Tag: jobs

I will not pay for my children’s college education, part 2

Continued from Part 1. Many of the personal finance sites I read concentrate on a few key areas: reducing debt, making investments, emergency funds, saving for your children’s college education and saving for retirement. I agree that most of these are important topics, but I don’t believe that you should save for your children’s college education. This may come across as a shocking or neglectful thing for a parent to say, but I have my reasons.

College costs. A report, “Trends in College Pricing 2006” (warning, big PDF), noted that “[p]ublished tuition and fee charges at four-year private colleges average $22,218 in 2006-07. The $1,238 increase over 2005-06 represents an increase of 5.9 percent, or 2 percent after adjusting for inflation. The average total tuition, fee, room, and board charges at private four-year colleges and universities are $30,367.” The report goes on to note that this amount is usually reduced by student aid, but let’s assume you’re trying to pay for them to go to the best college possible (no Cornell for my baby, only Yale/Harvard/Stanford for her!)

If we consider that tuition, fees, etc. increase at the same rate going forward (no sure thing) then a private school tuition for four years will be $42,000 in today’s dollars by the time my son is in college, around the year 2024. If you consider inflation, that will be $80,000 or more. So you’ll need $80,000 in the bank for each child. Keep in mind that the starting point, $22,000 is the average for a four-year college, not for the very best colleges. Yale, for example, now costs $35,000 per year all in. In 2024 a Yale education might cost – get ready - $370,000 for a four-year degree by my very rough calculations. I won’t have that much saved, frankly.

Personally I am not convinced that there is a lot of value in a private school education that is not present in a state university education. There may even be an argument that not everyone needs a four-year degree, to be honest. I am prejudiced. I received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from a state university, and I work alongside Ivy League grads every day. They don’t make any more money or have any more prestige due to their schooling than I do; the distinction between our backgrounds was flattened out back in the first 3 or 4 years of our careers. By year 15 nobody asks where you went to school unless you’re talking about sports.

Those Ivy grads I work with may not be the most successful Ivy alumni, though. If you want a career with the movers and shakers of the world, you need to go to a school where you’ll meet fellow future movers and shakers. For every Ronald Reagan attending Eureka College there are a thousand Bill Clintons/John Kerrys/George Bushes attending Yale, I’m sure. But don’t think that a state school means your ambitions will be cut short, and unless you have ambitions to be the next hedge fund manager or a U.S. Senator I’m not sure a private school is that much better. After you get that first job, no-one will much care if you went to State U. or Fancy Institute except on football weekends. Of course, if you want to major in some specialty that only exists at some private school, or you have some other reason for going (family ties, etc.) there’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t plan on giving my children an extra $328,000 just for the heck of it.

Invest in early education. One of the main reasons I’ve been uncomfortable with 529s is the fact that you are tying up money for a college education. I know you can get it out, I know it can be used for your own education if your child decides to run off to Nepal, and so on – but what if you need money for education in the early years? We are considering a private pre-school and kindergarten for our son; first, for safety and quality reasons and second, for our own opinions on educational philosophies (we are very interested in Waldorf education, for example). We hope that money spent early on can provide some love of learning that will help earn scholarships later on. I won’t have an answer on whether this was a good idea or not until 18+ years in the future, but it makes sense to me.

Conclusion

I guess in the end this is more of a decision related to your personal values. My parents helped me a lot during college, but I provided the great majority of the money for the total costs of my undergraduate and graduate education came from scholarships and teaching jobs, including 100% of tuition. While my parents could have (and I am sure would have) scraped together the money for me to attend Harvard (yes, I was accepted there), I never felt a burning desire to attend and haven’t ever felt that I shortchanged myself.

My hope is that my son will appreciate the fact that I have enough confidence in him, even now, to know that he’ll be able to put himself through college with scholarships and hard work, and hopefully we will return the favor by making sure first that we are never a burden to him.

I should also point out that I do have a 529 for my son (set up by his grandparents), but it’s mainly a place for relatives to put gifts. I haven’t contributed anything to it myself to date. Please don’t beat me up too much in comments.

weight gain behind a desk

I am not a dietician, a nutritionist, a doctor, a trainer, etc. Please consult a doctor before beginning any diet program.

supermanweight
photo credit: swruler9284

As promised, a continuation on my story of woe. Once I graduated from college, I got a job with a Big 4 (Big 6 at the time) firm. A job at the Big 4 is a little different from typical desk jobs. You move from client to client every few weeks. As you progress upwards, you may have more clients and so begin to go to one on Monday and another one on Tuesday. By the time I finished my career in the Big 4 I had eight clients (seven small to medium and one massive, year-round monster client). Then I switched to internal auditing which was much the same, only within a single company. So from 1994 to 2000 a typical day for me involved several very negative factors for fitness and only one good one:

  • Long hours. During busy season I would work 80 hours without thinking much of it. I once worked 110 hours during a week, including two days staying in the office until 4 AM. During “slow season” I would still probably put in 50 hours a week or so.
  • Random food intake. Part of the long and very hectic hours was a tendency to do one of two things for meals: either zip off to a restaurant for a long “working” meal with colleagues and try to unwind over rich food, or eating a hurried lunch designed to tide me over until I could “eat properly.” A joke explains it perfectly: “How do you know you work in public accounting? If in the last week you ate at least one meal at a five-star restaurant and at least one meal from a vending machine.”
  • No exercise routine. I never exercised. To put this in perspective: if you work an eighty hour week, your weekdays are probably about 12-13 hours each and your weekends are probably something like 10 hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday. To put that in further perspective, if you have a 30 minute commute (and I seldom have had one that short) if you leave home at 8:30 am on a weekday morning, you will typically return to your home at 9 or 10 pm. Tell me where you jam exercise into that schedule, plus do the wash, pay the bills, etc. It’s just not happening. I joined a gym from time to time, but my main use of the gym was to go sit in the sauna on weekends.
  • Stress, stress, stress. I was stressed almost all the time. Stress causes weight gain.
  • Caffeine. I kept inhaling diet Cokes during this time, and no matter what you may read on the bottle or hear from the company, I don’t think you can drink 10 of them per day and not gain weight.
  • The only good aspect was walking. I did have to walk a lot – back and forth from my desk to the client’s desk, between different clients, to the office, up and down stairs if we were on different floors from the client and often in Russia back and forth to the subway. Walking did not help as much as you would think, unfortunately.

    • So what was the result of this lifestyle? While in the States, immediately after college, slow weight gain. While in Russia, I started piling on the weight. After I returned to the States and started traveling frequently for business (lots of rich paid-for-by-the-company food) I hit my maximum of almost 315 pounds. At that point I was eating out of control and had almost no physical exercise.
    In August 2000 I was walking up a single flight of stairs from the New York subway when I had to pause and catch my breath once I reached the sidewalk. I realized at that point something had to change, and it did…

    Consulting

    Consulting is a tough lifestyle for someone accustomed to the heights of corporate America. I was a fairly senior person in my corporate life, having zipped and lucked my way into a corner office overlooking downtown Manhattan. Only two people in my reporting chain separated me from the CEO of the company. But I had severe problems with the organization and with my boss, and eventually that combined with the incessant travel and never ending corporate politics wore on me. When I got married, I realized that there was a life beyond work and Friday nights.

    So I joined a consulting firm that provided almost no support other than locating clients and taking care of billing and collection. I don’t get a computer from my company, or any sort of review or office supplies or whatever. I rely on my client for that. However, I don’t have the headache of finding clients or chasing after invoices, which is no small thing. And most importantly, they pick up 50% of my health insurance costs.

    I went from commanding multiple teams in far-flung countries to commanding, well, myself. I am in charge of nothing and nobody, and I am often supervised by people who are junior to me and who would have worked one or two levels below me in the past. So I stop and remind myself once in a while about why I do it:

    I never travel. Travel is a lot of fun when you’re single. I visited half the planet while staying in swank hotels and eating rich food. However, after you’ve been to Paris for the fifteenth time it gets boring. The routine of plane-hotel-office-hotel-office-plane gets overwhelming after a while. I keep a journal, and on these business trips I routinely have entries that begin “Stayed up until 2 am drafting the final report in my room.” I wasn’t partying constantly. Now, if I don’t want to travel, I don’t work for clients who require it.

    I have no corporate political affiliation. My previous jobs had a high component of politics; alliances were formed, strategy meetings were held, whispered conversations in board rooms were standard, and after-hours meetings huddled over drinks were frequent. I was sick to death of these things. I was good at corporate politics, but I realized that what “being good” meant was that I was expert at ripping other people down without really lifting myself up. I did do some good – I often used my political scheming to help lift some great people who worked for me – but by and large it was all negative. As a consultant I have no stake in such things, since I have no hope of promotion or fear of demotion. It’s liberating to only worry about the actual work.

    I leave work at 5, both physically and mentally. As I said above, I used to carry my work home with me, and even into my bed and sleep. No more. I am not reachable once I leave work. I don’t check my work email before sleeping. I have no Blackberry. There are no weekend “catching up on my reading” sessions.

    I have no investment in the company. I used to worry about the success of my company. This may seem like a small thing, but as an auditor you have some ability to really seriously damage your company, either through missing something in the audit (Enron, anyone?) or finding something in the audit (Worldcom). This presented me with harsh choices at least three times in my career. Each time, I tried to raise serious issues to senior management and was overridden by my superiors, creating a real love/hate attitude in me. It’s not easy knowing you work for crooked people, because then even your honest efforts only serve to enrich them. Now all I do is my work – my investment is in me and the quality of my work that will be the basis for landing future clients.

    I get paid overtime. That’s no small thing. I used to work 80 or 90 hour weeks and wouldn’t get a dime more; in fact, 40 hours would have been considered slacking. Now if I work more than 40 hours my rate skyrockets. Most clients don’t like the higher rate, so they send me home after 40 hours. I can’t say I hate that – getting home at 6 or 6:30 gives me time to go a few rounds with Little Buddy before he goes to sleep. In my past life, when I wasn’t traveling I often wouldn’t be home before 8.

    I get to quit my job two or three times a year. This is the greatest thing. I had a client earlier this year that nauseated me. Their unprofessional attitudes, horrible physical offices and cruel treatment of their staff made it one of the worst places I’ve ever worked. However, rather than needing to go through the drama of worrying about quitting a job I’d just started, I simply wound down my consulting gig and moved on. I never have to give any of those guys another thought. Even at the good clients I only stay long enough to do good work; when they start making small talk about me coming on board as an employee I usually know it’s time to go

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