Search Results for: trent hamm

March’s (F)RotM. You’re in Trent Hamm’s House.

March 28, 2014
Qwirkle. Belfort. Euphonia. These aren't even real words!

“Qwirkle.” “Belfort.” “Ingenious.” These aren’t even real words!

 

The biggest problem with Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar – aside from his repetition, impractical advice, stubbornness in the face of evidence that proves him wrong, unhealthy love of adverbs, repetition, comical overuse of the word “wonderful,” and repetition – is that there’s just too much to make fun of. We can read him only in spurts, then have to take a few weeks or months off or we’ll find ourselves making our own deodorant or recording awkward YouTube videos in one take.

Earlier this month, reader Kevin brought Trent’s latest to our attention and sucked us back in. A post called The Last Bit in the Container, which might be the quintessential Trent Hamm work. As long-winded calls to skimp (and scrimp) go, this one is the Trentiest.

It happens over and over again in life. You’re using a tube of toothpaste and you’ve used enough so that it’s becoming difficult to squeeze out the remainder. You’re eating a bag of chips and all that’s left are a bunch of crumbs at the bottom. You turn over your shampoo bottle to get a little for your hair and find that it’s not coming out very fast at all.

The container’s almost empty.

How is it possible that the biggest cheapskate on the planet can have no concept of economizing when it comes to words? You could take all the superfluous phrasing out of The Simple Dollar and use it to make another site. Several sites. The man has devoted terabyte after terabyte to saying more than the situation calls for.

The effort that he should expend on editing instead goes to arithmetic that tests the limits of his calculator’s display. Our own shows quantities no smaller than ±10-90. But if there’s a way to somehow save 10-91¢, Trent will find it.

I get 35 uses out of that shampoo bottle. If I stop right then, the shampoo is costing me 5.7 cents per use.

Trent is clearly slipping. He ratiocinated these figures to only a single decimal place. The Trent of old would never have admitted to paying 5.7¢ per brushing (excluding depreciation of the toothbrush) when he could avoid rounding down and claim to be paying 5.714¢ instead. Carnival of Wealth stalwart Paula Pant at Afford Anything observed that Trent made an egregious mistake, too. How can he contemplate spending 30 additional seconds in the shower getting an extra serving out of his shampoo bottle, while not factoring in the water he’s consuming during that time? Maybe he turns the water off while squeezing. Which would seem likely, for a man who counts out 9 squares of toilet paper per wipe. (We included a link so you could see the original source, but we warn you that that linked story Trent wrote is more than a little unpleasant. Let’s just say that the family that defecates together, gets visited by Child Protective Services together. Or should.) Trent isn’t done with measuring bathroom product expense per use, either:

Let’s say a tube of toothpaste costs $3 and provides a maximum of, say, 60 uses. This seems about right, since Sarah and I can get through a tube in about a month.

As Kevin put it, “It appears that he and the unfortunate Mrs. Hamm only brush their teeth once a day.  I guess this probably saves about 37¢ a month or so.”

Wait, we’re missing the big story here. This is the same hypocritical fat man who once wrote a post about how to save money by making your own toothpaste. (We already showcased that nugget of resourcefulness and ingenuity here.) Add stevia, cinnamon, peppermint oil, baking soda and hydrogen peroxide; buy a “small empty travel squirt container”, insert the former into the latter, and…

As soon as we’re done going through our backlog of toothpaste (purchased in bulk), I intend to use this as my only toothpaste.

He wrote that sentence 3 years ago, so if he’s telling the truth, that means he had at least 36 tubes of toothpaste in his pantry at the time. For him and his wife. As for their 3 kids, presumably they’re on their own.

When I reach a point where a squeeze doesn’t produce enough toothpaste to use, I’ll usually go down to the end of the tube and spend a minute or so rolling it up. I can usually get another ten or so brushes out of that tube if I do it.

We would have used the word “uses” rather than the misleading “brushes”, but then again we’re not the featured attraction at Financial Times Press, and that’s officially the most depressing independent clause we’ve ever written.

What kills us about Trent, every time, is that he couldn’t be more derivative yet thinks he’s being original. He seems to believe that he stumbled across this revolutionary new method of getting more toothpaste out of a tube – rolling from the bottom – and that his readers would stand to benefit from such a discovery. Just read this. Just freaking read this:

With no extra effort, I can get 50 uses out of the tube. That means my cost per use is $0.06.

For the last ten uses, I need to spend a minute rolling that tube up carefully to squeeze all of the extra into the end of the tube. This saves me $0.06 per use and I figure I’ll get another ten uses out of it. That means the one minute spent folding up the tube saves me $0.60. Is it worth it? I think so, since $0.60 per minute adds up to $36 per hour after taxes, a rate most of us would love to achieve.

Hey moron: You can’t extrapolate these piddling quirks of yours like that. It doesn’t work that way. He brags about how it takes him just 10 seconds to squeeze out another 6¢ worth of toothpaste (again, assuming that his cinnamon-stevia-hydrogen peroxide-baking soda concoction is still fermenting in the basement, and we can only hope there are a couple of ingredients in there that can chemically bond and turn Trent’s house into a mustard gas factory.) That’s not a functional $36/hour, unless you have 360 almost-empty tubes on hand and more teeth in your mouth than the standard 32. By the same logic, picking quarters off the street (assuming 3 seconds per pickup) is an effective $300/hour job. Why would anyone ever do anything else for a living?

This is what happens when you take a kid in a tiny Midwestern town, introduce him to fantasy role-playing games instead of teaching him how to throw a g.d. baseball, and leave him alone with his thoughts. He ends up becoming fascinated by minutiae, and the more minute, the better. Assuming the wife and kids exist (we’ve been skeptical, and would like to see tangible proof of at least one family member in those YouTube videos), how is he still at this obsessive point? How does the wife put up with it? Why does she put up with it? Does she consider the glass to be half full? (“He’s not smoking, he’s not doing drugs. [Of course not, they cost money.] I’m pretty sure I don’t have to worry about him cheating. I can deal with this. I’ll spend far more in therapy sessions than he’s saving in toothpaste, but I’ll figure it out.”)

Trent lives in Huxley, Iowa. When we find out his address, we’re going to break into his house one night, pour all the perishables down the sink, open all the windows so he’ll burn another kilowatt-hour or so of energy, then stand across the street and rub our hands with glee.

Filed Under: Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With: , ,

Trent Hamm, Genius. Trent Hamm, Lunatic

December 18, 2013
Who's the most handsomest boy at the board game convention?

Who’s the most handsomest boy at the board game convention?

 

See? He’s not the only one who can change his mind by 180º in a single motion. And honestly, he is something of a genius in that someone this, what’s a good euphemism – single-minded can attract tens of thousands of devotees despite having only one personal finance tactic at his disposal (“spend less.”)

If you’re unfamiliar, Mr. Hamm is the “creative” force behind The Simple Dollar, an amateurishly written website in which he repeats himself 14 times weekly. He’s been a favorite of ours for a very long time. His advice is insipid, his syntax more stilted than Roy Maloy. From Mr. Hamm’s latest post, here’s an example of the excruciating detail he entices his readers with:

The first morning we were [at a relative’s house for Thanksgiving], I grabbed some clothes and headed for the bathroom to take a shower. Just like I do at home, I turned the hot water to full and turned on the cold water just a little bit, waited about fifteen seconds, and stepped in.

No mention on which body part he used to turn the water on with, whether he closed the shower curtain behind him, or if soap was involved, and if you think we’re being funny you haven’t seen the depraved depths of specificity to which he’ll go. The shower turned out to be too hot for his soft white underbelly, so…you won’t believe what he did to address the problem. Any guesses? Come on, you can do this.

I turned down the hot water and turned the cold water up quite a bit until I found a good balance

This is how you become a great blogger, kids. Write things your audience can identify with. Who among us hasn’t gotten in an unfamiliar shower and found it too hot? More importantly, who among us has found it noteworthy to mention such an occurrence?

Afterwards, I was talking to the person who was hosting us

Trent goes to disturbing lengths to camouflage the identities of the bit players in his inexorable stories. Earlier, he refers to this home as that of “some of our extended family members.” Because “my wife’s uncle” or whatever just conveys way too much information.

Anyhow, the person who was hosting the Hamm clan (or, if you prefer concision, the “host”)

told me that he, too, turns on a mix of hot and cold water for his shower, as does his wife.

This isn’t an atypical post for Trent Hamm. Every one of them is this dull, pointless, and dizzyingly simple in its progression. If you were visiting kin and discovered that they drank beer with breakfast, dried their clothes in the oven, or tossed their trash in the neighbor’s yard, that would be worth mentioning. But that they “tur[n] on a mix of hot and cold water for [their] shower[s]”? You know, like everyone else in the civilized world does? To you, our readers, this is as pleonastic as information gets. To us, it’s something to make fun of. But to Trent, it’s critical to the plot.

[Finding out that these people shower with a mix of hot and cold water] threw me for a loop.

I was…shocked.

We only wish that Trent’s shocked-by-the-shower story had involved someone throwing a toaster in standing water while Trent was scrubbing down his orcine body, but no such luck.

We’re not going to parse every line in Trent’s Typhoon Haiyan of a post, because if we did we’d be here for months. Fast-forwarding, the unidentified male family member explained that they keep their water heater temperature high to prevent disease.

Where do these people live, Calcutta?

The good part, at least for Trent, is that this conversation gave him another triviality to obsess over.

At about 50 degrees Celsius, which is what we keep our hot water heater set to, you have a drastically higher chance of Legionella living in your hot water tank. Instead, [The Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases] recommends keeping it set at 60 degrees

God forbid he’d multiply the Celsius values by 1.8 and add 32 to accommodate his American audience, but Trent has a knack for paying attention to meaningless details only. Although he’d probably never given Legionella a 2nd thought in his life, he was now confronted with a whole new series of economic tradeoffs to calculate cost-benefit analyses for:

The problem with that temperature is that you run into some danger of scalding. The solution there is to have anti-scald devices at the faucets and showers

[…]I raised our own tank temperature up to about 140 F. We already had these anti-scald devices installed

So, does Trent’s post have a point? Of course not, this is Trent Hamm we’re talking about. By the way, the cheapest anti-scald device we could find sells for $42. Trent Hamm, who regularly tells his readers to save money by making their own toothpaste instead of dropping $1 for a tube of AquaFresh, and who literally counts the number of times he shakes salt or pepper onto his food, threw away $42 on an additional shower valve instead of just playing with the hot and cold faucets like a normal person would. The net result of Trent raising his water tank’s temperature to unfamiliar heights? Again, by now you should be able to guess this easily.

The water in the shower…does come out warmer than I like, meaning I mix in some cold water with my showers.

Every 12 hours, this psychopath manages to hunker down and squeeze out another post. Which sounds like it’d be hard to do, at least in terms of time expended, until you remember that he can burn multiple paragraphs on the subject of his preferred method for finding a comfortable temperature each time he steps into the shower (which, judging by his appearance on those YouTube videos, isn’t all that frequently.)

There is a plot twist. About once every couple of hundred posts, Trent goes iconoclast and stops praying at the altar of the great goddess Parsimonia (boldfacing his):

Frugality isn’t worth the risk of a significant increase in the likelihood of Legionnaire’s disease or other bacteria-borne illnesses in our home.

Again, what 3rd-world backwater is he living in? Last we checked, Huxley, Iowa was nowhere near the Gaza Strip. Granted, he lives with kids and kids are filthy, but so filthy that even 120º isn’t enough to stop the microorganisms from claiming another victim? The only people Legionnaire’s disease has killed in this country in the last 30 years all lived in nursing homes. Trent isn’t yet so immobile that he needs a health-care worker to wash him down with a rag on a stick, but you can’t be too careful.

This advice wouldn’t be so bad (though it’d still be plenty bad) if it weren’t coming from the same tool who bars the door against Legionella but goes out of his way to recommend other fun ways for incurring disease:

If your recipe says “Preheat the oven to 400º” and then later says “Bake for 30 minutes,” don’t preheat the oven at all. Instead, put your food in the oven, then set the temperature to 400º. Then, add about half of the preheat time to the cooking time. Why? When you open a preheated oven to put in your dish, it’s no different than opening the oven to check the food near the end of the cooking time. You lose that 2¢. (Ed. note: 2¢ being the amount Trent figured out that it costs to open your oven to check on food. That’s not a joke. Nor is it a joke that he apparently had no clue than turning on an oven light could have saved him 1.994¢ or so of those precious pennies.) 

Keep your shower’s hot water relatively cool to save money. No wait, raise its temperature so you don’t get an extremely rare disease. But it’s okay to risk a more common (if less fatal) disease if it means saving 2¢, or .05% of the price of an unnecessary anti-scald device.

Trent Hamm is an abomination. If you read him for anything other than the (admittedly small) amusement value, you’re throwing your life away. If you’re contemplating buying his book, please buy ours instead before killing yourself.

Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , ,

Carnival of Wealth, Trent Hamm Is A Charlatan Edition

February 4, 2013
Ladies, not sure how to break this to you, but he's taken.

Ladies? Not sure how to break this to you, but he’s taken.

Before we begin this week’s CoW, here’s the single stupidest thing any personal finance blogger has ever said, and given the hundreds of dumb personal finance blog posts written daily, that’s saying something. (Boldface in the original):

From a purely financial perspective, it’s never a good idea to sell a car. One could just keep repairing pieces of it as needed in perpetuity and, over the long run, you’re going to end up saving money.

Where do you even start rebutting that? The falsehood in the excerpt is obvious to everyone in the universe except the person who wrote it.

Oh yeah, him. His name is Trent Hamm and he writes The Simple Dollar, the most repetitive and inane personal finance blog in existence. It has 100,000 Feedburner subscribers. The title of this particular post is “Putting a Value on Reliability: When Is It Time to Trade In Your Car?” A reader unfamiliar with The Simple Dollar would assume that Mr. Hamm might give maybe a formula, or some sort of numerical benchmark, for keeping one’s car vs. getting a new one. Projected miles remaining vs. projected miles remaining in a new car, divided by (new car price minus Kelley Blue Book value of existing car), or something.

But such research and discovery is not what Trent does. This is what Trent does:

To me, it comes down to your gut. If it feels like it’s time to replace a car, then replace that car.

Sorry to ruin the climax for you, but that was it. Here’s another profound insight from earlier in this Benghazi embassy attack of a post:

[A]s a car ages, the likelihood of a vital system failing grows. If the likelihood of a system failure is elevated, that means the car isn’t as reliable.

Wait, how do you figure?

Everything that comes out of this man’s keyboard is baseless, and often internally contradictory, drivel. His writing is beyond sloppy, his imagination is nonexistent, and his knack for repetition is without peer. Aside from that, awesome site.

Welcome to the Carnival of Wealth. Personal finance blog posts from all 7 continents, none of which blow anywhere near as much chimp as Trent Hamm’s best work. Let’s get started:

Pauline Paquin at Reach Financial Independence made her stunning debut in last week’s CoW, and returns this week to show us her fatalistic self. What if civilization as we know it crumbled? Can you barter and make fire? The people with the fireproof matches will hold untold power in such a world.

New submitter this week, Gary at Gajizmo, the first CoW entrant to feature the sequence “jizm” in its URL. Gary’s post is not bad, and not concise. 1600 words on whether you should pay your mortgage off early, the answer being “it depends on whether you could put the balance in an investment that pays more than your mortgage costs, taking into account the interest deduction you’d forgo.” (Details here, Chapter VII.)

Journalistically trained and perennially masochistic Miranda Marquit just can’t leave us alone. She returns at Card Guys this week, spreading herself even thinner than we’d previously thought possible. She titled her post “Would You Rather: Spend Less Or Earn More?” Disregarding the unnecessary colon, isn’t the answer obvious? Even Trent Hamm would rather earn more, especially since there’s only so much you can subtract from expenses while revenue is essentially limitless. So we’ve answered her question without reading the post. Then we read the post, and wished we’d stopped at the title:

Consider a combination of cutting out the unimportant spending in your life and adding more income.

Is that what journalistic training does to the human brain? Good Lord. TWO SENTENCES LATER:

[C]oncentrate on boosting your income so that you don’t have to cut the things you really enjoy from your life.

Look. We like running Control Your Cash, we love having you folks read us every week, and sitting on a couch typing into a laptop beats the hell out of going to an office. Still, if we could return to a pre-internet world, where CYC didn’t exist but neither did the scores of awful bloggers pretending that they have something to say, we’d do so immediately.

How about a post that look longer than 4 seconds to write? With the benefit of hindsight, Darwin’s Money explains what would have happened over the last decade had you dollar-cost averaged your way into the market vs. making a lump-sum investment. He concludes that a lump-sum at the start of the decade would have returned more than annual and monthly dollar-cost averaging combined. And then starts the next sentence with, “If dollar cost averaging is something you’re interested in…” We’ve been scratching our heads on that one so hard that the skull is showing.
Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about your stupid carnival” quite like submitting a post from a site that still incorporates the default WordPress theme. So thanks, guy at My Journey to Financial Independence. His handy tips for what you need to do before investing include:

  1. Make a budget and track your income and expenses

  2. Establish an emergency fund

  3. Tackle your debts

Miranda Marquit thinks that’s useless and repetitive. Also, we’re going to murder the next submitter who recommends starting an emergency fund. You’ve been warned.

Somebody good? Please? Odysseas Papadimitriou at Wallet Blog will work just fine. He introduces us to “dark pools”, the quasi-stock exchanges that operate in realms where the NYSE and NASDAQ fear to visit. Dark pools are operated by investment banks and brokerage houses, and they even have ominous names that sound like divisions of Blackwater – “Sigma X”, “Crossfinder”, etc. Still, they’re a place to go if you believe that regulation, and not its absence, was to blame for the financial crisis of 2008.

Ooh, even better. DQYDJ.net‘s programmer-in-residence, PKamp3, went to the trouble of creating a calculator that tells you what your T-bills return over any 10-year period since the Grant Administration. With coupon payments reinvested, no less. Would that every personal finance blogger cared this much about not just taking up space.

If Miranda Marquit is the CoW equivalent of a battered wife, continuing to come back for more abuse because she likes the attention, the Thompsons at Becoming Your Own Bank are an entire family of same. They treated us to their first YouTube video this week, which actually isn’t horrible until you remember what they’re hawking – whole life insurance, the worst financial good this side of betting red in roulette.

Another CoW rookie, and a promising one. Deirdre Morhet at BASC Expertise explains that April 15 isn’t the only tax deadline Americans need to concern themselves with. If you derive income from other sources, as we strongly encourage you to do, there are 4 other dates that should concern you. One of which already passed, so good luck with that.

Modesty prevents us from naming the most outspoken personal finance site in existence, but Canajun Finances isn’t far behind. Big Cajun Man says that if you’re overwhelmed with debt, you should look at transferring your credit card balances, clip coupons, and adopt other meaningless gestures to reduce that load.

Just kidding. He thinks you’re an idiot and says as much. If you’re adding to your credit card balance by buying an expensive lunch, yet still taking vacations and leasing a new car every 2 years, you deserve to be in the red and will hopefully stay there forever if the universe is just.

Jon at Novel Investor explains methods to weigh stock bundles. There’s the standard price weighing that you see in the Dow and other indices. Beyond that, there’s market cap weighing, fundamental weighing and more. Jon lists them all, complete with pros and cons for investing purposes.

Still going to college with no purpose and paying borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of deferring a finite life for a few more years? Well, you’re the boss. Lynn Johnson at Wallet Blog explains how to minimize your student loans debt. How? By letting the taxpayers bail you out! Now you can start from zero in your loser retail job that you never needed a B.A. for in the first place. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Carmen at My Best Car Insurance has more useless drivel for your reading displeasure, including:

[T]he age of a driver relates to their experience on the road and how responsibility (sic) they drive.

Even better,

[A] good, clean driving record is one of the most important factors companies take into consideration when calculating pricing. Drivers with a driving history where there is no record of accidents, tickets, moving violations, or claims will get the cheapest pricing.

Would it kill you to try? There’s also an infographic that seems to claims that men are one-third more likely to get into accidents than women are, which conveniently ignores that men drive far more miles than women do. (To paraphrase an anonymous Deadspin commenter, “Every time I see a woman driving a man, I assume either his license is suspended or he’s returning from LASIK surgery.”)

Mike at Reward Cards Canada calculated which of 10 credit cards gives you the most cash back for fixed levels of gas and grocery purchases.

Kristen at My Dollar Plan tells you how much of your medical and dental insurance premia you can deduct from your taxes if you’re self-employed.

You still don’t know the difference between marginal and effective tax rates? You shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near money. Michael at Kitces.com explains the crucial difference.

Some of us (hi there!) pay undue attention to price/earnings ratios. Dividend Growth Investor reminds you to look beyond one-time incidences that can have a huge impact on P/E, and instead focus on years’ worth of data.

Andrew at 101 Centavos warns us that this is not one of his best posts, which means it’s still in the 95th percentile. In the public sector, customer service and going the extra mile mean nothing.

State-mandated financial literacy programs are an unalloyed good, right? Maybe not, according to John Kiernan at CardHub. Half a dozen business school professors (big ones, too: Harvard, Penn et al.) say that they’re a waste of time. For one thing, information changes rapidly between learning it in a classroom (from a textbook that’s likely already obsolete) and being able to apply it in the real world. For another, if you have a proclivity for bad financial decisions, it’ll take more than mere education to get through your head. Seriously, this is one of the most thought-provoking posts we’ve ever had the pleasure of hosting in the CoW.

We saved the best for last. Jason at Hull Financial Planning returns with the most convoluted explanation ever of how he came to sit through a screening of a crowdfunded movie. On the other hand, we find that he went to West Point. (Boy, it’s fascinating what you can glean when you actually read the submissions instead of just cutting and pasting like every other blog carnival does.) And then he takes off. In one of the longest submissions we’ve ever received, Jason takes us from his military career to his soul-sucking corporate career to his first entrepreneurial endeavor to where he is today. Jason explains that the ability to have options in your life – real options, not “Hmm…should I leave at 5:00, or stay another couple hours and hope the boss notices me?” are what separate the rich from the rest of us.

We’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for coming.

Filed Under: Carnivals Tagged With:
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