were only able to find one other explanation of it, in 
an article in the Journal of Retirement Planning from 2007. (See page 57.)
So Marotta may deserve credit for introducing this trick to the blogosphere. Of course, last week I said that I thought that Marotta didn’t explain it very well. It seems only sporting that I try explaining it myself. In case it needs to be made clear, I am neither a CPA nor a lawyer, just a sneaky jerk who likes to do things that make him feel clever.
First, a few preliminaries. Traditional IRAs can be converted into Roth IRAs, but a person has to pay tax on the balance that was in the traditional on the day of conversion as if it was income earned in that year. Currently there is an eligibility limit based on income to be allowed to convert, but that limit goes away in 2010.
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The blog Free Money Finance has a recurring guest blogger usually identified as Marotta Asset Management. In fact, Marotta posts often enough and has been doing so for long enough that the designation of "guest" seems a little strained. I assume that this is one of those mutually beneficial barter 
arrangements that make the blogosphere go. FMF gets free content and Marotta gets free advertising for their business. (They are a financial planning firm in Charlottesville, VA.)
The only flaw in this swap scheme is that the posts aren’t very good. I mean that both in the sense that the content falls short of what you would hope to see from an actual working financial advisor (not "just a blogger") and in the sense that the posts are not written as well as I would like. Indeed, on more than one occasion I have aborted plans to write about them here because in parts I am not sure what they are saying. And that makes it hard to argue that a post is wrong, even when I am pretty sure that it is.
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A few things too small for posts of their own have been cluttering up my (virtual) desk.
CreditMattersBlog today has a post on a column a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal by our friend Brett Arends on using your credit cards to raise money for an emergency fund. It’s a stupid as it sounds. The column, I 
mean, not the blog post. I have a rule not to pick on the same guy twice in a week, so I will keep from saying anything bad about Arends. I’ll just give you a link to where somebody else does it. (Note to any WSJ editors reading this: I would be happy to do Arends’ job for whatever you are paying him.)
CreditMattersBlog apparently noticed the Arends piece from a post by Liz Pullman Weston at MSN Money with the (for me) irresistible title “Why Suze Orman is Wrong – Again”. In case you missed it, good ol’ Suze put out some advice on March 1 that caused quite a buzz.
I want you to only pay the minimum due on your credit card balance and instead make it your top priority to build as much of an emergency cash fund as you can.
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Carnivals, Investing, PF Blogs | Frank Curmudgeon | 
June 23, 2009 10:00 am | 
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