Sing a Little Ditty ‘bout the Nitty and the Gritty

In my last post I commented about how much I hate sitting around feeling like I am wasting an opportunity if I don't fly.  Over the last 3 years I’ve had a crash course (no pun intended) in professionalism, responsibility and the fine art of decision-making.  One of the tenets of decision-making that I’ve picked up is faith in the truth that numbers can reveal.  With that in mind I took a hard look at my finances and the goals that I have for the upcoming season.  I had to come up with a solid budget.  With the numbers known, I can relax a bit in some ways. 

My goals for this competition season are easy:  compete and place well in two contests.  I took that goal and backed out everything from that.  The first contest is the New England Championship in Vermont; July 9^th.  The second contest is the Kathy Jaffe Challenge in Lumberton, NJ; August 6^th.  I figure that each contest could run around $1,500 each.  I’ll need lodging for 3 days, the cost of the contest registration fee, food for three days, and the biggest expense of all, the airplane to and from the contest and the actual contest flying.  I figure that my actual expenses are going to be less than what I’ve budgeted for but I would rather be surprised in the “hey I’ve got money leftover” way than the “crap, can someone lend me some money for some ramen noodles” way. 

This all means that by the beginning of July, I need to have $3,000 set aside for the competitions.  After all if I can’t afford to compete then the plan is moot anyway.  I’ve taken whatever money I would be putting towards rent and living expenses and instead I’m putting that towards flying.  I'm also allocating money that I had remaining from my original pilot training.  (While I want to be as open as possible with all of my information there are a few items I am going to withhold out of respect for my employer and yes, my own privacy.  Our Decathlon retails for $169 per hour.)  I added up 7 months worth of my savings and then deducted the cost of the contests, $3,000.  I then took the amount remaining and divided it by the amount I pay per hour to fly the Decathlon.  This new number represented the total amount of time I could spend training towards the contests: 42 hours.  Hot DAMN!  42 hours is two hours a week!  That is some serious training for me.  I could blow the doors off the competition with that. 

But of course nothing is ever so simple.  There are some costs that I have to incur between now and the first contest that are going to dig into my fund.  I have to get my chute repacked, have to pay for the new website to get built, and possibly get a new camera so that I can start documenting my practices and show it to all of you.  Now I’m down to 34.4 hours worth of practice.  Still good but getting closer to the once a week type of flight training schedule.  That is assuming that I am going to fly each week.  I may come up with an alternate plan for this.  

There are some other things that may dig severely into my budget that I am still mulling over.  When I figure out what I’m going to do I’ll update the blog about my plan.

My new task is to figure out what I am going to do with my time.  I have to come up with a syllabus for myself to get ready for the competition.  I have to make the best use of those 34.4 hours that I possibly can.  I cant waste an hour...a tenth of hour!  All this is going to do is force me to be smart.