Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How much Money do you make?

I'm in my 25th year of teaching elementary special education. With a summer school addendum, 60K and some change last year.

I'll answer honestly, with the understanding that there will be some manure flipped back at me for saying this.

When we lived in California, our combined income was in the range of $1.3 million a year at its peak. I got tired of working so much and having that level of pressure just to make someone else even richer so I went solo, then started a non-profit, and my income dropped by about 90%. My wife was a bit late to that way of thinking and she was the one pulling in more than half of the income, but she also got tired of living her life so others could be billionaires (and she was working longer hours than I was, with a 3+ hour commute each day).

So she's now mostly retired and most of my work is non-profit. We make less than 10% of what we used to, but we have WAY better quality of life in Montana, lower costs of living, lower taxes and more freedom.

There's a time and place to put up with the rat race, but if you spend too much of your life chasing wealth you won't be happy.

Millions.
Come on...you know everyone in California is making Millions.

😂🦫

It's all about perspective. My mom arrived in the US with what she was wearing and twenty cents (I don't recall the story of that, but it was given to her before she was released from the concentration camp) and my dad's family had a similar story. We all worked hard when we were kids, from paper routes to delivering furniture and hauling scrap metal. I used to get a $3.50 paycheck for the paper route (weekly) and I got paid $20 a day for the delivery/scrap metal work. My first real job after college paid $15k a year in the late 1980s. When I got out of law school, I was making big bucks at the time $60k to start, and when I left NYC I was making over $300k a year, then it went up from there in CA. The price for that was, as your sister experienced, 24/7 working and ridiculous amounts of stress.

It's nice to be able to do something like walk into a car dealer and drive off with a $140k car without even thinking about whether the check you just wrote will clear. It's even nicer to wake up in the morning knowing that whatever you have is paid for and you are happiest driving your older pickup to go hunting and never having to give a second though to how many emails/texts/voicemails will be waiting for you when you get home. I wouldn't change a thing about the years working my butt off for big money, but that's something folks should do between about age 25 and 50. If you keep chasing money after that age, you have lost the game.