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Make Smarter Decisions

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Rounding Out My Resume and Leaving Nothing to Chance

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If you happened to be on Twitter today, you may have noticed my tweet that it was my 46th first day of school. It was also day one of my 30th year of being an educator. I’ve spent a lot of time in schools in my 51 years and even though I’ve left full-time (tenure track) public school employment, I still went to school today.

In the first 29 years of my career, I had a lot of jobs! I was a high school science teacher, elementary school science lead teacher, assistant principal, college professor, student teaching supervisor, long-term high school substitute teacher, and doctoral candidate committee member – in that order.

But there has been one big gap on my resume. If you’re a teacher or parent of kids in this age group, maybe you noticed it. I’ve never taught at a junior high or its contemporary replacement – a middle school.

And that changed today.

I took a position as a 7th grade science teacher for a few months to replace a teacher who is on maternity leave. I’m rounding out my resume this fall because I’m not sure when the last time I’m going to teach will be.

As someone who has reached “FI” but is only partially “RE” (financially independent – retired early), this was my chance to say I’ve taught and worked with students at every level – pre-kindergarten through doctoral candidates.

And I’m not sure how many people there are who’ve been lucky enough to do that. Maybe someday, I’ll write about all that I’ve learned through the years and how it helped me grow and become a better person, educator, and leader.

But back to the reason I’m teaching again now. I’ve shared in the past that my New York State Retirement System tier requires me to have 30 years of service credit or I will have significant pension penalties. If I retire with 29+ years of service but not 30, my pension will be $14K less per year for the rest of my life.

Right now, I have just over 27.3 years of credit – even though it’s my 30th year of work. I took two years off from public education and taught at a private college after earning my doctorate. It was a great job but if I worked at a public university (which I switched to after two years), I’d be in my 30th year of service right now – even though I can’t collect my pension until I’m 55.

This is where “leaving nothing to chance” comes in.

It’s been suggested to me that $14K a year isn’t really all that much and that I might be able to earn that other ways. Our Women Who Money and Women’s Money Talk websites are growing and I could put even more energy into those. I could do more decision (life) coaching or write a book. I could create products, we could consider buying more rental properties, or we could start websites with two other great domain names we own.

All of those are great ideas and maybe I could make more than $14K a year. But remember, that $14K a year in my pension is for the rest of my life.

I’m close enough now that I’m not willing to gamble on losing that money for what could be 30 or 40 years of retirement (or close to $500K.) After all, I’m “swimming against the tide of aging” as I work each day to get Younger Next Year! I hope to have one long, healthy, and active retirement.

So what’s the easiest way to keep earning service credit and still be able to enjoy a partial “ER” lifestyle?

Work a few months a year in a school to earn credit and earn a few months credit teaching online. It’s the best of both worlds!

I’ve been teaching online through a public high school “cooperative” for the last five years and it takes 3-4 hours per week. If I only did that to earn credit, it would take me until I was 59 or 60 years old to reach 30 years of service – if nothing changes.

If I couldn’t stand teaching anymore or couldn’t find a short-term job, I might consider it. I’d lose 4 or 5 years of my pension (I wouldn’t want to collect until I hit the 30-year milestone) and about $150K – $200K.

By teaching in a school a few months each year for the next two or three years, I should be able to reach 30 years of service as I turn 55. I did a “fill-in” teaching test run this spring and had a great time! It met my needs, the students’ needs, and the needs of the district and teacher who was on maternity leave. A win for everyone!

I also worked in a school that was very different than any other school I’ve ever been in. I firmly believe that more experiences you have, the more you can grow. And I’m hoping to do a little more growing in my new middle school placement.

It’s an adventure too because the school is 3.5 hours from our home – so we have a great little furnished apartment! It’s also in a beautiful “resort” area near the Adirondack mountains. It’s a part of the state we’ve spent little time in, so we’re looking forward to being tourists while we’re here too!

And when the job is over in December, our plan is to head to Sarasota for the winter! We don’t plan to come back until there’s little chance we’ll see snow! We’re putting our snowbird housing plan to work and we plan to spend four months in Florida. We shifted from feeling like vacationers to residents last year and we were only there (on and off) for three months. This year we should feel even more at home!

For those of you who are bigger risk-takers, I’d love to have your courage. But for now – I’m taking the safer route. Could I change my mind? Definitely. We’re taking it one month – one school – and one job at a time and we’ll see how it goes.

What would you do? Would you tie yourself down for a few months a year (for the next few years) and to earn the credit? Or would you leave it to your entrepreneurial self to make up that money? Do you think age plays a big factor here?

Deciding to Take Different Jobs Has Made Me a Better Person

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It might not seem like a big deal to change jobs throughout your career now, but it used to be more the norm for people to work for the same company for 30 or 35 years before retiring. And in teaching, it is still the norm for many.

I earned my Bachelor’s degree in three years and stayed a fourth year to get my M.S. degree. A few days after graduation, I was hired as a high school science teacher – just a month after my 22nd birthday. It was the fall of 1989 and my plan was to teach until I was 55 and then retire. That’s just what teachers did unless they moved out of state or changed careers.

In my retirement system tier, I’d have more than 30 years of service by then and I could collect my pension. The “golden handcuffs” keep many teachers tied to the same state and losing seniority, tenure rights, and your step on the pay scale often keeps teachers in the same district.

There are advantages to staying in one job for 30+ years. A few of them include building deep ties to your school and community, developing strong programs, and each new school year becomes “business as usual” – just with new faces.

But some of those same advantages can be disadvantages too. I taught in a school district that was similar to the one I attended. It was also similar to the college I attended, in terms of diversity of the population. You build deep ties to a familiar community which can limit your understanding and respect for those that are different.

You complain about the same things at work year after year too – because you don’t know what it’s like to work anywhere else. You might have more than most teachers in a similar position and not realize it or you might not have things others schools and students have. And this can be true even if you network with people in other areas. Business as usual might reduce stress, but it might limit your growth and potential too.

A Change of Plans

After 11 years of teaching, I moved buildings to become the lead science teacher at our elementary school. This was my first step in viewing my profession and our community in a very different light. As a high school chemistry teacher, I saw motivated students with few learning challenges. At the elementary school, I taught every student and I certainly found out I had a lot to learn from my elementary school colleagues.

When I started as an administrator at the primary school level, I learned even more. This time I learned to work with families that were very different than mine and those I had worked with in the past. I also spent four years in a doctoral program with inner city and rural school colleagues. This helped fill in some gaps in my understanding of the challenges and rewards of working in different settings.

If I stayed a high school teacher, I might be a very different person today. Less empathetic, less understanding, less educated, and less caring – not because I wanted to be those things, but because I didn’t even know how different it was to work anywhere else or be with people who were different than me.

Making a Bigger Leap

I left the school district I worked in for 22 years to become an Assistant Professor of Education at a private college. The shift from K-12 education to higher education taught me some important lessons too. I was still teaching – just older students. And there were still faculty meetings that could mostly have been handled in a memo.

What I learned was that I definitely couldn’t stand the private college “show” and how they spent money. I looked for jobs in public universities and felt much more at home in the two colleges I taught at over the next few years. I taught my first transgender students (that I knew of) there and had more diverse students and colleagues than I had ever had before. It didn’t make teaching any different – but it made me happy to be around people that didn’t all look and think like me.

More and More Learning

Now that I get to choose if I work and the places I work, I am excited to keep learning new things around new people. I just finished a 10-week short-term teaching job in a very small school district. With less than 200 kids in the high school, I got to know a lot of them in my short-time there.

Kids in this school seemed to look out for one another more than in the other schools I’ve worked in. I think that when you are with the same 40 kids for 13 years, getting along matters more.

I also do some work with high school students online. One of my students this year lived in a half-way house and had two babies. She was determined to pass her class and graduate to go on to nursing school. I loved her determination and late-night emails. Many of my other students are in alternative education placements (they don’t handle regular high school settings well or have discipline problems.) Online learning gives these students more options to take a variety of courses in a setting that meets their needs. Without this job, I would have missed working with older students in challenging situations.

Taking Something from Each Experience

If you haven’t had the chance to work in a different setting or with a different group of people, I hope you see how it can help you reflect and think differently – from both good and not so good experiences. It would have been fine to stay in my very first classroom and teach for 30+ years but I think I’m a better person for the job changes I’ve made and the experiences I’ve had.

*Update! I’m starting a new job tomorrow! 9/4/18 – new city, new grade level. Post coming soon! Rounding out my career Pre-K through working with doctoral students. I’ll be teaching MIDDLE SCHOOL until Christmas! Covering for a woman on maternity leave!

What have you learned from changing jobs or careers? How did you grow?

Two Years of Blogging, Not Making Much Money But Richer Than Ever

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Things have been quiet on the blog the last month or so because I have had to prioritize my time. When I chose to take a teaching job for a few months, this was in addition to working with some student teachers. These jobs both give me service credit in the New York State Teachers Retirement System.

Since I have four years until I can start taking my pension, I am trying to maximize my service credit and hit a milestone of 30 years of service. Without hitting that milestone, I will earn about $14K less per year in retirement. But I’m also trying to earn credit while being able to travel, enjoy winters in Florida, and work only “seasonally” when we are in New York when school is in session.

And if you add in working with Amy from Life Zemplified to start two new websites since early March and you can probably see why I had to make choices about what I could get done and still get some sleep each night 😉

What are the websites? Women Who Money answers money questions in informational posts. We also post reviews of books, podcasts, apps, and various products we believe our readers will benefit from.  We “level” our content to try to help readers no matter where they are on their money journey! We also have pages that include over 550 women’s personal finance blogs, podcasts, and personal finance businesses on the site. We control the content on Women Who Money and we strive to write evidence-based posts that readers can trust.

Our other site is Women’s Money Talk. We bought the two domains at the same time thinking that one site would be informational and the other site would be story-based. Amy and I curate women’s personal finance articles to be featured on Women’s Money Talk. We also have a great collaboration and share posts with Ty from Camp FIRE Finance! Check out our blog and podcast feed and scroll through the latest blog posts and podcasts by awesome ladies writing or talking in the personal finance space.

My Takeaways from Two Years of Blogging

Since I just realized last week was the two-year anniversary of my blog, I thought I’d take time to talk about what I’ve learned. I started my blog as a way to share what I learned about decision-making in my doctoral program. I wrote a number of posts that included a decision-making framework people could use as a model and I talked about how we used it numerous times to help make smarter decisions.

I also offered free coaching services to readers to help them make tough decisions when they were struggling with what to do. In two years, I volunteered time to help eight people. Some of the decisions I coached people on were making decisions about relocating, changing jobs or careers, and returning to school to further their careers.

It was awesome working with each person and I hope I brought value to their decision-making process. I’ve now decided to charge for my services after a free consultation. It’s nice to volunteer time when I have it but time is at a premium right now.

I’ve made a few hundred dollars on the blog from affiliate links from products I have used and recommend. This has covered my Siteground hosting costs and the fees from Sucuri to keep my website from being hacked again. And yes, those are affiliate links. You don’t pay more when you use a link but I get a small percentage of any purchase you might make or a small set affiliate fee.

Transparency is an important part of blogging. And with the new GDPR regulations (from Europe), I have also updated my privacy policy. My guess is you’ve received emails about this from other businesses you subscribe to recently too. I won’t spam you or sign you up for anything you don’t want. Honestly, I don’t even know how to find email addresses you entered to get this post. Clearly, the technical part is not my thing!

There are some bloggers who are wildly successful and make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each month. But if you are thinking that you can make money easily on your blog, you really need to think again. Is there a chance you could make it big in blogging? Sure. But I could have made thousands of dollars working a part-time job or put more effort into starting a business. But that’s not why I started it in the first place, so I’m pleased that it has paid for itself.

So how am I richer if I’m not really making any money?

My life is richer because of the people I’ve met and the places we’ve gone since I started the blog.

The first year I mainly wrote content, coached people, and tried to make sense of blogging. And I did that as I worked full-time – which didn’t leave much energy to do other things.

What’s really amazing is what has happened in the last nine months.

We traveled to Longmont, CO and attended the PopUp Business School at Mr. Money Mustache’s headquarters. We have 80 new PopUp friends from all over the country and a few other countries too! And I regularly talk to four women I met their as we work to define our businesses and futures. We’ve also met up with other PopUp attendees in Florida and in New York this winter and one of the cofounders of PopUp and his wife stayed with us for a few nights in Florida too.

Our Younger Next Year Facebook group was created because of Twitter discussion I was having with a PopUp attendee. Somehow I got into a conversation the PopUp friend and Jonathan Cheveraux – one of Canada’s leading financial gurus. He runs the Financial Independence Hub and has authored two books – Findependece Day and the Victory Lap. The second one he wrote with Michael Drak who is also in the YNY group. We went and met them both as we celebrated Jonathan’s 65th birthday last week – an OAS (Old Age Security) check party in Toronto! (A 3-hour drive for us.) Really terrific people with similar goals for the future – living as healthy as we can, for as long as we can. We also had another YNY FB member meetup in Florida this winter too! If you want to join a fun group, come and hang out online with us! We’re 465 members strong now too!

And we can’t forget the four days in Dallas at FinCon last October. I won’t name who we met and hung out with those days (because there is NO way to include everyone!) But they were one fine group of people! And after hanging out with them in person, I can tell you they were as great as they are online. We’ll be heading back to FinCon this year too. More fun times ahead!

One couple we missed at FinCon were the bloggers behind the awesome blog, Freeom is Groovy. They couldn’t make it so we dressed up to be them at the FinCon Halloween party! But we did catch up with them in person this spring on our drive back from Florida. And as you might have guessed, they’re pretty groovy people. I’m glad our path to Florida will take us right by their soon to be Groovy Ranch. I’m thinking we’ll be dropping by for some visits!

In addition to chatting with Amy a number of times most days about our two new websites, another blogger I message with often is “Penny” from She Picks Up Pennies. Penny is a teacher, so we certainly have a lot to talk about! And if you don’t follow her, you should. She is bright, articulate, caring, witty and she’s making a difference. You’d all be lucky to have a Penny in your circle of friends.

I’ll probably need to add a Part 2 to this when I realize I’ve missed some key people! That’s one of the problems with naming names. But it’s also the beauty of having SO many amazing experiences this last year.

If all of that happened in 9 months, what does the future hold? We can’t wait to find out!

So if I missed you – I apologize! And I hope you’ll forgive me because I’ve been writing this post for a week and I need to hit publish tonight. And I have to get up to teach at 5 am…. Six more school days and I’ll hopefully get back to posting here more frequently. But the kids come first right now. Priorities you know. They get the best me everyday because they deserve it.

More soon and I hope you are all well!

Photo Credit: dlritter@freeimages .com

Our First Year Snowbirding – Feeling Like Residents Not Vacationers

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This post may contain affiliate links. See the full disclosure here.
Siesta Key Beach

We just returned to New York after spending part of the winter as snowbirds in Sarasota, Florida. With both kids off to college, this was the first year we were able to spend more than 5 or 6 days in a row at our condo near Siesta Key!

After our lake house remodel was finished in January, we moved into the house and then headed south! We spent most of Feb, March, and the first week in April enjoying the Sunshine State. We did fly home a few times so that I could work with student teachers; a job that is helping me accrue more credit in the retirement system.

I explained a little bit more about my $14K/year retirement system issue in my last post, I Just Took a Teaching Job – No Fooling. And I started the maternity leave teaching job today. It was the first time I’ve been in a high school classroom teaching in 17 years! But it’s not a tenure-track position and I’ll be done June 22nd. There are no more full year jobs in my plans at this point!

But today I’ll focus on the time we spent in Florida and explain some of the positives and negatives of feeling like residents not vacationers!

What was great?

The weather. No surprise on this one! We endured below zero, nasty winter conditions in New York in December and January (while living in a not very insulated cottage!) So sunshine and warm temperatures felt better than we could have imagined. We saw a light rain twice and the temperatures ranged from the mid-60’s to the upper 80’s! But most days were 75-80 and sunny. EXACTLY what we like.

The pace.  After being stuck inside and working in New York most of the winter in past years, vacations meant getting outside! We always felt like we needed to be out enjoying every minute our of our vacation. If it was sunny, we felt pressured to be at the beach or pool, out on a bike ride or taking in some local attraction.

This year, we did a lot of the same things but without the stress of maximizing every minute of the day. We walked for miles (in our quest to be Younger Next Year) and came home enjoyed coffee and breakfast (oatmeal for you YNY friends!) We’d do some work and then ride bikes. And then we’d just do whatever we felt like doing. The stress of getting in every last minute of “vacation” was gone.

More visitors. We always felt like visitors, so having people come and visit us only happened a few times over the 5+ years we’ve owned the condo. This year, we had company every couple of weeks! It was SO much fun to show people the area where we live. These weren’t long visits, but it still allowed us to connect and see family and friends, including those we met last fall in Longmont at the PopUp Business School!

Meeting people. In Disconnecting to Make Connections, I shared that I was really trying to meet more people in our condo association. My goal was to be able to say hello to people by name, rather than becoming good friends at this point. We also had a wonderful Easter dinner with 50 people from the association in the club room of the condo property. And I did get to meet one of our Younger Next Year group members for a great hike too!

Crowds at Sunset

What were the problems?

The mail. We ran into a few issues with the getting our mail forwarded to the condo, but we kind of expected that. It took almost two weeks for the mail to get to us and now that we’re home, it’s still going to take that long to get it re-routed. It wouldn’t be a problem, but a few of our small local municipalities still do everything by snail mail. And they don’t have long periods between sending the bill and the due date. We also have some rents being paid and a few side gig checks that come in the mail. The waiting game is on. I have notes all through my calendar to make sure the bills and checks actually show up.

We may look into an alternative like the Traveling Mailbox this fall. That way, no matter where we are – we can get our mail (as long as we have data or an internet connection.) If you have other ideas, let me know!

Healthcare worries. We are working very hard at staying healthy, but things happen. There is an option through our health care called the “Home Away” program, but we weren’t gone long enough to use it. It would assign us a primary care doctor in Sarasota and we would have coverage. But we still wouldn’t have coverage (other than ER care) if we were traveling anywhere else. We’ll probably try that next year, but we still have worries about traveling and health coverage. Again, any ideas? It’s on the summer list of things to look into!

Homeowner issues. We used to own 16 toilets, but after selling our house – we only own 14! And even though none of those leaked, one of our showers in the condo started leaking on our neighbor downstairs. We caught it early, but we had to quit using it and rip it out. We knew we’d have to do it eventually, but when you own property – there’s always something to fix!

Lack of time. Even though we were there for a couple of months this year, there were still SO many things we didn’t get to see or do. So even though I was happy with our pace, I still had hoped to do a few more things in Sarasota. We never went to the Farmer’s Market or the beautiful library a few miles away. And we’d like to get more involved and volunteer in the community. We’re looking forward to seeing and doing a lot more next year!

And we even have one “neutral” point to share! TRAFFIC!

Cars As Far As You Can See

The only reason we are neutral on this is that we chose a condo within walking or biking distance to anything we needed and most of the things we’d ever want to do during peak season. Siesta Key Beach has been named the #1 beach in the country on and off for the last decade. And people have found it!

If you want to get to the turquoise waters and white sugar sand from mid-February through mid-April, you have to go first thing in the morning or you won’t find a parking spot. We walk or ride our bikes, so it doesn’t bother us at all. It’s all about location, location, location!

We hope that spring will come to the northeast soon! We hit snow starting in Virginia on our way back from Florida on April 7th! And it was 22 degrees when I went to school today. Trying to be patient but we’re ready for nicer weather here too!

Thanks for reading about our first-year snowbird adventures! If you have any questions, just let me know in the comments. I think it was a lot like “slow travel” and I’m going to read more from people who post about that to see if our experiences were at all similar.

I Just Took a Teaching Job…No Fooling

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Covered Bridge Near School Where I’ll Be Teaching!

It’s been a couple of weeks since I updated life in the Make Smarter Decisions household! And for good reason. We’ve been busy enjoying some family time and getting some beach days in before our first year of snowbirding is over. I’ll write more about that soon, but we are super happy about our decision to spend more time in Florida this winter!

If you’re a new reader, you can check out our snowbird housing plan here. That plan has changed a little since we scaled up our lake house renovation. But you’ll learn how we’re using a foreclosure and an estate sale property to spend the best parts of the year in two different states.

Hanging out in the sunshine state has really improved our fitness levels! We are following the Younger Next Year and Thinner This Year exercise and nutrition “rules” and we’re loving it. We are both down close to 10 pounds and we feel SO much better. This isn’t any crazy health plan – no cleanses and nothing special to buy. Just sound rules you can follow the rest of your life. We’re up to 350 members in our Younger Next Year FB group now and I’ll write more about this soon too. (The list of draft posts is growing!!)

I am also purposefully practicing disconnecting to make connections with people I see every day in Florida. I haven’t gone out and joined any groups because we won’t be here long, but I am glad that I know a few of my neighbors and that I can carry on conversations and remember details about their lives.

I’ve also been really busy with our new website – Women Who Money! Amy from Life Zemplified and I are working hard to build a site that provides financial information and is inspiring to women – no matter where they are on their money journey. If you haven’t checked it out, please do! We’d love feedback and we are happy to host guest writers! We are also looking for inspiring women’s money stories for interviews. Leave me a comment or send an email if you are interested in finding out more. (Maybe you’ve thought of starting a blog or you’d like to try writing an article? This is a great way to give it a try! You don’t have to be a great writer – you just have to want to do it!)

And this is all in addition to a couple of very part-time jobs I’m still doing. Back when I wrote the post Finding the Cure for One More Year Syndrome last spring, I explained that I can’t “officially” retire from education and collect my pension until I turn 55. And that’s still 4 years away. I also still need to earn 31 months of service credit to meet a major pension milestone – 30 years of service.

If I don’t meet that milestone, I have a few options. I can take a reduced pension at 55 and just go on with life. My pension would be about $29,000/year. Or I can wait until I’m 56 to collect and keep earning service credit. If I’m not at 30 years though, there is still a big penalty. I could keep waiting to collect until I made the 30-year milestone and each year I haven’t collected reduces the penalty. At 62, I could collect my full pension (with no penalty) even if I don’t reach the 30-year milestone.

My full pension is about $43,000/year (based on my three consecutive highest years of earning as an administrator before I left to teach at the college level six years ago.)

That’s a $14,000 difference. Since my longevity calculator shows that I could live into my 90’s (Dad’s 87, Mom’s close to 80) – that $14,000/year could be close to $500,000 by the time I’m 90!

I’ve had people suggest that I could just quit earning service credit and earn money other ways. That could definitely work, but I’m not willing to gamble losing up to half a million dollars at this point. I’d rather keep working at it slowly on a part-time schedule to see if I can do it- even if I have to wait to collect my pension for a few years.

So how do I earn 31 months of service credit if we are snowbirding and I’m not working full-time? Good question!

I teach online and earn retirement system credit. This is a location-independent job and it only takes 3-4 hours per week. It also gives me about 3 months of service credit each year. I expect to earn 15 more months of credit from teaching online before I turn 55.

This brings the months of service credit I need down to 16.

So what options do I have to earn the credit?

  1. Keep teaching online past 55 at 3 months/year. I’d estimate hitting 30 years of service at age 60. This would prevent me from collecting my pension for 5 years, but I’d collect my full pension earlier than age 62 and we’d have a lot of freedom!
  2. Work with student teachers from state universities to earn credit. (I did that this year because we were at home during the lake house renovation. I really enjoy it, but the pay is TERRIBLE and I only earn a day of service for each student I work with. This option prevents us from traveling and is not a good return for my time.)
  3. Take a full-time teaching job for a year (K-12 public school or university) and do some subbing for a few months in one other year. This would guarantee I could collect my pension at 55, but it would also be a tremendous amount of work to create lesson plans for just one year. I have no interest in being a new teacher again 😊
  4. When we are in New York (fall, spring) work as a per diem sub on occasion or take temporary full-time teaching jobs filling in for maternity leaves or short-term assignments.

Which options best fit our current lifestyle?

I pulled our “end goals” (the ones we use to make decisions) and reviewed them:

  • Maximize My Health/Wellness – Extremely Important (EI)
  • Create a Flexible, Location Independent Lifestyle – Very Important (VI)
  • Commit to Grow/StrengthenRelationships – Important (I)
  • Continue Personal Growth – Important (I)
  • Increase Wealth – Somewhat Important (I)

When we looked at our options and these goals…

#1 works! The online teaching meets everything except my desire to collect that pension sooner!

#2 doesn’t work at all! I basically volunteered and although I want to help our next generation of teachers, state universities have to get a clue about what they are asking supervisors to do for a few hundred dollars.

#3 is not a smart decision because I simply don’t want to be in New York for a full year ever again!

#4 – An interesting option! We plan to be in New York for at least four months during the school year, so working a few days a week or for a few weeks at a time is a good option to earn credit for a few years. And I’d still have summers off!

Now back to the title of this post. We decided to give option #4 a try this year!

I’ve accepted a teaching job (filling in for a maternity leave) from mid-April through the end of June! I’ll be teaching chemistry, physics, and general science in a very small, rural school district about 90 minutes from our house. They advertised for a certified substitute for 5 months and couldn’t find anyone! I haven’t taught in a small school and I haven’t taught science at this level for 17 years! It should be a lot of fun and it will definitely be a challenge (but a good one!)

We’ll be staying in the small town during the week and we’ll head home on the weekends. They even have some jobs for my husband to do, so we’ll both be involved in the small school community. The salary I negotiated is plenty to cover my teaching and our housing. And I’ll earn another 2+ months of service credit toward retirement.

If this works out, it may really change how we think about earning those last months of service credit. My certifications are HIGHLY sought out by districts all across the state. We may look at “traveling teaching” (or administration) as an option during the spring and fall. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing that because school districts don’t pay substitutes very much! This may need to change in the near future because of teacher shortages that are already happening all over the state (and country!)

I could easily find work in different states, but that wouldn’t help me earn New York state credit – and that’s the goal in earning my full state pension.

I doubt that I will work enough to reach 30 years of service by age 55 because I don’t want to substitute every day we are in New York. But short blocks of time for a couple of years might be the answer. I can earn service credit, extra cash, and it will still allow us to travel and spend most of the year doing what we want to do.

So what do you think of our plan? Would you just stop working now and take the $29,000/year at 55 and try to go write a book or start a business that could generate cash to replace the $14,000/year? Maybe we should just be happy with what we have and not worry about that money? I’d love to know what I might not be considering! It’s hard to think about giving up that kind of cash for the rest of my life.

Happy Easter!

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Note: Ideas and opinions on MakeSmarterDecisions.com are simply the results of my own experiences, and they are not intended to advise or offend. MakeSmarterDecisions.com should be viewed and shared for educational and entertainment purposes only. My posts are based on my personal experiences, and all readers should consider consulting a professional or specialist in a given area (financial, retirement, real estate, etc.) before making any decisions. See full disclosures under the Home Tab.
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