(Financial) Retard of the Month for May

May 30, 2012

 

Meet The Simple Dollar's archnemesis, National Park Bookstore Patron

 

We don’t pick on Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar because he’s an inviting target, although he is. We pick on him because he fancies himself as an advisor. It’s right there in the subtitle of his blog: “Coupons and Financial Advice.” Yet if you acted on his counsel, your life would be an endless treadmill of calculating barely perceptible savings on mundane activities. And who knows what you’d be missing out on.

Headhunter: Hi, Ms. Bland? We’re looking for a new sales associate and we think you’d be perfect for the job. Whatever you’re making now, we can double it. Can you come in for an interview?

Simple Dollar Devotee: Where are you located?

Headhunter: On the corner of 1st and Main.

Simple Dollar Devotee: Well, that’s 15.98012 miles from my house. My Prius gets 42.29830 miles to the gallon (I’m obsessive like Trent, therefore I calculate such things to the 5th decimal place.) So with gas at $3.989 a gallon I’d be paying $3.01 to interview with you.

Headhunter: You do realize that this is a phone conversation, and that I can’t hear your italicizing and bolding, right?

Simple Dollar Devotee: Plus my car depreciates at an average of 12.31209¢ per mile, so that’s an extra $3.93 I’d be spending to go to this interview, for a total of $6.94. If you don’t hire me, that’s a sunk cost.

Headhunter: (snoring)

Plus, Mr. Hamm is the most ungainly writer ever to sit in front of a computer. He figures that because he’s got the rudiments of composition (largely) under control, he’s therefore the personal finance answer to Joyce or Dickens. No. Knowing the rules of football doesn’t make you an all-pro. At best, it might make you a back judge.

Just like knowing how to reuse Ziploc bags doesn’t make you an expert on personal finance, just a lunatic. Guess how many results the word “frugal” returns when you search for it on The Simple Dollar.

6,340. “Frugality” gets another 6,290, for a total of 12,630.

The word “and” occurs in the New Testament only 10,684 times.

The Baha Men want to know if Trent Hamm can sing any other songs. Keanu Reeves thinks Trent has limited range. Euclid’s definition of a line said that The Simple Dollar is too 1-dimensional.

The latest foolishness from the Most Inane Voice In Personal Finance is so good, it bumped another Trent Hamm submission for Retard of the Month. This week, Trent teaches us how to save money at…tourist attraction gift shops. You know, because such places are an everyday temptation. Also, “keep your money in your wallet” is only 6 words and therefore too short a recommendation to be useful as far as Trent is concerned.

I particularly don’t like it when you go through a museum exhibit or a tour of some sort, only to find yourself dumped into a gift shop.

The children are hungry and thirsty and often tired after such a trip

Who under the age of born-in-the-19th-century uses the word “children” instead of “kids”?

This is absolutely my least favorite part of traveling and visiting new places. It’s often an expense. It’s always a hassle.

Fortunately,

years of planning family vacations with a frugal mindset has helped me to avoid these traps more and more often.

At this point, does Trent need to use the qualifier “with a frugal mindset” when describing any activity that he does? We can’t even cite ridiculous imaginary examples here to illustrate the point, because the real ones are better. The generic go-to activity would be “brushing your teeth ‘with a frugal mindset’”, but damned if he didn’t already beat us to it. Several times.

Here are some of the tactics we use

Trent has a 4-point strategy for not buying snow globes at the Grand Canyon.

(1) Do the research. Before you go on vacations, spend some time researching the places you’re considering visiting. Find out if these places force you through a gift shop or not, and use such techniques as a negative when considering whether to use that item as part of your vacation.

How does that play out?

You: Hello, Roman Colosseum?

Her: Ciao.

You: Avete un negozio di souvenir?

Her: Sì. cosa ti piacerebbe? 

You: Never mind. Thank you. (To your traveling partners) Okay, that’s out. Damn. I really wanted to see the Colosseum, too. Alright, next up is the Pyramids. Anyone know Arabic?

Wait, what did Trent say?

use such techniques as a negative when considering whether to use that item as part of your vacation.

So “don’t go”, you’re saying (verbosely)?

Also, what are the “techniques” here? What is the “item”? Maybe Trent knows Arabic, because God knows his command of English is brutal.

a gift shop needs to be my option, not foisted upon me.

Yes, because gift shop clerks are notorious for holding visitors at gunpoint until they agree to take home a logo canvas bag.

(2.) Your first step should simply include digital photographs.

Then a Trent Hamm specialty, the immediately succeeding unnecessary follow-up sentence:

If you want to remember something, take a picture

But wait, Trent. Why would someone take a picture?

so that you can look at it later.

Of course! Knew it was something, couldn’t put our finger on it.

Again, we haven’t omitted anything. We’re in the middle of one unbroken stream of Trentness:

Similarly, recording your thoughts in a travel journal while going from place to place on a vacation can be wonderful.

Stephen King once wrote to aspiring writers that “the adverb is not your friend.” But he never met Trent, who never met a –ly he didn’t fall in love with.

Also, “wonderful” is on that list of words that no heterosexual man should use:

Tummy
Veggie, or veggies
Wonderful
Fabulous
Soupçon
Gorgeous
Onesie
Booties
Adorable, unless used ironically

There are probably others. Wait, we’re building to something here. Behold The Most Trent Passage Ever:

I often look for natural souvenirs to bring home, such as unique rocks. We have stones from tne (sic) north shore of Lake Superior and from the Arbuckle Mountains in our yard. Other family members have bricks and baseballs found on vacations.

Notwithstanding the convenient location of the Arbuckle Mountains, that sums it up right there. The Hamm clan collects rocks, bricks, and baseballs. And note the verb “found”. Trent’s not talking about a foul ball that landed in his kid’s glove at a minor league game. His family members find baseballs while on vacation. Where do you go to find a random baseball, i.e. without going to a sporting goods store and paying for one? Do the Hamms wait outside Little League games and steal them when no one’s looking? Does going to a Little League game in a strange town qualify as a vacation in Trent’s world? And would doing so count as an “end experience” or a “peak experience”? We’re guessing “end”.

Look, no one’s saying you should overindulge your kids. But come on. No, Junior, you can’t have that $10 field guide to the Birds of North America. Instead, how about this mostly intact cinder block your dad discovered in the parking lot?

Don’t spend like an idiot, that’s a given. But for the love of Pete, if you consider a rock to be a souvenir (not a geode, not iron pyrite, an ordinary rock), the best thing you can do for humanity is to throw said rock up in the air and catch it with your forehead.

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: , , , , ,

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: , , , , , ,
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