It’s getting untenable. I can’t keep on doing this.
Don’t know how long “this” has gone on, but it feels like it’s been forever. I’m working ten, twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Maybe longer than that. It’s 3:30 in the morning. By the time I finish writing this post, it’ll be time to get up and get going. By “get up and get going” I mean feed the dog and myself and then come back to the computer. Don’t know what time I went to bed last night, but it was late. The “workshops” I’m having to take to earn another $2,400 this summer (one of several tasks that have to be done to show I have done the course prep for the online feature writing section) turn out not to be what I would think of as idle on-the-job training workshops, but actual courses.
Yes. Yesterday afternoon I arrived home at 5:00 p.m. with homework! As though I had time for anything above and beyond the four hours a day in the classroom this thing requires. The instructor expects a documented and cited research paper, due today! By the time I finished that and fell into bed, I was so exhausted I didn’t even remember to lock the damn back door. Wouldn’t the roving burglars have loved that, if they’d come a-visiting tonight?
I feel like I’m tethered to the computer. I’m not getting any exercise at all. Not that I would get much if I could break free from the keyboard for any length of time: ten minutes ago, when the dog went out into the wee-hours darkness, it was 90 degrees out there! In this heat, even a walk around the block is more than I can contemplate, to say nothing of climbing hills (not that I can afford $2 a day to get into the city park) and riding bicycles.
At least for godsake when I was schlepping to GDU I had to hike a half-mile in to the office and climb up a couple flights of stairs.
When I wake at three o’clock in the morning after three, maybe four hours of sleep, what’s roiling through my mind is the scalding question of what on earth I’m going to do when I can’t keep working like this. I can’t get by without the piddling income I’m earning. Financially I’m barely making it. But this can’t go on forever.
“Forever” is likely to be a lot shorter eternity than I planned: sooner or later this is going to make me sick.
And what am I doing it for? For fourteen flicking thousand bucks a year?
This is insane. I’m working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a poverty wage? I’d do better cleaning house! At 80 bucks a day, I’d make $20,000 a year, much of it under the table. And get some exercise in the bargain. Figure in the state’s tax increase, and the 14 grand a year I’m earning now puts a munificent $10,780 in my pocket!
I guess what I’d better do is see if I can get some sort of menial job. That would gross $12,000 or $14,000, but I’d only have to work 8 hours a day at it, a big improvement on 16 hours.
Problem is, I’ll have to dumb down the résumé. How do I explain the kind of work I was doing at GDU without admitting to an advanced degree or two? No one is going to hire a Ph.D.—or even an M.A. or a B.A.—into the kind of job that earns minimum wage or less.
What do I have to show for all these health-crushing hours of work?
Yesterday, Funny made all of $10. Day before, it made something like 8 cents. Over the past week, it’s made a grandiose $52.23. Before we bitch too much about that, we must say that it hits the goal. To get me out of one section of freshman comp a year, FaM has to earn about $50 a week.
But to make it do that, I’m working a good six to eight hours a day on it! Eight hours a day to earn $2,600 a year?????
Editorial work earns a helluva lot more than that, but there’s almost none of it out there. By the hour it pays more, sure. But by the job? It pays about the same: I’m earning around $250 a month reading detective novels. Little other work to speak of is coming in.
Teaching a few adjunct courses, which believe me can easily absorb eight or ten hours a day, pays the 14 grand. So if you add up the teaching, the editing, and the blogging income, you come to something like $19,600. Gross. Cut 23% out of that and you get a take-home of $15,000. Since that exceeds the Social Security limitation, it’s a liability: it means a chunk of my Social Security income will be taken away, cutting the total gross to something more like $15,000. Even with the contract income going into the S-corporation, the teaching income alone exceeds the SS limitation.
Still, add the teaching and freelance income to the 15 grand of Social Security, and it’s almost not bad. But in a major American city, $30,000 is not good. It’s poverty-level income. I’m getting by, but just barely. All it will take is one major expense—replace the air conditioner, replaster the pool, reroof the house—and I’m screwed big time. And if something happens to to put me out of commission, like the fall that wrenched my arm out of its socket, the result will be the same: screwed, screwed, ge-screwed.
I’ve got to get a break from this grind. Last night I couldn’t even take Cassie to her agility training (there’s a break for you: running around a field with a dog in 100-degree heat!), because I had to write a research paper. Sunday I couldn’t go to church (again!!) because I had to finish a rush job for the detective-novel publisher. And work on the Carnival of Personal Finance.
Tomorrow Today (!) before the workshop, I have to drive across the city, to the tune of a quarter-tank of gasoline, to deliver the edited page proofs. With any luck, the detective-novel publisher have another book for me to read.
Speaking of books, these workshops put the eefus on my plan to wring a book out of FaM this summer. There’s plenty of content to do that, but nothing like enough time. I figured I’d better take the money from the college, because it’s a sure thing…who knows how much an obscure e-book would earn?
But though there’s some money coming in, it’s a dribble of pay compared to the amount of work I’m doing.
The problem here is I’m working about as unsmart as it’s possible to work. I’ve got to find a way to make a living that will pay the bills without expanding to fill every waking hour, including those insomniac hours that take place in the middle of the night. Even if it means waiting tables.
Images:
Waitress Taking an Order. Alan Light. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
“I Should Like to Make My Own Living.” William Thomas Smedley. Cabinet of American Illustration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.
How good a grade exactly do you need to get in these workshops? Would it be possible to take a page from my little sister and do the minimum necessary?
Most of the others seem to be doing that. However, it’s not at all clear that any of them are paid to be there. A couple of folks have already told the instructor that they’re going to drop because of the unexpected workload, which implies they don’t expect to receive $1,200 just for sitting in the classroom. I gather the Dean of Instruction, who OK’s the two payments they’re shelling out to me this summer, will see the stuff that goes up in there (all the work is submitted in blogs & wikis). So I think it behooves me to at least look like I’m still breathing.
Besides, I really like the instructor, who has been helpful beyond helpful to me. She really is an incredibly gifted course designer and a wonderful person. It might not look good for her if everybody just sits there like so many lumps on a log.
Yes… but you’re talking about dropping out entirely as an alternative, which I would think would be worse for both the Dean of Instruction and the Instructor. Plus, if your health is suffering from lack of exercise and stress, I would think that would be more important than impressing the instructor. There’s a big continuum between A+ (exceeding expectations) work and being a lump on a log. Heck, if you’re really worried you could talk to her about it. You’re both professionals and both grown-ups.
I tell my graduate students when they’re stressed out that the secret is spending a lot of time on the things that will improve them in the way they want to be improved and do what needs to be done on everything else. You already know how to write a well-cited research paper… what are you getting out of killing yourself doing this one for the instructor? Work hard on the things that will help your future teaching and put in less effort on the things you’re already good at or won’t need. They’re not paying you $1200 to do well in a course, they’re paying you $1200 to improve the product you output.
And while I’m ranting… that need to please everyone reminds me of my mom killing herself for an ungrateful foreign language department. Until she put off getting surgery for breast-cancer until summer because she couldn’t let the department down. At which point the cancer had metastasized. Fall semester she taught again because the department needed her and got terrible teaching evals. Which they took into account when deciding not to give her a merit raise that year… if she hadn’t taught then she would have gotten that raise based on the previous semester. Now she does her job but doesn’t let herself be a doormat. I understand that the community college is treating you well, but that doesn’t mean you have to let your health suffer. Unlike my mom’s department, they probably don’t WANT you to let your health suffer.
Is it time to start drawing a small percentage from your investments? The investments will do no good if you keel over from the stress. Isn’t that the reason you saved? Run the numbers. You are making how much an hour? What is the difference in taxes? Be discerning, work ONLY on projects of interest. Free up time to enjoy retirement.
Can you run other errands while delivering the proofs? Hit the credit union? Costco?
I’m working on a new site – Work at Home Site Directory (http://sites.google.com/site/workathomesitedirectory/). I’ve always wanted a place that has a list of legit sites, so I decided to just do it myself. It’s more of a community service than a money-maker. I have AdSense on there, but other than that, I’m clueless when it comes to making money by having a website.
It’s a long list now, but it’s going to grow. I have a huge list to add to it. Maybe you’ll find something there that allows you to work less.
I wonder if it’s time to look for a less expensive area? It’s no fun at all to be retired and still working. And true retirement IS fun!
@ Nicole: What a heart-rending and infuriating story! I don’t suppose she works at a certain large university situated in a tacky suburb of the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the U.S.? Sounds exactly like the sort of thing they’d pull.
@ Victoria: I saw your directory at Ozarks Crescent Mural. It’s good, really good. In fact, I forwarded it to my former associate editor, the Queen of Sidestream Income. She was very interested, indeed. It would be interesting to know if any of those employers pay a fair wage. Actually, I have a thought or two about how you might make a site based on the directory work. When I have a minute or two, I’ll e-mail you.
@ Brenda: Because so much was lost when the economy crashed, and because of course now I have almost nothing to put back in to investment savings except for two more RASL payments (one in 2011 and one in 2012), I really need to hold off on taking any more of a drawdown than I have to. I’m already having to use my retirement savings to pay my share of the mortgage on the ill-advised real estate purchase my son and I made several years ago. We really are trapped in that upside-down mortgage unless we default; my credit rating doesn’t much matter, but my son’s certainly does matter, especially with employers basing hiring decisions on credit ratings. As long as I’m throwing a portion of retirement savings(!!) into a black hole, I don’t think I should be using even more of it to live on, at least not while I’m still capable of doddering into a classroom.
At the time we bought the place, we thought the real estate market had bottomed out (how wrong can you get?), and it appeared unlikely that either of us would be laid off. Between my own contributions and my employer’s match, I was putting as much back into my 403(b) as I was taking out of my big IRA to cover the mortgage. But now, of course, that drawdown isn’t being replaced and never will be replaced. Given this dank turn of events, it would be highly ill-advised for me to pull out still more money to live on.
@ Ellen: That’s a thought. It’s hard to know where one would find comparable housing in a less expensive area, except maybe in Sun City. The older section of Sun City, where the exemption from school taxes is grandfathered in, is significantly cheaper to live in. However, Sun City is really not my cup of tea. My parents lived there, and I lived with my mother there for almost a year after I graduated from college. So I have reason to believe I’m right in thinking I just don’t like it there. My house isn’t really very expensive to live in; the problem is, I probably don’t have enough to maintain a house over the long run. One solution, I expect, is to move to a condo or patio home, where fewer expensive repairs are required of individual owners and where HOA fees cover water, insurance, and exterior maintenance.
Wow! Thank you so much for your sweet comment. I look forward to hearing from you.