January 2013

Graduate student personal finance (living abroad edition)

I’m a grad student again! First stop is Singapore. And that means a few things: different schedule (more and less flexibility in many ways!), taking classes again, moving expenses, and reassessing my monthly budget. Oh yeah, and making new friends. (I miss my old friends, so don’t worry, I’ll be back again!).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term personal finance, it just means tracking your money and what you are worth, including financial goals and life plans. Continue Reading

Rethinking worldliness

What would you do if a gang of monkeys threw coins at you? How would you escape out of a bus if it fell on its side during a rainstorm? I thought about these on my trip to India. In mid-2012, I was lucky enough to be sent off to India for work purposes, and was able to take vacation days to stay around after the meetings and see more than just the inside of a hotel.

At the airport, the hotel had sent 2 people to pick me up. We arrived in the perfectly luxurious hotel, tucked away from the center of Delhi. Meetings are what they are, but it was interesting to experience the biggest blackout in Indian history that took out most of Northern India but also be minimally affected by it. It is easy to complain. The elevators were not working. The lights flickered. The A/C turned off in the middle of the night. But in the bigger picture of things, many more people suffered much more devastating results. Continue Reading