Jon Bon’s Money

            Wow, today is not the greatest. I stayed up too late last night watching baseball, talking on the phone, and reading. I ended up going to bed around 11PM. Which is not that late, but one has to go to bed before eleven if you want to make it into the office by six in the morning to put in a ten hour day. Last week when I tried this went great, did I feel this way last Wednesday?

            Right now this four day work week is pretty tough, I don’t know if I will keep this up for the rest of the summer. One thing is for sure, I will be very happy Thursday night. I am already looking foreword too it.

           My employer has the policy of allowing an employee to work “Four-10’s” so I am putting in ten hours Monday to Thursday and taking Friday off. I have been able to do this the entire time I have had my job, but I have just never tried it for a number of good reasons.

            It is currently about halfway though my second day, and I am staying strong. Working 25% longer every day definitely takes some getting used too. I am just focusing on Thursday night when I will be free to enjoy a long weekend.

Now how is this related to personal finance you ask?

            My original goal was to save some money on gas, and make my car last longer. I started to car pool with someone who kept the same hours as me. And it did save me money and wear and tear on my car. At the same time it was a bit more inconvenient, then I would have liked, and the cash benefit was just about equal to the amount of inconvenience that I had to go through. At the same time I still had to drive about a mile everyday to meet my driver/rider and wait. So the second option is to try to work four-10’s.

            Now I can save myself 20% on commuting costs, and have a free day. All I have to do is come in early and stay late…..

On that note, who wants to go out Thursday night?

More to come on this experiment…..

           Tomorrow I am taking time off work to go and sit for the GMAT, aka Graduate

Management Admission Test. It is a 4 hour test and costs around $250 to take. For those of you who don’t know, the GMAT is the SAT for Graduate school. It’s the other factor along with undergraduate grades that they use to assess your intelligence.

            I have been looking over the test material and format. The GMAT has several kinds of questions that are unique to the test and cannot be found anywhere else. Obviously it would pay off to do a bit of research and studying before taking the test, it could raise your score significantly.

            Hopefully I get a decent score on this test and will be able to apply and be accepted to The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. It is where I got my undergrad, and I am actually looking forward to going back.

            Now if I got my MBA tomorrow, my job would not give me a penny more, but at the same time they would happily foot the entire bill of around $60,000 for the degree. The relative “value” of an MBA is many times more then that. There is no definite figure on how much more a person would make if they held an MBA over just a bachelors degree. But the law of averages says that on an aggregate level MBA holders can make 500,000 more then those without the degree.

Wish Me Luck!