Higher Education

by FrugalBabe on June 6, 2007

My husband and I are both health insurance agents, and I also work at the library part time.  My library gig pays about $20,000/year, so it most certainly would not keep us afloat on its own.  For quite a while now, we’ve been discussing what we’ll do if and when the US gets a national health care system.  Ironically, we’re both very far left of center, and both of us believe that the country would be better off with a single-payer national health care system.  It would equalize the system that currently provides better care for people with money.  But the bummer for us would be that we’d be out of a job.

We know that government projects like this don’t tend to happen overnight, so it’s likely that we’ll have plenty of warning if things are going to change.  But health care is no longer an issue that elected officials can continue to ignore, so we assume that something will change, probably within the next five years.  And alas, we probably won’t be ready to retire by then.

I’m feeling a bit un-marketable at the moment.  I have the ubiquitous undergraduate degree in psychology, combined with minors in math and economics.  I spent two years in the Peace Corps, two years at Enterprise Rent A Car (one year of which I was managing my own store), and the last four years working with my husband, running our own health insurance agency.  What am I qualified to do, other than what I do now?  I’m not sure.  When I look at job openings online, it seems that everyone wants a masters degree these days.  I checked out some MBA programs last night, and the price tags are scary.  I found in-class programs that ranged from $50,000 to $120,000.  Ouch.  But my alma mater offers a distance learning MBA for under $20,000 total.  That doesn’t seem so bad….

The other issue I’m struggling with is that we want to have a baby sometime soon, and I’m not sure what I’m going to want to do as far as being a stay-at-home mother versus working outside the home.  If we can continue to have our home-based business, I could do both.  But health insurance reform is the unknown factor there.  I don’t want to spend $20K right now to get an MBA, and then find out that I only want to stay home with my baby, and don’t start using the degree for another five years.  Maybe I could work on an MBA while being a stay-at-home mother?  My husband is much more marketable than I am, as he has extensive knowledge of search engine optimization (our website is number one on yahoo and number three on google in the organic search results – we don’t pay for our rankings) and could probably get a job pretty easily.  So he could provide for us for a couple years while I take care of a baby and get some additional education.

One thing that I’m certain of is that I don’t ever want to get into a big debt situation again.  If I were able to pay the $20K for the MBA over the course of the two years that the program runs, I think we could swing it without going into debt.  We might have to cut back on our retirement plan contributions during that time, but I don’t think we’d need loans.  I hated having debt when we were starting our business, and I”m determined to pay as we go from now on.  So I’m adding education to my list of things that we’re saving for (the other stuff: having a baby, lasik for my husband, and new cars when ours eventually wear out).  I figure if I start thinking about this well in advance, we’ll be able to make it happen without too much of a strain on our finances.  Good thing I’m not much of a shopper!

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  • http://frugalupstate.blogspot.com Jenn @ Frugal Upstate

    Lots for you to think about. I know that a masters really does help in the job market-I got mine while I was in the service and it is nice to know that I have it when I do decide to go back to work.

    On the other hand I think it is very valid to think that you may be staying home for a while anyways-and once your child (children?) are in school you may choose to take a job that is more of a “part time” thing to be home in the afternoons when they get home (it is a possibility) so it may be that the masters is not so necessary. Then again, if you have one child, stay home till kindergarten and go back into the workforce you may really wish you had that degree in 5 years!

    I will say that studying with an infant is insane. Studying with a toddler is possible (that’s when I finished up mine-btw it took me 7 years to do my masters. . . .obviously I didn’t do it straight through!) but I found I actually had to leave the house and go to the library or the bookstore in order to study. I just couldn’t study without constant interuptions at home. And by the end of the day when she was asleep I was too tired to want to deal with too much studying.

    I’m not trying to say you can’t do it, I ‘m just saying that it might take you a while to do it-you should check how long the credits are good for while you are enrolled in the program.

    The other option may be to get a job specific training course. I know it sounds goofy, but sometimes things like medical transcriptionists or something like that might be a tech course and very marketable with decent salaries (I’m totally picking that out of thin air, but you know what I mean)

    Good luck with all these difficult thoughts and decisions.

  • Ron

    Ahhhh, the facade that is the “health care crisis”. I don’t understand how you support something that will put you out of work. In my job, I come into contact with people everyday who do not have insurance and yet they receive better healthcare than I or my family does, They don’t pay a dime. A relative of mine has had three heart operations and has yet to pay money to anyone for them. Once the government involves itself in this, healthcare will be worse not better and those who are responsible with there money and lives will pay more for less.

    As a society, we should take care of those who can’t care for themselves. But we don’t do that. We take care of those who refuse to take care of themselves and then wring our hands that we aren’t doing enough.

    National healthcare, run by our government, is a terrible idea.

    Ron

  • Diana

    Don’t worry about not using your degree. Very few people are actually working in the field they got their degree in. Just having the degree shows that you were able to do well in the challenging university environment. The main thing you have now is the experience of running your own business. That sounds like what you like to do most anyway, so you can feel secure hiring yourself again and again in any other business ventures you set out to do. If you really want to work for somebody else in the future, they’ll like knowing that you have the experience running your own business, it doesn’t get anymore challenging than that!

  • FrugalBabe

    Ron, I fail to see the connection between my job and whether I would support a social reform issue. Yes, a national health care system would result in a career change for myself and my husband. But it’s working in just about every developed country on the planet, and the overall effect would be a leveling of the playing field when it comes to health care for all Americans. To not support it just because it would mean finding a new job would be the height of selfishness. I guess by that logic it’s ok for someone who works in the oil industry to be opposed to research into alternative energy?

  • Ron

    Frugal Babe,

    Frugal Babe said, “I guess by that logic it’s ok for someone who works in the oil industry to be opposed to research into alternative energy?”

    Maybe. Is the alternative energy better? Then that smart person should leave the oil industry and start a new alternative energy business. But that doesn’t really connect up with the previous post. You will lose your job to something that WILL NOT be better.

    I’m not suggesting we keep the status quo. And certainly, if you were making horse buggies today I would not suggest you should take on GM to keep your job. But you are in the health care industry. Are you saying that the government is your best answer to this alleged health care crisis?

    You propose a national program is THE FIX for a faulty health care system. You are correct that national healthcare “works” in other countries but it is not the best alternative. A despotic leader “works” in other countries but it is not the best environment for his people.

    Government involvement in medicine in the US is one reasons the health care system is in the condition it is in today. (Medicare, resulting in fraud and price gouging, for example). Allowing the government to run the entire program will result in further corruption and poorer treatment.

    I would think you could propose a better alternative than another billion dollar government program. Perhaps one that is in a more capitalistic vein?

    There are very few things the government is good at. Given their track record with Social Security, Medicare, welfare and the like, I am circumspect when it comes to their management of my health care.

    Ron

  • Mark

    Ron,
    I think capitalism is a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t lend itself to the healthcare industry unless you’re perfectly healthy. If you have health conditions, the insurance companies have ALL the power. Ironically, government sponsored insurance plans like state risk pools and medicare are usually the best choice for these people.

    “Given our governments track record for medicare”??

    They’re actually doing a very good job (especially pre-PartD). Overhead for Medicare is 1 percent to 2 percent. The overhead for various private insurance plans (HMOs, etc.) is 15 percent to 25 percent. This is especially good given the fact that Medicare is covering the higher cost over 65 age group and under 65 patients with expensive enough treatments, like dialysis, that private insurers aren’t covering. These “clients”, with their high volume of claims, create MUCH more work for medicare to deal with.

  • FrugalBabe

    Mark and Ron, thank you both for your comments. Yes, I am a fan of capitalism, but like Mark, I don’t think that it has a place in healthcare. I don’t think the industry should be for-profit. I’m not a fan of blindly supporting people who refuse to take care of themselves. And when I see someone who chooses not to have health insurance (but could afford it with a little effort), I have no sympathy when that person ends up with big medical bills.

    But what about the person who has a crappy policy because they worked with an unscrupulous agent? What about the person who had coverage through work but then the employer stopped offering coverage and the employee doesn’t qualify for individual insurance because of pre-existing conditions? These people might make too much money for Medicaid, but if they live in a state where there is no high-risk pool, their only option is to find a different job that offers health insurance. A national health care system would take care of people with pre-existing conditions in a much more fair way than we have now, and would eliminate the huge differences that we currently see between good and bad policies (which are often sold with similar premiums and pitch-lines, since the bad policies often have the slickest agents)

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