Wednesday, May 7, 2008

money woes & complications

Today I found out that I'll be making a lot less as a TA this summer than I was previously led to believe. I won't get a paycheck in June, but I already knew I'd miss a paycheck completely. But I was led to believe that I would be earning about ~$2500 per month for the other two summer months, which is more than I earn now (~$1850 per month). This would make sense considering that I'll be in the classroom twice as many hours per week this summer. Today, however, I found out that I'll get one ~$2500 and one ~$1250 paycheck which is exactly equal to two month's normal pay during the school year. I like teaching, but this kind of BS makes me not want to.

In short, this means that over the summer I'll be earning $3,714 for a workload that will be equal to what I normally have over the course of a semester for which I get paid $8,356. Shouldn't this be illegal?

Tomorrow I have to sit down a figure out a whole lot of budgeting for my trip. I need to budget for expenses in Big City that will be automatically deducted from my account while I'm gone, and I need to figure out how to balance my personal vs. grant funds for this trip. Complicating matters further, I'll have an advance on one grant but the other one I'll have to spend my own money and get reimbursed. Ai! I need to do some serious spreadsheeting to keep track of everything. I just opened an ING Electric Orange account on Saturday and thankfully the debit card came today. I'll use this to access the advanced grant funds while I'm abroad. I'm leaving my normal debit card with Jon so that he can continue to deposit his paper paychecks into my account (his bank doesn't have a local branch and we use a joint ING account to move money between our respective checking accounts- it's kind of complicated).

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