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

March 9, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

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

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

Early Childhood and Living in Poverty

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

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

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

Path to the PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrying Forward Financial from Growing Up Poor

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

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

Finances During Grad School

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

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

19:46 Emily: Not generous.

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

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

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

Frugal Strategies as a PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

Meal Prepping Has Benefitted This Prof’s Time, Money, Health, and Stress Level

November 11, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Brielle Harbin, and assistant professor at the Naval Academy. Brielle realized early on in grad school that she had to reform her eating patterns, and she slowly worked her way into meal prepping. She describes her current meal prep practice, including what she eats and when she shops and cooks. Meal prepping is an excellent practice for early-career PhDs as it almost always saves time and money and improves health. Brielle outlines a perfect first step for people who want to start meal prepping.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Brielle: And just start off with a very reasonable goal. Say, for a month, I’m going to meal prep my breakfast and I’m just going to try and get into the practice of preparing that and figuring out what that is. And then once that’s under your belt, then you can add, I think the next thing I added was a morning snack. So okay, now I’m doing the morning snack and once I had that under my belt, then I did lunch. Don’t try and go 0 to 100 that that’s not going to happen. So be very realistic about what’s the easiest thing that has the least amount of barriers for you to be successful and start there.

Introduction

00:40 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season 4, episode 13 and today my guest is Dr. Brielle Harbin, a new assistant professor at the Naval Academy. These days, Brielle is a skilled meal prepper, but things weren’t always that way. She tells us how her cooking and meal planning has evolved over her years in grad school and her post doc and describes the sustainable, flexible system she developed. Brielle’s commitment to meal prepping, has reaped benefits in her time, money and health. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Brielle Harbin.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Brielle Harbin, who is going to be speaking to us about meal prepping, which is a topic that I am so excited to learn from her about. So Brielle, will you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

01:36 Brielle: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Brielle Harbin and I am a political scientist by training. I got my PhD at Vanderbilt. I graduated in 2016 and I then went to the university of Pennsylvania for post doc and I was there for three years. And now I am actually beginning in my very first week of being an assistant professor and I have my new job at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. So I now live in Annapolis, Maryland.

02:10 Emily: That is amazing. And thank you for taking the time out of this first week to speak with us.

Cooking Habits Before Meal Prepping

Emily: Let’s take it all the way back to when you were in graduate school, before you got into meal prepping. What was your starting point with respect to cooking and how you managed your food and everything?

02:28 Brielle: Sure. I was very fortunate that I always liked to cook. I think I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner when I was in seventh grade. So I’ve always had a passion for cooking. When I was in grad school, I learned pretty quickly, especially the first semester when you’re taking coursework and you just have so many things that are being thrown at you that one of the biggest time sucks is going to get food. So that was quickly on my list of things to try and figure out how I can minimize the amount of time. It took quite a while for me to do that, and I can get into some of the different phases that I went through in that, but I started off with just, “I know I need to do this, but how can I do this when I don’t really have that much time?”

03:19 Emily: And are you speaking now about cooking in general or like cooking in an efficient way? Time efficient.

03:26 Brielle: Yeah. Trying to cook in a time efficient way. Because you know, as someone who loved cooking, I would always do it more in a social way. So I’d have people come over and it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to cut this and I’ll sit down and I’ll chat.” But when you’re in grad school, you don’t really have that liberty. I had to figure out, okay, how can I, one think and create a plan for what I’m going to cook, and then I need to think about, okay, when am I going to get it? Where am I gonna get it from? How am I gonna store it? How am I going to pay for it? It just became a much bigger logistical issue, then from just enjoying to do it with family and friends.

04:08 Emily: Yeah. It sort of sounds like cooking went from maybe more of like a hobby and an enjoyable activity to okay, I have to feed myself. It has to be monetarily efficient. It has to be time efficient, because there’s no slack in my schedule and in my budget for another way of doing things, at least not on a regular basis. So, we just mentioned a couple broadly a couple of barriers: going to obtain food, the budget, the amount of time it takes. Is there anything you want to go more in depth on about when you were trying to move towards what ultimately became meal prepping, what was maybe holding you back from being fully successful with it during graduate school?

04:49 Brielle: Well, one, I just think I was unrealistic in terms of how much I was spending. I didn’t have a great sense of how big of a cost it was. And so one of my earliest steps in trying to create a process was actually tracking how much I was spending on eating out. The way that my brain works is I need to have some type of motivation to help keep me, especially if time is zero-sum and you know, I have a lot of things competing. So when I saw the number of how much I was spending on eating out and then thinking about how much time it takes if my order is wrong and I’m unhappy with the meal, it just didn’t make sense anymore. I think, and I’ve talked to a lot of friends because everyone always asked me about my meal prepping, I think a lot of people don’t have a strong sense of how much they’re spending because you know, it’s a coffee here, it’s a quick run to, you know, whatever restaurant there and you never really aggregate the data. But as a social scientist, I guess this is my quantitative brain coming to bear. I wanted the data and once I saw the data, it was pretty ugly.

06:00 Emily: Yeah. That’s interesting that you bring that up because I feel like there’s a couple of different styles right with this. So there’s the style of what you were just saying. Maybe eating out quite frequently or making small trips to the grocery store and it’s sort of dribbling out money and dribbling out time and it is hard to, to keep track and add up what all that is if you’re not doing it quite intentionally versus like the meal prep approach is more like, okay, you’re going to do your shopping trip — maybe it’s once a week, whatever it is, a certain frequency, it’s a big trip — and then you’re going to do this big investment of time to do all the prep. And so it feels like a lot for the day or two it takes to do that. But then it pays off so much the rest of the time and you’re not dribbling out time and dribbling out money on continuing to shop and prepare food and so forth. It’s really a reallocation of time and money and like you were saying it, you become more aware of how much you’re spending in both of those areas with the meal prep, but it doesn’t mean it’s more in money or time than doing it the other way. It’s just your awareness is different of it, right?

07:01 Brielle: Yeah. The biggest thing and when I started my meal prepping, I wasn’t always saving a huge amount of money. I was always saving something because eating out can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. But the biggest changes were occurring in the amount of time I was just traveling, having to go places and whatever. If there’s traffic and all the different things that can hold you up, that was just consuming a lot of time and actually creating quite a bit of anxiety for me around if I’m going to lose my parking space so then I have to go at this time. It’s just a lot of brain space that it was taking up for met that seemed like a not great use of my time.

07:42 Emily: That’s another really interesting thing for me to hear. I’ve become more, I think, sympathetic over the years, as my life has gotten more full, to the advantage of totally simplifying decision making, and not having to make a decision in the moment of, “okay, where am I going to go eat and when is it going to be and what am I going to eat.” If it’s just like it just in this one small area of what are you going to eat, if I’ve already decided that in advance, it really is kind of, for me, a load off my mind, so I’m sure other people come to the same decision maybe in terms of routines that they go through in their daily basis or maybe they always wear the same types of clothing or whatever. There’s lots of ways that we can simplify our decision making and preserve that energy for other areas of our life and planning your meals is one of those areas.

08:27 Brielle: Yeah, I’m really into different professional development things and time saving. I’ve listened to several podcasts that are just about that. And I think, I can’t remember what I read or what I listened to, but I remember reading that, I think President Obama always wore a similar outfit because he didn’t want to have to waste the mental energy. And I was like, well, if it’s good enough for President Obama, it’s good enough for me. That really resonated with me and helped me a lot.

Getting Started With Meal Prepping

08:56 Emily: Okay. So you’re in graduate school and you have this eating out habit and this lovely hobby of cooking, but it has to become a little bit more utilitarian maybe overtime. Now it seems like, or let’s say in your post doc, prior to your move, you got to a really great spot with your meal prep. Can you tell me about how you did that? How did you make that transition?

09:22 Brielle: Beginning, and can I go back for a second to grad school, the way that I was able to make that transition, I actually started with the buddy system. I had a really good friend that I met actually the day of our orientation at Vanderbilt and he just happened to love to cook too, and also had a habit of doing it and similar stressors that were coming into life. Since we were in different departments and had different life things that were coming up at different times, I think, I can’t remember, I’m pretty sure I started it. I think he was taking an exam and I just went over there with three days worth of food, so that he didn’t have to think about it. And he was like, that is really nice. When I was going through a big exam, he came over with three days of something for me and then it kind of became a friendly competition because he has a Caribbean background and so all the things that he was very familiar with were not foods that I had before. It became, “Ooh, let me introduce you to this food that I love and that food” and it became a social thing, which outside of the efficiency question, which is nice to have a friend in to bond that way. I always tell people it’s not always realistic and I frankly don’t want to eat everybody’s food, but if you have that opportunity, it’s a really great way to mix up the meal prep process and when you are kind of at the height of all the things on your plate, maybe you have someone who’s not as busy and is willing to step in for you. So that really helped. Once I started with that, I never really fully got consistent every week in grad school with meal prepping just because honestly you have so many things going on that I think if you’re 50/50, that’s a good goal to have with meal prep.

11:14 Brielle: But once I moved to the postdoc, I realized this is less stressful now, I don’t have as many things on my plate, and I was craving stability. Honestly, I was just so stressed out during grad school and I’m feeling some of the effects of being post PhD in terms of the stress level that it has on your body, and I really felt and craved eating for holistic health. I actually briefly had a blog where I was kind of getting into different foods, how they make you feel, the effect that they have on your body, so I was doing all this research and then trying to incorporate these ingredients into my weekly meal prepping. It just became, after awhile, I think it was June in 2017, I just said, I want to, for two months, meal prep every Sunday. I’m going to do this for two months and then I’ll see how it feels. I’m going to take pictures on Facebook for accountability because that’s what we do these days. After two months I just felt so much better. I was getting better sleep, I was just feeling less stressed out during the day and like I was better powered in terms of my energy that I just stuck with it.

12:36 Emily: I love that approach of setting yourself a challenge right over a set period of time to really put your all into it and then decide at the end of it, was it worth it or was it not? I talk about this sometimes in the context of what I call frugal experiments. And meal prepping is a big frugal experiment, right? That’s a big, big timeline and these could be very minor, but I really just love the idea of having a set in advance, fixed period of time to have an experiment and evaluate the results at the end of that. It sounds like at the end of that period you were ready to keep rolling because you’d experienced so many advantages.

Meal Prep Routine

Emily: Can you tell me about what is the system that you came to? You’ve mentioned Sunday already, so just tell us what is the meal prep process for you?

13:23 Brielle: It started off where I was on Thursday and ended up being on the Fridays because I was usually tired on Friday afternoons. I would think about what is it that I want to eat for the next week and I would come up with a shopping list. I’m super organized and so I always went to the same grocery stores so I knew exactly which section everything was in. I created my shopping list by sections so that I could just get in and get out because I love to cook but I hate grocery shopping. Behind laundry, it’s the only thing I hate more in terms of just life stuff. I would do on Friday the shopping list and then on Saturday I always went to a morning spin class that was fairly close to the grocery store that I would go to. So I’d always go to the same class and immediately after go to the grocery store on Saturday morning and then on Sunday and not at a particular time, just sometime on Sunday I would actually cook the food.

14:23 Emily: Yeah. I think that’s a pretty common lay out for a meal prepper, right? To do the prep on Sunday and do the shopping on Saturday. I’ll start interjecting some of my own thoughts here at this point in the interview because meal prepping is something that I have tried maybe a little bit half-heartedly and not been very successful with. I definitely agree that you need to separate the shopping from the cooking. It’s all too much to do in one day. For me, trying to do all the cooking that I would eat for the week — and actually this is when I had a family, so it’s actually a lot of food — I was exhausted by the end of six hours or something and I was like, I haven’t even gotten through everything I planned and I felt like an abject failure. So tell me for the actual, on Sunday when you’re doing the meal prepping, what are you doing? What foods are you cooking? Are you making components that you then assemble into meals right then? Or are you making things that you’ll be assembling later?How does it actually work for you?

15:25 Brielle: So at some point, and I don’t remember exactly when this happened, I realized that I was having a challenge in my meal prepping because I really didn’t like the Tupperware I was using. That seems like such a small detail, but if you want to transport it and then microwave things, Tupperware can get pretty gross pretty quickly. Especially I would use a lot of curries and things like that. The big thing that shifted my process was getting Pyrex, and they are a little bit more expensive, but it’s actual glassware. I actually separate each one of my lunches into a different Pyrex bowl and I started off where I was trying to prep salads and I think that’s probably the most common question I get. How do I do that? And so for me, I always just put the leafy greens in one of the Pyrex things and then I have the component pieces in separate ones and then the sauce in a third smaller one, and then I combine it when I’m ready to eat, just because you don’t want to have a soggy salad.

16:37 Emily: I want to be clear about what I’m imagining here. I’m imagining you on a Sunday, you have your five, or seven, or however many you’re doing, bowls for your greens and you have your five, or seven for the toppings and then you have your five or seven dressing separately. All those are like individually packaged already starting on Sunday, is that right?

16:25 Brielle: Yes. I don’t actually have five separate for the dressing. I usually just use a Mason jar and made the bigger one and then I would just pour it into the smaller one because that’s a pretty easy clean. But yeah, otherwise you’re correct. I have a lot of pictures and posts I did on Facebook that showed my five dinners, because I usually do five, five lunch and five dinner.

Commercial

17:24 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money, but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series, as you make changes over the long term. You can find out more at PFforPhDs.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part coaching, part course, and part community. You can find out more and join the wait list for the next time I open the program at PFforPhDs.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

Meal Prep Recipe Ideas

18:39 Emily: Okay, you’ve talked us through salads. What are some other common meals or foods that would show up for you?

18:46 Brielle: I make a little bit of everything. I think one of the biggest things I tackled was getting bored with things. I had some regular meals that I would make, and then, after a while, I realized I think I’ve gotten tired of at some point or another, shrimp, and chicken, and all these kinds of things. I became a master at Googling ingredients and then finding new things that I would experiment with. Through that process, I figured out sometimes, you know, a picture looks nice, but when you get into the details of the recipe, it’s like all these elaborate things and all these mini micro steps that take a lot of time, so I use them for inspiration, but I didn’t always follow recipes one-to-one.

19:39 Emily: Just to follow up on that — do you have any go to resources to find, let’s say recipes specifically designed for a meal prepping or are you more adapting recipes? Not necessarily for that purpose, but just you do it on your own?

19:53 Brielle: I don’t necessarily do it for meal prep specifically, but I found a couple of sites that I like. There is a blog, Sweet Potato Soul and it is actually run by a woman of color named Janae and she is vegan. I went through a phase of just prepping vegan stuff. One of the things that I have continued to have, even though I’m not a vegan, in my weekly routine, is I love Buddah bowls because they’re so easy to just throw a grain in there, throw some chickpeas, and some toppings and she has a lot of great ideas for Buddha bowls. I would say that that is a staple and you can always change the ingredients of what’s in the Buddah bowl, but it’s really easy.

20:40 Emily: This is another example of simplifying the decision making, right? That you have like a baseline type of meal you make — salads, Buddha bowls — and then you can shift things up as your taste directs you. Any other resources you care to mention or any other types of food that you love to prep?

20:57 Brielle: I don’t have a specific recommendation beyond I think one of the most important things is going with the flow and listening to your process and not being too hard on yourself, if you don’t get it right. For me, there were a lot of different adjustments that I made along the way and you just have to roll with it and beating yourself up doesn’t help at all. But if you can just become more aware of maybe certain times of the year you like this type of foods or when you’re taking a test, this feels more of a comfort. Just paying better attention to yourself, which can be really hard in grad school, I think that’s the best advice I could probably give someone who’s trying to embark on the journey.

Saving Money Through Meal Prepping

21:39 Emily: Yeah, it sounds a little bit like budgeting actually. You may think it’s going to look one way when you haven’t quite dived into the process yet, but then it’s going to evolve as you evolve and your life changes and so forth, and you’ll learn more about yourself and what makes you happy and satisfied. Speaking of budgeting, do you think that you’re spending less money overall with this meal prepping stuff or how has meal prepping affected your budget?

22:07 Brielle: I definitely have saved money over time. The biggest shift actually though came when I changed my process from, I think I mentioned before that I would on Friday create a list and then go on Saturday. Once I got more comfortable with what I like to eat, I actually didn’t create a list and I would go into the store and find what’s on sale. I think when I was doing the list thing, I was spending some like $115 a week and I eat a lot of organic things, a lot of fruit and veggies, I get all organic meat, so that’s kind of at the top end of things. But I went from that to spending about $65 a week by just eating what was in season. So I think that’s a considerable difference.

22:59 Emily: Oh, that’s huge. That’s much higher than I was expecting actually. And did you then or do you now do all of your shopping at one store? You already mentioned your routine of going after your cycling class or spin class, but is it always one place or do you have a few different stores you hit in rotation?

23:16 Brielle: Now it’s just one, but at one point I was, there’s a produce junction that was in Philadelphia that I found one of the administrators at Penn told me about it, and you could buy fruit and vegetables in bulk. Now my challenge is that I’m single and so I would buy things and I was wasting a lot of foods. That didn’t work for me, but for somebody who has a family, I think finding some of those alternative options where you can buy in bulk would be a great option, but it just wasn’t for me. I wanted to say one thing to make sure that I acknowledged this, while it was still in my brain. I was a single person in grad school and I know a lot of people aren’t. A lot of times people would say, “Oh, I can’t really do that because I’m a mom where I have like this or that.” I’ve actually become much more attentive to asking my sister friends who have children and meal prep, how do you do this? And I think the biggest difference in the process is that some of the women that I have talked to say that they eat more stews and soups because you can just throw everything in a crockpot and it’s really easy. They may go to the grocery store twice, rather than once a week. I think it’s still possible to do it, it just might look different in that phase of life.

24:38 Emily: Yeah. And I think that goes to what we were just saying earlier is that this kind of has to evolve with you as things change for yourself and your family. I know that when I was in graduate school and just cooking between myself and my husband, I was using our Crock-Pot so much. I wasn’t really into meal prepping, but I would do bulk cooking. So like huge thing in a Crock-Pot, feed me all week for lunches. It was a sort of minor step in that direction and I still love that approach of just make an enormous pot of something and be done for a little while. Again, it takes the decision making off the table because you know what you’re eating for the next week when you cook in such great volumes. Okay, you were really able to take you’re spending down. You’re eating this lovely food that you feeling wonderful for your body and so forth and you really took your spending down by becoming a little more flexible and being able to go for sale items, in season items, and making the decisions on the spot in the store. I know I’ve fallen into that trap sometimes too of being too emboldened into my list or feeling too flexible and I go back and forth, but that’s a great percentage reduction in your spending just based on that one step alone, so that’s awesome. Thank you for that discussion on buying in bulk versus not because of course different households have different needs there. I know, personally, we shop at Costco right now quite a bit and the buying and bulking from Costco gets a lot of criticism, “Oh, how are you ever going use a gallon condiment jar or whatever.” But we actually buy produce and meat at Costco because we do get through it and we just eat the same produce for several days in a row and it works for us well. Okay, so we’ve talked about the time and how you do it and the money and so forth. Why do you think that other people should be meal prepping? Or maybe you think, why should other people consider meal prepping? What benefits might they experience? And let’s specifically think about our population of early career PhDs.

Other Benefits of Meal Prepping

26:31 Brielle: The biggest benefit for me, and I think for others potentially, is just the health benefits. I think it’s really hard when you’re in the thick of grad school to give time to your mental, physical health, but it’s so important. Sleep deprivation and all the different thingsthat’s happening to your body when you’re in such a stressful period. If you can’t sleep eight hours, at the very least, you can give yourself some leafy greens and nourishing meals. I consider it, and I didn’t always follow my advice, is just a little bit of — I know people kind of don’t like the self care language now, but something you can do for yourself that you’re going to have to do no matter what. It’s not like, you know, it’s an elaborate expensive thing to just take care of yourself in that process.

27:20 Brielle: For me, actually when I started, I went through a couple of different phases with like doing Whole 30 and different types of food preparation techniques because I was experiencing some health issues and I actually figured out what my food intolerances were by meal prepping because I was able to eliminate things and put things into my diet where I figured out what was causing me inflammation. I think even for that reason alone, it’s really helpful to just know how different foods are affecting your body so that you can at least control that part of a life that is pretty out of control in grad school.

28:01 Emily: Yeah. Great point. Exactly as you said, you’re going to be eating anyway, you may as well make it something that’s going to fuel your body properly and keep you feeling good for all that work you have to do. Just as we’ve discussed before, I think the other potential benefits, depending on how you do it, are of course time savings and money savings. we’ve well covered that, but thanks for adding the health benefit there.

Tips To Get Started With Meal Prepping

Emily: Let’s say there’s someone listening like me. I’m listening and thinking I need to give this a shot, I needed to try this again. What are some easy first steps you would recommend?

28:39 Brielle: What I did was start small. For me breakfast is always a pretty simple meal that I’m always going to pretty much eat the same thing and just start off with a very reasonable goal. Say, for a month, I’m going to meal prep my breakfast and I’m just going to try and get into the practice of preparing that and figuring out what that is. And then once that’s under your belt, then you can add, I think the next thing I added was a morning snack. So, okay, now I’m doing the morning snack and once I had that under my belt, then I did lunch. Don’t try and go 0 to 100, that that’s not going to happen. So be very realistic about what’s the easiest thing that has the least amount of barriers for you to be successful and start there.

29:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for that advice because that is what I need to hear. I’ve been pretty successful in cooking like a casserole for breakfast that’ll last us the week. Something like that. Lunches are also pretty accessible for me. I think dinner’s the real challenge and that’ll be left for last in my next go around with this.

29:42 Brielle: Hold your confidence when you find yourself because there’s going to be benefits. I even noticed I was able to better control the calories once I was like, okay, I’m eating this for breakfast. So then I’m snacking less and it’s like, “Oh, I lost a couple of pounds. Ooh, I feel better.” Okay, so now I’m motivated to do the next thing. Like you, I was the type of person who needed a reward for every single thing and celebrated every single success. So there are a lot of those small milestones along the way that’ll keep you going. If you just commit to the very small thing of, let me work on my snack or my breakfast first.

Meal Prepping During Life Transitions

30:19 Emily: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this wonderful view into your meal prep process and it’s really encouraging to hear that this is not something that was automatic for you from the beginning. It’s not something you learned as a child or anything. This is something you took years and years to develop. And of course there were times during graduate school when it wasn’t able to happen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t ever. And you’ve continue with that. How has it been with your latest move? Going from, you had your process down set when you were living for your postdoc and now you’ve moved. How has that gone?

30:59 Brielle: It was very chaotic. I think I was realistic in that if all my kitchen is literally in boxes, then I can’t cook. But it just takes a lot out of you to move, to pack and then to move. I thought, “Oh, okay, I’ll just jump in probably a week after and I’ll be back to it,” and that just didn’t happen. I just gave myself this space to say like, I’m gonna just enjoy eating out because even with my meal prep, I would still eat out on the weekends, just as a social activity. I allowed myself to do that and I’m just now kind of getting in, I moved at the end of May, and I’m now just a month or so later, finally getting back into my routine.

31:44 Brielle: It’s gonna look different because my life is different here, but I’m going with the flow. I think the other thing besides just moving that’s been a change in my routine is that, with my meal prepping, I got better in terms of feeling healthy with my food, which encouraged me to be better about my exercise. Now I’ve gotten to exercising five or six times a week, which now has changed how I had to meal prep, because in order to be able to do those workouts, I have to eat in a totally different ways. I think there’s never an end point in how this process works. However your life goes, you have to adapt and move with it. And so I don’t know, and I’m not feeling super successful about my food prep right now, but I know I will be if I just give myself some time.

32:35 Emily: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, what you eat is very intimately connected with many other areas of your life and health and work and sleep and exercise and so forth. And so yeah, just thanks so much for giving us a picture of that evolution with how meal prep has been fitting into your life over the last few years. Thank you so much for teaching us on this topic today.

32:55 Brielle: Thank you. And I wish everybody lots of success in whatever their journey looks like.

Outtro

33:02 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, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Achive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Student Feeds Her Family Largely from Her Garden

October 7, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Jane CoomberSewell, a PhD student in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Jane is self-funding her PhD through several part-time jobs and self-employment as part of the gig economy. Jane and her wife embrace this lower-earning phase of life by making frugality and budgeting into a game for their household of five. They are serious gardeners with a long-term plan to become almost completely self-sufficient in their food consumption. Jane explains what she grows in her garden, how she creates standard daily meals from the produce, and how gardening helps her work-life balance.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Jane: Financial balance is tricky. If you treat it as a challenge that it’s almost certain that you’re going to overcome and therefore it becomes a bit of a game, then it all becomes a lot more fun. And why are we here if not to be enjoyed and enjoyable?

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 four, episode eight and today my guest is Jane CoomberSewell, a self-funded PhD student in media and cultural studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Jane and her wife are avid gardeners. They have dramatically reduced their food spending by eating largely from what they produce and have a 10 year plan to become almost totally self-sufficient with respect to their food. In addition to discussing her garden and favorite recipes, Jane shares her positive attitude toward this lower income phase of life and how she makes budgeting and frugality into a game. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Jane CoomberSewell.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me today on the podcast, Jane CoomberSewell and she’s gonna take a moment to introduce herself to us a little bit further right now.

01:26 Jane: As you said I’m Jane. I’m the equivalent of a third year PhD student, but it’s a bit complicated because I’ve been part time until very recently, so I’ll be looking to submit in March 2020. I have a wife and we’ve been married for nearly eight years and in our household we have three grown-up young men, a 20 year old and two 24 year olds, all of whom are on the autistic spectrum to whom we give care. We’re trying to go self-sufficient, as much as we can, but we also have a range of jobs that we do to keep the wolf from the door and because we love doing them. My background is that I was a civil servant, I worked for the local authority, and now I work as a study skills support tutor to mainly students with disabilities at a couple of local universities. That gives you a starting point on me.

02:33 Emily: Could you say what your field is and where you attend, if you like.

02:39 Jane: I go to Canterbury Christ Church, which is one of three universities in the city of Canterbury, which is about 45 minutes drive from where I live. I come under media and cultural studies this week because they keep changing the name of the department. Might be media and design by the time we finish this. What I’m doing is I’m studying the life of a British war-time and post-war comedian/entertainer/actress called Joyce Grenfell.

03:14 Emily: Thank you. So you’re not employed by your university as what we would say in the States as an RA or TA. What is your relationship with your university and where does your money come from?

03:31 Jane: My relationship with the university, as such, is that of pure grad student. I’m counted as self-financed, so I don’t have any scholarships from any external bodies. My bio on university websites says I’m funded by the sweat of my own brow, and that’s basically how it is. In the past, when I was part time, I had up to four jobs that I was juggling along with studying, but now, because we’ve been able to secure a contract directly with disabled students allowance, it means we’ve been able to become become more stable. I’m actually better paid per hour, so I can cut my hours back and be full time on my PhD. But I also do all sorts of portfolio career and gig economy work. Whatever it takes to keep a roof over my boy’s head and keep funding. But yes, it’s my bank account that my fees come out of every month, not anybody else’s.

04:36 Emily: Right. That sounds like a very busy lifestyle. Full time on your dissertation, part time work, full time parenting of multiple children.

04:46 Jane: Yep, never bored, never bored.

04:49 Emily: Can you share with us what is your household income?

04:55 Jane: Okay, so it’s actually quite difficult to work out. Our household income is low enough that of the last seven years, we’ve only actually paid income tax twice so that indicates that in pure earned money, we’re earning less than £26,000 a year between the two of us, who as such, are heads of the house hold. But because of the boys disabilities, they get a variety of other income streams which works out to not huge amounts, but the impacts on the sort of total household income, about another £12-15,000 pounds a year. That’s all. So if you put that together, you’re talking, you’re still talking under £40,000 pounds. Not quite sure what the dollar conversion is but I think that would be about $60,000 for five of us.

05:53 Emily: Yeah, that’s a pretty tight of income to work with. Can you give us broad strokes how you’re making that work at a really high level?

06:04 Jane: Okay, so at a really high level, we treat it as a game because if you treat it as stress you would probably go a bit kabloo-y. So everything is a game. When the boys were younger, it was about challenging them. How quickly could they turn off all the switches so nothing’s on standby except the freezer and the fridge. Everything is a game. Everything is about how low can you get the costs for the necessities, so then you’ve got a little bit of money left over for fun, but also how much fun can you have for free. That’s basically how we treat our total income. We’ve very lucky we don’t have a mortgage, because in past years we earned more and we were able to get rid of the mortgage when we got married. We’re also very lucky because we live in a beautiful part of Kent in the Southeast of England. We are less than a mile from a beach and well, if you want some entertainment, go outside.

07:11 Emily: Yeah. I love that attitude of keeping the necessities down, leaving room to spend money on fun, but then also just maximizing the amount of fun that you can have for free. I love that.

Food Spending and Starting on the Path to Self-Sufficiency

07:23 Emily: So, specifically what we’re going to be talking most about in this podcast is food. Food spending and generating —

07:29 Jane: My favorite subject!

07:31 Emily: Yeah. So please give us kind of a sketch of how food works in your house.

07:37 Jane: So how food works is the two biggest boys, who are husband and husband — one is our grandson, so the other is our grandson in law — they have an apartment down the side of our house and they have part time jobs, so they generate their own money for food, or nearly generate their own money for food and they’re responsible for their own shopping and their own cooking. As I said, they’ve all got disabilities, but hopefully by the time they’re in their mid thirties, those two will be completely independent. When I’m talking about food and budgeting and I’m talking in the context of three people. Now the first thing to say is that, bless him, the youngest, the one who’s still most dependent on us, he has some food issues with his disabilities and he doesn’t eat any homemade food. He will only eat ready meals. So of our, approximately £40/week food budget, about £12 is for Ruki’s food.

08:43 Jane: After that, one of the ways we do it is that, my wife’s gone vegetarian. That’s for health reasons, but it has benefited the budget. I’m a bit cheeky, I only eat meat when I’m at my mum’s so she can pay for it. Or you know, if it’s a treat. Going vegetarian isn’t to everybody’s taste, but if you’re careful and you like veggie food, it can save you a lot of money. We are in love with beans, pulses and lentils and things like soya mince. Cooking is one of the things I’m best at, so I’m really good at flavoring things so they don’t taste boring. But we also have a Costco card and a Booker’s card, because it’s a similar cash and carry type thing, and we’re really good at stretching that out when they’ve got deals on.

09:49 Jane: But we’re also going self-sufficient. So until very recently, unfortunately I’m between flocks at the moment, but until very recently we had six chickens. We were producing our own eggs. And we have an enormous garden. My wife’s a lot older than me, so we have raised beds so that as we get older we can still garden and we are probably seven years into a 10 year plan to go almost entirely self-sufficient. We’re not quite there yet, but very nearly. We grow all our own, particularly potatoes, tomatoes. Then big crops at the moment I’ve just planted 240 sweet corn, or corn on the cob. We have three freezers and as long as you run them full rather than empty, they’re very cheap to run.

10:45 Emily: So when you say self self sufficient, is that the term that you used?

10:49 Jane: Yeah.

10:50 Emily: What does that mean?

10:51 Jane: Okay. So within as far as we can without actually starting a small holding, we’re trying to produce as much of our own food and to an extent later on, I want start adding so herbal medications as we can. We’re also beginning to try to be kind to the environment, so we try to keep, not only to keep costs down, things like single-use plastics out of the house as much as possible. We’re not quite there yet and realistically, I’m never going to own a cow and make my own cheese, but as much as you can in an ordinary domestic, suburban street, it’s about having as much in-house as we can.

11:46 Emily: Yeah. I’m glad you added that detail of the kind of place that you live. So it is a suburban environment? You have like sort of a back yard, we would say here.

11:55 Jane: Yes. When we talk about yards, we tend to think of something that’s concreted over, but yes, we have a very large garden. It’s 50 feet wide by a 100 feet long. I’ve got enough room to have — I mean my chickens are so spoiled. They don’t have a coop, they have a whole summer house that I’ve adapted and they have an 8 foot by 10 foot run, plus a mobile run on wheels. We have a greenhouse, and basically apart from one area that I let one of the boys have to plant flowers, if I can’t eat it, I don’t grow it.

12:35 Emily: Gotcha. So it sounds like, for your 20 year old, that’s most of the grocery budget you said, which was about £40 a week which is a over $50 in US. That’s almost all supporting him, is that right?

12:53 Jane: Well, no. I would say considering, considering that he’s one person, about half the budget is being spent on him, but even then, one of his disabilities is a very bad relationship with food. And if he doesn’t finish it, it supplements the chicken’s feed. As long as it’s nothing that can harm a chicken, I have a bit of a thing about feeding chickens, chickens, but apart from that, there’s very little things chickens won’t eat. So if Ruki can’t finish it, then either the chickens get it or the cats get it. Nothing, nothing is wasted. We have a lot of composting. It’s not only about how little you can spend, but it’s also about how far can you stretch it.

13:42 Emily: Yeah. So then the other half of the grocery budget is for you and your wife, but really mostly you’re eating out of your own garden and you’re cooking at home, it sounds like exclusively vegetarian meals.

13:57 Jane: Almost exclusively. At the moment we’re about 50% self-sufficient. We’re not quite to growing entirely out of the garden. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever crack the volume of beans and pulses that we would need to last us all year round, but certainly for six to eight months of the year where we’re pretty much eating out with the garden. And eventually I hope to make that all year round.

14:26 Emily: Well, yeah, I’m glad you mentioned seasonality. So how does that work there? Is your actual money you spend weekly on food, higher in certain seasons and then lower in others and how do you handle that?

14:39 Jane: I think it’s certainly lower in high harvest. We do a little bit of bartering as well. So among neighbors, friends and family, if I’ve got a glut of rhubarb, I’ll happily swap it with a neighbor for some green beans if mine haven’t been very good this year. And the wonderful thing about the barter economy, of course, is you can’t be taxed for it. But yeah, our fresh fruit fruit, veg, and salad bills are a lot cheaper in the summer than they are the winter. But as I said, I have three freezes and as harvest time approaches, everything has to be finished from last year, so we can start fresh and really stock them up.

15:31 Emily: Do you do any other food preservation, like canning or anything like that?

15:35 Jane: We are practicing. I don’t think we’ve quite cracked it yet and I’m very fortunate in that I have a very — they live a ways away but I have a very efficient mother and I’m not very good at things like jams and jellies, so I will turn up with the fruit, the sugar, the pan, and the jars and she will give me back the jam and the chutneys. I am very lucky from that point of view. I think the big thing with going self-sufficient — gardening, cooking — is you never stop learning. I think that’s maybe that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. At the moment, I could honestly say I’m really good at making fruit syrups to go on ice cream, but my jam never sets, but next year I might crack it. I’m going to keep trying.

16:22 Emily: I liked that attitude as well.

Commercial

16:25 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, but you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking, that’s P F F O R P H D S.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Long Term Plan for Food Self-Sufficiency

17:14 Emily: So you mentioned that you have a ten year plan and that you’re seven years into it, I was just wondering how you have managed to make that plan, and to plan for that kind of long term time period? And you said at the end of it you want to be nearly self sufficient, but what’s changing between now and then?

17:36 Jane: I think part of it is about getting the boys as independent as they can be. The more independent they are, the more time I have to spend on the garden. So the reason why I say seven years of a ten year plan, originally it was a five year plan. We bought this house seven years ago, August coming, and it was a very different house to how it is now. And at the time we had a little bit of savings. So what do you do when you find the perfect house? You rip it to shreds and reconfigure it. The first two and a half years were about making the house how we wanted it. What is now the boy’s apartment had been the office of the previous owners. So that was a big part of it. We knew for the first two and a half to three years that the garden would be on the back burner and we really weren’t self sufficient then, but it was always part of the dream. Then, we were on track and we had a really bad year. We lost my mother in law. Ruki came to live with us having been in a very desperate house situation. He’s another grandson. He’s the one who we have to buy most of the food for. Also, another of our grandsons was murdered. It was a hell of a year and it was also the year I started my PhD, and that’s when your relationship with the university becomes really important because several times they offered me an interruption and it took me quite a lot to persuade them that actually, doing my PhD was my solace and what was actually keeping us going because it was the one part of my life that wasn’t wrapped up in all this chaos. That, and doing a bit of gardening, so that’s one of the things that slowed well.

19:46 Jane: I think we’ve always wanted to go self sufficient and be as independent as we can. I think the plan has developed and I think any plan that doesn’t develop and isn’t organic is just a document. Ours is a document, it’s on pieces of paper and backs of envelopes, but it is a working document. Every few months we’ll go out in the garden, we’ll say, “You know what, that crop isn’t growing there on the plan of our garden, next year we’re going to grow it in raised bed — they’re very originally titled raised bed one, two, and three. It’s not growing in raised bed one, let’s try it in three next year or it’s not growing under the cherry tree. It’s too much shade. Let’s try it next to coop where there’s full sun next year.” And so I think one of the big things, whether you’re planning a business or anything that you’re planning to develop yourself, you have to keep revisiting that plan. And I’m hoping it’s not going to turn into a 12 year plan or a 14 year plan. I’m hoping that by 10 years the garden will be fully productive and every year it will just be about giving it that first seasonal weed and getting the crops in, or indeed, not even having a seasonal weed because it’s productive 365 days of the year. My big dream this year is having spuds I’ve grown myself for Christmas dinner.

21:12 Emily: How much time are you devoting to it?

21:21 Jane: Well, an ideal day for me looks like getting up around seven, being in the garden by eight. This is obviously if it’s not throwing it down. Doing a couple of hours and if Joyce is free to come with me too, so much the better. And then spending the rest of the day either studying or earning money. In an ideal world, I literally do that seven days a week. When you have a portfolio career like us, there’s no such thing as a working week. Every day has the potential to be a day off or a day of work. That’s why we also try and only do things that we love because then it never feels like hard work. You might be exhausted at the end of a day of heavy digging or of working very hard with students who nearly got what you’re trying to get across them, but they’re not quite there, but Joyce says if it doesn’t move, touch and inspire you, you can do without it in your life.

22:29 Emily: Yeah, I love that. And I relate to it very much, as well, as a self employed person. It never stops, but if you’ve chosen what you love to do, then that’s great, because it never stops. It sounds like you’re trying to have, maybe not work-life balance in the sense of hard weeks versus weekends, but just the daily “I’m doing what I love, I’m doing what’s rejuvenating, what’s refreshing” right away after you get up and then you can tackle the rest of the day.

22:56 Jane: Yeah. And I think particularly for trying to create a balance between study or an external job and growing even some of your own fruit and veg — lots of people go to the gym first thing in the morning, I go and garden. And because I have to put the chickens to bed, they don’t have their own little beds, I wish they did, I’m also out in the garden probably for the last 20 minutes before I go to bed, or before I start getting ready for bed. That starting and ending the day, even if it’s just time to have a walk round and see where I’m at, really helps set my mind up. Especially with one of my part time jobs, it’s all a bit stressful at the moment. Just keep it in perspective sometimes. Actually, just don’t do anything for a day or two, wait, see what develops, and the garden could really give you that message.

23:54 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Frugal Food Recipes

23:57 Emily: I asked you to prepare to tell us a few different recipes that you like that are both inexpensive, and you mentioned earlier that you are great with seasoning, so I want to hear how you’re doing with that because I am not so good with seasoning the food that I create. What are some of your favorite low cost recipes?

24:13 Jane: Okay, so really simply, you asked me t0 think about each meal of the day. Nine times out of ten, we’ll have — okay, mandatory translation — porridge or oatmeal for breakfast. So this time of the year, that might be in the form of overnight oats or Bircher where I’ve taken the fruit, we’ve grown ourselves. Yesterday we had our own strawberries. We have a microbiotic drinks that we buy, one of the few things I will never be able to replace, called Actimel. So it would be, oats, this microbiotic drink, and the strawberries. Goes in the fridge the night before and just get it out the fridge next day.

25:03 Jane: Lunch. Our favorite is always some kind of salad, which at the moment is very much from the garden. We are also quite fortunate that one of the boys works part-time at a local salad packing factory and anything that they’ve decided is not appropriate to sell, they’re allowed to bring home to supplement their wages, and he’s not a salad boy, so he passes it all onto us. So yeah, we have a lot of salad, often, as I say Joyce is vegetarian, with a boiled egg or with a little bit of grated cheese.

25:40 Emily: And then what about a dinner meal?

25:43 Jane: Okay, so a a dinner meal. I’m a big fan of, as I said, lentils and pulses, and also, soya mince. But supplementing it with as much fresh fruit and vegetables as in season as I can. I’ve almost got what I would refer to as a soya mince base that I can then get a tub out of the freezer. That’s what I’m going to do tonight. Tthen I add to it to turn into, so it’s a bit like, again, post-war Britain or post-war anywhere really. You would often have the stew on the stove that you added to every day. My absolute classic one is the equivalent of a can of tomatoes, half cup of lentil, any lentil, normally red in this house, an ounce per person of soya mince and whatever small vegetable, for example peas, sweet corn, mushrooms, onions, peppers, that you’ve got available, chopped up, really small. I make a vat of it in the slow cooker, and then I will portion that down. And then today we want something akin to Shepherd’s pie or cottage pie, so I will take out enough for the two of us I’ll add more vegetables that probably need using up, yet more mushrooms, yet more whatever. And we’ve got some potatoes that need using up, so I’ll put a top on it, but then next week I might get out the same base add some red kidney beans and some chilies. I’ve even managed to dry and caramelize my own chilies now. And that will be chili. Joyce’s mom was always teased because she could take mince, add different flavorings and turn it into anything. But actually if you’re imaginative, especially if you’ve got access to fresh herbs in the garden — right now my rosemary bush isn’t doing very well at the moment and we grow rosemary at university, so every time I’m on a break at uni, I go around and pick some rosemary from the university garden. And I’ll bring it home and dry it. I make rosemary biscuits.

Jane: And really if you’ve got those core mixes that you can cook very quickly and have available — we do a lot of batch cooking — then it being a good cook doesn’t have to be standing in front of the stove for another two hours when you finished your day’s work. It also doesn’t have to be having things sent to you in a box with a recipe card. When you said to me, what’s some classic recipes, it’s actually really hard for me because I am very much a “this is what I’ve got available” type of cook. How much have I got? Chuck it in! My boy Jason, the eldest, he says, you know you’re a good cook when you can open the fridge. Go damn, there’s nothing there. I know what I can make from that!

28:59 Emily: Yeah, very good point. I’m really, really glad that what you shared with us basically is what you’re eating on a daily basis. You have patterns in what you eat every day, and I like that because, of what you said. When you have more or less the same mix of things available or at least things that you can sub out, like this is going to work or that is going to work, depending on the time of year, you can be really efficient with using up everything you have. And it doesn’t take a lot of mental energy to figure out what you’re going to eat every day because it’s more or less a variation, it’s the same pattern.

29:36 Jane: It’s also, both budget-wise and health-wise — I mean I’m not exactly wasting away here and I’m trying to lose a few pounds –if you plan it will become sort of easy. Normally, Friday is shopping day for us. The boys have to be taken to the shop because neither of them have passed their driving license test yet. On a Thursday evening, while Joyce is watching the news, because I know everybody should be interested in current affairs, but I’m not, I will write the menu for the following week and then every day I will check, so I’ve got out what I need.

Tips for Starting Your Own Garden

30:16 Emily: As we conclude, we’ve talked a lot about like cooking tips, which I think is awesome, but do you have any tips for let’s say another PhD student or busy person, busy PhD, who’s interested in maybe dipping their toe into gardening? Not doing the full ten year plan that you have, but where would you get started? Maybe even for someone who just could do container gardening for example?

20:41 Jane: People would say start with the simple things, like potatoes and tomatoes. I would say yes, they are great things to start with, but don’t just grow things because they’re easy. Grow things because you like them. Okay. If all you’ve got is a window sill and you like spices, grow ginger and garlic. You can grow ginger from just planting a knob of the little head of ginger you buy from the supermarket. And if you’re patient and you water it, well, it will grow. I suppose my big thing for gardening is, as with everything that we try to live by, only do the bits you love or start with the bits you love until you get the bug.

31:38 Emily: Thank you for that suggestion. I don’t do any growing of my own food or anything right now. I live in an apartment so it’s inherently challenging, but I do love garlic and so I really liked the idea of having a little container in the window sill and having fresh garlic because I don’t really buy fresh garlic right now even though I love using it. It’s that you just use a little bit at a time. So, thank you for that suggestion.

Living a Frugal, Yet Enjoyable Life

32:00 Emily: Anything else you’d like to add before we sign off?

32:04 Jane: I think I’d go back to what I said earlier which is that I was a very serious person before I met my wife. I’m very lucky in that she will always see my funny side. Financial balance is tricky. If you treat it as a challenge that it’s almost certain that you’re going to overcome, and therefore it becomes a bit of a game, then it all becomes a lot more fun. And why are we here if not to be enjoyed and enjoyable?

32:43 Emily: Yeah, I do like that shift, because really, if you’re living on, let’s say a fixed, fairly low income, like you said, there’s certain challenges or certain realities to that, but your attitude towards it goes so far to make it bearable, enjoyable, horrible, whichever way. It can really go a lot of different directions just depending on how you approach it.

33:10 Jane: And however busy you are and however passionate you are about your studies, because we are after all dealing with PhD students or people who are maybe doing a postdoc even, try and put something aside for another passion, whether that’s playing the guitar or walking your neighbor’s dog or whatever. Anything you do that you’re passionate about, will benefit the PhD as well.

33:43 Emily: Thank you for adding that. I think PhDs can, some of them can get caught in this trap of 100% of my effort has to go towards my studies. And as you said, having some balance is good for you. It’s good for your work. You can’t be so 100% into that. It’s not healthy.

34:02 Jane: I sometimes get accused of telling people to abandon their responsibilities and that’s not true. I have very high sense of duty, but actually, if we don’t love it, especially if we are serving somebody else like helping to try and bring up the boys or doing some charity stuff, if we don’t love it, we’re not blessing the people we’re serving. So the more we love what we do, the more we’re not only blessing ourselves, but we’re blessing well the people around us. And I try to live like that. It’s not always easy because I’m not a naturally positive person, but I’m really lucky in that I have a wife, and who particularly around the boys, who is almost always positive. And you know, if you’re not surrounded by positive people and you need that positive energy, go and find somebody who is.

35:04 Emily: Yeah, thank you for that. Can you share with us your Twitter handle or where else people might find you so that they can get some doses of that.

35:12 Jane: So my personal one is, I’ll just spell out, is at J A N E, capital C, O, capital S, E. So @JaneCoSe and our business one is @CoomberSewell. But I have said the business one is slightly neglected because I’m so busy trying to finish this PhD at the moment.

35:32 Emily: Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that with us and thank you so much for joining me today.

35:36 Jane: Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s been lovely.

Outtro

35:39 Emily: Listeners. Thank you so much 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’s show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways to sell without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archives and it’s shared under CC by NC.

Give Yourself a Raise: Prepare Your Own Food Even with a Busy Schedule

April 30, 2018 by Emily 3 Comments

Grad students and postdocs typically spend a significant portion of their income on groceries and restaurant food; these budget categories are often targeted by trainees who want to cut back on their spending in favor of reaching other financial goals. Forming new habits around cooking and eating is challenging but certainly not impossible, even for busy researchers.

A version of this article was originally published on GradHacker.

If you are looking to “give yourself a raise” by reducing your spending on food, the go-to suggestions are to:

Reduce the number of meals you eat in restaurants or as take-out.
Prepare food from base rather than pre-processed ingredients; shop the perimeter of the grocery store.
Buy food in season.
Don’t waste food.
Buy in bulk.
Plan your menus.
Stick to your shopping list.
Patronize alternative food retailers.

Sometimes trainees justify their high food spending by citing long hours on campus and variable schedules. They tell themselves they don’t have time to plan, shop, or cook or they can’t commit to being home by dinnertime. They are often inexperienced in the kitchen, which means they rarely cook or are slow when they do.

Early on in my grad school career, I fell into some of these high spending patterns. I ate out with classmates because I wanted to bond with my peers. I wasn’t very capable in the kitchen, subsisting largely on sandwiches, fruit, salads, and canned goods. When I did cook, I picked rather involved recipes from cookbooks with several ingredients I wouldn’t use again, and making each meal took a large investment of time. I often stayed late on campus, and I ate far too many meals at Panda Express because I hadn’t planned ahead.

Over the course of my grad school career, I slowly improved both my time management and food preparation skills to the point that I was able to reduce the amount of money I spent on food while still feeling satisfied with what and with whom I was eating. My health also improved in parallel with my nutrition.

Sometimes the stumbling block in our efforts to reduce our spending is not that we don’t know how to spend less but rather that we don’t understand how to adjust our lifestyles to meet our new goals. The remainder of this post will not focus on how to spend less money, but how to make typical strategies for spending less money on food more palatable to a grad student or postdoc.

Think ‘Food Assembly’ or ‘Food Preparation’ Rather than ‘Cooking’

Novices in the kitchen may be intimidated out of preparing much of their own meals because they don’t know how to replicate, especially in a time-efficient fashion, the meals they are accustomed to eating in their parents’ homes, dining halls, or restaurants. But feeding yourself doesn’t have to involve skilled or elaborate cooking; you can reframe it as food assembly or food preparation.

Identify a few simple (components of) meals that you like that have only a single or a small number of ingredients and may or may not involve ‘cooking.’ You’re the only one you need to please with your meal, so don’t worry about whether it would be worthy to bring to a potluck.

Some of my favorite meals during grad school that involved little to no cooking were spinach salads loaded with vegetables and hardboiled eggs or ham, curry tuna salad paired with fruit, tuna mashed with avocado, a taco bowl, and a bunless cheeseburger with steamed broccoli.

Get into a Groove

Repetition is an amazing time-saver when it comes to eating out of your own kitchen. You don’t have to master every cooking technique out there; you just have to become competent at preparing a small number of meals that you like. Rotate through each meal in your wheelhouse at whatever frequency you need to keep from getting bored; add in new foods and techniques slowly so you don’t become overwhelmed.

Some personalities are more amenable to this strategy than others. My husband has eaten virtually the same breakfast and lunch nearly every weekday for years, and before we were married he only ever cooked a handful of different dinners; this amount of variety is satisfying to him and certainly has cost him very little in terms of time and money. Disabusing myself of the idea that I needed (or wanted) a different meal every day of the week was one of my big breakthroughs in committing to preparing my own food while pursuing my PhD.

Establishing patterns in your weekly or monthly meals also makes grocery shopping much easier; you don’t have to spend much time making a list or running to the store for forgotten items.

Acknowledge Your True Schedule

I didn’t have many peers in graduate school who seemed to keep a fixed work schedule, and I don’t remember any non-parents doing so. On top of the large number of hours many researchers put in each week, the nature of research often demands time flexibility. I frequently found myself staying on campus well past what my body told me was dinner hour to finish up labwork, meet up with classmates for a study session, or knock out some administrative tasks.

Early on in grad school, I didn’t plan ahead for these evening workday extensions; while I was quite consistent in bringing lunch to campus daily, I was ‘forced’ to buy dinner on campus if I wanted to stay late. Once I acknowledged that I would be eating dinner on campus from time to time, even if I didn’t know exactly on which days of the week that would occur, I started to plan for it. I prepared a few refrigerator-stable, microwavable, single-serving meals each week to keep in my office for the late nights, replenishing my supply as needed.

My favorite microwavable dinners to keep on campus were chili, split pea soup, flaxseed meal pizza, Mexican lasagna, and pasta with sauce. Full meals aren’t even needed in many cases to help you resist the convenience food available on campus; there’s really no reason to not keep some snacks around to tide you over. Easy room-temperature or refrigerator snacks to keep in your office are instant oatmeal, nuts or nut butters, yogurt, hardboiled eggs, cheese, raw vegetables, and fruit.

Don’t Allow Yourself to Get Too Hungry

‘Never go to the grocery store hungry’ is great advice; hunger can sap our willpower to stick with our eating plan, causing us to overbuy expensive, unhealthy, or unnecessary food. As a graduate student working sometimes long and late hours, I realized that allowing myself to become quite hungry caused me to make poor eating choices on campus and at home in addition to at the grocery store. It’s pretty difficult to arrive home hungry and take the time needed to prepare a meal, especially for a slow cook.

I started flipping my schedule around; nearly every weekday evening, I ate a pre-prepared dinner (or snack) right when I arrived home, and then cooked subsequent days’ meals later in the evening when my hunger was already satisfied. An alternative is to do as much food preparation as possible in advance (washing, chopping, saucing, etc.) so that finishing your meal when you arrive home takes a minimal amount of time.

Batch Cook

Acquiring a slow cooker halfway through grad school absolutely revolutionized how I prepared food; it was my introduction to batch cooking. Batch cooking is preparing multiple meals at once to freeze or refrigerate until they are consumed. Slow cookers are not the only way to batch cook, but they are an incredible tool for preparing large quantities of food at once with relatively little active work or skill needed. Batch cooking usually doesn’t take any or much more time than preparing a single meal, so it’s perfect for a busy trainee. A single person can prepare a meal of 4 or 8 servings and eat for a week off that one-time effort!

Socialize Economically

The connections you make in graduate school are very important for your career; I would not suggest that you skip chances to engage socially with your peers simply because you are trying to spend less money on food. You can, however, often socialize in a manner that limits the damage to your budget. For example:

Say ‘yes’ to free food and drink on campus
Meet up with friends for lunch on campus instead of off-campus so you can brown-bag it
Order judiciously in restaurants and bars
Encourage low-cost gatherings, such as house parties or attending free events
Find common interest groups that meet between mealtimes

Changing your eating habits is certainly not easy. However, by overcoming the challenges to eating out of your own kitchen while you are still a student or postdoc, you can effectively give yourself a raise both during your training and throughout the rest of your life.

How have you kept your food spending low as a graduate student or postdoc?

Why and How I Eliminated Eating Out for Convenience in Grad School (and You Can, Too)

July 19, 2017 by Emily 3 Comments

Shortly after my husband and I got married and combined our finances, we faced a reckoning in our budget. As we created our first combined spending plans and started our system of targeted savings accounts, we realized that our month-to-month spending was out of sync with our values and short-term goals. Chiefly, we wanted to put aside more money for travel spending, which meant that we had to find other areas in our budget to cut back. On the chopping block: eating out for convenience.

While our restaurant spending was never astronomical, we had each fallen into a pattern of buying convenience food on a regular basis. Among other reasons, I tended to buy a quick dinner on campus when my lab experiments ran into the early evening, my husband bought a fast food dinner every week on his way from campus to an evening activity, and we also occasionally went out to dinner just because we didn’t feel like cooking.

We determined that these convenience meals were not a great use of our money, especially in light of our travel goals. So we made a spending rule: We only ate out with other people on social occasions; we eliminated eating out alone or with each other. We held to that rule almost perfectly for our last few years of grad school, though I admit we started deviating a bit while dissertating!

In this post, I’ll share our strategies for sticking with our no-convenience-eating-out rule. I know this topic is of high interest to grad students (with busy schedules!) who are looking to reduce their spending. Most recently, we discussed it at length in Grad Student Finances’s monthly live money chat. (If you want to join our next money chat, sign up for the mailing list here to receive more information.) Even if you don’t want to eliminate eating out for convenience entirely, implementing these strategies will help you to enjoy eating out more when you choose to because it’s not done out of desperation.

Further reading: Give Yourself a Raise: Prepare Your Own Food Even with a Busy Schedule

Identify Your Patterns

The very first step to eliminate eating out for convenience is to take note of when and why it happens. In all three scenarios I listed for my own life, dinner was the issue. My husband and I never ate out for breakfast and rarely did for lunch, as we were consistent brown-baggers. Since dinner was the problem time for us, that was where we focused our energy for creating solutions.

I realized that I tended to get hangry and need to eat right away; if there’s not ready food available, I would buy something because I couldn’t wait an hour or two to get home/shop/cook. So part of my solution was to keep homemade food available (more on that next).

The pattern you identify in your convenience eating could relate to any meal or snack of the day or more than one of them. Maybe you’re not a morning person so you habitually stop for a coffee and bagel on your way to work. Maybe you like to take a nice break for lunch, and part of that is leaving your office to go to an eatery on campus. Maybe you need a pick-me-up snack in the mid-afternoon to keep from nodding off while reading. Maybe you tell yourself you deserve a night off from cooking after a long day in the lab. Work first to identify the situations in which you habitually buy convenience food or are tempted to, whether those are based around a meal, a time of day, a feeling, a stressor, a regularly scheduled meeting, etc.

Keep Food on Campus

If you are buying convenience food on campus or on your way to on from campus, like my husband and I were, the easiest solution is to keep food on campus in your office, department lounge, or whatever personal space is available to you.

Further reading: Make Your Stipend Go Further: Bring Your Lunch to School

We were consistently bringing our lunches with us every day and keeping them in our shared refrigerators. After identifying dinners as our weak point, we started bringing in dinners as well. On the days of the week that we knew in advance that we would need to eat on campus (like before a regular evening activity), we just brought in our lunch and dinner together. But I also started bringing an extra dinner in with me on Monday to stay in the fridge for the week to be eaten on whatever night I happened to stay late (and if that was early in the week, I’d bring in another the next day). In this way, I planned for the eventuality of needing to eat on campus, even though I didn’t know exactly when it would happen.

You don’t necessarily need to bring in a full extra meal to make this work. If you just need to tide yourself over for an hour or two, a snack will do just fine. If you choose shelf-stable foods or long-lasting refrigerator foods, you don’t even need to change them out every week.

Batch Cook

No kidding, batch cooking changed my life. When I first started eating out of my own kitchen and learning to cook, I prepared one-serving meals, which was very time-consuming and didn’t allow me to use frugal strategies like buying in bulk. I also ate a lot of pre-prepared foods and meals out because that kind of cooking was so exhausting. Our slow cooker changed all that for me.

While batch cooking is not limited to slow cookers, it is a good entry point. I started making 8+ servings at once of hearty chilis and soups in our slow cooker, which were easy to toss into a Tupperware and bring to campus for lunch or dinner. From there I moved on to other styles of cooking, but always making at least 4 servings at once. Batch cooking is perfect for a busy grad student as it is so time-efficient.

Batch cooking was key to eliminating our convenience eating out because 1) it created those meals that we wanted to keep on campus and 2) we always had food ready for reheating at home. Gone were the days of convincing ourselves to eat out because we had no groceries at home or cooking would take too much effort.

Further reading: Eliminate Eating Out for Convenience with Batch Cooking

Eat Before You Cook

Batch cooking also leads easily into this tip: eat, then cook. When I arrive home from work hungry, the last thing I want to do is spend a bunch of time cooking! People are always saying “don’t grocery shop while hungry” because it leads to poor decisions, and I apply the same logic to trying to cook while hungry. I get impatient and am liable to go off-plan.

So my (largely unconscious) strategy became to eat a pre-prepared meal upon arriving home, then do any necessary cooking for the following day(s). I did try to batch cook on the weekends, but usually I also needed to do it once or twice during the week, so I made sure that I had a dinner already available on those nights so that cooking could be put off until the later evening.

Use Your Freezer

Tying in closely with batch cooking and always having a meal available to you is freezer cooking. This is not a strategy I personally employed, but it works amazingly well for many people. Basically, you prep/cook one or more meals that are to be immediately frozen and then reheated/cooked at a later time. If you have a meal available in your freezer, you will never have an excuse to stop for convenience food on your way home.

This strategy also works very well for people who want to batch cook but don’t want to eat the same thing every single day. You can cook a four-serving meal, for example, eating one and freezing three. Rotating through that a few times will give you a selection of different freezer meals so you can spontaneously choose which to eat for any given meal.

Meal Planning

I’m a big believer in creating habits to avoid decision fatigue. I do not want to have to think about what I’m going to eat 3-4 times per day, 7 days per week. Eating the same meals over and over again makes my life so much easier. Grocery shopping, cooking, and eating all become consistent and decisions are minimized. If I have my meals planned out and food available to me, such as through batch cooking, I don’t have the opportunity to decide to eat out for convenience.

Luckily, my personality allows for eating the same dinner multiple nights in a row without becoming dissatisfied. If you crave more variety, meal planning can help you preserve that while still eliminating on-the-spot decisions. When you meal plan, you decide in advance what you’ll eat throughout the week. Often, weekends are used for shopping and prepping/cooking all of the meals, so all you have to do during the work week is carry out the plan with minimal effort.

To combine decision elimination with batch and freezer cooking, you can create a pattern of eating one type of meal every Monday, a different one on Tuesday, another on Wednesday, etc. An even more advanced level of meal planning coordinates the ingredients in the meals you eat throughout the week. The different meals will all draw from a common set of ingredients, which allows you to buy in bulk. (Combine that coordination with the sales cycle at your local grocery store and you are a super-frugal meal planning genius!)

It’s a tough adjustment going from eating family meals growing up or dining hall meals in college to cooking for one or two as a young adult. There is absolutely a learning curve, and sometimes convenience eating is part of that. But as you gain skills in the kitchen and clarity on how you want to use your money, you can make the decision to eliminate eating out for convenience. Start with identifying when convenience eating crops up in your life, then apply these strategies to combat it.

What strategies do you use to avoid eating out for convenience?

Eating Out

March 22, 2015 by Emily Leave a Comment

To reduce your spending on eating out, you can either eat out less frequently or choose less expensive foods when you do. You choose the approach that is most consistent with your values.

Further Reading: How to Cut Your Food Spending – Scaling Back on Eating Out

Eat Out Less Frequently

If you are in the habit of eating out alone for convenience, it is simple to replace those meals with ones you prepare at home. On campus, you can still eat with your peers even if you brown bag your lunch. You could try to replace social eating out with hanging out with your friends in less expensive venues from time to time, or skip dinner and join them for the next activity.

Further Reading: Get Rich With: The Secret Food ‘Stash

Spend Less When Eating Out

When you have influence over where you eat out, choose less expensive restaurants. When ordering, pay attention to prices and consider ordering less expensive entrees or replacing an entree with an appetizer, soup, or salad. Skip or order fewer appetizers, drinks, and desserts. Take your leftovers home to replace a second meal. You could also choose to frequent restaurants that offer student discounts or accept coupons or discount gift certificates.

Further Reading: Sometimes I Don’t Eat. Is that Rude?; 10 Ways to Save Money Eating Out at Restaurants

food

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

Introduction

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Early Childhood and Living in Poverty

Path to the PhD

Carrying Forward Financial from Growing Up Poor

Commercial

Finances During Grad School

Frugal Strategies as a PhD

Outtro

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

Introduction

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Cooking Habits Before Meal Prepping

Getting Started With Meal Prepping

Meal Prep Routine

Commercial

Meal Prep Recipe Ideas

Saving Money Through Meal Prepping

Other Benefits of Meal Prepping

Tips To Get Started With Meal Prepping

Meal Prepping During Life Transitions

Outtro

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

Introduction

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Food Spending and Starting on the Path to Self-Sufficiency

Commercial

Long Term Plan for Food Self-Sufficiency

Frugal Food Recipes

Tips for Starting Your Own Garden

Living a Frugal, Yet Enjoyable Life

Outtro

Think ‘Food Assembly’ or ‘Food Preparation’ Rather than ‘Cooking’

Get into a Groove

Acknowledge Your True Schedule

Don’t Allow Yourself to Get Too Hungry

Batch Cook

Socialize Economically

Identify Your Patterns

Keep Food on Campus

Batch Cook

Eat Before You Cook

Use Your Freezer

Meal Planning

Eat Out Less Frequently

Spend Less When Eating Out

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