Texas State B-School Diary

Well, the month of April has come and gone and May is just about finished.  I finally got my GMAT results back that I had been waiting on.  It only took four weeks for me to get them back.  I ended up making a 600 quantitative and verbal and a 6.0 out of 8.0 on the  written portion of the exam.  Not to bad for only a week of studying on the math and verbal and for running out of time on the written.  My advisor told me that all I needed to make on it was a 450 to get in, so I guess I’m in.  Hello McCoy graduate school of business.  I guess it will be a few weeks until I hear back from financial aid on scholarships, grants and loans.  I’ve called a few times and they keep telling me that I should receive a reward letter in the mail shortly.  With Memorial Day coming up this weekend and my birthday on Saturday, let’s hope for an early gift.

Good news!  I received my official acceptance letter to Texas State graduate school on Tuesday before Memorial Day and I received my official award letter from the financial aid office on Monday night when I got back from spending the holiday at my in-laws place on Matagorda Bay.  With my birthday being awesome, I have to say that this has been a pretty good week.  I received a small grant and was approved for a student loan. To bad that I just missed early registration by two weeks.  I am expecting to make the commute to San Marcos for at least this semester starting in August.  With my wife and I living in south Austin, it should only be a 20-30 minute commute, and I always enjoy being on campus.  I checked on-line and it looks like tuition for six hours is going to cost my around $1,500.  That’s good news as my award is double that so I won’t have to worry about textbook costs and the rest will help with other expenses.  I’m looking at buying a second car as my wife and I car pool right now since we work less than a mile from each other.  I can’t decide on buying a car to conserve on gas, or buy a truck that we will be able to use more efficiently for our home and as we grow.  I basically have three months to make a decision until classes start on August 24.

I’ve looked at the courses offered and it looks like I will be going to classes on Monday and Tuesday evenings from 6:30 to 9:15 pm.  I’ve already received approval for tuition reimbursement from my current employer, but that is not such a concern as I have my loan and grants to cover the initial costs.  I’m still working on a few scholarship offers, but I have plenty of time to submit those.  So with those in mind, it takes a bit of the worry out of me changing jobs within the next month.  I’ve been fortunate enough to market myself well enough to draw quite a few interviews from several financial services companies who would like me to go to work with them.

It’s funny how much more time I take to make decisions now then I did four years ago when I initially graduated from Texas State.  I guess that I’ve gotten quite a bit wiser in that time frame.  I won’t say smarter or more mature as I feel pretty young anyway when it comes to thinking that I’ve lived half of my life and that I am halfway to retirement at 55.  27 years can seem like a long time until you break it down to specific goals and identify your time frame for accomplishing those goals.  I expect to graduate from Texas State in 2008 with my Masters of Business Administration with my Certified Financial Planning certificate.  I also plan in the meantime to complete most of the coursework to have my real estate license at the same time.  I expect to have my mortgage and real estate broker’s license by 2010 and to start my own real estate, mortgage, and financial services firm two years after that.  I also expect to be debt free (excluding my mortgage) by the time I graduate.

These may seem like ordinary goals but when you see my balance sheet on student loans, credit cards, and car notes, debt freedom takes on a whole other light.  If you subscribe to any of the beliefs of Tom Hopkins, Zig Zigler, or Brian Tracy on goal setting and how important it is to write your goals down to help them to come true, then you will understand why I’m writing my goals to such a public audience.  Wish me luck!