Simple test: look at the teacher's house and/or car and then tell me if they're charging too much.
I have yet to see any music teachers laughing their way to bank. Same goes for martial arts instructors.
These people do it for the love of teaching. I have yet to see anyone get rich off of it, let alone make a decent leaving...which is why I only do it part time.
Others have touched on it, and I won't go into great detail, but music adds so much more to one's life than just learning how to bang out a few notes on the piano.
Quick example: At a local high school football game the other night, the school recognized the senior band members. When they read off their accomplishments and where they were going to college...wow. Quite impressive. And most were not pursuing music or music education.
I am so glad to see that everyone else's comments reflect how inaccurate many of the statements made in this post are.
Piano teachers study their whole lives in order to be qualified to teach. Personal trainers, private tutors, personal chefs, etc. all charge similar rates. When you're an expert at something, that's what you do, you charge accordingly.
Learning piano as a child benefits them in so many priceless ways. It builds confidence, improves brain function, improves grades, and more! Not to mention that once the kid learns how to play piano, they can usually learn almost any other instrument on their own (talk about savings)!
This may not be an option for you but this is what we did:
My wife taught three of our children piano herself. Eventually a point was reached where our children would not practice or pay attention. So our three children were traded with a neighbor for her three children, that is, just for piano lessons :). We found that both sets of children learned better from another mother.
Eventually my daughter outstripped her tutor's abilities. She then took inexpensive lessons from a neighbor who was home raising her own children. My daughter eventually gave lessons herself to raise money for band trips abroad.
Most of the cost of education we have spent on our five children has more than repaid itself productivity wise now that they are grown.
It is hard to understand why music lessons are so expensive. I was once an oboe teacher (and a student!), but had to quit teaching lessons because I was very disrespected by the parents of the students. Often, they would forget to pay me, would not show up to lessons and leave me waiting for thirty minutes, would not show up with the proper materials, or would show up and had not practiced since the lesson before. I explained my policies in the beginning, and was in understanding they understood too! However, I think they disrespected me because they thought I was too young, and not charging enough.
Since I was a college student teacher, I only charged $10 for an hour lesson. I wasn't making much money at all, especially considering what I had to deal with the parents. One reason music teachers may charge a lot, is to make sure the student is serious, AND the parent as well. A parent is much more likely to respect a teacher if it means $60 an hour. Granted, there are cheaper music lesson teachers out there. However, it takes many years to become trained enough to be a good musician, and especially someone with the gift to teach. And...musicians are often freelance, which means they can't work 8 hours a day, come home at not think about their job anymore. It's more like a 24 hour a day job, with random hours.
After all, the arts is very important for children to stimulate their creativity and feel a sense of accomplishment. If a student goes though lessons and enjoys them, wants to take them, then you should consider yourself privileged. Many children are made to take lessons, and they end up despising it. Consider it a WONDERFUL! investment if you child wants to take lessons and follows though. After all, if they stick though it and want to continue, then it's a great return for the money.
I love my cast iron pans and I avoid non-stick as much as possible which is why I haven't bought a bread machine yet, since all of them have non-stick pans. Does anyone know of a bread machine that has a safer material pan? Or a replacement pan that I can buy. I really, really want a bread machine!!! TIA
PS. I scrub my well seasoned pans with soap. However, I don't scrub my iron wok but do use soap.
I definitely think your post was way off the mark this time. Unless you're employed with a pretty well-to-do group, almost every musician I know does not make a fantastic salary. That $60 an hour is not just for the insurance, taxes, travel and other misc. expenses that almost always comes with teaching, you have to consider the fact that this person may have started his/her own musical training since he/she was 4 or 5 years old. That's a lifetime of training you're asking this person to pass onto your child for a mere $60 a week. That's a lifelong love and passion for an art that your asking them to teach your child, who may only be interested in it as a passing phase, for a mere $60 a week.
There's also the fact that most people do consider this a mere hobby, meaning the lessons stop whenever the kid loses interest, so it's not steady income. Plus, most piano teachers I know of have mentioned parents canceling whenever they have something "better" to do. Piano lessons are indeed a luxury, but musical training, even if only for a short while, cannot be valued monetarily. It gives you the ability to appreciate the intangible, an understanding of things that can or cannot be stated in words.
Some things simply cannot be quantified with a monetary value. If you are worried that your child will likely lose interest after realizing how much work must go into musical training, then start lessons with music student or a local high school kid with talent. Once you know your child is serious about continuing their training, or you see they develop a love or passion for it, then invest in a professional instructor or send them to a music school.
Honestly, I find your post to be filled with a complete lack of understanding of what a musician's life and lifelong training is like. It's fine if you didn't know, but to assume that they're just pocketing lots of money and rolling in dough is upsetting to musicians that really are struggling out there - and there are LOADS of struggling musicians out there! It just feels like you really don't respect their personal talent and years of practice just because you don't want to pay that much for lessons. Money isn't everything, but if that's how you feel, at least try not to be so insulting towards musicians.
WOW!! Those rates are blasphemously high!! i did not know that music school was that expensive. You ask that why are they so expensive. I think that the teachers reason that if you do have the next mozart of beethoven, you will take all the credit and fortune on yourself and forget that they are the ones that brought the talent out. So they would rather get as much from you as they can. But i really hope that you do not have the next mozart or bach or whatever. These very talented musicians all seemed to have real issues. Some died at very young ages, others were really sick all the time, others were deaf etc etc. Am not mentioning names y'all :)
I once attempted to add up all of the money I had spent on my children's musical endeavors; piano lessons, violin lessons, drum lessons, trumpet lessons, trombone lessons, not to mention the instruments themselves, and concluded that if I'd put the money away in college funds, they could have had a free ride.
I think, however, that the true value in all of this turned out to be the experiences for our family over the years. I attended hundreds of concerts. The kids were both involved in worship music at our church while they lived at home, and my daughter and her husband still are very involved in music ministry at their own church now. Their lives and ours have been enriched and enhanced by music.
In response to the person who commented that early music training increases cognitive development. I'm not entirely convinced that that's a cause/effect relationship. What we saw over the years was that the children who were involved in music had very involved parents. We would see them not only at musical events, but at football games, soccer games, baseball games, tennis matches, awards ceremonies, and eventually at college parents weekends. I think that the encouragement and involvement of parents in children's intellectual and aesthetic pursuits probably had a greater effect than the actual study of music.
Piano lessons cost more than ice hockey? Really!!!! I suspect that you have no idea what ice hockey costs. In my area (east coast), you can spend a couple thousand a year. My kids' piano lessons are much, much cheaper than ice hockey.
Your article would have been more useful had it included ways to make music lessons more affordble (bartering for lessons, finding music students in college who offer lessons, group lessons, etc) than merely to complain about the cost of lessons from a highly trained professional.
There are group lessons for small children. There are student teachers (as someone mentioned). There are guild teachers and non-guild teachers (who charge less). There are teachers who may be open to barter or skills trade. There are friends and family who had lessons as a kid and who could buy a beginners book and help your child along for a few months.
There's also the fact that early music training improves cognitive development, even in children that do not go on to be musicians... something your high-priced haircuts have clearly not done for you.
The point of this site is to think creatively about saving money while enjoying life... not to whine about things that you think are unfair.
I agree with the first guest. It takes years of dedication and practice to actually reach the level of profiency to teach lessons, and more often than not, private teachers have taken at least one course in pedagogy as well. They aren't all "out-of-work musicians", unlike the impression you seem to have.
Also, many private teachers work far fewer than 40 hours a week. What kids do you know go to piano lessons during the school day? Most of the time the lessons are taught at night. And like Andrea pointed out above, the hourly rate needs to cover the teacher's travel time, insurance, taxes, etc. I'm also curious how you reached your calculated annual salary for a piano teacher. If teaching private music lessons gave the teachers a salary of $120,000 a year, then students would be flocking to music conservatories to learn the craft. My mother taught private piano lessons out of our home when I was a kid and was busy from about 4:30-9:00 each evening with a studio of about 35 kids and I can assure you she was not making a fabulous salary doing that.
Piano teachers do have expenses. Pianos are not cheap and need regular tuning and maintenance. They can either rent a room at a studio or use a room out of their home, both of which cost money. If they're traveling to the student's home there the travel time and gas. And I would guess that very few actually teach 40 hours of lessons a week. There's also time they spend doing billing, looking for sheet music for the kids, planning competitions and recitals, etc. Since they're self-employed, they pay more in taxes than those working for a company, plus they have to pay for health insurance on their own, have no employer funded retirement plan, etc. To say they pocket $60 an hour is pretty wrong.
$60 is actually not that much when you consider what end its at. That is gross income. If the teacher comes to you there is travel expenses, if you come to the teacher there is rent. But if you think that its a ridiculous amount to charge think about it from a business perspective. who advertises? who does the accounting and taxes? who cleans the space? If all you did 40 hours a week and not a second over was teach lessons at $60/hr you might make really good money, in reality there is a lot more work going in than that.
For comparison last time I checked for my job(software engineer) I was contracted out at the rate of 127/hr. But this isn't just my time, its the office, supplies, the computer, receptionist, break room, education, travel, Marketing, HR/payroll, security, and support. 127/hr is a ton... but then my company is well in the black.
Thank you so much for this post. I didn't know that there were any free freelance organizations out there. I thought I'd be saving up for a membership fee or something. Again, thank you!
Mint.com is for me the best way to track all my money. You link up all your online banking and bills and it calculates all types of graphs and even emails you alerts if a certain category of your budget like groceries goes past what you've set up for yourself.
It's really neat and gives you all the money in one place.
Well, I've done freelance tutoring, and my rates included the following: 1) travel to my students between every tutoring hour, something that a working musician doesn't have to deal with--just two commutes --there and back. 2) Making basic living because (due to #1) I couldn't be *tutoring* 40 hours a week, and because people drop out ... one week I would have many students; the next I wouldn't. 3) Covering my own health insurance.
So paying the free-lance musician the additional $13 over the average employed musician seems reasonable to me when I factor in travel to students' houses, self-insurance, making allowances for #of students, and the training needed to be a music professional (the last included in the per-hour of the employed musician, too). Computer consultants and other people get far more than $60 an hour. Massage therapists often charge at *least* $60 an hour, and I have to go to THEM.
But while I think the piano teacher's rate is reasonable and in line with what other similarly-self employed professionals charge (if anything, too little), that still doesn't mean I can *afford* to pay $60 an hour. What about exploring lower cost alternatives? Piano students at your local university might give introductory lessons for less, and there might be some available at the local community center.
I'm not sure what the overall point to that post was - it takes years of practice and dedication to become a proficient pianist (a precursor to teaching), so I think that 60 dollars / hour is a reasonable return for the time and effort they've taken to get to that stage. I can definitely recommend it, having been the recipient of Piano lessons myself.
I use Quicken to keep track of bank accounts and Excel for budgeting and investment tracking. Works for me but would rather have one tool to do all of the above and more.
For many years, we used cash! If you have cash for spending in envelopes, when it is gone, you stop spending. Since we have a credit card with a rewards program right now, we use it for everything we can so that we can build up our rewards for a vacation, but using cash for so many years help keep us mindful of how much we spend and where we spend it.
Simple test: look at the teacher's house and/or car and then tell me if they're charging too much.
I have yet to see any music teachers laughing their way to bank. Same goes for martial arts instructors.
These people do it for the love of teaching. I have yet to see anyone get rich off of it, let alone make a decent leaving...which is why I only do it part time.
Others have touched on it, and I won't go into great detail, but music adds so much more to one's life than just learning how to bang out a few notes on the piano.
Quick example: At a local high school football game the other night, the school recognized the senior band members. When they read off their accomplishments and where they were going to college...wow. Quite impressive. And most were not pursuing music or music education.
I am so glad to see that everyone else's comments reflect how inaccurate many of the statements made in this post are.
Piano teachers study their whole lives in order to be qualified to teach. Personal trainers, private tutors, personal chefs, etc. all charge similar rates. When you're an expert at something, that's what you do, you charge accordingly.
Learning piano as a child benefits them in so many priceless ways. It builds confidence, improves brain function, improves grades, and more! Not to mention that once the kid learns how to play piano, they can usually learn almost any other instrument on their own (talk about savings)!
This may not be an option for you but this is what we did:
My wife taught three of our children piano herself. Eventually a point was reached where our children would not practice or pay attention. So our three children were traded with a neighbor for her three children, that is, just for piano lessons :). We found that both sets of children learned better from another mother.
Eventually my daughter outstripped her tutor's abilities. She then took inexpensive lessons from a neighbor who was home raising her own children. My daughter eventually gave lessons herself to raise money for band trips abroad.
Most of the cost of education we have spent on our five children has more than repaid itself productivity wise now that they are grown.
It is hard to understand why music lessons are so expensive. I was once an oboe teacher (and a student!), but had to quit teaching lessons because I was very disrespected by the parents of the students. Often, they would forget to pay me, would not show up to lessons and leave me waiting for thirty minutes, would not show up with the proper materials, or would show up and had not practiced since the lesson before. I explained my policies in the beginning, and was in understanding they understood too! However, I think they disrespected me because they thought I was too young, and not charging enough.
Since I was a college student teacher, I only charged $10 for an hour lesson. I wasn't making much money at all, especially considering what I had to deal with the parents. One reason music teachers may charge a lot, is to make sure the student is serious, AND the parent as well. A parent is much more likely to respect a teacher if it means $60 an hour. Granted, there are cheaper music lesson teachers out there. However, it takes many years to become trained enough to be a good musician, and especially someone with the gift to teach. And...musicians are often freelance, which means they can't work 8 hours a day, come home at not think about their job anymore. It's more like a 24 hour a day job, with random hours.
After all, the arts is very important for children to stimulate their creativity and feel a sense of accomplishment. If a student goes though lessons and enjoys them, wants to take them, then you should consider yourself privileged. Many children are made to take lessons, and they end up despising it. Consider it a WONDERFUL! investment if you child wants to take lessons and follows though. After all, if they stick though it and want to continue, then it's a great return for the money.
I love my cast iron pans and I avoid non-stick as much as possible which is why I haven't bought a bread machine yet, since all of them have non-stick pans. Does anyone know of a bread machine that has a safer material pan? Or a replacement pan that I can buy. I really, really want a bread machine!!! TIA
PS. I scrub my well seasoned pans with soap. However, I don't scrub my iron wok but do use soap.
Mint.com and old-fashioned pen and paper. :)
I definitely think your post was way off the mark this time. Unless you're employed with a pretty well-to-do group, almost every musician I know does not make a fantastic salary. That $60 an hour is not just for the insurance, taxes, travel and other misc. expenses that almost always comes with teaching, you have to consider the fact that this person may have started his/her own musical training since he/she was 4 or 5 years old. That's a lifetime of training you're asking this person to pass onto your child for a mere $60 a week. That's a lifelong love and passion for an art that your asking them to teach your child, who may only be interested in it as a passing phase, for a mere $60 a week.
There's also the fact that most people do consider this a mere hobby, meaning the lessons stop whenever the kid loses interest, so it's not steady income. Plus, most piano teachers I know of have mentioned parents canceling whenever they have something "better" to do. Piano lessons are indeed a luxury, but musical training, even if only for a short while, cannot be valued monetarily. It gives you the ability to appreciate the intangible, an understanding of things that can or cannot be stated in words.
Some things simply cannot be quantified with a monetary value. If you are worried that your child will likely lose interest after realizing how much work must go into musical training, then start lessons with music student or a local high school kid with talent. Once you know your child is serious about continuing their training, or you see they develop a love or passion for it, then invest in a professional instructor or send them to a music school.
Honestly, I find your post to be filled with a complete lack of understanding of what a musician's life and lifelong training is like. It's fine if you didn't know, but to assume that they're just pocketing lots of money and rolling in dough is upsetting to musicians that really are struggling out there - and there are LOADS of struggling musicians out there! It just feels like you really don't respect their personal talent and years of practice just because you don't want to pay that much for lessons. Money isn't everything, but if that's how you feel, at least try not to be so insulting towards musicians.
WOW!! Those rates are blasphemously high!! i did not know that music school was that expensive. You ask that why are they so expensive. I think that the teachers reason that if you do have the next mozart of beethoven, you will take all the credit and fortune on yourself and forget that they are the ones that brought the talent out. So they would rather get as much from you as they can. But i really hope that you do not have the next mozart or bach or whatever. These very talented musicians all seemed to have real issues. Some died at very young ages, others were really sick all the time, others were deaf etc etc. Am not mentioning names y'all :)
I once attempted to add up all of the money I had spent on my children's musical endeavors; piano lessons, violin lessons, drum lessons, trumpet lessons, trombone lessons, not to mention the instruments themselves, and concluded that if I'd put the money away in college funds, they could have had a free ride.
I think, however, that the true value in all of this turned out to be the experiences for our family over the years. I attended hundreds of concerts. The kids were both involved in worship music at our church while they lived at home, and my daughter and her husband still are very involved in music ministry at their own church now. Their lives and ours have been enriched and enhanced by music.
In response to the person who commented that early music training increases cognitive development. I'm not entirely convinced that that's a cause/effect relationship. What we saw over the years was that the children who were involved in music had very involved parents. We would see them not only at musical events, but at football games, soccer games, baseball games, tennis matches, awards ceremonies, and eventually at college parents weekends. I think that the encouragement and involvement of parents in children's intellectual and aesthetic pursuits probably had a greater effect than the actual study of music.
quickbooks + mint.com + iphone apps for citibank + websites for all my cards...
I use mint.com because it is easy to use and imports all of your transactions for you.
Piano lessons cost more than ice hockey? Really!!!! I suspect that you have no idea what ice hockey costs. In my area (east coast), you can spend a couple thousand a year. My kids' piano lessons are much, much cheaper than ice hockey.
Your article would have been more useful had it included ways to make music lessons more affordble (bartering for lessons, finding music students in college who offer lessons, group lessons, etc) than merely to complain about the cost of lessons from a highly trained professional.
There are group lessons for small children. There are student teachers (as someone mentioned). There are guild teachers and non-guild teachers (who charge less). There are teachers who may be open to barter or skills trade. There are friends and family who had lessons as a kid and who could buy a beginners book and help your child along for a few months.
There's also the fact that early music training improves cognitive development, even in children that do not go on to be musicians... something your high-priced haircuts have clearly not done for you.
The point of this site is to think creatively about saving money while enjoying life... not to whine about things that you think are unfair.
I agree with the first guest. It takes years of dedication and practice to actually reach the level of profiency to teach lessons, and more often than not, private teachers have taken at least one course in pedagogy as well. They aren't all "out-of-work musicians", unlike the impression you seem to have.
Also, many private teachers work far fewer than 40 hours a week. What kids do you know go to piano lessons during the school day? Most of the time the lessons are taught at night. And like Andrea pointed out above, the hourly rate needs to cover the teacher's travel time, insurance, taxes, etc. I'm also curious how you reached your calculated annual salary for a piano teacher. If teaching private music lessons gave the teachers a salary of $120,000 a year, then students would be flocking to music conservatories to learn the craft. My mother taught private piano lessons out of our home when I was a kid and was busy from about 4:30-9:00 each evening with a studio of about 35 kids and I can assure you she was not making a fabulous salary doing that.
Piano teachers do have expenses. Pianos are not cheap and need regular tuning and maintenance. They can either rent a room at a studio or use a room out of their home, both of which cost money. If they're traveling to the student's home there the travel time and gas. And I would guess that very few actually teach 40 hours of lessons a week. There's also time they spend doing billing, looking for sheet music for the kids, planning competitions and recitals, etc. Since they're self-employed, they pay more in taxes than those working for a company, plus they have to pay for health insurance on their own, have no employer funded retirement plan, etc. To say they pocket $60 an hour is pretty wrong.
$60 is actually not that much when you consider what end its at. That is gross income. If the teacher comes to you there is travel expenses, if you come to the teacher there is rent. But if you think that its a ridiculous amount to charge think about it from a business perspective. who advertises? who does the accounting and taxes? who cleans the space? If all you did 40 hours a week and not a second over was teach lessons at $60/hr you might make really good money, in reality there is a lot more work going in than that.
For comparison last time I checked for my job(software engineer) I was contracted out at the rate of 127/hr. But this isn't just my time, its the office, supplies, the computer, receptionist, break room, education, travel, Marketing, HR/payroll, security, and support. 127/hr is a ton... but then my company is well in the black.
Thank you so much for this post. I didn't know that there were any free freelance organizations out there. I thought I'd be saving up for a membership fee or something. Again, thank you!
Mint.com is for me the best way to track all my money. You link up all your online banking and bills and it calculates all types of graphs and even emails you alerts if a certain category of your budget like groceries goes past what you've set up for yourself.
It's really neat and gives you all the money in one place.
Well, I've done freelance tutoring, and my rates included the following: 1) travel to my students between every tutoring hour, something that a working musician doesn't have to deal with--just two commutes --there and back. 2) Making basic living because (due to #1) I couldn't be *tutoring* 40 hours a week, and because people drop out ... one week I would have many students; the next I wouldn't. 3) Covering my own health insurance.
So paying the free-lance musician the additional $13 over the average employed musician seems reasonable to me when I factor in travel to students' houses, self-insurance, making allowances for #of students, and the training needed to be a music professional (the last included in the per-hour of the employed musician, too). Computer consultants and other people get far more than $60 an hour. Massage therapists often charge at *least* $60 an hour, and I have to go to THEM.
But while I think the piano teacher's rate is reasonable and in line with what other similarly-self employed professionals charge (if anything, too little), that still doesn't mean I can *afford* to pay $60 an hour. What about exploring lower cost alternatives? Piano students at your local university might give introductory lessons for less, and there might be some available at the local community center.
I'm not sure what the overall point to that post was - it takes years of practice and dedication to become a proficient pianist (a precursor to teaching), so I think that 60 dollars / hour is a reasonable return for the time and effort they've taken to get to that stage. I can definitely recommend it, having been the recipient of Piano lessons myself.
I use Quicken to keep track of bank accounts and Excel for budgeting and investment tracking. Works for me but would rather have one tool to do all of the above and more.
My bank's website has everything I need for budgeting and to track spending.
For many years, we used cash! If you have cash for spending in envelopes, when it is gone, you stop spending. Since we have a credit card with a rewards program right now, we use it for everything we can so that we can build up our rewards for a vacation, but using cash for so many years help keep us mindful of how much we spend and where we spend it.
We use an excel spreadsheet customized to our income/expense categories and how we want to track it. Very similar to the one you show on Slideshare.
Thanks!
Notepad & pencil and Google documents