Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting a lot with my personal website, TrentHamm.com. Should it just be a puff piece that promotes me? Should I have some long essays or short stories on there?
What I eventually realized, though, is that the thing I enjoy doing the most is simply sharing [...] [continued] Read more »

When I was a kid, each year my Christmas stocking had a large orange in the toe. I always thought of this as a bit strange, so when I was a bit older, I asked my parents about the orange. It turns out that oranges were pretty hard to get ahold of when [...] [continued] Read more »

Megan writes in:
Congratulations on your third child! My husband and I are expecting our second child in February. I hope you’ll write an article about how to save money when another child comes along.
Your wish is my command, Megan. Here are some of the ways we’re preparing for our third child.
Diapers
As I’ve [...] [continued] Read more »

Lately, my wife and I have been studying ways to reduce our weekly grocery bill. We’ve been using several tactics to do this, which I will discuss one at a time over a series of articles.
Salads before dinner are a common staple at our house. For a long time, we would buy lots [...] [continued] Read more »

Over the past week, I’ve been conducting a quiet poll among friends and family concerning whether or not they shop at thrift stores. I received a few “yes” answers, but a surprisingly large number of “no” answers. Without arguing about the reasons, I also asked them why they didn’t shop at thrift stores [...] [continued] Read more »

One of the biggest personal and professional frustrations that I have (and that a lot of others seem to share) is that there’s never enough time to get to the important things we want to do.
We want to do things like…
+ visit an old relative
+ create a master information document
+ work on a [...] [continued] Read more »

Yesterday, my four year old son was watching a television program at his grandparents’ home. At our own home, we don’t watch much non-PBS programming at all, so this was one of my son’s first real exposures to advertising.
I came into the room after he had been watching for about forty minutes and started [...] [continued] Read more »

Recently, I picked up two Le Creuset 5 1/2 quart French ovens on a special deal. I’ve been slowly upgrading our kitchen implements and I’ve wanted to upgrade our cracked ceramic casseroles with enameled cast iron that can be used over a burner and also thrown in an oven for baking purposes.
They were expensive, [...] [continued] Read more »

Monica writes in:
I used to buy my daughter several new outfits before the start of the school year and then a few more items for Christmas. This worked well when she was less picky about her clothes. The last few years, though, she’s wanted nothing but a few specific brands of clothing – [...] [continued] Read more »

Recently, several couples in our community started a frozen meal exchange. It’s a really simple idea. On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members [...] [continued] Read more »