I quit teaching, now what?
Options I learned after quitting my teaching job (Untangle Post #4)
You left your teaching job. What do you do next? If I were you, I’ll take a week off, then deal with your choices next. We’ll use our WH questions for ourselves.
WHERE are you (financially) now?
If you haven’t read my Figure out Your Money Flow post, go there now. Then, download the free Guided Journal to help you process where you are financially or you can just list your monthly expenses. List all the money going in and out. If you will still receive some backpay, list them also.
It is likely that your total expenses will be higher than your money going in. Just breath and relax before committing yourself to another job that you might not want. Look at the illustration above. You can break it apart and see what you can change now.
WHAT can you change?
First, look at the money going out. Are there expenses that you can eliminate? If it is an essential expense like housing, can you move to minimize its cost? Now look at the money going in. Do you have something you can sell or trade? Does your employer owe you some backpay?
When I left teaching, here are some essential expenses that I changed:
UTILITIES - switched to Ting Mobile from the big name cellular services which starts with a $10/month flexible plan with unlimited talk and text. If I need it to surf, it is $5 per GB.
ENTERTAINMENT - went through all my subscriptions (Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc.) and unsubscribed. I do get Netflix and other services but I make sure I unsubscribe after a month.
UTILITIES - negotiated lower monthly price for my WiFi connection and used Google Voice (free) as my business phone. It uses the Internet to call and saves long distance expenses when you are traveling abroad.
WORK EXPENSES - chose one-time-fee or free apps instead of subscription-based software - for example, I chose Affinity and Google Docs over Adobe and Microsoft. Used free resources like LinkedIn Learning using my public library account.
What about you? What can you change in your expenses?
Major Change Starts with WHY then WHAT
After minimizing expenses, I had to face the biggest issue: where will my next income come from? In other words, WHAT will I do to generate money? Before I answered that, I went back to WHY I left teaching. My initial reason might be to take care of my family, but there is something more. When I was an inclusion SPED teacher, my co-teachers needed me to be in their classrooms but I can only be in one place at a time. I need to clone myself. Now that I am not bound by the four walls of the classroom, I can be a virtual co-teacher to more. That is my long-term goal: to reach more students and assist more GenEd teachers bridge learning gaps. But what about my coming expenses? Here’s what I did:
projected WHEN my savings and other resources will sustain me and my family. This timeline empowered me to sow seeds today that will yield income tomorrow without being employed.
looked for other resources like inheritance and assets I can begin to convert to cash.
studied relocation options including living outside the country.
focused on generating income from what I am already doing or did before
Before I left teaching, I was already a Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) Seller. I also sell in other online marketplaces. I decided to tend these sales channels while working on my long-term goal.
What about you? You know WHY you left. But dig deeper and find out what is your long-term goal. If you don’t know, just know that whatever you do next is just a stepping stone to that unknown goal. Now that is out of the way, figure out WHAT you can do to bring in money. Here are initial questions that might help you figure out what to do next. Do you want to consider the following options?
the same job, different place
the same job, different delivery (virtual, tutorial, homeschool support, etc.)
the same industry, different job (like an office manager in the district office)
different industry, same job (teaching kids in museums, parks)
different age-group, same job (training adults in any industry)
different industry, different job
Remember, whatever you choose is a stepping stone. If you need to earn immediately, it does not matter if you choose a “lowly” job. You are taking your time to find options while working in a less stressful place. Again, it is just a stepping stone towards your goal.
There is another option: the route I took. But I warn you, it will take some time to replace your income yet I believe in the power of exponential increase once the right seed is planted. I chose to productize what I know.
What is Productize
As a teacher, you are familiar with online courses. That is a productized service. The instructor is still teaching but not when you access the course. That means the course is available without the instructor. The course creator invested time, resources and knowledge and created a product that can be sold without him. In other words, the trainer’s earning potential is now NOT limited by his human time. I wrote more about this at the Teacher Career Change Options page. If you want a more formal definition, go to Investopedia.
Leap of Faith
Changing your career or situation is a leap of faith. There will be times when you will wish you stayed to get a paycheck. From now on, the only thing you can control is what you sow and how you tend it, whether in a job search or establishing your own business. Yet it is possible you’ll be blessed with great harvest. Here at Teacher Career Change, I write about unusual options starting with self-publication via Amazon’s KDP where I show you how I converted a simple PDF into a low-content book Kindle Paperback. As a teacher, you created a lot of worksheets. Those can be self-published as a Workbook with minimal resources. Subscribe for free so you’ll not miss any post. I will keep this online newsletter mostly free as my service to my fellow co-teachers.
