Essentials of Calculus for Finance Professionals
By Matthew Carter I January 21, 2025
"Matt and staff always have time for my questions. They streamlined my business accounting in a couple of months. Their rates are very fair. They're hassle-free bookkeepers."
Jim Bonino





Sign up/contact us
my expertise
sign up/contact us
What you can expect/what you get/advisory cfo stuff as checklist
Sign up/contact us
A small church had just reached a legal settlement to leave their denomination with their church building by agreeing to pay them $100,000 every year for the next 10 years. If they ever missed a payment, the building would revert back to the big denomination.
The church had fundraised the entire $1 million prior to the settlement. Its board wanted to payoff their exit fee immediately to avoid the risk of future nonpayment. They were worried, frustrated and felt out of their depth.
So I advised them to purchase a 10-year annuity that pays $100,000 every year. The cost of that annuity was only $930,000, and the nonpayment risk was now covered.
By saving $70,000, my advice was theoretically worth that much to them. But a few years later that same small church had a significant cashflow problem and that $100,000 annual payment would not have been paid. Thanks to my annuity advice solving their risk problem, their building was saved. The real life value of expert finance advice can be the organization's continuing viability. My personal takeaways are that stochastic processes are real alongside a reaffirmation of my father's advice that a failure to prepare is a preparation for failure.
The US Coast Guard Auxiliary is an all volunteer uniformed part of the US Coast Guard formed by Congress during WWII. There are more than 30,000 Auxiliarists spread across all 50 states.
The only Coast Guard tasks that an Auxiliarist is prohibited by law from performing are law enforcement and combat ones. So these Coast Guard volunteers perform an incredibly wide array of jobs from flying their personal planes to vessel inspections to research and development.
For years Coast Guard leadership wanted a valuation of their Auxiliary's diverse contributions of manpower and equipment, but they hadn't been able to perform this valuation in a way that passed DHS or Congressional scrutiny. I took over this project and created a valuation methodology that passed all Washington DC scrutiny so well I literally received a big medal for it.
The Auxiliary valuations I performed made their way into the Commandant's speeches and the first significant budgetary increases for the Coast Guard from Congress in years. The methodology I created is classified and still in use by the Coast Guard to this day.
From my award pinning ceremony: "You applied remarkable expertise in quantitative research to formulate a new statistical methodology for analyzing Auxiliary activity data. Exercising exceptional insight, you ... helped keep the highest levels of Coast Guard leadership clearly appraised of the extraordinary value of the Auxiliary's uniformed volunteers."
By Matthew Carter I January 21, 2025
By Matthew Carter I November 4, 2024
By Matthew Carter I November 4, 2024
By Matthew Carter I March 2, 2014
„
"Matt, you rock! Just anticipating questions from NACO and NEXCOM and you supplied exactly what I need."
COMO Fred Gates
Worcester, MA
By Matthew Carter I February 10, 2026
Page [tcb_pagination_current_page] of [tcb_pagination_total_pages]