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This PhD Student-Nurse Is Confident in Her Self-Worth

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In this episode, Emily interviews Brenda Olmos, a nurse practitioner and rising third-year PhD student in nursing. A first-generation college student who grew up without financial stability, Brenda was debt-averse throughout college and her master’s degree and started building wealth in her 20s through investing and real estate, eventually aligning with the FIRE movement. When she decided to pursue a PhD in her late 20s, she held out for an online program with an excellent culture and funding package. Thanks to her lucrative outside work, Brenda has continued to invest consistently during her PhD, although more slowly than she did pre-PhD. Brenda’s strong financial position and career optionality have set her up well for a fulfilling post-PhD career.

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Teaser

00:00 Brenda: It’s so cool to like see yourself grow in ways that you never thought you could. And financially like, okay, maybe I’m taking like a 50 or $60,000 per year cut. But in the course of my life, like is three years really going to matter that much, you know? And how much more will my life be enriched by having this degree? Like what doors will it open for me? Whether they’re monetary or not is not really the point for me anymore. And that’s something that I was able to achieve in my twenties.

Introduction

00:37 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 13, Episode 2, and today my guest is Brenda Olmos, a nurse practitioner and rising third-year PhD student in nursing. A first-generation college student who grew up without financial stability, Brenda was debt-averse throughout college and her master’s degree and started building wealth in her 20s through investing and real estate, eventually aligning with the FIRE movement. When she decided to pursue a PhD in her late 20s, she held out for an online program with an excellent culture and funding package. Thanks to her lucrative outside work, Brenda has continued to invest consistently during her PhD, although more slowly than she did pre-PhD. Brenda’s strong financial position and career optionality have set her up well for a fulfilling post-PhD career.

01:56 Emily: Would you please help me out with something? I want to record six podcast interviews this fall to be published over approximately the next six months. Will you consider being a guest? As a listener, I’m sure you have something to say about money as a PhD or PhD-to-be! Simply fill out the Google Form at PFforPhDs.com/podcastvolunteer/ to get the ball rolling. Alternatively, if you have someone in mind who you’d like to hear me interview, please connect me with that person over email or Twitter! I really appreciate it! Let’s keep the podcast going strong! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s13e2/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Brenda Olmos.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:52 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today someone I know from Fintwit, Brenda Olmos. She is a rising third-year PhD student at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She’s actually doing a PhD in nursing, so a very different kind of PhD student than we’ve had on here before. Not only that, her program is online, so she lives in Austin, Texas. So, Brenda, I’m so happy to have you on the podcast and get to have a deep-dive conversation with you. Will you please tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself?

03:20 Brenda: Sure! Hello everyone. My name’s Brenda Olmos. And, like Emily said, I live in Austin, Texas, and I’ve grown up in this area of central Texas and really enjoy living here. So, when I was searching for PhD programs, I was definitely searching for distance programs. And that’s the case about me being in an online PhD program. I grew up, like I said, here in central Texas, and I went to UT Austin for my undergraduate in nursing degree. Six years later, I graduated with my Master’s in Nursing as a family nurse practitioner. So, I had about six years of experience as a registered nurse at the bedside, which means I basically worked in inpatient hospital settings, taking care of people who were acutely ill. And then I chose to leave that setting when I became a nurse practitioner and I worked in an outpatient primary care setting for older people.

04:11 Brenda: So, I’m a geriatric nurse. And I found a scholarship in 2019 for geriatric nursing research. And I was kind of at a point in my life where I was satisfied with my career, and I found it rewarding. I found my work very gratifying, but I felt that my potential wasn’t really maximized in that role, that I made a difference one-on-one with patients, but that I wanted to make a difference at a larger scale. And in nursing, there are two paths for a doctorate degree. There’s a Doctorate in Nursing Practice, which is a DNP, and a lot of nurses do that because they want to make immediate change, like in administration or policy. And then there’s the PhD, which is the Doctor of Philosophy. And that’s more of a research-based doctorate, like most other PhDs in which you focus on generating new knowledge and you learn the research process.

05:07 Brenda: And I actually had really great mentors, which caused me to lean towards the PhD. And I chose the PhD in nursing because I felt that I wanted to have the doctorate that was universally recognized as a terminal degree and as a doctorate, whereas a DNP is very specific to nursing. I wanted to have something that, you know, the three letters that mean something to everybody <laugh> in the world, right? So, that’s kind of been my trajectory. I worked as a nurse practitioner for three years, full-time from 2017 to 2020. And then in 2020, I had been accepted to the PhD program. I was still kind of on the fence about it because I was making six figures as a nurse practitioner. And even though I didn’t know at the time that I had won this scholarship, I was like, I don’t know, this is a big leap to take. And then the pandemic hit and that took away so much of the joy of my work. And so much of the compensation that I realized I’m ready to go do something different. So, I’ve been in my PhD program since August of 2020. And like you said, I’m going into my third year now.

06:13 Emily: Wow. I love when I get someone on the podcast who has really, really thought deeply about their career and the trajectory of it and chosen, after all of that, to go into a PhD program. I don’t want be, you know, too critical of people who went like directly from undergrad down that path. I went almost directly from undergrad, but I just think it takes on a different tone. You have more focus in your research usually with all that like background work experience, and especially for you having a very, you know, very solid, super lucrative like career leading into that and you just really thought about, well, what do I want in my life? How do I want to be spending my time? That’s actually a lot of what we’ll be talking about today.

06:51 Emily: And I just want to kind of frame this for the listener a little bit that you know, Brenda’s had, as we just said of really different career trajectory than probably most people who are listening, probably the vast majority of people who are listening. And so once we get to start, you know, talking about Brenda’s finances, you’re going to see a pretty rosy picture. And it is of course, largely due to having that career in her twenties. But I don’t want you to like dismiss this episode as like, you’re never going to learn anything from it because you’re not in the same kind of position that Brenda was, because I still think there’s going to be something here, some strategy, some mindset, especially, that you can learn from. So, keep with us even though it may be a little bit of a different kind of story.

07:29 Brenda: And I do want to add to that that not every nurse is in my position, right? Like I had a really great scholarship for undergrad. Probably about 75% of my undergrad degree was paid for through scholarships and grants. I paid for my master’s degree, partially through hospital tuition reimbursement, and partially by working full-time. But I had classmates who took out a hundred thousand dollars for two years of their master’s program, and they’re paying that off now, right? So, I just want to be transparent about the fact that like, don’t go up to every nurse and be like, oh my God, you have no debt and you make a ton of money. Like, no, I was very strategic about the way that I got my education and I was always debt-averse. And so, I think that’s also important to point out.

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

08:14 Emily: Yeah. Because I next want to kind of talk about you discovering the FIRE movement, which you did prior to starting the PhD program, but you had already, as you just said, taken some, you know, FIRE-like steps leading up to that, by being debt-averse, by working a lot while you’re in school, by choosing an employer who’s going to give you tuition reimbursement and so forth. So like, you were already setting yourself up well financially, even if you hadn’t, you know, discovered that particular movement. But let’s go to that like moment when you discovered the FIRE movement and what appealed to you about it? Like, why did you decide to start going that route?

08:45 Brenda: Yeah, I think a lot of it was rooted in, like for many of us, the way that we grew up around money, right? Like the beliefs that were planted in our minds as young kids. And for me, and I’ve talked about this in BiggerPockets and in some other podcasts, is that I had so much financial instability growing up and I knew so much about my parents’ finances and I knew the lows and I knew the highs. And I had kind of, maybe not consciously, but unconsciously decided that I was going to be stable, that my adult life was not going to be a roller coaster of emotions, secondary to my financial situation. And so, I think that’s why FIRE appealed to me because it was like, oh, I don’t just have to be stable. Like, I can be free. <Laugh>, you know, it’s like, there’s one extreme where you’re tied to the ball and chain, there’s the middle ground where you’re stable and you’re working, you’re saving, maybe you’re investing. And then there’s financially independent where no matter what you do, whether you work or you don’t work, you’re okay, right? So, I found out about it through some podcasts, StackingBenjamins, Afford Anything, Earn and Invest. And I just started listening and I was like, wow, there’s a lot I can do with some money I have saved up. Or like, maybe I should buy a property, you know? And that’s kind of how it all took off.

10:13 Emily: I think we’re going to get here, like later in the interview, but this like really interesting overlap in your story between pursuing FIRE and pursuing the PhD, and like the time freedom that FIRE can give you to then apply it to your academic interest. Even if those interests don’t pay as well as other career paths, perhaps, that were available to you. So, I really hope, yeah, we pull that out later in the interview. So, give me a couple, like, you know, mechanical things that you did in those early years of FIRE. You mentioned, oh, maybe I should consider buying a property. Like, what were some things that you did that were deviations from the path that you were on before, once you learned about FIRE?

10:49 Brenda: Right. So, I started investing in a brokerage account, which I had never done before. Like the thought of investing in the stock market was really foreign to me. I knew that my parents had 401(k)s, but I didn’t know that that was investing in the stock market. And so, I started doing research on that. And I talk about this on the podcast I have with my friend, Minority Millennial Money, about how my first experience into investing was like going to Wells Fargo and having an advisor there telling me that I needed at least $25,000 to like open a portfolio <laugh> and, you know, I look back on that and I did it. But I look back on that and I’m like, oh, I was so naive, you know? And now I know so much more and eventually, I transferred it out of Wells Fargo, but so the first thing was investing, and the second thing was buying a home.

House Hacking

11:40 Brenda: First, it was a small condo in 2017. Prior to that, I had kept my living expenses low because I just lived with a friend who owned a home and I rented a room from her for $600 a month, right? So, for Austin, even seven years ago, that was really cheap. So, and I didn’t, I don’t mind living with people, but it was nice to have my own place when I bought a condo in 2017. And then in 2019, I bought a single-family home and I rented out the condo. And so, now I have both.

12:11 Emily: So, let’s see, in 2019 you bought the single-family home, in 2020, you started the PhD program. So, are you still living in that single-family home? Or did you move again?

12:19 Brenda: Yeah, and I house hack it. So, I mean, house hacking is really just having roommates, right? So, basically, I started having travel nurses stay with me so that I didn’t have a permanent person. I just kind of had a nurse house. And so, I really enjoyed that. And there was a little bit of a lull there when COVID hit because many of their contracts got canceled. And so, I was at a critical point where I was like, I’m quitting my job. I have this house to take care of and the income may not be there, but it ended up working out. And hosting travel nurses is really awesome.

12:59 Emily: Yeah. This strategy of house hacking is one that I have given some air time to in the past and I’m really excited about for PhD students, because for that stage of life, it’s already really normalized to live with roommates. And so, if you have the financial wherewithal to be able to purchase, be the owner and be the landlord, it can like really radically transform your finances. So, so glad to hear that you were taking advantage of that strategy even before starting the PhD.

Choosing a Supportive PhD Program

13:22 Emily: So, we kind of already talked about like, why you wanted to start the PhD, you know, why you thought it was the best move for your career. Did you want to add any more details about, I don’t know, that particular program or anything else about your, you know, deciding to go down that career?

13:35 Brenda: Yeah. And, you know, we have met over Financial Twitter and there’s also Academic Twitter. And on Academic Twitter, I see so many horror stories of like really difficult programs, really toxic environments. And I was like, A) I don’t have to do this. So, I am not going to go to a program like that. And B) What if I found a really great program, you know? And so, I just created a spreadsheet with all the schools I was looking at. And this particular program, the director called me, she wanted to talk, she was warm, she was encouraging. And she was genuinely interested in me, you know? And I was like, wow, that’s really special. Whereas other schools like just sent me computer-generated emails, you know? And I was like, okay. So, like my email just went into like a black hole. So, that was important to me, especially because I know that people don’t know this, you know, people outside of nursing don’t know this, but nursing academia has a really negative reputation for being very toxic, very discouraging, not supportive, hazing, in a sense.

14:44 Brenda: And it’s especially prominent at the graduate, you know, and doctoral level. So, I was like, I don’t need that in my life. So, I’m going to look for a program where I feel like it would be a good experience. And I found that, and I was like, okay, I could do this here. So, that was important to me. And also, it was important to me that, if I was going to take this big financial hit, that it was going to be for something worth it. And like you said, for me, the PhD is really something I’m doing for personal enrichment, right? There’s no guarantee that I’m going to make more money when I’m done. You know, I made almost $200,000 in 2019 just working a little bit extra. If I get a job that makes me that much post-PhD, I’ll be really excited. But for me, it was also really important to see people that look like me because I’m a Latina nurse practitioner. And I just could count on one hand how many people who were nurses who had PhDs, who were Hispanic, that I knew, you know? And so, in a field that’s predominantly or 95% white women, I thought it was important to increase the representation.

16:00 Emily: Yeah. I love all those overlapping motivations. And I love, it sounds like you were patient, right? Like you were willing to be really selective about the program that you went to. And I love that little note about like, oh, this person actually called me, like, I talked to this person over the phone instead of just email correspondence and just form letter stuff. And I love that like, you looked at this field, like you said, it has this bad reputation, and you said to yourself, I don’t need to do this. And I’m only going to do it if I can find the program that is going to be really supportive of me. It’s the right fit for me. And even if you know, Academic Twitter and everything else is telling you, no, no, everything’s terrible. It never, it doesn’t exist anywhere. You were like, no, I’m going to hold out and find that perfect program for me. And you did. So like, I just say that to point out that, like, that’s a limiting belief that you could have had. Like, you could have told yourself, oh, I’m never going to find a home. It doesn’t matter. People like me never, you know, get into this level of nursing or succeed or whatever, whatever. And you chose to not have that limiting belief, right? So, I want other people to hear that message as well.

17:02 Brenda: Yeah. And I’ve spoken with my classmates about this, and I think I’m just fortunate in the sense that I have a very positive disposition <laugh> and so I didn’t, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find one. I just thought, I just need to find one <laugh>.

Net Worth in Grad School

17:17 Emily: Okay. So, let’s hear more details about your life, like coming into the program. We’ve heard a couple of things. You already owned two properties. You had been making like over six figures. In fact, your income was nearly $200K in that year immediately prior to starting graduate school. Would you like to share anything about like your net worth or just any other aspects of your financial picture at the time that you started graduate school?

17:38 Brenda: Yeah. So, at the time I started graduate school, that was 2020. So, my net worth now is about $550,000. And at that time it was probably, I think I remember tweeting about it and I think it was like $330K at that time. And that big leap has really just been real estate prices just skyrocketing. And so, I do count like potential, you know, appreciation in my net worth. And then I probably have, right now, I have about $160K or $170K invested. And at that time I probably had like $120K. And so, I’ve been contributing, let’s see, with Roth contribution maximum, which is 6,000, plus about a thousand dollars a month. So, that’s like $18,000 a year in the last two years. So yeah, that makes sense. $120K plus another $35K to $40K. So, I’m at $160K. And I anticipate, you know, this is just kind of a lull in my investing trajectory. And once I go back to full-time work and I’m earning a full-time income again of hopefully at least a hundred thousand, if not more, because I’ll be able to add my clinical practice contract work to it, then I’ll be able to go back to investing closer to $25,000 a year.

19:00 Emily: I mean, investing $18,000 a year while you’re in a PhD program is well, definitely the highest number that I’ve heard <laugh> of anybody on the podcast. So, you’re not exactly a slouch in this area. But so, prior to the PhD, though, it sounds like you were using a taxable brokerage account and maybe some employer-provided stuff 401(k) or 403(b).

19:18 Brenda: Yes, a 401(k).

19:18 Emily: Yeah. Okay. And so, that benefit went away, I assume. Like at the moment you’re only doing your Roth IRA and then the taxable brokerage account.

19:27 Brenda: Yeah. And actually, so before the episode, we talked about my stipend. So, my stipend is, just to protect my time, I don’t owe any kind of labor for that stipend, but I am limited to working 20 hours per week. The great thing about that stipulation is that I’m not limited to how much money I can make. I’m just limited to hours I can work. So, I have been a graduate research assistant at the university since spring of 2021 with one of my professors. And we’ve actually published two papers together, which is awesome. But one of the benefits of that is that as a GRA, you become staff of the university and you get access to their 403(b) and 457. So, I have been contributing at least half of my GRA income, which pays $25 an hour. And what’s funny about this is that the original pay for that position was $15 an hour at the university.

GRA Salary Negotiation

20:27 Brenda: And I told my professor, I was like, I’m sorry, like, I am passionate about your work, but like, I just cannot do it for $15 an hour. Like I have too many things going on and I have too many other much more lucrative offers. And so she went to financial, I don’t know, the financial services building and they agreed to bump it up to $25 for everyone in the nursing program, because we’re all registered nurses, at least, you know, some of us are nurse practitioners. So, it was like almost insulting <laugh>, you know? I mean, I don’t want to be a snob about it, but it’s like, who would take $15 when I can go work the same hour for $65 or $75? So anyway, so yeah, I’ve been doing the Roth, the taxable brokerage, which really comes third on my list. Like if I’m short on money one month, that’s the last one I fund. And then I contribute 50% of that $25 per hour income, which is 10 hours a week, a thousand dollars a month. So, half of that goes to the 457. And I chose the 457 on purpose because you can access it anytime without penalty.

21:38 Emily: Love all those details. Actually, it’s interesting because most people who I speak with who are like on the level of 10-hour per week employees are not offered those benefits. So like, I would say that’s a great, like, exception that your university or health sciences center offers that. So, that’s awesome that you’re doing that. And I love that you, you know, shared that negotiation story and that it not only benefited you, but benefited everybody. Like this is a message I’m trying to get across with like, you can negotiate for yourself as an individual. Yes. But it can also help other people when you do that, because it sends a message.

22:12 Brenda: I wouldn’t have expected them to just give it to me. I mean, it would’ve been fine, but then it’s like, I think it was a fairness issue, right? Because they were like, oh, well, all these other students are also doing it. No, it was great. And I think it was definitely something that the graduate college had to take into consideration because you’re looking at, you know, graduate students, but we’re also working professionals, right? So, that is kind of a unique situation that nurses in graduate school are in.

22:43 Emily: Absolutely.

Commercial

22:47 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! These action items are for you if you recently switched or will soon switch onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac and are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on page 8 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe in 2022 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is September 15, 2022. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at tax time, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax, and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives.

24:06 Emily: If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes 1.75 hours of video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PF for PhDs dot com slash Q E tax. Now back to our interview.

Sources of Income in Grad School

24:50 Emily: So, let’s like back up a tiny bit and talk about sort of all of your income sources during graduate school. Because you know, you’ve mentioned a couple times you have this really fantastic scholarship, so let’s start there. Like, what does the scholarship give you?

25:02 Brenda: Right. So, the scholarship is specific to my university, and it’s a special foundation that was money given through a philanthropic organization. And they basically allotted $150,000 scholarships separated into three years, $50,000 per year. That comes out to $30,000 per year or $2,500 per month as a stipend, and $3,000 for summer tuition, $6,000 for spring and fall tuition, and $4,000 leftover are for travel to conferences and that kind of thing. And I will say that I have used some of your courses and the taxes because that $2,500 counts as 1099 income for me. So, I do have to pay taxes on that. And most of my contract work is not on a W-2. So, I do have to pay taxes on that as well.

26:01 Emily: Okay. So, it sounds like the scholarship is fully paying your tuition and fees, giving you a stipend of $2,500 a month, and you have this additional professional development fund per year. Wow. Okay. That sounds great, but we’re not done yet. The way that we talked about this earlier, and I think the best way to phrase it for the listener is that that stipend of $2,500 per month essentially protects 20 hours per week of your time for you to devote to your dissertation research, or your classes, whatever it is you have to be doing for your PhD. And so, with the next 20 hours of your work week, you can be doing other paid work in that time. So, you can earn above your stipend. It’s just, you’re limited in the number of hours you can spend working. And so for you, you’ve already mentioned like the assistantship that you have at 10 hours per week. Do you have any other work that you do in the other remaining 10 hours per week?

Clinic Contract Work

26:52 Brenda: Yeah, so my former employer kept me on as a contractor. So now, I technically work for the agency that staffs their clinics, but they have urgent care clinics every weekend from nine to four. So, I’ll pick up weekend shifts. And occasionally, because my former boss knows me and knows that I know like the day-to-day clinic work, then he’ll ask me if I can work some days during the week. And so, I’ll do that. And that’s at $75 an hour. And then I have a couple of other jobs where I fill in for other nurse practitioners, like when they’re on vacation or they’re out sick or something. And the great thing about some of those is that they’re kind of slow clinics. And so, I can just take my schoolwork and do it there <laugh>.

27:43 Emily: Yeah. Sounds like a sweet deal. So, with all these active income sources together, the stipend plus the other work that you’re permitted to do, what does that add up to in terms of like your yearly income on average?

27:56 Brenda: So, last year my taxes were a little bit complicated, so I have the 1099 income, and then I have the real estate income. And I don’t take any of that as income from the real estate. So, the condo has its own account, and it has a little emergency fund for itself. And anything that it makes, it stays in there for emergencies, and same with the house. It has its own account. I pay rent into the homes account for myself, and then my tenants pay for pay into that account as well. But I rarely take any money from those accounts. So, I don’t count that. So, out of $112,000 last year, about $30K of that was from the rentals. And so, I really made about $70K, probably. So, $30K of that was from the stipend and then I made another $40K in part-time work.

28:53 Emily: Okay. So interesting. So, you have income sort of on your tax return, you have income that you don’t actually consider, like you’re not actually taking it into your personal accounts. You’re just leaving that as emergency funds and so forth for the real estate stuff. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, earning $40K on top of the $30K, again, really great for a PhD student. So good for you. The message that I want the listener to be hearing from this part of the interview is Brenda’s time is valued in a certain way because of her existing credentials and work experience and so forth. But earning something like $75 an hour is not out of the question for a PhD student in other disciplines. Depending, of course, on your work experience and what your field is and how, you know, in-demand it is, et cetera.

Valuing and Monetizing Your Skills

29:38 Emily: So, like you made the comment earlier. It’s a good thing they’re only limiting me on time and not the amount of money that I can make, because, you know, in some of your income sources, you can command quite a high hourly rate. I would love for other graduate students and postdocs to hear that message and think about, wow, if I’m making $75 an hour, a hundred dollars an hour, I only need to work two hours a week to make a really huge difference in my budget. You know, like when you can get to those high hourly rates, you don’t have to spend a ton of your time, you know, to get your finances in the shape that you want them to be in.

30:10 Brenda: For sure. And I think that, you know, like you said, I have a very particular skill, but there are skills that I don’t have that I would gladly pay someone $65 an hour to do. Like currently I’m dealing with some big data and I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m like going on websites of like, you know, people you can pay on an hourly basis to like walk you through something. And I’m sure that there are people in PhD programs who know this like the back of their hand, and they’re just not making themselves available for someone like me. Because I can earn that money, you know, relatively easily, and I’m happy to pay someone for their expertise as well. So, that’s very true. And I think that maybe sometimes, you know, I am very aware of my skill because I have a license and a certification for it, but you may have skills that other people need that don’t necessarily have, you know, very formal credentials, but that people would be happy to pay for.

31:12 Emily: And I think it’s so easy to get caught in this trap of undervaluing yourself inside academia. Like what you were talking about earlier with like the $15 versus $25 per hour negotiation that you did. It’s so common inside academia to undervalue ourselves. We see everybody else doing it, then we do it as well. But if you can take a little bit of a pivot and maybe, you know, market your skills to somebody outside of academia where these are not, you know, a dime a dozen kind of skills that everybody has, then you can, you know, potentially get those higher hourly rates. So, definitely food for thought, I hope, for some people.

Negotiating In-State Tuition

31:42 Emily: So, I think that you are probably the first interview we’ve had on the podcast who is doing like a hundred percent remote program. Not just like remote for COVID or whatever has been going on temporarily. So, you live not in the same state as where your university is. So, how does that work out with your scholarship and with the tuition and everything?

32:02 Brenda: Yeah, so that’s true. I specifically was looking for long-distance programs because I like where I live. I live close to my family, and I knew that a PhD was an experience that I would need support for <laugh>. And so, I didn’t want to leave my support system behind to do that. And so, whenever I got accepted to the University of Oklahoma and I was still living in Texas, and I had no plan to leave Texas, there was the issue of out-of-state tuition costs. And so, I got accepted in about March 2020. I found out I got the scholarship in April of 2020, and I had kind of set that as the bar, like if I get accepted and I get the scholarship, I’ll go, right? But then I thought, well, out-of-state tuition is almost double, right? It’s the difference between $10,000 and $6,000 a semester.

32:58 Brenda: And I just told the director, like I really want to go to this program, and I’m really grateful for the scholarship, but I realized financially that the out-of-state tuition is going to eat up about 50% of my stipend per semester. So, is there any way I could get in-state tuition? And she actually took it up to the graduate college and they agreed to give me a waiver for three years. So, I pay in-state tuition, and actually the great part about being a graduate research assistant is that, when you take on that position, it’s actually the grant that is funding you, that pays the waiver. And so, the waiver that I had originally been promised can be given to someone else while I’m a GRA.

33:44 Emily: Wow. Okay. Another great example of negotiation, and also another kind of general negotiation point that I like to make to prospective graduate students is like, you don’t necessarily know all the different levers that these people behind the scenes can pull to like enhance your package. So, you made the suggestion, maybe I could pay the in-state tuition rate instead of the higher rate, and they made that happen. And if that hadn’t exactly been possible, maybe they could have found a different way to augment your package to make up that, you know, $4,000 per year difference. So, yeah, so encouraging for prospective graduate students.

34:15 Brenda: I do want to mention that one of the points I brought up was that, and maybe this is just using a rivalry to my advantage, but you know, UT Austin and the University of Oklahoma are rivals in football. And UT Austin has a policy that, if you’re an out-of-state student and you come in to Texas with a scholarship from Texas, like if you won a scholarship in Texas, then the University waives your out-of-state tuition. And so, I presented that to the director and I said, you know, UT Austin does this, do you guys do anything like this? And I think that was what helped, you know, is that I had kind of done my research and I was like, you know, this is something another university is doing. Can you guys do it? And they said yes.

34:58 Emily: That’s a great example as well of like sharing of best practices. Hey, these other people have found this solution over here. Sometimes it helps to open their mind. Oh, well, maybe we could find this similar solution. Absolutely.

Money Mindset

35:09 Emily: So, you mentioned, you know, you’ve taken a pretty substantial income cut to pursue the PhD. Are there any other ways that taking this step in your career has impacted your path towards financial independence?

35:23 Brenda: Yeah, like I said, it’s probably a little bit of a setback numbers-wise and on the spreadsheet, but I feel that it’s so valuable to me personally and professionally and in my development as a person, as a researcher, as a scientist, as a nurse. You know, I’m just being challenged to think in ways that I never did before. And my practice in primary care became kind of monotonous and, you know, unfortunately, there wasn’t very much motivating me forward. And I feel totally different now. You know, even though sometimes I’m overwhelmed to learn new things, it’s so cool to like see yourself grow in ways that you never thought you could. And financially like, okay, maybe I’m taking like a $50 or $60,000 per year cut. But in the course of my life, like is three years really going to <laugh> matter that much, you know? And how much more will my life be enriched by having this degree? Like what doors will it open for me, whether they’re monetary or not is not really the point for me anymore. And that’s something that I was able to achieve in my twenties, right? Like that I set myself up to where, whether I make $50,000 or $150,000, what matters most to me now is that I’m happy, that I’m fulfilled, that I’m challenged, that I enjoy the people I work with, that I genuinely feel that I’m making a difference.

36:54 Emily: And it’s just so like gratifying to hear that, you know, the work you did on your finances in your twenties, both before and after discovering the FIRE movement, set you up to have this excellent financial experience during the PhD. Now, part of that is your field, and this is normal and so forth, this fantastic scholarship, you got all of that. But part of that is just, you know, when I was listening to some of your other podcast interviews, I was thinking that you just sound so like, calm about your finances. Like you just sound so like relaxed about them, which is a very different energy than what I give off sometimes, and like other people who I listen to, or interview on the podcast. But that is on the back of all the work that you did in your twenties to lead up to this point.

37:37 Emily: And so, you get to be relaxed because you have this net worth, you have your properties, you have your house hack, and you have this fantastic income. And this is just something that I so wish that more PhD students could experience. Even a fraction of the experience that you’re having, right? Like maybe it’s having the reasonable income for a person in their twenties or thirties. Or maybe it’s, you know, having worked for a few years, building up a bit of a nest egg before taking that income cut the way you have. I just, I love hearing just your whole like, sort of disposition towards this.

38:09 Brenda: Yeah. And I think a lot of it is reorienting your mind to not have a scarcity mindset, right? To kind of have an abundance mindset, like I’m going to thrive and I’m going to find a great job after this. And like I said, I’m just gifted with a naturally positive disposition, but like, I don’t have any worries about what will happen after, because everything’s worked out so far. <Laugh> maybe that’s just because I’ve been so strategic, right? Maybe in some ways I could have relaxed a little bit, but I am very forward-looking, right? I’m always kind of thinking about the next thing. And I have to remind myself to live in the moment, too, but yeah. I think that most PhD students, like you said, undervalue themselves. And I think about my classmates alone. You know, I’m like, they’re so talented, they’re so smart. Some of them are doing this with kids, with a family, taking care of their parents, with a job. And I’m just like, those are skills, right? Like those are highly marketable skills. Like just getting through the program with life the way it is is a crazy good skill. So, I really appreciate that you encourage people to, you know, maybe do some inward thinking about how can I monetize these things that just come naturally to me now in this stage of my life?

What is Coast FI?

39:40 Emily: You said a couple of minutes ago that, well, it doesn’t really matter if I make $50,000 or $150,000 a year. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to work out. That reminded me of the term Coast FI, a particular version of FIRE. Do you think about Coast FI? Would you describe yourself as Coast FI? Let’s define that for the listener.

39:59 Brenda: Yeah. I think traditionally, Coast FI means that your retirement is set, even if you don’t invest another dollar. I wouldn’t say that I don’t need to keep investing. I think I do. But I don’t really see myself retiring early in the traditional like FIRE sense because I have, A) A very useful skill that’s highly needed in this country. B) I speak Spanish, which is really useful in my part of the country. C) I’m just such a busybody. Like I could never stop working, you know, <laugh> like, I just, when people talk about staying home, like with children, I’m like, I could never do that. I could have children, but I’m not staying home with them 100% of the time. So, yeah, Coast FI for me just means that I have the financial flexibility to choose something that means something to me, as opposed to just a means to an end, to like pay my bills. And a part of that has also been keeping my expenses low. But the other part is, like you said, everything I did to set myself up in my twenties. And, you know, a few years ago, I probably would’ve told you that I would quit working at 45. And now that I’ve been in the PhD program, I’m like, no, there’s so much to do. There’s no way I could cut off 15 or 20 years off my career, you know?

41:26 Emily: That’s so interesting that you described earlier kind of finding, getting into like a lull in your career. Like you weren’t so stimulated. And I think that some people, like you did, would see FIRE, the potential to retire early, as the solution to that. And you did, but you also found another solution, which is, you know, taking your career in a slightly different direction, going down the academic path. And you found that reinvigoration there. And now you have kind of choices on both fronts. You have many career options, you have many financial options, to work, to not work, to work in a capacity that other people would not be able to, perhaps, because they hadn’t maybe had all these, you know, made all these decisions in their twenties and so forth. So, kind of the world is your oyster really <laugh> once you finish this program.

42:09 Brenda: Yeah. And things have come up during the PhD program. I don’t know if it’s because of the PhD program, but for example, I was a volunteer vaccinator for a local community center that was giving out COVID-19 vaccines every three weeks. And I was just consistently going, because I just wanted to help my community. And then they reached out to me about being the clinical consultant for their community center, because it was part of their grant. It would help their grant application if they had someone, you know, whose name they could put down, and they offered to pay me for that as well. That was an income source I forgot to tell you about. So, they pay me $500 a month, and I basically like attend some meetings and answer questions about COVID, about the vaccine, about what to do if this or that. And that was something I never would’ve thought I would do. You know? And it’s just like kind of a result of just saying yes, like I was like, well, I don’t see clinical consultant on my resume yet. <Laugh> but I guess I’ll do it. You just tell me what to do and I’ll show up, you know?

43:17 Emily: That comes from having that financial margin in your life and the time margin, right? To be able to say yes to, at first unpaid, but then later look what it turned into, you know, opportunities, which is something I could certainly <laugh> learn from.

Post-PhD Plans

43:29 Emily: Okay. So let’s talk a slight bit more about post-PhD plans. You mentioned earlier, you know, you have a few different career paths that you might choose among. What are you thinking?

43:40 Brenda: So, the idea of working in industry, or like the pharmaceutical area appeals to me because every pharmaceutical company has a medical affairs division in which they have doctoral-level prepared clinicians or pharmacists, which kind of serve as the bridge between the scientists creating the drug or the device and the prescribers out in the world. And so, that’s actually a really lucrative option. Like I know a couple people who do it and they make about $170,000 plus bonuses. So, they’re making like $200,000 a year. So, if I wanted money, that’s what I would do. <Laugh> which I’m not above saying that I want money. Okay. <laugh> so if that job came up, I would definitely consider it. Then there’s obviously the traditional route of pursuing some kind of tenure-track research career in academia. I’m kind of iffy on that. I don’t know that it’s the best use of my strengths. I’m definitely a people person. I’m an extrovert. I can do writing and I can write grants, and I could potentially, you know, try to prove myself to the NIH for the rest of my life <Laugh> to try to get research money, but I’m not sure that I want that.

45:03 Brenda: And then, I could do a blend of clinical practice and teaching where I just teach as an adjunct and I maintain my clinical practice. That’s kind of what I was doing before the PhD. So, I’m not sure that I would really be maximizing what I learned in the PhD if I went back to that. And then there’s a postdoc if I do want pursue research and I just want to get into someone else’s work and see what they’re doing, and maybe that’ll make me more excited about a tenure-track career. And then I was also looking at the National Clinician Scholars Program, which is kind of like a subset of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And that’s a program at six campuses all over the country in which you basically get more education on health policy and organizational change. And most of the graduates go on to work at like the Department of Health or Health and Human Services or the CDC or some kind of federal agency where policy is happening. So, that’s probably one of my top ones. Pharma’s one of my top ones, and teaching in a, non-research, like very little research, that’s probably my third one.

46:11 Emily: Yeah. Well, hopefully, you have all of those things on the table once you get towards your graduation. And like you said, money could play a role in your decision, or maybe you’ll be following, you know, what seems most interesting to you. And again, the position that you’re in affords you those options. So, it’s wonderful to hear. And I think you said earlier, you know, you’re probably not going to be idle, right? Even once you achieve financial independence, however you want to define that. It sounds like you expect to have a long career, which is, once you’ve invested in something like a PhD program, it’s very, I think, worthwhile to keep your skills out there and keep, you know, working for your communities you’ve said so far. Yeah. Anything else you want to add about what you envision your life to change or not change? Like after you achieve financial independence?

46:57 Brenda: I think as a woman and as someone in their early thirties, you know, one of the big factors in deciding what I do is like, if I want to start a family, and what career option would be most conducive to that. And like you said, I have options, but like women have to think about that more. And especially in academia or in science, like you don’t want to be put on the mommy track, right? So, that’s also something I consider like if I were to have children, would it be right away after the PhD? Would I settle into another job? Like give it a year or two? I’m going to be 33 in September. Like what about my, you know, what about my fertility? Like, there are so many things to think about. And I think that’s very real for a lot of women in academia, right? It’s like juggling your human babies and the baby of your career, which is your research or whatever you’re working on post-PhD.

48:00 Emily: Absolutely. And another thing that having a strong financial position just puts you in a strong position to decide about. If you want to take an extra long maternity leave that’s unpaid, but you have a job to go back to, well, maybe that’s going to be, you know, the best situation for you, or maybe not. Maybe it’ll be a different decision, but whatever you do, I mean, having money gives you options. I say that over and over again, it just gives you options. And that’s really what you have now, which is so delightful to hear.

Where Can People Find You?

48:24 Emily: So, if people want to hear more from you, where can they find you?

48:29 Brenda: I’m on Twitter @almostbrenda, like the word almost, and then my name, almost Brenda. And that’s also my Instagram handle and my email address at Gmail, [email protected]. I’m on LinkedIn. That’s linkedin.com/in/bolmosfnp for family nurse practitioner. And I’d love to connect with people. Even if, you know, even if you just want to talk about how to improve your finances, I know Emily, you’re a great resource for that. And I’ve been in the Community forums there too. But if you’re interested in coming on our podcast, I cohost Minority Millennial Money which is on Apple and Spotify and all of the platforms. We love to have people come on and we talk through their finances with them and see what they could do better. So yeah, I’m easily reachable. I’m all over the internet. <Laugh>

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

49:26 Emily: Wonderful. I hope you’ll have a few people follow up with you from this. Okay. I’m going to conclude with the question that I always ask my guests at the end of interviews, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

49:44 Brenda: I would say it would be to disassociate your self-worth from your net worth, right? Because although I’m in a particularly advantageous position, I know how difficult it must be for people who are not in this position and are looking forward to those days when they get to earn a higher living. And you know, you’re already undervaluing your skills. You’re already in places that may be toxic and not supportive. Like, the very least you could do is like not value yourself based on what’s in your bank account. <Laugh>. And also, if you have the ability to keep investing, like to not lose time, because time is money in the market, right? So, anything you can throw at it is super helpful.

50:32 Emily: Great messages to end on. Brenda, thank you so much for this delightful interview!

50:36 Brenda: Yeah. Thank you!

Outtro

50:42 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Grad Student Advocates Individually and Collectively for Higher Stipends

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alyssa Hayes, a rising 4th-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Alyssa is a first-generation college student who experienced food insecurity and other forms of financial precarity as an undergraduate. Now that she earns a stipend of approximately $45,000 per year and lives in a low cost of living city, she feels financially secure—and wants the same for all graduate students. To that end, Alyssa shares two advocacy approaches: 1) Ask for what you need. As a prospective graduate student, she negotiated for a top-up fellowship to be added to her assistantship stipend. 2) Share pay information with your peers across universities and use that data to collectively bargain for higher stipends in individual programs. Alyssa and her peers in nuclear engineering are currently gathering this data, including stipends, benefits, cost of living, and university and departmental ranking.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Image for S12E5: This Grad Student Advocates Individually and Collectively for Higher Stipends

Teaser

00:00 Alyssa: I think that like all grad students should feel as comfortable as I feel in terms of my financial situation. I think that I make a fair wage, and maybe I’m biased because of my previous financial situation, but I personally have no complaints about the amount of money that I’m making right now. I feel supported by my advisor and by my department. I feel that I am valued for my labor. And I think that shows through how much they pay me. And I think that everybody should be able to feel that way about their department and about their advisor.

Introduction

00:44 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 12, Episode 5, and today my guest is Alyssa Hayes, a rising 4th-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Alyssa is a first-generation college student who experienced food insecurity and other forms of financial precarity as an undergraduate. Now that she earns a stipend of approximately $45,000 per year and lives in a low-cost-of-living city, she feels financially secure—and wants the same for all graduate students. To that end, Alyssa shares two advocacy approaches: 1) Ask for what you need. As a prospective graduate student, she negotiated for a top-up fellowship to be added to her assistantship stipend. 2) Share pay information with your peers across universities and use that data to collectively bargain for higher stipends in individual programs. Alyssa and her peers in nuclear engineering are currently gathering this data, including stipends, benefits, cost-of-living, and university and departmental ranking. You won’t want to miss Alyssa’s powerful messages peppered throughout the episode!

02:30 Emily: Longtime listeners of the podcast will remember the interviews I’ve published with Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator specializing in graduate students and PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. Several years ago, I told Sam how I’d heard over and over again about graduate students and PhDs being denied mortgage loans because of their unusual income sources and income history and asked him to look into the issue. Following that request, Sam actually developed quite an expertise in this area and is now the go-to mortgage originator for people with non-employee fellowship income. He even found a way around what we thought was an insurmountable barrier in the 3-year continuance requirement. If you’re considering buying a home, especially if you have non-W-2 income, I encourage you to reach out to Sam for a quote. He has a new website, which you can visit at PhDHomeLoans.com, or you can reach him on his cell phone, 540-478-5803. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alyssa Hayes.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:56 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Alyssa Hayes. She is a rising fourth-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. And we have a lot to talk about in terms of like her pay and her money mindset. And I’m really excited for this conversation. So Alyssa, thank you so much for volunteering. And would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

04:16 Alyssa: Thank you for having me! Yeah. So, I’m currently at the University of Tennessee. I did my bachelor’s degree in the same field at the University of Illinois. My current work involves like, you know, fusion engineering, specifically. I do a lot of computational plasma boundary stuff. But yeah, I guess we’re not really talking about any of my technical work today. <Laugh>

Money Mindset Up Until Starting Grad School

04:38 Emily: No, but very related to your experience as a graduate student. So, let’s take it back a little bit and tell me about sort of what your childhood’s like, and specifically how it relates to money and how that sort of developed your money mindset through your childhood and through undergrad, up until you started graduate school.

04:58 Alyssa: Yeah. So, I come from a biracial family, and my father comes from a long line of Americans in the military where, you know, his family was very like blue-collar labor. Like there wasn’t as big of a push to go to college, especially during the time when my dad was growing up in the seventies. And my mom is an immigrant from the Philippines. And her family was not extremely wealthy in the Philippines. And they came here when she was younger to pursue a better life. And she currently works at Walmart and has been for like almost 20 years and has supported my three siblings and me through retail and fast food. So, I was the first person in my family to pursue college. And we lived in an area where we had a lot of, like, there was a lot of really good funding for the school system, even though we weren’t in the nicest part of town. There were other folks who were pretty well-to-do, so I took advantage of everything that I could at that high school. And I got a full ride at the University of Illinois to pursue nuclear engineering. I didn’t have a lot of financial security while I was there, but I didn’t have to worry too much about student debt or tuition or paying fees or anything like that.

Food Insecurity in Undergrad

06:18 Emily: That’s amazing. The full ride to college, and obviously you went after it, <laugh> starting in your earlier years. But tell me a little bit about like the discretion that you had over money. Like, were you budgeting or like, how did you manage it? How did you manage what money you had above that, you know, what’s paying for tuition and room and board and so forth?

06:39 Alyssa: Yeah. So, I was first of all, extremely food insecure and didn’t realize it until I entered grad school. Once a month, I went out to lunch with like a professor who like, he knew I was food insecure, even if I didn’t know I was food insecure, and he would like pay for my food and we would like go somewhere nice that I couldn’t afford to eat at. For the most part, like there were times when like either because I, you know, couldn’t afford to go out to eat as often, but didn’t have the time because I was so stressed out to like make food from home. I like skipped meals often when I was in undergrad. I was very cheap and frugal all the time. I was constantly like thinking about like, I am hungry all the time and like bringing, like, trying to bring snacks with me. Apples were my thing.

07:22 Alyssa: I brought apples everywhere because they were so easy to just grab and then eat on the go. And then it was mostly about trying to make money to pay the bills and to pay rent. My rent, like in undergrad was only like $450 a month. But I worked a minimum wage job in the like plasma lab on campus. And then I worked as a TA as well. So that added stress onto my undergrad. I wish that I didn’t have to have worked so hard in order to like pay to live while trying to be a student. But that’s what it was like. Luckily, I don’t have any student debt now, but I couldn’t really you know, spend the money that was granted for my tuition on, you know, myself or the ability to make ends meet.

08:14 Emily: Yeah. So, I sort of misspoke or misunderstood earlier. You had a full ride in terms of the education cost, but not your living expenses. So, you were working to pay all of your living expenses.

08:25 Alyssa: Yes.

08:25 Emily: Yes. Okay. So that is a little bit like graduate school in a sense, except you didn’t have like a job that you were given. You had to cobble together like multiple sources of income, it sounds like. And there’s more management. You were probably paid, you know, less than maybe the average graduate student is. So, that sounds really stressful.

08:43 Alyssa: I had a little bit of spillover for my scholarships that I had received. So like it paid for like tuition and fees plus a little bit of extra and then like that would go towards rent, but it wasn’t like enough.

Student Loans for Dorm Payment

08:55 Emily: Why didn’t you take out student loans during that time?

08:59 Alyssa: So, I did have to take out student loans during my freshman year to pay for the dorms. Because dorms are a scam. If anyone who’s like not currently in grad school is listening to this, dorms are a scam. Do not live in them longer than you have to. The university says it’s so that way you can you know, help get acclimated to the college experience, but that’s a lie. They’re trying to take your money. I had to take out student loans to pay for those. Other than that, I didn’t take out any other student loans because I was afraid of the debt like piling up. I knew that like one of the types of loans didn’t charge interest until you were done, but the other type of loan did. And I, you know, didn’t want that to accrue while I was in college.

09:38 Alyssa: And I knew that I like had done all my budgeting and I knew that I was able to work to pay for all my stuff. So, I just kind of like, you know, I didn’t think anything was like wrong with the way that I was living. I didn’t see any like problems with like being so frugal or so cheap or skipping meals or missing sleep and stuff. But like, I guess grateful now to past me that I didn’t do that because now I don’t have any student debt. I paid off what little loans I had in like six months. But I did have to like work a lot to get there. But I was also happy doing the work that I did. I enjoyed being a TA and I enjoyed working in a research lab. And honestly, I’m glad that I didn’t end up like working somewhere that didn’t have anything to do with nuclear engineering. So that way I was able to apply all of that to my career trajectory later on in grad school, by having that research experience.

Funding and Finances in Grad School

10:36 Emily: Yeah. This kind of goes to show you like how we aren’t even aware of our own beliefs around money and our own mindsets around money until we sort of consciously try to take a step outside and examine them. And I understand that you can say now, “Oh, past me, I didn’t even know at the time.” You can say things like that because you’ve now reached a new phase in your financial life, which is the graduate student phase. So, tell us about how you’re funded now and how your finances are going.

11:00 Alyssa: Yeah. So, when I was applying to grad schools, I applied to the University of Illinois where I originally wanted to stay because I really loved working for my advisor there. And I also applied to the University of Tennessee because I had, through conferences and networking, I met my current advisor here. And I told both schools that I would stay at Illinois for less. And Illinois didn’t have the power to offer, or like the nuclear engineering program at the University of Illinois, didn’t have the power to offer me more than like the base research assistantship that they offer to like all of the graduate students there. But the University of Tennessee has these like top-off fellowships that they will add to a base stipend in order to get a student to commit to the university who’s maybe deciding between two programs.

12:01 Alyssa: And with just the base stipend, Illinois, I think pays, I might be mistaken on the exact number, but I think they were offering like $26,000 a year. And the University of Tennessee’s base pay at the time was $30,000 per year. We’ve since gotten a raise and now it’s $33K. But the top-off fellowship that was offered to me was $10,000 a year. So then it became a no-brainer. And I was like, I would stay at Illinois for less, but not this much less. And so, now I am making about $45K with bonuses and like a couple of like, you know, service-based scholarships that I get on a somewhat regular basis. So, it kind of evens out to about $45,000 a year with the raise and the top-off fellowship. And so now, I feel like more of a regular adult that has a livable amount of money and I’m not as worried anymore about like, “Oh God, I saw a movie this weekend and now I can’t do anything else fun for the rest of the week.” And so like, I don’t have any of those like worries anymore, but I do still think about them. Like that mindset is always in the back of my mind of like, “Oh, like, is this like a waste of money? I don’t need to be doing this,” or, “This is so expensive,” you know?

$45K Stipend in Knoxville

13:24 Emily: Okay. There was so much in there. So much good stuff that I want to follow-up on. Let’s take it kind of in turns. I want to put a pin in the negotiation part of it. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But let’s focus now on like again, still your money mindset. You just mentioned some of it. You don’t have to be as worried about small joys and extravagances that you allow yourself. So, you’re making about $45,000 a year. Very good stipend for a graduate student, especially in a, you know, lower cost of living area. How, like give us some context about how much that pays for. Because obviously in other areas of the country, $45K is like, “Oh, I’m barely scraping by.”

14:00 Alyssa: Yeah.

14:00 Emily: How does that feel for you right now?

14:03 Alyssa: Knoxville is very affordable to live in. When you’re going to school, like in not really a big city, but more of like a rural part of the country, that definitely helps. Although there’s definitely, you have to balance that with being a person of color, too. So there aren’t other Filipinos, like in this whole city, it seems. I haven’t met any of them or seen anybody else like that’s the same race as me. There’s also a lot of segregation here. And so like, there are parts of town that you can’t go to. So you kind of have to balance that when you’re like, “Oh, if I live somewhere rural, then that’s more affordable to live in,” but there are parts of those areas that also may not be safe for you if you’re in a similar situation.

14:48 Emily: Yeah. I’m glad that you pointed that out because it’s something that I often don’t acknowledge or that can go unacknowledged that people of color in some cases do not have all of the options available to them that White people do, or, you know, other like races. Because as you just said, there are some areas where you can’t live, you have to pay the premium to live in a different area because it’s simply not an option to feel safe, you know, paying the least amount of rent that you could or whatever. So, a very important consideration when people are choosing graduate schools to kind of, to feel out if you are going to feel safe there, and what is the university going to do to support you?

15:21 Alyssa: And while we’re kind of on this, it might also be worth mentioning the current abortion scenario in the United States. If that’s something that matters to you and you have the ability to become pregnant, like a lot of the 26 states that are passing laws that restrict your access to it may also be something to consider because a lot of those contain the rural areas where it is more affordable to attend a university there.

15:46 Emily: Another wrinkle. Yeah. We’re recording this in May, 2022. I don’t know exactly when we’re going to release this. There may be more developments between now and then. But yes, an issue that I think many of us were not expecting to have to consider when we’re choosing graduate school. So, another good point.

Prioritizing Happiness

16:04 Emily: Let’s talk more about the money though. So like, you’re able to pay, you’re able to live a more comfortable lifestyle. Your mindset is still, how is your mindset doing? Like, are you able to splurge on yourself a little bit, or do you still have some of the mindset lingering from when you grew up or your undergraduate experience?

16:22 Alyssa: A lot of it is more, I guess, in the back of my mind, but I have put like a conscious effort into prioritizing my own happiness. Not just in the way of like work-life balance, but financially to ensure that like, you know, spending money on things that make you happy is not wasted money in the same way that spending time on things that make you happy is not wasted time. And so, like I saw two movies this weekend <laugh> instead of one with my partner, because I wanted to and that helped distract me from some heavy things that were going on in my life. And that was money well-spent. Yeah, it wasn’t on a bill, but it’s something that I like, you know, put effort into not feeling bad about that. So, I’ve been dealing with grief this weekend, and I’ve been spending a lot of money, like additional money than I would in any other week on eating out a lot. Just so that way I wouldn’t have to like do household chores, like dishes or worry about cooking while I’m dealing with grief.

17:29 Alyssa: And so like, those are like, you know, that was part of like, I guess, a change in mindset that I noticed where it was easier for me to do that in my current financial scenario, like situation versus when I was in undergrad. Like I had those thoughts in the back my mind of like, “Wow, I’m spending a lot of money. <Laugh> this week alone between, you know, funeral costs and like the additional money I was spending on food.” I’ve easily spent like a thousand dollars in the last four days on not bills, but that was easier for me to accept now and probably even easier now versus like my first year in grad school, when that would’ve been a harder, like mental hurdle to get over.

18:16 Emily: Yeah. And I’m assuming that this simply would not have been an option for you in undergrad to spend in this way. It is not an option for many graduate students, either, who are being paid less. And in our prep for this conversation, you said to me something along the lines of, you know, you’re living well right now given what you’re paid and given the low cost-of-living, and you think that all graduate students should feel this way. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

18:42 Alyssa: Yes. So, currently, like I said, I make $45,000 about per year. And whenever I tell other graduate students that like, sometimes, like I try not to let it like come off as like a brag because of the low cost-of-living in Knoxville, too. But it’s more of that I obviously agree that like everybody should, you know, talk about their wages, especially to your coworkers. Because I think that like all grad students should feel as comfortable as I feel in terms of my financial situation. I think that I make a fair wage, and maybe I’m biased because of my previous financial situation, but I personally have no complaints about the amount of money that I’m making right now. I feel supported by my advisor and by my department. I feel that I am valued for my labor. And I think that shows through how much they pay me. And I think that everybody should be able to feel that way about their department and about their advisor.

Commercial

19:52 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I have set a big goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the U.S. who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Now, some universities, institutes, or funding agencies already offer such a training, and they have no need to work with me. But others won’t allow their employees to touch the topic of taxes with a 10-foot pole, and that’s where working with me can really benefit everyone. Would you please send me an email and tell me which camp your university falls into—or if it’s somewhere in between? You can reach me at [email protected]. Furthermore, let me know if you want to take Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients for free or think that the cohort coming in this fall should, and I’ll reply with how you can help make that happen. I look forward to hearing from you! Now back to our interview.

Learning to Negotiate

21:33 Emily: I wanted to come back now to the negotiation piece. So, I think you mentioned something like, you know, you told both universities that you would accept a slightly lower stipend from University of Illinois. Tell me like, you even brought up money in these conversations. Like why were you even having conversations with the programs? What gave you the idea that you could talk about this and that maybe there would be more for you there?

21:56 Alyssa: So, part of it was because while I was at the University of Illinois, I got comfortable asking for money. One by being a leader in a lot of the different like student programs and then having to correspond regularly with the staff and the department head there. So, I knew a lot of those people well, and at one point I wanted to go to the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp in the year 2017. And there was like obviously paying for travel flight costs. I didn’t have to pay for lodging as part of that Bootcamp, but there was also a hefty registration fee and I couldn’t afford any of that. And so, like there was no route to like ask for it to be paid for. There was no like standardized path or form that you could fill out for things to be waived.

22:46 Alyssa: So, I wrote like a little one-page request to my department saying like, this is this program. I really want to go. This is what I’m going to get out of it. Will you pay for it? And then at the very bottom, it said more information about why I may qualify for financial need available upon request. But I didn’t really like talk about my financial situation. I just explained what the program was, and why I wanted to go. And I gave that to them, and with no further questions they paid for everything. I think they even, I want to say they reimbursed my flights, but if I hadn’t bought them, they may have paid for them in advance. I don’t quite remember. But I had realized that like they wanted to support me, and that they were okay with students kind of going the outside-of-the-box route in terms of asking for money.

23:38 Alyssa: And that was when I was a sophomore in college. So, that gave me the confidence, then, when I was in grad school to ask for a higher rate or wage when I was applying to grad school. And they, unfortunately, weren’t able to do it or I don’t, you know, necessarily know all the behind-the-scenes that went on there. And sure, they said no, but I wasn’t at all reprimanded for asking in the first place. Like nothing, you know, bad happened to me. The best that I could have done was ask, even if they said no. So, I’m glad that I did. And it turned out well for me because at the University of Tennessee, I didn’t even know that there were top-off fellowships. But I got one because I was upfront with the University of Tennessee about how I would have, you know, taken the lower offer elsewhere and about how I was considering other schools and kind of in the same way that you’re like, I learned how to like negotiate a car price down from my dad.

24:36 Alyssa: So that was, I guess, a little bit of a privilege that I had because I had to buy a car to like move to Tennessee, because they have terrible public transit here. It’s kind of the whole tell the other you know, person that you’re negotiating with about this other thing that you’re also considering. Make that look nice and shiny. So that way they’ll try to give you a little bit of a better offer. I ended up also getting this laptop and all of the accessories that go with it out of the same deal with my current advisor. Like I asked them to buy me, you know, personal equipment that I could use to like, you know, be a person outside of grad school, too. Like I didn’t have a functioning laptop at the time. And so all of that got thrown in as well.

25:23 Emily: I think that’s such a powerful message, like, and I’m glad that you learned it as a sophomore in college and that you were able to then apply it in your process for applying to graduate school. Like just ask, like, just let people know of your need and let them figure out how they can best, you know, work behind-the-scenes to make that happen for you. So, you got this amazing like top-up fellowship. I mean, $10,000 is a very significant, you know, add-on to an already, you know okay base stipend. So, that sounds amazing. Just, I think this is a wonderful message for any prospective graduate students, or anybody at any stage, really just ask for what you need. Let people know, and especially like you said that you have options and this would help your decision. I think you said earlier, like it was a no-brainer to go with the University of Tennessee once they made that, you know, augmentation to their offer. So, so glad to hear that.

Normalizing Talking About Grad Student Stipends

26:12 Emily: Let’s talk more about stipends for other graduate students as well. So, I understand you’ve recently kind of entered into some conversations with peers about how we can, union is not the right word, but sort of collectively bargain or like share information about stipends. So, tell me more about that endeavor.

26:33 Alyssa: Yeah. So, normalizing talking about our wages is like step one in changing the culture around laborers. So that way we can all benefit collectively. But we kind of wanted to take this a little bit of a step further among nuclear engineering grad students specifically because by going to conferences and networking, not just with employers or other universities, et cetera, but we also spend that time networking with each other. And so, because it’s so common for grad students to kind of see the same people all the time in the nuclear engineering programs, because we’re so small, a lot of us just know each other from like all across the country. And I know that this isn’t something that a lot of other fields have the benefit of because it’s not realistic for like every electrical engineering graduate student to all know each other.

27:31 Alyssa: But at least to know somebody who knows somebody at pretty much any nuclear engineering graduate program is realistic for us. So, we got together at the most recent student conference. And we are currently building a spreadsheet that has everybody’s like gross pay, all of the things that you have to pay for that are related to your health insurance or your academic costs, your fees, and then what your take-home pay is, and then comparing all of that to the cost-of-living based on where your university is, your university’s ranking, and your department’s ranking. So, that way you can kind of compare and contrast. So that way, if there is a department that is ranked highly compared to its university’s ranking, which implies that that department has more power to maybe change the pay that their graduate students are receiving, but those graduate students maybe aren’t being paid well, then they can use the collective sheet to say like, this is where we’re falling right now, compared to how much these other similar programs are paying their graduate students. And we think that you should, you know, value our labor a little bit more and that we deserve to have higher wages. And so, use like that collective information for other institutions to bargain. So that way maybe they can get the same level of financial comfort that I am afforded right now.

29:07 Emily: This is an amazing effort. I totally commend you and your peers for like this idea, and starting work on this. It sounds like you’re in the data collection stage.

29:17 Alyssa: Yes.

29:17 Emily: Is that right? Like you’re building the spreadsheet, putting in all these different factors. I love that you mentioned like ranking of university, because I have some work in this area as well, and I just think about cost-of-living. I don’t think about like how, you know, the university is regarded or their program is regarded. So, I think that’s a really interesting like additional element. I’m not sure when this episode will come out in relation to these other ones, but I have some other podcast episodes slated for 2022 on this same issue of like sort of information-sharing about stipends and bargaining in some manner to increase stipends. So, this is wonderful and it aligns very well with that.

Health Insurance (Non-)Coverage

29:53 Alyssa: The thing that like, the one piece of information that like made it, like click in my brain where I was like, “We need to like, do something more about this and just talk about our pay,” was that one of the grad students that I didn’t even know well, like while I was at U of I, that I was just kind of like chatting with at a social at this conference told me that his health insurance was not covered. And like, mine is, like, I don’t, it’s not taken out of my pay. Like, yes, it’s like technically like, “Oh, like you could have just, you know, they could have just given me the money that they’re using to pay for my health insurance,” but like the University of Illinois’ grad student health insurance is like taken out of their pay. So, that’s like a part of like the gross pay that they advertise. And I was like, that’s not cool. <Laugh> what do you mean your health insurance isn’t covered? So then I asked to have a meeting with the department head there because I like knew him well from when I was a student there. And he actually was the one who gave me the idea. He was like, why don’t you get more of this information from other schools? And then, so we’ll go from there.

30:59 Emily: That’s excellent. And I totally agree, like in PhD Stipends as well, I have a way to enter like what your stipend is, but then like, what are you paying out of that stipend in terms of fees and tuition and whatever. And like for health insurance and other types of fees as well, like that can add up to thousands of dollars a year. So, that’s not some insignificant like, oh, it’s a $20 fee, whatever. This is a really big percentage of like that overall stipend that they’re receiving.

31:23 Alyssa: Yeah.

31:24 Emily: The other thing I’m really excited about for your project too, is like this fellowship that you received is probably one that’s offered sometimes to other students as well. So, it’s good to have both sets of information, right? Like what’s the base stipend and then, “Oh, sometimes this additional funding is available.” Wouldn’t it be great if we could pull everybody up to that level or, you know, that kind of thing? So, I just, if you aren’t already, I would definitely encourage you to include that kind of information as well in the spreadsheet. What different students are being paid, even within the same department.

31:52 Alyssa: Yeah, we did get a raise this year, which took effect about two months ago. So, because of the change in the economy throughout the pandemic, all graduate students in the nuclear engineering department at the University of Tennessee received a 10% stipend raise. So, full research assistants are now making 33 instead of $30,000 per year as the base-level stipend. Additionally, this was through the effort of our nuclear engineering graduate student assembly, which is kind of like also not a union, but a collection of just the nuclear engineering grad students. We managed to through a couple of years actually of pressure convince our department to begin covering our academic fees. So, which also kind of feels like a raise in terms of take-home pay. So, now we no longer have to pay as much and many students don’t have to pay any fees anymore for things like, you know, your basic like academic, you know, transportation fee, student health center fee, recreational fee. So, all of that is pretty much covered now.

33:02 Emily: For sure. And it makes it so much easier to compare apples to apples, right? When those kinds of fees are covered. But I’m sure in your spreadsheet you’ll be accounting for everything. So, I love this idea. I’m so excited for y’all to like move forward with this and hope it comes together in the near future.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

33:16 Emily: Well, Alyssa, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you and I’m so glad that you volunteered to be on here, and you’ve had so many really vital messages that have come through in this interview. And I’m really grateful for that. I wrap up all my interviews by asking my guests one final question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

33:39 Alyssa: I had a similar question asked of me in my most recent D&D session with my friends. Just like we were talking after. And, specifically, their question was, how much of my success is rooted in like just being confident? And that applies to so much in that, like I had the confidence to ask to go to all these different programs, the Bootcamp, to different conferences. And when I’m at conferences, then while I’m there, I’m networking with all these different potential employers and powerful people, like some of my future reference letter writers are people that I’ve only ever interacted with at conferences and have no other like relationship with them. And so, by networking with those people that, you know, that’s how I met my current advisor, and that’s how he learned about my work.

34:42 Alyssa: And that gave me the confidence to then talk to him about my financial situation. And you know, even asking to go to conferences in the first place built my confidence in asking for funding and asking for a raise. And it really taught me that, I mean, the best thing you can do is to at least ask and see if, you know, people will just give you money. Because sometimes they will. So, I don’t necessarily like the mindset of, you know, just apply to everything because it also can take resources and time. But apply to the things that you can, or that you have the spoons to. And it’s a way to try to tackle imposter syndrome is to know that other people have it too, but you deserve to have the confidence, regardless of any imposter syndrome you might have, to put yourself out there.

35:41 Emily: Thank you so much, Alyssa, for those concluding thoughts. Again, it’s been great to have you. Thank you so much!

35:46 Alyssa: Yeah. Thank you! Thank you for having me!

Outtro

35:53 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance…but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Grad Student’s Finances and Mental Health Were Stuck in a Negative Feedback Loop

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Haley Sanderson, a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan. Haley was dramatically underpaid during graduate school and discouraged from working on the side. While many of her peers lived hand to mouth, Haley’s situation was made more dire by her at-the-time undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder. Haley entered a negative feedback loop in which her finances, mental health, and physical health deteriorated together. Emily and Haley discuss what her program could have done to ameliorate this negative spiral and why it’s vital to sufficiently financially support PhD trainees. Haley concludes with her very practical financial advice for anyone at a career transition point.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Image for S12E4: This Grad Student's Finances and Mental Health Were Stuck in a Negative Feedback Loop

Teaser

00:00 Haley: My suggestion would be, if somebody’s in my situation, to go get the help you need and get the financial help that you need, even if it means taking out loans. Because it’s much better to have the financial debt than the mental health debt.

Introduction

00:22 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 12, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Haley Sanderson, a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan. Haley was dramatically underpaid during graduate school and discouraged from working on the side. While many of her peers lived hand to mouth, Haley’s situation was made more dire by her at-the-time undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder. Haley entered a negative feedback loop in which her finances, mental health, and physical health deteriorated together. We discuss what Haley’s program could have done to ameliorate this negative spiral and why it’s vital to sufficiently financially support PhD trainees. Haley concludes with her very practical financial advice for anyone at a career transition point.

01:44 Emily: I have set a super audacious goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. It’s actually a bit difficult for me to even speak it out loud! My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the U.S. who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I am passionate about this topic because surprise tax bills, high tax bills, and fines are an almost completely preventable source of financial strife for my community, and all that’s needed is a bit of education delivered at the right time. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Most of you have heard me talk about it before, and some of you have taken it. The perfect time to give PhD trainees access to this workshop is when they start or switch onto non-W-2 income, which often happens near the start of the academic year, i.e., the near future.

03:08 Emily: If you share my passion—or maybe it’s more of a frustration for you—and know that your university is not already providing sufficient training in this area, would you please recommend that your graduate school, postdoc office, graduate student association, or department sponsor my workshop for those interested in taking it? You might want to take it yourself, or perhaps you just want to save the entering cohort the time and energy it took you to figure this all out on your own. To make this recommendation, simply email the potential sponsor with the reason you are recommending the workshop and this link: PFforPhDs.com/sponsorqetax/. If you’re comfortable with it, you can Cc me [email protected], and I can pick up the conversation. Thanks for participating with me in trying to reach this goal! I know it will prevent a lot of people in our community from experiencing tax-related financial emergencies next spring.

You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e4/.

Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Haley Sanderson.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

04:33 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Haley Sanderson, who is a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan, and she is coming on the podcast to talk about a really sensitive topic, which is living on a very low graduate student stipend while dealing with mental illness. So, Haley, I’m really pleased that you volunteered to be on the podcast to talk about this important topic. So, would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

04:58 Haley: Hi, I’m Haley. I have a PhD in environmental studies where I specialize in environmental microbiology and biotechnology. I finished my PhD in five years defending and graduating in fall 2018, since then I’ve completed postdocs with the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Dalhousie University, and I’m now a postdoc in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. And I’m currently applying for more full-time permanent gigs <laugh>.

05:37 Emily: Well, best of luck with that. Okay. So we’re going to go back to your grad school years, and most of my listeners are going to be in the U.S. So, could you please explain, give some context for how you are funded during your PhD?

Funding During the PhD

05:53 Haley: So, during my PhD, I started as a master’s student, so I actually started on a much lower stipend of about $14K Canadian. So, to get that money, I had to TA for about two semesters every year and then do a research assistantship in the summer. I was a master’s student for a year, and then I bumped up to be a PhD. I ended up getting three provincial scholarships in Ontario that bumped my stipend up to $25K, which is only a little bit higher than the base stipend for a PhD student. So, with that stipend, we actually have to pay tuition out of it. So, not all of it gets to go to living. You also have to pay your tuition out of the money that they give you. So, the actual amount that I lived off of was much smaller than the stipend that I got <laugh>.

07:14 Emily: Yeah. Well, let us know, do you remember the numbers on that? Like after paying the tuition, what amount were you living off of? And then give us some context for, like, how does that compare to the local cost of living?

07:26 Haley: I don’t know the exact numbers, but tuition was about $2,000 a semester, I would say, for about $6,000 a year. So, when I was on my original master’s stipend, I only had maybe $8K <laugh>, which is a little <laugh> insane. I had a lot more to live off of once I was in the PhD program. So, when I was a master’s student, I actually had to work, but there were some problems with the department not wanting me to work and kind of threatening to take away the stipend that was paying like my tuition and my rent.

Challenges to Supplementing the Stipend

08:09 Emily: Yeah. I mean, the numbers that you’re throwing out there sound incredibly low. It’s not surprising at all to me that you would, you know, seek other sources of income. Was that something that your peers were doing as well? Was the department also like threatening other peers who were working, or how were they making ends meet?

08:27 Haley: A lot of the other people in my department had like side gigs that they’d only do every once in a while. A lot of people hid if they had part-time jobs. Unfortunately, I worked close to the university and some of them saw me working, so that didn’t work out too well <laugh>.

08:48 Emily: How was that resolved? Did you have to give up the side job?

08:53 Haley: Some of the admins helped me apply to the provincial scholarships. And once I got the provincial scholarships, I was kind of told to get rid of the part-time job.

09:03 Emily: And would you say that when you had that higher $25K minus, okay, let’s say $19K per year stipend during the latter part of your PhD, was that enough to survive, or did you feel like you would’ve worked more if you were allowed to?

09:18 Haley: I probably would’ve worked more, but I think I would’ve had trouble doing that with the mental illness, because there were a lot of things that that impacted. Like my eating, my sleeping, my social life were also impacted by finances, and moreso by the mental health problems.

Mental Health Impact on Money Mindset

09:41 Emily: Yeah. Let’s talk about that more now. So, you had an undiagnosed slash untreated mental health condition at that time. So, how was that affecting how you handled your finances?

09:54 Haley: So, I have a psychotic disorder that causes me to have delusions and hallucinations that are usually really disparaging and kind of controlling. So, let’s say, for instance, when I got accepted into the master’s program, my mom made a comment that my brothers paid for their second degrees. And that kind of morphed in my mind to my parents won’t help me at all, so don’t ask them. Even when I tried to apply for like student loans, I kind of got it in my head that I would never be able to pay them back. So, it was kind of like a brick wall to actually apply for that. There were other things in my life, like I couldn’t eat certain foods because I thought I’d get really sick and stuff like that. So, it was essentially that I couldn’t really do anything to help my situation because my brain would tell me, like, you can’t actually do this.

10:58 Emily: Wow. Yeah. I had not like, thought about that or realized that was a potential, you know, symptom that some people could be experiencing. So, thank you for sharing that. I do a lot of like, how do we find workarounds on this podcast? Or like breaking through like your money mindset stuff. But like when you’re dealing with a serious mental health condition, that’s simply not an option without higher-level treatment, right? Which you eventually got, and we’ll get to that. And so, how then also did having such a low income during graduate school affect your ability to get diagnosed or treated?

11:33 Haley: I started to have psychotic episodes during my third year of my undergrad. And at that time, I went to go see a doctor and that doctor gave me antidepressants, which there was a co-pay for. And he wrongly sent me home without doing any more assessment and essentially told me, you might be developing schizophrenia, we’ll see <laugh>, which is not the best thing <laugh>. So, I was already on a very small budget when I was in undergrad. My parents paid for like my tuition and my rent. So, I was never in a situation where I would be homeless, but I was still in a situation where I didn’t have that much money. If I were in that situation now where I’m on my antipsychotic and my antidepressant, the antidepressant is maybe a couple dollars a month, but if I didn’t have benefits my antipsychotic would be over $200 a month.

12:43 Haley: So, part of the reasons why I stopped taking the medication at that point was, one, that it caused pretty severe hallucinations, more than I had before I got on the medication, because it was the wrong one. And the other thing was that I didn’t necessarily want to pay for it <laugh> because it was making me feel worse. So, I was kind of in denial that I needed them when I was in grad school, because I could no longer tell if I was feeling well, or if I was sick. Everything just kind of melded together. So, in terms of the impact of having a really low budget in grad school, I couldn’t eat properly. I maybe spent $30 a week on food, and I pretty much ate the same things all the time. Like rice, lentils, beans, and apples.

13:48 Haley: I was so worried about things that I also didn’t sleep. And by that I would mean I would be in the lab for maybe 16 hours a day and I’d go home and sleep for four to six hours. And one of the big things about controlling psychosis is that you need to get enough sleep. So now, I actually need close to eight to 10 hours on average. So, that was a pretty big impact. And it certainly didn’t help the delusions that I couldn’t get financial help <laugh>. It was kind of like a feedback loop.

14:27 Emily: I was just going to say that sounds exactly like a negative spiral, right? Like you are having tight money issues, so you forgo the medicinal and also other forms of self-care that maybe were somewhat available to you. And then your mind is also telling you that you can’t access or don’t deserve those things. And then it loops around again. So yeah, that sounds horrible.

Financial Stress and Sacrifices on a Low Stipend

14:56 Emily: You just mentioned living off of a really small, like food budget, for example. So, were there other things that you didn’t spend on that you forwent spending on to make that really low stipend work?

15:10 Haley: I didn’t go out very often and kind of avoided any social situation where I might have to pay for stuff. Particularly in my first two years. After my first two years, I moved somewhere with a better cost of living. I kind of filled my time only with work because I couldn’t really afford to have hobbies <laugh>. At one point when I decided to move in my second, third year, I had to give up a cat that was kind of my emotional <laugh> animal at that time, because I couldn’t move them across the country to where I was working. I didn’t go home for Christmas, and I barely saw my family because I really couldn’t afford to go on a bus or go on a plane. I didn’t take a vacation throughout my entire PhD. I didn’t date anyone during my entire PhD. And I avoided buying anything other than food. So, I would wear clothes until they like physically fell apart. Same with shoes. I’d wait until I really, really had to. So, I essentially forgo like anything that would be making me kind of happier <laugh>. So, it really wasn’t ideal.

16:39 Emily: Yeah. I realized that I kind of phrased that question as like, “Oh, what are the great strategies you used?” Not that I meant it that way, but this is not at all a laudable list, right? This is all a list of things that caused you to become even more unhealthy. And again, in that spiral that we were just talking about, and to not be able to break out of it. Like having an injection of some extra money, I mean, it would also help if your mind were, you know, allowing you to spend on these things, but having some extra money would’ve helped your general mental health, but also specifically your condition so much. It’s so obvious that that would be the case. I’m just like hearing a picture of you like drowning during graduate school. Financially, mentally. And I’m wondering about the people around you, like your advisor or other people in your department. Like, was there anything that they could have done? I’m asking this in a way of like, what can other people listening to this, take away if they see a peer or someone in their program that is to say, maybe they’re a faculty member or someone else who has a bit of power in the situation too. Like what, what should they have been doing or what could they have done to help you out of this spiral?

What Could Have Helped?

17:59 Haley: In some ways, there wasn’t really much people could do. In terms of what the department did, they tried to help me get scholarships, which did make the situation a lot better. There is an opportunity to do like graduate assistant work that I did for two summers. That was really helpful. Maybe having like emergency funds that are easy to apply to would be very useful too. But a lot of the time, I didn’t think that my, I couldn’t tell that my situation wasn’t normal <laugh> because a lot of my peers had similar problems. Probably not to the same mental extent, but in terms of money, it was pretty common. And maybe just increasing the stipend would make a big difference. I checked the department’s website and it looks like the PhD stipend has increased, but the master’s stipend is still quite low. But that would be what I would think of when I think of what the department could do to help people.

19:09 Emily: Absolutely. I think pay graduate students more. Pay graduate students enough that they don’t experience the things that you mentioned, like not being able to go home and visit your family members, never going out socially if there was, you know, a possibility you might spend money. In addition to just being like the compassionate thing to do for students who are under your charge, as well as, especially if you’re not going to allow them to work or whatever, they’re not developing. You were not developing as a scholar in the way you could have. You could have blossomed even more, had you been sufficiently financially supported. Same goes for your peers too. So, it’s just really, it’s very hard for me <Laugh>, I’m sure for the listeners as well, to hear how much you were struggling and how big of a difference, you know, a few more thousand dollars a year from your department would’ve made, and what exactly is tying their hands to make that not happen? If their goal is to develop scholars and PhDs, they could do that even better by financially supporting them better. That’s how I view it.

20:12 Haley: Yeah.

Commercial

20:15 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I have set a big goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the US who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Now, some universities, institutes, or funding agencies already offer such a training, and they have no need to work with me. But others won’t allow their employees to touch the topic of taxes with a 10-foot pole, and that’s where working with me can really benefit everyone. Would you please send me an email and tell me which camp your university falls into—or if it’s somewhere in between? You can reach me at [email protected]. Furthermore, let me know if you want to take Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients for free or think that the cohort coming in this fall should, and I’ll reply with how you can help make that happen. I look forward to hearing from you! Now back to our interview.

Ending the Negative Spiral

21:56 Emily: So, how did you ultimately end this spiral that you were in? Did you get on medication? Did you see different doctors? Was it a matter of graduating? Like what happened?

22:06) Haley: Graduating was actually the worst thing that happened <laugh>. So, I had to pay for my ticket to do my defense because I was living in Alberta at the time and I had to come back to Ontario, and that actually completely depleted my bank account. If I hadn’t gotten a job pretty much right away, I would not have had a place to stay and I wouldn’t have been able to go home at all. I ended up going through an even bigger spiral where I entered like acute psychosis. Like the CRA is after me <laugh> kind of psychosis or people are actively following you and you’re hearing complete conversations and more disparaging comments and so on. I essentially kept working for almost six months with acute psychosis. And then I finally hit a point where I couldn’t do it anymore and I realized that there was something incredibly wrong.

23:21 Haley: So, I ended up going to the doctor who tried to put me on an antipsychotic, but I essentially spiraled further when I got onto the antipsychotic because it was essentially too late to be putting me on it in an outpatient location. So, I ended up having to go to the ER twice. The first time there wasn’t a psychiatrist. So, they sent me home. The second time, I was essentially really dehydrated, only weighing 80 pounds and completely out of reality <laugh> essentially. So, the psychiatrist put me into inpatient care and I stayed there for a month where they put me on medication and I essentially slept because I was burnt out from work and the PhD. So, it’s taken probably two and a half years to get on the right medication and recover fully from that.

24:23 Haley: Starting a postdoc that actually pays me enough to live has been pretty helpful <laugh> in that because I’ve been able to start eating more healthy. I’m not as worried. And I have the psychosis under control between medication and therapy. So, I’m sleeping a normal amount. I’m eating a normal amount. I’m exercising because I can afford to go to the gym and like go to spin class and stuff like that. One of the weird things is I actually got out of the grad school with absolutely no debt because I couldn’t actually apply for the loans. Like my head would not let me apply for them. So, I ended up getting out with absolutely no debt, but also absolutely no money <laugh>. So, I was really lucky that I was offered a job right away. After I was hospitalized, I had to take three months off. So, I actually lost the job that I had gotten and I had to find another job, which I had to move across the country for. And then after that job, I had to move across the country again, which has always been kind of a financial burden, but that’s just kind of how my job goes <laugh>. But I’m doing much, much better than I was doing in grad school and have a lot of things more under control.

Paying Off the Mental Health Debt

25:57 Emily: I am so glad to hear that you’re in a much better place right now. Although it does seem to me that it’s taken a long, long time to get there. I mean, you mentioned that you came out of graduate school with no financial debt, but you had a debt to yourself of another kind, right? Of having not taken care of yourself and had been on the medication and doing the sleeping and the eating and all that stuff. So like, you still had to come out of that depth of the, you know, of care that you needed to get back up to the point you’re at now, the stable and healthy point.

26:32 Haley: I would say that I would’ve rathered have the financial debt than the mental debt. So like, my suggestion would be if somebody’s in my situation to go get the help you need and get the financial help that you need, even if it means taking out loans. Because it’s much better to have the financial debt than the mental health debt.

26:57 Emily: I totally agree. And I’m really glad to hear you say that. I don’t want to criticize other people either in their financial situations, but when you’re in a unique time of life, like being a graduate student and it is ideally time-limited and you’ll move on to having a better-paying job later on, it can, in some situations make sense to take out debt and some people feel so debt-averse that they, and I’m not saying you did this because you had this mental health condition, but they put themselves into debts of these other kinds. They’re not eating properly. Maybe they are not living in a safe situation. Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing them, but they do as a graduate student, at least in the U.S., have the option of taking out debt and alleviating some of that.

27:43 Emily: And so, I just want them to think about that as a legitimate option and not something that’s completely off-limits to them to help this short-term cash crisis that they’re in during graduate school. Again, the responsibility for that as we were talking about earlier falls much more on the programs underpaying people. That’s on them, rather than the people who are being underpaid. But that is a way out of a very difficult short-term situation. And like you said, you would’ve rather had a bit of money to pay off than having these years and years that it’s taken you to recover from the state that you were in by the end of graduate school.

Save Money and Study the Financial Side of Grad School

28:20 Emily: Do you have any other advice for prospective graduate students who are walking into programs like you did your master’s, your PhD program, who are potentially being radically underpaid compared to the local cost of living?

28:37 Haley: I would mostly work for a while and save money before you go to grad school. I wasn’t in a situation where I thought I could do that, but if I could do it again, I probably would’ve started working right away and then decided if I wanted to do grad school after I’ve made a little bit of money <laugh>. Make sure that whatever program that you want to go into does have a fair stipend. I didn’t even think of that when I joined grad school, but that should have been a much bigger consideration than what it was for me because I’m first-generation. I didn’t think that they would give me a stipend that I couldn’t live off of <laugh>.

29:17 Emily: Misplaced trust.

29:19 Haley: Yeah <laugh>. I would maybe do a little more digging on the financial side before starting grad school.

29:27 Emily: Yeah. I think those are great suggestions for someone considering graduate school. Definitely look into the stipends versus the local cost of living. I have a website that helps with that. At least if you’re in the U.S., which is called PhDstipends.com. So you can see what other graduate students actually report as being their income, not what the programs tell you they’re paying. Those might be two different things until you get the offer letter, at least. So you can kind of do some pre-research on the programs that you’re planning on applying to, to see if they’re paying a living wage or not. And like you said, I think a lot more people should be considering working for a decently-paying job for a year or two or three before they start graduate school to build up some kind of financial safety net so that they don’t have to do things like you were just mentioning, the cost of moving multiple times across the country.

30:13 Emily: That’s very significant. And if you end up paying for that, let’s say with like credit cards, because you don’t have the savings or cash to do it, then you’re kind of starting graduate school like already knocked back, already knocked onto your back foot, like financially, because you’re now having to pay down credit card debt in addition to living on this very, very small stipend. So instead, if you can have that savings, so, so helpful to just kind of get out ahead of these issues. So, that’s great advice for prospective graduate students. And thank you for giving that.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

30:43 Emily: I do end my interviews with a standard question that I ask all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve talked about in the course of the interview, or it could be something completely new.

30:55 Haley: If you’re a postdoc, I’d start saving and get a retirement fund and maybe a rainy day fund. Because postdocs are fairly short for most people, and you’re probably going to have to move again and things come up. So, it’s good to start saving once you can start saving after grad school. And kind of the same advice for looking at a postdoc. Make sure the salary is enough to live comfortably on before you agree to do it. It’s not a nice thing to accept a salary and then get to the city and realize that you can’t really live there <laugh>. And maybe try to negotiate your salary if you can.

31:45 Emily: All wonderful advice. I’m recalling actually, when my husband got a postdoc offer in Boston, we were living in Durham, North Carolina at the time. So kind of moderate cost of living to high cost of living. And we calculated it after accounting for the cost of living change between those two cities. He was actually being offered effectively less money than he had made as a graduate student with that postdoc position in Boston. And he did try to negotiate and he got them to increase the offer very, very slightly. And ultimately did not take that offer and finances were, you know, a part of that decision. And so, I totally agree with you, especially if you have not yet lived in a city, whether it’s for grad school, for postdoc, anything else. You need to really investigate what the cost of living is because you just don’t know until you actually live there. And by the time you accept an offer and move, it’s too late <laugh>. You need to do as much as you can in advance. So, Haley, thank you so much for being willing to give this interview. I think it was a really important conversation that the listeners are going to benefit so much from. So, so glad to hear you doing well. And thanks again for volunteering!

32:50 Haley: Thanks for having me!

Outtro

32:58 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance…but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How Grad School Rewired This Student’s Brain for Financial Success

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In this episode, Emily interviews Elise Glickert, a fifth-year PhD student in organic chemistry at the University at Buffalo. Elise got married in the summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. Between their student loans and car loan, Elise and her husband were in about $85,000 of debt. With two irregular incomes, they quickly realized they had to change something to do more than just get by with their finances, and they implemented a zero-based budget. Elise compares long-term debt repayment with the process of completing a PhD—both require a long-term mindset, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. Elise and her husband are now debt-free, planning their next steps with their finances, and expecting a baby.

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Teaser

00:00 Elise: Even with that, I think that was helpful. Just even for both of us to see, “Man, like, it is kind of cool how, like, you know, you can increase income just by like approaching or working towards something from a different angle.” And again, I think just like when you’re working on research projects, right? Sometimes you need like a different angle or different thought process to kind of come in and be like, “Oh, cool. Actually, I could approach this problem, look to solve this problem from this angle, instead of just this way.”

Introduction

00:30 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 11, Episode 9, and today my guest is Elise Glickert, a fifth-year PhD student in organic chemistry at the University at Buffalo. Elise got married in the summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. Between their student loans and car loan, Elise and her husband were in about $85,000 of debt. With two irregular incomes, they quickly realized they had to change something to do more than just get by with their finances, and they implemented a zero-based budget. Elise compares long-term debt repayment with the process of completing a PhD—both require a long-term mindset, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. Elise and her husband are now debt-free, planning their next steps with their finances, and expecting a baby.

01:30 Emily: Speaking of the transition from undergrad into grad school or the working world into grad school, I am giving away an incredible resource for rising graduate students later this week! The resource is a live webinar on the financial actions that people who will matriculate into graduate school in the coming months need to take right now. It’s really, really practical. We are covering why and how to right-size your housing and transportation expenses, budget and save up for your start-up costs, and investigate your paychecks prior to receiving the first one. I’m really looking forward to sharing this material with you and hearing your questions and concerns. If you are headed to graduate school in the fall, you can register for the webinar at PFforPhDs.com/rising/. If you’re already in or past graduate school but wish someone had sat you down to warn you about the financial pitfalls in your path to the PhD, please share the registration page with the rising graduate students in your life. Again, the URL to register for the free, live webinar on Thursday, April 28, 2022 is PFforPhDs.com/rising/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Elise Glickert.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:59 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Elise Glickert. She is a fifth-year PhD student at the University of Buffalo, and we are going to discuss her financial journey, along with her husband, from when she started grad school to this year, when she’s nearly done. And it has been quite a journey. So, I’m very excited to talk about Elise. Elise, will you please introduce yourself a little bit for there for the audience?

03:20 Elise: Yeah, so what’s up everyone? Yeah, just like Emily was saying I’m Elise and a fifth-year PhD student at University of Buffalo. I do organic chemistry research. So that’s kind of what I’m working on right now, synthesizing different compounds. And then primarily as well, the hope is with that to ultimately go on maybe into like academia, do some teaching or some like business type stuff. Especially like I tutor now, we’ll probably talk a little bit more about that with like kind of like side businesses and side hustles as well and stuff, so, yeah, it’s exciting.

Finances at the Beginning of Grad School

03:57 Emily: Okay. Sounds great! Let me know, let’s kind of take it back to the beginning of graduate school. I understand you got married right around that time as well.

04:05 Elise: Yes. Yeah.

04:06 Emily: So, what was going on with your finances and also, you know, your understanding of finances or your outlook on finances at that time?

04:13 Elise: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so my husband and I, we got married in May of 2017, and we actually got married the day after we graduated, which I will say made finals week very, very stressful. Very, very stressful. Yeah. And so, you know, because it’s like you still have all your tests and everything and then also double-checking, like, Hey, is the DJ good? Is the catering, all this stuff. But it was also a lot of fun because we went to a small college in Ohio, and so it was cool getting to you know, just like kind of have like a final like celebration per se with all of our friends and everything. So that was really awesome. And then after that, we actually headed out to Buffalo. One of the reasons I even chose Buffalo or UB was because at the time when we had started talking about like getting married and stuff I didn’t really care where we lived at all.

05:03 Elise: My family’s originally from Jacksonville, Florida, and my husband has a lot of family in New York. We had some friends in like this New York area as well. And so yeah, so UB was one of the places I applied to that accepted me. And then, yeah, basically after that got married, graduated honeymooned, and then headed out to Buffalo and I started doing some TAing during the summer, and then my husband was also working in retail at like a DICK’s Sporting Goods. So, yeah, so that’s kind of how we started with that. And then in regards to finances, I will say we are complete polar opposites. I’m a huge spender. One of the like embarrassing stories I share is so like my senior year, so entering my senior year of college, I had this goal. I have no idea why, it’s not even really that great of a goal, honestly, to just like blow a thousand dollars in a day. And I was a college student.

05:54 Elise: I didn’t, I mean, it was bad. But anyway, so I did that, and then I hadn’t actually read my like student bill correctly, so I didn’t even have enough money. So I blew the thousand, and then like three days later went into the admissions office and was like, “Hey, like I, is there any way I can get more money? Like I don’t have.” It was so bad. So very, very, yeah, very irresponsible, I would say, was more of my mindset. And then my husband is the complete opposite. Absolutely hates spending money whatsoever. So yes. Yeah. That’s kind of like, again, my financial background there. Yeah, I would say definitely no financial literacy whatsoever. It was just kind of like, yeah, you know, as long as the bank account’s not zero, enjoy spending.

Combined Debts and Incomes

06:38 Emily: Got it. And what about your like net worth or your combined net worth at that time? Did you all have debts? Did you have assets coming out of college?

06:46 Elise: Yeah. Yeah. So we both had student loans coming out of college. And so I had around like $30,000 or so, and then my husband had around like $46,000. My loans then went in deferment. But for his, right, we were then like six months later began making those payments. And then we also in like the fall, so like fall of 2017, we then also financed a car. And with that again, I will say I’m more so kind led this as a spender, but again, something I would recommend not doing. I remember we both walked into the dealership and I like told the dealer who was there, like the salesman. I was like, “Hey, yeah. So, you know, we’re looking for a car, our budget is $15,000, but we can go up if needed.” So again, not the best, really just not the best lines to use there. So as I said, yeah, I was super yeah, not super intentional with money or anything, so yeah.

07:46 Emily: Okay. Let me know about your incomes as well at that point. So like, what was your stipend when you started grad school? And what was your husband earning?

07:53 Elise: Yes. Yes. So for me, it started out around like basically $26,000 a year, like $26,300. And usually, that would be split up into like $23,000 the full like semester, both semesters, and then $3000 during the summer. So, like $3,200 during the summer.

08:13 Emily: Interesting. So you would have to prepare a little, I mean, in theory, you could prepare a little bit through savings to supplement over the summer, but I’m not thinking that was something that you were trying to do at that point.

08:25 Elise: No, definitely not. Yes. I remember even when we saw this you know, you’re like talking with other grad students, you see the forms and stuff. And yeah, I remember where both of us, as I said, since we were kind of more like opposite-minded, there kind of started to be very much a “Man, something’s going to need to change. Otherwise, this is going to be kind of disastrous.” Right? And even, I know like one of the things that can be like one of the leading causes of divorce, right, is like financial issues. And we didn’t want to have that. So, yeah. Definitely again, that kind of was what even really started, I would say especially for both of us, a passion for finance was kind of realizing, “Man, we are going to, just like what you’re saying, we’re going to have to start planning.”

09:08 Elise: Because like my income’s a little bit irregular. And then as I said, at the time he was working at DICK’s and so that was I think that like first semester or whatnot, that summer again making like $15,000 or whatnot. Or like 12 to $15,000. And then again, that was kind of irregular because he was working at DICK’s part-time and then also had like an internship as well. So, it again was like part-time. So not, yeah, we weren’t bringing in a ton of money. I think those first six months’ gross was maybe like $25,000 or so. And again it was all irregular, always irregular paychecks.

Money Mindset and Strategies in Grad School

09:52 Emily: Yeah. So let’s kind of talk through, you know, we have a good picture of the start. So let’s talk through like how those next few years went, and what you were learning. And maybe what strategies or mindsets you started to use along the way. Because you know, we’ll get to what the current picture is, and it’s a lot rosier than, you know, what the start was. So like let’s talk about that evolution.

10:13 Elise: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say the big thing for us was kind of a desire to make sure we were on the same page. Because I will say, when we did first get married, there weren’t I guess like a lot of like financial stressors per se, it was just, everything was very disorganized. But we weren’t having like I will say we were sort of blessed. We didn’t have like any huge thing that kind of like came up where it was like, oh no, it was just, it was like, man, we are, you know, we’re little just organized and stuff, but Hey, you know, it’s good, life’s good. Like you know, I’m doing school he’s working. And then again, I would say is more so because our paychecks were so irregular, it was kind of like a “Man, we’re going to need to be a little bit more intentional with this.”

11:00 Elise: And so that was when I started doing a little bit more research into just personal finances of like, “Hey, you know, how should we like set up a budget?” You know, what’s the best way to do that. And we ended up finding like a zero base budgeting type method. And so with doing that, it’s kind of where you’re like setting up, Hey, at the beginning of the month, this is how much we’re going to spend, which was really helpful for us, especially because of, again, that irregularity. We were then able to be like, okay, well this is for sure, you know, like our expenses. And then you know, even though the incomes are irregular, this is how we can use this excess. And then we also decided that it was like, “Hey, let’s also look to start having some financial goals together.”

11:48 Elise: I would say we both do love setting goals and achieving them together. So it was also a lot of fun kind of setting like one of them was, “Hey, let’s become debt-free.” So again, let’s be intentional with that zero-based budgeting of how can we pay off our debt? And then also like, you know, getting savings account set up, stuff like that. So I would say, but the big start with that shift was really kind of like those again, how irregular the incomes were and kind of almost seeing, “Man, if we’re not intentional about this, sure, it’s fine now. But like five years down the road, this would be just disastrous, right?” It would not, because again, if anything comes up, like it’s going to be really, really bad because we’re just not keeping track of everything thing well.

Debt Repayment Goal

12:34 Emily: I’d love to talk more about the debt repayment goal. And so, you mentioned that you both had student loans, but yours were in deferment. And you had the car loan. And so, did you use any particular like methodology? Or like how did you decide what to tackle first or how much to pay? How did all that work?

12:55 Elise: Yeah, so I will say one of the big things. So we really liked Ramsey Solutions. That was again, when I was doing like the basic Google search, right, for personal finance. I mean one of the top things that came out, and they talk about doing like the debt snowball method, paying off just smallest debt. And it was fun to feel like all of those wins with things. And then, this is interesting because like I would say at the same time as all this is happening, right? I’m also like progressing in my program as a grad student, and it was interesting, I guess kind of the similarities of, I really liked the focus that like they kind of talked about of like delaying gratification. And obviously, I mean that’s a hundred percent grad school, right?

13:40 Elise: You’re constantly delaying gratification. So, I guess as my brain was already being rewired to some degree of going from, I would say like my senior year where it’s just way more you know, kind of like, “Hey, whatever feels good right now. Like let’s just do it” to a “Man, okay. Let’s put you know, kind of submit to a process.” You know, get that like I’m delaying a pleasure, right? And then again, that intentionality. I would say that was kind of the big methodologies, but I’m not going to lie. I don’t actually know if I wasn’t in grad school, like at the same time as we were doing this, that might have been honestly a little bit, maybe too much of a rewiring all at once. But it was cool because you know, at the same time I’m running experiments and I’m learning, “Hey, this is what happens when this doesn’t work.”

14:25 Elise: Then I have to come back in, you know, or “Man, this is going to be like a five to six-year journey.” You know, like my brain’s already getting used to longer journeys than just, “Oh man, I can’t like pay off all the debt in like three months. So what’s the point, you know? So it’s just interesting all the similarities there that I would say really helped both of us, especially as we were going about achieving those goals. But the big one was yeah, just paying off smallest to largest and kind of, for us, it was realizing, “Hey, this is not going to be something that we finish in a year.” But again, it’s like grad school also, right? It isn’t something that you finish in a year. So, it was difficult, but at the same time, I don’t know, like obtaining a PhD is difficult. So I think it was nice to have like those similarities.

15:14 Emily: I love that you brought up this point because this is actually something that I bring up at the beginning of one of my seminars, which is The Graduate Student and Postdoc’s Guide to Personal Finance. And so, what I say because I know that people who attend these seminars are not necessarily, you know, like you are now like, are a super podcast listener would be like, oh, I’m super interested in personal finance. Like yeah, I’m going to really dive in. You know, they may just be like casually like, oh, I probably should learn something about money. So I’m going to show up at the seminar. So what I do to kind of like frame this is like say, you as a graduate student or postdoc, you have already made the decision to commit to this, you know, as you said, five-ish year, at least maybe 10 years, training period to set yourself up for this wonderful successful career at, you know, the start of that.

15:57 Emily: And you making the decision to do that gives you certain like personality, characteristics, like going through it, like you were saying like forward-thinking, planning ahead, committing to a process. And that, I say, if you take this sort of the personality you’re developing by being a graduate student, by being a postdoc and you translate it over to the financial side of your life, you are going to be successful. Because it does take long-term thinking. It does take delayed gratification. It does, you have to think about it as an investment in your future, whether it’s debt repayment, saving, investing, whatever it is, it’s all setting you up for an easier time in the future than you’re necessarily having right now. So, I really love that you, you know, clearly saw yourself going through this process as well. Brilliant.

Student Loans and Savings

16:39 Emily: Well, I want to ask though about, you know, regarding the debt snowball, which is a great method to use, how did you treat your student loans in there? Because they were in deferment. So, they’re a little bit different than the other types of debt.

16:49 Elise: Yes. A hundred percent. So I will say with that I should say, I guess maybe like a caveat should be, we use like a debt snowball hybrid <laugh> because yeah. So, because with the deferment, right? You did have the 0% interest and yeah, basically, the way we did it was, which, I mean, we just kind of thought of all of our debts as together, I will say. But I guess if you technically split them up, we paid off like my husband’s loans first that were broken off into the like, you know, $3000, $1000, $2,000 chunks. And then did the car, and then did like the student loans that I had. But technically the student loans that I had were higher than like our car.

17:35 Emily: So, sort of a combined avalanche snowball method. Because of the 0% due to the subsidy and deferment and so forth.

17:42 Elise: Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yes.

17:44 Emily: Gotcha. And you mentioned also earlier savings. So, how were you thinking about cash savings versus this big debt payoff goal? Like how much cash did you decide to keep on hand and for what purposes? How did you think through that?

17:57 Elise: Yes. So I will say we did use where for us, we kept it a thousand dollars. I will say though, also we did keep our expenses very, very low. And we were like pretty much every month, again, once we started being intentional and doing that zero-based budget, we had usually like $2000, $3000 a month or again, depending on the year. And as I said, our incomes were irregular. But yeah, we had the $2,000, $3,000 a month where like, if something did come up, we would just take like a pause on the debt payment. But we always had with like an emergency fund of, as I said, a thousand dollars. Again, just in case like because when we were looking at kind of like our lives, it was like, “Hey, you know, the like worst thing that could happen would not exceed really like a thousand dollars, honestly.”

18:53 Elise: Because the biggest thing for us would’ve just been the car repairs, and we actually only had, and still have, one car. So, it also kind of worked out that way. And yeah, most of our expenses I will say, and even now, are like under $2,000 a month. So it also makes it again a little bit easier to with that intentionality of okay, cool. Well, you know, I always have this amount of cash flow. And we did have later on like in our marriage, whatnot and in our journey where technically, I will say, which is bad on my part, like I have actually totaled like two cars. So, when that happened, like we did have to press pause on it and we then like saving up money. And so instead of it just going to the debt again, like $2000 or again, depending on how the income varied, it would go into savings or towards yeah getting a car.

19:51 Emily: I also skated through graduate school with a thousand dollars in a designated emergency fund savings account. Because I mean the way that you described it was also sort of similar for my husband, me, like we were renters, we only had one car, not a whole lot of financial responsibilities at that time of life. Now I did have other savings in other, like I’m really big into targeted savings accounts. I had other cash in other places that were like designated for car repairs or like other purposes. So, it wasn’t like that was our only cash on hand, but I like what you said, because you know, you had the thousand dollars in savings, but every month, if something came up, you had a thousand, $2,000, you could devote to that new thing that popped up because you were so, you were cash flowing so much debt, you know, above the minimum payments every single month. So I definitely, I don’t know how much I’d recommend it, but I definitely see how you could, you know, get by with that. Were there any other like strategies or mindsets or anything that you wanted to share from, you know, that time in graduate school?

Intentionality

20:49 Elise: Yeah. I think honestly the big thing is just kind of what we’ve been talking about. Just like the intentionality. Like, I don’t know, even, I feel like just kind of when you’re choosing a lifestyle. Again, that’s another thing that I think for us going straight from like college to grad school and everything we didn’t do a lot of like the lifestyle creep. And I will say a lot of that maybe I should probably should credit as well to like my husband, because as I said, he’s way more like frugal than I am, but it is really nice, I will say. And again, this is kind of similar thinking to like grad school, it’s like once you’re in a process, it kind of becomes the norm, you know, and you don’t even think about it. So even for both us, like when people are like, “Oh man, you guys don’t,” you know, there would be times where people would say like, “You don’t have two cars?” And it’s like, well, you know, yeah, we have one, but actually we’re like good <laugh>, you know, but it becomes the norm.

21:37 Elise: Or same with when I’m talking about like grad school to people, right? And you know, sometimes you get the whole like, “Wait, you mean you don’t just work like a nine to five in grad school?” And it’s like, no, no, but it’s like, that’s the norm for me. You know what I mean? So again, once you’re in these, I think it’s just the same with personal finance. Like you really do get to set and determine, to some degree, you know, “Hey, this is the lifestyle I’m going to have.” And, I would also say with that, it also becomes harder if you like set a norm that’s maybe a little bit higher that you can’t maintain. Because then you, again, you have to like almost rewire your brain, which is one of the huge benefits, again as I was saying, I think of like being in the PhD program and also the personal finance journey. Because there are just so many similarities that can really, really assist you.

22:24 Emily: I agree.

Commercial

22:27 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The Community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! Now back to the interview.

Supplementing Your Stipend

23:33 Emily: You mentioned earlier that you were tutoring. Like what was your, how did you supplement your stipend? I guess I’ll put it that way, during grad school.

23:41 Elise: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Yes. So I will say, yeah, so for us, again, as we were kind of on like our debt repayment journey. You know, there kind of starts as you’re like going, going, going, it’s like, “Man, like what, are there any other things I can do to like speed up the process?” Again, similar with like grad school, right? Sometimes you might have weeks where it’s like, “Man, I actually, yeah, I’m going to put in more time. Or okay, I’m going to not do this because I want to, you know, I’m so close. I just man, just got to push through.” And so that was kind of how that started. And then I was looking for different like side businesses or side hustles and things to do. And during the pandemic, actually we did a little bit of like DoorDash, you know, just because you’re like in your car and just dropping off.

24:22 Elise: I mean, it was great, you know. You just pick up the food, drop off the food, and then like wave to the person from your car or whatnot. So super safe and everything. And so doing that, it was kind of like, “Oh this is cool. Like we can supplement income, you know, doing this.” And then also, as I said, our incomes have always been very irregular. And my husband, after working in the retail then went into more of like sales, which was still making around like a 30, 35 or again, depending, because it’s very irregular. But even with that, I think that was helpful. Just even for both of us to see, “Man, like it is kind of cool how like, you know, you can increase income just by like approaching or working towards something from a different angle.”

25:06 Elise: And again, I think just like when you’re working on research projects, right? Sometimes you need like a different angle or a different thought process to kind of come in and be like, “Oh cool. Actually I could approach this problem, look to solve this problem from this angle instead of just this way.” And then with that, so then it was like, man, I’m doing all this stuff with organic chemistry. And so, what would be a good like side hustle I could do that’s more related to organic chemistry? Because obviously DoorDash is not really related to organic chemistry at all. And I had always tutored like a little bit, but it was more so like I would help out like you know, like tutor some like high schoolers at like church or whatnot. Or there’d be someone who would recommend like, “Hey, can you help this student?” I’d be like, “Yeah, sure.” But I use a platform called Wyzant.

Wyzant Tutoring Income

25:50 Elise: And so I started doing that last year actually. And it was awesome. It was I think really, really cool just because I loved it, because I loved being able to teach. I love being able to talk and like communicate with students and explain concepts. And it was great too, because it’s like an online platform, and I feel like you know, obviously everyone has different like opinions and stuff about online learning, but I think a lot of people have really gotten used to it as well. And so it’s also really cool. Because this platform’s just great. And the students like they’re great, you know, it’s just awesome. Being able to like teach and communicate again that one-on-one. Yeah, so it’s just been really, really awesome and it’s been great too. Because then I get to do like organic chemistry on the side, which is also what I’m doing in lab. So I think that’s been really awesome.

26:35 Emily: Another tie-in with what I teach in many different venues, which is if you can somehow employ the specialty that you’re developing in graduate school in some other arena, you’re probably going to get paid like at a better rate than, well, one staying inside academia, like, you know, maybe tutoring at your university, and also, or just trying something totally different that doesn’t use that skillset, like you were saying with DoorDash.

27:00 Elise: A hundred percent.

27:00 Emily: Can I ask what your like pay rate or how much you’re earning like monthly is from Wyzant?

27:05 Elise: Yes. Yes. So in general, which, I will say I started it last year in June, so it wasn’t actually a huge part honestly, even of like our like debt-free journey per se. But yeah, I make on average around like a thousand to 1200 a month from it. And then I charge with it like $50 an hour for the tutoring. And usually it’s like at the college level. And then there’s a couple of students in high school that I tutor as well. But yeah, it’s awesome because again and just like what you were saying, and even like some of like the articles and things that you have posted as well, right? It’s also nice because, to some degree, right? Especially like you’re becoming like an expert, you know, in a field.

27:53 Elise: And so, it’s very, very helpful for me honestly just continuing to man, make sure I’m really communicating well. And then also it is great when, you know, they can both kind of coincide. Because like I do, you know, organic chemistry at work and I can come home in the evenings, you know, for like a couple hours or so, or during the weekends for a couple hours. And yeah, it’s really, really nice. And then, I will say, it does slow down a little bit like in January and then December as well. Just because, you know, not as many students are taking classes and stuff during those times, but yeah. So far it’s been really, really great. And I’ve really been yeah, enjoying just the one-on-one tutoring and mentoring with students.

Current Financial Situation

28:35 Emily: Yeah. That’s a great pay rate. That’s a great addition to your budget. I mean, you know, you’re on the order of magnitude of like a grad student paycheck. I mean, you’re not quite there, but it’s the same, you know, you’re in the neighborhood. So, that’s awesome. Give us an update then on how, like what your finances are like right now. You know, we went over at the beginning of graduate school, you know, the various debts that you had. What do your finances look like now? We’re recording this in January, 2022.

29:00 Elise: Yes. Yes. So now yeah, we’re a hundred percent debt-free. So got rid of all of that, the $85,500. And as I said, that was a process, right? The 47 months paying that off. But again, like grad school’s a process too. So, you know, I think that’s one of the cool things about processes is like all the stuff you can learn about yourself in them. And then right now we’re working on increasing just like our emergency fund. So, as we were talking about like a thousand, you know, it’s fine for like, in my opinion, it’s fine for a starter emergency fund. Really, I would not recommend, you know, spending the rest of your life with a $1,000 emergency fund and especially you know, we have a baby coming, so that’s really, that of course changes things where it’s like, yeah, a thousand dollars isn’t, you know, we don’t want to have that for like 20 years.

29:47 Elise: But yeah, so we’re looking to increase that right now to, which more would be like four to six months for us, which is like $10,000, just to have that nice and set up. And that should be set up in like early March or whatnot is when we should have that. And then right now, after that, we’re also looking to, we’re going to start investing, so we’re going to max out two Roth IRAs. So just kind of again, which that’s a way longer process, you know, but just getting that money saved up for retirement. And I think for that, we’ll probably I’ll be using Fidelity and then my husband as well, who set his up either with Fidelity or maybe Vanguard, because he works for Geico now. And so with that, I think they have Vanguard.

30:39 Elise: So yeah, we’ll see with that. And then, I mean I suppose we’re not a hundred percent sure what like the next five years will look like for us. And so we’re also in the process of we’ll look to get something, once our daughter’s born, we’ll look to get something set up for her for college or just future educational goals. We’re thinking of it’ll probably just be we’ll just set up a 529. And New York has some nice like tax benefits when you set up a 529. And then yeah, and then it will be like saving up for a house. Right now, our goal is to buy a house in cash, because again, with the current lifestyle that we have, as I said, it’s less than $2,000, but we are very content with that. Obviously, when our daughter’s born, you know, that will increase. That will increase a little bit.

31:28 Elise: But yeah, we think we can probably cash flow, because again, my husband’s income continues to go up and my income, hopefully, you know, will also go up beyond the graduate stipend cash flow, hopefully around like 30,000 so a year and we’re hoping to then buy, I don’t know, maybe like a condo or townhouse or single family. Again, depending what, you know, where we go for like maybe $120,000 or something like that. So we’ll see. Yeah, but that right now is kind of the plan with everything. And right now the biggest focus is just yeah, getting that savings increase from a thousand to the, or like I think right now it’s like $1,800 to $10,000. And then yeah, getting those Roth IRAs maxed out.

32:13 Emily: I really like it actually when, this point that you’ve volunteered to do this interview, at this point of we just became debt-free, and now we are ready to start these next steps. I love it that we’re talking at this point. Because whenever you have someone like you, who’s gone through this very intense, very intentional debt repayment journey, you get all of your, you know, systems and processes and mindsets, everything’s set up. So your cash flowing above your, you know, your expenses a thousand, $2,000, $3,000 a month. And it’s all been going towards this debt. And now you get to the point where you get to switch it, and it’s like this massive, you know, amount of cash flow. Like I think of it as like a huge like fire hose like you now get to direct to other goals. And I love that you have this like order. Okay, first is the emergency fund, Roth IRAs, 529, you know, you have your priorities set out. So, absolutely love that. It’s very apparent, you know, these last years have been preparing you for this state. I also want to add that I went through, again, the exact same process when we were pregnant with our first child, that I was looking at that thousand dollars emergency fund going, “Not going to cut it anymore.”

Preparing for Baby’s Arrival

33:15 Emily: And I think our goal was also something like 10 or $15,000 as that next thing to do, like before the baby comes. Which turned out to be very useful. I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about that. Are there any other, you know, you just mentioned sort of long-term financial plans and of course getting the emergency fund together, but are there any other specific financial preparations that you’ve been making or thinking through for your baby’s arrival? Like, I don’t know, like health insurance or childcare like these other, maybe leave? What other sort of major financial things are you working through right now?

33:46 Elise: Yes, yes. No, that’s a great question. So, I will say in regards to like preparing for our daughter and everything, the big thing was I got to have a fun time. Well actually, yeah, both my husband Kyle and I, but kind of doing stuff where, yeah, like reading those actual like health insurance statements. Not going to lie, when I first got to UB, they gave me the handbook and I was like, “Okay, cool, thank you.” And then did not even glance at it. And so, but just, you know, making sure that we know like, Hey, this is like our deductible, this is the amount we will be expected to pay. And it’s actually kind of cool. I will say I have been very blessed, like the lab I’m in, there’s actually like three other students who have also had kids as well.

34:27 Elise: And so for them, it’s also nice because you know, we all technically have the same insurance, and so yeah. And UB I will say does have pretty good health insurance as well. So it’s nice. So we’re of course planning for that where it’s like, okay, cool. We should you know, that’ll cost us like $200 and then, you know, you have all the visits as well, which we again, since we do the zero-base budgeting, we just budget for like, okay, this month, you know, it’s going to be this much for these visits. And then everything else in regards to just like kind of preparing for like stuff and everything, that has more so come from just kind of like asking other people in our lives and also just like other grad students, “Hey, like how much, you know, do you find yourself like spending for diapers?”

35:13 Elise: And I will say also there is a lot of information that is online as well. So it’s kind of like using a mix of like the online plus, like what, you know, our friends are actually just telling us that, “Hey, this is how much I spend for this.” Which has also been super, super helpful. Or like, “Hey, you need this, you know, this is the cost of this.” And just like adding all of that up, like, you know, car seat yeah, cribs, stuff like that. So that’s good. I would say that’s been kind of how we’ve been primarily preparing financially for that. In regards to leave, I’ll have three months of maternity leave that I’ll be taking. And then I have, yeah, kind of like a fellowship that goes through that. And then, so that’s kind of something like, again, me and my boss talked about like maybe a month and a half ago or so, just about, “Hey, this is kind of like the expectations there.”

36:04 Emily: So that’s paid, just to be clear?

36:06 Elise: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

36:08 Emily: Fantastic!

36:09 Elise: Yes. Yes. So I would say that is, that is a nice thing again about like you know, every state’s different, but like New York does have that paid family leave. And then my husband as well is going to be taking, because as I said, yeah, he’s working for Geico now. So they do paternity family leave or like paid family leave as well. For him, his is a month though, is what, yeah, right now we’re planning on for him. And then, yeah, so that’s kind of, I would say those are the big, like financial preparations we’re doing. But again it is something that, especially, I don’t know when we first like kind of found out, I just like Googled like how to prepare for a baby. And it’s amazing how like just many articles and all this stuff that comes up, and it’s all so different again, based on the insurances, which I’m sure even, you know, right? Like there’s, so there’s just so many different variables. So I think it’s very helpful, at least for us, it’s been very helpful, like talking with other people, talking with peers, talking people from church, talking with people from our places of employment. Yeah. And just like to get that information.

37:08 Emily: I agree. I think those, especially your labmates. Same insurance, same advisor.

37:12 Elise: Exactly. Yeah.

Childcare Decision-Making

37:13 Emily: Been through it recently. Like that’s going to be the absolute best resource. Yeah, definitely. And I asked about childcare earlier, so do you have a plan yet for after your leave ends what’s going to go on?

37:25 Elise: Yes. Okay. So I will say so for that plan, we will. Yeah. We’ll kind of see, because right now, again I don’t think, so we don’t have like anything against daycare or anything like that. Like I think, and UB’s daycare actually is supposed to be like fantastic again, like two of my coworkers use it and they’ve been very, very pleased. For us though right now, so since with every, and again, we don’t know everything will happen with the pandemic, but so my husband, technically he does work from home right now. And then for me, I’m man, I’m just not a hundred percent sure if I would just, you know, maybe just have a weird schedule as opposed to like putting our daughter in daycare because one of the things my boss, obviously he wants us to make sure like we’re getting our research and everything done, but with organic chemistry, there’s a lot of stuff where like you set up a reaction for like six hours or you set up a reaction for four hours, you know, and then you’re like doing some writing stuff and like research stuff.

38:22 Elise: And so for me, yeah, I’m not, I think right now the plan is kind of where it would just be I would just kind of have a schedule set up of like, I’m just going to be in lab at weird hours, like from eight to noon and then maybe come back from like eight to 10 or you know, just weird scattered hours. But we’ll see, that could also, you know, we could also start that and then a week in if I’m like, “This is terrible.” And it’s like, okay, well she’s going to go to daycare. So, it’ll kind of depend too, I think that’s another thing with even talking with people in regards to pregnancy, it affects every woman differently. And so yeah, as much as I love to be planner, sadly, I can’t plan out exactly, “This is how I’m going to feel a hundred percent.” So yeah. But right now the plan is just, I would just have kind of weird hours and just stagger things. And again with that, at least right now, it doesn’t sound all that bad because again, it’ll take a lot of intentionality, you know, I would have to like schedule things out, but yeah, I think it would be fine, but we’ll see. We will see what happens.

39:21 Emily: I will recommend for you in case you haven’t listened to it or any other interested listeners, the interview I did back in season one with Dr. Heather. Because she talked about when she had her first child at the end of graduate school, similar timing to you, how she and her husband set up a overlapping “we’re providing our own childcare” schedule. I think he was teaching actually, he had like a visiting professorship, something like that. So like you said, there was some work that could be done from home. There was some work that had to be in person for both of them, but they just kind of worked out the schedule so that.

39:51 Elise: I like that. Yeah.

39:52 Emily: You know, they could each be with their child. I will say that since then, I believe all their children are in all the daycare and all the preschool, like as much as possible after they got out of this grad student phase. But that’s what they did for kind of the finishing up of grad school, like period. Yeah, so that’s a really, really interesting interview if that’s kind of your like philosophy and the approach that you want to take. And it’s actually a little bit similar to what my husband and I wanted to do as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

40:14 Emily: So, awesome! Well, Elise, this has been such a delight to chat with you. Congratulations on becoming debt-free! Congratulations on the pregnancy! I’m so excited to kind of see where, you know, where your new financial next phase of your journey takes you. Because like I said, you, you have all these goals and you’re really ready, right, to tackle them. So it’s awesome. I would like to ask you the question that I end all my interviews with, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on during the interview or it can be something completely different.

40:45 Elise: Yes, yes. So I would say, yeah, the biggest one I always recommend is just to do a zero-based budget. Again, you can also budget, right, where you just kind of look at the end of the month. But I just think, especially even honestly more so when you’re working on like a stipend, just get into the habit. Because again, you’re already learning how to be intentional anyway. So just go ahead and get into the habit of with finances as well, “Hey, this is how much I’m going to spend” you know, in each of these categories. Or, you know, whatever stuff you have set up, or this is much I want to save. You know, in our case it was like paying off debt and then building up savings and investing stuff. But again, whatever your financial goals are like, it’s just so much, I feel like, yeah, just so much easier and so much more helpful when you just zero-base budget it. And it also just like again with grad school, as you like are disciplined and are intentional, your confidence grows, you know?

41:42 Elise: And so I think that’s another thing too, where it’s awesome to, you know, be confident as you’re like doing experiments and stuff, but also confident in the way you’re handling your money. And when you’re able to create a plan and then, you know, like it doesn’t have to be perfect, but then able to like achieve some of the things within that plan. It’s just awesome. Yeah. To then be able to grow that confidence. So for sure.

42:05 Emily: Great advice. Well, thank you so much, Elise, for joining me for this interview!

42:09 Elise: Yes. Thank you, Emily. Thank you so much for having me on.

Outtro

42:17 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with a email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

An MD/PhD Pays with Time Instead of Money

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In this episode, Emily interviews Emily Przysinda, an MD/PhD student at the University of Rochester who is approximately halfway through her 8-year degree program. As is typical in a Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), Emily’s funding package includes tuition and fees and a stipend for the entire program. Emily and Emily discuss the financial side of the MD/PhD and why it shouldn’t be thought of as a free medical degree. Emily shares why she chose an MD/PhD program and what the career options are afterwards. Thanks to the low cost of living in Rochester, Emily has been working on her finances intentionally for the last couple of years and is pursuing several savings and investing goals—but decided against buying a house. This episode is perfect for anyone considering an MD/PhD program or curious about the mindset of someone pursuing an 8-year-long graduate program.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

mdphd pays with time instead of money

Teaser

00:00 Emily P: If you think about what an MD might be making in the four last years of their career, because that would be to assume they might have a more extended career by four years, it’s probably only about maybe a year or two worth of salaries of debt that they take on for this. But essentially I say that I pay in time and not money for my MD degree, just because of the opportunity costs of not having those extra four years of the career.

Introduction

00:37 Emily R: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 10, Episode 13, and today my guest is Emily Przysinda, an MD/PhD student at the University of Rochester who is approximately halfway through her 8-year degree program. As is typical in a Medical Scientist Training Program, Emily’s funding package includes tuition and fees and a stipend for the entire program. We discuss the financial side of the MD/PhD and why it shouldn’t be thought of as a free medical degree. Emily shares why she chose an MD/PhD program and what the career options are afterwards. Thanks to the low cost of living in Rochester, Emily has been working on her finances intentionally for the last couple of years and is pursuing several savings and investing goals—but decided against buying a house. This episode is perfect for anyone considering an MD/PhD program or curious about the mindset of someone pursuing an 8-year-long graduate program. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Emily Przysinda.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:50 Emily R: I am delighted to have joined me on the podcast today, Emily Przysinda. She is an MD/PhD student at the University of Rochester. And since the very beginning, like episode one of this podcast, I have wanted to interview an MD/PhD or an MD/PhD student. And Emily is the first person who has like, come along, who has volunteered to do that. So I’m really excited about this, and just delighted to have her on. So Emily, will you please introduce yourself to us and yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself?

02:17 Emily P: Hi, I’m delighted to be on the podcast, been listening for about a year now, so I’m really excited to be here. So I’m originally from Livonia, New York, which is south of Rochester. I went to Skidmore college in Saratoga Springs, majored in music and neuroscience, and I was also on the swim team there. After that, I worked in a music cognition lab at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and there I solidified my love for human cognitive neuroscience. And I applied to MD/PhD programs while I was there for two years. And then now I’m in the University of Rochester MD/PhD program, or MSTP, which stands for Medical Scientist Training Program. I’ve completed the first two years of medical school and also the first few years of my neuroscience PhD. And so I’m about halfway through, and my project is looking at social language processing in patients with schizophrenia using neuroimaging methods.

03:25 Emily P: So it’s fairly integrated with clinical and research. And yeah, and then also before I get started, I just want to acknowledge my privileges and express gratitude for just a couple of things. My family kind of had modest means, but I’m very lucky that all my needs were met and most of my wants were fulfilled. I learned how to save for big ticket items at a young age. And my life was very rich with relationships, activities, and experiences, especially in nature. And then for funding my undergraduate degree, I was happy and very grateful to get a good financial aid and merit combined scholarship and have around an average amount of student loan debt. And I’m very grateful for some family support with room and board and transportation costs. And I’ve been financially independent from my parents shortly after graduation. And I’m currently a white female and I’m only financially responsible for myself. So that’s just kind of some things that I’m very grateful for and want to get into before we talked about any breakdown of finances and things like that.

How Do Finances Work for an MD/PhD?

04:40 Emily R: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for that context. So I don’t know that all of my listeners will be very familiar with MD/PhD or MSTP programs. So could you please explain like, just in general, like maybe the timeframe and so forth and and of course what the finances are, because I think we all know the finances about PhD programs. Most of us can make some assumptions about the finances of MD programs, but how does the MD/PhD fit, you know, between those two?

05:06 Emily P: So, yeah, it’s actually kind of similar to the PhD except for it’s longer for most programs. And so I’m in a NIH-funded program, and not all programs have funding from this. So it’s a combination of NIH funding and funding from my institution. And so I get a stipend that’s like essentially like a STEM graduate stipend for the full eight years of the program. And just to give you an estimate about that, it’s around $30K, which I think is standard depending on the city that you’re living in. And the PhD is kind of sandwiched in between two years of med school on each side. So you have two years of med school, which is mostly didactic courses and some patient interactions, and then you have the PhD, which is four years.

06:03 Emily P: And then the last two years of MD, which is mostly clinical. So it’s eight years long, and you really try to only keep the PhD to four years, but some people do have longer. And then, in terms of just like a couple of nuances to the finances, the PI is kind of responsibl for your stipend for after the first 21 months of your PhD. So it kind of gives the PIs an incentive to take on an MD/PhD student. You stress to them that it’s four years, or maybe even a little bit less, so you can make that transition back into med school. And you’re encouraged to apply for an F30, which is like the MD/PhD equivalent of an F31 grant. The program here, at least, covers health insurance and disability insurance. And they take over, once you go back to medical school. We also have about a $2,400 stipend for MD/PhD things during the program. So like conferences, test prep, like lab laptops. And there are some student fees, but they’re generally minimal except for the first year and during some of the medical school years. Yeah. So that’s kind of the overall trajectory in terms of finances in the program.

An MD/PhD is Not Just a Free MD

07:37 Emily R: Yeah. And I think at first blush, this seems like, What? Like you get a free MD and you get paid while you’re there, like during both the med school part and the PhD part? That’s incredible! What a deal. Can you tell us why that might be the first reaction, but it shouldn’t be the only reaction to how this program is funded?

07:59 Emily P: Yeah, so it’s definitely a valid reaction, and I think it can be a very good deal, but really only if you like research a lot. Because it’s a very long program, it’s eight years. So the way that I thought about it even going into it is that I more compare it financially to an MD program where you would be funding the MD out of pocket. And so the MD career trajectory will be essentially four years earlier than an MD/PhD’s. So, if you think about what an MD might be making in the four last years of their career, because that would be to assume they might have a more extended career by four years, it’s probably only about maybe a year or two worth of salaries of debt that they take on for this. And more with interest, because that can be a big thing depending on your specialty. But essentially, I say that I pay in time and not money for my MD degree. Just because of the opportunity costs of not having those extra four years of the career. And for that reason, I definitely wouldn’t suggest doing an MD/PhD just because it seems like an awesome deal. You should really like the research, both the research and the human clinical side, because both of these training programs can be fairly brutal. So, definitely want to consider that.

09:35 Emily R: I really like that you noted in that comparison that what we’re really talking about is, in a sense, a four-year shorter career, possibly. So like it’s those end, you know, the last four years of salary that is the difference rather than, you know, your residency salary or whatever you’d be doing in the, you know, most immediately post-degree. But I wonder, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, is like playing around with like the compound interest effect on this because you know, it sort of cuts both ways. Because one, if you did the MD instead of the MD/PhD, you again would be out four years earlier and you can get compound interest working for you earlier from your like big MD salary. And of course you’re paying off your debt as well. Versus during the PhD, maybe you can only invest a little bit, but you do have that stipend coming in.

Think of Yourself as an Adult with a Job, Not as a Student

10:18 Emily R: So some early investment is possible, we know of course the massive time value of money. So I don’t know, it cuts both ways, but I think it’d be really, really interesting if someone, for their own situation, you know, played around with those numbers and saw that. But I really like that you emphasized, you know, we’re going to talk about finances today, but in terms of the motivation to do an MD/PhD program, you really want to get both of these degrees and love what you’re doing the whole time. So, you know, you were just mentioning how of course you have this history that you told us at the beginning with like being into like a music and you mentioned being on the swim team, and of course you really want to have both the neuroscience PhD as well as the MD. So what do you think, like, what is your outlook on maintaining your life outside of just being an MD student or a PhD student? And do you think that’s different at all from maybe another PhD student?

11:13 Emily P: Yeah. So I’d say that I’m not sure if it’s necessarily too different from MD and PhD. However, given the length of the program, I think that it’s very important to kind of think of yourself as being an adult with a regular job and not a student. It would be very difficult to postpone this mentality shift for eight years. And I think that’s something that could be valuable for both MD and PhD, but it’s especially important to take that into consideration. So, I consider my program to be a full-time job with my stipend as my income. And then that just helps you to act both in better financial interests, but also able to continue to live your life and not put it on pause because of this program. And so, since it’s such a long program, I would say that you want to secure your support network as soon as possible when you get to med school and especially because med school ramps up really fast and can be very difficult.

12:28 Emily P: There are a few kind of, I guess, areas of personal capita that I would suggest getting up and running as soon as you get there. Or as soon as you can. Academically, I’d say you want to make friends with MDs and MD/PhDs because it’s good to have a group of people to study with. And you might also want to talk to people who are currently in your graduate program that you’re thinking about joining to make sure that’s the program you want to do. And then also establish relationships with your advisory dean and your MSTP or MD/PhD director. And so those are all things that I guess are related academically, but also can be very helpful in your outside life. Also, you want to do the adult thing of setting up your support network for personal health.

Your Health and Support Network

13:25 Emily P: So the two most important thing would be to establish a relationship with a primary care doctor as soon as possible. Even if you don’t necessarily need them, just like make an appointment to like get your prescriptions transferred. And then also find a therapist in the community. I think that every PhD and MD student, or MD/PhD student, should have a therapist because oftentimes, if you actually need a therapist, it’ll take months to get, so you want to find a therapist, maybe you just meet with them every month. And then if something comes up, you can meet with them more often. And then set up the other auxiliary things, dentist, eye doctor, and things like that. So, you want to make sure you’re doing the regular adult things that you should be doing to make sure you that you get support in the program.

14:16 Emily P: And then moving to some other outside of medicine is that you want to make sure you’re maintaining your relationships with friends and family that you already have. If you’re living near your family, which I am, make sure you have boundaries and they know when you can talk to them and see them. And set up regular phone calls and visits and you know, plan to see friends in other cities if you want a vacation. And then finally, you should maintain and pursue potentially additional hobbies outside your med school, graduate school training. Personally, I joined a masters swim team, which is just adults swimming, and it’s really fun. And I made a lot of friends there. I go to a lot of Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra concerts. There are really great tickets for that. And I also sing karaoke. So those are some of my hobbies that I do. And most people have their own kind of hobbies that they do. Two of my previous housemates, they both had their martial arts, horseback riding, and volunteering through religion. So I think it’s very important to kind of set up that support network and then including your hobbies and relationships.

Time Management Approach

15:36 Emily R: The other thing I wanted to follow up on was that, you know, you described that your attitude towards your graduate program is that it’s a full-time job and you’re being paid this stipend for your full-time job. Does full-time job to you mean 40 hours per week? Because definitely you’ve mentioned a lot of great stuff like that you do outside of work. So yeah. I’m just wondering, like what your sort of overall time management approach is.

16:00 Emily P: Yeah. So I think it honestly depends on what stage you’re at. The MD, the whole thing is probably going to be more than 40 hours a week because you’re studying a lot and that really can kind of cut into the outside time. However, I found that you just have to, as long as it’s not like interfering with like required activities and things, you just have to put that time in your schedule, like try to make it in the evening and carve it out, which is what I typically do for things like swimming. I know that on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, I’m going to be at swimming and I’m not going to be studying. So you kind of have to make time, if makes sense. And same with like going to the Rochester Philharmonic, you have to carve out that time for yourself. In grad school, it’s definitely a bit more flexible. And I’d say like, I probably never work the same amount of hours like in consecutive weeks. It always fluctuates. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. It depends on deadlines and when I’m running participants and stuff like that. But it’s a similar thing. Like you have to prioritize your hobbies, your relationships, and put them in the calendar and kind of treat them like you would any other commitment.

17:25 Emily R: Yeah. Not dissimilar from a good strategy for your finances as well. Get the big, important things in there in first and kind of let everything else fall around the margins.

Commercial

17:36 Emily R: Emily here, for a brief interlude. This announcement is for prospective and first-year graduate students. My colleague, Dr. Toyin Alli of The Academic Society, offers a fantastic course just for you called Grad School Prep. The course teaches you Toyin’s four-step grad boss method, which is to uncover grad school secrets, transform your mindset, up-level your productivity, and master time management. I contributed a very comprehensive webinar to the course titled, “Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School.” It explores the financial norms of grad school and the financial secrets of grad school. I also give you a plan for what to focus on in your finances each season of the year that you apply to and into your first year of grad school. If this all sounds great to you, please register at theacademicsociety.com/emily for Toyin’s free masterclass on what to expect in your first semester of grad school and the three big mistakes that keep grad students stuck in a cycle of anxiety, overwhelm, and procrastination. You’ll also learn more about how to join Grad School Prep, if you’d like to go a step further. Again, that’s theacademicsociety.com/E M I L Y for my affiliate link for the course. Now, back to our interview.

Role of Finances in Choosing University of Rochester

19:03 Emily R: Let’s talk a little bit more about the money part of it. What role did finances play in your choice of University of Rochester, in particular over perhaps other programs you were admitted to?

19:13 Emily P: So I would say, I guess aside from like kind of the overall picture of paying in time and not money, I definitely chose MD/PhD, I guess I would consider for the right reasons because I really like clinical and research. And I was a bit anxious about taking out a lot of loans for medical school. So this route definitely helped me. But just to reiterate, that’s not the primary reason. I definitely applied to programs that were more in low- to mid-cost of living. I come from kind of a rural town. So like, I wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a big city anyways. But I definitely was looking at places that were a little more, not necessarily rural, but smaller cities. And I guess I chose Rochester, I’m a bit biased here because most of my family is here. And so I was really excited to go to Rochester because of that. But I also got really lucky that it was in a very like low- to mid-cost of living city in Rochester. Yeah, so that’s kind of why I really wanted to come to Rochester, but I say like, you should definitely talk to people who were looking at a lot of other places because I definitely was biased by the family a fair amount.

20:42 Emily R: Yeah, that’s definitely fair. I think you mentioned earlier, your stipend around $30,000 per year. Do MSTP programs vary a lot like with cost of living, or are they in a pretty tight range?

20:58 Emily P: That’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure. I think when I was looking, most of them were around there, but since I didn’t look at some of the higher cost-of-living cities, I’m not sure that they actually increase it all that much for the higher cities. But I wouldn’t quote me on that because I actually didn’t see them. But I think it also might be standardized if they get NIH funding as well. So usually the websites are pretty open about that. But that’s definitely something I would calculate, the cost of living, if there’s some place you really want to live and make sure it’s high enough for you. There are ways to increase it, like getting an F30 grant. Well, I guess it depends on your school. Usually they’ll bump it up a little bit as kind of a reward for getting the grant, but yeah. It really depends on the program.

Financial Goals Pursued with MD/PhD Stipend

21:55 Emily R: So $30,000 a year is a decent stipend, and I think in Rochester goes fairly okay. So, I know you’ve been sort of intentionally working on your finances for the last couple of years and learning a lot. And so what are the financial goals that you’ve been able to pursue with that stipend?

22:14 Emily P: Yeah, so I feel like I live very comfortably on this stipend. I’ve been a very avid saver most of my life. So a lot of my personal finance work has been on instead of trying to like cut back on expenses, it’s more like how do I allocate extra expenses and also transition my money to be able to spend it towards things that I actually enjoy. And maybe still I go with my natural instinct of saving on things that aren’t as important to me. And, yeah, so I would say that actually initially my goal when I started the program is that I wanted to house hack and buy a house. Because I didn’t know that much about personal finance other than like kind of budget and I was saving a lot. But I wanted to house hack.

23:16 Emily P: But then I kind of got into the first few years of medical school and it was kind of crazy and I realized that being a landlord would kind of be a lot of work. And so I kind of shifted away from that. Especially after living in a house with five people during COVID because we had some partners move in temporarily. I decided that I just wanted to live with my partner and not have housemates. So that’s kind of the icing on the cake in what I decided that I didn’t want to house hack anymore. So I decided that I wanted, since if I was just living with my partner, it would be more of a personal residence. And so many finance books that I read say that your house is not an asset, it’s a liability. So I was like, alright, I think that I want to actually buy assets and make some investment decisions instead since I wasn’t going to be house hacking.

24:24 Emily R: So interesting. I’m really glad you brought up this perspective because I am very enthusiastic about house hacking, but I have never done it and I’ve never been in like the position that I was considering it. And I think I, like you, now that I am at a new homeowner, yeah, there’s a lot of work that just goes into owning a home. Not even adding like the landlord aspect on top of it. So, you really have to be up for that. And it can be worth it. Like, especially if you’re, you know, let’s say in your financial situation, you’re looking at house hacking versus having like a side job. Well, the house hack can be your side job and that can make sense, but you have to have the time to be able to do that stuff. So I think that makes so much sense for you and especially, COVID kind of like changing the equation on this.

25:04 Emily R: Like yeah, how many people do you want to live with? And if it’s only going to be two and yeah, house hacking, like that’s actually one of the reasons why I love talking about house hacking. Because I kind of feel like anybody who’s in the position where they could buy a house in graduate school, house hacking makes it like a slam dunk, good financial decision. Whereas it’s more iffy, you know, if it’s really just your personal residence, as you were just saying, you know, you can get lucky or unlucky with the housing market in that case. I know that’s probably what would have happened for me living in Durham had I not house hacked, which I didn’t end up buying overall. But anyway, I’m just really glad to have your perspective on that. Yeah. Living with six other people during COVID sounds like a lot.

25:44 Emily P: Yeah. And also, just, I guess the opposite perspective is that actually my two housemates that I was living with, they actually went on to buy a house. And one of them is house hacking. So it’s definitely something that MD/PhD students can do. They do house hack a lot. But it was just something that I decided not to, and I’m very happy and we live in an apartment complex and when something breaks, the landlords come right away, or the maintenance people come right away, and I’m very happy with that.

Tracking Cashflow, Investing, and Saving

26:17 Emily R: And so when you mentioned that you’re buying actual assets instead of the combo asset liability, does that mean you’re like investing for retirement or investing in other ways? Like what are you doing?

26:29 Emily P: Yeah, so I have a couple different areas. So I’d say like personal finance and investing has kind of been like a hobby that I was somewhat interested in before COVID, but during COVID it’s actually become a lot bigger and I’ve had a lot of time to do some reading and listening to podcasts and stuff. And so, I mean the first step to all this, I would say, was definitely budgeting or tracking your cashflow if you hate the budget word. And I take a very hands-on approach to this because I think it’s really fun. And I kind of try to make it a game. And so, like knowing your cashflow is the first thing. Otherwise, before I knew exactly what my cashflow, even though I knew where my money was going, I didn’t know how much I had to spend for the future and such.

27:25 Emily P: That’s given me a lot of freedom to put the money towards where I actually wanted to go. And oh, I also started tracking my net worth, which is inspired by your emails. So that’s been fun. So those are like really the basic building blocks before anyone should start investing. So I just want to say that I did those first. So yeah, but in terms of what I’m actually investing in, I do have a Roth IRA, and I love my Roth IRA. And I learned, I think from your blog actually, that I was able to open one, and I was very excited about that. And yeah, it’s been a little bit of a challenge. I kind of try to challenge myself to fund that every year fully. Before this, I did have some cash, because I had a lot saved up for the potential house.

28:20 Emily P: So I put it in a regular brokerage account. Some stocks, mostly ETFs. And so I am in the process of kind of trying to fund the Roth IRA with my money that’s incoming. And then when I can’t make the limit, to supplement it with a brokerage account. And then finally I’m saving for some of my future expenses. Medical school can, some parts of it, can be very expensive, such as standardized tests and residency applications. I was actually told to save like $10,000 for residency application. So, and it might be changed a little bit because it’s potentially virtual, but we don’t know if that’s changing. Saving for a new used car, and for paying off student loans, which I chose to defer until after. And it’s definitely tricky to find the right vessel for this savings goal for like about three to five years out. And I actually did something that was maybe a little bit not in the normal, it’s like a specially designed whole life insurance banking policy. And I won’t go into the details, but it’s definitely something that’s a bit controversial in personal finance, but I researched it heavily and it made sense for me, but I definitely would not recommend unless you like fully research it and alternatives for that. But those are the kind of major places where my cashflow is going, the Roth IRA, and the savings for future expenses.

29:50 Emily R: Yeah. Those sound like incredible goals. And yeah, $6K to a Roth IRA per year, either out of cashflow or out of your existing investments is incredible, setting yourself up. Yeah, I hadn’t heard about, or I hadn’t thought about using a whole life policy for sort of shortish, mediumish term expenses. I assume you’re then going to borrow against the policy to do that. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. We won’t go into it, but like, as you said, there’s not really a good like solution out there for that kind of timeframe. So it’s not surprising to me that you would like, you know, kind of get creative with that.

Career Paths for MD/PhDs

30:23 Emily R: You know, you just mentioned like doing a residency, and I’m wondering is a residency definitely the next step for all MD/PhDs? And, you know, overall, what is the career path for MD/PhDs in comparison to only MDs or only PhDs?

30:38 Emily P: That’s a great question. In certain situations, like interviews and things like that, it’s definitely the next step. But there are a lot of other options out there. But I mean, generally, you’re going to need a residency if you’re wanting to practice clinically at all. Even if you decide to do a full-time like academic lab, if you want to have any proportion medical, clinical things in your work, you’re going to need to do a residency. And they’re usually four to six years long and they can be pretty intensive depending on the field. Sometimes there are research intensive. So the ideal MD/PhD kind of percentage breakdown, which is somewhat arbitrary, is that you’ll spend 80% running your own lab and 20% in clinical doing clinical work.

31:34 Emily R: And that would be in like an academic or like a hospital setting. Is that right?

31:38 Emily P: Yes. Typically in an academic hospital combined setting. So like a larger institution. I’d say, like that’s not, I mean, I think some people do that. I think it’s a very arbitrary number and it might be very difficult. You might end up working, you know, 150% instead of a hundred percent, which can be difficult, especially if the clinical work can just be like pretty brutal and like kind of time suck your time. So if you do something like that, they say to be very purposeful in like protecting your research time.

The 80/20 Myth

32:20 Emily R: So is that like, so when you’re talking about, okay, so the ideal outcome career for an MD/PhD is this 80% running your own lab, 20% clinical breakdown, but is that like telling a PhD student that their career should be a tenure-track professorship? Like, is it that kind of, I guess what I’m asking is what are the actual job prospects for MD/PhDs coming out of residency to get a position like that? Like what percentage actually get a position like that versus go on to do something else?

32:52 Emily P: I would say, I don’t know the stats, there are definitely like papers on this topic, but I would say, this would be like you do your residency and then you try to get a full tenure-track position with part-clinical time. And I’d say, I think oftentimes people end up doing one or the other. I think it can be very difficult. Sometimes it depends on the field of medicine you go into as well. So it’s really all over the place. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can kind of do whatever you want. There are a lot of options with this degree. So like academia, academic medicine, and clinical are just like two of the, probably most common, fields that people go into. But also there are some options in like industry, particularly, in health tech, I guess pharmaceuticals, but that’s a whole other basket of worms. So yeah, but I’d say that there are there options, but essentially you do have to do that residency, typically. There are some nonclinical roles, but you generally want to do the residency and then, you know, pick full-time clinical or part-time clinical. And then I’d say like more of these other options might come later in your career or might be like a part-time side hustle or things like that.

34:23 Emily R: Yeah, very interesting. I guess I’m just going back to what you said, you know, near the beginning of our conversation was, you know, you’re paying in time and not money. And like, I hope that you all know by the time you get to, you know, choosing a residency, like whether that’s going to play into your future career, because that is a long time and a big salary opportunity cost to spend doing a residency, if it’s not ultimately something that plays into your long-term career plan. So tough decisions. And what about you personally, like, do you want to go for that, like 80/20 academic medicine kind of split or like, what are you thinking?

35:03 Emily P: I personally am more interested in having, so my research right now, even is fairly integrative with clinical and research, so I would like to have more of like a clinical aspect to it, and then do some collaborative research and really use kind of my skills and knowledge as a physician to inform clinical research. And I think that is very doable in my field of like psychiatry or neurology, which is currently two of the options that I’m looking at. But I’m also not a hundred percent sure. I’d say there are like a lot more and more collaborations or collaborative PI labs. I’m not sure I’d want to be like the single PI in the lab, just if I want to maintain clinical. So yeah, I’d say I’m interested in kind of both, but maybe more integrating them. And I also really am interested in health tech things. So maybe I’d be interested in starting kind of my own business or consulting, but that would be later on in my career after I had established myself clinically.

Talk to Upperclassmen for Advice

36:19 Emily R: Yeah. Well, thank you for giving us that peek into your plans. Do you have any go-to resources on finances for MD/PhDs in particular? It’s so niche, I’m wondering if any exist?

36:32 Emily P: So I haven’t come across any yet that are specific to MD/PhDs. It might exist. But I’ve been able to get a lot of what I need out of out of your content, specifically geared towards PhDs, in addition to numerous podcasts and audio books that are in personal finance. I haven’t come across anything that’s specifically geared towards MD/PhDs. I generally get a lot of my advice from talking to upperclassmen, just either casually to find out what they’re doing. I had a neighbor who was an upperclassman nearby and he would give me advice about the program and also sometimes financial things. I guess if there was something I really wasn’t sure about from the MD or MD/PhD perspective, I’d like maybe email someone and ask them specific questions. We also have like, MD/PhD it’s called like a blue book for incoming students with certain things that with many things, including personal finance things. And there are some seminars where you can ask upperclassmen different questions and stuff. So I’d say it’s more by word of mouth from what I’ve seen. However, a lot of the resources geared towards PhDs and just personal finance in general, really applied to the situation of MD/PhDs.

Best Financial Advice for An Early-Career MD/PhD

37:57 Emily R: Yeah, that makes sense. And I love the advice of like, just talk to real people who have been in your shoes a year or two back and have like the real, you know, high-quality information that definitely applies to you. So great, great, great. Do you have any other great advice? What is your best financial advice for another early career MD/PhD student or MD/PhD? Your best financial advice for that person?

38:20 Emily P: I would say my best advice is something I touched on earlier is just shifting your mindset from student to adult. It’s just way too long to consider yourself a student and not start living your life. I’d say that it might be difficult sometimes. So you should try and shut work off after you come home. Whatever hours you may need to work, just like try your best to shut it off and maintain your life outside your graduate program. And I think that if you kind of separate your program and your in your life, to some degree, it’ll help you financially and also help you develop your relationships and your hobbies, and also for maintaining your mental and physical health.

39:07 Emily R: Yes. Fantastic! Thank you so much for telling us that. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective in this interview. It’s been fantastic.

39:15 Emily P: Yeah, great! It’s my pleasure. I’m so happy to be here.

Outtro

39:23 Emily R: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! pfforphds.com/podcast/ is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episodes’ show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved! If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 4 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with a email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and effective budgeting. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 4. Subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe/. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

The Tech Entrepreneuroscientist on Happiness and Financial Independence

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Sharena Rice, who recently completed her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Michigan. At the start of grad school, Sharena defined what she considers “the good life” and made sure that she lived according to her values. She committed herself to simple living so that she could invest over half of her stipend and pursue adventures. One element of Sharena’s good life is fulfilling work, so she became involved with five start-ups during grad school to gain experience with entrepreneurship. Don’t miss this unique and insightful interview!

Links Mentioned in the Episode

the tech entrepreneuroscientist on happiness and financial independence

Teaser

00:00 Sharena: If compound interest works in this way, and I can reasonably expect this amount if things perform averagely, then this is how my future will turn out if I save an extra $5 a day, for instance. And seeing how little tweaks could make a big difference.

Introduction

00:23 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 10, Episode 12, and today my guest is Dr. Sharena Rice, who recently completed her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Michigan. At the start of grad school, Sharena defined what she considers “the good life” and made sure that she lived according to her values. She committed herself to simple living so that she could invest over half of her stipend and pursue adventures. One element of Sharena’s good life is fulfilling work, so she became involved with five start-ups during grad school to gain experience with entrepreneurship. Don’t miss this unique and insightful interview! Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Sharena Rice.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:19 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Sharena Rice. She recently defended her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Michigan. And she’s going to tell us a really exciting, big financial story about what she’s done with her finances during graduate school, and also what’s coming up next. She’s been involved with entrepreneurship, which is super exciting. So Sharena, thank you so much for volunteering to be on the podcast. And will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

01:43 Sharena: Thank you so much, Emily. I have recently defended my PhD in neuroscience from the University of Michigan. I like to refer to myself as a tech entrepreneuroscientist because I’m both a technology entrepreneur and a neuroscientist. I have roles in five different startups ranging from co-founder and a C-suite executive to advisor. And it’s been a rewarding journey.

02:10 Emily: Yeah. I’m excited to hear more about that a little bit later on. So give us an idea, like briefly, like where did you go to undergrad? Of course I mentioned University of Michigan for grad school. Like, what’s been your educational background?

02:23 Sharena: For undergrad, I studied biochemistry and molecular biology and minored in philosophy and psychology, and felt myself being pulled in these three seemingly completely different directions. But I realized that I could combine them all by being a neuroscientist. So I did a Post-baccalaureate Research Education Program, the PREP program at the University of Michigan and decided to stay for graduate school.

Money Mindset at the Start of Post-Bacc

02:51 Emily: That’s perfect. I did a post-bacc as well at the NIH before starting at Duke. And it was really, you know, during that post-bacc, I had just graduated from college, like you did, that I started learning about personal finance. Because it was for me the first time I’d had like a semi full-time income to deal with. Tell me a little bit about your money mindset, where you stood with respect to your finances, at the start of that post-bacc.

03:17 Sharena: Before my post-bacc, when I was an undergraduate, I was doing various tutoring gigs because I realized that I could make a lot more money by tutoring on my own, rather than through some kind of agency. So I started budgeting things and analyzing things and thinking through hours and how things would work out. I was wondering, okay, how do I want to make things of my life? How can I create more options for the future? Even as a person who is thinking of going into graduate school. So I read a bunch about personal finance. I got to learn about how wealth is created. Went to a lot of entrepreneurship events, went to many things about community leaders and engagement. So, one thing that I’ve realized there is that a lot of times, the smartest people, they’re not making the most money. And yet at the same time, some people who have been making a lot of money, they’re not the smartest people.

04:26 Sharena: So then, it seems like this different dimension to a lifestyle, and to the way that a person operates and carries themselves. So I had this experience as an undergrad, making these financial models in Excel spreadsheets, just for fun at first. I wanted to be able to predict the future by mathing stuff up. So I got to do that some more as a post-bacc, seeing, okay, if compound interest works in this way, and I can reasonably expect this amount, if things perform averagely, then this is how my future will turn out if I save an extra $5 a day, for instance. And seeing how little tweaks could make a big difference.

05:12 Emily: So, I love that you, you know, frame this around, like you wanting to understand how wealth was created, and I totally understand why you went down this entrepreneurial route after investigating that question. So I really want to hear how these journeys of like the PhD and entrepreneurship come together later on. I also noticed in your phrasing just there, are you a Millennial Revolution fan?

05:33 Sharena: Yes.

05:34 Emily: Okay. Yes. So for those not familiar, they have this catch phrase that’s like math stuff, I’m substituting a word, math stuff up. So, they have a very sort of unconventional approach, right? They don’t accept conventional wisdom. They reanalyze everything. Have you adopted that as well?

05:53 Sharena: Yeah. There are many things in the financial independence retire early community that I think of not as a person who necessarily wants to retire early, because if I did retire, then I would just be making more technology anyway, because this is fun for me. But as a person who wants to be doing what I’m doing because I want to do it. So that, okay, whatever job I’m in, I will be bringing my all to it because it is my choice. And wouldn’t it be great if everyone just kind of lived that way, where they’re going to work because they want to be there and they could be doing a zillion other things at that time, but it’s their choice to be working with these particular people in this particular company?

Money Mindset Growth in Grad School

06:45 Emily: I love how you phrase that. And that is such an ideal to be working toward, and certainly one that’s espoused by the financial independence community. So tell me, also, you know, we talked about your financial mindset at the start of your post-bacc. So how did that change over the course of graduate school, or hasn’t?

07:03 Sharena: It has sort of changed, to some extent. Alright. As a graduate student, I have lived in a Buddhist temple for 22 months. And during that time, I got the sense of alright, what does it really take to be happy? Because a lot of times people, they think, “Oh, if I have X amount of money up to a certain point, then I will be happier.” But if you think about it, some monastics are the happiest people in the world, despite having taken a vow of poverty. Alright. If that’s the case, then what if I just leveraged that idea where I could find joys in all kinds of things that don’t actually take money and then save a lot and it compounds over time, so that I’m just doing exactly what I want to do?

08:00 Emily: Yes. Amazing, amazing insight to receive, especially I would say, you know, early on in life to have that, because that’s something that a lot of people never come to, or it takes decades and decades of chasing after the wrong stuff to find happiness before they finally get around to the insight that you have. So that’s incredible. So you told me, when you volunteered for this interview that you saved at least 50% of your grad student stipend, on average. What? How?

Saving ~50% of Student Stipend

08:32 Sharena: I think it’s 53% at this point, and the way that I did that was, alright at the beginning, I was reading these personal finance books and doing these financial model things and thinking, okay, there are very small things that make a very large difference. So for example, I could have lived closer to my laboratory then I actually lived, and it would have cost more, but I could live slightly further. Let’s say that I need to walk an extra three minutes a day or something like that. Well, in that case, I could get a little bit of extra exercise just built into my lifestyle, but also I’m saving money by living a little bit further away. So things like that. Well, there’s the question of what do you value, and is the way that you’re spending your money reflecting those values? I have chosen to invest quite a bit in the future because that’s what I wanted to do.

09:40 Emily: I totally concur with what you’re saying. And I think that once you identify what you value, in your case, investing for the future, it makes you excited to be able to put money towards that. And it doesn’t seem like such a big sacrifice to be cutting back on your spending or choosing not to spend in some other areas of a budget. But I love the philosophical point of view, but I want to get like a little bit more practical. So for example, can we start with, do you mind sharing what your stipend was throughout graduate school?

10:08 Sharena: In my first year, the stipend was $29.6K and that eventually rose to $33K at the end.

10:19 Emily: So I think of that as like a very decent stipend. Nothing out of this world, but certainly in Ann Arbor, sort of a moderate cost of living city. It’s a decent amount of money to make, but still being able to invest and save half of that is kind of a big accomplishment. So you mentioned, you know, you were paying for housing, right, but you just chose strategically. So you were paying a little bit less for housing maybe than some of your other options. Let’s go through just like the big expenses for average Americans. So we touched on housing. What about transportation?

Biking and Cutting Food Costs

10:51 Sharena: I decided that when I was moving out to Michigan, that I wanted to have a simple life or at least simple in terms of material possessions. So my first year when I was here, as a post-bacc, I didn’t have a bed frame, for instance. I just had a mattress on the floor because I didn’t know exactly where I would be for grad school. And when it came to transportation, I just rode a bicycle around. I’ve lost a lot of weight as a grad student and also was able to get from place to place. People ask, “Oh, Michigan has snow. How do you deal with that?” The answer is, “I bike anyway, the roads are cleared. Salt happens. I just bike.”

11:36 Emily: I’m glad you headed off that question. Okay. So no car, cycling lifestyle. What about food? Do you have any particular kind of diet that you follow that happens to be low cost? Or what are your strategies around there?

11:49 Sharena: If you think about it, a lot of places in world where there aren’t that many health issues like cancer and diabetes, they have this really simple diet of, they just pretty much eat rice and vegetables and they don’t have that much meat to them or anything like that because that’s what is available to them. So then I’ve pretty much been eating like a peasant and being just happy with that. Learned to make a really good stir fry, learned to make really good lemon garlic pasta.

Investment Strategy

12:25 Emily: Yeah. So I think we can clearly see from those three big categories that you just sort of slotted yourself on the low-cost end of the spectrum that you could spend in each of those areas. So you mentioned this 50% savings rate, investing rate. What were you investing in? Was it like the stuff I talk about all the time, like index funds and Roth IRAs, or are you doing that plus other stuff? Let us know what your investment strategy is.

12:48 Sharena: At first, I just invested in some stocks from companies that I liked and thought had good leadership to them. So for example, Costco notoriously treats their employees well, and I liked that. So I invested in them. And the Home Depot, well, it seems to be quite a good company, too. So I invested in some individual stocks at first, and then learned that there was this thing called index investing and then switched mostly to that. I also own some real estate investment trusts and some worthy bonds and a tiniest amount of crypto. I just bought $20 worth of Bitcoin for fun, and then laughed as it went up and down and up and down.

13:38 Emily: Yeah. So I like that. So like bulk of your investments are tried and true index funds, hands-off approach, but you have these few other holdings that you’ve, you know, intentionally selected that are sometimes interesting to track. Okay, well, that’s awesome for your investment strategy.

Commercial

13:57 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The Community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the Community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Our next live discussion and Q&A call is on Wednesday, November 17th, 2021. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to PFforPhDs.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now, back to the interview.

Living the “Good Life”

15:09 Emily: You also told me when you volunteered that you have been focused on living the good life on, as we were just saying, less than 50% of your stipend. What does it mean to you to live the good life and how have you been doing that during grad school?

15:24 Sharena: I think that the good life, it is a life that I am doing fulfilling things in that I’m growing in and that I feel connected with other people in. So part of this is, alright. What does it mean to live life to the fullest? I think that it’s investments, not only in terms of money, but also investments in other things that compound interest such as health, and friends and family, and making connections. But also there’s the shenanigans. And that’s a lot of fun, too. I went to Puerto Rico with nothing but a backpack this one time, because people were telling me you need a vacation. I was working in lab on Thanksgiving this one time and thought, well, I have to see the world. I’ve never been out of the country before. So I’m going to book a trip to Rome. So that’s exactly what I did. And then eventually I went to Rome.

16:29 Sharena: But also, when it comes to the good life, there is work as a big part of it. I think a lot of us, a lot of our identity is in what we do for work. I was very lucky to be in a laboratory that was just starting up. So I could be at the forefront of bringing new processes to life. And I just loved that, even though it may have been frustrating to some people who just want to move on with their lives. And they want to get into a place where everything is already set up for them. But working with machines, that was a big part of it, too. I just love machines and the ways that they work and how animals and machines could create systems.

17:22 Emily: I think that those elements that you identified of a good life are ones that are probably to some degree shared by just about everybody. But I definitely encourage the listener, and I need to do this as well, just to periodically, like, think about what brings you joy, what brings you satisfaction, and then do that next step of connecting, “Well, how do these things that I want to pursue in my life, that I want to have in my life, how does having money or spending money help me fulfill those? Or are there ways to fulfill these without spending a lot of money?” Some of the things you mentioned are, you know, such intangibles like connections with friends and family, like sometimes money can help that, but it definitely isn’t required to do so. So I think all of these things are, you know, achievable at whatever level of income that you’re at. You just have to find a way to fit it in with your lifestyle at that time, which you clearly have done.

Entrepreneurship Journey

18:13 Emily: So let’s talk next about your entrepreneurship experience. You know, there’s been a theme of that already through this interview of finding fulfilling work and, “Hey, even if you had infinite choices because of your finances, you know, because you’re financially independent, you would still choose to work in some capacity.” Tell us, you know, how you got involved with these like five companies that you mentioned earlier and just what’s your entrepreneurship journey been during grad school?

18:35 Sharena: I received a message out of the blue on LinkedIn this one time from the founder of a computer vision company for pedestrian behavior prediction. He wanted to meet up with me. He was in Ann Arbor. I was in an Ann Arbor. So we met up and we talked. And he showed me what he currently had in terms of the pedestrian behavior software. On the spot, I came up with several ways that it could be improved. And to me it just made a lot of sense. So then he offered me the opportunity to be his co-founder. And from then on, we continued co-founding this company and building it up more and more and more. We have been a fantastic team, where he goes out and he gives a lot of pitches and manages a lot of the day-to-day stuff while I have been a grad student who has had to mostly work on lab things. But this worked out because a lot of the things that I did were about ideation and about intellectual property and things that were not bound to a certain time of the day.

20:00 Emily: So that’s one of the companies that you co-founded, then. Can you just tell us briefly, maybe a couple other examples of how you got involved with some of these other companies, especially for someone who’s thinking, wow, I’d love to get involved with entrepreneurship as a grad student, how that happened?

20:14 Sharena: The second company that I co-founded, that was a vertical spinoff for devops and for freelancers. So, the second company came out of the first company. As for the rest of them, the first company that I started advising, that actually came about because I saw that they had a product, I signed up to be a tester for it, and I wrote in the comments box, “Would be interested in helping the founders.” We had a wonderful conversation, and I became their advisor. Then, I started talking with people on the Clubhouse App, eventually, about technology. Got into lots and lots of conversations, which eventually evolved into Zoom conversations, which eventually, at the end of those conversations, often led to offers of, “Wait, I’m starting a company soon. Would you be interested in working with us on some sort of development.” Usually a development, of something between a machine and a human in the loop, which is exactly what I love. So then I said yes to them.

Funding Structure in Grad School

21:28 Emily: So I would just very broadly sum that up as like networking, and just like being open to conversations, offering help. I mean, it sounds like you offered help initially in at least two of these scenarios without yet any expectation of a return, but just putting value out there and some good things came back from it. So I understand that you were not able to be paid by any of these companies because of something about your funding structure. Would you tell us a little bit more about that?

21:59 Sharena: Yeah. My graduate program does not allow anyone to receive money or equity in exchange for work for a company outside of the university while they’re still a student. So there’s the question of, okay, given that this is the case, then how do I set things up so that things will work out. And the answer is, work with legal documentation, and just create a vesting structure so that right after you graduate, then that’s when a cliff happens and then you will receive your funding, your equity, your compensation, at that point.

22:40 Emily: I mean this as a complete compliment, but that seems like such a loophole, right? Because like you’re clearly putting in the time, the work, adding your expertise during the time of your graduate program. In your case, you still finished, it’s all good, right? Like it didn’t detract from that PhD journey. But you just arranged for the payment to happen later. And I give this to you as a compliment because I think it’s a great creative solution to this problem in case anybody else is running into it, but also want to voice that I completely disagree with your program. My basic philosophy around this is like, if you’re doing well in your program and you’re advancing and you’re doing the work that needs to be done, and your advisor’s happy with you, the university should keep its nose out of the rest of your business. In terms of whether you’re earning money or not, or equity or not, or whatever you want to do with the rest of your time should be yours. That’s my position. Do you know if this has any motivation in terms of like the university can then claim ownership over like the company? Is that the reason why they have that kind of verbiage?

Consider Grad Programs that Encourage Direct Experiences

23:39 Sharena: I think that they have it because of the way that academia used to work and how academics or people who are in PhD programs used to be thought of. It used to be thought of that a person has to just work, work, work on their thesis, and that that is enough. But if you actually want to make it as an entrepreneur, how do you do that without having actual experience? My experience makes me very rare. There aren’t very many PhDs who are just graduating from their program with this much experience, as an entrepreneur. A person can take classes. I was encouraged to take classes when I said that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But no, they didn’t want me to actually do anything in a company. But I wanted to be an entrepreneur, partly because I wanted to do change the world in a positive way to promote road safety, for instance, with my pedestrian behavior prediction company.

24:47 Emily: Yeah. I am so glad that you shared this experience with us because I think it’s really instructive. Like if anybody else like you, and I’m not criticizing you by saying this, but if anybody else like you knows that they’re quite interested in pursuing entrepreneurship during the graduate program, once you’re going around and interviewing and talking to various advisors or whatever, like that’s something to bring up. Does your program have a prohibition on me starting a company or me having equity in a company that I advise during the course of this program. And, you know, maybe use that to help you make a decision about where you should end up in terms of a graduate program. I am a little bit surprised to hear about that from Michigan.

What’s Next for You?

25:23 Emily: Let’s talk about what’s next, then. You just said that you’re a unique kind of PhD with this sort of experience. What is the next step in your career, having just defended?

25:33 Sharena: Given that I have positions in five different companies, I think that I need to create a portfolio that I will call Yellow Pill Ventures. There’s this narrative sometimes that you can either make a profit or you can make a positive difference in the world. But I think that the two can really come together, and that can be by premise of my portfolio. Aside from Yellow Pill Ventures, I will also be pursuing a career in big tech. And the reason why big tech is because they already have the infrastructures place to bring ideas to life quickly. It’s not like we have to wait to hire software developers, for instance, but that they are already within the company. They’re ready to receive work. So between the two, I think of it as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Barbell Strategy of you put 80 to 90% of your time into something that’s completely stable, and you put 10 to 20% of your time into moonshot things, but that there’s not very much in the middle in terms of risk. That way, if the moonshots just do not pan out, then you are perfectly fine. If your perfectly fine thing, well, it’s not enough for you because you still have ideas that just are not relevant to your so-called real job. Then, well, they’re still manifested in the world with this possibility of actually taking off.

27:11 Emily: I love that idea. I love that you shared that analogy, and I think it pairs so well with FIRE, right? You have your job, like you had your stipend, you know, during graduate school. You’re doing all the great things to put yourself on the track for financial independence. And at the same time, you’re taking, well maybe not taking risks, but you have those possibilities of moonshots, like you were just saying. So I love that approach. Where can people find you in case they’re thinking, “Oh gosh, Sharena would be perfect for my company”?

27:41 Sharena: You can find me on LinkedIn. I am Sharena Rice. S H A R E N A and then space, R I C E. And I am @SharenaRice on Twitter as well. And on Clubhouse.

27:56 Emily: Absolutely. Perfect. I will note that we’re recording this in August, 2021. So possibly by the time it’s come out, someone might go to your LinkedIn profile and find that you’re already on to your next big job, your next big position. But in case you are still looking, they should check you out.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

28:10 Emily: Okay. Well, let’s conclude with the question that I ask of all of my guests. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?

28:19 Sharena: The answer to that is just start. A person does not need to know everything. They don’t really need to know, “Okay. What are absolutely all of the investment options? What is the exact risk of everything.” But rather, “Okay, what is something that’s reasonable, that I feel comfortable with?” That’s a good place to start. There’s a narrative in academia, it seems, that grad students, they shouldn’t care about money. Or that that’s kind of a problem for their future self to think about rather than their current self. But habits, they compound over time. Mindsets, they compound over time and spread. So, it’s good to just start where you are and to just learn where you can. And actually start conversations with the people in your life who may know something or not know anything about finances, just to make it more of a conversation rather than something that people are just hushed about.

29:36 Emily: I love that advice. I love how we saw in this part of your story that you shared today, we saw that advice reflected. And this has been a really thought-provoking interview for me. So thank you so much, Sharena, for joining me.

29:48 Sharena: Thank you so much, Emily!

Outtro

29:55 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episodes’ show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved! If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 4 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with a email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and effective budgeting. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 4. Subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.