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 ;-)