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How to Financially Manage Your NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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Congratulations on being awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) (or a similar remunerative, competitive, national fellowship)! Whether you’re a prospective grad student or a current first- or second-year PhD student, this fellowship is a great boon to your research, your CV, and almost certainly your finances. However, you may not yet realize that your finances will become a bit tricky once you start receiving your fellowship. With the help of this article, you can avoid the pitfalls associated with fellowship income and fully capitalize on the benefits.

NSF GRFP stipend

The NSF GRFP’s Negotiation Power

I’m sure you didn’t miss this headline info about the NSF GRFP: The fellowship pays you a stipend of $34,000 plus $12,000 of educational expenses to your institution for three years. Awesome! At the majority of universities in the US, that stipend amount is well above what you would be paid if you didn’t receive the fellowship, so you’ve effectively achieved a raise for the next three years.

But the good news doesn’t stop there: Your university/department might confer even more benefits upon you for winning independent funding. If the administration isn’t forthcoming about these additional benefits, it is appropriate to inquire about them.

Independence

Your new outside funding may give you a degree of independence in your research that you wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. This is highly dependent on your field, department, and advisor, but the fellowship may enable you to take your doctoral research in a direction that you advisor couldn’t or wouldn’t have supported without it. Perhaps you could take a risk on a side project, establish a new collaboration, or take extra time to rotate through a lab to gain new skills.

Additional Funding

At many universities, there is a standard offer of additional funding for winning a multi-year, lucrative fellowship like the NSF. This offer could come in one or more forms, such as:

  • A guarantee of funding for additional years
  • A one-time bonus
  • A stipend supplement above $34,000 while you have the fellowship
  • A stipend supplement after the fellowship concludes (e.g., up to $34,000/year for your remaining time in graduate school)

Not all departments offer additional funding to NSF GRFP recipients, but it’s worth inquiring about with your advisor, the administration, and current NSF fellows at your university. Stipend supplements during the time that you receive the NSF GRF are more common in high cost-of-living cities where the departmental base stipend is near $34,000/year to begin with. For example, searching “NSF” in the PhD Stipends database reveals stipend supplements awarded during the NSF GRFP years to students at the University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Columbia University, while a student at the University of California at San Diego writes that he/she received no funding incentive for winning the NSF GRF.

For Prospective Graduate Students

You’ll never have more negotiation power than you do as a prospective graduate student with an outside fellowship in hand. Unfortunately, you don’t have a lot of time to negotiate as the NSF GRFP awards list comes out approximately two weeks before grad school decision day, April 15.

Further reading: Vote with Your Feet, Prospective Graduate Students

As quickly as possible, you need to clarify if the offers from the universities you are still considering are going to be sweetened at all now that you have your fellowship. If the financial package from your preferred university isn’t up to par with your other offers (after considering cost of living differences), you can tactfully ask if a bonus, stipend supplement, or guarantee of future funding is possible.

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Budgeting with Your Fellowship Income

There are two vital questions you need to ask of your department before you can begin creating a budget for your NSF GRF stipend.

  1. After the fellowship ends, what will my stipend be?
  2. How frequently is my fellowship disbursed?

Accelerate Progress on Financial Goals

In my ideal personal finance-oriented world, an NSF fellow would live on (less than) the base stipend from his department and put all the excess income received toward growing his wealth. There are a few advantages to that approach:

  • Your lifestyle roughly matches that of your peers in your department.
  • You can relatively quickly achieve financial goals such as saving or debt repayment.
  • If your income is set to drop once the fellowship ends, you avoid acclimation to the higher, temporary income and don’t have to make major lifestyle sacrifices once the three years are up.

Some financial goals you could work on during the time you receive the additional fellowship funds are:

  • Eliminating any troublesome debt (e.g., credit card balances, medical debt, car loan)
  • Saving up cash for short-term needs and expenses (e.g., emergency fund, targeted savings accounts)
  • Investing for long- and mid-term goals (e.g., retirement, house down payment)
  • Pay down student loans

Further reading:

This strategy is easiest to implement for graduate students who start the NSF GRF after one or more years in grad school. Just put all of your ‘raise’ toward financial goals and don’t change anything about your lifestyle! Prospective grad students will have to be more conscious about setting up their grad student lifestyle on a lower income than they will start out with.

Preparing for the Post-Fellowship Income Drop

If you choose to upgrade your lifestyle with your fellowship stipend, be careful to maintain any long-term financial contracts at a level that will be sustainable for you after your income drops (if it will). The two key areas to watch out for are housing and transportation expenses. While it is possible to reduce your spending in either of these areas during grad school, it is a painful process, so it is preferable to lock in your spending in those areas at a level that you can maintain long-term.

Budgeting with an Irregular Income

Sometimes, fellowships are disbursed to the recipient at a frequency other than monthly, e.g., once per term. This schedule can cause issues for budgeting, which is usually framed as turning over each month.

One of the advantages of an infrequent disbursement schedule is that you are paid at the beginning of the period rather than the end, so the money you need throughout the period is already available to you. However, you may not be able/inclined to use typical budgeting software functions and prefer to set up your own budgeting system.

One of the most useful budgeting concepts for people with irregular incomes is that of fixed vs. variable expenses. At the beginning of your budgeting period, project the fixed expenses that will be paid during the period, such as your rent/mortgage, debt payments, certain utilities, subscriptions, etc. Then allocate your remaining income to your variable expenses at a frequency that is convenient for you. For example, you can estimate the variable utility bills that you may pay monthly during the period, plan to spend no more than a certain amount of money each week on groceries, and give yourself a lump sum of money for entertainment for the entire period to be spent as opportunities arise. In this way, allocate your fellowship disbursement so that you are sure that your expenses won’t exceed your income (leaving some buffer for unexpected expenses).

Income Tax Implications of the NSF GRFP

Your NSF GRFP stipend is subject to federal income tax. (It is usually subject to state and local income tax as well, but there are some exceptions.)

Further reading:

However, the taxation of fellowship stipends is handled completely differently by universities than assistantship pay.

Tax Reporting

While assistantship pay is reported on a W-2, fellowship stipends are not required to be reported in any particular way.

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A large fraction of universities, possibly the majority, do not report outside fellowship stipends on any official tax form. At most, the fellow might receive a courtesy letter, which is an informal letter stating the amount of the fellowship stipend received during the calendar year.

Some universities report fellowship stipends on Form 1098-T in Box 5 (along with other scholarship and grant income).

A small minority of universities report fellowship stipends on Form 1099-MISC in Box 3.

Whatever reporting mechanism used or not used, the important information to bring to your tax return preparation process is the amount of fellowship stipend paid to you during the calendar year. From that point, the fellowship stipend income is treated the same as any other fellowship/scholarship/grant income, and (possibly after some adjustments) it will ultimately be taxed as ordinary income.

Further reading:

Quarterly Estimated Tax

While you are required to pay federal and usually state income tax on your fellowship stipend, the vast majority of universities do not offer automatic income tax withholding on your fellowship stipend as they normally do for employee pay. (You should inquire whether automatic withholding is an option and use it if so, but the remainder of this section assumes it is not offered.)

This means that you will receive 100% of your gross fellowship stipend instead of your stipend net of income tax as you would assistantship pay. However, the IRS still expects to receive income tax payments throughout the year, so you will have to look into filing quarterly estimated tax.

Further reading: The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

As a default position, you should assume you are responsible for paying quarterly estimated tax. It’s possible that you won’t be required to in the year you switch on or off of the fellowship or if you’re married to someone with a high income and high withholding, but even in those cases it’s prudent to check.

The way you calculate your quarterly estimated tax due (and figure out if it’s required of you) is by filling out Form 1040-ES. That form will give you the amount of the payment you are supposed to make four times per year and an estimate of your total tax due for the year. You can make the payment online at IRS.gov/payments or through a host of other mechanisms.

Whether or not you are required to file quarterly estimated tax, it’s a great idea to set up a personal system that simulates automatic tax withholding. Open a separate savings account labeled “Income Tax” and transfer in the fraction of each paycheck you receive that you ultimately expect to pay in tax each time you are paid. Then, draw from that savings account when you make your quarterly or yearly tax payments.

This upcoming weekend I’m running an online workshop to help fellows file quarterly estimated tax. This is my first time giving the workshop, but if it goes well I plan to repeat it at least twice per year. If you would like to join my mailing list to be notified about future iterations of this workshop, please enter your information in the form immediately following this paragraph or at the end of the article.

Investing Implications of the NSF GRFP

The upside of receiving the NSF GRF is that your income is most likely higher than it would have been, which means you have an increased ability to achieve financial goals during graduate school such as debt repayment, saving, and/or investing.

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The downside of receiving the NSF GRF is that the stipend is not considered “taxable compensation” or “earned income.” It is taxable income, as discussed in the previous section, but it is not “compensation” or “earned.” If you receive only fellowship income in the course of a calendar year (and you’re not married to someone with taxable compensation/earned income), you become ineligible for certain tax benefits. The lost benefit that most commonly concerns graduate students is the ability to contribute to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA).

Further reading:

An IRA is a tax-advantaged retirement savings vehicle. It’s a great idea to use an IRA (or other tax-advantaged retirement vehicle such as a 401(k) or 403(b)) for your retirement savings as it helps you maximize your long-term rate of return by protecting your investments from taxes. As a graduate student, you almost certainly don’t have access to the university 403(b), so the IRA is basically the only game in town for tax-advantaged retirement savings.

The catch is that you (or your spouse) must have taxable compensation during a calendar year for you to contribute to an IRA for the year. So if you go an entire calendar year with only fellowship income (you don’t have compensatory income from an assistantship or outside job and you’re not married to someone with taxable compensation), in that year you’re not eligible to make any IRA contributions.

It’s a catch-22: While you are likely more financially capable than ever of investing for the long term, you’re barred from doing so in a tax-advantaged retirement account.

I don’t think your inability to contribute to an IRA should stop you from working on your financial goals. It may be that you choose to prioritize another goal over retirement savings as a result of not being able to use an IRA, e.g., paying down student loans. But if saving for retirement is your top priority, you should pursue it; just use a taxable account instead of an IRA during any years of ineligibility.

Your tax burden can actually be quite low during grad school if you choose a long-term, low-turnover investing strategy. If you are single and your income in 2019 is below $39,375, your long-term capital gains and qualified dividends will be taxed at 0% at the federal level (you may still owe state and local tax). So it’s really not too bad to save in a taxable account as long as your income stays low. When you have access to an IRA or other tax-advantaged retirement account, you can probably shift your taxable assets into that account time to maximize the growth rate in the long term.

Further reading: Fellowship Recipients Can Save for Retirement Outside an IRA

What other questions do you have about financially managing your NSF GRF stipend?

Making Ends Meet on a Graduate Student Stipend in Los Angeles

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In this episode, Emily interviews Adriana Sperlea, a PhD student in computational biology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Living in Los Angeles is financially challenging to say the least, and Adriana has found ways to improve her cash flow over time, such as by doing a summer internship, moving into subsidized graduate housing, living car-free, and budgeting intensively. She has even recently started contributing to a Roth IRA! Adriana and Emily additionally discuss how Adriana discovered that she owed a large tax bill on her fellowship income and how she paid those back taxes and started paying quarterly estimated tax.

Links mentioned in episode

grad student los angeles

0:00 Introduction

0:54 Please Introduce Yourself

Adriana Sperlea is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is studying Bioinformatics through an interdepartmental program. She is an international student from Romania. Her stipend is about $32,500 and she says it goes up a little bit every year. Each month, she receives $2,400. She is in her fifth year of her program.

3:03 How do you live within your means in Los Angeles?

Adriana says that getting outside financial support wasn’t an option for her. Her family doesn’t have the means to provide her financial support. As an international student, she doesn’t qualify for subsidized loans. After her third year of graduate school, she had a summer internship that provided an income on top of her graduate stipend. This is the only extra income she has been able to receive outside of her stipend. Due to regulations on visas, international students cannot work side hustles. It is illegal for international students to be employed outside of the university. Emily says that international students are in a tough financial position because they don’t have access to options to loans or side income that U.S. citizen graduate students can access.

Adriana was on a training grant that required her to do an internship. It was the Biomedical Big Data training grant. She received pay for her internship and continued receiving her graduate student researcher funding. She lived in San Diego for her internship. San Diego is cheaper than Los Angeles, but she still had to pay her portion of rent for the apartment she shared with her partner in Los Angeles.

6:56 What is your approach to budgeting in Los Angeles?

Adriana says that before she created your budget, she had to figure out your housing costs. She lives in graduate student housing, which is subsidized and affordable, but there’s not enough available for all graduate students at UCLA. In Los Angeles, you have to shop around a lot and hustle to make housing costs work with your stipend income. Many people use Craig’s List. Finding housing that costs 30% of your income is not feasible in Los Angeles, but housing that costs 40% of your income could be feasible.

Adriana explains that the subsidized housing at UCLA is available through a lottery system. Those who get into the subsidized housing are allowed to stay for seven or eight years, basically as long as needed to complete the graduate program. The leases are month-to-month, so people move out at any time of the year. Adriana says there isn’t enough available, so she pushes for more student housing. She lives in a junior one bedroom, which costs $1,300 per month. She pays $650 for rent because she shares the one bedroom. It helps lower housing costs to share a one bedroom, but for many people this is not an ideal situation.

Adriana says that housing and transportation are the two big items for the budget. She doesn’t have a car, but she shares one with her fiancé. She says to find affordable housing, you need to spend time looking for uncommon offers, start early, and have patience. You may need to sacrifice certain amenities and quality, but look for places livable and clean. Ultimately, there is only so much you can do.

13:30 What is the system that you use for budgeting?

For her budgeting system, Adriana uses a manual spreadsheet. She inputs her income and monthly fixed payments first. Then she divides the remaining income by four, for four weeks of the month. This sets her variable spending income for each week. Whenever she buys something, she inputs it. She always has a sense of what she spends. She buys groceries on the weekends and cooks her meals, so she doesn’t go out to eat during the week. She doesn’t spend anything Monday through Friday. Often, she has about $100 leftover to use on the weekends for fun.

Emily recaps Adriana’s budgeting system. Adriana subtracts her monthly bills from her monthly income. With the remainder, she divides by four for each week. She uses it for groceries first, then doesn’t spend money during the week. She has wiggle room for miscellaneous and money leftover for the weekend. Adriana adds that if she sees something she wants to buy, she puts it on a list. At the end of the month, she looks at her list and ranks the things she wants. This reduces impulse purchases and formalizes the practice of delayed gratification.

17:30 What do you do about large expenses?

Adriana has a savings account with $2000 to $3000. She has this savings because her rent decreased since she moved into subsidized housing and she received extra income during her internship. She uses this savings account for big expenses that are necessary, and then she gradually fills it back up. She says that before her internship, it was really tough to make big purchases. For example, she didn’t go home to Romania often because she didn’t have enough for flights.

Emily recaps that Adriana got a boost from her summer internship. This helped her get ahead. She repays herself into savings instead of using a credit card. Adriana says she has credit cards for maximizing rewards but she does not spend unless she actually has that money. She has a healthy fear of credit cards.

20:16 Any other comments about your budget or how you make it work in Los Angeles?

Adriana has loosened the reigns on herself. She says she has gotten a sense of it after manually managing her budget for so long. Emily says Adriana has internalized her budget. Her budget is in her mind, so she is less dependent on the spreadsheets. Emily says that if you go to a new city, you get thrown. If there’s a big shift in your life that’s a good time to start carefully tracking again.

22:00 Can you talk about saving for retirement?

Adriana shares that about one year ago, she asked her fiancé’s dad about investing. Her fiancé’s dad talks a lot about investing, so she asked to learn more. He recommended the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Adriana realized that investing is not rocket science and super simple. She thinks there is a weird culture around investing to make it sound more complicated than it is. She says that it’s easy, there’s a low risk way to do it, and during graduate school is the best time to invest. She thought that you have to worry about the market, but she jokes that the best strategy is to forget your password.

Adriana uses a Roth IRA. This account pays taxes on her money now. She says this is better because during graduate school, this is the lowest tax bracket that she’ll ever be in. It’s the lowest tax bracket that exists, so this is a good time to invest. She puts $200 in every month. She can budget that now because her rent costs are low. Adriana likes to check in and see she’s accumulated money. Emily writes about investing on her blog and agrees investing is easy.

25:54 Can you tell us the story of your big financial mistake from your second year?

When Adriana started graduate school, she was taxed as an international student. As an undergraduate, she went to college in the U.S. She always had taxes withheld and she never had to worry about taxes. But after Adriana started graduate school, Adriana’s residency status changed from non-resident alien to “resident for tax purposes.” This means the U.S. can tax her like she’s a resident. This tax status changed in June of her first year of graduate school, but it was retroactive for the whole calendar year. She had never heard about this issue from anyone else. In June when her status changed, the IRS refunded her about $3,000 that was originally withheld from her. At the time she didn’t fully understand why she received this money, and she spent it. But when April came and she had to do her taxes, she learned that she owed about $3,000 in taxes. It was pretty scary for her.

Emily says this tax mistake is pretty common. For the first full calendar year that you’re in graduate school on a fellowship-style stipend, you’re supposed to pay quarterly estimated tax. Most people don’t know about this.

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30:28 How did you pay the tax balance?

Adriana only had about $1,000 set aside. She feels a bit lucky that she was disputing with the IRS for money that she hadn’t gotten back due to a treaty between Romania and the U.S. that provides for international workers to get their taxes back from first five years from working with non-resident alien status. This dispute got resolved at the same time as her large tax bill. She also applied for a payment plan with the IRS. Anyone can do a payment plan with the IRS if you haven’t done one in past five years and your balance is less than $200,000.

Emily says that many people are intimidated by the IRS, but it sounds like Adriana had a good experience. Adriana says she spent a lot of time on hold. But if you’re a graduate student and you realize you can’t pay your tax bill, the IRS is a place to turn to and get a payment plan with no interest.

34:40 Final Comments

Adriana says budgeting can be tough and time consuming, and a little bit stressful. She says it’s worth it because it’s more stressful to not be able to pay rent. Emily says that it’s better to fess up, face up to reality of the situation, and engage with it. Don’t try to run and hide, because that compounds the problems.

35:18 Conclusion

This Postbac Fellow Saves 30% of Her Income through Simple Living and a SciComm Side Hustle

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In this episode, Emily interviews Maya Gosztyla, a postbac fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, MD who saves approximately 30% of her income from her stipend and freelance science writing income. Her goals for funding her PhD program applications and upcoming move to grad school and wedding motivate her to keep her expenses low and sustain her side hustle. Maya gives great financial advice for PhDs in transition into and out of grad school.

Links mentioned in episode

postbac savings rate

0:00 Introduction

1:15 Please Introduce Yourself

Maya Gosztyla graduated in May 2018 from Ohio State. She majored in Neuroscience and Molecular Genetics. She started as a postbac at National Institutes of Health (NIH) right after graduation. She is mainly focused on drug discovery research. Her interests are in neurodegenerative diseases in particular. She is applying to PhD programs, with intent to begin her PhD program in Fall 2019. Maya is relieved that she does not have to balance undergraduate coursework with time spent on graduate applications. She also has more time for the interview weekends, which Emily says can be a fun experience.

2:33 What is your income? Where do you work and live?

Maya’s postbac annual salary is $30,000. She works at NIH location in Rockville, Maryland. The cost of living in this location is fairly high, because she is in the Washington DC metro area.

3:26 What was your financial situation coming into your postbac position?

Maya didn’t have any student loans. She says she treated filling out scholarship applications like a full time job, so she was able to fund her entire junior and senior years of undergraduate education. She didn’t spend all of her scholarship stipend during senior year. She has emergency savings fund of about $7,000 since she graduated from college.

4:25 Do you apply the same mindset from your undergraduate scholarships to your graduate school fellowship applications?

Maya says she has been applying to many graduate school fellowships. She applied to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG), and one example of a school specific fellowship is the Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University. In addition to her graduate school applications, she has been sending in many applications to go after award money in full force. Emily assures that this strategy is a great idea, because you are certain that you will get paid for your graduate work.

5:58 Where did you move from? How did you manage your finances during your move?

Maya’s rent during college was $350 per month. In Rockville Maryland, her rent is $850 per month. Maya says what helped her most during her move was making a really detailed budget. She used several cost of living calculator websites. Additionally, she doesn’t have tax withdrawn from her postbac stipend, so she had to estimate quarterly tax.

She was in shock when she moved from the inexpensive Ohio city to the much more expensive DC area. She thought she needed to spend as little as humanly possible. For instance, she first moved into a bedroom in a three bedroom apartment. Her portion of the rent was $700 per month, which is the cheapest she could find in the area. She had an hour long commute, and she had to leave the apartment because of a cockroach infestation. Maya advises that people not to choose the cheapest apartment, but to take into account other factors. She says it can be worth more rent money to be closer to work for a shorter commute, and to live in a quality apartment.

Maya used cost of living calculators to get a sense of the maximum expenses she would have in the DC area. She says she spends less than suggested by the calculators. She talked to people who are in the NIH postbac program, because these are people in her age group and income level. At this early career stage, people are willing to share information about income and rent.

10:04 What is your savings rate? How are you saving this amount each month?

Maya is averaging around 30% of her gross income, pre-tax, going into savings. She emphasizes the importance of setting targets and timelines for what she is saving for. One of her specific goals was to pay for PhD program applications, which was well over $1000. She wanted to start an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), since she’s not sure she can have an IRA while she’s in graduate school. Another financial goal is to get married next summer! With her partner, she wants to take a couple of weeks vacation in Europe. She wants to do all of this without tapping into her emergency fund, because she wants to use this fund for her move to graduate school.

Maya has several frugal strategies. She doesn’t have a car, which is unnecessary in DC and major cities. She takes a bus to work, which she says is reliable. NIH will pay for public transit, so she gets reimbursed for her bus expenses. Maya says eating out is really expensive. She cooks almost all of her meals, and she meal preps. She goes out to eat with friends, as a social experience, it’s important to eat food to bond with people. This happens two to three times a month, and they don’t go out for drinks that much either. She views her eating out expenses as paying for access to space and people, and eating food isn’t the purpose. She set a rule for herself that she won’t eat out alone.

She goes to work, gets groceries, finds free stuff to do, and she doesn’t spend on entertainment. Also, she has a side source of income. Maya does science writing as a freelancer. It’s not easy work, but it’s not incredibly technical. She can pick and choose when and what kind of assignments she wants to accept.

15:27 How did you get connected to opportunities for freelance science writing?

Maya started a blog about Alzheimer’s Disease while she was in college. She wasn’t making money from the blog, but she started getting cold emails from people who liked her writing who would commission her for articles. She uses Upward, the freelancing website to find clients. Upward has a fee of 30% from every writing, so she charges more to make sure she doesn’t undercharge for her work.

Emily recommends the academic blogging network on Facebook (now called Gradblogger Connect) as a great resource for people interested in blogging and podcasts.

She doesn’t see science writing as her career. The variable income makes her feel anxious. She’d like to keep writing on the side, because she believes it is important for scientists to write about research for the public. Emily says that a side hustle during the PhD training is useful to figure out if this is what you want to do for your career.

20:37 Do you consider yourself having a financially quiet life?

Maya says that she applies a KonMari method to her purchases. She asks herself questions like, “will getting take out actually make me happier?” She does spend money on flights, because her fiancé lives in Ohio and she travels to see him. Maya observes that people spend money because they feel like they have to. She says it’s not a sacrifice for her to not go out every weekend, because she doesn’t really like alcohol. Emily says that it’s very interesting to apply Marie Kondo’s method to finances, and ask “does this spark joy?” Maya has gone through the introspection to consider what is bringing her high value. When you have low income, you can’t just default to the kind of consumerism you see around you.

23:30 Have you started thinking about how you’ll financially manage the transition to graduate school?

Maya is applying to high cost of living areas, so she feels more prepared for that move. Since she’s lived in the DC area, she will have a better idea of expense in places like Boston and San Francisco. She’s trying not to touch her emergency fund, because she needs it for her moving expenses. She is also trying to make sure that fiancé and her are comfortable in their current low income lifestyle, she wants to avoid the lifestyle creep. Graduate school will be a transition, but Maya will also experience the life transition of combining her lives with her partner.

25:02 Do you have any advice for someone looking at a transition out of college or into graduate school?

Maya says the first thing you have to do is look at what you have and where do you want to be in a month, or year. There is no way to set a savings rate if you don’t have something you’re aiming for. She gives the example that she wanted to save $4,000 for their honeymoon, then she could create a budget with that goal in mind.

She also says don’t forget about taxes. She had lab mates who didn’t know this. They weren’t setting aside money for tax season, and ended up owing. She says you can set up a separate savings account to set aside taxes. Emily says that this blindsides a lot of people. She has created resources on her website to help people estimate their quarterly tax.

Maya says you need to buy things that actually make you happy. She offers the caveat that if something is actually important, like you don’t need to get the cheapest apartment, get one you want. You can keep stock of what you actually care about. Maya wonders if people really know the taste of expensive wine, for example, or if it’s more about expectations. Emily says we may need to shuck the expectations. You have to figure out if something is right for you, if it “sparks joy” for you, and it’s not an expectation that others put on you. Maya says that others don’t pay attention.

Finally, Maya says to keep a really detailed spreadsheet. She used to use Mint, but now she uses a manual spreadsheet, and inputs once a week. She customizes it for her needs.

30:47 Conclusion

Travel and Savings Are This Frugal Grad Student’s Top Priorities

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This podcast episode is a budget breakdown with Latisha Franklin, a third-year graduate student in biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University. Latisha works to keep her housing and especially food spending low so that she can spend more on experiences, such as her yearly international vacation. She employs several powerful strategies in her frugality and budgeting to enable her saving, such as taking out cash for variable spending, prioritizing a “me” budget category, vegan meal prepping, and actually reading her email to find free food on campus. Emily and Latisha discuss how establishing a routine schedule lends itself well to developing frugal practices.

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frugal grad student travel saving

0:00 Introduction

1:14 Q1: Please Introduce Yourself

Latisha Franklin is a third-year graduate student in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program at Penn State University. She moved to State College, Pennsylvania, for graduate school from her hometown Mobile, Alabama.

Her stipend is $1,996 per month after taxes.

2:27 Q2: What are your five largest expenses each month?

Latisha’s top expense categories are rent, car insurance, food, bills, and “me,” in other words, money she can spend freely on herself. She shares that she budgets much of her income for her Roth IRA and savings.

3:57 #1 Expense: Rent

Latisha lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her dog at the time of the interview. However, she had plans to move. Her rent was $820 per month and the rent in her new place is $710 per month. Originally, she wanted to move to a new place with a roommate. When those plans fell through, her realtor helped her find the new apartment.

Her new apartment is attached to a house. She has access to a backyard for her dog, which was appealing to her. Her new apartment is closer to Penn State, a 5 minute drive and 20 minute walk from campus. The neighborhood is family-oriented. This is in contrast to her former neighborhood that had a good mix of graduate students, young families, and late-career adults.

Latisha thinks Penn State graduate students living alone pay about $900 or more for rent. She thinks that $700 is the low end of the range for rents. In her estimates, she is not taking into account possible lower rents in shared housing with roommates.

8:29 #2 Expense: Car Insurance

Latisha has a 2016 Hyundai Tuscon. She bought the car new in winter 2015 and paid it off completely within two years. She used savings she had been building since middle school to buy the car new. Her monthly insurance payment is $159.

10:22 #3 Expense: Food

Latisha spends $150 per month on food. She spends $20 each week for food that she’ll eat during the week, and $50 each month to buy items she’ll use throughout the month. Her strategy to keep food expenses low is to meal prep and cook in bulk.

During her first year, she found herself cooking every other day. Cooking was too time-intensive, so she read articles about meal prepping. Now, she uses Sundays as her meal prep and cooking day. She makes enough to last the week and portions food into six or seven containers.

Latisha didn’t have any dietary restrictions or considerations during her first year in graduate school. She has now removed meat and dairy from her diet. She uses many kinds of beans, rice, nuts, and fruit in her meals. She buys fruit from the farmers markets and from her share of community supported agriculture (CSA).

Her meals include muffins, which she eats every week, salads, soups, and pastas. Additionally, Latisha eats free meals on campus as often as three times a week. She takes ten minutes each day to read her university emails to find events with free food that also match her interest. She rarely eats take-out or at restaurants, and this expense is from her “me” category.

18:54 #4 Expense: Bills

Latisha’s pays for electricity and wifi, because heat and water are included in her rent. Her parents pay for her cell phone bills. The electricity bill is $13 per month and wifi bill is $32 per month. To keep electricity costs down, Latisha makes the most of daylight for work. During the evening, she relaxes and minimizes her electricity use.

In her new apartment, she will have to pay for all utilities separately. She’ll have more bills, so she has planned to increase this budget category.

21:38 #5 Expense: “Me,” or Variable Spending

Latisha budgets about $20 a week, or strictly $100 a month, to spend as she wishes on herself. Typically, she uses this money to go to the movies, go out to dinner, or try something new. She bought herself a microscope because she enjoys using it to look at everyday items. Overall, she prefers “experiences, not stuff.”

Latisha’s strategy is to keep her “me” budget in cash. Using cash is strategy to keep variable spending in check. She mentions that credit cards didn’t suit her.

25:17 Q3: What are you currently doing to further your financial goals?

Latisha prioritizes savings. Since her teenage years, she kept savings for undetermined large purchases. For example, she bought her new car with her savings, even though she hadn’t intentionally planned the purchase.

She contributes $150 per month to a Roth IRA for retirement. She saves $50 per month in her savings account. This is about 10% of her net income. She is focused on building her Roth IRA

She started savings with a CD, about three years ago, without much knowledge of savings or investing. Her dad encouraged her to get a Roth IRA. Latisha read Emily’s emails and is now working on better managing her Roth IRA.

Latisha has set a goal to take one big trip a year. Here she discusses saving for her trip to Iceland. She has budgeted about $100 per month and has $1,200 saved at the time of the interview. She likes to travel and wants to get out and see the world while she has minimal responsibilities. Iceland is the first big trip that she has initiated on her own.

33:24 Q4: What don’t you spend money on that might surprise people?

Latisha spends very little on food. Many of her peers claim to not have the time to cook, so they get take out or eat out more often. She found the time on the weekends to prepare all her meals for the week, so she saves time during the week. Emily and Latisha agree that in reality, getting take out or going to eat can take just as much time as preparing your own meals. Prioritizing cooking your own meals is a great frugal strategy.

35:34 Q5: What are you happy with in your spending and what would you like to change?

Latisha is happy that most of her money goes to experiences, not things. She wants to add money to food, because she believes trying new kinds of foods is a good experience. Joining the CSA is one way she is trying new foods. She is interested in new fruits, like dragonfruit. Additionally, she is happy has “cushion money” so she is prepared for anything.

36:48 Q6: What is your best advice for someone new to your city who is budget-conscious?

Latisha recommends over estimating your budget so you have cushion money. This reduces stress and helps even out irregular expenses. One strategy that Latisha uses is to set up separate accounts for her money. For example, she moves her income out of her spending account into a reserve account. This restricts how much money is available for her to spend, but the money is still accessible if she really needs it.

Latisha also recommends personalizing your budget. She has had financial training that emphasizes certain income percentages for budget categories, but this advice doesn’t suit her lifestyle. She realized this when she went through the process of purchasing a home but ultimately could not get approval. During the process to buy a home, she found that financial advisors insisted that 50-60% of income is budgeted to living expenses. Though she was frustrated she couldn’t buy a home, she is glad she went through the process and would recommend the experience to other graduate students.

44:46 Q7: Would you like to make any other comments on what it takes to get by where you live on what you earn?

Latisha takes the bus for her commute. She does not use her car for every day commuting, just for irregular driving, like taking her dog to the groomer. Penn state has a graduate students bus ridership program that Latisha says is a $180 one time fee, then free riding for the entire year. Just a few rides each month would make the pass pay off. She says this is definitely worth it.

Latisha says her budget is possible because she manages her time carefully and sticks to a routine. Her budget is a result of her focused lifestyle. Emily and Latisha agree that budgeting is easier and more accessible when you recognize the patterns you have in place in your life.

48:30 Final Comments

Latisha and Emily hope listeners learned more about frugal strategies for living on a graduate stipend.

48:45 Conclusion

A Graduate Student’s Balanced Money Formula

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Grad students frequently wonder how much they should spend on various expenses or even how much they should be saving. The Balanced Money Formula (BMF) answers this question for the average American, but how applicable is it to a grad student’s budget?

Further reading: The Power of Percentage-Based Budgeting for a Career-Building PhD

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A version of this post originally appeared on GradHacker.

What Is the Balanced Money Formula?

The BMF, as defined in All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, is a high-level allocation of your net (after tax) pay to three areas: needs, wants, and savings. The idea is that if you conform to this ratio throughout your life, you will have a great chance of feeling satisfied with your current spending while saving enough for your future. The trap that many people fall into is letting the needs component of their spending take up too much of their income, which crowds out saving and inhibits spending your money in areas that bring you a lot of comfort and satisfaction (your wants).

The magic ratio of the BMF is 50% to needs, 30% to wants, and 20% to savings. The definitions of these three categories are a little different than what you might intuitively think. Needs are defined as all expenses that must be paid on a regular basis, such as rent/mortgage, minimum debt payments, insurance, contracts, groceries, transportation, and utilities. Wants are defined as discretionary purchases such as restaurant eating, entertainment, shopping (beyond basics), and travel. Savings is broken up into a few stages and categories. When you have debt other than for your mortgage, savings means accelerated debt repayment (the minimum payments are in the needs category). Once you are out of all debt except your mortgage, the 20% to savings becomes 10% for retirement, 5% for extra mortgage payments, and 5% for your “dream” goal.

Keep in mind that the BMF was not designed for a Millennial audience. I’m particularly concerned about the advice to save only 10% of net income for retirement (and only after you’re out of non-mortgage debt). Millennials will likely only have one-and-a-half legs of the older generations’ three-legged stool available to them – personal retirements savings and a reduced Social Security benefit (no pensions). That personal retirement savings leg is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting, and 10% of net after you’re debt-free probably isn’t going to cut it.

What I think is valuable about the BMF is the emphasis that there is a place for each of needs, wants, and savings throughout your life, the stern warning against letting the needs category inflate, and the suggested 5:3 ratio between spending on needs and wants.

Can and Should Every Graduate Student’s Financial Management Conform to the BMF?

Absolutely not.

1. The BMF may be right for a lot of people, but ultimately it is just an opinion. You can create your own BMF with a different ideal ratio among needs, wants, and savings that works best for your life. The point is to find a ratio that keeps you on track to accomplish your financial goals without feeling too restricted.

2. Even if you do agree with the BMF, All Your Worth acknowledges that an individual might not stick to the BMF during special life circumstances. Living on a low stipend for a limited period of time while you’re receiving training can qualify as special life circumstances if you need it to. You can find another ratio to keep during grad school and set up your post-grad life to fit the BMF.

Given these caveats, the BMF is still a good starting point for planning how to allocate your stipend pay.

How Can a Graduate Student Create a Balanced Money Formula for Herself?

First, categorize your spending according to the BMF’s needs/wants/savings definition and see how it compares to the suggested 50:30:20 ratio. When I did this during grad school, I was pleasantly surprised that my financial allocation aligned within 1% of the BMF (though my full 20% to savings was going into retirement savings). This told me that my gut feeling that my spending and saving was in balance and sustainable was probably correct.

The danger for graduate students is the same as for the population at large: the needs category ballooning and edging out what makes your life stable (savings) and fun (wants). Even for graduate students, the percentage of your post-tax income that is spent on needs rising above 50% should give you pause and compel you to consider ways to reduce your spending. You may not get it under 50%, but the better you do with minimizing that category the more ‘in balance’ you will probably feel.

In some high cost-of-living areas, close to 50% of a graduate student’s stipend might be spent on rent alone and of course in those cases the BMF cannot be achieved. But if you are over 50%, you should be doing as much as you reasonably can to minimize that category of expenses overall. For example, perhaps your rent is high, but you live with a roommate to get it as low as possible, and the location allows you to live car-free, which minimizes your overall needs spending. Consider capping the percentage of your pay that you are willing to spend on needs at your absolutely maximum (e.g., 70%) to trigger yourself to reduce one of your large fixed expenses, even if it requires moving, should your needs ever rise to that level.

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Some graduate students with more generous stipends and/or a manageable cost of living may spend significantly less than 50% of their stipends on needs. In the case, the best course of action is not to intentionally spend more on needs (though you have the leeway if you would like to), but rather to increase the amount you save and/or spend on wants.

If you have asked yourself if you are spending a reasonable amount of money on your wants and needs and saving enough, the BMF is a great formula to use as a starting point for your budget. However, over time you will likely want to adapt how you allocate your money to best match your values and goals.

Savings in Graduate School

If you want and are able to follow the BMF, the 20% of your money that is saved during graduate school could go toward building an emergency fund, investing for the future, and/or paying down debt. You should start with at least a baby emergency fund of $1,000, if not a few months of expenses. According to All Your Worth, your next step should be to pay off all non-mortgage debt, but if (some of) your debt is at a low interest rate and doesn’t bother you, investing for retirement is a great choice as well. Let both the math of the situation (interest rates on debt vs. expected rates of return on investments) as well as your personal disposition toward the options lead you to the correct choice in your life.

While I am a proponent of adding money each month to targeted savings accounts to help you pay for irregular expenses, I think this type of saving should come from your needs or wants categories. Saving with respect to the BMF should be only for mid- or long-term goals, whereas saving for irregular expenses is a short-term goal.

It is enormously worthwhile to start building the habit of saving during graduate school, even if you can’t reach the 20% target from the BMF. Applying compound interest in the form of investing or debt repayment to even a small percentage of your pay is amazingly powerful.

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For Stipends that Are Just Too Low

Not having room for needs, wants, and savings to some degree in your grad student budget is an indicator that your pay is too low or your spending is askew. If you are earning too little from your role as a graduate student, your options are to develop a side income or take out student loans. You must carefully weigh the consequences of your choices. Student loans will hold you back from building wealth post-grad school. A side income might benefit you if it furthers your career goals, or it might distract from your degree progress, which should be your top priority.

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What percentages of your net pay do you spend on needs, wants, and savings? Have you ever successfully reduced the amount of money you were spending on needs?

How to Financially Navigate an Unfunded Summer

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One of the most frustrating aspects of graduate school is that your income may fluctuate with each term. In some fields and at some universities, you might change roles not just each academic year but perhaps as frequently as each semester or trimester. When each role (fellow, teaching assistant, research assistant, graduate assistant) comes with a different pay rate, the result is a variable or irregular income. It’s even common to go without an income for a term, most typically the summer. This does not mean that you are at loose ends over the summer or free to work any type of other job. Research must go on in order for you to graduate in a timely manner!

An unfunded summer – or even just an income decrease – is not at all financially trivial for a grad student, and the solutions to an irregular income that other people use are not necessarily available or optimal for a grad student because of his low overall income. Of course, the ideal situation is to secure funding over the summer from an RA position or outside grant. If that option is not available, you must consider other avenues. If you see the funding lapse coming or it occurs regularly, you can prepare for it throughout the entire year.

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1) Get Another Job

You can take a job to replace the income you received during the academic year.

It may not be possible (or ethical) to find a regular full-time job since you plan to return to your fellowship or assistantship in the fall. A temporary or seasonable job is a good alternative, whether full-time or part-time.

First, look for a job that would advance your career in some way; it might help you demonstrate an existing skill, learn a new skill, expand your network, or simply look good on a CV. A paid internship is an example of a temporary job that is likely to advance your career.

Second, look for a job that you would enjoy doing, even if it’s not career-advancing. Your university is a great place to start when searching out opportunities, such as a work-study position. Inside or outside your university, there may be opportunities to work with younger students who are also on summer break, such as through camps or tutoring services.

Third, look for a job that pays you the highest available rate while still allowing you some time for your research and/or professional development on the side. If it isn’t advancing your career and you don’t enjoy it, just earn as much as you can per hour so you can minimize your work time.

2) Become Self-Employed

A way to earn an income that is an alternative to a temporary job is to work for yourself. It takes a certain personality and a lot of work to be successfully self-employed, but the advantages are:

  • You choose the type of work and clients,
  • It has the potential to pay a better hourly rate than a job, and
  • Your schedule and workload are under your control.

Try to think of a unique or marketable skill that you have and how you can leverage it to serve clients.

A few generic avenues for self-employment available to many grad students are:

  • Consulting (in your field),
  • Tutoring,
  • Freelance research, writing, and/or editing, and
  • Childcare.

If self-employment appeals to you, you should start pursuing it ASAP, because it often takes time to start generating an income/get paid. You might have to sustain your business year-round, though you could ramp it up or down depending on your academic workload.

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3) Save in Advance

The typical financial advice for dealing with an irregular income or lapse in income is to save up in advance so that you can cover your expenses from your savings instead of your income. This is good advice for someone with an income that far exceeds her expenses. For example, if you will go three months without an income, you should save approximately one-quarter of your income from each month that you are paid to sustain yourself during your unfunded summer. Setting this savings goal ensures that you keep your expenses in check year-round while building up the account you plan to draw from.

But how many graduate students are able to save one-quarter of their net income? And more so, how many of those well-paid graduate students might actually face an unfunded summer?

To the degree possible, you should save from your academic year income (your grad student income as well as side hustle if you have one) to pay expenses during your unfunded period if you don’t know you will earn as much from a different job/side hustle. In the face of short-term uncertainty, especially with respect to income, cash is king. But be honest with yourself from the first regular paycheck you receive about whether this plan is feasible.

4) Reduce/Shift Expenses

In the spirit of living within your means, if you are going to earn less or live off savings during your unfunded summer, you should try to reduce your expenses as well.

As your largest expense is likely housing, that’s where you should look first. If there is nothing physically keeping you at your university over the summer, you can move for the term. Sub-let your academic-year home and rent a less expensive place somewhere else, move in with your parents/relatives, or house-sit.

If any other of your typical expenses become unnecessary over the summer, try to jettison those as well. For example, many cities offer a slate of free activities over the summer, so you may be able to dramatically reduce the amount of money you typically spend on entertainment, eating/drinking out, etc.

Another possibility for making ends meet on a temporarily lower income is to shift any expenses possible to when you have a higher income. This doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount you would spend, but rather makes budgeting easier. Expenses that might be shifted include:

  • Shopping, i.e., for clothes, electronics, household furnishings,
  • Routine medical/dental/vision care,
  • Non-monthly insurance premiums or subscriptions, and
  • Vacation.

5) Take Out Student Loans

Finally, if you are enrolled as a student and taking a sufficient number of credits over the summer, you may be eligible to take out a student loan. (Credits don’t necessarily equal classes, depending on how your university registers graduate students.)

This is in my opinion a method of last resort and should only be used to speed progress toward graduation if a large salary bump is expected. A summer free from teaching or other service obligations can be an incredibly fruitful time for research progress – for some projects, it might be the only time when meaningful work is accomplished – so student debt can be reasonably justified for that purpose.

Do some math on the ROI of taking on the debt (principal and interest) vs. your other income options for an unfunded summer to make sure it’s worth it. You don’t want to end graduate school with an amount of debt that will be onerous to pay back with your post-PhD salary, but you also don’t want to tread water in graduate school and put off earning that post-PhD salary for too long.

Using student loans over the summer isn’t incompatible with any of the other options; use the other approaches to minimize the amount of student loans you need to take out/repay them immediately to the degree that they do not interfere with your research progress. Also, it is preferable to take out student loans than to accrue higher-interest rate debt (e.g., credit card debt) due to poor planning.

If you know your upcoming summer will be un/under-funded or you aren’t sure whether you’ll be able to secure an academic position or grant, start preparing now by:

  1. Reducing your expenses and saving as much as you can.
  2. Searching for temporary/part-time jobs.
  3. Pursuing a self-employment side hustle that ideally both pays well and complements your graduate work.

Even if you find funding for your summer and don’t need the side hustle or saved money, you will have put yourself in a better financial position and set your mind more at ease about the potential for subsequent unfunded summers.