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Is Podcasting a Lucrative Side Hustle? with Elana Gloger of Dear Grad Student

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In this episode, Emily interviews Elana Gloger, a 5th-year PhD student at the University of Kentucky and the host of the Dear Grad Student podcast. Elana and Emily discuss Elana’s motivation to start Dear Grad Student, how the podcast makes money and how much, and the podcast’s expenses. They both give advice on how to earn money from a podcast for someone just starting out and list examples of other types of side hustles grad students pursue and how generate a high pay rate over a short period of time. At the end, Emily shares a key strategy with Elana for managing her business finances going forward.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Is Podcasting a Lucrative Side Hustle? with Elana Gloger of Dear Grad Student

Teaser

00:00 Elana: If you want to start a podcast, overwhelmingly, my advice is going to be, do it. It is awesome. It is fun. If you want to make money off of a podcast, it’s hard. That’s my biggest piece of advice. If you figure it out, let me know!

Introduction

00:20 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 17, and today my guest is Elana Gloger, a 5th-year PhD student at the University of Kentucky and the host of the Dear Grad Student podcast. We discuss Elana’s motivation to start Dear Grad Student, how the podcast makes money and how much, and the podcast’s expenses. We both give advice on how to earn money from a podcast for someone just starting out and list examples of other types of side hustles grad students pursue and how to generate a high pay rate over a short period of time. At the end, I share a key strategy with Elana for managing her business finances going forward. In my business, I’m well into scheduling events for the spring term. If you have a position in a Graduate School or Graduate Student Association or similar—or have the ear of someone who does—please consider bringing my material to the graduate students and postdocs at your university or institute. I offer live and pre-recorded seminars and workshops on a variety of personal finance topics, all tailored for the PhD audience. I’ve noticed that my investing content, whether as a deep-dive workshop or as part of a comprehensive seminar, garners a lot of interest and questions. Most popular of all is my tax workshop for graduate students who are US citizens, permanent residents, and residents for tax purposes, which teaches them how to calculate and report their taxable income and determine which higher education tax benefits to use. If any of that piqued your interest, please start a conversation with me over email, emily@PFforPhDs.com, or visit PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Elana Gloger of Dear Grad Student.

Will You Please Briefly Introduce Yourself?

02:21 Emily: I have a very special episode for you today, Elana Gloger is back with us. You know her as the host of the Dear Grad Student Podcast. She’s also a PhD student at the University of Kentucky, and we are talking today about her podcast, but specifically the financial side of her podcast and how it’s working out as a side hustle. And maybe some ideas about how you can best manage side hustle income or pursue side hustle income as a graduate student or PhD. So very, very exciting. Elana was last on the podcast in season eight, episode nine. So if you want to learn more about her personal finances, not just the podcast side, you can listen to that one, sort of a mini coaching session. But Elana, welcome back to the podcast and for anybody who is not a listener of your podcast, or didn’t hear the last episode, would you please briefly introduce yourself?

03:07 Elana: Absolutely. So, so, so happy to be back! I have recommended this podcast to so many people since I was last on it. But yes, hello. I am Elana. I’m a fifth year PhD student and I study health psychology at the University of Kentucky. I focus on how our immune system interacts with how we manage stress and regulate ourselves and how that determines how well or poorly we age. And I host Dear Grad Student, which is a podcast. And I’ll just give you my slogan, “for all grad students to celebrate, commiserate, and support one another through grad school.” And yeah, I started it in summer 2020, 6 months into COVID, feeling lonely. Wanted to complain with fellow grad students, and I missed doing that in the hallways between classes and I made a virtual space for that to be, you know, more than just Twitter. So yeah, I love to podcast. It’s a great creative outlet. And as we will discuss today, not a great side hustle for cash, but super, super fun.

What Inspired You to Start Dear Grad Student?

04:07 Emily: Yes. I feel the same way about my podcast. What inspired you to start Dear Grad Student, aside from just lonely during the pandemic?

04:14 Elana: Yes. Well, right. So that was sort of the first one, right? I was lonely. I missed complaining. The other thing is that I really needed something creative to occupy my time that I wasn’t just going to drop off. You know, I crocheted for a really long time and I loved that, but it was like, after you make a few blankets, it’s like, you’ve done it. You know? So it was like, what’s going to be the next thing? And what’s something I can do long-term, that’s going to be fun and relevant for me? And then the other thing, I mean, I did want something that was going to be a side hustle. I don’t make a lot of money as a grad student. We talked about this on your episode, we talked about it on the episode you are on for my podcast, it’s episode 27. We don’t make a lot, but I’ve made a little bit of money from the podcast, and it’s sort of incremental. So, maybe one day this will be, you know, a big dent, but mostly it was, I wanted something fun and creative. I wanted to feel fully me in whatever that was. And I wanted to do something that was impactful to other people, which luckily the podcast has been.

Return on Investment (ROI)

05:12 Emily: I think that ordering of your motivation is really crucial. That you wanted to create something that you’re passionate about. And also, if money comes from it, that’s cool. And that would be a nice supplement. Let’s talk more about how that’s actually working out. So I know from our kind of offline conversations, how much of yourself you put into this podcast. So let’s kind of talk about the ROI here. Like what are you putting in and what are you getting out aside from the feeling of creating community and helping people?

05:43 Elana: Yes. I mean, as a hobby, it’s incredibly fulfilling. Like you said, I mean, I could not be happier. I’m probably at one of the happiest points of grad school, not just with my own personal stuff going on, but because of this podcast, so absolutely fantastic and satisfying for that. Regarding time I spend, which is of course what you were alluding to, I’ve done a little bit better this year. I have shortened the length of my episodes. I’ve gotten some folks on my team to help me out. Last year, I was spending a solid 10 to 15 hours a week, basically unpaid, to do the podcast. This year, it’s a little bit closer to six to 10, depending on length of episode, depending on the hype I’m making for each episode, you know, communications and things. And regarding what that looks like financially, I mean, I’ve actually been making profit every month, profit quote unquote, every month since March.

06:34 Elana: So like individual months, I’m in the green, I would say. But over my whole chunk of this experience, I think I still am in debt, like 134, like that’s, my net is negative $134. And that comes from a lot of different things. And I’ve spent, I will say probably the minimal amount of money that I would spend on a podcast of this size. So it’s been a lot of time to be unpaid. I mean, you really have to love something to put this much time in and get no money and be in the negatives despite the popularity of the podcast over the last year.

07:10 Emily: Yeah. You know, I think that information might be surprising to some people who know how well your podcast has taken off and how well it’s doing and the fact that it is monetized. Just to know that, okay, it is great news the last six months or so, like you’ve made more money than has gone out. But one, that doesn’t account for your time spent at all, you’re not paying yourself directly.

07:33 Elana: Literally not at all.

Emily’s Podcast’s Business Role

07:33 Emily: But then two, like it does cost money to get a podcast off the ground. And so those initial expenses, you’re still paying yourself back for those initial expenses that you incurred near the beginning. Podcasting is definitely a labor of love, I would say for the great, great, great, great, great majority of podcasters, but yeah, it might be surprising to know that behind podcasts and behind bloggers and YouTube channels and all these things like, yes, there are ways to make money from this, but the percentage of people, the percentage of creators who are making any kind of substantial money is so, so, so small.

08:05 Emily: Since you’re disclosing, I may as well disclose that for me, the podcast is not a money-making endeavor. It actually costs me a lot of money directly to make the podcast. And secondly, I pay virtual assistants to work on creating the episodes with me. And so each episode probably costs me 150 to $175 in direct costs of paying assistants and other things like hosting and doing transcripts and so forth. And I’ve decided to incur that cost because this does supplement and support the rest of my business. So for me, the podcast is technically content marketing. So it’s me talking about things that are related to my business. Hopefully, you know, people listen to this, they get something out of it. And eventually they get around to somehow sending money my way through the various means that that could happen like speaking engagements. So that’s kind of my business model. The podcast is in itself as isolated, a money loser and a time loser, but it bolsters the rest of my business. I think to me, in a way, that’s worth it. So that’s kind of my perspective on the podcast financials. Is there anything else that you wanted to add about how you’re like managing the finances of the podcast?

Dear Grad Student Main Revenue and Costs

09:17 Elana: Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to be super transparent about like what my main revenue is, the costs that I’m incurring, things like that. So I have it broken down here in front of me and I just think it would be helpful to let people know like, what is the minimal cost as I mentioned? Like, you know, so people know that the podcast has a Patreon group. I currently have 17 active patrons and I allow people to contribute 1, 3, 5, or $10 a month to the podcast. And it’s listed on the Patreon page, all the things that you can do and the reasons that I’m, you know, trying to earn money. So I have 17 patrons that all have those choices. And last month I made $60 after taxes, which maybe sounds like a lot. It’s actually not. And that’s the most I’ve ever made in one month.

10:00 Elana: And I do have other ways of making money. Like I am an affiliate for you and some of your tax workshops, I promote BetterHelp and their therapy services, Magoosh which is a GRE prep service. I’ve worked with Instacart, things like that, but it is really hard to make money with an affiliate link. I think that you and BetterHelp are probably the ones that I make the most money off of. But it’s a lot. Because with, they say that it’s like 1% of the people that click will buy something. So a hundred people click on something, you might get one purchase. My rate is a little bit better than that because I’ve never had a hundred clicks and I’ve sold things, but it’s really hard.

What is an Affiliate?

10:37 Emily: I want to make sure we were clear about this. So like, when you say affiliate, people might not know like what that means. So an affiliate is like, you’ve decided you as the content creator have decided that you’re going to have an advertising relationship with another entity. But you only get paid if someone actually makes a purchase to, you know, BetterHelp or one of my tax workshops or whatever the different partnerships are. And so it’s like, by the way, for the listener, it’s really helpful if you are going to make a purchase anyway, if you actually do it through the link where you heard about it, right? Like give that person the credit, let them get the few, you know, the dollars or whatever it is that they’re going to get from that sale. That’s really, really helpful. So thank you for those of you who are doing that. This is different from maybe like flat rate advertising where like maybe an advertiser would pay you to run a commercial based on your listenership, like based on the exposure they think they’re going to get, but they’re not going to directly track sales. Two different models. But that’s how affiliate marketing works.

11:36 Elana: Yeah. I’m so glad that you explained that. That’s one of those things that like, it’s now normal knowledge for me, but like, this was all new for me a year ago when I was diving into it. It’s usually bigger podcasts or YouTube channels that if they have millions of followers and people just are like, yeah, the exposure is fine. And then whatever. And so those are my main sources of revenue. And like I said, the costs I’ve put in, despite making, you know, 50, $60 a month off Patreon and other things, I still haven’t broken even. So some of the costs that I’m accruing regularly are things like hosting the podcast on Buzzsprout and that’s $18 a month. I do use a social media schedule to make sure that I can have boundaries with the podcast and have things automatically post.

12:16 Elana: And that is, I think about $14 a month. Because I had to up that a little bit. And then there’s the stuff I pay for yearly. And this is where the big chunks come from. Hosting the website on Squarespace: $200 a year. Otter.ai is what I use for transcripts, which is a big must for me, that is $80 a year. And I pay my transcript editors, Kayden Stockwell, and Vishal Thakkar. And you know, there’s also things like patron benefits, which people are starting to sign up for the tiers where there’s a free mug, a free sticker or whatever it is. And that comes out of my pocket because I’m really thankful for anyone who is putting enough money towards the podcast, that it warrants a free item. And then the last way that I get revenue is merch sales. And so I have made probably $25 in profit from Dear Grad Student merch that’s on red bubble.

Redbubble Merchandise

13:10 Elana: The way that red bubble works is you upload artwork and then you can put it on any item. They handle the payment, the shipping, making the product, all of it. But you get a very, very little bit of the actual sale made. So that is a small place that I get some profit, but I don’t make a ton. And the podcast was never meant for that. So that’s okay. And you know, even if I did make more, probably wouldn’t pocket it, it would probably go to growing the podcast more until I was at like a really steady rate. So, it’s a balance and I’m doing the best that I can, but maybe don’t go into podcasting for money unless you already have a big following.

13:47 Emily: If there’s anyone listening who wants to support either one of our podcasts monetarily and wants to know what is the biggest impact action they can take, they are willing to part with some money. What can they do to make sure these podcasts continue? So for you, what’s your answer to that? I’m assuming it’s Patreon, is that right?

Patreon and Networking

14:05 Elana: Is, yeah, Patreon’s the biggest one. I do have a couple of affiliate links that pay me quite a big chunk of money. The most being from BetterHelp, but I’m not going to say like, if you want to support the podcast, I would ask you to please go to therapy. What I would rather is to have a relationship with you, and Patreon really allows for that. So you can contribute, like I said, 1, 3, 5 or $10 a month, which hopefully is in a range grad students or postdocs can afford. And it allows you to have a private message with me on there. There’s benefits like you can ask questions I put in the episode, you can know episode themes early. One of these days, I’m going to have special Patreon-only merch. So you really get some extra fun content. And it means a lot to me. I shout the patrons out every month on the podcast, I take special requests from them. So it’s also a benefit for people who really like the content that they know that I’m making. So Patreon is the biggest, and I think the most fun for me as well. So I really see it to be mutually beneficial.

15:05 Emily: Yeah. I think if someone wanted to send a message to you through their money that says, I support Dear Grad Student, the Patreon is the clearest way to send that message, and possibly the least expensive for the person sending the message. Because as you said, for some of the other things, you only get like a small payout compared to what the customer would be paying via the other entity. Of course, that’s how that works. To answer the question for myself, really monetarily, the best thing that comes out of me for the podcast, similar to what you were just saying, is networking. So it’s getting it’s when listeners refer me well, either when listeners themselves have the power to host me for an event with your university or your grad student group or whatever, or can refer me to someone at their university who can. Like those sort of bigger jobs and bigger payouts literally sustain the business. So that is amazing. And thank you so much for those of you who have made those recommendations.

Starting a Podcast and Knowing Your Audience

15:58 Emily: Let’s turn the advice to a different segment of the audience. Let’s say that someone else really wants to start a podcast and they want to make money from it. What is your advice for that person?

16:09 Elana: Great question. If you want to start a podcast, overwhelmingly, my advice is going to be, do it. It is awesome. It is fun. If you want to make money off of a podcast, you have to be really, really good at shameless self-promotion. You need to know your audience. So there’s a reason that I have Magoosh and BetterHelp and things like that, that grad students or people applying to grad school would benefit from. It’s a reason why the merch that I sell is on mugs and stickers because grad students have coffee and laptops. So you want to know what your audience would actually buy from you. And then there are websites like Podcorn. That’s P O D C O R N. I know there’s others, but this is the one I’ve used before, where other people that want to advertise on podcasts, even small ones will say, Hey, we have this thing we’re trying to promote.

17:01 Elana: And then us podcasters can submit a proposal to say, Hey, we want to promote it. Would you pay me X amount of dollars to read an ad? I have never gotten one of these, but I know other small podcasters who have, that spend and dedicate more time to it. So there are ways to do it. You can also get on YouTube with your episodes. And then if you have, you know, X amount of followers and you become a YouTube partner, that’s the way to get a little bit. You can have ads on your website, which I do not do, because I don’t know how, but technically that can also happen where Google analytics can track how much money each page makes. But it takes a lot of time to build money from that. So I think the biggest thing, if you want to make money from a podcast, maybe have a big audience first, know your brand, know your audience, and do things that would make sense for them buy. Like I’m not going to try to sell wellness things because grad students don’t have the extra money to try some tea. Like, that’s not going to work. So it’s hard. That’s my biggest piece of advice. If you figure it out, let me know.

18:04 Emily: I think that is great advice.

18:06 Elana: I guess my conclusion there would just be, there are so many other ways to make money as a grad student that aren’t related to this, like tutoring or transcribing things for businesses or podcasts or a research lab. Making things for an Etsy shop where you probably get a similar, you know, the content is something physical that you can send people. So it’s not like making money. Isn’t possible. Like, I don’t want the total takeaway message from this episode to be grad students cannot successfully have a side hustle. Because that’s not it, but we already have a full-time and a half job probably. So the time it takes to get something that is lucrative, we don’t have as much. That’s where it gets tough.

18:47 Emily: Yeah. I agree. Podcasting is an ultimately very indirect way to make money, if that is your goal at all. And until you get very, very big, you’re not really directly making money.

Commercial

19:00 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, December 15th, 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.

Finding Your Unique Space as a Grad Student

20:12 Emily: So you just mentioned a couple of great examples of ways that graduate students can have a lucrative side hustle that is not podcasting. I would say like generally speaking, the fastest way to make money is to sell services. So like you can immediately start making money if you are putting yourself out there for tutoring, like you just said. Or writing or editing services or coaching services, if that’s within your wheelhouse. Selling sort of directly your time or how you apply your time to like a project is the fastest way to make money. It’s not necessarily the most lucrative. Unless I would say as a subset of that, you look at what your really special skills are. Like, what makes you unique in the marketplace? And so for graduate students, like maybe that is some skill you’ve been developing during graduate school, like maybe it’s like super ninja data analysis, something or other, and you can sell that as like a consulting service. So that’s something else to think about. Like, if you want money now, go for a service. If you want a lot of money, what makes you unique? A lot of people can tutor. A lot of people can teach, what is it that you do that’s special?

21:22 Elana: And I would say as well, I mean with how big Academic Twitter is and how much advice there is out there, there are a lot of people doing coaching in that space. So now it’s even not just, you know, what’s unique about you, but what can you provide above and beyond what people are accessing for free? And I think that that would be the really tough thing. It’s why I am not offering that kind of thing because I don’t think anything I have to say is that unique. The podcast just gives me a place to say things that I hope everyone knows accessibly. And so it’s really hard to be unique. I think that that’s really something that people don’t quite understand. I don’t know if it’s that we all just think we’re special or what. But I’m having a very hard time on a regular basis figuring out what is unique for the podcast. And that’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time doing to make the podcast something. But when we think about like you said, services, it is hard to sell yourself. That’s why I’m not doing it. I’m selling, you know, the podcast, I’m selling merch, blah, blah, blah, because that’s something that is so hard. And I don’t know if I have the self-esteem for it. I mean, it’s tough, it’s tough.

22:24 Emily: That’s such a good point. I’ve had like, if this will help people who are feeling that way, I’ve had several episodes on the podcast, and I’ll try to link everything I can think of later in the show notes of people who have done things, like consulting, something very relatively high ticket for a graduate student, finding their unique space. And I think a lot of times that just starts with like, you talking about your work with people who aren’t necessarily your peers. So like pivoting, like out of academia and looking in the wider world where they have more money for higher pay rates and like asking yourself, how can my services help these people in this other area who don’t typically interact with PhDs and academics? And maybe what I do seem special. I don’t think it’s special inside academia, but maybe it is special in this other setting. And how can I connect with those people? And this often results in like amazing like work experience and growth experiences. I have an episode with Dr. Chris Caterine that I published recently, we’ll link in the show notes on yeah. Taking those skills that you developed in academia, outside of academia. And having them be really valued because they’re rare. They’re not rare at university, but they’re rare elsewhere.

23:32 Elana: Yeah, for sure.

Impact of Podcast on Personal Finances

23:33 Emily: You mentioned that in recent months, you’ve made something like $60 a month on average from Dear Grad Student. Is that impacting your personal finances at all at this point? Like, are you actually taking that money home? Are you reinvesting it somehow? What are you doing with it?

23:48 Elana: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I’ll say sort of broadly, you know, I track everything for the podcast on this, like Google spreadsheet, because I don’t have a lot of money going out or coming in. So it’s very easy. There’s, you know, three or four lines filled out every month. It’s not high-tech. And because I’m tracking, oh, you know, what is my net gain or loss of the podcast since I started it in August, 2020, I know that I’m still like in the negative one thirties, like I mentioned. So right now, when I get paid from the podcast, it goes into my checking account and it just becomes part of whatever I’m paying off of my credit card or throwing into savings. I’m just replenishing at this point, even though it’s been long-term, like I bought the podcast website in February of 2021. Technically, you know, the $200 I spent I’ve made back, but in all with everything I’ve spent, I haven’t.

24:33 Elana: So right now, it’s just going into my bank account, like normal income, almost like I’m not even seeing it. When I get to the point of hitting zero, which, you know, cross fingers because we’re coming up on a one year of Otter and one year of the website and I’m going to start all over again. But when I get to $0 and I can start actually making profit and, you know, and getting somewhere, I think that will be a question of how much of this do I want to invest in the podcast for what? Right? What’s going to have the biggest gain and growth for the podcast? Like the website was a big one, huge. Transcripts, huge. So the question really will be what is going to be the thing that makes this income even higher? And from there, I can start thinking about investing or fun things or other things like that. But for right now, just replenishing, just trying to hit zero because, you know, I don’t want to be in debt for this. I don’t want to like regret, and I don’t, but I don’t want to be in debt from it. Even $130, like that’s a lot for a grad student.

25:34 Emily: May I make a recommendation?

25:35 Elana: Yes! Help!

Keeping Business and Personal Finances Separate

25:38 Emily: If listeners, as I was talking about earlier, want to learn more about this recommendation, I’m just about to make, I have a course inside my Personal Finance for PhDs Community called Best Financial Practices for Your Self-Employment Side Hustle. And you can find that course directly at pfforphds.com/S E S H for self-employment side hustle. So go there. But the basic basic basic tip is to have some separation between your business finances, and you do have a business, now, even if your business is in the red, you still have a business, and your personal finances. And so I totally understand what you’ve been doing because you’re still in the red net over time and it makes sense that you’re paying yourself back with whatever, you know, monthly profit you have. But once you get to that zero point, once you get to being in the black overall, my recommendation is to have a separate checking account where you’re running everything for your business through that.

26:28 Emily: So all the expenses are paid from there. All the income goes to there. At first, you may not pay yourself, right? Once you’re back to black, you’re not relying on this income, let it build up a little bit in that account. And then you can make decisions about, do I want to reinvest in something? You know, you can save up for maybe a bigger expenditure using that account. Or maybe the answer is no, I want to pay myself a tiny bit for the massive amount of time that I’m putting into this. I’m going to set a salary for myself. And it almost sounds like silly to say that because you know, when we’re talking like $60 a month level, like maybe you would have the ability in a few months to pay yourself a hundred dollars a month. Maybe you’d have that ability.

27:07 Elana: I mean that’d be incredible, because a hundred dollars goes a long way as a grad student.

27:11 Emily: It does. And especially a hundred dollars you can rely on. So this is not like, oh, maybe I’m going to get 60 or maybe 150, or maybe this other amount. When you have the separation between your business finances and your personal finances, once again, you build up some kind of buffer to, you know, ride out the ups and downs. You can make these regular salary transfers. And then maybe it starts out at a hundred dollars, but then maybe in six months, it’s 200 and then maybe it’s 500 and then maybe $1000.

27:37 Elana: It’s the dream, right? It’s the dream.

27:38 Emily: Exactly. And this is how I’ve handled my business as well. Like my salary, I didn’t pay myself a salary for a while, and for a while was a thousand dollars, and then it was 2000, and then et cetera, et cetera, we’ve gone up from there. But I think it’s so, so helpful just mentally to have that separation. Because you don’t feel like you’re being, like you mentioned earlier about like not wanting to put yourself out there and sell and stuff like that. Like, how well you’re doing with selling doesn’t have to immediately impact her personal finances. You can have this degree of separation. So, that’s the first tip.

Facilitating Taxes for Business

28:11 Elana: Yeah, that’s good for the boundary of it. I mean, I hear that and my first thought is like, Ooh, when do I have to start paying taxes on this kind of thing? But I know that that’s the next step. My mom can help me with that. It’s going to be okay. But I know that that is sort of the next step. And maybe that’s what I should have said. Like, I’ve thought about it. It kind of feels dramatic, but I think that I just need to let go of that mindset. Like it isn’t dramatic. Like you said, this is a business, you know, as much as it’s fun, and it really is a hobby. I mean, this is really a passion project for me. There’s income going in and out, and maybe I should start treating it that way.

28:41 Emily: It’s going to be a lot easier come tax time to have this easy record in this one bank account of all of your expenses. You’re not going to have to go hunting through your personal expenses to find all the charges from XYZ different services that you use. So like, that’s one of the main reasons to do it. One is the personal finance reason of the separation. One is the tax simplicity of like the tracking of it. I am very, like we said, this is September, 2021. I think you’re going to sound like you’re going to be in the black in 2021, right? Like overall?

29:10 Elana: Oh wow, I hope so. From your mouth to God’s ears. I mean, truly let’s hope so.

29:15 Emily: So, 2021, you get to file your schedule C and pay tax on this whatever amount of income it ends up being above your expenses. It’s going to be helpful to have that separate account. But yeah, separate account and eventually a salary that you can build into your budget.

29:32 Elana: I’m excited to tell you when I get there. I’ll definitely let you know, I’ll tweet at you. I’ll say Emily, it’s happened. It’s time. I made it.

It Takes Time to Build Something

29:40 Emily: Anything else we want to talk about in this episode about, you know, starting a side hustle, managing finances from a side hustle? Any other comments you want to make?

29:48 Elana: Yeah, I think my biggest thing is that it takes time. Don’t get discouraged if you are trying to build something. I mean, you know, when I started the podcast, I had 372 followers on my personal Twitter account. I ended up having my tweet go viral, which is really what started and launched the podcast. But it takes time, you know, over a year I’ve had like 26,000 downloads. I have almost 5,000 followers on Twitter, over a thousand on Instagram. But all of that has taken all of those hours I mentioned with basically zero income and being in the negatives. So don’t give up, if you have a passion project and you want to go for it and it might make you money, go for it. But you never know if it will or not. And I think that it has been so satisfying and fulfilling in my personal life that, you know, here we are over a year into me doing it. And I don’t even care that I’m in the negatives, but I’ll be super happy when I’m not anymore. So let the passion fuel it rather than the money. Because I feel like that spark will leave really quick if you become impatient with that part.

30:49 Emily: I totally, totally like could not agree more that when you start this kind of thing, creating content that maybe will eventually result in money, you have to be passionate about it to get it off the ground. You know, you mentioned earlier when you had the idea to start the podcast that you wanted something that you were going to stick with long-term. Frankly, a lot of people don’t stick with podcasting, long-term, right? Like most people produce a few episodes and then it’s a lot of work.

31:11 Elana: Yeah, the average is about seven. I saw that online. It was like a threat. It was like, the average is like, they’ll make seven and they’ll stop forever. And I remember when I published my seventh episode, I was like, yeah, watch me. You know, like it became like a dare to myself, and then when I got the followers, it was like, well, now people are expecting a weekly episode. And of course, if I was like burnt out, people are like, oh my God, like, we don’t care to take a week off. But generally I’m like, I have a schedule. I have a structure. People are expecting an episode and I want this to keep growing. So it fuels me.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

31:41 Emily: Okay. So final question that I ask all of my guests and I asked this to you last time, maybe you’ll come up with something new.

31:46 Elana: I have something new. I’m ready to go.

31:48 Emily: Okay, good. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? It could be something that we touched on in this episode or it could be something completely different.

31:56 Elana: Yes. So this is going to be sort of a bridge between the last episode and this one. You said that was season eight, episode nine. Okay. Everyone should go listen to it. It was a great conversation. So I think my best financial advice bridging these two together is follow a budget early, and listen to financial tips about how to grow wealth at any income. Ever since I was on this last podcast, I’ve been looking for other places where I can also learn about this. One place that I’ve gone, there’s a podcast and Instagram account called Her First $100K, which is kind of like a feminist approach to women building income, which is like, I’m living for it. Your podcast. I’ve listened to many, many, many additional episodes. Like, before I think I’d listened to like what I thought were quote unquote relevant. And now I’m like, just listen to more because you’re going to find bits and pieces, especially when you have like the Q&A section at the end, which may be, or may not be related.

32:47 Elana: I’m like, that’s where I’ve learned the most. I’ve now invested, I know you told me to stop putting money in my Roth IRA. And I did to keep that in my bank, but, I invested that in a mutual fund and I learned a lot about, you know, what to pick. So I think similar to my last advice, it’s about the little steps, but realizing that even at a small income, you can start making those steps. Even at a small income, you can build things and don’t be afraid to go for something. Don’t be afraid to try to make money on the side. There’s nothing wrong with that. And you know, at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to build the best lives for ourselves.

33:21 Emily: I love that. I love finding some people to follow who are having these conversations that feel relevant to you. So like I’m sitting in this like grad student, PhD, academic like perspective on this, but obviously you can learn a ton. And I learned a ton from people outside of that specific niche. And so finding someone else, I mean, there’s so many in the financial space content creators now, like you’re going to find someone that you can identify with, whether it’s Her First $100K, excellent, excellent brand. Whether it’s, they’re all these, like people, you know, people of color and like first gen, you know, college graduates, you know, if that’s the group you are in, like, you can find someone who’s speaking to that audience and will address your, you know, the particular issues that I might not be talking about. Because I’m focused on people in academia. So like assembling like a team of experts that you’re like listening to.

34:09 Elana: Yes, it’s my like mentorship team and they don’t even know about it.

34:11 Emily: Exactly. Excellent, excellent strategy. Well, Elana, it’s been such a delight to have you on again. I’m so glad we were able to do this. I don’t know when this is going to be released, but I will be on your podcast in tax season. So check Dear Grad Student in tax season for that one. And yeah, it’s just great to have you, and thank you so much for coming.

34:30 Elana: Thank you so much for having me again. I have loved this partnership that you and I have built and the collaborations back and forth. Your episode will be coming out on Dear Grad Student at the end of January. So really like, beginning of tax season for me, but maybe that’s actually middle of tax season for normal people who are on top of their finances. But yes, end of January. And then for anyone listening who has not heard of me or Dear Grad Student before, you can find everything for the podcast at deargradstudent.com, you can find me on Twitter @DearGradStudent or @Elana_Gloger. You can find the podcast on Instagram, @DearGradStudentPod. You can find me on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere. I’m really easy to Google. So I hope you’ll join me if this was interesting, and definitely listen to Emily’s episode on my podcast we’ve already done. You can find that at deargradstudent.com/episodes/27.

35:17 Emily: Perfect. Thank you so much!

35:18 Elana: Thank you!

Outtro

35:26 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 an 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.

This PhD Candidate Paid for Her Wedding with Her Research Side Hustle

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In this episode, Emily interviews Rebecca Brenner Graham about side hustling to pay for her wedding while a PhD candidate in history at American University. In addition to working on her own dissertation and serving as a teaching assistant, Rebecca used her skills as a history researcher in a self-employment position assisting an economics professor at another university. Rebecca had to quickly learn how to manage her time and energy well across all her different professional roles and her personal life. If you are planning a wedding as a graduate student, you’ll also enjoy hearing wedding planning and budgeting tips from both Rebecca and Emily.

Links Mentioned

side hustle wedding

Teaser

00:00 Rebecca: The piece of advice that I’m just learning and wish I had known sooner was that unpaid opportunities are almost always not worth it. Full stop.

Introduction

00:20 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 six, episode 14, and today my guest is Rebecca Brenner Graham, a PhD candidate in history at American University. Rebecca has always side hustled to supplement her stipend, but she kicked it up a notch in her fourth year to pay for her wedding. We discuss how Rebecca balanced her time and energy among her own dissertation work, her teaching assistantship, her self employment gig as a researcher for an economics professor, wedding planning, and the rest of her life. Listen through to the end here, how Rebecca’s wedding went and some wedding planning tips from both of us. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Rebecca Brenner Graham.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:07 Emily: I am so delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Rebecca Brenner Graham, who is going to be discussing with me, her wedding, her recent wedding, and how she ended up paying for that on her Grad student stipend, and actually on more than just her grad student’s stipend. So Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today and will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself?

01:27 Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me, as I was telling you. I’m a long time listener and it just occurred to me that I might have something useful to add. I went to college at Mount Holyoke in Western, Massachusetts as a women’s college. There, I double majored in history and philosophy, and then I went straight into my history graduate school. I’m now starting my fifth year of the PhD. I was able to do the public history master’s combined with my doctoral coursework, which is one of the reasons that I love my department at American University. My dissertation, if anyone’s interested in that, is on Sunday mail delivery from 1810 through 1912 as a lens into religion, state relations. Because I got my masters in public history, I’ve also had some museum gigs on the side, on top of working as a TA in the American University Department of History. That’s about it.

Side-Hustling as a History PhD

02:27 Emily: Yeah. Is that typical for people in your department to be taking on museum jobs or outside gigs like that.

02:33 Rebecca: It’s typical in the sense that being atypical is typical. So there’s not one way to do it. There’s not one way to make it work. Like one of my classmates does a bunch of oral histories of basketball players for money. Some of them are like older and married or have houses. For me, especially brcause I came straight from undergrad, in order to have enough money to not be worrying about it constantly, I have had part time work every year on top of the TA-ing.

03:06 Emily: Okay. That’s good to know. So basically what you’re saying is the stipend that you’re receiving is not sufficient across the board. No one is doing this on just the stipend. They either have outside sources of income from a spouse or something, or maybe past savings, or they’re currently taking on side hustles. Right?

03:22 Rebecca: So I can think of two classmates who, and this is not a coincidence, they’re the two in the department that are younger than me, that haven’t had that much part time work. One of them is extremely frugal and the other one decided to take out loans on top of the stipend. I adore my department, like I am so happy to be there, at the same time we do have the second lowest stipends of all history departments in the greater DC area.

03:49 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Glad to hear that balance of like, Hey, it’s worth it, we’re doing it, but this is what it takes to get it done. Side hustling for you, other solutions for other people, but glad to hear that.

Getting Engaged During Grad School

04:01 Emily: Okay, you’ve given us a little bit of a brief career history, coming straight from college into graduate school, doing your master’s and PhD right in a row. Where does your relationship factor into this?

04:12 Rebecca: Going way back for a second, we actually met in a summer program in Washington, DC when we were 16, like for high school students. We ended up at college near each other. His name is Brandon, and Brandon went to UMass Amherst. We were together for the first half of college, and then we broke up, just seeing other people, didn’t think or know that we’d get back together. We ran into each other a couple of years later and the summer after graduation, we ended up getting back together. Then six months after that, he moved from New York to DC in order to be with me. And even before Brandon and I got back together, I had to facetiously told friends that I need to pass my dissertation proposal, even before I get an engagement proposal. And this was even before I was in a PhD program, this is when I knew I wanted to do a PhD.

05:04 Rebecca: So third year of graduate school, toward the end of the year, I was about to become all but dissertation, ABD, and we had already gone ring shopping. I thought we might be getting engaged soon. And then I ended up getting engaged a few weeks before my prospectus defense. So at the end of my third year of grad school, I was ABD and also engaged.

05:30 Emily: Yeah. I really love that you were, I know you said facetiously, but you were thoughtful about this, right? You had an idea of how you wanted your career to play out and also how your relationship, whoever that was with, how you wanted that to play out. And it’s good to hear really that, um, your husband made that sacrifice when he was your boyfriend of moving to where you were so that you could prioritize your career and he was going to figure it out and it’s not necessarily common story. I’m really glad to hear that.

06:00 Emily: I’m reminded of when I got engaged which was also during graduate school. My husband, we had sort of decided together that we were going to get married, moving towards that direction, but he wanted to wait to propose until he also achieved candidacy. So I was further away from that. That actually didn’t happen for me until my fourth year of graduate school, I think, just the way my department works. But he was like, no, I got to get, I have to get my prelims out of the way, and then I can think about the engagement. So he had the same thought process as you, but from the opposite perspective, in our case.

06:34 Rebecca: I think it’s an autonomy of time thing because even if it’s the same work across the board, you have, I think in most programs, you have more autonomy of time after that ABD mark.

06:45 Emily: Yeah. I think for my husband, it was that, but also just the stress of preparing for the prelim and writing whatever he had to write and doing whatever we had to do, like oral defense or something, I don’t remember the details for him, but just to get past that stressful thing, he wanted it off his plate, so he could enjoy the process of being engaged and planning the wedding and not having to juggle those two things simultaneously and know that, yeah, there’s going to be a few more years here until we have to repeat that process for the dissertation and ultimate defense. With respect to your actual timing of your wedding, like how long were you guys engaged for?

07:25 Rebecca: We got engaged in March, 2018. For about a month, we were actually planning with my parents, and my mom in particular is quite traditional and they were generously willing to pay for it, but it became clear, especially to me very quickly that coordinating with them and negotiating priorities was more labor, and especially more emotional labor, than actually making money myself and working towards paying for it. We also decided in between that March and April period that the things that we cared most about relating to our wedding were not that expensive. Like making the ceremony go how it was important to me was a higher priority than venue or the number of people who were coming. So eventually, I guess around April, when we started planning and paying for it ourselves, we got a date on the calendar. We got married a year and I guess two or three months, not great with numbers, I guess a year and three months later on June 30th, 2019.

08:43 Emily: Okay. So yeah, we are recording this in August, 2019, so this is really fresh for you and that’s exciting. This is definitely a tip for other people who are going into the wedding planning process of anyone who contributes gets a say. If you don’t want that party to have that say in that particular way or whatever, if there are strings attached to that gift, sometimes it is easier to simply take on all of the finances on your own. That’s the decision that you made.

Paying for the Wedding through Side-Hustling

09:12 Emily: We’ve already kind of gone over that your stipend was not really enough to live on, at least in the lifestyle that you want, and you were already side hustling. Did you have a plan for like how much more money did you need to bring in either in total or on a monthly basis to be able to pay for the wedding?

09:28 Rebecca: We looked at it a little backwards, in retrospect. It was more like however much money we have to delegate toward this, that is how much that we could pay. Brandon and I split it almost exactly evenly between us with a few exceptions. If there was something that was really important to him or really important to me. I paid for Ketubah the Jewish marriage contract. I paid for our pre rabbinical counseling. He paid for our entire rehearsal brunch because that was not something that I was tied to doing. On my end, my stipend from American when I started was $19,000 per year, and now currently thanks to our union it’s $22,000 per year, which is actually a huge difference just in the four years or whatever that I’ve been a TA. I really didn’t give it that much thought about, will I be able to afford this? It was more if I can’t afford it, then I won’t do it, and we love each other, and we want to get married, and that’s the most important thing. I have another classmate in my program who literally eloped at one, but I don’t really know the details on that. Also around this time, I was reading those books by Jen Sincero, have you ever read her books? The first one is called “You Are a Badas” and the second one is called “You Are a Badass at Making Money” and they’re —

11:00 Emily: Actually, I’ll interrupt you just for a second. I literally just finished “You’re a Badass At Making Money”, like last week. So I’m a little late to the Jen Sincero game, but I did read it and enjoyed it. I’m trying to figure out what I want to incorporate. So yeah, please go on.

11:15 Rebecca: Oh, that’s so exciting. I’m glad you liked it. In spring 2018, this was when her money book came out, the green one. She’s a little bit more, I don’t know if the word is capitalist than I am, but she’s also in line with my feminism. A central takeaway from Sincero’s work is that sometimes you have to jump and then create the net for yourself. That’s what happened when we decided to pay for our own wedding. So around the time that we had made that decision, I was reading a bunch of Jen Sincero. A major advantage of doing a history program in DC is that a lot of people email the department to offer work opportunities. So then in May, 2018, I heard about a summer job working for an economics professor at George Mason to do research on 19th and early 20th century labor history. My dissertation is on 19th century and early 20th century religion-state relations, and there was a lot of overlap with that labor history. I ended up working for her over the summer and then she offered for me to stay for the coming school year, like this past school year 2018-19. My advisor helped me negotiate a 50% salary increase for that, so that was my side gig that took a lot of time and essentially paid for my wedding. But it was also a completely pleasant experience working for this economist.

12:55 Emily: Yeah. I want to hear more about the logistics of how this side hustle worked. For you with American, because you’re a TA, does that mean that you’re not working/not being paid over the summer?

13:07 Rebecca: Oh yes.

13:09 Emily: Okay, so you’re already dealing with an academic year only stipend. So —

13:13 Rebecca: Last year I had a fellowship from my department for summer research. This year I did not, which was my why my reaction was “Oh yeah”, because that was the situation. But last summer I had a $3,500 fellowship from my department and then $5,000 from this professor George Mason.

13:35 Emily: Okay, so in your summers, at least last summer, you had a balance of working on your own dissertation and also doing this other work for this other professor, but I’m wondering, because you guys are at different universities, what was the actual relationship between you and this professor or the grant? Were you a W-2 employee or was this a self-employment situation?

13:58 Rebecca: It was a self employment situation, so I got taxed on it pretty heavily.

Researching as a Side-Hustle

14:04 Emily: Yeah. So that’s definitely a couple of things I want to talk further about with that, because I don’t really know that well, how this works. I think you’re the first person I interviewed for the podcast who has done research, like very similar skill set and everything to what you’re doing for your dissertation, and as a graduate student, but as a self employment project. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about what the differences are between that self-employment gig and maybe what you typically do as a graduate student?

14:36 Rebecca: In terms of the content itself, it was really just teaching versus researching. This past year I TA-ed class about the presidents and then I TA-ed History of Memory, and that whole time I was researching 19th century labor history. The biggest difference in terms of how much it affects me is that the side gig did not withhold any taxes. So as a graduate student, I’m cobbling together a bunch of opportunities to approach like 40[K per year, which is really great for grad school, I paid $4,000 in taxes last year, and that was most of my money.

15:23 Emily: I’ll make a couple elaborations on that for anyone who is looking into self-employment, which, if you’re going to do a side hustle, I kind of think self-employment is the way to go, because you have a lot more control over your schedule over how much you’re going to work. But the flip side of that is you have to take a lot more responsibility yourself when it comes to the financial side of things. One of the main things is that you need to pay a lot of tax and no one is withholding that tax for you, so two notes there. The first is that, with self-employment stuff, it’s not like income tax and you know that, so I’m speaking to the audience, but it’s not like income tax where you’re not taxed on the first chunk of income you take in, then you’ll have a low tax rate on the next chunk, then you’ll have a higher tax rate on the next chunk. That’s the graduated income tax system. You will still pay income tax as a self employed person, so just add that on top of whatever the rest of your income is. It’s going to be in the 12% or maybe even the 22% bracket, depending on how much money you make. But in addition, you have self employment tax, which is, I believe 15.3% on everything. The first dollar that you make as a self employed person, 15.3% of everything. So it’s not like that graduated system. It ends up feeling like you pay a lot and you do pay a lot in tax because of these two different types of tax that you end up paying income tax and self employment tax.

Emily: For anyone who is making a significant self employment income like you did, you have to set money aside for tax. You have to prepare for that. You have to do the calculations because you don’t want to be surprised at the end of the year with…I mean, you can be very pleased that you made all this money through selling employment, that’s amazing, but you have to be prepared for the tax side of things. One thing I’ll recommend actually for anyone who is either self employed or who has a fellowship who doesn’t have income tax withheld, I have resources on my website about paying quarterly estimated tax. You can go to the site and search for quarterly estimated tax. You’ll come up with like my main article on that. It’s designed for people who have fellowship income, but people with self employment income can take a lot out of that as well. And if you want a little bit further help I’ll link from the show notes, actually have a workshop on helping people pay quarterly estimated tax. Again, to not be surprised at the end of the year with a huge tax bill. It helps you estimate the amount of tax you’ll have to pay and also pay through it quarterly.

17:37 Emily: Okay, so Rebecca, that was a little bit of a diversion just because this is my wheelhouse about taxes.

17:41 Rebecca: That’s very helpful. Yeah.

17:44 Emily: I actually was a little bit for curious, because I think what I was asking, I didn’t phrase quite right earlier, was about, so the difference between your dissertation work, which you are either receiving a fellowship for, or maybe not being explicitly paid to do in your primary role as a graduate student versus the self employment relationship, this contractor relationship you have with this professor. I guess what I’m asking about is like intellectual or academic ownership over that work. Are you going to be on papers? Just because it’s an unusual way to be doing research, as a self employed person, but still in an academic setting, but it’s at a different university. So that’s why it was sort of interesting and complex.

18:24 Rebecca: I find it to be really common, particularly in Washington DC where we have a lot of federal archives. Since I started grad school in 2015, I’ve honestly lost track of the number of professors who’ve emailed the department literally from as far as Australia and asked our grad students to do work for them. Now I don’t do it unless it’s $30 per hour, but I used to do it for like $12, $15 per hour before I knew better. And as far as I know, we never get even an acknowledgement because we’re a human in the right location who has used archives before, and isn’t going to mess it up when researching.

19:12 Emily: Gotcha.

19:13 Rebecca: For my dissertation, I am the author.

19:16 Emily: Right. So it’s really just by virtue of where you’re attending graduate school and the skill set that you have,that you have access and people, as you were saying from all of the world want some access and they’ll use you, hire you to be a conduit for helping them with that work. But in terms of the academic ownership, because you’re being paid and again, as a contractor, it sounds like you sort of relinquish that. They’re going to be completely in control of the scholarship side of things. You’re not apparently even getting an acknowledgement, which I feel like it definitely deserves an acknowledgement at minimum, but okay.

19:50 Rebecca: That’s just the random people from California or whoever who can’t fly into DC.

19:54 Emily: Yeah, totally. Okay. So now I have a better idea about this.

19:57 Rebecca: It’s not even taxed sometimes, because it’s not enough money to be taxed, but I’ve done that a lot of times. And then my research gig at George Mason, I have a relationship with this person now. I don’t know when her book will be done, but I’ll be in communication with her. And I definitely felt like I was a part of the project, even though for the argument of the book, that’s entirely her argument, I’m just providing the facts that she then integrates into her analysis.

20:29 Emily: Yeah. I guess I’m also wondering like maybe you know for her situation, why wasn’t she working with a graduate student at our own institution? Like her advisee or something like that.

20:39 Rebecca: She wanted a historian. She’s in an economics department and she specifically reached out to history departments because she wanted reviews of historical literature by historians. And then also just that change over time analysis that my department trains me to do.

21:01 Emily: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. This is really, really interesting to me.

Commercial

21:06 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I am just bursting with this news. I have launched a community for personal finance for PhDs. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to level up their practice of personal finance 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 I’ve made in the past, and I’m going to add new trainings that library every month. There is also a discussion forum, a monthly live calls with me, a book club, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community is going to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community to find out even more. If you’re listening to this in real time, you have the opportunity to become a founding member of the community at a discount. The price is going up on August 15th, 2020, so don’t delay. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community for all the details. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Research Side-Hustles and Career Advancement

22:29 Emily: I guess the other sort of big picture question I wanted to ask you about side hustling is, so the side hustling is necessary financially — for the wedding, for living your life — do you think it’s giving you more than that? Like is this actually advancing your career in some way?

22:46 Rebecca: That’s a fantastic question and I really hadn’t thought about it. I mean, the economics people at George Mason, like their department is a completely different environment than mine, so it’s educational, just in that sense to meet more people in different places. Overall, the research work definitely was not expanding my skillset. It probably expanded my content knowledge a little bit, but it wasn’t that much more than whatever I had to be familiar with for comprehensive exams, because I did all of that time period. For the George Mason people I earned, what was it? For the whole year it was $15,000. And the previous year, before I was engaged, my side hustle, during my third year of graduate school paid $1,500, so literally take off a zero, and that was writing an exhibit for a museum. That was fantastic experience that definitely advanced my CV/resume and what I know how to do.

23:56 Emily: Gotcha. So there may be a little bit of a trade off there. This is not surprising that the things that benefit you more as an individual, there may be a trade off on the money there. You’re being paid more, but —

24:06 Rebecca: In my experience, that is correct.

24:08 Emily: Yeah, so I mean, hopefully that’s not the case. I wish for everyone to have a side hustle that pays really well and advances your career and all that, but sometimes you may have to trade off one or the other, but it sounds like at least at the very, very minimum you’ve expanded your network, right? You’ve met more people. You’ve worked closely with this one individual. So maybe that’ll come into play later on. Who knows about that.

Time Management and Side-Hustling

24:31 Emily: So I want to move now to talking about how you, how you manage your time. You’re obviously a long time side hustler, but it sounds like you really maybe stepped it up, maybe stepped up your hours to make this additional money in this past year to be able to fund the wedding that you wanted. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you balanced your dissertation work, your TA role, the side hustle, maybe multiple side hustles, if you’re still doing other ones, and then of course, just the rest of your personal life.

24:59 Rebecca: I have noticed for a while that it comes down to two things. One is time management, which I’m sure seems pretty straight forward. And the second is the kind of energy that the opportunity is giving you. I have felt for a long time, this is also just my personality, that if an opportunity is giving me a lot of positive energy and genuinely feel like I can do anything, but if it’s not, and sometimes things take away from my energy, then that becomes a real challenge. I remember at the beginning of last school year, last fall, actually around this exact time, last year, I majorly had not figured out how that balance was going to work. I was so stressed that I ended up giving up caffeine for several months, even though coffee is my favorite thing, because I was just so energized and stressed all the time that it was just miserable. And just not knowing how I was going to balance my time all year.

26:03 Rebecca: Also, the way that we ended up doing our wedding, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later, it ended up working out great, but we accepted a lot of favors from people. Like a friend did the photography, a friend did the flowers, a family friend officiated our service. And when you rely on people, even if they’re really close friends and family, it’s just really stressful to maintain the relationships. I never wanted to feel like I was a burden on people. That created a lot of stress and the most challenges very early on, but over the course of the year, I think I just adjusted. Also second semester, I had this past TA assignment for a fantastic, really supportive enthusiastic professor. She’s Eileen Finley at American University and she was just a breath of fresh air twice a week, and that made a huge positive difference in my ability to find positive energy and manage my time well.

27:08 Emily: I think that’s an excellent, excellent point that you’re making. I wonder to make it any more applicable for the listener, can you tell in advance what kinds of activities are going to give you energy? So you can kind of filter, like I’m not gonna accept this opportunity because it seems like it’ll be draining. Have you figured out any kind of framework around that or is it just have to try it and then see?

27:31 Rebecca: I’m definitely not an expert on that in the sense that I am still figuring that out. So this is not what you asked, but I could break down what an average week was like. I think both semesters my TA at AU, that was Tuesday and Friday, so then I would often go to George Mason where they gave me a desk, which was nice. And that way I felt like I had community there. I almost always went once a week. I didn’t go more than once a week, very often, but it was typically on a Monday, Wednesday or a Thursday really. And then one or two days I would actually get to do my own work on my own dissertation. And I ended up, um, drafting one chapter out of six first semester and one chapter out of six second semester, but I really have much higher hopes for this coming academic year when I’m not planning and paying for a wedding. I hope to be able to draft more than one chapter each semester.

28:31 Emily: That actually does sound like really good progress to me. I take it you are going to take the side hustle down some. You’re not trying to make as much money in the upcoming year as you did last year.

28:41 Rebecca: I ended working for George Mason at the end of the school year, because it was an academic school year position, but also during second semester, I allocated some time toward applying for fellowships just because everyone told me that that’s what you do when you’re going into fifth year. I actually got three out of four of the ones that I applied for. One of them is through the same people at George Mason, so that ties into what you said about like making connections helps. One is from Mount Holyoke College where I did my undergrad work. It’s specifically from the history department. There that’s the biggest fellowship. They’re basically paying my rent for the coming year. And that will hopefully really allow me to focus on my actual dissertation work. Then the third is a research grant from my department at American. I’m really trying not to take on side hustle work like I did last year. Though, I did have a potentially paid opportunity fall into my lap for this coming year, but it hasn’t fully developed yet and I need to prioritize my dissertation because I wasn’t always able to work on it as much as I wanted to this past year.

29:58 Emily: Yeah. Congratulations on winning those three fellowships. Are you continuing to TA in addition to accepting those fellowships?

30:05 Rebecca: This coming year is my last year of TA-ing.

30:08 Emily: Yeah, it’s a great point for anyone who is looking to side hustling during graduate school and especially for you where your progress on your dissertation is up to you. You’re ABD, it’s at your own speed. There is a danger of devoting too much time to making money on the side and not enough time to actually progressing through your current career stage so that you can get a full time job and have an actual salary.

30:33 Rebecca: It’s a balance to strike for a few reasons. One is I get the most work done when I can take myself out to the pizza place next to my apartment and buy my favorite pizza, or get coffee and a bunch of different coffee shops, or buy a nice new planner for myself to organize my life. You have to have some cash flow, at least in my experience in order to be your best student.

31:00 Emily: Gotcha.

31:01 Rebecca: And I think the other reason is that I actually want to go into public history and museum work rather than academia. So in order to get more relevant job experience, that’s also a balance to strike for me.

The Financial Side of Wedding Planning

31:15 Emily: For sure. Yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. So we’ve been talking about the side hustles and the wedding you added, you know, $15,000 to your wedding fund. It sounds like more or less for this past year and it just was a month or so ago. So how was it, how did the wedding go?

31:30 Rebecca: We got married at the Hamilton Restaurant in downtown Washington, DC. It’s around the corner from the White House and it’s both a restaurant and a concert venue. And I would highly recommend to anyone looking to have a great wedding at a minimal cost to get married at a restaurant that has a concert venue because under one contract we had our venue, the food, they provided the cupcakes, they included the open bar. There was a guy that was — so, I thought we had a lights guy and then a sound guy, and I just realized when I was telling my husband about this interview, that those were actually the same person. So it came with a lights guy and the sound guy. The venue was really great.

32:18 Rebecca: I was really happy with my dress. I found it for $130, which I’m really proud of. One of my bridesmaids asked me what I was envisioning and I described sort of a shorter dress, but also a sun dress, but also beautiful. And she pulled up one on Pinterest and was like, “do you mean like this?” And I was like, “yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.” Then, a few days later she texted me that it was 75% off online. So that’s how I got my dress from $130. A different bridesmaid took me veil shopping and I got one for $30. I would say for any brides out there, don’t spend a lot of money on the veil because you’re only going to wear it once. One of my aunts bought my shoes for me at Macy’s or something as a gift.

33:09 Rebecca: The most important part of the whole wedding experience to me was the ceremony and it’s hard to describe why that is. I guess, I mean, it’s a Jewish life cycle event and I did not have the traditional bat mitzvah, but I identify very strongly with Judaism, and my husband’s one of his parents is Jewish, but he didn’t grow up with a lot of religion, so I would describe it as Jewish with an interfaith twist. The way I think back on our ceremony is that there are a few events in life that are really deeply, very important, and for one of those to go so well, I appreciate that it went flawlessly so much. I think the ceremony itself, which we have a link to the video, actually that I can send you if you’re interested, I’m just so happy with how it went. We had a family friend officiate and play guitar and sing. My cousin, who is also a bridesmaid, did the Hebrew. An aunt and uncle made our chuppah for us as a gift to us. My dad sang a song during it, actually. It was like everything I could have imagined, and I’m so grateful for that, and we made it happen ourselves.

34:31 Emily: Yeah, that’s something to be really, really proud of, obviously. What I’m hearing, as someone who has also planning a wedding, is that it sounds like you DIY-ed, in terms of accessing your community and asking people to contribute, the parts of the whole experience that were most meaningful to you, but also the ones that their contribution was particularly, again, meaningful or personal, like singing a song, for example. And also not particularly a ton of work, versus your choice of venue, where you combined the restaurant and the venue and all the staff is there and everything is, as you said, under one contract. That was a way that you made a really simple decision that made the planning a lot, lot easier. I did the opposite thing with my wedding, so I know that it’s a lot of work and a lot of money to do things the other way. So anyone who’s thinking about planning a wedding, I think that you went about this in a very positive and thoughtful and way that paid off, it sounds like, really well.

35:34 Rebecca: What was your wedding venue, if you don’t mind me asking?

35:36 Emily: Yeah. So we had two, first of all, because one, we got married in the church and two the reception was at a different location. So it’s already dealing with two different locations, right? We actually had our reception at a museum of natural history in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was awesome.

35:52 Rebecca: I’ve been there, actually.

35:55 Emily: Yes, it’s a fantastic museum. I was so excited. I grew up outside DC, so I’ve been in love with the natural history museum as part of the Smithsonian forever, so to have a chance to do that in a similar museum in Raleigh was so much fun. The venue was really, really fun, but it was an outside caterer. It’s a lot of work. Rentals were a whole separate thing. Getting it all done in one place, I think, was really smart. It saves a lot of time, saves a lot of money. And as I said, then you chose to DIY the parts where people could actually really contribute instead of, for example, asking for people to contribute on the food or, you know, there’s other ways to do this kind of thing that could be a little bit more work for everyone rather than just, oh, I’m giving you this wonderful gift of a song or the shoes or whatever it turns out to be. I appreciate hearing that. And it sounds like you had a wonderful time and I’m happy that everything worked out with the side hustle and everything. Any final comments on the wedding and the side hustle?

36:50 Rebecca: Just a quick, funny thing that came to mind is that one of my closest friends who did our flowers, she was literally a few days away from getting her doctorate. Her name’s Arlisha and she got her doctorate in history a few days after my wedding. Her final year of dissertating, she literally texted me and was like, I’m taking up flower arrangement as a hobby while I finished my dissertation, can I do this for your wedding? And I had not previously cared about the flowers, but I was like, yes, if you want to, go for it. She did an amazing job. Just the aesthetics of the room, I think looked so much better because Arlisha’s dissertation side hobby was flower arrangement.

37:34 Emily: Yeah. I think in the academic space, we talk a lot about mental health and self care and so forth, and that’s a really fun, healing, stress-relieving thing to potentially do that, hey, can also help out a friend or even become a side hustle , if you want to. I had an interview recently with someone who decided to turn her baking hobby, as a graduate student, into a business. So it’s the same kind of thing, right? You have something you enjoy doing, it’s a stress reliever for you, why not turn it into something a little bit bigger?

Final Words of Advice

38:02 Emily: Final question here, Rebecca, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career?

38:08 Rebecca: The piece of advice that I’m just learning and wish I had known sooner was that unpaid opportunities are almost always not worth it. Full stop.

38:20 Emily: Yup.

38:20 Rebecca: Also, as a PhD student, you have to do your doctoral requirements and dissertation, but there’s really nothing else that you have to do. And if you have different wedding preferences from your parents, just do it your own way. And if some customs from your religion are meaningful, just stick to those. If others aren’t…our wedding was really a growth opportunity for me and I’m proud and thankful for how it went.

38:50 Emily: Wonderful. No need to elaborate any further on that, Rebecca. Thank you so much for sharing the story on the podcast with me.

38:56 Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Outtro

38:58 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

How to Negotiate as a Graduate Student or PhD in Industry and Academia

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research, and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs; the importance of considering all aspect of your offer, not just your salary; the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia vs. industry; and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

PhD negotiation

Teaser

00:00 Abby: Realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one-shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything.

Introduction

00:18 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 six, episode 11, and today my guest is Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs, the importance of considering all aspects of your offer, not just your salary, the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia versus industry, and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation. This is a jam-packed episode that will be valuable for graduate students and PhDs at every stage of their careers. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Abby Rainer.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:22 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Abby Rainer, and we’re going to be talking a lot about negotiation and mindsets around that, particularly women in negotiation. I’m so excited for this topic, and Abby is an actual expert. This is related to her PhD work, and she now has a business related to this area. So, she’s going to tell us all a lot more about that. Abby, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And will you fill our listeners in about your background?

01:48 Abby: Sure. Thank you for having me, Emily. I really appreciate being on here. So, to cover my background in a pretty brief term, I got my PhD from Michigan State University in 2018 and got a similar combination of a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Wake Forest. I got the master’s in 2015 and the bachelor’s at the end of 2013. So, I combined both of those degrees into five years just so I could hurry up and get onto the PhD.

02:14 Abby: I was cross-trained in several different areas that are relevant to today’s topic, including communication, industrial organizational psychology, management, human resources, and then education administration. And then areas that I trained on and did research on as well as other administrative work included areas like social support, stress, family planning, and some health topics. But then I also had a lot of business topics like specifically, if you are looking to negotiate your benefits and compensation packages. And then I looked a lot at STEM career trajectories. So, how women were flourishing and more male-dominated areas and the strategies they use to choose their careers and kind of how those paths sort of manifested for them. And then on top of, with my recent background, I have made courses for grad students on Udemy that cover areas like negotiating your benefits and compensation for grad school. And then also if they want to do more of a process improvement project on their finances, then they can find my green belt training there too, which covers a lot of very simple and straightforward ways to save money and document how you do that. It gives you a lot of tools on how to figure that out.

What is Your Udemy Site?

03:22 Emily: Yeah. Could you repeat the name of your Udemy site?

03:26 Abby: Sure. So, the Udemy is just a sort of, what’s called a MOOCs So, a Massive [Open] Online Course website and people can go to Udemy’s website and then they can just type in things like “grad school funding.” That would be a series of keywords that would bring up my training on graduate school benefits and compensation. And then they could also type in green belt, Six Sigma Green Belt, or Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and also my name. So, that should help them see where that pops up. I’ve only created one green belt training. I’ve not had more than one, so it should isolate that one particular training very quickly.

Abby’s Dissertation: Women in STEM + Negotiation

04:01 Emily: Oh good. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be under like your name or like a business name or something. Abby, what’d you tell us a little bit in more detail, what was the subject of your dissertation?

04:10 Abby: Sure. So, I kind of in connection with what I was talking about earlier, I had done research on women in STEM careers and then work on negotiation in general. Like I gave some presentation work on hostage negotiation and terrorism, and this is a very different type of negotiation, but having a background, like a family background in finance, I kind of wanted to combine all those areas and some finance research I had done and specifically look at how women going into STEM careers, specifically their first STEM careers, how they negotiated not only their salaries, but really other types of compensation they could get like their health care packages, how much family time, like leave they had for, for instance, caring for children, and then other areas like bonuses and just work assignments as well.

04:56 Emily: And what drew you to that area? Why did you choose that for your PhD work?

05:01 Abby: I chose that because there was a lot of work that involved experiments, for instance, that created hypothetical situations, but these women were real-life women who had actually gone through actual negotiations in different companies across the United States. And so, I wanted to get a sense of reality. I wanted to see what women were actually going through and I collected a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. I used most of the quantitative data for the PhD sort of dissertation part, but I also created a series of questions in the survey that looked at, for instance, what were the descriptions of the negotiations actually happening, like who was involved in the negotiation? Did they say anything that was maybe discriminatory or that showed some sort of bias toward the women? And so, really looking at those areas, I started to pull some data on things like how much training impacted different outcomes, like how much money women were thinking of walking away with, or how much they actually walked away with.

05:59 Abby: And then I also looked at about 20 different benefits that women were able to get during negotiations, like a series of negotiations, and which ones they tended to get, so I could isolate different trends as to what people were more likely to walk away with other than just the salary being increased.

06:16 Emily: Yeah. I love that you actually took this forward into, let’s not just look at what’s going on, but what interventions are possible to actually help the situation a bit. That’s great. And I’m sure that we’ll talk more about that in a minute here, but just for the listeners. I mean, Abby obviously is an expert in this area. She has a lot to say, so we’re going to move really quickly through a few different questions in this interview. And if you want to follow up with her, which I imagine many of you will want to, check out the website that she already mentioned, her courses and so forth, and you’ll get a lot more of the content there.

Role of Mindset in Negotiation 

06:48 Emily: So, okay. I have been talking more and more recently about mindset and about its importance in personal finance. And I know that you also know something about mindset with respect to negotiation. So, what role does mindset play when you’re going into negotiation?

07:07 Abby: I think that mindset has everything to do with not only how confident you are, but also how effective you are. And you have to monitor how you are coming across in an interview so that you have to develop that sense of mindfulness. That way you can do what’s called pivoting. So, pivoting will be that you notice that someone’s not responding particularly well to a negotiation tactic, like using too much silence, for instance. You can turn the conversation around and ultimately start executing a series of steps based on that reaction to get what you want. So, you have to really stay in the present with the conversation, that way you’re able to assess the situation ongoing.

07:40 Abby: And you’re just able to create new strategies or choose ones that you already have in mind as you go along and just keep responding to what’s there, not what’s going on in your head and not what you think should be happening.

How Can PhDs Overcome a Scarcity Mindset when Negotiating?

07:50 Emily: I see. So, kind of what I’m hearing is what happens in negotiation is not totally set, linear, this is the exact script kind of path. And you have to be kind of adaptive to what is going on in the situation. And how can a PhD–like I know a lot of PhDs come into this whole post-PhD career thing with a lot of hangups that they developed in graduate school, around money and around their worth and so forth. And, you know, we might even call this like a scarcity mindset, or like a poverty mindset. And so, how does a PhD set that aside when they’re going into a negotiation? Like how do you actually overcome that if that’s what’s happened during graduate school?

08:31 Abby: I think that one really good way to look at it, especially if you were going into a non-academic job or if you were going into your first professor job and you’re not really sure, kind of where you stand compared to other people is, think through how to calculate and communicate your ROI or return on investment. That’s a very important business term not a lot of PhDs really think about or know how to calculate or communicate. But whenever you’re in a negotiation, let’s just say, I’m going to use a real life example of mine. I was interviewing with a major retailer, specifically in the jean sector, once for a job. I had to fly out to a different state to do that. And as I was there, I talked with, I think about 10 to 20 people.

09:11 Abby: And just one day, I had a series of individual meetings with some people, like higher-level directors, and then a larger lunch with a smaller group of people who were lower-ranked. I think they were maybe talent recruiters or something. And so, what I learned while there was that people wanted to hear how you were able to contribute to the table in ways they understood. So, with that particular case, I was interviewing for a jean company. So, some language to use when communicating my ROI would have been things like “best-sellers.” Like if I wanted to predict who was going to be engaged in a company over time, so looking at employee engagement, how to improve that, I could say the five best-sellers or in more or less research terms that grad students might understand, the five predictors of work engagement would be, let’s just say supervisor quality and four other things.

10:03 Abby: So, learning how to speak in ways that people in industry understand that don’t necessarily rely on statistics, because a lot of them don’t really know very much, if anything, about statistics is a good idea. And you can apply that mindset too if you’re applying to academic jobs like being a professor or a postdoc. You just have to know, for instance, let’s just say for ROI, you wanted to calculate how much grant money you’ve brought to the table when applying for different grants, or how many students you’ve taught, or ways that you’ve saved the university money. Other things like those can be communicated in a way that’s specific to your department or organization and what they care about. So, match what you’ve done to what people care about, and communicate it in a way that uses industry-specific language that they understand. And you should be good to go and sort of like start to defeat that poverty mindset over time. Because you can physically see–you can’t really contradict numbers in that case–you can see on paper, “Okay, I’ve done a hundred thousand worth of grants in one year. That’s a lot of money.” So, just starting to visualize that, but also learn how to be precise is important.

Focus on Thriving, Not Just Surviving

11:07 Emily: Yeah. What I’m hearing you say in this portion is like, I think part of the problems, and these are universal outside of academic training or whatever. Some people, a lot of people come into a negotiation thinking, “What do I need to survive? What kind of salary do I need to command to have the lifestyle that I want?” And coming out of graduate school, it’s probably not a high number because you’ve probably been living on a pretty, pretty low salary for the last several years. And you’re reframing this not as, “Okay, well, what do I need to get by?” But rather, “What value am I bringing to this organization? What metrics, what proof points do I have to back this up?” And also the further step of, “I need to communicate this to them in a way that they’re going to latch onto and appreciate,” not necessarily your most natural way of communicating. Does that sum up what you were saying?

11:55 Abby: Absolutely. And what a lot of people have to think about is not really putting themselves of “How much money do I need to survive,” but, “What is my, what’s called, market value?” So, when you look at market value, it’s a completely different mindset from what you’re taught in grad school, because the norms in your particular field, like if you’re going into tech, the norms for salary and benefits will be different they. Somewhat depending on the company, but also compared to other industries. Like if you work in manufacturing. So, you have to just consider those differences. But also you have to think of the whole negotiation as a win-win mindset. So, it’s not just about what can I get from this company. You have to think about me, myself, and family, because realistically speaking, and I know this is kind of harsh, but a lot of people, and especially in HR, will, if people say something in an interview, like “I need this much mind to live,” unfortunately they’ll just tell you perhaps even bold facedly, they don’t care, you know, what you need to survive, which it knows is harsh and I would never–I’m in HR.

12:48 Abby: So, I would never say that to an applicant. But really the company just cares about what you can bring to the table, because the implication of you bringing things is that they will take care of you in turn. So, you don’t really have to communicate, “This is what I need.” You have to show them based on, for instance, your certificates, what your capacities are, just different software and other skills that they find relevant. You can use all of that to get more money because you are clearly bringing more to the table. They’ll be generally more willing to pay for all those skills. Because especially, at least in my case, for instance, I bring a lot of really rare skill sets to my particular job. And I got that job through a contract. And so, you know, just being able to show what all you bring that will help the company give you the money and you won’t have to worry about surviving as much. You’ll be able to think about thriving, which is completely different, as far as the psychological response goes. Survival schools, more of grad school, it’s just the bare minimum. What can I possibly scrape by? With industry, you should present yourself as what can I do to thrive and help people at work thrive and just kind of frame it like that.

Big-Picture Negotiation Items Besides Salary

13:47 Emily: Yeah, so this is really, you know, taking a step back from being very me, me as the applicant, very me-focused and more about what am I bringing to this organization? What other big-picture items should applicants be thinking about when they’re going into a negotiation process?

14:02 Abby: I think that one of the big ones that a lot of people don’t really particularly talk about, and sometimes I’ve heard in even other podcasts, maybe discourage a little bit, is thinking about what’s called the total reward lens. So, the total reward lens, if you think of the big pie, for instance, like the kind of pie you can eat, not the number. If you think of a pie and you think of all the possible pieces that could come out of it, those are all interrelated, but they’re also their own separate entities once they’ve been cut out of the pie. So, they’re able to be standalone items. Whenever you think of a total reward lens, whenever it comes to getting what you want from work, you have to think of that kind of like a pie, too, because salary is naturally going to be a big part of that pie for a lot of people. But you also have other pieces of the pie like your healthcare, which projects you can work on, the quality of your supervisor.

14:51 Abby: And then some other areas like how much autonomy do you get? Or how much natural light does your office get? And those pieces of the pie in terms of their size or their weight, depending on how you want to think about it, are all different for different people. So, you have to think about, “If I were to make my ideal pie, what would that look like in terms of where all the pieces are and how much those matter relative to the overall sort of picture that I’ve got going on?” Because different people are going to have different needs. If you’ve got a parent who’s got young children, then maybe flexibility might be more important for them. Or if you have someone who’s more into work-life balance, like they want to go ski on the weekends, then that might be very important to them, too. But it might not be as important to someone who maybe like myself is single and doesn’t really have to take care of kids, at least right now. So, it really depends on your specifics. So, you just have to like define those numbers for yourself, but also realize if you don’t get a bigger part of the pie focusing on salary, maybe you could get a bigger part of the pie that would focus on another area or two or three other areas that you also care about.

Is Everything Open for Negotiation?

15:53 Emily: Yeah. I think this is an area that people definitely don’t pay enough attention to. Like you were saying, it’s kind of all about the salary, but there are so many other aspects to your benefits or just your work culture and work style that should play into your decision about which kind of job to accept and also what to negotiate. So, would you say that is every piece of this pie up for negotiation? Or like where might one focus your negotiation if you’re not quite happy with all the different pieces?

16:22 Abby: A lot of it depends on the type of job you have. So, for instance, if you are working in a government position that is governed by a shared contract, like a collective bargaining agreement, for instance. Then certain areas of your package, like the initial salary may very well not be negotiable. I actually had to tell, whenever I was hiring people, several individuals who applied, this is part of the collective bargaining agreement. You can’t negotiate it. Over time, you can perform better and get a bonus that way. But at least with this contract, your salary, at least your base, is set. So, if you want to get more money over time, it’s really on you. You have to perform in terms of exceeding expectations. And then you can get more money that way. You can also get other money by doing other tasks that the job would be open to.

17:08 Abby: So, for instance, if you did overtime, that might be something that you’d be able to get more money from, but it again depends on whether that’s available. So, those are some examples of what all you could do besides money. And then, of course, you have to think about too, what other options are available? And most places have a lot of different options when it comes to healthcare. For instance, you might have a lower deductible, and that works for you whenever it comes to healthcare, compared to someone else who wants to have a higher deductible. Or you might want to put more money in your 401k, like a retirement account, or, you know, the company might match whatever you do put in. So, you just have to look at/get sort of an initial view. If you can, if there’s an employment handbook, that will usually tell you different things like the possible packages available, the benefits, like maybe gym membership.

17:53 Abby: So, try and look there first. And usually those come through websites, they might be coming through HR. Like HR might directly send you them. Once you get your initial offer letter, just take a look at not only the offer letter, but the information they send over through those handbooks. A lot of people don’t even bother to look at those handbooks, but they’re very useful. So, I would just say, take a survey of what you’ve gotten initially. And then if you’re not happy with something, think about, “Okay, what could I bring to the table in terms of ROI to argue why I should get that thing?” So, it’s not like, most places are not going to have a huge conversation about negotiating healthcare. You go on and enroll yourself. So, that’s kind of a proxy for negotiation, but if it’s something like maybe extra days off, you would want to be able to come up with an argument to justify that. Personally, from an HR standpoint, I wouldn’t start from the job like day one saying, “I want more hours off.” I would wait until over time, maybe six months once you’ve had a little bit of tenure there, to propose that. But it just really depends on your situation. Try to take into account whatever information you do receive. And if you have questions, of course, ask at that time into your discussion, depending on your situation.

Commercial

19:04 Emily: Hey social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15-minute call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time. I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now, back to our interview.

How Employee Training Benefits the Employer

19:50 Emily: I want to mention one of the things that my husband actually negotiated for when he took his current position was, I guess you would call it, like training. So, like professional development. Maybe it’s something like, it’s not clear whether that actually like increased, you know, what he was going to get anyway, but it made it more explicit to his employer that he was looking to advance his career. And this is how he saw, you know, that he wanted to do it. And they said, “Yes” to it. Like, “Yes” to his proposal. So, I would imagine that would apply in a lot of other places, maybe where negotiation on salary or something else is a little bit more rigid. But you know, you can set yourself up right from the beginning to, you know, to seem like a go getter, right? You’re going for a promotion like right away, you know, you’re eager. You’re going to be growing your career. You want to grow with that company and how can they help you do that?

20:37 Abby: Right. And one of the things that you want to communicate whenever you’re proposing for something like more training is what kind of value that would also bring to the company, because that will set you up. For instance, one of the trainings I received during my government job, my last job, was that I was able to become a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. And a lot of people might not know what those are or what they mean in terms of quantities, but in the process improvement area and finance and some other areas, those are very well sought-after certifications for people to have. And you can bump up your salary over time by anywhere from 5,000 with green belt to maybe 20,000 plus with a black belt.

21:13 Abby: But at the same time, you’re also able to save companies a lot of money because you’re able to go in, create change interventions, lead people through those interventions, and then identify ways that your group can maybe devote money to other resources. Like if you’re spending too much on training, for instance, and you could maybe cut costs or reallocate those costs, then maybe you can use that money to give people higher bonuses or something to that effect. So, as you’re proposing that increase in training, definitely make sure to communicate how that would benefit the company too, because in some way, shape or form, it probably will. You just want to make sure that people understand what that is from a very early standpoint. That way, you can frame your training as, “Okay, I propose there are five key goals that I’m going to get out of this. I’m going to go in, get those and I’ll show my team whatever those things were.” That way I can make sure I’m consistent with what I promised.

Negotiation in Academia vs. Industry

22:00 Emily: Excellent. So, I imagine we have people in the audience who, you know, they’re hearing your talk and you’ve mentioned industry a lot so far. But many of my listeners may be, you know, gunning to stay in academia. So, is the process of negotiation different, the same between those two different types of workplaces?

22:20 Abby: I would say that some of the behavioral norms and perceptions are very different. Because when I was in academia, I was in grad school and then I negotiated for my negotiation packages, like my benefits and compensation packages. And so, the first time I did it, wasn’t really negotiable as we were kind of on a collective bargaining agreement. Again, meaning that we all just had the same benefits and compensation. Like our stipends were all the same, and there wasn’t really a step-raise as much. But a lot of people in academia can negotiate quite a lot, too. And I would say that one of those critical parts of you negotiating, whether you’re a faculty member or a grad student of any level coming in, is that make sure you go do a campus visit. If you’re not invited to, definitely make sure you go do one. Because you want to get kind of a survey as to what your office area might look like, what the different resources like laboratories for instance are or libraries, and really how the people are, too, and kind of how everything is arranged. Because what I’ve noticed over time is that the way a department is arranged in terms of its space, its people, and its resources will tell you a lot about how you’ll fit well there or not.

23:23 Abby: So, for instance, I went to whenever deciding between two different PhD programs, I decided which one based on the visit that I went to with each one. So, whenever I went to grad school A, Choice A, I noticed that for instance, the offices had no windows whatsoever. And that’s very common in a lot of places in academia, especially if you’re in a much larger, more kind of cloistered building. And I was thinking, I’m definitely the kind of person who needs natural light. And that might not sound like a big deal to many people. But when you’re in an office for three years, constantly working on high-stress projects, maybe dealing with students who have a lot of problems and then other people who come in with different requests, you want to make sure that you have an office that’s inviting to at least some extent.

24:08 Abby: And so, I thought a natural light kind of office would be better for that. That wasn’t as big of a pie piece. Getting back to my pie analogy earlier, compared to the travel stipend that I got, for instance, but it definitely was important. So, use the visit that you get to kind of determine what you need to negotiate and think about because you can actually get a lot more by going to visit. Because whenever I went to visit, I got an extra, I think it was 4,000 at the start, from Place A compared to Place B just by contributing during the discussions that people had about, you know, why you want to become a grad student here and so on. And you’re able to meet people and add value to them. And that’s the key thing is make sure you add value that way. People are more likely to give you things in return because you can leverage that powerful principle of social reciprocity, which is if someone gets something from you, they’re more likely to give back in return.

Virtual Campus Visits

24:56 Emily: So, we’re recording this on March 23rd, 2020. And I think all PhD grad visits are probably off at this point for the remainder of admission season. Now, we’re actually going to publish this episode, I think after April 15th. So, after all the decisions have been made. But I’m just thinking about for students in this current situation, or maybe in future years when a visit is not possible for whatever reason. Of course, it’s ideal, but if it’s not possible, how can an applicant as a graduate student, or even at a later stage, get a sense of these things remotely, somehow? What do they need to do to create a facsimile of an actual visit?

25:36 Abby: Sure. So, there are different options. And I think that departments, if any faculty are listening, I would highly encourage them to explore this option. I’ll really just lay out two quick options. One would be to see if there’s any way–some departments already do this, depending on the school and the department you’re in, some don’t. Some departments offer digital tours. So, if students cannot come for whatever reason, they might have someone doing kind of a vlog of the laboratory, that might be something that’s interesting and valuable to you. And maybe you can live tweet them while you’re doing that. It really just depends on who all is leading that. Another option would be to, and you probably should do this in addition to option one, if you can. But another option would be definitely talking about your office setup and other things with faculty and grad students. Grad students would be more likely the safer option whenever it comes to communicating about what their offices are like. Faculty may very well not know anything about what current grad students are doing with their offices.

26:28 Abby: A lot of places do publish things about their grad student groups. Like who’s the president, VP, finance person, so forth. I was the finance chair with my group. But try to get out to reach that person, and they will probably connect you. If they don’t know something, they will connect you with someone who does. So, I would follow those steps. And then also just if the place has a Facebook group, for instance, definitely see what all people are taking pictures of there. And really over time, I would just say, try to ask a lot of really good questions. Because faculty and grad students love it when someone not only praises their work that they’ve been working on, but they have a mutual interest in, but also they appreciate someone who asked really thoughtful questions about things that they care about, too. So, I think if you frame it still as a win-win, like I’m giving this person a valuable, interesting conversation and they’re giving me information in turn that’s useful, I think that that will help you come across a lot more effectively. Because email conversations were very instrumental for me, too, whenever applying to grad school and deciding between different schools as well.

Misconceptions Around Negotiation

27:25 Emily: Yeah, I think if at all possible those conversations should happen over the phone or over video conferencing. Just because if a grad student, for instance, has anything not so nice to say about their department or their advisor or their group or whatever, they’re probably not going to want to put that in writing. So, it’s much better to speak live and not in a recorded fashion when you’re having those really candid conversations with current graduate students. So, thank you so much for those thoughts, Abby. And finally, can you clear up any misconceptions for us around negotiation and negotiation strategies?

28:03 Abby: I think that one of the biggest ones that I didn’t really think about early on, but started to realize over time, and then of course in retrospect, see a lot better is that a lot of people worry about negotiation if they don’t get it right the very first time–like their first semester right as, for instance, they’re getting into grad school or right as they’re becoming a professor or an industry professional–that they’ll never be able to do negotiation over time, or they’ll never be able to get it right. So, there’s that kind of fixed mentality of, “If I don’t get it now then I never will.” And that’s not necessarily true because the truth is that your job is very dynamic over time. People change. Sometimes departments get reorganized as we’ve seen more lately, whether you are in academia or in industry. Sometimes entire companies get reorganized to where their benefits and compensation structures change.

28:46 Abby: So, always be aware of what’s going on in your organization or in your grad school or your department, if you’re a faculty member or person wanting to join that. And just keep aware of the changes going on. That way, you can see different opportunities. Also make sure to realize that you are still, no matter where you are in your career, adding some sort of value, like a service, to your department or a company, for instance. So, keep abreast as to what ROI you are bringing to the table. And you can even keep, for instance, like a shout out sheet. I know a lot of people will use that. So, it’s like a list of all those accomplishments you have, what value that’s added, like making employees more engaged or improving organization, like even organizing a closet or like an area of the office where people store papers or files can be very useful. That may or may not be in your job description, but it depends on your situation.

Negotiation Can Happen Over Time

29:36 Abby: So, just realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything. Because for instance, whenever I went into grad school, the grad school I chose for my PhD program had a lower stipend than the one that was offering me a package in return. And the reason I chose that other one was just that it really seemed to fit more with what I was hoping to do regarding the research methods path I wanted to go on, regarding the kind of set up of the department, and some other factors. But what happened was that over time I actually got, I think it was 15,000 extra dollars from that department during my three years there because I got 3,000 extra dollars in conference funding that I didn’t even have to apply for. The department chair just told me I qualified for it based on how I was a domestic student.

30:31 Abby: There were other things like consultant contracts which I was able to get and work on that brought in extra money. And then there were some other things too, like dissertation grant money that I got a lot more of there than I would have at the other place. So, I actually ended up kind of starting from a lower place at that Choice B university or not really Choice B, but Option B, and then working my way up to where I got actually a lot more money, pretty much almost a year’s worth of extra money, for only going three years. So, it doesn’t have to be like a one shot kind of picture. You just have to think over time, how can I find ways to negotiate? And if people want to read an area of IO psychology that deals with this a lot too, but not necessarily in money terms, they can look at what’s called the job crafting literature. And so, job crafting will show you different opportunities that you have to negotiate and it’s got four different categories and several of those papers. Very useful.

Where Can People Find You?

31:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that tip. And speaking of, you know, where to go more, can you just mention again where people can find you if they want to hear more from you?

31:31 Abby: Sure. So, other than my Udemy course on negotiating your funding for grad school and then on another for Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, which shows people how to save money, people can also go to Twitter. My handle is @rainer_abby. And then they can also go to find me on LinkedIn a lot. And it’s just Abby Rainer PhD Lean Six Sigma Black Belt on there. So, those are the main places right now that they can go.

Best Financial Advice for an Early-Career PhD

31:59 Emily: That’s excellent. Thank you so much. And I always conclude my interviews with this question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we touched on today in the interview, or it can be something completely different.

32:13 Abby: I would say that my best financial advice would be, and one of my early advisors told me this as well, is that if you do anything regarding finance, make sure to get it in writing and to make sure it’s in very clear writing. Because sometimes especially if you’re in a company or in grad school, people will promise you things like working on projects or grant money, but they might not be very upfront about it, or very clear as to when you’ll get that money, how, and so forth. I break a lot of this down in my Udemy training on funding for grad school, but just make sure that you get everything–the who, what, when, where, why and how–very clear, because you want to know exactly where your money’s coming from, why you were getting it, how it’s going to be dispersed to you.

32:56 Abby: And if you need to return part of that for any reason, like if you’re writing a grant, how you do that. Just so that everybody is very clear about what expectations are and there’s no fuzzy area regarding what needs to be done and by who.

33:09 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s excellent advice. And it’s also not even necessarily people being like underhanded and like purposefully leading you on or whatever. Sometimes people are just forgetful. And especially, you know, like in graduate school, faculty members, they’ve got a lot on their plates, so it really is better for all parties to be really clear and put it in writing, as you said so that everyone’s on the same page about what’s going to happen and when and so forth. So, thank you so much for that advice. And thank you for this interview, Abby.

33:36 Abby: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And I hope that people find this very useful because I didn’t know any of this before grad school or my time in academia. And some of it, I didn’t even know before my time in industry, but now that I’ve kind of been in both worlds, I see a lot of things that maybe I wouldn’t have before. And they can do that, too. It’s not just, you have to have a background in finance. You can do it regardless of where you’re from.

33:58 Emily: Absolutely. Negotiation is a topic that I don’t know as much as I would like to know about it. And so I’m highly interested in getting more of this content out to my audience. So, thank you so much for providing it.

34:08 Abby: You’re very welcome. Thank you. I appreciate you having me and hope everybody does well.

Outtro

34:13 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode, register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How This Grad Student Navigated a Broken Engagement in a High Cost-of-Living City

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In this episode, Emily interviews Tina Del Carpio, a third-year PhD student at the University of California at Los Angeles in ecology and evolutionary biology. Tina chose their PhD program in Los Angeles in no small part because their fiance’s career was tied to the city. However, when they moved in with him and started planning the wedding, cracks began to form in the relationship. When they broke up, Tina had to figure out how to extricate themself from their shared apartment and yours-mine-and-ours financial system. Fortunately, Tina landed on their feet with the help of their NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, understanding advisor, and network of supportive friends. At the beginning and end of the episode, Tina and Emily also discuss the power of self-advocacy in graduate school.

Links Mentioned

grad student breakup

Teaser

00:00 Tina: Thankfully, we also talked about what would happen if we broke up, even before I moved out here. I was very adamant about having my own support network and knowing that I’d be able to survive without, if things just didn’t work or we’d gotten divorced or something.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast to higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode ten, and today my guest is Tina Del Carpio a third year PhD student at UCLA in ecology and environmental biology. Tina chose their PhD program in Los Angeles in no small part because their fiance’s career was tied to the city. However, when they moved in with him and started planning, the wedding, cracks began to form in the relationship. When they broke up, Tina had to figure out how to extricate themself from their shared apartment and “yours, mine and ours” financial system. Listen through the end of the interview to hear how Tina handles their finances these days, and they’re excellent advice for other early career PhDs on advocating for yourself. By the way we recorded this interview in September, 2019. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Tina Del Carpio.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further

01:19 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today. Tina Del Carpio, who is a graduate student at UCLA, and we’re discussing a little bit of a tough topic today, which is Tina’s breakup from about a year and a half ago. They had a little bit of financial commingling before the breakup and had to disentangle themselves from one another afterwards, which was a challenging thing to do in the midst of graduate school. Tina, I’m so delighted to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. And will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself?

01:47 Tina: Of course. Thanks for having me on Emily. My name’s Tina Del Carpio, my preferred pronouns are they/them or she/her. I’m a second year PhD student at UCLA, or I guess about to be a third year PhD student at UCLA. My focus is on genetics and epigenetics of canids, specifically dogs and foxes.

Getting Engaged, Starting Grad School and Moving to LA

02:10 Emily: Okay, so we need to take this story back to when you started graduate school. How did you make the decision to go to UCLA? What factors were you?

02:19 Tina: Yeah, so this is actually really entangled with my relationship because at the time, my partner and I had been long distance for about five years and he was working in the film industry, so his life and his job were very tied out to LA. I geographically restricted my search to universities near Los Angeles, or ideally in Los Angeles. I was very fortunate to make a connection with a postdoc from the lab that I currently I’m a student in. I talked to her about her experience in the lab and the project that she was sort of leaving behind as she was graduating. I got really interested in that project and was looking to pick it up and met with her and the advisor, my now advisor, Bob Wayne, and we talked about the project and they helped me put together an application for the NSF GRFP. I ended up being awarded that fellowship. This all happened kind of very quickly. We actually had this conversation, decided for me to apply for the NSF, like a week before it was due. I actually only applied to UCLA in that case and figured “oh it’s a crap shoot. I probably won’t get in, and I’ll just stay on track with my other plan to just apply to a bunch of schools the following year.” But it worked out, I got funding and it was in my ideal city, and with an advisor was happy to work with.

03:49 Emily: That is an incredible story, not even the one that we’re focused on today, but I love hearing about sort of non-traditional ways of finding your way into a PhD lab. You networked your way basically into this, right? You said you first connected with a postdoc who was leaving the lab, then that connection led you to the advisor and put together this NSF application, which by the way in a week, that was successful. That is incredible! Good job on that. How did you first make that connection with that postdoc?

04:22 Tina: Yeah, so it’s funny. I literally was thinking about, okay, I changed jobs, I was working as a lab tech gaining more research experience to apply to grad school, and I had just sort of wistfully bookmarked a bunch of labs that I was interested in applying to in about a year. Then my boss announced that we’re getting a new postdoc. It happened that she was coming from one of the labs that I had bookmarkedm and when she came out to look for housing and to make some plans to settle in, in North Carolina, I kind of cornered her and was like, “Hey, so I’m interested in applying to the Wayne lab, can you tell me about the Wayne lab.” Also, it happened to line up with, I was about to be in LA visiting my ex, and so I was like, “Hey, I’m going to be there next week, can we meet up in person, and can you give me a face to face introduction with Bob?”

05:15 Emily: That is incredible. I mean, this is how networking works. It’s not like you were in some unrelated lab, right? You were already on the course to be studying something related to what you would ultimately do in graduate school. Of course there are related labs and people know each other and you run into people. That’s a wonderful story. It’s actually not that dissimilar from how I got into my graduate school, which is that my husband started — we graduate from college at the same time, but he started graduate school at Duke immediately, whereas I did a postbac year. And so, because I was regularly visiting him in Durham, I was especially interested in getting into Duke, and I basically used one of my visits to see him as like, “Hey, various professors that I’m interested in, why don’t I set up my own interview with you?” all prior to admission season even starting and made a few connections there. Ultimately applied to Duke and various other places and went through kind of the normal admissions route after that point, but then ultimately circle back around, and one of the people who I had created my own interview with ultimately, you know, offered me a position and he was my advisor during graduate school. These things, if you have the motivation, sometimes they do work out. I’m really glad that we have that story upfront.

06:28 Emily: Okay, so you were awarded the NSF GRF, that’s awesome, and you’re starting at UCLA and you’re finally living in the same city as your partner. What was going on with you guys like logistically and financially at that time?

06:40 Tina: Yeah. Things are getting a little bit more commingled and complicated at that point. When I actually got the NSF and got accepted to UCLA, because actually I initially wasn’t accepted and wasn’t even invited on the official interview weekend, but suddenly having your own funding for three years opens doors.

07:01 Emily: No kidding.

07:02 Tina: Yeah. So I got the NSF award and then shortly afterwards we got engaged, and then planned a wedding, made a lot of wedding deposits, and then I moved out into LA. Part of the navigating how to do our finances together, we basically decided we’d each keeps some of our money separate, but we opened together a checking account, a savings account, and a credit card, so we could both funnel some money into that and use that to build up a little bit of shared savings and also to pay off any expenses, groceries, rent, things related to the wedding, et cetera.

07:43 Emily: I want to ask a little bit more about that because this is becoming a very popular model, whereas maybe a few decades ago, a vast majority of couples were using fully joint finances. Some minority were using fully separate finances. Now this “yours, mine and ours” model is becoming very, very popular. As you said, most people use it for shared expenses like rent, like you were just saying, you had the wedding that you were putting down deposits for all that kind of thing. How did you decide on the split? Were you guys contributing equal amounts of money to your joint accounts? Or was it maybe by a percentage of income or how did you navigate that?

08:23 Tina: Yeah, so I guess the tricky part we were navigating was housing costs because my ex made about double what I was making, even on an NSF salary or stipend. We ended up deciding for housing that we would pay housing proportional, so he paid two thirds of our rent and I paid one third, especially moving from Durham, my rent went from $400 for my half of a two bed, two bath to we had a like $2,400, one bed, one and a half bathroom apartment. So my rent was changing significantly and also I was eating up a bunch of moving costs. So housing, we decided to do proportionately, but everything else we decided to just split 50/50.

09:10 Emily: At least it was the conversation that you had. That is a great point that you’re at least coming to a firm decision and have a strategy for addressing it. So the place that you were living, which was out of your price range, it sounds like, or I guess was it actually, so like, would you have made a different housing decision had you been moving there as a single person or maybe looking to find a roommate or like what would have been different and how much do you think you would have been paying?

09:35 Tina: Yeah, so I would have definitely looked for something different because it was…well, there was also a lot of uncertainty for me of like, what are my housing costs going to be? Even coming to LA my car insurance went up significantly and that’s actually a thing that I also commingled with my ex. He had USAA, which has a great insurance discount. I added my car onto his, onto his insurance, and so it took me a little while to navigate that and figure that out. But initially the budget I had set for myself was $800 for my rent. And then eventually, you know, I had to reconcile that when we were breaking up.

10:16 Tina: Thankfully we also talked about what would happen if we broke up, even before I moved out here, because my mom got divorced after like 20 years of marriage and I saw the financial struggles my mom went through because she had stopped working to take care of her three kids and the house and things. Then my dad lost his job and all these other problems. And of course, issues between my parents that led to them being divorced. I just watched my mom struggle a lot with her finances without my father to help support her anymore, so I was very adamant about having my own support network and knowing that I’d be able to survive without, if things just didn’t work out or if we’d gotten divorced or something. I feel like I I kinda lost the thread there, what were we talking about?

11:06 Emily: What different housing decisions might you have made? This rolls into what housing decision did you make once you guys decided to split up. Have we concluded talking about all the intermingling that was going on prior to the breakup? Is that about what the full picture was?

11:24 Tina: Yeah, I think so. I think the point I was trying to get to earlier that I lost was we talked about if we broke up and especially when we actually did break up, there was like a couple of months of us discussing it before it actually happened. But we reaffirmed that if we broke up, we would continue paying for the apartment that same way. That I would still just be paying a third and that he would continue paying two thirds, and he ended up moving out since he had family and places to go here, and my nearest family members are in Florida. I stayed living in the apartment for a couple of months until the lease was resolved and he continued to pay that two thirds of the apartment. Thankfully that was something we had discussed and agreed upon long before the breakup.

Financial Ramifications of Breaking of The Engagement

12:08 Emily: Yeah. I think we can move into kind of talking about that second phase now. It sounds like it was a long conversation. You guys had a long relationship, you were on the track to getting married, this is not something to be undertaken lightly. So you were having these conversations over a relatively long period of time. And of course, one of your concerns was how do I provide for myself in this transition to not being in this partnership any longer? So one of the things that you discussed and agreed on was the rent split. What else did you have to do once you guys decided that this breakup is official, the engagement is off? What other things had to happen to fully separate from one another?

12:46 Tina: I think the housing was the biggest thing because we broke up before our lease expired. It was like this big burden and I talked to the landlord and he told us that if we could rent the apartment to somebody else, he’d be willing to terminate our lease. Actually, I got into like kind of a sticky situation that I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with, but where he was like, okay, I’ll advertise the apartment, but I need you guys to show the apartment. Even after we had actually moved our stuff out and we’re no longer living there, he was still like, no, you guys have to show it, I’m not gonna drive over and show it. I was still devoting time and energy to that, and it ended up still being worth it. It took a couple months to rent the apartment to somebody else, but we managed to end the lease at least a month early. For me getting back that $800 was huge.

13:43 Emily: Yeah. So the housing situation was the main one. It sounds like your ex was pretty generous, or maybe you would say reasonable, right? He was okay with continuing to pay your agreed upon portions of the rent for the amount of time necessary, but you were still doing what you needed to do to get out of it as soon as possible.

Commercial

14:03 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude, the deadline for filing your federal tax return and making your quarters one and two estimated tax payments was extended to July 15th, 2020. I never expected to still be talking about taxes into the summer, but here we are. Post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows still need major help in this area because of their unique situation. I provide tons of support to PhD trainees preparing their tax returns and calculating their estimated tax. Go to PFforPhDs.com/tax to read my free articles and find out if one of my tax workshops is right for you. I have one workshop on how to prepare your annual tax return and one how to determine if you owe quarterly estimated tax. Both workshops include videos, supplemental documents, and live Q&A calls with me go to P F F O R P H D S.com/T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Making Budget Adjustments

15:19 Emily: So where did you move to and how did you find that next housing situation?

15:24 Tina: Yeah. So for me, I like living with other people. Actually I describe myself as painfully extroverted, so the first move was to find another roommate or find a roommate, I guess. A person in my cohort I had been spending some time with and was taking a class with and felt comfortable discussing some of my relationship stuff with, I mentioned to her like, yeah, I might be moving and looking for a new roommate soon. She was also in a housing situation, in grad student housing housing, which is really expensive here. I know Adriana, you interviewed awhile ago was living in like the family housing that’s highly subsidized, but my roommate was in the regular housing that’s like $1,300 per person per month, so not nearly as subsidized. Anyways, I found the person to live with, and then I was sort of waiting for her to finish up her paperwork to get released from her housing contract. And based on the new information I had of how much it was actually costing me to live in LA, I set a new budget of $1,100 a month for rent, and we found a two bedroom, two bathroom near campus, but far enough away that it was in our price range, and most importantly, for us, it had to be near a bus stop, so it was easy to get to campus.

16:44 Emily: Yeah. A couple of points I want to follow up within that. One is yes, I had that interview with Adriana and she was living in family housing for UCLA. I have another interview that’s been recorded, but not released as of the moment that we’re doing this interview, with Dr. Travis Seifman, and he is specifically talking about grad student housing. He’s lived in like a couple of different of the UC grad student housing, different universities. And then he’s also lived in graduate student housing at some other universities, including overseas. We have an extensive discussion around this, and one of the things that we talk about is his consternation around the price difference between family housing and single but roommates housing, and why is it that there’s such a price difference there. And so anyway, for any listeners who are particularly interested in that discussion, I’ll recommend that other interview. TBD when it will actually be published. Thanks for bringing that up.

17:39 Emily: One of the things I really like about the story is that, once you had been in LA, at UCLA for a year, you were able to, well, one, probably be more realistic about the amount of money you were able to pay in rent. Your budget went from $800 up to $1,100 per month. And then also, you found a person you wanted to live with and you guys probably had more at that point familiarity with the area and were able to do a housing search a little bit better than you could have from a distance. Of course that’s the case. My message, what I want to emphasize to listeners is that it’s a really good idea to reevaluate your housing, maybe after your first year of graduate school, whenever you’re thinking about housing in that second year, because you probably know a lot more about the area that you’ve moved to in that second iteration of the housing search. So how did that new higher rent fit in with your budget? What adjustments did you make to make that happen?

18:03 Tina: Yeah, I mean, I think I actually just had room for it. I had over budgeted other items. It took us a while to figure out the car insurance, and initially I was planning for my car insurance to double and instead it only gone up $30 and even then, it went up again when I had to separate my car insurance from my ex’s, but not as much as I was anticipating, so that was helpful. I think I ended up having to put a little bit less into savings, I think that’s where most of the difference came from. A couple of things that I have over head over budgeted initially, before I knew anything out here and then also pulling a little bit out of what I was contributing to my savings.

19:15 Emily: Another thing you did really well, there is to be sort of conservative in your estimates of your spending, in that you think you’re going to spend more than maybe you actually do, so you have that wiggle room for later adjustments within your budget.

Financial Life after the Break-up

19:27 Emily: Okay, we’ve gone through the breakup process and the separation from your ex, how are things looking in your finances today?

19:35 Tina: They’re looking okay. I just made a big purchase recently. I had a car that was a lease and I recently bought out my lease, and so that took a big chunk of my money. Basically, my car to buy out was like $12,000 with taxes and fees, and if I had been buying it from a used car dealership would have been closer to like $16,000, so it seemed like a pretty good deal. Especially since I could buy it out right, I’m not paying any interest on it. And the way I did that, is I had a considerable savings, just like paying out of my savings account. And so I paid for a third of the car, my father was able to contribute a third, and then another family member was able to lend me a third. So I did still take out a loan for my car, but from a family member who is lending it to me without any interest, of course.

20:27 Emily: Yeah. So that was a big chunk out of your funding, but that’s nice to not have that monthly expense. I mean, it’s still a monthly expense because you’re repaying the loan, but a much, much smaller one.

20:36 Tina: Yeah.

20:37 Emily: That is a great reduction in the rest of your spending. That’s great. It sounds like you and your ex were really thoughtful in this process. You had seen your parents get divorced and so you were keeping in your mind, this is a possibility. You’re going to move to LA, you’re going to live together, start commingling your finances. Maybe things won’t work out, you’re not married yet, and even after that, it still could not work out. It sounds like you did things pretty intelligently and carefully through this process, and so I think that you have like a positive example here of how this can happen, but is there anything that you, looking back, wish that you had done differently?

21:14 Tina: I think most of it was pretty settled. I wish I’d been a little bit more thoughtful about how we divided up and dealt with paying the wedding deposits, because that was a little bit of a thorn in my side when we were splitting up. And arguably my ex paid significantly more in the wedding deposits than I did, but he essentially, at the end of the day was the one who asked to call the wedding off, and so I requested that he pay me back for the wedding deposits that I had paid, which amounted to about a thousand dollars, which, again on a grad student income is a pretty significant chunk of money. And the message I got was, well, let’s see how long it takes you to move out of the apartment, and how much money is spent on the apartment, and then we can make this decision.

22:11 Tina: Then even though we saved more than that by moving out of the apartment early, then there was like some thorny issues about the engagement ring. So the engagement ring had been less than $2,000 and under the law in California, if the giver breaks off the engagement, the receiver legally owns the ring. Also my ex had told me, “oh, the ring is yours, it’s a gift to keep no matter what” and basically when I brought up the issue of my lost money on the wedding deposits, was told, “well, I let you keep the engagement ring, you should be able to sell that and recoup some of this money.” Then it turned out that he had super overpaid for the engagement ring and the money I can recoup from that is very little. I wish I had been a little bit more thoughtful about that sort of spending before we like commingled and talked a little bit more about what we would do in the situation where things broke off, but at the end of the day, I decided it wasn’t worth the emotional turmoil to be like, “well, this ring doesn’t actually cover my expenses, why don’t you take it back and you sell it and do this emotional labor and just give me my thousand dollars back.”

Navigating the Emotional Aspect of the Break-up

23:25 Emily: Yeah. I do want to come back to that point in a moment about the emotions of all of this, but I guess this is just kind of a point around splitting up in general is like, once you’re married, as you were just saying, there’s, there’s state laws that govern how relationships, how marriages separate, in terms of what’s done with the property. Sometimes it has to be figured out in court ultimately, and a lot of money can be spent on lawyers, but the really tricky thing is once you, if you’re not having that legal contract of marriage in place, and you guys were moving towards that, but not quite there yet, breaking out becomes a lot more murky. It’s something that becomes very individual and hard to navigate and something that takes a lot of energy. I just wanted to ask you, how did you manage to continue moving forward in your graduate program? Or did you? Obviously, you have ultimately, but did things stall a little bit as you’re going through this enormous personal upheaval?

24:22 Tina: I think there were two major things that helped me. There definitely was a little bit of a stalling point, but most directly related to grad school was talking to my advisor and telling him, “Hey, this is what’s going on. I’ve been a little mentally checked out because I’m trying to see whether or not my engagement is going to fall apart,” and thankfully, my advisor was very supportive of that. Around that time, actually, I had to turn in a 10 to 15 page written proposal as part of my first year requirements to slowly move towards eventually advancing to candidacy. So I talked to my advisor about it and basically just requested from my committee and extension and said, “Hey, here’s, what’s going on, can I have an extra month to turn this in?” And everybody on my committee was very supportive of that. That was number one.

25:13 Tina: Then number two was also just reaching out to friends and it took me a while to feel comfortable telling some of my lab mates and other people in grad school and just other friends I had met in the city, because at the time I had only been living here for about six months, so I didn’t have any real long-standing, deep relationships with anybody yet because I just didn’t have the time to establish them. But once I shared that information, everybody was super supportive. I actually learned that one of my grad school friends went through the same thing of also had an engagement end during her first year of grad school. They were super helpful. And then my longterm friends were unbelievably helpful. One actually flew out from Canada, where he was doing his PhD to come help me move.

26:02 Emily: Very, very sweet. Very, very wonderful to have that both new and old connections supporting you through that time. Plus, for me, this part of your story, when you were talking with your advisor and committee hearkens back to when you entered graduate school. You didn’t have to conform to the standard procedures in place for applying to graduate school. You realize, “Hey, yeah, this is a requirement in the first year, but maybe they can be flexible with me, and I’m just going to ask about it because what’s the harm in asking?” I mean, your advisor’s probably noticing that you’re not totally engaged anyway. It just comes back to that point that you are doing a great job kind of advocating for yourself and making things happen for you, and people can be accommodating if you ask them in the right way.

Best Financial Advice for Other PhDs

26:45 Emily: Tina, with the end of this interview, I’m going to ask you a question that I ask of all of my interviewees, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be related to the conversation that we’ve had today or could be completely something else.

27:01 Tina: I think actually it kind of ties into our last point of just like asking for help, of just reaching out to people and saying, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing, please help me.” I realized in the last couple months that investing has been a big hole for me, and I’ve been talking to one, actually one of my closest friends of over a decade and only recently learned that investing as a hobby of his. And then also like friends who are very good cooks. I never really learned how to cook as a kid growing up, so now I’m saving money by cooking at home a lot more. Just reach out to friends or coworkers or whatever and say, “Hey, I think you’re really great at this thing. I’ve noticed you seem to be really good with your money, or you’re really great at cooking, or you’re really great at this thing — how did you learn that? I’d really love to learn from you.

27:51 Emily: Nobody’s going to say no to a request phrase that way, absolutely. Wonderful, wonderful tip. And actually I know from Twitter that you are starting investing yourself and that you are listening to a podcast that really pushed you to do that — you want to mention that podcast and what you like about it?

28:08 Tina: Oh, sure. Yeah, you and I have been corresponding a little bit over Twitter and another podcast I had discovered that’s really helpful is called “Bad with Money” with Gaby Dunn. Part of what I really like about it is that I grew up with not knowing a whole lot about money and feeling like a little bit ashamed of that and just kind of feeling the differences in class, especially having gone to a private university for undergrad and my family had lost their house and lost our cars right before I went to undergrad. I just felt very distant and ashamed and all these bad emotions about money. Listening to Gaby’s podcast and being like,” Oh, it’s not just me, there are other people who feel very left out of the system,” made me feel a lot more comfortable talking about it.

28:57 Emily: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for that recommendation. And Tina, thank you so much for this conversation today. I am sure that it is helping people in the audience who are maybe considering a breakup, or trying to navigate one, or trying to recover financially from having been through one recently, so I really appreciate your willingness to talk about this.

29:15 Tina: Great. Thanks so much for having me on Emily.

Outtro

43:30 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Got a Late Start Financially But Is on Track to Retire Early

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In this episode, Emily interview Dr. Sean Sanders, Director and Senior Editor for Custom Publishing for the journal Science and Program Director for Outreach. Sean came to the US for a postdoc position with little savings. Living in the DC area on a postdoc salary was financially challenging; he didn’t start to make real progress with his finances until he left his postdoc for an industry job, which more than doubled his salary. Sean and Emily discuss the strategies he has used to build wealth in the last decade, from moving to reduce housing expenses to retirement investing to purchasing real estate. They go into great detail about Sean’s passive investing strategy and the mistakes he made in the past. Sean lists his favorite books and podcasts on personal finance that he has used to improve his knowledge over the years.

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Links Mentioned

PhD early retirement

Teaser

00:00 Sean: When I was thinking about being a scientist, I always had the impression that scientists are poor. We never make money, and that you did research because you loved it. You know, when I moved over to the USA, I really didn’t have much in savings, so I didn’t really think about it very much. I had to learn from scratch once I moved to the US and once I had a little bit of income to invest, that’s really when I started thinking about what I wanted to do with it.

Introduction

00:33 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 six, episode eight, and today my guest is Dr. Sean Sanders, director and senior editor for custom publishing for the journal Science and program director for outreach. Sean came to the US for a postdoc position with little savings. Living in the DC area on a postdoc salary was financially challenging. He didn’t start to make real progress with his finances until he left his postdoc for an industry job, which more than doubled his salary. Sean and I discuss the strategies. He is used to build wealth in the last decade or so, from moving to reduce housing expenses, to retirement investing, to purchasing real estate. We have a particularly involved and enjoyable discussion of Sean’s passive investing strategy and the mistakes he made in the past. We also swap recommendations of personal finance websites, books, and podcasts. Sean is now on track to retire early, and I’m sure his story will give hope to other PhDs who have, or will enter their thirties without any appreciable savings. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Sean Sanders.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:50 Emily: I’m delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Sean Sanders. Sean works for AAAS and actually we met recently and did an event together at the end of 2019, Fiscal Fitness for Scientists. We’ll link it up from the show notes is a great event that Sean moderated and I was part of the panel. That’s how we first connected, but as we talked more and more at that event, I realized that Sean has an amazing story of his own to tell with respect to his own personal finances, so that’s what we’re going to be discussing today. Sort of how his career has evolved and also his finances, alongside those. Sean it’s really a pleasure to have you joining me here, and will you please introduce yourself further for the audience?

02:29 Sean: Hi, Emily. Thank you so much for inviting me, for the opportunity to talk to your audience. It really is a great pleasure for me to be here. I think we had some fantastic conversations when we met and I’m so pleased to share a little bit more of my story. I’m currently the director and senior editor for custom publishing at Science, here in Washington, DC. I’ve been in this position about 13 years now, but I actually started out as a research scientist. To give you a very overview of my career arc is I started my studies in South Africa. I grew up in Cape Town. I did my undergrad at the University of Cape Town. I then did a one year what we call an honors degree, which is equivalent to a one year masters. I took a break for a while and then I did a PhD actually at University of Cambridge in the UK. I was very fortunate to get in there. Following that, I moved over to the US to do a postdoc at national institutes of health, doing cancer research. I then moved on to a second postdoc at Georgetown University. I was there for about a year and a half, and then a few things happened, which we’ll probably get into a little bit later in the podcast, and I ended up moving into industry, into a small biotech company where I was for about three and a half years. Then got laid off from that, and that’s another story in itself. Then I moved into publishing and I joined the journal BioTechniques for a couple of years. Then, I finally got an offer at Science and I’ve been here for 13 years now. It’s quite a convoluted journey, but it’s been really interesting. And obviously I’ve learned a lot of things along the way.

Early Career Money Mindset

04:09 Emily: Yeah, love it. We’ll be hearing about a few of those as we go forward. Going back to your days in training during your PhD and your postdoc, was your plan to stay in academia and that changed during that second post doc. And then alongside that, with your plan to be in academia, how were you handling your finances at that time? And what was your view of finances generally?

04:29 Sean: When I was thinking about being a scientist, I always had the impression that scientists are poor. We never make money and that you did research because you loved it. And that’s what I wanted to do. I really had just a great passion for research. I really enjoyed investigating. So that’s what I wanted to do. When I was doing my undergraduate, I didn’t really think about finances. I didn’t have much money, even when I moved over to the US I, I really didn’t have much in savings. I didn’t really think about it very much. I had to learn from scratch once I moved to the US and once I had a little bit of income to invest, that’s really when I started thinking about what I wanted to do with it.

05:15 Emily: You’re referencing your move to the US, is that a thing in and of itself, your move to the US, or is it more that you were just advancing in your career and it was a later stage and you were earning more money?

05:26 Sean: I think it was a little bit of both. I was a student through the time that I was in the UK at Cambridge University. As a student, I had a very generous scholarship from the Welcome trust, and I actually managed to save a little bit of money to bring over to the US, but it wasn’t more than a few thousand dollars, so I really was starting from scratch. I didn’t have any income to save and at that point, I didn’t even know what a retirement account was.

05:54 Emily: Yeah. I mean, the transition to the US also comes getting used to a whole other financial system, which I think we’ll talk about more in a moment. So your view was that scientists are always poor. That was your plan. Did you think that would even be the case once you got the tenure track job? You just really thought that was going to be your whole life?

06:13 Sean: Yeah. I didn’t think that scientists earned more than like $70,0000 or $80,000. And, you did it for the love of it. You were working off grants, so you never really made a lot of money. I didn’t ever think that I would be able to retire any time before 65, 70.

Changes in Finances Leads to Changes in Money Mindset

06:31 Emily: Got it. But you mentioned earlier that sometime during your second postdoc, something happened, something changed. Can you tell that story please?

06:38 Sean: Sure. As I said, I was at NIH for about three and a half years, and then I moved to Georgetown University. One thing that I should share with everyone is coming from South Africa, when I moved to NIH, I was on a J-1 visa. I’m not sure if your audience are familiar with this, some probably are, but it’s a training visa. While you’re on a training visa, you’re essentially like a student. You don’t pay taxes like a worker does, and you don’t pay social security. You don’t pay Medicare. Any of that. Now, the advantage of that is there’s more money in your pocket. The disadvantage is you don’t have that social safety net. When I moved to Georgetown University, I got into an H visa, which is what I wanted, because that’s a working visa and enabled me to stay in the country for longer and also progress to a green card, which I eventually did. But what comes along with that is all these other taxes. I had to pay federal tax. I had to pay state tax. I even had to pay county tax in Montgomery County, which was a huge surprise. When I was thinking about this job and looking at the finances and seeing what they would pay me, I didn’t even think about all these additional taxes and I didn’t do my due diligence, and that really came back to bite me.

07:53 Emily: I want to add in there that this is not even necessarily a story that’s unique to someone switching visa types or anything, or becoming a resident. This is something that can happen. I think even moving from graduate school to the postdoc level, or postdoc to another type of job. The reason is not regarding income tax, but regarding payroll tax. As graduate students, generally speaking students, don’t pay payroll ta, that is for social security and Medicare. They have a student exemption. Also anyone who’s not receiving wages, so anyone on fellowship, non W2, they also aren’t paying payroll tax. So getting out of those kinds of training stages, that payroll tax can be, it’s like 7.65% on the employee side, so if you weren’t expecting that, it can be a shock. For you the shock was bigger, because it is not only payroll, but it’s also income taxes and other things, but just wanted to point out like other people need a little heads up about this as well.

08:45 Sean: Right. I wasn’t completely ignorant to the federal taxes I’d had have to pay, but it was just everything at the same time. On top of that, I found out that I had to pay for parking on campus, which I didn’t know about and that was an extra hundred dollars a month or something. All of these things sort of piled on top of each other and then I’d been there for about a year and I read a story in the local paper about what garbage collectors or sanitation engineers, I guess they call them, were being paid, and it was actually a couple of thousand dollars more than I was being paid as a postdoc. Not to take anything away from any kind of employment, it’s all honest work, but I felt that with all the work that I put in to get these higher degrees, I really wasn’t doing myself any justice by being in a position where I wasn’t getting paid, what I thought I was worth.

09:39 Sean: I made a decision at that point to start looking around and I started doing a search for a job in industry, and I was very fortunate to find something up in Massachusetts. The thing is it’s something that probably affects a lot of your listeners is that you can’t always make easy moves, geographically. Some people have families, they have kids, they have spouses. I was in the fortunate position that I could, so I looked very broadly around the country. I looked on the West Coast, I looked up in New England, and I found a great position in Massachusetts, and almost instantaneously I’m more than doubled my salary. I’ve heard of some people calling this geographic arbitrage where you’re willing to move to a different place for our highest salary, and that’s what I did. And although I didn’t love living in Massachusetts, the snow was horrendous, but it was worthwhile for me, and it really set me off on a new financial path, where I could actually save some money and invest in my future.

Making Lifestyle Changes to Increase Savings

10:38 Emily: Yeah. Please elaborate on that. What were the changes that you started making in that time with the higher salary?

10:45 Sean: Well, I think probably the biggest thing was just starting to put away money in savings. As I’m sure you’ve talked about, the first thing I did is I started an emergency fund. I brought up about three months of savings. I also put money into my company’s 401k, immediately. It was as soon as I could, I think it was six months before I could vest. There were also some stock options, which ended up not being worth anything because the company to go under, but it was, it was things that I needed to think about and learn.

11:18 Sean: I started really focusing on living below my means because actually when I was at Georgetown University, I actually found that from the numbers that I looked at, I was actually losing money. So I was spending more than I was earning. Part of that was living in Montgomery County, which was expensive.

11:37 Emily: If you don’t mind, just how were you financing that. If you were actually losing money, was it savings previously built up that you’re drawing down or were you accumulating consumer net?

11:47 Sean: No, it wasn’t debt. I just couldn’t come out on what I was earning. At the time was paying about $800 or $900 a month in rent and that was about 40% or 50% of my income. I didn’t go out that much, but you want a little bit of spending money and I was paying all these other things. I was paying for parking. And I was managing to save a little bit, but really not much. It just made it clear to me that I needed to find some way to focus a bit more on my financial future and get the kind of position where I could actually save and have something in retirement.

12:27 Emily: Yeah. One thing that I discuss during the seminars that I give at universities, one of the points I try to make is that there’s a lot that you can do within your finances while in training, regarding frugality and finding the low rent place to live or what have you. But ultimately, the best thing you can do for your career is to finish that training, be out of graduate school, be out of the post doc, and get that your full salary. The point that I’m trying to make is, although I love to talk about frugal strategies and I love to talk about side hustling and all that stuff, none of that should distract you from just progressing in your career and moving on and getting that higher salary. When you did that, when you achieved that, and you decided, okay, we’re ending this postdoc, I’m getting another type of position, you said that you were focusing on living beneath your means, but I wonder how that compared to your lifestyle when you were at Georgetown. When you got the new job, did you consciously increase your lifestyle in any way, yet still live beneath your means, or were you trying to keep it pretty much feeling like you had during your postdoc?

13:30 Sean: No, I was very focused on saving as much as I could because, at that point I was in my thirties already and I really had very little savings to speak of, and I knew that I really had to start doing something, because I didn’t want to reach 35 or 40 and not have any savings. I’ve always focused on living beneath my means. I can tell you, just an interesting story. When I was up in Massachusetts, I had a coworker who I remember was talking about leasing a car with her husband, and they turned in their previous car. They were paying something like $500 a month or something exorbitant like that. They turned in the car and they could’ve got a cheaper car, but instead they got a better car, a fancier car for the same payment. And that made absolutely no sense to me. Why wouldn’t you get the same car or similar car that’s cheaper and pay $350 a month. That was a mentality that I never understood and I didn’t want to fall into that trap. The way I looked at it is I’m going to get the cheapest car I can. I buy a second hand car, drive it into the ground. I’m going to spend as little as possible on rent. And in fact, what I did is I moved three times in five years while I was up in Massachusetts, both to get closer to work, so my commute was shorter, but also to save on rent. The one move that I made was into a new condo unit that had just been refurbished and they were giving a special for the year and two months of free rent. I stayed there for the year and then I moved. Again, if you’re able to do something like that, you can save quite a lot of money. And I mean, it probably saved me about $5,000.

15:08 Emily: Yeah. This is a strategy that I also try to mention because it’s one I used during graduate school. For example, I moved a couple of times specifically because okay, our rent is increasing, we know what else is around, that’s available. Can you talk about how you actually executed that though? Because it is a really daunting thing to both research a new place to live and then actually execute the move, and it can be expensive too. How did you do this, and still come out ahead financially?

15:32 Sean: As far as moving, you just got to have very patient friends who are willing to help you move. And I always depended on them. I tapped into my network and I’d hire a U-Haul and throw everything in there and move to the next place. Actually, just to add a little bit to the story, once I I’d been at this company for about three and a half years, the company ran out of funding, we were venture capitalist funded, and I got laid off along with the rest of most of the rest of the business. I decided I’d have to move. I couldn’t afford the apartment that I was in. I moved from a two bedroom apartment to a one bedroom, a little bit away from the main part of the city, so it was cheaper. The commute was a little bit longer, but it was definitely worthwhile. Again, I saved quite a lot of money that way. To your question about how I did it, I would just always be keeping a lookout for new places. Both as I drove around and online, I’d constantly be researching, see if there were any deals. And to this day, I do things like that with for instance, CD rates. I look every couple of months just to see where the certificate of deposit rates are, see if I can get a better deal some way. If there’s a good savings account that I can move my money into, my emergency fund, just to get maybe a half a percent or percent more.

16:55 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like you’re just kind of keeping a pulse on the market. Whatever markets you’re involved in, you’re keeping an eye on it to see if there’s a better deal available.

New Financial Goals

17:03 Emily: Okay, so when you increased your salary, you moved to Boston, eventually, of course, you found yourself back in the DC area, you mentioned using the 401k available to you through work, you mentioned living beneath your means consciously. It sounds like you didn’t have any debt or no significant debt to work on. Were there any other financial goals that you’ve set for yourself, with this higher salary?

17:31 Sean: Not really. I’m not much of a goal setter, and that’s probably one of my downfalls. I don’t have a budget. I feel that I just spend as little as possible. I would do things like I would eat out very seldom. I’d rather get takeout or cook at. I was not married, I didn’t have kids, and I know that definitely adds complications to everyone’s stories. I was very fortunate, from that point of view. And I really just wanted to build up as much savings as I could and put the maximum into whatever retirement funds that I could, just to really build up a nest egg for myself in retirement. And also, my parents were aging at that point and I wanted to make sure that if necessary, I could provide for them.

18:20 Sean: Then the other thing that I had in mind is that I did eventually want to buy a property to live in. That was sort of one of my goals. I wasn’t saving consciously towards that as in, I didn’t set aside a separate bank account and put in money for a down payment, which some people say is a good way to do it, sort of use the bucket mentality. I was thinking about the future, but not in any specific way, but I did know that eventually I wanted to be a homeowner and have a place that I could call my own, that I knew I couldn’t get kicked out of because somebody wanted to raise the rent.

18:57 Emily: And has that happened? Have you purchased a home?

18:59 Sean: I did. When I moved back to Washington to my, my position at Science and AAAS, I decided…well, actually my thought process was, I think you’re old enough now you should get a place of your own, so I bought a condo in an area called Columbia Heights, which is an up and coming area in DC. I was quite strategic in doing that. I wanted an area that had recently been revitalized and that was not too expensive, but that I saw some opportunity. Also DC, as you probably know, is a city that will always have people coming to live there. It’s a huge itinerant population that are coming to work for government, for law firms, et cetera. I thought having a place there would be good because when I eventually upgraded or got married or moved out, I’d be able to rent it. That’s actually what I’m doing. I lived in the unit for eight years and I’ve been renting it now for five years, and basically my rent covers my mortgage payment and the condo fees with a little bit of extra. It’s worked out really well.

20:01 Emily: Nice. Have you bought another property or are you renting again your primary residence?

20:05 Sean: No, I actually, I got married, and I moved into my now wife’s house, up here in Silver Spring. I’m looking to possibly buy another rental property, an investment property, but this area is really, really expensive and you need to find just the right place to make it worthwhile, and it’s really tough. I’ve been looking for over a year now and it’s very difficult.

Commercial

20:34 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Financial Strategies and Advice

21:20 Emily: Okay. Yeah. So I think we’ve gotten a good landscape of the goals that you had — saving cash, using your 401k, buying property, and some of the strategies that you use, but were there any other strategies that you’d like to throw out there for the audience? Anything you’ve tried and found works really well for you?

21:37 Sean: As I mentioned, I’m as frugal as I can be. I try to live below my means and save as much as I can. The other thing that I learned in the last few years is that…Well, let me take a step back. When I moved to the NIH and I started investing, I had a little bit of extra money, I got advice from the banker who was at the local Crest Star branch, which is, I think became SunTrust eventually. There was a little bank at the NIH and he recommended some stocks that I could invest in, some mutual funds, and I didn’t know any better, so I put some money into that, but I learned over the years about what kind of fees are involved, especially with mutual funds.

22:21 Sean: I started reading and listening to podcasts, and my strategy now really is all index fund investing. I invest in ETFs, exchange traded funds. They have very low expense ratios, usually less than 1%, and I have no doubt on your show, you’ve talked about the power of compounding. If you start early and save, by the time you get to retirement, you’ll have a good nest egg. The same applies for expenses, sort of in reverse. If you have very high expenses on your investments, you’re going to lose a lot of that money. I recognized that I had not done my due diligence on the type of funds that I was investing in. There’s a few people that I follow that I’ll maybe mention some of the podcasts that I listened to who talk about index fund investing and how much more efficient it is than investing in especially managed mutual funds, where you’re paying 1%, 2%, sometimes 3% or 4% in the expense ratio.

Investing Strategies and Tips

23:22 Emily: Yeah. I do want to elaborate on that because investing and the specifics, like this, are not something that we talk about on the podcast, as much as I would like to, because I love the subject. Expense ratios, for those who don’t know, it’s just kind of a catch all number representing how expensive it is to own that fund. And basically whatever amount of return you’re getting, you have to subtract those fees, those expenses right off of it. So if over the long-term, you might expect like an 8% average annual rate of return, if you have a 1% fee that you’re paying, it knocks you down to 7%. And while that doesn’t necessarily sound like a lot, like 1% doesn’t necessarily strike you as very high, I’ve seen calculations on this, where it can result in a net worth decrease over the decades of hundreds of thousands of dollars ,for just paying something like a 1% fee, where you could have gotten with an ETF or an index fund, maybe 0.1%, maybe 0.05%, maybe 0% in some cases. So there are much less expensive funds out there, and the expense of owning an actively managed mutual fund is one of the reasons why index funds and ETFs are actually, in the long-term, better investments in the sense that you end up with more money in your pocket, usually, when you invest in those kinds of vehicles, rather than actively managed mutual funds. Expenses are one of the big reasons why that is the case. Do you agree, would you like to elaborate at all?

24:40 Sean: Absolutely. I think we’re singing from the same hymnal. I completely agree and for the scientists out there, as much of your audience is, there is a lot of good research that shows that investing in managed mutual funds is not beneficial to you. You actually end up making less money than if you invest in exchange traded funds. The reason is that the management of the funds will sometimes be good for a few years, but then they always going to have downtimes, and the success of the fund really has very little to do with the manager. There are very few people in this world who actually know how to invest well in the stock market, and maybe just a few people like Warren Buffet and Jack Bogle are ones that maybe it would come to mind. But really for the majority of us, we don’t have the time or the resources to really understand every single stock that we invest in.

25:39 Sean: Just to talk a little bit more about ETFs, essentially what you’re doing with an ETF is similar to a mutual fund, where you are investing in a basket of companies. So instead of just investing in a single stock, so say I buy Amazon or Apple, I invest in the broad market. Say I have a Vanguard total stock market ETF, and that basically encapsulate the entire stock market, and that way it protects you against volatility and risk. You’re not going to make the same returns as if you invested say in Facebook 10 years ago, and now it’s worth 20 times as much as it was, but slow and steady wins the race as far as I’m concerned. You’re not going to lose your pants by investing all your money in a company, or in Bitcoin, or something scary like that.

26:27 Emily: Yeah. Lots of good long-term investing principles and philosophies that we’re throwing out there. Anything more that you’d like to say about investing or other strategies you’ve been using?

26:37 Sean: Maybe I’ll just talk a little bit about some of the other ETFs invest in. I will mention before the end of the podcast, a few resources that I really like. But from the advice that I’ve read, really the methodology that I follow is to get broad market funds. I invest in the total stock markets. Then I have a little bit of money in small cap and medium cap ETFs, or mid cap ETFs. Then I also have some in an international equity ETF, and all of these actually are through Vanguard. I did want to mention this because you did mention that there are some expense ratios that are zero, and there are companies now, including Vanguard and Fidelity that are offering some of their ETFs at a zero expense ratio, which is fantastic. And a lot of them also offer free investing so that there’s no charge to purchase these ETFs, and I think that’s a great deal.

27:37 Sean: Then the other two areas of the market that I do invest in are a total bond market ETF, as well as a REIT which is a real estate investment ETF. Basically, it’s very similar to the other ETFs that invest in companies that are invested in real real estate. And the reason I do that is just to diversify. Generally, REITs don’t move with as much volatility as the rest of the markets, so they’re a little bit more stable, but they’re not quite as as low return as bonds are. They’re kind of between stocks and bonds. I have it a little bit, maybe about 10 or 15% of my portfolio in that.

29:19 Emily: I think what you’re describing, it might for the uninitiated listener, sound a little bit complicated. You’ve thrown out maybe five, half a dozen different ETFs you’re invested in, but to my ear, what this is, is a well diversified and an appropriate asset allocation for you and your investing goals. And you need a few different ones of these buckets to make those two things happen. But the actual investments that you’re in are all in themselves well-diversified and across market sectors. You are not for example, picking individual stocks. As you mentioned, you had done that in the past, or your advisor was telling you how to do that in the past. You’re also not picking market sectors. I didn’t hear you say, Oh, well, I’m invested in a special biotech ETF, or a special some other one. You’re going for something that’s representative of full market sectors. You are really avoiding the kind of psychological traps that we can easily fall into around investing, of thinking we know where the market’s going or one segment of the market, so I appreciate that approach. Are those kinds of things that you’ve done in the past and that you’ve learned from and changed your approach, or did you avoid some of those pitfalls entirely?

29:23 Sean: I think it’s been an evolution over the years that I’ve sort of moved more and more towards ETFs as I’ve become more comfortable with them. Really, I went from investing in individual stocks to investing in mutual funds and then into ETFs. I did want to make the point though, that I don’t want to tell you shouldn’t invest in individual funds or in more narrow market ETFs, but just do your due diligence. And also, one of my mantras is I don’t invest money that I can’t afford to lose. If there is money that I need say in the next couple of years, that is not money that’s going to be in the stock market. I’m investing long-term. In fact, in my investment account, I’ve sold very few of my stocks. I’ve sold some of the original ones that were high expense ratios and some of the individual stocks, but I really haven’t sold much except to rebalance. I’m investing for the long-term. I’m putting money in, I’m not taking much money out. If you think you’re going to need to buy a house in the next five years, that money shouldn’t be in the stock market, that should be in something safer.

30:30 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree with you. You mentioned earlier using your 401k — are all of your investments inside that 401k, or do you use other kinds of vehicles as well, like an IRA or a taxable investment account?

30:42 Sean: I try to max out my 401k. I actually have a 403b, which is essentially the nonprofit version of a 401k because I work for a nonprofit, AAAA. I do also put as much money as I can, as I’m allowed, into a traditional IRA. There’s also a Roth IRA that’s available to some people. There is a cap on your income where you can no longer invest in a Roth IRA, but if you are able to I’d recommend that as well. And then I also have just a straight brokerage account where I put in after tax money. Anything that’s left over goes into that.

31:24 Emily: I do want to mention, because this is a conversation about investing, at least it’s part of it, that earlier, 2019 and prior, graduate students and postdocs who are on fellowship, who did not have W-2 income, they were not able to contribute that non-W-2 fellowship income to IRAs, but starting in 2020, that law has changed and you are now able to contribute non-W-2 fellowship income to IRA. So anyone who had learned about that old system, but hadn’t yet heard about the update, I want to throw that out there for them, that you are able to now use that kind of vehicle, even if you have non-W-2 fellowship would come during graduate school or your post doc.

32:01 Sean: That is great news.

Financial Literacy Resources

32:03 Emily: What we’ve come to, I think is kind of a very…I don’t necessarily want to see sophisticated because it’s also simple, but a well-tuned practice of your personal finances. You’ve mentioned a couple of times, maybe you can take a little bit more time now to say, how did you actually come to this point? How did you learn about all these different strategies and start to implement them? Because it’s not something that many of us would get from our mother’s knee, for example.

32:33 Sean: When I moved to this country, I was very fortunate to meet somebody who already worked at the NIH, who kind set me on the right path. His name is Chi Kang and he’s still a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for more years than I can count. He gave me some really great advice to start off. One that I remember is as soon as you come to the country, start building up a credit history. Even if you don’t need credit, take out a small loan for a car or something like that, because you really need that later on in life, if you plan to stay in the country.

33:03 Sean: Really, I just enjoyed reading articles, online reading books. I’m something of an autodidact, so I like to learn myself. I don’t necessarily like being taught things. I just love to read as widely as possible. I kind of got into a little bit of the wrong track early on when I started reading magazines like Money. They used to make my head spin because they’re always jumping around from the latest thing to the next latest thing that you need to invest in. And I realized when I learned a bit more, that they’re really just selling a magazine. I don’t think there’s really good information there. Once more articles started getting online and more podcasts became available, that really became my primary source. There’s a really fantastic series that it gets quite deep into the weeds, but you can take away what you want from it. But there’s a guy named J.L. Collins who you’ve probably heard of, Jim Collins, who did a fantastic series on stocks, it’s called the stock series and it’s available at jlcollinsnh.com and I’m sure you’ll link to that in the show notes.

34:10 Emily: I will. It’s a very famous, very well-known stock series.

34:13 Sean: Yeah. I’m probably about three quarters of the way through that, and it is quite dense, but you get so much information from that. It’s really amazing. That could be your single resource for investing for the rest of your life, and you’d probably be just fine. He actually has a couple of really nice, different types of investment portfolios from a single ETF through to, I think, a seven or nine ETF portfolio. And that’s actually one of the portfolios that I followed. I sort of took the four stock portfolio and I’ve based my investing on that. I didn’t come up with all of this myself, just so that everybody knows. As I think Einstein said, “we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

34:55 Emily: Just to add, J.L. Collins published a book based on that stock series called The Simple Path to Wealth in either 2018 or 2019. We’ll link to that as well in the show notes, if you prefer book over blog post form.

35:08 Sean: Yep, that’s a great one as well. And then a few other books that your listeners might be interested in is The Four Pillars of Investing, that I’m sure you’ve heard of, that’s William Bernstein, and A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which is also a really great book. Right now I’m actually reading for the first time in my life, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, which isn’t necessarily about investing, but it’s a really great book about how to think about your life and how you’d like to be in your life. It definitely can be applied to your investment strategy.

35:45 Sean: Then if I can, I’d love to mention some podcasts that I listened to.

35:50 Emily: Of course, I am a great podcast lover!

35:54 Sean: Of course. I’m sure you’ve heard of, of a number of these. One of my favorites at the moment is Afford Anything with Paula Pant. She covers quite a broad range of investments and investment strategies, but what I like about it is it’s just very accessible. The way she talks about these things, she explains things really well. Every other week, she has a guest and on the alternate week, she answers questions from her audience. I always come away from every single podcast with some nugget of information that I can apply. Another one that I like is the Mad FIentist. That’s like scientists with an F instead of the S-C. It’s called the Financial Independence Podcast. I haven’t seen any new podcasts since October last year, but I think he’s still going.

36:44 Emily: He has an irregular publishing schedule, but what he does is everything he publishes is so high quality. It’s fantastic. Yes.

36:53 Sean: Yeah, no, he’s great. And I also love the graphic that he has for his podcast. It’s a crazy guy in a lab coat. Then the other one is The White Coat Investor with Dr. Jim Dahle. Now this is actually specifically for medical doctors, but I think a lot of what he talks about is applicable to everybody and also specifically to scientists. And then of course there’s Planet Money and The Indicator from NPR, which I think are just really great podcasts about the broader macro economic principles and really very interesting, accessible content that can help you learn about sort of how the financial world more broadly works.

37:32 Emily: I like those two. They’re not exactly well, The Indicator more so, but they’re not exactly like breaking news, but it sort of keeps me up to date on what’s going on the economy more broadly without being overwhelmed by daily content. I used to listen to Marketplace, for example, when I had more time, and I liked it, but it’s a lot every day to take all that information. Not all shakes out to be really that important in the long run, so I really like Planet Money and The Indicator for that.

37:59 Sean: And I like the way that they sometimes take a different look at the economy, or they’ll take something that you think has nothing to do with the economy and apply economic principles.

38:10 Emily: I think I cut you off a little bit, but I think you were going to mention ChooseFI, as well.

38:15 Sean: Yes. ChooseFI was the last one. So this is a new one to me. I haven’t really had much of a chance to listen to it. I’ve binged on a few episodes. I find that I have too many podcasts that I want to listen to, but I get to it when I can. They also really have some fantastic information and if folks don’t know this FI term refers to financial independence. Some people call it the FIRE movement, financial independence retire early, and this is something I’ve only started learning about it in the last few years, but it really resonates with me. Sort of harking back to what I said previously about thinking that I would just have a straight career path and retire when I was 65 or 70, this really gave me some insight into how I can change up that story, and I’m actually on the path and intending to retire hopefully within the next five years. So I’m hoping by the age of 55, which will give you a clue to how old I am. It gave me some confidence to look at my finances and say, you know, maybe I can do this.

39:21 Emily: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the FIRE movement, because as you were talking and telling your story, I could tell that you would find a home within that movement, if you hadn’t already, which it sounds like you have, as it’s become more popular. You were on this path before it really exploded. I also really love ChooseFI. We’re recording this in March 2020, and I just a couple of weeks ago, finished listening through their entire archive, which was like an eight month project as I was, of course, listening to new episodes as well. It was a big thing to tackle, but I think it was really worthwhile. Even though I don’t necessarily consider myself part of that movement, I got a ton out of all of that content. And actually what you said earlier reminded me of one of the hosts, Brad Barrett’s little mantras, which was, he basically says he doesn’t keep a budget either. He just says, “well, I just default to not spending money. I’m just going to save a hundred percent until I decide that something is worth spending on.” So that reminded me of sort of your philosophy as well.

40:16 Sean: Yeah, absolutely.

40:16 Emily: Since we’re swapping podcast recommendations, I will add one more, which is So Money with Farnoosh Torabi. She does three episodes a week. Her Friday episodes are Q&A’s ,and then she has guests on Mondays and Wednesdays. She has a little bit more of a women in money and women in entrepreneurship spin on the personal finance content, but still very strong in personal finance. So I really love that one, as well.

Final Words of Advice

40:38 Emily: I think we’re now down to our last question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

40:46 Sean: I think we’ve probably touched on all of these. I would say that the top four that I have is, remember the awesome power of compounding. Start early, save as much as you can. I know there’s, there’s plenty of calculators out there that you can play with online and see if you save even $20 a month, or $50 a month, when you you’re doing a PhD, and I know it sounds like a lot, but if you just save whatever you can, when you get to retirement age, you will have a good nest egg.

41:19 Emily: The way that I like to phrase that in my seminars is never discount whatever small amount of money it is that you can put towards investing when you’re early on in your twenties or your thirties. Never discount that because it will add up and compound being just a startling amount of money.

41:36 Sean: Yeah, absolutely. And I completely agree. The other one is educate yourself and do your homework. We all make mistakes. I certainly made my share, but I guess I’ll add to that, one of my other mantras, which is that the perfect can be the enemy of the good. There’s never going to be a perfect investment strategy. Things are going to change. You’re going to learn as you go, but just start, do something, start investing, even if it’s very small. There’s plenty of apps out there now, like Robinhood is a really great way to just start investing in small amounts of money. So yeah, start now. Don’t wait until you know everything.

42:14 Sean: Then the last one is really just live below your means. It’s kind of like if you’re trying to lose weight, you’ve got to take in fewer calories than you expend, and your body will lose the weight. It’s the same — if you spend less money than you bring in, you will save. It’ll be automatic.

42:32 Emily: Yeah. And I like to turn that on its head a little bit. I think this is probably a strategy you use, although we haven’t articulated it, is to pay yourself first. That old personal finance chestnut, but to live beneath your means, give yourself less means. Save first, give yourself less means to live on, if you are tempted to spend your checking account down to zero, as I am. What I have to do is get that money out of my checking account, out of my mind first, and then I know that I can safely spend the rest if I want to.

43:03 Sean: Right. And there’s so many ways to do that now. Even my bank will do automatic sweeps from my checking account into a savings account. I just set the amount and it does it automatically every month, so you don’t even see the money.

43:14 Emily: Absolutely. Well, Sean, I enjoyed this conversation so much and I think the listeners will have gotten a lot out of it, especially our discussion about investing, so thank you so much for joining me.

43:22 Sean: Oh, it’s such a pleasure. I really appreciate the invite and hopefully we’ll stay in touch and swap some more podcasts

Outtro

43:30 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Learn from This Professor’s Nightmarish Home Ownership Journey

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Kevin Jennings, a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. Kevin and his wife bought a home in Savannah shortly after he started his position, and the house has proven to be a money pit. Kevin catalogues all that has gone wrong with the house, what he wishes he would have known as a first-time home buyer, and the lessons he’s learned the hard way. He also gives excellent insight into the academic job market for someone already on the tenure track and how his status as a homeowner has affected his career prospects.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Further Resources

Teaser

00:00 Kevin: The one thing I might’ve done differently is look for a house with fewer of these incidental costs, right? So if I wasn’t so close to the water, I wouldn’t have to do the flood insurance. If I wasn’t outside the city limits, I wouldn’t have to pay for the extra fire and protection stuff like that. I wish I would have known about those things in order to judge where to buy and which house to buy.

Intro

00:31 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 six, episode seven, and today my guest is Dr. Kevin Jennings, a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. Kevin and his wife bought a home in Savannah shortly after he started his position. And the house has proven to be a money pit. Kevin catalogs all that has gone wrong with the house, what he wishes he would have known as a first-time home buyer, and the lessons he’s learned the hard way. You won’t want to miss Kevin’s insight into how his choice to purchase this home has affected his mindset toward his academic career. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Kevin Jennings.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Kevin Jennings, and he is going to talk to us about, well, a bit of a money pit that he is currently invested in. So, we’re going to hear tons more about that. Kevin, will you please introduce yourself to the audience?

01:37 Kevin: Yeah. Hi, I’m Dr. Kevin Jennings. I’m from Austin, Texas, and I went to Texas State University–Go Bobcats! Meow–and got a PhD in Criminal Justice in 2014. I was then hired at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, and I moved there immediately after graduating for a tenure track job, which I realize how lucky I am to land a tenure track job just out of getting my PhD. And I mostly focus on cyber crime and digital forensics. So I do a lot of work with law enforcement, but also work with computer science people and tech people to kind of find evidence on digital storage devices.

02:27 Emily: What an exciting topic. We’ll hear more about that at the end of the episode, where people can learn more. So, you moved to Savannah for this position. You said that was four years ago. Is that right?

02:40 Kevin: Five years ago.

Homeownership Journey

02:41 Emily: Five years ago. Okay. And you decided when you moved there shortly after that you were going to buy a home. Can you tell us more about how you did that shortly out of graduate school and why?

02:54 Kevin: So, we moved here in 2014 and rented a house. Unfortunately, in 2015, my grandfather passed away and he was the last of my four grandparents. And he left my parents and his three siblings a fairly decent amount of money. And my parents decided to share some of that with me and my sister. So, we got this decent size chunk of money. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it was enough for a down payment on a house. And my wife and I, having so recently started our actual career jobs, feeling like we were more adulty than we really were, decided to use that as a down payment on a house. So, we shopped around the city of Savannah. We, we were leaning towards finding either a fixer-upper that we could get for cheap and put money into, or kind of a duplex or house that had something we could rent out.

04:00 Kevin: Our real estate agent showed us this house in the neighborhood we were currently living in, which is great, less than 10 minutes from campus, really nice houses. And it was neither of those things, but we both fell in love with it. It’s kind of a two and a half story, four bedroom, two bath, huge backyard, and where the backyard ends, there’s a tidal creek right behind it. It’s just swamp and woods. And it was just beautiful. And we just kind of both fell in love with it. So, even though it wasn’t what we were looking for, we decided that this was the house we really wanted.

Making the Down Payment

04:40 Emily: And with that down payment money you were able to do the purchase?

04:44 Kevin: We were able to afford the down payment, which was I believe 10% of the total purchase cost, which was listed at $160,000. And we were super, super good negotiators and talked them down to 159. So, we put, again, I want to say it was 10% down. And we got this house and we were so excited, but we sat through kind of the lecture from the bank on, “Here’s your mortgage payment and here’s what that’s going to consist of.” And we were really shocked at how little of our actual mortgage payment goes into the principal amount of the loan. I mean, so I have my latest house bill here and my monthly payment is $1,142. Of that $1,142, $233 goes to the principal, which, I mean, that’s what, 20% maybe? So, we were kind of shocked by that. And we were looking at the other kind of things that, that had to go and pay for.

Expected vs. Unexpected Costs

06:05 Kevin: And there was the stuff we were expecting, obviously interest is going to be a big deal. The interest on ours is $460 a month. So, we knew that was going to be a big deal. Taxes, of course we expected. Coming from Texas, the taxes were actually slightly lower than we thought they were going to be. Because Georgia has an income tax rather than relying on property taxes the way Texas does. But then the other things that got added in there are the stuff that really kind of shocked us. First off, because we had that beautiful tidal creek in our backyard, we were required to get flood insurance, which most homeowners insurance doesn’t cover floods. And since Savannah is a low-lying coastal city, plus we’re right up against that tidal creek, we were required by law to get flood insurance. The other thing we didn’t expect was private mortgage insurance. It’s like $200 a month for this private mortgage insurance, essentially because we’re first-time homeowners. And that will go away when we’ve paid the mortgage down to 80% of the level of the value of the house. But since we only put 10% down, getting from 90% of the value to 80% of the value is going to take years.

07:31 Kevin: And we’ve been paying for four years and we’re still, I don’t want to say nowhere close, but not nearly as close as we’d like to be to that 80% level that will allow us to take away that private mortgage insurance. So, that’s $200 a month we’re paying for essentially not having enough money. So, just all those things combined to create a mortgage payment that we really kind of weren’t expecting. Homeowners insurance, flood insurance, private mortgage insurance, all that stuff really adds so much to the monthly fee, which really hurts in the long run.

Mortgage Structure

08:11 Emily: Yeah. I just want to jump in and make a couple of comments for the listener in case they’re not that familiar with the structure of mortgages. You mentioned a couple shocking figures, like the amount of your monthly payment that actually goes towards principal is 200 some dollars. Whereas the amount that goes towards interest is 400 some, and people may not realize this, but mortgages are on an amortization schedule where the great majority of your payment in the first year goes towards interest. Very little goes towards principal. And that shifts over the course of the loan. So, in year 30, if it’s a 30 year mortgage, you’re paying a vast majority towards principal and very little towards interest and ultimately pay off the loan. So, it’s really like when you start over with new mortgages, maybe every five years or something if you move, that amortization schedule, you’re kind of always playing around in the paying mostly interest, very little in principal, part of the amortization schedule.

09:02 Emily: And that’s why it is so difficult, like in your case, to get from 10% equity up to 20%, so you can remove that private mortgage insurance. Because mostly what you’re paying, as you said, is towards interest. Plus, all these other things you had to add onto the mortgage. So, it’s really kind of, you know, people talk about the differences between the advantages of renting versus buying. But the thing is that in your case, and many others, when you have so much of your monthly mortgage payment that goes towards anything other than the principal, that’s almost like paying rent. It’s just money that’s out the door every single month that’s not really building your own net worth, your own equity in the house. It’s just stuff that has to go out the door to keep you in that house. And so I wanted to know, when you were sitting through this explanation from your bank–which actually it’s kind of cool that they gave you the explanation, honestly, like they were doing a little bit there to help educate you–how far along in the process were you, and were you ready to like run out the door or was that no longer an option?

Mortgage: A Little Extra Goes a Long Way

09:59 Kevin: It was no longer an option. But I was so ecstatic over finally owning a home that it didn’t quite hit me, what exactly it meant until I had made a couple of payments. The other thing was, it wasn’t until I think a year after we bought the house, my wife decided to go back to school. So, she helped put me through grad school. And then a year after I graduated and moved here and got this job, she decided to go back to school to become a nurse. Because what she did before, there’s really no job market for here in this part of the country. So, while she was still kind of working a semi-decent job before she went back to school, we were paying extra towards the principal every month, which I had been told was a very, very good idea. Because anything extra you can put in, especially at the beginning of a mortgage, really knocks down the long-term cost of the mortgage.

11:17 Kevin: So, we were able to put an extra, I can’t remember exactly how much, extra 50 or $60 a month towards the mortgage for the first year, maybe two years, that we were in the house. With her back in school, we really had to tighten our belts. We were not able to do that, but now she’s graduated. Just started her new job yesterday, in fact, and I’m really excited to be able to kind of go back to doing that. Putting even just a little bit extra towards that mortgage, I think, will help a lot.

Unforeseen Costs of Home Improvement

11:50 Emily: Yeah. Like you said, you get a lot of bang for your buck when you start paying down that mortgage at the beginning a little bit faster, at least until the point where you can get rid of PMI. I mean, that’s like a really big goal when you have a mortgage. To not be paying insurance on the behalf of the bank to insure against you, to not have to pay that makes a huge difference. Yeah. So, at least to get to that point. That would be amazing. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that your house has kind of turned into a little bit of a money pit, right? So, it’s not only the structure of the mortgage payment that you were learning as you got into the house, that, “Hey, not that much of this money is actually going towards principal.” But in fact, you’ve incurred a lot of other expenses that you did not really realize or factor in when you first got into the house. So, can you outline what those are, please?

12:38 Kevin: Absolutely. So, we were buying this house and we realized we wanted to do a bunch of stuff to it. So, right off the bat, as soon as we bought it, we knew we wanted to take out all the carpet because we hate carpet. And we wanted to replace a lot of the lighting fixtures because the house was built in kind of the mid-nineties. And it had those kind of classic, like little glass globe, things that were super cheap and in every house back then. So, we knew we wanted to replace those. We knew we wanted to paint a bunch of stuff. And that was when my wife and I kind of both realized that we don’t have those skills. We were both very nerdy in high school and college and we never got those, those kind of woodworking and electrician and, you know, I can barely use a screwdriver.

What You Pay is What You Get

13:29 Kevin: So, those skills are something that I really wish I would have had before I decided to buy a house. So, we rip out the carpet, and two big problems presented themselves. One, there were places where the floor was uneven and the carpet kind of hid that. But two, the stairs that we had hoped to just kind of refinish, were just kind of ugly two by fours that they had nailed down. So for the floors, we hired someone to come in and put in some vinyl flooring, which was, I was shocked at how much vinyl flooring costs. But you know, it’s still cheaper than hardwood. The stairs we replaced ourselves and the flooring was not installed properly. We just kind of found somebody on Craigslist or something and brought them in. And that was a really bad idea.

14:34 Kevin: If you’re going to hire someone to come in and work on your house, don’t go for the kind of cheap fly by night operation. Definitely, definitely try to find someone you trust or a company that has, you know, you can go on Yelp and find their reviews. Stuff like that. Then there were little expenses, like we had to replace the mailbox paint, because we wanted to paint a bunch of stuff. But yeah, when we first moved into the house, those were kind of these big expenses that we kind of sort of planned for. We had saved some money to the side that we weren’t putting into the down payment just for those improvements. But we went, I don’t want to say wildly over budget, but fairly over budget on that process.

Hurricanes and Fences and Air (Conditioning) – Oh, My!

15:30 Emily: So, you’re saying there were certain things that when you bought the house, you knew, okay, you hate carpets, you’re going to tear all those out. There were certain things that were obvious upon purchase you knew you were going to take care of, and you had prepared to some degree to do that with savings. What’s next? Were there other things that have come up in the years since then?

15:49 Kevin: So, we are in a coastal city and when we moved here we were told, “Don’t worry about hurricanes. Hurricanes never hit Savannah because we’re kind of tucked into the coast.” And then of course, since we’ve moved into the house, we’ve had two hurricanes. So, our fence, when we first moved in–and for a long time we had dogs. We are, are now dogless, unfortunately, rest in peace–but one of the reasons we liked this house is because it had a fence and a big area for the dogs to play in. But one of the hurricanes that came through kind of finished it off and knocked it down, or at least a large section of it down. So, we got our entire fence replaced which was thousands of dollars we weren’t planning on spending.

16:40 Kevin: And even though we had essentially hurricane insurance, the deductible on that is like almost $5,000, I want to say. So, it really wasn’t financially viable to use the insurance to fix that fence issue. The second problem is that the upper half of the second floor was an add-on. When they originally built the house, it was just the first floor and the main part of the second floor, the upper part was all attic space. The second owners of the house finished out that attic space and turned it into a fourth bedroom. What we didn’t know when we bought the house, and what the home inspection didn’t show, is that when they finished out that area, they had to move the indoor air conditioning unit. When they did that, instead of redoing the drain line, the way they should have, they just ran a new line from where it used to be to where it is now.

AC Repair Fiasco

17:50 Kevin: So, essentially, the drain line for the air conditioner goes from one part of the house, across the house to where the air conditioner used to be, down under the flooring of the attic, then back across the house to where the air conditioner is now to actually drain out of the house. We had no idea that had been done that way. So, we had all these problems with the air conditioner. Finally, we call in a good repair company and they come in and take a look at it. And they’re like, yeah, the drain lines are all bad. But also this air conditioner system is designed and built for a house of the old size. With the addition, you’ve added so many square feet that you really should move up, and it’s getting towards the end of its like 20-year life or whatever it was anyway.

18:45 Kevin: So, if we’re going to do all this work, it’d be a lot better in the long run to just replace the entire system. So, we said, “Okay.” So, we got a new indoor unit, a new outdoor unit. Ended up needing to rerun all of the ducts because when they had done the addition, they had messed up the duct work, new thermostats, whole nine yards. I think we spent $13,000 on essentially a $15,000 system. Then it started having problems and wouldn’t work. And we spent the next year replacing parts and getting service. And finally, finally, after a year they just replaced a huge chunk of the outdoor unit, all these things, but it took them a year in the South Georgia heat with no air conditioning before they finally figured out kind of what was wrong and how it was messing up. But essentially, we ended up with, as part of the replacements, they gave us improvements. So, essentially we got a $17,000 air conditioning system for $13,000. But that’s still $13,000 we hadn’t budgeted for, we hadn’t planned on. So, I think we got a six-year loan, interest-free, luckily, and that’s $230, $240 a month that we weren’t planning on. Which, right when my wife was in the middle of nursing school, was a very difficult financial burden to kind of take on unexpectedly.

20:31 Emily: Yeah. I was just going to ask how you actually did pay for that. I’m thinking about your mortgage payment and that whole system costs about what a year of housing cost for you. That’s I mean, a huge expense. So, glad to hear that you got some decent financing, it’s not going to cost you any extra in interest, but what a saga. And especially to live for a year without proper air conditioning, as you were describing. Are those the big things that you’ve had to lay out for the house?

21:00 Kevin: Those are kind of the big things.

Commercial

21:05 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early-career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics, or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers, even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

Rule of Thumb for Annual Home Expenses

22:03 Emily: There’s a rule of thumb–and you might laugh at this, but maybe you’ve heard it before–there’s a rule of thumb that you should expect to spend on average on your home 1% of the value of the house per year. So, like average 1% of the value of the house per year on home maintenance repairs and so forth. Sounds like you probably have blown that out of the water every year you’ve lived there, right?

22:25 Kevin: Yeah. Oh yeah. So, the downside is we now have our garage doors, we have two garage doors, that need to be replaced because it’s Savannah, Georgia. Everything is wet here, constantly. I mean, it’s just moisture, moisture, moisture. It’s ridiculous. So, our garage doors are rotting out and we need to replace those. Our deck, for similar reasons. It’s not bad, but we’re anticipating that we’re going to need to replace it in the next couple of years. So, there’s more thousands of dollars of stuff that we’re kind of dreading and preparing for. The other things that have really shocked me are things like–we’re technically outside of the city limits, right? So, we have to pay for fire and EMS services directly. Instead of it being paid for through our city or County taxes, we have to pay, I want to say, it’s just under $300 a year to the fire and EMS service to come out. We have to pay for termite inspection yearly, or termite service yearly, which is hundreds of dollars a year. So, all these things have really combined. We didn’t think about it. Going from an apartment to a house you expect, you know, okay, rent, mortgage. There are going to be taxes and interest and principal. But then it seems like there are all these other fees and taxes and payments for things that you would never expect, having spent your entire life, or at least entire adult life, in apartments and renting places. It’s incredible.

Lessons Learned: Do It Right the First Time, Due Diligence

24:29 Emily: Yeah. I think a couple of the lessons that I’m hearing from this, that maybe the listener can apply. Two things. One is do the work right the first time.

24:38 Kevin: Yes.

24:39 Emily: Invest in quality from the beginning, and hopefully you won’t have problems or the replacement costs or whatever won’t come up so soon. Part of that was decisions that you’ve made, part of that was the previous homeowners’ decisions, but pay for it to be done right the first time. And the second one is–maybe, I don’t know, it sounds like you did what any reasonable person would do in terms of buying the home in that you lived in that neighborhood for a year prior to buying and you think you know where everything is, you know where are the schools, whatever you’re considering in your home-buying purchase. Just by living nearby, you’ve learned a lot of those things. But it sounds like you didn’t investigate–and why would you have?–the fact that these services were being billed directly instead of through the tax system, or all these other line items. Or, you know, maybe if you’d understood more about flood insurance, you would’ve told your real estate agent, “No, I’m not interested in anything next to a creek or whatever.”

25:37 Emily: I mean, those are not things you’re going to naturally pick up just by living somewhere. You’re learning this the very hard way. And so, I’m really pleased to be able to share your story with the listeners. Just say like, there are probably going to be more expensive than you think there will be. So, just plan for the unexpected, right? And prepare for that. But maybe do a little bit more due diligence to try to figure out what the peculiarities are of this city that you’re choosing to buy in. Like you were saying, well, people told you hurricanes never hit Savannah. Turns out, at least for the recent years, that hasn’t been the case. But I don’t know, I think you did what any reasonable person would do, so I’m not criticizing you. But I’m just really glad to hear this for anyone else who’s coming up on a home-buying purchase to do a little bit more to figure out what all these little nuanced expenses are going to be.

Do Not Skimp on Home Inspection

26:24 Kevin: Absolutely. The other thing I want to point out is home inspections. Do not skimp on the home inspection. We had a fairly decent one, but they missed a lot of these things where if they’d have been just a little bit more paying attention, a little bit more thorough, we would have known about these things in the contract negotiation process, not a year or two years or three years later. So, do not skimp out on the home inspection.

26:57 Emily: Yeah, definitely. So, I live in Seattle, so in the market here, at least in recent years, it’s been a sellers market, right? And a lot of people, as part of the bid that they enter, they waive inspections. It’s just something that no one wants to hold up the process, but even if you have to go that route based on what’s standard in the market, still do the inspection. Even if you don’t have it as part of the contingency or whatever, still do it so you know all these things upfront, like you were saying.

How Does Being an Academic Affect Homeownership?

27:28 Emily: So, I’m curious about how your position as a faculty member, as an academic, has played into these homeownership decisions or your ability to handle these things, I guess. So, it sounds like you got this tenure track position. Despite a little bit of upheaval with your university, you’ve maintained that and you bought a home where you got your tenure track position, probably what anyone would try to do, if possible soon after. So, yeah. How does being an academic affect this whole homeownership situation?

28:03 Kevin: When I was in grad school, I kind of bought into the belief that if you can find a really nice, good tenure track job you can stay at that university for a long time. Decades, if not your entire career. At the university I went to and the department I was in, there were a lot of professors that had been there for 20, 30 years. So, I was kind of expecting that kind of experience. So, when I moved here and was ready to buy the house, I was very much in this mindset of, “My family will be at this university working here for a long, long, long time.” So, in the University system of Georgia, you have an option between a pension system or a 401k.

29:01 Kevin: And if you’re going to be there longer than 10 years, the pension system is really the better option. So, that’s what I chose because I thought, “Oh, I’ll be here at least 10 years, no big deal. I’ll buy a house. I’ll be here at least the five or six years that it takes to really get enough equity in a home to make a profit when moving.” But I’ve come to kind of find out and realize that job-hopping and transferring positions is almost, or just as important in academia, as it is in private industry. Growing up in Austin, there were a lot of tech people. And tech people were all talking about, “Oh, you’ve got to move jobs every five years or every however many years.” And I thought academia was kind of exempt from that. And it comes to find out, it really isn’t. It’s depressing when you’ve been working at the same university for four or five years and they make new hires, straight out of grad school, hired at well more than you’re making. So, I wish I was able to move or at least have the possibility of moving. I wouldn’t necessarily want to leave. I love my job. I like living here. I like the university I’m at, but being so tied financially, through both the house and the pension, to this one job in this one place is something that even if I am going to stay here for the next 10 or 20 years, it’s still distressing. And it makes me feel like I don’t have options. It makes me feel like I’m stuck. Even if I want to be here, that’s still kind of a bad feeling, you know?

The Golden Handcuffs

30:55 Emily: Yeah. I definitely understand that. You know, sometimes people refer to the benefits or something that a job gives you as golden handcuffs. So, it’s like you feel, you feel tied to your job because you don’t want to lose the great compensation or the benefits, whatever. The pension is a little bit like that for you, but the house is on the other side of that. That’s not so much golden handcuffs as it is kind of an anchor. Until you get this equity up to a certain point, it’s going to be very–I mean, it’s not impossible–but you may take a loss, you may have to bring money to the table. Something, if you were to try to move without having a lot of years under your belt, paying this mortgage and getting the equity up there.

Would You Have Done Anything Differently?

31:36 Emily: So, I definitely understand what you’re saying. And I think it’s really great insight for other people who are looking to enter the job market that we think a lot of times as getting that tenure track position as like, “I’ve made it, this is it. That’s all I needed to do, and I’m going to be set for the rest of my career because I landed that one position.” And what you’re saying is, “Hey, that’s good for the first few years, but don’t think that you’re never going to apply for another job to advance in the way you want to.” That you might not have to move around, as you said, like what happens in the private sector. So, I’m really glad for that insight as well. And just, I don’t know, would you have done anything differently? I mean, knowing this. Now that you know this about your job and your feelings about it, would you still have purchased the house? Because it still kind of seems like the thing to do, right?

32:26 Kevin: Yeah, it does. It depends on what the alternative is. If the alternative was, you know, renting, I don’t think I would have. The one thing I might’ve done differently is look for a house with fewer of these incidental costs, right? So, if I wasn’t so close to the water, I wouldn’t have to do the flood insurance. If I wasn’t outside the city limits, I wouldn’t have to pay for the extra fire and protection stuff like that. I wish I would have known about those things in order to judge where to buy and which house to buy. Right? Does that make sense? So, it’s not that I regret buying a house. It’s that I regret not understanding exactly what the cost of buying this particular house are.

Best Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

33:13 Emily: Right, right. Yeah. Thanks for your insight into that. So, two questions as we wrap up here. The first is what is your best piece of advice for another early-career PhD? It could be related to the conversation we’ve been having, could be something else. What is that?

33:28 Kevin: Start putting money away as fast as you can. Start saving. It can be a 401k, it can be putting extra money towards just a stock trading account. Also, speaking of stock trading accounts, I found the Fidelity, I think it’s a bank, but it has a stock trading app thing. And they have a credit card where you get 2% cash back from every purchase that goes straight into the stock trading account. So, I put all my purchases on that and pay it off in full every month. So, I never pay a dime in interest, but I still get 2% into this longterm savings account. And then once I build up enough money from that I can purchase a stock or an exchange-traded fund or something like that. And then I never touch that. That’s all just socked away money. That’s essentially free money. As long as you’re paying off that card every month, that’s essentially free money. So, definitely do something like that. It can be a travel card that gives you miles on an airline. But make sure it’s paid off in full every month.

Where Can People Find You?

34:50 Emily: And second question, last one here, is where can people find you?

34:55 Kevin: So, I’m on Twitter with the username @CyberCrimeDoc, and I’m on YouTube with the channel name, Arresting Developments. And I actually do have a group I just started not too long ago called Americans for Election Reform. It’s a big political focused on elections and election security and making sure all Americans vote and all votes count. And that is on Facebook and Twitter.

35:29 Emily: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Kevin, and for telling us this very easy to learn from story.

35:35 Kevin: Absolutely. Thank you so much having me. I really appreciate it.

Outtro

35:38 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.