How I Survive on a Teacher's Salary

hi guys welcome back to 2.4 middle school I'm very excited about this video because so many people have asked about this topic and I think it's a really important aspect of teaching to discuss so today we're going to talk about money and how much I make how much I have to spend how much I've invested in my education in order to have the job that I do and this can be very uncomfortable I think that you know people feel like talking about money is a little bit rude or uncouth but in almost every situation I tend to believe that those things that were uncomfortable talking about are usually the things that kind of keep us in bondage and keep us from success and let me just preface this by saying that I am not good with money I'm definitely on a journey to become much more financially responsible and to save a lot more but I feel like one of the best ways to do that is in community and to have the most information possible and be able to talk to other people about it and get advice and I think particularly as women we don't talk about money very often and we're like not expected to be very savvy with our money sometimes there's a stereotype that women just spend spend spend not that that's entirely untrue for me but in general I just feel like it's healthy to talk about so let me tell you about how this video got started so many people have asked me this question in the past couple of years and so I thought about how to make this video and what to cover and I wanted this to be relevant to more people than than just people in my exact situation and it got really overwhelming teacher salaries are different from district to district and from state to state and the requirements to be a teacher and you know the the increase that you get from a master's is just so different everywhere and it was really going to be difficult for me to cover everything in one video so I was talking to my friend Latonya and she was like let's just open this up to everybody and get the perspectives multiple people so that people don't just have one view they can see what it's like all across the country and even all around the world and Latonya is actually very like financially savvy she used to work in banking so she was able to kind of organize this idea into a list of questions that we can all answer so I encourage anybody out there to make their own video just to add their voice to the conversation I feel like teachers voices on salary and on like wages don't get heard until we have a strike or until we're in like absolute crisis and there have been amazing teachers in Arizona and Oklahoma and West Virginia Kentucky lobbying and fighting for their students fighting for their fellow teachers and I love it and I think that one way that we could support them is to just make this information more readily available okay so let's get started with these questions number one is what state do live in and I live in California Southern California in the LA area and just know that California itself is very very diverse I actually grew up in rural Northern California where the cost of living and the wages are significantly lower than what they are here and I've looked at moving to like the San Francisco Oakland area and they're the wages and the cost of living is even higher so there's a huge variation in the state of California number two how many members are in your immediate household it's me and my husband and our two year old son Jensen number three are you a single or double income household both my husband and I are teachers actually so I'm we make similar salaries I think I currently make a little bit more than him because I have my master's and a lot of units swim all the way over to one side of the salary schedule and I'm gonna explain that in just a minute but he has more years than I do so he is actually currently pursuing his master's I think he'll be done in January and that's going to give him a fairly significant raise so we're going to get into all of those detail and just a minute here just going over the basics at first number four do you own or rent we rent a one-bedroom one-bathroom apartment with no washer/dryer no dishwasher just one little outside parking spot and it's about two thousand a month and that's a really really good deal we've been here for a while and they haven't increased our rent very much so we're really lucky if we ever have to move we're gonna have to pay a lot more in rent and of course we like have a goal of purchasing a home but around here it's minimum a million dollars usually quite a bit more than that so that's just one of the realities about Southern California is that housing is limited and cost a lot and it always accounts for a significant chunk of your paycheck but the weather is great and it's beautiful number five what is your highest level of education does your education level affect your pay in your district so I have a master's degree plus a bajillion units so I am all the way over on the pay scale so if I can just kind of like make an invisible chart for you right here in this corner you have the lowest amount that you could possibly make in my district every year that you work you move down the scale like this and there is a bit of an increase in salary for the additional education that you obtain you move this way on the salary schedule and you can make more as you go over here so if you're moving down in years like you've been in your district for a while and you also increase your education you end up like here on the salary schedule and this is more money than over here so for my husband what he noticed is that even though he was going down the salary schedule this way it kind of stagnated around like year ten and you didn't get much of a raise after a while but if you had a master's degree then there was a bigger raise so it's really good to look at that kind of stuff I'm not always great about looking at those things I don't have stuff memorized but my husband is really good about checking up on that seeing exactly you know what we're gonna be making the following year what we could do to earn more so I'm gonna look it up for my district here and just give you a sense of how much of an increase I get from having a master's degree okay so I am on step 5 even though this is my sixth year of teaching my first year I only taught 60% and it has to be 75% in order to count as a year on the salary schedule so it's like I never worked that year as far as like retirement goes and the salary schedule goes also if you ever like have a baby and you are out on maternity leave for more than 25% of the school year you're gonna lose that year at least in in my district or if you ever did like a job share thing where you were working like 50% you'd have to work for two years to move up one step on the salary schedule so just keep those kinds of things in mind okay so I'm on year five if I didn't have all of my extra education that I have beyond my credential I would be making $10,000 less than I currently am per year so that is pretty significant and I'm just looking at like these classifications and the way that things work is okay you get more if you have 15 units beyond your BA or 30 units beyond your BA or 45 but then in order to get to the econ you have to have your masters so I have my masters and BA plus 75 units so I'm all the way over here so at this point no more education will help me make any more money although I did see at the bottom here that if I get a PhD I'll get an extra thousand dollars a year but a PhD is like sixty thousand dollars so definitely not in my best interest to do that okay number six how much did it cost you to attain your degree are you still paying for your education and student loans okay ouch this is where things completely fall apart my education was astronomically expensive for me it costs a ton of money to become a teacher in California so I'm gonna try and keep this story short because I think I've told it multiple times on other videos you can check back for more information on any one of these topics but to get my bachelor's degree it took me seven years and there were a number of fact that led to that so for one I paid for all of my education except for my freshman year of college my parents helped me out with that to cover what I wasn't able to cover in scholarships but for let's say six years of my BA I paid for my own housing my own food my own gas my own car my own tuition my own bucks my own everything and this isn't cuz my parents didn't support me or anything this is just how their parents raised them and they raised me to be independent and go after what I wanted and I think they really trusted me to make good decisions but I didn't make good decisions I didn't have the skills or the knowledge to make good decisions and now I am facing the consequences of that so for me I was working and going to school and colleges in Southern California are like really impacted and you can't always get the classes that you need to graduate or you know like you need to keep like twelve units in order to stay on your parent's insurance and ended up being much higher by the time I was finally done the cost of living and I was like in Orange County in Orange County is very high I always had roommates we didn't spend much money I lived as cheaply as I could but I was working a part-time job as a piano and voice teacher for most of it and having to commute really far and work my schedule around like classes and my job and I was on like the hip hop team the dance team at Cal State Fullerton and just trying to fit in you know those things that I wanted to do and I like added a minor and I kept changing my major so it took me a really long time and I took out loans to cover my tuition but then I would always take out a little bit extra because I knew I needed to pay for books and I needed to pay for gas and over like this summer and Christmas break a lot of my students would be out of town and I couldn't teach and so I wouldn't get paid so I would need to have a little bit of extra money in my savings that I could pull from during those times when I wasn't making any money so over the course of seven years that really added up but I was just like well it's student loan debt someone had once told me that student loan debt is good debt no debt is good debt but I was like oh it doesn't really matter it's just student loans only I could go back in time and slap myself so after my seven years to get my bachelor's degree I got married like a week later so anyway that year I was getting my credential because in California you can't become a teacher just with a bachelor's degree except for in like emergency cases so credential takes about a year that was more student loans and in my program I had two student teach for a full school year so I taught high school which was really fun for an entire year but that means you can't work a regular job during the day a student taught during the day took classes in the evenings and still taught piano and voice lessons on evenings when I didn't have class or on the weekends but again that wasn't really enough to get us by so I relied on some of my student loans a few other things that cost money aren't like taking the tests to become a teacher if you take the sea bass which is like a hundred dollars you have to take the SI sets which are your subject matter competency so I took them for social studies and there are three and they each cost $75 can take them all together or at different times you can retake them if you fail but then you have to pay another $75 as I started applying for jobs which I finished my credential there were no history or PE jobs which were my two credentials that I had so then I went back and added an English credential and that test has four pieces so four pieces times $75 and then on top of all that we were in a recession in California especially Southern California during this time so there were not teaching jobs available once I got my credential so I had all of this student loan debt and my first year out I was working at an after-school program for about four hours a day for like $12 an hour my husband was actually working at a university at that time as a researcher and so you know in Southern California you really do need to have like two incomes in order to to make it unless you don't have any debt but my husband's like college story is really really similar to mine both of our parents were just like okay go to college we're really proud of you have fun with all those student loans so we both financed our college through student loans and looking back now we both say like cost of living and housing that's where like the biggest cost was so if we could have lived at home and gone to school that would have saved us so so much money but that wasn't an option for me because I lived out in the middle of nowhere and there was no university anywhere within miles so I had to move in order to go to college and for him there was no college with a kinesiology program near where he lived so he also moved to get the degree that he wanted so for people who are able to live at home while you go to school and just like save money on the on the housing that is a really great thing to do we're gonna be paying it off for years so anyway I wasn't making very much money that first year out so I decided to go back and get my master's degree as long as I still had like I had all this time during the day because they didn't need me at the after school program until like two so again check out student loans in order to cover tuition and books and have a little bit of savings because again like when it was Thanksgiving break or Christmas break I wouldn't have hours my next year out we were still really in like the depths of the recession but there was this part time history position that I'd be out 200 other candidates for and I was so thankful for this job and I remember that my paycheck had a one at the beginning of it so I didn't even make $2,000 a month I only taught three periods so I was thrilled to be working and I felt like I was really making money but I wasn't and then the other thing that you have to do in California is clear your credential through a process called bitsa which i think is now called induction and my district didn't offer that and so I had to go out of district two thousand dollars out of my own pocket for this required program at that job we were on like a ten month pay check deal so that program was literally more than ten percent of my salary so I would fight hard to make sure that that never happens to another new teacher again and I did like take that to the school board and I I fought hard against that and kind of like exposed that when I was in that district I was still getting my master's degree at that time as well and I remember thinking like I'm a teacher I work I should be able to pay for my tuition without taking out student loans so I didn't I got him like this payment plan but I was still hardly making any money so I made like the first payment or two and then I couldn't keep up with them and I just got a credit card and put my tuition on that credit card and I still have a balance on that credit card today so it's just tough when you don't actually make enough money to like cover the investment that you're putting into your education so let me just like go through this story faster so it took me five years altogether to finish my master's degree because I was teaching full time at the same time thank goodness the next year I did get a full-time teaching job it was like an hour away from where I attended school and nothing was on line I was doing this like pre PhD master's in history program is really intense very very difficult and it got really expensive and so I took out I had like federal loans a credit card credit union personal loan to cover the cost of all that so it took me 12 years altogether to pay for my own education and get a bachelor's and a credential and a master's so I'm very proud of the education that I have now because it took so much work to get it the problem is that now I have nearly a hundred thousand dollars in debt as it's gained interest in everything and and I've looked into all of the programs for repayment and income based repayment and teachers and all of that stuff so I am in programs and stuff to to get it may be paid back someday but just like on the surface without any kind of special programs my student loan payments are $900 a month so I'm a teacher than my student loan payments are $900 a month I'm a teacher and I went to school for 12 years like this is the thing like we expect doctors and lawyers to be paid a lot because they invest a lot in their education and they have a lot of knowledge but really it's the same with teachers okay so that was absolutely the longest part of this video I just want people to know how hard it is to become a teacher in California it's a lot of work and a lot of Hoops to jump through and a lot of money okay number seven how is your salary schedule structured starting-point max out salary and annual incremental increases okay I will tell you and my district is one of the much higher paying districts in Southern California they pay quite a bit but again keep in mind how much cost of living is around here there is no way to get a home for less than a million dollars maybe less than two million dollars so in my district you start at 58,000 not complaining about that that's good if you work for 38 years which I kind of can't imagine doing am I gonna work for 38 years oh that's a lot um and you have your education all the way over to here you would top out at a hundred and fifteen thousand so that's really really good that's what you would retire at it's important to look at what your like what you would max out at in a district because you're gonna be relying on that pension for longer than you think like you know when you're 25 and looking for a job so that's important let's see in my district again if you've got tons of education you can make six figures by like year thirteen so it's not bad and I think that every district needs to have a similar salary schedule to what we do if the cost of living is comparable let's see number eight where are you on your district salary schedule and you can kind of answer this as vaguely or as specifically as you would like so these are things I need to know I'm not even sure okay you're five all the way over okay I'm in the high 70s again not complaining about that although they do take out a ton from my paychecks taking home that much but that's where I am on the salary schedule hi we have a visitor oh you want to play the piano okay oh no no no I need this honey I need this sorry absolutely join a drink okay I think we should add to these questions now that I'm thinking about it like what are your major expenses per month just because income doesn't really mean anything without the context of like what your expenses are so for example for us our rent is two thousand a month we are tithers so we always give to our church we give away about a thousand dollars a month Jenson's day cares about fifteen hundred a month again my student loans are nine hundred a month but I'm in deferment right now we both have to have reliable cars because my husband is a traveling PE teacher and I'm responsible for the baby every day so let's see combined our car payments are probably around 700 plus car insurance probably puts that up close to another thousand again we just both have leftover debt from being really poor in college and then not making enough to get back our investment when we first started teaching the most of our money is spoken for by the time we get our paychecks and I don't want this to seem like a doom and gloom video I just want to be honest about the struggle but honestly this money really isn't something that like keeps me up at night worried because like I said we are tithers and we are Christians and we believe that God is our provider and there have been times when we had nothing zero dollars in the bank and people who didn't even know that we're just like I feel like I need to give you $200 numerous times we've been like on the brink of not knowing how we're gonna pay rent and God always provides so we are fine we just I know that I need to be a better steward of what God gives me and I love to give things away and I love to like shop with ethical companies but being transparent about this is part of my like journey to becoming a more responsible adult professional with my money sometimes I just like to ignore it and just like hope everything will work out but once start breaking everything down and really budgeting you realize how difficult it is and how how much bondage you're really in or how much bondage I'm in so we've got the Dave Ramsey stuff we've we know about you need a budget I've got the Mint app we're working on it we're working on it it's a process and it's hard but we're working ok so anyway let's continue with the questions I just threw that one in extra and do you supplement your income in any way we do supplement our income I coach volleyball my husband coaches basketball actually all that my school and then he coaches literally tournaments like three weekends a month and he has practice every single Saturday and those tournaments are full days so he works a full day 26 days a month or so so he definitely supplements our summer income by coaching travel ball like he does and he also trains kids in the afternoons so he's very busy but like he loves doing it so another question that we probably should put in here is like how many months do you get paid some people get paid twelve months both mine and Eric's districts pay us eleven months out of the year because that's how many months we work so in August neither of us will be receiving a paycheck so Derek saves his coaching money I try to just put aside enough every month to save for the month of August and then normally for like my entire life I've always like run summer programs or taught summer school this year they just didn't hire me for summer school they didn't need me so I was totally planning on that money and I'm out of luck so I am trying to like make money off of YouTube views or partnering brands doing sponsored posts and stuff like that so I'm waiting into stuff and trying to supplement my income that way because difficult to like do pick up a new summer job that I wasn't planning on and also drum figure out daycare for him and he still has to go days of summer touch my page spots we still have a daycare bill in the summer who wants to take them off my hands today anybody I feel like that would be another good question too like how much money do you spend on your classroom for a year and I would say like 500 minimum did you have additional deductions taken from your paycheck retirement union dues etc yes we have a son taking out for retirement attorney taking out for union dues a ton taking out for taxes another thing to take into consideration is health care like my district for example charges a lot of health care they'll take a lot out of your paycheck but my husband's charges less so we I like decline my health care in my district and I'm covered under my husband so that's another important thing to keep in mind because it can make a big difference in like what your actual take-home pay I'm number 12 do you feel your current salary is enough for you to make ends meet and live comfortably I feel like it is if it hadn't cost me so much to go through school so we choose to live in the area where we do we could move and live closer to families where we could have more help with childcare and you know maybe we could have like lived with parents for a few years or something like that we could have made those decisions and it would have saved us a lot of money but we just didn't so that's not our situation but like yeah honestly my salary is enough to live comfortably there's just so much variation and how much debt you have to get into to become qualified for the job that I have number thirteen are there any financial goals that you're still working towards and we are trying to get our debt paid off Jensen finally took my phone but I think the last question was just do you have any financial advice for teachers getting into this profession and it's definitely just to not take on a whole lot of debt if you can possibly help it and then you can just take home more of your paycheck and take advantage of opportunities for supplemental income like coaching or other things that your district offers work over the summer here's the thing like with a husband the reason that he's able to work so many hours outside of his regular job is since heshes just PE he doesn't have a lot of like raving to do or like lesson planning to do so he has like the mental capacity to work another job after school but whatever you can do to kind of streamline your teaching so that you do have something left over to give that's gonna make you more money or at least have the potential to make more money you know what I mean like the people that are doing TPT and spending 5 hours a day working on creating teachers and teachers products they've got the mental and physical energy left over after teaching to do that so as much as you can figure out a way to do that that's great like my current job this this year was very like mentally taxing it took a lot of planning time to teach all these different courses and stuff next year hopefully mentally it will be a little bit easier but honestly emotionally I have it so good like my kids are pretty well behaved for the most part and I've got the energy to do things like this for you guys this is why I do this for you guys I know that I have this emotional energy left over and I want to use it to help you guys and because my son is so little I don't have like all of the time or physical energy in the world but there are things that I can do me and Eric kind of believe that like you should always have two streams of income like because something could happen right like I didn't get summer school like I thought that I was going to so I need to have some other possible way to make at least a little bit of money that's why he worked so hard on his training business and his coaching because when you work for the government and your paycheck is dependent upon tax payers if there's a recession or something like that you could be let go and with teaching - it's not necessarily dependent on how hard you work or how effective you are it's usually just like when you got hired so you want to protect yourself a little bit and try to have a second stream of income if at all possible anyway I've got this little one in my lap and we need to go play or something or like go outside thank you so much for watching sorry this was super long and please make your own video to add to this car because just my experience isn't useful unless it's within the context of a bunch of other perspectives and experiences so that we can get a better picture of what it's like to teach and survive on a teacher's salary so thank you so much for watching guys I'll see you in my next video bye [Music]

Channel: too cool for middle school

Views: 111,835

Rating: 4.8863955 out of 5

Keywords: ethical fashion, sustainable style, fair trade fashion, baby boy, multicultural, us history, virgin islands, middle school, teaching, teacher, classroom, english, history, english teacher, history teacher, sixth grade, eighth grade, junior high, high school, education, classroom organization, vlogger, mommy vlogger, teacher vlogger, bulletin boards, classroom ideas, goals, teacher goals, mom style

Id: lhjtLpFXypg

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018