What the pandemic has taught me about money (Lockdown progress report, May 2, 2020)

Total words: 0 (yesterday I wrote 1,990)
Manuscript total: 46,517

Not having a job for an entire school year has been financially excruciating.

Unlike interns in other professions, teacher interns (student teachers) do not get paid. We do all the jobs of a teacher — planning, teaching, grading, going to staff meetings, sometimes calling parents — not for money but for fieldwork hours. We have to accumulate 600 of those fieldwork hours to earn our teaching certification (despite losing two weeks to school closures, I accumulated well over 800 hours).

It is a system that privileges student-teachers who have a significant other or parents to support them financially. The rest of us (like me) just hold our breath and do the best we can without full-time income for 10 months.

My friend N cobbled together tutoring jobs to help make up for lost income, but even then, she couldn’t afford to pay for the edTPA ($300). (When we learned that, the rest of us future English teachers all pitched in to pay it for her, so she’s good now.) My friend J lost her tutoring job when coronavirus lockdowns started, and last I heard from her, she was facing having to possibly move back in with her parents due to the loss of income, all while still student teaching online every day.

In fact, I have several friends who ended up taking the lead when distance learning began, because we had been earning our degree via Zoom classes long before coronavirus shut the schools down. Just like myself, my colleagues were the ones now teaching our guiding teachers how to navigate online learning spaces. Unlike me, some of their guiding teachers threw up their hands in despair and essentially allowed their student teachers to take over the entire distance learning challenge.

All for free.

Hemorrhaging Money

I’ve been lucky financially for three reasons:

1. I’m fiscally cautious anyway,
2. I didn’t have any undergraduate student debt to worry about,
3. and I have you, my readers, to give me a part-time income even on the days I don’t sit my butt down and write.

Nevertheless, I have been running my savings down for months. A part-time income from my novels just isn’t the same as a full-time income supplemented by book sales.

To make matters worse, Soldier of Dorsa decided it was going to be longer and take me more time to write than any other book I’ve produced so far. And finding time to write amidst the demands of grad school and student teaching was a battle of wills and organization.

By January, I was in a race against the clock: What would come first, my savings bottoming out, or publishing the book?

Fortunately, this story had a happy ending. I was able to complete the book at last and start drawing income from it before I was forced to live on credit cards.

But meanwhile, the coronavirus threw the world into total chaos. How will it affect the job market in the fall as I try to take all my hard work from studying and student teaching and transform it into my first full-time teaching job?

I have no idea.

But here’s what stay-at-home orders have taught me.

I sat down to do my end-of-month accounting a few days ago and discovered something startling. In April, I still landed in the red financially, but I lost less than a third of what I’d lost in February and March.

At first I thought I’d made a mistake, that I’d missed putting in some expenses. After all, my budget projected that I would lose more than three times what my accounting said I had lost.

But I double-checked and realized there was no mistake. Barely leaving the house for an entire month has had tremendous financial benefits. Case-in-point: I haven’t put gas in my car since the middle of March. And not driving also means I haven’t had to re-up the money in my highway toll account.

Writing and doing homework at home also means I haven’t given any money to Starbucks or the Barnes & Noble Café, my two go-to spots when I get bored of the view out my window.

I also haven’t treated myself to a trip to the movie theater, which I do about once per month or every other month; I canceled my AMC Premium subscription because the season finale of The Walking Dead and the beginning of the new spin-off have been indefinitely delayed; and eating out has been such a hassle (and a danger) that I only did it twice in the past six weeks.

Furthermore, the convenience of impulse buying has been completely taken away. I can’t just pop up the road to Target to grab one item and then leave with ten, and I’ve reduced my weekly grocery shopping trip to about once every ten days.

So yeah, not driving anywhere has saved me money, but not paying for gas and tolls alone does not account for all the money I’ve saved these past six weeks.

And you know what?

I don’t miss most of it.

I miss spending time with friends. I miss boxing with LT on Sunday morning and then having brunch at the Mexican place afterwards. I miss not needing to carefully time every trip to the store so that it doesn’t take three hours.

And LORD KNOWS I miss getting my hair cut every three weeks.

But my weekly tall latte with coconut milk? Driving fifteen miles for a good hike when there’s an equally good hike just up the road?

Or spending $80 on gardening supplies only to kill all my plants within two weeks? (Yeah, I did that.)

I don’t miss any of that.

Which has me thinking…

I feel like the pandemic is giving me an opportunity to step back and really think about the money that I normally spend. Like I said, I’m not a big spender; I don’t carry credit card debt, before student teaching started I had a healthy savings account, and I’m honestly not particularly addicted to anything that I spend more than I should on.

But even without egregiously bad spending habits, I’m realizing that at least some of the hemorrhaging of money I have been doing all school year was probably unnecessary. It’s too late to go back an un-spend, but it does give me a chance moving forward to reevaluate the financial choices I’ve been making all along and be more circumspect about what I spend and why.

It also gives me hope that, with the insight into my finances that the pandemic has provided, I will be able to meet my goal of paying off my grad school debt within a reasonable time frame. Maybe I will even be able to crush that goal. 🙂

That would be nice.