Personal Finance for PhDs

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Serial Graduate Assistant

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Today’s post is by a grad student who expanded her transferable skills through a series of summer jobs.

Name: Sudiksha Joshi

Institution: West Virginia University

Department: Natural Resource Economics

1. What was your side job and how much did you earn?

While pursuing my Master’s Degree I worked in the Library (Cataloguing) and was paid around $8/hr. While pursuing my Ph.D. some Summers, I got to help my Professor out and was paid additional 20 hrs/week which was between $20-$25/hr. One summer I worked on an outside research project in which one of my Faculty members was a consultant and so for that I was paid $12/hr. While these are not the side jobs, during the final two years of my Ph.D. I was not funded by my department. One Semester I taught and was responsible for Introductory Biology Labs ($18-20/hr) and then I was a Graduate Student Assistant  ($18-20/hr) for the McNair Scholars Program which led to the Project Coordinator role after I defended my Dissertation.

2. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

These were done during the summer when I was not taking summer classes.

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3. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

Most of them did. I learned something new in every job. Working as a teaching assistant in the biology lab was taxing especially due to the grading that needed to be done (at least 100 papers to be graded every week and 200 if I have them a quiz that week) but I had completed all other requirements for my Ph.D. other than defending my dissertation. Working in McNair even though it was a lot of work became a turning point in life and working with students in such a close setting showed me a better way to prepare students for further studies and life outside. This also provided me the motivation which had dwindled to finally finish my dissertation, defend, and graduate.

4. How did you get started with your job?

It started with reaching out to the University career services or for the most part reaching out to the Faculty members in my department.

5. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

I have learned a lot of transferrable skills from taking on various responsibilities during my graduate studies and those experiences continue to help me even today. I would highly recommend taking jobs/roles (even volunteer roles) outside or even within the department that have different responsibilities than what you are doing now. A broader perspective on things and new skills are going to allow you to consider alternatives and allow you to explore your own strengths and weaknesses and interests in new ways.  Keep on exploring!

Sudiksha Joshi, Ph.D. is a Learning Advocate who connects the dots between people’s strengths, ideas, and data to enable curious and conscious individuals to personalize their learning and life. Sudiksha currently works as a Data Engineer, is a HuffPost Contributor and writes about her personal journey on WeAreAlwaysLearning.com.

The Full Cost of Applying to PhD Programs

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The full cost of applying to PhD programs is significant; it can easily surpass $1,000 and even reach a few thousand dollars if you take a GRE prep course, apply to a large number of programs, and/or pay out of pocket to visit the universities you applied to. Given the enormous impact where and with whom you do your PhD has on your career, it’s vital to present yourself as well as possible in your applications and interactions with faculty. Mostly that’s going to translate to a large investment of time and energy, but sometimes it does translate to spending sufficient money on the application process.

This post outlines the three main direct costs of applying to PhD programs so that you won’t be caught by surprise during the process and can adequately prepare for this expenditure.

cost of applying to PhD programs

Know Your Programs

PhD programs are amazingly diverse. There are field-to-field differences as well as university-to-university differences. It’s imperative that you grasp how the admissions process works in your field and at each university you apply to. There are different expectations regarding the personal and/or research statement that you write, whether you should contact individual faculty members in advance of submitting your application, the purpose of a campus visit, etc.

Another massively important difference is the level of financial support offered to PhD students and what form it comes in. You might be funded by a fellowship, training grant, teaching assistantship, research assistantship inside or outside of your dissertation advisor’s group, or graduate assistantship (or some/all of the above). The support might be year-round or only during certain semesters, and it might be guaranteed for a certain number of years or at the discretion of your advisor or department. You might or might not have to pay fees or insurance premiums out of pocket. You must to know what is typical in your field to evaluate the offers that are ultimately extended to you.

The best way to figure out these largely unspoken cultural and policy differences is to ask current students or recent graduates of the programs you’re interested in. Tap your alumni networks and any relevant personal connections (LinkedIn can help you find these). Faculty members in your field at your current institution or a faculty advisor charged with supporting prospective PhD students are also wonderful resources.

The GRE(s)

While the predictive capabilities of the general GRE have come under fire, most universities in the US still ask for general GRE scores and sometimes subject GRE scores on their applications.

Further listening: Seriously, Can We Ditch the GRE Already?, Does the GRE Predict Which Students Will Succeed?

The registration fee to take the general GRE is $205 and to take the subject GRE (biology, chemistry, literature in English, math, physics, and psychology) is $150 as of July 1, 2017. Test-takers with qualifying financial needs can receive a 50% discount on the fee.

If the programs you’re applying to weight the GRE in their admissions decisions, such as by setting a minimum score, you could decide to study for the exam so you can perform your best. You can avail yourself of free resources available through the ETS website or purchase a review book (tens of dollars), course (hundreds of dollars), or tutoring (thousands of dollars). Whether or not you spend money preparing for the test, you may choose to devote significant time to it. However, extensive preparation for the exam is totally optional, and your time may be better spent on other aspects of your application.

Download the PhD Applications Budget

This spreadsheet lists all the application costs in detail and calculates your total budget.

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Application Fees

Most application fees for US PhD programs fall between $50 and $100. Here are a few examples of fees for the 2017-2018 application cycle:

  • Clemson University: $80 for domestic applicants and $90 for international applicants
  • Indiana University at Bloomington: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
  • Johns Hopkins University: $75
  • North Carolina State University: $75 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
  • Rice University: $85
  • University of California at Davis: $105 for domestic applicants and $125 for international applicants
  • University of Kansas: $65 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
  • University of Notre Dame: $75
  • University of Utah: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
  • Washington State University: $75

Many universities also offer fee waivers for qualifying applicants, the details of which can be found on their websites.

In addition to the application fee that the university charges, you will also usually pay a fee to send your GRE scores and transcripts to each university. You can choose to send your GRE scores to four universities for free on test day for the general GRE and upon registration for the subject GRE. To take full advantage, make sure your application list has four schools finalized on it before you are prompted to send the free scores. ETS charges $27 to send your score from each test to each additional recipient.

With the full cost of each PhD application hovering around $100, the cost of applying to a handful of PhD programs adds up quickly. Determining the number of schools to apply to is a challenge: too few, and you risk the randomness of the application process leaving you with no acceptances; too many, and you spend a lot of money and spread your time thin, possibly harming your chances of getting into the university that would fit you best.

Visits and Interviews

Another field-by-field difference is whether the application process involves an interview or campus visit.

Some programs admit or reject applicants outright, and if a prospective student wants to visit the university, she’ll do it on her own dime and schedule. Some programs request interviews, but the interview is conducted over video or the prospective student pays to visit campus. Most STEM programs arrange for a visit weekend, where a group of prospective students is flown to campus to meet with faculty and be courted by the program. That visit weekend might include interviews upon which the admission decision will depend or simply serve to sell the program to admitted students.

The out-of-pocket costs for the visits could be $0 if everything from the flight to your meals are paid for by the department or reimbursed (be prepared to front money, though!) or the applicant could be responsible for the full cost (up to hundreds of dollars for flights, lodging, ground transportation, and food). Even if you think the program will pay for everything, it’s a good idea to budget some walking-around money for each visit in case a meal ends up going unreimbursed or you want to do some sight-seeing or buy a souvenir.

While deciding what programs to apply to and preparing your applications is very time-consuming, it can be done on your schedule. One of the hidden costs of campus visits is the time it takes to leave school or work for 1-3 days. If you have a (part-time) job, save some vacation time or try to shift your hours around so that you don’t have to forgo any wages to go on the visits. However, for schools you are seriously considering, it’s worthwhile to miss work to properly evaluate the programs, and that will need to be factored into your applications budget.

The temporal and monetary cost of applying to PhD programs generally – and the application fee in particular – serves as a disincentive to apply to too many programs. It takes so much time and money to fully investigate and apply to each program (not to mention actually choosing which you will attend!) that you should be judicious about which institutions make your list. This requires carefully evaluating your own research and career goals as well as the programs, but you will without question benefit professionally and personally from this careful introspection in the application stage.

How much did you pay to apply to graduate schools? Did you incur any costs not listed here?

Linguistics Researcher for a Movie Website

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Today’s post is by a grad student who networked her way into her side job – but not networking as you might usually think of it.

Name: Anna Marie Trester

Institution: Georgetown

Department: Linguistics

1. What was your side job?

Linguistics Researcher for the website which accompanied the film: Do You Speak American?

2. How much did you earn?

Was abt. $10/hr (and this was more than 10 years ago)

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3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

Job started during the summer, and then continued part time (about 10 hours/week) once the school year started. This was a significant commitment on top of my fellowship responsibilities, and my advisor told me to give it up (actually, she suggested that I give the opportunity to a classmate who had recently not gotten funding), but I had always wanted to work “in film” and this was the closest I had ever gotten, and hello!?! that’s not actually how hiring works out there in the world, so no – I argued for and fought to keep the job that I had secured for myself! 🙂

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

The experience was a turning point for me as an advocate, and it changed the way I approached my studies and how I taught moving forward. Up until that point, although I had been feeling a real calling to “bring linguistics to work” I had absolutely no idea how to do it, nor any sense for how deeply challenging it would be!!!

Some background: this film was produced by Robert MacNeil (of PBS Newshour fame), who is passionate about language, and is an expert journalist, but is not a linguist. One of the first things that slowly started dawning on me is that the linguists who had been interviewed for the film must have been telling them (probably repeatedly) that they needed to hire a linguist because they had constructed a film using a decidedly journalistic frame, such that for every point, they had sought out a counterpoint, so something along the lines of: “while this language expert says that bilingualism is good, this one says it is bad.” For a linguist, language is neither good nor bad. We are scientists, so that means that we study how language changes and how languages influence one another. We describe these processes, we would never evaluate them positively or negatively or prescribe how change or contact should happen. (It would be sort of like asking a physicist to say whether they liked gravity or not, or whether they thought it was a good thing for children to have to experience it).

So, what had resulted in their pursuit of journalistic “neutrality” was a film that actually gave a platform to some rather bizarre folks with some pretty strange ideas about language (and to be frank, some of them quite xenophobic). With the website, they saw an opportunity to remedy some of these problems, so I focused on developing resources for them that would bring forward the incredible social and cultural benefits of bilingualism, immigration, linguistic innovation and change, technology, etc.

5. How did you get started with your job?

It’s a funny story, actually!  And one that I tell in my book Bringing Linguistics to Work* because I think it exemplifies something really important about apparent randomness in networking. I had been applying for months to work on the film project through all of the official channels and by networking like crazy at conferences and every other chance I got to talk with anyone who I knew who had been involved in the film (as a consultant, interviewee, etc). But in the end, I got the gig because of a connection that I made randomly at my Graduate Student Association happy hour. Upon arriving at that event, I sat down with a group just as one man was laughingly telling the group “so today, my boss asked me if could help her find a “SOCIOLINGUIST!?!?”” (with a tone that suggested: can you even imagine!??!!)  So while I got the job through networking, it was not the networking that I had been doing focused on getting me the gig. But of course that previous networking absolutely helped me get the gig, because I showed up at the interview knowing a great deal and all fired up about what I could bring them, since I had already been thinking about it and talking about it for months!  So, yeah, I got started because I network, and I now also approach networking differently.

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

Even though I had worked for several years before graduate school, this professional experience was very different from previous ones because not only were my tasks, duties, and responsibilities not at all clearly defined, I had to be the one to decide what needed to be done, often having argue for and defend these decisions and ideas while simultaneously navigating a complex web of office politics. It was the hardest job that I had had up until that point, but it took everything up a notch for me professionally, and I think this experience was instrumental in setting me on my current entrepreneurial path, so I am tremendously grateful for it!!

Anna Marie Trester is the founder of Career Linguist, a blog and resource center for linguists interested in exploring careers beyond academia. She helps linguists figure out how to bring their unique skills and training to the world of work (beginning with the task of applying for jobs), and the world of work understand why they need linguists!

Financial Habits Every PhD Student Should Live by

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Nick Giangreco is a second year PhD candidate in Systems Biology at Columbia University in New York City.

Graduate school is an enriching and rewarding time in one’s career, especially in the biomedical sciences. As I’m pursuing my PhD in Systems Biology at Columbia University, I get the chance to hone my skills and, using more glamorous terms, reach for becoming a biological data scientist. But as every graduate student knows, though we get paid during this stage in our careers, it pales in comparison to the paychecks of those working as employees in companies.

In this reality, it helps to be mindful of our financial situations and practice good habits. I’d like to share some tips that I follow as a research trainee. These tips have helped me over the past couple of years, so hopefully they will be helpful for you to extend your income while living on a meager stipend.

financial habits PhD student

Watch your income and spending

I’ve made excel spreadsheets and google sheets that detail my monthly income and expenses, as well as trends in spending and savings over time. This has made me more aware of where my money is coming from, where is it going, and managing for expenses in the future. For example, to pay off a large sum of student loans, I budgeted an amount every month and saw a trend of paying “x” amount of money every month to pay it off by a certain date. I became debt free recently because of this consistent payment over a couple years.

Eat in rather than eat out

I tend to spend more buying food at restaurants or fast food chains than if I were to buy food to make meals for the week. An alternative to eating out and spending a lot having a night out with friends is having a dinner party or game night in your home or apartment. I hosted multiple of these with my group of friends-they are a lot of fun-and they typically cost a lot less than buying drinks at bars or having late night snacks at restaurants. Also, a big money saver is taking advantage of the (ubiquitous) free food offered at school events. **Tip: Always have Tupperware on you!

Join groups on social media or email

Schools often have listservs that allow you to sell items or to buy items for cheap. This may save you a lot compared to buying new at a brand-name store! Also, metropolitan cities or areas often have social media groups such as Facebook groups that post on free events in your area or offer a marketplace for selling and buying items for cheap. Instead of buying a new Ikea set at the store, someone might be selling a gently used set for 2 or 3 times less!

Set your priorities

Is it important to you to live in a studio apartment? A nice neighborhood? Close to work? Do you want to travel on the weekends or vacation often? Do you have to see a healthcare specialist? Need a medical or dental procedure? Want to try cross-fit? Foresee other large bills coming up in the future? All these things should factor into your budget. You may be able to live somewhere that’s cheaper and allows you to do more costly events or activities. Or you may value a nicer living situation, but this may mean substituting weekly for monthly or bimonthly trips to see friends and family. Some people can’t stand eating the same thing for lunch everyday and need to buy more variety at the store or eat at restaurants, while others may be fine with eating low cost meals with low variety and can save for larger purchases in the future. Know where you fall on the spending and saving spectrum and see where you can save and need to spend according to your preferred lifestyle and budget.

Save for a rainy day

Setbacks happen unexpectedly all the time. You may need to see a specialist for a health issue, maybe family requires you to do frequent travel, your phone or laptop may break, the car may need repairs, and much more. For the time when you’ll need to make that purchase or pay that bill, have enough cash reserves for that situation and allow yourself to grow it again for the next setback.

Keeping these tips in mind has helped me to realize what are my lifestyle priorities, luxuries, and disposables. Saving during the week on meals allows me to have upwards of 50 to 100 dollars cash for brunch and events on the weekends. Living in a metropolitan city, when I opt for public transportation over a taxi, I can save considerably when practiced over many weeks. If putting in another amazon order is within my planned budget, I don’t feel bad about spending the money. If I need to make large purchases for pilates sessions, travel or lodging for an out-of-town wedding, or just travel to see family, I may dip into my rainy day funds and then set a course to replenish how much I took out. Practicing these and other conscientious financial habits have helped me over the years; hopefully now they will offer you perspective for adjusting and living your preferred lifestyle based on earning a graduate student stipend.

Higher Ed Coordinator and Consultant

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Today’s post is by a grad student who strategically took on two roles within her university aside from her job as a teaching assistant, which had an unexpected consequence.

Name: Katy Peplin

Institution: University of Michigan

Department: Screen Arts and Cultures

1. What was your side job?

  • Program Coordinator, Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) series for the Center of Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) – I basically was a full team member with staff from CRLT, doing everything from making copies all the way up to designing and presenting seminar content. I ran two seminar sessions (2015 and 2016) and one conference (2016) under this title.

  • Graduate Teaching Consultant, also with CRLT – I observed graduate student instructors, worked one on one to improve their teaching, and facilitating workshops of my own design to graduate students.

2. How much did you earn?

$20/hr – my hours varied widely, averaging five to ten hours a week, and 30-40 hours a week for the 5 weeks the seminar ran (in May of each year.)

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3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

My advisor was not supportive of my alt-ac career planning, so I did not fully disclose this work to her. Logistically, I worked with my department administrator (who handled our budget) in confidence, and she worked directly with CRLT (which was also a unit within the University) to make sure that I complied with hour restrictions for my funding as it changed from semester to semester. In terms of managing my time, I was also teaching a full load and working on my dissertation, so I scheduled on-campus meetings with CRLT around my teaching schedule, and generally tried to put out whatever fire was burning the brightest at any one moment.

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

It was definitely a strategic move to work at CRLT, as I knew early on that I wanted to be prepared for a wide range of post-PhD career moves. I figured that teaching-focused institutions would look kindly on the pedagogy aspects of the work, that non-profits would appreciate the administrative, budget and publicity parts of my portfolio, and that I would have extensive experience to prepare me for a variety of positions in other teaching centers. It did definitely detract from my graduate work, however – compared to some of my other peers, I published less and often missed out on things like scholarly talks because of my schedule.

5. How did you get started with your job?

I completed the Preparing Future Faculty seminar as a participant in 2014, and approached one of the facilitators for an informational interview about her role in the teaching center. When the program coordinator position came up, she emailed me to encourage an application, and to apply for the teaching consulting position the next year.

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

Looking back, I feel I might have focused too narrowly on the field of educational/professional development when pursuing work experiences during the PhD. When I graduated and entered the market, I was over-qualified for post-docs in professional development, but also was passed over for positions in teaching centers that ultimately went to people with post-docs. Because I was geographically tied to one location because of my partner’s career, there were only so many jobs in that field in our city (and even fewer tenure-track or adjuncting opportunities in my research area) and my resume was still decidedly “higher-ed.”

Katy Peplin completed her PhD in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan in 2016 and is now a graduate student coach, specializing in wellness, mental health, and sustainable work/life balance during graduate school. See more at www.katypeplin.com, where she blogs regularly about all things grad student.

Why and How I Eliminated Eating Out for Convenience in Grad School (and You Can, Too)

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Shortly after my husband and I got married and combined our finances, we faced a reckoning in our budget. As we created our first combined spending plans and started our system of targeted savings accounts, we realized that our month-to-month spending was out of sync with our values and short-term goals. Chiefly, we wanted to put aside more money for travel spending, which meant that we had to find other areas in our budget to cut back. On the chopping block: eating out for convenience.

While our restaurant spending was never astronomical, we had each fallen into a pattern of buying convenience food on a regular basis. Among other reasons, I tended to buy a quick dinner on campus when my lab experiments ran into the early evening, my husband bought a fast food dinner every week on his way from campus to an evening activity, and we also occasionally went out to dinner just because we didn’t feel like cooking.

We determined that these convenience meals were not a great use of our money, especially in light of our travel goals. So we made a spending rule: We only ate out with other people on social occasions; we eliminated eating out alone or with each other. We held to that rule almost perfectly for our last few years of grad school, though I admit we started deviating a bit while dissertating!

eliminated eating out

 

In this post, I’ll share our strategies for sticking with our no-convenience-eating-out rule. I know this topic is of high interest to grad students (with busy schedules!) who are looking to reduce their spending. Most recently, we discussed it at length in Grad Student Finances’s monthly live money chat. (If you want to join our next money chat, sign up for the mailing list here to receive more information.) Even if you don’t want to eliminate eating out for convenience entirely, implementing these strategies will help you to enjoy eating out more when you choose to because it’s not done out of desperation.

Further reading: Give Yourself a Raise: Prepare Your Own Food Even with a Busy Schedule

Identify Your Patterns

The very first step to eliminate eating out for convenience is to take note of when and why it happens. In all three scenarios I listed for my own life, dinner was the issue. My husband and I never ate out for breakfast and rarely did for lunch, as we were consistent brown-baggers. Since dinner was the problem time for us, that was where we focused our energy for creating solutions.

I realized that I tended to get hangry and need to eat right away; if there’s not ready food available, I would buy something because I couldn’t wait an hour or two to get home/shop/cook. So part of my solution was to keep homemade food available (more on that next).

The pattern you identify in your convenience eating could relate to any meal or snack of the day or more than one of them. Maybe you’re not a morning person so you habitually stop for a coffee and bagel on your way to work. Maybe you like to take a nice break for lunch, and part of that is leaving your office to go to an eatery on campus. Maybe you need a pick-me-up snack in the mid-afternoon to keep from nodding off while reading. Maybe you tell yourself you deserve a night off from cooking after a long day in the lab. Work first to identify the situations in which you habitually buy convenience food or are tempted to, whether those are based around a meal, a time of day, a feeling, a stressor, a regularly scheduled meeting, etc.

Keep Food on Campus

If you are buying convenience food on campus or on your way to on from campus, like my husband and I were, the easiest solution is to keep food on campus in your office, department lounge, or whatever personal space is available to you.

Further reading: Make Your Stipend Go Further: Bring Your Lunch to School

We were consistently bringing our lunches with us every day and keeping them in our shared refrigerators. After identifying dinners as our weak point, we started bringing in dinners as well. On the days of the week that we knew in advance that we would need to eat on campus (like before a regular evening activity), we just brought in our lunch and dinner together. But I also started bringing an extra dinner in with me on Monday to stay in the fridge for the week to be eaten on whatever night I happened to stay late (and if that was early in the week, I’d bring in another the next day). In this way, I planned for the eventuality of needing to eat on campus, even though I didn’t know exactly when it would happen.

You don’t necessarily need to bring in a full extra meal to make this work. If you just need to tide yourself over for an hour or two, a snack will do just fine. If you choose shelf-stable foods or long-lasting refrigerator foods, you don’t even need to change them out every week.

Batch Cook

No kidding, batch cooking changed my life. When I first started eating out of my own kitchen and learning to cook, I prepared one-serving meals, which was very time-consuming and didn’t allow me to use frugal strategies like buying in bulk. I also ate a lot of pre-prepared foods and meals out because that kind of cooking was so exhausting. Our slow cooker changed all that for me.

While batch cooking is not limited to slow cookers, it is a good entry point. I started making 8+ servings at once of hearty chilis and soups in our slow cooker, which were easy to toss into a Tupperware and bring to campus for lunch or dinner. From there I moved on to other styles of cooking, but always making at least 4 servings at once. Batch cooking is perfect for a busy grad student as it is so time-efficient.

Batch cooking was key to eliminating our convenience eating out because 1) it created those meals that we wanted to keep on campus and 2) we always had food ready for reheating at home. Gone were the days of convincing ourselves to eat out because we had no groceries at home or cooking would take too much effort.

Further reading: Eliminate Eating Out for Convenience with Batch Cooking

Eat Before You Cook

Batch cooking also leads easily into this tip: eat, then cook. When I arrive home from work hungry, the last thing I want to do is spend a bunch of time cooking! People are always saying “don’t grocery shop while hungry” because it leads to poor decisions, and I apply the same logic to trying to cook while hungry. I get impatient and am liable to go off-plan.

So my (largely unconscious) strategy became to eat a pre-prepared meal upon arriving home, then do any necessary cooking for the following day(s). I did try to batch cook on the weekends, but usually I also needed to do it once or twice during the week, so I made sure that I had a dinner already available on those nights so that cooking could be put off until the later evening.

Use Your Freezer

Tying in closely with batch cooking and always having a meal available to you is freezer cooking. This is not a strategy I personally employed, but it works amazingly well for many people. Basically, you prep/cook one or more meals that are to be immediately frozen and then reheated/cooked at a later time. If you have a meal available in your freezer, you will never have an excuse to stop for convenience food on your way home.

This strategy also works very well for people who want to batch cook but don’t want to eat the same thing every single day. You can cook a four-serving meal, for example, eating one and freezing three. Rotating through that a few times will give you a selection of different freezer meals so you can spontaneously choose which to eat for any given meal.

Meal Planning

I’m a big believer in creating habits to avoid decision fatigue. I do not want to have to think about what I’m going to eat 3-4 times per day, 7 days per week. Eating the same meals over and over again makes my life so much easier. Grocery shopping, cooking, and eating all become consistent and decisions are minimized. If I have my meals planned out and food available to me, such as through batch cooking, I don’t have the opportunity to decide to eat out for convenience.

Luckily, my personality allows for eating the same dinner multiple nights in a row without becoming dissatisfied. If you crave more variety, meal planning can help you preserve that while still eliminating on-the-spot decisions. When you meal plan, you decide in advance what you’ll eat throughout the week. Often, weekends are used for shopping and prepping/cooking all of the meals, so all you have to do during the work week is carry out the plan with minimal effort.

To combine decision elimination with batch and freezer cooking, you can create a pattern of eating one type of meal every Monday, a different one on Tuesday, another on Wednesday, etc. An even more advanced level of meal planning coordinates the ingredients in the meals you eat throughout the week. The different meals will all draw from a common set of ingredients, which allows you to buy in bulk. (Combine that coordination with the sales cycle at your local grocery store and you are a super-frugal meal planning genius!)

It’s a tough adjustment going from eating family meals growing up or dining hall meals in college to cooking for one or two as a young adult. There is absolutely a learning curve, and sometimes convenience eating is part of that. But as you gain skills in the kitchen and clarity on how you want to use your money, you can make the decision to eliminate eating out for convenience. Start with identifying when convenience eating crops up in your life, then apply these strategies to combat it.

What strategies do you use to avoid eating out for convenience?