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How This Entering PhD Student Has Set Himself Up for Financial Success in Graduate School

August 10, 2020 by Emily

In this episode, Emily interviews George Walters-Marrah, a rising first-year PhD student in biophysics at Stanford. In the last year, as George has been applying to and preparing to attend graduate school, he’s been on a financial journey as well. We walk chronologically through the financial steps he’s taken this year, from applying for fellowships last fall to taking a personal finance course this past spring to drafting a budget this summer for how he plans to use his stipend in Palo Alto. Additionally, Emily and George have an insightful conversation on what George learned about investing in his personal finance course and how he’s already implementing some of the strategies.

Teaser

00:00 George: I’ve been investing for a while now. And it’s like, it’s not really time-consuming at all. I kind of like check it at least once a day just because I like looking at it. But other than that, it’s not like I’m constantly fidgeting with my stuff. And I think the more you fidget with it, the more fees you get. So, it’s like, it’s kind of like passive investing. It’s kind of like a win-win.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 15, and today my guest is George Walters-Marrah, a rising first-year PhD student in biophysics at Stanford. In the last year, as George has been applying to and preparing to attend graduate school, he’s been on a financial journey as well. We walk chronologically through the financial steps he’s taken this year, from applying for fellowships last fall to taking a personal finance course this past spring to drafting a budget this summer for how he plans to use his stipend in Palo Alto. Additionally, we have an insightful conversation on what George learned about investing in his personal finance course and how he’s already implementing some of the strategies. This is a perfect episode to listen to if you are near the start of your financial journey, whether that’s at the beginning of graduate school or further on in your career. Without further ado, here’s my interview with George Walters-Marrah.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:26 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today George Walters-Marrah. He is a rising PhD student. We are recording this interview in July, 2020, and within the next month or two, he’s going to be starting his PhD program at Stanford. And he’s already been on a financial journey. So, we’re going to talk through about the last year, how he’s been preparing financial aid to go into his PhD program, as well as he’s done an awesome amount of career preparation to get to that stage as well. So, George, it’s a real pleasure to have you on the podcast. Would you please introduce yourself to the listeners?

01:58 George: Thank you for having me. So, I just graduated with my bachelor’s in molecular microbiology, and I have a research interest in interdisciplinary sciences. But I’ve also been kind of really obsessed with personal finance over the last year. So, I’m glad to be able to talk about it. Because whenever I get the chance, I kind of get excited because I’ve been so involved and kind of like consumed with it for a while. So, thanks for having me.

Financial Preparation Before Grad School

02:28 Emily: Well, it’s really exciting for me as well. And the way we actually met was over Twitter, and you prepared this fabulous document of personal finance resources and included a lot of mine in there, which I’m really grateful for and you shared it. And I happened to see it and was just so flattered that you did that, and it was a fantastic document. So, I’m really excited that you have been sharing this material with your peers. We’ll get into that, why you’re doing that during the course of the interview. So, let’s take it back to almost a year ago. How were you starting to prepare financially for graduate school even, you know, well, well, before you finished your undergrad degree?

03:05 George: Yeah. So, about a year ago I was like kind of oblivious to personal finance. But what I did know was that there were things called fellowships and scholarships and stuff that I could apply to. So, like about a year ago during the summer, I was looking into scholarships and fellowships and I applied, I was starting to apply to the NSF GRFP, the Ford Fellowship, and other things like that. So, I started that pretty early and I would suggest to start that over the summer, if you can. If not, start it at the beginning of the fall, because I was able to get a couple of fellowships and I think a really big reason I was able to do that was because I started so early, kind of like reaching out to my letter writers and starting my personal statement and kind of like collecting the different, like papers that I would need to write my research proposal.

Balancing Coursework with Grad School Applications

03:54 Emily: Yeah. We’ll link in the show notes because I’ve done a couple other interviews with fellowship winners and that was a common thread of advice: start early. So, even right now, you know, July for the people who are going to be applying in the upcoming, you know, starting about six months from now, they need to really be working on this, you know, the preparation process getting started now. How did you–so I applied for graduate school and all of these fellowships after I finished my undergrad, I had a post-bac year–how did you manage sort of balancing your coursework, your thesis work, I assume, with doing these, you know, intensive applications?

04:30 George: So, full disclosure, I was a fifth year student, so I graduated in five years. So, I had most of my class requirements done. So, I had the luxury of kind of decreasing the amount of classes I had. So, I still had 12 credit hours, but I was able to kind of like pick and choose classes that weren’t like super intensive. So, I kind of did that. And I also had the luxury of having a class that could be like a placeholder and I could use that time to do my personal statement and prepare to apply to graduate school and fellowships. But I would say that, try to decrease the amount of classes that are super intensive. Try to kind of pick classes that, you don’t have a lot of, like, time-consuming, like it doesn’t consume a lot of the your time, and kind of learn how to say no to things.

05:25 George: If you can kind of just say no to a few things so you can use that time to kind of work towards your fellowship applications, work towards your grad school applications. I think that would kind of like, it builds up, like when you keep saying yes. So, if you kind of learn how to say no to things that may not be helpful to you in the future, or may not be worth the time, I think that would kind of really be helpful with allowing you to find that time to kind of complete all that you need to do that last semester.

Which Fellowships Did You Win?

05:54 Emily: Yeah. I think it’s a great idea that you actually had space in your core schedule for doing these applications, because that’s really how you need to treat it. You need to treat it as at least one class, if not multiple classes. That’s the amount of time it’ll take. So, you were successful in winning some of these fellowships. Which ones did you win?

06:12 George: So, I was able to get like three fellowships. It was kind of like three different types of fellowships. So, I had got an external fellowship and two internal fellowships. So, I got the NSF GRFP, which was external, it kind of followed me wherever I went. And then I got an internal Stanford fellowship, which is, they kind of reviewed my application and you kind of get considered for this just by applying. And they gave me that fellowship based on my application. And then my last fellowship is one I got actually pretty recently. And it was a fellowship that I got by applying to a program, a first year program, after I got accepted and after I decided to come. So, it was kind of like the first one, I applied to it way before I applied to grad school, and then I got the external one. The second one, like they considered me just by applying, and I got that one. And the third one, I applied to it after I actually got into the program. And it was like a separate first-year program at Stanford. So, like, there are kind of several different ways that you can try and get these fellowships, which I think is like really nice.

07:16 Emily: Yeah. So, the fellowship applications did not stop, you know, just after the fall of your application season. That’s awesome that you won so many different ones. I have a post that I’ll link to in the show notes where I list a bunch of these portable external fellowships, like the NSF GRFP. So, I’ll put them in the show notes if people want to kind of peruse through. A lot of people know about the NSF fellowship, but there are some other ones that are a little bit less known. You mentioned Ford earlier. That’s another great one. So anyway, there’ll be a list there, several ones you can probably apply to, you know, in the year that you’re applying to graduate school and then in a few years after that, but you’re taking care of for a few years. So, that’s amazing.

Lessons Learned from Undergrad Personal Finance Course

07:53 Emily: Okay, so now we’re going to fast forward, you know, that was kind of the fall of your last year of undergrad. And then I believe in the spring semester you took a personal finance course. So, tell me a little bit about that course. Like why did you elect to take it, and maybe like two to three big takeaways from the course that you think would be really instructive for other PhDs to know?

08:14 George: Yeah. So, my school like offers this course called Personal Finance and Investments. I actually learned about it the fall that I was applying to graduate school. And I always wanted to take a personal finance class because I didn’t really know anything about personal finance. I didn’t know how to invest. I didn’t know how to make a budget. I didn’t know any of that stuff. And in my first few semesters, I thought of like, “Oh, maybe it’s microeconomics or macroeconomics or something like that,” but I read the summary and it didn’t make sense. So, I finally found this class and that’s like, “Oh, this is the class.” So, I took it and it was a great class. Like, it was a kind of a learning curve. You had to kind of learn the language of personal finance. Like what’s a dividend and all these different stuff.

Lesson 1: You Don’t Have to be an Expert to Invest

08:55 George: But after I got the hang of it, it kind of went very smoothly and I got like way more invested in it. And if I was to say to like three things that I thought that I learned from that class that were very helpful to me, the first big one is that to invest, you don’t really need to like follow the stock market and be like an expert and kind of like, look at it every single second of every day. There are like a lot of different kinds of innovative ways that allow kind of like people who are super busy or people that are kind of inexperienced to actually have a good experience investing.

09:29 Emily: If I can summarize that first point or what you were starting to say, it’s that, I mean, I love the way you phrased it. Like investing does not have to be something that you are paying attention to all day long every day in and out. I think that is an image that we have in our culture of what investing is, maybe from like, I don’t know, the eighties or the nineties or something, like it’s kind of archaic at this point. Because index funds, which I think was what you were starting to talk about there. They’ve been around for, I don’t know, four or five decades at this point, but only have really been gaining in popularity in the last couple of decades. But index funds, like you were saying, just are a diversification. Like you get a lot of different investments, stock investments often in one bucket and it’s representative of kind of the whole market or an entire sector of the market. And so you can buy, you essentially buy everything when you buy an index fund and it’s in a given market sector. That means you’re buying the winners. It means you’re buying the losers. But it turns out that that’s a more effective strategy than trying to pick the winners and avoid the losers. Is that what you were learning through your course?

10:31 George: Yeah, so, it was big because like, I think like a lot of people think they have to beat the market, but if you match the market, you kind of avoid that pitfall of like losing to the market. Because it either could go really bad or really good, or you could just match it. And then the market kind of like trends up. So, I decided to go that way, kind of like passive investing. So, that’s like the one, the first big thing that you don’t have to, it’s not a full-time job to invest, which is really nice, since as a grad student, I’ll be very busy.

11:04 Emily: Actually, if I could expand on that for one more second. So, I also tell people like investing should not be your side hustle. Like you should not be spending a ton of time working on your investments. And I always say to them, like, if you want a full-time job doing investing, get a full-time job as an investor, be a hedge fund manager or go do that kind of thing. Like, make a ton of money off of this. Don’t just play around with your own money. If you’re going to be, you know, actually investing that kind of time into the process, which again, I don’t think is necessary or a good idea. So to me, investing is kind of like learn about it for a little while, you set up what you need to set up, and then you just let it run and you just do maintenance and you don’t have to, you know, mess around with it a whole lot.

Lesson 2: Make an Emergency Fund

11:45 George: Yeah. I totally agree, because like, I’ve been investing for a while now and it’s like, it’s not really time-consuming at all. I kind of like check it at least once a day just because I like looking at it. But other than that, it’s not like I’m constantly fidgeting with my stuff. And I think the more you fidget with it, the more fees you get. So, it’s like, it’s kind of like passive investing. It’s kind of like a win-win. But I guess two more points that I would say that are really nice that I got out of it is that kind of making an emergency fund. I never really thought of that. Kind of like before, an emergency happens, you just have the money in your savings account. So, I’ve been trying to get my emergency fund kind of like they say at a minimum is three months but I’m hoping to get it like higher, maybe to nine months, if possible.

Lesson 3: Time Value of Money

12:29 George: And I’m kind of slowly building towards that. And another thing that I learned that was pretty interesting is that, kind of like this thing called, I think it’s called time, money value, a time value of money. It’s kind of like a dollar today is worth more than a dollar a year from now. So, if you can get money today and kind of put it in your investments or put it into your savings account, maybe like a high yield savings account, that will be worth more than kind of like $50, maybe a year from now, that you weren’t able to get that interest off of by having it in your account. So, I never really thought of it that way. I kind of, I always thought that like, “Oh, if I have a thousand dollars today, it’s the same as having a thousand dollars in 10 years.” So, those are kind of like the three big things that I would think of that I got from the class.

13:15 Emily: Yeah. I think the time value of money is also just a, it’s a mind-blowing concept. Like once you kind of understand like compound interest and how much your money can work for you. And I think the point that, you know, graduate students especially should take away from that is it’s okay–it’s great–to start investing now with a very small amount of money. It will not be a small amount of money decades from now when you actually reach retirement. So, what I like to say is that graduate students should not dismiss whatever tiny amount of money they might be able to start investing right now. Maybe it’s $10 a month. Maybe it’s $50 a month. That money will add up over time with this factor of compounding with the time value of money applied to it. And so, yeah, it’s not something that you should just say, “Oh, well, I can’t really save that much, so I’m not going to bother. Like, it’s still something you should pursue, even if it’s a small amount of money today.

14:05 George: Yeah. Totally agree.

What Financial Changes Did You Make?

14:08 Emily: And so, what did you actually, you know, you took this fabulous course, you learned a lot from it. What changes did you actually make? So, you’ve already mentioned that you started investing. Can you talk a little bit about how you started down that road?

14:20 George: Yeah, so I started investing well, like the first thing I did was I tried to get my financial life together, trying to get like my financial health in order because I didn’t really know anything. So, I started tracking my finances. So, I got the Mint app. I started tracking how much money I spend in a month. And the first month I wasn’t really trying to make a budget. I was just trying to understand my money habits and see what I could change. See what I wanted to keep. And then I started thinking about budgeting. And then after that I started my emergency fund. I also started collecting all of my important documents, like my birth certificate and my social security number and putting them in one place. They were kind of like scattered around. So, I wanted to put them in one place and kind of like, just get all of my stuff, like organized, like the first few months.

15:05 George: And then after I got myself situated and kind of like knew what was going on financially, that’s when I started investing. I decided to do a Robo Roth at the start until I get kind of like experienced with the stock market. And then I plan to transfer it over to a manual one to kind of like start my own Roth. So, my manual Roth–I mean not my manual Roth, my Robo Roth, I’m kind of like, “invest stuff for me,” and it’s kind of in the safest way possible. So, I don’t kind of like put it in something that kind of like blows up in my face and I lose all my retirement money. And my brokerage account is kind of just, it’s a tax account, but I only put money in there that I put in there so I can kind of gain experience with buying stocks and selling stocks and stuff like that.

15:50 George: So, and now that I think about it, one other thing that I learned from my class is that, when I’m looking at stocks and stuff, there are these things called like target-date retirement kinds of funds, which is like kind of nice. And I plan when I make my manual Roth, I actually planned a large part of it to be a target-date fund, which will kind of like change based on how close I am to retirement. And so after I did all of that, I kind of like started thinking about like different things that I learned about in my class that I should think about when I’m kind of like investing my brokerage account. Like don’t invest what I’m not willing to lose. And like, if you don’t understand it, don’t invest in it. And I started kind of like building up my portfolio and now I have like a pretty decent nest egg. So, I’m pretty proud of how I’ve gotten so far in the last few months.

Choosing a Robo-Advisor

16:42 Emily: I know, you haven’t even started graduate school yet. I mean, which is arguably I guess not a job, and you’re just getting out of undergrad, and I don’t know, it’s a fabulous amount of progress that you’ve made in this time. Which robo-advisor did you choose to start with?

16:57 George: Oh, so I actually chose Betterment. So, there are several different websites, I think there’s NerdWallet, that kind of review all these different things. Something else I learned from my class is don’t take it from one source alone, kind of go to multiple different sources and then based on all the sources together, make a decision. And kind of like across the board people suggested Betterment. So, I kind of went with Betterment since it had such great reviews all across the board.

17:31 Emily: Mhm. I think, I don’t know specifically, this is true for Betterment. It might be because you chose them. But one of the advantages that robo-advisors have is that they often have $0 minimums to start investing. So, it’s a great place like you’re doing when you’re just at the very, very start of your journey to use something like that, as you were saying, sort of some more familiarity, get some experience. And then you can switch over as you were planning on doing to a Roth IRA that you manage yourself through one of like the discount brokerage firms, like Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab. I’m sure you’re looking at one of those three, if not something similar, for once you switch, but those often have some kind of minimum. So, I know like my strategy when I started my Roth IRA was I started with Fidelity because they, at that time, they waived their minimum if you had a $50 per month automated investing plan. So, I did that until I had $3,000 and then I switched over to Vanguard, because that’s where I really wanted to be, once I had the Vanguard $3,000 minimum. So, it sounds like you’re probably doing something similar with your robo-advisor to, you know, a Roth IRA that you’ll manage yourself strategy. Is that right?

18:34 George: Yeah. And there are like multiple different reasons as well. Like a big one is like the minimum so that like I could start investing now so that even if it’s a little bit, I could still start growing my investments. And also, when I get to a decent amount, I’ll be able to get, like, I think there are minimums in mutual funds as well. So, it’s like in order to invest in mutual funds, you need to have a certain amount of money. I’m not there yet. So, I think I’ll keep it in my Robo fund, which is kind of very low expense. Very kind of like, easy to, well, not low expenses–you can put as little money there as possible, and then it starts going in investments. But I feel like with the robo-advisors, I don’t want to keep it in there too long because they have these expense ratios. And if I have a large amount of money, I kind of start eating at my investments. But I think early on in the process that this was the best decision for me.

19:25 Emily: Yeah. And expense ratio, for those in the audience who haven’t started investing yet, is a representation. It’s a percentage representation of the total cost of owning whatever the investment is. So, with something like a robo-advisor, they usually add to the expense ratio of the underlying funds that you buy. Maybe about a 0.25% fee, which is sort of low. It sounds like pretty low. But you can get quite a bit lower if you just manage it yourself. Like you’re planning on doing, you know, in a few months or a year or whatever. You can get down under like 0.1%, 0.05%, even down to 0% expense ratios. So, there are very, very low expense ratios out there, even though the robo-advising fee doesn’t sound very high. Over time, as you were saying, it really does add up. Whatever you’re paying in expenses compounds, as we were talking about earlier, and it could end up being quite a bit of money over your entire investing lifetime. But your plan sounds really great to me. It sounds like you’ve gone about it in a totally intelligent way. So, that’s awesome.

Commercial

20:27 Emily: Emily here, for a brief interlude. I am just bursting with this news. I have launched a Community for Personal Finance for PhDs. The Community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to level up their practice of personal finance by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the Community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products I’ve made in the past. And I’m going to add new trainings to that library every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, a book club, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the Community is going to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.com/community to find out even more. If you’re listening to this in real-time, you have the opportunity to become a founding member of the Community at a discount. The price is going up on August 15th, 2020, so don’t delay. Go to pfforphds.com/community for all the details. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now, back to the interview.

George’s Financial Resources Document

21:47 Emily: Could you share like why you created the document that you did? Because I think it came out of the course, right? What you were learning from the course?

21:57 George: Yeah so, I was learning all the different stuff and I started kind of looking up all these different, like websites and I found your website and many other websites and I started bookmarking them. And then, since I was kind of so engrossed with it, I would talk about it. So, I’m a McNair scholar at University of Central Florida, and we’re in this kind of like community together. And I always talk about it to other McNair scholars, and they ask me for advice, they ask me, “Oh, what can I learn about this?” And then I would kind of like blow them up with links. And I didn’t think it was kind of the best way to go about it. So, I decided to make an easy to read document with like the links, kind of like embedded in words.

22:36 George: So, you can read through it in kind of a relaxing way, and then click a link if you want to learn more about what I was talking about. And then I posted this in our McNair group chat. But then I thought it would be nice for other people to use this as well as they wanted to. So, I posted it on my Twitter, and I think a few people were able to like use it to learn more about personal finance.

22:58 Emily: Yeah. And we’ll link to the document in the show notes as well because I thought it was really well put together. So, thank you for doing that. Thank you for that, like, community service.

Factors in Choosing a Graduate School

23:06 Emily: Okay. So, now we’re in the spring semester, you have, you know, you have applied to your fellowships, you’ve applied to graduate school. You’re being admitted to different programs. And of course, you know, we’re considering a lot of things when we choose a graduate program, the quality of the research, the mentor that you might work with, maybe overall the program, the structure of it, where it’s located and so forth. But you know, the stipend, I think should be one of those considerations. Did you factor in the finances when you were choosing which graduate program to attend, or were you able to make the decision based on those other factors?

23:41 George: So, I applied to like nine graduate schools, and I think from eliminating the first ones, it was mostly based on like the research and like the faculty and the resources and stuff like that. But then when I got to the end, it was kind of hard to decide. It was a very hard decision. And when I was down to two, like based on cost of living of the two areas, the stipends were very similar, the research interests were really similar. Like everything was very similar. So, it was kind of hard to kind of make that decision. So, I think what it came down to was kind of two things. The first thing was that one school was kind of like calling me and checking up on me, answering my questions and that kind of like had a really good impact on me.

24:27 George: But then the last thing is that the school that I decided to go to, which is Stanford, they offered transitioning costs. So, like transitioning funds. So, I think transitioning to grad, I mean, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve heard that transitioning to grad school can be really expensive. So, that they offered kind of some funds to allow me to kind of like take that stress off of me was kind of like, I think that’s what kind of pushed me to choose Stanford since it was a really hard decision.

24:58 Emily: I think that’s an excellent, I mean it’s a really, really good insight into your decision-making process. It sounds like, you know, these final two schools, it was really close. What tipped you over was, you know, people at Stanford were really attentive to you, checking up on you, and then they offered you this moving fund. And I mean, that’s something that graduate programs should know about. If something that minor, a few thousand dollars I assume?

25:19 George: It was actually $500.

Consider Stipends AND Cost of Living

25:20 Emily: Oh, $500? Okay. Right. So, $500, which is like nothing to the graduate programs, could tip an excellent candidate like you, you know, you won this outside fellowship, you’re bringing in money. If something like offering you $500 could tip the scales in their favor, that’s something that they all should be doing, frankly, at this point. So, I think you mentioned something in there really quickly, but I believe you said something like after you factored in the cost of living of the two different places, the stipends were similar, is that right? So the stipends themselves weren’t actually the same, but they were similar to another, once you factored in the cost of living, is that right? Can you talk about how you did that?

25:57 George: Yeah. So, like the cost of living at Stanford is much higher. So, the two schools, I guess, were Stanford and Cornell. So, the cost of living in Palo Alto is much higher than the cost of living in Ithaca, New York. So, the Stanford stipend was much higher than the Cornell stipend, but there are different websites where you can put in the location. I think it’s a cost of living calculator. You could put in the location where you plan to live and then the money that you’ll be bringing in, and there are also like tax calculators, because there are different tax rules. So, you can calculate how much tax will be coming out of your stipend. They can calculate how your stipend compares if you were to live in another area. And I kind of compared the two stipends and they were very similar, like almost identical, once you took into consideration cost of living. So, I couldn’t really use that as a reason to choose one over the other.

26:53 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. Like, I mean, even, you know, I also was sort of getting into personal finance in the year that I was applying to graduate school, and I didn’t even do that step that you did of taking that into consideration. I was just kind of looking at, “Oh, the stipends are all sort of similar. I don’t know. I assume the cities are different, but I never sat down and like actually did that little, little bit of math that you did. So, it’s a great idea just for the audience, anyone else going through this. I really like to use the MIT Living Wage database or calculator, livingwage.mit.edu. And it shows you what the living wage is for every, you know, county or metro city area in the U.S. And so, that’s the factor that I like to use.

27:31 Emily: That’s what we use in phdstipends.com, which is my database website where people enter their stipends and then we do this little division, like you were just saying, of divide the stipend by the local cost of living from this database and spit out this like factor, you know, is it more than one? Is it less than one? So, exactly what you were doing, maybe using a different calculator, but I think it’s really, really smart.

Housing Budget and Taxes

27:51 Emily: So, okay. You’ve chosen to go to Sanford, and you already were just mentioning some of the basic building blocks of the budget that you’ll have once you start graduate school. Like you were talking about taking into consideration how much your taxes are going to be. And I know that you’ve been preparing a budget over this summer before you’re moving to Palo Alto. So, can you talk about that process a little bit, and also about your decision around housing?

28:12 George: Yeah. So, I started my budget already. So, the first thing that I kind of took out of my budget was taxes. Because what I kind of like found out that was pretty surprising is that they don’t take taxes out of fellowships. So, like your income tax will be kind of just like given to you and you’re expected to know that it’s supposed to be paid back in taxes.

Quarterly Taxes on Non-W-2 Income

28:34 Emily: Okay. Let’s pause there because I think we need to emphasize that. At most universities, it sounds like it’s Stanford included, if you’re receiving a fellowship, which is what I call non-W-2 income. So, fellowship, training grant, this kind of income. Very likely, they will not be withholding income tax for you, as a domestic student. For international students, they do. So, let’s emphasize that again. You are receiving your entire paycheck, but that does not mean that you get to keep all of that. Part of that is going to go back to the IRS in the form of income taxes, which you may have to pay quarterly. I’ll link in the show notes to my resources on that. It’s probably ones that you found, George, as you were doing this research. But yeah, please keep going. I just wanted to, like–we don’t want to gloss over that. Like, you will probably end up paying income tax and you have to do it yourself. It’s not done for you. And it’s a process that a lot of people just completely miss and they have an ugly surprise when they get to their taxes after their first year of graduate school.

29:30 George: Yeah. And actually, I plan to do quarterly taxes as well. So, I was kind of like putting it together so that every month, like I kind of calculated how much taxes I would owe at the end, and then I divided that by 12. And then I would kind of like save that amount of money every single month. So, when it comes to that time, when I have to pay my quarterly tax, I already have it in my savings account and I can just pay it. But that’s the first thing I kind of put away. And then I went to my housing. So, at Stanford, they have housing on campus which is subsidized. So, it’s kind of nice that I was able to kind of apply to housing at Stanford.

30:06 George: So, I kind of looked at all the housing options, and out all of the ones that I liked, I kind of picked the highest monthly rent, and I put that in my budget. And I was thinking that, if I get a lower one, I could just change that in my budget. It will be easier to change to lower than to higher. So, that was kind of my thought process on that. And then with my budget, I tried to make it so that it’s not a budget that I kind of don’t like looking at. So, I kind of like, as I said before, like I tried to find out how I spend my own money and I tried to make a budget that I can comfortably live within the budget, and I gave myself some breathing room.

30:44 George: I wanted my budget to be kind of pleasant to live on so I don’t kind of like break my budget. So, I kind of was thinking like, “Okay, I spent this much on food. Let me give myself a little breathing room since I can kind of like afford to do that.” And then I also put some money in there for shopping. I put some money in there for transportation because I don’t plan to bring my car with me my first year. And then I also put like 20 to 25% away for investments. So, kind of like putting stuff into my savings accounts, putting stuff into my Roth IRA. And then for my brokerage account, I don’t plan to put monthly in there until I have a good amount in my savings account, but then I plan to start putting monthly into my brokerage account. For now, I’ll just kind of like, if I have some money from the money I put away for shopping and for like kind of random stuff, I’ll buy some stocks if I feel like I want to, but it won’t be like a monthly thing that I put money specifically away for yet. But that’s kind of like what I decided to put in my budget.

Ranking Housing Options

31:53 Emily: I want to go back just to the housing point for a second, because I think you’ve made a really good decision, which was like, okay, so you’re applying for all this, you know, subsidized on-campus housing. You account in your budget for the highest possible rent you would be paying. But is that actually how it turned out? Like what housing did you, when you were saying where you wanted to live, was that the one that you put at the top of your list? Or like how did you rank order that list and what did you actually get into?

32:18 George: So, I ranked the list, so there’s like really new housing that’s coming out. It’s going to actually debut this fall semester. So, I put that at the top of my list and that was actually the most expensive, and I was able to get it. So, I didn’t change my budget, but I also had these different ones that were a little bit older, but they had good amenities. They would have good spacing. And I actually got the tour it when I was at my interview. So, I would be fine living with it. It’s not like I would be like, “Oh, I can’t live here and I’ll have to live somewhere else.” So, that’s how I ranked it.

32:53 George: But, there were other options that were really, really expensive. So, I kind of listed those. They say to list everything, so I listed them, but they were like in 30th place, like it was kind of ridiculous how much they cost. So, I tried to kind of combine quality, but also the cost of living because I feel like housing, I think when I was reading my budgeting you should try to keep housing as close to 50% as possible. My housing is a little bit, it’s still over 50%, but I think it’s kind of difficult to kind of get 50% or lower as a grad student. So, I tried to get as close to that as possible. And with some of the other housing, it was like well over 50%. So, I tried to take into consideration that I should try to be close to 50%, if at all possible.

33:43 Emily: Yeah, I think I don’t know exactly what you were learning in the course, but according to the balanced money formula, which is a framework that I like to reference, you should keep all of your necessary expenses below 50% of your net income, which is really, really challenging to do on a graduate student stipend and also on a graduate student stipend in a high cost of living area, which is what you’re doing. So, it’s not surprising at all to me that even you, you know, making a prudent housing choice, it’s still over 50% of your income. That is pretty common for graduate students in high cost of living areas. But yeah, so it sounds like you were, you know, really thinking through both the finances and the lifestyle that you wanted to have with that housing decision. So, super happy that you were, you know, really intentional about that.

Long-Term Emergency Savings Goals

34:29 Emily: And you were mentioning just now, like some of your financial goals for your finances in graduate school. You mentioned that you were going to be saving/investing 20 to 25% of your income and then possibly doing a little bit more investing if you wanted to at any particular time. And I think you also mentioned earlier that you wanted to save up an emergency fund of nine months of expenses. Is that right? Is that your ultimate goal?

34:54 George: Yeah, I’m trying to, one day I hope to get to nine months. So, I would say my kind of goals for personal finance and graduate school, in particular, are kind of modest. I’m not looking to have like a huge, huge thing by the time I graduate. I hope to kind of like build habits and get into the habit of kind of like investing, get into the habit of staying on my budget, getting into the habit of putting money away monthly. Because like in undergrad, I didn’t have any of those habits, and I think that’s something I’m going to have to kind of build. And also, have at least like three months, hopefully nine months, of my emergency fund. Because I know that emergencies are emergencies and I doubt I won’t have any emergencies in graduate school.

35:37 George: So, hopefully by the time I graduate, I’ll have at least three months, hopefully nine months. And then kind of have a decent amount in my kind of Roth IRA as well as in my brokerage account, and that I’ve kind of stayed consistent throughout the five, six, or maybe seven years that I’ll be doing my PhD of monthly, always, putting some money away and not falling into blowing money on stuff. But also giving me that kind of flexibility to have fun and to do things that I find kind of amusing so that I don’t get too stressed through graduate school.

36:13 Emily: I think that’s such an excellent point that you made. Like yes, it would be great to come out of graduate school with savings, with investments, with a nice nest egg. That’s what happened for me. My husband and I defended with quite a good nest egg, and it was really fabulous for our subsequent life. But, the more important thing, actually, is the habit formation. And it’s sort of changing your–like becoming a person who budgets, becoming a person who invests. Now, I know I said earlier that it matters a whole lot. Like if you do that with a small amount of money, it’s great, and yes, that’s true. But, even more powerful is the habit. And so, when you have that nice post-PhD salary, and you’re already in the habit of investing or you’re in the habit of saving, you can then apply those habits to that fabulous higher income and really make some fast progress with your, you know, financial goals.

Any Other Goals for Grad School?

37:02 Emily: So, I think that was such a good point that you made, and even for people who aren’t able to do what you plan on doing, which is still, you know, saving and investing during graduate school. Even getting into the habit of budgeting, like that can be a great goal for your time during graduate school is just to make those changes in yourself and who you are. Even if you aren’t able to come out with more savings, again, once you have the post-PhD income, you’ll be able to keep applying those habits and really make some fast progress. So, such an excellent point, George. Any other goals you have for graduate school, aside from the ones that we just talked about?

37:37 George: I guess like, I mean, there are like nonfinancial goals, like kind of building like skills and kind of building my network and traveling and learning all the different stuff from different people. But financial-wise, I just hope to kind of pay as little in taxes as possible, learn how to file my own taxes. Kind of learn like all the financial things that I need to know to kind of like succeed. I think for my brokerage account, I’ll be kind of investing. I think the money in there is probably going to be used as a down payment on a house in the future. That’s kind of like, well far off, but I’m kind of thinking, “Oh, I’m investing in my brokerage account. I’ll probably use it to kind of buy a house or have some money towards a house.” Kind of things like that. Those are kind of like the goals I’m thinking of, but I don’t really have like super hard, concrete stuff yet. But those are kind of the things I’ve been thinking about.

38:30 Emily: Yeah. I think it’s great that you identified like, “Okay, I know it’s important to have an emergency fund.” You’re going build that up. “I know it’s important to save for retirement. I’m going to build that up.” And then, “Okay, whatever else comes, I have this other brokerage account, you know, other savings I can use for that. If it’s a house down payment, if it’s something else.” I think that’s a great way to structure your finances when you have a lot of unknowns in the future, as is very, very common for PhDs, because we never know where we’re going to live. You know, after, it’s a lot of uncertainty that we live with kind of longterm.

38:59 Emily: But George, it was a real pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing this beginning part of your journey. I hope that we’ll catch up with you again in maybe a few months or a year and see if it’s all panning out the way you thought it would. Thank you so much for sharing your insight.

39:15 George: Yeah, no problem. It was a pleasure to be able to talk about it.

Outtro

39:17 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This PhD Candidate Paid for Her Wedding with Her Research Side Hustle

August 3, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

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

Links Mentioned

Find Rebecca on her website and on Twitter
Personal Finance for PhDs: Community
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

Side-Hustling as a History PhD

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Engaged During Grad School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying for the Wedding through Side-Hustling

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

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

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

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

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

13:07 Rebecca: Oh yes.

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

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

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

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

Researching as a Side-Hustle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19:12 Emily: Gotcha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

21:06 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I am just bursting with this news. I have launched a community for personal finance for PhDs. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to level up their practice of personal finance by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products I’ve made in the past, and I’m going to add new trainings that library every month. There is also a discussion forum, a monthly live calls with me, a book club, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community is going to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community to find out even more. If you’re listening to this in real time, you have the opportunity to become a founding member of the community at a discount. The price is going up on August 15th, 2020, so don’t delay. Go to PFForPhDs.com/community for all the details. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Research Side-Hustles and Career Advancement

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

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

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

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

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

Time Management and Side-Hustling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31:00 Emily: Gotcha.

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

The Financial Side of Wedding Planning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Words of Advice

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

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

38:20 Emily: Yup.

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

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

38:56 Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Outtro

38:58 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This Muslim Graduate Student Found Halal Investing and Now Teaches It to Her Family and Friends

July 27, 2020 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Joumana Altallal, a Muslim graduate student at the University of Michigan. Joumana began investigating personal finance in the summer before she started graduate school to prepare to manage her stipend. In just her first year on a stipend, she has saved a full emergency fund, established credit, and funded a Roth IRA. Joumana shares what she’s learned about Halal investing, a strain of socially responsible investing for Muslims that has become much more accessible in recent years with the rise of robo-investing. Joumana’s enthusiasm for personal finance and halal investing, in particular, has spilled into her relationships with her family and friends. At the end of the episode, she gives a wonderful articulation of the role her finances play in the world.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

UMich Helen Zell Writers’ Program
PF For PhDs Episode 8: This PhD Government Scientist Is Pursuing Financial Independence: Part 1 (Dr. Gov Worker)
PF for PhDs Episode 9: This PhD Government Scientist Is Pursuing Financial Independence: Part 2 (Dr. Gov Worker)
George Hayward Household Budget YouTube Video
George Hayward Household Budget Excel Template
Halal Investment Companies, e.g.,
- Wahed Invest: https://wahedinvest.com/
- Amana Mutual Funds: https://www.saturna.com/amana
- Azzad Funds: https://www.azzadfunds.com/
PF for PhDs: Speaking
PF for PhDs Episode 13: Combatting Climate Change with Your Finances, Individually and Collectively (Jewel Tomasula)
PF for PhDs Podcast Hub
PF for PhDs: Subscribe

Teaser

00:00 Joumana: I think taking a halal approach to investing and saving money is always really grounding for me in that it acts as this constant reminder, that at the end of the day, my finances are meant to serve an ethical role in the world. So, they’re not just a fulfillment for my own needs and desires, but that they also function in this greater, sort of just way in the world.

Introduction

00:28 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 13, and today my guest is Joumana Altallal, a Muslim graduate student at the University of Michigan. Joumana began investigating personal finance in the summer before she started graduate school to prepare to manage her stipend. In just her first year on a stipend, she has saved a full emergency fund, established credit, and funded a Roth IRA. Joumana shares what she’s learned about halal investing, a strain of socially responsible investing for Muslims that has become much more accessible in recent years with the rise of robo-investing. Joumana’s enthusiasm for personal finance and halal investing in particular has spilled into her relationships with her family and friends. You won’t want to miss her wonderful articulation of the role her finances play in the world. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Joumana Altallal.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:28 Emily: I’m delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Joumana Altallal. She is a current graduate student and also a Muslim graduate student. So, we’re going to be talking about a particular version of socially responsible investing today, which is halal investing. So, Joumana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. And will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

01:49 Joumana: Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me today. My name is Joumana Altallal. I’m a second-year master of fine arts student in poetry at the University of Michigan. My family and I immigrated to the U.S. In 2003 and were resettled in Charlottesville, Virginia. So, that’s actually where I grew up since I was about six years old. And I would say my journey with personal finance has definitely been informed by my identity as both a refugee and a Muslim.

02:17 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. And tell us where you are now and what you’re studying.

02:21 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m at the University of Michigan at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. So, it’s a creative writing program that is two years with a fellowship year third year. I am a poet, so I’m spending all of my time in writing workshops

02:37 Emily: Sounds fantastic. And you and I actually met when I was speaking at the University of Michigan in 2019, I guess it was, right?

02:46 Joumana: Yeah.

Personal Finance Journey

02:46 Emily: Yeah. So, I met in person, actually, you came up to me with this question about this particular version of investing, and I said, “I have no idea about that. Will you please come on the podcast and teach me and my audience about this?” So, I’m really happy to have you on today to talk more about that. So, kind of first step, more like background stuff before we get to that particular topic. So, what have you been learning about personal finance and also applying since you started graduate school?

03:15 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. So, I actually came to graduate school immediately from undergrad. So, I didn’t have much experience budgeting or tracking money in a sort of systematic way before. And although I’d been obviously working throughout high school and college, I was still primarily supported by my parents. So, my financial decisions were definitely limited in that scope. But my interest in personal finance kind of grew out of a hobby that I had. The summer before moving for grad school, I was kind of introduced to the financial independence and early retirement movement through Reddit forums of all places. And I found myself sort of accidentally spending a lot of time reading people’s posts and advice to each other. So, I think part of what’s so great about personal finance forums, I guess, is that they don’t really assume a starting place for anyone, which was really helpful for me. You can ask questions as a beginner or share advice on an experience that you just went through. So, as someone coming from like an immigrant background, I saw my parents really struggle with understanding what things like 401ks were even. And I believe a huge part of that is because workplaces don’t use accessible language to really explain what these investment opportunities are. So, a huge group of people end up being like absolutely excluded from personal finance conversations despite having a right to them.

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

04:49 Emily: So, I love that you were sort of introduced to personal finance inspired by the FIRE movement, something I’ve also been kind of getting into recently. FIRE, Financial Independence and [Retire Early]. I’ve actually done a couple, a pair of interviews with a PhD who’s pursuing FIRE in season three of the podcast. So, if people want to check that out, we’ll link that from the show notes. And also some of my other guests have sort of incidentally mentioned being inspired by the movement as well. Would you say that you are pursuing FIRE or going to be pursuing FIRE, maybe once you’re done with graduate school? Or are you just like, “No, I’m just using some of the principles for like general personal finance stuff”?

05:27 Joumana: I think right now I’m using the general principles for personal finance. It feels a little scary to say that I’m pursuing FIRE as a 22-year-old grad student. But that is absolutely something that I would love to one day be a little more stringent in following.

05:45 Emily: Yeah. So, for listeners who aren’t yet familiar or haven’t listened to the other podcasts on the subject. I think the reason why, you know, Joumana and I do not say we’re part of the FIRE movement is probably because we do not have savings rates that top 50% of our income, which is not a requirement to be part of the movement, but definitely something that many people within the movement do. And that’s how you get that, you know, really fast acceleration towards retirement. So, very difficult to carry out that particular aspect of it on a grad student kind of salary, but you can definitely use the broader principles, start using the broader principles that also apply to personal finance. That was really something that came out of my previous interview with Dr. Gov Worker, is that he really sees the FIRE movement as like an entrance into just good personal finance practices. It’s just a particular way to like inspire people to follow through on the stuff that everybody talks about, you know, from decades ago. So, yeah. What have you actually, like maybe things you’ve put into practice within your finances since last summer?

Building Credit and Budgeting

06:44 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. So, the summer before grad school, my sort of first step into the journey was opening a student credit card through Discover which is something that prior to that I’d never had. So, beginning to build my credit was really important to me. And then obviously knowing that I would be receiving a monthly stipend once I began my MFA, I knew I needed some sort of system to track my income and expenses. So, I know there are apps like Mint that do this automatically, but I actually rely on a sort of extensive Excel spreadsheet that allows me to type things in manually the particular template that I’ve been using for the past year and a half just comes from George Hayward’s YouTube channel. But any, and all can achieve the same thing really.

07:31 Emily: We’ll track that down and put that in the show notes as well.

Emergency Fund and Roth IRA

07:35 Joumana: And the most important step I think after that was really focusing on building an emergency fund that I knew could last me for at least two months, but now I’ve brought it up to six months. And that’s actually advice that my parents have always followed. So, it didn’t feel too strange to me to begin doing. And after that, opening a Roth and beginning to stash away a monthly amount into my savings.

What is Halal Investing?

08:01 Emily: Yeah. Those are a fantastic number of steps to be taking just in like your first year or so of graduate school, especially that six month of expenses emergency fund. Very, very impressive. You must be living well below your means there in Ann Arbor. So, for those of us who like me, had never heard of halal investing before you brought it up. Can you tell us some of the differences between halal investing and maybe, you know, what your average American might be doing for investing?

08:28 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. So, to kind of backtrack a little bit, in Islam, the word halal just means permissible. So, halal investing is just a faith-based approach to investment management that’s both ethically and socially responsible. Halal investing really just tries to eliminate placing money in interest-based investments and highly leveraged company stocks or in securities of companies whose profit is typically earned from things like firearms, alcohol, or gambling, for instance. So, as you can tell, it’s not just as easy as opening a Roth through Vanguard, for instance, and beginning to save. However, doing the research has really helped me understand what it is I’m doing with my money and how the process works.

09:17 Emily: Yeah. So, maybe to explain like, just a little bit further for the listeners. So, what you’re basically saying is no bonds, right? Because bonds are a debt-based product. So, stocks are okay. But you mentioned that you can’t use companies that are very highly leveraged, so that requires some additional degree of research. So, it sounds like some company stock would be okay, some wouldn’t. And then nothing in these certain categories of “the sin stocks” as they might be referred to. Okay. So, that gives us a basis there. Does that also mean that you don’t use like interest-bearing checking or savings account? Is that correct?

09:55 Joumana: Yes. So, typically I actually won’t put my money into the savings portion of my bank account and I just have it all stashed in terms of the like six-month emergency fund, I just have it in my checking account. Because interest isn’t necessarily something that I’d want on my money, the same way that most people would.

10:18 Emily: Yeah. Gotcha. When I read up about the subject a tiny bit before our conversation, I read that many who are pursuing halal investing actually will end up not investing in stocks at all because of that additional degree of research that’s required. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Halal Investment Companies

10:37 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. I think for the average person, it can seem a little bit overwhelming to have to do all of this research all of a sudden. But I do think that there are actually a lot more solutions now than there were even just a few years ago. So, there are actually investment companies like Wahed Invest, Amana Mutal Funds, or Azzad and others that kind of facilitate the process of halal investing so that it’s not all entirely on the Muslim investor who doesn’t necessarily always know where to go or where to put their money. So, the way this works is that these companies essentially screen investments and identify companies that meet ethical standards based on halal investing. So, they also do things like help you calculate your annual Zakat percentage, which is just an obligatory charitable payment that has to be made on your earnings every year. And really the good thing with using these companies is that they have tickers that you can use to still invest through places like Schwab or Vanguard. So, realistically your Roth could still be with Schwab like I have it. But these companies by using tickers, these companies just screen all of the investments that you could have and provide you with places that you could potentially invest in.

Compromise: Higher Expense Ratios for Greater Flexibility

12:05 Emily: Okay. So, let me see if I have this right. So, basically, as I said earlier, this is sort of a particular version of socially responsible investing. So, this is a similar process that other socially responsible investing funds would go through, right? There’s a higher degree of screening of the companies that are included according to whatever the principles are that the fund operates under. And so it sounds like these companies that you just mentioned, they have created mutual funds, is that right? That then you can invest in maybe directly through them, but also through, as you just said, you know, other companies just by buying that particular mutual fund. And something that often happens with other SRI funds is that, due to that increased basically degree of work that’s required, the expense ratio is a little bit higher than you might find if you were doing like a standard index bond. Is that correct for like the investment that you chose?

12:54 Joumana: Yes, that’s typically correct. Although I know that companies like Wahed Invest, for instance, rely kind of heavily on robo-investors. So, the percentage is probably a lot lower. But yes, there are some kind of compromises that you make in terms of these investments that you choose to follow.

13:17 Emily: Yeah. So, one of the principles, let’s say, of the FIRE movement that you might come across, and also personal finance more generally, is this ruthless pursuit of low expense ratios on investments. And what expense ratios are for the listener, it’s basically just an expression of the cost of owning a particular fund. It’s expressed as a percentage. So, you know, at Vanguard with ETFs or something, you might get an expense ratio down in the 0.05 or less percentage. So, five basis points or less. They could be as low as that.

13:52 Emily: And then higher expense ratios are like 1%. Like 1% would be like pretty high. And there are many, you know, in between. And usually, with robo-advisors, you would have the underlying expense of the actual fund that you buy. So, like maybe 0.1% or less, plus a fee that the robo-advisor would tax on top of that to basically be managing your investments for you. But it sounds like even within this, you know, halal investing, even among these options, there are various expense ratios that you could be sort of pursuing and choosing among. Yeah, I think it’s one of the downfalls of the FIRE movement that SRI, socially responsible investing, is not talked about that much. And it’s very important to certain people for various different reasons. And so it’s something that is definitely worth, you know, maybe sacrificing a little bit on the low expense ratio side of things to, of course, in your case, be able to invest according to your principles at all. And for other people just being able to invest according to their general values and what they want to be supporting in our economy and so forth.

Commercial

14:54 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early-career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics, or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers, even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

Halal Investing is Growing and Increasingly Accessible

15:53 Emily: Anything else you want to add about the products or the solutions that are available for halal investing?

16:00 Joumana: I would say that they are definitely doing a better job of reaching out to the Muslim population now. So, I think there’s a growing movement really of young Muslim students, or even young Muslim workers who are really active in the investment community, which is always lovely to see.

16:21 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. It seems like, you know, as you said, robo-advisors are now being involved and robo-advisors are a relatively recent phenomenon in the last five or 10 years. So maybe, you know, the last generation when they were looking into investing they probably saw that, well, the burden was completely on them, right? To do all this research that we were just talking about and that can be, you know, prohibitive, right?

16:44 Emily: For even going that route at all. Like for instance, before mutual funds came on the scene, everyone was like calling up their brokers, buying more of this stock or selling more of that stock. Like that’s a lot of work to be putting in. And we’re so fortunate now to be living in a time when, you know, index funds are available to us. When these highly curated mutual funds are available to us that are, you know, relatively not that expensive. And as you just said, you know, there’s been more and more attention being brought to this. And so, these particular funds exist for your community and that’s really great to hear and very encouraging.

17:17 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely.

17:19 Emily: One other thing that I read about in this article was that, for some Muslims, again, who were avoiding stock investing entirely and of course, bond investing as well they basically had their money just in cash and real estate. Was that the case maybe in generations past?

17:36 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. I actually still think that it’s overwhelmingly the case for most folks who identify as Muslim in the U.S. And I think so much of that is just the lack of really accessible information about the kinds of investments that are available for adherence of the Muslim faith. And I think most Muslims, especially of an older generation, have this lack of trust in banks or in investment companies generally for various totally rational reasons. But I also think so much of it is just a lack of understanding of what actually your money is doing and how you can still adhere to a principle of halal investing while having your money in places like Schwab or Vanguard, for instance, or in a 401k or a Roth, whatever that may be.

Helping Family and Friends with Halal Investing

18:32 Emily: And have you been, now that you’ve been learning this stuff from Reddit and other places, have you been kind of turning around and spreading that message like to your parents or other family members or other people in your community?

18:42 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. Once I started learning about it, I would honestly annoy my parents all the time by being like, “Hey, let’s talk about this now, let’s talk about this.” So, I actually ended up helping my mom, once she left the job that she had been working in for about 15 years, to roll over her 401k there into an IRA, actually. And that was sort of a defining moment in my journey throughout personal finance is being able to actually like implement and apply the things that I’ve been learning. Especially when it came to someone like my mom, who I felt like was always on that journey alongside me somehow. So, I’ve definitely been bringing it over to my family. And then in terms of friends, I’ve actually been reaching out to a lot of my Muslim friends and being like, “Hey, let’s have like meetups where we talk about our finances, let’s talk about like our stipends or how we’re dealing with just being in grad school and even just budgeting if we’re not ready to talk about investing really.” So, it’s definitely been a way for me to kind of understand what other people are doing in terms of their grad stipends or the ways that they’re organizing and negotiating the budgets that they have for themselves.

20:08 Emily: That sounds amazing. Has this group gotten much traction?

20:13 Joumana: Yeah, absolutely. So, a lot of the people that I speak to are actually in totally different places. So, we’ll FaceTime occasionally and just kind of touch base about what we’re doing on any like new information that we’ve learned in terms of halal investing, any kinds of opportunities that have opened up. So, it’s definitely something that I’ve been really happy about keeping up with. And it’s definitely been just an absolutely amazing learning opportunity for me as well. Now that I can take it from those Reddit forums into the real world.

20:49 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like you’ve created, I think in the entrepreneurship community, we call this a mastermind, right? A group of people, same people who regularly meet and talk about a certain topic and sort of hold each other accountable and push each other forward towards meeting your goals. That sounds absolutely brilliant. And something that I hope that other people replicate in their own communities or among their own friend networks. Are there any other ways that you would say that your practice of personal finance is different than that of your peers?

21:19 Joumana: Hmm. I don’t know that there are any huge differences really, but I think taking a halal approach to investing and saving money is always really grounding for me in that it acts as this constant reminder that at the end of the day, my finances are meant to serve an ethical role in the world. So, they’re not just a fulfillment for my own needs and desires, but that they also function in this greater sort of just way in the world. And I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s the kind of relationship that many of my peers have been able to cultivate with their finances. I know that many do, I know that many are very interested in socially responsible investments. But yeah, at the end of the day, that is deeply important for me to know about my own finances.

22:11 Emily: Yeah. I think you articulated that very well. It’s very inspiring to hear. I’ve actually recorded another interview on socially responsible investing. I’m not sure if that’ll be published first or if this one will be published first, but in any case, I’ll, I’ll try to link from the show notes to the other one, which is on sort of environmentally focused, socially responsible investing approach. So, these two complement each other very well, I think, in talking about those principles.

Best Financial Advice for an Early-Career PhD

22:34 Emily: So, final question here, Joumana, as we wrap up. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on already in the interview, or it could be something completely else.

22:46 Joumana: Yeah. I think it’s incredibly easy to become overwhelmed when it comes to tracking money, especially as a grad student who is already not earning that much. But really, finding a system that works for you and supports your own mental health is way more important than applying every single piece of advice you read. So, really, the best financial advice that I can give to any other grad student is to do what works for you. To find a system that is helpful to you, and to explore all the options that exist out there. Because what works for someone might just be a terrible use of resources for you.

23:27 Emily: Yeah. I totally agree with that. These systems that we use for managing our money should absolutely be, you know, supporting and complimenting our lives and not be a super heavy burden or some onerous thing that we feel is like externally put on us. It definitely has to come from like within and be, of course, in adherence with your own values and your own priorities. It really should be something that makes you feel good and augments your life instead of, you know, feeling the reverse way. So, I hope that everyone can get to that point with their finances. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast and giving this interview. And you’re obviously, you know, very thoughtful about the subject and I’m so glad that you’ve learned about it and now you’re, you know, turning back around and helping your family and your community learn these principles as well. So, thank you very much.

24:14 Joumana: Thank you, Emily.

Outtro

24:14 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How This PhD Student’s Budgeting Practice Enabled a Hawaiian Vacation

July 20, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

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

Links Mentioned

Find Sean on his blog, Authentically Average, and on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest
Find out more about Sean’s leadership coaching
Blog Post: Put Your Money In What You Value
Blog Post: Travaasa Hana Highlight Reel
Personal Finance for PhDs: Financial Coaching
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

budgeting for travel on a grad student stipend

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translating Life Values to Your Budget

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

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

Retirement Savings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiential Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tithing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living and Dying By Your Budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25:44 Emily: Yeah, exactly.

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

Frugal Tips for Experiential Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Budgeting Pays Off: Sean’s Trip to Hawaii

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

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

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

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

41:39 Emily: Pet-sitting.

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

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

43:51 Sean: Yup, definitely.

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

44:22 Sean: Right, definitely.

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

44:29 Sean: Absolutely.

Where to Find Sean Online

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

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

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

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

Outtro

45:39 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

How to Negotiate as a Graduate Student or PhD in Industry and Academia

July 13, 2020 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research, and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs; the importance of considering all aspect of your offer, not just your salary; the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia vs. industry; and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Abby: Realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one-shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything.

Introduction

00:18 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode 11, and today my guest is Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs, the importance of considering all aspects of your offer, not just your salary, the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia versus industry, and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation. This is a jam-packed episode that will be valuable for graduate students and PhDs at every stage of their careers. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Abby Rainer.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:22 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Abby Rainer, and we’re going to be talking a lot about negotiation and mindsets around that, particularly women in negotiation. I’m so excited for this topic, and Abby is an actual expert. This is related to her PhD work, and she now has a business related to this area. So, she’s going to tell us all a lot more about that. Abby, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And will you fill our listeners in about your background?

01:48 Abby: Sure. Thank you for having me, Emily. I really appreciate being on here. So, to cover my background in a pretty brief term, I got my PhD from Michigan State University in 2018 and got a similar combination of a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Wake Forest. I got the master’s in 2015 and the bachelor’s at the end of 2013. So, I combined both of those degrees into five years just so I could hurry up and get onto the PhD.

02:14 Abby: I was cross-trained in several different areas that are relevant to today’s topic, including communication, industrial organizational psychology, management, human resources, and then education administration. And then areas that I trained on and did research on as well as other administrative work included areas like social support, stress, family planning, and some health topics. But then I also had a lot of business topics like specifically, if you are looking to negotiate your benefits and compensation packages. And then I looked a lot at STEM career trajectories. So, how women were flourishing and more male-dominated areas and the strategies they use to choose their careers and kind of how those paths sort of manifested for them. And then on top of, with my recent background, I have made courses for grad students on Udemy that cover areas like negotiating your benefits and compensation for grad school. And then also if they want to do more of a process improvement project on their finances, then they can find my green belt training there too, which covers a lot of very simple and straightforward ways to save money and document how you do that. It gives you a lot of tools on how to figure that out.

What is Your Udemy Site?

03:22 Emily: Yeah. Could you repeat the name of your Udemy site?

03:26 Abby: Sure. So, the Udemy is just a sort of, what’s called a MOOCs So, a Massive [Open] Online Course website and people can go to Udemy’s website and then they can just type in things like “grad school funding.” That would be a series of keywords that would bring up my training on graduate school benefits and compensation. And then they could also type in green belt, Six Sigma Green Belt, or Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and also my name. So, that should help them see where that pops up. I’ve only created one green belt training. I’ve not had more than one, so it should isolate that one particular training very quickly.

Abby’s Dissertation: Women in STEM + Negotiation

04:01 Emily: Oh good. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be under like your name or like a business name or something. Abby, what’d you tell us a little bit in more detail, what was the subject of your dissertation?

04:10 Abby: Sure. So, I kind of in connection with what I was talking about earlier, I had done research on women in STEM careers and then work on negotiation in general. Like I gave some presentation work on hostage negotiation and terrorism, and this is a very different type of negotiation, but having a background, like a family background in finance, I kind of wanted to combine all those areas and some finance research I had done and specifically look at how women going into STEM careers, specifically their first STEM careers, how they negotiated not only their salaries, but really other types of compensation they could get like their health care packages, how much family time, like leave they had for, for instance, caring for children, and then other areas like bonuses and just work assignments as well.

04:56 Emily: And what drew you to that area? Why did you choose that for your PhD work?

05:01 Abby: I chose that because there was a lot of work that involved experiments, for instance, that created hypothetical situations, but these women were real-life women who had actually gone through actual negotiations in different companies across the United States. And so, I wanted to get a sense of reality. I wanted to see what women were actually going through and I collected a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. I used most of the quantitative data for the PhD sort of dissertation part, but I also created a series of questions in the survey that looked at, for instance, what were the descriptions of the negotiations actually happening, like who was involved in the negotiation? Did they say anything that was maybe discriminatory or that showed some sort of bias toward the women? And so, really looking at those areas, I started to pull some data on things like how much training impacted different outcomes, like how much money women were thinking of walking away with, or how much they actually walked away with.

05:59 Abby: And then I also looked at about 20 different benefits that women were able to get during negotiations, like a series of negotiations, and which ones they tended to get, so I could isolate different trends as to what people were more likely to walk away with other than just the salary being increased.

06:16 Emily: Yeah. I love that you actually took this forward into, let’s not just look at what’s going on, but what interventions are possible to actually help the situation a bit. That’s great. And I’m sure that we’ll talk more about that in a minute here, but just for the listeners. I mean, Abby obviously is an expert in this area. She has a lot to say, so we’re going to move really quickly through a few different questions in this interview. And if you want to follow up with her, which I imagine many of you will want to, check out the website that she already mentioned, her courses and so forth, and you’ll get a lot more of the content there.

Role of Mindset in Negotiation

06:48 Emily: So, okay. I have been talking more and more recently about mindset and about its importance in personal finance. And I know that you also know something about mindset with respect to negotiation. So, what role does mindset play when you’re going into negotiation?

07:07 Abby: I think that mindset has everything to do with not only how confident you are, but also how effective you are. And you have to monitor how you are coming across in an interview so that you have to develop that sense of mindfulness. That way you can do what’s called pivoting. So, pivoting will be that you notice that someone’s not responding particularly well to a negotiation tactic, like using too much silence, for instance. You can turn the conversation around and ultimately start executing a series of steps based on that reaction to get what you want. So, you have to really stay in the present with the conversation, that way you’re able to assess the situation ongoing.

07:40 Abby: And you’re just able to create new strategies or choose ones that you already have in mind as you go along and just keep responding to what’s there, not what’s going on in your head and not what you think should be happening.

How Can PhDs Overcome a Scarcity Mindset when Negotiating?

07:50 Emily: I see. So, kind of what I’m hearing is what happens in negotiation is not totally set, linear, this is the exact script kind of path. And you have to be kind of adaptive to what is going on in the situation. And how can a PhD–like I know a lot of PhDs come into this whole post-PhD career thing with a lot of hangups that they developed in graduate school, around money and around their worth and so forth. And, you know, we might even call this like a scarcity mindset, or like a poverty mindset. And so, how does a PhD set that aside when they’re going into a negotiation? Like how do you actually overcome that if that’s what’s happened during graduate school?

08:31 Abby: I think that one really good way to look at it, especially if you were going into a non-academic job or if you were going into your first professor job and you’re not really sure, kind of where you stand compared to other people is, think through how to calculate and communicate your ROI or return on investment. That’s a very important business term not a lot of PhDs really think about or know how to calculate or communicate. But whenever you’re in a negotiation, let’s just say, I’m going to use a real life example of mine. I was interviewing with a major retailer, specifically in the jean sector, once for a job. I had to fly out to a different state to do that. And as I was there, I talked with, I think about 10 to 20 people.

09:11 Abby: And just one day, I had a series of individual meetings with some people, like higher-level directors, and then a larger lunch with a smaller group of people who were lower-ranked. I think they were maybe talent recruiters or something. And so, what I learned while there was that people wanted to hear how you were able to contribute to the table in ways they understood. So, with that particular case, I was interviewing for a jean company. So, some language to use when communicating my ROI would have been things like “best-sellers.” Like if I wanted to predict who was going to be engaged in a company over time, so looking at employee engagement, how to improve that, I could say the five best-sellers or in more or less research terms that grad students might understand, the five predictors of work engagement would be, let’s just say supervisor quality and four other things.

10:03 Abby: So, learning how to speak in ways that people in industry understand that don’t necessarily rely on statistics, because a lot of them don’t really know very much, if anything, about statistics is a good idea. And you can apply that mindset too if you’re applying to academic jobs like being a professor or a postdoc. You just have to know, for instance, let’s just say for ROI, you wanted to calculate how much grant money you’ve brought to the table when applying for different grants, or how many students you’ve taught, or ways that you’ve saved the university money. Other things like those can be communicated in a way that’s specific to your department or organization and what they care about. So, match what you’ve done to what people care about, and communicate it in a way that uses industry-specific language that they understand. And you should be good to go and sort of like start to defeat that poverty mindset over time. Because you can physically see–you can’t really contradict numbers in that case–you can see on paper, “Okay, I’ve done a hundred thousand worth of grants in one year. That’s a lot of money.” So, just starting to visualize that, but also learn how to be precise is important.

Focus on Thriving, Not Just Surviving

11:07 Emily: Yeah. What I’m hearing you say in this portion is like, I think part of the problems, and these are universal outside of academic training or whatever. Some people, a lot of people come into a negotiation thinking, “What do I need to survive? What kind of salary do I need to command to have the lifestyle that I want?” And coming out of graduate school, it’s probably not a high number because you’ve probably been living on a pretty, pretty low salary for the last several years. And you’re reframing this not as, “Okay, well, what do I need to get by?” But rather, “What value am I bringing to this organization? What metrics, what proof points do I have to back this up?” And also the further step of, “I need to communicate this to them in a way that they’re going to latch onto and appreciate,” not necessarily your most natural way of communicating. Does that sum up what you were saying?

11:55 Abby: Absolutely. And what a lot of people have to think about is not really putting themselves of “How much money do I need to survive,” but, “What is my, what’s called, market value?” So, when you look at market value, it’s a completely different mindset from what you’re taught in grad school, because the norms in your particular field, like if you’re going into tech, the norms for salary and benefits will be different they. Somewhat depending on the company, but also compared to other industries. Like if you work in manufacturing. So, you have to just consider those differences. But also you have to think of the whole negotiation as a win-win mindset. So, it’s not just about what can I get from this company. You have to think about me, myself, and family, because realistically speaking, and I know this is kind of harsh, but a lot of people, and especially in HR, will, if people say something in an interview, like “I need this much mind to live,” unfortunately they’ll just tell you perhaps even bold facedly, they don’t care, you know, what you need to survive, which it knows is harsh and I would never–I’m in HR.

12:48 Abby: So, I would never say that to an applicant. But really the company just cares about what you can bring to the table, because the implication of you bringing things is that they will take care of you in turn. So, you don’t really have to communicate, “This is what I need.” You have to show them based on, for instance, your certificates, what your capacities are, just different software and other skills that they find relevant. You can use all of that to get more money because you are clearly bringing more to the table. They’ll be generally more willing to pay for all those skills. Because especially, at least in my case, for instance, I bring a lot of really rare skill sets to my particular job. And I got that job through a contract. And so, you know, just being able to show what all you bring that will help the company give you the money and you won’t have to worry about surviving as much. You’ll be able to think about thriving, which is completely different, as far as the psychological response goes. Survival schools, more of grad school, it’s just the bare minimum. What can I possibly scrape by? With industry, you should present yourself as what can I do to thrive and help people at work thrive and just kind of frame it like that.

Big-Picture Negotiation Items Besides Salary

13:47 Emily: Yeah, so this is really, you know, taking a step back from being very me, me as the applicant, very me-focused and more about what am I bringing to this organization? What other big-picture items should applicants be thinking about when they’re going into a negotiation process?

14:02 Abby: I think that one of the big ones that a lot of people don’t really particularly talk about, and sometimes I’ve heard in even other podcasts, maybe discourage a little bit, is thinking about what’s called the total reward lens. So, the total reward lens, if you think of the big pie, for instance, like the kind of pie you can eat, not the number. If you think of a pie and you think of all the possible pieces that could come out of it, those are all interrelated, but they’re also their own separate entities once they’ve been cut out of the pie. So, they’re able to be standalone items. Whenever you think of a total reward lens, whenever it comes to getting what you want from work, you have to think of that kind of like a pie, too, because salary is naturally going to be a big part of that pie for a lot of people. But you also have other pieces of the pie like your healthcare, which projects you can work on, the quality of your supervisor.

14:51 Abby: And then some other areas like how much autonomy do you get? Or how much natural light does your office get? And those pieces of the pie in terms of their size or their weight, depending on how you want to think about it, are all different for different people. So, you have to think about, “If I were to make my ideal pie, what would that look like in terms of where all the pieces are and how much those matter relative to the overall sort of picture that I’ve got going on?” Because different people are going to have different needs. If you’ve got a parent who’s got young children, then maybe flexibility might be more important for them. Or if you have someone who’s more into work-life balance, like they want to go ski on the weekends, then that might be very important to them, too. But it might not be as important to someone who maybe like myself is single and doesn’t really have to take care of kids, at least right now. So, it really depends on your specifics. So, you just have to like define those numbers for yourself, but also realize if you don’t get a bigger part of the pie focusing on salary, maybe you could get a bigger part of the pie that would focus on another area or two or three other areas that you also care about.

Is Everything Open for Negotiation?

15:53 Emily: Yeah. I think this is an area that people definitely don’t pay enough attention to. Like you were saying, it’s kind of all about the salary, but there are so many other aspects to your benefits or just your work culture and work style that should play into your decision about which kind of job to accept and also what to negotiate. So, would you say that is every piece of this pie up for negotiation? Or like where might one focus your negotiation if you’re not quite happy with all the different pieces?

16:22 Abby: A lot of it depends on the type of job you have. So, for instance, if you are working in a government position that is governed by a shared contract, like a collective bargaining agreement, for instance. Then certain areas of your package, like the initial salary may very well not be negotiable. I actually had to tell, whenever I was hiring people, several individuals who applied, this is part of the collective bargaining agreement. You can’t negotiate it. Over time, you can perform better and get a bonus that way. But at least with this contract, your salary, at least your base, is set. So, if you want to get more money over time, it’s really on you. You have to perform in terms of exceeding expectations. And then you can get more money that way. You can also get other money by doing other tasks that the job would be open to.

17:08 Abby: So, for instance, if you did overtime, that might be something that you’d be able to get more money from, but it again depends on whether that’s available. So, those are some examples of what all you could do besides money. And then, of course, you have to think about too, what other options are available? And most places have a lot of different options when it comes to healthcare. For instance, you might have a lower deductible, and that works for you whenever it comes to healthcare, compared to someone else who wants to have a higher deductible. Or you might want to put more money in your 401k, like a retirement account, or, you know, the company might match whatever you do put in. So, you just have to look at/get sort of an initial view. If you can, if there’s an employment handbook, that will usually tell you different things like the possible packages available, the benefits, like maybe gym membership.

17:53 Abby: So, try and look there first. And usually those come through websites, they might be coming through HR. Like HR might directly send you them. Once you get your initial offer letter, just take a look at not only the offer letter, but the information they send over through those handbooks. A lot of people don’t even bother to look at those handbooks, but they’re very useful. So, I would just say, take a survey of what you’ve gotten initially. And then if you’re not happy with something, think about, “Okay, what could I bring to the table in terms of ROI to argue why I should get that thing?” So, it’s not like, most places are not going to have a huge conversation about negotiating healthcare. You go on and enroll yourself. So, that’s kind of a proxy for negotiation, but if it’s something like maybe extra days off, you would want to be able to come up with an argument to justify that. Personally, from an HR standpoint, I wouldn’t start from the job like day one saying, “I want more hours off.” I would wait until over time, maybe six months once you’ve had a little bit of tenure there, to propose that. But it just really depends on your situation. Try to take into account whatever information you do receive. And if you have questions, of course, ask at that time into your discussion, depending on your situation.

Commercial

19:04 Emily: Hey social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15-minute call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time. I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now, back to our interview.

How Employee Training Benefits the Employer

19:50 Emily: I want to mention one of the things that my husband actually negotiated for when he took his current position was, I guess you would call it, like training. So, like professional development. Maybe it’s something like, it’s not clear whether that actually like increased, you know, what he was going to get anyway, but it made it more explicit to his employer that he was looking to advance his career. And this is how he saw, you know, that he wanted to do it. And they said, “Yes” to it. Like, “Yes” to his proposal. So, I would imagine that would apply in a lot of other places, maybe where negotiation on salary or something else is a little bit more rigid. But you know, you can set yourself up right from the beginning to, you know, to seem like a go getter, right? You’re going for a promotion like right away, you know, you’re eager. You’re going to be growing your career. You want to grow with that company and how can they help you do that?

20:37 Abby: Right. And one of the things that you want to communicate whenever you’re proposing for something like more training is what kind of value that would also bring to the company, because that will set you up. For instance, one of the trainings I received during my government job, my last job, was that I was able to become a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. And a lot of people might not know what those are or what they mean in terms of quantities, but in the process improvement area and finance and some other areas, those are very well sought-after certifications for people to have. And you can bump up your salary over time by anywhere from 5,000 with green belt to maybe 20,000 plus with a black belt.

21:13 Abby: But at the same time, you’re also able to save companies a lot of money because you’re able to go in, create change interventions, lead people through those interventions, and then identify ways that your group can maybe devote money to other resources. Like if you’re spending too much on training, for instance, and you could maybe cut costs or reallocate those costs, then maybe you can use that money to give people higher bonuses or something to that effect. So, as you’re proposing that increase in training, definitely make sure to communicate how that would benefit the company too, because in some way, shape or form, it probably will. You just want to make sure that people understand what that is from a very early standpoint. That way, you can frame your training as, “Okay, I propose there are five key goals that I’m going to get out of this. I’m going to go in, get those and I’ll show my team whatever those things were.” That way I can make sure I’m consistent with what I promised.

Negotiation in Academia vs. Industry

22:00 Emily: Excellent. So, I imagine we have people in the audience who, you know, they’re hearing your talk and you’ve mentioned industry a lot so far. But many of my listeners may be, you know, gunning to stay in academia. So, is the process of negotiation different, the same between those two different types of workplaces?

22:20 Abby: I would say that some of the behavioral norms and perceptions are very different. Because when I was in academia, I was in grad school and then I negotiated for my negotiation packages, like my benefits and compensation packages. And so, the first time I did it, wasn’t really negotiable as we were kind of on a collective bargaining agreement. Again, meaning that we all just had the same benefits and compensation. Like our stipends were all the same, and there wasn’t really a step-raise as much. But a lot of people in academia can negotiate quite a lot, too. And I would say that one of those critical parts of you negotiating, whether you’re a faculty member or a grad student of any level coming in, is that make sure you go do a campus visit. If you’re not invited to, definitely make sure you go do one. Because you want to get kind of a survey as to what your office area might look like, what the different resources like laboratories for instance are or libraries, and really how the people are, too, and kind of how everything is arranged. Because what I’ve noticed over time is that the way a department is arranged in terms of its space, its people, and its resources will tell you a lot about how you’ll fit well there or not.

23:23 Abby: So, for instance, I went to whenever deciding between two different PhD programs, I decided which one based on the visit that I went to with each one. So, whenever I went to grad school A, Choice A, I noticed that for instance, the offices had no windows whatsoever. And that’s very common in a lot of places in academia, especially if you’re in a much larger, more kind of cloistered building. And I was thinking, I’m definitely the kind of person who needs natural light. And that might not sound like a big deal to many people. But when you’re in an office for three years, constantly working on high-stress projects, maybe dealing with students who have a lot of problems and then other people who come in with different requests, you want to make sure that you have an office that’s inviting to at least some extent.

24:08 Abby: And so, I thought a natural light kind of office would be better for that. That wasn’t as big of a pie piece. Getting back to my pie analogy earlier, compared to the travel stipend that I got, for instance, but it definitely was important. So, use the visit that you get to kind of determine what you need to negotiate and think about because you can actually get a lot more by going to visit. Because whenever I went to visit, I got an extra, I think it was 4,000 at the start, from Place A compared to Place B just by contributing during the discussions that people had about, you know, why you want to become a grad student here and so on. And you’re able to meet people and add value to them. And that’s the key thing is make sure you add value that way. People are more likely to give you things in return because you can leverage that powerful principle of social reciprocity, which is if someone gets something from you, they’re more likely to give back in return.

Virtual Campus Visits

24:56 Emily: So, we’re recording this on March 23rd, 2020. And I think all PhD grad visits are probably off at this point for the remainder of admission season. Now, we’re actually going to publish this episode, I think after April 15th. So, after all the decisions have been made. But I’m just thinking about for students in this current situation, or maybe in future years when a visit is not possible for whatever reason. Of course, it’s ideal, but if it’s not possible, how can an applicant as a graduate student, or even at a later stage, get a sense of these things remotely, somehow? What do they need to do to create a facsimile of an actual visit?

25:36 Abby: Sure. So, there are different options. And I think that departments, if any faculty are listening, I would highly encourage them to explore this option. I’ll really just lay out two quick options. One would be to see if there’s any way–some departments already do this, depending on the school and the department you’re in, some don’t. Some departments offer digital tours. So, if students cannot come for whatever reason, they might have someone doing kind of a vlog of the laboratory, that might be something that’s interesting and valuable to you. And maybe you can live tweet them while you’re doing that. It really just depends on who all is leading that. Another option would be to, and you probably should do this in addition to option one, if you can. But another option would be definitely talking about your office setup and other things with faculty and grad students. Grad students would be more likely the safer option whenever it comes to communicating about what their offices are like. Faculty may very well not know anything about what current grad students are doing with their offices.

26:28 Abby: A lot of places do publish things about their grad student groups. Like who’s the president, VP, finance person, so forth. I was the finance chair with my group. But try to get out to reach that person, and they will probably connect you. If they don’t know something, they will connect you with someone who does. So, I would follow those steps. And then also just if the place has a Facebook group, for instance, definitely see what all people are taking pictures of there. And really over time, I would just say, try to ask a lot of really good questions. Because faculty and grad students love it when someone not only praises their work that they’ve been working on, but they have a mutual interest in, but also they appreciate someone who asked really thoughtful questions about things that they care about, too. So, I think if you frame it still as a win-win, like I’m giving this person a valuable, interesting conversation and they’re giving me information in turn that’s useful, I think that that will help you come across a lot more effectively. Because email conversations were very instrumental for me, too, whenever applying to grad school and deciding between different schools as well.

Misconceptions Around Negotiation

27:25 Emily: Yeah, I think if at all possible those conversations should happen over the phone or over video conferencing. Just because if a grad student, for instance, has anything not so nice to say about their department or their advisor or their group or whatever, they’re probably not going to want to put that in writing. So, it’s much better to speak live and not in a recorded fashion when you’re having those really candid conversations with current graduate students. So, thank you so much for those thoughts, Abby. And finally, can you clear up any misconceptions for us around negotiation and negotiation strategies?

28:03 Abby: I think that one of the biggest ones that I didn’t really think about early on, but started to realize over time, and then of course in retrospect, see a lot better is that a lot of people worry about negotiation if they don’t get it right the very first time–like their first semester right as, for instance, they’re getting into grad school or right as they’re becoming a professor or an industry professional–that they’ll never be able to do negotiation over time, or they’ll never be able to get it right. So, there’s that kind of fixed mentality of, “If I don’t get it now then I never will.” And that’s not necessarily true because the truth is that your job is very dynamic over time. People change. Sometimes departments get reorganized as we’ve seen more lately, whether you are in academia or in industry. Sometimes entire companies get reorganized to where their benefits and compensation structures change.

28:46 Abby: So, always be aware of what’s going on in your organization or in your grad school or your department, if you’re a faculty member or person wanting to join that. And just keep aware of the changes going on. That way, you can see different opportunities. Also make sure to realize that you are still, no matter where you are in your career, adding some sort of value, like a service, to your department or a company, for instance. So, keep abreast as to what ROI you are bringing to the table. And you can even keep, for instance, like a shout out sheet. I know a lot of people will use that. So, it’s like a list of all those accomplishments you have, what value that’s added, like making employees more engaged or improving organization, like even organizing a closet or like an area of the office where people store papers or files can be very useful. That may or may not be in your job description, but it depends on your situation.

Negotiation Can Happen Over Time

29:36 Abby: So, just realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything. Because for instance, whenever I went into grad school, the grad school I chose for my PhD program had a lower stipend than the one that was offering me a package in return. And the reason I chose that other one was just that it really seemed to fit more with what I was hoping to do regarding the research methods path I wanted to go on, regarding the kind of set up of the department, and some other factors. But what happened was that over time I actually got, I think it was 15,000 extra dollars from that department during my three years there because I got 3,000 extra dollars in conference funding that I didn’t even have to apply for. The department chair just told me I qualified for it based on how I was a domestic student.

30:31 Abby: There were other things like consultant contracts which I was able to get and work on that brought in extra money. And then there were some other things too, like dissertation grant money that I got a lot more of there than I would have at the other place. So, I actually ended up kind of starting from a lower place at that Choice B university or not really Choice B, but Option B, and then working my way up to where I got actually a lot more money, pretty much almost a year’s worth of extra money, for only going three years. So, it doesn’t have to be like a one shot kind of picture. You just have to think over time, how can I find ways to negotiate? And if people want to read an area of IO psychology that deals with this a lot too, but not necessarily in money terms, they can look at what’s called the job crafting literature. And so, job crafting will show you different opportunities that you have to negotiate and it’s got four different categories and several of those papers. Very useful.

Where Can People Find You?

31:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that tip. And speaking of, you know, where to go more, can you just mention again where people can find you if they want to hear more from you?

31:31 Abby: Sure. So, other than my Udemy course on negotiating your funding for grad school and then on another for Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, which shows people how to save money, people can also go to Twitter. My handle is @rainer_abby. And then they can also go to find me on LinkedIn a lot. And it’s just Abby Rainer PhD Lean Six Sigma Black Belt on there. So, those are the main places right now that they can go.

Best Financial Advice for an Early-Career PhD

31:59 Emily: That’s excellent. Thank you so much. And I always conclude my interviews with this question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we touched on today in the interview, or it can be something completely different.

32:13 Abby: I would say that my best financial advice would be, and one of my early advisors told me this as well, is that if you do anything regarding finance, make sure to get it in writing and to make sure it’s in very clear writing. Because sometimes especially if you’re in a company or in grad school, people will promise you things like working on projects or grant money, but they might not be very upfront about it, or very clear as to when you’ll get that money, how, and so forth. I break a lot of this down in my Udemy training on funding for grad school, but just make sure that you get everything–the who, what, when, where, why and how–very clear, because you want to know exactly where your money’s coming from, why you were getting it, how it’s going to be dispersed to you.

32:56 Abby: And if you need to return part of that for any reason, like if you’re writing a grant, how you do that. Just so that everybody is very clear about what expectations are and there’s no fuzzy area regarding what needs to be done and by who.

33:09 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s excellent advice. And it’s also not even necessarily people being like underhanded and like purposefully leading you on or whatever. Sometimes people are just forgetful. And especially, you know, like in graduate school, faculty members, they’ve got a lot on their plates, so it really is better for all parties to be really clear and put it in writing, as you said so that everyone’s on the same page about what’s going to happen and when and so forth. So, thank you so much for that advice. And thank you for this interview, Abby.

33:36 Abby: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And I hope that people find this very useful because I didn’t know any of this before grad school or my time in academia. And some of it, I didn’t even know before my time in industry, but now that I’ve kind of been in both worlds, I see a lot of things that maybe I wouldn’t have before. And they can do that, too. It’s not just, you have to have a background in finance. You can do it regardless of where you’re from.

33:58 Emily: Absolutely. Negotiation is a topic that I don’t know as much as I would like to know about it. And so I’m highly interested in getting more of this content out to my audience. So, thank you so much for providing it.

34:08 Abby: You’re very welcome. Thank you. I appreciate you having me and hope everybody does well.

Outtro

34:13 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode, register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How This Grad Student Navigated a Broken Engagement in a High Cost-of-Living City

July 6, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Tina Del Carpio, a third-year PhD student at the University of California at Los Angeles in ecology and evolutionary biology. Tina chose their PhD program in Los Angeles in no small part because their fiance’s career was tied to the city. However, when they moved in with him and started planning the wedding, cracks began to form in the relationship. When they broke up, Tina had to figure out how to extricate themself from their shared apartment and yours-mine-and-ours financial system. Fortunately, Tina landed on their feet with the help of their NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, understanding advisor, and network of supportive friends. At the beginning and end of the episode, Tina and Emily also discuss the power of self-advocacy in graduate school.

Links Mentioned

Find Tina Del Carpio on Twitter and on their blog
Related episode: Making Ends Meet on a Graduate Student Stipend in Los Angeles
Personal Finance for PhDs: Tax Center
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

00:00 Tina: Thankfully, we also talked about what would happen if we broke up, even before I moved out here. I was very adamant about having my own support network and knowing that I’d be able to survive without, if things just didn’t work or we’d gotten divorced or something.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast to higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode ten, and today my guest is Tina Del Carpio a third year PhD student at UCLA in ecology and environmental biology. Tina chose their PhD program in Los Angeles in no small part because their fiance’s career was tied to the city. However, when they moved in with him and started planning, the wedding, cracks began to form in the relationship. When they broke up, Tina had to figure out how to extricate themself from their shared apartment and “yours, mine and ours” financial system. Listen through the end of the interview to hear how Tina handles their finances these days, and they’re excellent advice for other early career PhDs on advocating for yourself. By the way we recorded this interview in September, 2019. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Tina Del Carpio.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further

01:19 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today. Tina Del Carpio, who is a graduate student at UCLA, and we’re discussing a little bit of a tough topic today, which is Tina’s breakup from about a year and a half ago. They had a little bit of financial commingling before the breakup and had to disentangle themselves from one another afterwards, which was a challenging thing to do in the midst of graduate school. Tina, I’m so delighted to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. And will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself?

01:47 Tina: Of course. Thanks for having me on Emily. My name’s Tina Del Carpio, my preferred pronouns are they/them or she/her. I’m a second year PhD student at UCLA, or I guess about to be a third year PhD student at UCLA. My focus is on genetics and epigenetics of canids, specifically dogs and foxes.

Getting Engaged, Starting Grad School and Moving to LA

02:10 Emily: Okay, so we need to take this story back to when you started graduate school. How did you make the decision to go to UCLA? What factors were you?

02:19 Tina: Yeah, so this is actually really entangled with my relationship because at the time, my partner and I had been long distance for about five years and he was working in the film industry, so his life and his job were very tied out to LA. I geographically restricted my search to universities near Los Angeles, or ideally in Los Angeles. I was very fortunate to make a connection with a postdoc from the lab that I currently I’m a student in. I talked to her about her experience in the lab and the project that she was sort of leaving behind as she was graduating. I got really interested in that project and was looking to pick it up and met with her and the advisor, my now advisor, Bob Wayne, and we talked about the project and they helped me put together an application for the NSF GRFP. I ended up being awarded that fellowship. This all happened kind of very quickly. We actually had this conversation, decided for me to apply for the NSF, like a week before it was due. I actually only applied to UCLA in that case and figured “oh it’s a crap shoot. I probably won’t get in, and I’ll just stay on track with my other plan to just apply to a bunch of schools the following year.” But it worked out, I got funding and it was in my ideal city, and with an advisor was happy to work with.

03:49 Emily: That is an incredible story, not even the one that we’re focused on today, but I love hearing about sort of non-traditional ways of finding your way into a PhD lab. You networked your way basically into this, right? You said you first connected with a postdoc who was leaving the lab, then that connection led you to the advisor and put together this NSF application, which by the way in a week, that was successful. That is incredible! Good job on that. How did you first make that connection with that postdoc?

04:22 Tina: Yeah, so it’s funny. I literally was thinking about, okay, I changed jobs, I was working as a lab tech gaining more research experience to apply to grad school, and I had just sort of wistfully bookmarked a bunch of labs that I was interested in applying to in about a year. Then my boss announced that we’re getting a new postdoc. It happened that she was coming from one of the labs that I had bookmarkedm and when she came out to look for housing and to make some plans to settle in, in North Carolina, I kind of cornered her and was like, “Hey, so I’m interested in applying to the Wayne lab, can you tell me about the Wayne lab.” Also, it happened to line up with, I was about to be in LA visiting my ex, and so I was like, “Hey, I’m going to be there next week, can we meet up in person, and can you give me a face to face introduction with Bob?”

05:15 Emily: That is incredible. I mean, this is how networking works. It’s not like you were in some unrelated lab, right? You were already on the course to be studying something related to what you would ultimately do in graduate school. Of course there are related labs and people know each other and you run into people. That’s a wonderful story. It’s actually not that dissimilar from how I got into my graduate school, which is that my husband started — we graduate from college at the same time, but he started graduate school at Duke immediately, whereas I did a postbac year. And so, because I was regularly visiting him in Durham, I was especially interested in getting into Duke, and I basically used one of my visits to see him as like, “Hey, various professors that I’m interested in, why don’t I set up my own interview with you?” all prior to admission season even starting and made a few connections there. Ultimately applied to Duke and various other places and went through kind of the normal admissions route after that point, but then ultimately circle back around, and one of the people who I had created my own interview with ultimately, you know, offered me a position and he was my advisor during graduate school. These things, if you have the motivation, sometimes they do work out. I’m really glad that we have that story upfront.

06:28 Emily: Okay, so you were awarded the NSF GRF, that’s awesome, and you’re starting at UCLA and you’re finally living in the same city as your partner. What was going on with you guys like logistically and financially at that time?

06:40 Tina: Yeah. Things are getting a little bit more commingled and complicated at that point. When I actually got the NSF and got accepted to UCLA, because actually I initially wasn’t accepted and wasn’t even invited on the official interview weekend, but suddenly having your own funding for three years opens doors.

07:01 Emily: No kidding.

07:02 Tina: Yeah. So I got the NSF award and then shortly afterwards we got engaged, and then planned a wedding, made a lot of wedding deposits, and then I moved out into LA. Part of the navigating how to do our finances together, we basically decided we’d each keeps some of our money separate, but we opened together a checking account, a savings account, and a credit card, so we could both funnel some money into that and use that to build up a little bit of shared savings and also to pay off any expenses, groceries, rent, things related to the wedding, et cetera.

07:43 Emily: I want to ask a little bit more about that because this is becoming a very popular model, whereas maybe a few decades ago, a vast majority of couples were using fully joint finances. Some minority were using fully separate finances. Now this “yours, mine and ours” model is becoming very, very popular. As you said, most people use it for shared expenses like rent, like you were just saying, you had the wedding that you were putting down deposits for all that kind of thing. How did you decide on the split? Were you guys contributing equal amounts of money to your joint accounts? Or was it maybe by a percentage of income or how did you navigate that?

08:23 Tina: Yeah, so I guess the tricky part we were navigating was housing costs because my ex made about double what I was making, even on an NSF salary or stipend. We ended up deciding for housing that we would pay housing proportional, so he paid two thirds of our rent and I paid one third, especially moving from Durham, my rent went from $400 for my half of a two bed, two bath to we had a like $2,400, one bed, one and a half bathroom apartment. So my rent was changing significantly and also I was eating up a bunch of moving costs. So housing, we decided to do proportionately, but everything else we decided to just split 50/50.

09:10 Emily: At least it was the conversation that you had. That is a great point that you’re at least coming to a firm decision and have a strategy for addressing it. So the place that you were living, which was out of your price range, it sounds like, or I guess was it actually, so like, would you have made a different housing decision had you been moving there as a single person or maybe looking to find a roommate or like what would have been different and how much do you think you would have been paying?

09:35 Tina: Yeah, so I would have definitely looked for something different because it was…well, there was also a lot of uncertainty for me of like, what are my housing costs going to be? Even coming to LA my car insurance went up significantly and that’s actually a thing that I also commingled with my ex. He had USAA, which has a great insurance discount. I added my car onto his, onto his insurance, and so it took me a little while to navigate that and figure that out. But initially the budget I had set for myself was $800 for my rent. And then eventually, you know, I had to reconcile that when we were breaking up.

10:16 Tina: Thankfully we also talked about what would happen if we broke up, even before I moved out here, because my mom got divorced after like 20 years of marriage and I saw the financial struggles my mom went through because she had stopped working to take care of her three kids and the house and things. Then my dad lost his job and all these other problems. And of course, issues between my parents that led to them being divorced. I just watched my mom struggle a lot with her finances without my father to help support her anymore, so I was very adamant about having my own support network and knowing that I’d be able to survive without, if things just didn’t work out or if we’d gotten divorced or something. I feel like I I kinda lost the thread there, what were we talking about?

11:06 Emily: What different housing decisions might you have made? This rolls into what housing decision did you make once you guys decided to split up. Have we concluded talking about all the intermingling that was going on prior to the breakup? Is that about what the full picture was?

11:24 Tina: Yeah, I think so. I think the point I was trying to get to earlier that I lost was we talked about if we broke up and especially when we actually did break up, there was like a couple of months of us discussing it before it actually happened. But we reaffirmed that if we broke up, we would continue paying for the apartment that same way. That I would still just be paying a third and that he would continue paying two thirds, and he ended up moving out since he had family and places to go here, and my nearest family members are in Florida. I stayed living in the apartment for a couple of months until the lease was resolved and he continued to pay that two thirds of the apartment. Thankfully that was something we had discussed and agreed upon long before the breakup.

Financial Ramifications of Breaking of The Engagement

12:08 Emily: Yeah. I think we can move into kind of talking about that second phase now. It sounds like it was a long conversation. You guys had a long relationship, you were on the track to getting married, this is not something to be undertaken lightly. So you were having these conversations over a relatively long period of time. And of course, one of your concerns was how do I provide for myself in this transition to not being in this partnership any longer? So one of the things that you discussed and agreed on was the rent split. What else did you have to do once you guys decided that this breakup is official, the engagement is off? What other things had to happen to fully separate from one another?

12:46 Tina: I think the housing was the biggest thing because we broke up before our lease expired. It was like this big burden and I talked to the landlord and he told us that if we could rent the apartment to somebody else, he’d be willing to terminate our lease. Actually, I got into like kind of a sticky situation that I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with, but where he was like, okay, I’ll advertise the apartment, but I need you guys to show the apartment. Even after we had actually moved our stuff out and we’re no longer living there, he was still like, no, you guys have to show it, I’m not gonna drive over and show it. I was still devoting time and energy to that, and it ended up still being worth it. It took a couple months to rent the apartment to somebody else, but we managed to end the lease at least a month early. For me getting back that $800 was huge.

13:43 Emily: Yeah. So the housing situation was the main one. It sounds like your ex was pretty generous, or maybe you would say reasonable, right? He was okay with continuing to pay your agreed upon portions of the rent for the amount of time necessary, but you were still doing what you needed to do to get out of it as soon as possible.

Commercial

14:03 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude, the deadline for filing your federal tax return and making your quarters one and two estimated tax payments was extended to July 15th, 2020. I never expected to still be talking about taxes into the summer, but here we are. Post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows still need major help in this area because of their unique situation. I provide tons of support to PhD trainees preparing their tax returns and calculating their estimated tax. Go to PFforPhDs.com/tax to read my free articles and find out if one of my tax workshops is right for you. I have one workshop on how to prepare your annual tax return and one how to determine if you owe quarterly estimated tax. Both workshops include videos, supplemental documents, and live Q&A calls with me go to P F F O R P H D S.com/T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Making Budget Adjustments

15:19 Emily: So where did you move to and how did you find that next housing situation?

15:24 Tina: Yeah. So for me, I like living with other people. Actually I describe myself as painfully extroverted, so the first move was to find another roommate or find a roommate, I guess. A person in my cohort I had been spending some time with and was taking a class with and felt comfortable discussing some of my relationship stuff with, I mentioned to her like, yeah, I might be moving and looking for a new roommate soon. She was also in a housing situation, in grad student housing housing, which is really expensive here. I know Adriana, you interviewed awhile ago was living in like the family housing that’s highly subsidized, but my roommate was in the regular housing that’s like $1,300 per person per month, so not nearly as subsidized. Anyways, I found the person to live with, and then I was sort of waiting for her to finish up her paperwork to get released from her housing contract. And based on the new information I had of how much it was actually costing me to live in LA, I set a new budget of $1,100 a month for rent, and we found a two bedroom, two bathroom near campus, but far enough away that it was in our price range, and most importantly, for us, it had to be near a bus stop, so it was easy to get to campus.

16:44 Emily: Yeah. A couple of points I want to follow up within that. One is yes, I had that interview with Adriana and she was living in family housing for UCLA. I have another interview that’s been recorded, but not released as of the moment that we’re doing this interview, with Dr. Travis Seifman, and he is specifically talking about grad student housing. He’s lived in like a couple of different of the UC grad student housing, different universities. And then he’s also lived in graduate student housing at some other universities, including overseas. We have an extensive discussion around this, and one of the things that we talk about is his consternation around the price difference between family housing and single but roommates housing, and why is it that there’s such a price difference there. And so anyway, for any listeners who are particularly interested in that discussion, I’ll recommend that other interview. TBD when it will actually be published. Thanks for bringing that up.

17:39 Emily: One of the things I really like about the story is that, once you had been in LA, at UCLA for a year, you were able to, well, one, probably be more realistic about the amount of money you were able to pay in rent. Your budget went from $800 up to $1,100 per month. And then also, you found a person you wanted to live with and you guys probably had more at that point familiarity with the area and were able to do a housing search a little bit better than you could have from a distance. Of course that’s the case. My message, what I want to emphasize to listeners is that it’s a really good idea to reevaluate your housing, maybe after your first year of graduate school, whenever you’re thinking about housing in that second year, because you probably know a lot more about the area that you’ve moved to in that second iteration of the housing search. So how did that new higher rent fit in with your budget? What adjustments did you make to make that happen?

18:03 Tina: Yeah, I mean, I think I actually just had room for it. I had over budgeted other items. It took us a while to figure out the car insurance, and initially I was planning for my car insurance to double and instead it only gone up $30 and even then, it went up again when I had to separate my car insurance from my ex’s, but not as much as I was anticipating, so that was helpful. I think I ended up having to put a little bit less into savings, I think that’s where most of the difference came from. A couple of things that I have over head over budgeted initially, before I knew anything out here and then also pulling a little bit out of what I was contributing to my savings.

19:15 Emily: Another thing you did really well, there is to be sort of conservative in your estimates of your spending, in that you think you’re going to spend more than maybe you actually do, so you have that wiggle room for later adjustments within your budget.

Financial Life after the Break-up

19:27 Emily: Okay, we’ve gone through the breakup process and the separation from your ex, how are things looking in your finances today?

19:35 Tina: They’re looking okay. I just made a big purchase recently. I had a car that was a lease and I recently bought out my lease, and so that took a big chunk of my money. Basically, my car to buy out was like $12,000 with taxes and fees, and if I had been buying it from a used car dealership would have been closer to like $16,000, so it seemed like a pretty good deal. Especially since I could buy it out right, I’m not paying any interest on it. And the way I did that, is I had a considerable savings, just like paying out of my savings account. And so I paid for a third of the car, my father was able to contribute a third, and then another family member was able to lend me a third. So I did still take out a loan for my car, but from a family member who is lending it to me without any interest, of course.

20:27 Emily: Yeah. So that was a big chunk out of your funding, but that’s nice to not have that monthly expense. I mean, it’s still a monthly expense because you’re repaying the loan, but a much, much smaller one.

20:36 Tina: Yeah.

20:37 Emily: That is a great reduction in the rest of your spending. That’s great. It sounds like you and your ex were really thoughtful in this process. You had seen your parents get divorced and so you were keeping in your mind, this is a possibility. You’re going to move to LA, you’re going to live together, start commingling your finances. Maybe things won’t work out, you’re not married yet, and even after that, it still could not work out. It sounds like you did things pretty intelligently and carefully through this process, and so I think that you have like a positive example here of how this can happen, but is there anything that you, looking back, wish that you had done differently?

21:14 Tina: I think most of it was pretty settled. I wish I’d been a little bit more thoughtful about how we divided up and dealt with paying the wedding deposits, because that was a little bit of a thorn in my side when we were splitting up. And arguably my ex paid significantly more in the wedding deposits than I did, but he essentially, at the end of the day was the one who asked to call the wedding off, and so I requested that he pay me back for the wedding deposits that I had paid, which amounted to about a thousand dollars, which, again on a grad student income is a pretty significant chunk of money. And the message I got was, well, let’s see how long it takes you to move out of the apartment, and how much money is spent on the apartment, and then we can make this decision.

22:11 Tina: Then even though we saved more than that by moving out of the apartment early, then there was like some thorny issues about the engagement ring. So the engagement ring had been less than $2,000 and under the law in California, if the giver breaks off the engagement, the receiver legally owns the ring. Also my ex had told me, “oh, the ring is yours, it’s a gift to keep no matter what” and basically when I brought up the issue of my lost money on the wedding deposits, was told, “well, I let you keep the engagement ring, you should be able to sell that and recoup some of this money.” Then it turned out that he had super overpaid for the engagement ring and the money I can recoup from that is very little. I wish I had been a little bit more thoughtful about that sort of spending before we like commingled and talked a little bit more about what we would do in the situation where things broke off, but at the end of the day, I decided it wasn’t worth the emotional turmoil to be like, “well, this ring doesn’t actually cover my expenses, why don’t you take it back and you sell it and do this emotional labor and just give me my thousand dollars back.”

Navigating the Emotional Aspect of the Break-up

23:25 Emily: Yeah. I do want to come back to that point in a moment about the emotions of all of this, but I guess this is just kind of a point around splitting up in general is like, once you’re married, as you were just saying, there’s, there’s state laws that govern how relationships, how marriages separate, in terms of what’s done with the property. Sometimes it has to be figured out in court ultimately, and a lot of money can be spent on lawyers, but the really tricky thing is once you, if you’re not having that legal contract of marriage in place, and you guys were moving towards that, but not quite there yet, breaking out becomes a lot more murky. It’s something that becomes very individual and hard to navigate and something that takes a lot of energy. I just wanted to ask you, how did you manage to continue moving forward in your graduate program? Or did you? Obviously, you have ultimately, but did things stall a little bit as you’re going through this enormous personal upheaval?

24:22 Tina: I think there were two major things that helped me. There definitely was a little bit of a stalling point, but most directly related to grad school was talking to my advisor and telling him, “Hey, this is what’s going on. I’ve been a little mentally checked out because I’m trying to see whether or not my engagement is going to fall apart,” and thankfully, my advisor was very supportive of that. Around that time, actually, I had to turn in a 10 to 15 page written proposal as part of my first year requirements to slowly move towards eventually advancing to candidacy. So I talked to my advisor about it and basically just requested from my committee and extension and said, “Hey, here’s, what’s going on, can I have an extra month to turn this in?” And everybody on my committee was very supportive of that. That was number one.

25:13 Tina: Then number two was also just reaching out to friends and it took me a while to feel comfortable telling some of my lab mates and other people in grad school and just other friends I had met in the city, because at the time I had only been living here for about six months, so I didn’t have any real long-standing, deep relationships with anybody yet because I just didn’t have the time to establish them. But once I shared that information, everybody was super supportive. I actually learned that one of my grad school friends went through the same thing of also had an engagement end during her first year of grad school. They were super helpful. And then my longterm friends were unbelievably helpful. One actually flew out from Canada, where he was doing his PhD to come help me move.

26:02 Emily: Very, very sweet. Very, very wonderful to have that both new and old connections supporting you through that time. Plus, for me, this part of your story, when you were talking with your advisor and committee hearkens back to when you entered graduate school. You didn’t have to conform to the standard procedures in place for applying to graduate school. You realize, “Hey, yeah, this is a requirement in the first year, but maybe they can be flexible with me, and I’m just going to ask about it because what’s the harm in asking?” I mean, your advisor’s probably noticing that you’re not totally engaged anyway. It just comes back to that point that you are doing a great job kind of advocating for yourself and making things happen for you, and people can be accommodating if you ask them in the right way.

Best Financial Advice for Other PhDs

26:45 Emily: Tina, with the end of this interview, I’m going to ask you a question that I ask of all of my interviewees, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be related to the conversation that we’ve had today or could be completely something else.

27:01 Tina: I think actually it kind of ties into our last point of just like asking for help, of just reaching out to people and saying, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing, please help me.” I realized in the last couple months that investing has been a big hole for me, and I’ve been talking to one, actually one of my closest friends of over a decade and only recently learned that investing as a hobby of his. And then also like friends who are very good cooks. I never really learned how to cook as a kid growing up, so now I’m saving money by cooking at home a lot more. Just reach out to friends or coworkers or whatever and say, “Hey, I think you’re really great at this thing. I’ve noticed you seem to be really good with your money, or you’re really great at cooking, or you’re really great at this thing — how did you learn that? I’d really love to learn from you.

27:51 Emily: Nobody’s going to say no to a request phrase that way, absolutely. Wonderful, wonderful tip. And actually I know from Twitter that you are starting investing yourself and that you are listening to a podcast that really pushed you to do that — you want to mention that podcast and what you like about it?

28:08 Tina: Oh, sure. Yeah, you and I have been corresponding a little bit over Twitter and another podcast I had discovered that’s really helpful is called “Bad with Money” with Gaby Dunn. Part of what I really like about it is that I grew up with not knowing a whole lot about money and feeling like a little bit ashamed of that and just kind of feeling the differences in class, especially having gone to a private university for undergrad and my family had lost their house and lost our cars right before I went to undergrad. I just felt very distant and ashamed and all these bad emotions about money. Listening to Gaby’s podcast and being like,” Oh, it’s not just me, there are other people who feel very left out of the system,” made me feel a lot more comfortable talking about it.

28:57 Emily: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for that recommendation. And Tina, thank you so much for this conversation today. I am sure that it is helping people in the audience who are maybe considering a breakup, or trying to navigate one, or trying to recover financially from having been through one recently, so I really appreciate your willingness to talk about this.

29:15 Tina: Great. Thanks so much for having me on Emily.

Outtro

43:30 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.