Darwin's Finance » Kids and Money

Why Your Kid’s KinderGarten Teacher is Worth $320,000

Darwin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:25:52 +0000

There have been some rather controversial yet entertaining posts on teacher pay in the PF blogger world of late. First, Evan at MTJM threw some fuel on the fire by venting about Why Teachers Anger Him. Well, with my wife being a teacher and seeing first hand the various myths and misunderstandings about teachers, work hours, pay and stress that continue to propagate amongst people unfamiliar with the role, I did a post on In Defense of Teachers. Similarly, Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff shared her insight being the spouse of a teacher as well in A Teacher’s Reply. (sorry Evan, it’s the gift that just keeps on giving).

Well, anecdotes and opinions aside, today, the NY Times had a piece on how a Kindergarten teacher is worth $320K as calculated by the present value of ADDITIONAL future earnings of your child into adulthood when they have a strong kindergarten teacher. This of course does not even account for the benefit of quality of life, longer life expectancy, better fiscal management outcomes, etc., over peers that have lousy teachers.

In essence, while previous studies had focused on test scores and scholastic achievement through primary schooling, for the first time, a major study (and seemingly well controlled) was conducted to track 12,000 children in a planned experiment from the 1980s. Now that they’re into their 30s and the data set was so large, meaningful data could be gleamed by comparing their adult outcomes with their Kindergarten teacher experience.

Key Findings:

Children who learned more in Kindergarten were more likely to go to college than peer group (normalized for other background noise)

These students were also less likely to become single moms and dads

They exhibited better retirement/savings behaviors

They earn more money

They earn about $100/percentile per year improvement over average. So, if your child had a top tier teacher/test score of 90 percentile, your child could reasonably be expecting to earn $4000 more per year than an average student and the effect tends to grow over time.

Based on these outcomes and considering the financial impact of future earnings, it was calculated that the value of a top kindergarten teacher is $320,000 per year. That’s about 4-6 times what most of them make, depending on location and experience.

The key takeaway here isn’t the number; that’s actually a bit of a silly anecdote to me with many assumptions built in. For instance, when I was in a sourcing role and saved $5 Million for my company on a single deal, I didn’t expect to get paid $5 Million that year, or even see anything different than my typical income – since that was my job!…to save money. So, a teacher’s job is to teach and do it well. This isn’t an argument on whether teachers should get paid more, but rather, people should take note of the key financial and net economic benefit teachers provide to society now that there is more firm data tied to it. To naysayers who consider teachers to be high paid babysitters, the data is tough to ignore. They matter.

Your thoughts?

Harvesting Our Own Food for Health, Fun and Savings

Darwin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:40:59 +0000

This weekend, the family went strawberry picking at a local organic farm. We also started a small garden last week at home. While eating organic, local farming, home gardening, sustainable foot, etc. seem like trendy fads these days, we’ve been giving these ideas a try and we like the experience and the results.

How to Find Local Farms and Farmer’s Markets

Aside from word of mouth and local stories in your paper, there’s a great site for identifying local farms and farmer’s markets by location: LocalHarvest.org has the most user-friendly and in-depth data set I’ve come across. I actually wish I’d started using it sooner rather than asking around and waiting to happen to pass a weekend farmer’s market before acting on it.

Strawberry Picking

We rounded up the kids (6,4,1) and off we went to a local farm. The two older boys loved getting their baskets and running up and down the rows picking strawberries. We had a rather obnoxious woman warn us that we were unlikely to find any good ones in the rows we were in since she doesn’t miss a strawberry and she’d already been there. So, it was all the more rewarding to find some great plump, ripe strawberries throughout the morning. In all, we probably spent an hour there. My wife got some great pictures and I had the baby on my back so I got quite a leg workout bending down to pick with the extra 20 pounds (that’s after the 20 pounds I’ve put on since my glory days!).

After we’d filled our baskets up pretty well, we brought them to a stand where they weigh your baskets. We ended up taking home about 11 pounds of strawberries at $3 per pound. When I compared that with what we pay at a local grocery store, I initially chuckled to myself that we pay about that at the store but I provided the labor for free. Then I considered that they’re organic and usually for for about $5-$6 per pound, so in that respect, it was a meaningful discount.

Others must have seen the value on a larger scale as well, because there were a few “hardcore pickers”. Besides the bizarre encounter with the champion strawberry picker, we saw some other earthy-looking people with massive trays and buckets of strawberries, presumably bringing tens of pounds back to their commune or wherever they were headed. But it wasn’t just families out for fun.

Once home, I couldn’t resist picking through the basket now and then throughout the day and my wife made a great strawberry shortcake last night. We also got some tips on storing them, freezing them, making jam and other ideas. So, they won’t go to waste, we saved some money, supported a local farm, and had fun while we were at it.

Home Gardening

Last week, I set up a small garden in the back yard with some simple vegetables. I recall gardening with my dad as a kid and while I got some enjoyment out of it then, setting it up, planting and sharing the experience with my kids brought back memories. That vegetable garden was actually my foray into entrepreneurship. I had a stand out in front of the house and my dad used to let me keep the proceeds.

I’d put off starting a garden in the past primarily due to laziness. After doing some basic research, we just walked into a Home Depot and snagged a side-wall garden box, some soil, some fencing, and set it up in the yard in a sunny spot. In all, it only took about an hour to get set up and start planting a few things.

For this garden, we certainly aren’t saving any money this year. The setup cost was well over a hundred bucks and we’ll probably get all of $50 in vegetables out of there, but it can be considered an initial investment with much lower operating costs in future years. We ended up planting various peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, herbs and some other stuff. It will also be nice for the kids to see where our food comes from. Many kids these days have no idea where their food comes from, what it takes to grow something, what it costs, or what the health benefits are. Might as well start teaching them while they’re young.

What Are Your Gardening Experiences and Resources?

Simple but Important Calculation: How Much Should You Have Saved for College Today?

Darwin — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:48:27 +0000

While not all parents agree on which type of college their kids should attend, how much of the cost they should front, or whether a college degree is even worth the immense upfront expenditure at all, what is virtually unanimous is that given recent trends in tuition it’s a terribly expensive undertaking that will likely worsen over time given other developments in the economy, endowment investment losses and other economic factors.

According to the inflation trends at the College Board, the average annual increase over 10 years was 6.5% for a 4 year public college while increasing 5.2% at private colleges. Meanwhile, core inflation, wages, or whatever other measure of purchasing power you consider to be relevant was much lower – in the 1.5-3% range. Therefore, the cost of college in real dollars has been increasing substantially each year at virtually double that rate, and if you have a child born this year, it’s entirely plausible this painful trend will continue unabated for the next 18 years. Over time, the power of compounding is sure to make the college experience daunting to those who didn’t adequately prepare in advance.

There are myriad assumptions and calculations out there for how much you’ll need to save for college, but given the wild swings in outcomes of various investment classes, assumptions surrounding which college costs to assume and hundreds of other variables, what I’d offer is a very basic high level set of assumptions that will allow you to immediately get an idea of how much money you need either for a new child or how much you should have saved (and will need to make up) for a child approaching college age:

Assumptions:

Child attends college at 18
Child attends 4 year public or private school – for estimate use 2010 average of $15,213 for public and $35,636 for private
Money is invested in a typical tax-advantaged college plan like a 529 or ESA
Returns on investments are roughly equivalent to college cost inflation – This is a key assumption and I’ll explain below why I used it

Now, there are a few assumptions that you are your children need to discuss during the college selection process, and these may change along the way as well. First off, is college even appropriate for your child? For many, the answer is yes. However, let’s say your child just didn’t excel in school, didn’t enjoy it and barely got by…but perhaps they love a particular trade that may provide a decent income in adult life? College isn’t for everyone and there are perfectly successful and content workers and entrepreneurs that don’t have college degrees. Once that question is answered in the affirmative though, the next consideration is what burden of the total costs are to be borne by the child versus the parent. If you tell your kid, “You can go to whichever college you like, but we’re only able to provide for $15,000 per year (in 2010 dollars) and you’re on the hook for the rest”, chances are they’ll opt for a state school. If you want your child to be able to attend any school they want and you’re doubtful they’ll be the recipient of a scholarship or any sort of aid given your income (this is the most conservative assumption), then you’d better plan for the bull $36K/year in today’s dollars.

For the assumption on investment returns, there are a few factors at work here. First off, while the long-term return on stocks is generally touted at 8-9% annually, the reality is that this is not guaranteed, and also, you’ll likely want to adjust your asset allocation to shift into more conservative assets as your child approaches college so as to not see your plan drop in value by 50% in a blink of an eye like we saw across 2008-2009. For instance, perhaps at age 1, your child’s plan is invested fully in stocks, but by 14, you’re down to 65% stock and 35% bonds/money market. Therefore, even with a rosy 8% assumption, given this asset switch along the way, your real returns through the life of the term are probably closer to the annual college inflation costs.

Now, you might say these assumptions are way to simplified, broad and back-of-the-napkin. Well, maybe they are. And maybe you’ll want to spend the next 3 months tracking down a financial adviser who’s going to charge you a lot of money (either upfront or from fees by putting you into investments in which they derive fees) to tell you something different, but at least here, you’ve got a start. You have an order of magnitude wake-up call on just what it’s going to take to put your kid(s) through college. Start today with this goal in mind as opposed to trying to find someone who’s going to tell you something you’d rather hear – that it will be cheaper, how to get scholarships, or whatever sounds better than these large numbers.

What Happens if You Saved Too Much?

While this is hardly a common problem since even these costs are likely underestimated and adjustments could be made along the way, the beauty of the 529 College Savings Plans is that there are several alternatives at your disposal if you encounter that situation ranging from using the money for another child to various options for withdrawal (see 529 Plan Basics for more details on this and which plan we’re using).

How Are We Doing?

In looking at it this way, we’re behind the 8-ball a bit. While we do have several thousand dollars save for each kid, we have three kids and we want the ultimate flexibility (most conservative assumption) of a top private college with no assistance, we’re talking about saving $428,000 in today’s dollars. That’s a staggering amount! It’s another mortgage (way more than our current one by the way) but to be paid in half the time! Our actual plan involves my wife returning to the workforce once our youngest is out of the house and into school and having my wife’s salary to virtually do nothing but shovel money into college accounts. But that’s taking on a bit of risk in assuming they’re hiring teachers again in a couple years and no other lifechanging events occur. So, admittedly, it’s daunting for us as well, but we’ve got a plan, we’ve got a backup plan, we’ve already started investing for each child, and I know what we’re up against.

How Do You Stack Up?

Is Putting in a Swimming Pool Worth It?

Darwin — Tue, 04 May 2010 01:43:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again where the weather’s getting nice and the pool parties are starting. We just went to our first one of the year and as always, my wife says, “Boy the kids would love a pool. We have the room. Would it be crazy if we did a pool?” In years past, I’ve immediately replied that she is in fact crazy. More recently though, I’ve started to at least give credence to the notion of either footing the bill for a new pool or perhaps even moving to a house that has a pool already. There are some key hurdles I continue to struggle with though and it’s clearly a mix of tangible costs and intangible costs and benefits.

What’s a Pool Cost?

While the estimates vary widely by what type of pool you want, what type of landscaping, patios, fences, and even what your locale is, the high level estimate I’ll go with for our situation would be $50,000. That sounds like a huge number, but when all is said and done, that’s about what we’d be looking at. If you’re going to go forward with a pool, you’re going to want a nice look to go with it, not to mention all the additional ongoing costs once it’s in, like an increase in homeowner’s insurance, a tax increase, maintenance expenses like opening/closing the pool, heating it if applicable, etc. For an additional data point, we have some friends in the area who got multiple quotes last year for a small pool given their yard size and they were coming in at around $45,000, so $50,000 for what we’d want is probably a decent bet. Of course you could argue that adding a swimming pool increases the resale value of your home, but that’s not what I want to focus on here.

What are the Benefits of a Pool?

The kids would obviously love it, that’s the only reason we’d ever even consider it. When I was a kid, my friend across the street had a pool and we were at his house constantly over the summers. I still remember playing Marco Polo and all kinds of other games in there for years. On one hand, that meant his mom had to worry about young kids in the pool, feeding us, washing towels, and everything else that goes along with it. But on the other hand, she knew where her kid was all the time. For people that like to entertain and have young kids of their own and friends/family with kids, it’s great. But then again, there are always fun summer activities you can do with your kids, even on a budget.

Downsides of a Pool

Aside from the added ongoing costs mentioned above, frankly, it’s solely for the kids. I used to love pools as a kid, but as an adult, I can’t say I get giddy over a pool. My assumption is that once the kids are off to college, perhaps even once they’re in highschool, they’re just not going to care or use it any more and it’s just going to sit there. Maybe if it’s there we’d feel compelled to use it now and then, but it’s not something we’d actually desire in our 50’s. Conversely, perhaps if you keep it around long enough, and we never move, eventually it would be a reason grandkids would love to come visit, but that’s looking REALLY far out and probably not worthy of decision-making inclusion. We may actually have to just fill the thing in some day.

There’s also the constant fear of an accident. Regardless of your homeowner’s insurance and an umbrella policy, if a kid drowns in your pool, regardless of whether you taught your own kids to swim, that’s not something we’d want to live with. But life is about risk and management of those risks. Presumably, we’d put in place enough safeguards and ensure our presence while kids and friends are at risk that the risk is manageable, but it would still weigh on us.

If we wanted to move, many homebuyers don’t want a pool. So, while the pool may be of some incremental value to homebuyers looking for a house with a pool, it will greatly shrink the population of buyers that would consider our house, so we’d lose that flexibility and I wouldn’t count on any additional premium on our sale price as such.

Does it Make Sense Financially?

When my wife and I discuss the finances related to a pool, we delude ourselves with statements like, “If we had a pool, we wouldn’t need a summer vacation,” etc. The reality is the novelty would eventually wear off and within a couple years, that couple thousand dollars in vacation savings we talked about would go out the window. For the sake of argument though, turning this pool idea into more of a financial model, I could make the following assumptions:

15 Years of Use – I have 3 kids, with the youngest at 1 year old. I figure the older boys would start getting immediate use out of it now and our youngest would lose complete interest in it by senior year of high school. Any mild benefit of the kids coming back from college in the summer or using it in future years is excluded.
$50,000 up front cost
Time and annual maintenance costs negligible – While there are costs, these days pools are much easier to maintain and since the $50K may be inflated to begin with and costs aren’t thousands per year, we’ll just assume it’s absorbed into our routine summer entertainment budget.
Assume the pool is used 3 days per week between May and August for ~50 uses/yr max – While there will be some spurts in the summer where kids are in the pool every day, there would be rainy days, travel/vacation outages and other scenarios to even it out.

With these assumptions in mind, if we were thinking along the lines of what it would cost per use for a simple day in the pool with kids and/or friends/family, that would equate to roughly:

$67 per Swim Session in Our Own Pool – Sounds a Bit Pricey!

It’s interesting to look at it that way. I mean, we could join the community pool for a couple hundred bucks for the family each summer and make that up in a couple sessions. But there’s nothing like the privacy and flexibility of having your own pool in a wooded back yard – with the convenience of your house a few feet away.

While initially thinking about the $50K spread over so many years, I figured the number would be much lower, but $67 per use for something we’d be doing several times per week over such a prolonged period does seem awfully expensive. I complain about spending 50 bucks at the movie theater and going out to dinner seems expensive. Imagine doing that across a year once per week for 15 years (spreading the $50 across a full year)?

I’m still not sold that it makes sense for us. Perhaps if we were thinking of a move and we were able to find a house with a pool that was being sold reasonably close to its market value were it not to have a pool, I’d consider it. But at the moment, unless my assumptions are way off, it just doesn’t seem to make sense for our family.

Have You Considered a Pool?
Any Good Pool Installation Stories?

The Hidden Cost of Staying Home with the Kids

Darwin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:43:35 +0000

Whether or not to stay home instead of working often comes down to money. Often times it doesn’t, and mom would really just rather be working, but for many families, mom would love to stay home but the numbers don’t work for varying reasons and they go back to work after maternity leave is up.

Can You Afford to Live on One Income?

There are some key assumptions and knowns that a family must factor in when making the switch from dual income to a single income. On the income side, you’re obviously going to lose the additional income the working parent had been bringing in. However, you’ll now get a $1000 child tax credit if income limits apply and won’t be spending money on things like a commute, dry-cleaning and other non-reimbursed employment expenses like perhaps eating out and happy hours with the office cohorts. If going back to work, factor in the cost of daycare and any tax benefits derived from that. There are more, but these are pretty much known or easily estimated costs that can be captured on a spreadsheet to allow you to see how your new budget’s going to look.

But, there’s probably one thing you didn’t think of if you’re going to be a new parent…

Moms Get Bored

This isn’t a knock on moms, but it’s reality. Dads get bored too to be fair. But this article’s about (typically) stay at home moms and the hidden costs of staying home that may not have been evident during pregnancy. After considering the finances above, what my wife and I didn’t consider and what most others probably don’t is just how much more money is spent by stay at home parents simply because they’re home and not working.
Here are some examples:

As much as we talk about budgets, not impulse buying, etc., there’s no way a working parent can fathom and keep up with the flurry of bargains, buying ahead on “deals” for next year at the end of a season (does this REALLY save money in the long run if you wouldn’t have bought the item next year to begin with?), buying for all the birthday parties of your child’s friends (often other stay at home moms), getting pictures taken at the mall, eating out, going to the zoo and museum, Little Gym, etc. These things all cost money – and they’re all things that mom (or dad) wouldn’t be spending nearly as much money on if they were working – there simply isn’t enough time in a weekend.

If you’re home with your child, especially all the way through school-age and with multiple kids, you’re talking like 8-10 years of staying home. Is it reasonable to assume that for a full 8-10 years, mom’s going to sit around the house, be supermom who can provide for endless hours of entertainment and enrichment and never get bored or spend money on things they wouldn’t otherwise?

The reality is there are some days where that’s the case. And there are other days where mom just needs to get the heck out of the house. The kids are driving mom nuts, they’ve run out of stuff to do and it’s time to go out and do something fun – which usually entails some spending. Parks and outdoor games only take you so far. Moms have friends. The Joneses phenomena is really incredible to watch. Our friends, without exception, all spend way more than we do on seemingly frivolous stuff so I’m not knocking my wife (in case you ever read one of my posts after years of blogging?!?). I’m sure it’s frustrating to always seem like “the cheap one”. But I’m sure each wife is saying the same thing to complaining husband each time the credit card bill comes – “you should see what SHE spends when we go to the mall. I spend the LEAST money out of our whole group. Our kids don’t have NEARLY the amount of toys their kids have”. The list goes on. If each mom is saying (and I believe in many cases, actually believing) the same thing, it’s a gradual arms race of spending more and more money within a given network. When mom’s at work, this simply doesn’t occur. Little boy or girl is in daycare during the day and on weekends, mom and dad are typically doing family stuff, day trips or the occasional outing with friends for a birthday or something. But it’s not this daily play group, trips to the mall to kill time or whatever.

The point here is to just make you aware that a) this phenomena exists and b) no matter how frugal or disciplined you think you are before kids, you WILL spend more money than you anticipate as a stay at home parent. And you’ve gotta factor this into your budget assumptions so it still works with this reality factored in.

Another Reason to Live Within Your Means

In our family’s situation, my wife actually planned on going back to work after our first child! Her mother worked while my wife was in daycare and she turned out OK, right? Most of our friends and colleagues were dual earner families where both people did or planned on working once children came. During the pregnancy, we didn’t necessarily make any big financial moves or relocate or anything, but based on my wife’s inclination, I assumed looking out a year and further into the future, aside from the 6 months off, we’d be back to two incomes. But, in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, “what if something changes?”. What if she changes her mind? What if we have a “whoops” moment shortly after baby 1 arrives and she’s out again without a meaningful work stint? As such, our spending was pretty much supported by my income solely and her income was supplementary (savings and nice vacations before kids came).

Well, as it turns out, about a month before delivering, my wife promptly announced that she wanted to stay home. She didn’t want to go back to work. Fortunately, we had that flexibility because we were living well below our means. If her income was needed to pay the mortgage, car payments and other routine spending, we would have been in a jam – she would have begrudgingly returned back to work and probably resented other moms who were able to stay home. We had this flexibility in part because I bought a house and had no car payments or credit card debt at the time of our marriage. We had no real debt to speak of other than the mortgage and I was already paying that along with our other living expenses on my salary. So, whether or not we had my wife’s additional salary wasn’t necessarily a requirement, but a bonus.

Plan Ahead

In summary, even if mom thinks she will be going back to work, why not plan as if she isn’t? If she goes back, that’s a surefire way to start socking away that extra money in a 529 and retirement accounts, and have some excess cash for some nice family vacations, nice upgrades to the home, etc. If she changes her mind and wants to stay home, you’ll both be happy you had the flexibility and lifestyle to be able to do so.

In the spirit of political correctness, there are stay at home dads (we know two), but this is a small fraction of all stay at home parents, so yes, I referred to “mom” throughout the article. But of course, I’m aware that in some families, it makes more sense for mom to work than dad. I’d actually be curious to hear how Dad finances stack up here and if they have the same spending pressures and tendencies.

Do You Agree with This Phenomena?

How Much Do you Think It Costs Monthly?

How Did Childhood Jobs Influence Your Current Financial Situation?

Darwin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:50:40 +0000

My wife and I were talking about teaching our kids about money the other day and she mentioned how entrepreneurial our 5 year old seems. I haven’t really started to talk to the kids about money too much other than the piggybank 50/50 save/spend thing which will eventually become a bit more structured. However, this topic of our 5 year old being so interested in starting a lemonade stand and making money at his age had me reminiscing about some of the early jobs I had. In retrospect, I think many of these experiences in my formative years had an influence on my current financial habits and interests.

Under 10 Years Old

Welcome to My Childhood - My father was definitely from the old school (which I value much more now than I did at the time) and didn’t believe in this “video game crap”, kids with soft hands and goofing off all the time. He always kept us busy either with sports, work or study. We had playtime with our friends too of course, but if it was a nice summer day and I was in the basement watching the latest Transformers or G.I. Joe (isn’t funny how these are new movies again?), it would burn him up to no end. Sleeping in was forbidden as well. He’d scream up the stairs, “Get off your back, put on your pack soldier!” followed by some sort of bad bugle impression and I’d be blasted out of bed unceremoniously. This taught me to wake up early so I didn’t have to meet that untimely wakeup call.

Splitting Wood, Gardening - Anyway, in my early years, I learned how to do everything from plant seeds and pick vegetables to mow the lawn and split wood. On the side, my father delivered firewood for years. He’d go to developments where they were clearing lots and load up huge logs on his truck or cut them up with the chainsaw there and put the rolls in the truck. He’d bring them home and we’d split them. We had a wood burning stove so this exercise certainly spared us considerable heating costs each year, but he also sold cords of wood at night and on weekends. I don’t recall all the specifics, but I think in his peak years, he was selling probably 100 cords a year at something like $100 each, so he’d pull in an extra $10,000 a year. I had no clue about income and expenses and what it would cost to send me to college someday, but in retrospect, I can see why he did it. He also liked to stay in shape and it was definitely a workout!

Vegetable Stand – We had enough land to have a decent sized vegetable garden growing everything from corn and peas to pumpkins and zucchini. I recall we’d pick a bunch of vegetables and there would be way more than we could possibly eat without spoiling, so he’d set me up with a stand by the road. I’d sell stuff for a quarter for this, 50 cents for that. Before you know it, by the end of the day, I’d have taken in like 7 or 8 bucks. I learned about making change, upselling (yes, I used to try and get people to buy even more stuff than what they asked for, I just didn’t know it was an actual marketing ploy at the time), dealing with people and I saw the entire cycle from start to finish – from planting seeds through harvest through sale. I was really learning about how the world works. Money didn’t just grow on trees, but indirectly, over time and with hard work, it kind of did!

10-15 Years Old

A Job For Every Season – While some of the garden stuff continued, I outgrew the vegetable stand thing and I started to translate chores I had at home into money elsewhere in the neighborhood. In the winter, we had to shovel snow. In the summer, we had to mow the lawn. In the fall, we had to rake and blow leaves. We had a fair number of elderly neighbors who willingly took up the opportunity to have leaves taken care of twenty bucks or a lawn mowed for twenty bucks or sidewalks shoveled for 5 bucks. Eventually, in the summers, I had some standing lawn-mowing jobs for about twenty bucks per week if I recall. In one case, my dad had to load the lawnmower on the back of the truck and drive across town. I recall dodging the vicious German Shepard endearingly named “socks” that would lay down and pretend to be asleep near his dog house and then lunge at me as I mowed near his doghouse. Anyway, it was surely a hassle for my dad to drive me all the way over to my brother’s baseball coach’s house to mow his lawn each Saturday, but he did it so I could have a scheduled job. Sure, there were some Saturdays that I wanted to just lay around or go hang with my friends, but I learned to work around it. It was a commitment, an obligation I had, to get that lawn mowed each weekend and make it up Sundays if it rained.

16 Years Old

Retail – By sixteen, I was getting to be the age where I could work in retail stores with other kids my age but I wasn’t quite driving yet. I worked at a Bradlees, which was kind of like a K-Mart of the time. That was kind of a boring retail cash register-type job, but I had learned some skills in regards to working efficiently, making change, doing quick calculations in my head, diffusing angry customer confrontations and other skills that probably indirectly transferred to later roles.

Animals Need Food Too – For an entire summer and part of the school year, I worked at a “Feed Farm” delivering horse feed and other large animal feed to farmers. I used to have to carry 2 fifty pound bags at a time off the truck, up ladders, down stairs, all kinds of places where the farmers wanted the feed. When we weren’t on a run, I had to work in the feed store, which I didn’t like quite as much. I found inventory and the register there to be quite boring. I was kind of drawn to the camaraderie of driving around the state with the driver, delivering feed and seeing all kinds of different farms and animals. The pay wasn’t great though and the owner was notoriously cheap. My parents drove me to these jobs since I didn’t drive yet.

17 Years Old

The “Big Time” at the Grocery – Once I had my car, I started working at a ShopRite (typical large grocery store). I had started on typical inventory/cashier type positions. I recall working much more quickly and efficiently than most. I had employed this double-handed scanning technique where I would whip the stuff by on the scanner and someone with a $300 order would be done in no time. I’d spin around and bag stuff if they weren’t (I never understood people who stood there and watched me bag 400 items instead of helping move things along themselves) and then jump back on the scanner and whip stuff through. I was quickly promoted to what they called “Front-End”. It was kind of like a supervisory position, I guess, where I was in charge of keeping things moving and it had financial responsibilities as well. I had to count the cashier’s drawers at the end of the night and report discrepancies, address customer complaints, run around for a price check now and then, over-ride cash registers for mistakes, schedule the cashier breaks and such. It was a definite morale boost being promoted into somewhat of a leadership role at that age, being given charge over people with more tenure and age then myself, presumably due to some efficiencies and leadership skills I had demonstrated early on. When I was getting ready to go off to college, I remember the store manager expressing disappointment that I’d be leaving and he offered me an assistant manager role there, but I had my heart set on college.

College – School in Session

Snotty Clothing Store – While in college, I had worked a few odd jobs ranging from a stint at Abercrombie & Fitch which had those “big shirts” that all the cool people (so we thought) were wearing at the time. We were able to get decent discounts of like 30 or 40% off by working there, but I didn’t like the job at all. Snobs, snobs, snobs.

Tutoring Paid Dividends! - I also tutored chemistry since I had taken to it in highschool and college. As luck would have it, that’s how I landed my wife! She wasn’t doing well in her chem class and a mutual friend introduced us so I could tutor her and that was that! Since then, I’ve learned much more from her than she has from me, but it’s funny how a thing like a college side job can have such a fateful influence on the rest of your life.

The Future is Metals (maybe) – My senior year, I had a decent gig tied to my major where I worked in a development lab for metal injection molding at Allied Signal. It was supposed to be the technology of the future for making everything from golf clubs to watches. I’m sure if it ever took off or not, but it was a good learning experience that I was able to cite during my subsequent job interview process.

College – Summers

Dodging Dogs and Dirty Looks – I mixed it up during summers. For two summers, I had a summer intern job for my Dad’s insurance company measuring the houses of the insured for “reassessment”, basically making sure if they added square footage, deck, etc., they were properly insured. I had to deal with angry people that didn’t read their mail to know I was coming, didn’t answer their door, and then when I started measuring, threatened me since I was on their property. In two cases, they literally “sic’d” their dog on me. It was like something out of a movie. Also, my colleague was mugged for his Polaroid camera on an inner-city jaunt. Decent job, decent pay, not relevant to my major.

Tree Work is No Walk in the Park – Another summer, I worked for my brother who owned a tree service. He jobs both large and small from clearing entire lots with heavy equipment to just removing fallen trees off people’s houses, etc. It was backbreaking work, but it was a fun bunch of guys and I got to spend a lot of time with my older brother that summer, which was shortly before he stopped talking to our entire family after marrying a truly evil woman (sad but true, long story).

So Much Promise…My final summer job was supposed to be related to my Chemical Engineering role to help me land a job post-graduation. It was a classmate’s dad’s company that applied coatings and paints to siding. Sounds boring, but it was sold as a way to optimize manufacturing processes, develop new coatings, work in the plant, etc. using my degree. It was a total lie. I ended up climbing on rolls of aluminum each day in a hot warehouse for inventory “cycle counts”, and I worked on some new computer system install they were doing. It was pretty annoying that I was duped into a useless internship for my final summer.

Finally, My First Real Job!

After all that, I landed a job in biopharma manufacturing. After working very long hours for years, I transitioned into a technical role and some business roles including the present project management role with an MBA along the way. While Chemical Engineering is a perennial top paying job at graduation (see the top majors for 2010 by salary), I didn’t stay within that discipline for long at all.

Early Learnings

I can’t say that any one of the jobs I had in my youth had a huge impact on my professionally, but I think the cumulative experience of the various jobs and my upbringing had a great deal to do with the current success and satisfaction I have now in everything from my career to my marriage to how I raise my children now. I learned how people treat “workers” when I was all dirty hauling logs in the summer or carrying bags of horse and pig food through smelly barns. I always make sure to treat people doing work for us with kindness and respect. I learned about leadership and building trust and friendships on the job. I learned that life isn’t always fair. I also learned that money isn’t everything. These are things that kids that don’t work often don’t learn until it’s too late – in their first real job.

What Were Your Most Influential Jobs Earlier in Life?

10 Highest Paying Degrees 2010 – Best Majors in Demand Now

Darwin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:34:12 +0000

The top 10 highest paying majors numbers are out from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and it’s a very interesting mix. The top slots are all very similar to the highest paying majors from the 2009 salary survey with some minor annual increases. The bottom of the list changed a bit. What I continue to find interesting is the strong demand for engineering degrees at the entry level even though many manufacturing companies are leading waves of layoffs given lack of demand during the recession.

Noticeably absent from the top 10 list are any financial, business or accounting related majors that dominated the list in 2008. Overall, the average salary for 2010 graduates is $48,351 which is down 2% last year’s average of $49,353. However, I noticed that when contrasting these highest paying salaries with last year’s list, most of these showed positive increases year over year for 2010 (hence, “in demand”):

Top 10 College Degrees by Highest Starting Salary

1. Petroleum Engineering $86,220

2. Chemical Engineering $65,142

3. Mining & Mineral Engineering $64,552

4. Computer Science $61,205

5. Computer Engineering $60,879

6. Electrical/Electronics & Communications Engineering $59,074

7. Mechanical Engineering $58,392

8. Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering $57,734

9. Aerospace/Aeronautical/ Astronautical Engineering $57,231

10. Information Sciences & Systems $54,038

Top 10 Degree Analysis

Commodities Engineers:

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see petroleum, chemical, mining and mineral engineering degrees as top spots on the list. Even though Wall Street is suffering and the face of the automotive industry has changed forever, given the growth in emerging markets and the insatiable consumption of energy and materials for their commercial/residential buildouts and economic development, these degrees will likely be in very strong demand for years to come.

Computer Science/Engineering:

One of the few things America still leads the world in in terms of manufacturing and development, is computer technology. Be it Intel or Apple, even though many of our wares are subsequently copied and mass-produced overseas, there is incredible demand for cutting edge launches out of the US. Additionally, the knowledge economy is very much demanding programmers and thinkers from top colleges as well. Google is still known as a top employer of choice and even the US government is heavy into data analysis in the post 9/11 world for everything from tracking terrorists to facial recognition technology to developing algorithms to detect suspicious financial activities.

Engineering in General:

Why do Engineering degrees comprise such a large portion of the top slots year after year? It’s basic supply and demand. There are too few engineering graduates each year to meet the demand in the private sector. Contrast that with say, a Communications major (nothing against them, there just seem to be more of these graduates out there than jobs beckoning). Even though it’s a tough job market right now, engineers coming out of good schools have always been able to practically write their own ticket if they had the right skill set, grades, a decent internship and are open to relocating to score an entry-level position at one of the best places to work.

I’m a Chemical Engineer – Starting Salary Isn’t Everything:

The irony in these surveys and how salary levels pan out further into a career are that the engineering degrees tend to be very much in demand in the early years of a career, but the pay increases roughly with overall wage inflation. However, for a business major or any major for that matter, that either goes directly into the Financial industry or snags an MBA along the way and does so, the salaries 10 years later are off the chart.

Consider my experience. I lived in a pretty crazy environment in college. I was 1 studying engineer in a house of another 20 guys studying everything from history and economics to anthropology and accounting. Most of them pretty much did the bare minimum scholastically and the absolute maximum from a party/having fun standpoint. I got out one or two nights a week, but it was a constant party of most of these guys. Funny thing is, even with mediocre grades, many of them ended up on Wall Street or other financial firms in the area and now make double to triple what I make. Why? Wall Street pay skyrocketed for those who stayed in the industry. How’d they get into these roles? Connections.

The nice thing about an engineering degree is that it’s widely recognized as a highly adaptive, “capable” major. For instance, rather than jumping into chemical plants, many of my graduating class went to work as actuaries (even higher starting salary), Wall Street, medical schools and other seemingly unrelated destinations. Once in industry, as unfair as it may seem, chemical engineers especially, tended to command higher starting salaries for the same given job title and raises. Why? If the going rate for a bio major is $50K and a chemical engineer is $65K and rising each year, in order to retain those chemical engineers, a company has to make sure they’re keeping up with the rest of the job market.

On the theme of an adaptive/diverse background, a useful combo, and one that I pursued personally, is the engineer/MBA combo. Basically, I cut my teeth in manufacturing and spent a few years pursuing an MBA at night and then transitioned into a broader strategic/business role. Not only has the role brought me a higher income via promotions, but the diverse background is well-suited to multiple roles now. Given the need, I could work in any one of multiple manufacturing, supply chain, procurement or project management roles.

So, it’s a toss-up. Going after the Wall Street career is no longer a guarantee to either a) even get in or b) lifetime employment or c) high pay. Things are changing. ETFs are overtaking mutual funds so there’s that many fewer fund managers and sales reps. The government will play an ever-increasing role in the regulation and suppression of growth of large firms to prevent another “too big to fail” scenario. some of the regulations that will inevitably be enacted may permanently curtail the profit growth and career potential in the financial industry.

Six-Figure Jobs

Six Figure Jobs are getting to be harder to come by in the current economic environment. As the supply-demand equation has switched from a shortage of qualified workers and an abundance of firms looking to talent to many talented, experienced employees looking for work, it’s not quite the same as we saw during the boom years. That being said, there are new services and resources that didn’t exist previously. A wonderful resource that I enjoy is The Ladders. If you’re highly qualified and used to earn upwards of six figures, this service can greatly hone your search and it also limits the candidate pool to those with recent six-figure salaries.

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