.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} If someone had told Trent Hamm six months ago that he would be earning more money from his personal finance blog than from his day job in information technology, he wouldn’t have believed it.

And two years ago, the Central Iowa resident says, he wouldn’t have known what to do with any amount of money he earned.

That may be hard to believe about a guy who writes one of the Web’s most popular personal finance blogs, The Simple Dollar, and whose articles share space on MSN Money with established financial columnists such as Jim Jubak and Liz Pulliam Weston.With nearly 40,000 links and an estimated 45,000 visitors a month, his blog, www.thesimpledollar.com,, has struck a chord with people seeking ways to use their money more wisely and get out of debt.

“My site is doing 1 million page views a month, and for a blog, that’s a very large number,” he said. “There are only about 500 blogs in the world that get that kind of traction. I literally have my own server.”

Christian Connett, an Indianola Web site developer who closely follows the blogging world, said The Simple Dollar has “a great traffic rank,” based on figures from sources such as Google Inc. and Alexa Internet Inc. Though he couldn’t verify it, it’s quite plausible the blog could be getting a million views a month, he said. Google, for instance, has indexed more than 1,700 of his pages, which Connett said compares with an average of a few hundred for some of his top Iowa clients’ sites.

Hamm, who religiously posts 25 articles a week, dug himself out of debt within eight months after teaching himself how to manage money. Having grown up in a poor family in rural Illinois, the Iowa State University graduate mistakenly looked to spendthrift peers as role models after he began earning a professional salary.

“I thought that was the behavior I should emulate,” he said. “And I just spent money on all sorts of things I shouldn’t be spending money on. It took time for me to realize it wasn’t the path to follow. I had the discipline within me; it was just a matter of learning right from wrong and following through.”

Much of Hamm’s motivation came from the birth of his son, now 20 months old. “I was realizing that I needed a financial future for him and I was not building any money the way I was going,” he said. “So I just started reading on personal finance topics, and things just finally started to click.”

One of his recent articles on MSN Money describes a strategy a 20-year-old can use to retire by age 40 by squirreling away 20 percent of his or her salary each year. Saving money isn’t easy, but it’s achievable, he says.

“It sounds kind of corny, but I’ve found the best thing that works for me is finding ways to spend less money,” he said. “That’s really the No. 1 thing that works, time in and time out. If I’m thinking about spending money on something, I really, really think it out and try not to spend the money.”

With another baby on the way and in the midst of moving from Ames to Boone, Hamm and his wife are already putting away money to buy the house they plan to live in 20 years from now. They’re doing it by treating the amount they wish to save as any monthly bill. They’ve arranged to transfer that amount automatically to a savings account each month and rolling the money as it accumulates into mutual funds.

“The more things you can do automatically, the better off you are,” he said. “If you make it automatic and have to make an effort for it not to happen, it’s a lot more likely to happen.”

Hamm is just as methodical in his approach to blogging, which he fits in with a full-time position in computational research. He declined to name his employer, noting that he’s careful not to make any references to his job or his company in his blog.

“I keep a notebook with me all the time; whenever I have an idea I write it down,” he said. “Then I usually spend about two to three hours each evening going through the idea list, pulling out the ones that seem to have some potential and just doing some research. As soon as I feel it’s not working out, I toss it out. Writing a blog, you have to keep posting stuff to keep an audience, and I don’t have time to keep following the path of something that doesn’t feel right.”

Finding good personal finance ideas is never a problem, he said. “Going through an average day, I have 20 ideas. Maybe three of them will end up being an article.”

His online income, which Hamm said last month was $5,500, comes from companies such as Google, which pay based on the number of people who click on ads they reach through The Simple Dollar. “In general, about 1 percent of all my page views have someone clicking on an ad. I make a certain amount per ad; it’s not a large amount, but with volume, it adds up. It really requires traffic to make money off of this.”

Through his blogging, he has developed a friendship with John David Roth, an Oregon resident who authors a competing personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly. Hamm said the two are now negotiating with a “major financial services firm” for an exclusive joint sponsorship of their sites.

“I have probably 40 percent more page views than him, but he makes a similar income to me because he’s been at it longer and so has substantially more archived stories,” Hamm said.

What’s next? Hamm shook his head and smiled. “I don’t even know where to start. This just started out as a side hobby and it’s progressed into something that could be a career. … I’ll have to see where it goes in the next few months.”