How It All Started

When I first started teaching in 2004, I brought home $1810.12. It’s probably weird that I would remember that, but it leans to my obsession with holding on to personal memorabilia.

I graduated from college May of 2004, and got my first teaching job just one month later. I didn’t really have a concept of salaries and money at that time. Before graduating, I was a writing mentor making $7.25 an hour, so when the district told me that my starting salary would be thirty, plus thousand dollars, I felt like I hit the lottery. Which is why I felt like it was okay for me to do away with my 2000 Pontiac Grand Am and buy a 2003 drop-top, snow white Ford Mustang. In hindsight, I should have kept driving that Pontiac Grand Am until the wheels came off.

Once I assumed the responsibilities of a working adult, I quickly learned just how little I was actually making. My parents lived about an hour from the school I was working at, so my original idea of saving money by living at home wasn’t a realistic option. I leased a tiny apartment, 565 sq ft, more like a studio, near Northpark Mall. The view was everything. Surrounded by scenic pines, with a rustic, outdoorsy feel. The window in the living room welcomed the sunlight, and splashed its warmth onto every corner of my space. I remember picking out a bright red sofa with primary-colored pillows. It was a graduation gift from my dad. Five hundred bucks from T&D Furniture store. It felt like it was worth millions of dollars. And three years down the road when I had to get rid of it because it wouldn’t fit inside my new apartment in Atlanta, I cried like a baby.

My mom supplied the the costly sauder entertainment center, and the brand-new fat-back tv. I took my graduation money and Martha Stewart’d the rest of the apartment. It felt like home.

By the first of August, I was still riding high, anticipating the end of the month when I would get my first paycheck.

(Insert disclaimer: It’s always a great idea to learn to budget. That would have erased the shock factor when that check landed in my Wachovia account.)

I got my check on the 31st, and was broke on the 2nd:

$635.00 Rent

$317.00 Car Payment

$177.00 Car Insurance

$250.00 Household Utilities

$60.00 Cell Phone Bill

$150.00 Groceries

You do the math. That left me with about $232.00 to live off of for the month. I haven’t even factored in gas, student loan payments, or a stash for emergencies. That’s when I learned how to be a ninja at deferring my student loan payments. There was no way to pay for them and live too.

As a teacher, I was responsible for six periods of English II (state test). I was responsible for staying up late to grade over one hundred essays, decorating my classroom and buying supplies when the EEF money ran out. Rewards and incentives for the kids? All me. Staying after school to help tutor kids…for free? All me.

I remember thinking that was the norm, and the way of life for all teachers. I learned how to live off $50.00 a week, and eat Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers from Wendy’s off the dollar menu on the weeks I fell short. Which happened a lot. Between borrowing money from my parents or the local Check-Into-Cash, I found myself on this never ending cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But don’t get me wrong. I had no real responsibilities back then. Even though it sounds absurd now, it didn’t feel that way to me in the beginning. I was fresh out of college. My first job. I felt like it was just something I had to get through.However, now that I have a child, I can understand the panic some of my coworkers felt every month. I remember being in the teacher’s lounge listening to the heart-wrenching stories of teachers who were working two and three jobs and were still short every month. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how they had time to work those jobs, because so much of our time went to our students, even when the bell rang. We were still on the clock, with no overtime.

In the summer of 2006, I moved to Atlanta. And just like that, I wasn’t struggling anymore. My salary went from $33,000 to $45,000 in a matter of miles. I hadn’t even earned my Master’s at that point in time.

That created a feeling and thought process in me. I started to think that I could never be successful in my home state. It made me feel like all the teachers I knew would be better off if they just left. If not, they would be on this never-ending paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. And who wants to live like that? I knew that I didn’t, and from the moment I crossed that Georgia line, I haven’t looked back. Not in the sense of not working in Mississippi. But in the sense that I wanted to control my own financial future and I wasn’t going to let some “teacher” title dictate my worth.

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