The Mystery of Banking

I am a biologist with an economics fetish. If I had to do a PhD over again maybe that's something I'd like to study. So I was reading this pdf book, called the The Mystery of Banking. It was a very insightful read, particularly during this financial crisis. It seems that an understanding of money: how it is created, destroyed, and how it flows to add value to our lives (or not)-- that explains a lot about how the world works. And why the status quo today is just so. I also didn't know much about what the Federal Reserve does exactly, how the modern banking system works, and where the money for the bailout package is actually coming from. . . and this book explains that.

I am not totally sure about whether we should go back to a gold standard or limit the inflationery creation of money as the book suggests. By some accounts, inflation may be a good thing. But it is clear that the entities involved with the creation of money has a lot of power. As with any kind of power, it can be used for social good. Or not. Financial stability is a social good in and of itself, I suppose. Maybe this is a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" idea, amidst a larger moral question of whether guns can ever be used for good. And of course, the idea of whether any one should be entrusted with such power at all, ever. Yeah, I like economics because I am confused by it.

J-1 212e 2-year home residency waiver

Getting the waiver of the two-year home residency requirement was a big step. Just wanted to share the lessons learned from this experience, so that others in a similar situation can hopefully benefit. Which probably holds true for many post-docs. This post is particularly relevant to Indian citizens from Calcutta.

The most common application involves getting your embassy to issue you a "no obligation to return to India" (NORI) certificate. There are other possibilities (Definitely visit this Department of State site), but I'll describe the NORI process here.

Depending on how much faith you have in this system and how good your contacts are in the different Indian ministries, I would recommend starting this process at least 1 year before your J-1 visa is due to expire. It can easily take that long to get the waiver processed. Some people start the waiver process (at least getting the NORI part) as soon as you start the J-1 status. And there is nothing wrong with this approach. The only thing to keep in mind is that once your waiver has been granted from the Department of State, your sponsor can no longer extend your J-1 status. So you need to have a plan about what you will do after you get the waiver.

Go to the Indian embassy website in your jurisdiction and download forms for issuance of NORI. You can then submit these forms along with a Miscellaneous services form and a fee to the Indian embassy (in person or by mail). The instructions on the Indian website page are fairly clear. The only confusing part for me was that you will need to notarize the Affidavit's from your local bank or library or notary public BEFORE you submit the forms to the embassy (along with fees, passport, Misc services form, and photographs). I guess it does say so on the website, but I initially thought the embassy will notarize it. . . and they won't. The embassy will just attest the series of four documents and send it back to you. I did this process in person at the embassy in Washington, so it took only about a week to get these attested forms.

Now you need to mail out the forms to:

a. The State Government (Department of Home)
b. Department of Education, Ministry of Human Resources Development, Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi
OR
Ministry of Health & Planning, Government of India, New Delhi.
c. The concerned passport office from which the application obtained passport to come abroad.

First of all you prepare your package. It should contain the following:
1. Cover letter asking them to issue you with a NORI, and telling them which address to mail the NORI out to along with the enclosures in the package.
2. Your signed/attested affidavits and forms (the ones you got from the Indian embassy.)
4. Copies of the front and back page of your passport.
5. Your CV
6. A copy of your birth certificate
7. A copy of your Xth, XIIth, and/or college transcript if these were done in India.

This is probably overkill, but you just don't know what the authorities want to look at really, so I sent them everything.

From web searches I had found out that the Department of education is fairly efficient about processing these documents. So I just mailed my package directly to:

Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Education, ES-5 Section, A-1/W-3, Curzon Road Barracks, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi–110001

Turns out I was right. I got the NORI from the Ministry of Human Resources back within a month.

My passport was issued in Delhi, and I am originally from West Bengal. The address of the Delhi passport office is:

The Regional Passport Officer,
Hudco Tricoot-3
Bhikaji Cama Place
R.K. Puram
New Delhi-1100066

The address of the desk in Calcutta where the package needs to be sent has eluded me, and I still don't know where to send it. It is in Writer's building, and I have a phone number.

For the Delhi Passport office and the state government I used the services of this company: Your man in India. They charge over a 100 bucks per package, but you have a person there who personally hand delivers your package to the required desk, ensures that the application is complete and well received, and lets you know if there is a confirmation number/file number to your application. So that you can follow up if necessary. I must say, I was fairly impressed with their service. They will send you their addresses where you mail the package to, and they will personally deliver it to the required office. It's a good option for those who don't want to bother their relatives in India.

For the Delhi submission the passport office required me to send an additional letter authorizing YMI to submit on my behalf. I got a 4-digit ledger number. For Calcutta, I got a stamped cover letter saying "received", but no file number.

All these NORI's were submitted in March of 2008. I got my MHRD NORI back by May. The RPO Delhi NORI was issued, but it never reached me. A contact e-mailed me a scan of the NORI by May. I have not reached the Calcutta NORI yet, but there was a police verification at my house in September. So I guess things are moving along over there.

The Indian Embassy might issue you a NORI based on just 2 out of 3 certificates.

Once you have received these certificates, fill out the DS-3039 form on the Department of State website, pay the fee, get the confirmation number barcode, follow the instructions with the Indian embassy for them to issue a message directly to the department of state. This part of the process is very well documented, so follow the instructions on the websites. You'll have to mail the printed documents and attachments to the DOS, while the Indian embassy sends the NORI directly to the DOS.

Once that is done, it should just take a month or two to get the waiver certificate.

It is a long and stressful process. There are many things that can go wrong, and certificates might not come through. Even after that, there is some probability that your application might be rejected by the DOS. It's not a transparent system. But by and large, this is a tried and tested method that works for a majority of Indian postdocs on J-1 visa's. I got it and so can you. Best of luck!

Some other interesting links:

New York Indian Consulate General
Discussion thread
Another discussion thread.
Umich information: questions answered.

Home Buying Links

Friends have asked me for links and advice on house buying. So here are some of the ones I found most useful, from my bookmarks list:

1. Decide how much you can afford. Using your own budgeting methods. This will be based of how much money you have left over at the end of the month after paying all your other expenses, and then putting an additional cushion of say 30-40% on that to calculate the highest mortgage you can afford. This is probably one of the most important steps in the home buying process, and I recommend doing this early.
2. Bankrate is a great resource for knowing current interests. Typically the interest rate you will get will be around what this site tells you. . .maybe 0.25-0.5% lower if you have excellent credit and are lucky. The price of the home you can afford will be determined by the current interest rate, and how much you can afford to spend per month. As rates go up, the price of the home you can afford goes down and vice verca.
3. Mortgage Professor is a great resource to REALLY understand mortgages. If you have time. It also has a bunch of calculators that will tell you e.g. whether it is better to rent or own, how much your payments will be, etc.
4. Zillow is a great resource to get a ballpark figure of what your house maybe worth. You can also try http://www.realestateabc.com/home-values/ When you make an offer, you can use this and the realtors assessment to come up with your figure.
5. For us, the walkability of the neighbourhood was important.
6. If you don't want to pay for cable and want to find out whether you will get TV reception (and what kind of antenna you need), this site is pretty cool.
7. You can research schools and crime stats of your neighbourhood.
8. To find the houses themselves our realestate agent would send us MLS listings which were great. We also liked Google Base for location based narrowing down of houses, Realtor wasn't bad, and there were a couple of others.

And if you dear reader are looking to buy in the Montgomery County, or suburbs of Washington DC, we highly recommend our real estate agent, Mr. Danny Sadoun. Contact me if you want a reference. But yeah, he was really helpful and knowledgeable and good to work with.

Ok, hope that was helpful.

Updates

So it has been a while. As we get along with our lives and careers, this blog does not need to be the outlet that I needed when I was in graduate school. I still do need an outlet sometimes, but perhaps it is not the same. Since the amortization sheet posted last December, I've been up to the following:

1. We bought a house in March.
2. Anyesha cleared her PE Exam.
3. My parents visited in May.
4. I went to Thailand for 3 weeks in July.
5. I got an adjunct assistant professor appointment at USUHS.
6. I got my J-1 2-year home residency waiver.
7. Over the year, we visited friends and friends visited us. We went to Mystic, CT and Valley Forge, PA among others.

Apart from that it's the little things. Bicycling and walking regularly on the trail near our place. Furnishing and decorating our place through a judicious combination of Ikea and Craigslist. Raccoons rummaging through the trash. The highs and lows of office work. And a gnawing post-doctoral uncertainty that is typical to this stage in ones career. Occasional tennis with friends. Netflix streaming movies, hooked up to the television through a 50' S-video cable. All episodes of MI-5. And now, Autumn is here. It's been a good year so far.

Amortization worksheet

Mortgages are extremely confusing, even the most basic 30 year fixed interest loans. To wade through some of the complexity that the loans here is an excel worksheet that can help generate amortization schedules. Hope all of you who like my Sudoku excel sheet and Kaplan-Meier calculators find this useful!

Amortization Excel Worksheet

The idea is to fill in the values for loan amount and interest rate. The table will suggest a minimum monthly payment for P&I for different terms(not accounting for other costs such as taxes, home insurance, PMI if applicable, etc.) such as 30 year, 25 year, and so on. If you are looking at 30 year mortgages, plug that value in where it says "Monthly P&I".

This will generate your amortization table. For each row, you have a distinct payment. . . and it shows how much interest you have paid, how much you owe, and what percentage of the home equity you own. It also shows the total cost of the house (total principle+interest, if you continue paying at this rate).

The cool thing about the table is that you can modify individual payments. So if you want to pay more than the minimum amount on a given month, you type that in. And the table calculates how it affects your overall payment structure. This is particularly useful because making higher payments earlier during the process can lead to significant savings overall. Trying out different scenario's also gets you a feel for negative amortization. Hopefully this can serve as a tool to help compare different mortgage products in terms of their overall cost and how responsive they are to savings from early payments.

Travel Videos and Updates

Considering that I just spent a month on the other side of the world, and that there is plenty to report, my blog has not seen much activity. Somehow I am not really into maintaining it any more, especially after I joined my new job. I am enjoying that quite a bit, and I perhaps don't have the same sense of freetime that I did in at least the several initial years of graduate school.

Anyway, first things first: the travel updates. I was in Thailand for about 16 days with a team, collecting mosquitoes from areas where dengue had been reported. Along the way, over the weekends we managed to do some site seeing. A number of the photos taken during this period can be seen on my flickr page. Here is a video compilation of the more touristy moments.



Following that I was in Taipei for a week, to attend a conference on Dengue and to give a talk at (and initiate some collaborations with) the National Taiwan University. Anyesha joined me in Taipei, and here is a video compilation of our sight seeing trips there. She does an excellent job of writing up how our trip went.

Thailand field studies

Pagoda
Originally uploaded by subhamoy_pal

I have spent over a week now in Bangkok, Thailand and it has been a lot of fun. We already had a number of very productive days in the field, chasing down dengue causing mosquitoes and trying to pick them up using our PCR assays. Despite our equipment arriving here late, due to delays with customs. One more week here, and then I am headed to Taipei for a conference.

Quick Calcutta trip

I am going into international traveller mode. Earlier this month, I made a quick visit to Calcutta. I haven't visitted Calcutta in summer in a really long time. . .so there was an overeating of mangoes and jackfruits. The rainy season started soon after I reached, making the temperatures fairly manageable. And my parents were there, en route to Moscow. So I got to meet with them.

PSA: Be careful with your luggage if you are flying British Airways through London. In fact, avoid it altogether if you can.

On the way over there, my luggage did not arrive with me. Apparently with new construction, new security regulations and all that stuff, Heathrow is a mess. So, I spent the entire trip expecting that my luggage will be delivered by the next flight, as I was told. And it never arrived. Now I am back in Maryland, and it still hasn't arrived. It's been over a month now. Calling customer service means a minimum of a half an hour hold before you speak to someone who doesn't know anything. All you can do is wait for your luggage to miraculously get to you. And file for compensation (which they still haven't acknowledged, and it's been over two weeks, so I need to follow up with them again.) But at least, I am in good company: apparently A.R. Rahman and Shilpa Shetty lost their luggage too.

Anyway. This August, I am likely to go to Thailand for a field study and Taiwan for a conference. So stay tuned for more travel stories.