For the Win!

I'm standing on the 11 books and various notes I've used to pass the various licensing exams I've taken over the past year. I finally passed the last one, the Series 63, earlier this week finally ending all this crap. All of these books will now collect dust somewhere.

Over the last ten years I've sat for five different exams. My first two licenses have lapsed, one being supplanted by the Series 7 last year (the test with six separate books), and the management license wasn't carried over by my last employer. I currently hold the 7, the 63 and a Texas Insurance License. Over the next few months I have to get an Insurance license for the other 50 states (49 + DC). Luckily I don't have to take another test for those.

Otherwise, the job is going well. It's super busy with tax season in full swing, and people's statements just going out. I love the calls where people wonder why they've lost money in stock based investments this year. Still, even better are the calls from people who didn't know that they even had a retirement account. The moment they hear there's more money out there, they want to know if they can cash out, not thinking about the future. Ahh, the final triumph of a consumer-based economy.

Despite weeks of training, there are many ways that customers can throw you. there have been questions here that I've never had at previous jobs., partially because there's many more types of investments here than I've worked with before. Still, someone can come along trying to log on our company website and get an error that no one in the office has ever seen before.


Now that all of the tests are done (for now) I need to get to some home based projects and cleaning. Believe me, Chris would really like me to do more of the cleaning.


In other news, our little neighborhood suffered some damage, torn up garage doors and fallen trees, but other areas of town suffered much more in the storm. I had to go through a detour yesterday coming home where a huge metal power line tower had been blown over and many newly built homes had been stripped of their rooves. The small neighborhood next to us, the one I call tiny town, had their entire fence blow over. Still, the city of Dallas has already replaced the traffic light poles at the nearby intersection.