(not so) CHEAP SOCIAL WORKER

In my short career, I've been fortunate enough to work at various hospitals as a medical social worker.  Doing so has helped me hone my social work skills and learn about the various community resources in different locales.  Additionally, I've been able to see first-hand the true versatility of this profession, as demonstrated by how the social work role differs at each hospital.

I've practiced two main models of hospital social work practice: pure social work and social work/discharge planning.  In this post I will elaborate on these two practice models and discuss the pros and cons of each.

Pure Social Work
Pure social work focuses exclusively on the psychological and social barriers that affect a patient's well-being and hinder a safe discharge home.  Social workers practicing this model focus on completing comprehensive psychosocial assessments, providing brief counseling/crisis intervention services, assisting with end-of-life situations, finding shelters for hom…

Yesterday, I was looking at my Mint.com account, which I signed up for over the summer to better track my spending.  Let's just say that after getting the account, I probably visited the site a total of 5 times between then and yesterday.  Looking at the charts from the past six months, I was horrified to find out that in the span of half a year, I had spent over 35% of my annual pre-tax earnings.  I know I'm not cheap, but I didn't realize I had spent that much!

Fortunately, upon further inspection I noticed that Mint.com was adding my total credit card charges to the totals on my credit card statement, making it look like I spent a lot more than I did.  Mint.com also counted several transfers to savings accounts as spending.  In the end, I computed that I actually spent 29% of my pre-tax earning in the span of a WHOLE year.  Still not that great, considering I live at home, but not as terrifying as the idea that I spent more than I made.

Here are a few more things I pond…

It's been a while since my last blog post.  Between work, travel, and general writer's block, I've really haven't written very much lately.  Hence, I really feel like my already mediocre writing skills have diminished even more!  This year, I'm hoping to change that by making alterations that facilitate more frequent posting and allow me more practice in writing.

The first major change is streamlining my blogs.  Looking through my archives, I noticed that I was cross-posting many of my posts to my other blog.  Instead of having two infrequently updated blogs, I figured it would be best to consolidate everything into one blog.  I will still keep Adventures of a (not so) Cheap Social Worker up for now, but all the posts from there can now be found on this site.

Postings on this site will pertain to my job, the social work field, anything remotely social work/healthcare related, money related issues, and my attempts to make the most of a social worker salary.  Like th…