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Are PhDs in a Financial Emergency?

April 7, 2025 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily shares her thoughts on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency. It’s possible that you are facing a financial emergency because you’ve been laid off or your grants have been terminated or interrupted or there’s some risk of that happening in the future. In this episode, Emily explores 1) what she learned from attending the National Postdoctoral Association’s Annual Conference in March, 2) what steps she recommends that you take in your personal finances and your career if you are in a financial emergency, and 3) what she’s giving away this spring to help you in this turbulent time.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Introduction

Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

This is Season 20, Episode 7, and today you’re getting my thoughts on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency. It’s possible that you are facing a financial emergency because you’ve been laid off or your grants have been terminated or interrupted or there’s some risk of that happening in the future. In this episode, I’m going to share with you 1) what I learned from attending the National Postdoctoral Association’s Annual Conference in March, 2) what steps I recommend that you take in your personal finances and your career if you are in a financial emergency, and 3) what I’m giving away this spring to help you as best I can.

The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e7/. Without further ado, here’s my episode on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency.

I attended the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference in March, and it was quite valuable for me to get to speak with postdocs and postdoc office personnel about what’s happening on their university campuses and with their jobs. Everything has been so chaotic this spring in terms of the actions of the new administration and the responses from the judicial and legislative branches, it’s really hard to keep up with. Thankfully, some of the presenters pivoted their planned sessions to address what’s been happening and academia’s response, and the conference helped me to clarify a few of my thoughts, which I’ll share with you in this episode. Part 1 is what I took away from the NPA conference. Part 2 is what you can do in your personal finances to best weather the present storm, and I’m going to include specific advice for different stages of PhD training and employment. Part 3 is what I’m giving to you over the next couple of months and why and how you can access everything.

Part 1: My Take-Aways from the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference

This was my first time attending NPA, and I attended as a sponsor, and I thought it was a wonderful conference. I attend conferences both for networking with potential clients and my own professional development, and in this case the timing was really good for me to get a sense of how universities are responding to the funding cuts and so forth. Because this conference was focused on postdocs, I didn’t hear much specifically about graduate education, but I’m sure I will learn more when I attend other similar conferences later this year. At this conference, I especially appreciated the talks from Tom Kibis from the NPA and Nicholas Dirks from the New York Academy of Sciences, the session co-led by Meagan Heirwegh from Caltech, Sofie Kleppner from Stanford, Julia Parrish from the University of Washington, and Zoe Fonseca-Kelly from Harvard, and my conversation with Alberto Roca of Diverse Scholar, as they most directly addressed the current situation.

My overall take-away from the conference is that everyone is bracing for a tough time economically. The tough time has already started but will get worse in the next fiscal year, which typically starts in July, if we continue on the track we’re on. Some universities have instituted hiring freezes, which may or may not extend to postdocs and graduate students. I’m sure we’ve all seen reports of graduate programs rescinding offers and just generally admitting fewer graduate students than has been typical in recent years. Positions that are funded by soft money, which means external grants and contracts, are most at risk of being eliminated.

Tom Kimbis, the CEO of the NPA, referred to the results of a survey of NPA members conducted in February; the survey results and an op-ed by Tom are linked in the show notes. The headline numbers from that survey are that 43% of postdocs say their job or position is threatened and 35% say that their research is delayed or otherwise in jeopardy.

The overall climate of the conference was of great concern for the postdoc workforce, particularly international postdocs. If we don’t see major pushback from Congress or via the judiciary, there will be a lot fewer postdoc positions available next year. Again, we’ve already seen the reduction in PhD program offers, and this is honestly the responsible step for PIs to take as they face uncertainty regarding their grants. So the postdoc itself as a training step is in jeopardy. And, broadening beyond this specific conference, the research enterprise as a whole in the US is under threat.

A lot of current postdocs will need to find new positions in the near future. Again, the highest level of concern is for international postdocs if temporary visas are harder to come by and fewer jobs are available overall. Will those positions be in academia or the federal government? We all know how few people were being hired as tenure-track faculty members before this attack on research, and that market is only going to get tighter, and I think hiring for non-tenure track academic and governmental jobs is also going to be quite limited. Understandably, institutions feel most responsible for their current employees and probably won’t want to extend themselves too much in hiring.

I don’t mean to give the impression that the conference attendees were throwing up their hands in defeat. There was plenty of talk about what people generally and postdocs offices specifically can do to meet the moment, and I heard some creative ideas about how to keep people on payroll to at least give them more time to find another job.

However, from what I heard, most of the discussion was around helping PhDs prepare for and land jobs in “industry.” What I didn’t hear enough discussion about was the likely upcoming recession and how that is already affecting hiring in the private sector. While the pain might be less acute in the private sector in comparison with government and academia, again, if we continue on this route, there will be an overall contraction in the labor market. PhDs typically have a very low unemployment rate, but I am definitely skeptical of industry’s ability to provide jobs to a glut of PhDs exiting the federal government and academia in the coming months. Some private companies are already conducting layoffs, even when not directly or substantially funded by the federal government. Of course, this will be worse in some sectors and not so bad in others, and I expect the most pain will be felt by PhDs in areas of research that are more dependent on funding from the federal government.

So the conclusion is: A lot of PhDs are going to lose their jobs, whether that’s called a layoff or a firing or a contract not being renewed. I suspect the unemployment rate or at least underemployment rate among PhDs is going to go higher than we’ve seen in recent recessions because academia is being targeted, and that PhDs are going to land in jobs that are different from their previous career aspirations. Many PhDs on temporary visas will have to exit the country, even if they would like to stay, because they can’t find an appropriate position fast enough when their current one ends. I’m not much one for prognostication and it really pains me to report such a grim outlook, but that is how I see it.

Part 2: Financial Steps You Should Take Right Now

I want everyone who works in academia or research to consider that they may now or soon be in a financial emergency and to take appropriate steps. Since the main threat at the moment is loss of income, rather than being underpaid or experiencing rapidly rising expenses, the steps are to serve both your finances and your career.

First, I’ll share some steps I think everyone should take, and then I’ll share some stage-specific suggestions. To begin with, please assess your finances holistically. What are your assets: bank account balances, investments, property, etc.? What are your liabilities: credit card debt, buy now pay later debt, student loans, a car loan, a mortgage, medical debt, IRS debt, etc.? What is your current income? What are your current expenses? Specifically, I want you to focus on one type of asset and one type of debt. What I’m sharing next is an abbreviated form of the financial framework that I teach in my live workshops.

The asset is your emergency fund. The best practice is to have a separate, named high-yield savings account for your emergency fund so that you can be super clear about the money available to you in the case of an emergency vs. the money available to spend on a monthly basis on regular expenses or annual basis on irregular expenses. Based on your current expenses, for how many months could your emergency fund support you if you were to lose your primary income? If your answer is that you don’t have an emergency fund or it’s smaller than three months of expenses, please make it your top financial priority to build the fund to that level. This is a slightly larger recommendation than I have made in the past specifically because of the unique threat we are under. You should consider yourself to be in a financial emergency until you reach this goal—more on this in a bit.

The debt is credit card debt. The best practice is to carry no balances on your credit cards, and in fact to use your credit cards as if they are debit cards, only making a purchase if you could pay for it right then with the money already in your bank account. If you could not immediately pay off all your credit cards and switch to using only debit cards, you are in credit card debt—even if you never pay interest. Following the creation of your 3-month emergency fund, your next financial goal should be to clear this credit card debt. However, I recommend that you keep the credit cards open as long as they don’t have an annual fee; you may need these lines of credit in the future if you do lose your income or incur a large, unexpected expense such as a move. Holding debt of this kind also puts you in a financial emergency.

If you’re a little further along in your financial journey, I want you to increase your emergency fund size to six months of expenses. That would be if you have no credit card or other high-interest debt, have other savings for near-term expenses, and have started investing. If all those elements are in place, you’re not in a financial emergency, but you should put some extra financial effort into building your emergency fund to six months of expenses. Once you’ve achieved that goal, you’re in a very strong financial position and don’t have to be quite so intense about keeping a high savings rate.

The next step is to assess your job security and career security. If you haven’t yet, this is the time to talk with your advisor or boss about the source or sources of your paycheck and the group, office, or company’s overall funding. You may learn that the source of your income is entirely or largely independent of federal funding, such as from a private foundation or tuition. You may learn that the source of your income is federal, but there are currently no concerns about its continuity. Or you may learn that the source of your funding is federal and is tenuous. We’ve already seen many grants cancelled or temporarily paused, and so you would probably know if you were in that group because you’ve either already lost your job or you’ve been switched to some kind of emergency or temporary funding. Or perhaps your advisor is currently funded but not optimistic about securing more grants due to the shifted funding priorities of the new administration. In those latter cases, assuming your emergency fund meets the levels I just outlined, throw your efforts into preparing for a job or career transition.

Now let’s get to some practical steps. We’ll do the financial first and then the career. If you’ve self-diagnosed that you’re in a financial emergency or have a financial goal that you should strenuously work toward, how should you do so? Let’s look first at expenses. Normally, when I teach about reducing expenses, I do so with a focus on long-term sustainability, so I talk a lot about right-sizing housing and transportation and other large, fixed expenses. Right now, I’m not so concerned about sustainability, because you have a short-term, highly urgent goal of increasing your emergency fund or paying off high-priority debt. That means slashing your discretionary expenses, essentially engaging in a limited-term fast from anything you can possibly spare.

The question you should ask yourself is: If I had no income right now, would I spend money on this? If the answer is no, don’t spend on it and put all the money you can free up toward your financial goal. I suggest that you stop spending entirely or as close as you can get on discretionary expenses such as restaurants, takeout, and delivery; entertainment; going out; travel; and shopping aside from the bare minimum. The exceptions are for expenses for your job search or career pivot, such as expenses related to interviewing or professional development. Delay every expense that you can delay, even what you might consider necessary expenses. Take a hard look at your subscriptions and cancel everything that you would cancel if you didn’t have an income. You can always restart them when you’ve reached your goal.

For me personally, it would be really hard, but if I didn’t have a fully funded emergency fund right now, I would cancel my gym membership, take my kids out of their pay-by-the-month extracurricular activities, cancel all our streaming services including Amazon Prime, skip my next haircut, and put off some much-desired-but-not-strictly-urgent home repairs.

You can also try to increase your income to reach your urgent financial goals. Normally, when teaching on increasing income, I say to focus on income-generating activities that also advance your career goals. That’s still great work if you can get it, but with our top-of-mind objective of adding to your emergency fund or paying off debt, you can pursue other types of work as well. Whatever gives you the best pay rate-to-time or pay rate-to-energy ratio is worthwhile. In fact, diversifying your income sources so that you are less directly or indirectly dependent on the federal government is a great idea in the short term.

Finally, I suggest planning where you would turn should you lose your income and deplete your emergency fund. If you would turn to debt, think through what is the least toxic type of debt available to you. Credit cards are an easy option, which is why I want you to pay them down but not close them, but as they come at such a high interest rate, they might not be your best option. If you have good credit, you might be able to get another type of loan like a personal loan or a home equity line of credit, but it’s going to be more difficult if you wait until after you’ve lost your income. If things got really dire, would it be possible for you to move in with a family member or friend until you get back on your feet?

Turning our focus back to your job or career, I suggest devoting serious time to professional development, and that goes whether you perceive your job to be at risk or not. Of course, the more unstable your job or career is, the more important it is to engage with this. If you don’t know already, you need to figure out, as I heard one person at NPA put it, your career plans B, C, and D and start setting yourself up to pursue them. If you are affiliated with a university, this means patronizing professional development events and the career center. Check if there are recordings of past events that you can catch up on as a full suite of topics is probably covered over the course of 12 to 24 months.

Networking is vital right now, and again that goes whether you anticipate a near-term job search or not. Yes, use LinkedIn and attend local meet-ups, but also make an effort to connect individually with people you know from past degrees or past jobs. It’s always great to catch up with an old friend or colleague, and it doesn’t have to be like “Can you offer me a job?” Just ask what they’re up to and if their industry has been impacted by the new policies. Then if you do need to come around again with a serious request, it won’t be so out of the blue.

By the way, when you’re networking, keep two things in mind: 1) What can you offer the person you’re speaking with? It could be continued friendship or information or access to your own network. 2) By keeping up with your network, you might very well be able to help a friend or colleague. So do this not just for yourself, but to help the people you know find great-fit jobs and careers. We should all increase our networking activities right now, not just if we have an urgent need.

So far I’ve only mentioned networking with peers and colleagues, but don’t forget that people outside of your profession can be part of your network and prove very helpful, especially if you are considering changing industries. To that end, speak openly about your career aspirations and industry concerns with people you know socially. In fact, it will be a great boon to your mental health if you lean into in person social groups and gatherings in this difficult time. Remember that you are much more than just a researcher; you are a well-rounded human being with unique hobbies, interests, beliefs, etc.

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Financial Advice for Each Stage of Your Academic Career

We’ve spoken in general terms to this point about assessing your finances and your career stability and some steps you can take to prepare for a loss of income. Nothing I’ve said so far is extreme, and you will improve your finances and career by following the advice, even if you never lose your income. Now let’s delve into some stage-specific advice for those who have lost their income or whose income is at higher risk. We’ll start with people earlier in the PhD career track and move to later.

A) Prospective graduate students: If you’re still interested in graduate school after all this, more power to you. Go ahead and apply next fall or whenever is appropriate for you. But please apply for jobs as well in case admission or funding doesn’t work out. Seriously consider whether a master’s or PhD is more appropriate for your career goals and whether it might be worth paying for a master’s, even if your original plan was to pursue a funded PhD. I can’t yet tell how the landscape will shift between those two types of graduate programs. It might be worth taking a couple of years to work before you head back to graduate school; you will have more clarity about your career goals and what academia can offer you and will also be in a stronger financial position to start graduate school if you use your income intentionally. When you apply to graduate school, please apply widely for fellowships. Consider programs abroad as well as in the US. Also, listen to my advice for rising and current graduate students.

B) Rising graduate students: Some of you have gotten a really raw deal, and I’m sorry. The fact that this attack went down literally during admissions season was the worst possible timing for you. If you’re still headed to graduate school, take a really critical eye to the stability of your funding, and do your best to build financial and career security if you do perceive your funding to be tenuous. More on that next in the section for current graduate students. Also, as you start graduate school, do your best to keep your large, fixed expenses like housing and transportation as low as is comfortable for you so that you can maintain a savings rate. Your emergency fund, etc. could become a lifeline if things go south.

C) Current graduate students: If your funding does not seem to be secure, layer in financial and career stability in other ways. 1) Apply widely for funding opportunities, focusing outside the federal government. 2) Establish at least one side stream of income, if that’s legally and morally permissible for you. Ideally, this would be from a career-advancing activity. 3) Treat every year of graduate school like it might be your last, because it very well might be if your funding evaporates. What I mean by this is that you should have at least one big accomplishment to point to within the last 12 months that will translate well to your resume. That could be completing practical classes, mastering skills, finishing your master’s degree, publishing or patenting, etc. You should also be ready on very short notice to conduct a job search, so stay up-to-date on your professional development, career exploration, and networking. This especially goes for international graduate students, who have a very small window of time available to find another position before they would have to leave the country. 4) Submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. I certainly hope it doesn’t come to this, but if a small student loan will bridge you to the end of your degree which itself would vastly improve your job prospects, it may be worthwhile. 5) Do your research now on the social supports that would be available to you if you did lose your funding or have to leave grad school abruptly. For example, does your department, school, or university offer any kind of bridge employment or funding? Do graduate students qualify for unemployment in your state, and if so under what circumstances? Does your university offer emergency loans or grants to graduate students? Are there programs through your city that would help you pay for rent or groceries if you lost your income?

D) Current postdocs: Much of the same advice for graduate students applies for you as well, although thankfully you have the security of your finished PhD. Take those steps to shore up your financial and career resources, especially if you are an international postdoc. You should also check into whether you would qualify for unemployment in your state should your position end; don’t assume you will, especially if you are a non-employee.

E) PhDs in government, academia, and nonprofits: You know your situation best, but stay frosty. Like everyone else, you should understand how your position is funded to ascertain its potential instability and be ready to transition out at any time. If you haven’t already, I suggest starting the process of separating your personal identity from that of your job. These can become especially intertwined for tenured or tenure-track faculty. If you do have to separate, it will probably be super painful. I suggest listening to the new podcast Academics and Their Money by former podcast guest, Dr. Inga Timmerman.

F) PhDs in the private sector: Your job is probably the most secure of any that we’ve discussed so far, which is not at all the case in normal times. You will be everyone’s best friend right now if you devote some of your time to networking, doubly so if your company is hiring. It may benefit you in the future, but it will almost certainly benefit your friends and peers.

I have a couple of concluding thoughts, and for these I need to thank the most recent episode of the new podcast Optimist Economy, titled Is This a Recession or Not?, and the financial independence movement.

First thought: During a recession, if you manage to keep your job and assuming you didn’t expect to retire super soon, you are going to be financially fine. You might have some anxiety, and perhaps I’ve fed into that today, but you will come through it in good shape. The pain of recessions is felt mostly by people who lose their jobs, and typically, it’s not so much the losing of the job that’s the worst, it’s the time it takes to get another job, which is lengthened during recessions. That’s why I’ve focused so much time today speaking about how you can prepare yourself for the loss of your income. It’s a low-probability but high-risk event.

However, we have the added wrinkle in the PhD community of being super specialized in our research or skills and perhaps even the sector in which we expect to perform that research or use those skills. For PhDs in academia and government and nonprofit research settings especially, losing your job is so much more than a temporary disruption in income. It’s a rupture of your identity because of how much of yourself you had to put into breaking into that career path. In another time, you might have been able to get a similar job, but that just might not be the case right now if your whole field is contracting. Losing your job might feel like the end of your career. It’s not, it doesn’t have to be, but if you feel that way, it’s going to take some serious inner work to decouple your career from your identity and move on. In this, we can take some inspiration from the financial independence movement. Many early retirees have modeled this process of finding yourself outside of your career. It will look different for someone who is still working, but it is a good example.

Second thought: One of the scariest aspects of losing your job in the good old U S of A is that you likely lose your health insurance as well. That part of it is almost as horrible as losing your income, especially if you are chronically ill or have dependents. There are solutions, however, and again these have been well explored by the financial independence community. It may help you alleviate some anxiety to think through what you would do specifically about health insurance if you were to lose your position.

You might be able to hop onto your spouse or partner’s insurance or your parent’s insurance, depending on your specific eligibility and the cost of doing so. Some insurance plans offer a program known as COBRA, in which you can continue with your same coverage for up to 18 months after you lose your job. Your workplace likely offers COBRA, but your student health insurance plan probably doesn’t qualify. If you are eligible for COBRA, you have up to 60 days to enroll in the program and it covers you retroactively, so you could wait up to 60 days to see if you actually need insurance before starting to pay any premiums. The premiums are going to feel high because you have to pay the portion that your employer was paying previously in addition to the portion you paid before. Another good option is to purchase a health insurance plan through the ACA marketplace in your state. This is the fallback plan for most early retirees who stay in the US, and it is a good one, especially since you likely will just be on the plan in the short term. Finally, another type of plan that’s popular with early retirees is a health care sharing ministry, which is not proper health insurance but serves some of the same functions as health insurance. People like it because it’s less expensive than proper health insurance. I will leave it to you to look into further and decide whether this is a viable or preferable option for you should you lose your job.

Part 3: What I’m Offering You for Free

A few weeks ago, I was feeling really despondent and powerless in the face of all these terrible changes, so I decided to embark on what I’m calling Giveaway Spring. I finished all my scheduled speaking engagements by the end of February, so I have an unusual amount of free time between now and the end of the academic year, and I’ve decided to give away a lot of it.

If you aren’t already on my mailing list and you want to sign up for any of these giveaways, please register through PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/. You’ll receive an email with all the current giveaways being offered, and I’ll update my mailing list periodically as I add items. I’m planning on expanding the content I’ve shared in this episode into a full webinar, for example, and I’ll give a pilot of that webinar away to a limited number of people on my mailing list after I put it together.

Here are some of the items on offer as part of Giveaway Spring:

1) I’m offering free 60-minute Q&A calls to cross-institutional groups. This would be perfect for a professional society or interest group that has a lot of PhDs and PhDs-to-be. You don’t even have to be on my list to schedule one of those, just email me at [email protected].

2) I’m offering free 30-minute coaching sessions, four per week between now and early June. These are going fast so once you get the link, keep checking back as availability opens up on a rolling basis.

3) I’ve collected all my best free templates and downloadables into one easy folder.

4) I’m hosting a free AMA with Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator specializing in graduate students and PhDs, on April 8, 2025. You can register via PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/.

5) I’m giving away other people’s books! The first giveaway is for The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond by Ilana Horwitz. I will keep cycling through my favorite personal finance and academia books throughout the spring. You can sign up for the book giveaway directly at PFforPhDs.com/BookGiveaway/.

6) I’m sharing free opportunities hosted by other groups or people as I find out about them. For example, Princeton’s GradFUTURES conference from a couple of weeks ago went out to my list, and right now via PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/ you can sign up for an upcoming free webinar from AccessLex titled “Navigating Recent Updates to Student Loan Repayment and Forgiveness.” If you are hosting or know of free events or resources that are related to PhD personal finance or careers that you think I should pass along, please notify me—I would be happy to do so!

Again, the link to find out about all the current giveaways is PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/. I would really appreciate you sharing that link with your peers. I’m trying to get two things out of these efforts: 1) goodwill within our community and 2) new mailing list subscribers. So you can really help me out with both of those goals by sharing PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/ or any of the other links I’ve mentioned in this section.

I would be very happy to hear your reactions to the content of this episode if you would like to share them with me. Perhaps you’re hearing different messaging from your university or employer or you think I missed a good piece of advice. Please share any comments with me at [email protected]. Good luck this spring, this year, and this four years. I’m rooting for you.

Outro

Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Stipend Data and Strikes on the Path to a Grad Student Union

March 24, 2025 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily interviews Garrett Dunne, a 5th-year PhD candidate in the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Realizing that they were being dramatically underpaid, Garrett and his peers used the data from PhD Stipends to advocate for a significant stipend increase in their department. Subsequently, they joined up with grad students in other schools within the University of Alaska system to unionize and bargain for better pay and health insurance. Garrett’s account of their relatively quick process includes several concrete tips for graduate students at other universities who are advocating to increase their stipends and improve their benefits, including who is in the best position to lead the charge.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Stipend Data and Strikes on the Path to a Grad Student Union

Teaser

Garrett (00:00): Disturbing and depressing is probably the best way I can put it. And so it, it does take students that are in that position of safety and strength to then advocate for the people who are a lot more vulnerable.

Introduction

Emily (00:19): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:47): This is Season 20, Episode 6, and today my guest is Garrett Dunne, a 5th-year PhD candidate in the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Realizing that they were being dramatically underpaid, Garrett and his peers used the data from PhD Stipends to advocate for a significant stipend increase in their department. Subsequently, they joined up with grad students in other schools within the University of Alaska system to unionize and bargain for better pay and health insurance. Garrett’s account of their relatively quick process includes several concrete tips for graduate students at other universities who are advocating to increase their stipends and improve their benefits, including who is in the best position to lead the charge.

Emily (01:32): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e6/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Garrett Dunne.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:44): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Garrett Dunne, who is a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And we are going to discuss increasing grad student stipends through a couple of different mechanisms. And I, I won’t say more than that now, but hopefully you’ll take away a couple of actionables that may be applicable at your own university as well. So, Garrett, would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

Garrett (03:08): Hi, everybody. Uh, I am Garrett Dunne. Uh, I’m a fifth year, as you said, PhD candidate, university of Alaska Fairbanks. I study, uh, two species of a shark in Alaska. Um, I’m trying to improve the federal stock assessment for those two species. Uh, I did my undergraduate work at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and then I did my master’s degree at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. But did my field work in, uh, based outta Biloxi, Mississippi in the, uh, Gulf of Mexico. The naming has changed, but I’m gonna go with Mul- Gulf of Mexico. Um, and then I have been working on and off in Alaska for about the last decade, uh, primarily on fishes. I started with Salmonids and then transitioned into sharks, which is my true passion. But, uh, salmons where the money is made.

Emily (03:53): Wow, okay. You’ve lived all over the place. I was gonna ask if you’re an Alaska native or anything, but it sounds like you’ve been living there on and off for 10 years.

Garrett (04:00): Yeah, originally I’m from New England. I split my time between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but I really have kind of lived all over the country. Um, and I settled in Alaska full-time about four years ago now,

The Impacts of Low Pay and Poor Healthcare in Grad School

Emily (04:12): Speaking of four years ago, that is when we first started our email correspondence. <laugh>, uh, the listeners, sometimes it takes this long to our podcast episode to get into production. So, so four years ago you emailed me about the project that I have going on PhD stipends, PhDstipends.com, which is a database of self-reported stipend information all across the US and actually outside the US as well. So let us know, like what was going on with you back in 2021ish, like what was the pay you were receiving the benefits and like what led you to reaching out about this dataset?

Garrett (04:47): Unsurprisingly, it was because the pay and, uh, university healthcare was underwhelming. So, uh, in 2021, uh, there was a bunch of different levels within my college. University of Alaska Fairbanks breaks up the way that they, uh, pay students one by college and then usually within the college. It’s multiple different levels, but for sake of ease here, if you averaged out what master’s students were making at different levels and PhD students were making at different levels, uh, in 2021, the average salary was, uh, about 21,500 annually for a graduate student at UAF. Um, and the, to further complicate things that really depended on, uh, what type of funding you were through, um, the UAF and kind of UA system is funded through a very large patchwork of different ways to be funded. I, myself have been funded as a TA, RA and fellow, uh, throughout my five years. Um, and at different times and in different orders. I started as an RA, moved to fellowship, moved to TA, and now I’m an RA again. Um, so it’s a bit complicated and the numbers change a little bit depending on what style of funding you have. Um, sadly, uh, after my first year of being an RA, I moved to a fellowship, um, and in some ways that was easier, uh, but it did not leave enough room for summer funding, so I was unpaid in the summers. So while my take home should have been 21,500, my effective take home, because of the lack of pay in the summers was about 17,000, um, which is quite low. And the cost of living in Alaska is very high. Um, the federal government adjusts, I think their numbers from I think 1.25 or 1.5 times the poverty line, uh, for Alaska and to, in 2021, the poverty line was $16,000 a year, um, in Alaska. So, uh, as a graduate student in the sciences, I was being paid a thousand dollars above the poverty line, and I was forced to take, uh, additional work on in the summers. Um, I didn’t mind taking on that work. It was something that I got to, uh, I I’ve always enjoyed and actually did before going back to graduate school. Uh, but it has significantly delayed my progress on my dissertation. Um, and so yeah, we kind of came to, uh, the realization as a college that we just were not being paid enough. Um, and too many people were living at near poverty levels, and we wanted to, uh, push the graduate school to do better. And most of this work was led by the student organization within my college, so the, the, uh, fisheries student organization where people realized that the healthcare was poor and that, uh, we were being underpaid. And because of this patchwork nature, people were going from making $21,000 a year to me then making 17 a year, and then I wasn’t even sure if I was gonna get paid the following, uh, year. So, uh, quite complex as far as things go.

Emily (07:44): Also, shocking shockingly low numbers for 2021, as you said, in a, a relatively high cost of living area. Um, wow. I mean, I know you just sort of offered part of the effect on your own personal finances, which is that you had to take outside work in the summer, which has then, you know, therefore you’re not working towards your dissertation and that’s gonna push things out. Um, would you be willing to share with us anything else that you experienced on that low stipend at that time or maybe that you observed your peers experiencing?

Garrett (08:16): Yeah, for me personally, it was just I had no ability to save. Um, and so I was living very much paycheck to paycheck. I was in the privileged position of coming into, uh, my PhD with no major debt. Um, so I didn’t have major debt from undergrad or large car loans or a, a home loan, anything like that. And, um, I was living paycheck to paycheck. Uh, and so for others that I had spoke to people coming in with undergraduate debt or master’s debt or medical debt, which is a huge problem in the United States, um, they were actively losing money. Um, and so they were dipping into their own savings to be able to have the privilege of going to the graduate school. And it was becoming a real problem. And once we started digging into it, one of the reasons that we were paid so low was that we realized that the college had not given a pay raise to graduate students since 2008. So we were in 2021, and we had not gotten a pay raise since 2008. And so in 2008, the pay was actually fairly competitive and did keep up at least somewhat with the cost of living in the area. But I used the data set that you provided to then look at how we were being paid nationally and even in compared to low cost of living areas. Um, at 21 5, we were being underpaid. And then you had students like me who were making just above the poverty line, uh, and we were obviously being deeply, deeply underpaid. And so we took this data set. I did most of the data analysis and just kind of made box plots and just looked at the fact that we were being paid underpaid nationally. Um, and within specifically art disciplines, I used your dataset, got rid of everything that didn’t have to do with kind of biological science, and we were still being underpaid, um, nationally. And again, we, we <laugh> we live in a relatively high cost of living area. Yeah, it is not one of the major coastal cities, but Alaska’s expensive and especially the stuff that graduate students need, food is very expensive. Housing used to be inexpensive. Um, that has changed actually just really in the last five years, especially in, uh, the major campus areas, which would be Anchorage Fairbanks in Juneau. Um, I don’t live in any of those partially because of the high cost of living. Um, but with food and shelter being expensive, uh, it really, really dips into our ability to, uh, survive up here, um, and not have to dip into savings or take out loans, which, uh, many other students did.

Emily (10:40): Yeah, so the, the data from PhD stipends, okay, first of all, I was in graduate school in 2008 <laugh>, and those numbers are still not that rosy. Um, especially I was even in a moderate cost of living area and I was being paid more than that. Um, yes. Okay, so <laugh>, your lived experience is were barely above the poverty line. People are having to, you know, do outside work and these kinds of things to, to get along here. That’s your lived experience. Then also, you look at this data set and you’re like, wow, wow, wow. Okay, everybody else across the board is getting paid more than us. What, what was the, and you did this data analysis and then what was the next step that you took, like with approaching the administration, for example?

Using Data to Negotiate a Long Overdue Pay Increase

Garrett (11:20): The last part of that analysis was looking and saying, okay, so we are being underpaid. And then, uh, actually adjusting, using the federal numbers to adjust what we were being paid to the current marketplace. So taking in co- uh, inflation and the fact that the federal government says that our poverty le- poverty level is higher. And so our average was 21500, adjusting for all of that. It was about 30,000 is what we should have been paid in 2021 compared to what it was in 2008, which I think is definitely more competitive. Still not that competitive, but more competitive. Um, and so our next steps after having those numbers, having this write up in all of this data analysis was mostly getting, uh, at first graduate students riled up. I mean, all of this came outta the fact that we kept having these student meetings and all these graduate students were saying, I can’t pay for the healthcare. I’m having to ch- choose. I’m having to ration meals I’m having to live in. Um, uh, one of the unique experiences, the University of Alaska Fairbanks is dry cabin living. And it is not something that a lot of people think about. Fairbanks gets incredibly cold. Uh, last winter we hit negative 50 Fahrenheit, so aggressively cold. So heating buildings is not always feasible. And so a lot of the cabins do not have running water. And so a lot of graduate students have had to resort to living in dry cabins that are heated in a variety of ways with no running water.

Emily (12:44): That’s a new one for me. Wow. Yes.

Garrett (12:46): Yeah. And so that had used to be the way that you could save money and attend the university is an experience. Um, and not everyone dislikes it, but it is a difficult one. Um, and those dry cabins have actually gotten quite expensive. And so, you know, even when I joined the university in 2020, uh, those were usually 400, $500 a month and you could get a small cabin for yourself. Uh, those prices have skyrocketed close to a thousand dollars a month for the privilege to live without running water. Um, and so during covid, the university shut down shower access, we have lots of students living in dry cabins, so that got everyone quite angry. And then we all got together, decided that the pay was too low, the healthcare sucked, got us all angry, and then we approached our faculty. Um, and not all faculty were supportive, but my advisor was quite supportive. And a couple of new faculty especially were supportive of this because, similar to your experience, which was they looked around, they went, oh wow, we’re not paying these students enough. And they had seen other university systems and seen the conditions for other graduate students and were very supportive of bringing that forward. And so we got a large portion of the graduate students, a number of the faculty, and then we approached the dean. Um, and that is how we pushed forward with it and said, you are criminally underpaying us. Some people are living at or below the poverty line. Something needs to be done. Um, and we did effectively, uh, petition for a, a pay pay increase. Um, it wasn’t everything we wanted, but it was at least a, a sizable increase.

Emily (14:17): How long did that take from, from the point of, um, I guess first approaching the dean to the pay increase? What was that timeline?

Garrett (14:27): The timeline for approval was surprisingly short. I think that was about a month, two months of negotiation. Um, we did have to wait to the next fiscal year for it to be implemented, however, so that took a a bit longer. Um, I think the problem was we had told the dean a problem for him was that we had told him that we were gonna start going to the papers. Um, the fact that we had students living in poverty and squalor, um, was a real problem and it was gonna look really bad for the dean and the university. Um, we were also significantly underpaid compared to the other science disciplines within the university program. Um, the other colleges, uh, in, in other sciences especially, uh, geoscience, aerospace, those kind of programs are quite well funded. And as I said, we hadn’t gotten a pay raise since 2008, so it was, uh, a bit of an issue.

Emily (15:19): So you used PhD stipends, but you also were gathering data from your peers at your university?

Garrett (15:24): Yeah, absolutely. And just saying that we were even being underpaid within the university system, so PhD stipends was absolutely one of the best ways we could say, look, not only are you underpaying us compared to these other colleges, but like you are underpaying us nationally and it’s expensive to be here. Um, so yeah, it was, it was kind of a double whammy.

Emily (15:43): One of the, I guess, points of criticism about PhD stipends that I’ve heard from other advocates is at least that what they heard when they presented the data was, this is self-reported. This has not been verified by anybody. Did you get any pushback like that or was it just so obvious in your case that we overlook that?

Garrett (16:04): Uh, I had to do a lot of cleaning of the dataset to make sure that we were getting out outlier values. ’cause there are definitely some things that have been mistyped and, you know, we had to take out some of the small values and some of the extreme values where you’ve got somebody who’s counting their stipend as like they’re being paid by a tech company to go back to school and they’re reporting that they’re getting 80,000 or $90,000 a year to go back to graduate school. We had to pull all of that out, but we really didn’t get much pushback on it because it was just so obvious that we were being underpaid. Even if some people were misreporting and there were some outlier values still contained within it, um, yeah, we didn’t get much pushback and the fact that they hadn’t given us pay raise since 2008, pretty much just it was self-explanatory, uh, that we, we something needed to be done.

Emily (16:47): Absolutely.

Commercial

Emily (16:50): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

The Unionization Movement at University of Alaska

Emily (17:41): And so the next step was you achieved this big win for your department, um, but then you rolled this into a larger movement. Can you tell us about that larger unionization movement?

Garrett (17:53): Yeah, yeah. And, um, I don’t want to undersell this. So we were kind of having this conversation within our own college and push for the pay raise, and we actually got them to, uh, agree to a biennial, uh, pay increase as well, pegged to inflation, which was really nice for us, so we didn’t have to fight for it as often. And as a part of this, we started kind of hearing murmurs in the background that actually the, uh, some of the liberal arts colleges had already started talking about unionization. So I don’t wanna say that we were the, we were the start of this, but we did join in with a lot of gusto. And so we heard that there were other organization groups. And so, um, one of the main reasons that that started in the liberal arts college is to my understanding, they were being paid at or below poverty line at their maximum amount amount of pay. So most of these students were making between like 14 and $17,000 a year, and that was maximum if their summers weren’t paid for. Um, they were making $12,000 a year, um, well below the poverty line for Alaska. And so they had a lot more reason to be even angrier. So they kind of got things started and then we joined in in that process. Um, and so that the murmurings of that happened, I think around the time I got started, uh, in 2020. And then by 2020, late 2021, early 2022 is when things kind of got moving. Um, and I’m, I’m happy to talk more about kind of that process if that’s something you wanna dive into.

Emily (19:29): Yeah. Maybe give us like, ’cause it’s, I mean, we don’t need to motivate this. We obviously see the problem with the pay for the graduate students. Um, I’m more curious about, you know, at the time of either, um, you know, voting to form a union or starting to approach the administration about the contract. Like just go over how that process went for you all. We’ve heard it a couple of times on the podcast before, but every story is a bit unique, so I’d love to hear yours.

Garrett (19:55): Yeah, yeah, the healthcare seems to be one of the biggest drivers for us. The, the pay was always bad, um, for, for most of the graduate students, and that was always an easy one. But we are under United Healthcare Student Resources, um, and United has a reputation, um, deservedly so for being quite poor and frequent to deny pretty much any type of coverage. It’s actually, how I got involved in all of this was I spent about two years fighting with them. And so we kind of took these people who were upset about pay and very much upset about healthcare, and we were getting a lot of pushback from United and the, um, student, uh, healthcare manager at the university. And so we decided to say that we were not getting anywhere as a group. And so we started talking internally and seeing what it would take to form a union. And so it was starting to take like, you know, the, the student organization out of the, the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, which is the college I’m in, and finally meeting with the, um, you know, a lot of the liberal arts colleges, many colleges have this problem or universities have this problem where the different colleges are quite separate. Alaska is specifically difficult, um, because we are so spread out. It is a giant state. The UA system, since it is integrated, we actually had to, uh, unionize across all of the colleges. We could not just unionize UAF or UAA. And so it was trying to get all the graduate students from all the different colleges to gather in enough of a critical mass to then move forward. So that was step one was just trying to get these meetings and get enough, uh, frankly upset students <laugh> together to say, okay, so this is something that we actually do want to do.

Garrett (21:35): The next step from there was then saying, okay, we need to start picking people who have time and ability to then, um, become officers and really lead the charge. Uh, I was one of the officers during that push, um, but I was definitely not one of the leaders. I I was just kind of there to help do paperwork, reach out to people, move forward and, and get in contact with people. And the, once we kind of had officers, the, the me- major next step was getting the word out and finding union representation. And that was, honestly, that’s one of the biggest key steps that in retrospect I see is just you can’t do it alone. You need lawyers and you need someone who’s actually been through the unionization process before because all of us officers were very engaged, very motivated, but we needed somebody to actually guide us through. Um, and so we approached two unions, one of which we never had much interest from, and then UAW so United Auto Workers, which I did not think would be heavily involved with graduate students in the United States, which they are, um, was really excited about working with us. And, um, kind of we got in touch with them, found somebody who was gonna be, you know, our, our union rep for this process and their set of lawyers, and that’s really where we got the ball rolling.

Emily (22:48): Wow. Okay. So the ball’s rolling on the unionization process. Um, I think the next step is like a, a card drive, like a signature drive kind of thing, and then, and then it’s starting to talk with the admin, right?

Garrett (23:01): Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so card drive was next, and that was again, trying to make sure we had that critical mass of pissed off students before we kind of even got that ball rolling. Um, and that was really difficult, especially up here because I’m more in the Anchorage area and so I had cards shipped down to me UAF primarily. They have the bulk of the graduate students for the UA system. And so we were the primary university for driving this. We were shipping most of the cards everywhere, but it was really trying to make sure that we had representation of these officers in all these different places so we could go to offices, hand out cards, talk to people, um, because graduate students are bombed with emails, the best thing you can do is call people in this day and age, text people, um, emails sometimes work, but we didn’t always have the best response there. And it was really the officers in the background making sure we went through every graduate student collecting everyone we could and just reaching out over and over again to get those cards signed. Um, it was an incredibly successful drive. Um, the graduate students in the UA system are quite upset with kind of the general state of things, um, and that’s not always the university’s fault. There’s more information there we can always chat about. Um, there were some very large cuts in 2019 to the university system that have made it very hard to make things better for everyone, including faculty and staff. Um, but we got the cards together and then, uh, yeah, I mean we had representation and then we could approach the university, and then we went directly into bargaining, um, and we bargained for a contract if I’m not misremembering, within five months, which is unheard of. Um, getting from card drive to a, um, a, a formal union in, in a contract within a year is impressive. So we went quickly into bargaining and then had a contract within a year. Um, and we have signed and it is formed.

Factors that Accelerated the Unionization Process

Emily (24:48): Yeah, I’m also surprised by that, um, speed, especially given what you just said about there being university-wide, like funding cuts just prior. So like, what, what do you think, what were the factors that made that happen? And especially fast for you all?

Garrett (25:04): I mean, we were protesting a ton. Um, we were protesting on the University of Alaska, Anchorage campus, UAS and UAF, uh, UAF especially because we have the largest population of graduate students. We were regularly picketing the deans of the colleges and the deans of the college and ju- and the university. I mean, we were just being very loud and obnoxious. Um, and we were talking to several papers up here, um, really just getting the word out that we were very, very unhappy and that was the best thing that we could’ve done. Um, partially because the university is so resource strapped as well. Um, we got more than what we initially asked for as far as inclusion within the graduate school. Um, so we, it’s, uh, it’s a difficult thing to deal with, but you know, the TAs and RAs are very easy to say yeah, they’re employees of the graduate school, the fellows, as I talked about, it’s a much more washy area, but we actually managed to get all the fellows included as well, um, as well as some staff.

Garrett (26:03): There were a lot of weird kind of one-off students that are partially employed by the university also in graduate school, and we got a lot of those included as well. Um, the, the university did not play their hand particularly well, and the state was, uh, very sympathetic to a lot of our arguments. So, so it went quite well, uh, for us there. Um, yeah, and, and the speed was just because the university was tired of dealing with us. Um, we really wore them out. Uh, we did not get everything that we wanted within the contract. Uh, one of the big things that we had to jettison for the year was the, uh, healthcare. And so that’s what I care about most. But we had already signed a contract with United for that year, and so if we wanted a contract that at least locked in a floor for all graduate students for pay and a lot of other, you know, representation, grievance policies, things that really are, uh, a huge part of what a union provides and streamlining all of that, we had to wait for this year, which we are now going into bargaining for.

Emily (27:02): Hmm. So everybody, all parties knew that that was still gonna be renegotiated as soon as possible.

Garrett (27:07): Yeah, we wanted to, and absolutely it’s why I got involved and I was disappointed to see that that was the case. But the, uh, university just didn’t have time. They had already signed the contract with the United, so yeah, all parties knew that we were gonna be coming back to the bargaining table within the next year or two to, uh, work on that. Um, one of the fun things that we discovered through this whole process of discovery and requesting information from the university was for years we had been told that, you know, actually no, we, we look at this every year. We find the best healthcare for you guys and we’re really on it. And through discovery, we found out that literally they just check the mark. They, they ask for requests from three possible institutions, they pick the cheapest one and go with it. And turns out they’re pretty much just rubber stamping united every year because they United shifts most of the cost to the graduate students so they can provide the lowest cost to the university, uh, on the healthcare. For the record, we are also required to buy this healthcare. There is no way to opt out. Um, and it’s, uh, become quite expensive. It’s about $1,500 a semester now, and it was about a thousand dollars a semester, um, previously, and that’s before copays and, and all of that. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s poor coverage.

Post-Unionization Stipend Amounts

Emily (28:17): Okay. So forthcoming progress on the healthcare front, but in terms of the stipend, can you tell us like what’s the new minimum or like maybe what you’re making now versus what you were making before?

Garrett (28:29): Yeah, yeah. My, my experience is probably not the best one to go for, um, because I’ve now switched back to an RA ship and so I’ve gone back up to being paid, um, uh, quite a bit better and through the summers. So I’m no longer living at that kind of 17,000 and having to take on summer work. Uh, my new pay rate is closer to, uh, 25,000 a year, um, which is more reasonable. It’s not amazing, but it’s definitely more reasonable, um, if you average out all of the different pay steps that they still have within our college because while we put a floor through the union for the whole university system, um, our pay actually wasn’t affected all of that much. We just now get a regular annual increase peg to inflation, um, rather than, um, we, we didn’t see a pay raise ’cause we were already above that floor. Um, uh, the average now is about 27,000 a year. Um, and some graduate students are now making over 30,000, which, if you remember from when we were chatting earlier is in 2021, arguably kind of where we should have been, um, if we had actually, uh, kept giving pay raises with inflation that said inflation’s been rampant over the last four years or so, uh, post covid or, you know, whatever we wanna call this era of time. Uh, and so I would argue that we’re now should probably be paid in kind of the mid 30 thousands, um, if we were really trying to be, uh, competitive. But it is significantly better than it was, uh, although the healthcare is not where we would like it to be.

Emily (30:05): Okay. So on your personal side, the work that you did to, with your peers to, you know, advocate for increasing the stipends within your department, um, that was sufficient to bring everybody above the minimum that then was set by the union. So really it’s like both efforts were important, like that unionization part of it is not gonna allow you guys to drop below any floors. It’s going to make sure that everything is reevaluated on an annual or biannual basis. Um, but you had already done a, a great amount of legwork for your closer group of peers, but now we get to extend this to a much wider group within the university.

Garrett (30:42): Yeah, absolutely. And that was the case is the College of Fisheries and a lot of the science colleges didn’t see much of a pay raise. Um, we did get those locked in, you know, annual or biannual increases, uh, but it was really trying to keep especially our, our liberal arts colleagues from living in poverty. And so that was one of the privileges of being able to be a part of this was I was able to work before I went back to graduate school, I had savings and I was less concerned with, uh, retaliation from the university. And it was something that I felt good that I was able to provide was help, uh, help push through to help our lower paid colleagues who really just didn’t have a lot of, uh, leeway and, and ability to then argue, uh, without worrying about retaliation from the university. Um, and there were several times where retaliation seemed to be very much on the table. Um, the power dynamics of going through, uh, a unionization push was not what I expected it to be. Um, and it was, uh, difficult for sure.

Power Dynamics During the Unionization Process

Emily (31:41): Can you share any more about that observation?

Garrett (31:43): The power dynamics of, of some of these people who are leading colleges and paying paid hundreds of thousands of dollars against students who are living at or below the poverty line, taking out loans to survive and are deeply concerned that if they get sick or are living with chronic illness, they’re gonna fall into deep medical debt. Um, is, uh, it’s disturbing and depressing is probably the, the, the worst, yeah. The best way I can put it. Um, and so it takes often students that are in positions that are a little bit more stable and have support. Like I said, my uh, advisor was very supportive of both our push for, uh, a pay raise within the college and the unionization push, um, that I felt safe. And so it, it does take students that are in that position of safety and strength to then advocate for the people who are a lot more vulnerable, um, because they, they simply, the power dynamics don’t allow for them to be as loud.

Emily (32:42): Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. I hope that for any listeners who are interested in this, who there’s not yet union representation for their campuses, that they’ll take a, you know, an eye to themselves and see am I in this more privileged position? Am I in a safer position to be able to advocate on behalf of my peers or am I, am I not? And I need to, uh, advocate within my peer group for somebody else to take on these, uh, bigger roles. But I’m really glad to hear that you felt like you were able to do that and, and carry through it with all this, um, wonderful progress. Um, would you say, so earlier, you know, you mentioned that like the main thing for you having the lower stipend was that you weren’t able to save anything. Are you able to save now?

Garrett (33:26): I am, yeah. Which is quite nice. Um, and primarily I’m saving up for unexpected car repairs and it is not a significant amount of savings, but it is, uh, much more stable and I don’t have to worry about going to the grocery store anymore, which is very nice. Um, and not having to shop all of the worst possible least expensive brands, <laugh> is also, uh, a bit of a relief. Um, and so I mean, one of the ways I was able to survive at that very low pay rate was, and I think this ties into uh, a question we’ll probably talk about more, is by creating a very, very detailed budget. I mean, I have a monthly spreadsheet that has all incomes, all outflows and then an annual up or down. And that’s how I kept track of the fact that I was actually generally losing money at that lower stipend level was that you could see, you know, month to month I was losing a couple hundred dollars. Um, I was in the lucky place to have some savings, so I was able to dip into that rather than taking out loans or asking money from friends and family. Um, but that is not the position for many graduate students that I spoke to pre uh, unionization push. So

Emily (34:32): Yeah. And do we really wanna select for graduate students who have worked prior to graduate school who have family support, et cetera, et cetera, or do we want graduate school to be a place that anybody can financially survive?

Garrett (34:45): Absolutely. Yeah.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (34:46): Great. Well, Garrett, this has been such a wonderful story. I’m so glad that you came on to share it with us. Um, I would love to hear, uh, from you the answer to the question I ask of all my guests at the end of interviews, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it can be something that we’ve touched on already or it could be something completely new.

Garrett (35:04): Yeah, I, I think I’m gonna echo a lot of the themes we’ve had during this interview. Um, is first is to pay attention to the entire compensation package. It’s not just to the stipend, but also especially for us, in my experience, the, uh, healthcare that’s provided, how expensive that’s gonna be, what your expected out of pocket is gonna be. Um, does university provide it? Do you get, pay it through your grants? Um, and then you need to really understand the cost of living in the area that you’ll be, uh, doing your work from. If you’re lucky enough like me to be able to do things remotely, you can reduce some of your costs, but a lot of universities I know don’t allow for that. Um, and so you need to see what your pay is gonna be, what your healthcare is gonna be, and any other kind of sneaky costs and, uh, costs of living are gonna be. Um, for me, uh, it was a benefit to wait to return to grad school, um, make sure that I had some savings and was able to, uh, have resources available in case of an unexpected car repair or a surprise cost, a surprise injury. Uh, and so I would encourage some graduate students to consider whether going directly to graduate school is the best option for them, depending on financial situation. Um, my fi- my, uh, budget spreadsheet or using an application for keeping track of your finances, I think is huge. Um, it, it really, really helped me when I was living at kind of the most, uh, spare ends of when I was being paid. And um, and then one of the biggest issues for me, and we haven’t really touched on this, but also looking at how long that funding that you have, uh, for your graduate program lasts. Um, I came into graduate school with only one year of funding and so every year I’ve had to reapply and it’s been a huge stressor for me and, and a big financial strain not knowing whether I’m gonna be in graduate school next year. I do not know if I’m gonna get paid. I don’t know if I’m gonna have my classes taken care of. I’ve been really lucky. I’ve managed to get all the way through and every year I’ve managed to find some form of funding, but it’s been really tight and very close in a couple ways. And so I think that is one of the things that’s most important is making sure that there’s enough money for at least your first many years and that it’s stable. Um, we live in a climate now where funding stability is much more in question and it’s definitely worth asking that, um, before you decide to go to any program.

Emily (37:22): Absolutely. Um, for like prospective graduate students, you know, looking at the offer letters and starting to do, uh, visits or interviews or what have you, um, what’s the best way do you think for them to find out some tricky things like that? You know, what is this insurance policy actually gonna cost me out of pocket? Um, that kind of information within this compressed time period of like the admission season.

Garrett (37:45): Yeah, absolutely. And that is the real hard part is you’re juggling multiple universities, multiple offers and trying to figure out how to navigate it all. Uh, graduate student groups are probably one of the best ways I’ve found. ’cause often that’s where a lot of the grievances are held and that’s where I got together with my colleagues and kind of figured out how to start pushing forward towards action. So any of the graduate student groups in the colleges that you might be going to great people to reach out to, um, other graduate students within your lab, um, often I would argue the ones that are farther along tend to understand the systems a little bit more and be a little bit more honest about the difficulties that they’ve had within the system. Um, and that those are probably my two biggest resources. They tend to be the most honest about both the benefits and drawbacks of those institutions.

Emily (38:32): Yeah. They’ve had time to see maybe some edge cases play out, like, uh, oh yeah, this is normally how things go, but like 10% of the time it goes this other way, you know. Um, well, Garrett, again, thank you so much for agreeing to come on, um, to the podcast and talk about this whole process. It’s been a long, you know, time in, in making this story, but I’m really, really glad to hear this, uh, not a final outcome, but this point in the process and how, how things have been for you and your peers. So thank you so much for your work and for sharing it with my audience.

Garrett (39:03): Yeah, it was a pleasure and thank you so much for having me. Um, I’m just hoping we can make, uh, the graduate student experience better for everyone.

Outtro

Emily (39:21): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

March 10, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 2 Comments

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ilana Horwitz, a professor at Tulane University and the author of the newly released book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. Ilana explains how a grad student or academic can be an entrepreneurial scholar and why it is so beneficial in an environment of uncertainty and limited resources. Ilana and Emily discuss the necessity for grad students to become the CEOs of their own educations and careers. Finally, they explore in more detail ideas from the chapter on how to leverage resources, both human and monetary.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

Purchase Dr. Ilana Horwitz’s book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond, use the code IMH20 to receive a discount!

Teaser

Ilana (00:00): It helps you sort of to have an identity outside of academia to have sort of self-worth in yourself, right? To understand that you are a person that isn’t just bound up with your academic identity. Because if, again, the academic job market doesn’t work out, the crisis that one has about their sense of self-worth is like maybe a little bit less, knowing that you have value in some other capacity.

Introduction

Emily (00:34): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:03): This is Season 20, Episode 5, and today my guest is Dr. Ilana Horwitz, a professor at Tulane University and the author of the newly released book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. Ilana explains how a grad student or academic can be an entrepreneurial scholar and why it is so beneficial in an environment of uncertainty and limited resources. Ilana and I discuss the necessity for grad students to become the CEOs of their own educations and careers. Finally, we explore in more detail ideas from the chapter on how to leverage resources, both human and monetary.

Emily (01:44): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ilana Horwitz.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:56): I am delighted to have a return guest on the podcast today, Dr. Ilana Horwitz, who’s a professor at Tulane University, and the author of the new newly released book titled The Entrepreneurial Scholar and Ilana’s previous episode on the podcast was season 16, episode four, and we get a lot more of like her personal story about being a parent in graduate school and like all the resources she marshaled to, you know, financially get through that period. But it’s interesting, she and I were just looking back at our email exchanges. We first got connected back, you know, over a year about two years ago, um, because she was starting to write this book and wanted to, you know, give for, wanted me to give a short interview for it. And I ended up interviewing her and that came out quite a while ago. But now the book that she’s been working on for so long is finally out. And so that’s our subject for today, the Entrepreneurial scholar. So Ilana, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Will you please give a brief introduction for the audience?

Ilana (03:50): Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. It’s great to be back. Um, as you mentioned, yes, I am trained as a sociologist of religion and education. I am in the Jewish studies and sociology department at Tulane University. I’ve been here, um, for four years, and before that I spent a decade at Stanford as a grad student and as a postdoc.

What Is An Entrepreneurial Scholar?

Emily (04:10): Excellent. I wanna jump right in to like, what, what is this book about? Because it’s not about, as I, you know, maybe thought just by reading the title, it’s not about academics or PhDs who want to become entrepreneurs. We have a slightly different spin on that. So can you tell us the working definitions you have for like an entrepreneur and also an entrepreneurial scholar from the book?

Ilana (04:31): Absolutely, yes. So this is a little bit of a different definition of what entrepreneurship means. When I say entrepreneurship and when I talk about entrepreneurial scholarship, I’m specifically talking about the ability to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. What I don’t mean by entrepreneurship is, uh, I’m not talking about trying to take a neoliberal approach to academia, uh, that advocates for the corporatization of the academy. I am not talking about applying market models to universities, and I’m also not talking about the kinds of sort of, um, business oriented research firms. And as you mentioned, I’m also not talking about necessarily starting some sort of, um, venture on the side, which is like what most people of think of when I say entrepreneurial, uh, thinking. And so again, being an entrepreneurial scholar means being a- able to generate ideas, right? That is the product that is like the currency with which we work. Being able to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. That is what entrepreneurs do. And it’s actually also what scholars do when we are at, um, when we are sort of working within the constraints of what academia is.

Emily (05:51): And one of the things that I found really interesting about your book is that, and this is actually what how you ended up quoting me, like within the subject matter, um, is that going, we’re not just talking about like academics like you, like who have, you know, career professors and that kind of thing. We’re going all the way back to basically the grad student stage and how this mindset can be helpful in, in fact is necessary even from that point of making that transition from undergrad to graduate student. And you just mentioned, um, you know, ideas are the product that we work with within academia. And so I just wanted you to expound on this a little bit more. Like what is this transition that a person has to go through from being a, an excellent undergraduate <laugh> to being a successful graduate student? And why do so many people kind of get stuck or mired along the way and don’t make that transition successfully?

Ilana (06:40): Yeah, absolutely. The main mindset shift that I think people need to make is being able to shift from being a consumer of information to a producer of knowledge. And I really didn’t understand this. I think when I started my PhD program and it was at my orientation that, um, a professor said, right to all the incoming students, like, your job is no longer to consume information, it is to produce knowledge. And what that meant for me as this like realization that my entire life I have been evaluated on the basis of like my ability to consume information and regurgitate it back to the teacher, right? That’s what we generally do in K 12. That’s mostly what we do in college, right? And I was actually never very good at this. Um, which is, I ultimately, I think what ended helped me love graduate school. Um, but when I realized that graduate school is about being able to, um, is, is really about this production of knowledge, meaning that you are now like playing detective and it is up to you what is the problem in the world that you wanna pursue.

Ilana (07:45): And it is up to you how you wanna pursue it and when you wanna pursue it and what resources you wanna pursue it. Like you have so much agency in the process and your grades no longer matter. And for me, that was really liberating. But for a lot of people that’s really debilitating. And the reason it is debilitating is because people who often end up in PhD programs are people who are so good at school and meaning that they were so good at navigating the, what I call the or sociologists of education called the hidden curriculum of school. Like the rules and the routines and regulations, right? They’re like pros at this and they’re like, oh, I’m so good at school that I should go pro. And going pro means going to a PhD program, right? You are a career sort of, uh, student career students, um, aren’t necessarily great at having the mindset to sort of think outside the confines of what is expected of you.

Ilana (08:35): And so when grad school starts and you have a bunch of, you know, requirements, it’s okay, but then the script falls away. And then that is when I think panic, uh, sets in for a lot of people. ’cause it’s like, wait, now there are no rules and there are no routines and there are no regulations, like, what am I supposed to do? And then they, there’s this resentment of like, why isn’t my advisor telling me what, what to do? And like, why isn’t it super clear? And so the ability to like, instead of feeling that moment as debilitating, but instead of, uh, embracing it and embracing that autonomy, I think is like the big mindset shift that needs to happen.

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Education

Emily (09:08): I totally agree. And I, I see, you know, in retrospect how I kind of f- faltered in that myself during graduate school. And it was, it was difficult and you just used the term like script. I think that’s a really, really good way of putting this, like, as you said, you can master how it is to be good at school, you know, all the way up through the end of undergrad and be successful in that. And then once you reach graduate school, you have to really forge your own path. And it’s not totally cl- it’s not just, you know, x, y, z and then you get a degree. It’s a completely like unique experience. And the term that you use in the book, which I really loved is, um, becoming the CEO of your own education. And one of the reasons why I liked this is because it made me think about your education is not just what you do in graduate school, it’s a holistic picture of everything that goes into who you are professionally. And that could be experiences that you have through your classes and through your research and with your advisor and with your colleagues, but it could include a whole lot more than that. And you had a lot of examples in the book of people, um, seeking out experiences that, um, you know, using this mindset of being an entrepreneurial scholar that ultimately led them to the creation that they, you know, were in, were in graduate school or in their careers and to do so. I just really liked that like, framing of it. Did you wanna say anything more about that, that phrasing or how you view it?

Ilana (10:30): Yeah, that’s such a great question because right, my PhD is from a school of education, so I also, uh, think of education as a much more holistic endeavor. And when I think about your P- one’s PhD journey, and if I reflect on my own right, it’s so much more than what I learned in my classes. Um, and so for example, in the book I talk about this experience that I created for myself where I realized at one moment, maybe around my fourth year that I really needed teaching experience, um, as a Stanford, a PhD student in my program. Like I didn’t have to teach, I only had to be a research assistant. And I was like, how do I create an opportunity for myself to go teach? I ended up going to teach at a community college. And so when I think about my own education, I learned so much from that experience of being a community college, um, professor, both from the students in the class who were very different than most of the people I spent time with. They were like working adults mo- mostly first gen, low income, um, students of color. And so not only did I learn from them, but I also learned what it means to sort of educate a different population and what it means to sort of talk about sociological concepts to people who generally don’t come from elite backgrounds. And, um, and so all of that right, was part of my education. Uh, and my education also when I think about my PhD was about navigating things like gender expectations in the academy and like being, um, a sort of, uh, in a household, um, where I had to navigate gender dynamics, um, as everyone mostly has to. Um, and it was about doing a bunch of side hustles, uh, so that I could learn like, what does it mean to do, you know, statistics like act- for ac- an actual client as opposed to doing it for a class. Um, so yes, education is this like much more holistic experience, um, as you mentioned,

Emily (12:22): And now this is a little bit of a sidebar, but it’s kind of a soapbox that I get onto from time to time on the podcast, which is I really think it’s shortsighted of graduate programs to, um, disallow their students. And maybe this was not your experience, but it is in some places to disallow their students from taking outside work opportunities, very much like the ones you just mentioned, adjuncting, you know, side hustling using their skills that they’ve learning graduate school. Um, I get it that they want them to stay focused on finishing their dissertations. Um, but it’s, as I just said, it’s very shortsighted because many of these kinds of side hustles can be, um, augmenting as we were just talking about being the CEO of your own education and making you a better prepared professional once you get to the end of graduate school. So, um, yeah, little <laugh> just a little sidebar there, but I don’t know if you have any comments about, about that and how faculty might in some places view these kind of side endeavors.

Ilana (13:16): Yeah, I think it’s tricky, right? Because I, as you said, like I understand from the faculty’s perspective that they want students to be really focused because once you have some sort of job, especially if it’s like a full-time job, it’s really hard to stay focused on your research. But, um, I also feel very strongly and uh, and I did this myself, that when you take those outside opportunities, you are both, um, building your skillset, developing a network that’s really important. And also like, just being really realistic about the fact that most people who start a PhD program are not gonna end up in a a professor position, right? A very, very tiny percentage of people will end up in the, uh, being able to get a tenure track position or even a non-tenure track position. So it’s just like to, to navigate the uncertainty of academia means being really realistic with what the prospects are and to buffer yourself against that, uh, sort of crisis that is gonna come when you realize you can’t get a job. It’s really helpful to know that you have other options. Um, in my case, um, the School of Education, look, it didn’t have, I think there was a policy and some professors sort of instituted the policy more than others. I will say that, um, there was certainly not enthusiasm for me pursuing this, uh, teaching position at a community college, but I made the case, um, of why it was beneficial. And so it was allowed. And then I, and then there was a bunch of stuff that I did without telling anybody, and it was totally fine because I’m very good at being the CEO of my own education and I sort of knew what I could manage and what was valuable, like what, when I thought about it from a cost benefit ratio, like how much time am I spending on something versus the value I get out of it? And I have no regrets about pursuing anything, um, outside of academia and in the book, there are several examples of people who I interviewed, um, of how transformative those opportunities were. Because one is, it helps you sort of to have an identity outside of academia to have sort of self-worth in yourself, right? To understand that you are a person that isn’t just bound up with your academic identity. Because if, again, the academic job market doesn’t work out, the crisis that one has about their sense of self-worth is like maybe a little bit less knowing that you have value in some other, um, sort of capacity. And some, um, there have been some like amazing opportunities that people got because, you know, one person who I interviewed, Tamara worked for Kamala Harris, uh, on Fridays, and that led to a bunch of other opportunities. And particularly like if you’ve never worked outside of an academic setting, like if you are a person who’s pretty much going straight through from undergrad to your PhD, it’s really important to work in the outside world to understand sort of like the real, how the world, real world functions and not just be in like the academic bubble.

Emily (16:13): Absolutely. I, I totally agree everything you just said. Um, and I guess maybe a, a a corollary, like a, another interpretation of CEO of your own education is CEO of your own career, because you don’t know for sure that you are gonna end up in academia. And it makes sense, as you were just saying, to have, um, built an image of yourself that’s bigger than just an academic in case that career path, if it’s one you’re even going for, um, doesn’t work out. And you can still be an entrepreneurial scholar in graduate school and pivot to something else outside of it. But, um, the point that I wanted to make is that being the CEO of your own career maybe includes some career development experiences that you wouldn’t, you aren’t automatically being pushed into as a graduate student, but that are available to you probably from the graduate school and the career center and so forth. And just being able to like, spend some time exploring those professional development, um, resources and career ideas can, can really help you whenever you are making that next transition point,

Ilana (17:07): Right? And I talk in the book about like, you cannot predict the future, but you can help create it. And that’s, uh, I think an important lesson because all these things that you’re doing can help create your future, um, and it helps sort of offset that uncertainty that we as grad students, uh, sort of have to live with on a, on a day-to-day basis.

Emily (17:29): Yeah, and I, I really love that you talked in the book about uncertainty and about limited resources and oh my gosh, how timely is this? We’re recording this in February, 2025, and as of now there’s been these executive orders. We don’t know in academia how this is all gonna shake out whether there’s gonna be a massive funding decrease, um, you know, know layoffs. We don’t know. We’re in a period of uncertainty. And so how, I mean, it’s, it’s horrible timing in a sense, but it’s good timing for your book to like sort of land in this moment where in academia there’s probably a lot of questions going around about what, what resources do I have? What’s the value that I can bring here? What is my career path going to look like? And so, well, for that reason, if not any other, maybe it’s time to, you know, pick up this book.

Commercial

Emily (18:15): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Leveraging Available Resources as an Academic

Emily (19:07): And since we were just talking about scarce resources, um, I was really compelled by the, the book is basically five, five big ideas, five big chapters, and I was really compelled by the fourth one, which is around leveraging the resources available to you as a graduate student or as an academic. And so can you just expound a little bit more about what kinds of resources, um, might be available to a graduate student or an academic that could, you know, help them as an entrepreneurial scholar?

Ilana (19:33): Yeah, absolutely. So I actually start off the book with this idea of that being, um, thinking entrepreneurially means asking yourself, given who I am, what I know, and who I know, what kind of opportunities could I create for myself? And so here we are thinking about sort of, um, like the intellectual capital that you have, the human capital that you have, and the social capital that you have, right? Who do you know, what do you know? And who are you, um, to start thinking about how you can leverage all of that. So let me talk about this. First of all, this idea of like who, you know, in academia and particularly in the humanities, um, we tend to sort of think of, um, this very, this like lone scholar sitting in a library doing work very independently. And I really wanna disrupt this idea even in the humanities, because even if you’re writing a monograph, I wanna put forth the idea that scholarship is a community sport. Even if you end up writing alone, why is it a community sport? I want people to sort of imagine that the academic landscape is this vast network where each node is a person and each link is a potential collaboration or a shared idea, or even like just a mutual support system, um, because nobody should be doing this alone. And I remember even like as a grad student, I’m in the social sciences, so there isn’t a fair amount of collaboration, but the sort of reticence that some of my colleagues had to ask each other for help to seek out help from, um, more senior people was, was astonishing to me because I came from working in startups and in management consulting where it was very, very common to just ask for help or ask for other people for ideas. So when I say that I want people to think of scholarship as a community sport, what, what that means in practice is like thinking about your network and relationships that you have, not just like, how do you in an icky way try to extract value from that, right? That’s an icky like, um, and I think incorrect version of what it means to network. Instead, I want people to think about networking as the opportunity to actually help other people, right? Not extracting value, but actually putting yourself out there so that your idea and someone else’s idea or sort of your problem and the problem that someone else is experiencing, um, can have sort of mutually beneficial, um, solutions, right? That you in, in partnership with other people can problem solve together, right? And so for example, um, at one point in when I was a sort of latter stage grad student, I was working on a paper, um, and I got really stuck on it. Um, and a new postdoc came to Stanford and I, we were having lunch and I started telling him about this paper. Um, and then I realized that like what I was missing was like a whole framing around gender.

Ilana (22:26): He happened to be a gender scholar, and I realized like it would be really beneficial if he came and joined as an author on this paper. Um, and it was this very, very mutually beneficial decision and collaboration that by the way, has a, actually ended up, that paper ended landed in the top sociology journal. And I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that alone. And since then, he and I have collaborated on several other, uh, other things. Um, but it wasn’t like I was like, oh, this, this person is coming and I wanna just extract value, um, by having lunch with ’em and like seeing what I can sort of get out of that person. Like I knew that this would be a me- mutually beneficial relationship. Um, and so there are many ways to think about how can you identify people in your network, but also develop relationships with people who are outside of your network, um, by thinking about like, where might you have complimentary skills with other people? Um, how might you be able to offer value to somebody else’s project? Right? And so not just thinking about your own career advancement, but thinking about like, how can we do more with what we have, um, by, by collaborating, right? If like, I think of, uh, I think therefore I am instead, like, I think therefore I collaborate.

Emily (23:38): Hmm. Yeah. As you were talking about that, I was just thinking like, yes, this is such a human endeavor. Like it’s human to have relationships with other people and build things together. And I like what you said there because under, under the topic of like leveraging resources, really what you’re saying is think of yourself as a resource that you can offer to other people, and then they mutually can offer their resource of themselves in this case back to you. So it’s, it’s, it’s quite mutual. So I love that. Um, any other sort of categories of, of ways people can leverage resources?

Ilana (24:11): So when people hear the terms leverage resources, they immediately think of money, right? And sort of funding. And so I would do wanna touch upon that and what does it mean to sort of think entrepreneurially about funding? Um, in the book I give examples of people who, uh, have been very successful at getting different fellowships. And there are different ways to think about how to be strategic in those. Like do you go for a bunch of sort of small, low, uh, uh, sort of low bar, uh, grants where it doesn’t take very much to apply to them? Like maybe you can repurpose something and then you just apply to a bunch of really small things. Or do you invest several months into putting together something that has, uh, bigger, bigger reward, right? You always wanna be thinking in all of academic life, you wanna diversify your risk, uh, sort of risk benefit portfolio. And funding is one of those things. Um, I’ll give an example of something that happened to me recently because a lot of thinking entrepreneurially is like taking advantage of opportunities that you didn’t necessarily expect. And so recently, um, Tulane had, uh, somebody from the Russell Sage Foundation come and give a talk about, you know, their funding streams. And I went, and in that talk I realized, I was like, oh, I don’t have anything relevant for this, because they’re looking for really early, more early stage projects than anything that I have. Um, I sort of wrote it off, you know, like I didn’t even take the opportunity to meet with a program officer. And then about a month later I had kind of like a crisis in one of my projects that resulted in me pulling out of the project for a variety of reasons. Um, and I, I was having this like sort of moment of both, like panic, but also seeing opportunity emerge from this breakup where I was like, oh my gosh, like this gives me an opportunity to actually do a totally different study. Uh, and I was like, oh gosh, but that’s like really early stage. Where would I get funding? And I was like, wait a minute. I was like, I just sat through one of those RSF things. So right away I contacted the person at Tulane who had set up that program officer to come and I said, I all of a sudden have an idea, is it too late to meet with them? And she said, let me get in touch. So I met with a program officer, I learned so much, I told them what my idea was, and through that conversation I learned about like some stuff that, about their grants that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out just based off of their website. Like it turns out that there was a stream of funding that wasn’t gonna continue and it would be very beneficial for me to apply to, to this particular stream of funding. So I did, and I submitted, um, a letter of intent, um, which is their first stage. And I actually made it through to the, to the proposal stage. So I should hear back in a couple of weeks about whether I got it or not. But I at least feel very good that I made it through the LOI stage. And again, the like, key takeaway is I didn’t, you know, the sort of, I put myself out there, I went to the session, I didn’t think anything would come of it. And then when I had this like moment of, of crisis and I, and I saw opportunity, I was like, oh, wait a minute, I can connect the dots here. So, so thinking about like, um, expansively about funding and resources, um, and just like sometimes going to stuff that you may think doesn’t have any benefit for you, you never know when there will be, um, a payoff.

Emily (27:24): Hmm. And I’ll speak as a business owner, I actually don’t identify with the term entrepreneur for my particular type of business, but as a business owner, I have to think about the revenue streams in my business. And I have, I might have predictions about which revenue streams are gonna work out to what capacity, but it’s really beneficial, as you were just saying, to have, um, ideas maybe on the back burner, <laugh> of other revenue streams, other fellowships, other grants you could apply to. And so if you have the capacity, like in your example that you just gave, if you suddenly have the capacity to be applying for things or putting effort into an area that you weren’t before, then you say, oh, I, I have some background in this. I know how to turn this on in a, in a quicker way than just, you know, starting completely like cold. I really love that example. Anything else you wanna add? Um, I, I, just for the podcast listeners, especially if you’re a longtime podcast listener, chapter four of this book is really special because Ilana included, um, my podcast, like interviews as some of the resources and also interviewed some other people that I’ve had on the podcast before. So like, it was like seeing some old friends in this chapter, which was really exciting. And also, of course also pulled in some other interviews that I found really, um, great. So I thought you actually summed this up really well in the, you know, concluding notes for that chapter where you said, remember, every funding opportunity is also a chance to expand your community and collaborate with others who share your vision and actually ties really well both of those points, um, together. So thank you so much. Anything else you wanna add in about this leveraging resources topic?

Ilana (28:48): I’ll add one more thing, and this is sort of the, this idea of connecting with people so that you can expand your knowledge of what is possible in the world. And what I mean by that is there are things like that I remember as a doctoral student that I was like, there’s no way that I can do this because I have no mental map and I have no schema in my head for how to make this possible. So for example, um, at towards the end of grad, grad school, I was like, I wanna write a book. I had written a multiple multi paper dissertation, but I wanted to write a book, but I have no mental model of how you go about writing a book when you are a PhD student. And it seemed like out of the realm of possibility. And nowhere in my graduate program did anyone ever train me to think about this. Um, and I had a friend who as a grad student was able to, uh, not a friend, he wasn’t even at my institution, but, but it was someone who I had met along the way. Uh, and I knew that he had been able to secure not one, but sort of two offers from prestigious public, uh, book presses, um, for an advanced contract. And I was like, wait, that’s a thing. I didn’t know that was possible. And once I knew it was a thing and he helped me understand how it became a thing and walked me through all the steps that he went through and even shared his proposal, I had this like ability to think beyond what I could think about earlier. I was like, oh, if he could do it, maybe I could do it too, and here’s what it could look like. And I followed some of the similar steps, um, and it became possible. Um, so I think we, we don’t think of collaborating, um, as sort of an opportunity to think beyond ourselves, but that’s what it does for me. It gives me the, the poss- that that sort of opportunity to imagine possibilities that I thought were off the table.

The Origin Story of The Entrepreneurial Scholar Book

Emily (30:37): Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. So this is your second book and you use this book as an example in, I believe it’s the fifth chapter of, um, a an entrepreneurial scholarship activity, right? Of publishing a book. So, um, can you just tell us really briefly how the book, um, came about?

Ilana (30:56): Yeah, the book came about, um, from something I totally didn’t expect and out of a sort of a story of failure, which I think is like a very defining, uh, feature of entrepreneurship. When I was a graduate student at the very end of grad school, I was a sixth year, you know, I wasn’t even taking classes, but because I was in this mindset of like, I wanna get everything I can out of Stanford while I’m here and while it’s free, um, I decided to, I was auditing a bunch of classes. I was auditing classes on like how to be a good public speaker and improv. And one of the classes I audited was how to Write for the Public. And it was taught by Sam Weinberg, a professor, um, at the School of Education. And our final assignment was to write an op-ed, right? Not surprisingly, and mostly everyone in the class took this opportunity to write an op-ed about their research. And at the time I was about to graduate and I was reflecting sort of deeply about how my own PhD journey, um, went. Um, and so I took this opportunity to write, um, an op-ed that like, basically I submitted to a couple places and it failed. It did not get published. And it was really frustrating. And Sam, who, um, who I really, really have to give a lot of credit to, he was like, you, you shouldn’t give up on this idea. There’s something there, there. And even if you sort of put it down for a little while, you have to promise me that one day you will pick it back up because I see it, it has a future. Like he, he believed in it. Um, and so for two years, Emily, I kid you not two years, this thing just like sat on my computer. And so about a week before I started my job at Tulane, I was already in my new office and I was about to go home for the day and I was like, you know what? I was, was like, I have childcare. Nothing is gonna like blow up at home if I just like stay in the office for two more hours and I’m gonna pick up that op-ed and I’m gonna dust it off, you know, and see what I can do with it. ’cause I promised Sam that I would. And, and I did, and I, I sort of spoke from a place of what I knew, like I leaned into this startup and, um, consulting experience that I had and I wrote this op-ed that was, or I revised it I think with the title Why PhD students Should Think Like Entrepreneurs. And I submitted and then I thought about, okay, I have this, where can I submit it to? At that point, I already had published once in Inside Higher Ed, so I submitted it to them, right? That was like the, the, the, the most obvious choice. I already had a personal connection there. And within two hours they wrote me back and I, and they were like, yeah, this is great, we will take it. And I was like, oh, that was easy. Okay. And then a few weeks later it came out and, you know, I got a, a couple of nice emails from, um, faculty and some from therapists who said how much this resonated for them and working with grad students. And then I got the most unexpected email. It was from, uh, the editor at Princeton University Press, Peter, and he was like, this is great. Do you wanna flesh this out into a book? And I was like, I’m sorry, come again, <laugh>, uh, you want me to write a book on this topic? And so that, that is the, the sort of birth story of this book. Um, and so it really came out of something very unexpected and to, to write this book, I went out and I interviewed about, um, 45 people who hold either different positions in academia or who have left academia or who are entrepreneurs. So this book really required me to think about like, who am I? What do I know and who do I know to make it happen? So in that way, it is very much like a story of an entrepreneurial, uh, endeavor.

Emily (34:30): Absolutely. I can see that so clearly. I’m so glad that you brought that up so that I could ask you this question about how the book came to be. Um, and so interesting that there was that two year just time period, and I dunno what it was, I don’t know if it was the rewriting that you did or how things had changed in your perspective in two years, or how the world had changed in the two years, but somehow the idea clearly hit <laugh> the second time around. Um, and that’s, that’s fantastic. Where can people find the book?

Ilana (34:57): The people can find the book at Princeton University Press, and I think in your show notes, uh, I can share a, uh, discount code, um, that people can use. People can also find it on Amazon as well as learn more about it on my website, www.IlanaHorwitz, that’s I-L-A-N-A-H-O-R-W-I-T-Z.com. Uh, and I encourage people to reach out to me, uh, if they wanna learn more about it.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (35:27): All right, and since you said that you love dispensing advice, we have one more opportunity for you to do so, which is with the standard question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it could be something completely new.

Ilana (35:44): My best advice is to pursue a side hustle if possible. And I recognize that it is not possible for everyone, especially international students, students who are parents. Um, I get that this is something that isn’t available to everybody, but if you have the opportunity and sometimes the pay might be so bad, like my first side hustle, I made $12 an hour and it was absolutely worth it because I gained so many skills from the experience. But don’t just think about it from a financial perspective, think about all the other different ways that it could benefit you. Um, and the money that you get on the side is also a really nice perk.

Emily (36:26): Very good. Uh, thanks for tying all those themes together. Well, Ilana, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you again.

Ilana (36:34): Thanks Emily.

Outtro

Emily (36:45): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

What to Do When Facing Financial Uncertainty

March 6, 2025 by Emily Leave a Comment

Academic and research institutions are facing federal funding cuts—both realized and potential—due to the Trump administration’s hyper-aggressive and ham-fisted attempts to reduce federal spending. Many of the graduate students, postdocs, faculty members, and researchers at these institutions are experiencing uncertainty about whether their positions will continue and how they will be funded, at least to a degree. In the face of income uncertainty, there are certain steps you can take to shore up your personal finances so that you can better weather any storm that might come.

The following are practical steps you may take to strengthen your personal financial position if you still have an income. There’s no need to take every action on this list. My intention is to help you reduce your stress at this time, not add to it.

Establish or Increase Your Emergency Fund

Evaluate whether you should increase the size of your emergency fund. An emergency fund is a sum of money specifically set aside to be drawn upon when you have a financial emergency, such as income loss or an unexpected but vital expense. This money should be kept in cash equivalents, such as a high-yield savings account, not put at any risk.

While in more stable financial times you might be able to get away with maintaining a smaller fund, right now I suggest an emergency fund size of two months of expenses if you are early in your financial journey (e.g., are holding high-interest debt) or six months of expenses if you are later in your financial journey (e.g., are debt-free aside from student loans or a mortgage and are regularly investing).

If you don’t yet have the smaller size of emergency fund set aside, please make it a top priority to create it quickly, even if it requires an uncomfortable level of sacrifice in the short term. You can free up cash flow for your emergency fund by fasting from discretionary purchases, cancelling discretionary fixed expenses, selling items you no longer use, increasing your income if possible, and attempting to reduce your expenses generally. Ask yourself what you would and would not spend on if you had no income, and spend only on what’s absolutely necessary until you reach your emergency fund goal.

Pay Off Your Credit Card Debt

If you are carrying a balance on your credit card(s), the next step after increasing your emergency fund to two months of expenses is to pay down or off your credit card debt. Like with the emergency fund, please do this as quickly as possible. Credit card debt typically accumulates interest at a very high rate, which is toxic for your finances. I don’t suggest closing any credit accounts in this process unless you are paying an annual fee for them because if worse comes to worst you might have to accumulate a balance again (see next).

Research and Prepare to Take Out (Less Toxic) Debt

Where would you turn if you lost your income and spent down your emergency fund? Especially with a smaller-sized emergency fund, that could happen before you secure another position or funding source. Taking out new debt is a possibility, even though it’s no one’s favorite option. What types of debt are accessible to you that would come with a lower interest rate than your current credit cards?

If you are a student, look into whether you’re eligible for federal or private student loans; consider submitting a Free Application for Federal Student Aid now to open up that possibility without committing yourself to taking out any debt.

If you’re a homeowner with equity in your home, compare home equity line of credit (HELOC) offers from a few lenders and consider opening one. Opening an HELOC doesn’t obligate you to borrow against your home, but once you open it, the credit is available to you. However, there are origination and possibly account fees, so don’t exercise this option without weighing the costs. Some lenders require you to have an income to take out this type of loan.

Shop around for a personal loan at a reasonable interest rate—preferably without an origination fee or a very low fee. If you want to take out this type of debt, you will have to do so while you still have an income.

Consider opening a credit card with a lower-than-average interest rate to turn to if you run out of cash. Some cards offer a 0% interest rate for a fixed period of time.

Diversify Your Income Sources

In general, I suggest the habit of applying for at least one fellowship/grant per year, and right now you should double down on that practice. Take some time this month to identify several potential funding sources; some of them should be from organizations other than the federal government. Loop your advisor/mentor in to help you decide which to apply to, and make it a priority to submit a strong, tailored application at the appropriate time.

Now is also the time to start a side hustle or job if you don’t yet have one—or to add another. You don’t necessarily have to set a goal of earning a lot of money through it right now (unless you’re trying to increase your emergency fund size or pay down credit card debt). The purpose of establishing one or more income sources outside of your primary one is to be able to quickly ramp up your income through them should you lose your primary income. For example, if you freelance and typically take one small job per month, if you needed to, you could try to attract additional clients. It’s easier to go from one client to five than to go from zero clients to one, so establish yourself now, before you need the income.

When you diversify your income sources, think about the upstream source(s) of the money you seek. At this time, it’s best to add income sources from people/companies who do not directly receive federal funding. While I typically advise graduate students and postdocs to focus their side hustle efforts within areas related to their developing expertise that could potentially advance their careers, now is the time to cast a wider net. Yes, offer your data visualization services, but maybe also do a few baby- or pet-sitting jobs to gain references.

Research Resources Available to You

What resources are available to you through your university, city, county, or state if you did lose your funding? You can research this question in advance so that you know where to turn. For example:

Would you qualify for unemployment benefits? (Don’t assume you do as a graduate student or fellow! It varies by state.)
Does your university offer emergency grants or loans? What is the application process?
Where are the local food banks and when are they open? What are their eligibility criteria? (There may be one on your campus.)

If you are a student, the financial aid, basic needs, and/or financial wellness offices can help you with this research.

Prepare for a Career Pivot

While you hopefully will not suddenly lose your income, it may become clear over the coming months that your current career path is not viable or will not meet your expectations. In that case, prepare to pivot. Early steps you can take are to update your CV/resume, reconnect with and expand your network, and utilize the career and professional development resources available to you, such as through your university’s career center.

I hope that taking one or more of these steps will help to calm your nerves in this time of uncertainty. If you are able to, please advocate for the restoration/continuation of vital research funding.

How Academics Can Apply Self-Compassion to Their Money and Time

February 24, 2025 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Danielle De La Mare, a career wellness coach and facilitator and the person behind Self-Compassionate Professor. Danielle recounts how she reached a crisis point in her career and personal life that led her to quit her tenured professorship. This crisis included a financial component due to her avoidant money mindset. Danielle describes how she is healing in the area of finances, especially in relationship with her husband, using self-compassionate practices. Danielle and Emily draw parallels between time management and money management to keep both in balance and sustainable. Danielle ends the interview by teaching two quick self-compassion practices that you can apply immediately to your financial life.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How Academics Can Apply Self-Compassion to Their Money and Time

Teaser

Danielle (00:00): So the healing was really about like me finally just like, ah, turning into the reality that I had to develop a relationship with money and it was really scary.

Introduction

Emily (00:21): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:49): This is Season 20, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Danielle De La Mare, a career wellness coach and facilitator and the person behind Self-Compassionate Professor. Danielle recounts how she reached a crisis point in her career and personal life that led her to quit her tenured professorship. This crisis included a financial component due to her avoidant money mindset. Danielle describes how she is healing in the area of finances, especially in relationship with her husband, using self-compassionate practices. Danielle and I draw parallels between time management and money management to keep both in balance and sustainable. Danielle ends the interview by teaching two quick self-compassion practices that you can apply immediately to your financial life.

Emily (01:35): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor this workshop for you and your peers? You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Thank you so, so much for doing so! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e4/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Danielle De La Mare of Self-Compassionate Professor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:12): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Danielle De La Mare of Self-Compassionate Professor. And we, uh, this podcast interview came to be from an unusual path, which is that we both work with Dr. Jill Hoffman, who you heard from, uh, last season in an interview. So Jill thought it was a great idea to get me and Danielle together and we agreed. So we’re doing this interview now and I’m really excited we’re going to talk about the intersections of money with other aspects of life management, and Danielle has a lot of unique perspective on this. So, uh, Danielle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

Danielle (03:51): Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. Um, yeah, uh, I’m Danielle De La Mare and I have been what I call a career wellness coach to mostly mid-career academics, um, for the last several years, since 2019. And, um, sometimes I have early career academics, sometimes I have postdocs, sometimes I have later career academics that I work with full professors. Um, but basically these are people who have hit a wall in their career. They’re not feeling alive in their career. They’re not feeling joy, they’re not feeling well. Um, and basically I have a group, um, program that that sort of works them through that. Now I myself earned tenure in 2018 and then quit my job right after that <laugh>. So the way, um, I engaged with academia myself was very hard on my body. I was very overwhelmed all the time. I was very stressed all the time. I hit burnout. I had small illnesses all the time. And then I had really big major like life-threatening kinds of illnesses as well. Um, two of those actually. So I ended up leaving academia and I started doing this career wellness coaching work, um, diving into it, trying to learn about how to be well in my career and what <laugh> what I found is that those toxic work habits I, um, used in academia I just brought with me to this new job. Um, and, uh, the reason I left academia so quickly is ’cause my husband got a job. Um, he, he was an academic at my same institution and he got a job, um, across the country. So I ended up leaving and I was so happy to leave and thought I can start this new gig and do it all differently. And then I ended up doing the same thing. So, um, yeah, I guess that’s it. The, the core of my work is about self-compassion, like making decisions about your career, taking action in your career from a place of self-compassion. And I guess that’s me in a nutshell.

Emily (06:16): Yeah. Okay. I’m so glad to, I’m, I’m excited to hear more about this story. So like when you were coming up on those maybe the last few years, um, as an academic, um, give us kind of what was going on with you getting up to that crisis point. Um, you’ve mentioned health crises already, but maybe also about your time management, maybe also about your career progression, maybe also your money, like even more holistically. Let’s hear more about that.

Danielle (06:43): Yeah, 100%. Um, so yeah, physical body was giving out. Um, and I think had I been somebody who was a planner, like I never planned anything like weekly planning monthly. I never did any of it. Um, that would’ve definitely helped with my overwhelm. Um, my overwhelm definitely contributed to my, some of my health crises for sure. Um, so I was essentially just focusing only on my work, doing my work, and that was it. I was trying to shut out my life other than that in every way. Um, you know, I was a professor and that was my identity and this is what I did. And, um, I wanted to prove to the people around me that that’s, that I could do a good job and that I would do it well. So I would shut my door <laugh> when I got into the office. Um, and I could hear my colleagues banter outside the door and I wouldn’t communicate with them. I wouldn’t hang out with them. I could hear them and I would kind of have this longing of like, oh, it’d be nice to go hang out with them, but I can’t. I’ve gotta work. Um, I remember, you know, doing everything I could to, to push my daughter off on, um, my mom like, can you take care of Mar she needs, uh, she needs you today ’cause I have to work. Um, I didn’t look at, you know, I didn’t look at my weeks. As I said, I didn’t look at my months, I never looked at my money, I didn’t look at anything. The only thing that mattered was my work, and it’s because I had this core, core belief that I was incompetent and I was bad and I was wrong. And it was this impo-, these imposter feelings. And because of those, I shut everything else out and not shockingly got sick.

Navigating Money, Career, and Relationships

Emily (08:39): Wow. Wow. I can so see how your brand became what it is, <laugh> identifying that as the core issue inside you, your psychology, um, that was kind of like fueling all of this. Um, was there ever going to be an end point or with that like core belief that you were incompetent, had you not left your job, would you just have continued, as you said, shutting out everything else in your life to only focus on the work?

Danielle (09:07): Well, I think I did do that. Um, I, I continued to shut out everything to focus on the work even after I left. Um, I, I remember having an argument with my husband right after he accepted this job across the country. And, um, I was like, I’m fine leaving. This job sucks. It’s not for me, dah, dah, dah, dah. I don’t feel well, this is well after I had hit burnout. And so it, you know, my feelings were very different then. And I was like, let’s go, let’s get outta here. And he’s like, okay, I get that you want to start sort of this entrepreneurial work and I just need to know like, where are we money wise? Like when are we gonna call it quits? Like we can give it a shot, we can move, I can take over, you know, paying for things and doing, you know, supporting us, but then I need to know when you’re gonna, when is sort of the breaking point when we’re not gonna be able to do it anymore. Um, and I remember just getting really angry, like, this is my purpose in life. I’m pretty sure that we can manage it. We can figure this out. I can’t believe you want a number. What is this number thing? And I, I remember getting really, really angry with him and, and he was really angry with me. Like I, he wanted some clarity, he wanted some sense that, you know, we go into this. He, he knew like when the end point was he needed that. And I, I was like, um hmm. It’s like I was offended by it. Like, no, this is my real work. This is the work I’m meant to be. How could you, you know, question that kind of thing. Um, and so I kind of shrugged him off and he kind of let me, and he wasn’t happy about it and he carried a lot of sort of resentment about it. And we got here and I’m in Denver now where he got the job and I ended up taking another faculty job to appease him. But then I got sick. I got really, really, really, really, really sick life, threateningly sick and ended up having to quit six months later. And so it was this, like, it was the body <laugh> was, was communicating things to me. My husband wanted some clarity about money. I didn’t know how to plan my time out in a way that would like actually balance out my life. Um, I was just sort of fully focused on my career and my, my new job, or I guess I should say my new career, my new, what I felt was like my calling, my, my dharma, my purpose. Um, and I was very, very, very imbalanced. And so we got here and started arranging our new life and things just got more and more stressful actually. And I guess a big part of that stress was lack of money because I had to quit that job six months in and then I had to try to build a business and I refused to talk about money with my husband and <laugh>, like all this stuff was happening.

Emily (12:22): Was he more clued in about the money than you were, or were you both kind of flying like in the dark?

Danielle (12:27): So this is kind of how I think of it. I think of our relationship to money as like attachment style. If you’re securely attached, you, you communicate with like your partner and your friends and the people around you in this way that, that, that is productive and loving and truthful and those kinds of things. Well, we have that same relationship to money <laugh>. Um, and if you don’t have a secure attachment style for me, I tend to be avoidant. Um, I will avoid human relationships. I will avoid, um, relationship to money. I will avoid relationship to time. And he, my husband falls sort of on the other end of the spectrum and he is, um, he’s anxious about everything and he tries to push things into being, and it should work like this and it, and he gets really rigid about it. And so I would say that neither of us had a secure relationship to money. Um, and in fact we were talking about money in completely different ways, and each of our ways were like totally unhealthy, <laugh> totally, totally unhealthy, totally toxic. Um, yeah. And actually as I, as I recall this time, like I can feel this sort of pain in my body and the heaviness and the sadness. It was a hard time.

Healing and Building a Relationship with Money

Emily (13:51): Yeah. And I, I think we’re gonna keep the conversation fairly focused around money today and it, and its relationship with these other things, but clearly this was going on for you in multiple areas of your life, right? It’s not just money, it’s not just career, it’s, it’s well beyond that. So you’re speaking about this time in the past tense. So let’s talk about like, emerging from that or, or shifting it or healing from it or however you like, conceptualize that. So like, what’s been the shift from like that point in time to now

Danielle (14:19): Turning into the reality that I need to have conversations with my husband about finances, um, which was really scary to me. I, when we first started, we, we have these weekly meetings every Tuesday, although we haven’t had them for a few weeks, and it’s making me nervous. Um, but I would, I would get shaky, um, when we would sit down to talk about it and he would get angry and they were very stressful. And it was this like turning into like what’s authentically happening right now as we talk about money, when we, what, Like, I, uh, just like I said to you just now, like, I can feel this in my body as I’m talking about it. Like, I started saying that to him, like, I can feel the shakiness showing up in my body and I can feel like a sense that I wanna run away really fast from this and I don’t wanna have this conversation. Um, and so being really honest, and then when I was doing that, he started telling me how he would feel and often we’d have similar reactions like he wanted to run too. Um, so the healing was really about like me finally just like, ah, turning into the reality that I had to develop a relationship with money. I had to develop a relationship with all of these things, with my husband, with <laugh>, you know, with time. Um, and it was really scary. And, um, it, and, and if I compare that to where we are now, I would say that there’s still definitely work to be done in terms of my own relationship to money, but also my relationship to my husband, um, when it relates to money. ’cause that is like the hot point for us and has been for the 20 years that we’ve been married, like it always has been. Um, and so we continue to do the work. I can see when he kind of pulls out and it’s like, ah, I gotta go to a meeting and I can’t meet for our time. And then I feel like comfortable with that, like, yeah, yeah, please go and I don’t have to worry about it or deal with it kind of thing. Um, and so it’s very easy, easy for us to fall into that avoidant place where we don’t talk about it and we don’t think about it. And like I said, for the last few weeks we haven’t been doing it and I’m like, I gotta get back on it. I gotta step back in. This is probably why I’m on the podcast right now, so that I can like force myself to do that. You know what I mean? Like, I’m thinking about like divine intervention or something. I would say that so much of it has been about just holding myself in these difficult moments. I mean, just in the same way when I talk to my husband about money, I get nervous and scared and shaky. Uh, the same thing happens when I look at my, my money. Um, when I look at the actual numbers and I’m, and I’m tracking. And when I’m doing that every single day, which I’ve been doing, um, I really have to take a self-compassion break. I have to like hold my chest. I have to tell myself I’m not alone. I have to tell myself that everything is okay. I have to tell myself that I am competent and I can do this money thing. Like there’s, there’s some real stuff that I need to do to get in, get in a really good, secure relationship with money. Um, and I’m doing it, but it’s a process and I think that’s what I really wanna impart to people. It’s not just you look at the numbers and then you know, you quit avoiding and you transition and voila you’re there. It’s not like that. It, there is some healing work and some time. And to know that I think is really important.

Emily (18:02): I’m very actually impressed that you and your husband have both been able to like, identify that you want to avoid and that you want to run away and so forth. And yet have held yourselves to maybe not the weekly standard, but like a standard of meeting periodically and engaging with the subject and doing the work. Um, as you were saying, like physically to get to that point where you can have those conversations. I’m wondering in the time that it’s been since you have been intentionally engaging with one another around the subject of money, um, what positive things you’ve been able to accomplish, like what keeps you coming back to the table even though it has been so difficult?

Danielle (18:39): I feel closer to him when I can hear the way he’s thinking about things and the way he’s framing sort of our money story. And, um, and, and he actually says to me, thank you. When I tell him, you know, what, where I am and how I’m feeling, um, like he’s, he’s really valuing hearing me and I can feel just this, like, I can feel a real tenderness that he has for me when I talk to him about my fears and when I talk to him about why this is so difficult for me. Um, and that, that is, um, that is absolutely the thing that keeps us coming back, right? Like, wow, wow. To feel that sense of tenderness and, and care for each other when, when money for the 20 years we’ve been married, um, has always been, um, just fraught with pain and, uh, disdain and contempt and um, and so knowing that it’s hard but coming back feels really, really good. It feels like courageous. Like, I can do this and um, and I can and I can love fiercely and I can see he can do the same thing. Uh, so yeah, that’s what comes up for me when you ask that.

Emily (20:13): Hmm. That’s, that’s incredible. And it, it speaks also I think greatly to, um, your marriage, your partnership. Um, I think of there’s various aspects of our lives that we can share with our partners. Not everybody shares money and you’re not even necessarily talking about the dollars and cents, you’re talking about sharing the feelings and the fears and the dreams and so forth. And that’s, that’s really, that’s really precious and it can bring people closer together the way that sharing other aspects of your life can as well. This is just kind of one of those examples. I’m really glad to hear, hear that. That’s really lovely. Is there anything else you wanna talk about from kind of that first question, which is like, coming to crisis point and how you came out of that?

Dharma and Connecting to your Purpose

Danielle (20:58): I think this idea of dharma, I’m a huge Stephen Cope fan. Stephen Cope talks about dharma. He’s a yogi and a psychotherapist. And he had his own like mid-career crisis as a, as a therapist in Boston years and years ago. And, um, during this time when I was in my tenure track job and I was feeling all the stress and all the pain and my husband said to me, you like carry anxiety with you at all times. Um, I would have like these Sunday mornings, um, when I had an infant at home, I would go to the coffee shop and just read Stephen Cope, um, his work. And he had a book, what was it? I’m trying to see it on my shelf. Uh, I think it’s, I think it’s called Yoga and the Search for True Self or something like that. Anyway, in it, I, when I was reading it at the coffee shop on those mornings when I was always anxious and I’d have this from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM ’cause I had a baby at home, 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM on Sunday mornings, was this like, ah, I can just kinda slip into this place where it feels like somebody understands me and the crisis I’m going through. And this is the person that also talks about purpose and dharma from a, from a sort of yogic philosophy, from particularly he, he, he talks about the Bhagavad Gita, which is um, which is this, this scripture that helps us to understand purpose. Uh, and so that was the thing I think that got me it, one, it was the thing that caused some arguments ’cause my husband didn’t get it and he was like, I don’t like this. Um, like, we can’t have a conversation about money because you’re so, like, this is my purpose. This is what I do, this is what I want. Uh, he thought it was so lofty and ridiculous, so it caused that kind of problem. But what it did for me is it the idea of having a dharma, the idea of having a purpose and then just like putting to work the health of my body, time, money, all of those things in alignment with that sense of purpose. That was the thing that kept me moving because those things bore me otherwise, like, oh my gosh, time, money, it’s boring, it’s dumb, I hate it, but if I have like a real why about why I do it, like this is why I do it, it for me it was dharma. Knowing that I’m doing it because I know there are other faculty out there who are having a hard time and I wanna be able to be there for them and I wanna be able to to, to heal, to help heal with them.

Commercial

Emily (23:57): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Connections Between Time and Money: Prioritizing Wellness in Both Areas

Emily (24:48): I would love to talk a little bit more about some of the things that you just mentioned. We’ve touched on this a couple times, the time management, the planning, the weekly plans and so forth. And I want to kind of draw a comparison between managing your time and managing your money and see how well, you know, strategies from one can transfer to the other and maybe in some cases where they break down and these things are very different and can’t be thought of in a similar way. Um, so tell me like, you know, having gone from someone who, who wasn’t doing the management of time and now presumably you’re much better at it because. You want it to be part, you know, enabling you to do what you’re here to do. Um, tell me a little bit about like your practice of time management or how you teach other people about it. And let’s just start talking through those analogies with money.

Danielle (25:35): I do weekly planning in my program that I have for faculty. And every Friday we get together and we talk about our career wellness or we, I have them meditate on their career wellness destination, this is where I wanna be. So like, let’s step into that, that let’s feel into that, what is that? And then now let’s set an intention for the week that supports that. Um, so, uh, I would say that as a person, I, I do things, uh hmm. I have to act on things before they sort of integrate. Um, so I had to do the weekly planning with my people for a long time, for probably at least a year before I was really getting good at it sort of myself. Um, and I, that same thing with my dissertation. When I wrote my dissertation, I had to be in the field. I did ethnographic research, I had to be in the field before I could really write my methods section. Like I’m just not the kind of person who can like, you know, put it out there, make a plan, and then, and then move forward with it. Like, I have to act on it, I have to feel it, it has to be part of me kind of thing. So I think that that’s the one thing, like just developing a relationship with the plan every week. And that’s the thing I say to them every time we come together, the purpose of weekly planning is to develop a relationship with our weak so that we can self compassionately protect ourselves, our future selves protect, you know, um, our, our needs and our wants kind of thing. So, so it’s this like, here’s our why, this is why we’re coming together, right? Here’s the, here’s the big why, the career wellness destination, here’s the little why, this is why we’re doing it this week. And um, and doing that with them every week, week after week after week after week really allowed me to integrate that into me and to, um, and to my own practice and develop my own relationship with, um, with time. Because before that it was like I would read what somebody said about time management and what somebody else said about time management, but until I like made it my own, I really couldn’t do it well. Um, so there’s always space for them to, to do it their way as well. It’s not just about me, but I do always want to remind us all of the why before we do the planning.

Emily (28:11): Yeah. So what I’m curious about in trying to draw an analogy with, we’ll say budget planning, right, is the analogous, analogous, um, area there, and it probably wouldn’t happen on a weekly basis. It might be more of like a monthly or quarterly kind of thing if we’re talking about money. But what I’m wondering about is when you and the people you work with are creating these plans, um, what’s the, I mean, you, you said, you know, we have to keep in mind our overall goal, career wellness goal, but then within that, are you emphasizing like accomplishing something this week or rather putting in time for something this week that will like move your career forward versus just keeping your head above water and getting the grading and, you know, all this stuff that doesn’t really move the needle? Like is that more like what you’re talking about, like making sure you make space for overall progress or is it more about, um, scheduling in time for, um, self-care or, or like, or all of that? Or like how do you think about maybe the different components of the week that should be present?

Danielle (29:16): Yes. The, the bigger picture is we’re trying to be more well in our careers. And so with that, we’re always scheduling in rest. You know, you spend three hours a week with each of your classes, well, there needs to be three hours of rest time for you, space that you get to do whatever you need to do to feel more connected to yourself. You know, body, mind, spirit. Um, so there’s that piece, but then there’s also the piece of like, let’s figure out what our priorities are. Um, this week I have all of these things on my list for work, but what’s actually priority and how can we, Martha Beck talks about, and I always use this, she talks about the three Bs, right? How can we, like, if you look at something and you don’t wanna do it and you have this weird relationship to it, like, oh, I really don’t wanna work on this thing this week. How can you one, bag it, how can you two, barter it? Like, and she says barter it is just sort of like give it to somebody else, right? Um, and three, how can you, um, better it? Like I’m gonna, I don’t wanna grade, but I’m gonna sit in this chair that I love and listen to music that I love while I grade. So, so, uh, and then I had, I had a client once say, and then we should do botch it, so do it imperfectly, right? And um, so, so we go through that like what is the list? What are your list of to-dos? Now let’s just get rid of ever-, let’s get rid of all the things we can get rid of. Let’s delay the things we can delay. Let’s, uh, let’s commit to doing things imperfectly, that kind of thing. And so now we’re gonna find our priorities for the week. Now we’re gonna find, um, like I said, our time that we’re gonna do rest. Now we’re gonna find time that we need to take care of our ourselves. Like, are you scheduling lunch every day? You should have a lunch every day. And that is not something faculty ever think about, right? Like, oh, I haven’t eaten for 12 hours. <laugh>. Like, that is common. That is very common. So those kinds of things. And just staying in relationship to the week and knowing that that weekly relationship is gonna contribute to the larger goal of career wellness.

Emily (31:33): I just love this advice on its own. I mean, if this were a time management podcast, we would just talk about it because I, I love that stuff. Um, but I’m still trying to draw these like analogies with money. Um, and I’m thinking about how when we’re planning a budget we have to plan for, and the typical term, which you actually mentioned earlier is like needs and wants and also saving. And I feel like the saving is more like the rest actually that you were just speaking about because it’s, um, it’s shoring up your ability to roll with punches in the future. It’s shoring up your own health, um, both in the long term and in the short term. And so that to me is like, it’s something that you can neglect on a weekly basis, monthly basis, maybe even for a year, maybe even for a few years. But it will come back with a vengeance if you never ever address it. Um, and it’s so much better to build it in cyclically like on a weekly basis like you’re talking about. So that to me is like a saving, kind of like saving, um, building in your own, again, ability to kind of continue to live your life with all the like, you know, the, the punches that you know, life is gonna throw your way. Um, and then also like thinking about the needs and the wants and the priorities. Um, like you were saying about okay, there’s maybe a list of tasks that need to happen. There may be a list of things that you want to spend money on in the course of a month, let’s say. And some of those are more important than others. Some of them can be delayed, some of them can be frugalized, <laugh>, some of them with a little bit of, you know, creativity. You might be able to use something for free or lower cost. Um, some things may just need to be deferred into the future. And so that’s kind of the analogy I would draw there of like, but with money, and probably with your time you have some big rocks that are just standard, right? Like you gotta pay your housing costs every single month. You have to spend a certain amount of money on food every single month. There’s gonna be some staples going on. But similarly in, in your time management, there are probably staples depending on what your job actually is and what your life consists of. There are some things you gotta do, um, every single day. Yeah. Do you have any comments on, on that?

Danielle (33:41): I love the way you just broke that down. Um, and, and drew an alignment to, uh, money. And I will say that money is something I’m still building a relationship with, and so I don’t think I can speak about it in the way I just spoke about time, right? And so, and I think that’s really important to say, like, it’s really important to be really honest about that. Like every day I sit down and I do something that helps me to feel inspired with money, right? Like have a little mantra or I tell myself this is why I’m doing this. And then I look at my, and then I look at my tracking and just like developing that relationship that isn’t a scared, shaky relationship, um, feels like the only thing I can do right now. And so having this sort of big eagle view of my money at the moment is really hard. But having that, that, and I eagle view versus mouse view, I’m again drawing from Martha Beck, mouse view is this like, you know, the the little daily thing I can do to stay in relationship and to develop a deeper relationship, that’s all I’m doing right now. And so talking about it, um, in big lofty terms with somebody who’s an expert on this feels pretty intimidating. ’cause it’s just not where I am yet. Um, and I, and I want people out there who really are hearing this and being like, oh my god, I can relate to that and I’m scared and I wanna get away from it. And, and hearing all the financial terms and all of, and hearing people who are really good at it talk about it all the time, that is scary. And it makes me wanna shut down. I want those people to hear me say that it takes time. And I know I just said it, but I wanna say it again.

Emily (35:37): Thank you so much for pointing that out because part of the purpose of this podcast is, um, and the listeners, hopefully regular listeners will know this, but you may not, is that I interview regular people. Like yeah, they may be regular people who are willing to talk about money, which is not everybody in the population, but I don’t interview other experts almost ever because I think it’s much more relatable, useful, actionable to hear from people who are more similar to the listener rather than more similar, like to me who’s like devoted my career to this, right? So like we already have one of me on the podcast. We don’t necessarily need two <laugh>, at least not every episode.

Danielle (36:08): Totally.

Using Automation and Routines to Support Wellness

Emily (36:09): So that’s kind of my like, uh, approach there. So I’m really, really glad that you said that. And I actually, I’m gonna think more about this mouse view versus eagle view <laugh>, uh, terminology that you just pointed out. And like, yeah, what can be done to draw the connections between the two? Like if you have an eagle view, how do you develop mouse? Uh, I don’t know, habits or actions? And if you only have mouse views and habits and actions, like how do you get up to the eagle view as well? Um, one thing I wanted to ask you about, again, in this analogy between like money and time management is I really love automation in the area of money, and I’m wondering how much automation comes into your view of time management. And by automation I could mean something as simple as like, well actually something you just said reminded me of, uh, Kendra Adachi of the Lazy Genius. Are you familiar with this brand?

Danielle (36:55): No.

Emily (36:56): Okay. So what you said earlier that reminded me of her is that, uh, she’s very intentional to schedule her lunch because she realized that she was not taking lunch like ever and that it was ineffective overall for her wellbeing and also for her work to not be taking lunch breaks anyway. One of her so-called lazy genius principles is decide once, and that’s a form of automation. It’s not necessarily carrying things out automatically, but it’s okay, I only had to think about this one time. This decision is gonna last for a while and I can just carry out that decision without revisiting it every single time it comes up. So that’s kind of a form of automation. Um, so yeah, I’m wondering what you think about that in, in the area of, of time management.

Danielle (37:35): Hmm. The thing that is really automation for me is when I sit down to do weekly planning, I have questions for inner wisdom. Because when you look at your week and you’re like, ah, I don’t know how this is gonna work and I still need to, to contact this person and figure this logistic out and blah, blah, blah, all these things are happening, right? And you don’t always know the answers to everything. You don’t always, um, know how to exactly plan. How am I going to find the capacity to get such and such done this week? Um, that might be an inner wisdom question or whatever it is, but if you just have those questions listed and then they’re not like taking up space in your brain and they’re not like, uh, and you’re not ruminating on it and you’re not getting, um, like scared about that. And then after you know what your questions are, you take space to go listen to what the answers are. So I’m gonna, now that I’ve done my weekly planning, I’m gonna gonna schedule some time this weekend to just go for a walk and really jus- like I look at my questions before I go for my walk, and then I’m really just gonna let the answers come to me as they need to, right? Um, and trusting that they will, and they will, they will, I mean sometimes they’ll say, don’t do this yet. Like pause and, you know, postpone this until next month or something. They might not have an answer in that way, but at least you have some kind of an answer.

Emily (39:02): The automation is the listing of the questions. And then scheduling reflection time again because you mentioned earlier like not, not wanting it to take over all of your brain space to ruminate on these questions. Like you’re just gonna give it a dedicated time where you’re like, I know from doing this process many times if I just have these questions working in my subconscious during this time, a few answers will arise

Danielle (39:25): 100%.

Emily (39:26): I’m actually also thinking about in terms of automations like routines. So have you developed, for example, a morning routine or a sitting down to work routine or an evening routine or anything like that? Or do you like those or do you recommend them?

Danielle (39:39): I do. I love the getting up in the morning and doing what I’ve been calling a trust practice, um, which is just kind of like, um, feeling into gratitude or feeling into a celebration of yourself or anything that’s gonna make you feel good. And I call ’em trust practices because they allow you to trust the moment they allow you to trust your journey. Um, and if you don’t do them, you often will feel distrust and like you can’t do the things you want to do in your life. Like you’re not gonna be able to make it happen. Um, so I would say one, some kind of a trust practice and usually for me, um, I am thinking about things I’m grateful for and I’m thinking about ways I’m really proud of myself and in the evening I’m always doing right before bed. I’m always just taking a second to really feel into my career wellness destination. Just like, this is what I really want and this is how it feels to have that. Um, and I do that just because, um, you know, those people who, who talk a lot like in the spiritual world, right? And manifestation world, they talk about that. And um, and how if you do that just before bed, you know, it sort of sets your psyche up for, for the next day to do things that are in alignment with that. I also love Cal Newport’s shutting it down thing at the end of the workday. Oh my gosh, I feel so much better when I do that, that kind of like, okay, I need to get this done, this done and this done first thing tomorrow. And then these are the things that I need to think through for the rest of the week. Like, and then now I’m gonna check the box because I have his like calendar. I’m gonna check the box that says shut down. I did the shutdown and I am done. And I’ve noticed that I don’t look at my phone as much. Um, when I do that, I just feel better and the whole day because I’m just intentional about how I spend my time.

Emily (41:41): I also have used Cal Newport’s, um, time block, time block planner, which has that shutdown, uh, checkbox in it. And I don’t always use it, but when, as you said, when I do, I certainly feel like a difference. And I’m actually trying to draw another analogy with money here. And this would again, probably happen on like a monthly or yearly basis instead of on a daily basis. But like knowing when you can call something good enough and done and that you don’t need to devote the additional hours that day. Analogously, I’ve done enough with my money this month. I’ve hit my minimum goals. It’s okay if I haven’t used every single last dollar optimally or whatever. Like, it’s okay to have some flexibility and to set your goals realistically, <laugh> like, I mean, Cal wouldn’t want you to schedule, you know, 12 hours of work into a six hour day. That’s not feasible at all. And so similarly, like you need to rightsize your money goals according to the means that you have at that time so that you’re not in this like dissatisfied feeling all the time. Like you have to get to a peaceful conclusion <laugh> at least some of the time with your time and your money. So yeah, that’s just another analogy I was thinking of there. I wonder if you could leave us with maybe one or two self-compassion strategies. You’ve actually already brought up a couple in the course of the interview, but maybe like one or two more that you haven’t brought up yet that we could use across different areas of life wellness or management, including money.

Self-Compassion Practices for Academics

Danielle (43:06): Yeah. So the first one I brought up was a self-compassion break. And this is, uh, from Kristin Neff and Chris Germer’s work in mindful self-compassion. And essentially it is when you know, notice you’re nervous, and it might be while you’re planning, it might be like while you’re planning your week, it might be while you are working through your budget, it might be something else. Um, maybe it’s, maybe it’s even your body, right? Like, I don’t want to exercise right now. And everything in me is like, eh, I don’t wanna exercise. And so a self-compassion break would be to just feel those feelings. Oh yeah, this is what it feels like in my body to feel terrible about this, whatever it is, the anxiety, the stress, the anger, whatever. And then you place your hands either over your chest or somewhere else, that is, that feels very supportive, right? You could like cup your face or um, you could hug yourself, whatever it is, but you’re finding a way. And I really like wrapping a blanket around myself, like really just feeling the warmth of the blanket and letting and, and doing it tightly so you can really feel it tightly. But that that sort of nervous system thing where you’re really giving your nervous system some soothing, um, and then you’re just gonna lean into your own hands or into the blanket and let all the feelings you’re feeling be there while it holds you or while your hands hold you. And then you just remind yourself, I am not alone in this. This is life and life is hard. And, um, everybody’s on their own journey and everybody deals with hardships kind of thing. Um, the other thing is you wanna soothe yourself with words. If you can find something that feels really good to you, so you know, this too shall pass, or I’m doing this for a reason, I’m doing this because I want to, you know, for me it would be to fulfill my dharma, whatever it is. Um, so just you’re, you’re holding yourself with your hands, you’re holding yourself with your words and you’re reminding yourself you’re not alone. Those are the big self-compassion, um, pieces to a self-compassion break. Um, so that’s one way.

Danielle (45:24): The other way is just pausing. I, I think pausing is huge. Like, I’m moving through my day and I’m starting to get stressed and this is happening and I’m triggered. I just went to a faculty meeting <laugh> and I’m triggered because faculty meetings are, I don’t know why they seem to be like triggering 80% of the time, but you walk out of there and, um, for many of us, we just keep, continue on with our day and um, instead pause, right? And I could do this too, especially when I, as I’m developing this relationship with money and I’m trying to heal my relationship with money,

Connecting with Dr. Danielle De La Mare

Emily (46:00): Thank you so much for explaining how to be more self-compassionate in these, you know, times when we might need a little bit of extra. And certainly I know there are people in the audience who are gonna be feeling this with respect to money and will appreciate those strategies, um, when it comes to opening up their bank account or meeting with their partner or whatever, whatever is, um, causing those that trigger to come up. So thank you so much for that. And if someone is listening and they realize that they’re kind of in the, the audience of people that you serve, um, can you tell us just a tiny bit more about how they can find you, how they can learn more about your work and what it looks like to work with you?

Danielle (46:35): Yeah, thank you. Uh, selfcompassionateprofessor.com. You can go there and you can come to one of our monthly coffee chats, um, where we just make space for career wellness. So we spend an hour every month, anybody who shows up and we talk about anything you wanna talk about, whether it’s like toxic workplace, feeling like you, you know, are burned out, whatever it is, you come, you chat. It’s, it’s free, it’s an hour every month. Sign up selfcompassionateprofessor.com, just click on Coffee chats. And then I also have Self-Compassionate Professor, the podcast, um, for people who, who are interested in, in that as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (47:14): Excellent. Thank you so much. And let’s end with the, uh, question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that can be something that we have touched on already in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

Danielle (47:29): It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have it all figured out. All you have to do is be in relationship to your money. That’s all you have to do.

Emily (47:42): Could not have phrased it better myself. Thank you so much, Danielle, it was absolutely a pleasure to speak with you.

Danielle (47:46): Yay, you too.

Outtro

Emily (47:58): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Financial Hacks Unique to Graduate Students

February 10, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Kyle Smith, a sixth-year graduate student at Penn State, about the financial strategies and hacks he’s used during grad school to increase his income and optimize how he spends and manages his money. In addition to side hustles and credit card and banking bonuses, they discuss how graduate students can benefit from using 529s and 457(b)s in a unique way. Kyle’s message is that finding ways to spend a few percentage points less on much or all of your expenses really adds up over time to confer financial security in the present and increase wealth in the long term.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Financial Hacks Unique to Graduate Students

Teaser

Kyle (00:00): By saving a few percent off your living expenses, having your emergency fund earn a few extra percent, saving a few percent on your taxes for money, that’s gonna grow a few percent every year until you retire. Um, these things, when combined, uh, really start to add up and let you, uh, get to a place where you have enough money, that you have more financial stability and more flexibility, uh, to do the things you want. Um, and really a lot of it comes from having enough of an emergency fund saved up that you can do these sorts of strategies.

Introduction

Emily (00:39): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:08): This is Season 20, Episode 3, and today my guest is Kyle Smith, a sixth-year graduate student at Penn State. Kyle and I go deep on the financial strategies and hacks he’s used during grad school to increase his income and optimize how he spends and manages his money. In addition to side hustles and credit card and banking bonuses, we discuss how graduate students can benefit from using 529s and 457(b)s in a unique way. Kyle’s message is that finding ways to spend a few percentage points less on much or all of your expenses really adds up over time to confer financial security in the present and increase wealth in the long term.

Emily (01:49): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor this workshop for you and your peers? You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Thank you so, so much for doing so! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e3/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Kyle Smith.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:24): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Kyle Smith. He’s a sixth year graduate student at Penn State, and we are going to talk about, well, I’m gonna reference the title of another podcast, I listen to All the Hacks. We’re gonna talk about several different, numerous different kind of financial hacks that Kyle has used throughout graduate school to increase his income, decrease some expenses, optimize finances in a few different ways, and Kyle’s been at it for several years, so he has a lot to share with us, some very unique strategies that we hardly ever touch on in the course of the podcast. So you’re definitely gonna hear some new stuff today. Um, Kyle, thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast. And will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

Kyle (04:03): Yeah, my name’s Kyle Smith. I’m a, uh, sixth year graduate student at Penn State. Like you said, uh, I got first introduced to your podcast right before I was starting, uh, graduate school, so I’ve been able to learn from some of your tips over the years. Um, my research, I’m in the anthropology department, uh, looking at dog human interaction. So for my research I’ve gotten to go to the dog park and watch people’s dogs and, uh, study how they think and interact with people, um, which has been a lot of fun.

Motivation Behind Pursuing Financial Hacks

Emily (04:31): Yeah, that does sound like fun. Um, okay. We are going to, as I said, talk about some different financial hacks that graduate students may be able to apply in their own lives. But before we get into your list that you sent me, um, I wanted to know why have you pursued all of these and kept going with, you know, some of them that worked out? Like why not just take your stipend and work with it as is and not put in the effort to find these extra, you know, extra workarounds? So tell us about that motivation.

Kyle (05:02): Yeah, I suppose really kind of my whole life, I’ve just been more of the saver sort of mentality. Um, you know, just whatever money I got, I would usually just save it up. Um, I think I tend to have less expenses that I wanna spend money on compared to a lot of people. Um, but then, so I’ve just tried to, you know, just kind of accumulate enough excess that I have the flexibility that when there is something then that I wanna spend the money on, um, that I have enough of a buffer to do. So. Um, so really been just kind of, uh, trying to optimize things to just accumulate a little bit more, uh, focusing a lot on retirement and especially saving for retirement in a way that gives them flexibility with what to do with that money, which we’ll get into it a little bit later. Um, and just realizing that, you know, any money that you’re saving up now and investing, uh, for the future will be worth a lot more later. Um, so, you know, if you’re fine to do a few things to save on some of your expenses, that that really adds up over time.

Emily (05:59): Absolutely. And I do wanna point out that, um, in the list that you sent me, there really isn’t too much about what I would call like true frugality. We’re actually not talking about decreasing expenses in terms of like giving up, uh, quality or downsizing or anything like that. We’re really gonna be talking about earning more or like financial type ways to spend less without getting less. Is that a fair way to characterize the list?

Kyle (06:24): Yeah, I would say so. With the things I’d mentioned. I mean, I definitely do, you know, try to, you know, spend less money on, you know, don’t eat out super often. Uh, split living expenses with people, um, never lived solo. So, you know, there’s strategies like that that have saved some money. Uh, but um, yeah, a lot of the things I just try to figure out ways where if I have a recurring expense I can save a few percent on it. Um, you know, if I have some money sitting there, I can get a few extra percent on it. Uh, and finding that those really add up over time.

Emily (06:57): Yeah, and I especially wanna point this out for like the listeners who <laugh> have, have felt like they’ve maxed out on spending less. Like I’m doing everything already that I can to spend less and I’m not interested in cutting any further. How can I earn more or optimize more to, you know, free up more money for my goals? Right. So that’s really what we’re talking about today. Okay. So let’s jump into your list. The first thing you told me is that you volunteer for research studies. Tell me about that and how much you’re earning from it.

Grad Student Financial Hack #1: Participating in Research Studies

Kyle (07:27): Yeah, there’s, it’s been a while since I’ve done any of those. Um, but you know, when you’re on campus in a university you can walk around the hallways and see there’s, you know, signs sometimes where they have looking for research participants. Um, you know, so a lot of times I’ll just pay attention to that and um, follow up with that if it seems like something that’s worth pursuing. Um, you know, plenty of studies are kind of short and you can make a quick 20 bucks or some are a little more involved, but you can make hundreds over time. Um, you know, so there was one in particular, uh, that I got quite a bit from because they were doing a longitudinal study of graduate students that started my first year of graduate school. Um, so there were kind of recurring surveys that they would have you do, they’d have you come in sometimes, uh, for some invis- in-person, uh, sampling, such as like cutting your hair to look at your cortisol and stuff like that. Um, you know, so I saved up few hundreds of dollars, uh, through studies like that. There was one I did where they were did an MRI scan of my brain that they also pay you a little bit higher for, uh, ’cause you’re in a cramped box. So yeah, just looking out for opportunities like that allow you to sometimes save just a little bit extra money here or there. Uh, and then if you have a strategy where you’re trying to save anything extra for retirement, uh, or for the long term instead of uh, you know, getting an extra $20 and immediately spending it, then that really adds up over time.

Emily (08:46): Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Either way, whatever you wanna do with it, it’s your extra $20 here or there. I mean, like you said, in any sort of large research university, there’s gonna be studies like that. I think one of the other bonuses is that sometimes they’re actually pretty interesting to participate in. Um, like you actually learn something about yourself or about the study or, or what have you. Have you found that to be the case?

Kyle (09:05): Oh, definitely. Um, you know, it’s been interesting just getting to see a different side to research from the research that I’m doing and the research that I read about. But actually being a participant in it, um, can be pretty interesting sometimes, especially when you see connections with like what you’re doing. Like I had look at the hair, cortisol, the dogs, and I was giving my hair for the hair cortisol. Um, there was actually a study I did when I was an undergrad. I volunteered and they as part of it, uh, took my DNA and I got my 23andme results back in addition to getting paid for doing it. So that was an interesting thing,

Emily (09:37): Definitely. Wow. Gotcha. Okay. Next item on your list was a side hustle, a true side hustle. Tell us more about that.

Grad Student Financial Hack #2: Editing as a Side Hustle

Kyle (09:46): Uh, yeah, this was kind of funny ’cause it was just came out of nowhere. I got an email in my inbox one day, um, saying that the person was a Chinese academic who was looking for American students to help edit manuscripts by Chinese academics. Uh, and asking if I was interested. And I immediately thought that it looked like some sort of scam phishing email. There was a strange address. Um, you know, people offering you money that you’ve never heard of before is usually something to be a little wary of. Um, but it seemed, you know, I thought about it and I was like, well, it might be legit. So I tried to look up the person and looked up his papers. Um, I found that, um, people in the acknowledgements had been thanked for helping translate, so I actually reached out to those people before him and was just is that guy legit, and they, they told me they’d work with them and had good experiences. Um, yeah, so that was just kind of an occasional thing. Sometimes I would do a few of these in a month, sometimes they didn’t offer me any for a while. Um, but yeah, just, uh, he seemed to have some connections to other researchers and try just to reach out to Americans, uh, to help just edit the English. I’ve done a handful of those over the past few years. They usually paid around 150 to $200 per manuscript depending on how long it was.

Emily (10:55): That’s an amazing pay rate. Yeah,

Kyle (10:57): No, it’s been, that’s been a good way to, it’s not a reliable enough thing that I can count on that as predictable income, but just occasionally they reach out and they’re like, Hey, can you do this paper?

Emily (11:07): I really like this type of side hustle that just opportunities come your way and depending on your schedule and your availability, you can just say yes or no and that’s great. It’s nice to not be committed to something when you go through busy or periods as a graduate student.

Kyle (11:21): Yeah. Whenever they’ve reached out about editing these, they’ve asked first if I’m available before sending it and you know, there were a couple times where I’m like, no, sorry, I’m too busy this week.

Grad Student Financial Hack #3: Credit Card/Banking Bonuses

Emily (11:31): Absolutely. Okay, next item on your list is kind of a bigger one. Um, credit card and banking bonuses. Tell us about your strategies here. Yeah,

Kyle (11:40): There, there’s a few websites out there that accumulate these sorts of things. Um, doctor of credit is one where they have bank bonuses and credit card bonuses that are, uh, being offered at that time. Sometimes you get some in the mail so you know it’s worth checking your junk mail about these. Uh, and a lot of times different banks will, or credit cards will offer you like a couple hundred dollars if you sign up for a bank account or open a credit card with them and spend x amount of money in the first certain amount of time. Uh, and in many cases these can be, uh, fairly profitable ways with not that much effort. Um, usually there’s some sort of requirements attached to it, so you have to pay attention to those and carefully note down, uh, what the requirements are and if you can meet those and that you’re not gonna be incurring more expenses than you’re getting back. But for instance, a lot of banks, they’ll say like $200 if you direct deposit at least a thousand dollars. So I just update my direct deposit for that month, you know, have my next paycheck go into there and then, you know, change it back after that. And there’s, if there’s not ongoing fees for maintaining it, um, then that’s sometimes just an easy way to get some money.

Emily (12:47): Okay. Yeah. Let’s pause a little bit on the banking bonuses. Um, so you just gave one example of like, oh, I just had to update my direct deposit to go to a different place. Um, sometimes you might have to keep that up for a few months. I think for some offers like this or other ones I’ve heard of, you have to keep like a certain balance in the account for a certain amount of time. So I’m wondering if you have done anything like that. Have you had to move like a chunk of money somewhere and kept it there to get a bonus?

Kyle (13:13): Yeah, there’s sometimes little requirements like that. Sometimes there’s a minimum bonus for a certain amount of time. Um, some of these, when you run the math, it doesn’t really make sense to do, but others, you know, I can keep a thousand there for three months and then get a few hundred dollars out of it. Uh, assuming you’ve got enough money saved up that you have some flexibility there. It’s a strategy that makes more sense. If you’ve got enough of an emergency fund that um, you have a few extra thousand dollars to spare, uh, some of them require a certain amount of transactions. Um, you know, there’s oftentimes easy ways around this. You can like set up your main account to just transfer $10 in and take it out automatically if you need to have a certain transaction each month, um, in order to not have a fee. Um, some of them are tied to like use your debit card, you know, 20 times in the first month and I just go to the gas station and buy a dollar of gas, buy a dollar gas, buy a dollar of gas just in a row. Um, so there’s ways to trigger it. And if you look on sites like Doctor of Credit, they usually detail, uh, what these are.

Emily (14:11): Hmm, that’s so interesting. I hadn’t heard about those little strategies just to fulfill that requirement like very quickly. That’s very helpful to not have to like think about it over a long period of time and remember, oh, I’m supposed to be using this card versus like this one to do this.

Kyle (14:24): Yeah. I think the way they get you with these things is they’re hoping that, um, it’ll be too much for you to do all that. So they either won’t have to pay the bonus because you trip up or that you just, um, you know, you’re not paying enough attention and then you start accumulating some monthly fee because you weren’t doing their one transaction a month or whatever.

Emily (14:43): So you just have to be really organized. Yeah,

Kyle (14:45): Yeah. You just have to be really organized, pay attention to what exactly the rules are and just make sure you’re following those to a T.

Emily (14:50): Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let’s take like a credit card example then, since we just talked about bank accounts now. When I was in graduate school, it was quite a while ago, so credit card offers were different than they are now. I know. I was always concerned about being able to reach those signup bonuses like spend 1, 2, 3, 6, whatever it is, thousand dollars over two to four months. These kinds of things are common. Um, and I also, I don’t think in graduate school I ever paid an annual fee for a credit card. I do now <laugh>, but that was something I was just sort of like the whole category. I was just like against it at the time. Right. So like, tell us about that. Like how do you balance knowing that you’re gonna be able to meet these signup bonuses? You know, do you have any tricks about, you know, spending or timing the spending or whatever? Um, and also, yeah, how, how do you weigh the pros and cons if you, if there are some costs associated with it?

Kyle (15:38): Yeah. Um, I just try to pay attention to what my actual level of spending is and what the requirements are. And if there’s something where I don’t think I can meet the requirements won’t do it. I don’t have as many credit cards as some people who really pursue the strategy. Um, but there’s some that are quite easy to meet, like, um, some of the ones from Chase tend to be some of the most sought after ones and you can only get a certain number of credit cards per often before your credit score starts to go down and you start getting rejected. Um, but you know, some of the chase ones you have to spend $500 in the first three months and you get $200 or something like that. And that’s easy enough for most people do if they put all their groceries on it for a few months. Um, there’s some that have had bigger amounts, so some of the chase ones are more lucrative where you can get a thousand dollars signup bonus or so the amount fluctuates. So you have to look at the time, but you have to spend $4,000 in three months. And I don’t spend that much in that amount of time, especially ’cause uh, you know, you’re not paying the rent on the credit card typically. Um, but there are strategies that you can do and I think you’d only wanna do this if you’re the kind of person who knows that you’re gonna specifically be doing the math to spend the right amount to make it worth it for you instead of just spending a bunch of money and thinking, oh, I’m saving money because I get it, uh, a bonus. So what I’ve done when I, you have to spend like the, you know, a larger amount of money, you know, getting a thousand back on 4,000 spending is still worth it if you can make it work. So what I’ve done is just put everything that I can on it during that time. And then when it gets closer to the deadline, um, there’s various grocery stores and pharmacies sell these $500, um, prepaid debit cards with about a $5 fee, um, which normally doesn’t make any financial sense, but if you’re getting essentially 25% back, then you can put the last couple thousand dollars of that on these prepaid cards and then just use those for your expenses for the next few months. Um, so you can kind of preload your spending of that amount and let it stretch over your expenses for for many more months. Um, I’ve also, you know, paired this for if I know I’m gonna be booking some flights for the holidays or some other expenses. So when the timing of when you get these cards can matter a bit too.

Emily (17:47): Yeah. So not only for either one of these strategies, you have to stay very organized. You also have to really know your budget. You have to know what your spending is going to be over the next, you know, three or six months or whatever so that you can understand, yes, I’m gonna have enough spending or I’m not quite going to have enough. So as you said at the end, I’m gonna be able to use this strategy. But prepaying, you know, by buying gift cards or whatever, um, debit cards that requires you to have that money up front. So another area where we talked about like getting that first, you know, thousand two, three, $4,000 in like an emergency fund or just a general savings fund is so, so helpful to actually help you generate even more side hustle money. Like you’re really putting your money to work for you. Now we’re all of course hoping that an emergency wouldn’t come your way in that time when you have some money tied up in a de- in a debit card or whatever. Um, but anyway, it gives you more flexibility. So it’s just something that like builds on itself. Um, so if you get that first thousand, like then maybe the next, you know, few hundred is easier to come by ’cause you can use some of these like tricks and hacks

Kyle (18:45): For sure.

Emily (18:46): Um, and you also were just telling me that you paired this strategy with paying estimated tax on your fellowship. Can you tell us what that strategy was, uh, when, when you were using it?

Kyle (18:57): Yeah, so if you’ve not been listening to this podcast as much and you’re not aware of the estimated taxes, uh, sometimes if you’re on a fellowship, um, they’re not withholding your income tax and you’re responsible for paying that several times a year. Uh, I was on a fellowship like this my first year of graduate school. Some people are on it, if they have the GRFP for three years, depends on your situation. Um, and they let you, um, pay these payments either straight from your bank account or you can pay it with a debit card for like a $2 or so fee I think it is. Um, so again, if you’re able to buy these prepaid debit cards in such a way that you’re earning a decent percent back and then you can use that to pay your prepaid taxes for a small fee, you know, you do the math and see if the, if it works out in your favor, but especially if you’re getting a big bonus or if you have a big percent back on that credit card, then uh, it can end up saving you quite a bit more money than you’re spending in a fee. Um, there’s some credit cards too have like different rotating benefits. Like I have one that has a category that changes, uh, four times a year and sometimes they are giving you a bunch of money back for PayPal and they also normally give you money back for a pharmacy and those stack on top of each other. So if I can get 7% back at a pharmacy by buying a pre-K card and then use that for my taxes that they immediately refund to me, uh, that saves you a decent bit of money. Uh, the last time I tried that, they didn’t let me buy the prepaid card with the credit card at the pharmacy, uh, or with PayPal anyway. Um, so you have to, you know, your mileage may vary as they say, and the, the kind of rules for these things are changing all the time. But if you look at, uh, sites related to, you know, people who are doing these sorts of strategies, you can kind of find out to some extent what works and doesn’t at that time.

Emily (20:42): Yeah, all the like buying of gift cards, buying of prepaid debit cards, those kind of, um, ways to get up to those minimum spends. It’s a common suggestion, but the routes to doing it oftentimes get shut down. <laugh>, it, it makes sense that these things don’t always work in perpetuity, but as you said, there are resources available where you can learn how to pivot.

Kyle (21:01): Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Emily (21:02): Yeah. Is there anything else you wanna add about the credit card or the banking bonuses?

Kyle (21:07): One thing with regards to the banking is, you know, another strategy is not just the signup bonuses, but banks that are gonna give you a certain amount of, uh, interest on what you have in that account. Uh, most banks tend to give you very low percentages these days, uh, but you can sometimes find some that give you a few percent back. I have most of my money, uh, in an account offered through Vanguard called Cash Plus, uh, that gives I think three or 4%, uh, per year of what you have in there as interest. It’s kind of a clunky account. It seems like it’s not as made to interface very well with other banks. So there’s been some frustrations with using that. But if you have thousands of dollars saved up as an emergency fund and you can get 4% of that back every year, you might as well park that money in a, in an account where it’s gonna be, uh, giving you a decent percentage back. And that just goes back to the whole theme of trying to optimize, uh, your finances by a few percent here or there, especially in the long term.

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Emily (22:07): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Grad Student Financial Hack #4: 529 Contributions

Emily (22:58): Okay, now we’re gonna get into the strategies that I’m really excited about. So the first one is a 529 strategy. So Kyle, tell us, what is a 529 <laugh>? Why would a graduate student be using one? You know, how are you using it in a way that’s very different from how it’s like advertised?

Kyle (23:14): So a 529 plan is something that was created to help incentivize parents to save money for their kids’ college. Uh, if you’re familiar with retirement accounts, it’s kind of similar to that where you’re getting some tax benefits to be investing money for a long-term goal. Uh, but in this case it’s higher education. Um, the, like I said, the intention seems to be more about saving for your kids’ college, but they have some flexibility about this. It doesn’t have to be your child, it can be your grandkid or your spouse or even for yourself. Uh, and while the intention is that you’re, uh, going to for expenses farther down the road, usually, uh, the minimum amount of time it has to be in there, it seems to be about a week. And it’s not just college that this works for, they let you, you use these funds for K through 12 education that has tuition and also for graduate school. So a lot of states have tax deductions for people who contribute to these plans because they’re trying to incentivize people to invest in higher education. Um, the idea is if you’re a parent, you contribute, you know, a few thousand dollars each year, uh, invest it, and then when you’re taking time that money out for your kids’ education, uh, you don’t owe taxes on that after all the growth and you’ve been saving some money on your state taxes along the way. What I’ve been doing is a tip I learned from, uh, your site years ago where you create an account where you’re both the account owner and the beneficiary, you contribute money to it, withdraw it a week later after the hold lifts, and then you can, if you’re using those money for qualified educational expenses, you’re allowed to deduct that from your state taxes. So the qualified educational expenses, you know, you need to look up and make sure it works, but basically it’s room and board for a graduate student, it’s tuition’s allowed too. But since most graduate students aren’t paying tuition, that’s not as helpful. Uh, I believe you can also do a certain amount of, uh, student loan payments as well. So, you know, I’ll just every few months, uh, contribute some of my money into this account, withdraw it a week later, uh, and then just keep track of how much I’m spending on food and rent and then just kind of do this so that the amount that I’ve contributed and withdrawn, uh, is, you know, as close as I can get it to the amount that I’m spending on room and board without going over it. Uh, and then when it comes time to pay my taxes in Pennsylvania, I can deduct in theory up to $19,000, uh, of contributions from my taxes, assuming that that doesn’t, you know, go that I’m not using these for things that are other than the qualified educational expenses. And since the Pennsylvania income tax is 3.07%, uh, you know, that adds up over time. I think in total I’ve saved about $2,000 on my estate taxes over the years by doing this.

Emily (26:07): Wow. Okay. I can see now why you’re being careful to keep track of how much you’ve actually spent in qualified education expenses. So I didn’t know about Pennsylvania specifically, but some other states I’ve looked at, the benefit might be limited to like $5,000 or like a few hundred dollars even. So with having such a high limit then yeah, it really makes sense that you are trying to, as you said, get as close as you can to matching your actual qualified education expenses so you can try to deduct as much as possible for that year. Um, that may not be as much of a challenge in other states is what I’m saying. ’cause maybe your rent alone for a few months would already max out like that benefit. Uh, we’re using the term qualified education expenses, which very, very astute listeners will know that when we talk about qualified education expenses, we always have to say what the benefit is that is defining that particular instance of qualified education expense. So qualified education expenses from a five for 529 accounts, as you mentioned, include things like living expenses, uh, you know, room and board. Um, it’s defined, but qualified education expenses for other benefits are like only tuition and required fees and so forth. So just be sure that you’re looking at the right definition, the right list when you’re trying to figure out what your qualified education expenses are for 529s. Um, so anyway, your particular benefit in Pennsylvania sounds incredible because that limit is so high. Other states the limits will be different. Sometimes it’s a credit, not a deduction. Um, some states don’t have any benefit and we are talking about a state level benefit, not a federal benefit. So the state that I, that I live in, California doesn’t offer any tax incentives for contributions to 529s. So, you know, you may be stuck with a state that doesn’t participate in this in any way, and then this isn’t gonna work for you. But if you live in a state with income tax <laugh>, then you should certainly look up whether there is any 529 contribution benefit. And I’m just, you know, struck by the fact this is another example where because you have freed up, you know, a thousand, 2000 whatever amount of money that you’re able to move around and do these different things that like these 529 contributions, you’re able to then spend less so, so much more money, like how that little bit of financial flexibility is buying you even more and more and more financial flexibility. So for those listening, I would just say if you haven’t saved that first 1, 2, 3, $4,000, like work on that hard because then you can, these other ideas are then open to you after that point. That’s so awesome. Now I have been wondering about that residence time of like the money being in the account, um, because you know, in your case, like you don’t wanna contribute $19,000 and let it sit there for the whole year, right? You wanna do small bits like frequently throughout the year. Um, so how did you come to find out what the minimum time it had to spend in, in the account to, to, you know, qualify for this deduction?

Kyle (28:49): I don’t remember how I first found out if it was somewhere in the, you know, the documentation about opening it or if I’d seen other people mentioning it. Um, the one thing to note, like you said, the state laws vary quite a bit, so you just have to look up how it applies to you if it does. But the, um, some states require it to be a specific plan from their state and others let you do any 529 plan. Pennsylvania doesn’t care what state it is. So I just did it through I think the Kansas plan because I already had a Schwab bank account and Schwab runs the, uh, Kansas plan, but you know, there’s others through Vanguard or whatever the case may be. So you need to make sure about that. But at least the one that I’ve done through Schwab, the, it just needs to be there for one week minimum. And like you said, I’m not gonna put my entire living expenses for the year all in at the same time. Um, but every month or two, um, if you just have enough money saved up for, you know, the next month’s living expenses, you can put it in, in the middle of the month, take it out, and by the time you’re paying your bills at the start of the next month, um, it’s still back there. Um, so you wanna have, you know, some extra money saved up, but it doesn’t need to be a ton.

Emily (30:03): Yes. Wow. What a powerful strategy. And so you’ve been, have you been doing this the whole time you’ve been in graduate school?

Kyle (30:08): Yeah, I, I first heard of it I think either in the beginning of graduate school or slightly before. Um, so I’ve just been doing that the whole time. Uh, it saved me quite a bit of money on my state taxes.

Emily (30:18): Yeah, you said about $2,000, that’s something like 400 per year approximately, right?

Kyle (30:23): Yeah, something like that. I, uh, I got married last year. Um, my, my spouse is also, she was a graduate student. Um, so once I was married I started contributing for her expenses as well, which saved us a little bit extra. Um, but yeah, if you’re doing this, uh, in graduate school in Pennsylvania, you know, saving 3% on all your rent and food expenses each year really adds up.

Emily (30:47): Yeah, it definitely does. Oh my gosh, I’m so grateful for this example. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Kyle (30:52): One important thing to note with the 529 plans, uh, is because they’re not really set up for people to be using it in the way that I’ve been using it is you gotta pay attention to certain details. Like in my account I’m listed as both the account owner and the beneficiary. Uh, so you have to make sure that you are contributing as the account owner and removing money as the beneficiary, uh, because it gives you the option to also remove it as the account owner, uh, I guess for people who contribute it and then decide that they didn’t wanna contribute it. Um, but if you’re removing it as the account owner, uh, then they’ll say that you’re not actually contributing it. Uh, so then you won’t get that tax benefit. So you just need to pay attention to that detail.

Grad Student Financial Hack #5: 457(B) Retirement Accounts

Emily (31:31): Yes. Another example of where being organized and detail oriented is very necessary for making this strategy work. Okay, awesome. And then the last strategy you mentioned to me was about using a 457 retirement account, which is not one that gets a lot of airtime. So tell us what’s different about this account? Why do you choose to use this, um, either uh, first or in, you know, to supplement your other tax advantage retirement accounts?

Kyle (31:58): Yeah, so I was working for a few years before I started graduate school. So I already had a Roth IRA and an account from my employer. Um, they thought I was contributing money and saving up that way. Um, and then when I started graduate school, I was still contributing to the Roth IRA at first. Um, but then I saw, I just think I got some letter in the mail just mentioning employee benefits that I had access to and one of them was a supplemental retirement account and I was like, what is that? Um, so I looked it up and something that a lot of graduate students encounter is that they’re not eligible for most employer sponsored retirement accounts, so they can’t sign up for, you know, a 401k and get their employer matching their contributions or anything like that. Um, but uh, I found in my case this probably holds at some other universities as well that there’s something called a supplemental retirement account where they’re like, we’re not gonna contribute any money to this as your employer, but you’re allowed to put money into it. Um, at first this wouldn’t seem like it has that much of an advantage compared to just your own IRA because you’re managing that yourself. Why would you worry about involving your employer? But I noticed when I was reading the benefits that the 457B seems to have some really specific advantages that are actually quite nice and that I don’t think you can really get, uh, through any other account that I’m aware of. Um, so if you’re not as familiar with, uh, retirement accounts, uh, they, whether they’re an individual retirement account, an IRA or an employer sponsored plan, uh, there’s usually two types, either Roth or traditional. So Roth, you’re paying your taxes on your income now, um, and then contributing it to the account where it can grow, uh, without getting taxed on your dividends or anything when you’re investing it. Uh, and then when you withdraw it when you retire, uh, you don’t owe any tax on it. Traditional is the other way around where you’re saving on your taxes for what you contribute. You don’t have to pay income tax on it, it grows without getting taxed on the dividends. And then when you withdraw it in retirement, you, uh, owe tax on it at that time. Um, so there, there’s two different strategies depending on whether you wanna pay your taxes now or pay your taxes at retirement. And a lot of people seem to recommend the Roth accounts in situations where it actually doesn’t really seem to make sense. Um, the typical advice that you hear is, oh, if you’re, you know, a graduate student or somebody else with a relatively low income, you’ll probably be, uh, earning more money in retirement or when you’re older, so you might as well do the Roth now, uh, and save on your taxes ’cause you’ll owe more tax on it later. Um, there’s really no way of knowing exactly what your taxes will be in retirement because you don’t know how policy will change and how your lifestyle will change. Um, but let’s say for instance, you’re in the 12% tax bracket now and you’re in the same one when you retire. Um, if you contribute to a Roth account, you’re saving the 12% or you’re paying the 12% now and then you withdraw that tax free later. Um, but if you’re contributing to a traditional account, you’re paying, you’re saving the 12% now and then you pay o tax when you retire. But if you’re in the same tax bracket, the first chunk that you pull out goes to your standard deduction and you don’t owe tax on it, the next chunk you pull out is in the 10% bracket. And not only after that, uh, do you owe the 12% tax on it. So your average tax rate will actually be probably lower than your marginal tax rate. So it’s a little more advantageous in many circumstances to do traditional. Uh, one of the disadvantages with traditional, as opposed to Roth, is that money is tied up until you’re 59 and a half and you’re not allowed to remove it early without owing both the income tax on it and also a 10% penalty. Uh, with Roth, one of the nice advantages is you can take that money out, um, that you’ve contributed early without owing any penalties on it. Uh, that’s only a contribution. It’s not what it’s grown from being invested. But the unique thing that I found out about the 457B plan is it kind of is the best of both worlds. You get the tax benefit now, um, which like as I just laid out, is probably in most cases gonna be saving you money on your taxes overall. Um, but uniquely with it you can actually withdraw the money you contribute before retirement age as long as you’ve separated from that employer. Uh, and as a graduate student, I’m not planning on being employed by Penn State for the rest of my life just until I finished my PhD and then after that point I’ll have access to that money should I want it. Um, and I think that this is a really nice advantage because it’s nice to have the flexibility. You know, if years down the line I have a loved one who gets sick and I want to quit my job and you know, for a year or two live off of what I have saved up, I would be able to do that and I would just owe my income tax and not any extra fee. If I get to age 50 and decide I wanna retire, then instead of waiting until 59 and a half, if I have enough money, I could just go ahead and do that and use this account. So it gives you a lot more flexibility about how you wanna use it. Um, yeah, the, this does get withheld from your paycheck, so you have to a month in advance go in and say how much you want withheld. Uh, I’ve kind of adopted a flexible approach about this where I just look at my, uh, expenses and budget and how much money I have and I’ll be like, I have more money saved up than I need, so I’ll make my contributions a little bit higher. Or, oh, I had an unexpected expense this month with car repairs or something, I’ll make it lower. Um, but I’ve been trying to save up through that and uh, I think on average contributed in the like eight to 9,000 per year, uh, into this account, which is actually more than the space from an IRA.

Emily (37:25): Thank you so much for that thorough explanation. Um, I totally agree. So, because I think most, most Americans, if they have any kind of workplace based retirement plan, it’s gonna be a 401k or maybe if they’re a federal employee or something, TSP, but a lot of people who are employed by nonprofits, um, and also government agencies at whatever level, um, might have access to a 403 B and maybe also a 457 as you do, but, but because it’s such a small like kind of percentage of the population, this account doesn’t get a lot of airtime, you know, when retirement accounts are discussed. So you’re exactly right that like this benefit of being able to remove the money early without penalty is pretty unique. Um, that is to say without having a special circumstance, like you can remove sometimes for education or like stuff like buying a home, stuff like that, but, but without any reason, right? You just, you just have access to it whenever you want it. You don’t have to justify it. It is a really unique thing and especially attractive for people who are going for early retirement or as you said, might just wanna access a chunk of money for whatever reason, for special life circumstances or, um, what have you. So it is really unique. It sounds to me like you are using this as your primary tax advantaged retirement account, right? Like you’re, you’re not using a Roth IRA or anything similar in addition.

Kyle (38:39): Yeah. Ever since I found out about this account, I’ve only contributed to that for retirement. Uh, I still have the Roth IRA from before that’s been accumulating money in the meantime. Um, but because of the advantages of this and that I’ll only have access to it for the time that I’m a graduate student, uh, I’ve just been prioritizing anything that I’m saving for retirement into this account.

Emily (38:59): Absolutely. And I do wanna point people to season 17, episode nine, my interview with Dr. Corwin Olson. So he and I had a, a long discussion in that, um, episode about what you were just mentioning, how sometimes contributing to a traditional retirement account, even when you’re in graduate school or a fairly low tax bracket, uh, makes sense, makes sense in certain situations. It’s still not something that I’m gonna say is my number one <laugh> best thing to do. I still firmly believe in the Roth IRA for most people who are going to expect that higher income marginal income tax bracket in retirement. But certainly like we talked about with Corwin, like people who are planning on retiring early have to do a lot different kinds of considerations about filling up like the standard deduction aspect of their, um, income and the 10% bracket and the 12% bracket and so forth. So it’s kind of a different calculation. Um, but I appreciate you bringing that to light again and yeah, why this could be certainly a legitimate choice even for a graduate student.

Kyle (39:56): Yeah, and as far as I understand too, the fact that I have a Roth IRA, um, from before actually pairs well with this because, you know, I could withdraw from the 457B up to the standard deduction or up to the 10% tax bracket, and then if I’m still spending money beyond that withdraw from the Roth IRA without owing any extra taxes.

Emily (40:15): Absolutely correct. Yeah, I, that’s one of the reasons why I say that it’s great to have both traditional and Roth money available to you when you get to retirement so that you can do that kind of tax optimization. And we’re even talking about pre-standard retirement age in the case of the 457 that you, you would’ve access to it, as you said, as long as you’ve separated from your employer. So that’s a really exciting account to use. Um, as you kind of mentioned early on, you do have to be an employee of your institution to have access to this. So like you mentioned your first year you were on fellowship, I’m suspecting this letter came after you transitioned over to an employee type position. So for those listeners, um, for those listening, if you are an employee, then certainly this is something to check into. I would hazard a guess that, um, large public universities part of state systems like the one that you’re at are more likely to offer this kind of benefit than private universities, or it might depend on your state as well, like maybe some state systems do, some don’t, but I have heard of this for, you know, certain employees at um, large public institutions.

Kyle (41:19): Yeah. My understanding is that, uh, it’s more of a benefit of public universities, so you wouldn’t find it everywhere and some universities might just not offer it, but worth looking into if you’re employed by a public university.

Emily (41:32): Absolutely. Before I ask you my final standard question, I was just wondering, with all these strategies you’ve been using over the past five, six years, what’s been the effect? Like, have you, you’ve mentioned numbers here and there, but like have you significantly increased your income or your net worth or reduce your stress or like, what, what has been the effect of actually employing these strategies? And I guess also the cost, like how much time do you spend on these kinds of activities

Kyle (42:01): Overall, the result of these has been, you know, thousands of dollars that I’ve saved up. And because any extra money that I’m saving up, I’m putting into retirement accounts that’ll continue to compound. So, you know, a thousand dollars saved now will be even more thousands of dollars at retirement age. Um, so it’s really kind of had a snowballing effect, uh, where just a little bit saved results in making it easier to save more money, uh, which will result in more money with investments further down the road. Um, so I found it to be definitely worth pursuing. Uh, my net worth has definitely increased quite a bit in graduate school, although part of that was having a Roth IRA from even before I’d started graduate school. Um, and like you said about, uh, benefits to stress and wellbeing, I think that’s a very strong part of it as well. Uh, by having enough of an emergency fund, uh, saved up that you can do these sorts of strategies and have money to contribute for, uh, 529s or bank bonuses or whatnot, um, and having enough extra money like that beyond your monthly living expenses is really a source of stress relief. Uh, it’s nice to know that uh, if something unexpected comes up, I’m not gonna be unable to pay my bills that month. You know, and there’s circumstances where, you know, for instance, one point in graduate school, both my parents injured themselves within a few days of each other and I flew out, uh, to help take care of them. And you know, having enough money that you can just book a last minute, uh, flight without having to, you know, be unable to pay your bills, uh, is really a source of stress relief

Emily (43:40): About the cost question. Like how much time would you say you spend doing the stuff? Like per week or per month?

Kyle (43:45): Really not that much, I would say. Um, a lot of these things, especially over time have gotten better at optimizing. Um, you know, in terms of like contributing to a 529 plan and stuff like that. Um, you know, once you’ve got it set up, it just takes a few minutes to say, you know, transfer a thousand dollars into this account and then just put a reminder on your calendar to do taking it out next week. Um, so some of these are pretty low effort. I would say that the bank bonuses and credit card bonuses take a lot more time and that’s something that I’ve not been doing as much lately, especially as I’m trying to finish up my dissertation. Um, but it’s something that, you know, was a nice extra source of cash here and there, there, and you can kind of devote time flexibly to it depending on if you’ve got extra time to look up if there’s any good signup bonuses right now. Um, but then since you’re not depending on that income, if you’re don’t have the time or don’t wanna deal with it, then you don’t have to.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (44:47): Yes. Oh, such a wonderful position to be in. Thank you so much for sharing all of the things that you’ve learned and tried out and, you know, found what works and what didn’t for you, um, over the course of your time in graduate school. This is really amazing. I really hope the listener is gonna take away at least one thing to experiment with <laugh>. Um, so let’s wrap up with, um, my final question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it could be something completely new.

Kyle (45:14): Yeah, if I had to sum up everything that we’ve touched on in this interview, it’s that things that are small amounts of money here and there and just a few percent of recurring things, uh, really add up over time. Um, that by saving a few percent off your living expenses, having your emergency fund earn a few extra percent, uh, per year, um, saving a few percent on your taxes for money, that’s gonna grow a few percent every year until you retire. Um, these things when combined, uh, really start to add up and let you, uh, get to a place where you have enough money that you have more financial stability and more flexibility, uh, to do the things you want. Um, and really a lot of it comes from having enough of an emergency fund saved up that you can do these sorts of strategies. Um, so especially anything that you can do to save up extra chunks of change if you don’t have an emergency fund. And then once you get to the point where you, you know, got four or five months of your living expenses you’ve saved up in the bank, you can start to play around with some of these other strategies to let that money snowball.

Emily (46:18): Wonderful. I love it. Thank you so much, Kyle, for volunteering to come on the podcast.

Kyle (46:23): Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

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Emily (46:34): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

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Part 1: My Take-Aways from the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference

Part 2: Financial Steps You Should Take Right Now

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Financial Advice for Each Stage of Your Academic Career

Part 3: What I’m Offering You for Free

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

The Impacts of Low Pay and Poor Healthcare in Grad School

Using Data to Negotiate a Long Overdue Pay Increase

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The Unionization Movement at University of Alaska

Factors that Accelerated the Unionization Process

Post-Unionization Stipend Amounts

Power Dynamics During the Unionization Process

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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What Is An Entrepreneurial Scholar?

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Education

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Leveraging Available Resources as an Academic

The Origin Story of The Entrepreneurial Scholar Book

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Establish or Increase Your Emergency Fund

Pay Off Your Credit Card Debt

Research and Prepare to Take Out (Less Toxic) Debt

Diversify Your Income Sources

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Navigating Money, Career, and Relationships

Healing and Building a Relationship with Money

Dharma and Connecting to your Purpose

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Connections Between Time and Money: Prioritizing Wellness in Both Areas

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Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Motivation Behind Pursuing Financial Hacks

Grad Student Financial Hack #1: Participating in Research Studies

Grad Student Financial Hack #2: Editing as a Side Hustle

Grad Student Financial Hack #3: Credit Card/Banking Bonuses

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Grad Student Financial Hack #4: 529 Contributions

Grad Student Financial Hack #5: 457(B) Retirement Accounts

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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