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This PhD’s Message for University Housing Is “Work with Us, Not Against Us”

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Travis Seifman, a postdoc at the University of Tokyo. During graduate school, Travis lived in university housing at multiple universities, but chiefly two campuses of the University of California. While the housing was subsidized and convenient to arrange, Travis noted a few downsides and annoyances. Travis and Emily discuss the differences between university housing and private housing and wonder how best to allocate this scarce resource. Travis proposes an adjustment in the approach that universities can take toward their housing administration: “Make it reasonable for adults.” This episode, recorded in August 2019, should serve as a conversation starter regarding the objective of university housing and its administration, especially in the era of COVID-19.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Travis: The purpose of university housing is not to make money for the university. The purpose of university housing is to provide an affordable place to live for students, in light of the fact that we’re only making X amount and they know full well that we’re only making X amount. And in light of the fact that in many of these communities, local housing, regular market housing is extremely expensive. Making it affordable, and then also making it reasonable for adults.

Updates

00:31 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 four, and before we jump into the interview, I have some personal and business updates to share with you. I’m going to start adding short updates to the beginning of each episode. This week, I have a pretty huge one on both the personal and business front, which is that my family moved from Seattle, Washington to Orange County, California at the end of August, my husband and I lived in Seattle for five years and had both of our kids while we lived there, so it’s a big change for all of us. This move brings us one step closer to our next financial goal of buying our very first home, which we are trying to do in 2021. I am documenting all the steps we’re taking to reach that goal in my progress journal inside the Personal Finance for PhDs community. If you want to keep up with our journey, or document your own, or access the multitude of resources in the community, you can find it at pfforphds.community. Now onto the interview.

Introduction

01:35 Emily: My guest is Dr. Travis Seifman, a postdoc at the university of Tokyo. During graduate school, Travis lived in university housing at multiple universities, but chiefly two campuses of the University of California. While the housing was subsidized and convenient to arrange, Travis noted a few downsides and annoyances. We discussed the differences between university housing and private housing, and wonder how best to allocate this scarce resource. Travis proposes an adjustment in the approach that universities can take toward their housing administration: make it reasonable for adults. I expect that this episode recorded in August, 2019 will serve as a conversation starter regarding the objective of university housing and its administration, especially in the era of COVID-19. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Travis Seifman.

Can You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:29 Emily: I have joined me on the podcast today, Dr. Travis Seifman. I’m delighted to have him. Travis, thank you so much for joining me. We’re going to be talking today about university-affiliated housing and Travis’s wide range of experiences with university affiliated housing. So Travis, thank you for joining me today, and will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

02:49 Travis: Thanks so much for having me, Emily. I’ve just finished my PhD in history at UC Santa Barbara, University of California, Santa Barbara, this year. My main research focus is on early modern Japan and Okinawa and rituals, diplomatic relations between them. I previously did two master’s degrees, actually at the University of Hawaii and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Um, so I’ve lived in a few different places. And during my research, I also lived for a short time at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, and at the University of Tokyo.

Travis’s Experience with University-Affiliated Housing

03:25 Emily: And all these different places that you’ve lived, at least some of them, or most of them you’ve lived in what I’m saying is university-affiliated housing. Can you describe the housing situations — main situation or multiple — that you’ve had?

03:37 Travis: Yeah, sure. Just to say it very briefly. When I was at SOAS in London, I stayed in grad student dorms, university housing. University of Hawaii, I stayed in regular private departments for one year. And then for two years, I lived at the East West Center, a federally funded think tank organization located adjacent to the university of Hawaii. So I lived in their dorms for a couple of years. Then, when I moved to UC Santa Barbara, they have dorms for single grad students and they also have family housing. I’ve lived in both of those, and I’ve also lived with my girlfriend at the family housing at UCLA. And during my research trips, I stayed at university dorms, visiting researcher dorms at both University of Ryukyus and university of Tokyo.

04:22 Emily: Why don’t you start with where you UCSB where did your PhD? What was your experience there with that housing?

04:28 Travis: To a certain extent, I would say it’s overall positive, simply in that university housing is always an easy go to option when you’re moving across the country or even moving to a different country. You know how to apply for it. You don’t have to arrive early, or get a hotel while you search for apartments and all this kind of stuff. And it’s often cheaper than the housing that’s around.

04:50 Emily: Do you think that it’s sometimes or usually is cheaper than going off campus because the accommodations are different, like maybe less private, for example, than what you’d get off campus, or have you actually lived in like subsidized university housing?

05:08 Travis: I think everywhere I’ve lived has been subsidized, whether it’s subsidized enough is another question. One place we could start is to just talk about the price. When I was living in the single dorms, the single person dorms at UC Santa Barbara to begin with my first year, the rent was somewhere around $980 per person in a four bedroom apartment. And the apartments in that area are somewhere around that cost. It’s the most I’ve ever paid to live anywhere. It was more than I paid to live in a private apartment in Honolulu. It was more than I’ve paid anywhere else that I’ve lived in my life for dorms in Goleta, which is a town that I had never heard of before I even moved there. We’re not even in Santa Barbara proper.

05:52 Emily: One clarifying question — you were living in a single person room, right? You had a private room in a four bedroom suite, is that right?

06:00 Travis: Yeah, it’s four individual private rooms, shared in a suite. It was $980, or somewhere around there, per month. And after I think, my second or third year there, the grad student association, or perhaps it was the TA union, actually managed to negotiate with the administration to get the rent lowered to $780, which I thought was an incredible victory. I don’t know how typical that is at other campuses, but we did manage to get it down. Regardless of what the market can bear in the area, it’s much more reasonable based on what we’re being paid.

06:38 Emily: Do you mind sharing what your stipend was at that time?

06:41 Travis: I believe it was somewhere around $1,900 a month, so if you spend half of that on rent —

06:46 Emily: Yeah, that’s quite high.

06:48 Travis: Yeah, and meanwhile, the family housing was somewhere around $1,300 a month, so you’re paying $1,300 for an entire apartment. I understand, obviously, subsidizing for families because they need it more, they have more dependents, but just to sort of mentioned that.

07:07 Emily: When you describe family housing or a whole apartment, are you saying it’s a studio or a one bedroom, two bedroom? How large is it?

07:14 Travis: Yeah, so I forget what precisely the rates are, but UCSB family housing has one bedroom apartments, they have two bedroom apartments. There’s a number of different configurations, but basically one bedroom and two bedroom, and I think they charge somewhere around $1,300 a month. And I’ve lived in one of those two bedroom apartments for a year as well.

07:36 Emily: So that was $1,300 for the entire apartment, so split between two presumably adults, maybe they have kids or maybe they don’t.

07:47 Travis: Yeah, exactly. So split between two adults, presumably both adults have some kind of income, but you know, one of them might not, one might be on a grad student stipend and the other one might be stay at home spouse, with children.

08:01 Emily: I think that’s not uncommon among international students, that if you get a spousal visa, the spouse is not permitted to work in the United States.

08:10 Travis: Right. That’s true. I hadn’t actually thought about that point. That’s true.

University-Affiliated Housing vs. the Private Market

08:13 Emily: How did it compare for you as a renter in that place versus if you had gone to the private market, as you had in the past?

08:22 Travis: When you’re working with the university housing, at least you have the advantage of that there’s an entire administration there and you kind of know who to talk to, as opposed to finding the landlord, like how do I actually get in touch with them? And to be fair, I suppose a lot of the rules probably aren’t too different, in terms of whether or not you’re allowed to have pets, most apartments don’t allow pets. Most landlords don’t want you repainting the walls or putting nails in the walls or anything like that. So in terms of a lot of those things, I suppose, I can’t say it’s too different. University housing has the opportunity to be more caring and more understanding about students. The idea that a landlord is in it for the money, that’s just the way things are. The university, ostensibly is not in it for the money. They’re in it to provide housing for members of their community. And so there’s an opportunity there to say, not just anything goes, but just to kind of be understanding of people’s needs, provide allowances, and just be a little bit more open.

09:30 Emily: I think what you’re saying is these students are part of the university community, right? The university is also their employer in many cases, or the administrator of their fellowships. It’s where they’re spending all their time and you’re part of this specific group. It’s not like when you go to the open market and as you said, it’s basically just about price, that’s it. It’s not intentionally trying to foster community or positive relationships between the landlord or the tenants or among the tenants or anything. So university housing is in a different position in that way. And like you said, one of the really positive things that it does is it makes it easy for students who are moving to a new area to find housing. They know they’re not going to be hosed. They’re not going to get in with a bad landlord or whatever. If it’s provided by the university, they know they have already a degree of trust there, is that right?

10:20: Right, right. And I think two places where private housing has the advantage over university housing because of the way that it’s administered, is in terms of access to guests, for example. I’ve had private landlords who’ve said we don’t want really loud parties, we don’t want you disrupting the whole community. But generally you have a key to your apartment that you can give to a guest if you’re leaving for a week or whatever it is. Nobody needs to know about it. You can have overnight guests and nobody needs to know about it. You can sublease and whether that’s officially allowed or not under the lease, you can sublease and people generally don’t have to know about it. University housing, they have all kinds [rules] — you can only sublease to single students who are actively UCSB students. Or if you’re in a family apartment, you can only sublease to people who qualify to be in a family apartment. If you’re going away for the summer, or if you’re going to wait for a whole year to do your research, it’s extremely limiting and for no really good reason.

11:21 Travis: A lot of university apartments, typically at UCSB, they’ve instituted that you don’t have any kind of key to your apartment. You open it with your student card. So again, if I’m even just having a guest over for one night, and I need my student card to get myself into stuff on campus, I can’t give them the card to get into the apartment. It’s these kinds of, I guess, on their point of view, it helps them enforce things maybe, or maybe it’s just a convenience that they didn’t think about the ramifications of, but it’s that kind of stuff where I’m an adult and who’s to say that I can’t have overnight guests. And even at the University of Tokyo apartments, even though the rules said that your overnight guest has to be officially a family member — a sibling, parent, or spouse, or child, I guess — when I actually, when my girlfriend actually came to visit me, they said, “well, we’ve put her down as your sister, so don’t worry about it.” And it’s that kind of, we can get into it later or maybe not, but it’s that kind of being willing to bend the rules that I think is, or not even bend the rules, but just be willing to help students rather than I’m here to enforce the rules, which I think a lot housing departments could afford to have a bit more of.

12:33 Emily: Yeah, that’s interesting. Thanks for providing the example of how you actually access your home. I was thinking, I guess it kind of makes sense for security purposes that you don’t want keys being given out and anybody being able to access whatever, especially because you have roommates within your suite, right?

12:51 Travis: That’s true. And security is an issue.

12:53 Emily: But like you said, it doesn’t allow for any discretion on the part of the actual person who lives there. And you wouldn’t have that kind of — I mean, with landlords, it’s like, okay, you’re not allowed to make copies of your keys. Most likely that’s in the lease somewhere. But as you said, it doesn’t mean you can’t allow your guests to have access a time or two when you’re not physically with them. It’s again, up to your discretion, as the person having the guest over.

Interplay Between the University and it’s Housing Office

13:18 Emily: What other experiences would you like to share?

13:20 Travis: One main thing that I would like to touch upon as I touched upon a little bit already is just the idea of having the staff there to say, I’m here to help you, I’m here to help you figure things out rather than I’m here to enforce rules. To give just a couple of examples of that, UCSB housing, if you have your own car, you can register that car, not any other. Only one car and you can park in the parking structure every day. If you don’t have your own car, you get, I believe it’s two visitor park passes a month and it’s included in your rent. I had my girlfriend coming up from LA however often, and granted that’s not allowed under the lease to be having overnight guests, but even so you won’t let me register her car because it’s not in my name, so what am I supposed to do, how am I supposed to have people park? I’m allowed to park all the time. It’s included in my rent if I have my own car, but because I don’t, I only get two passes a month. Anyway, the point of the story is to say that you walk in and the administrators say, “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them” rather than saying, “I don’t make the rules. And I know they’re stupid, so let me tell you, actually, you can park over there over the weekends, or actually you can park here, or actually, if you use this code, you can get extra visitor passes.” Fill me in on what tricks or tips there are for making this more viable. And similarly —

14:56 Emily: I think that’s a more generalizable problem with bureaucracy, and the people who enforce it, as you said, rather than actually make the rules, but the people who are on the ground, interacting with those who are displeased about the rules. Often, the first response is just a recitation of this is the rule. Like I know the rules and this is the rule. It’s a little bit harder to find someone who’s willing to like find a creative solution. And often those people know what the creative solutions are because they know the rules so well, they’re supposed to enforce them, so they know the ways around them. It’s nice when you do find someone who is willing to work with you, but it might be something that you have to push for a little bit like, “I know the rule, but like, is there another way that I can get the result that I’m going for without breaking the rule?”

15:39 Travis: Right. Exactly. And that has to do with the way that university housing is integrated into the university administration, rather than being a separate entity, because if you have a private landlord, you can deal with them and they might be more friendly or less friendly that you can deal with them without it impacting reputation with the administration or I don’t know what to say, because it’s so integrated. And then of course, you have the opposite problem as well that very often housing is not integrated well enough into the administration, and I’ve had times when the cashier’s office agreed to let me defer my rent beausethe knew they hadn’t paid me. They knew that I wasn’t in the payroll yet, so they agreed to defer my rent for a few months and then nobody told housing.

16:21 Emily: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because not being paid on time is actually a surprisingly common problem among graduate students. You would think that if whatever the problem was — the fellowship didn’t come through, it wasn’t processed on time, whatever it was — that housing, being affiliated with the university, they would have some procedures in place for “Oh yeah, this happens sometimes. It’s not the student’s fault. It’s again on the administration, and we have this policy where they can not pay rent for awhile.” You would hope that that would be in place. Whereas with the landlord, it might be a lot of hoops you have to jump through to convince them that it’s okay for you to not pay rent. Maybe you’ll get kicked out. That’s a possibility. So it sounds like it didn’t operate quite so smoothly for you.

17:05 Travis: Right. Actually that’s a really good point too, in terms of the pros and cons of university housing. The landlord doesn’t care whether you’ve been paid or not. I mean, they could choose to be flexible on a personal basis. Whereas the university you’re hoping it’s more integrated that they know. This particular case at Santa Barbara, it worked out very well in the end. Generally speaking, I’ve had overall, I don’t know why, but somehow UC Santa Barbara administration overall seems to be the least problematic of places that I’ve interacted with. They do seem to get their stuff together. When I first arrived at, at UCSB, as happens, I think anywhere that you go, it takes a little time to get into the payroll system. The semester or the academic year starts at the very end of September, so until you’ve worked through the month of October, then you get paid at the beginning of November. Otherwise they have no work to pay you for just yet. For whatever reason, maybe it’s typical for undergrads to pay for their housing on a quarterly basis rather than on a monthly basis. So originally they charged me three months rent at once and they wanted to take it all out of my fellowship before I could even pay my credit card bills, before I could buy groceries, before I could do anything else. Long story short, I talked to the cashier’s office and they were understanding and flexible and they agreed to not only put me back onto a monthly basis, but also to defer it so I didn’t have to pay the first few months rent until November. I then started receiving notices from the housing office saying that I hadn’t paid the rent.

18:44 Emily: So it was more of an internal communication problem within the housing office.

18:46 Travis: Right. It was just an internal communication problem between the cashier’s office on campus and the housing office over by the dorms.

Commercial

18:56 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.

Single vs. Family University-Affiliated Housing

19:59 Emily: And then the other thing that you brought up that I was interested in is you brought this up a little bit earlier about the price differential between single student housing and family housing, and you mentioned to me earlier that what is the definition of a family is a little bit of a strange thing to be talking about with university housing, right?

20:21 Travis: Right. Sure. At UCSB and I think probably UCLA as well are quite flexible and quite open minded about what counts as a family. I hope that it works similarly at other campuses. I hope that it does. At UCSB, when I applied for family housing with my girlfriend, you don’t have to be married, you don’t have to be in a hetero relationship. All kinds of different possibilities are possible — single parent with children, all kinds of different possibilities are acceptable. But you have to prove it. And I understand why on the administrative side, because you have such a limited number of units for family housing, you want to make sure that the people who are living there are actually families who are ostensibly more in need of the extra subsidized apartments. So I understand from the administrative side that they have to find some way of kind of proving that you’re a family.

21:28 Travis: At UCLA, they just do that through a very limited set of things. You have to have a shared bank account, proof of a former lease that you used to lease together under both of your names, marriage certificates, other kinds of very formal things. UCSB, for better or for worse, they say, even if you don’t have those kinds of very formal documents, you can share with us Facebook posts, texts, screenshots of your personal and private stuff to help try to show, try to prove that you’re in a meaningful relationship. So we shared with them screenshots from Facebook and from texting to say, “Oh, my parents are coming in for Thanksgiving. Are you going to be coming to dinner with us?” Or things like this.

22:18 Emily: This reminds me a little bit of, and I only know about this from TV or whatever, about green card marriages. Not green card marriages, but marriages in which a green card is involved and like having to prove to the government that you are actually in a romantically-inspired marriage, as opposed to some other kind of arrangement. It seems a little bit of overstepping.

22:45 Emily: I guess what I’m curious about with respect to family housing, and maybe this gets into more what you think or what you think the university thinks the purpose of family housing is? What do you think the purpose of it is? And is it accomplishing that purpose?

23:00 Travis: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s a complicated issue because I think that for families, especially for grad students, like I was saying before, if one partner is on a grad student stipend and the other partners being a stay at home spouse, stay at home parent. Or even if both parents are on grad student stipends, you’re providing an opportunity, providing a way for them to live affordably as a family, with their dependents. For those in those situations obviously it’s a very good thing that that’s provided. I can’t imagine how some of my friends managed to afford…just how do you afford to live? We get paid roughly $1,900 a month. If your rent is $1,300 a month for the whole apartment, and that’s your only income for an entire family with one or two kids, I don’t know how people do it. So I appreciate that they have family housing for that purpose.

24:05 Travis: But then of course the flip side is that the single students are saying, just because I’m single, just because I don’t happen to have a romantic partner or a larger family, I have to pay more per person at least to stay in these smaller apartments. I personally have never had problem with being in a dorm room situation where I have my private room attached to a common room. But I know a lot of people also who say, I’m an adult and I want a whole apartment to myself or something like this. UCLA has studio apartments for single grad students and they charge a lot of money for them. UCSB the only option on campus is these two or four bedroom apartments, like I was talking about before.

24:54 Emily: Yeah. I guess this conversation is making me think about what is the purpose of family housing? Because like you said, it’s a differentially applied benefit. There’s more subsidy available to some people because of their family versus other people. And is that fair or is that not? But we were talking about university housing versus private off campus housing, where off campus the only regulation you’re going to find is a maximum number of people who can live in a certain size space. They don’t care, married, unmarried, children, not, it doesn’t matter. So maybe there is an opportunity with on campus housing to provide some, as we were talking about earlier, some additional support for the students in most need, like we were talking about students moving long distance or from overseas — hey, that university housing is there for you to make the whole process easier. And so maybe there is an opportunity to sort of subsidize students who are more in need, like those with dependents. But for me, the harder argument actually is extending that benefit to students in two income households, two income families without any dependence. That’s what, to me, gets a little bit tricky. Like you were saying, single adult versus a couple where it’s just two adults — why should that couple get any more subsidy if both of them are working, if both of them are permitted to work? For me it’s a little bit harder to extend this benefit beyond those who have actual dependents, whether they’re children or non-working spouses.

26:29 Travis: Right. And also, as you’re saying about this, it makes me think about international students who — I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I think being an international student is a lot more difficult in all kinds of ways than the rest of us know. But I wonder, I would imagine that for international students, even beyond the simple matter of the convenience of not having to look for an apartment, the convenience of being able to just arrive in the US and have already arranged an apartment. I would imagine that looking for a private apartment as an international student, you probably have all kinds of trouble with documentation with guarantors. Part of the reason that I’ve never looked for a private apartment for myself in Japan the many times that I’ve gone there for research is because I don’t have a Japanese guarantor, and I don’t have a Japanese bank account, and I don’t have a Japanese phone number until after I have an address to give the phone company to say that I live in Japan and to get a phone number.

27:25 Emily: There’s credit scores as well. That’s another major hurdle for international students coming to the US. The US doesn’t recognize any credit that might have been established in other places.

27:35 Travis: So that’s a whole other conversation to be had about whether some kind of more consideration should be given to international students, especially international students with a family, with dependents rather than domestic students, perhaps. And then just to kind of throw it in there, at the East West center, you have the opposite situation where the East West center dorms are only for people who are on a fellowship or otherwise sort of officially affiliated with the East West center, which is this sort of Asia Pacific studies organization. And it’s about, I think it’s about 75%, my numbers might be wrong, I think it’s about 75% international students. You can only get in there if you’re on a particular kind of affiliation with this organization. If you’re a UH student who doesn’t have that affiliation, you don’t get to live in these dorms. And the dorms are primarily single rooms and double rooms. The single rooms are $400 a month, the last I checked. That was about 10 years ago, but extremely reasonable, especially for Honolulu. But if you’re in a family, you can’t live there. It’s actually kind of the opposite situation of trying to get into these subsidized apartments and family housing at other campuses. That’s a whole other complicated…they really want people to live in the community and interact with each other, on a day to day basis. But if you’re in a family, then you can’t. I think you’re absolutely right. These are the conversations that people are having. Is it fair to have these subsidized apartments only for people in certain situations, and especially if the the second spouse, the non grad student spouse is earning a proper full salary at whatever job it may be, then they absolutely can afford that apartment while other people can’t.

29:16 Emily: And in your experience, has there been any means testing. Have you been asked what your income is when you apply for housing?

29:23 Travis: I don’t recall whether or not I’ve been asked, but I’m not aware of…I mean, I don’t know what goes on in the back rooms, but I’m not aware of that being a policy. I’m not aware of them giving preference to people who don’t have the second income or anything like that. I definitely know people who live in family housing who have a second income, people who don’t have a second income, international students, non international students.

29:54 Emily: It’s just interesting, because again, when we’re comparing with private landlords, how much you make is a very important question for them to ask, to make sure that you can afford the apartment. But of course, there’s no case where they’re going to say, Oh, you make too much, of course we can’t live here. Make however much you want. It’s fine. But it goes again, back to the question of what is the purpose of university housing, and if it is subsidized, and if it is one of their objectives to help students and students’ families who have less means to be renting off campus or whatever, then it might make sense to ask about that. But again, that’s another example of maybe some overstepping that could be going on. So this is a very complicated issue, obviously.

The Ideal University Housing System

30:29 Emily: I’m wondering for you, Travis, if you were to design your ideal university housing system, maybe what would your goals be? And how would you try to achieve those goals?

30:42 Travis: It’s a really good question, and I tried to give it some thought. I don’t know, I have to admit as much as we all have gripes, and I certainly have gripes. At the same time, I’m not an expert administrator, all of the ins and outs of how it should be done, and I understand that people are trying to do what they can, but I think the key point is the purpose of university housing is not to make money for the university. The purpose of university housing is to provide an affordable place to live, for students, in light of the fact that we’re only making X amount and they know full well, that we’re only making X amount. And in light of the fact that in many of these communities, I guess it all depends on where you are at college, but for the places that I’ve lived, local housing, regular market housing is extremely expensive. Making it affordable, and then also making it reasonable for adults.

31:34 Travis: I think part of it is also whatever regulations you have — we didn’t really get into this too much — but whatever regulations you have for undergrad housing, keeping in mind, I mean they are legally adults, but you mind certain notions of trying to take care and keep control over the community in loco parentis, and all of that kind of stuff. Simply extending those policies to grad students isn’t the best way, and acknowledging that as grad students, we want to have a full apartment to ourselves, or at least have the option. We want to redecorate our places. We want to be able to have parking. We want to be able to have pets. We want to be able to come and go over the summer or for a whole year and still retain our apartment. Or if we can’t retain our apartment, then work with us as adults, I think is sort of the key point.

32:13 Travis: And again, just working with people in a way that works with us and not against us. I understand there’s a much more complicated conversation about bureaucracy in general, in terms of, if you give people exceptions, then who are you not giving exceptions to? And how is that fair? And what’s the purpose of policies if you’re not going to enforce them and all these kinds of things. Saying you can’t have overnight guests unless officially of your relationship. And then what happens when you have a girlfriend or even just a friend coming? I pay for this apartment, I should be allowed to have people stay. Just various things like that. I think the key point is just making it affordable, making it a place where real adults can live and making it friendly and workable. Making it a place where people are working with you and not against you. It’s kind of the three points I would make.

33:04 Emily: I’m really glad to have your perspective as someone who’s lived in multiple different university-affiliated housing situations like what’s worked well, what have you, what positive things have you seen about it, maybe what things can be changed. It seems to me that one of the main points that you’re making is just that the administration needs to listen to the students, and as you were just saying, treat them like adults. It seems like that at least happened in your experience at UCSB, when the union or the GSA or whichever it was, was heard and actually got that rent lowered, which is an amazing victory. I just really appreciate your perspective on those issues.

Best Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

33:41 Emily: As we finish up, would you please share with us what your best financial advice is for another early career PhD?

33:48 Travis: Yeah, I think as someone who’s just finished, I’m not sure what kind of advice I can give for other people who have just finished, but for people who are still in the PhD, I think my main advice would just be to keep your eyes out for whatever you can apply to, and kind of be aware of the fellowships and other kinds of resources that are available for you. You can’t spend hours and hours and hours applying to every single thing and investigating every single thing, but be aware of what’s available to you and take advantage of it. If your department offers whether explicitly or sort of implicitly offers that everybody gets summer funding, at least once or offers that everyone gets at least one quarter or two quarters off before the end, make sure you take advantage of that, make sure you do that. Don’t miss the deadlines. Just be aware of what’s out there and be aware of what you’re eligible for, not just in your department, but also in grad div or in School of Humanities or in whatever other things it might be coming from.

34:49 Travis: The other thing I would say is push and advocate and make the professors, make the faculty and administration aware that certain kinds of things are not funded. This is going into a whole other conversation, and I’ll just take one more minute, but for example, at Santa Barbara, I was fortunate to have a certain amount of funding available possible, potential to me for conference travel and for research travel. And that seems very logical from a top down kind of, okay, we’re giving money for conference, traveling for research travel.

35:22 Travis: Well, what about language study and what about things that are not strictly language study? Because I’ve gotten the funding in the past to study, there’s a thing called FLAS, the Foreign Language Area Studies scholarship, which allows you to study modern languages that the government considers to be of strategic value. But then when they find out that you’re studying classical Japanese or classical Chinese, or you’re not really in a language program per se, but you’re doing paleography or how to handle documents or a workshop on how to handle documents. Well, now it’s not language study, so now there’s no funding for that. You need to make people aware that these programs exist and they cost money and you need to have funding for it from some avenue. FLAS won’t pay for it and if conference travel and research travel won’t cover it, what can the department do? What can grad div do to create something that will cover book history workshops, paleography courses, archeology field, school, and so forth.

36:18 Emily: Yeah, it sounds like, again, you’re bringing up the points of being flexible with people. If everyone’s on the same page about what the goals are, then let’s be flexible about the way that we get there. Or just not letting people fall through the cracks. If you create big planks and boards, let’s make sure there aren’t gaps that people are actually falling into between those boards. Thank you so much for adding that Travis, and thank you so much for giving this interview.

36:45 Travis: Thanks so much for having me. This was really wonderful. I really appreciate it.

Outtro

36:48 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 Postdoc from a Low-Income Family Evolved Her Financial Attitudes and Practices During Her PhD Training

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Fushcia Hoover, a postdoc at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. Fushcia grew up in a low-income family and graduated from college in 2009. Unable to find full-time work, she accelerated her plans to pursue graduate school, ultimately earning a PhD from Purdue University and winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Fuschia’s background imparted her with certain financial attitudes and skills that influenced her financial journey through her PhD and postdocs. On the positive side, she already knew how to keep her expenses low and she had enough discretionary income from her stipend to pay off her undergrad student loans, even while sending money home to her mother. On the negative side, she was unfamiliar with investing and understandably gun-shy after witnessing the stock market crash. Fushcia and Emily discuss how her financial attitudes and practices evolved during her PhD and first postdoc and why and how she negotiated her salary for her second postdoc position.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Fushcia: As a graduate student, postdoc, there’s this expectation that we just kind of have to accept things as they are. And, certainly in some cases, yes, that’s true. But I think in a lot of cases, there are always things that are negotiable and that are malleable. And I think a lot of that comes down to recognizing how valuable you are, not just as a person, but also as the work and your contribution.

Introduction

00:35 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 two, and today my guest is Dr. Fushcia Hoover, a postdoc at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. Fuschia grew up in a low income family and graduated from college into the depths of the great recession. Those experiences, and parted her with certain financial attitudes and skills that influenced her financial journey through her PhD and postdocs. On the positive side, she already knew how to keep her expenses low, and she had enough discretionary income from her stipend to pay off her undergrad student loans. On the negative side, she was unfamiliar with investing and understandably gun shy after witnessing the stock market crash. Fushcia and I discuss how her financial attitudes and practices evolved during her PhD and first postdoc, and why and how she negotiated her salary for her second postdoc position. You absolutely do not want to miss her concluding words of encouragement for all PhDs, but especially those in marginalized groups. By the way we recorded this interview in October, 2019. Without further ado. Here’s my interview with Dr. Fushcia Hoover.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:54 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Fushcia Hoover, tnd she’s going to be Talking to us about her background, coming from a low income family and ultimately entering graduate school and a couple of different postdocs. And what she has picked up and learned about finances along the way and the work she’s done on her own mindset. I’m really excited about this episode. Fushcia, thank you so much for joining me, and will you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself please?

02:17 Fushcia: Thank you so much for having me I’m happy to be here. I am a engineer by training. My graduate degrees are all from Purdue University, Ag and Bioengineering, but I actually got my degrees from an interdisciplinary program, the ecological sciences and engineering program at Purdue. And so a lot of my research that I do now, as well as my dissertation work, looks at both social and ecological aspects of storm water management and the way green spaces and green infrastructure can be used to reduce runoff during rainfall events, but then what are the different environmental justice potential impacts. Then recently I have also started incorporating black geography theory, which looks a bit more at the way that people and places are connected and the historical and cultural connections between those two, and what that means in terms of storm water management planning and where we place green spaces and green infrastructure. That’s kind of where I’m at now, so I like to call myself, well, it always changes, but currently I call myself a socio-ecological systems hydrologist.

03:45 Emily: That is so fascinating, that the arc of your work has gone in that direction, from the technological to the more sociological. Okay, great. And so you said you have your all degrees from Purdue, bachelors through PhD, is that right?

04:00 Fushcia: No. My bachelor’s is actually from the University of St. Thomas, which is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I originally am from and grew up. That degree was mechanical engineering, as my bachelor’s. And then I also had a minor in Middle Eastern studies. I’ve always been interested in balancing my science and the technical work that I do with more social and cultural components. That’s where I started and I’ve just been traveling the Midwest sense, but now I’m on the East coast.

04:34 Emily: Yeah. So tell us about your positions that you’ve had since you’ve finished.

04:39 Fushcia: Yeah, so I finished in 2017. My first postdoc was through the National Academy of Sciences. And that’s called National Research Council graduate fellowship, or post graduate fellowship, I believe. That was based at the Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was there for a year and eight months, so almost two years. Then, my contract for that ended, and my boss and I weren’t sure if there was going to be additional funding, so I had been applying to other postdocs, one of which is the one I’m currently in, which is with the, this is very long, so bear with me, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, um, or SESYNC for short, and that’s in Annapolis, Maryland. So both very research focused. All I do is research. At the time I wasn’t interested in going into academia. Things have changed since. Then I worked in this position with Sarah Moreau, who is a faculty at Arizona State University.

05:52 Emily: Gotcha. So interesting that you just dropped in there that you’re now more interested in academia than you were before. People don’t usually go in that direction, but not the subject of our interview today. I’ll have to follow-up about that another time.

Growing up in a Low-Income Family

06:05 Emily: Let’s take a step back even further to your childhood and then basically your time going through college and up until you entered graduate school. Just really briefly, what was your financial experience during that time?

06:18 Fushcia: My mom is a single parent and I have a twin sister as well, so it was the two of us and our mom. We grew up in a single parent households and we had been low income for the duration of my childhood into early adulthood. Certainly for anyone that is from, I think either one of those demographics, there was a lot of like coupons and buying things either on sale or clearance or discount. On and off throughout growing up, we would have access to food stamps, depending on what my mom’s specific financial situation was at the time. The great thing about growing up in Minnesota was that there were and are amazing social services. In terms of basic needs like healthcare, we were on the free and reduced lunch program, we always had all those things. So it actually took me a very long time to realize that we were low income because of that. It was, I think until seventh grade, when I realized that lunch wasn’t free. I just thought that was a service everybody got and people who brought their lunch, that was just a preference. I really grew up in that environment of saving and being very conscious about spending.

07:53 Fushcia: My mom was also very open with us in terms of explaining why we could only get things on sale, but I think the child, part of me was still like, well, if she wanted to, we could get this, but she’s just being a mom. You know, “parents are mean” type of childhood mentality. It wasn’t until I got older, I was like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.”

Loans and Scholarships During Undergrad

08:21 Emily: Yeah. Thanks for telling us about that. Then, when you got to college, what was the situation then? You mentioned the school that you went to, but was it private or public, and how did you fund it?

08:34 Fushcia: It’s the largest private university in the state of Minnesota, and I was fortunate there was a college access program and I was part of in high school called College Possible. I made my sister join as well, so we were both part of the program and it helped teach us about scholarships, applying for college, doing college visits, as well as like practicing the ACT, which is what most of the Midwest takes as the college entrance exam. I think I had applied to between 20 and 30 scholarships as a senior, and then the ones that I was awarded, combined with, I received a full tuition scholarship from the University of St. Thomas based on my academic record and I’d done a lot of community service as a high school student as well. So through that, I was actually receiving refund checks, which is pretty rare.

09:45 Fushcia: A big part of the conversation my mom had with us in terms of college was that she could not afford to send us to college and she could not afford to co-sign on a loan. So my sister and I were very diligent about then seeking out money and applying for scholarships and finding resources that could help us pay our way, or in my case get paid, through college. I took out two loans, one for my last semester of college, and then for a January term study abroad. When I finished, I had about $7,000 in debt and that was all within Sallie Mae at the time, so one was subsidized and one was un-subsidized.

10:40 Emily: That is really good. I mean, to have access to that program, first of all, maybe that was part and parcel with the general great services you had access to in Minnesota, but yeah, that set you up amazingly and to of course then put in the work and get the scores and do the scholarships and everything that, I mean, it’s clear why that happened and why you ended up in that position. So your tuition, you had a scholarship. You had enough scholarships coming in to cover the room and board and so forth, so that you’re actually receiving at sometimes a little bit of money back. Then you took out some small student loans for part of that experience. So coming out of college, about $7,000 worth of student loans and you didn’t go immediately to graduate school, is that right?

11:19 Fushcia: Yeah, that’s correct. And I actually forgot, I did have, I think it was maybe like a $3,000 loan from Wells Fargo, which, well, maybe I can save this for the end as one of my pieces of advice, but at the time I didn’t know about kind of self-loans or just the loan system. My checking and savings were through Wells Fargo, and I was like, “okay”, not knowing that that doesn’t allow you to defer your loan and that the rates are higher.

11:52 Fushcia: When I graduated, in 2009, which if you remember, was kind of the peak of the financial crisis.

12:03 Emily: Yeah, the worst year to be graduating.

12:05 Fushcia: Yes, it was a horrible year to graduate. I didn’t have a job. I had started working part time for a program that I was a part of while at St. Thomas. And then I had transitioned into working for a program called AVID or the Advancement Via Individual Determination, which was located in the public — well, it’s a national program, but I specifically worked within the Saint Paul public school system. Tthat was part time as well. So I was doing that, I had moved back home, I was living with my mom and barely able to pay my $50 a month minimum for my Wells Fargo loan. I had been able to put it into forbearance for six months. That was the only thing that they would allow me to do. It was actually a very…I was very stressed. Thankfully, living with my mom helped cut down on a lot of expenses, but it was a lot of penny pinching. I think my income was maybe $500 a month, before taxes. So, trying to give my mom something and then basically pay for my cell phone and basic expenses and then this loan. That was my financial situation upon graduating.

Starting Graduate School in the Midst of the Great Recession

13:39 Emily: And did the difficulty in finding work of that year, the peak year, did that play in your decision to go to graduate school or had that always been the plan?

13:48 Fushcia: I’d always wanted to go to graduate school. I did not want to go right away. I was really mentally and emotionally exhausted after undergrad.

13:59 Emily: I know that feeling.

14:01 Fushcia: Yes, and I think a lot of us have those feelings even after grad school as well. I think the only difference was that I went to grad school sooner than if I would have had a full time job. I worked part time for almost two years before going back to grad school, because I also wanted to make sure that I wanted to go back and I didn’t know what I wanted to go back for quite yet. I knew I wanted to stay within engineering, but I didn’t know…I knew a lot of what I didn’t want to do. I took that time to figure out the programs and the schools of interest and what my potential research interests could be.

14:49 Emily: Gotcha. So when you entered graduate school, was that actually an increase in your income from working, I guess it’s still part time technically in graduate school, but was your income higher than at that point?

15:02 Fushcia: It was. It’s funny, a lot of people talk about how poor graduate students are and how we’re going to pay, and we are. I certainly agree that for the work that we’re doing, all graduate students should be paid more. But it was such a jump in income for me. I think especially going into an engineering program at Purdue, I think my monthly income was about $2,500 per month. All of a sudden, not only did I have a higher income, but I also had a dependable income. And it was an income that I was going to be getting, regardless of my hours that I put it in. That was the first time being on a salary, and having something that I was like, “okay, wow, I can pay my bills, I can pay my loans, and that’s not something that I’m going to have to worry about. Where’s this money going to come from? Am I going to make my minimum payment this month?” It was a big relief for me in a lot of ways.

16:13 Emily: Yeah. And I would imagine that stipend goes pretty far in Lafayette, Indiana, does it not?

Employing Frugal Strategies in Grad School

16:19 Fushcia: Oh yes, it does. And I very much…I had two roommates, I didn’t have a car either. I had a bicycle, so I was pretty much biking or Lafayette, if you’re a student, or basically if you are affiliated with Purdue and you have a Purdue ID, then you get to take the public transportation system for free, so I wasn’t having to spend money there. It was really just groceries and utilities and rent split between three people. I found a lot of ways to reduce the amount of expenses that I had because then I had also then started sending money back to my mom. I was sending her about $300 every month. Definitely trying to funnel resources and reduce costs.

17:09 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like you took a lot of the the strategies that you’d been using prior to that point, and also some of the mindsets you’d had to that point. That was what you applied right then. You found the low cost living situation, you used the public transit instead of owning a car, so you really reduce your expenses right off. But it sounds like still, even with sending your mom money, you probably had a good bit of discretionary money to be working with, above the bills that needed to be paid. What did you start doing in your personal finances at that point? What did you have to learn about since you now finally have this discretionary money to do what you want with? What did you learn about what did you apply in your life?

Paying off Student Loans During Graduate School

17:49 Fushcia: It’s funny, I had taken a financial literacy workshop before I started graduate school, and that was more focused on like budgeting and saving and negotiating whether you pay off credit card debt first, or if you have student loans and how you prioritize your debts. The biggest thing, aside from sending money home to my mom was that I started making monthly payments on the undergraduate loans that I had. I targeted the Wells Fargo private loan first, and then —

18:28 Emily: I just have a follow up about that. Were those loans, at least maybe the federal ones, in deferment at that point?

18:34 Fushcia: They were, yes.

18:36 Emily: And what about the Wells Fargo one? Was that in deferment?

18:38 Fushcia: No, the Wells Fargo, my forbearance had ended after the first six months, from me finishing my undergrad degree. I had only been making $50 a month payments, so you can imagine on a $3,000 loan, that’s not very much. So I kicked that up and I think I started making either between $150 and $200 loan payments every month. So about $500 every month was going to this one particular loan and then my mom. Then the rest that was remaining after bills and rent, I was just putting into savings or using for other expenses like going out to eat or going home for the holidays, things like that.

19:34 Emily: What I like to call irregular expenses.

19:37 Fushcia: Yes, irregular expenses.

19:38 Emily: The ones that can really mess up your cashflow if you try to pay for them in just one month. How long did it take you then? Did you just keep working in paying down those loans straight before adding any other goals to the picture and how long did it take you to pay them off?

19:50 Fushcia: I did. I had paid off my Wells Fargo loan by the end of my masters, so just under two years, and then my government loans, it took about two and a half. I don’t remember if it was two and a half or three years. I think part of the decision why, even though those loans were in deferment, one of them was unsubsidized, so it was gaining interest. And I think because of coming from low income background, and even though I was in this position where I had a steady paycheck, I was still really worried that it would end. Certainly, I knew the degree would end and I wasn’t sure what my income would look like after that, and I didn’t want to have that stress. I think I might’ve been the only one I knew of my friends with loans from undergrad who was actively paying it down.

20:54 Fushcia: That was my goal, was to have zero debt by the time I graduated from Purdue. Pretty much all of the focus was on paying off those loans. Then I would typically have anywhere from like $200 to $400 that I would just put into savings every month.

21:17 Emily: I will say, in my contact with graduate students, some people do, but it’s on the rare side to be working on paying down student loans while in graduate school. I think yours because they’re relatively small, might…I think some people get really defeatist about student loans. Especially if you have more than a hundred thousand dollars or multiple tens of thousands of dollars of student loans, it can feel really, really daunting, and why even bother like getting started on your low salary during graduate school. But I think yours, they were a fraction of what you made in a given year, and so it felt like something that you could tackle, probably. And like you were saying, you had that fear of, well, what if your program ends for whatever reason? Well, then the loans are coming out of deferment, you have to make at least minimum payments, and then what’s your income going to be? You don’t know. That decision definitely makes sense to me.

Commercial

22:12 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Personal Finance Mindset Shift During and Post-PhD

22:58 Emily: Did you do anything else within your personal finances during graduate school, aside from paying off those loans and then also building up savings?

23:06 Fushcia: No. I had conversations, I talked with a couple of friends who were working about IRAs and investments, but it was all very intimidating. I think for me, at the time, it was easier to just put my money in savings and then I could also see it, and there wasn’t like a fear of losing it. With investments, I think particularly because of being an adult through the stock market crash, and also remembering when Enron went under and people’s entire pensions were lost. I have a, I wouldn’t say a strong distrust, but I would say I’m very kind of apathetic and very wary of different financial institutions. Even Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac and all of those. For me, I was like, “nope, I want to have my money with me, so I’m putting it in my savings account.” By then I had also transferred to a credit union, so I felt a lot more secure about credit unions as financial institutions, int that I’m an owner in this. And I have amplified checking, so then I was getting, I don’t remember what the return is, but it’s a couple percent return. I was like, “okay, I like this. I can make money from my own money.” Even though I had those conversations with a lot of friends who had higher income backgrounds or whose families did, and so these were conversations that they had. It still wasn’t something I felt comfortable really digging into because I think part of me still felt like I didn’t have the financial security yet to start investing.

25:05 Emily: Yeah. It’s interesting. I graduated from college in 2007, so two years before you did, so before the crisis hit and I was safely in graduate school, by the time everything went down. But I took away like a different kind of financial trauma from that whole period, which is that I’m very gun shy about the housing market. I’ve still always been a renter. I have yet to buy my first home. And that’s partially because, while I didn’t personally experience, all the media coverage is about people losing their homes and foreclosures. So while I was very gung ho about getting into the stock market and I was able to experience the rise right after the crash, it’s still is something that lingers with me regarding the housing. It’s just interesting to talk to someone near a similar age who had some witnessing and some stake in everything that happened and what’s lingering.

Investing

25:58 Emily: Actually, maybe you’ve turned this around since then. You were talking about during graduate school, you were nervous to start investing. And I think it actually is really smart to build up the cash savings to get the debt paid off before embarking on that. At what point did you, or have you started to invest?

26:14 Fushcia: I started a few months, maybe six months into my first postdoc. By the time I finished at Purdue, I had about a four month break where I was job searching and then preparing for a move, and I had saved up about maybe $5,000 to $6,000 in savings. One of things that I did start doing was also using credit cards as a way to prepare for high cost expenses. I had opened a card, um, just before I graduated so that it allowed me to have 18 months of 0% APR because I knew I’m not going to have a job. I was at a part time job that I got to cover basic things, but in terms of, I have to move, that card held all of those expenses. Then once I started my postdoc and getting paid, I worked on paying that down, and since I had 18 months, there was no rush. But then, because I was like, “Okay, I have a job.” As an engineer coming in for an NRC, my stipend was $69,000 for the year, which certainly is very high compared to a lot of postdocs, but I think most of the federal agencies, you’re going to see a higher salary, that’s closer to what a full time federal employee would be making

27:55 Emily: And for you in particular that’s over double what you had been making her in graduate school.

27:59 Fushcia: Yes. Well, and I should say that my first year of my master’s I applied for and was awarded a National Science Foundation GRFP, so I think that also really allowed me to focus on my debt because then I was making $30K. I still had to account for the taxes, which was not fun, but compared to my friends in college of liberal arts, who were in English or social science making $13K, that’s a big difference. One of the things that I actually learned from you was while I was in my first postdoc, I joined the National Postdoc Association, and you were a guest. This would have been a couple of years now. I watched your webinar, when you gave a presentation. From that point, I looked more into kind of the difference between an IRA and a independent tax account and figuring out, okay, with NRC, it’s the same thing. They don’t take out taxes. And so then —

29:19 Emily: I’ll jump in there and say, because you were on fellowship, because you were not technically an employee, I’m just explaining for the listener, you wouldn’t have had access to the workplace based retirement account, whatever that would be, that they would offer to their full time employees. So you’re still dealing with a stipend, you still have to handle the taxes manually, and you’re really only tax advantaged retirement option would be an IRA. Nothing was being offered through your employer, because you didn’t have an employer.

29:47 Fushcia: Yes. I was a contractor. I did a little bit of…well, I should say I did a lot of research trying to figure out then where I wanted to open an account. I actually ended up going with an online system called Betterment because I did not have the time to actually look into managing my own investments. I think because so much stuff is online, it also made it easy for me, so then I didn’t have to find an office location to go into. In my postdoc now we are considered faculty of the University of Maryland and the University of Maryland is a state run system, so we actually have mandatory investment portfolios and the portfolio that I chose is through the I don’t remember the, the full meaning, but it’s TIAA.

30:53 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know what it stands for either, but TIAA or TIAA CREF.

30:57 Fushcia: I still have my betterment accounts and I haven’t decided how much I’ll be putting into it. They take out just over 7% from my salary for the TIAA account, so I need to figure out what that balance is going to look like. Now I was like, okay, it’s probably about time. I was a little bit nervous about being older, like 31, and just starting to invest. But I think because I don’t have any debts and because, well I have a little bit of credit card debt, but I also just moved for this postdoc. I think that’s why I was finally at a point where I feel confident that I will have a job and I will continue to have income and that’s not going to be something I’ll be lacking anymore. And so now I can fully invest having confidence in, well the system is still problematic, but I at least have confidence that I’m not going to wake up and be without a job.

Learning Debt Management Strategies

32:12 Emily: You said earlier there were maybe some things that you brought out of your childhood that you had an aversion towards debt. A smart one. But you also maybe weren’t exposed to conversations around investing and IRAs, maybe like some of your peers were. Was there anything else that you kind of felt maybe you were a little bit out of step with other people during graduate school, or during your postdocs regarding personal finance. And anything you had to learn or mindsets to change or overcome?

32:44 Fushcia: I think I definitely learned about the healthy ways that you can use credit cards to manage certain debts. I think that that came from conversations with a close friend when I moved for my postdoc. I opened a card to buffer that, and a lot of that helped and realizing that all debt doesn’t have to be bad. That it can help you create a credit score and debt management techniques and strategies, and build out this financial portfolio that can actually then make you have a higher score and more competitive for other loans and things like that. A lot of that came from conversations with friends who had either taught themselves that, or they learned it by proxy from their parents. Just asking about their debt and how they managed it, and then also asking, are you afraid that you won’t pay it off or are you afraid that it’s going to be there forever? Certainly, I remember an ex of mine, she was like, “Yeah, it’s just going be there, and it’s just this thing that I have, and I’ll make payments, and it sucks, but also I have the education that I wanted to get and I’m in the job that I I think through those conversations, it definitely helps release some of the anxiety and like intense fear around debt.

34:48 Fushcia: Listening to webinars or reading your blog, for example, and just trying to educate myself more, so that I’m more informed and that’s definitely alleviated a lot of the fear and anxiety, but I think I still like coupons, I still like things on sale. It’s still really hard for me to pay full price for clothing or a pair of shoes that’s a hundred dollars. I’m like, no, can’t do that. Like you, I’ve been a renter this whole time and I don’t know if I want to buy property or a home. I did buy a car when I moved to Cincinnati, and so I’m making those monthly payments now. Part of it is also okay, well, I’m going to make these payments and pay off my car and then maybe see where I’m at in terms of, if I’m in a permanent position that then I feel more comfortable buying a home. I think some of the approaches I still have to managing that is to have one type of debt at a time. Take on debt, pay it off and take on a new debt, pay it off.

36:10 Emily: Yeah, it sounds like you really have learned much more about, as you were saying earlier, debt management or how you can use debt as a tool, especially to avoid large expenditures of cash. Because it sounds like you still have cash savings to a degree, but it’s more about not wanting to let go of that and using debt to help you basically just hold both to have the cash and to have the debt, so that you can feel, feel more secure around it. Is that right?

36:39 Fushcia: Yeah. I think that’s a really good way of kind of summing that up.

Negotiating a Post-Doc Salary

36:44 Emily: Yeah. And then the other thing that you mentioned that you wanted to talk about in this interview was negotiating your salary, which is also kind of another mindset leap, right? Like not only, maybe from someone coming from the kind of background that you have, but also just being in academia where like with your first postdoc, negotiation is not really an option, but it sounds like you did at your first opportunity, negotiate. Can you tell us how that worked?

37:09 Fushcia: Yeah. To be honest, a lot of it was just like, I know I need to practice this because I know I’ll have to do it at some point, so let me just practice it now because it’s lower stakes.

37:21 Emily: Yeah. Good point.

37:25 Fushcia: Part of that came from in your webinar you had been talking about kind of how you plan for transitions. So either going from your degree to a postdoc, postdoc to a full time permanent position, and managing the moving costs and change in expenses. I had sat down and looked at essentially the cost of living for Annapolis and estimating what my costs are now, and what’s expected to grow. The majority of that, it’s about a 300% increase in housing expenses from Cincinnati to Annapolis. I started there and then looked at how much would I want in savings or investments, and then worked with the business office at SESYNC to then figure out is there a parking cost? Learning about the exact percentage rate that they take out for retirement or investments. Trying to find what are all the other hidden costs and expenses that come with this position so that I could factor that into my budget and then know what would my minimum salary need to be, because I know my minimum payments for my car. I know my cell phone payments. Those are things that I know and then wanting to make sure that it had wiggle room.

38:54 Fushcia: Then I think on top of that, I also wanted to try and stay as close as possible to what I was already making. Certainly, it can be challenging to do that with a different type of postdoc, particularly because this one’s affiliated with the University of Maryland, academic post docs are much slower. But I didn’t want to have this $20,000 drop, because the great thing about the NRC was that they gave a $1,500 increase every year. I came in at $69,000, but then the next year I was making $70,500. So it’s like, okay, well, how close can we get to this?

39:38 Fushcia: Again, a lot of it was using my network, and talking to in particular, a good friend who is now at Cornell. She had just finished her PhD, and she had negotiated her position. Asking her for advice and resources and how you frame what you’re negotiating for and the language that you use so that it’s still appropriate and respectful, but that you’re still firm, in terms of, these are my skills, particularly because I was coming out of a postdoc. I already have almost two years of experience post-PhD, and I’ll have all these other publications, and knowing different questions to ask.

40:22 Fushcia: I wrote up this letter, had a few people review it. Ironically, when I asked my former PhD advisor, she was like, “We don’t do that. If someone were to do that, maybe I’d give like a two to 3000 increase.” But when I had looked up other negotiation strategies on Inside Higher Ed, I used a lot of their articles. They mentioned, I think it’s 15% to 22% is typically what you negotiate as your range, particularly if it’s not a lateral position, if you’re moving up. So I was like, “Okay, we’re going to go for 15%.” And they did not give it to me, but they came close. From there I went back and said, “Okay, based on this salary, could I make it work?” And I could. It’s going to be tight, which is a bit frustrating to have a point where you have more flexibility and you have more expendable income and now it feels a little bit more like being a grad student again where it’s a smaller salary. I have to be more conscious of where my money is going and not spending as much as I was, particularly now that I have a car and all the expenses that are associated with that. But I know that I have the skills to make it work. And at this point I’m also looking for a permanent position after this postdoc. I don’t anticipate after this two year position, being in a situation where I have to kind of penny pinch and reduce costs elsewhere.

42:23 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like you approach that — I mean, it’s clear that you did a lot of research and preparation through that process, not only taking what you learned from the webinar that I gave, but also this research you did with the articles in Inside Higher Ed and in speaking with your friend. You really prepared for that and kind of the best way possible, so it’s a great, it’s a great model for the listeners to hear, especially because you knew that you were going into an almost guaranteed income drop and also a cost of living increase. Both of those factors just highlight the need for being really careful around this. And if your academic advisor said, well, this isn’t done, I mean, it is, it is done sometimes, in some places. Maybe no one’s ever attempted it with her.

43:06 Emily: I want to point the listeners to one of my resources, which is postdocsalaries.com. And there’s also another one PhDstipends.com, for those in graduate school. It’s kind of like a Glassdoor, but for those types of positions, for postdocs and for grad student positions. That’s just another resource out there, if people want to get benchmarks on what is reasonable to be paid for different kinds of postdocs in different areas of the country. And I also ask questions about negotiation on that survey. I think the last time I looked in the database, it was around 25% or maybe a third of the people who had answered the questions had said, yes, I at least attempted to negotiate salary or benefits for the postdoc position. I think it’s becoming more and more popular, as people realize that this is a standard thing you do in most jobs, and why don’t we at least try it in these academic or nonacademic postdocs. That was great story.

43:58 Fushcia: Well, and I think too, salary, while I think it is very important, isn’t the only thing that you can negotiate. You can negotiate moving expenses and you can negotiate time off. I also negotiated my start time because I wanted to finish through my contract at the EPA before coming to SESYNC. That was something that I successfully negotiated. I had picked my top three things of these are the things that I would like, so we’ll see where they can meet me. There’s another postdoc who negotiated because he also was coming out of a previous postdoc and then everyone else who we’ve talked to, we were having a conversation and they were like, I didn’t know that you could do that. And we were like, all they can say is no, especially once they offer you a position, if they want you. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

45:02 Fushcia: I would also say for all the listeners that if you are going to any type of public institution, you can look up everyone’s salary, that’s all publicly accessible information. And that was something that I did to give me a sense of what are the ranges for the people that are employed within the center. I had an idea of what their budget is to figure out do I ask for the 15% or I do I ask for the 20% to 25%.

45:29 Emily: Yeah, that’s a great advantage when you’re going to those types of places, that there’s a large degree of transparency around salary there. That’s an amazing thing to look up, if that’s where you’re applying.

Best Financial Advice for an Early Career PhD

45:41 Emily: Last question here, Fushcia, as we wrap up — what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be something that we have touched on in this interview, or it could be something completely else.

45:53 Fushcia: I think my first piece of advice would be to do as much research as you can. As grad students, we’re training basically how to do research and conduct research. I think we already have a lot of the skills to be able to access these resources and information and find ways or people to help us get there. I would say that most of the way that I have navigated my finances has been through talking to friends, talking to people who are in positions where I see myself going, and just doing the research and using the academic online journals that are available or financial journals, blogs, anything, and everything that you can capture to try and help inform what the decision that will be best for you, or rather the best decision for you.

47:00 Fushcia: The second thing that I would say is to give yourself more value and credit than what you would default to. I think as a graduate student, postdoc, there’s this expectation that we just kind of have to accept things as they are. And certainly in some cases, yes, that’s true. But I think in a lot of cases, there are always things that are negotiable and that are malleable. I think a lot of that comes down to recognizing how valuable you are, not just as a person, but also as the work and your contributions and that the majority of the people in this country do not have PhDs, so you’re bringing in a very valuable skillset, which, when you’re going into a space where everybody has PhDs, it may not seem like that, but I think it’s important to remind yourself of that.

48:05 Fushcia: I think especially, I say this to women postdocs, women of color, black women postdocs, we are already underestimated in many way. We are already underpaid in many ways, thinking about your initial salary offer or associated benefits. I think because of all the work that’s coming out from the national academies and other research centers about this still huge discrepancy across all fields, I think I use that as a way to empower me to ask for more. Because now it’s not just valuing my work and what I bring, but also recognizing that I’m already going to be undervalued, because of what I look like when I come in the room. I think that would be the last piece of advice that I would say for all the postdocs out there. And this includes folks who are femme or femme-identified. If you’re any type of on the marginalized periphery, ask for more, because again, all they can say is no. And if they take back that offer, then that’s probably not a place you want to go in the first place. Because you want to go where you’re going to be celebrated and valued. Give yourself more value than what you default to.

49:39 Emily: I think you put that so well. That was great. I have nothing to add there. Just everybody go back and listen to that again, listen to it a few more times, especially if you’re in one of these groups that Fuschia just identified. Absolutely.

49:50 Emily: Well, thank you so much for this wonderful interview and it was really a pleasure to speak with you today.

49:54 Fushcia: Yes. Thank you so much. This was really fun. I hope that whoever’s listening has been able to take something away, even if it’s just to know that you’re not the only one that’s in grad school who’s from a low income background or is having anxiety or fear around debt or salary. That’s that’s normal and also you will be okay. Everything will be fine.

50:23 Emily: Love that. Thank you so much.

50:25 Fushcia: Yes. Thank you.

Outtro

50:27 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.

Best Practices in Side Hustling During Graduate School

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In this episode, Emily interviews Lourdes Bobbio and Meryem Ok, two PhD students who work on this podcast as virtual assistants. Today’s conversation is all about side hustling! Lourdes and Meryem each give their perspectives on why and how they started side hustling, how they manage their time, and how they handle their self-employment income with respect to taxes and budgeting. Throughout the interview, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes perspective on how this podcast is produced. The end of the interview is a discussion of the unexpected benefits Lourdes and Meryem have experience from working on the podcast.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

side hustle grad school

Teaser

00:00 Meryem: Every once in a while, if I need to make an extra purchase or a gift, I will kind of rationalize with myself, “Okay, I was able to make some extra income this month with the side hustle so it’s okay to spend that extra money.” And essentially that’s not a super cut and dry method, but it sort of helps me at least to rationalize my additional expenses and not get too anxious about finances during grad school, which is really, really nice to have that cushion outside of my usual budget.

Introduction

00:36 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast and higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 18 and today my guests are Lourdes Bobbio and Meryem Ok, who are both PhD students and work with me as virtual assistants on this podcast. Today’s conversation is all things side hustling. Lourdes and Meryem each give their perspectives on why and how they started side hustling, how they manage their time, and how they handle their self employment income with respect to taxes and budgeting. Throughout the interview, you’ll get a behind the scenes perspective on how we produce this podcast. We close the interview discussing the unexpected benefits. Lourdes and Meryem have experienced from working on the podcast. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Lourdes Bobbio and Meryem Ok.

Will You Please Introduce Yourselves Further?

01:31 Emily: I’m bringing you a little bit of a different interview today. This is the first time on the PF for PhDs podcast. We have had three people on the call at once, that is two guests interviewees, and it’s really special to me because the people I’m interviewing today are my virtual assistants who work on the podcast with me, Lourdes Bobbio and Meryem Ok, and they’re both PhD students. We’re going to get into more about side hustling today, like the side hustle that they do with me and their experience with that, maybe their experiences side hustling with other people. So yeah, we’re talking side hustling today and I have my two guests with me. I’ll have you introduce yourselves, so Lourdes, why don’t you go first?

02:10 Lourdes: Hi everyone. My name Lourdes Bobbio. I’m a fifth year PhD candidate at Penn State University in the Department of Materials Science, and I work on additive manufacturing of metallic materials.

02:23 Emily: Yeah. Lourdes was actually a guest on a previous podcast episode and we will link that from the show notes. We did a budget breakdown with Lourdes, so we talked through her budget there in State College and Meryem, please introduce yourself.

02:35 Meryem: Hi, my name is Meryem. In 2016 I started the MD PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — go Heels. After completing the first two years of med school in 2018, I started my PhD in UNC-NC State’s joint Department of Biomedical Engineering. Currently I am working in the Magnus Lab, developing tools to better understand human intestinal STEM cell fate. And I’m happy to say that I’m officially a PhD candidate as of two days ago.

03:05 Emily: Yes. Congratulations! We will record and release this in August 2020, so it’ll still be fresh news by the time this episode comes out. I’m just delighted to have you both on.

Why Side Hustle In Grad School?

03:17 Emily: First question here is why did you decide to start side hustling in graduate school? Why don’t we still go with Lourdes first?

03:25 Lourdes: Financially, I was doing actually pretty okay with my stipend. As Emily mentioned, I was previously on an episode where I discussed my NDSEG fellowship, and so I generally have a somewhat higher stipend than my peers and State College has a generally low cost of living. So financially I was doing, in terms of I had enough money to live on and for extras and to save, but the reason that I got into side hustling was so that I could have money to contribute to a Roth IRA. I think Emily has done an episode on this earlier in the year, but as of this current year 2020, fellowship recipients are now eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA, but previously they were not. I started one before I was being paid on fellowship and I wanted to try to contribute at least a little bit of money monthly to that, so having that side hustle, self employment income helped me to be able to do that and continue to contribute, even though I couldn’t with my general fellowship income.

04:32 Emily: That’s so strategic. I love that. It is the advice that I was giving out for people who had multi-year fellowships, is to consider that self-employment side hustle. Meryem, why’d you decide to start that side hustling.

04:44 Meryem: For me, I guess coming into medical school, I had actually taken a gap year and was able to transfer a lot of those funds into starting an IRA, so for me, it was less of a strategic approach and more just that I’ve really always had a lot of interests in gaining new skills and collaborating with other people outside of my primary career interests. I think specifically, actually, as far as video and podcast editing, I was inspired by my dad who is always the one recording all of our family memories and making home videos. And he actually founded and produced a public access TV show called Turkish American TV. That’s been going on for 15 years, completely as a passion, volunteer project. I remember many times he’d rope me into his projects and show me how to use video and editing software, and I really just felt lucky to have his guidance. I feel like I inherited his eye for detail since that’s helped me be more confident in marketing myself as a freelancer who just really genuinely enjoys editing. I guess for me, just as someone who needs to have hobbies and tasks outside of work, I wanted to try something new and also make a little extra income in line with my career development goals.

06:03 Emily: Maybe we should say what you all actually do for me with the podcast, to give you credit where credit is due. As the listeners know, I conduct the interviews for the podcast, but kind of everything that happens after that, I hand off to you two. So you do all the video and audio editing of the interviews, and you compile the show notes, which are actually full transcripts. It’s more work than it sounds actually. We use an automated tool to generate the first transcript, but then you go through with a careful listen and make it actually readable, which I really appreciate. And you also write the social media posts that we do for each episode, and you schedule things. There’s a few other tasks in there too, but those are the major pieces of work. It’s been an amazing help for me.

How did you find your current and previous side hustles?

06:44 Emily: I know how you two landed this side hustle, which is that I reached out to my mailing list when my last VA decided to leave the position. Thankfully, she gave me a lot of notice. I reached out to my mailing list and said, “Hey, podcast listeners, do you want to work on the show?” And you two both volunteered to do a trial episode and ultimately your work was great, so I hired both of you. But I don’t know if that’s the first side hustle you’ve had in graduate school, or whether you were even particularly looking for that kind of side hustle, or really how it came about kind of from your end, so why don’t you tell us. Lourdes?

07:19 Lourdes: I had done a couple of side hustles through freelancing websites. There was actually one particular one that was captioning and transcription of usually short audio files through this company called Rev. It’s basically just pick and choose these audio files and you get paid. It’s a very low paying job, but it was something that I did just sort of in my spare time. When I heard about the opening on this podcast, I was like, “Hey, this is perfect. This is like what I was doing before, but on sort of like another level and sort of a next step up.” It seemed like a perfect fit for what I like to do in general anyway, just on a higher level.

08:07 Emily: Yeah. Meryem, how about you?

08:09 Meryem: Yeah, that’s so funny, because actually that’s the first time I’m hearing this. For those who don’t know Lourdes and I actually went to undergrad together, so the fact that we serendipitously ended up as virtual assistants for the same podcast and kind of working together was phenomenal to experience and to find out. For me, I also was trying to look into doing these things independently through similar websites, but it was not really a sustainable effort or something that was really worth the rate that they were paying. And I felt like it’s so much more useful to be able to use these skills and also benefit from all of the knowledge that I’m gaining as I’m editing these episodes, which is relevant to us as graduate students trying to better our personal finances. Really it was a no brainer when I saw that email from Emily and reached out and I’m just so glad that it worked out and that we were able to take turns, Lourdes, and still have an activity shared together despite the distance and the years since college.

09:15 Emily: Yeah, that’s why I reached out to my list first, to try to hire for this position. I hoped that there would be people who would actually be interested in the material as well as having the skill set to work on the episode, instead of going with an independent agency or something, which I could have done, maybe if it hadn’t worked out, initially. I wanted to go to people who I sort of had a relationship with, and actually it happens to be the fact that I had corresponded with both of you over the years before that — we mentioned Lourdes had been on the podcast and Meryem has been on my mailing list for a long time, so we had exchanged emails and I think had call or two in that time. It was really helpful that I knew your names at least, when it came time for people to apply for that position. Meryem you have, since we started working together, taken on another podcast editing position, why don’t you talk about how that came about?

10:08 Meryem: Yeah, that’s right. Actually, I owe it to you, Emily, for alerting me to another side hustle opportunity in podcast editing with the AcaDames podcast, which is another awesome podcast focusing on women in academia. Earlier this year, I remember Emily sent an email to us, letting us know that AcaDames was looking for help since their previous student executive producer was graduating soon, and they wanted to have somebody to overlap during that period of transition. I reached out to them about that position and thankfully we were a good fit. Now I just feel really lucky that I get to work with these two amazing podcasts. My work with them partially involves editing, but also involves a little bit more of administrative and social media management work. I’ve just learned so much from both podcasts and I’m excited to be involved. And also again, benefit from all of the career development advice that I’ve been receiving just by working with both of them.

11:09 Emily: Yeah. I think it’s kind of interesting that for these positions, this podcast virtual assisting position and the AcaDames one, it sounds like we’re looking for someone who’s going to be doing a multiplicity of different things and you come in with maybe some subset of the skills, like Lourdes, you had the transcription type experience, but then we’re asking you to learn a bunch of other stuff which expands your skillset overall, even if you’re not going to be career podcast editors. I assume you’re going to do something with your PhDs, but it’s nice to have that kind of side work, I think.

Balancing Side Hustles, Grad School, and Personal Life

11:36 Emily: Between the side hustle, your graduate work, everything else that’s going on in your life. I know you two are both in relationships — Meryem, you recently got married. Lourdes, you’re engaged. You have a lot of stuff going on in your lives. And so how do you fit in this side work that you’re doing, along with everything else? Lourdes?

11:55 Lourdes: I guess for me, what attracted me to the side hustle specifically was that it’s something that I can work on from home. I don’t have to go anywhere to do anything, and I can kind of fit it into my schedule. It’s very flexible. Emily is super nice, in that she gets us a lot of heads up time between when we get audio files and when they’re going to be released. So there’s a lot of flexibility in the position, which is definitely something that I was initially looking for in side hustles, as well, when I was doing the more freelance, low paying transcription job, it’s something I could do just in my own time, so that’s been helpful in terms of being able to work it into my schedule, work my schedule around it.

12:38 Lourdes: Also, like Emily mentioned, I’m engaged, but for the last year I’ve also been long distance, and so I’ve had a little bit more free time. It’s also been really great during this work from home time, to have something else to do. Now that you’re pretty much primarily at home, we’ve all been at home, things can get a little bit stale, but having a lot of different activities to do has been really helpful in managing my own mental health. I don’t feel like I’m only at home to do work and I get to sort of have some variety in my day, so that’s been nice.

13:22 Emily: How about you Meryem? How do you do the time management aspect?

13:25 Meryem: Yeah, I want to echo everything that Lourdes said. I think it’s really nice, even without a pandemic, but especially during a pandemic, to just have something else to turn to when you need a break from grad school or just want to use a different skill set for a bit, or just kind of escape from the world. And right now, especially because of COVID, I tend to work a later shift in lab, and my understanding is Lourdes does as well, so the rest of our work is pretty much done remotely, which makes it easier, but also I have to be a little bit more diligent about priority setting and setting boundaries, because it is so easy to kind of just switch between projects both between my main job as a grad student and then my side hustles and leaving room for my personal life.

14:07 Meryem: Usually I’ll try to do this by reserving chunks of time to work on the podcast editing, either in the mornings or late in the evenings after my shift and maybe the weekends to kind of catch up, which is very useful for particularly busy weeks. I think just like setting deadlines and trying to stay organized to prioritize all the things that are going on is helpful. I will say that I recognize that it’s probably easier for me to manage everything that I have to do given that I don’t have too many responsibilities outside of my work and extracurriculars right now. I don’t have any human babies, but I do have a fur baby named Sabine, but she’s pretty self sufficient. I think overall it is pretty much managing expectations with myself and now with my husband, but overall I think, much like Lourdes said, you get into a workflow and we do have a lot more time at home so that does help a lot.

15:06 Emily: I’m just thinking how I would answer if I asked this question of myself, of how do I manage my time? Because I do have two human babies and no childcare in a pandemic and it is definitely more challenging now than it was a few months back to be handling my schedule. But I think what Lourdes brought up initially, the fact that in our schedule we have basically a two week cycle from when I get the raw interview to you two and then we have a two week process before publication, and Ithink that really helps. I know a lot of side hustle jobs are really quick turnaround, like super short deadlines, and it’s not even really so much on your end, like I’m giving you guys a lot of time. I need a lot of time to do my part of the process as well, because I can’t necessarily jump on a response right away, because it’s just a busy long day every day right now.

Commercial

16:00 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Budgeting Side Hustle Income

16:46 Emily: Okay, so personal financial show — let’s talk about the money that’s associated with the side hustle income. What are you doing with the money from your income? Does it have a particular job to do in your budget or how are you handling it generally? Lourdes, why don’t you go first?

17:01 Lourdes: In general, I put most of my side hustle income into savings, whether that be more long-term savings or shorter term savings, kind of depends. If I have an upcoming trip, it might go a little bit towards that. In general, how I work my budget is that, I pay myself first, in that I put money aside for savings first, and then any money leftover is my money that I get to spend for the month.

17:31 Lourdes: One of the tips I learned from the first episodes I edited was a side hustle episode, I think it was Allie Judge, and she mentioned how she holds off on paying herself her side hustle income until the month after she’s earned it. So sort of working on a delayed schedule, in terms of using the money that she’s earned. After I heard that, I’m like, that’s a great idea, so ever since then, I’ve been doing the same thing, where I count basically any money I earn in August goes towards my September monthly budget. That helps me in terms of planning and not using the money before I’ve actually earned it. That’s how I mainly handle it in terms of budgeting.

18:22 Emily: Yeah. Thank you. Meryem, how does it work in your budget?

18:26 Meryem: I’ll be totally transparent in that I don’t necessarily have a specific allocation for my side hustle income, because for me it was primarily a chance to essentially have a hobby and use a different skillset. But I kind of do try to visualize it in a way that permits me to have those extra side expenses during the course of the month that you might not otherwise be able to do. For me, it’s kind of a mental exercise, and I do have the money go straight into a savings account that I don’t really touch, but every once in a while, if I need to kind of make an extra purchase or a gift, I will kind of, I guess, rationalize with myself like, okay, I was able to make some extra income this month with the side hustle, so it’s okay to spend that extra money and think of my extra purchases outside of my needs in terms of how much of my work and effort that is worth. And essentially that’s not a super cut and dry method, but it helps me at least to rationalize my additional expenses and not get too anxious about finances during grad school, which is really, really nice to have that cushion outside of my usual budget.

19:41 Emily: Yeah. That trick, that mental framework of translating the cost of a purchase into your time, or maybe number of episodes, or however you want to structure it, is a really powerful one, a really common one for people sort of were advanced in their personal finance skills to think about really carefully, like whether they want to make a purchase and how they want to spend and so forth to translate into time. That’s a really good tip.

20:07 Emily: I’m particularly thinking about this question of how to handle your irregular income with respect to your budget because, so in August 2020, I launched a community PFforPhDs.com/community, if you want to find out more about that, but every month I’m creating new content for it. Right now I’m working on the September content, which is on how do you handle your irregular income with respect to your budget?

20:28 Emily: Lourdes, the tip that you gave is basically the first one that I’ve already put into this, which is count up your income from one month and put it towards the next month budget, that you got from Allie. It’s absolutely perfect, because you never know when something could go wrong with your side-hustle income. Like if one of you became ill, for example, maybe you need to skip an episode. That’s not a problem for us, but it would be a problem for your budget if you’d already spent the money that you expected to come in. That’s number one, baseline tip for handling side hustle income is give it a delay. Meryem, you’re doing a similar thing by putting it directly into savings, and then later on thinking about, well, how do I want to spend it, or do I want to keep it here? Different articulation, but kind of the same principle there. I’m really glad to hear that.

Side Hustle Income and Taxes

21:13 Emily: Now we come to one of my favorite subjects within personal finance, which is taxes. So you two are both self-employed, you are contractors for me, and Meryem, now you have this other contractor, essentially you’re like a real true contractor working for multiple people with the same skillset. Self employment taxes are kind of a whole other ball of wax. You’ve been doing this for a year, do you have any systems that you’ve put in place or just what are you doing with it, with respect to your taxes? Lourdes?

21:40 Lourdes: For me, it’s a little bit of two different things. I generally set aside about 30% of my self employment income for taxes. That’s taking into account the about 15% self employment tax and then income tax being around 12%. But also, I am on a fellowship that requires me to pay estimated taxes quarterly, and so at the beginning of every year, I basically estimate how much — well, I know how much I’m going to earn from my fellowship, and then I basically estimated how much I anticipate earning from doing this virtual assistant for the podcast. Basically, I have ahead of time, I know how much I have to set aside each month for both my fellowship income and this side hustle income. I immediately put that into savings and I just don’t touch that money. It’s not even money that I think about. And then I tend to over save just a little bit in terms of taxes, just because I’d rather have a cushion. Last year, I think I was off by like $150 just because of other things. I also have some investments that will change throughout the year and change my tax situation, but I do tend to oversave just so I have that little extra cushion and I don’t have to take it out of other pockets of my savings. Then if I have extra money left over, I kind of use it as my own personal tax refund. So the government isn’t giving me any, but I have some extra money left over in my tax pot. I use that and just reallocate it usually to different savings categories.

23:23 Emily: Yeah. I handle my income from my business exactly the same way, so it sounds like you’re just incorporating the self employment tax issue into your existing structure for paying quarterly estimated tax. Meryem, I want to give you a chance to answer that one as well, because I know this is shifting for you right now,

23:39 Meryem: Actually I’m absorbing all of Lourdes’ tips because for me, I just, in the month also started receiving fellowship non-W-2 income. Prior to that, I wasn’t really thinking about estimated quarterly taxes as much because I didn’t have to deal with all of that. But now moving forward for tax year 2020 into next year, I will have to kind of be thinking about that. Even though the actual amount of taxes that I’ll from the side hustle income will be less than the amount that is necessary to be able to pay estimated quarterly taxes — so my original strategy was just to collect all of the receipts that I’ll receive from PayPal and then make sure that I back calculate the amount that I have to pay for the self employment tax and pay that come tax season. That original plan is fine if you know that you’re not going to owe the amount that you would need to, to not have to pay fees for not paying estimated quarterly taxes, but I like the strategy of kind of building it in so that by the time tax season does roll around, you’ve already paid everything.

24:45 Meryem: I actually think that I’m going to adopt that policy rather than shifting it and waiting until tax season. And as for my other side hustle with AcaDames, their structure is also changing since they’re recently going through the process of incorporating and becoming an LLC. Previously, and currently during the transition, I’m being paid through W2 income because it’s very easy to me to be able to do that as a UNC student and the cohost, or at least one of the coasts now is based at UNC, so it was really easy to deal with that through payroll and not have to worry about freelancing or independent contracting. But I imagine that that will also shift within the next year as they’re making this transition into becoming an LLC. So having all of these strategies in place now will probably be really useful moving forward.

25:38 Emily: Yeah, that’s good for me to know. Interesting. I should mention also, I just brought up the Personal Finance for PhDs Community, but for the last several years, I’ve had a workshop available for individuals on quarterly estimated tax and helping them fill out their estimated tax worksheet and form 1040. That workshop is now coming under the umbrella of the community. So anyone who’s wondering about how do I file quarterly estimated tax on my fellowship, that’s where to go for that particular workshop PFforPhSs.com/community. And I just told you, I’m thinking about in September, the training that I’m going to release on handling your irregular income with respect to your budget. Later on this fall, I’m planning on doing another full workshop on the self-employment side hustle that is so common for graduate students and PhDs, and how to handle that for your taxes, so a whole other tax workshop just on this topic of self employment taxes. That’ll be available if anyone needs help with that sort of thing. I’m really excited about creating because I’ve been doing my own taxes as a self employed person for a number of years, so I have a basic familiarity with it and I’m excited to do a bit more research to figure out how it works for other kinds of businesses as well. That’s where to find out more info there.

Unexpected Benefits from Side Hustling

26:54 Emily: As a second to last question here, have there been any benefits to doing a side hustle that you didn’t anticipate when you first took on the position? Lourdes?

27:05 Lourdes: Specifically for this podcast, Emily interviews a wide range of guests and a lot of them also have social media that they promote. I’ve been able to connect with some of the different guests on social media, just as a result of sometimes promoting the episode. They’ll see that I promote it, and then we connect, we end up talking, following each other on Twitter. That’s been like something I didn’t really expect to happen, but it’s been really cool because q lot of them are fellow grad students, and then just getting into that academic sphere of Twitter has been really interesting just to see all these different graduate experiences from people all over the country and all over the world. That’s been one of the most unanticipated benefit from this particular side hustle.

27:57 Lourdes: And then also, as has been brought up multiple times, I think Meryem brought this up, just learning a different skillset that’s something very different from what I do in my normal day to day graduate work. And I, in particular, am starting to figure out what I want to do after grad school. I’m a fifth year student going into my sixth year, so I’ve been leaning towards maybe some more like alt-academic jobs, and being able to have this completely different skill set is definitely something that I think adds to my resume and adds to potential job options and sort of also gives me ideas of what other type of work is out there. Along with what I was mentioning before Emily does have so many different types of guests on the podcast, just seeing what opportunities are available to graduate students after they’ve defended and after they graduated, has been really interesting and something that I hadn’t even considered or even thought of prior to really getting to know some of these guests through the podcast.

29:04 Emily: Yeah. That’s really great for me to hear. I know that this too was an unexpected benefit for me of doing the podcast is I didn’t expect it to be such good networking. I knew some things that would happen from it, but not the networking aspect, so I’m really glad that you’ve been able to tap into that as well. So Meryem, how about you?

29:24 Meryem: Yeah, I agree completely with the networking component as this amazing side benefit of being involved with editing the podcast. And I think for me also, I just find it inspiring how relevant the episodes have been in my own personal journey as a student, often in real time. In fact, I’ll never forget that the very first trial episode that I edited was with Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel about her decision to change labs and how to prepare for the unexpected in grad school. And it just so happened that that exact same week that I was editing that episode, my former PhD advisor surprised that our lab with an announcement that she would be leaving UNC and moving across the country, and all of this was happening while I was trying to plan a wedding with my fiance, and now husband, who had just moved down to Chapel Hill to start a new job, to be with me after we’d been long distance for so many years. And anyways, it ended up working out and I was able to switch into an amazing collaborating lab and stay at UNC, but unbeknownst to Katie, her advice at that time was so timely for me and helpful for me as I was going through that transition. So I always rave about the podcast to pretty much every grad student I come across and I try to send along helpful episodes and resources to them if it sort of just happens to come across in conversation. It’s just amazing to me how many times that, that has just happened, where I’m editing an episode and realizing, wait, I really need to pay attention. This is really relevant to my life right now.

31:00 Emily: That’s really good to hear. Of course you told me at the time that that episode was striking you in that way and I’m so glad that I could help. I think that, as Lourdes, as I was saying earlier, I’ve been doing this podcast for about two years now and I have quite a few interviews under my belt and it’s not always the same type of person, as you were saying. It’s a lot of different kinds of personal finance stories coming from a lot of different sorts of people who have been in academia for a time at least. There is a good trove of episodes there, that you might find something useful to your current situation, if you do a little diving into the archives.

Best Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

31:34 Emily: Last question here, which, you know, I ask of pretty much all the guests who come on the podcast. I’ll give you a chance to give your answers as well. What is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And we’ll go to Lourdes first again.

31:48 Lourdes: For me, I think one of the best things for me is having a yearly budget. At the beginning of the year, and I’ve been doing this for quite a few years now, I lay out my plan for the year financially on a spreadsheet, and it really helps to be able to see a longer term plan for my money for the year. I think, especially with self employment income, side hustling, it kind of gives you an idea of…Maybe I have a trip planned later in the year, or I have some big event that I’m going to need to save up money for, and being able to more strategically allocate your money on a larger scale rather than just month to month. I think that’s been one of like a strategy that I’ve been employing for a couple of years now, and it’s just been super helpful for me, and it’s something that I will see myself doing like far into the future

32:44 Emily: That is, I think, typically a good piece of advice, but I want to know how it’s going in 2020.

32:50 Lourdes: It’s been interesting to say the least. There have been a lot of…I had some trips planned that have gotten canceled, so I have this extra money, but also different expenses that I didn’t anticipate come up. And it’s been a little bit of am eye-opener in terms of plans change as the year goes on, but I think sort of having that framework to begin with helps me realize that even if…I go back to this budget every month, it’s the same spreadsheet I use for my monthly budgeting, so it changes and updates and it’s a very fluid document, but just having that outline there to begin with has also been something that provides some structure, especially when the year got so different than what everyone anticipated.

33:43 Emily: Yeah, I also use the year as the sort of standard timeframe when I talk about irregular expenses, so expenses that come up non monthly, and you and I talked about this in our interview from a year or so ago. I think it’s a great strategy to think about what budgetarily is coming up for you — trips, as you mentioned earlier, or maybe some other kinds of irregular expenses, so you can anticipate them over the course of about a year. So yeah, I like that time frame as well. Meryem, how about you? What’s your best advice?

34:12 Meryem: Yeah, so my best advice is probably to be honest with yourself and keep an open mind about your personal finances. A wise friend once told me that disappointment happens when our expectations don’t match up with our reality, which was really helpful for me to hear at the time, as an optimist, because I used to feel a lot of guilt or disappointment if I couldn’t maintain an unrealistic budget, or if I couldn’t resist making an impulse purchase on something that maybe wasn’t necessary, but made me or someone else really happy. But I also think it’s really important for our mental and physical wellbeing to work towards a healthy relationship with money, which I know can be particularly challenging on a grad student’s stipend. So with that in mind still, I think as best as you can try to be honest with yourself and set realistic goals for yourself, not based on anybody else’s priorities or spending habits, but whatever matches your needs. That being said, if something really isn’t working for you, that’s probably a good time to have an open mind and try to adapt, effective strategies from others. I guess I would say it’s okay to experiment and even take calculated risks, while figuring out what works best for you, but being honest yourself and keeping an open mind is probably my best financial advice and general life advice as well.

35:44 Emily: I love that as well. I often think about the mismatch between expectations and reality, and how that provokes us, so I try to keep my expectations low, basically. I really love that advice and I think that’s unique. I don’t think we’ve heard that on the podcast before, but I think it’s perfect. And something that graduate students can sometimes be discouraged around their finances because they are working with such a low income, it’s for such a long period of time, and I talk a lot about investing and saving stuff and that’s just out of reach for a lot of graduate students, but they can implement your advice, Meryem. They can like learn to just figure out what’s going to work for them in managing their own finances right now and carry that skill set and that habit, whatever it is that they determined as the right system or whatever, forward into their career and post-PhD income, and hopefully have a lot of financial success at that time, having been honest with themselves and really using the time in graduate school to get to know what their preferences are with respect to managing their finances. That’s good advice for anybody, anytime. You can always implement it.

36:46 Emily: I’m so glad to have had you two on the podcast and thank you so much for volunteering to do this. Thanks for coming on.

36:53 Lourdes: Thank you, Emily.

36:54 Meryem: Thanks Emily.

Outtro

36:56 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 Fulbright Fellow Supplements Her Stipend with Prior Savings

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Caitlin Kirby, a graduate student at Michigan State University and former Fulbright fellow in Germany. Caitlin has been greatly financially challenged on the Fulbright, namely by: 1) the large amount of money needed to move and settle into her new city and university, 2) the high cost of housing relative to the stipend, and 3) the additional expense of bringing her husband with her. Caitlin and the majority of her peers are supplementing their Fulbright income with prior savings. Fortunately, Caitlin and her husband grew their net worth in advance of starting the fellowship through house hacking and savings goals.

Links Mentioned

Fulbright fellowship stipend

Teaser

00:00 Caitlin: We’re paying about €1,025 a month for a furnished apartment with all bills included, which is the norm in Germany, and that’s 85% of my base stipend.

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 six, episode 16, and today my guest is Dr. Caitlin Kirby, a graduate student at Michigan State University, and former Fulbright fellow in Germany. Caitlin details the financial challenges she experienced on the Fulbright, namely the large amount of money needed to move and settle into her new city and the university, the high cost of housing relative to the stipend and the additional expense of bringing her husband with her. Caitlin and the majority of her peers supplemented their Fulbright income with prior savings. Fortunately, Caitlin and her husband built up savings in advance of starting the fellowship through house hacking and savings goals. This episode is valuable, not just for future Fulbright fellows, but also anyone facing a career transition or move. By the way, we recorded this interview in February, 2020, and I’ve included an August, 2020 update from Caitlin after the interview. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Caitlin Kirby.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:25 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Caitlin Kirby, and we’re discussing something that I haven’t had the opportunity to before, which is actually the Fulbright fellowship, super exciting, that is as a PhD student. And Caitlin will also be telling us in the second half of the episode about how to prepare for financial challenges that you don’t even know you’re preparing for, like the Fulbright. So Caitlin, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. Dave, thank you so much. And will you please introduce yourself a little bit to the audience?

01:53 Caitlin: Yeah. Thanks. I’m glad to be joining you. I am a PhD candidate at Michigan State University in Environmental Science and Policy. My dissertation looks at environmental decision making in cross cultural spaces, and I also engage in science education research in university classrooms.

02:13 Emily: Yeah. How did you decide that you wanted to do the Fulbright? I guess maybe my own bias coming into this is that I really think of it as something people do after undergrad while not yet enrolled in a graduate program, but you know much more about this. So how did this come on your radar and why’d you decide to apply for it?

02:31 Caitlin: Yeah, so the program you’re thinking of is probably primarily the English teaching assistant program, which is primarily students who have graduated undergrad and not moved on to a graduate degree program. And then a smaller subset of the Fulbright is study and research grants for graduate students. I have always enjoyed international travel. Like I said, my dissertation is looking in cross cultural spaces. I did some research in South and so it was always something that was kind of on my radar. And actually I was thinking about doing it for a post doc. And in my last couple of years of grad school started looking at the application requirements and figured out that it was going to be simpler to apply as a graduate student, so I did, and here I am.

03:18 Emily: And is this, I know it’s playing into your dissertation, but is this kind of you taking like an extra year or is this really not extending your time to degree at all and it’s just going to go right in with your overall plan?

03:31 Caitlin: Yeah. So a little bit of both. I actually defended my dissertation in October, so it’s kind of an extension of my dissertation and degree time. Although I probably would have graduated in May anyways and now it’s August instead.

Financial Support Provided by Fulbright

03:47 Emily: Gotcha. Well, congratulations on already defending. We’re recording this in February, 2020, so for the listeners reference. Okay, so what financial support does the Fulbright give to you?

04:01 Caitlin: Yeah, so it is different for every country. I am speaking about Germany Fulbright grant. Although I also looked at a lot of the Western European ones. They get a lot of applications as well, have a lot of grants and are fairly similar in that they are relatively expensive places to live. Hopefully this is generalizable across a lot of those spaces. My understanding from folks that I’ve heard from who are in spaces that have lower cost of living is that the stipend is a little bit more generous in those spaces.

04:34 Caitlin: What Fulbright does provide in Germany, if you are a graduate student or an English TA, you get €850 a month. If you’re a PhD candidate, so you’ve passed your comprehensive exams, then it goes up to €1,200 a month. So if you are a PhD student and you can wait until after comps, I think it’s worth it.

04:58 Emily: Yeah, that’s a big raise, surprisingly.

05:01 Caitlin: Yeah and €850 is actually the lowest, I’ve seen for countries in this area. Other countries in Western Europe range from about €1,300 to €1,500 a month. These stipends are not posted on the actual application website. You have to go to the Fulbright website for each individual country to find those, and sometimes they’re not available and sometimes they don’t include all the details.

Financial Challenges of the Fulbright

05:26 Emily: Yeah. So I understand that you have encountered some financial challenges based on that stipend and also maybe a lack of clarity up front about exactly what was going into this whole package. So can you explain a little bit more about what you’ve found?

05:41 Caitlin: Yeah. There are some challenges that are specific to my situation and then some challenges that some other Fulbrighters have also experienced. I would say sort of summarizing those across from what I’ve seen from others and for myself is that the three really primary challenges are that you need a lot of savings at the beginning to cover your first couple of months and some initial expenses. Then number two would be that housing is really kind of the make or break factor in how far your stipend goes. And so if you can look ahead of time when you’re deciding what institution to work with at the cost of living in a city, maybe try and find one that’s not so high. And then the third thing would be, think about any extenuating circumstances that might make it more costly for you as an individual.

06:33 Emily: This actually sounds like really good advice for anyone approaching any financial or location transition whatsoever, so people going into graduate school, going to a post doc, going to your first job, so I really want you to expand more on each one of those points.

#1: Expected and Unexpected Upfront Expenses

06:48 Caitlin: For the initial costs,, or the one-time costs when I arrived here in Germany, first of all, like everything else in academia, the Fulbright stipend model is built on reimbursement. So you buy everything ahead of time, and then after you get your bank account in your country, they will reimburse you, which for Germany can also take a long time. It’s a very bureaucratic country. A lot of the Fulbrighters in Germany were paid late, like two or three months after their grant had started, and it was really inconsistent across different fellowship recipients. Or sometimes they were paid in consistently. So having that initial savings is really important to be able to get you through.

07:34 Emily: What kinds of upfront costs were you experiencing?

07:39 Caitlin: Yeah, so moving costs in general, right? You have to get your travel, which Fulbright covers some of, and sometimes again, depends on the country. My flight was covered and then they provided an additional, like €150 for other expenses, but I decided to fly out of Chicago, which was far away, so I needed hotel and transit and it didn’t really cover all that. Then once we arrived as well, there was a lot of traveling around the city that we had to do to get everything settled. I’m saying we, because I came here with my husband, and that transit was eventually covered by my university pass, which I also had to pay about 300 euros to enroll at a university. And some folks will have to pay tuition as well.

08:29 Emily: Wow. That is a lot, and it sounds like it’s quite variable too. Going into this situation, it sounds like actually you’re in contact with other people doing the Fulbright. And so is there like a network already of people that you can tap to find out, okay, what are all these expenses, or does the program make it really, really clear once you have a host university?

08:51 Caitlin: It was more hearing from other people that I got this information. I don’t remember how I was contacted about this initially actually, but there was a Fulbright Facebook specifically for folks in my year. And some alum had joined that as well. I believe the Fulbright did actually connect me with these social networks. So they are very good about getting you in contact with alumni and folks that you can engage with, and then beyond that, it’s kind of up to the folks in each cohort to decide what to share and how often and all of that.

09:26 Emily: This actually sounds very familiar to what I understand is the experience of many international students coming to the US — the place where they get the most information from, is the network of students from their country already at that university or who are coming in at the same time, which can be truly an amazing resource in many ways. However, if that group doesn’t already have the correct information or the best information, then it can kind of be passed along and not like optimized. It’s probably 80% awesome and then 20% maybe someone else could give you better information, but like that is really the best go to resource.

10:05 Caitlin: Yeah.

10:06 Emily: Not being paid, that is reimbursed for two to three months sounds really long. Were there any other kind of upfront reasons why you needed to tap savings or expenses that you wish you’d known about in advance?

10:22 Caitlin: Yeah. This one is perhaps unique to Germany in that when you get an apartment in Germany, when they say unfurnished, they mean like unfurnished. There are no light fixtures, there are no cupboards, there’s no kitchen sink. So your choices are to come and basically furnish a whole apartment, which I know another married grantee did this year, or you can pay a premium to get a furnished apartment, which are much less available and so much more expensive than —

10:58 Emily: Wow, so it’s typical to bring in your own appliances and like all of that? Do people move that stuff when they move from place to place?

11:06 Caitlin: There’s a reason that Ikea is a big deal here because you can just kind of pack it up and take it with you or you can sell it to the person who’s renting your apartment next, which so then if you’re renting an apartment and they’re offering the kitchen, then you can pay like 1200 euro to, I’ve seen up to like €4,000 to keep the kitchen in the apartment

11:28 Emily: Wow, that is a lot of upfront costs. Anything else to add to that list?

11:34 Caitlin: Some bureaucratic stuff in general. I think most Fulbrighters would be aware of this, but maybe not necessarily how much of it or how much it might add up. So passport photos, the passport itself, some places have expensive visa applications and then myself coming in as a married grantee, there’s extra documentation that we needed around our marriage certificate, getting that translated, paying for my husband’s visa, that kind of thing.

12:02 Emily: It’s a lot of costs. It’s a lot of costs you’re listing. Are you being completely supported by the Fulbright in this year or is Michigan State supplementing at all?

12:11 Caitlin: You’re not allowed to really have significant other income. It’s up to 450, I don’t remember dollars or euro a month is allowed as a Fulbright grantee. And that again, may be specific to Germany that amount, but still the fact that you’re not supposed to have significant outside sources of income holds true. I did receive an award in the semester that I was awarded the Fulbright, from Michigan state. I got some money from them as an award for receiving this fellowship that I then tucked away and said, okay, that’s going to supplement when I am on my Fulbright.

12:52 Emily: Yeah. That’s a great thing to have upfront going into this process.

12:56 Emily: Okay, so we’ve talked about upfront expenses. Sounds like you need massive amount of savings to undertake this. What was the second point that you were going to make?

#2: Cost of Living and Housing in Your New City

13:06 Caitlin: Yeah, housing is definitely the biggest factor in how far your stipend is going to go. That’s again where you might want to consider, because as a Fulbright grantee, you decide which institute you’re going to work with or which university you’re going to attend, and if you somehow have a choice between some different costs of living areas, you might want to choose one that’s a little bit easier on the wallet. Then the other thing that sort of made housing more difficult for myself as an older grantee, and a married grantee is that there’s not really shared housing options available as a married couple. We had to get our own apartment, and that makes it a lot more expensive. It’s a lot more reasonable if you’re able to share space, but a lot of graduate students might not be able to, or might not want to for a variety of reasons.

13:57 Emily: So when you’re talking about sharing space and that not being available to you as a married couple, are you still talking about having like individual bedrooms or is it like a dorm situation or what would other people do if they were single?

14:11 Caitlin: Yeah, so they’re called veh has in German, or WG is the abbreviation for it. And it’s basically everybody has their individual bedroom in an apartment that’s shared with people.

14:24 Emily: Okay. And you can’t share a bedroom then as a couple?

14:28 Caitlin: It’s just extremely rare, so rare that on the websites where you can like search for these housing options, there’s no option to have a couple, or like a male/female mix going into these rooms. So it’s a little bit of a cultural thing.

14:47 Emily: Yeah. Interesting. I mean this point is also super super applicable to anyone moving anywhere. Rent, or your housing expenses more generally, is most likely going to be the largest expense in your budget. It’s very difficult to change once you — I mean, you can change it maybe after a year or something, but once you sign that lease, you’re locked in for a little while. It’s so important to put really the bulk of probably the research that you’re doing into that housing choice. And it does sound like yours was further constrained by bringing your spouse along with you. Anything else you wanted to add about the housing cost?

15:22 Caitlin: I think that about covers it, but just to give an idea, we’re paying about €1,025 a month for a furnished apartment with all bills included, which is the norm in Germany, and that’s 85% of my base stipend. I do also get, I think I didn’t mention that I get some dependent support for my husband being with me. It’s about €270 a month, so not a huge amount. That really has been, that was the biggest shock to me, I think, because I could see on apartment websites, things that were cheaper, but they weren’t able to fit to our needs.

16:05 Emily: Yeah. And do you have any other source of income right now? You’ve mentioned the Fulbright grant, the additional support for having a spouse and then the upfront award that Michigan State gave you to help a little bit with that. Does your husband have any income right now?

16:19 Caitlin: No. He’s not allowed to have income either, both because of visa issues, and then if he did earn significant income, then we would just say, okay, we don’t need the dependent support from Fulbright. But with visa issues and also language issues, it would be very difficult for him to work. So it’s savings and Fulbright.

16:43 Emily: Yeah. Wow. Okay, well, we’ll get into how you’re making that work in a moment. And what was that third point that you wanted to say about everyone’s unique situation?

#3: Individual Personal Finance Situations

16:53 Caitlin: Yeah, so there’s a lot of difficulties that I’ve had with the Fulbright, but I don’t think overall it’s necessarily an unfair stipend. I think that you need to weigh it against your individual needs. So again, myself bringing my husband, that’s two people living on one income, obviously it’s going to be more difficult. If you have student loans that you’re still paying, some of them are eligible for deferment, depends on who your loan provider is, in some cases. If you have pets that you either want to try and bring with you or need to get taken care of. If you have a lease at home that you need to break or keep paying on or storage for your items, regular bills at home. So our car right now is on storage insurance, which is luckily not very much, but still something to consider. Prescription drugs — there is some level of health coverage provided by Fulbright, but they do not pay for regular expenses like that. And accessibility needs too. Our apartment would not be accessible to someone with a wheelchair. And even though there’s great public transportation, you might need to be closer to the city center than we are. Just all kinds of things that maybe are easily or more integrated into your life before you leave that become very obvious as challenges when you’re on your way.

18:20 Emily: A lot to think about there. Actually going back to your second point, I think I was getting the impression that the Fulbright grant is the same across every country. Is that right? The income, that is, that you would get as the same across the country, or is it actually different depending on which university you land in?

18:40 Caitlin: So for Germany, it is the same across the country. Some other countries vary it depending on what the cost of living is in the city that you’re in.

18:50 Emily: Okay. So in some cases you might have a cost of living adjustment built into your income, and in some cases you might not, and that’s why you were saying, okay, let’s be really careful about, which institute you choose to go to in that case.

19:01 Caitlin: Yes. And Germany did actually announce a few months into the grant that they have extra money for a housing stipend. So folks who are in those higher costs of living situations will be able to receive up to €250 a month. And there is some kind of, I think as an American, maybe kind of ridiculous size requirements and that single people get 200 something square feet for that stipend and as a married couple, you can get a 320 square foot apartment, which is tiny. That’s like a studio with like a hot plate and a toaster oven, right? For us, cooking is really important, so we opted to get a prorated stipend and have somewhere with a full kitchen.

19:47 Emily: Gotcha.

Commercial

19:51 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics, or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group, or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers even while social distancing. Now back to our interview.

Making it Work Despite the Financial Challenges

20:50 Emily: So, I’m freaking out a little bit for you when you mentioned the percentage of your income that your rent takes up. How are you making this work? What have you been doing in the years leading up to going on the Fulbright that makes you not freak out right now about money?

21:09 Caitlin: Yeah. So one piece that I do want to say, is that I’m not necessarily unique in that I am having to use a lot of other savings. On the Facebook group, I mentioned that to the other Fulbrighters in Germany, I just did an informal poll and 62 out of 91 responded, so that’s about 70%, said that they would not be able to financially survive without significant additional savings, gifts or income. So —

21:37 Emily: Is that something that the program makes clear earlier in the application cycle or is this something that comes as a surprise once people are really starting to look into the financials?

21:49 Caitlin: I think it’s more of a surprise. They are pretty upfront about what support is provided, like you can go look at the numbers. I was surprised that that many people were struggling with it because I was thinking like, yeah, this makes sense, I’m supporting two people on this income and my savings, so of course it’s going to feel like a, a stressful year. But I was surprised that that many people expressed that they, they had to use significant outside sources. There were like 15% of people who said that they had money left over for savings, so again it’s working for some people.

22:27 Caitlin: Yeah, but not the majority. All right. Yeah, go ahead. How are you making this work?

22:33 Caitlin: Yeah, so I think like with anything else in academia or life, it’s a combination of luck and privilege and decision making. My husband and I were in a low cost of living area, Michigan State University is in East Lansing right next to Lansing, Michigan’s state capital. We were living in Lansing where houses are fairly cheap and we were able to buy a house when I started graduate school, because I had funds, enough for a down payment, from a relative who had passed away. We intentionally bought this house within biking distance from the university, so we sold one of our cars once we arrived, and we ended up having roommates for almost the entire time that we lived there.

23:23 Emily: How large is your house? How many bedrooms?

23:26 Caitlin: It was a three bedroom.

23:28 Emily: Okay. And so you had one or two tenants that entire time?

23:34 Caitlin: Yes. Usually one, sometimes two.

23:38 Emily: I love this strategy. It’s come to be known as house hacking. It’s actually something I’m excited about covering even more on the podcast. Either — well, whenever this is released — maybe in the recent past, or maybe in the soon to be future. But I love the strategy for graduate students. Of course, it’s only possible in relatively low or moderate cost of living cities, where the housing market is something that a graduate student can kind of grasp. It definitely helps to have two incomes, like presumably you and your husband have, and also to have acquired down payment money from somewhere. Those are things that are very, very helpful, although not strictly necessary, but go into the likelihood of house hacking being possible. Overall, has that single tenant paid your entire mortgage, half of your mortgage? How much of a financial boost has that situation given you?

24:31 Caitlin: We were doing it both for personal and financial reasons. Every single person who lived in our house was someone we knew, either friends or family members. So we charged the actual cost to them, of living there, which maybe doesn’t quite work out in our favor because we were also then paying for maintenance costs and that kind of thing, but it was what we decided to do. All of the income that we got from renters, we put into savings or paying off my husband’s student loans, which we had to do at the beginning of graduate school, or IRAs, retirement accounts.

25:17 Emily: What was your husband’s income like during this time? Did his income far exceed yours, or was it similar to what you were making?

25:25 Caitlin: His income was similar to what I was making, similar to a graduate stipend?

25:29 Emily: Yeah. Okay. Not a huge boost there, but good for two people living in a lower cost of living city. Great, so you were beefing up your savings. Anything else that you were doing during that time to help you prepare for this challenging year?

25:43 Caitlin: Well, so I knew relatively ahead of time that the Fulbright was a possibility and if I didn’t get the Fulbright, we were going to take a trip to travel around Europe anyway, so we had this designated savings account for a Europe trip or Fulbright supplement and we were able to put $5,000 in that. I was also keeping pretty good track of how much money we were spending, so I knew in general how much we would need to supplement the Fulbright and was able to funnel that away in the months leading up to it.

26:18 Emily: How long did you take to directly prepare for the Fulbright and, or generally going to Europe?

26:26 Caitlin: Hmm, that’s a good question. It has been a goal in my financial tracking account for over two years.

26:37 Emily: Okay. Yeah. That’s a great time horizon. I usually encourage people to think out at least a ahead, like what major expenses may be coming their way, but two years is even better, if you can do it. That’s a great kind of baseline to have to prepare. I forgot to ask, what are you doing with your house right now? Is it fully rented out?

26:55 Caitlin: We sold our house before we left. We didn’t want —

26:58 Emily: Oh wow.

26:58 Caitlin: Yeah. And because I’m graduating at the end of the Fulbright, I’ve been applying for jobs. We don’t know where we’ll land, so it just made sense.

27:05 Emily: Okay, so you’re not planning on returning to Lansing, and you’ve closed everything out there that you need to before leaving.

27:13 Caitlin: Yeah.

27:13 Emily: That’s great. So presumably you also had some capital gains from that sale?

27:18 Caitlin: We did, yeah.

27:19 Emily: That’s awesome. Anything else that you’re doing to make your financials work this year?

27:25 Caitlin: Just keeping track, basically, which is a little bit harder in Germany. It’s very much a cash economy and I like to keep track of my purchases with card, but instead I’m out paying cash and euro and then coming home and converting that and remembering what went to what. Keeping track so that we can then also have some money set aside for travel, since that’s part of the mission of the Fulbright, as well as this cultural exchange.

27:56 Emily: That sounds awesome. Anything else you want to say to another potential Fulbright applicant, regarding the finances of, of doing the fellowship?

28:05 Caitlin: I would say don’t be dissuaded based, based on what I’ve said. I think it tends to be most overwhelming at the beginning and then things kind of level out. You either figure out where to make sacrifices, or there are options for you to earn up to an extra 400 euro a month, which is pretty accessible. I would say that it’s still definitely worth it, if in your situation it’s not going to be too burdensome.

28:36 Emily: I think it’s kind of like with any other life transitions, as I was saying earlier. Having cash in your bank account and your savings account is going to help you so much through that transition, and it’s not necessarily like vital, but it is going to make it a lot smoother. And it’s something that you can then repay out of your ongoing income. Like you said, with the reimbursements coming slowly, that can go right back into refilling the savings for the next transition that will be happening at the end of the year, or whatever. So the earlier you can build up savings kind of for whatever comes your way, as you did, the better okay.

Final Words of Advice

29:10 Emily: Caitlin, I end all my interviews by asking my guest, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

29:17 Caitlin: I would say find a way to enjoy or kind of make a game out of financial management, with the caveat that I understand that some PhDs are not in a position where they can really even sustain themselves. You’re allowed to feel stressed out about it if that’s the situation you’re in, but find what works for you and what interests you about your finances, so that you can keep track in a way that makes sense for you. For example, I do not like to budget out where every single bit of my money is going. Instead I set aside, this is for retirement, this is for long-term savings, this is for this specific short term savings goal, and then everything else can get spent because everything’s taken care of. But if you don’t want to even want to look at a spreadsheet, then make a visualization or make it into a presentation, make it interesting for yourself.

30:18 Emily: I love that tip. I don’t know if this is a widely used term, but I call it the “unbudgeting” method. So for those people who don’t want to be down in the weeds with this category versus this category, as long as you have that high level savings or debt repayment or whatever you’re doing, as long as that’s taken care of and ideally through like automated transactions, so you don’t even have to think about it. As long as you’re paying attention to that balance in your checking account, just spend what’s there because you know you have your big goals already taken care of. And it actually — seems like it doesn’t sound like this is your preference — but in a cash economy, budgeting without putting a ton of spreadsheet effort into it can be possible because you just say, here’s my cash for eating out, here’s my cash for groceries, and just spend that down, and don’t worry about having to keep track specifically because you did it ahead of time.

31:09 Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Caitlin. As I said, I’m really excited to discuss the Fulbright. It’s a first for me.

31:16 Caitlin: Yeah. Great, and I’m excited to discuss personal finance.

31:20 Emily: Thank you.

August 2020 Update

31:22 Caitlin: Hi, Caitlin Kirby here with an update on what happened with coronavirus and Fulbright. In March, Fulbright programs around the world started sending people home as coronavirus was coming into those countries. For me in Germany, that meant a couple of weeks of sort of confusing communication from Fulbright, followed by eventually them suggesting that everybody go home, followed shortly by all Fulbright programs, worldwide, being suspended. Again, things were different on a country to country level. For Germany, we were given funding for changes in travel plans to head home. As per regular in the Fulbright program, that was only for the grantee and not for any dependents. And then we were also given our stipend through June 30th, which for me meant that I was receiving a month and a half less of payment. For most people that’s when the program was ending anyway.

32:31 Caitlin: And then Fulbright Germany was also able to provide folks with, I think it was a thousand euros just as additional transition funds. This information kind of all came piecemeal, so it was a little bit stressful in the moment. But I did end up then going back to the United States in March. I was fortunate enough to be able to, at least from the research standpoint, work remotely with my research team back in Germany, so I still got to complete a lot of my goals for the Fulbright, as far as research goes, but obviously missed out on the rest of that experience of being in the country, in Germany. I was also fortunate to then be able to start my postdoctoral research position at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln a little bit early, so I didn’t have gaps in funding, which obviously was really helpful.

33:24 Caitlin: Fulbright, in this coming year, again is a little bit country to country. I know some programs have been canceled because of coronavirus. Some programs are starting late, in January, and that is really all that I’ve heard. If you are just considering applying to Fulbright now, I think chances are better that things will be a little bit more normal by the time you start or at least Fulbright will have better contingency plans for what happens if outbreaks do occur so that you’re not sort of waiting week by week, or really day by day to figure out what’s happening at the commission level or with the Fulbright program, overall.

34:08 Caitlin: One other note, if you are applying this year, there is potential for you to have increased competition because Fulbright did offer for folks whose grants were interrupted to be able to reapply in the coming cycle. They don’t have any priority over folks who are applying for the first time or second time, but that is a possibility for folks who are in situations where they’re able to come home and then apply for Fulbright again, which is not for a lot of people I know who were doing the Fulbright, but it’s, again, a possibility.

34:46 Caitlin: If you want a little bit more information about some of the impacts of the changes in the Fulbright program in different countries, there is a group on Twitter called Fulbright Crisis and they have been cataloging some of the difficulties that people coming back from different countries have had, or people coming back in general. Like for example, the health insurance that Fulbright provided was only in the country that your Fulbright was in so when folks were sent back home, some of them did not have health insurance. And some folks were not provided stipends throughout the program. Like once the programs ended in March, some countries were not providing stipends for their grantees. Again, the Twitter handle for that is @FulbrightCrisis and they’re showcasing some of those difficulties if you want a little bit more information about what that has looked like and maybe what that will look like in the future

Outtro

35:49 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 Candidate Paid for Her Wedding with Her Research Side Hustle

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In this episode, Emily interviews Rebecca Brenner Graham about side hustling to pay for her wedding while a PhD candidate in history at American University. In addition to working on her own dissertation and serving as a teaching assistant, Rebecca used her skills as a history researcher in a self-employment position assisting an economics professor at another university. Rebecca had to quickly learn how to manage her time and energy well across all her different professional roles and her personal life. If you are planning a wedding as a graduate student, you’ll also enjoy hearing wedding planning and budgeting tips from both Rebecca and Emily.

Links Mentioned

side hustle wedding

Teaser

00:00 Rebecca: The piece of advice that I’m just learning and wish I had known sooner was that unpaid opportunities are almost always not worth it. Full stop.

Introduction

00:20 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 14, and today my guest is Rebecca Brenner Graham, a PhD candidate in history at American University. Rebecca has always side hustled to supplement her stipend, but she kicked it up a notch in her fourth year to pay for her wedding. We discuss how Rebecca balanced her time and energy among her own dissertation work, her teaching assistantship, her self employment gig as a researcher for an economics professor, wedding planning, and the rest of her life. Listen through to the end here, how Rebecca’s wedding went and some wedding planning tips from both of us. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Rebecca Brenner Graham.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:07 Emily: I am so delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Rebecca Brenner Graham, who is going to be discussing with me, her wedding, her recent wedding, and how she ended up paying for that on her Grad student stipend, and actually on more than just her grad student’s stipend. So Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today and will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself?

01:27 Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me, as I was telling you. I’m a long time listener and it just occurred to me that I might have something useful to add. I went to college at Mount Holyoke in Western, Massachusetts as a women’s college. There, I double majored in history and philosophy, and then I went straight into my history graduate school. I’m now starting my fifth year of the PhD. I was able to do the public history master’s combined with my doctoral coursework, which is one of the reasons that I love my department at American University. My dissertation, if anyone’s interested in that, is on Sunday mail delivery from 1810 through 1912 as a lens into religion, state relations. Because I got my masters in public history, I’ve also had some museum gigs on the side, on top of working as a TA in the American University Department of History. That’s about it.

Side-Hustling as a History PhD

02:27 Emily: Yeah. Is that typical for people in your department to be taking on museum jobs or outside gigs like that.

02:33 Rebecca: It’s typical in the sense that being atypical is typical. So there’s not one way to do it. There’s not one way to make it work. Like one of my classmates does a bunch of oral histories of basketball players for money. Some of them are like older and married or have houses. For me, especially brcause I came straight from undergrad, in order to have enough money to not be worrying about it constantly, I have had part time work every year on top of the TA-ing.

03:06 Emily: Okay. That’s good to know. So basically what you’re saying is the stipend that you’re receiving is not sufficient across the board. No one is doing this on just the stipend. They either have outside sources of income from a spouse or something, or maybe past savings, or they’re currently taking on side hustles. Right?

03:22 Rebecca: So I can think of two classmates who, and this is not a coincidence, they’re the two in the department that are younger than me, that haven’t had that much part time work. One of them is extremely frugal and the other one decided to take out loans on top of the stipend. I adore my department, like I am so happy to be there, at the same time we do have the second lowest stipends of all history departments in the greater DC area.

03:49 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Glad to hear that balance of like, Hey, it’s worth it, we’re doing it, but this is what it takes to get it done. Side hustling for you, other solutions for other people, but glad to hear that.

Getting Engaged During Grad School

04:01 Emily: Okay, you’ve given us a little bit of a brief career history, coming straight from college into graduate school, doing your master’s and PhD right in a row. Where does your relationship factor into this?

04:12 Rebecca: Going way back for a second, we actually met in a summer program in Washington, DC when we were 16, like for high school students. We ended up at college near each other. His name is Brandon, and Brandon went to UMass Amherst. We were together for the first half of college, and then we broke up, just seeing other people, didn’t think or know that we’d get back together. We ran into each other a couple of years later and the summer after graduation, we ended up getting back together. Then six months after that, he moved from New York to DC in order to be with me. And even before Brandon and I got back together, I had to facetiously told friends that I need to pass my dissertation proposal, even before I get an engagement proposal. And this was even before I was in a PhD program, this is when I knew I wanted to do a PhD.

05:04 Rebecca: So third year of graduate school, toward the end of the year, I was about to become all but dissertation, ABD, and we had already gone ring shopping. I thought we might be getting engaged soon. And then I ended up getting engaged a few weeks before my prospectus defense. So at the end of my third year of grad school, I was ABD and also engaged.

05:30 Emily: Yeah. I really love that you were, I know you said facetiously, but you were thoughtful about this, right? You had an idea of how you wanted your career to play out and also how your relationship, whoever that was with, how you wanted that to play out. And it’s good to hear really that, um, your husband made that sacrifice when he was your boyfriend of moving to where you were so that you could prioritize your career and he was going to figure it out and it’s not necessarily common story. I’m really glad to hear that.

06:00 Emily: I’m reminded of when I got engaged which was also during graduate school. My husband, we had sort of decided together that we were going to get married, moving towards that direction, but he wanted to wait to propose until he also achieved candidacy. So I was further away from that. That actually didn’t happen for me until my fourth year of graduate school, I think, just the way my department works. But he was like, no, I got to get, I have to get my prelims out of the way, and then I can think about the engagement. So he had the same thought process as you, but from the opposite perspective, in our case.

06:34 Rebecca: I think it’s an autonomy of time thing because even if it’s the same work across the board, you have, I think in most programs, you have more autonomy of time after that ABD mark.

06:45 Emily: Yeah. I think for my husband, it was that, but also just the stress of preparing for the prelim and writing whatever he had to write and doing whatever we had to do, like oral defense or something, I don’t remember the details for him, but just to get past that stressful thing, he wanted it off his plate, so he could enjoy the process of being engaged and planning the wedding and not having to juggle those two things simultaneously and know that, yeah, there’s going to be a few more years here until we have to repeat that process for the dissertation and ultimate defense. With respect to your actual timing of your wedding, like how long were you guys engaged for?

07:25 Rebecca: We got engaged in March, 2018. For about a month, we were actually planning with my parents, and my mom in particular is quite traditional and they were generously willing to pay for it, but it became clear, especially to me very quickly that coordinating with them and negotiating priorities was more labor, and especially more emotional labor, than actually making money myself and working towards paying for it. We also decided in between that March and April period that the things that we cared most about relating to our wedding were not that expensive. Like making the ceremony go how it was important to me was a higher priority than venue or the number of people who were coming. So eventually, I guess around April, when we started planning and paying for it ourselves, we got a date on the calendar. We got married a year and I guess two or three months, not great with numbers, I guess a year and three months later on June 30th, 2019.

08:43 Emily: Okay. So yeah, we are recording this in August, 2019, so this is really fresh for you and that’s exciting. This is definitely a tip for other people who are going into the wedding planning process of anyone who contributes gets a say. If you don’t want that party to have that say in that particular way or whatever, if there are strings attached to that gift, sometimes it is easier to simply take on all of the finances on your own. That’s the decision that you made.

Paying for the Wedding through Side-Hustling

09:12 Emily: We’ve already kind of gone over that your stipend was not really enough to live on, at least in the lifestyle that you want, and you were already side hustling. Did you have a plan for like how much more money did you need to bring in either in total or on a monthly basis to be able to pay for the wedding?

09:28 Rebecca: We looked at it a little backwards, in retrospect. It was more like however much money we have to delegate toward this, that is how much that we could pay. Brandon and I split it almost exactly evenly between us with a few exceptions. If there was something that was really important to him or really important to me. I paid for Ketubah the Jewish marriage contract. I paid for our pre rabbinical counseling. He paid for our entire rehearsal brunch because that was not something that I was tied to doing. On my end, my stipend from American when I started was $19,000 per year, and now currently thanks to our union it’s $22,000 per year, which is actually a huge difference just in the four years or whatever that I’ve been a TA. I really didn’t give it that much thought about, will I be able to afford this? It was more if I can’t afford it, then I won’t do it, and we love each other, and we want to get married, and that’s the most important thing. I have another classmate in my program who literally eloped at one, but I don’t really know the details on that. Also around this time, I was reading those books by Jen Sincero, have you ever read her books? The first one is called “You Are a Badas” and the second one is called “You Are a Badass at Making Money” and they’re —

11:00 Emily: Actually, I’ll interrupt you just for a second. I literally just finished “You’re a Badass At Making Money”, like last week. So I’m a little late to the Jen Sincero game, but I did read it and enjoyed it. I’m trying to figure out what I want to incorporate. So yeah, please go on.

11:15 Rebecca: Oh, that’s so exciting. I’m glad you liked it. In spring 2018, this was when her money book came out, the green one. She’s a little bit more, I don’t know if the word is capitalist than I am, but she’s also in line with my feminism. A central takeaway from Sincero’s work is that sometimes you have to jump and then create the net for yourself. That’s what happened when we decided to pay for our own wedding. So around the time that we had made that decision, I was reading a bunch of Jen Sincero. A major advantage of doing a history program in DC is that a lot of people email the department to offer work opportunities. So then in May, 2018, I heard about a summer job working for an economics professor at George Mason to do research on 19th and early 20th century labor history. My dissertation is on 19th century and early 20th century religion-state relations, and there was a lot of overlap with that labor history. I ended up working for her over the summer and then she offered for me to stay for the coming school year, like this past school year 2018-19. My advisor helped me negotiate a 50% salary increase for that, so that was my side gig that took a lot of time and essentially paid for my wedding. But it was also a completely pleasant experience working for this economist.

12:55 Emily: Yeah. I want to hear more about the logistics of how this side hustle worked. For you with American, because you’re a TA, does that mean that you’re not working/not being paid over the summer?

13:07 Rebecca: Oh yes.

13:09 Emily: Okay, so you’re already dealing with an academic year only stipend. So —

13:13 Rebecca: Last year I had a fellowship from my department for summer research. This year I did not, which was my why my reaction was “Oh yeah”, because that was the situation. But last summer I had a $3,500 fellowship from my department and then $5,000 from this professor George Mason.

13:35 Emily: Okay, so in your summers, at least last summer, you had a balance of working on your own dissertation and also doing this other work for this other professor, but I’m wondering, because you guys are at different universities, what was the actual relationship between you and this professor or the grant? Were you a W-2 employee or was this a self-employment situation?

13:58 Rebecca: It was a self employment situation, so I got taxed on it pretty heavily.

Researching as a Side-Hustle

14:04 Emily: Yeah. So that’s definitely a couple of things I want to talk further about with that, because I don’t really know that well, how this works. I think you’re the first person I interviewed for the podcast who has done research, like very similar skill set and everything to what you’re doing for your dissertation, and as a graduate student, but as a self employment project. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about what the differences are between that self-employment gig and maybe what you typically do as a graduate student?

14:36 Rebecca: In terms of the content itself, it was really just teaching versus researching. This past year I TA-ed class about the presidents and then I TA-ed History of Memory, and that whole time I was researching 19th century labor history. The biggest difference in terms of how much it affects me is that the side gig did not withhold any taxes. So as a graduate student, I’m cobbling together a bunch of opportunities to approach like 40[K per year, which is really great for grad school, I paid $4,000 in taxes last year, and that was most of my money.

15:23 Emily: I’ll make a couple elaborations on that for anyone who is looking into self-employment, which, if you’re going to do a side hustle, I kind of think self-employment is the way to go, because you have a lot more control over your schedule over how much you’re going to work. But the flip side of that is you have to take a lot more responsibility yourself when it comes to the financial side of things. One of the main things is that you need to pay a lot of tax and no one is withholding that tax for you, so two notes there. The first is that, with self-employment stuff, it’s not like income tax and you know that, so I’m speaking to the audience, but it’s not like income tax where you’re not taxed on the first chunk of income you take in, then you’ll have a low tax rate on the next chunk, then you’ll have a higher tax rate on the next chunk. That’s the graduated income tax system. You will still pay income tax as a self employed person, so just add that on top of whatever the rest of your income is. It’s going to be in the 12% or maybe even the 22% bracket, depending on how much money you make. But in addition, you have self employment tax, which is, I believe 15.3% on everything. The first dollar that you make as a self employed person, 15.3% of everything. So it’s not like that graduated system. It ends up feeling like you pay a lot and you do pay a lot in tax because of these two different types of tax that you end up paying income tax and self employment tax.

Emily: For anyone who is making a significant self employment income like you did, you have to set money aside for tax. You have to prepare for that. You have to do the calculations because you don’t want to be surprised at the end of the year with…I mean, you can be very pleased that you made all this money through selling employment, that’s amazing, but you have to be prepared for the tax side of things. One thing I’ll recommend actually for anyone who is either self employed or who has a fellowship who doesn’t have income tax withheld, I have resources on my website about paying quarterly estimated tax. You can go to the site and search for quarterly estimated tax. You’ll come up with like my main article on that. It’s designed for people who have fellowship income, but people with self employment income can take a lot out of that as well. And if you want a little bit further help I’ll link from the show notes, actually have a workshop on helping people pay quarterly estimated tax. Again, to not be surprised at the end of the year with a huge tax bill. It helps you estimate the amount of tax you’ll have to pay and also pay through it quarterly.

17:37 Emily: Okay, so Rebecca, that was a little bit of a diversion just because this is my wheelhouse about taxes.

17:41 Rebecca: That’s very helpful. Yeah.

17:44 Emily: I actually was a little bit for curious, because I think what I was asking, I didn’t phrase quite right earlier, was about, so the difference between your dissertation work, which you are either receiving a fellowship for, or maybe not being explicitly paid to do in your primary role as a graduate student versus the self employment relationship, this contractor relationship you have with this professor. I guess what I’m asking about is like intellectual or academic ownership over that work. Are you going to be on papers? Just because it’s an unusual way to be doing research, as a self employed person, but still in an academic setting, but it’s at a different university. So that’s why it was sort of interesting and complex.

18:24 Rebecca: I find it to be really common, particularly in Washington DC where we have a lot of federal archives. Since I started grad school in 2015, I’ve honestly lost track of the number of professors who’ve emailed the department literally from as far as Australia and asked our grad students to do work for them. Now I don’t do it unless it’s $30 per hour, but I used to do it for like $12, $15 per hour before I knew better. And as far as I know, we never get even an acknowledgement because we’re a human in the right location who has used archives before, and isn’t going to mess it up when researching.

19:12 Emily: Gotcha.

19:13 Rebecca: For my dissertation, I am the author.

19:16 Emily: Right. So it’s really just by virtue of where you’re attending graduate school and the skill set that you have,that you have access and people, as you were saying from all of the world want some access and they’ll use you, hire you to be a conduit for helping them with that work. But in terms of the academic ownership, because you’re being paid and again, as a contractor, it sounds like you sort of relinquish that. They’re going to be completely in control of the scholarship side of things. You’re not apparently even getting an acknowledgement, which I feel like it definitely deserves an acknowledgement at minimum, but okay.

19:50 Rebecca: That’s just the random people from California or whoever who can’t fly into DC.

19:54 Emily: Yeah, totally. Okay. So now I have a better idea about this.

19:57 Rebecca: It’s not even taxed sometimes, because it’s not enough money to be taxed, but I’ve done that a lot of times. And then my research gig at George Mason, I have a relationship with this person now. I don’t know when her book will be done, but I’ll be in communication with her. And I definitely felt like I was a part of the project, even though for the argument of the book, that’s entirely her argument, I’m just providing the facts that she then integrates into her analysis.

20:29 Emily: Yeah. I guess I’m also wondering like maybe you know for her situation, why wasn’t she working with a graduate student at our own institution? Like her advisee or something like that.

20:39 Rebecca: She wanted a historian. She’s in an economics department and she specifically reached out to history departments because she wanted reviews of historical literature by historians. And then also just that change over time analysis that my department trains me to do.

21:01 Emily: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. This is really, really interesting to me.

Commercial

21:06 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I am just bursting with this news. I have launched a community for personal finance for PhDs. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to level up their practice of personal finance 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 I’ve made in the past, and I’m going to add new trainings that library every month. There is also a discussion forum, a monthly live calls with me, a book club, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community is going to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community to find out even more. If you’re listening to this in real time, you have the opportunity to become a founding member of the community at a discount. The price is going up on August 15th, 2020, so don’t delay. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community for all the details. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Research Side-Hustles and Career Advancement

22:29 Emily: I guess the other sort of big picture question I wanted to ask you about side hustling is, so the side hustling is necessary financially — for the wedding, for living your life — do you think it’s giving you more than that? Like is this actually advancing your career in some way?

22:46 Rebecca: That’s a fantastic question and I really hadn’t thought about it. I mean, the economics people at George Mason, like their department is a completely different environment than mine, so it’s educational, just in that sense to meet more people in different places. Overall, the research work definitely was not expanding my skillset. It probably expanded my content knowledge a little bit, but it wasn’t that much more than whatever I had to be familiar with for comprehensive exams, because I did all of that time period. For the George Mason people I earned, what was it? For the whole year it was $15,000. And the previous year, before I was engaged, my side hustle, during my third year of graduate school paid $1,500, so literally take off a zero, and that was writing an exhibit for a museum. That was fantastic experience that definitely advanced my CV/resume and what I know how to do.

23:56 Emily: Gotcha. So there may be a little bit of a trade off there. This is not surprising that the things that benefit you more as an individual, there may be a trade off on the money there. You’re being paid more, but —

24:06 Rebecca: In my experience, that is correct.

24:08 Emily: Yeah, so I mean, hopefully that’s not the case. I wish for everyone to have a side hustle that pays really well and advances your career and all that, but sometimes you may have to trade off one or the other, but it sounds like at least at the very, very minimum you’ve expanded your network, right? You’ve met more people. You’ve worked closely with this one individual. So maybe that’ll come into play later on. Who knows about that.

Time Management and Side-Hustling

24:31 Emily: So I want to move now to talking about how you, how you manage your time. You’re obviously a long time side hustler, but it sounds like you really maybe stepped it up, maybe stepped up your hours to make this additional money in this past year to be able to fund the wedding that you wanted. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you balanced your dissertation work, your TA role, the side hustle, maybe multiple side hustles, if you’re still doing other ones, and then of course, just the rest of your personal life.

24:59 Rebecca: I have noticed for a while that it comes down to two things. One is time management, which I’m sure seems pretty straight forward. And the second is the kind of energy that the opportunity is giving you. I have felt for a long time, this is also just my personality, that if an opportunity is giving me a lot of positive energy and genuinely feel like I can do anything, but if it’s not, and sometimes things take away from my energy, then that becomes a real challenge. I remember at the beginning of last school year, last fall, actually around this exact time, last year, I majorly had not figured out how that balance was going to work. I was so stressed that I ended up giving up caffeine for several months, even though coffee is my favorite thing, because I was just so energized and stressed all the time that it was just miserable. And just not knowing how I was going to balance my time all year.

26:03 Rebecca: Also, the way that we ended up doing our wedding, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later, it ended up working out great, but we accepted a lot of favors from people. Like a friend did the photography, a friend did the flowers, a family friend officiated our service. And when you rely on people, even if they’re really close friends and family, it’s just really stressful to maintain the relationships. I never wanted to feel like I was a burden on people. That created a lot of stress and the most challenges very early on, but over the course of the year, I think I just adjusted. Also second semester, I had this past TA assignment for a fantastic, really supportive enthusiastic professor. She’s Eileen Finley at American University and she was just a breath of fresh air twice a week, and that made a huge positive difference in my ability to find positive energy and manage my time well.

27:08 Emily: I think that’s an excellent, excellent point that you’re making. I wonder to make it any more applicable for the listener, can you tell in advance what kinds of activities are going to give you energy? So you can kind of filter, like I’m not gonna accept this opportunity because it seems like it’ll be draining. Have you figured out any kind of framework around that or is it just have to try it and then see?

27:31 Rebecca: I’m definitely not an expert on that in the sense that I am still figuring that out. So this is not what you asked, but I could break down what an average week was like. I think both semesters my TA at AU, that was Tuesday and Friday, so then I would often go to George Mason where they gave me a desk, which was nice. And that way I felt like I had community there. I almost always went once a week. I didn’t go more than once a week, very often, but it was typically on a Monday, Wednesday or a Thursday really. And then one or two days I would actually get to do my own work on my own dissertation. And I ended up, um, drafting one chapter out of six first semester and one chapter out of six second semester, but I really have much higher hopes for this coming academic year when I’m not planning and paying for a wedding. I hope to be able to draft more than one chapter each semester.

28:31 Emily: That actually does sound like really good progress to me. I take it you are going to take the side hustle down some. You’re not trying to make as much money in the upcoming year as you did last year.

28:41 Rebecca: I ended working for George Mason at the end of the school year, because it was an academic school year position, but also during second semester, I allocated some time toward applying for fellowships just because everyone told me that that’s what you do when you’re going into fifth year. I actually got three out of four of the ones that I applied for. One of them is through the same people at George Mason, so that ties into what you said about like making connections helps. One is from Mount Holyoke College where I did my undergrad work. It’s specifically from the history department. There that’s the biggest fellowship. They’re basically paying my rent for the coming year. And that will hopefully really allow me to focus on my actual dissertation work. Then the third is a research grant from my department at American. I’m really trying not to take on side hustle work like I did last year. Though, I did have a potentially paid opportunity fall into my lap for this coming year, but it hasn’t fully developed yet and I need to prioritize my dissertation because I wasn’t always able to work on it as much as I wanted to this past year.

29:58 Emily: Yeah. Congratulations on winning those three fellowships. Are you continuing to TA in addition to accepting those fellowships?

30:05 Rebecca: This coming year is my last year of TA-ing.

30:08 Emily: Yeah, it’s a great point for anyone who is looking to side hustling during graduate school and especially for you where your progress on your dissertation is up to you. You’re ABD, it’s at your own speed. There is a danger of devoting too much time to making money on the side and not enough time to actually progressing through your current career stage so that you can get a full time job and have an actual salary.

30:33 Rebecca: It’s a balance to strike for a few reasons. One is I get the most work done when I can take myself out to the pizza place next to my apartment and buy my favorite pizza, or get coffee and a bunch of different coffee shops, or buy a nice new planner for myself to organize my life. You have to have some cash flow, at least in my experience in order to be your best student.

31:00 Emily: Gotcha.

31:01 Rebecca: And I think the other reason is that I actually want to go into public history and museum work rather than academia. So in order to get more relevant job experience, that’s also a balance to strike for me.

The Financial Side of Wedding Planning

31:15 Emily: For sure. Yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. So we’ve been talking about the side hustles and the wedding you added, you know, $15,000 to your wedding fund. It sounds like more or less for this past year and it just was a month or so ago. So how was it, how did the wedding go?

31:30 Rebecca: We got married at the Hamilton Restaurant in downtown Washington, DC. It’s around the corner from the White House and it’s both a restaurant and a concert venue. And I would highly recommend to anyone looking to have a great wedding at a minimal cost to get married at a restaurant that has a concert venue because under one contract we had our venue, the food, they provided the cupcakes, they included the open bar. There was a guy that was — so, I thought we had a lights guy and then a sound guy, and I just realized when I was telling my husband about this interview, that those were actually the same person. So it came with a lights guy and the sound guy. The venue was really great.

32:18 Rebecca: I was really happy with my dress. I found it for $130, which I’m really proud of. One of my bridesmaids asked me what I was envisioning and I described sort of a shorter dress, but also a sun dress, but also beautiful. And she pulled up one on Pinterest and was like, “do you mean like this?” And I was like, “yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.” Then, a few days later she texted me that it was 75% off online. So that’s how I got my dress from $130. A different bridesmaid took me veil shopping and I got one for $30. I would say for any brides out there, don’t spend a lot of money on the veil because you’re only going to wear it once. One of my aunts bought my shoes for me at Macy’s or something as a gift.

33:09 Rebecca: The most important part of the whole wedding experience to me was the ceremony and it’s hard to describe why that is. I guess, I mean, it’s a Jewish life cycle event and I did not have the traditional bat mitzvah, but I identify very strongly with Judaism, and my husband’s one of his parents is Jewish, but he didn’t grow up with a lot of religion, so I would describe it as Jewish with an interfaith twist. The way I think back on our ceremony is that there are a few events in life that are really deeply, very important, and for one of those to go so well, I appreciate that it went flawlessly so much. I think the ceremony itself, which we have a link to the video, actually that I can send you if you’re interested, I’m just so happy with how it went. We had a family friend officiate and play guitar and sing. My cousin, who is also a bridesmaid, did the Hebrew. An aunt and uncle made our chuppah for us as a gift to us. My dad sang a song during it, actually. It was like everything I could have imagined, and I’m so grateful for that, and we made it happen ourselves.

34:31 Emily: Yeah, that’s something to be really, really proud of, obviously. What I’m hearing, as someone who has also planning a wedding, is that it sounds like you DIY-ed, in terms of accessing your community and asking people to contribute, the parts of the whole experience that were most meaningful to you, but also the ones that their contribution was particularly, again, meaningful or personal, like singing a song, for example. And also not particularly a ton of work, versus your choice of venue, where you combined the restaurant and the venue and all the staff is there and everything is, as you said, under one contract. That was a way that you made a really simple decision that made the planning a lot, lot easier. I did the opposite thing with my wedding, so I know that it’s a lot of work and a lot of money to do things the other way. So anyone who’s thinking about planning a wedding, I think that you went about this in a very positive and thoughtful and way that paid off, it sounds like, really well.

35:34 Rebecca: What was your wedding venue, if you don’t mind me asking?

35:36 Emily: Yeah. So we had two, first of all, because one, we got married in the church and two the reception was at a different location. So it’s already dealing with two different locations, right? We actually had our reception at a museum of natural history in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was awesome.

35:52 Rebecca: I’ve been there, actually.

35:55 Emily: Yes, it’s a fantastic museum. I was so excited. I grew up outside DC, so I’ve been in love with the natural history museum as part of the Smithsonian forever, so to have a chance to do that in a similar museum in Raleigh was so much fun. The venue was really, really fun, but it was an outside caterer. It’s a lot of work. Rentals were a whole separate thing. Getting it all done in one place, I think, was really smart. It saves a lot of time, saves a lot of money. And as I said, then you chose to DIY the parts where people could actually really contribute instead of, for example, asking for people to contribute on the food or, you know, there’s other ways to do this kind of thing that could be a little bit more work for everyone rather than just, oh, I’m giving you this wonderful gift of a song or the shoes or whatever it turns out to be. I appreciate hearing that. And it sounds like you had a wonderful time and I’m happy that everything worked out with the side hustle and everything. Any final comments on the wedding and the side hustle?

36:50 Rebecca: Just a quick, funny thing that came to mind is that one of my closest friends who did our flowers, she was literally a few days away from getting her doctorate. Her name’s Arlisha and she got her doctorate in history a few days after my wedding. Her final year of dissertating, she literally texted me and was like, I’m taking up flower arrangement as a hobby while I finished my dissertation, can I do this for your wedding? And I had not previously cared about the flowers, but I was like, yes, if you want to, go for it. She did an amazing job. Just the aesthetics of the room, I think looked so much better because Arlisha’s dissertation side hobby was flower arrangement.

37:34 Emily: Yeah. I think in the academic space, we talk a lot about mental health and self care and so forth, and that’s a really fun, healing, stress-relieving thing to potentially do that, hey, can also help out a friend or even become a side hustle , if you want to. I had an interview recently with someone who decided to turn her baking hobby, as a graduate student, into a business. So it’s the same kind of thing, right? You have something you enjoy doing, it’s a stress reliever for you, why not turn it into something a little bit bigger?

Final Words of Advice

38:02 Emily: Final question here, Rebecca, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career?

38:08 Rebecca: The piece of advice that I’m just learning and wish I had known sooner was that unpaid opportunities are almost always not worth it. Full stop.

38:20 Emily: Yup.

38:20 Rebecca: Also, as a PhD student, you have to do your doctoral requirements and dissertation, but there’s really nothing else that you have to do. And if you have different wedding preferences from your parents, just do it your own way. And if some customs from your religion are meaningful, just stick to those. If others aren’t…our wedding was really a growth opportunity for me and I’m proud and thankful for how it went.

38:50 Emily: Wonderful. No need to elaborate any further on that, Rebecca. Thank you so much for sharing the story on the podcast with me.

38:56 Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Outtro

38:58 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 This PhD Student’s Budgeting Practice Enabled a Hawaiian Vacation

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In this episode, Emily interviews Sean from Authentically Average, a fourth-year PhD student at a university in Houston, TX. Sean and his wife have very intentionally set up their budget to reflect their values, and now live and die by their budget. Their top three budget priorities are retirement savings, tithing, and travel. Sean’s budget helps him say “no” to certain areas of spending or opportunities for spending so that he can say “yes” to his travel aspirations. Sean describes a wellness vacation he and his wife took to Hawaii and why travel is such a high priority right now.

Links Mentioned

budgeting for travel on a grad student stipend

Teaser

00:00 Sean: If you aren’t budgeting yet, try to get there as soon as possible. Tracking expenses is great and it’s helpful to get you in the right mindset. But until you are, I think, front end saying this is the money I will have coming in, here are the places it’s going to go, you can’t really capture your values fully and where to invest unless you’re doing it upfront.

Introduction

00:26 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 12. And today my guest is Sean from Authentically Average, a fourth year PhD student at a university in Houston, Texas. Sean, and his wife live and die by their budget. And they have put a lot of effort into making sure that their budget reflects their values. Their top three budget priorities are retirement savings, timing, and travel. Sean describes a vacation they took to Hawaii and the ways they minimize spending in lower priority areas of their life so that they can spend more on vacations and other types of experiential living. By the way, we recorded this interview in September, 2019. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Sean from authentically average.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:18 Emily: I am delighted to have joined me on the podcast day Sean, from Authentically Average. Authentically Average is the name of his blog. And Sean, I’ll just let you introduce yourself to the listeners.

01:28 Sean: Sure. Thanks Emily for having me. My name is Sean. I run the authentically average blog. I characterize myself as a PhD student, husband, chef, pretty much all of the above kind of general life stuff, and that’s the focus of the blogs, every day kind of living. I’m a PhD student in the 3D printing space. I just started my fourth year, so I’m hopefully approaching the light at the end of the tunnel. I live in Houston with my wife, Allie. We have nine children, and by children, I mean plants and most of them are still alive. I’m doing a PhD in 3D printing space. I got my bachelor’s in chemical engineering before that, went directly to grad school, and still trying to figure out what I’m looking for afterwards. I’m thinking like medical device route. That’s a really interesting space for me and the community in Houston is really kind of exploding right now, so I’m really passionate about trying to see that grow.

02:36 Emily: Yeah. Sounds really good. And I understand that your wife is a graduate student as well.

02:41 Sean: She is. My wife is getting her MBA currently. She’s super woman. She’s working full time and getting her MBA on the weekends. A lot of school at our house.

02:50 Emily: Yeah, that’s a full plate. I guess you might not be the busiest one in the household.

02:57 Sean: I think it goes both ways. The nicety of being a PhD student, sometimes, is depending on your advisor, the work schedule is not necessarily lighter, but more flexible. I tend to do a lot more of the, I talked about this briefly on my blog, but like, I tend to do a lot more of the household activities, like the cleaning and cooking and stuff, just because I’m the one that has the time for it. It’s like not always super sexy to talk about sometimes, but if I don’t cook, we don’t eat. Somebody’s got to do it. But we like to share. I mean, she’s got a lot on her plate right now from a professional capacity, so I’m happy to take on those other roles.

Translating Life Values to Your Budget

03:45 Emily: Yeah. And I guess that’s one of those things that you can talk about on a blog that is named Authentically Average. You can talk about your everyday experiences. And money of course, is among those. You recently published a post that was kind of talking about your financial values, which is something that I love to talk about. It’s the foundational concept in personal finance, yet not one that gets a lot of airtime, I feel like, unfortunately, so why don’t you go ahead and tell us about how your values inform how you use your money.

04:20 Sean: Sure. Thank you for that. A couple of weeks ago, the focus of that post was, and we can talk about this in a little bit, but I had gone on a vacation and some people were like, “Oh wow, this is great” and some people were kind of like, “okay, great, you went on this really nice vacation, but your blog is authentically average, how do you reconcile those?” I started thinking about it. I said, okay, I should probably take a step back. The value focus, like you said, is I think central to personal finance and making “smart” decisions with money, but not one that’s talked about a lot. Primarily the goal for that was “here are my values, here’s what I try to invest my money in, and by extension a little bit my time.”

Retirement Savings

05:10 Sean: For me and my wife, we have three top tier values, and then beyond that, everything kind of falls into place. The first one is financial security, so saving for retirement, making sure that we are doing the things we need to do now so that we can live comfortably later. I think that sometimes people get really caught up in this concept of like, I’m doing what I gotta do right now, and that’s fine. And sometimes they are not saving for retirement because they feel like they can’t and that there’s a lot there to kind of go through. And sometimes because they simply don’t think about it. The first time that I kind of understood the concept of like retirement savings and compounding interest and all of that, I started to notice, Oh, wow, there’s a lot of ground that I can make up here in my late twenties and set the stage for how my thirties and forties are going to go. That’s the first piece. The second piece is —

06:14 Emily: Actually, I want to make one offshoot comment to that because of course, saving for retirement is something that I love to talk about. One point that I really like to make when I’m speaking with graduate students or other sort of people on the younger side, younger and lower income side of things, is that if you look at those compound interest calculators, the time is what matters. I mean the time and the amount of money you save, of course they both matter, but the time — you wouldn’t believe what a little bit of extra time will get you in terms of increased returns. And so I always say, whatever amount…like if you feel like you can’t save anything okay, maybe that’s true, but if you can even find like $10, $50 a month that you can start putting away for that purpose, it’s unbelievable what a huge difference that makes on the back end of things, just to have those few extra years. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t save like a thousand dollars a month. That is a very large and unreasonable amount of money for a graduate student level of income, but a smaller amount of money makes a really, really big difference too.

07:18 Sean: Yeah, definitely. And just to kind of keep going on that thread, the stereotypical thing that people give of why you should start investing as early as possible is they talk about if you invest for 10 years from 20 to 30, the amount of money that you make during that time, by the time you retire, will outpace starting from 30 and moving forward. You can’t possibly catch up. Just like you said, sometimes I think people get like, Oh no, I can’t do that much., and that’s okay, but if you can do something, that’s great.

07:55 Emily: Yeah. I think one of the really difficult things that people run into early on is that they’re dealing with debt loads and they might have to clear those first before they can even touch the investing for retirement side of things. But since you’re already starting to invest retirement, I take it you’re either debt-free or you have debt that does not concern you.

08:14 Sean: We are debt free. I would say that my wife and I are very blessed, lucky, strategic, however you want to look at it, I guess. We paid our last debt off last year. I had an outstanding car note that I paid off. We again are very fortunate, I think, to be able to cash flow her MBA. That’s something that I think is a challenge, especially in higher education. I know that the finances for PhDs vary pretty drastically depending on field. In my PhD program, it’s tuition free, and we collect a stipend for working here. When I think about my PhD, I think about it more as job than I think an education of being a student. And I think collecting a paycheck helps me keep that association clear. So yeah, we are debt free. We are investing some. I’d like to be investing more, but also, you know, like you just said, there are different things that we’re trying to take care of and trying to keep all the balls in the air at the same time.

09:23 Sean: Yeah, definitely. Okay. So that is one of your top priorities, is saving for retirement. What’s the next one?

Experiential Living

09:30 Sean: So there’s two more. The second one would be, we have a really big focus on, I call it experiential living, but in the current case it’s travel. I joked about having plant children. Allie and I don’t have any kids yet. We have plans to have kids, but we just don’t have them right now. We have this focus on like, if there are things that would either be impossible or significantly more difficult to do when we have kids and when we’re older, we’d love to do them now. That post that you mentioned earlier about our travel, we went to Maui for a week over the summer. That was born out of like, “Hey, this is a great time to just go and spend a week in Hawaii and just, you know, live it up.” I mean, responsibly, but this is great. After saving for retirement, our next focus is, Hey, we want to have a good time, and for us having a good time looks like going out and exploring.

10:33 Emily: So I was really curious about this term, you just used — experiential living. Right now you said it looks like travel. What are the other things that might fall under that category for you?

10:42 Sean: I guess one thing is I know that some people, their focus is they want this nice X or Y. I think Allie and I, we would much rather save up money for a few pay periods and go to a nice concert or go see a play or a musical or something than buy a new TV or buy something else for the house. We do live in a nice apartment and we’ve decorated and all of that, but we would much rather do something that’s I think a little bit more like out and active. There’s not anything good or bad about that, or any other way. That’s just our preference.

11:24 Emily: Okay. So is this basically boiling down to the personal finance experiences versus stuff debate where everyone has kind of come down to the side of experiences? Is that what I’m hearing

11:36 Sean: Somewhat, yeah. I think that the stuff thing, depending on what the stuff is, is very valuable, in terms of having stuff and, and that’s all fine. But also I know just from, we did the like whole KonMari thing a couple months ago and realized, Oh, I have a lot of stuff. It was nice at the time, but in hindsight I would rather, I think have spent the money that I spent on that stuff on doing something.

12:06 Emily: Yeah. I actually heard this really great thing on a podcast recently. It was on the ChooseFI podcast and the, one of the people that they were interviewing, I can’t remember who the guest was said, something like he strives to have one memorable moment per month, some new thing that he’s never tried before. Travel would certainly fall under that, but it could be like a cooking class or like just doing something different out of your routine, once per month, he has that goal to make a memory, basically, with his wife. And actually it can be the same moment or they can have two different moments, one that each one prefers more per month, but that was his goal. And I thought that was amazing, and I really want to implement it in my life now, because I do feel like months can go by where it’s like, yeah, what happened that was great or notable or important, I’m not even sure.

12:59 Emily: Okay. So experiences, concerts, travel, that kind of stuff. And so right now your focus is doing the things that you would have a harder time doing once you have children. And I will have to say that when I read your post about your vacation, I was like, how do I get rid of my kids for a week, so I can do this. It sounds awesome. What is your third top priority?

Tithing

13:20 Sean: Again, so saving for retirement, travel and experiential living. The third one, honestly, is giving back and tithing. My wife and I tithe every pay period. I know sometimes as graduate students that can seem like a tumultous topic. We already do not make all that much money —

13:45 Emily: Actually, Sean, let’s pause there because some of the listeners might not be familiar with the term “tithe”, could you define that?

13:51 Sean: Sure. In a traditional tithe you would be giving, donating a 10th or some amounts. I mean, tithe literally is “10th”, but giving some amount back to your church family. My wife and I are Catholic. We give back to, we split between the church that we currently go to and then we also support a couple of students through the FOCUS program. They do ministry on college campuses throughout the United States. Good clarification. We give back to our church. For us, we do a traditional 10% tithe. That’s just, I think how we have decided that that’s where we want to put that value at. Does that kind of answer that?

14:39 Emily: Yeah. It’s not something that’s come up on the podcast hardly at all, but we also tithe and have for throughout graduate school, a long time. And it definitely, while I knew other graduate students from our church who also did that practice, it wasn’t something that I felt like was really widespread or something that graduate students could really get a handle on that large percentage. The 10% is a very, very large chunk of your income, but, I feel like tithing for me in terms of like the budget actually pushed us towards what I call percentage-based budgeting. If a 10th of your gross income is going towards that, we also did a certain percentage, it changed over time, starting at 10%, for like saving for retirement and then now we’re up to like 20%, so we’ve increased that over time. And I’m trying to remember, well, taxes are also sort of, not exactly a percentage, but you can convert them to a percentage of your income, so for us, it was like these different goals scale with the amount of money that we make, which I really liked that there was like this flexible percentage. The percentage is fixed, but the amount of money is changes depending on what your income is.

15:51 Emily: I really liked that way of thinking about budgeting, that you should have percentages going towards different things. And it actually goes pretty well with the balanced money formula. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this at all. It basically says that you should keep your necessary expenses below half of your take home pay. And I really liked that as well because, I think for graduate students, there’s this phrase that Dave Ramsey uses that I really like, not for graduate schools, but for people in general, which is something like “act your wage”, something along those lines. I think this percentage-based budgeting, I think, is really appropriate for people who have incomes that they expect to change a lot, like graduate school. Hopefully it’ll be going up alive later on, but if you have those percentages it can keep you really grounded and something can be consistent through those fluctuations in income basically.

16:44 Sean: Right. Definitely. Yeah. We do a similar thing in terms of trying to make sure that we’re doing a percentage breakdown on our budget. One small detail, we do typically everything on net pay, and then also when we get a tax return, I mean, ideally our tax return is zero, right. But if we do get a tax return, then we’ll do the same thing on whatever the return is. But I think it basically shakes out to be the same thing. I have found that to be really helpful. I feel like it helps us recognize where are we essentially overspending in our lives, and conversely, where could we be giving more attention, certainly.

Living and Dying By Your Budget

17:32 Emily: A phrase that I read in your recent post was we live and die by our budget, and that really stuck out because you talked about, I guess, that your budget is a plan for how you’re going to spend your money. And if opportunities arise after you’ve made the, you oftentimes say no to those opportunities, you stick with your original plan. I just wanted to ask you about that. How did you guys put together your budget, and how do you find the fortitude to stick with it?

18:02 Sean: I mentioned this very briefly before, disclaimer, this is not an ad, wish it was an ad, but it’s not, my wife and I use it’s called YNAB, or You Need A Budget. It’s a budgeting tool online that you use, to keep everything in order. One of the, I think, nice things about living and dying by your budget is it tells you how much money you’ve budgeted and allocated to every, whatever category you want to put it in. And if you overspend, the color of the money bar goes from a nice, pretty green to a very angry red color. And that’s just like, I think, maybe potentially a little bit of an immature way, but it’s really reinforcing for me of like, Hey, you made your money angry because you spent more than you allocated.

18:56 Sean: I joke about that sometimes living and dying by our budget. Really, it’s taken a lot of discipline to get to the point that we are now and give yourself grace and patience to get there as you’re working through things and things come up, of course. But we’re in a space right now where we have a set of goals, like I talked about, and a set of values. Sometimes things come up that don’t align with those, or potentially detract a little bit from them and we have to make a mature decision on like, Hey, is it worth us to do this? So one of the things I talk about in that post is, a friend of ours came to us and said, Hey, we want to go to this football game, last minute. Allie and I are huge college football fans, I went to a big football school for undergrad. Great, right, in terms of an interest standpoint, I think that’s great.

19:55 Sean: We started to look at the finances and said man, this is going to be like a thousand dollar trip just out of the blue. And I think at the beginning of the year, had we started the year and said, Hey, we want this to come up and we want to plan for this — great, okay, we’ll budget for it. But a few weeks out, we had to say, no. I mean, first of all, based on our budget, we literally did not have the money to do it without taking money from other standpoints. I really struggle with the idea of pulling money that we had saved for retirement out of retirement to go to a football game. But more than that, I think it’s sometimes difficult when you…This is always a challenge when you have very diverse friend groups is like, everybody has their own different set of values. And I want those people to understand, like friends of mine, that sometimes I to turn things down. Like, hey, I love you guys. You’re great, I appreciate everything about you, and I appreciate our relationship, but just understand that me not wanting to come out, or me not wanting to do this last minute, isn’t a reflection on like our relationship and is a reflection on I just don’t have the money for it according to what my wife and I decided it was important to us.

21:11 Emily: Yeah. There’s another blogger, content creator in the personal finance space, Paula and her brand is Afford Anything. And so her tagline is kind of like, “you can afford anything, but you can’t afford everything.” She’s really, like you were just saying, you have to get really clear about what’s important to you because you want to be able to say yes to the things that are at the top of your list. And that does mean saying no to the things that fall further down and that’s hard. But you can’t say yes to everything. If you say yes to everything, you’ll end up saying no to the things that are most important to you, if you accept every opportunity that comes your way.

21:52 Emily: I have to say though, your story reminded me of when I was in graduate school. I went to Duke and Duke won two championships while I was there 2010 and 2015. 2015 was technically after I defended, but I was still enrolled as a student and I still had tickets to games and stuff. So anyway, in 2010, of course you never know, going in to the tournament, how it’s going to turn out. And at the last second, we had an opportunity to go to the Final Four. Duke went, and my husband and I had the opportunity to attend. They were giving away tickets for students. It was actually free. The tickets were free. All you had to do was get there and stay there. And we really deliberated, and I don’t know that it came down to mostly a financial decision. There were other time reasons why we decided not to go. We had already traveled actually the previous year to see them play and they hadn’t advanced, and so we already had like, kind of that disappointment. So we decided against going, and of course in 2010, they ended up winning, same story in 2015. That’s just one of my major regrets from when I was in graduate school, because I was a fan, that I let anything stand in the way of like attending those events. So I do think that my main regrets from graduate school, in terms of my personal life were things that I didn’t do that money played into why I didn’t do it. It probably wasn’t the whole situation, but yeah, there’s two times I can point to an opportunity came my way and I said no to it, a very reasoned decision, and I really think that was the wrong way to go.

23:27 Sean: Yeah. And sometimes I think that that’s a struggle because we’ve done a couple of things too, where it’s like, Oh, this is such a good opportunity to do this thing. Sometimes, and I say this with a mountain of salt, occasionally we will not live and die by the budget. And the only way that that works is to have intentionally over allocated somewhere else, so that the total amount of money is still there, like the money to cover a different decision is still there. It’s not like we’re living outside of our means, but we do give ourselves a little bit of grace. Sometimes I’m like, this is a really big deal. That trip to Hawaii was pretty much entirely planned for, but there were a couple of things once we got there, that was like, you know what, we’re here, I think we’ll regret this thing if we don’t do it, let’s do it and we’ll figure it out.

24:27 Emily: Yeah. I think that strategy of over saving or just saving for things that you don’t know quite what you’re saving for — at some point a friend will invite you to do something, at some point you’ll have an opportunity to come your way that you’ll want to say yes to at the last second. And I think the way that most people who are not on top of their finances would handle it would just say, okay, I’m going to put it on a credit card, I’ll worry about how to pay for it later, which is not a great strategy. But if you save in advance and you’re just not totally sure what that money is going to go for, but you’re pretty sure something’s going to pique your fancy along the way then you can be able to say yes again to those opportunities, knowing that it’s still within everything you’ve allocated for an advance,

25:08 Sean: Just a small insight, we have a category in our budget called “stuff we forgot to budget for”, and we put a small amount, however much, in there every pay period just because inevitably something comes up. Now, if it’s an emergency, we have separate money set aside. You mentioned Dave Ramsey earlier — we have a separate emergency fund set aside for that kind of thing. This is more like your friend asked you to do something, you have an opportunity to go watch Duke win a championship, whatever.

25:44 Emily: Yeah, exactly.

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25:48 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Frugal Tips for Experiential Living

26:34 Emily: So I’m wondering if you have any ways, any sort of frugal things that you’ve done in your life that help you have these experiences that you want have. Either minimizing the money that it takes to do those things or minimizing other areas in your budget so that you can free up more money for your top priority. Are there any like really good strategies you use in that vein?

26:58 Sean: I think the stereotypical student might fight this a little bit. I’ll start with the like ways of like daily life first. We cook 99% of our meals. That’s just the way it is. For me that’s two reasons. That post that I wrote is primarily about investing your money in what you value, but there’s also a small segment on investing your time in what you value and no question about it, cooking for yourself takes it takes time. It costs money to go buy groceries and it takes time to cook those meals. I think it’s easier to go out to eat, from a time perspective or pick up quick ready meals and that kind of thing, but from a time perspective, like at that point, I’m investing in my health. It’s almost exclusively healthier for you to cook for yourself than it is to go out to eat, and it’s almost exclusively less expensive to cook for yourself too. In that post I talk about, Allie and I have been discussing potentially giving ourselves a little bit more room on this and kind of grace on this for when we want to go out. We don’t go out to eat ever. Like once every couple of weeks and the reasoning for that is, whatever amount of money I would spend on going out to eat a couple nights a week is better suited towards saving for Hawaii, or, we’ve been married for just over a year, for our honeymoon we went to Italy. We spent two weeks there. That’s not an inconsequential trip size, and the only way that that works is you’re making cuts, so to speak, elsewhere in your life.

28:37 Sean: The other thing for us has been we’re busy people. She’s in school part time, well, no she’s in school full time and working full time, and I’m working full time and doing things at home. And so it’s really important for us to invest in our marriage. Regular date nights are important, but it doesn’t always have to be this five star restaurant. Those types of things are nicem, but I think I also get 90 plus percent of the relationship building component from that type of date from going to somewhere kind of casual, hole-in-the-wall, or going on an experience. We talked about this this morning, actually. It’s been a couple weeks since we had a formal date, and one thing that we’re going to do next week is we’re going clothes shopping and we’re going to Marshall’s-hop. There’s like seven of them within a 10 mile radius of us and we’re just gonna — we found that when we hit, we really hit there, but they’re very hit and miss, but there’s a lot of them, so we can kind of hop between and see. I think that that might sound somewhat silly to some people, but for us, we like investing in clothes that makes us feel good and feel professional, but also not breaking the bank and this “adventuring”, so to speak, and helping each other try things on — that I think is a fun relationship building activity that literally the travel aspect only costs the gas, and then we would have budgeted for the clothes. There’s that aspect on like life-hacking.

30:11 Sean: From a travel hacking standpoint, honestly, it’s just time. You have to decide how much your time is worth, but we always look for great deals on hotels and flights. Google has a flight tracker that you can use. It’ll send you alerts when your flights fall. I do the same thing for a lot of the hotels. A lot of third party websites are great. For Italy, actually this, this is a great story. For Italy, the flights were going to be like, I don’t remember like $1800 a piece or something, like a lot of money. We went in May, so like the beginning of high season, I get it. Then, the day before I was going to buy, because they weren’t falling, I said, “Oh, let me just look on another website.” I went on, I think it was Priceline or one of the third party website and it was like half that, together. I was like, “Yes, I’m absolutely doing this. We’ll take a weird layover to save half the cost. You could write a book about that, but that’s the things that I think of.

31:15 Emily: Yeah. I think when your goal is to have experiences and make memories and so forth, I guess there’s been research on this that like the anticipation of the experience is a big component of your satisfaction with it. And so taking the time to plan, and do whatever travel hacking and price comparisons and all of that, it actually enhances like your ultimate experience when you put a lot of effort into it upfront. I don’t know, to me it’s a little bit counter-intuitive, but yeah. So pursuing these travel hacking strategies, um, in addition to saving money can actually make you feel better about the whole thing. I guess what I was thinking about when you’re talking, especially about like the food and not spending so much money on eating out and so forth. That was a strategy that we used also. We cut out basically all kinds of convenience food, in favor of cooking for ourselves. And that is like a little bit of a sacrifice because yeah, you have to plan it a little bit more and all that, that goes into cooking. But for us, like for you, the money that we were not spending on convenience eating went towards our travel fund. And so when we knew exactly where the money that we would’ve spent on one thing was going to go, if we didn’t actually carry through with the eating out or whatever it was, that makes the whole thing a lot more palatable. It makes the whole thing go down easier if you know, okay, yeah, I’m sacrificing a little bit in this moment right here, but that is going to enable something really fantastic later on.

32:43 Sean: Right, right, right, right.

32:45 Emily: Any other frugal strategies around those things, either minimizing expenses on things you really want to do or cutting expenses and things that are not such a high priority?

32:54 Sean: I think the only additional thing that I’ll add is — it’s especially common, I think because like I, as a PhD understand or PhD student, rather, my time is limited. I think that my time is a little bit larger than some other people’s because I just try to make a point of, I’m only working X hours this week. Like this is my job and I’m putting this much into it. And that sometimes works for people and sometimes doesn’t. But I see a lot of, because we have such little free time, convenience buying and convenience spending somewhat to kind of what you, you mentioned earlier. And I think in some ways you do have to give yourself a little bit of that because the amount that you stress over not making convenient spend is also a use of resources, maybe not for the best. Just watch it. I always go back to “live and die by the budget”. Until I had a budget that I like actually did religiously every week and every pay period, I didn’t have a clue. And I started to look at my spending habits and said, man, I didn’t realize I was spending this much on snacks, or this much on cable and this other thing that I don’t even use. It just, it never occurred to me because I was always tracking my spending after the fact that never really looking forward any further than the next couple of weeks.

34:20 Emily: Yeah. I mean, tracking your spending is an amazing thing to do as like a first step. It actually does start to change your behavior in many cases. But if you’re just tracking it as a passive activity and it’s not actually balancing, okay, well, where do I want my money to go? And do I prefer it here? Or do I prefer it there? That’s what you have to do with your budgeting. They’re both really useful, um, activities, but I guess once the shock of the tracking wears off and you make whatever sort of subconscious changes you’re going to want to make from that, you need to start budgeting to get that further of value add from the activity.

When Budgeting Pays Off: Sean’s Trip to Hawaii

34:54 Emily: So we’ve teased this enough. Tell us about your trip to Hawaii, that made me so jealous.

35:01 Sean: We went to Maui specifically. We went to Hana, which is a very small town on the East coast of Maui. Allie was really into this idea of like a wellness retreat. And I did, I think the stereotypical husband thing that I hate and I was like, what are you talking about? No. And then I started to look into it. I was like, Oh, this actually sounds pretty awesome. So I was like, okay, yeah, let’s go for it, sure. There was a resort there called the Travaasa, just right in the town. Hana is not really the type of place that you go to and stay at unless you go to this hotel. There’s not a city center. It’s people that live there and this hotel and that’s it.

35:45 Sean: So we went and we said, okay, you know, let’s do it. This sounds great, let’s go. The only thing I’ll say about traveling to Hana is getting to the airports, great, but there’s a very famous road there called the road to Hana and it’s like 90 degree turns the whole way. It’s 40 or 50 miles and it took us three hours. You’re crawling and it’s crazy. But scenery is amazing and beautiful. The little food stops on the way are great. And then once we actually got there, it was just like paradise. It’s still the States, so there is cell service, but there’s no wifi available. The cell service is kind of shaky, we turned our work phones off, and just lived, and it was awesome.

36:34 Sean: There’s there was a lot to do there. They have a spa on site. I’m not a huge massage/spa person, but I was the most relaxed I’ve ever been in my whole life that week. The food was awesome. There was waterfront yoga and like paddle boarding and horseback riding and just like all of this stuff that we don’t ever do in our daily lives. It was really awesome to just for once I think go and just exist. My wife and I, in particular, but I think more generally PhD students and other graduate students, you’re just going nonstop all the time, and there’s not really any moment where you kind of just sit back and you’re like, “Hey, I’m not thinking about anything about tomorrow, except whether I want to do this cool thing or that cool thing.” I don’t know, I think that was a nice refresher for us.

37:34 Sean: Everything about it was super chill. The only not super chill thing about it is, there was actually a wildfire on the West side of the island while we were there. We went back to catch our flight and all the planes are delayed because they’re trying to get people that live there, like out of danger. Things are, I don’t want to say fine because you know, wildfires are extremely dangerous and there was a lot of damage there. People are generally fine. There were a lot of people that got helped. Everybody was safe. I don’t recall seeing any reports of fatalities, which is incredible. But for us, we’re literally there with our bags in a very small airport on Maui and we’re just like, “all right, guess we’ll chill.” I think a small price to pay, obviously relative to potentially losing your home in a fire, of course. But for us, nobody told us anything. Our airline didn’t give us any updates. We just got there and they were like, we’ll see what happens. Like I said, there’s a much longer post about it with pictures that are describing it way better than I can tell it, but highly recommend. Would definitely do it again. It was great.

38:54 Emily: What really struck me about the, your description of this vacation was that I didn’t do anything like that when I was in graduate school, except for my honeymoon. The honeymoon was relaxing. I mentioned that we saved a lot for travel before, but it was all obligation travel, all of it. We were usually traveling domestically to either see our families, or go to weddings, or attend reunions. Other stuff where somebody else was dictating the schedule, the timing, the place, all of that. I’m not trying to say that was a…We wanted to do it. We wanted to do all that obligation travel. Going to weddings is really important to us. That’s a high value for us, but it just kind of squeezed out any other possibility of taking a vacation that was just for us and just for the purposes of recuperation. There were always other purposes for the trips — seeing certain people, or witnessing certain events. Looking back on it, I did not give myself a proper amount of rest, throughout that process. And it’s still something that I struggle with, so I’m really glad that you guys, made it a priority, made the time for it. Hopefully you’ll do it a few more, maybe not the same vacation, but something similar, a few more times during graduate school so you guys can finish strong and finish healthy. So that sounds amazing, and yeah, we can point people to the post from the show notes.

Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

40:23 Emily: As we finish up here Sean standard question that I ask all my guests — what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be something related to what we’ve talked about today, or it could be something entirely different.

40:36 Sean: Sure. Just because we’re towards the end, I’ll give two quick ones, because I think they’re both very important. The first one we’ve touched about a few times is if you aren’t budgeting yet, try to get there as soon as possible. Like you said, tracking expenses is great and it’s helpful to get you in the right mindset. But until you are, I think front end, saying this is the money I will have coming in, here are the places it’s going to go, you can’t really capture your values fully in like where to invest unless you’re doing it on the front end. So that’s the first thing that I recommend.

41:12 Sean: The other thing is, depending on your program, especially for PhD students on grants and fellowships, so kind of take that with a very specific niche market in mind, sometimes you will be allowed to pursue other things outside of your degree and have side jobs and side hustles. I know, recently talked to another student, here in Houston who, I think was baby-sitting or dog-sitting. Am I remembering that right?

41:39 Emily: Pet-sitting.

41:39 Sean: Pet-sitting, right. And like, okay, great. So she had a side hustle and that’s awesome. Sometimes you can and look around for what things are available because the extra cash is really useful. Sometimes you can’t, on paper. They expect you to be in the lab, and if you have time that you could be giving to another job, you should be spending it in the lab. And I think my recommendation for that is more of a career-related one. You’re a graduate student and you’re contributing to the academic space. That’s beneficial to the field. It should also be beneficial to you, and so I think that I always recommend that students take opportunities that they find, when they become available, in stride, because it may be a value add to their career or to their finances, that isn’t necessarily a value add to their academic education. And that’s okay. I think sometimes we get this feeling of guilt of like, I’m not working hard enough in the lab. And if that’s true, okay, work harder in the lab, but if it’s not true and you can be doing other things that are beneficial for you, it’s okay to do things outside of lab. And I really struggled with that when I first got to graduate school, and I see that as a common struggle now.

42:55 Emily: Yeah, I guess, so I’ve been reading a lot about like time management, recently, to work on my own time management practices, and I guess one thing I’ve learned, I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of Laura Vanderkam’s stuff, and so she references research that’s on…First of all, that people don’t work as much as they say they do. Like people who are reporting that they work 80 hour weeks, almost always are never working more than like 55 hours a week. They may be at work for 80 hours a week, and that’s not a good return on your investment of time, is just to be around more. You should be resting or doing other things instead of that. But another part of that is that there’s sort of an optimal amount of work that you can put into something in a given week, and once you start going beyond that, your returns for the amount of time you’re putting in decrease and decrease and decrease. After 40 or 45 hours, you may be putting in more time, but you’re not necessarily getting that much more of it. It’s kind of this like 80/20 principle.

43:51 Sean: Yup, definitely.

43:52 Emily: Yeah. So I’ll just say like on that time management component, that it can really be beneficial for you if you don’t consider research to be like a black hole, you just throw more and more and more and more time into, that’s not necessarily the best way to approach it, but rather more like managing your energy and managing your time as well. And if that gives you time to pivot to a side hustle or hobby or, you know, exercise or whatever it is you want to do, that’s probably going to end up giving you more energy rather than taking away from your work. Do you know what I mean?

44:22 Sean: Right, definitely.

44:22 Emily: Just like taking vacations, you don’t do it necessarily for the reason of being more productive, but you probably are more productive when you come back from it.

44:29 Sean: Absolutely.

Where to Find Sean Online

44:33 Emily: Where can people find you if they want to read your blog or follow up with you elsewhere?

44:37 Sean: Sure. I’ll send these over so you can put them on the show notes as well. The name of the blog is Authentically Average. It’s authenticallyaverage.com. No hyphens or spaces. On Instagram and Pinterest I’m @AuthenticallyAverage, one word. Twitter was a little weird and I have @AuthenticAvg. That’s where you can find all of the different ways to connect with me. The two posts that we talked about today are up as pins on Pinterest. I can send those over and people can look at them if they want to. I love using Pinterest, just as a side note, I think it’s been really fun. If you are in the 3D-printing space and see me at an academic conference, come and say hey. I’m not shy. If you happen to recognize me, I’m happy to talk and all of that.

43:33 Emily: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and having this great discussion with me, Sean.

45:37 Sean: Yeah. Thank you for having me

Outtro

45:39 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.