If you know me in real life, you probably know that I love ragging on Trent from The Simple Dollar. Now let me just say first that I don’t think he’s incompetent or stupid. He obviously knows a lot about personal finance, much more than I do, and it’s amazing that he’s worked off as much debt as he had.
With that being said, though, there are a lot of things he writes that I think are simply ridiculous.
Take his post from Sunday, “Walk the Walk Before You Talk the Talk.” He starts off describing a conversation he had with someone (someone he just met, from what it sounds like) who told him that a debt repayment plan she thought was great really turned her life around. And then when she told him that she had just started the plan, he used that as a launching point into his diatribe about how you need to have experienced something to talk about anything.
What? This poor woman was just sharing her personal experience of starting to pay off debt, a place where he was not too many years ago, because she knew that personal finance was something he wrote about. So instead of saying something encouraging about her having the courage and initiative for starting this difficult journey, Trent instead disparages her, saying that she shouldn’t be talking about it because she hasn’t actually done it yet.
This is kind of ridiculous. This woman was just having a personal conversation with Trent, not pretending to be some sort of authority on the subject and writing about it on a public blog or anything like that. Trent, on the other hand, writes about stuff that he hasn’t yet mastered or completed all the time. By his own logic, he shouldn’t really write about veganism, since he just started his vegan diet months ago. He also shouldn’t write about paying off a home mortgage, because he’s not done with that yet. And he definitely shouldn’t be writing about weight loss or dieting, because… I mean, look at him. And his mayonnaise-laden casseroles.
This is just another example of Trent’s holier-than-thou attitude that seems to be coming up more often in his entries lately. I don’t know why, but he seems to be growing more arrogant and judgmental. I can’t believe the number of times he’s written about judging someone for something they said or did, and it’s often something really minor, like the conversation in this article. Somehow, this one little exchange has led Trent to believe that this woman is somehow talking the talk before walking the walk, and he probably has secretly crossed her off of the list of people he wants to be friends with (another thing he seems to do a lot is to say things like “it’s not worth maintaining a friendship with this person”). Perhaps as his readership grows, he feels that his authority and influence grow with it. His blatant hypocrisy in this article is just maddening. How can he criticize this woman for something she said in a personal conversation, when he spouts off about things he barely knows anything about on his blog that reaches thousands of people, pretending to be an authority on whatever it is he’s writing about?
Personally, I enjoy it when people share their experiences, whether they’re complete or not. Who cares where they are in the process? The important thing is that they’re sharing their experience with you.
You might ask why I even bother reading his blog, when I disagree with it so much. I actually find it quite entertaining, really. When he posts pictures of his food thinking it’s good, when really it looks disgusting. When he talks about how he tries to maintain relationships with people, while disparaging people for innocent comments or actions on his blog. It must be nice to be able to deceive yourself so completely like that.