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The Motivation and Strategy Behind Biology PhD Stipends

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In this episode, Emily interviews Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. After learning of the possibility of a stipend decrease in her department last year, Shelly dedicated herself to raising the stipend in her department at UF. She and a partner even launched an app to collect stipend information from other biology departments around the US. Shelly shares everything she’s learned about the factors that influence how stipends are set and her advice for other stipend advocates. The interview concludes with a round-up of all the stipend and benefits advances Shelly has witnessed in her department, through her union’s negotiations, and at other institutions.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

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Teaser

00:00 Shelly: I think that the conversation has to focus on how competitive the stipend is. I think that is a focus of admins, at least here at UF. That is a big focus, is, you know, they want to compare themselves to other institutions and they want to look good. So, I think that comparison’s really important.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 14, Episode 10, and today my guest is Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. After learning of the possibility of a stipend decrease last year, Shelly dedicated herself to raising the stipend in her department at UF. She and a partner even launched an app to collect stipend information from other biology departments around the U.S. Shelly shares everything she’s learned about the factors that influence how stipends are set and her advice for other stipend advocates. The interview concludes with a round-up of all the stipend and benefits advances Shelly has witnessed in her department, through her union’s negotiations, and at other institutions.

01:40 Emily: There are some free recurring opportunities to meet with me that I’d like you to be aware of. First, my Office Hours are back! I set aside 30 minutes once per month to chat with up to 4 early-career PhDs about whatever money-related questions or topics you’d like to bring up. I’ve set the dates for these sessions through August 2023. Register for any of them at PFforPhDs.com/officehours/. Second, through at least September 2023, I’m hosting a monthly Ask Me Anything on mortgages and being a first-time homebuyer with Sam Hogan. Sam is a mortgage originator specializing in early-career PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. If you are considering or embarking on the home-buying process and have a question about any aspect of it, please join us! Register for the next session at PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/. I hope to see you in one of these calls in the coming months! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s14e10/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Shelly Gaynor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:07 Emily: It’s really a special day on the podcast because today I get to interview Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. You may recognize Shelly’s name because she is one of the people behind an advocacy campaign and research campaign around raising stipends in her department and across the field of biology. And that’s gotten a lot of attention in the past year. So, Shelly, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to speaking with you today! Will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

03:40 Shelly: Well, thanks for having me! I study evolutionary biology of flowering plants here at UF and hopefully will be done in about a year.

03:49 Emily: Yeah, that’s great. So, regarding the project that I just mentioned, is there a name? How should we refer to the project?

03:56 Shelly: We call it Biology PhD Stipends.

Biology PhD Stipends

03:59 Emily: Okay. Biology PhD Stipends. So, what motivated you to start to advocate around raising stipends in your own department, which ultimately led to Biology PhD Stipends?

04:11 Shelly: So, I started advocating more formally during my fourth year of grad school. I was starting to plan out my timeline and figure out when I was going to finish my PhD, and it became very obvious that I really should take six years. We had always planned for me to take six years, but I hoped not to because I really didn’t plan for the cost of living to increase so much in Gainesville. Every year, it seemed that rent went up about a hundred dollars, but the cost of living increased even more as we moved through the pandemic. And, you know, friends everywhere were struggling, not just here, but it was very noticeable here that people were starting to struggle to afford to live. So, at first I put together a document with about four other students that outlined what the current salary meant in Gainesville, what was the take-home after taxes, tuition, fees, and health insurance, and how far did that money actually go in Gainesville.

05:05 Shelly: And the conclusion was that it doesn’t cover the average cost. Students are expected to be rent burdened and spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and they could also be health burdened and spend more than 7.5% of their income on health costs due to our really high out-of-pocket maximum. At the same time as we put together this document and distributed it through our department, at the college level, there were discussions about how to deal with the decreasing teaching assistants’ budget. And they had decided that a group of faculty were the ones who had to decide how to decrease this budget, how to deal with those decreases. And one of my dissertation committee members was a part of that committee, and he let me know about discussions regarding cutting the graduate teaching assistant pay and standardizing it across the college. And this is when I started to collect data.

06:05 Emily: That’s a bit shocking. What was the reason behind the overall budget decreasing? Is that enrollment decreasing or something further than that?

06:14 Shelly: I think it had to do, based on the documents that I’ve read, with just general flow of money, there was a line that used to go into OPS budget, which is what the teaching assistants come from, and that had been diverted elsewhere. So, they had to deal with this ongoing decrease, and the provost gave them funds for a few years to help them cover this change, but the decrease was still coming because that revenue flow wasn’t supposed to be there originally. And they just had to start to account for that.

06:48 Emily: It’s not that I don’t appreciate the budgetary strains that I think universities and schools and departments and so forth are dealing with, but it seems to me that making the budget balance seems to be too often placed on the shoulders of the graduate students and it becomes their responsibility. And the effects on them are real <laugh>. They don’t eat as much or they don’t get the type of food that they want. They don’t live in safe housing, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of being a more, I don’t know, academic exercise <laugh> to cut it elsewhere. I think it’s so unfortunate that the budget is balanced on the backs of teaching assistants, for example. Okay. So, you heard that this was a possibility of there’s not even less work to go around, it’s just the same amount of work and potentially for less pay. You started doing the research route, the actual cost of living, what the stipends were.

07:50 Shelly: And there is a happy ending to at least that part is that they did not cut, you know, graduate TA stipends. That was not the end result.

07:58 Emily: So, what happened? What did they do?

08:01 Shelly: They did allocate differently and they cut the overall amount of TA lines rather than individuals’ pay.

08:07 Emily: Okay. So, the work was just distributed among fewer people, but those people were not paid less than they were before. Is that right?

08:16 Shelly: Yes.

08:17 Emily: Okay.

08:17 Shelly: From my understanding.

Building an Argument

08:19 Emily: So, when you started collecting this information and to make this argument for not just maintaining but increasing the stipends, what elements were you looking at to include in this argument?

08:31 Shelly: So, since we put together that document about, you know, how does the pay go in Gainesville, how far does that go? I focused on what would convince those who weren’t swayed by student conditions, what would the admins want to see? And I talked to a ton of faculty and leaders at my institution, but mostly others. And what I learned from that was, you know, you need to know who controls the budget and you need to focus on the importance of hierarchy. So, there are different budget systems at universities, and from my understanding, at the University of Florida, the budget is determined by our provost and our board of trustees. Now, to get to that provost and board of trustees, the faculty members need to convince the department chair to then go to the college and the dean who then can go to the provost and board of trustees.

09:22 Shelly: So, that was part one, is that, you know, it’s a hierarchy that people need to be talking up the list so that everyone cares and is pushing for this agenda item. Now, the second part is that benchmarking is really important. At the college level, and at the university level, the main administration offices should be doing benchmarking. And what I mean by that is two parts. So first we have internal benchmarking, which is just assessing the current status of students. For example, within our department, we found we have 19 different pay rates for the same work. So, are TA positions are at 19 different rates. We also looked into the yield rate, which is the percent of students who accept our offer to come to our program. And we found that in three years, we went from 80% to about 55%. The next step is external benchmarking, and that’s pure institution comparisons, and that is what my database was made for.

10:25 Emily: So, the internal and the external benchmarking, you targeted these as areas that you could, I guess, assist with or bring your own data to. But were the administrators and you know, this hierarchy, people in this chain of command, they were already doing this, right? Or were you bringing different data to them? How were you supplementing the process that they were already engaged in?

10:49 Shelly: So, supposedly they were doing benchmarking and they have presented data at the board of trustees meetings, but it doesn’t match my data. And even if I cherry-pick my data, I can’t find a way to make it match. And one of the reasons is because they’re combining med programs with college of liberal arts and science programs and calling that biology. So yes, we do look a lot better when you take the students who are funded by the med school versus colleges that only fund based on liberal arts and graduate TA ships.

11:22 Emily: So, in your mind, they weren’t really comparing apples to apples, they were conflating a couple of different groups together?

11:28 Shelly: Exactly.

11:29 Emily: Okay. So, the process that you were engaged in was, you were thinking, presenting higher quality data than the ones that they were using in their discussions to hopefully go up this chain to the decision makers. Is that right?

11:42 Shelly: Kind of. I also wanted the data to be accessible at the faculty level. So, when we talked to other faculty, they would ask me, you know, what about the other institutions? Like, that was actually a conversation that we already started having. So, it made sense to collect our own data so that we had something to show.

11:59 Emily: Gotcha. So, it seems like the conception of Biology PhD Stipends was to be able to compare, do this external benchmarking from the University of Florida, but also many other universities would be able to use this data as well to do this external benchmarking. And you mentioned my database, PhD Stipends, which is self-reported and a starting point I would say, but you approached things a little bit differently with Biology PhD Stipends. So, can you explain to us how you were collecting this data?

12:33 Shelly: We should rewind a bit. So, originally I just made a plot of 40 or so departments and realized they didn’t meet the living wage. And once I tweeted that and got a lot of feedback from other departments, that’s when we made it public. The reason why it’s different than PhD Stipends and not self-reported is because admin don’t always want to believe that data. And so we got a ton of pushback saying, well, you know, these are self-reported, they’re probably less, they probably account for taxes already and fees, and that’s not, you know, what we’re looking at. So, we don’t trust this data. Bye. You know, they would push it away. So, my goal was to have something that an admin couldn’t push away, couldn’t discredit, to do as much due diligence as possible. We even have an option on our website to only look at nine-month salaries versus 12-month, even though those nine-month agreements are the only money you’re getting for the whole year. We still allow those divisions so that if that’s where the pushback comes from, you can already see the data that way.

Phases of Data Collection

13:44 Emily: Okay. So, I guess I’m asking maybe two phases. So first phase, when you were collecting data and you created this chart that then later got more attention, where did that data come from?

13:55 Shelly: So, part of that data came from my undergrad institution and from faculty members there who had collected internal or external benchmarking measurements for their own efforts. And the rest of it came from searching the internet or there was this one Google sheet with a couple links in it for EEB stipends. So ecology and evolutionary biology stipends. And I worked from there. So, I just started searching biology PhD stipends to see if I could find reported stipends online.

14:26 Emily: Okay. So, this is what departments themselves say about what they’re paying their students, is that right?

14:31 Shelly: Yes.

14:32 Emily: It’s interesting that, and I understand it, but that the administrators didn’t want to trust the self-reported data in PhD Stipends, for example. But I don’t trust what they put on their websites. You know, you have to get both sides of the story. Right? Okay. But you went with the self-reported in terms of the administrative self-reporting side of things for that initial set of 40 schools. And then you said you tweeted, it got lots of attention as <laugh> I’m sure anyone would be interested. And then how did you expand the data from there?

15:01 Shelly: I started talking with faculty members at a lot of different institutions as a student rep for the Botanical Society of America. And that gave me a lot of connections within my field. And so I knew faculty members at lots of different institutions and I made a Google form and had different faculty members test it out to see if they could report data accurately and if it made sense. And I, in some cases, sent it to two people at one university to see if they would report the same thing. And then we made the shiny app. Part of the reason it was a shiny app which is just a version of R, it’s an interactive R-based plot, that you can put on a website was because my significant other had just launched another shiny app. So it was like, okay, I’m going to learn how to make a shiny app with this data to make it accessible. So, we made the Google form, we put up the shiny app, and we went from there.

15:57 Emily: I guess I’m still wondering a little bit about this data collection process. It doesn’t seem too dissimilar actually from what we’re doing at PhD Stipends, but you mentioned like internally within, I can’t remember if it was your department, you said there were like 19 different pay rates. So how, if you approach a faculty member at a different department, at a different university and say, what are you paying your graduate students? How do they know which pay rate they’re supposed to choose?

16:20 Shelly: So we asked for the minimum, what is your lowest paid PhD student in your department at this time? Not in the incoming class, but in the class that still exists. Who is your lowest paid? What is that rate? And that’s what we’re looking for. We make that very clear on our Google form. And that’s why I sent it to many faculty members was, Hey, does this make sense? Do you know what you’re reporting? Yeah. And the cool thing is that a lot of faculty or a lot of different departments have been reported more than once. So we can go through, compare the wages, figure out what’s going on, and a lot of times it’s the same, which I think is really important to see.

16:59 Emily: Do you get back zeros? Are they reporting that there are unfunded students or is that something that you explicitly exclude?

17:08 Shelly: So, if you don’t have an appointment, a 0.5 FTE, then no, we’re not including you. It’s only if you have a work appointment. In biology, it’s very rare to enroll in a program and not have an associated research assistantship or teaching assistantship. And if that’s the case, run, like don’t be part of that program

17:33 Emily: Yeah. In that field for sure. And then I’m also wondering about people who are not employees, but who rather are paid from what I call awarded income or fellowship income. I’m assuming they’re not included in this survey?

17:47 Shelly: No, they are not.

Commercial

17:51 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! We’re doing something special for Season 15 of this podcast, and as a loyal listener, I know you’re going to want to be involved. Season 15 will be a chance to share your financial experiences, even if you don’t want to give a full-episode interview or want to remain anonymous. We’re going to publish compilation episodes around certain themes, and each episode will feature at least a half-dozen different contributors. The contributions can be audio clips or written text that I will read aloud for the episode. If you are interested in contributing, check out PFforPhDs.com/season15/. That’s the digits 1 5. On that page, you’ll find a list of the proposed themes and how many volunteers I’ve identified for each episode. Your next step is to email me at emily@PFforPhDs.com to let me know which episode you’d like to contribute to or if you have another idea for the list. Once I’m confident that we have enough contributions for an episode to be created, I’ll give the volunteers specific prompts and directions to create their submissions. I hope you will choose to participate in this unique season! I can’t do it without you, so please get in touch! Now back to the interview.

Reallocating Funds for TAs

19:14 Emily: So, what happened as the database gained traction?

19:18 Shelly: Okay, so nothing happened here at UF Biology in response to the database gaining traction. Eventually, maybe seven months later, I ended up presenting at faculty meeting and our faculty signed a letter saying they wanted to increase salaries, but then they had voted against every option to increase salaries at the department level. Within a department, there are many ways other institutions have been able to successfully increase TA salaries. It might not be by a lot, but things that other institutions have done include converting faculty hire lines into teaching assistantship salaries. Many have reevaluated the teaching assignments and decreased their TA needs to then reallocate funds. Many admit fewer students. One cool one was fundraising to top up students, which is kind of fun to see. And then another that’s more controversial is that programs have required principal investigators to cover summer pay.

20:21 Emily: Okay. So, all of these options were sort of in the mix. Maybe this could happen, but specifically none of them were agreed to.

20:29 Shelly: Yeah, not so far. We’ll see over time how that changes. I hope that they you know, look at the TA allocations. I think that’s something in the works, but it just hasn’t started yet.

20:42 Emily: So, that’s what was happening at UF. Have you seen other reactions or other effects at other institutions?

20:50 Shelly: Yes, and so I think that’s the more positive side. I’ve seen about 50 salary increases in biology departments across the country this year. We’ve had a lot of users on our site, about 12,000 unique users and a lot of submissions and corrections. It’s always good to hear that it’s been helpful in discussions in other departments and successful in some cases.

21:16 Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. And you’ve had people like directly attribute like, Hey, we use this data to make this argument. Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for doing this work, and I’m so glad it has had some positive effects for some other people not necessarily at your institution.

Behind-the-Scenes Factors for Administrators

21:32 Emily: Okay. We touched on this a little bit earlier but let’s expand. So, what have you learned about the behind-the-scenes factors that administrators are weighing when they set stipends? And in learning that, do you have any advice for people at other institutions who are advocating for stipend increases?

21:50 Shelly: I think that the conversation has to focus on how competitive the stipend is. I think that is a focus of admins, at least here at UF. That is a big focus is, you know, they want to compare themselves to other institutions and they want to look good. So, I think that comparison’s really important. From that and from behind the scenes, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is advocacy has to happen at every level. You need to be having conversations about pay with your faculty members, and they need to have those conversations with the chair. And the chair needs to be pushing. Everyone has to push for change to happen. And not only that, the money needs to come from somewhere. We just saw that with the UC system, that in some cases in response to this amazing bargaining agreement, departments are cutting the FTE to be able to afford the pay. So, identifying where the money can come from would also be something important to administrators.

22:55 Emily: So far, these levels that you mentioned, I suspect would’ve stopped at the university president, but how about going up to the state level or federal level? Have you given thought to advocacy at those levels yet?

23:08 Shelly: To an extent, yes. In Florida, our universities can submit funding requests in order to raise stipends. And so, Florida State University was actually able to do that. So, they got that from the state, but I haven’t thought about advocacy at that level because I’m in Florida. And I don’t think it would be successful at this time. They would rather have the war against academia than work with us. So, I don’t think that’s a conversation we’ll have here.

23:39 Emily: Yeah, I was thinking about it, because I live in California, when the UC strike was going on like that again, the responsibility for balancing the budget should not be on the backs of the graduate students. It needs to be at the state level, it needs to be at the federal level. And I agree it’s a much harder road to hoe in Florida than it is in some other states. So yes, thank you for those comments. So, I understand that you have a union at UF for graduate students. Is that just for TAs or is it for research assistants? How many people does it cover?

Graduate Assistants United 

24:10 Shelly: So, it is called Graduate Assistants United, and it covers teaching assistants. So, as a fellowship recipient right now, it doesn’t technically cover me.

24:20 Emily: Okay. And so what work is the union doing on campus, and how does your Biology PhD Stipends project fit into that?

24:31 Shelly: So, our union is currently bargaining, and in the past they have won tuition waivers, health insurance coverage, and some increases including about a thousand dollars increase to the minimum last year. Biology PhD students are paid more than the minimum. So my data really isn’t helpful for our union because they’re really focused on that minimum and bringing the minimum up.

24:56 Emily: Okay. So the union has made some strides, but your biology department already being above those minimums, it’s a little bit not so relevant. But is there anything else that you want to say about how your work can complement the union efforts?

25:11 Shelly: So, our union is still currently bargaining and they have made past wins, like I mentioned. One thing that makes it really hard in Florida is we’re a no-strike state. So, that puts a lot of burden on what advocacy can be done. As we’ve seen strikes have been, you know, really successful in unions across the country. And with that off the table, I think it’s really difficult to bargain here.

25:36 Emily: Yeah, as I’m learning more and more about this topic of unionization, and because I work nationally, that’s something I need to keep in mind. That not everything operates the same in every single state. It’s really kind of a heterogeneous map. So, then what is the current status of the minimum stipend in your college?

25:56 Shelly: So, at our university, it’s now $17,000, but in the biology department, we found out that our master’s students are actually paid $18,000 while our PhD students are at $20,500 as the minimum. So, this is the same minimum we started at when we started the biology stipends database, but new students who are incoming, there’s a slight win that for the next four years in their degree, the first four years of their degree, they’ll be paid $24,000. So that we see as a win, even if it doesn’t really help the rest of us. There was also an increase in the maximum research assistantships that our faculty were allowed to write into their grants, so that now has increased as well. One other, I would say exciting increase partially because my dissertation advisor was a part of this, our biodiversity institute was able to increase their nine-month fellowships to 30,000, which is a big win.

26:58 Emily: Yeah, I’m so pleased about those things. I’m a little bit surprised actually that the raises that were given didn’t apply to current graduate students and only incoming. Do you know any more about the reasoning behind that?

27:11 Shelly: That has to do with how the university allocates funds. So, in order to, you know, recruit good students, they have funds that are only earmarked for recruitment and incoming students, and those are only four-year fellowships. So, that’s what the funds come from and sadly, they cannot be applied to current students.

27:33 Emily: I guess this is the dangerous downside of using that external benchmarking specifically as a comparison in terms of recruiting other students, is that they can then use that logic of, well, we already have students enrolled, we don’t need to worry about them leaving, we’re just going to focus on recruiting that next class with this extra money. So, a little bit sorry to hear that, but good for them. And thank you again for doing the work that you do to at least benefit those incoming students and really your department overall, if not the older classes. Okay.

Advice for Prospective Students

28:05 Emily: So, what advice, you know, speaking of prospective graduate students and being recruited and so forth, what advice do you have for prospective graduate students in light of everything that you’ve learned through this process?

28:15 Shelly: Yeah, so I just had two undergrads I mentor apply to PhD programs. And one thing I kept telling them was, know your worth and ask for more, and actively discuss pay. Ask students in your potential lab and department how much they get paid now and what opportunities exist at their institution after you’re enrolled. Just because we know that these, you know, top-ups to get you there exist in those only last four years when our programs could last much longer. So, having those conversations as you interview at institutions is really important. I just think that we really have to open the door to conversations about pay and financial wellbeing during that recruitment process, make it not taboo, really just open that dialogue. So yeah, if your prospective, I definitely say talk about it.

29:07 Emily: That component of your answer was about gathering data, right? As a prospective graduate student, what are you being paid? And I would add onto that, of course, the qualitative, how does that feel, <laugh>, are you able to live well enough? Right? But you mentioned when you first started answering, ask for more. So what do you think about that process?

29:24 Shelly: So, I’ve never done it myself, but when I was applying to grad school, a current PhD student in my lab told me, you know, apply to multiple places and then tell them how much the other institution’s gonna pay you. He said he did it successfully, and that is the only time I’ve ever heard of that working. But, you know, if an institution really wants you, they’ll find more funds if you need, like, if they really truly do or at least I think they will.

29:51 Emily: Yeah, I fortunately in my line of work have come across many examples of people using that kind of strategy and also the strategy of, I won this external fellowship. If I bring it to your institution, you know, what are you going to do for me? Et cetera, et cetera. Those kinds of strategies, I mean, they’re not universally successful, but some people do have success with it. Your comment of if they really want you, then they’re going to find more money. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s true, but I think they should at least respond to you very respectfully and understand why you’re asking for this and explain to you at the kind of the things that you’ve learned. Well, you know, our hands are tied in this way and we have to standardize this and this and this, but we do really want you. And you know, they, they may be able to find another way to make up for it that’s not financial, at least with verbal affirmation, we hope, alone. So yes, these strategies can be successful sometimes. Any other advice for prospective graduate students?

30:42 Shelly: I think on that same line read the fine line print, like if a fellowship is only gonna be four years, ask for the other for what’s left over to be covered. If you’re on a research assistantship that pays more than your teaching assistantship in the department and that research assistantship only asked x number of years, ask to see if there are funds available to make it equivalent. In some cases there won’t be, you’re completely correct, but if there is, it’s good to know about them going in and if there isn’t, it’s good to know about them going in.

31:16 Emily: And I just think this process of asking, even if you don’t get anything from it, which I certainly hope that people will, and I think they do sometimes. I think just the process of asking signals to the DGS or whoever is you’re asking that they can go up the chain as you were saying earlier, this is an issue that is important to the graduate students that we are recruiting. And even if they can’t do anything right then for that student who’s in front of them, it goes into, you know, the anecdotes and the data that they’re collecting to make those arguments for more fellowships or higher stipends or whatever the case it is going forward. So, even if you don’t see an immediate yes result, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to have a positive effect downstream. And really that’s kind of the lesson that we’ve seen from your work overall, right? Like there have been some, you know, gains here, gains there, marginal gains here, and it’s certainly helped a lot of other people quite a bit. So, like you never really know what the end result is going to be from that ask or from that data that you collect.

32:13 Shelly: Yeah, I definitely agree. Even having the conversations about if someone brings a fellowship, we should top them up is important and something that GRFPers who received that award while they’ve been here, have been having with the department here. So, I do think just asking can have a lot of impacts.

32:35 Emily: Yeah, I literally gave that advice to someone I was speaking to last night. A current first-year graduate student won the NSF GRFP, her stipend’s going to go up by $10K for those three years. And I said, just ask, just ask for that fifth year, sixth year, whatever it’s going to be at that 10K bonus or closer at least, and it really does no harm. Just ask.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:56 Emily: Well, Shelly, I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing this information with us, and I really hope that the listeners will take some of these strategies and lessons that you’ve learned and certainly the database itself if they’re in your field, and use those for a positive effect on stipends at their own universities. And then to wrap up here, I want to ask you the question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on already in this interview, or it could be something completely new.

33:26 Shelly: Yeah, so I went back and forth with my family about what makes sense, and one thing that I live by, save when you can and try to live within your means. And I know that’s a really hard thing to do when we’re talking about stipends not meeting the living wage. But as you move through your career, I think it’s important to keep that in mind.

33:49 Emily: I had an experience in my own life where, you know, sometimes the opportunity to earn money can be there and sometimes it cannot. And I just told myself, make hay while the sun shines <laugh>. when you have the chance, earn the money that you can, put away the money that you can because at some point that sun will stop shining. Whether that’s because of something, you know, decided for you by your university or other personal circumstances and it’s just such a peace of mind that you could have something to fall back on in those cases.

34:17 Shelly: Yeah, I definitely believe in a rainy day fund and having funds saved up.

34:23 Emily: Well, Shelly, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast and giving this interview. And for anybody wondering, you know, where to find all the great work that you’ve been doing and there’s been articles about your database and so forth, we’ll link all of that stuff from the show notes. So, thank you so much again for coming on and sharing your insights!

34:39 Shelly: No problem.

Outtro

34:45 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Grad Student Saved and Spent $60,000 for a Year-Long Seabbattical

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In this episode, Emily interviews Michael Spano, a fifth-year PhD student in chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. After seeing his stipend offer from UCI and securing university-subsidized housing, Michael resolved to save and invest as much money as he possibly could throughout grad school. Michael shares his financial philosophy of keeping recurring expenses low, splurging only on high-value experiences, and finding joy and fulfillment in inexpensive activities. Over the course of graduate school, Michael saved up approximately $60,000 in cash, which he has spent—listen through the end of the episode to find out on what. His post-graduation plans include a year-long sabbatical and pursuing financial independence.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Image for S14E9: This Grad Student Saved and Spent $60,000 for a Year-Long Seabbattical

Teaser

00:00 Michael: I talked about how I minimized all of my recurring costs so that I have a lot of ability to save, and that allows me to make these one-time purchases that I put a lot of value on. Things that I only have to buy once. For instance, you know, a wetsuit, it’s maybe a four or $500 investment, which, you know, if you don’t have savings, it’s a lot of money. But because I had this, you know, money saving up as I’m watching it grow, I’m like, Hmm, yeah, I’ll take a little bit off the top and I’m going to buy this equipment. And it gave me hours and hours and hours of joy.

Introduction

00:36 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 14, Episode 9, and today my guest is Michael Spano, who at the time of this interview was a fifth-year PhD student in chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. After seeing his stipend offer from UCI and securing university-subsidized housing, Michael resolved to save and invest as much money as he possibly could throughout grad school. Michael shares his financial philosophy of keeping recurring expenses low, splurging only on high-value experiences, and finding joy and fulfillment in inexpensive activities. Over the course of graduate school, Michael saved up approximately $60,000 in cash, which he has spent—listen through the end of the episode to find out on what. His post-graduation plans include a year-long sabbatical and pursuing financial independence.

01:59 Emily: I have a personal update for you all today. The last six months or so have been pretty hard for me and my family. Starting last fall, my husband and I had some extra caregiving duties for one of our parents pop up. And the conclusion of that journey a couple of months ago was the death of that parent. So, it’s been a very trying season of course managing all of our regular life plus these extra caregiving responsibilities. Plus it was tax season, which, you know, is like the busiest time of year for me. And then of course grieving and the funeral and all these associated things. So, it’s been a lot, and I just wanted to say thank you to you all. To everyone who has supported my business in any large or small ways through this period, I’m especially appreciative. I could not do any marketing for my tax return workshops outside of like this podcast and my own mailing list because I didn’t have the time and energy for it.

03:05 Emily: So, I super appreciate all of you who recommended that workshop, whether that was to an individual or to a potential sponsor at your university. It really helped me get through this season without a huge hit to the business revenue and so forth. And I also want to say, you know, thank you for your patience with me. Some of you may have emailed me during this time and I may not have gotten back to you or gotten back to you weeks or months later. And I’m really sorry about that. It had to happen. And one more, very special thank you needs to go to my team who works with me behind the scenes on the podcast and on other aspects of my business. Jill, Lourdes, and Meryem, I appreciate you so much. It is really, really all to their credit that things have been happening in the business. That your emails have been getting answered, that podcast episodes have been coming out, that transcripts are getting done, all of those sorts of things especially over the last few months. Literally, the business would have ground to a halt without you. So, thank you.

04:03 Emily: Now that we’re near the beginning of May, I have turned my thoughts to summer vacation. I am looking forward to a change of pace and hopefully some rest and recuperation over the summer. My kids are out of school from about early June to like mid-late August, and we have a couple of vacations planned. I’m going to a couple of conferences as Personal Finance for PhDs. My kids are enrolled in fun summer camps. I’m just really looking forward to a change of pace for the summer. One exciting thing about the podcast is that we’ll be doing something different with episodes over the summer and I really want you to contribute. So, please keep listening to this episode to find out how you can be part of the special set of episodes we’re doing over the summer.

04:50 Emily: What this experience has to do with finances, let’s see. I am really grateful to myself and my husband in the past for working very diligently on our finances and especially automating as much as we can. Because whenever you hit an emergency of any type, and we’ve been through a couple, having those finances automated is just a huge peace of mind that the bills are getting paid and you do not have to do anything to make that happen. I’m also really grateful that we, you know, have aggressively saved in the past because we did have some extra costs associated with the caregiving we were doing. And we didn’t have to worry about overdrawing the checking account. We had savings that we could rely on. And this experience of losing a parent and, you know, reflecting on the life that that person had and the relationship that we had with them, it makes you realize that <laugh> life is for living, you know?

05:38 Emily: And money should be in service of that. So, I do think that we are going to be adjusting our strategy going forward. We’re not going to be saving quite so aggressively for retirement. We’re really good on that front, and we’re going to be using our money a bit more in the here and now to upgrade our lifestyle and create, you know, lasting memories with our friends and family. So again, thank you so much for bearing with me through this time period. I’m really grateful to you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing these episodes. If you’d like to join my mailing list to keep up with new episodes coming out and other announcements from Personal Finance for PhDs, you can do so at PFforPhDs.com/advice. And why don’t you give your loved ones a hug or a phone call today? You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/S14E9. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Michael Spano.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

06:27 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Michael Spano. He’s a fifth-year PhD student at UC Irvine in chemistry, and he was actually recommended by past guest Sam McDonald from season eight, episode three. So, Michael, thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

07:05 Michael: Yeah, sure. Thank you for the warm welcome, Emily. I’m really happy to be here and talk about my story. Sam and I are domestic partners, so we share a lot of things in common. A little bit about my background. I’m actually a dual citizen with Brazil. I spent half of my life in Brazil. I had all of my primary education there, so middle school, high school, and college. And then I got lucky in college to have a Science without Borders fellowship. So I came to North Carolina and I got exposed to what like a science lab was in the United States, and I was hooked. So I knew I had to do my PhD here. So, ever since then I’ve been working to get back to the United States. And here I am doing my PhD at UC Irvine in chemistry, and I’m, yeah, stoked.

07:49 Emily: So, I understand that when you started your PhD, well, tell us what your stipend was. And tell us how that struck you. Having, you know, recently or let’s say for college, you were in Brazil and so obviously there’s currency and, and cost of living differences there. So like what were you thinking about that stipend when you first saw that offer letter?

08:05 Michael: Yeah, absolutely, right. So, the stipend was right around $30,000. And that was an enormous amount of money, like you said, having been coming straight from Brazil that was more money than any of my professors made at university in Brazil. So, it struck me as like an opportunity. Like if I play my cards right and I’m frugal about living, I could save a ton of money and be really well off. And mind you, if you go to a federal university in Brazil, it’s free. So, I didn’t have any debts from college. And I was going into a PhD where not only was I not accruing debt, they were paying me. So I could actually build net worth if I played my cards right. So, $30,000 a year was the largest amount of money I had ever seen at the time. And I think we can agree I kind of played my cards well and built something for myself.

Cost of Living Expenses

08:56 Emily: Yes, that will be revealed through the course of the episode. I know where the exciting conclusion is here, but the listeners don’t yet. But okay. I mean, you see the number $30,000 per year, I understand how that could strike you, but we also are talking about Southern California, which is incredibly expensive. So I don’t know if you had like the context for that at that time. Like when you lived in the U.S. before, was it also in a high cost of living area? Or like how did you, before you actually got on the ground in Irvine, did you have a concept of how much your basic living expenses would, you know, account for as part of that stipend?

09:27 Michael: That’s a fantastic question. Because no, I didn’t, I had no idea. You always hear like, you know, California’s super expensive. So, kind of to back up, I applied only to three grad schools because it costs money to apply. And, you know, at the time I didn’t have it. So, I applied to three schools, got into two of them, Chapel Hill and UCI. And UCI had this really cool deal where they guaranteed you student housing if you signed up for it in your first year. And it’s common in graduate programs, at least in chemistry, for them to fly you out to see the school and you get to meet the faculty and everything. So on that trip, you know, I took a quick look at all the facilities. I was like, great, yeah, everything checks out. It’s a top-notch school.

10:08 Michael: Let me go to Aldi and buy, you know, enough groceries for a week. Let me see what that costs. Let me go fill up the rental car that I have. Let me see what it costs to actually live here. And I talked a lot with the students about housing, and I saw that the rent varied a lot. The cheapest housing units at UCI were around $550 a month, which is like fantastic. And some of the more expensive ones were around $1,500. So, that’s a difference of a thousand dollars every month. That’s 12 grand a year. That’s a $60,000 difference over the course of your PhD. So, it was essential that I got one of those cheaper units. And because I got accepted into two programs, I was willing to walk away from UCI and go to Chapel Hill because the cost of living there is much cheaper if I didn’t get the housing assignment. Did that answer your question?

10:57 Emily: Yes, it did. So I think we’ve already, if there are any prospective graduate students listening to this, we’ve gotten some lessons there already from just what you said was going on during this admission season of you actually having the opportunity to be on the ground at the university. You were checking out what are the costs that you can observe, what are the costs that you can speak with other graduate students about? And like you said, housing is number one, the most key expense to identify and make sure that it’s going to be able to fit within your budget. So, this sounds like this was a point of negotiation with your program, that you said, I must have this guaranteed housing spot, or else I have to decline the admission. Is that correct?

11:33 Michael: Not quite. I didn’t quite have the power to enforce that requirement upon the school. But I did know the date in which they would tell me if I got the housing was still not too late, that I couldn’t turn down the offer and go and join the other school in North Carolina. So it was kind of like a plan B, if I didn’t get the cheap housing, I was willing to just say, okay, I’m out. I quit and I’m going to go to this other school that’s cheaper.

12:02 Emily: Yes. Okay. Maybe not for your situation, I don’t know, but for other prospective graduate students listening, don’t be afraid to try to use this as a point of negotiation. For you, it sounds like it was just a boundary. If I get this, I’ll go here, the numbers are going to work out. If I don’t, I’m going to go with my next top choice. And that’s totally fine to have that boundary for yourself. But other people could maybe go the next proactive step and just inform the program that that’s what you’re thinking and that is going to be a boundary that you’re setting for yourself. Okay. So, you have your $30,000 per year statement. You have your guaranteed lowest cost housing. You mentioned $550 per month. Is that what this has been during your graduate career, or has that changed?

12:45 Michael: Yeah, it’s been that and it’s gone up 15 bucks every year. So, I’m still in the range of like $600 something per month. Yeah.

Money Mindset in Grad School

12:53 Emily: Okay. Amazing. So, you know, you spoke earlier about, you know, being impressed by the amount of money and that you were interested in saving as much as you could of that stipend. Can you say anything more about what motivated you to think in that direction? Because it’s definitely not a typical goal for a graduate student.

13:14 Michael: Yeah, I think I just realized at some point, you know, like this money is freedom down the road, right? Like we exchange our life for money to do things we want. And if you’re not born into wealth, all you have to work with is your salary, right? If you’re not, if you don’t get an inheritance of, you know, $500,000, a million dollars, all you’ve got to work with is, either you come up with a really good idea, you start a business, you get rich, or you work with what you have. So, that was basically me realizing like, hey, this is a really good opportunity. I’m going to work with what I have. I did the math and you know, as we’re going to get into shortly, making some really severe like austerity measures, you can save a lot of money during grad school. It’s guaranteed income for five years, and if you play your cards right, you can save it. So, I think that’s where my head was at. You know, I realized, yeah, I wasn’t born into like a lot of wealth or anything. And this was what I had to work with. So, this was my shot I was going to take it and work with it.

14:19 Emily: So interesting again, and so unusual. I think I did something similar when I was in graduate school, though not to the same extreme as you in terms of the mindset that you had. My mindset was more like, I am an adult and I need to do adulty things with my money, even though I am also a graduate student. And so that involved like saving 10%. So I’m not thinking like, oh, I want to save every single dollar I possibly could, but like having a savings rate of some kind is something that, you know, I wanted to do. And so we had a similar thought process, but you’ve taken it a little bit further than I did at that time.

Minimizing Recurring Costs

14:53 Emily: So, let’s talk about the budget that you’ve had during graduate school, and later on we’ll discuss what you’ve, you know, decided to put those savings towards. But in terms of living expenses, what have those been aside from the rent, which we’ve discussed?

15:06 Michael: Yeah, so my philosophy on living expenses was to really take a hard look at everything that I was spending money on and asking, is this absolutely necessary? Do I really need this recurring cost? And I’ll be clear, I’m trying to minimize all of my recurring costs, like rent, like insurances, like cell phone bills, all these things that you have no choice. They get billed to you every month and you have to pay them, right? If you minimize those and you can save a lot of money, then you can choose to buy things when you want them, right? Like one-time payments for an object that will bring you lots of joy in my mind was better than subscribing to things over and over. And then, you know, wasting my salary because that, like I said, that was my only leverage is building up that savings.

15:53 Michael: So, my rent, I’m going to give you some numbers here annually, but my rent equates to about $7,200 annually. So for 12 months, I decided that, you know, in California you absolutely need a car. So I had a hand-me-down little car but it needs insurance, and that’s a recurring cost. So, even if my car is parked, it still costs me insurance. That was around $348 per year. And that’s another thing, a lot of people pay way too much for car insurance. Call the competitors and haggle. Say, Hey, I’ll switch to your company if you beat this price by 50 bucks. And when they do, call up the other competitors, like six companies. Just keep doing that until you drive the cost down.

16:34 Emily: I do have to say I’m very impressed by that number. Because I hear other people talk about their expenses for car insurance but I’m assuming you have a car that doesn’t have much value, right? And that mostly you have liability insurance is mostly what it’s there for.

16:48 Michael: Exactly. It’s just liability. A car is a tool. It shouldn’t, I’m sorry, this is my opinion, it should not be your pride and joy. That’s silly. It’s a trap. It’s a financial trap. If you’ve got a new car, sell it. Go buy a junker. Anyone giving financial advice would tell you that. Buy a junker, drive it until it explodes, fix it, and keep driving it. So here we are, rent $7,200 car insurance, $348 a year. My cell phone bill, I prepaid a whole year with Mint Mobile. They were doing this promotional. $109 for the whole year. And that’s for a four gigabyte plan, unlimited talk and text. The car needs a smog check in California, it’s $36 every year. Can’t get around that. It also needs to be registered, $128 a year. So right there, those are like my basics. Living and transportation. Mind you, I don’t have to put fuel in my car.

Retirement Saving and Discretionary Spending

17:36 Michael: So that’s not non-discretionary, that’s definitely discretionary. And then one thing that I put in my budget that I was not going to skip on was maximizing my Roth IRA. Now that’s a retirement account, it’s tax leverage. So you put money in that account that you’ve already paid taxes on and it grows tax-free and you can withdraw it under certain circumstances. But typically when you’re about to retire. So I max that out, it was $5,500 and it’s grown to $6,500 now. They might even change it this year or next year to compensate for inflation. So, when you add all those up, my non-discretionary spending, things I have no choice to pay. It’s $14,321 per year as you know, the criteria there. So my gross income is $30,000. You subtract those two and I now have a discretionary spending of $15,679.

18:31 Michael: So now, what do I choose to spend my money on? How am I going to live my life, live a fulfilled life, travel, see the world, be happy on $15,679? Well one, I buy California state park pass. So, that’s $200 a year and that gives me free parking to any of the state parks. So, I live six miles from a beach and that’s my go-to place. That’s my happy spot. I also bought some, well I’ll talk about that later, but groceries is a big one. I’ve got this supermarket called wholesome choice. I mostly eat vegetables, really healthy food. It’s $35 a week. So, that equates to $1,680 a year. I choose to have beer. I like my beer money. So, you know, having two or three beers a week, that’s, you know, at the grocery store. So, it’s six bucks a week. That equates to $288 a year.

19:25 Michael: Gasoline, let’s say $60 a month to go travel, see things that really opens up your horizons. That’s $720 a year. And then finally the National Parks Pass, which is a hundred dollars a year. And that, you know, just opens your world, right? And then California, we have so many national parks. That was, you know, hands down worth it. A hundred dollars a year. So now, add up my discretionary spending, that’s $2,983. Subtract that from my discretionary spending, and I’m left with what is my saving ability. So, I’m able to save $12,696 every year if I stick to this or roughly these numbers. So, that’s about a thousand dollars a month. So, multiply that for 12 months over the course of a PhD, five years, that’s $63,480. That’s not accounting for, if this money is in a savings account or invested in the stock market growing with the market, it’s actually more than that. It turns out to be like 70, 75,000 over that five-year span. So, that was the math I did. You know, if I can be happy putting gas in my car, going, seeing national parks, doing natural things, I don’t have to spend money on movie tickets or these other things or buying clothes or whatever, right? Whatever brings people happiness. Mine was cheap quality, good happiness, and I’ve lived a very fulfilling life.

20:50 Emily: That does bring me back to kind of a note or a point or a question that I wanted to make regarding what you said earlier about, you know, like not getting trapped into like high rent or like high transportation costs in terms of what you’re calling your recurring expenses. The expenses that have to go out the door every single month. It sounds to me like you do not value those things. So, you are going to spend as little as you possibly can. And thankfully, you know, UCI has given you a good deal on housing and so forth. So, it’s not like you have to go to market rent and everything like that and compete in Irvine for that. But I just wanted to point out that other people can have a different opinion about this.

21:29 Emily: The listeners, for example, might not want to follow your example of spending the absolute minimum possible amount of money on things like housing or transportation. And that’s okay. It’s just that you have determined, what I think is really fantastic about this story is that you have been very clear about what is important to you and what is not. And minimizing the spending on what is not important to you. You know, you’ve been very intentional about that and I fully agree with, advocate for that strategy of decide what’s important, decide what’s not. Spend as little as you can on what’s not important so that, like you’re doing, you can free up money to spend on the things that are really adding value to your life. Like you mentioned the National Parks Pass and the state parks parking and all that sort of thing. The gas to get to these, you know, wonderful natural, beautiful places. You’ve decided that’s what you value. Now you’re, I don’t know if lucky’s the right word, but in your worldview it happens to be that those things are not that expensive, right? <Laugh> in the grand scheme of things. So adding a lot of value to your life for just a little bit more spending has really increased your quality of life dramatically.

22:33 Michael: Yeah, I think you nailed it. That’s a great summary of my perspective on this.

Commercial

22:39 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! We’re doing something special for Season 15 of this podcast, and as a loyal listener, I know you’re going to want to be involved. Season 15 will be a chance to share your financial experiences, even if you don’t want to give a full-episode interview or want to remain anonymous. We’re going to publish compilation episodes around certain themes, and each episode will feature at least a half-dozen different contributors. The contributions can be audio clips or written text that I will read aloud for the episode. If you are interested in contributing, check out PFforPhDs.com/season15/. That’s the digits 1 5. On that page, you’ll find a list of the proposed themes and how many volunteers I’ve identified for each episode. Your next step is to email me at emily@PFforPhDs.com to let me know which episode you’d like to contribute to or if you have another idea for the list. Once I’m confident that we have enough contributions for an episode to be created, I’ll give the volunteers specific prompts and directions to create their submissions. I hope you will choose to participate in this unique season! I can’t do it without you, so please get in touch! Now back to the interview.

Spearfishing

24:02 Emily: You brought up something else in our prep for this episode that I thought was really illustrative of your kind of philosophy around spending, which was spearfishing <laugh>. So, please tell me how spearfishing fits into your financial philosophy?

24:18 Michael: Okay, so I talked about how I minimized all of my recurring costs so that I have a lot of ability to save, and that allows me to make these one-time purchases that I put a lot of value on. Things that I only have to buy once. For instance, you know, a wetsuit. I still bought a pretty cheap wetsuit, so don’t think like spearfishing, super expensive, but you know, a spear gun, a wetsuit, gloves, it adds up. It’s maybe a four or $500 investment, which, you know, if you don’t have savings, it’s a lot of money. But because I had this, you know, money saving up as I’m watching it grow, I’m like, Hmm, yeah, I’ll take a little bit off the top and I’m going to buy this equipment. And it gave me hours and hours and hours of joy. I’ve just fallen in love with the ocean and I’m so fortunate that I got to go to school here.

25:04 Michael: I’ve never been an ocean person, but by going to the ocean, I fell in love. One day when this lady, she took her goggles and put it on a kid, her daughter shoved her head underwater and she’s giggling and screaming. And I went over, I was like, can I see what’s underwater? She put the goggles on me and I was hooked, instantly hooked. I wanted everything to do with underwater. So, spearfishing actually allows me to catch quality fish, be sustainable, and save a lot of money on groceries. Like I only buy fruits and veggies at the supermarket. Most of my protein comes from the ocean. And quality protein. Lobster season just opened up. It’s legal to catch lobsters here with your bare hands. So, I’ve had fantastic lobster dinners, lots of sea bass. I make ceviche, I jerky my fish. I mean, I have a really good quality of life from spearfishing. So, it brings me joy and it reduces my costs even further by providing me quality protein that I don’t have to spend money on, or at least the cost is very little.

26:03 Emily: Yeah, what a virtuous like cycle there that you have set up. Like something that you enjoy doing with your free time, brings you some, you know value to your mental health and so forth. And oh, what do you know? It also happens to help you reduce your expenses at the same time in terms of the grocery spending and, you know, the healthful diet and all that lovely stuff. So, I think the, maybe the broader lesson to take from that for the listeners is, maybe you won’t be able to find such a hobby that will actually help you reduce your expenses after, you know, an initial investment. But finding an inexpensive hobby that really brings a lot of value to your life is wonderful during grad school. Obviously, when you don’t have, have tons and tons of money to be having a very, very expensive hobby, it’s great to find things that are just low cost. Like I know for me during graduate school I went to Duke, so I got like really into Duke basketball and like, it’s free essentially to like watch a game with your friends, right? Like, and to have that be like your social activity. So yeah, I just love that point of finding these low cost activities that you just really, really enjoy.

Self-Sufficiency and Knowing What Makes You Happy

27:05 Emily: Is there anything else that you’d like to add regarding your expenses or how you find joy and happiness at this like, lower spending level?

27:16 Michael: There are two things I might want to talk about. So one is unexpected things happen, right? We own things that might break, like our cars or laptops, whatever. I’ve gotten very good out of necessity at fixing those things myself. So, if you think about, you know, the hourly cost to bring your car into the mechanics, it’s outrageous. If you have to do that very often, because you’re driving a junker like me, it actually defeats the purpose. So I’ve gotten phenomenally good at fixing my own car. And I’ll often try to purchase equipment that will allow me to fix the car multiple times. So that thing could break, like for example, I bought a welder from Harbor Freight for a hundred dollars because I had a hole in the exhaust of my old Subaru that rusted all the pieces. So when I got a quote from a welder, it was $150 to fix it.

28:09 Michael: And I thought, well I could buy this welder for a hundred and fix it two or three more times because another hole’s going to show up. So, it’s that kind of mentality of like, I’m going to do it myself. I’m going to fix these things, I’m going to drive the cost as low as possible. And you know, for some people it might just seem like work, but you end up learning so much in the process. Like, I can fix anything now and it’s great. I mean, even like in my next steps in life, it comes in really handy to achieve those dreams because I know how to fix things and I’m good at it. So, and another thing that I would like to drive home is like when you’re trying to find these cheap hobbies, it can be hard because we live in such an environment where we’re being advertised to all the time or we compare ourselves with other people. Try and declutter everything and, and ask yourself what really makes me happy? For me it’s nature. I love nature. And the beauty is nature’s free, right? You can just walk outside, go to a park, and yeah, when you get in tune with the things that really, really make you happy and you pull back away everything that’s clouding that, not only does it make for a much more fulfilling life, but you can save a lot of money too.

29:19 Emily: Do you think that you would have gone on that same kind of journey of understanding yourself and what makes you happy had you not had the financial constraints of the stipend slash wanting to save as much as possible? Like if you had gone a different route and not gone to graduate school, had a different kind of job, do you think you would’ve ended up in the same place?

29:41 Michael: Probably not. I think another beauty of grad school is it gives you a five-year span where you can think about things, right? It’s kind of our job is to, well the Ph in the PhD is philosophical, right? So, we have this time to think. I think, I can’t quite say if things would’ve panned out the same way if for instance, I had declined UCI and gone to Chapel Hill. My life would’ve been totally different. I probably wouldn’t have discovered the ocean. I might not have had a reason to save so aggressively my stipend, who knows, right? But all I can say is that, the way it happened, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been a fantastic experience.

Sailboat and Seabattical

30:24 Emily: I think the listeners don’t yet fully appreciate how fantastically you are setting yourself up. Because we talked about, you even talked about Roth IRA contributions as like a recurring thing that you have to do, but you’re saving on top of that around $12,000 per year. You have that opportunity to save around $12,000 per year. So, the big reveal, what are you doing with that money <laugh>?

30:50 Michael: Right. So, to everyone that pulled out their calculators and was adding up all my expenses you know, five years of saving a grand a month, that adds up to, you know, over $60,000. I’ve purchased a sailboat here in Southern California. And more importantly, sailboats actually are kind of cheap. I bought the parking space for the sailboat that was twice as much as the boat. So, it’s called a mooring system. It’s lead weights at the bottom of the harbor, and you get to park your boat on it, and it’s kind of like a lease. So, when you buy that, you buy the rights to use that indefinitely, so long as you pay a small tax. So, that’s what I’ve done with my stipend. I’ve saved up all this money. I’ve bought the mooring and the sailboat. And my view for it in the future is, you know, it’s a little place that I can call home.

31:40 Michael: I’ll always have a place to come back to in California, wherever my life might take me. And you can actually live on them for very cheap. Now, some people have all the amenities of a house on a boat and then you completely skip rent. So, in a future where perhaps I get a job somewhere here in southern California, I have a place where I could live virtually for free and that will allow me to save, repeat this process and save even more, earning six figures. And then, you know, together with Sam, we both are like-minded. We can do whatever we want. We’ll be financially free. We can take whatever job we want because we don’t have to have a job. We’ve saved up enough money and we could do this in a relatively short time-scale.

32:22 Emily: You are the first person I’ve interviewed who has purchased a boat during graduate school. And as you said, not even just the boat, but the place to house the boat even more important. Incredible.

32:33 Michael: Thank you.

32:34 Emily: Why are you living in your campus arrangement right now? Is the boat that you have right now not suitable for living in full-time?

32:41 Michael: Yeah, it’s not suitable right now. I need to do some work on the plumbing for the sewage. Now, trying to juggle a PhD and working on a boat that’s floating in the middle of the harbor is kind of difficult. So, I’ve prioritized my education right now. But also, if you look at the house around me, this is a really nice deal. It’s beautiful. I call this place home and it’s lovely. I wouldn’t want to get rid of it. So, the rent, even though I could cut that and live on the boat cheaper, the joy that this apartment brings Samantha and I for the cost is worth it. So, we’re going to stick with this until I can no longer live here when I graduate.

33:21 Emily: And so, I see how now, you know, the skills that you mentioned developing from working on your car, I’m assuming some of those are at least the same learning mindset is translating to being able to fix up the boat and maintain the boat and and so forth. So like you found a new way to apply the skills that you were trying out and practicing on maybe a lower stakes endeavor with the car?

33:42 Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Anyone that knows someone that owns a boat, they are financial nightmares unless you do the work yourself, in which case they’re a time commitment. But it’s kind of what I’m going for here. I want to have the ability to slow down and take life at a slower pace. And that means that I do the work myself on the boat, even if it takes me a little bit longer. And I’m planning as soon as I graduate to spend a whole year on the boat traveling around the world with Sam before we go into our next endeavor. You could call it a “seabbatical”. And in that time, you know, I really want to slow down, kind of refind myself again before I just jump into the next opportunity and, you know, spend the rest of my life in a career. I really want to make sure that I get that time for myself. And slowing down learning how to fix things yourself on a boat, it’s a good way to make that dream happen on a budget.

34:36 Emily: I am so amazed by this, this idea of doing the seabbatical after you finish. Now, you’re a fifth-year, so this is in the relatively near future, right? Can you tell me what the plans are for finishing up your PhD, for doing the seabbatical, for, you know, what you’ll do after that for your next job?

34:53 Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m quite, I’m right in between opportunities here. I’m trying to finish up my thesis work and get that published and submit my thesis and defend. I’m trying to do that in the next, let’s see, we’re in November. I’m trying to do that in the next three months, and then be graduated sometime in January. And I’ve already written a grant that will fund my postdoc at a National Laboratory. So, that money is already, you know, in my hands at the National Lab. So, I’ve got a guaranteed postdoc after the seabbatical. So the idea is graduate, take the boat down to Baja, explore Baja, California, cross the Pacific either to Hawaii or straight to French Polynesia. And it’s my lifelong dream. I want to see the Pacific atolls. There are these beautiful rings of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That’s my dream. If I see that in this upcoming seabbatical you know, I’ve made it, you know. Anything else can come and I’ll happily go and join a national lab and do work there and produce science.

35:57 Emily: I love the strategy of securing the funding before, like knowing really what that next step is going to be. Because it’s a little bit of a risk, and especially I think with academia type stuff. People say, oh, you know, you take a break, you get out, you can never come back and so forth. But I really like this that you have the money, which is kind of the most important part. Having that established so that you know, you have a place to land when you’re done with this lovely break. And I’m so excited for that. And I definitely want you and or Sam, both of you to come back on the podcast after you’ve taken this year break and tell me, you know, all the shifted, you know, perspectives that you have. Maybe your life won’t even be going in the same direction that you thought at that point. That would be wonderful.

National Laboratory Postdoc Funding

36:37 Emily: But I want a little bit more detail now, if you don’t mind. I understand you’re already working with this National Lab that you had then, you know, applied for the grant for and so forth where you’ll do your postdoc. So, can you talk about that like relationship between, you know, yourself and your current advisor, your current program, and that National Lab?

36:55 Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when you join grad school, they tell you that you’re guaranteed a stipend, right? $30,000 in my case. What they don’t tell you is what you have to do to earn that $30,000. Most people find out kind of the rather harsh way that they need to be a teaching assistant their entire PhD. Or some people write NSF grants and they get a fellowship which funds them. My case was neither. My case was, you know, a fellowship that came from Los Alamos National Laboratory. They were looking for a person that had my skillset. And my advisor at Los Alamos, my current advisor now at Los Alamos, reached out to my advisor at UCI looking for this type of individual that I kind of fit the bill. And that was that they already had built up a relationship in the past.

37:38 Michael: And, you know, that’s kind of how the world works. You call up, do you know anyone that’s good at this? And yeah, I do, here. So, that’s how I got selected for this. But that didn’t quite solve my financial problems once that connection was made. Just because I was the person for the project didn’t mean the money was there yet. So, we went through multiple rounds of applying for grants to fund me in this new endeavor, this partnership collaboration between UCI and Los Alamos. And it took us three years to actually get the funding. And then finally it came through internally from Los Alamos. My advisor at Los Alamos kind of pulled through and got that funding. And it was meant to be more of like a summer internship funding. But the way that we’ve structured it is we’ve kind of spread that money out over the whole year.

38:22 Michael: And then we, it’s not enough to fund me for the whole year. So then we have to supplement it with additional funding that my advisor from Los Alamos is able to get internally there at Los Alamos. And it’s kind of the first of its kind, but there are going to be many more of these types of fellowships. So kind of like a plug to anyone that’s in the southern UC school systems. It might not be known, but the UC system is actually a third owner or administrator of the National Laboratory. So, they’re trying to build a pipeline of students from the southern UC, you know, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Irvine to go to Los Alamos because all of the Northern UC system schools already have that pathway to the National Labs in Berkeley. So Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia, they already have that pathway. So, their students kind of go there. And so they’re looking to build that. So, there are actually going to be more opportunities like the one I have for students in the Southern UC school system.

39:20 Emily: Yeah. And so the way that I understand this is structured is you are an employee of the National Lab, but since you’re still a student, your education expenses are still outstanding. And your department, your program has agreed to pay those on your behalf, even though you’re not, you know, a teaching assistant or you don’t have a fellowship that’s being administered by the university, they’re still covering that part of things.

39:43 Michael: Yeah, that’s correct. It’s kind of messy, right? Because once you get external funding, the school doesn’t get its cut and then it requires you to pay for tuition. But in the way that this is, because there is this unique kind of like part-ownership of the UC systems with the National Labs, they’re trying to make this work, right? They’re trying to get students from the UC systems into the National Labs. And so, you know, some kind of conversation had to occur between Los Alamos National Lab and my department where my department agreed to pick up my tuition costs.

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

40:19 Emily: I’m so glad we got that into the interview because it’s a structure that I had not heard before. So, it’s really just interesting and good to hear that there are creative solutions to how graduate students can be funded in various ways. And thanks for letting the other, you know, UC students know about this upcoming pipeline. Surprise second-to-last question, Michael. There are some ways that you’ve been answering questions in this interview that indicate to me that you might be part of the financial independence movement. Is that the case?

40:51 Michael: I mean that’s the dream. Yeah. FIRE, right? Financial independence, retire early. And I think it’s funny because a lot of people have a negative connotation with the word retire, but it’s focused more on the financial independence, right? If you have saved enough money, built enough wealth, created passive income streams to the point where you don’t have to take a job, it means you can work on whatever you dream, whatever you wish. And because we’re humans, we’re always evolving. What we picked to do in school might not be the thing we want to do for the rest of our lives. So, having that ability to say no to that job, say no to maybe perhaps corporate America or something and say yes to entrepreneurship or whatever floats your boat, right? That’s the beauty. So that’s what Samantha and I are both trying to achieve together is that financial independence so that we can dedicate our lives to whatever we want, whatever we think has value, not necessarily the big corporate, you know, pharma company or this or that, whatever pays the bills.

41:46 Emily: Do you see this pursuit of financial independence as enabling you to continue to do science in the way that you want to? Or are you thinking of it as a way of stepping away from that vocation entirely when it might, you know, please you to do so?

42:01 Michael: Hmm. Both <laugh>. Yeah. To do science, it’s a very costly endeavor, and it’s really funny the way that we structure, you know, professorships. You get paid to teach, you don’t really get paid to do the science. You need to get that grant money kind of independently from your position as a professor. So it’s kind of like, they hire you for one thing but expect you to do the other. If you have the financial independence, you can do whatever you want. You can do research, maybe you go and pursue opportunities in science that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Like perhaps joining an antarctic exploration boat or something like that, right? It means you have the flexibility to pursue what you want. That might be continuing science, that might be doing something entrepreneurial, but it’s nice to have the flexibility and the financial security, or at least striving towards the financial security, to do whatever I might please in the future.

42:59 Emily: I’m so glad we got to this point of understanding this even bigger picture. Because we’ve been talking about, you know, the expenses during grad school, the savings, saving up for the seabbatical and everything, which is not full early retirement, but it’s certainly a mini-retirement as it’s called within the FIRE community. I’m glad to see that this is a vision that you see playing out over your entire lifetime. Not something you’re doing, you know, temporarily just during grad school, just for whatever reasons. You’re going to be sort of fluidly moving in and out of different employment opportunities and maybe some other sabbaticals or mini-retirements and maybe other, you know, unusual work arrangements and so forth because you’ve already started to build up this financial capital. Even though you’re not fully FI at this point, you have enough financial wherewithal to have a lot of control over how you spend your time and everything.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

43:51 Emily: And so, I’m just so pleased that we can see how, you know, that started with the seed of an idea at the beginning of graduate school and how it’s going to be blossoming over the coming years and over the coming decades. So, so glad that we got to this point in this interview that we could understand that. The question that I ask all of my guests at the end of interviews is, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? That could be something that we’ve touched upon already or it could be something completely new.

44:18 Michael: Hmm, that’s good. I’m going to try and answer this as best I can. Because as we’ve established, I’m kind of an exception to this, right? So my advice might be a little bit extreme for others, but I would advise to those whoever may resonate with my story, minimize your recurring costs, advocate for yourself, whether that’s, like you pointed out, the necessity for a certain accommodation at the university. You can also advocate for a higher stipend for yourself at the university. Most people don’t know that. So, minimize recurring costs. Advocate for yourself. Those are my two big ones.

45:00 Emily: I love that. That’s sort of how I see my, you know, even business going forward of like advocacy and also doing really well with what you have, such as by minimizing those not important to you, recurring expenses. And Michael, where can people find you if they want to reach out?

45:17 Michael: Yeah, so if you want to follow me, my sailing adventures are all published on YouTube under my channel Sailing Ambrosia. So if you want to, you know, unplug and unwind, you can follow me there on YouTube.

45:30 Emily: Michael, this has been such a fascinating interview. I’m so glad that Sam recommended you. And thank you so much for taking the time to give it!

45:37 Michael: It’s been my pleasure. I really hope that someone out there resonates with this story and perhaps I’ve enlightened someone to follow in my footsteps.

Outtro

45:49 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

Budgeting for the First Year of Grad School Even with Financial Anxiety

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In this episode, Emily interviews Georga-Kay Whyte, a first-year graduate student in history at Brown. Georga-Kay is a first-generation college student from Jamaica who grew up with financial insecurity, which spurred her to set a high bar for the financial support she expected from her graduate program. Georga-Kay was just as forward-thinking as she evaluated her housing and transportation options for her first year at Brown to set them at a reasonable level for her stipend. However, once she started living the grad student life, she realized she was overspending, especially on groceries and Amazon. She shares how she worked through her financial anxiety to confront her spending and start to budget. Finally, Georga-Kay details her financial goals for her 20% savings rate going forward. This episode is a must-listen for anyone with an upcoming career transition or move, especially if it’s your first!

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Image for S14E8: Budgeting for the First Year of Grad School Even with Financial Anxiety

Teaser

00:00 Georga-Kay: There’s so much like financial literacy that we don’t have as graduate students because it isn’t prioritized. And so, the best way to sort of break that barrier is to talk to other people who are in similar situations. And that’s how it’s helped me to approach a lot of the things that I do now and how I think about creating a budget or how I think about my lifestyle. So, I highly recommend just reaching out to your community and starting those conversations. It helps a lot.

Introduction

00:31 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 14, Episode 8, and today my guest is Georga-Kay Whyte, a first-year graduate student in history at Brown. Georga-Kay is a first-generation college student from Jamaica who grew up with financial insecurity, which spurred her to set a high bar for the financial support she expected from her graduate program. Georga-Kay was just as forward-thinking as she evaluated her housing and transportation options for her first year at Brown to set them at a reasonable level for her stipend.

01:28 Emily: However, once she started living the grad student life, she realized she was overspending, especially on groceries and Amazon. She shares how she worked through her financial anxiety to confront her spending and start to budget. Finally, Georga-Kay details her financial goals for her 20% savings rate going forward. This episode is a must-listen for anyone with an upcoming career transition or move, especially if it’s your first! If you’re listening to this episode the day it’s released, you know that tomorrow is the filing and payment deadline for your 2022 tax return as well as the payment deadline for your quarter 1 2023 estimated tax. If you haven’t yet cracked the code for your grad student or postdoc taxes, there’s still time to receive my help! Go to PFforPhDs.com/tax/ and sign up straight away for the appropriate workshop for you. The workshops are asynchronous, so upon registration you’ll have immediate access to all the video modules with transcripts, worksheets and/or spreadsheets, and recordings of previous Q&A calls. Best of luck finishing up! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s14e8/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Georga-Kay Whyte.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:04 Emily: I’m so excited to have on the podcast with me today, Georga-Kay Whyte. She’s a first-year graduate student at Brown, and our subject today is budgeting and what she’s learned as a first-year graduate student about that topic. So Georga-Kay, would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

03:20 Georga-Kay: Yes! First, thank you for having me. My name’s Georga-Kay, I’m a first-year history PhD student at Brown University. I study 20th century African American labor history and I’m actually first-gen Jamaican. My parents are immigrants. We all migrated to the U.S. And so, I sort of like had to figure out not only personal finances in terms of like living in a new country but also personal finances because like I didn’t grow up with a lot of personal finance talk in my family. So yeah, that’s just like my background.

03:51 Emily: Okay, so you get the multiple first-gen labels, right? Like you get first-generation American, I don’t know about first-generation college, necessarily.

03:58 Georga-Kay: I am first-gen in college as well. <Laugh>, first-gen graduate student, first-gen everything.

04:02 Emily: First-gen grad student, we got it all. Okay, that’s wonderful! And what age did you come to the U.S.?

04:08 Georga-Kay: I came to the U.S. actually right before I turned 18. So, I was pretty, yeah I was, I was much older.

04:13 Emily: Very new.

04:14 Georga-Kay: Very new to the U.S., yes.

04:16 Emily: Yes. And where did you go to college?

04:18 Georga-Kay: I went to college at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. It’s a small women’s liberal arts school.

Money Mindset at the Start of Grad School

04:24 Emily: Yeah. Okay. So, wow. Okay, this first question that we have, what was the state of your finances and your financial background and money mindset coming into graduate school? So really we’re talking about what you grew up with in Jamaica, and then also just that short time you had in college. Yeah. So what was going on both in your finances and your like money mindset by the time you entered graduate school?

04:47 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so I grew up, I would say like relatively low income. In Jamaica, like I would be considered mostly like middle-class but in the larger scheme of things I grew up with a lot of financial insecurities. So, I had like an anxious sort of relationship with money from like childhood. And so, once I was coming into grad school I was super anxious about it because I had just started like looking online and seeing like the discourse around grad school and grad students being like they’re underpaid and they’re not like happy with their financial situation. And coming from someone who’s first-generation, I didn’t have a lot of financial safety nets. Like I just know that if anything, I’d have to figure it out on my own. And so yeah, definitely once I was like deciding to go to graduate school, this was before I found out about like what schools I’d be going to when I was thinking about like applying, I was like, “Oh my god, is this going to be the worst financial decision of my life to do this right at this time?” Because I came straight from undergrad, so I didn’t have a lot of time to like build up savings and stuff like that. But I really knew that I was passionate about the topic so I was like, I’m going to do this, hopefully it works out. Hopefully I can get a stipend that’s like livable. And that was my number one concern. I wanted a stipend that I wouldn’t be in a financially precarious situation just because I’ve already experienced so much like financial turbulence that I wanted some sort of safety net.

Role of Finances in School Selection

06:04 Emily: Absolutely. That makes so much sense. So, I want to talk a little bit more about maybe application and admissions process. You, I mean as anyone would be, were very nervous seeing the discourse currently going on, rightly so, about how difficult graduate school is financially. And all the unionization movements and so forth. So like, tell me about like the schools that you chose to apply to, were finances on your mind? Let’s talk about that. Like the selection process of where to apply.

06:31 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so I was super selective about the schools that I applied to, and I sort of feel like I was really naive in a way, but it worked out right <laugh>? I was like I’m going to apply to mostly private schools because they tend to have higher stipends, unfortunately. I started looking, I actually used, I forget what the platform is called, but they publish stipends for students. I think you might know what it’s called.

07:01 Emily: Is it PhDstipends.com?

07:03 Georga-Kay: Yes. Is that a website that you run?

07:05 Emily: That’s mine, yeah.

07:06 Georga-Kay: Yes. Okay, okay. Yes. So, thank you for that because I actually used that website a lot. So I looked at the PhD Stipends and I was really serious about, “Okay like is this a stipend that’s livable?” And then I would go ahead and like look at the livability calculator to see like, “Okay, is this going to work?” And I ruthlessly took schools off my list if they weren’t in that like situation of like they had a decent stipend for the area. So even if the stipend on its face was like, you know, almost $40K and the livability like it’s in New York, it’s like okay that’s still not going to work. So I was very serious about that, and I ended up applying to nine programs. And those nine programs I felt like had really strong stipends and they had other benefits like health insurance and stuff like that that I was looking at, too.

07:52 Emily: So, you’re the first I think interviewee I’ve had on the podcast who answered that question in that way. Because a lot of people I talk to, of course by the time they get into admission season they’re thinking about the financial offers and so forth. But to back that up into application season, I mean this is actually what I teach in my workshop for prospective graduate students: Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School, is it starts way back the summer before you apply even earlier than that, understanding the funding models, just like, I mean you said you were naive, but that is a very advanced strategy that you’re applying. So that’s awesome. Yeah to really think through like why bother applying to a place that you are pretty confident already is not going to support you sufficiently? And so to just, if you have programs that you know, make your list, that’s great. You don’t need to bother with the other ones who aren’t. If this is a priority for you, which it was for you. It’s not necessarily going to be a priority for everybody, but for you it was. So, I love that process.

08:48 Georga-Kay: It was really just my financial situation, like coming in with so much student loans. Like I felt a lot of guilt over the amount of student loans I had, and I knew I didn’t want to get any more student loans in graduate school. And so I was like, I need to find a situation that’s going to work out. And the reason why I say naive, just because talking to people about like the admissions chances in graduate school. So I was like, okay, I’m going to be selective but these schools are going to have higher competition. Because they do like, they have high stipends and people know about them and stuff like that. So that’s why I was like, okay, well hopefully I get it <laugh>, you know?

Considering Other Factors

09:19 Emily: Yeah. But applying to nine schools, that’s a pretty good number. I think that’ll give you a lot of chance. Anyway, it has worked out. So let’s talk about admission season. I don’t know how much you want to share about how many offers you got, but like, you know, did your expectations bear out? And the offers that you did get, yes, they were decent stipends? And then maybe you could share how much more finances, if at all, played in the decision of where to go or if you’d already done that filter early on, maybe it didn’t really have to.

09:46 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so I got three admissions out of the nine that I applied to. I got admitted to Penn, Brown, and Maryland. University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and University of Maryland. And those offers were pretty good offers honestly. Especially looking at like the averages for stipends. So, I got $38,000 from Penn and then I got $45 from Brown. And I think Maryland offered like $32. I don’t remember specifically, because I knew almost immediately that Maryland had the lowest stipend. So I was just mainly considering Penn and Brown. And yeah, those were like comparable in some sense. Obviously like there’s still a discrepancy there between the amount that I got from Penn and the amount I got from Brown. It was actually a hard decision for me because the programs were both equally great, but then also the cost of living was relative. And I knew that like if I wanted to, I could have probably negotiated with Penn, which I didn’t end up doing, but I definitely still considered finances when I was thinking about it. But it was like close enough where I felt like, “Okay, well what else do I want from graduate school?”

10:51 Emily: Based on how you’ve talked about your thought process so far, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but were you only considering your first-year stipend and like the source of the funding? Or were you also looking forward to like, were you being funded for five years or were there guarantees or you know, was it a TAship versus a fellowship? Like did you factor all that stuff into?

11:12 Georga-Kay: I factored everything in. When I got my offers, I reached out to the like DGAs of each department and I was like, okay, explain to me how this works <laugh>? I was just like, I wanted all my bases covered. So I talked to both schools and I was like reading through the offers and sort of seeing, okay, like first year, they were very similar. So it was like first year would be fellowship and then you would TA for some years and then you’d go back on fellowship. And both schools offered like five to six years of funding. Brown guaranteed six years, Penn basically they’re like, you basically will get six years but we’re guaranteeing five. And so, I knew that like throughout the program I would be funded for the entirety of it.

11:53 Emily: I’m so glad that you shared that as well. This is another thing that I encourage in my workshop is following up with the directors of graduate studies or maybe the admin in the department to like explain to you anything that’s not really clear, or maybe they’re only talking about the first year but they’re not talking about subsequent years. Like they’re recruiting you, okay? They want to convince you to make good on that offer that they just made you and convince you to come there. And so they should have pretty solid answers to these questions. And they might say, like Penn did, “Okay, you know, we’re not officially going to guarantee that sixth year, but you know, in nine cases out of 10, like we do find funding for you know, that sixth year or whatever.” Like they should be able to give you those really well-thought-out answers to those questions. So I’m so glad that you went through that process as well of really investigating.

Financial Expectations in Grad School

12:35 Emily: And you chose Brown, and that’s where you are now. So, let’s kind of talk I guess about now that you knew the stipend, you knew that maybe had some degree of confidence that the precarity was not going to be as much of an issue for you. What were your expectations then about how your finances would look in graduate school once you had that offer in hand?

12:56 Georga-Kay: Yeah, once I had the offer, I sort of felt a lot more secure just because like I feel like $45,000 is like a relatively, it’s not like anything crazy, but it’s average enough where it’s like, okay, in Providence I could live on that. And I think I could save on that, which was like a big deal because I know that like a lot of times in graduate school people talk about not even being able to save. And I wanted to be able to save and like achieve other financial goals. So, once I got that offer in hand, I started to think about, okay, well now what do I want to do? Like I know I’m going to make this much money. How much do I want to spend on rent? Do I want to keep like my costs low? You know, how much am I willing to compromise for the next few years–because I’m in my early twenties–to sort of set myself up for a good financial foundation?

13:39 Georga-Kay: And so those were just sort of all the questions that I had in my head. And then also, I started to think about like the realities of graduate school and what in cost that would incur as well. So, I like when I was going through my stipend and sort of backtracking a little bit, going through my offer, I would see that, oh I had like research funds and these funds, but I didn’t know until I sat down with the DGS and asked about it. I was like, “Is this money that would be like deposited into my account?” And they’re like, “No, it’s reimbursements.” And I was like, “Oh okay.” So then I had to learn about this whole reimbursement thing. So I was like, I have to actually have to have a safety net, like some sort of savings because if I want to pay for something I have to pay for it first before I get the money back. And so I started to think about that and just, yeah, just a lot of wheels turning now that I know that okay this is how much I’m going to make, how can I make this work in order to like pay for my day-to-day living expenses?

Housing and Rent

14:29 Emily: And one other thing, again, I’m talking about this workshop so much because this is the process you just went through. One other thing I talk about in this workshop is about the big decisions you need to make in your budget that happen probably before you even arrive at graduate school, right? You mentioned housing, so like did you commit to a lease for example, in advance of moving? Or is that something you were able to arrange once you got there? It’s very different, you know, different housing markets.

14:50 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so housing for me was one of the biggest things that I thought about because it was going to be my first time paying rent because I came from undergrad where I was like paying tuition and that would like cover, you know, my expenses. So, I wasn’t paying anything monthly. So moving to Providence and then also having to pay for moving expenses. I knew that like housing was going to be a big deal and I knew that it would probably be my biggest expense. And I had to make a decision about whether I wanted to live with roommates or I wanted to live alone and what does that mean? So I decided to live alone. I’m currently in graduate housing and the housing is somewhat subsidized. I don’t know if they say it’s subsidized on their website, but it’s like a lower cost of living apartment than I typically would be able to find in Providence, essentially.

15:32 Georga-Kay: And that was great. I started that <laugh>, luckily I started the process early so I was able to sort of like compare housing situations. I looked at the average cost if I wanted to live with a roommate in a house or if I wanted to live in a studio. I currently live in a studio and my rent is like, I feel like it’s on the high end of what I would want to spend, but I knew that I would appreciate that more having that sense of like security and that sense of not having to worry about if I have a roommate that maybe I don’t mesh with or you know, like there’s things that you have to think about lifestyle stuff. So I was like, okay, I know that I’m willing to pay a little bit more to live alone and keep my other costs low.

16:10 Emily: What I love about this model, I mean you’ve listened to the podcast, you know, I’m always like roommates, roommates, good idea. But what you did was you worked with your numbers and you knew that it was feasible, especially making that you know, decision to go with the on-campus option and so forth. I’m curious now we’re recording this in March, 2023, if you’ve already made a decision for housing next year? Or like are you going to keep the same situation? Do you think you’re going to do something different?

16:34 Georga-Kay: Yeah so I’m definitely, unfortunately the housing at Brown, they only guarantee it for two years. So I’m going to keep those two years. So I’m going to keep going until next year because I really love the area that I live in. I love my apartment, and so I feel like I really lucked out with housing. So, I’ll keep it and I probably will have to move after my second year since it’s not guaranteed and that it’s a really high interest area. Like a lot of students want to live here. So, I feel like after the second year I’ll be more comfortable in the area I can find somewhere else.

17:02 Emily: Yeah, and you might have met someone you really like enough to live with <laugh>.

17:06 Georga-Kay: That is true.

17:07 Emily: So, a roommate might be more feasible.

17:08 Georga-Kay: I’ve also considered that. Yes, I’ve thought about that too.

Transportation and Other Expenses

17:10 Emily: Yeah. So, we’ve already talked about kind of what I call the biggest rock in your budget, which is housing. And I’d like to know about your transportation choice. Like do you own a car or do you think it’s necessary? What is your choice there?

17:24 Georga-Kay: So, I decided to actually sell my car <laugh>. I sold my car before. When I was living in Atlanta, I bought a car used and it was a great car. It carried me to my like last two years of undergrad. But then I was like, I’m moving to the northeast. The transportation here seems a little bit easier. There’s a lot of public transit and there’s also trains and stuff. So, I talked to graduate students and they said that it would be fine to live without a car. So I was like, I’m going to use that money to move. And now I currently don’t have one and I rely on public transit, walking, and Brown has a university shuttle that’s actually really, really good and I’m able to basically spend like less than $50 a month on transportation costs.

18:06 Emily: Love that. Whenever it’s possible to live car-free, especially if when you’re pairing that with the campus housing, it’s like, I’m sure it’s really convenient and everything, you can just, not eliminate entirely, but dramatically reduce the costs associated with transit by getting rid of your car. Ugh, I have a car but I’m such a like anti-car person. <Laugh>, I live in Southern California.

18:26 Georga-Kay: No, I love living in a walkable city and that’s something I considered too. I was like, I wanted to, I knew that like if I’m going to be paying a little bit higher rent then at least if I don’t pay transportation, it kind of evens out.

18:37 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So, we’ve talked about these major, major components of your budget, the housing and the transportation. And so I’m curious like how you formulated the rest of your budget, maybe more with the other smaller fixed expenses and other variable expenses? And then kind of what you’ve learned through living with that budget for the last, you know, six, seven months?

18:55 Georga-Kay: Really the things that I thought about was rent and transportation and then the rest of it was just sort of like I was going to do trial and error. So I was like, I don’t know what’s a reasonable grocery bill? I don’t know how much I should expect to, you know, spend, I also have a pet. And so that’s also a part of my budget. So I was like, I don’t know how much I’m going to be spending for vet bills. And so, I really just was like, okay, like this is less than half of my, like my total living expenses is less than half of my stipend. And so I was like, whatever the rest is, I’ll play around with the numbers. So when I originally started, I realized I was overspending because I just sort of didn’t want to look at it to be honest.

19:32 Georga-Kay: I was like, I’m going to take care of the big stuff. And because of my financial anxiety, I sort of had a lot of avoidance about money, especially when I just moved because I was like, “Oh my god, like am I going to, you know, completely throw off my budget or something like that?” So I was like, okay, I have this wiggle room essentially and we’ll figure it out. And so I started just shopping without caring. And then once I started looking back at my budget, which is something that I’m really happy I did, I started actually looking at my money. I was like, oh, maybe I’m spending a little bit too much on groceries. Like, and talking to other graduate students as well. I’ll get to this later, but talking to other graduate students and realizing, oh this is like an average cost for, you know, a meal for a single person, like a grocery bill for a single person, or this is the average cost for electricity or something like that. So I at first was avoidant, but then I started slowly having those conversations, started slowly thinking about it and then I started actually setting price markers like, oh I want to spend $300 on groceries. Oh, I want to spend this much on electricity. And then actually going in and doing those numbers and keeping track of that.

20:38 Emily: I think this process that you’ve gone through is so relatable. Absolutely. You don’t know how much you’re going to be spending on all these little variable expenses that aren’t like a contract that you’re entering into.

20:48 Georga-Kay: Yes, <laugh>.

Financial Discussions with Other Grad Students

20:49 Emily: When you first get to a new city and you have a new lifestyle different than the one you had before. So it definitely makes sense to just kind of work it as you go. And really, I’m actually very impressed you’re talking about having financial anxiety around this just six months ago and six months later you’re coming on a financial podcast? Like that’s a lot of progress in a short period of time. So I’m very impressed. How did you start having these conversations with other graduate students? Like, did you just come out and say, what’d you spend on groceries last month? Or like, what was it?

21:15 Georga-Kay: No <laugh>, no it wasn’t like that. I feel like I just started getting closer to the people in my program, but also just to people that I’ve met through school. And I like to think I’m a pretty forthcoming person. So if like we’re talking and everyone’s like, how’s your week been? And it’s like, you know, if there’s something on my mind, especially now that I feel like I have a close relationship with some of the people in my program I’ll mention like, “Oh my god, like I feel like I’m overspending on groceries,” which is literally something I did. I was like, I feel like I’m overspending on groceries, but I don’t know. And then all of a sudden everyone starts chiming in, like, oh, I think I spend this much. And then we all start comparing. We’re like, oh. And so I sort of like, I guess instigated the conversation, but now I feel like there’s so much more financial transparency between us all, like within my history cohort and we’ll share things now where it’s like, okay, do you guys think this is a reasonable amount to spend for this or something? And yeah, so I just feel like luckily I’ve always been open to sharing and I feel like sharing invites other people to share.

22:09 Emily: Absolutely. What you did there was like, you were a little bit vulnerable, you said, oh I have a little weakness or like something I’m unsure about, can you help me?

22:19 Georga-Kay: Yes.

22:19 Emily: And you like invited that feedback. And that allows the other person to like be the expert for a second, because they’re the expert in their own budget, right?

22:25 Georga-Kay: Yeah.

22:25 Emily: So like then they can help you and everybody feels good about it and like, oh man, that’s a wonderful like sort of pattern that you have established. I think that’s going to help you so much throughout your time in graduate school. I remember for example, not necessarily about groceries, but like just asking other people how much they spend in rent. Like, oh I really like your place. Like do you mind me asking because this is what I spend and like how much do you have? And that was a way that I found like a really great deal on housing. My friend was like, you wouldn’t believe it. I only pay such and such for this great place. You know? And so just having that, those open conversations, I feel like it’s easier among people who are all paid the same <laugh>, which I suspect probably everyone in your cohort is more or less like being paid the same, at least at the moment, right?

23:05 Georga-Kay: Yeah, we’re all paid the same. I do have an additional fellowship just a little bit, but yeah, we’re relatively all on like similar pay scale. And I also with the rent thing, like that was also a thing that we talked about was like, okay, well this is how much I pay for rent. This is how much we all pay for rent. And having those conversations, like especially for someone I think because I’m first-gen and I’m also like the youngest in my program that I’m like the baby and I’m like, I want to ask because like you guys have had a few more years of like, people have been in master’s programs, so I know like I feel like accepting that like I’m still figuring it out and not having any sort of pride about it of being like, oh I’m not going to share because you know, maybe someone will judge me. Just being like, hey, like you know, I’m figuring out and you’ve had some experience like what is your take on this? As you said, like they’re the expert in their budget and so people like to help in that way.

Commercial

23:55 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! You’ve heard me mention several times during this interview how Georga-Kay perfectly lived out the principles and strategies I teach in my year-long asynchronous workshop, Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School. If you would like to take a deep dive with me into financial tutorials designed for prospective and rising graduate students, please check out PFforPhDs.com/setyourselfup/. The workshop modules that relate to the topics in this interview are:

  • Stipends vs. Cost of Living
  • Decipher and Compare Offer Letters
  • Right-Size Your Necessary Expenses
  • Prepare for Your Start-Up Expenses

To learn more about these modules and the structure of the workshop, visit PFforPhDs.com/setyourselfup/. I hope to see you inside the workshop and to help you set yourself up for financial success in graduate school the way Georga-Kay has! Now back to the interview.

Tracking and Budgeting

24:53 Emily: Okay, so you’re on the ground, you’re figuring things out, you’re using your cohort to kind of bounce ideas off of. I love that. Tell me about your actual practice of budging. Because you said at first you didn’t want to look at the numbers, but does that mean that you were actually tracking? Like there were numbers there that you were avoiding looking at? Like practically, what was happening with those numbers?

25:14 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so once I moved, I sort of had a little nest egg to move because I knew that I would need that money. Luckily, we did get a transitional amount. We got $2,200 so I knew I was going to get that as well. So I had like a number in my head, okay, this is how much I’ll need to move. And once I paid for my moving costs, there’s a lot of things I didn’t think about. So like how much furniture costs, buying a trashcan, buying a trashcan is so expensive. Like all of these little things I’ve never paid for before. And I quickly went over budget and had to put some of those things on a card. And that was the first time I’ve ever done that, which is like put expenses that I couldn’t afford on a card, and that gave me a lot of financial anxiety as well.

25:52 Georga-Kay: And so once I did that I was like, I don’t want to look at this, I don’t want to know how much I have to spend because some of this stuff was like necessary expenses and I knew that once I started getting like regular stipends I could like then start thinking about it more critically. But in the first like month or two I was just like, I knew I was spending and I knew I wasn’t overspending, but I was definitely spending very close to like the borders of my budget I guess. My budget being the amount that I know that I make per month, that’s sort of like what I had in my head is like this is how much you make, this is how much you have to spend on your actual, like as you said, like the things I have to spend like contractually.

26:30 Georga-Kay: But everything else I was like okay, I’m going to spend and hope I don’t go over. And so I wasn’t looking at it. I wasn’t looking at it. I was just spending and not looking. And then after I would say about October, I downloaded Rocket Money, which is this app, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but it’s just like, it’s sort of like a Mint. If anyone’s familiar with Mint and they do like roundups, essentially. They tell you this is how much you spent on restaurants, this is how much you spent on Ubers this month and whatever. And so that was my first step into like, okay, what am I actually spending per category here? And then I saw the numbers, I was like, oh God, you know? And once I saw those numbers and I didn’t have to do a lot for it, I feel like that also is like something I would recommend if you’re scared about it and you don’t want to actually sit down, like go line by line, having some sort of like app that does it for you. It’s just like all I had to do was open, put my bank account in, open it and then just be like, okay, what is here? And so I looked at it and I was like, this is how much I’m spending per category. And then I started to think about changes that I might want to make in the future.

Frugal Measures

27:30 Emily: Yeah. Can you give some examples of what those changes were having realized that you were, your spending was a little bit too high? Like what were some, I would probably call it frugality, but what were some frugal like measures you started taking?

27:42 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so the spending that I saw was like mainly Amazon, which is <laugh>. I feel like people can relate to that. I was overspending on Amazon because I was constantly being like, oh I need to get this for my apartment because I had just moved and I realized, oh I don’t have like you know, I really want a toaster or something like that. Things that I didn’t need in the moment. And so I was like spending this much on Amazon, but I was doing it like in singular expenses, so I was never tracking how much I was actually spending and I wasn’t thinking about the cash flow of like, maybe I should wait a week or two until I get my next stipend to pay for this as opposed to like buying everything at once. And so I was just like not paying attention to it.

28:20 Georga-Kay: So once I saw it I was like, oh, I’m spending like $500 on Amazon, that’s like so much money. And then I was like, okay, I need to plan out what are the essential things that I need right now for my apartment since I just moved. Everything else will have to wait. And then also I looked at groceries, which I’ve mentioned a few times before and I was like, oh, I’m spending this much on groceries. I was spending like over $350 on groceries and I’m a single person and I wasn’t even eating that much. And I was like, that seems like a lot of money to me. And so I asked people and people were like, oh, like I actually spend like $300 or a little bit less than that on groceries. And then I realized it was because I was shopping at the more expensive grocery store. And I didn’t know, because I didn’t like shop around. I was like, this is the closest grocery store to me, so that’s what I’m going to go to. But literally if I just went in a like one that’s like a little bit further away, I found cheaper groceries and so I was able to get the same amount of groceries for a little bit less. And so yeah, those were the things that I realized once I looked at the numbers.

29:13 Emily: This is so relatable to me personally. And also I think the audience generally just, yeah, it’s a transitional time when you’re starting grad school and you don’t know the place to shop yet. And you do need, well need is a relative word. You want to have some things for your new place. And so it sounds like it was a combination of like finding some more frugal tactics to apply, and then also just really the proactive aspect of budgeting. You know, you were doing the reactive, the retrospective aspect, which is like looking at where your money had gone. And then you started adding in the, okay, well I only have, you know, available this amount of money for you know, discretionary Amazon purchases so I’ve got to keep it to that limit and anything else will have to wait for the next pay cycle and you know, we refill the coffers. Is there anything else that you’d like to add about that practice of budgeting?

30:02 Georga-Kay: I would say once I started doing like the automated where it was like the app was tracking it for me, then I actually sat down and like made an actual budget. Like I was like okay, this is how much, not like what the thing is telling me that I should spend based on my previous expenses, but based on my goals, like my savings goals, how much should I reasonably spend? And then that actually made me cut back a little bit more because I was like, oh, if I want to save up an emergency fund, then I can’t be spending this much on you know, eating out or something.

Resources for Budgeting

30:31 Emily: Yeah, I want to get back to those financial goals in just a minute, but before we do, so you said that you had some resources that you’d like to share about, you know, how you’ve learned about budgeting, how you’re practicing budgeting. You mentioned, I’m going to say Rocket Mortgage, that’s like the ads that I hear for them, but Rocket Money, is that the name of the budgeting app?

30:49 Georga-Kay: Yes, Rocket Money is the one that I started with. I’ve actually, in college I tried to use Mint because everyone was like, oh, Mint is a great app and I think it is a great app, but I quickly realized the interface just wasn’t like super user-friendly to me it was just, it was a little bit clunky. So I stopped using that and mainly also because I was just scared to budget at that point as well. It’s taken me a while to get into proactively looking at my money. And so Rocket Money has helped me to do that because it’s been like a really simple interface and once I put in my stuff it just sort of gave me all the numbers that I wanted to look at. And I would say also a lot of personal finance podcasts, which obviously this one I listened to, which I think is really, really helpful because there are just some things as an academic that like other podcasts will be like, oh you need to focus on, you know, negotiating for a raise or things like that.

31:37 Georga-Kay: And it’s like, okay, that’s not super practical to the life I’m going to be living for the next few years. But in terms of podcasts, I love The Financial Confessions. I feel like it talks a lot about like the social life of money, like money with friends and money and relationships, which I think helps a lot. I also like the Her First $100K podcast, which is like, I feel like that’s a pretty popular one, but it’s like Women in Money and thinking about how we perceive money, which is a lot of these podcasts are actually thinking about like how we think about money, how we use money on a daily basis. And then books. I love books I feel like as academics, like of course like my first sort of introduction to finance was through books. So I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which is a very popular one.

32:19 Georga-Kay: But also Jen Sincero’s, How to Be a Badass With Money [You Are a Badass at Making Money]. I think that’s the title of the book.

32:26 Emily: Yeah, I’ve read that as well.

32:27 Georga-Kay: That one really, yeah, that one is really good. I know people have mixed opinions on it, but the reason why I personally enjoyed it is because it’s sort of like allowed me to think about the ways that I talk about money to myself in ways that I didn’t really think about before. Because as I mentioned a lot that I’ve had anxieties around money and so I would just sort of be like, oh, like in college, like I’m so broke or I’m so this and like a lot of negative money talk and I’ve stopped doing that and I think having done that for a few years now and sort of reframed the way that I think about myself and my relationship with money has allowed me to make these like larger steps towards being like more financially competent.

33:02 Emily: Yeah, I noticed in those books that you listed, there are a lot of money psychology, like aspects there. It’s not, and that’s the hard part, right? Like the hard part is not necessarily the math <laugh>, like it’s not like the addition, subtraction, multiplication. It’s not the facts of like, okay, do I have access to an IRA or not? I mean I talk about that because it’s a little wonky, but like once you know, you know. The psychology part of it is the one that you need to work on over a time and it’s like you’re never really done with it <laugh>. You’re always evolving to like a new level with it. So, I like that you mentioned those like for that reason specifically. Yeah, any other resources that you’d like to add to your list?

33:41 Georga-Kay: I would say, I don’t know if this really counts as a resource, but what I mentioned previously, which is talk to graduate students. Like talk to graduate students, preferably graduate students are in a similar department to you or in a similar field to you because then you can get like ideas about, you know, the decisions that you can make that might help you in the future. Like just like daily living expenses. As you said, like maybe talking to them about apartments you might find a great deal or something. So I found that actually some of the best like resources have been like the other students in my department and students at Brown.

34:14 Emily: What I love about that suggestion is just that you’re going to get the most relevant information from the other people who are living that similar life to you. Like for me, like I work on a national level, so I do not get to be an expert in every single different state in every single different city. And so, sometimes when I go to speak at certain universities, I ask the people who are living it, like for their suggestions, like I can say some things that work generally, but like they’re going to know like the exact, like you mentioned earlier, the right grocery store to go to for like this specific thing. Like oh this farmer’s market is really wonderful for blah blah blah, whatever. Or like, oh, have you heard about this city-specific subsidized resource? Things like that. Like that is not what you’re going to get from from books and and national podcasts and so forth.

34:57 Emily: It’s really, you have to get it from the people who are living through it with you. So it’s an amazing resource. I’m so glad that you’ve been tapping into it. I hope people listening to this episode will follow that model as well.

Financial Goals

35:08 Emily: Okay, so I want to turn now to talking about the future. We’ve talked about how diligent and thorough you’ve been with like investigating your finances and becoming more comfortable with them in the past. But now I’m wondering like have you set some financial goals for the rest of your time in graduate school?

35:26 Georga-Kay: Yeah, so my biggest goal is to save three to six months of expenses so that I can have just like a little cushion if I need to so that I don’t end up incurring more debt in the future. I would love to be able to, you know, occasionally be able to go back home, go to Jamaica, go visit extended family or even having a pet. Like I am scared that if something happens and I need to cover like a really big vet bill, I don’t want to have to put that on a card. So my immediate immediate goal is to save three to six months of living expenses. And then my second goal is really a way to like manage my financial anxiety, which is just to automate a lot of the big picture stuff that I know that I want. So, automatically like saving 20% of my income.

36:09 Georga-Kay: And then also once I’ve done that, moving on to automating retirement and investment. So, that’s something I see as more like a building sort of building block sort of goal where I’ll be working on that for the next year or two of just slightly changing things within my account so that the money goes where I need it to go. My third goal is to increase my income, which is not something I hear a lot of graduate students talk about and I get why. But I really do feel like especially for me, I want to be able to help with family stuff and just feel more secure. And so I feel like the best way to do that is to increase my income. And the way that I sort of see myself doing that is through additional teaching responsibilities. So, I can teach in the summers and I can also do like proctorships that pay a little bit more and those will pay up to like $10,000 more per year. So, that’s just a small way that I can increase my income so that I can have a little bit more flexibility.

37:01 Emily: So, with your first two goals of building up that emergency fund and then you know, starting to invest and starting to save for like other types of goals as well, you mentioned a 20% figure. So, I’m wondering are you currently saving 20% and is that going towards your emergency fund? Or is 20% something you’re like working up to over time?

37:22 Georga-Kay: Yeah so I’m currently saving 20%. I have my account set up where once I get my stipend, it automatically takes off that 20%. I am not going to lie, I’ve had to dip into it a couple times. Mainly for my dog. She’s had some stomach issues and so I just had to pay a huge vet bill. But I will continue to save that as much as I can and do that 20% minimum. And in the future, I would actually like it to be more, but for now I feel like 20% is a good amount to save.

37:52 Emily: Definitely don’t feel any guilt about spending on emergencies. I mean that’s what it is when you have like a medical situation, whether it’s yourself, your family member, your pet, if it has to be done, it has to be done. That’s what, I mean you’re saving the emergency fund, that’s what the emergency fund is for, so you’re saving it and yeah, you spend down but you still have the 20% savings rate and it’ll, you know, not every month is going to have, you know, one where you have a big expense like that. So, that’s awesome. That’s an amazing savings rate for a graduate student. So, just congratulations to you and I’m really excited for, you know, when the emergency fund is filled and when the other, you know, cash savings goals are filled and you get to turn to investing, it’s going to be so exciting.

38:25 Emily: And I love this idea of, you know, of course increasing income as a graduate student but also that you’ve thought through what your options are. And sometimes like it seems like you identified in your case there are opportunities even at your university that you can sort of easily pivot to and just add on to the responsibilities that you know you’ll have in the moment that’ll allow for that additional income. And I like that because you know, side hustling is sometimes frowned upon, sometimes disallowed, but when it’s an opportunity that comes through your university, it’s like oh you’ve kind of already like been approved for this because it’s something they offer to you, you know? So it doesn’t have to be like hidden or you know, anything like that.

39:00 Georga-Kay: Yeah, and that’s something I thought about. I’m very much a work smarter not harder person. And so I was like I keep my, now we’ve gotten like emails about like, oh if you want to teach in the summer, I’m actually going to be teaching this summer. And that’s an additional $4,000. So I was like, actually this is great. Like if I teach every summer or if I try to, then I can make a couple thousand dollars and then if I take on like an extra TA assignment, I can make another couple thousand dollars and that’s like money that I can put towards savings because right now I feel like pretty good in my base living expenses that I don’t need to like, you know, upgrade apartments or anything like that. So, it’s like all that money can go towards my larger goals.

39:39 Emily: Yeah, and you’ve just identified another great strategy there, which is base your, you know, your typical budget, your contractual living expenses, your necessary expenses around the minimum amount of money you can expect to be taking in the course of the year so that you know, anything you’ve taken above that could be used for savings, or also other discretionary purchases. Like you mentioned, you know, going like back home to Jamaica, and so like that maybe you could do an extra trip, you know, and still have money to put like into savings as well. So, I love that balance and it’s a great strategy for pretty much any stage of life, not just graduate school.

Best Financial Advice for a Fellow Early-Career PhD

40:09 Emily: Well, Georga-Kay, this has been such an amazing interview. I’m definitely going to be pointing to it for all the prospective graduate students as a model for how to handle this. And even especially, you know, even like your self-awareness around the money anxiety and so forth and how you, you know, faced it and like trying to work through it and everything. Again, super relatable I think to so many people. So, I’d like to finish up here with the final question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best piece of financial advice for a fellow early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview or it could be something completely new.

40:41 Georga-Kay: Okay, so I have two, but I’ll make it quick. I would say the first one is one that I’ve mentioned a few times, which is that you should talk to the people around you. Like I would say not even just graduate students but also if there are any postdocs in your department or even early-career faculty. I have just like had such great conversations, and it might be hard at first to sort of like bring things up, but I feel like you don’t even have to ask about specific numbers, but just how people make it work in graduate school because there’s so much like financial literacy that we don’t have as graduate students because it isn’t prioritized. And so the best way to sort of break that barrier is to talk to other people who are in similar situations. And that’s how it’s helped me to approach a lot of the things that I do now in how I think about creating a budget or how I think about my lifestyle.

41:28 Georga-Kay: So, highly recommend just reaching out to your community and starting those conversations. It helps a lot. I would also say the second thing is to look at your money <laugh>. I think that’s harder than it seems especially for people who maybe struggle with being scared about what they’ll see, but it really, really helps because you don’t even have to make any changes. Like I just start looking at it and like being cognizant of like, okay, this is how much I’m spending. And I feel like that automatically leads to you making some slightly different decisions.

41:59 Emily: I agree. Totally, totally agree. It could just be you don’t even have to do, like you sort of went very quickly from the looking at the numbers to the starting to budget stage. But even staying at that, like I’m just looking, I’m not intentionally making any changes, but as you said, it kind of works in the background of your mind and you’ll automatically most likely start to make at least a couple of changes and you don’t have to be too like forceful with yourself about it, just having that awareness. So that is great advice. Thank you so much for sharing and Georga-Kay it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’m so glad that you volunteered to come on the podcast and you know, I hope you’ll come back in a couple of years for an update.

42:31 Georga-Kay: Thank you! I’ll be back anytime you want me <laugh>.

42:35 Emily: Okay, lovely. Thank you so much!

42:37 Georga-Kay: Thank you for having me!

Outtro

42:43 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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

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

Links Mentioned in this Episode

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Teaser

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

Introduction

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

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

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

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

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

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

House Hacking

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

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

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

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

Choosing a Supportive PhD Program

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

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

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

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

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

Net Worth in Grad School

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRA Salary Negotiation

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

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

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

22:43 Emily: Absolutely.

Commercial

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

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

Sources of Income in Grad School

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

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

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

Clinic Contract Work

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

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

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

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

Valuing and Monetizing Your Skills

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

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

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

Negotiating In-State Tuition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money Mindset

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

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

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

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

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

What is Coast FI?

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

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

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

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

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

Post-PhD Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Can People Find You?

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

50:36 Brenda: Yeah. Thank you!

Outtro

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

This Grad Student Advocates Individually and Collectively for Higher Stipends

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

Links Mentioned in this Episode

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Teaser

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

Introduction

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

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

Money Mindset Up Until Starting Grad School

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

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

Food Insecurity in Undergrad

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

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

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

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

08:25 Alyssa: Yes.

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

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

Student Loans for Dorm Payment

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

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

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

Funding and Finances in Grad School

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

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

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

$45K Stipend in Knoxville

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

14:00 Alyssa: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritizing Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

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

Learning to Negotiate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normalizing Talking About Grad Student Stipends

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

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

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

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

29:17 Alyssa: Yes.

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

Health Insurance (Non-)Coverage

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

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

31:23 Alyssa: Yeah.

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

Financial Advice for Prospective PhD Students

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In this episode, Emily shared the financial advice for prospective and rising graduate students that she collected from current graduate students and PhDs. This financial advice can be applied all the way from when you are reading a grad school offer letter to when you’re matriculating into your PhD program. The topics covered include evaluating cost of living, side hustling prior to or during grad school, saving up cash, purchasing a home, and investing.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

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Teaser

00:00 Courtney: I really highly recommend using Emily’s savings bucket strategy throughout grad school to cover irregular expenses. About halfway through grad school, I started using the savings bucket strategy, which helped me feel a lot less stressed about money and my finances because when large expenses came up, I had a plan in place.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 11, Episode 5, and today I’m sharing with you the financial advice for prospective and rising graduate students that I have collected from current graduate students and PhDs. This financial advice can be applied all the way from when you are reading a grad school offer letter to when you’re matriculating into your PhD program. The topics covered include evaluating cost of living, side hustling prior to or during grad school, saving up cash, purchasing a home, and investing. This episode is kind of a sequel to Season 5 Episode 2, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Choose a PhD Program That Will Support Your Personal and Professional Development. That episode was also designed for prospective graduate students and included advice from invited contributors on finances, grad student unions, professional development, mental health, and work-life balance.

01:28 Emily: If you’re already in or beyond grad school, would you please share this episode and/or the previous one so that it can reach its target audience? I’m sure once you listen through it, you will agree with me that the advice is invaluable. If you planning to start a PhD program in 2022 and would like to learn even more about the financial side of this process, I invite you to attend a couple of upcoming free webinars, part of my series Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School. The March webinar is for prospective graduate students, and you can find more information at PFforPhDs.com/prospective/. The April webinar is for rising graduate students, and you can find more information at PFforPhDs.com/rising/. If you’re not sure what I mean by prospective vs. rising, listen through the remainder of this episode. I hope that you will join me for these webinars. I will show you how to start graduate school on the right financial foot.

Do You Even Need to Go to Grad School?

02:33 Emily: The advice in this section is for prospective PhD students, by which I mean people who have already applied to programs and perhaps received some acceptances and/or started interviewing, but who have not yet committed to a program. We’ll start with the advice collected from your fellow graduate students and PhDs.

02:53 Emily: Our first topic is do you even need to go to grad school? And this is the advice from Elyse K: “Figure out if a PhD is absolutely necessary to do what you want to do, and only go if it is absolutely necessary. It is worth delaying school to be absolutely sure–don’t get a PhD to figure out what you want to do! This is financial advice because there is a substantial opportunity cost to going to school full time for 4-6 years–even if you have a full stipend and tuition waiver you would probably make more working full time. If a PhD it isn’t going to serve you after you graduate, you’ll be financially better off without it.”

03:37 Emily: This advice from Elyse K is spot on, and it is something that you must listen to as a prospective PhD student, even if it’s unpleasant, because you’ve already committed a lot to this process of getting into a PhD program, I’m sure. Not just the application cycle, but the years leading up to that. But don’t be trapped by the sunk cost fallacy. It’s only going to get worse and worse if you enroll in graduate school and it’s not the right path for you. So as Elyse says, and I agree, be absolutely sure that the PhD is the right thing for your career, the right thing for your personal life and that this is the right time for it. Much better to bail now than halfway through a program or even all the way through your program if you realize that it wasn’t the right choice for you. If you want to hear more discussion of the financial opportunity cost of getting a PhD, please listen to my interview with Dr. Jen Polk from season seven, episode 14.

Reading Your Offer Letter

04:37 Emily: Our next topic is on reading your offer letter, your funding offer letter, from a graduate program, and Elyse K again says: “Don’t go into debt for a PhD. Find a program that will pay you or save up and cash flow school.” Again, I totally agree with Elyse. I am very hard pressed to think of a field in which you would get a PhD, but not be paid to it. Very difficult to come up with that. So of course, almost certainly you’re going to be receiving offers of funding along with your offers of admission. But to put a little bit more nuance on Elyse’s point, just because someone is offering you full funding, doesn’t mean you wouldn’t incur debt by going into that PhD program, because the offer of funding might not be high enough or consistent enough to keep you out of student loan debt, or alternatively having to side hustle. So I want you to really keep your eyes wide open when it comes to evaluating whether this program will actually keep you out of debt. Next up, we have a clip submitted from Shana.

05:42 Shana: Hello, Personal Finance for PhDs community. My name is Shana Slebioda, and I’m a staff member at a research university who works with graduate students. My advice for rising PhD students is to ask about summer financial support. Summer support packages may be different from during the academic year, especially if your support comes mainly from being a teaching assistant, also known as a TA. If your funding letter does not contain specifics about the summer months, be sure to ask. Talk to a faculty or staff member in your prospective program to get additional information. You can also talk to current students in the program to find out how they spend their summers. Do this early. Your first summer session will be there before you know it. And good luck.

06:36 Emily: This is absolutely vital advice from Shana. And again, I completely agree. Your offer letter, ideally, should tell you how you’ll be funded for the entire first 12 months of your program. So, if it doesn’t include details about your summer, as Shana said, you need to inquire about it. Both from, you know, the DGS [Director of Graduate Studies] or whoever’s offering you the funding package, and also with current graduate students to find out how funding typically works in the summer, or if it’s funded at all. But I want to extend this advice to say that it’s also very important to get an idea of your entire funding path through the PhD. Not just through the first summer, but your second year, your third year, fourth year, and all of the summers as well. Your program might or may not be able to give you super specifics about your situation. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but that’s where current graduate students come in very handy because they will tell you what from their experience and what they’ve observed among their peers about how people are funded or not throughout their time in the PhD program.

Evaluating Cost of Living

07:37 Emily: Our next topic is on evaluating cost of living for, I would say all of the programs that you are seriously considering attending. Julia’s advice is: “Ask current students about living expenses and estimate your budget. In some cities, to rent an apartment you might need to pay three to four months worth of rent upfront (first and last month of rent, broker fees, security deposit). You might need to consider having a roommate.” Again, the advice to talk to current graduate students is the best. They are going to be the people best positioned to give you the picture of how finances are working on the ground in this PhD program.

08:14 Emily: And I love the specificity of how much you might be asked to put up to rent an apartment. This is very, very city-dependent. I’m guessing Julia may live in Boston or New York. Certainly there may be other cities that operate the same way, but yes, it can be very expensive to get into your first apartment. In some cases, up to four months of expenses, in some cases less, it’s just going to be really city dependent. So it’s something you need to investigate possibly before you commit to a program, but definitely at the point that you do commit to a program.

08:44 Emily: We also have some advice from Ben: “You can pretty much have a successful research career anywhere you end up. So don’t let thoughts about potential research advisors overshadow comparisons of cost of living and stipend when considering programs.” I wish that I had heard this advice from Ben when I was in this phase of being a prospective PhD student, because I absolutely number one was picking my program based off of the potential research that I could do there. The advisor that I would have, the resources that the program had at its disposal, these kinds of things. So I was really not giving any thought to finances or other personal considerations that I now know are very, very important to have you know, in the mix in your decision-making.

09:29 Emily: And so I now definitely agree with Ben that yes, the research considerations are very important, but so is understanding what your lifestyle is going to be financially during your time in graduate school. And so are a lot of other things you might call personal factors. So they all should have a place. And don’t forget that your finances and these other personal factors will affect how successful you are in your program. So these are not, you know, disconnected from one another. If you are super stressed about money, or if you have to go into debt or side hustle, it’s going to affect how well you perform in your research career and potentially how long it takes you to graduate. So, as I said, all the factors should go into the mix.

Working Before or During Grad School

10:13 Emily: Our next topic is on working, either in this period of time between now and when you matriculate or after you matriculate. Our first piece of advice is from Gillian Hayes: “Work as much as you can in paid positions before returning to graduate school to save money to bridge the difficult times during the PhD. You may also make connections that will allow you to do side hustles or internships during your program.” Coming into graduate school with cash savings sets you up as best as possible to have a strong financial position. When I think about people who start graduate school without cash savings, or maybe even with, you know, incurring some credit card debt because of those moving expenses, you’re sort of thrown onto your back foot financially, like you’re off balance.

11:03 Emily: It’s not a strong position to start in. And of course it’s necessary in many cases, but I like Gillian’s advice. I agree with it. If at all possible, work before getting into that PhD program to generate cash savings so that you have money for moving, so that you have money for start up expenses. And so that you don’t have financial stress at the same time you’re trying to get started in your program. I also totally agree with her that working certain kinds of jobs will help you in your career that you’re trying to pursue during your PhD, and things like internships and side hustles can be part of that. If you’d like to hear more from Gillian, and I know you would, you can listen to her full interview in season six, episode six.

11:45 Emily: And here’s some advice from Nell: “Consider having another job. When I went to grad school, I went part-time with my previous full-time job. I’ve done it during school for 4 years now. I’ve noticed among my friends and colleagues that it’s the grad students who have second jobs who seem happier and mentally healthier, and have less trouble meeting their deadlines and keeping grad school anxiety in perspective. Obviously, you should keep monitoring yourself to see if it’s sustainable or the right choice for you. I have moments where I feel overwhelmed. But I have a lot less anxiety about grad school since it’s not my entire professional identity and I’m not taking a huge pay cut to be here. I see people who have never held another job applying for academic jobs and facing the possibility that they will not get anything permanent or well-compensated, even though they are excellent at what they do. They don’t know how to pivot and are doubting all their choices. It’s not their fault; it’s the market. But I see having a second job as a hedge against the kind of personal and financial crisis that comes in those circumstances.”

12:46 Emily: I think it’s really going to depend on your program and your field, whether holding a concurrent second part-time job is feasible, and also of course your personal responsibilities as well. So it seems to be working for Nell. And of course, she has great advice by saying keep monitoring yourself to see if it’s sustainable. So I don’t know if like a full like part-time job, like 20 hours a week or something is going to be right for everyone. But I do agree with her that it does lessen anxiety related to graduate school when it’s not, as she said, her whole professional identity or even identity generally. And so I do think it’s really healthy to have a side hustle or some kinds of side pursuits during your time in graduate school, because it does give you a break from all of your focus on your PhD.

13:33 Emily: It may give you another source of income, which can help with financial stability. So there are lots of positives to it. The drawbacks being of course, the time management aspects, the energy management aspects. So, you have to know yourself in this respect, but I do think it’s well worth considering. So if you have currently a full-time job that it’s possible to keep working for that employer part-time, either on still an employee basis or maybe a contractor basis, I think that’s worth having a conversation, it’s worth a tryout, of course, given that it would be allowed by your graduate program. Now, some graduate programs do bar outside work or outside work of a certain type or above a certain hourly commitment. So you have to be careful about that, but I do like the suggestion. And alternatively, if you’re not in a full-time job that you would, you know, consider taking with you in some capacity into graduate school, the next suggestion is to develop some kind of side hustle during these months between now and when you matriculate that you’ll be able to take with you into graduate school.

Emily’s Best Advice for Prospective PhD Students

14:28 Emily: My best advice for prospective PhD students is to 1) interrogate your offer letter, and 2) compare your actual salary to the local cost of living. What I mean by interrogate is that there’s a set of about a half-dozen financial questions that you need to have answers to regarding your funding package to fully understand what your finances will look like during your PhD program. One example is how much of what is listed as your stipend in your offer letter will you pay in tuition, fees, and/or your health insurance premium. You need to subtract those mandatory fees from your stipend to see what you’ll actually be paid before taxes. If your offer letter doesn’t provide all the answers, you’ll need to ask the questions of the program’s administrative staff.

15:12 Emily: However, the absolute stipend numbers are not the whole picture. Obviously, $30,000 is going to go a lot further in West Lafayette, Indiana than Seattle, Washington. You need a way to normalize the stipend to the local cost of living. The first-pass way that I suggest you do this is to use the numbers in the Living Wage Database from MIT at livingwage.mit.edu. You can divide each stipend by the local living wage to get an idea of how much purchasing power the stipend will actually provide.

15:48 Emily: I suggest making a spreadsheet to keep track of all these factors, and in fact I will provide such a spreadsheet in my upcoming Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School webinar for prospective graduate students. In this webinar, I’ll expand on what I stated above and cover additional timely topics, including one that is almost taboo in academia. The webinar is free and you can find more information and how to sign up at PFforPhDs.com/prospective/.

Commercial

16:19 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! Taxes are weirdly, unexpectedly difficult for funded grad students and fellowship recipients at any level of PhD training. Your university might send you strange tax forms or no tax forms at all. They might not withhold income tax from your paychecks, even though you owe it. It’s a mess. I’ve created a ton of free resources to assist you with understanding and preparing your 2021 tax return, which are available at PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I hope you will check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the material or have a question for me, please join one of my tax workshops, which are linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I offer one workshop on preparing your annual tax return for graduate students and one workshop on calculating your quarterly estimated tax for fellowship and training grant recipients. It would be my pleasure to help you save you time and potentially money this tax season, so don’t hesitate to reach out. Now back to our interview.

Cash Savings for Rising PhD Students

17:35 Emily: The advice in this section is for rising PhD students, by which I mean, people who have committed to attending a particular PhD program, but have not yet matriculated. We’ll start with the advice collected from your fellow graduate students and PhDs. Our first topic is the necessity of cash savings. Our first piece of advice is from Elyse K: “Adjust your budget now to your stipend income and save up to make sure you have a substantial emergency fund (more on the 6 months of expenses side than 3 months). Many universities only offer students crappy or expensive healthcare plans. Hopefully, you are healthy over the next four-to-six years, but knowing you can cover a high insurance out-of-pocket maximum without additional debt is comforting.” This is definitely great advice, especially if you’re currently working and living on a salary that’s higher after adjusting for cost of living than the stipend that you will be on in just a few months. So, it’s great advice. Live on that future stipend and save everything you can in between now and then. I also love that she points out the importance of having an emergency fund and yeah, knowing your insurance benefits. So knowing what your deductible is, what your co-insurance responsibilities are. You can find out this information now to start preparing. Next, we have a clip from Courtney.

18:57 Courtney: Hi, my name is Courtney, and last year I graduated with my PhD in microbiology. My biggest piece of financial advice for grad school is to set up an automatic transfer after you get your stipend payment to a separate savings account for paying taxes if you do not get income taxes withheld from your paycheck, which I know many graduate fellowships do not. This way, the money is already allocated when it comes time to pay quarterly estimated taxes, or when you file taxes in the spring. And jumping off of that, I really highly recommend using Emily’s savings bucket strategy throughout grad school to cover irregular expenses, such as large purchases, maybe medical deductible payments, or friends’ weddings. Also, it’s important to save for an emergency fund, maybe a pet fund if you have a pet, and planning for fun thing as well, such as vacations. About halfway through grad school, I started using this savings bucket strategy, which helped me feel a lot less stressed about money and my finances because when large expenses came up, I had a plan in place. I used this strategy to save for a month’s worth of living expenses to cover a month gap in between when I finished my PhD and when I started my new position, and I also was able to save up for a vacation to celebrate my graduation and really treat myself after completing my PhD.”

20:34 Emily: I love that Courtney gave us these specific examples of how targeted savings buckets can be used. For her, it was paying her taxes and also saving up to cover an income lapse and saving up for a vacation. I love that she said it made her less stressed. If you’d like to learn more about this savings bucket strategy, I devoted a whole podcast episode to it. It’s season seven, episode 15: How to Solve the Problem of Irregular Expenses. It goes beyond just having an emergency fund to preparing through saving for other large irregular expenses like taxes, like having to buy flights, like having to replace your computer or buy furniture or any other large purchases you might have to make. Specifically on the topic of taxes, it’s very important for you to know sometime before you matriculate that it’s pretty likely that at some during graduate school, you are going to be funded through a source of what I call awarded income. It might be called a fellowship or a training grant or a scholarship or some other kind of award that pays your stipend.

21:38 Emily: And if that is the case, most universities will not withhold income tax on your behalf the way they do for employees. You may be an employee at other points in your graduate career, like having an assistantship. But if you’re ever not an employee, then that income tax withholding may not be offered to you. And if that is the case, you will be responsible for making your own tax payments manually, whether that’s up to four times per year through the estimated tax system, or in one lump sum when you file your tax return each spring. So as Courtney said, it’s really important to save up for those tax bills. I like to call it, setting up a system of self-withholding. So you’re sort of simulating the withholding that would be done by an employer if you had one by doing, as she said, these auto-transfers. Every time you receive a paycheck, set up an automatic transfer to go into your designated tax savings account for an appropriate amount of money. If you’d like more detail about how to do these calculations around taxes or the system of self-withholding, I have a whole workshop devoted to it, which you can find at PFforPhDs.com/QETax, that’s for quarterly estimated tax. And this is something that I wish every matriculating graduate student was told during orientation that estimated tax is your responsibility, potentially, if you are on one of these non-W-2, non-employee sources of income.

23:03 Emily: And our final piece of advice regarding cash savings is from Julia: “Try to save even a little bit and put the money away for savings and/or retirement investments. Learning about investing can be overwhelming, but you can start with passive investing in a couple of general ETFs (e.g., tracking S&P 500 and international stocks for diversification) and learn more as you go. To avoid overwhelm, allocate fixed time slots to learn about finance, e.g., 1 hour per week. Eventually, you’ll become more comfortable.” I mean, of course, I totally agree with this advice from Julia. It’s kind of everything I do in my business teaching about personal finance, and I especially love talking about investing with graduate students and postdocs. It’s very easy to get started with passive investing. It’s very easy to manage investments passively. So it’s something that can be completely compatible with your journey as a graduate student, as long as your finances are ready for it. I would say it’s more important to build up some of the emergency and buckets we’ve been talking about and pay off high priority debt, like credit cards, before getting involved with investing. But once your finances are ready for it, it does not have to be a big time suck for you. So that’s great advice from Julia.

Homeownership

24:17 Emily: Our next topic is homeownership. This is one of my favorite new topics to be talking about with graduate students and early-career PhDs. Here’s the advice from Nell: “Seriously consider home ownership EARLY in your program. Emily and her brother have covered this on the podcast, but you ideally need 3 years of funding remaining. I bought a place at the beginning of my second year. The second job and the 5 years of continuance made it easier to get a mortgage. Meanwhile, I have a friend in his 5th year, now in the process of buying a place, and he found out about the 3-year continuance rule very late, causing an extremely stressful family situation and problems with his department, who he had to beg for a letter promising him more funding. While there have certainly been stresses with my place (roof, plumbing) which I am privileged to be able to deal with, the fact that I can go away for research and rent it out rather than have to pay two rents or put all my stuff in storage means that I am able to be much more mobile and flexible as I design how I will spend my time researching and writing the dissertation. Again, this is about peace of mind and mental health as much as financial security.”

25:23 Emily: This advice from Nell is so valuable. Now, I have to say, first off, many graduate students are not in a position to buy. The vast majority of graduate students are not in a position to buy a home, because several factors have to come together kind of perfectly. You have to live in a housing market where the home prices are not very, very high. You have to have a stipend that is high enough to manage to, you know, qualify for a mortgage in that market. And you have to have some savings place for the down payment and the closing costs, moving costs, these kinds of things. And you have to have good credit. So these things all have to come together. But for some graduate students, it is possible.

25:58 Emily: And if you think you may be in that situation, you should definitely investigate it early on. I have done several podcast episodes with my brother, Sam Hogan. He is a mortgage originator with Prime Lending (Note: Sam now works at Movement Mortgage) who specializes in graduate students and PhDs. And he knows all the ins and outs of qualifying for a mortgage, even when you have non-employee income fellowship income, which for some lenders is unfamiliar. The podcast interviews that I’ve done with Sam in the past are season five, episode 17, How to Qualify for a Mortgage as a Graduate Student or PhD, Even with Non-W-2 Fellowship Income, and season eight, episode four, Turn Your Largest Liability into Your Largest Asset with House Hacking. Those are really exciting episodes to listen to, but I do want to tell you there have been some updates, especially to the content that Nell just talked about. So, we used to think there was this necessity to have three years of guaranteed funding when you had a non-W2 type position as a graduate student or postdoc, but Sam has actually found a way kind of around that in some cases.

27:00 Emily: So, I would say it’s very helpful to have three years of continuance, but not strictly necessary for everyone. So the best thing to do is to talk to a mortgage lender like Sam, or like someone else who’s familiar with PhDs and graduate students, and get their perspective on your income type and your whole like picture to see whether or not you would be able to qualify for a mortgage. Check out the Personal Finance for PhDs’ YouTube channel for some of those like short updates. I’ve been publishing clips from the live Q&A calls that I’ve been hosting with Sam for first-time home buyers. If you’d like to learn more about that, go to PFforPhds.com/mortgage to find out when the next live Q&A call will be. By the way, if you want to reach out to Sam directly, the best way is probably to text or call his phone number, which is (540) 478-5803. Or you can email him at sam.hogan@movement.com.

27:59 Emily: I really love Nell’s perspective in this advice of having it be an ease on her mind and her finances to own a home versus renting when she has to be away for research purposes. Like I never thought about that before. So I’m really glad to get Nell’s perspective on this. I’m really glad that it’s worked out for her. Elyse K also added this advice: “If you’ve been working full time and it is the right time for you, consider buying a home you can afford on your stipend before your full-time income is gone because it will be easier to get financing.” Again, you can hear a lot of concern about qualifying for a mortgage as a graduate student. It is an area of concern, but Sam can help you with this specifically if you want him to. But Elyce’s advice is really good. If you are going from a full-time job into graduate school, and especially if you’re not moving cities, getting that mortgage and the home purchase done before starting graduate school is a good idea. But as she said, make sure you can afford it on your stipend, not just your current salary.

Working During Your PhD

28:54 Emily: Our next topic is working while you’re pursuing your PhD. So, Gillian has this advice: “Intern. No matter what your field, there are internship opportunities. This will provide insight into non-academic career paths as well as extra money during your studies.” I could not agree with Gillian anymore about this. Internships are becoming much more widely available and acceptable to do during a PhD, which is wonderful. And they often pay more than the, you know, stipend that would be getting during that time anyway. Again, listen to that previous episode that I did with Gillian and also check out season seven, episode seven, where I interviewed a current PhD student who did a very well-paid summer internship with a tech company, and that worked out very nicely for her finances.

29:42 Emily: But really, Gillian’s point about gaining insight into non-academic career paths is the invaluable part of this. Like, yes, the money is nice, but while in graduate school, you are setting yourself up for your future career, and doing internships and other kinds of work opportunities do serve that goal just as much as your PhD studies do. And this advice is from Elyse K: “Consider finding or starting a side hustle within your university’s boundaries (many allow <20-hour per week part-time positions). Part-time income can make or break PhD students; I’ve seen some have to drop out because they need money.” Again, really solid advice. It should not be the case that graduate students need side hustles or need student loan debt to financially get them through graduate school. Yet this is the reality for a lot of people, or if not strictly necessary, sometimes side hustles can just enhance your lifestyle and make things a little bit better for you during graduate school. Whatever the reason, I think side hustling is a great idea, but of course you have to make sure that it’s not interfering with your progress towards your degree. That is primarily what you are in graduate school to do.

Financial Assistance as a Grad Student Parent

30:54 Emily: Next, I have some great comments from an anonymous contributor who is a graduate student parent. “Even if you think you do not qualify, consider applying for income assistance programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and other DHS programs for needy families. Generally, students enrolled over half-time do not qualify for SNAP, but if you have any of these exemptions, there’s a chance you’ll qualify. Some exemptions include: Are under age 18 or are age 50 or older. Have a physical or mental disability. Work at least 20 hours a week in a paid, on-the-job training program. Work at least 20 hours a week in paid employment. Participate in a state or federally-financed work study program. Participate in an on-the-job training program. Care for a child under the age of 6. Care for a child age 6 to 11 and lack the necessary child care enabling you to attend school and work 20 hours a week or participate in work study. Are a single parent enrolled full-time in college and taking care of a child under 12.”

31:50 Emily: “With children you may also qualify for state funded childcare, children’s health insurance, and possibly even income supplementation. These are often wrapped into the same application at your state’s Department of Health and Human Services website, making it much simpler to apply for all at once. You never know until you apply, and you just might be surprised. Every dollar helps! Every so often you will need to reapply or get re-certified so you’ll be asked to update your information periodically, so always look for these very important mailings once you’re involved in any assistance programs or you could risk losing coverage for not responding in time.”

32:22 Emily: Super appreciative to anonymous for submitting these comments. This is not something I had personal experience with during graduate school, so I really appreciate, you know, the community member stepping up to speak to this situation. In season two, episode one, I published an episode with Lauri Reinhold [Lutes] who was a single parent during graduate school. And what came through in that interview was how intentional Lauri was in choosing her graduate program, choosing one that would be supportive of her needs as a graduate student parent, and then also applying for every single benefit she possibly could on behalf of herself and her daughter once in graduate school. So that’s another great interview to follow up with to learn more about this topic if you are a parent or are planning on becoming a parent.

Final Pieces of Advice

33:05 Emily: And for our last topic, we have a really quick piece of advice from Ben, which is: “Read The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins!” So this advice is on investing again and how relatively accessible it is. I read The Simple Path to Wealth myself about a year ago, really enjoyed it. J. L. Collins is a really easy person to read and understand all about index fund investing, passive investing. So, highly, highly recommend that book as well. And thank you, Ben, for that advice.

33:34 Emily: My best advice for prospective PhD students echoes some of what you just heard, and it’s to work between now and when you matriculate to save up cash for your move, startup expenses, emergency fund, et cetera. If you’re already working a well-paid full-time job or have existing cash savings, that’s awesome, and you’re on a great track. If you are currently a college student or have a not-so-well-paid job, like I did before grad school, it’s time to think about how you can increase your income over the coming months so you can save. Can you do a paid internship? Can you get a full-time temporary position with a good pay rate? Can you start a side hustle, ideally one that you can take with you to graduate school? I love flexible self-employment side hustles for graduate students, such as consulting, freelancing or teaching, but it can take time to build up a client base, so start laying that groundwork now, or at least over the summer.

34:31 Emily: We’ll expand on this topic in my next Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School webinar for rising graduate students. We’ll also go deep on the financial decisions you’ll have to make this spring and summer that can literally make or break your finances during grad school. And I’ll give you some guidance on those. The webinar is free and you can find more information and how to sign up at PFforPhDs.com/rising. Thank you for listening through this episode, and a special thanks to those who contributed their best financial advice. Before you go, don’t forget to share this episode with a prospective PhD student, and if you want to join me for the upcoming webinars in my Set Yourself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School series, you can find more information at PFforPhDs.com/prospective/ and PFforPhDs.com/rising.

Outtro

35:28 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with 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 increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.