The perverse reality for many professions is that, when you are youngest and best able to take advantage of the magic of compound interest, you are barely paid enough to survive independently. After paying for loans to cover college and graduate school, a public school teacher would be lucky to save $15,000 a year 10 years after starting their career.
https://work.chron.com/annual-salary-firstyear-teacher-5573....
Appendix A [1] contains the salary schedule for Chicago Public Schools, which shows that in the current school year a first-year teacher ("step 1") with a bachelor's degree ("lane 1") earns between $57,000 and $69,000 per year, depending on the length of the school year in the particular school they are appointed to. A master's degree ("lane 2") bumps the pay by somewhere in the range of $4,000-5,000.
Being a coach on the sports team earns an additional $26.21 per hour of coaching, participating in after-school non-coaching, non-instructional activities earns $40.90 per hour, and after-school instructional activities earn $47.62 per hour.
It appears as though a teacher could add $5,000 or more per year with only an hour of extra time per school day.
If a teacher wanted to be frugal and save money, it surely appears possible.
It would not be particularly pleasant, but as I said, it would be hard (possibly hard enough to merit a newspaper article), but not impossible.
Why would i skim off all money in the first 10 years of my working life if i know the pie gets bigger, but my share as a working class person is getting smaller and smaller?
However, the numbers aren’t totally bonkers. Suppose she invested $15,000 saved from her first year, which would be hard but not totally impossible on a teacher’s salary.
If that makes 7 percent per year for 35 years, it will be worth about $160,000 at retirement. That’s just for the first year. Money earned and invested the next year will earn a bit less, though with raises, etc, perhaps she could invest a bit more....