SC Beach House

Surfside Beach is just south of Myrtle Beach on the South Carolina coastline. It's much cheesier than I ever anticipated with miles of "all you can eat" seafood joints, "cheap beachwear" signs, a random waterpark, a couple mini golf places and lots of billboards. Our four bedroom, four bath house was across the street from the beach. It slept 14, we had 21, which meant accommodations for the weekend were inexpensive. We loaded up plastic tubs with ice and all the "decent" cheap beer you could drink. Shots flowed as we had TWO ex-bartenders competing in a shot-off. Afternoons were often spent at the beach, sometimes with a football or what some like to call a frisbee in hand (the hole in the middle makes me beg to differ). All around, the six hour drive to the coast from Atlanta was worth the weekend. The extra traffic for my drive home was unwanted, but the great thing about long car rides by myself is that I can to catch up with friends. I spoke with a former classmate from Colorado for 2 hours about business school, the internship, his job, his hopes of b-school and other aspects of life. I promised I'd visit NY sometime as well (though at the rate my weekends fill, who knows when that will be).

I'm back in the grind for the week, until Friday when I head to Vegas for a triple birthday celebration, one of which is MINE! :D I've spent hours playing with spreadsheets this week and while I'm not analyzing the end numbers, I have been combing through the inputs and corresponding equations. Analytical in a different way. What I found on Monday was no less than shocking. The NPV calculation in excel was being used wrong. Let me preface by saying I learned TVM (time value of money) calculations on an HP 12C. When I first switched to excel, I was warned of some idiosyncrasies. Needless to say, I often still check my answers on my financial calculator simply because I am more comfortable with how to get the correct answers. Excel, when using its “=NPV” function, you do not include the initial outlay, essentially Year 0. You add Year 0, which more often than not is a negative number, to the NPV of Year 1 through X. This spreadsheet, used Year 0 through 5 within the NPV function, ooops. While the correction increased the NPV of my example by a couple million dollars, I suppose it's possible the correct NPV for a different project would have an unfavorable result.

The summer is racing by.