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How to Advocate for Financial Policy Change on Your Campus

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Tyler Hallmark, a recent PhD in Higher Education and Student Affairs and a low-income, first-generation college student. Emily and Tyler and discuss the why, what, and how of advocating for improving university policies that relate to finances and benefits. They cover the timing of fellowship disbursements and assistantship paychecks vs. fee due dates, emergency aid funds, reimbursements, prohibitions on outside work, and more. If you want to raise an issue that they skipped, please leave a comment in the show notes, email them, or start a conversation on social media.

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Teaser

00:00 Tyler: You don’t have to wait for a union to form. You could be the one that is forming it. I did this often informally, you know, I never thought to call us a union, but I would just share my experiences vulnerably with my peers. And they would share theirs with me. And we would come together and we would go approach the chair of our department or, you know, someone that does have power in our school and say, Hey, we’re having this issue. There are multiple of us. Is there anything we could do?

Introduction

00:32 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 11, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Tyler Hallmark, a recent PhD in Higher Education and Student Affairs and a low-income, first-generation college student. Tyler and I discuss the why, what, and how of advocating for improving university policies that relate to finances and benefits. We cover the timing of fellowship disbursements and assistantship paychecks vs. fee due dates, emergency aid funds, reimbursements, prohibitions on outside work, and more. Tyler is quite knowledgeable and experienced in advocacy and shares his story with us vulnerably. I’m confident that our discussion of policies and hearing about Tyler’s approach to advocacy at the end will help enhance your own advocacy efforts on your campus. If you want to raise an issue that we skipped, please leave a comment in the show notes, email us, or start a conversation on social media.

01:42 Emily: April 18th is fast approaching, so in case you haven’t started working on your tax return yet, I wanted to point you to my #1 most popular free downloadable. It’s my tax cheat sheet for graduate students who are U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and residents for tax purposes. You can find it at PFforPhDs.com/student-tax-sheet/. The cheat sheet briefly explains my framework for the categories of higher education income, the three higher education tax benefits that might be available to you, and why students who were age 23 or younger at the end of 2021 need to be extra cautious. Better yet, once you sign up for my mailing list to download the cheat sheet, you’ll receive a free email course explaining in-depth all these concepts and more. Again, you can download the cheat sheet from PFforPhDs.com/student-tax-sheet/. Please share that link with your peers as well! Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Tyler Hallmark.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:59 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Tyler Hallmark. I first met Tyler actually on an episode of Dear Grad Student. We were both featured by Alana on episode 27. And we talked about kind of, you know, high-level issues related to being a graduate student, advocacy topics. And I just really enjoyed that conversation so much, I wanted to invite Tyler on this podcast to dive even more deeply into that topic. So, Tyler, it’s absolutely a delight to speak with you again. And would you please introduce yourself to the audience?

03:27 Tyler: Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Tyler Hallmark and my pronouns are he/him. I am presently working as a program associate in the higher education program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation here in New York City. Before I came here, I was actually finishing my PhD at the Ohio State University in higher education and student affairs. And so, a lot of my background while I was there was focusing on low-income students, first-generation students, students of color, and their journey through higher education and how we can really make the systems more equitable and more supportive for students like myself that has gone through this as someone who is from a low-income household, who was the first in their family to go to college and who is also Cherokee. And so, you know, I’ve written a lot about my experiences. I’ve written for Diverse, I’ve written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, these different outlets, really, sharing some of the backgrounds, some the challenges I faced, and trying to really shift policy, shift practices, on our college campuses for students like myself.

The Importance of Advocacy in Higher Ed

04:36 Emily: Yeah. And we’re partially basing this interview off an article that Tyler sent me in advance, so we’ll link that from the show notes if you want to get even more of his perspective on these issues. So, you know, beyond just what you explained about your own background and about your work with first-gen and low-income students, students of color, and so forth. Are there any other reasons why you think it’s important to advocate for yourself or other graduate students in higher ed?

05:00 Tyler: Well, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s always important as I was going through, I think, you know, students from backgrounds like myself already have so many barriers to face going to college, having to, you know, learn the whole admissions process, having to learn how to, you know, really make it, how to learn study habits. I didn’t really know have good study habits until I just kind of, you know, picked them up as I was going through college. And so, you know, with all those barriers already in mind, there are so many barriers that are just unnecessary that we’re facing as we’re going through college and, you know, it’s really making a big impact on whether we even complete the degrees we set out to and reach the goals we have for ourselves. So, I always try to share my own experiences and be vulnerable with people, not only just to hopefully shift the policy or practice to make it easier on my college journey, but because I know there are so many students coming after me, and I know if I don’t speak up now, then no one’s going to speak up for me. So, that’s what ultimately got me into doing this kind of work.

06:00 Emily: And I think I’ll add to that as well, like of course it’s a necessary and beautiful goal to make higher education more accessible to more people. Everyone benefits from that. But I was also thinking about this idea of like, we do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done. Or like, I had this experience in my PhD program, so that means that you’re going to have to put up with this too, and how like damaging that is and how unnecessary it is. And so, you know, as we have gone through the, you know, decades of graduate students, like we’ve learned some things that maybe don’t need to be the way they are. And I think part of the purpose of me doing this episode is to try to, you know, with your perspective as well, share what policies maybe are being tried out at some places that could be tried at other places.

Earlier Distribution of Financial Aid

06:43 Emily: Like maybe there aren’t as many barriers to changing these policies, as you know, you might assume. So that’s kind of the impetus behind the conversation. So, let’s talk specifically about what are some of these policies that you think, that I think could be changed, should be changed, that we see kind of in many places across higher education. So, I have a list in front of me and we’re just going to bang, bang, bang, go through this list. Again, partially based on this article that you wrote. So, first of all, one of the things we talked about on the Dear Grad Student podcast was earlier distribution of financial aid. Can you tell me more about that issue and how it can change?

07:17 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So, as you’ll see in the article that you mentioned, I talk about my experience. As a grad student, I would go into the financial aid office, and one semester, I was going to miss my rent. I didn’t have any money, and they were not going to release the funds until two weeks after classes had started, well after my rent was due. And I went into a financial aid counselor and I was like, Hey, is there any way I can get my financial aid easier? My scholarship had already sent the money to my institution, but my institution just wasn’t releasing it to my bank account until after classes started. And the financial aid advisor basically just said, well, I don’t know why you don’t have money saved up. I don’t know why you are in this predicament. You should just learn to manage your money better.

08:03 Tyler: And I was really taken aback because I didn’t have any money to manage. So you’re just really expecting me to already have the savings account and all this kind of stuff. And I didn’t have any of that. And so, what I’ve been pushing for is for institutions to really release the financial aid before the semester starts. You know, I can’t afford to wait to move until, you know, after classes start. So, you know, federal guidelines say you can release it 10 to 14 days before classes start, even loans, federal loans and that kind of stuff. And so, I’m really pushing for an earlier financial aid distribution on that regard, or in the cases that institutions can’t move the whole distribution up, at least allowing students to take an advance on financial aid. And some institutions, like my first institution I attended, actually let me take out up to $1,500, which was enough to cover me for one month of rent. However, a later institution I attended would only let me have like a $400 advance, which wasn’t nearly enough to make my rent.

09:06 Emily: It’s a little bit rich, right? Coming from this financial aid officer, whoever you’re talking to to be like, “Um, yeah, we’re going to hold your money hostage for like an extra month here. But like it’s really on you. This is your problem.” As you said, the federal guidelines allow that earlier distribution. So like why wouldn’t the universities, as you said, at least release part of it? And specifically maybe for your situation or how this works in general, when you’re talking about financial aid, I think you’re speaking about a scholarship, right? So like awarded income that, you know, had been sent to the university for you, and it was just basically giving you access to that money earlier.

Detrimental Effects of Lack of Early Access to Your Own Funding

09:40 Tyler: And a lot of this falls back to also institutions doing enrollment checks. So, you know, it’s mandated that professors and faculty report attendance to their classes. And so the financial aid office will often wait until they get those attendance records before they let students have any money to make sure they’re showing up. But I think that’s a detriment because especially, I’m in grad school. I know I often showed up to class and I didn’t have my books on the first day of class. And I had a professor saying, you’re a PhD student. How do you not have your books already? You should have learned this, you know, years ago. And I’d say, well, I’m a PhD student, but I’m still poor. I still can’t afford, you know, to get my books before classes start, unless they give me my financial aid.

10:26 Emily: Yeah. I think this is so relatable to anybody who’s been through that transition to graduate school. I mean, at least they can imagine like the difficulties in that. Like, I think back to my own move to graduate school, and like, oh wow. Now I realize how fortunate that was. Because for example, I didn’t have to move very far. Like I didn’t have to buy a plane ticket. I already had a car. So like, it was just like, okay, I’m going to pack up my possessions and go. And actually the apartment that I got into did like a student, like thing where you didn’t have to put down a deposit. So it was like all kind of set up to be like, okay. And I did have little bit of savings from the previous job that I had. So it was like, looking back on that it’s like, it went okay for me, but I can so easily see how it could be really, really difficult if you don’t have some of the things that I just mentioned already in place or like more challenges there.

11:10 Emily: Another sort of way to get at this problem is for PhD programs, in particular, to provide something like an extra bit of money, a moving bonus, a top-up fellowship, something that is specifically sort of earmarked to help students move to that institution. Because as we know, probably most great majority of PhD students are moving some distance to get to their new programs. Now, I’ve seen, like I’ve had heard reports of people telling me that their offers included this kind of thing, $500, a thousand dollars. We talked about this, for example, in the episode with George Walters-Marrah, which I’ll link to in the show notes. It was a $500 moving bonus that helped him decide between his number one and number two choice of PhD programs. Like that was kind of the final clincher was getting that offer. But I understand that you have talked about this with many people before as well, and you’ve been hearing some different things.

12:02 Tyler: Yeah. So first off, I will say I’m a big advocate for applying moving bonuses for students, especially those grad students trying to move to college that often have to go across state lines to find a graduate program that matches their needs. They have to leave home. So, a big advocate for that. And I’ve been talking about that a lot, you know, you’ll see me post about it on Twitter and those kinds of things and my own experiences showing up to college and going $5,000 in debt because I had to move across the country. But then I also had a lot of responses from, you know, deans and administration that read my work and they’ll say, Hey, we looked into doing this moving bonus thing, but it’s just not feasible. Like it’s not possible for us, we’re facing different, you know, barriers to policy that just won’t let us distribute those kinds of bonuses to students. And so I’m not, you know, super familiar with what policies are in place and if those are federal or state or how that’s working there. But I do know some institutions run into trouble when they do try to look into that.

13:02 Emily: Yeah. So this is a little bit of an open question. And maybe it does vary by state. Maybe it varies, you know, public versus private institutions. But I am glad that people, at least administrators, are at least looking into it, at least making the effort. But in places where it is possible, it is a great, great, great, incentive to help with that, as we were just talking about, that early financial crunch that everyone’s going through just to get to school. So thanks for sharing that. I hope that they keep kind of chipping away at whatever these barriers are that they’re seeing.

Benefits of Pro-Rating

13:31 Emily: Okay, another issue that I’ve had people actually on the podcast mention to me before is about the student fees that often have to be paid like really soon before the start of the semester, that can happen, or very soon into the semester. And I know for me, for example, one of the fees that I paid, it wasn’t even necessarily a required one, but I mentioned I have a car, so I paid like a parking permit fee once per year. So I paid that, you know, in one lump sum, it actually changed like how I even budget to like, be able to handle that kind of once per year expense. But I heard from some other people at other institutions that their fees and things like parking permits were prorated like per paycheck. And I thought that was such a smart idea to like spread out that payment throughout the year. Is this an issue you’ve thought about all?

14:16 Tyler: You know, I really like the idea of pro-rating. I think you run into trouble with that when you look at scholarships because you have to pay in a lump sum then. You know, when I was on my PhD, I relied on scholarships and fellowships less so than an actual job and paycheck. So I didn’t face that directly. I will say some of the things I faced, and I would often ask for, and a lot of students don’t know to even go ask for this, was these places that often require fees upfront, you can often ask for them to push that fee back. So for instance, when I would enroll for my fall courses, they would say, well, a certain amount of fees are due in May before, you know, three months away. And I was able to always petition for that and they would say, okay, we can wait until your scholarship comes in in August or September and pay it then. And so just institutions could make that more clear that students can actually ask for that. And on the student side, you should just know that that’s often an option. I’ve done that at multiple institutions so far in that regard.

15:20 Emily: Yeah. I think the basic point here is just like, let’s time the payment of fees along with when the student actually has money to pay. So if it is a monthly or whatever, kind of paycheck, let’s pay the fees with every paycheck instead of, you know, upfront all at once. Or if you’re receiving these like larger scholarship or fellowship distributions, yeah, as you just said, like let’s coincide the date of the fee needing to be paid with that disbursement because that’s when the money is available. So logical. Love it. Thank you so much for, you know, pointing out that you’ve been successful in having that exception made for you.

Emergency Aid Funds

15:52 Emily: Let’s talk about emergency aid funds now, and I’ve actually heard this in two forms, both grants and loans. I don’t know which one you have been talking about the most. But there are sometimes emergency funds available to graduate students. So, can you tell me a little bit more about this issue?

16:08 Tyler: Yeah. So, we see a lot of this coming up, especially over the pandemic. I see a lot of federal funding that is going to institutions during this time. Institutions are then turning that into an emergency aid fund. Of course, I’ve seen a wide variety of funds. Like you mentioned, there’s a loan and the actual grant money that you can just keep and not have to pay back. But also there are some that require different amounts of paperwork in different red tape to even receive. So, you know, some will actually require, and they won’t process it for a week, whereas some will process it within two days in a senior student account and those kinds of things. So, the thing I mainly advocate for is to even have these funds set up, but also have them as easy as possible for students to access.

16:55 Tyler: And the final note I will say is that too often institutions gear these towards undergraduates only. And they don’t even write that. I had one institution where I was struggling and I was going to apply for this emergency grant funding. I actually had a financial aid counselor tell me to apply for it. And after I applied, they emailed me back and said, well, you’re a graduate student. This is for undergraduates only. And even the financial aid counselor wasn’t aware that it was for graduate students only. So, making that clear around those and really targeting it towards all students on your campus and not only certain populations.

17:28 Emily: Definitely. I attended a conference in 2019, the Higher Education Financial Wellness Association’s annual conference. And I remember these like emergency aid, you know, grant and loans programs being a big topic of conversation at that time. More and more universities were implementing them. And so I think, you know, the suggestion here is just yes, more please, and also to more populations of students, please. And Hey, also postdocs. Don’t want to leave out the postdocs here. They have financial stress as well.

17:54 Tyler: Totally. Especially when you think about that it’s often these graduate students and postdocs that are more likely to have families. So they’re more likely to run into these kinds of emergency situations in different regards.

Food Pantries and Subsidized Housing

18:06 Emily: Similarly, another topic of conversation that I heard at that conference was about food pantries and food banks being set up at universities and how they were implementing those programs. Can you tell me about your experience and advocacy around these?

18:19 Tyler: Yeah, certainly. Again, this goes back to having a wide variety of what these food banks look like. The one thing I really advocate for these is really having them in a place where students hang out. You know, when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, we actually had this great intercultural center where students would just come and study, hang out with their friends, have movie nights. And there was a food pantry that was just open. There wasn’t anyone that you had to sign in and get the food. You could just walk in and take the food as you needed it. And you know, a lot of students that are often facing this food insecurity, um, are often, you know, afraid of the shame that comes with it. Afraid of someone seeing that they need help. And so having these, just being open and easy to access for students, I think that’s the best way to really go about setting up a food pantry instead of hiding it, you know, in a basement on campus or somewhere that students don’t even know where to look.

19:09 Emily: Yeah. Or putting up any like red tape or anything like that. I mean, of course they want to know how much it’s being used. But you could just do an inventory to figure that out. Great, great. Another issue that I wanted to raise is something that I’ve talked about in many of my other podcast episodes, which is offering subsidized housing in high cost-of-living areas. This happens sometimes, although we’ve had sort of questions about it on the podcast, whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be. And I’ll link to some of those previous episodes in the show notes, but then also subsidized childcare. And this is something that’s come up in two of my episodes, specifically with grad student parents. Are there any comments that you’d like to make around these issues of being able to subsidize, you know, these big, big expenses for students who need it the most?

19:56 Tyler: Yeah. The one thing I’ll add here is just when we’re thinking about housing on campuses, I know one of my grad schools, the reason I even chose it was because they actually offered a form of graduate student living that was free. I mean, I had to work for the university in their housing department, but they offered me housing. And that just made it all the more possible for me to live it in an expensive city. And so, I think even thinking about jobs and where we could provide, you know, if students do want to take on that extra job, mine was like a 15 to 20-hour job a week and I was able to get free housing for it. So it paid off for me. And that really helped me afford my master’s degree.

20:36 Emily: Absolutely. That’s something that we’ve talked about, really featured, that kind of strategy of serving as a resident advisor in two previous episodes, one with Adrian Gallo and one with Dr. Erika Moore Taylor. So check out those episodes in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. And it is a job, I know, you know because you did it, but it’s absolutely a job. It’s absolutely a part-time job. So we can’t trivialize that, but it can be very, very valuable, you know, to your bottom line, as a graduate student. I guess the other point that I want to make about these, you know, subsidized, um, resources is that they’re always too scarce. And so I think when you’re making a decision about where to attend graduate school and having, you know, the possibility of being in subsidized housing or the possibility of obtaining subsidized childcare is something that you need to have to make the finances work in that particular place.

21:21 Emily: You, you have to be so in-depth about what is the process of getting into this? How long can I have access to it for? So, for example, just recently, it was season 11 episode one, published an interview with Maya Gosztyla who was living in subsidized graduate housing at UCSD. And because she had started it, I think a couple of years ago, she had this like locked-in rent, but rent was being increased for like new people coming onto leases massively. It was like a, I don’t know, a 60% increase or something huge like that. And so, you know, these things can happen. So like you just have to really kind of understand the way the winds are blowing on campuses in terms of how much is being put behind these resources. And if you need it, you need to make sure you’re going to have access to it.

22:07 Emily: I know that childcare is always, always too scarce. I do recommend the episode I did with Lauri Lutes, if you already have a child or are planning on having a child going into graduate school. She was very intentional about choosing which graduate program would be the most supportive to her in her childcare needs and ended up at Oregon State University in terms of what she had to choose among. And they did things like for example, have free childcare, like sort of like afterschool care on campus, up to like four hours a day, completely free for students. So having it on campus and having it as like that part-time flexible option in addition to full-time, you know, daycare or something, that was vital for her, like making her finances in graduate school work.

Commercial

22:53 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 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 2021 tax return, which are available at PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I hope you will check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the material or have a question for me, please join one of my tax workshops, which are linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I offer one workshop on preparing your annual tax return for graduate students and one workshop on calculating your quarterly estimated tax for fellowship and training grant recipients.

23:57 Emily: There are two remaining live Q&A calls for the annual tax return workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), which are scheduled for Monday, April 4th and Sunday, April 10th. For fellowship and training grant recipients, please be aware that the deadline to make your quarter 1 2022 payment, if applicable, is April 18th, the same day as your 2021 tax return is due. The 2022 quarter one live Q&A call for my estimated tax workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients, is scheduled for Thursday, April 14th. 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.

Reimbursement Timelines

24:47 Emily: Another issue you brought up in your article was something that every grad student complains about, which is reimbursements after you, you know, outlay funds for conferences or for equipment or travel or other things. Talk to me about that reimbursement timeline issue.

25:02 Tyler: Yeah, definitely. So I think, you know, there’s this dangerous assumption we have probably in society broadly, but especially I’ve seen it in higher education is that students have the money to pay for things up front and rely on a reimbursement that can come sometimes months later, months down the line. And I think that’s really particularly concerning when we think about this professional development and how important professional development is. And even though we’re setting aside funds for students, we often expect them to pay for the conference, the hotel, the travel, everything up front, and then rely on this reimbursement that can often have a lot of red tape that, you know, students can often not be sure if they’re even going to get it back. Or even when they apply for reimbursement funds, they might not hear back until a week before the conference when flights and hotels are already super expensive. So having reimbursement not only, perhaps think about giving that money upfront, having to pay an advanced setup, but also thinking about when we approve students for it and how fast we can approve for that, that they’re going to certainly get these kinds of funds going forward. I think those are some things to really think about here.

26:14 Emily: Yeah. Pay in advance would be ideal. And if not, get that reimbursement back to them as quickly as possible. Even before the event occurs, like you said, the timing of buying flights and so forth, like you can buy these things months in advance. The conference registration fees also can be really high paid months in advance. So like, can we just reimburse them right when they have the expense, you know, one, two weeks later or do we actually really have to wait until after the event occurs? Hopefully not. And like you said, you know, there is the assumption in these systems that students have access to cash, which as we know is usually not the case. And most graduate students, I would say, put these kinds of expenses on credit cards. And then even if the reimbursement does come through, we all hope it does, then they have those months of interest that they’ve paid on, you know, hundreds over a thousand dollars worth of these kinds of expenses. And so that’s like a lot of financial damage that happens in response to this, you know, kind of system. So totally agree with you. I know everyone’s on board with that topic, right? How do we improve this reimbursement system or eliminate it?

27:13 Tyler: Absolutely. One thing I’ll also add there is, we’re assuming all students have access to credit, but I’ve actually had many students, you know, going through my career that were perhaps international students that had just gotten over here and they didn’t have an American credit line, you know, and that kind of access. So they didn’t even have a credit card to put this money on. They really had to dig into their bank account if they ever wanted to participate in these kinds of things.

Prohibitions on Outside Work as a Grad Student

27:37 Emily: Such a good point. Also my assumption. Access to cash, also assuming access to credit. Great, great point. Thank you. Another issue that I wanted to throw in here is about prohibitions against outside work as a graduate student. And tell me about your experience. I think you at least went to a couple different institutions for graduate school. Did they have any explicit prohibitions against outside work?

27:58 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. It was actually my first year in my PhD. I received a fellowship, and in that fellowship contract, they explicitly stated that I couldn’t take any jobs. That the whole purpose of the fellowship was to fund me so that I, you know, could focus on my studies. And while I understood that it was well-intentioned, still, I had a lot of time. First year was actually the least busy year of my PhD. So that was the one year I did want to have an extra job and try to pay off some of the debt I had, pay off those moving expenses that we mentioned, and really set myself up so I could focus more on my studies in my second, third, etc. years down the road. But that first year, because I had a fellowship, they actually made me sign a contract that I wouldn’t take any other job, whether that was with the institution or outside of it.

28:47 Emily: And I totally understand your impetus for like wanting to clear up, you know, past debts. And as you said, set yourself up for having a good, you know, subsequent second, third, and fourth years. Did you feel like that fellowship was sufficient had you not had those goals? Like if it were just paying for living expenses? Or was it like already outrageous that they were thinking that was enough?

29:08 Tyler: Actually, the fellowship is like the, at that institution, is like the one thing that pays well. So, it was actually enough for me to live on. It was fine there. But to set myself up to pay these rents before, you know, the semester begins and set myself up for those kinds of money management they expect from me and the financial aid office, it wasn’t enough for that. It was just enough to cover me on a monthly basis.

29:33 Emily: It is, I think at a minimum, a great idea for a fellowship to sufficiently support a graduate student. But as we were just talking about assumptions, the assumption there is that every graduate student has the same financial needs and the same financial responsibilities. You had a different situation maybe than one of your peers and you wanted to have that outside income. My kind of stance on this is, the university should stay out of your time, the business of your time, aside from, you know, what you are devoting to your studies. So if that’s going to be whatever you decide it is, but as long as the student is making sufficient progress towards the degree, I don’t think that university, whatever, anyone in your department, your advisor should have any restrictions on what you do with the rest of your time. After all, we were just talking about people at different life situations, for example, you know, people can be parents or caregivers for other, you know, people. Maybe you have a really time-consuming hobby that you engage with.

30:27 Emily: All of that is fine. Why would someone else not be able to work during their free time as you were just talking about that wasn’t taken up with progressing towards their degree? Let students manage their own time, and if it includes making money, that’s okay. As long as they’re doing what they need to do, you know, for the PhD, kind of my opinion on that. I’m not a fan of these outside work prohibitions, especially when they’re really, really broad, like saying you can’t have any outside source of work or income versus saying something like you can’t have a job where it interferes with the hours you’re expected to be in lab. That kind of thing makes sense. Like they don’t want you being pulled away from your primary responsibilities to head to your W2 job somewhere else. But to say that you can’t have like a freelance, you know, thing on the side, that’s totally up to your own time and discretion. It just does not make logical sense to me.

31:16 Tyler: Absolutely. One thing I’ll add here also is thinking about that just because you’re telling students they can’t get jobs and be compensated for their time, that often can lead to detrimental effects in the way that a faculty member might say, oh, Hey, you have this fellowship, and it won’t let you have any other jobs. So you can do this research for me on the side, right? And it puts these weird power dynamics in place that faculty can take advantage of you. I never had that, but I will say I have seen peers struggle with that, that they’re on this fellowship year until faculty see them as someone they can add to their research team because they have extra hours now, and now they’re not being compensated for that research, but they’re still being expected to put work in. And so, those are some things we should really think about in these prohibitions.

Time to Pay Higher Stipends?

32:05 Emily: Yeah. The general problem of unpaid labor in academia coming down to a fellowship recipient. Absolutely. And the final kind of point that I wanted to bring up is just the very, very simple financial solution of pay higher stipends pay, bigger fellowships, just pay people more. Would you like to add anything on this issue as a general solution? Just give a higher stipend.

32:32 Tyler: Yeah, no, I completely agree with it. I think it’s wild that we have, you know, careers in the real world that will raise your salary annually, or supposedly, to keep up with living wages, but grad students are still getting the same stipend they did 10 years ago. And so, I absolutely agree with increasing it appropriately and really taking those things into account.

32:59 Emily: Yeah, I’m especially thinking about this issue right now in a time of, you know, high inflation and wondering, now we’ve experienced rather low inflation for the last, you know, more than 10 years now. And so having no increase in stipend or a small increase in stipend that may have been manageable. But now programs really need to be proactive about responding to these increases in inflation by offering larger annual cost of living adjustments and increases. And I’m just afraid that it’s going to take some of them like three years of studying the issue before they finally like raise the stipend for goodness sakes. And similarly, I’ve seen this issue too with fees increasing. So like sometimes state universities, they can’t increase their tuition. You know, there are certain caps on how fast they can increase it, but there are much fewer restrictions on how fast they can increase fees.

33:47 Emily: And so, fees on graduate students can increase rapidly without there being increases in the stipend to actually pay for those fees. And so that’s something I want, and obviously program administrators to keep that in mind, just like, what are you even charging your students that’s going to come out of their own pocket? And can you then add to what’s going into their pocket to make up for that because if you have this static stipend for five years and the fees increase every single year, you may not know going into graduate school that that could be a possibility, but it has happened.

34:14 Tyler: Absolutely. That’s a great point. One more thing I would like to add is, thinking about how we structure financial aid advisors and having those cater to students. You know, we mentioned the point earlier about really understanding that students have different financial needs and we should be catering these setups towards them. And one of the ways we could do that is really assigning one financial aid advisor to a student. So that one financial aid advisor gets to know you over four years, gets to know your needs. And they’re able to really cater these kinds of policies and adjustments as necessary. I have had that at some institutions. You know, my first institution, I had a really great relationship with my first financial aid advisor. You know, they knew me on a first-name basis. However, later on, I went to an institution that treated me more like a customer. That I would just come in and whoever was at the desk would serve me that day. And they often didn’t have any clue about my needs. They didn’t know how my scholarship worked and how it was, you know, structured, et cetera. And it always led to confusion and made life a lot more difficult for me. And so, that’s one solution I often put out there is for institutions to really think of students as students, as human beings, and not just customers that they can just, you know, serve with a one-stop-shop.

How Do We Advocate?

35:33 Emily: I love that point. Thank you so much for adding that. It makes total sense because once you get to know the students more intimately, and you’re not having those, like I’m meeting you for the first time conversations over and over and over again. As you said, they can better understand your needs, and then they can better advocate for you when they’re talking about policy changes within their own like offices or whatever. And speaking of advocacy, we talked at the beginning of the episode about, you know, why it’s important to advocate on these, you know, financial and benefits-related matters. We talked about what you, you know, the listener could advocate for at their own institutions. By the way, if the listener, if you listeners have other issues you want to raise, please tag us on Twitter or add a comment to the show notes for the episode, anything like that, email us, that would be great. But to conclude this, how do we actually go about advocating? What are the actions that someone could take to, you know, try to enact change on one of these issues?

36:27 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think there are a lot of ways to go about this, and you’ve got to really find what fits you. One thing that I often do is I write, I write about my issues. I tell my story, and every story I tell, I try to end it with, you know, asking myself the question, what would make this experience better? You know, you can read the story to the article that we linked earlier. I really just wrote writing to get my frustration out about this financial aid advisor, and then telling me to manage my money better. I started writing about that frustration, and then I turned the question on myself and I said, what would’ve made that situation better so I can really think of recommendations for other people? And publishing them in these kinds of outlets that higher education practitioners read, that’s one way to do it.

37:09 Tyler: Another way would just be going through your own institutional systems, setting up meetings, you know, when you really run into something, meet with your department chair on the reimbursements. Meet with the head of your financial aid department and say, Hey, why is the system set up like this? It’s really causing a barrier for me. Having those kinds of conversations with people on your campus, I think, you know, and maybe it’s a big assumption, but I like to assume that people always have your best intention in mind. And I like to assume that people who are working on these college campuses are trying to help students and trying to listen to you. Just sometimes they might not be aware of that. And so, bringing those issues up to people that are in a position to make change is one way to go about that.

37:52 Emily: And I think, you know, back when we had that conversation on Dear Grad Student, I was listening to you, you know, share this approach of sharing your own story, vulnerably, like opening up to an administrator and saying, okay, this is the policy that’s in place, and this is the effect that it’s having on me personally. And is there something we can do to alleviate this situation? I thought that was a wonderful way to go about it. And it’s actually a theme I’ve heard over and over again as I’ve talked with graduate students about negotiation, for example, there’s, you know, an early point in this, which is like negotiating your offer letter before you even become a student at that institution. That’s a great time for negotiation. But the way that I heard that students were going about this was by sharing vulnerably how they anticipated the stipend and benefits offered by an institution, how they anticipated that would affect their personal finances and their lives and their stress level and their ability to devote, you know, time to their studies and all that kind of thing.

38:45 Emily: And it just is like, it’s not like a hard nose like you have to give me more, you have to fix this. It’s like, Hey, I’m having an issue here. Like what can be done? Like what creatives solutions can we come to that are going to help with this? And as you said, you know, that can happen not just at that early point before you become a student, but over time you can develop relationships and go back to these people over and over again. And they can really learn again how these policies are affecting you. So, I love that suggestion and your approach to it.

Unionization Movements and Collective Bargaining

39:11 Emily: One other topic I wanted to bring up was about unions and unionization movements, or not even like, necessarily like official unions, but just I’ll call it collective bargaining. So like getting together with other people, let’s say in your department, even if you’re not represented by a union and saying to the administrators, Hey, 50% of us are having a problem with this policy. Like what can we do about it? Same kind of conversation, but coming from a group rather from an individual. Do you have any thoughts on these, you know, unionization movements or how this can be a part of advocacy?

39:42 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. I think the big thing to say here is like, you don’t have to wait for a union to form. You could be the one that is forming it. I did this often informally, you know, I never thought to call us the union, but I would just share my experiences vulnerably with my peers and they would share theirs with me. And we’d have these conversations back and forth in private until we finally, you know, just, oh, you know what, I’m having the same issue. And we’d come together and we would go approach the chair of our department or, you know, someone that does have power in our school and say, Hey, we’re having this issue. There’s multiple of us. Is there anything we could do? And that’s how I often would position any kind of argument or, you know, any kind of advocacy that I would take to someone else. I would say other students are having it, too. This is a problem that we should really, that warrants addressing. So, yes.

40:35 Emily: That’s a perfect example. I’m so glad that, I mean, just as you said, like if a union is in place, go through that channel. If a unionization movement is in place, you know, join up with that and make your issues like heard to that larger group as well. Even if not, as you said, you don’t have to wait for it, you can go as a group and express your, you know, desire for something to change. So, love that so much.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

40:55 Emily: Tyler, it’s been great speaking with you again. Wonderful to have you on the podcast and have all of your insights here. I’m really glad you agreed to do this episode, and I want to ask you the standard question that I ask of all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on in the course of this interview, or it could be something completely new.

41:15 Tyler: Yeah. Well, the big advice I’ve been telling people, even people starting at my current position at my, you know, Foundation has been asking for, you know, some moving expenses and a signing bonus. You know, for instance, not all jobs will let you negotiate the salary. You know, my position wouldn’t actually let me negotiate the salary. But my way of negotiating was saying, Hey, I’m a low-income student coming out of a PhD program. I could really use a moving stipend and, you know, it was, again, going back to this whole being vulnerable. I could do that in my career as well. And, you know, they really wanted me, they understood my situation and all these things I’d advocated and wrote on. They knew my experiences. And they were able to provide me a moving expense. So that was one thing. The second thing I will say is, just making sure you really understand and read deeply on your benefits when you do sign, you know, what’s it mean to start a retirement fund? Those are things important to think about when you’re starting a new job and to pay in as much as you can, when you’re still young. As much as you can afford, you know, as someone who might have loans or whatever it might be to pay off.

42:20 Emily: Love that advice. I love being able to speak with people who are already past the grad school experience and can give us a view from the other side in the world of proper full-time employee stuff. So, that’s great.

42:32 Tyler: The grass is greener over here. I promise that.

42:35 Emily: Yeah. Good to hear. Good to hear. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s been great to talk with you again!

42:40 Tyler: Yeah. It’s been great talking with you. Thank you for having me!

Outtro

42:48 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. 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 increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 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.

Fellowship Income Can Trigger the Kiddie Tax

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The Kiddie Tax is an alternate, higher rate of calculating tax due that applies to young people. While it was intended to ensure that wealthy parents paid their full share of tax on their investments, it also sometimes applies to graduate students whose income comes primarily from a fellowship or training grant.

Kiddie Tax fellowship graduate student

If you have found this article through search, it’s likely that your (software or human) tax preparer has determined that you owe the Kiddie Tax. This article will help you understand what the Kiddie Tax is, who it applies to, how it is calculated, and how to avoid it in the future.

What is the Kiddie Tax?

Back in the early 1980s, finding tax shelters (i.e., legal ways to avoid paying tax) was all the rage because tax rates were much higher than they are today. The top marginal tax rate was reduced to 50% in 1981 and finally to 28% in 1988 with the last major tax reform prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (source).

One of the tax shelters was for parents to put income-generating assets in their minor children’s names. The children were (presumably) in much lower tax brackets for investment income than their parents, so overall the family paid less in tax for those assets (source).

In 1986, the “Kiddie Tax” was enacted to close this loophole. Under the Kiddie Tax, a child or young adult’s unearned income is taxed at a higher rate than it would be if they were older (with all other factors being the same).

How Does the Kiddie Tax Affect PhD Students?

The way the Kiddie Tax is written and structured makes sense for the purpose of preventing wealthy parents from sheltering their income using their children. However, it has an off-label effect on PhD students.

The Kiddie Tax applies to all children through age 17, some children through age 18, and some students through age 23. It applies to “unearned income,” which includes not only investment income but also income from fellowships, scholarships, and training grants.

This means that a graduate student under the age of 23 whose income is from a fellowship may be taxed not at the ordinary income rates that they will be at age 24+ but rather at their parents’ marginal tax rate (if it is higher than their own).

(The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed at the end of 2017, changed the alternate tax rate to be the one used for estates and trusts rather than the parents’ marginal tax rate, which it had been historically. This negatively affected college students from low-income backgrounds, who are often funded by scholarships and grants. At the end of 2019, the Kiddie Tax rate was changed back to the marginal tax rate of the parents, which was also retroactively applied for 2018. If you paid the Kiddie Tax in 2018, an amended return may be warranted.)

The PhD students most in danger of the Kiddie Tax applying to them in a way that will massively increase their tax due are those who received fellowship (awarded) income for an entire calendar year, e.g., January of the first year through December of the second year.

Who Has to Pay the Kiddie Tax?

The Kiddie Tax does not apply to every graduate student on fellowship, though it applies to many.

The instructions for Form 8615 lay out who has to file the form and (potentially) pay the Kiddie Tax. There are five qualifications for being subject to the Kiddie Tax, all of which must apply. If any one of the following is not true for you, you aren’t subject to the Kiddie tax.

1) You had more than $2,200 of unearned income.

Taxable fellowship and scholarship income counts as “unearned income.”

The definition of “unearned income” from p. 1 of the instructions for Form 8615 is:

“For Form 8615, “unearned income” includes all taxable income other than earned income. Unearned income includes taxable interest, ordinary dividends, capital gains (including capital gain distributions), rents, royalties, etc. It also includes taxable social security benefits, pension and annuity income, taxable scholarship and fellowship grants not reported on Form W-2, unemployment compensation, alimony, and income (other than earned income) received as the beneficiary of a trust.”

2) You are required to file a tax return.

The Form 1040 instructions (p. 8-11) answer the question of who has to file a return for 2019.

Chart A (p. 9) is for most people under age 65. It states that you must file a return if you are single and your gross income is at least $12,200.

Chart B (p. 10) is for dependents. You are required to file a tax return if you are single and:

  • “Your unearned income was over $1,100.
  • Your earned income was over $12,200.
  • Your gross income was more than the larger of
    • $1,100, or
    • Your earned income (up to $11,850) plus $350″

For the purpose of Chart B only, taxable scholarships and fellowships are “earned income” while “unearned income” includes taxable interest, ordinary dividends, and capital gains distributions.

If your gross income was less than $11,850 and your unearned income (taxable interest, ordinary dividends, and capital gains distributions) was less than $350, you do not need to file a tax return and are not subject to the Kiddie Tax.

Alternatively, you can use the IRS’s Interactive Tax Assistant to determine whether you are required to file a return: Do I Need to File a Tax Return?

3) You are a student under age 24

To be subject to the Kiddie Tax, you must be (Form 8615 p. 1):

  1. “Under age 18 at the end of 2019,
  2. Age 18 at the end of 2019 and didn’t have earned income that was more than half of your support, or
  3. A full-time student at least age 19 and under age 24 at the end of 2019 and didn’t have earned income that was more than half of your support.”

Full-Time Student Status

Form 8615 refers to Publication 501 for the definition of ‘full-time student’ (p. 12):

“To qualify as a student, your child must be, during some part of each of any 5 calendar months of the year:

  1. A full-time student at a school that has a regular teaching staff, course of study, and a regularly enrolled student body at the school, or
  2. A student taking a full-time, on-farm training course given by a school described in (1), or by a state, county, or local government agency.

The 5 calendar months don’t have to be consecutive.

Full-time student. A full-time student is a student who is enrolled for the number of hours or courses the school considers to be full-time attendance.”

You do not have to be a student throughout the calendar year to be defined as a student and subject to the Kiddie Tax. You are considered a student if you are a full-time student in (part of) 5 calendar months, which do not have to be consecutive.

Support Test

Defining support and who/what provided it is the trickiest part of determining whether you are subject to the Kiddie Tax. First, you must determine your support, and then calculate whether your earned income amounted to more than half of your support.

The Form 8615 instructions defines support as (p. 1):

“Support. Your support includes all amounts spent to provide you with food, lodging, clothing, education, medical and dental care, recreation, transportation, and similar necessities. To figure your support, count support provided by you, your parents, and others. However, a scholarship you received isn’t considered support if you’re a full-time student. For details, see Pub. 501, Dependents, Standard Deduction, and Filing Information.”

Publication 501 includes the Worksheet for Determining Support (p. 15), which you must go through in detail. Your support is the amount of money that is used to pay all your living, education, medical, and travel expenses. The education expenses include the tuition, fees, etc. for your graduate degree.

If you do not have earned income totaling at least half of your own support, you may be subject to the Kiddie Tax. Scholarships and fellowships do not count as earned income for this purpose.

The support test being calculated this way creates a very high bar for funded graduate students as tuition can easily rival or exceed living expenses.

4) At least one of your parents was alive at the end of the year

If your parents (including adoptive and step-parents) are deceased, the Kiddie Tax does not apply to you.

5) You don’t file a joint return

If you are single, the Kiddie Tax may apply to you. If you are married filing jointly, the Kiddie Tax does not apply to you.

If you meet all five of these criteria, you need to fill out Form 8615, as the Kiddie Tax may apply to you.

How Is the Kiddie Tax Calculated?

Form 8615 calculates your Kiddie Tax. Part I calculates your net unearned income, and Part II calculates your tax.

You should carefully fill out each line and read the instructions to find the correct definitions. I have highlighted some points about each line specific to fellowship recipients, but you still need to read the full instructions.

Line 1

Line 1 asks for your “unearned income” as defined above. If you had no earned income (i.e., you were 100% on fellowship for the calendar year and had no other income sources), you can use the value from your Form 1040 Line 1. If you had both earned and unearned income, you need to fill out the Unearned Income Worksheet (p. 2 of the form instructions), which subtracts your earned income from your total income.

Line 2

If you took the standard deduction, enter $2,200. If you itemized your deductions on Schedule A, there is a different formula to use in the instructions.

Line 3

Line 3 = Line 1 – Line 2

If the value in Line 3 is 0 or negative, you do not have to pay the Kiddie Tax. (Translation: If you took the standard deduction and your unearned income is less than $2,100, you do not have to pay the Kiddie Tax.)

Line 4

Enter in Line 4 your taxable income from Form 1040 Line 11b (your gross income minus all relevant deductions).

Line 5

Enter in Line 5 the smaller of the values in Line 3 and Line 4.

Line 7

To calculate your tax, you have to use the Line 7 Tax Computation Worksheet on p. 4 of the instructions or the Tentative Tax Based on the Tax Rate of Your Parent Worksheet on p. 5. The first worksheet applies the tax rates for estates and trusts to your unearned income; it is likely more advantageous to you to elect to use the second worksheet, but you will need to know your parents’ and siblings’ incomes for the calculation.

How to Avoid the Kiddie Tax

Once a tax year ends, you run out of opportunities to avoid the Kiddie Tax. To avoid the Kiddie Tax in the current or a future tax year, make sure that at least one of the five above points on who the Kiddie Tax doesn’t apply to is true for you. For example, you could:

  1. Delay your matriculation into grad school
  2. Configure your income and expenses such that you pass the support test, e.g.,
    • Request that you are paid by an assistantship instead of a fellowship for part or all of the calendar year
    • Earn a significant side income
  3. Get married and file a joint return.
  4. Find every applicable qualified education expense to make more of your fellowship income tax-free (e.g., your student health insurance premium if paid by scholarship)

How to Minimize the Kiddie Tax

If you are subject to the Kiddie Tax, the best thing to do is minimize your unearned income and taxable income. If you have any influence with your parents and they are willing and able to minimize their taxable income, please ask them to do the same.

You can minimize your unearned (awarded) income by making as much of it tax-free as possible using your qualified education expenses. This is largely accomplished more or less automatically, but please be thorough in tracking down and documenting every possible qualified education expense, such as course-related expenses and certain fees. Box 1 of your Form 1098-T is likely not the full sum of your qualified education expenses for this purpose.

You can minimize your taxable income by taking additional above-the-line deductions or adjustments to income, such as contributing to a traditional IRA (through April 15 of the subsequent year) or paying student loan interest (during the tax year).

Remarks

The fact that fellowship income triggers the Kiddie Tax is unconscionable and potentially highly financially damaging to an already vulnerable population, graduate students funded by fellowship or awarded income. Despite their lack of earned income, these graduate students are typically financially independent from their parents, so their parents’ income, even if high, is immaterial to their lives. This aspect of our tax code desperately needs reform; however, I am not hopeful that it will be reformed in the near future as it has withstood two recent tax code updates.

How to Financially Manage Your NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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

NSF GRFP stipend

Further listening: The Financial and Career Opportunities Available to National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows

The NSF GRFP’s Negotiation Power

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

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

Independence

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

Additional Funding

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

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

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

For Prospective Graduate Students

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

Further reading: Vote with Your Feet, Prospective Graduate Students

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

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Budgeting with Your Fellowship Income

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

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

Accelerate Progress on Financial Goals

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

Preparing for the Post-Fellowship Income Drop

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

Budgeting with an Irregular Income

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

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

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

Income Tax Implications of the NSF GRFP

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

Further reading:

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

Tax Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

Quarterly Estimated Tax

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investing Implications of the NSF GRFP

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

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Through 2019, fellowship income, like that of the GRFP, was not eligible to be contributed to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA). However, starting with tax year 2020, fellowship income is eligible to be contributed to an IRA, eliminating the only major downside of receiving fellowship income.

Further listening: Fellowship Income Is Now Eligible to Be Contributed to an IRA!

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

Further reading:

The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

by

If you’re reading this article, you’ve already done the hard part: You know (or suspect) that you’re supposed to pay quarterly estimated tax on your fellowship using Form 1040-ES. Whether you’re a graduate student, a postdoc, a postbac, or some other kind of fellow or trainee, if you’re not having tax withheld from your income, it’s pretty likely that you have the responsibility of paying quarterly estimated tax. The main obstacle to PhD students and postdocs paying quarterly estimated tax is simply awareness! The process itself is not complicated or difficult, as I’ll show you in this complete guide to quarterly estimated tax for fellows.

complete guide quarterly estimated tax

If you’re still unsure that you owe income tax at all on your fellowship income – or you want to help your peers understand this issue as well – I have plenty of articles and podcast episodes on that topic in particular.

Further reading and listening:

This article is for US citizens, permanent residents, and resident aliens living and working in the US, and I’ve made the assumption that you are not, in addition to being a fellow, a farmer, fisherman, or business owner/self-employed, that you do not have any household employees, and that your adjusted gross income is less than $150k. (There are additional factors at play for these groups with respect to calculated estimated tax due.)

This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or financial advice.

Table of Contents

This article is an overview of how to handle estimated tax as a fellowship recipient. For an in-depth, line-by-line exploration of the Estimated Tax Worksheet in Form 1040-ES that addresses the common scenarios fellowship recipients face, please consider joining my tax workshop. It comprises pre-recorded videos, a spreadsheet, and quarterly live Q&A calls with me.

Click here to learn more about the quarterly estimated tax workshop for fellows.

What Is Estimated Tax?

The IRS expects to receive tax payments from you throughout the year, not just in the spring when you file your tax return.

To that end, employers offer automatic tax withholding to their employees. The employee files Form W-4 with the employer. This form helps the employee perform a high-level calculation about the amount of income tax the employee will owe for the year, which tells the employer approximately how much income tax to withhold from each paycheck. (Non-student employees will also have FICA tax withheld.)

Non-employees are almost never extended the courtesy of automatic income tax withholding by their university/institution/funding agency. (Income tax withholding for fellowship/training grant recipients is offered in rare cases—Duke University is one, at least while I was there—so it is worth inquiring about, but don’t be surprised if the answer is no.) Instead, the onus is on the individual to manually make tax payments.

By the time a person/household files a tax return in the spring of each year, the IRS expects the tax paid throughout the year to be in excess of or only slightly less than the actual amount owed. Approximately 3 in 4 Americans receive a tax refund (the amount of tax paid throughout the year minus the actual amount owed) after filing their tax returns. The rest, presumably, owe some additional tax when they file their tax returns. If the amount of additional tax due (above the amount paid throughout the year) is too high, the IRS will penalize the taxpayer.

To help taxpayers avoid underpaying tax throughout the year and being penalized, the IRS has set up a method of making manual tax payments four times per year: quarterly estimated tax payments. Anyone whose primary income isn’t subject to automatic withholding (e.g., fellowship recipients, self-employed people) or who has significant income in addition to their employee income (e.g., investment income) should look into making quarterly estimated tax payments.

Who Has to Pay Estimated Tax?

In general, you should expect to pay income tax in the year you receive your fellowship unless:

  • Your income is particularly low (e.g., you had an income for only part of the year or your fellowship went toward qualified education expenses instead of your personal living expenses) or
  • Your tax deductions and/or credits are particularly high.

Your tax due for the year might be large enough that you are required to make quarterly estimated tax payments or small enough that you can skip the quarterly payments and pay all the tax due at once with your annual tax return.

The dividing line is $1,000 of tax due at the end of the year in addition to the tax you had withheld and your refundable credits. If you expect to owe more than $1,000 in additional tax for the year, you should make quarterly tax payments, unless you fall into one of the exception categories discussed in the next section. If you expect to owe less than $1,000 in additional tax, you don’t have to make those quarterly payments and will just pay everything you owe with your annual tax return.

For individuals who receive only fellowship income not subject to tax withholding throughout the calendar year, the calculation is straightforward: How much income tax will you owe for the year, greater or less than $1,000?

For individuals/households with fellowship income not subject to withholding plus employee income subject to withholding (e.g., one person with part-year fellowship income and part-year employee income, one spouse with fellowship income and one spouse with employee income), both the total amount of tax owed across all incomes and the amount withheld must be taken into consideration. If you will owe more than $1,000 in additional tax at the end of the year, you should file quarterly estimated tax.

Having a combination of fellowship and employee income is very common for PhD trainees, especially if they are married. My tax workshop addresses how to handle this particular scenario in detail.

Click here to learn more about the estimated tax workshop.

Who Doesn’t Have to Pay Estimated Tax?

Some people who owe more than $1,000 in additional tax at the end of the year are not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments.

  1. If you had zero tax liability in the previous tax year, you are not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments in the current tax year. For example, if last year you were a undergrad or grad student with a low enough income that you didn’t owe any income tax, you’re not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments this year.
  2. If the sum of your tax withholding throughout the year and refundable credits equals or exceeds 90% of the tax you expect to owe this year, you are not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments. For example, if your spouse earns the lion’s share of your household income and has a generous amount of tax withheld automatically, your household’s overall tax withholding might be sufficient to exempt you from making quarterly estimated tax payments on your fellowship.
  3. If the sum of your tax withholding throughout the year and refundable credits equals or exceeds 100% of the tax you owed last year, you are not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments. For example, if last year you finished undergrad and started grad school with a stipend, your tax owed for the year was likely quite small. If you have assistantship pay with tax withholding for part of this year and then switch to a fellowship with no withholding, your tax withholding from your assistantship might cover 100% of your tax owed from last year, and you wouldn’t be required to make quarterly estimated tax payments.

The best way to estimate your tax due this year along with your withholding and refundable credits and determine whether you are required to pay quarterly estimated tax is to fill out Form 1040-ES.

Psssst… Want to take a shortcut? If you have no interest in filling out Form 1040-ES’s Estimated Tax Worksheet, join my tax workshop. I explain a shortcut method to make sure you pay enough in estimated tax to avoid a fine without having to complete an advance draft your tax return this year. This method will only take a few minutes!

Click here to learn more about the quarterly estimated tax workshop for fellows.

Fill Out the Estimated Tax Worksheet in Form 1040-ES

Form 1040-ES, specifically the Estimated Tax Worksheet (p. 8), guides you through 1) estimating the amount of tax you will owe for the year, 2) determining if you are required to make quarterly estimated tax payments, and 3) calculating the amount of your required estimated tax payment.

I’ll point out a simple approach to filling out the Estimated Tax Worksheet for individual taxpayers/households with only fellowship and employee income. If you additionally have self-employment income or other types of income, your approach will be more nuanced.

If your fellowship income is disbursed frequently throughout the year (e.g., once per month for the entire year), this simple method will work for you. If your fellowship income is disbursed infrequently (e.g., 1-3 times per year) or throughout only part of the year (e.g., only the fall term after switching funding sources), keep reading for an alternative method.

The important numbers a fellowship recipient needs to plug in to Form 1040-ES to fill it out are:

  • Line 1: Your expected Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), which is your total income for the year less your above-the-line deductions (e.g., deductible portion of student loan interest paid, traditional IRA contributions). Your AGI includes your fellowship income, taxable scholarship income (if applicable), and any wages you (and your spouse) received, e.g., from an assistantship.
  • Line 2: Your deductions. If you plan to itemize your deductions, you should enter the total of those itemized deductions in line 2a; otherwise, enter the amount of your standard deduction (in 2021: single $12,550, married filing jointly $25,100).
  • Line 7: The sum of your credits if you plan to take any. Examples of credits include the Lifetime Learning Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Credit. [Special note for 2021: The American Rescue Plan made the Child Tax Credit and the Child and Dependent Care Credit fully refundable, so they will go into Line 11b.]
  • Line 11b: The sum of your refundable credits if you plan to take any, such as the Earned Income Credit or the Additional Child Tax Credit.
  • Line 12b: Your total tax liability for the prior year.
  • Line 13: Income tax you expect to be withheld throughout the year. This can generally be extrapolated from your most recent pay stub.

If you come to the worksheet with this set of numbers, all you need to complete it is to follow the arithmetic steps instructed in the form and to look up your tax due using the Tax Rate Schedule on p. 7.

Once you fill out the worksheet, line 11c will tell you the total amount of tax that it is estimated you will have to pay for the year. The rest of the form helps you determine the minimum amount of quarterly estimated tax you have to pay to avoid a penalty, which might be $0. Both of these numbers are key for your tax planning for the year; don’t just make the minimum payments necessary and forget that you might owe additional tax along with you tax return in the spring.

Are you curious about the rest of the lines in the Estimated Tax Worksheet and wondering if you need to fill them out? My workshop devotes a video to explaining each line so you can determine if they apply to you or not.

Click here to learn more about the estimated tax workshop.

Method for Irregular Income

If you receive your income unevenly throughout the year, the IRS has a method for calculating a different amount of estimated tax due in each quarter, the Annualized Income Installment Method (see Publication 505).

Essentially, you calculate your tax due for each quarter based on your cumulative income up to that point of the year. Ultimately, you can pay the lesser of the estimated tax calculated through this worksheet or the quarterly estimated tax calculated from the previous method. (This is helpful if your income is higher later in the year than earlier; you don’t have to pay the extra tax until you actually receive the income.)

If you receive your fellowship income irregularly throughout the year—particularly if you are paid more later in the year than earlier—and want to be very exact about the amount of estimated tax you pay each quarter, you should fill out the Annualized Income Installment Method Worksheet after you complete the Estimated Tax Worksheet.

However, the Annualized Income Installment Method is a very complicated and fiddly worksheet, so if you don’t mind just making the regular quarterly payments, perhaps with guesstimate adjustments, that’s going to be faster and easier. For example, if you have tax withholding in place for much of the year through your assistantship but switch to fellowship funding for just the fall semester, your estimated tax payments all need to be made in the last one or two quarters, not the earlier part when you were having tax withheld.

Join my tax workshop for more details on how to handle quarterly estimated tax when you switch on or off of fellowship mid-year, a common scenario for fellowship recipients.

Click here to learn more about the estimated tax workshop.

Paying Your Quarterly Estimated Tax

If you are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, you have many options for doing so, such as by mail, over the phone, and through the IRS2Go app. The easiest method is most likely through the website IRS.gov/payments, where you can choose to make a direct transfer from your checking account for free or to pay using a debit or credit card for a fee.

The due dates for your 2021 quarterly estimated tax are:

  • Q1: April 15, 2021
  • Q2: June 15, 2021
  • Q3: Sept 15, 2021
  • Q4: Jan 18, 2022 (or Feb 1, 2022 if you file your annual tax return by that date)

Please note that these dates are not at 3-month intervals. Quarter 1 is three months long; quarter 2 is two months long; quarter 3 is three months long; quarter 4 is four months long.

Penalties for Underpaying Tax throughout the Year

There are penalties for failing to make estimated tax payments when you are required to do so or underpaying your estimated tax. The penalty is calculated separately for each quarter, so you may be penalized for underpaying in an earlier quarter even if you made up for it in a later quarter. The details about the penalties can be found in Publication 505.

State Quarterly Estimated Tax

Your state and/or local government may also require you to make estimated tax payments.

Set Up a System of Self-Withholding

If you are going to owe any income tax for the year and do not have automatic income tax withholding set up, you should intentionally prepare for your tax bill, whether or not that tax is due with your annual tax return or quarterly.

My recommendation is to set up a separate savings account labeled “Income Tax” or similar. With every paycheck you receive, transfer into your savings account the amount of money from it that you expect to pay in income tax. For example, if you receive monthly fellowship paychecks, you should set aside 1/12th of the amount you calculated in Line 11c (rounding up). When you pay tax quarterly or annually, draw the payment from that dedicated savings account.

For more details about how to set up this kind of system and save in advance for each of your tax deadlines, join my tax workshop.

Click here to learn more about the estimated tax workshop.

How to Avoid Paying Estimated Tax Using Your Spouse’s Withholding

If you are married filing jointly with one spouse receiving a fellowship not subject to withholding and one spouse subject to automatic withholding, it is possible to set up the withholding on the employee income so that you don’t have to pay quarterly estimated tax on the fellowship.

The idea is that you will increase the automatic withholding on the employee’s income so that it covers what you owe in tax for the year as a couple. This involves filing a new W-4 with your spouse’s employer.

The simplest way to make this change is to enter an additional amount of money on Form W-4 Line 4c to have withheld from each paycheck (Form 1040-ES Line 11c divided by the number of paychecks your spouse receives per year).