“I’m Angry About My Future Financial Situation”
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June 1, 2024 at 12:29 pm #1129238
From a LW:
“I am angry a lot of the time. I am 30 and I have a bachelors degree in a STEM field. I work fulltime in my field and I make about $20 an hour. This is considered good pay for my field. My husband has his masters in a different STEM field and makes $14 an hour at his fulltime job in his field. Both of us graduated from college debt-free. I am so angry because I feel like society betrayed us. We did everything ‘right’ we were told to do growing up— work hard, do well in school, get a scholarship, get a degree, get married— but we’ll never be able to afford a house and we’ll never be able to afford a kid. My husband is able to shrug it off and make peace with our current and future situation, but I’m bitter about it. I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I feel like our respective jobs are exploiting us. I enjoy my job and it’s one where I feel like I’m making a difference (my husband feels largely the same way about his job) but I can’t make my job pay me more money, I can’t make houses or babies cost less money, and my fears about our dismal future keep me up at night mad at the world around us. How do I move forward from these negative feelings?”
KateJune 1, 2024 at 1:21 pm #1129241I know, there’s a lot that’s fucked up right now. Housing and kids are not affordable right now. Buying a home in particular, though market dynamics can change.
How long have you two had these jobs? Often the best way to get a big jump in pay is to switch jobs, and that’s easier when you’re young. Do you have a resume that lists your accomplishments and quantifies what you achieved (as opposed to just listing your responsibilities)? Are you keeping track of your achievements and praise you get in some kind of folder so you can use it to argue for promotion or in a job interview? Do you know how to advocate for yourself?
I am surprised a STEM field pays so low. Do you know your worth? Have you checked on Glassdoor and fishbowl and sites like that to get a general idea? Are you actually hourly, or are you salaried with benefits? If one of those benefits is a 401(k) with a match, you absolutely have to be contributing at least as much as the match.
But I keep coming back to, how can there not be jobs for a college educated math or science major that don’t pay a respectable salary? Can you change industries? You don’t have to feel great about the work you do, imo, it’s just a job. It’s not your purpose in life.
ronJune 1, 2024 at 8:21 pm #1129242What STEM fields are you talking about and are they from a college of at least moderate-level quality? I know that some B.S. degrees in biological fields don’t pay well and lead to beginning technician-level work, as an advanced degree is considered the professional threshold and jobs are scarce in general in these STEM areas. Even still, an entry-level technician job should pay more than $14/hr. Are you working for small nonprofits? There is a big pay differential among the many ‘STEM’ fields and there are mail-order degrees from not well regarded programs. Something seems amiss here. Please give more info. Btw, many professional societies compile annual tables of average salaries by degree, years of service, and type of employer. I found the American Chemical Society’s surveys for Chemists and Chemical Engineers to be very helpful over the course of my career. Such lists provide a valuable benchmark against which to compare your own situation.
LWJune 2, 2024 at 9:27 am #1129256LW here, for added context: we both work in the natural sciences/conservation biology type of work. He works for the federal government (technically at $15/hr but I fudged his number by a dollar bc I was nervous about posting publicly initially) and I work for the state. People keep telling us about “amazing government benefits” but honestly they suck. We both got our degrees from the same school, a state college (ends in SU). I moved through four different states getting experience in my field, and I’ve moved through 3 different jobs already. My starting fulltime pay in 2020 was $12 an hour. At my most recent job I just moved laterally into a new role that’s less physically demanding four months ago. My field is both competitive and specific so I do have a good resume but job hopping too much looks bad & I’ve already done so much & moved through so many states. I think I’d have to go back to school to switch fields to something that pays well, and I simply don’t have the money to do that without student loans that all my current coworkers already have and I see them suffering under.
KateJune 2, 2024 at 10:05 am #1129257Ok but can you switch to corporate, like biotech? Someone I work with, for example, was working for the CFPB, and just switched to a financial services company. We get a nice bonus every year and a profit sharing contribution to our 401k that basically doubles what we can contribute per year.
There has to be a better paying job for someone like you. If there isn’t then I’m wondering why you chose this major and type of work. I don’t understand how your husband’s degree and skills don’t make him more than working at McDonald’s.
ronJune 2, 2024 at 1:33 pm #1129259Here are the stats for earnings for a conservation biologist in PA:
Conservation Biologist Salary in Pennsylvania
Annual Salary Monthly Pay
Top Earners $137,328 $11,444
75th Percentile $121,300 $10,108
Average $80,910 $6,742
25th Percentile $59,600 $4,966Conservation Biologist Salary in Pennsylvania – ZipRecruiter
ZipRecruiter
The hourly rate you are being paid is well below the 25th percentile. Is your job that of conservation biologist or a much less responsible position? Having you been working in states like Mississippi or Alabama where the government is really cheap? PA isn’t an expensive state to live in and these salaries are way above what you’re earning. Thay you are an hourly worker suggests that for some reason your employer isn’t treating you as a professional. Job hopping works a lot more to your advantage in nongovernmental jobs than it does in government, which pretty much comes down to tenure and job rating, until you reach middle management or higher.
LWJune 2, 2024 at 3:25 pm #1129261For additional context: his field is similar to ornithology but isn’t exactly that. Jobs want 4 years of directly related experience or a PhD to pay anything (and the jobs that don’t need a PhD have PhDs applying to them anyways, it’s so competitive), and while he’s working in his field, it probably isn’t going to be the type of direct experience employers are looking for in order to pay those 60-80k positions in three years. I’m not exactly a conservation biologist specifically, but a huge problem in the natural sciences is even getting to a permanent position no matter how low the pay is (temp jobs are common in the field, we’re exploited, yes I found out too late. My parents & everyone else mentoring me growing up had no idea these particular STEM fields pay so terribly and the shift to more temp jobs only happened in the last few years as far as I know). To make matters worse, these average percentile calculations for my field ALWAYS include upper management/director salaries, which just isn’t representative of how much the average employee makes. Probably not qualified for any biotech jobs given my field but I did take Biotechnology 1010 as a freshman in college. I have lived in multiple states (Oregon, Florida, Texas, etc) and they all pay crap. I make only about four dollars less an hour than someone in my field would make with the best and most well known employers in California, and I have no idea how anyone in my field survives living in California. Also my mom raised multiple kids and bought a home off a single school teacher salary so I thought a salary similar to hers would be just fine growing up… obviously this ended up not being the case.
ronJune 2, 2024 at 6:29 pm #1129262I feel for you. The natural sciences job market is brutal. Too many academic advisors don’t give the true picture to their department’s majors — I think in part to keep enrollment up so the department isn’t closed or at least doesn’t lose slots. Back almost 60 years ago the valedictorian of my H.S. class majored in biology, got his PhD specializing in fresh-water invertebrates and had a teaching/research job at University of Michigan. When his grant wasn’t renewed, he lost that job at age 45. He loved biology and that job. It was very sad. Forty years ago, when I was working on a development project funded by Department of Energy, who sent a review team to meet with us twice a year, the only woman on the team was a PhD biologist. She loved her job and had a long tenure with DOE. Her daughter wanted to follow in her footsteps, but she said no, she wouldn’t pay for a bio degree. She explained it that DOE at the time accepted job application year-round for most college majors, but only for one month for bio majors. Get the app in early and it was returned, if received a day late, sorry, try again next year. Simply brutal.
I worked in environmental, health, and safety with a Fortune 500 chemical company. We interviewed college students with general environmental science or conservation B.S. degrees. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out exactly what skills and knowledge were taught in these programs. It made hiring chancy. Natural sciences job market has been brutal for at least the past 50 years.
If you and your husband are basically technicians in the environmental/conservation field, I can give some encouragement from observing the career arcs of a number of technicians (bio as well as chemistry and physics and machining or welding). Many advanced to well-paying jobs. Within the company they moved into more business-related jobs, some left for pharmaceutical sales, a couple became plant managers for smaller companies, some had long careers in R&D, one of whom became a principal investigator on his own analytical project. It could be done back then and I suspect it can still happen today. There is a shortage of qualified workers.
Adding additional skills is key as is looking for higher-paying jobs a little divorced from your current work.
LisforLeslieJune 3, 2024 at 6:25 am #1129267Ron clearly has a shit-ton (that’s the scientific measurement) experience here so definitely pay attention.
Other things to consider:
Find a job that has an education benefit. I had a not-great paying administrative job that offered up tuition assistance and I was able to get 80% of my master’s degree paid for by the company. I had to be there a year and then when I finished, I stayed a bit but it made it possible for me to get a significantly better paying job.Consider Consulting: Right now the key word across all industry is “Sustainability”. Use that to your advantage.
Government jobs are not considered fantastic in the moment. They are considered fantastic because they can’t just fire you at whim and they usually have a pension. If you don’t have a pension or decent health insurance, then it’s not worth the lower salary. If you do have a pension, and there is a clear career trajectory, then staying in a government position has a benefit that almost no other job has anymore which is income during your retirement years. Given the current state of things and the predictions about Social Security, it should be part of your considerations. But if the equations don’t add up, then maybe it’s not the right option.
I’m a little older than you, a middle-of-the-pack millennial. I get it. It often feels like boomers benefited from systems that they then fucked up for the rest of us. Life is really expensive — the cost of education, housing, childcare, etc. are all out of control — and wages haven’t kept up. Many of us listened to the advice of our parents when we were teenagers only to come out the other side with degrees that buried us alive in student loan debt and poor job prospects. Some of the things I’ve heard older folks say about people in my general age range feel beyond out of touch. Some of the advice I’ve gotten about how to find new, better-paying jobs over the years was laughable (e.g., don’t apply for jobs online, print and mail your resume). Anyway, yes, things suck. I can understand why you’d feel so bleak about the future.
But, I think you need to change your mindset a bit. Right now you’re bitter, telling yourself what you’ll never have. And again, I get it, but if you can focus on how you can pivot, you may be happier. Maybe that’s a master’s degree. Maybe that’s looking for a different way or environment to use your current skillset. I don’t know anything about your field so I can’t offer concrete solutions.
I’m someone who went straight from undergrad to grad school. I was making decisions of impact at 21. I hadn’t yet worked full-time, didn’t know much about the “real” world, and if I’m being honest, barely knew myself. I was in large part relying on the advice of others in my decision-making. Things started off shaky in my mid-20s because I had to do what I’m recommending you do — be creative in how I used my background to find a path that felt true to me and paid me enough to live comfortably — but by now, I feel ok about how things have worked out… but I know that if I’d had full-time work and real-world experience before making any kind of post-grad education decisions, I would’ve chosen a different path. I’d have been better equipped to understand realistic employment outcomes. I’d have been better able to research the true ROI of different degree programs now that my blinders off about how universities operate. Now that I am out from under my student loans, I can appreciate why you would want to stay debt-free, but I think with proper research and understanding, some debt to go back to school isn’t the worst thing. (Like yeah, it’d be better if it was very affordable, but that’s not our reality.)
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