The week's best financial advice

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

Grad gifts that keep giving

By all means, give the gift of cash this graduation season, said Suzanne Woolley at Bloomberg​. "But the best gift may be twofold: some cash your grad can spend as he or she likes, plus a gift that introduces the power of long-term saving and investing." One popular option is to open a Roth IRA; these accounts are easier to tap into before retirement than a traditional IRA, like for the down payment on a house. If your graduate earned income this year, you can give the amount of that income up to the annual limit of $5,500. Another idea is to "match your grad's savings or payments on debt," like student loans. Or set him or her up for a lifetime of money management, with paid-for "sessions with a planner."

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Cramer's market record

CNBC TV personality and Mad Money host Jim Cramer is one of the country's most famous stock pickers, said Jennifer Booton at MarketWatch.com, "but he doesn't beat the market." Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Cramer's charitable fund, Action Alerts Plus, has underperformed the S&P 500 since its 2001 inception, with total cumulative returns of 64.5 percent compared with 70 percent for the index. The Action Alerts Plus portfolio, which Cramer uses in part to sell $15-a-month newsletter subscriptions that give information about the fund's holdings, actually beat the market in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, but it has struggled since. Cramer isn't alone, however. A majority of active money managers have underperformed the market over the past 10 years, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Reselling your hotel room

"Stuck with a pricey hotel reservation?" asked Amy Zipkin at The New York Times. Try reselling it online. With cancellation restrictions and fees becoming more widespread, travelers are turning to sites like RoomerTravel and Cancelon to unload nonrefundable reservations. Sellers can list booked rooms for any price to recoup some or all of what they originally paid, and the listings appear on travel sites like Kayak and Trivago. When a room sells, the sites take a percentage — 15 percent at RoomerTravel and 10 percent at Cancelon. There's both an upside and a downside for those looking to book a room. The offered rooms can be cheaper — RoomerTravel says its average discount is 45 percent — but some consumers say they have had issues with confirmation numbers associated with their stays.