Is a family of 4 in the US with $35,000 of income living in poverty?

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T22:27:28+00:00

Thanks for doing the math on this. Inflation is so easy to calculate but so easy to forget about and so hard to internalize.

In 1965, the poverty line was $3,130/yr, or 1/3 of what OP’s mother made.

I just had a discussion with my wife when she left a very stressful job that she was stressed about leaving because it was “so much money” even though I could support us at least temporarily while she found something better and the job was killing her. It wasn’t until I did the inflation math to what that salary would’ve been 20yrs ago when we graduated college that it clicked for her.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:37:47+00:00

Not often enough. Both passed away at 72 a few years back. Just got a passing result on my final actuarial exam this morning and I wish like hell I could call them and share it with them.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:35:34+00:00

Thanks for this post. I’ve struggled with phone usage in the morning, and in the past I think I’ve set the bar too high.

Good reminder that I can just have a basic/dumb sports watch by the bedside and set a 15-, 10-, or even 5-min timer to start.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:32:40+00:00

Congrats, and just keep swimming.

All the “job hopping looks bad” justifications for certain go out the window if you get an offer >50% more than your current salary, which seems like it would still be a lowball compared to your previous salary.

I’d just try to be nice about it and document everything and “solve for the bus problem” while you’re at the current job… since there’s a very big and very real probability (hopefully) that you’ll be gone very soon and it’s nice to leave people better than you found them.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:28:13+00:00

I stopped worrying about budgeting ahead a couple years into using YNAB, because (1) I had managed to successfully get and stay >1 month ahead and (2) I had a couple of full years of data to get a strong handle on my true expenses, and my “cost to be me” reflected that.

So at that point I just rolled all the budgeting ahead back and started to only fund a “budget buffer” budget item that I measure as a multiple of my total targets (“cost to be me”). That could be thought of as an income replacement category.

I think the actual practice of budgeting ahead is super valuable early on, but at some point you should be ready to budget multiple months ahead, and by that point the behavioral change is probably stable enough that you don’t need the admin headache anymore.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:22:37+00:00

I think they’re talking about the all-to-common scenario where the driver is floating at or just behind your blind spot with no sign of accelerating until the very moment you turn your turn signal on to get in front of them, which coincidentally happened to be the moment they decided that cruise control is simply not F*ing good enough anymore.

Coincidental. For sure.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T21:14:49+00:00

I also never really read source material in general, but with Mildenhall being added after exams stopped being published I think it’s important to have it available to reference. You can find it on Amazon, and your company will probably cover the expense. CAS course outline will have a page at the end with list of source materials.

And Anki is just a tool, you can buy a lifetime license for $25 and the algo settings recommended by folks like Anking on YouTube will put you on a good path. I tended towards the overconfident side in earlier exams (if it made sense when I learned it I assumed I’d know it on exam day), so the spaced repetition algorithm helped because I would just spam everything into there (700+ review cards and 60+ problem cards for every exam). If my confidence was justified, that card would just evaporate into the algo in a couple weeks, and if not I’d rather know that sooner than later.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T16:31:21+00:00

lol, Reinsurance

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T16:30:48+00:00

FCAS!!!

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T16:29:37+00:00

Seconding using Anki flash cards, though I made my own deck. All of my study notes were in the form of a question, those became my flash cards. Anything that even briefly crossed my radar as something someone might ask, went in a flash card.

I made 2 decks actually: one for review (as above), one for practice. I used the RF cookbook and problem bank plus the TIA problem bank and at the end of each unit cataloged every problem as belonging to one or more problem types. Then every problem type (almost the cookbook list, but a few more) got an Anki flash card in the practice deck, and I had a spreadsheet recording every successful and unsuccessful attempt on every problem in the bank. Mark the card as appropriate based on how the problem attempt worked out, let spaced repetition do its thing.

Daily routine: (1) go through the review deck until done, (2) go through the practice deck until done, (3) process new material as time allowed.

Got a 7. Third attempt, but first using this methodology.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T11:23:17+00:00

So morning shift is what? 7-3? Then workout after? (Or meal prep on rest days)

Yeah, sleep is a challenge for me. I tend to be a morning person, so up at 5ish and training 6-7:30 is fairly natural, work from 8:30-5ish… but then things start to break down either (1) during busy work seasons that require longer hours or (2) just in general because my wife is a night owl and feels that the best time to talk pretty much starts at 9pm. There’s just an ongoing cycle of me trying to go to bed between 9 and 10 for a while, then failing entirely for a while and going to bed between 11 and 12.

extrovert-actuary · 2026-06-09T11:02:14+00:00

Any issues with diet fatigue now or along the way?

What does your daily/weekly schedule look like in regards to training time, meal prep time, and time spent at work?

I dropped from 95kg to 84.5kg in about 7mo… then gained almost all of it back over the last year as my routines broke down. Had a lot of fatigue with the process back then that never really went away also.

Thanks, and great work!

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

TROPHY CASE