Amazon Recap – Finances

This is the final installment about our experience at Amazon during the 2013 Peak season…

We’ve had a lot of questions about whether we intend to return next year for another season…and the short answer is Yes! The longer answer is more complicated….

We already knew when we were preparing to put the house up for sale that we weren’t going to make enough money to pay off the truck and fifth wheel loans. While we are blessed to have Harry’s pension and subsidized health insurance, his pension is not enough to cover our living expenses and our loan payments. (Also, we were so happy when we bought our truck to get 0% financing, but the downside is it locked us into a five year loan with a pretty sizeable loan payment. And we really would hate to refinance it to a  lower payment because then we would have to start paying interest which would be so depressing.) So our choices were…to stay in NY and keep working at our jobs until the truck was paid off, which would mean we would hit the road sometime in mid-2015 (this was our original plan) or to spend the first years going from one workamping job to the next (which was too uncertain for Harry and I to feel comfortable making this choice).

So, back in the fall of 2011, when I was doing research about full-timing, I was so excited to read in a fulltimer’s blog about something which I considered the answer to our dilemma – the Amazon Camperforce program. In researching the program, I discovered that not only would we have our site fee covered for the time period we were working, which would save us that expense, but we would also have a salary coming in. And, after reading more about the interview process, it seemed like it would be a pretty sure thing as long as we were willing and able to make the commitment of time they were looking for. After talking it over, we decided that this would be enough to supplement our income and would make up what we need to cover our loan payments. Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile may remember a couple years ago when my countdown to putting the house on the market took a pretty significant jump forward. It was this job plan that enabled us to make that decision. So we were planning on working for Amazon in Kentucky long before we even sold the house, and barring any unforeseen complications, we will be going back for at least the next 3 to 5 seasons.

Now…to get to the financing recap details…

We arrived in Campbellsville on Sept. 7th and started work on Sept. 9th.

The first two weeks were the work hardening weeks. So we worked 22 hours the first week, and 30 hours the second (four 7.5 hour days).

After that, in total, but not in this order, we had six 40 hour weeks, one 45 hour week, four 50 hour weeks, and two 60 hour weeks.

Our normal full-time income was…$5,900.38 each.

We each made an additional $1,324.48 in overtime for a total of $7224.86 each.

On top of that we got a bonus of $1/hour for each hour worked. We each worked 633 hours.

Total earned (gross) including regular pay, overtime pay, and bonus - $15,717.09

We are happy with the return on our three and a half months of work. Now, our reward is that we get to relax and enjoy the next 8 months or so until we head back to Amazon for the 2014 season.