Yes! My kids (above, age 22 and 24) started out making more than I make after 30 years of MT!

• Have any of you ever thought of court reporting? sm - Penguin
  • Court Reporting - llwynn
    • Software used with Court Reporting Machine - Steno Secretary
  • I checked it out recently (sm) - MT
    • The thing that really interested me is the sm - Penguin
  • From what I have heard, harder to break into than - MT.
  • I'm learning scoping, and its quite interesting, instead of CR -- nm - Sara
    • Link to scoping infor, if interested - Sara
  • Nope. If I wanted to work outside the home, it certainly would not - tired of sitting on my backside
  • Would like to exchange notes..sm - amie
  • I don't want to work that hard! OR learn somethingn new. nm - Becky AKA Old Dawg
  • court reporting - no name
  • My husband is an attorney and suggested the same thing to me once. - sm
    • I wouldn't recommend it... - D
      • They have one of those Stenomasks on Ebay. It's funny! - stenomask
        • yikes - Saras
      • Speech recognition in court reporting - MTness
      • I tried to transcribe one of those - PJ
      • That's right...sm - former CR student
        • Do you use your steno machine to transcribe? nm - D

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and with a really good incentive plan.  I live in the Kansas City area.  $10 seems like a low starting point even with only two years experience which is the usual benchmark for hospital MT jobs. 

It's been my experience that the low end of the pay scale for hospital employed MTs was around $12 an hour.  Also, it's been my experience that the pay offered is usually based on years of experience and how well you perform on the transcription test.

I would say if their pay is that low, they should at least be making it up with incentive and it doesn't sound like they are.

JMO

I miss him like crazy even though he comes home every weekend with his laundry!   He is also a drummer in a band and for some reason, their new drum set is at my house.  But, I realize that soon enough my house will stay clean and the noise (i.e. - drums, guitars, laughing, fighting - not sure I'll miss the fighting!) will quiet, so I try to enjoy it all as much as possible.  (excuse me while I go have a quick cry and then get back to work!  ) 

Happy New Year, everyone!

I feel like I can't get out of this rut of making enough money to just pay my bills and nothing left over.  What would you say the average annual salary should be after 2 years of acute care work?

Thanks

We got one hour of PTO (paid time off) for every 10 hours worked, so that's just a little less than 3 weeks a year. We had a 401K that was pretty decent, good health insurance, life insurance equal to two years' pay, and they offered AFLAC and disability insurance as well.

Oklahoma's cost of living is among the lowest in the nation....I don't know how people living in California can make it on $8-$12/hr.

Now it seems, I'm just scraping by, juggling the utility bills and paying whichever one has sent me the 24-hour disconnect notice this month; it's become a grim miserable job compared to what it was.  I'm nearing retirement age, but I doubt retirement is going to be in my future for a very long time.

The single worst thing that ever happened to us was going from the gross line count to the character count, and not adjusting the line rate upward to parity -- not to mention the adjustments that should have been made to accommodate all the extra time spent struggling to make sense of huge increase in ESL dictations that has occurred over the last 15 years, and of course there should have been COLAs as well, which we all know has not happened.

In the 1980s, with the advent of powerful and affordable PCs, free lance transcription became much more common.  So if you were experienced, disciplined and organized, you could be much better off economically by working for yourself -- although there were definitely advantages to working in-hospital.  There were great benefits and the salary was indeed enough to support a small family (albeit very modestly.) 

For a number of years during that time, many of us worked part time in the hospital for benefits, but made our real money at home.

But in my case, the time came when it just made no economic sense to work in-housel, I was better buying off buying private insurance for major medical care, tax-deferred annuities, and self-insuring the little stuff. 

I would just pick up tapes from the hospital every morning, and drop off the work (which I printed out) from the day before.

I usually had 24 hours to transcribe tapes which I did during school hours, when things were peaceful and quiet. 

I transcribed a couple thousand GROSS lines day.  Every single character line counted, so by taking advantage of headers/footers, creative macros, word expansions, etc., I really boosted my productivity far beyond to what I could do in-house on the self-correcting Selectric, Wang or Mag Card, or whatever 10-years behind technology was currently being used, plus all the office distractions and politics, and I definitely did not to have to work 24/7 to earn a good living. (Oh how I loved WP5.1!)

In fact, 2000 gross lines a day, 5 days a week at 10 cents a line (courier 10-pitch font, one-inch margins) was very very do-able for an experienced productive acute-care MT, provided she had good equipment, good reference books, and stayed focused.  It would take about 5-6 hours a day to get that amount of work done.  So figure the math out for yourselves, that's just a tad under $50,000 a year, certainly not a high standard of living in those days but adequate when it meant you could stay home and be actually be a full time parent when your children were home from school, and very comfortable, if you were married with a working spouse, or had rerliable child support, or social security for your children (if you were widowed.)

If you chose to work some weekends and evenings, it was not that all that difficult to hit that $75,000 a year mark, which I did for a couple of years so I was able to pay the tuition at a good boarding school -- and cruelly thwarted my teen-aged son's only ambition in life, which was to become a high school drop-out.

Things have gotten bad, no doubt about that, and the worst part of it is, is that most of the big MTSOs are still charging the hospitals as much as we used to earn, and sometimes even more, but the MT is no longer earning it, and often can't get enough work to meet the line counts required by the MTSOs for benefits (although the cost of those benefits are reflected in the cost charged to the hospital.) 

I don't know what the answer is, as the electronic immigrant is such a huge threat.

It's pretty darn awful, and I feel very very bad for those of you starting out in this field, and I do hope things change for you (and that someday soon I can retire.)

And the point that the person made is that that she was worth $75,000 a year, not necessarily that she was getting it or could get it, and I absolutely agree with her.  This is a hard tough job if it's done right -- it's mentally tiring, it's hard on your back, your hands, your neck (and your behind.)

It requires a lot of time -- it requires focus, you must stay alert, and must give 100% of your attention to what you are doing 100% of the time, it takes education and brains -- and now a word of truth which my 35+ years experience gives me the right to say aloud -- it's not fulfilling, wonderful, lovable and enjoyable, it's often as repetitious and tedious as an assembly line but infinitely more frustrating.

PS: I recall one of my colleagues from those early years of my career, now gone from this earth, telling me that the 1960s were really the "fat" years, that things actually began to decline salary-wise, in real dollars, in the 1970s. 

as an IC at the local hospital and at first, didn't make much money, but as I got more familiar with the dictators, I could do 150 minutes in 6 1/2 hours. That was a good deal. I left because:

1. I got bored.

2. I worked 7 days a week plus all the holidays.

3. I thought the grass was greener elsewhere. I needed bennies and the hospital, even though my work was good, wouldn't hire me as an employee because then they would lose #2.

I started in a small hospital in the Midwest and spent 6 years there, then moved to the West Coast.  When I started, we had two reference books, Dorland's and the Surgeon's Syllabus (a red much used book).  We were on Royal typewriters, four carbon copies, all colored with different color white-out for each copy.  Our dictation came in on wax records with the stats at the switchboard station.  They would call us when one came in and we would walk down and get it.  They were on lilac wax and the others were on a salmon color.  We had little record players at our desk and we would transcribe the wax records, then put them in a press to take out the grooves and use them over and over.  I loved working there.   We then graduated to the Norelco reel-to-reel, and then to the Dictaphone plastic belts, then the magnetic belts, and then the MT/ST, then the Mag-Card, and finally to the computer, then to the Lanier pop-up tape system, then to the Sony Network, and then to digital voice.  It's been a long joury and I was with one employer for over two decades before being sold to MQ. I had the best boss in the world, generous to a fault, but then MQ came along and offshoring and the MT business went down, down, down. I make half of what I used to and I work twice as hard. Benefits are hard to come by and there is no security.  I long for the old days.

Switched to working for services from home for a while and now I work for the same hospital I started out at, but I work from home now.  So I guess you can say I've come full circle and now I'm back where I started.  I much prefer being an employee of a hospital versus an IC or employee of an MTSO.

It may be that your user profile in EXText is not set up to allow you to add normals.  I've found with services they don't give their MTs a whole lot of freedom with their software.   

Mine are grown, but the grandchildren occasionally are over.  The oldest one will play his Gameboy or some cube thing all day and only occasionally ask to be fed.  However, when the youngest one can't go do daycare for some reason my world is turned upside down.  The granddaughter has it in her head that when I ask her to be quiet it means come over to my desk and whisper.  All in all, it isn't too often that I have children in my house when I work.  My hat is off to those of you who do it on a regular basis, you are queens of organizational/concentration skills. 

I worked outside of the house for one year after my first boy was born.  I hated leaving him.  So I was home working by the time he was a year old.  I really enjoyed it.  10 years later, I'm still working at home, and have a 6 y/o boy too.  Both my kids are in school.  I'm so thankful to be home so that I can get them off the bus, attend parties at school, go on field trips with them.  I can take care of house chores and keep and eye on my three dogs.  The only thing is sometimes I miss being around people, being able to leave my work at my job (at home it's here all the time).  My hubby works midnights, so he's home during the day too, but sleeps.  Sometimes I feel like I have no "me time".  After my boys get a little older, I may get out of the house to work.  Sometimes I would like to actually change my career to sometime more hands on with patients.  I love the medical field, I've been doing transcription for about 14 years.  Another plus for working at home with kids is if they are sick, you don't have to call out of work.  You can do your job and take care of your kids.  You don't have to look your best either, on those days or any days.  I'm guilty for sitting here in my PJs a lot, not having any makeup on or hair fixed. 

Good luck in the future. 

living.  I'm not going to be cheated.  It sounds as though you've decided to let yourself be used and abused aby the MTSOs all with a big smile on your face.  Whatever!  It's MTs like you, not I, that have caused the pay rates to decline.  MTs like you who will accept whatever abuse they companies hand out, accept being cheated, and accept losing jobs to India. 

You'll be back on here next week or next month posting under a different name, crying about your paycheck and looking for sympathy.