1st Year of Work (Part I)

Today marks the one year anniversary of my career teaching private lessons. As you might be aware, I keep very precise statistical records of my income, including estimates regarding the amount I expect to make from my clients based on their consistency from week to week (some clients occasionally opt to take a week off for vacation or whatever). The amount that I made this past year was only around $21,500, but considering that that only involves an average of 8.5 hours of work a week, that's pretty darn good! Also, this average factors-in a long start-up period where I wasn't making that much a week, so my current weekly expected averages are a good bit higher (if I were to be teaching my current clients for the next year, I would make around $30,000 in this next year).

One thing you might ask is why I would choose to work only 8.5 hours a week when I make so much money per hour. Well, as you might also imagine, work doesn't come that easily, and people are often quick to drop lessons in a financial crisis like this. I would most certainly work at least 20 hours a week if I could, but to my knowledge I've never had more than 15 hours of work a week, proving that even at my busiest, new students can often be hard to find. Thus far, I have taught a total of 34 different students (plus two theory classes and some random gigs), but students come and go, so I'm sure I never taught more than 20 or so at a time (at the moment I'm teaching 16 students plus one theory class).

Overall, I feel like I'm doing pretty well, all things considered, although it wouldn't hurt if I were making more money. I haven't actively advertised to gain new students in awhile, mostly due to the fact that until recently I had a pretty full schedule and that I recently moved to a new area, which complicated things. Regardless, my quality of life, when measured by contrasting the amount of money I make versus the amount of free time I have, is quite high, so although I don't see myself teaching privately for a really long time, I'm content for the moment.

Tomorrow I think I'll write a post about my first year of work as it concerns non-financial matters.