A Rebuttal

August 22, 2012

(To this, specifically.)

 

This man once wrote a blog post entitled “The Value of Personal Appearance.” No joke. 11/16/06.

 

Dear CYC,

I just read your “article” and boy I am steamed.
I am more steamed than the steam that powers my at-home micro-generator (Hey, thanks for asking! Did you know that a tea kettle, a steel hamster wheel and a small magnet can generate enough power to recharge a AA battery in only 7 days? So long, Big Electric!)

Back to the topic – I cannot believe what a waste that article was. I don’t mind the hour that I spent disecting it – as we know, time has no value – but after a few more hours crunching the numbers, I realized that you cost me $0.0012 of electricity for my computer monitor. Thankfully that is much less than most people would pay (Hey, thanks for asking! Did you know that if you set your monitor’s brightness to its lowest level, then light a few homemade candles, you can nearly make out the words – while saving almost $0.00001 per hour? So long, Big Computer!)

Even so, $0.0012 is no trifling matter and I demand reimbursement. I’m sending you a self-addressed stamped envelope and I expect a speedy response. Or less than speedy. Either way, really – after all, you can’t put a time value on money.

I know you may be tempted to ignore this message, but that would be unwise. Unfortunately this isn’t the first time someone of lesser status (and by that, I mean someone with fewer page hits) decided to attack me. So, I have my own lawyer, who I got for the low cost of $9/hour (Hey, thanks for asking! It turns out that if anyone knows how to negotiate for small change, it is that guy who lives between the 1-train grate and the 9th street dumpster. Even better – like most of the homeless folks in this city, he has a law degree from a “boutique” law school! So long, Big Law!). He’s already spent 28 hours on this case, so he is more than ready to take you to court unless I see that $0.0012 pronto!

OK, with that ranty-rant of my chest, I’m a bit more calm. But, I still think you need to learn a lesson. So, let’s turn the tables and see how you like a little razor-sharp satire:

Hi! I’m Control Your Cash. I talk about my fancy dinners paid for by the poor renters of my many properties. And I waste money on things like driving and showers that last more than 90 seconds. Plus I just buy gas wherever I feel like it, even if the station across town is .099¢ cheaper. I think people should buy things like rental properties and stocks and “assets” – which are really expensive, by the way – instead of safely stashing money in their hand-carved piggy banks. I wouldn’t know how to make my own toothpaste if my life depended on it, and I’ve never even HEARD of fecal reclamation. Yet I try to tell people how to handle their money. Funny, huh?

Worst of all, I am mean. Just plain mean. For example, I never, ever encourage people’s dreams of being the first in their family to obtain 7 degrees, or of completing the liberal art trifecta (English major, master of art history, and an unplanned pregnancy). And I make fun of those who pay down their smallest, lowest-interest loan first even though SCIENCE has proven that a debt snowball is the best way to make someone feel better about themselves.

And I just wrote an entire article mocking plus-sized people just because they like a little candy and pizza with their workout. And I wasn’t mocking them for buying corporate candy instead of making their own from tree sap and orange juice – that would actually make sense. No, I was mocking them for trying to get into shape while having a little fun and a lot of burritos. That is a judgment. And people don’t want to hear judgments or opinions on blogs – they want recipes for homemade bubble gum (Hey, thanks for asking! Did you know that the easiest way to make your own bubble gum is to boil 15 pieces of used bubble gum along with a dash of glue for 10 minutes? I didn’t know that because I’m not Trent, so can’t say So Long, Big Bubble!). Telling plus-sized people that they won’t get in shape by drinking a Frappuccino while watching other people exercise hurts their feelings.

But I don’t care about that, because I have no feelings. Which is a shame, because that is what money is all about – feelings. But I wouldn’t know that, because I’m not Trent. I am CYC.

See, it doesn’t feel so good, does it?

Unless you want more of that, perhaps you should go pick on someone in your own league, like that uppity lady at AffordAnything.com. I have better things to do than keep talking to you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hand pick the grass on my front lawn (Hey, glad you asked! Did you know that a gas-powered motor costs almost $0.30 per mowing? Even a goat costs almost $0.15, and the composting benefit they provide is worth at most $0.05. Meanwhile, I can do the job for free while getting the same $0.05 composting benefit. So long, Big John Deere!)

Toodles,

Trent

(Note: Guest contributor Pseudo-Trent is an international vice president with a famous multinational firm who has way too much time on his hands. Follow him on Twitter @DubaiAtNight.)

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

Financial Retard of the Month: The Simple Dollar Does It Again

July 27, 2012

This picture will make perfect sense in our next expose

 

He’s making it too easy for us. That self-important oracle, Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar, created another fictitious mailbag out of the myriad emails he receives. Or as he puts it on his main page:

I do receive hundreds of questions per week,

Or as he put it a few weeks ago,

I’ll go very quickly through the thousands (yes, I do mean thousands) of emails built up during the week 

In this feature we’re not just going to make fun of the dull or pointless things he says, because if we did there’d be no room for anything else. Instead, we’re going to focus strictly on the dumb and the false. Here’s an email Trent recently concocted received:

I’ve read that you shouldn’t pay more than 25% of your monthly take-home pay for housing costs.

Background info: I have an emergency fund of $7,000, I have no debt, I am 26, female, and I currently rent (living alone), paying $860/month for a one-bedroom apartment.

We’re not sure why “her” sex is relevant, or why “she” mentioned it at all, especially since “she” signed off with a woman’s name. Anyhow, “she” also gives some other information about her finances, and as women and Trent do, takes 4 paragraphs to get to the point: wanting to know if she should rent or buy a place to live.

Trent’s sage advice includes:

From my perspective, if you’re putting much more than 25% of your income toward your housing, you’re starting to put yourself in a risky situation.

No way! “Lauren” repeated a piece of folkloric homespun wisdom, and Trent seconded it exactly! Kind of like the time Control Your Cash ran a question from the woman who’d heard that male personal finance bloggers are extremely well-endowed, and wanted confirmation.

Anyhow, Trent recommends that “Lauren”

get a mortgage quote, then run some calculations on it. 

Really? So if a person wants to choose between items A and B, and knows how much A costs, you believe she should determine how much B costs before she proceeds?

We can’t argue as to whether Trent or “Lauren” is the bigger imbecile, since they’re the same person. However, we can have a legitimate debate as to whether Trent/”Lauren” or Trent’s average reader is stupider. Anyone who finds any of the advice in Trent’s mailbag to be actionable is clearly forgetting to exhale once in a while.

He’s not done. Here’s the next (and final) line, with nothing omitted:

The housing market is depressed enough right now that I would not look at a home as an investment in the short term.

YES, BECAUSE WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO BUY WHEN PRICES ARE LOW? Does his helper monkey even proofread this stuff for logical coherence before pressing “Publish”?

How about loosening another belt notch on your husky Today’s Man slacks and writing something that makes sense? Don’t worry, we’ll do it for you:

The housing market is depressed enough right now, and mortgage rates similarly low, that there will never be a better time to buy a house. Or houses. A passive income stream will do more for your bottom line than all of my penny-shaving recommendations combined.

In any other blogger’s mailbag, that’d be the most laughable response of the week. But this is Trent Hamm, proprietor of The Simple Dollar. He probes depths that the bathyscaphe Trieste wouldn’t plunge to:

My 75 year old mother is in mediocre health. She’s losing the place she’s living in and needs to move in the new year.
…
I will be earning a big chunk of money in the first part of the new year and would like to buy a home for her to live in…

Pretty straightforward, right? Well, it’s straightforward if you edit out all the irrelevant details that Trent puts in to make the “reader” sound more human. This one’s another female, by the way. Why any woman would seek his advice after he told the entire distaff half of the species to swim in their underwear, we have no idea. Anyhow, he tells “Sheila” not to worry because time is on her side:

I would rent an apartment for her. If her health is slipping, it’s likely that the period of time you would rent would be limited.

We’ll get to the obvious objection in a second, but is Trent’s reading comprehension so awful that he can’t remember what his own blog said just a few lines earlier? “Mediocre” means average. It’s static, and doesn’t imply a direction. Trent took it to mean “slipping”, which makes us wonder exactly where he graduated among the cab drivers and slaughterhouse workers in his ESL class.

And oh yeah, he just told a reader that a great way to save on housing expenses is to wait for your mother’s imminent death.

We’ll ask this now, before the inanity of The Simple Dollar becomes a weekly feature: is this all an intricate joke, and we’re the patsies? If you were a resourceful online comedian who wanted to create a parody of an everyman dispensing financial advice, wouldn’t you give him a forgettable work history, a green golf shirt, 2.3 kids and a home in Nowhere, Iowa? No real person can be this earnest, this humorless, this insipid, this cheap, and this consistent about it.  Here, read an entertaining mailbag instead.

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

Now Trent Hamm’s Just Daring Us To Name Him Financial Retard of the Month

April 27, 2012

There’s GOLD in them there textile fibers!

 

By far our favorite punching bag here at Control Your Cash is Trent Hamm, the hyperfrugal crazy person who runs The Simple Dollar. 14 times a week, he writes about compulsive, creepy, maniacal methods for shaving undetectable amounts off your expenses. Meanwhile he writes next to nothing about how to increase your revenue, which is swell because we don’t need the competition.

In previous posts he’s recommended bypassing the toothpaste aisle at the drugstore so you can collect the ingredients to make your own inferior version, and also told female readers that they should never spend more than $3 on a swimsuit. When a commenter pointed out that $3 swimsuits don’t exist, Trent helpfully suggested that women swim in their underwear. Yet people still continue to read this corn-fed monster of impracticality, and not always for the undeniable comedic value. That he has any audience at all is testament to the axiom that stupidity begets stupidity. Also, people = sheep.

By the way, Trent Hamm didn’t suggest homemade toothpaste brewing as a fun craft project for the kids on a night when the TV and the internet are down. He suggests it as a legitimate way to save money. And dozens of his devotees cyber-chime in to nod their empty heads.

One of his latest money-saving tips is so bizarre, so utterly immersed in minutiae, so microscopically unhelpful, that we had to let it sink in for a few weeks before choosing the right way to poke fun at it. Here, we’ll let Trent take it away:

Several months ago, I was curious about how much heat was lost when I opened up the oven to inspect a dish cooking in there. I put an oven thermometer in the oven, waited until the dish I was cooking was almost finished (a casserole cooking at 400º), then opened the oven door for about ten seconds to inspect it.

During those ten seconds, the thermometer dropped almost 20º. When I closed the door, the temperature slowly returned to 400º, but during that period, the oven had to put in some extra work to return that heat.

How much? It’s really difficult to exactly calculate that without a meter running specifically for the oven. My best estimate, using a lot of math and thermodynamics, is that you lose about 2¢ worth of energy every time you open the oven door.

My solution? I turn on the oven light when I’m cooking anything in the oven. That way, I just lean over and check what I’m cooking without opening the oven door. 

 

Where to start? With his discovery of the oven light? It’s not quite the game-changer that Leif Ericsson landing in the New World was, but it’s close.

 

How about that! Those forward-thinking engineers in the appliance industry researched the problem and put a light, a source of illumination, INSIDE the oven. Combined with a glass window that sits between the interior of the oven and the outside world, that means you can look at your food as it’s cooking.
Trent? You know we’ve sent men to the moon and back, right? That was 43 years ago.
Now that we’ve made fun of his stunning appreciation for the glaringly obvious, let’s not forget Mr. Hamm’s bread-and-butter: the cheapness that would put Hetty Green to shame.
It costs 2¢ to open the oven door. Even if you’re opening the oven door for no better reason than to warm up the kitchen a little…well, you don’t need us to tell you that 2¢ isn’t going to bankrupt anyone who can afford an oven, electricity, and food. We wonder how long it took him to calculate the 2¢ figure, and whether he could have spent that time earning money instead.
Throughout your life, how many times have you opened an oven to check on a dish before it was ready? Does 100 sound about right? If you have, that’s 2 WHOLE DOLLARS you figuratively flushed down the drain. You could have used that money to buy several servings of Trent Hamm’s homemade laundry detergent. Instead, you just tossed it away like it grows on trees. Nice going, you wasteful pig.
Nor does Mr. Hamm show his “math and thermodynamics”, presumably because he thinks the rest of us will flee at the sight of an equation or two. Then again, given his readers’ intelligence, that presumption might be the most rational thought Trent Hamm has ever had.
But wait. Light bulbs don’t power themselves. So where’s he getting the money to turn the oven light on with? 
The light bulb uses less than a cent of energy per hour of use …”
Well, that’s a relief. Measuring the difference between the two, you can replace your daily regimen of oven-opening with one of light-keeping-on and be on your way to economic self-sufficiency in no time.
Mr. Hamm isn’t just taking his obsession over minute amounts of money to its nadir, he could be indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions. Why, he’s openly encouraging his readers to die of trichinosis: 

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¢.

(Italics and boldfacing ours.)

“Damn it, don’t you people understand? Those 2¢ increments are valuable! You wasteful reprobates probably keep your toasters plugged in when you’re not using them, too.”*

And if that doesn’t beat all, this will. Here’s another excerpt from The Simple Dollar archives, from February 26, 2009:

There’s also a group of what I would call “frugality extremists.” These are the Ziploc bag washers, the people who will gladly invest quite a bit of time to save a dollar or two. I find these people and their ideas interesting, but not necessarily applicable to my life.

Got that, everyone? Washing a Ziploc bag is going over the line, but calculating that it costs 2¢ every time you open your oven door to check on what you’re cooking is completely normal. Trent Hamm, you’re magical. Since we have to pick a Retard of the Month 12 times a year (a calculation which required lots of math, not so much thermodynamics), promise us you’ll never change.

*Of course, he’s written about this too. 

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »