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I'm meant to be spending 20% but my partner has been skimping recently due to being jobless. Paying 40% is pretty tough. 

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My pops always said "no more than a week's pay" which I guess is like 25% right? I'm really fortunate because I live with 5 other friends and we're able to keep rent way down that way.

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i'm paying 15% for a 2up 2 down all of my own. I should be paying at least double that, but i'm getting a sweeeeet deal.

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Many apartments will not let you even apply if your gross pay isn't at least three times the rent. For a while I scraped by at 2.5 times for one particularly lousy studio apartment (good location though.) These days I try to keep it around a quarter of my gross pay going to rent.

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Wow, I've never heard any of this before... I pay like 45% of my income in rent and I feel okay with things. I rarely spend money outside of groceries and other basic necessities though, so maybe that's why.

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Yeah, for years I was paying about half of what I make to rent. Then I got the job I had been going to school for, and that fraction changed to about 1/7th of what I make. I went nuts, bought two guitars and a bass, and just tonight am preparing to move into a much nicer place with my girlfriend of 8 years tomorrow.

 

...which brings me to why I'm in the life thread right now. I got some job stability! Being a beginning teacher is tough, as at the drop of a hat someone with more seniority can get you punted from your current classroom and back to the substitute roster. I seem to have a job guaranteed for next year though, things are stabilizing financially, and on the 10th of June, my girlfriend of 8 years has her graduation ceremony for university. As a result, she's going to work full time and can afford to move out of her parents' house. We're moving in together, I'm going to have cats again for the first time since years ago when I lived with my own parents, and we managed to find an apartment that is bloody beautiful for an amount that's about 40% of what I make on my own, and is totally manageable with us doing a 66%/33% split. As the icing on the cake, I hooked up a buddy who was looking for a place with the landlady I've had for the last 4 years and he'll be taking over the apartment I'm leaving. This means I don't even need to leave a forwarding address because anything that doesn't make it to my new address will be going to one of my best friends. He also has a vested interest in helping me move, because we're getting my stuff out and his in. This is a pretty fantastic month, though it is super high stress.

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Why do they do that to you as a teacher? I'll never understand why there aren't all this big cushy incentives to be a teacher since they are so important.

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Dunno, the system is definitely heavily weighted towards seniority here though. There are 3 stages of teaching in Alberta: temp, probationary, and then permanent. If you're a temp, you're covering maternity leaves and such for people and working as a substitute when you're not on contract. You still can't have another job though, since you're on call from 6am to 6pm every weekday for sub work. As probationary, you get put on a "must place" list, which means that you have a job no matter what, but it is not necessarily going to be consistent in any way. This year I progressed from temp to probationary, and the way it works for me now is that my current class (grade 5) is mine for the year, but over the summer a teacher with a permanent contract could decide that they'd rather teach my class than whatever they're doing. At that point, I get placed on a shuffle list and am guaranteed some job by the time the fall rolls around but it could be literally anything from kindergarten to twelfth grade, whatever comes available first. As such, I'm guaranteed a job in the fall no matter what, and they all pay the same (your pay scales as a teacher based on how long you've been doing it and your level of university education, not what subject or grade you teach), but it won't necessarily be the same grade or even the same school I'm at now. Hell, it could be in a completely different quadrant of the city. Once I'm permanent (minimum two years of probationary work to qualify), I'm secure unless and until either I decide to switch careers/grades/fields/schools or I turn out to be grossly incompetent. Hopefully that latter one never happens.

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...And I was wrong, as usual.

Back to being alone forever, per the norm.

I tried to figure out what the heck you were talking about with this trio of posts but couldn't. You should be less cryptic!

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I tried to figure out what the heck you were talking about with this trio of posts but couldn't. You should be less cryptic!

 

He went on a date that seemed promising, it went well, but then the whole thing didn't turn out well in the end. At least that's how I'm reading it.

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Halfway through this first date, she had to leave because her sister's car broke down on the highway. This is after she had to cancel not one, but TWO previously set up dates! (The first time, she had to go to the hospital because she hit her head at work, and the second time because she thought it was on a different day!)

 

Ahhh I have terrible luck.

 

We'll probably be seeing each other again tomorrow, so it's fine, also, we I think get along better than any previous date I've had in the past few months, just man this pattern is getting to be hilariously monotonous!

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He went on a date that seemed promising, it went well, but then the whole thing didn't turn out well in the end. At least that's how I'm reading it.

Oh... I thought it was something like that but when I followed it back to the beer thing I just got confused. If that's what happened then I'm sorry to hear that. Dates... pain in the arse sometimes!

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Best of luck to you. How did you meet, if you don't mind me asking?

Dating app, I've mentioned it before: Coffee Meets Bagel. Not sure if it exists in your part of the world! I like it 'cause it's a whole lot less of a "game" than, for example, Tinder. You get one person a day and if you both like each other, you have a week to talk before the app disconnects you.

 

I find dating very stressful and unfun the vast majority of the time, and I had almost just given up for a while before this latest one worked out (so far). Here's hopin'!

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Since dating is back, I'll update people on the French guy I mentioned a little while back!

I am in a healthy relationship that all my friends approve of. This is foreign territory.

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Yesterday our kitten came in from outside hobbling and shaking from pain. We suspect she's either fallen or suffered an injury from our 85 year old landlord who has directly told us that "It won't be in this world for long". We're worried about what happened to our cat, twitching in shock and barely making the effort to eat or drink let alone use the bathroom. She's going to the vet tomorrow and we think she's had some type of green stick fracture on a hind leg. 

We've come to see our landlord as quietly mean unhelpful at best. He's often tending to a garden and he loves the wild birds that gather there so it's understandable he's not happy with our cat. However blaming or injuring a kitten for the risk it might pose one day to a bird, when already several roaming cats live in the neighbourhood is not okay.

The tenancy agreement said that pets were negotiable and his property manager didn't bring up animals at all when originally viewing the place. We agreed to move in when we didn't have the kitten but mum was gifted the cat in the interim before moving. 

We think he's kicked her while she was going to the bathroom in the garden; hard enough to be in a lot of pain.

 

We'll obviously have to police her comings and goings even more now and we're definitely not letting her into the garden without supervision. If he is caught hurting her again I suppose we can go to the SPCA and have him charged with animal cruelty or something but I'm sceptical that there's any real legal deterrent to his actions there's plenty of opportunity for him to bait a possum trap with cat food and have it break her neck one day.

 

I swear if I find proof that he's hurting her and still trying to I'll salt every inch of his fucking garden.

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Wow, your landlord sounds like violent jerk.

 

I suppose once your cat is healed, the best case might be to keep the cat inside? Generally that is recommended with cats according to my wife, the vet tech, even though my cats growing up always came and gone as they pleased. They would get into fights though and sometimes get injured as well, as well as a case of scabies we all got from one cat's mange, and their inability to ever keep their collars on in case they got lost. So maybe none of that was such a good idea.

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We put a bell on her to appease his concerns soon after we moved in. Obviously there's no way to know for sure she's been injured by him but.. Well we won't do anything when all we have is our suspicions. 

We are planning to keep her inside a lot more now. We already made sure to the best of our abilities that she didn't go outside at night.

She's a people cat and gets very anxious when we leave rooms or close doors on her so she's usually fine with that.

But this has just made me so angry. I hate having this level of toxic, inane rage in me. We have a year on our lease and we're too poor to voluntarily move right now.

I fear none of our efforts to contain our cat are going to be met with anything but contempt. Of course we'll get an angry rant every time a bird dies.

A cat (likely someone else's given our kitten's youth, bell, day time only access, and the storm we didn't let her out in that previous night) has already supposedly killed a tui; he came across it in his garden before finding my mum and condescendingly talking at her and making threatening hints to our kitten's existence. So I don't have a tonne of confidence in him.

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If you do find out it was him, salt the garden and put out bowls of cat food every morning and night so all the cats in the neighbourhood start hanging out in the garden the whole time.

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Dunno, the system is definitely heavily weighted towards seniority here though. There are 3 stages of teaching in Alberta: temp, probationary, and then permanent. If you're a temp, you're covering maternity leaves and such for people and working as a substitute when you're not on contract. You still can't have another job though, since you're on call from 6am to 6pm every weekday for sub work. As probationary, you get put on a "must place" list, which means that you have a job no matter what, but it is not necessarily going to be consistent in any way. This year I progressed from temp to probationary, and the way it works for me now is that my current class (grade 5) is mine for the year, but over the summer a teacher with a permanent contract could decide that they'd rather teach my class than whatever they're doing. At that point, I get placed on a shuffle list and am guaranteed some job by the time the fall rolls around but it could be literally anything from kindergarten to twelfth grade, whatever comes available first. As such, I'm guaranteed a job in the fall no matter what, and they all pay the same (your pay scales as a teacher based on how long you've been doing it and your level of university education, not what subject or grade you teach), but it won't necessarily be the same grade or even the same school I'm at now. Hell, it could be in a completely different quadrant of the city. Once I'm permanent (minimum two years of probationary work to qualify), I'm secure unless and until either I decide to switch careers/grades/fields/schools or I turn out to be grossly incompetent. Hopefully that latter one never happens.

It seems like they would want to keep you within the same district instead of a different quadrant. It's good that eventually the system will stabilize you though. I'm just kind of shocked how often you seem to be given the raw end of the deal for a while in your quest to simply just teach.

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It seems like they would want to keep you within the same district instead of a different quadrant. It's good that eventually the system will stabilize you though. I'm just kind of shocked how often you seem to be given the raw end of the deal for a while in your quest to simply just teach.

Actually, my experience has been uncommonly smooth. I got on the sub list straight out of school, had two maternity leave temp contracts that lasted for all but a week of my first year, and got on a probationary contract before the end of my second September. Most of my friends from university are still subbing, if they got work at all. I have been very lucky in the opportunities I've had considering I'm only a second year teacher.

Moddy, that shit is awful. I second Ben's recommendation.

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