the simple dollar

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 NaHCO₃H₂O₂bouillabaisse of Trent’s creation is literally a recipe for disaster. What an imbecile.

What, are they saying white women are cheap?

Note: This post appeared in a vastly different form on Adaptu, where Greg contributes. Really, the only similarities are the message and the title. Go there and read it, after this.

In the 1930s, people made ends meet during the Great Depression by moving out of the Dust Bowl and eating possum stew. Today, people ravaged by the worst financial crisis since then are valiantly fighting economic stasis with…scissors and paper clips.

With the rarest of exceptions, coupon clipping is penny wisdom and pound folly. For all the effort the average coupon clipper puts into saving a few quarters on toaster pastries and bottled water, there are better and more financially rewarding ways to spend one’s time.

(Oh, and by the way? “Coupon” is a noun, not a verb. Now excuse me as I resume paragraphing.)

The jar of pickles that your coupon reduced from $2.99 to $2.59 is not a 40¢ saving. It’s still a $2.59 outlay. Food producers aren’t in the habit of leaving money on the table, any more than anyone else is. Rather, they’re just testing multiple prices on the same public and seeing which guinea pigs bite, as it were. If a manufacturer issues a coupon and thus reduces its profit on each jar by a few pennies, but the result is that significantly more people each buy a jar than otherwise would, then the manufacturer’s learned some valuable information about its clientele.

Of course, we’re more interested in coupons from the consumer’s perspective, not the producer’s. From the consumer’s perspective, the time involved in achieving that miniscule saving is almost never worth the effort rendered. Especially when there are so many easier ways to save money, and especially when people insist on confusing spending with saving.

Take the recent multitudes lining up to buy the TouchPad, Hewlett-Packard’s dead-on-arrival competitor to Apple’s ubiquitous iPad. The rush on TouchPads didn’t start until HP announced they weren’t going to make any more of them. Ever. No improved model down the road, no software updates. Just the opposite, in fact.

TouchPads went for $500 the day before HP announced they’d stop making them, $100 the day after. To the common gullible consumer, that means an extra $400 in his pocket. But here’s a truth that’s so obvious that it’s easy to miss:

Buying a consumer product – any consumer product – doesn’t make you money. It’s not as if each customer is skipping out of Best Buy, triumphantly waving four $100 bills that he wouldn’t have if he’d never entered the store.

Retailers dropped TouchPad prices 80% out of necessity – unsold inventory is no fun – and the masses did what masses do. Given how quickly smartphones and tablets lose resale value (my own HP Pre went from $550 to a $30 eBay cut-and-run sale in under 2 years, an inevitable byproduct of technological progress), even $100 for an end-of-line product can be a lot.

Why do people spend beautiful Sunday afternoons indoors, sorting through flyers when they could be out enjoying life? Or waiting in line for a durable good that will almost certainly be a paperweight in a couple years’ time?

They fall victim to the oldest psychological trick in the retailer’s playbook, anchoring. Instead of offering a product at price x, offer it at price x+y with a y discount. It sounds so simplistic that you’d think it couldn’t possibly work, but it does. In the early 2000s a sewing supply shop in CYC’s hometown took out the same tiny ad in the local paper, every day. The ad stated that you could bring it in to buy a particular sewing machine for $168, or pay $899 without the ad. This example is more blatant than most, but it’s an important reminder that a coupon has no intrinsic value. It’s not worth 40¢, $1, or in the case of the sewing supply store, the price of a flight to London. If you’re altering your behavior to spend money because of a perceived saving, think about the 100% saving you’d enjoy if you didn’t spend the money in the first place.

Speaking of psychological tricks, say you can buy a certain shirt at a store across the street for $40. But the exact same shirt is available on the other side of town for $10. Would you drive across town to buy it? (Or to phrase it differently, Would you still buy it across the street for 4 times the price?) Most people who like the shirt, and even some who don’t, would make the trip for a colossal 75% saving. Sounds reasonable, right?

Okay then, would you buy a new car for $29,658 across the street, when a dealer on the other side of town is selling it for $29,628? Most people (who haven’t been exposed to the previous question) would prefer to stay close to home, rather than waste time and fight traffic to take advantage of a measly .1% saving.

Hopefully I don’t need to point out that the two scenarios are equivalent. To be consistent, you should say yes either to both or to neither. A $30 saving is a $30 saving, regardless of how expensive the underlying item is.

Why are coupons so popular? Because taken at face value, they appear to be one-sided marketplace victories gained without effort. I got one over on the grocery store. But more often than not, using a coupon means buying something that you’d otherwise have been ambivalent about at best.

Instead of spending valuable hours saving microscopic amounts, go for the big fish. Every year, buyers leave billions on the table because they’d rather spend their time dealing in impersonal printed discounts than learning the fundamentals of negotiating. The same people who devote one day a week to clipping coupons are by and large the ones who are terrified to try to talk a house seller or mortgage lender down a few thousand dollars.

If you’re buying necessities, and don’t have to change your behavior to acquire them, coupons could make sense in theory. (You’ll notice that your power company and water utility aren’t in the habit of issuing coupons.) If you’re buying frivolities, things that only caught your eye because of the reduced price, then you’re not saving money no matter how hard you justify doing so. And if you’re buying expensive necessities – a house, a vehicle – the amount you’ll save by learning how to stand your ground and walk away if necessary will dwarf anything you’ll save by making the supermarket clerk scan Universal Product Codes.

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