In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Brielle Harbin, and assistant professor at the Naval Academy. Brielle realized early on in grad school that she had to reform her eating patterns, and she slowly worked her way into meal prepping. She describes her current meal prep practice, including what she eats and when she shops and cooks. Meal prepping is an excellent practice for early-career PhDs as it almost always saves time and money and improves health. Brielle outlines a perfect first step for people who want to start meal prepping.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

• Personal Finance for PhDs: Sign up for personal finance coaching
• Personal Finance for PhDs: Wealthy PhD group program sign-up
• Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
• Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list
• Find Dr. Brielle Harbin on Twitter

Teaser

00:00 Brielle: And just start off with a very reasonable goal. Say, for a month, I’m going to meal prep my breakfast and I’m just going to try and get into the practice of preparing that and figuring out what that is. And then once that’s under your belt, then you can add, I think the next thing I added was a morning snack. So okay, now I’m doing the morning snack and once I had that under my belt, then I did lunch. Don’t try and go 0 to 100 that that’s not going to happen. So be very realistic about what’s the easiest thing that has the least amount of barriers for you to be successful and start there.

Introduction

00:40 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season 4, episode 13 and today my guest is Dr. Brielle Harbin, a new assistant professor at the Naval Academy. These days, Brielle is a skilled meal prepper, but things weren’t always that way. She tells us how her cooking and meal planning has evolved over her years in grad school and her post doc and describes the sustainable, flexible system she developed. Brielle’s commitment to meal prepping, has reaped benefits in her time, money and health. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Brielle Harbin.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Brielle Harbin, who is going to be speaking to us about meal prepping, which is a topic that I am so excited to learn from her about. So Brielle, will you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

01:36 Brielle: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Brielle Harbin and I am a political scientist by training. I got my PhD at Vanderbilt. I graduated in 2016 and I then went to the university of Pennsylvania for post doc and I was there for three years. And now I am actually beginning in my very first week of being an assistant professor and I have my new job at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. So I now live in Annapolis, Maryland.

02:10 Emily: That is amazing. And thank you for taking the time out of this first week to speak with us.

Cooking Habits Before Meal Prepping

Emily: Let’s take it all the way back to when you were in graduate school, before you got into meal prepping. What was your starting point with respect to cooking and how you managed your food and everything?

02:28 Brielle: Sure. I was very fortunate that I always liked to cook. I think I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner when I was in seventh grade. So I’ve always had a passion for cooking. When I was in grad school, I learned pretty quickly, especially the first semester when you’re taking coursework and you just have so many things that are being thrown at you that one of the biggest time sucks is going to get food. So that was quickly on my list of things to try and figure out how I can minimize the amount of time. It took quite a while for me to do that, and I can get into some of the different phases that I went through in that, but I started off with just, “I know I need to do this, but how can I do this when I don’t really have that much time?”

03:19 Emily: And are you speaking now about cooking in general or like cooking in an efficient way? Time efficient.

03:26 Brielle: Yeah. Trying to cook in a time efficient way. Because you know, as someone who loved cooking, I would always do it more in a social way. So I’d have people come over and it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to cut this and I’ll sit down and I’ll chat.” But when you’re in grad school, you don’t really have that liberty. I had to figure out, okay, how can I, one think and create a plan for what I’m going to cook, and then I need to think about, okay, when am I going to get it? Where am I gonna get it from? How am I gonna store it? How am I going to pay for it? It just became a much bigger logistical issue, then from just enjoying to do it with family and friends.

04:08 Emily: Yeah. It sort of sounds like cooking went from maybe more of like a hobby and an enjoyable activity to okay, I have to feed myself. It has to be monetarily efficient. It has to be time efficient, because there’s no slack in my schedule and in my budget for another way of doing things, at least not on a regular basis. So, we just mentioned a couple broadly a couple of barriers: going to obtain food, the budget, the amount of time it takes. Is there anything you want to go more in depth on about when you were trying to move towards what ultimately became meal prepping, what was maybe holding you back from being fully successful with it during graduate school?

04:49 Brielle: Well, one, I just think I was unrealistic in terms of how much I was spending. I didn’t have a great sense of how big of a cost it was. And so one of my earliest steps in trying to create a process was actually tracking how much I was spending on eating out. The way that my brain works is I need to have some type of motivation to help keep me, especially if time is zero-sum and you know, I have a lot of things competing. So when I saw the number of how much I was spending on eating out and then thinking about how much time it takes if my order is wrong and I’m unhappy with the meal, it just didn’t make sense anymore. I think, and I’ve talked to a lot of friends because everyone always asked me about my meal prepping, I think a lot of people don’t have a strong sense of how much they’re spending because you know, it’s a coffee here, it’s a quick run to, you know, whatever restaurant there and you never really aggregate the data. But as a social scientist, I guess this is my quantitative brain coming to bear. I wanted the data and once I saw the data, it was pretty ugly.

06:00 Emily: Yeah. That’s interesting that you bring that up because I feel like there’s a couple of different styles right with this. So there’s the style of what you were just saying. Maybe eating out quite frequently or making small trips to the grocery store and it’s sort of dribbling out money and dribbling out time and it is hard to, to keep track and add up what all that is if you’re not doing it quite intentionally versus like the meal prep approach is more like, okay, you’re going to do your shopping trip — maybe it’s once a week, whatever it is, a certain frequency, it’s a big trip — and then you’re going to do this big investment of time to do all the prep. And so it feels like a lot for the day or two it takes to do that. But then it pays off so much the rest of the time and you’re not dribbling out time and dribbling out money on continuing to shop and prepare food and so forth. It’s really a reallocation of time and money and like you were saying it, you become more aware of how much you’re spending in both of those areas with the meal prep, but it doesn’t mean it’s more in money or time than doing it the other way. It’s just your awareness is different of it, right?

07:01 Brielle: Yeah. The biggest thing and when I started my meal prepping, I wasn’t always saving a huge amount of money. I was always saving something because eating out can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. But the biggest changes were occurring in the amount of time I was just traveling, having to go places and whatever. If there’s traffic and all the different things that can hold you up, that was just consuming a lot of time and actually creating quite a bit of anxiety for me around if I’m going to lose my parking space so then I have to go at this time. It’s just a lot of brain space that it was taking up for met that seemed like a not great use of my time.

07:42 Emily: That’s another really interesting thing for me to hear. I’ve become more, I think, sympathetic over the years, as my life has gotten more full, to the advantage of totally simplifying decision making, and not having to make a decision in the moment of, “okay, where am I going to go eat and when is it going to be and what am I going to eat.” If it’s just like it just in this one small area of what are you going to eat, if I’ve already decided that in advance, it really is kind of, for me, a load off my mind, so I’m sure other people come to the same decision maybe in terms of routines that they go through in their daily basis or maybe they always wear the same types of clothing or whatever. There’s lots of ways that we can simplify our decision making and preserve that energy for other areas of our life and planning your meals is one of those areas.

08:27 Brielle: Yeah, I’m really into different professional development things and time saving. I’ve listened to several podcasts that are just about that. And I think, I can’t remember what I read or what I listened to, but I remember reading that, I think President Obama always wore a similar outfit because he didn’t want to have to waste the mental energy. And I was like, well, if it’s good enough for President Obama, it’s good enough for me. That really resonated with me and helped me a lot.

Getting Started With Meal Prepping

08:56 Emily: Okay. So you’re in graduate school and you have this eating out habit and this lovely hobby of cooking, but it has to become a little bit more utilitarian maybe overtime. Now it seems like, or let’s say in your post doc, prior to your move, you got to a really great spot with your meal prep. Can you tell me about how you did that? How did you make that transition?

09:22 Brielle: Beginning, and can I go back for a second to grad school, the way that I was able to make that transition, I actually started with the buddy system. I had a really good friend that I met actually the day of our orientation at Vanderbilt and he just happened to love to cook too, and also had a habit of doing it and similar stressors that were coming into life. Since we were in different departments and had different life things that were coming up at different times, I think, I can’t remember, I’m pretty sure I started it. I think he was taking an exam and I just went over there with three days worth of food, so that he didn’t have to think about it. And he was like, that is really nice. When I was going through a big exam, he came over with three days of something for me and then it kind of became a friendly competition because he has a Caribbean background and so all the things that he was very familiar with were not foods that I had before. It became, “Ooh, let me introduce you to this food that I love and that food” and it became a social thing, which outside of the efficiency question, which is nice to have a friend in to bond that way. I always tell people it’s not always realistic and I frankly don’t want to eat everybody’s food, but if you have that opportunity, it’s a really great way to mix up the meal prep process and when you are kind of at the height of all the things on your plate, maybe you have someone who’s not as busy and is willing to step in for you. So that really helped. Once I started with that, I never really fully got consistent every week in grad school with meal prepping just because honestly you have so many things going on that I think if you’re 50/50, that’s a good goal to have with meal prep.

11:14 Brielle: But once I moved to the postdoc, I realized this is less stressful now, I don’t have as many things on my plate, and I was craving stability. Honestly, I was just so stressed out during grad school and I’m feeling some of the effects of being post PhD in terms of the stress level that it has on your body, and I really felt and craved eating for holistic health. I actually briefly had a blog where I was kind of getting into different foods, how they make you feel, the effect that they have on your body, so I was doing all this research and then trying to incorporate these ingredients into my weekly meal prepping. It just became, after awhile, I think it was June in 2017, I just said, I want to, for two months, meal prep every Sunday. I’m going to do this for two months and then I’ll see how it feels. I’m going to take pictures on Facebook for accountability because that’s what we do these days. After two months I just felt so much better. I was getting better sleep, I was just feeling less stressed out during the day and like I was better powered in terms of my energy that I just stuck with it.

12:36 Emily: I love that approach of setting yourself a challenge right over a set period of time to really put your all into it and then decide at the end of it, was it worth it or was it not? I talk about this sometimes in the context of what I call frugal experiments. And meal prepping is a big frugal experiment, right? That’s a big, big timeline and these could be very minor, but I really just love the idea of having a set in advance, fixed period of time to have an experiment and evaluate the results at the end of that. It sounds like at the end of that period you were ready to keep rolling because you’d experienced so many advantages.

Meal Prep Routine

Emily: Can you tell me about what is the system that you came to? You’ve mentioned Sunday already, so just tell us what is the meal prep process for you?

13:23 Brielle: It started off where I was on Thursday and ended up being on the Fridays because I was usually tired on Friday afternoons. I would think about what is it that I want to eat for the next week and I would come up with a shopping list. I’m super organized and so I always went to the same grocery stores so I knew exactly which section everything was in. I created my shopping list by sections so that I could just get in and get out because I love to cook but I hate grocery shopping. Behind laundry, it’s the only thing I hate more in terms of just life stuff. I would do on Friday the shopping list and then on Saturday I always went to a morning spin class that was fairly close to the grocery store that I would go to. So I’d always go to the same class and immediately after go to the grocery store on Saturday morning and then on Sunday and not at a particular time, just sometime on Sunday I would actually cook the food.

14:23 Emily: Yeah. I think that’s a pretty common lay out for a meal prepper, right? To do the prep on Sunday and do the shopping on Saturday. I’ll start interjecting some of my own thoughts here at this point in the interview because meal prepping is something that I have tried maybe a little bit half-heartedly and not been very successful with. I definitely agree that you need to separate the shopping from the cooking. It’s all too much to do in one day. For me, trying to do all the cooking that I would eat for the week — and actually this is when I had a family, so it’s actually a lot of food — I was exhausted by the end of six hours or something and I was like, I haven’t even gotten through everything I planned and I felt like an abject failure. So tell me for the actual, on Sunday when you’re doing the meal prepping, what are you doing? What foods are you cooking? Are you making components that you then assemble into meals right then? Or are you making things that you’ll be assembling later?How does it actually work for you?

15:25 Brielle: So at some point, and I don’t remember exactly when this happened, I realized that I was having a challenge in my meal prepping because I really didn’t like the Tupperware I was using. That seems like such a small detail, but if you want to transport it and then microwave things, Tupperware can get pretty gross pretty quickly. Especially I would use a lot of curries and things like that. The big thing that shifted my process was getting Pyrex, and they are a little bit more expensive, but it’s actual glassware. I actually separate each one of my lunches into a different Pyrex bowl and I started off where I was trying to prep salads and I think that’s probably the most common question I get. How do I do that? And so for me, I always just put the leafy greens in one of the Pyrex things and then I have the component pieces in separate ones and then the sauce in a third smaller one, and then I combine it when I’m ready to eat, just because you don’t want to have a soggy salad.

16:37 Emily: I want to be clear about what I’m imagining here. I’m imagining you on a Sunday, you have your five, or seven, or however many you’re doing, bowls for your greens and you have your five, or seven for the toppings and then you have your five or seven dressing separately. All those are like individually packaged already starting on Sunday, is that right?

16:25 Brielle: Yes. I don’t actually have five separate for the dressing. I usually just use a Mason jar and made the bigger one and then I would just pour it into the smaller one because that’s a pretty easy clean. But yeah, otherwise you’re correct. I have a lot of pictures and posts I did on Facebook that showed my five dinners, because I usually do five, five lunch and five dinner.

Commercial

17:24 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money, but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series, as you make changes over the long term. You can find out more at PFforPhDs.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part coaching, part course, and part community. You can find out more and join the wait list for the next time I open the program at PFforPhDs.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

Meal Prep Recipe Ideas

18:39 Emily: Okay, you’ve talked us through salads. What are some other common meals or foods that would show up for you?

18:46 Brielle: I make a little bit of everything. I think one of the biggest things I tackled was getting bored with things. I had some regular meals that I would make, and then, after a while, I realized I think I’ve gotten tired of at some point or another, shrimp, and chicken, and all these kinds of things. I became a master at Googling ingredients and then finding new things that I would experiment with. Through that process, I figured out sometimes, you know, a picture looks nice, but when you get into the details of the recipe, it’s like all these elaborate things and all these mini micro steps that take a lot of time, so I use them for inspiration, but I didn’t always follow recipes one-to-one.

19:39 Emily: Just to follow up on that — do you have any go to resources to find, let’s say recipes specifically designed for a meal prepping or are you more adapting recipes? Not necessarily for that purpose, but just you do it on your own?

19:53 Brielle: I don’t necessarily do it for meal prep specifically, but I found a couple of sites that I like. There is a blog, Sweet Potato Soul and it is actually run by a woman of color named Janae and she is vegan. I went through a phase of just prepping vegan stuff. One of the things that I have continued to have, even though I’m not a vegan, in my weekly routine, is I love Buddah bowls because they’re so easy to just throw a grain in there, throw some chickpeas, and some toppings and she has a lot of great ideas for Buddha bowls. I would say that that is a staple and you can always change the ingredients of what’s in the Buddah bowl, but it’s really easy.

20:40 Emily: This is another example of simplifying the decision making, right? That you have like a baseline type of meal you make — salads, Buddha bowls — and then you can shift things up as your taste directs you. Any other resources you care to mention or any other types of food that you love to prep?

20:57 Brielle: I don’t have a specific recommendation beyond I think one of the most important things is going with the flow and listening to your process and not being too hard on yourself, if you don’t get it right. For me, there were a lot of different adjustments that I made along the way and you just have to roll with it and beating yourself up doesn’t help at all. But if you can just become more aware of maybe certain times of the year you like this type of foods or when you’re taking a test, this feels more of a comfort. Just paying better attention to yourself, which can be really hard in grad school, I think that’s the best advice I could probably give someone who’s trying to embark on the journey.

Saving Money Through Meal Prepping

21:39 Emily: Yeah, it sounds a little bit like budgeting actually. You may think it’s going to look one way when you haven’t quite dived into the process yet, but then it’s going to evolve as you evolve and your life changes and so forth, and you’ll learn more about yourself and what makes you happy and satisfied. Speaking of budgeting, do you think that you’re spending less money overall with this meal prepping stuff or how has meal prepping affected your budget?

22:07 Brielle: I definitely have saved money over time. The biggest shift actually though came when I changed my process from, I think I mentioned before that I would on Friday create a list and then go on Saturday. Once I got more comfortable with what I like to eat, I actually didn’t create a list and I would go into the store and find what’s on sale. I think when I was doing the list thing, I was spending some like $115 a week and I eat a lot of organic things, a lot of fruit and veggies, I get all organic meat, so that’s kind of at the top end of things. But I went from that to spending about $65 a week by just eating what was in season. So I think that’s a considerable difference.

22:59 Emily: Oh, that’s huge. That’s much higher than I was expecting actually. And did you then or do you now do all of your shopping at one store? You already mentioned your routine of going after your cycling class or spin class, but is it always one place or do you have a few different stores you hit in rotation?

23:16 Brielle: Now it’s just one, but at one point I was, there’s a produce junction that was in Philadelphia that I found one of the administrators at Penn told me about it, and you could buy fruit and vegetables in bulk. Now my challenge is that I’m single and so I would buy things and I was wasting a lot of foods. That didn’t work for me, but for somebody who has a family, I think finding some of those alternative options where you can buy in bulk would be a great option, but it just wasn’t for me. I wanted to say one thing to make sure that I acknowledged this, while it was still in my brain. I was a single person in grad school and I know a lot of people aren’t. A lot of times people would say, “Oh, I can’t really do that because I’m a mom where I have like this or that.” I’ve actually become much more attentive to asking my sister friends who have children and meal prep, how do you do this? And I think the biggest difference in the process is that some of the women that I have talked to say that they eat more stews and soups because you can just throw everything in a crockpot and it’s really easy. They may go to the grocery store twice, rather than once a week. I think it’s still possible to do it, it just might look different in that phase of life.

24:38 Emily: Yeah. And I think that goes to what we were just saying earlier is that this kind of has to evolve with you as things change for yourself and your family. I know that when I was in graduate school and just cooking between myself and my husband, I was using our Crock-Pot so much. I wasn’t really into meal prepping, but I would do bulk cooking. So like huge thing in a Crock-Pot, feed me all week for lunches. It was a sort of minor step in that direction and I still love that approach of just make an enormous pot of something and be done for a little while. Again, it takes the decision making off the table because you know what you’re eating for the next week when you cook in such great volumes. Okay, you were really able to take you’re spending down. You’re eating this lovely food that you feeling wonderful for your body and so forth and you really took your spending down by becoming a little more flexible and being able to go for sale items, in season items, and making the decisions on the spot in the store. I know I’ve fallen into that trap sometimes too of being too emboldened into my list or feeling too flexible and I go back and forth, but that’s a great percentage reduction in your spending just based on that one step alone, so that’s awesome. Thank you for that discussion on buying in bulk versus not because of course different households have different needs there. I know, personally, we shop at Costco right now quite a bit and the buying and bulking from Costco gets a lot of criticism, “Oh, how are you ever going use a gallon condiment jar or whatever.” But we actually buy produce and meat at Costco because we do get through it and we just eat the same produce for several days in a row and it works for us well. Okay, so we’ve talked about the time and how you do it and the money and so forth. Why do you think that other people should be meal prepping? Or maybe you think, why should other people consider meal prepping? What benefits might they experience? And let’s specifically think about our population of early career PhDs.

Other Benefits of Meal Prepping

26:31 Brielle: The biggest benefit for me, and I think for others potentially, is just the health benefits. I think it’s really hard when you’re in the thick of grad school to give time to your mental, physical health, but it’s so important. Sleep deprivation and all the different thingsthat’s happening to your body when you’re in such a stressful period. If you can’t sleep eight hours, at the very least, you can give yourself some leafy greens and nourishing meals. I consider it, and I didn’t always follow my advice, is just a little bit of — I know people kind of don’t like the self care language now, but something you can do for yourself that you’re going to have to do no matter what. It’s not like, you know, it’s an elaborate expensive thing to just take care of yourself in that process.

27:20 Brielle: For me, actually when I started, I went through a couple of different phases with like doing Whole 30 and different types of food preparation techniques because I was experiencing some health issues and I actually figured out what my food intolerances were by meal prepping because I was able to eliminate things and put things into my diet where I figured out what was causing me inflammation. I think even for that reason alone, it’s really helpful to just know how different foods are affecting your body so that you can at least control that part of a life that is pretty out of control in grad school.

28:01 Emily: Yeah. Great point. Exactly as you said, you’re going to be eating anyway, you may as well make it something that’s going to fuel your body properly and keep you feeling good for all that work you have to do. Just as we’ve discussed before, I think the other potential benefits, depending on how you do it, are of course time savings and money savings. we’ve well covered that, but thanks for adding the health benefit there.

Tips To Get Started With Meal Prepping

Emily: Let’s say there’s someone listening like me. I’m listening and thinking I need to give this a shot, I needed to try this again. What are some easy first steps you would recommend?

28:39 Brielle: What I did was start small. For me breakfast is always a pretty simple meal that I’m always going to pretty much eat the same thing and just start off with a very reasonable goal. Say, for a month, I’m going to meal prep my breakfast and I’m just going to try and get into the practice of preparing that and figuring out what that is. And then once that’s under your belt, then you can add, I think the next thing I added was a morning snack. So, okay, now I’m doing the morning snack and once I had that under my belt, then I did lunch. Don’t try and go 0 to 100, that that’s not going to happen. So be very realistic about what’s the easiest thing that has the least amount of barriers for you to be successful and start there.

29:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for that advice because that is what I need to hear. I’ve been pretty successful in cooking like a casserole for breakfast that’ll last us the week. Something like that. Lunches are also pretty accessible for me. I think dinner’s the real challenge and that’ll be left for last in my next go around with this.

29:42 Brielle: Hold your confidence when you find yourself because there’s going to be benefits. I even noticed I was able to better control the calories once I was like, okay, I’m eating this for breakfast. So then I’m snacking less and it’s like, “Oh, I lost a couple of pounds. Ooh, I feel better.” Okay, so now I’m motivated to do the next thing. Like you, I was the type of person who needed a reward for every single thing and celebrated every single success. So there are a lot of those small milestones along the way that’ll keep you going. If you just commit to the very small thing of, let me work on my snack or my breakfast first.

Meal Prepping During Life Transitions

30:19 Emily: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this wonderful view into your meal prep process and it’s really encouraging to hear that this is not something that was automatic for you from the beginning. It’s not something you learned as a child or anything. This is something you took years and years to develop. And of course there were times during graduate school when it wasn’t able to happen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t ever. And you’ve continue with that. How has it been with your latest move? Going from, you had your process down set when you were living for your postdoc and now you’ve moved. How has that gone?

30:59 Brielle: It was very chaotic. I think I was realistic in that if all my kitchen is literally in boxes, then I can’t cook. But it just takes a lot out of you to move, to pack and then to move. I thought, “Oh, okay, I’ll just jump in probably a week after and I’ll be back to it,” and that just didn’t happen. I just gave myself this space to say like, I’m gonna just enjoy eating out because even with my meal prep, I would still eat out on the weekends, just as a social activity. I allowed myself to do that and I’m just now kind of getting in, I moved at the end of May, and I’m now just a month or so later, finally getting back into my routine.

31:44 Brielle: It’s gonna look different because my life is different here, but I’m going with the flow. I think the other thing besides just moving that’s been a change in my routine is that, with my meal prepping, I got better in terms of feeling healthy with my food, which encouraged me to be better about my exercise. Now I’ve gotten to exercising five or six times a week, which now has changed how I had to meal prep, because in order to be able to do those workouts, I have to eat in a totally different ways. I think there’s never an end point in how this process works. However your life goes, you have to adapt and move with it. And so I don’t know, and I’m not feeling super successful about my food prep right now, but I know I will be if I just give myself some time.

32:35 Emily: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, what you eat is very intimately connected with many other areas of your life and health and work and sleep and exercise and so forth. And so yeah, just thanks so much for giving us a picture of that evolution with how meal prep has been fitting into your life over the last few years. Thank you so much for teaching us on this topic today.

32:55 Brielle: Thank you. And I wish everybody lots of success in whatever their journey looks like.

Outtro

33:02 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Achive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.