grad school

The Graduate Student Savings Act Fixes a Major Flaw in Tax-Advantaged Retirement Accounts

October 14, 2019 by Meryem Ok Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Abigail Dove, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. Abby spent last summer as a science policy fellow at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). Her major policy accomplishment during her internship was to secure FASEB’s endorsement of the Graduate Student Savings Act of 2019 (GSSA), a bill that has been proposed in both chambers of Congress. Graduate students and postdocs are not currently permitted to contribute their non-W-2 income, which typically comes from fellowships and training grants, to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs). The GSSA would allow this type of income to be contributed and have a very beneficial effect on the PhD trainee workforce. Abby explains her role in shepherding the GSSA endorsement through FASEB, what the GSSA would do for graduate students and postdocs, and how the GSSA relates to the SECURE Act, another bill that has passed the House and is before the Senate.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Abigail: But it was a little tricky for FASEB to first navigate the waters. They’ve never supported a tax legislation before. You think that experimental biology doesn’t have that much to do with legislation on tax. But here was a perfect one for them to start.

Introduction

00:22 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 nine and today my guest is Abigail Dove, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins and recent science policy fellow at FASEB, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Abby’s major policy accomplishment during her summer at FASEB was to secure FASEB’s endorsement of the Graduate Student Savings Act of 2019, or GSSA, a bill that has been proposed in both chambers of Congress. Graduate students and postdocs are not currently permitted to contribute their non-W2 income, which typically comes from fellowships and training grants to individual retirement arrangements or IRAs. The GSSA would fix that problem and have a very beneficial effect on the PhD trainee workforce. Abby explains her role in shepherding the GSSA endorsement through FASEB, what the GSSA would do for graduate students and post docs, and how the GSSA relates to the Secure Act, another bill that as of this recording has passed the House and is before the Senate. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Abigail Dove.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:33 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Abigail Dove, and she is a PhD student who completed an internship at FASEB last summer. And she has a lot to tell us about the Graduate Student Savings Act. So if you have been wondering about your IRA and why you can or cannot contribute to it, that’s what we’re going to be discussing in today’s episode. Abby, thank you so much for joining me today and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further?

01:59 Abigail: Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Abigail Dove. Currently, I’m a PhD student at Johns Hopkins and I just started my sixth year. I work in fruit flies and study the gonad development. A little bit of my background: I first started as an undergraduate at Bard college, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York. And then I did a postbac for two years at the NIH NIDDK (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases) before starting at Hopkins. What we’re talking about is kind of the work that I did at my internship at FASEB, which is the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which I guess to be a little more descriptive it’s a society that represents 29 member societies, which has about 150,000 scientists that they represent.

Tell Us More About Your FASEB Internship

02:57 Emily: Excellent. You and I have common that we both did a postbac at the NIH. In fact, I’ve interviewed several other people on the podcast who have that on their resumes as well. So very popular program. Anyone still in college considering going for a PhD in biomedical sciences or related areas should definitely consider the NIH postbac program. It’s amazing. Okay. So you had this internship at FASEB last summer. What exactly were you doing in that role? Because it’s a little bit unusual for a graduate student to have an internship. And I think especially a graduate student in the biological sciences because, I don’t know about you, but I sort of observe the culture as like, “ah, you need to stay at the bench 120% of your time and never do anything away from the bench.” So please tell us a little bit more about what you were doing in that internship.

03:40 Abigail: Yeah, so I was really fortunate. I have a PI that–we both know that I’m interested in a career that is outside of the academic track. So, I did a lot of science outreach and I knew that I like communicating science to the public. So I wanted to pursue this career of science policy as a way to talk to the public about science and its importance. So what I did at FASEB, I had a lot of responsibilities. I was particularly interested in training and workforce policy. So, policy that relates to students, postdocs, and even faculty as it’s something that everyone can relate to. So that was one of the reasons that I was most interested in it. And I did a wide range of things. I hosted a webinar on work-life balance and the lab culture and we can include a link to that if anyone wants to watch it later. I represented FASEB on Capitol Hill and at the NIH for different events and I generated comments on sexual harassment that will soon be sent to the NIH. I also helped organize an online symposium series for the FASEB Science Policy Committee on challenges facing women throughout their career lifetime. And then I compiled minutes for the meetings, I drafted talking points for committee members, and then the big thing that I did was I spearheaded FASEB’s endorsement of the Graduate Student Savings Act.

How to Land a Science Policy Internship

05:13 Emily: Excellent. And we’ll get a lot more into that in a moment. But that sounds like a really exciting internship. It’s absolutely fabulous that your PI was supportive in you completing that. I actually did a science policy internship as well. The Mirzayan Policy Fellowship out of the national academies. That was actually after I finished graduate school. But it’s available to current graduate students as well. So, if what Abby was describing sounds amazing to you, that’s another potential avenue for you to get that kind of experience in science policy. Okay. So how did you actually land this internship if other people are interested in doing something similar?

05:46 Abigail: Yeah, so I first started–we have an office at Hopkins, it’s called the Biomedical Careers Initiative Office. And it’s really great for people that are looking for careers outside of the academic track. They were offering a course on science policy and advocacy that was actually being taught by the Director of Public Affairs at FASEB, Jennifer Zeitzer, and the Director of Science Policy, Dr. Yvette Seger. So the class gave us a background on legislation and how bills get enacted into law. And we did some case studies on different issues in science policy. They also taught us how to be a science advocate. But finally, we had to write a policy memo on an opportunity or challenge in research activities supported by federal funding, and we had to give an elevator pitch on that to the class as well. And I did mine on saving for retirement as a graduate student and a postdoc.

06:48 Emily: Yeah. Excellent. And so was it through that paper and that pitch that you gave that you found the Graduate Student Savings Act?

06:56 Abigail: Yes, that’s how I found it. Oh, I guess we didn’t cover how I got the position too. So this office that hosted the class actually also hosts internships for students. And so FASEB was also accepting applications for science policy fellows through the Biomedical Careers Initiative Office. So I applied for that directly. But they also have internships for a wide range of different careers outside of the academic track, including industry and consulting and patent law as well as policy.

What is the Graduate Student Savings Act?

07:33 Emily: It sounds like a great deal of support actually, that Hopkins is providing and helping you sort of step a little bit outside of academia into another role that can really presumably help your post-PhD career, should you decide to pursue one in science policy. So let’s kind of back up a second and explain more about what the Graduate Student Savings Act is because it’s probably not one that most people have ever heard of. Right? Like probably a lot of people in my audience, they know about IRAs. Maybe they don’t have one, but they sort of know they’re supposed to or maybe they know they might not be able to have one. So what is the Graduate Student Savings Act?

08:06 Abigail: Yeah, so the Graduate Student Savings Act. There’s a bill in both the House and the Senate and they’re essentially the exact same bill, so they’re called companion bills. And they would allow graduate students and postdocs who receive their income through either a fellowship or stipend to contribute to an IRA or an individual retirement account. The current issue right now is that on the current tax law, trainees who are receiving their income through a fellowship or a stipend are actually prohibited from contributing to an IRA because it’s not considered compensation or earned income.

08:44 Emily: Exactly. And I like to further kind of clarify this for people by saying within academia we might use the word fellowship in different ways. We might use the word stipend in different ways. Nobody’s ever heard the word compensation. But what it really boils down to is, is your graduate student or postdoc income reported on a W2 or not reported on a W2? It could be reported somewhere else, it could be reported not at all. W2 income is the kind of income, taxable compensation, or earned income that can be contributed to an IRA under the current law. And anything else in terms of graduate student, postdoc income non-W2 does not fall into that category, unfortunately. So that’s how things currently stand. The Graduate Student Savings Act includes this type of non-W2 or fellowship income in taxable compensation for the purposes of contributing to an IRA. Is that correct?

09:39 Abigail: Yes. And unfortunately, it doesn’t change its designation universally. It doesn’t make it earned income or compensation, but it just allows it to be saved for retirement purposes in an IRA.

09:51 Emily: Yeah. This is one of those confusing things about the tax code in general is that they use these terms like “taxable compensation” and “earned income” under different contexts. And so sometimes they have different definitions under different contexts. So earned income has other implications in the tax code, like around the earned income tax credit. Whereas, taxable compensation has a different meaning. It’s under the section for IRA contributions and so forth. So it’s sort of defined there as “taxable compensation for the purposes of contributing to an IRA is these things,” and currently, it says explicitly, “does not include fellowship income, not reported on a W2.” So that’s the current status. But then there’s this Graduate Student Savings Act bill as you said, it’s sort of on the floor in both the House and the Senate.

How Abby Got FASEB to Endorse the GSSA

10:37 Emily: I was looking at the history of this and I think the first time it was introduced was 2016 and it’s introduced every year I think in more or less the same form until now, 2019. We should actually say we’re recording this interview on September 25th, 2019. It will be released within a couple of weeks of that date. So things might have changed. But as of September 25th, 2019, the Graduate Student Savings Act has not been passed but it is, I guess, available to be passed. So, what was the process like for getting FASEB to ultimately endorse the Graduate Student Savings Act, and what work did you do to make that happen?

11:15 Abigail: Yeah, so originally before I even did the class, FASEB was not aware of the Graduate Student Savings Act at all. It wasn’t on their radar. It wasn’t until I wrote my policy memo on the issues of graduate students saving for retirement, and I actually did the research and I was just Googling it and I came across it on my own, that we both kind of became aware of it. And so I kind of took this on as a task that I wanted to complete in my fellowship and I thought it was an important task and FASEB was great. If there was an issue that I really wanted to take on and it was something that was good for FASEB to endorse, they would have no problem with me taking the lead. So this was my big accomplishment of the fellowship.

12:04 Abigail: And since FASEB is a nonprofit organization any bill that they support needs to have bipartisan support for endorsement. And that thankfully both the House and Senate bill had bipartisan support on both pieces of legislation. I think some of the previous iterations of the Graduate Student Savings Act didn’t have bipartisan support. So this was really important for FASEB to get on board. But it was a little tricky for FASEB to first navigate the waters. They’ve never supported a tax legislation before. You think that experimental biology doesn’t have that much to do with legislation on tax. But here was a perfect one for them to start.

Personal Impact of Flawed Tax Legislation

12:49 Emily: Yeah. As you were saying earlier, it’s a clear workforce issue. Right? So that’s the definite connection or conduit between what they do generally and this weird little tax quirk that happens to deeply affect their own workforce.

13:03 Abigail: Well, yes. So this actually personally affected me. From when I was in college and doing other side jobs, I was always contributing to an IRA, if possible. My dad is very financially responsible and he just told me when I was young, “you need to have an IRA.” He always recommended a Roth IRA. He always thought it would be better to get tax first and any profit you make later you don’t get taxed on. So there’s two different IRAs, a Roth and the standard IRA. So maybe some clarity on that. But this personally affected me when I was a post-bac for those two years I was receiving stipend income and wasn’t reported on a W2 so I couldn’t contribute to an IRA for those two years.

13:51 Abigail: Then my first year in graduate school I was on a training grant, so also not receiving a W2 so I couldn’t contribute. My second year I was actually a teaching assistant, so I was being employed by the university somewhat and getting my income reported on the W2. So I was for that year able to contribute, which was really great. And then I got awarded the National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellowship award.

14:20 Emily: Congratulations, but also, dun, dun, dun.

14:23 Abigail: Yeah. So it was really great. But then I also couldn’t contribute to my IRA because it wasn’t reported on a W2. So that affected me for my third and fourth year of graduate school. My fifth year I got married. So that changed things a little. I was still on my NSF fellowship. But because I was married to someone who had a real job and was receiving income that was deemed compensation, I was able to contribute to my Roth IRA just because I was married to my husband. so that was my last year of my fellowship. Now I’m back at Hopkins and I’m TA’ing for this year. So I will again be able to contribute even if my husband wasn’t receiving earned income himself.

15:14 Emily: Yeah, I have a little bit of a similar story of flip-flopping between RAs and fellowship income. And at some point I got married and so my husband, having a similar situation of flip-flopping between RAs and fellowship income, it helped in certain years one of us would have a taxable compensation, maybe the other one wouldn’t. So one of the things that helps people in this situation–under the current status of fellowship income, non-W2 income is not eligible to be contributed to an IRA–one thing that helps is that the academic year and the calendar year do not line up. So, if you have different sources of funding in two different academic years, maybe you can be covered for one calendar year in terms of being able to contribute. It helps if you’re married of course, to someone with taxable compensation. And the other workaround is actually having a side hustle that is self employment income. So self-employment income is taxable compensation that can be contributed to an IRA. So that’s something I sometimes float with people who are frustrated by their multi-year wonderful fellowship packages that don’t allow them to contribute to an IRA. If it’s possible to side hustle, that’s another way to kind of sneak in that eligibility. So, your stipend wouldn’t be eligible, but that side hustle income would be eligible. All these are workaround solutions, the real main solution is just changing the tax code because this is ridiculous that this is happening, right?

Commercial

16:35 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, 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 are interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, 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.

Anything Else About Your Role in FASEB?

17:25 Emily: Okay. So, anything else to add about your role with getting FASEB to endorse the GSSA?

17:31 Abigail: Yeah. So, because it was a tax bill and FASEB had never endorsed a tax bill before, they want it to go through full process of endorsement. They wanted to get everyone’s feedback on it. So the first step was going through their Training and Career Opportunities Subcommittee. So, they have a monthly meeting, I prepared talking points for the chair of that committee, and we discussed it and they couldn’t see anything wrong with it. So, we got a full endorsement from that subcommittee. Then we had to go up one level to the Science Policy Committee and did the same thing, had to talk to the entire committee, got overwhelming support of it. So, it got pushed up to the next FASEB tier, which was the executive committee. They gave the final approval. Actually, for the Training and Career Opportunities Subcommittee and the Science Policy Committee, I made a one-page summary of the current situation and how the Graduate Student Savings Act would change that. So, a one-page review for them. And then when we went for approval for the Executive Committee, we had the full letter drafted for them to approve, and we can also give you a link to the FASEB’s endorsement letter too, as well.

18:56 Abigail: Normally, it would go to the FASEB board for approval, but the board was jam-packed with what they had to do for that month. So, because we got unanimous support from the two committees before that, they thought that the Executive Committee approval would be sufficient. But I started my internship in June and it wasn’t approved until the first week of September. So, it does take a long time for this approval to go through because you have to wait every month for the next committee to happen. And if there are changes and edits to it, then it can also take a lot of time. You want to do it as quick as possible so the endorsement actually has an effect if the bill is getting voted on soon.

19:47 Emily: Yeah, exactly. This is fascinating to hear kind of how the sausage is made, and not even to make the policy, but just to get something like this: an endorsement from group whose endorsement matters in this kind of thing. What I’m just thinking is how good it is that FASEB has connections to the current trainee workforce like through you and other interns they accept because they had you to tell them, “Hey, this is an issue that’s going on. And by the way, there’s a solution to it and it’s in front of Congress right now.” So it’s just, I guess it’s really good for them to offer these kinds of internships programs to get those fresh ideas and those connections to people who are still in training.

20:30 Abigail: Yeah, I think they really appreciate the fellowship program for that same perspective. The younger generation. People serving on these committees and the boards are faculty members that have been serving for a while and they’re very removed from this training portion. I think there might be–and correct me if I’m wrong–but I think there could be a few postdocs who are serving on boards, but I think that’s very unlikely. Most of it’s always faculty. There’s never a postbac representative in these meetings. So, having a fellow there, they really value so they can get that younger perspective on what’s happening currently.

What is the SECURE Act?

21:10 Emily: Yeah. That’s excellent. Okay. So that was your role with FASEB and then with respect to the GSSA, the Graduate Student Savings Act. There is a different bill before Congress that has sucked up a lot more attention in terms of changing the tax code than the GSSA has, and that is the SECURE Act. Can you tell us what the SECURE Act is? Not in a lot of detail, but basically just how it relates to the Graduate Students Savings Act?

21:35 Abigail: The SECURE Act is Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, and it’s just a massive retirement savings bill. For some perspective, the Graduate Student Savings Act is a two-page bill, whereas the Secure Act is 124 pages. So it’s just way too large for FASEB to endorse something so big. But fortunately, it has almost the exact same wording as the Graduate Student Savings Act in one of its sections. So it would get across the same thing as the Graduate Student Savings Act. It would allow graduate students receiving unearned income to contribute to an IRA account. It just was too big of a bill for FASEB to endorse because we can’t vet everything and it’s a little bit out of FASEB’s wheelhouse.

22:22 Emily: Yeah. So, basically what sounds like has happened is that the Secure Act has absorbed the Graduate Student Savings Act pretty much verbatim. And it’s making a lot of other changes as you said to retirement accounts. I’ll link to a couple articles on the Secure Act from the show notes, but some other things that caught my eye that it’s trying to address are like having part time workers have more access to 401k’s. It’s changing a little bit of the distribution rules, like once you’re actually in retirement and about inherited IRAs and there’s just a lot of changes there. Abby and I were glancing over it and we saw something that, “Oh maybe this addresses the kiddie tax.” We’re not even sure about that, which would be amazing if it does. So there’s a lot of different things that it touches.

23:02 Emily: And as you were saying earlier, like for FASEB being able to endorse the GSSA, the GSSA had to have bipartisan support. In fact the Secure Act does have bipartisan support. It passed the House and is currently hung up in the Senate as of, again, September 25th. Because the Secure Act passed the House with such strong bipartisan support, everyone kind of thought that it would pass the Senate really quickly. But it’s been hung up, so its future is uncertain but hopefully it will get through. And the wording that was adopted from the GSSA, hopefully that would actually be maintained. And in the final version we would actually see this benefit be extended to graduate students and postdocs where it wasn’t before. But that’s kind of where things stand as of today as of this recording. Hey, maybe by the time this is published something will have changed on that front. That would be awesome.

23:56 Abigail: I think something also important to note is that the wording of the bill, I don’t think that it would also apply to postbacs. It seems very specifically to graduate students and postdocs. So I think, unfortunately, postbacs would be still excluded from the Graduate Student Savings Act.

How Will the Internship Help Your Future?

24:12 Emily: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. I’ll have to take a look at that because I didn’t realize there were distinctions being made among different levels of training. We’ll see how that actually shakes out. It’s always sort of uncertain until kind of the next tax cycle rolls around how these things are actually going to be implemented and everything. Thank you for pointing that out. For postbacs out there, this might not be the news you’re looking for. Maybe you still need the side hustle or maybe you still need to get married to have one of these workarounds. Just kidding, people don’t do that. Okay. So Abby, how do you think that this internship experience with FASEB is going to benefit your future career?

24:52 Abigail: Oh, I think it benefited me already tremendously. Besides from just getting a sense of what science policy really is and getting to immerse myself in it and what I would expect in a job. I got great networking. I already met a bunch of people because FASEB represents so many other societies. You know, I really got to get my name around and people know my work now. I also just got a ton of experience. I generated a bunch of writing samples, which is really crucial in the science policy job search, and I think I’ll get great references also for future jobs. So, it’s benefited me tremendously.

25:30 Emily: Do you have specific plans yet for after you finish? Like what positions you might apply for?

25:35 Abigail: Yes, I’m probably looking for science policy analyst positions. When I graduate. I don’t see really any benefit of doing a postdoc afterwards. There are people that continue to do more science policy fellowships. I’m kind of in the boat where I would just like to be out of fellowships and schooling and just want a real job. And I think with this internship I generated enough experience that I would be able to get an entry-level position and be a sought-after candidate.

Final Advice for Early-Career Grad Students

26:08 Emily: Yeah, I have a great deal of sympathy with that position of, “okay, I don’t need any more training. I’m trained. Let me have a job. Finally.” Definitely. So Abby, last question here, which is one I ask all of my guests. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be related to something we’ve talked about today or it could be something entirely different.

26:29 Abigail: Yeah. So I think of course I would recommend that everyone should open and save in a Roth IRA account and start saving what they can, even if they can’t hit the max. But I think more importantly, we know that graduate school is a really stressful time, and I think it’s really important to invest in your personal wellbeing. And so if that means, paying for workout classes or traveling or if it’s even retail therapy. I think whatever it is, if it’s important to you and if it makes grad school a little bit saner for you it’s important to put some money aside and make time for yourself.

27:08 Emily: Yeah, it’s, it’s actually a little bit weird that sometimes we have to give graduate students permission to spend money on themselves. But if you think about it like more broadly, other people when they receive the financial advice to cut back on those discretionary expenses, cut back on those Wants and so forth, it’s usually because they’re spending at such a level that’s actually endangering their other financial security.

27:35 Emily: Graduate students I would say in general are not spending a sufficient percentage of their income on discretionary things for themselves. Actually, sort of to tie this back to the GSSA, one of the co-sponsors of the GSSA is Senator Elizabeth Warren. She’s sponsored every year in the past, whatever, four years that it’s been up. Many years ago, back when she was a consumer advocate, basically, she wrote this book called All Your Worth. She co-authored it with her daughter. And that book promotes the balanced money formula, which is to spend, of your after-tax income, no more than 50% of your after-tax income on Needs, 30% on Wants and 20% to Savings. And I was looking at that the other day and I’m thinking that graduate students, I would be surprised if they spent 30% of their income on their Wants.

28:28 Emily: Usually, it’s that Needs category that gets up to 60, 70, 80% or more because of rents and high costs of living areas and low stipends and all of those kinds of problems. So yeah, in fact, sometimes we do need to hear the advice that it is okay to spend a little bit of money on yourself to help bolster your mental health and help you get through graduate school in great shape. Of course, it’s ideal if you can do that alongside saving for your future and doing all these other great things, but we want you to get through graduate school in one piece. So yeah, thank you for that advice, Abby, and for giving this interview today.

29:02 Abigail: Well, thank you for having me.

Outtro

29:05 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 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 do so 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 Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC.

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.

How to Advocate for Yourself and Your Income with Respect to Conference Travel, Job Offers, Fellowships, and More

September 30, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory learned to advocate for herself with respect to her income during graduate school. Her message to graduate students is that they are not merely students but professionals within their fields and should be treated as such, and the skill of being assertive but not aggressive is useful across a lifetime. Mallory and Emily discuss negotiation, where to find funds to pay for research and conference travel, and Mallory’s experience tutoring undergraduate physics students as a side hustle.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Mallory: When you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree and the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do.

Introduction

00:24 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 seven, and today my guest is Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory has a message for graduate students. You deserve to get paid and asking to be financially compensated, doesn’t have to be gauche. We talked through several applications of this mindset from rectifying a lapse in pay to finding creative sources of travel funding, to negotiating a job offer. Mallory also shares her experience side hustling as a tutor for undergraduate students in physics. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Mallory Smith.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Mallory Smith. Mallory came to me with several ideas that she wanted to speak about from her own personal life, all relating to income, so that’s what we’re going to cover today. Income as a PhD trainee. So Mallory, will you please introduce yourself to our audience a little bit further?

01:33 Mallory: Sure. I got my PhD in 2016, officially 2017. I was a postdoc for about two years and now I’m a staff scientist. I’m on the staff. We use the term staff scientists to say that you’re promoted and I haven’t been promoted, so I always add that disclaimer, it’s a new position for me. I went to a small state school for undergrad and to a larger, but not very large, private university for grad school, so that’s kind of definitely colored how I see income and what opportunities I’m able to talk about because it’s defined by what I’ve been exposed to.

A Message for Grad Students: Practice Self-Advocacy

02:20 Emily: Yeah, definitely. We’re looking for your personal angle on this here. So you came to me saying, I have a message, I have a message for PhD trainees. What is that message?

02:32 Mallory: So I have had a couple of experiences in grad school and a couple of friends in grad school. One particular story stands out. I have a friend whose professor was just absent-minded, and completely forgot to figure out summer funding for her. She kind of had assumed that he was on top of it and he completely wasn’t, so it got down to the last minute and it’s like, “Oh by the way, next week you’re not going to be paid anymore because I don’t have summer funding for you. Oh, well.” And she said, “Oh, okay.” The deadlines for everything had passed. And I’m like, “You need to tell the department,” because our department was really trying to make sure that they got some funding, somehow, for every single one of their students, whether it be a summer TA position or working something else out, and she didn’t want to ask because she was afraid that was passed all the deadlines and you know, I think she kind of felt like, “Oh, it was my responsibility have figured this out earlier,” or something like that.

03:48 Mallory: The thing is that when you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree. And the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university. Whether you’re training and especially when you’re presenting at conferences and when you’re doing any TA positions or anything like that, you are furthering the objectives of the university and you are an employee of the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do. That also is a piece that I think departments can use some help in, in realizing where their gaps are. Because if you don’t feel valued, you’re not going to be as productive or as enthusiastic about where you’re at.

04:46 Mallory: So for example, with that particular professor, he had grad students sporadically and I think the network of communication can get lost, the thread can get lost. If you are letting your department know to say, “Oh yeah, that professor, they have that problem, they’ve done this to four other grad students, we have a backup option for you.” Or the department doesn’t know this is going on and say, “Oh, okay, now I know”, and the department chair or the heads can look out maybe for future grad students and prevent that from happening.

05:23 Emily: I have so many things that I want to say about this topic as well. It’s such a strange relationship that graduate students have with their advisors and also with their departments and universities. And it varies so widely across different universities and across different departments and with different students in different advisors. During what you were saying just there that you’re an employee is only the case for some graduate students, right? So many, many graduate students are employees and should absolutely be empowered by what you just said, that they bring value to the university in one way or another. That’s why they’re being employed and if their employment should lapse by accident, of course that’s something that should be rectified. But anyway, it’s such a strange relationship between the trainee and the institution because, in some cases you’re treated more like a student or a trainee and in some cases, you’re treated more like an employee. And it usually seems that the university wants to do whatever is in their best interest — treat you as a student in one case, employee in another case whenever it benefits them and it’s a real shame, but it does fall to the student or to the trainee, in many cases, to push back against that and it shouldn’t be that way. Like in your example of this, the student’s advisor should have been looking out for her, should have been on top of things, but in that case, he wasn’t and so it did fall to her, unfortunately, but it did.

06:59 Emily: I observed something similar actually when I was in graduate school. This happened to a postdoc that I knew that her pay just lapsed for several months. And she was an employee, so I don’t know, maybe she was switching positions or something. I’m not sure what happened actually. I think it had to do with being a visa issue because she was an international postdoc. But anyway, she went unpaid for several months while this was being sorted out by our, by her advisor and like you said with your friend, she was kind of OK with it. I was shocked and appalled when I found out that was happening, but she didn’t really want to rock the boat. And maybe that was because it had to do with visa stuff. I don’t know. But in any case, it did unfortunately fall to her. I’m sure this happens to a lot of different people, what should these students and postdocs do if they find themselves in this kind of situation where they’re kind of being taken advantage of, although maybe it’s unintentional, and it’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s just bad management?

08:07 Mallory: I think it’s departments and professors, people, they take the path of least resistance to getting the thing crossed off their list. I think when you’re a grad student, you have to start looking out for yourself to some degree. There should be better policies in place at a lot of universities to prevent a lot of this from happening but until we’re there, I think when you start, you have to know what your parameters space is. Your offer letter will tell you how many months of funding you’re guaranteed. I think, it’s been a while, I started grad school in 2010, so I think my offer letter said that I was employed 11 out of 12 months, but that it was nine months of like serious pay and then two months of summer pay to be covered by the professor. There was some language in there that you would know ahead of time. Also, if your professor is someone who’s not paying attention to deadlines and not being forthright in communicating things with you, you kind of have to take that on yourself to find out in March if you have summer funding because that leaves you not enough time to work something out.

09:40 Emily: Unfortunately, again, these advisors are very rarely trained in any kind of management. They’re often kind of flying blind and doing whatever they’ve done in the past and it’s really an unhealthy situation, something that really, really desperately needs reform within academia. Yet, this is the system that we’re working with right now and students and trainees do find themselves there. So in the case of your friend, in the case of my friend, how could they have phrased this request so that they’re likely to have it fulfilled but also not feeling whatever is holding them back from asking the first place? Maybe they didn’t want to feel pushy. Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the mistake of their supervisor. How could they have maybe tried to rectify this?

10:30 Mallory: If it’s hard to start that conversation, you know it’s intimidating to make an appointment with the department chair and say, “I’m lodging this formal complaint that I’m not getting paid and I’m angry.” That’s a very hard approach. That’s not what I would personally take. That’s definitely not one my friend would be comfortable with taking. So I’d say find someone that has a low barrier of entry to talk to. Departments have a lot of other people beyond the administration, the secretaries and other people who have been working with the department, sometimes for decades — they’re often in this position that they’re not someone directly responsible for your management as a grad student, but they know the department. You can sort of start to find the people who know the things in the department. In my graduate school, we had someone who was really looking out for graduate students and you could go very easily to her and say, “Hey, like I’m having this issue, how should I approach it?” and get some real feedback that wouldn’t be going all the way and lodging a complaint. Also, older grad students; if there’s an older grad student in your group with that professor, say, “This is happening to me did this happened to you, what do you think I should do?” and you can kind of get some tips on the least “causing the boat to rock” way of getting what you really deserve.

12:07 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, in my department as well, when I was in graduate school, we had an excellent administrative assistant who was handling all the graduate student’s stuff. And she, as you were saying, was really an advocate for graduate students. I feel like I could have easily gone to her and said, “I’m having this problem. What do I do about it?” And maybe that is escalating it to the DGS and doing something formal and she would know, or maybe it’s as simple as, she’s just going to go have a conversation with someone and it’s going to be fixed, no problem. I don’t know how it could be resolved, but that person would know. Identifying your resources within the department, absolutely, I think that’s a great idea. Even if you don’t know how to do that, as you said, to ask an older student or someone else who’s sort of serving kind of as a mentor to you or that you look up to within the lab or within the department and they’re going to know who that person is to go to. So I think that’s an excellent way to approach it.

Self-Advocacy Post-Grad School

13:00 Emily: I can definitely see how this skill of advocating for yourself when necessary can apply to post PhD life. Isn’t this the purpose of being a student? We’re learning how to do thing. We’re gaining knowledge and gaining skills and so forth. And some of these soft skills, like speaking up when something isn’t right, are very valuable to learn within graduate school and can be used later. Do you have any thoughts about using this skill of self-advocacy post training phase?

13:34 Mallory: Typically PhD programs, in my experience, which is a narrow set field of physics, is narrowly defined, like here is the tuition that graduate students in this department get. That’s it. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but during graduate school, I learned there’s other ways to ask for money. The postdoc I applied for, it also had like a set salary — this is what we paid postdocs, that that’s it, but someone else I know actually asked for additional travel funding and they were able to give that to that person, so they had their own travel budget to go to whatever conferences they wanted to. They didn’t need approval or to worry about funding regulation, like it has to apply to the grant that’s paying for it. They could just pick a conference and go. That’s a type of perk that you can ask for.

14:38 Mallory: I think some postdocs do allow you to negotiate for salary. Then every job post-postdoc, maybe not every but most every job post-postdoc, is the negotiate-for-your-salary type of position. The graduate school I went to had a big business school and it was big on their undergrads being successful and so they had a lot of professional development events about how important it was to negotiate for your salary. They could just show you this graph that if you ask for an additional X thousand dollars in your salary now, the impact over your career is substantial because when you’re starting out, the next position you go to, the salary will be based off what you were paid previously.

15:36 Mallory: When I applied for my job, I had been, for years hearing, “You have to negotiate for your salary” and I’m like, “Oh God, they’re offering me such a great salary. I’m so happy with it, but like I feel like I have to negotiate.” So I went to one of my mentors, my boss, and I said, “Hey, I’m interested in negotiating.” And they were like, “Well, typically you have some skill that you can say, ‘Hey, I can bring this and you should pay me more because I’m bringing this skill’” I didn’t have anything like that but I actually ended up crafting this response letter to my offer and saying, “Oh, I just looked it up and I was wondering if a salary increase to this amount would be possible.” And they actually came back and said, well, not to that amount, but to a slightly lower amount that was still higher than what they had a base offered, and that felt really cool of course, but hopefully over the long run, that’s the type of impact that is meaningful, in terms of salary.

16:48 Mallory: When you go to negotiate for your salary, there are web sites like glassdoor.com and other places where you can find out the range of salaries that are possible for your position. Typically, there’s a lower end and a higher end, and they have a cap. They can’t pay you higher than this amount for this position. That’s it. You always want to ask to be in the top half of that bracket and they’ll put you somewhere, hopefully in the middle, but not the lowest part of that bracket in that negotiation. But just kind of note, I knew when I was asking that I was not asking for an exorbitant thing and also, I was intimidated because I knew everyone that I would be working with already. When you ask for money, you’re not asking from the people that you’re working with. You’re asking from the university and really from HR. You shouldn’t feel like, “Oh, I’m asking for some special treatment that I don’t deserve.” It’s really a linear, top down thing from the administration and just ask. We have this sort of negative connotation about asking about money and talking about money, but if you just simply ask and say, “Hey, I was wondering if this is possible” and you’re not being aggressive about it at all. that’s not, that’s not an aggressive question to ask.

18:22 Emily: I think you’re exactly right and I’m so glad that you shared the exact phrasing that you use because it’s one sentence, the way you phrased it. It’s so easy to throw that up there and if you didn’t have what you felt was justification like, “Oh, I’m bringing X, Y, Z skills to the table,” you can still ask, especially if it’s in line with whatever the ranges that you know are appropriate for that position. I think that’s a pretty standard thing is that you’re looking at taking a new position and you look up what people are paid and you have a range there and if your offer is coming in on the lower end of that range, just ask for, as you said, the higher end of that range and maybe they’ll meet somewhere in the middle.

19:01 Emily: My husband did the exact same thing when he negotiated his current industry position. He just said, “Hey, I looked up the salary range for this position in the city that I’ll be moving to and it looks like this is a fair number. Can you do that?” And they said, “No, but we’ll bring it up by a certain degree.” That was really successful and once you get over the mental hurdle of doing it, the actual phrasing of the one or two sentences is really not like that much. But as you said, it pays off so much every single year for the rest of your career going forward in the compounding of the raises that you’ll be getting. It’s the same way that compound interest works with investments or reverse ways with debt works exactly the same with your salary to the degree that your new salary is based off any previous salaries. I just love that you said that.

19:55 Emily: I also want to point out that negotiation is more rare but is possible at the postdoc and even the graduate student levels. I wanted to point the listeners to two websites I have that function similarly to Glassdoor, which are PostdocSalaries.com and PhDStipends.com and so there you can just go and look up what are postdocs or PhD students being paid at that university or in this field or what have you and get an idea of whether your offer is livable, whether it’s more or less than other people in the same city are making. You can even, especially as a postdoc, start using that as justification for negotiating your salary. I actually do have a question within the survey in postdocsalaries.com did you negotiate your salary or benefits? And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of people forget about negotiating benefits. Maybe that salary number can’t move, but something else on the side can move. Because the thing is that when you take on an employee, like you said, the salary ranges are set above levels than just your advisor that you’re going to, it’s a few levels above that. The thing is that the cost of taking on an employee is actually much more than just the salary. They have to pay taxes for you, they have to pay benefits for you, and so asking for an increase in salary, you may be like, “Oh, I’m asking for a 5% or 10% increase in the salary,” but that’s not a 5% or 10% increase in the total package that they’re taking on, by hiring you, it really is a smaller number to them then it looks like to you. Keep that in mind when you’re going to negotiate.

21:33 Mallory: When you get a new job, you get this salary offer and it’s more than you’ve made before because if you’re coming from grad school, anything’s going to be, should be more than what you made as a grad student. When you get out of grad school, you have to calibrate yourself to not be like all blown away by that number because typically, they’re going to offer you the low end of the bracket. It’s more efficient for them.

Commercial

21:59 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.

Finding Sources of Travel Funding

22:48 Emily: You mentioned a little bit ago that a friend negotiated for some travel funding. What ways have you gone out and gotten extra funding? Or what ways have you seen other people do that?

23:08 Mallory: I know that for example, the American Physical Society often has a pot of money for helping grad students attend conferences. You can apply andI think the one that I knew about gave everybody who applied and they accepted $300 toward traveling to this conference. And it’s not much, but it helps cover some of the difference,

23:40 Emily: Especially if it’s something you are going to pay out of pocket anyway, that’s a big help

23:45 Mallory: The other thing is that departments sometimes are strapped for cash and I think that if you’re running up and you’re asking for money and they really are like, “we don’t have money, we’re sorry, we really don’t have money,” they will say that and it will be clear. But a lot of times departments have pockets of money around and if you know to ask, this will become accessible to you, but you have to know to ask and sometimes they’re not advertising that part as well. I know that for certain universities, they often have some study abroad relationship with one country in particular, so if you want to go to, if there’s a conference and it happens to also be in that country and your university already has a relationship with sending students there, even if it’s undergraduate students, there might be a pipeline for getting funding. That’s pretty easy. I got travel funding from a private fund that came from the donation that existed for grad students to travel internationally and present their work or attend a workshop and learn, and I didn’t know about that until my advisor said, “Hey, I don’t have money to send you to France, but you should apply for this thing.” And that worked out. Then there’s pockets of professional development funding around that, if you’re presenting your work, is accessible to you. The other thing is that sometimes graduate student unions have money set aside for helping grad students with this. I think our graduate student union had a some sort of rolling application that you can apply to get a couple hundred dollars towards travel and preference given to students that haven’t gone anywhere yet, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of weird avenues that you can find out there. There’s also cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary types of collaborations and alliances that if you’re doing anything related to them you can reach out and say, “Hey, I would like to go to this conference that you guys are holding because I’m doing this thing, it’s related. Can you help me cover some of that cost?”

26:08 Emily: Thank you so much for listing all those different, as you said, little pockets of money that might be accessible to you if you have the secret key, the unlock code, to inquiring about them. It’s too bad that this is kind of secret grad school knowledge that has to be passed by word of mouth instead of sort of being out there and clear. And maybe it is clear in some places, but this is another one of those reasons, these are the ones that you’ve like observed that were relevant for your university and your department and they may or may not be similar with somewhere else, but hopefully if a newer grad student or a newer post doc entering a new place can ask some people a few years ahead, “Oh, I’m looking for funding to go to this conference. I ran into a barrier, there is no more pools of money in the standard place. Do you know how people have gotten funding.” Just asking those questions of maybe there’s some kind of work around here. I love all the examples that you threw out. I hadn’t heard of half of them before, so that’s wonderful and everyone can try those. But also, still ask your peers, what are the secrets to this place, these funding pools. Hopefully, if you ask enough people, you’ll get the right answer. Especially, go to people who have been traveling internationally, who have clearly done the thing that you want to do, and ask them how they went about doing that.

27:29 Mallory: I think a lot of times during our PhD we’re in our bubble and a lot of the things that are unique for us are not unique for the department and not unique for graduate students. You’re probably not asking for something new that’s never been done before. The other thing I’d like to mention is professors who have been professors for a while think about this differently. I think they kind of have the mentality of it’s ridiculous not to get compensated and of course, why wouldn’t you ask? So they’re not saying, “Hey, by the way, I can pay for if you ever want to do something like this, this or this.” It’s not because they’re trying to keep it a secret from you. It’s just, it doesn’t occur to them that you wouldn’t know about this already, which is crazy, right? If you’re a new student, why would you know? But they get kind of stuck in their experience within their bubble of what they see and what they deal with and how they think about salaries and funding, which is on a whole different level.

Tutoring as a Side-Hustle

28:36 Emily: Going back to your first point about simply asking and advocating for yourself in a very gentle way can be done with respect to this additional travel funding and so forth. Another topic that you wanted to bring up was regarding side hustling. Can you tell us about your experience with side hustling in graduate school?

29:04 Mallory: My side-hustling was a tutoring, so I didn’t aggressively side hustle. I didn’t need to really supplement my income, but it was nice to. Tutoring is something that one, there’s always a need for tutors for freshmen level physics; and two, if you look up what the typical tutoring charge per hour is, if you have your bachelor’s, that level is typically $25 to $30 or so, and then if you’ve got your master’s or your PhD, it’s $30, $40, $50 an hour. A couple of things with that. One, I hate charging students that are struggling with physics, like, “Okay, yeah I can help you but it’s going to cost you,” and so I never charged the whole amount that I should have, but I learned something in getting to the point where I was comfortable with charging: one, the students that were undergrads at my graduate school, their parents were paying their tuition bills, so I was not making some student broke, they were able to afford it; two, when I was getting compensated for my time, $20, $30 an hour, I was very happy to prepare for that well and to do a good job. Once I had some experience tutoring, because I went in with very little experience and I always joke I have to write the students I first tutored and say, I’m really sorry, I learned how to tutor with you and you didn’t learn any physics. But I learned after! But that’s okay. The other thing is that when you get stuck in graduate school and you can sit down at the end of the day and help someone learn physics, that’s really gratifying. I got stuck in my research, I struggled with my classes and being able to help someone else was like, okay, I’m not a failure as a physics person. I’m clearly benefiting younger students.

31:11 Emily: I think that tutoring, I would say it’s the number one thought of side hustle for a grad student, because clearly as you were just saying, you do have something to teach. You have a great deal of expertise in some areas, even if it doesn’t feel like that on a daily basis, once you can look back a little bit, you’ve really come a long ways within your field, and so it’s so accessible to be able to teach people coming along behind you by a few years. The other thing about charging students and feeling a little bit weird about that is that you have to remember that this is above and beyond all the resources that the university itself is transferring to those students. They have the class that they’re in, they have the TA for that class, they have their professor, they have maybe, at least at the college that I went to, there was sort of a free tutoring center available that you could just make appointments out for various subjects. Being a private tutor — well, they’ve already maybe either gone through those resources and haven’t found them sufficient or they don’t want to use them for whatever reason. They’re willing to pay someone for their time, for the individual attention, whatever it is. Just to keep that in mind when you are going into that situation that you’re charging for. They already have a lot of resources available to them that are included with what they’re paying already for tuition. They have decided that they want something above and beyond that.

32:36 Emily: I wanted to ask you about the difference between how you distinguish yourself as a TA versus a tutor. And maybe you weren’t teaching during that time. Was there ever a time when you were both TAing and tutoring and how you sort of draw a distinction there? Presumably, you are not tutoring the students who are enrolled in your class.

32:54 Mallory: Our department actually, they had a list of tutors that they just said they gave the undergraduates and these people said they’re interested in tutoring, contact them. But you were not allowed to tutor someone that you’re TAing. That’s probably a good rule, because then they’re paying you to get preferential treatment in some sense of it. The other thing is, when I got to be on my feet about tutoring, I would have more students that could contact me than I could handle. I can’t tutor more than five or six students in a given week. That’s a significant time investment. But what you can do is try to get all students that are in the same course so that you’re not having to cover new material. It would get to be, I do one hour of prep and then I tutor four people because it’s just bang, bang, bang. It’s the same material.

34:03 Emily: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t thought of when you have such a demand for your skills, it makes sense that you could then select among the potential clients that you have. The other thing I’ll say to that is raise your rates. If you have more demand, raise your rates. Standard thing. Did it ever occur to you to do group tutoring? Would that have been possible when you were already lining up these students in the same course?

34:31 Mallory: Yeah, I had done some group tutoring and I think that, at least for my style of tutoring, more than two people becomes really less one on one. My one on one rate was one thing. My group rate was like lower per person because I just think that the experience that I could offer in that environment was a little bit less. But that’s a good way to do it if there’s a lot of demand and you feel like you want to really help the students. That’s a good way to minimize the impact on your time to help the maximum number of people.

35:13 Emily: It’s a little bit of a win-win: lower the rates for them, you raise your hourly rate for yourself. Don’t just split the same rate among everyone, you’re working harder. Or raise it and then split it.

35:25 Mallory: Yeah, raising it and then splitting it, absolutely. But then also, I think, at least the undergrads that I encountered, they were like, “Well no, we’re paying for one on tutoring experience. I don’t care how much it costs the, I’d rather have that than that group thing.” I couldn’t really convince them to make the group thing a thing, but that’s okay.

35:48 Emily: Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, I’m really glad that your department made that easy for you because often when I think about tutoring, I guess I don’t really think about going through the departments first, but that’s a very, very natural match. If the departments are willing to have a running list you know grad student tutors available, then that’s great. Did your advisor know about your tutoring side hustle? You were on a list somewhere so he or she maybe could have known?

36:17 Mallory: Yeah, definitely. I’m sure my advisor knew. It was something that I did after hours and so I didn’t consider it like I need to ask for permission for this. It’s my time. Also, since the department encouraged it, there’s some advisors, I’m sure that would discourage you thinking about anything other than your own research, but it was sort of okay because it was normalized.

36:48 Emily: Yeah, I guess I would say for an environment where it hasn’t been normalized, like maybe that list isn’t available or you don’t really see other grad students working with undergrads at the same institution, tutoring is still available. It’s just you might have to look to a different population like in your city, like high schoolers or students at another university or community college. Or do it within your own university, but keep it a little more quiet. There are just a lot of options available for tutoring. And like you were saying earlier, it’s not really necessarily a distraction from your research if it’s reinforcing basic principles for you and improving your teaching skills and improving your confidence within your own field or whatever it is. I feel like tutoring is one of those side hustles that’s both easily accessible and potentially has benefits in your primary professional life, not just, “Okay, I’m earning an extra income here.”

37:43 Mallory: Yeah, absolutely.

Any Last Words of Advice?

37:45 Emily: To close out, Mallory, what advice do you have for a grad student or postdoc who’s looking to increase her income?

37:53 Mallory: I’d say find out the resources that are available in your department. Find out every opportunity for getting expenses covered. If you’re traveling to a conference, typically there’s some expense coverage for doing that traveling. That includes the meals when you’re traveling, and just sort of knowing what’s reasonable. There’s always fellowships and things to apply for and my advice is to apply. I wanted to apply for a fellowship and I applied for one and I didn’t get it. I didn’t feel like I really deserved a fellowship. I had a friend who applied for a different fellowship and she was encouraging me to apply for that fellowship also. And I said, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t qualify for this.” And she applied for it and she got it. I don’t think our background experiences were so different. You looked at our records on paper, we had a lot of similar things. Don’t close yourself off to opportunities because of where you think you’re at or what you think you’re worth. Go for everything and let them tell you. You might be surprised.

39:29 Mallory: The other thing is just doing everything. If you care about maximizing your income, minimize your expenses. Don’t get a Netflix account on your own, share it with 10 friends. If you can bundle your car insurance into a six-month payment or yearly payment that’s on auto pay, you can get significant discounts. Other weird things like, do you ever need a rental car? Because if you are considered in any way an employee of the university, there are often just global discounts with major car rental companies that you can say, “Hey, and I work for this university,” and even if it’s for personal travel, they’ll still say, “Oh, okay, well we can give you an 18% discount.”

40:19 Mallory: I never really went out to maximize my personal, wealth. I just wanted to sort of do well and, and keep my head above water. I think that if you really want to maximize your wealth, then you’re the expert in providing all of the information for how to do that. But you don’t have to maximize everything in order to just do well financially. I’m happy with where I’m at financially. I could be somewhere else entirely, but I’m doing well and that’s all I need.

41:06 Emily: I think finding that point for you where you can have whatever income level it is, where you feel comfortable and happy and if you can have a job that allows you to have that income level and you can feel fulfilled professionally and have the lifestyle that you want, that’s a really sweet spot. Right? I think because we’re speaking to academics, people who have been in academia at least in the past or maybe in the present, I think it’s a pretty well, you know, shared value that being wealthy or being incredibly rich is not the number one priority for everyone, because you wouldn’t have made the life choices that you have at this point if that were the case, right? You would have gone into high finance or you know, high tech or whatever. You would’ve made different choices. But I think what you’re saying is exactly right. If you can find that professional fulfillment, know what the standard things are in that area and just try to optimize where you can within that. I think, for example, your goal as a student or as a postdoc should be to not pay for your own professional travel. Your goal should be to not pay for any component of that out of pocket. You should find funding to cover completely. Now if you fall a little bit short and you end up paying for your meals on one trip or what have you, that’s okay, that’s acceptable. But you should just be trying and striving to find the funds that will cover that. That’s a small way that you can maximize your income/minimize your expenses. After all, this is professional related travel, right? It should be covered by someone else other than you.

42:44 Mallory: I was shocked when I was the young student at traveling and I didn’t know that this was sort of expected people were like, “Why would you be paying for anything? You’re taking this trip because you’re asked to for your career. You shouldn’t be paying for anything.” And I thought, “Oh, you paid for my flight. That’s more than enough. I shouldn’t ask for more.” No. When I went to my first trip to go to this other lab for a couple months and do this research project, they said, “Okay, here and you get $5 a day for food.” And I said, “Okay.” And another student from my group joined and said, “This is ridiculous.” And immediately called up our advisor and said, “They’re giving us $5 a day for food. This is completely unreasonable.” And it immediately became like $10 or $15 a day. So it’s the squeaky wheel gets the grease, a little bit, with stuff like that

43:41 Emily: Well, Mallory, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for sharing your insights into these areas.

43:48 Mallory: Thanks very much for having me Emily. It was a lot of fun. I’m happy to talk. Thank you very much.

Outtro

43:49 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.

This PhD Healed Her Scarcity Money Mindset Using a Goal-Setting Framework (Part 1)

September 16, 2019 by Meryem Ok Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Lucie Bland about her financial journey from graduate school to self-employment. Lucie was severely underpaid as a PhD student, and she felt such guilt and shame around spending that she became terrified of money. Her money mindset didn’t improve when her income increased several-fold as a postdoc, and it wasn’t until she discovered the Good-Better-Best goal setting framework that she started to heal her relationship with money. She now describes herself as a money boss. In this first half of the conversation, Lucie details her financial journey from underpaid PhD student to well-paid postdoc and how she needed to take a break from full-time employment to set herself on the right career and financial trajectory.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Lucie: I did go to some extent through that transition of seeing not money as like an enemy or something that needs to be hoarded, but something that can be used as an investment for a good life. When I was doing my PhD, I was not future-oriented. I was in survival mode.

Introduction

00:21 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 five, and today my guest is Dr. Lucie Bland, self-employed PhD living in Australia. Lucie has such an amazing story to tell that I’ve split it into two episodes. This one and next week’s. In this episode, Lucie talks us through the roller coaster of her financial journey from severely underpaid graduate student in London to well-compensated postdoc in Australia to not having an income to starting a business. Lucie describes herself during graduate school as “terrified of money,” And that didn’t automatically improve when her income more than tripled and her cost of living dropped. We discuss the intentional steps she took to heal her money mindset, including the goal-setting framework that she now applies in her personal and professional life. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Dr. Lucie Bland.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:26 Emily: Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. We have a really delightful set of episodes ahead for us. It’s going to be a two-parter. My guest today is Dr. Lucie Bland and so I’m going to kick it right over to her right now and have her introduce herself to you a little bit further.

01:44 Lucie: Thank you, Emily. Thank you for having me on the podcast. My name is Dr. Lucie Bland. I’m an editor and writing coach and I help researchers and writers get published.

01:54 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really exciting. Can you tell us what your background is?

01:59 Lucie: Yeah. I graduated from Oxford University with a degree in biological sciences and then I did my PhD at Imperial College, London in Ecology in 2014. That’s when I finished, and then I moved to Australia for two postdocs in conservation science. The first one at the University of Melbourne and the second one at Deakin University. And now for about a year I’ve been running my academic editing business, which I now do full time. So very much serving the academic community, but I’m no longer directly a researcher.

02:34 Emily: Yeah. Well, we are in the same boat in that respect. Can you say right away up top what your website is?

02:42 Lucie: My website is luciebland.com and that’s spelled l u c i e b l a n d.com.

02:49 Emily: Yeah. And any other personal details you’d like to share, maybe where you’re living now or is your household just you?

02:56 Lucie: I live in Melbourne with my boyfriend and our Burmese mountain dog that you might see in the video if he comes around.

03:05 Emily: Yeah. Enticement to hop over to YouTube and watch this on the video instead of over the podcast. Okay. So we have this great story that I know a little bit about already, so bring us back to your time in graduate school. What was going on with you financially at that time, both in terms of like how much money you were making and also what was your relationship with money?

Lucie’s Evolving Relationship to Money

03:30 Lucie: Yeah, my money situation, my relationship to money when I was doing my PhD was very different to how it is now. I was living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I was earning 13,000 pounds per year, which is 16,000 US dollars. And I would spend 650 pounds a month on rent, which is 60% of my income. And I remember that time reading a report that said that your level of basic socioeconomic level can be determined by how much you spend on rent, and the higher it is the poorer you are. So that was a little bit depressing to me. But despite having these really high expenses and that really low income, I was really not wise about money at all. My money strategy was to bury my head in the sand. I was paid quarterly, which would mean that I would run out of money every quarter.

04:27 Lucie: And I didn’t have a savings account. So normal accounts could be very regularly in the double digits and I just didn’t know how that would happen. And when I moved to Australia, I experienced a very different money situation in that my income pretty much tripled. I was paid $80,000 a year and I lived in a really funky flat on my own in the hipster part of town. So I kind of went from rags to riches, but I very much kept my very Scrooge-y lifestyle and I still didn’t budget. It did mean that I was saving $20,000 a year because my expenses were really low cause I would still collect vouchers and coupons and have that very “PhD student” lifestyle. But I wouldn’t say that my budgeting skills or my approach to money improved in any way. It was just that my income was higher.

05:26 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah, that’s a great overview, and I think it’s one that’s going to be relatable to a lot of people within the audience. Most of my audience is in the U.S. and the cost of living differences can be so wide between, you know, New York and San Francisco versus certain cities in the Midwest that are quite a bit smaller. And so a graduate stipend can also kind of be all over the map and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with higher stipends in higher cities necessarily. Sometimes that’s the case and sometimes not. I’ve interviewed several people on the podcast who live in high cost of living cities but have an okay kind of income, maybe double or more what you just mentioned, and others where that’s completely not the case. A much, much lower income. Actually, I want to go back a little bit further and talk about your mindset from even before you started graduate school. Would you say that you grew up middle class, or what was your mindset about money or the socioeconomic status you had prior to entering graduate school?

Money Mindset Before Grad School

06:34 Lucie: Yes, so I was definitely middle class. Especially my father had a very relaxed and confident approach to money and to some extent my mother as well. But in a way they hadn’t taught me any budgeting skills at all, which is a little bit sad, but kind of looking a bit backwards again. And that has really influenced my money story. My French grandparents grew up under German occupation and under rationing and that really influenced their mindset around money and around the use of resources. And to some extent, even in my kind of middle class nuclear family, especially, my mother could also have that very Scrooge-y or scarcity mindset. And I remember my grandparents still drinking chicory, which is a coffee replacement that’s made from the root of a plant, that French people used to drink under the German occupation.

07:30 Lucie: And so they still had some of these relic habits of, you know, we don’t know when the next meal is coming. And so you’ve got to finish off your plate, you’ve got to use all your resources in a very savvy way, which in many cases can be a good approach. But I think that as a child, I really internalized that. And one of the funny stories in my family is that at the age of 10 or 11, I signed up to this website, it was called scrooge.com and got lots of vouchers and was very obsessed with using those and not spending any money. So, I’m quite conscious that my personal money story and approach to money, well to some extent determined by my socioeconomic level or being from a middle-class family, was also influenced by lots of other family patterns that predated that.

Money Mindset During Grad School

08:20 Emily: Yeah. So I guess we could suffice to say that in some ways you were unprepared for being in graduate school on that kind of income and in that expensive city. In other ways, you had maybe some skills and some mindsets that would be, I hesitate to even say helpful. I mean helpful to survive, but maybe not helpful to be sort of healthy mentally overall towards money, especially later on once you have that income increase. So when you were accepted to graduate school and you knew what that stipend was going to be, and you knew more or less where you’d be living and that it was going to be 60% of your income going towards rent, what were your thoughts? How did you approach that situation? Did you think, “well, I’m just going to have to make this work. I’ll do it somehow”? Or did you consider debt? And I don’t know if that was even really an option for you.

09:14 Lucie: The thing is I didn’t even know that I was going to spend 60% of my income on rent because I hadn’t calculated it at all. I was completely in the dark, and no, that was not an option. I’ve never had a loan or credit card. Again, different countries have different approaches to that. And for me, I was just going to have to eat pasta. That’s how short-sighted my thinking was. To some extent, I could have considered a student loan, which I might not have been eligible for as a French person. But you know, my thinking was not even that advanced.

09:54 Emily: Right. And so once you did find out, once you did secure housing and you knew how much of your stipend was going to be eaten up by rent, what was your plan at that point, and kind of how did you get through it? And I guess this might be sort of advice in sort of how to keep expenses low. Although of course in the overall arc of this conversation, that’s not really what we want to be talking about. But for those years, how did you get by?

10:19 Lucie: I probably spent very little money on food, and I did go out a little bit, but I wouldn’t do anything that was fun. You know, I would probably not go to the cinema. I probably would not go to expensive parties. One of the things I did in London, I had a bike and I would be very savvy about whether I would take the tube or the bus. The bus was cheaper, and so everything became a decision. And if the decision presented itself to me, I would always take the cheaper option. So, I didn’t think long-term about do I need to build savings? Do I need to think a bit longer term? It was extremely short-term.

10:57 Emily: Was thinking long-term even an option though?

Short-Term versus Long-Term Vision

11:01 Lucie: At that stage, I wasn’t thinking long-term at all because I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the funds to do it.

11:09 Emily: Yeah. It’s not really a personal oversight. It’s just this is how the day-to-day is passing by of thinking about these really minute decisions around money, which are so important to whether you’re going to stay in the block for the month or the quarter. So you were surviving by being extremely frugal in many areas and not spending much on entertainment. I wonder, were your classmates living in a similar manner?

11:39 Lucie: Yes. Yes, we were all living in house shares in London. In quite difficult conditions with lots of issues with housemates, with landlords, with boilers breaking and not getting repaired. Like in a way it was a very kind of low-income status. And I remember kind of looking in awe at some of the PhD students who might be a little bit older who might have worked before and had a bit more savings or maybe had a partner who could support them, who lived in a real adult flat and had furniture that they bought new rather than scavenged from the streets. And to me that was very much a vision of the long-term future. It’s definitely not something I was doing then.

12:27 Emily: Did you find that it was helpful to have that comradery with some of your classmates? Did it make getting through this experience a little bit more bearable?

12:37 Lucie: Yes, and to some extent, even people who would start their first job in London. So, not a PhD student, would probably be on a similar income. And that was 2010. It was post-global financial crisis. So actually some people had decided to do a PhD or go to graduate school just to avoid getting a job. Because there were so few jobs. So that was kind of the economic climate of the time, which has improved slightly now, but we were all very much in that same mindset regardless of whether someone was starting, you know, their first teaching job or was doing your PhD or had a job in admin or in sales at a small company. None of us were making the big bucks.

Money’s Impact on Lucie’s PhD Perfomance

13:20 Emily: How do you think that being–it sounds like very consumed with thoughts about money and decisions around money on a daily basis–do you think that had any effect on your scholarship?

13:34 Lucie: Do you mean how I performed during my PhD?

13:37 Emily: Yeah. Like, let’s say your income was double of that, and you had an easier time with money, there was less stress there. Do you think that you would have done better?

13:49 Lucie: I actually think the opposite in that because I couldn’t do that much outside of going to work and coming back home, I worked really hard. And that’s what I would just do. I had a very traditional existence of cycling to Uni, doing my PhD, and coming back. And I think that to some extent doing my PhD, was a release from my money worries, and that’s why I worked so hard on it. So that could be my specific experience.

14:18 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s generalizable. I mean, I’m happy to hear that you thought it was a positive effect on your work. But I remember when I was interviewing for graduate schools that I heard that argument from–I interviewed in a city that didn’t have a whole lot going on. A very, very small city, rural–and the argument was kind of, well there’s nothing to do here except for our work. And the weather is really tough in winter. And so we just work, and that’s all. Versus if you lived in a very exciting city or one where there’s just a lot more fun activities going on, you might be more tempted to get out of the lab and go to these other things. But we’re talking about living in London and having that attitude. So, I’m a little bit surprised by that. That you were able to kind of “tunnel vision” on just your work during that time.

15:07 Lucie: Yeah. I think that in that case, it’s very much necessity is the mother invention or this dictates how you behave.

15:16 Emily: Yeah, exactly.

15:16 Lucie: And that’s why I was very relieved when I moved out of London, came to Australia where the cost of living compared to London is lower. You know, it’s kind of insane to say. Australia has a reputation for being expensive, but I found Australia very cheap.

15:32 Emily: Yeah. Let’s talk about that transition now. But first, how many years were you in London doing your PhD?

15:38 Lucie: Four years.

Financial Life as a Postdoc in Australia

15:39 Emily: Okay. So that’s plenty of time for this to become a very ingrained mindset and approach towards money. So, you finish up and you’ve accepted a postdoc in Australia. Tell us about that. Tell us about the money that you’re making and where you’re living and so forth.

15:55 Lucie: Yes. I was very excited to come to Australia to come to Melbourne. As I said, I would be making $80,000, which was way more money than I’d ever made. I could afford to live on my own, which was a big thing in a really nice little flat in the inner city. I bought a car, I bought new furniture, you know, things were going really well. But what I noticed as well was that I did keep a lot of my former habits in the sense that, for example, Melburnians are big fans of their coffee. All the postdocs would go to the really nice coffee shops and have take-away coffee and bring it back to their office while I was very purposefully making instant coffee in a little kitchen so as to avoid buying coffees. And most of my decisions were like that in that I still got reclaimed furniture from the streets. I would do most of my shopping at op shops, which is very eco-friendly but there is a limit to how healthy that is as well. And so, even though my income was higher, I had still kept that mindset of trying to keep my cost of living as low as possible. Not really from a conscious intention, but just because that was the only thing I knew how to do.

17:13 Emily: Yeah, it sounds it’s actually hearkening back to your example from your grandparents, right. Even the coffee, specifically. So this is really interesting to me to talk to you about this transition because it’s something that I think about a lot and that I talk about quite a bit as well of how should PhDs manage their money once they’re out of graduate school. And I think the standard personal finance advice that I often say as well is live like a college student. And that’s the general advice, and the way it applies for graduate students that I say is “continue at your graduate student lifestyle for as long as possible.” Even though, once you’re making this higher income, to kind of make up for the lost time and the lost income from the previous years, so that’s a time when you can be building up savings and starting to invest and so forth.

18:05 Emily: But I trip over that advice sometimes a little bit. And especially in a case like yours, because if your lifestyle was so constrained, due to your graduate income, that’s not good advice any longer, right? You should increase your lifestyle as your income goes up, and still do all the things you want to, you know, be saving and so forth, investing or paying off debt, whatever it is you need to do. But if you have been consumed and shutting out large portions of your life because of lack of money, that’s not something that should continue. So I’m really glad to have your example as one that is counter to the advice that I usually give and the advice that many people would probably hear once they are seeking out personal finance content. So, can you talk a little bit more about that change? Once your income is higher, how did you start changing how you were using your money and thinking about your money?

Money Change #1: Saving Toward Retirement

19:05 Lucie: The first decision that I ever made about my money, that was a very good decision, which was based on the advice of one of my friends who’s a financial advisor, was that when I started my postdoc in Australia, we’re very lucky that we have 17% of our salary be put into a superannuation fund by our employer. So the employer adds to our salary 17% and puts it into a fund for our retirement. But we can make additional pre-tax contributions. And I made the maximum pre-tax contribution, which was 9.5%. So, I basically had a quarter of my salary going into a super every month, and that was not increasing my lifestyle. That was making a very conscious decision about investing in my future. And that was pretty much the little seed that then grew not into expanding my lifestyle but into this view of investing in myself in the sense that I can invest in savings, I can invest in my super, but I can also invest in my own wellbeing, not because I’m being frivolous, but because it pays off.

20:17 Lucie: It pays off, let’s say to have a gym membership, to have a yoga membership, to have healthy social relationships, et cetera. And so I think that I did go to some extent through that transition of seeing not money as like an enemy or something that needs to be hoarded, but something that can be used as an investment for a good life. And that was what I’d seen in some of these older PhD students in London who were maybe buying a property, et Cetera, that they were investing in their future. Versus when I was doing my PhD, I was not future-oriented. I was in survival mode. Versus this increase in salary opened up for me the possibility that I could plan for a future.

21:01 Emily: I think you put that so well and I want everyone listening, if you’ve resonated with anything, Lucy said so far to go back a minute or two and listen to that–what you just said, over again–because I think it was so, so insightful and well-put. As you were saying, the first intentional money decision that you made after this income increase was not about just going crazy and spending because you’d been so restricted for so long and just splashing out on everything. But rather, being able to think about really changing how you even viewed money. What you said was in viewing it as being able to invest in yourself and having an enjoyable and healthy lifestyle overall rather than trying to hoard it as much as possible because there was such a scarcity, you know, before that point.

21:52 Emily: And I did want to add a slight translation for my, my listeners in the U.S. So, our equivalent to what you did was, when you got your higher salary, basically we would call it “maxed out your 401(k),” which in the U.S. is $19,000 per year. So if anyone’s listening who has started a new post-PhD job and you’re wondering what to do with that lovely salary bump, maxing out your 401(k) is an excellent thing to do. For the reasons that Lucy just mentioned, that it is an investment in yourself and it’s an investment in your future.

Commercial

22:25 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 are interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, 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.

Money Change #2: Impulse Shopping

23:13 Emily: So were there any other changes that you made, after that point, after starting to think about the long-term with respect to retirement? What other changes did you start making?

23:24 Lucie: Probably the next change that I made, which was not a good change, and that happened in my second postdoc, was that I started to impulse shop, and that was entirely related to the stress that I was under. So for, as you said, for a few years I managed to keep my spending quite low, and to have that fairly frugal lifestyle. But then after years of PhD, years of postdoc being put under a lot of pressure, I was starting to struggle, and I could see that being reflected in my spending. And I very quickly knew that this was an issue. So it wasn’t that I was being frivolous in being released, I was using that kind of as an emotional Band-Aid. And that kind of was one of the alarm bells that told me that maybe I need a bit of time off or to think about why I was in academia and what I’d wanted to do. Because one of the symptoms of this was how I was sending my money, which was not really in accordance with my values, and that was quite troublesome to me.

24:31 Emily: Yeah. I think that’s also very common behavior, whether people can afford it or not. So, coming to impulse spending just to emotionally relieve some kind of stress or difficulty or pain that’s going on. So, yeah. Can you tell me more about, having recognized that issue, what then did you do? You just mentioned you took some time off from your postdoc.

Leave of Absence from Postdoc

24:56 Lucie: So I think this was kind of part of a larger quarter-life crisis in the sense that the pressure had been mounting probably since the first day that I started my first postdoc in Australia. And now that was three years later of full-time work with a lot of international travel, a lot of publications. We’re all familiar with that kind of lifestyle. And I just didn’t know why I was in research anymore. I felt really lost and kind of, as we talked about before, I could not see my future in it. And I didn’t know if it was because I was too stressed or confused or because it was genuinely not what I wanted to do. So I was very lucky that I could ask for a six-month unpaid leave of absence from my university and kind of take a little break from all my responsibilities. Because, especially in my first postdoc, I think I must have supervised four or five students to completion. I think I kind of bumped to a lecturer role very quickly. But that amount of responsibility, and then it kind of caught up with me a few years later, was like, well, I’m going down this route very quickly. Do I want to continue with this route?

26:16 Emily: Yeah, really in many jobs, many workplaces, there is a great deal of just going with the flow and some inertia. And you can get to a point where your job duties are not at all kind of what you expected or what you signed up for, but it evolved. So that’s amazing that you made the decision and also were able to say, “okay, hold on a second, I need to take some time to figure out where I really want to go next.” And this is maybe a little bit of a naive question, but were you able to fund that period of being away from your job because your expenses had been so far below your income for the previous years?

26:53 Lucie: Yes, I had a lot of savings at that point.

26:56 Emily: Yeah. And, what I say quite a bit, that money gives you options. And so, you’d been earning quite a lot and saving quite a lot for those few years, and then you had the option to take a step back and have that time to reevaluate. So, what did you do with that time off?

Personal and Career Development Journey

27:16 Lucie: First, I had a holiday to see my parents in Europe, which was great. And I think the first two or three months of the six-month period, I was brain dead. I was recovering. I was watching TV, doing all of these silly things that people do when they finish their PhD. But I’ve seen that quite a lot in first or second postdocs in that people who don’t take a break between their PhD and their postdoc tend to get hit at a later date with trying to cope with all that change. I had also moved to Australia by myself and so I think it just all caught up with me a little bit later. So, I spent a few months resting and relaxing, and that’s when I started to coach myself. I became very interested in these personal development and career development books.

28:09 Lucie: I started to use a career coaching book that’s called, What Color is Your Parachute? It’s a very famous career coaching book.

28:16 Emily: Yes, I’ve read that.

Part-Time Editing, Part-Time Postdoc

28:18 Lucie: Yeah, it’s great. And basically, I figured out that probably a very good job for me, which matched to actually want I wanted to do as a child–I wanted to be a writer. And what I was enjoying, what I was really good at as an academic was publishing. And kind of putting these two things together, I was like, “well, getting a job as an editor would be quite a good fit.” And I got a small job with a big global editing company, editing research papers, writing research papers, kind of being a writer for hire. And I really enjoyed that but it paid very little, and I was just starting out. And I could see with the budgeting that I had started doing when I was off work–because that was another really great habit that I’ve gotten into–was that just having that editing job was not gonna cut it for the type of life that I wanted. And that kind of spurred that decision to go back to my postdoc part-time. I was also not sure whether I wanted to quit academia completely. I thought that maybe if I worked part-time, I could cope with the challenges of academia better because I would have reduced hours. Then I could do my editing job as well. So that was the plan in that period, which would be to do the postdoc job part-time and the editing job part-time, and then together it would make a healthy income.

29:52 Emily: I love just how intentional you were with all of those decisions. The series of decisions that you made there, in trying to align your career with what you really wanted to do. And also, you briefly mentioned, but starting to budget is a major, huge leap in one’s personal finances. And that, it sounds like, sort of contributed to the career planning. Right? How much money do I actually need to make to fund the lifestyle that I want and then how can I redirect my career to make sure that I make that amount of money? And is that how it worked out? Did you find that the half-time postdoc position was lower stress, and was that a good situation that you were then in?

Backfired Plan: Full-Time Work for Part-Time Pay

30:35 Lucie: In a way that was a complete failure, in that I was doing full-time work for part-time hours and part-time pay. And I’ve heard that story a lot with other people, in that research is a job that is difficult to do part-time. And a lot of mothers, a lot of people who would want to work part-time for lots of reasons, find it challenging. After a while, I did end up quitting the editing job because it was too much in that postdoc responsibilities would come during my editing hours and would influence the quality of my work at the editing company. And because I was an employee of the university, they kind of took it as this is your priority, and your other job is not a priority. And that was quite difficult to manage. And also at that time I would realize that having my own business would enable me to make the kind of money that I want it to make from editing instead of working for an editing company. And so that spurred my decision to quit the editing job and to start my own business. So, as you’d mentioned, some of these decisions were intentional, but also some of them were just due from the decision to go part-time, in a way, backfired.

32:02 Emily: Yeah. So, did you end up not staying part-time for very long? How long did you stay at that part-time?

Going Full-Time into Self-Employment

32:09 Lucie: I stayed part-time for a year. And then I went full-time with the business. I had a few months to start the business when I was still part-time at the university. And that gave me a little bit of a cushion. And then again with the budgeting, I realized within three months that actually with the business, I was making enough money to not need the Uni job, which I then let go of. It makes it sound like a very drastic and calculated decision. There was a lot of kind of emotional decisions that went into it as well because I love research and I continue in a way, but I knew that having my own business would be a better decision for me for the lifestyle that I want to have, for the type of people that I want to surround myself with, etc. And finances were I guess one of the drivers of that decision. But there were also lots of other things that went into it.

33:08 Emily: Yeah. I have many of the same thoughts around and motivations around becoming self-employed. So, we’re going to talk plenty about your transition to self-employment in the second part of this two-part series. But before we do that, I wanted you to introduce this Good-Better-Best framework that you started using. I believe during this period when you were taking a break from work and when you started budgeting. What is that framework, and how were you using it?

Good Better Best (GBB) Framework

33:40 Lucie: Yes. So the framework that I was using at the time along with my budgeting is called Good-Better-Best goals. And it’s a framework that was devised by business coach Megan Hale. So when I was on my break, I just sucked up a lot of books and podcasts on how to be an entrepreneur. And usually these guys have much healthier attitudes to money. People have worked really hard on their money story and their finances to be at a stage where they can own their own business. And so that GBB method relies on defining Good-Better-Best benchmarks in terms of income generation. So, your “Good” goal is your minimum viable income. It’s the minimum of amount of money that you need to survive. Probably, my income when I was a PhD in London was even below what could be called a minimum viable income because it came with so much strain.

34:40 Lucie: A “Good” goal in the GBB framework is your basics, your rent, your bills, et cetera. Your food, and maybe something that you find really important–a little bit of going out or a Netflix subscription, but it really doesn’t go overboard. It’s pretty much the minimum that you need to have a relatively happy life. Then it gets very exciting when we go to the “Better” and the “Best” goals because then we start to cast out some of these big dreams that we have. So, for example, for me and my “Better” goals, I’ve got things such as buying furniture, buying a new dog, going on holiday. So, that’s when your lifestyle starts to improve and increase. Like you were mentioning, with having a postdoc that has better pay. Usually, people get to that “Better” benchmark where they can start to save money. They can work towards these big dreams. And because they cast it out in advance, it’s very motivational in the sense that, let’s say budgeting or restricting your income and things that you don’t like. It comes natural because you want to reach these other goals. Instead of feeling restricted, you’re just moving your money around to enable going towards the things you really want.

35:56 Lucie: And then the “Best” goal really blows your mind in the sense that if you could make that much money, it would be almost unfathomable. And you could afford so many different things. So, here you can cast a lot of these bigger dreams like buying a house or going on very luxurious holidays, et cetera. And so because you have these three benchmarks, you can always assess where you are in this very logical and objective manner. And maybe that’s something we’ll go into the next episode. It helps you get out of this very emotional attitude to money or this very fear-based attitude to money because then they just become numbers in a spreadsheet. They are in an order: Good, Better, Best. And then you can address them in this objective manner rather than having no numbers or this nebulous idea in your head that your dreams are never going to come true because they are too expensive, versus when you know exactly how much it’s going to cost, you can start working towards it.

Expanding the GBB Framework for Personal Goals

36:59 Emily: Yeah. I think you explained that very well. So, the source that it came from for you and the way that you first learned about it is very oriented around being self-employed or being a business owner in terms of having variable levels of income and a degree of control over your income. If I make this amount that’s going to keep the lights on and my life’s going to be okay. If I strive for this amount, then the next levels I could unlock in my lifestyle, and then, okay, the third level is even well above that. But given your history, coming as a PhD student and then as a postdoc, how did you massage this framework into something that you could use maybe in your personal life and not just as an aspiring business owner?

37:46 Lucie: Yes. Well, first, just defining the “Good” goal. This is applicable to anyone in the sense that most people actually don’t know their minimum viable income. And that would change their decisions on what type of job to take, what city to move to. They might think that a certain city is too expensive or a certain job doesn’t pay enough, et cetera, versus if you have a really good handle on how much you actually spend. For me, I’ve done personal budgeting for more than a year, so I know my yearly fluctuations. That enables me to make much more informed decisions about every aspect of my life. Because if I want to go for job, let’s say I’m not self-employed, I would know what this job would allow me to do and whether, let’s say I would be ready to move to a cheaper area or to a more expensive area. And the GBB goals would put that into context.

Financially Navigating a PhD Career Transition

38:47 Emily: Yeah. I actually love that you brought that up in terms of evaluating your next position. If you’re getting out of graduate school, going to a postdoc, going to another job. This is actually something that I’ve talked about in some materials that I released in the summer of 2019, which if you want to check that out, you can go to pfforphds.com/next. N e x t. And that’s about putting a job offer, a salary offer that you receive in the context of the local cost of living for the new place that you don’t live yet. And there’s ways to do that without having tracked your own spending like you’re talking about. Like trying to figure out, okay, how does this new city’s cost of living compare to where I currently live, what I currently make, what would I be making there? How does it compare?

39:27 Emily: But it’s much, much more powerful if you actually do what you’re talking about and have tracked and budgeted for yourself wherever you’re currently living. And it gives you so much more information for then evaluating that next salary offer. And like you were saying, okay, maybe in graduate school, you’re able to spend at the “Good” level. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re at an insufficient level and it’s even below what you would consider to be a “Good” level of spending. You’ll at least have a handle on that. You’ll know where your current salary and current expenditures relate to that, “Good” or “Better” or whatever it is level. And that will help you evaluate, as you were saying, the next position that you might be offered. Or in your case, well, how much money do I really need to make to make this leap into self-employment, which will be so much better for me and you know, x, y, z other areas. But can I do it financially? It helps you evaluate that. Am I getting that right?

40:21 Lucie: Yes. Completely.

Final Advice for a Healthier Money Mindset

40:23 Emily: So, something that you mentioned when we were first talking about doing this interview was that you had used this GBB framework to heal your mindset towards money. So, that’s this period that we’ve been talking about. And when you’re really facing your numbers and starting to budget and so forth. What advice do you have for another, let’s say PhD student currently who is struggling both with a low income and with an unhealthy mindset towards money?

40:53 Lucie: Yeah. My main advice would be to start taking action now in the sense of doing very basic budgeting because not knowing where your money’s at makes things worse. We think when we’re putting our head in the sand that things are better because we’re not looking under the hood but it actually makes things worse. And the reason why it’s important to take some form of action really early on–and this thinking is corroborated by forms of therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy–is that by changing your behaviors, you actually change your beliefs. It doesn’t really work the other way around. You won’t wake up tomorrow with another set of beliefs about money. It’s about taking action. And then this informs our beliefs and how we evolve in relation to money. And so by taking small actions such as when I started, which was very simple, which was just to print out my bank statement and then put a little circle around the expenses that brought me a lot of joy or a lot of value and then a little cross with the ones that I was not so sure about. I was like, maybe that’s wasted money. And then just gradually adjust your spending so that you only have the little circles. And that can help you towards what is your minimum viable income, what’s your “Good” goal without all the extraneous bits that you spend money on but actually you don’t enjoy that much.

42:14 Emily: Yeah, I absolutely love that advice. It’s sort of increasing the efficiency of the use of your money. So, I think that’s wonderful advice for that student.

Outtro

42:23 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 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 do so 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 Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC.

This NDSEG Fellow Prioritizes Housing and Saving for Mid- and Long-Term Goals

August 5, 2019 by Jewel Lipps Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Lourdes Bobbio, a graduate student in materials science at Penn State and NDSEG fellow. Lourdes breaks down the top five expenses in her budget: housing, food, taxes, utilities, and subscription services. She explains the financials systems she has put in place to reach financial success during her PhD: targeted savings, automated transfers, quarterly estimated tax, high-yield savings accounts, and taxable retirement investments with a roboadvisor. Lourdes has decided to prioritize her housing within her budget, but still balances that expense with plenty of saving for her future wedding and retirement.

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

1:07 Please Introduce Yourself

Lourdes Bobbio is a fourth year PhD student at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. She is in the materials science and engineering department. She currently lives alone.

1:55 What is your income?

Lourdes is on the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship. She makes $38,400 each year which is $3,200 per month. She says that this income goes pretty far in State College.

2:37 What are your five largest expenses each month?

Lourdes explains that the cost of living in State College is fairly low, especially compared to where she grew up near Washington, DC and where she went to undergraduate in Boston. She was more accustomed to high cost of living. Her top expenses are rent, taxes, food, utilities and subscription services.

3:08 #1 Expense: Rent

Lourdes lives in the downtown area of State College. She lives on her own without roommates. She determined that she values being able to walk to work every day, living close to campus, living near restaurants, and living by herself. She doesn’t have a car, so she doesn’t have car related expenses in her budget. She says she has never owned a car. She says a majority of graduate students in State College have a car. The town is small and there is a limited number of things to do. If you want to go away for the weekend, having a car is useful. She says there is an abundance of housing close to campus and a fairly good bus system.

She spends about $1500 per month for rent. She lives in a one bedroom with an office space which could be a second bedroom. She values having a space of her own. Because it is a college town, it runs on the school schedule. She says the cycle of finding apartments is over in November and December. She has lived in the same place for her whole time in graduate school. She says for her first year of graduate school, she wasn’t on the NDSEG fellowship. Her parents helped her pay rent a little bit and they stayed in the office room when they came to visit her. When she got her fellowship, she determined she could pay for the apartment on her own.

Lourdes says that her boyfriend has a car, and several of her friends own a car. When she wants to travel out of town, she goes with them.

8:46 #2 Expense: Taxes

Lourdes charges herself for taxes. Because she has fellowship income, she does not have automatic withholding for her taxes, so she needs to make quarterly estimated tax payments to the IRS. When she gets paid at the beginning of the month, she takes out the money for taxes right away and puts it into a savings account. When it’s time to make the quarterly payment, she has the money available. Emily emphasizes that the majority of fellows do not have taxes withheld and fellows need to withhold taxes themselves.

When she first got her fellowship and realized that no taxes would be withheld, she had to go through the process of filling out the 1040-ES worksheet to figure out the total amount that she would owe. She figured that out and divided it by twelve so she could save that amount each month. She has a spreadsheet to plan her budget for the entire year. She sets it aside in a high yield savings account until she has to pay it each quarter. Emily explains that 1040-ES is not submitted to the IRS and she has a workshop to help people work through the form.

Lourdes banks with Discover online bank and she also has a credit card with them. She puts her long term savings there. She has a checking account with a local credit union and a short term savings account.

13:42 #3 Expense: Food

Lourdes includes groceries and going out to eat in her food expenses. She says she spends more on dining out than she would like to, but she doesn’t feel guilty about it because she budgets for it and knows how much she can spend. Emily shares that budgeting is “freeing” and Lourdes agrees. Lourdes says that she values the social time that is associated with dining out. She spends about $200 to $300 per month on food.

15:42 #4 and #5 Expense: Utilities and Subscription Services

Lourdes says that she pays $30 to $40 on electricity. She pays about $25 per month on subscription services, Netflix and Spotify. She says that Audible is about $15 per month and she recently cut it. She reevaluates what she is subscribed to each year.

Her apartment has internet and cable included. She wouldn’t have paid for cable if it wasn’t included. She says that internet can be pricey and she’s glad it is included in her rent.

19:08 What are you currently doing to further your financial goals?

Lourdes has short term, mid term, and long term goals. She says she has two savings accounts to break down her goals. She has a savings account through her credit union that’s connected to her checking account. She puts money for her short term goals there. Her mid term and long term goals go into her high yield savings account.

Her short term goals include a general travel fund. She takes a bus to go to DC to visit her parents. She puts about $15 to $20 per month for travelling home. She has a gift fund as well, which helps her save for going to weddings. She has a “fun fund” where she saves for higher price experiences, like going to Broadway shows that have $60 tickets. She also uses her fun fund for buying items for her hobbies, like baking equipment. Emily says that she calls this a system of targeted savings account. This is a system for saving for irregular expenses.

Her mid term savings goals is for her wedding. She is saving about a couple hundred dollars per month for her wedding. She is also thinking about buying a house in the future and she is saving with that in mind. Additionally, because she is on a fellowship, she has to pay out of pocket for her health insurance. Recently when she had to be taken off of her parent’s health insurance, she used her emergency savings account to pay for health insurance. Now she has been saving for her next year’s health insurance premium.

26:28 Do you have long term goals?

Lourdes is also saving for retirement. For one year in graduate school, before she was on her fellowship, she was able to max out her Roth IRA. She learned that she is not eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA while on a fellowship. Now she invests in a general taxable brokerage account. She does not contribute as much but she tries to put $100 or $200 per month into it.

Emily explains that your eligibility for an IRA depends on you having taxable compensation or earned income. For graduate students, this means W-2 pay which is typically an assistantship. The NDSEG fellowship doesn’t count as taxable compensation or earned income. At this point, many people don’t bother saving for retirement because they don’t have an IRA. Emily encourages investing at as an early an age as possible.

Lourdes said when she learned about the tax and retirement savings of her fellowship, she realized that she would have to invest in a taxable account. She did a lot of research into what she wanted to invest in. She didn’t feel very knowledgeable. She used Vanguard for her Roth IRA but she wanted to try something else. She currently uses an online roboadvisor Wealthfront, which she likes so far. She says it is an easy way to get a broad portfolio. She thinks in the future she would move to somewhere with lower fees. She says she has no fees because her amount is below the threshold of $15,000. Wealthfront lowers the threshold with referrals. Her referral link in these shownotes.

32:30 What is your best financial advice that you’d share with your peers?

Lourdes advises not to be afraid of having a budget. She says many people are worried that budgets are restricting. She says that budgets are freeing, especially as a graduate student on a limited income. She says the budget gives her freedom that is very valuable and makes finances less scary.

33:50 Conclusion

This PhD Student Is Paying Her US Student Loans with Her Swedish Krona Salary

July 8, 2019 by Jewel Lipps Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Crista Wathen, an American PhD student in archaeology at Stockholm University. As a PhD student in Sweden, Crista is considered more of an early-stage researcher than a student, which was one of the reasons she chose to study there. Crista’s salary and frugal living habits permit her to pay down her US federal student loans from her master’s degree. Finally, Emily and Crista discuss her blog, Richful Thinker, and why she is pursuing FIRE as a graduate student.

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

0:58 Please introduce yourself

Crista Wathen is a US citizen doing her PhD in Sweden. She is in the field of archaeology. She’s from Florida and went to the University of Florida for her undergraduate degree. She did her Masters in the UK.

1:51 What made you choose to go abroad for your Masters and PhD?

Crista says when she was an undergrad, she did an archaeology excavation trip in Ireland. She met another student who was applying to Masters in the UK, who explained that a Masters is cheaper in the UK.

Crista says that a Masters in Archaeology in the UK is only one year. This makes the degree half as expensive as a two year Masters degree in the US.

3:24 Was a Masters degree from the UK viewed differently than a degree from the US?

Crista says the degrees were viewed the same. For PhD programs in Sweden, they looked for people who could speak English or Swedish. She says most people speak English. Crista started learning Swedish, which helped her when she first arrived. However, she does not have a proper immersive language experience in Stockholm because most people speak to her in English.

5:24 What are the differences between doing your PhD in the US and doing your PhD in Sweden?

Crista says in Sweden, she is considered an early stage researcher as opposed to just being considered a student. When she applied, she had to propose a project and submit a research plan. She has two years of classes and two years of only research, though she does research all four years.

Crista says that many Masters degrees in Europe are research based. PhD programs in Sweden require applicants to have a Masters degree. Crista says she already has experience creating a project, and she built upon what she did for her Masters for her PhD application. She explains her PhD classes emphasize reading theory, and do not focus on lab or skills training.

8:33 How is your pay for your PhD research?

Crista shares that she has a salary for her PhD and she doesn’t have to worry about applying for grants. She receives monthly pay. The university pays into an annual pension fund on her behalf. In Sweden, she receives socialized healthcare. She pays up to about $100 US dollars out of pocket. She receives dental and vision care, and she has access to several other benefits such as parental leave.

Crista says she thinks she can take her pension with her if she leaves Sweden, or she can leave the pension in Sweden until she retires. When she moved to Sweden, she was given a person number and is always in the tax system.

Emily says that PhD stipends in the US are not generous, and in many cases they are barely enough to live off of. Crista says that she lives frugally. She lives in subsidized student housing, which she is able to stay in for the duration of her degree. She estimates she is paid about the median income for Stockholm, about $2,000 to $3,000 per month. She explains that the pay for PhD work increases each year. She gets 28 days of holiday leave.

14:26 Tell me about your student loans

Crista had a full ride for her undergraduate degree, the the state of Florida Bright Futures. Her loans are for her Masters program. When she exited her Masters, Crista’s loan balance was $60,000 and now it is $45,000.

Crista has federal student loans, even though her Masters was at a UK institution. When she was accepted into the PhD program in Sweden, she called the loan offices to learn about income based repayment. The loan offices told her that her pay in US dollars is effectively zero, so her loan payment is zero.

Because of compounded interest, Crista wanted to make loan payments even though she wasn’t required too. Crista is considering whether to keep her savings and make payments or to take her savings to pay off all her loans. The interest rates on the loans are nearly 7%.

Crista says the loan payment process has been smooth except for the fees to send money to the US and the exchange rate. Recently, the Swedish krona has been worth a little more than the US dollar.

22:02 Do you have any advice for a US citizen who is doing graduate work abroad and has student loan debt?

Crista says she was looking for a university that would take her project. It’s a new culture and experience, which is worth a lot. She advises to save up because it’s expensive to move. She says take logistics into account.

23:21 Where can people go to learn more about your story?

Crista has a blog called Richful Thinker. After her Masters, she worked in banking. She learned about the benefit of having a banker and all the things a banker can do for you. She thinks more people should know about this. She also talks about what it’s like to be an American doing her PhD abroad.

24:30 What is the FIRE movement and why are you part of it?

Crista explains that FIRE is financial independence, retire early. She is most interested in financial independence. She says most people who retire early are in their 30s or 40s. But since retiring is typically 65, even retiring at 50 is retiring early. Crista says she wants to be comfortable without worrying where her money is coming from.

Emily adds that for many young adults learning about personal finance, financial independence refers to being independent of parents. In the FIRE community, financial independence is being independent of a job. This could be through passive income, like making money from rentals or investments.

Crista says she knows it can be difficult to find a job after your PhD, so financial independence is a way to assure she finds a job that she will like. She doesn’t want to take the first job that’s open. Emily shares that financial independence can make having a job more fulfilling.