Personal Finance for PhDs

Live a financially balanced life - no Real Job required

Main navigation

side hustle

This Postdoc Epitomizes Side Hustling to Get Out from Under $100,000 of Debt

by Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Shana Green, a postdoc at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Shana finished her PhD with $108,000 of debt, and she decided to side hustle to pay it off as fast as she could. After trying several academic and non-academic side hustles, she is currently chiefly working as a driver for GrubHub. She’s on track to be completely debt free in less than four years total. We discuss the strategies she’s used to optimize her side hustle, how she feels about side hustling as a driver, and her goals for her YouTube channel, The Wealth Vibe.

Links mentioned in episode

side hustling postdoc

0:00 Introduction

1:09 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Shana Green is a Gates Millennium Scholar. This program funded all of her undergraduate education, and provided some funds for graduate education. Shana went to Howard University for her bachelors of arts in Anthropology. She got a Masters of Public Health at Columbia University, where she had to take out student loans for rent, food and living expenses. She went to the University of South Florida for her PhD in Public Health, where most of her education was funded but she had to take out some loans for her fifth year. She graduated in 2017 and worked as a postdoc at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She recently got a new position as a contractor for the CDC.

4:54 What was the total of your debt when you finished your PhD?

Shana was aware of her debt before she finished her PhD. She had $108,000 in debt when she graduated with her PhD. She says about $56,000 is from student loans. She took out about $40,000 from student loans, but she has accrued over $10,000 in interest. She had car debt, IRS debt, medical bills, and credit cards. One of her credit cards had $14,000 of debt.

She didn’t have to go into repayment for her student loans during her postdoc because she qualified for graduate fellowship deferment. She wanted to tackle her other debt first. Now she has about $63,000 in debt remaining. She paid off the credit card, IRS debt, and medical bills. She is very close to paying off her car. She will only have her student loans remaining after two years of he repayment journey.

Shana says that when she moved to Atlanta, she started side hustling right away. She couldn’t afford to go out and meet people and get to know the city. She went straight to the grind and working hard to pay off her debt.

8:50 How does your postdoc salary affect your debt repayment journey?

Shana is grateful she has a higher stipend than many postdocs. She was making about $70,000 gross annual pay from her postdoc stipend at the CDC. This is in contrast to the National Institutes of Health minimum stipend that was just below $50,000 annual stipend. She was in an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) funded postdoc, which compensates based on education and work experience. She received about $5200, then she had to pay quarterly taxes. Her take home was somewhere around $4,000.

Shana says while this was a good stipend, it wasn’t enough to cover her debt payments. She calculated she needed to make another $1,500 to $2,000 more each month for her debt payments. Her goal was to be debt free by February 2021.

11:38 What are the different side hustles that you’ve tried since moving to Atlanta?

Shana says the first side hustle she tried was Instacart. In this job, she shopped for groceries and delivered them. She started that in October 2017. When Instacart changed their system so she made less money, she tried other jobs. She tried virtual assistance, Upwork, and local food delivery service. Since April 2018, she has worked for GrubHub and still does Instacart every now and then. She also does freelance research through Upwork. She says GrubHub is her “bread and butter” as a side hustle.

13:17 How does a GrubHub side hustle work?

Shana explains that when a customer places an order, she gets a ping on her phone. GrubHub provides the details up front to help her decide if she wants to accept it. She is free to reject orders. If she accepts, she goes to the restaurant to pick up the food and bring it to the customer. She contrasts this to Instacart, where she had to put together the order herself instead of just picking it up.

She makes about $20 per hour with GrubHub. The least amount she makes is $15 per hour, and the most is $25 per hour. She spends about four hours a night doing GrubHub. On the weekends nights she works 5 hours. She works at minimum three days during the week. There were several weeks that she worked every day of the week. After her work at the CDC for the day, she almost immediately started her GrubHub work.

17:34 How do you decide which GrubHub orders to take?

Shana keeps three things in mind: the payout, the distance, and whether the person tips. GrubHub pays a minimum of $3 base pay, a mileage contribution, and tips if the customer chooses. She says if the person has not tipped through the app, they won’t tip in person. She tries to take orders $8 or $10 or more. She also tries to do orders within a four mile radius. She maximizes the base pay and the tips, not the mileage. Shana mentions some restaurants are unreliable, which she learned through trial and error, and she factors that into her decision.

22:12 Has anything really bad or really good happened to you as you worked for Instacart and GrubHub?

Shana says she had unpleasant interactions with Instacart customers. She tells stories about customers that insult her and imply that she is “lesser” for working these side hustles. These customers have no idea that she has a PhD and works as an epidemiologist. Shana shares that she has felt down about having to work side hustles that are not using her expertise, but she gives herself pep talks and reminds herself this is temporary.

25:08 Why didn’t you limit your side hustles to PhD type of work?

Shana explains that she tried through Upwork to offer data analysis and research consultation services, but she didn’t get any clients. She realized that this wasn’t going to work, because she needs quick money. She wanted to be able to make money like an Uber or Lyft driver could.

She was a little ashamed of doing this at first, and she didn’t tell anyone except for her mother and her boyfriend. She felt like she had reached a level of success, like she was “Dr. Green” and she used to teach at a university. She worried that people would view her work at Instacart and GrubHub as a step back. Now she wants to inspire people to take on their debt and work hard for their financial goals. This is why she started her YouTube channel “The Wealth Vibe.”

Emily says that if anyone speaks negatively about this work, as if this work is “beneath them,” that speaks poorly of that person. She also says that Shana is on a great career trajectory, but the work for many PhDs is more limited and many have to be in adjunct position, which typically does not pay well. Emily says Shana is living like no one else like now because she is working hard, but in two years Shana will be debt free and living like no one else in the positive sense.

Shana shares that she also teaches an online course in Epidemiology. This pays $3,000 per semester. She says she makes way more money through GrubHub than she does as an adjunct. Shana says she found that PhD work does not pay well. Emily adds that there’s not enough volume, or demand, for side jobs for PhDs.

35:08 What is your YouTube Channel about?

Shana’s YouTube Channel is called The Wealth Vibe. She creates videos to help people increase their income, help them budget, so that people can build their wealth. She posts monthly videos about making her budget and paying off her debt. She also makes videos about her side hustles and how to maximize money you make. She has made videos about taxes, because her taxes are not withheld and she has to save for tax payments. She says she reaches a broad audience of people who are GrubHub drivers as well as who have PhDs.

39:40 Conclusion

How to Successfully Plan for Retirement Before and After Obtaining Your PhD

by Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Brandon Renfro, a finance professor and financial advisor. Brandon shares the tortuous path that led him to his current faculty position at East Texas Baptist University and side business in retirement advising. They discuss the long-term financial effects of doing a PhD – both positive and negative – and how to have a successful retirement even if you can’t save (much) during your PhD training.

Links mentioned in episode

PhD plan for retirement

0:00 Introduction

1:05 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Brandon Renfro has a PhD in Finance. He is both an academic and a practitioner. He advises retirement advising for individuals. He does financial planning while being a tenure track professor.

2:02 What was your career trajectory?

Brandon says that he “walked backwards” or stumbled into his PhD. As an undergraduate, he planned to go to law school. He was advised to major in business in preparation for law school. He took an American enterprise course and saw a presentation about the time value of money in the retirement planning context. This presentation inspired him, so he majored in finance and loved it. He went to law school but says he crashed and burned. He was in the military and had GI bill benefits. He decided to use his GI bill benefits for an Master of Business Administration (MBA). He asked his MBA advisor about adjunct teaching. He had to have 18 graduate hours in the discipline to teach a course. He discovered he loved teaching. He decided he wanted to teach full time. He feels fortunate that he got a tenure track position at a liberal arts college in Louisiana, where he worked for three semesters. Now he is in his third semester at East Texas Baptist.

Emily points out that Brandon tried stuff and saw what stuck. Brandon agrees that this is important to explain to students today. He says many students set a goal and stick to it no matter what, even if the path isn’t right for them. He says there is a time when you should recognize if you don’t love what you’re doing and you should try something different. Brandon says he would tell his 18 year old self to major in finance, but at the time it didn’t occur to him.

Emily asks how Brandon handled the sunk costs of going to law school. Brandon clarifies that he didn’t meet the GPA requirements to continue law school but he wasn’t sad about it. He says he was miserable in law school. He had taken out loans to pay for the year in law school. He says it was $20,000 that he spent to learn that he didn’t want to be an attorney. He says if he looks at it like it’s money he spent to learn that he loves being a finance professor, it was worth it.

7:47 Given that a person has decided to do a PhD and maybe a postdoc, what are the effects of their financial outlook?

Emily starts by explaining that graduate students, postdocs, and early career PhDs have a lot of anxiety around saving for retirement. Most of these people are in their 20s or 30s and they know they are supposed to be investing for retirement. But planning for retirement feels overwhelming in the context of their competing financial demands, like student loan payments or saving for a house down payment, coupled with their suppressed income for an extended period of time.

Brandon says that if you put off starting a career to do a PhD, this will make saving and preparing for retirement a little more challenging. These are foregone years of savings. However, academics have the ability to work past typical retirement age. As a professor, you can work longer and save money for retirement for more years, even if you start work and start saving a little later in life. Emily clarifies that PhDs can add years on the back end, instead of on the front end, to the total years that they can work to save for retirement. PhDs can do this because their work is fairly intellectual, and hopefully they get better with time. It’s less daunting to add years at the end in these career paths than others. Brandon says it’s (physically) easier to talk about what you know than it is to work on a factory floor, and you can prolong the years you do this kind of work. Even as PhDs reach retirement age, they have options to be an instructor, lecturer, adjunct, or consultant. You can work less than a full time load, and still capitalize on your years of experience.

Brandon says even while you’re working in your 30s or 40s, you have the ability to leverage expertise outside the classroom. Even if you are working a full time tenure track position, you have a lot of knowledge that you can leverage in industry, even while you’re teaching. Emily shares that when she was an engineering PhD student at Duke University, she saw plenty of professors had consulting businesses or wrote books. In academia, there are many ways to step outside your primary role and leverage your expertise. Emily says that there are plenty of opportunities to have side hustles all through your career. She is part of a community of self employed PhDs, and many people’s self employed job is on the side of their full time job. Brandon believes there is a lot of potential for academics to be self employed. He says even if you were the lowest ranked student in the lowest ranked PhD program, you still have knowledge and you are already part of a select group. Emily says any PhD can find a market where their skills are valuable. They give examples of formatting and copy-editing and tutoring.

17:13 How can someone handle the income jump after the suppressed income period of being a trainee in a PhD or postdoc?

Brandon says in one phrase, avoid “lifestyle creep.” When you suddenly go from an undergraduate or PhD student lifestyle based on lower income to receiving a full time income, you need to be mindful to not immediately start living at the new income. He says you don’t need to be extremely frugal, but use a moderate amount of your new income to build your emergency savings, pay down consumer debt, and pay down student loans in order to be much better off in the long run.

Emily shares the standard personal finance advice to commit a large percentage of your raise to your financial goals. Either all of the raise or as much of the raise as you can, put it towards goals instead of your consumption spending. She says it applies even more when you have a large income jump. Most of it should be used to accelerate financial goals. When Emily and her husband finished their PhD programs, they applied this concept to their new “real jobs” income. They had several financial goals that they focused on and avoided lifestyle creep.

Brandon shares his story about buying a house. He was unsure where he would get his tenure track position, but he wanted to build equity without committing his family to a large mortgage payment. He bought a small rent house before they bought a house to live in. Emily brings up that some people rent their properties as they move, in contrast to how Brandon purchased the property purely as a rental property.

23:40 Grad students and some postdocs don’t pay into the social security system. What are the long term effects of missing out on these years of contributions?

Brandon explains that social security benefits are based on 35 years of covered earnings. Essentially, it’s an average of your highest 35 years of earnings. If you’re starting to contribute later, do the math. If you’re in your early 30s, you may be in your late 60s before you have 35 years of covered earnings. The issue is that your benefit will be calculated with some zeros in the 35 year average, which skews down your average. When you’re on the back end of your career, this may influence your decision to work for a few more years to replace some of the years where you contributed zero dollars to social security.

26:59 What steps can someone who’s in or recently been in PhD training do to mitigate negative effects of lower income and not contributing to retirement?

Brandon brings up the psychological benefit of being used to living on a small income. He says to continue to live like that for a couple of years so that you can build yourself a financial cushion and start saving for retirement. He says eventually the feeling goes away and you get used to the new level of income. Psychologically, it’s harder to start saving for financial goals later.

Emily says that this is classic personal finance advice. Sometimes the lifestyles of PhD students are lower than those of college students. She says it’s difficult to deflate lifestyle. You might see the higher paycheck from your first real job, then you lock yourself into higher housing costs or buy a new car. It’s difficult to take a step back, but it’s much easier to keep a similar lifestyle and put the new income to your financial goals and slowly work up your lifestyle.

30:16 If a person starts saving during graduate school, what kind of effect can that have on retirement?

Brandon explains the first presentation that he saw on the effect of compound interest. If you started when you were 18 years old and you saved just $2,000 per year in a retirement account, you would have a million dollars for retirement if you simply earned the average market return. He says the same is still true if you start at 30 or 32, but there are a few less years for compounding to take effect.

Emily says that even during graduate school, saving a couple hundred dollars a month is accessible. It’s not a thousand dollars every month that you need to save. The earlier you take these steps, the more and more impact it can make. It really does make a difference to take these steps earlier.

Brandon adds that at least, don’t make negative steps. Buying a cheaper car or cheaper clothes can go a long way. Emily says that the professional students, like law students, were living a higher lifestyle even though they were living on loans. She says the smallest amount of debt that you have to take on during training will make it easier for you in a few years.

35:50 What do you do for clients?

Brandon can help with anything within realm of retirement planning. He can help someone starting out. He can help graduate students and postdocs sort through their different options for retirement plans. He can help with decisions about how to invest within retirement plans. Brandon encourages you to take retirement very seriously and to think very hard about putting off retirement. He says it’s really hard to make a strong case against contributing to a plan with an employer match. He says employer match is essentially free money. Emily says an employer match is a 50% or 100% return on investment.

Emily clarifies that someone looking at different options can ask Brandon for help considering which option to prioritize. Brandon can help overcome “analysis paralysis.” Brandon says something is almost always better than nothing, and you need to just do something. He encourages you to envision your retirement and what your financial goal looks like.

40:03 Final Comments

Brandon’s contact information is at brandonrenfro.com. If anyone has a question about something that he hasn’t published an article about on his website, send him an email and he will write about it!

41:15 Conclusion

How To Launch A Side Hustle in Grad School

by Leave a Comment

Side hustles are all the rage these days. Everyone seems to have one, and some even translate into big money! However, in my experience, few grad students are aware of (or understand how) to get one going. Even fewer faculty seem to be aware of how they could have one themselves OR how they can support their students in this endeavor. In this post, I’m going to talk to you about why you want to launch a side hustle, and why it’s worth your time to do it in grad school. If your a faculty member these tips can also apply to you!

Today’s article on how to launch a side hustle is by Dr. Leigh A. Hall. To read an article today by Emily, please visit Leigh’s website, Teaching Academia.

launch side hustle

What Is A Side Hustle?

A side hustle is a way to earn extra cash. Ideally, it’s going to be something you are super passionate about because you will be spending extra time creating it. Side hustles happen outside your current full time job (or graduate studies/assistantship). You decide how much time you want to devote to it and when you want to put in the hours. You can work with someone else, but most side hustles tend to start out as solo ventures. As they become more successful, you may find you need to pay others to help you. Some people have such successful side hustles that they eventually leave their full time job and devote themselves solely to their project.

Why Should You Launch A Side Hustle?

You might be thinking you have enough to do right now. You don’t need to have extra demands on your time. And there’s no guarantee that a side hustle will pay off anyways, right? But think about it this way – if your side hustle is inline with things you already enjoy doing then you’re not wasting any time by devoting yourself to it. If you were going to do it anyways, then you lose nothing by seeing if you can generate some extra income by sharing your work with others.

However, the side hustle is not just about you. While it can be a great way to generate extra income, ultimately you are providing a service that benefits others. If people are willing to pay you for your work – whatever it may be – that means they find value in it which means you are enhancing the lives of others in some way.

Finally, a side hustle can allow you to establish yourself beyond your academic career. It will allow you to connect with more people, and different people, than you likely would through academia alone. This can bring you a whole host of opportunities and open doors that otherwise would have stayed close. Your work as an academic will likely reach a narrow subset of people. Add a side hustle to that and you can expand your reach.

How To Identify The Right Side Hustle For You

Ok – you’re interested but unsure about where to start. The first thing is to figure out what you want your side hustle to be about. It can be connected to your day job, but it doesn’t have to. If you have a hobby that you are exceptionally good at then you could turn that hobby into your side hustle. It doesn’t have to extend from your job.

For example, several years ago I ran a successful yoga blog. I’m not a yoga teacher. I just wrote about going to yoga classes and what I learned in the process about myself. Eventually the blog ran its course, but I was able to get some great sponsorships and support along the way.

Because my blog added value to the yoga community, companies would send me yoga mats, clothes, shoes, all kinds of goodies for review. I even got to review a meal kit service so I had groceries mostly paid for now and then. My yoga practice was a serious hobby, and it was able to generate some income for me – even if just through free products – that I enjoyed and benefited from.

Currently, my side hustle extends from my job. I have a number of courses I sell. Do I generate massive amounts of income? No, but I do enjoy a nice supplement that I can do with as I please (I often just save it).

The key here is to pick a niche that you enjoy and that you want to share with others. And it’s perfectly fine to have both a hobby and a professional side hustle! You get to set the hours and how much you will be involved so do what’s best for you.

Launching Your Side Hustle

There are a number of ways to launch your side hustle, and any combination of them can work. After you identify your niche, you’ll need to consider how you want to connect with others. Some common ways to do this are:

  1. A website. You can get one for free (wordpress.com) and later move to a paid version. A free version lets you test the waters and play around without the stress of having to pay for it.
  2. A YouTube channel: I highly recommend this. Everything is going in the direction of video. A channel will allow you to build an audience. And while you are giving people content for free, once they see that you have something of value they will start to buy your more in-depth products.
  3. Patreon: Admittedly, I need to get this one going. Patreon allows you to sell memberships at varying tiers. For example, you might have people who give you 5.00 every month in exchange for specific things you create or offer. A second tier of people might give you 10.00 a month and receive something different/more. You get to decide how to price the tiers and what people get in return.
  4. Selling Courses: You may want to create one or more courses that people can access asynchronously. A number of platforms allow for this with varying advantages and disadvantages. Udemy allows you to post your courses free of charge, but they will take a hefty fee in return (they also help with marketing your courses). Platforms like Teachable and Thinkific require you to pay an ongoing fee or yearly subscription for your courses to be hosted, and they do no marketing. However, you stand to keep more of your money each time you sell a course here than on Udemy.

Launching your side hustle thus requires:

  • A clear vision of what you are going to be offering
  • Who would be interested in your product/creations?
  • Understanding where to house yourself and your work

A side hustle is going to require a mix of free and paid content. You are going to want to have a website or YouTube Channel (likely both) and a plan in place for content development. What do you want to sell? When will you find time to create this content and build out your offerings (both free and paid).

If you’re wondering if there is a right/wrong/best time to launch your side hustle my answer to you is this:

There is no best time to launch. You need to know what it is you want to do and what platforms you want to start out on. Then you go. You don’t need to do everything at once, and you can build out along the way as you get comfortable. The trick is to not get caught up on something not being good enough or that you only need to do X and then everything will be perfect. We’re not looking for perfect here. We’re looking for a few key things to be in place and then it’s time to go.

Having a side hustle can bring in extra income while allowing you to grow and develop professionally or with a hobby. The sooner you get started the sooner you will start to reap the rewards.

Dr. Leigh A. Hall is a professor at the University of Wyoming where she holds the Wyoming Excellence Chair in Literacy Education. She’s had a side hustle for four years now selling courses that can benefit graduate students and early career academics. See her work at TeachingAcademia.com.

An Unfunded Summer Didn’t Deter this PhD Student Thanks to Her Creative Side Hustle

by Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Bailey Poland, a rising second-year PhD student in rhetoric and writing at Bowling Green State University. Bailey earns a stipend of just $14,000 for the academic year, but manages to live a comfortable life thanks to her disciplined budgeting and two side hustles. Unlike many of her classmates, she devoted her first summer as a PhD student exclusively to research, relying on her side hustle income and savings from her stipend to tide her over until the next academic year started. Emily and Bailey discuss in detail Bailey’s housing choice, frugal habits, and unique Patreon side hustle that complements her graduate work.

Links mentioned in episode

unfunded summer PhD

0:00 Introduction

1:26 Q1: Please Introduce Yourself

Bailey Poland is a second year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Bowling Green State University. Bowling Green is a city in Ohio, located to the south of Toledo, Ohio. Bailey’s stipend is $14,000 per academic year. Additionally, Bailey earns $460 per month from Patreon and $150 quarterly from copy-editing a music magazine focused on Texas. She is the only person in her household.

Bailey’s PhD stipend does not include summer funding. She budgets savings over the academic year in order to meet her expenses over the summer.

3:25 Q2: What are your five largest expenses each month?

Bailey’s largest expenses are rent at $600 per month, car payment at $200 per month, health insurance and fees at $400 per month, food at $150 to $200 per month, and car insurance at $112 per month.

4:14 #1 Expense: Rent

Bailey rents a two bedroom apartment for $600 per month. She says this rate is higher than other options available in Bowling Green. She looked at options for rent at rates of $350 to $450 per month, but these apartments were in poor quality or clearly undergraduate housing. Bailey used to own a house, so she approached her apartment search with those expectations.

Bailey’s apartment is in downtown Bowling Green. She walks to campus, so she doesn’t use her car or have a university parking pass. She drives to the grocery store, but she lives above a coffee shop. She thinks she is in the perfect location. She lives by herself in the two-bedroom apartment, so she sleeps in the smaller bedroom and uses the extra bedroom as her office and library.

6:18 #2 Expense: Car Payment

Bailey pays $200 per month for her car. She has a 2017 vehicle that she bought new. She traded in her older Toyota Corolla when she bought her new car. Due to unfortunate family circumstances, Bailey received money from inheritance and estate closure. She used this money for her car payments. She has stayed ahead of interest and has gotten ahead on payments.

8:06 #3 Expense: Health Insurance and Fees

Bailey pays health and insurance and fees in lump sums a couple times a year. The amount works out to about $400 per month. She uses her credit card to make the payment at the start of each semester, but she pays it off immediately. Her credit card pays back 1.5% so she received a small kickback. Generally, she doesn’t keep a balance on her credit card so she avoids interest payments.

She made her first health insurance and fees payment before she received any of her graduate school stipend. Because she formerly worked as a marketing analyst for global HR and payroll company, she had enough savings available to make this payment when she started graduate school. She chose to go to graduate school because she was much happier in a classroom than behind a desk in a corporate office.

10:25 #4 Expense: Food

Bailey pays $150 to $200 per month for food, which includes groceries and dining out. She plans and prepares meals ahead of time. She cooks two or three times a week and freezes leftovers. She takes food with her to campus.

She has a limited set of go-to recipes. One of her favorites is chile garlic tofu. She says the meal is filling and takes half an hour to prepare. She gets four meals from one block of tofu. She eats lots of eggs, pasta, and rice-based meals. Her vegetarian cooking has increased since she started PhD program.

Bailey learned meal preparation from trial and error in the first few months of graduate school. She figured out which meals took too long or she didn’t like enough to have leftover. She used the Budget Bites website to find recipes. She cooks on the free nights of her week, because she knows which nights she’ll want to eat dinner as soon as she gets home. Bailey is on campus from 8am to 6pm most of the week. The latest she gets home is 7pm or 8pm. She takes lunch and a small snack with her to campus, and she eats dinner at home.

14:51 #5 Expense: Car Insurance

When Bailey purchased her new car, her car insurance rate increased from $85 per month to $130 per month. She has a plug-in for diagnostics of her driving habit, which lowered her insurance rate to $112 per month. She only regularly drives to and from the grocery store, which is a 10 minute drive. She also drives to her mom’s house, which is 30 minutes away and all highway driving.

Bailey says graduate students can get by without a car in Bowling Green. In her PhD cohort, at least one person doesn’t have a car. Busses run regularly to and from campus. Grocery stores deliver for a fee. Local activities are accessible to pedestrians. Bowling Green does not have cabs, Uber, or Lyft. It is pretty rural. Bailey needs a car to leave town to see her family.

18:10 Can you tell us about your side hustles?

Bailey has two separate side hustles. For one, Bailey copy edits a magazine about the country music scene in Texas. She missed doing copy-editing work, so she posted on Twitter that she was looking for an opportunity. Someone from the magazine responded to her and said they’d pay her to copy edit. Bailey has had this side hustle for three years. She receives $150 every few months and she has learned a lot about a topic that is unfamiliar to her.

For another, Bailey uses Patreon, the crowdfunding platform for artists and creators. She receives $460 each month from Patreon. She got started after she defended her Master’s thesis and she quit her corporate job earlier than she had planned. She was working at a bookstore and she needed more income. Some of her friends had Patreon, so she was familiar with the platform. Bailey started by doing live readings of The Rhetorical Tradition, like live tweeting her readings with funny commentary. People got invested in her live readings and she transitioned the activity to Patreon. Reading The Rhetorical Tradition was a really long project. She planned in advance and read as much as possible during the summer so she wouldn’t need to read during her first graduate school semester. She planned to post about The Rhetorical Tradition on Monday and Friday, post photos of her mom’s three cats on Tuesday and Thursday, and post an essay style blog post on Wednesdays. She only writes one or two truly new posts per month. With her PhD work, she doesn’t have time to write four or five new posts a month. Recently she has started a new reading series that overlaps with her prelim list for her PhD. She is gaining familiarity with texts in her field, having interesting conversations with her patrons, and making some money.

Bailey has created a very niche platform. Starting a Patreon was a huge leap of faith. She used to be super active on Twitter with a group of 18,000 followers. She authored a book, which helped her gain an audience invested in her thoughts. She trusted that her audience would move with her from Twitter to Patreon. She front loaded the work during the summer, so during her first semester it was more like a passive income stream. Now it serves multiple purposes for her. She finds it fulfilling that her academic work is accessible to the public. Her work lately is archival, and through Patreon she can share what it’s like to work in an archive. Bailey finds joy in her patrons and appreciates that they pay for her to do this work.

26:35 How do your colleagues react to your side hustle? Do they take on side hustles?

Bailey says her colleagues know and are supportive. For example, Bailey did a public series on Patreon that was a reflection on teaching practices she learned at Bowling Green. Her program’s website’s homepage included a link to her series. Generally, PhD students are discouraged from outside work because they should focus on doctoral work, but her department gives no formal prohibition of outside work. Most other graduate students have some other work, though it may not be talked about.

During the summer, other PhD students in her department find jobs. Some find online teaching roles, and one is working in the garden center at Lowe’s Hardware Store. One is going to a writers retreat that comes with a stipend. PhD students with spouses don’t work or find part time work.

29:28 Q4: What are you currently doing to further your financial goals?

Bailey has a 401k from her corporate job that she will roll into a Roth IRA over the next few years. She has investments with Betterment that serve as her long-term emergency funds. She has a high earnings online savings account as her primary emergency fund. Her goal is to have three months of expenses saved, and she is $600 short of her goal. Generally, her goal is to have her retirement well planned. She wants to be in academia long term, but she can’t be certain about this path. She wants security and confidence during her job search. Having savings going into graduate school frees up opportunities.

During her first summer as a PhD student, Bailey is working on archival projects and taking a class. During the school year, Bailey has multiple things going on, like classes, teachers, committees, conference planning. Summer is really valuable to devote focused attention to a project. In subsequent summers, it is possible she will take teaching jobs.

34:30 Q4: What don’t you spend money on that might surprise people?

Bailey doesn’t have student loans. She paid all of her loans within two years after undergrad. She hasn’t taken out any loans for higher education. Because she went to a State school, had scholarship, and finished in three years, she had very manageable loans from her undergraduate education. She took a job after college right away.

She has stopped buying books, which is hard for her personally. Even if she buys used books, it adds up quickly. She tries to keep miscellaneous spending low every month. She used to buy $200 to $300 worth of books every month, now she just buys one book a month. She checks out a lot of books from the library, and she lives less than a block from local public library

She doesn’t spend a lot on hobbies. She likes to cross stitch. This is inexpensive and takes a long time. She can spend $20 on one project that entertains her for five months. She has hobbies that help her relax and are not difficult for her budget.

39:00 Q5: What are you happy with in your spending and what would you like to change?

Bailey’s rent is higher than she wants to pay and is more than what others pay. She negotiated for lower increase rate when she renewed her lease. She’s considering doing a spending fast over the summer because she has no stipend coming in. She wants to minimize the hit that her savings is taking. She can find entertainment in Bowling Green for free. For example, there is a huge arts community and a massive arts festival.

42:12 Q6: What is your best advice for someone new to your city who is budget-conscious?

Bailey recommends that someone new to Bowling Green shops around for a place to live. There a lot of good options. Graduate student housing is affordable and it is easy to find a roommate. She says to look for an apartment as early as possible. She started looking in July, which limited her options. She would have looked earlier if she knew.

She advises new PhD students in Bowling Green to plan on saving. She says make sure you have cushion before you get here. Graduate school is stressful enough without living paycheck to paycheck. You should get rid of debt completely if you can.

44:22 Q7: Would you like to make any other comments on what it takes to get by where you live on what you earn?

Bailey says it is definitely possible to live in Bowling Green frugally and have a good time. She says there is always stuff happening that’s free or inexpensive. Toledo is a twenty to thirty minute drive. It may not be possible to live on the stipend alone, but you don’t need much more. Bowling Green has a low cost of living and is a college town invested in the university community.

45:22 Conclusion

This PhD Side Hustler Maintains a Healthy Work-Life Balance

by Leave a Comment

Today’s podcast guest is Dr. Caitlin Faas, an assistant professor of psychology and perennial side hustler. We discuss her history with side hustling and her motivations for pursuing it. Caitlin’s current side hustle of academic coaching dovetails so well with her primary role as a faculty member that she’s even planning to include that work in her tenure packet. Her work involves coaching and teaching about time management, productivity, and overcoming psychological barriers to academic success, so listen through the episode and check out her website to learn the tips that work well for her and her clients.

Links Mentioned in Episode

healthy work life balance

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Give your feedback on Season 1 and influence the direction for Season 2 through this form.

0:00 Introduction

1:09 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Caitlin Faas is an assistant professor at small liberal arts college in Maryland. She’s had her job for five years, and soon she is submitting tenure packet. She went to graduate school at Virginia Tech, where she studied human development and family studies. She’s the developmental psychology professor in her department. Her research focus is emerging adulthood.

For her side hustle, Caitlin runs a business to coach busy professionals as they try to integrate school and academics into their daily life. She provides career direction and productivity tips to her clients, as well as offering advice on her blog and social media. Her clients are associate professors, graduate students, and professionals considering applying to graduate school.

3:17 Did you have a side hustle as a student?

Caitlin has always valued hard work and earning her own income. As an undergraduate, she worked while being a full time student. Then as a graduate student, Caitlin worked at the local yarn shop during the summer and had a couple corporate retail work experiences. Having extra spending money was her motivation for her side hustle. She’d usually spend her income from the yarn shop on yarn for her knitting hobby. She also used her money for non-funded academic opportunities, like going to conferences.

Caitlin and Emily both agree that having outside activities, whether paid or hobby, helps you personally while you’re a graduate student. A side hustles is a valuable way to learn other skills and discover what you enjoy doing.

Video Series: How to Increase Your Income as a Graduate Student

Pfforphds dranddr

Subscribe to our mailing list to receive the 7-part video series on increasing your income as a graduate student, including side hustles and passive income.

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Powered by ConvertKit

8:10 How did you transition into self-employment as your side hustle?

Caitlin went from graduate school directly into her assistant professor position. For the first two years, she focused on her productivity, time management, and personal values. She decided that she wanted to work 9-5 and use her non-work time as she chose. She trained for a half marathon and on her runs, she listened to Nick Loper’s Side Hustle Nation podcast. The stories she heard on the podcast inspired her to start her own business on the side. Starting a coaching business seemed like a way for her to take more control of her career trajectory in the face of an uncertain economy. In contrast to other professors who may do consulting on the side, Caitlin decided to create her own platform to reach the general public. She wanted to help people beyond her students and outside her own academic network.

15:13 What do you do in your business and how does it complement your primary job?

Caitlin is a personal coach, working with clients to improve their productivity, time management, writing and academic life. To get started, she took coaching classes and offered her expertise to a broad audience. Most clients needed help determining if they should leave their job to go to graduate school, so Caitlin’s work has evolved to focus on that audience.

She spends about 8-10 hours per week on her business during the academic year and 20 hours per week during the summer. This time is spent coaching clients, collaboratively editing writing and teaching writing skills, speaking at conferences outside of her field, engaging her audience on social media, and on networking calls. She recently began working with corporations to help bridge generational differences. For instance, she has advised business how to help baby boomers and millenials work better together. She’s been paid to give webinars in a corporate setting.

Caitlin and Emily comment that academics are trained to view much of their work as voluntary service. Academics do many tasks, like reviewing papers, as a service for no extra money. Yet through a side hustle, Caitlin is paid for these tasks, generating income for her valuable skills.

20:50 What benefits have you experienced from your side hustle?

Caitlin benefits from flexibility with her finances that come from her side income. She has student loan bills, so this income helps her make those payments. She dreams of financial freedom. Also, Caitlin likes that her side hustle gets her outside of the ivory tower. She enjoys getting to know other people and helping people. Her goal is help people feel empowered to make decisions about their career and be productive. Through her business, she feels in control of her career, where she can learn lessons and grow opportunities.

23:02 Can you tell us about your website?

Caitlin’s website provides free content for interested people. She includes a blog with posts about productivity, self-improvement, and deciding whether to go to graduate school. Every two weeks, she sends an email newsletter. She provides videos with a transcript and worksheets.

Her first website was very simple and didn’t have much content. Having a website was an important first step to establish her business and build an audience. As she earned more money, she could put some of that money back into her business. Now, she hires a graphic designer and video editor to improve the quality of her online products.

25:34 How do you manage your time between your primary job, side hustle, and other commitments?

As a productivity coach, Caitlin practices what she coaches. She is serious about working her primary job 9-5 and having free time on evenings and weekends. She is super strict about sleep, so she always make sure she has 8 hours of sleep each night. She encourages people to start with getting enough sleep. Caitlin critically considers how she likes to spend her time, so that she spends it on activities she enjoys. For instance, she has decreased the time she spends editing papers, because she finds more fulfillment from coaching clients in person. She read Gretchen Rubin’s books for inspiration, and suggests that others look for productivity role models to follow.

Increase Your Income

Join the mailing list to receive our 7-part video series, "How to Increase Your Income as a Graduate Student," including side hustles and passive income.

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Powered by ConvertKit

30:48 How does your side hustle interact with your primary job?

At first, Caitlin kept her business idea quiet. Now that she has established her side hustle, she is open about it with people in her department. She says typically people don’t think too much about what she’s doing, but colleagues ask her about time management.

Coaching clients has made Caitlin a better professor, because skills she learned while she trained to be a coach showed her how to be a better teacher. She’s including information about her coaching business in her tenure package. She is making the case that her coaching business has improved her performance as a professor.

33:38 Would there be a situation where your side hustle became your primary job, or alternatively, you would stop it?

Caitlin has other goals that are fulfilled through her professor position. For example, one of her goals is travel, and her professor position gives her the opportunity to take her students abroad. She took her students to Greece, and her travel was paid for. She sees this as a perk of being a professor.

She is in a growth mode in her coaching business. She has 8-10 hours each week, so she’s examining how she can grow even though her time is limited. Additionally, Caitlin and her partner will be foster parents for teenagers soon. This family life transition may change her priorities and time management.

37:12 How could someone with a PhD find a side hustle that complements their primary work?

Caitlin recommends completing “What’s your purpose?” and “What are the things you like to do?” activities offered on several entrepreneur websites. Even though the entrepreneur path may not seem like an intuitive one for many with a PhD, Caitlin suggests plugging into the entrepreneur network to find support.

Through a side hustle, you can truly explore what you want to do and find something you love to work on. When you find something that you love, Caitlin says you have energy to overcome road blocks and make it grow. If you don’t love the work, you have the freedom to change direction.

39:40 Final Comments

Caitlin and Emily are both part of a self-employed PhD network led by Dr. Jennifer Polk. The network is very supportive and includes a diversity of people. Caitlin and Emily welcome people to reach out to them directly.

40:55 Conclusion

Code Maintenance Consultant

by Leave a Comment

 

Name: Carolyn Chlebek

University: Cornell University

Department/Program: Biomedical Engineering, PhD student

 

What is your side or temporary job?

I work as a consultant for a Gait Analysis Laboratory on campus. I maintain the code that provides the interface and analysis packages for the laboratory.

How much do you earn?

I earn $18/hr.

How do you balance your job with your graduate work?

I set aside 5 hours per week in my schedule. Typically, I look at my weekly schedule Sunday night and find some time that I physically block off – I ensure that I work 9 hr/day in total, therefore ensuring I give enough time for my research (minimum 40hrs/week).

Does your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

Yes, this job can definitely influence my career. Much of my research requires me to create and maintain code, so this side hustle is good practice. Additionally, the graduate student who held this position before me went into consulting and found that this position was a great talking point in interviews and demonstrated his skills that made him a great fit for a consulting position.

How did you get started with your job?

Another graduate student in my lab held the position before me and recruited me to take over from him after he graduated.

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

I enjoy the challenges of this position, and the more translational nature of this work – the lab uses this data to evaluate the healing progress of pet dogs after surgeries. They also use this data to guide future surgical decisions – as a dog lover, this is very motivating!