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

I've been meaning to respond to several reader comments and will be doing so over the next few days. I'm going to be starting with the most recent posts and working my way back.

In my post where I wondered about the possibly polytheistic nature of Catholicism I receieved a variety of comments. To my surprise, I also received some comments from people that were very offended. Two quick examples:

Seriously, is this your post? Are you just trolling?

OK...quick primer...Saints...pray to them for intervention with God.

Mary...veneration. She is venerated, not worshipped.

Baptists...do you all hate dancing and think alcohol is the devil? We had a Baptist preacher in undergrad who would stand in the student union and declare all the sorority girls to be whores.

I cannot get over how stupid this post was. Hey, get a book. I cannot believe I am still typing. I am even more frustated that this was picked up on my blog scanner.

Seriously, if you have nothing to post, don't. This just makes you look ignorant. [Javert]

I'm a lapsed Catholic bordering on agnostic. Even though it's highly unlikely that I'm returning to the Church, I find your views to be quite ignorant and offensive. I was taught to pray to Mary and other Saints but they were never described to us as Gods and Goddesses. They were seen more as intermediaries for God. Honestly, we're not that different from Protestants. You must be from the South or some other area of the country that doesn't see many Catholics. [Anon]

Firstly, I was very clear about my ignorance with respect to Catholicism and I stated that I was confused about the many saints as well as being able to pray to Mary. I cannot honestly see why my post was considered offensive. Was it ignorant, why yes, I was pretty explicit about my ignorance. Perhaps next time I will just read a book like Javert suggested, or maybe just do a Wikipedia crawl. For what it's worth, I was trying to do something similar to my post entitled Are Mormon's Christians except this time I did not have a clear opinion on the matter.

Anywho, on to the more substantiative comments.

Timothy, who appears to be Catholic, did actually try to answer my questions as well as many other comments that stated that Catholics are polytheist and for that I am grateful to him. Hopefully you don't mind if I disagree with you Tim :).

Are saints minor deities and is Mary a goddess? Tim disagrees with the statement that saints are minor deities (and I would assume that he would disagree with the statement that Mary is a goddess), but you can only pray to saints and Mary to intercede on your behalf. They might have been human once, but the fact that they are "venerated" above others and are granted this special "power" to intercede on someone's behalf sounds to me like a minor deity. Add to this the dogma of The Immaculate Conception (see Javert, I can-sa read a books too, yes sa) where Mary is now elevated to a person born without original sin and I am hard-pressed to call her just another human being. My verdict, because only saints and Mary can be prayed to for intercession with Jesus/God and because of the dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, they are equivalent to minor deities, but I wouldn't necessarily call Mary a goddess.

On the other end of the spectrum, you had people who said yes, Catholics are polytheist, but what does it matter? Take for example Reed:

From my perspective, issues like this, all of theology really, is just lipstick on a pig. Religion is so backward and useless that debating the details is only helpful in highlighting the absurdity of it all.

This was also raised in my post about Mormonism where plonkee asked whether it really mattered if Mormon's are Christians or not. From the perspective of an atheist, it matters not. As one person put it, why bother arguing over the color of the Emperor's new clothes when he isn't even wearing clothes in the first place. For me, having very little knowledge about Catholicism, I wanted to have a better understanding of their perspective for my own edification and to come to my own conclusions. My conclusion is that while Catholics are technically monotheists, they do have polytheistic tendencies.

Back in August when markets started mean-reverting to being actually volatile I mentioned that I was going to try to take advantage of the situation in my Roth IRA. For those of you who have been keeping track, that didn't go so well and today I am admitting defeat. My Roth is down almost 5% from that time and I'm throwing in the towel. Thus ends my one attempt to outsmart the market. Thankfully it was a relatively inexpensive attempt and in the future I will keep these types of shenanigans to no more than 5-10% of my overall portfolio. C'est la vie as the French would say.

Since I grew up in a Baptist household, I don't really know that much about Catholics or Catholicism. I did attend Mass once in college (because my first gf was Catholic) but that is the extent of my knowledge of Catholicism. So my question is this, are Catholics polytheist? I know that Catholics are Christian (and for some, the one true faith) and therefore are considered monotheist, but I am confused about the large number of saints that one can pray to for different things. Indeed, I've even heard people say that Mary is a goddess in everything but name to Catholics.

What are other people's thoughts on this matter? Are Catholics monotheists with polytheistic tendencies? Are they in denial of their polytheism? Is it polytheism in disguise, or am I just mistaken? Please educate me.

Recently we had a minor snafu with our cable bill. I had called in to "cancel" our service and was able to get a promotional rate on for our TV package for 1 year. Since it worked so well I called again to try to get a promotional rate for our Internet. It worked again...or so I thought.
All in all I thought I was able to get a full year of cable TV and (faster) Internet for $60/month. Lo and behold our first bill came in the mail and instead of approximately $60 I see $186! Talk about a WTF moment. Anywho after a few calls with the customer service rep (not as helpful, but did credit my account) and the retention specialist (much more helpful and again credited my account!) I found out that you are not allowed to have two promotional packages on at the same time so that explained one part of my bill. They also double billed me for the Internet so that was an error on their part. Now we are back to our original package with our older slower Internet speed :(. I just called to check again to make sure everything was set and it turns out we now have a credit on our account. It's nice to know that complaining works sometimes.

I didn't realize that my feeds were set to short until now. That has been corrected. Sorry, it was just set to the default setting.

The last time I brought up Monte Carlo simulations I stated that my 100 simulations resulted in a 65% probability that the S&P 500 would finish the year up from 1479. For what its worth, the S&P 500 finished at 1468 so obviously it ended up in one of those states where it was less than 1479 :P.

So now for fun, I wanted to see what my simplistic simulation would say for the year ahead. Instead of 100 simulations, I ran 200 simulations. Here are the results.

First, here is the standard unreadable bunches of line chart.

The chart represents the potential trajectory of the S&P 500 for the coming year.

Now here is the distribution of the yearly return of the S&P500.



Looks familiar, that's right, normal distribution baby!

Some descriptive statistics
- average: 9.2%
- median: 8%
- max: 54.8%
- min: -37.5%
- stddev: 16.25%

So I can say with zero confidence (to mutilate the statistical phrase) that the S&P has a 70% probability of finishing the year in positive territory. Not only that, but there is a 68% probability that it will end up somewhere between -7% and 25% with an average of about 8-9%.

How do you use that knowledge to invest? Beats me, this was just a fun exercise, plus by putting sufficiently wide bands around by mean (-7% to 25%) I can claim victory at the end of the year if the S&P500 ends up in that band. Man, this forecasting stuff is easy :P

So JLP had a "funny" definition of welfare up on his site that equates welfare to the government stealing money from others to help other people. He found it funny, I didn't. I just wanted to point out two quick data points on welfare:

The Bad
My wife's sister, we'll call her Sandra, was a doctor in a private practice who routinely saw people from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. When Sandra was first starting off she had a fair amount of student loan debt and was trying to save money to buy her first home. Sandra had a patient who was telling her that he had something on the order of 10 children or so. Sandra's first thoughts were Wow, how does this person afford this? I can hardly pay my student loans and I'm trying to save for a house.. When she asked him how he could afford all those children, the man said something along the lines of, "I have my kids with several different women, and they're all on welfare, so I don't have to pay for them!"

I don't know about you, but that pisses me off. It's everything that's wrong with the system, and validates that damn poster JLP has up right now. How dare these people suck off the teats of all these other people's hard work. Sandra relayed those feelings as well when she told my wife this story. Can't say I blame her.

The Good
The teen parents just had their first child together. Exhausted from the ordeal and coming home for the first time, they needed some necessities. Thankfully, the teen mother had the foresight to get on welfare before giving birth. In addition to that, she also signed up for WIC which provided formula for their new child. These resources proved invaluable to the teen parents and they were able to worry about one less thing as they tried their best to raise their new child together.

I am grateful for my wife and her foresight to get us on these government programs. Undoubtedly, things would have been much more difficult for us without that help. It is a humbling experience, for sure, to be "on welfare". I'm glad that we had the help, but I'm even more glad that we are no longer on any assistance program.

But those are only two vastly different data points. One highlighting the laziness and downright atrocious behaviour it can foster, and the other highlighting how helpful it can be when you didn't have much to your name.

I know welfare isn't perfect and there are certainly things that can be done to improve it, but it's a bit much to call it the government stealing from one person to give to another. What about medicare, social security? Should we get rid of all those programs as well because they are doing the same thing?

Here's part two of the conversation between Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, and Sam Harris.

Apparently, it is also available for sale on DVD and proceeds will benefit The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Have a look!

As is typical of the year-end our net worth surged skywards due to my year-end bonus. Assets were up 4.71% for the month. The kids 529 plan was up 60% due to Christmas gifts, and our 401(k) balance was up 18% for the month as well. On the liabilities side, liabilities were down 4.95% with our credit card balance down 45% as we paid off some balance transfers. The leads us to a net worth of $11,119. This was less than last year's $15,000, but that's due to the fact that our largest asset (our home) was written down substantially in between now and then.

I expect this number to be down significantly due to the fact we'll be taking out some more balance transfers that I've mentioned before in lieu of my wife taking out more student loans.

Now to recap the year in more detail.

Major asset changes Year-over-Year:
- Home Value: After writing down the value of our home, I left it flat since then. One home on our street sold for approximately 5% more than what I have it valued at but in these uncertain times, I'll leave it there for now.

- 401(k): Our 401(k) balance more than doubled this year and our calculated rate of return was 9.8%. Not too shabby considering the considerable market volatility we experienced.

- Roth IRA: We started the year with no Roth and fully funded it before April at $8,000. We end the year with $8,041. Why you ask? Well, my wife's Roth was placed in a money market fund and she has over $4,100 now. I decided to take more risk in mine and my bad did not pay off and I now have $3,900 in my Roth. Not something that I want to keep doing (lose money) but it has been a learning experience. I can be too smart for my own damn good and should have left it in the money market fund. Oh well.

- One of the biggest change on the asset (and correspondingly liabilities) side of the equation was the purchase of two new cars. We lost both of our used cars in one month and we purchased two new cars. We financed both of them and our interest rate was 4.9% and 5.5%. Not too shabby, but it's still debt on a depreciating asset.

Major liability changes:
- Added two new car loans, what more can I say.
- Our credit card debt went from as high as $45,000 (when we were doing 0% bal transfer arb) to a "mere" $15,000. More than half of which is a 3.99% APR for the life of the balance transfer we used to pay off our original car loan. This came in quite handy as we now have the option of making minimum payments on the card to concentrate on the now higher new car loan at 5.5%.

It's been quite a year for us. I hope 2008 will be just as prosperous for our family both financially and personally.

After recapping my goals for 2007 it's time to take a look at where we want to be at the end of 2008.
Before I do that I need to mention that we were able to accomplish one more goal from 2007. We actually were able to double the kids 529 plan balance with Christmas contributions. We had an unexpected gift from my dead-beat dad and with it the kids balance stands at a total of almost $4,000. Thanks dead-beat dad!

Looking ahead to 2008, here's what we hope to accomplish:

• Pass Level III of the CFA in June. The plan is to do what I've done for the last two exams in terms of studying.


• Lose 10 lbs by June 1st. The plan is to make small but meaningful changes to my lifestyle. One change will be to drink mostly water. Another change will be to try and walk on a daily basis (when it's no longer snowing outside of course). If I was really motivated, I could do this in a month, but I'm not so I'm giving myself till June with the small changes I listed above.


• Spend more time with the family throughout the year. The plan is to get to work earlier and leave earlier so that I can get home at a decent time. To try and maintain my current level of output, I will also have to do about an hour's work from home. This will allow me to get home at a time when the kids aren't just getting ready for bed. That way I can actually do something with them such as helping my eldest son practice his piano.


• Implement a form of GTD by the end of January and continue with it throughout the year tweaking as necessary. There is no way I'm implementing the complete system, but I'd like to have a variant of it to help me be more organized.


• Publish a weekly report for my work. Hopefully this gets my name out there to more people and "adds value".


• Increase "face-time" at work. I have some ideas about how to do that.


• As part of my review for the year, my manager told me he wants me to speak up more at work. I plan to start by adding commentary in smaller meetings where I feel more comfortable and then moving on to the larger meetings once I feel sufficiently comfortable. Hopefully in a month or two I'll move on to the larger meetings, but right now I'm going to stick to the smaller meetings.


• Double our 401(k) balance again. This should be an automatic thing given my contribution, but I'm putting it here as well.


• Contribute $5,000 to both of our Roth IRAs.


• At the end of the year, we'd like to have $10,000 in our Emigrant Direct account.


• We'd like the balance of the kids 529 to be about $4,800


• We'd like to continue nurturing our eldest son's social interactions so that he feels more comfortable interacting with other people. So far, he's been doing a tremendous job since starting preschool.


• On the budget side of things, we want to stick to our $100/month eating out budget. Looks like it's time to go back on the envelope method.


• Lastly, for the blog I'd like to generate $20/month in income by the end of the year and I would realistically be able to start on that goal after June '08. I picked $20/month because that's about enough to pay one utility bill.

Whew, that seems like so many things. I'd be happy if we fullfil 60% of them come the end of 2008.

Happy New Year to all.

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens sit down for 2 hours and have a conversation. Hilarity ensues...well, not quite, but check it out for yourself. Note, this is just part 1.