Accountant by Day

If you are going through a financial audit, and the auditor asks for a “detail” of an account, the detail you provide should equal what your trial balance says the account balance is! Before we can audit the underlying financial information of an account, that information needs to sum to the total balance!

I recently learned that 50 Shades of Gray began as/is fanfiction based on the Twilight series. I haven’t read the Twilight series or 50 Shades of Gray, but when I heard about this, I distinctly remember thinking to myself “You know, fan fiction is just not my thing. I guess there are other people who like it, but it’s not for me.” And then, the universe paid me back for this disdain - almost immediately I stumbled across Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

“In A World … “ Movie written and directed by Lake Bell (also the lead actress) about voice over actors. Also has an adorable love story. I know, this came out in 2013, but I hadn’t heard of it before my boyfriend suggested it, so if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a good one. “Champion Rose” Fantasy novel by Andrea K Host. Strong story line about a King and his Champion, who are more controlled by their country’s enchanted magical defenses than they would like to be.

University is back in session, and so is recruiting for public accounting! As you’re meeting the firms for the first time, here are a couple of pointers: RESEARCH THE FIRMS (okay, just one pointer for this post.) I know, people tell you to do it, your college hands you a guide to the accounting firms that recruit in your area, and there are 200 firms to look through, and you don’t even know where to start looking.

If I want my dog to have a few hundred acres like this to run in one day, I'm going to have to start saving! It’s funny how things in life work out. If I didn’t have a dog, I would probably be living in a studio apartment in a nice part of town paying $900/month in rent right now. Instead, when I moved into the city, I needed a place with a yard and roommates that would be willing to let my dog out for me when I’m working late.

So, I have had my Republic Wireless plan for a little over a year now, and I’m currently in the process of canceling the service. I signed up for the plan because I was on a voice-only plan with Verizon Wireless (about $30/month on the family plan) and I wanted a phone I could get my e-mail on when traveling for work. Instead of upgrading my Verizon plan to a data plan, I decided to try Republic Wireless, which offered (at the time) plans as low as $25/month for unlimited voice and data.

I’ve always considered myself a fairly responsible person - not driving drunk, getting my work done on time, making sure that any animals I have are well cared for. But I’m only good at being responsible for myself - I am terrible at being responsible for other people. I’ve had a huge fight in the past with fellow college students who got upset with me for not driving them home when they were drunk (they had to walk the mile back to their dorm.

Many personal finance bloggers are hoping to retire young, or at least, to make some extra money through wise financial decisions. So, what would your plans be if you retired at 40 instead of at 67? I imagine that I would still like to have some kind of productive work to do, whether it was running a small business, or being a mother. (Kids are far in my future, so I don’t know how I feel about the idea of being a stay-at-home mom 24 hours a day.

Tomorrow is review day. But also, tonight is stay-up-way-too-late-to-finish-work-due-in-the-morning night. I’m not sure I foresee my review going so well with me going into it after the day I had today. The fun part about working in a profession where you track all of your chargeable hours, is that you have days where you know you were super busy all day, too busy to even eat lunch, but you realize you really didn’t get anything accomplished because you only have about 2 chargeable hours to show for it.

“Creativity” is not usually a quality that public accounting firms are interested in when evaluating potential employees. In fact, a quick Google search of “creativity in accounting” mostly leads to results about “Creative Accounting” also known as fraud. However, one of my managers is often trying to squeeze creativity out of our staff, a process which is most likely simply frustrating for both parties. This desired creativity is still not in the realm of our actual work though, but in the area of recruiting, which is really just a form of marketing.