Almost there

I have less than one week to go and I cannot even begin to express how excited I am about wrapping up the first year. Out of the five classes I took this Mod, Taxes and I-Banking have already been completed. Taxes was completed with a full blown take home exam that kept me busy along with the final I-Banking presentation over the weekend. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before but the financial modeling part of the Investment Banking class is taught by Scott Rostan, an ex Merrill Lynch M&A banker and founder of Training The Street. His company trains most of the Analysts and Associates on Wall Street. Most of the other Business Schools get a piece of him only for the short one or two-day program but we are privileged to have him for 4 hours weekly for 8 full weeks. I enjoyed the class and certainly feel prepared for the summer. We wrapped up the class with a price negotiation simulation. My team was on the sell-side of an M&A deal and we had fun negotiating with the guys on the buy-side.

Earlier, I blogged about an expensive textbook I had to buy for the Taxes class and how quickly I’ll sell it after the class. I ended up liking the book so much that it’s the only textbook I’ve decided to keep from this Mod. It also helped that the professor, a former University of Chicago professor, is one of the co-authors of the book.

On a different note, I recently received a letter from my big bad credit card company notifying me that the interest rate on the card will be jacked up from 8% to 18%! I jumped on the internet immediately to see if someone had screwed with my credit. My credit score was doing just fine so I called the company to know what informed their decision. They had absolutely no reason and I threatened to pay if off (Yeah Right) if they don’t bring down the rate to something reasonable. To cut the story short, I asked if they’ll rather make zero interest income from me if I pay off or keep making a fair income at 8%. The rep’s response suggested they don’t give a hoot whether I stay with them or not.

Due to the bank’s massive size, they have so many uncoordinated moving parts. I had an offer from another unit of the same bank that I had kept for a day just like this. I swung into action, took them up on the offer and paid off the 8% balance with their own money effectively locking them to 3.9% for the life of the balance. Guess who’s laughing now.