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The Financial Upside to Leaving Academia

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Chris Caterine, the author of Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Chris holds a PhD in classics and worked as a visiting assistant professor before transitioning into a career in the private sector. Leaving Academia addresses the necessary identity shift and practical steps that accompany this process and grew out of the informational interviews Chris conducted. Emily and Chris discuss the financial pressures that motivated Chris to shift to a non-academic career and how to financially prepare for that change. They also discuss the role side hustles and volunteer experiences can play in helping you land a non-academic job. This episode is a must-listen for anyone currently in PhD training or working in academia!

Links Mentioned in the Episode

financial upside to leaving academia

Teaser

00:00 Chris: And when I really stared down that fact it became very, very hard for me to cling to this idea that it’s okay to accept a certain degree of poverty or lack of wealth in being an academic. And to really say, you know what, like actually, I want to have some nice things and I’m not sure I’m willing to be ashamed of that anymore.

Introduction

00:27 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 10, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Chris Caterine, the author of Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, which was published one year ago. Chris holds a PhD in classics and worked as a visiting assistant professor before transitioning into a career in the private sector. Leaving Academia addresses the necessary identity shift and practical steps that accompany this process and grew out of the informational interviews Chris conducted. Chris and I discuss the financial pressures that motivated Chris to shift to a non-academic career and how to financially prepare for that challenge. We also discuss the role side hustles and volunteer experiences can play in helping you land a non-academic job. This episode is a must-listen for anyone currently in PhD training or working in academia!

01:29 Emily: Did you know that I run a couple of database websites for collecting stipend and salary information for PhD trainees? The domains are PhD Stipends dot com and Postdoc Salaries dot com. If you haven’t done it yet, would you please take a minute to: 1. Fill out the survey to report your 2021-2022 stipend or salary to the appropriate website? The databases consist of crowd-sourced information, so they rely on the willingness of PhD trainees like you to self-report their income. 2. Share the site with your peers over a social network, a listserv, or a forum website? These websites are super useful for prospective PhD students and postdocs, but they are also often used for advocacy efforts to bolster the case for raising stipends and salaries. Thank you so much for participating in these efforts! Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Chris Caterine.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:32 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Chris Caterine. He is the author of the new book, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, and I’m super delighted to have him on because we’re going to be talking about career changes, graduate students, and PhDs and academics who are leaving academia and how personal finance relates to that process. So I’m super excited. Chris, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

02:56 Chris: Of course. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. Again, I’m Chris Caterine, I’m a communication strategist and proposal writer for a global consulting firm. My academic career was actually in classics, which is Greek and Roman literature history and all that stuff. I got my PhD in 2014 from the University of Virginia. And as Emily said, last year I had a book published called Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide with Princeton University Press.

03:20 Emily: Fabulous. And in the book, it talks a lot about your own journey, as well as what you learned from others. And there were lots and lots of interviews which went into the book, which was fascinating. Can you just tell us like quick synopsis, what’s the book about, what do you want the reader to do with it?

03:34 Chris: The book is really designed to do two things. The first thing is that I’ll go to the practical side, which is to say, if you are in academia and you realize that you don’t have a career, a future in academia, which, you know, 93% of entering social sciences and humanities graduate students don’t, then the book gives you practical steps, just put one foot in front of the other and figure out what you need to do to find a new career. Even if you have no idea what that’s going to be. And that practical side of the book again, is good for everybody, not just humanities and social sciences, but STEM folks as well. The other side of the book is almost more psychological or identity-driven. And that’s really trying to get into the mindset of people who can’t imagine having any career besides a professorship. And what sort of, how do you approach what is ultimately an identity crisis, not just knowing what you will do, but not knowing who you will be if you leave the academy. I think those tend to drive more towards the humanities and social sciences side because there’s always been more industry outs for people in STEM. But really it applies to anybody who views academia as vocation and feels called into that line of work and realized since then, that might not be their future.

04:50 Emily: I love the way you described that. And I also loved, I don’t remember if it’s the introduction or something, but you sort of positioned what your book adds to the field already, because I don’t know if I read some of the exact same books you’re referencing, but I read the kind of book that you’re referencing, which is like a lot of like personal essays or like individual stories around careers that people have after they, you know, get out of graduate school or finish their PhD. And that’s wonderful to see examples of what’s going on, but your book is more about, okay, what is the actual like logistically, like, what is the process here? Like what do I actually do to get to that end point that I see as possible? And I really appreciated that. And of course I love, and I’m sure everybody loves that these six chapters have alliteration for all the titles to them.

Motivation for Leaving Academia

05:32 Emily: So there’s, I’ll just read them out because I have the book here. Dread, discern, discover, decipher, develop, and deploy. And I actually found I thought my favorite parts of it were actually in decipher when you were talking about, I don’t know if you use this term, but the translatable skills that you develop in academia and how they actually relate to other jobs you could do later. And I know I’d always heard that in graduate school, you have translatable skills, you can use them later, but like your explanation was just more detailed than anything I’d read before, which I found really delightful, it made me feel a little bit better about the things that I learned while I was in academia. So thank you for that. So, delightful book, and as I said it’s, it was driven by all these informational interviews that you did. And you did more in-depth interviews for the book. But I wanted to know about sort of your motivation for leaving academia. And it’s apparent from the book that finance has played at least some role in that. So would you please elaborate on that?

06:32 Chris: Yeah, really, for me, I think I began accepting that I was going to be leaving academia around age 30. It sounds a little bit cliché, but it was a big transition point, even if I didn’t want to admit it. And I was getting to that stage of life where you know, my wife and I had been married for a few years. We were thinking that we probably wanted to start a family at some point. I just remember looking at all of these jobs I was applying to, you know, I was making $40,000 a year teaching a 3/3 as a visiting assistant professor. And I was applying for jobs like that, that were apart from my wife and I was saying, well, first of all, how do we have kids if we’re living apart, that’s really work. But also like just doing the math and the salary and trying to think, okay, if we’re trying to live in two places, that’s two households, 40, 50, even $60,000 a year like this, just like the math doesn’t work.

07:22 Chris: And on top of that, even if we lived in the same place somehow, you know, solved the two-body problem, because my wife is also an academic, or still is an academic. Even if we solve that, I looked at it and said, you know, I don’t know that my wife and I would be able to give any child or children in the future, anything resembling the quality of life that our parents gave us. And when I really stared down that fact, it became very, very hard for me to cling to this idea that it’s okay to accept a certain degree of poverty or lack of wealth in being an academic. And to really say, you know what, like brass tacks, actually, I want to have some nice things, and I’m not sure I’m willing to be ashamed of that anymore.

08:07 Emily: So interesting. I mean, really what you’re talking about here is a realization of your own values as you grew, you know, towards age 30 and so forth, and realizing that the career, which is one of your values, I’m sure that aligned in some way with your values was in conflict with these other values of what is the standard of living that I want? What is the kind of family that I want? And you resolved, I assume, this conflict by having a career outside of academia that still, again I’m assuming, fulfills many of your values and so forth, but this book is about the process of finding that and landing that career. I’m just wondering, because we’ve heard the story before, a similar story before on the podcast. I’ll refer listeners to the episode with Dr. Scott Kennedy, who similar to you, came into academia, aspiring to the professoriate.

Financial Framework in Grad School

08:51 Emily: And during graduate school got married and actually had, I think, two or three children during graduate school, and realized that it was just not tenable financially and exited academia and found fulfillment elsewhere. So that was a wonderful example, but I want to know. Okay. You just mentioned, you know, as a visiting assistant professor, the $40K salary. Did you know, like back when you were in graduate school, that that was your financial future, if you stayed in academia? Or did you have like a rosier picture? Like what did you think was going to happen?

09:18 Chris: Well, in grad school, I was living on an $18,000 a year stipend. So I figured anything more than that would make me rich. I mean, I literally just thought it’s double the buying power and of course that isn’t actually the case, you know, taxes increase. If you’re living with a partner, like maybe you have two incomes, but you need more space for the two of you. The costs do not kind of move up in a linear way. And so I sort of expected that as my salary went up, you know, in a linear way that the costs would track and they just don’t actually in a lot of ways. And so, I really worked hard to live on that, that $18K a year. You know, it’s funny, I was looking at my pandemic hair, which is getting all too long in the back and I was like, man it hasn’t been this long since graduate school.

10:03 Chris: And I’m like, oh yeah. Like I got one haircut a fiscal quarter for $12 at a place, you know, a 20-minute drive away because I wanted to not put money into that and save it for drinks out, whatever it was. And so I think I just assumed that like my spending was so low that anything that I brought in would let me do infinitely more. And part of that was I was living in a low cost area. And part of that was, I just didn’t understand how those costs scaled, and part of it was that, you know, at age 22 the prospect of kids was a long way off. And then you start thinking about it, you say, oh, I have 18 years to save, you know, $350,000 for college. That’s that’s not going to work right on $40 a year. The math just doesn’t track. So yeah, I think my thinking definitely changed later on. But in graduate school I just assumed that it would be okay.

Financial Strain as a Common Motivator

11:03 Emily: And I think that, you know, you said earlier, oh, it’s cliché approaching my 30th birthday, I had all these, you know, realizations or whatever. But I think that your story, again, is common that as we age, we realize that we want a higher standard of living than what we were enduring during graduate school. And the other thing, you mention this, I think, somewhere in your book that during graduate school, I don’t believe that you were contributing to your retirement. That was something you were able to do only once you had your full-time job and so forth. And so there’s also this like sort of deferred cost, like you’re pushing off responsibility to the future for yourself. And so, yeah, maybe $40K is not actually double $18 K because you have XYZ taxes and retirement and all these other things. Maybe a house, maybe a family, all these other things you want to do. So I totally understand. And it’s the same, you know, experience that I have as well. Do you find that financial strain in academia is a common motivator for leaving academia for other people?

11:59 Chris: Yeah. A lot of people that I’ve spoken with do raise that issue. And I would say that the stories vary a lot. These are some people who say I have a ton of debt, I have nothing in savings. And you know, I’m done with graduate school in three months. Can you help me. And that’s a big ask. You know, I can give advice. I can tell you maybe how to prioritize that three months that you have, but that’s a challenging situation. For other people they see it a little bit earlier on, and maybe they realize that things won’t work out financially, for other people, especially in the U.S., healthcare becomes an issue as well. I would say that that is a big motivating factor for a lot of people. And I think as you do get closer to completing, and as you start applying for jobs and thinking about you know, incurring the cost to move for a jobs that pays you $30,000 like that’s going to cost you a few thousand anyway, you’re kind of burning negative on that deal.

13:06 Chris: I think when people start actually thinking about that or trying it out a few times and seeing how it works out, yeah, the finances do become a big issue. And especially looking at salaries outside of the academy, it’s just wild. I mean, I felt rich when I went from my $18,000 to $40,000 as a visiting assistant professor. And I didn’t realize just how small a salary that was until I began looking outside.

Personal Finance Strain on Contingent Faculty

13:36 Emily: Yeah, my husband’s also PhD and he and I went through a similar thing going from like graduate student to postdoc salary, but then realizing, oh, wait, we’re paying FICA now. Okay. It doesn’t go that far. So I’m actually wondering, so, you know, you mentioned near the start of the interview that only maybe 7% ish of people who start a PhD program will actually end up in a tenure-track job. And I think one of the issues that maybe is not discussed head-on, but certainly indirectly in your book is the problem of contingent faculty, right? So if you get the tenure-track job, then maybe you are on a decent salary path. I mean, I don’t know about your field necessarily, but I have certainly run across many citations of professors making over $100K a year and even $150K or more, but that’s not at the contingent level, the visiting level, the adjunct level. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the strain on the personal finances of contingent faculty, as they’re maybe holding out hope of this, you know this ultimate dream job?

14:38 Chris: Oh, this one really breaks my heart. And one of the things that actually precipitated my move outside of academia was working on contingent faculty issues for my professional society. So that was the first time I really started to look at what life could be like. And when you start hearing figures that something like, it’s like 54% of adjuncts qualify for food stamps you know, like I can’t remember all the statistics off the top of my head now, but I mean, the numbers are really bleak, and you start realizing like, oh my God, this is severe. And as a society, we’re essentially subsidizing these universities that don’t pay people. Like, what, why do we do this? Why do we put up for it? I think the thing that really crushes me so much now, when I talk to people in contingent roles who say, well, you know, I want to try one or two more times is that, you know, they are missing out on the opportunity cost of the situation as well.

15:42 Chris: And it’s like, well, yeah, okay. You can try to get an academic job one or two more times, and maybe you have a, you know, three to 5% chance of getting one, but all the time that you spend on those applications, all the money you spent flying to the conference interview for the job, whatever it is, all of that time and money could be put into other things that could be preparing you for a career that actually makes you happier than being an academic and gets you out from under the thumb of the system that is fundamentally broken. And convincing people that if they’ve bought into the idea that their identity is tied up in being a professor is very, very hard. And there’s sort of only so much that you can do to get people to move past that. And I hope, you know, the early chapters of my book, “Dread,” I give this dire name, title, because I’m trying to shake that sense into some people who maybe are resistant to it. But really, you know, for some people, it is just a matter of coming up and seeing what that’s like. But I would encourage all your listeners to really go out and read some stories of what contingent life is actually like financially. It’s not a good situation.

Commercial

16:53 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Our next live discussion and Q&A call is on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! Now, back to the interview.

Changing Money Mindsets

18:06 Emily: Chris, I know we could stay on the subject for quite a while, and I wish we could, but let’s talk a little bit more about money mindset, specifically for you. So, you know, what was your attitude towards money, practice of personal finance when you were in graduate school, versus did it change later on as you became a visiting assistant professor, as you moved into your non-academic job?

18:26 Chris: So growing up, both my parents were trained as CPAs. I had like a pretty decent financial literacy growing up in that, you know, I knew how to balance a checkbook. I knew how to make at least a basic budget and make sure that there was more money coming in and going out and use that to sort of set my discretionary spending accordingly. So I’d been doing that sort of all the way through graduate school and had adapted pretty well to a very modest standard of living. And I was proud of doing it, and I still am that I did it, but, you know, as time went on, I think, especially with my move to New Orleans. You know, I grew up in Boston, went to school in Virginia. When I ended up in new Orleans, I saw a very different mode of life and people here definitely embrace the better things in life.

19:14 Chris: There’s good music, good food, good drink. And I started saying, wait a minute, like, why am I deferring all of that like a hundred percent? And so my wife and I had made a choice to live in a smaller apartment so that we could afford to dine out in New Orleans thinking we’d only be here for one year. Well, eight years later, here we are. So you know, geography sort of changed my outlook on what I actually wanted to be doing with my money. Not just squirreling it away in the bank, but using it to enjoy life. And I think I also ended up going from being extremely risk averse in graduate school. Just because there wasn’t that much, so if I lost any of it I felt it more, to over time just becoming a little bit more comfortable with risk.

20:01 Chris: And for me, leaving academia was actually a process of embracing risk and embracing financial risk in a way that I hadn’t before. So I had one year left on my visiting assistant professor contract and my wife and I had decided that we wanted to stay in New Orleans no matter what. And we decided to buy a house. And I was terrified of that decision, because we could afford the monthly payments for the next year, but I had no idea what was coming after. I hadn’t really built a good network. I didn’t have good leads on jobs. It was a big question mark, and I actually used that life event to sort of put my back against a wall and say like, if there’s the prospect of losing this house if I don’t figure something out, then I better figure something out. And that was a huge motivator to me. Again I was in a privileged position to be able to do that, but that was sort of the rationale was using sort of a financial tool to push me into a space where I was uncomfortable.

21:09 Emily: I think I’ve heard this referred to as like a commitment device. Like there’s going to be some real big downside if I do not follow through on my goal of X, Y, Z. I’ve heard it in a lower stakes situation than home ownership, but I think this qualifies as well. And, you know, I think what you said earlier about the opportunity cost of that particular example, the opportunity costs of staying in a contingent faculty position, doing 1, 2, 3 more cycles on the job market. There’s also a major opportunity cost to graduate school. There’s also a major opportunity cost at staying at these lower salary levels. So you said, you know, I had to think about risk in a different way. I had to be willing to take on more risk. There was implicit risk in what you were already doing, but it probably wasn’t forefront in your mind, right? Like the risk of spending years and years and years pursuing this career that was not working out financially, was never going to work out financially. But it’s so hard to see that. It’s hard to see graduate school as opportunity cost.

22:11 Chris: It is. And I think the biggest challenge with the PhD right now is really that if you want to be a professor, it is a credential that you need to get. So if you want to keep the professorship open as a possibility for your future, that is the only path you have to do it. And yet, the vast, vast majority of people who get a PhD, can’t become professors. And I think because of that tension, people do get sucked into this mentality that you just need to forge ahead. And anything that you do that deviates from your scholarship or your teaching is ultimately going to be lessening your odds of that thing that you’re working towards. So it feels like a risk-averse position to be overly narrow, when actually it’s not.

Preparing Finances for Leaving Academia

23:00 Emily: Very well phrased. You mentioned earlier an example of, you know, someone coming to you for advice who has three months until they’re not being paid anymore and they have a lot of debt and so forth. And you’re saying, oh, it’s a short timeframe. We can do something here, but let’s say that, you know, some listeners have a longer timeframe, a year or more before they’re thinking about exiting academia. What can that person do to help prepare their finances for this process of leaving academia?

23:30 Chris: I would say, you know, save every penny that you can because at a certain point, you can actually buy time. And what I mean by that is that if you have, you know, three months of expenses in the bank, then even after your last paycheck hits, you will not necessarily need to take the first job that comes your way. And if you are making a major career change, you know, from a planned academic path to something totally different, it is likely that the first offer that you get is not going to be a job you want. And, you know, I cite these examples in the book, but I was interviewing for jobs to pour samples of beer at the grocery store. I was offered a job to sell life insurance, which seemed like a really good idea going through the interview process until I stopped to think about it and then said, wait a minute, like actually this whole thing, the financial arrangement that they put before me was a scam.

24:32 Chris: And I had, you know, friends and family fortunately say like, yes, we didn’t want to be discouraging, but that would be a bad idea. And because I had some savings in the bank because I had a partner with a stable income, you know, we’d looked at the numbers and said, okay, I can probably wait three to six months after that last paycheck. And then at that point I’ll need to shift my mindset into another, take anything that’s available or, you know, begin looking outside of New Orleans and consider potentially having to uproot. But the more you can save, the more flexibility you will have to make a sort of a positive choice at that end game, instead of being backed into something that you’re not totally happy with.

Benefits of Pursuing a Side Hustle for Skill-Building

25:16 Emily: I am in total agreement. And if someone were to follow this process in your book, it’s very deliberate and it takes a good amount of time, not just like the number of hours, but sort of longitudinally for you to be able to process and understand what’s going on and make the networking connections and so forth. It takes quite a bit of time. So to give yourself that runway, it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship, give yourself a runway before your paycheck ends, or, you know, if you can give yourself runway with savings, the more you can, the less of a desperate situation you will end up in eventually. And hopefully, as you said, you can make a positive career choice. And so I really enjoyed that you talked about in the chapter “Develop” how a side hustle can further this whole process. And I think in that chapter, you were specifically citing side hustles as a way for you to sort of add to your resume, add more experiences, demonstrate your skills, that sort of thing. But I think that side hustles could probably be helpful in multiple stages of this process of leaving academia. Can you talk about the benefits that you’ve seen of pursuing a side hustle?

26:18 Chris: For me, what I will say first of all, is that in graduate school, the only side hustle I had was tutoring, which was great because it got me some extra money, but it was also a really foolish thing to do because it didn’t get me anything besides that money. Like it didn’t actually make me a better teacher. It didn’t develop any new skills. It just sort of deepened my presence in a space that I was already in. So if you’re thinking of doing that and like, you just need a little bit of extra cash. Okay, fine. But again, think about opportunity cost. How could you spend that time? Could you get, you know, more than $15 or $20 an hour tutoring to do something else? You know, in that regard, I got lucky. I had a neighbor and a close friend who had a small business.

26:59 Chris: It was him and one other developer. And he just needed somebody to help with website development and like maintaining his books and like doing all this stuff that I had no idea how to do. And I knew him well enough that he said, well, I can pay you. I think he gave me 15 bucks an hour, and he said, “you know, I know that like me giving you $15 an hour to do it is going to free up time for me to bill my clients. And it’s going to let you learn some skills. And it’s probably, you’re going to figure it out faster than somebody I’d pay $35. So I’m good.” Now I got lucky with that situation, but it was great because I brought in a little bit of extra money, but I also began thinking about, okay, how do you sell a business service to a buyer who is probably resistant to incurring that expense in the first place?

27:50 Chris: Where do you go to advertise to small and mature businesses for kind of a small salesforce.com development group. So I began thinking in all these different ways, and it turned out that all that practice talking about technology services for maybe skeptical business audiences really paved the way for the stuff I’m doing now, where most of the time I’m working on proposals for big technology for the patient. I had no idea that would pan out, but that’s sort of how it did. So I think, you know, to get back the core of the question, how can side hustles really help? You don’t know how they could help. But I think you want to use them as a way to simultaneously build new skills and make some extra money. And if you let them do double duty, then that’s great.

28:47 Chris: My wife has a saying now which is like, she doesn’t do anything that doesn’t count twice. And if she can’t kind of apply it in two places, it’s not worth doing because the time investment is just too high. So I think that’s a really good attitude to take as you’re exploring new careers, as you’re trying to, you know, make extra money in graduate school or even beyond graduate school. You know, tutoring, you know, working in a restaurant, all that stuff can, yes, get you money, but is it going to be advancing those other career objectives that you have? If the answer is no, then you might want to think again about how to balance that equation.

Career-Advancing Side Hustles

29:24 Emily: Yeah, you’re absolutely speaking my language here. I have an interview with Dr. Gaius Augustus, which we’ll link in the show notes, where we talk through this framework that I have thinking about how valuable a side hustle will be to you. My favorite side hustle, I call career-advancing side hustles. Double-duty, as you said, it brings in money and also helps you demonstrate a skill, learn a new skill, have another line for your CV, expand your network, anything like that. And I think what was interesting about your example of, you know, keeping the books for your friend’s business is that you didn’t know how that experience was going to advance your career. And it turned out it did, in retrospect. And I think that just speaks to the benefit of like trying something new. And as you said, instead of staying in the same space that you already know tutoring, you know, it’s in your wheelhouse already, try to stretch yourself a little bit and it’ll spark new thoughts and it’ll spark new perspectives.

30:13 Emily: And so, yeah, just give some new things, a chance. And I noticed from that chapter of your book, it seemed like you were pursuing this side hustle, maybe, you know, some other volunteer experience and so forth over a fairly short period of time. And you got a lot out of it over just like a few months, six-month period or something. And so it doesn’t have to be like, oh, I have to set this up and do it the entire time I’m in graduate school. No, just try something. You know, see if you benefit from it. If it’s good pay and you do, keep doing it. Or if not, try something else. Just experiment with it.

30:40 Chris: Yeah. In software development, they have this concept of failing fast. And the idea is that it’s good to experiment and try little things. And like the sooner you find out something doesn’t work, the sooner you can stop spending time doing that thing. And so, I think that sort of agile and iterative approach to trying new stuff to build career skills is absolutely the right path.

31:01 Emily: I think the other benefit is that, you know, working for your friend’s business for a bit, it gave you some language probably that you didn’t have before. Not just the skills, but just that practice, as you said, of speaking with people you weren’t speaking with already inside academia and just that diversity of experience helped you, ultimately, you know, get the job that you have, because I know you said in the book that it took practice to change the kind of language that you use the kind of speech that you used from what you were used to in academia to what was acceptable in the business world, and that exposure can help a person, you know, along with that process.

31:33 Chris: Yeah. It’s maybe expected that a communications strategists would say that like career changes ultimately come down to communication. But in this case, I really do think that that’s the biggest challenge, is just that academics speak their own language, their own jargon. We have ways of interacting with people that are different from the world outside. And until you go out there and learn how other people speak and behave, the like trying to translate is a fool’s errand. It’d be like me trying to translate Latin into Mandarin. I can’t do it until I know Mandarin.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:06 Emily: Chris, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I’m so glad you came on the podcast. I know we’re leaving the listeners wanting more. So where can they find you and where can they find your book?

32:15 Chris: So I’m available on Twitter @clcaterine, also on LinkedIn, Christopher L. Caterine. My book is available from Princeton University Press on Amazon and also at local independent bookstores.

32:27 Emily: Very good. And by the way, hat tip to Dr. Brandon Renfro who connected us, and you can listen to his episode, we will link that in the show notes as well. So Chris, the question that I ask all my guests at the end of our interviews is what is your financial advice for another early-career PhD? So would you please share that with us?

32:44 Chris: You know, we looped this earlier and I think budgeting is a really valuable tool and you should absolutely do it, but sort of don’t be tricked by thinking that the budget that you set for yourself as a graduate student is going to scale up. And yeah, you know run models, figure out what you might need to have the sort of life you want to live, and use that to figure out what kind of income you would need from a job to live that life. And if you have real data that backs it up, you can be really targeted in the jobs you pursue, both inside and outside of the academy, and find a career that works for your life.

33:21 Emily: Yeah. And I think that’s a wonderful exercise to couple with all the exercises that you lay out in your book. So thank you so much again for joining me on the podcast today!

33:29 Chris: Thanks so much for having me!

Outtro

33:37 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhds.com/Podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast. On that page are links to all the episode show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to voluntee to be interviewed on the podcast. 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 Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list listserv, or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and effective budgeting. I also license prerecorded workshops on 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 by Lourdes Bobbio, and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

Can I Make Extra Money as a Funded Graduate Student on an F-1 Visa?

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In this episode, Emily interviews Frank Alvillar, an immigration attorney at Alvillar Law in San Antonio, Texas, and Sheena Connell, a designated school official and the assistant director of International Student and Scholar Services at the University of the Incarnate Word. International students are sometimes in a very tough financial situation in graduate school, even if they are fully funded, and may desire to increase their incomes. But what kinds of additional income are allowed on an F-1 visa if a graduate student already receives a stipend? Frank and Sheena share their frameworks for thinking through what is and is not permissible. Emily asks them how these frameworks apply to specific income-generating activities such as self-employment, working remotely for an employer outside the US, investing, rental income, credit card rewards, and more. This episode is a must-listen for any prospective or current international graduate student!

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Sheena: I think there is a kind of an idea that that students can work around it. I think culturally, I find a lot of our students come from a lot more…there are a lot more countries that has a lot more ingenuity and that’s appreciated, of going outside the bounds of law, but in US immigration law, there’s just not a lot of wiggle room. And the, “I didn’t know excuse” doesn’t really work that well.

Introduction

00:33 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 eight, episode 13, and today my guests are Frank Alvillar an immigration attorney at Alvillar Law in San Antonio, Texas, and Sheena Connell, a designated school official and the assistant director of international student and scholar services at the University of the Incarnate Word.

01:00 Emily: In this episode, we discuss what kinds of income generating activities are allowed and not allowed for funded graduate students on F1 visas. I have been asked variations on this question by international students in tough financial situations for many years and I finally found two experts who are able to give us a full answer. Frank and Sheena share their frameworks for thinking through what is and is not permissible. I asked them how these frameworks apply to specific income generating activities international students have proposed to me, such as self-employment working remotely for an employer outside the US, investing, rental real estate, credit card rewards, and more. This episode is a must listen for any prospective or current international graduate student in the US. Even if you’re not in a tight financial situation right now, things may be different down the line and it’s best to be prepared.

01:53 Emily: This podcast episode kicks off a season for my business of publishing in-depth content for graduate students, post-doc and PhD workers who are in the US on visas. The three big topic areas I plan to publish content in are this podcast episode on work options, an at your own pace workshop on taxes, and at least one video course on investing. That last course will be taught by Hui-chin Chen, who we heard from in season four, episode 17. If any of these subjects sounds interesting to you, please sign up for the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list at pfforphds.com/international to learn when the new content becomes available, which I expect to be in the next six months. I’m really pleased to be able to serve this segment of the PhD population in more depth and I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

Book Giveaway

02:42 Emily: Now it’s time for the book giveaway contest. In March, 2021 I’m giving away one copy of, I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, which is the Personal Finance for PhDs Community book club selection for May, 2021. Everyone who enters the contest during March will have a chance to win a copy of this book. I Will Teach You to Be Rich has come up in two previous podcast episodes with Dr. Amanda in season five, episode 15 and Laura Frater in season eight, episode two. In both episodes, my interviewees is say that while they were initially turned off by the books title, it eventually inspired them to execute dramatic financial turnarounds. After listening through either one of those episodes, you will definitely want to read this book and participate in the book club. If you would like to enter the giveaway contest, please rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts, take a screenshot of your review and email it to me emily@pfforphds.com. I’ll choose a winner at the end of March, from all the entries. You can find full instructions pfforphds.com/podcast. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Frank Alvillar and Sheena Connell.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:59 Emily: This is a really special episode. I’m so glad that you all have joined today. I have with me Sheena Connell and Frank Alvillar. We are talking today about graduate students on F-1 visas and what their possible options are for adding to their incomes. Can they work? Can they not work? Can they get an income without working? These are the kinds of questions that we’re going to be asking today. I’m so glad to have these two experts with us. So Sheena, will you please tell us a little bit more about who you are, where you work and so forth?

04:30 Sheena: Yeah, sure. I’ve worked with international students for almost 15 years now. I’ve worked at public research institutions, at private schools, secondary schools, intensive English language programs — kind of the whole gambit of the F-1 world. I am currently serving as assistant director for international students scholar services at University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. And I’m also the designated school official for their F-1 program and alternative responsible officer for the J-1 program. I’ve served as the co-chair for San Antonio Forum for International Educators. And currently, just started this position, serving on the national team for NAFSA, which is the Association of International Educators as the chair elect for international student and scholar services knowledge community, and we’re kind of responsible for cutting edge international advisor resources and trends. I’m not a tax expert. I’m not a Department of Labor expert but I am a certified trainer in F-1 and J-1 advising.

05:32 Emily: Thank you so much. We are so lucky to have you on today. And will you please explain what this role DSO is? Because I know this is going to come up more later and it was not one that I was familiar with.

05:41 Sheena: Yeah. We have this acronym, designated school official, that is a designation given by Department of Homeland Security to a person or a group of people at a university who control F-1 student records and then alternative responsible officer is the equivalent on the J-1 side.

06:01 Emily: Thank you so much, Sheena. And Frank, will you please introduce yourself?

06:04 Frank: My name is Francisco Alvillar, I go by Frank. I am an immigration attorney. I have been practicing since 2007. I’m board certified in immigration nationality law. I practice in every area of immigration law and that runs the gambit from processing visas at consulates, to defending people in deportation court, to simple green cards, simple citizenship cases, as well as federal litigation, which involves suing the US government.

06:37 Emily: We are so fortunate to have you as well. And Frank, you are the one who I initially reached out to about doing this interview because you have recently started a fabulous website. And will you please tell us more about that?

06:48 Frank: Sure. It’s immigrationcases.org. A friend of mine and myself, we found that a lot of our clients had what we referred to as pain points. Those were things that individuals didn’t necessarily need legal representation for, but they were pieces of information that they couldn’t get online, that we knew because we had been through the process with our clients. Things from delays in cases, to general processes, to just little nuance things, delays in receiving receipts, what to do when you have a court case. What we’ve done is trying to find those pain points and create pages for each and every single one and that’s how we got connected because one of the pain points for F-1 international students is knowing what their options are to work because it’s expensive to go to school here in the US. We found a lot of people calling our offices asking for options where they didn’t necessarily need representation, but they just wanted to be informed before they made a mistake and jeopardized their immigration status.

08:01 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s going to be the case for a lot of people listening to this episode. I was just googling F-1 work options as I do every few months, because I had not really found a satisfying article until I did this a month or two ago, and found your website ranked on the first page of Google. Really, really wonderful article and I immediately reached out and proposed this podcast episode. That’s kind of the background for this.

Disclaimer

08:25 Emily: I know that, Frank, you had a disclaimer you had to say upfront and also just kind of explaining the different perspectives that you and Sheena come from. Let’s talk through that.

08:34 Frank: As a primary disclaimer, the information that we provide should not be construed as any type of legal or direct advice for your case. You may hear something that sounds extremely similar to your situation, but don’t take it for granted that you could have things or aspects of your situation that could make the outcome markedly different than what we’re describing here. It’s always important to get that information for your specific situation and to not rely necessarily on just what the descriptions we’re giving here. That’s number one.

09:11 Frank: Number two is that we’re going to be talking about this from two perspectives. One is the legal perspective, what the law says. We’re able to give you a description of what the regulations tell you you can and can’t do. But I think that the more important thing, which is perspective, number two is the practical application, because one of the things that you have to realize is that it’s people who are applying the law and immigration law is complicated because it’s so voluminous and you can’t expect every single immigration official to know every single regulation. It’s important to understand that the way these things are applied aren’t necessarily just based on what the regulation says. It’s based on the individuals. You want your case to make sense to individuals within the framework of the law, but you should never rely strictly on this is what the law says, and then you almost argue with an immigration official that they’re wrong. You never want to be in that situation. Think practically when we’re giving you this advice, because that’s the way — or not advice, but practically what we’re giving you this information, because that’s really, what’s most important here.

10:25 Emily: Okay. Thank you for providing that perspective, but I guess I’m still a little bit confused. Let’s say we go through the course of this episode and we’ve identified something that according to law would be a perfectly fine income generating activity for an F-1 visa student. Does that mean because this practical application other lens that they shouldn’t pursue an activity that does seem to be in accordance with the law?

10:50 Frank: Not necessarily. I think that what I would tell them to use is the Frankie five second rule. And the Frankie five second rule is that if an immigration officer can’t understand what you’re doing within five seconds, it’s probably a bad idea because anytime they’re confused or it’s unclear the activities that you engaged in, they’re going to err on the side that you did something wrong. As an example would be, let’s say, and we’ll talk about this later, but credit card rewards shows up as income on your tax returns. If they were to ask you to see your tax returns, it would look like you worked here in the US from some individual’s perspectives. You would need to be able to, let’s say, as a practical matter show, those credit card rewards statements, show the amounts, maybe even make a spreadsheet, showing that they add up to the amount that’s declared on your taxes. It’s not that you don’t want to do it. It’s just that you want to make sure that it’s clear what you’re doing. And like I said, I even use this with my clients — the five second rule, and it’s not for when the food falls on the floor, it’s for when an immigration officer gets confused, you never want to be in that situation.

Work that is Permissible with an F-1 Visa

12:01 Emily: Okay. I think that’s a super helpful rule of thumb, so thank you so much for clarifying that. I want to go over here the perspective that I’m trying to ask these questions from, which is the one that you know, I was not an international student myself, but I speak with international students on a very regular basis through the podcast, through the speaking engagements that I do through people who email me, and I hear quite often about the financial pressure that international graduate students are under because in all too many universities in the US graduate students are underpaid. International students lack the pressure release valves that some domestic students have, like being able to take out student loans without like a guarantor in the US. Maybe right away when they arrive in the US they don’t have credit scores yet, so they don’t even have the option of like consumer debt immediately. And then there’s of course the work issue, which we’re going to be talking about in much more detail.

12:53 Emily: When I hear from international students, sometimes they are in very, very dire financial straits. Some have dependents here in the US that they aren’t able to support properly, and they are looking for any kind of solution, any kind of way out of this rock and hard place that they’re in. A lot of times I get these questions about, well, what kind of income generating activities are permissible? I’m using that term very carefully, because I’m not necessarily talking about work, and we’ll try to distinguish between these two things later. That’s kind of the perspective that I’m coming from, that I’m asking these questions from. Let’s start off with what kind of work is definitely, definitely allowed on F1 visa. Like it is what they’re doing that they are in the US to be doing. What kind of work is definitely, definitely allowed?

13:36 Sheena: I would start, I guess, to preface all of that is that the F-1 visa is a student visa, so the primary purpose is to study and work is not really at the forefront, unfortunately. I also think that the US in general kind of underestimates the cost of education when students are coming. F-1 students are supposed to prove a certain amount of money to survive in the US before they’re even allowed to enter, but I think that schools could do a better job on estimating what the real cost is. Talking to students before you arrive is probably pretty helpful on that.

14:14 Sheena: As far as what’s allowed on campus, of course is naturally allowed. Now on campus can come into quite a different few forms. For graduate students, research assistant fellowship, teaching, and whole gambit. And those can be different things, hourly pay tuition, waivers, stipends, more combination. I would say anything that takes place on your institution and is paid by your institution, definitely allowed, unless it’s under federal work study or sensitive fields with specific grants that wouldn’t allow non-citizens to work there. There’s also on pick campus employment, commercial, or contracted businesses that provide direct student services. That would be your bookstore or sometimes your student cafeteria if it it’s run by a different company. What would not be is probably construction. So let’s say that there’s a company that’s contracted to do construction on campus, that definitely wouldn’t be allowed because it’s not providing that direct student services.

15:13 Sheena: Off campus, this is a tricky one, which a lot of students don’t know about, but the off-campus/on-campus employment or educational affiliate sites. You’ll see this with a lot of the researchers where maybe they’re not actually on the campus, but they’re at a place that’s contractually, I guess put together by funded research projects. They’re not on campus, but they’re at a lab somewhere, something similar to that. The practical training world — hopefully all of our F1 listeners know about CPT and OPT, so I won’t go into that too much.

15:47 Sheena: And then there’s the rare kind of off-campus authorization. And all of those require that you apply with your international advisors with the form I-765 for employment authorization document, for severe economic hardship. And that we’ve seen has been very difficult over the last few years to get approved. Usually these are unforeseen circumstances, well beyond the student’s control. That could mean like a death of a family member, or there’s a war going at home, major surgery, or the currency plummeting for some reason, which at this time it’s kind of worldwide, so I don’t know the trends right now of economic hardship, how that’s going to look in the post COVID world, but it’s worth a try, I would say if, if you feel like you’re in that situation. However, you’ll usually have to be in your program for one year before you can apply for those, because again, as an F-1 student, you had to prove that you had enough money to come here to begin with.

16:47 Sheena: And then the employment with international organizations. That’s any organization under the IO Immunities Act, meaning like International Monetary Fund or World Bank, that’s also a type of work authorization you can get to work for those companies. So those are the allowable work worlds that we see most often.

17:05 Emily: Okay, let me ask a follow-up around that, because the situation that I see most often is PhD students who are funded, like you said, through assistantships or potentially through fellowships, which in the case of fellowship technically wouldn’t be work, it’s kind of like a scholarship award sort of thing. But anyway, with assistantships, what I typically see is that the appointment is limited to 20 hours per week. And so I’m just thinking of a person who is thinking, “Okay, oh, wow, Sheena you just listed all these options for different places I could work on campus, but I already have a 20 hour week assistantship.” Is it possible to add on to a job that you already have that already is a halftime employment deal?

17:45 Sheena: I think that’s going to range per institution. Graduate students do have a little leeway at some institutions about the 20 hour work week, if it’s CPT and a research assistantship combined. Now that’s not all institution. Some institutions interpret it very strictly and say, nope, 20 hours is 20 hours. Others consider it if it’s CPT, if it’s part of your coursework, it shouldn’t be counted against the 20 hours. Now, I would say USCIS has been very strict about tallying up those numbers over the past three years that we’ve seen. We didn’t see that under the previous administration. I don’t know if we’re going to see it under this administration, Frank might be able to talk more to that, but you do have to realize that your institution’s interpretation, if it’s more lenient, you’re still at some point taking a risk if you’re going more than 20 hours. And that’s from my point of view, I’m a very conservative advisor on these types of things. But you also have to remember during spring break, you have a little bit more leeway during winter break, and then also during summer break, you can go more than that 20 hours without a lot of issue. Now, finding the job, that’s an additional pain point, as Frank was saying.

19:07 Emily: Okay, Frank, do you have anything that you want to add onto this point about the straightforwardly allowable activities?

19:13 Frank: Yeah. I think that what Sheena touched on and I think more generally from the 30,000 foot view is these DSO’s are quasi-immigration attorneys and one of the things that a lot of F-1 students don’t realize, and perhaps it’s different with PhDs because I deal more with undergrads than graduate students, but that the institutions are reliant on immigration giving them permission to accept these F-1 students and it’s a big deal to these institutions. They’re required by regulation, by law to report violations to make sure that they’re doing everything properly. One of the things that’s very important is to really go and speak to the DSO and that you understand that there are perhaps options that are institution specific. Because again, the institution is the one who has to report back to CIS. In other words, the institution going to okay, it, and then CIS is going to okay it, or immigration is going to okay it, so it’s important that you go have that conversation.

20:14 Frank: And you shouldn’t be having that conversation right before you’re in economic dire straits. You should be having it the minute that you arrive at a university. If I need to work, if something happens, what are my options? Can we talk to people? Can we figure something out? Just in case so you have it in your back pocket, because the big takeaway is that these decisions, and this is what I described it to Sheena before podcast and I think she agrees with the metaphor is that these students come and they’re in the immigration system or the US is a dark room and all they have flashlight. And so you need to light that room up as much as you can. And it starts first and foremost with the conversations with the DSO, because it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. They get to accept you as students and recruit from around the world, and you get an education from them. That’s going to be the first starting point for you, and it should happen before you need it.

21:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that. I think just to pick up on a point that you made earlier Sheena. If you have spoken with other graduate students, let’s say, especially, you would be valuable as other graduate students from your same home country, and they’re telling you, “Ooh, it’s really tight on the stipend.” You know you have to have that conversation with the DSO right away. What are my options here? And not to wait, like you said, Frank, until you really get into trouble before having the conversation. Now, if students are telling you, “Oh, no, that’s no problem. Don’t worry about it.” Well, maybe you can skip out on that for the moment because you’re not really anticipating having any difficulties with the stipend.

22:02 Sheena: I would also add that DSOs, we care a lot, sometimes to a fault, but if we see a student struggling and they’ve come up to us and said, “Hey, I’m really having a hard time.” We might not have an immediate solution, but we might have a scholarship that comes in later this semester. We might have an additional grant that we find out about. And if we have those students in our mind, we know this kid’s not doing great, the student might need help — we keep that in the back of our mind, I would say the majority of DSOs that I work with.

22:32 Emily: Great, great tip. Thank you.

Consequences of Violating the Work Restrictions of an F-1 Visa

22:34 Emily: Okay, so we talked about what is like straightforwardly permissible on an F-1 visa. Before we get into like maybe more borderline or creative solutions, what is the potential consequence of violating this work aspect of your visa?

22:50 Sheena: As Frank mentioned, we definitely have a legal obligation as advisors to report violations. If we don’t report it, not only are we jeopardizing that student we’re jeopardizing every F-1 student, our ability to host it, our institution’s reputation, everything. So working beyond F-1 regulations or working within regular F-1 regulations, but without prior approval, those are the big violations I would say most DSOs see. Those have severe consequences.

22:23 Sheena: Number one, automatic termination of your F-1 status. Your SEVIS record is no longer valid, your I-20 is no longer valid, your I-94 loses validity because it’s tied to your I-20. Your visa is essentially canceled. Frank can go more into the weeds of what happens once that happens. We actually are automatically immediately notifying DHS. DHS, or Department of Homeland Security, they have access to SEVIS. We’ve worked with ICE officials that come in and educate our students about the negative consequences, and they’ll say, once that file hits my desk, it’s kind of game over, particularly for work violations. Those are the most serious violations of your F-1 visa. There’s a lot of forgiveness, I think in F-1 violations. You can apply for reinstatement, but work, that’s not one of those violations that you can apply for reinstatement.

24:20 Emily: Okay. Thank you. I was just thinking the same thing as you said, game over. What do you say, Frank?

24:25 Frank: Yeah, I think that the big thing is that anytime somebody is trying to get over, visit the US or come to the US, they’ll ask about a visitor visa first, and then I recommend, if they need to study, to find a program here, a short term program, and the reason why is that I say that the consulate officer is a lot more willing to give you an F-1 visa or a student visa because they know that that school will report you when you don’t do what you’re supposed to. To pick up on what Sheena said and talk about ICE, which is immigration and customs enforcement, which is the police arm of immigration, they have, and they will, and I’m sure continue to show up at people’s door when their SEVIS record is terminated. It doesn’t happen a hundred percent of the time. I can’t give you a percentage of what it is, but you’re playing with fire when you commit a violation. And when they come to visit you, it doesn’t necessarily indicate an arrest. They’ll normally give you, what’s called a notice to appear, which is how they initiate deportation proceedings against you. That’s one consequence.

25:33 Emily: The second one is simpler and straightforward is that if you fall out of status here and you have to go back to your home country and try to reapply. You can’t do what Sheena said, a reinstatement. They just don’t treat violators, they don’t give them a lot of latitude. What I mean by that is the immigration system, when we’re talking about everything other than a green card, is designed for you to come for a specific purpose for a specific time. They are giving you this visa with that in mind. When you violate that, you essentially lose the trust of the consulate officer or the consulate. When that happens, it’s very, very difficult to get that back. How do you prove that you’re not going to do something in the future after you’ve done it. You can’t prove a negative Just having that stain on your record, which in a lot of cases can be really unfair, why you have it, but that goes back to the, you have to talk to your DSO and be fully informed because as Sheena said, the consequences can be fairly, fairly high for mistakes that you intended to make or didn’t intend to make.

26:46 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that. And I think, just to put a really fine point on it, if you lose your visa, I’m guessing you’re going to be kicked out of your program. I’m sure it’s going to vary by program and there’s been a lot of leniency during 2020 for people working remotely and still being in their programs, even if they’re in another country or whatever. But I would imagine that you’re going to be terminated from your program if you lose your visa for most cases.

27:09 Sheena: That’s going to depend on the institution, but I would say you’ll definitely lose your assistantship. You’ll definitely lose the ability to work on campus specifically. If your entire education is based on campus funding by an assistantship or something like that, that will no longer be an option.

27:30 Emily: Yeah. Gotcha.

27:31 Frank: Yeah. One of the things just to follow up on that is the non-immigrant visa system works based on this idea of continuity since their last entry. Violations break that continuity and so going from step to step, getting the permission or going from the student to an OPT, I taught an immigration law class and I would always talk to students or teach them this way, that when you’re talking about a change of status, you can’t go from nothing to something. If you have no status because you made a mistake or because there was a violation, then you have to do as Sheena said, a reinstatement, but you do jeopardize the ability to be able to move on in the system because it breaks that continuity.

28:14 Emily: Got it. Thank you.

Work That Is Not Allowed on an F-1 Visa

28:16 Emily: Okay, so we talked about what is straightforwardly allowed now let’s talk about what is definitely not allowed. We know for sure that these are not going to be permitted. Sheenna, this is just the negative of what we talked about earlier, but let’s go over it again. What can you not do?

28:31 Sheena: I would reiterate anything outside of the description that I had for the different work authorizations. And then anything without prior approval. I would say, this is the biggest issue.There are some things you can actually do, but if you’re not asking and getting permission or figuring out a creative way to make it work for you, either with your DSO or an immigration attorney, then you can’t do it or you shouldn’t be doing it. I would say employment not authorized by your international office, of course, is not allowed. And then we would also go so far as to saying working or any thing that generates active income. And there’s a bright line rule, which most DSOs will subscribe to. And you’ll talk to an attorney, they might have a different perspective. But for us is if you’re doing any work on us, soil for anyone or any company located anywhere on earth, you are violating your immigration status. That’s, if you are doing that work on us soil, then you are violating your immigration status. And that’s, even if you’re working in the USA online for foreign company, you’re paid in your foreign bank account, you’re paid in foreign currency, that’s still in most DSOs definition is a violation of your immigration status.

29:52 Emily: Okay. What you said there was so insightful, and I’m so glad that this came out early on in the interview, because I have been asked this question of, “okay, I get that I can’t have a second job off campus. I can’t be a W-2 employee for some American employer.” People understand that, but I have had multiple people say to me, “Oh, well, I work for such and such a foreign employer. Not a problem, right?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” That’s why I got you guys on here. So you’re saying that your definition, your bright line is you’re in the U S you’re doing active work, doesn’t matter where the money is, who the employer is, you’re in the US you’re doing the active work — that’s not allowed. Am I hearing that correctly?

30:34 Sheena: That is probably 99.999% of DSOs interpretation because we’re beholden not just to the US government, not just to our students, but also to our institution. We’re not jeopardizing any student just for, oh, maybe there’s a little wiggle room. That’s where you go and talk to an immigration attorney and they might have a different perspective.

30:55 Emily: Okay Frank, let’s hear your perspective.

30:56 Frank: This is where the whole idea of what the law says and the practical application. I would, as the late great RBG would say, I respectfully dissent. I think that you can probably think of a situation that wouldn’t be too crazy of a hypothetical where let’s say somebody working in a foreign online, but the companies outside the US, they’ve hired them because they have work authorization in the country of origin. They’re getting paid in that bank account, whatever the case may be. I think the law probably…You’re not taking any job away from any US worker.

31:44 Frank: That said you just had a conversation with a DSO who said that there’s a problem with that. So despite what I’m telling you the law says, from a practical standpoint, you can see where this can be an issue with your institution, and that’s going to be the first stop that you make. Those are going to be the first conversations you’re going to have, because if a DSO has that perspective, the perspective that Sheena described, and they get wind of you working, they could terminate your status. Again it different. What the law says, the argument you can make, you can make that argument all day long to your DSO, but they’re worried about their status possibly to be terminated where they can’t, for a willful violation, where they wouldn’t be able to accept F-1 students anymore. When you do that, you have to realize I’m asking permission from somebody who their perspective is going to be wholly different from mine. Again, my legal perspective, I don’t think that’s unauthorized employment, but in terms of the practical application, I think a DSO would disagree, like Sheena said.

32:53 Frank: I also think that it’s likely that immigration would disagree with me. If we’re working by Frankie’s five second rule, and I can explain why I’m working in my home, in the US while I’m on an F-1, if it doesn’t make sense within five seconds, you probably don’t want to get into that legal chess match or more of a checkers match with a CBP officer or USCIS by mail or somebody else, trying to argue that, well, that’s not what the law says. That that should be, that’s only your point of last resort. I think that you’re probably going to get pinged with it, even if I disagree that that is actually unauthorized employment. My opinion only matters so much. It’s how they apply the law.

33;38 Emily: Okay. I’m so glad that we got right away to an example of this difference between the theory and the practical applications.

What if No One Finds Out About my Unauthorized Employment on an F-1 Visa?

33:46 Emily: I’m going to ask a question that I hope probably no international student would actually ask you Sheena, which is what if you never find out? What if my DSO never finds out about this online work that I’m doing for someone else? And how likely also is it that immigration would find out? I feel like we’re treading into dangerous territory here, but yeah. What if you never found out?

34:07 Sheena: We actually have whole sessions about this. I love this conversation. So that’s risk you’re going to have to take. And I would say, I am not paid by Department of Homeland Security to go knock on your door and see if you have all this nice stuff that you bought with this job that was off-campus. My job is not to hunt you down. My job is if something comes in front of me and I have evidence, I have to take action. B,ut I would also say just because I don’t catch you or I don’t know doesn’t mean you’re not going to get burned later on in line. We saw this a lot in this last administration, because the way the agencies were implementing some of the rules that had been standing for years, were all of a sudden more strict or more intense, or they scrutinized applications harder. What looked like a normal case maybe five years ago, over the last three years, they were either denied or they were asked for more information. You don’t know what you’re risking in the future. Especially for a lot of our students, they do plan to work in the United States. Some of them may plan to immigrate on down the line. And just because I’m not finding out doesn’t mean they’re not shooting themselves in the foot years from now. Frank, you probably have a lot more content for that one.

35:30 Frank: I think that one of the things that the past administration implemented was that the forms changed. The net that before had the holes that were a little bit bigger, the holes shrunk. The information that could get you in trouble that was slipping through that net, it was getting caught. I think that that’s where you see that the officials and the rules and the forms are catching up with the understanding of what people are doing. What people would say, “I did this and I didn’t get caught, or they didn’t ask about it, so I didn’t get in trouble,” that’s no longer 100% true. We see that a lot, not just with F-1 students, but just in general, because as Sheena said, an example would be your reported income on your 1040, on your tax returns. Let’s say in the future that you have to prove that you maintain status since your last entry. CIS could look closer at that if you have a green card application. As I mentioned before, if you break the continuity, there could be huge consequences. Let’s say as an example, you were present in the US for five years and you messed up in year three, and then you applied in year five for your green card and they say, you have to prove that since your last entry, you maintain status, well, that status would have been broken when you may have committed that violation in year three. And they can catch it, let’s say on the application for a green card, but maybe they didn’t catch it on the application for the student visa. As Sheena said, just because you can do it or get away with it, and I put that in air quotes, doesn’t mean that there won’t be consequences down the road.

Commercial

37:27 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Taxes are weirdly, unexpectedly difficult for funded grad students and fellowship recipients at any level of PhD training. Your university might send you strange tax forms or no tax forms at all. They might not withhold your income tax from your paychecks, even though you owe it. It’s a mess. I’ve created a ton of free resources to assist you with understanding and preparing your 2020 tax return, which are available pfforphds.com/tax. I hope you’ll check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the, or have a question for me. Please join one of my tax workshops, which you can find links to from pfforphds.com/tax. It would be my pleasure to help you save time and potentially money this tax season. So don’t hesitate to reach out. Now back to our interview.

Creative Solutions for Working with and F-1 Visa

38:33 Emily: Okay. So we’ve talked about, what’s definitely straightforwardly allowed, what is not allowed in each of your opinions. Getting in between those two, how do we thread the needle? What are some activities that may be permissible to generate income and Sheen I think you used a really key word before, which was active income. So now let’s think about like passive income. Is that such a thing? What are each of your perspectives on that question? Like if it’s not work, not active work, what kinds of ways can an F-1 student generate income that would not be raising any flags?

Active vs. Passive Income

39:06 Sheena: I think understanding income, understanding what employment means, understanding what working means, and understanding tax law, I think to some degree. I put that disclaimer up front, I am not a tax expert, but there are tax experts out there specifically for non-residents, which is a majority of the students that we work with. Remember that your intent is to study, that’s what the visa is for, and anything that’s passive, shouldn’t be a lot. Anything that’s passive can bring you under, but it’s worth, I think it’s $5,000, something around there, again, not a tax expert, could bring you under more scrutiny. If you’re making money in your sleep because you’re investing and all you’re doing is investing like four hours a week, not an exorbitant amount of money of time, then I, as a DSO, we don’t see any problem with that. If you want to invest, that’s great.

40:09 Sheena: But the problem is, again, like Francisco was saying, is that at some point it’s going to get noticed. And so for us passive income, isn’t that big of a deal. I would never probably know about the passive income you’re making, but you do have to arm yourself as a student and know your own boundaries or understanding tax law, understanding immigration law more than what a DSO would do, because again, your immigration status is your immigration status. We’re there to help you, we’re there to bring you along, but if you’re doing something outside of the normal DSO realm…I’ve worked a lot in this because we get a lot of these questions, but if you’re working outside of that, you need to hire somebody, in my opinion, or at least take advantage of as many free resources as possible to understand what’s really going on it when it comes to passive income.

41:04 Sheena: I think there is a kind of an idea that students can work around it. I think culturally, I find a lot of our students come from a lot more…there are a lot more countries that have a lot more ingenuity and that’s appreciated, of going outside the bounds of law, but in US immigration law, there’s just not a lot of wiggle room. And the, “I didn’t know, excuse doesn’t really work that well,” so making sure that you are becoming that mini-immigration or that mini-tax expert before you go into any of these passive income realms is really important.

41:41 Emily: Okay, Frank, I want to get your answer to this in just a moment, but especially because Sheena, you mentioned if you’re not doing that much of it, and I’m wondering if you meant time or money or both, like the income is above a certain threshold or the number of hours is above a certain threshold, but before I throw it over to you, Frank, for to get your answer, what are some other examples, Sheena, of passive income types of activities that you’ve seen that you think are permissible if they fall within this “not too much” definition that we’re trying to get to. For instance, you mentioned investing, what about being a landlord? Is that passive rental income?

42:18 Sheena: It’s going to depend on how much work you do, and again, this is my advice as a DSO, working with students in a framework that they can understand, or that I can explain, would be, if you’re doing something more than 500 hours a week (a year), it’s no longer a hobby. It’s no longer just for fun. You’re doing something that’s taking a significant amount of time. I believe that there’s actually a rule that we let our immigration attorneys explain in our workshops.

42:59 Emily: Let’s go over to Frank, then to get the definition here of what is passive.

43:04 Frank: Yeah. I think that we’re looking at what Sheena was referring to is that when the Department of Labor defines, if it’s less than 500 hours a year, then it’s considered a hobby. But passive income, I think that for simple terms is as Sheena put, it is money that you’re making while you’re asleep. You’re not getting your hands dirty doing anything. You mentioned rental properties to me, that would be fine. And I’ll tell you why in the context of F-1 by giving an example of other visas, which is for example, there are a lot of Mexican nationals. We live on the border here in Texas, and a lot of them own properties and a lot of them have somebody who manage it, and collect rent and they have income and they’re not considered to be violating their non-immigrant visa status.

43:56 Frank: I think that rental properties are probably okay, but again, I’m going to defer to, or hark back to the Frankie five-second rule, which is if somebody asks you, can you explain that income? And I mean, show a statement that says this is purely, you know, I have a management company who collects rent, here’s a letter from them that amount of collection minus the expenses is what’s reported, so I don’t really do anything. I just invested in real estate, but I’m here to study. That’s all I’m here to do. And so if you’re able to explain that within five seconds and it makes sense to the officer, then I think that you’re going to be okay.

44:34 Frank: Again, it’s the practical versus the legal. You have to realize that when you come, let’s say for example to the border that I mentioned, if you’re coming from an international flight, you have CBP officers who have been sitting there all day. You’ve been on a flight all day and they’re seeing people over and over and over again, it’s a heavy to make them sit there and listen to you meander through an explanation. So just be prepared with documentation to show that you’re really not actively getting your hands dirty to do something. You always want to err on the side of caution. So rental property probably just higher, there’s tons in every city of people who will manage the rental properties for you. You don’t have to do anything. That’s a perfect example of where you say, well, I have a rental property, but I don’t touch it. It’s a management company that handles everything. I think that would be a great example, but I think that what you need to do is you need to think in practical terms to be able to explain it to somebody who has no idea, who is you meeting you for the first time and be able to do it in a simple and straightforward way so that they’re comfortable that you’re not taking a job from a US worker.

Investment Income

45:47 Emily: Okay, I’m going to throw another idea at you Frank. So Sheena mentioned investing earlier, but also you just said, the 500 hour per year guideline — what about, what I might call day trading or active investing? How about that? How does that play?

46:03 Frank: Right. I think that I looked up what the common definition of day trading is, and it’s making four more trades a week. And I think, again, we’re getting to the practical application of this because as Sheena mentioned, a couple of times during this podcast, the administrations can strictly enforce rules. Also, people coming from different countries, and I think the way where enforcement is different. I think she mentioned flexibility or the approach is different, but I think ultimately how laws are enforced really, really matters. And for us in the US, the president or the executive branch has the exclusive authority to enforce immigration laws.

46:43 Frank: Related to that, if you have an administration that’s tightening the screws, then you probably don’t even want to be called a day trader. We have yet to see how the Biden administration is going to do it, but let’s work on the assumption that they’re going to be a little more laxed about this. I think that the approach should be that if you’re trading in a way to support yourself, that it’s almost a necessity, you’re doing it in that type of volume where you can pay your rent, your groceries, you pay all your bills with day trading, even if you don’t need to, but you’re making enough money to do all that, it’s probably not going to be okay. Say that you are buying stocks, four or less a week. You’re trading, just something dropped and you’re doing the investment, then I think that that’s probably okay.

47:33 Frank: Being able to explain it, these trading platforms will issue a form 1099 that’s fairly detailed, and as long as that matches your taxes and you say I invested when the market dropped. I don’t need it to support myself and I’m doing it in a volume that’s very low frequency, here’s the statement, you’ll probably be okay. But again, that’s my perspective. You’re going to have to ask, or you should ask your DSO and be prepared to explain it. But in terms of day trading, I think that unless you’re doing it in this high volume every day, trying to move and really just make enough money to pay for every expense here, school included, living expenses, I think that you probably okay, if you don’t do it in that type of volume.

Credit Card Rewards

48:27 Emily: I have another scenario for you, which is one you’ve already mentioned, I think at least once in the interview, which has credit card rewards, which to me seems one of the more accessible forms of generating a side income is that also considered making money while you sleep? And is it easy enough to explain to an immigration officer?

48:44 Sheena: I would chime in about documentation. So of course we’re concerned about documentation and so tax documentation, what that looks like, is what you’re going to have to pay attention to. Then also realize we’re working with the IRS, we’re working with the Department of Labor, we’re working with Department of Homeland Security. All of these are factoring into what the reality of the situation is and factoring into how they’re enforcing it at that specific time.

49:14 Frank: Yeah, that was one of the things that we talked about before the podcast, is that not only different departments, but different sub-agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, their perspectives can be different. The Department of State, when they’re processing your visa, abroad could be different than USCIS. I’ve seen it, where something is okay here and then all of a sudden it’s not okay abroad. It comes as a shock to the client because they were asking how can one sub-agency say yes, and the other one say no, and that’s why it is important to have that documentation.

49:51 Frank: You asked about credit card rewards, so let’s take just a hard example. Let’s say you made $1,000 or $2,000 in credit card rewards, which means that you’re using your credit card quite a bit, but that’s money, that’s considered income. But I think that if you’re able to know that if anybody asks you, you could have that spreadsheet, you could have those statements, you can show the totals and show that you’re not working. You’re simply getting rewarded for using American Express, Visa or MasterCard. I think you’re going to be okay, because again, the practical application of laws, you have to remember that you’re dealing with a human being, so a human being will understand if you can show them that you didn’t go and apply for a job anywhere. You’re not actively doing anything. I’m sure that almost every credit card offers some sort of reward points at this moment. Those are things that an immigration officer can understand, as long as you can show them that that’s what’s reflected in your tax forms or that’s what’s reflected in whatever official document you have to present them.

51:01 Sheena: Yeah. And we actually found a pretty good article about it talking that some rewards, if it’s per dollar you spend, it’s more like a rebate, whereas if you’re actually opening an account and that’s the incentive, then that can be considered more like income.

51:16 Emily: Oh, interesting.

51:17 Sheena: And that’s what might get you the 1099 miscellaneous.

51:20 Emily: Okay. So kind of a difference between ongoing credit card rewards and credit card churning, which is opening new accounts for the sign up bonuses. Interesting. I will have to look into that distinction further.

Self-Employment

51:30 Emily: I think we’ve probably already covered this, but I just want to throw out one last scenario, which is essentially self-employment. Again, maybe sort of not taking work maybe from an American, but how does self-employment fall into this whole framework?

51:47 Sheena: For what’s already allowable, OPT definitely go for it. It’s encouraged. It’s one of the seven allowable types of employment, as long as it’s directly related to your degree programs so it’s giving you practical experience in your, in your program.

52:04 Emily: I’m wondering how common or how practical of a solution that is for again, the people who I serve are generally PhDs, so they’re in a PhD program and that’s supposed to be taking up pretty much all of their energy, and maybe they’re only allowed a little bit of time for themselves or hobbies or whatever on the side. When I was thinking about self-employment or starting a business, again, a lot of students don’t have a lot of capital either. I’m thinking more about tutoring, freelancing, like wr,iting, like editing these kinds of services that I think would be a little bit more analogous to having a job rather than owning a business where you could outsource the work. Does that make sense? I would think that those kinds of activities would probably fall under, no, this looks too much like work.

52:46 Sheena: Yeah. If you register your company, if you obtain the license, those kind of aren’t operating the business. I think planning the business, especially depending on your major could be okay. I think who’s doing the services. Who’s controlling the money. If you’re involved in any of that process, it’s not a good thing. Using the institutional address. So if it’s part of your program, we have a lot of MBA students, if it’s using your program and it’s part of CPT, or if it’s part of, I guess, pre completion OPT is the more common, then you could possibly try that one. I think it comes down to how dirty your hands get, as far as how much are you in. I will tell you, your DSO will rarely have an exact perfect answer for this. They’re going to tell you to talk to an attorney so they can help you set it up because if you’re really interested in doing that, you’re going to have to invest some money to do it properly. It’s not just, “Oh, here are the five points and you’re fine.” It is about the documentation. It’s making sure that if all those agencies, look at it, they’re going not going to determine that you’re working.

54:03 Frank: Yeah. Self-employment is going to be the same as just having somebody hire you, if you’re just working, but only working for yourself. If it looks like that, if you could do the same thing that you’re doing for yourself for an employer, then I would tell you, even me who tries to navigate along the lines of edges of immigration law, I would say you can’t do that because they’re going to accuse you of working here or violating your status. I think what you have to remember is, as Sheena said, your F-1 is given to you to study, and so if it’s not obvious that you can do it CPT, OPT, on-campus employment, economic hardship, then you really have to understand the decisions you make sometimes will toe the line and you need to mitigate the possibility of being accused of violating your status. And the only way to do that is conversations with your DSO, conversations with an immigration attorney. A lot of attorneys offer free consultations. Even if you have to spend $100 to $200 to speak to an attorney, I know that you’re doing it because it’s already a difficult situation, but just come armed with some questions and that $200, if it saves your status, I think will be well worth it.

55:31 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for mentioning that as the next step, when you’re thinking about is this kind of activity okay or not. Those two resources — speak to a DSO, speak to an immigration attorney — I’m glad you threw out that number because yeah, $100-$200 is a significant amount of money, but it’s not $1,000 it’s not $10,000. I’m glad to get that sort of order of magnitude.

Additional Workarounds, Advice, and Resources

55:51 Emily: Are there any other workarounds that we have not already brought up? Because we’ve already brought up the economic hardship, which there’s different trends in that, may not be as viable as before. Sheena, you brought up CPT, OPT, maybe there’s some creative solution there. And also both of you mentioned changing visa types just away from the F-1. Any other workarounds that we haven’t mentioned so far?

56:15 Sheena: I would push for scholarships. We have a pretty extensive workshop on how to apply for scholarships. There’s so much money out there that actually doesn’t get used and I think a lot of students, especially if they’re on a full ride or like a full tuition waiver, they’re not necessarily thinking of how else can I get a scholarship or grant. There are outside ways I think to get a little bit of extra money without even touching the work world. And I think on top of that with COVID and with everything going on right now, a lot of institutions do have emergency funds. So if it really is a matter of, “Hey, I may not be able to afford rent this month” or “Hey, I, I need groceries,” I think reaching out to your institution, they are aware that students are struggling right now, particularly now, so having that conversation again with your DSO or with your financial aid office, or even your campus ministry. There’s a lot of different resources on campus that are meant to help to support students. If you find that you’re, you’re kind of on that cusp, then that’s what I would recommend.

57:23 Sheena: I also want to put a plugin for stay away from Instagram. I’ve had this question billions of times I feel like. The product placement, being a brand ambassador, getting a few things, even only fans — all of those, that free merch, a lot of times it’s not free merch. Those product placements, a lot of times if they’re mailing you something, they’re going to 1099 you later on. Just be very, very wary if you’re messing around with any of those social media platforms. Those companies that are trying to get people to be influencers, they do not care how they’re taxing you. They will burn you hard if you’re not paying attention and asking questions before you accept something free.

58:09 Emily: Okay. I’m so glad you brought that up as like a potential other, the influencer model for gaining what is normally called passive income, but there’s certainly a lot of work as well that goes into that. Are you saying it’s more of a problem on the tax front or more of a problem on the hours you spend doing it front?

58:26 Sheena: Our interpretation is on the tax front. You may be getting four bathing suits for free or something, or I don’t know, whatever anybody gets these days. But it may not actually be free. They may actually send you tax documents or their HR may be considering it, that you’re an employee or that you’re a contract worker, when in actuality you just thought you were getting free stuff for posting something. I think you really have to, again, not to make everyone go and hire an attorney, but I think in this realm, in the F-1 world, you cannot be too safe when it comes to planning ahead and doing your research before you jump into something. I think some of the students that I’ve seen gotten in trouble, haven’t asked ahead of time. They haven’t done their research. Or they trusted a friend’s advice who was very well-meaning but may have been from a different country or completely different circumstances, or maybe didn’t have as much to risk or to lose as they do.

59:31 Emily: Okay. Thank you. And Frank final workarounds, or just final other examples and thoughts?

59:36 Frank: Congress just passed a $1.9 trillion package. A lot of that money is going to local governments. The local governments don’t necessarily always make a distinction between the status of the individual. They just want to help the local economy. They’ll do a hold evictions in abeyance rent programs, local programs, and if they don’t make a distinction between it and you don’t have to do anything to obtain the money, then it’s probably okay. I would say, as Sheena mentioned, but just generally speaking, why work if you can get the money for free?

1:00:14 Emily: Yeah. I’m glad we got around to those solutions that are even outside the scope of really our conversation today.

01:00:19 Emily: Okay, so someone listening may be left with more questions than they had at the beginning of the podcast. This is just an introduction to the material. Where would each of you recommend that people go next? Obviously we’ve already talked about talk with your own DSO at your own institution. How does one find an immigration attorney, Frank? Where do people go next?

01:00:39 Frank: Right. So in finding an immigration attorney, my recommendation is to go to aila.org. That stands for American Immigration Lawyers Association. They are the largest immigration lawyer institution in the country. They have over 3000 attorneys or 2,500 members, rather. That is anyone who’s a serious immigration attorney will be a member. You can do that. That’s number one. Each state bar will have board certification lists or people who have to take exams, take classes, practice immigration law, and they’ve been certified by their state bar association. You can look for that particular to your state, wherever you are, but it’s also important to keep in mind that immigration is federal, so you can actually look at any state for a board certified immigration attorney. I would say those two would be two places. You can go to our website, immigrationcases.org. You can follow me on Twitter @alvillarlawpc, and you can post something and I’ll try to give you some general advice and see if I can answer the question. But I think that if you’re going to schedule something with an immigration attorney, aila.org, or looking for a board certified immigration attorney through the state bar website, or the state board of legal specialization would be a great place to start.

01:02:08 Emily: Yes. Thank you. And Sheena, do you have any recommendations for further resources?

01:02:11 Sheena: Yeah, so Study In The States, that’s Department of Homeland Security website. They do have a lot of nitty gritty stuff about your immigration status that your DSO is probably telling you, but just to double-check them, you’re more than welcome to. I would be very wary of forums. De COPT I think is one of the more reputable ones, but they do get some stuff wrong. Quora is absolutely terrible. Yahoo answers, absolutely terrible. Don’t trust your immigration life to that. I think avvo.com, I think it’s where attorneys answer questions, that’s pretty decent. When it comes to investment, I didn’t mention this resource, but our campus uses Sprint Tax. They actually came out with a great blog about investment income for F-1 students and how to file those on taxes. I would definitely work on that one. And immigrationcases.org, Francisco’s website actually has really great content.

01:03:10 Frank: I would also, Sheena mentioned this earlier, but go to your DSO and ask them to reach out to local attorneys or even attorneys from out of town who can do video presentations. That’s an easy marketing tool for attorneys, so a lot of them will jump at it and it can be really helpful to have that perspective because it’s a group setting where maybe there are questions that you haven’t thought of, that one of your classmates can bring up. Reaching out to your DSO to see if they can bring in an attorney or have an attorney present at your college or university.

01:03:43 Emily: Yeah. That’s a wonderful idea.

01:03:44 Sheena: There are great attorneys, as well as Francisco that lots of campuses can reach out to that are more than willing to give their time to talk about all of these topics for free to a group of students.

01:03:59 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s an awesome next step to help, not only you, the listener, but the other people on your campus. Well, this has been just an incredible interview. Thank you both so much for your time. This has been really enlightening for me. I know it has for many of the listeners. I hope it helps be well, see solutions, avoid pitfalls, and yeah. Thank you so much for joining me.

01:04:17 Sheena: Thank you, yes.

01:04:17 Frank: Thanks for having us.

Listener Q&A: Estimated Tax Payments

Question

01:04:26 Emily: Now onto the listener question and answer segment. Today’s question was asked in advance of a live webinar I gave recently for a university client so it is anonymous.

01:04:36 Emily: Here is the question: “I heard that there is a penalty for not having income tax taken automatically from fellowship paychecks. Is there any way for me to withhold some of my pay to cover taxes and avoid the penalty?”

Answer

01:04:50 Emily: Thank you anonymous for this question. It is excellent and you are exactly right. The IRS does expect to receive tax payments throughout the calendar year. And when you’re an employee that’s typically taken care of by your employer through income tax withholding. However, when you’re not an employee, like if you’re on fellowship, most universities do not offer income tax withholding as a benefit. Yet the IRS still expects those payments.

01:05:18 Emily: So what’s the best way to go about getting those payments to the IRS? So, first of all, you should check if your university offers this benefit to non-employees, to fellowship or training grant recipients. While rare, some universities do such as Duke and Johns Hopkins. This most commonly happens when fellowship paychecks are processed through payroll rather than through financial aid. So if your university does process your paychecks through payroll, you can inquire if you’re able to submit a W-4 and have them withhold income tax on your behalf. Now, like I said, that solution is simple, but it’s not that common.

01:05:56 Emily: Next consideration after that is whether you or your spouse has any W-2 income that continues throughout the entire calendar year. So for example, some graduate students have a combination of W2 income, or employee income and fellowship income, or some other kind of award on top of that. If you have that kind of combination income throughout the whole year, all you have to do is submit an updated form W-4 to payroll and request that they withhold more than they had been before out of your W-2 income. How exactly you calculate, how much more they should withhold, we’ll get back to in a moment. This strategy also works well. If you have a spouse who has W2 income, because what the IRS cares about is whether your entire household sent sufficient tax payments into the IRS throughout the year, not whether you did as an individual. So likewise, your spouse could submit an updated form W-4, that indicates a slightly higher withholding rate.

01:06:56 Emily: Now, how do you calculate what you should put on a W-4? And also what do you do if those options are not available to you? Well, really the main way that graduate students and post-docs get their income tax into the IRS if they’re on fellowship and they’re at university doesn’t offer this kind of benefit is through the estimated tax system. The estimated tax system exists to collect income tax payments throughout the year from individuals who don’t have employers withholding income tax for them, such as fellowship recipients, but also such as self-employed people or people who have passive income.

01:07:31 Emily: What you need to do is pull up form 1040-ES go to page eight, which is the estimated tax worksheet, and fill out that worksheet for your income for the entire calendar year. Basically you are going to do kind of a high level draft of your tax return in this one-page form. When you get down to the end of the form, it will tell you, this is how much income tax you can expect to owe this year and whether or not that rises to the level that the IRS requires you to make estimated tax payments.

01:08:05 Emily: My kind of rule of thumb is if you’re on fellowship and you have no W-2 withholding or anything like that, if you’re on fellowship for an entire calendar year and you’re a grad student, or post-doc, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to be required to make quarterly estimated tax payments, but the worksheet will tell you for sure. If you have fellowship income for only part of the year, like you switched funding sources mid year, then a little bit more borderline, you definitely need to fill out the worksheet to see whether or not it would be required of you.

01:08:31 Emily: If quarterly estimated tax is required of you after you fill the worksheet, it will tell you what the amount of your payment should be up to four times per year. So you can manually go right before the due dates and make those payments. They’re in mid-April, mid-June, mid-September, and mid-January. Or near the beginning of the year, you can set up automated payments for all four of those payments throughout the year, if you know, it’s going to be consistent. Form 1040-ES will give you various payment options, but personally, I think the easiest one is just to go to irs.gov/payments.

01:09:03 Emily: Now, if the worksheet tells you that you’re not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments what’s going to happen is you’re going to make the full tax payment that you owe when you file your tax return in the next year. So you do need to be prepared because you may owe quite a large lump sum at that time. The best practice for preparing to make these payments, whether once per quarter or once per year is to set aside the money that you expect to pay in tax from each one of the paychecks that you receive. I recommend using a separate, dedicated savings account.

01:09:34 Emily: Now, what if you’re looking at the estimated tax worksheet, and you’re really not clear about how to fill it out — looks pretty complicated to you, you’re not sure how to answer all the questions, you don’t know how it applies to your specific unique fellowship situation. I have a resource for you go to pfforphds.com/qetax. That page will tell you about an asynchronous workshop that I created. It’s a bunch of videos, a spreadsheet, and an opportunity to attend a live Q and A call. And I’ve included in the videos answers to a lot of the common questions I receive about fellowship income and quarterly estimate tax, such as how to handle things when you switch on or off a fellowship during the course of the year. So that resource is there for you, if you need it.

01:10:20 Emily: By the way, the last part of the question about the penalty, if you are required to pay your income tax quarterly and you do not do so, yes, the IRS might assess a penalty to you. It’s not necessarily anything to freak out about. It’s probably going to be on the order of dozens of dollars, not hundreds of dollars, but still, I think it’s best to avoid that. If you’re required to pay quarterly estimated tax, just go ahead and make those payments, even though it’s a little bit of a pain. Better to do that than to be hit with a fine, in my opinion. All right. Thank you again to anonymous for that question. If you would like to submit a question to be answered in a future episode, please go to pfforphds.com/podcast and follow the instructions you find there. I love answering questions, so please submit yours.

Outtro

01:11:04 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episodes show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast and instructions for entering the book giveaway contest, and submitting a question for the Q&A segment. 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 podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. If you leave a review, be sure to send it to me. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list serve, or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover 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. 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.

Turn Your Largest Liability into Your Largest Asset with House Hacking

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In this episode, Emily and her guest, Sam Hogan, explain how house hacking can benefit graduate students and early-career PhDs. House hacking is when you purchase a property, live in it, and rent out part of it. While not possible in every housing market, house hacking is within reach for many graduate students and certainly postdocs and PhD with Real Jobs. In the first part of the episode, Emily teaches some of the most salient concepts from The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop. She also presents some real numbers from potential house hacks in college towns. In the second part of the episode, Emily interviews Sam Hogan, a senior loan officer at Prime Lending who specializes in writing mortgages for graduate students and PhDs, especially those with fellowship income. Sam gives additional details about how an early-career PhD can qualify for a mortgage for a house hack.

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Links Mentioned in This Episode

grad student house hack

Teaser

00:00 Sam: The best example, which has happened I would say many times over, is in North Carolina. One student purchasing that, you know, the regular stipend amount of around $32,000 a year, he bought it at $200,000, put $10,000 down was still within his debt-income ratio. And when he started off the process, he did say he was going to house hack.

Introduction

00:28 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 8, Episode 4, and I have a different episode structure for you today. The entire episode is devoted to exploring house hacking, which is when you purchase a property, live in it, and rent out part of it. We’re going to focus on how house hacking can benefit graduate students and early-career PhDs, and how it is possible for more people than you might expect. In the first part of the episode, I teach some of the most salient concepts from The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop. I also point to a few real examples of potential profitable house hacks that I looked up this week. In the second part of the episode, I interview Sam Hogan, a senior loan officer at Prime Lending who specializes in writing mortgages for graduate students and PhDs, especially those with fellowship income.

01:26 Emily: Sam gives additional details about how an early-career PhD can qualify for a mortgage for a house hack. Sam has been featured on two previous episodes and is now an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs. Reading this book came at a great time for me, actually, as my husband and I are taking steps to buy our first home within the next few months. It’s given me a different perspective on real estate investing for sure and the value of your primary residence. I’m very excited to share this material with you. Our giveaway contest is actually for the book Sam and I read for this episode! In January 2021, I’m giving away one copy of The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop (affiliate link—thanks for using!), which is the Personal Finance for PhDs Community Book Club selection for March 2021. Everyone who enters the contest during January will have a chance to win a copy of this book.

02:18 Emily: If you would like to enter the giveaway contest, please rate AND REVIEW this podcast on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot of your review, and email it to me at emily at PFforPhDs dot com. I’ll choose a winner at the end of January from all the entries. You can find full instructions at PFforPhDs.com/podcast. The podcast received a review this week from Emily B. The review reads: “This podcast has been so helpful to me as I apply to graduate school!! So many of these things aren’t talked about but Emily is great at explaining all of these concepts and interviewing people who have great advice.” Thank you to Emily B for this lovely review, and best of luck to you this spring! Without further ado, here’s my review of the concepts in The House Hacking Strategy.

Review of The House Hacking Strategy

03:08 Emily: The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop (affiliate link—thanks for using) was published in 2019 through Bigger Pockets Publishing. Bigger Pockets is a popular online real estate investment community. House hacking, which I’ll define momentarily, is popular among this community, and Curelop presents a very enthusiastic and rosy picture of the strategy. For the duration of this episode, I want you to allow yourself to dream a little. I know and you know that house hacking is not possible or desirable for many graduate students and PhDs for a variety of reasons. But just for the next few minutes, I want you to suspend your doubts. We’ll come back to reality in a little bit and talk over some numbers. For the moment, instead of confirming for yourself all the reasons that you can’t house hack, ask yourself, “How and when might I be able to make this strategy work for me?” If you are convinced that you want to house hack, you may just find that a fire is lit underneath you and you can make it happen sooner than later.

04:07 Emily: In fact, I did some searching on Redfin and Craigslist and found three properties near three R1 universities that I think might be profitable house hacks for single graduate students. I’ll present those numbers after I go through some of the material from The House Hacking Strategy. I’m going to start my teaching in the same place that Curelop starts his book. I’ll read some quotes and summarize some paragraphs from pages 23 and 24, the start of Chapter 1. Quote “What is your largest expense? The majority of the United States population would not hesitate to reply with “housing.” Whether you are paying rent or paying down a mortgage alongside with taxes, insurance, maintenance, and all the other expenses associated with owning a home, your house is likely what you spend most of your money on each month.” End quote.

Definitions: Asset and Liability

04:54 Emily: Curelop then shares the definitions that Robert Kiyosaki uses in his books, which is that an asset is anything that puts money into your pocket every month, and a liability is anything that takes money from you every month. Under this definition, your home is a liability, whether you own or rent. Quote “Arguably, the biggest misconception that most Americans have is that their home is their largest asset. When, in fact, it is their largest liability. However, there are some exceptions. A few of them are exemplified at the conclusion of each chapter. You will read fellow house hackers’ stories in this book who have used strategies outlined here to turn what could be their largest liability into their largest asset. “They strategically designed their lifestyle so housing is not their largest expense. As a matter of fact, through the strategies I talk about in this book, they have completely eliminated housing as an expense and they make money from their living situations every single month. And yes, their lives look just like yours. From the outside, you would not think that they are any different because they have days jobs, errands to run, and families to care for.” End quote.

Turning Your Largest Liability Into Your Largest Asset

06:03 Emily: Turning your largest liability into your largest asset—that is an incredibly powerful idea. How do they do that? Let’s define house hacking. House hacking is when you buy a home, live in it, and rent out part of it. The classic house hack, according to this book, is buying a multifamily property (a duplex, triplex, or four-plex), living in one unit, and renting out the others. In that case, your tenants are your neighbors. Another variation of house hacking is to buy a single-family home and rent out the bedrooms that you do not occupy. In that case, your tenants are your roommates. There are all kinds of reasons that house hacking is powerful from a real estate investment standpoint, which The House Hacking Strategy covers very well. I’m taking a different approach, which is speaking to people who are not necessarily enamored with real estate investing, but rather want to find a way to reduce or eliminate their largest monthly expense: their rent or their mortgage payment.

07:01 Emily: Whenever I speak about frugality and reducing expenses, I ask that people first consider how they can reduce their housing expenses, even though accomplishing that can be difficult and expensive upfront. I’ve published through this podcast and highlighted in my seminars creative strategies such as serving as a resident advisor, living in subsidized or low-income housing, renting your home on AirBnB, and house hacking, although I haven’t used that term before. I published two full interviews with grad students who rent out rooms in their homes, which I’ve linked from the show notes, and some of my other guests have mentioned in passing that they use the strategy.

Benefits of a Successful House Hack

07:37 Emily: If you set up a profitable house hack, you will either: 1) Bring in enough rent to completely cover your mortgage and reserves, which is the money you need to put aside monthly for future home maintenance and vacancies, or 2) Bring in enough rent that your personal housing expense is less than what you would have paid in rent had you not house hacked. If you were to move out and rent your room, the total rent from the property would be more than the mortgage and reserves. A minimally successful house hack reduces your personal housing expense. A very successful house hack puts money in your pocket on a monthly basis. I believe house hacking is a hugely powerful strategy for PhD students and a great one for postdocs and other early-career PhDs. It’s accessible to many more early-career PhDs than those who currently pursue it.

08:26 Emily: I’m going to focus in this episode on single PhD students and their numbers since they are the most difficult case. If you have a postdoc income or Real Job income, getting into a house hack will be easier, and likewise if you have two incomes to work with instead of one. I want to throw in a word of caution that this episode is just a short summary of part of a book that is not super in-depth either. So while I want to encourage you to look into this strategy, you must do your due diligence in your local market before taking the step to actually buy a home.

Why is House Hacking a Great Fit for Grad Students?

08:59 Emily: So why is house hacking a great fit for graduate students? First, a traditional grad student fits perfectly into the ideal demographic of house hackers: people without children who are willing to live with other people. That’s not to say that you can’t house hack if you do have children, but it might look different for you. Second, a grad student basically by definition lives near a university, which boasts a large pool of potential tenants. I think it would be straightforward to set up a house hack where all your tenants are fellow grad students, the way Dr. Matt Hotze from Season 3 Episode 3 did. Third, grad students have limited avenues for increasing their incomes. Yes, it is possible and you should do what you can within the rules of your visa, department, funding, etc. House hacking is a way to increase your income without violating the letter or spirit of any of the restrictions placed on you and will almost certainly take less time than a side hustle for what you earn.

Curelop’s Five House Hacking Strategies

09:56 Emily: Curelop presents five house hacking strategies. On one side of the spectrum, you have the strategy that necessitates the smallest lifestyle change but is also the least profitable. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the strategy that is the most profitable, but that also necessitates the largest lifestyle change. From least profitable to most profitable, the strategies are: 1. Rent out an accessory dwelling unit on your property 2. Purchase a multi-unit property and renting out the units you do not occupy 3. Purchase a home and rent out the rooms you do not occupy 4. Rent out your own bedroom and sleep in your living room 5. Rent out your whole residence and live in a trailer or RV in your driveway If you’re like me, strategies 4 and 5 do not sound very appealing! I’m going to focus on strategy 3 in this episode, but it’s perfectly fine if another strategy is the best fit for you.

House Hacking: Ongoing Costs

10:56 Emily: Let’s talk more about both sides of the house hacking ledger now, first your ongoing costs and then how you make money. On the costs side, every month you need to make your mortgage payment, which consists of principal paydown of your loan, interest, property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and probably private mortgage insurance or PMI. You might also have a homeowner’s association payment. Another cost, which is irregular, is the cost of maintenance and repairs on the home and also renovation if you choose to do that. Curelop recommends putting aside every month a few hundred dollars—what he calls reserves—for home repairs and also to help you make your mortgage payment when you are between tenants. He also says you should have $10,000 at a minimum in your reserves to start with. If you don’t have $10,000 yet, he suggests securing access to a line of credit in case something comes up that you can’t cover with your existing reserves.

House Hacking: Net Worth Increases

11:41 Emily: That covers the ongoing costs of operating your house hack. I’ll get to the up-front costs a little later. Now for the exciting part: how your net worth increases while you house hack. First and most importantly, you will collect rent from your tenants. As I said earlier, this rent should either completely cover your mortgage payment and reserves or at least reduce your personal housing expense. Second, each month as you make your mortgage payments, you will pay down the principal balance of your loan. Now, in the first few years after you take out the loan, only a very small fraction of your payment goes to principal due to the amortization schedule; the great majority goes to interest, tax, insurance, etc. So principal paydown is a relatively small factor early on in the mortgage. Third, your home is likely to appreciate in value over time. When you sell, it will probably be worth more than what you bought it for. Appreciation comes in two forms, natural and forced.

Natural and Forced Appreciation

12:48 Emily: Natural appreciation is the general increase in real estate prices over time. According to Curelop, historically real estate has appreciated 6% per year on average across the US. Now, as we all remember from the housing crisis, different real estate markets do appreciate at different rates, and depreciation is also possible if you get really unlucky with your timing. So while natural appreciation is likely to be in effect over the long term, you can’t count on it over the short term. Forced appreciation is when you do something to a property to increase its value, such as finishing a basement to add bedrooms and a bathroom. You of course have much more control over forced appreciation than natural appreciation. If you choose your renovation judiciously, you can increase the value of your property by more than what you spent. Appreciation can rival rent collection as the most positive factor in increasing your net worth through house hacking, but it’s only realized when you sell the home. Fourth, there are tax benefits to rental real estate. Curelop doesn’t go into much detail on this in the book and I’m not familiar with them so I won’t elaborate either, but this is another way that your house hack is less costly to you than owning a home that you don’t rent out.

Seven Common Objections to House Hacking

14:00 Emily: I hope the financial advantages of house hacking have sufficiently excited you about the idea. Curelop also presents and then counters seven common objections to house hacking. I’ll list all seven, but only go into the arguments against a few of them. Just know that if the others are hurdles for you, he does address them in the book. 1. House hacking is more work than renting. 2. When you house hack, you will share space with other people. 3. You need to keep a professional relationship with your tenants. 4. You have to live in an investment property, which might not be as nice of a location as you could afford. 5. The housing market could tank. 6. You have to put more money down to house hack than your up-front rental costs. 7. Your tenants might fail to pay you. My overall observation of this list is that these objections are all valid. They all have at least a kernel of truth or a possibility of occurring. I think it would be really helpful to identify every adverse event that could occur and come up with a plan for how you would respond. Going through that exercise might make you feel better about moving forward with house hacking instead of just being generally nervous about the downside risk.

Counterpoints to Some Common Objections to House Hacking

15:11 Emily: I want to add some thoughts to a few of the aforementioned objections. 2. “When you house hack, you will share space with other people.” Having roommates is pretty standard in graduate school for single people. Even if you could afford to rent a place on your own, it wouldn’t be strange to choose to have roommates instead. I’ve also known plenty of PhDs who continue to live with roommates even after they couple up or get married. I think this is less of an objection for our population than others, at least up until the point that you have children. 3. “You need to keep a professional relationship with your tenants.” and 7. “Your tenants might fail to pay you.” My fantasy house hack for a graduate student is to rent to other grad student peers and to be friends or at least friendly with your tenants. It is important to maintain professionalism at least within the bounds of your landlord-tenant relationship. You should be a great landlord, responsive and fair. I hope your tenants will respond in kind and not try to take advantage of your personal relationship. Curelop devotes a whole chapter to screening tenants, which as a new landlord I think you should follow to the letter. Of course, this book was published prior to 2020. The possibility of tenants not paying and not being able to evict them probably didn’t occur to many landlords, but now it’s on everyone’s radar. As a house hacker, you should make sure that you are financially capable of paying the mortgage even if your tenants are unable to pay rent for an extended period of time. If your university offers funding guarantees, I think that’s worth asking about on a rental application. You can’t prevent a tenant from misusing their money to the extent that they are unable to pay rent, but you can make sure that their income is reliable.

Four Considerations to Purchasing a House Hack

16:56 Emily: What does it take, financially, to purchase a house hack? Is it feasible where you live now? Let’s consider four elements. 1. The cost of properties appropriate for house hacking 2. The price to rent a room 3. Your stipend or salary 4. Your savings First, how expensive of a home could you buy on your income or your household’s income? Interest rates are so low now that rules of thumb like “Your mortgage shouldn’t exceed three times your income” have become outdated. Really, I’m asking two different questions here: 1) How large of a mortgage will you qualify for? and 2) How much of a mortgage would you feel comfortable taking out? Some house hackers will take out the largest mortgage they qualify for because they are counting on rental income to help pay it, but you might be more conservative, as I discussed before.

17:48 Emily: I’m going to talk this over with Sam Hogan a bit more in the second half of this episode. According to what he told us in our last interview, Season 5 Episode 17, if an applicant has no debt and excellent credit, they could qualify for a mortgage of four to five times their yearly income. If you have debt or merely good credit, the multiple will be smaller. Now, whether taking out that much debt is prudent is up to you. If you weren’t house hacking, I would say no, but if you are, it depends on your risk tolerance. Now you have a ballpark idea of the size of mortgage you could take out. You of course need to work with a mortgage originator like Sam to calculate your exact number. But going forward with the ballpark number, are homes available for less than or around that mortgage amount? Or is it way too low to buy anything? You can use a site like Redfin or Zillow to figure out what a house hack would cost you. If you’re looking for a townhouse or single-family home to house hack, perhaps you would look for a 2 bedroom place at a minimum. Broadly speaking, the more bedrooms you can purchase, the more rental income you’ll be able to generate.

Consider Cost-of-Living

18:56 Emily: If you live in a high cost of living area and you’re trying to purchase a home with one grad student income, you are likely to find that everything is out of reach. It’s disappointing, but don’t give up on the idea of house hacking for later in life. If you find that you can maybe afford to buy something, the next question is whether a house hack, in particular, is viable. Can you rent out the bedrooms that you won’t occupy for enough to at least reduce if not eliminate your housing cost? The answer is not an automatic yes for the type of home you can afford. If you’re not familiar with rental prices by the room in your area, check Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Having verified that house hacking is viable on your income and in your rental market, we come to the last piece of the puzzle, which is the down payment and closing costs. In the interview with Sam coming up next, we discuss the down payment requirements of various mortgage programs. If you’re not a veteran, you’re looking at 3% at minimum, but Sam suggests up to 10% in some cases. So for a low-cost property, the down payment could be as little as a few thousand dollars.

Five-Year Rule of Thumb

20:02 Emily: Curelop states in the book that closing costs are typically paid by the seller, not the buyer, so the money the buyer has to come to the table with above the down payment is rather minimal, perhaps a few hundred or a thousand dollars. Even if you don’t have the savings required to fund a home purchase in your bank account right now, how quickly could you come up with the money if a fire were lit underneath you? Over the course of a year, a vigorous side hustle, a higher-paying fellowship, or a summer internship could do the trick. Since I mentioned a year, I want to address the five-year rule of thumb. I know that many grad students and postdocs feel a ticking clock when it comes to considering real estate purchases. Many of us expect to move with every new career stage we attain. The five-year rule of thumb implies that you may not even break even if you buy a home instead of renting during grad school or your postdoc because of the high transaction costs that come with buying and selling and that you can’t count on natural appreciation over short time frames.

21:00 Emily: What I found interesting about The House Hacking Strategy is that it concentrates on the return on investment that can be achieved within one year. The reason for the focus on that timeline is that owner-occupancy mortgage loans require you to live in the property for one year. An aggressive house hacker might move every year to a new house hack, collecting rental real estate along the way instead of selling. The point that I want you to take from this is that you don’t have to listen to rules of thumb or rely on appreciation to overcome the transaction costs of real estate. Instead, you can use the rental income from your tenants. A house hack might be viable for you even if you plan to remain in your current city for only a couple of years—you just have to look at the numbers. Also, it’s important to plan your exit before you purchase your house hack. Are you open to turning it into a fully rented property after you move? Do the numbers still work if you have to hire a property management company? Or if you are sure that you will sell, you need to account for the high closing costs in your calculations.

Thought Exercise: Three Example House Hacks

22:02 Emily: Now let’s get into those numbers I mentioned earlier! As a quick exercise, I looked at the list of universities I’ve given or am scheduled to give webinars for in the 2020-2021 academic year to see whether house hacking was viable in those cities and what the numbers might be. Here was my process: 1) I searched Redfin for the university’s city with a max asking price of $150,000. I typically set a 3 bedroom search minimum, but sometimes adjusted up to four or down to two. I picked a house within a few miles of the university, something that looked move-in ready and not the cheapest available. 2) I searched craigslist for the area the house was in to get an idea of rental prices by the room and picked a price in the middle to low end of what I saw. 3) I went back to Redfin to look at the estimated mortgage payment. I set that the buyer would put 5% down and get a 3% interest rate.

23:03 Emily: I’m now going to share with you the properties and numbers I found in three of the cities I looked at. Of course, this was a cursory search, so my selections and numbers might be off due to a lack of local insight. Just consider this a ballpark estimate. Also, please note that I’m doing this exercise in January 2021, and both the renting and buying markets are really weird right now due to the pandemic and it being outside of the high home buying season. If you do this search even just a couple of months from now, it might look totally different, let alone a couple of years.

23:39 Emily: Example #1 is in East Lansing, Michigan, near Michigan State University. The property I picked is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1500 square foot single family home, and the asking price is $89,900. A 5% down payment is $4,495, and the monthly mortgage payment would be $752. I picked $400 per month as the rental price per room. That means that renting out two of the bedrooms covers the mortgage payment while you live in the third. After setting aside a couple hundred dollars per month for reserves, you have reduced your own housing cost by about $200 per month. Over the course of one year, assuming that your irregular expenses did not exceed your reserves, you would have reduced your own housing expense by $2,400. Over five years, that turns into reducing your own housing expense by $12,000, and that’s without taking into account possible rent increases.

24:43 Emily: Example #2 is in Louisville, Kentucky, near the University of Louisville. The property I picked is a 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 1300 square foot single-family home, and the asking price is $134,000. A 5% down payment is $6,700, and the monthly mortgage payment would be $777. I picked $500 per month as the rental price per room. That means that renting out two of the bedrooms covers the mortgage payment and perhaps all of the reserves. You would live for free in the third bedroom and pocket the $500/month rent from the fourth bedroom. Over the course of one year, assuming that your irregular expenses did not exceed your reserves, you would have taken in $6,000 in rent above your mortgage payment and reduced your own housing expense by $6,000. Over five years, that turns into $30,000 in rent collected and reducing your own housing expense by $30,000, and that’s without taking into account possible rent increases.

25:48 Emily: Example #3 is just outside St. Louis, Missouri, near the Washington University in St. Louis. The property I picked is a 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 1800 square foot single-family home, and the asking price is $150,000. A 5% down payment is $7,500, and the monthly mortgage payment would be $925. I picked $600 per month as the rental price per room. That means that renting out two of the bedrooms covers the mortgage payment and perhaps all of the reserves. You would live for free in the third bedroom and pocket the $600/month rent from the fourth bedroom. Over the course of one year, assuming that your irregular expenses did not exceed your reserves, you would have taken in $7,200 in rent above your mortgage payment and reduced your own housing expense by $7,200. Over five years, that turns into $36,000 in rent collected and reducing your own housing expense by $36,000, and that’s without taking into account possible rent increases.

26:53 Emily: Now, if those numbers don’t motivate some of you in low- to medium-cost of living areas, I don’t know what will! You can literally buy an income stream that will benefit you to the tune of thousands or over ten thousand dollars per year for a few thousand dollars, an extra hour here or there, and the willingness to take a risk. And that’s not even counting the principal paydown, tax benefits, and potential appreciation! Keep in mind that all of my examples are completely made up. I’m just trying to ballpark some numbers and show that this is possible in some places on one grad student’s income. Curelop publishes the numbers of a real house hacker at the end of each chapter. For transparency, I didn’t examine every city on my list of candidates. I skipped the California ones, I only briefly glanced at Austin, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts to verify that $150,000 won’t buy you anything near the universities right now. I went down a road a bit in Providence, Rhode Island before crossing it off my list. But I thought these three examples were good ones. Purchasing may very well be possible in those other markets if you have more than a single grad student stipend to work with, or perhaps at a time of year when there is higher volume on the market. After the commercial break, I’ll be back with my interview with Sam Hogan.

Commercial

28:15 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you know that you want support in accomplishing a big financial goal this spring, I recommend my group coaching program, The Wealthy PhD. You and I will meet one-on-one to identify and plot a course toward your big financial goal. Past participants have opened IRAs, set up systems of targeted savings, started budgeting, systematically implemented frugal tactics, and more. Every week for eight weeks, you’ll participate in a small accountability group that I facilitate. The group will help keep you on track to meet small weekly goals that add up to your big goal. Prospective grad students, this would be a perfect cycle to join as I and the other participants can give you a ton of support and financial insight as you interview and ultimately choose your PhD program. The deadline for discounted early bird registration for The Wealthy PhD is Saturday, January 30th, 2021. Visit pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD to learn more and register today. Now, back to our interview.

Welcome Back, Sam! How Can People Find You?

29:26 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today my brother, Sam Hogan. Sam is a Senior Loan Officer at Prime Lending, and we’ve been having conversations over the last several years about how grad students and postdocs, especially, can get mortgages when their income is maybe it’s fellowship instead of employee. Maybe it’s temporary instead of a long-term thing. We’ve had these conversations before. So if you’re, you know, liking what you hear today from Sam, please go back and listen to season two, episode five, that’s a two-part interview. The first part is with a person who actually house hacked, Jonathan Sun. And then the second part of the interview is with Sam. And then Sam was also back in season five, episode 17, where we talked a lot more about this issue of fellowships and being able to qualify for a mortgage with fellowship income. So Sam’s back today to talk about house hacking. I gave him an assignment. I told him to read The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop along with me so that we could have a conversation about it and get his perspective as a loan officer. So Sam, welcome back to the podcast.

30:32 Sam: Thank you for having me happy to be here.

30:34 Emily: Can you upfront say your contact information, everything for the audience?

30:38 Sam: Yep. My cell phone is (540) 478-5803. And then my email is Samuel.Hogan@primelending.com.

What Did You Think About the Book?

30:48 Emily: Yeah. And you’ve been getting a lot of referrals. A lot of people have been finding you through the podcast episodes you’ve done before. Graduate students and post-docs and early-career PhDs. So we’ll talk about a few of those sort of case studies in a little bit, but first I just wanted to get your general impressions about the book on house hacking. I know that you are not a house hacker, although you are a landlord, but yeah, just what did you think about this book and this idea generally?

31:16 Sam: Very motivational. Definitely on the aggressive side of house hacking, giving suggestions, like living in a trailer in your driveway. Not something I would do personally, but it’s a step in the right direction. I mean, people need to know that it’s okay to live in a house for just one year and then buy another property the following year. So I liked it a lot. There were some accuracy things that I would’ve changed just regarding loan approval, but the loan guidelines and laws we have to stay within, they change annually. So there are always little tweaks and adjustments, especially 2020 was a funky year. So they made some higher credit score requirements and things like that. Generally speaking.

Did it Make You Want to Try House Hacking?

32:01 Emily: I think that’s a really good way of approaching this book. I do see it more of like a motivational book and like an overview, but maybe not once you drill down into the specifics, like, yeah, it might not be accurate year to year because things do change. The book was published in 2019, but as you said, 2020 kind of upended, a lot of things we’re recording this interview in January, 2021. So yeah, I totally agree about the book. And did it make you want to try house hacking?

32:27 Sam: It did. And then they also made me reflect on what I had when I was still living in a one-bedroom, one bathroom, how I actually rented out the common area to a buddy who needed a place to live.

32:39 Emily: Oh yeah, because you were house hacking for a little while. I forgot about that. Because your place was only a one-bedroom, but you did have a tenant.

32:46 Sam: Yeah, he was just switching jobs. He’s also in finance. And yeah, he ended up just bunking with me. And I think it was only like $4,000 for the year, but Hey, I mean that’s $4,000 I didn’t have to start out with.

Real Example of Potential for House Hacking

33:03 Emily: Yeah, definitely. And before this point in the interview, I’ll have told the listeners a lot of the principles from the book. So we don’t have to go through all of those in detail, but I wanted to really get from your unique perspective, some ideas about how a graduate student or how someone on a lower income can actually make this house hacking strategy work. Of course it will not work in every housing market. We know that. The incomes for graduate students and postdocs are too low to make it work in high cost-of-living areas. But there is a chance of it working in lower cost-of-living areas even on one income. But especially if you did have two incomes or if maybe instead of a graduate student or a post-doc, you know, there are some different situations where this does work out. So I wanted to get from you, you know, from all the clients that you’ve worked with a few examples of people who either were planning on house hacking, and you knew that at the time you were making the loan or who bought a large enough place that they could house hack if they wanted to. So can you talk us through a couple of those examples?

34:03 Sam: Yeah. So I mean the best example which has happened, I would say many times over, is in North Carolina. One student purchasing that, you know, the regular stipend amount of around $32,000 a year. I actually just looked up the property it had appreciated. He bought it at 200,000, put 10,000 down, was still within his debt-income ratio. He closed in April last year, and when he started off the process, he did say he was going to house hack. When I followed up with him a few months after closing, he didn’t end up renting out any rooms. He enjoyed having those extra spaces. So I’ll probably check up with him in the spring and see if he had changed his mind. But, I mean, it was a four-bedroom place, so he definitely had the ability to do it, but then just didn’t execute after closing because I guess he was comfortable with the payment enough.

35:02 Emily: I do want to emphasize that whenever you’re planning a house hack, it’s really vital to be confident that you could make the mortgage payment without any rent coming in. Maybe in the case like this person, you just decided not to rent out the rooms, ultimately your life circumstances change, or you want your privacy or whatever. Or it could be that, Hey, maybe you have a tenant, but that tenant is not paying you. And that’s happened a lot in 2020. It’s really a difficult situation to resolve for everyone. And so you need to be sure that, you know, if you scrimp and save and you reduce your other expenses, you would be able to make that mortgage payment still. So the example that you just spoke about and you said this has happened multiple times in North Carolina. I know that you’ve been working with a lot of graduate students in the Triangle, at UNC and at Duke, NC State, to make these loans happen in that area.

Loan Qualifications for a ~$32K/year Stipend

35:49 Emily: So let’s just take that market for example. So what size of a mortgage could a graduate student, let’s say, possibly take out? Like, I guess what I’m asking is, you know, they’re looking at their stipend, someone who isn’t ready to approach someone like you, a loan officer yet, but they’re looking at their stipend, they’re making 30 or $32,000. Like you said if everything were ideal in the rest of their finances, like let’s say they’re debt-free and they have a great credit score. How large of a loan could that person qualify for? Because that’s really kind of the question here is, are you going to be able to qualify for a large enough loan to make house hacking a possibility in your housing market?

36:27 Sam: So the highest I’ve been able to approve without a co-signer is 220,000. That was also in the Research Triangle.

36:37 Emily: So $220,000 on about a 30, $32,000 kind of stipend.

36:41 Sam: $32,000, this student did not have any student loans that were deferred. She was pretty much debt-free except for a few credit cards.

36:51 Emily: Okay. So pretty, really, really good solid portfolio otherwise. So just for the listeners, like house hacking could still be possible if you have those other kinds of debt, you’re just going to qualify for a little less. So it just has to work in your housing market.

37:04 Sam: Right. I mean, it’s important to understand that, like, even though you might have a similar situation to somebody else, it’s never exactly the same. So you want to have someone pull your credit, look at your entire financial picture in order to give you the results catered to your ability to purchase. You don’t want to just assume you’re going to fall into a bucket and everything will be okay. Because there are some very important details that go into this approval and those have to be evaluated by an expert. There’s just some things you can evaluate on your own, especially things like mortgage insurance, what will be allowable for your down payment, you know, in order to make your ratios work and make sure you’re within the guidelines.

37:49 Emily: So I think what I would encourage the listeners to do, if they are enthusiastic about this idea of house hacking but they’re not sure if they’re going to make it work is look really high level at what is your income and then what are houses, at least probably a two-bedroom home of some kind, selling for in your area. And if you’re within like striking distance of like, maybe I could get a loan, possibly, I’m not sure, for enough to make this work. That’s the time to approach someone like you that is to say, to approach you because you’re the expert in this subject and ask, well, how much can I be approved for? And then figure out whether or not there are houses in your area that would help you make this strategy work.

Different Types of Loans Available in the Marketplace

38:27 Emily: So let’s talk about the down payment for a moment because you just brought that up and we’d actually, didn’t talk about this much in our last episode. And it’s an important factor to consider. I would the two big hurdles for especially graduate students to buy homes are: one, qualifying for a big enough mortgage on their low income, and two, having enough of a down payment. So would you just really quickly run through the different types of loans that there are available in the marketplace and how much of a down payment is required for each of them?

Sam (38:55): Yeah. So some of your most popular loans, FHA loans and conventional loans. FHA a classic first-time home buyer basically program. It’s insured by the Federal Housing Administration, and the down-payment is three and a half percent. So they make it very achievable. There’s some employment and income that’s not accepted for FHA. So you want to check with your lender. And then when we get over to the good stuff, the conventional loans, taken out, allow you to go as little as 3% down and that can come from a gift from a family member or a friend. It doesn’t have to be your own verified funds. More commonly, Epic FHA loans are not a good fit for fellowship income, but if you have regular W2 income or some other employment, maybe a second job you’ve had for a year or two, this is also a good option.

39:45 Sam: Now if you have excellent credit, you’re going to want to get into the conventional loan bucket because it’s going to have lower mortgage insurance. It allows as little as 3% down. When we’re thinking about stipend income at $32,000 a year, you going to want to lean towards 5%–or 10%–down to make your ratios work. This is all going to depend on working with, you know, someone you trust so they can evaluate your personal qualifications. Okay. But outside of those two popular loan products, we have VA loans. So if you’re a veteran and you’re back in school, VA loans are a piece of cake. They require no down payment. There’s no mortgage insurance. There are a lot of good other good benefits. Like the VA loan can be assumed by another person and take over that low rate that you’ve already established.

40:39 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. So we’re talking about 3% down, as little as 3% down for conventional, although you’re recommending five or 10% as maybe a better fit, depending on the person. FHA loans, three and a half percent down. VA loans, 0% down. So the kind of range of downpayment costs that we’re talking about are, it sounds like, okay, let’s say on a $150,000 property, that would be like four and a half thousand dollars at 3%, up to $15,000, if you were putting down 10%. So kind of somewhere in that range is what we’re talking about as a minimum down payment. I don’t know, in one sense, it’s a lot of money for a graduate student to come up with that. That’s a pretty, you know, it’s a good chunk of a year’s salary. However, if the outcome is getting you into a house that cashflows you every month, or at least reduces your housing expense every month, in the long-term, it’s a small amount of money. It can be a larger amount of money to come up with in the moment. And you just mentioned for conventional loans, it is acceptable for someone like a parent, perhaps, to gift you the down payment.

41:44 Sam: This is very common.

41:48 Emily: And I was of course, very impressed by, you know, the case studies that were in the house hacking strategy of people making back their entire initial investment and more, you know, within the first year of owning their house hack, that is the down payment money. Plus maybe they put in some renovation funds. It was some really, really inspiring case studies. And of course you have to take everything with a grain of salt because the author is going to be picking the absolute best to include in the book, run the numbers in your own situation. But I mean, as you just said, compared to renting, which is a pure drain on your net worth, you have a really good chance of, you know, actually coming out ahead with house hacking–with buying, but like house hacking makes it even more sure. You know, that you’re going to come out ahead when you have that rental income coming in.

42:33 Sam: Yeah. And I do want to say the examples he gives in this book, they are very good examples. I also feel like he’s kind of, double-dipping on some of the numbers sometimes because I mean, you’re not paying $8,000 down on your loan amount in your first year of ownership. You’re paying mostly interest. So I just felt like he was kind of double-dipping with, Oh, if I have this extra rental income and I have that, plus I’m using that to pay down my loan, you know, and then he’s making it motivational, I’ll say. But is that realistic at all markets? Definitely not.

Examples Outside of the Research Triangle

43:13 Emily: I wanted to get an idea of you of a few other housing markets that you’ve worked with grad students in. Maybe not specifically for house hacking, but just grad students who have been able to buy homes around other universities. Can you give us a few examples outside of the Research Triangle?

43:28 Sam: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had success in outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where you think it’s a high-cost area and then someone on a fellowship wouldn’t afford it. That has been successful. Outside of Denver, Colorado. We’ve also had some purchases there with a post-doc. Gosh, Miami, Florida, we even had someone purchase who was going to University of Miami. Atlanta, Georgia is popular. Emory University has a good funding letter, which I’ve helped a few students out down there. It’s really all over. I mean, we have from Texas to Rhode Island to Tennessee and Ohio.

44:11 Emily: Yeah. That gives us a good idea. Thank you. So I was actually surprised to hear some really big markets in that list where you’ve made this work. So yeah, I would say for a grad student or postdoc, whoever who’s listening who is wondering about this strategy, just run some really high level numbers in your area. According to like what’s in the market right now and what your stipend is, and then yeah, if you think you’re within striking distance, like reach out to Sam, reach out to a few lenders and see if they can make the numbers work for you.

44:38 Sam: Yeah. I just want to put the emphasis on like, if you feel like you’re well-qualified, like you know you don’t have $200,000 in student loans. You know income’s going to continue for years plus, just reach out to myself or someone on my team because there’s very often a personal touch that we have for this community. I work with some students that have been denied by two other lenders. But they’re already in contract and you know, I’m two weeks late on working with them. So just in respect to your own time and maybe these other lenders that aren’t familiar, you know, we work a lot with the PhD community. I mean, we’re doing at least five plus deals a month right now, all over the country.

Correcting the Record: Credit Scores

45:27 Emily: Was there anything else about the book that you wanted to kind of correct the record on?

45:33 Sam: Yeah. I mean, there are a few things regarding credit score that changed in 2020, after this book was written. So last spring, when everything with COVID-19 was restricting some lenders, they upped credit score requirements. So a lot of FHA loans, you can’t really apply for them unless you’re over 640. And for conventional loans, no lenders typically go down to 620. There’s a breaking point. It’s at 660. So if your FICO score, if your middle FICO score is above 660, it’s going to be cheaper for you to go conventional monthly. The mortgage insurance is lower. Now, if your middle FICO score is below 660, it’s going to be cheaper for you to go FHA. That’s just a rule of thumb that all lenders use. When we price out everything and when we compare monthly payments, that’s the breaking point.

46:27 Sam: So if you’re at 661, I’m going to put you in a conventional loan. You’re at 660 or 659, FHA is for you. It does mention in the book, how, if you’re in an FHA loan, you will have to refinance into a conventional loan. This is a very common thing. Everybody does it. It reduces your mortgage insurance and also allows your mortgage insurance to drop off at 78% of equity. Okay. But everything else was looking really good. He had some very clear things to say for these first-time home buyers or house hackers. I would just suggest everyone to get better results. You should work with a loan officer, either myself or someone who’s also a senior loan officer who has a few years experience, so they can make something cater to your needs. But generally speaking, it was a great read. Very aggressive when he starts talking about, you know, living in a tent in the backyard and renting out every room in your three bedroom.

47:29 Emily: That strategy also was a little too much for me. And I think, you know, when I’m presenting this to my audience, it’s more about what can you make work over the course of five years? Not necessarily over the course of like one year. The book is very focused on one year and you know, there’s reasons for that from a real estate investing strategy, why that’s the case. But I think for the people who are listening to me, they’re more likely to want to stay in a place for a few years and have their own bedroom during that time.

47:58 Sam: Exactly, exactly.

Would You Please Give Your Contact Info Again?

47:58 Emily: Okay. Sam, thank you so much for this interview. Great information. I really hope we’ve gotten some people excited about house hacking, about buying homes, making it seem like a possibility earlier, even during graduate school. I know that I wish that I had seriously considered this or known about this concept when I was in graduate school. So as we close out, will you please give your contact information again?

48:19 Sam: Yeah. Thank you for having me again. The best way to reach me is by phone. It’s (540) 478-5803. My best e-mail is my work e-mail. It’s Samuel.Hogan@PrimeLending.com.

48:34 Emily: Wonderful. Sam, thank you so much for joining me.

48:37 Sam: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Concluding Thoughts About House Hacking

48:39 Emily: I’m back with a few concluding thoughts. I fervently wish I had learned about the power of house hacking earlier in my life. I did my PhD at Duke between 2008 and 2014. I knew several fellow grad students who were house hacking, though I didn’t know the term at the time. So it was possible to make the numbers work. My husband and I together definitely could have purchased a home in 2010, the year we got married, based on our two stipends and our existing savings. However, I was still psychologically scarred from watching the housing market crash and there was a lot of talk about rigorous lending standards. We thought that we would leave Durham in 2013 perhaps, so following the five-year rule we did not pursue homeownership. We didn’t end up moving away from Durham until 2015. So in retrospect, house hacking was possible and almost certainly highly profitable, and we lived there long enough that either selling or keeping the home as a rental would have been viable options.

49:38 Emily: All that is water under the bridge for me, of course. What I can do now that I have learned about this strategy is two things: 1) I can consider how I can house hack in my present life. My husband and I are planning to buy our first home in the near future. We do want a detached single-family home but could consider adding an accessory dwelling unit. If that turns out to be impractical, perhaps we could house hack during a sabbatical year in another area of the country or once our kids are grown. 2) I can share this strategy as widely as possible, as I’m doing in this episode, and support anyone in my audience who wants to investigate or pursue house hacking. A perfect place to talk over these ideas as you pursue them is inside the Personal Finance for PhDs Community. In fact, we have one member already who is planning a house hack in the next few months! The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop is our monthly Book Club selection for March 2021. So jump into the Community at PFforPhDs.community and we will discuss house hacking!

50:39 Emily: I want to continue this conversation not just in the Community but also on this podcast. If you are a grad student or PhD who is currently house hacking or has done so in the past, please get in touch with me. I’d love to publish a compilation podcast episode with several real case studies. If you’d like to volunteer, even anonymously, you can reach me at emily@PFforPhDs.com.

Listener Q&A: Do I Report My Stimulus Checks?

51:07 Emily: Now, on to the other one of our two new segments, the listener question and answer. Today’s question comes from a grad student in my annual tax return workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return and Understand It Too. Here’s the question: Do I report my stimulus checks as part of my gross income? This question has a really short answer, which is no. Your stimulus checks, or your economic impact payments as the IRS calls them, do not have any effect on your tax return unless you did not receive one when you were supposed to. I’m going to read from an IRS newsroom release from last spring titled, What People Really Want to Know About Economic Impact Payments. And I’ll link to this page from the show notes. Quote, “Is this payment considered taxable income? No, the payment is not income and taxpayers will not owe tax on it. The payment will not reduce a taxpayer’s refund or increase the amount they owe when they file their 2020 tax return next year. A payment will also not affect income for purposes of determining eligibility for federal government assistance or benefit programs.” End quote. So there you have it. Super straightforward.

53:18 Emily: The stimulus checks, the economic impact payments, are not taxable. Really the only catch, like I just mentioned, is if you were in fact eligible for these payments in 2020, but the IRS didn’t know that you were eligible and you didn’t receive the payments, then you will claim what’s called a recovery rebate credit on your tax return. So on form 1040 in line 30, you’re going to have a number in that line. It’s going to be an additional credit to you, which means you’ll get more of a refund than you were expecting essentially. Now, if you’re not sure if you’re eligible for the recovery rebate credit, there is a worksheet in the instructions for form 1040 called the recovery rebate credit worksheet. And you can fill out that worksheet and it’ll tell you exactly, you know, whether or not you were eligible and whether or not you can claim the recovery rebate credit. So thank you Aanonymous for that question.

53:18 Emily: By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about my tax workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return and Understand It Too, and potentially join it like this questioner did, you can go to PFforPhDs.com/taxworkshop to find more information. If you would like to submit a question to be answered in a future episode, please go to PFforPhDs.com/podcast and follow the instructions you find there. I love answering questions, so please submit yours.

Outtro

53:48 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episode show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast and instructions for entering the book giveaway contest and submitting a question for the Q and A segment. 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 podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. If you leave a review, be sure to send it to me. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media with an email listserv or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover 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 Meryem Ok.

How to Set Yourself Up for a Successful Career and Financial Life Post-PhD

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jennifer Polk, a career coach specializing in PhDs whose brand is From PhD to Life. Emily and Jen explore the damage that graduate school and academia often does to PhDs’ financial lives, in terms of both dollars and money mindset. They answer the question, “What can a graduate student or PhD do to mitigate academia’s financial damage?” from both a financial and career perspective, starting in grad school and extending several years post-PhD. Jen concludes the interview with an incredible insight that can only be gained with years of distance from the PhD.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

post-PhD career and finances

Teaser

00:01 Jen: Woo boy, I think the two-word answer is compound interest. The more that you can put away, even very, very, very small amounts earlier on, make such a huge disproportionate difference over the long term.

Introduction

00:23 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 seven, episode 14, and today my guest is Dr. Jennifer Polk, a career coach specializing in PhDs, whose brand is From PhD to Life. Jen and I explore the damage that graduate school and academia often do to PhDs’ financial lives, in terms of both dollars and money mindset. We answer the question, “what can a graduate student or PhD do to mitigate academia’s financial damage?” from both a financial and career perspective, starting in graduate school and extending several years post-PhD. Jen concludes the interview with an incredible insight that can only be gained with years of distance from the PhD. If this episode, and that final insight in particular, get your wheels spinning about what you should be doing right now in your finances, there are several ways you can work with me in the upcoming months to level up your financial life.

01:29 Emily: The Personal Finance for PhDs Community is always open to new members. That’s where you can find my courses on financial goal setting, budgeting, investing, et cetera, plus monthly challenges to participate in a book club and lots of opportunities to ask me questions and engage in discussion with other like-minded graduate students and PhDs. You can find out more at pfforphds.community.

I’m facilitating my brand new half-day workshop, Chart Your Course to Financial Success, twice in the next couple of months. Spend four hours with me and a small group of peers, and you’ll come away with clarity on what your current financial goal should be and how to achieve it, plus super actionable ideas for increasing your income and decreasing your expenses. On December 12, 2020, I’m facilitating the workshop exclusively for funded graduate students. And on January 10th, 2021, it’s exclusively for PhDs. You can find out more at pfforphds.com/chart.

02:34 Emily: Finally, Mark your calendars for the next round of The Wealthy PhD. My two-month group-coaching program that provides guidance and, most importantly, accountability to help you achieve a significant financial goal and set you up for future financial success. Enrollment will open in early January, 2021. You can find out more at pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD.

I’m so pleased to be able to offer you all these different avenues of support going into the new year. I hope you will identify one that fits you the best and sign up.

If you’re not quite sure about diving into working with me, please join my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Every Friday, I’ll send you an email detailing, a personal finance concept, an actionable strategy, or an inspirational story. You will receive an incredible amount of value, absolutely for free, through the list.

Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Jen Polk.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:28 Emily: I’m delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jen Polk. You probably know her brand From PhD to Life. She is a career coach specializing in PhDs. So, she has a lot to say to us around this topic. And we’re actually going to be talking about money mindset today and specifically how it affects, you know, your finances, but also your career journey as you’re moving through and beyond the PhD. So, Jen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast day. It’s wonderful to have you.

03:56 Jen: Yeah. Thank you, Emily. It’s my pleasure. I’m nervous. I’m excited.

04:01 Emily: It’ll be fun. So, please tell the audience just a little bit more about yourself.

04:05 Jen: Sure. So Jen, as Emily says, I work with PhDs figuring out what to do next in their careers and my business is From PhD to Life. That’s fromphdtolife.com. And I’m self-employed and I live in Toronto.

What Academic Culture Teaches Us About Money

04:22 Emily: What does academic culture–in your experience, and also what you’ve observed from your clients–what does academic culture teach us or tell us about money?

04:32 Jen: Yes. Yes. Big question. So, my own personal background is from the humanities, a history PhD. And I think that academia emphasizes, at least my corner of academia, to use that phrase, thinks of money as a bad thing, as kind of a necessary evil. And extremes to which we might take that view do exist out in the wild. There are people out there who will, they can’t possibly live this way every day of their lives, but they will literally say things to me that anybody who has more money is morally inferior or that it is unethical to have, you know, more money than one needs, et cetera. And I think that, yes, one can find that view in academia.

05:29 Emily: Is that defined as more money than they have? Is that the dividing line?

05:34 Jen: Probably, probably, probably. But yeah, I think that thinking about money, talking about money makes you somehow less of a scholar, less of an intellectual. Of course, as we know, the truth is that you can’t actually do scholarly work over the long-term if you are constantly worried about money. It’s difficult. But yeah, there’s definitely a sense that if you’re the person–and I think this is also tied in with aesthetics–if you show up in your humanities department wearing flashy suits and red lipstick and earrings you will be deemed less serious as a scholar, as an intellectual. I think that is related to money mindset as well. It’s really gross. It’s really gross. And yet, of course, you need money.

06:33 Emily: Yeah. I mean, you just said that, of course over the long term, you, you have to have money or else you’re going to have a constant, you know, really it’s a fog in your brain. When you’re constantly stressed about money, when you experience scarcity, and this has been studied, you know, through research, that you literally don’t cognitively function as well as you could, if you did not have that stress in your life. So it’s really actually perplexing to me that we do this. We–academia–does this to graduate students, especially, but also postdocs and also, you know, adjuncts and other faculty members to a degree. Why are we doing this to our youngest, most vulnerable developing scholars? I mean, I know you can’t answer that question, but it’s really perplexing to me that, you know, the system chooses to put this kind of stress on people, and then moralizes it, as you were just saying, says, “Oh, this has been official to you that you don’t have the distractions of money and flashiness and opulence and so forth in your life.” When really what it is is, “No you’re stressing us out, so we can’t even think properly.” And that’s, it’s horrifying, really.

07:37 Jen: Academia is perplexing. I think that’s a good short way of putting it. There’s a lot of work to be done to kind of recognize the truth of one’s situation and think about what you actually do value that is different from what academia implies that you should value.

Money Mindsets in Academia

07:57 Emily: Yeah, I will say from my, you know, my corner of academia and engineering, I did not get the message that money is evil or money is to be shunned. Certainly, we were still under, you know, some money stress depending on how well-funded you are. But definitely from the advisor or the faculty level, we weren’t getting that kind of message. And yet, there were still money mindsets that academia tells even to students in disciplines like that, like all your best time and energy has to be spent on research. Like, you know, you’re not allowed to do XYZ other things in your personal life or earning money on the side. Even if it is not explicitly disallowed, it is certainly frowned upon, because again, you should be spending all your best energy on your research. Things like that. And I think another really sort of damaging thing that happens that probably speaks a little bit more to your experience as a career coach, is that people become anchored at the graduate student salary that they are earning during those years. And so how do they judge what they’re worth in the marketplace after they exit academia when their skills can and should be valued much differently? But how do they, you know, transform their own understanding of the value that they bring? Maybe we can talk more about that.

09:14 Jen: And I also see from scientists that, of course it varies and everyone’s experience is unique, but a lot of worry about getting a quote unquote industry job is morally inferior. And I think part of that is that those jobs pay better than academia. And I think people not only would you make more money, but potentially, I mean, depending, you would have a better life and a better career. Because there’s just lots more variety out there. And there’s a lot more better places that one could be for a lot of people. But I do think that money is part of it as a signal of virtue. Does that make sense, Emily?

09:56 Emily: Yes, I definitely hear what you’re saying. I actually would add onto that. It’s possible that you can have more of an impact on the world in industry than you could in academia, potentially, depending on your field. So, there’s that too. Is your scholarship actually getting out there?

10:11 Jen: Yeah. More money, more impact.

Financially Damaging Money Mindsets

10:14 Emily: We’ve talked about how these money mindsets are not true, damaging in some ways. How is this financially damaging?

10:25 Jen: Whoo boy, the two-word answer is compound interest. The more that you can put away, even very, very, very small amounts, earlier on makes such a huge disproportionate difference over the long-term. There is such a potentially, I mean, again, it really varies, but there is a real opportunity cost to spending time in academia, as a graduate student who is not earning, you know, a whole lot of money. And then, you know, if you do post-docs and then in a lot of disciplines, even a tenure-track professorship, is not going to pay you really enough to live in a lot of cases. And that, you know, life isn’t about comparing oneself to others, but it does put you behind, to use that framing, other people with similar types of education in terms of your financial resources. And of course, if you have debt.

11:20 Emily: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, you know, sometimes I think about there’s been, I don’t know, I think I’ve seen studies from time to time on, “Oh, a PhD is worthwhile like salary-wise because yes, you take this income hit early on, but then later you could make, you know, much more than you would with just a bachelor’s or whatever.” But I really wonder, and I have not done the math on this. I really wonder, well, you’re disagreeing with even that assertion because I’m sure it is very individual, entirely. But even taking that as a given, if you then factor in the opportunity costs for compound interest of paying off your debt, starting to invest for the long-term for retirement, it becomes very dubious.

11:58 Jen: Well, that’s just it. That’s just it. Exactly what you say. Like, even if the salary itself is higher, you’re starting so much later than other people. Like Emily, you and I are both in North America, U.S./Canada context. PhDs take a while. You know, on average, somebody is 30, more than 30, almost 30, right, when they finish, with limited prior work experience. And yeah, it’s not just about annual salary. I’ve seen those studies where everybody’s like, “Look how much more money PhDs make” than people with other degrees. And yes, that is an average. And, you know, it varies a lot. A lot. Not only between disciplines, it does vary a lot between disciplines, but within disciplines, it varies a lot, over gender and race and immigration status, et cetera, subfield. And whether you’re in an academic career track or not, right?

12:54 Jen: There’s a lot of variety there. But yeah, it’s not just about your salary number. It’s not just about that. Yeah. It’s about all of the other things you said. You know, if you’re 10 years later entering the housing market, you might not enter the housing market, et cetera. Anyways, I don’t mean to bemoan and lament, but I do think that it is a message that if anybody listening is considering a PhD or in a PhD program earlier on and doubting whether they should continue, please take this seriously and know that I respect any and all decisions to not apply, not enroll and potentially, you know, if it’s right for you, to not continue in a PhD, because it really might not be the right thing for you for lots of reasons, including financial ones.

Working on the Post-PhD Money Mindset

13:40 Emily: Yes. I would actually love to expand on that. So, we were just saying, okay, to people who have not yet applied for graduate school or are early on in your graduate school journey, take seriously any doubts you may be having and explore other career possibilities for you. For my part, I’m a little less don’t do the PhD, but I’m more on like, why don’t you get some work experience and see what’s out there for you and be able to judge the PhD more, not from, okay, I just got out of undergrad and this is what I want to do, but judge it in a little bit of a more informed context? So let’s say someone is on that path and they’re firm about finishing the PhD, but they’re still early on or, you know, midway through. What can that person be doing to be, you know, both working on their mindset, setting themselves up for financial and career success, following the PhD, what can they do at that stage?

14:31 Jen: I think that, you know, and this comes from my own work, you know, day-to-day career coaching PhDs. I think it is never too early, never too early to think about your career because there is, and I don’t, I think this surprises people, there is so much work that you can do that you really ought to do, but you know, that you can do before you ever apply for a job. And part of that is about money and how much you really need and how much, you know, you 10 years from now is going to want. But I would really, the quicker that you can get into a job and the quicker that you can get into a job and a career that is one that you like, and you can really excel in and you know, it doesn’t sort of match up that you would excel in a career and you make money, but a little bit, right, the quicker you can make that happen for yourself after you graduate, the better.

15:28 Jen: So, do all of the work that you can when you’re still a student. And I just mean the self-assessment, the reflection, like what you were talking about, Emily. Identifying the right, you mentioned identifying the careers that you are interested in going into, right? Like do all of the work ahead of time to identify those, and then start building your network, and, and draw on your network to learn more about those career paths, to get really specific about the types of work that you could do. To have a kind of a draft resume in place for various different kinds of roles that you might apply for. Again, long before you ever get to the point of application. So that six months, four months before graduation, before you’re kind of ready to work, you can hit the ground running.

16:13 Emily: You mentioned like doing self-assessments and so forth. I did a lot of that stuff and it was provided by the career center at my university. I wouldn’t say I showed up at every event, but I was definitely like a regular frequent flyer at, you know, what they had going on. And I was able to do like, yeah, some of the various self-assessments and that was wonderful.

Career Exploration: Know Thyself

16:30 Emily: So, there’s resources that may be available to graduate students through their career centers. There’s your website of course, From PhD to life. Do you know, would you recommend any other resources outside of the university context, for people to help in this like career exploration phase?

16:46 Jen: Yeah. I think at this point, anything can be useful. And so, you know, I think it can sound really simple, simplistic but even just sitting down and making a list of the things that you actually truly value and that are really important to you, that there’s real power in that. Taking a few minutes and just doing a brain dump, like, okay, what do I actually value in having, and write it down. Make a visual of it and make a graphic that you stick on your computer desktop. I mean, whatever it is so that you can keep reminding yourself when academic culture is swirling around you, which can be, I’m exaggerating, but it can be a bit of a totalizing culture and impose values and priorities on you that, you know, can kind of make things messy, just to remind yourself of what you truly value.

17:42 Jen: When I say anything can be useful at this point, I mean, sure do the Myers-Briggs. Scientifically dubious, doesn’t matter, because point is to give you new language, like literal words, and new perspectives, different perspectives on the types of skills and strengths that you have. So, any kind of like skill assessment, strengths test, value survey, anything like that, you can find online. Any of those that can be really kind of interesting to get you thinking about yourself in a different way. And then make your own lists. Some people like spreadsheets. And take advantage of any and all assessments that, yeah, you get from your career center on campus if that’s available to you. This process, I’m talking about it like it’s a mess, and that’s because it is a mess. So, it’s fine. And the other thing I would say is that this is not a process of identifying your one true right job.

Do Not Get Stuck on the “Dream Job”

18:42 Jen: Your dream job. No, no. Wipe that from your mind. That’s not a thing. A lot of jobs out there are broadly similar. And you, whatever your PhD discipline, whatever your background, you can do a lot of them. So they’re broadly similar and you can do a lot of them. And so what becomes important is not that particular job title, but more where in the world do you want to live? What kind of lifestyle do you want to have? What the vibe of the office that you want to be in? What kinds of like actual work do you want to do every day? Who do you want to hang out with? What kind of impact do you want to make? So all of those kinds of questions that, like job title is not even that relevant. At a certain point, you’re going to try and identify some so that you can find jobs to apply to. And so that your network can help you out by making suggestions. But yeah, it’s a mess. Embrace the mess and know yourself.

19:37 Emily: At that stage. Because you can be really open to a lot of different things, like you were saying. We’re not at all trying to like narrow things down, right? It’s about sort of broadening. So, I’m also thinking about, for an early-stage graduate student, mid-stage graduate student, how to mitigate this financial damage that we were talking about. And so very briefly, I just want to say, as you said earlier, compound interest. So if you are at a stage in your finances, when you’re able to save, get an emergency fund together, but after that start tackling your debt, start investing if that’s where you are. And I of course talk about that many, many other interviews and so forth. So people can find a lot more resources. But as you said earlier, the early you get started, small amounts of money, perfectly fine. It’s still going to make a difference.

The Value of Outside Work Experiences

20:18 Emily: So don’t dismiss just because you’re a graduate student, “Oh, I can only save 50 bucks a month or I can only save a hundred bucks a month.” That’s amazing. That would be a lot of money if you actually got that invested. So don’t dismiss that while you’re, you know, doing all this other career stuff. I also want to bring up outside work experience. You know, you mentioned earlier, like, you know, think about your network and so forth, and you can do that without working. You can expand your network. But you know, for some PhD students, it is possible to do internships or to have some kind of side hustle, that’s going to ultimately help you in your later job. Can you speak to that a little bit?

20:53 Jen: Yeah. And I take your point, Emily, that you said for some they can have, because yes, acknowledgement that, you know, it does depend on visa status and the contract, et cetera, et cetera. But, so in response to a Tweet I sent earlier this morning, somebody, I think she’s a humanities PhD student, said that in her program, when she was doing her PhD, she was reflecting on one of her colleagues had this like prestigious grant. So she didn’t have to have a job on campus to pay the rent. Because she had the prestigious grant. And the person who wrote the tweet was saying, you know, I didn’t have that, but instead I worked outside of academia and that, you know, the implication here being that, that gave me the same amount of money. And the vibe she got, not only the vibe, the actual literal the message she got from her professors in the department was that the fellowship was of greater value.

21:46 Jen: Even though from our perspective now, as people out in the world, you know, working jobs, we know that actually in some ways having actual work experience is more valuable. And that is really, really, really important and can’t be undervalued. This is not, you know, to ask students to do more and more and more work. But just to say that when you are making decisions about what to do in your kind of free time, quote unquote, you know, where you have a choice about whether to do this and this and this, just to pause and say, “Well, the, the thing that I think that I should do is adjunct one more course.” Well, hold up, just think to yourself, what is the value of adjuncting a course versus stepping up your side hustle or getting a job outside campus, even just in retail? I mean, it’s not obvious from where I sit that adjuncting a course is the right move. Whereas that can be like just a totally obvious thing according to academics, but no no no. I mean, it really depends. So, I would, you know, use your critical thinking skills and question the things that seem obvious to you.

Commercial

23:00 Emily: Emily here, for a brief interlude. You are invited to my brand new half-day workshop, Chart Your Course to Financial Success. The central question this workshop will help you answer is what should my singular financial goal be right now and how should I best pursue it? I’ll teach you my eight-step financial framework that explains when you should save versus pay off debt versus invest. And we’ll explore many, many strategies to increase your income and or decrease your expenses. I will facilitate the workshop exclusively for funded graduate students on Saturday, December 12th, 2020, and exclusively for PhDs on Sunday, January 10th, 2021. You can learn more and sign up at pfforphds.com/chart. That’s P F F O R P H D s.com/ C H A R T. The deadline to register for the December 12th workshop is Wednesday, December 9th. So, don’t delay. There are discounts currently available for both workshops and registration is limited. Now, back to the interview.

Pay Attention to Your Base Salary

24:10 Emily: Let’s now talk about someone who’s finishing up about to finish up the PhD, and maybe about to finish up a postdoc, if that’s the choice that you made following the PhD. And you want to get a real job and it’s not going to be in academia. So, what can a person who’s reached that stage do, again, to mitigate the damage that the mindsets and the financial damage that academia has caused?

24:31 Jen: It’s really tricky this because you know, some people ask, how do I know when to take this job now, or to take the risk of turning it down in hopes that I would get a higher offer six months from now? So, you know, I think it’s not obvious what the answer is and it will highly depend on the individual person. But one thing for sure to think about is, when you’re ready to accept and negotiate a job offer, right? Accept and negotiate, right?

25:02 Jen: Both of those together. That your base salary is a really important consideration. It’s not the only thing up for negotiation. It’s not the only thing to discuss. But that a one time payout, like a bonus, like a signing bonus of five grand, for example, that seems great in the moment and sure you could invest that, but over the long-term, it’s probably better for you to have like $500 extra on your base salary, something like that. I mean, I can’t do the math immediately, but I think tending to base salary is really important.

Do Not Underestimate the Value of Your Network

25:37 Emily: To pick up where we left off with the career exploration, exploration of yourself. Now this person is ready to narrow things down and apply for some jobs. So, what do they do at that stage?

25:53 Jen: Yeah. So, I think don’t underestimate the value of your network. And before people are like, “Hold up, Jen, I don’t have a network.” No, you have a network, you have a network and you know people, and the people that know you also know other people. And, it can depend, but your academic network, don’t discount them. Even if you’re applying for non-academic jobs. Again, it can depend. But, I mean, I have a client now who is a research associate, a post-doc, and he was nervous about talking to his PI about the fact that he’s, you know, he’s on the job market. And he had the conversation and the PI was very supportive. And then the PI sent a few emails. My client got some interviews literally the next week and, you know, might have a job offer like within like a month. And so don’t discount the value that your network can come through for you.

26:54 Jen: And I know in my work with PhDs, with my own clients, but also all of the research that I’ve done over the years that you talking with people, and that’s all I mean when I say you should network, is you should interact actively with people in your field, with other professionals, quote, unquote. Just actively interact with people, that pays off enormously. And if you don’t do that, it’s going to be so, so, so, so, so much harder. At this stage, unless you have really particular technical skills, and I would wager that a huge number of PhDs don’t–and that’s not a criticism, that’s not a criticism–but if you don’t have these like really narrow, really specific, really rare technical skills, and you’re not at the right place at the right time, then you really have to use your network.

People Can Connect Us to New Opportunities

27:48 Jen: And that’s all of us. Not only so that potentially you could get referred to a job, you could be an inside hire as it were. Right? That’s great. But it’s not only that. It’s so that you can learn what’s out there. It’s so that you have people on your team to send you job ads. I applied for a job in September, and I wouldn’t have seen it except that somebody that I know and have known over the years. I’m not frequently in contact with her, but she kind of knows about me in general. She sent me the job ad as soon as she saw it posted. And I was like, “Oh my goodness.” And what happened is I had a number of other people send me the job ad subsequently.

28:26 Emily: Your branding is so clear that many people could identify what is a perfect job for you.

28:31 Jen: Exactly, exactly. Right. Exactly.

28:34 Emily: I actually have another story to add to that pile, which is how my husband got his job in industry. And so this is more about the value of networking with people from your own program who have moved on in the years prior to you. Because it’s not just the faculty who have networks. It’s anybody who’s exited academia. Even an undergraduate that you worked with who is now in the workforce can be a contact in your network. So my husband, some person who had graduated from his program a couple years earlier, sent a job listing for his, you know, at the time current company to my husband’s PI and said, I know that your lab lines up very well with what we do here. Could you show this to your students who are graduating? And that happened, and my husband got that position. So that was like just, yep. Clearly networking. Because of course it was on the strength of his PIs reputation. This individual didn’t know my husband in particular. But yeah, that’s exactly how it happened and it was quick and easy.

29:31 Jen: Yeah. And that’s what you want. Right? I mean, life doesn’t always work out that way, but quick and easy means that there was years of work that went into that ahead of time, but it doesn’t have to difficult. It’s all, I mean, it’s just about making friends, having good conversations and doing work that you find interesting and that you find engaging. And if you do that over the years and you are in conversation with people about that, hopefully kind of stars align at a certain point and it seems easy.

Always Try to Negotiate Your Starting Offer

30:03 Emily: Yes, exactly great point. So, okay. Our candidate has, you know, done the job searching, done the self-reflection, applying for jobs. You mentioned a moment ago, negotiating base salary as incredibly important. And so this to me also is one, probably your biggest opportunity, to mitigate financial damage that’s occurred during your PhD, is to get that first starting offer as high as you reasonably can within the scope of the field and your skills and so forth. But to negotiate that offer, because I think some PhDs might be kind of bowled over by, “Oh my goodness. You’re offering me how much money?” And again, they’re anchored to their graduate student salary. And so, might just feel so grateful, yeah, and I get that, that they don’t negotiate. But really it’s expected. It’s absolutely expected in industry and it’s probably going to be pretty well-received.

30:54 Emily: Even if the answer is, no, this is a union job and you can’t negotiate, that might be the answer, but you’re not going to be faulted for trying. Right? So, definitely at least attempt that negotiation, because as you said, having a slightly higher base salary, that’s going to affect for sure, whatever salaries you have, as long as you stay at that company. And may even beyond that, if you know, employers shouldn’t, but are allowed to, at least in the U.S. In many cases ask about prior salaries, it depends on what state you’re in. So it’s possible that it could even affect once you leave that, you know, that particular employer, could still follow you. So getting that starting salary as high as you can is a great idea. Even if it seems really scary and daunting to you in terms of the number.

31:38 Jen: Yeah. And I would recognize, you know, everything in life is a risk. Sure. Of course. But once an employer has made an offer to you, they are imagining you solving their problem and hanging out with them every day. And that gives you some power here. As I say, there’s a risk, but I would, you know, own the power that you have in that situation to make a strong case for yourself. You have to make the case. But you want to be successful in that position long-term to help the team grow, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you’re going to show up for them and they should show up for you in terms of base salary.

Good Employers Make their Employees Feel Valued

32:22 Emily: Yeah. And I think it actually goes back to what we talked about earlier that academia, for whatever reason, decides to put this financial stress on its trainees. Your employer probably does not want you to be under that kind of financial stress. They want to pay you enough to reflect the value, to make you feel like you’re valued. That you’re not going jump ship and go to someone else. That you’re going to be able to live in the city that they’re in, you know, comfortably without having to move an hour away for your commute. All of that stuff affects your performance at work. And so it can all come into play when you think about what is the salary that I want to have to perform well in this position? That’s really your opportunity to express that.

32:57 Jen: To a certain extent, there’s some recalibration that might need to happen for folks coming out of academia, where things can be such a struggle, and you can have this impression that any employer is kind of out to get you, out to screw you over. Depending on the experience that you have in academia and the experience of your colleagues and friends around you. But yeah, as Emily said, I mean, any employer that you would really want to work for, they recognize the crucial importance of their labor, of the people doing the work. I mean, this is so, so, so important, and employers, good employers, employers that you want to work for. And there’s lots of them out there. They’re not going to pay you outrageous sums of money potentially, but they want you to be able to have the lifestyle and do the work and be happy and get what you need to be on their team, solving their problems. So, I would assume, assume that they want to pay you equitably right. Fairly and adequately. And, you know, maybe a little more than that. I would assume that, and go forth.

34:04 Jen: Yeah, I am glad you put in the caveat of a good employer, because certainly there are ones that–maybe not employers broadly, but maybe a manager, someone who views this more as a competitive thing, like I’m going to pay you less because I have that better from my bottom line. But it really should be viewed more so as, “We want you to do a great job, and we’re going to compensate you well to do that great job.” And certainly if you get into a salary negotiation process with an employer and you’re getting a vibe that they don’t really seem like they want to support you, then that’s your red flag. And that’s the time to go back to the exploring you’ve done and go back and look at other, you know, positions that you might have, and so forth.

Avoiding Lifestyle Inflation and Unhealthy Mindsets

34:40 Emily: Okay. So, let’s then talk about, you’ve got the job, maybe you’re a few months, a few years into that point. What should you still be doing to again be mitigating the mindset and the literal financial damage that your time in academia has wrought?

34:55 Jen: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think there’s lots of things that one could say here, but something that comes to mind for me is a phrase that I’m sure, you know, people that grew up in this part of the world have heard, penny-wise and pound-foolish, right? And to a certain extent, you know, when you’re in academia, there are a lot of things that you don’t pay outright for, of course you do pay for them through tuition, et cetera. But it doesn’t occur to you. So there might be things that you yourself would want to invest in, to use that term. And I use that term kind of in a broader sense that will help you over the long term. Ideally, your employer pays for professional development and pays for coaching and whatever, pays therapy, right? Ideally you have benefits around that. But it could be, you know, if you don’t, or if you’re unemployed at the moment, that it can be really valuable to invest in those kinds of services for a relatively short amount of time, because the investment as a metaphor is the right one, because there will be a longer-term payoff.

36:01 Jen: And if you can get your career started kind of on a good footing, great. Right? It’s just so helpful. It’s so helpful. And I would sit down with a money advisor, financial advisor, or whatever the term is, you know, somebody who can kind of tell you things, even if it’s your mom, right? Because if you can get into the lifestyle kind of early on of making good decisions around money, but also, you know, making decisions about you suddenly have more money, hopefully maybe you can set money aside for vacation. You know, that’s a good thing too, et cetera.

36:43 Emily: I totally agree. And actually, this is a phase that I’ve come to now that I’m, you know, a few years post-PhD and into my career, my business with Personal Finance for PhDs, is this idea of investing in myself was something I was very reluctant to do, right? Because I was being penny wise, pound foolish right when I finished my PhD because I wasn’t making that much money yet. So how can I, you know, decide to invest? But actually, you were one of the first people who I worked with, you know, near the start of my business. And it was a was a small investment, but I joined one of your programs. And it, I mean, I still talk about it and laud it, this was Self-Employed PhD, and how we originally met and what an impact that made on me.

37:23 Emily: And I’ve since then been much more willing to invest in training and professional development for myself. So I would definitely, I mean, obviously my field as an entrepreneur is, is different from what other people were doing, but just be thinking about what are the professionals, if it’s again, not provided, as you said, through your workplace, which sometimes it is, what professionals might I work with that can help further my career further, my financial development? Of course you are one of those professionals. If the question is more on the career front with PhD to Life. I am one of those professionals if the question is more on the, how do I handle my finances? How do I handle my budget? You know, what should I be saving for? What should my life look like? If those are the kinds of questions, then of course, feel free to work with me, but there are also many other types of professionals, depending on the exact needs that you have.

Invest in Your Future

38:06 Emily: And as you said, it is an investment. It takes money to work with a professional in the way that we’re talking about. But ideally, the dividends are going to start coming very, very soon after you begin that relationship. Another sort of financial tip, I’ll definitely say, once you’re into that, you know, your career and you’re making a much better salary than you were as a post-doc or as a graduate student. This is now the time to not super increase your lifestyle. Yes. Hopefully, you will be spending more so that you don’t feel stressed. But to some extent you should keep your lifestyle level on a little bit lower than maybe where you see your new colleagues at because you do need to make up for lost time a little bit, and doing things like starting to invest inside your company’s 401(k), even maxing out that 401(k). So to be going into those tax advantaged, designed for retirement types of accounts to a great degree, I mean, just put money away from your salary. You never see it coming in your paycheck. It’s all payroll deductions. That’s the best way to do things. So it might seem like a large number. Right now, a 401(k) in the U.S. would be $19,500 per year to max that out as an employee.

39:17 Emily: Why not? Why not? If your salary has jumped up by much more than that in this transition, why not go for that? Why not have that be your new anchor in your mind? So think about maxing out that 401(k), or at least contributing a good amount to it. Think about making serious, serious progress on your student loans if you have decided that you’re not going to go for an income-driven repayment plan and forgiveness plan. So all kinds of other questions, but this is the time when you get into that job where you can really, like you were saying earlier, you know, hitting the ground running like you’ve done these years of preparation for your career so that by the time it’s finally time to apply for a job, you’re ready and raring to go. It’s kind of the same thing financially. You’ve been keeping your lifestyle low for such a long time. Now you have the salary, don’t do too much lifestyle inflation and just get saving, get investing, get on that debt.

Think of Your Future Self

40:02 Emily: When we were preparing for this interview, you told me you had a message for people earlier on in their PhD journeys than you are currently. So what is that message?

40:12 Jen: Oh boy, your future self is going to care so much more about money than you do now. You know, if you’re in a PhD program, like I started my PhD at 24, like I was like, “Whoa, $15,000 a year.” This was a while ago now. Great. I can’t believe, you know, we hear this all the time. I can’t believe I’m going to get paid to do a PhD. That’s amazing. Okay. Awesome. Congratulations. But just know that your future self is going to care so much more. I mean, I happily, relatively happily, lived with a roommate for years and years and years, and I now live by myself and I pay a lot more money for that privilege, but I just, I just don’t, I don’t want to go back. Right? And so, of course I need a lot more money than I used to. And that, yeah, your future self is going to thank you i you care about it a little bit more than you might be inclined to when you’re, say, 24.

41:15 Emily: Yeah. And by doing the things that we’ve been talking about, like negotiating, like starting to invest early, even if none of your peers are doing it. Like having a side hustle maybe to bring in a little bit of extra money. I’ll say from my perspective too, like now that I, you know, my husband and I got married during graduate school, so we really, you know, we didn’t need any more money after our marriage than we did before. We were both in graduate school. But after we finished our PhDs, we had a couple babies and you know what, once you get on that train, things get very expensive very quickly. And so that’s not at all to say that you can’t have children earlier. That’s just my personal journey, but I certainly feel like we need to command a much higher salary at this stage in our lives and our family formation than we did years ago when we were, you know, DINKS [dual income, no kids]. So there’s that too, if you want that in your future. Yeah. It’s something to start thinking about now.

42:08 Jen: One of my recent clients, she lives in an expensive part of the U.S. Right? Granted but the lifestyle that she has now, a few years out of her PhD with a couple of kids and, you know, a mortgage and all of the above, she really can’t accept a job that pays her less than $150,000 a year. And right. It’s just the reality. And that might seem outrageous to folks listening now who are living on, $30k or less, maybe much less. Like, just keep that in mind. It’s not, you know, I’m not saying that my client, she’s not greedy. It’s just the reality of the situation. Life can get expensive really quickly.

42:45 Emily: Yeah. And I’ll link actually in the show notes, a wonderful interview I did with Dr. Scott Kennedy a year or two ago where he talks about his own realizations as he formed his family during graduate school, that he was going to have to change his career plans, to go into a different field that was going to pay more because he could not afford, now that he had a family, to stay on the track that he had been on. Even though that was sort of intellectually, maybe his preference from earlier on. So these kinds of things have, you know, your life has real impacts on how much money you need to make. And that’s something to start, you know, being realistic about as early on as possible.

How Can People Work With You, Jen?

43:24 Emily: All right, Jen, how can people work with you, should they, you know, if they’ve been intrigued by this interview?

43:32 Jen: For sure. Yeah. Thanks for asking. So, start on my website fromphdtolife.com. I work with individuals. I do small group things, coaching, open discussions. Those are a lot of fun. Shout out to small group things. I think those are awesome. I do drop-ins for Self-Employed PhDs. So, if that applies to you at all, check those out. And then I also work with institutions. So I’m happy to come to your campus, virtually please, I do a presentation or a workshop. I love workshops. So there’s different options.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

44:07 Emily: Wonderful. And final question that I ask of all my guests. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?

44:15 Jen: So this is a totally “do as I did, and also, as I say,” usually those two things do not go together. But one thing that I have been doing for 20 years, gosh, wow, something like that, is I track every penny. There are no pennies in Canada anymore. I track everything that I spend. So I know how much my life costs. Like I literally know how much my life costs in different categories. And years ago, I used to do this on a, it wasn’t even Excel. I use the WordPerfect version of excel, just a spreadsheet. But now there are lots of programs out there. But I think, you know, tracking what you spend is really, really important. It’s different from budgeting. You can do both together. But the example I like to give is like, I think this is really common for grad students.

45:11 Jen: Like you might spend like a lot of money, like on clothing kind of once or twice a year, not on a monthly basis. So some of the kind of standard ways of thinking about budgeting is sort of like a monthly thing. You go to your big annual conference one month and suddenly you’ve spent $2,000 more than, right? So anyways, but track, and then you can see the trends over time. And by seeing the amount of money that you’re spending in different categories, literally being able to like, see it on a spreadsheet, you can make decisions, better decisions about, you know, how much, how do you really want to spend $200 on takeout every month? Maybe. Yes. Maybe no. Right. But it makes it very clear.

45:55 Emily: I totally totally agree. Foundational personal finance advice. Step number one, track your spending. Track your expenses. Well Jen, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your expertise.

46:07 Jen: Thank you.

Outtro

46:09 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.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, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. 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 Meryem Ok.

How to Handle Your Student Loans During Grad School and Following

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In this episode, Emily interviews Meagan Landress, a Certified Student Loan Professional who works with Student Loan Planner, about how a grad student or PhD should best handle their federal student loans. Meagan outlines the financial profiles of someone who should use an income-driven repayment plan to pursue forgiveness, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, vs. someone who should consider refinancing. She answers the questions: Should a graduate student pay down their student loans while they are in deferment? How should a graduate student who needs to take out debt decide between a student loan and consumer debt? Meagan also explains how marriage affects student loan repayment under each of the income-driven repayment programs. Don’t miss this episode jam-packed with actionable information!

Link Mentioned in this Episode

student loans grad school

Trailer

00:00 Meagan: We are taking a non-traditional approach to debt and so I kind of backed that up with, make sure you know, that federal student loans are just not a regular debt. That’s one. That’s the biggest thing we need to remember.

Introduction

01:18 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education and personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode 13 and today my guest is Meagan Landress, a certified student loan professional who works with Student Loan Planner. We’re discussing how a grad student or PhD should best handle their federal student loans. Meagan outlines the financial profiles of someone who should use an income-driven repayment plan to pursue forgiveness, including public service loan forgiveness, versus someone who should consider refinancing. She answers the questions: should a graduate student pay down their student loans while they’re in deferment? How should a graduate student who needs to take out debt decide between a student loan and consumer debt? Megan also explains how marriage affects student loan repayment under each of the income driven repayment programs. If you have federal student loans, and there is any question in your mind as to how you should handle them, you should absolutely listen through this entire episode. When you have a really high stakes student loan decision to make, such as which forgiveness program is right for you and your family, or whether to pursue PSLF versus refinancing, I highly recommend working with a certified student loan professional or a certified financial planner. Student Loan Planner can refer you to one of their partners who is a qualified professional.

01:39 Emily: On the other hand, if you’re looking for assistance with determining what your current financial goal should be, evaluating your budget, or figuring out what your financial life should look like in your next position, please consider working with me. I also serve as a financial coach and I specialize in funded graduate students and PhDs. You can sign up for a free 15 minute introductory call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to see if one-on-one coaching with me would be a good fit for you. Alternatively, if a group coaching and accountability program is attractive to you, The Wealthy PhD might be your best option. I’m enrolling for the next round of The Wealthy PhD in January, 2021 and you can go to pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD to learn more and join the wait list. Whatever the financial decision you’re facing, it can really help to get an outside perspective. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Meagan Landress.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:36 Emily: I am so pleased that Meagan Landress, a certified student loan professional, has agreed to join me on the podcast today to give an interview all about federal student loans for graduate students and PhDs. Meagan has her own coaching business around student loans, and she also works with Student Loan Planner, which is a really well-known brand in the space that I respect a lot. So I was really pleased to be connected with Meagan and so pleased that she accepted the invitation to be on the podcast. So Meagan, will you please introduce yourself to my audience a little bit further?

03:05 Meagan: Definitely. I’m Meagan Landress, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. And yes, I have my own financial coaching practice where I work with folks on the basics of financial planning. And Student Loan Planner, I consult for specifically on student loans, helping people navigate that big elephant on their chest, I would say. I’m excited for this conversation today.

03:29 Emily: Yeah. When I approached Student Loan Planner, I said, I would love to interview someone. I need someone who’s going to be able to speak to PhDs and the specifics of their situation. They said, Meagan’s going to be the perfect fit, so I’m really excited for this conversation.

Federal Student Loan Forgiveness Programs vs. Refinancing

03:42 Emily: Let’s jump right into it. I’m imagining a person who, whether they’re in graduate school, whether they’re maybe out of graduate school, they need to know whether or not they should be pursuing a forgiveness program at the federal level. One, maybe you could just remind us briefly of a few of those acronyms that are involved with the federal level forgiveness programs, and then let us know who is the type of person, what is the financial profile of a person who really should be looking carefully at pursuing one of those forgiveness programs?

04:13 Meagan: Yeah, so I think the most maybe well-known is public service loan forgiveness. That is, if you’re dedicating your career to a public service opportunity, so government, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) work. But also each of the income driven plans, there are four, each of those income driven plans have a forgiveness component and it’s really more so like their maximum repayment period. The folks that should be pursuing or entertaining forgiveness, there is a rule of thumb on balance.

Meagan: For the longer term income driven plans, if your balance is much greater than your annual income, we use 1.5 times your annual income, then you should probably be entertaining that longer term forgiveness route on the income driven plans. It’s not public service work. It’s not career-driven anything like that. You just have to be making payments on that plan for either 20 or 25 years. PSLF, I think is a little more straightforward. If you find yourself in a public service position and you can foresee your career continuing to go that route. I see this a lot in education, you know, public universities, and so that’s where we want to be entertaining, maybe public service loan forgiveness, which is 120 qualifying payments on an income driven plan. And then you reap the benefit of forgiveness. So it’s much shorter. Those would be some maybe identifying factors there.

05:42 Emily: So just to put a real fine point on this, when we’re talking about a debt to income ratio, is that the income that the person has post all education or during the course of their education

05:54 Meagan: Post-education. So I would say the first couple of years of their career.

05:59 Emily: Okay. So someone coming out of their PhD, first post-PhD job within those first couple of years, if they see that their debt is more than one and a half times, their post PhD income, that’s when they should be looking pretty hard at enrolling one of these forgiveness plans and potentially seeing it through to completion. Is there any difference in that rule of thumb, around whether if the program is PSLF, which only would take 10 years, versus one of the ones that would take 20 to 25 years,

06:27 Meagan: There’s a little bit of, because that ratio is not quite right since it’s such a shorter period of time. And so folks who have about the same, or maybe even a little less than their income, could still benefit from public service loan forgiveness. We just have to do the math on it because the payments are going to be based off of your income. And we need to project that out to see, would you just pay it off in 10 years or would you reap the benefit of some kind of forgiveness? The debt to income ratio isn’t so relevant with PSLF, but it could be maybe a rule of thumb to start with, and then you have to go and do some math.

07:07 Emily: Yeah. I’m fully anticipating there being a lot of answers like, well, this is the starting position, but really we have to fine tune it through doing some more math. So I fully anticipate a lot of those answers during this interview and that’s perfectly fine. I just want to get people a starting point, because when you’re sitting, prior to getting out of graduate school and you’re wondering whether or not you should be, your loans are probably in deferment, but you’re wondering whether or not you should pursue a forgiveness plan afterwards. It’s just helpful to see whether or not you have to go further into the details of it or not. There’s another option for repaying your student loans. Well, there’s a few options. You can do the standard repayment program for the federal government. That’s going to take 10 years, and it’s just based on your debt amounts, not based on your income at all, the repayment amounts. Or you have the opportunity to potentially refinance your loans. And there’s been a lot of advertising around student loan refinancing in the last 10 years. Very, very low rates are being offered. What is the financial profile of person who should be considering refinancing rather than potentially pursuing PSLF or another forgiveness program?

08:13 Meagan: Yeah. Refinancing is a big, you’ll see these commercials on TV all the time now. But when it’s right to consider refinancing, I think that’s when your balance is lower than your annual income, and you feel comfortable walking away from the federal system. And what I mean by that is the federal system has a lot of flexibilities that private loans just don’t offer. You won’t have very generous for forebarance availability. You won’t have access to income driven plans. There’s no forgiveness opportunity with private loans. And so if you feel comfortable with your financial situation and you can commit to the term for refinancing and you weren’t a good candidate for forgiveness in any way, then that’s when I think it’s appropriate to pull the trigger on refinancing.

09:00 Emily: Yeah. And I think what concurs with that is that you have to have a fairly low debt to income ratio to even qualify for the really good refinancing options. Like it pretty much has to be below about one-to-one anyway, to do that, which for people in my audience, PhDs, oftentimes refinancing is not going to be an option during graduate school because the income is just so low. However, if your post PhD income is going to jump up quite a lot, then refinancing might make sense once you get to that point. You may wish you could have refinanced earlier, but you probably wouldn’t qualify if your debt is maybe a few multiples of your graduate student income, but less than one year’s worth of your post PhD income. Thanks for that clarification.

09:40 Emily: I know there’s a lot of anxiety going on right now about PSLF. There was a report, I think it was in 2018 or something about how 90-whatever percent of people were being rejected by PSLF. Can you shed some light on this? Should people be concerned about the health and the future of PSLF?

09:54 Meagan: I wish I could take this article down. This one, everyone references, I feel like, when we’re talking about PSLF, but it’s funny when you go back to that article and you break apart the math in that article, you’ll see that about 70% to 80% of that 99% number of denials was due to one of two reasons. One was because people applied before reaching 120 payments. I think there’s a lot of reasonings behind that. Some people truly may have just been off a couple of payments and got denied. It didn’t mean that they’re denied for the whole program, they just have to make a couple more payments to get to 120. But I think the other big reason was there was a buzz about PSLF in 2017 and 2018. That was the first year we could have applied for the forgiveness. People in public service got excited about it and they were like, “Oh, I’ll just apply to see what happens,” and they hadn’t done the due diligence to check all the boxes and they definitely didn’t do the time. And so that’s my unofficial hypothesis on what happened there.

Meagan: Then there are some other things too, like there are some specific things you need to make sure you’re checking the box for, like having the correct type of loans, only direct loans qualify for forgiveness and being on an income driven plan. Those are two that were another percentage of why people got denied. They had either the wrong type of loans or weren’t on the right repayment plan. That article, while although looked horrifying, if that was the route you were going, it was very misleading. And I wish they would have pulled out some of that bad data. But PSLF is a great program to pursue. We just have to make sure we’re doing the due diligence and keeping a pulse on our payments over time to not have any surprises, that’s really the big important part with PSLF.

11:49 Emily: I guess I’ve also heard sort of anecdotally that I believe you have to do a recertification every year to make sure that your employer is still the type of employer where you would qualify for this program and that maybe you need to stay on top of your employer and your lender to make sure that all that paperwork is going through. Sort of you as the borrower need to take on a little bit more responsibility than you might like to, just to make sure that all the I’s are being dotted and the T’s are being crossed and everything.

12:16 Meagan: Yes. There’s what’s called the employment certification form that we recommend submitting at least once a year, even if you haven’t switched employers. What that form does is yes, it does verify that the employer still has that tax-exempt status. It also verifies and certifies that you still work there full-time. That’s one of the other requirements, working full-time for that entity. Once they get that form, then they update your payments since the last time you submitted it. And what’s nice too, they just updated their portal to where it shows your PSLF payment track, which is new because he used to have to wait for that confirmation email after submitting the ECF form to know where you stood payment-wise, but now it reports real time. So I’m excited about that. It’s a great addition, I think, to the portal,

13:04 Emily: I’m sure that gives the additional peace of mind to not have to wait for that communication to come back.

Making Payments on Student Loans During Grad School

13:11 Emily: Now I’m thinking about a person in graduate school, their loans are in deferment. They’re looking ahead to their post PhD career and saying, yeah, “I think I’m going to be able to pay these loans off once I get to that point. I don’t really think I’m going to have to do an income driven repayment program. PSLF is not an attractive…That type of employment is not really my plan.” That’s what they’re saying to themselves in graduate school. In this particular scenario, this graduate student has the flexibility to be able to make some kinds of payments towards their student loans. They’re receiving a stipend. It’s enough for them to live on. They’re able to pursue some financial goals aside from just paying for basic living expenses. Is that a good idea? And how does the person determine whether they should go that route, of repaying a bit of debt during graduate school, or whether they should just kind of defer it all and wait until afterwards?

14:00 Meagan: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think, yes all of those things you mentioned before have to exist. We need to know that we’re not pursuing PSLF one way or another. And I would suggest before putting money down on the student loans, making sure your emergency savings is healthy. We never want to be in a position where we have thrown all of our money towards our debt, we can’t get it back out, and we need it for an emergency. That is a bad situation to be in. I think having a buffer and savings is important, but I think one thing being in graduate school, we can’t officially enter repayment until we have graduation status. We can, with some of our undergrad loans, if we wanted to, we can enter repayment on those specifically. We can make payments, we just can’t officially enter a repayment plan on our existing school loans, so if you wanted to make payments, you could.

Meagan: Your un-subsidized loans do accrue interest while you’re in school. So that’s anything that says un-subsidized from undergrad and from grad school, and also grad school loans are considered un-subsidized. Those loans specifically accrue interest. Subsidized loans do not. If you wanted to prioritize which loans you’re applying payments to, subsidized loans aren’t going to be growing while you’re in school. So you can maybe prioritize the unsub and I think you can apply it straight to that interest. Again, it’s going to accrue on a monthly basis, so maybe you can find out how much that is and make those payments so it doesn’t grow while you’re in school. Those are some thoughts there. Post-graduation you can immediately enter repayment if you wanted to, by consolidating. You typically have a six month grace period where you can decide what plan you’re going on, get established. But if you wanted to enter repayment officially sooner, you can consolidate and kind of force yourself into repayment.

16:03 Emily: I see. How big of a factor should the interest rate on the unsubsidized student loans play in this decision, about whether to pay them down a bit or pursue other financial goals? We already covered the emergency fund, but if a graduate student is looking at “well, I can start investing for retirement, for example, versus paying down the student loans,” what are your thoughts about how the interest rate should factor into that decision?

16:28 Meagan: Yeah, so the interest rates on student loans do a lot of times fall in a gray area where, I mean, between 5% to 7% — I’m not sure, I’m not confident that you might get a longer term return if you were to invest that extra money instead. It really just depends and it kind of depends on your risk tolerance there. But any interest rates that are below 5%, we can kind of put those lower on the totem pole because if we took that extra money and we put it into our IRA or putting it towards our financial independence, long-term investing tells us on average, we can get close to 7% to 10%. I know that’s a big range, but it just depends. So if our debt is charging us 4%, or 5% even, there is that that net value that we’re missing out on. So I would say lower interest rates, I wouldn’t prioritize necessarily. If you have extra dollars, put that towards savings or put that towards your IRA or have a split approach — put some towards the loans and some towards retirement. When interest rates are higher though, when they’re in the 7% range, which is normal for graduate students, that’s where they’re a little iffy and we might want to prioritize them a little more. Those would be ones that you’d want to prioritize and you can kind of take a avalanche approach where we tackle the highest interest rate loans first, if you wanted to do it that way.

18:01 Emily: Yeah. What if we flip the scenario a little bit and say, okay, well instead this graduate student is someone who is going to pursue an income driven repayment plan and potentially forgiveness, maybe PSLF, but they still have that disposable or discretionary income during graduate school, then I guess the weight would tilt towards starting to invest. If you know that you’re going to be enrolling in one of those plans later, my understanding is, hey, never make an extra payment, never pay more than the minimum, if that is your plan and all that extra money should be going towards your other financial goals.

18:35 Meagan: You said it. Yeah. And we can’t have a qualifying payment while we’re still in school. Sometimes that’s a misconception. People feel like they can enter repayment and start having payments count towards forgiveness. We can’t necessarily with our existing degree loans, we have to wait until post-graduation for those payments to count. So, yes, we don’t want to pay a dollar extra. So throw that towards something that’s going to serve you in the future, and that would be retirement or savings.

Commercial

19:04 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Taking Out Student Loans During Grad School

20:08 Emily: Yeah, I think another point that might be helpful for the listeners is to understand, if you want to take out federal, and if you have any conception in your mind that there might be a possibility you want to take out a federal student loan during graduate school, what are the steps you need to do in advance to have that be an option for you versus what you just said: well, maybe at the given time that you need money, maybe you can’t take out a loan right at that moment. What steps should a person do in advance? If they’re thinking, yeah, this might be a possibility for me down the road.

20:34 Meagan: You’d want to complete FASFA each year. As a graduate student, your parents information, does it factor in anymore so it is solely on your financial situation. That’s going to help you with the un-subsidized funding, which you can get up to $20,500 for. You’ll also might want to consider looking at signing the graduate plus promissory note, which your financial aid office will tell you to do if you need that additional funding. But it is a separate promissory note. If we need above and beyond that $20,500, then you can spill over into the graduate plus loans. That’s what I would, I would do each year: FASFA and then for the first time you borrow, graduate plus, or if you don’t have graduate plus now, maybe go ahead and sign that promissory note. Either way you have to accept the aid that you’re being awarded. It’s not like you’re just willy-nilly applying for a loan. You have to intentionally accept it, but that gears you up to be able to accept it without having to do all that paperwork in a rush or being too late.

21:41 Emily: Yeah, I guess I’m just thinking financial planning wise for graduate student, going into or in a graduate program where they just know this program is not paying me well, I can barely make ends meet, that might be a thing to do in advance. It’s actually a little bit like having an emergency fund. If you know you can’t build up your own emergency fund right now, where it’s not going to be very big because they just aren’t paying you enough to make that happen, then maybe this is a good sort of backup plan to have. Do all the paperwork in advance, if anything adverse ever happens this is another step that you could take. I don’t love that idea because of course it’s better to just have your own emergency funds and go and you go forward and of course that’s, most of the strategies that I talk about through the podcast is how to overall be building up your savings during graduate school, but just as like a backup plan, it seems like it could be prudent to take these steps so that money, the loans could be available to you if you came upon a situation where you needed it. You do need to take some steps in advance to make that happen, so thank you for clarifying that.

The Intricacies of Student Loan Repayment

How Marriage May Affect Your Repayment

22:40 Emily: Okay, now we’re getting to a couple, maybe more niche kinds of questions. I get a question sometimes from people who are either married or they’re considering getting married, but they want to know how their status as being legally married or not is going to affect things like their tax returns and therefore their student loan repayment amounts. Can you just explain how that works? I’m thinking especially for someone who is maybe considering getting married, but wondering about the timing of it and wondering if they’re going to have to do married filing separately and these kinds of questions. So with taxes and student loans, what happens when you get married and you have student loans or your spouse has student loans?

23:25 Meagan: Yeah. When you get legally married, your tax filing status, when it comes to being on an income driven repayment plan matters. If we’re filing taxes joint with our spouse, and we’re on an income driven plan, it is going to factor in our spouse’s income. We not want that to happen. We may keep our finances separately. We may be trying to keep our payment as low as possible to pursue forgiveness. One strategy we talk about is considering filing separately and what this does, depending on the plan, if we file our taxes separate and we’re on an income driven plan, either pay as you earn income based repayment or income contingent repayment, then we’re allowed to exclude our spouse’s income and keep our payment off of just our own, which can be hugely beneficial.

24:18 Meagan: There are downsides to filing separate that need to be weighed, so you want to do an analysis of what is the cost difference between filing separate and joint? Because you’re missing out on some tax discounts and maybe some benefits. And how does that compare to how much it saves us over the course of the year in our payment? I never want someone to be scared to get married because of their student loans. We can always pivot. It’s just in the year of marriage. You need to know that being married will impact the income driven plan that you’re on and you might want to take a closer look at how you file before you file.

24:57 Meagan: Then the last thing I’ll mention on that is revised pay as you earn, which is 10% of discretionary income, that plan does not care if you file separate. It’s going to count spousal income or all household income regardless. If you’re on that plan and you don’t want your spouse’s income factored in, you might need to switch to either PAYE or IBR and that can kind of solve that problem to where if you don’t want income factored in.

Choosing a Repayment Program

25:25 Emily: Gotcha. Thank you so much for clarifying that. You said earlier there are four different programs plus PSLF you mentioned a few of them just now — for someone who’s looking at this landscape and wondering how in the world do I choose which one of these programs I should enroll in. How can they do that?

25:43 Meagan: A really simplified way to think about it is if you’re going the forgiveness route, you want to choose the lowest income driven plan available. So that would be revised pay as you earn or pay as you earn. If you don’t want spousal income factored in, that would be pay as you earn or IBR, if you don’t have access to pay as you earn. From an income driven plan perspective, that’s how I would think. If our plan is to pay off the loans, then we might want to be choosing one of those amateurized options like the standard 10 year until we can commit to refinancing, or, and this might dive into one of your other topics I know we had mentioned, but if our income is really low now, and we want to take advantage of an income driven plan, but we are not ready to throw a lot towards it, then starting out on REPAYE could be really advantageous because of its interest subsidies. What that means is it has discounts on how much interest accrues when you’re in repayment, but the payment itself might not be as much as it needs to be to cover interest and principle. So it keeps that balance from ballooning and instead of being in forbearance or pausing loans during that timeframe, interests won’t continue to grow in that way. I know we were going to touch on that. I might’ve skipped ahead, but let me know if you want me to slow down on that one again.

27:11 Emily: No, I think it just gives a flavor for how complex this decision is, and how your individual career path and income path will affect the decision that you make, plus what you’re doing in your personal life, whether you want to get married or not. Who should be working with someone like you? What’s the kind of person who should be working with someone like you to figure out what the best decision is? And who’s the kind of person who, well, it’s simple enough, you can figure it out on your own?

When to Consult a Professional

27:38 Meagan: Yeah, I think if you have any anxiety or stress about making this decision, and it’s overwhelming doing this research for yourself, in a one hour consult, we will have your plan put together. If you want to save the time, save the energy and the stress, that’s somebody who would be a good candidate to work with us. For someone who might not be such a great candidate, I think if you are already very familiar with all of these repayment options if for sure that you’re going to be refinancing or just paying it off really aggressively, then I think that would be more so like a quick, “Hey, yup, I think you’ve got the right idea.” And again, that would be if your balance is lower than your income and you’re ready to walk away from those federal flexibilities. I think we won’t be able to provide as much value there, but for folks who have balance is much greater than income, and they’re a little nervous about that decision or navigating that, we would be helpful in that situation.

28:40 Emily: Yeah. I guess the way I’m thinking about it is like how high are the stakes here. If they’re pretty high, if that loan balance is pretty high compared to your income, that’s the time when you need to be sure you’re making the right decision and it helps to get some professional guidance at that point. And like you said, if you can have a one hour session and get a firm answer, that’s going to do well for you for the next 10 years, or unless and until your situation drastically changes, then that is awesome peace of mind to pay for in just an hour. That sounds wonderful.

29:09 Meagan: Yeah, and just the strategy too. There’s a lot of technicalities that go into when to file, like when to certify income, how to reduce income. There’s a lot of things that go into it, so if you wanted to get really sexy with your planning, that’s where we could come into.

The Emotional Aspect of Repayment

29:24 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Great recommendation on that front. Another question occurred to me, pulling together some of the threads that we’ve mentioned so far in the interview, if you are deciding to go in an income driven repayment plan and your intention is eventually to have a lot of that balance forgiven. We mentioned earlier never make more than the minimum payment you’re required to. Don’t make payments during deferment. Don’t make more than the minimum once you’re in repayment. Emotionally, how does a person deal with potentially seeing their balance, plus the interest increase and increase and increase, which is the situation that some people would be in pursuing that route over those 10 years, or even 20 or 25 years, while they’re in those types of programs? How do they emotionally deal with looking at that until they do get to the forgiveness at the end?

30:13 Meagan: It is something I feel like you need to compartmentalize because we are taking a non-traditional approach to debt. I back that up with make sure you know that federal student loans are just not a regular debt. That’s one, that’s the biggest thing we need to remember that if we were going by traditional debt advice, and if this was a traditional debt, we would have the opposite mindset. It would be, let’s pay this off like our hair’s on fire. But the federal system has some really unique opportunities like income driven plans and forgiveness that we can take advantage of that really help us prioritize other financial obligations. Maybe instead of getting anxiety about the loan balance increasing, maybe focus more on your savings increasing. So you have a lot more cashflow to be able to throw towards your financial independence and as long as we’re working towards that forgiveness timeline the balance will grow, but there is an end in sight. That’s something that I think can bring some peace of mind and just knowing and remembering that federal loans are not a normal debt.

31:18 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that insight. I think I’ll add to it. The real danger here is going into one of these forgiveness plans, one of these income-driven repayment plans, and taking advantage of the lower payment and then not having any movement in the rest of your financial life — not doing the investing, not doing the saving. That’s the real danger when you get to the end of the 10 years or the 20 or the 25. And yes, hopefully everything goes smoothly and the rest of the balance is forgiven, but you kind of have nothing on the other side of it because the whole time you’re thinking, “well, I still have my student loans, so I’m not going to be investing.” If you’re making the intentional decision to pursue an income driven repayment plan and pursue forgiveness, then your high priority needs to be, “yep I’m taking advantage of this, but at the same time, I’m going to be working on my finances over here. I’m going to be building up my portfolio, building my net worth.” And who knows what might happen in the future. If it turns out that the forgiveness was taken away or didn’t happen or something went wrong or something happened in your life, I don’t know, at least you have some net worth on the other side of the equation to potentially deal with the debt or whatever might be going on. It’s really just shoring up your finances in one spot rather than paying off the debt. Thank you so much for that insight.

What is Your Best Financial Advice for an Early Career PhD?

32:31 Emily: Meagan, I like to end all my interviews by asking for your best financial advice for an early career PhD, a graduate student or a PhD. That could be something that’s related to what we’ve talked about in this interview, or it could be something completely else, but would you please share that with us?

32:46 Meagan: I would say, I think my best coin of advice would just be to have a plan. And I know that sounds like so blah, but I think looking at your student loan situation or your financial situation head on is not as scary as it may seem. I think people avoid a lot of financial things because they’re not sure how to tackle it or they’re overwhelmed by it. I promise you, you will feel so much better if we just have a plan from the beginning. Because if you ignore it for three years, which sometimes I see, then we’re three years behind when we finally do pick up and start focusing on it. Having a plan is important for your peace of mind for your future self. It’s self-care to have a plan now. I think that would be what I’d part on there.

33:33 Emily: Yeah. I absolutely totally, totally concur about having a plan. I know looking back at myself when I was in graduate school, not having a financial plan. When you have so little income, so little wiggle room, you know you can never do everything you want to do with your money. You know that you can’t pay off your student loan debt and invest and do all the saving and all the lifestyle. You just have to prioritize and then triage the situation. So that’s what a plan helps you do and thank you so much for that advice.

Where to Find Meagan Online

Emily: Meagan, if people have enjoyed this interview and they’ve learned a lot from you and they want to potentially work with you, how can they get in touch with you? Or where can they learn more?

34:08 Meagan: Yeah. So studentloanplanner.com is a wealth of information. We write a lot of blog posts about anything student loan related. We have a podcast. And if you wanted one-on-one help, you can schedule a consult through our website, studentloanplanner.com.

34:22 Emily: Yeah. Wonderful. There are so many free resources available and it’s really nice to know that there also professionals like Meagan backing that up and there for you, if you need those consultations. Meagan, thank you so much for giving me this interview and joining me today.

34:35 Meagan: Thank you. It was fun nerding out with you.

Outtro

34:38 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.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, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. 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.

 

How to Curb Your Impulse to Keep Up with the Joneses

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Joy Lere, a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral finance consultant on the danger of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Joy explains how emotionally unsatisfying and financially damaging trying to keep up with the Joneses is and that contentment can only come from within yourself. PhDs anticipating future income jumps would do well to put off lifestyle inflation for a least a few years after their salaries increase, which will give them more career and lifestyle choices in the future.

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Links Mentioned in This Episode

keep up with the Joneses

Teaser

00:00 Joy: If you can understand that this idea of peer comparison, it is going to be ever-present, and it’s not so much that the environment or the people around you need to change. What needs to flip is the script in your mind, in terms of the mentality you have when looking to the people in your life.

Introduction

00:28 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 seven, episode 12, and today my guest is Dr. Joy Lere, a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral finance consultant. Our topic is the danger of keeping up with the Joneses. Joy explains how emotionally unsatisfying, and financially damaging, trying to keep up with the Joneses is, and that contentment can only come from within yourself. PhDs anticipating future income jumps would do well to put off lifestyle inflation for at least a few years after their salaries increase, which will give them more career and lifestyle choices in the future. This interview really hit home for me, as I reflected on my post-PhD life and finances and where my family is headed next. As you might have garnered from listening to previous episodes of this podcast, I had a pretty good handle on my finances by the end of grad school.

01:30 Emily: And I was truly satisfied with my lifestyle. I had defeated my Joneses. Or so I thought. Then, my husband and I moved to Seattle. We rented a relatively inexpensive apartment in a wealthy neighborhood. There’s a lot of tech money in Seattle, as I’m sure you know. Suddenly, I wasn’t comparing my lifestyle to that of other graduate students in a medium cost-of-living city, but to other full-fledged adults in a high cost-of-living city. I distinctly remember my first and hardest-hitting Jones moment in Seattle. Shortly after we had our first child, I joined a mother support group in my neighborhood. Our first meeting was in the home of our group leader, and each participant would rotate hosting subsequent meetings. I remember walking into our group leader’s house, which was gigantic, gorgeous, and immaculate. It was somewhat shocking to me. Plus, during the meeting, our group leader casually mentioned she was in the process of custom building another house in our neighborhood to move to the next year.

02:33 Emily: My heart sank, knowing that I would eventually host these mothers and babies in my small, dingy, undecorated apartment. That cheap apartment had been a strategic financial choice upon our move. We were following the advice to live like a grad student so that we could keep our retirement savings rate high while I got my business off the ground and we adjusted to parenthood. Even though we had good reasons for living in that apartment, those reasons paled for me, when I saw where and how my group leader lived. And I started questioning all our choices. That was my first big post-PhD Jones moment. I got past that feeling, kind of, eventually, for that situation, but now my husband and I are in the early stages of searching for our very first home to purchase. And I can sense myself starting to become aware again of the Joneses. Since buying a house in Southern California is such a big, expensive decision, I know I have to be really conscious about those feelings and influences. That’s why the subject of this interview was so timely for me. I hope it will be for you as well. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Joy Lere.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:50 Emily: I am just delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Joy Lere. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral finance consultant, such an interesting combination. So, I’m really happy to have her on the podcast today. We’re actually going to be talking about keeping up with the Joneses. Or rather, how not to keep up with the Joneses. So, Joy, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further?

04:11 Joy: Absolutely. It is a joy and a privilege to be here with you today. My name is Joy Lere. I am a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral finance consultant. So, essentially I am someone who as a clinician works where Freud meets finance. So, I live and work outside of Napa, California, and I’ve a telemedicine practice where I see patients for psychotherapy. And I also work in specializing in consultation within the finance industry. So within that role, I’m providing support, training, education, coaching, and psychotherapy also to financial planners and financial advisors, because there are a lot of really exciting things happening within the industry where there’s more and more attention being given to the fact that people’s relationship with their money is not just a matter of math or economic theory. Money itself is emotional currency. So, having an understanding of human psychology and how that drives financial decisions is really starting to be integrated more and more into the world of finance.

05:33 Emily: Yes. Thank you so much for that description. Yes, of course, I have observed this trend as well. And I’m really excited to have you on. Actually, I did an interview some time ago with Dr. Daniel Crosby. So, we’ll link that from the show notes as well, since that was on a similar topic.

05:47 Joy: He is a good friend and just, he’s fabulous.

Tell Us a Little More About Your Education

05:52 Emily: Oh yeah, it was a wonderful conversation. Would you also tell us a little bit more about your education, because you’ve spent some time in academia as well?

05:58 Joy: Yes. So, I obtained my master’s degree while living abroad in the UK for a couple of years. And I decided after that experience and after starting my clinical work in England, that I wasn’t quite yet ready to be done with school. So, my husband is in the military. We made our way back across the pond. And then I went to graduate school at George Washington University and obtained my doctorate in clinical psychology while I was there.

Can You Define “Keeping Up with the Joneses”?

06:33 Emily: Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. So, our topic for today, keeping up with the Joneses. Probably a phrase that maybe everyone’s heard in the audience, but can you give a little bit more of a fine point on the definition?

06:45 Joy: Absolutely. So, this is a phrase that’s popularized in society, and it really speaks to the way that people look around their social spheres and circles, and look oftentimes at their peers and kind of benchmark their lives and their decisions to that. So, they are seeing something, often an outside image or kind of a curated facade. I think certainly social media makes this even more complicated for people today. And then they think to themselves, “Well, if they have that or they are making that lifestyle choice, that must mean I can, or I should.” So then, they make decisions based on what they are seeing around them.

Does “Keeping Up” Make Anyone Happier?

07:43 Emily: Does attempting to keep up with Joneses actually make anyone happier? You know, we’ll address the financial component of that in a moment, but does it do anything for us emotionally or socially to try to keep up with the Joneses?

07:58 Joy: I think really, being in the comparison trap just keep someone emotionally stuck. Because what is not happening when you’re telling yourself, “I need to be, I need to be doing that. I need to be getting farther ahead,” is you aren’t focusing and being centered from a place of being grateful for what you have and really having a sense of contentment. And when you think about someone’s financial life, when there’s this constant search and drive and need for more and more and more, that can lead to dangerous, destructive places. Being on a hedonic treadmill like that can be exhausting. And the truth is that when a lot of times people think, “Well, I will eventually catch up,” but oftentimes the goalpost just keeps on moving.

09:01 Emily: I was just going to say that the phrase is keeping up with the Joneses, right? It’s not hanging out with the Joneses and being at the same level as the Joneses. It’s just like it implied in the phrase itself is a continual striving, as you were just saying, which sounds totally exhausting. I really like that you make the point that we can also move these goalposts on ourselves. Like yeah. Maybe you caught up with, you know, Jones number one over here. Well, that just means you’re going to switch your attention to Jones number two and try keeping up in some other area.

09:32 Joy: I tell people, throughout your life, there will always be Joneses there. You went to graduate school with them. You looked around there and you were like, “Well, they’re doing this. That means, naturally, that’s what I should be doing.” They are always going to be in your workplace. They’re going to be on whatever street you live. So, you moved to the bigger house, the newer neighborhood. Well then there’s going to be someone else who ultimately has a little bit more. So, if you can understand that this idea of peer comparison, it is going to be ever-present, and it’s not so much that the environment or the people around you need to change. What needs to flip is the script in your mind, in terms of the mentality you have when looking to the people in your life.

The Hedonic Treadmill

10:29 Emily: Yes, such a wonderful point. You mentioned the term hedonic treadmill a couple of minutes ago, and I’m betting not everyone in my audience knows what that is. So, can you explain that a little bit further?

10:42 Joy: This idea that often times we’re running a race, we’re going after more, something better. There’s a desire for enough. And people think they are moving closer to the mark, but really you are just exhausting yourself on a treadmill, and there’s never a finish line. So, when you are caught in this cycle, you’re just going to keep running. And it ultimately is never enough. I think, I encourage people to reflect on this idea of what is enough. Who decides what it is, how much it is, how do you know you have it? You know, even how someone answers that question is, is enough a number? Is it a sense of security? Does the outside world get to decide what enough is? Or is that something that you determine for yourself? No, this is, this is good. I can stop. I can breathe. And I don’t have to continue to feel the need to be amassing more.

11:55 Emily: Mhm. I’m currently reading the book Your Money or Your Life for the very first time. This is inside the Personal Finance for PhD’s Community. We have a book club, so I’m reading it for the book club.

12:06 Joy: That’s fabulous.

12:06 Emily: Yeah, I’m surprised it took me so long to read actually, because of course it has been out for a couple of decades. But anyway, the concept of enough figures very prominently, the argument that the authors are making in that book about having, as you were just saying, determining for yourself, and it’s really about self-reflection and it’s not at all about looking around you at what anybody else is doing. You know, what it is to be content, be full in a sense, like in terms of thinking about your appetite. You’re full, but you don’t want to stuff yourself. You don’t want to go beyond this, you know, level of fullness or contentness or enoughness because it’s damaging not only to your finances, but also to you as a person to, you know, as you were just saying, continually strive to go and beyond, beyond, beyond. One aspect of the hedonic treadmill idea that I understand at any rate is that, maybe it’s a little bit similar to like addiction or like getting into that, but what you need to feel a pleasure hit from spending becomes higher and higher and higher because you become adapted every new spending level.

13:10 Emily: You know, you get to a new spending level, you’re like, “Well, this is fantastic. I have all these new experiences and stuff. It’s wonderful.” And then suddenly it’s just normal and it’s just you again. It’s just you, yourself. And then you have to go to a higher spending level to get that hit again. And that’s the sort of a mountain climbing, like that’s kind of the treadmill aspect of it, is that correct?

13:28 Joy: Yes. Yes.

Keeping Up with the Joneses Affects Your Finances

13:31 Emily: So, we were just talking about how this is not ever going to be emotionally satisfying. What happens to your finances if you are striving to keep up with the Joneses?

13:40 Joy: I think it, peer comparison when it comes to finances is so complex. And oftentimes it is very problematic because peers give you permission to sometimes spend in ways that you ultimately can’t afford. And sometimes there’s pressure or there’s fear of missing out. Now, when we look at this idea and this concept of keeping up with the Joneses, when we look at the financial state of affairs of the average American family, who is indebted, over-leveraged, all of these things, if you are then trying to keep up with someone who is overextending, you are then overextending yourself even more. So, it just perpetuates this problem indefinitely. My great-grandmother who lived through the depression, had this phrase that I love. And I never met her, but it was something that was instilled in my mom. And it was this: “Just because they have it, does not mean they can afford it.”

Just Because They Have It, Does Not Mean They Can Afford It

14:53 Joy: And that is something that so many people confuse. They look at, “Well, this is the house they’re living in. This is the car they are driving. These are the vacations they are taking. And so that must mean like that’s okay.” What they don’t see is what goes on behind closed doors. They don’t see the physical, the psychological cost of the stress that comes with carrying debt. They don’t see the impact of the work stress of the employment situation that person feels like they are trapped in because of the lifestyle that they are living. A lot of that stuff happens behind closed doors. But I tell people, so part of my job as a therapist is–I love my job–so often, I wake up and I’m like, “I truly believe I have the best job in the world because I get to sit behind closed doors with incredibly bright, driven people who are having conversations they aren’t having with anyone else in their lives.” So, I’ve sat behind closed doors with the Joneses. And let me tell you, their lives are not as rich or pretty or neat as most people think when you just see a public-facing persona.

16:28 Emily: Yes. That’s a wonderful phrase from your great-grandmother. And actually, it reminded me of something that my pastor from my church in North Carolina was preaching a sermon one time and was talking about this concept of keeping up with the Joneses. And I remember him saying, you know, if you’re going to follow sort of the the Christian way of handling money, you know, there’s certain things in the Bible, the layout of how you’re supposed to do this. He says, you’re going to be living multiple steps behind who you perceive to be as your peers. You’re going to be living a step behind because you’re not going to be leveraged with debt, at least outside of your mortgage or whatever. You are going to be living in step behind because you’re going to be giving. You’re going to be living a step behind because you’re going to be saving for your future as well.

You’re Going to Be Living Three Steps Behind

17:12 Emily: So, he was like, “You’re going to be living three steps behind, you know, who you perceive to be your peers in terms of like your career or whatever it is.” And that has really stuck with me too, that like, yes, it just, as you were saying, you don’t know how other people are handling, you know, as an outsider, you don’t know what’s going on inside their homes and how they’re really managing to live the lifestyle that you can perceive. And, you know, you brought up social media earlier. We have so many more, I think, potential Joneses in our life right now, because we have access, in a way limited access, to a lot more people from maybe a lot of our different stages of life and even people you don’t know. So, I’m sure that this just exacerbates this entire problem.

17:50 Joy: Yes. And I love what you brought up. You brought up something so important about lifestyle choices. If you do the things that most people do, you are going to get the things that most people get. You’re going to get average. And right now, financially average in our country is not a pretty picture. So, it really requires people to step back and ask, “Okay, what do I really want? And what do I want long-term?” In order to get ahead, you have, especially early on, our little choices compound over time. So, I will often explain to clients and people, if you can make, and this is especially applicable to, to students, to professionals. A lot of times, if you are entering a kind of employment, or you’re graduating, you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to start living the doctor life.” No, hold on.

18:56 Joy: If you can give it a couple of years of living like you are a broke grad student and what you can do with the savings during that time, when a lot of your peers are starting to make very different choices, what that can lead to for you in the long-term is huge. But that requires being able to say, “No.” It requires being able to tolerate, okay. Maybe you’re going to miss out on some things. But, if you can be willing to do things differently than other people, you give yourself a chance at having something bigger and better that most people will never achieve.

Commercial

19:44 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The Community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the Community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, a book club, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now, back to the interview.

Present Lifestyle Choices Impact Your Future Comfort

20:49 Emily: I’m really glad that you took the conversation in this direction, because it’s exactly where I wanted to go as well. Talking about, you know, when you have these large income jumps, you know, okay for PhDs, you finished graduate school, maybe you’re moving up to a post-doc. Hopefully, a decent jump in income there. Okay, you’re moving out of the postdoc or directly out of the PhD, you’re getting into a proper job. Hopefully, a big jump there. And maybe, you know, throughout your career, potentially there could be other big jumps as you switch, you know, employers or whatnot. So, a lot of my audience is still in graduate school or is still in training. And so, they’re still anticipating and looking forward to those large income jumps in the future. And of course, the advice you just brought up, you know, there’s versions of it. You know, live like a grad student, live like a college student, live like a resident. It’s basically just, keep that lifestyle, or as close to that lifestyle as you can, from your prior earning stage for at least a little while into that next one. And then as you said, you know, this can do fabulous things to your finances. So, can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

21:45 Joy: Absolutely. And I want to explain. I think something that people often don’t fully understand or account for is in school, or maybe early in your career, you have a picture of, “This is what I’m going to want. I’m on this linear trajectory, professionally.” But things change. Life circumstances change. Sometimes your dreams, your desires, opportunities can lead to different places. And, if you have made financial choices so that you have the freedom and flexibility to change your mind, if you want to at a later time, and not be locked in because of the debt you have and the lifestyle that you have settled into, that gives you a ton of freedom. So, I just really emphasize to students that the things you are doing with your money now in these first years of your career are huge. So, if you can just hold on and be a little bit more conservative in some areas, that can have huge implications for your financial life later on.

Saving During Graduate School

23:11 Emily: Yeah. I actually want to give an example from my own life here. It a little feels like I’m tooting my own horn, but I think it does illustrate what you were just talking about. So, when my husband and I were in graduate school, we did our PhDs at the same time. So, we were both on stipends, same time. We saved, you know, I’m into personal finance, right? So like I was figuring this stuff out early. I was figuring out saving, investing and paying off debt and doing all these things. And so I started that during graduate school. Whereas a lot of people, either one have no opportunity to start saving or investing during graduate school, just completely off the table based on either their going into debt for their degrees, or they’re just simply not paid even a living wage. That was not our case.

23:50 Emily: We were very fortunate. So, we were doing that saving. We, one, could, but two, we took the initiative to do it. We were figuring that out at that time. By the time we finished graduate school, we had amassed quite a decent nest egg. And, you know, one, one attitude could have been during that time, “Well, you know, I may as well just spend what I have have, I don’t really need to save right now because I’m going to have this big income jump in the future. And, you know, it’s going to take care of itself at that time. I won’t worry about investing until, you know, later on.” But because we took that other route of starting as early as we could with, you know, saving and investing and so forth, we had a decent nest egg built up by the time we finished graduate school. That enabled one, my husband to take a job at a startup, which he had never anticipated doing and was completely, you know, really nervous about that.

24:30 Emily: We’re sort of conservative with our careers. And so we were like, “Wow, you know, this good job could go at any point.” But it was just such a perfect fit for him. We were like, “How can he pass this up?” You know, we’ll take the risk. We have the nest egg, we can do that. We can take that risk of him taking that kind of job. Secondarily, I was able to start my business, which meant, you know, just completely going off a different track from, you know, the normal job thing, which is a fantastic opportunity and similarly, very good fit for me. So, I feel like our life, you know, career satisfaction levels were much higher than they would have been had we not been in a financial position at that time to be able to make that choice. And the reason we were in that position was because years earlier we had started this process not really knowing that was how it’s going to work out. You know, we didn’t realize, you know, these opportunities came our way and we could take advantage of them because of the preparation we’d done before that point.

25:19 Joy: Absolutely.

How to Cultivate Contentment in the Now

25:21 Emily: So, I’m thinking about a graduate student, probably. Maybe a post-doc, who is currently maybe even practicing not keeping up with the Joneses. Because they probably have a lot of Joneses in their lives that they couldn’t possibly keep up with. Right? Like it’s just not even a feasible thing for them to do right now. So, what would you say to that person about how to still cultivate contentment in their life when they know they can’t even possibly play the game with the Joneses right now, and also how to maintain that once maybe they are able to get in the game once their income is higher?

25:57 Joy: I think, you know, this idea of game and even if we bring it back to the race. if you can understand everyone is playing a different game, and if you can focus on running your own race and just stay in your lane, that is going to set you up for success. Now, I don’t think that if you are not trying to keep up and you’re making a concerted effort around that, that doesn’t mean your life needs to be devoid of fun and human connection. I think, I encourage people to be creative. You can be the one driving the conversation, making suggestions. And the truth is, sometimes if you are maybe doing things or suggesting things to your social circle that are not going to be exorbitantly costly, there are probably going to be some people who are really relieved. Because here’s the thing. Everyone’s running this race.

27:04 Joy: And some people are more aware of it than others. Some people, based on their upbringing and what they bring to the table in terms of their own money scripts, and what gets activated for them around money, they may have different thoughts and feelings about it. But that’s one way to think about it. And you know, this transition when you do have more income, I think it’s important that it doesn’t become, you know, if you think about someone who’s been on a diet and then it’s like, everything is suddenly available, I’m just going to binge. If you can keep a mentality of moderation, that is going to serve you going forward.

Take Ownership of Social Spending

27:50 Emily: I love those two suggestions. And especially the first one around like, it’s sort of like, money decisions, let’s say about social spending with your peer group. They don’t have to happen to you, right? Like you can actually sort of take the wheel and say, at least some of the time, I’m going to be suggesting things to do that are within my budget. Like you said, probably some other people will be relieved. And so, you know, you can do a combination of planning things and maybe saying yes or no here or there to things that other people suggest. So that you’re not, you know, always, always saying no to everything, but yeah, you can keep it more within your range and steer things. I know, certainly for me in graduate school I found a group of friends that I was comfortable socializing with and we all sort of had the same manner of socializing that we enjoyed, and it was very inexpensive. And it was really good for all of us in that sense.

28:40 Emily: And so, you sort of find your people, is maybe one way. So like, there aren’t so many Joneses, so close to you in your life. I had a couple other ideas about how to like combat this, you know, impulse to keep up with the Joneses. One was to redefine what you’re jonesing for. So like instead of jonesing for the consumption aspects of using your money, Jones for like, “I’m going to max out that 401k,” like “I’m going to, you know, be striving”–if you want to strive for something–be striving for something that’s ultimately going to benefit your finances instead of, you know, working in the opposite direction for you.

29:17 Joy: Change your status symbols.

Happiness is Not Contingent on What You Are Chasing

29:20 Emily: Yes. Oh, that’s a great way of putting it. I love that. It’s very, you know, it’s millionaire next door. Right. So, try to be like that person. Are there any other like sort of behavioral finance tips that you would suggest for, you know, helping people achieve their financial goals without letting these Jones impulses kind of get in their way?

29:40 Joy: Well, I think just really paying attention to what you are benchmarking to, this idea of this is the baseline. I think that’s really important. As you think about and reflect on, I think developing financial self-awareness and doing some reflection and understanding about what gets activated for you with your money, and really starting to dig into some of the more core beliefs you carry about money and how that drives what you do with it. I think those are really important foundational places for people to start.

30:26 Emily: Yeah, I think going along with those exercises as well, and you just mentioned this, is sort of remembering where you’ve come from. Like remembering the influences, of course, that your parents have, and then maybe your peers, you know, through different stages of your life. And remembering like, especially once you’ve passed, like the graduate school stage, like, “Okay, back then I did live on this amount of money. I did have this size of home. I did do these things. Was I happy then? Was I content then? Why are things different now? Could they be more similar to how things were in the past?” I’m asking myself some of these questions now that I’m, you know, a few years out of graduate school.

31:02 Joy: If you are telling yourself, “I will be happy when,” and you are then looking to something in the future, I would really encourage you to go back into your history and think about this idea of happy. What is some other evidence you have that there have been other times when you’ve had that feeling that experience that you haven’t had that thing? So, happiness is not contingent on that which you are chasing.

The Power of “No”

31:34 Emily: Yeah. That’s such a, I think foundational point about happiness, that I’m only just sort of starting to learn myself now in my thirties. And I wish I had known it because I am the type of person who kind of always has goals and is always striving for something. And my husband definitely kind of complains and kind of ribs me for like always wanting the next thing. And why can’t you be satisfied now? And, I am starting to realize like that. Whoo. That’s just how I am. I need to really like, look at that because I’m never going to get there. Right? If that’s what I’m basing that on. Is there anything else you wanted to add, Joy, before we wrap up the interview here?

32:09 Joy: I think this idea of there’s a lot of power in saying no and having financial boundaries, that’s something I do a lot of talking with people about. I think a lot of things get in the way of people saying, “No.” There’s a fear of missing out. There’s a discomfort with what you are anticipating someone else’s reaction is going to be. And the truth is, I believe people would be healthier, wealthier, and less exhausted overall if they built that muscle of saying “No” more often. And again, that’s not saying no to everything. But if you are finding yourself in a situation in your gut where you’re like, “I’m going to say yes, but I really don’t want to do this.” Ask yourself why. And then what is getting in the way of your taking care of yourself? If it’s your energy, if it’s your finances, and what would need to happen in order for you to have the courage to say, “No?” And what is the cost to your yes? Be that financial, physical, psychological.

How To Connect with Joy Lere

33:27 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much. How can people find out more about the work that you do? Or I don’t know, if they want to be a client of yours. Like how do people connect with you?

33:37 Joy: My website is my name. J O Y L E R E. Joylere.com. I am active on LinkedIn, Joy Lere Psyd, and also spin my creative wheels on Instagram a little bit, @ joylerepsyd, and also love to hang out on Twitter and connect with people there. Also, my handle is joylerepsyd.

Best Advice for an Early-Career PhD

34:02 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much. That’s where we connected as well. So, final question here, Joy. What is your best financial advice for an early-career PhD? It could be something we’ve touched on in this interview, or it could be something else entirely.

34:14 Joy: My best advice is to do things different than most people around you. If you do that now, you will have things that no one else later on in their career will likely be able to accomplish and achieve.

34:36 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Thank you so much for this interview and for joining me today.

34:39 Joy: Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your platform with me.

Outtro

34:44 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.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, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. 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 Meryem Ok.