Learn From This Poor Kid-Turned-PhD Student’s Different Perspective on Frugality and Debt (Part 2)

March 16, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interview ZW Taylor (Zach), a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, Zach identified as a “poor kid” and never thought higher education was for him. His upbringing and winding path through community college and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees taught him lessons about money that he has carried into his life as a PhD student – for better and for worse. In this second half of the conversation, Zach gives detailed and unique financial advice to prospective and rising graduate students on evaluating stipend offer letters and selecting housing. He was determined to not go into debt during his PhD, so he thoroughly investigated his stipend offer letter and the socioeconomic layout of his new city before accepting the offer. Finally, Zach shares his vision for the future of his finances once he’s done with his PhD and earning a significantly higher paycheck.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Zach: If they want you and they offer funding, then in a different side of the same coin, they should be able to tell you specifically what you’re getting, because how can you budget, how can you plan without knowing what your income is? I mean, it’s incredibly important. So to your point, encouraging PhD students to be their own best friends and their own advocates and be very clear about what you’re getting before you go.

Introductions

00:29 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five episode eleven and today my guest is Zach Taylor, a PhD student in educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Zach has such a unique perspective and so much wonderful advice that I’ve split our interview into two episodes, last week’s and this one. In this episode, Zach gives detailed and unique financial advice to prospective and rising graduate students on evaluating stipend, offer letters and selecting housing. He was determined to not go into debt during his PhD, so he thoroughly investigated his stipend offer letter and the socioeconomic layout of his new city before accepting the offer. At the end of the episode, Zach shares his vision for the future of his finances once he’s done with his PhD and earning a significantly higher paycheck. Without further ado, here’s the second part of my interview with Zach Taylor.

Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

01:30 Zach: You know, in terms of advice for other early career PhDs, in terms of saving money and thinking about going to grad school, especially with the kind of frugal mindset is I was not going to go to grad school one, if I had any debt. That was just something that I had always thought to myself that if I’m going, again another childhood lesson, if I’m going to pay for it, I’m going to pay for it in cash and I’m not going to take out a loan. My best advice for early career folks who are thinking about the PhD is if you can work before you go to grad school and pay down any undergrad debt you might have. I know it’s not possible for some folks, but try your best to get some work experience and pay down that debt.

Further reading:

02:18 Zach: And then when you’re thinking about doing the PhD, do some of the same leg work that I did. Investigate the city — where is public transportation? Where are groceries? How can you get around? Talk with other folks who have been there for a couple of years. You know, one reason I came to UT Austin is that everyone was eager to give me their perspective. I mean, when I asked people how do you like living? How much do you spend? Where do you live? How do you get to school? No one held information back from me. Everyone was so willing to share because I think you want to help other folks out. So ask questions and be inquisitive and see where you can make it work financially. But then when you make that choice, I made the choice that I was going to go to a funded PhD program. I was going to work through. I wasn’t expecting just to not have to have an assistantship. I’ve worked all the way through, but I’m also not gonna have to take out any loans. And I think if you have the right combination of work experience and academic experience in certain fields, you can find those programs that are very, very low cost or no cost and be able to work through.

03:27 Emily: I just want to add a couple of comments on those pieces of advice, starting with your most recent one. So in the STEM fields and engineering, where I’m coming from, there’s this advice I guess, that people sometimes say to a prospective graduate students, which is that an acceptance without funding is a tacit rejection. Like if you are not offered funding along with your offer of admission, they don’t really want you there. And that’s typical in those kinds of fields. And at a certain, I’ll say tier of university. Not every graduate students — I mean some people do either take, you know, fully pay for their PhDs on their own, like there’s no funding package offered or they go into a situation where they know, okay, sometimes there’s going to be funding, sometimes there’s not going to be, or okay I’m going to have funding to a degree but I’m also going to have to do X, Y, Z to make up the deficit.

Emily: It’s really hard for me to ever say something as blanket as don’t go to a PhD program if you have to take out debt, because I just, I want to allow for individual situations. But I mean it sounds like from your perspective, even being in a totally different field than I’m coming from, you were still determined, I’m not going to go to graduate school if I have to take out debt. It’s just not going to happen under those circumstances. So you were very selective about where you applied slash the programs that you were actually considering going to, to make sure that you could make it happen in that way, even though it did in your case involve outside work as well.

What to Research When Choosing a Program

04:59 Zach: Absolutely. And one thing that I really insisted upon before I came and I don’t, know of too many other young PhD prospective PhD students who do this, but you really have to push the graduate coordinator or someone in financial aid. Know exactly what you’re getting. It’s really easy to say you’ll have an assistantship and it’ll provide a stipend. After taxes and benefits, how many specific dollars am I getting? When in the month am I being paid? Am I being paid biweekly or monthly? Am I paid over the summer? What are the opportunities for employment over the summer? As someone who is going to embark on a five or six year journey, they owe that to you. They have the information, they can provide that to you.

Zach: Before I came I was very, very explicit in saying, if I’m going to leave this job that I know that I like and I’m going to forego wages for five years and give up a salary and not be able to save any money, what am I specifically getting? What are the specific opportunities? And then matching them up with the area and saying, okay, I can make this sacrifice for four or five years. Yes, I’m going to forego wages and a savings, but I’m also not going to be in so over my head or I’m going to feel pressured to make choices that I wouldn’t normally make. And you know, Emily, to your point, it’s absolutely been the case in my experiences and other classmates that there have been times where they’re unclear about their funding package because it wasn’t made specifically clear when they were admitted. Kind of that tacitly, if you’re not fully funded, we don’t fully want you. If they want you and they offer funding, then in a different side of the same coin, they should be able to tell you specifically what you’re getting, because how can you budget, how can you plan without knowing what your income is? I mean, it’s incredibly important. So to your point, encouraging PhD students to be their own best friends and their own advocates and be very clear about what you’re getting before you go.

07:10 Emily: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad that you made this point even more explicit because it’s one that I talk about frequently during admission season. Check the show notes, if you are a prospective graduate student because there will be links there to further articles and workshops and resources that I have on that exact topic of figuring out exactly what your offer letter is saying to you and asking questions when there’s a lapse in information in the offer letter. And I mean, to your point, pay frequency. I mean that’s not even something that you would necessarily think about, but it’s really important once you’re actually on the ground and doing that budgeting. I’m super glad you brought that up.

Further reading/listening/watching:

Emily: But to go back to one earlier point would you mentioned which was paying off debt and working potentially before starting graduate school. I totally have to concur on this because, now student loans I’ll put in one basket, okay, because student loans can be deferred while you’re in graduate school, but other kinds of debt — credit card debt, car debt, any other kind of debt that you have to be making payments on during graduate school — do everything within your power I would say to clear that before getting into graduate school because the stipend is already so meager, you don’t want to have ongoing payments that you don’t have to, once you’re in that situation. And then of course the student loans in another basket, if it’s at all possible to pay down part or all of them are maybe the ones that the highest interest rate or just to make some kind of progress on that student loan debt, if you’re carrying a lot of it, before you start graduate school. It’s an amazing step to take. It’s a gift to yourself. Me personally, I had some student loans coming out of undergrad. I was sure to pay off all of the unsubsidized student loans before I started graduate school. The subsidized student loans, they’re not going to garner interest during that time. At that point, wasn’t caring about that so much, but I got the unsubsidized ones wiped off before I started graduate school. Just wanted to emphasize that point as well. Please go on with your other other advice for early career PhDs.

08:59 Zach: Yes. So this is more about where you’re planning to study and how you can kind of network beforehand. You brought up a great point that I want to hit on again about where you’re living and how much you’re paying and understanding kind of the socioeconomic context of not the university, but the city. Austin, like you said, is really rapidly growing and I applied across the country. I applied to Indiana, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell, all over the place. But I was really specific about researching Austin when I got in because I knew how rapidly Austin was growing. And to give you an idea of the cost of living increase and how much graduate students are actually paid, I moved into this current one bedroom apartment back in the spring of 2017 for $960 a month and I am a one hour commute from campus. So I’m one hour away for $960, with utilities it’s about $1200 a month. That was a sacrifice I made. However, these apartments now go for $1310. So they have increased almost $400 in two years. And I’m still one hour from campus. If I was arriving to Austin today and having to sign a lease today, I would pay almost $400 more than I would have paid just two years ago. Now you had talked a 10% increase — 30% increase, 40% increase. And these are not….we don’t have a garage. We don’t have a private yard. We don’t have too many amenities. It’s a pretty standard one bedroom apartment with air conditioning, but it’s also an hour away from campus.

10:53 Zach: I always host PhD students in the spring who are prospective students. And I always, when I show them apartments, I ask not only for the current rent because a lot of major cities have market rent, which means it changes, with the ebbs and flows of moving season throughout the year. Don’t only ask for the rent now and move in, but ask for it three years prior because they have records of all the leasing contracts and all of the, um, leasing and rental agreements. So you can see how rent has changed and gone up or gone down in a certain area. And actually I just helped a friend from Michigan move in just the other week and he and his partner made a very specific decision to go to a certain complex and neighborhood because the rent had been somewhat stable over the past three years and had only gone up about $180 over three years. Whereas my neighborhood is in a different kind of more developing area of Austin and it is growing like crazy.

Zach: Especially when you’re moving into a new city, getting an idea of historical trends and then do the exact same thing for the stipend. How much was the living stipend, how much was the assistantship five years ago? What does it now and do you anticipate a cost of living increase and is that going to be compensated by the university? Something that UT Austin recently did was dedicate new money to try to keep up with cost of living and try to develop some new graduate student housing, which we haven’t really talked about, but always inquire about graduate student and subsidized housing because some universities still do have it. Even though in a very landlocked, city locked university like UT Austin, there’s not a lot of room for expansion anymore, but always ask about the cost of living increases in historical rent in the city, how that relates to the stipend from the university and then what the university is going to do to keep up with that cost of living. I couldn’t agree more.

12:56 Emily: Yeah. I’m so glad you made that point.

Commercial

13:02 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Understanding The Role of Cost of Living Increases

14:05 Emily: Really, a new idea for me is actually asking about those historical rents and seeing the increases. This might be a silly question, but does Austin have any rent protection in place? Like increases can only be a certain amount over time, like in terms of laws in place?

14:21 Zach: Not that I am aware of and it doesn’t seem to have translated to people who have actually been into leases and stayed multiple years. Our rent has only gone up $60 in two years, but for the same apartment, for new leases, it’s that new elevated price. However, and this to me was just absolutely ridiculous, I was actually outraged by this, that we have a valet trash fee that is mandated. That we have to pay $14 a month to have somebody pick up our trashcan outside the door and take it to the dumpster. Now the dumpster is a half a block away and I don’t want to pay for valet trash, but I have to because it’s part of the lease and it’s an industry that Austin supports. So there are some fees — you know I’ve heard a lot about the fee creep and higher education where you might have a tuition freeze, but you can keep charging student fees and those add up. The same thing happens with amenities and fees in Austin. The trash fee has gone up, water has gone up, electricity has gone up. It used to be that we would come in a close to $100 over the summertime for air conditioning. Now it’s closer to $140 or $150, and it’s a dramatic increase. So not only understanding the rent, but really understanding what fees you have to pay, what are mandatory, what are optional, and then how those feeds are going to be adjusted over time, because in some big cities they’re just mandated and you just have to bite the bullet and pay for them even if you don’t want to. But those really add up just in fees. We pay an extra $95 or $100 a month just in fees.

16:09 Emily: Yeah. What I’m getting from this part of our discussion is just the importance of interrogating every single component of your offer, of what your living expenses are going to be. And all the time that you put into researching these different components before you actually move to the city that your graduate school is in, or after graduate school, same story, it’s really going to be worth it. It’s going to pay off when you do this research, because the less you have to learn on the ground once you’re there and make changes, the easier it’s going to be. If you can find a place you want to live for several years right from the beginning, it’s a lot easier for you. I did want to go back to make one other point from what you said earlier about asking about the historical stipends. I definitely think you should and can ask a graduate program that, but I wanted to plug my own website, which is PhDstipends.com and also I have another one for postdocs, postdocsalaries.com. PhD Stipends has been around for five years now, I think. And people enter which academic year, the stipend their listing is for. So if your university has enough data in there, you definitely can look back, even potentially at your own department and see what they were paying five years back to compare it to what’s in your offer letter.

17:24 Zach: Yeah, absolutely. And to your point about having that access to data and actually seeking that out, now that you mentioned that, I don’t know anyone else who did that when they came. A lot of folks were really excited just to be able to come to Austin and to be in a PhD program. It’s a very highly ranked program. It’s very prestigious around the country, so a lot of folks were just happy to be there. But then down the road they really kind of regretted not understanding where they were going to live, how much they were going to make. Also the time crunch in making a decision. I had to make my decision in a series of three or four weeks. I mean really in graduate student visits when I was admitted to PhD programs, I the beginning of February really until about mid-March to visit places, do my research. So also understanding how that’s going to affect whatever job you have at the time.

Zach: When you’re exploring PhD programs, it is a serious time commitment. I mean just finding a PhD program in a city that fits you and your budget and that you can continue to maintain your expectation of living whatever that is, is like a full time job. It’s like being on the job market and people should take it with the same seriousness and explore all of those resources that they can because like you said, I have been very, very fortunate. It was some good planning, but I’ve been very, very fortunate not to have to move every year, not to have to sublet. That means my computer workstation has stayed the same. I have a routine. I’ve been able to write. I’ve been able to travel because I haven’t had to worry about where I’m going to live, how much money I’m going to make. It’s all very budgeted, all very meticulous and I think that has really made the PhD program a much more fulfilling experience, because like you said, I have gone through those hoops initially to make sure that I was in a place that I could afford and I would feel comfortable in.

Final Words of Advice

19:24 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so glad that you brought up that point as well. Any final advice for other early career PhDs?

19:31 Zach: Yes, so I guess lastly, and it’s kind of more of a philosophical point, is I did make the choice not to go to a PhD program that wasn’t going to financially support me. And I think, most people who pursue a PhD, it’s right in the prime of their earning potential, right? So you’re talking early twenties to anywhere in the late thirties like that 10 to 15 year period, you can make a lot of money during that time of your life and pay down a lot of debt. You have to understand that going and getting a PhD, you’re going to forego wages and you might take on debt. It’s such a double edged sword because you’re losing money on one hand, and you’re kind of having to borrow more money. So really, really committing and making that sacrifice, because understanding how many hundreds and thousands of dollars you may be foregoing in the future, and having to pay back debt, and having lost wages.

Zach: The sacrifices I made were having a very compromised social life and a very kind of frugal living down here because I knew it’s going to be four or five years of just extreme sacrifice. I am not going to go out. I am not going to go out to eat very often, I have only gone out for drinks three times in three and a half years and all three times were for professional networking, and to work on projects. I just don’t do it. A margarita is $12 and that’s my food budget for almost an entire week. I have made that kind of level of commitment to stay out of debt and to do it frugally. Not everyone can do that, but if you can commit to doing that, you can get out without debt or with very low debt and 10 or 15 years down the road, you’ll really thank yourself, and you’ll look back and you’ll realize, you know what? I think that sacrifice was worth it.

21:27 Emily: Yeah, I think so. I mean your point about opportunity cost is a very, very important one and not something that people, I think think about enough going into PhD program. For me, it’s another reason to work before you go into a PhD program because you have a better idea of what you are giving up on the one hand in terms of salary potential during that time. And you also have more context for your PhD work. What is this going to do for me on the career side?

Financial Plans After Grad School

21:51 Emily: I’m gonna surprise you with one last question, Zach. This is not what I prepared you with, but what do you think you’re going to be doing with your finances once you’re done with the PhD? And hopefully, you have a job you enjoy that pays you much better than whar you’re being paid right now. Do you see yourself shedding some of these mindsets and habits that you’ve carried with you to this point? And if so, how? How can you even step away from this since it’s been going on for so long in your life now?

22:22 Zach: Yes. It is such a lifestyle. I cannot emphasize that enough. I have thought about what I want to do with my money when I graduate and get a job and now I don’t have debt and the money is mine to spend. I don’t want a larger than two bedroom house because I’ve never lived in a place larger than that. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a four bedroom house in the suburbs. That’s just not me. I would not feel at home there or comfortable. I could never buy a new car. I could never do that. I would not feel comfortable driving in a 2019 anything. I’ve always bought used cars. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable doing that. If you remember actually from HEFWA, though, what is really, really important to me is donating. I wanted to stay out of debt and get a PhD and have the earning potential to donate to certain programs that I was a part of as a kid and that really helped me out. I think when people are asked about “why do you save money?” I saved so I can give more. Since I’ve been a PhD student, I have been able to donate about $700 to my alma mater and a mentoring program that they have going that I was a part of when I was there. For me, that is such a better use of the money instead of going downtown a couple of weekends and having drinks. I feel so much better about it.

Zach: I think having an understanding of the kind of money I will make when I’m done and then how I’ve grown up, it’s going to allow me to do a lot more good and amplify a lot of the philanthropy that I’ve started doing, and that is really how I’m going to be spending a lot of my expendable income as you could say. I’m going to start a savings account. I’m going to start a 403B or a 401k or some employer sponsored a savings account. If there’s a state pension program, I’ll participate in that. But it’s really going to free me up to spend money where I think it needs to be spent, which is education and low income kids. And like I said, I’m going to look back on my time at UT and Austin and say, maybe I was able to send some kid to community college because I didn’t go out. I was able to help some kid get their associate’s degree because I made those sacrifices and I will trade that any day of the week.

24:56 Emily: I’m so glad to have that incredible perspective from you on the podcast today. It sounds like a really bright future and happy for you that you’ll be finished quite soon, and you’ll get there before too long. Zach, it’s been an absolute delight to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining me.

25:16 Zach: Absolutely. Thanks Emily.

Outtro

25:18 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Learn From This Poor Kid-Turned-PhD Student’s Different Perspective on Frugality and Debt (Part 1)

March 9, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interview ZW Taylor (Zach), a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, Zach identified as a “poor kid” and never thought higher education was for him. His upbringing and winding path through community college and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees taught him lessons about money that he has carried into his life as a PhD student – for better and for worse. In this first half of the conversation, Zach shares the financial struggles his family experienced when he was a child and how he finally committed to higher education – without debt – as a way out. Living in Austin, Texas, with its rapidly inflating cost of living, has its own challenges, and Zach still employs some extreme frugal strategies that he developed earlier in his life.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Zach: Whenever I submit to a conference, I will email the conference chair and try to arrange some sort of email conversation or phone call and ask to volunteer in exchange registration feeds. So there are probably 25 conferences that I’ve gone to in state and out of state. I have never been turned away.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five episode ten, and today my guest is Zach Taylor, a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Zach has such a unique perspective and so much wonderful advice that I’ve split our interview into two episodes, this one and next week’s. In this episode, Zach shares the financial struggles his family experienced when he was a child and how he finally committed to higher education, without debt, as a way out. Living in Austin, Texas with its rapidly inflating cost of living has its own challenges and Zach still employs some extreme frugal strategies that he developed earlier in his life. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Zach Taylor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:20 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Zach Taylor, and this is a really special episode for me because we’re recording this in August, 2019 and Zach and I actually met at a conference just last month. We were both at the Higher Education Financial Wellness Summit and Zach was a keynote speaker. And he had just this incredibly compelling story to tell during that keynote, which he’ll tell us a shortened version of that during this podcast, of his own personal story. And then during that keynote he also talked a lot about his academic work and we’re not going to get into that so much in this interview, but rather how Zach’s upbringing and the money mindsets and lessons he learned as a child have affected how he handles his finances as a graduate student. And also some tips for other graduate students who may find themselves in a similar financial situation to Zach. Zach, I’m so happy to have you on the podcast today. Will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

02:17 Zach: Absolutely. Thanks Emily. Zach Taylor. At this point, I’m a PhD candidate at UT Austin in Higher Education Leadership. I have done a lot of things in education. I’ve been an admissions reader, college instructor, high school English instructor, youth coordinator, mentoring program coordinator. I’ve kind o, been in education my entire life. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and be talking about this because so many of my life lessons in living an educational life. My mom was also a teacher. It’s been constantly learning new things and ways to save money. I’m so excited to be able to share it today.

Early Childhood and Living in Poverty

02:58 Emily: Yeah. Perfect. So let’s go back to your childhood, your pre-college days and tell us what was going on with you around that time, what was going on with your family?

03:09 Zach: I grew up very low income in the Midwest. Kind of grew up all over the place. My dad had a really hard time holding a job and it came to a head when I was about seven or eight years old. I think my mom realized that she couldn’t just take care of my brother and I, she needed to work, because my dad just couldn’t do it. She became a teacher, and we lived on that teacher salary pretty much my entire adolescence until I was 13. Something kind of tragic happened in my family at that point, so my mom and I decided to leave and go make a life on our own. And if any listeners out there are children of divorce, you can know how financially crippling that is, especially on a teacher’s salary. My mom paid child support to my dad. We were very, very poor. We split a apartment together. She became kind of more than a mom to me. She was kind of my roommate and my best friend and someone who split expenses with me.

Zach: And that was happening during high school. I was an athlete in high school and I quit most all sports by junior year because I needed to work. I needed to make money. I wasn’t able to buy food and pay for transportation and feel like I could save any kind of money at all. And that mindset growing up, coming from the family, I came from — loved going to the library because the library was free. I loved riding the bus because the bus was free. It didn’t cost anything. It was always reliable. It was always there for me. And so as I was growing up, having lived with my mom and having worked really, really early on, a lot of those behaviors really carried into college. I still, to this day, I love a good library. I love a good bus ride. I love having roommates. I’ve never really lived on my own because I’m so used to splitting expenses and living as frugally as possible. I’ve kind of foregone a lot of privacy in my life for that reason. I’m happy to share a lot of those experiences, and how they’ve translated in my college life because I’m again surprised how many habits were formed when I was a young kid that actually, I still practice to this day.

Path to the PhD

05:39 Emily: Yeah, we will definitely get into that in a moment. I also wondered if you could share for the listeners a little bit of your nontraditional path to the PhD. Because there may be some people in the audience who are thinking, well, they have some degree of imposter syndrome as many people do, but maybe a higher degree than others because of not going directly to college after high school or starting in a community college like you did. So can you talk about how you got to where you are now educationally?

06:08 Zach: Yes. I was not a good high school student. Like I said, kind of a broken home, working a lot. I never wanted to go to college. I actually didn’t think about going to college until my stepdad — I was living in my mom and stepdad’s basement working at a gas station and he had said, you’re a smart kid, you can probably go to community college. I was actually not fully admitted to community college. I had to take remedial courses. I had not taken even Algebra II at high school. I didn’t even pass Geometry. I was really credit deficient. I had no AP classes. I barely graduated when I did. And part of the reason I graduated was because my mom was a teacher and kind of helped me out doing summer school and getting and making up credits. I was extremely credit deficient coming in. Took the remedial coursework at my community college the first semester. I joked during the keynote that tuition at the time was $150 per class, but to me that was like food for months. That seemed so unaffordable. $150 per class was unaffordable to me and was initially a deterrent.

07:21 Zach: But I slowly came to realize that education was a way out of working at that gas station and being a poor kid. It was a a way out in many ways. I eventually finished about 18 credits or 21 credits at the community college. Got some really good academic momentum going. I applied to the cheapest in state public school that I could. I wasn’t looking at academic programs, wasn’t looking at what I was going to do. I solely looked at the tuition rates and I said, what can I afford to do as a part time student working part time so I don’t take out any loans? I was very debt averse and one of those things from childhood was if you couldn’t pay for it in cash, you didn’t buy it. And the same attitude translated to college. If I could not pay for tuition in cash, if I could not afford to support myself, I was not going to go. There were a couple of times then throughout undergrad where I stopped out and took a semester off and saved money and came back the next semester. I remember professors telling me, I hope I see you in the spring because they knew I wasn’t going to be there in the fall because I was going to take a a gap semester and make some money.

08:44 Zach: After seven years, I eventually finished. I transferred a few times trying to save money. My parents lost a lot of money in the housing collapse in 2008 so I ended up stopping out again and going back to work. But I was very persistent and also, another lesson from childhood was no waste. Don’t waste anything. And I had already had 80 or 90 credits. I didn’t want to waste those. I wanted to finish. So that was something that really propelled me forward was this investment. I already knew how many sacrifices, how much money, how much time I had already put into this thing, and I really wanted to finish.

09:24 Zach: I eventually did finish. Got a job as a mentoring program coordinator and teacher. I paid for master’s degrees with cash. I didn’t take out any debt. Granted, it took me five years to earn those degrees, but I didn’t accrue any debt because I paid as I was being paid. I was never able to save any money. To this day I have not had a savings account over a thousand dollars. however, I don’t have any debt. I don’t have any credit card debt. I don’t have any college student loan debt, specifically because I paid as I went. Now, that is not going to sound like how a lot of students do it. A lot of students go right from high school to college. They take off those loans, they get that degree as soon as they can. I took a much different path, but in looking back on it and hearing some of the stories that I hear from some classmates, some of them are a little envious of how I did it. And granted there were lots of sacrifices along the way, but being 33 years old, being in a really great PhD program, almost to the finish line and not having any debt is something I’m really proud of.

10:37 Emily: It’s a truly incredible story. And I hope that anybody who can relate to your path in any way, either about growing up as you said, as a poor kid and having some of the mindsets that come with that, or taking this sort of longer term route to get to the PhD to get to where you are now. But by the way, being 33 and being almost done with your PhD doesn’t sound too far behind to me. I hope that they’ll be able to follow up with you if they have anything that they want to you know, talk with you further about or learn from you about.

Carrying Forward Financial from Growing Up Poor

11:08 Emily: What I wanted to ask you about now is some of the attitudes or mindsets that you have carried from your childhood that are, that you’re carrying forward. Whether they are mindsets that you think help you or whether there are mindsets that you think kind of hurt you. You’ve already mentioned a couple of them. One is you being extremely frugal. We’ll get into more of that in a few minutes. Being extremely frugal, not wanting to waste anything. The other one is debt aversion, which I learned at this conference that we both attended is a very common thing for people who grow up in lower income families is having debt aversion, which can be very helpful in some situations and can also, as you were just saying mean that it takes you more time to do certain things like finish your education. If you’re not taking out student loans, there are just trade offs. Are there any other mindsets that you can see from your childhood that are carrying over?

11:58 Zach: I’ll start with the positives. Having the work experience and the education has been so helpful in interpersonal communication and just professionalism. I waited tables and I stocked shelves at gas stations and grocery stores and that kind of manual labor. And working with other people, working your body, you’re really just kind of come to an understanding that there are a lot of different kinds of work out there, about the different kinds of people out there, and to respect all professions and be able to communicate with folks from lots of different professions. In a positive, feeling like I needed to avoid that debt and work my entire way through, I’ve got to meet a lot of people I would never get to meet. I’ve got to develop my communication skills to a degree where I feel as comfortable on a public bus or a shelter or a church or a tier one research institution. Talking with senior level administrators, same level of comfort because I’ve been around and lived amongst all those kinds of folks. So that has really, really helped me in terms of the negatives.

13:13 Zach: Growing up, never went out to eat, never vacationed. The longest vacation we actually ever took was a weekend trip to Minneapolis when I was, I think eight or nine years old and that was it. That was the only vacation. Never left my home town. My first plane ride was at age 30, coming and visiting UT Austin. We never took vacations, kind of with the idea that if you can’t pay for it in cash you are not going to pay for it. And then thrifting almost everything. In prepping for this podcast, I was trying to remember going school shopping and I don’t think I ever did. I don’t think we ever went school clothes shopping. It was either hand me downs from older kids in our neighborhood and cousins or it was going to St. Vincent DePaul and getting used clothes. And to this day when I need something, a chair, shorts, shoes — I just bought a really great pair of used shoes — I still go thrifting for a ton of stuff. That has stuck with me, for better or for worse. To this day, I also just seek out free stuff even if I don’t feel like I belong, like free food on campus. There are speaking events that I go to that if they fit in my schedule, I’ll go for the food and for the socializing, which is totally free sponsored by the university. Also though, with having a really kind of frugal mindset, I had still made some really bad choices. I still tend to eat spoiled food and expired food. It’s just a bad habit to break. It’s kind of the no waste. I buy in bulk as much as I can and then if it goes bad, I still eat it. I still, for better or worse, shop at Walmart. A lot of my classmates are hard on me for shopping at Walmart, but it was the only grocery store in my hometown. It is consistently the cheapest. They always have discounted poultry and meat and bakery. I always freeze things and can things when I can. Some people have thought that I’m kind of weird for doing that. Like buying day old bread and buying day old meat and freezing expired food to kind of stretch the eatability and the usability of the food.

15:42 Zach: That has actually been a little socially stigmatizing. I find myself kind of gravitating toward other folks who grew up poor and just understood that that loaf of bread should last you a week and a jar of peanut butter should last you two weeks. And those can be meals, every single meal if you need them to be. It’s also been a little stigmatizing being an Austin because there’s so much money in this town. There’s so much technology and a lot of folks do come from money and going out to eat twice a week. Living downtown in a $2,500 a month apartment isn’t anything out of the ordinary. It’s so foreign to me and it’s been hard to relate to some folks who grew up that way, especially if we’re in the same PhD program, because I just don’t have those experiences. I don’t feel good about doing those things. So there are some positives than, as you said, there’s obviously some negatives too.

16:43 Emily: Yeah. I’m so glad that you’re telling this story here. It’s really good for me to get your perspective because I did grow up very differently, and most people who I know grew up more middle-class like I did. Or maybe if they had a background more similar to yours, maybe they were sort of concealing that. It sounds like you don’t do that, at least not all the time.

Commercial

17:12 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Finances During Grad School

18:16 Emily: Okay. My question is around sort of the PhD program being kind of an equalizer in terms of income. Not that every PhD student or every PhD student at UT Austin makes the same amount of money, but more that you know, you’re kind of put on, let’s say within a factor of two, within your university, of one another. Now, some people coming into that situation are used to living a lifestyle that is higher than what they can afford on their PhD stipends. You, maybe, I don’t know, we’ll get into it, this may be have been a lifestyle increase to be able to have the stipend that you have, based on where you were coming from before that. But everyone has a choice to make when they hear the stipend that they’re receiving. They can choose to live within their means, at least semester by semester, sometimes funding changes, but they can choose to attempt to live within their means. Or they can choose to take on outside work or take out student loans perhaps and augment that stipend income with other sources of income or debt. I was wondering, maybe you could speak a little bit about what your finances are like right now — what is the stipend that you get at UT Austin and how did that compare is really briefly to cost of living? And whether or not you’re able to save on that or does anybody save on that?

19:35 Zach: In the college of education and most social sciences, the typical graduate research assistant or assistantship stipend is between $1,400 and $1,700 a month.

19:46 Emily: Not generous.

19:48 Zach: Not generous. And if you look around Austin, the typical one bedroom, entry-level, we’re talking no amenities, no garage, you might not have central air conditioning, you may have a box air conditioner, $1,500 a month, $1,700 a month, and if you want to live downtown and not have a car, it’s going to double and sometimes triple. It’s pretty ridiculous. The living stipend does not let you live comfortably whatsoever. And even really for my standard of living, you know, trying to find a one bedroom apartment on $1,500 a month, it’s incredibly hard to do and so incredible that I have had roommates my entire time here because there is no way that it would have been able to work. And in talking with other grad students in my program and, and in social work, and in psychology, sociology, linguistics, I don’t know anyone who lives on their own. They either live with family or they have roommates. Really in Austin there’s no other way to do it.

20:56 Zach: In terms of saving, there has been no saving. It has been avoiding debt. I’ve not had to take out any debt, but I’ve also not been able to save anything. And that’s common almost across the board. It’s just kind of four or five years of “I’m going to sacrifice earnings. I’m going to do my best to say at a debt, but I know I’m not going to save anything on the stipend”. Now at UT Austin, we do have healthcare paid for, so that is really great. It’s a great healthcare system. It’s really has really great coverage. There are other student benefits. We get to ride the bus for free. We get discounted food on campus. I mean there are lots of other perks of being a student. You are paid in other ways than just monetarily, but that money does not stretch far, that is for sure. In terms of being able to make ends meet and making enough money to be able to afford this town, I’ve picked up several other jobs, so I do work more than my assistantship for sure. I generally put in between 60 and 70 hour weeks. I also am an admissions reader. I teach courses part time at a nearby university. I edit dissertations part-time for about $75 an hour. And that has helped me make rent and pay for food some months. I also take automated surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk during my bus rides. I’m a little bit car sick, so I can’t read a book and I can’t study, but I can be on my phone and take surveys. And through Amazon Mechanical Turk I can usually make $8 or $10 per commute, so I will drive my car to my park and ride for about 15 minutes. I’ll have about a 45 minute bus ride in, but in those 45 minutes I can make between $8 or $10 and that could be my food for a couple of days. I’ve been able to really stretch that out, but as you kind of alluded to debt aversion, but no savings whatsoever.

22:58 Emily: Yeah. Well I’d like to get now into more how you make it work. You mentioned what the stipend is at UT Austin, which I mean Austin is a rapidly increasing cost of living city, so I think what’s common in those cities is that the stipends that graduate students are paid and probably other people, the university, their salaries are not indexed at all to what the cost of living is increasing by. It’s a really tough situation to be in, especially as a graduate student, as you mentioned. Coming in and having maybe a five plus year path to the PhD, I mean in that five years, the cost of living can go up tens of percentage points, but your stipend is going to increase very little. So the situation that you sign on dotted line for when you start graduate school is not necessarily the situation that you’re in by the time you finish because your stipend is not going to be keeping up with cost of living. Just a word of warning there for prospective graduate students.

Frugal Strategies as a PhD

23:55 Emily: Now I would really love to talk about how how you make those ends meet. What are the frugal strategies? You mentioned extra income, which is fantastic, but on the side of being frugal, what are the strategies that you’re using that maybe you carried over from these mindsets from your childhood that you think are a little bit unusual? We already mentioned roommates. Okay. A lot of people have roommates. It’s kind of a necessity in most places. What are some other things that you’re doing that maybe other students wouldn’t think of? The idea behind this question is just so they can get some more ideas for other ways that they might be able to cut expenses. And also, with each tip or some of the tips, maybe say what you’re sacrificing to do things that way because there is always a trade off.

24:36 Zach: Absolutely. So, when I looked at moving here, I first and foremost looked at where the fastest public transportation was located and on which streets. In Austin, the big buses run on Congress and Lamar, so I knew I wanted to live off of those streets because I also understood that transportation was free with my student ID. First and foremost, before I even moved here, it was a very strategic move of I need to live on public transport and I also need to live near a grocery store because Austin is kind of known for having these food deserts and other major cities do as well, where there might be an entire swaths of the city where there is not a grocery store within walking distance or on public transport. Before I moved it was getting on transportation and getting on food and specifically living near a Walmart because I knew how much money I could save. Just being kind of a Walmart shopper, already having my budget from where I was moving from, I knew roughly how much I would spend so I could really budget my money really well.

25:48 Emily: With the first part, I just want to add that the selection, the location where you live determines so much about what you’re going to be spending during graduate school. You obviously are more highly aware, maybe then most students coming into graduate school. I really think this is something that other, you know, example that other people should follow.

26:05 Zach: And to your point about sacrifices, I do not live where the bars are or where the entertainment district is. I live miles and miles away from that. Right now, if I wanted to get to some place that had the live music venue, it’s a 12 mile bus ride. I do not live where all the action is in Austin and that’s a sacrifice. I lived on the bus line, I reserve myself to a 45 minute, one hour bus ride that was free. So those are are part of the tradeoffs. But I also went a step further specifically with Walmart and some thrift stores. And I asked, first of all, I would call the location and say to Walmart, when do you discount bakery? When do you discount meat? What day of the week do you put that out? And they’re happy to tell you like bakery and my Walmart is Mondays and the meat is Thursdays. So I know that I go Thursday morning, try to do grocery shopping on Monday and save a ton of money that way. And we’re talking, you know, ground beef that might be $12 is down to $4 and it’s the same amount of meat and you can still freeze it. So stuff like that.

27:14 Zach: Also thrift stores — when do you inventory and when do you give things away? A lot of folks who don’t shop at thrift stores don’t know that thrift stores throw out about 25% of the things that they get in donations and they tend to save those. So they’ll load everything in the back, they’ll sort through what is salable and then they’ll actually throw away everything that they don’t think is salable. A lot of good stuff is still in there though, so you ask thrift stores, down here it’s Goodwill. There’s lots of Goodwills and they are different in different places, but they’ll tell you when they’re going to chuck stuff and you can go on that day and not pay anything. You can go through and get good chairs, good tables. And especially in grad school, if you’re only going to be in a place for four to five years, a lot of that furniture can be just a rental, a four year rental. You go get a free set of kitchen table and chairs for free from a Goodwill, use them for a couple of years, and then give them away. Going the extra mile, especially knowing where I was going to live, but then the social services I was going to use — how could I maximize those? So that when I got here, it wasn’t a huge culture shock. I was doing a lot of same things back home that I had been doing here.

28:29 Emily: Yeah, I really love that combo, those first two tips of it’s not only where you shop, but when you shop. And I don’t think that second step when you shop is something that necessarily occurs to people right away. Thank you for that insight. What’s another tip that you have?

28:47 Zach: this is more along the academic side. in being a PhD student, there’s always pressure to publish and go to conferences and be an academic. But I have found that I am able to save quite a bit of money and do a lot of travel that I would never be able to do by one, when I do go to conferences, be extremely outgoing and friendly and —

29:11 Emily: I can attest to this, you are extremely outgoing and friendly. Yes.

29:14 Zach: And specifically try to meet people that are not from your state and those people become your friend network and those become people who have couches and floors that you can sleep on. So I have gone to a ton of conferences and not paid for a hotel or an Airbnb at all, just knowing someone in that spot. I’m going to Portland in the fall. I’m staying with someone. I’m going to San Francisco next spring. In San Francisco, the group hotel rates were $190 per night. I’m staying for free with a friend who I met at a conference and I have them return that favor. People who are coming to conferences in Austin, I always put them up, I keep a spare mattress, we throw it in the living room and they sleep on a mattress in the living room floor. That’s saving them hundreds and hundreds of dollars of conference hotels.

30:08 Zach: And then actually attending the conferences — I heard a lot of folks tell me they could never do this, but whenever I submit to a conference I will email the conference chair and try to arrange some sort of email conversation or phone call and ask to volunteer in exchange registration fees. So there are probably 25 conferences that I’ve gone to in state and out of state where I know when I will arrive and I’ll say, I can give you eight hours of my time before my presentation. I’ll help you at 5:00 AM and I’ll get the conference room set up. I’ll set up tables, I’ll put up projectors. TACAC is the admissions conference here in Texas and I have done check-in for the past three years in exchange for registration. I will happily volunteer a few hours of labor for a $200 registration fee that I don’t have to pay. And it also doubles as great networking, because they see a grad student who is eager to volunteer and help out and chip in, and I have never been turned away. I’ve never had anyone say, “no, we can’t support you in some way.” It’s not only saving the money in your personal everyday life, but in your academic life, there’s also some ways you can save some serious money and that money adds up over time. I’ve saved at this point over three years, thousands of dollars by doing those things.

31:34 Emily: Yeah, that’s a really incredible and powerful tip that I’m so glad you shared because I hear all the time, um, about how conference expenses are such a limiting factor in a grad student’s ability to network, ability to get their research out there and so forth and those fees and so forth are real barrier. Even if your department or your funding agency or whoever pays for part or all of it, it still is hard to have that money up front and what you’ve come to here is just a really brilliant solution, and I hope that a lot more people will start following your example. I mean the fact that you’ve never been turned down like when given that offer is just incredible. Well, I hope not too many people start doing it or else maybe you’ll have some competition for the volunteer jobs, but it’s a great, great idea and such an actual tip. Thank you.

Outtro

32:25 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Why Mental Health Is Worth Investing In (with PhD Balance Founder Susanna Harris)

February 17, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Susanna Harris, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina and the founder of PhD Balance (formerly PhDepression). Susanna is an outspoken advocate for the mental health of PhDs. However, bolstering mental health can take up-front resources, such as time, money, and energy. Susanna argues that mental health is worth investing in, particularly in your early 20s and while you’re affiliated with a university. Susanna and Emily discuss low- and no-cost methods to improve mental health.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Find Susanna Harris on Twitter or Instagram
Find PhD Balance online, on Twitter, and on Instagram
This PhD Healed Her Scarcity Money Mindset Using a Goal-Setting Framework (Part 2)
How This Graduate Student Rejects the Academic Culture of Being Broke
How to Combat the Negative Financial Attitudes We Learned in Academia and in Childhood
Personal Finance for PhDs: Tax Center
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

00:00 Susanna: The point of investing time, money, resources into your mental health is one, if you don’t, it’s not going to get better. I think that there is this really dangerous mentality around grad school that it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do grad school and then when it’s done I’m going to start my life” and that for some reason that the moment you graduate, everything’s going to get a lot easier and there’s a lot less stress and you’re going to be making way more money and you’re going to feel like an adult. And not surprisingly, when I talk to people who’ve been out of their PhD for six months they’re sort of still reeling from it.

Introduction

00:43 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five, episode seven, and today my guest is Susanna Harris, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the founder of PhD Balance. Susanna is an outspoken advocate for the mental health of PhDs. However, bolstering your mental health can take upfront resources such as time, money, and energy. Susanna makes the case for why mental health is worth investing in particularly in your early twenties and while you’re affiliated with the university. We discuss ways you can improve your mental health even if you don’t have much or any money to put towards it. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Susanna Harris.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:34 Emily: It is my pleasure today to have Susanna Harris on the podcast. She is the founder of PhD Balance and we’re going to be talking about a really exciting and a very relevant subject matter, which is mental health. So Susanna, for those in the audience who don’t already know you, will you please introduce yourself?

01:48 Susanna: Sure thing. Well, first of all, Emily, thank you for inviting me. At first when you asked for me to be on, I was like, I don’t know what my work has to do with finances and it’s definitely not something I’ve gotten nailed down. I started PhD Balance about a year and a half ago to really just start talking about mental illness in graduate school. I myself am a, we’ll say a final year PhD student in microbiology, and what I really wanted to do is just start talking about mental illness because I’m someone with depression and anxiety and working on a PhD. And throughout this process of building that community, I’ve learned a lot of really important things, one of which is how important it is to get mental health care and how it can be really tricky for people to find space in their finances to do that.

02:44 Emily: Yeah, that’s exactly how we’ll narrow this very vast subject down today, the crossover point between the two of us. So tell us a little bit more about this origin story of PhD balance because I understand there’s even a name change involved.

02:56 Susanna: Yeah. I think that was one of the most difficult decisions for me. So when originally this started, it was just called PhDepression. Again, because I was a PhD student with depression, I thought maybe I would put up an Instagram post and find a couple other people who’d be interested in joining. The whole point was to share a photo, like you would put up on Instagram or you know, the image that we put out to academia. And then in the text share a more personal story about your own dealing with mental illness or mental health struggles while going through academia. And this all came about actually because about a month before — so PhDepression started in March of 2018 — about a month before this Nature Biotech paper came out showing about 40% of graduate students were dealing with anxiety or depression or the symptoms of them at any given time, and I saw that and it was just like, “Oh, I kind of had no idea. I thought I was really alone in this.” And I looked around, I was in a conference of about 200 people and I thought, “there’s no way that five other people understand.” And I think that that’s where it sort of clicked of we get these numbers, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless we can look around and find other people who are going to understand us, who are going to listen to us, not judge us, and then really importantly, be able to give us the resources that we need when we need them.

04:19 Susanna: Probably about a year into it, well six months in, I ended up turning it into a business and that was mostly for liability reasons. It’s a sensitive topic to talk about mental illness. At that time I had a small team of people working with me and I wanted to make sure that if anything should happen, if we ever faced anything legal that we just didn’t know about, that that responsibility would fall on my shoulders. And of course, once you have a business, then people ask you to kind of run it as a business and figure out money. As we were doing that, trying to think of what it’s going to be a sustainable financial model for what we do, we realized that changing to PhD Balance, one people could pronounce it easier, which is always a benefit.

Susanna: Two, it really became much more about general mental health, and that idea that even if you’re not dealing with a chronic mental illness, even if in general, your mental health is great, there’s going to be times where you do become imbalanced. You do kind of tip over to one side and need to right yourself. And so the idea of this PhD Balance is to acknowledge that there are those tipping points that different people have their kind of center at different places, but that the goal is to find that place where you’re okay. And I like to tell people, I think about it balance in terms of yoga, where the purpose of balancing in yoga is not to be perfect. And in fact, if you’re in a position where you’re absolutely perfect and it’s no challenge, you’re not really pushing yourself. Maybe that’s where you need to be that day, but you’re through yoga trying to find out more about yourself, learning where your limits are, understanding that your limits are different than somebody else’s. And the goal is not, again, to be perfect, but rather to learn how to balance and learn how to respect those boundaries of yours. We thought PhD Balance was a good switch to encapsulate all of that.

06:17 Emily: Yeah. What I’m getting from what you’re describing is a dynamic balance, right? And not a static balance. I think everyone likes the term balance, but I like it too, and one of the reasons is really what we’ll be talking about during this interview is that it’s not actually that mental health is one’s only concern, right? You would not sacrifice everything else in your life to have whatever perfect mental health might mean because this does impact other areas of your life such as finances, such as time management, such as work-life balance, other areas. It is about finding a balance between what your needs are and your resources are in one area versus another, and it does have to be dynamic over time. Anyway, we’ll be diving into more of that for the rest of this interview.

Intersection of Finances and Mental Health

06:59 Emily: Let’s talk about kind of, again that intersection between the finances and the mental health. When you’re experiencing financial stress, financial insecurity, as many PhDs do, especially during the graduate student or postdoc period, what effects can that have on mental health?

07:17 Susanna: I think there’s a few kind of separate but overlapping ways that that can affect your mental health. One is just like you said, that added stress. Chronic stress, so stress that lasts over weeks instead of let’s say a day. You know, there’s some stress that’s good. I think that whether it’s in work or even in finances to go, “Ooh, well this is a crunch time,” that’s not necessarily bad, but rather to have it constantly ticking in the back of your mind, that can take a toll on everything else. Oftentimes when we’re stressed about finances, it’s not just that we want to get to a certain goal, but rather that we’re afraid of falling into something else. Especially as people who in general are not making a lot of money, or are making no money, or paying money, it’s not so much always about like, “Oh, how can I best invest my extra money?” It’s rather, okay, how do I get by with my rent and my food and you know, any dependents I might have. And so just that stress and that background knowledge that you might be dealing with those things, that on its own is very difficult.

08:29 Emily: If you don’t mind, I want to add something there, which is about how chronic this can be because I think in regular society, in a normal kind of job, if you were experiencing financial stress or insecurity, there are actions you can take to alleviate that by increasing your income through your primary job, finding another job, moving to another place. But inside academia we don’t feel as free because we have this career goal that we’re pursuing, and the income is not really the main point of the job, right? It’s the training for that next stage. So we start to feel more stuck. Whether that’s actually true or not, how stuck we are, I think it’s a very common feeling, and to me that contributes to the stress, as well as just looking out of this long time horizon of this is not going to change for years and years and years potentially. I really think that that contributes to it, the stuck feeling.

09:22 Susanna: Yeah. Well absolutely. Sometimes I think about, so I’m in my sixth year and at this point I’ve invested so much time and money that I could have made in a higher paying job and I’ve gotten paid the same amount for five and a half years. Now, if I decided I have to have more money right now — I’m really lucky to be a single person who didn’t come in with a huge amount of debt, and has a lot of skills that help to keep my financial requirements down — but let’s say I had a dependent, or let’s say something happened, if I needed more money, I literally could not get it right now. Part of my department is that we signed on saying we weren’t going to have a part time job. I would have to choose between my actual needs versus all of this time and energy I’d put in and walking away with almost nothing. At this point I actually can’t master out, it’s a weird part of my department, so I would literally walk away after five and a half years. So I think that that goes both ways with any kind of crisis, right? Whether it’s finances or mental health or just general physical health, that we are in this really precarious spot where if anything major happens, there’s not really a safety net. And I think that we’re constantly, like you said, we’re constantly aware of that and it’s not something that’s going to go away.

10:52 Emily: Yeah, we’ve definitely well outlined that part of the problem. What was the second point you’re going to make?

10:56 Susanna: Yeah. So the second point is just that, and I think we’ll talk about this a little bit more, of why mental health is worth investing in, worth putting in that money, even when we don’t see the dividends right away. But if you don’t have the money you might decide to or you might have to allocate your resources to other things. Although mental health affects everything that we do, if you can’t buy food that’s going to be a more immediate problem. And what we know about mental health is that even if it’s a small issue, if left unaccounted for, I’m saying untreated, but that doesn’t have to be necessarily medical, that can just be talking to a close friend or doing something like yoga, those things to help you rebalance, if you don’t get the chance to do that, then can develop into something worse and more chronic and takes you more energy and resources to get out of. I think that those financial issues not only cause some of the mental distress, but also make it very difficult for people to remedy the kind of signs and symptoms before it becomes a bigger issue.

12:14 Emily: Yeah, I definitely see what you’re saying there. It’s the same in the area of finances as well, which I say this a lot, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but when the prevention becomes out of reach for whatever reason, then yeah, you’re continuing down that line into the negative conclusion there.

How to Support Your Mental Health in Grad School

12:33 Emily: Okay. Given constraints in resources that PhD students and postdocs have, how can they find low cost methods and resources for bolstering mental health? And you just said it might involve treatment or it might involve some non-treatment options.

Professional and Medical Options

12:50 Susanna: I think my biggest piece of advice would be to talk to an expert in whatever way that you can. It’s not great across the world or even across the US, as far as having healthcare for students, but one thing that people might not necessarily know is that your general practitioner, so the doctor you’d go to if you had a sore throat or something similar, that’s actually someone who has some training in mental health. If you have health care coverage, you can go to that perso, and that’s something, you know, if you go to your university and say you want to talk to someone about mental health, if they covered mental health at the university, then that’s fantastic. I think it’s worth looking into. If they don’t, it’s okay to say, well, I’d like to speak with my general practitioner, and they can do some basic screenings.

13:39 Emily: I actually want to ask a little question there because when I was in graduate school, I went to student health as my — so I didn’t have a primary person, I had sort of a practice that I saw through the university. So when you’re saying the university versus your primary care provider, you’re saying the university as in the nonmedical support options that a student might have available to them. Is that right?

14:01 Susanna: Oh, no, that’s a good clarification. So for me, even though I go to campus health, we have our own providers. So we can meet with somebody and then request them every time. I do all of my physical health care through the university student health. The university also has a campus psychological service, so a counseling service, and in fact, what happened for me when I was having a hard time is I actually went into my practitioner who is at the general student health, and she did this little screening. I had gone in to try and get sleep medication because I wasn’t sleeping and she said, “you know, it seems like there might be something else going on here. I’d like to instead prescribe you some antidepressants.” And then they kicked me over to the campus psychological services who in turn referred me to my now therapist. But all that’s to say that the campus health, the people there, even just in the physical health spaces, do have training, at least to give you an idea, is this something that you’re going to need a more specialized form of help, or is this something that maybe you can deal with outside of medical treatment?

Susanna: In terms of the financial side of this one is that it’s really important to figure out what your insurance covers. This can be really tricky and I would just recommend either finding someone who’s gone through this or working with the campus facilities because they should have somebody. It’s okay also to reach out to a friend and say, “Hey, I’m having a hard time with this. I have to navigate it and it’s going to be brutal. Can you help me?” Because I think that’s one of the big issues with the crossover of finances and mental health is that when you’re already feeling just drowned in distress and responsibility, the idea of waiting through calls and emails is just absolutely abhorrent. I would say reaching out, figure out what your insurance covers, take a look at what money you do have flexible. If this is something that you could afford to see a therapist once a month, twice a month, once every two months, and to be able to then go into your resources, at the university, talk to someone and say, this is the amount of money I have, just full stop. I don’t have flexibility outside of that and they will be able to help you find, there’s something called sliding scale therapy, and so if you don’t have the means or the insurance, there are places that don’t take insurance but also charge you based on how much money you make. One really good option is group chat sessions, or kind of the support groups. Sometimes they’re through university. A lot of times depending on what you’re dealing with, there are local groups.

Susanna: Then I would say though that there are going to be some situations that you’re going to have to find a way to see, maybe a psychologist or a psychiatrist. A psychologist has a PhD in psychology. They’re usually you’re like high level counselors. A psychiatrist is someone who can prescribe medication. And so for things that might need a little more attention, it’s going to be important to figure out if you can get close to those resources. I would just encourage people to reach out to a friend, reach out to an ally and ask them for help navigating the system because there are low cost options, but it can be really exhausting to figure out what you need.

17:40 Emily: Yeah, that’s a great point. It would be, I’m imagining it would be amazing if there were a campus affiliated person who could like officially could help you navigate this. That may or may not exist in different places. Sort of an ombudsman, I guess that kind of thing, maybe that would exist. I know for me, when I sought out a little bit of counseling help when I was in graduate school, if I remember correctly, I went straight to the counseling services on campus. I did not go through like the medical referral route and they had some sort of package available where you can get this many sessions for free over the course of the semester. And then if I needed more than that, I think it would’ve gone through my insurance. Then the other place that I went to was actually through my church and I was able to get some free counseling sessions — actually, some were free and some were low cost — through that avenue too. So it could be another maybe community group that you’re part of. Maybe that’s something that is provided to you as a benefit for being part of that group maybe. That’s kind of the medical side of things. Actually, I want to make one more point, which is for graduate students who are younger and who are still on their parents’ insurance. This is something that you might want to consider when you have insurance offered to you through your graduate program, but you also have the option of being on your parents’ insurance still. If you know that you’re going to need this kind of care, and this would apply to a variety of other medical conditions as well, which insurance is going to be more beneficial to you, and maybe even, is there a way to get double covered, potentially. I don’t know if that’s the case sometimes. Just something to evaluate if you’re eligible for more than one plan.

19:10 Susanna: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would also say one of the things that gets brought up a lot is that it’s bad, that’s like the low term, that students don’t get full psychological care in addition to whatever medical insurance they’re provided, or just full medical care. But I would say that graduate school in general is not a bad time to start these processes and to get early intervention care. About 75% of people who are going to deal with mental health problems have their first encounter before they’re 25. So right around early, mid twenties is when these things really start showing up, or at least they recognized as larger issues. This is a good time to start getting that help and often university programs, even though they’re not fantastic always, offer a lot more things than you might get at a starting position at a job. I think that it’s worth mentioning, even though it’s not the best system, this might be one of the better places, at least for me in the next five years, foreseeably this is a better insurance set up and a better support system than I will probably have at my next job.

20:25 Emily: I think one of the other benefits there, and it goes right along with that is that the people who you see who are affiliated either with a university or just in the same city as university are used to seeing college students, graduate students, young adults, other people in this age range as you were just saying, when these problems sort of first start occurring, so they may have a little bit more familiarity than if you were in some random city somewhere else and a person who’s dealing with all kinds of different people. We would hope, at any rate.

Commercial

20:55 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Non-medical Options

21:58 Emily: Okay, so that was kind of on the medical side of things, but what about on more of the balance that’s not directly related to the medical or counseling treatment of mental health problems. What can people do this low cost or no cost on that side of the spectrum?

22:13 Susanna: Well, I love that you brought up the aspect of your church. Whether or not it’s a church, more religious side or some other kind of community based services. And I also know that some churches, even if you’re not a regular member, even if you’re not necessarily religious, will offer those kinds of support groups for people, depending on where it is and what exactly you’re looking for. But even things like joing a yoga studio, or finding a group — Meetup oftentimes has groups that get together, do yoga or have conversations — what can be really helpful for your mental health, there’s a couple things. One, the biggest thing is having a community and being able to feel like you can reach out to somebody and say, “Hey, I’m having a hard time” and to know that they have you. I think that’s technically a no cost option but it takes time to build those relationships with people that you can actually trust.

Susanna: Another really big thing for your mental health is your physical health. Being able to unplug from our phones, which is funny coming from someone who I basically live on social media, but I do actually try to take a week off every two or three months. But taking some time away from our built environment inside and getting outside or if you have access to university gym, fantastic. If not, going for a walk is fantastic. Call a friend while you go for a walk if you don’t want to be alone. Or walk to the grocery store. Or a lot of times if I’m having a bad day, I will get off the bus one stop early and just give myself a little bit extra space. You can do this with any sort of physical activity. There’s ways that you can build up your mental health, even by little things of like choosing positive music, doing affirmations, which is so cringy if anyone has done affirmations, it feels really weird. One of the things that I do that helps that takes like three minutes — I call it three, two, one where I list out three things. I’m grateful for that day; two self complements, so the things that I would say to a friend, but to myself; and one self-love thing I’m going to do that day. It could need get myself a coffee, it could be call a friend, whatever. That kind of like active self intervention can be so helpful.

24:48 Emily: I want to add something there. I really love that you gave that little tool because it’s so, I mean, you can do that at any time throughout the day at any point. I’ve recently been learning more about affirmations also and I’ve actually published a couple podcast episodes on how sort of your mindset with respect to money and career affects your finances overall and how affirmations can be helpful in reversing limiting beliefs around money or false beliefs that kind of holds you back from accomplishing things. I also was very resistant to this idea of affirmations the first dozen times I encountered it. But anyway, anyone who’s interested in that kind of thing, there’s been a couple episodes in the past, I’ll link them from the show notes. This affects all different kinds of areas of life, but I’ve been focusing on learning more about how they affect your money mindset. But go ahead.

Further listening:

25:38 Susanna: That’s super cool. Now I’m going to have to go back and listen to those podcasts. The last thing is just having hobbies, having things that you do outside of your work. And that can be anything from, again working out can be a hobby, or cooking, or sewing. Anything that you do, not because someone else is going to think it’s cool, you know, something that you walk away from and you’re like, “yeah, I feel better” just cultivating that. It takes time away, but it is a way for you to give back to yourself and basically a very low cost way of taking care of your overall balance.

26:20 Emily: There’s one more that I want to add in there. I think it’s on the physical health side of things, but that is sleep. This is something that I learned like personally, I did not sleep a lot during college. It was such an intense time and it was weird, I actually went on graduate school interviews about a year after I finished college saying if people ask me, what do you like to do in your spare time, what are your hobbies? I would just say I sleep now. That is my hobby. I lost all my hobbies during college. Now I sleep. That’s how I’m choosing to spend my time and build into myself. And it’s something that I’ve never returned to that lack of sleep that I practiced during college and it’s so much better on this side of things with the sleep.

27:04 Susanna: Yeah. I think that, overall a lot of these things can be summarized of like there’s two limiting factors. You’ve got the limiting factors of finances and you’ve got the limiting factors of time, and in general you’re going to have to choose what you’re gonna pay into. And you’re probably going to have to pay in both, but it is worth it because you get back both. I think that’s what’s really cool is that if you’re at a place mentally that is more healthy, you’re going to do better with your finances and you’re definitely going to do better with your time management and with the enjoyment you get out of your time.

26:45 Emily: Yeah, I think so as well. I don’t really think of these activities as taking away from time or money, but like you said, just just building back into it. I hear this a lot about like working out, like working out does not take time out of your day. It gives you back time during your day because of the energy boost you experience from it and how much, well, if we want to talk about productivity, how much more productive you can be after working out and so forth. Okay, so great, low and no-cost resources there.

The Importance of Investing in Your Mental Health

28:14 Emily: You mentioned earlier this idea of investing in mental health and especially at this particular time of life of, you know, potentially the early twenties. Why is mental health worth investing in? I use that term very carefully, because there’s very few things that actually qualify as investing. And because I deal with finances, I think about actually putting money towards making more money. But there is this parallel idea of investing in other areas of life that don’t directly give you returns on your money but rather give you returns on your self, your person. Why is this worth investing in?

28:46 Susanna: Wow, there’s just so many things and I guess I’m saying this from a perspective of somebody who, if we’ll keep going with the analogy just like really kept digging into that credit card of mental health, where I really didn’t sleep much. I’m still guilty of this and sometimes pushing it too hard, of having to dig into these stores that I don’t necessarily even have. But the point of investing time, money, resources into your mental health is one, if you don’t, it’s not going to get better. I think that there is this really, I think it’s dangerous mentality around grad school that it’s like, “okay, I’m going to do grad school and then when it’s done I’m going to start my life.” And that for some reason that the moment you graduate, everything’s going to get a lot easier, and there’s a lot less stress, and you’re going to be making way more money, and you’re going to feel like an adult. And not surprisingly, I when I talked to people who’ve been out of their PhD for six months, they’re sort of still reeling from it. They’re like, “Oh, it’s, I still have stresses, I still have responsibilities. And in fact, it’s really hard now because I have dealt with these for so long. It’s exhausting.” And so one of those things of why investing now is important is that, um, relative to at least how my future looks — that I want to have a family and kids, I want to have a really full career. I love being busy — is that I don’t foresee my life getting some easier and for me to suddenly find an extra hour in every single day to start dedicating. Building those healthy habits is going to set you really well up for the future when you do have more responsibility rather than just fight this kind of stress. I think this is a really weird time. There’s a huge amount of stress there. There’s no question.

30:42 Susanna: Then the other thing is that I think people have this idea that having better mental health just makes you feel better and it certainly can. I will also say that sometimes working on your mental health feels really awful and it’s important to know that working on your mental health or focusing on finding that balance throughout your life, might not feel great at the time, but you do reap a ton of rewards later on. Speaking personally, I used to go really hard throughout the week and I had something called my Fridays where anyone who was close to me understood that probably two or three Fridays every month I would just crash out. As of about 2:00 PM, I was useless. I was cranky. I couldn’t stay with having commitments and it would take until Saturday afternoon until I was back on it. It would just be a really weird cycle. Looking at it, if I — and this is what I’ve started doing is that I’ve been able to invest 20 minutes a day or so, on average, and then I don’t have that crash out time at the end of the week. And that’s time that I have actually saved. Some interesting things is that people who, for instance with depression, people who deal with depression take significantly more sick days than people who are not dealing with depression. People with anxiety are much less productive if it’s not being handled or managed. And so although you might be working more hours and feeling like, Oh, I can’t possibly fit 30 minutes of exercise in here a day, based on the data we have, you’ll probably be much more productive and you’ll probably make up that 30 minutes and then some, and you’ll also have the benefits of enjoyment that you have there.

32:39 Emily: I think you’re making excellent points on the mental health side of the equation, but I just have to underline everything that you’re saying on the financial side, too, of like don’t squander this opportunity that you have at the moment in building those positive habits in multiple different areas of your life. Because I couldn’t agree with you more that it is pervasive in academia that we think that our life somehow gets to be put on pause during graduate school or during PhD training. And it’s really not the case. As you were saying, if you allow problems to lie on unaddressed, they just, they fester and they grow and then it takes, even that much more to pull yourself back out of it if it’s even possible, at the end of that process. So it is much better to, as you were just saying, invest a little bit of time, a little bit of money, a little bit of effort on a consistent basis up front rather than trying to dig yourself out of it on the back end. Whether we’re talking about mental health or whether we’re talking about finances. Wonderful points overall. And I’m sure if we had more people on this call speaking about other areas of life and they would say the same thing. Beautiful points there.

Financial Advice for PhDs

33:44 Emily: As we wrap up the interview, I like to ask all my guests, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be related to something we’ve already addressed in the interview or it could be something entirely different.

34:00 Susanna: I think my biggest piece of advice and the thing that I’ve had to learn several times over is to give yourself a bigger buffer than you expect. I think what was hard for me is that coming into grad school, I budgeted kind of monthly and that was because a lot of my expenses were pretty consistent throughout undergrad. It was like, okay, every month I’m going to have this, and I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have my own real place. I was renting and everything was already taken care of. What I spent in one month was pretty much what I would spend the next month and I’d have a small buffer. And then getting into grad school, you get kind of these more adult-like problems of your washing machine breaks down, or I have to suddenly pay medical bills that I wasn’t expecting. Things like that. And so I’ve had to learn instead of focusing on a month to month and if I have a buffer at the end of the month, then great. I get to spend that next month, thinking about my buffer in terms of semesters or at least longer, maybe six months at a time. And then at the end of that six months, consider using that buffer. I actually had to learn that my second year when I switched over to a fellowship and they didn’t give us our fellowship for I think 25 days. I didn’t get a paycheck until almost a month after I was expecting it and I was really lucky to have that buffer. You are kind of at the whim of the university. You can’t do a side hustle necessarily. And so that pre-planning for things that you have no idea if they’re going to it’s just, it’s necessary. It’s tricky but it’s necessary.

35:45 Emily: Yeah. Wonderful point. And I mean there’s so much that I could and have teased out in what you’re saying in terms of not relying on the university to pay fellows the same way they would pay employees in terms of being on a deadline. That’s a common unfortunate problem. I totally agree with you about budgeting. I would say over the course of a year, like looking out over the coming year, although semester’s a little bit easier to get your hands around, through what I call targeted savings accounts. That’s a little bit more of a formal system. But like you were just saying, it’s just basically having a longer view about the expenses that are coming your way because they are hard to handle if you only have a given months amount of income to do so. Wonderful points there and thank you for that. Great advice.

Where to Find Susanna Online

36:24 Emily: For members of the audience who don’t yet know where to find you, what’s the best place that they want to follow up with you or learn more about something that you cover?

36:33 Susanna: Sure. I am on social media probably more than I should be, but it is sort of one of my hobbies. I consider it the only game on my phone. You can find me on Twitter and on Instagram @SusannaLHarris. And then to find PhD Balance, we both have a website which is www.phdbalance.com. And then we have Instagram and Twitter as well. You can join the conversation. You can see the other stories that people have have posted, some of our tips and we’d love to hear your stories and your tips. That you can find us @PhD_Balance.

37:15 Emily: Perfect. Thank you so much for giving this interview today.

37:18 Susanna: Yeah, thank you Emily. I’ll talk to you later.

Outtro

37:20 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Three Financial Strategies Every Early-Career PhD Should Employ (with Kate Mielitz, PhD, AFC)

February 3, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Kate Mielitz, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University who holds a PhD in financial planning and is an Accredited Financial Counselor. Kate gives her top three financial tips for early-career PhDs: celebrating financial wins, no matter how small they are; asking questions regarding your pay and benefits; and saving in advance so you can say “yes” to networking opportunities, from a meal or drink with a colleague to conferences. Kate also tells the story of a recent financial challenge she encountered that is highly relatable to anyone in academia. Due to her preparation, what could have easily been a financial disaster became just a hiccup.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Kate: It is okay to make a financial mistake. I want that very, very clear right now. We are human. It is only money. Yes, you heard it from me. It is only money. How do we use it? It’s the tool that we’re using like the hammer or the screwdriver. If you make a mistake, you pick yourself back up, you carry on, you figure it out. What’s the mistake? You ask the questions of yourself and figure out where you went wrong. You figure out where you need help going forward, and you take proactive steps. You’re going to be okay.

Introduction

00:43 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five, episode five and today my guest is Dr. Kate Mielitz, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University who holds a PhD in financial planning and is an accredited financial counselor. Kate and I discussed the top three financial strategies early career PhDs should employ: celebrating financial wins, no matter how small, asking questions about your pay and benefits, and planning to spend money on networking. Kate also shares her recent and pretty big financial mistake, which will be highly relatable to anyone in academia, and how she weathered it. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Kate Mielitz.

01:34 Emily: I am just delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Kate Mielitz, who is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University and an accredited financial counselor. So we have an expert on the show with us today, for once. It’s wonderful. Please introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us a little bit more about how you got where you are and what you do.

01:55 Kate: Yes. Thank you so much Emily for having me on. This is a thrill for me. Let me give you the deep background first. I have 20 years combined experience, a bit little more than that, in collections, bankruptcy, fraud, financial counseling and education. I’ve been an accredited financial counselor for a little over 10 years. And the accredited financial counselor can be associated with and compared to the certified financial planning designation. The accredited financial counselor focuses on some of those foundational pieces, like, do you know how to budget? Do you know how to save? Do you have enough insurance? Do you know how to appropriately use credit? Whereas the CFPs look at wealth growth and wealth management. So my area of expertise is helping people get a solid financial foundation that works for them, that’s specific to them and their financial situation. Then I have my PhD in personal financial planning from Kansas State University and I work in the family financial planning program in the department of family development and family science at the Oklahoma State University.

03:06 Emily: Yeah. And again, it’s such a pleasure to have you on today, Kate. So, because you are an accredited financial counselor and a PhD in this area, and again, an expert, I am basically going to turn the reins over to you and let you direct where you want this to go. I asked you to give me your top three financial strategies that early career PhDs should be using. Let’s talk through those.

Financial Strategy #1: Celebrate Financial Wins

03:28 Kate: First, I want you to remember before I give these three strategies that it’s always dangerous to give me this much leeway, Emily, so thank you for that. But remember that no matter what I say, you need to be true to you. So ground this in your financial reality. And when I say for example, with my first strategy, always celebrate the progress forward that you make on your savings goals no matter how small, I mean that quite literally. If that means that for one month to the next, that all you can get in that savings account is an extra penny — celebrate it. It’s the small victories that then help us get into the bigger victories. Do we want to focus on just putting pennies, nickels, and dimes in savings? Not if we can avoid it, but when we are early career, when we are in graduate school and coming into postdoc and coming right up, it’s not always easy. Finding a way to commit to savings and then doing it always celebrating those small successes is so very, very important.

04:29 Emily: Yeah. I’d love for you to elaborate on the point you were just making about how, okay, even if it’s just a penny, it’s still worthwhile. It’s still something to celebrate. Even if the dollar $10 a hundred dollars, whatever scale we are at, it’s worthwhile doing. And can you talk a little bit about the reasoning behind that? Like why it’s worthwhile to save even if it’s just a few dollars? Because some of my audience members, it can only be a few dollars, if anything.

04:53 Kate: I have so been in those shoes. We could go forever on this, Emily. The fact of the matter is, any teeny tiny amount that you can put forward is still a teeny tiny amount that you’ve put forward. I have worked with families who are experiencing homelessness, who are out of work or supporting a family on minimum wage. So I get working with small amounts and the reason that we focus on the small amounts is because those are bite size. How do we eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Therefore we save a penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a few bucks at a time to make that small progress. So then we’re more conscious about it. The more we’re thinking, “Oh, you know what, this is 34 cents that I got back in change — I’m going to put that in my savings account.” And then the next time, “Oh, this is 56 cents, I’m going to put that in my savings account.” Maybe we can’t do it every time, but as we think about these pennies, whether we collect in a change jar or it’s just, “okay, I made progress,” it’s gonna stick in there and we’re going have these little tickle reminders that it’s like, “well, I was successful. I was successful before. I can be successful this month.” And we’re not focusing on, “Oh my God, I only put 20 bucks in savings. I should just give up now.” Never give up! These teeny tiny amounts add up. Americans throw away billions of pennies a year. I mean, it’s mind blowing. So stop and think about what you can put forward.

Kate: One real quick caveat I wanted to share with you, Emily, on this idea. I remember watching an old Family Feud episode and the host asked, “we surveyed a hundred people on the street, what is the smallest dollar amount you would dive back in the trashcan to retrieve?” I was blown away that the number one answer was a $10 bill. I mean, I was like, are you kidding me? I have gone for 26 cents and I’ll do it because to me those small things make a difference. And I mean, whatever happened to the $1 bill and the $5 bill? Those, those are very valuable, as our quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies. So start small, save small, build as you can and you can do it. So celebrate that small progress.

07:11 Emily: Yes. Oh my gosh, I love this point so much. And one thing I wanted to add to what you’re saying is, one of the most valuable things that I think, and this is I think another rephrasing what you’re saying, of it sticks in your head when you start saving, you know, rounding up to the next dollar, whatever it is. I think what most important thing that it does is it changes your self identity to one of “I am a saver.”

07:32 Kate: Oh yeah, absolutely.

07:33 Emily: Doesn’t matter what the amount is. If you become a saver in your own mind, that’s what’s going to create that habit change that carries into the future when the dollar amounts can be bigger. But you have to start with that identity change. And the best way of doing that is to actually enact savings. Even if it is that small amount.

07:52 Kate: You’ve nailed it, Emily. I mean that’s it. It’s really about phrasing it. When you got your first published article, even if you were fourth or fifth author, didn’t you then say, I’m a published author? Well, yeah, the same thing goes. I’m a graduate student, I’m a successful graduate student. Oh my gosh. I’ve landed my first job. I’m a postdoc, I’m an assistant professor. Own these things. And yes, even if it’s pennies, you are a saver. So now let’s keep going. Absolutely.

08:22 Emily: Yeah. And going back to your original point of celebrate — what are some ways that you can celebrate without spending the 34 cents that you just saved?

08:31 Kate: Absolutely. Well, it’s kind of like weight loss. They say never celebrate weight loss by going out to eat. So we’re not going to celebrate saving by spending, but we’re going to maybe, and this is so key, especially for graduate students in early careers, but give ourselves permission to just kick it. Give ourselves permission to sit back and worry about the hustle, not worry about the side hustle, it exists, and just breathe. Whether that means taking an hour for ourselves and watching an extra show, or that means potluck in with a friend. You already have the food in the, in the cabinet. So let’s have somebody over. They bring a piece, you bring a piece. Nobody’s really out of pocket. Talking about it with friends. Call Emily, send her a message, send me a message. Say, “Hey, listen, I did it!” Celebrate those small things. Tell your mom and your dad. Sometimes it’s just a matter of not physically doing something, but just acknowledging it. Looking at yourself in the mirror and say, dude, you saved. That’s empowering and it’s exciting and it is a way celebrate.

09:41 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the word celebration maybe can be boiled down to just acknowledgement in some positive way. It could be as small as that or it can be bigger, if you have the means and the time to do so. But the key is do something that’s out of your routine to acknowledge that you accomplished something because you really did.

10:00 Kate: That’s right.

Financial Strategy #2: Ask Questions About Your Finances

10:01 Emily: Okay, let’s move on to your second strategy.

10:04 Kate: Second strategy: ask questions about money. Now, if you are in graduate school and you don’t have access, for example, to a retirement plan, maybe it’s not human resources that you’re going to. If you’re early career definitely be seeking out human resources to ask questions about your insurance plan or your retirement plan and what those things mean. But don’t ever think that you have a question that is too small or too easy or so-and-so is going to think I’m an idiot if I asked this. Listen, Emily and I would not be doing what we are doing if any question were too basic or too small. That’s how we thrive, right? Emily?

10:46 Emily: Exactly.

10:47 Kate: So if you don’t know who to ask, reach out to Emily, reach out to me. We are more than happy to answer any financial question you have because it is your financial health that you need to be focused on. So what resources? No, we’re not going to rescue. Absolutely not. But we’ll get you a list of resources. We’ll point you in the right direction. Sometimes it’s just as simple as, well does this mean that they’re going to match this and that’s a yes or no. So ask the questions and never be scared that “Oh, I’m a graduate student or I’m a PhD, I should know this.” No, not necessarily. That’s why they give PhDs in personal financial planning because other people don’t know. So that’s what I’ve got mine.

11:29 Emily: Yeah. I’ll say especially for, so obviously anyone who is an employee anywhere, you’re going to have an HR department or an HR person, or something. I say person because my husband works for a startup and they do not have an HR department, but they have a person, part of whose job is to handle this kind of thing. So there is someone, if you are an employee, who you can ask questions about the benefits that you’re receiving or even something as simple as, and this is a big question that we’ll get into later, “Hey, when’s my next paycheck coming? What amount is it going to be in?” Those, those are not even trivial questions for, let’s say a graduate student or a postdoc who’s changing how they’re being paid from this system to this system, et cetera. Things can fall through the cracks. It is very worthwhile to keep on top of these questions.

Emily: If it’s not an HR person who’s available to you, go to someone in your department, like the administrative assistant for the graduate program that you’re in or there is someone there. Even if they can’t help you with the question directly, they’re going to be able to point you to the next step. Definitely keep asking questions at your institution until you get the answers that you need around your benefits. And like Kate was just saying, you can go to outside people like me and like her if you have non institution specific questions. One I get all the time is “am I eligible to contribute to an IRA?” I can answer that question for you if you give me a few details about you know, how you’re being paid.

Financial Strategy #3: Plan to Spend on Networking

12:47 Emily: Now, what’s the third third strategy?

12:49 Kate: The third strategy is to plan to spend money networking. We talk a lot about planning to pay our rent. We talk about planning to pay our car payment or our car insurance, but we don’t always talk about planning to spend money socially. And, no, I’m not talking about going and kicking it with the girls or the guys after work, but that can sometimes be a networking tool. But I’m talking about really digging in and you know, once a month, every couple of weeks, having that networking lunch. Who is somebody that you met at an orientation or somebody who your major professor introduced you to, or somebody who you happen to find out via a Google Scholar search has the same area of interest as you in research, but it’s across campus in a whole different department. Reach out, invite that person to lunch. You can go splits down the middle, you can pay, you can switch off and pay as you go, but plan to spend that money. Because the old adage is that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. But truly it’s what you know and who you know, you’ve got to have both pieces in there and that is so insanely true in academia. It’s what you know and who you know.

14:02 Emily: I think it’s really, really smart, as you’re bringing this up, just to acknowledge that first of all, networking is an important part of career development at every single stage. Never think that you’re too early on to start networking. You are a person worthy of knowing and you should introduce yourself to other people. So plan for it at every single stage of your career and just acknowledge in advance that you’re going to have opportunities come your way and you want to be able to say yes to them immediately without being concerned about where’s that money going to come from? You want to be able to accept a lunch invitation when you’re not really sure if you’re going to end up paying or the other person will, or you want to be able to accept taking a few hours drive to another institution to do a meeting. Anything like that, where you might end up being financially are responsible for, you don’t want to have to say no to that because you’re not prepared. So I really love the idea, and tell me what you think about this Kate, of having, so I’m really into targeted savings accounts or sinking funds, so having a sinking fund or target saving account that’s labeled networking and there’s enough money in there for whatever you think might come your way.

15:08 Kate: You know Emily, I was just thinking in my head, “Oh, I want to make sure that I talk about the budget sheet that I use.” Whether you call it budgeting or spending plan or targeted savings. The fact of the matter is you’ve got to have a plan for those dollars and cents and yes, having that emergency savings — I’m going to remind you, emergency savings comes first — but then secondary to that, what else do you need to have that money set aside for. On our budget sheets, I tell people all the time, I tell my students, I tell my clients, I remind co-counselors all the time — it’s not my money, it’s your money. So what is your plan for it? Where do you intend to spend it? And write it down. If I’m going to spend a $500 a month on entertainment, which I don’t do, but if I was going to spend $500 a month on entertainment, as long as my budget is balanced and I have the dollars and cents to do that, I can do it.

15:58 Kate: Now, when we’re talking about planned networking and we’re talking about spending money consciously to do this, I’m not talking 50 bucks a month. I’m talking maybe as little as $20. But like you said, Emily, maybe it’s a few hours drive to another institution. Or maybe we’re talking about a conference. It’s really big in our industry, and so we’ve got to take the time to find the money. Now it can be very difficult to do on small salaries so seeking out what funding is available through my department, what grant funding, what fellowship, what scholarship monies might be available. Ask. Even if you, graduated, you’re in your first position as an assistant professor or you’re a postdoc, don’t think that that precludes you from opportunities to get assistance to travel. Ask. Worst case scenario, the answer is no, we got nothing. Okay. At least you know, and then going forward you can put those dollars and cents away toward that. But I’m still going to say try and keep that $20 in your pocket so that if you get the opportunity to say, “Hey, let’s go grab a Coke” or “let’s go grab, you know, a quick bite to eat and talk this through,” you’ve got it. It’s not always easy to do, so please do not hesitate to ask a qualified professional for help. How do I put this budget together on these teeny tiny little pennies that I am paid? And there are resources available to help you do just that.

17:23 Emily: Absolutely.

Commercial

17:28 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Saving tips for larger networking events

18:38 Emily: One thing I just wanted to follow up on about the conference travel, because now we’re not talking about a $20 lunch, right? We’re talking about potentially thousands of dollars, between fees and travel and the lodging and all of that. So of course, totally want to underline, ask and ask and ask if there’s any money available from the sponsoring organization, from your department, from your university, from anywhere you get funding, outside scholarships you can apply for. There’s many different potential sources of funding for travel awards. That’s something we’ve covered on the podcast in the past. But I want to say that in some fields, the money is less prevalent, right? And so in some fields you may be able to say, “Oh, of course I’ll be able to find funding for that conference.” And maybe you can keep, you know, just a smaller amount of money available for your incidental expenses while you travel. But in some fields you may know, “well, I may get funding once or twice during my PhD, but really I should be attending a conference every year.” Then, it’s a scary thing, but you just need to acknowledge that that is going to come up at some point and start preparing for it.

Emily: Because the thing is, I think what happens with a lot of people with conference travel is that they end up just with a reaction to it. They act retrospectively instead of proactively about it. If you put a conference on a credit card and it’s $2,000, whatever, you’re gonna end up paying that over months or years and with interest and you may as well flip that around and pay it upfront into your savings over months and years and be gaining interest instead of losing interest. You’re going to end up paying for it slowly over time either way, if it has to come out of pocket and you can’t get it paid for, so just do it upfront instead of on the backend and you’ll come out much further ahead financially. I just hate it when I hear about students who have to forego these really wonderful conferences or networking opportunities because they can’t find the funding, they don’t have the money saved. And it can be a real blow to your career potentially. So it’s just something that’s worth building into your budget, as you were just talking about, early on, you know, from the beginning.

20:36 Kate: And let me, if you don’t mind Emily, I’d like to follow up on, on the comment you made with the credit card. Credit cards are amazing tools when used appropriately. We’re not going to use a hammer to put in a screw, we’re not going to use a credit card to finance everything. But if you know that you can utilize some points off that credit card and/or, emphasis on the and, you can pay that off, say for example, six months from now I will have this conference paid off rather than just making the minimum payment, but you can pay twice or three times the minimum payment, even if you can’t front load the conference because you found out about it last minute, or Oh my gosh, I never thought about it this way and I’m coming up on it. Don’t be afraid to use the credit card as a tool, but I just want you to be careful and I want you to be conscious and I don’t want you to think about, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ll carry a minimum balance for the next however long.” No, no, no. Go into it with the forethought to say, “all right, I’m going to pay this off in six to 10 months. This is how I’m going to do it. And at the same time, I’m going to be saving for next year’s conference.” Again, you are not walking this path alone. You have resources. Ask, ask, ask, ask, and you will get answers and you will find help to help you make these decisions and figure out how you’re going to use these dollars.

22:04 Emily: Absolutely. I feel I have to at this point put in a bid for my own services, which I do offer one-on-one money coaching. And so if you, one of the listening audience members, wants to work with me on these kinds of issues around budgeting or around paying off debt or investing for the future or whatever it might be, please contact me and I will be happy to, you know, have a short call with you to talk more about that. You can find more details about that in the show notes. And Kate, I don’t know if you offer individual services at this point or if you are, uh, you know, strictly in your academic role.

22:37 Kate: I do offer services. You can find, contact information for me and other professionals like me at afcpe.org and you can just search, find a counselor. I think it’s either find a financial counselor or find a financial professional in your area. I happen to be in Oklahoma, but there are many of us throughout the country who work specifically with students, graduate students, postdoc, early career, the broke, the wealthy, across the gamut. So we are available afcpe.org.

23:09 Emily: What I love about that AFCP database, and also if you wanted to search for a CFP, similarly, is that the professionals identify themselves by their areas of expertise or types of people that they prefer to work with. And so for example, for me, I’m not an AFC, but I specialize in graduate students, postdocs and early career PhDs. So probably anyone listening, your,within my area of specialty. But let’s say you had a different situation like you are in the military or your spouse is in the military, or you’re dealing with maybe an inheritance due to the death of a parent or you know, there are all these other special situations that might come up that maybe that’s your primary identification, not as a graduate student or postdoc, and maybe in some other area. That’s what I love about these databases that you can really search and find who is looking for…you are someone’s perfect client, right? And you can try to find that person through one of these databases. Thanks for adding that a resource, Kate, and that’ll be in the show notes as well.

How a AFC Deals With Financial Challenges

24:05 Emily: Okay. I think we’re ready to talk about your financial challenge that you have had recently due to your academic position. This will be very relatable to many people in the audience.

24:15 Kate: Okay, so let me lay it out really quick. Miscommunication is what this boils down to. Misunderstanding. Me, even as a financial professional, not asking the right question. Not full information being passed down the pipeline. So I wanted on the board, nobody is at fault here, but if somebody has to take it, it’s probably me. I didn’t ask the right questions, didn’t think about it the right way. But what happened is this: I have a nine month contract and I wanted to get paid over 12 months from the start, but because of when I did my onboarding paperwork, I couldn’t do it, I had to wait until the next spring. Well, the way I understood it was that when I did my 12 month pay, my pay would become effective July 1st, the new fiscal year of this year. Well, I knew that I was going to be out pay for about a month, but it turns out that that’s not what the actual situation was. Yes, they would input the information, but my 12 month pay would not actually start until my next contract started. My next contract starts September 1st, my first pay September 30th. So instead of one month without pay, I’m four months without pay. Ouch. Just to put it mildly.

25:42 Kate: Fortunately, because by nature I am a saver, I am a scrimper, I have very little fun. My husband is just like, “Can we go?” “No, I got to put the money away. No, we can’t. No, don’t ask me again.” I put money aside and my emergency fund will be empty come payday because I’m still pulling from savings with his retirement, his disability money to pay the bills. But come September, we’re back on the horse. And so yeah, the end of September. So I’m eking, I made it, I had enough money set aside. I had, I didn’t even realize it at the time, but with small changes, I had three to four months in the emergency fund. I’m always shooting for six. We had had a lot of fun and relaxation prior so I could have tightened the belt a little bit more. We only made a few small changes. This has been a hiccup for us. Not a, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh,” but again, another learning experience.

26:45 Kate: It is okay to make a financial mistake. I want that very, very clear right now. We are human. It is only money. Yes, you heard it from me. It is only money. You set a hundred dollar bill on the table. You get up and walk away. Forget the wind. It’s not going to get up and walk its feet. How do we use it? And so it’s the tool that we’re using, like the hammer or the screwdriver. And so if you make a mistake, you pick yourself back up, you carry on, you figure it out. What’s the mistake? You ask the questions of yourself, you figure out where you went wrong. You figure out where you need help going forward, and you take proactive steps to fix it. You’re going to be okay. We’re okay. I’m going to be rebuilding my emergency savings over the course of the next year, because that’s probably how long it’s going to take to get things back into the groove. But that’s okay. I now have a plan of action and I lived through it. My family lived through it. Nobody starved. This is a good thing.

27:47 Emily: Yeah. I think that this issue that you ran into, again, for the people inside academia, I mean, I hope it hasn’t happened to you, but you probably know someone this has happened to you. They didn’t, as you were saying, didn’t fully understand the contract that they were signing, didn’t fully understand the timeline that the other party was working on. And you end up without — in your case, it wasn’t specifically without summer funding, but that’s how it sort of laid out — but many people will end up without funding for a summer or a semester or something, at some point in their graduate degrees. Hopefully not as a postdoc, although I have known postdocs that that’s happened to, that they go a lapse and pay for some period of time. But this is exactly what an emergency fund is for, right? The primary way you calculate how large an emergency fund should be is if I lost my income for three to six months, how am I going to pay the bills in the meantime? And that is exactly the kind of emergency fund you had so you were able to sustain yourself and your family through that period. But it’s a super, super relatable problem. I’m really glad that you brought this up because hey, if it happens to you as a graduate student, that’s a mistake that Kate made and so you don’t have to feel bad about making that mistake.

29:01 Kate: Don’t feel bad at all!

29:04 Emily: People with PhDs in personal financial planning can make this kind of mistake too. So don’t feel bad about it. But the point is just to the greatest extent possible to prepare in advance for whatever comes your way. It might not be specifically this kind of lapse in income, but at some point you may have a lapse in income for a variety of different reasons. It’s a great reason to have an emergency fund. All kinds of other emergencies might occur and other great reason to have an emergency fund. As we were saying earlier, use that mindset of putting away even the small amounts of money. Start snowballing that account bigger and bigger and bigger, and over time it’ll eventually become a full-fledged emergency fund or whatever it is that you’re working on. Thank you for sharing that story, Kate.

29:44 Kate: Absolutely. And then when you do use it, like I’m in my position, I’m empty or I will be empty in about three days. Start over. And if that means that I’m starting small and I will, because my last paycheck when I was really focusing on building it, I was getting paid over nine months. Now I’m getting paid over 12 months, so my paycheck is going to be smaller. So my contribution to savings is going to be smaller. But that doesn’t mean that I give up. That doesn’t mean that I look at that and say “Oh, I’m never going to make it.” No, I am going to make it. Is there something I can cut out? Like, I don’t need to go downstairs to grab something to eat everyday. I can pack that sandwich, or you know, small things like that. The things that we hear, no matter where we go, here are easy ways to trim your budget. They are true. Not all are applicable, don’t get me wrong, but if it’s a $1.50 for the soda at the vending machine and you’ve got a cold Coke at home, grab it from home, stick it in your backpack and off to work you go. Small, teeny tiny changes will add up. That’s not just in contributions to savings, but also in decreases to your budget. The small make a difference, because gosh darn those pennies add up.

30:54 Emily: Absolutely. One last point that I wanted to make about this story and what you were just saying, is that if you do end up choosing to make some sacrifices to your lifestyle to fund a savings goal. For example, you’re needing to rebuild your emergency savings, it’s going to take a while. You’re going to have to do a few sacrifices in the meantime. Don’t think that that’s going to be forever. Don’t think that just because you have to give up your weekly lunch out, or whatever it is that you are in the meantime, it’s a temporary thing that you need to do to reach this goal. Once you have reached the goal, you can reevaluate. Is that something that I want to continue in that habit that I’ve created? Or is it time to add that spending back in now that I have a little bit more financial security. But don’t have the mindset that just because you make the cut for some period of time, it has to be forever. Things will be different in a few months or a few years and you can reevaluate at that point.

31:47 Kate: And also don’t be afraid to say, I can’t afford to do it this month. It is absolutely empowering to say I can’t afford to do it this month. Maybe that means that you don’t participate. Okay. But if you are honest with yourself and have the courage to say, I can’t afford it, I guarantee you the person you’re talking to is going to understand, because they have been there or maybe they’re there, but they’re hiding behind a credit card or they’re hiding behind borrowed funds. Listen, people, it happens and it happens all the time. So it is okay to say I can’t afford it. And yes, I know that point number three was the plan to spend money networking. Well, plan to bring a Coke and a sandwich from home and go meet on the bench. Go meet at the union and people watch. Go for a walk in network. You don’t have to have $20 every time if it’s not going to work. If it’s not in your budget, it’s not in your budget. But don’t think that the money needs to stand in the way of that networking.

32:48 Emily: Yes, absolutely.

How to Contact Dr. Kate Mielitz

32:49 Emily: Well Kate, this has just been a wonderful interview and I’m so glad to have met you and to be able to introduce my audience to you and you know, let them know a little bit more about what an AFC is and you know, what do you guys do? And so thank you so much for joining me today.

33:03 Kate: Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute thrill to be on today, Emily. I really appreciate it.

33:08 Emily: And where can people find you if they want to follow up about something?

33:11 Kate: People can find me on Twitter, @KateMielitz, and I have a sneaking suspicion Emily that you’ll put that in the comments. You can also find me on Instagram, @KSMielitz , or if you just Google my name Kate Mielitz and Oklahoma State University, it’ll pop right up and give you my university contact information as well.

33:35 Emily: Beautiful, thank you so much.

33:36 Kate: Thank you.

Outtro

33:38 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

How to Combat the Negative Financial Attitudes We Learned in Academia and in Childhood

January 20, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Cortnie Baity, a doctoral candidate in Human Development and Family Sciences at Florida State University and licensed marriage and family therapist intern. Cortnie’s dissertation is on how your upbringing influences your financial attitudes and behaviors later in life and how to effect better financial outcomes, specifically for African American families. Cortnie shares a framework from the literature of four money belief systems, three of which significantly correlate with income and net worth and two of which can become pathological. We discuss the financial messages PhDs absorb from academia and how those might influence financial attitudes and behavior. We conclude with Cortnie’s advice for PhDs who want to combat financial attitudes that don’t serve them well.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Cortnie: I would suggest early career PhDs to take a financial attitude questionnaire and to gain additional insight to see what financial attitudes you resonate with the most and how they could be possibly subconsciously guiding on your financial behaviors and influencing your overall financial well-being.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five, episode three and today my expert guest is Cortnie Baity, a doctoral candidate in human development and family sciences at Florida State University and licensed marriage and family therapist intern. Cortnie’s dissertation is on how your upbringing influences your financial attitudes and behaviors later in life, and how to bring about better financial outcomes, specifically for African American families. We discuss how financial attitudes form and how they translate into behavior. Cortnie shares a framework from the literature of four money belief systems, two of which can become pathological. We discussed the financial messages PhDs absorbed from academia and how those might influence financial attitudes and behavior and what PhDs can do to combat financial attitudes that don’t serve them well. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Cortnie Baity.

Will Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:25 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Cortnie Baity, who is a doctoral student, and she specifically has an interest in financial attitudes and how they develop. This is such a relevant subject for us. I’m so delighted that Cortnie reached out to me and that we’ve been corresponding and she agreed to come on the podcast. So Courtnie, will you please introduce yourself?

01:47 Cortnie: Hello, Dr. Roberts and hello listening audience. Again, my name is Cortnie Baity. I am a current doctoral candidate in the human development and family sciences PhD program. I am located at Florida State University. I earned my masters of science degree from the couple and family therapy program at the University of Kentucky, where I initially became interested in personal finances. Just a little bit of background about my areas of research, it includes family finances, personal finances, socialization processes, African American families, and minority mental and physical health disparities. The overall goal of my research program is to minimize any inqualities in mental and physical health, experienced by black families. In the way that I have chosen to go about intervening on health for black families is looking at how personal finances influences or undergirds some of those health disparities that we might be noticing in the literature.

02:52 Emily: That is so interesting. So exciting. Really, really glad that you’re working in that area. Can describe for us for just a couple of minutes, the dissertation that you’re working on, your specific research?

03:04 Cortnie: Yes. So my dissertation studies financial socialization in black American families, and its implications on financial wellbeing for young black adults. My primary hypotheses is that black young black adults experience asset and resource inqualities, in part because they receive minimal or possibly counterproductive training about finances. My goal with my dissertation is to do three things: document diverse types of family, financial socialization experienced by black young adults, explore the consequences of types of family, financial socialization for financial literacy and financial wellbeing, and then lastly, consider gender variation experienced in family and financial socialization and how it may have undesired effects on financial literacy and financial wellbeing. My overall hope for this study is to, in this study and in following research, will be to produce clinical strategies for marriage and family therapists like myself to help black clients improve financial management, which can help reduce asset and resource inequalities among black families. Personal finance has been demonstrated in the literature to be connected to mental and health outcomes, especially unfavorable mental and physical health outcomes. So I’ve chosen to focus my research on personal finance interventions to improve black health overall.

What is Financial Socialization?

04:40 Emily: Yeah, I’m sure the listeners know that this is a subject that I’m intensely interested in — how to improve financial outcomes among our population, the PhD population. And this is so applicable. It’s a great subject for me to learn about as well. You’re using the term family financial socialization. Can you explain that? Can you define that a little bit more? What plays into that?

05:03 Cortnie: Yes. If we think about socialization broadly, there’s a communication component, so it’s the sending and receiving of a social message, but it also includes the implementation and application of that message into the individual’s life. If we put that into context of personal finance, we’re looking at how families socialize their members surrounding personal finances. That includes how the messages and beliefs surrounding personal finances, including budgeting, world perspectives about money, and the economy and that influences an individual’s financial attitudes. There’s also a tie between financial attitudes or your perspective of finances and how that influences your financial behaviors. And then of course your financial behaviors feed into your overall financial well-being.

06:03 Emily: Yeah. So there’s a whole chain there and this is something that is being passed from parents and other family members to children, and it’s being propagated within families, as well as within society more largely. Can you give some concrete examples of maybe those communications or demonstrated behaviors?

06:23 Cortnie: Sure. One concrete example of a family financial socialization that you may witness in families is, for instance, when families, parents will distribute out an allowance to a child, and they say, “Hey, you know, you have this amount of money once it’s gone, if you want to buy things for your hobbies or if you want to buy a video game, that money is gone.” And so it’s socializing the child surrounding finances in the family social context. Some type of message is being transmitted over to that child. The thought behind family financial socialization is that the child not only hears that message from the receiver, but they start to internalize that message and start to make decisions about their environment around them, based on the message from the receiver. And in that case, whether the child internalize the message to save the money and let it stretch a little bit. So don’t kinda spend all your money on the most expensive video game because you know that if you want to go to the movies the next weekend with your friends as well, you won’t have anymore financial means until the next time that you receive an allowance. So that will be one concrete example.

07:47 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that. That’s definitely an example of an intentional or an overt way that parents would communicate around finances to their children. I don’t know about you, but the family that I grew up in, the signals around finances were implicit. We did not talk very openly about this subject, but I learned a lot from my parents by example. So can you give another example of how that kind of communication would work?

08:11 Cortnie: Oh yes, absolutely. Gudmunson and Danes has a family financial socialization theory and they support the idea that the majority of family financial socialization happens through modeling or observation. So one implicit way that we learn about money is when our parents will take us to the bank with them. There is some type of message that is being sent to us that there are outside institutions that help us to manage our money. That would be one concrete example of family financial socialization. You’re with your parent, it’s in the family social context is not really being spoken we’re at the bank because I need them to help me manage my money, but it’s that kind of unspoken undertone. It’s an institution It’s associated with money. I see mom and dad go here. So those kind of implied messages are occurring in that kind of way.

09:16 Emily: It’s a really, really interesting example. It just reminds me of, well first of all there’s a large unbanked population within the United States, right? So there’s all kinds of children who are not getting that particular kind of message that maybe some other children are. Maybe the actual interaction the parent is having with the teller or the manager could be positive, could be negative. All kinds of differences there. And it’s actually making me think now. So I have two very young children. The older one is maybe on the cusp of being able to learn some money lessons if we were to overtly teach something. But I’m just thinking about how much financial stuff that I do that it just takes place digitally online. It wouldn’t necessarily be seen very easily by my children if I just choose to not do that stuff in front of them. So yeah, I don’t know. Going into the new generation, we might have to have different strategies around how to do the socialization, given the differences.

10:09 Cortnie: Very true, very true.

The Four Financial Attitudes

10:11 Emily: Okay. So that’s about how parents and families are communicating some lessons around finances, implicitly or explicitly. How the children are receiving those attitudes. Can you speak a little bit more about the connection between what you’re learning in your family and the attitudes and so forth that you develop and then how that translates to behavior? What the connection is between those two.

10:33 Cortnie: Personal finance psychology and marriage and family therapist scholars, Klontz and Britt have produced some studies that look at how financial attitudes developed and they suggest that trans-generational personal finance messages, typically learned in childhood, subconsciously influences the development of financial values and beliefs. And collectively these financial values and beliefs are referred to as financial attitudes. So Klontz and Britts specifically have come up with four distinct financial attitudes. One is money avoidance, money worship, money status and also money vigilance. To have these categories are important because some of them suggest a pathologic view of money that can have a negative impact on your financial behaviors in your overall financial well-being.

11:35 Emily: I love to hear a framework. This is great. Can you say a couple of words about what each of those four categories are so people can kind of say, “Oh, I definitely see myself here or there.”

Money Avoidance

11:45 Cortnie: Reiterating when I say a financial attitudes are important because certain attitudes for example, like money avoidance and money worship, have been demonstrated to suggest pathological views of money. Those who resonate with money avoidance attitudes may tend to believe that money is bad or that you don’t deserve money, and for people with this personality, money can typically evoke feelings of fear, anxiety, or disgust even. This is a financial attitude that is common among low income, younger, and single individuals because they typically have something going on with them where money is evoking these anxiety or stressor indicators for them. It has been demonstrated that typically those who are money avoidant produce, financial outcomes like financial well-being that are not as high as individuals who possibly resonate more with other types of financial attitudes.

12:58 Emily: Yeah, I definitely can see that. I mean, we can sort of imagine very easily that prototype person who is money avoidant. There’s probably, I don’t know if they’d be listening to the podcast, but there’s certainly potentially some of those within academia, within graduate students. Maybe not because of how they were raised, but then the environment that they’ve been put in, you know, since getting into training. We’ll talk more about that a bit later, but go through these other three categories please.

Money Worship

13:23 Cortnie: Money worship, more so those types of individuals, you would see indicators of that individual where they’re very central to their career. They’re very central to building wealth and things like that. It can be suggestively pathological. In the Klontz Money Scripts inventory, there is a cutoff score for what is kind of considered as like a clinical concern, a clinical cutoff score. If you go beyond that threshold, you will be considered possibly you need to look into it being an actual issue. Even if you resonate with, and I do want to say it is possible for you to resonate with several categories of financial attitudes. For a lot of people it kind of depends on the context. Like we talked about, being a PhD student. But going back to what I was saying with the, clinical cutoff score, there essentially are four different types of financial attitudes and worship would be another example of that. There’s literature that goes through the exact representations of the four financial attitudes and Klontz and Britt will be the scholars to kind of refer to that information in further detail.

15:05 Emily: Yeah, I would love it if you could send me a link to put in the show notes for that. Yeah. So I think money worship is another one where we can again, sort of maybe imagine a prototype for that. And I think that I, obviously I don’t know about this clinically for myself, but I have been very careful, mentally to not, because I think I have maybe some tendencies where I could fall into that category. Maybe not even tendencies, but just based on what I do, right? I talk a lot about money. I’m very careful to not allow myself to fall into that category.

Money Status and Money Vigilance

15:33 Emily: Can you remind me what the final two were and maybe give some examples? These were maybe more the non pathological categories.

15:41 Cortnie: Money status, it more so resonates with viewing money as a social status for yourself. And then also money vigilance is being careful with money. Those are two that are not as suggestive to pathological views of money.

16:02 Emily: Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that clarification. I’m seeing myself maybe in the vigilance category, for sure, and I hope the audience is starting to get an idea of where they might fall and what possible interventions might be helpful depending on where they are.

Commercial

16:21 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

How Financial Attitudes Can Affect Your Finances

17:25 Emily: Can you give maybe like a concrete example of how let’s say, a money avoidant person, a behavior that might result from that attitude?

17:33 Cortnie: I think that it kind of blends into our follow-up question of how does academia, how does being a graduate student, how does that influence certain financial attitudes. As we all know, being a graduate student is very expensive, yet graduate students often have very little income, unless you’re in a situation where you do have enough fellowships and scholarship funding to carry you throughout your entire program. Also, because graduate students are in the process of becoming experts in their field, they may feel like they do not deserve to get paid very much. Those kinds of experiences typically evoke fear and anxiety surrounding money, which could be suggestive that graduate students tend to have a money avoidant financial attitude. Of course, there are clinical cutoffs for that, as we discussed before, but some of those common experiences and feelings of being a graduate student, surrounding money, may lead to being category categorized as money avoidant.

18:52 Emily: Yeah, I definitely want to talk about for this for another moment, because I think this is going to be such a common experience for many people in our audience. Either that they’re currently in this space, they are currently a graduate student and experiencing some of these forces and attitudes or maybe that is in their past and it’s still something they’re working on because they still have some residual effect, mentally, from that time. I do think there are pervasive messages within academia that your passion should sustain you. You should not care how much money you’re making right now or in the future because you just love your work so much, none of the rest of that matters. It really plays into a larger attitude within academia. And I’m not blaming any person or institution. This is just like a mother culture kind of thing around “Well, you should just go ahead and put your life on hold while you’re in training. Nothing else matters aside from your training. Put your money on hold, put your relationships on hold. Other things in your personal life, your health, mental health, all that stuff is secondary to the all consuming goal of your research getting to a certain level, finishing your dissertation, whatever it is. Super, super unhealthy. Super, super unsustainable. I mean, maybe you can do that for a few months or a year, but for the five, ten, more years you might be in training it’s too tall of an order. And yet this is still the message that we’re all kind of marinating in within academia. Right? And so what I think I’m hearing from you is that these messages, maybe it’s not the family that we grew up in, right? That has a certain influence on us. But then our academic family is also having an influence. Does that make sense? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

20:37 Cortnie: That definitely makes sense because essentially what family financial socialization theory suggests is that our founding beliefs and values surrounding money typically come from the family system because that’s typically our first opportunity to learn in a social context. As you become 18 and you move away from home and you have more interactions with other socialization agents, like being in an academic setting, being around peers, being in a romantic relationship, that influences your personal finances as well, or how you’re being socialized around personal finances as well. It’s certainly a undertone, kind of an unspoken thing in academia that the main goal is to focus on getting your program or research to a certain level, getting through the program and graduating and the personal finance piece is often not really addressed very much, or the stressors that are associated with finances are typically not addressed unless you actually go directly to a personal finance specialist on campus that can help you to continue to fund your program. And not just your program, but your life outside of that. A lot of graduate students have full blown families. They’re married, they have mortgages and all kinds of things like that. So yes, academia can definitely put some stressors on your personal finances and your financial beliefs and kind of make you question “Should I be money avoidant because it gives me so much anxiety or possibly having the opposite effect of making you so money vigilant to the fact that you kind of become OCD about just budgeting down to the dime every single semester so that you can have all your expenses covered.

22:43 Emily: Yeah I think there’s the component of what we sort of implicitly absorb in academia about work being the primary thing. But then there’s what you were just saying, the actual real life in your face stressors – the stressors associated with being academia, not being paid enough for where you’re living, having to pay tuition fees, the budgeting issues. These are all not just in your mind, these are real problems that are happening to students. And I think what I’d also love you to comment about is the influence that these experiences and hearing these messages can have on a young adult, right? We’re just talking about okay, the family is the first place where we start to form these attitudes. But I would imagine that a graduate student in their 20,s maybe straight through college and to graduate school is going to have a different set of experiences than someone who starts later on after working. Maybe they are married, maybe they’ve had just more time to build up what their beliefs are and their attitudes around their own finances. Can you comment about that a little bit?

23:46 Cortnie: So I’m not speaking from my empirical research theoretical standpoint. This is just my own personal perspective. But my belief is that when young adults go straight through graduate school and they don’t really get that real world application personal finance management, they kind of start at a deficit when it comes to personal finances as an early career PhD, or if you’re graduating fresh out of a master’s program or early career master’s degree recipient. You don’t have those opportunities to really grapple and absorb what it means to budget with an income and a salary, especially not at the level that you will be earning outside of a graduate program. Then also maybe not being privy to the realities of the consequences of not having enough personal finance related literacy. Not knowing about how credit works, how student loans may impact credit, how that may later impact your purchasing power when it comes to purchasing a new home or a car. And then of course, it has implications on your romantic relationship. Having to have not so easy conversations with your partner that “Hey, you know, when it comes to my personal finances, I’m kind of behind the curve”, especially if you have a partner who did not take the graduate school route, who did have opportunities to kind of build up their financial literacy through work experiences and budgeting that adults do who do not decide to go straight through graduate school. So yes, absolutely, going to graduate school for us to sit significant amount of years, not participating in the workforce as like a traditional adult would so to speak, definitely can leave a graduate school student at a little bit of a deficit when it comes to managing their personal finances. Unless you’re a business major, typically you do not get that background working knowledge about personal finance management.

How to Work with the Money Attitudes You Have

26:11 Emily: Yeah. This is exactly the space that I’m trying to step into. On that subject, once a person recognizes, “okay, academia is feeding me some toxic messages, it’s giving me all these stressors,” what do you do with that? How is it that you can change financial attitudes. Or maybe it’s from the upbringing as well. Maybe you recognize, “okay, my family was not super healthy around this, can I change my own way I approach these things?” How do you actually do that?

26:39 Cortnie: Me, personally, as I’ve gone throughout my graduate school education, I have become more immersed in the subject area of personal finances, becoming more aware of my own financial attitudes and financial behaviors that do not serve me well, and I go by the saying of try to practice what I preach in my clinical practice. And as a therapist, I suggest to all my clients, the first step of changing an unwanted behavior is to acknowledge that it’s problematic and explore its origins. If you recognize that you’re just taking out way too many loans, it’s just not feeling right to you, kind of explore the fact you’re going against what one of your financial values or beliefs are, which is to keep your loans to a minimum, and explore where the origin of the motivation to do that behavior is coming from. Once you have acknowledged that the behavior is problematic, explored its origins, from there I will suggest seeking out resources to support the desired behavior change. Personally what I did for myself is one, I made personal finances, I was very intentional incorporating that in my area of research. And also, my niche is actually surrounding personal finances, mental health, physical health and family relationships. And so it kind of forced me to get immersed in the personal financial literature, become more financially literate in ways that were supportive of my career, but also in my personal life. So I actually did the accredited financial counseling education requirement through Texas Tech University. I did that program back in this past spring and I learned a wealth about personal finances that not only legitimized myself as a marriage and family therapist, that her niche would be personal finances, but also my research. I will say another huge impact that it had was application into my own personal finances. Recognizing that there’s an issue with the financial attitude or the behaviors that you have become accustomed to in graduate school, exploring what the origins are, like why did you even start doing these behaviors, and then seeking out resources, and there’s a wide variety of ways of doing that, but just becoming more knowledgeable about healthy money management.

29:44 Emily: I can definitely see a parallel in myself to what you’re saying. I didn’t necessarily know that what I was trying to do was changing my attitude so that my behaviors would follow. But I can see, from my upbringing, I grew up with a one one parent who was like a spender and one who was like a saver, and sort of absorbed the spender mindset from one of my parents. And that was something when I finally had my own paycheck coming in, I realized my small stipend cannot support the spender inclinations that I had based on my upbringing. And so that was something that I had to, as you were just saying, recognize, “okay, this is going to put me at some dissonance here.” This desired behavior and the financial realities, I realize, “Okay, well that I learned that from my parent. That doesn’t have to be what I do. That’s just what my parent behaves that way, I can be different.” And as you just said, seeking out more and more resources and support around the positive behavior that I wanted to affect, which was not spending a lot of money whenever I wantet to. And so the resources that I went to at that time were personal finance books, the personal finance blogosphere, which now has morphed into podcasts and blogs and Reddit and all these other wonderful places where you can go for resources. So I really sort of started to see into the lives of people who I could recognize as models of positive financial behaviors and start to, um, enact what they were doing in my own life. And if I would be so bold, I will say that the Personal Finance or PhDs community is one of these places where you can learn some of these positve behaviors, from me and from the guests who I interview and from the articles I have on the site and there’s lots of ways you can get involved. In fact, please, if you’re not yet on my mailing list, get on my mailing list because I’ll be sending this great content your way every week.

31:35 Emily: Cortnie, thanks so much for pointing that out. I think we’re coming to the end of the interview here. If someone wants to follow up with you, maybe they have a question about something you’ve said today or maybe they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need Cortnie in my life. I need more Cortnie”, how can they get in touch with you?

31:51 Cortnie: For those listeners out there who are interested, I’m always happy to share whatever information I have and chat with you. So, um, I can be best contacted at my email. It’s csb11d@my.fsu.edu. I am also listed on the Psychology Today website as a psychology today verified marriage and family therapist intern. You can look their website up and then as we’ve discussed previous to actually starting the interview, you’ll leave the actual website in the notes. Then also the agency that I’m currently contracted it as a marriage and family therapist intern, Better Living Solutions in Tallahassee, Florida, and we’ll also leave information for their direct website. Those are two additional mediums to gain contact with me.

32:57 Emily: Yeah, it’s so excellent. All that information will be in the show notes as Cortnie just said.

Final Words of Advice

33:00 Emily: So last question here, Cortnie, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

33:07 Cortnie: In the same spirit of the conversation we’ve been having, I would suggest early career PhDs to take a financial attitude questionnaire — one example is the Klontz money script inventory — and to gain additional insight. If you have some inklings but you’re not exactly sure if you’re at that clinical cutoff for certain financial attitudes, to see what financial attitudes you resonate with the most and how they could be possibly subconsciously guiding on your financial behaviors and influencing your overall financial well-being.

33:47 Emily: Perfect. And can we add that link to the show notes as well?

33:49 Cortnie: Absolutely.

33:50 Emily: All right. Perfect. Oh, Cortnie, this is such a wonderful interview. Thank you so much for providing your expertise on this subject.

33:56 Cortnie: Thank you so much for having me Dr. Roberts, I enjoyed talking with you.

Outtro

34:01 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Choose a PhD Program That Will Support Your Personal and Professional Development

January 13, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

This episode comprises seven audio clips from PhDs and PhD students who are advocates for PhD students’ professional and personal development. They each answer the prompt: “What aspects of a PhD program – beyond academics and research – should a prospective graduate student consider when deciding among offers of admission and why? How should they investigate and evaluate the strength of a program in this area?” The contributors are Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finance for PhDs on finances, Mr. Kevin Bird on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Emily Myers on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Jen Polk of Beyond the Professoriate on career development, Dr. Katy Peplin of Thrive PhD on mental health, Ms. Susanna Harris of PhD Balance on mental health, and Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel on work-life balance. Please share this episode with all the prospective PhD students in your life!

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Find the contributors on Twitter:
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list
Finance: Calculate the Living Wage
Finance: How to Read Your PhD Program Offer Letter
Finance: Additional Financial Factors to Consider Before Accepting an Offer of Admission
Unionization and Advocacy: Find out more about unions in Washington and California
Career Development: Beyond the Professoriate
Mental Health: Thrive PhD
Mental Health: PhD Balance
Work-Life Balance: More from Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel

Introduction

00:05 Emily R.: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five, episode two and today I have a very special episode for you. I have invited six other PhD advocates to contribute their voices to this episode and you’ll hear from myself and each one of them in turn. The questions I’ve asked each of these contributors to answer are: what aspect of a PhD program, beyond academics and research should a prospective graduate student consider when deciding among offers of admission, and why? How should they investigate and evaluate the strength of a program in this area?

00:45 Emily R.: If you’ve already matriculated into or completed a PhD program, you probably appreciate what an important topic this is. Will you take a minute to please share this episode with prospective PhD students in your sphere of influence? Please tweet your thoughts on the episode using the hashtag #PhDfactors. In this episode, we’re going to hear from me, Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finance for PhDs on finances, Mr. Kevin Byrd on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Emily Myers on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Jen Polk of beyond the professoriate on career development, Dr. Katie Pepin of thrive PhD on mental health, Ms. Susanna Harris of PhD balance on mental health and Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel on work life balance. Without further ado, let’s hear from our contributors.

Finances with Dr. Emily Roberts

01:43 Emily R.: Naturally, my contribution to this episode revolves around your finances, specifically how to evaluate whether you will be sufficiently supported by the stipend or salary provided by the program. You may or may not end up using this factor when you choose your PhD program, but either way you should go into graduate school well aware of the financial realities. When I was applying to PhD programs, I didn’t pay much attention to the stipends in the offer letters. I naively trusted that every program I was accepted to would support me financially to a reasonable degree. The PhD program I picked based on only the research opportunities and location actually did pay a decent stipend, but that was blind luck on my part. I know now that graduate students often do experience a great degree of financial stress and ill effects. Approximately 50% of PhD students take out student loans, prior to graduation and many also accumulate credit card and other types of consumer debt. Some PhD students qualify for snap benefits and a few experience food insecurity. Think about the difference it would make to your mental health alone to attend a graduate program with a stipend that allows for a comfortable standard of living versus a program where you have to pinch every penny, side hustle like mad, and still be in the red every month. Do you think you will be able to perform well academically if you’re experiencing chronic financial stress?

03:08 Emily R.: There are long-term financial effects to think about as well. If you currently have student loans, will your stipend allow you to start to repay them? If they are un-subsidized, they will accrue interest all through your graduate school deferment period and you’ll have an even larger balance to tackle post-PhD. What if you were able to start investing with your stipend? If you’ve never played around with a compound interest calculator, pause this episode and spend a few minutes doing so now. With reasonable assumptions, investing $250 per month throughout only five years of graduate school can turn into nearly $1 million in your retirement years. That’s $1 million of wealth in retirement that would not exist if you accepted a stipend that didn’t afford you that ability to save.

03:56 Emily R.: Are you sufficiently motivated to pay attention to the stipends in your offer letters? Good. I’m going to tell you how to evaluate the single most important factor in your funding package. The number that I want you to find in each of your offer letters is your stipend or salary net of fees. Some of your offer letters might state this number clearly and some might obfuscate it. To compare apples to apples across all your offers, you need to know how much money is actually going to end up in your bank account after your tuition, insurance premiums, and all fees have been paid. If your offer letter doesn’t make it clear to you what financial obligations you will have to pay to the university from your stipend, it’s worth a follow-up email to clarify.

04:39 Emily R.: Next, we need to put this net stipend number in the context of the local cost of living for the university. I like to use the MIT living wage database for this. The living wage is basically the amount of money it takes to pay for basic living expenses like housing and food in that local area. It doesn’t include discretionary expenses like travel or putting money toward financial goals. Go to livingwage.mit.edu and click on the state and county of the university you’re considering scroll until you see the amount of money that constitutes a living wage, including income taxes for a single person. If you have a child, or someone else who depends on your income, you may need to scan over to the amounts for larger family sizes. Take the living wage number you found and compare it to the stipend after all education related expenses have been paid. Ideally, your stipend will be higher than the local living wage. Personally, I felt I was able to live comfortably during grad school and save a good amount of money and my stipend was about one third higher than the local living wage. The number that represents your stipend, net of fees divided by the local living wage is the number that you can compare across all of your offer letters.

05:54 Emily R.: Now, what should you do with this information? My advice, which you can take or leave, is to eliminate from consideration all of the PhD programs that will pay you less than the local living wage. If you choose to go to a program that pays you poorly, steel yourself for the likelihood that you will take out student loans or consumer debt during your PhD or have to devote a lot of time to side hustling. You may decide that this is worthwhile, but at least now you’ll go in with your eyes open. If you have two or more offers that are above the local living wage, if you like, you can continue to factor in financial considerations as you make your decision. In fact, I’ve made a list of a dozen additional factors you should evaluate before committing to a PhD program. The stipend divided by the local living wage actually just scratches the surface. You can download the PDF of the full list by going to pfforphds.com/offerletter and signing up for my mailing list.

Further reading: 10 Ways to Combat Financial Fragility Beyond Grad School

Unionization and Advocacy with Mr. Kevin Bird

07:00 Kevin: Hi, my name is Kevin Byrd. I’m a PhD candidate in the department of horticulture at Michigan State University and I’m also the current president of the graduate employees union in Michigan State and I’ll be covering how and why to take graduate unions into account for your graduate school decision. Graduate unions are important to consider because I think they’re central to a safe, secure, and equitable experience in graduate school. If you have a graduate union, it means there’s a system in place to combat harassment, discrimination, overwork, and other workplace mistreatments, independent from these university institutions. It also means there’s more power to pushing universities to provide living wages, comprehensive health insurance to all graduate assistants and to keep university fees low. When we were looking at other universities at Michigan State for our last contract campaign, we found a pretty stark pattern that the highest stipends in terms of cost of living were held by unionize universities and the lowest by non-unionized. In fact the only universities that had stipends less than half the cost of living were non-unionized universities.

08:03 Kevin: Additionally, through collective bargaining, there is something that holds institutions to their word and maintains benefits and services graduate assistants are entitled to receive. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, there was a moment when graduate assistants lost their health insurance with two days notice. Without a binding collective bargaining agreement, these students were largely left powerless to get back the benefits they were promised upon signing. Meanwhile, at Michigan State after several contract campaigns, we have some of the most comprehensive health care on campus with low deductibles and low co-pays, even after the university tried to reduce those benefits in the last contract cycle. It’s this sort of stability and progress that unions help maintain and build upon year after year. Hopefully the benefits of unions are at least partially clear right now and we can move on to how to evaluate unions at universities that you’re looking at.

08:52 Kevin: One of the first things to look at is whether the university is public, private, public universities are governed by state labor law, while private universities are governed by federal labor law. Given the latest ruling by the national labor review board, most private university unions are fighting for a struggle to be recognized by universities, whereas many state labor laws allow for graduate students to be unionized. Knowing whether university is public or private is one of the easiest ways to figure out if there is an established union or if there is a union currently fighting for recognition. Right now at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Loyola, all private universities, there are unions but they are not officially recognized by the university and they have not been able to participate in collective bargaining.

09:33 Kevin: The next move would be some internet sleuthing to look at the website of the union at the university you’re looking at first see if they have their last collective bargaining agreement posted. This would tell you the benefits that graduate assistants currently have with the university, especially important things like the minimum stipend the university can pay you, the pay increases every year, and the current health insurance plan the graduate students currently enjoy.

09:54 Kevin: Next, would be the current campaigns the union’s currently working on. What sort of things need to be addressed in the university? What’s the union doing to address them? And what does progress look like over the last few years? All of these things will help you get a landscape of what issues are facing a campus and how a union is working to address them and how successful they’ve been in the past. Additionally, you can look at media presence to see how the news covered the last bargaining cycle that a union undertook. Did they have to shut down streets with a march? Did the hold rallies? What sort of actions were they able to take that eventually led to the progress that they got in their latest contract? These things in particular can tell you how well organized a union is and how they can use their power to make changes on progress for graduate assistance.

10:34 Kevin: You can also look for other benefits that unions provide to their members. At Michigan State, we have something called the solidarity grant where members can apply to the union in times of financial need and receive a couple of hundred dollars or a thousand dollars to address major crises that have occurred in their life, from a flat tire to burst pipes. One final thing to consider is whether the university website talks about the union on it. This could be an indication of labor relations between the union and the university. It’s probably best to be at a university that acknowledges and at least recognizes the union and works to distribute information about contract benefits to prospective and current students.

11:07 Kevin: All these things considered, I would personally recommend prioritizing universities with strong unions in your decision. A graduate degree can take many years and the political and economic landscape can change rapidly. An established union is capable of increasing and maintaining current benefits, while also fighting off rash decisions by university administrations. If you’re committing to live somewhere for five years and you’re embarking on an ambitious academic project, it’s good to have someone on your side fighting for your benefits and maintaining a quality of life that you deserve while you’re working on this degree. While these conditions may exist anywhere, I think they’re much more likely to occur in universities with strong graduate unions.

Unionization and Advocacy with Dr. Emily Myers

11:50 Emily M.: Hi, my name is Dr. Emily Myers. I, very recently, as of last week, have a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Washington, here in Seattle. I am also an executive board member with UAW 4121, which is the union that represents about 6,000 postdocs and academic student employees, like teaching and research assistants, here at the University of Washington. I am going to give some insights into what I wish I had known when I was looking for a PhD program, and how important unions can be for your graduate student experience beyond stipends and student fees, which unions have also won major victories for graduate students.

12:31 Emily M.: So I chose my program for my science interests and because I loved Seattle, but I really didn’t have the depth of knowledge about how institutions work that I do now that I’m on the other side of my PhD. I was fortunate that I chose a university where the graduate students had been unionized and had been building power since 2001 and we had stronger workplace protections than most other schools, because academia is a strict hierarchy, with power dynamics that do not favor trainees, like grad students. In tandem with these power structures are institutional structures, where harassment and discrimination are widespread. In fact, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine put out a report last year showing that women in science face rates of harassment second only to the military, and that this was for white women, and so fails to capture any sort of intersecting identities. And it’s important to understand that harassment and discrimination are about power, and who has power, and who maintains access to that power. Unions are a fundamental way to change power structures, through bottom up grassroots organizing, and gives graduate students and other trainees more of a voice in their workplace. As union members, we have access to third party neutral arbitration, which is the only scenario where the university does not have final control over the outcome of a harassment claim. This is a huge step in rebalancing power and that’s one of the top things that grad students at Harvard are on strike over and are fighting for right now.

14:07 Emily M.: In addition, unions can be a phenomenal source of community in graduate school, because graduate school can be extremely isolating. And so finding folks outside of your discipline is huge and the unions can also offer resources that are not dependent on university approval, which can be critical for international students on visas. And I think that enthusiasm and recognition for the need to change these power structures is reflected in how we are seeing a huge spike in graduate students and postdocs forming unions across the country at all kinds of schools.

14:43 Emily M.: So to give an example of this, towards the end of my time as a PhD student, I made a complaint about a professor in my department who notorious for making sexual jokes for harassing young women and saying racist things. And the university investigated and said while they believed us, but it wasn’t bad enough, meaning it didn’t cross the legal definition of harassment, and so the university was not liable and would not take further action. And it was through working with my union, we were able to get this professor removed from supervision of grad students, even after the university failed to take action. So I am not sure that without my union community and allies, I would have felt safe enough to say anything in the first place, let alone get results from speaking out about harassment.

15:32 Emily M.: As always, I hope anyone listening here won’t face harassment and discrimination in their time as a graduate student or in general. But I also strongly encourage anyone who comes from a marginalized background or is concerned about their future work environments to consider the status of a graduate student union in their decisions about choosing a program. So you can find out if a university has a union by either asking current graduate students. Or universities typically will have a labor relations office and you can check their webpage to see what workers are unionized on campus and you’ll want to look for a name and local number. Like for example, UAW 4121 is United Auto Workers four one two one. Because student senates and associations are not the same thing. And you can always reach out to current graduate unions like mine at UAW4121.org for more resources or resources or information. Or for example, if you’re in California, it would be UAW2865.org. And with that I just want to say congratulations on your PhD programs and good luck.

Career Development with Dr. Jennifer Polk

16:50 Jennifer: My name is Jennifer Polk and I’m co-founder of Beyond The Professoriate. I earned my PhD in history from the University of Toronto and now work full-time helping graduate students and doctoral degree holders build awesome careers. It’s crucial to actively attend to your career while pursuing a PhD. This might seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t the PhD itself the thing that will help your career? While that may occasionally be true, it’s only true if you build into your experience activities and accomplishments that matter to employers, both within and beyond academia. That building is usually something you need to do for yourself. You can’t rely on your advisor or graduate program to do it for you.

17:44 Jennifer: Most PhD students live on minimal stipends and it’s common for folks to take additional paid work, if they’re able, to pay their way. An awful lot of folks have significant student loans too, of course, and if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you know all this very well. All of that is to say that you might need a decent paying job pretty quickly once you graduate. Since it could take months to find work, even for the most successful among us, you’ll need to put in the groundwork over the years of your PhD to build experiences, gain skills, and cultivate a professional network that spans a variety of fields. That’s so you’ll be in a good position to get hired when it’s time to start applying for jobs. Ideally, your advisor will be supportive of your career no matter where it takes you. A good match with your primary advisor is incredibly important. That’s true beyond career concerns, of course. Advisors have a lot of influence over your experience, much more than you might expect, and there are academic studies that show this. I’m not just making it up.

19:01 Jennifer: Beyond your advisor, ideally, your department and the graduate program specifically will actively create opportunities for you and your fellow students to gain professional experience and grow your networks. Maybe you can do an internship with the full support of your department or attend regular lunch and learn or other networking events that they organize. Pay attention to academic and nonacademic resources. The default in many academic disciplines is to privilege scholarly careers above all others. Avoid, please, avoid departments that give you that vibe. They are not living in reality and you very much will be.

19:46 Jennifer: The bottom line here is to make sure your advisor will treat you with respect always and support you doing what you need to do to build career-relevant experiences and skills for both academic and nonacademic careers. You can absolutely ask your prospective advisors pointed questions about what kinds of career support you can expect. This is your career, your life, and you want to make sure you’ll get the support and resources you need for success during and after your studies. Graduate school is hard enough without all this added stress.

20:21 Jennifer: As you’re exploring your options, learn about programming and other opportunities available to you via the institution’s career center or graduate school. Look, for example, for a robust series of workshops, for career consultants, you can make one on one appointments with. Maybe they focus specifically on graduate students, even just PhD students. That’s awesome. You can also investigate what’s being done at the association level, so to check on what your academic discipline is up to. For example, some of the larger scientific societies host regular webinars and program multiple career-related sessions during their annual meetings. That’s great. Do take a proactive approach before you accept an offer and enroll. This is not the time to be shy. If you don’t find a good fit, you might be better off not doing a PhD at all or not this year. Your bachelor’s or master’s degrees are absolutely good enough to help you create an awesome career and life for yourself. One filled with all the creativity, intellectual rigor and challenging problem solving that drew you to want to do a PhD in the first place.

21:36 Jennifer: Learn more about Beyond the Professoriate on our website beyondprof.com and you can find us on social media too. You can also follow me, Jen, on Twitter at @FromPhDtoLife. I’d love to see you there. Thank you.

Mental Health with Dr. Katy Peplin

21:58 Katy: Hello, my name is Dr. Katy Pepin and I am the founder and head coach of Thrive PhD. Thrive PhD is a community for graduate students. It’s also individual coaching, courses, a Twitter presence, and Instagram all at that handle. Why I care about this aspect, mental health, of PhD programs is because it was one of the things that was so hard for me when I was a grad student. I have been dealing with a brain that tends toward anxiety, that can have some depression issues. My diagnoses aren’t as important as the fact that I knew early on in my PhD program that if I didn’t take care of my brain, as well as my career and my publications, I wasn’t gonna make it through.

22:48 Katy: So some of the things that I think it’s important to consider when you’re looking at a PhD program are first of all, the resources that are available for your mental health, through the university and hopefully at no cost or little cost to you. Some questions to ask: are grad students allowed to be seen in the on-campus mental health facilities? Sometimes those are undergraduate student only, so that’s important to know. Whether or not the health insurance that you’ll be offered covers mental health services or medications? If so, is there a limit to how many sessions you can have per year or per semester? Do you have the ability to be seen by providers outside of that insurance network or are you limited to a handful of people inside of the area? All really good questions to ask for your insurance.

23:41 Katy: Secondly, it’s important to kind of ask some questions around the mental health culture in the department. Some of the sure sign tells for me are: one, do graduate students stay enrolled? Do they have a high dropout rate? Sometimes that can indicate a mental health climate problem. Do people openly and excitedly talk about their non-PhD, non-grad school lives in the program? Do they talk about how they go rock climbing? Is it encouraged to work out? Do people have the ability to flex their schedules based on how they’re feeling on any given day? Is the opportunity available for you to work remotely? And if people are struggling, do people feel comfortable asking for help around those areas?

24:29 Katy: It can be really difficult to find that out on a prospective visit or even from an email as you’re evaluating, as you’re not a student. But it can be very important to find ways to ask that question. So some of the questions that I have asked to get around the mental health climate without directly saying, does your faculty support or not support the idea of graduate students having robust mental health resources and support, are to ask things like, do people feel comfortable talking about their personal lives? Do any graduate students have different family structures? Do graduate students have kids? Is anybody a parent? Is anyone a caretaker? What kind of relationships do people have? And are those things supported? Another great question to ask are how are the boundaries around breaks? One of the sure fire tells of a department that has a kind of problematic culture around mental health is that students either don’t feel comfortable taking breaks or they only take them in between the semester when their grading is finished or when the university is otherwise shut down. So ask graduate students, you know, what are the PI’s policies around weekends and evening work? What are the policies if you need to go home unexpectedly or if you’re not from here? Is it flexible enough for you to work remotely if you need to? Are there opportunities for graduate students to tweak the conditions of their work in order to best support themselves?

26:02 Katy: It can be really hard to ask those questions and it definitely can be worrying to say, I want to know what these resources are in advance because some graduate students might feel like that makes them seem like they’re already a problem and they’re not even there. So I would embolden you and encourage you to ask as many questions as you feel comfortable, but know that there are always ways to build support around yourself, whether that is through what the university provides or supplementing it from an outside perspective or place. I’m wishing you a happy new year. And again, my name is Katy Paplin. I am the founder of thrive PhD. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram @ThrivePhD or thrive-phd.com

Mental Health with Ms. Susanna Harris

26:58 Susanna: Hi everyone. My name is Susanna Harris and I am a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I am also the founder and CEO of the PhD Balance. PhD Balance is an online community dedicated to talking about those difficult challenges and problems we face while we’re in our graduate programs. I founded this group because we really wanted to make a space to talk about certain things like dealing with difficult advisers or understanding what to do after graduation, but most importantly we wanted to talk about the struggles that students have with their mental health and with dealing with mental illness throughout their programs. I really care about this because I myself have depression and anxiety and I realized that a lot of other people around me did as well, but we just didn’t talk about it.

27:48 Susanna: For this reason, I think it’s really important to look at graduate programs and understand how they will support students’ mental health. You can get a good idea of this based on what kind of resources they have, as in, can you go to campus health? How long does it take to get an appointment? What kind of treatments are covered and can you see a therapist outside of those treatment options? This might include how does the department respond to when there is a mental health crisis or when a student divulges to someone that they are struggling with some sort of mental illness. You can even understand what is the culture surrounding the discussion of mental illness. Does the department actively provide resources? Will the lab group that you’re joining be open and accepting of someone having a difficult time? Does the university provide mental health days or access to other kinds of literature? This is really important because although a lot of us, myself included, go into graduate school thinking we are prepared and we will somehow get through it faster and easier than the average, we have to remember that the average is made up of people just like us and I’ve quickly realized that the challenges I faced in the PhD were just as hard as people before me had said.

29:06 Susanna: So what are the best ways to go about seeing if your new program or your new lab will take care of your mental health, no matter what kind of challenges arise? The best way to do this is to just ask people directly. Say, “this is something that is commonly talked about. I know that others have expressed difficulties with dealing with their mental health. How does it work in where you are?” It’s better to ask things about how or what or when rather than just asking, “is the mental health culture good or is mental health supported?” You can ask things like what has happened in the past when someone has talked about these things or you can say, are you aware of what resources there are and can you show me where to find them? Even understanding if a faculty member or a lab member or department has or knows about these resources tells you a lot about how important this topic is to them.

29:57 Susanna: If you want to understand more about my perspective, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at @SusannaLHarris and I would love for you to check out PhD Balance. We have a website that’s www.phdbalance.com or you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram to hear other people’s stories of dealing with these really hard challenges in graduate schools and sharing resources about how to get through a program. That’s at @PhD_balance. So thank you so much. Bye.

Work-Life Balance with Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel

30:39 Katie: Hi, I’m Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel and if you follow me on Twitter it will be no surprise that I’m here to talk about the importance of considering work-life balance when choosing a PhD program. This is a subject I’m passionate about because I chose a PhD program without considering things like departmental culture and the recreational opportunities in the area. Both of these ended up being a pretty bad fit for me and in hindsight I wish I would have more strongly considered the nonacademic factors as seriously as I considered the academic ones. As a PhD student, it’s very easy to lose yourself to your program, to your work, and it’s critical that you’re able to rest and recreate regularly in ways that fuel you. As I say frequently, rest is not just a reward for hard work, but a critical component to working hard. Making sure that the university you attend and the surrounding area can provide enough resources for your well-rounded life and interests is important.

31:33 Katie: When you become a PhD student, generally you will work for the university as a teaching or research assistant in addition to conducting your own research and while will take up a lot of your time and energy, it should not and does not have to be all that you are. You are allowed to be a whole person, not just a research robot and finding a departmental culture and location that fit your interests is important.

31:57 Katie: Let’s first talk about departmental culture. What do I mean by this? Let’s say for example, if you don’t drink alcohol but learn that a department you’re considering regularly encourages binge drinking as a reward for working hard, then perhaps that’s not a great fit for you. If it’s important for you to see your family for certain holidays, make sure that the department you’ll be joining encourages or at the very least does not reprimand students for taking time to spend with loved ones.

32:25 Katie: Now about location of the program. This is something, again, I mistakenly did not consider when choosing my program and it made falling into the bad habits of overwork and over-drinking too easy, as my usual hobbies and recreational activities were hard to come by in the area. For example, do you like to hike and camp? Then a university in a flat state with few nature exploration opportunities may not be a good fit. Do you enjoy seeing or performing in live theater? Google the area and make sure there’s an outlet for this nearby. Does seeing the ocean or other body of water help calm you down when you’re stressed out? If so, maybe only consider schools that have natural features that fit these needs.

33:04 Katie: So how can you look into the work life balance factors as a perspective student? Well, the best thing you can do is ask current students in the department, preferably over the phone or in person, questions about the local culture within the department and the recreational opportunities nearby. Preferably, you’ll be able to talk to this current students over the phone or in person, and I specifically recommend asking over the phone or in person so that the current students will feel more open to answering honestly, as they don’t have a written record of their answers. If you are unable to ask in person, say on a recruiting trip, you can email and ask for a quick phone call. In my experience as both the perspective student and the current student in this scenario, most folks are happy to chat and share their own experiences. Some questions that I recommend asking are: are current students able to comfortably take time to spend with loved ones? Can they travel for holidays? Are they encouraged or reprimanded for working reasonable hours and taking time away when needed? What do they do for fun that’s not related to their work? What do they like most about the location of their program? And what do they like most about the departmental culture that they’re in? If you’re a minority, I’d also recommend asking others who share similar backgrounds with you if they feel that their way of life feels welcomed and safe within their department and local culture. And one of the most important questions I think you can ask is if the current student would choose the same program again, knowing what they know now about it.

32:42 Katie: So now that you’ve talked with the current students about the departmental culture and the location of the university, what do you do with this information? Seriously consider their answers and allow those answers to help you decide between programs. If you get an off feeling from a program’s culture or worry that you won’t be able to do your favorite hobby, trust your gut and find a program that best suits your needs, both the academic and your personal work life balance needs. As my amazing advisor, Dr. Tarla Rai Peterson once told me, “We are all better off when we give ourselves permission to know one another as whole people.” Your PhD research is going to be important, but who you are as a person is even more important and I encourage you to consider your own personal needs in addition to your academic ones in choosing a program. For more on work life balance as a graduate student, you can read some articles I have in the Chronicle of Higher Education or follow me on Twitter at @krwedermeyer. Thanks for listening and best of luck as you choose your program.

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35:58 Emily R.: It’s Emily again as we close out this episode. I’d like to emphasize two themes I heard from the contributors. First, grad school is your real life. It’s not reasonable to try to ignore or suppress your personal life or what makes you happy and healthy for the five or so years you’ll spend in your PhD program. Choose a PhD program that enables you to live a full life and succeed academically. Second, you can find a good amount of information online, but nothing can replace personal real time conversations with current graduate students. The best time and place for those conversations, and your other observations, is during campus visits. I encourage you to attend as many of those as you possibly can and participate in them fully, asking all the questions the contributors suggested in this episode. You can follow up over the phone, as needed, as decision day approaches. I wish you all the best in choosing the PhD program that will foster both your professional and personal development. Please share this episode with all of the prospective PhD students in your life.

37:12 Emily R.: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio

Lourdes Bobbio

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Introductions

Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

What to Research When Choosing a Program

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Understanding The Role of Cost of Living Increases

Final Words of Advice

Financial Plans After Grad School

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Early Childhood and Living in Poverty

Path to the PhD

Carrying Forward Financial from Growing Up Poor

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Finances During Grad School

Frugal Strategies as a PhD

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Intersection of Finances and Mental Health

How to Support Your Mental Health in Grad School

Professional and Medical Options

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The Importance of Investing in Your Mental Health

Financial Advice for PhDs

Where to Find Susanna Online

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Financial Strategy #1: Celebrate Financial Wins

Financial Strategy #2: Ask Questions About Your Finances

Financial Strategy #3: Plan to Spend on Networking

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Saving tips for larger networking events

How a AFC Deals With Financial Challenges

How to Contact Dr. Kate Mielitz

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Will Please Introduce Yourself Further?

What is Financial Socialization?

The Four Financial Attitudes

Money Avoidance

Money Worship

Money Status and Money Vigilance

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How Financial Attitudes Can Affect Your Finances

How to Work with the Money Attitudes You Have

Final Words of Advice

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Finances with Dr. Emily Roberts

Unionization and Advocacy with Mr. Kevin Bird

Unionization and Advocacy with Dr. Emily Myers

Career Development with Dr. Jennifer Polk

Mental Health with Dr. Katy Peplin

Mental Health with Ms. Susanna Harris

Work-Life Balance with Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel

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