Mentor Involvement Survey

[techhelpbb]

So this topic has given me a chance to review something my accountant often makes me sit through.

Each year you have an easy 2,000 working hours.
That's 40 hours per week for 50 weeks, assuming 2 weeks of vacation.

For the last few years my total FIRST related activities - not accounting for day dreaming - have hovered close to or over 400 hours.

So that's 1/5 of a work year spent on FIRST over my more than 2,000 hour work year.
I have worked 110+ hour weeks.

I am in the unusual position of being able to actually convert worked time directly into about $100 per hour after taxes (this is actually an average some of what I do pays more and some less) in wages. I have a full time job and I have other sources of income I can tap that merely require time.

Strictly discussing wages I am walking away from around $40k a year.

That does not include the donations which climb into the thousands collectively and the profit that never happened because it required that labor I redirected to FIRST.

For example depending on how you look at the donations I made last year, last year accounting wise I put $62k into FIRST.

The time involved is divided between mentoring, volunteering and 3rd party R&D because the organization does not share my interests but the results are mostly applicable to FIRST.

If anyone has seen me refuse to do something: now you know why.
On the other side: this is how much FIRST and the people involved mean to me.

There is a fine balance here between which is more valuable: my time or my money.
It is difficult to maintain that balance because of cooperation and information issues.

This year was the first time someone flipped this backwards for a little while.
They paid me to mentor and for the travel time to do it.
While all parties involved had involvement in FIRST, it was not a FIRST activity but it was robotics mentoring.

To put that further into perspective I live in NJ.
My property taxes are greatly composed of the cost of my school taxes.
My property taxes on my 1.25 acre exceed $11k a year.
So approaching 1/3 of my income per year (considering some other charity) goes towards education of other people.

As a great deal of this cost is against lost opportunity it can not be written off business taxes as other business donors can.