Leave it to me to be the writer of a Christian Finance Blog and post something with a faulty mathematical calculation in it. I'm sure that many of you who have read my post from yesterday figured out the real amount that you would end up if you won the one million dollars on Deal or No Deal after all the capital gains taxes would be six hundred fifty thousand dollars and not sixty-five thousand dollars. That was a case of me misplacing a zero somewhere in my head. A good friend of mine pointed out the mistake, and I could only laugh and nod my head 'yes' at my mathematical goof. It's kind of funny how easy it is to make foolish mathematical mistakes like that that you don't even realize are faulty until you or someone else reads what you wrote later on. I suppose that we're all pretty lucky that most of the math that any of us have to do on a regular basis is really very easy. For those you who keep check book registers, I would imagine that some of the most difficult things that you have to do is keep track of outgoing money by doing a little bit of subtraction with borrowing. That's third grade-ish math, so that can't be too bad. Adding things always seemed a little bit easier to me in the check book...both mathematically and mentally. We all love seeing those numbers increase, right? I suppose that mathematics in our lives can get pretty crazy, especially around tax time if we choose to take care of our tax returns for ourselves. I personally like to have someone prepare my return for me...that way I know it's right. I surely don't need any friendly IRS agents breathing down my neck over some careless mistake. But anyways, I'm not quite sure what kind of crazy math you have to do when preparing your own tax return, but I imagine that it's not all that much fun. I mean, maybe it involves a little bit of multiplication or division, but it's not like the United States government expects taxpayers to be solving differential equations to figure out what they owe.

Gosh, I was just thinking about when I was a kid, and my mom was trying to teach me how to figure out discounts in the department store. I was always amazed at how quickly she was able to figure out the calculation in her head about how much her shoes were going to be when they were twenty-five percent off of the original price. I'm pretty sure that I still figure out percentages the exact same way as she taught me probably twenty years ago in JCPenneys. I'm sure that there are other ways to figure out percentages differently than how my mom taught me...especially since my roommate has some odd way of calculating them. He does some crazy trick about figuring out the discount by increments of ten percent and then adding up the rest. It always seems way too complicated for me, so I've never really bothered to learn any way other than the one that I've always used. After all, I've never been a big fan of doing math in my head anyways. I know some of you out there are probably very good at adding and subtracting numbers in your head, but I always been a fan of writing things down on paper. That way you can check your work to make sure it's right. That's also why I still use my old graphic calculator from high school for the simplest math calculations, because you can see what you've typed in on the screen and then catch any mistakes that you've made.

Anyways, I guess that I've gotten off on a bit of a tangent in my apology for my faulty Deal or No Deal calculation in yesterday's post, but I suppose that the subject that I've been talking about is something that all of you can probably relate to. After all, we've all got to deal with little calculations on a daily basis no matter what we're doing. We've got to figure out our monthly budgets, add and subtract from our checkings and savings accounts, and figure out discounts on our grocery bills. We've even got to figure out what percentage of our credit card balance that we can afford to pay off from month to month. These little ventures into math seem to come at us from all angles and directions.