Millionaire

I can’t believe I am a millionaire at the young age of 24! Okay, it’s not really a million dollars but this is the closest to having a million of something – million wons! I finally got my first month’s pay check! I got my flight reimbursement, my settlement allowance and the extra pay for 3 classes as well. However, I am still waiting for the interview job payment which was few weeks ago. Hopefully I get that soon because it has been awhile and they said we would get paid within few days. For those who do not know how the Korean currency looks like, please refer to the photos below.
The 50,000 wons currency is not used often.
For the longest time the 10,000 wons currency was the highest currency in Korea!
Here is a quick tip for future English teachers coming to Korea to teach and would like to transfer money. 1,000,000 wons after “Transfer fees＋cable charges” equals $876.62 CDN but after checking my Canadian banking statement, it shows $861.62. I am going to guess that $15 was taken from the Canadian bank for processing the transfer as well. From now on I will wait until I accumulate more than 1 million before transferring the money because I found out from a friend here in Korea that if I transfer 1 million or 5 million, I am still going to be charged the same amount of fee for transfers. I might as well learn how to transfer money now so I can do it by myself in the future. Now I can pay off my credit card debt that was accumulated during the 8 months of joblessness in Windsor while attending teacher’s college.

Please do remember that the Canadian dollar is very strong at the moment. 1000 wons do not equal $1, in fact it’s more like 1123.64 wons equals a Canadian dollar (at the moment). It is always fluctuating. By the way, transferring money is very simple and quite efficient through KEB (Korean Exchange Bank). I strongly recommend you using this bank because they have services in English and their online banking is very easy to use. Now, I need to figure out how to pay bills because the bills are all written in Korean with some English here and there. I will somehow figure that before August 1st when the bills are due but until then I will just start saving up.

My next blog post will be about what I have being during the summer camp for week 1, which I will post on Friday. I was requested to put this particular blog post up because of their curiosity of the Korean currency compared to the Canadian one.