ILMathTeachr wrote:
> But saving $20K annually,
> starting at age 26 at a more conservative estimate of 8% return, would make you a
> poor in 20 years,
Did I get trolled by a mod? I typed 'poor', not poor! <<<EDIT: Confirmed auto-troll: I typed m-i-l-l-i-o-n-a-i-r-e in the quotes!
8-o
Anyway, great stories. Great to hear that a determined saver CAN pull off financial security as an IT.
Downsides of IT
-
snowphantom
- Posts: 19
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2017 4:42 am
Re: Downsides of IT
> HOLY SMOKES! Given I'm seeing people on here cite salaries of ~$30-40K, I didn't
> think that level of savings was doable, especially since many cite the benefits of IT
> as including convenience of travel. If you started at age 26 with $400/month invested
> at 11% return, you'd have $2MM by age 62. That'd be nice. But saving $20K annually,
> starting at age 26 at a more conservative estimate of 8% return, would make you a
> poor in 20 years, and worth $5MM by the time you're Medicare eligible. Are IS
> teachers, broadly speaking, actually pulling this off? Or is Caesar the exception to
> the trend?
Saving 20K a year is fairly easy as long as you are at a top tier school. As a teaching couple with kids, we save about 55K a year without much trouble and take 3 big trips a year. However, we have been overseas for 20 years so if you are just starting out and don't have Masters, etc, it may be more challenging.
> think that level of savings was doable, especially since many cite the benefits of IT
> as including convenience of travel. If you started at age 26 with $400/month invested
> at 11% return, you'd have $2MM by age 62. That'd be nice. But saving $20K annually,
> starting at age 26 at a more conservative estimate of 8% return, would make you a
> poor in 20 years, and worth $5MM by the time you're Medicare eligible. Are IS
> teachers, broadly speaking, actually pulling this off? Or is Caesar the exception to
> the trend?
Saving 20K a year is fairly easy as long as you are at a top tier school. As a teaching couple with kids, we save about 55K a year without much trouble and take 3 big trips a year. However, we have been overseas for 20 years so if you are just starting out and don't have Masters, etc, it may be more challenging.
Re: Downsides of IT
In the end it depends on hooking up with a school that pays well and then staying put, putting on the golden handcuffs can be both a blessing and a curse.
Re: Downsides of IT
Personally, I just can't seem to stay back when I go back. My last stint in the States, I had a job family and friends envied, working at a public on-line school. I did most of my teaching at Starbucks. It was a really cushy job and zero discipline problems, which is my standard excuse for not teaching in the States. Anyway I lasted a year and wanted to go back overseas.
IT is addictive.
IT is addictive.
Re: Downsides of IT
Regarding retirement - my husband and I do the same thing Caesar is doing, except with higher numbers. We throw about $80,000 a year into index funds and should have enough to leanFIRE by the time we leave our current school. It's doable, but you have to make sacrifices in other areas (choice of school, lifestyle, vacation locations, how much you spend on material goods, etc.). Worth it for us.
-
Artrageous
- Posts: 36
- Joined: Sun Oct 20, 2013 2:49 am
Re: Downsides of IT
An upside for us has been that my kids have an open mind and experiences when it comes to the world and its people. They have friends all over. Another thing is having home help in some places. Very handy if you have a young family and it can make a difference in your life and your helper's.
Re: Downsides of IT
To add on to this thread, from a teaching aspect, not just living internationally, what are some of the downsides you see in a school itself? Workload? Parent expectations? Administration? Admin expectations? Students? Teacher-to-teacher relationships?
Re: Downsides of IT
@jamcdona
Poor admin without checks and balances, they can fire teachers at will as teachers have few legal options, parents and students are mostly nice. Workload can be pretty hectic if you work at top-tier schools and teachers group according to nationalities and hobbies. Can be very isolating sometimes.
Poor admin without checks and balances, they can fire teachers at will as teachers have few legal options, parents and students are mostly nice. Workload can be pretty hectic if you work at top-tier schools and teachers group according to nationalities and hobbies. Can be very isolating sometimes.
Re: Downsides of IT
@mathman85
Could you expand upon more about poor admin with checks and balance and about firing teachers at will? It's my understanding that you sign a contract for a minimum of a year or 2. Could schools fire someone before their contracts are up? Wouldn't it need to be for extreme reasons for them not to fulfill the contract obligations?
Just curious... Thanks!
Could you expand upon more about poor admin with checks and balance and about firing teachers at will? It's my understanding that you sign a contract for a minimum of a year or 2. Could schools fire someone before their contracts are up? Wouldn't it need to be for extreme reasons for them not to fulfill the contract obligations?
Just curious... Thanks!
Re: Downsides of IT
jamcdona wrote:
> @mathman85
>
> Could you expand upon more about poor admin with checks and balance and
> about firing teachers at will? It's my understanding that you sign a
> contract for a minimum of a year or 2. Could schools fire someone before
> their contracts are up? Wouldn't it need to be for extreme reasons for them
> not to fulfill the contract obligations?
>
> Just curious... Thanks!
not necessarily. it depends where in the world you are teaching, and even then, "not fulfilling contractual obligations" is a broad and vague notion that can mean nearly anything.
v.
> @mathman85
>
> Could you expand upon more about poor admin with checks and balance and
> about firing teachers at will? It's my understanding that you sign a
> contract for a minimum of a year or 2. Could schools fire someone before
> their contracts are up? Wouldn't it need to be for extreme reasons for them
> not to fulfill the contract obligations?
>
> Just curious... Thanks!
not necessarily. it depends where in the world you are teaching, and even then, "not fulfilling contractual obligations" is a broad and vague notion that can mean nearly anything.
v.
Reply
@jamcdona
First, IE contracts are not written to benefit ITs, they do not provide 'rights', they are drafted to protect the ISs and to reduce confusion in communication. A 'contract' in IE is less an agreement in the sense of a negotiation to reach a meeting of minds and more a dictation of terms such as one you would find in an EULA or TOS in software, or music, or film that provides simplified communication and allowing the IS and its ownership to minimize 'rights'.
Second, most of IE is in the realm of independent/private education, you typically have little more rights or protections than any other employee in any other field or industry. While regions such as the WE generally provide ITs more rights and protections those rights arent typically greater than they would be for non ITs, and in the cases they do its usually because the region has a union or other collective bargaining unit that represents edu and ITs benefit from some of those negotiations. Regardless, the rights of private/independent ITs in these regions are often still less than those you would find for DTs in DE municipal edu systems. Essentially the standards for dismissal in IE are the same burdens you would find for general employees.
Third, and this is the difficult part for a lot of ITs to understand is that in IE, most contracts arent worth much more than the paper they are written on, contracts without practical enforcement mechanisms results in little more than a document of suggestions, the IS has all te power and the IT very little. This varies as @vandsmith and as indicated above, but in the vast number of scenarios the IT is at extreme disadvantage. The burden of proof that the dismissal is without cause or unlawful is typically on the IT, and the venue they have to pursue that is typically long, complicated and expensive.
Say Thursday the day before your pay disbursement is made you receive an email that your appointment is terminated and your dismissed. What is the 'contract' going to do for you? Assuming leadership even lets you back on the IS site, what are you going to do wave the 'contract' in front of their faces and state loudly "but we have a contract", leadership can and likely will shrug and proclaim to what amounts to as a "so what?". So what are you going to do? How do you 'make them' do anything. If you are fortunate there is some kind of labor tribunal that you can access as a lay person, but if there is the remedies available to you are often little more than the IS having to provide you what ever severance is, and possible some benefits, but its rare that you will get full fulfillment and performance of the contract without some form of judicial process that amounts to a lawsuit, which as a foreigner you likely dont understand anything about their civil court system, the language. So Its Friday morning you just got shown the door, what do you do go to the labor department, they tell you to get a lawyer, than you go back to your apartment and start Google searching for labor attorneys. You set up a few meetings, and then find out it will take you years at best and will cost you a years salary just in fees and your not likely to win, or at best its a coin flip that you will. Now complicate that youre a foreigner, and your IS is probably already working to revoke your visa, how do you stay, and if you can get a judicial stay, will you be able to work and who would hire you, because youre equivalent of a "designated activities" visa is immediately recognizable by any other IS, or ES as being different from a standard work visa. Without work how do you support yourself, and pay your legal fees?
So yes is theory you may have strong rights but without a practical means of enforcing them, you end up taking what ever the IS offers you and leave, even if it isnt fair.
Fourth, the vast majority of contracts are again written to benefit and protect the IS, not the IT. So even if you have the resources and time to pursue a case against the IS, it is HIGHLY unlikely that any type of language that describes "extreme reasons" for dismissal exists. The contract very likely allows the IS to dismiss you for little if any cause. Most contracts include very vague, ambiguous, and generic language that describes incompetence and insubordination in very beneficial terms to the IS. The standard is likely little more than leaderships claim that you were insubordinate or incompetent. Its very unlikely that it requires anything like professional evaluations, or anything. Even in regions such as the WE where their are higher standards and requirements, they are not insurmountable, it wont take much more than a couple of reports and various pieces of documentation for leadership to justify cause for dismissal, they dont even have to be accurate or valid, they can write whatever they want, and get assent from other leadership, and thats going to be all they need. It becomes nothing more than your claim you were dismissed unfairly against theres, so after the long and expensive judicial process case its going to come down to their documents and their testimony against your claims that its untrue. Arbitrators and judges are likely to side with the IS if thats all the case is, and thats what most of the cases come down too. The contract will do absolutely nothing to help you.
Fifth, the IS is in a position to exert very intense pressure. Aside from controlling in large part your visa, the IS controls the all powerful reference. Even if you win you lose, you still either have to ghost it or hope that any recruiters and leadership are sympathetic to your position, and your previous leadership even if you win can say anything they want. This leaves ghosting the experience as the viable option and in that case you want to move on quickly to minimize the gap you have to bury.
In the vast majority of scenarios, at the point of dismissal the contract no longer means anything, they negotiate the best severance they can and then they leave and what really rubs salt into the wound, is that afterwards the most they can usually do is write a review on this site. Your agency wont help you, and depending what the IS wants to say (which could be anything) they may even drop you as a candidate and if they dont the best youll get is reactivation of your profile, though they may very likely require you to pay the registration fee again. There is no global or IE regulating authority that will investigate. Accreditation agencies care about the curriculum and the binder and they typically wont do anything. Politicians have zero power over a foreign entity like an IS, theres nothing your local, regional or national political representatives can do. You can pursue legal action, but unless you have some way of enforcing a judgment from a domestic court (assuming you can overcome the primary issue of jurisdiction), the courts order like your contract isnt worth more than the paper its written on.
The upside to all of this is recognizing that the contract isnt worth much of your attention. Your primary concerns are two; 1) The section of compensation, how much coin, how often and for how long and the description of benefits (notice description not obligation) such as housing, transportation and travel (where do you live, how much do they pay, how do you get too and from work to home and how do you get in country), and 2) Your duty time, when do you have to be on campus, when can you leave, how many teaching hours/periods vs, contract hours/periods, preps, courses, holidays and leave. Everything else is nonsense boiler plate, that is largely non-negotiable and really all comes down to NOT being more trouble than your worth. Tip the balance from adding value to being a negative influence to where they want to get rid of you and the IS will PNG you.
First, IE contracts are not written to benefit ITs, they do not provide 'rights', they are drafted to protect the ISs and to reduce confusion in communication. A 'contract' in IE is less an agreement in the sense of a negotiation to reach a meeting of minds and more a dictation of terms such as one you would find in an EULA or TOS in software, or music, or film that provides simplified communication and allowing the IS and its ownership to minimize 'rights'.
Second, most of IE is in the realm of independent/private education, you typically have little more rights or protections than any other employee in any other field or industry. While regions such as the WE generally provide ITs more rights and protections those rights arent typically greater than they would be for non ITs, and in the cases they do its usually because the region has a union or other collective bargaining unit that represents edu and ITs benefit from some of those negotiations. Regardless, the rights of private/independent ITs in these regions are often still less than those you would find for DTs in DE municipal edu systems. Essentially the standards for dismissal in IE are the same burdens you would find for general employees.
Third, and this is the difficult part for a lot of ITs to understand is that in IE, most contracts arent worth much more than the paper they are written on, contracts without practical enforcement mechanisms results in little more than a document of suggestions, the IS has all te power and the IT very little. This varies as @vandsmith and as indicated above, but in the vast number of scenarios the IT is at extreme disadvantage. The burden of proof that the dismissal is without cause or unlawful is typically on the IT, and the venue they have to pursue that is typically long, complicated and expensive.
Say Thursday the day before your pay disbursement is made you receive an email that your appointment is terminated and your dismissed. What is the 'contract' going to do for you? Assuming leadership even lets you back on the IS site, what are you going to do wave the 'contract' in front of their faces and state loudly "but we have a contract", leadership can and likely will shrug and proclaim to what amounts to as a "so what?". So what are you going to do? How do you 'make them' do anything. If you are fortunate there is some kind of labor tribunal that you can access as a lay person, but if there is the remedies available to you are often little more than the IS having to provide you what ever severance is, and possible some benefits, but its rare that you will get full fulfillment and performance of the contract without some form of judicial process that amounts to a lawsuit, which as a foreigner you likely dont understand anything about their civil court system, the language. So Its Friday morning you just got shown the door, what do you do go to the labor department, they tell you to get a lawyer, than you go back to your apartment and start Google searching for labor attorneys. You set up a few meetings, and then find out it will take you years at best and will cost you a years salary just in fees and your not likely to win, or at best its a coin flip that you will. Now complicate that youre a foreigner, and your IS is probably already working to revoke your visa, how do you stay, and if you can get a judicial stay, will you be able to work and who would hire you, because youre equivalent of a "designated activities" visa is immediately recognizable by any other IS, or ES as being different from a standard work visa. Without work how do you support yourself, and pay your legal fees?
So yes is theory you may have strong rights but without a practical means of enforcing them, you end up taking what ever the IS offers you and leave, even if it isnt fair.
Fourth, the vast majority of contracts are again written to benefit and protect the IS, not the IT. So even if you have the resources and time to pursue a case against the IS, it is HIGHLY unlikely that any type of language that describes "extreme reasons" for dismissal exists. The contract very likely allows the IS to dismiss you for little if any cause. Most contracts include very vague, ambiguous, and generic language that describes incompetence and insubordination in very beneficial terms to the IS. The standard is likely little more than leaderships claim that you were insubordinate or incompetent. Its very unlikely that it requires anything like professional evaluations, or anything. Even in regions such as the WE where their are higher standards and requirements, they are not insurmountable, it wont take much more than a couple of reports and various pieces of documentation for leadership to justify cause for dismissal, they dont even have to be accurate or valid, they can write whatever they want, and get assent from other leadership, and thats going to be all they need. It becomes nothing more than your claim you were dismissed unfairly against theres, so after the long and expensive judicial process case its going to come down to their documents and their testimony against your claims that its untrue. Arbitrators and judges are likely to side with the IS if thats all the case is, and thats what most of the cases come down too. The contract will do absolutely nothing to help you.
Fifth, the IS is in a position to exert very intense pressure. Aside from controlling in large part your visa, the IS controls the all powerful reference. Even if you win you lose, you still either have to ghost it or hope that any recruiters and leadership are sympathetic to your position, and your previous leadership even if you win can say anything they want. This leaves ghosting the experience as the viable option and in that case you want to move on quickly to minimize the gap you have to bury.
In the vast majority of scenarios, at the point of dismissal the contract no longer means anything, they negotiate the best severance they can and then they leave and what really rubs salt into the wound, is that afterwards the most they can usually do is write a review on this site. Your agency wont help you, and depending what the IS wants to say (which could be anything) they may even drop you as a candidate and if they dont the best youll get is reactivation of your profile, though they may very likely require you to pay the registration fee again. There is no global or IE regulating authority that will investigate. Accreditation agencies care about the curriculum and the binder and they typically wont do anything. Politicians have zero power over a foreign entity like an IS, theres nothing your local, regional or national political representatives can do. You can pursue legal action, but unless you have some way of enforcing a judgment from a domestic court (assuming you can overcome the primary issue of jurisdiction), the courts order like your contract isnt worth more than the paper its written on.
The upside to all of this is recognizing that the contract isnt worth much of your attention. Your primary concerns are two; 1) The section of compensation, how much coin, how often and for how long and the description of benefits (notice description not obligation) such as housing, transportation and travel (where do you live, how much do they pay, how do you get too and from work to home and how do you get in country), and 2) Your duty time, when do you have to be on campus, when can you leave, how many teaching hours/periods vs, contract hours/periods, preps, courses, holidays and leave. Everything else is nonsense boiler plate, that is largely non-negotiable and really all comes down to NOT being more trouble than your worth. Tip the balance from adding value to being a negative influence to where they want to get rid of you and the IS will PNG you.
Re: Downsides of IT
@ psyguy
> The upside to all of this is recognizing that the contract isnt worth much of your
> attention. Your primary concerns are two; 1) The section of compensation, how much
> coin, how often and for how long and the description of benefits (notice description
> not obligation) such as housing, transportation and travel (where do you live, how
> much do they pay, how do you get too and from work to home and how do you get in
> country), and 2) Your duty time, when do you have to be on campus, when can you
> leave, how many teaching hours/periods vs, contract hours/periods, preps, courses,
> holidays and leave. Everything else is nonsense boiler plate, that is largely non-negotiable
> and really all comes down to NOT being more trouble than your worth. Tip the balance
> from adding value to being a negative influence to where they want to get rid of
> you and the IS will PNG you.
I'd planned to do at least doing the minimum spelled out in a contract and I'd hope most people would do the same, plus more. So my question now becomes, out of100 teachers, what percentage of them have their contract terminated before it's complete? 5% 10%? More? And for what reasons because insubordination and incompetence are vague terms like psyguy said? is it because they didn't do the minimum in their contract? Unprofessionalism? Clearly don't know how to teach the curriculum? Other reasons? Wouldn't it be more difficult for the IS to find a replacement mid year and should wait until the year ends and start fresh at the beginning of the new school year? Is there a particular Tier group 1-3 that does this more than others?
Thanks again. Really curious about this...
> The upside to all of this is recognizing that the contract isnt worth much of your
> attention. Your primary concerns are two; 1) The section of compensation, how much
> coin, how often and for how long and the description of benefits (notice description
> not obligation) such as housing, transportation and travel (where do you live, how
> much do they pay, how do you get too and from work to home and how do you get in
> country), and 2) Your duty time, when do you have to be on campus, when can you
> leave, how many teaching hours/periods vs, contract hours/periods, preps, courses,
> holidays and leave. Everything else is nonsense boiler plate, that is largely non-negotiable
> and really all comes down to NOT being more trouble than your worth. Tip the balance
> from adding value to being a negative influence to where they want to get rid of
> you and the IS will PNG you.
I'd planned to do at least doing the minimum spelled out in a contract and I'd hope most people would do the same, plus more. So my question now becomes, out of100 teachers, what percentage of them have their contract terminated before it's complete? 5% 10%? More? And for what reasons because insubordination and incompetence are vague terms like psyguy said? is it because they didn't do the minimum in their contract? Unprofessionalism? Clearly don't know how to teach the curriculum? Other reasons? Wouldn't it be more difficult for the IS to find a replacement mid year and should wait until the year ends and start fresh at the beginning of the new school year? Is there a particular Tier group 1-3 that does this more than others?
Thanks again. Really curious about this...
Re: Downsides of IT
of all the schools in the world, it's pretty hard to say a particular amount...if i am guessing, i'd say if you had a random selection of teachers, maybe 85% stay the minimum. if the school sucks, and the admin sucks, there is a direct relationship to teachers staying or leaving. some teachers can weather anything - even really bad admin - for many reasons (money, lifestyle, location, spouse, kids, etc...)
insubordination could range from asking a question or suggesting a way of doing something, to telling your principal they're an incompetent boob. as PG says, if you're going to rock the already bullet-hole ridden boat, it's better to cut you loose.
v.
insubordination could range from asking a question or suggesting a way of doing something, to telling your principal they're an incompetent boob. as PG says, if you're going to rock the already bullet-hole ridden boat, it's better to cut you loose.
v.
Re: Downsides of IT
vandsmith wrote:
> insubordination could range from asking a question or suggesting a way of doing something,
> to telling your principal they're an incompetent boob. as PG says, if you're going
> to rock the already bullet-hole ridden boat, it's better to cut you loose.
LOL... okay thanks. I'm not a boat rocking type of person, so I should be okay. Thanks!
> insubordination could range from asking a question or suggesting a way of doing something,
> to telling your principal they're an incompetent boob. as PG says, if you're going
> to rock the already bullet-hole ridden boat, it's better to cut you loose.
LOL... okay thanks. I'm not a boat rocking type of person, so I should be okay. Thanks!
Re: Downsides of IT
In my experience it’s far lower. My largest school had over 300 teachers and typically fired one per year. For egregious stuff. Inappropriate contact sort of level. About one every three years would do a runner. About one per year would negotiate an early departure on their request. Stick to good schools and the numbers are in your favor.