Wow. I am exhausted. On Saturday, I wrapped up my first semester here at the Evening and Weekend program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Between work, school, and a flurry of personal life stuff that’s been going on, these last few weeks have been brutal.

One day I calculated that this program was costing me about $2.23 per minute of class time. However, in reality, I’ve spent closer to about 18 hours total per week on class related things, so perhaps the real cost is about $1 per minute. Either way: is it worth it? Absolutely.

To date, I’ve taken:

• Economics for Business Decision Making [aka Microeconomics]
• Organizational Behavior
• Financial Reporting [aka Financial Accounting]
• Marketing Organization and Management

Already I’ve used some of the concepts I’ve learned in class, at work – hence, the benefit of doing this program part time. I was skeptical at first, but it really does happen.

Some other observations:

• I significantly underestimated the amount of time necessary for homework and group projects.
• Gas is cheaper in Berkeley.
• I’m very glad I picked the Saturday option – though this means I don’t really have much in the way of weekends, I spend less time commuting.
• It’s very refreshing to talk about something completely different other than software, and other work-related things. Very refreshing. Sometimes it feels like I’m living two lives!
• I hope to attend more extra-curricular events next year. There are constantly so many interesting talks going on, especially with this current financial crisis. But getting to Berkeley by 6pm is sort of hard!
• 238 between 580 and 880 is scary due to construction and very narrow lanes. A tractor trailer big rig almost ended my career last Friday.
• I’m glad I work for an employer that allows for a more flexible work schedule.
• I’ve met a lot of great friends through this program. And they’re not all engineers!

Well… now a 6 week break until the Challenging Semester begins. The classes are very quantitative heavy. The fact that there’s a review class for one of the classes next semester is a sign – so has the flurry of e-mails explaining the tutoring policy.

A friend of mine asked me: “How do you manage to go to school, go to work, and stay married?”. My answer: “They’re all graded on a curve.”

I still find it hard to say “Go bears!” with zeal though… this has been quite the change from being at Hopkins… working on it!

This snippet in an editorial in the WSJ caught my eye:

Targeting Your 401k – WSJ.com
Tax breaks alone hardly explain the popularity of 401ks. Over the past 30 years, the number of individuals covered by them nearly trebled, up to 65 million accounts, while the number under defined-benefit pension fell 30%. People are attached to their 401ks because it is their property, which they can carry with them to new jobs unlike traditional pensions, manage as they see fit and bequeath to heirs.

My interpretation of this snippet is that “401k’s are popular not just because of the tax breaks, but because it is the property of the person.” Is that your interpretation?

If so, that’s pretty silly. It’s not like employees have a choice of whether they get a 401k or a pension plan – they get whatever the employer offers them, and few offer pension plans anymore.

Here’s another interesting snippet:

The main liberal objection to 401(k)s seems to be that they let average Americans control their own investment decisions for retirement.

I think there’s actually two issues here:

1. Is it really true that the main liberal objection to 401k’s is because it allows average Americans to control their own investment decisions? Are there other objections? I don’t know.

2. This supposes that it is a good thing that average Americans control their own investment decision for retirement. Is that really true?

In fact, this Wall Street Journal article from August 2008 tells the tale where 401k’s went horribly awry, forcing taxpayers to bail out teachers:

Seventeen years ago, West Virginia school employees joined millions of workers nationwide in a shift from a pension plan that guaranteed a monthly check, to a retirement-savings plan that would make the teachers, bus drivers, custodians and other staff responsible for their own investment accounts.

“It was horrible,” says Judy Hale, president of the West Virginia Federation of Teachers union. Most felt poorly informed, and they invested too conservatively, putting the largest sums of money into a fixed-rate annuity, a safe but low-yielding option that typically is inadequate for building a nest egg. As employees began to retire, most balances were pitifully small. So on July 1, after a vote authorized by the state legislature, 14,871 school employees, or 78 percent, switched to the old-fashioned pension plan.

After the vote, teachers were “jumping up and down and crying in the halls,” Ms. Hale says.

The school employees put their mistakes behind them, but their experience stands as a cautionary tale for employers and employees across the country. As large numbers of workers are starting to retire with 401(k) or 401(k)-like plans to support them, what happened in West Virginia is a window into exactly how things can fall apart for workers, and it serves as a wake-up call for figuring out how to avoid having plans go as badly off track as this one did.

[snip]

The West Virginia plan initially offered stock and bond mutual funds, a money-market fund, and an annuity, in this case from Variable Annuity Life Insurance Co., or Valic, a unit of American International Group Inc. In addition to the Valic annuity, current offerings include funds from Capital Group Cos.’ American Funds unit, Federated Investors Inc., Fidelity Investments and Franklin Resources Inc.

From the start, most employees favored the annuity. Some say they were swayed by Valic’s sales force, which included former educators and school employees who went into the schools during the workday to talk about the option. “These people came during your lunch or during your planning period basically to sell the program,” says Debra Elmore, a third-grade teacher in Ansted, W.Va.

Ms. Elmore acknowledges knowing little about investing. “Oh, Lord no,” she says. “I had no idea.” She set up her account so that 85 percent of her contributions would go into the fixed-rate annuity. “I just thought, ‘Well, these are safe. Let’s stay there.’”

Here’s a pretty interesting list of interviews about how 401k’s came to being. Some snippets

The 401(k) plans were originally introduced as supplemental plans. No one ever said, “Oh, let’s end these traditional pensions and replace them with 401(k) plans.” What happened was these 401(k) plans came in at the same time the stock market took off. People liked them because they liked having their own accounts that they could look at, and they liked being able to control their investments, particularly in an environment where stocks go up every year. And employers liked these plans because they didn’t have to worry about the risk and what it might do to their earnings. …

Apparently, the 401k was a one line change to benefit a few execs at a certain company.

On the other hand, 401k’s are better for people who change jobs regularly.

Suffice to say, there’s plenty more to 401k’s, the pros, the cons, the possible reforms than exist in the soundbites you hear in the news and from politicians.

Gov’t offers little help for stuck air passengers – Yahoo News
A federal task force approved voluntary guidelines Wednesday for airlines and airports dealing with passengers stranded for hours on the tarmac but produced no fixed limit on how long they can be delayed before being allowed to leave planes.

Passengers who had hoped for stronger protections were left empty-handed by the guidelines.

…

The task force report recommends that:

_Airlines update passengers delayed on tarmacs every 15 minutes even if there is nothing new to report.

_A secure room be provided for passengers from diverted overseas flights so they can avoid having to go through security checks when reboarding an aircraft to their final destination.

_When practical, refreshments and entertainment should be made available to passengers confined aboard aircraft awaiting takeoff.

_Airlines should make reasonable efforts to be keep airplane restrooms usable.

…

Ruden said his main objection is that the task force does not ask Peters to require airlines and airports to develop contingency plans.

I must say, I’m pretty disappointed. Those are not exactly the sweeping reforms I was looking for. Here’s to 2009 being another interesting year for the air travel experience.

Lately I’ve been pretty busy. For example, tonight I’ve been working on Financial Accounting homework – each problem takes about 1-2 hours.

But when it rains, it pours.

Last Monday I made a deposit at a Major Bank that I had just switched to, after 13 years with Citibank. Generally when I make deposits, I go to a teller. Call me old fashioned. I deposited a money order and I noticed that today, it still hadn’t been credited to my account.

So I called and they said they had no record of my deposit. Now at home, I found the receipt and it turned out that the amount had been credited to account ending 1141. Uh. My account is 1191.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that my handwriting isn’t great, so 9->4 is quite possible. But the fact is that before the teller accepted my money order, I had to swipe my ATM card and enter a PIN.

Shouldn’t some sort of alarm been raised at the fact that I was trying to deposit a money order to an account that was not mine? What was the point of swiping my ATM card and entering my PIN?

This raises all sorts of troubling questions. Hopefully I’ll uncover what happened tomorrow. Oye vei!

As an aside, I now understand why it is called crediting my account at the bank!

UPDATE: A few calls later, the money magically appeared in my account. Lesson learned – always check your receipt.

This particular comic caught my attention:

PHD Comics: Deadline

I remember that happening a lot in college in computer science – especially in my junior year when at the height of the Dot Com boom, all these people (including some wearing scrubs) decided they wanted to become database experts. As a result, the servers kept falling over, and in two separate classes that I took in Fall that semester, people could not submit their final projects until early in the Spring semester.

Extensions are not always a good thing.

Lehman Bros. bust hit San Mateo County hard
San Mateo County has been stung by the recent Wall Street investment crisis, absorbing about $150 million in potential losses that could result in public school budget cuts, delays on road and Caltrain improvements, and scaled-down city services.

…

Funds from these cities, school districts and special districts were pooled together in San Mateo County’s $2.6 billion investment portfolio. Critics have said the county needs to hire an outside expert for this portfolio.

Jean Holbrook, the county’s superintendent of schools, pegged countywide losses at $37.4 million for kindergarten through grade 12. The San Mateo County Community College District, whose three colleges serve 40,000 students, lost $25.2 million. The countywide school insurance fund lost more than $550,000.

“It’s hitting at the same time that we had a late and inadequate state budget,” Holbrook said. “Those losses are impossible for a school district to absorb. This is not money just sitting around in reserves. It’s used for our ongoing operating expenses – paying salaries, and making the payments on buildings and facilities.”

The Sequoia Union High School District, which includes schools in Belmont, Woodside, Atherton, San Carlos, Redwood City and Menlo Park, was hit especially hard by the bankruptcy, losing $6.6 million – more than any other district in the county, said spokeswoman Bettylu Smith.

…

Church and other supervisors are considering whether to limit the amounts invested from each issuer of commercial paper and corporate bonds, from 10 percent to just 2 percent of the county pool. The Lehman Bros. portfolio accounted for 5.9 percent of the county’s investment fund.

This is rather unfortunate. Given the precarious position that most schools are in already, this is just more bad news.

Today I received an e-mail from HSBC stating that the interest rate on my account was dropping to 3.0%. While that’s not news I wanted to hear, I applaud them for being upfront about it. Some of my other accounts have dropped the interest rate in half without any notice.

On Friday, at around 1030am, the security lines at Terminal A in SJC were so bad that they backed up into the ramps descending from the parking garages.

Did you know that there’s a secret security line that’s only open between 5am-11am and has no one in line (because it’s secret)?

Just walked a little further outside to the International Arrivals building. If you have a boarding pass already, and have only carry on luggage, apparently they will allow you to enter and be screened there.

I walked by Friday and then doubled back to re-read the sign stating the rules. A TSA agent noticed and actually tried to flag me down to enter because I guess there was no one there (I was trying to leave the airport though… not enter).

Pretty neat. But only between 5am-11am according to the sign.