Just the Two of Us

Amsterdam, May 2004
River Seine, Paris, May 2004
Trevi Fountain, Rome, May 2004

When people get married, it is expected that having children would come next. Not in our case. It's been ten years, but we have not been blessed with children. I admit, we would love it if we were blessed with children (see our posts on IVF) , but life has been good to us and we couldn't really ask for more.

Having gone through a lot in our quest to have children (numerous medical consultations, surgery, IVF) and not being successful have put our marriage to a test. And the experience had actually strengthened what we have. We now know that happiness in a marriage cannot be equated with having children.

What Hubby and I have done to cope with not having children is to always look around us and appreciate what we already have, and we actually enjoy a lot of good things even if we don't have kids.

Some of the things that we enjoy the most with not having children is that we can plan for travel anytime we want. We don't have to worry about whether we should bring the children and scheduling our vacations only when the children are on vacation. Not having to think of saving up for tuition fees (which I know could cost as much as P100,000 per year in grade school and up to P200,000 for college) is also a positive thing. In addition, there is no need to worry about yayas -- I've had a lot of officemates who would have to absent themselves from work when their yayas quit. And, as I understand there is also a lot of pressure now for parents to teach their kids and help them in their school work. Some required projects would be impossible for kids to do without major help from parents ,which I think is so unfair to parents by the way and I just think it would just make kids more dependent on help. Teachers should only assign projects that can be done by kids themselves! I'm not sure if I would take that sitting down, I can picture myself fighting with the teachers :-)

In other words, we continue to experience some form of personal and financial freedom. We can be a bit carefree with our finances (spending on things we both enjoy) without really worrying about the future. We can travel, buy luxury items which we both enjoy and dine in expensive restaurants. We can do whatever we want without the guilt.

Not having children allows us to pursue our dreams even late in life. I started teaching only three years ago, and it is something I see myself doing for the long haul. It also allows us to try new things , and sometimes take risks like start a business.

We are also able to spend more time with our parents, our families, our nephews and nieces. We realize that there is more of our time, money and other resources that we can share with our loved ones.

We can also afford to help other people, in their education, their kids' education, medical bills and other things.

And I think the most important thing is that my Husband and I have grown closer together. We have turned to each other during the most difficult times, but we have also spent our happiest moments together. We are happy, even if it's just the two of us.

One of Those Days When I Love Teaching

I was invited to be a resource speaker at a seminar series for Financial Analysts. I was a bit apprehensive about accepting this engagement because I knew I would be speaking before finance professionals. But I guess because I had the right background, being in the industry that was going to be analyzed and being a finance professional, the seminar organizers said that I was the "ideal" resource speaker. I prepared very well for this by going over my presentation materials (which I finished only yesterday afternoon) several times and anticipating questions that they may ask.


I was actually surprised at the level of interest I got from my presentation and the points that I have raised. I'm glad that I was able to get a lot of questions and reactions, and this resulted to a very lively discussion. I guess it meant that they were really interested in the issues presented. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to bring up relevant issues, share some of my financial expertise, as well as learn from the different points of view that were shared in our discussions.

The above session was held in the morning in Diliman, Quezon City. Today was also the last day of the six session seminar series on Financial Management for Marketing Practitioners, so I had to rush to Manila after. This day really brought fulfillment for me because I now know that the participants learned a lot from our sessions. They were required to present actual business cases where they could apply the financial skills they learned as a final project. The analyses they came up were in-depth and comprehensive. The recommendations were sound and were based on good analyses of the business cases. The participants considered their projects major accomplishments. When we started out 6 weeks ago, they did not feel very confident that they will be able to have good financial skills. After this project, they now feel confident that they now know enough to be able to be good managers by looking at the financial implications of their decisions. I feel proud and happy that I was able to share my skills and knowledge, but happier that I've learned from them as well.

Thank You for 20 Years of Friendship!

This is my college barkada.

July 2006, We were almost complete after many years! (DW and RW were here at the same time, DL was the only one missing...)
December 2002 (DL home for Christmas)
December 1998, TC and SC's Wedding Reception (We were complete! Unfortunately, SC was not able to join us in this photo...)

New York Mini-Reunion, November 2006
December 2005

I consider myself to be very fortunate that I have this group of friends. We have been together for more than 20 years. Over the many years of friendship, we have experienced growing up, finding (and losing) loves, and having our own families. Through the years, we have stuck together and helped each other through good times and bad. We always had each other to turn to.

My most memorable time in college would have to be our Baguio trip! We would parade around Baguio with our "uniform" Kashieca black cardigans :-) That was fun (and definitely not baduy!) After college, we would have frequent get togethers to celebrate birthdays, promotions , marriages , kids' birthdays and other special occasions such as when our overseas-based friends would be home. We also spent a memorable long weekend in Subic.

Although three are now based abroad (two in the US and one in Hongkong) , we have our "daily chats" through the internet. It's just like everyone's just around the corner. And even if there are months when we, the "Manila girls" don't see each other, we know that we will always be there for each other.

I would be lost without them. It is always comforting to know that I have people who accept me as I am, who will support me through bad times , and will be happy with my successes. And I know that I always have people to turn to.

To my dear friends, thank you very much. Hope you know that I will always be here to support you in everything that you go through and everything that you want in life! Luv you ! :-)

Budgeting and Financial Planning at Home

I just realized today that I have been dealing with Budgeting and Financial Planning at work, and at school and have not done enough for our home! It all started with setting our target budget for our upcoming US Trip, which up to now does not have a definite date yet. Since it's supposed to be a relaxing break for us we said that we will set the date when we have reached a certain percentage of our Travel Budget. This was how we came up with our budget:

(in USD)
1,360 -Airfare (MNL-LAX-MNL)
2,300 -Meal and transportation allowance
560 -Train
1,300 -Airfare within the US
------------
5,520 or PHP 253,920

This is of course a conservative estimate as I'm still not familiar with how VUSA works, I just took the rates from the internet.

The next step of course was to have an assessment of how much we can afford. What I did was to allocate our income among the various REQUIRED expenses, and I came up with the following:

32% - Income tax
11% - Home mortgage
10% - Car mortgage
8% - Transportation expenses
4% - Groceries
4% - Daily meal allowance
4% - Electricity
1% - Water, telephone, internet
1% - Insurance
----
75%

What a realization that if only we can control the NON-REQUIRED expenses, we can easily save 25% of our income every month! Well, it's not too late. And little by little we are learning to manage with less. We now eat at home more, we don't watch movies as much in the cinema (I was shocked to learn that it now costs P160 per person to watch a movie), we don't have household help (which means no salary to pay and less grocery expenses), and other little things that we have learned to do without.

We are currently working on a November or a January schedule for our trip so that we can leave on non-peak periods at work. Hopefully by then, we have saved enough, and maybe a little extra for some shopping :-)

Opportunities

My husband and I went out tonight with his friends to celebrate new (and better) jobs for two people. I'm reminded of the two people I just lost the past four months for better job opportunities. One is now in Singapore at a multinational technology firm, and one is now the CFO of a medium-sized company. My husband's friends are in Marketing, and the two people I just lost are in Finance. I feel happy. There seems to be a lot of people around me who are finding better opportunities for themselves and their families. I guess we all have to find our own "corner of the sky" while we can. These people have dared to find their destiny, not being content in what is comfortable and stable. In the end, we should be in a job that will make us happy, whether our reasons be financial, intellectual or self-fulfillment.

Sometimes I feel sad that I've lost people, people whom I have relied upon heavily over the past few years. But I feel more proud that they have dared to spread their wings. After all, I am sure that I was part of their professional growth. Anyway, I still have people left and will have new people coming in for me to guide and mentor, and hopefully, they too can find the path that will provide them fulfillment and happiness.

Busy Days Again

Saturday, July 28 was the third (of six) session of the Finance for Marketing Practitioners seminar series. It was an extra difficult day because the third (and last) topic for the 7 hour session is Time Value of Money. I've taught this subject for the nth time, but still have a difficult time trying to simplify this. The good thing is that learning about this actually helps them understand the mechanics of investing and saving, and that is incentive enough for them to learn. My sample problems always deal with retirement, like this problem:

You are 40 years old and you want to save for retirement. You put $5,000 a year into the stock market and you estimate the market's return to be about 12% a year. How much will you have by the time you're 60? when you're 65?

Can you imagine me trying to teach this, with most of them not having a financial calculator or laptop computers with them? I also showed them how to use the Present Value tables! I didn't bother requiring them to buy the financial calculators (unlike with my college business students) anymore. Maybe next time I teach this, I would require the school to give me the computer lab as classroom.

After class, I went to the 7th birthday party of my godson and nephew ZD at Jollibee. It was fun to be with family and kids.

Sunday, July 29 was the birthday celebration of my brother in their home. Joining us in this are his in-laws who have all been like real family to us since. We had a great time, especially now that our niece (my brother's and sister-in-law's 10 month old baby) can now say "bye bye" and can wave her hand, she can also now almost walk (with the help of a walker).

Hubby and I went to mass after, at Power Plant, Rockwell, our favorite tambayan on Sundays. We go to mass there, buy our groceries and have dinner. He treated me to Cibo where we had the new beef dish (with garlic and olive oil, but I forgot the name) and salad. A bit expensive, but we enjoyed the time together (we almost had the place to ourselves as we ate there at around 5:30 PM).

Monday, July 3o was the start of a real hectic workweek. I had three meetings that day and had lunch with my close friends at work at The Old Spaghetti House. Classes that night were also difficult ones. In my Financial Management class, I was teaching them Valuation Methods for Stocks. Dividend growth models, Free Cash Flow models, etc. That was indeed tiring. My consolation is that they understood the concept of discounting perfectly because we spent a lot of time with Time Value of Money (it was the previous topic). In my Management Accounting class, our topic was Budgeting and Forecasting, another confusing one, based on my experience...but thanks to Excel, it was easier for them to appreciate the process...

Tuesday, I had lectures the whole day for Heads of our different Profit Centers at work. I taught them how they can evaluate their business units using Financial Analysis tools. Whew! What a week of teaching!

Of course, Wednesday was another school night... but it was my students' turn to be stressed, because I gave them quizzes, hehehe ;-)