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How to Prioritize Financial Goals When You Can’t Do It All

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As graduate students, we can be overwhelmed easily by everything our stipends are ‘supposed to’ accomplish for us. If you read any personal finance material (including mine!), you will see that your income should go toward saving for retirement, paying off your debt, saving an emergency fund, saving for your short-term goals… oh, and feeding, clothing, and housing you, too! It can seem impossible to make any financial progress when faced with all these demands. Instead of trying to do everything at once, prioritize the various financial goals you might set based on both the math behind them and your personal disposition toward saving, investing, and debt.

prioritize financial goals

A version of this post originally appeared on GradHacker.

In my opinion the first two goals you should accomplish with your stipend are obvious, and after that you’ll have leeway to choose among competing valid goals.

Goal 1: Pay for Your Basics

The primary purpose your stipend should serve each month is to pay for the basic expenses in your life, such as housing, utilities, food, and transportation. If that’s all your stipend can manage, it has served its purpose: providing you with enough money that you can fully devote yourself to your studies. Increasing your short- and long-term financial security will have to wait until after graduation.

However, keep in mind that it’s very possible for these basic expenses to inflate from “need” into “want” territory. “Want” aspects of these basic expenses include living alone, housing amenities (access to pool, gym, social spaces), a car/a car that’s worth a significant fraction of your yearly income, eating out, bar tabs, etc. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t spend money on those above-basic aspects of these expenses, but just be aware that you can’t justify that portion of the spending as “needs.” It’s easy for your large, fixed expenses such as housing and transportation to get away from you, so spending your stipend on the “want” aspects of your basics should be weighed against using it for your other possible financial goals (more on that later).

Goal 2: Save an Emergency Fund

Everyone should have an emergency fund, even if it’s small. An emergency fund is cash reserved only for emergencies. It’s basically money that will prevent you from going into debt when something unexpected happens. A full emergency fund is on the order of 3-6 months of expenses, but that shouldn’t necessarily be your first goal. A small emergency fund of $1,000 is a great start when you have other pressing financial goals, such as debt repayment. It’s not prudent to delay repaying high-interest-rate debt to save a larger emergency fund the purpose of which is to prevent you from going into high-interest-rate debt.

Start with a $1,000 emergency fund as your second financial goal, but after that let the math of your other choices and your gut help you decide whether to keep building the emergency fund or move on to another goal.

Accumulating Cash vs. Growing Wealth Mid/Long-Term

Cash savings has great utility. If your expenses are quite uncertain over the next year (such as when you near graduation), it makes sense to save up to be able to pay for the most costly scenario in cash. It’s also a good idea to keep cash on hand for irregular expenses, such as in a system of targeted savings accounts. As just discussed, a larger emergency fund can bring great peace of mind to certain people.

But you should limit your cash savings to the amount that you may well need in the short term (1-2 years plus any mid-term goal expenses like a house down payment or wedding). To increase your net worth in the long term and ultimately become financially independent, you need to invest for the long-term and pay off debt. As soon as you have sufficient cash on hand (by your estimation), you should start investing or paying off debt, but deciding when you have enough cash is largely about your comfort level.

It’s also fine to simultaneously invest/pay down debt and save additional cash, as long as you can accept that your progress toward each goal will be slower. For example, if you decide to save 20 percent of your income, 10 percent can go toward investing/debt repayment and 10 percent can go toward cash savings.

Investing vs. Debt Repayment

The earlier you get compound interest working in your favor, the better. You can accomplish that by investing or paying off debt. Deciding between investing and debt repayment is again a balance of math and personal disposition.

First, do the math. Put numbers on your various possible investing and debt repayment goals. Your debt repayment “rate of return” is the interest rate of the debt in question. The long-term average rate of return on your investments is estimated from your asset allocation. For example, a grad student invested 100 percent in large-capitalization US stocks could anticipate a 9-10 percent long-term average rate of return (before adjusting for inflation). Other asset allocations will have different expected long-term average rates of return. Mid-term investments should be more conservative, with a lower expected average rate of return but more muted peaks and valleys.

Compare your investing and debt repayment expected rates of return, giving a handicap to the debt repayment side of the equation because there is no risk associated with debt repayment as there is with investing. Given a certain expected rate of return for your investments, the math would argue that debt below a certain interest rate will be a lower priority. For example, if you expect an 8 percent long-term average rate of return on investing, any debt below about 5 or 6 percent might become low-priority.

Second, evaluate your personal disposition. If you feel passionate about one type of goal over another, that should have some influence on your decision. I believe that your passion for a financial goal positively correlates with the amount of effort (i.e., money) you will put toward achieving it. For example, if you hate your debt, you should pay it off, even if the math favors investing. If you are very excited to start investing, perhaps you could reduce the debt repayment handicap in your math to only 1 percent. Just don’t justify keeping high-interest-rate credit card debt because you want to start investing!

The one caveat I’ll make to allowing your personal disposition to hold sway over the math is for a very risk-averse person: you will have to start investing eventually, even conservatively, if you want to reach financial independence. You will automatically pay your installment debt off in time even if you just make the minimum payments, whereas there is no mechanism to force you to start investing. So it is acceptable to prioritize (non-mortgage) debt repayment over investing, but when you’re done paying the debt, be sure that you hold yourself accountable to take the next step to start investing.

Know that More Goals Means Slower Progress

The more financial goals or purposes for your money that you have, the slower your progress will be toward each of them. If you feel strongly about working on multiple goals at once, accept this knowing that you are making some progress in all the areas that are important to you. But if you are frustrated by slow progress to the point that you end up not devoting money to any goals, working on one or a small number of goals at a time is a better fit for you. In this case, set concrete dollar-amount goals that you can achieve within months or a small number of years and work toward them intensely. For example, set $4,000 as your goal emergency fund size, but once you achieve it, move on to something else. Paying off one debt entirely could be another concrete goal.

Living Your Life

Since our income is limited (unless we have a side income), any money that you put toward the above types of financial goals is money that won’t be used for your everyday comforts and living expenses. By no means do I suggest that you suffer through a Spartan lifestyle while you put every penny possible toward your long-term future. Everything must be in balance for you. A guideline like the Balanced Money Formula may help you work through what percentage of your income to use today and what percentage to put away for tomorrow.

My Choices During Grad School

When I was in grad school, the financial goal that most excited me was investing. Therefore, after ensuring that I could live within my means and establishing a $1,000 emergency fund, I started investing 10 percent of my gross income into my Roth IRA. Over time, I built up cash savings in my targeted savings accounts and also increased the fraction of my income that I saved for retirement. To devote more money to these goals, I reduced my living expenses by developing frugal practices. Paying off my remaining student loans was my lowest priority as they were subsidized during deferment. I’m happy with these choices given my personal disposition (not risk-averse), but if I were to do it over again I would have beefed up my emergency fund earlier, delaying increasing my investing percentage for a short time.

How to Start Investing with Just Five Dollars per Month

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In the last several years, we’ve seen an explosion of “fintech,” aka financial technology. One of those new areas is “microinvesting;” there’s never been a better time to be a beginning investor with only a small amount of cash flow available to invest. No longer must you have thousands of dollars to open an investment account or millions of dollars to receive professional investment advice. While of course it is preferable to invest a large amount of money each month for your retirement or other investing goals, sometimes that’s simply not possible. Often it’s not possible for graduate students and postdocs, yet these groups are just as intensely interested in investing as anyone else – more so, I’d wager. This post details how to start investing with just five dollars per month (or whatever amount of money you can spare right now).

invest just five dollars per month

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Why It’s Beneficial to Invest Just Five Dollars per Month

Thanks to the power of compound interest, a small amount of money given a long amount of time can turn into a large amount of money. That means that any amount of money you can put away when you are younger is going to make a significant difference to your wealth in retirement. It’s much, much, much better to invest $5/month than $0/month when you have decades to let it grow.

Now, you’re not going to fund your entire retirement with just a few dollars per month. But starting small is perfectly acceptable when your income is suppressed during your PhD training or you are otherwise in a financially challenging circumstance. Get started now with whatever amount you can, and increase your savings rate when your income increases and/or expenses decrease.

For example, if you contributed $5/month to an investment account over 5 years and received an 8% average annual rate of return, you’d end that time period with $367. Leave that $367 invested with an 8% rate of return for 50 years, and your ending balance is just shy of $20,000. I won’t sugar-coat it: That amount of money isn’t going to get you too far in your old age. But it is $20k better than taking no action.

Further reading:

In addition to the money itself, I see two compelling reasons to start investing even with only five dollars per month:

1) Committing to an investment plan creates a habit and changes your self-identity. If you invest five dollars per month, you become an “investor.” It’s part of who you are. The positive financial habit of committing to a monthly savings rate is a very powerful one to cultivate early on in life.

2) Once you get started, it’s easy to increase. The biggest hurdle is going from investing $0/month to $5/month, not from $5/month to $100/month. If you self-identify as an investor, you are naturally going to look for ways to increase your rate of investment. When you complete your training and move into a better-paid position, you will be ready and raring to save more each month, and you’ll already have the infrastructure in place. You’ll only be a few clicks away from investing serious money each month instead of having to wrestle with all the decisions and setting everything up at the same time that you’re dealing with a job transition.

Why It’s Challenging to Invest Just Five Dollars per Month

Until a few years ago, the only way to invest a small amount of money each month and be well-diversified was to use a mutual fund. Unfortunately, to open a brokerage account in which you could buy mutual funds usually took at least $1,000 if not several thousand dollars. Even the brokerage firms that waived their minimum balances usually required an ongoing investment commitment on the order of $50 or $100/month. That barrier can seem prohibitively high to some people; instead of saving up cash for months or years to meet the minimum balance, I imagine many people gave up on the idea of investing.

Further reading: Brokerage and IRA Account Minimums

Now, however, several investing platforms use fractional ETF shares to solve this issue. The platform buys whole shares of ETFs but sells fractions to its users. In this way, a user can purchase one or more ETFs in whatever increments she likes, and there is often no minimum balance required to open the account.

(I have only included in my list below microinvesting platforms that use ETFs. Robinhood is another investing platform that I ran across many times while researching this article because it is a fee-free platform. However, it is designed for investing in individual stocks. You have to invest a lot of money to create a diversified stock portfolio through buying individual stocks. You can buy ETFs through Robinhood but not fractional shares, so that is not compatible with investing just $5 per month. I’ve decided to exclude Robinhood from my list below because it inherently encourages active investing. Of course, if that’s your preferred investing strategy and/or you have a larger amount of money to invest, Robinhood is well worth considering.)

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The Best Platforms For Investing Just Five Dollars per Month

I reviewed a number of fintech microinvesting platforms for this article, though I do not claim that it is comprehensive. I am not a customer/don’t have a relationship with any of these platforms, so I’ve drawn this information from the company websites and reviews rather than personal experience or communications.

Acorns

Acorns is probably the best-known microinvesting platform. Its concept is to round up each of your purchases to the next whole dollar and invest the change. You can also set up a recurring investment.

Fee structure: $1/month for under $5,000 (free for students for 4 years) + ETF expense ratios
IRA option: Coming “early 2018”
Portfolio creation: Suggests a portfolio of ETFs after receiving user input

WiseBanyan

WiseBanyan calls itself the “first free financial advisor.” (They earn money through upselling products and services to their clients.) The service asks you a few questions and uses Modern Portfolio Theory to construct a passive portfolio appropriate for you.

Fee structure: Only the expense ratios of the underlying funds
IRA option: Yes
Portfolio creation: Uses low-fee index ETFs according to Modern Portfolio Theory after you input data for its investor profile

Stash

Stash allows the user to choose among low-cost ETFs to create her own portfolio. The expense ratios on the ETFs are low, and Stash can recommend certain “themed” combinations of ETFs.

Fee structure: $1/month + ETF expense ratios
IRA option: In beta ($2/mo)
Portfolio creation: The user creates his own portfolio from among 40 pre-selected ETFs

Clink

Clink bills itself as more a savings app than an investing app. There is no minimum investment, but if you want to use the scheduler the minimum is $1/day. Clink invests your money in Vanguard ETFs according to Modern Portfolio Theory (a passive strategy).

Fee structure: $1/mo when balance is under $5,000 + ETF expense ratios
IRA option: No
Portfolio creation: Combines your risk tolerance with Modern Portfolio Theory to create an asset allocation of six Vanguard ETFs

In addition to these companies that are explicitly designed for microinvesting, you could also consider other brokerage firms that have wider array of financial services that includes microinvesting. For example, Betterment is a roboadvisor and has no account size minimums. If you do have a lump sum available to invest, though only $5 per month on an ongoing basis to contribute, you could consider other traditional low-cost brokerage firms like Vanguard, Fidelity, or Charles Schwab (and look around for one that will waive its minimum).

What Are the Downsides to Using a Microinvesting Platform?

The microinvesting platforms I listed above are providing a great service to a previously underserved population, and they are to be commended for that. But in order to make it possible, they have engaged in several trade-offs that wouldn’t be necessary with larger investment balances.

1) The Investment Choices Are Severely Limited

The platforms diversify your money into ETFs, but they offer only a small number of ETFs, and I suspect only a few ultimate combinations of those ETFs depending on the user’s input. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you simply want a generally appropriate asset allocation and are not too concerned with the exact underlying funds used or the exact percentages, having those limited choices might even be advantageous. But if you want to design your own asset allocation or choose among the other thousands of funds possible, you probably won’t be too happy with these platforms.

2) The Fees Are Sky-High

There are two types of fees typically associated with owning investments. The first is due to the cost owning and transacting the investments themselves. When we are talking about an ETF, this fee is called the expense ratio and is expressed as a percentage of your investment balance. Each of the four platforms above have this fee, and it is typically quite low, approximately 0.1%. If you ever see an expense ratio that is around 1%, this is considered high and a red flag that the fund is actively managed.

The second type of fee is for administering the plan or platform itself. For reference, a full-service fee-only human financial advisor charges approximately 1%.

Three of the microinvesting platforms in my list above charge at least a $1 per month fee of the second kind. That doesn’t sound like a lot of money in absolute terms, but the whole reason we’re talking about microinvesting is because small amounts of money are worth paying attention to. If you are investing just five dollars per month, a one dollar per month fee is a staggering 20% of your savings rate. This kind of fee absolutely cripples your investing efforts. I would not be at all surprised if you lost money overall almost every year if you were investing just five dollars per month because the long-term average annual return of the stock market is approximately 10%.

Of course, you can mitigate this problem by using WiseBanyan or another platform that doesn’t charge a fee (e.g., if you are a student and can have the fee waived) or by investing more money each month.

3) They May Not Offer an IRA

Only one of the above platforms currently offers an IRA investing option to all its users. While it is great to invest outside of an IRA, if you are saving for retirement using an IRA is optimal. Plus, your IRA contribution room disappears every year. If you use a microinvesting platform for a few years as a means to save enough to open an IRA with a larger lump sum, keep in mind that your contribution room disappears with each year. It would be better to contribute to an IRA all along instead of doing it in one lump sum at the end because it would use up so much of your contribution room in the last year.

Further reading:

4) You May Develop a Sense of Complacency

I’m trying to thread a needle here: I want to encourage you to invest any small amount of money you can right now while emphasizing that to reach financial independence or retire someday $5 per month is not nearly a high enough investing rate long-term.

If investing just five dollars per month is truly all you can do right now, go for it. But do not allow yourself to think you can keep your savings rate that low when your financial circumstances change. I want you to jump that rate up by about two orders of magnitude as soon as you are able!

Doing something is better than doing nothing, but over time you must move from doing something to doing the best thing or the sufficient thing.

Further listening: Ask Dave: Micro-Investing Apps?

How to Invest When You Have More Money

As of now, I do not think that microinvesting platforms are on par with other brokerage firms and investing platforms that require lump sums to open accounts or higher ongoing investment rates. It’s fine to start out investing with a microinvesting platform, depending on your goals, but as soon as you are able, I think you should switch to a brokerage firm that offers a wider array of investments, lower fees, and IRAs. All of the advantages of the microinvesting platforms (aside from the zero minimums) – low-cost ETF investing, asset allocation recommendations – can be found at a brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, or Charles Schwab. Plus, start-ups like these fin tech platforms often change their business models or fold, so even if you like your solution right now it might not be around forever.

When you do make that switch, be sure to choose a diversified, passive, low-cost strategy appropriate to your goals. And increase your savings rate!

If I were in a position to invest only five dollars per month, among the microinvesting platforms I looked at I would sign up for WiseBanyan. Because it doesn’t charge a platform fee on top of the ETF expense ratings and it offers IRAs, I think it gives you the best chance at actually readying you to invest for the long-term. But you also have to consider that it uses a freemium model, which has not yet been proven sustainable in the financial sector.

Don’t Make These Investing Mistakes

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Just as useful as knowing what to do with respect to investing is knowing what not to do. In fact, some of the core investing principles that I teach involve pitfalls to avoid: don’t pay high fees, don’t jump in and out of the market, don’t delay, etc. This article details 11 common investor behaviors and choices that are detrimental. Don’t make these investing mistakes!

investing mistakes

Wait to Get Started

There’s a common aphorism on investing: “It’s not timing the market, it’s time in the market.” We’ll get to market timing as an investing mistake later in this post; for now focus on the time in the market.

Once you are financially and mentally ready to invest, get in the game! Do not wait on the sidelines for months or years on end! On average, waiting means you’ll miss out on gains. The math of the power of compound interest show you just how damaging it is to miss out on even a year of returns.

Remember my example showing how the investments you make just during graduate school can translate to $1,000,000 in retirement? Instead, let’s say that you invested over your final four years of grad school instead of five. Your ending balance drops by $225,000!

Further reading:

And on that note, one particular mistake that might cause you to wait to get started is that you…

Get Stuck in Analysis Paralysis

I’ve made this mistake more than once with my investments! Investing is an intimidating subject to approach for a novice. But investing isn’t complicated! (Some people like to make it (seem) complicated, but that isn’t better than a simple approach.) I’ll boil it down for a long-term goal like retirement: Buy a stock index fund and hold it until you need the money in retirement.

OK maybe you want a little more detail on that, but you don’t need much more before you get started! Really, you can learn all you need to know about investing in a couple hours. (If you’re super interested, keep going, of course, but you don’t have to.) After that, just start! You can refine and improve your strategy along the way if you want to as you learn more.

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Think You (or Your Broker) Knows Better than the Market

Think you can beat the market or place your money with the person who can? Think again. After costs are taken into account, in a given year the vast majority of both individual investors and professional fund managers fail to even match the returns of the broad market sector they’re invested in. And to beat it year after year after year? Vanishingly rare.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) states that it’s impossible to beat the market because share prices always account for all known information about each investment. There are no market inefficiencies to exploit through market timing or precise selection of individual investments.

The EMH is a theory and up for debate, but there is little evidence that contradicts it. Even the most well-known investor in our time to consistently beat the market, Warren Buffet, recommends the S&P 500 index fund, which simply tries to represent the market sector of large-capitalization stocks (source).

This is good news for those prone to the previous mistakes: there is little analysis needed to invest in index funds, and therefore you can skip the paralysis and jump right in.

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Save Too Little

According to the EMH, you can’t control your investment outcome; the best you can do is match your (sub-)asset class of choice. What you can dial in are costs (more on that later) and your savings rate.

Given a certain rate of return on your investments, what’s the best way to double the amount of money you have in retirement? Save twice as much. Your savings rate is a linear scaling factor in the math of compound interest.

If your goal is to fund your retirement/become financially independent, you need to build up a very large nest egg. It takes decades to save what you need and to allow compound interest to work its magic. So in addition to starting early, save at a very healthy clip: 10% of your gross income is a great goal if you start in your 20s, more if you start in your 30s.

Bonus: The higher your savings rate, the smaller your goal savings amount. If you want to reach financial independence, you should save up approximately 25 times your yearly living expenses (following the 4% safe withdrawal rate). The more you reduce your living expenses, the smaller the nest egg is that you require to retire and the faster you’re able to save up to reach it. For example (given certain assumptions), increasing your retirement savings rate from 15 to 20% means that you can reach financial independence 6 years sooner. Jumping your savings rate up to 30% shaves an additional 9 years.

Further reading: The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement

I know a retirement savings rate of 10-15% a big ask while you’re in grad school or a postdoc. If starting early and saving only a little have to play off against each other, start early with whatever rate you can. Just know that you’ll need to jump it up when your income increases.

Get Sucked in by Gimmicky Fintech

One of the great advances in personal finance in the last several years is the explosion of “fintech” or financial technology. Fintech has enabled small investors to access some services and benefits that were only previously available to higher net worth investors because financial advisors have been able to scale their services.

These fintech platforms are now heavily advertising to their new potential clients, i.e., you. While more choices for regular people with respect to investing is a good thing, this heavy advertising environment for the new technology has perhaps crowded out the choices that were and are still available for those same investors, which may in fact be the more appropriate.

For example, the rise of microinvesting platforms that enable people to invest as little as a few dollars per month might give the impression that 1) those platforms are the only ones available for beginning investors or 2) it is sufficient to invest only a few dollars per month. Believing either of those premises is detrimental to the investor.

Another example is roboadvising services. Roboadvisors are a lower-cost, lower-touch substitute for full-service human financial advisors. While they might represent a less expensive but sufficient alternative for a person who would otherwise use a financial advisor, they are a more expensive (i.e., possibly wasteful) alternative for someone who could manage his own investments just fine (the DIY approach) if he knew it was an option. (It’s an option! An easy one! Your brokerage firm will almost certainly make an asset allocation recommendation to you for free if that’s all you’re looking for.)

Pay Too Much or Too Little Attention

On the spectrum of how much attention you should pay to your investments, there is a wide range of what is appropriate. Only the extremes will get you into trouble.

You don’t need to pay a whole lot of attention to your long-term investments. If it stresses you out to see your balance fluctuate daily due to a choppy stock market – and especially if paying that close attention will cause you to try to time the market – force yourself to tune out. You don’t need to check your account balances or investment news daily.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t go years between check-ins, either. You do need to make sure that your investments are doing basically what you expected they would and that they are still appropriate for your goals. A quarterly check-in is sufficient for long-term investments.

Time the Market

One of the gravest investing mistakes that I’ve already hinted at is market timing, which is when you attempt to jump in or out of a market at just the right time to make a killing or avoid a staggering loss.

Guess what? It’s a super ineffective strategy, way worse than just staying invested or steadily adding to your investments. This again relates to the EMH. Any insight you might think you have about an impending skyrocketing or plummeting of the market has already occurred to a zillion other people and been priced in.

You might think you’re buying low and selling high or being fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful, but most of the time you’re probably just doing yourself a disservice. Besides, even if you guess right once and get out at the right time or in at the right time, you have to be right again to get back in/out!

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Be Undiversified

One of the core tenants of modern portfolio theory is diversification. This means that instead of owning one investment of a type, e.g., one stock, you should own a collection of that type of investment. It’s the basic principle of not putting all your eggs in one basket. You never know which stock is going to be a huge winner and which will go to zero. Instead of picking only one or a handful, own a few tens or a few hundreds and spread out the risk.

One of the sneaky ways to become undiversified is through employer stock that you are given or able to purchase at a discount. If you have a high percentage of your portfolio (e.g., > 10%) tied up in employer stock, then not only is your job at risk if the company falters but much of your savings as well!

Pay Too Much in Fees

Fees, just like taxes, are a drag on your rate of return on investment. Instead of getting a 8% average annual rate of return, for example, fees or taxes might knock you down to 7.5, 7, or even 6%! That makes an enormous difference over the decades – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars!

If we use tax-advantaged retirement accounts to avoid taxes on our retirement savings, doesn’t it also make sense that we should minimize our fees?

Sure, it would be worthwhile to pay higher fees if you actually got better investment returns, but, after accounting for fees, approximately 80% of actively managed funds underperform similar passively managed funds.

The way that you can keep an eye on fees is through a fund’s expense ratio. That’s a single number that expresses the all-in costs of owning the fund in terms of a percentage. A very high-fee fund will have an expense ratio of 1% or even higher, whereas a low-fee fund would have an expense ratio of a couple tenths of a percent or even below 0.1%.

Mix Investing with Insurance

A very expensive investing mistake is to mix investing with insurance though a whole life or universal life insurance policy. The selling point is that you build up money in an investment product as you pay your insurance premiums.

However, what you might not realize as you are being pitched such a product is that your premiums are several times or even an order of magnitude higher than they would be for the same amount of term life insurance, and the investment product doesn’t give you great returns, either.

It’s much less expensive to buy term life insurance (the same sort you have on your car – expiring after a set length of time) and invest the rest of the money you would have spent on the premium on your own. It’s very likely that you’ll end up with more money after decades of using that method.

After all, you don’t actually need life insurance for your whole life – just until you reach financial independence. And that day will come a lot faster if you don’t mix insurance with investing.

Basically, the only people who recommend mixing investing with insurance are those who sell that kind of product. Speaking of which…

Blindly Take the Recommendation of Someone Earning a Commission

I’ve met a few graduate students with no need for life insurance at all who own whole/universal life insurance policies. And it was easy for me to correctly guess why: a family or friend had started selling those products.

There are three types of financial advisers, differentiated by how they are paid.

With two of them, it’s transparent how they are paid. One type charges you straight up for their time and will help you create a financial plan. The other type charges you a percentage of your portfolio to manage your money for you. These two types are usually held to a fiduciary standard, which means they are ethically bound to give you the best financial advice for your situation.

The kind that will meet with you for free is likely to make their money through commissions on the products they sell you. They are not fiduciaries. That’s not to say that they will behave unethically, just that they are not required to be objective in their recommendations. They are permitted to pitch you the product that earns them the highest commission as long as it’s “suitable.” And that’s how a grad student with no need for life insurance ends up with a whole/universal life policy.

The caution against blindly taking the advice of someone earning a commission applies to more than just financial advisors. Affiliate advertising is incredibly widespread right now. You may learn about a product from a content creator (e.g., website, podcast) whom you respect. It’s quite likely that the person will earn money if you buy it through their link/promo code. (I used to be an affiliate myself for a few products through a prior website.) Again, earning a commission doesn’t necessarily mean the person is pushing a bad product or is behaving unethically, but you just have to recognize that it is a form of advertising and you should be a savvy consumer. It’s very difficult to claim to be completely objective when there is a commission in the line.

How to Financially Manage Your NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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

NSF GRFP stipend

The NSF GRFP’s Negotiation Power

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

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

Independence

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

Additional Funding

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

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

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

For Prospective Graduate Students

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

Further reading: Vote with Your Feet, Prospective Graduate Students

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

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Budgeting with Your Fellowship Income

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

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

Accelerate Progress on Financial Goals

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

Preparing for the Post-Fellowship Income Drop

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

Budgeting with an Irregular Income

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

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

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

Income Tax Implications of the NSF GRFP

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

Further reading:

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

Tax Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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Quarterly Estimated Tax

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

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

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

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

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

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

This upcoming weekend I’m running an online workshop to help fellows file quarterly estimated tax. This is my first time giving the workshop, but if it goes well I plan to repeat it at least twice per year. If you would like to join my mailing list to be notified about future iterations of this workshop, please enter your information in the form immediately following this paragraph or at the end of the article.

Investing Implications of the NSF GRFP

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

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The downside of receiving the NSF GRF is that the stipend is not considered “taxable compensation” or “earned income.” It is taxable income, as discussed in the previous section, but it is not “compensation” or “earned.” If you receive only fellowship income in the course of a calendar year (and you’re not married to someone with taxable compensation/earned income), you become ineligible for certain tax benefits. The lost benefit that most commonly concerns graduate students is the ability to contribute to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA).

Further reading:

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

The catch is that you (or your spouse) must have taxable compensation during a calendar year for you to contribute to an IRA for the year. So if you go an entire calendar year with only fellowship income (you don’t have compensatory income from an assistantship or outside job and you’re not married to someone with taxable compensation), in that year you’re not eligible to make any IRA contributions.

It’s a catch-22: While you are likely more financially capable than ever of investing for the long term, you’re barred from doing so in a tax-advantaged retirement account.

I don’t think your inability to contribute to an IRA should stop you from working on your financial goals. It may be that you choose to prioritize another goal over retirement savings as a result of not being able to use an IRA, e.g., paying down student loans. But if saving for retirement is your top priority, you should pursue it; just use a taxable account instead of an IRA during any years of ineligibility.

Your tax burden can actually be quite low during grad school if you choose a long-term, low-turnover investing strategy. If you are single and your income in 2018 is below $38,600, your long-term capital gains and qualified dividends will be taxed at 0% at the federal level (you may still owe state and local tax). So it’s really not too bad to save in a taxable account as long as your income stays low. When you have access to an IRA or other tax-advantaged retirement account, you can probably shift your taxable assets into that account time to maximize the growth rate in the long term.

Further reading: Fellowship Recipients Can Save for Retirement Outside an IRA

What other questions do you have about financially managing your NSF GRF stipend?

Whether You Save During Grad School Can Have a $1,000,000 Effect on Your Retirement

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Today I’m sharing with you a graph that I show during “The Graduate Student’s Guide to Personal Finance.” It’s always shocking to the audience. It motivates some people to save during grad school and some people think it’s unreasonable; I’ll break all of that down here.

save during grad school

The point of this graph is to illustrate the power of compound interest, which roughly translates to investment returns. (More on that ‘roughly’ later!) I used Illuminations to create the graph.

Here’s the toy example:

Alana receives a $30,000 per year stipend and she saves 10% of it consistently into an IRA that is invested for her retirement (i.e., rather aggressively). So she is saving $250/month every month throughout her five years in graduate school. Her investments generate an average annual rate of return of 8%.

Over those five years, Alana puts in $15,000 and her ending balance is $18,369.21. So that’s cool and all – an extra $3k.

But then, she keeps the money invested for the same average rate of return for the next fifty years. So if she graduates when she’s 30, she checks her balance again at age 80. Remember, she’s not making additional contributions to this money at all – it’s just what she saved during grad school.

Alana’s investment balance has grown to a breath-taking $989,688.35! Her diligence to save during grad school translates to an extra $1M in retirement!!

I really want you to let that exercise sink in. That is the power of compound interest. Even a modest amount of money, given enough time and a high enough rate of return, can turn into an enormous amount of money! That is why any small amount of money that you can invest during grad school will have a huge impact on your long-term financial wellbeing.

I hope you had a “wow” moment there and are motivated to start investing or increase your investing (or pay off debt). I’m going to break down the exercise now to address the common questions and objections that I hear.

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1) It’s unreasonable for a grad student to save $250/month.

Whether or not saving $250/month is possible or reasonable is highly individual and depends both on the grad student’s income (usually a stipend rate set by the university/department) and personal living expenses. $250 is absolutely possible for many grad students (by the end of our PhDs – after lots of optimization – my husband and I were saving about $800/month together), and it’s not for others. Sometimes stipends are just too low, the local cost of living is just too high, or you have a challenging situation like paying off a lot of debt or supporting family members.

I do think 10% or $250/month are good benchmarks for grad students who have the ability to save. If they’re not saving that much yet, this illustration should encourage them to find a way to save more. If they’re already at that level, they can feel good about their efforts and maybe push for more as well.

The point of the exercise is not to say you have to save $250/month or it’s all useless. It’s to illustrate that saving early – whether it’s $250/month or $25/month, whether it’s every month or in one lump sum – has an incredible impact on your wealth over the long term. So any amount you can invest during grad school is wonderful. At just $25/month, that ending balance is nearly $100,000 – an amazing amount of money as well!

2) A guaranteed 8% rate of return isn’t available.

The objection to the 8% average rate of return figure is two-fold: 1) Why 8%? 2) You can’t get a high fixed rate of return in today’s market.

The reason investment returns are illustrated using compound interest is to make the math easier and keep the point clear. If you looked at models that include how the stock market really behaves, they get complicated and difficult to parse. You don’t end up with a nice single value but rather a distribution of possible results. There is a chance (minuscule over long periods of time, but non-zero) that you could lose all your money. There is an equally small chance that you end up a billionaire. And everything in between. But somewhere in the big fat middle of that distribution is the answer that a clean compound interest calculation gets you to.

The point of the exercise is not to predict exactly how much money you’re going to end up with in retirement down to the cent. It’s to show you the scale of change that’s possible over a long period of time with a reasonably high rate of return and motivate you to harness the power of compound interest.

If you look at enough of these types of compound interest examples, you’ll see a few different interest rates chosen. When we’re talking about stock investments, 8% is on the modest side. The long-term average return for the total stock market is often pegged at 10%, so that’s a popular figure. Dave Ramsey likes to use 12%. I chose 8% because it’s reflective of a largely-but-not-completely stock investment portfolio, which is appropriate for aggressive long-term investing (not speculating). It’s also pretty unlikely that you would have a single expected average rate of return over 50 years, as the standard advice is to move toward more conservative investments as retirement draws nearer, but the illustration ignores that detail as well. If the stock market future more or less resembles its past, 8% is a very achievable long-term average rate.

To really blow your mind, the same example above with a 12% rate of return gives an ending balance of $7,192,995.42. So this rate of return choice really matters to the illustration, and even the breath-taking ending balance I got to is a conservative example of the power of compound interest.

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3) I don’t want to wait 50 years to retire.

I actually have never heard this objection from an audience member, but it’s one I have in my own mind. When I break the news that we’re looking at a 50-year compounding period, I say “So if you get out of grad school when you’re 30, you’re now 80. But don’t worry because by then 80 will be the new 50.” There’s some truth to that; people are living longer, and Ray Kurzweil thinks that by 2029 it may be possible to live forever.

There’s no special reason to use 50 years in this example, except that it’s a round number that when added to a grad student’s age puts them past the current retirement age but probably still kicking. The point is that the more years you give compound interest to work, the more impressive the outcome. It really does matter whether you start saving during grad school or after! If you’re shooting for a specific number that represents financial independence, starting earlier gets you there earlier.

4) You’re not accounting for inflation.

Good catch! $1M in today’s money is very different from $1M in 2067 money. It won’t seem nearly so impressive at that point. But that should not stop you from saving. If anything, the existence of long-term inflation (in the US, a bit higher than 3% annually on average) argues for more saving and more aggressive investing. You are losing purchasing power if you keep it in cash and barely maintaining it using bonds.

5) Can’t I achieve the same result by maxing out my 401(k) in my first year with a real job?

I fielded this question only once, and it was during my very first seminar ever. And it’s a great one. My argument is that you come out of grad school with $18k in savings and continue to invest that for 50 years. Currently, the maximum someone under the age of 50 can contribute to a 401(k) is $18,000 per year. The point is correct: If you just max out your 401(k) in your first year with a real job and keep it invested for 50 years, you get the same outcome as you would by saving that $250/month all through grad school. The compound interest math is identical.

But guess what’s even better? Saving $250/month during grad school and maxing out your 401(k) in your first year with a real job – and every year after. And who is more likely to max out their 401(k) (no mean feat!): someone who has never saved a dime or someone who is already in the habit of saving, even in a challenging time of life like grad school?

Becoming a mega-saver with your first real job is a great step. But it doesn’t erase the opportunity you have to start investing during grad school. You can have your $1M in retirement from that first year’s 401(k) and your $1M from grad school.

Why the Roth IRA Is the Ideal Long-Term Savings Vehicle for a Grad Student

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You’re a graduate student with the means and desire to save for your future. What is the best way to do so? If you have taxable compensation, the Roth IRA is an awesome choice. IRAs confer long-term tax advantages so your money grows at its maximum possible rate. The Roth version of an IRA is very well-suited for people who currently have a lower income than they expect to have in retirement. And if you decide that your goal is not saving for retirement after all, you can still access your money!

Further reading: Even Grad Students Should Have a Roth IRA


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Tax Advantage of the IRA

If you keep your investments in a taxable account, whenever a taxable event occurs (like you sell an investment or receive a dividend) you will have to pay tax. Year after year, those taxes erode the gains in your account. In any given year, this may seem like a nibble, but when you consider that you will stay invested for decades, taxes become quite a big bite.

As a simplified example, compare the account balances of two people who invest $5,000 per year at a 10% rate of return over 40 years. The person whose account is not subject to tax ends with $2,434,259.06. The person who pays a 20% tax on the gains yearly ends with $1,398,905.20, 43% less!

The way to keep from paying tax on the gains in your account is to use a tax-advantaged retirement account. This deal does presume that you will not access your money until retirement (exceptions are below). There are many types of tax-advantaged retirement accounts out there, but they all depend on your workplace offering them to you or you being self-employed. Virtually no universities extend their 403(b) benefits to graduate students. Luckily, there is one tax-advantaged retirement account that is independent of your workplace or self-employment income, which is the IRA (Individual Retirement Arrangement).

The IRA is a wonderful vehicle to invest through. As it is independent, you can open this type of account at just about any brokerage firm and can put just about any type of investment inside of it. The world is your oyster when it comes to investment choice inside an IRA. In 2017, you can contribute up to $5,500 per year to an IRA.

There is one catch that will trip up some graduate students. You can only contribute taxable compensation to an IRA (yours or your spouse’s). With respect to your grad student stipend income, if you receive a W-2, you have taxable compensation, and if you do not, you don’t.

Further reading: Fellowship Recipients Can Save for Retirement Outside an IRA

Pay Tax Now, Not Later with the Roth

Tax-advantaged accounts currently come in two flavors: traditional and Roth. The main difference between the two is when you pay income tax on your money. While your money is inside the IRA, it grows tax-free, as discussed above. But you also get a tax break upon either contribution to or withdrawal from the account.

With a traditional IRA, you take an income tax deduction on the money you contribute to the account and pay ordinary income tax on the distributions you take in retirement. With a Roth IRA, you pay your full income tax on the money you contribute and do not pay income tax on the distributions.

When choosing between the traditional and Roth, the idea is to pay tax when you will be in a lower tax bracket. The typical graduate student has a low income during graduate school but expects a higher income later in life and in retirement. Therefore, the Roth option is the more popular for graduate students.

The Roth promises that you will pay tax on your IRA contribution now at your marginal income tax rate (likely 15% or lower) and never pay tax on that money again, no matter how much your investments grow!

Flexibility for Non-Retirement Goals

I’m an advocate of clearly defining your goals and choosing investments appropriate to your time horizon. For this reason, I think that you should only contribute to an IRA if you intend to use the money in retirement. But the Roth IRA rules allow for some flexibility. If the idea of absolutely not being able to use your investments for anything other than retirement is preventing you from starting to invest, you should know that you can access much of the money in your Roth IRA early should you change your mind about your goal.

Usually, when you pull money out of an IRA early, the distribution is subject to a 10% penalty. However, there are big exception categories for the Roth IRA. You can remove the contributions you made to your Roth IRA at any time without penalty. When it comes to your earnings, your distribution becomes qualified and therefore not penalized if you use it for the purchase of a first home (up to $10,000) or for higher education expenses.

So if you want to invest for the long-term but the idea of absolutely not being able to touch your money until retirement puts you off, rest easy that the Roth IRA is a great option for you. If your financial goals change in the next few years, you do have the ability to use the money in your Roth IRA for something other than retirement.

Between the tax-advantaged status, the option to pay tax now at a low rate and never again, and its flexibility to be used for multiple goals, the Roth IRA is just about a perfect retirement investing vehicle for graduate students! The only things I would change about it are: 1) fellowship stipends would be eligible to be contributed and 2) the contribution limits would be higher. But grad students with taxable compensation have very good reasons to contribute to a Roth IRA