My situation right now is okay. First I should say that I don’t live in the US, so I don’t need as much money to have a decent life as I would if I lived in a HCOL country.
I work as a public school teacher in Taiwan, making about $2500 USD per month before taxes and year-end bonus. I work 44 hours per week, but a lot of it is pretty chill- as long as I’m on top of my class prep and grading, I have quite a lot of office time that I can use for whatever (gym, YouTube, personal projects, seriously whatever). It’s a public position so my salary is set to a schedule and goes up according to education and seniority. I’ll gain an additional $50 per month for every year I work in the public school system up to 15 years, at which point I hit the ceiling.
Put another way, right now I make about $36k per year before taxes. In 13 years, when I max out the seniority scale, I’ll make $41k. As I said, that’s actually a pretty good salary in Taiwan (about twice the average yearly salary, in fact), but objectively it’s not much and certainly if I ever want to take my family back to America it’s not enough. It’s also an interesting thought to imagine I might hit my career salary cap in just 13 years…
I like teaching. I like my job, and I feel like what I do makes the world better in a small way. I like to think my students appreciate me and feel that I’m helping them to accomplish their goals. I also really like having six weeks off every summer! But I’m thinking about possible alternatives to the teaching life if I ever want to knuckle down and make some money. Unfortunately with everything burning down over in America, the market is fairly flooded with former teachers, so I am not sure what options realistically remain.
What are your thoughts? Should I just accept the chill, happy job I have, or should I stretch myself while I’m still young and healthy?
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