I have finally decided to write about funding the INSEAD adventure. I got another request to write about this and I think some people applying now could benefit from the information.

If you come from a developing country such as India or any African country, my guess is that you will experience similar difficulties regarding money issues that I experienced during my application time.

The tuition for MBA at INSEAD this year is a cool 48 800 Euros. Now where I come from I can buy a 2 bedroom house for this amount. In the smaller towns perhaps 3 bedrooms with a garden. If you add living expenses which I currently estimate to around 40 000 Euros this becomes a really large sum of money. The 40 000 Euro living expenses is just an estimate at the moment, I will be able to confirm this number as time goes on. I do think however that it is a fair amount if you add all the costs of air tickets, laptop, rent, insurance, etc. Of course there will be people who spend more and people who spend less, safe to say that the people spending less will not spend significantly less.

I am keeping a spreadsheet of costs which I hope I will be able to share with interested parties at the end of the year.

The total amount to be funded then is 88 800 Euros... Call it 90K. This is a nice round number to work with.

If you come from a developing country like myself you will know that securing such an amount is a really difficult task. Most banks would laugh at you if you came and asked for an unsecured loan of this amount. They will not even talk to you about half of this amount. The key tip here is to have all your lines of credit available for you, i.e. apply for the maximum bank over draft you can get, get some credit cards 2 or 3 would go a long way. The reason why you need all this money is that even if you do get a scholarship it only gets announced after the date for the first deposit payment has gone past, so you would need to have made the 4500 Euro payment.

In South Africa they have complex laws about extending credit past a certain limit. So my advice to my fellow countrymen is to apply for all the cards simultaneously. i.e. you have to do all the credit card applications within 1/2 days of each other so that when all the card companies check your record you would not have reached your FICA allowed limit. In this way you can raise perhaps R120 000 (12 000 euros). If you are lucky you can also get perhaps a personal loan, given the interest rates I would advise against this.

Another reason for securing all the funds you can get is because even if you get scholarships and or loans sometimes they get deposited into your INSEAD fees account (this was the case with my scholarships and loans). It could take some time to get this money out. In the mean time you will need the credit cards to keep going.

Loans/Scholarships
The real money to cover the fees would have to be sourced from foreign countries if you come from a developing country. This is when you ask everyone you know who is a citizen in a developing country if they would be willing to co-sign a loan with you. Most places require that you sign with a citizen or at least a permanent resident. If this is not possible, do not lose hope.

I got a loan from a company called Prodigy Finance. They are a UK company that is in start up phase and they help MBA students to fund their studies. They charged me 8% interest on my loan. I know some of you might think its too high, but if you compare with the 14% I would have paid in South Africa this is fine. They are ex-INSEAD guys, and I think one of the founders is South African who went the same undergrad university as I did. They were really nice to deal with...very efficient too. They did not require collateral except a life cover paying them out in case I died.

The rest of the money I got from INSEAD scholarships. There isn't much to write about scholarships that is not on the INSEAD website already. You just have to apply and cross your fingers and hope for the best. I suppose the only advice for this is that you should not leave your essays for too late since these essays could be worth a lot of money. I was thinking about it the other day. I wrote 2 essays for a scholarship and if I divide the amount of money I got from the scholarship by the number of essays that gives me a very high yield per essay. I do not think I will ever write such high yield essays in my life. Although I hope I do.

Bank Accounts
Given the volatility of most emerging markets I would not recommend transferring your loan money into your home account. You could lose all of the money due to currency fluctuations, and this is not cool. For instance, the South African Rand (my beloved currency) has lost about 10% against the Euro in the last month due to power issues that South Africa has been having. What I did to mitigate against this risk was to open an offshore Euro bank account with HSBC. I thought it would be wise to keep the money in the currency in which I owed the student loan. HSBC is the bank I used, there might be others like citi bank who provide such accounts. Open this account early to avoid last minute confusion and receiving account details and cards in your home country after you have left. It took about a month for my account to be finalised.

When you get to Singapore you will have to open a local bank account. Probably DBS since they have the most ATMs. If you are only here for 1 period I wouldnt bother opening a local account, I think it is feasible to get by with the other accounts one already had.

International Transfers
This section only applies for people whose countries have transfer restrictions like South Africa, Zimbabwe etc. You would do well to inform INSEAD of this complication so that they know that your initial deposit could arrive late since you might have to collect 10 stamps before you can get the forex to send. In South Africa you only have to fill in a Balance of Payment for from SARS and you are ready to go. The process takes about a day so leave some time to spare before the deadline. I can imagine other countries having longer and more complex processes for forex transfer. Investigate your situation and act early.

The last in my list of advice for this post is Student Pass for Singapore. Everyone who starts at the Singapore campus needs a student pass. This is a visa for studying in Singapore. The Singapore government is really efficient so this only takes about a week to process during which you will not have your passport and hence can not leave Singapore. Make sure you factor this into your plans.

The student pass also requires a medical check. They have many centers which do these tests here for a relatively cheap price 39 Singapore Dollars (I think, around that much anyways). These test cost a lot more in other countries so my recommendation would be that you do this test when you get to Singapore if you want to save. The inconvenience of this idea is that you have to sit in their hospital for about 1-2 hours to have this done. So do the maths for your own situation to see if its worth doing it before you come to Singapore or waiting.

That's all for today... more later.

The above article was taken from this blog