October’s (F)RotM, Now in Acronym Form

October 30, 2013

lowest-paying-job-fast-food

 

Control Your Cash entered into a new professional venture a few weeks ago, with an agreeable fellow who made one modest condition: that we no longer employ the word “retard” on the site. (He’ll hopefully excuse that instance of it, given that it wasn’t gratuitous but rather vital to the plot. Like Thora Birch’s nudity in American Beauty.) We could have stood our ground, but it was a battle hardly worth fighting. And it reminded us of a quote that we can’t remember the source of, but want to use on the jacket of our next book:

 

The world is full of fast food cooks who never took flak from anybody. 

 

So yeah, our monthly feature is now the (F)RotM. The F is for financial, the o is for of, and you can search through our archives to figure out the rest. For some reason we let the feature go last month, not properly honoring anyone as our (F)RotM, so we looked doubly hard to find someone fitting this time. And succeeded.

Debt bloggers are the freaking Hydra. You have to not only cut off the head, but cauterize the stump to stop two more from growing in its place. Like our latest (F)RotM laureate, No Debt Brunette. Misogyny may be more of a pastime for us here than it is an overarching worldview, but it’s hard to take some of the ladies seriously when they willingly reduce themselves to something as trivial and inconsequential as a hair color. (There’s also a Budget Blonde, and probably a Recession-Proof Redhead*, too.) Anyhow, here’s what makes No Debt Brunette such an original:

I have almost $25,000 worth of debt and have decided to regain control of my life.

See if you can distinguish her from this previous winner:

My name is Tricia and my husband and I got into a little bit of debt in our 20s. Okay…it’s more than a little bit of debt. When we finally decided to shape up our financial life in February of 2006, our credit card debt was over $37,000.

Or this one:

I had debt that I couldn’t pay on, student loans that I hadn’t paid on in years, no job, I lived at home with my mother & my two young boys and my car had just gone its last mile. I sat in my room and cried for a good two hours.

(The blogger cried. Do you even need to guess the sex?) Then there’s this one:

I was over $45,000+ in student loan debt as I was entering the “real world”. […] Along with my student loans, I also have about $13,000+ in credit card debt.

Or this one:

I found myself with $50,000 worth of credit card debt, all of which I created myself.

There are hundreds more. Literally hundreds. The only thing remarkable about them, as a collective, is their stunning uniformity. As individuals, they’re each as unique as the capsules in this bottle of Kirkland® brand fish oil. And about as palatable.

can-i-give-my-baby-fish-oil

Back to No Debt Brunette, who not only has a negative balance, but a goal!

I am on a year long Spending Freeze where I only pay necessities. Instead of spending money on fun things like new clothes and sodas, I am putting it towards my bills.

“Spending Freeze” is capitalized, meaning that she’s attaching some importance to it. Also, we’ve uncovered a new level of pathos where a soda counts as a “fun thing” to spend money on. (Last we checked, Walmart cola runs about 20¢ a can, excluding deposit.) She wrote that promise earlier this year, March or so. You already know what her progress has been like over the last 7 months, but let’s examine the failures and corresponding excuses here. Starting with last Wednesday:

I’m already 23 days into my Spending Freeze: Take Two!

Take Two? Back up a minute. What happened?

When I started this adventure in February of last year, my beginning debt balance was $24,996.98.

So, subtract all the money I payed toward that total, add all the charges I made during my move, add a car loan and I now have a debt total of $37,472.79.

When you’re 25 large in the hole, well, why wouldn’t you take out a car loan? Ally Financial has quarterly quotas to meet. No Debt Brunette is now tantalizingly close to half again as much debt as she had when she started this charade. It’s actually 49.9%, to one decimal place. How do you describe someone who’s detailed enough to ratiocinate her debt to the nearest penny, twice, yet who commits to lowering her debt and then raises it by half? Wait, let’s hear her rationalization. This is great:

I know I know, the balance increased dramatically instead of decreasing. I could have only incorporated the amount of student loan debt that I have left but I want to be real and focus on becoming COMPLETELY debt free, including paying for my car.

Is that latter sentence even English? We’ve said before that the only way to become debt-free, assuming you were stupid enough to have incurred debt in the first place, is to live like a panhandler until your net worth is finally back up to zero. No new clothes, no new entertainment, no new nothing (except groceries) until you’re done. Why? Because intense pain concentrated into as short a time as possible beats protracted dull pain every time. The Band-Aid principle, if you will. Eventually you figure you can live with the dull pain, as it chips away at your self-worth, both metaphorical and financial, one day at a time. But no worries, because this time it’s going to be different. No Debt Brunette (what a grossly misleading moniker) knows all the platitudes, too. Listen to her delude herself:

I feel like a seasoned veteran now and know what needs to be done. I am going to spend this next week meal planning, taking photos of stuff I can sell online, and preparing myself mentally for this new journey. Starting a Spending Freeze right around the holidays is going to be tough but I’m excited to do it.

As a rule, taking time to “prepar[e] [one]self mentally” is not a step undertaken by achievers. Also, what holidays occur around October 1? Diwali?

It gets better. It always gets better. Before Spending Freeze 2.0 began in earnest, she had to get some expenditures out of the way. Expenditures that might have made sense if she were living in 1960:

I decided to send thank you cards to people in my life who have recently done something kind for me. If the person is in my everyday life then I will hand deliver the card (saving postage) but if not, I’m okay with spending 47 cents on them. I have about 8 stamps left but my Spending Fast is serious business. So, I am going to buy a $10 pack of stamps to hold me over till I can ask for more for Christmas.

  1. You’re going to buy a $10 pack of stamps to “hold you over’? This is all over the WGAS channel.
  2. We have this thing called email now. It’s free.

But that’s so impersonal.

And you’re $37,473 in debt! God, do we have to spell out everything? By the way, we’ll be expecting a card shortly for being the only people with sufficient reserves of tough love to tell you frankly what an absolute moron you’re being.

There’s another minor expense that she declares she has to take care of before she decides to again think about lowering her (now greatly heightened) debt, too:

I committed to a few things in October. My BFF Lauren is getting married next weekend and I have booked a hotel already. I committed to visiting my best man friend in VA in a few weeks and I’m traveling to DC for a high-school-lady-friend-reunion.

[W]hile it would save a little money if I didn’t go, I’ve learned that people are more important than money.

Then WTF is the point of your website? Why not just say “I’m drowning in debt, it’s getting worse, but I like spending money and seeing my friends so there’s no point worrying about it”, The End? We know you’re not serious about getting out of debt, that much is obvious, but could you at least pretend to care for the sake of this website that you’ve put so much wasted effort into?

The wedding was last week, or at least her recap of it was.

I had to constantly stay aware of my purchases. I had allotted $300 for this trip.

If people really are more important than money, why didn’t the bride say, “Look, you’re broke. I know you’re broke, because you’ve dedicated a blog to how poor you are. Maybe you should sit this one out.” Oh, that’s right, women are insane. The Brunette also had to board her dog for a few days at $40 a night. Dogs are more important than money, too.

(No, we’re not being facetious. Control Your Cash’s charity of choice remains Best Friends Animal Society, mostly because its beneficiaries aren’t responsible for making any stupid decisions.)

It’s not the immaturity nor the crying jags that get us in the (F)RotM series, it’s these people’s endless refusal to look in the mirror and comment honestly on what they see. If you want to spend money injudiciously, just freaking do it and stop pretending to care about ever getting out of debt. More to the point, stop thinking that your repeated and unrepentant failure is of interest to anyone.

Buy assets, sell liabilities, build wealth. That sequence never, ever fails.
Get in debt, get further in debt, rationalize your awful choices, spend money in contradiction of your alleged goals, fall even further behind, die broke. That one never fails either. Your choice.

*No, but there is a Red-Debted Stepchild. Thanks to a frequent Carnival of Wealth contributor for the last-minute research. 

Filed Under: Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With:

August’s (Financial) Retard of the Month Is A Good One

August 30, 2013
Time for good old common pennies, amirite?

Time for good old common pennies, amirite?

 

No, no, no, no, no. 58,000 times, no. Because we haven’t made fun of enough of these undifferentiated debt bloggers yet. So here’s another one! Lindsey Thurston at Cents & Sensibility. These vermin are so indistinguishable, so repetitive, so devoid of originality that they think they’ve uncovered new strata of cleverness every time they fashion a pun on “cents” and its homonym “sense”. The sad(der) part is that the logo on Ms. Thurston’s site doesn’t even spell its own name correctly. It uses the wrong homonym: “Sense and Sensibility”, just like the original (unreadable) Jane Austen novel. She also used the same image from the Lauren Graham movie Bad Santa that we did a few months back. Sister, if someone’s going to violate copyright law around here, it’ll be us, OK? Besides, you clearly stole this line in your bio from every other Financial Retard of the Month we’ve already objurgated over the years:

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (in Psychology) and a monstrous $45,000 student loan.

Do you people realize how tiresome this gets, this general first-person declaration that you borrowed far more money than you could afford (to achieve an empty goal, no less) and now think that your broke posterior is qualified to write a single word about money? (Other than “Keep me away from it, before I burn my fingers with it again”?) It’s the same 1-chord song, but only the singer changes. We’d now link to every Lindsey Thurston clone who’s already brought similar steaming plates of rotten lutefisk to our attention, but there are literally dozens of them and it’d take forever.

Blue-collar champion and master of the practical Mike Rowe recently summarized the state of self-destructive higher theoretic education and the accompanying student loan industry, stating “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist.” Or in the case of what one can do with a B.A. in psychology, jobs that never existed. As always with these people, it gets better.

Lindsey got knocked up at 19. (Fat girls really are more fun!) She and the father went their separate ways, and if there’s a worse preparation for adulthood than being a single teenage mom and then proceeding to incur $45,000 in debt while attending college for a useless degree, we don’t know what it might be.

That’s only the start. Lindsey graduated in 7 years, which we’re guessing wasn’t due to a Mormon mission and a medical redshirt. She then met a guy who thought that hitching his wagon to a single mom with a 7-year old kid and a Lake Baikal of red ink would be a prudent decision. You’re not going to believe this, but their fairytale romance didn’t work out. 2 years later they split, and she returned home with…well, when it comes to these pathos research projects it’s best to quote the original sources:

I ended up getting the job (but with low pay) back in my hometown  and went about trying to start over. I never seemed to have enough to make ends meet though. I was working three jobs at one point trying to “catch up”.

But how can that be possible, given that she had an invaluable university (not “college”, she’s Canadian) degree? Nothing’s more important than an education, so how did that impressive psychology B.A. not attract hundreds of employers with lucrative job offers? Especially since she spent so much time crafting it?

This gets weirder. Ms. Thurston continually refers to her blog as “Sense & Sensibility.” The only reference to “Cents & Sensibility” seems to be in the URL. She can’t even do rehashed puns right. Nor has she figured out the one homonym that mastery of should be a prerequisite for attending the 2nd grade:

I made too much too (sic) qualify for “interest relief” on my student loans and other social programs and too little to make ends meet.

So by all means, create a personal finance website then. We learn that Ms. Thurston is currently $35,000 in debt, but that’s totally cool because she used to be $67,000 in debt. You see, this stuff is all relative. And if we were to point out that the Control Your Cash principals are several multiples beyond that, but in the other direction, then that would just mean that we’re ostentatious and insecure blowhards who love rubbing our good fortune in poor people’s faces.

(Actually, it would mean that we refrained from making calamitous decisions such as reproducing far too early and handing stacks of third-party cash over to a university, but most people don’t like to hear the truth.)

We’re skeptical of the $35,000 figure, too. If the graphics on her site are any indication, and are calibrated arithmetically and not logarithmically, it’d seem that she’s more like $53,000 in debt. She has two bars on the right column of her main page, one showing that she’s paid off half a $50,000 debt and the other showing that she’s paid off maybe 1/20 of a $29,000 debt. She gave these bars the precious names “Makin’ A Dent-O-Meter” and “Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter”, and would it kill these net drains on society to act like adults and take this stuff seriously? Then again, why should they when there’s endless reinforcement in the comments? One commenter wrote “Hey 32k is a lot!!! Great job!” Taking that on its own merits, 35k is an even bigger lot. (!!!)

Imagine if there existed a personal finance blogger who created a “Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter” to quantify her augmenting positive net worth. Her monthly cash flow rose $2000 last month, her net worth $16,000, and the Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter documented the increases. Most people would regard that as unseemly, a crass display of one’s materialistic bent and the kind of thing better kept private.

Then how the hell is it any different when you’re trying to reach zero instead of some other number? Ms. Thurston ought to keep this to herself, but this is 2013. Accruing consumer debt is no longer something embarrassing, but rather something to be proud of as it cements one’s position as a victim yearning to break free – a Strong Woman Who Shall Overcome Whatever Life Can Throw At Her, even if what life’s throwing at her is a 16-lb. shot put and she’s the one who hoisted it in the first place.

Ms. Thurston even admits that she was inspired to create her blog after discovering one called, ahem, “Making Cents of Sense.” You see what the author did there? Here, we’ll walk you through it one more time. She noticed that “cents” and “sense” sound identical (though they’re spelled differently), and considered it dexterous wordplay to bring that coincidence to her readers’ attention.

Our favorite part was when Ms. Thurston offered financial advice to her kid, now 16. The easy joke to make here would be that the advice was “Do everything I didn’t do,” but that’s exactly what it is.

[S]he doesn’t understand the value of money in any real sense. She connects the two facts that there are things she wants and that they cost money but that’s about it for insight. The idea that she has to earn money before she can spend it seems to be the missing link in her brain.

That’s a blockquote. Which means it’s Ms. Thurston referring to her kid, not us referring to Ms. Thurston.

Jesus H. Of course she splurged on a wedding.* Of course she’s going back to college for another bachelor’s degree, because 7 years in university just weren’t enough. And of course she’s made a list of goals (people who never accomplish anything love to list goals), one of which is…that she promises to spend 45 minutes a day entering contests. Because you never know what you might win. What she’d win from spending 45 minutes a day on a StairClimber is more certain, more beneficial, and more tangible. But it’s also less fanciful, and considerably more difficult, so we can discard it immediately.

If you take one thing away from our site, let it be this: By and large, people want to be poor. They make the decisions and willingly execute the activities that will invariably result in being poor, therefore it stands to reason that they must want to be poor. Nothing will convince them otherwise, as they happily continue with the same destructive habits (spending too much, overeducating, writing interminable self-referential blog posts) that got them poor in the first place.

The good news is that thanks to them, the field is a lot less crowded for the rest of us. Don’t crank out kids when you’re a teenager, don’t spend money you can’t afford, don’t borrow money to exacerbate the problem of spending money you can’t afford, and stop selling assets and buying liabilities. Read this and you’ll never be anyone’s retard.

*If you’re $35,000 in debt, and you do anything beyond paying $50 to have a justice of the peace marry you, you’re splurging. 

 

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Consumer Debt, Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With: , , , ,

July’s (Financial) Retard of the Month

July 26, 2013
He claims to have a wife. The hundreds of board games on the shelves would indicate otherwise.

He claims to have a wife. The hundreds of board games on the shelves indicate otherwise.

 

Yes, him again. If you’re tired of our repeated honoring of Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar as Retard of the Month, and want us to broaden our scope, we remind you that we don’t obsess on him anywhere near as much as he obsesses on his sole topic of interest, frugality.

But wait! Things have changed. Trent recently showed us his other side. His profligate side. In a post entitled “Five Frugal Things I Don’t Do.” They’re perfect, every last one of them. We’re going to break them down in increasing order of ludicrousness, and we can’t get wait to get started. Here, this is only his 5th-dumbest non-frugal tip:

I don’t save condiment packages from restaurants.

As we’ve said before, it’s not Trent’s cheapness that gets us. We’re not above crumpling up a piece of paper and using it as a cat toy instead of buying a $12 Martha Stewart®-branded feather attached to a stick. It’s Trent’s endless inconsistency that makes us want to vomit. This is a man who:

  • Advocates taking buses everywhere, yet owns a vehicle.
  • Says you should buy cheap shampoo and use it sparingly, but says you should make your own shampoo instead.
  • Gives workout advice, yet appears to be closing in on 300 pounds.
  • Calculates his homemade meal prices to the penny, yet eats in restaurants.
  • Saves money by collecting ordinary rocks for his kids to play with on their summer vacations (not a joke), yet appears to have dropped at least $10,000 on board games.

And dozens of other examples. But what burns our grass the most is his use of the lazy literary device known as the imaginary friend. Conveniently, Trent has a friend who…well, we’ll let Trent explain:

One of my friends always asks for extra condiment packets at restaurants and always grabs a fistful whenever they’re available. He then takes them home and, when he’s doing something like watching television, he opens them and puts them into the respective bottles.

Were this person to exist, and of course he doesn’t, it’d at least be understandable why he and Trent would pal around. But as bizarre as it is to hoard ketchup packages, even assuming someone was going to do that, why on Earth would he then open them up and squeeze them into an awaiting bottle?

Trent and his circle live at the intersection of cheapness and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But as we stated, Trent’s condiment-rearranging friend is 100% mythical. As long as you’re pilfering the mustard and Sriracha sauce to begin with (does Sriracha come in single-serving packets? Oh that’d be awesome), why wouldn’t you keep them in their sealed containers? The short answer is because then Trent wouldn’t have a fictional anecdote to expand upon:

Food cross-contamination issues sincerely worry me and when you do this, you’re doing lots of potential cross-contamination.

Also, we’re willing to bet that there are several dozen condiment packages taking up space in Chez Trent as we speak. Cake icing, full-fat tartar sauce, all the usual suspects.

Somewhat related to the phenomenon of hoarding condiments,

I don’t use public restrooms unless I have to.

It’s Trent’s iconoclasm that makes him a winner. While the rest of society can’t wait to rush out of their houses just so they can sit on unfamiliar toilets with unknown histories, Trent turns conventional wisdom on its head and – get this – urinates and defecates at home whenever possible. Weird, isn’t it?

That being said, before today we were certain that Trent’s home contained functioning toilets only because building codes require it to. All that unnecessary porcelain, just adding to the price of Trent’s house. Anyhow, back to his radical idea of not using traditionally filthy public toilets, something none of us had ever thought of before:

An old coworker of mine use (sic) to go to the bathroom like clockwork just before leaving for the day, theoretically to save on toilet paper, water, and soap at home.

Like the guy who empties ketchup packets into a Heinz bottle, this old coworker is a figment of Trent’s dull imagination. At the absolute least, and giving Trent way too much benefit of the doubt, a coworker might use the work bathroom only because he’s facing a 50-mile commute home or something. But no human outside of the Hamm household is going to take toilet paper, water and soap savings into consideration when excreting.

Again, while this can certainly save a bit of money on water, soap, and paper products,

No it can’t, unless you’re measuring bits in hundredths of cents.

I tend to avoid public restrooms for sanitary reasons.

Sanctimony punctuated by earnestness. Trent seems to legitimately believe that his readers could stand to learn from his real-world observations, including the one that your bathrooms at home are going to be under greater personal scrutiny than public ones.

(If you’re following along with Trent’s public bowel movement of a post, we’re not going through his list in order. Instead we’re building to a crescendo.)

I don’t reuse aluminum foil.

Earlier in the post Trent mentioned that he will, however, wash Ziploc bags. If there’s a significant difference between the one and the other, we’re too dumb to see it.

I know at least one person who will flatten it out and save it for use the next time.

Oh, you liar with the aroma of a public toilet. So now Trent has casually mentioned, within the space of single blog post:

  • a friend who reuses aluminum foil
  • a (different) friend (alright, an ex-co-worker) who makes it a point of going to the bathroom at the end of the workday, to save money on soap and toilet paper. Oh, and water.
  • a (3rd) friend who not only saves extra ketchup packages, but then transfers the packages to a bottle while he’s watching TV.  

How amazingly fitting. If those people really existed, then Trent would be only the 4th-cheapest person in East Rectum, Iowa.

I don’t buy the low end version of something I know I’ll use.

Why the hell not? As for our own frugality (CYC confessional time), our local WinCo sells 2 brands of milk – one from the local dairy whose name we can’t remember, which goes for $3 a gallon or so, and the store brand which is usually around $2. We’re not sure why anyone would buy the former, or even why buying the latter counts as an activity worth mentioning, but then we’re not Trent. Here’s his rationale for not buying the low-end version of something he knows he’ll use. We give that rationale to you in its entirety:

I am quite willing to spend more on an item that I know is going to receive regular use around my home.

If I know something is going to be used a lot, I’m more interested in purchasing a reliable version of that product than I am buying the absolute least expensive version. I will buy the “cheap” one if I’m not sure how much I’ll use an item, but when I’m replacing something and I know I’ll use it, I will always look for the best “bang for the buck” version of the item with a strong eye toward reliability. That often means a pricier version than I might have otherwise purchased.

Trent hates detail almost as much as he hates throwing out Ziploc bags, which is a quirk (of his myriad) that we can’t begin to understand. He doesn’t cite a single example of an “item” or a “product” that he does this with? You know, so his readers might have a clearer illustration of what he’s talking about? Towels. Silverware. Thumb drives. Garden tools. ANYTHING. But no, he gives us nothing more specific than items and products. It’s like his bogus mailbag submitters who write, “My husband and I live in a major city in the Southeast region,” because identifying such as Atlanta or Charlotte might mean too much disclosure.

Finally – we were saving this – his grandest indulgence of all:

I don’t constantly negotiate.

Here is a man who expresses concern that opening an oven to check on food will “waste” 2¢ (and who only later discovered that technological marvel, the oven light), yet who will presumably leave hundreds of dollars on the table because negotiation is either déclassé or overly stingy.

“So, Mr. Hamm – and is it OK if I call you Trent? A special discount just for you.  I don’t do this with most customers, but you look like an honest man who appreciates the value of a dollar. That’s why I can get you into this Prius today for just $48,000.”

“Sounds good. Where do I sign?”

Trent Hamm never had anything interesting to say to begin with, and after 6 or so years of sharing his microthoughts with the world it’s only gotten worse. Yet there are 100,000 Feedburner subscribers who go out of their way to let him tell them that he prefers his home bathroom to public ones – and not only that, but that his reason for doing so has an economic basis. Mohamed Morsi got deposed this month, yet Trent Hamm’s confounding reign continues. There is no explanation.

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