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Weird Tax Situations for Fellowship Recipients

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

weird tax fellowship

Further reading:

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

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

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

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Receiving Unusual Tax Forms

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

  • 1098-T
  • 1099-MISC

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

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

1098-T

A 1098-T, which is issued to some students depending on your university’s policies, is sort of a clearinghouse form for the sum of your fellowships/scholarships/grants received (in Box 5) and also the sum of the qualified tuition and related expenses that were billed (Box 2) or paid (Box 1) to your student account. Your fellowship income might be lumped in with your scholarships in Box 5, which makes them a little hard to parse, or Box 5 might only include your scholarships (see next section if so).

The good thing about the 1098-T if it includes your fellowship income is that it does put front and center two of the important numbers you’ll need to work with when you prepare your tax return, the sum of your non-compensatory (fellowship, scholarship, and grant) income (Box 5) and your Qualified Education Expenses (Box 1/2). You don’t really need to know what your fellowship income was independent of your additional scholarship/grant income See Weird Tax Situations for Fully Funded Grad Students for more details about working with the 1098-T.

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1099-MISC

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

First, any non-academic who hears/sees that you have income reported on a 1099-MISC is going to think you’re self-employed. Self-employment/contractor income is the most common usage for the 1099-MISC, but that income is reported in Box 7. Fellowship income will show up in Box 3, “Other income.” If you are a grad student, you are not self-employed; do not pay self-employment tax! (The situation is murkier for postdocs!)

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

Second, the instructions for the 1099-MISC tell you to (“generally”) report your Box 3 “Other income” in the “Other income” line on your 1040 (line 21). You can do it that way and your tax calculation will turn out correctly in a lot of situations, but it’s more correct to report the income explicitly as fellowship/scholarship income. It’s less confusing for the IRS and will possibly enable you to take more educational tax breaks.

Further reading:

Receiving No Tax Forms

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

Further reading: What Is a Courtesy Letter?

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

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

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

Quarterly Estimated Tax

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

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

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

Taxable Compensation and Earned Income Tax Breaks

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

Individual Retirement Arrangement

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

Further reading:

Earned Income Tax Credit

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

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

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

What to Do with Your Higher Take-Home Pay

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Whatever you might think of the Republican tax bill from last fall, it has now been passed into law and has already started to affect your income taxes for 2018. In many cases, your tax burden as a graduate student or postdoc will decrease for this year compared to last year, which means you’ll have more money in your pocket starting with your January or February paycheck.

higher take home pay

Will Your Take-Home Pay Increase?

A few weeks ago, I calculated what the tax burden would be for single or married people with no dependents with the income ranges that are most common for graduate students and postdocs ($15,000/year to $110,000/year). I found that across those income ranges, the tax burden decreased by 20-35%. Families with children under the age of 17 would see an even further decrease due to the larger Child Tax Credit.

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To perform these calculations, I assumed that you will take the standard deduction on both your 2017 and 2018 taxes. If that assumption is true (and your income is in the above range), you should see a decrease in your tax burden.

The taxpayers who may see an increase in tax due under the new law are those who currently itemize their deductions, such as households who have in the past deducted more than $10,000 in property tax and state and local taxes together. Another group that may see a higher tax liability under the bill (depending on the rest of their situation) is parents of dependent children aged 17 and older; the exemptions they used to take have been eliminated, and the expanded child tax credit is only for children up to age 16.

Further Reading:

However, I think my assumptions are valid or at least reasonably accurate for the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs, who tend to be younger with lower incomes/expenditures. It’s safe to say that most graduate students and postdocs will see a higher take-home pay in spring 2018 than they did in fall 2017; effectively, you will see a ‘raise.’

What to Do with Your Income Increase

I have no shortage of ideas of actions you can take with your increased take-home pay, whether it’s $14.50/month (for a single person with no dependents earning $20,000/year) or $109/month (for a married couple with no dependents earning $70,000/year). Chances are, last month you didn’t have a lot of money lying around begging to be put to use, and starting pretty soon you will have some non-spoken-for money to work with.

Don’t let this money just disappear into the ether! Allocate it to something specific. If possible, I recommend you set up an automated transfer from your checking account to wherever the money needs to go so that you relieve your willpower/memory of the responsibility of making the transfer manually.

Financially Responsible Action Items

Add to Your Emergency Fund

If you don’t yet have a dedicated emergency fund with a balance of $1,000 (or a higher target, e.g., three months of expenses), use the extra money to beef up your emergency fund! When (not if!) life throws you a curveball, your emergency fund is what stands between you and serious financial consequences.

Further Reading:

Start Investing/Add to Your Investments

YES it is possible and worthwhile to start investing with just a few dollars per month and it’s also amazing to even incrementally increase your existing regular savings rate!

Using this compound interest calculator to estimate, adding just $25/month to your investments for one year, at an 8% rate of return in 50 years that $300 will become over $13,000! If you kept up that higher savings rate for all 50 years, it becomes over $172,000! Sure, that’s not all the saving/investing you will need to do for your retirement, but even a small regular savings rate helps a lot.

Further reading:

Free Email Course: Investing for Early-Career PhDs

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Pay Down Debt

Similar to the investing example, a few extra dollars per month thrown at your existing debt can accelerate your progress to debt freedom.

If you currently had $500 in outstanding credit card debt and were making the minimum payment of $25/month, it would take you 23 months to pay off the card. But if you instead paid $50/month, you would knock out that debt in 11 months!

While you are not required to make payments on deferred student loans, if they are unsubsidized they are currently accruing interest. For example, if you had $10,000 of deferred unsubsidized loans at 6.8% interest and five years until graduation (and the end of the deferment), putting $25/month toward your loans would decrease the $14,036 you would have owed at the end of grad school to $12,255 (the $1,500 you paid decreased your debt by $1,781).

Further reading:

Invest in Your Career

Instead of using your money to increase your financial security or net worth directly, you could double down on your PhD training and invest in your career. Not many universities provide adequate career exploration and training for PhD students and postdocs, especially for “alternative careers.” You could use your increased cash flow to save up to attend a key conference in your field (if you’ve already used the funding available to you) or for a career path you’d like to get into. You could join a membership site like Beyond the Professoriate to help you transition out of grad school/your postdoc/your current job and into a fulfilling job. You could take a one-time seminar on negotiating a job offer; think of the ROI on that training!

Not-Financially-Focused-But-Still-Good Ideas

There are plenty of good ideas of what to do with money that will have a positive impact on your well-being rather than your bottom line specifically.

Treat Yo Self

Set aside a bit of time to consider what would give you the most ‘bang for your buck’ with this extra cash flow in terms of increasing your satisfaction in your life. You could use it on a monthly basis to take a fancy exercise class, have a special date night, enroll in a new subscription service, or care for a small pet. You could save up over the course of a few months or the year and take an extra flight to see loved ones, purchase new electronics (my husband is currently eyeing an ergonomic mechanical keyboard!), or update your wardrobe. What will mean the most to you is obviously quite personal, but whatever you choose, the key thing to do is to earmark the extra money for your choice so that it doesn’t get swept up in the rest of your expenses.

Give

At any point in 2017 or earlier, did you come across a non-profit or certain cause that you had the impulse to donate to, but you just didn’t have the available funds? This is your opportunity! You can now set up a recurring donation to a group whose work is meaningful to you. Non-profits really appreciate steady contributions that they can plan on. Alternatively, you could set aside a dedicated savings account with a monthly automatic savings rate that is earmarked for giving. My husband and I did this in graduate school for one-off donations that we would make a few times a year, and it was a wonderful feeling to be able to say “yes” when an opportunity presented itself without having to scramble or make hasty calculations.

Don’t let this opportunity to act intentionally with your increased cash flow pass you by! It might be quite a while before you get another increase in your take-home pay so make the most of it.

New Fellow? Pay Your Quarterly Estimated Tax for the First Time This Week!

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Did you start receiving a fellowship this academic year as a graduate student or postdoc? First, congratulations! Second, I must clear up a pernicious misconception about fellowships in the US: you do owe federal income tax (and probably state, too) on your fellowship income. If income tax is not being withheld from your stipend/salary (and the majority of universities do not offer withholding on this type of income), you may be responsible for making quarterly estimated tax payments throughout the year. The next payment is due tomorrow, January 16, 2018! This post will guide you through how to determine whether you owe quarterly estimated tax and how to pay it if so.

Do You Receive Your Gross Income?

The IRS expects to receive income tax payments throughout the year, not just each April. Employees almost always have income tax withheld from their paychecks; instead of receiving their gross (full) income, their employer sends approximately the amount of tax the employee owes from each paycheck to the IRS and the employee receives the rest (net income).

Fellowship recipients (when the term is used conventionally; perhaps not universally) have non-compensatory pay and are not considered employees of their universities. Most universities do not offer income tax withholding on fellowship stipends/salaries. Taxpayers who do not have income tax withheld from their salaries (or who have too little withheld compared to the amount of tax they owe) are sometimes responsible for manually sending money to the IRS. This is called making quarterly estimated tax payments.

If you are a fellowship recipient (e.g., the NSF GRFP), your first step is to confirm that you are in fact not an employee, and your second step is to check whether you are receiving your gross or net income.

Step 1: The easiest way to determine if you are an employee (or rather, confirm that you are not) is to check whether you receive a W-2 for your fellowship income. (If you had an assistantship in this calendar year, you will receive a W-2 for that position, so be sure to check specifically about your fellowship income.) However, if you just started your fellowship in the 2017-2018 academic year, you aren’t due to receive (or not receive) your tax forms until the end of January 2018, and the estimated tax payment is due in mid-January. Your next best option is to inquire into what tax form you will receive for your fellowship stipend/salary. Non-compensatory pay will appear on a 1098-T, 1099-MISC, or courtesy letter or will not be reported in any way. Compensatory pay (indicating that you are an employee) will appear on a W-2. You should try asking your departmental administrative assistant, university fellowship coordinator, Bursar’s Cashier’s office, and/or payroll office. You will most likely be told that they “cannot give tax advice,” but confirming what type of tax form your income generates is not advice.

Step 2: Having confirmed that you are not an employee (if you are, you don’t need this post!), double-check the stipend/salary amount that hits your bank account. If you multiply it by the number of pay periods over which you will receive it, is it equal to the gross fellowship stipend/salary you were told you would receive or is it less? If it is less, did you at any point file a W-4 (e.g., when you had an assistantship)? You may be one of the few students/postdocs who has income tax withheld from a fellowship stipend/salary. As stated earlier, a small minority of universities do offer withholding on fellowship income, and they should use a W-4 to determine the amount of withholding.

If you are not an employee and are not having income tax withheld from your fellowship stipend/salary, you may need to make quarterly estimated tax payments.

Are You Responsible for Paying Quarterly Estimated Tax?

The IRS explains who is responsible for filing quarterly estimated tax on Form 1040-ES p. 1.

Right off the bat, you are not required to pay quarterly estimated tax if in the previous tax year your total income was zero or you did not have to file a tax return (and your return covered all 12 months). For example, if you were a student for all of 2016 and either didn’t have an income or your income was so low that you didn’t have to file a tax return, you aren’t required to make quarterly estimated tax payments.

If that first provision doesn’t apply to you, the IRS has a helpful flow chart on Publication 505 p. 24.

Publication 505 Figure 2-A

At this point, you’re going to have to do a few calculations to determine what amount of additional tax you owe for the year (additional to any withholding you already had). You simply need to fill out the worksheet on Form 1040-ES p. 8 for your household. It looks sort of involved but if you have a simple financial life you won’t actually need to put very many entries into the worksheet. You will need at your fingertips your 2016 tax return (or at least the total amount of tax you paid), your gross income for 2017, the amount of income tax you had withheld in 2017 (if any) and an educated guess as to your 2017 deductions and credits (your 2016 return will be helpful for this).

Once you calculate the amount of tax you owe in total for 2017 (Form 1040-ES line 13c), you can determine whether you are responsible for paying quarterly estimated tax.

First, look up the total amount of tax you paid in 2016. Second, take your total tax due for 2017 and multiply it by 90%. The smaller of these two numbers is the amount of tax you need to pay throughout 2017 to avoid a penalty (Form 1040-ES Line 14c).

Subtract the amount of income tax you had withheld in 2017 (Form 1040-ES Line 15) from the amount you need to pay to avoid a penalty. If the result (Form 1040-ES Line 16) is less than $1,000, you are not required to make a quarterly estimated tax payment. If the result is greater than $1,000, you are required to make a payment.

Please note that just because you are not required to make quarterly estimated tax payments does not mean you will avoid paying tax the whole year, only that the additional tax due does not have to be paid until you file your 2017 tax return this spring. Now that Form 1040-ES has given you some warning, use the next few months to prepare to make that lump sum income tax payment.

How to Pay Quarterly Estimated Tax

If you are required to make a quarterly estimated tax payment, the calculation is pretty simple since this is the last payment due for 2017! You should make a payment for all the additional tax due that you calculated you owe (Form 1040-ES Line 16a). If your calculations were exact, when you file your 2017 tax return in the spring, you won’t receive a refund or owe any additional tax. More likely, filling out your full tax return will bring to light a few adjustments in your calculations, so you may end up receiving a small refund or paying a small amount of additional tax.

The easiest way to make your quarterly estimated tax payment is online at www.IRS.gov/payments (find all your payment options on Form 1040-ES p. 3-4 or Publication 505 p. 32-33).

If you were unaware that you had any income tax liability on your fellowship income and are unprepared to pay what you owe by January 16, 2018, don’t avoid the issue! Give the IRS a call and they may be able to work with you to minimize the penalties you owe (though not the interest).

Calculating your quarterly estimated tax is not very difficult; the most challenging aspect is knowing that you’re supposed to do it! If you are a new fellow and this is your first time making a quarterly estimated tax payment, rest assured that it will be easier going forward. You first quarterly estimated tax payment for 2018 is due on April 17, 2018. You’ll want to freshly fill out the 2018 1040-ES once it’s available, but it should be similar to the form you just worked through.

How to Put Your New Postdoc Salary in Context

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After a long, arduous journey through graduate school, you’ve successfully defended your PhD and are about to take the next step in your research career: a postdoc. One of the best perks of transitioning from being a graduate student to a postdoc is the pay increase. While postdocs aren’t exactly rolling in dough, they are usually paid significantly better than graduate students, and after 5+ years of zero to tiny raises, it’s gratifying to finally receive a higher salary.

However, before you buy that new car or put an offer on a house, take some time to put your new postdoc salary offer in context. There are a few subtle changes common to the grad student-postdoc transition that will decrease your take-home pay and/or discretionary income.

(This post is specific to the US.)

Employee or Fellow?

The very first question to clarify is what exactly your employment status will be with respect to your university/institute. Just like in graduate school, there are two broad ways you can be paid: compensatory or non-compensatory. In academic-speak: Are you an employee or a fellow?

If you see “fellow” in your title or offer letter, have heard “fellowship” from your advisor when discussing funding, or have won an outside individual fellowship, you are a fellow and not an employee of your university. As a fellow, you may receive no benefits from your university or only a few; you are almost certainly not going to receive all the benefits a full employee would. You should contact your university’s postdoc office or your departmental administrative assistant for a full explanation of your benefits.

If you aren’t labeled a “fellow” you are most likely an employee, but there may be multiple classes of employees at your university so it’s important to determine which one. (Postdocs may not be offered the same benefits as faculty, for example.) Once you know exactly your class of employee, you can read through material provided by Human Resources to determine your benefits, and direct any questions you have to Human Resources or the postdoc office.

When in doubt, ask if you will receive W-2 pay or not. W-2s are use for employee pay, while non-compensatory pay is not reported to the IRS or reported on a 1099-MISC.

Further viewing: Types of Grad Student Pay and Their Implications

Some of the common, though not universal, differences in benefits offered to employees though not fellows are: income tax withholding, 403(b) access, 403(b) match, subsidized health insurance premiums, health insurance premiums paid as a payroll deduction, Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account, group disability and/or life insurance access, and official paid time off.

Income and FICA Taxes

If you’re earning more as a postdoc, you’re also going to pay more in federal income tax (given no other changes in your personal life). Your effective tax rate will increase and possibly your marginal tax rate as well. So if your gross pay increases by $1,000 per month, for example, federal income tax may take a $120 or $220 (or somewhere in between) bite out of that increase.

The same broad story would be true for state taxes if you are not moving states, but many postdocs relocate states as well with their new positions. If you don’t want any surprises in your first paycheck, look up how your new state’s tax brackets and rates compare to your old state’s.

One of the biggest tax changes that occurs when going from a grad student to a postdoc is FICA tax (Social Security and Medicaid). As a graduate student, you did not pay FICA tax. Postdoc fellows will also not pay FICA tax (or self-employment tax) on their income as they do not technically receive “wages.” However, postdoc employees will begin to pay FICA tax. On the employee side, the Social Security tax is 6.2% and the Medicare tax is 1.45% on all of your income up to $128,400 (in 2018). If your new postdoc salary is $45,000 per year, for example, you will pay $3,442.50 in FICA tax. That can be a big shock for someone who wasn’t paying any tax in that category previously.

The best way to calculate your new take-home pay after all of these changes is to use a paycheck calculator, of which there are many. (However, due to the recency of the tax law changes, online paycheck calculators may not yet be updated for 2018. As of this writing, the IRS has not yet updated its withholding calculator.)

Further reading: Why Is My Take-Home Pay as a Postdoc Nearly the Same as When I Was a Grad Student?

Health Insurance

While your grad school and postdoc universities almost certainly offer you the option of buying group health insurance, who pays the premium and how might change.

As a graduate student, it is typical to have your health insurance premium paid partially or completely from funds that are not part of your stipend pay, so many graduate students don’t have to factor that cost into their take-home pay.

A postdoc employee will likely pay part or all of his insurance premium through a tax-free payroll deduction. A postdoc fellow’s insurance premium may be paid on her behalf, similar to a graduate student, or come completely from her salary.

This is an important benefit to check into prior to starting your postdoc position as you don’t want any lapse in coverage or to be surprised by the additional expense. The premium for a postdoc’s insurance may be much higher than a graduate student’s, depending on the risk pool each position is put in.

Student Loans

Another big change when you transition out of being a student is that your student loans, if you have any, are no longer eligible for in-school deferment. Beginning to pay off student loans can be a large monthly expense on a postdoc salary, depending on the total amount owed.

Contact your lender(s) to find the minimum payment due and the period over which you will repay your loans. Federal student loans have a standard repayment period of 10 years, but private student loans may take a shorter or longer period of time. Factor this minimum payment due into your planning for how to allocate your salary.

If you want to pay off your debt faster than the standard repayment period, which is an excellent idea for debt at a moderate or high interest rate, plan on paying more than the minimum amount due each month.

If you don’t think your postdoc salary can handle even the minimum payment on your student loans, you have two options to immediately consider.

1) With respect to your federal student loans, you may be eligible for one of the many repayment programs that lower your minimum payment due (even, potentially, to $0) by extending the repayment period and overall amount of money you will repay (income-based repayment, pay as you earn, etc.). Your eligibility for these programs depends on your household income. Carefully consider whether it is in your best interest to use one of these programs, even if you are eligible.

2) There are many lenders currently offering student loan refinancing at competitive interest rates. When you refinance, you are paying off your old loans and taking out new private loans, so make sure you would not be losing any benefits unique to student loans, such as the repayment programs for federal student loans. Be forewarned that these lenders only work with borrowers with excellent credit and low debt-to-income ratios. If you can significantly lower your interest rate, refinancing may be a positive step for your personal finances, both lowering your minimum payment due and reducing the total amount of money you will repay.

Cost of Living

With a change in university naturally comes a change in the local cost of living. As you well know, living expenses vary greatly from city to city. At the lower salary levels of a graduate student or postdoc, this can be a major concern.

There are two quick methods to estimate how the cost of living will change between your grad school city and your postdoc city.

CNN offers a cost of living comparison calculator. Plug in the two cities in question (or as close as you can get to them) and put in either your grad student salary or your postdoc salary. Your greater familiarity with the cost of living in your grad school city combined with this calculator will help you estimate how far your new salary will go in your new city.

MIT’s living wage database also provides insight. Look up the living wage for your grad school university’s county and your postdoc university’s county. The living wage will be closer to your grad student salary than your postdoc salary, but the difference between the two will also help you determine how much of an increase or decrease in cost of living you will experience.

A more involved but also more effective step if you have not yet moved to your new city is to sketch a budget. Using your best estimate of your take-home pay based on the above factors, research how much you are likely to spend on housing, food, transportation, etc. if you kept your perceived lifestyle the same from grad school into your postdoc. Ideally, this exercise will help you decide in which areas of your budget you are able and would like to upgrade your lifestyle, such as living without a roommate.

Personal Experience with the Transition to a Postdoc Position

My husband stayed in his PhD advisor’s lab for an extra year as a postdoc to finish up a few papers before applying for a “real” multi-year postdoc at another institution. My husband received one postdoc offer that he seriously considered before ultimately choosing a position in industry. We performed the calculations above regarding increased taxes and insurance costs to compare the take-home pay of his new postdoc offer directly to the take-home pay from his short-term postdoc and graduate student positions. The take-home pay from the postdoc offer was slightly less than that of his short-term postdoc position and much higher than his pay as a graduate student.

However, when we compared the cost of living in our grad school city, Durham, NC, to the cost of living in Boston, MA, where the new offer was from, we were shocked by the results. In terms of the effective purchasing power from my husband’s take-home pay, the pay for the postdoc position in Boston was “less” than even his grad student pay in Durham. We would not have expected to experience an effective pay decrease moving from a grad student position to a postdoc position, but that is how the numbers worked out. I’m very glad that we took the time to do those estimates before he made a final decision about the offer.

Further reading: An Agonizing Decision

While the gross pay from your new postdoc position may seem great in comparison with your grad student pay, don’t be fooled! You must account for several important changes in taxes, benefits, and cost of living to compare apples to apples.

Why It Matters How You Are Paid

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If you look across a sample of graduate students receiving stipends within any given field, you will find that they have quite similar day-to-day activities: taking or teaching classes, researching, writing articles or chapters, applying for funding, etc. However, behind the stipends that allow these students to engage in their studies are two very different types of sources, which the student’s tax forms reveal. (This distinction and the tax-related details herein are for graduate students in the US.) Whether a student has one type of funding or another has implications for his taxes, access to retirement accounts, and possibly university benefits.

A version of this article first appeared on GradHacker.

The two types of pay that provide stipends to graduate students are ‘compensatory’ and ‘non-compensatory.’ Compensatory pay is given in exchange for work. Typically, this work is in the form of an assistantship – research, teaching, or graduate. Non-compensatory pay is given as an award, and there is (according to the IRS) no work requirement for receiving it. Typically, this award is in the form of a fellowship or participating in a training grant. (Scholarships that go toward paying tuition, fees, and/or health insurance premiums are another form of non-compensatory pay.)

why it matter how you are paid

The type of pay that is behind a graduate student’s stipend potentially affects several aspects of her finances, depending on the university’s policies.

1) The tax forms generated by each type of pay differ. Students with compensatory pay will receive a W-2 in January. Students with non-compensatory pay will see their pay listed on, depending on the university’s policies, a 1099-MISC in box 3, a 1098-T in box 5 (probably summed with the scholarships received), or an unofficial courtesy letter. It is also possible that students with non-compensatory pay will receive no additional notification at tax time. Despite these different reporting mechanisms, a graduate student will report both types of pay in line 7 of his 1040 (with “SCH” denoted next to the line to indicate non-compensatory pay).

2) Graduate students receiving compensatory pay will have the opportunity to have income tax withheld from their stipends, while graduate students receiving non-compensatory pay may or may not, depending on the university’s policy. If students receiving non-compensatory pay do not have the option to have income tax withheld, they may have the responsibility of paying quarterly estimated tax.

3) With rare exceptions, graduate students cannot elect to contribute to retirement accounts at their universities. Therefore, graduate students who wish to save for retirement inside a tax-advantaged account typically opt to contribute to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA). However, only compensatory pay (aka ‘taxable compensation’ or ‘earned income’) is eligible to be contributed to an IRA. Graduate students who receive only non-compensatory pay in the course of a calendar year (and are not married to a person with compensatory pay) are not eligible to contribute to an IRA in that year (though they can still save for retirement).

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4) Full-time graduate students typically do not pay FICA tax on their stipends, but the reason for this is different between the two types of pay. Graduate students with compensatory pay enjoy a student exemption to FICA tax, whereas non-compensatory pay is not subject to FICA tax in the first place. This distinction is important if graduate students ever become predominantly viewed as employees rather than students, which sometimes occurs in the summer when they are not enrolled in classes. In that situation, they might lose their FICA exemptions temporarily and have to pay additional tax.

5) The benefits that universities extend to students may differ based on their status. Graduate students receiving non-compensatory pay are unambiguously students in the eyes of the university. Graduate students receiving compensatory pay are both students and employees, and universities have varying views on which half of that balance is dominant. In some cases, when graduate students are considered employees, different or additional benefits may be extended to them that graduate students who are only students do not receive, such as union membership, childcare subsidies, and pensions.

While graduate students receiving compensatory and non-compensatory pay likely have very similar roles within the university, you can see that the IRS and the universities draw a number of distinctions between the groups that become important at some points in a graduate student’s career. If you are unsure which type of pay you are currently receiving or received earlier in the calendar year, you can either wait to see which kind of tax form you receive (W-2 for compensatory, anything else or none for non-compensatory) or inquire within your university’s payroll or financial aid office.

Have you received compensatory, non-compensatory, or both types of pay during graduate school? Was there a time that you realized that your type of pay affected your life materially? Do compensatory and non-compensatory students receive any different benefits at your university?

How to Improve Your Finances this School Year

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A new school year brings the sense of a fresh start, even for those of us who are largely unmoored from the academic calendar. Even with a PhD trainee’s limited income, we can harness our renewed optimism for our finances each September. If you are willing, there are steps you can take this week, this month, and this year to improve your relationship with money, your money management skills, and your net worth.

A version of this post was first published on GradHacker.

improve your finances

Improve Your Finances This Week

Identify your life values

There is no single right way that everyone should use their money; your own individual best practices will be based on your life values. Your values are the concepts that you hold most dear; examples include freedom, fun, family, health, excellence, and so on. Identifying what is most important to you will bring great clarity to your financial decisions. You can choose to spend more resources fulfilling your values and dispense with things and activities that do not.

Further reading: Determining Your Values and Financial Goals in Graduate School [A Personal Finance for PhDs Guide]

For example, when my husband and I identified ‘community’ as one of our top values, we knew we wanted to allocate more money for traveling to visit our families and attend weddings. To enable that, we cancelled our cable TV and stopped eating out for convenience, as those areas of spending did not correspond to any of our values.

Create a balance sheet

A balance sheet is a snapshot of your entire financial life – every asset and every debt listed by type, financial institution, balance, etc. If you have any confusion or disorganization in your finances – or the tendency to bury your head in the sand – a balance sheet will help you see your whole situation at a glance. If you have debts, you can also include the minimum payments and interest rates so that you can easily decide which payoff to tackle first. Your balance sheet may reveal vestigial accounts or other duplications that you can clear up this week.

Start tracking your spending

My top financial ‘tip’ for grad students newly interested in their finances is to implement a tracking system for all their financial transactions. The simple act of tracking is often enough to start optimizing behavior. You can do this manually with anything from a notebook and pen to an app such as Wally or automatically with software that links to your accounts such as Mint or Mvelopes.

Create a prioritized goal list

Taking your values and balance sheet into consideration, list the current financial goals you would like to reach. You may be able to work on some of those goals simultaneously. For the goals that should be tackled sequentially, choose the order in which you will focus on them so that you can make quick progress. For example, if you have multiple debts you want to pay off, use the debt snowball or debt avalanche method to create your prioritized list.

Improve Your Finances This Month

Implement a frugal strategy

Trying out a new frugal strategy is a great way to unblock what can feel like an impossibly tight financial situation. You don’t have to commit to it forever – just give it a test run so that you can evaluate how much money you save and how it affects your life. (Bonus points if the frugal strategy you choose reduces a fixed expense!) You can find tons of suggestions online (example: 66 Ways to Save Money in New York City) or among your peers.

Further viewing/reading: A Month of Frugal Tip for PhDs-in-Training by PhDs(-in-Training)

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Optimize your food spending

Food spending is a prime target when you are trying to free up more money, as it’s among the largest variable expenses in a grad student’s budget. Check out these articles on how to get the most for your money:

Add to your emergency fund

Even a small amount of available cash can save your bacon in the case of an emergency. If you have nothing put aside for emergencies right now (46% of Americans surveyed couldn’t even cover a $400 emergency), set a goal of saving $1,000 for that purpose. If you already have $1,000, consider setting a larger goal based on your current monthly expenses or your insurance policy deductibles. You can add to your emergency fund with a monthly savings goal or in dribs and drabs as you free up cash.

Improve Your Finances This Year

Right-size your housing and transportation

As housing and transportation eat up a huge fraction of a grad student’s income, it’s important to pay only what you can afford or – in some high cost-of-living areas – as little as is feasible. If you realize that you are overspending on rent or your car, it will take some time and doing but you can correct the situation by moving, getting a roommate, selling your car, switching to cycling for your commute, etc.

Develop a side income

There are two ways to free up more money each month: spend less or earn more. Grad students tend to focus on the “spend less” side of that equation, forgetting that “earn more” is sometimes also an option, depending on the source of your funding and your department’s culture. A judiciously chosen side job can advance your career as well as generate income, providing you with opportunities far beyond what your program can.

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Regularly invest and/or pay off debt

In some situations, the best a grad student can do is keep his head above water financially in grad school, but in others it is possible for a grad student to increase her wealth. The best way to increase your net worth is to make saving, investing, and/or paying down debt regular and automatic (pay yourself first). Don’t only use frugality or a side income to free up cash flow that is then lost to the ether. Commit that cash flow to working for you through automatic monthly transfers to your savings account, investments, or loans.

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What are you doing this week, month, or year to improve your finances?