OMG. Yeah. As I write this, the US is barreling full tilt toward opening schools with a pandemic raging out of control. As I look through FB, my friends and colleagues are freaking out. And the very first school corporation in Indiana just made the call to go 100% virtual this fall. I’m praying that all the rest follow suit. But if yours doesn’t and you are in a position where you just can’t return to school in person, here is my best advice to help you quit teaching without ruining your life.
I have been researching personal finance for about 20 years now and side hustles for about 2. Here I’ve tried to assemble the best information I can as quickly as I can. That doesn’t mean it is complete or error-free OR right for your personal situation. You need to make your own decisions and do your own fact-checking and due diligence. But I hope this will spark some ideas and at least provide resources and a starting point for teachers who feel like they must leave the classroom or who have been shaken into the feeling that they may have to in the future and want to have a plan in place.
There will be a lot of links to other posts that might be helpful, either from my own site or others.
Please help me to provide the best info out there. If you have a valid suggestion for insurance or a company that is hiring for LEGIT work from home positions, comment below. Posts about MLMs, direct sales, self-promotion, or other comments that just seem scammy will be deleted. Thanks!
Step 1 – Slow your roll
DO NOT quit teaching or resign from your position unless the return to school is almost immediate. In my home state of Indiana, districts just today (July 13) started re-evaluating their decision to physically open schools. I believe that other districts will soon do the same. The last thing I would want for you would be to resign and then find out that your school is going to be 100% virtual to start the year.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t take action. On the contrary, following the steps below will put you in in MUCH stronger position to walk away on short notice if you decide that your district is not taking adequate steps to protect you.
Step 2 – Communicate
With your partner
If you have a partner, this should probably be the first person you communicate with. Do they share your concerns? If not, you are going to need to work together to figure out at what point you would indeed quit teaching and stay home. Try to put specifics on it, such as infection rate, number of new cases, or specific policies from your district. If you are on completely different wavelengths, it could add serious stress to an already stressful situation. In short, you know your relationship best, but for this to work, you will need to reach some kind of agreement.
With your employer
School districts are in a tough position here, too. They are trying to balance the needs, wants and fears of many groups all at once. However, if you are seriously considering leaving your position, this is important for your principal and HR department to know. They might want to open schools virtually for a few weeks, but be under pressure from another entity (cough cough – US Department of Education – cough cough) or from parents to open in person. If they know that a large number of their teachers are willing to resign rather than return in person, that gives them a realistic idea of how difficult opening will be and might help them to justify opening online. (Normally, I do NOT accept administrations pushing difficult decisions off on teachers, but in cases where it will literally save lives not to open schools, I am not super picky.)
With your union
If you are a member of the union, check with them before you make any solid decisions. They should be working with the administration to help teachers cope with this previously unimaginable situation. Some corporations are offering an unpaid leave of absence for up to a year. Some have other options. You won’t get your best deal unless you inform yourself, and often the union can offer ideas that might not occur to most of us. PS If you are not a member of the union and you don’t have a specific reason, you might want to reconsider that. Just sayin’ 🙂
With your support network, either virtual or IRL
This is a fine line to walk. You don’t want to operate in an echo chamber, but you also don’t want to share your fears with people who will belittle you. And that’s a real concern right now. This is some scary sh*t going on, no doubt about it. But examining our own assumptions is also a healthy thing to do. You know your situation best, so choose carefully who you do – and don’t – communicate with.
If you feel comfortable talking with extended family and close friends, you might want to just see what help and insight they might be able to offer. Do they have experience with making money on the side or a better understanding of health insurance than you? Maybe someone you know would love to pay you to help them manage online education for their kids while they work from home or to deliver their groceries or something else. Communicating with a slightly larger group will help you form an accurate picture of what support you might have.
Step 3 – Take stock of your situation
Leaving a stable profession is not a step you should take lightly. But then again, neither is returning to a classroom full of kids during a global pandemic. So give this some thought, and try not to be ruled by your emotions. The goal here is to focus on fact and get an understanding of the risks and challenges.
as to health risks
To what extent will returning to school put your health or that of your loved ones in danger? Some items to consider are
- the infection rate in the district where you will be teaching
- the health of yourself and your family members
- your mental health
- your ability to enforce safety measures in your classroom
- the number of students you will be in contact with each day
- your faith in the district leadership to be open and transparent, your current financial situation
- any potential job leads you already have.
All of these pieces will play a part, and each will have a different weight on the decision based on your particular situation.
Write these down in a format that works for you. It could be a table, a mind map, or a spreadsheet. The important thing is to get the info out of your head and into a format where you can see it and use it to make a rational decision.
and money
This is the other big part. For many teachers, this would be THE major hurdle keeping them in the classroom. This is a whole blog post in and of itself, so that will be coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled for it. For now, let’s just focus on the basics.
You need to know how much money you NEED to pay your bills each month, so I am going to say the dreaded “B” word. That’s right, budget. You must know how big of a gap your quitting would leave between your family’s monthly must-haves and your monthly income. If you are serious about the possibility of not returning to school, it’s time to do the crappy stuff.
Assemble as many bills as you can from online and hard copy sources. Try to have credit card bills and bank statements back for at least 12 months, if possible, so you don’t forget about expenses like life insurance that you might pay only one time a year. But if you can’t go back that far, don’t let that paralyze you. Use what you have.
Figure in any other income you may have – a spouse’s paycheck or unemployment check, child support, whatever – and look at the gap. Now that we know what our situation is, let’s look at insurance.
Step 3 – Ensure your health insurance before you quit teaching
This is the other major hurdle for most of us. If you have a spouse with employer-sponsored health insurance , the first option would be putting your family on that plan. Most of the time a change in employment is a qualifying condition that will allow changes in who is covered, but the cost will most likely change.
Even if you think this is your best option, do some research to 1) be sure you CAN get onto your spouse’s plan and 2) learn how much it will cost.
If you can’t rely on another family member’s insurance, things get a lot stickier. I’m not going to lie: I have not found a great answer here. I am researching it and talking to actual people who are self-employed and have had to get insurance. I will update as info comes in. So far, the best that I have found is the ACA coverage from the federal government. To get more info and find out whether you could qualify, you can click here.
If you are leaving employment with a school corporation, you have the option to take COBRA. However, chances are that it will be prohibitively expensive. With that said, there is NO WAY I would go without health insurance right now unless I was just planning to take the chance of having to declare bankruptcy. If you are in a position that is serious enough that you absolutely can’t go back to school and your corporation will not work with you, that might have to be an option. (Hey, bankruptcy is bad, but losing your life or losing a family member is worse.) But it should be a last case scenario.
Finally, if you know a secret in this area that I don’t, let me know!
Step 4 – Lower expenses (A great thing to do, even if you DON’T quit teaching!)
In step 2, we looked at the gap between your income and expenses. Now, let’s shrink the gap.
Once you know how much your current expenses are, think about how much you could cut. Obviously, if you have kids doing online learning, Internet is a necessity, as is food, housing and a lot of other things.
But what could you do without? Shopping for clothes and non-essentials? Restaurant meals? (I hope that if you are seriously considering quitting teaching that you haven’t been in a restaurant in months. But I know a lot of people have been relying on Door Dash and take out to provide a bright spot in a dreary time.) What about subscriptions you don’t use or may have even forgotten that you have? You’d be surprised what you might be paying for without even realizing it. (If you want to go step-by-step through your money and see if you are paying for things you don’t even use, check out my 5 day Found Money Challenge below.)
This is not going to be accomplished all in one day. You will probably think of things you can do without over the course of a week or more. Just keep whittling those numbers down and see how small you can get the difference.
Step 5 – Create immediate income
In a perfect world, your work would be done. You would have income from some other source and low enough expenses that you could buy yourself some time to breathe. What we are looking for here is money to close the gap between your essential expenses and your income for the first few months that you are out of work. In this step, we are just looking for enough income to fill the immediate gap.
We all know this isn’t a perfect world, so let’s look at other options. What we are looking for in this step is money to fill the immediate gap. If you have an emergency fund, that could be your answer to this step.
If you don’t have any money in savings, yyou need a source of immediate income. Depending on your circumstances, working with a few families that need help with virtual schooling could be a great option. I’ve created a forum for teachers and families in Indiana to connect. You can sign up by clicking the links in the previous paragraph. If you are outside Indiana, check FB groups and Google to see if the same thing exists for your state. If not, comment below and I’ll do my best to help you set one up.
Note: Any work that you do as an independent contractor will not have taxes taken out, so it is a good idea to set up a separate bank account any deposit about 25% of income from non-employer sources directly into it. This can keep you from getting a nasty surprise come tax time next year.
There is also an increased demand for delivery workers right now. Besides pizza delivery, these 7 delivery companies might be worth investigating. I know delivery might not sound very appealing, but the key here is to get some income right away until you can put more permanent plans in place.
One of the first things that teachers think of is teaching English online. You can read more about VIPKid in this blog article but based on what I am hearing a TON of new teachers have signed up since the shut down and bookings are extremely slow. So don’t count on this as an immediate plan. Put it in the long-term category.
There will probably be another post on this coming soon, so check back if you need more info on immediate opportunities.
Step 6 – Create long term income
Here we are talking about putting a longer term plan in place, say 3-12+ months. If you are able to take a leave of absence from your job and have your expenses covered, this step might not even apply to you. On the other hand, some school employees will finally be pushed over the edge by the lack of concern shown for their safety and will be looking for more permanent employment.
In that case, you’ll need to do some soul searching about whether this is a good time to create a job for yourself through entrepreneurship, or whether you want to search for another full time job. If you’ve always wanted to start a small business, well, this will be a tough time to do it, but there are some solo-preneur ideas that just might work. They all take some time to start producing income, which is, of course, why they are long term plans.
My favorite solo-preneur idea is indexing, and you can read more about it here. Even with all the hype around work-from-home jobs, it seems to have gone unnoticed. There are other real options for working from home, though. Virtual Assistants are becoming more and more popular, especially those who have a sought-after niche. Some VAs specialize in Pinterest, others in Facebook ads. If you think being a VA would appeal to you, here is an article on 17 specific VA niches.
Otherwise, while a ton of places have been laying off employees, others have increased needs and are hiring. Here is an article about openings from May, and another one from January about some of the best companies for remote online work.
Whatever you decide, remember to make your decision about whether to quit teaching based on solid research and facts, not panic. And remember, you’ve got this!