Personal Finance for PhDs

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401(k)

What to Do With Your 401(k) or 403(b) When You Start Grad School

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One of the common perks that companies and organizations give to their employees is access to a workplace-based retirement account such as a 401(k) or 403(b). They may even match your contributions to a degree! Unfortunately the great majority of universities do not give their graduate students access to their 403(b)s. (This does happen rarely, so it’s worth inquiring about.) If you had a 401(k) or 403(b) in a prior job, what do you do with that account when you leave your job for grad school?

Further reading: Financial Reasons to Work Before Starting Your PhD

401k grad school

Your Three Options for Your Workplace-Based Retirement Account

In general when you leave a job, you have three options for what to do with your 401(k) or 403(b).

Leave It Where It Is

Most of the time, your former employer will permit you to leave your 401(k) or 403(b) where it is and continue to manage the account for you while you are in grad school. Employers usually have a minimum balance requirement to maintain these accounts, so your account has to meet that bar.

The upside to this approach is that you don’t have to do anything, and if you liked the investment options and account fees, you can keep using it.

The downside to this approach is that you have to stay in some degree of contact with your former employer and go through them if you want to make any changes to the account.

Roll to Your New Workplace-Based Retirement Account

If you have the option to open a 403(b) with your university, you may be able to roll your previous 401(k) or 403(b) into that account. Again, this opportunity is rarely extended to grad students.

Roll to an IRA

You always have the option when you leave a job to roll your 401(k) or 403(b) into an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA). An IRA’s tax advantages are similar to those of a workplace-based retirement account, but you manage the account yourself instead of your employer managing it. Be sure that you have instructed your firms to execute a “rollover” directly to your IRA and not to cash out your account and send you a check, which would be a hassle to correct. You can use an existing IRA account or open an IRA account specifically to receive this transfer.

Which Option Should You Choose?

The general personal finance advice is to always roll your 401(k) or 403(b) when you leave an employer to avoid eventually having accounts scattered across many employers and potentially losing track of one. Whether you should roll into your new employer’s 401(k) or 403(b) or your IRA is debated. If you are trying to optimize the investments inside your retirement account, IRAs have an advantage because the entire world of investment options is open to you, whereas the options inside a 401(k) or 403(b) are only what your employer decides to make available. Sometimes, 401(k) or 403(b) plans are more expensive than what you can get inside an IRA, and since cost minimization is a key tenant of successful investing, again IRAs are preferred.

However, this general advice is not necessarily fully applicable to grad students.

First, your options are mostly likely to be either to leave your 401(k) or 403(b) where it is or to roll it into an IRA.

Second, you may not want to manage your own investments. While managing your IRA can be easy and hands-off, it may still be intimidating, and some students might prefer to simply choose among the options offered by the former employer to opening and managing an IRA.

Third, the investments available to an individual investor inside an IRA may not be as attractive as the institutional-level investments available inside a 401(k) or 403(b) in terms of their fees. To paint with an overly broad brush, 401(k) and 403(b) options at smaller companies and organizations may be more expensive than what you can buy inside an IRA, whereas 401(k) and 403(b) options at larger companies and organizations may be less expensive than what you can buy inside an IRA. So if you were employed by a university or a large company before starting grad school, compare the cost (expense ratios) of your current investment options with those at the brokerage firm you’re considering for your IRA. It may turn out that your existing options are more favorable.

Further reading:

My advice to entering grad students is to roll your 401(k) or 403(b) into an IRA unless you have high-quality, inexpensive investment options inside the workplace-based retirement account and do not want to manage your own account.

Other Advice Related to Retirement Saving

You’re on a great path already by starting to invest for retirement through your job. If at all possible, continue to make excellent choices related to retirement investing during grad school.

Contribute Money to Your 401(k) or 403(b) While You Still Can

It’s a great idea to kick your retirement savings rate into an even higher gear in the months you have left at your job. You’re likely to not have access to a 401(k) or 403(b) again for quite a while, so any additional money you can get into that tax-advantaged account will be a huge boon to your post-PhD self. (Plus, you’re forcing yourself to deflate your lifestyle, which you’ll have to do in a few months anyway!)

However, don’t become so zealous about retirement saving that you compromise your cash position. It’s going to take a good amount of cash to transition into grad school between moving costs, start-up expenses, and university fees. You don’t want to put a lot of money inside your 401(k) or 403(b) only to turn to credit cards to make it until your first grad school paycheck.

Keep Investing for Retirement!

Yes, it is sometimes possible to invest for retirement during grad school, but it heavily depends on your stipend, the local cost of living, and the rest of your financial situation. If you have no pressing debt, enough cash savings for emergencies and short-term expenses, and some excess cash flow, please continue to invest for retirement!

Further reading:

If you have W-2 income as a grad student (typically from an assistantship) in a given calendar year, you can contribute to an IRA. If you don’t have IRA eligibility due to receiving only non-W-2 (typically fellowship) income in a given calendar year, don’t let that stop you from investing for retirement! You can still use a taxable brokerage account. Between tax-efficient investments and your low tax bracket, you are likely to still enjoy tax benefits of investing even outside of an IRA.

Further reading:

Consider Traditional to Roth Conversion During Grad School

During your time in grad school, you may be in a lower tax bracket than you were while at your previous job. Grad students, unless married to someone with a much higher income, are usually in the 12% marginal tax bracket at the highest.

If you have any money in a traditional 401(k), 403(b), or IRA (which you certainly would if you ever received a retirement contribution match from your employer), consider converting it from traditional to Roth during your lower-earning grad school years. It’s pretty unlikely that you’ll ever be in the 12% (or lower) tax bracket again after you finish grad school due to both your personal earning potential and today’s rock-bottom income tax rates, so it makes sense to do the conversion at that low tax rate to gain the benefits of a Roth IRA. (People are flocking to do this type of conversion even in much higher tax brackets!)

Further reading: Why the Roth IRA Is the Ideal Long-Term Savings Vehicle for a Grad Student

When you do the conversion, you’ll have to pay income tax on the full balance of your traditional retirement account. Before you start the conversion process, be sure that you 1) have enough cash to pay the tax and 2) are not bumping yourself into a higher tax bracket with that income infusion.

You don’t have to rush to do this in your first full calendar year as a grad student if you’re not ready, but you should do it as early as you can, and keep an eye on that year in which you expect to finish and get a higher-paying job.

This conversion can be slightly complicated if you only want to convert part of your traditional money in any given year, so be sure to discuss your plans with the brokerage firm that houses your IRA.

Conclusion

Great job on contributing to a 401(k) or 403(b) prior to starting grad school! The positive financial habits you’ve already cultivated will serve you well during and after grad school. If you want to take any steps at all with your existing workplace-based retirement account, they are quite straightforward and easily accomplished.

How to Successfully Plan for Retirement Before and After Obtaining Your PhD

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Brandon Renfro, a finance professor and financial advisor. Brandon shares the tortuous path that led him to his current faculty position at East Texas Baptist University and side business in retirement advising. They discuss the long-term financial effects of doing a PhD – both positive and negative – and how to have a successful retirement even if you can’t save (much) during your PhD training.

Links mentioned in episode

PhD plan for retirement

0:00 Introduction

1:05 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Brandon Renfro has a PhD in Finance. He is both an academic and a practitioner. He advises retirement advising for individuals. He does financial planning while being a tenure track professor.

2:02 What was your career trajectory?

Brandon says that he “walked backwards” or stumbled into his PhD. As an undergraduate, he planned to go to law school. He was advised to major in business in preparation for law school. He took an American enterprise course and saw a presentation about the time value of money in the retirement planning context. This presentation inspired him, so he majored in finance and loved it. He went to law school but says he crashed and burned. He was in the military and had GI bill benefits. He decided to use his GI bill benefits for an Master of Business Administration (MBA). He asked his MBA advisor about adjunct teaching. He had to have 18 graduate hours in the discipline to teach a course. He discovered he loved teaching. He decided he wanted to teach full time. He feels fortunate that he got a tenure track position at a liberal arts college in Louisiana, where he worked for three semesters. Now he is in his third semester at East Texas Baptist.

Emily points out that Brandon tried stuff and saw what stuck. Brandon agrees that this is important to explain to students today. He says many students set a goal and stick to it no matter what, even if the path isn’t right for them. He says there is a time when you should recognize if you don’t love what you’re doing and you should try something different. Brandon says he would tell his 18 year old self to major in finance, but at the time it didn’t occur to him.

Emily asks how Brandon handled the sunk costs of going to law school. Brandon clarifies that he didn’t meet the GPA requirements to continue law school but he wasn’t sad about it. He says he was miserable in law school. He had taken out loans to pay for the year in law school. He says it was $20,000 that he spent to learn that he didn’t want to be an attorney. He says if he looks at it like it’s money he spent to learn that he loves being a finance professor, it was worth it.

7:47 Given that a person has decided to do a PhD and maybe a postdoc, what are the effects of their financial outlook?

Emily starts by explaining that graduate students, postdocs, and early career PhDs have a lot of anxiety around saving for retirement. Most of these people are in their 20s or 30s and they know they are supposed to be investing for retirement. But planning for retirement feels overwhelming in the context of their competing financial demands, like student loan payments or saving for a house down payment, coupled with their suppressed income for an extended period of time.

Brandon says that if you put off starting a career to do a PhD, this will make saving and preparing for retirement a little more challenging. These are foregone years of savings. However, academics have the ability to work past typical retirement age. As a professor, you can work longer and save money for retirement for more years, even if you start work and start saving a little later in life. Emily clarifies that PhDs can add years on the back end, instead of on the front end, to the total years that they can work to save for retirement. PhDs can do this because their work is fairly intellectual, and hopefully they get better with time. It’s less daunting to add years at the end in these career paths than others. Brandon says it’s (physically) easier to talk about what you know than it is to work on a factory floor, and you can prolong the years you do this kind of work. Even as PhDs reach retirement age, they have options to be an instructor, lecturer, adjunct, or consultant. You can work less than a full time load, and still capitalize on your years of experience.

Brandon says even while you’re working in your 30s or 40s, you have the ability to leverage expertise outside the classroom. Even if you are working a full time tenure track position, you have a lot of knowledge that you can leverage in industry, even while you’re teaching. Emily shares that when she was an engineering PhD student at Duke University, she saw plenty of professors had consulting businesses or wrote books. In academia, there are many ways to step outside your primary role and leverage your expertise. Emily says that there are plenty of opportunities to have side hustles all through your career. She is part of a community of self employed PhDs, and many people’s self employed job is on the side of their full time job. Brandon believes there is a lot of potential for academics to be self employed. He says even if you were the lowest ranked student in the lowest ranked PhD program, you still have knowledge and you are already part of a select group. Emily says any PhD can find a market where their skills are valuable. They give examples of formatting and copy-editing and tutoring.

17:13 How can someone handle the income jump after the suppressed income period of being a trainee in a PhD or postdoc?

Brandon says in one phrase, avoid “lifestyle creep.” When you suddenly go from an undergraduate or PhD student lifestyle based on lower income to receiving a full time income, you need to be mindful to not immediately start living at the new income. He says you don’t need to be extremely frugal, but use a moderate amount of your new income to build your emergency savings, pay down consumer debt, and pay down student loans in order to be much better off in the long run.

Emily shares the standard personal finance advice to commit a large percentage of your raise to your financial goals. Either all of the raise or as much of the raise as you can, put it towards goals instead of your consumption spending. She says it applies even more when you have a large income jump. Most of it should be used to accelerate financial goals. When Emily and her husband finished their PhD programs, they applied this concept to their new “real jobs” income. They had several financial goals that they focused on and avoided lifestyle creep.

Brandon shares his story about buying a house. He was unsure where he would get his tenure track position, but he wanted to build equity without committing his family to a large mortgage payment. He bought a small rent house before they bought a house to live in. Emily brings up that some people rent their properties as they move, in contrast to how Brandon purchased the property purely as a rental property.

23:40 Grad students and some postdocs don’t pay into the social security system. What are the long term effects of missing out on these years of contributions?

Brandon explains that social security benefits are based on 35 years of covered earnings. Essentially, it’s an average of your highest 35 years of earnings. If you’re starting to contribute later, do the math. If you’re in your early 30s, you may be in your late 60s before you have 35 years of covered earnings. The issue is that your benefit will be calculated with some zeros in the 35 year average, which skews down your average. When you’re on the back end of your career, this may influence your decision to work for a few more years to replace some of the years where you contributed zero dollars to social security.

26:59 What steps can someone who’s in or recently been in PhD training do to mitigate negative effects of lower income and not contributing to retirement?

Brandon brings up the psychological benefit of being used to living on a small income. He says to continue to live like that for a couple of years so that you can build yourself a financial cushion and start saving for retirement. He says eventually the feeling goes away and you get used to the new level of income. Psychologically, it’s harder to start saving for financial goals later.

Emily says that this is classic personal finance advice. Sometimes the lifestyles of PhD students are lower than those of college students. She says it’s difficult to deflate lifestyle. You might see the higher paycheck from your first real job, then you lock yourself into higher housing costs or buy a new car. It’s difficult to take a step back, but it’s much easier to keep a similar lifestyle and put the new income to your financial goals and slowly work up your lifestyle.

30:16 If a person starts saving during graduate school, what kind of effect can that have on retirement?

Brandon explains the first presentation that he saw on the effect of compound interest. If you started when you were 18 years old and you saved just $2,000 per year in a retirement account, you would have a million dollars for retirement if you simply earned the average market return. He says the same is still true if you start at 30 or 32, but there are a few less years for compounding to take effect.

Emily says that even during graduate school, saving a couple hundred dollars a month is accessible. It’s not a thousand dollars every month that you need to save. The earlier you take these steps, the more and more impact it can make. It really does make a difference to take these steps earlier.

Brandon adds that at least, don’t make negative steps. Buying a cheaper car or cheaper clothes can go a long way. Emily says that the professional students, like law students, were living a higher lifestyle even though they were living on loans. She says the smallest amount of debt that you have to take on during training will make it easier for you in a few years.

35:50 What do you do for clients?

Brandon can help with anything within realm of retirement planning. He can help someone starting out. He can help graduate students and postdocs sort through their different options for retirement plans. He can help with decisions about how to invest within retirement plans. Brandon encourages you to take retirement very seriously and to think very hard about putting off retirement. He says it’s really hard to make a strong case against contributing to a plan with an employer match. He says employer match is essentially free money. Emily says an employer match is a 50% or 100% return on investment.

Emily clarifies that someone looking at different options can ask Brandon for help considering which option to prioritize. Brandon can help overcome “analysis paralysis.” Brandon says something is almost always better than nothing, and you need to just do something. He encourages you to envision your retirement and what your financial goal looks like.

40:03 Final Comments

Brandon’s contact information is at brandonrenfro.com. If anyone has a question about something that he hasn’t published an article about on his website, send him an email and he will write about it!

41:15 Conclusion