Blog
In my previous life, I was a travel blogger. But life happened so these days, while I still travel from time to time, I prefer to blog on other stuff. Like the future of journalism profession, my journey towards personal healing, why mental health matters and creating a more life-centric career path.
My dad died a month ago and this encouraged me to seriously consider taking a registered financial planner (RFP) course (and even take a loan to go to B school).
Wait, what? So how did this happen? And what’s the connection between my dad’s funeral and my MBA aspirations?
Well, it has something do with estate planning and dealing with all the red tape that our family had to go through just to do the following:
a.) get funeral benefits from the Philippine Social Security System
b.) calculate and pay the estate taxes for the house where we grew up.
We all thought that after all the sleepless nights preparing for our dad’s funeral and receiving guests
during his wake, we could finally relax after he was interred.
But noooooo. Death and taxes, they said, are the only things that are certain in this world. And our family learned how accurate that adage was.
The paper work alone is enough to bury us alive, which is why I decided to hire a lawyer to settle this. As of this writing, we’re still waiting for the revenue department calculate the taxes that we need to pay.
The lawyer, my friend K, has in fact encouraged me to get an estate planning insurance for my personal assets. Which is what I’m going to do later this year.
Which is why I’m planning to sign up as an RFP. Not to change careers, but to fill knowledge gaps.
I've been a business journalist for more than 20 years and yet my zero knowledge on estate settlement has revealed one of my biggest weaknesses.
Finance is not really my strongest suit. I've always been afraid of numbers. It’s ironic because I made a career out of economic journalism. But I since I mostly cover political economy, I could get away with it as being in that field didn’t require a high degree of numeracy skills. Which wouldn't be the case had I ended up reporting on the banking and finance industry.
On a personal level, I also realized that I needed to get a handle on my finances. Which is why I’m (re)reading personal finance books and blogs and putting a tight lid on my budget (Tip: in my case, having a digital wallet that I can monitor all the time has helped in keeping my spending in check).
My spiritual teachers have always said that life happens for you, and not to you. And ‘life’ did indeed happen for me. My personal tragedy has proved to be a teachable moment and I wouldn’t want it any other way.