When I retire:

I want to teach financial literacy and capital allocation at Taiwan.

Feeling trapped to make a decision that I do not fully believe into. Like most others, I am risk averse. I do not take unnecessary risk unless the reward is great enough to outweight the risk, at least in financial decisions, and I see career choice in essence as a financial decision.

Dentistry. Places I looked and information I gathered, they don't point to a future that I believe to be wise financially. The future I see involves tremendous risk that I will be taking, and it might even endanger all those who might be financially involved with me. On the macro data, I can't seem to find a reason to justify the risk. Perhaps only on the micro level, where I can say, maybe my future might be different from others.

It seems to me that most of my peers are not as worried as me. They see what they see of dentistry as of today or even the past. When asked, I don't think they ever considered or know what the future looks like. Undoubtedly, no one does. Like most people in the financial market, it's human nature to believe what happened in the past must continue. It's especially true for science students who are so fonded with the predictable charts and graphs. I do not believe that. My research of dental history suggests that the economic cycle of dentistry is reaching another peak that is about to fall. Like buying financial assets right before the burst, my class is set to be doomed as a whole in comparison to the previous generations. I don't think any of my peers fully understand the extend of the future that is coming.

Yet, I fought so hard for all these years to gain an acceptance of admission. For what? I asked myself. The pride? perhaps it was too much for me to swallow failure, and that has cost me a fortune in terms of time, lost income, and work experience. For lack of options or other opportunity? I would have to admit it was true when I was graduating. For that I did not fully utilize career center to find out the opportunities. Lack of connection and social network to know what was out there. I sticked to what was in style and seemed available at the time. Like those who chases fashion, one thing for sure, the season is set to be changed. And I, who committed so much time and resources for this path, seems to be binded for this only viable choice at this given point of time. Bearing the consequence of a choice that I did not fully thought through before, and trapped.

On the bright side, dentistry has a strong business mix in its private practice. It's something I enjoy, and an opportunity that I might not otherwise get so easily if I were to pursuit other careers. All in all, i'm complaining or perhaps a common cold feet symptom before making a big decision on education investment. Wish for the best and set out to make the most of it.

Beware of New Chase Accounts!!

Friends, we all know Washington Mutual has been replaced by Chase, and I personally think the friendly Wamu culture is no longer there as well.

I may be an unhappy customer with complaints, but I want to tell you my finding so you can be aware as well.

1. Starting from mid-October, Chase will replace both of wamu checking and saving accounts with their own chase accounts. In addition, chase will charge a $3 ACH outgoing transfer fee to BOTH new chase checking and saving accounts. It’s about the only bank I know that will actually charge you on ACH transfer. If you do any online banking to transfer your fund to pay credit card or any external banking account (meaning other banks), it will either be a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer. (ACH is the slow transfer that often takes 3 days while wire-transfer is the kind that takes the transfer instantly, which costs $10).

I do use my account to pay for credit cards regularly, so I am very unhappy about this new fee that I will incur every month each time I pay for a credit card.

2. Chase no longer waive over-activity fee for their customers (while Wamu does so). For my case, Chase actually manipulated the ending statement period in my account from 22 to 24 of the month, so they can charge an excess-activity fee of $10.

The transfer that I’ve done was from saving into checking (online). Wamu did not count this internal online transfer as an outgoing transfer, but chase does. I asked them how would I transfer my money out of saving into checking without hitting the fee, and they told me that I would have to come into the branch to do that. I believe that defeats the point of online banking.

In sum, watch out for the new fees that might occurs in your chase banking statement in the future. For this, I have decided to take the hassle and search for a new bank. (You may ask any chase representative to verify the information I said.)