debt-free?

My female owner once took further maths at junior college and mathematics at undergraduate level. And also considered taking up accountancy. Once. Now, her maths is really bad and her accounting/ budgeting skills leaves one to wonder if she was really once a maths guru.

Anyway, no thanks to a super “gao” coffee she had at 2300 (my female owner says it is the equivalent of drinking 70% cocoa dark chocolate), my female owner is still up at such an unearthly hour. This also means that most of us turtles would be threading the boundary between slumber and wakefulness since the Balcony will be blasted with light from the living room.

My female owner decided to do some accounting of the expenses incurred for her postgrad studies. She did a very rough calculation based on her mother’s declaration that she had spent S$113k so far. Subtracting the amount my female owner currently has in her Aussie bank (converted back to Sing dollars at a much more favourable rate – my female owner assumed that she won’t need this money if she takes up the offer) and the sponsorship amount offered, my female owner realised that actually, she probably spent about S$15k of her mother’s money after all.

And she started calculating how long she might need to repay S$15k… (with a sinking feeling, she worked it out to be 6 years) and suddenly remembered that she actually did pump in more than S$20k of her own savings for her postgrad studies. Which means… tada! She doesn’t owe her mother anything if she takes up the offer!

But then, some things just didn’t seem to add up, no thanks to her non-existent book-keeping efforts. For one, after taking away course fees, she ended off 2009 with more money than she started. Even though she supported herself with part-time jobs, my female owner thought that correspondingly, she spent a lot more, especially for the short trips she made around Australia. Perplexing.

My female owner reckons she needs to do more detailed calculations to ascertain how much of her mother’s money she actually used. How cool would it be, to end off her postgrad studies debt-free. Such a different scenario from when she first started out in Brisbane, thinking that she would need S$150k from her mother to cover expenses.