FUB Score

FUB Score You

The Urban Dictionary defines “fubbing” in a much nastier way than my definition following. Go look it up if you don’t know. I defined a FUB as something one spends that gathers the ire of someone aware of the expenditure. It’s an ancronym that stands for F**k yoUBudget. It comes from my time living at Carlos Bee Hall with Timothy Johnson and Akira Hashimoto when I owed Akira money and instead of paying him back, spent the money on movies and other stuff that had no lasting value.

Akira, in accented English, said something like, “So, you spend money on movie and don’t say the words but it’s just like you say, “F**k You! You like to talk about budgets you make on the computer. I must be in your F**k You! Budget in that stupid spreadsheet”. A FUB purchase is an expenditure that is stupidly self-indulgent, has no lasting value, makes the fiscal picture worse and bonus, makes a mess of relationships.

Fast forward to today as I type this and the mashup of the Urban Dictionary definition and my rueful definition of a self-destructive and self-indulgent expense is working for me. It’s as if I had stuck (redacted) Akira’s (expletive deleted).

High FUB

I used to say a FUB is a choice made to forgo paying bills because the available cash isn’t sufficient in favor of a self-indulgent blowout of dining and shopping. Afterword, you have no money and the bills are still there needing to be paid. You have made the problem worse in an orgasm of cash fueled pleasure.

My son Tim suggested there should be a metric of how self-indulgent and self-destructive the expenditure was. He was trying to design a sarcastic credit score that measured how much was spent, how irrational/self-indulgent/emotion driven the expenditure was, and how much damage is done to your fiscal and social life. It is an anti-credit score. We never considered fingers penetrating strange orifices.
High FUB scores indicate very self-indulgent, expensive and self-destructive spending. Bernie Madoff has a lifetime achievement award and a FUB score in excess of 1,000 for his ex-traordinary success being profligate with other people’s money. We on the staff of this site bow to him and are not worthy.

Low FUB is Boring

Low scores or scores in the negative indicate self-sacrificing, Holy Spirit driven budgeting that builds fiscal stability. Well behaved, fiscally wise folk will have a FUB score approaching zero if they still work a day job and increase their net worth through savings and wise investment. Church going folk who donate above their tithe to local charities and save/invest wisely can gain FUB scores less than zero. The lowest scores go to folk who have gained and keep enough net worth to be able to quit their day job, donate above their tithe to local charities, and create living wills which will mean they will die with their entire estate going to charity after normal costs and ensuring the fiscal security of their heirs. These folk, while admirable, annoy us for being so responsible.

Our FUB Wish

Low scores don’t make good copy or drive traffic to the site so we tend to ignore people who have them. We have a secret wish that they have an undiscovered addiction or fetish we can blast across Facebook. It’d make our day. We are having a big debate on how to report on Dennis Rodman since learning he got drunk in North Korea. Some on the staff want to give him our second ever four digit score for getting plastered on communist won. So far, it’s not getting traction because we haven’t heard that he spent money irrationally, or that it was expensive to him, or that it hurt him financially.

But, there it is. A FUB is a sarcastic score of your spending. It is intended to shame you into spending your money better. Save that, to have a good laugh at your spending habits since you won’t pay us back. The Urban Dictionary definition? Eew.