grad students

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.

Where to Find Completely Free Help for Your Tax Return

March 27, 2019 by Emily Leave a Comment

It’s incredible that in the US we are expected to prepare our own tax returns! Even a simple return can prove quite challenging for someone new to preparing one, so it’s natural to turn to other sources for help. Grad students have a double disadvantage in this area: 1) Their income and expenses are a bit unusual, so finding the right help can prove difficult. 2) They don’t have much available cash to pay for help. The good news is that there are numerous 100% free sources of help for your tax return.

The IRS

I think the IRS should be the first place you turn for help when preparing your tax return! After all, they have the final word on how to properly fill out a tax return. The IRS provides multiple sources of 100% free help.

Instructions

The central form of your tax return is Form 1040. (Non-residents will use a Form 1040-NR. In previous years, you might have used a Form 1040-A or Form 1040-EZ, but those no longer exist post-Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.) That is the one every filer will fill out. If you have a simple return, that’s where it stops, but if your return is more complex, you may have some additional schedules and forms to fill out.

Form 1040 comes with a detailed instruction booklet. If you’re ever confused about what the form means, just refer to that particular line in the instructions.

Interactive Tax Assistant

In addition to the PDF publications, the IRS has large set of tools known as the Interactive Tax Assistant. After selecting your question of interest (e.g., Do I Include My Scholarship, Fellowship, or Education Grant as Income on My Tax Return?), the ITA will prompt you for information and give you an answer at the end of the process.

Publications

Additionally, the IRS has instead created numerous publications to explain their interpretation of the code even more clearly.

The most relevant publications for PhDs are:

Publication 17, Your Federal Income Tax
Publication 501, Dependents, Standard Deduction, and Filing Information
Publication 970, Tax Benefits for Education
Publication 505, Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax
Publication 519, U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens

These publications are also frequently broken up and summarized into articles that are easily searched on the IRS website.

Free File

The IRS also provides free tax software for low-income individuals and households through its Free File system. If you have a household income below $66,000 per year, you can take advantage of it. Very well-known software providers like TurboTax® and TaxAct® have Free File versions available.

Help Line

If you would rather wait on hold than sift through publications on your own, you can call the IRS Help Line. Sometimes a customer service agent can quickly answer your question and clear up your confusion.

Be warned that:

The hotline is available from 7am to 7pm “local time.” The last time I called, local time was determine by my phone number’s area code, not the time zone where the call actually originated.
The customer service agents don’t have access to any special information. Everything they reference is already publicly available.

Other Tax Software

If you don’t qualify for the IRS Free File software, you may be able to use free versions of other software, like TurboTax® (affiliate link). Software like this prompts you for relevant information to assemble your tax return, so it’s an easy way to access professional tax advice. However, if your return becomes complex enough, you may be required to pay a fee to complete and submit it.

The Internet

There are plenty of non-IRS sources of tax help available online:

My Tax Center for PhD trainees (postbac, grad student, postdoc)
TurboTax® forums
Reddit
- Personal Finance
- Tax

As with anything you find online, you have to take tax information with a grain of salt. Check the source and check their references. You are not receiving advice tailored to your situation, even if you’re listening to an expert. A special word of warning for tax year 2018: Check the publication date on any articles or posts. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a once-in-a-generation tax overhaul, and a lot of things changed between 2017 and 2018. Triple-check any information you find that was originally published for tax year 2017 or earlier.

Your University and/or Community

Your university and local civic organizations (e.g., libraries, community centers) may provide free tax help. It might even be tailored for students and/or low-income individuals. A number of universities have hosted my tax seminar, and others ask local CPAs to volunteer their time. One common program at universities and elsewhere is Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) for taxpayers earning less than $55,000 per year and others with particular needs. If you avail yourself of help from any of these sources, please be aware that the volunteers and even professionals may not be well-trained in the nuances of higher education income and expenses as relevant to PhD trainees.

Further reading: How to Work with a Tax Preparer when You Have Fellowship and/or Scholarship Income

When to Pay for Help

The great majority of tax information that you need to prepare your return is available to you for free. If you have the time and inclination, you could learn enough to put together a competent tax return. However, your time may be more valuable to you than the money you could spend getting more targeted and/or direct tax help. If your tax return is sufficiently complex (e.g., you own property, have investment income, are self-employed, etc.), it’s worthwhile to hire a professional tax preparer. (I vetted tax preparers last year regarding higher education benefits. Email me for a recommendation!)

My workshop for funded PhD students provides (in video format) exactly the information grad students need to prepare and understand their tax returns. It includes special scenarios, such as for dependents and students under the age of 24. The best component of the workshop is the live Q&A sessions, in which you can ask any questions you have after viewing the videos. Working through the components of this workshop will massively cut down on the time you need to spend researching how to prepare your tax return as it is narrowly tailored for funded graduate students.

Tax software such as TurboTax® (affiliate link) is very popular, and it’s probably the cheapest and fastest way to have your tax return prepared professionally. As entering your higher education income and expenses into TurboTax® can be unintuitive, I created a guide to help grad students with these steps. Again, these are inexpensive ways to prepare your tax return quickly and with confidence, even if you end up paying a small fee to submit your return through the software.

Finally, some tax questions are just too nuanced for the answers to be clearly found for free online. Last fall, I hired a tax firm to validate my overall approach to grad student and postdoc taxes and research some really gnarly questions. As I learned, there is a lot of gray area when it comes to taxes! The relevant sources are the tax code, the IRS’s translation of the code (e.g., the publications), the court rulings that help interpret the code, and finally, what the IRS actually elects to enforce. If you’d like to benefit from this research (and the benefits may include a literal reduction in your tax liability!), you’re welcome to join my tax workshop for grad students.

Making Ends Meet on a Graduate Student Stipend in Los Angeles

March 25, 2019 by Jewel Lipps Leave a Comment

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

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

0:54 Please Introduce Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17:30 What do you do about large expenses?

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

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

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

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

22:00 Can you talk about saving for retirement?

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

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

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

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

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

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30:28 How did you pay the tax balance?

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

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

34:40 Final Comments

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

35:18 Conclusion

Weird Tax Situations for Fellowship Recipients

February 20, 2019 by Emily 10 Comments

One of the most puzzling tax scenarios that is common in academia but almost unheard of outside of it is fellowship funding because it neither a wage nor self-employment income. Fellowships frequently pay the stipends and salaries of grad students and postdocs, but also apply to some other kinds of trainees that aren’t considered students or called postdocs. This post explains the weird tax situations for fellowship recipients and how to resolve them. I’ll clarify right up front that you do need to incorporate your fellowship income into the gross income you report on your tax return, and you almost certainly will end up paying tax on it (unless your total income is very low or you have lots of other deductions/credits).

Further reading/viewing:

I have to define my terms up front here because “fellowship” is used variously inside and outside of academic research, and these weird tax situations don’t always apply. What I’m talking about is when your income from your academic/research role is not reported on a W-2 (and you’re not self-employed). Often, though not always, winning a fellowship generates this kind of income. The NSF GRFP and DoD NDSEG are probably the most well-known examples of this type of income at the graduate level for STEM fields. Basically, you’re being paid because you won an award, not because you are directly trading work or time for money. This kind of income can come from training grants and other kinds of grants as well as fellowships, and in those cases you might or might not be labeled a fellow. If your income is reported on a W-2, whether it’s called a fellowship or not, this post doesn’t apply to you!

Personally, over my time in/near academia, I received non-compensatory pay on five occasions:

I was postbaccalaureate fellow at the NIH for a year between undergrad and grad school, and my income was reported on a 1099-G.
I was on a training grant in my first year of grad school, and my income was reported on a 1099-MISC in Box 3.
I won an internal fellowship for my second year of grad school, and my income was reported on a 1099-MISC in Box 3.
I was paid from my advisor’s discretionary funds in my sixth year of grad school, and my income was reported on a 1099-MISC in Box 3.
I was a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering, and my income was reported on a 1099-MISC in Box 3.

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

Receiving Unusual Tax Forms

The way to definitively tell that you’re receiving non-compensatory income is that you don’t receive a W-2 at tax time for your income, which was likely paid similarly to a regular salary or perhaps in a lump sum per term. Instead, you might see your income reported on some other strange tax form:

1098-T
1099-MISC

There are other possible mechanism for this reporting; these are the two most commonly used within universities.

Neither of these forms was designed for reporting fellowship income; neither does it very well, but they do get the job done if you know what you’re looking for.

1098-T

A 1098-T, which is issued to some students depending on your university’s policies, is sort of a clearinghouse form for the sum of your fellowships/scholarships/grants received (in Box 5) and also the sum of the qualified tuition and related expenses that were paid (Box 1) to your student account. Your fellowship income might be lumped in with your scholarships in Box 5, which makes them a little hard to parse, or Box 5 might only include your scholarships (see next section if so).

The good thing about the 1098-T if it includes your fellowship income is that it does put front and center two of the important numbers you’ll need to work with when you prepare your tax return, the sum of your non-compensatory (fellowship, scholarship, and grant) income (Box 5) and a subset of your Qualified Education Expenses (Box 1). You don’t really need to know what your fellowship income was independent of your additional scholarship/grant income See Weird Tax Situations for Fully Funded Grad Students for more details about working with the 1098-T.

1099-MISC

The 1099-MISC is a super confusing form to receive for fellowship income.

First, any non-academic who hears/sees that you have income reported on a 1099-MISC is going to think you’re self-employed. Self-employment/contractor income is the most common usage for the 1099-MISC, but that income is reported in Box 7. Fellowship income usually shows up in Box 3, “Other income,” although occasionally it does show up in Box 7. If you are a grad student or postdoc, you are not self-employed; do not pay self-employment tax!

Further reading: Grad Student Tax Lie #2: You Received a 1099-MISC; You Are Self-Employed

Second, the instructions for the 1099-MISC tell you to (“generally”) report your Box 3 “Other income” in the “Other income” line on your Form 1040 Schedule 1 Line 21. You can do it that way and your tax calculation will turn out correctly in a lot of situations, but it’s more correct to report the income explicitly as fellowship/scholarship income. 1099-MISC Box 7 income that is definitely fellowship income should be reported as fellowship instead of as self-employment. In both of these cases, it’s less confusing for the IRS and will possibly enable you to take more educational tax breaks.

Further reading:

How to Prepare Your Grad Student Tax Return
Where to Report Your Grad Student Income on Your Tax Return (applies for non-student fellows as well)

Receiving No Tax Forms

Going along with the theme of not receiving a W-2 at tax time, you might very well not receive any tax form at all! It’s very common for there to be zero communication between the organization that pays the fellowship and the fellowship recipient. Other times, the fellow might receive what I call a “courtesy letter,” which is just a short, informal letter stating the amount of fellowship money paid.

Further reading: What Is a Courtesy Letter?

Fellows who don’t receive tax forms or whose universities/institutions don’t communicate with them at all about their personal taxes may feel completely adrift. They have no idea where to even start with preparing their tax returns. Many pay no taxes at all (if you know someone like that, send them this article!) since it takes a certain level of awareness of your tax responsibility to even wonder if you need to pay income tax. Even those who suspect they need to report and pay tax on their fellowship income might be daunted by the task of figuring out from scratch exactly how to do that.

Further listening: Do I Owe Income Tax on My Fellowship?

But it’s really a simple process to carry out if you know what to do! You should be able to find the amount of fellowship income you were paid for the whole year from your bank records. If you’re not a student, you just straight report that number in Form 1040 Line 1 with “SCH” written next to it. If you are a student, you have to work with your other scholarships and qualified education expenses a bit before reporting a number for your non-compensatory pay; see Weird Tax Situations for Fully Funded Grad Students for more details on that.

Further reading: Where to Report Your Grad Student Income on Your Tax Return (applies for non-student fellows as well)

Quarterly Estimated Tax

In my observation, most fellowship recipients have the responsibility of paying quarterly estimated tax, and many, many, many neglect to do so. If you need one level of awareness to even understand you’re supposed to pay tax on your fellowship income, you need an even higher level of awareness before you follow through on paying quarterly estimated tax. In fact, if the organization providing you the fellowship didn’t mention this, it’s not a water cooler topic around your department, and/or you’ve never been self-employed, you almost certainly wouldn’t know to do it.

The basic principle here is that the IRS expects to receive tax payments throughout the year, not just in April when your tax return is due. If you owe enough additional tax at the end of the year (and don’t qualify for an exception), the IRS is going to demand not only your tax payment but late fees and interest as well.

The main system for sending tax in to the IRS is tax withholding on a normal paycheck. If you don’t do that or your withholding isn’t sufficient, you’re supposed to file quarterly estimated tax. Basically, you send in a payment (no forms need to be filed) to the IRS four times per year to make sure you don’t have too much extra tax due when you file your yearly tax return. You should work through the estimated tax worksheet in Form 1040-ES to figure out if you are required to pay quarterly estimated tax and in what amount; you can also find the instructions for filing it in that form.

Taxable Compensation and Earned Income Tax Breaks

Some of the tax breaks the IRS offers are contingent on the type of income you have, and fellowship income (not reported on a W-2) does not necessarily qualify.

Individual Retirement Arrangement

To contribute to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA), you (or your spouse) must have “taxable compensation.” Unfortunately, while taxable, fellowship income does not qualify as “compensation” (Publication 970 p. 5). So if your only income for a whole calendar year is fellowship/non-compensatory income and you’re not married to someone with taxable compensation, you aren’t eligible to contribute to an IRA in that year.

Further reading:

Earned Income Tax Credit

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Earned Income Credit (EIC) is a credit extended to low-income individuals and families. If your household income is quite low and/or you have one or more children, you might be able to receive the credit. As the name implies, you need “earned income” to qualify for the EITC. Unfortunately, fellowship/scholarship income is not considered “earned income” (Publication 596 p. 18). Puzzlingly, having zero earned income disqualifies you from the credit, but having too much non-earned income also disqualifies you from the credit. The definition of earned income also plays into the calculations for the Child Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit.

Further reading: Grad Student Tax Lie #8: You Can Claim the Earned Income Tax Credit

Dependent Status

When you are trying to determine if you should file a tax return as an independent adult vs. a dependent of your parents, it is more difficult to qualify as independent with fellowship income rather than an equal amount of W-2 income. (This only applies to students.) While education expenses count as part of the amount of money that goes toward your “support,” scholarships and fellowships that you won do not count as you providing your own support.

Kiddie Tax

Fellowship income counts as unearned income for the purposes of being subject to the Kiddie Tax. If you are under the age of 24 on December 31 and a student, your “unearned” income exceeding $2,100 may be subject to a higher tax rate than the ordinary rate.

What other weird tax situations have you encountered due to your fellowship income?

Weird Tax Situations for Fully Funded Grad Students

February 20, 2019 by Emily 2 Comments

“Actually, I get paid to go to school.” How many times have you said that to distant relatives and new acquaintances? If you look at it that way, being a funded grad student is a pretty sweet gig. But there are definitely downsides, like the low pay, sub-par benefits, and the weird tax situations that come with getting paid to be a grad student in the US. Receiving a 1098-T that has seemingly no basis in reality and having to incorporate it into your tax return – or worse, not receiving one – can become a real time- and energy-suck. The whole tax return support system seems to have been set up to help people who are in the red with their universities, not people who are in the black. Fortunately, there are solutions to these weird tax situations for fully funded grad students, and I’ve brought them to light for you in this point.

The points covered in this post are strictly to do with being a funded graduate student at a university.

Further reading:

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

You Might or Might Not Receive a 1098-T

The 1098-T looks like a super official tax form, rather like a W-2. However, I like to think of it as a communication between the university and the IRS that you, the grad student, have only been cc’d on. It’s not issued to help you properly report your income to the IRS. Its primary purpose is to let the IRS know that a student (or a student’s parents) might try to take an education tax break so that it can check the amount of the tax break claimed.

But fully funded grad students often do not claim net educational tax breaks. And if a tax break isn’t in order, it’s actually optional for the universities to even create a 1098-T. So as a fully funded graduate student, you might receive a 1098-T or you might not; the choice belongs to your university.

Further reading: What Is a 1098-T?

Your 1098-T Might Mislead You

The only thing worse than not receiving a 1098-T is receiving one that is misleading.

Further reading: Form 1098-T: Still Causing Trouble for Funded Graduate Students

When a 1098-T is issued, it is supposed to contain all of the scholarships and grants the grad student received (Box 5) as well as the payments received (Box 1) for qualified tuition and related expenses. If Box 1 is greater than Box 5, an education tax break is likely in order, and if Box 5 is greater than Box 1, you may have some excess income to report.

Box 7

But wait! It’s not always that simple. See Box 7? If that is checked, we’ve run into a calendar year/academic year issue. Sometimes the tuition, etc. for a winter or spring semester/trimester (beginning in January through March) is charged in or before December of the prior year. But are the corresponding scholarships that pay those charges posted at the same time? Nope! They often are posted in that January to March window. So the charges end up on the 1098-T for one calendar year while the corresponding scholarships end up on the 1098-T for the subsequent calendar year.

It’s not a good idea to take a tax break in one year only to have to pay a boatload of extra tax in the next year. The solution is to pair the charge with the scholarship that is earmarked for it. You do this by pulling the charge forward into the calendar year when the scholarship shows up.

So basically, your 1098-T isn’t reliable if Box 7 is checked, and you have to do your own arithmetic with the charges and scholarships that show up in your student account to find the proper numbers to plug into your tax return.

Box 1

In addition, your 1098-T might not list in Box 1 all the qualified education expenses you are eligible to claim… More on that later!

Box 3

Starting in 2018, the IRS eliminated the previously used Box 2 (qualified tuition and related expenses billed) in favor of Box 1. Many if not most universities therefore switched accounting systems between 2017 and 2018, and Box 3 is checked if that was the case. This potentially causes a double-counting issue if Box 7 were checked on your 2017 1098-T: the same charge for qualified tuition or related fees could show up in Box 2 of the 2017 1098-T and Box 1 of the 2018 1098-T if it was billed in late 2017 but paid in early 2018.

If You Have Scholarships and Qualified Education Expenses, You Can Choose between a Deduction and a Credit

When you have qualified education expenses such as tuition, you get to use them for some kind of tax break. That’s good news. The bad or at least complicating news is that you have to make a choice about how to use them. With some limitations, you get to choose being using them for a deduction and using them for a credit.

A quick review on deductions vs. credits: Deductions reduce your taxable income, while credits reduce your tax due.

How much a credit is worth to you is pretty easy to calculate. If it’s a $1,000 credit, you knock $1,000 off your tax due. (Be a bit careful because some credits are non-refundable, meaning that they stop working when your tax due hits $0.) If it’s a 20% credit for up to $1,000, if you take the full credit you’re knocking $200 off your tax.

How much a deduction is worth to you depends on your marginal tax rate. You have to multiply the amount of the deduction by your top marginal tax rate (or two tax rates, if the deduction makes you cross tax brackets). If your top tax bracket is the 10% tax bracket, a $2,000 deduction takes $200 off your federal tax due. You also should factor in your state marginal tax bracket if your state honors the deduction.

Further reading: Marginal Tax Brackets, Deductions, and Credits Explained Graphically

With your qualified education expenses, at the graduate level you will choose between ways to use them to reduce your tax burden, and ultimately you may use both. (I’m leaving out some limitations such as what qualifies as an educational institution, income ceilings, and what the scholarships can be used for, so look those up before you make a final decision.) You can:

Make some or all of your scholarship/grant income tax-free (i.e., take a deduction), or
Use the Lifetime Learning Credit (20% credit up to $10,000 for tax year 2017).

Please note that you can’t use the same qualified education expenses for more than one tax break.

You can find a complete discussion of how to choose among these three educational tax benefits in How to Prepare Your Grad Student Tax Return.

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

You Have to Figure Out Your Own Qualified Education Expenses

Oh, and did I mention yet that the definition of a Qualified Education Expense is slightly different depending on the tax break you’re trying to take? Yeah, that’s another weird tax situation for fully funded grad students.

Even though the same term, such as qualified education expenses, is used to label a basic component of many of the education benefits, the same expenses aren’t necessarily allowed for each benefit. – IRS Publication 970 p. 4

Tuition is considered a qualified education expense for all of the education tax benefits I’ve discussed, but some additional expenses sometimes qualify, such as required fees and course-related expenses, e.g., books and supplies. These types of expenses might or might not appear on your 1098-T in Box 1. You should refer to Publication 970 for the full definitions of qualified education expenses under the three different education benefits.

Further reading: What Are Qualified Education Expenses?

One controversial point is whether your student health insurance premium is a required fee/qualified education expense for the purpose of making the scholarship that pays it tax-free. Insurance and student health fees, along with some other expenses, are explicitly disallowed as qualified education expenses for the Lifetime Learning Credit, but not explicitly for making scholarships tax-free. I recently contracted a tax firm to conduct some research for me, and their determination is that a health insurance premium paid to your university can be considered a qualified education expense for the purpose of making the scholarship that paid it tax-free.

You Have to Report Excess Scholarship Income

Funded graduate students with net scholarship (or fellowship) income have to report it on their tax returns. This is a weird tax situation because it’s uncommon at the undergraduate level, so many people, even professional tax preparers, don’t know that you’re supposed to do it. But now that you know, it’s actually quite easy to do.

You report your net scholarship/fellowship income in the same line on your tax return as you report your wages, e.g., Form 1040 Line 1. You also need to print SCH next to the line so the IRS knows part or all of your income is not reported on your W-2.

Further reading: Where to Report Your Grad Student Income on Your Tax Return

You Might or Might Not Be a Dependent of Your Parents (and It’s Not a Choice)

Because graduate students are students, they might be considered dependents of their parents (or another relative) for tax purposes. You and your parents don’t get to choose whether they should claim you as a dependent or you should be independent based on what’s best for the family’s tax due; rather, you have to follow the IRS’s definition.

The conditions for being considered a dependent (not exhaustive) are:

You are age 23 or younger at the end of the calendar year.
You were enrolled as a student in at least 5 calendar months (doesn’t have to be consecutive).
You lived with your parents for at least half the year (being away for educational reasons can count as living with them).
You must meet the “Support Test”: You did not provide more than half of your own support in the calendar year (see Publication 17 Worksheet 3-1).

For any years that the first three points above apply to you, you should fill out the Support Test to determine if you provided enough of your own support to qualify as independent. Keep in mind that education expenses count as support that you needed, but scholarships and fellowships that paid that support don’t count as being provided by you.

You’re (Mostly) Not Paying FICA Tax

FICA (Social Security and Medicare) taxes seem like an unavoidable burden for employees and self-employed people. But even if you’re an employee of your university/graduate school (i.e., you receive a W-2 at tax time), you’re most likely not paying FICA tax because you have a student exemption. This exemption depends on both the primary function of the organization that employs you (i.e., educational) and your primary relationship with the organization (i.e., as a student rather than an employee).

The student exemption is almost universal for graduate students, but I have come across two exceptions that depend heavily on the exact wording of the exemption:

1) Graduate students at research institutions that are not primarily universities might not receive the exemption.

2) Graduate students, even at universities, whose primary relationship with their employer is as an employee rather than a student may pay FICA tax. For example, this might occur during the summer vs. during the academic year, and could happen without the student even perceiving a difference in roles. (This is not common; I’ve seen one example and it was for a senior graduate student at a public university.)

Graduate students receiving fellowships also do not pay FICA tax, but that is because they are not receiving wages rather than due to their student status.

Yes, there are a lot of weird tax situations for fully funded grad students. You have to do a bit of legwork instead of just blindly entering numbers from your 1098-T into tax software or ignoring your excess scholarship income. But if you break the issues down one by one, it’s actually straightforward to determine how to resolve them.

How to Prepare Your Grad Student Tax Return (Tax Year 2018)

January 24, 2019 by Emily 6 Comments

It’s common for funded graduate students to be a bit intimidated by preparing their own tax returns, particularly if they are inexperienced in doing so. The sources of PhD student funding, namely fellowship stipends and the scholarships that pay tuition and fees, are rather unusual, so most people and even most professional tax preparers don’t have any experience with them. The strategies that apply for undergraduate-level taxes are pretty different from those that apply for graduate-level taxes. But learning how to prepare your grad student tax return isn’t actually difficult, nor are the resulting steps complicated. There’s no reason to be intimidated! This post covers the essential points you need to know to prepare your grad student tax return, whether you do it manually, with tax software, or with the help of another person.

This post is for tax year 2018. This post only covers federal tax due for domestic graduate students in the United States; you may have additional state and local tax due. I am detailing only the aspects of preparing your grad student tax return that are specific to higher education; I am not covering more general tax information that applies to the population at large.

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

Preliminary Remarks

This post is a step-by-step guide on how to prepare your grad student tax return. I want to clear up some confusion right up front so that you can work your way through the guide without becoming sidetracked.

All of your income is potentially taxable. The purpose of your tax return is to show that you don’t have to pay tax on all of it. What graduate students don’t often realize is that they have income sources aside from the one(s) that hit their bank accounts or are reported on official tax documents, and they need to deal with those incomes on their tax returns.

You have your stipend/salary that serves as your take-home pay, and this is potentially taxable, even if you don’t receive an official tax form about it and you didn’t have any taxes withheld. In fact, I’ll say you’re very likely to end up owing tax on it unless it’s quite low and/or you have a lot of tax deductions/credits.

You also have another kind of income if you are funded: the money that pays your tuition and fees. Your university might refer to this as scholarship, tuition waivers, tuition remissions, etc. Even if this money never passes through your personal bank account, it does pass through your name via your student account, and it also is potentially taxable. There is a very high chance you can use an education tax benefit to reduce your taxable income and/or reduce your tax due, but you have to sit down and do the arithmetic on it, not just assume that you won’t owe any tax on it. (In fact, doing the arithmetic may very well help you pay even less tax than if you ignored it!) This guide shows you exactly how to do that.

Further reading:

Collect All Your Income Sources

The first step to prepare your grad student tax return, and any tax return, is to collect all your income sources. These income sources include wages as well as non-wage income such as interest and investment income and self-employment income, but does not include loan disbursements.

With respect to your grad student status, you have income sources that are unusual and may be officially reported to you or not (so check for all of them):

Your TA/RA pay will be reported to you on a W-2.
Your fellowship stipend or training grant income may be reported to you on a 1098-T in Box 5, on a 1099-MISC in Box 3, on a courtesy letter, or not at all. If your university does not send you any documentation of your fellowship income for 2018, you have to sum all the payments you received to figure out what it was.
Your scholarship/grant income (i.e., the money that paid your tuition and fees), may be reported to you on a 1098-T in Box 5 or not at all. If you did not receive a 1098-T from your university, you should look at the transactions in your student account (e.g., Bursar’s account, Cashier’s account) to see the money posted there on your behalf.

Your university may not use the exact terminology that I did, but the tax forms and documentation (or lack thereof) will help you differentiate among the three types.

Further reading:

At this stage, you may be thinking that the total of all this income is way too high. There’s no way you want to pay tax on all this income! Stick with me: We are going to reduce either your taxable income or your tax due in a subsequent step. But for now, work with all of your incomes.

Categorize Your Income

Your grad student income (assistantship pay, fellowships, and scholarships/grants) falls into two broad categories: compensatory and non-compensatory income. Compensatory income is easy to define, as you will receive a W-2 for it. (This rule is with respect to your three sources of grad student income only; other types of income could be compensatory but not associated with a W-2, such as self-employment income.) Non-compensatory income is best defined as any grad student-related income that is not compensatory (reported somewhere other than a W-2 or not reported). According to the IRS, it is “various types of educational assistance you may receive if you are studying, teaching, or researching in the United States… scholarships, fellowship grants, need-based education grants, qualified tuition reductions” (Publication 970 p. 5), but the way the IRS uses those terms doesn’t completely match how we use the terms in academia.

Decide Which Education Tax Benefit(s) to Use on Your Grad Student Tax Return

For tax year 2018, there are two relevant education tax benefits that you can access to reduce your tax burden: making non-compensatory pay tax-free and the Lifetime Learning Credit. You use your qualified education expenses (QEEs) to take a deduction (by either making your non-compensatory pay tax-free) or take a credit (by taking the Lifetime Learning Credit). A tax deduction reduces your taxable income, while a tax credit reduces your tax due directly. You can apply either one or both of these benefits, but you have to use different QEE dollars.

Qualified Education Expenses

The definition of a QEE changes slightly for each tax benefit.

Even though the same term, such as qualified education expenses, is used to label a basic component of many of the education benefits, the same expenses aren’t necessarily allowed for each benefit. Publication 970 p. 4

Tuition at an eligible education institution is a QEE for both tax benefits (although to make non-compensatory pay tax-free you have to be a degree candidate). “Required fees” are QEEs for making non-compensatory pay tax-free. The Lifetime Learning Credit uses the wording “the fees and expenses [that] must be paid to the institution for enrollment or attendance” to define a QEE. Other fees and expenses beyond tuition may be QEEs; you should refer to the definition of a QEE with respect to each benefit.

If you received a 1098-T from your university, Box 1 will contain the sum of the QEEs that were processed by the office at your university that prepared the form. You may have additional QEEs not reported on a 1098-T.

Between 2017 and 2018, the IRS updated the 1098-T, and some universities had to change their accounting system. If Box 3 on your 1098-T is checked in 2018, it is possible that some of your QEEs are double-counted in both 2017 and 2018. So instead of running with the value in your 1098-T Box 1, you should figure out if any of the QEEs included were already used in 2017.

Further reading: What Is a 1098-T?

Whether you received a 1098-T or not, you should examine the transactions in your student account to make the final determination about the qualified education expenses that were processed by that office.

You may have additional QEEs not reported on your 1098-T or in your student account, such as required course-related expenses (keep your receipts!).

Make Non-Compensatory Pay Tax-Free

The non-compensatory pay that you receive can directly cancel against your QEEs to become tax-free. For example, if the tuition that you are charged and the scholarship or tuition reduction that pays it are exactly the same amount, they net to zero and you won’t be taxed on that portion of your non-compensatory pay. In fact, you don’t even have to show the IRS this calculation; you only have to report the portion of your non-compensatory pay that exceeds your QEEs.

The definition of a QEE to make non-compensatory pay tax-free is (excerpted from Publication 970 Chapter 1):

Further reading: Grad Student Tax Lie #3: You Can Deduct Tuition, Even If You Didn’t Pay It

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

Lifetime Learning Credit

The Lifetime Learning Credit reduces your tax burden and may be beneficial to apply if 1) your QEEs exceed your non-compensatory pay and/or 2) a 20% credit is more valuable to you than a deduction.

The Lifetime Learning Credit is a 20% credit; that means that if you use $1,000 in QEE expenses for the Lifetime Learning Credit, your tax due will be reduced by $200. There is a $10,000 limit on QEEs that can be used for the Lifetime Learning Credit, so the maximum benefit is $2,000 even if you have additional QEEs.

The modified adjust gross income phase-out for this deduction begins at $56,000 for a single person and $112,000 for a married couple filing jointly.

The definition of a QEE for the Lifetime Learning Credit is (excerpted from Publication 970 Chapter 3):

If you take the Lifetime Learning Credit, you must fill out and file Form 8863.

How to Decide Which Tax Benefit to Prioritize on Your Grad Student Tax Return

Do you remember how on multiple choice tests you are instructed to choose the “best” answer, not necessary the (one and only) “correct” answer? There are multiple acceptable ways to prepare your grad student tax return. At the end of the day, you can figure out the “best” answer – the one that results in the lowest tax burden for you – but it may very well take calculating your tax due with each of the different approaches. I do think it’s worth delving into the details of this decision, because may be possible to reduce your tax liability by as much as $800!

This section assumes that you are eligible for both of the education tax benefits (based on your income, the status of your educational institution, your student status, etc.); if you are ineligible for one or the other, that makes the decision all the easier. Please note that if you elect to apply the Lifetime Learning Credit when you could have made a scholarship tax-free using a matched QEE, that scholarship (by its terms) has to be eligible to be applied to a non-QEE. If a scholarship, for example, is earmarked only for paying a QEE such as tuition, then you must use your tuition QEE to make it tax-free; the scholarship cannot be included in taxable income and the QEE used for the Lifetime Learning Credit.

Essentially, you will choose which education tax benefit to apply first, tax-free scholarships and fellowships or the Lifetime Learning Credit. The one you apply first should be whichever minimizes your tax liability.

The following method will give you a first-pass indication of which benefit is better for you:

As tax-free scholarships and fellowships is a tax deduction, it is “worth” the amount of your QEEs or non-compensatory income (whichever is lower) multiplied by the sum of your federal, state, and local marginal income tax brackets.

As the Lifetime Learning Credit is a credit, it is worth its face value, which is 20% of the QEEs you apply to it up to $10,000.

Ask yourself if the sum of your marginal tax brackets is more or less than 20%.

If the sum is greater than 20%, that indicates you should apply your QEEs first to make as much of your non-compensatory pay tax-free as possible. If you have any remaining QEEs, apply them to the Lifetime Learning Credit (up to $10,000 of QEEs).

If the sum is less than 20%, that indicates you should apply your QEEs first to the Lifetime Learning Credit (up to $10,000 of QEEs). If you have any remaining QEEs, use them to make as much of your non-compensatory pay tax-free as possible.

When in doubt, calculate your tax due under both methods (or use software). In some situations, the above rule of thumb will not indicate the correct method to minimize your tax burden. For example, with the Lifetime Learning Credit-first method, you report a higher income than you would have if you used the tax-free scholarships and fellowships method, which might make you ineligible for certain tax benefits on other parts of your return, e.g., the Earned Income Credit. It’s imperative to calculate not just your total federal tax due under each method but your state and local tax due as well. Not all states treat scholarships and fellowships as ordinary income, for example.

The Numbers You Need for Your Tax Return

Once you have decided how you would like to use your QEEs, you should bring a few numbers with you to enter into your federal tax return:

your total amount of compensatory pay (W-2 pay with respect to your grad student income)
your net non-compensatory pay (after applying your QEEs to reduce it), and
the amount of your Lifetime Learning Credit (maximum $2,000) from Form 8863.

Fill Out Your Grad Student Tax Return

With respect to your (net) grad student income, Lifetime Learning Credit, and tax already paid, how to report them on your tax return is very straightforward. Of course, you will fill out the rest of your tax return by following the form instructions; this section only relates to the grad student aspects of your return.

Report Your Income

Your compensatory pay and net non-compensatory pay will be summed and reported as a single figure in the wages line of your tax return. (Add to this figure any other wages as well according to the form instructions.)

On Form 1040, you will write your income in Line 1. If your grad student income includes any non-compensatory income, write “SCH” in the line next to the number. You may also include the amount of the net non-compensatory pay. The purpose of this note is to alert the IRS that there is no W-2 associated with all or part of the income reported on that line.

Further reading: Where to Report Your Grad Student Income on Your Tax Return

Report Your Lifetime Learning Credit

Report your Lifetime Learning Credit on Line 50 of Form 1040 Schedule 3; you will also file Form 8863. The amount of this credit will directly reduce your tax due.

Report Your Tax Already Paid

If you received a W-2 and/or 1099-MISC for part or all of your grad student income, you will enter the amount of federal tax that was withheld from your income in Line 16 of Form 1040.

Further reading: Grad Student Tax Lie #5: If Nothing Was Withheld, You Don’t Owe Any Tax

If you paid quarterly estimated tax on your fellowship income, report the total of the estimated tax payments you made in Line 66 of Form 1040 Schedule 5.

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Essential information to help funded US domestic graduate students with their federal tax returns

Notes on Other Education Tax Benefits

I have omitted from detailed discussion one education tax benefit that you may be familiar with from past experience preparing your tax return.

American Opportunity Credit

The American Opportunity Credit is typically used during the undergraduate years only. It can be claimed in only 4 tax years and not in any tax year after the one in which you finish your first four years of postsecondary education. Therefore, if you graduated from college in 2018 (in four years) and you (or your parents) claimed the American Opportunity Credit in no more than 3 previous tax years (e.g., freshman spring/sophomore fall, sophomore spring/junior fall, and junior spring/senior fall but not freshman fall), you may be eligible to claim it in 2018. If you claim the American Opportunity Credit, you cannot use the Lifetime Learning Credit. If you are considered a dependent on your parents’ tax return in 2018, you cannot claim the credit.

Conclusion

The most challenging aspect of this process is simply knowing the various aspects that you have to consider. The most complicated aspect is deciding how to use your QEEs, but you can always take the default option of prioritizing making your non-compensatory pay tax-free if you don’t want to do the extra calculations. (Your tax software or professional tax preparer should make the determination for you, but you have to give it/him/her good information to work with to do so properly.)

Further reading: How to Work with a Tax Preparer When You Have Fellowship and/or Scholarship Income

Best of luck to you as you prepare your grad student tax return this year! If you need additional support, download my tax “cheat sheet” and/or register for my workshop (includes live Q&As!). And please consider sharing this post with your peers through social media or a list-serv!

We at Personal Finance for PhDs are not professional tax preparers; this post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax advice.

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grad students

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

Introduction

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

A Message for Grad Students: Practice Self-Advocacy

Self-Advocacy Post-Grad School

Commercial

Finding Sources of Travel Funding

Tutoring as a Side-Hustle

Any Last Words of Advice?

Outtro

The IRS

Instructions

Interactive Tax Assistant

Publications

Free File

Help Line

Other Tax Software

The Internet

Your University and/or Community

When to Pay for Help

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

0:54 Please Introduce Yourself

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

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

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

17:30 What do you do about large expenses?

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

22:00 Can you talk about saving for retirement?

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

30:28 How did you pay the tax balance?

34:40 Final Comments

35:18 Conclusion

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Receiving Unusual Tax Forms

1098-T

1099-MISC

Receiving No Tax Forms

Quarterly Estimated Tax

Taxable Compensation and Earned Income Tax Breaks

Individual Retirement Arrangement

Earned Income Tax Credit

Dependent Status

Kiddie Tax

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

You Might or Might Not Receive a 1098-T

Your 1098-T Might Mislead You

Box 7

Box 1

Box 3

If You Have Scholarships and Qualified Education Expenses, You Can Choose between a Deduction and a Credit

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

You Have to Figure Out Your Own Qualified Education Expenses

You Have to Report Excess Scholarship Income

You Might or Might Not Be a Dependent of Your Parents (and It’s Not a Choice)

You’re (Mostly) Not Paying FICA Tax

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Preliminary Remarks

Collect All Your Income Sources

Categorize Your Income

Decide Which Education Tax Benefit(s) to Use on Your Grad Student Tax Return

Qualified Education Expenses

Make Non-Compensatory Pay Tax-Free

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Lifetime Learning Credit

How to Decide Which Tax Benefit to Prioritize on Your Grad Student Tax Return

The Numbers You Need for Your Tax Return

Fill Out Your Grad Student Tax Return

Report Your Income

Report Your Lifetime Learning Credit

Report Your Tax Already Paid

Download Your Tax "Cheat Sheet"

Notes on Other Education Tax Benefits

American Opportunity Credit

Conclusion

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