Now you, too, can have a great first quarter.

Now, if Merrill (MER) debt was a book, it would be stacked on that back table next to Alec Baldwin's autobiography. Ironically, this has given BofA a big boost. Since that debt is worth so much less, its shrinkage actually counts as dollars gained.

Sell something: Hocking jewels or an art collection is a time-honored way to raise some scratch when the coffers are running a little low. In Bank of America's case, its recent sale of $1.9 billion worth of shares in China Construction Bank certainly helped fatten up its bottom line. Unfortunately, as analysts shrewdly realized, selling off assets isn't really a sustainable model of revenue generation. Despite BofA's strong first-quarter showing, the market rewarded it with a 24 percent drop in share price, largely due to the one-time nature of its gains.

Skip December: Sure, it'll put all those creepy mall Santas out of work, but that's a small price to pay if it helps net you $1.66 billion in quarterly profits, like it did for Goldman Sachs (GS). When Goldman made the transition from an investment bank to a bank holding company, it switched from a fiscal year that ended in November to one that aligned with the calendar year. As a result, December 2008—during which the company lost $1.3 billion—dropped off the radar. While Goldman, of course, had other reasons for turning itself into a bank holding company, the quashing of December was a nice ancillary perk that made its first-quarter results far sunnier than they would have been otherwise. Maybe you can eliminate your own month!

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