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Today I went for an interview at a financial advisor/fund management company.

I applied for the position of equities analyst in this company because it has a reputable investment newsletter and has a great track record in fund management. A friend, who’s also a subscriber of theirs, also has high recommendations about them and he says I’ll learn a lot about building assets from the fund manager (my interviewer) if I work there.

I expected the salary paid by them will be lower than my current pay because their company’s smaller in size and… well… it’s also a chinese company (chinese are famous for underpaying workers, lol). However, I was still eager to attend the interview… because if I get hired, the knowledge I gain will outweigh the sacrifice of a paycut.

I was first asked to do some tests, questions like “choose one topic below and explain in layman’s term what the topic is:
a) time value of money
b) normal and abnormal distribution
c) theory of probability
d) Do you agree our country should maintain the currency peg? Why?”

I had returned most of what I studied back to my lecturer after graduation so I had very little idea on how to elaborate a,b,c and I chose d. Another test was two articles about two great fund managers (Peter Lynch and Mark Mobius), and I have to describe what impresses me most about these two fund managers.

To be honest, I thought the test was bullshit! I always hate doing tests at interviews. I think I did pretty good during the group discussion though.

After a weird supposed-to-be-group-discussion-turned-chit-chat, I asked these questions:

1) “What are the working hours like?”

“Working hours are looonnngggg. We work saturdays. If any of you don’t want to work saturdays, you can be honest with me now and I’ll withdraw your application. Sometimes we work 10 to 12 hours. I work 17 hours.”

2) “If anyone of us has the honour to work for your company, what is the pay like?”

“$1600. Our company is performance based, so it is the bonuses that are to be looked forward to… the minimum is 0 but the maximum is unlimited. The most we have paid out before is 13 months bonus.”

3) “Can your employees own shares?”

“Yes, in fact, we encourage them to own shares!”

4) “I’m asking this because your website said ‘independent’ reviews”

“Yes, we really encourage our employees to invest because we don’t want them to rely on their paycheck. Sometimes we even force them to buy good stocks with their bonuses haha”

Okay, so why am I telling you all this?

Remember the rich’s mentality vs. poor’s mentality constantly mentioned in Kiyosaki’s books? Well this is a great illustration of it (okay, I know I’m worrying too much before I am even offered a job, but hey, who knows? I may get hired).

First of all, I was hoping the working hours won’t be as long as the current job I have so that I can have more time for my web business, but it turns out it is equivalent or maybe longer than the one I have now (my current job is only 5 days a week).

Second, although I think the knowledge I’ll gain in this job outweighs the paycut…. I’m still thinking about the paycut. As I’m already used to my lifestyle, the paycut seems huge! But for one thing, the bonus and the fact that he encourages wealth building among employees was a big plus.

My employee mentality continues *bing* *boink* *bing* *boink* to contradict my wealth building objective. There’s this big uncertainty about living on $1600 and whether the company really teaches its employees to build wealth… is he going to walk the talk? Sigh…