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This Postdoc Has a System for Debt Repayment That You Can Follow as Well

June 1, 2020 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Suba Narasimhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. Suba and her husband each brought debt into their marriage, and once they both had full incomes, they decided to tackle it together. Suba presents a step-by-step plan for anyone at the start of a debt repayment journey. Emily and Suba discuss in detail how to handle credit card debt, including whether to pay credit cards off with student loans or 0% interest promotional credit cards. Suba doesn’t follow the debt snowball or debt avalanche methods exactly, but rather has mixed the two for a custom solution. Suba emphasizes the importance of being kind to yourself while repaying debt and adopting a nonjudgmental attitude toward your and your partner’s debt.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Suba: You have to think about this as part of your life. And if you have the ability to preplan and save some money, have a little bit of savings, and also just assume that maybe you’ll have to take on more loan debt. How much could you afford given whatever your loan burden is now?

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 five, and today my guest is Dr. Suba Narasimhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. Despite maintaining a debt-free status until midway through her PhD, Suba eventually took on both student loans and credit card debt due to financial emergencies and adverse situations. When she started her postdoc position, Suba and her husband decided to tackle their debt head-on, even though it was very daunting and anxiety-producing. Suba presents a step-by-step plan for anyone who wants to eliminate their debt and shares her own decisions throughout. Listen through the episode to hear her encouraging words on maintaining a positive, nonjudgmental attitude during debt repayment. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Suba Narasimhan.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Suba Narasimhan. Suba will be telling us about her debt repayment journey, which I’m so excited to dive into that topic with her. So, Suba, say “Hi” to the audience, please.

01:35 Suba: Hi! Hi, Emily. Thank you for having me.

01:38 Emily: Thanks so much for volunteering to come on. I actually wanted to tell the audience how we met, which was a couple years ago. So, I gave a seminar at UCLA and Suba came up to me afterwards and she said, “I’m so interested in what you do. I kind of want to do what you do. Can we talk further about this?” And we did. We went and we had lunch, and we had this wonderful conversation. In fact, Suba is the one who encouraged me to start this podcast. So, if you’re a fan of the podcast, you can thank Suba for encouraging me at that point when I was really still considering whether it was something I wanted to go for. So, anyway, I just want to say that if you, an audience member, ever see me at your university or at a conference or if you hear that I’m coming, please come up and introduce yourself and identify yourself as a podcast listener or a mailing list subscriber or whatever you are and I would love to talk to you. If I have time in my schedule, I will hang out with you one on one if it’s at all possible. I love to meet people who are in my audience and consuming my content. I want to hear your insights. So, we’re getting Suba’s insights today. I’m really excited about that. So, Suba, will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

02:48 Suba: Absolutely. And I have to say, Emily’s a great lunch mate, so you all should totally do what she asked you to and come up and chat with her about finance. So, I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, and it’s a really enjoyable experience. I am actually originally from the South and wanted to return to the South. And so that’s kind of how I ended up at Emory. I am in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education. So, that’s a School of Public Health Department. Yeah, it’s a great job.

Where Did You Do Undergrad?

03:31 Emily: Wonderful. And where did you do your undergrad? So, I know PhD at UCLA, and you’re at Emory now for your postdoc. Where was undergrad?

03:37 Suba: So, for my degree, you tend to do a master’s as well before you go on to your PhD. And so I did both my undergrad and my master’s at UNC Chapel Hill. Go Heels! I know, Emily, your rival school.

03:55 Emily: I was going to say, I think we were in the Triangle at the same time for at least a few years. But yes, I will allow that on my podcast. I’m a generous host. Okay. So, let’s talk about your debt repayment journey, which starts with a debt accumulation journey. So, tell us about that phase of your life.

Debt Accumulation Journey

04:12 Suba: So, I was really, honestly, I was very fortunate. I was really good with money for a long time and I was lucky to have had financial help from my parents during college and to have gotten both through my master’s and most of my PhD without accumulating any type of debt, consumer or student loan debt. And it was around the third year of my schooling in LA where I had a ton of unforeseen circumstances happen. So, I had some family illnesses. I had a lot of different difficult experiences happen and it was an emotionally trying time. And then it also became kind of a desperate time in terms of money. And even though I was working quite a bit, I just wasn’t totally making ends meet. And I think that that’s a very common experience for PhDs and can be one way that you really get into using credit cards or using student loans as a way to kind of just live your life. And being a PhD student is also a time in your life where you have to take a break from what might be a better-paying job to finish your degree. And I wasn’t one of these people, but I also think that there are a lot of people out there that probably are also very reliant on just their stipends to make ends meet. So, I think this is a pretty common situation to happen.

Importance of an Emergency Fund

05:44 Emily: We’re going to talk through how you’re remedying that situation. But just for anyone who hasn’t yet come upon that emergency situation in their life, if there’s any way that you can create some margin right now, some cash savings to help you kind of buffer through something like that, please, please take the opportunity to do so. So you don’t have to have this extreme reaction once an emergency does occur. And like you said, the thing about emergencies is that they’re rarely just financial, right? Something else has gone really poorly in some other area of life. Maybe it’s a huge emotional problem or a health problem or something like that. And so not only are you dealing with like logistics and emotions and just your routines being thrown off and your relationships, then you also have this financial component. So, at least what you can try to do for yourself, if at all possible, is to make the financial component of the emergency less of a thing so you can focus your energy on all these other areas of your life that need it at that time as well. So, that’s my soapbox. Okay.

Your PhD is Part of Your Life Journey

06:43 Suba: No, no, that’s a good soap box because one other thing I was going to say is I counsel a lot of students who are trying to enter PhD programs. And one of the pieces of advice I give them is something that I was given before I started my PhD. And that’s to think of your PhD journey or your PhD work as part of your whole life. And so, to also think about your finances at that time. So, one thing that was positive in this was that I had calculated out how much student loans I could take and feel a little bit less burden. So, the consumer debt I took on was unforeseen, but the student loan debt I had already pre-calculated what I thought was the maximum I could do in terms of payments if I got what I would consider just being a postdoc, honestly, in terms of finances is one of the lower-paying jobs that you can take because you’re usually on an NIH salary scale. So, that’s also my soapbox. You have to think about this as part of your life. And if you have the ability to preplan and save some money, have a little bit of savings, and also just assume that maybe you’ll have to take on more loan debt. How much could you afford given whatever your loan burden is now?

08:13 Emily: Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that because I think that if graduate students are not accustomed to taking out student loans, like maybe they haven’t done it since undergrad or they didn’t even do it in undergrad they might not think of turning to student loans in the case of some emergency expenses popping up. But it sounds like you did, like you took on some credit card debt, but then you also were using student loans to get you through this situation. So, can you talk about some of the advantages and also the disadvantages of choosing to use student loans versus just accumulating more credit card debt?

Student Loans vs. Credit Card Debt

08:47 Suba: Absolutely. I mean, one is that your interest rates–it’s always better to ask your university what type of emergency loan protections they have, which all universities do have that. And you can go to the scholarships and financial aid department and ask them about these short-term loan borrowing programs. And they are a lot more straightforward and they’re a lot more willing to work with you than a credit card company, which is a for-profit company, would be. So, I would say, that’s important. And the positive thing about student loans is that there are certain things, if you’re taking out federal loans, that you have access to which is the counseling components and the grace periods. And you can, eventually, if you do have student loans from undergrad or your master’s or some other type, you can roll them together and refinance them, and going through that is relatively painless.

09:54 Suba: And this is not necessarily something you can do with credit card debt. Right? What I would caution people against is if the student loans that you have to take out are private student loans, that then again gets you into this territory of consumer debt. So, I would really think about the terms and conditions of any private student loans that you might have to take out because they are often better than credit cards, but they still come with a lot of stipulations and issues. The problem with taking out a student loan is, unlike credit card debt, if there is something in the future where you have to declare bankruptcy, which could happen–happens to people for all kinds of reasons–you can’t discharge that debt at this point. And you also have to be really cautious if you’re thinking about maybe doing a public student forgiveness program. Sorry, public, what do you call it again?

10:52 Emily: Public service loan forgiveness.

Know the Terms and Conditions

10:54 Suba: Yeah. Which a lot of people in the medical sciences do. You hear a lot about people in medical and nursing programs, and there are a lot of people who are going to go into a nonprofit sector that think about that and it’s still a really viable option. It’s just you have to know the terms and conditions of that program going in so you can’t add to your debt burden without planning for how you might want to pay them off.

11:20 Emily: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with what you’re saying. I mean, when we’re thinking about credit cards versus student loans, federal student loans or private student loans, usually you’re looking at a lower interest rate for the student loans versus the credit cards. So, that’s attractive. But as you said, there’s a real danger point, which is if you ever get to the point where you are thinking about declining bankruptcy, you can’t get rid of those student loans. So, it’s a gamble, either way you go for it. But I really liked your suggestion of trying to access your university’s emergency loan system, which I don’t know about all, but I know that many universities do have that. And it’s certainly spreading, it’s a popular program that’s coming to more and more places.

Emergency Loans on Short Notice

12:00 Suba: And what I was going to say is you can also get those loans in very short periods of time. That’s why they’re considered emergency loans. So, if you know that there’s something that’s really looming on the horizon and even it’s maybe something that might happen to you next week, that could be something you can talk to a counselor about. And I think universities are really trying to be more sensitive about the fact that students, especially PhD students, are going through, you know, life challenges.

12:32 Emily: Yeah. And the thing about student loans is that they do take some time to apply for and acquire. So, it’s not a quick solution, but it might be something that you can set up if you know that you’re going to be holding debt for a longer period of time. I mean, not having to make payments on it, being in deferment while you’re still a graduate student is a really great benefit if it’s just not something that you are able to pay off in the moment. But of course, then you’re not paying it off. Right? So, the interest is accumulating. So, pluses and minuses there. It sounded like you ended up with a combination, then, of student loans and credit card debt.

Life Happens, Cost-of-Living Matters

13:02 Suba: I did, yeah. And one of the issues was, I was going through a lot of stuff and I just didn’t calculate how much I was spending. And I was having to deal with pretty significant emergencies that kind of made me have to travel and things like that. And so, that was how kind of this situation ended up happening. And then I also had some life circumstance changes that were great. Like I moved in with a partner. But you know, even that, any transition, honestly, is tied to money. And I’m living in Los Angeles. Another really big issue that might not be salient for people who live in maybe smaller places or less expensive places, is that the cost of living and especially the cost of rent goes up really quickly and sometimes without a lot of notice.

14:01 Suba: So, I also had to figure out my living situation and move apartments. So, I had a lot of things that really had nothing to do with my school life, which was going fine. And also, I did have a lot of financial help from school and from my fellowships and things like that. I was a fully-funded student. So, these are all, I think in an attempt not to scare anybody, but more to say we’ve got to think about the shocks and the issues that might come up and maybe prepare for them a little bit.

Inflection Point: Debt Talks

14:39 Emily: Totally, totally agree. So, thanks for going through that part of your story. At some point, you were no longer accumulating debt. In fact, you decided to turn it around and start paying that debt down. So, can you talk about the inflection point?

14:52 Suba: Right. And I think that was fairly recent. So, about a year ago, which coincided with me graduating from my PhD program, I also got married, which was great. And then I moved down here to start my postdoctoral fellowship. And my now husband also had a full-time job. And so, we said we think we want to start this next chapter of our lives. And one of the issues that we had sort of minimally talked about during our time together but hadn’t really deeply delved into was putting our finances together. And so, in having that conversation, we sort of said, “Hey, I think it’s time that we start to think really deeply and then have a clear plan about what we’re going to do and get rid of the debt that we are both carrying.”

15:46 Emily: Can you talk about how you went through that and how you tackled it, maybe for one of your peers listening here who is also facing a mountain of debt, a lot of different types of debt and doesn’t quite know how to start?

Tackling Debt Conversations

15:58 Suba: Yeah. I think the first step is to have a conversation and it’s usually one person says something like, “I’m totally scared about this debt, or I have so much debt and I don’t know what we’re going to do.” So, again, we opened up our finances to each other and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve decided to share a life together. What’s the most important thing that you want to do in the next five years? Like, what is the most important thing you feel like you want to spend money on? And why do you think, you know, getting rid of that debt would help?”

16:32 Suba: And so, having that discussion really made it sort of a positive and nonjudgmental environment to start having these conversations about money, which can be really anxiety-producing. And so, for me, making up these spreadsheets and having a plan and stuff was really energizing. I was like, “Okay, I am solving an issue.” For my husband, it was super anxiety-producing. It just created this feeling of like, “I don’t make enough money. I don’t know what to do.” You know? And so, also stopping at certain parts of this process. It may take, you know, more than one conversation to get to this point. And saying, “Okay, you know, the whole goal of this is not to stigmatize either one of us for bringing what we brought into the relationship, right?”

Dreaming, Not Blaming, Together

17:20 Emily: I like that – I just want to jump in and say, I really like that you started that conversation and are framing it around–I’m going to phrase it differently than you did–around dreaming together, right? Because as you just said, it puts this whole thing in a positive light. It’s not, “Oh, you know, sniping at each other, blaming each other for, you know, what’s happened in the past.” It’s, “No, like we’re standing together, we’re looking to the future. What do we want our bright future to look like? Let’s agree on that. And, okay. What are the steps we have to take to get to that point? Now, let’s tackle it.” But as you said, for some people it can feel like such a big thing to be working on. So challenging, like for your husband that it sounds like he wanted to shy away from it. Right? Whereas you wanted to charge toward it.

18:04 Suba: Yeah, it took different conversations to get to a point where–you know, and the honest truth is, he had less debt than I did. And so, the way I was feeling was, you know, a lot of blame and kind of shame. Or like, why, how did I bring this into our home, you know, kind of thing? And I think that that is a pretty common feeling for a lot of people. I don’t know anybody who’s had this conversation that hasn’t felt all kinds of feelings about it, you know? And so, I think from those big picture conversations you can also kind of talk about priorities. So, maybe one of you likes to travel more than the other. And so, setting up this idea of, “Okay, we’re going to decide that we want to take this many vacations a year or maybe we want to go to this many friends’ weddings a year, that’s important to us. We want to go home for Christmas or for New Year’s or things like that.” You know, like these are kinds of things that flow out of those conversations. What’s important to you, what’s your priority?

Allocating Money Toward Retirement

19:15 Suba: And we disagree on lots of things about spending money. It’s just we’ve allotted the parts of the money that we agree on so that we have this freedom, you know. So, one interesting thing about us is actually we don’t have a joint bank account. We still have separate bank accounts, and we’ve discussed maybe, but we have a joint savings account. And so, we’ve discussed how we allot money into our joint savings. And then we’ve also even talked about how we are going to allocate money towards our retirements because we look at those as shared money. And then after we’ve paid the bulk of our bills or whatever, the leftover that we haven’t allocated is our own money to spend the way that we feel. So, I think it’s also a balance between getting yourselves on the same page, making a shared priority list and plan, but then also saying, “Well, I don’t need to know and account for every dime that you’re spending. If you like to spend money on X thing and I don’t understand it, that’s okay. I don’t need to.” So, it’s not about controlling the other person, either.

Commercial

20:34 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.

Cataloging Debts

21:21 Emily: Okay, so first step was, “Let’s look at the picture. Okay. Let’s dig our heads out of the sand and look at what is the debt.” Okay. So, what did you do after that point?

21:30 Suba: Absolutely. We cataloged all the debts and the cataloging of this plan. So, essentially, we did create a full spreadsheet at this point of all of the debts, the interest rates, and what types of debt they were. So, was it student loans or consumer debts? And then when interest rates would either change or when they would kick in. And in terms of the consumer debt, one thing that I did was I called the credit card companies and I tried to get my interest rates lowered and be as nice as possible. And it did work for a few of them, actually, honestly. So, don’t be afraid to ask. The worst that can happen is that they say no and you can ask to be kicked up to people who have a little bit more power than maybe the receptionist that you talked to on the phone. And if you do it in a kind way, it works out. And then I also looked at the balance transfer offers that some of my credit cards had. And I would not say, like, open another credit card to do this. I would say, if you already have existing cards, many of them have balance transfer offers and they do charge a fee. So, weigh that fee against the amount that you save in interest by paying it off in the 0% period.

Strategically Using 0% Financing

22:54 Emily: I’m going to ask you a little bit further about this because I’ve never gone through this process myself. So, I want to know a little bit better. So, what you’re talking about is, you have an existing account open, and that account, you know, you see that they’re offering a 0% financing deal, 0% period. And so, what you’re doing then is you’re using that financing to pay off a different credit card balance, right? So, you’re sort of transferring the balance over to the other card that you had open that had that 0% offer. And then the offer is, “Okay, we’re not going to charge you interest for a given period of time.” Usually, it’s like 12 months or 18 months or something like that. What was it in your case?

23:28 Suba: It was 18 months. I only did the ones that were 18 or 22 months. So, the longest period. But you have to do this very strategically. What you don’t ever want to do is to be using these as another crutch so that you can kind of just not pay things off. So, I would then strategically plan to pay per month this amount off a few months before the end of the period. And so, that also gets to my next point. Part of after cataloging your debts, you have to catalog also the salaries that are coming in and the expenses. So, you have to see what your margin of expenses to your income is so that you can make a reasonable plan for your debt payoff.

Making the Minimum Credit Card Payments

24:23 Suba: You shouldn’t use any of these strategies in terms of your credit cards until you figure out, “Can I at least make the minimum payments on my credit cards? And then now I want to make more of a payment on either my credit card or my student loan.” If you’re having trouble making the minimum payments, I would absolutely say call your credit card companies and tell them, “Hey, I’m having a lot of trouble making my minimum payments.” Credit card companies want your money, and it’s better off that you don’t miss your payments because that can affect your entire credit history really negatively. So, these are, these are kind of things you have to do in tandem with one another. You have to catalog your debts and the times in which your debts need to be paid off. But then you also will have to catalog your expenses versus your income to see what’s a comfortable and reasonable amount for you to put towards paying off your debt every month. So, just to say, you had asked me before if I used a debt snowball versus debt avalanche. I think we are a little bit of a combination.

Debt Snowball vs. Debt Avalanche

25:35 Emily: Let’s pause and define that for the listeners who don’t know. I’ll just say, so in the debt snowball and the debt avalanche methods, which are these two very popular methods for repaying debt, repaying multiple debts, you usually pay the minimums on everything and then you make a list of your top priority to your lowest priority debts. And with all the remaining money you have to throw towards debt, you throw it at your top priority. This is in both systems. In the debt snowball method, the top priority is the debt with the lowest balance. And in the debt avalanche method, the top priority is the debt with the highest interest rate.

26:11 Emily: So, debt snowball, you move from smallest balance to largest balance, paying each one off in full. And then moving on to the next one. Debt avalanche method, paying the highest interest rate first. And then once you pay that one-off, completely moving on to the one with the next highest interest rate. The debt snowball method, the sort of reasoning behind it is that it’s very psychologically motivating to be able to cross that small debt, that first small debt off your list and you know, feel like you’re making a lot of progress and move on to the next one. Versus the debt avalanche method is mathematically the most optimal way to go about things. If you were to throw the exact same amount of money into both methods, the debt avalanche method would get you out of debt the fastest. So, go ahead and explain, between those two extreme models, what you actually did.

26:53 Suba: So, I’m still in the process of this. So, I also don’t want to say, “Look at me, I’m debt-free, and I could give you all this advice.” No, we’re still in the process of this and it’s been really fruitful for us. But we started off with the debt avalanche method. So, we wanted to pay off these highest interest debts first and within the reason of the amount of debt pay off that we could do per month. Right? And then when we would get to a certain threshold, so maybe it was a thousand dollars or $500, we would pay off that card or that debt in full. And that gave us, on some months, that would give you just like an extra boost. You know, it just makes you feel good to see that zero balance. And when you pay off a piece of a student loan, they send you a congratulations email. So, that doesn’t hurt too badly, either.

Prioritizing Interest Rates

27:46 Emily: So, I want to clarify because some listeners may have this question. So, if you have at least one, maybe multiple credit cards where you’re currently in a zero interest rate promotional period, does that become a low priority for you or is that still a high priority because the eventual interest rate is going to most likely be quite high? Can you talk a little bit about that?

28:09 Suba: So, I prioritize by the time that the interest rate would change and turn into the higher debt rates. So, say it was January 1st, I would make a plan where I would subtract two months from that, so November, and then I would calculate how much per month I would need to pay on that card to pay it off in full by that November. So, it doesn’t necessarily become a low priority or a higher priority. For some debts, you can’t change the interest rate, right? So, any of those debts would be the debts I would pay off the soonest if I can, or pay off the largest amount. I also thought a lot about how much debt I was carrying per card.

28:57 Suba: So, in one situation, I essentially didn’t have that many credit cards, right? So, one of my cards was more than 30% utilized, which is a lot, and that’s not very good for your credit score, either. So, my goal was to get that less, like lower than 30%. So, I prioritize basically based on the highest debt, and then when the interest rate would change from 0% to whatever it was. And it’s also really important, I don’t want any of your listeners to like go willy nilly and start moving their money around to 0% interest credit cards. That’s a strategy to be used when you need extra time and you have to really make a very clear plan that’s very reasonable to get that done and see what the fee is versus how much benefit you get. So, the fees always range from either 2% to like a minimum of a certain amount of dollars. So, you have to see what that is for each of your, you know, things. And I would definitely call credit card companies first and see if you can lower the interest rate before you change anything.

Automating Debt Payments

30:21 Emily: Okay. What’s your next thing that you did, or your tip for someone else facing this challenge?

30:27 Suba: So, I think, you know, I talked about how you should catalog your expenses towards your income and then figure out what’s a percentage of your paycheck per month that you’re going to put to your debt. And then you want to automate that. So, you basically want to be making a specific payment. And you can either do that, if it’s on your credit card, you can put the payment to a specific date or if it’s to your student loan servicer you can make sure that the check for your student loan comes out of your bank account at the same time.

31:02 Suba: So, you want your income to come in and then that money to go out almost immediately. So, you almost don’t see it, right? So, the reason I say, you know, and this isn’t like news, you know. Automating your finances helps so much because it lowers the stress of you having to keep track of it. But it also tricks you a little bit, psychologically. You never see that money after your paycheck comes in. So, you don’t feel like you have it, right? It’s already gone. It’s already been pledged to something. So, I think that helps.

31:39 Emily: I totally, totally agree. I’m a huge fan of automating, paying yourself first. Absolutely. Go ahead.

Paying Yourself First

31:42 Suba: Yeah. And, you know, there’s been a little bit of discussion sometimes too towards this idea of paying yourself first, right? And I think a lot about that. When you’re starting your first jobs after your PhD and even, you know, some postdocs and fellowships allow you to pay into their retirement system. If there’s a way you can think about putting some level of money per month into retirement, even if it’s just $50 a month or something like that. And that’s something that doesn’t seem astronomical. That’s also an important part of this calculation. And I think there’s a lot of debate on whether you should go whole hog and pay off your debt first and then think about your retirement. And people have all kinds of philosophies. I’m, you know, a moderate. And so, I think you have to live your life. So, you want to try to take advantage of the systems, the positive systems, that you have at the same time. So, my husband and I also looked at our retirement plans and factored in how much money we could put pretax and then put post-tax, if that was possible, into Roth IRAs. So, we thought about that in this whole system as well.

32:58 Emily: Absolutely. We are focusing on talking about debt right now, but once you get certain interest rates of debt eliminated, once those rates, you know, anything you have remaining is sort of in, as you were kind of just saying, a more moderate range, maybe six, seven, 8% or less. That’s the kind of time where you can start saying, “Okay, maybe we should do some retirement savings, not just the debt repayment.” But, to emphasize, if we’re talking about credit card debt, get rid of that credit card debt. Okay, go for that first.

Plan for the Future

33:25 Suba: That should be number one. Absolutely. And I think the next thing that we did then is to think about possible future changes and issues that could come up. So, you know, changes could be things like, “Well we have to prepare for making sure we go visit our family during the holidays or that we have to buy Christmas presents or things like that.” So, kind of trying to figure out what are the issues that we have had in the past that we didn’t prepare for? How can we prepare for them now? So that, you know, that’s an ongoing conversation that’s part of this.

34:08 Emily: I think that’s a really important thing to bring up, especially again for grad students and postdocs who don’t have large amounts of cash flow going through their bank accounts. Because there are going to be months where you have some larger expenses. So, to be able to save up that cash, to handle that at that time, that’s going to prevent you from, again, turning back to the credit card. So, it’s still kind of about debt repayment or debt avoidance to have that cash saved up, again for people who couldn’t easily absorb one of those large expenses in your monthly cash flow.

Small Changes, Big Differences

34:40 Suba: Absolutely. And even if it’s just, you know, a small amount that you put away every month. Again, we’re not having to think about these things in huge dollar amounts. I think sometimes what gets people a little bit down or can be very frustrating is this idea that these have to be very large amounts to make a difference. They don’t. Even if you have a buffer of a hundred dollars and you don’t put that hundred dollars on a high-interest credit card, that’s better. That’s why people have emergency funds. And so, it’s going to take a little bit of preplanning and it’s going to take some time, too. And even if you don’t have much of a buffer and that’s not something you’re able to do, that’s about the situation as well. So, that’s okay as well. It’s just you plan, you say, “Okay, when these credit cards are paid off or when the student loan is paid off, then that money that I’ve allocated towards the credit cards and student loans will now go to another priority.”

35:50 Emily: Exactly. And this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation where we were talking about looking forward into the future. You know, “What does my life, what do I want my life to look like this year, in the next five years, whatever it is?” Part of that is planning, “Okay, I’m going to be doing this type of traveling.” Guess what? Holiday gift-giving season comes up every single year at the same time. We know it’s there. So, yeah, just looking even ahead a few months or a year and just figuring out, “Okay, what are these life things that are going to happen?” They have to be part of the plan as well.

Positive Rewards (Treat Yo’ Self)

36:19 Suba: And part of this too is, just as you prepare for these issues that might come up, you’ve also got to give yourself positive small rewards. And so, what my husband and I did was we thought about things that we could give ourselves as a reward that didn’t involve us spending money. So, maybe once we got to a certain place, we went to like a new park in a city. And you can also prepare in your budget if there are things that cost money, like you want to buy a coffee every morning, you know, you put that into your budget. That’s your small reward for living life as a human being. I think my whole debt payoff philosophy is that you’ve still got to live your life, you know, in the most enjoyable way that you can.

37:12 Suba: Yeah. And another thing is, you can have a potluck with people without telling them the reason why. You know, like that’s another thing. Sometimes you can create a celebration and you don’t necessarily have to tell them, “Well, it’s because I paid 5% of my consumer debt off.” Right? Like that’s still a way to mark something positive and create a positive memory. And you know, things like that, they don’t cost a lot. And so, that also helped keep us motivated. So, we would say, “Okay, well we will save this treat until we get to this point.” And we tried to vary the different kinds of things that we would do.

Business Meeting Times

37:59 Suba: And one of the last things is we created kind of a business meeting time. So, I think one of the issues that happens when you start to get into this mindset of paying off debt or tracking things is that you think about it a lot. And especially if you’re somebody like me who really likes spreadsheets, you’ll be looking at it on your computer all the time and thinking about ways you could optimize. That’s not the best, I think, way to go about it because it can also become negative. You can start to look at the numbers and feel like things are not really moving that much. So, we would create a business meeting time when we would talk about these money-related issues or debt payoff issues. And then the rest of the time we would try not to bring it up. So, having that protected time to talk about it also meant that your entire relationship isn’t really consumed by it. And then also your own thinking throughout the day when you’re working and things are happening, you’re not thinking about it all the time.

39:10 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I’ve heard the strategy of having a business meeting with your spouse or whatever. And I’ve also definitely heard the strategy of compartmentalizing difficult subjects into, as you said, a time on the calendar. Like you know it’s designated that you’re going to think about it or you’re going to talk about it at that time. It helps it from bleeding into all the rest of your life. So, I really like your combination of those two ideas.

Make it a Positive Environment

39:31 Suba: Yeah. I think when it can kind of create anxiety and worry, and if anyone is prone to anxiety or worry, it could just like snowball into a lot. And you want to treat that time to be a time when other things are not as stressful. So, if you know, maybe like it’s after your kids have gone to bed or it’s on a Sunday because you know like on Sundays you don’t have as much to do, and you want to make that situation as positive as possible. So, sometimes we would like open a beer and sit down or something like that. Just like, make it a positive environment and start off the discussion in a positive way as best you can because these topics are difficult. And every month you may not see progress, right? So, there are things that happen. That’s the other thing. You may have all of these great plans in place and then one month you have to cut down a little bit on paying debt because you have another expense, you know? And so, those are kind of the times when you can have these conversations.

40:43 Emily: Definitely. Again, I love that you’re bringing up any way you can to put kind of a more positive spin on what is fundamentally a really hard situation to be in.

Be Kind to Yourself and Others

40:53 Suba: I guess in the last tip I would say, and I think I’ve said this throughout, is you have to be extremely kind to yourself. I think debt is incredibly stigmatizing. And I feel like I’m somebody who follows a lot of financial blogs and a lot of financial people online. And I think one of the things is we cannot be mean to ourselves or other people about their choices around money. Everybody’s choices are really, really different, and it’s very normal. Especially in this day and age when when people’s jobs are changing so much and maybe they’ve had different circumstances that the only real way to be empowered is to first normalize the fact that this is something that is part of your life. It’s something that happened to you because of a certain set of circumstances, but it’s not something that you can’t control. It’s not something that you eventually can’t get over, you know? And the only real way to be like, I think, empowered is to let go of some of the stigma, especially towards ourselves. We can be really unkind towards ourselves when we make, you know, choices that we don’t think are the best. We should be able to talk about these things a little bit more. And get advice from one another about how to tackle some of these things, even though our situations aren’t the same.

Best Advice for Early-Career PhDs

42:16 Emily: Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with this interview. And so, Suba, thank you so much for putting yourself out there. So, I like to end with this one question for all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? It could be related to the conversation we’ve had today, it could be something totally else.

42:34 Suba: I think my best advice is probably two things. One is try to plan, preplan, for changes in your life as much as you can, as best you can. And then the other is it’s never too late to start improving your finances. It doesn’t matter if you are $10,000 in debt, $200 in debt or a hundred thousand dollars in debt. You know, just figure out what your priorities are and see if you can align your priorities with what you want your financial life to look like in the future.

43:08 Emily: Yeah. I don’t want anyone to feel discouraged about debt numbers. I mean even you can look back through the archives, this podcast and I’ve had several interviews with people who are paying off six figures worth of debt successfully. So, it can be done. It does take work, it takes a positive attitude, Suba as you were just saying, it takes organization. But you know what, grad students and PhDs, we have some of those qualities in spades. So, this is definitely something that is tackleable for our community. And again, thank you so much for talking about this topic today on the podcast.

43:40 Suba: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Outtro

43:43 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.

The Necessity of Both Economic Justice Advocacy and Personal Financial Responsibility

May 25, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the University of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union, and viewed a higher income as the solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt and in the process reformed his practice financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and Emily discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices.

Links Mentioned

Find Dr. Ian Gutierrez on Twitter
Related Episode: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Choose a PhD Program That Will Support Your Personal and Professional Development
Personal Finance for PhDs: Financial Coaching
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

00:00 Ian: It was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which was sort of embarrassing to say 29 or 30 year old.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode four, and today my guest is Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the university of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union and viewed a higher income as a solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt. And in the process reformed his financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and I discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice, and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ian Gutierrez.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Ian Gutierrez, and Ian and I first connected actually when I was looking for guests for my “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise” episode that came out season five, episode two. That was the one that was a compilation episode, with a lot of people and had a couple of guests talking about unions. Ian and I connected and we had such a great conversation that I was like, “Can we just have a whole episode, just your own interview instead of trying to cram all you have to say into just this little tiny spot. So that’s how this episode came about. So Ian, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

02:01 Ian: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. This is very exciting for me. My name is Ian Gutierrez. I have a BFA from New York University in recorded music, which was actually my first love. And then I got my Master’s degree in psychology from the New School, prior to becoming a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, where I was enrolled from 2012 to 2018 when I defended my dissertation. So I now hold a PhD in clinical psychology from UConn. Shortly following the completion of my clinical training at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I was very briefly a postdoctoral fellow at the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. And I am currently a research psychologist with Tech Works LLC in the Washington DC area, where I conduct psychological research on mental health and resilience in support of our nation’s service members.

The Intricacies of Unionization for Graduate Employees

03:03 Emily: It sounds like a fascinating career path, something that would be great to explore at another time, but we’re actually going to go back to your graduate school days at UConn. And of course you were involved at that time with the union. Can you talk a little bit about what the climate was UConn at that time and why you got involved with the union movement?

Impetus for the Union

03:22 Ian: Sure, absolutely. I would actually say, first and foremost that it was one of the best parts of my graduate school experience was being involved with the graduate student unionizing effort. I often tell people that the experience that I had negotiating our first contract after we unionized was one of the best classes I ever took in graduate school. I first got involved with the unionizing effort in 2013. I was serving on our university’s graduate student government, and at the time the university was moving, or attempting to move graduate students over from a state-based employee health insurance plan into a student health insurance plan. Some people call it a SHIP. And bottom line was that we were getting worse health coverage for a higher price. Within the graduate student government we tried to advocate as best we could, but parallel to that, a number of other students thought that maybe unionizing was the way to go.

04:37 Ian: Now, personally, I grew up in a union family. All of my parents are union members in the theater business, actually. So that naturally struck me as the far more effective way to go about advocating for what we needed. I joined the organizing committee for our nascent union at the time and we, after interviewing a number of international unions, where you talk to the Communication Workers of America, Service Employees International Union, AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, we ultimately decided to organized with the United Auto Workers, which had had a lot of success in the area, unionizing graduate students, for instance, just up the road at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. So we organized our union in 2013 we ran a membership drive, a card counting campaign, to get legal recognition for our union, and that it was a very successful campaign. Very exciting. The state of Connecticut recognized our union in April of 2014, and from that point we moved into the bargaining process with the university administration. At that point, ran to be one of the six members of the bargaining committee, and then over the course of the following year from starting about August of 2014, up until June of 2015, we met with the university administration, I don’t remember exactly, a dozen times, maybe more, as we negotiated our first contract. We were fortunate enough to successfully negotiate our first contract with the union in 2015.

Issues at Play in Union Negotiations

06:29 Emily: Thank you so much for giving that context. I’m wondering when you, when you went into negotiate that first contract, was it mainly the health insurance issue that you all were focusing on, or were there some other issues that also came into play?

06:42 Ian: When we went into negotiating our contract with the administration, of course health insurance was a major issue for graduate students. Of course, it wasn’t the only one. I think actually the university was quite surprised by the litany of issues that we brought up and the many things that we wanted to negotiate over. Healthcare, in the end, turned out to be a remarkably, I won’t go so far as to say easy, but there was a very equitable solution that we were able to come to. In this particular case, the state of Connecticut had what they called the Connecticut Partnership Plan, where the state would work with local governments to work out affordable health care plans for local employees, and so that provided a very nice rubric that could be applied to graduate employees at the university.

07:39 Ian: But that was again, not the only issue that we covered. I think the biggest issues that really came up for us were fee waivers, and then a lot of the rights and protections for the union itself. One of the major differences from being a graduate employee who’s not unionized to being graduate employee who is unionized is that there’s a clear grievance procedure, which in my opinion is actually one of the strongest components, one of the most important components of being unionized as an employee anywhere, is that there’s some kind of legal recourse when something comes up in the workplace, and there’s very clear rules about who to go to, who to raise the issue with, and how the difference can be resolved.

08:34 Ian: But second to that, of course money talks, right? Fee waivers for us was, I very clearly remember, was sort of the last issue that we negotiated over it at some great length and turned out to be the hardest thing for us to come to an agreement on. We ended up coming to a resolution where, what the university called it’s infrastructure fee, which was a $460 per year fee, ended up being waived for graduate assistants. And then the university provided GAs with a hundred dollar credit every year, that ramped up by a few dollars over the course of the contract, to help offset the cost of fees. So those were some of the major issues that came up. I think that barely scratches the surface and certainly we could talk for a long time about the, the 30 to 40 provisions in the contract, but healthcare, tuition and fees, and a grievance procedure where, I think, some of the biggest issues that we really cared about.

09:45 Emily: Yeah, I think all of those are also really common ones to come up in these negotiations across many universities. And I really appreciate your point about the grievance procedure being one of the most important components because it is like the wild west out there in academia. I mean, there’s all these power structures and imbalances and just lack of clarity, and so that actually sounds really great that you would have that in place after that point. Something I wanted to ask you about is from your position at the bargaining table, how did you come to understand that the university, or at least that university, that administration, the people who you were talking with, how did you understand that they viewed graduate students and especially around their financial issues?

Grad Students vs. the Administration

10:27 Ian: Yeah, really interesting question. That to me was one of the more shocking components of the experience. You know, university administrators talk a lot about how important students are to the university, and will say things about how the student body is the lifeblood of the university and the reason that it exists, of course, and there’s a whole political rhetoric around the way in which administrators talk about students. And I think a lot of that comes primarily from their dealings, especially with undergrad, what the undergraduate population, where things are a little bit cleaner. Undergraduates are the public consumers of the education that the university is providing. And they also make up the majority of the student body at almost almost any university.

11:20 Ian: With graduate students, it’s a little bit more complicated because on the one hand graduate students are students. We are receiving an education, but in our roles as research assistants, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, generally, we’re also employees. So things get a lot murkier there and they’re very comfortable talking about us as students. They’re much less comfortable talking about us as employees and at the bargaining table where we’re really presenting fully and in that context only as employees, a lot of that kumbaya rhetoric about us being students really falls away remarkably quickly.

12:03 Ian: At the same time there’s a lot of nostalgia that comes up for a lot of these administrators because most of them, not all of them, but most of them, were graduate students at one point, too, but a lot of their touchstones to what the graduate student experience was like, is what it was like in the sixties, seventies, the eighties, the nineties. And they were looking at a much different financial picture then, than graduate students are looking at now. Not only that, but the demographic of graduate students has in many cases shifted pretty dramatically as well. So it’s not like you’re getting…I mean, who’s ever heard, nowadays of somebody getting out of school through PhD at the age of 24 or 25. Impossible? No, but pretty rare. A lot of folks are getting their PhDs, I know at least in clinical psychology, the average age is about 31. So we’re talking about folks who might already have kids, maybe elderly parents to care for, potentially. Possibly chronic health problems.

13:08 Ian: We’re looking at a much different, a much more complicated picture of who we are, and for the administrators to come to the table and understand who we are, I think was a leap for them, in as much, to be perfectly frank as it was for us to understand the complicated financial picture that the university has to deal with. And I want to be clear in saying that, well certainly there are many acrimonious relationships between graduate employees and administrators at many institutions. I actually came away from the process being more proud of being a graduate of the University of Connecticut, because I think that, while we didn’t always see eye to eye, the administration was really fair in their dealings with us, and I think that we returned that to them in kind. It was certainly a learning experience for us, and I like to think of what’s a learning experience for them as well.

14:11 Emily: So fascinating. Thank you so much for adding that. And I am glad to hear that it wasn’t totally an adversarial relationship there at the table. I actually thought you might’ve been going in a little bit of a different direction when you mentioned the shifting demographics of current graduate students versus maybe some decades ago. Because I’m thinking about more like first generation students getting to graduate school and earning their PhDs. Also people who don’t necessarily come from families that can provide them financial support in the case of an emergency or just on an ongoing basis. I don’t know the stats on this, but I would assume that’s more common now than it was some decades ago, as you know, diversified who’s earning a PhD, which is a great thing, but it certainly comes with different sets of issues and problems then maybe people who got their PhDs some decades ago were facing

14:59 Ian: Just to jump in on that point, I think it’s also really important and one of the other really key components of what makes me proud to have been a part of that union too, was the union’s strong focus on diversity and representation. I understand full well that as a white man, receiving a PhD at a university that I come to the table with a lot of privilege and a voice that some other people might not have. But one of the things that really struck me in the way that our union organized is that the people who in my personal view really made it happen were the student employees of color, and the women who were in our organizing campaign. And it was really actually two women in particular who really made our union possible, and in many ways, to the extent that I was a part of it, I think I sort of rode on their coattails. And when we were negotiating at the table, equal protection policies for our students who might have green cards, or students of color, making sure that there was bathroom access for the trans community at the university — all of these things were a very large component of what our union was about. And I’m very proud of that.

Commercial

16:35 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Personal Finances in Grad School in Relation to Unionization

17:21 Emily: Okay, so you’re in graduate school, you’re at the bargaining table, you’re working for better benefits, better processes, higher stipends, fee waivers and so forth. That’s one aspect of personal finance, right? What income is coming in, what your benefits are and so forth. What was going on with you? How were you handling the money that you actually received at that time?

17:43 Ian: Oh man. I would say that despite my heavy involvement in the union, I would mostly describe my practice for personal finance in graduate school as primarily relying on some degree of magical thinking. I didn’t really have a theory of the case regarding my personal finances really in any sense. I had a big picture sense that “more money, good, less money, bad,” but I never had any kind of robust plan on how I was going to move away from debt and towards wealth. I think the implicit thought process that I had was, well, I’m a graduate student and I’m poor and I’m in debt now, and somehow it all kind of come out in the wash after I get my degree and get a real job.

18:40 Emily: I think that’s super common. That sentiment is everywhere in graduate training.

18:47 Ian: And for me, even thinking about personal finances, a component of my life was…I engaged in a lot of avoidance around my own money management. And I think, as I have read into more financial guidance, you know, your Dave Ramsey or your Suze Orman’s or whoever — where do they start? They always start with, in a budget you want to first take a look at how much money you think you have coming in every month. Well, personally, speaking personally about my family background, my family worked in theater and even though you might be a part of a union, how much money you’re making in a month, you don’t know how much money you’re necessarily making in the next week or two weeks. You don’t know when your paycheck is coming and when it comes, you don’t necessarily have the best idea of how large it’s going to be. I never really had a financial budget education from my family background. But then sort of even more strikingly, I never had it in high school. I never had it in college. I never had it in graduate school. I just never had it, which, for being a pretty well educated person, still kind of leaves me. floored. Talking about money, it was almost like talking about sex. It was like everywhere and defining the culture, but you couldn’t actually get a grasp on what was going on.

20:34 Emily: That’s a great analogy.

20:34 Ian: Really striking. I think it really is because money is so personal and it’s such a component of who we are that we all have a lot of the feelings — good, bad, otherwise — around what it says about who we are and our understanding of what our life is and where our lives are going. Long story short, I just really engaged in a lot of avoidance around it, and I also think that part of the way that my own income from graduate school was structured led me into some poor practices as well. For one example, I received half of my income from a GA stipend that I received every two weeks, like a paycheck, but then the other part of my income I received from a fellowship check, which came in these two big checks every year. What it sort of led me to believe was that, well, as an adult, twice a year, you’re just going to received this huge windfall, so I can just spend up a lot of money on a credit card, and, well, no big deal because I’m going to get this big windfall every August and every January. Come to find out, at the end of this golden brick road, that’s actually not what happens in the course of typical adult living. Suddenly, after graduate school, I had this student debt and the cavalry’s not charging over the hill anymore.

22:18 Emily: That’s so interesting. I haven’t interviewed anyone before who’s spoken about the pay frequency, which I mean what you described as maybe a little bit unusual, but there’s plenty of people who deal with a couple of times per year, big checks coming in, or maybe just a pay frequency that they were unfamiliar with, like monthly instead of biweekly, or just any kind of shift. It’s interesting just to hear how that impacted actually the way that you handled your money. Of course there are many budgeting techniques to deal with this and that’s a conversation with me for another time. But I’m really curious now to hear about what actually caused you to change these attitudes in this behavior. Was it getting out of graduate school and realizing that you had a steady paycheck and it wasn’t ever going to be these windfalls? What was your motivation to start exploring the subject area?

23:05 Ian: Well, the one thing that I did decide, and this is a little bit particular to the way that graduate education is structured in clinical psychology, is that if you’re pursuing a doctorate in clinical or counseling or school psychology, you have to complete a year long internship. Most people move for this year long internship and the internship pays a stipend that is roughly similar to what you would get paid as a graduate assistant, depending on locale. It’s anywhere from $20 to $30 grand a year. When I made this move, I knew that I wasn’t going to be enrolled in enough course credits to access loans and I can either fork up a bunch of money to take on six credit hours or whatever it was, so that I could have access to student loans, or I could not sign up for those credit hours and not be eligible for loans.

24:03 Ian: I chose to not sign up for the credit hours and not be eligible for loans. I sort of took the cold turkey approach to student loans. And it was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident, because now I wasn’t receiving my windfall fellowship twice a year and I had cut myself off from student loans and a lot of my credit card balances were fairly high. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which is sort of embarrassing to say as a 29 or 30 year old, but that’s part of the reason I’m here on the podcast saying it, is because I know that my assumption in life is that if it’s affecting me, it’s probably affecting someone else. I can only imagine that there is a silent, I don’t know that it’s a majority, but a silent plurality, of current or former graduate students out there who have also suddenly realized at the ripe age of 30, that they know nothing about financial planning, have been behaving, you know, somewhat irresponsibly, and now they’re in a bad situation.

25:26 Ian: I never really took myself as someone who lived wildly outside of my means. I bought and paid off and used car and sure, my wife and I would go out dinner from time to time, but I wasn’t living the high life by any stretch of the imagination. And yet still, after all of that, I realized that I just didn’t have any scheme for how I was going to manage any of this. To keep on with the language of addiction, and there’s certainly many parallels to be drawn between credit cards and addiction, to be sure, I had sort of hit a rock bottom, where I suddenly realized that I need to come up with a plan, not only so I can pay this stuff off, but so that I can build and save for the future.

26:20 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think you’re absolutely right that many people are waking up at some time or another to realize that in the same way that you did. So first of all, average American kind of thing, a lot of people don’t live within their means or they do in some aspects of their budgeting and they don’t in other. Like they are racking up credit card debt and then occasionally will pay it down, and there’s this cycle there. That’s pretty common. But I think that the graduate student experience sort of exacerbates that mentality. I think academia tells us that well, while you’re a graduate student, even to some extent while you’re a postdoc, you’re excused from the general financial responsibility that you might feel at another stage or at another time in life because well, you know that your pay is going to be low and so what expectations can you really have of yourself when your pay is so low. That’s one aspect of it. The other one is, as you mentioned, the access to student loans, which I think that if people aren’t necessarily using them, they may kind of forget that they do have access to them all the way through graduate school really. But it is there as a backstop, as a good decision or as a bad decision to take it out. You really are given an out all through graduate school that you don’t have to live within your means, unless you choose to, because the culture is telling you you don’t have to do, you have student loans there if you need to take them out. It kind of just contributes to that overall problems. I definitely don’t think you are at all alone.

27:46 Emily: I really think about myself going into graduate school. I very intentionally told myself I’m going to live within my means. And I actually thought about it that way at that time, for various reasons. But that was partially because I had a break between undergrad and grad school, where I had to live within my means. I didn’t have access to student loans, and so it was like, okay, I’m just going to carry forward into my graduate degree with what I learned when I was out of school. But if you don’t have the same attitudes that I do or didn’t have exposure to the same stuff, or you went continuously from college to graduate school, you may not have had the wherewithal to even think about it that way.

Personal Finances After Grad School

28:22 Emily: Okay, you’re getting into your internship year, you don’t have access to the loans, you have the high credit card balances, you’re realizing you actually have to live within the paycheck — what did you do? How did the story evolve?

28:36 Ian: Well, let’s see. I would say that I didn’t start by coping with it in a very…I mean, despite my training in clinical psychology, I want to say that I dealt with it like in a very logical or sensible way. I think mostly I felt terrified, and then anxious, and then afraid, and then hopeless, and then angry, and I cycled through all of this stuff. That was my first reaction, and of course none of that was really particularly helpful. Eventually, I took out a Dave Ramsey book from the library. And I would say that I have mixed feelings about his guidance. I certainly have mixed feelings about prosperity gospel, for sure. But I think the basics, like the super, super basics of what he, or I mean really anyone — him, or Suze Orman, Gaby Dunn — any of these folks out out there, is that the 101 clearly gets you on the right path of figuring out how much money you have coming in every month, determining your expenses, and figuring out what you need to do to balance that equation. There were some other components that I found particularly helpful, where my feeling was, I had heard about this thing called debt snowballing with credit cards and I knew that I wanted to do that, but reading, at least based on Dave Ramsey’s recommendation, that if your finances are really a hotness, which that’s me, the first thing you want to do is save $1000. Save enough money so you have some kind of stop gap if car breaks or unexpected medical bill or what have you.

30:41 Ian: I think that’s what really got me started with it, but I do also want to say that what also got me started with it was after graduate school, having an income that gave me enough hope that I could pay down some of these debts, which I think brings me sort of full circle to a point of balance in my own way of thinking about finances, where I personally believe that true financial responsibility is not just about managing your own finances, but also advocating for greater economic justice. That they’re not separate. Blaming all of your financial problems on the world and the way it is, is not the healthiest way to look at things. Viewing your finances as a personal responsibility that you, yourself need to carry like Atlas to the end of time, come hell or high water, no matter what else is going on out in the world, I also don’t think it’s particularly healthy.

31:52 Ian: There needs to be a balance where we can say to ourselves that the world can be a cruel and unfair place. We have to do whatever it is that we can to live a financially healthy life now, while advocating and fighting for a better future for ourselves and for our children. Even in sort of tying it back to my time in the graduate students union, if I have two legacies that that I left at university of Connecticut, one is my dissertation, which is going to metaphorically collect dust on a server, because the likelihood that anybody will read it except for figuring out how to format own dissertation is pretty low. But the legacy of knowing that we have left, that I and all of the other students who worked together, hand-in-hand, to create a union so that future students could have a more prosperous future while they were in graduate school, that’s something that I can really look back on with pride. I think coming to that sort of healthy balance for me is where I’m currently at in my own thinking about financial health.

33:15 Emily: Yeah, thank you so much for that articulation, that was absolutely fascinating. And I think I also am going on a similar journey to come to the same place, but starting from the opposite side of, okay, just keep your head down, focus on your own business, and not necessarily look up at the wider picture as much. I’m sort of emerging from that viewpoint. Thanks to a lot of these interviews that I’m doing through the podcast, it’s been really a big growth experience for me.

33:45 Emily: What I wanted to ask you about though is in coming to that healthy place of being able to do both of these things, what you think about the idea of the necessity of having your own personal finances in the best shape that they can be in as enabling you to go out and do that good work in the world and advocate for others. I won’t say it’s impossible to do the latter without the former, but I think if you come from an area of personal strength, that it just further enables you to do that work. What do you think about that?

34:17 Ian: I like that idea. I think it resonates with this idea that to help others you need to help yourself, like on the airplane where you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help somebody who’s sitting next to you. I think that that can be true. I don’t think that one needs to preceed the other, however. I think that it’s important that we have a broader conversation, both within higher education, but within society as a whole, about the relationship between economic justice and the economic structures that we’re embedded in, and our own personal financial health. I think, actually, that unions could be a really nice and really good nexus at which students can find that, because at least to me, if a university administrator who’s making $200,000, $300,000 a year comes and lectures me about financial responsibility, my response is not going to be, Thank you, I appreciate that. As a graduate student, my response to that would be, go take a hike, to put it politely.

35:46 Ian: However, I think if unions can sell this idea that a stronger union, a more just economic society is one in which its advocates and its members and its stakeholders are able to responsibly manage their own finances, I think that’s really important. While, at the same time recognizing that there are some situations in which financial responsibility is not itself always the primary problem for someone who’s having financial difficulties. A few examples that come to mind are if you have a child or a loved one or yourself who has had a severe medical emergency and suddenly you have a six figure bill put on your doorstep, the problem there is our healthcare system, and not necessarily how you’ve managed your own money. Of course you still have to come up with a solution and that’s important, but let’s not lose sight of the big picture.

36:59 Ian: I think it’s also important that we recognize the impact that mental health can have on a person’s finances. While I was in graduate school, one of the things that I studied was gambling disorder, for instance. The processes that underly gambling disorders, I mean, I’m sure there are graduate students out there who have issues with gambling, but sort of more broadly just than gambling, if you think about shopping addiction, any kind of mental health problem that might lead to episodes of irresponsible financial behavior. Bipolar disorder would be another one that would fall very neatly in that category. We have to make enough room within our economic justice advocacy to recognize that there are people for whom their financial problems are not primarily caused by a lack of what you might call personal responsibility. I think we can come at it from both directions, but part of getting folks who are able to be financially responsible, to be financially responsible is to have the right vehicle for learning about that, that says the world can be a terrible and unfair place, but in light of that, in recognition of that, let’s help give you the skills to thrive to the best of your ability, financially, in spite of that adversity.

Best Financial Advice for Graduate Students and PhDs

38:27 Emily: I’m so glad you put that in the larger context. I’m really glad that we took the time for that. So as we wrap up the interview, what is your best financial advice for maybe a graduate student or another early career PhD, perhaps something that you’ve learned, post this transformation after you’ve reformed your own practice of personal finance?

38:50 Ian: Sure. I would say that I have three small pieces of advice. The first is keep track of everything that you spend. And this is just personally, I think if you keep track of every little thing you spend, you really understand where your money is going, and it starts to sort of become like a fun game of saving money, where you can go “Oh, well, you know, I could spend, you know, $4 at Starbucks or I could buy a bag of beans and make a cup of coffee at home for 25 cents.” That’s sort of my simple suggestion.

39:29 Ian: Number two is forgive yourself and it’s never too soon to start. Again, sort of having worked in the world of recovery, it’s never too soon to start. Whether you’re 22 and just thinking about graduate school or whether you had gone back to graduate school and you’re 37 and you have two or three kids and you’ve never really seriously considered how to build wealth, it’s never too soon to start.

40:07 Ian: And then number three, my final point would be make economic justice advocacy a core component of your own financial responsibility. Really own the idea in your heart, that taking care of others is taking care of yourself, and taking care of yourself is taking care of others. And in that spirit, hopefully, all of us can create a more economically just life for graduate students in higher education and more broadly, in society at large.

40:45 Emily: Thank you so much Ian. I’m so glad to learn from you and to have your perspective here on the podcast. So thank you so much for giving this interview.

40:53 Ian: Thank you so much. If you would like to, you can follow me on Twitter at @ianagutierrez and it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

Outtro

41:02 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.

The Financial Hurdles of Moving to the US as a Postdoc

May 18, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Louise Lassalle, a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Berkeley, CA. Louise recounts the hurdles in the process of her move from France to the US for her postdoc. We discuss short-term hurdles; e.g., being approved for a rental, establishing credit, and the cost of moving; medium-term hurdles; e.g., choosing a health insurance plan, adjusting to the cost of living, and paying tax; and long-term hurdles, e.g., the cost of applying for a green card. This episode will give international graduate students and postdocs preparing for a move to the US a preview of what is to come and what pitfalls to watch out for.

Links Mentioned

Find Dr. Louise Lassalle on Twitter
Website: PostDocSalaries.com
How to Budget At a Distance
Personal Finance for PhDs: Speaking
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

00:00 Louise: Don’t just accept a job offer because you love the science. We are all passionate about it, we just want to do science. But where you live is also important, and if you have to worry too much about the financial then you won’t have as much time to do actual science.

Introduction

00:24 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 three and today my guest is Dr. Louise Lassalle, a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Berkeley, California. Louise recounts the hurdles in the process of her move from France to the U S for her post-doc. We discuss short-term hurdles like being approved for a rental, establishing credit, and the cost of moving; medium term hurdles like choosing a health insurance plan, adjusting to the cost of living and paying tax; and long-term hurdles like the cost of applying for a green card. This episode will give international graduate students, postdocs and workers preparing for a move to the US a preview of what is to come and what pitfalls to watch out for. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Louise Lassalle.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:21 Emily: I am delighted how joining me today on the podcast, Dr. Louise Lassalle, and we are going to be discussing the particular financial challenges that come with coming to the US for part of your training. So, Louise, thank you so much for joining me and will you please tell me and the audience a little bit more about yourself?

01:40 Louise: Sure. Thank you for having me. I got my PhD in France, in Grenoble and after that I was looking for postdoc and I think I was looking in all Europe and also in the US and I got a postdoc in San Francisco in Berkeley, more precisely. When I came for my post-doc was my first time in the US. I went to the US neither for vacation or for conferences and I’ve been there for three years now and I’m still the same job, so I’m still on my post-doc.

Initial Financial Challenges with an International Move

02:23 Emily: All right. Yeah. Great to hear. So let’s start back when you first arrived, maybe even before you arrived in the US but when you were applying for your job, getting your job offer — were there any challenges associated with being an international post-doc associated with that stage of things?

Before the Move

02:41 Louise: I think the first thing is even before you come, you already start with a visa application. You already start with paperwork and try to understand what’s going on. I think that’s the visa application was the main thing to understand, make sure you do everything right and I think that’s the main thing.

03:06 Emily: One question to that is that — the visa application, is that something that you’re able to do totally on your own or do you need to consult with a lawyer or something?

03:15 Louise: In the US, most of the post-docs will be on G-1 because it’s the easiest way to get a post-doc. A G-1 is supposed to be for a change and visitor, but university use it for that proposal too. So basically you employer will provide you with a form for DS-2019, and the process is quite easy on G-1s. Now that I know other processes, I realized that G-1 wasn’t that difficult, but as a first timer you don’t know. So you don’t need a lawyer. It’s quite a straightforward.

03:54 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Great. And I think you mentioned to me earlier that one of your difficulties at that stage of things was understanding the salary offer that you received and putting it in context, having never lived in Berkeley before.

04:11 Louise: Yeah. So first I was very excited to get a post-doc in Berkeley and the topic was super interesting for me, so I was already in the mood that I will accept whatsoever. And also the salary was basically twice what I was doing before, but of course it doesn’t work this way because the rent is not the same as it was. The rent would be like three times and all the costs of living are different. So that is my first advice is make sure you know what the cost of living is before. I’m not sure would have been able to negotiate my salary whatsoever. It’s very hard when I just have like a Skype interview with my PI at this point. But perhaps negotiate your starting time, if the flight is too expensive, then say, “okay, can I start like one month later?”, or something like that.

05:12 Emily: Yeah. Actually, so a year or so I launched this project, PostDocSalaries.com and that’s a database of self reported salary and benefit information. And one of the questions I included in that survey is did you negotiate something about your package or not? And I was surprised actually that about, if I remember correctly, it was about a quarter or a third of the people who responded said, yes, they did negotiate, successfully that is. I thought that was actually pretty high. So it’s definitely something that people don’t necessarily know to do, but it’s sort of one of those, well you may as well try, like you might not be successful, but why not try. But I would be interested in knowing if international postdocs have less leverage maybe than domestic ones in going into that negotiation process. I’m not sure.

06:01 Emily: So you decided you were going to accept whatever offer came your way because you’re excited about the topic and so forth. And so did you try before you actually moved to figure out what the cost of living was going to be or were you just kind of like, “Okay, it is what it is, I’m going.”

06:15 Louise: It was a little of both. I think I still started to check on Craigslist to see the rent, but I was still very optimistic about that and I can go little more on how to get to housing after that. So no, I didn’t really look at it more carefully and it was more like, “Let’s go, let’s do it.”

06:42 Emily: Okay. And so did you arrange for housing before you moved or upon your move?

06:47 Louise: So in this also, I was a little too optimistic. I did a book an Airbnb for one week before and it wasn’t enough at all. I should have booked it, I will advise at least two weeks or even one month. Also because, at least for me, where I live is kind of important. You want to make sure you’re making a great choice and I won’t advise anyone to rent something, apart from Airbnb, from outside. You need to see before you sign anything or you send money. I would really advise to go to an Airbnb, even if you spend a little more money at the beginning, and then find something that really fits your needs. And also you don’t know your neighbors, you don’t know the public transport, or if you want to get a car, if you can do it.

07:40 Emily: Yeah, there is a lot. I mean I agree with you. It’s very difficult to rent something sight unseen. You’re taking a big risk there. And so it’s kind of cool actually that there has been this rise in short term rental options so that you can do something for a couple of weeks or a month without having to sign a lease, but just going into a short term rental situation so that you can do all that research on the ground. It sounded like you needed a little bit more time than what you gave yourself. Did you end up extending that Airbnb or moving to a different one or how did you work that out?

08:09 Louise: I moved to another one but I got a very cheap one and it wasn’t great. And then I rushed to rent an apartment and it wasn’t a good one, because what you see in Airbnb is not what you will get. I can expand more on that later on, but you are not actually competing at exactly the same levels as other people, so in general you go to the more expensive or the apartment that kind of no one wants.

Financial To-Do List When You Land

08:37 Emily: Yeah. So what’s the next thing that you would like to address? When you have your flight coming into San Francisco or wherever you flew into, what were the financial challenges that you were facing right away?

08:50 Louise: I think this is for everyone moving somewhere else, you need quite a lot of money to just first book your flight. Since you need your visa and you don’t know when your visa will come up, then you book your flight like two weeks in advance. And for example, I booked my flight and I arrived mid July. It was a more expensive flight I ever booked, and this, I think I could have perhaps negotiated more, or ask for an increase in my relocation fee because of that.

09:28 Louise: To rent, all of this, I think opening a bank account was actually one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. It Is very, very easy, and what helps a lot is to have the letter of employment with you, and that helps also for the renting part. In general, when you go to the city, everyone knows the big universities that are close by and they like to rent, especially if you’re not the students, you are post-doc, because they know that an employee will pay their rent on time and is not going anywhere. This kind of helps as kind of a reference.

10:06 Emily: I actually am curious about how you paid for things like until you had that bank account opened. Did you have a credit card from your home that worked here or how did that work?

10:17 Louise: Yeah, so you can pay with your credit card. Actually in France we don’t have credit cards and our card is both debit and credit. But the equity we can get on it is generally smaller. But you can pay outside. I think we use, I think the cheapest way is to use wise transfer, but this also takes a few days, so sometimes it’s a little harder. I have to say think that with a credit card I was good because after one week I sent some money over and it was okay.

10:55 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like opening a bank account was probably one of the very first things you did right? Like day two or something.

11:02 Louise: And as I say, it was super easy. Some people say that they ask for, for example, security numbers. They don’t or at least the one I went to it was okay.

11:15 Emily: Gotcha. And what about getting like ID here? Is that another thing you did right away?

11:21 Louise: So right away what you need to do is get your social security number, for sure. This was also another paperwork, but I think it was — generally the university will provide you with some guidance on that. Then what you can do, I mean, the only ID you can get here is a driver license, and I got mine actually a few months after I got here because I didn’t need a car. It was more so I didn’t have to bring my passport everywhere. I think a drivers license is great because it’s kind of an ID and, and then you can keep your passport safe.

11:58 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah. Was there anything else that you discovered in those first few weeks here, especially as you’re arranging for housing? Anything that you wish you had known maybe before you moved or that would have made things easier?

12:14 Louise: So I didn’t expect it will be so hard to get an apartment. First, a lot of people ask for reference and they ask for credit score, and if you’ve never lived in the US you don’t have a credit score. And you have your letter of employment, but technically you didn’t start it yet, so you don’t have that previous salary and sometime also when, if you move up as a couple, you just have one salary. So in general, when they do the list and it’s hard to get at the top of the list, because there’s always someone that’s making more than you, or has better credentials.

13:00 Emily: I would imagine just the housing market also in the Bay Area, broadly, is a very difficult place. Lots of competition. So you may have had among the hardest times that you might have in any city around the US. So how did that end up working out?

13:18 Louise: So I rented something very fast and it wasn’t the best apartment ever, and I moved out this apartment after six months. Also, for example, the rental lease, the rule around that is very different from France and it’s much, much harder on the people that are actually renting the apartment than on the owner, and for me was a surprise to sign a lease. I say that I will have to stay there, whatever happened, even if I get a new job for one year, or I will have to elect to pay for it.

13:55 Emily: So the terms were a little bit unfamiliar to you, in terms of it was much more favorable to the owner, the landlord than it was to the tenant. Is that what you’re saying?

14:05 Louise: Yeah.

14:05 Emily: So what would be more typical in France?

14:08 Louise: So in France, in general, the lease is to protect the renter and also owner. So the lease will be a [inaudible] lease. That means that the owner cannot push you away or they need a big reason for doing that, but you can leave. You have to let your landlord know three months in advance and you can go down to one month if it’s a very hot market or if you get a new job or you move for professional reasons. So I think it’s much more close to what the reality here is, that sometimes you just need to move because you get a new job.

14:46 Emily: Yeah, I know the lease that I signed for my current apartment in Seattle, the terms to break the lease were much more stringent, much higher costs than I had signed in the past. So this is definitely one of those local things, right? It can vary from place to place and obviously individual owner or leasing company, like that. But yeah, I think maybe in higher cost of living cities, the owners have a little bit more power and anyway, the terms can be quite high for breaking a lease early.

15:15 Emily: Anything else regarding some of those first financial challenges that you encountered right away when you arrived here?

15:24 Louise: One thing, it is not directly financial, but you have one month, at least in my lab, you have one month to sign up for your healthcare insurance. The postdocs here have great healthcare insurance also because we have a union, so it was negotiated. We pay very low. You still have two ways, like HMO, PPO is covered differently. And so I think it’s not specific to internationals, because what I understand is even for an American it is a complete mess and so I don’t think it’s very specific, but perhaps for international, it had another layer of things you have to take care of and can be very stressful. And I will say especially for people with family, to understand that with kids that you go much more often to the doctor to understand how it works.

16:19 Emily: Yeah, I can imagine that can be a huge challenge because the US healthcare system is really, really challenging for everyone, and especially if you’re coming from somewhere that makes it a lot easier and you’re not familiar with all the weird stuff that happens here, I can see how that could be super challenging. Was your HR department helpful for you in making that kind of decision about which kind of healthcare plan to take? Did they guide you in any way?

16:42 Louise: Yeah, we had some presentation. The problem here is that I think I remember not getting anything. I think I got how it works perhaps one year after, when I was actually explaining to other people and I asked them to sit down and I think it’s just very confusing. Even me when I tried to explain it again to new postdoc, I also get confused at some point., but they try to help you out.

17:10 Emily: Okay.

Commercial

17:13 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.

Mid-Term Financial Challenges of an International Move

18:13 Emily: So let’s move to sort of more midterm challenges. You’ve been here for a few months, what were the next sort of set of financial challenges or questions that you had?

18:25 Louise: I think you feel like you are getting a bunch of money, but of course, when you remove the rent and then half is gone, and as the cost of living tends to be also a little higher, so I think you also need to adapt to that and adapt your way of living. Also what you will do in your country that will cost you nothing that here is expensive. For example, the food. You have to rethink and you have to come up with new things because there’s no way I can eat the same way I eat in France, it is way too expensive. I mean this is a small adjustments, but it is and adjustment. For me, and this is personal, but I have a hard time to understand the credit card system. And it scared me at first, that they say, yeah, you have $1,000 and you can spend it. I’m like, but I don’t have it really. I mean, yes, you have it, but not really. Andwhen I should do my reimbursement and how I should reimburse so my credit score actually goes higher. This also was a little confusing for me.

19:38 Emily: I do not think you’re at all alone about that, because even for people who grow up here, if you’ve never been explicitly sat down and taught how a credit score works or read about it for yourself, there’s a lot of misconceptions floating around about it. Like, for instance, some people believe that if you carry a balance on a credit card, it improves your credit score. In fact, the opposite is true. It’ll probably dinging you in some ways. So yeah, understanding that system can be really difficult. Did you start off with a secured credit card? Was that the first kind you got or were you able to qualify for like a normal credit card?

20:14 Louise: I think a normal. So what I heard from some friends is sometimes the bank actually asks them to put a deposit and they get from this deposit and I don’t know why my bank just give me one and they didn’t ask for anything. And even my husband that was, so we were teo on my salary, and my husband got a credit card like this. So yeah, no we didn’t. I think we get the normal one right away.

20:42 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know why that would be either. The path that I also know is the same thing. Secured card. You put down a deposit, then that’s the amount of money you have available to you. So it’s kind of the same as a debit card, but it helps you build credit. It’s something that mostly people only have to use for a few months, maybe six months or something, before they can then move on to the regular credit system. I don’t know why you would be able to jump right into that one either, but glad you didn’t have to take that first step. And how do you feel about credit now? Now that you’re three years in, are you more comfortable with that? Do you use it at all?

21:13 Louise: Oh yeah. I noticed some people have different credit cards and all from a specific supermarket or brand or whatever. And I just, I didn’t go into it. I feel more safe to just have one. And even this, I use it carefully. But yeah. This is this more personal but once you get it, it’s okay.

21:44 Emily: It sounded like you moved in July, three years ago. How about when it came to tax time that following year? How did you work through that?

21:58 Louise: Okay, so first I’m a post-doc employee, so I have a W-2 form, so it’s quite easy. It’s much, much easier than people on fellowship. So you just have to do it once. And I find actually the first year, it’s not so confusing. We had a presentation here to the lab from the tax people, they help us go through and we can send her an email with our specifics, because since also I wasn’t in the US before, so I was no resident for everything, and it was kind of okay. I think the second year I became a resident for California, but not resident for federal, and it makes it a little more difficult. And this year actually my husband got paid, but as self-employed and that for this one was very difficult to figure out how to declare that. The taxes are hard, but it’s also once a year and everyone has to go through it. We invite people to try to find people from the same country because you can have some country has this treaty that you’re exempt from federal taxes, and some country you still need to pay your taxes back then. Some you don’t. This was quite, it was a boost of my salary and helped a lot in the beginning. That’s a big one for federal taxes.

23:34 Emily: And so is that what the tax treaty with France says? Is that what applied to you, that in the first year you moved here you didn’t have to pay federal tax, but starting in the second year you did, is that right?

23:44 Louise: It’s two years.

23:44 Emily: Oh two years.

23:44 Louise: Yeah, it’s two years day to date. And then the fact that I didn’t have to pay in France is because French tax says that you just pay what you earn in France. It is not related to your citizenship like in a US or in Germany.

24:02 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah, I think the US is very unusual. There’s only a couple of countries that tax their citizens no matter where they live, but yeah, US does that, warning.

Additional Advice for PhDs Planning an International Move

24:13 Emily: Anything else? Any other financial challenges you came upon or things that you want to pass on to other people, bits of knowledge, as you were getting acclimated to the US.

24:22 Louise: Yeah, I just think getting used to that you will spend much more cash and you have to be careful with that. Also, you get a little excited. You want to travel, you want to visit, and it can get a little too much. Every time you go on conference you will spend at least $1000 to $2000 and in general you will get reimbursed but after that, so even with credit card and all of this, get prepared for that too and kind of put it on your budget. If you know you will go to a conference, you should have at least $2000 to make sure you cover the cost. This is for everyone, but that’s true that for an international sometimes you already spent so much on getting there and then you need to rebuild your funds.

25:13 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. You were just mentioning traveling and I guess something that we think about here is that, you know, in France, our perception is that you guys get a lot of vacation time and we get very little vacation time in comparison. How has that been for you?

25:28 Louise: First that’s true. But as I mentioned before, we have a union, we negotiate five weeks vacation. So it’s actually quite good. And we have also some sick leave that we can take from here to here. Five days is the minimum you will get in France, for example. Generally when you work for a university in France, you get more like 10 or 12, weeks per year. So it’s not that far away and I think it’s helped a lot also. Also if we talk about vacation, this is also a burden on the international. It’s like every time you need to renew your visa, you don’t know how long it will take. So in general, in most countries in Europe are okay, but you never know because they can go on back processes and then you don’t know. But people from India or China, it could take like one month, one month and a half, and then you just use all your vacation for that or you just don’t come back.

26:37 Emily: Yeah, that’s really, really challenging. Just the uncertainty around that, I agree.

Long-Term Planning for Permanent Residency

26:42 Emily: So I understand that you are applying for permanent residency, or are looking into it. What’s that process been like?

26:49 Louise: Okay. Actually I got it.

26:52 Emily: Oh yeah. Great. Congratulations!

26:54 Louise: I got it a few weeks ago. The process for the green card — you will need to pay basically two entities. You will need to pay the US government, and it will be I think $2000 to $3000, also depending if you apply as a couple or not. The big thing, the big part of it is to pay a lawyer, and I won’t to go into details, but you may need lawyers. A lot of people go with lawyers because if you need to make your case, even if you get a green card because you are a scientist, there is a lot of legal stuff going into it, and it’s not a straight out science, like you would write a paper. You can get become eligible by just getting married with an American. Your employer can also ask for a green card for you, and you can petition. That’s what I did. And as a scientist you can kind of easily make your case and you can go for one of the easiest ones, national interest. So that’s like US economy needs you, basically. Then there’s the whole process to get people to refer you. Technically, your lawyer will write a reference letter that you will send to them and they will sign it. And then it’s a lot of bunch of paperwork, that you need to put and translate stuff. In general, preparing all of this will take between three to six months, I would say. And then generally this is used both for eligibility and to adjust your status. Eligibility, you will know around six months. Adjustment of status, it depends a lot on where you come from. It can be from one year to 10 or more.

28:40 Emily: Wow. Yeah, that sounds quite the ordeal. And do you mind sharing, how much did you ultimately spend on the lawyer part of it?

28:48 Louise: For the lawyer, I paid for the eligibility part and I paid $5,000 and I think that is roughly what you will pay. There are cheaper ones, but…I did much more math for this one, I wanted to be more prepared. If you look at the postdoc salary, anything else you can get, in general, is much highe,, and that’s th problem. With my G-1 I cannot get a job in industry or nonprofit or anywhere else. And also I cannot have a side job. I just can work for my employer at my university. This, or me, was also why I wanted ,a green card so I can start and perhaps have a side business, if I wanted to.

29:39 Emily: And why did you decide to go that route instead of maybe finding a next employer and going to the H1B route?

29:49 Louise: Because I wanted to do a career move. I wanted to go out of science and go more applied initiative positions in university or nonprofits. To still work with scientists, but more on the kind of development on the science communication part. And for this one, then my skill as a scientist, I will use part of them, but not the specific one, not the technical one. My employer won’t be able to say, because that’s what they do when they ask for your H1B for you, they basically say no American can do it. I was applying for jobs that they can’t say that, so that’s why. And I think even if you can get a n H1B, the H1B for industry, you can just apply once a year and it is a lottery, so even your employer doesn’t know if you will get it. Then I think you have the O-1 that you can apply to, but it is also, I think, depending on the employer, so you do get less freedom on your part. Actually a lot of people that want to stay here a little longer, if they can, the go for a green card because that’s what gives you the most freedom and also peace of mind. Because now if I lose my job now I need to leave the country within a month. So I think a green card also gives you some freedom around this.

31:12 Emily: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that you have completed that process, so you have that peace of mind now. That’s great to hear. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered yet? Some piece of advice you’d want to give to another international student or postdoc moving to the US for the first time?

Final Words of Advice

31:26 Louise: Yeah, so for sure I will say, do your homework, as good as you did when you choose your position, or you look for a job. When you look for a job, you will perhaps do informal interviews, you will do networking, and try to know what is the job about and do you want to go this way? And I think it’s great to do exactly the same when you move to another country, or another city. Do informal interviews. Be aware, because, so I did one, but someone who lived here I think five years ago and so the renting market just completely changed. The rent doubled. So of course what he was saying, he wasn’t what was happening right now. Do some informal interview, too. See if the environment fits you and fits your needs, because this can also be one point. And do the math, too. And be aware that getting an apartment for the first time will be much harder than you think you will be, so take your time for that.

32:34 Emily: Yeah, I agree. And actually I have a resource. I made a webinar and template spreadsheet earlier this summer, so I’ll link that from the show notes that are all about how to budget at a distance. So how to figure out what is that cost of living where you’re moving to. This could be within the US, if you’re coming from another US city, or coming from outside the country, it’s going to work either way. So what are some like resources you can look to, to figure out what does that cost of living going to be, especially the housing, because that’s the really big rock in the middle of your expenses is figuring that out. And so that’ll really help you kind of know, how is that salary offer? Is it going to be sufficient? And certainly for graduate students it is a question mark, whether or not it’s going to be enough to live on, depending on the city and depending on the program. If that sounds good to you, please go check out that resource in the show notes.

33:19 Emily: So Louise, last question before we wrap up. What is your best financial advice for another postdoc or another early career PhD?

33:29 Louise: Really look into it. Don’t just accept a job offer because you love the science. We are all passionate about it. We just want to do science, but where you live is also important, and if you have to worry too much about the financial part, then you won’t have as much time to do the actual science. And especially if you move in with a partner or if you are moving with your family, then you have even more. That is my advice.

34:04 Emily: Oh, excellent. I totally co-sign all of that. Great, great advice. And Louise, thank you so much for this interview and for joining me today.

34:10 Louise: Thank you.

Outtro

34:14 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Entrepreneur Advocates for Universal Basic Income (Part 2)

May 11, 2020 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and co-host of the Basic Income Podcast. Jim defines universal basic income and outlines how it would alleviate poverty and other social ills, including results from research and real-life experiments with basic income. He describes the possible avenues by which universal basic income could be funded and whether it would replace our existing social safety nets. Jim and Emily speculate about how universal basic income might affect higher education funding, including PhD stipends and postdoc salaries, and PhD trainees themselves.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Jim: You could basically think of this as universal basic fellowships for PhD students because I think that the dynamics that come with it very, very closely would match what it would be if you were getting a fellowship of the same size.

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 two, and today my guest is Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and cohost of The Basic Income Podcast. In this second half of our interview, Jim articulates what basic income is and how it would alleviate poverty in the United States, including results from recent research and experimentation. He describes the possible avenues by which it could be funded and whether it would replace our existing social safety nets. We speculate about how basic income might affect higher education, including PhD stipends and postdoc salaries. Without further ado, here’s the second part of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:06 Emily: We’re back now with part two of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh. In part one, he told us all about how he started a business a few years after graduate school, which ultimately allowed him a great deal of time freedom. So, his business pays for his lifestyle, but he only works at this point about five hours a week on the business. And that has allowed him to pivot to his advocacy work around universal basic income, which is what we’re going to be hearing a lot more about today. So, Jim, thank you so much for continuing this interview with me. And we want to start off with a basic question about universal basic income because frankly, I probably would not have really heard about this except that you and I are Facebook friends. And also, we’re recording this in September, 2019 and Andrew Yang is a candidate for the democratic nomination for president. So, between those two things, I’ve kind of heard a little bit about basic income, but I would love to hear a lot more about what it actually is from you.

01:59 Jim: Sure. Well, so, just to start with the definition. A universal basic income is a policy that would provide every single person in the country with unconditional cash payments regularly–most people talk about once a month–that’s actually enough to cover basic needs. And the idea of it is that, if you were to enact this, you eradicate absolute poverty. You’re ensuring that everyone does have enough money to cover the fundamentals. And so, in some ways it’s very, very simple because it’s just giving people some cash. But in other ways, we’re potentially talking about something very radical because we would for the first time be saying, we are fully abolishing absolute poverty. We’re saying that absolutely no one in the country should be poor and that we’re going to structure our systems with that in mind. And so the ramifications of that are pretty profound as far as what does it mean for work? What does it mean for health? What does it mean for people’s general lifestyle if you’re actually establishing that fundamental financial security floor?

Benefits of Universal Basic Income (UBI)

03:12 Emily: Okay, so let’s first take the benefits–the upsides of this–and let’s leave aside, for the moment, the practicalities of it, but just to talk about the vision for what this society might be like. So, what are the benefits that people might experience maybe who are currently in poverty but would be lifted out of that through UBI? You started to talk about this a little bit at the end of the last episode. So, there’s actually been research done in this area and there’s been some experimentation. So, can you talk a little about what we know already about how this might change things for people?

03:43 Jim: Yeah, so I think there are the obvious things that we know when people are poor, they can’t afford food or at least healthy food. They may be having trouble finding somewhere to live. They may not be able to take care of themselves. So, if you’re actually ensuring that everyone is up above the poverty line through just regular cash transfers, those are all things that are addressed, first order of facts. But I think beyond that, that’s where things start to get quite interesting because we have seen more and more evidence around how poverty and financial insecurity, if not causing, are at least are greatly contributing to a lot of other issues that we’re dealing with today. And so, people when they are approaching any aspect of their life, they can either be in an abundance mentality where they think, “Okay, I have enough. I can think bigger picture.” Or a scarcity mentality where they feel constrained, which basically gives people tunnel vision that they’re only thinking about what’s right in front of them.

Abundance Mindset, Higher IQ

04:51 Jim: And that difference has huge impacts on what happens to people. So, first off, there have been studies just looking at general intelligence, and there is a substantial shift in people’s IQ level between those two different headspaces. I think it’s around one standard deviation, so about 10 IQ points, smarter when you’re in an abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. So, you’re making better decisions. Second, as I said, when you get that tunnel vision and so it means you’re just thinking about what’s right in front of you, it basically prevents you from longterm planning. You can’t be thinking about, “What is my life going to be even a year, much less, five, 10 years down the road?” if you’re worried about, Oh, how am I going to put food on the table tonight or tomorrow? And so, it allows people and encourages people to plan better, to make better longterm decisions which has big impacts around choices on education, choices around what sort of work they pursue, and ultimately, where they do end up in five, 10 years down the road.

Scarcity Mindset Damages Mental and Physical Health

05:58 Jim: And so, beyond just being able to afford health treatments, there’s also a lot of evidence that when you’re in a scarcity mindset, when you’re in poverty, it’s extremely damaging for mental health. And also for physical health, the stress has an impact on that as well. Crime–strong, strong correlation based on people’s financial security as to whether they’re more or less likely to commit crimes. And so there’s all of these second and third order implications around how things would look in our society if we weren’t to have this absolute poverty. That’s seems incredibly promising. And so, that’s why, again, our typical approach as a society is to, when something’s going wrong, to treat the symptoms of it. And this, instead, is really saying, “Let’s actually try to take a step back, deal with some of the underlying causes, and see how much easier that makes dealing with all the rest of this stuff.”

UBI and Job Flexibility

07:00 Emily: Okay. Sounds amazing. It sounds very, very compelling. I’m wondering a little bit more about what the vision for what this society may look like, should we bring it about. You talked earlier about jobs. And so, is the idea that not as many people would need to work? There wouldn’t necessarily be as many people in jobs? Or is the idea that you would have just more freedom and flexibility around when you want to work and when you went to have further training? How does this relate to the jobs, I guess is what I’m asking?

07:28 Jim: I think much more the latter. So, the idea is not that this is something that’s going to replace jobs wholesale. I think it does allow you to pursue a more general definition of work, I would say. And so, in the sense that “job” right now means a fairly specific thing in those conversations about more like a nine to five, like ongoing, consistent workplace. This does give you additional flexibility to think a bit differently about what is the right form of work for you to be doing. So, whether that’s part-time, whether that’s taking some time to get more of an education in the area that ultimately is going to allow you to do something that you feel better about and maybe much more productive for society. Whether it’s going to give you the flexibility if you want to do some sort of family care or staying home with children or elderly folks.

UBI Facilitates Entrepreneurship

08:25 Jim: Another one is entrepreneurship. If you’re considering starting a company or doing something that, in its early stages, may not be giving you a steady paycheck–having more flexibility around that as well. So, it opens up all these doors that most folks, I would say, don’t really have access to at this point in time. As far as overall impact on how much people are working, there have actually been a number of studies on this. And what it suggests is the results vary. That there are certain situations where, when you give people regular, unconditional cash, they work more. It seems like, either through stimulating the local economy and creating jobs or by giving people that flexibility, they end up doing more work. So, Alaska for the last 40 years has actually had a universal income provided by oil in the state. And recent studies have found that the overall work rate hasn’t changed, but you see a lot more people engaging in part-time work than you have in the past. Or, certain groups, studies have found there is a decrease in work, quite consistently actually across studies. The ones where that’s only really stood out is parents with young children and teenagers, basically. And interviewing folks involved in that, it seems like the former is spending more time staying home with kids, the latter spending more time at school. So, again, it’s not captured as work in how we measure it today, but it actually is work and potentially much more pro-social work than they might otherwise be engaged in.

10:06 Emily: So, this is really reminding me of–so I have not read this book. The book is Your Money or Your Life by Vicky Robin, I want to say. And she has a coauthor. Anyway, I heard a podcast interview with her within the last few weeks and she was talking about how in our current society, like you’re saying, there’s a lot of work that is not inside a job, right? There’s a lot of work that people do in our society to further it. A lot of women do this kind of work and it’s not valued in terms of a paycheck from a job, right? That doesn’t mean it’s not contributing to society. And so, I don’t remember if they specifically talked about basic income on that podcast, but this is a way to sort of reframe what counts as work and what counts as doing something valuable with your time.

UBI and Social Safety Nets

10:51 Emily: Yeah. Okay. So, I think I’m getting you here. I have another question: would this replace the social safety nets that we have currently and expand them, I guess you could say?

11:03 Jim: So, there are mixed opinions on this amongst people who advocate for basic income. I’m actually in the camp saying that this should not initially be treated as a replacement for any social programs. And I think the reasons are: one, is that I think there is widespread recognition across the political spectrum that our social safety net is not working as well as we would like it to. You get very different opinions as to what would allow it to work as well as we would like it to. But no one is satisfied with where it’s at. I think a lot of people have talked about, “Let’s provide basic income and then just cut much, if not all, of other social programs because this will eradicate absolute poverty. Why do we need to worry about anything else?” And there are actually, I would say, a lot of edge cases here where it’s people who are dealing with some specific challenge for which cash on its own is not going to quickly solve it. It will help a lot in many situations. But I think there is the risk that if you say, “All right, we’ll get rid of this other stuff and just give you cash,” you’ve basically taken a problem that requires multiple parts to solve and just replaced one part with another. And, in some cases, maybe they keep people worse off because of that.

Targeted Interventions Beyond UBI

12:25 Emily: Can you be more specific about what is being provided to people now that’s not money?

12:29 Jim: Yeah. So, I think disability being a good one where disabilities can look very different for different sorts of people. And in some cases, the support you would need to actually be able to live with disabilities requires much more than what a basic income would provide. And so, that’s a case where, if someone were to say, “We’re going to wipe everything off the books and just give you that,” a lot of people in that situation are going to be left far worse off. I think there are specific issues around addiction, in some situations, housing assistance where there is obviously there are areas where housing is far, far more expensive. And so, to think that a national UBI would actually be enough for people in the Bay Area to be able to get by, it’s not realistic. And so, that’s a situation where a targeted intervention beyond the UBI is going to be important.

13:22 Jim: And then I think there are other ones where it may be some general challenge where someone’s falling out of the workforce or coming back from deployment abroad where, again, making sure that they have enough cash is important, but there are additional services that come beyond that that also much better set them up to succeed than the cash on its own. And so, I think that that’s a key thing here is to recognize both how transformative and valuable UBI could be, but also that it’s not a panacea. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s something that will need an ecosystem of additional supports if we actually want to have an effective safety net. And so, I don’t think the safety net that we have right now is doing that well enough, and we need to be rethinking that. But I think that there’s a danger when people say, “UBI instead of that,” that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and end up in a situation where people may be much worse off than they are today.

Regional Cost of Living Considerations

14:25 Emily: Yeah. I think because this is, I don’t necessarily want to say it’s a new idea. I mean, you said Alaska has been doing something like this for 40 years, but it’s gained maybe national attention only in recent years. So, this is still an idea that’s being worked out. And at the policy level, if viable, we don’t know exactly what the ultimate solution would look like. And presumably, it would change over decades and generations anyway. So, I’m glad you brought up the cost of living question. Because the U.S. is very diverse in terms of cost of living. Is the ultimate idea still that people would get the same amount of money no matter where they live? Maybe with some additional help, like you were just saying, for certain people in certain areas?

Psychological Implications

15:05 Jim: So yeah, a key part of it is–and I don’t think I said in my original definition, but the idea is–this would be the same amount to everyone. And there are a couple reasons for that. One is logistical that it becomes much easier to manage if it’s the same for everyone. But the other is more psychological. One of the reasons for taking a universal approach is to try to eliminate stigma associated with receiving support, which in our modern age, we all see how much stigma is associated with receiving various forms of welfare. And that, if it’s something that everyone in society is getting, you’re able to get around that. Because why is it wrong for the homeless person on the street to get the check every month if I’m also getting my check every month?

Regional Supplements

15:52 Jim: And so, that’s another reason to have the equal, universal amount. But as you say, what that means is that in particularly different regions across the country, you’re going to see big differences as far as the implications of that. So, there certainly are parts of the country where if you were giving everyone a thousand dollars a month, you can survive without too much difficulty. If you’re in the Bay Area or other places, that does not get you very far. And so, that’s an area where you do need to have something beyond that. There’s been some discussion around regional supplements where you might be able to top up a equal federal amount with something that goes up more for more expensive areas. But I think beyond that, yeah, there may be other targeted interventions that are important.

UBI Increases Mobility

16:46 Jim: I think one question that comes up that we don’t really have a good answer to but people wonder about is, if you’re providing the basic income to everyone, it is going to increase people’s mobility. And so, if you currently feel tied to a certain geography for economic reasons, which may be very expensive, whether that gives you the option to relocate to somewhere that is less expensive. And then that gets very complicated because it goes into community ties and family and things like that where there may be other factors beyond just the economics of it. But it’s something that would be different if we did this and so, potentially, that at least partially would help to mitigate some of those challenges.

Commercial

17:35 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.

The Basic Income Podcast

18:34 Emily: I feel like I could continue asking you questions about this for quite a long time. It’s a good thing you have a podcast where other people can learn more about this. What is the name of your podcast?

18:45 Jim: Our name is a bit on the nose. We are The Basic Income Podcast. We’ve been introducing weekly episodes for about three years now and exploring both UBI specifically, but also, how it relates and connects to all sorts of other areas.

How to Fund UBI in the U.S.

19:00 Emily: Okay. So, I’m going to hold off on the questions that are still swirling in my head and just say, listeners, if you’re excited about this idea, or skeptical of it, or whatever, go ahead and check out the podcast and I’m sure there are other resources that you refer to from there where people can continue to learn even more. So, one more question around the vision of this, which is should we all, or enough of us in the United States, decide this is a good idea, what actually does it look like to fund this? Maybe post-transition, if there is a transition.

Enact Changes to the Tax Code

19:32 Jim: Yeah, so that’s another area where people have very different opinions around. Because, I mean, if we’re looking at it on its face saying, “All right, everyone in the country gets a thousand dollars a month,” that’s about $4 trillion, which is the size of our current governmental spending, which seems insane. But there are various caveats, I would say, that make it much more achievable than it may seem at a glance. My preferred approach to financing is first to recognize that, if you’re going to enact universal basic income, it means you need to make some significant differences in the tax code. And specifically, as a starting point, I think income tax. At its core, the goal of UBI is to provide people with financial security. And so, what that means is that, knowing you’re always going to get your check every month is important because who knows what may happen to you. And having it always there gives you that security.

20:31 Jim: But, if you’re earning a good paycheck, there’s no reason why you should be coming out net ahead, necessarily. And so, to basically update our income tax brackets such that, once people make above a certain point, their UBI is effectively being taxed away. So, maybe that’s four times the poverty level. So, if you as an individual are earning more than 50 or $60,000 a year, basically, you’d be getting your check every month and then you’d be paying a bit more in taxes to cover that expense. If you do it that way and look at what’s eventually the net cost, it drops to somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion dollars a year, which is still a lot, but a lot less than the four trillion we started with.

Shift Tax Programs and Brackets

21:18 Jim: And so, then there are different ideas as to how do you pay for that. That’s much more in line with other somewhat ambitious governmental programs. You can couple together some combination of a carbon tax, the financial transaction tax, a wealth tax. And sort of talking more about that, Elizabeth Warren wrote it up in her campaign where you’re able to raise that amount of money to cover that difference. And also, I think potentially looking at adding a few tax brackets at the top of the income level. If we were to go back to the taxation we had pre-Reagan, that would be bringing in a substantial amount there. So, with those things combined, you can relatively easily actually be able to cover the cost.

UBI and Graduate Training

22:02 Emily: Okay. Very, very interesting. So, I wanted to pivot a little bit to tie this really into more of our PhD audience because we haven’t brought that up so far really. I mean, you mentioned earlier that you know, having a basic income could afford people the flexibility to do more training. Of course, PhDs have a lot of that. Have you given any thought, or has there been any discussion around this, how basic income–I’m sure it’s been discussed at the undergraduate level, how that would affect people pursuing college degrees? You can speak about that a little bit if you like, but I am curious about what you think about how it might affect PhD training in the United States. And specifically, you know, you brought up earlier the scarcity mindset and how that prevented people from thinking longterm and it caused an effective IQ drop.

22:45 Emily: And in season four of this podcast, I published a two-part interview with Dr. Lucie Bland and she talked about her scarcity mindset that she developed during her PhD because she was living in poverty during her PhD. She was funded at a very low level. She lives in a very expensive city, and it’s something that a lot of people can relate to during their graduate training. Although you wouldn’t necessarily think about graduate students, a relatively privileged bunch, I would expect, necessarily being beneficiaries of basic income. But maybe during that training period, they are. So, can you just speak a little bit about that?

UBI and Financial Security

23:18 Jim: Well, I would actually just add on to that. What we’re seeing in the Bay Area right now is not only at the graduate student level, but actually the assistant professor level, in some places, that people are homeless. They can’t afford to live here. So, they’re living out of their cars. Yeah, I mean I think that it’s giving you that layer of financial security, which should help with that. I think, not just because it’s some extra money, but because it would be extra money not tied your employment education situation. And obviously this is not everyone, hopefully a small minority, but if you’re having some bad power dynamics with your professor and feeling like you don’t want to be working with him or her but are not able to step away because of finances you’re receiving from there, it gives you kind of that out knowing that, regardless of what you decide there, you have that income coming in otherwise.

Parallel: UBI and Fellowship Income

24:15 Emily: So, there’s actually a slight parallel there, actually with fellowship income, right? And you did your PhD outside of the state, so, maybe it’s a little bit different there. But here with fellowship income, you know, it’s an award that you receive as an individual. It’s based on your own merits. And so, it’s not necessarily tied to you staying in one person’s lab. And so, I again, I publish an interview in season four where someone was able to switch labs, did not have a good relationship with their first advisor, was able to switch labs partially because she received an NSF graduate research fellowship. And so, similar situation, right? If, you know you can go a few months and transition without a paycheck coming from your advisor, it gives you more freedom there to really seek out the situation that is going to support you best as a developing researcher. So, yeah. Excellent point there. Please continue.

24:59 Jim: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I think you just nailed it. You could basically think of this as universal basic fellowships for PhD students because I think that, yeah, I think the dynamics that come with it very, very closely with match what it would be if you were getting a fellowship of the same size. I mean obviously with the added flexibility that you could leave a PhD program and still have it. But as far as the context within graduate school, I think that that’s basically what it would be.

25:27 Emily: Just to explore that a little bit further. Because I do think it’s a good analogy. So, one of the great things about fellowship income is that it gives you more freedom in your research, right? So, if you’re not beholden to working on a specific grant for your advisor, like you often are in STEM fields if you have a research assistantship. The fellowship allows you more intellectual flexibility and pursuing projects that are more in line with your own goals. It allows you to pursue collaborations. It’s just a greater degree of freedom. Now, some advisors exact more or less control when they do have people on a grant for research assistantships. That’s sort of up to their discretion. But yeah, the flexibility there in terms of your intellectual pursuits would then translate in terms of UBI into your general career pursuits, life pursuits. It would just be a much broader funding of that.

26:14 Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think I could imagine there would also be kind of a trade-off on that versus greater financial security. Because one of the questions would be, if everyone were getting a basic income, would you still have PhD student stipends and outside fellowships at a similar level? If you would, okay, everyone’s going to be much more economically stable.

Final Thoughts on UBI and Academia

26:40 Emily: You said earlier as like a touch point that, in your vision of this, around 50 or $60,000 of income, that’s when the UBI would kind of phase out. And for the graduate student level, graduate students don’t reach that point. A lot of postdocs don’t reach that point. So, in some sense, if nothing changed on the grant side of things, then it would boost your income. But yes, the question is whether people would still be funded to the same degree given that they have that baseline. So, if the idea right now in academia is we give people just enough money to live on so they don’t have to have other jobs that distract from their PhD research, well then maybe they would just decrease that funding. So, yeah. Any other thoughts around that? I’m sure this has not been very fully explored because it’s a very niche interest.

27:24 Jim: Well, no, I think that this is a specific example of something that is much broader, which is basically, if we were to have UBI, what does that do to wages? And the theory is that it depends a lot on what type of work you’re talking about and how much there is the internal versus external motivation around doing that work. Because if someone’s only doing the work because they’re getting paid to do it, UBI actually has the potential to then increase wages because it basically gives them more leverage to say, “Oh, well I don’t actually like this work. I’m going to go pursue other options.” And a company might then have to say, “Oh, well instead of $8 an hour, we’re going to pay you $15 an hour.” On the flip side, if it’s something that people just want to be doing for other reasons, like perhaps going to graduate school since not too many people go to graduate school to get rich, then there’s the opposite potential where, if someone is basically willing to do it, assuming that they won’t be starving, then universities may say, “Okay, well you’re UBI now instead of giving you $18,000 a year, we’re going to give you six.

28:43 Jim: So, I mean, it’s a whole other topic, but I would say that that’s where unions might come in handy. But yeah, I think it’s one of those areas that it’s very, very difficult to answer and know exactly what will happen until we actually do it. So, we can hypothesize around it. But yeah, that’s an open question.

Value of Teaching and Shifting Landscape in Education

29:07 Emily: Yeah, I guess I’m also thinking about sort of we’re having larger debates and angst in academia around the value of teaching, right? Because there’s this huge adjunct workforce that is, you know, severely underpaid. They don’t have job security and yet such a huge percentage of the classes that undergraduates and graduate students take are being taught by people who are not full-time employees of the institution that they work for or institutions. And it’s just such a difficult area right now. I can definitely see how UBI would help people in that situation, right? Because they are also experiencing poverty or near poverty-like situations, many of them. But, yeah. I mean, we’re in a transition point for education broadly. Like, if we’re moving to massive online courses and so forth, maybe if your teachers are needed. I don’t know. There are just a lot of transition here. I guess when we’re talking about maybe some kinds of jobs disappearing or transitioning, teaching at the higher education level, is one of those jobs that is sort of in transition in the workforces. And so, yeah. UBI is just kind of another element to kind of throw into the mix here that we don’t really know how it’s going to play out entirely.

30:13 Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right. And this applies less, I would say. I would expect it to still apply to some degree, but on the flip side, as far as what is the responsibility of the teacher versus the student? I think, certainly at the elementary and high school level, there’s ample evidence that financial stability of the family that the students are coming from makes a big difference as far as how well they’re able to learn. And so, that’s, I would say, another wrinkle that gets thrown in here as well, where if you are ensuring that everyone who is in the class is in more of an abundance mindset, what implications does that have to what is the most effective way of educating?

Tell Us More About Your Podcast

30:55 Emily: Such an interesting topic, Jim. I think that people will definitely want to follow up with you and learn more about this. Maybe have more discussions with you around what does the potential of UBI look like in affecting higher education and graduate students and postdocs and trainees. Again, tell us a little bit more about what you do. We have the name of it, but what do you do on your podcast?

31:14 Jim: Yeah, so we cover a lot of different areas. Most of the episodes, I think like yours, feature or are centered around a guest interview on some topic. And so, we’ve covered everything from, yeah what does UBI do with the disability community, to what’s happening in Canada with UBI to digging in on some of the modern control pilots that are being done in the U.S. and abroad to what is the connection between UBI and housing? And so, it really covers a lot of different areas, but generally we bring on an expert, we chat with them, and then we talk through what are the ramifications of what they said. And so, really try to dig in a little bit on many different areas.

UBI and Healthcare, Education

32:03 Emily: So, actually one follow-up question that goes maybe more back to our earlier conversation with what does this vision look like? Does the implementation of UBI come with it or depend on a revolution within healthcare and also in higher education? You know, paying for higher education.

32:21 Jim: Yeah. So, I would say healthcare comes up a lot. And in my view, UBI can only truly be successful if we actually have truly universal healthcare because it basically counts on the assumption that you can somewhat reasonably project what is the cost of living for people across the country. In our current system. If you don’t actually have universal coverage, that is impossible. I mean we see all the time, all these cases of people having insane bills for services. And as long as that continues to happen, there’s no way to actually guarantee universal financial security. And so, I see those two things as very, very complementary and part of a whole package that we should be fighting for. And education, perhaps not quite as closely coupled, but I think if we’re talking about what is beyond just financial security, what is really setting people up for longterm success, it seems obvious that we want to make that as accessible as possible. And so, a model where everyone in society has access to higher education is certainly the way to go.

Best Financial Advice for Another PhD

33:29 Emily: Gotcha. Okay. Standard question as we wrap up here that I ask all of my guests which is what is your best financial advice for another PhD? And that could be related to something that we’ve talked about in these two episodes, or it could be something entirely new.

33:44 Jim: I mean, I think it’s just like figuring out your sustainability. So, I mean, thinking about where you’ll be going with your PhD and what is your cost of living then, but just trying to set yourself up so that you’re not heading towards a cliff somewhere, which yeah, I feel like it would look very, very different depending on your specifics.

34:06 Emily: Yeah, definitely. It’s something I talk about a lot for people who are sort of in transition, right, out of graduate school, out of the postdoc into other positions, especially when they’re moving. Make sure you understand the cost of living. As you brought up earlier, you know, in San Francisco, make sure you understand the cost of living that you’re getting into and that the salary that you’ve been offered is is appropriate for that area and negotiate if that is not your initial offer. So, thank you so much for that advice. Jim, this has been a fascinating conversation, really just the tip of the iceberg on this topic, and so thank you so much for joining me.

34:38 Jim: Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation as well.

Outtro

34:40 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 Entrepreneur Advocates for Universal Basic Income (Part 1)

May 4, 2020 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and co-host of the Basic Income Podcast. Jim earned a PhD in computer science and subsequently worked for the Democratic National Convention and other progressive groups. He always aspired to start a business, and his post-PhD work experience inspired him to found ShareProgress, a software product and consulting service. Jim describes the evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about 5 hours of work per week. Jim’s observations of changes in technology and the workforce while building his business and newfound time freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Jim: As you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Introduction

00:25 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 one, and today my guest is Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and cohost of The Basic Income Podcast. Jim’s doctoral work in computer science and his experience working for the Democratic National Convention inspired him to start ShareProgress seven years ago. In this first half of our interview, we discuss the growth and evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about five hours of work per week. Jim’s observations while building his business and newfound time-freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jim Pugh. It’s a really special episode for me because Jim and I know each other in real life. He is the older brother of a dear friend of mine and my husband’s from college. And we actually had lunch a couple months ago when we were visiting and had gotten into this really interesting conversation about what Jim’s up to these days, the activism that he does. And it was just really exciting and I could see there was a definite PhD angle there, not just because Jim himself has a PhD but also because what he works on has implications for PhDs. So, we will get into all of that in just a few minutes. So, Jim, will you please take a moment and introduce yourself a little bit further to the listeners?

01:53 Jim: Yeah. Well Emily, thanks for having me on the podcast. My background brings together a few different areas. My academic background is in the sciences. I did my undergraduate and doctorate in computer science, specifically robotics, my doctorate. And following that, ended up getting involved in the political world. And so, I spent some time working on the 2008 Obama campaigns, spent a few years in D.C. after continuing political work out there. And then about six, seven years back decided to take honestly experiences on both those fronts to start my own company called ShareProgress, working primarily with political and nonprofit organizations, providing them with tools and other technical support. And then just in the last few years, I started to delve really in on the activism side of things myself and helped to start an organization that does a lot of work around universal basic income doing both advocacy around that topic and also some policy development work in that field.

What Role Did Your PhD Have in Starting Your Business?

02:58 Emily: Yeah. Super, super exciting. Thank you. Clearly, you have a lot of skills and a lot of interesting experiences that you’ve brought to bear on these most recent endeavors. So, kind of backing up slightly to the business that you started, ShareProgress. How did your PhD prepare you for ultimately starting that business? Obviously, you had some work experience after that point before you started it, but how did the PhD specifically prepare you? Or how did it not prepare you very well for that?

03:25 Jim: So, I would say the PhD itself wasn’t terribly relevant for starting that because I was really in a hard research area and was working on algorithms and models that didn’t have any clear path to monetization to turn it into a company. So, that I don’t think was terribly relevant. What was a bit more relevant is I was involved with, at the university I was working with, which is the Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. They actually were making a pretty significant investment in cultivating entrepreneurship amongst their students, both undergraduate and graduate. And so there was a program on campus that was talking a lot about that. And so, I feel like there was some stuff I learned through experience with that going through events, and they had various activities that they would organize. And so, I felt like that it was informative in some ways, but it really was very much focused on taking the sort of research you do through your doctoral degree, through your academic work afterwards and turning that into a company. And my company that I ended up starting really didn’t resemble that much at all because that was much more informed by the political work I’d done and seeing what the needs were in that space. So, there were there aspects around “what does it look like to go through that process?” that I would say generally provided me with some guidance. But as far as the specifics, really not much at all.

Jim’s Entrepreneurship Journey

05:02 Emily: Did you have in your mind at that time that you did want to pursue entrepreneurship?

05:08 Jim: I did. That was something from I think pretty early on in college I realized was an area I was quite interested in. And when I was graduating from undergraduate, actually, I kind of had in my head either go to grad school or do a startup. I didn’t have an idea for a startup, so I said, “Well I guess it’s grad school.” But it definitely was something that I had been thinking about for awhile.

05:34 Emily: And did you initially, when you were getting involved during your PhD program with this training program for entrepreneurship, were you thinking about the possibility that you might turn your PhD work into a company? Or were you already like, “No, that’s definitely not going to happen, but this is just like for future reference?”

05:50 Jim: More the latter. Maybe there were a few moments where I considered something that was closely connected, but in general, that wasn’t where I saw opportunity. I more generally was thinking about, “Oh, I want to do something at some point. And this is an area that interests me and is just an area that’ll be helpful to know more about.”

Relevant Technical Skills Gained During PhD

06:10 Emily: Gotcha. And what about, I guess I could say, your technical chops. Did you use those in your business, or were you always hiring out for that? And then also is that something you got from your PhD, or do you think your undergraduate education was sufficient in that area?

06:23 Jim: I think there definitely was some of that from my PhD. Obviously, as an undergrad I had done a lot in that space, but I think that some of the specific technical skills and areas of expertise–and I think also just generally understanding different technological ecosystems–some of that did come through in my PhD. When I was starting my company, I very much structured it to not have put myself in the role of that technical person because I was interested in really taking on the CEO mantle in the more traditional sense. So, I had hired out for a developer to actually build out our software platform from the get-go. That said, I was being involved in various ways with the technical stuff throughout, and at different points definitely got more engaged on that front. And so, having that background definitely proved to be important and a valuable asset. And honestly, I mean I think those of us who are deeply into tech, and particularly doing software development and whatnot, we think of tech in a pretty extreme way as compared to the population in general. And so, just knowing how to work with various technical systems out there, I know it’s a leap for a lot of people not committed to that space. And so, certainly my background had equipped me well to be able to handle that sort of thing.

07:50 Emily: Yeah, I kind of see this as being a common sort of value of the PhD. You sort of prove yourself in an area, you can work very deeply, you can master something completely. And then after that, a lot of people do take a step back and allow other people to do that kind of work and do more of the management. And that’s kind of the PI model. Right? So, that sort of does apply, in a way, to what you did after. But it sounds like the actual work experience that you had after your PhD with the Obama campaign and so forth, that was what gave you the idea–right?–for what your company would ultimately be. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Inspiration While Working for the Democratic National Convention

08:19 Jim: Yeah, so the work I was doing, to some degree on the campaign, but in particular when I was out in D.C., I was working for the Democratic National Committee at that point, and we were actually running, effectively, the continuation of the Obama campaign. It was called Organizing for America at that point. And so, my role, I was the director of digital analytics and also web development for the program. And so, it was really paying attention to/digging in on what was actually happening under the hood with all of our digital presence, our social media, our email lists, our website, and so on. And so, I got a chance to see what’s possible, what’s not, what works well, what doesn’t. And one of the observations I had was that so much of our ability to do anything, whether that was raise money, whether it was to try calls to Congress, whether it was to get people turning out in their local communities for events, it depended on us having a wide reach.

09:19 Jim: And that reach, to a large degree, came from us intentionally doing outreach to get people involved. Whether that was big publicity efforts, whether it was paid acquisition online. But then the third category being people bringing in their friends. And actually during that time period, that was really crucial for us that so much of the new people we had coming in, it wasn’t from anything we were doing in particular, it was because our existing supporters were recruiting people they knew to get involved in a campaign and whatever the moment was. And it was an area that there really had not been much investment in as far as figuring out, “Alright, well how do we facilitate, and how do we amplify this?” So, that was really the motivation for my company, which was, “Let’s build some software tools that make this more effective and easier to do.”

How to Gain a Wide-Reaching Audience

10:10 Jim: And so, basically we had a plug and play solution where organizations, as they were doing this sort of advocacy work, they could be encouraging their supporters to be reaching out to their friends through various digital social channels. So, social media, Facebook, Twitter, but also just getting people to email folks they knew and say, “Hey, I’m involved in this really important thing. Will you be involved as well?” And that’s proved very, very effective at bringing in new people, particularly in high-energy moments. And then we allowed organizations to track the analytics on what was happening there. And so they really understood what was going on and actually allowed them to do controlled testing around what sort of messaging they could give to their supporters that made them more convincing, basically, to people they knew. So, when their supporters post on Facebook they could have a couple of different headlines, a couple of different thumbnail images and the system would be able to measure, “Okay, well how effective are those different pieces of content at getting their friends to say, ‘Oh, I’m interested,’ and click through it and get involved.”

Evolution of ShareProgress

11:16 Emily: Yeah. Super scientific approach to that. Right? I’m sure your background helped with that, the design of it. Okay, so that’s around the product that you created. I think you said when you introduced yourself that this was maybe six, seven years ago that you started the company. Two years ago, you transitioned more to doing this advocacy around universal basic income. So, I’m curious about how your role within the company, and in particular the time that you put into it, evolved over that, five-ish-year period.

11:44 Jim: Yeah. So, at the start, the software that I just described, the plan was for that to be the company. That was what we were going to do. I realized relatively early on about six months in that the growth that we were seeing from that wasn’t going to allow us to sustain. And in exploring different investment strategies, the type of company I was looking to build, which very much had a social mission, wasn’t looking to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible if that compromising that, wasn’t actually a great target for traditional investment routes with startups. And so, what I decided to do was to couple on with that a consulting arm where we would actually work with the same sorts of organizations that we were providing the software to, but a system with either data analysis work or some sort of web design development work, which is similar to what I had been doing out in D.C. prior to that.

12:42 Jim: And so, that actually ended up being the bulk of what the company did for most of its existence. We were able to find clients there. I was able to scale up our staff with that sort of work. And so, while we were doing the software, we were continuing to grow the consulting side of the company. And so, our peak was I think early 2017 we were nine people and most on the consulting side. But it was around that time I had realized–I had known pretty early on, I didn’t really want to start a consulting company. That seemed like where the path to profitability was. But around that time, my interests had started to shift to more of the advocacy work around universal basic income. And we went through some tough periods as far as expectations around business and profits and not matching reality. So, we had to do some downsizing. And so, at that point I actually decided, “This isn’t where I want to be investing my time and effort for the future. So, let’s just ramp down the consultant product company.” And at that point, our software was making enough money that I could support a much smaller staff. And so, over the course of 2017 I went through a process around that. That ended with, at the end of the year, I was having more of a skeleton crew and requiring not very much of my time in order to just keep our software running, or the clients that we had there.

Consulting as a Stage of Growth

14:20 Emily: So, I’m curious, with the evolution of adding the consulting aspect and then winding it down, are you happy that you did that, or do you think that you should have just stuck with the software product kind of throughout that whole time and come to this point where you are now maybe a little bit sooner?

14:36 Jim: Well, it honestly wasn’t an option to do exactly that because we did need the consulting early on in order to make payroll. So, it took a while for us to build up enough of a client base and the software where that was an option at all.

14:49 Emily: So, it’s a stage of growth, then.

14:51 Jim: It was a stage of growth. Whether or not I would have invested as much as I did in that, I think looking at it solely from a business perspective, I think that was probably a mistake. I think that it would have been a better approach to say, “Let’s keep focused on the software. Let’s do this as much as we need to, but let’s not really invest in growing that as the company.” Because I think that in most cases, when you’re trying to do more than one thing, you’re not going to do either of them as well. And so, that would have been the better business decision. As far as from a personal perspective, I think I certainly learned a lot through the whole process. So, I wouldn’t say it was a bad decision from that. It certainly was stressful at times, but I think that it’s hard for me to make a valuative judgment on it.

San Francisco Venture Capital (VC) Environment

15:40 Emily: Sure. I want to say for the context, for the listeners, that you live in San Francisco right now, and you mentioned living in D.C. before that. Did you start the company when you were living in San Francisco?

15:50 Jim: Yes, that’s right.

15:51 Emily: So, you’re in a very different environment than probably most of the listeners who are maybe still on academic campuses, you know, spread throughout the U.S. and other places. So, anyway, I just want to say that because you probably had a lot of exposure just from your environment in things like how to approach for VC funding, whether that’s actually a good idea for your business. You decided that the values that they’re going for are not exactly the values that you were going for. And so it wasn’t a good match there. This is actually something I’ve heard about quite a bit that people elect not to go the VC funding route for various, I guess, “vision” reasons.

16:23 Jim: Well, I should clarify that I did attempt to raise funds for the company with already knowing that there would be certain people I wouldn’t accept money from, certain types of investment that I wouldn’t be comfortable with. But, I was hoping to be able to do it in some capacity and was not successful at it. So, that was part of it. Maybe had I met the right people, those things could have looked differently. But I will say, both prior to that and since then, having observed the dynamics in that space, I see how that would be a challenge for many, many people who are attempting to do something similar. But it wasn’t as though I was equipped to know upfront, “Oh, there’s no way this is going to work.” It was very much a learning experience for me.

Current Role in the Business

17:11 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really great, actually. And you’re still living in San Francisco, so you’re still exposed to all of that stuff. But I’m curious about this decision that you said around two years ago, you wanted to focus more on the UBI stuff and you restructured the business. And now, how much time do you spend working on the business now, maybe per week or per month? And what is your role in it now, exactly?

17:32 Jim: Yeah. Well, I’m still CEO of the business, but to be honest, it probably averages about five hours a week at this point because we want to keep running, we want to keep our clients happy there. The idea is really to have it be maintaining the service rather than doing new things. And so, that just doesn’t require that much work. So, I have an employee who is, basically, like any sort of support we need to provide, is dealing with that, keeping an eye on things, and then myself overseeing things. And that allows us to keep going with that.

18:06 Emily: And to ask kind of a more pointed financial question, but you are supporting yourself entirely off of your business income for which you’re only putting in about five hours a week at this point?

18:16 Jim: That’s right, yes.

Financial Independence and Early Retirement (FIRE) Movement

18:17 Emily: Wonderful. Wonderful set up for you. So, we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the upcoming UBI conversation. But the reason I was kind of interested in your story and sharing it on the podcast is because there’s this big movement in the personal finance community called the FIRE movement, Financial Independence and Early Retirement. In season three, I released a pair of interviews with someone on that subject. And your story, while the FIRE community might not call you financially independent by their definition, a lot of what they’re going for, financial freedom, you have bought for yourself with your business, right? So, there’s a lot of overlap there between the goals of the FIRE movement and what you’ve done for yourself. So, I was really interested in having you on the podcast for that reason.

Business Advice for Early-Career PhDs

18:59 Emily: So, okay, now that we’re going to transition to sort of the universal basic income aspect of our conversation, I kind of wanted to wrap up the aspect of our conversation about the business by just asking if you had to give some advice, if another early-career PhD asked you advice around starting a business, what would you tell that person now?

Advice #1: Talk to People

19:20 Jim: I think just go and talk to a lot of people who’ve been through the process because I think part of the challenge is it does look very different in different situations. And that was something I struggled with early is thinking, “Okay, well, there’s going to be standards around this. And so did a bunch of Googling online for like, “Okay, what is the standard, whether it’s around the equity or whether it’s around other aspects of the business.” And I found some stuff but not as much as I expected. And so, I think that, if you can just talk to a lot of people who have gone through the process, you get a sense of the diversity of ways that can work. And so I think it can give you a better idea as to what the trajectories may seem to be. That was something I know I struggle a lot with, and I think may have delayed me deciding to start a business, is that it just felt too amorphous and scary. Alright, what does it look to get something like this off the ground? And in hindsight, it’s such a simpler process than so much of the work I had done before, but I think that there is that opacity and then those unknowns that make it difficult. I feel like I was not unique in having that perspective.

Advice #2: Find Your Focus

20:33 Jim: And then I think focus is another big thing that I continually struggle with frankly, but I see many, many people struggle with. There’s many great things to do and, as you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Commercial

21:07 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.

Should Entrepreneurs Move to San Francisco?

22:06 Emily: I’m trying to think about for someone who is, let’s say still affiliated with the university, I would imagine there are some people to talk to there, networking, especially universities that have incubators or something from launching a business out of. But I asked you before about living in San Francisco, what do you think about moving to a place like San Francisco where you can just run into other people who are on a similar path? What do you think about that idea?

22:31 Jim: I mean, I think it’s a very double-edged sword because certainly the density of that happening is a significant asset for a lot of this sort of work. And it is so expensive here that if you’re looking to hire locally, you’re gonna be paying, sometimes easily two, three, four times as much as you’d be paying, not too far away. And so, I think it’s a question of balancing those sorts of things. I mean, I think there are ways, like either if you live somewhere not too far away, where you can go into the city and have those easy conversations in-person with folks, but still be in a place where it doesn’t cost you thousands and thousands of dollars every month to pay for your rent. That could be your compromise. Or, just take the occasional trip out here. Assuming you can afford whatever the travel costs are. And then I think there are other areas where you’re starting to see better density. I don’t really have a great sense for what it actually looks like yet. And I do think that there is a cultural component to why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because there’s kind of a pay-it-forward mentality, pretty broadly, where people who have done well are eager to help new people coming in, which I think has made a big difference. But yeah, you get both sides of it.

Advocacy for Universal Basic Income

23:54 Emily: I see. Okay. So, now that you pay for your life based on your business, which you only work in a few hours per week now, I’m curious about this transition that you made two years ago. I mean, you said it was kind of like you became more interested in universal basic income and that movement. You then structured your life so that you didn’t have to work so much. So, I guess the question is, how has your experience of having that business and having that source of income that requires only a very small amount of work at this point or small amount of time, how did that lead you into your advocacy for universal basic income?

24:34 Jim: So, I think there are a couple of different ways that I can answer that. So, as far as what first got me interested in universal basic income, a big part of it was the process of starting my company because I had certain expectations coming in around staffing related to operations, to payroll, to HR services, and expecting that, assuming things at all got off the ground pretty quickly, I would need to be hiring at least part-time help to assist with that. And what I found is that there were all these new online services that automated a lot of that. And so, from the beginning for payroll in the company, we use Gusto. It used to be called ZenPayroll, which you have to plug in the information to start with people’s where they live, their bank account transfer information, what the unemployment insurance rate is in the state. But then every twice a month you just say, “Okay, go,” and it pays them and files their taxes and that’s it. And costs not very much money to do it. And so, that being one example of how technology is allowing us, not just to replace jobs because I think you lose something when you describe it just that way, but is A) definitely changing the way that that work is being done, and B) and this is the thing that really stood out for me, is allowing much smaller groups of people to be able to do far, far more than was true before.

Small Business is the New “Big”

26:14 Jim: Because in the past, if you wanted to start a big company, or I shouldn’t say big, I should say a company that was going to generate a lot of income and wealth, kind of inherent to the process is you would need to involve a lot of other people. And it’s far less true now. You can have a team, I mean if you look at I think, what was it, the WhatsApp team, which is like half a dozen, a dozen people who then sell a company for multiple billions of dollars. Never in human history before could something like that happen. And so I think that was an A-ha moment for me and realizing that things are already starting to and will continue to look very differently than they have in the past and we need to stop assuming that the economic solutions that have been effective before are necessarily the right ones going forward.

27:06 Emily: So, it’s not necessarily just jobs are going away, but maybe some jobs are going away, some other jobs are popping up, the people that create the companies and the software and so forth. Are you also speaking about wealth concentration?

27:20 Jim: Yeah.

27:21 Emily: Gotcha.

Changing Mindset Around Universal Basic Income

27:22 Jim: Yeah. And I think for me, that was as much of a factor as jobs are not. I think we’re used to thinking about the jobs thing, so it’s more clear why that would be problematic if we had only a requirement that 10% of the people have a job. But I think that, particularly as I’ve worked on the issue more, that piece more clearly is a big issue that I think as our systems are structured now is really incompatible with having a fully-functioning society, I would say. Anyway, so that was kind of how I first started to think about UBI, universal basic income. And I don’t even remember where I first heard about the idea. I think I read maybe some piece about the referendum that Switzerland was pursuing.

28:18 Jim: It started back in 2013. But my initial reaction was, “This seems dumb, frankly.” I was like, “Oh, this seems like an oversimplification. Just thinking you can give people money and that will solve things. And then I started to look more into it and look at the research and understanding what are the actual, both economic and psychological ramifications when you do this. And it turns out it was incredibly positive that this is something where we have, at this point, a lot of evidence that unconditional cash–people take that and use it for whatever they actually need to use it for. And that, in fact, it confers a sense of agency to people that they might not otherwise have. And that in itself is hugely beneficial because it encourages people to think more longer term in terms of sensing more responsibility for a situation, all things that are actually very valuable in sending people out for their own longterm success.

29:15 Emily: I want to leave this for part two of this interview. Where we’ll be talking less about your personal story and more about, well, maybe what you’ve been learning over the last few years. We’re going to take a step back and define universal basic income because we haven’t done that yet. So, listeners, if the next part of this conversation sounds like it’s going to be really interesting to you, please tune in next week. For the second part of the interview, we’ll be talking a lot more about universal basic income with the expert, Dr. Jim Pugh.

Outtro

29:40 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 to Qualify for a Mortgage as a Graduate Student or PhD, Even with Non-W-2 Fellowship Income

April 27, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews her brother, Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator with Prime Lending (Note: Sam now works at USA Mortgage) who specializes in PhDs and PhD students, particularly those receiving fellowship income. Sam relays what it takes to qualify for a mortgage in terms of credit score, income, and debt load, including the special way deferred student loans play into the calculation. He details the unusual strategies he has learned over the past year of working with PhD clients to help them get approved for mortgages, even with non-W-2 fellowship income. At the end of the interview, Sam shares why he loves working with PhD home buyers. Over the past year, Personal Finance for PhDs has referred so much business to Sam that he has become an advertiser on the podcast.

Links Mentioned

Contact Sam Hogan via phone: (540) 478-5803; or email: [email protected]
Listen to a previous episode with Sam Hogan: Purchasing a Home as a Graduate Student with Fellowship Income
Related episode: “This Grad Student Defrayed His Housing Costs By Renting Rooms to His Peers”
Personal Finance for PhDs: Financial Coaching
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

Teaser

00:00 Sam: It’s always best for a PhD student to be as proactive as possible. I’ve seen letters with three years of continuance, but they’ve reached out to me after one semester has passed. Now they only have two and a half years of continuance, where someone, if they had reached out a year earlier about their future, and how they’re planning to purchase home when they were in a new area, that is the perfect slam dunk way to do it.

Introduction

0:33 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 5, Episode 17. And today, my guest is Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator with Prime Lending (Note: Sam now works at Movement Mortgage) who specializes in PhDs and PhD students, particularly those receiving fellowship income. Sam relays what it takes to qualify for a mortgage in terms of credit score, and debt load, including the special way deferred student loans play into the calculation. Sam details the unusual strategies he has learned over the past year of working with PhD clients to help them get approved for mortgages, even with non-W-2 fellowship income. At the end of the interview, Sam shares why he loves working with PhD home-buyers. Over the past year, Personal Finance for PhDs has referred so much business to Sam that he has become an advertiser on the podcast. Without further ado, here’s my interview with my brother Sam Hogan.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:34 Emily: I’m welcoming back to the podcast today. My brother Sam Hogan, who is mortgage originator. He sells mortgages. And Sam was actually on the podcast before in Season Two, Episode Five. It was while we’re recording this on April 12, 2020 and he was last on about a year ago. At that time, we were talking about how someone with fellowship income can actually get a mortgage — non-W-2 fellowship income because tis is a tricky thing that we talked about in that episode. So now, as I said, it’s been a year since that time, Sam’s handled a lot more mortgages of this type and so he knows a lot more about this process now. So I thought we’d have him back on for an update, basically, and a little more background on getting a mortgage as a graduate student or postdoc or PhD. So, Sam, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming back on. Will you please just tell the listeners a couple words about yourself?

02:28 Sam: Thank you for having me, Emily, and Happy Easter from the east coast. Yeah, I’ve been working with PhD students now pretty heavily over the last 12 months. The company I work for, Prime Lending (Note: Sam now works at Movement Mortgage), is licensed in all 50 states. I’ve had the opportunity to read, review, approve, sometimes deny, these special candidates while they’re looking for their options for home-ownership.

[Sam’s Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry number: 1491786]

Basics for First Time Home-Buyers

02:52 Emily: Thinking about someone who is probably probably a first time home-buyer doesn’t necessarily know a whole lot about the process of getting a mortgage, and of course is concerned maybe about their their income, and are they really going to qualify and all these factors — what are the factors that go into a mortgage application? And what are the the ranges, that would be acceptable for those different factors?

03:16 Sam: Okay, so generally speaking, we’re looking at a risk profile and the ability to repay. For the borrower, having a over 700 credit scores for conventional, now about over 640 or 660 for FHA loans.

Different Types of Home Loans

03:32 Emily: Okay, you just dropped the terms conventional and FHA — what’s the difference between those two?

03:37 Sam: Yeah, so FHA is your original first time homebuyer program. It’s backed by the government and it’s designed for everyone to qualify for it, if you have decent credit and decent income. Conventional is preferred because it’s going to have a lower monthly payment, and the private mortgage insurance will drop off automatically. You should have over 680 or higher credit scores to go conventional and the income ratios are a little tighter. So it’s the better loan to qualify for and it has better terms throughout the whole 30 years, or whatever your loan term is.

04:16 Emily: Okay, so FHA is a little bit easier to qualify for, because it’s sort of designed for first time home-buyers, but it’s a less preferable loan in the long term. And so if I remember correctly, a lot of people who have FHA loans for a while they then end up refinancing to a conventional type of loan a little bit later on, to get rid of that private mortgage insurance.

04:38 Sam: That is correct.

04:39 Emily: Okay, great. Okay, so going back to the the lending standards you just mentioned, like credit scores, what else goes into an application package?

04:49 Sam: Yeah, I want to just touch on our current world situation and the lending standards are changing right now. And they’re changing because everyone is in the same boat regarding a possible change or disruption in income, slowing income for a certain amount of time, so be sure to talk with an expert and their specific requirements because this will change from bank to mortgage company to a larger credit union or financial institution. These are uncertain times, so you’re going to have some fluctuation and differences from lender to lender, but you want to work just as we said before, you want to work with someone who’s keeping you in mind and your goals in mind.

How Credit Scores and Debt Impact Home Loans

05:32 Emily: Yeah, okay, great. I totally agree and we should re-emphasize that like we’re recording this in mid April, things could be different by the time we publish it, things could be different a couple months down the line, so definitely just talk with someone right away. You mentioned credit scores, but I know also, your income, of course, plays into how much of a mortgage you can qualify for. Can you talk about that a little bit?

05:53 Sam: The common rule of thumb is people will qualify for four to five times their annual income. Now that will depend also on how much debt they’re carrying, and how much they’re putting from their savings into downpayment. But that’s a pretty safe estimate. Some people who are completely debt free will qualify six times their annual income, up to. Something else lenders experience a lot is, um, people doing their own due diligence and crunching the numbers, but we have systems and practices that do this quickly, more accurately, and can give you better results, so I would say talk with someone early and have them do the work. And then after you get their feedback, run your numbers to double check and maybe have some questions for them. We want to be able to work for you, and there’s no obligation to just have a few conversations and have someone explore your options.

06:48 Emily: Yeah, that sounds good. How does that play into that because I know a lot of PhD students do have significant debt loads from maybe undergrad or a master’s degree or something like that. How does debt affect the package?

07:03 Sam: Debt is not bad. It’s good to have things on your credit that have positive history, whether that’s a student loan you’ve paid off or currently paying off, revolving credit cards. You will run into issues, if you have absolutely no debt or debt history. I strongly recommend everyone, even against their pride, get a credit card. Don’t exploit it but use it regularly, pay off regularly. You want to have established credit, especially for a young homebuyer, because they might not have the 10 or 15 years of other types or forms of debt that someone who’s in their 30s or 40s might have.

07:49 Emily: Yeah, I definitely agree with establishing a credit score and having a strong credit history. But I’m just wondering, you mentioned earlier about the size of the mortgage and how debt can affect that. Solet’s say there’s someone who’s holding a good amount of debt. Does that affect like the ratio of the amount of mortgage they can take out?

08:06 Sam: Absolutely. Let me put it in some simpler numbers. If you’re bringing in $3,000 a month, all your credit cards, new house payment, maybe your car payment or gym membership, all that cannot add up to more than $1500 dollars of your income, We take your gross income and if you’re over 50% of that debt ratio, that’s a “Hey, better luck next time.” Even better situation is to be under 43%. Under 43% of your monthly income to debt ratio, is what Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae require, currently. Now this could be used to change, sometimes annually, sometimes quicker than that, but under 43% and better is a very good place to be in.

08:55 Emily: That makes sense. Yeah, so the total amount of debt payments you can have per month is limited and the mortgage has to fit in. To be approved for a mortgage, it has to kind of fit in around those other debt obligations that you already have.

09:09 Sam: Correct.

09:09 Emily: Okay, yeah, that definitely gives us something to kind of get our hands around when someone’s deciding, like, is it even worthwhile for me to approach Sam or another lender about possibly applying for a mortgage? I know you said earlier, just ask, that’s the best thing to do, because you guys can run the numbers better than than we can outside of the industry. I had one more question about student loans, because while student loans are in deferment, how does that play into that 43% that you just said. Because if they don’t make payments, does that just like not count at all? Or how does that work?

09:43 Sam: This a very specific guideline detail that changes, just letting you know Emily, and for conventional loans, and FHA loans, it’s both different. A rule of thumb: if your student loans are in deferment, you have to take the remaining balances and calculate 1% of that, and we factor that into your debt to income ratio. So if you have $100,000 in student debt, and we’re about to calculate a potential thousand dollar payment, even though you’re not making payments on them, that could stop your deal. Okay, so brings me back to letting an expert look at it.

10:19 Sam: Also, sometimes when the lender pulls credit, the way the credit populates, it looks like they’re making payments on their student loans. But really, they’re in deferment, so all those payments have to be switched. This is why when people run the numbers themselves, they might think, “Oh, no, I can’t do it.” But lenders know what it takes to get it approved. And I did want to touch back on the debt to income, it’s best for people to know first that you want to be under 43%. If that’s 42.98%, that’s still two thumbs up. But as soon as you’re over the 43%, some of the loan terms can change and make it stricter for you to buy.

10:56 Emily: Gotcha. And I also want to emphasize that just because you qualify for a mortgage of a certain size, or just because your debt-to-income ratio fits onto that 42% or whatever, that doesn’t mean you have to buy a house that that’s expensive. So these standards are for the lending industry, they’re not necessarily the advisable thing on the personal finance side. So just keep that in mind. We’re talking about basically how to qualify, not whether this is a good idea for your finances overall to have that high of a, an amount of debt per month. I just want to add that in there from the personal finance side.

What If You Don’t Have a Typical Situation?

11:33 Emily: Okay, Sam, so thanks for running down those broad strokes criteria. If someone doesn’t meet one of these, is there any recourse? Is there anything else that can be done if they still want to go through with a purchase?

11:47 Sam: Don’t give up lenders in general, we’re in the process of approving loans. We’re not in the business of denying people we would be out of business. So try and try again, I would say, because I have had PhDs students who have finalized their transactions with me been denied by two other lenders. The tip I can give to some of these people exploring their options is be willing to over document things for any uncertainty the lender might have. If there’s some variables in your income, explain to them that “Hey, this is all under the same advisor. I’m working in different areas, different years, but it’s under the direct supervision of x and he can provide you a letter saying that I’m here for five years under his supervision and it’s common for students in my place to continue to receive their funding. Please let me know if you need any other confirmation from my supervisor.” But yeah, recourse I would just validate how good of a borrower you are: I have great credit. I have the downpayment. I have guaranteed funding.

12:52 Sam: And you always can strengthen a file with obviously a cosigner. You can have a non occupant co bar family member, even a friend, who also is hopefully in good credit standing and has income to cosign on the loan for you. That’s not a forever thing, you can refinance them off the loan. But what I’ve found out in my years in this business is, there’s always a way to make it work if you keep working at it. Some people run out of options, and while they’re in school, it’s a funky time in their life, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be a homeowner in a year or two years.

13:33 Emily: Yeah, gotcha. I actually was thinking specifically about co-borrowers because that was another example that we had on the podcast. My interview with Matt Hotze, he bought a home in Durham, North Carolina when he was at Duke and he bought his first year there and he had his parents, or maybe one of his parents, as his co signers and that enabled him, because his income was, low — one graduate student stipend. He was able to get into a larger house than he would have qualified for on his own. He actually had a three bedroom house. And then he rented out two of the bedrooms. So he was able to house hack, had no problem paying the mortgage because he had reliable renters. And yeah, it all worked out really well for him. So he just needed that little bit of help at the beginning. His parents, very fortunately, were able to provide that to him, and it was kind of a rosy story after that point, but that’s what he had to do to qualify for the mortgage.

14:27 Sam: A cosigner, sometimes can solve everything, except for poor credit. But strength in numbers. You can have up to four people on conventional loan application. Have I done that ever? No. But is it possible? Yes. So yeah, I mean, if you’re having some difficulty, your loan officer, if you’re brainstorming with them, one of their first solutions is have a cosigner. A cosigner is a very simple fix. If you have to pivot your approval because you have gone through the process, you didn’t get approved on your own and your adding a cosigner on your contract, I would say give your lender about 10 days and you should be in good shape.

15:08 Emily: Gotcha. I’ll add in one more time. This is the “how to qualify for a mortgage” talk, not “is it a good idea to be a cosigner or to have a cosigner”. Totally separate conversation.

15:19 Sam: A client of mine that’s closing this month who listened to your podcast…I don’t want to reveal too much about his purchase, but we’ve been given the approval and at the start, we ran the numbers a few different ways. He was like “With a cosigner, what’s my payment? Without a cosigner how much is my cash to close?” And we were on the fence for a little bit but we were still in the process. So while he was under contract, I was still able to give him scenarios and options. We eventually decided with his deposits and everything that was already being credited, his cash to close was low enough that he wouldn’t need to have a cosigner. So it’s not set in stone at the start. Yes, it’s always better to have your ducks in a row. But the lender is flexible. We always can pivot for the buyers needs. And I also say that in the buyers defense. If something’s going wrong with the house, the lender can help you get out of the loan on your finance contingency, maybe if your home inspection is past. So there’s different ways we’re always here willing to help.

16:25 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really good.

Commercial

16:30 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.

Tips for Home Loans with Non-W-2 Income

17:15 Emily: Okay, so let’s narrow down to the the scenario that we talked about the last time we did an interview, which is about a graduate student or postdoc with fellowship income, with non-W-2 income, and that a lot of lenders don’t understand how to deal with that. You’ve been working with these types of clients quite a bit over the last year. And so you have really figured out some things that how to make these loans work in some cases and what will not work in other cases and maybe in those cases, a co-borrower or something like that would be needed. Can you just tell me a little bit about, you know, this particular weirdness of non-W-2 fellowship income and how you make it work?

17:54 Sam: It’s definitely a tricky income. How I help make it work is I support all the variables within the fellowship income. I show that it’s the same field of study or field of work that they previously in. Especially in the offer letters, they usually always contain a phrase if the student remains in good standing, and the underwriter can say, well, that’s too much of a variable, we can’t accept this income because there’s too many variables. Well, I say well look at her transcripts, look at his transcripts. They’ve always been in good standing, literally forever. That’s why they were one of five students selected out of 400 applicants to get into this program. Yeah, it takes a little bit of storytelling, and the presentation is important, so it’s okay if someone who doesn’t have W-2 income, we treat other incomes just as fairly, but you have to know how to present it, how to over-document it, and if it’s too uncertain at the start, most lenders have a scenario desk you can reach out to who will give you some early feedback without going completely through the application process, completely through the loan process, and still having a little bit of a question mark about if you’re really approved. I’ve had our scenario desk, give me pushback on certain files, and I just asked, How can I support that variation or the uncertainty that you’re seeing in this letter because I can provide what you’re looking for most likely, I just need to know what that is.

19:38 Emily: Yeah. So I think if I can kind of zoom out from that a little bit. First of all, one of the things that you talked about in the last interview was that non-W-2 fellowship income is not going to qualify for an FHA loan. It’s just completely off the table. It’s only going to be a conventional loan. And what you’re talking about now is saying, okay, you know, PhD student or postdoc, you’re showing me your offer letter and you are looking for certain things that offer letter, like the income and also the number of years of guarantee, sometimes that’s in there as well. And then you’re saying, Okay, well for all the things in the offer letter that are maybe a question mark to the underwriter, you have now learned how to recognize some of those things, and you can start providing additional supportive documentation, that is asking the student or postdoc, okay, well send me your transcripts. Okay, well send me whatever it is, your work history. I don’t know what those things are. Can you talk a little bit about that guarantee? Because I know the guarantee is a very important factor when we’re talking about non-W-2 income.

Loan Types for Non-W-2 Income

20:41 Sam: Yes. So I want to answer your questions in the right order. One of the main critical points for this type of income is that it’s not recognized by the VA, Veterans Administration, FHA. It’s not recognized by USDA, and it’s not recognized by Fannie Mae. Your most successful application and loan approval is going to come from a Freddie Mac conventional loan, okay. Now you can do as little as 3% down for that conventional loan. But this is the key point that only Freddie Mac recognizes this income, per the lenders approval. Why these PhD students are not going to approved their first attempt with their lender is because it’s per the lenders approval, the lender can’t document it and approve it with their underwriter, then Freddie Mac will not take the loan.

21:40 Emily: So what you’re just saying there is that you now know having worked this type of income, this mortgage type is off the table. This mortgage type is off the table. This is the one that is potentially successful. And what you have to do is get your underwriters that you work with to approve that loan and then Freddie Mac will take it on, will approved it. What you have figured out is these little tricks and document support and so forth that need to happen for the underwriters that you work with, which presumably would be the same elsewhere, except they’re not necessarily as knowledgeable about this particular type of income.

The Importance of Offer Letters for Non-W-2 Income

22:15 Emily: Let’s talk more about that. I know that you’ve mentioned to me before, I think you mentioned in the last interview, that for this non-W-2 income, normally underwriters, lenders for W-2 income, they presume it’s going to continue for at least a while, even though we all know you can lose a job at any point. But for the fellowship income, they for some reason, don’t presume that it’s going to continue and they want to see a certain length of guaranteed fellowship time.

22:41 Sam: Yes. For conventional loans, we’re looking for three years of continuance of income. Now, I know it’s not fair because my job doesn’t guarantee me three years of employment in the future. That’s not the typical contract for all employment, its employment will usually. For conventional loans we want to see three years. I actually have a example that I’ve written up. It’s a mix of a few different approval letters that worked, that I had some success with clients in the past year. And I will say briefly that if your approval letter is more than three pages, there might be too many variables in your offer to get an approval.

23:36 Emily: You’re saying an offer letter, like the offer letter you get when you start grad school or start a postdoc position. This is going to be your stipend this along goes on for. This is a typical document, like instead of having a Form W-2, this is what a fellowship recipient would send to you. They would send you their offer letter and so what are you looking at in that offer letter that is like yeah, this is going to go forward or no, this might be a problem.

24:00 Sam: Yes, so what we’re looking for is the continuance of income, we want to have three years. We want it to state that you’re being provided health insurance, because that’s a really good sign shown you’re actually an employee, you’re not just a student. It’s okay for it to have a few variables in it, like remaining in good standing or making satisfactory progress towards their doctoral degree. That’s a good phrase in there, that’s fine. But when you have layers and layers of variables, like you know, making satisfactory progress towards our doctorate, you must take these courses or get this exact GPA or higher in these courses, must have approval from their supervisor for a continuance into a fifth year. Those are things I’ve had to get more information on because the more variables, the more uncertainty it makes the underwriter feel. And so that’s where it comes back to the presentation of the loan.

An Example of An Offer Letter

24:58 Sam: “I’m pleased to inform that you been awarded a fellowship in the first academic year beginning September 2019. In subsequent years, you’ll be supported by research and teaching assistantship. This Fellowship Award gives you deserved recognition for your accomplishments to date, as well as added independence to stipend and exploring your research interests for the first year. For the academic year 19-20, the stipend will be $3,345 for nine months. For Summer 2020, the stipend will be $3,475 for three months. This means you receive an annual stipend of $40,530. In addition, the award pays your tuition health insurance and health services fee. We are committed to continue this financial support for for up to five years, as long as you remain a PhD student in good academic standing.

25:51 Emily: Yeah, so what I’m hearing and I think what the listeners will hear is, that’s first year fellowship followed by W-2 income for the remainder, four years guaranteed.

26:02 Sam: Right.

26:03 Emily: That’s great. So that means in your world, that person would qualify for a mortgage during that first year, even though it’s fellowship, because their letter says, Yeah, it’s one year of fellowship, but you’re going to have after that this W-2 type income,

26:17 Sam: Correct. The most success I’ve seen with the PhD community are the simple letters that are less than two pages with little variable, that will show more than three years of continuance. And that’s a very simple approval for us.

26:35 Emily: And that’s whether that is fellowship income, or W-2 or a combination. If that’s what the offer letter says three years or more. That’s straightforward for you.

26:46 Sam: Correct. And that is where I’ve seen the most success with these doctoral candidates.

26:53 Emily: But still going back to your earlier point of if that’s not what a particular individuals letter looks like, still reach out to you, or another lender, because maybe with enough supplementary documentation, it could still go through, but it’s just going to be a little bit more of a process.

27:09 Sam: Correct. And, I mean, when I get connected with some of these department supervisors, I let them know, “Hey, this is what we’re looking for. Can you simplify this offer ladder for me, because we’re looking for something a little less complicated?” And I do like to tell my PhD applicants that, “Hey, I would love a shortened version of your personal statement. I want to be able to know a little bit more about where you’ve been, where you’re going.” And it always helps to tell a little bit of a story.

27:40 Emily: That is really interesting. That adds a little more detail to what you said earlier about the story and the presentation being what matters. That’s really interesting to me that you that you might include something like a version of a personal statement in this package that goes to the underwriter, that’s really interesting.

27:59 Sam: At the end of the day, I know I said this in the last episode, the last time I chirped in, but it does come down to one person’s decision. If the underwriter is comfortable, they’re going to approve you. If they’re not comfortable, they’re gonna want more documentation, or a cosigner, or something else to make it, you know, aboveboard.

28:20 Emily: Yeah, that clarifies. Thank you.

Final Words of Advice

28:23 Emily: Sam, is there anything else that you’ve learned about this fellowship type income that would be helpful to the listeners, with respect to getting approved for a mortgage?

28:32 Sam: I’ve learned that working with the PhD community are some of the best clients I’ve ever had.

28:38 Emily: Yeah, you’ve told me that before, and I really love to hear it!

28:42 Sam: Yeah. It’s really nice to work with people who are planning. It’s always best for a PhD student to be as proactive as possible. I’ve seen letters with three years of continuance, but they’ve reached out to me after one semester has passed, so now they only have two and a half years of continuanc, and that is a big problem. Whereas someone, if they have reached out a year earlier about their future, and how they’re planning to purchase a home when they were in a new area, that is the perfect slam dunk way to do it. Unfortunately, I’ve had to let some PhD students know that it’s not going to work out because their continuance, they’re under three years. And that’s going to be one of the major roadblocks. So talk to someone early, tell them you’re interested in a Freddie Mac, conventional loan. If they can find the right way to document their income and approve them. It’s happened more often in the last two months, I would say, with clients reaching out at this time of the year, when, if I had been talking to them six months ago, I could have had them approved.

29:52 Emily: Yeah, so actually at this time of the year, April 15 is decision day. Everyone has to decide what grad school they’re going to, or they’re supposed to decide. So if a PhD student is looking at that fellowship income in their offer letter, it says three years, they need to reach out to you sooner rather than later before that clock starts ticking, if they’re interested in purchasing within that first few months or first year or whatever, of being in graduate school. They need to reach out earlier. Thank you for saying that.

How To Reach Sam Hogan

30:21 Emily: Sam, you have not been particularly self promotional during this interview, and I appreciate that but I do want to say that you have been working with this type of client — people receiving fellowship income, also other types of PhD clients over the past year. I think you’re working really hard for them and that they should go to you, at least among getting a few different voices in their life, they should come to you. So will you please tell them the best way to contact you?

30:46 Sam: The best way to reach me is definitely by cell phone. Text is preferred right now because there’s a lot of volume going through the industry. My cell phone number is (540) 478-5803. And then my work email is a great line of communication, also. It’s [email protected].

31:15 Emily: Yeah. And we’ll have all that contact information in the show notes, as well. Sam just mentioned, I was surprised to learn, but even during this social distancing period, the mortgage industry is hopping, because interest rates are so low. People are really refinancing a lot right now, even if they’re not doing necessarily new purchases at the moment or not going into that process at the moment. But, you know, maybe in a few months or a year, whatever things will return to a more normal time and you’ll be able to move forward with lots more purchases.

31:47 Emily: Sam, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And thank you so much for working with this population and being willing to, as a personal favor to me, to investigate this and take this on. I think it’s really fruitful and it’s been really great for my audience, so I really appreciate you

32:00 Sam: Thank you for having me on Emily. Always a pleasure to work with you and the PhD community. I’m just here to help, so if you need help text me, call me bother me on the weekend. It’s all good. I just want to make sure you all are seeing some success here while you’re getting your doctorates.

32:16 Emily: Excellent. Thank you, Sam.

Outtro

32:18 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.