Personal Finance for PhDs

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Emily

How to Manage Income Tax Payments for Your Fellowship or Training Grant Stipend

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Title: How to Manage Income Tax Payments for Your Fellowship or Training Grant Stipend

Format: Live workshop (in person or remote)

Intended Audience: Graduate students and postdocs receiving stipends/salaries not reported on a Form W-2 (i.e., fellowship, training grant)

Length: 90 minutes

Timing: Year-round

Summary: This workshop shows graduate student and postdoc fellows exactly how to handle paying income tax on their stipends/salaries, whether through the quarterly estimated tax system with their annual tax returns. Every participant should leave the workshop knowing whether they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax to the IRS in 2020 and in what amount and how to repeat this calculation in subsequent years.

Outline:

  • How the IRS views fellowship/training grant income
  • Best practices for saving for your tax bill
  • What is quarterly estimated tax
  • Who does not have to pay quarterly estimated tax
  • Special scenarios: married filing jointly, switching on or off of fellowship, under age 24
  • Walk-through of Form 1040-ES’s Estimated Tax Worksheet
  • How to pay quarterly estimated tax if required
  • How Q1 and Q4 are different
  • State estimated tax

Back to Speaking home page.

How and When Will I Receive My Stimulus Check?

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In this episode, Emily explains how and when the stimulus checks from the CARES Act will be sent to qualifying individuals. She points to new IRS tools to help you track your payment and ensure that your payment arrives in a timely fashion. A minority of citizens and residents may need to submit their 2019 tax returns or other information prior to receiving their checks.
 
Links Mentioned in the Episode
 
stimulus checks PhD
Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts.
 
This is Season 5 Bonus Episode 2, and in this episode I will answer the question: How and when will I receive my stimulus check?
 
I’m recording this on April 15, 2020. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act aka the CARES Act was signed into law a little less than three weeks ago, and one of the major components of the bill was economic impact payments aka stimulus checks sent to qualifying individuals.
 
Stimulus checks have just started arriving in people’s bank accounts this week. In fact, my family’s stimulus check showed up this morning.
 
If you are expecting a stimulus check but it hasn’t arrived yet, you are probably quite anxious to know when it will come and if there is anything that you need to do to hasten the process, so that is the subject of this podcast episode.
 
For most Americans, the stimulus check will be delivered automatically, without having to take any action. However, some people do need to take steps to receive the payment or to receive it sooner.
 
While you’re listening to this episode, I suggest you go to the URL IRS.gov/coronavirus/economic-impact-payments. That link will be in the show notes for this episode as well.
 
On that page you will find a link to the Get My Payment tool, which was launched earlier today. That is where you can check on the status of your stimulus check so you know when it will arrive. You can also provide the IRS with your banking information to enable direct deposit.
 
If you received a tax refund last year by paper check, chances are the IRS does not have the ability to directly deposit your stimulus check into your bank account. The same goes for if in the last two years you paid additional tax along with your tax return, which is common for fellowship recipients who don’t have automatic income tax withholding. In that case, you should use the Get My Payment tool to submit that information. If you’re eligible for a stimulus check but don’t have that direct deposit information on file, you’ll likely wait several months to receive your paper check rather than just days or weeks for the direct deposit.
 
 
If you were not required to file a tax return in 2019 or 2018, you should go to the other link on the webpage I referenced, which is called Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here and fill out the application. It is a very short form to collect your information so that IRS can issue the payment. You do not need to take this step if you receive Social Security retirement, disability, or survivor benefits or Railroad Retirement and Survivor Benefits.
 
For some of the younger members of my audience, perhaps 2019 was the first year in which you were ever required to file a tax return. In that case, according to the Get My Payment webpage, you do have to file your 2019 tax return to get your stimulus check. If you need help doing that, you can find all my best resources at PFforPhDs.com/tax.
 
Now, let’s say you qualify for a stimulus check but for some reason you don’t receive it or the one you receive is not as large as it should have been. You can rectify this on your 2020 tax return.
 
The stimulus money is technically a new refundable credit for 2020 paid out in advance of the tax filing season. Therefore, on your 2020 tax return, you can show that you should have received more of this stimulus money, and the IRS can add the missing money to the tax refund you receive in spring 2021.
 
If you are not sure if you are eligible for a stimulus check or have other CARES Act-related questions, I recommend purchasing the webinar I gave last Saturday, April 11. You can find the webinar page at PFforPhDs.com/CARES.
 
I’ll leave you with one final note about scams. IRS scams have run rampant in recent years, and the stimulus checks are an enormous opportunity for scammers. Please be vigilant against phishing or scam attempts both for yourself and your elderly loved ones, who are particularly vulnerable. The IRS will not ask you for your personal information via phone, text, email, or social media. Don’t open unexpected emails that appear to be from the IRS. Please report phishing attempts directly to the IRS.
 
That’s it for this episode! I’ll catch you again on Monday for our next regularly scheduled interview.
 
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, 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.

How to Improve Your Finances While Social Distancing

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Now that we’re a few weeks into our new normal of social distancing / isolation / quarantine, you may find yourself with the time, ability, and willingness to work on your personal finances*. Below are my top suggestions of activities you can engage in while social distancing that are highly likely to improve your finances in the short or long term, helping you to save money, pay off debt, and invest more money.

*If this sounds preposterous to you, this article isn’t for you right now! Keep taking care of yourself, your loved ones, and your community. If you want to know how I’m getting on without my regular childcare, listen to this podcast episode.

This is post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting PF for PhDs!

social distancing finances

Read a Personal Finance Book

Reading (or listening to) a book is the most time-efficient way to consume high-quality, curated personal finance content. I started my personal finance journey with a few cornerstone books (some of which appear on the list below) before moving on to blogs and podcasts. Reading a book is a great way to get a firm foundation—if you choose the right book.

In normal times, I would suggest that you check your local or university library first for the books you are interested in before considering purchasing. Personally, I know my local library branches are closed, but ebooks are still an option.

The list below includes some of my personal favorites and suggestions I received in response to a Twitter prompt. The knowledge you’ll glean from any one of these books is worth incalculably more than you would pay for them if you do decide to purchase!

Catch Up on a Podcast

For fascinating interviews with financially successful people and in-depth discussions of particular financial strategies, I turn to podcasts. (Podcasts are the one thing I have more of in my current life than I do in my regular life!)

Personally, I am a Completionist, so I prefer to listen through the full archives of most podcasts that I decide to subscribe to. Now that you have the time, here are a few of my favorite personal finance podcasts and other popular ones in the space. Listen to a couple of the recent episodes; maybe you’ll decide to commit to the archive!

File Your Tax Return

I am a major tax return procrastinator. My husband and I usually start working on our tax return in April and submit it barely under the deadline. Confession: This year, with the filing deadline extension to 7/15, we haven’t even started yet.

I do think that preparing your tax return is a good social distancing activity if you have the capacity. You can put an evening or two’s worth of uninterrupted time blocks to work with your tax software or even manually prepare your return (that’s our preferred method).

If you are expecting a refund, file ASAP to receive your refund ASAP. It’s your money! It should be working for you, either by paying expenses if you’ve experienced an income drop or going into savings, debt repayment, or investing if you income has stayed steady.

My tax workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), comprises videos, worksheet(s), and live Q&A calls. Please consider joining through the appropriate link:

Network

One of the upsides of physical social distancing for some people is the chance to connect remotely with a different set of people than usual. (I am highly envious of this! I had high hopes to reconnect with old friends during this time… My children’s insistence on derailing all adult conversations has dashed those hopes.)

Instead of limiting your Facetime/Zoom calls to your family and friends, consider reaching out to people in your professional network.

In a general sense you should be networking like this all the time, but the motivation intensifies if you are coming up on an expected transition point in your PhD career or you think your job/position is at risk and you might need to look for another soon.

An excellent, low-risk group to network with right now is people who graduated from (or otherwise left) your PhD program in recent years. You can reach out over email to see what they’re up to and schedule a call if that is mutually agreeable.

If you reach out to someone and don’t receive a response, don’t take it personally! People are dealing with a lot right now. Just cast a wide net, and appreciate the people who are able to give you some of their time right now.

Oh, and always ask at the end of an interesting conversation if the other person can recommend one or more people for you to connect with next!

Explore Career Options

As a spin off of networking, right now is also an incredible time to work on exploring your career options. Yes, the academic job market looks abysmal right now, but—upside?—it’s been trending that way for decades, so there are lots and lots of PhDs established in non-academic careers that might be of interest to you.

A great first place to go for resources is your university’s career center. (Check on this even as an alum—you may have access to resources from all the universities/colleges you’ve graduated from.) The robustness of their resources for PhDs in particular might be strong or weak, but some of their resources for undergrads will still be helpful.

The career center may have assessment tools, instructional resources for job seekers, recordings of past live events, and opportunities to meet one-on-one with staff. If you know they have a resource that is not currently available online, submit a request that it is made available.

Two platforms for PhD job seekers in particular are Beyond the Professoriate (Aurora) and Versatile PhD. If your institution has a subscription, access the platform through its login mechanism, but if not you can sign up as an individual. Beyond the Professoriate has an upcoming online career conference as well.

To combine networking with exploring career options, set up informational interviews with people in careers you’d like to learn more about. From my experience on both sides of informational interviews, they can be quite enjoyable and beneficial for both parties!

Invest in a Frugal Strategy

Most of us are practicing forced frugality these days in a few areas of our budget. I’d wager that your discretionary spending was down in March from where it was February and that April will be lower than March. There are lots of possible uses for that freed-up cash flow, but consider one more: investing in a frugal strategy.

One of the major, legitimate complaints about frugal practices is that they take some capital to get started with. I’ve heard “Frugality is only for the rich,” for example. This is not the case for every frugal strategy, but it is for some. Well, now that you have some capital, what frugal strategies can you ‘invest’ in that you know will pay off with decreased spending over the long term?

I’ll give you one tiny example: Last December, I ‘fessed up—to myself—that my family (which includes two tiny children, one of whom is still in a high chair) was consuming paper towels at a positively alarming rate. We were buying the huge packs from Costco for $20 each half a dozen times per year. This didn’t sit well with me from a financial or an environmental perspective, so I purchased these microfiber cloths (12 for $12—now I wish I had doubled it!). They work far better than paper towels, our paper towel consumption rate dropped like a rock (we’ve probably made up for that initial investment twice over by now), and they haven’t substantially added to our laundry load. (Again, two tiny children—we already do a ton of laundry, including cloth diapers.) These towels were absolutely a frugal investment. Bonus: Not having the pressure right now of needing to buy this particular paper product before we run out when it is in short supply is a load off my mind!

Ask yourself: Are there any frugal strategies I’ve wanted to try but haven’t yet because of the up-front investment of capital? Can I use my newfound cash flow right now to establish one of the strategies? And if it wasn’t money but rather time was your limiting factor before: What frugal strategy did you never have time to initiate, but you can put in the time now to make it a habit?

Here are a few ideas for similar frugal/environmental investments, gleaned from this Twitter thread:

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Clear Out Your Closets, Etc.

My mother, a retired empty nester, has undertaken as her social distancing project clearing out the basement storage area of the home my parents have lived in for 30 years. It’s a massive project, and it is made more difficult by the closure of some of the places you might normally go to resell, donate, recycle, or trash your old possessions.

I do think a spring cleaning/clearing out is a good activity for right now. This might positively affect your finances if you are willing to hold on to the valuable items long enough to resell them. (You might be able to resell currently, but I suspect the demand will be relatively low.) If nothing else, it will benefit your mental health and will reduce the amount of work you’ll need to do leading up to your next move.

Close Old Financial Accounts (and Open New Ones?)

Spring cleaning can apply to your finances as well as your home!

You may very well have old banking or credit accounts that you no longer use or have need for. If you can close the old bank accounts without going anywhere in person, do so! Some people like to keep old credit card accounts open because length of credit history and utilization ratio play into your credit score. However, if you have a high credit score already, you should consider closing the accounts you don’t need; maybe just keep the single oldest account open. The suggestion to close old accounts goes quintuple for any accounts that charge you a fee.

In the same vein, now is a great time to join (aspects of) your financial accounts with your spouse or partner if you have decided to keep joint money. My husband and I decided to join as much as we could after we got married, and the months-long process involved researching and opening new accounts, waiting for money to transfer, and closing old accounts. Again, it’s a great social distancing activity as long as you don’t have to go anywhere in person. (Another reason online-only banks are my preferred institutions!)

If you’ve never looked into it before, you could put your free time into figuring out how to generate extra income from credit card or banking rewards. Please keep in mind that offers might be somewhat different during social distancing than they were before (or will be again). Before you open any new accounts, triple-check that you can meet the minimum spending requirements or transfer amounts given your (presumed) lower level of current spending.

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

Plumb Your Values/Dream

If you’ve been able and willing to slow down and reflect, this pandemic might have granted you new insight into what you want for your life. I don’t think you should be making any life-altering decisions in this stressful period, but lean into your different perspective and deepen your introspection.

What is truly important to you? What are the aspects of your life that make you feel fulfilled? What can you change about how you manage your finances to better support those aspects?

Further Reading: Determining Your Values and Financial Goals While in Graduate School

Get Coaching, Take a Course, or Join a Community

One way you can invest in yourself right now is to establish a relationship with a coach, join a community, or take a course focused on an area of personal or professional development. Spending money on this kind of endeavor makes it much more likely that you will actually take the necessary steps to ensure your financial success.

If your chosen area is finances, consider how you and I could work together. I offer one-on-one financial coaching, and I am also going to open up the doors to my program, The Wealthy PhD, in May 2020. Through both avenues, you will have individualized access to actionable knowledge, inspiration, and accountability. If you feel confident in your income security, this is the perfect time to firm up your financial plans and even take advantage of the unique opportunities this period affords.

If finances aren’t your preferred area of focus right now, I also recommend checking out the services offered by my colleagues:

  • Dr. Jen Polk coaches PhDs on their careers
  • Dr. Katy Peplin’s community Thrive PhD supports graduate students around the mechanics of graduate school and their mental health
  • Dr. Katie Linder offers podcasts with actionable tips, coaching and courses for academics on productivity and related topics
  • Dr. Echo Rivera offers courses and coaching on effective presentation design & presenting with data for academics, scientists, and researchers (grad students through PhDs)

If you do commit to working on your professional or personal development in one of these other areas, I’m confident that there will be an indirect positive effect on your net worth! Perhaps at that point you’ll be ready to directly work on your finances with me.

How have you improved your finances while social distancing?

Our Lives and Finances Under Social Distancing: A Self-Employed PhD and a Grad Student

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In this episode, Emily and Lourdes discuss their lives and finances during the coronavirus pandemic. Emily is balancing running her business with caring for her two small children (while her husband also works full-time), and Lourdes is adjusting to working on her PhD remotely and virtually never interacting with other people face-to-face.

If you would like to work (remotely!) with Emily in any of the following ways, please email her:

Lourdes’s previous budget breakdown podcast episode: This NDSEG Fellow Prioritizes Housing and Saving for Mid- and Long-Term Goals

Fellowship Income Is Now Eligible to Be Contributed to an IRA!

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In this episode, Emily explains the new legislation that allows non-W-2 fellowship income to be contributed to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA). Up until 2019, fellowship or training grant income (reported on a Form 1098-T or Form 1099-MISC or not reported at all) was not eligible to be contributed to an IRA. Certain legislation, the Graduate Student Savings Act (GSSA), which fixes this problem, has been proposed a few times since 2016, but never passed. However, at the end of the 2019 Congressional session, the text of the GSSA was passed and signed into law as part of an omnibus spending bill (H.R. 1865). PhD trainees who are newly eligible to contribute to an IRA should consider their overall financial status and goals to determine whether to contribute and in what amount.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

taxable compensation fellowship IRA

Intro

Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast: a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts.

This is Season 4 Bonus Episode 1, and in this episode I will update you on recent legislation that has a major positive impact on the PhD trainee population.

Specifically, starting on January 1st, 2020, the definition of “taxable compensation” for the purpose of contributing to an individual retirement arrangement or IRA was  updated to include taxable fellowship income not reported on a W-2.

That’s the takeaway point for those of you already in the know about this issue: Your taxable non-W-2 fellowship income is now eligible to be contributed to an IRA. You can open a Roth or traditional IRA on January 1 or following and put in the $6,000 maximum contribution if you like, assuming your taxable fellowship income is at least $6,000 in 2020. If that’s all you need to know, feel free to stop this episode now, but please share it with your peers as you go.

In the rest of this episode, I will review the prior definition of taxable compensation and how it negatively impacted the PhD trainee community and then explain the recent legislation that changed the definition for 2020 and forward. At the end of the episode, I’ll point you to a few resources to help you in your investing journey.

1 The Prior Definition of Taxable Compensation

The federal government offers a few different tax incentives to encourage individuals to invest for their retirement.

When you invest money inside a tax-advantaged retirement account, you don’t have to pay tax on the growth in your investments as you would for a regular taxable investment account and you also can take a tax break on either the amount of money you contribute to the account or the amount of money you withdraw from the account in your retirement.

Most of the tax incentives are offered through workplace-based retirement accounts, such as a 401(k) in the private sector or a 403(b) in the nonprofit sector. However, there is one type of account that can be opened outside of your workplace, and that is the Individual Retirement Arrangement or IRA.

You as an individual can go to just about any brokerage firm and open an IRA, and it’s not at all connected to where you work. The contribution limit for an IRA is $6,000 per year if you’re under age 50.

The restriction the federal government places on IRAs is that you have to have what’s called “taxable compensation” in a given calendar year to contribute to an IRA. Your overall income also has to fall under certain limits to contribute.

The old definition of taxable compensation was as follows. Think of a two-column list. The left-hand column is types of income that are considered taxable compensation, and the right-hand column is types of income that are not considered taxable compensation. I’m not giving you the exhaustive lists, but just an idea.

In the left-hand list, taxable compensation, you had:

  • W-2 income, such as you would receive from being an employee,
  • Self-employment income,
  • Alimony,
  • Etc.

In the right-hand list, not taxable compensation, you had:

  • Rental income,
  • Interest and dividend income,
  • Pension or annuity income,
  • Taxable scholarship and fellowship income not reported on a W-2,
  • Etc.

This was specified in the tax code. So if your fellowship or training grant income was reported on any kind of tax form other than a W-2, such as a 1098-T or 1099-MISC, or not reported at all, it was not considered taxable compensation for the purposes of contributing to an IRA.

That means that if you went an entire calendar year with only non-W-2 fellowship income, you would not have been able to contribute to an IRA in that calendar year.

This was really tough news for a lot of people in our PhD community. The irony was that students and postdocs who won outside fellowships often received a higher income than their employee peers, so they perhaps had more money available to invest, but they were barred from using an IRA to do so.

Now, there were a couple workarounds. Keep in mind that the contribution limit to an IRA is $6,000 or the amount of your taxable compensation, whichever is lower.

First, the calendar year and the academic year do not line up. So if your funding source switched between W-2 and non-W-2 between academic years, you would still have at least a degree of IRA eligibility in that calendar year.

Second, if you were married and your spouse had taxable compensation, you could contribute to a spousal IRA, up to their amount of taxable compensation or the overall $12,000 per year limit for two IRAs, whichever was lower.

Third, if you had a side hustle, that self-employment or W-2 income would give you some eligibility.

As a last resort, if you truly didn’t have access to an IRA in a calendar year, you still had the option to invest for retirement in a regular taxable investment account. If you chose a tax-efficient investing strategy, such as passive index investing, you probably would not have much of an additional tax burden due to the favorable tax rates for long-term capital gains and qualified dividends. However, this tax advantage was not widely recognized.

The effect of this law was that many PhD students and postdocs who had the financial means to invest for retirement were prevented from contributing to IRAs, and they likely didn’t try to invest instead in a taxable account. The law sent the message that PhD trainees were not supposed to be investing for retirement and were not worthy of being extended the same tax break that employees were. This had an overall dampening effect on the financial ambition of PhD trainees, which in my opinion was a very serious problem.

2 The Legislation That Changed the Definition

All that has changed now. In essence, the new legislation moved taxable scholarship and fellowship income not reported on a W-2 from the right-hand column to the left, from being explicitly excluded from the definition of taxable compensation to being explicitly included in the definition for graduate students and postdocs.

The origin of this legislation was the bipartisan Graduate Student Savings Act or GSSA, first introduced in 2016 in the Senate by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mike Lee and in the House by Congressmen Joe Kennedy and Luke Messer; however, it was not passed at that time. The GSSA was re-introduced in 2017 and 2019 and eventually included in the bipartisan SECURE Act in 2019, none of which passed.

You can learn more about the GSSA in Season 4 Episode 9 of this podcast, in which I interview Abby Dove, a graduate student who as a science policy fellow worked on getting a scientific advocacy group to endorse the GSSA.

Ultimately, in the closing days of the 2019 session, the text of the GSSA was included in an omnibus spending bill along with the rest of the SECURE Act, passed by both chambers of Congress, and signed into law by the president.

I’ll read to you exactly the change that was made in House Resolution 1865, and I’ll link it from the show notes.

“SEC. 106. CERTAIN TAXABLE NON-TUITION FELLOWSHIP AND STIPEND PAYMENTS TREATED AS COMPENSATION FOR IRA PURPOSES.

(a) In General.—Paragraph (1) of section 219(f) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by adding at the end the following: “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.”

(b) Effective Date.—The amendment made by this section shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2019.”

There you have it! The definition of “taxable compensation” for the purposes of contributing to an IRA now includes taxable fellowship income for graduate students and postdocs. However, by my reading, it seems that taxable post-baccalaureate fellowships have not been included in the definition.

That language of “aid the individual in the pursuit of graduate or postdoctoral study” reflects the definition of a fellowship from IRS Publication 970, which reads quote “A fellowship grant is generally an amount paid for the benefit of an individual to aid in the pursuit of study or research” end quote.

3 What to Do Now

This change is really good news for the PhD trainee community overall, but it may or may not materially change anything for you. If you now have access to an IRA in 2020 when you otherwise would not have, what should you do? I imagine that PhD trainees fall into one of three groups.

First, some PhD trainees should not be investing for retirement right now, so having access to an IRA doesn’t really matter. This is the case if you don’t have the available cash flow to invest or have other, higher-priority financial goals, such as paying off high-interest debt or saving up cash.

Second, some PhD trainees are ready and able to invest but don’t have pre-existing savings or investments. Maybe they have recently finished paying off certain types of debt or saving up sufficient cash, and they now have cash flow available for investing. This is the group that can open up an IRA and set up a regular savings rate into it; this is called dollar cost averaging. With a $6,000 per year limit, your regular monthly contribution to the IRA can be up to $500, which would be a great savings rate for a graduate student or postdoc.

Third, some PhD trainees have already been saving or investing outside of an IRA and are eager to contribute a lump sum of money to an IRA. You are permitted to contribute the full $6,000 in one go if that’s your preference. Then, throughout the year, you can direct your ongoing savings rate to a taxable investment account or other financial goals.

One question I’ve already received a few times is whether fellowship recipients will be able to contribute to a 2019 IRA. In general, you are allowed to contribute to your prior year’s IRA up until tax day of the subsequent year, and this is a strategy I recommend to anyone who has not yet maxed out their IRA for the prior year. However, since the text of the bill says the change will go into effect after December 31, 2019, my reading is that the old definition of taxable compensation will apply to 2019 IRAs and the new definition will apply to 2020 IRAs.

If you’re not sure what your unique next steps should be or if what I spoke about today even applies to you, I am available to coach you. I can’t recommend specific funds, but we can work together to determine your next financial goal, increase your savings rate, and figure out which high-level investing strategy is most appropriate for you.

You can set up one-on-one coaching with me by going to PFforPhDs.com/coaching. Another excellent option is to participate in my upcoming program, The Wealthy PhD, through which you will receive course content, individual and group coaching, and community with your peers. You can find more information about The Wealthy PhD at PFforPhDs.com/wealthyPhD.

I would be absolutely delighted to shepherd fellowship recipients who have never before invested through the process.

As for additional resources, I have many, many articles on investing on my website, and I have linked several updated ones from the show notes. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s4be1 for season 4, bonus episode 1.

For international students and postdocs, I would also recommend listening to Season 4 Episode 17 of this podcast, which answers the question of whether it is permissible and advisable for international students, postdocs, and workers to invest while living in the US. Keep in mind that I recorded this episode prior to the definition of taxable compensation changing.

Finally, if you need to take a big step back because you were surprised to hear that your fellowship and potentially scholarship income is taxable, I recommend listening to Season 2 Bonus Episode 1 of this podcast, titled Do I Owe Income Tax on My Fellowship?

Thank you for joining me for this special bonus episode. Please spread the good news about IRA eligibility to your peers also receiving fellowship or training grant income by sharing this episode with them!

Outtro

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 Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC.

This PhD Developed His SciComm Career Through Side Hustling

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Gaius Augustus, a PhD in cancer biology and habitual side hustler. Gaius combines his artistic talent and knowledge of science to communicate science visually and teaches others to do the same. Within Emily’s framework of side hustles, Gaius details the half-dozen side hustles he pursued during graduate school and how they have contributed to his personal and professional development. He has now turned one of his grad school side hustles into a full-fledged side business in his post-PhD life. In this discussion, Gaius shares his hard-win insights into time management, self-advocacy, and imposter syndrome. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to advance her career through side hustling, networking, or volunteering.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

science communication side hustle

Teaser

00:00 Gaius: When I started doing this I just went to the office and said, look, I need extra money and this is the way that I’ve found to make extra money and I’m still going to get my work done and I expect you to hold me to that, but this is something I have to do.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Emily Roberts. This is season three, episode 10 and today my guest is Dr. Gaius Augustus, a PhD in cancer biology, artist and side hustler. During grad school, Gaius pursued half a dozen different side hustles, which contributed to his personal and professional development as well as financial bottom line. In what is now his side business, he combines his love of science and his artistic talent and training to communicate science visually through figures, graphical abstracts, infographics and more and teaches others to do the same. In this discussion, Gaius shares his hard-won insights into time management, self advocacy, and imposter syndrome. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Gaius Augustus.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: My guest on the podcast today is Dr. Gaius Augustus, and he’s going to be talking to us about his history with side hustling and how that’s actually turned into a side business, which is very exciting. Gaius, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further? Let us know more about who you are.

01:34 Gaius: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. I actually have a kind of interesting past. I have my PhD in cancer biology, but I actually started out as an artist and in high school. I went to a fine arts high school, I loved the arts, and I actually got really into comic making and video production. When I left high school, I actually went for film and television at a fine arts university. I ended up leaving that because the culture wasn’t quite right. I went into retail and worked retail for about five years. While I was working retail, I got some experience in the pharmacy. I was like, oh, this is pretty cool, I could make a living as a pharmacist. And I was really kind of missing the science part of my life.

02:25 Gaius: And so I decided to go back to school for pharmacy and joined a lab and just fell in love with the scientific process. I got my bachelor’s in 2014 in integrative studies, which is a kind of design your own degree program where you can mix from different disciplines. I mixed biology, chemistry and a little bit of psychology. Then I went straight into a PhD program at the Arizona Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at University of Arizona, which is an umbrella program, again so that I could choose a program within that. Then I joined the cancer biology program in 2015. I literally, two weeks ago, April 2019, defended my PhD, and now I am trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

03:26 Emily: Yeah! Fantastic. I love to hear that non-traditional route to the PhD. It’s definitely going to inform the rest of our conversation today.

Why Did You Side Hustle During Your PhD?

Emily: Throughout your progress through the PhD and maybe even before that you have been a side hustler, habitual side hustler. Why did you start side hustling during your PhD?

03:51 Gaius: I want to say that when I was an artist, I took science classes for fun in high school and everyone thought I was crazy. Again, I was at a fine arts high school. When I went back to school for science, I thought, okay, this is it, right? I’ve always missed the science. Here it is. But then as I got into science more, I realized I really missed the art. And I never really thought there was a way to balance that. I thought, okay, well these are just two separate things that I have to do. During my PhD I started thinking, okay, is there a way to mix this? So I started with just like making comics where I anthropomorphize science topics and wrote those comics and never really to share, just to have them.

04:39 Gaius: As I started going on and people started being interested in those types of things, I started thinking this is pretty cool that people are interested, but I never really thought about making money with it. So along the same time, my partner, who is not in grad school or a scientist and is an artist who has been making money in our new city as an artist, was thinking about how we can make a little bit of extra money besides just what I make for my grad school stipend and something that was a little different than them having to go get a traditional job.

05:18 Gaius: We actually started our first big side hustle, which was starting a kind of art, crafty sort of side our business, which I’ll talk about a little bit more later. Along with that, when I started talking to people about that, people were really interested in that, and they were very interested in the fact that I had been an artist. As I got interested in science communication about two years ago, the people that I was talking to about that were also like, hey, you can also do this cool artsy stuff. How can we fit that in? I started by just doing infographics, and I wanted to learn animation for fun. So I just was like, if I can figure out animation in time for whatever your deadline is, then let’s do that.

06:06 Gaius: I was actually hired by the University of Arizona Cancer Center to create infographics and animations when I could. Animations weren’t difficult because I had some experience in the past with it. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be to get back into that. From there, people just start hearing about it. The more people heard about it, the more people were interested in it. So I was like, I guess I can make money doing this. That would be really awesome because I could do both art and science and learn about lots of cool science. That’s really what motivated me to start. Just knowing that there’s a possibility to make money was like the original thought, but then learning that I could do something I really loved and make money doing, it was a really big reason for me to push a little bit harder.

06:59 Emily: I really love that story. I’m so happy we’re going to go even more in depth with it in a moment. Because it seems so organic. You weren’t simply out to make extra money, although that’s a very welcome side benefit and maybe an important benefit. But it was just, what do you want to spend your time doing? Where are your interests leading you? Also you’re kind of responding to the market, right? Like you were, I’m putting some things out there, oh, and people are responding and it leads me over in this direction and then it leads me over here. I’m excited to hear even more about that.

07:38 Gaius: Something I find really interesting is I remember in my undergrad talking to one of my advisors. He always talked about how intentional his path was. I was always really jealous of how intentional everything he had done and all the types of things he had tried in order to reach where he was at that point. I still think about it all the time, that he was always saying making intentional choices to get to where you are. My life has been the complete opposite. It’s just been chaos. It’s more been like, what opportunities are available? Let’s take it, let’s move on to the next one. But still, if you allow yourself to not think of those things that you’ve done as mistakes and instead think of them as intentional choices that you made that have led you to this path, I think it’s really a good way to get yourself into new opportunities and use everything that you’ve done in your path to inform what you do with your life right now.

08:41 Emily: Yeah, you’re using the word intentional, which is like, everyone can get behind that. Like of course you want to make choices that are well considered, but I think what your professor was saying was more like a linear path, right? Like, like straightforward and efficient.

09:01 Gaius: And forward-thinking. I think he was thinking, okay, 20 years in the future, this is where I want to be, I think that was more what he thought he was saying. Whereas I think like you were about to say, you just want to make choices that you are intentional about in that moment. You mean to make the choice that you make with whatever hardships you have right now or whenever you’re dealing with right now, you make what choices you can and go forward with those.

09:29 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Not that your professor’s path was a bad one if he’s happy with the outcome of course. But there are plenty of people who set out on a path and keep at it for decades and aren’t happy with the outcome even though they were very intentional and they were very efficient. That definitely depends more on your personality. It’s about knowing yourself really. I’m so happy to hear about your journey as a counterpoint to that.

Side Hustling Framework for PhDs

Emily: You already mentioned a couple different side hustles that you’ve had going on and also were starting to say how that’s led your current business. I have this framework that I like to use when I talk about side hustling, which is that side hustles, let’s say for a grad student, can fall into one of four categories or maybe even multiple of four categories.

10:19 Emily: The first is what I call “career-advancing.” So a side hustle, and again, these all make money in some capacity or another, but it’s letting you explore a new career area or maybe it’s expanding your network or maybe it’s demonstrating skills or learning new skills. Something that we think is going to advance your career. That doesn’t have to be your scientific career. It could just be whatever else you want to do. So there’s that. The second one is an enjoyable hobby that you happen to be able to monetize. It’s something you enjoy doing, not even necessarily a hobby, but just an activity that you enjoy that you happen to be able to monetize. The third category is that you don’t enjoy this activity at all, but it does pay you.

11:04 Emily: So I’m thinking this is like, well, you mentioned working retail earlier. I don’t know if that’s your passion. It doesn’t sound like it ended up being the route you went, but that’s also something a lot of grad students do just for extra income and I doubt it’s very career-advancing or enjoyable. The last one is passive income, which may be a little bit unfamiliar to people who are not in the entrepreneurial space. Basically in those first three paradigms, I’m assuming that you’re trading your time for money more or less directly. With passive income, it’s more about investing a lot of time, money, energy, or creativity to create a product that then sells over time. The very classic example is of an author. You write a book, and then the book sells. Over time you get those royalties. This is complicated a little bit with advances and we won’t go into that, but that’s kind of the idea. You put a lot of time and energy into something and then you sell it over time. So thinking about that framework, which we’ll link from the show notes: Put the side hustles that you’ve had into those different buckets, if you would.

12:11 Gaius: Yeah, sounds good. I thought about this from, should I talk about each one individually or should I talk about the framework? I think that the framework is so well designed or so well thought out that I’m just going to talk about it from the framework side.

Career-Advancing

Gaius: When I think about career-advancing, I’m thinking about networking. Like you said, it doesn’t have to be scientific, but it can be about growing your network and people who can help you find jobs in the future. So, like I said, I worked for the University of Arizona Cancer Center. I made infographics and animations and did some writing for them as well. That was definitely career advancing. I met so many people through that. I actually did six months of work for them volunteer, so I wasn’t getting paid at all. And then I did six months where I was getting paid, but that was a great career-advancer as far as meeting everyone at the university and people who potentially I could work for in the future.

13:20 Emily: I actually have a follow up question on that one because that sounded fantastic from the first time you brought it up. I was so excited about it. How did you get into that position? It sounds like it started with volunteering, but how did you initiate that volunteer relationship?

13:36 Gaius: One of the hardest things I think all of us have to do as graduate students is promote ourselves. Right? You have to promote yourself when you learn to write grants, you have to promote yourself when you tell your PI about your cool new experiment that you want to try that costs a lot more money than your PI maybe thinks it’s worth. I actually was helping with website design. I used to do freelance web design on the side of working retail. Like you said, I’m a longtime side hustler. So I was helping my department with redesigning their website and in order to get a better idea of what they needed, they pulled in the PR person from the Cancer Center. We just were having conversations because I show up to meetings on time and he shows up to meetings on time and academics don’t.
14:28 Gaius: We were just having conversations before all of our meetings, and I mentioned that I was looking into science communication. Finally one day he was just like, you should come work with us. I’m not sure I have a budget, but I really like what you’re saying. So it was totally me just talking about things I liked and being willing to talk about myself and what I do and what I think I do well and someone being willing to say, okay, well I want to take a chance on you and give you more experience and get a volunteer to help me out to get that opportunity.

15:09 Emily: It’s very clear from that story that this was about networking. You volunteered your skills at the small circle of your initial network, which was your department, and that led you to a slightly wider network and more opportunities there. That sounds amazing. This is a bit more of a financial or technical question, but I’m just curious about how being hired by the cancer center, the PR wing, played with your stipend. Was that in addition to it? Was that all kosher at the university level? Were you hired as an independent contractor? What were all the details there?

15:46 Gaius: At the time I was on an NIH training grant. There were a lot of discussions between the department and the Cancer Center about how that was going to work. Apparently they looked into the fellowship and made sure that there was no language saying I couldn’t get paid. Then what they did was they just said, okay, well we can only pay you up to a certain number of hours because you’re a student worker. What this person did was just found the best offer he could as far as an hourly pay where I could kind of maximize my income under the guidelines that were currently there. He was a really big advocate for me and I really appreciate that. But there was definitely some arguments and conversations that had to happen between the university and the cancer center and my department.

16:44 Emily: Clearly. In addition to just the pay issue, which it sounds like that’s a very specific solution for the training grant you were on and so forth. How did your advisor feel about you…? Because a lot of people keep their side hustles quiet, right? They don’t let their advisor or other people know about it. But clearly your advisor must have known about this from the beginning or early on. How did that go over?

17:08 Gaius: This is going to go back to kind of self advocacy again. I worked in retail for five years, and in retail there is no self-advocacy. You do what you’re told, and if you don’t, anyone could have your job or at least that’s what they tell you even when it’s not true. I’d had some really, really horrible bosses and really horrible experiences in retail. When I started back in school, one of my goals was never to be treated like that again. When I got into grad school and started thinking about doing on the side… Sadly it was never a question of is my PI going to be okay with this. When I chose a PI, I was very straightforward and saying I’m kind of going to do what I want to do and I need your support and how do you feel about that?

18:05 Gaius: And he was like, you know, I want to do what’s best for you and your career, and I will work with you. Wo when I started doing this, I just went to the office and said, look, I need extra money and this is the way that I’ve found to make extra money and I’m still going to get my work done. I expect you to hold me to that, but this is something I have to do. He was very worried about me and very worried about whether I was going to be able to keep doing it, but he supported me and never questioned it. He just made a couple of like side glances, but then it was just like, do what you got to do.

18:46 Emily: Yeah. You finished in five years it sounds like. So this didn’t end up tacking on any extra time at minimum. This is a great tip for anyone who has not yet chosen an advisor: to find someone who is going to be supportive of your career broadly defined – however you want to define your career. That person should be supportive, or if they’re not, know that early on and don’t work with them unless you’re 100% on the tenure track. I’m really glad that you described like your relationship with that person and how that worked out. That was so much detail, but that was such an exciting side hustle.

Emily: What’s the next one on your list?

19:24 Gaius: One thing that I’ve been doing a lot over just the past like six months is a lot of freelance sci art. I’ve been doing infographics, graphical abstracts, animations for scientists, for departments. That’s been extremely fun, but it’s also been a great networking experience. A lot of the time, I work with someone and then someone who they know is like, oh, this person told me that you are great to work with, I would like to work with you too. As far as career-advancing steps, the sci art, freelance, and I’ve done a little bit of writing as well has really helped with getting that networking done and also giving me the confidence that I needed to say people do enjoy my work. Also, they’re not just hiring me because they like me because strangers are hiring me. Those have been my big career-advancing hustles.

20:21 Emily: Yeah, that sounds like so much fun as you just said. If people want to see your work, where’s the best place to go?

20:28 Gaius: All of my work is available on my website, which is gaiusjaugustus.com, which I hope you’ll put in the notes since it’s not always the easiest to spell. If you also search Gaius Divi Filius on Twitter, you can see me and get to my website. I’m on Instagram as Process of InQUEERy with inquiry spelled with “queer” in the middle. I am on Facebook with Process of Inqueery as well.

20:55 Emily: I wanted to put that in the middle of the episode instead of just at the end so that people can go and look at your stuff as they’re continuing to listen to this conversation. I would imagine that just by the nature of what you did with that particular side hustle of it being art, it sounds like it’s incredibly shareable. You chose something where networking is easy. If you do a great job, people are going to ask who’s behind that work.

21:17 Gaius: It’s interesting you say that because I’ve never thought about that before. I’m a very visual person. I struggled to learn science because it was reading the books and reading articles and I do so much better when I started reframing it as look at the results and then try and frame your scientific ideas around the results and then read the articles and see if they agree with you. Same with learning science, go and look at the pictures in the chapter, try and figure out what they mean and then read the text and make sure I’m getting on the right track. I’ve just always been that kind of visual person. I’m drawing, in class, ideas out since I was little. So it’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that people just see it and it automatically gives a good networking side of things.

22:09 Emily: Yeah. You’re much more in touch with the sci comm community than I am. But when I think of science communication, I initially think about the written word. I don’t go to to video or to art or anything, but maybe it’s a bigger component of it that I realize. Anyway, I just think it’s a really wonderful way of communicating that may be undertapped at this point.

22:35 Gaius: I agree completely. I think you hit the nail on the head about how most people feel about sci comm.

Commercial

22:43 Emily: This summer. I’m putting forth extra support for PhDs undergoing career transitions into grad school, a post doc or a real job. If you’re moving onto the next stage in your career or thinking about it, please visit pfforphds.com/next to check out my articles, webinars and coaching program. Allow me to come alongside you during this transition to ensure that you set yourself up for financial success.

Enjoyable Activity or Hobby

23:13 Emily: What’s the next side hustle? Any monetized hobbies?

23:18 Gaius: On the enjoyable category, one of the big ones is the side hustle that I started initially with my partner. We’re pagan and we love making stuff. As we were making things for us, we just decided to bring that to a broader audience. We actually make resin jewelry. We make pagan goods, things that maybe you would find in your house or things you might want to wear out to just kind of show off pagan pride as well as just things that everyone uses but instead of looking at it from just a regular angle, we say how would we look at this from a pagan angle? Recently my partner made plushes and instead of an animal or something, they made crystal balls.

24:12 Gaius: So stuff like that. We make a lot of the resin jewelry, but we’re also kind of pushing that a little bit further now into other things like plushes and shirts and things like that. That’s all through theindigopath.com, which if you go to is not anything yet. We took down our shop to do a bunch of conventions and things like that and we’re rebuilding it to put up our new branding and things like that. But that’s been something that’s just been pure enjoyment. It’s paying for itself, but that’s about it at this point.

24:47 Emily: Yeah. I love that you found something that you could do with your partner. Just something fun that’s a bonding experience or a fun project to work on together. I’m sure that it has relational benefits as well as the potential monetary benefits and just something enjoyable to do with your time. Although it does not sound like you are hard pressed for things to do with your time! Plenty going on already. What’s next in your list?

It Pays But It’s Not Enjoyable

25:10 Gaius: The next is the “it pays, but I don’t necessarily enjoy it.” The big one for me is web design. I do love web design, but I don’t necessarily like doing web design for other people. I love playing around with it for myself. I’ve been doing it for years and like I said I used to do it freelance. It pays the bills. When people want or need help with their website, I can get people up and running quickly. I can do trainings so that people can understand it. I was also a cheap sell for my department to be able to redo their website for very, very low pay. That’s probably my best example of something that pays, but it’s not necessarily the thing that I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

25:59 Emily: Yeah. Well it sounds like you should increase your rates on that. Do less of it, but get more out of what you do.

26:06 Gaius: Yes. You’re probably right.

Passive Income

26:07 Emily: Anything else in that category or should we move on to the passive one?

26:14 Gaius: Oh, let’s move on to the passive, which I’m really excited about, but also very skeptical about because I know that there is a lot of talk in my blogs about whether you should do passive income or whether you should wait until you have a following to do passive income. I’ll just tell you what I do. One thing that I do is I write blog articles for my website. I actually started doing that because I was part of the Grad Blogger Connect Group on Facebook led by Chris Coney, and I just decided to start this blog. It was the first thing I ever did to do any science communication, before I worked for the cancer center or anything. I just put ads in there, and I think I have like a $1.20 in my ads account. So it’s never really made me anything but it’s there. But because I’ve written the blog articles, those will continue to be there and when my site blows up in the near future and people are reading those articles a lot, those ads hopefully will make some income at some point.

27:21 Emily: Is this the same website that you mentioned earlier?

27:23 Gaius: Yes, it is the same website.

27:25 Emily: Okay, great. Glad to hear it’s all integrated together.

27:29 Gaius: Yeah, that was something I really wanted, but it’s very difficult to do the more side hustles you try. You have to figure out how to get all that branding to work together. The other thing actually, which is also on the same website, is I have a shop of just designs on T-shirts and pillows and things like that. I knew I wanted to do that because I love making up T-shirt designs. As part of The Indigo Path, we constantly are buying iron-on stuff to make designs. The shop doesn’t use my iron-ons, they are actually professionally printed. But I do like the idea of having a totally customized wardrobe. The shop has a lot of cool science-y themed designs. This is passive. I make the designs, I put them up in the shop. If somebody likes it, they buy it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a week from now or a year from now, I’ll still get hopefully about the same cut on that. I put in that up-front work. Whatever money I make down the road comes from the initial work that I put into making those designs.

28:44 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know if I told you this, but that shop was the reason that I invited you on the podcast. I saw that as a potentially passive income stream and I was like, alright, I need to talk to this guy.

29:01 Gaius: The shop feels to me like the dark secret of my website, because even though it’s up front, I don’t really advertise it that much. Bbut I just love making designs and putting them on stuff. Especially all over prints, which I don’t actually have that many of on the site, but I am obsessed with all over prints. So I make them, I put them up there and I don’t promote it but I think that it’s really cool and it’s probably one of the favorite things that I do.

29:34 Emily: Yeah. Like you said earlier, there’s talk about when to introduce potentially passive streams of income and so forth to your business, but it just sounds like the perfect medley of some of the other things we’ve talked about. It uses your unique skills and your unique subject area interests. It’s just something that you enjoy doing and you threw up the end result online. If people want to come and find it, cool. I think what’s interesting about passive income though, especially when we’re talking about web-based businesses, is that it’s not really ever truly passive. If no one came to your site, if you weren’t driving traffic to your site from other means, then no one would ever find it and no one would ever buy it. It’s really not truly passive because you have to still be active online and somehow trying to get traffic to your site, such as by doing podcast interviews! But anyway, your time is decoupled from what money you make from it. So that’s what makes it passive.

30:33 Gaius: Definitely. And I will say that if you put your work up on other websites, it can be more passive. Etsy is that if you get your hashtags right, so there’s some up front work as usual, but if you get your hashtags right, you really figure out the game on Etsy, you can do pretty passive income. As soon as you move into a realm where like you said, you have to drive traffic, then it becomes less passive. But it’s still way more passive than a lot of the work that I do. If you’re already creating things, in some ways there’s no drawback. If I’m already creating these designs to put on T-shirts for myself, at some point there’s no drawback to just putting it up for other people to have as well.

31:24 Gaius: That’s in my mind the great time to do passive income if you don’t have a lot of following, is to do things like you said, that you already enjoy and you’re already doing. I caution people when they’re like, I’m going to build this entire course and do all these things into it. It’s been a year developing it and I don’t even know whether people are going to sign up for it. No one knows who I am. That’s when it’s like, well if you really love designing courses and you’re really passionate about this, then that’s great. But as far as passive income is concerned, that year of work may take a lot longer to come back to you.

32:04 Emily: Yeah. If anyone in the audience is interested in passive income and you haven’t yet heard of Pat Flynn, please go check him out right now. His brand is Smart Passive Income. This story just reminded me of his origin story. He was an architect and studying for some kind of licensing exam. As he was studying, he created a study guide, and when he was done and he passed the exam, he put the study guide up online for sale. It sold like gangbusters, apparently surprising everyone, including him. That was the start of his passive income empire. As you were just saying, if you can put in 5 or 10% more work and make something that you’ve already created for yourself something that other people could use, why not go ahead and just see what happens. You haven’t invested any time that you wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s really no downside there.

Benefits and Detriments of Side Hustling During Grad School

Emily: I want to speed through the next set of questions, which is, what are the general benefits that you’ve experienced by side hustling during graduate school and the downsides or the detriments? Anything that we haven’t already covered?

33:10 Gaius: I think the biggest upside is just having that creative outlet. I also think for other people the greatest benefit is being able to try things out before you decide to switch careers, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m thinking of leaving academia, and as soon as I started thinking about leaving academia, I was like, oh my God, if I don’t do academia, what do I do? Do I have to go back to retail? That was a big enough push to try out other things and see what happens and to see if building this kind of business model is possible. The downsides really are the commitment that you have less free time. I feel like I’m always working and have to schedule off time to say, okay, I’m really going to go do other things. It can slowly take over. It can become really fun and a good excuse to not do schoolwork. I know people already have problems with procrastination. So you do have to be very intentional about how you do it, and it does have the possibility of growing out of control. You really have to think hard about what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and how much.

34:25 Emily: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s actually something that I experienced during graduate school. I wouldn’t call the blog that I had at that time necessarily a side hustle, but it was certainly a time intensive hobby that brought in money a little bit. I was not very thoughtful at the time about why I was spending so much time on my blog instead of doing my work. It turns out finance is much more of a passion for me than my specific research area, no surprise now, but it was at the time. As you just said, be really thoughtful and be balanced, because financially having a side hustle can help you a lot with your cash flow during grad school. What’s not going to help you is delaying your graduation and delaying getting a full time job or launching a full time business or whatever the next thing is for you.

35:19 Gaius: I actually purposefully delayed writing my dissertation until the latest I could. I could’ve graduated probably nine months earlier, but I just kept pushing it because I knew that I would have that income and I was like, well at least I know I have income and so I’ll just keep pushing it until I can’t push it anymore. That was not smart.

35:43 Emily: I see what you’re saying because you were, as you just mentioned, thinking, do I have to go back to retail if I don’t have another job lined up? So certainly that’s a reasonable thing to be afraid of. I don’t want to graduate before I have something lined up. That’s a total thing that people might delay for that reason. But as you were exploring those other options, you are actively working on it, you weren’t just work like, oh no, I’m afraid to graduate and I’m not making any progress in actually getting to a point where I want to graduate, therefore I’m going to delay. It’s an understandable path.

Emily: Now, as I understand, you’ve just defended and you’re looking for a full time job, but you’re also now developing a side business, which is weaving together some of the different things that we’ve talked about so far. Can you talk about a little bit of the mindset shift from going from I’m a PhD student first and a side hustler second to now I’m starting a business.

36:44 Gaius: For me it was less of a change as far as I’m a PhD student to I’m a business owner and more of a shift in thinking about how other people saw me. So seeing people be like, oh Gaius draws cool stuff. This is really neat. Can you draw something for me? Going from that to wow, your work is really amazing. I would love to pay you to do it. That was a really huge jump for me. Like I said, I started out in art school, I took my first art classes like in eighth grade to start on my art career. I was always going through this thinking I’m never going to be good enough, and this is the first time that I ever thought, I am good enough to make art my living. I think having that kind of self confidence was really the big shift for me. The business side, because I’d been doing these other side hustles like The Indigo Path, it wasn’t really that hard for me, but just understanding that people appreciated me and that I was worth it and I was talented enough. That was a huge hurdle for me.

38:05 Emily: Yeah. Sounds like imposter syndrome, something we are so familiar with.

38:09 Gaius: I don’t know what you’re talking about!

38:11 Emily: It can definitely crop up in other areas besides your PhD work. That goes back to the self-advocacy theme from earlier. It’s just a different application of it. I’m really glad to hear that you’re progressing on that front and defeating your gremlins.

Last Advice for a Grad Student Side Hustler

Emily: In the last minute or so we have here, do you have any advice for another graduate student pursuing side hustling, interested in pursuing side hustling, that we haven’t already covered? We have covered so much. But did you have anything else you want to throw in there?

38:44 Gaius: No. The main thing I want to stress over and over again is that you have to balance your time. I highly suggest anyone who’s in grad school to have some kind of side passion. It doesn’t have to make you money, though it’s great if it does. Really think about how much time you’re spending, why are you doing it, why are you continuing in your PhD or grad program or whatever, and make sure that all of those things are happening in the right amount of time and the right doses as well as for the right reasons. Because the ultimate goal is for you to find a balance that makes you happy, not for any other reason. As long as you’re happy and reducing your stress overall and not just delaying your stress, I think you’re in the right place, but that balance is really important.

39:39 Emily: Oh yeah. Thank you so much for emphasizing that. Thank you so much for being my guest today.

39:44 Gaius: Thank you for having me.

Outtro

39:46 Emily: Listeners, I’m so glad you joined us for today’s 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, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, a survey, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. See you in the next episode! The music is stages of awakening by Paddington bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Jewel Lipps.