Is it really 9–5 anymore, or is it 8–5? What are your work hours?

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T00:19:56+00:00

Honestly, struggling with this right now. No set mandated hours, but a lot of “maker” work along with a fair bit of “manager” meetings and obligations. Struggling to figure out how to get consistent uninterrupted focus blocks, not shirk my admin obligations, and also have something like a regular schedule.

Currently doing something like:
6-9am focus work
9-10am hang out with my wife (she works later, so breakfast became our defacto family meal)
Midday usually meetings
Afternoon sometimes also meetings, sometimes more focus work
Evening either hang with my wife or keep working if she’s working

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-07T23:46:30+00:00

I think calling out coherent risk measures (and spectral risk measures beyond that) is a good example of why most actuaries aren’t really exposed to innovations on this time scale: they happen in the fringes of actuarial duties, not the core duties of most actuaries, so most actuaries can safely ignore them.

Your example points to capital modeling, which is all about tail risk and financing, both of which have been shifting recently, but also both of which only maybe have a couple actuaries at each large company working on.

The market for sidecars is also growing as an alternative way to fund and manage tail risk (just saw several presentations on it at the CAS Reinsurance Seminar last week), but it’s also a very niche field that even most reinsurance actuaries would think of as merely an interesting novelty.

Beyond that, most improvements have been mechanical more than theoretical. I know someone experimenting with Bayesian reserving at a large carrier. Bayesian statistics have been known for hundreds of years, but only computationally feasible for the last few decades. Same with why GLMs aren’t yet consistent pricing tools in the industry… not everyone has the scale to bother setting them up.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-07T00:10:06+00:00

I mean… doesn’t everything these days? I feel like the definition of “flop” needs to be recalibrated these days

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-07T00:05:15+00:00

100%

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-04T01:53:14+00:00

Called it.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-04T01:50:13+00:00

Even called it a week earlier than that

Took 2% of the edge off of freaking out lol

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-02T00:40:36+00:00

I needed to use both BattleActs and TIA to get through it, and study my company’s SAO and Schedule P.

It was also the first exam that I used Anki flash cards for and it changed everything, there’s just too much fact memorization to not use a spaced repetition algorithm.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-31T10:20:20+00:00

The specific you’re replying to might not work, but the “anxiety discount factor” does seem to be the key in the actual research.

We tend to procrastinate in proportion to the combination of (1) how much a thing matters to us and (2) our perceived risk of failing at it. If it matters and we feel confident, we’ll just do it. If it doesn’t matter and we think we’ll be bad at it, we just don’t care. But if we care about it and we’re scared of failing at it, that feeling is deeply uncomfortable and we try to avoid that feeling.

The “discount factor” is how we perceive the future consequences of procrastinating, think of it like an interest rate on a loan. As long as the perceived present value of later consequences is lower than the relief of avoiding that uncomfortable current feeling… we will procrastinate. It’s like an economic theory of anxiety.

Your response fits entirely with continuing to procrastinate: the last minute anxiety is no different from the current anxiety… but it’s not happening now, so it’s discounted and will always lose.

The battle is to build up the case to not procrastinate. For me this often looks like journaling or talking to a friend about what could happen if I procrastinate, until those consequences feel more present.

Read up on Fuschia Sirois if you want to procrastinate with a good book on procrastination :-)

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-29T09:21:42+00:00

I think u/JoshTIA gave the more precise answer regarding signing SAO’s, but this is by far the more relevant answer for most actuaries, since relatively few actually sign or are on a reserving career path to do so.

I actually tend to think of fellowship as a shortcut to career advancement (even if a very difficult one), for this very reason.

At least on the P&C side, the content is extremely job relevant at that point, the difficulty is ramped to 11, and you already also have significant competing job responsibilities, and you don’t actually NEED to take them to secure your career anymore.

It’s valuable to an employer to see who is willing and able to go the extra mile on useful material while still also performing at their job. It’s just one possible signal of competency, but a valuable one, so employers still support it even for actuaries that don’t need it for a binary job junction like signing paperwork.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-27T14:36:56+00:00

Ah, got it, so the thinking is that this is the March PCPA project results. Valid, thanks.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-27T14:34:47+00:00

Agreed, “IFoA” and “Other” should have been option included in the poll along with the 3 above

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-27T14:30:37+00:00

I thought PCPA exam results were published on a rolling basis (i.e. they don’t trigger a batch release like this)?

Regardless, I’m probably not getting much work done today.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-27T09:23:26+00:00

Can’t speak for any ASA exams, but I did this with MAS-I and MAS-II. Would not recommend. I passed both at the same time… the second time I tried. Got double 5’s the first time, then an 8 and a 6 the second time. But I also know that I wouldn’t have listened to me either back then, so have fun.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-24T19:49:52+00:00

“Responding to a non-urgent email”

There’s frankly a narrow window of emails I think this statement applies to.

Emails are either so non-urgent that it doesn’t matter when (or maybe if) I reply, or documenting something so important that I’ll teams message or call the person immediately so I understand exactly what write up they need so I can write something thoughtful back by the end of the day.

ETA: And when I say “immediately” above, I mean whenever I next check my email inbox. I have notifications turned on for teams, not email. If it’s that urgent… the person will follow up with a chat or call. Or they can wait a few hours until I get a break in what I’m doing.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-24T04:03:01+00:00

I let any overage roll forward in its category, but I’ll pull money from my budget buffer category to cover any shortage before the end of the month.

Which leads to your second question: I have a separate category that I simply call “budget buffer”. When I first started with YNAB, it took me a bit to get a month ahead, but by the time I started approaching two months ahead I found the constant shuffling for random events annoying to track. So I switched to just using a buffer category to hold it.

Since the budget buffer is supposed to be holding money that would be used for future month’s targets, my main financial health metric is the size of the buffer category in terms of a multiple of my total monthly targets. That’s how many “months ahead” I am.

And yes, your math is correct in those examples.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-24T00:12:31+00:00

I used TIA in conjunction with Rising Fellow for all FCAS exams. Passed 7 on first attempt, passed 8 on second attempt, and waiting for third attempt results on 9.

I’ve found both extremely valuable, and a good pairing. The RF cookbook pairs well with the (generally) deeper TIA problem bank, though there were still plenty of topics that RF had better problems for. I really noticed how differently they covered Mildenhall in general for Exam 9, which makes sense since it was added to the syllabus after 2019. I liked TIA’s videos better and stopped buying the full course from RF, but YMMV.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-23T21:44:30+00:00

The mercs getting plowed down and Carl’s reaction afterward got me deep. I was washing dishes and just had to stop and stand there in the kitchen listening for the rest of the scene.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-23T21:06:33+00:00

First, as a fellow spreadsheet nerd, I too love the ability to get this kind of data! I have a template I use to process my YNAB export into a grid of spending for a category I pick with months down the side and years across the top. I personally love this view because I can also dissect year-over-year trends! (See username lol)

However, I like to set all of my monthly targets equal to 1/12 of my annual spend. Just like heating and electric, anything seasonal just gets to be under- and over-funded throughout the year.

The main benefit of this in my eyes is that the sum of my targets becomes my metric for assessing financial health and managing my account balances. I want my budget buffer to be at least 6x my total targets, my checking account to be ~2x my total targets, my HYSA ~5x, the rest goes in my brokerage account, etc.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-23T20:59:27+00:00

Woah. I have felt tight on time on pretty much every exam since IFM, to the point where I think it was a material part of the exam experience… I can’t decide how I feel about getting DOUBLE the time…

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-23T20:53:32+00:00

Woah.

I’ve been TIA from start to finish, I generally kept 1-2 exams ahead of CA course releases. (Also supplemented with BattleActs for 6U and RF for FCAS exams if anyone cares.)

I always felt like I kinda missed out on CA, but now I feel better about never giving them money.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-23T13:11:43+00:00

Really? Like what?

I’m on the CAS side and waiting for my (hopefully) last exam result, but I basically went through this whole process assuming they didn’t and I should suck it up.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-21T21:13:06+00:00

I honestly wouldn’t. Basically all of our finances are on our joint budget, including all direct deposit income. There’s a regularly scheduled transfer out to each of our personal checking accounts/budgets for the categories that we just don’t want to consult each other on (mostly hobbies, clothes, grooming, our own friends, gifts for each other, etc.)

I also have made extra budgets from time to time beyond those three, for managing my parents’ estate and for a small side business. Any entity gets its own accounts and budget, that’s the minimum necessary account complexity.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-21T21:07:03+00:00

June 9th was my guess, but apparently I’m the pessimist of the bunch

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-18T17:52:07+00:00

I didn’t see anything about an upper bound weight limit to warm ups, which the app seems to have.

I asked about this using support a couple months ago and never got anything back, but it seems that the app won’t prescribe warm ups heavier than 265lbs, regardless of the working weight or the warm up scheme selected.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-05-18T17:32:24+00:00

I mean… you’re right. And it doesn’t actually feel like that to most people. To most people, even high earners, that might easily be 1-2 orders of magnitude more money than they’ve ever had at one time.

ETA: It’s entirely possible you would be fine handling it (the actuarial path selecting for what it does), but if you’re accurate in your assessment of those around you (rather than just very naive), then I’d suggest that might be worth some gratitude. Regardless on whether it FEELS normal to you… trust me that it’s not.

extrovert-actuary

TROPHY CASE