She’s A Hustler Baby, And I Want You To Know (That She’s Leaving Work)

Starting today, my wife is leaving the office and will no longer be working as an attorney. At least for the next fourteen months, that is.

She is now preparing for her new job as a mother to a newborn baby girl.  Our life as parents will include a good dose of restless nights and being on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On the surface, it sounds like residency all over again, but I know being a parent is a totally different animal!

We are really excited and we can’t wait to meet her.

Fourteen months?

Yes, you read correctly. My wife is taking a fourteen month maternity leave.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a federal law that guarantees certain employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave each year with no threat of job loss. And it requires employers to maintain health benefits as if they were working. However, this only applies to certain employees. Many American workers are not guaranteed paid maternity leave at all. This is pretty pathetic when contrasted with the generous benefits mothers have in Europe and many other parts of the world. For instance, in the United Kingdom, mothers enjoy a 52 week maternity leave, with 38 of those weeks partially paid up to 90%. Moms in Sweden get to bond with their baby for a long time with a very generous 68 week maternity leave at 80% pay!

My wife’s employer contract guarantees an additional 52 weeks of maternity leave, after FMLA, with no threat of job loss. Only 6 weeks will be paid leave at 50%. Her employer paid benefit is definitely not as generous as the maternity leave benefit in the U.K. or Sweden, but we feel fortunate that she can take at least a year off to bond with our baby knowing that her place in the office will still be there for her when she returns.

Luckily, we can also afford it. The past year we have been readying ourselves for this moment. We have been paring down our excessive, discretionary expenses. Our lifestyle has become more simple and minimal. And we hardly buy anything anymore. We currently live comfortably on only 30% of my gross income. The rest (including almost all of my wife’s income) goes to taxes, savings, and investments. Not having her paycheck every month will not significantly impact our livelihood.

 

She’s a hustler baby

My wife is totally excited about becoming a new mom. But the idea of not working feels oddly strange to her. She has always been a hard worker. If we had the money to be financially independent for multiple life times, she said she might still work. I, on the other hand, would not hesitate to leave work behind and live a life of productive leisure.

Being a doctor is the only real job I have ever had. My time in high school, college, and medical school was mostly spent studying and having fun (i.e. partying and other forms of douchebaggery I may not be currently proud of).

By contrast, my wife has always had some form of paid employment since she was fifteen. She’s been working over half her life! She has had multiple jobs and side hustles way before the term “side hustle” was even a thing.

 

She works hard for the money

My wife is a hard worker for many reasons.

First of all, she grew up in an immigrant family with very little money. As a result, she knows what it feels like to live paycheck to paycheck, while being very frugal for survival (and not by choice). By contrast, I grew up in a upper middle class, all-American family and never experienced what it feels like to struggle financially.

Additionally, my wife doesn’t like debt and never felt right asking her parents for money. Through work, she paid for her college tuition, room, and board all by herself without taking out a loan.

A few days ago, we were talking about how a lot of millennials are still dependent on their parents. You know the stereotype: still living in their parent’s basement, wasting time playing video games, and too lazy to find a job.

Then we started talking about the various jobs that she has had and how interesting they were. I couldn’t quite keep track of all twenty two, so I wrote them all down.

Below is a list of all the jobs she has had since she was fifteen…

1) Tutoring

My wife was a smart cookie in high school. Because she did so well in school, multiple parents asked her to tutor their kids for money. She tutored two of her classmates, her friend’s older brother, and a middle school boy. She was paid up to $30 an hour for her tutoring services!

2) Babysitting

She made quite a bit of money in high school babysitting too!

3) Writing

She may not have been a professional freelance writer, but she did earn quite bit of money (at least $500) winning a few essay-writing contests in high school. If I were a better writer, I would have done this too; but in high school I hated writing.

4) Earning private scholarships

My wife was a member of her mock trial team. She was so good that her coach Mr. Wagner (a successful local attorney) gave her a private scholarship of $10,000 when she graduated. This experience may be one of the reasons why she wanted to go to law school. It’s definitely impacted her decision to pay it forward and volunteer to coach a local high school mock trial team.

5) Working at an ice cream store

In the summer after high school, she worked at a local ice cream store. Nothing like staying cool during the hot California summer and making a few friends while earning a little cash.

6) Research lab assistant

When she entered college, her various scholarships covered the tuition. But she also sought work-study opportunities to pay for room and board as well as other living expenses. Throughout college, she worked as an assistant in a research lab as part of her work-study program. She would make about $12-15 an hour. Interestingly, her lab studied pain tolerance. (It’s interesting because I am a pain management specialist.) Her job entailed entering data and other tasks, but she was also able to study for her classes while at work.

7) Research subject

Not only was she a research assistant, she often volunteered (for money) to be a research subject. While walking on Bruin Walk, she would often see flyer advertisements that sought college students who wanted to be paid for participating in clinical trials. One of these studies was through UCLA Nutrition. They provided her a large supply of strawberries and pomegranates to eat, then later would ask for her urine sample. To this day, she is not sure what the aim or purpose of the study was (since it was a blinded study), but she didn’t care. She was paid $300 per month AND received free healthy food. What a great deal!

8) Personal assistant and driver for Hollywood stylist

My wife found this job as a posting on Craigslist. When she inquired about the work, she had no idea she would be working for a Hollywood stylist for celebrities. (But hey, it’s Los Angeles, everybody know somebody who knows somebody in “the industry”.) Anyways, her job mostly entailed driving his kids to and from school. She wasn’t paid a ton, but she thought it was very interesting to say the least.

9) Helping out a White House chef

This is another interesting job she found on Craigslist. As she recalls, the listing read something like: “I just moved into town and need help lifting heavy boxes”. The description caught my wife’s eye because she was a student athlete on the UCLA rowing team and she was always looking for ways to apply her physical strength AND get paid at the same time. This job fit the bill! Little did she know that she would be working with Will Greenwood, the White House chef for President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush!

At that time, he had moved from the hustle and bustle of Washington D.C. to a quiet California suburb southeast of Los Angeles. He wanted to take a break from the high stress environment of working in the White House. When he saw that my wife was a college girl, he didn’t want hire her at first because he didn’t want her to get hurt moving heavy things. But she convinced him that she was a powerful athlete and so he allowed her to help. She also helped him prepare Christmas meals to needy families in the community. Not only did she earn $500 dollars per week, she also learned some valuable cooking skills too! A huge win for me ;).

10) Landscaping and moving boulders

Another physical job found on Craigslist. She said this posting read something like: “Need help clearing my backyard”. Seeing the opportunity to get paid for physically demanding work, she jumped on this opportunity too. When the older couple who listed the posting saw my wife, they were also reluctant to hire her. But she was also able to convince them that she was an able-boded girl who can get the job done. (She is very persuasive!) So that day, she lifted and carried large boulders the size of beachballs into a wheel barrel and wheeled them out of the yard. She doesn’t remember being paid much, but she liked the work and they physical work out.

11) Passing out newspapers and flyers door-to-door

I forgot how she found this job, but it was probably also Craigslist. Anyway, this was kind of an odd job she did to earn a few extra bucks. She was the only young female doing it (everybody else was a male day-laborer type), but she didn’t care. Money is money.

12) Platelet donation

My wife would go every week to the UCLA blood and platelet donation center to earn extra money donating her platelets. It paid a decent 4 hours at her $12 per hour work study rate for a total of $48 each time she donated.  It pays to help save lives!

13) Selling educational books

One summer during college, my wife drove cross country to Virginia for a job opportunity selling books. The company really coached her on how to be an effective door-to-door salesman/woman. They taught her various concepts such as:

• Always look at your target customer in the eye with kind eyes and say their name very often
• Emotionally involve the spouse or the child so that it would be hard for them to say no
• Don’t take no for an answer
• “Sell the sizzle, not just the steak”
• When making the sales pitch, always present an option #1 versus an option #2 and never allow them to think that buying nothing is one of the options

She became really good at sales and actually made quite a bit of money doing it. But she didn’t enjoy it because she felt a bit slimy selling overpriced products to families who likely don’t need it.

However, she appreciated the opportunity to live in and see Virginia for the summer. And she learned a lot about the world of marketing and sales.

14) Behavioral therapist

My wife studied psychology and child development in college. As part of the child development program, she was hired as a behavioral therapist for children with autism. This job was rewarding for her.

15) Coaching

She probably wouldn’t count this as a real job. But because she is an exceptional athlete, I asked her to be my running coach. It was during her last year of college and I was training for a 5k race. I didn’t pay her anything monetarily, but I would like to think my companionship was somewhat valuable. Running was how we got to know each other and look at us now… we’re married! 🙂

16) Elementary school teacher

After she graduated from college and before starting law school, my wife worked as a teacher for an after school enrichment program. She worked there five days a week and had a lot of fun planning various activities with the kids.

17) Law library clerk

When my wife entered law school, she continued her hard working ways. She didn’t earn a scholarship for law school, so it was the first time she took out a school loan. Being somebody who doesn’t like to have debt, she looked for a job immediately. One of those jobs was being a clerk at the law library. She had this job throughout law school and it helped her pay for living expenses.

18) Legal assistant in large lawsuit

Wild fires are a concern when living in California. One year, one of the wild fires was caused by negligence and improper maintenance of equipment by the local electrical company. Many homes were lost and lives were devastated. The people filed a lawsuit against the electrical company and one of the lawyers was Mr. Wagner, my wife’s former mock trial coach. He had asked her if she wanted to help him as a legal assistant. As a first year law student with minimal legal experience, she agreed without hesitation. She interviewed a lot of the fire victims and helped to determine how much property damage and monetary value was lost.

19) Winning a case in small claims court

In order to save a lot of money during law school, my wife often lived in really cheap places. Sometimes as low as $500 a month (really cheap for California standards). One of these places was a spare room in a woman’s trailer park mobile home. I will spare you the details of her living conditions. Anyway, the dispute occurred because my wife never received her deposit upon moving out despite being an excellent tenant. So she sued the land lady in small claims court. The judge sided with my wife and ordered the land lady to pay two times the amount of the deposit. It was definitely not a pleasant situation, but she did end up with even more money than she sued for.

20) Clerkship with a state judge

The summer after her first year of law school, my wife clerked for a Nevada in Las Vegas. She didn’t get paid much, but it was valuable work experience. We had a lot of fun exploring Las Vegas together and several of the surrounding national parks.

21) Internship at prosecutorial agencies

After her second year of law school, my wife did several internships at prosecutorial agencies including the district attorney’s office and the attorney general’s office. She received a stipend for her internship. It was a stepping stone toward attaining the job that she has today.

22) Selling things online

My wife is good at selling things that she no longer needs. She uses various online sties such as ebay and Craigslist. She has been doing it for a while and still does it to this day. Her earnings through the years probably exceed $2000.

 

Final thoughts

My wife has had many jobs in the past. But nothing can compare to the job of being a mother.

She is full term and our daughter can be born any day now. We are excited about the joy of being new parents. And we are also preparing ourselves for the unique challenges of taking care of a newborn. I’m sure we will figure it all out :).

 

Readers: Do you have any helpful tips for new parents? How much parental leave are you able to take? What kind of jobs and “side hustles” have you participated in to increase your income streams? Comment please. 🙂