Weekend reading: Have you got your mustache on?

Good reads from around the Web.

I could make every post of the week in my regular weekend reading slot one from Mr Money Mustache. The guy drops more bombs than Wile E. Coyote.

Besides being wise and funny, his blog is also stuffed with swearing, shouting, and uncompromising stances. It’s what my blog might be if my prosencephalon didn’t insist on compromises, caveats, and complicated clauses (not to mention ad hoc alliteration).

Some people think they hate Mr Money Mustache. I point them towards it, only to hear how they’re annoyed by the cursing and his made-up words like ‘complainypants’ and ‘Mustachianism’. 

They’re still telling me how annoying it is two months later, when they’re clearly still reading it.

A couple more months more, and it wasn’t them who ever said a word against Mustachianism, oh no guvnor. They’re his biggest fans!

Like this, Mr Money Mustache is taking over the U.S. blogosphere. He’s going to end up bigger than Dave Ramsey, Suzie Orman, and all those other people we’ve never heard of.

And when he does, it will be because beneath the love-him-or-love-him-a-bit-later fireworks, he’s got a rare talent for writing.

Here he was this week writing about a piece of junk mail. Just some junk mail!

I sometimes try to deny it, circulating in my privileged life of bicycles, library books and You the Mustachians.

I pretend that the shopping malls have closed and the former customers are all out there chipping up the asphalt to plant great community gardens. The Escalades are all gliding slowly along their Final Conveyor Belt, about to hit the carbide blades of the grinder which will shred them for reprocessing into wind turbines and solar panels.

But yesterday, someone had the nerve to stuff the mailbox at the Mustache residence full of colorful flyers advertising a huge array of Absolute Crap. And these flyers reminded me that that our work here is far from done. And they enraged me sufficiently that I was forced to grab a pair of scissors and some school glue in order to make the following Infographic for you. Study it, and try to keep a handle on your pulse rate, for it is horrifying indeed.

Beneath the pen, paper, and glue infographic, he asks:

Are people out there still buying scaryass white-bread fast food and jugs of “soft drinks”, a substance only barely less toxic than drain cleaner?

The food is sold with big closeups of deep-fried batter, when instead the image should be of the decaying 720-pound corpse of a man who died in his mid 40s of diabetes and obesity complications.

Read the full post, and find your mind being tweaked and re-tuned by his deceptively spectacular prose.

Cult religions have started on less than this.

From the blogs

Making good use of the things that we find…

Passive investing

• A Scottish index tracker would be lumpy and bumpy – Munro blog
• Why market beating strategies don’t last – Canadian Couch Potato
• Why rebalance your portfolio? – Financial Ramblings

Active investing

• UK individuals own just 11.5% of UK shares – DIY Income Investor
• Looking beneath the US political and tropical storms – Investing Caffeine
• Wexboy finally buys a German residential property company – Wexboy
• Using the dividend compass to identify trouble – Clear Eyes Investing
• Debunking 100% probability recession warnings – A Dash of Insight

Other articles

• Stop when you win the game – The White Coat Investor
• How to get free loft and cavity wall insulation – Miss Thrifty
• On the invariant nature of investor ineptitude – The Psy-Fi blog
• Debating peak oil – Mr Money Mustache
• Micro diversification: The ‘all weather’ portfolio – CSSA Analytics
• Resisting planned obsolescence – Consumerism Commentary
• Stock Watch – The Onion

Product of the week: Marks & Spencer Bank has cut the rate on personal loans to just 5.5%, which The Telegraph reports is the lowest rate in six years.

Mainstream media money

Highlights from the wall of noise…

Passive investing

• Your portfolio: Better off than four years ago? – CBS
• Why Russian investors mistrust trackers – Investment Europe

Active investing

• 1950s lessons for the boom in bonds – FT
• Pursue profits: A new way to be a value investor – CBS
• Beware: China could get stuck in the middle – BBC

Other stuff worth reading

• The coming boom – The Motley Fool
• Delay retirement and live longer – The Telegraph
• Smart metering meets social networks – BBC
• First-time buyers flock to affordable housing schemes – Telegraph
• Is equity release the answer to interest-only woes? – Telegraph
• The cost of buying your Swiss bolt hole – Independent
• Families seek longer-term tenancies – FT
• How to boycott ‘tax-dodging’ Amazon, if that’s your wont – The Guardian
• Lunch with Conrad Black [Very wry!] – FT

Book of the week: I learned this week that Walter Schloss has died. Schloss was an associate of Warren Buffett’s, a quietly super-successful value investor and an Octogenarian tennis player who partly inspired me to ask why great investors live so long. He didn’t write any books, but he did leave his investing rules. A new high-profile book The Value Investors dedicates its first chapter to him, too.

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