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

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart

e e cummings

My wife is officially done with Harvard. After many long sleepless nights (for her, not me) she is all done with her Masters. I have never been more proud of her. I really am one lucky SOB. No all we need to do is start paying down those student loans. You know what they say about marriage, what's mine is yours :P. Good think I have my excel financial calculators to see how fast it's going to take to pay of off.

I'm not feeling very motivated at work. Like many in the financial industry, I had a significant bonus cut this year and I haven't felt like putting in any effort as a result. I feel this way because I'm pretty much at the bottom of the totem pole and when things get better I don't really share in the upside as the people who are more senior.

And yea I got a promotion, but it's easy in this environment to give me more responsibilities, a title change with no additonal compensation or even an office or anything else...except for new business cards.

So I've been contemplating/day-dreaming about starting my own hedge fund. The thing is that some securities are so cheap right now that you don't need to be that smart about it. Prices are so low that you can craft asininely draconian scenarios and still come out making money.

However, as I go down this route I just think about how difficult it would be for someone like myself (with not that much experience, no connections, and no rich relatives) to raise the necessary capital to run a fund. Add into that the Madoff scandal, the fact that all kinds of sophisticaed investors are backing away from established hedge funds and I stand a microscopic chance of actually being able to pull it off.

Still, it would be sweet to open a fund with a 3-5 year lock-out period, work my ass off in those intervening years and make a few million.

A guy can dream can't he.

This is the last post from me for a while. I have updated my suite of excel based financial calculators and added a multiple debt payoff tool. This post will walk you through the mechanics of the tool:

1. There are 5 inputs for each debt you have:
- Debt Name: What do you want to call this? (example, MasterCard, Mortgage, Auto Loan)
- Current Balance: How much do you currently owe? (example, $5,000)
- Current Interest Rate: What rate are you being charged (shoould be annual amount)? (example, 9%)
- Currently Monthly Payment: how much are you paying a month? (example, $256.90)
- Use Monthly Payment Towards Other Debt: This is either Y or N. Example of how this work:, you have two credit cards that you are paying $100/month and $200/month. You finish paying off the card that was $200/month, so you now apply $100 plus $200 for a total of $300/month to the other card. This allows you to pay it off faster. I hope that explanation makes sense.

2. After you've entered your debts, you then choose how you want to repay it:
- Highest Interest Rate First: This is the mathematically optimal way of doing it
- Lowest Balance First: This is the Dave Ramsey Snowball method
- Shortest Term: Which one would you pay off the fastest

3. Next, you enter any extra payments you would like to apply towards your debts and how often:
- Amount: how much is the extra payment ($100, $5,000)
- Start Month, Start Year: When do you want to start applying it?
- Frequency: How oftern do you want this debt to be applied? Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annually, Annualy, or is it a One Time payment?

4. From there, you click the Calculate button and it should go through and show you a few things:
- The order in which your debt will be paid off (based on your repayment method chosen).
- Summary Statistics

Those should be relatively self explanatory.

Much thanks to mapgirl for some helpful suggestions on this tool a while back.

As always you can download my suite of excel based financial calculators here.

Thanks and Happy New Year to everyone and maybe this tool will help you with your goal to get rid of debt in 2009.