What Are Good Rounding Errors In Personal Finance? A Key To Living The Semi-Retired Life

A major goal of personal finance, particularly for those of us who will Never Retire, should be to have lots of good rounding errors.

Sometimes in life rounding errors can be a bad thing.

Like if a crappy political party gets 48.7% of the vote and we round it up to 49.0% only to discover that 0.3% was the difference between them running the government or not. Or if a good political party gets 49.3% of the vote and we round it down to 49.0% only to discover that 0.3% was the difference between them running the government or not.

Rounding errors can be a bad thing in stock trading or war. Because the lack of precision can cause costly, even deadly errors. Drilling down into basic math, if we make a rounding error and continue calculating with subsequent rounding errors we can end up way, way off.

In our Living The Semi-Retired Life personal finance vernacular we use the term rounding error a bit differently. We consider rounding errors, particularly relatively large ones, a good thing. In fact, we strive for them.

Let’s consider practical examples you can start using today.