Personal Finance for Educators

With the school year approaching, I wanted to make a post for folks who might be starting a new teaching job and feeling overwhelmed with everything. First, congratulations! You’ve joined a wonderful profession! Thank you for the time, dedication, and heart that you've already committed. When it comes to personal finance, my experience has been that new teachers often get minimal guidance related to benefits. Unless you are someone who enjoys digging through pdfs, reading spreadsheets, and examining fine print*, you likely won't have much engagement with specifics apart from surface-level comments at an orientation meeting. This is problematic because the benefit decisions you make now can have significant short-term and long-term financial consequence. Moreover, as I mentioned in  Focus Less on Numbers,  the first few years in the teaching profession can be overwhelming as you learn the trade (e.g., lesson planning, assessment, classroom management) and navigate big life chan...

In a previous post,  The Pension Path , I shared an overview of the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) and how it works. In this post, I’m taking the next step: exploring a scenario along this path. My goal is to help folks understand how to estimate a pension benefit and how it might fit into a broader financial strategy. I’m a mathematics educator, not a financial advisor, and this post is meant for educational purposes only—like everything else on this site. If your financial journey includes traveling the pension path, then I think you should, at a minimum, understand what this path looks like. If you are part of the WRS and have never looked at  WRS Retirement Benefit Page , consider this a homework assignment. If you are part of another pension system and reading this blog, you are likewise charged to explore your benefits. Although waiting to understand how a system works the last few years of employment might work out fine, I think it very likely you will have missed o...