CNNMoney.com asked forty famous people for their best piece of financial advice. You’ll hear answers from the likes of Bill Miller, Derek Jeter, Jon Barry, Steven Levitt, and even advice from Rodney Dangerfield. In the beginning of the slideshow, the photos are of the respondents but as you get closer to the end it’s photos of the origins of the advice; you’ll know what I mean when you get there.

Unfortunately, they didn’t ask me, otherwise this is what I’d say about the smartest financial advice I got:

The smartest advice I ever got from my parents was to always work hard. My dad once told me that I was one of those people who could complete a fifteen minute job in ten minutes. As I basked in the compliment, my dad told me that what would separate me from the other people who could do the same thing was what I did with the other five minutes. Everyone has talent in something, but not everyone has a work ethic. A strong worth ethic is what separates the great from the merely good. I can’t say I disagree.

Here are my favorites from the slideshow:

Elizabeth Gilbert: Swear off debt.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a book my wife has read and really enjoyed, and I thought this bit of advice from her parents was a gem. Her father passed along this message from her grandfather: “Borrowing money is like wetting your bed in the middle of the night. At first all you feel is warmth and release. But very, very quickly comes the awful, cold discomfort of reality.”

In Taiwan, and China, the concept of consumer debt is only a recent phenomenon. Until the last five or ten years, the idea of a credit card was foreign in Taiwan. My father told us a story about when my parents bought a home on Long Island that my grandfather wanted to give him the cost of the home (this was nearly thirty years ago). My dad explained to my grandfather that he could put 20% down and borrow the rest, a concept that made no sense to his grandfather. Why borrow money? Just keep saving and saving and saving until you can afford it. It’s amazing how pervasive consumer credit has become in such a short time.

Derek Jeter: Know where your money goes.

Derek Jeter is the shortstop for the New York Yankees and considering the size of his paycheck, it’s amazing this was the advice he thought of. I think it’s valuable because as we get older, the finances get more complex and you begin relying on more and more experts. We now have an accountant that handles our taxes, we leaned on a real estate agent when we bought our house, we’ll have to rely on the expertise of numerous subject matter experts as we grow older but it’s always important to be part of the process.

Chris Larsen: Take risks when you can.

Chris Larsen founded E-Loan.com and Prosper.com, two hugely successful and innovative companies in the lending industry. This bit of advice came from Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Larsen’s MBA professor at Stanford. “You’re young. You can fail two or three times, even lose all your money two or three times, and you’ll be just fine. Taking that risk puts you in the path of wealth.”

In my MBA, I received similar advice from my Entrepreneurship professor. He said that, especially if you’re young, you should be willing to take risks and try paving your own way. It’ll be hard, you might fail, but the worst thing that can happen is that you go back and get another job.

There are a lot of good gems in there including appearances by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, Four Hour Work Week author Tim Ferriss, and many many others.

The smartest advice I ever got [CNN Money]

If you’re a fan of behavioral economics (think Freakonomics and Undercover Economist), you should pick up a copy of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. I reserved both the print and audio book versions (I didn’t know which would be available first) and have been listening to the CDs in my car as I drive around.

I was delighted to hear, somewhere on the third CD, and then confirm in print, on page 122-123; Ariely mentioned a New York Times article written by John Leland that featured several debt bloggers I know: Tricia of BloggingAwayDebt.com, Stephanie of PoorerThanYou.com, Him and Her of MakeLoveNotDebt.com, and a blog called We’re in Debt (I thought I recognized the URL but it resolved to a landing page - oops).

Here’s what the passage said, it was in reference to how you could force yourself to save and control destructive consumer spending behavior:

John Leland wrote a very interesting article in the New York Times in which he described a growing trend of self-shame: “When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt. Yet from the laundry room of her hom in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: She goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now a negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down ($15,312) since starting the blog about her debt last year.”

It is also clear that Tricia’s blog is part of a larger trend. Apparently there are dozens of Web sites (maybe there are thousands by now) devoted to the same kind of debt blogging (from “Poorer than You” poorerthanyou.com and “We’re in Debt” wereindebt.com to “Make Love Not Debt” makelovenotdebt.com and Tricial’s Web page: bloggingawaydebt). Leland noted, “Consumers are asking others to help themselves develop self-control because so many companies are not showing any restraint.”

BLogging about overspending is important and useful, but as we saw in the last chapter, on emotions, what we truly need is a method to curb our consumption at the moment of temptation, rather than a way to complain about it after the fact.

The book is very very good and provides great insight into how predictably irrational we are.

Home sellers in Madison, Wisconsin, in the period between 1998 and 2004, that sold their home using a real estate agent did not consistently get higher prices than those who didn’t. When you factor in the commission, for sale by owner sellers did better. How about them apples?

What stinks is that its likely not representative of the average because the Madison, Wisconsin for sale by owner websites are more popular than others in the nation, but it certainly points to a direction that the National Association of Realtors doesn’t want to go. The primary benefit that real estate agents offer is exposure - specifically a listing in the MLS database. As fewer prospective homebuyers rely on real estate agents and begin scouring for sale by owner, or other sources of homes for sale listing, the less value a realtor can provide.

What can a real estate agent do nowadays that will get you more for your home that you can’t do yourself? If you don’t know how to stage a home and need tips, watch some home flipping or home selling show on A&E. If you don’t know how to play people off each other and getting them to overpay, read a book by Machiavelli. Short of having the legal document templates handy, I honestly don’t think there’s much to offer outside of the exposure/MLS listing and this study backs that up.

What’s funny is that the National Association of Realtors claim that houses sold through MLS get a 16% premium over those not sold through MLS, which is really as fair a measure as the Madison, Wisconsin results when you think about it. Unless they sold identical homes at identical times, some with MLS and some without, there are so many disparate factors that the claim is meaningless. Plus, 16% is before the 6% commission, and 10% is probably getting close to how much error they had on that self-serving study.

If you want to read more, Freakonomics has a great writeup with additional reading material and the original article appeared on the New York Times.

Any real estate agents out there want to defend their commissions?

If you have a moment, send Tricia some love as she’s going through a difficult time.

Now, onto personal finance stuff…

Nickel does a good job analyzing a mortgage refinancing offer. It’s a great post that you should read if you’re considering refinancing because often times people don’t look at the total cost to you, just the drop in monthly payment. By calculating the full cost, he saw that it wasn’t a good deal because of how the clock would reset (back to thirty years). On a slightly different note but still related to housing, Flexo discovered a tool that will help you figure out if you’re overpaying for rent. If I was renting, this tool would be crucial in the decision making process, overpaying on anything, especially high dollar things like rent, always bothers me.

FMF’s March Madness is still going on and it’s down to the Final Four, so get your vote on! Also, check out MBH’s dollar coin allowance - MBH’s been on a serious dollar coin kick lately.

On the consumerism front, JLP went to Sears lately and saw that they were fudging with their stats. If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, you probably aren’t surprised by this especially if there are incentives for coming in under time.

If you can get past the crassness, I think Jeremy’s article on burying for under $1000 is worth reading. Not knowing anything about this sort of thing, thankfully, it’s good to read it before you go through it - it’s a little less stressful now.

While not directly applicable to me, some of you may find this children’s allowance strategy insight helpful at Raising4Boys.

Lastly, SVB asks an interesting question: how much credit have you turned down? The estimate is half a million but considering how I get every single day in the mail and how I shred all of those offers, I wouldn’t surprised if it was considerably more. That’s not saying much because getting offered $5,000 credit lines a hundred times is different than getting one half a million dollar line but it’s still an interesting thought.

I was reading the Freakonomics blog (if you liked the book, you’ll love the blog, it has a lot of good stuff on it) when Stephen Dubner mentioned a report put out by CipherTrust, a security management firm. They studied the first two weeks of October and saw that all phishing attacks originated from less than five zombie networks (computers taken over by spyware/malware/backdoors/etc and send out these emails likely without the owner’s knowledge). Less than five!

Remember, if a bank or Paypal or financial institution ever unexpectedly contacts you via email, never click on a link in that email no matter how genuine it looks. If it were really urgent, they’d call you (they have your phone number) and if it’s not urgent, you can call them.