You are a young teacher. You worked hard to get your degree and find a teaching position. You love what you do. You are good at it. But you love your husband/wife, you both want to have a family, and you aren't getting any younger. You are both well-educated and you know the importance of staying at home with your baby for at least 3 years. New research is saying 5 years. You've looked at your finances and talked and talked and talked. Finally, you both decide that for the benefit of the baby and children to come, you will stay home with the children. Before you finalize this decision and quit your teaching job, you need to consider some additional issues and get some agreements in writing.
Before you finalize this decision, you simply must face one important issue: 50% of all marriages end in divorce. No one plans a family if divorce is even remotely being considered. But over time, things sometimes happen and you find yourself facing a divorce. Suddenly you realize that the joint decision you made years before isn't going to have joint consequences unless you prepared yourself and got some things in writing.
You dealt initially with the negative consequence of loss of income, but that was shared equally; and your children will benefit from the positive affects of being with you. There are, however, many potential negative consequences only one of you will pay.
Other Issues You Must Consider:
1. Never leave teaching mid-year if at all possible. When I got pregnant, the baby was due in June. I would have only needed to miss the last few weeks of school; but "for the benefit of my students" I left at semester. My reasoning was that the students would be better off with a teacher for the full semester rather that having a sub for just a few weeks at the end of the school year. That was all true and very noble. However, that decision came back to bite me twice. When I returned to teaching in another state several years later and they were calculating how many years of experience they would give me, they flippantly said "we don't count any half years."
Years later, as my retirement was being calculated, again "we don't count any half years." At that point, I had four half years (one from baby, one from father with cancer, and two from taking over temporary positions when returning to teaching) which should have placed me two years higher on the retirement chart, but "we don't count half years." What was good for my students turned out to be very bad for me - permanently bad for me. Your students are important, but YOU are more important. Make decisions based on YOU - not them.
2. Understand that for every year that you stay out of teaching you are dropping one step on the pay scale. If you stay out of teaching for 10 years, you will enter the pay scale 10 steps below your peers. That is a big salary difference and one that is permanent. You can never make up that pay. While this is very frustrating, as long as you are married, it isn't too much of an issue. But if you get divorced and you didn't make some arrangement for this in writing, then ONLY YOU get that consequence. Your spouse went right on up the pay ladder while you didn't. You need some kind of on-going "equality pay" from your spouse so that you are not the only one paying for that joint decision.
3. #2 also affects your retirement if your state has its own retirement plan for public employees. Colorado calculates retirement on both your number of years of experience and your HAS (Highest Average Salary-for 3 years). If you stayed out of teaching 10 years, then your have 10 fewer years of experience and because you are lower on the pay scale your HAS is much lower. You get bitten twice for that joint decision.
4. This issue may or may not impact you--it depends on the state. In calculating retirement Colorado puts a 15% cap on how much your salary can increase from one pay year to the next. The purpose of this rule is to prevent people from being given principalships just to raise their salary before retirement. Seems logical, right? What isn't logical about it is that there in no allowance for the passage of time. So, when you stay out of teaching 10 years and return, your new salary will likely be more than 15% higher than when you left just due to time. But when it comes to calculating retirement, your new higher salary doesn't get totally counted toward your HAS. They allow you only 15% more than your last salary even though they were separated by 10 years. (And this caps every year after as well.) I got caught by this twice! With no allowance for time, this is a very unfair rule and the people it generally impacts are the parents who stayed home to raise children. This should be against the law!
I know it seems awful to have to think about these things when you feel so excited about starting a family. I also know that it is easy to convince yourself that should something happen, your spouse will be fair. After all, your loved each other once and you had children together. Right? Wrong! When it gets down to the almighty dollar, everything else goes out the window! I speak from experience on every single one of these issues. I have bite marks for every one!
To summarize: Get in writing:
(1) An automatic child support increase for each year. I didn't have this, he wouldn't volunteer it, and to get it I had to return to another state, get a lawyer, and fight. I couldn't afford to do that, so I paid every increase incurred by children as they grow and go through high school. You shouldn't have to do this. It isn't right.
(2) Some form of salary adjustment from your spouse to offset your lower pay scale position. Discuss this in the beginning and get it in writing.
(3) Some form of split of your spouses retirement or a separate retirement account for you that is paid by your spouse to offset the decease in your retirement. Protect your retirement. You may have to live on it a very long time. My retirement is almost half of what it should be due to half years and unfair 15% caps. And, now, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. (The final indignity is that if you live in a state with its own pension fund, the federal government will not allow you to collect any social security you earned from other sources. Nice!)
The decision to raise a family is an important one and the benefits to your children by staying home with them are enormous; but the decision needs to be a joint decision and the consequences (of which there will be many) need to be joint as well.
Shirley Slick, "The Slick Tips Lady," is a retired high school math teacher and tutor with degrees in Mathematics and Psychology and additional training in brain-based learning/teaching. Her goals: (1) to help parents help their children with math, (2) to help eliminate the horrendous Algebra failure rate, and (3) to inform the general public about problematic issues related to the field of education. For your free copy of "10 Slick Tips for Improving Your Child's Study Habits," visit her website at http://myslicktips.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shirley_Slick
No comments:
Post a Comment