Modelling Life

As I was browsing through ITunes, I came across the Actuary Song, taken from the musical “I Love You Because”. Well, I had no idea there was an actuary song, as you can imagine. It turned out there were actuary two others songs on ITunes about actuaries. But I will focus for the moment on the Actuary Song. The Actuary Song is about a girl Marcie who broke up with her boyfriend and her friend Diana gives her some advice about finding Mr Right. I have lived happily as an actuary now for a number of years and I had never heard actuarial principles were used on the dating scene. If only I had known this, maybe I could have applied some of my mathematical skills to assess the likelihood of certain relationships. So here is what I learnt from the Actuary Song... The Rebound Time (RT), that is the time (in years) you need before you start another long-term relationship, depends on the Relationship Length (RL) of the previous relationship. The first year is worth 6 months of RT, the next is ...

I was reading this most random story about president Barack Obama receiving an insurance policy in the event of a crocodile attack as he travels to Darwin in the Northern Territories of Australia. President Barack Obama's family will receive a $50,000 benefit if the most powerful man on planet Earth gets eaten by crocodile. How comforting is this! The man is probably insured for millions in the event of death. But they will get an extra 50K for a crocodile attack. The article added that "the policy was designed to give Mr Obama's family peace of mind." An official said: "For Michelle and the kids they can be comforted if a terrible event did occur then $50,000 would be payed out by TIO to help support them." Here is my question: how do $50,000 give you peace of mind when you lose a husband? I don't know about you, but I would have peace of mind up until the moment some random insurance company tells me I could be eaten by a crocodile. Then I would th...

Yesterday I spent the day helping my friend to set up a booth for a MasterChef expo down in Sydney. Her brother is a famous Chef at a local organic restaurant. As I was contemplating all the work that is involved with being a Chef – cooking, managing staff, judging competitions... I said casually “That must be quite stressful for your brother to do all that”. To which my friend replied: “It is stressful; I heard Chef and bricklayer are the 2 most stressful jobs.” Chef, I can totally see that it is a stressful job, especially if you’re not just cooking but also building a reputation, running a business as in the case of my friend’s brother, and trying to advance the culinary science with innovative recipes. But bricklayer?... Who would think being a bricklayer is a stressful job? Hard-working job, certainly. Physical job, absolutely. Stressful job? I’m not quite convinced. I still have the image that bricklayers are well-built guys with a nice tan, and they whistle at pretty girls w...

There are 2 kinds of responses people have when they ask what I do as a living and I tell them I am an actuary…One response is “A what ?” The other response is “Wow, you must be smart.” Both responses are quite challenging. In both cases, I don’t know what to answer. To the first response, I answer something like “I make insurance products work.” I don’t know if that helps, but that’s the shortest I can come up with. To the second response, it’s even harder to find an answer. Am I smart? The reality is that you rarely feel smart when you’re sitting an actuarial exam. I would feel really good after a Maths exam in high school, but unfortunately I never had the same kind of inner confidence when I sat actuarial exams. I ‘felt’ smarter when I was in high school than when I was doing my exams to be an actuary. Am I smart? I am smart enough to know that being smart is not all there is in order to move forward in life. Sometimes you don’t need to be smart, you need to be assertive, or you ...

CBC News - Canada - Was David Li the guy who 'blew up Wall Street?'

Have you ever thought about the first person who ever call themselves an ‘actuary’? I imagine this person waking up one morning and thinking “Oh, I want to become the first actuary!” This person must have been very smart just to come up with this idea. The next day, someone asked them “What do you do in life?” And they replied “I’m an actuary, I tell people what’s the chance they’re going to die this year.” Well, that’s what Edward Rowe Mores did in 1762, when he decided, as the leader of what would become Equitable Life, that he should be called ‘actuary’. This is the first recorded time that the word referred to a role in business. I’ve looked up Edward Rowe More and what was the most fascinating thing to me is that he wrote a lot of papers in Latin. I suppose Latin was the Lingua Franca in the scientific community of that time. But still, it amazes me. I did 2 years of Latin, and my mastery of Latin doesn’t allow me to read more than the line “Cogito ergo sum”. What is also fascin...

Does someone listen to me? Does someone care? I may not surprise you if I say that over the years, I haven’t found a lot of people who actually care about what I do as an actuary. People still say things like “You work in IT, right?” after years of telling them I work as an actuary. Would you find it frustrating if people kept believing you’re doing something but you’re not? Would you find it frustrating if people said you were an accountant after telling them a million times you are an actuary? Life as an actuary can be frustrating. You develop great insurance products, and nobody comes to say thank you for the great annuity they’re going to get in 20 years' time. Life as an actuary can be unrewarding. Let’s be realistic, is there someone out there who cares about my actuarial contribution to the world? Last week, I went to visit my sister, and I had this immense opportunity to have an actuarial conversation with my nephew. He’s 15 years old and he’s contemplating a career as ...