How I Survive on a Teacher Salary | The Cost of Being a Teacher

hey guys let's remember welcome back to my channel so in today's video I will be talking about the financial side of being a teacher so smarty salad - before middle school started this tag in order to just kind of start a conversation about the financial side of teaching alright so let's go ahead and get started with the questions so the first question is what state do you live in so I live in Arizona more specifically I live in southern Arizona so question number two is how many members are in your immediate household and I'm gonna have two answers for some of these questions just because it's soon gonna change the kind of one to give you both perspectives so for the vast majority of my first year of teaching with the exception of about two or three months I lived on my own just completely by myself and then for two of those months of my first year of teaching I lives with my brother but then he moved out but basically it was just me in the household and now going into my second year teaching well it will be - it'll be me and my fiancé Alex Bush number three is are you a single or double income household so again during my first year of teaching I was a single income household and now going into my second year of teaching we're gonna be a double income household which is gonna make a huge difference and I will talk about that later on mission number four is do you own or do you rent so for my first year of teaching I rented I had a two-bedroom apartment because again my brother lived with me and then he left so I still had a two-bedroom apartment but my dad still paid his half of the rent until the lease was over sorry if the lighting just changed it's kind of cloudy outside but going into next school year I will be owning if you watched my last like life update I think then you would have known then you would know that my fiance I just bought a house we actually closed in my house tomorrow so I'm really excited to not be renting anymore but I do want to make it clear that it was just me and just my income I really don't think it would be possible for me to buy a house it'd be really really hard to afford that I guess I could buy a condo but not a house and it would mean and it would not be a nice condo it would just be really hard to make it on my own with this with just my salaries being a double income household now it definitely makes it a lot easier to be able to afford a house question number five is what is your highest level of education does your education affect you pay in the district so I just graduated last year so my highest level of education is just a bachelor's degree and of course your education level affects your pay I can that's pretty much a standard everywhere now I really don't know how much it affects it but I know it does so you can kind of move up on a salary schedule if you have a master's degree or if you have like college credits I know that at my old school if you wanted to get college credit how'd that play into your pay it had to be a proof for the district and you can only take certain classes you couldn't just take whatever you wanted so the other is that it's question is how much did it cost for you to attain your degree and are you still paying for it so I chose to go to Community College first and then transfer to a four-year university because that was going to be the most cost effective way to go about it especially because I did not get any scholarships after high school and then on top of that I did end up having to stay one more year at Community College because of some paperwork mishaps that happen when I was trying to transfer to a different University that I did it in the butt ending so I essentially just stay another year so I could apply to another University the next time around and still be it would apply for scholarships because if I waited one semester scholarships wouldn't be available that semester so I didn't wanna like have to take out student loans does that make sense so my three years at Community College cost me around six thousand six hundred dollars and my two years at the U of A cost me around twenty four thousand two hundred and four dollars which totals about $31,000 for a bachelor's degree and am I still paying for this mmm kind of yeah enough for all of it so I was very very fortunate to not have to pay anything when I was going to community college because my financial aid would cover all of it and it would also get crayons there every semester where I would have a high GPA and then because I had a pretty high GPA throughout all Community College I was able to get quite a few scholarships so when I transfer to the U of A so then that covered my whole tuition now I do have a student loan and it's a very small student loan in comparison to those of my peers and people that I know I only have about five thousand dollars in student loan debt and honestly I didn't really have to take it alone but I chose to because I wanted to make sure that I was gonna be financially okay in my last year of college specially going into student teaching when I knew that it was not gonna be able to work as much or really at all during student teaching next question is how's your salary schedule structured is there a starting point out point annual raises and honestly I am very confused in regards to salary schedules I'll used in my oldest trip anyway I was under the impression that I would get like an annual race with years of experience but then I was told that that wasn't the case so I'm not really sure how that works but I did look into three different school districts here in the Tucson area and just kind of see what what their salary schedules look like so for example 40 USD for a salary schedule for new higher teacher caps out of ten years and it caps out at forty thousand seven hundred dollars so that's what you would get starting on with that district and then after that I'd only know how it works Catalina Foothills Unified School District cap set up 40 years of experience going into the going into a district and it caps at at sixty nine thousand two hundred and fifty dollars but again that's for forty years of experience and then lastly for the amphitheater Unified School District it caps out at 27 years of experience and it caps out at the amount of fifty four thousand four hundred and forty seven dollars after you've been in those six after you've been in those issues for a while I really know how it works I definitely understand how my district salary schedule worked so can't really help you there next question is where are you on your district's salary schedule I'm gonna give you more of a ballpark amount so at my old school my base salary was more on the lower 30 so like thirty thousand dollars a little bit higher than that um but definitely not mid definitely not mid 30s but that was my base salary not including 301 money at my new school my salary was gonna be closer to mid 30s for my base salary not including 301 money as well next question is do you supplement your income in any way and yes I do during school breaks I work at a daycare and I pretty much been doing that for every school break that we had this last school year except for a rodeo break then it's just soy and I do this because it gives me a little bit extra money that I can use for like emergencies and stuff like that or just to put away if I need to but usually goes away two things that I'd need write them in there I'm glad I did work that second job during the school year next question is how much money does your school give you for supply for the beginning of the school year do they provide basic supplies throughout the school year so at my mom saw at my last school I did not get any money at the beginning of the school year but we did get money throughout the school year to spend on various things sometimes it was very like restricted on what you could spend it on so for example one time I got money to spend on Lake Shore and it was only for instruction my aides then we got money for office depot so I could spend on things like construction paper glue sticks and stuff like that so I think we got money three or four times throughout the school year they did not provide basic supplies throughout the school year so either I had to buy them myself or I would ask parents they could provide them for us on my new school I heard that if I need things order so like pencils and stuff like that I can just ask the school secretary and she'll order it for us and then I also heard that if I buy anything from my classroom I can get reimbursed up to $250 a year next question is you have any additional deductions taken from your paycheck and of course signs you so I have retirement disability Medicare health insurance vision insurance and like other little things like that which are taking out of my paycheck pre-tax so I kind of have like a bigger amount of money to take those deductions out from but that ends up being about 20% of my paycheck pretext and of course once those are taken out then taxes are taken out and then my paycheck is pretty sad next question is do you feel your current salary is enough for you to make ends meet and live comfortably I made a list of all my monthly expenses from when I was living on my own and then just subtracted those expenses for my monthly income I most of those things that I have to pay every single month I did Emily Poe expenses such as like going out to be with friends TBT you buying a new lipstick haircuts like I changed my tires and stuff like that I did not include those type of things so I just included more like consistent bills that's remain the same for month-to-month so in that I included rent car payment car insurance payments loan payments electric bill internet bill gas groceries miscellaneous subscriptions phone and credit card so after I took out all those expenses for my monthly income I was left with about six hundred and thirty dollars left over for the whole month and if you divide that for the week it's about one hundred and fifty seven dollars a week again that does not include going on to you for a friend buying a new dress for school buying new shoes we're placing a tire or anything like that it just includes like my basic month-to-month bills so all in all is my salary enough to make ends meet yep it is but is it enough to live super comfortably no this is definitely not the way that I would want to live for the rest of my life so there's that next question is are there any financial goals that you are still working towards and yes I want to be able to I want to be able to learn how to manage my money better I feel like that would definitely help yeah alright so then the last question is what is the biggest piece of advice you would offer to someone considering teaching really really think about all the expenses that you're gonna have once you're a teacher I know for me I thought I did think about all these things but I did not take into consideration my grown-up expenses and I also did not take into consideration my expenses as a person that has a career as opposed to if my expenses to this person that's in college so when I was in college I had financial aid to fall back on and also had my dad so my dad would pay my rent throughout college because that was our deal if I went to college and got good grades to pay my rent and like I said with my scholarships in stuff like that I had money left over that I could use to do whatever I wanted now when I graduated college I did not have those options anymore and I had more expenses that I did not have before so before I did not have my rent payment I didn't have not have a car payment I did not have a car insurance payment I am one-half C's or more than half C's on electric and Wi-Fi and I did not have a credit card back in either yeah it had a lot more expenses and you probably will too so really take into consideration all those expenses and try to see if it's something that you are gonna be able to do and if you're not how are you gonna make it work are you gonna have to live with roommates are you gonna have to live at home are you gonna have to not buy a new car are you gonna have to not travel so you really have to think about all of that and be a really good planner and then be able to handle your finances and stuff like that because it is hard to live on a teacher's salary here in Arizona all right guys so but I said for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed it and if you did please give this video a thumbs up if you have any more questions that I did not answer or you want something that's clarified please ask me in the comments below and I'll get it to you as soon as I can yeah that's pretty much it I will see you guys in my next video bye

Channel: That One Happy Classroom

Views: 24,331

Rating: 4.9192548 out of 5

Keywords: Teacher, Teacher Vlog, A Day in the Life of a Teacher

Id: _yjERg8ITWM

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 23 2018