Personal Finance for PhDs

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Knowing Your Worth in an Environment that Devalues Your Work

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In this episode, Emily interviews Sam McDonald, a fifth-year PhD student in informatics at the University of California at Irvine. Sam received the NSF GRFP, completed a lucrative internship at a tech company, has won multiple smaller grants and fellowships, and taught classes for additional income. Upon observing this, some of her peers questioned why she was still applying for awards. Even more light was shone on this issue when her department compiled a list of all the grad students’ income as part of the Cost of Living Adjustment protests in the University of California system; Sam was the highest-paid grad student. In response, Sam became discouraged and even stopped submitting funding applications until her advisor counseled her about knowing her worth. Sam has now come out the other side of this financial shaming experience and has great advice for anyone else questioning their worth and what they should be paid in academia.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

grad student know your worth

Teaser

00:00 Sam: Sometimes our expertise and our ability to do stuff is so undervalued. And it’s hard to measure how much you’re personally valued because you have all these different discrepancies in how different grad students are getting paid. And you really, I think just have to sit yourself down and look at comparatively, well, if I were to go into industry right now, how much would I be making? So I’d recommend the students to really go out there and see how much is my value in other places versus in grad school, where I think we have this skewed sense because of this limited budgeting construct of how much you’re actually worth.

Introduction

00:33 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season eight, episode three and my guest today is Sam McDonald, a fifth year PhD student in informatics at the University of California at Irvine. Sam received the NSF GRFP, completed a lucrative internship at a tech company, has won multiple smaller grants and fellowships, and taught classes for additional income. Upon observing this, some of her peers questioned why she was still applying for awards. Even more light was shone on this issue when her department compiled a list of all the grad students income, as part of the cost of living adjustment protests in the University of California system. Sam was the highest paid grad student. In response, Sam became discouraged and even stopped submitting funding applications until her advisor counseled her about knowing her worth. Sam has now come out the other side of this financial shaming experience and has great advice for anyone else questioning their worth and what they should be paid in academia.

01:42 Emily: It wasn’t until Sam brought up this topic to me, that I realized that I had my own story of financial shaming and academia. Additionally, several of my relatively well-paid grad student, friends, acquaintances, and podcast guests have told me their stipends or that they had won a fellowship, but asked me not to repeat that information. I believe this was in fear of the financial shaming they might experience from their peers. I am a big advocate of transparency around stipends and benefits, which is why I started the websites, PhDstipends.com and PostdocSalaries.com. But transparency is hindered by shame. Asking for what you’re worth is hindered by shame. Shaming someone else for their financial success doesn’t put any money in your pocket, it just discourages them and ultimately harms our whole community. I’m so pleased that Sam volunteered to give this interview. I hope her message encourages you to swing for the fences financially and to speak respectfully when discussing sensitive topics like finances. Those are great lessons for me too.

Book Giveaway

02:35 Emily: Let’s turn our focus to the book giveaway contest in January, 2021. I’m giving away one copy of the House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop, which is the Personal Finance for PhDs Community book club selection for March, 2021. Everyone who enters the contest during January will have a chance to win a copy of this book. I’m delighted to bring attention to house hacking, which is when you buy a home live in it and rent out part of it, thereby radically reducing or even eliminating your housing expense. It’s a new name for an old tactic that grad students and PhDs have been using for a very long time, but this book puts a highly strategic spin on it. If you’d like to enter the giveaway contest, please rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts, take a screenshot of your review and email it to me [email protected]. I’ll choose a winner at the end of January, from all the entries you can find full instructions pfforphds.com/podcast. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Sam MacDonald.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:54 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast, Sam MacDonald, who is a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine and she’s here to talk with us today about kind of a touchy subject. It’s financial shaming, and she’s experienced this and I’m really just excited that she’s decided to come forward because I know that her experience is not unique. After she approached me about this topic, I started thinking and I realized I’ve experienced this. I’ve realized I know other peers who have experienced this, so she’s definitely not alone. And we’re going to treat the subject very carefully today. So Sam, thank you so much for your willingness to talk about this. I know it’s not an easy subject matter at all. Would you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

04:37 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me Emily. Like Emily said, my name is Sam McDonald. I am a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine studying informatics. I actually study the United States Congress and their use of constituent communication. So I’ve been back and forth in DC and in California to figure out how members of Congress use technology to communicate with their constituents and how to make it better. I have an undergrad degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where I did a lot of research before going straight from undergrad to my PhD and I got a master’s along the way that I got from UC Irvine.

Funding During Graduate School

05:11 Emily: Thank you so much that overview. Super interesting subject matter, not what we’re getting into today, but thank you so much for the context. So what’s been the funding situation for you during grad school?

05:21 Sam: My funding has been different for different years. My first year I got the GAANN fellowship, which is from the US Department of Education that my department supplied to me, which was really helpful not to TA at first. Then I TAed for two years, and while I was doing that, I applied for the NSF GRFP and luckily I got it to fund my last three years of my PhD. I’ve also spent two quarters teaching as additional funding and have gotten grants from congressional research funding and travel grants. And then also I’ve worked for Facebook for an internship, so I have internship money as well.

05:54 Emily: Can you give us like an idea of much money you were being paid — and I know it might be different year to year — versus, if you’re aware of it, the baseline stipend in your department?

06:05 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The TA baseline stipend is around $2,200 for teaching us a little bit more. And my GRFP is about $2,800 per month, just to give you a baseline ballpark for how much that is.

06:21 Emily: Okay. And it sounded like in your second year you were being funded only from TA-ships. Is that right?

06:27 Sam: Yes.

06:27 Emily: Okay. So on that year, you lived on that baseline stipend and is it every other year you’ve been above that for one reason or another?

06:34 Sam: Yeah, it’s really fluctuated for different months, depending on if I’m getting travel grants, going to DC during the summer is quite expensive, so getting additional grants for that to be moving around, but still keep my apartment in California. I think my money has fluctuated every single month, being different because of all these different activities that I’m doing in addition to this baseline salary.

06:57 Emily: That is such an interesting budgetary conundrum. One that I would love to explore, but not our subject for today. And this is maybe not super on this subject, but I’m just curious how much the internship at Facebook paid.

07:09 Sam: Let me remember. I think it was around. I could be wrong, I think it was around seven per month,

07:16 Emily: $7,000 per month?

07:18 Sam: Yeah. I think it might be a little bit higher than that. I’d have to go back and double check, but it’s definitely around that ballpark.

How Sam’s Peers Reacted to These Extra Sources of Income

07:24 Emily: Yeah. Sounds great. Well, I am of course, wanting to congratulate you on winning the NSF, gaining these other travel grants, but I understand that’s not necessarily how some of your peers reacted to you having this wonderful CV full of accolades.

07:40 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The NSF GRFP — I want to particularly point out, I’ve had three advisors, not through my own fault, one retired, one moved, and then one picked me up like a lost puppy and she’s been great, but none of them have had funding for me, so I’ve always had to go out and get my own funding as well, which is why I was so motivated to get a lot of these grants. But I always haven’t had the best reactions to it. After I got the NSF, which is amazing and it’s given me so much more flexibility, I still had to pursue other grants for travel to DC, and then I just kept applying to more grants because it looks good on your CV. A lot of students were really supportive, but one or two would always sort of give me side comments of like, “Oh, you’re applying for this grant, I thought you already had the GRFP. Why do you need this? Why did you win this grant even though you already have these things?” So I’ve had to deal with a little bit of tension and figuring out my own worth in that process.

08:30 Emily: Yeah. How did you feel when you got those snide comments?

08:35 Sam: I felt a little bit guilty. I will say with a caveat that like I am a more privileged person. I’m white. I came from an upper middle class family. I am working in technology, so I get tech internships. I have a really supportive advisor. I live on subsidized housing and I also live cheaply because I love hiking and I bike more than I drive places. Just for context here at the University of California, Irvine it’s so expensive to live in Orange County that even the professors have their own subsidized housing on campus and there’s an entire professor community. I’ve done a lot to really sort of push myself towards getting these grants, and it kind of made me feel bad that I was getting them because I am in such a privileged position. So for a while I was feeling bad about applying to grants and had to talk to my advisor and other peers about it to figure out if I’m in the wrong here of applying for more money, even though I already have a more stable income.

09:28 Emily: So it seems like even though a lot of your peers were supportive of this and they were helping you edit your applications and so forth, a few, a minority, were making these comments. What do you think their kind of motivation was behind that?

09:43 Sam: I think a lot of students — we’ve had protests in California about this — are struggling financially in some ways, or maybe they don’t get the grants that they want, and then they’re feeling like I’m getting a lot of grants and my research is very attractive for the current context with everything going on in Congress and wanting to improve that. I naturally do have an attractive topic and I think some people feel like maybe their topics aren’t reaching that same attractiveness when it comes to advertising your own research. Also it’s hard being a grad student and I’ve worked really, really hard to have really good grants. When I did the GRFP, I went to the writing center on campus at least 12 times and had dozens of friends review it and professors review it, so I really, really take my time with grants where I know some people also can do them last minute because they’re so overwhelmed with everything else. I think it depends on the person, but it’s just the struggle a lot to get grants in the first place, I think.

10:38 Emily: Yeah, definitely. I understand that at some point, this sort of crystallized and it was not only people by happenstance noticing that you won this grant or that grant, even though you already had the GRFP, but at some point it came down in black and white. Can you tell us about that?

10:54 Sam: Earlier this year, our department got together and decided to make a spreadsheet of everyone’s income from the department, because this was part of our consolidarity with the COLA protests. And for those who don’t know, COLA stands for cost of living adjustment. Here in California there’s been a lot of protest from grad students around, the cost of living adjustment, especially at UC Santa Cruz, where a lot of grad students are spending 50 to 70% of their income on just their housing alone, because it’s so expensive to live and they are demanding to have an adjustment to their rent because they are so rent burdened. So UC Irvine and my department in particular, especially one or two students who are really involved in the unions on campus, wanted to make a spreadsheet to show how much did we all make because we needed the data in order to demonstrate how most of us are rent burdened. Even though we have subsidized housing, even though we are a tech department, we found out that 99% of us are still rent burdened just going through this. But did find out in that instance that I do make more money than everyone else in the department. And that was in black and white and that’s on a spreadsheet that’s available to all students in my department to see.

12:03 Emily: I think this is a great process to go through actually and I am very in favor of more transparency around what people make, especially in grad school, not necessarily with your name tied to it, but just what people are making and the range. I’m kind of curious about why you ended up, I guess it was because it was asked of everyone, but what the motivation was for including people who were on fellowship, especially external fellowships like yours, along with people making the baseline stipend from the department. The argument is going to be about increasing the baseline stipend, right? So is it, we want the bottom sector here, that’s just making the baseline to be brought up closer to where you are, closer to where other people who receive outside fellowships are? I’m kind of wondering what the angle is on that.

12:47 Sam: That’s a great question. When this was sent out to students, it was completely optional. You had the option of doing it anonymously. I think most of us just decided to do it publicly and to be able to share how much, and we did put specific notes for each person of like where your funding was coming from — is this the baseline, or is this with an addition to external income? Is this pre-tax, this is post tax?. So we had all those details as well and it is a good question because I think with our department particular, there is an assumption, especially in the summertime that you’re going to go out and get other sorts of funding. And they know that there are a lot of students in our department who have Google and Facebook and Amazon and other sorts of internships because we are a more attractive group for those big tech companies that overcompensate sometimes for this wealth gap and this discrepancy for teaching.

13:34 Sam: I think that was also sort of demonstrating, even if there was a baseline, how much students were maybe feeling like they have to go for these internships in order to supplement their income. And just seeing these different discrepancies of if you were lucky and privileged enough to even get an internship. There’s actually someone in our department who studies this and how to get a tech internship, and she’s really helpful, but also shows the different discrepancies that can happen for who gets it and who doesn’t. So all those details, I think, were just really interesting to sort of demonstrate how broad the ranges and incomes in our department, just for students.

14:06 Emily: Yeah. It’s a super interesting project. I’ve actually recently heard of another, not related to the California specific protest, but another department where students took this on and used it as a negotiation tactic, as in a sense collective bargaining, although they were not in a union. So it can be a really powerful exercise. And what happened with either your peers or with your own feelings about this after the spreadsheet is out there?

14:28 Sam: The spreadsheet was out there during the pandemic, so I haven’t seen much of my peers in person, so there’s less discussion that I can have with them. Definitely for me personally, it did really two main things for me. First, it really sort of solidified this idea that I do make more money than everyone else in the department, and sort of feeling a little bit shameful and a little bit uncomfortable with that, but also at the same time, recognizing that I have a privilege to have these sort of grants and I’ve worked for it, but I’ve also been very lucky with some of these grants. And because of that, I do feel like I have a responsibility to share that and make that transparent and advocate for the people in my department who don’t. So on the one hand, it does make me uncomfortable to come out and say like, “Oh, I make a lot of grant money and I do a lot of other things to supplement that money in different ways, but also I am privileged enough to share this with you to show these discrepancies and make sure that we’re all coming up to a baseline.” And even before I had my tech internships, despite getting all these grants, I was still technically considered rent burdened. It’s kind of funny to show that you make more, but we’re all still in this sort of struggling standpoint, so it doesn’t really help to have as many tensions, in-fighting, I guess, as much as it is to collectively work together.

Continuing to Apply for Additional Grants

15:38 Emily: How did you feel regarding going after more funding?

15:45 Sam: That was a little bit hard for me. I had to talk to my advisor once about this and really figure out what’s the best path, because I did have to tell her once that I felt uncomfortable applying for more because I’ve gotten some of these comments. I was like, “I have enough, I’d be okay.” And she really sat me down and made sure I remembered what my worth is and that grants are really important for CVs if you’re wanting to go into academia, and that you should not stop applying for things just because you have some money.

16:13 Sam: I have a great example of this where actually one of my funders, the democracy fund in DC helped me fund an entire summer in DC and they asked me, “Okay, how much do you need to do your research? And I was like, “okay, well I need this much for housing and this much for food and this much for a plane ride and some Metro and like, that’s it.” And they came back to me and said, “This is great, but you forgot to mention your actual value in terms of the work that you’re doing for this grant, so we’re going to double what you’re asking for.” That just blew my mind because it was the first time that someone came to me and told me you’re worth way more than you’re asking for and you need to make sure that you’re asking for these things at a higher level. I think even now I am getting these grant fundings, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is my baseline worth just because I get something. And that took me a while from my advisor really encouraged me to keep applying for grants coming to me and telling me that I’m worth more than what I’m asking for.

Commercial

17:06 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude taxes are weirdly, unexpectedly difficult for funded grad students and fellowship recipients at any level of PhD training. Your university might send you strange tax forms or no tax forms at all. They might not withhold your income tax from your paychecks, even though you owe it. It’s a mess. I’ve created a ton of free resources to assist you with understanding and preparing your 2020 tax return, which are available pfforphds.com/tax. I hope you’ll check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the, or have a question for me. Please join one of my tax workshops, which you can find links to from pfforphds.com/tax. It would be my pleasure to help you save time and potentially money this tax season. So don’t hesitate to reach out. Now back to our interview.

Understanding the Value of Your Work

18:12 Emily: I’m really glad that you can share that with our listeners, because some other people in the audience might be feeling the same way — sort of limiting themselves and saying, “well, I shouldn’t go after more. I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do that.” You had these great mentors in a sense in your life to help you push back against that, but maybe someone in the audience doesn’t have that and they’re hearing this line of thought for the first time, which is really wonderful, so I’m really glad you’re sharing that with us now. Is there anything else that you want to say about like understanding your worth? I mean, that is not just in the context of fellowship and grant applications, but just for graduate students more broadly, this is a very tricky topic to value yourself.

18:53 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes our expertise and our ability to do stuff is so undervalued and it’s hard to measure how much you’re personally valued, right? Because you have all these different discrepancies and how different grad students are getting paid. How much you’re worth versus another grad student. You really, I think just have to sit yourself down and look at comparatively, if I were to go into industry right now, how much would I be making? How much is my value in terms of giving to different nonprofits or companies, which was what I was doing. I was technically partially consulting, but mostly had a grant to do my own research. Having those opportunities and making myself step out there and ask other people, “how much am I worth to you?” I think that makes a big difference, so I’d recommend to students to really go out there and see like how much is my value in other places versus in grad school, where I think we have this skewed sense because of this limited budgeting construct, of how much you’re actually worth.

19:46 Emily: I think that’s a really excellent point and I want to underline it that who is paying you, that context, matters a lot in how much you can command for your value. Your value can be the same in the academic context, in the private sector, or in the nonprofit sector. But what you can get paid is vastly different from those different contexts and if you stay stuck in just the academic context, you’re not really going to realize all those different price points, in a sense, for your work.

20:16 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve come across different discrepancies, even internally, because in addition to having the GRFP and doing my research, I was extremely lucky and my department gave me a chance to teach twice, the first time being right at the onset of the pandemic. And me never teaching before and then teaching 140 students online wasn’t the funnest, but it really showed me how much they were also paying. And actually apparently we get paid more as grad student lectures than adjunct faculty do, which is kind of crazy think about because we have a better union. Recognizing the transparency that “wait I’m a grad student, but I make more than an adjunct faculty.” That’s just telling me that the value system inside the university is skewed and I really shouldn’t use that as a metric for my worth and that I really need to go outside the university bubble to understand that metric at least for grad school.

Financial Transparency in Academia

21:10 Emily: I understand we’ve been in COVID times, you haven’t seen much of your peers so I don’t know if you’ve actually, now that you have this new mindset around going after things and valuing yourself, maybe you haven’t had a chance really to speak with your peers and receive a comment and be able to respond or push back against it. Certainly tell us, have you had that opportunity at all?

21:33 Sam: No, I really haven’t just because everything’s remote and most of the stuff is just friendly, get togethers and things like that. There was a little bit of work with COLA still going on, but that’s a little bit hard with everything being remote and kind of put off to the wayside, I think, in a lot of people’s minds.

21:48 Emily: Definitely. I guess maybe in preparation for you once again seeing your peers in some months, maybe — we’re recording this in January, 2021 — is there anything that you think that you’ll say to your peers at that time, or maybe something you wished you could go back and tell them, earlier on in this process when these comments started?

22:09 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the biggest takeaway that I’ve really found, especially contributing to this data when it comes to COLA is that we’re really all in this together. And it’s really important to be open to this process, to share it with other grad students and to not really react negatively when other people are potentially making more than you are applying for more grants than you are, because everyone’s so different. Especially even in my department — my first advisor was an anthropologist, my second was a computer scientist, and my third had a business degree a PhD. Even in that, the professors in our department have different scales of finances just because they come from different backgrounds, so it’s all a little bit hodgepodge anyways.

22:46 Sam: But most importantly, I think it’s important to be transparent. I had an occasion where we had new grad students come into the department, like accepted grad students, and they had a panel of current grad students answering questions about what it’s like living in Irvine. What is the rent like? What is it like being a student and what type of classes do you take? And one of the accepted students asked “what is your stipend like, and how much is it to live on campus?” And none of the other students on the panel were directly answering the question. They’re like, “Oh, it’s enough. It’s reasonable.” And I was like, why aren’t you giving people a number and I just straight up said, make this much money. This is how much I pay for rent. And this is for this type of housing. And they’re like, “Oh, thank you. That’s really helpful.” And I think there’s a stigma still even just to share for accepted students, this is how much you’re actually going to make, because there’s some uncomfortableness with this transparency that I think really needs to be broken because it really does help us collectively to have those discussion.

23:46 Emily: Yeah, thank you for that. And of course, I also contribute to and promote this process through my website, PhDstipends.com and PostdocSalaries.com. That’s an anonymous way that you can share what you’re making, what the funding sources and so forth, because that is also super, as you were just saying, important in this context. Are you making a baseline stipend? Do you have supplemental money coming in from XYZ, other sources? Are you taking out student loans to supplement the income because the rent is so high? Whatever the situation is I’m definitely in favor of being more transparent about it. But I certainly understand the discomfort because this is not, of course, something that exists only inside academia, only in our context, but in our entire society. Employers, even if they can’t actually disallow it, certainly discourage employees from sharing their salaries with one another. It’s really an entire society wide situation, so it’s really commendable for you and also for your peers that you are doing more to throw back the curtain and say this is what it is and we want more and using it as like a bargaining tool. It’s really awesome.

24:49 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And especially, I think now that we’re having more conversations about minority students and getting a leg up for a lot of people who are underprivileged, it helps to know where the line is and what they should be meeting equally. I work a lot with Congress and there are so many debates about congressional staffers, because staffers are woefully underpaid, but there’s no transparency as much. There is some in documentation about knowing people’s worth in that context. So I’ve just been around these discussions and I feel like the more that we can pull back the curtain, the more we can level up people, especially people who are underprivileged in the beginning and even that playing field.

Advice for Other Early Career PhDs

25:22 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much and thank you for your willingness to come on the podcast and talk about this because it’s a bit of an uncomfortable process. As we wrap up the interview, the question that I like to ask all of my guests is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on in this interview, or it could be something completely different.

35:43 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Going along with the theme here, apply to everything, even if you think you have enough, because you’re often worth way more than you think that you are, things cost more than you think they’re going to be in the beginning. That’s always something that happens too. So I think that’s really, really important and always being smart with your money. I’m personally a big fan of the FIRE method. I barely eat out. My activates that I love are cheap, so I’m just naturally in that mindset of being more financially savvy than I think a lot of people want to be, but that’s okay, and that’s my position. Not everyone needs that. But I think the more that people understand to apply and to really say “I could have more and I can really utilize this to my own advantage.” Take advantage of it. There’s so many grants out there that barely anyone applies to and those micro grants really can add up. Just applying for anything that you possibly can, I think is really important. And I know sometimes you get tired, especially towards the end of your PhD, like I am now, but it definitely makes a huge effect in the long run, especially you want to talk about compound interest and investments and things like that. Absolutely doing those as much as possible in the beginning.

26:49 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for that advice. And I totally agree with that. I want to emphasize two components of that. One is, like you were just mentioning, kind of the only way you can get a raise as a graduate student is to win outside funding. And whether that is outside funding that replaces your stipend at a higher level or supplements a stipend that you’re receiving, maybe like you mentioned earlier, taking on extra teaching work could be another way to do that. But the fellowship and grant applications are really the way to do it without actually adding more work to your life, so it’s kind of the equivalent of getting raised rather than just taking on more hours of work. A lot of paths to higher income are barred for graduate students, but this is one that is available.

27:30 Emily: The second thing that I wanted to emphasize is, you mentioned earlier that your advisors don’t have funding for you, so this was completely your responsibility. I think that’s part of this mindset of you know that you have to provide for yourself, but I just want to emphasize for people who do have funding to fall back on as a research assistant or teaching assistant, whatever it is for their advisors or their departments, the word guarantee might be in there, but what does it actually mean? And the word guarantee you might not be in there and what does that mean? I had a friend for example who had the NSF GRFP and that finished and she still needed another year or something. And because of a situation going on with her advisor not providing funding as he had in the past, she was left unfunded for a year. That was not something she ever anticipated. That was not supposed to happen in the way the funding typically went in this department, but it did happen. She had to negotiate and say, “you know what, I brought in the GRFP, you can give me another year. I brought in three years of funding.” But that wasn’t necessarily guaranteed to work.

28:37 Emily: In a sense, in academia you’re a little bit like an entrepreneur. You have to hustle for your own money. Yes, you’re supposed to be paid by someone, but how secure is that really? It feels to me a little bit more secure to be applying for lots of different things, have a lot of irons in the fire. And if those don’t work out, at least you can say to your department or to your advisor, “I have applied for four grants in the last year. Hey, they didn’t work out, can you give me some bridge funding?” There’s a way to argue about that too. I think there’s a lot of merits and a lot of different directions for applying for as much as you possibly can. I’m really glad you came back around to that position after having these conversations with your advisor and so forth.

29:19 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you said about thinking about it as a raise. Especially as you’re getting more and more in your PhD, you are more valuable, but your finances stay exactly the same. I love the idea of thinking about applying as a way to show that your worth increases over time. Thanks for sharing that too. Yeah.

29:35 Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining me today for this interview, Sam, this was really enlightening.

29:39 Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much!

Listener Q&A: Investing

Question

29:42 Emily: Now onto another one of our new segments, the listener question and answer. Today’s question actually comes from a survey I sent out in advance of one of my university webinars this past fall, so it is anonymous. Please note that nothing I say in the segment or anywhere else on the podcast is investing advice.

Answer

30:00 Emily: Here’s the question: How do I invest? I don’t have time to monitor the stock market constantly, but I would like to have at least a small amount of money invested.

30:10 Emily: What a wonderful question and I am so on board with the sentiment here. I also do not have time to monitor the stock market constantly. Who does? Honestly, I feel like people who do have the time and inclination to constantly monitor the stock market should just make that their full-time job, like go become a fund manager and get paid millions of dollars to do so instead of just doing it for your own paltry assets.

30:33 Emily: The good news is that spending that kind of time on investing is absolutely not necessary. In fact, in 99+% the cases it’s actually counter-productive to do. Let me introduce a term to you: passive investing, also known as index investing. Passive investing is the most effective least expensive and most time efficient manner of investing.

31:00 Emily: The real quick gist of passive investing is that you buy one or a small number of index funds and you hold those funds in your portfolio long-term in a percent-wise allocation that you have determined in advance. Index funds themselves are collections of, we’ll stick with the stock market, collections of stocks that reflect a broad market sector. So in these funds, the fund manager is not trying to pick the winners and dump the losers. They’re just trying to buy either everything or a representative selection of everything available in that market sector. My go-to example is always the S&P 500 index. When you listen to the stock market news of the day, you’re going to hear how the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones did. So those are three indices that represent how the market overall is doing. The S&P 500 has a really clear definition. It’s simply the 500 largest companies that are traded on the US stock exchanges. So if you were to purchase an S&P 500 index fund, you would be a part owner, a very small part owner,of all 500 of those companies. So that represents the market sector of large cap companies, the largest companies. So basically the learning and the research that you need to do is to understand what passive investing is, what index funds are and which index funds you want to purchase and in what allocation. This might take you a few hours of upfront investment of your time, but it’s not something that you need to put time into on a continual basis. Once you’ve decided on your strategy, you basically just let it ride. Another really easy set it and forget it way of accomplishing this is to use what’s called a target date retirement fund, which is in itself a collection of index funds in a percent-wise allocation like I described earlier.

32:53 Emily: So where to go next for resources. I actually have a set of webinars inside the Personal Finance for PhDs Community explaining what passive investing is, what index funds and exchange traded funds are, how to choose them, which brokerage firm to use for your investments, whether you use an Roth or a traditional IRA, all these kinds of questions. So if you would like to view that webinars series, simply join the Personal Finance for PhDs community at pfforphds.community. And that webinars series will be immediately visible to you. I also have inside the community, a challenge that I ran a few months back on opening your first IRA. So you might be interested in following the steps of that challenge, which point to certain webinars to watch in a certain sequence and other steps to take. That might be relevant for you. Or you could do something like read a book such as the Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins.

33:46 Emily: Now, another element to this question is that you mentioned you want to have a small amount of money invested. You might be tempted to use. What’s called a micro investing platform. Those are brokerages that specialize in helping people with zero capital upfront get started with investing. Some names you may have heard are Acorns, Robinhood, M1, these kinds of platforms. I want you to be really careful when you’re choosing the platform to go with. Ideally, you would only pay the fee associated with the ETF itself that you end up buying. You wouldn’t be paying fees on top of that. For example, some of these platforms charge like $1 per month to be invested with them. I want you to avoid a platform that charges, that kind of fee. Because when you are investing only a small amount of money, a fee of $1 per month actually takes a big, big bite out of that money. So if you go with a micro investing platform, make sure it’s one that doesn’t charge any fees on top of the underlying ETF fees.

34:46 Emily: You also should check whether the platform offers IRAs, individual retirement arrangements. It might not seem important when you’re just starting out with investing, but retirement investing should probably be your top investing goal when you’re starting out, because it is such a large need, even though it’s a long time away. For example, Robinhood fit some of the criteria I mentioned earlier — they don’t charge you fees on trades, you can buy ETFs through that platform, but they don’t offer IRAs, at least as of the time of this recording. It’s very worthwhile to check out what are called the online discount brokerage firms, like Vanguard, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. Those are kind of my go tos for being able to avoid higher fees that might be charged by other companies. However, the issue is that sometimes they have minimum amounts that you need to invest to get started, like maybe a thousand dollars, which of course is not at all a that you would have that much money. So in my mind, those are the places to get to, eventually maybe when you’re starting out or maybe later on. But if you need to start out in a micro investing platform or a robo-advisor at the beginning, that’s perfectly fine.

35:51 Emily: I think once you really understand the concept of passive investing and how simple it is, how easy in a sense it is to build up wealth over the decades, you’re going to want to have more than a small amount of money invested. You’re going to be really motivated to increase that savings rate and a discount brokerage firm is a great place to be when you’re saving a hundred dollars a month or more, or have a thousand dollars in your account already. Personally, when I first opened my IRA and started investing, I went with Fidelity because at that time they allowed me to open an account with no money up front, as long as I set up a recurring savings rate of at least $50 per month. So I did that for a little bit over a year until I had $3,000 in my IRA. And then I transferred my account over to Vanguard. They had a $3,000 minimum at that time, and I’ve been with Vanguard ever since. So I hope that is a start to answer your question and that you have a place to go for our further resources, either with me or other people who talk about this. And I really want to encourage you at the start of this investing journey, so I do hope you’ll take that next step. If you would like to submit a question to be answered in a future episode, please go to pfforphds.com/podcast and follow the instructions you find there. I love answering questions, so please submit yours listeners.

Outtro

37:10 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episodes show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast and instructions for entering the book giveaway contest, and submitting a question for the Q&A segment. 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 podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. If you leave a review, be sure to send it to me. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list serve, or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover 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. Music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast, editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2020 Edition

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Emily published the first episode of this podcast in July 2018. This is the one hundred and seventh episode, and over the last two and a half years, the podcast has featured 94 unique voices in addition to Emily’s. The last episode in 2020 catches up with the guests from Seasons 1 through 3. The guests were invited to submit short audio updates on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of their interview. The question with which all the interviews are concluded now, “What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?” was not one that was asked in the earliest seasons. The guests who didn’t have the opportunity to answer the question in their initial interviews answer it in this update, so you’ll hear lots of financial advice throughout the episode as you have grown to expect from this podcast.

Link Mentioned in this Episode

financial interviews

Introduction

00:10 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode 16, and today I’m featuring many guest voices. I published the first episode of this podcast in July, 2018. This is the 107th episode and over the last two and a half years, the podcast has featured 94 unique voices, in addition to my own. For a last episode in 2020, I thought it would be fun to catch up with the guests from seasons one through three. I invited them to submit short audio clips to update us on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of our interview. The question with which I conclude all of my interviews now “what is your best financial advice for another early career PhDs?” was not one I asked in the earliest seasons. I asked the guests who didn’t have the opportunity to answer the question in their initial interviews to do so in this update, so you’ll hear lots of wonderful financial advice throughout the episode, as you’ve grown to expect from this podcast. The audio clips in this episode are ordered by when the original episode was published. If you’d like to circle back and listen to any of the previous interviews you can do so in your podcatcher app, or at my website, pfforphds.com/podcast. To keep up with future episodes, please hit subscribe on that podcatcher and/or join my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Since I featured my own financial story from graduate school in season one episode one, you’ll hear an update from me first followed by the rest of the guests. Happy listening and here’s to the end of 2020!

Dr. Emily Roberts

01:53 Emily: Hi, this is Emily Roberts from Personal Finance for PhDs. I was on season one, episodes one and two, and season three, episode one and it’s been about two and a half years since I recorded the first of those episodes. Not a whole lot has changed career-wise in that time. My husband still works for the same startup that brought us to Seattle, and I’ve expanded my business into a few new areas. I now offer one-on-one financial coaching, run a group coaching program called The Wealthy PhD a few times per year, and facilitate the Personal Finance for PhDs community. And of course, continue to host this podcast and give seminars and webinars for universities and conferences. The big personal changes are that we had a second child, so our daughters are now ages four and two, and we moved from Seattle to Southern California in August, 2020. Moving in a pandemic with toddlers was much more challenging and less enjoyable than the move I described in my earlier episode, but it went very smoothly, all things considered my husband and I are now technically location independent, at least for the time being. Our current big financial goal is to buy our first home in Southern California in 2021. For the last several years, we’ve balanced investing for retirement with saving a down payment, so hopefully we’ve done enough on both fronts. I’m really looking forward to stability in the housing area of my life. Thanks for listening to my update. If you want to get in touch, you can visit my website pfforphds.com or find me on Twitter at @pfforphds.

Dr. Caitlin Faas

03:27 Caitlin: Hi there listeners. My name is Dr. Caitlin Faas and I was on episode seven of season one, October of 2018. A lot has changed for me since then. I left my position as a faculty member. I was tenure track at the time earned tenure, became a department chair and then left the position at the end of 2020 to work for myself full time as a certified life coach, I made that decision officially in February of 2020, right before COVID hit. And I knew it was time to take the leap. And then the universe sent me all the tests, my husband being laid off and COVID and so many other things, but I still trusted and knew it was time to leave. And I’m proud to say this year, I’ve earned over a hundred thousand dollars and we paid off all of our debt and all my concerns and worries that I managed along the way are what made it possible for me to be ending the year of 2020 successfully.

04:33 Caitlin: We also, in that time adopted our teenage daughter out of foster care and something I wish I could tell myself, looking back in 2018, as I had an idea that I might want to leave academia and continue to grow my business was I just wish I could tell myself not to stress as much about the debt we had. I took it a little too seriously. It all worked out as it was supposed to, and I didn’t have to hustle and grind my way there. I definitely followed a budget and Dave Ramsey’s plan, but the biggest thing was money mindset and law of attraction, setting those goals for myself and continuing to trust the flow and surrender to the process. That’s what made the difference. So best of luck as you hear my update and go about your own path with Emily.

Nicholas Giangreco

07:13 Nicholas: Hi, this is Nicholas Giangreco from season one, episode 10. I am a systems biology PhD student at Columbia Medical Center. I’ve kept a budget throughout my studies and living in New York City, logging in my expenses and savings. First switching to a rainy day fund goal, then a more moving fund/cushion goal, and now recently, been able to transition to more heavily into a retirement saving, and that’s because having the budget has helped me be more conscious of my spending and saving decisions over time. That would be my advice for new graduate students — keep a budget. I use Google sheets. Whatever makes you conscious of your decisions and helps you stick with a goal that you have in mind is really important throughout your graduate career. As well as taking advantage of opportunities, such as tutoring, teaching, and internship. They can help you get to your goals and become more financially stable. Hopefully that helps out people and enjoy the rest of your listening.

Bailey Poland

08:51 Bailey: Hi, my name is Bailey Poland, and you can find me at Patreon.com/BaileyPoland. I was originally on season one, episode 12. I’m now a fourth year PhD candidate in rhetoric and writing studies. And I’m about a chapter and a half away from being done writing my dissertation. I’m currently on the job market, both for academic and industry jobs, especially given the way the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the academic job market. In the original episode, Emily and I talked a lot about side hustling, so I wanted to give a little bit of an update about that. While I do still have my Patreon, my other side gigs have changed a lot and this year I’m on an assistantship that allows me to focus exclusively on my dissertation, so that’s my main priority right now. But in the past couple of years, I’ve worked as a virtual social media assistant for a women-focused finance organization called city girl savings. I took on some extra work in my department as a digital development and promotional outreach assistant, and I’ve done various freelance jobs in writing and editing, especially professional writing and editing, as I’ve had the opportunity to work on those. So despite my stipend only going up a little bit across the time that I’ve been in the program, I’ve managed to hit a six figure net worth over the past couple of years by keeping my expenses low, doing that extra paid work and investing.

10:14 Bailey: And on that note, my best financial advice for another early career PhD is to find a way to save and ideally invest as early as you possibly can, even if it’s just to get into the habit of having some money set aside or having an automatic transfer of some kind of set up. Even if you’re still paying off other debt, even if it’s only a little bit of money here and there, that really, really adds up, especially over the long-term. Time is a huge factor in creating financial security for yourself and the earlier that you can build those foundational habits, the better off you’ll be.

Dr. Lauri (Lutes) Reinhold

10:51 Lauri: Hi, my name is Lauri Reinhold, formerly Lutes, and I was on season two episode one. My main updates are to share that I completed my PhD and amidst the pandemic, which was quite an achievement for me. And I now have a postdoc position. In my episode, I spoke a lot about the ways I took advantage of resources in my area to overcome some of the challenges of being a single mother and a graduate student. One of the goals later on in graduate school that I looked into was home ownership. And I wanted to share this with you because had I looked into it sooner, I probably would have benefited a little bit more. I am settling into a higher cost of living area, especially in comparison to where I grew up in the Midwest. And looking into home buying is quite intimidating due to the average cost of a home. I found in my state in Oregon, there’s a program called an individual development account or an IDA, and this is a three to one matching program where I can contribute $2,000 and walk away with $8,000 that I can use for a variety of different expenses — educational buying a car retirement. However, I was most interested in using these funds for a down payment on a home. Unfortunately since I looked into this later in my career and my admittance into this program was delayed due to the pandemic and this perfect storm of things occurred, my current income puts me just over the threshold to qualify for this program, so I’m no longer able to participate. However, I am happy to report that I have learned a lot about the home buying process along the way, and that I am still actively pursuing this long-term goal. My advice to you is if you have these financial goals, I encourage you to see what’s available in your state and take advantage of these programs sooner than later, so that you can start saving. And perhaps you might be more likely to meet some income thresholds and take advantage of some of these opportunities to get ahead.

Dr. Gary McDowell

12:54 Gary: Hi, I’m Gary McDowell and I work as a consultant on early career researchers and affecting change for and with them. I’m now based at Lightoller LLC, but you may have heard from me on season two, episode three, when I was the executive director of the nonprofit Future of Research. I’m doing almost exactly the same kind of work and have the same motivations to work on behalf of the interests of early career researchers. Now I’m just in a different business model. I’m also now more permanently settled in Chicago, Illinois. I spoke about our effort on postdoc salaries with you before, and I’m still working on that in my spare time. I’m currently embarking on a new set of data requests from universities, and I hope to have five years of data to look at and share with you all in the not too distant future.

13:38 Gary: But I think the best advice that I can give to you at the moment is that you should be very proactive in bringing up the topic of salaries when talking with current or potential supervisors in an academic setting. I mentioned this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my sense is that compared to when I started working on salaries nearly five years ago, it has become much more acceptable to talk about money, hopefully in no small part because of the efforts of people like myself, constantly putting this up as an issue publicly with academics. This is particularly true, I think, in the present situation with the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased financial burdens that that’s placing on early career researchers. I think it’s important that you try, if you can, to advocate for yourself.

14:23 Gary: Secondly, I always advise that you bring this up with a potential supervisor because how they react can tell you a lot too. Even if you don’t get a raise in the salary offer from the discussion, if they react with, “why would I pay you more?” I think you should probably question generally whether this is the person you actually want to work for versus someone who might respond that they can’t give you a raise, but then talks about how that could be explored through fellowship applications or talking to the department chair, or just generally seems willing to about it. If you don’t feel able to advocate for yourself, maybe you have a precarious visa situation, for example, find ways of advocating with others through a union or association. There’s strength in numbers and decades of recommendations from blue ribbon panels that you should be paid more. So make sure you’re advocating for your worth because you are worth it. Feel free to contact me. You can do so through my website, lightoller.org or emailing [email protected]. Or you can always contact me on Twitter at @GaryMcDowellPhD, or find me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening.

Maya Gosztyla

15:33 Maya: Hi guys, this is Maya Gosztyla from season two, episode four of the podcast, which came out in February of 2019. And that episode was about how during my postbac fellowship at the NIH, I was able to save about 30% of my income despite having a fairly low salary of only around $30,000 a year. We also talked about how I use science communication as a side hustle to earn a bit more money on top of that. It’s been almost two years now, about a year and a half since that was published and a lot has changed since then. I got married to my then fiance and we had a very simple wedding. We just eloped at the cherry blossom festival in DC and spent some money on a two week honeymoon abroad, which was lovely. I also started grad school at the University of California, San Diego, which is also lovely. I love it here.

16:25 Maya: A lot of the things that I talked about in that episode have continued. I still live very simply. I don’t eat out very much and I try to budget very carefully. But of course, 2020 had a lot of things that made it much harder to live the way I had last year. In grad school, I have a pretty similar stipend as I did as a fellow and I also have a fairly similar cost of living, but the difference is now of course it’s me and my husband, not just me living by myself since we were long distance during my fellowship. As a result of COVID, like so many other people, my husband does not have a job right now so we’re basically both living on my grad school stipend. As a result of that, I’m no longer able to save 30% of my income. Unfortunately, we pretty much just break even with the stipend alone. However, I have continued doing my little side comm side hustle, and all of that is kind of on top of my stipend just goes into savings. So that just gives us a little extra buffer to continue saving a little bit toward our goals as much as we can. And having that emergency savings that I did build up during that fellowship was super helpful. It gives us a lot more peace of mind in case we have any major expenses, like when we just had to get some car repairs done, and having to buy health insurance from my husband when he aged out of his parents’ insurance. We were able to do that without much problems. So that’s been really helpful to have that little cushion.

17:45 Maya: Our plans for the future are basically when my husband does get a job, and hopefully this pandemic ends, people can go back to work, we’re going to continue to live on my stipen as much as possible and then try to use anything that he makes to just work on paying down student loans, and eventually saving toward retirement. My advice for students would be definitely save up some emergency savings before grad school, if you can. And if you’re living with a partner, try to live on one income, if you can. I’d be happy to talk to people who are in a similar financial situation and gives some advice, so you can feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. My username is @alzscience on Twitter. Good luck to everybody.

Dr. Jill Hoffman

18:25 Jill: Hi, this is Jill Hoffman from Toddler on the Tenure Track. I was on season three, episode four, where I talked about public service loan forgiveness, as well as the decision that my husband and I made to have him become a stay at home dad. Career-wise, I’m still on my tenure track position and I’m on track to submit my tenure package in October of 2021. Also in September of 2020, my husband started a part-time position that he does from home. So he’s still doing the bulk of the childcare, but we’re switching off with childcare responsibilities when our work hours overlap. Financially, given the pause on student loan interest that’s happened as a result of the pandemic we’ve put our more aggressive student loan payments on hold for now. I still have a significant amount left on my loans and I’m still on the public service loan forgiveness program. And with my husband’s loans we’re waiting to see what happens when the new administration takes office before we start back up with our focus on paying those off.

19:24 Jill: Personally, we’ve had some major ups and downs since I was in the podcast and are currently trying to work out the logistics of a move back East to be closer to family. We’re currently in the Pacific Northwest. Sadly, my dad passed away in late 2019, and we had some other family emergencies that really made us reconsider the distance from family at this point in our lives. And financially, the money associated with traveling back and forth isn’t sustainable for us at our current income level. on a happy note, we’re expecting our second child in may of 2021, so that’s also playing a role in our interest to at least be an easy driving distance to family. You can find more about what I’ve been up to toddleronthetenuretrack.com.

Crista Wathen

20:08 Crista: Hi everyone. This is Crista Wathen from Richful Thinker. Last time you heard from me was season three, episode seven, where I spoke about the benefits of completing your education abroad and how I am using my PhD salary and Swedish kroner to pay down my US student loan debt. The biggest update since the interview that I have for you is I have finally reached positive net worth after being negative for so many years. I was also asked what was the best financial advice that I can give you, but that has changed in the meantime, and it is increase your savings rate so you can let that. You do have to decide the vehicle in which you want to place it in, but you have to let that grow. Now you can follow my journey as an American abroad. You can go to my blog, richfulthinker.com or my Instagram account, which is @richfulthinkerblog. Thank you guys so much for listening and I hope to speak to you soon.

Dr. Gov Worker

21:12 Gov Worker: Hi, this is Dr. Gov Worker and I appeared on season three, episodes eight and nine. Emily and I talked about the FIRE movement and the FIRE movement stands for financial independence and early retirement. Since that time I’m still on a path towards early retirement and financial independence. And in fact, with the large market gains that have been going on since the time we recorded, I’m further ahead than I thought it would be towards achieving financial independence. Once I reach financial independence, I’m still planning on working right now, but it’s nice to know that if something were to happen, I’d never need to work again, but I’m enjoying my job right now too much to leave.

21:58 Gov Worker: And I know I gave advice on the podcast, but if I had more advice, it would be really understand your employee handbook. Or if you work for a university, the university rules, or the federal government rules. Whatever your workplace is, understand all the rules about your employment, because sometimes you might find a benefit buried somewhere deep in an employee handbook that you don’t know about. And I think a lot of what I am really passionate about right now is educating people on how to get the most benefits out of their jobs that they’re they’re already at. I definitely recommend doing that. And if you want to get in touch with me, I’m on Twitter. You can tweet at me it’s @govworkerfi, and I’d love to hear from you. I love hearing from my readers. I also have a blog governmentworkerfi.com, but if you just tweet me, you can get to my blog.

Dr. Toyin Alli

22:59 Toyin: Hi, this is Toyin Alli from The Academic Society. I was on season three, episode 12 of the podcast where I shared how grad students can find the perfect side hustle while working on their degree. Since recording my episode, my job hasn’t changed much besides doing it remotely. I’m still a lecturer at the University of Georgia, and I’m up for promotion this year. My business, The Academic Society has grown so much since the episode. My YouTube channel has grown to almost 6,000 subscribers and my time management programs and courses are helping so many grad students. I’ve also revamped my signature grad school prep course for new grad students. It’s the resource for new grad students. Inside of my program I help recently accepted in first year grad students uncover grad school secrets by learning about the culture of grad school. I help them transform their mindset from an undergraduate mindset to a grad school mindset. I help them up level their productivity so that they can actually get their work done, and master time management so they can have time for themselves without worrying about how grad school works. I help grad students become more prepared and understand what grad school is all about so they don’t feel anxious about starting. I’m so happy that my business is in a place that allows me to not depend solely on my income as a university lecture. This summer, I was able to buy my first home, a condo in a pandemic. I’m paying off my student loans from undergrad, and I’m excited about building wealth from my side hustle.

24:41 Toyin: Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my update and catching up with me. You can find me on my website, theacademicsociety.com on YouTube, my channel is called The Academic Society with Toyin Alli. You can also follow me on Instagram @theacademicsociety_, and you can join my Facebook group for grad students, it’s called The Academic Society for Grad Students. Across all platforms, I talk about time management and productivity, but my overall mission is to show grad students and academics that you can live a fulfilled life and be successful in academia at the same time.

Follow-up from Emily

25:23 Emily: Hey, it’s Emily again, adding onto the last update. After Toyin and I got back in touch for this update episode, she invited me to guest lecture for Grad School Prep, the course you just heard about. The recording of the workshop I gave, “Set yourself up for financial success in graduate school” now lives inside Grad School Prep. If you are a prospective or first year grad student, I highly recommend joining Toyin’s course. In hindsight, I recognize how desperately I needed the skills and information in Grad School Prep when I started my PhD. My contribution lets you in on the financial secrets of grad school, explains the financial mindset you should adopt, and walks you through the financial steps you should take during your application year and first year of grad school. Toyin gave a free masterclass on what to expect from your first semester in grad school and how grad school prep can help you with the transition, including a description of my workshop. You can sign up for the free masterclass theacademicsociety.com/Emily.

26:28 Emily: Toyin’s interview was the last one in season three so we are finished with this update episode. I hope to devote an episode at the end of each calendar year to updates from previous guests. I hope you have a restful and joyful holiday season, despite the year we’ve had. We’ll be back with a new episode on Monday, January 4th, 2021.

Outtro

26:51 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

How to Handle Your Student Loans During Grad School and Following

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In this episode, Emily interviews Meagan Landress, a Certified Student Loan Professional who works with Student Loan Planner, about how a grad student or PhD should best handle their federal student loans. Meagan outlines the financial profiles of someone who should use an income-driven repayment plan to pursue forgiveness, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, vs. someone who should consider refinancing. She answers the questions: Should a graduate student pay down their student loans while they are in deferment? How should a graduate student who needs to take out debt decide between a student loan and consumer debt? Meagan also explains how marriage affects student loan repayment under each of the income-driven repayment programs. Don’t miss this episode jam-packed with actionable information!

Link Mentioned in this Episode

student loans grad school

Trailer

00:00 Meagan: We are taking a non-traditional approach to debt and so I kind of backed that up with, make sure you know, that federal student loans are just not a regular debt. That’s one. That’s the biggest thing we need to remember.

Introduction

01:18 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education and personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode 13 and today my guest is Meagan Landress, a certified student loan professional who works with Student Loan Planner. We’re discussing how a grad student or PhD should best handle their federal student loans. Meagan outlines the financial profiles of someone who should use an income-driven repayment plan to pursue forgiveness, including public service loan forgiveness, versus someone who should consider refinancing. She answers the questions: should a graduate student pay down their student loans while they’re in deferment? How should a graduate student who needs to take out debt decide between a student loan and consumer debt? Megan also explains how marriage affects student loan repayment under each of the income driven repayment programs. If you have federal student loans, and there is any question in your mind as to how you should handle them, you should absolutely listen through this entire episode. When you have a really high stakes student loan decision to make, such as which forgiveness program is right for you and your family, or whether to pursue PSLF versus refinancing, I highly recommend working with a certified student loan professional or a certified financial planner. Student Loan Planner can refer you to one of their partners who is a qualified professional.

01:39 Emily: On the other hand, if you’re looking for assistance with determining what your current financial goal should be, evaluating your budget, or figuring out what your financial life should look like in your next position, please consider working with me. I also serve as a financial coach and I specialize in funded graduate students and PhDs. You can sign up for a free 15 minute introductory call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to see if one-on-one coaching with me would be a good fit for you. Alternatively, if a group coaching and accountability program is attractive to you, The Wealthy PhD might be your best option. I’m enrolling for the next round of The Wealthy PhD in January, 2021 and you can go to pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD to learn more and join the wait list. Whatever the financial decision you’re facing, it can really help to get an outside perspective. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Meagan Landress.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:36 Emily: I am so pleased that Meagan Landress, a certified student loan professional, has agreed to join me on the podcast today to give an interview all about federal student loans for graduate students and PhDs. Meagan has her own coaching business around student loans, and she also works with Student Loan Planner, which is a really well-known brand in the space that I respect a lot. So I was really pleased to be connected with Meagan and so pleased that she accepted the invitation to be on the podcast. So Meagan, will you please introduce yourself to my audience a little bit further?

03:05 Meagan: Definitely. I’m Meagan Landress, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. And yes, I have my own financial coaching practice where I work with folks on the basics of financial planning. And Student Loan Planner, I consult for specifically on student loans, helping people navigate that big elephant on their chest, I would say. I’m excited for this conversation today.

03:29 Emily: Yeah. When I approached Student Loan Planner, I said, I would love to interview someone. I need someone who’s going to be able to speak to PhDs and the specifics of their situation. They said, Meagan’s going to be the perfect fit, so I’m really excited for this conversation.

Federal Student Loan Forgiveness Programs vs. Refinancing

03:42 Emily: Let’s jump right into it. I’m imagining a person who, whether they’re in graduate school, whether they’re maybe out of graduate school, they need to know whether or not they should be pursuing a forgiveness program at the federal level. One, maybe you could just remind us briefly of a few of those acronyms that are involved with the federal level forgiveness programs, and then let us know who is the type of person, what is the financial profile of a person who really should be looking carefully at pursuing one of those forgiveness programs?

04:13 Meagan: Yeah, so I think the most maybe well-known is public service loan forgiveness. That is, if you’re dedicating your career to a public service opportunity, so government, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) work. But also each of the income driven plans, there are four, each of those income driven plans have a forgiveness component and it’s really more so like their maximum repayment period. The folks that should be pursuing or entertaining forgiveness, there is a rule of thumb on balance.

Meagan: For the longer term income driven plans, if your balance is much greater than your annual income, we use 1.5 times your annual income, then you should probably be entertaining that longer term forgiveness route on the income driven plans. It’s not public service work. It’s not career-driven anything like that. You just have to be making payments on that plan for either 20 or 25 years. PSLF, I think is a little more straightforward. If you find yourself in a public service position and you can foresee your career continuing to go that route. I see this a lot in education, you know, public universities, and so that’s where we want to be entertaining, maybe public service loan forgiveness, which is 120 qualifying payments on an income driven plan. And then you reap the benefit of forgiveness. So it’s much shorter. Those would be some maybe identifying factors there.

05:42 Emily: So just to put a real fine point on this, when we’re talking about a debt to income ratio, is that the income that the person has post all education or during the course of their education

05:54 Meagan: Post-education. So I would say the first couple of years of their career.

05:59 Emily: Okay. So someone coming out of their PhD, first post-PhD job within those first couple of years, if they see that their debt is more than one and a half times, their post PhD income, that’s when they should be looking pretty hard at enrolling one of these forgiveness plans and potentially seeing it through to completion. Is there any difference in that rule of thumb, around whether if the program is PSLF, which only would take 10 years, versus one of the ones that would take 20 to 25 years,

06:27 Meagan: There’s a little bit of, because that ratio is not quite right since it’s such a shorter period of time. And so folks who have about the same, or maybe even a little less than their income, could still benefit from public service loan forgiveness. We just have to do the math on it because the payments are going to be based off of your income. And we need to project that out to see, would you just pay it off in 10 years or would you reap the benefit of some kind of forgiveness? The debt to income ratio isn’t so relevant with PSLF, but it could be maybe a rule of thumb to start with, and then you have to go and do some math.

07:07 Emily: Yeah. I’m fully anticipating there being a lot of answers like, well, this is the starting position, but really we have to fine tune it through doing some more math. So I fully anticipate a lot of those answers during this interview and that’s perfectly fine. I just want to get people a starting point, because when you’re sitting, prior to getting out of graduate school and you’re wondering whether or not you should be, your loans are probably in deferment, but you’re wondering whether or not you should pursue a forgiveness plan afterwards. It’s just helpful to see whether or not you have to go further into the details of it or not. There’s another option for repaying your student loans. Well, there’s a few options. You can do the standard repayment program for the federal government. That’s going to take 10 years, and it’s just based on your debt amounts, not based on your income at all, the repayment amounts. Or you have the opportunity to potentially refinance your loans. And there’s been a lot of advertising around student loan refinancing in the last 10 years. Very, very low rates are being offered. What is the financial profile of person who should be considering refinancing rather than potentially pursuing PSLF or another forgiveness program?

08:13 Meagan: Yeah. Refinancing is a big, you’ll see these commercials on TV all the time now. But when it’s right to consider refinancing, I think that’s when your balance is lower than your annual income, and you feel comfortable walking away from the federal system. And what I mean by that is the federal system has a lot of flexibilities that private loans just don’t offer. You won’t have very generous for forebarance availability. You won’t have access to income driven plans. There’s no forgiveness opportunity with private loans. And so if you feel comfortable with your financial situation and you can commit to the term for refinancing and you weren’t a good candidate for forgiveness in any way, then that’s when I think it’s appropriate to pull the trigger on refinancing.

09:00 Emily: Yeah. And I think what concurs with that is that you have to have a fairly low debt to income ratio to even qualify for the really good refinancing options. Like it pretty much has to be below about one-to-one anyway, to do that, which for people in my audience, PhDs, oftentimes refinancing is not going to be an option during graduate school because the income is just so low. However, if your post PhD income is going to jump up quite a lot, then refinancing might make sense once you get to that point. You may wish you could have refinanced earlier, but you probably wouldn’t qualify if your debt is maybe a few multiples of your graduate student income, but less than one year’s worth of your post PhD income. Thanks for that clarification.

09:40 Emily: I know there’s a lot of anxiety going on right now about PSLF. There was a report, I think it was in 2018 or something about how 90-whatever percent of people were being rejected by PSLF. Can you shed some light on this? Should people be concerned about the health and the future of PSLF?

09:54 Meagan: I wish I could take this article down. This one, everyone references, I feel like, when we’re talking about PSLF, but it’s funny when you go back to that article and you break apart the math in that article, you’ll see that about 70% to 80% of that 99% number of denials was due to one of two reasons. One was because people applied before reaching 120 payments. I think there’s a lot of reasonings behind that. Some people truly may have just been off a couple of payments and got denied. It didn’t mean that they’re denied for the whole program, they just have to make a couple more payments to get to 120. But I think the other big reason was there was a buzz about PSLF in 2017 and 2018. That was the first year we could have applied for the forgiveness. People in public service got excited about it and they were like, “Oh, I’ll just apply to see what happens,” and they hadn’t done the due diligence to check all the boxes and they definitely didn’t do the time. And so that’s my unofficial hypothesis on what happened there.

Meagan: Then there are some other things too, like there are some specific things you need to make sure you’re checking the box for, like having the correct type of loans, only direct loans qualify for forgiveness and being on an income driven plan. Those are two that were another percentage of why people got denied. They had either the wrong type of loans or weren’t on the right repayment plan. That article, while although looked horrifying, if that was the route you were going, it was very misleading. And I wish they would have pulled out some of that bad data. But PSLF is a great program to pursue. We just have to make sure we’re doing the due diligence and keeping a pulse on our payments over time to not have any surprises, that’s really the big important part with PSLF.

11:49 Emily: I guess I’ve also heard sort of anecdotally that I believe you have to do a recertification every year to make sure that your employer is still the type of employer where you would qualify for this program and that maybe you need to stay on top of your employer and your lender to make sure that all that paperwork is going through. Sort of you as the borrower need to take on a little bit more responsibility than you might like to, just to make sure that all the I’s are being dotted and the T’s are being crossed and everything.

12:16 Meagan: Yes. There’s what’s called the employment certification form that we recommend submitting at least once a year, even if you haven’t switched employers. What that form does is yes, it does verify that the employer still has that tax-exempt status. It also verifies and certifies that you still work there full-time. That’s one of the other requirements, working full-time for that entity. Once they get that form, then they update your payments since the last time you submitted it. And what’s nice too, they just updated their portal to where it shows your PSLF payment track, which is new because he used to have to wait for that confirmation email after submitting the ECF form to know where you stood payment-wise, but now it reports real time. So I’m excited about that. It’s a great addition, I think, to the portal,

13:04 Emily: I’m sure that gives the additional peace of mind to not have to wait for that communication to come back.

Making Payments on Student Loans During Grad School

13:11 Emily: Now I’m thinking about a person in graduate school, their loans are in deferment. They’re looking ahead to their post PhD career and saying, yeah, “I think I’m going to be able to pay these loans off once I get to that point. I don’t really think I’m going to have to do an income driven repayment program. PSLF is not an attractive…That type of employment is not really my plan.” That’s what they’re saying to themselves in graduate school. In this particular scenario, this graduate student has the flexibility to be able to make some kinds of payments towards their student loans. They’re receiving a stipend. It’s enough for them to live on. They’re able to pursue some financial goals aside from just paying for basic living expenses. Is that a good idea? And how does the person determine whether they should go that route, of repaying a bit of debt during graduate school, or whether they should just kind of defer it all and wait until afterwards?

14:00 Meagan: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think, yes all of those things you mentioned before have to exist. We need to know that we’re not pursuing PSLF one way or another. And I would suggest before putting money down on the student loans, making sure your emergency savings is healthy. We never want to be in a position where we have thrown all of our money towards our debt, we can’t get it back out, and we need it for an emergency. That is a bad situation to be in. I think having a buffer and savings is important, but I think one thing being in graduate school, we can’t officially enter repayment until we have graduation status. We can, with some of our undergrad loans, if we wanted to, we can enter repayment on those specifically. We can make payments, we just can’t officially enter a repayment plan on our existing school loans, so if you wanted to make payments, you could.

Meagan: Your un-subsidized loans do accrue interest while you’re in school. So that’s anything that says un-subsidized from undergrad and from grad school, and also grad school loans are considered un-subsidized. Those loans specifically accrue interest. Subsidized loans do not. If you wanted to prioritize which loans you’re applying payments to, subsidized loans aren’t going to be growing while you’re in school. So you can maybe prioritize the unsub and I think you can apply it straight to that interest. Again, it’s going to accrue on a monthly basis, so maybe you can find out how much that is and make those payments so it doesn’t grow while you’re in school. Those are some thoughts there. Post-graduation you can immediately enter repayment if you wanted to, by consolidating. You typically have a six month grace period where you can decide what plan you’re going on, get established. But if you wanted to enter repayment officially sooner, you can consolidate and kind of force yourself into repayment.

16:03 Emily: I see. How big of a factor should the interest rate on the unsubsidized student loans play in this decision, about whether to pay them down a bit or pursue other financial goals? We already covered the emergency fund, but if a graduate student is looking at “well, I can start investing for retirement, for example, versus paying down the student loans,” what are your thoughts about how the interest rate should factor into that decision?

16:28 Meagan: Yeah, so the interest rates on student loans do a lot of times fall in a gray area where, I mean, between 5% to 7% — I’m not sure, I’m not confident that you might get a longer term return if you were to invest that extra money instead. It really just depends and it kind of depends on your risk tolerance there. But any interest rates that are below 5%, we can kind of put those lower on the totem pole because if we took that extra money and we put it into our IRA or putting it towards our financial independence, long-term investing tells us on average, we can get close to 7% to 10%. I know that’s a big range, but it just depends. So if our debt is charging us 4%, or 5% even, there is that that net value that we’re missing out on. So I would say lower interest rates, I wouldn’t prioritize necessarily. If you have extra dollars, put that towards savings or put that towards your IRA or have a split approach — put some towards the loans and some towards retirement. When interest rates are higher though, when they’re in the 7% range, which is normal for graduate students, that’s where they’re a little iffy and we might want to prioritize them a little more. Those would be ones that you’d want to prioritize and you can kind of take a avalanche approach where we tackle the highest interest rate loans first, if you wanted to do it that way.

18:01 Emily: Yeah. What if we flip the scenario a little bit and say, okay, well instead this graduate student is someone who is going to pursue an income driven repayment plan and potentially forgiveness, maybe PSLF, but they still have that disposable or discretionary income during graduate school, then I guess the weight would tilt towards starting to invest. If you know that you’re going to be enrolling in one of those plans later, my understanding is, hey, never make an extra payment, never pay more than the minimum, if that is your plan and all that extra money should be going towards your other financial goals.

18:35 Meagan: You said it. Yeah. And we can’t have a qualifying payment while we’re still in school. Sometimes that’s a misconception. People feel like they can enter repayment and start having payments count towards forgiveness. We can’t necessarily with our existing degree loans, we have to wait until post-graduation for those payments to count. So, yes, we don’t want to pay a dollar extra. So throw that towards something that’s going to serve you in the future, and that would be retirement or savings.

Commercial

19:04 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Taking Out Student Loans During Grad School

20:08 Emily: Yeah, I think another point that might be helpful for the listeners is to understand, if you want to take out federal, and if you have any conception in your mind that there might be a possibility you want to take out a federal student loan during graduate school, what are the steps you need to do in advance to have that be an option for you versus what you just said: well, maybe at the given time that you need money, maybe you can’t take out a loan right at that moment. What steps should a person do in advance? If they’re thinking, yeah, this might be a possibility for me down the road.

20:34 Meagan: You’d want to complete FASFA each year. As a graduate student, your parents information, does it factor in anymore so it is solely on your financial situation. That’s going to help you with the un-subsidized funding, which you can get up to $20,500 for. You’ll also might want to consider looking at signing the graduate plus promissory note, which your financial aid office will tell you to do if you need that additional funding. But it is a separate promissory note. If we need above and beyond that $20,500, then you can spill over into the graduate plus loans. That’s what I would, I would do each year: FASFA and then for the first time you borrow, graduate plus, or if you don’t have graduate plus now, maybe go ahead and sign that promissory note. Either way you have to accept the aid that you’re being awarded. It’s not like you’re just willy-nilly applying for a loan. You have to intentionally accept it, but that gears you up to be able to accept it without having to do all that paperwork in a rush or being too late.

21:41 Emily: Yeah, I guess I’m just thinking financial planning wise for graduate student, going into or in a graduate program where they just know this program is not paying me well, I can barely make ends meet, that might be a thing to do in advance. It’s actually a little bit like having an emergency fund. If you know you can’t build up your own emergency fund right now, where it’s not going to be very big because they just aren’t paying you enough to make that happen, then maybe this is a good sort of backup plan to have. Do all the paperwork in advance, if anything adverse ever happens this is another step that you could take. I don’t love that idea because of course it’s better to just have your own emergency funds and go and you go forward and of course that’s, most of the strategies that I talk about through the podcast is how to overall be building up your savings during graduate school, but just as like a backup plan, it seems like it could be prudent to take these steps so that money, the loans could be available to you if you came upon a situation where you needed it. You do need to take some steps in advance to make that happen, so thank you for clarifying that.

The Intricacies of Student Loan Repayment

How Marriage May Affect Your Repayment

22:40 Emily: Okay, now we’re getting to a couple, maybe more niche kinds of questions. I get a question sometimes from people who are either married or they’re considering getting married, but they want to know how their status as being legally married or not is going to affect things like their tax returns and therefore their student loan repayment amounts. Can you just explain how that works? I’m thinking especially for someone who is maybe considering getting married, but wondering about the timing of it and wondering if they’re going to have to do married filing separately and these kinds of questions. So with taxes and student loans, what happens when you get married and you have student loans or your spouse has student loans?

23:25 Meagan: Yeah. When you get legally married, your tax filing status, when it comes to being on an income driven repayment plan matters. If we’re filing taxes joint with our spouse, and we’re on an income driven plan, it is going to factor in our spouse’s income. We not want that to happen. We may keep our finances separately. We may be trying to keep our payment as low as possible to pursue forgiveness. One strategy we talk about is considering filing separately and what this does, depending on the plan, if we file our taxes separate and we’re on an income driven plan, either pay as you earn income based repayment or income contingent repayment, then we’re allowed to exclude our spouse’s income and keep our payment off of just our own, which can be hugely beneficial.

24:18 Meagan: There are downsides to filing separate that need to be weighed, so you want to do an analysis of what is the cost difference between filing separate and joint? Because you’re missing out on some tax discounts and maybe some benefits. And how does that compare to how much it saves us over the course of the year in our payment? I never want someone to be scared to get married because of their student loans. We can always pivot. It’s just in the year of marriage. You need to know that being married will impact the income driven plan that you’re on and you might want to take a closer look at how you file before you file.

24:57 Meagan: Then the last thing I’ll mention on that is revised pay as you earn, which is 10% of discretionary income, that plan does not care if you file separate. It’s going to count spousal income or all household income regardless. If you’re on that plan and you don’t want your spouse’s income factored in, you might need to switch to either PAYE or IBR and that can kind of solve that problem to where if you don’t want income factored in.

Choosing a Repayment Program

25:25 Emily: Gotcha. Thank you so much for clarifying that. You said earlier there are four different programs plus PSLF you mentioned a few of them just now — for someone who’s looking at this landscape and wondering how in the world do I choose which one of these programs I should enroll in. How can they do that?

25:43 Meagan: A really simplified way to think about it is if you’re going the forgiveness route, you want to choose the lowest income driven plan available. So that would be revised pay as you earn or pay as you earn. If you don’t want spousal income factored in, that would be pay as you earn or IBR, if you don’t have access to pay as you earn. From an income driven plan perspective, that’s how I would think. If our plan is to pay off the loans, then we might want to be choosing one of those amateurized options like the standard 10 year until we can commit to refinancing, or, and this might dive into one of your other topics I know we had mentioned, but if our income is really low now, and we want to take advantage of an income driven plan, but we are not ready to throw a lot towards it, then starting out on REPAYE could be really advantageous because of its interest subsidies. What that means is it has discounts on how much interest accrues when you’re in repayment, but the payment itself might not be as much as it needs to be to cover interest and principle. So it keeps that balance from ballooning and instead of being in forbearance or pausing loans during that timeframe, interests won’t continue to grow in that way. I know we were going to touch on that. I might’ve skipped ahead, but let me know if you want me to slow down on that one again.

27:11 Emily: No, I think it just gives a flavor for how complex this decision is, and how your individual career path and income path will affect the decision that you make, plus what you’re doing in your personal life, whether you want to get married or not. Who should be working with someone like you? What’s the kind of person who should be working with someone like you to figure out what the best decision is? And who’s the kind of person who, well, it’s simple enough, you can figure it out on your own?

When to Consult a Professional

27:38 Meagan: Yeah, I think if you have any anxiety or stress about making this decision, and it’s overwhelming doing this research for yourself, in a one hour consult, we will have your plan put together. If you want to save the time, save the energy and the stress, that’s somebody who would be a good candidate to work with us. For someone who might not be such a great candidate, I think if you are already very familiar with all of these repayment options if for sure that you’re going to be refinancing or just paying it off really aggressively, then I think that would be more so like a quick, “Hey, yup, I think you’ve got the right idea.” And again, that would be if your balance is lower than your income and you’re ready to walk away from those federal flexibilities. I think we won’t be able to provide as much value there, but for folks who have balance is much greater than income, and they’re a little nervous about that decision or navigating that, we would be helpful in that situation.

28:40 Emily: Yeah. I guess the way I’m thinking about it is like how high are the stakes here. If they’re pretty high, if that loan balance is pretty high compared to your income, that’s the time when you need to be sure you’re making the right decision and it helps to get some professional guidance at that point. And like you said, if you can have a one hour session and get a firm answer, that’s going to do well for you for the next 10 years, or unless and until your situation drastically changes, then that is awesome peace of mind to pay for in just an hour. That sounds wonderful.

29:09 Meagan: Yeah, and just the strategy too. There’s a lot of technicalities that go into when to file, like when to certify income, how to reduce income. There’s a lot of things that go into it, so if you wanted to get really sexy with your planning, that’s where we could come into.

The Emotional Aspect of Repayment

29:24 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Great recommendation on that front. Another question occurred to me, pulling together some of the threads that we’ve mentioned so far in the interview, if you are deciding to go in an income driven repayment plan and your intention is eventually to have a lot of that balance forgiven. We mentioned earlier never make more than the minimum payment you’re required to. Don’t make payments during deferment. Don’t make more than the minimum once you’re in repayment. Emotionally, how does a person deal with potentially seeing their balance, plus the interest increase and increase and increase, which is the situation that some people would be in pursuing that route over those 10 years, or even 20 or 25 years, while they’re in those types of programs? How do they emotionally deal with looking at that until they do get to the forgiveness at the end?

30:13 Meagan: It is something I feel like you need to compartmentalize because we are taking a non-traditional approach to debt. I back that up with make sure you know that federal student loans are just not a regular debt. That’s one, that’s the biggest thing we need to remember that if we were going by traditional debt advice, and if this was a traditional debt, we would have the opposite mindset. It would be, let’s pay this off like our hair’s on fire. But the federal system has some really unique opportunities like income driven plans and forgiveness that we can take advantage of that really help us prioritize other financial obligations. Maybe instead of getting anxiety about the loan balance increasing, maybe focus more on your savings increasing. So you have a lot more cashflow to be able to throw towards your financial independence and as long as we’re working towards that forgiveness timeline the balance will grow, but there is an end in sight. That’s something that I think can bring some peace of mind and just knowing and remembering that federal loans are not a normal debt.

31:18 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that insight. I think I’ll add to it. The real danger here is going into one of these forgiveness plans, one of these income-driven repayment plans, and taking advantage of the lower payment and then not having any movement in the rest of your financial life — not doing the investing, not doing the saving. That’s the real danger when you get to the end of the 10 years or the 20 or the 25. And yes, hopefully everything goes smoothly and the rest of the balance is forgiven, but you kind of have nothing on the other side of it because the whole time you’re thinking, “well, I still have my student loans, so I’m not going to be investing.” If you’re making the intentional decision to pursue an income driven repayment plan and pursue forgiveness, then your high priority needs to be, “yep I’m taking advantage of this, but at the same time, I’m going to be working on my finances over here. I’m going to be building up my portfolio, building my net worth.” And who knows what might happen in the future. If it turns out that the forgiveness was taken away or didn’t happen or something went wrong or something happened in your life, I don’t know, at least you have some net worth on the other side of the equation to potentially deal with the debt or whatever might be going on. It’s really just shoring up your finances in one spot rather than paying off the debt. Thank you so much for that insight.

What is Your Best Financial Advice for an Early Career PhD?

32:31 Emily: Meagan, I like to end all my interviews by asking for your best financial advice for an early career PhD, a graduate student or a PhD. That could be something that’s related to what we’ve talked about in this interview, or it could be something completely else, but would you please share that with us?

32:46 Meagan: I would say, I think my best coin of advice would just be to have a plan. And I know that sounds like so blah, but I think looking at your student loan situation or your financial situation head on is not as scary as it may seem. I think people avoid a lot of financial things because they’re not sure how to tackle it or they’re overwhelmed by it. I promise you, you will feel so much better if we just have a plan from the beginning. Because if you ignore it for three years, which sometimes I see, then we’re three years behind when we finally do pick up and start focusing on it. Having a plan is important for your peace of mind for your future self. It’s self-care to have a plan now. I think that would be what I’d part on there.

33:33 Emily: Yeah. I absolutely totally, totally concur about having a plan. I know looking back at myself when I was in graduate school, not having a financial plan. When you have so little income, so little wiggle room, you know you can never do everything you want to do with your money. You know that you can’t pay off your student loan debt and invest and do all the saving and all the lifestyle. You just have to prioritize and then triage the situation. So that’s what a plan helps you do and thank you so much for that advice.

Where to Find Meagan Online

Emily: Meagan, if people have enjoyed this interview and they’ve learned a lot from you and they want to potentially work with you, how can they get in touch with you? Or where can they learn more?

34:08 Meagan: Yeah. So studentloanplanner.com is a wealth of information. We write a lot of blog posts about anything student loan related. We have a podcast. And if you wanted one-on-one help, you can schedule a consult through our website, studentloanplanner.com.

34:22 Emily: Yeah. Wonderful. There are so many free resources available and it’s really nice to know that there also professionals like Meagan backing that up and there for you, if you need those consultations. Meagan, thank you so much for giving me this interview and joining me today.

34:35 Meagan: Thank you. It was fun nerding out with you.

Outtro

34:38 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

 

How to Identify and Change the Money Mindset You Developed in Academia

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Chris Cornthwaite of Roostervane. Chris and Emily share the money mindsets that they have observed among PhDs and academics, including believing money and wealth to be evil, scarcity, relating time to income, and anchoring. They discuss how to identify and change your own money mindset. Chris shares how his money mindset has evolved from his youth idolizing poverty through his underpaid grad student years and now into his employment and entrepreneurial journey.

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Link Mentioned in this Episode

PhD money mindset

Teaser

00:00 Chris: It’s one thing to start when you’re, when you’re 20 or 25, and have the value of compound interest over time and save that $40 a month or whatever it was. But it’s actually quite a different thing to start when you’re 35 with student loans that need to be paid off and try to create a sizeable chunk of wealth.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode 11, and today my guest is Dr. Chris Cornthwaite of Roostervane. Chris and I list the money mindsets that we have observed among PhDs and academics, including believing money and wealth to be evil, scarcity, relating time to income, and anchoring. We discuss how to identify and change your own money mindset. Chris shares how his money mindset has evolved from his youth idolizing poverty, through his underpaid grad student years, and now into his employment and entrepreneurial journey. As you’ll hear during this episode, one of the best ways you can change your money mindset is by intentionally seeking out and learning from people who have the money mindset you want to move toward, whether that is through books, other media or new acquaintances.

01:22 Emily: If this episode convinces you that you should work on your own money mindset, I invite you to join the Personal Finance for PhDs community at pfforphds.community. Inside the community, you can communicate with me and other like-minded PhDs through our forum and monthly live calls. The community has a monthly book club and group financial challenges as well. In November, 2020, we’re reading Get Money by Kristin Wong and in December, it we’ll read The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. Our challenges for November and December are to create a frugal stack and set up a system of targeted savings accounts. One of the eBooks included in the community, The Wealthy PhD, also has a chapter on what money mindset is, why it’s important, and how to shift it. While I didn’t understand it at the time being part of the personal finance blogosphere while I was in grad school was absolutely vital to the level of financial success I had then and now, and was directly my inspiration for starting my business. With the Personal Finance for PhD’s community, I’ve attempted to replicate many of the positive elements of that experience while making the whole process more time efficient and accessible for you. If you’re interested in learning more about and joining the community, you can do so at pfforphds.community. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Chris Cornthwaite from Roostervane.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:49 Emily: I’m so delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Chris Cornthwaite of Roostervane. He writes a lot about PhDs and career transitions and career over there, but he also has a lot of material about money, wealth, money, mindset, and so forth. And that’s why I invited him on the podcast today to tell us more about money mindset. So, Chris, will you please just introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

03:14 Chris: Yeah, for sure. So in terms of my academic background, I have a PhD in religious studies from the University of Toronto and after I finished my PhD, I was kind of lost and didn’t know what to do for work. Kind of was the impetus for starting Roostervane, eventually. But I went and I worked for a think tank. So I ran projects for Canadian think tank. Kind of a lot of different projects, but some that kind of related to money that are still interesting to me is things like economic development and prosperity and things like that. And then I went and worked for the federal government for a little while, the Canadian federal government. I worked on a project that helps other countries launch refugee programs. Basically it’s a lot of like international diplomacy kind of stuff and that was really neat. And I still do some consulting in that world, in the refugee program world, but I also run Roostervane. I started a blog, initially it was kind of chronicling my own journey out of academia, but it’s just evolved to things that I like to write about. It’s become everything from a little bit on personal finance, as you say to careers, LinkedIn, ideas about purpose, which has really been an interesting question for me. That’s become about, I would say it’s maybe like 80% of the work I do, but it’s not my full-time income yet. It’s growing, but as you know, it takes time, so I’m working on that too. That’s me.

4:40 Emily: So interesting. Thank you so much. So money mindset is our topic for today.

What Are the Common Money Mindsets of PhDs and Academics?

And I wanted to start off by asking you what are the common money mindsets that you have observed in PhDs or academics?

4:53 Chris: This is such a fun conversation. I’m really glad to have it. I think the thing that I see a lot of, I mean, we could talk about scarcity mindset and that sort of thing, and that’s certainly common. I think the thing that I deal with the most, especially as people are like leaving academia and it’s not just about money, but it’s about careers in general, but there’s a lot of constructs within academia, like ideological constructs that money is bad, money is evil. The pursuit of money is something that, especially for those pursuing life in academia, a lot of people kind of buy the idea that this is a noble cause and worth doing for nothing basically. I think that a lot of PhDs have the idea that they shouldn’t think about money or that they’re bad for thinking about it or that they’re not serious academics if they want to think about it.

5:46 Chris: The irony is that, I remember having one exchange with a student in particular and he was kind of saying some of these things to me and he was quoting his professor. And some of the things his professor had said about how this is not about money. And I said, “is that your professor who makes $170,000 a year?” There’s a huge discrepancy, I think, between the idealism of PhDs and the reality of both the Academy and just “real world”. I think that’s the biggest holdup I see in terms of money mindset is that people have this idea that poverty is noble or that earning money is bad. Investing is capitalism, capitalism’s bad. I think those become really big holdups and I think can actually seriously hinder people from first of all, making good decisions about their career, but also from actually acquiring wealth and getting comfortable, much less wealthy.

6:38 Emily: So I think here, your discipline might be showing because like in contrast, so I’ve heard the same things, but it was not until I started speaking with PhDs more widely across a lot of disciplines that I encountered that mindset. Because for me as an engineering PhD and in the STEM fields, yes, scarcity mindset was there. Yes, undervaluing yourself was there, but not the money is evil aspect of things because I think we were all expecting like, okay, yeah, this is a low-income period of life, but this is not characterized my life overall. Like overall I’m going to be a highly employable, decent to good earner as an engineering PhD or STEM PhD. And honestly, even in my let’s say path through academia in terms of the professors that I interacted with, because I was in science fields and engineering fields, I didn’t have any professors say to me, capitalism is evil or anything like that. So it’s not an idea that I found until I started interacting with humanities PhDs that I even encountered that. I think this is really feel dependent.

7:48 Chris: A hundred percent, I agree. And it’s interesting for careers too. I’m always kind of realizing where these field differences are and it’s hard because I write for PhDs, like it’s one audience, and in some cases I think there are a lot of things that are kind of universal, but you’re a hundred percent right. And I think a lot of the kinds of ideologies around money that I was exposed to, and I mean, I still see them a lot, but you’re you’re right, they’re definitely much more predominant in humanities, social science fields for sure.

8:13 Emily: Yeah, but I’m so glad you brought that one up because I think that one is maybe the most insidious, like the hardest to reverse, which of course we’ll get to in a moment, but that was a great first observation to bring up. Do you have any other ones? You mentioned scarcity mindset earlier, but didn’t actually define it. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what scarcity mindset is?

8:31 Chris: Gosh, yeah. I think scarcity mindset for me, the way I understand it is just the idea that like there’s never enough money and it’s always, I’m just going to be poor and I’m always going to be poor. I mean, I don’t know, we’ve never had the conversation about the philosophies of money behind it, but a lot of the people that I read see this as manifesting into your life, that you adopt this type of scarcity and it becomes true for you. There’s a whole different conversation we could have, but I think at least anecdotally that’s been true in my life too, that when I kind of live this kind of scarcity — there’s never enough money, I have to keep it all tight, and pinch every penny and be just really, really controlling about, about my money. I think that’s what I see and I saw a lot of that in academia and I think, I mean, a lot of people are poor. I actually did all right, because I won the right fellowships. I mean, it’s just luck of the draw. There’s not really any reason why one PhD makes $15,000, another one makes $50,000. But all that to say that I saw a lot of that scarcity mindset. But the other thing that I think one of the things that I really observed academia taught me was this idea of linking your time to money. I didn’t get paid by the hour other than when I did TA or RA work, so I think one of the really valuable lessons I learned in academia and it’s a mindset that academics have if you kind of dig for it is this idea that you can actually work on a grant application for five or six hours and it might bring you a hundred thousand dollars. I think there are also some positive money mindsets from academia too, if you want to dig for them, but it’s just hard to kind of hard to get at them sometimes.

10:16 Emily: Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting point to bring up. Actually, I wanted to go back to the scarcity mindset for a second because there’s actual scarcity in your life and there’s the scarcity mindset and those things can come together or they can be separate from each other. You can have one or the other, you can have both, you can have neither. There is actual scarcity, especially at the graduate student level in terms of how much money you’re making. Now, does that apply to everybody? No, because of course there’s fellowships you can win, you can have side hustles, but there is scarcity in a sense. But whether it limits your mindset or not doesn’t necessarily come along with that scarcity. And the other thing is the academic job market, like there is literal a lot of scarcity in the academic job market. And I think that PhD’s observing that market, even if they choose not to pursue it or don’t end up in academia long-term, they still take that observation with them onto their other career paths and imagine the kind of scarcity and other places that they have rightly observed within academia.

11:15 Chris: Yeah. That’s really interesting. One thing I’m thinking of as you say that some of my professor friends who sat on on grant committees, especially for university-level scholarships and realize how many scholarships actually didn’t get any applications. So it also kind of does make me think that like there is of course literal scarcity, but I think one of the ways for example, that that can play out is that instead of me saying as a student, how can I go make more money or how can I increase my, my income? What scholarships can I apply for in this case because there was a lot of years that they didn’t give out a lot of the scholarships. It’s easier just to say, well, I’m just poor and this is my lot in life and woe is me kind of thing. So I hear what you’re saying. I do. I totally agree with you. And I think there’s a balance there for me between the actual scarcity and the mindset that says, how can I make the most of this? There’s obviously going to be some kind of a limit, but how can I expand what I do have access to?

12:11 Emily: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s really depressing for graduate students to think about their hourly wage, because they imagine, especially because they work so many hours, usually beyond 40 and yet they’re only being paid ostensibly — you mentioned RA or TA work earlier, that’s typically limited to like 20 hours a week, at least in the US — so they’re calculating this off of like 40 plus hours per week when actually they’re only being paid for 20 and technically they’re doing their dissertation for free and a lot of people don’t understand that. So it is depressing, they calculate their hourly wage, but like you said, that’s not actually literally what they’re being paid for. And sometimes you can, as you said, win an award for just a handful of hours of extra work on top of the work that you are already doing. So I do like the idea of divorcing the hourly wage thing, but it’s disheartening to think about in the first place.

13:05 Chris: I’m trying to look on the bright side. There’s a lot to be sad about, about the financial state of academia. So overall I’m not saying it’s like, great, but there are things that I’ve realized — I know we’re going to talk about it later — but as I’ve moved into my life, there are things that academia trained me for that I’m actually like, Oh, that’s actually not a bad thing.

13:22 Emily: Yeah. So let’s finish up talking about the mindsets that you see. Are there any ones that you’ve have any other ones that you’ve observed either positive or negative, helpful or unhelpful?

13:32 Chris: Let me think. Well, I guess so, so I think the thing that initiated this conversation was you had mentioned a post that I wrote where I had identified a lot of different things that I had learned. I’m trying to think about how much they relate to mindset, but I think there are principles, some of which do relate to mindset, about money that students kind of carry forward. So we already talked about the hourly wage, but I was thinking about in terms of scale, like when you think of I don’t know, a journal publication, like creating one thing that can influence multiple people. That’s not so much a mindset though. I guess I think the answer is no, I don’t really have any other mindsets offhand that I talk about.

14:13 Emily: I think the only other one that I’ll bring up is anchoring. So when you’re in graduate school and you’re making this tiny hourly wage or maybe you think about your yearly salary also tiny, because you’re anchored there, because that’s the first, early on salary that you’ve experienced in your life, you may not really understand your value in the marketplace once you go forward from that position, whether it’s in academia or outside of academia. And so your anchored to this, as you mentioned, 15 or 30 or whatever it is, thousand dollars per year, you’re making as a graduate student and you think, “Oh, wow, could I make double that?” And that’s like amazing to you. Instead of thinking, I want to three X, four X, five X, 10 X what I was making in graduate school, or more. I think that’s another really insidious one is, is the ultimate under valuing that you do later on.

15:04 Chris: Yeah, that’s a great point.

How Do You Identify Your Money Mindset?

15:06 Emily: So we talked about the money mindsets that are common among PhDs. These are not universal. So how does an individual determine what are the money mindsets that I currently have? And this is such a tough question because money mindsets are so closely held you don’t even recognize them as such. It’s just how the world works according to you. So how do you identify your own, your own money mindset?

15:28 Chris: I think the thing that helped me most was reading. I would say the first book I read on money was The Undercover Economist. And I read that, I mean, that must be 10 years ago now. I read it somewhere in my graduate journey, I think pretty early on and it rocked my world and I started reading every single personal finance or money book I could get my hands on after that. So I’ve read a lot of them. And I think a lot of what I saw through reading kind of reflected back to me in my own life.

16:01 Chris: For example, I started to, I can’t even pinpoint like where I got it from, but I started to see like things that I was raised with. I was raised in quite a poor family. My dad worked as a maintenance man in hospital, my mom stayed home with five kids, and a lot of my money mindset came from there. There was never enough money, money doesn’t grow on trees, money is for other people, and then we were also religious, so it was also spiritualized. I don’t know if I ever heard that money is evil, but I definitely heard that poverty was kind of noble, poverty was spiritual. I think the more I started to read and just hear people name similar things to what I had felt and seeing other people who grew up in similar places, I started to unpack a lot of those. There’s one podcast I really liked, it’s called Profit Boss, and she really did a fantastic job. Is it Hillary Hendershot? Do you know that one? I haven’t listened to it about five years.

17:00 Emily: I don’t think I know that one.

17:00 Chris: She had done an episode on money mindset, and it was really good and really opened up to me a lot of my own limitations and that really helped a lot. I think just hearing people name their money mindset and seeing it in myself.

17:17 Emily: So I totally agree with you that you have to start encountering other minds to recognize your own mindsets and whether that’s through reading as you were doing. I also early on in my life journey was reading the personal finance blogosphere quite a lot. So hearing from other personal stories of people who are talking explicitly about money. That’s the thing is you have to actually kind of get towards money or money related topics when you know, exchange these other minds. So it’s a little bit easier to do in an impersonal format, like reading or listening to podcasts or watching videos or whatever. But I’ll add into that talking with other graduate students, maybe like we mentioned earlier, outside your own discipline and outside your own worldview. Or not even other graduate students, but just like your peers, maybe peers who have real jobs, that can help you open up. If you’re actually, again, touching on these money or money related topics can help you recognize what’s a mindset in you and what’s like actual observable truth about the world versus just your perception of it. Encountering other people I think is crucial to identifying your own money mindset.

18:24 Chris: The kind of thing that that makes me think of is this idea of even talking about money. And I know that’s another money mindset I had is like, we don’t talk about money. We don’t talk about it with anybody. Money, politics, and I guess religion were the three things you’re not supposed to talk about. Right. And that’s definitely something that I’ve experienced. It’s funny, even with Roostervane. For example, I wrote a post a while back and it was just for fun about how PhDs can be worth a $100K or something, and it was one of the most read posts that I’ve ever done, but it’s actually one of the least shared. People were happy to kind of read about it, but didn’t really want to talk about it. I think there’s a lot of shame in talking about money and expressing an interest in money, and even an interest in having money or growing wealth. That’s another mindset that had held me back in the past. And I think it’s still pretty prevalent.

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

How Do You Change Your Money Mindset?

20:27 Emily: Okay, so an individual has started to identify their own money mindset by listening to this podcast or reading your articles or reading other materials. How do you think they should actually go about changing a money mindset that they’ve identified as unhelpful that they have?

20:44 Chris: I’ve given a lot of thought this. It’s an interesting question, because I think what I realized is it doesn’t change overnight and I will find myself even years later, like something identified years ago and all of a sudden I kind of will stop myself when I’m doing something and say like, Oh, that’s my X mindset that has kind of played in, but it’s kind of sneaking back in. It’s really, really hard to change the way that you are kind of hardwired to think about money. It takes a lot of time. I mean, I’ve done things like I do journaling and I will sort of journal about it. I just watch and read a lot of stuff. I think really immersing yourself in things that kind of present a different view from what you’re used to, I think that kind of immersion has really helped me a lot. I’m trying to think what else. Those would be the two main ones, just kind of exposing yourself to different ideas and kind of recognize that you’re on a journey to change your money mindset. It will definitely take time. It’s not going to happen overnight. Start taking kind of the little incremental steps to grow it. And I think also education, I would say, is a big part of that. The more you learn about money, the more you learn about growing wealth, the less scary it get. It can get confusing because there’s a lot of contradictory information, but it’s at least less scary. So ideally you’re going to, you’re going to be a little more competent and therefore comfortable with actually thinking about and dealing with your money.

22:07 Emily: I totally agree with you that I think the first stop is sort of the extension of the identification. It’s continuing to encounter other ideas about money and maybe now you can kind of selectively go towards, “okay, well, this is a money mindset that I would like to cultivate, or this is the money mindset I want to get away from, so I’m going to specifically listen to source X or source Y, which is going to help me move again slowly over time towards that more helpful money mindset.” So yeah, I totally agree. Like for instance, listen to this podcast. Maybe this is giving you a different perspective on money than you had before. Or continue to read other sources. I know I, as I mentioned earlier, totally immersed myself in like the personal finance blogosphere. That was really helpful in changing some of my money mindsets, especially around like earning more because definitely as a graduate student, I had those limiting beliefs about like, I can’t have a side hustle and like, I can never increase my stipend, but that turned out to not be true after working on it for years and years I finally figured that out. So definitely getting around other people. I don’t remember the exact phrase, but there’s that thing where like, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And so with respect to your money mindset, if you’ve had parent one, parent two, professor one in that circle before, you can maybe, at least with respect to this subject, edge those people out in favor of people who, have the mindset that you want to adopt.

23:28 Chris: Exactly. Yeah, I totally agree.

23:30 Emily: And I’ll add in, you mentioned a little bit earlier, abundance mindset and thinking and so forth. And I’ve also read a little bit about that in the entrepreneurial space. That’s how I actually first sort of encountered the topic of mindset was through the entrepreneurial stuff. One of the things that is talked about a lot in that space, which I think might be helpful, is actually writing and saying affirmations. And you mentioned, it’s a little bit related to journaling. Basically what we’re talking about is self-talk. You’ve been telling yourself money is the root of all evil and capitalism needs to die and I will never have money and all those things. You’ve been telling yourself those things for years. And so now you need to start telling yourself other things. It might be helpful to actually write down an affirmation, something that you know maybe intellectually to be true, but you don’t really feel it. You haven’t really internalized it yet and start reciting those to yourself. Maybe it’s once a day or a few times a day, to kind of get that self-talk like grooved in. And so eventually you’ll go to it more naturally. This is something I recommend to people who I work with on money mindset. It’s not something I practice all the time, but I do it from time to time when I feel like I need a little boost or a refresher with my mindset. Have you ever done the affirmation thing?

24:46 Chris: I do actually. I think I just, wasn’t clear in defining how I think of journaling because I do journaling, but within my journaling, I do affirmations as well. I have every day and there’s one in particular, there’s one that I’ll share just because it’s been a recent realization for me. I’m not particularly religious anymore, but coming from this idea of my youth that having money is evil somehow or whatever, I’ve really been thinking through like trying to get myself to adopt the idea lately that money is almost spiritual. That having money and creating wealth, especially as an entrepreneur, is actually an indication of the value that I bring to somebody else’s life. Rather than our ideas about entrepreneurship growing up is like, well, business people trick people into giving them money or whatever. In fact it’s quite the opposite. My wealth, the amount that I get paid is reflective of the value that I bring to people’s lives, and that’s really a beautiful thing. I think that’s one thing, just for example, that I’ve been kind of writing down variations of that for quite a long time now, trying to really worm it into my head because I really do believe it’s true, actually.

25:54 Emily: Yeah. I’m working on a similar one for me and my business as well. The amount of money you’re bringing in reflects the value that you bring to the world. That’s true, if you have a job too, but it’s sort of brutally true when you’re an entrepreneur, like you’re feeling that like all the time, there’s no comfort of the salary.

Chris’s Own Money Mindset Journey

26:13 Emily: Okay, so we’ve talked through what kind of mindsets you might have if you’re in academia, how do identify them, how to change them or start to change them, because you said, it’s going to be a process. You’ve talked about your own personal story here and there throughout this. Is there anything that you want to add more so about your career or your financial journey, especially as it relates to your money mindset?

26:35 Chris: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I’ve had a constant evolution of my money mindset and it started back when I started reading personal finance books, at the beginning and each personal finance books was like a revelation. Like the first one, I remember reading a book called The Millionaire Teacher. I don’t know if you know that one. And it was like, okay, it’s low cost index funds, that’s how I’m going to build wealth. Low-cost index funds, low MER, ETFs — that’s the answer. And then I read the next one and it was like, actually people with managed portfolios do better over time and like, okay, who do I believe?

27:11 Chris: I think one of the most interesting things about my money journey has been, first of all, just digesting the huge amount of contradictory information out there. And there is a lot of it. For example, I remember reading Dave Ramsey and David Bach around the same time, and Dave Ramsey is like, pay down debt, don’t buy a house until you’re out of debt and David Bach was like buy a house tomorrow because nobody’s going to let you leverage that amount of money anywhere else. So it’s funny, I think like looking back now, I was forming my own views around money, even though there are little nuances in how they actually play out. I remember reading one book in particular and it was after I had read all these different people and the book was, I’m almost ashamed to say it. There are two money books I’m really ashamed to say that I like. I wonder if you could guess them, the first is Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

28:05 Emily: Yeah I was going to say Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

28:08 Chris: I’m so embarrassed to say that I liked that one. First of all, because if you Google Robert Kiyosaki, as an individual, I’m not endorsing Robert Kiyosaki. He’s had some interesting business practices and definitely has some interesting beliefs today. But the book was revolutionary for me. It really changed the way that I thought about business and wealth and just my own upbringing. The second one, this one it’s called The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime! It’s by a guy named MJ DeMarco. I would almost recommend it, but I’m hesitant because it’s like a bro book. He’s just one of those…he was an internet millionaire and it’s really, especially when you read it there are just some things that like don’t sit right. But the one thing that I will say that hit me about that book is he said actually when you look at all these personal finance gurus, none of them got rich off of following their own advice. Dave Ramsey and Susie Orman, these people didn’t get rich from saving 15% of their paycheck. They got rich by creating something that had massive value, massive scale, and creating huge personal brands and putting it out there in the world.

29:16 Chris: And I think that was really like something clicked. I had been working for the government too and realizing that even though I was making quite good money compared to what I was making in my PhD and I was interviewing for jobs that would make even more, I was giving away a third of it in taxes. I was struggling. Even our family, we thought we were going to be wealthy now that we have a paycheck and have a good job and I have a pension. And I mean, the opposite was true. Trying to scrape together that 15% to save every month or whatever it was going to be, it felt almost impossible, just because of the realities of our cost of living and raising kids and unexpected expenses. And I remember kind of thinking this through and saying, okay, it’s one thing to start when you’re 20 or 25, and have the value of compound interest over time and save that $40 a month or whatever it was. But it’s actually quite a different thing to start when you’re 35 with student loans that need to be paid off and try to create a sizable chunk of wealth. It’s possible. It’s definitely possible.

30:23 Chris: At the time I was the only one working my spouse Carolyn was home with our kids and she is a graphic designer, so she does some freelance work, but she wasn’t making a full-time income. So I think I just kind of came to the reality and it was about the time I read this, that it kind of shook me. And I said like, actually the way that I’m thinking about wealth is right for a lot of people, but it might not be right for me. For your listeners, there’s probably a variety of people. If you’re a two income family earning $180,000 a year, it might be pretty easy to catch up and squirrel away 30% a month instead of 15% a month and catch up to where you would have been. But for my own reality, I fell in love with the idea of business and the idea that in my case, especially with an internet business that I could start with almost like nothing. I could start with $3 a month and create a business that’s worth a lot of money. I didn’t know where else you could leverage that. Like you have that kind of leverage or create that kind of scale from starting with like paying Bluehost $3 a month and putting my ideas online to creating something. And I don’t know exactly, like I’m not great at evaluating blogs, but I think even today, Roostervane, from what I understand would be worth like between $30 and $60,000, which is not a huge amount of money, but I started it last year.

31:39 Chris: As a business person, it’s just thinking through business has changed everything about how I see money and I’m no longer one of those people trying to squirrel away part of my paycheck. And those are totally fine if that’s the position somebody is in and that’s kind of their money worldview, that’s totally great. But for me personally, I just got a lot more interested in creating an asset. Creating this asset that’s called a business and it changes everything. I don’t really care how much I take out of the business. I don’t care how much my paycheck is because I actually love having money in the business to reinvest back into it. It’s just little things like that, that as an entrepreneur radically reorients your relationship to money and it really changes the way you view everything. It’s been a long journey and I think I’ve talked a lot about it, but it’s been really interesting, and I still have so much to learn, but it’s just that constant growth and realization, coming to the idea that there are some principles that I’ve come believe about money, about things like scale and impacting people and creating value. And that’s some of the things that I’ve put on the blog, which I haven’t really blogged about why you should invest in low cost index funds. I’ve just blogged about here are some of the kind of generic things that I believe about building wealth.

32:54 Emily: Yeah, I’m so glad to hear that narrative and I see a lot of my own story reflected in that as well. Of course, I’ve also come to entrepreneurship.

Chris’s Business

33:01 Emily: So if people want to read more stuff from you, tell us where they can, they can find you.

33:08 Chris: Yeah, Roostervane.com. It’s kind of like a weather vane, but there’s a rooster on top — Roostervane. And that’s where I blog about…my main thing is careers with purpose. It’s just thinking through like how we actually get jobs and careers, but also how we make meaning from them. That’s the kind of humanities thing that I bring to it is how we think about meaning. So Roostervane.com. You can find me on Twitter, @cjcornthwaite is my handle. You can just search my name, Chris Cornthwaite. Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever I’m always happy to chat.

33:40 Emily: Wonderful. And last question for the interview, Chris, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be related to something we’ve already discussed in this interview, or it could be something completely else.

33:52 Chris: Educate. Education, learn. It’s amazing how many people can spend five or ten years learning about the nuances of a field, but don’t actually want to take any time to learn about the basics of personal finance. I would say read as much as you can, listen to a podcast like this one, and just educate yourself and you’ll be empowered to actually create wealth and to get over some of those mindsets we’ve talked about.

34:18 Emily: Wonderful advice. Thank you so much for joining me for this interview, Chris.

34:22 Chris: Thank you, Emily. My pleasure.

Outtro

34:24 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This Grad Student Travels for Free by Churning Credit Cards

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In this episode, Emily interviews Julie Chang, a graduate student at Stanford University. Julie’s partner and parents live on the East Coast and she has family abroad, so during grad school she has pursued a specific credit card rewards strategy known as churning to help her travel hack. She has regularly flown domestically and internationally for several years almost exclusively using points and miles instead of cash. Julie details how she manages her churning strategy, including how she meets minimum spending requirements on her stipend, and how she has changed her strategy during the pandemic.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

grad student travel hacking

Teaser

00:00 Julie: Even if you don’t want to start off with churning right away, my best advice is to just get a credit card with a low minimum spend, and at least use that to start building your credit score and acquiring some points.

Introduction

00:18 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode eight, and today my guest is Julie Chang, a graduate student at Stanford university. Julie’s partner and parents live on the East coast and she has family abroad, so during grad school, she has pursued a specific credit card rewards strategy known as churning to help her travel hack. She has regularly flown domestically and internationally for several years, almost exclusively using points and miles instead of cash. Julie details, how she manages her churning strategy, including how she meets minimum spending requirements on her stipend and how she has changed her strategy during the pandemic.

01:06 Emily: Julie and I don’t go deeply into the topic of who can or should pursue credit card rewards or how to get started, so I’m going to point you to some free resources I’ve created on those topics. They’re all linked from the show notes for this episode, which you can find pfforphds.com/podcast. My article titled “Perfect Use of a Credit Card” explains how to avoid all the pitfalls that easily accompany credit card usage by putting in place some pretty stringent rules. You will have to be well-practiced and following strict rules in this area if you want to succeed with credit card rewards. My article titled “How to Establish Credit in the US” is for people who have recently arrived in the U S or who have lived in the US for many years, without taking out any debt. It explains how to get your first toe hold in the world of credit and how to build your credit score over time. Finally, in 2019, I published a podcast interview with Seonwoo Lee titled “How To Make Money Without Working: Credit Card rewards and 529s”. That episode is quite complimentary to this one, and I recommend listening to it. If you want to go deeper into the subject. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Julie Chang.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further

02:20 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Julie Chang. She is a graduate student at Stanford currently, and we’re going to be talking about credit card hacking, credit card rewards strategies today. So, Julie, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further?

02:34 Julie: Sure. I’m a fifth year bioengineering PhD student at Stanford, and I’m currently studying how the mechanical properties of the extracellular matrix affect cell behavior and specifically in the context of cancer.

Credit Cards vs. Debit Cards

02:48 Emily: Yeah. Excellent. You have done what I used to view as the impossible, which is having a strategy for credit card rewards during graduate school. And I always thought there’s a little bit out of reach, so I’m really excited to learn more about credit card reward strategies in general, and then the strategy that you use in particular. Let’s just start off for listeners with what are the general advantages for using a credit card versus using a debit card? Because I know for me, I definitely started out just using debit cards. I was a little bit afraid of credit card. So what are the advantages?

03:22 Julie: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of main advantages. The first is that you can earn rewards often in the form of points or miles, and then you can actually redeem this for either cash back or for miles to fund plane tickets. And on another point is that you can actually use credit cards to help build credit history. So in the future, when you’re buying a house, getting a mortgage, having a high credit score is super important.

03:50 Emily: And another benefit I’ll add to the two that you just mentioned is there’s a little bit more fraud protection available for credit cards. It’s quite easy to have a fraudulent charge reversed, erased on a credit card versus maybe more of a process or maybe even potentially impossible with certain charges on debit cards. Those are three, three great ones.

Pursuing Credit Card Rewards

04:08 Emily: Specifically on the rewards aspect of using credit cards, what are the different kinds of goals you might be able to pursue?

04:15 Julie: Right. Sometimes you can acquire airline points, so you can get a lot of Delta points, American airline points, and then you can use those to re redeem tickets, either domestically or internationally. On the other hand, you can also use points for cash back. Then you can actually use this to kind of pay yourself back when you purchase, say groceries or anything else. It kind of depends on the credit card.

04:43 Emily: Yeah. I know when I was in graduate school and I started learning about this area, I definitely only tried to pursue the static cashback, because I guess I sort of felt like the travel rewards were a little bit more, it’s a little bit higher level. It’s a little bit more complicated. It’s something you have to learn. There’s more of a learning curve on that. So I definitely stuck with the static stuff at first, which I think is a pretty common approach for people. But both of those are different kinds of strategies that will work. For you in particular why are we talking to this today? Why is this a strategy that you have learned a lot about and decided to pursue during your graduate degree?

05:19 Julie: For me, I’m doing my PhD program in California, but my family lives in New York, so then I would have to go back during breaks and my partner, he’s actually also a PhD student in Atlanta, so this requires a lot of traveling. Also a lot of my relatives are in Taiwan, so occasionally I make these international trips. Basically my perspective is using credit cards on things that I would purchase anyway and slowly build points to then redeem for these flight tickets. My goal was to not spend too much money on flights during grad school, but I don’t want money to be kind of a limiting factor in that I can’t see my partner or my family.

06:08 Emily: Okay. And was there…when did the shift happen? When did you set this as a goal? Was it just when you were starting graduate school, when you were looking at the geography of the situation and realizing the challenge, or did you go for while paying for flights in cash and then said, well, there must be a better way here.

06:23 Julie: I got into it just before graduate school since, I think to apply for credit cards, it’s a lot easier to apply for credit cards after you’re a certain age. It might be 21. So before then, I wasn’t really applying for credit cards anyway. And I think just when I turned 21 and then it was right before I went to graduate school, so it kind of worked out in that sense. And then I just kind of learned about it from searching online.

06:54 Emily: Yeah. And would you say that you’ve done more traveling than you would have been able to do just if you were paying straight cash? What’s been the effect on your finances, I guess?

07:06 Julie: Yeah. Essentially I typically don’t really need to factor flights into my budget, which is really, really awesome. And basically when I need to travel, I typically am able to, of course I still need to look at my budget overall, but there is a lot of flexibility. Another example is that my partner and I, we were able to go on a vacation to Greece, which typically the tickets might be a little bit more expensive and because we were able to pay for our flights in points, then maybe we have a little bit more flexibility in our budget for say housing or for food, during our vacation. So it definitely just reduces the impact of needing to spend a lot on a vacation.

07:50 Emily: Oh yeah. I mean, I can’t remember exactly what I was saving to spend on travel during graduate school, but I think it was at least a couple hundred dollars per month per person. And that was really mostly just for like obligation travel, like I have to go see my family, I want to go attend this wedding. So yeah, it’s really inspiring what you’ve been able to do. I’m really excited to dive into the mechanics of exactly how this happened.

The Basics of Credit Card Churning

08:13 Emily: What you have been doing as a strategy known as credit card churning. Can you explain what that is?

08:20 Julie: Yeah. Basically the bulk of the cash back from credit cards isn’t necessarily through the exact amount of money that you spend. It’s actually through these bonuses of signing up for new credit cards. For example, in some credit cards, you can get a certain number of points, usually it’s pretty high, maybe like 50,000 points, if you spend a certain amount of money in a few months. So a lot of cards you might have to spend $1,000 to $4,000 in about three months. And these points have 50,000 points. It could translate to say $500 if one is 1 cent, but if you can actually increase the value, say 1.50 cents per point, it becomes $750.

09:05 Emily: Yeah. I think maybe another way of phrasing what you just said is the amount of money that you need to spend to gain a given level of rewards is much less when you do that through signup bonuses, rather than through ongoing spending and ongoing cash back. There’s this lucrative period available right when you sign up for a new card. It’s the incentive that they’re giving you to do your business through that card versus some others. It’s this opportunity to capitalize on, right when you first switch onto a card. And so credit card churning is like very frequent switching onto new cards to gain those early on sign up bonuses. Is that right?

09:42 Julie: Yes, that’s correct.

Keeping Track of of Credit Cards

09:44 Emily: Okay, awesome. For you, as I said earlier, this is a little bit of an advanced level strategy. How do you keep track of all these cards that you either currently have, or maybe ones that you need to close, or maybe ones that you’re planning on opening? What is your mechanically…how do you keep track of all this?

10:04 Julie: Oh yeah. I basically do this through an old-fashioned spreadsheet. I color code everything. I typically put when I sign up for a credit card. And this is especially important if a credit card has an annual fee, because potentially you might want to cancel or downgrade the card when the annual fee comes up because it might not be worth keeping the card.

10:27 Emily: Yeah. So you keep track of when you sign up for a card, and then when one year, let’s say, is up for something that has an annual fee. Do you keep track of anything else? Maybe the minimum spend amount I would imagine, and the time period over what you have to do that?

10:40 Julie: Yeah. I keep track of all of that. I actually go into more detail in which I actually, every month I update all the point totals that I have and I also keep track of all of my redemption. So I think that might be a little bit extra in the amount of information I’m keeping track of, but for me it’s actually pretty fun to just tabulate everything.

11:01 Emily: Yeah. I could totally see how this would be fun because there’s kind of two halves of this, right? There’s like the accumulation of points and then there’s the planning of how am I going to actually use these points. And that is the really pleasurable par, I think, especially if one enjoys planning then getting to play around with different scenarios and so forth. Well, let’s come back to that in a few moments.

Meeting Minimum Spends

11:20 Emily: We just mentioned the minimum spending requirements like between one and $4,000 over a period of some months, that might seem like a lot of money on a graduate student’s stipend. So how do you actually make sure that you’re going to meet these minimum spends without, as you said earlier, outspending your budget, outspending your planned expenditures?

11:40 Julie: First I just want to be clear that everyone has to be very careful and tracking their finances. And you’re definitely in a very privileged position if you are able to do this. But for me, I look at many different factors. So one is timing. If I have a big purchase coming up, then I might as well use it in a minimum, spend another, more specific for graduate students is if you have conferences. So conferences can be pretty expensive. Sometimes you have to use your own credit card, so why not actually use it to help meet a minimum spend? Another thing that I’ve done is paying stuff in advance for other people, especially my family, where, for example, if we have a cell phone bill, I can pay that ahead of time. Another one that actually found out more recently is that you can actually pay estimated taxes with credit cards. And this is really interesting because with a credit card, there is a fee of, I think the lowest is 1.87%. But say, if you have a credit card that does 2% or even a special credit card, if the rotating category matches 5%, you can actually make money by paying the estimated taxes, which you actually have to do anyway. However, if you don’t have a card for that, if you’re actually trying to meet a minimum spend, perhaps it is worth it to pay that fee to kind of help you get that really high bonus for the credit card.

How Many Cards is Too Many

13:09 Emily: So for you, like let’s say in 2019, how many new cards did you sign up for?

13:19 Julie: I would say I haven’t signed up for too many cards just because I’ve been slowing down a little bit towards the end of my PhD, but I would guess maybe three to four cards, so nothing too crazy. I know there’s people that are super into it that might sign up for 10-20 cards per year.

13:36 Emily: Yeah. Well, that’s 10-20, that’s a number of more minimum spends that you need to hit. Actually three to four sounds like fast, but like okay, reasonable pace for graduate students. I think that this strategy of keeping track of minimum spends and what your expenses might be that are coming up that might help you meet those minimum spends, it goes actually really well with the strategy I love to talk about, which is that of targeted savings accounts. Not specifically the saving in advance for doing things, which is also a good idea, but actually more the planning aspect that comes along with keeping account budgeting like that is that you can look out over the next six months or over the next year and say, yup, I know that this large expense is hitting in this month. I know this needs to be, be paid here. And I definitely found that there were some one, two month periods when I was in graduate school where I would have like a flight I needed to buy, well, I was buying them in cash, a flight I needed to buy, and my six month car insurance premium was coming up and there were some other maybe some housewares or electronics purchase we need to make. There were definitely months where they would hit kind of like that, and I was budgeting for those and using targeted savings and thought that was great, but hey, the next level up from that is yes, save in advance, but why not also put it on a credit card and meet a minimum spend that you’re gearing up for anyway.

When to Apply for a New Card

14:48 Emily: This is more of a personally motivated question, but how far in advance of, let’s say a major purchase that you know is coming up on a certain date, would you need to sign up for a card? How do you actually time this so you know that you have the card ready to go when you actually need to make the purchase.

15:04 Julie: Yeah. I mean, I would probably do at least a month just because you have to apply for the card. And in some cases, if you’re not approved right away, you might have to wait a week or so. And that doesn’t mean that they’ll reject you, it’s just something that is part of the process. Another is if you put a credit freeze on your credit score, so that’s actually something I’ve done to be extra careful, you might have to lift your credit freeze, and that also takes some time. So I would budget at least a month.

15:35 Emily: Yeah. I know there’s a little bit of a game there because you need to give some buffer time in advance, but you also need to have enough purchases within the period of time to get the bonus to go through.

Commercial

15:46 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Using Credit Card Churning to Fund Travel

16:50 Emily: So you mentioned the challenge that you were facing of living far from your family and your partner, and you also mentioned, okay, you’ve been able to, for instance, you were able to go to Greece with your partner. What were some of the other benefits that you’ve experienced by doing this? For instance, have you ballparked like how much money you have not spent on travel by doing this strategy? Or can you tell us a little bit more about the upside?

17:13 Julie: It’s definitely quite a bit of money that I’ve saved through travel. I don’t remember exactly how much, but for example, I would go from California to New York round trip before the pandemic, probably two to three times a year. Then in addition, I would also go to Atlanta or vice versa maybe a couple of times a year. So it’s definitely many flights that I’ve saved on. And pretty much I’ve been able to not pay cash for most of my flights during grad school.

17:44 Emily: Yeah. It’s just an incredible benefit to not have to have that aspect in your budget, of paying for travel when you know that you have to do it like this. It’s really amazing that money can come kind of from nowhere, if you have a great credit score, if you’re really on top of your budget, if you have a spreadsheet like you do and you’re keeping track of everything and being diligent. It’s just amazing how much money you can free up for your budget. So I hope this is sounding like good news to some people in the audience who are currently spending more than they would like to on travel.

Credit Card Churning Strategies

18:14 Emily: For you, like when you’re realizing you’ve come to the end of a one period of minimum spend and you start thinking, well, what’s going to be my next card, how do you search out these cards? How do you actually find that’s going to be the best fit for you?

18:27 Julie: There’s a lot of very active communities on the internet. Specifically on Reddit, there’s a subreddit called churning that has all of these. There’s a lot of specific websites such as Doctor of Credit. Actually, I keep pretty up to date and people will typically announce whether there might be a new card coming up. But for me as a graduate student, if I know I don’t have any big purchases coming up, it’s also a practice of self-restraint, where I know I shouldn’t apply for new credit card, and instead kind of look at my portfolio of credit cards and see perhaps certain cards have increased points per certain category and maximize that instead.

19:10 Emily: I see. And then you mentioned earlier cards with annual fees, specifically canceling a card with an annual fee before that second fee comes up. How do those overall play into your strategy? Is it something that people should consider or maybe should avoid? What are your thoughts about that?

19:26 Julie: I would say definitely for beginners, maybe focusing on cards without annual fees because they also have much lower minimum spends, so it would be pretty easy to hit minimum spend. But for me, the only card I have with an annual fee that I currently use is a Chase Sapphire Reserve. For me, I always have to do a calculation, whether it’s worth it for me to keep the card for the next year. There’s certain factors that I consider. One is looking at the benefits that the card offers and if I would actually use that, and another that I might consider is whether keeping the card will help me increase the value of the points that I’m spending. For example, with the Chase Sapphire Reserve, each point I can actually redeem for 1.50 cents instead of just 1 cent.

20:19 Emily: Yeah. I actually, so also for me, the Chase Sapphire Reserve was the first or maybe the second card with an annual fee that I ever signed up for. And I actually just canceled it a few months ago because I was like, I’m not traveling. I’m not traveling anytime soon. I don’t want to pay this fee because I do not see any redemption on the horizon. What I did specifically with that was I transferred the points to another Chase branded card that we had figuring at some point in the future, I’ll probably get the Reserve or the Preferred again, transfer the points back and be able to redeem them at at least that much value, if not more/better later on. So that was my particular solution to that, but I’m glad that you reevaluated and decided, okay, I’m going to keep this card for the time being. It does have some pretty nice perks to it for a high fee.

Churning During the Pandemic

21:04 Emily: Speaking of the pandemic and recent changes, what has been going on with you and this strategy in the last six months?

21:11 Julie: Yeah. So there has actually been a lot of changes to the point space since the pandemic and I think these effects are likely to stay for quite a while. So obviously I’m not redeeming my points for travel; however, for Chase, because they realize this they’re actually allowing you to redeem 1.50 cent per point for groceries. Before it used to be just travel, but now it’s actually for grocery purchases. So for me, if I put my grocery spend on the Chase Sapphire reserve, I’m able to redeem those points for the groceries. And also since I had a few canceled flights this earlier this year, then I’m not really looking to apply for cards that will give me more miles, but I might look for cars that give me a little bit more flexibility in how I can use those points.

22:01 Emily: Hmm. So when I thought about the pandemic and affecting my travel plans, both personally and professionally, I’m already in a period of not applying for cards right now because my husband and I are looking forward to buying a house in a few months. And so we don’t want to be messing around with our credit right now. If not, I think I would probably still be signing up for stuff because I, again, hypothetically, I think my attitude would be well, get the points, bank them now, spend them later at some point. Why is that not your approach? Why do you prefer the flexibility right now?

Julie (22:36): Well, so actually right now, I’m not really applying for cards and I’m just kind of using my current portfolio of cards to reach or to kind of build up the points, as you said. I might look towards applying for a card later this year, but I’m actually not in a rush to apply for new cards right now.

Planning Point Spending

22:59 Emily: Yeah. You said you updated your spreadsheet monthly with figuring out how many points you currently have and with what providers and so forth, how do you go about planning how you’re going to spend the points? What is that process like for figuring out, okay, these points transfer to this airline, you know, all of the complexity that goes along with that.

23:18 Julie: Yeah. That I would say is actually the hard part of figuring out how to use those points. There’s certain programs, like Chase, where it’s pretty easy to redeem the points because you can just do it through any airline by using Chase travel, but certain cards you can actually transfer it to specific airlines and convert it into miles, which is actually, even though it’s harder, it could be better because you could get better value for your points. For me, I like having points in several different companies, for example, also in American Express. I also have points specifically in Delta, so then whenever I, for example, if I want to travel to New York, I can look at what are the different points I have and figure out which program I want to redeem it in for the best value.

24:10 Emily: I’m also thinking that some of this, the planning of the redemption might be specific to your local city. You obviously live in a major city with several different airports and airlines to choose from. I’m also reflecting, I recently moved from Seattle to the Los Angeles area. So in Seattle it’s all about Alaska. Like Alaska is by far the winner airline right there, so I was always trying to sort of figure out how to get Alaska airline points versus other things. Now that I live in a different kind of city I’m thinking, well, my strategy might need to be different. Do you know of any resources where people can find out more about the airlines that service their local airports or maybe their destination where they commonly go, they want to figure out how to do that?

24:51 Julie: I think the best way to figure that out is just looking through the specific airline website and figuring out which destinations your city travels to. But otherwise also just looking online to see what other people tend to do in your city.

25:08 Emily: Yeah. And I guess if you live in a major city, like the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, Los Angeles, there’s going to be plenty of conversation around how to do this in cities like that. Well, is there anything else you want to add to tell the audience more about your strategy or what you’ve been able to do with it?

25:26 Julie: I think as a graduate student, even if you don’t want to start off with churning right away, my best advice is to just get a credit card with a low minimum spend and at least use that to start building your credit score and acquiring some points.

Best Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

25:43 Emily: So Julie, as we wrap up this interview, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

25:50 Julie: My best financial advice would be to start early. Many financial related actions serve their greatest benefits when done early, so the effects can be compounded over time. And I think this not only applies to investments compounding over time, but also any positive practices that you do such as saving money on food by not eating out too much or using credit cards to your advantage.

26:14 Emily: Yeah, absolutely agree. Starting early, I mean, a lot of graduate students might feel like they don’t have a lot of options right now, especially living on a lower stipend, but anything you can do any habits that you can form any even habits of mind that you can work on, it’s all going to benefit you throughout your time in graduate school, after that going into your career, and really, I like to think of it as, if you build up these habits and practices and thought patterns right now during graduate school, once you get that higher salary later, you’re going to be able to like hit the ground running blast through financial goals, when you get to that point, if you’ve done the sort of mental preparation beforehand, even if you don’t see a lot of actual financial progress earlier on.

26:57 Emily: Thank you so much that advice, and thank you so much for joining me today, telling the audience about your strategy. I’m really excited post buying a house to be back on the credit card rewards game so this is really inspiring to me.

27:11 Julie: Thank you.

Outtro

27:13 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Student’s Intricate Budgeting System Uses Cash Symbolically

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alicia Jones, a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the creator of the YouTube channel Alicia Does Adulting. Alicia explains in detail her intricate budgeting system, which involves creating a zero-based budget every two weeks, allocating cold hard cash into envelopes, contributing to her debt avalanche, and funding her targeted savings accounts. She uses this budget to keep her intimately connected with her spending decisions and accountable to her financial goals. Alicia and her husband have paid off $70,000 of debt in the past year and a half and now have a positive net worth.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Alicia: I try to turn whatever I can into a game. And finance has become a game for me. I do the little colored charts. I want to see exactly how much money I can put towards savings or debt each month and that continues to motivate me.

Introduction

00:18 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast, a higher education In personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season seven, episode six. And today my guest is Alicia Jones, a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the creator of the YouTube channel, Alicia Does Adulting. Alicia explains, in detail, her intricate budgeting system, which involves creating a zero based budget every two weeks, allocating cold, hard cash into envelopes, contributing to her debt, avalanche and funding her targeted savings accounts. She uses this budget to keep her intimately connected with her spending decisions and accountable to her financial goals. So far Alicia, and her husband has paid off $70,000 of debt in a year and a half and now have a positive net worth.

01:12 Emily: You’ll hear an exciting new addition to the interview today, which is a couple of questions contributed live by members of the Personal Finance for PhDs community. Going forward, members of the community are invited to attend my podcast recording sessions and ask their own questions of my guests. If you would like to participate in the interviews as well, all you have to do is join the community at pfforphds.community. If you’d like to check out my schedule of upcoming podcast recording sessions, you can find that pfforphds.com/podcast. Joining the community is an excellent way to support the podcast. Plus, you’ll receive myriad other benefits. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alicia Jones from Alicia Does Adulting.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:58 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Alicia Jones from Alicia Does Adulting, which is the name of her YouTube channel. And Alicia has really fantastic story to tell us, but really primarily, she’s here to teach us her budgeting system, which is quite intricate. And I highly recommend that you go check out her YouTube channel. It’s actually really fascinating. You’ll be hearing more about it as we go forward. Ao Alicia, please introduce yourself a little bit further for our audience.

02:26 Alicia: Well, thank you so much for having me. This is super exciting. My name is Alicia. I’m a third year doctoral student and I go to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaige. I am studying kinesiology. I actually got my masters from U of I in kinesiology as well. And my research interests are kind of varied. I’ve not had the most traditional grad student experience. I am running on average three studies at once, just because of the way my program is. Overall, my research is how behavioral changes impact the overall wellbeing of people with and without disabilities. I also work in MS work. I work in breast cancer work. I kind of do a little bit of everything, but it’s nice being in kinesiology because you get to wear leggings to class sometimes. If you’re looking for a major or concentration, highly recommend exercise science for that.

03:20 Emily: All right. That’s really fun. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And along the way of your grad school journey, or maybe before, I don’t know, you developed an interest in personal finance, and in particular, you started your YouTube channel, Alicia Does Adulting. The channel name is quite general, but I think that you mostly talk about personal finance stuff, is that right?

03:39 Alicia: Yeah. The way that I introduced the channel is that I’m attempting to get my life together and I’m focusing on finances first. Eventually I would like to fully adult with all the aspects of adulting, but I’m not there yet. I’m still working on the money part.

03:55 Emily: Yeah. Well, the money part is going to, it takes a lifetime to work all this stuff out.

Alicia’s Budgeting System

The Basics

03:59 Emily: Really excited to get to the topic of our conversation today, which is on your budgeting system, which of course, when I saw your YouTube videos, I was absolutely fascinated by this. Please, I know it’s going to take a little while to explain, but just kind of walk us through all the different elements that you use for your budgeting.

04:14 Alicia: Definitely. I will start off with, I’m not saying that this budgeting system is for everyone. Everyone has their own way of making this work for them. I actually originally started doing a monthly budget and it failed horribly and I started playing around with it from there. The way that I will describe my budgeting system is that it is a zero-based, paycheck-to-paycheck budget.

04:41 Alicia: What does that mean? Zero-based means that I take any remaining penny after my bills, expenses, free spending money, any of that, and it gets given a specific job. So before the pandemic, that was pretty much exclusively going towards debt. When the pandemic hit, I switched my goals and I wanted to save some money, so it all went there. So I have $0 left after my paychecks are all cleared. I do keep a little bit of money in my checking account just because math is not always my friend and sometimes I forget something. I leave about a hundred dollars cushion. So you don’t have to worry about overdraft fees this way.

05:23 Alicia: Then I do paycheck to paycheck. Between my husband and I, we have anywhere between four and eight or nine jobs at once. The paycheck to paycheck system worked well for me because every other Friday we each had a steady income coming in on those days. All of the bills that come up during that pay period, I take care of all of that during that paycheck. Then if I’m saving up for something, I can kind of devote that. It comes down to a lot of planning and a little bit of strategy, I guess.

05:56 Emily: Yeah. Let me make sure understand exactly what’s going on here, because this is definitely different from how I budget and probably how most people do it, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. When you say that you have the zero based budget, is what you mean that when you receive your pay or at least every second Friday, when you’re settling up, you are at that point, allocating all of the money for the upcoming two weeks, is that right?

06:20 Alicia: I do it within the week. Anything that was due on that Friday, I account it starting there up until the next Thursday. Whenever the bill is hit, for the most part, I tend to pay my bills about two weeks in advance, just because I’d never want to miss it. That just tends to be my system, but if you look at a true paycheck to paycheck, it would be within that Friday to the following Thursday.

Dealing with Variable Expenses

06:46 Emily: Okay. And then I understand that the bills that have come in, that’s a fixed amount, you know what it is. What about money that’s sort of up to you, like your grocery spending or some discretionary money. Are you allocating a maximum that you’re going to put towards that? Or how do you handle variable expenses?

07:05 Alicia: This is where my system probably gets more complicated to people, but it’s what works for me. I use a cash envelope system on top of it. For groceries, for example, for our household, every paycheck, I set aside $300 for household, so groceries and whatever else might come about, but then I put everything on credit cards. If you watch my channel, you’ll see I will do an expense tracker where I go through every single penny that I spent, then I actually will take the money out of the cash envelopes. The reason why I like this system is I am a chronic spender. I actually managed to get myself into $15,000 of debt in my early twenties and I never want to be in credit card debt like that again. This is kind of like a checks and balance system. If I didn’t have that check for me personally, if I say I’m only spending $50 on clothing, and then I find a $75 outfit that I really want, in my brain, I still want credit card. I want to put it on a credit card. I want it now, that kind of thing.

Alicia: What I can do with my system is, “okay, I bought the $75 outfit, I have to make a sacrifice somewhere else because I don’t have any flexibility.” That $25 could come out of my household to make up the difference, but then I can’t spend all of my money on household. It kind of becomes a checks and balance system. And for me, I’m flexible with it. Some people, with the envelope system, it’s very much like when you hit the end of your envelope, you cannot spend any more. And I just give myself a little bit more leeway. Things come up, or sometimes you just need to de-stress a little bit and maybe you go out and have a drink with a friend or something. As long as I’m making sacrifices and none of it stays on my credit card, then I’m happy with it.

09:01 Emily: So the cash aspect is actually a stand in for just, this is the limit. The important part is not literally that you’re using cash because ultimately when you make the purchases, you are not using cash, you are using credit cards. But the cash is just sort of a visual and physical reminder that, okay, that’s the end of the envelope, you’ve reached the end, now you must reallocate if you need to go beyond that. I definitely like this aspect of it because I am not that strict with my budget anymore. I used to be quite strict in a similar way, like, okay, I overspent here, I’ll have to transfer from somewhere else now. I sort of let it go, but I definitely find it attractive to, at the end of the day, make sure everything’s added up to zero to account for the entire paycheck.

How Alicia Keeps Her System Flexible

09:43 Emily: Okay, we’ve talked about it being a paycheck to paycheck budget, a zero based budget. You’re allocating every single dollar that’s coming in. We talked about the cash envelopes. Are there any other elements to your budget that you’d like to share?

09:56 Alicia: I think the big thing for me, and it’s one of the things that I think some people don’t understand if you’ve watched the channel for a little bit. It’s strict and slightly complicated, but it also allows for a lot of flexibility, and that was something that was really important to me. Everyone that’s listening to this is either in grad school or wants to go to grad school or has experienced grad school and we know how stressful it is. And I try to add as little extra stressors to my life as I can, but I have a bunch of student loan debt that I really want to pay off. I have a bunch of financial goals, like I’m working towards technically retiring early. I want to have that kind of cushion in my bank account. So I want to start working towards those goals, but I also just don’t want to stress myself any more. It is a little bit time consuming, which is why I’ll say it’s probably not for everyone, but it is something to potentially give it a try. It’s been really fun on the YouTube channel in particular, because I get to hear people trying my system and it was never really meant for other people to try it, it’s just what worked for me, so it’s been really cool to hear success stories about how it works. If you’re interested in it, definitely give it a shot.

11:11 Emily: There was one more thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is, I believe that you also use sinking funds or, I use the term targeted savings accounts for that. Is that the same as your envelopes or is that a separate sort of variation on that?

11:25 Alicia: It’s very similar, but I leave my sinking funds online because they’re usually bigger purchases and I just don’t want to have that cash on me, personally. I put all of my sinking funds into one checking account and then I have an online tracker for everything. It’s a similar kind of grace system of, I actually have three sinking funds that are negative right now, and it’s because I’ve borrowed from other places. We do an annual trip to Canada, but we didn’t this year because the borders were closed. So I have some money set aside in that account that I can borrow from. I do highly recommend sinking funds or targeted savings. They have been a massive game changer for me because that was one of the ways that when I originally started to budget without much guidance, those types of things like needing new tires, I logically knew that those that was going to happen, but I never planned for it. And then the month would come and it would be a disaster and it would go on a credit card and then I’d carry on. And that’s how I got $15,000 of credit card debt.

12:31 Emily: Yeah. Can you actually, for the listener, explain a little bit further what a sinking fund or a targeted savings account is, and actually give a few maybe examples or your list of which ones you have named.

12:41 Alicia: Definitely. Sinking funds and targeted savings accounts are things that you’re saving up for that you know will eventually happen. For me and my family, we celebrate Christmas. Christmas happens same time every single year, and I know approximately how much I want to spend. So instead of in December pulling $600 out of my budget, every single month, I put $50 into a Christmas sinking fund account. I have some for the Canada trip that I mentioned, which is usually about a $2,000 expense, so I save a couple hundred dollars every single month, so it doesn’t feel super overwhelming to me.

13:19 Alicia: I actually did some research into sinking funds because they were such a game changer and I’m a grad student nerd, so I wanted to know what the literature said, and it’s actually a concept of being able to allocate money with a name. I don’t know if any listener or if you might have this experience, but I’ve actually always been a semi-decent saver. I always had money and usually several thousand dollars, at least in my savings account, but then my tires would blow up and I would need new ones and I’d put it on a credit card because to me in my brain that wasn’t an emergency. I shouldn’t take that out of my emergency savings. That money always has to be there. So by allocating this little bit of money that just sits to the side that has a name, it makes the rational jump of, “Oh, I need new tires. I have a car maintenance fund. It comes from the car maintenance.” That is probably one thing I will keep the rest of my life, no matter what. It is a massive game changer for me.

14:19 Emily: Yeah. I absolutely love sinking funds and targeted savings accounts as well. I started using them in grad school as well, when, similar to you, I had some expenses come up and in our case we didn’t go into credit card debt, but we just had to say no to a bunch of stuff that we didn’t want to say no to. And it kind of helped us realize, okay, well we do need to do some advanced planning for these sort of large expenses that come up every so often. So I started using them in grad school as well. And I did have a year when I didn’t use them, which was the year from when we left Durham, where we were living during graduate school and moved to Seattle. And so for that first year in Seattle, everything was an upheaval and we had no idea, it was a lot harder to predict your expenses once you moved to new place, et cetera, et cetera. But after that year, I was like, “Nope, I’m tired of living this way. I need to go back to having the targeted savings accounts in place.” So they’re back in place and still in play, which has been wonderful. Of course, 2020 has thrown things off quite a bit. Like you didn’t end up using your Canada trip money and certainly we’ve had spending opportunities that we anticipated that didn’t happen, so there’s definitely been some reallocation, but you kind of have to roll with it.

Using a Combination of Cash and Credit

15:25 Emily: Actually we have a question that just came in from one of my Personal Finance for PhD community members. I invite my community members to listen in on my podcast recordings. So if you are listening to this podcast and you want to be in on these recording sessions and ask your own questions, I invite you to join the community. You can find it at pfforphds.community. The question that just came in is: why or how did you decide to use both cash and a credit card and not just cash? What do you do with the cash since you’re not actually spending it? And this is exactly the question that I was gonna ask too, so please go ahead.

16:00 Alicia: Yeah. This is one of the biggest questions that I get. The big reason why I didn’t want to use just cash is because I’m on campus very late at night. And so I didn’t feel comfortable. I have a very relatively safe campus, but I just didn’t want to have any extra money on me that I didn’t need to have. I’m also not a purse or bag carrier, so I have just like a little wallet that has my keys. So having the credit cards was more convenient for me and some places on my campus actually don’t take cash, they only take cards. So the few times I’d like go to pay for something. I would have had to put it on a card anyway. But there are a few benefits for me personally, at least I guess, not just me, but you do get a little bit of extra security. If something goes wrong, if it’s a payment that you didn’t actually make or something like that, there’s security systems built into credit cards, which is beneficial. I have a little bit of extra leeway. If something massive happens, so for a real life example, last night, I had to take my cat to an emergency vet and that is $2,000 and that was not in the budget. That will go on a credit card, which now gives me 30 days to pay it off before any interest hits. That’s a nice benefit. And you also get cash back. Eventually I do want to get into travel hacking, but right now I just use the cash back to help pay off random bills that come up that I wasn’t expecting or kind of like treat yourself things. And on average, I make about a hundred dollars a month on my cash back credit cards, so I’ll take that.

17:42 Emily: Yeah, that definitely helps with the budget as well, to give you a little bit more wiggle room. And then the other part of that question was, so you literally have cash in your home, and it just gets recycled paycheck to paycheck period? What exactly is happening with that cash?

17:56 Alicia: It kind of depends. Before COVID, I was very good at taking that money, putting it into the deposit envelope and taking it right back to the bank. Since I’ve been limiting my trips, it has been getting recycled. So the people at my bank know me very well and they know I have very specific denominations that I asked for. They were very used to me doing it, but it is just kind of like a cycle of cash. So I end my week on a Thursday and usually on Friday is when I will go through all of my expenses and pull out all the cash. If it’s convenient for me to go to the bank, that money just goes back and then goes directly to credit cards. If not, since COVID that money kind of just sits there, and then the next time I need to take out cash, I just don’t take it. So the cash that got left in the bank account that never came out, goes towards the credit cards.

Commercial

18:49 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Debt Repayment Under Alicia’s Budgeting System

19:53 Emily: You mentioned earlier that you’re working on student loan debt repayments, some other debt repayment — how does your debt repayment process figure into the budget?

20:02 Alicia: That’s one of the reasons why I like the zero based budget. I do a debt avalanche. I target one debt at a time and I specifically targeted the highest interest debt to save the most amount of money that I could in interest. I have an allotted amount of all of the previous debt that I’ve paid off. Each month $1,600 actually goes towards debt pretty much no matter what. Maybe in a massive emergency I wouldn’t, but I pretty much do that every month. Then whatever excess money I have goes towards debt. I pay all of my bills, I do all of my cash envelopes and sinking funds, and then every other penny gets thrown towards debt.

20:47 Emily: I see.

20:48 Alicia: It becomes a big part of my budget.

20:50 Emily: Just to clarify, I think when you said all the debt you’ve paid off in the past, what you’re talking about is the minimum payments of each one of the debts that you’ve made in the past that have now been cleared. You’re still quote unquote making that minimum payment. You’re just making it to the next debt and you you’re in your list, the top debt in your list. So it used to be that you had minimum payments of $1,600 and now some portion of that is you just throwing additional money at your current top loan, is that right?

21:18 Alicia: Yep. And so the way it ended up working with the debt avalanche method in particular, pretty much all of my big minimum payments were first. I did, after about five months of starting budgeting, get a $20,000 medical bill, so I put that onto a credit card and I had one year to pay that off and I made the decision to have that as part of my minimum payments and my debt snowball too. It got a lot bigger because of that.

21:44 Emily: Yeah. Wow. I’m so glad to have these examples of real life coming at you. Not that it’s pleasant or happy, but just as instructive as it is for the listeners to learn how you’re dealing with that, because I’m sure a lot of them have had similar experiences or are having similar experiences.

22:00 Emily: One comment about that debt repayment method — I think I made this name up, so I don’t know if anyone else uses it, but I call what you just explained saving first and last. In the personal finance community, we talk a lot about pay yourself first. So as soon as you get paid, you do your debt snowball, you put money towards that, all of your financial goals, you put money there, then you spend whatever remains. But I also used your system of, okay, I have my financial goals, that’s happening right after I get paid, and then whatever money I have left over because I came in under budget in X, Y, Z categories, that also gets saved or thrown into a debt snowball or debt avalanche process. I call that saving first and last because saving last is like not a good idea, but saving first and last to me that was like motivational to come in under budget in these various categories so I would have more money to throw towards the financial goals. Does that work same for you?

22:54 Alicia: Yeah. And I don’t know if you’ve read any of like the gamify literature, but that’s kind of what I do with everything is I try to turn whatever I can into a game. And finance has become a game for me. I do the little color charts. I want to see exactly how much money I can put towards savings or debt each month. And that continues to motivate me. I hadn’t thought about that it was first and last, but it definitely is.

Why This Budgeting Method Works For Alicia

23:19 Emily: Yeah. So you mentioned earlier, your system is complex, it’s intricate. That may not be for everyone, but why have you made it so complex to yourself? Why do you think that this is working well for you?

23:32 Alicia: I think a big part of it is that I am very numbers driven and I wanted to take this journey to learn as much as I could about myself and about my finances, particularly since I’m the spender of my family. I wanted to know every little piece of data and I don’t really show it too much on the channel, but I do run the numbers for myself. I like to see exactly how much I’ve increased in household spending from this time, this year versus last time. It’s complicated, but part of it just feels like I’m learning lessons every single week. And particularly with using cash and credit, I’m having to constantly remind myself that you can have certain things, but you have to make sacrifices. You don’t just get the easy win all the time. You have to balance it out.

24:24 Emily: Yeah. When I talk with people about budgeting, sometimes I talk about the merits of using an app versus like maybe creating your own spreadsheet, or at least doing manual tracking in some manner, even if it is in an app or something. And what I say about that is that, doing these things manually keeps you very intimate with your numbers. It keeps you very closely connected to facing up to the decisions that you’re making and reconciling them. It sounds like that’s why you’re doing that. In terms of recommending the system to anyone else, who do you think the system would work well for?

24:56 Alicia: It has to be someone that’s pretty motivated, I think, because it does take more time than just tracking it within an app. But I think this is someone who, if you’re very motivated by learning, I think that’s probably the biggest thing. I’m constantly diving back into my own spending habits and I really like self help type things. I love working on self-improvement and that’s, I think why I was really drawn to this method of constantly having to learn and adapt and that to me is exciting.

25:30 Emily: Yeah, that sounds wonderful. What motivates you to stick with this now intricate and somewhat time consuming system?

25:40 Alicia: Honestly, one of the biggest thing is accountability. One of the reasons why I first started this channel is I’ve found that the more that I talk about things that I experienced in my life, the more people I find to have experienced similar things, or can relate and give advice. I started talking about money with my friends and family. I started talking about it on my YouTube channel, and if you follow it, you see just about everything that I spend and do and whatnot. Unless I forget something, you see it. Knowing that that’s always there, that my friends are now tracking my progress in some ways, on the times that I’ve just really wanted to go and do something, maybe not super crazy, but a little bit frivolous I don’t because I know someone’s holding me accountable to it. And unfortunately I’m not the type of person that can just hold myself accountable. Having other people has really, really helped me in this journey.

26:39 Emily: Yeah. I’ll say another vote for that as well. My current website, my home on the web is pfforphds.com but during graduate school, I was actually blogging for under a different website, which was evolvingpf.com, Evolving Personal Finance. And I similarly, not as frequently as you, but I would do at least monthly reports of this was everything I spent and this was a very popular thing to do on the internet at that time. And I’m sure it’s still maybe on YouTube as well. And it was really, really great accountability for us, helping us to stick to our goals. We use that during the time that we were in graduate school when we really had a tight budget and we had high, lofty goals for our money. It seems less necessary in my life now, post PhD, so I’ve kind of moved on from it, but it was a really, really useful tool for that time. And just actually to mention the community again, this is something that any listener can do through the PFforPhDs Community, if you choose to use it that way. It can be great for accountability, and you’re welcome to report all your spending inside that community as well, if you want. It’ll be private. It won’t be open for everyone to see, but you will have the other community members there to at least in theory, hold you accountable.

How Alicia Uses Her Budgeting Method for Achieving Financial Goals

27:48 Emily: I was also thinking about your debt repayment journey, and now you said earlier that you’ve also started saving up more since the pandemic. Maybe your priorities are a little bit different. Can you talk about using this budgeting system and how you’re motivated to use it towards your financial goals?

28:03 Alicia: Yeah. So I started this journey with $120,000 of debt and actually just this month, I’m under the $50,000 mark, so we’re making some pretty good progress. But it comes back to the idea of kind of gamifying everything. I turn as much as I can of my life into a game to keep it fun and interesting. Each month being able to see my savings account get higher, and then you get additional interest, which is also a nice little boost because it feels like free money. And then seeing my interest amounts go down when I pay off debt or just seeing the numbers go down. Each and every month I track that I track both of those and then I also track my net worth. And so each of those has become a game to me, and again, I try to not have too much stress in my life, so if my net worth goes down, I don’t beat myself up over it. I know it’s part of the journey. When the pandemic hit, I was working really hard to pay off all of my debt by May of 2021 beause that’s when I turned 30 and I wanted to be debt free by 30. That didn’t happen and that’s not going to happen because pandemic, but now I’ve been able to see my investments grow a little bit. I’ve been able to see my savings grow. Having constant check-ins, or at least regular check-ins really helps keep me motivated.

29:21 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for telling us about that. How do you think being a PhD student interacts with this journey? I know you’re married, so presumably your husband is not a graduate student as well. Do you think that being a PhD student plays into your budgeting or your financial goals at all?

29:39 Alicia: I think in some ways. I think possibly the reason why it’s so complicated is because I do like data as much as I do, and I like being able to see those numbers. Tracking absolutely every single thing, maybe a PhD thing, but I think also being a PhD student and looking at things from more of a logical point of view has also really helped me. Being able to sit down and like logically look at the debt versus how much money I could have in retirement has really helped me on the journey. It’s helped me take some of the emotions out of finance when finance is a very emotional thing. It can be your entire life. I think that’s kind of where the PhD-ness comes out

30:23 Emily: More of like the personality of a PhD student or PhD. Will you please recommend a video or two, if people want to check out your channel, Alicia Does Adulting. So you count cash on your channel, which I had never watched a video of before, but now that I’ve seen on your channel, wow it’s actually pretty riveting. Would you recommend a video or two for people to kind of get an intro to you?

30:46 Alicia: It sounds really odd when you tell people the first time I’m a former bank teller, so the sound of cash is very soothing to me. That’s how I actually found personal finance YouTube, was cash counting. Any of the “budget with me”, you can see in detail how I do my budgets and then see the cash counting, which is very fun. I actually have a video coming out this next week, which is really exciting, so before October 1st and it’s the science of cyclical savings. I’ve kind of evolved my channel a little bit into at least two educational videos per month-ish, when I can.I dug into financial literature and I started to find different savings strategies, investment strategies. Different things that my population for the most part is not PhD students they’re not going to go to academic literature, so I kind of break it down into more lay terms for people, because I genuinely just want everyone to have a good financial standing and for it to not be stressful for them. That will be out next week and I’m really excited to talk about that, and how you can save 80% each month more than if you didn’t have a plan.

31:59 Emily: Oh, wow. Yeah. I’ll definitely watch that video and will, and get from the show notes as well beause it should be out by the time this episode comes out. That sounds fabulous.

Questions from the Personal Finance for PhDs Community

32:06 Emily: I want to take a pause here and invite any members of the Personal Finance for PhDs Community who have a question at this point. This is your opportunity to follow up with Alicia and maybe get some more specifics for your situation.

32:18 Emily: Okay, so we do have one question that came in from a community member. Would you say that using cash is symbolic for you more than anything?

32:27 Alicia: I think symbolic is a really good word for it. I just need one extra thing of accountability and I’m the type of person if I hand over $20 that actually wasn’t as painful for me as having to budget it at the end, so using just cash envelopes, didn’t really work for me in that sense, but physically going through and having to pull money out of my personal spending for an unexpected thing is very symbolic and just kind of helps visualize that process for me.

33:00 Emily: Yeah. I really liked that aspect of it as well. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I actually didn’t really catch on to that just from watching a few of your videos, that the cash was really being recycled, at this point, not before, but at this point.

Best Financial Advice for an Early Career PhD

33:10 Emily: We’ll wrap up with our final question, Alicia, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

33:17 Alicia: My biggest advice is it’s never too early to start and it is never too late to start. Every little bit that I’ve done along the way has helped. Every step you take really does help you and if you have never really thought about looking at your finances, today’s the day to start because you never know when one of these unexpected massive things are going to hit. Since I started my journey, I’ve had a lot of massive financial things happen and because I understood my money and I understood where I was at, I could face $20,000 of medical debt with relative calmness, which I can guarantee you, Alicia from five years ago would have been a sobbing mess over all of it and I was actually pretty calm. My biggest advice is just start. Even if it’s small, even if it’s $5, it really does add up.

34:13 Emily: Yeah, I totally totally agree. And actually just to give people some scope, you said you’ve paid off, I think it’s over $70,000 worth of debt right now. Over what time period did you do that?

34:22 Alicia: It’s been about a year and a half.

34:25 Emily: Oh wow!

34:26 Alicia: Yeah! Our first year was really good and then everything kind of hit the fan. This year has not been great, but we actually went from a negative $56,000 net worth and we’re now in the positives. We’re about to hit $10,000, which might not sound like a big net worth to a lot of people, but it was a big deal for me to be positive.

34:46 Emily: Yeah. You’re now at a $10,000-aire, right? Every order of magnitude we can celebrate. Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation, Alicia, and thank you so much for joining me and sharing your experience and your wisdom with my listeners.

35:00 Alicia: Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been super fun!

Outtro

35:04 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.