I teach business and finance in career and technical education. Eighteen years, mostly with students heading into the trades.
Before that I worked as an automotive technician. I did side work on top of the job, driveway work on weekends for whoever asked, and later ran a computer repair business alongside my teaching career. Some fabrication and construction along the way.
I had a finance degree the whole time. I still priced jobs off what I felt like charging and gave away hours I never counted. I understood cost accounting in the afternoon and quoted a brake job that night based on how well I knew the guy, and it never occurred to me that those were the same subject.
That’s why these exist. A tradesman gets trained properly in a difficult skill and goes into a field where working for yourself is normal, without anyone covering what an hour costs to produce, how overhead gets recovered, or why the number on a timecard has little to do with what an employee costs. It isn’t in the curriculum anywhere, and I have looked.
You can see your number without giving me anything. No signup, no account, and what you type stays in your browser.
Each page also tells you plainly whether you need to buy software at all, and usually the answer is no. Where a page carries an affiliate link it’s marked, and it doesn’t change what the calculator tells you.
Use any of these with your students. No permission needed.
If you run a trade program or an apprenticeship, I’d like to hear how you handle the business side, or whether you do. That’s the part I’m still trying to understand.
Nobody Taught You the Money is where these came from. Twenty-one tools, of which this site has a few. It isn’t published yet. There’s a form on every calculator page if you want to know when it is.
ryan@journeymanstandard.com