Something on my Mind: If I Were Young Again

There doesn't seem to be any shortcut to learning life's difficult lessons. It often takes time, age, and mess-up after mess-up to learn a thing or two. I speak from bittersweet experience.

How many times have you said (or heard someone else say), "Boy, if I only knew then what I know now")? I cannot recall how many times I have heard that over the years, and I think I rolled my eyes every time someone it.

Well, I no linger roll my eyes when I hear it, because I'm usually the one that's saying it.

I'm 63 now, so let's take a stroll back forty years. I was just fresh out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), with a receipt, er, degree, in hand that showed that I was "qualified" to teach school somewhere, somehow.

Qualified, smallified. I knew nothing about teaching or classroom management, and at that point, the last thing I wanted to do was...teach . That opinion lasted for approximately another twenty years, before I finally plunged into the profession, in Kamloops, BC.

Over the years I have had mostly good experiences, with most of them right here at Bow Island's Cherry Coulee Christian Academy.

This is actually more of a "what if" issue, as I reflect on those "missing" twenty years, as in, What if I had started my teaching career right when I graduated from UBC? And, What if I put in 30 to 40 years in the classroom, maybe even in the principal's office (on the other side of the desk, by the way)? Think of the early retirement and pension, the experiences of influencing lives, and living in various posts around the province.

Well, I didn't, so muttering "shoulda, coulda, woulda" doesn't get it done. Yet, though I didn't, my life has been fulfilling in many other areas. There's no turning the clock back, no parking on the side of the road called Dreams Lost, and no lamenting lost wages.

Please allow me to ask what would have happened, in concrete terms, if I had chosen to get into teaching right away? Maybe this can spur someone else on to think about maybe doing what I didn't do.

A key factor to all this is that I married a public school teacher, so that would have added some significant factors to this discussion.

Simply put, we would have moved way up north, to some out-of-the way place, and both of us would have taught in a local school for a few years.

Back then, teachers could live in teacherages quite inexpensively. That could have helped us save money. All things being equal, we would have lived off one salary and salted the other one away in a high-yielding, locked-in savings account.

That's the theory anyway.

Even at an annual income of $50,000, multiplied by five years, we would would have built up a nest egg of $250,000, plus interest. (Bear with me: I might be off in my base rate; after all, it was more than 35 years ago.)

At any given point, we could have stayed put or moved elsewhere, continued this very wise way of saving for the future. After ten years of living this way, we would have accumulated quite a nest egg.

Teaching is only one option, and I cited it as an example because that's what I did. Chooseany profession or trade that pays well, where both husband and wife can be employed full-time, and the rest follows suit. The North is one option; overseas is another.

This can be done as a husband and wife team or as a single person. I see greater financial advantages with the married couple option, as there is more money to go around. It's a matter of determining to live well but frugally enough and salting away your spouse's income.

So here is my simple advice: If you're young enough and just starting out on a career, look for somewhere to go away for a few years and save your money.

But please, don't roll your eyes at me.