Every day of my life I feel blessed. I have a fantastic wife, a three-month-old son who sleeps twelve hours uninterrupted each night, a nice house, car and good parks nearby.
I also have a good job. I am in my twelfth year as a public school teacher. The kids are good. We have lots of funding problems, but we survive. And the job allows me to live a good middle-class life. That's the dream, right?
Anyway, I don't really think about it much, but I always spend a little bit of my money every day out of pocket to do my job. My wife is also a teacher and she does the same.
We have a little black box where we throw the receipts after we return home. Again, we don't think about it much until tax time rolls around. Well, I just did the taxes. And we declared $5,000 in teaching expenses.