My goal every year is $52k, which I have done for the past 2 years working sm

• Forgive the last message, but WHAT do I have to do to make 40,000 - FLmt
  • Thanks for all the feedback...time to kick it into high gear, I guess..nm - FLmt
  • There are lots of factors involved. - me
    • Would you mind sharing which nat'l co. sm - GLF
  • depends on platform used - per cpl
  • My goal every year is $52k, which I have done for the past 2 years working sm - KS MT
    • KS MT Your response - Paradise
  • You have to have your own accts SM - hate to tell you
    • 30 years exp for me. - Ditto
      • Same for me, I made more 10 years ago. It depends so much on account, SM - ditto squared
  • He, he!! - Ugottabkidding
    • I'd look for another job. With my line rate at - OMG
      • Did you read my post, the part about - Ugottabkidding
    • Geez. I do about 2800 lines a day and make right at $60K. - You're kidding, right?
      • 2800 lines a day???? How in the heck - do you do it? Are you clones, or do you just work
        • How fast do you type? I do about 130 wpm. - It helps. lol
        • FLmt, it's extremely doable. Copy the positives! nm - EditScripter
          • Well I must be doing something totally wrong then. - I work 7 hours a day and I put in 1200 to 1500 lin
      • Line count - Ugottabkidding
  • Doing wrong? Probably only working 80 hours a week 6 days. - nm
    • At too low a line rate and probably as an IC to boot. nm - No big dollars here. NM

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I do not believe getting the CMT is as worthy as you say. I believe that it is overrated when it comes to getting paid more my by services and I do speak from experience.  I had the CMT for many years and I let it lapse because it was a waste of perfectly good money.  Money I choose to keep in my pocket rather than spend putting in AAMTs pocket. No, I am quite happy not having the CMT and earn a living wage even without it.  As I said previously, I can say as an informed MT (former CMT) that a good 90% or more transcription services do not care if you have the CMT.  All they care about is that you can get the job done and at the cheapest rate of pay possible. 

Ex-CMT

Is it the typing that's getting you or the subject matter?  Maybe try general or insurance transcription?  I did secretarial work at home for a while, bookkeeping, typing, resumes, insurance typing, databases, mail merges.  I did mystery shopping, but couldn't make any money at it.

I sold on eBay by going to yard sales in the hot afternoon and offering people $1 a box to haul off their leftovers.  Or go early in the morning so you can snap up the collectibles.  Run an ad in the paper that you're buying certain collectibles.  Estate sales and auctions are good sources of stuff, too.  I once paid $12 for several boxes of junk that I sold for $800.  eBay does get tiring quite often between finding packing materials; finding inventory to sell; answering people's emails because they can't bother to read the auction instructions; nonpaying bidders; blatant liars; driving to the post office every day, etc.

I've done some other WAHM jobs but, again, eBay and transcription make the most money for me from my home.

the tests were not dictations that I do on an everyday basis.  I know they pick and choose carefully what they will test you on because there are always kinks in there where the doc either stumbles, mumbles, or you know you would have to be a genius to figure out what they are saying.

MQ's debts are not high either.

http://news.biohealthmatics.com/PressReleases/2005/08/19/000000002719.aspx

always went back to it. The longest I've quit was 3 weeks. My mom died from COPD and she had smoked from age 16. She really enjoyed smoking and although we kept trying, couldn't get her to quit until she was on 24 hour oxygen.  She told me if she couldn't enjoy anything in life (smoking), why live. She died 3 months later.

I started smoking at 13...you know, the "try it, you'll like it" phase. We both tried to quit when I was 19 but we only lasted a day. There was only cold turkey then.

I've tried the patch (3 weeks off cigarettes), cold turkey, herbal meds, hynosis (only lasted 5 hours), you name it. I've used all the suggestions possible to no avail.

With a cigarette dangling from my mouth, I told my boys never to start smoking because they'd never be able to quit easily. Two took my advice, one didn't. He also tried to quit smoking but failed. He was on Wellbutrin for it.

My husband started smoking at 8 while working in a coal mine. He quit cold turkey 19 years ago. He was smoking almost 4 packs a day and one day he got so disgusted with it, he  just threw them out the window of the car. Never touched one since and smoke from other people doesn't bother him.

He told me you really have to have the willpower and just get disgusted enough to quit. There's no other way. I guess I just don't have that willpower.

nm

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. 

Definitely need an external keyboard and I would also recommend an external mouse instead of using the touch pad, unless you have a keyboard that has a touch pad.    Unless you plug in an external monitor too, the smaller screen may be an adjustment, although several of the newer laptops have 17 to 17.5 screens now.   A major plus to a laptop is if the power goes out and you download via wav files you can work, at least for a little while, using the battery.   I have cable internet, but I also get 20 hours/month dial-up with that, so I can use the dial-up to download/upload and use my battery to work for 3+ hours.   You can also get  an inexpensive inverter to plug into your cigarette lighter in your car and plug your laptop into that to charge your battery, or use for working in the car while traveling.  I have a box about 1-1/2 inches tall that all my power cords plug into and I have my laptop sitting on that and it makes it the right height for typing. 

Laptops generally run considerably more than a desktop, though you can find a decent laptop now for $800.00 or less, though most will run you around $1000.00/more depending on what bells and whistles you want.