In this episode, Emily interviews Lucy Capano, a rising fourth-year PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis. Since she started her graduate program, Lucy has been funded by a non-W-2 fellowship and training grant, which has affected her financial practices of retirement investing and paying income tax. Lucy and Emily discuss what changed for 2020 to permit fellowship recipients like Lucy to use an IRA and how Lucy handles calculating, saving for, and paying quarterly estimated tax to the IRS. Lucy shares her motivation for pursuing saving and debt repayment goals while in graduate school and her surprising best financial advice for another graduate student.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

• PF for PhDs Episode: GSSA and SECURE Act
• PF for PhDs Episode: SECURE Act Passes
• PF for PhDs Tax Center
• PF for PhDs Episode: NDSEG Fellow
• The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients
• Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients [Workshop for Individuals]
• 2020 IRS Form 1040-ES [Estimated Tax for Individuals]
• How to Manage Income Tax Payments for Your Fellowship or Training Grant [Live Seminar]
• PF for PhDs Podcast Hub
• PF for PhDs: Subscribe to the Mailing List

Teaser

00:00 Lucy: That amount would automatically withdraw to that separate checking account that I didn’t really use for anything. And then at the end of three months, when it was time to pay quarterly taxes, I knew I had that amount and I was not worried about it. Right? I never even saw it in my regular checking. It only went into that secondary checking account.

Intro

00:22 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode nine, and today my guest is Lucy Capano, a rising fourth-year PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis. Lucy has been funded by non-W2 fellowships and training grants since she started her graduate program, which has affected her financial practices of retirement investing and paying income tax. We discuss what changed for 2020 to permit fellowship recipients like Lucy to use an IRA, and how Lucy handles calculating, saving for, and paying quarterly estimated tax to the IRS. Lucy shares her motivation for pursuing saving and debt repayment goals while in graduate school and her surprising best financial advice for another graduate student. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Lucy Capano.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:21 Emily: I’m delighted to welcome to the podcast today Lucy Capano who’s a rising fourth-year PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, and we are talking about my two favorite subjects in one episode, investing and taxes, particularly for graduate students, maybe postdocs as well. So, Lucy, would you please tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

01:38 Lucy: Yeah, I’d love to. My name is Lucy, like Emily said, I’m very grateful to be here. I study neurodegenerative diseases and the age-associated causes that could be implementing them in the human brain. And we have a really cool protocol, but this is not about science. This is about taxes and budgeting because as a graduate student, we have a very limited income, and really, depending on where you are, you can have excess, or you can be really, really tight-budgeted. And it took me two-and-a-half years to really figure out where I needed to be. And so, why would I keep that information to myself? I think we should be sharing it.

Estimated Taxes on Non-W2 Fellowship Income

02:19 Emily: Yeah, I see we have a similar mission! So glad to have you on the podcast. So, your personal story, when you started graduate school, you had what I call non-W2 fellowship income. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why that was particularly financially challenging and odd at that time?

02:36 Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. As a first-year, I came in, and generally, that one is non-W2, and then I was immediately transferred to a training grant, which again means that I’m on a non-W2. So, that means my taxes that I would need to pay annually to the government are not taken out of my paycheck automatically. So, I get the full, gross amount given to me, and then I need to section portions of it to be able to pay estimated taxes. So, estimated taxes are due every quarter, April 15th. Oh my gosh. Am I going to get these dates right?

03:12 Emily: I have them. It’s mid-April, mid-June, mid-September, and mid-January, except in 2020 the first two quarters–so what would usually be mid-April and mid-June–have now been bumped back to that July 15th, 2020 annual tax due date. So, three types of tax stuff all due on the same day in 2020, but you got a little bit of a reprieve. So yeah, go ahead. It’s weird, right? It’s three–two–three–four months in length throughout the year. That’s why I also had trouble remembering this for like the first couple of years.

03:44 Lucy: The July has definitely been throwing me off because I’m used to June and now we’ve got July. So, when you get this money, how do you even make sure that you’ve got enough to pay per quarter? And do you want to do it all upfront, which you can totally do? Do you want to actually do it by quarter and hope that you remember? There’s a lot of ways to tackle it. You just need to find what works best.

Grad School Pay Frequency and Investment Goals

04:05 Emily: And so for you, are you being paid monthly? Or what is your pay frequency?

04:10 Lucy: We are paid on the last business day of the month. So, everything comes to me in one large lump sum. And that’s also slightly problematic, right? You need to be able to budget so that your entire month can be paid without overdoing it while waiting for that monthly paycheck to come in.

04:28 Emily: Yeah. Pay frequency is one of these really weird things about graduate school, where most people I think are once per month, but there are some people every two weeks or bi-monthly. And then there are some people on fellowship who receive an entire term’s worth of income two, three times a year. So, that’s a whole other sort of budgeting challenge. It’s nice that you get it up front, but it also causes problems. But that’s what I was wondering about when you mentioned paying the estimated tax. So, let’s talk a little bit more about estimate tax at the end of the interview and switch to talking about investing. So, when you started graduate school, what was your situation around investing? Was it a goal of yours, and were you able to do it?

05:06 Lucy: Yeah, so I moved here from an East Coast city. I’m now in the Midwest, and I love the East Coast, but it is not cheap. Just like the West Coast. And so, we pretty much didn’t have any disposable income. It was paycheck to paycheck. I was working both my lab tech job and a supplemental just to help kind of keep us afloat. And so when we moved here, the cost of living is a lot less. And so, we actually had a surplus after a certain bit of time. You know, after all the moving expenses when we paid those off. And the problem became, I always knew that I wanted to save for retirement and start savings, but I kind of didn’t know where to start. And in addition to that, I had never really had excess money before.

05:52 Lucy: And so a lot of money was escaping places that I didn’t really notice it was escaping. And that was kind of the big “Aha” moment for us was when we shifted. And I’m saying “we,” I live with my partner, we’ve been together for quite some time, was realizing that we had to make a decision. Do we want to go out to eat a bunch of times this month? Or do we want to have the retirement savings and the flexible savings accounts that will get us to the goals that we want, which is probably to move back to a coast, which again, not cheap. So, we need to do a lot of good saving while we’re here.

Retirement Investment: IRAs

06:33 Emily: So, was retirement investing in particular on your mind at that point?

06:38 Lucy: Yeah, so I had worked a number of jobs before coming to grad school. So, I had a 403(b), which is the nonprofit version of a 401(k), and I also had a Roth IRA from that same time. But when I became a graduate student in 2017, I knew that I couldn’t contribute with any of my stipend. So, I couldn’t do much other than build kind of the flexible savings that you keep within your bank account. And so, I knew I was just kind of in limbo and I was going to live there. And then in 2019, the SECURE Act was passed. And that changed the game for graduate students.

07:14 Emily: Yeah. Just to go back and explain that a little bit further because still a lot of people are kind of unaware of all these different laws and so forth. So, 2019 and prior, I think going back to like the eighties, the 1980s, what I referred to earlier, non-W2 fellowship income–so, any kind of fellowship training grant income that you get that’s not on a W2–at that point was not eligible to be contributed to an IRA. It was not considered taxable compensation or earned income. So, that was the situation until the SECURE Act passed. Not to say that everyone receiving that kind of income was totally unable to contribute because if you had a side hustle you could, if you were married to someone with taxable compensation you could, so there were some workarounds. But for plenty of people, it was just a hard “No.” If your stipend, your non-W2 fellowship stipend was your only income in the course of the calendar year, nope. An IRA was not an option for you. But pick up again, please with what the SECURE Act did.

How the SECURE Act Supports Grad Student and Postdoc Savings

08:06 Lucy: Yeah. So, the SECURE Act stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act, which is great. I love that it ends on enhancement and then adds the Act back in. And what it says is that the term compensation shall include any amount, which is included in the individual’s gross income and paid to the individual to aid the individual in the pursuit of graduate or postdoctoral study. So, that meant that anything that I could claim as my gross individual income was now able to be used to be saved for retirement.

08:45 Emily: I think that was always a point of confusion prior to 2019, is that, wait, wait a second. My income as a graduate student is taxable? Like I have to pay income tax on this, and yet, I am not allowed to contribute to an IRA? It was very incongruous, hard for people to understand. It was there in black and white in the tax code. It was unambiguous, but it’s just a hard thing logically to come to grips with. So, it’s so great that the SECURE Act, which originally this Act was called the Graduate Student Savings Act, and then it was folded into the SECURE Act. I have a great podcast episode from last fall–two, actually–that I did on the SECURE Act’s passage. So, I’ll include those in the show notes in case you want to go back in time and listen to those. But yeah, end of the day, the great news is starting in 2020, people like you with only this type of non-W2 fellowship income, now you can contribute to an IRA again. So, have you been? How are the savings going?

09:37 Lucy: Yeah, great. We absolutely have started putting money into the Roth. It’s important to start early, right? In high school, we learned about compound interest and investing, and the earlier you start, the more you get out of it in the end. And so, when we talk about budgeting, we usually try to have around–I was taught about six months of your important and unmovable expenses, right? Your rent, your car, your car insurance, whatever else you may have that you know you have to spend monthly in a savings account. But then after that, there’s no point in continuing to build that up. That stuff should now move to retirement savings and kind of investment options. So, now we have automatic, biweekly–which is every two weeks because biweekly is a fun word–directly into the Roth IRA account for me and both my partner. And so, then I go in and I take those and I apply them directly to whichever funds I want to purchase with that.

Why Make Retirement Savings a Priority During Grad School?

10:38 Emily: Yeah. That’s awesome. Can you expand a little bit more about why it is important for you? Like why you have decided to make retirement savings a priority during graduate school? When, first of all, I mean, yeah, we need to acknowledge a lot of people can’t. You said that earlier. Some people are just plain not paid enough. That’s an unfortunate reality of some programs underpaying their students. But for the people who are able to, it might not necessarily be a goal. Maybe they want to do some other things with their money. So, can you expand a little bit more on why this early start is so important?

11:10 Lucy: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. It is definitely personal preference, right? Some people it’s just not on the radar and that’s alright if that’s what makes you feel comfortable. But for me, with the experience that I’ve had growing up and the experience that my partner’s family has had. I think it’s just so important to have that kind of a safety net for when retirement occurs. Both my parents are now retired. They go on trips whenever they feel like it because they have a really wonderful nest egg of savings and retirement funds that they can pull from at any time. And thankfully, they are very comfortable in that regard. And the earlier you start, like I said earlier, it compounds, right? So, every dollar that my Roth IRA makes, I have it reinvesting automatically. Because that’s just more money that gets to live there and build through the market value.

12:02 Emily: I, like you, worked only for one year before I started graduate school. And during that time, I embarked on learning about personal finance and I read this, “Oh, you have to save 10% of your gross income for retirement” rule. And I love rules. So, I was on it. It was challenging, but I was determined to do it. And I kept that up during graduate school. Thankfully, I, like you, also lived in sort of a moderate cost-of-living area and my stipend was fine for there. And so, obviously in more expensive places, as you were mentioning earlier, graduate student stipends don’t really get that much higher. So, it’s quite challenging there, but I was in a good position in that case. So, I was investing for retirement all through graduate school, as well as building up some other kinds of savings.

Investing in Your Future Positively Impacts Your Present

12:44 Emily: And I just have to make a plug for this in case anyone listening to this is not that motivated around it. Because what we found, my husband and I, who was also a graduate student at that time, not only is this like you’re saving and you’re investing for the far-off future, but it actually had an impact in the here and now. Well, after a few years after we really saw the balances building up, and that was actually during quite a strong, bold market. So, the compound returns were coming fast and furious. When we got out of graduate school, we had quite a good nest egg, both in our retirement accounts, and also in cash. And it actually enabled us to make more risky career decisions than we would have otherwise that were actually very well-suited for us. So, having that security of something that we had built during graduate school to be able to fall back on in case that risky decision didn’t turn out so well, that was instrumental in us actually making those decisions to go for our maximum career fulfillment, even at these riskier kinds of jobs. Obviously, I’m referring to my business, which is quite a risky endeavor, especially at the beginning. So, that’s kind of how I found that this mattered for me even decades earlier than I expected it to.

13:54 Lucy: Yeah, we have always known that we would like a house. And in order to have a house, you have to have a down payment. And in order to have a down payment, you have to have savings for it. Right? And there are certain rules surrounding specific savings or retirement accounts like Roth IRAs, where you can actually withdraw a certain portion for a first-time home purchase. So, there are absolutely benefits, and who doesn’t want to imagine being 70 and being like, “I’m just gonna fly to some beach and sit down and have a cocktail.” Right? That sounds really nice. It’s hard to imagine at this current time, but it is going to happen again.

14:34 Emily: True. We are recording this in May, 2020. Yes. Enough said there.

Commercial

14:43 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. The deadline for filing your federal tax return and making your quarters one and two estimated tax payments was extended to July 15th, 2020. I never expected to still be talking about taxes into the summer, but here we are. Postbac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows still need major help in this area because of their unique situation. I provide tons of support to PhD trainees preparing their tax returns and calculating their estimated tax. Go to pfforphds.com/tax to read my free articles and find out if one of my tax workshops is right for you. I have one workshop on how to prepare your annual tax return, and one on how to determine if you owe quarterly estimated tax. Both workshops include videos, supplemental documents, and live Q&A calls with me. Go to P F F O R P H D S.com/T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now, back to the interview.

Strategies for Handling Estimated Tax

16:00 Emily: Okay. I want to return to the situation around estimated tax. If you wouldn’t mind explaining a little bit more about how, you know, you said earlier that your mileage may vary, people handle estimated tax in different ways. I’m curious, what is the best solution that you’ve come to for handling your estimated tax?

16:18 Lucy: Yeah, I was kind of pseudo-mentored by another graduate student, and he was always on this camp that he would save up four or five thousand dollars and pay his entire year’s estimated tax in January of the start of that year. And he would send in four different checks, one with each estimated tax document. And that would be it for the entire year. Now, at the time that he was trying to convince me of that, we did not have that kind of money. And so then I had to find some other way. And of course, I have an old checking account from when I was in high school. And so, what I decided to do was I calculated my estimated tax. Those forms look scary. They’re not that bad. Talk to somebody, talk to your friends, somebody knows how to do it. And once I had kind of figured out my estimated tax, I said, “Okay, well, this divided by four is, let’s say $400. And a quarter of the year is three months. Right? Okay. So, now I have $400, divided by three is, whatever. I can’t do math on the fly like this, but that amount would automatically withdraw to that separate checking account that I didn’t really use for anything. And then at the end of three months, when it was time to pay quarterly taxes, I knew I had that amount and I was not worried about it. Right? I never even saw it in my regular checking. It only we went to that secondary checking account.

17:38 Emily: Yeah. This system that you’re describing is absolutely the one that I recommend. Actually, I featured it in a past interview as well, which I’ll link from the show notes. The interview is with Lourdes Bobbio, and she is an NDSEG fellow. And so, this is exactly what she did to handle her estimated tax. It’s what I did in graduate school as well, and still do, because as a business owner, I also pay quarterly estimated tax. So, I think it’s a perfect system. It’s actually the one that I kind of recommend for everyone. Like you said, to pay all of your estimated tax upfront is a really high amount of savings to have on hand which would be unusual. So, that’s not for everyone.

PF for PhDs Resources on Estimated Tax

18:20 Emily: By the way, I do have a resource on estimated tax. I have a couple, so I’ll link them from the show notes, but if you also just want to go to pfforphds.com/tax, I have an article there called, “The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients,” free article. And I also have a paid workshop. You can join anytime throughout the year. And I have videos that I’ve recorded. There’s like a spreadsheet that is included with that. And I also do live Q&A calls every quarter to answer any kind of final questions you have after you’ve gone through the material. So, that would be a great one to join if estimated tax is a concern for you.

18:53 Emily: As you said, Lucy, look at form 1040-ES if you think you can handle it, fine. It’s really not that hard for fellowship recipients, but I do know some people get a little intimidated. They want that live support. So, like you said, you know, you can turn to–I really hesitate, actually, to say to turn to a friend, because this is an area that people mess up a lot. It sounds like you got really good counsel, but you never know. You don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And so you don’t know if counsel that you’re receiving is good or not. So, I’ll just say, come to me, come to my site. I have the references for you. Yes, listen to your classmates, but trust, but verify. Let me put it that way. When it comes to tax and rumors running around graduate schools.

19:34 Lucy: Yeah. We just recently were talking about taxes with some of our upcoming, or now upcoming second years, asking them how they did and what they felt like, and how we can support them in the future. And they were like, “Oh my God, estimated taxes.” And then it was just like a flurry of papers and pens. And imagine that kind of cartoony instance. And it ended up half of them just decided they weren’t going to pay it because they weren’t sure what to do. And then two of them overpaid by $2,000, which I’m not really sure how that’s possible on our current stipend. Because I think we pay less than $5,000 a year. So, I’m not sure what they were doing for that one quarter, but they totally miscalculated, which is perfectly fine. But that is when finding a resource like Emily might be really helpful if you just don’t want to worry about it. You can go to her. I mean, I’ve never used Emily. I’m sure she’s great. But she seems to know what she’s talking about. And so, if you just don’t want to worry about it, if you pay a little bit upfront, you don’t have to worry long term.

Use Your School’s Tax Resources or Bring in an Outside Expert

20:34 Emily: Yeah. And I also love, you know, you mentioned before we started the recording that your university of WashU is providing–and in particular, your program is providing tax support in the form of workshops, which is amazing. Anyone who’s in a program in a school that does that, I definitely encourage you to attend one of those seminars. If no one is doing it and you feel competent, you can always try to start it doing some peer support in that area. And hey, I am also available and I have a live seminar that’s sort of a live version of the tax workshop that I just mentioned. So, if you want to bring in an outside person and you have a budget, I am available to do that. Because this is such, I mean, this is an area that, I cannot tell you the number of people I talk to every tax season who have maybe been surprised by, “Oh, it’s April and turns out I owe all this tax that I thought was being withheld from my paycheck, but it turns out it wasn’t,” that’s a really tough situation to be in.

21:28 Emily: I’ve talked to people who have gone three, four, five years of that happening and just wake up to the fact that they have all these back taxes. That is so tough. And you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care. So, we can just say again, if you’re on fellowship, if you’re on a training grant, look into estimated tax, it’s possible, you won’t have to pay them in your first year. Don’t forget about them. Look again in the second year, it could come up at that point. So, please tell your friends. Tell your friends about estimated tax. Send them this podcast episode. And as I was just saying, look for resources at your university. They may be there, or you may be able to start them or bring them in.

22:03 Lucy: And even if they don’t have them, you can let them know that it’s something that the students are interested in. Right? So, I’m the co-director of a student body group, and that’s what we do. We think students need this, so we advocate for that with the administration. And unless they know, they’re not going to be thinking about kind of dealing with this type of stuff.

Any Other Financial Goals?

22:25 Emily: Yeah. I think actually taxes at the graduate student level got a lot more attention after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed because there were those couple months where we thought maybe tuition waivers would be taxed, so anyway, it got a lot of attention. I think after the Act ultimately passed, which thankfully did not have that provision in it, people were just a little bit more aware like, “Oh, okay, I have to deal with taxes. Maybe there are some resources out there that can help.” So, going back to your personal story Lucy, aside from the retirement investing, which is incredible and awesome that you’re doing that, you mentioned saving up for a house. Do you have any other financial goals that you’re going to be working on for the remainder of graduate school?

23:04 Lucy: I mean, really, it’s trying to find that financial stability that we couldn’t find while we lived on the East Coast. So, we were building that initial six-month-ish nest egg that you might want to refer to it as. Now, that’s done. So, we’ve shifted to building kind of the large expense nest egg, right? Like, the next time we have to buy a car, if our fridge breaks, right? Those things that you never want to have to think about, but they absolutely exist within life. And at the same time, we also obviously are working to pay off student loans. And we are working to invest in retirement. It seems like that’s not really feasible, and I’ll be completely honest, I put $50 in every week to that large expense. That’s not a lot, but assuming, and this is all assuming I don’t have a large expense for a couple of years, I’m going to have plenty of money in that.

Even a Little Bit (of Savings) Matters

23:58 Lucy: So, even a little bit matters. You might think $20 doesn’t matter to a Roth IRA, but it does build up. Slow and steady, it builds up. Can you imagine $20 every week over the course of however long your PhD is? I don’t want to say a number because it jinxes us all, but it’s really important to start kind of building these ideas because you don’t want to be caught out in the rain.

24:19 Emily: It sounds like you really have been able to accomplish a lot with the stipend. And I think your experience of moving from a higher cost of living area to St. Louis is really helpful in that way. Unfortunately, a lot of students go the other way and they end up in Boston, New York, San Francisco from a less expensive place. And it’s jarring that way, too. So, you put in your time in the higher cost of living cities and then experienced a bit of relief moving to St. Louis. That’s really great. And you know, I totally agree that even these small amounts of money make a huge difference given enough time. And as you were saying, the PhD is actually pretty significant amount of time. Over the course of five plus years, it can really add up, like it did for me and my husband. And so, anyway, I’m just really pleased to hear that you’re making your stipend work for you so effectively. That’s wonderful.

Best Advice for an Early-Career PhD

25:10 Emily: So, as we’re finishing up the interview, this is a question that I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve mentioned in the course of the interview, or it could be something completely else.

25:23 Lucy: Yeah. I have to fully admit it’s an allowance. Like, I’m over 30 and I have an allowance. When we finally had kind of spare money, every month I would go on and get a graph at the top of my bank account that shows me my personal value and it would stay flat. And I’m like, “What are we spending our money on? This doesn’t make any sense. Okay, I bought this. Okay, I bought that. But it’s really not that bad.” So, we decided to implement an allowance. We’re two over 30-year-olds with an allowance. I mean, I can’t say that enough. And what we figured out was, “Do I really want to spend the money on this, right? Is this really what’s going to make me happy where I can’t necessarily save for retirement?” Which again is my goal. “Is this a thing that I need?” And it really showed us where our money was going, which was just little knickknacks and doodads. And after a year of that allowance, our personal value went up by like $3,000 because we weren’t accidentally spending $500 a month on whatever we felt like. And so, I recommend it. It’s hard and weird to say, but I recommend allowances. It keeps you a little bit honest about it. We have a post-it note on our fridge and we have to write everything we purchase that is for us specifically and not household.

Give Yourself an Allowance for Discretionary Funding

26:48 Emily: So, I want to make sure that I understand what you mean by allowance. So, what you’re saying is like, aside from the necessary expenses, and as you were just mentioning household joint expenses, allowance is, it sounds like something that is just for you as an individual. And it’s probably discretionary, is that right? And as long as you fit it within your allowance every month, or maybe you build up a balance over some time, as long as the purchase fits within that, you’re good to go. If not, you have to say, “Well, I need to wait on it.” Is that right?

27:16 Lucy: Right. Exactly. So, you know, let’s say you’re going to a conference and you need a new suit jacket. That does not count as an allowance. That’s something that’s important for your personal development. Let’s say there’s a really cute dress that has just come out from your favorite company. That is not something that’s related to household or even professional development. So, that’s probably going to go on allowance. I just spent actually the last of my allowance already on a gift for a friend for her birthday. I knew it was something I wanted to do. And so, that was in my budget for the month, or my allowance for the month.

27:55 Emily: Yeah. So, it’s kind of just another way of framing budgeting. Like it’s just a more like catch-all category and you’ve specified it just for you as an individual. I know you’ve mentioned your partner. I mentioned my husband. Like the whole couple money management thing, people do it a lot of different ways. And you really have to find what works for you. I know my experience in graduate school, my husband and I were both graduate students and didn’t have a lot of discretionary income. And so, we didn’t use the allowance system, but it was kind of because there wasn’t that much money left for an allowance after we were doing all of the goals and all the joint spending. So, thankfully we found a way to navigate that over time. But yeah, I think if we had had a little bit more discretionary income, having some autonomy over that money because we do keep joint finances, but having some autonomy over a portion of it, that’s a system that works very, very well for a lot of people. So, I’m really glad you brought it up. Well, Lucy, this has been just a delight and I’m so glad that you came on the podcast. And I hope to have a chance to meet you in person before too long. Because it sounds like you’re doing some incredible work there with your program at WashU. So, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story and sharing your expertise in this area.

29:03 Lucy: Thank you for having me. It’s such an important component of life and graduate school for those that are interested. And I appreciate that you exist and you’ve been thinking about this and building things around it because it didn’t really seem like it existed when I first started.

29:19 Emily: Sounds good. Thank you so much.

29:21 Lucy: Thanks, Emily.

Outtro

29:23 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 involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.