Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist - The F.S.A.

When I was going through my net worth feasibility analysis, one of the key criticisms was my assumption for salary growth.

Since then I've found out more about how my salary will be determined in the future. It turns out it's going to be more volatile than I expect. While it won't be as volatile as some of my friends salaries who are in trading (where you can get a 100% increase or 80% decrease YoY), it's still more volatile than I was initially expecting. Possibly to the tune of 20-40% YoY increase or decrease.

This is due to the fact that as I progress, more and more of my compensation will be in the form of annual bonuses, stock-based compensation, and various other forms of compensation. This is both good and bad for my salary prospects. On the one hand, it's quite possibly that I exceed my initial salary growth assumptions due to these factors. On the other hand, it's difficult to plan for these forms of compensation until I have a better idea about how they work.

In either case, I will have to take stock each year to chart our progress to $2 mill and $4.5 mill to see how we are doing. You can expect to see a similar table to 2million's at the begining of the year.

Tags: personal finance

As has already been reported elsewhere, Discover card is having a promotion where you receive $20 for each $200 spent at certain malls. Although there weren't any malls in NH or MA close to us, on the way down to PA my wife and I stopped by NJ to purchase some items from a participating mall. Since we had two different discover cards, we both purchased $1,000 worth of merchandise, pocketed the $100 in gift cards (limit 5 per card) and then returned the merchandise at another location. We have since activated the gift cards and have used them to make purchases.

Interestingly enough, there is a fairly lengthy debate over at mymoneyblog about whether what we just did is ethical or not. Obviously, we are of the mindset that there is nothing wrong with it. We just view it as another legal money-making scheme like the credit card balance transfers we're doing, the 30-day free trial of credit protector, or the flipping of ps3s on ebay. In either case, every little bit helps, and we'll be able to purchase some things we really need.


Tags: personal finance

I am going on vacation for a week. We will be visiting my wife's family in PA. They have this huuuuge mall close to where the live called the King of Prussia mall. We're going to be going there after Christmas to shop and hopefully get some stuff we need. I hope everyone has a Happy, Happy, Holidays. Whether it's Christmas, Hannukah, or the Solstice, make sure to spend time with your love ones in anyway you can.

Here's to another funtastic year. Let's save a ton of money, make a lot of money, enjoy our families and kids, and not go too crazy from stress. Have a good one everyone. See you in about a week.
Tags: personal finance atheism

LAMoneyGuy had an excel question:

Frank, this one may be a simple answer, but I can't seem to figure it out. I want to shade a cell if another cell meets a given criterium. Sounds like conditional formatting, but I can't make it work.

So, if a1="yes" then b1 should be shaded yellow.

Can you help me on this one?

Indeed I can! You are correct in that this can be done with conditional formatting. The key is to change the condition from "Cell Value is" to "Formula Is". Here is a quick screenshot that answers your question.

As you can see, my conditional formatting for cell C7 is Formula Is and the formula itself is =B7="yes". So this gets me to if cell B7 is yes, cell C7 is shaded yellow. Hope that helps :).

crsandus had this excel question:

Funny you should mention that. I was working on making an excel sheet that was split in half and one half could scroll down while the other half stayed stationary. Any help?

There are actually two ways of doing this. One is split panes (as Matt @ Crazy Money has mentioned) and the other is Freezing Panes. You can access both by going to the Window Menu Item. See the screen shot below.

I put together a sample sheet with a Date and a Balance column. The Date starts at 1/1/2001 and ends at 2/1/2006. Here's what it looks like if I Split the Window. A1 and B1 are still visible and so is A44 and B44 on down. Notice the gray bar going across. That gray bar can be moved by dragging on it.

[image coming, blogger sucks :(]

Now, here's what it looks like if I Freeze Panes. Once again A1 and B1 are visible, but there is a thin black line going across instead of a gray bar. You can't move that black line by dragging. Instead, you have to play around and see what cell to highlight in order to freeze the panes effectively.

[image coming, blogger sucks :(]

Hope that helps as well. Let me know if people have any other Excel questions.
Tags: excel

I've added two blogs to my blogroll Trent of The Simple Dollar and Slick Rich of Get Rich Slick.

From what I gather, these two are completely opposite from each other in many ways. Trent seems to be a conservative (not in a political sense) guy, who warned me about doing credit card balance transfer arbitrage. Rich Slick would most likely chastise me for not doing enough :P.

In either case, I have been enjoying some of their recent posts and figured that I would add them to the blogroll. They each offer two different perspective on a variety of topics which is the best part about the personal finance blogosphere. Check them out, you might be surprised what you learn from each one.
Tags: personal finance

Please don't hold it against me. I was weak and I knew it would make me feel good. Sigh, I guess I'll just have to come clean with it then. No more pussyfooting around...I prepaid a portion of my student loan debt. The rate is under 5% and I get a tax deduction...but I'm so close to being under the $12,000 mark and in a moment of weakness I forwarded an electronic payment. Curse the convenience of electronic transfer.

Please don't revoke my membership in the I-like-leverage-and-will-only-act-completely-rationally-when-it-comes-to-debt club.

Come on guys, I still have my balance transfers!
Tags: personal finance humor

I've seen some posts recently about Citi's Credit Protector. Between my wife and I we have 6 Citi credit cards that we are using to do 0% balance transfers. Here's how we were able to squeeze out more money from those cards by utilizing a free 30-day trial of credit protector on all six cards.

Background Info
Citi's credit protector is an overpriced "insurance plan" for your credit cards (cost is $0.85 per $100 of balance). Here's what it covers

• Put payments, interest, and all fees on hold for 2 years when you suffer an involuntary job loss, hospitalization or disability


• eliminate up to $10,000 when you if your household's highest wage earner suffers a long-term disability or die


• Cancel 2 minimum payments when you have a "life event":
  • marriage
  • divorce
  • CHILDBIRTH or adoption
  • buying a home
  • moving to a new residence
  • starting college
  
  
• Other events: victim of national disaster, family takes leave for certain events, and then if you are called for active military duty

To tempt you to join they offer a free 30-day trial and when we did it they had a $20 rebate on any retail purchase (although now they have a $100 gas rebate deal).

What we did
As you can see from the above list, they cover one key life event for us: childbirth. We took a chance and signed up 2 weeks before my wife's due date (she turned out to be a little late this time, talk about being on edge!). They sent us $120 worth of rebates. We also called to "cancel" one of the cards and they sent us along $50 worth of $10 gift cards rebates. The way it works is that you get one gift card a month for 5 months.

A day after my wife gave birth I called the number to activate our benefits. It was remarkably simple. They didn't request any confirmation from the doctor or hospital. They then promised to make 2 minimum monthly payments (what I was doing already since these were 0% bal transfer cards).

For my wife, she activated a hospitalization benefit which effectively froze her account for one month, and then she activated the child-birth benefit to pay 2 monthly payments.

Here's the breakdown for our P/L:

• Balance on all cards approx $30,000


• Two minimum payments @ 1.5% each: ~$900 total


• Three gift cards to Walmart: $30 total


• Two months of "extra" interest from Emigrant Direct from not having to transfer money to make minimum payments: ~$5-6


• $80 in rebate checks: 4 were processed, denied for one, waiting for one more

So that's like over $1,000 right there that the credit card company paid us to keep their cards. After the two payments posted to our accounts, I would call typically the day after and cancel. It's important to cancel BEFORE your statement ends for the month to avoid being charged. We were erroneously charged on one card, but 5 out of 6 isn't too bad, and we should be getting a rebate for that soon. Plus, they are not charging us interest on that erroneous fee.

To Summarize:
- Read the fine print, Read the fine print, read the fine print
- See if you are expecting a future life event that's covered on the list
- Read to see the terms of the benefit. Fees and interest typically do not accrue over this time frame, but you might not be able to use your card. Also, check to see if automatic monthly payments will still go through.
- Utilize the 30-day free trial to give yourself some time for the scheduled life event. This also gives you your initial bonus.
- Activate benefit to have them pay your minimum payments.
- Cancel before your statement ends to avoid being charged.
- Do it again next year :P

If you don't have a citi card, contact me as citi has a referral program that gives us both bonuses if you sign up. Please use responsibly.

Tags: personal finance credit protector

I've posted before about how to use the pmt function to calculate the monthly P&I payment for your loan. I then followed up with how to build an amortization table using that function in Excel. I wanted to know if people were interested in learning more about Excel? From basic formulas to macros I can pretty much talk about any aspect. Please let me know, I'm just trying to brainstorm here for 2007 post ideas.

Thanks to ricemutt for the gentle prodding :P
Tags: excel

I tried to move my blog over to the new version of blogger and it didn't seem to work. Not sure what's going on, but I still seem to have my old stuff. So yea, I'm back now...any help/thoughts?
Tags: personal finance atheism

As usual several people have left some great comments on my post about the people struggling to get by on $150,000/year.

Kira starts off mentioning something I forgot...they live in Nebraska, not NYC or some other high cost of living state.

don't have much sympathy for these people. Living in Nebraska on $150k should be a piece of cake. There is definitely something about their spending that is pulling them down, and allowing the husband to treat money-sucking rental properties as some kind of expensive toy is really unthinkable. You can't keep properties because you're "working so hard" on them. That's the excuse for why you don't throw out a model boat.

I think it's also a matter of having put too much mentally in the "that's a reasonable price" pot. It is my impression that most people think a horse is an expensive item, but they see it as a monthly expense that can be afforded by giving up other (probably smaller) expenses. But you have to wonder, if they think a horse is affordable, what other things have they spent their money on?

LAMoneyGuy wasn't sympathetic, but he was also pretty laid back about it:

Well, they made some poor choices which has put them in a difficult place. Certainly no sympathy, but I don't think they would want our sympathy anyway. They have the means to make things right quickly. Sell the rentals seems obvious.

I'm not going to point fingers at them and say, "Bad, bad Americans!" They are just another family who needs to become more realistic about their finances.

Jim didn't spare words. Talk about tough love.

These are people who have decided it's more important to have a horse and throw money down the toilet on the husband's rental property hobby than to fund the primary wage earner's 401K or their children's college funds. They strike me as complete fools.

sfmom had a been there/done that type of attitude.

I see them as a family with financial ignorance. They've done the first step of acknowledging that they have a problem. Now, I hope they heed advice given to them and get their ducks in a row.

I have some sympathy for them now because of their ignorance. I don't have sympathy for entitlement attitudes. I used to be that way and learned better. I hope they learn better too.

On another note, I sometimes feel like I live paycheck to paycheck and I make a comparable salary. My problem is that I try to save too much. Crazy problem, huh? I have the 401k, traditional ira, roth (which we are on the verge of not qualifying for anymore.), 529. I'm working on building up an e-fund and in the mean time can't seem to make groceries, etc. fit within the "rest" of the left over cash. It's a constant struggle of trying to rework a budget. So, again, I do sort of have sympathy for them. I understand how hard it is. They honestly need to take the steps needed to correct the situation.

The Financial Ladder had some sage advice.

They should invest in a computer, and visit a few of the personal [finance] blogs around here...

So there you have it.

I hope people like there Heard it in the comment posts. One of the best things about having a blog are the (insightful) comments that I get on my posts. I hope to highlight my great readership going forward on a regular basis.
Tags: personal finance

And with that, the last PS3 leaves our household. We sold our last system several days ago and now we just have to return the games and accessories to walmart that didn't sell. We made money...less money than we expected, but a fair chunk of change.

After tabulating the results and counting the pennies, we made ~$4,000 after selling 10 PS3s, 4 wiis, and 12 Elmos. A little over $1,000 is earmarked for the repair of the water heater from last month. We would have made more but we made some mistakes (you'd think that two college educated adults would be able to spell playstation and know the difference between 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM, but you'd be surprised :P). All in all for less than a month's worth of effort I took home more than a month's worth of salary (seeing as how I don't have deductions and the like).

So that leaves us with ~$3,000 surplus. With that money, plus my bonus, we plan to do the following:
Responsible Stuff
- Donate to my Alma Mater
- Fund a Roth IRA. The total in our retirement accounts might actually go over the five figure mark as a result. Not only that, but a coworker reminded me about the profit sharing that we all get and he told me the magnitude of the payment. This will place us in the five-figure mark depending on what the market does. This astonishes me. I feel incredibly fortunate that we are in such a great position already.
- Personal Property Insurance
- Get a will and a living will
- Repay some personal friends who let me borrow money while I was in college. These two guys let me borrow close to $1500 with no intention of ever asking for it again. I mean, talk about two guys that uphold the principles of Christianity (both are pretty religious). Their help was invaluable and I'm more than happy to pay them back thanks in part to the great year my wife and I had.
- Open a 529 plan for daughter 1. This will allow us to save any money she receives for Christmas. (This has already been accomplished).
- Save some more for the boys in their 529 plan.
- Earmark the surplus for an emergency fund.

Fun stuff/wants
- We're going to be visiting my wife's family in PA and that means we're going to be spending quite a bit of time in Chinatown getting all my wife's favorite dishes.
- My wife needs some clothes and some new shoes. She's still wearing stuff from the eighth grade for crying out loud. Will be looking for some after-christmas bargains for this one.
- I need pants for work. I am down to one pair of pants that I'm washing all the time. I generally try to spend about $20/pair if I can help it. Going to be looking for this after christmas as well.
- Repair laptop. Needs a new keyboard. Total cost, $10 from Dell. Was also planning on getting a new CD-drive, but a friend told me about daemon tools, and we will hold off the new CD-drive for now.
- Piano lessons for son number 1. We've found a program that I think we'll be happy with. It utilizes the Suzuki method so my wife will be taking some parent classes as well. I really hope that he learns to love playing and we will try our best to help him appreciate classical music.

That pretty much sums it up. We are now fully collateralized with our credit card balance transfers. No more extra credit card debt for us, which is totally sweet and awesome. Our outstanding debt consists of our mortgage, our auto loan, and our student loans. I've made 12 timely payments on my student loan, so I'm due a rebate or something like that. Plus since I've signed up for electronic deposit, I get a 25 basis point discount on my interest rate. We're in a terrific spot and my wife and I are mostly on the same page when it comes to finances. We have a routine for monthly bills and expenses and we try to save where we can. I am every so thankful for the people that read and comment on this blog and to all the other bloggers out there who share their stories. Here's to a great year, and I'm looking forward to another one.
Tags: personal finance

Now that my bonus has been deposited, I was taking stock of what our tax situation looks like. Using the HR Block Tax Estimator Calculator, I found out that we are going to be getting a couple thousand back for a refund! The reason I'm surprised is because I used the IRS calculator to see how much to withold and thought I had it down pat. I used amortization tables to estimate how much interest I was going to pay over the year and even double-checked myself after our unexpected windfall.

However, I forgot to take into account the one-time tax treatment of my bonus and didn't change my witholdings. As a result, I overpaid in the last month of the year. Curse you Uncle Sam. You get an interest-free loan from me for a few months!

Oh well, could be worse :P.
Tags: personal finance taxes

Saw this article on CNN Money. It's kind of hard to sympathize with these people, but I don't want to be too critical/judgmental. More and more I realize that it's not how much you make, but how much you keep. Plus it looks like they bought two cash-flow negative rentals with high vacancies that's eating up a lot of their income, and the dad did lose a job recently. So I guess it's just important to plan ahead and have an emergency fund.

What are people's thoughts on the matter? Should we be sympathetic with them, or should we just blame them for their high consumption rate? I mean, they are the typical American family. Right?
Tags: personal finance

This was a post I found that I meant to post a while back. It was going to be part of the now defunct god-or-not carnival
When I was still a Christian, I recall hearing testimonials in church all the time (I attended a black southern baptist church after all). Most of them were run of the mill stuff, i.e. I didn't know how I was going to pay my bills, but God provided a way. Some times however, someone would come up with something really miraculous. I remember one person who spoke about being diagnosed with cancer after going to the doctor. She went home and prayed and prayed and prayed. Next day, she went back to the doctor to take more test and she was cured! Back then I really truly believed that person had been miraculously cured of cancer. It helped me to reaffirm my faith in god and his ever palpatable presence in my everyday life.

Now, however, I know better. I now know that most medical test are far from 100% accurate. That's not to say they're ineffective. But even a 95% or 99% rate of accuracy will still give a false positive ocasionally. In statistics that's called a Type I error (wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_error). In order to rectify a false positive, the doctor could do the same test again, or maybe another test that is more accurate. With a test the is 99% accurate, the probability of two false positives are pretty slim (like .01%), doing the same test over can catch those false positives given an accurate enough test. Most people don't know that about these tests though and more often than not a Medical Misdiagnosis can be transformed into a Medical Miracle. Here's how:

Let's say that hypothetically a test for a certain cancer will give a false positive 5% of the time. A religious individual goes for his/her yearly physical and has to take the test as part of their checkup. The test comes back positive and the doctor tells them that they may have cancer, but more tests are needed. Not surprisingly, this leaves the person distraught and devastated. They go home and being religious they do what comes naturally, they pray. They then go back to the doctor who runs another test, or maybe the same test and lo and behold, there is no sign of cancer! It's amazing! The doctor is baffled. He says things like, "I've never seen this happen before". What wondrous news! This persons prayer has worked! God has spared them from the ravages of cancer! Why...it's a miracle!

In one fell swoop, a Medical Misdiagnosis has been completely and utterly transformed into a Medical Miracle. Even though there is a more plausible explanation for why something like this could occur (the fallibility of medical testing), many people often will and do believe otherwise.

People are just too quick to attribute aberrations in their daily lives to some form of supernatural, miraculous cause.
Tags: atheism

People find bonds confusing, but intuitively, they are actually quite simple. A bond simply represents debt. It's somebody's debt. It's IBM's debt. It's the state of New York's debt. It's the United States government debt. It could even be your debt or my debt. It just debt, debt, debt...plain and simple. If you know how your mortgage works, you can develop an intuition for how bonds work [with some caveats of course ;)].

Before we talk about bonds, we need to discuss one fundamental concept. It's the most important financial concept that you can learn. It doesn't matter if you're looking at bonds, stocks, or complex derivatives. Any financial instrument can all be boiled down to this underlying concept: present value.

To put it another way:

the value of money is dependent on time/when we receive it

Excuse me for shouting but it's just that important.

Example: If I offer you $100 today or $100 one year from now, which do you prefer?

Now, if I offer you $95.19 today or $100 one year from now, which do you prefer? You might say the $95.19 today, but you should be mostly indifferent because you can take that $95.19 invest it in emigrant direct currently yielding 5.05% APY and in one year you will have $100 with no risk (assuming that ED keeps the rate the same).

Because money's value depends on time, we need a way to compare money we'll receive at different time periods on an apples-to-apples basis and that's why we have present value.

Simply put, the present value of $95.19 today is equal to the present value of $100 one year from now assuming the 5.05% interest rate from ED.com.

To extend on this further, a bond investor would say this: I am willing to let you borrow $95.19 today with the promise of getting $100 one year from now. Then you can extend that to multiple time periods of 3 months, two years, and etc.

Now there is a fair amount of math that goes with present value calculations, but in an uncharacteristic move, I'm going to eschew the math to try to help you develop an intuition for present value and for bonds.

Key Takeaway: Given the choice of getting money today or tomorrow, I prefer to get money today, rather than tomorrow. So if I am lending you money, I want that money back sooner rather than later. We will see how this ties into bonds soon.

I know I didn't seem to touch on many bond concepts, but that will come in time.
Tags: personal finance bonds

LAMoneyGuy tagged me with this five things you don't know about me meme. I had to think long and hard about this one, so here goes:
1. When I was a really small kid growing up, it was common to save rainwater in large buckets. We would then boil the water and use it to drink and cook, this was because there was a cholera epidemic and we needed a clean supply of water (this is obviously not when I was in the USA)
2. I hate the following foods: tofu, soy milk (even though I'm driking it now because it's healthy), jook (sorry LAM), and spam (sorry LAM, Mapgirl, and ricemutt...but it's just nasty!).
3. I became a United States citizen this past year (like 2 months ago). After answering such difficult questions as "what color are the stars on the flag" they let me become a citizen :). I'm really looking forward to vote in all those important elections now. I'm also looking forward to jury duty...not.
4. I have a scar above by upper lip from when I ran in barbed wire as a kid. I had to get stitches. This was also when I wasn't in the United States.
5. In middle school I broke my ankle on the first day of a band trip...in Chicago. Now that wasn't a fun call home, let me tell you.

That's it. Hope you voyeurs are happy now! I know I'm suppose to tag 5 more people, but I'm lazy. So there you have it.

Tags:

I found this Net Worth Comparison tool over at CNN Money. It compares your age and income level. Apparently for my age I'm doing well (Median Net Worth is $400!), but salary-wise I have a loooooong way to go. The source is apparently a 2005 Market Audit Survey by Claristas and I have no idea how accurate the information is.

Take a look and tell me how you're doing against the median.
Tags: personal finance

Thank you everyone for the comments on my last post rant. I normally don't become frazzled by jokes/comments like that, but for some reason it irked me to no end on Monday. In retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing because I channeled my anger into a super-productive day at work.

I'll try to limit those ranty posts, because you people come here to hear me talk about personal finance and atheism, not whine about jerks at the office. In either case, I appreciate the sentiment from everyone, and I promise that I'll try not to stray too far from the central theme of this blog (but you have to admit, the math jokes are pretty funny).

Alright, I feel better, and I'm glad that I have the types of readers and commenters that I do. Now back to our regularly scheduled program :).

Tags: personal finance atheism

[rant]

This is just a friendly reminder from the FSA. I have three kids and I'm 23. That means I had a lot of unprotected sex. While I understand that 23-year-olds with kids are atypical, please get over it. The jokes were funny in the beginning, but now they are becoming midly offensive. Maybe I'll make jokes about you then and let's see how funny there are. Maybe I'll mention how you were passed up for the position and they gave it to me instead. How hilarious would that be! But, I'm just joking! Hahaha.

Seriously people, my wife and I live with our decisions everyday, and it's hard to forget that I have three kids, especially when it's brought up in almost every conversation.

It usually goes something like this: "OMG, did you know, he's 23 and has 3 kids!!!! OMG, yea, and he isn't unemployed, or on welfare or anything. Wow, what a guy! You must have been busy!! Hahahahaha! You must be tired with 9 kids...oh, I mean 3. Hahahahah, well at the rate you're going!! Hahahah!"

Hahahaha, you fucker. Now please shut the hell up.

[/rant]

Sorry for my normal readers, I'm not usually this vitriolic in my posts, it's just one of those days
Tags: personal

...So go check out these other links in the meantime.

1. Those crazy 911 conspiracy thinkers
2. Religious freedom isn't just for Christians
3. What was that about no religious test?
4. Narnia's Theodicy
5. Men are cheap to get gifts for, didn't we already know that?
6. Excel is useful duh, I've already told you people that :P.

Have fun reading!
Tags: personal finance atheism

Right now I have about $30,000 in balance transfers on credit cards with most of that in the bank earning interest at emigrant direct.com. That's about as much as my wife and I feel comfortable leveraging ourselves up.

I know that 2million has about $48,000 which I found impressive and Matt over at Crazy Money had just under $34,000 which is in line with how much I have.

Here's the thing. That's NOTHING compared to what some people are doing on fatwallet. For instance, check this guy out

EXEC SUMMARY
- Total Credit Limit of $363.2K [wow]
- Total Balance Transfer $170K [holy crap]
- Took $100K and put it into HSBC at 5% [sensible]
- Took $50K put it in brokerage accout and traded stocks and mutual fund [OMFG WTH IS HE DOING!!!!!!!!!!]
- $20K in more liquid savings
- Made about $9,000 and counting from interest, bonuses, selling gift cards, and an ipod. He also included some stock gains and unrealized mutual fund gains...which is cheating a little.

This left me completely stunned and amazed. First at the sheer size of the BT transfers and second at the audacity to put $50K into a brokerage account. Talk about some major balls...or stupidity!!!

In either case, it seems to be working out for him. I don't know if I'd ever be able to lever myself up to $170K in credit card debt. Maybe $50K-100K???

Tags: personal finance balance transfer

Looks like Blogger ate my template earlier so I had to revert to a back-up. Learned my lesson that one time it messed me up. Any how, we now return to your normally scheduled program. :)

Tags:

December arrives with much fanfare and song....well, not quite, but it arrives with good news. The FSA household leaped into the black this month! Our Net Worth is positive and growing. Thanks to my wonderful wife, who kept us in budget on daily incidentals and kicked my butt into procuring a total of 10 ps3s, 4 wiis, and 10 god-damn-furry-red-bastard elmos. Thanks to the stock markets for some positive action. Finally, thanks to the blogosphere for giving me a voice to rant obsessively about this that and the other and correcting me along the way. And now, on to the big (ok, small) number:

$6,068
Crowd Chants: in the black, in the black....

Some Highlights:
- I'm worried about our house value and I'm thinking I will revise it down in the coming month. There are two homes for sale close to where I live that will be tremendously good proxies for our home. Unfortunately, they are still on the market and will probably have to drop their prices below what I'm currently valuing our home. All in all, I will wait and see what happens.
- We had an ~$1,000 bump from cash released from our escrow! This represents much more than I was expecting. Initially I was going to put it towards the principal of our mortgage, but instead I will just deposit into the bank.
- I did include the value of the remaining PS3s in our calculation of net worth. I valued the unsold ones at the lower of cost and market value. To be fair, this is pretty realistic because I can return them to the store and get a refund in the exact same amount. I could have easily added another $1,000 assuming the $300-$400 premium I could get for them, but decided to value them at cost.
- For the month of December I still have one more paycheck and my year-end bonus which will put us even more solidly in the black with a funded ROTH IRA, zero "extra" credit card debt, and a burgeoning emergency fund.

So that's that. On another note, I've been considering moving from emigrant direct to eloans but have been a little spooked by their bungling of several people's transfers. We'll see. This is shaping up to be a pretty good year for the FSA family!
Tags: personal finance net worth

From ricemutt, thanks for reminding me of this one.

A constant function and e^x are walking on Broadway. Suddenly, the constant function sees a differential operator approaching and runs away. So e^x follows him and asks why he's running.

"Well, you see, there's this differential operator coming this way, and if we meet, he'll differentiate me into nothing!"

"Ah," says e^x, "he won't bother ME, I'm e to the x!" So he continues forward with a swagger.

After a short distance, he meets the differential operator.

e^x: "Hi, I'm e^x"
diff.op.: "Hi, I'm d/dy"

Tags: math