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: , , ,

Stupidity Before Bed, And After Every Meal

January 27, 2012

Trent Hamm, after flossing

 

Kudos yet again to everyone’s favorite purveyor of pointless personal finance advice, Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar. Our hero has discovered a groundbreaking new way to avoid the tartar and dental caries that have plagued mankind since we started walking upright. Tired of having a smile that looks like a truck drove through it? You’re not going to believe how easy it is to solve that particular problem. Check out Trent, coming hard with the wisdom on November 5, 2009:

Brush your teeth. An unclean mouth is a perfect place for unwanted bacteria and germs to take root. Good oral hygiene reduces the chance for bacteria to grow in your mouth.

(Italics and boldface his.) And because repetition is the key to education, here’s another golden excerpt, this one from February 28, 2008:

Brush your teeth every day and floss them, too. Also, visit the dentist sometimes to make sure your teeth are still in good shape.

A clean mouth and clean teeth give you a nice smile and fresh breath, both of which are major positives for one’s personal appearance. It just takes a good scrubbing in the morning to cause it, so don’t skip over brushing your teeth.

No one’s going to remember something that complicated, so here’s yet another passage, from November 16, 2006:

Practice strong oral hygiene and use a strong mouthwash. Brush your teeth thoroughly at least twice a day; your breath is a key part of your appearance and “cover up” items such as Tic-Tacs often only work for a short while. It’s much better for your appearance to make sure your mouth is truly clean.

And finally (finally for our purposes, that is. We’re pretty sure Trent will still have much more to say about the value of brushing one’s teeth), here’s one from January 23, 2010:

…clean your teeth. If you have a habit of using more than just a dab of any product, read the directions and make sure you’re not over-using. If you’re using three times as much as you should, you’re buying three bottles for every one you actually need to buy.

Get the last little bit out. When the toothpaste tube seems empty, put the cap back on and cut off the bottom – you can still squeeze out a surprising amount.

Okay, so now that Trent has established that a good way to preserve the health of your teeth is to…

/going back to check, making sure we get it right

brush them, how to do so? Presumably, you’re going to need toothpaste to accomplish this bit of hygienic sorcery.

 

Aim is the cheapest toothpaste in existence. You don’t have to look hard to find it selling for around $1 for a 6-ounce tube. That’s less than a penny a brushing. Or as Trent would describe it, highway robbery courtesy of those rapacious capitalists at Church & Dwight. 

Trent was tired of Big Sodium Bicarbonate profiting off the mouths of the 99%. True to his pathologically frugal nature, he devoted a recent post to, of course, making your own toothpaste. At this point, we’re fairly impressed that he deigns to spew this drivel via a commercially manufactured computer, instead of one that he grew from saplings in his back yard. From last March 1:

The best recipe I’ve found is mixing 1/2 cup baking soda, 1/4 cup hydrogen peroxide, a packet of stevia (a natural sweetener that also is good for your teeth), and either a dash of cinnamon or a drop or two of peppermint oil (for flavor). Mix these together until they form a paste.

The baking soda and the hydrogen peroxide in the quantities required will run you about 30¢. Not to go Trent on you and spend inordinate amounts of time calculating minutiae, but we’re going somewhere with this. Trent continues:

For dispensing it, just head to the travel toiletries section of your local department store and pick out a small empty travel squirt container.

Yes, because when you’re already in the drugstore, it’s SO MUCH EASIER to pick out baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, stevia (assuming they sell stevia at Walgreens), cinnamon and/or peppermint oil, and small empty travel squirt containers, than to just walk over to aisle 6 and drop a single George Washington on a tube that someone else already went to the trouble of filling and sealing.

Oh, and is there anything missing from that list of ingredients? That is, between the sugar substitute and the chemical they use to clean bathroom tile with?

How about SODIUM FLUORIDE? You know, the ionic compound whose discovery spawned modern preventative dentistry as we know it? The stuff that does to cavities what The Simple Dollar does to common sense?

Look, we try to avoid all caps and boldface as much as possible. The intensity of our words alone should be enough. But good Lord, this idiot’s Rube Goldbergian methods are now going too far. Trent Hamm claims 750,000 or something readers per month. NONE of them have attempted to brew up a batch of Trent’s dangerous and counterproductive homemade dentifrice, probably not even the author himself. Which is good, because otherwise their teeth would start falling out. This NaHCO3H2O2  bouillabaisse of Trent’s creation is literally a recipe for disaster. What an imbecile.

Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Insufferable Simple Dollar

December 7, 2011

You ever listen to Sean Hannity? He’s the guy on Fox News Channel whose head, for some reason, perpetually tilts 11º to the left. On television, he’s just another gasbag with an agenda, identical in kind (if not in opinion) to Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, and that old wino on CNN who refuses to wear a jacket.

In addition to his TV work, for the last 10 years Hannity has hosted a daily 3-hour radio show. It’s the most earnest thing ever broadcast. Never mind the validity of his arguments, the man has somehow managed to go an entire decade without being interesting or funny. Not even by accident. For this – just the radio show – he earns $5 million a year. If you’ve heard Hannity’s intellectual ascendant, Rush Limbaugh, then you’ve heard everything Hannity has to offer and then some. But unlike Limbaugh, Hannity is as dry as the Atacama Desert. But he flourishes because a) he’s easy to digest, and b) he’s physically attractive. Women repeatedly call in to tell him how cute he is.

Equally digestible, somewhat homelier and even less endurable is Trent Hamm, the Iowan behind a soporific website called The Simple Dollar. It’s not the worst personal finance site in existence – there are others whose authors can’t even spell nor punctuate – but it’s the worst of the established ones. It’s the personal finance blog equivalent of Maroon 5’s music or Stephenie Meyer’s books. Hamm populates his blog with interminably long, utterly worthless posts that focus on life’s tiniest minutiae.

Americans, and people in general outside of Japan, spend too much money. Therefore, the most facile personal finance advice it’s possible to give is to tell people to economize. And like a James Valentine guitar solo, Hamm has been playing the same notes in the same order for his entire career.

Hamm is proud that he posts twice daily, which is hardly an accomplishment. Charles Dickens couldn’t write two worthwhile posts a day, let alone a man with no filter between his most trivial ideas and his blog. Hamm will spend paragraph after paragraph weighing the value of spun-glass residential air filters versus polyester fiber ones, then triumphantly conclude that the one will save his readers .000004¢ per use over the other.

But for sheer self-unaware buffoonery, nothing beats Hamm’s periodic advice columns. Thinking of himself as the long-lost triplet of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, Hamm runs questions from “readers” whose writing style is suspiciously similar to his own, then dispenses pointless counsel. We’d reproduce the answers here, but he seems the litigious sort and they differ only in their degree of inanity.

One recent idiot asked Hamm what vehicle to buy that has lots of leg room in the back seat. Keep in mind, Hamm is not an automotive writer, and doesn’t write about cars any more than anyone else does. The questioner tells us what type of vehicle his 6’6” son drives to college and back, and explains that the son will occasionally need to ride in the back of this as-yet unpurchased vehicle, details of interest to no one but which Hamm couldn’t bother to edit.

Rather than spend a nanosecond Googling “car” + “leg room”, the reader sought the advice of a man whose main talent is fashioning his own duct tape out of discarded pieces of smaller rolls of duct tape. After rambling for 3 paragraphs, Hamm tells the reader to test out vehicles at a dealership.

Seriously.

Another labor of Hercules, crossed off the list.

Most of Hamm’s recommendations, however, involve reducing expenses. That’s his life’s single guiding directive. Cut your finger with a rusty knife? Then turn off your lights when they’re not in use. Shingles falling off the roof? Use public transportation once a week and give your car (and the environment) a rest. Blood on your toothbrush and a hacking cough? Look for money-saving coupons in your Sunday paper. One day, he’s going to run the following question in his reader mailbag:

Dear Trent:
My husband just died and left me $6.6 billion. What should I do?

-Laurene Powell Jobs


Dear Laurene:

Now would be an excellent time to cut back on unnecessary expenditures. Have you considered making your own chicken stock? Here’s a simple recipe my family and I have used for years…

But nothing beats an unfortunate thread of last summer, when a possibly inebriated Hamm told his readers that an overlooked place in which to save money is in swimwear.

To recap, because we’re not going to give him the satisfaction of a link, he told his readers that they should never spend more than $3 on a swimsuit. Disregarding that Hamm apparently hasn’t looked at swimwear prices since the 1940s, he told his readers – the female ones in particular – that they could economize even further by swimming in their underwear.

(Note: We like to be sarcastic on Control Your Cash, but we’re not joking here. Or even exaggerating. As God is our witness, he really did advocate that.)

Some female readers explained that modesty and legal concerns aside, bras aren’t designed to be submerged and chlorinated. As someone who’s never swum with a harness on his breasts (although if you examine his picture, you’d at least think it’s possible), did Hamm defer to his readers?

Hell no. He dug in even further, insisting that it was women’s fixation on appearances and their malleability in the hands of the millinery-apparel-industrial complex that kept them from seeing things his, correct, way.

This is a married man. Whom, after being told that he didn’t know what he was talking about on a topic he couldn’t possibly understand as well as any woman, never thought to consult his evidently long-suffering wife and see if maybe he might be wrong. In Hamm’s mind, only two types of suits exist – proper $3 ones and extravagant $80 ones. (Again, we’re not joking.) He then goes on a tirade about needs vs. wants, explaining that swimming itself is unnecessary if you’re serious about reducing expenses.

The swimsuit fiasco was Hamm’s apex as a purveyor of stupidity, but every week (in fact, twice daily) he comes up with something moronic. We’ll save you the trouble of looking through his archives and recap his especially golden moments in future posts here on CYC. You’ll love them.

This article was featured in:

**The Totally Money Carnival #47-Prelude to a New Year**

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Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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