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How to Make Money without Working: Credit Card Rewards and 529s

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In this episode, Emily interviews Seonwoo Lee, a PhD student in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. Seonwoo has mastered two methods to earn extra money without “working.” Emily and Seonwoo discuss in detail their experiences with garnering credit card rewards and give both beginner and advanced tips. Seonwoo also explains a 529 hack he discovered to reduce his state tax bill that is applicable in as many as 30 states. They also briefly touch on several other methods to make money without working that are readily accessible for early-career PhDs.

Links mentioned in episode

make money without working

0:00 Introduction

1:14 Please Introduce Yourself

Seonwoo Lee is a PhD student in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. He did his undergraduate at Cornell. He pursued a number of ways to make money without actually having a second job.

1:48 Why have you tried to make money without working?

Seonwoo says that if you do it right, you can make more money per hour than working a traditional job. He says it gives you more flexibility, since you can do as much or as little as you want.

There is some effort involved in pursuing these strategies, but it’s not as much time you would put into working if you had a second job. Additionally, some people are prevented from officially working in other capacities, either by the terms of their contract or by their student visa. The strategies they’ll talk about are probably available to any PhD student or postdoc.

3:07 What are the two topics that we’ll go into detail discussing? What are some other strategies?

Seonwoo will discuss credit card rewards as well as banking sign up bonuses. Second, he’ll talk about the 529 trick to save money on your state taxes.

Emily mentions other ways to make money without working.

  1. Emily has sold items when she’s moved as part of a downsizing process. She has sold items on craigslist.
  2. Another option is Ebates *. Here, you make purchases through the Ebates platform and you are selling your information in exchange for money.
  3. Emily presents short term investing in taxable accounts as an option to make money without working. She and her husband paid off student loans through mid-term investing.
  4. Other options are receipt apps like Ibotta, where you upload your receipts and you sell your information to get cash back.
  5. Also, there is the strategy of “car wrapping,” which is wrapping your car in an advertisement and you receive money based on how much you drive. Emily recommends listening to the How to Money podcast for more information on car wrapping.

* This is a referral link. If you sign up and spend $25 through Ebates, you’ll receive a $10 bonus to your account and I’ll receive a referral fee. Thank you for supporting Personal Finance for PhDs!

7:19 How do the credit card rewards and sign up bonuses work?

Seonwoo begins with the caveat that if you can’t manage credit cards responsibly, you should not pursue credit card rewards in any form. If you pay any interest at all when you do this, you are likely not going to reap the benefits of rewards. Emily adds that you already need a good or excellent credit score to pursue these strategies. If you carry a balance on your credit card, this strategy is not for you. Emily says make sure you are using your credit card like a debit card, and if you are you can consider this strategy.

Further reading: Perfect Use of a Credit Card

Seonwoo says that plenty of credit cards offer sign up bonuses. These require you to spend between $500 and $4,000 within the first three months of signing. The bonuses will vary from credit card points to straight cash. The offers will range from $100 to $500 in cash or 30,000 to 100,000 points. Seonwoo says there are ways to meet these minimum spending requirements without spending more than you normally would.

Emily talks about fitting these credit cards into your normal spending. She signed up for a credit card with a minimum spending requirement of $3,000 over three months. She had to put everything she was purchasing on that one card. She picked a time of year when she had to pay for car insurance and flights. She timed signing up for the credit card with when she knew she had above average expenses. Reaching the minimum spend requirements is a hurdle for people with lower income.

Seonwoo says you can see if you can pay your rent with a credit card. He says the fee may be 3%. If that is the only thing stopping you from pursuing a sign up bonus, do the math to see if the rewards are worth it. You can see if you can put tuition or fee charges on the credit card. You can see if you can pay your bills months ahead of time. He says you can buy grocery gift cards to get the charge on the credit card, but then you can spend that gift card over a longer period of time.

Emily says that someone new to this can try it with existing spending, then they can try manipulating their spending.

13:00 Is cash back or points more valuable to a graduate student?

Seonwoo says that cash back is much easier to start with and understand. There are only so many cash sign up bonuses. If you like to optimize things, credit card rewards will be more valuable if you use the rewards for travel.

Emily says that there are cards with a regular cash back rate, like 1-2% back on spending. She says that is a good way to start. Then the next level would be switching to actively pursuing credit card rewards. To make rewards lucrative, you have to be able to redeem them. She explains that in Durham, North Carolina, she couldn’t be loyal to any one airline. But in Seattle, Washington, she makes use of the Alaska Airlines credit card and its reward system.

16:18 What are the pros and cons of the annual fee situation?

Seonwoo says a lot of cards that have sign up bonuses waive the annual fee in the first year. Seonwoo’s strategy is that he signs up for the card, meets the minimum spend requirement, and by month 11 he has decided he won’t pay the annual fee and he will close the card. He says some cards are worth the annual fee, but he wouldn’t recommend keeping the annual fee card to people with lower income.

Seonwoo says that if you cancel within 30 days of being charged the fee, you can often get a refund. Ideally, set up a spreadsheet and reminders to track your credit cards.

18:54 How much money have you made using this strategy?

In his best year for strictly cash, Seonwoo has made about $2,200 to $2,500 from sign up bonuses. He says he has more credit cards and points than he knows what to do with. Most of his rewards have been in credit card points.

Emily says when she was in graduate school and pursuing cash sign up bonuses, she and her husband together made about $1,000. This can alleviate budgetary stress.

20:38 Anything else you want to add on this topic?

Seonwoo brings up how this affects your credit score. In general, when you apply for a credit card, there is a small hit because you have an inquiry on your report. He emphasizes that the point of your credit score is to help you get low interest rate loans or good rewards credit cards. If you’re not applying for a loan in the near future, you can use the credit score for new credit cards. He applied for cards until he started getting denied. He waited a few months, then tried again and got approved. He says people stress out a bit too much about their credit score. He says people should recognize the point of the credit score.

Emily points out that there are positive affects of having several credit cards. She also mentions some cases where you need to keep your credit score high, like when you apply for a new residence or take out a mortgage.

Further reading: How to Establish Credit in the US

24:24 How do banking sign up bonuses work?

Seonwoo says that the main difference is that instead of requiring you to spend money, banking sign up bonuses require you to already have money. You sign up for a new checking account, get a couple of direct deposits in there and keep it open for at least six months, and sometimes make some transactions. You can get between $100 or $350 for signing up for that account. Some have fees, but the bank may waive the fee for students or on other terms.

Emily mentions minimum balances, and Seonwoo clarifies that high balances requirements are usually for savings accounts. Checking accounts have minimum balance between $1500 and $3000, and the percent return is 10% to 20% in six months. This is a good option for your emergency fund.

Seonwoo recommends the blog Doctor of Credit, who has several blogs on these topics.

28:54 What is a 529? What are the benefits of it?

Seonwoo explains that there are two types of 529 plans. One is a prepaid tuition plan, which he is not talking about. The other type is an investment plan. At both the state and federal level, it is not taxed when you withdraw it for education expenses. Emily compares this to an IRA, where you are not taxed on the growth of the money if you use it for retirement. Seonwoo calls it a Roth IRA for education.

Seonwoo says 30 states and the District of Columbia offer a state income tax deduction for contributing to your 529 plan. Most states require that you have a plan with that state, but they don’t require a net contribution for the year. He says you can contribute the money to get a deduction, then pull it out to pay for your expenses.

Emily says cost of living expenses can be considered qualified education expenses for the 529 plan. She explains that you can put money into a 529, then take it out to pay rent, and then you get a state tax deduction or credit. Seonwoo says even if your living expenses are $0, you can still do this. The amount is set by the university’s financial aid office room and board estimate of the cost of attendance.

Seonwoo explains his specific example at Georgia Tech. The financial aid office lists the cost of attendance estimate for room and board as more than $10,000. In Georgia, a single taxpayer can deduct up to $2,000 of a 529 contribution. His marginal tax rate is 6%, so a deduction of $2,000 saves him $120 per year in state taxes. So, he contributes $2,000 to the 529 plan and leaves it in there for 10 days, then he takes it out. This is all it takes to get the tax deduction.

36:37 Where can we go for more resources?

Seonwoo says he learned about this by going through his state tax return to look for deductions. On his blog, he has a college tag and he has a post about the 529. The site Saving for College is a good resource for 529 plans.

Emily says this is a strategy that you need to investigate for your own state. Seonwoo mentions that there are other education credits and deductions available, but you can’t double count expenses. This 529 trick makes use of the living expenses, because this is unique to this tax benefit.

Seonwoo recommends printing to PDF the page from the financial aid office that documents the cost of attendance. This is documentation to keep if you’re audited.

40:50 Final Comments

This episode is about ways to alleviate budgetary stress by leveraging your assets and optimizing your usage of financial accounts.

41:17 Conclusion

How To Launch A Side Hustle in Grad School

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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.

The Complete Guide to a Side Hustle for a PhD Student or Postdoc

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It’s no secret that PhD students and postdocs are paid a meager salary, sometimes not even as much as the local living wage. While a fraction of graduate students have probably always pursued side income to supplement their stipends/salaries, e.g., through part-time jobs, moonlighting, or odd jobs, only in recent years has it become easy to make money online or make money from home. Enter the ‘side hustle.’ The term exploded in popularity during the Great Recession along with the ‘gig economy.’ The flexibility of modern side hustles has made it possible for students and postdocs to fit their income-generating activities around their busy research schedules.

This article details why a graduate student or postdoc would want to side hustle, whether it’s allowed by their university/institution, examples of real side hustles held by PhDs, how to best manage the side income, and advice from PhDs with successful side hustles.

side hustle PhD postdoc

Motivations for Side Hustling

The motivations for having a side hustle during your PhD training are to make up for the deficiencies in what the university provides: money (primarily) and career-advancing experiences.

Increase Income

Pursuing your PhD during graduate school or gaining additional training as a postdoc is supposed to be your full-time (or more) pursuit. Research is life, right? Unfortunately, the positions don’t pay anywhere near as well as a regular full-time job.

The best case scenario for a PhD student or postdoc is that you will be paid enough to support yourself without making extreme lifestyle sacrifices, i.e., living in a van. However, there are plenty of programs and universities that do not even meet that low bar for a single person with no dependents. For a graduate student or postdoc with a dependent spouse (e.g., of an international trainee) or children, the low stipend or salary is almost certainly inadequate.

Graduate students almost always turn first to cutting their living expenses to be able to live within their means. They know that they are supposed to devote the lion’s share of their weekly energy to their coursework, research, and teaching. But when their backs are against the wall, some make money on the side to avoid going (further) into debt.

Career-Advancing Experiences

Some graduate students and postdocs are motivated to side hustle not by lack of income but rather lack of practical career preparation.

What careers does a PhD or postdoc prepare you for? These days, the vast majority of PhDs are not hired into tenure-track faculty positions. (Time to stop calling the jobs most PhDs get “alternative”, right?) Some universities have acknowledged this and put in place programming to help PhDs transition out of academia (my alma mater, Duke University, and in particular the Pratt School of Engineering, is innovating in this area), while others are still catching up.

Of course, PhDs have plenty of transferable skills that can be put to use in a wide variety of careers, but landing a job is still challenging.

Further reading: How My PhD Prepared Me for Entrepreneurship

A judiciously chosen side hustle (or even volunteer work) can help a PhD build out her resumé/CV and network to stand out from the other PhD applicants. A side hustle can teach you new skills, give you an opportunity to demonstrate the skills you already possess, and introduce you to professionals who can further your career journey.

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

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Are Side Hustles Allowed by Your PhD Program or Postdoc Position?

While some academics may take the view that side hustling distracts from classes, teaching, research, etc., for some people a side hustle is the main factor that enables them to stay in their graduate programs or postdoc positions. They side hustle because they want to keep doing PhD-level research; otherwise, they can just leave and earn more money elsewhere! If conceived and managed properly, a side hustle is not a distraction from the student or postdoc’s training but rather an enhancement of it.

If you think about graduate school or your postdoc as similar to any other type of job, usually the only stipulations regarding your side hustle are that: 1) it does not interfere with your primary job and 2) it does not present a conflict of interest. That logic is helpful for thinking through whether a side hustle is allowed, but the universities sometimes add layers of complexity.

Further reading: Can a Graduate Student Have a Side Hustle?

Side Hustle Permissibility by Position Type: International, Fellow, Employee, Etc.

There may be explicit bans on making money on the side or it may be frowned upon. The income and experience gained from a side hustle is not worth getting kicked out of your graduate program or postdoc position.

International trainees

The F-1 and J-1 visas generally only permit employment directly in your capacity as a graduate student or postdoc. Sometimes, you can seek permission for other employment ventures, such as Optional Practical Training (OPT) for F-1 visa holders. A side hustle that you work on simultaneously with your research will likely not comply with these rules, so it’s a no-go.

Fellowship Recipients (Graduate or Postdoc)

Check the terms of your fellowship funding supplied by your university, employer, or funding agency. There may be a stipulation that no outside income is allowed as the fellowship is designed to support you completely and require your complete dedication. If you choose to pursue a side income against the terms of your fellowship, proceed with extreme caution and recognize the downside is potentially losing your primary funding. In other cases, outside income is not mentioned by the fellowship terms or is even explicitly allowed.

Research and Teaching Assistants

This is the category of graduate students most likely to be able to get away with a side hustle or be explicitly allowed because your responsibilities are generally time-limited to 20 hours per week (officially). Of course, beyond that, you are responsible for your dissertation work, so side hustling might conflict with that important pursuit. If you are in a contract with your university, check its terms. If outside income is not allowed, proceed with caution as you might lose your assistantship. You might, however, find a provision that allows outside income, perhaps up to a certain number of hours per week.

Postdoc Employees

A postdoc employee has a regular job, albeit a demanding one. Your desire to side hustle at that point in your training is more likely motivated by career advancement rather than income. Again, check your contract, but a side hustle may very well be permissible as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work. If you are working in your field, though, it could be a good idea to seek your advisor’s permission in advance.

What Does Your Advisor Think?

The person with the most important opinion on your side hustle–after you–is your advisor. Allowed, disallowed, frowned upon… The status of side hustling in the eyes of your university, department, or funding agency is less important than its status to your advisor. If your advisor is an unforgiving taskmaster who expects his myopic view of the supremacy of research to be adopted by his trainees, a side hustle is a very risky endeavor. However, if your advisor is a reasonable and kind person who respects work-life balance, it may be better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission if your side hustle is discovered and viewed negatively.

The Bottom Line: The Spirit of the Law

The spirit of the law when it comes to side hustling during graduate school or your postdoc is that it should not distract from your training. (This sentiment does not apply to visa holders; the letter of the law is most important in that case.) Financial and career stress itself can easily distract from training, so it may be a matter of choosing the lesser of two ‘evils.’

Prohibitions against outside income make sense when the income comes from a part-time job with fixed hours (meaning that you wouldn’t be able to stay late in lab if necessary) or if it takes so much time overall that you can’t complete your work healthily. But I don’t find prohibitions against outside work that doesn’t interfere with the student or postdoc’s primary ‘job’ any more logical than prohibitions against having a family or a hobby (assuming no conflict of interest).

Ultimately, rules or no rules and advisor’s opinion aside, you are the only person who gets to decide whether to pursue a side hustle. You are the one who will manage it and make sure that it enhances your PhD training instead of detracting from it.

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

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Types of PhD Side Hustles and Examples of PhD Side Hustles

I break side hustles for PhDs into four categories: ones that advance your career, ones that you enjoy, ones that pay well (enough), and passive income. A side hustle that pays well and advances your career is ideal. If you can’t achieve that, doing something you enjoy is obviously preferable to doing something that you dislike or feel neutral toward that simply pays some bills. Passive income is outside of this ranked order as it doesn’t involve trading time directly for money.

By the way, if you are looking for a way to increase your income that your advisor would be totally on board with, try applying for a fellowship. I’ve created a guide to applying for and winning fellowships that includes a list of broad, portable fellowships that pay full stipends/salaries.

Further reading: How to Find, Apply for, and Win a Fellowship During Your PhD or Postdoc

PhD Side Hustles that Advance Your Career

There’s no better type of side hustle than one that pays you and helps you along in your career. Through this type of side hustle, you put your current skills to use, learn new skills, expand your network, and/or explore a possible career path. Often, this sort of side hustle is related to your current field of research or uses skills you’ve honed during your PhD. You might even be able to start working for a potential future employer while you’re still in training.

Examples of PhD side hustles that advance your career are:

  • Consulting
  • Writing
    • Freelance writing (Derek)
    • Freelance academic writing (Vicki)
    • Journalism
  • Editing
    • Freelance scientific paper editing (Julie and Amy)
    • Freelance scientific paper editing (Jenni)
    • Thesis/dissertation editing
  • Internships
    • Scientific research summer internship (Alice)
    • Engineering summer internship (David)
  • Professional fellowships
    • Science policy fellow (Emily)
  • Analysis
    • Research analyst for investor relations (Adam)
  • Teaching

PhD Side Hustles that You Enjoy

Sometimes an enjoyable hobby can be monetized or you can find meaning and delight in a side hustle. This kind of side hustle is one you would likely spend some time doing even if you weren’t being paid and can be particularly revitalizing during the long slog of your PhD or postdoc.

Examples of PhD side hustles that you might enjoy are:

  • Monetized hobby
  • Non-academic teaching
  • Resident advising
    • Resident advising for graduate students (David)
    • Resident advising for a fraternity (Adrian)

PhD Side Hustles that Pay the Bills

If the only purpose a side hustle fulfills is bringing in some money, it’s done its job. Sometimes these pursuits are necessary for survival, but you shouldn’t spend any more time on them than absolutely necessary.

Examples of PhD side hustles that (likely) simply bring in income are:

  • Tutoring
  • Retail
  • Food service
  • Uber/Lyft
  • Childcare

PhD Passive Income

Passive income has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. Ostensibly, passive income occurs after you make some kind of investment that then pays a residual.

Making a monetary investment in a rental property or dividend-paying stock is a classic example of passive income. The former is definitely a possible income source for a PhD who owns her own home.

Further reading: Should I Buy a Home During Grad School?

If you don’t have money up front, you can “invest” your time and talent into a product that people will buy over time. The classic example of that type is an author who is paid a royalty with each book sale.

The current fad incarnation of passive investing is a promise that you can “make money while you sleep!” through online business, generally selling previously created digital products. (I do this in my business.) However, almost no online business runs for long without input of time and labor. The upside for a graduate student or postdoc, however, is that the large time investment needed up front to generate passive income and the maintenance over the long term can generally be performed on your own schedule and under the radar.

Examples of PhD side hustles that are passive income:

  • Writing (i.e., published author)
  • Patent holder (licensed)
  • Digital products
    • Flash cards and ebook (Alex)
    • Courses
  • Investing for current income
  • Landlording

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Balancing Your Side Hustle with Your PhD Work

Figuring out how to make money and settling into a groove of earning a side income can be exciting. It can even be more gratifying at times than your research as research is basically a series of failures punctuated by occasional successes. In those weeks and month when nothing is going right in your research, being able to turn to an activity with a known outcome ($$!) can be a welcome relief. However, you should not forget why you are pursuing the side hustle in the first place: to finish your PhD and pursue a certain career. (Of course, your side hustle may spur you to leave your program, but only do so after serious reflection! It shouldn’t be about the side hustle per se but a carefully considered evolution of your career plans.)

To that end, there are a few strategies you can use to make sure your side hustle complements and does not compete with your primary role:

1) Track Your Time

Set weekly limits for yourself on the amount of time you will spend on your role as a graduate student or postdoc vs. on your side hustle. If your time spent side hustling creeps too high or your time spent on research dips too low, you know you need to readjust. Expect your weekly time goals to change throughout the seasons of your PhD training.

2) Set Geographic and/or Temporal Boundaries

It’s best if you conduct your side hustle in a different location than your primary PhD workspace; for example, you could work from home on your side hustle and never in your office or on campus. An alternative to geographic boundaries is temporal boundaries, such as never working on your side hustle during daytime working hours. The exact boundaries you set will depend heavily on the nature of both your PhD work and your side hustle.

3) Choose a Flexible Side Hustle

An ideal side hustle for a PhD is one that can be accomplished from anywhere at any time and ramped up or down depending on how busy you are with your research. This is not realistic for all side hustles, but the more axes of flexibility yours has the better it will complement your primary job.

4) Keep Your Side Hustle Quiet (If Possible)

An internship or professional fellowship that requires time away from your graduate program or postdoc obviously can’t be kept secret, but many other side hustles can fly under the radar of your advisor and department if you want them to. The seriousness of the possible repercussions or how “frowned upon” side hustling is should dictate how open you are about your pursuit. Keep in mind that a side hustle in your current field of research may very well get back to your advisor as communities are quite small, so in that case it may be better to be completely above board.

Best Financial Practices for Your Side Hustle

Most side hustles are independent contractor or self-employment positions, which means that you become an entrepreneur (or solopreneur) of a kind. There are some common best practices in self-employment you should put in place from the start of your side hustle.

Further reading:

1) Use a Separate Business Checking Account

Separating your personal transactions from your business transactions at the account level will help you keep track of exactly how much money you are earning after expenses and what is deductible on your tax return. You can make periodic transfers from your business account to your personal account to pay yourself.

2) Set Aside Money for Tax Payments (Quarterly or Annually)

Your PhD side hustle generates (potentially) taxable income, subject not only to income tax but also in many cases self-employment tax. Add your marginal tax brackets at the federal, state, and local levels together with the FICA tax you must pay, and set aside that fraction of each of your side hustle paychecks to ultimately pay the extra tax. If you earn enough in your side hustle compared to your primary job, you eventually will need to start paying quarterly estimated tax. Fellowship recipients who don’t have automatic tax withholding are already familiar with this process. Even if you aren’t required to pay quarterly, expect a larger year-end tax bill.

Further reading: The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

3) Give your Earnings a Job

The best way to ensure you don’t blow your side income is to assign it a job to be completed as soon as it hits your personal account. You could pay a specific bill or two with your side income or only allow yourself certain indulgences from your side income. For example, Jenni saved her side hustle earnings for travel.

Closing Advice and Thoughts from PhD Side Hustlers

“Honestly, it kept me sane to have other things going on… [They] helped me to finish my dissertation more quickly because I was more focused on the time I had, instead of having lots of unstructured time to work.” – Kathayoon

“I’d encourage graduate students to pursue a lot of different opportunities while in school, even ones that are at a slant from what they usually do. It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a grad student, but if you open yourself up, you can develop really useful skills while reinvigorating your academic work.” – Derek

“I definitely recommend finding something in grad school that’s unrelated to the work you do, monetized or not, so that if all your experiments fail one week, you still have something meaningful to throw yourself into.” – Shannon

“This experience was critical for my transition out of graduate school. I ended up getting a full-time offer at the same company after maybe 2 months of hourly work and have been there for almost 2 years now. The best part was that I had an opportunity to try out my job before starting full-time. How else do you know if you want to launch a career in a certain field?” – Adam

How to Financially Navigate an Unfunded Summer

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One of the most frustrating aspects of graduate school is that your income may fluctuate with each term. In some fields and at some universities, you might change roles not just each academic year but perhaps as frequently as each semester or trimester. When each role (fellow, teaching assistant, research assistant, graduate assistant) comes with a different pay rate, the result is a variable or irregular income. It’s even common to go without an income for a term, most typically the summer. This does not mean that you are at loose ends over the summer or free to work any type of other job. Research must go on in order for you to graduate in a timely manner!

An unfunded summer – or even just an income decrease – is not at all financially trivial for a grad student, and the solutions to an irregular income that other people use are not necessarily available or optimal for a grad student because of his low overall income. Of course, the ideal situation is to secure funding over the summer from an RA position or outside grant. If that option is not available, you must consider other avenues. If you see the funding lapse coming or it occurs regularly, you can prepare for it throughout the entire year.

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1) Get Another Job

You can take a job to replace the income you received during the academic year.

It may not be possible (or ethical) to find a regular full-time job since you plan to return to your fellowship or assistantship in the fall. A temporary or seasonable job is a good alternative, whether full-time or part-time.

First, look for a job that would advance your career in some way; it might help you demonstrate an existing skill, learn a new skill, expand your network, or simply look good on a CV. A paid internship is an example of a temporary job that is likely to advance your career.

Second, look for a job that you would enjoy doing, even if it’s not career-advancing. Your university is a great place to start when searching out opportunities, such as a work-study position. Inside or outside your university, there may be opportunities to work with younger students who are also on summer break, such as through camps or tutoring services.

Third, look for a job that pays you the highest available rate while still allowing you some time for your research and/or professional development on the side. If it isn’t advancing your career and you don’t enjoy it, just earn as much as you can per hour so you can minimize your work time.

2) Become Self-Employed

A way to earn an income that is an alternative to a temporary job is to work for yourself. It takes a certain personality and a lot of work to be successfully self-employed, but the advantages are:

  • You choose the type of work and clients,
  • It has the potential to pay a better hourly rate than a job, and
  • Your schedule and workload are under your control.

Try to think of a unique or marketable skill that you have and how you can leverage it to serve clients.

A few generic avenues for self-employment available to many grad students are:

  • Consulting (in your field),
  • Tutoring,
  • Freelance research, writing, and/or editing, and
  • Childcare.

If self-employment appeals to you, you should start pursuing it ASAP, because it often takes time to start generating an income/get paid. You might have to sustain your business year-round, though you could ramp it up or down depending on your academic workload.

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3) Save in Advance

The typical financial advice for dealing with an irregular income or lapse in income is to save up in advance so that you can cover your expenses from your savings instead of your income. This is good advice for someone with an income that far exceeds her expenses. For example, if you will go three months without an income, you should save approximately one-quarter of your income from each month that you are paid to sustain yourself during your unfunded summer. Setting this savings goal ensures that you keep your expenses in check year-round while building up the account you plan to draw from.

But how many graduate students are able to save one-quarter of their net income? And more so, how many of those well-paid graduate students might actually face an unfunded summer?

To the degree possible, you should save from your academic year income (your grad student income as well as side hustle if you have one) to pay expenses during your unfunded period if you don’t know you will earn as much from a different job/side hustle. In the face of short-term uncertainty, especially with respect to income, cash is king. But be honest with yourself from the first regular paycheck you receive about whether this plan is feasible.

4) Reduce/Shift Expenses

In the spirit of living within your means, if you are going to earn less or live off savings during your unfunded summer, you should try to reduce your expenses as well.

As your largest expense is likely housing, that’s where you should look first. If there is nothing physically keeping you at your university over the summer, you can move for the term. Sub-let your academic-year home and rent a less expensive place somewhere else, move in with your parents/relatives, or house-sit.

If any other of your typical expenses become unnecessary over the summer, try to jettison those as well. For example, many cities offer a slate of free activities over the summer, so you may be able to dramatically reduce the amount of money you typically spend on entertainment, eating/drinking out, etc.

Another possibility for making ends meet on a temporarily lower income is to shift any expenses possible to when you have a higher income. This doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount you would spend, but rather makes budgeting easier. Expenses that might be shifted include:

  • Shopping, i.e., for clothes, electronics, household furnishings,
  • Routine medical/dental/vision care,
  • Non-monthly insurance premiums or subscriptions, and
  • Vacation.

5) Take Out Student Loans

Finally, if you are enrolled as a student and taking a sufficient number of credits over the summer, you may be eligible to take out a student loan. (Credits don’t necessarily equal classes, depending on how your university registers graduate students.)

This is in my opinion a method of last resort and should only be used to speed progress toward graduation if a large salary bump is expected. A summer free from teaching or other service obligations can be an incredibly fruitful time for research progress – for some projects, it might be the only time when meaningful work is accomplished – so student debt can be reasonably justified for that purpose.

Do some math on the ROI of taking on the debt (principal and interest) vs. your other income options for an unfunded summer to make sure it’s worth it. You don’t want to end graduate school with an amount of debt that will be onerous to pay back with your post-PhD salary, but you also don’t want to tread water in graduate school and put off earning that post-PhD salary for too long.

Using student loans over the summer isn’t incompatible with any of the other options; use the other approaches to minimize the amount of student loans you need to take out/repay them immediately to the degree that they do not interfere with your research progress. Also, it is preferable to take out student loans than to accrue higher-interest rate debt (e.g., credit card debt) due to poor planning.

If you know your upcoming summer will be un/under-funded or you aren’t sure whether you’ll be able to secure an academic position or grant, start preparing now by:

  1. Reducing your expenses and saving as much as you can.
  2. Searching for temporary/part-time jobs.
  3. Pursuing a self-employment side hustle that ideally both pays well and complements your graduate work.

Even if you find funding for your summer and don’t need the side hustle or saved money, you will have put yourself in a better financial position and set your mind more at ease about the potential for subsequent unfunded summers.

How to Improve Your Finances this School Year

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

A version of this post was first published on GradHacker.

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Improve Your Finances This Week

Identify your life values

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

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

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

Create a balance sheet

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

Start tracking your spending

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

Create a prioritized goal list

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

Improve Your Finances This Month

Implement a frugal strategy

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

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

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Optimize your food spending

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

Add to your emergency fund

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

Improve Your Finances This Year

Right-size your housing and transportation

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

Develop a side income

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

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Regularly invest and/or pay off debt

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

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

Simultaneously Earn Extra Money and Advance Your Career

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In my final year of graduate school, I participated in a leadership program at my university. In the course of this program, all the participants worked on group projects, the subject of which was how to improve graduate student and postdoc career development. My group decided early on that we would focus on how trainees could participate in internships to gain work experience.

A version of this post was originally published on GradHacker.

Instantly, our group uncovered a culture clash: I was coming from an engineering program in which internships were fairly encouraged and some students even consulted or started their own companies. Two other group members were in the biological sciences, where the farthest you were allowed from the bench was Woods Hole, MA. The fourth group member was in a humanities program and insisted that 100% of his classmates got tenure-track teaching positions and therefore would be totally uninterested in any career development aside from teaching (a claim the rest of us found dubious).

Ultimately, we were able to agree on a project that helps students gain relevant experience outside of academia by thinking beyond internships to volunteering, part-time jobs, freelancing, launching new programs, taking courses, etc. The process of collecting testimonials on these career-developing experiences opened my eyes to the many ways grad students can advance their careers, even if their advisors or programs frown upon it.

Since I’m a money-minded person, I was particularly interested in the examples of grad students who earned money from their career-developing experiences. That really seems to be the best of all options—gaining relevant work experience and some extra cash, of course in balance with dissertation work. Internships are the most obvious way to accomplish this, since they often pay more than assistantships, but I found that many grad students had strategically chosen a variety of non-internship experiences that also fit the bill.

Below are a few examples of students who landed or created career-developing work experiences that also paid them. These examples are drawn from our Think Beyond Internships project from last spring (not specifically paid experiences, but many are) and my series on side jobs (not specifically career-developing experiences, but many are).

1) Summer intern

Alice completed a paid summer internship at a medical device company doing work related to her dissertation research, which confirmed for her that she wanted to pursue an industry career after her PhD. In addition, she gained “great contacts and references,” and “it was also really helpful to see the way PhDs were viewed at a big company … and understand the corporate mindset.”

2) Weekend consultant

Kathayoon created her own consulting practice evaluating zoos and aquariums, which was in line with her dissertation work. She found her first client through a mentor, and then more clients approached her; she traveled on weekends to complete the evaluations. Consulting helped her “build a lot of important skills … make connections to people in [her] field who acted as study subjects for [her] dissertation, and … get a job after graduation.”

3) Part-time analyst

Adam worked on a part-time, hourly basis as a research analyst for an investor relations firm, writing reports and updates. Not only was this a paid position that “made [him] realize how underpaid [he] was as a graduate student,” but he took a full-time job at the company after he finished his PhD. He said, “The best part was that I had an opportunity to try out my job before starting full-time. How else do you know if you want to launch a career in a certain field?”

4) Freelance editor

Julie and Amy freelanced for a scientific journal article editing company as contract editors. They edited articles related to their fields of study on a pay-per-assignment basis. Because of this this experience, Julie “read much more widely than [she] ever would have on [her] own and… [thought] more critically about what [she is] reading.” She also noted the networking benefits to working for her company. For Amy, “the contract job was perfect because [she] learned a lot and could do as much or as little as [she] wanted.”

5) Semester-long science policy fellow

I participated in the Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellowship after I finished grad school, but many of the other fellows in my class were current graduate students. We worked at the National Academy of Sciences for 12 weeks, learning about careers in science policy, gaining relevant work experience, and networking like crazy. The fellowship was designed to give graduate degree-holders a taste of science policy; they know that some of the fellows will pursue careers in science policy, but others will take their experience back to academia or into other sectors. My mentor agreed to serve as a reference for me for future positions, and many of the other fellows were able to stay on at the Academies after the fellowship or landed other science policy positions in DC. We received a stipend for participating in the fellowship.

I hope these examples have excited you about the possibility of finding paid work that also advances your desired career path. Before I conclude, I offer three tempering notes:

1) Some graduate programs explicitly disallow outside work in their assistantship or fellowship contracts, so you should check whether being paid will get you in hot water with your funding source or advisor. However, I think the spirit of this exclusion is more important than the letter. The point as far as I can tell is that your program wants you to make progress on your dissertation at a reasonable pace and not get distracted by outside commitments. But are a few hours of paid work a week really any more or less of a distraction than many other activities graduate students engage in (socializing, hobbies, self-care, raising children, etc.)? I think you should use your own judgment in how to balance your main goal of completing grad school with your side job and other pursuits and discern when you might need to refocus more or solely on your graduate work. In my own observation, some programs that state their students are not allowed outside employment will actually encourage work that is related to the student’s thesis topic.

2) All of the examples above and most in Think Beyond Internships involve students in STEM disciplines. I am hoping that is selection bias because the vast majority of my group’s contacts were STEM grad students and that students in other disciplines are also able to find paid, career-advancing work. I would love to hear from some non-STEM graduate students who have engaged in this type of work in the comments below.

3) Even if you aren’t able to find a job that combines both purposes of advancing your career and paying you, you can still achieve the goal that is more important to you (or both, through separate experiences). You can volunteer your time in such a way that advances your career (there are plenty of examples on Think Beyond Internships), or you can earn some extra money from unrelated work.

I wish you all the best in both setting yourself up for your post-grad school career and generating some extra cash flow!

Did you have paid outside work during graduate school, and if so what did you do? How strict is your department in disallowing students from working? How have you advanced your career during graduate school, aside from your dissertation work?