'bout to open a can of actuarial whoopass
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I just finished a long analysisā¦ trying to write it up before I forget what I didā¦
I feel like the guy from memento
have two presentations next week that I havenāt even started on.
this weekend will be fun. NOT
Iām spending a chunk of my day trying to figure out various bits of the CMS Direct Contracting thing, which includes a Geographical Adjustment Factor, so Iām definitely GAF today.
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Iām spending a lot of today studying multistate models. But unlike you folks I guess, Iām enjoying it 
I didnāt work today. I roasted a chicken, made chicken broth with the leftovers, made a blueberry pie, and worked up a character for a d&d campaign. There are GREAT online tools for d&d these days. I can tell the discord bot I want to attack, and it will query my character sheet, roll the right dice, make the right adjustment, and tell me (and everyone else in the game) what my attack score is.
Oh, i also saw my personal trainer and had a nice long walk.
Hafta GAF: Iām trying to find a stupid, piddly discrepancy!!! Not even 6 digits!!! Hardly worth my time!!! 
wait are we in the same DB? im looking for 60k on a 400M blockā¦
I one time had an auditor of a Profit Sharing plan try to get me to explain a $9.21 ā² in the plan with around $17MM in assets and around $2MM is transactions and earnings for the year.
I eventually went to her supervisor and it got quashed.
It was 0.0005% of the transactions, let alone the total assets.
So what did you end up doing with the extra $9.21 in your paycheck?
$36K, but I found it!!!
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Weather is nice here today, difficult to GAF
I spend more than that on lunch sometimes!!! Silly auditors!!! 
Yo, Bee Gee!!! How many Costco hot dogs is that???
I had a job in high school helping out with accounts receivable. Back before computers are what they are today, a chunk of work was still fairly manual, including some data entry.
The dept kept a dummy account around, if you had a discrepancy of less than a dollar and couldnāt find it, after about 30 minutes theyād give up and adjust that fund to tie out. Simple and effective way to not spend an hour finding a nickel.
But itās genuinely fun trying to find a lost nickel. Itās a number. Itās a mystery. Itās a like a great word problem from an algebra textbook. I mean, that is why I got into insurance. In high school I was on the math team for free. Now I get paid money to do the same kinds of things. Why would you write off a discrepancy, when you can dive in an solve a puzzle? Maybe even find someone to blame and hang it on them. If you donāt like that then maybe being an actuary isnāt right for you.
In newspapers ( I know, many of you may not even remember newspapers) they used to have these stupid word problems that some people would do for fun. The idea was to put words down in predefined boxes, some words going left to right and some going up to down, crossing over some letters, using word clues (often bad puns). I mean, they look a little mathematical with grids of squares and some numbers on them, but they are just bad vocabulary tests - often with word that have no real use except for these tests. But some people, no kidding, some people found these things were recreationally fun! No Fāing way. Let me spend some time with a blank spreadsheet and some accounts to balance or some data to sort out any day of the week.
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This is why I never wanted to do reserving
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Either I donāt know how to look for data entry errors, or you donāt know how to have fun.
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I just think that if you a āmath personā then you will see the existence of a discrepancy as an opportunity to strut your stuff and do some math. If I find a $9 discrepancy, part of me always wonders āIs this a $9 mistake somewhere, or two mistakes for $1,000,000 and $1,000,009 that partially offset each other? Letās dig in and find out.ā
If you are not a āmath personā then you just write it off, because āwho caresā about a mere $9.
I had just assumed that with a name like Mathman that you were in the former group.
I know a person that teaches high school math. She is a teacher at heart. She is not a math person at heart, even if she thinks she is. But she shows no interest in her personal finances. She doesnāt balance her checkbook. She has no idea of her net worth. She has no spreadsheets or records of her spending habits. She has been known to over-spend her checkbook on stuff and then later realize she has to live penniless until her next payday. She has no savings or retirement accounts except for her defined benefit plan that she presumes will support her someday. But she is good at teaching the district math curriculum to the 2/3 of her students that care about learning, and good at dealing with the problems caused by the 1/3 of her students that donāt give a crap. She would totally write off $9, because sheās not a math person.
I wonder if kids thinking that is the sort of thing āmath peopleā enjoy is part of the reason so many of them have no interest in mathā¦
Ok, now youāre just giving me anxiety.
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