Life After Quitting My Job as a Teacher

Part 2: Your questions answered!

Welcome to part 2 of leaving my teaching job to work from home. In part one, I shared my teaching story- how I started out and what led to the decision to resign. In this post, I’ll share what I’m doing now and also answer your questions.

Q. What is your job?

A. I work from home full time running my TpT (TeachersPayTeachers) store. I started my store in February 2011, so my business is a little over 12 years old. You can visit my store here. If you’re unfamiliar with TpT, it’s basically Etsy but for teachers. I create digital resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. I started my store back when TpT was first starting to be widely used by teachers around the world, and since then the site has grown and changed tremendously. Lots of people ask me how they can get started in this business, but I don’t feel like I have a good answer. The way I started out would not work today because social media marketing didn’t really exist for TpT back in 2011. You basically created a resource, uploaded it, and shared it on your blog. Now the process for getting your resource noticed is way more complex and something I’m still working on. There are lots of courses out there if this is something you’re interested in though! When I was starting out, it was very much a trial-and-error process.

Here are a couple of examples of what my TpT resources/marketing looked like for me in 2011/2012.

Nowadays, my products look more like this:

These are screenshots from my blog. We’ve come a LONG way, haven’t we? LOL

Q. How are you able to afford it?

A. This was easily the most asked question. TpT turned into a full-time job for me around 2016. Even though I consider myself incredibly lucky, this also took an incredible amount of work. I’m not exaggerating when I say I would teach 5 days a week, and my weekends would be devoted to sitting in the recliner in my parent’s living room (this was back when I still lived at home) and I would create TpT products all weekend long. Then it grew to working on my store after school when I got home from my full-time teaching job in the afternoons. When social media started playing a role in education, that created even more work. At one point, I would wake up and work on my TpT business before I left for my actual teaching job, and then in the afternoon, after giving myself basically an hour to recover from the school day, I would go back to working until around 7 when I was finally finished for the day. During summer “break”, I worked all during June on my TpT business because July was consumed with classroom prep. It was absolutely exhausting.

To read about what my 3am morning routine working two full-time jobs looked like, click here.

Q. What are you doing for health insurance?

A. If the comment above was the most asked, then this one was second! Health insurance is a biggie and ridiculously expensive. For the first few months after resigning, I had insurance through COBRA, but then I enrolled through HealthCare.gov, which made it about $400 a month cheaper than what I was paying through COBRA. I was nervous that this would be a complicated process, but it was incredibly easy!

Q. Is it “scary” to not have a steady income?

A. I wouldn’t say it is scary, but it was comforting knowing each month would bring the same amount of money. My current job is not like that. This hasn’t been something that’s troublesome or worrisome. I think it hasn’t been an issue because that’s how it’s always been with my TpT store, and I knew that when I resigned. I know that August through January/early February are typically my biggest months, while May, June, & early July are extremely slow, so I have to plan accordingly. It just takes some getting used to.

Q. Do you do more TpT-type work or more social media work?

A. I would say both. TpT can very much be passive income-meaning once you upload it, it can sell on its own without you having to do anything. Since it’s a digital product, there isn’t any packaging or shipping. One resource can be downloaded over and over. My top resource (Bloom’s Ladders) has actually been downloaded over 7,000 times. Yes, there are things you have to do like answering questions, revising products, and working on SEO, but for the most part, the actual TpT resource is passive income. Marketing your resources has become a HUGE part of the business and that’s where social media comes in. I’d say half my time is spent working on new products/updating older resources and then working on social media content. Social media is a beast to tackle! It’s constantly changing and so incredibly time-consuming. The algorithm can be your best friend or your worst enemy, and it’s so tricky to figure out what will work. You can spend tons of time on a video or post and it not get picked up in the algorithm for whatever reason, but then you can try the same video/post or something that took little to no time to create and it gets shown to thousands more people. It’s a constant guessing game.

Q. How can you afford it as a single person?

A. I decided to address this question separately from the previous question about finances because I realize it is a different situation doing this independently as opposed to with a spouse. I think a couple of key factors can be attributed to this.

I lived with my parents until I was 26. This allowed me to save money. It was a HUGE help. I am so glad I did this. I was able to save because I didn’t really have any other expenses. I was able to pay a lot down on my first house that I bought in 2014 and make some money when I sold it five years later and built my current house.

I also bought my first car when I still lived at home and was able to pay it off in a very short time since I didn’t have any other expenses. I’m currently 36 years old and I’ve only owned two cars in my lifetime! My parents bought me my first car when I turned 16. It was a red Camaro. I loved my car so so much. I drove it all throughout high school, college, and my first three years of teaching. Then I sold it and bought my first car on my own. I bought a BMW 328i in 2012 and still drive it to this day. It has been the absolute best car, and I never want to get rid of it. It was my first big purchase and I remember to this day how special and exciting the day I bought it was.

Q. Did you have any savings to fall back on?

A. Absolutely. I made up my mind long before resigning that I would not do so unless I had a certain amount to fall back on. When I decided I was going to resign, I set a certain amount to keep in savings that I consider untouchable.

Q. How long did it take you to make as much with a WFH job as a teaching salary?

A. TpT went from a side business to a full-time business for me about 5 years after I started it.

Q. What is one thing you miss about teaching?

A. Hands down, sharing books with my kids. I miss creating a classroom library and watching kids find a book they love. One of my top 5 favorite teaching memories was when one of my most reluctant readers picked up The Crossover and started reading it in the classroom. That night, he posted a picture of himself on IG holding up the book saying he had just finished it and it was probably the best book he had ever read. This kid always said he hated reading, yet he finished a book in one day! AND he shared his excitement about it online! This made me so incredibly happy. I miss that excitement over books.

I also miss creating a classroom. I know people say they love to decorate their classroom, but I feel like the part I really enjoyed was creating a classroom that helped me teach. To me there’s a difference. It’s more than just some cute decor. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely wanted my classroom to be pretty, but the main focus was for it to function in a way that helped the kids learn. Yes, the classroom looked nice, but there was also a lot of thought and research that went into the planning and layout. I feel like every year my classroom was different because my students were different and the classroom had to reflect that. What worked for one group of kids didn’t work for another. I shared my thought process on how I planned my classroom in this post from 2018. You can also watch old classroom set-up videos here.

Q. Will you go back?

A. I really don’t know. At times, I say I’ll never go back, but then sometimes I think maybe? I didn’t realize I would miss it as much as I have, but at the same time, I can’t stand the thought of going back to all that stress! I just don’t know…

Q. What issues made you want to leave?

A. I talked a lot about this in part 1, but there are other day-to-day issues that made teaching so incredibly difficult. For example,

• Dealing with parents. For the most part, I was really lucky when it came to the parents of my kids, but every once in a while, there was the occasional parent that made up for all the “good” parents. You know what I’m talking about- the ones that constantly email or call or request a meeting during your only 50-minute break of the day in which you have to spend grading papers, making copies, attending trainings, and numerous other issues that prevent you from actually using your planning time to plan. Those parents were always challenging. I once had a parent look up my own parent’s home phone number in the phonebook, called their house, and asked my dad if he knew what time I was going to get home because she had a question she needed to ask me. Those parents make teaching even more difficult than it already is.
• Inadequate planning time. Teaching the way we are instructed to is impossible because there simply isn’t time to prepare. Take the beginning of the school year for example. Teachers usually go back a few days before students but there are so many meetings, trainings, and other unnecessary things that prevent you from actually doing what would help you-getting your classroom ready! Lots of schools require teachers to move everything out of their classrooms at the end of the school year so they can wax the floors, yet in many cases, there is no time provided over the summer to put your room back together. Teachers are expected to simply figure it out and the only way to do this is to work during your own time.
• The constant worry. I know this could be said for many other jobs, but teaching is definitely not a stress-free profession. I was constantly worried. I would worry that I wasn’t teaching something the way students could understand it. I was worried I hadn’t prepared them enough for a test, yet at times I worried I was teaching to the test too much and they wouldn’t be prepared for the next grade level. I was worried my classroom wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, so I would go back up to my classroom after school or on the weekends and rearrange areas to try and make the flow of the classroom work better. I was worried I hadn’t graded a written response question correctly. I was worried it was taking me too long to return graded papers. I was worried I had forgotten to respond to a parent who had emailed. I worried about everything and it was exhausting.
• All the paperwork and documentation. Not only is the actual teaching part of the profession an overwhelming task, but then you are responsible for keeping up with data. And RTI documentation. And IEPs. And 504 plans. And behavioral plans. The list goes on and on and on. I always felt like if I was doing a really good job with teaching, everything else was a mess. BUT, if I had all my paperwork, documentation, and data up to date, my teaching wasn’t as effective as it should have been. It seemed impossible for it to all be done all the time. And I could tell myself that it wasn’t just me. Other people were struggling with this and no one was “doing it all” but I still wasn’t able to let it go and not stress over it. I feel like if you’re a type A person who loves a good checklist, that can be a really valuable trait when it comes to teaching, but it can also be a really hard thing to deal with because a teacher’s job isn’t set up to be achievable in the way that you can write things down and make a list and cross everything off at the end of the day. When you cross off one thing, you still have 10 more to go. It’s never-ending.

I will say, on the flip side, there was a lot about my job I loved. I absolutely loved the actual teaching part (oh, the irony! How ridiculous is it that the part about teaching that is the most important is also the part that somehow gets overlooked when you look at what all teachers actually have to do each day!) I feel I was extremely lucky to teach at my home school, which I loved. I loved the people that I worked with. I loved my kids-yes, I dealt with a few challenging students during my 12-year teaching career, but for the most part, I had great classes. My principal always gave me the freedom and flexibility to teach how I wanted as long as I was teaching the standards. I didn’t have to teach using a basal or a certain reading program, so I taught using paired texts, novels, etc. I loved having the ability to do this! It was just everything else that was such a struggle.

Q. Do you make most of your money through affiliate links or TpT resources?

A. Almost all of my income comes from selling teaching resources. I also work with publishing houses like Random House and Simon and Schuster on book campaigns, but only a very small part of that includes paid sponsorships for me. I do receive free books which has definitely helped with my book budget! 🙂 I earn a very small amount through LTK, but I’m not consistent about linking things. It seems like most of what I share isn’t linkable, so that hasn’t been a huge part of my income.

Q. Are you still working on your master’s?

A. Yes! I have 3-4 classes left, depending on whether or not one credit from a previous college from several years ago will transfer and count towards my Reading Specialist degree. I didn’t take any classes last fall because I felt like that really affected my ability to switch to working from home full-time the previous year. I’m so glad I didn’t! I would love to take one this fall and then finish up in the spring, but my grandmother is having some health problems, so I don’t want to have a lot of extra things going on. We’ll see!

Q. How did you learn to create teaching resources? Is there a class?

A. I’m sure there are classes now, but since I started my TpT store when the concept of purchasing teaching resources was still brand new, I just taught myself! It was a lot of trial and error and lots of research. I randomly took a class during my first year of college that covered the basics of Microsoft Office, and that class ended up being so helpful. I never realized when I took it as an elective that it would play such a big role in my career!

Q. Can you share your typical work routine?

A. I would love to share what a normal workday looks like for me, but I can’t. This has probably been the biggest obstacle to overcome in making the switch to working from home. I never would have believed you if you had told me I would struggle with time management because I really think I had mastered that before I resigned. Teachers thrive on a schedule, and I thought I would be able to create a routine for myself that would allow me time to work and then time to do whatever I wanted, but that hasn’t been the case at all. I really made a mistake taking 4 grad school classes right after I resigned because that took all of my focus and time right off the bat. I was trying to learn how to go from a very strict schedule that teaching offered to a more laid back flexible work-from-home schedule, yet I had SO MUCH grad school work. Once that semester was over it seemed like one thing or another would come up and prevent me from establishing a routine that worked. My desktop crashed and my new computer took a month to be delivered. My mom started having some health problems, then the same thing with my grandparents. My mom and I had to clean out my dad’s house and get it ready to sell during all of this as well, so it’s just been one thing after another. I really want to work on creating a routine that is the same every single day-or most days, but it’s still a work in progress!