Personal Finance for PhDs

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Emily

The Best First Step to Improve Your Finances

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Sometimes when I meet someone in a social setting and they find out what I do, they ask me for my very best tip to help them improve their finances. I know I only have a few seconds to impart potentially life-changing information at a moment when they are open to it, so I have to keep it simple. I tell them, “The best first step to improve your finances is to start tracking where your money goes. You’ll be amazed at what you find out, and the simple act of tracking will cause behavior change.”

If you’re inclined to take this suggestion right now, stop reading this post and do it! It doesn’t matter how you accomplish this – paper and pencil, a spreadsheet, software like Mint or You Need a Budget – just get started. Even if you don’t act on the information right away, when you’re ready to you’ll have the data ready.

best first step to improve your finances

If you need some more convincing or details, read on.

Actually, it doesn’t matter the setting or how long I have to talk to someone about money. I truly believe that tracking how you use your money, if you’ve never done it before, is the best first step to improve your finances that you can possibly take. It’s even more fundamental and easier than budgeting.

Why to Start Tracking Your Money

There’s an old saying, “Look at a man’s checkbook and you’ll see his values.” I don’t know who keeps a checkbook register any longer, but the principle is this: What you spend money on, you value. Without that transaction log, there is no way to check that what you think you value is actually represented in how you use your money.

1) You almost certainly don’t know where it’s going

Unless you have a superhuman memory, without tracking your spending you simply do not know where your money goes. This may be an acceptable state if you have a high income relative to your expenses, but I don’t think many grad students have that problem. If you desire to use your money to maximize your life satisfaction, you need to know what it’s being spent on now.

2) It will cause behavior change

The personal finance version of the observer effect is this: The act of tracking your spending necessarily changes your spending. Just knowing that your transactions are being recorded and scrutinized (by you!) will cause behavior change. You might forgo a small purchase you would have made unthinkingly before, like buying a drink or paying for parking. You might shop around a little more for a good deal on a purchase you want to make. You might decide to bring your dinner to work instead of visiting a campus dining establishment. While you can never get a clear picture of what your spending was before you started tracking, starting to track will put you on a path to optimizing your use of money.

3) You can analyze the data to use your money better

Once you have tracked your spending for a period of time, such as a month or even a week, you can start to identify patterns. You have your fixed expenses that will be the same every month, your variable expenses that you always have but in different amounts, and your irregular expenses that pop up only once or a few times per year. Ask yourself if you are happy using your money the way you are in light of what else you might do with it. One category might jump out at you as being particularly over- or under-funded or out of proportion in comparison with what you spend on another area.

4) You can catch mistakes

Retailers, banks, and lenders are not perfect; computer glitches and human error happen frequently. While they may or may not be actively malicious, some companies (e.g., cable and mobile phone) and banks (e.g., big banks) make a lot of ‘mistakes’ in their own favor. If you never looked at your tracked spending, you might not notice that you were double-charged for a purchase, a refund didn’t go through, or a bill was higher than your contract stated. With your tracked data, you can keep from being taken advantage of and put money back in your pocket.

5) It’s a great lifetime habit to start now

Eventually, a great tracking system will operate in the background of our life through automation or habit, bringing just enough awareness that we hold ourselves accountable for our spending but not becoming a burden. Even if you go through periods when you aren’t doing much with the tracked information, your future self will thank you when you do want to use the data for budgeting or another purpose. The best time to implement such a system or habit is today! Given that tracking is so low-effort, once you start why would you ever stop?

How to Start Tracking Your Money

How you choose to track where your money goes is really a personal preference. You should use whatever method you’re most likely to maintain and that makes the data available in a useful form.

When I first started tracking my money, I simply set up a spreadsheet with a handful of categories and manually recorded every one of my transactions. I categorized the transactions appropriately or as “miscellaneous” and made notes next to them as needed. It was a very simple system that worked well for me. At the time, I didn’t make a whole lot of transactions and I only had one bank account and one credit card to monitor.

A few years later when my husband and I got married and joined our finances, our financial lives were much more complicated. We had many more checking, saving, and credit accounts open, and my husband was uninterested in manual tracking. So we started using Mint, a web-based tracking tool and app, which linked up with all of our accounts and downloaded and categorized our transactions for us.

The big advantage to manual tracking is that – if you stick to it – it forces you into a high level of awareness of your finances. You have to notice every single transaction, no matter how inconsequential. You can practice manual tracking with pencil and paper, a spreadsheet that you create (or download a template), software, or an app. A few examples of free manual tracking software and apps are EveryDollar (Dave Ramsey’s software), GoodBudget, and Wally.

The big advantage to automatic tracking is that it’s incredibly easy (maybe too easy!). You can link your accounts to the software/app and, if you want, forget about them. The tracking will go on unnoticed by you. That’s great if you’re a busy person with lots of transactions because nothing will slip through the cracks. If you check in on the tracked data at least once a month, that automatic tracking will probably work well for you. But if you never look at it or just take a glance it probably won’t affect your behavior. However, it is useful to have the tracked data if in a few months or a year you decide to start engaging with it. A few examples of free automatic tracking software and apps are Mint, You Need a Budget (one year free with proof of student status), and mvelopes.

What to Do Once Tracking Is in Place

Once you’ve had your tracking system in place for about a month, you can start using the data.

If you want to only take a small step or two, just notice where your spending might be out of alignment with your values and goals. For example, if you can’t seem to save money for a short-term goal like travel, maybe there are a few outsized areas of discretionary spending you can cut back in.

The next larger step that would be useful for any grad student willing to undertake it is to start budgeting. With tracking, you’re looking at what your money did. With budgeting, you’re creating a plan for what your money will do. While a stereotypical budget prompts you to limit your spending in one area or another (always something fun, right?), your budget may or may not serve that purpose. In fact, I found budgeting freeing in a way; after I planned for a certain level of discretionary spending (e.g., clothes shopping), I stopped second-guessing my purchases.

At its most basic, a budget is a spending plan, no more and no less. Tracking your spending is the accountability tool that helps you stick to your budget. While the best first step to improve your finances is tracking, budgeting is the best second step to take. With your budget, you plan how to use your money in the way that brings you the most satisfaction in life.

Whether You Save During Grad School Can Have a $1,000,000 Effect on Your Retirement

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Today I’m sharing with you a graph that I show during “The Graduate Student and Postdoc’s Guide to Personal Finance.” It’s always shocking to the audience. It motivates some people to save during grad school and some people think it’s unreasonable; I’ll break all of that down here.

save during grad school

The point of this graph is to illustrate the power of compound interest, which roughly translates to investment returns. (More on that ‘roughly’ later!) I used Illuminations to create the graph.

Here’s the toy example:

Alana receives a $30,000 per year stipend and she saves 10% of it consistently into an IRA that is invested for her retirement (i.e., rather aggressively). So she is saving $250/month every month throughout her five years in graduate school. Her investments generate an average annual rate of return of 8%.

Over those five years, Alana puts in $15,000 and her ending balance is $18,369.21. So that’s cool and all – an extra $3k.

But then, she keeps the money invested for the same average rate of return for the next fifty years. So if she graduates when she’s 30, she checks her balance again at age 80. Remember, she’s not making additional contributions to this money at all – it’s just what she saved during grad school.

Alana’s investment balance has grown to a breath-taking $989,688.35! Her diligence to save during grad school translates to an extra $1M in retirement!!

I really want you to let that exercise sink in. That is the power of compound interest. Even a modest amount of money, given enough time and a high enough rate of return, can turn into an enormous amount of money! That is why any small amount of money that you can invest during grad school will have a huge impact on your long-term financial wellbeing.

I hope you had a “wow” moment there and are motivated to start investing or increase your investing (or pay off debt). I’m going to break down the exercise now to address the common questions and objections that I hear.

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1) It’s unreasonable for a grad student to save $250/month.

Whether or not saving $250/month is possible or reasonable is highly individual and depends both on the grad student’s income (usually a stipend rate set by the university/department) and personal living expenses. $250 is absolutely possible for many grad students (by the end of our PhDs – after lots of optimization – my husband and I were saving about $800/month together), and it’s not for others. Sometimes stipends are just too low, the local cost of living is just too high, or you have a challenging situation like paying off a lot of debt or supporting family members.

I do think 10% or $250/month are good benchmarks for grad students who have the ability to save. If they’re not saving that much yet, this illustration should encourage them to find a way to save more. If they’re already at that level, they can feel good about their efforts and maybe push for more as well.

The point of the exercise is not to say you have to save $250/month or it’s all useless. It’s to illustrate that saving early – whether it’s $250/month or $25/month, whether it’s every month or in one lump sum – has an incredible impact on your wealth over the long term. So any amount you can invest during grad school is wonderful. At just $25/month, that ending balance is nearly $100,000 – an amazing amount of money as well!

2) A guaranteed 8% rate of return isn’t available.

The objection to the 8% average rate of return figure is two-fold: 1) Why 8%? 2) You can’t get a high fixed rate of return in today’s market.

The reason investment returns are illustrated using compound interest is to make the math easier and keep the point clear. If you looked at models that include how the stock market really behaves, they get complicated and difficult to parse. You don’t end up with a nice single value but rather a distribution of possible results. There is a chance (minuscule over long periods of time, but non-zero) that you could lose all your money. There is an equally small chance that you end up a billionaire. And everything in between. But somewhere in the big fat middle of that distribution is the answer that a clean compound interest calculation gets you to.

The point of the exercise is not to predict exactly how much money you’re going to end up with in retirement down to the cent. It’s to show you the scale of change that’s possible over a long period of time with a reasonably high rate of return and motivate you to harness the power of compound interest.

If you look at enough of these types of compound interest examples, you’ll see a few different interest rates chosen. When we’re talking about stock investments, 8% is on the modest side. The long-term average return for the total stock market is often pegged at 10%, so that’s a popular figure. Dave Ramsey likes to use 12%. I chose 8% because it’s reflective of a largely-but-not-completely stock investment portfolio, which is appropriate for aggressive long-term investing (not speculating). It’s also pretty unlikely that you would have a single expected average rate of return over 50 years, as the standard advice is to move toward more conservative investments as retirement draws nearer, but the illustration ignores that detail as well. If the stock market future more or less resembles its past, 8% is a very achievable long-term average rate.

To really blow your mind, the same example above with a 12% rate of return gives an ending balance of $7,192,995.42. So this rate of return choice really matters to the illustration, and even the breath-taking ending balance I got to is a conservative example of the power of compound interest.

3) I don’t want to wait 50 years to retire.

I actually have never heard this objection from an audience member, but it’s one I have in my own mind. When I break the news that we’re looking at a 50-year compounding period, I say “So if you get out of grad school when you’re 30, you’re now 80. But don’t worry because by then 80 will be the new 50.” There’s some truth to that; people are living longer, and Ray Kurzweil thinks that by 2029 it may be possible to live forever.

There’s no special reason to use 50 years in this example, except that it’s a round number that when added to a grad student’s age puts them past the current retirement age but probably still kicking. The point is that the more years you give compound interest to work, the more impressive the outcome. It really does matter whether you start saving during grad school or after! If you’re shooting for a specific number that represents financial independence, starting earlier gets you there earlier.

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4) You’re not accounting for inflation.

Good catch! $1M in today’s money is very different from $1M in 2067 money. It won’t seem nearly so impressive at that point. But that should not stop you from saving. If anything, the existence of long-term inflation (in the US, a bit higher than 3% annually on average) argues for more saving and more aggressive investing. You are losing purchasing power if you keep it in cash and barely maintaining it using bonds.

5) Can’t I achieve the same result by maxing out my 401(k) in my first year with a real job?

I fielded this question only once, and it was during my very first seminar ever. And it’s a great one. My argument is that you come out of grad school with $18k in savings and continue to invest that for 50 years. Currently, the maximum someone under the age of 50 can contribute to a 401(k) is $18,000 per year. The point is correct: If you just max out your 401(k) in your first year with a real job and keep it invested for 50 years, you get the same outcome as you would by saving that $250/month all through grad school. The compound interest math is identical.

But guess what’s even better? Saving $250/month during grad school and maxing out your 401(k) in your first year with a real job – and every year after. And who is more likely to max out their 401(k) (no mean feat!): someone who has never saved a dime or someone who is already in the habit of saving, even in a challenging time of life like grad school?

Becoming a mega-saver with your first real job is a great step. But it doesn’t erase the opportunity you have to start investing during grad school. You can have your $1M in retirement from that first year’s 401(k) and your $1M from grad school.

Serial Graduate Assistant

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Today’s post is by a grad student who expanded her transferable skills through a series of summer jobs.

Name: Sudiksha Joshi

Institution: West Virginia University

Department: Natural Resource Economics

1. What was your side job and how much did you earn?

While pursuing my Master’s Degree I worked in the Library (Cataloguing) and was paid around $8/hr. While pursuing my Ph.D. some Summers, I got to help my Professor out and was paid additional 20 hrs/week which was between $20-$25/hr. One summer I worked on an outside research project in which one of my Faculty members was a consultant and so for that I was paid $12/hr. While these are not the side jobs, during the final two years of my Ph.D. I was not funded by my department. One Semester I taught and was responsible for Introductory Biology Labs ($18-20/hr) and then I was a Graduate Student Assistant  ($18-20/hr) for the McNair Scholars Program which led to the Project Coordinator role after I defended my Dissertation.

2. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

These were done during the summer when I was not taking summer classes.

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3. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

Most of them did. I learned something new in every job. Working as a teaching assistant in the biology lab was taxing especially due to the grading that needed to be done (at least 100 papers to be graded every week and 200 if I have them a quiz that week) but I had completed all other requirements for my Ph.D. other than defending my dissertation. Working in McNair even though it was a lot of work became a turning point in life and working with students in such a close setting showed me a better way to prepare students for further studies and life outside. This also provided me the motivation which had dwindled to finally finish my dissertation, defend, and graduate.

4. How did you get started with your job?

It started with reaching out to the University career services or for the most part reaching out to the Faculty members in my department.

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

I have learned a lot of transferrable skills from taking on various responsibilities during my graduate studies and those experiences continue to help me even today. I would highly recommend taking jobs/roles (even volunteer roles) outside or even within the department that have different responsibilities than what you are doing now. A broader perspective on things and new skills are going to allow you to consider alternatives and allow you to explore your own strengths and weaknesses and interests in new ways.  Keep on exploring!

Sudiksha Joshi, Ph.D. is a Learning Advocate who connects the dots between people’s strengths, ideas, and data to enable curious and conscious individuals to personalize their learning and life. Sudiksha currently works as a Data Engineer, is a HuffPost Contributor and writes about her personal journey on WeAreAlwaysLearning.com.

The Full Cost of Applying to PhD Programs

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The full cost of applying to PhD programs is significant; it can easily surpass $1,000 and even reach a few thousand dollars if you take a GRE prep course, apply to a large number of programs, and/or pay out of pocket to visit the universities you applied to. Given the enormous impact where and with whom you do your PhD has on your career, it’s vital to present yourself as well as possible in your applications and interactions with faculty. Mostly that’s going to translate to a large investment of time and energy, but sometimes it does translate to spending sufficient money on the application process.

This post outlines the three main direct costs of applying to PhD programs so that you won’t be caught by surprise during the process and can adequately prepare for this expenditure.

cost of applying to PhD programs

Know Your Programs

PhD programs are amazingly diverse. There are field-to-field differences as well as university-to-university differences. It’s imperative that you grasp how the admissions process works in your field and at each university you apply to. There are different expectations regarding the personal and/or research statement that you write, whether you should contact individual faculty members in advance of submitting your application, the purpose of a campus visit, etc.

Another massively important difference is the level of financial support offered to PhD students and what form it comes in. You might be funded by a fellowship, training grant, teaching assistantship, research assistantship inside or outside of your dissertation advisor’s group, or graduate assistantship (or some/all of the above). The support might be year-round or only during certain semesters, and it might be guaranteed for a certain number of years or at the discretion of your advisor or department. You might or might not have to pay fees or insurance premiums out of pocket. You must to know what is typical in your field to evaluate the offers that are ultimately extended to you.

The best way to figure out these largely unspoken cultural and policy differences is to ask current students or recent graduates of the programs you’re interested in. Tap your alumni networks and any relevant personal connections (LinkedIn can help you find these). Faculty members in your field at your current institution or a faculty advisor charged with supporting prospective PhD students are also wonderful resources.

The GRE(s)

While the predictive capabilities of the general GRE have come under fire, most universities in the US still ask for general GRE scores and sometimes subject GRE scores on their applications.

Further listening: Seriously, Can We Ditch the GRE Already?, Does the GRE Predict Which Students Will Succeed?

The registration fee to take the general GRE is $205 and to take the subject GRE (biology, chemistry, literature in English, math, physics, and psychology) is $150 as of July 1, 2017. Test-takers with qualifying financial needs can receive a 50% discount on the fee.

If the programs you’re applying to weight the GRE in their admissions decisions, such as by setting a minimum score, you could decide to study for the exam so you can perform your best. You can avail yourself of free resources available through the ETS website or purchase a review book (tens of dollars), course (hundreds of dollars), or tutoring (thousands of dollars). Whether or not you spend money preparing for the test, you may choose to devote significant time to it. However, extensive preparation for the exam is totally optional, and your time may be better spent on other aspects of your application.

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Application Fees

Most application fees for US PhD programs fall between $50 and $100. Here are a few examples of fees for the 2017-2018 application cycle:

  • Clemson University: $80 for domestic applicants and $90 for international applicants
  • Indiana University at Bloomington: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
  • Johns Hopkins University: $75
  • North Carolina State University: $75 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
  • Rice University: $85
  • University of California at Davis: $105 for domestic applicants and $125 for international applicants
  • University of Kansas: $65 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
  • University of Notre Dame: $75
  • University of Utah: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
  • Washington State University: $75

Many universities also offer fee waivers for qualifying applicants, the details of which can be found on their websites.

In addition to the application fee that the university charges, you will also usually pay a fee to send your GRE scores and transcripts to each university. You can choose to send your GRE scores to four universities for free on test day for the general GRE and upon registration for the subject GRE. To take full advantage, make sure your application list has four schools finalized on it before you are prompted to send the free scores. ETS charges $27 to send your score from each test to each additional recipient.

With the full cost of each PhD application hovering around $100, the cost of applying to a handful of PhD programs adds up quickly. Determining the number of schools to apply to is a challenge: too few, and you risk the randomness of the application process leaving you with no acceptances; too many, and you spend a lot of money and spread your time thin, possibly harming your chances of getting into the university that would fit you best.

Visits and Interviews

Another field-by-field difference is whether the application process involves an interview or campus visit.

Some programs admit or reject applicants outright, and if a prospective student wants to visit the university, she’ll do it on her own dime and schedule. Some programs request interviews, but the interview is conducted over video or the prospective student pays to visit campus. Most STEM programs arrange for a visit weekend, where a group of prospective students is flown to campus to meet with faculty and be courted by the program. That visit weekend might include interviews upon which the admission decision will depend or simply serve to sell the program to admitted students.

The out-of-pocket costs for the visits could be $0 if everything from the flight to your meals are paid for by the department or reimbursed (be prepared to front money, though!) or the applicant could be responsible for the full cost (up to hundreds of dollars for flights, lodging, ground transportation, and food). Even if you think the program will pay for everything, it’s a good idea to budget some walking-around money for each visit in case a meal ends up going unreimbursed or you want to do some sight-seeing or buy a souvenir.

While deciding what programs to apply to and preparing your applications is very time-consuming, it can be done on your schedule. One of the hidden costs of campus visits is the time it takes to leave school or work for 1-3 days. If you have a (part-time) job, save some vacation time or try to shift your hours around so that you don’t have to forgo any wages to go on the visits. However, for schools you are seriously considering, it’s worthwhile to miss work to properly evaluate the programs, and that will need to be factored into your applications budget.

The temporal and monetary cost of applying to PhD programs generally – and the application fee in particular – serves as a disincentive to apply to too many programs. It takes so much time and money to fully investigate and apply to each program (not to mention actually choosing which you will attend!) that you should be judicious about which institutions make your list. This requires carefully evaluating your own research and career goals as well as the programs, but you will without question benefit professionally and personally from this careful introspection in the application stage.

How much did you pay to apply to graduate schools? Did you incur any costs not listed here?

Linguistics Researcher for a Movie Website

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Today’s post is by a grad student who networked her way into her side job – but not networking as you might usually think of it.

Name: Anna Marie Trester

Institution: Georgetown

Department: Linguistics

1. What was your side job?

Linguistics Researcher for the website which accompanied the film: Do You Speak American?

2. How much did you earn?

Was abt. $10/hr (and this was more than 10 years ago)

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3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

Job started during the summer, and then continued part time (about 10 hours/week) once the school year started. This was a significant commitment on top of my fellowship responsibilities, and my advisor told me to give it up (actually, she suggested that I give the opportunity to a classmate who had recently not gotten funding), but I had always wanted to work “in film” and this was the closest I had ever gotten, and hello!?! that’s not actually how hiring works out there in the world, so no – I argued for and fought to keep the job that I had secured for myself! 🙂

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

The experience was a turning point for me as an advocate, and it changed the way I approached my studies and how I taught moving forward. Up until that point, although I had been feeling a real calling to “bring linguistics to work” I had absolutely no idea how to do it, nor any sense for how deeply challenging it would be!!!

Some background: this film was produced by Robert MacNeil (of PBS Newshour fame), who is passionate about language, and is an expert journalist, but is not a linguist. One of the first things that slowly started dawning on me is that the linguists who had been interviewed for the film must have been telling them (probably repeatedly) that they needed to hire a linguist because they had constructed a film using a decidedly journalistic frame, such that for every point, they had sought out a counterpoint, so something along the lines of: “while this language expert says that bilingualism is good, this one says it is bad.” For a linguist, language is neither good nor bad. We are scientists, so that means that we study how language changes and how languages influence one another. We describe these processes, we would never evaluate them positively or negatively or prescribe how change or contact should happen. (It would be sort of like asking a physicist to say whether they liked gravity or not, or whether they thought it was a good thing for children to have to experience it).

So, what had resulted in their pursuit of journalistic “neutrality” was a film that actually gave a platform to some rather bizarre folks with some pretty strange ideas about language (and to be frank, some of them quite xenophobic). With the website, they saw an opportunity to remedy some of these problems, so I focused on developing resources for them that would bring forward the incredible social and cultural benefits of bilingualism, immigration, linguistic innovation and change, technology, etc.

5. How did you get started with your job?

It’s a funny story, actually!  And one that I tell in my book Bringing Linguistics to Work* because I think it exemplifies something really important about apparent randomness in networking. I had been applying for months to work on the film project through all of the official channels and by networking like crazy at conferences and every other chance I got to talk with anyone who I knew who had been involved in the film (as a consultant, interviewee, etc). But in the end, I got the gig because of a connection that I made randomly at my Graduate Student Association happy hour. Upon arriving at that event, I sat down with a group just as one man was laughingly telling the group “so today, my boss asked me if could help her find a “SOCIOLINGUIST!?!?”” (with a tone that suggested: can you even imagine!??!!)  So while I got the job through networking, it was not the networking that I had been doing focused on getting me the gig. But of course that previous networking absolutely helped me get the gig, because I showed up at the interview knowing a great deal and all fired up about what I could bring them, since I had already been thinking about it and talking about it for months!  So, yeah, I got started because I network, and I now also approach networking differently.

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

Even though I had worked for several years before graduate school, this professional experience was very different from previous ones because not only were my tasks, duties, and responsibilities not at all clearly defined, I had to be the one to decide what needed to be done, often having argue for and defend these decisions and ideas while simultaneously navigating a complex web of office politics. It was the hardest job that I had had up until that point, but it took everything up a notch for me professionally, and I think this experience was instrumental in setting me on my current entrepreneurial path, so I am tremendously grateful for it!!

Anna Marie Trester is the founder of Career Linguist, a blog and resource center for linguists interested in exploring careers beyond academia. She helps linguists figure out how to bring their unique skills and training to the world of work (beginning with the task of applying for jobs), and the world of work understand why they need linguists!

Financial Habits Every PhD Student Should Live by

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Nick Giangreco is a second year PhD candidate in Systems Biology at Columbia University in New York City.

Graduate school is an enriching and rewarding time in one’s career, especially in the biomedical sciences. As I’m pursuing my PhD in Systems Biology at Columbia University, I get the chance to hone my skills and, using more glamorous terms, reach for becoming a biological data scientist. But as every graduate student knows, though we get paid during this stage in our careers, it pales in comparison to the paychecks of those working as employees in companies.

In this reality, it helps to be mindful of our financial situations and practice good habits. I’d like to share some tips that I follow as a research trainee. These tips have helped me over the past couple of years, so hopefully they will be helpful for you to extend your income while living on a meager stipend.

financial habits PhD student

Watch your income and spending

I’ve made excel spreadsheets and google sheets that detail my monthly income and expenses, as well as trends in spending and savings over time. This has made me more aware of where my money is coming from, where is it going, and managing for expenses in the future. For example, to pay off a large sum of student loans, I budgeted an amount every month and saw a trend of paying “x” amount of money every month to pay it off by a certain date. I became debt free recently because of this consistent payment over a couple years.

Eat in rather than eat out

I tend to spend more buying food at restaurants or fast food chains than if I were to buy food to make meals for the week. An alternative to eating out and spending a lot having a night out with friends is having a dinner party or game night in your home or apartment. I hosted multiple of these with my group of friends-they are a lot of fun-and they typically cost a lot less than buying drinks at bars or having late night snacks at restaurants. Also, a big money saver is taking advantage of the (ubiquitous) free food offered at school events. **Tip: Always have Tupperware on you!

Join groups on social media or email

Schools often have listservs that allow you to sell items or to buy items for cheap. This may save you a lot compared to buying new at a brand-name store! Also, metropolitan cities or areas often have social media groups such as Facebook groups that post on free events in your area or offer a marketplace for selling and buying items for cheap. Instead of buying a new Ikea set at the store, someone might be selling a gently used set for 2 or 3 times less!

Set your priorities

Is it important to you to live in a studio apartment? A nice neighborhood? Close to work? Do you want to travel on the weekends or vacation often? Do you have to see a healthcare specialist? Need a medical or dental procedure? Want to try cross-fit? Foresee other large bills coming up in the future? All these things should factor into your budget. You may be able to live somewhere that’s cheaper and allows you to do more costly events or activities. Or you may value a nicer living situation, but this may mean substituting weekly for monthly or bimonthly trips to see friends and family. Some people can’t stand eating the same thing for lunch everyday and need to buy more variety at the store or eat at restaurants, while others may be fine with eating low cost meals with low variety and can save for larger purchases in the future. Know where you fall on the spending and saving spectrum and see where you can save and need to spend according to your preferred lifestyle and budget.

Save for a rainy day

Setbacks happen unexpectedly all the time. You may need to see a specialist for a health issue, maybe family requires you to do frequent travel, your phone or laptop may break, the car may need repairs, and much more. For the time when you’ll need to make that purchase or pay that bill, have enough cash reserves for that situation and allow yourself to grow it again for the next setback.

Keeping these tips in mind has helped me to realize what are my lifestyle priorities, luxuries, and disposables. Saving during the week on meals allows me to have upwards of 50 to 100 dollars cash for brunch and events on the weekends. Living in a metropolitan city, when I opt for public transportation over a taxi, I can save considerably when practiced over many weeks. If putting in another amazon order is within my planned budget, I don’t feel bad about spending the money. If I need to make large purchases for pilates sessions, travel or lodging for an out-of-town wedding, or just travel to see family, I may dip into my rainy day funds and then set a course to replenish how much I took out. Practicing these and other conscientious financial habits have helped me over the years; hopefully now they will offer you perspective for adjusting and living your preferred lifestyle based on earning a graduate student stipend.