With penalties and minimum withdrawal requirements to consider, timing is of the utmost importance when taking money from your IRA. (Getty Images) Individual retirement accounts, commonly known as IRAs, are retirement fund staples for many people.
In statistics, the mean is the mathematical average of a set of numbers. The average is calculated by adding up two or more scores and dividing the total by the number of scores. Consider the following number set: 2, 4, 6, 9, 12. The average is calculated in the following manner: 2 + 4 + 6 + 9 + 12 = 33 / 5 = 6.6.
The z-score is the number of standard deviations you are from the mean of 0 (recall that by subtracting the mean and dividing the result by the standard deviation you convert your data to the standard normal distribution which has a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1).