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**

**Top Personal Finance Posts of the Week -30K Challenge Edition**

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

Financial Retard of the Month

August 26, 2011

Time for a new feature on Control Your Cash, where we’ve taking to scouring the internets to find personal finance bloggers we can hold up as examples of what not to do with your money. We’re thinking of doing this weekly, although we could probably feature a different retard every hour.

Our heroine (artist's conception)

Today’s honoree is Sallie’s Niece, who lives in New York state and is busy creating an anti-nest egg. (NOTE: We’re not providing links. She doesn’t need the traffic from a popular blog like ours. But you really should witness this foolishness firsthand.)

Her disclaimer (everyone has a disclaimer, except us) starts off with the funny:

I am in NO way qualified to answer any financial questions

You’ll find out why shortly. The “Sallie” in question is Sallie Mae, the money-losing boondoggle that enables people ostensibly on the cusp of adulthood to defer productivity for years if not decades. To hear the niece in question describe it, 



I’m a 30 (gasp!) year old professional woman struggling to pay off my student loans, live on a budget, and plan for the future.

Here at Control Your Cash, we’re old enough to remember when “professional” meant something. It meant that you were a doctor or an engineer, not that you simply had a job.

Guess how many student loans this financial drain took out? Remember, she’s an individual, not sextuplets.
SIX. Six freaking student loans. Including a law school loan that she managed to pay off. We’ll let you know the parade route once it’s scheduled. Rounded to the nearest thousand, her remaining loans total $40,000, $33,000, $21,000, $19,000 and $6,000. For a total of $118,000, a debt which no 30 (gasp!) year-old should incur unless she’s buying a house.

Still got some food remaining in your gullet? Here’s an emetic we can all enjoy. This woman works in some level of government and is, well, we’ll quote the original source:

Assuming I make the same salary for the next 6 years I will have contributed about $14,000 to my pension. Then I stop contributing but keep working for at least 10 more years. How much do I get?
Using a final average salary of $49,312, when I am 57 years old I will have 30 years of service credit. I will thus be eligible for a Single Life Allowance of $29,587 a year. That’s 60% of my final average salary. All for contributing just $14,000! This is totally morbid but even if I only collect for one year I am getting 2x my money back!

Why are state and municipal governments (to say nothing of the big one in Washington) drowning in debt? No idea whatsoever. Can’t quite place our finger on it.

Where would your priorities be if you were carrying $118,000 in student loans, while financing a laptop; carrying a credit card (you’re not going to believe this, but there’s credit card debt, too); borrowing money from a friend, a fiance-cum-husband and your mom; and aren’t even organized enough to pay your water bill on time? Don’t know about you, but we’d spend $7000 on a wedding!

You know, that change in your legal status that any justice of the peace can handle if you spend $40 on a license. But what’s the fun in that, when you can spend $6,960 more? You’d have to be crazy to apply that money to your student loan balances instead.

It’s the brazenness that gets us more than anything else. One of this woman’s stated goals is to increase her net worth to -$100,000 this year. She hopes to one day achieve the rarefied financial air of her husband (she calls him “DH”, for “dear husband”, and isn’t that precious?), who last clocked in at a robust -$15,000.

She uses terminology such as “fun money”, which we can only assume goes for pedicures and other non-assets. Listen: if you’re $100,000 in the hole, you don’t get “fun money”. You get debt reduction money, and maybe a buck or two to feed and clothe yourself with.

People often ask the CYC principals how we’ve managed to lead lives of relative affluence. Two answers. One, read the book. Two, by not doing the same idiotic, self-destructive crap that other people do. This doesn’t require anything beyond a 1st-grade comprehension of math. At its absolute most basic, income > expenses. Replace the > with a = or a <, and you can’t build wealth. Even if you’re sucking at the public teat like our friend Sallie’s Niece.

Here’s our favorite line from her archives, from April:

(The husband and I) recently combined finances.

Oh, this is going to end spectacularly. If you’ve never heard Mark Steyn’s line about dog feces and ice cream (or in this case, dog feces and slightly less pungent dog feces), Google it.

It gets even better. She donates to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, completely unaware that she’s the charity case. What’s the best way to help poor people? Not adding to their ranks. This isn’t a case of there always being someone less fortunate than you. This is a case of needing to get your own house in order before vacuuming the neighbors’ carpets.

(NOTE: We’d originally used American Cancer Society as our example in the preceding paragraph, but a couple of clicks later we found she’s also donating to the starving unfortunates who run taxpayer-sponsored television that nobody watches. In her words, “I can’t imagine a world without PBS.”)

$200 concert tickets. Trips to Mexico. A “fabulously unfrugal (sic) Hawaiian honeymoon.” She used boldface 24-point type with exclamation points to announce when her consumer debt got down to $122,000. And there’s also:

The base price of my (wedding) dress is $1100, plus planned alterations of $150 and taxes of $104, the total comes out to be $1354.

It never stops. You know what? Forget about the two-pronged advice we just gave about how to build wealth. Instead, simply do the exact opposite of everything Sallie’s Niece does and you’ll be swimming in it.

Make sure you read the congratulatory comments, too. If there’s one thing we Americans do better than anyone else, it’s celebrate non-achievement. Like the morbidly obese woman who shrinks from 800 pounds down to 780, and whose case worker commemorates the meaninglessness by passing out hugs and Pixy Stix. Instead of celebrating the woman who’s always weighed 120 pounds and who goes to the gym every day and eats healthily to maintain that weight.

Oh, and sure enough, Sallie’s Niece is fat. It stands to reason: if you’re grossly undisciplined in one aspect of your life, you’ll be grossly undisciplined in most of them. We couldn’t locate any pictures of her, but people who aren’t fat don’t join Weight Watchers. (Nor do they join a gym as a New Year’s resolution, the surest sign that those pounds are not only staying on but inviting some friends to join them.)

Also, it’s a cleft palate, not a “cleft palette”. (Worst art supply ever.) Look, it’s one thing to make worse financial decisions than a Holstein cow would make. What we don’t understand is why she considers her stunning lack of acumen to be something worth sharing with the world.

And she smokes. Of course. And she “could use a Halloween costume.” (Again, 30 [gasp!] years old.)

Damn. The Chinese can’t invade our shores us fast enough.

**This article is featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #324: The Universe Edition**

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