Accounting for a Detoured Economist

In a few months I will want to strangle myself for saying this…but I want to get out of the office and do some field work. In the past two weeks I have done almost 50 hours of CPE. Yuck! With a lack of billable time from clients, in anticipation of June 30 clients getting info to us soon, I have been banished to the world of CPE time filling.

Since I am the new guy I have had the joy of countless hours of Independence, Revised Audit Standards (especially in GASB land), and all the other crap the firm want me to learn so they can cover their ass if anything ever goes wrong (you know the we had him take 10 hours of CPE on this audit standard so he knew what he was doing was wrong). Needless to say a cash reconciliation is looking mighty interesting at the moment. Board minutes?…anyone have board minutes for me to read?…please!

Well I finally have some free time and thought that there is no better use of free time then to write inane posts on a blog read by a small niche of the small niche of accountants that read blogs to begin with. Hi. My wife, daughter, and I had enough of the San Francisco Bay Area and its $800,000 fixer-0upper starter houses and decided that if we ever wanted a house we had better move to an area in the US that we could afford to buy a starter house.

The search was difficult because we had soo many requirements for a place we would consider moving. After living in Ithaca, New York for a while we knew we didn’t want to live anywhere that had snow for more then a few weeks a year, which cut out more then half of the country. The demographics had to be right, we prefer living in tech savvy towns with educated population demographics, low crime and good schools. Furthermore, salary scales had to be very similar to the Bay Area and housing had to be at least half of the price. With those criteria in mind we narrowed our choices to Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas…both places I had considered attending graduate school a few years ago.

Since the wife didn’t want to live in Texas North Carolina became the sole entry on the list. So a couple of months ago we flew out so that I could test the job market and we could get a feel for the city. The trip was a raging success. With three job offers in four interviews the job situation looked promising. We decided that living in a suburb of Raleigh (Cary, NC) would be desirable and found a house in one day…made an offer, and as of the end of June we have become proud North Carolinians.

The last box was unpacked yesterday and I can now commute to work without the help of a GPS device so posting will become a bit more regular. I hope all is well with you. TTYL.