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Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts

June 24, 2016 by Emily

Title: Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts

Format: Live In-Person Workshop

Intended Audience: graduate students receiving stipends

Length: 60 minutes

Timing: Year-Round

Live Seminar Outline: Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts from Emily Roberts on Vimeo.

Summary: Graduate students face common challenges in their money management. While they may budget and/or track their expenses, their budgets are not maximally effective in helping them reach their goals and weather irregular expenses. This workshop challenges the status quo of each student’s budget by teaching him how to set and reach goals effectively and prepare for irregular expenses. Each attendee is asked to watch a video in advance of attending, bring her budgetary data with her to the workshop, and work through several collaborative exercises during the session.

Outline:

Background Video

Define and identify values
Identify current financial stage
Calculate net worth
The power of compound interest
Budgetary data collection and categorization

Workshop

Goals
- How to move through financial stages
- Creating SMART process-based goals
- Brainstorming bite-sized goals
Irregular expenses
- How irregular expenses challenge a grad student budget
- Identifying irregular expenses
- The targeted savings solution to irregular expenses
- Building individualized targeted savings categories, amounts, and timelines
Adapt your budget
- Creating a prioritized list of goals and targeted savings
- Brainstorming how to cut back in budget categories
- How to weigh uses of money against one another

Decipher Your Stipend Offer Letter

June 24, 2016 by Emily

Title: Decipher Your Stipend Offer Letter

Format: Live Lecture with Q&A (In Person or Remote)

Intended Audience: prospective graduate students receiving stipends

Length: 60 minutes

Timing: January to March

Live Seminar Outline: Decipher Your Stipend Offer Letter from Emily Roberts on Vimeo.

Summary: The stipend offer letters that graduate schools send out tend to be flattering to the recipients but difficult to understand. This presentation teaches prospective graduate students how to analyze their stipend offer letters to figure out what is truly being offered to them and what is expected of them. They will learn the key words to watch for in offer letters and what additional questions they need to ask of their prospective departments. Ultimately, they will compare their offers to one another directly by factoring in the local cost of living in each city.

Outline:

Factors in choosing your graduate school
Why money in graduate school matters
What is a typical funding offer for your field? (research assistantships vs. teaching assistantships vs. fellowships, funding guarantees, part-year stipends)
What is your stipend and why are you receiving it? (calculate take-home pay, work requirement)
What does your university expect from you? (fees, fee amount trajectory, residency)
What are your benefits? (health insurance, unions)
Compare your stipend to the local cost of living

Back to Speaking home page.

How to Calculate Your Net Worth

April 18, 2016 by Emily

You calculate your net worth by preparing a balance sheet. Your net worth is the sum of your assets minus the sum of your liabilities, which are listed on your balance sheet. Your net worth and balance sheet are snapshots in time and do not directly reflect your monthly income and expenses.

First, list all of your financial assets by type and amount. Financial assets might include the money in your checking and savings accounts, investments, your home, your car, other valuable property, etc.

Second, list all of your financial liabilities or debts by type and outstanding balance. Your liabilities may include student loans, your credit card balance(s), your mortgage, your car loan, personal loans, etc.

Third, subtract the sum of your liabilities from the sum of your assets. This number is your net worth.

It is useful to track your net worth so that you can see how it changes with time. While some financial software may report your net worth daily, to make fair comparisons, it is most useful to update your balance sheet and net worth on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Resource: What is my current net worth?

What Is Net Worth?

April 18, 2016 by Emily

Your net worth is a single number that describes how (monetarily) wealthy you are at one point in time. It is calculated by subtracting the sum of your liabilities (debt) from the sum of your assets (also known as a balance sheet). In other words, your net worth is what you own minus what you owe. As a graduate student, your net worth might be negative, close to zero, or positive.

Your net worth is only a snapshot in time, so it is useful to track how your net worth changes with time – both the direction and rate of change. If you are taking out student loans to fund your graduate education and/or living expenses, your net worth is likely decreasing. If your stipend barely covers your living expenses, your net worth is likely fairly static. If you are currently saving money, paying off debt, and/or your investments are increasing in value, your net worth is likely increasing.

To build your wealth over time and to eventually become financially independent or retire, your objective is to increase your net worth by increasing your assets, decreasing your liabilities, or both. Due to the power of compound interest, as your total invested assets increase, your net worth on average also tends to grow even faster.

Further reading: What is Net Worth?, What Does Your Net Worth Really Mean?

While it is useful to know your net worth, do not allow its absolute value or even its direction and rate of change to impact your emotional self-worth. Your net worth is not a reflection of your value as a person. While achieving (or being given) a positive and/or increasing net worth during graduate school gives you a nice start in life, it alone does not determine your continued financial success. Likewise, having a negative or decreasing net worth in graduate school does not doom you. As a graduate student, you are just starting your career, which ideally will be long and financially prosperous. If you are taking out student loans during graduate school, the liability side of your balance sheet is growing, but the asset side does not take into account the knowledge, skills, experience, and network that you are currently gaining that will help you greatly increase your income and net worth in the future.

Data Science Consultant

April 11, 2016 by Emily

Today’s post is by a PhD student whose side job perfectly complements his graduate work and career goals – and pays him incredibly well, too boot!

Name: Edward Kim

University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Department: Materials Science and Engineering

1) What is your side or temporary job?

Data science and machine learning consulting (freelancing, remote-based).

2) How much do you earn?

Between $100-200 / hr; it pays much, much better than a grad student stipend, so that’s nice.

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3) How do you balance your job with your graduate work?

I keep my consulting hours at ~10hr/wk, and I don’t do research on weekends or evenings unless it’s an emergency. I generally try to keep a pretty relaxed attitude regarding grad school, so keeping a balance isn’t too much trouble.

4) Does your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

It’s directly related, since I plan to work in an industry position doing machine learning (or something related) after I graduate. I’m also interested in remote work and entrepreneurship, and so this ties in nicely with both of those goals too.

5) How did you get started with your job?

Surprisingly, I just posted on one of the Reddit job boards and got a reply from a manager at a company who wanted some consulting services. I didn’t think that it would be so straightforward, but I guess I got lucky.

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

I think that if you market your skills carefully, then even as a grad student, you can offer a lot of value to a company. The trick is in having a sense of what kinds of business problems you might be able to solve.

Brokerage and IRA Account Minimums

March 31, 2016 by Emily

A very common issue for graduate students, postdocs, and PhDs just starting out in their Real Jobs who are ready to start investing is that they have only a small amount of savings to contribute to their investment accounts or they have no savings but have identified some monthly cash flow. While some brokerage firms have minimum account balances of one or a few thousand dollars, others have no minimum or waive the minimum if a monthly deposit is initiated. This post outlines the minimum amounts of money needed to open accounts at various brokerage firms. This information was last updated on 1/17/2018.

Brokerage Firm	IRA Minimum	Taxable Account Minimum
Vanguard	$1,000 or $3,000 for mutual funds; ETF price for ETFs (~$50+)	$1,000 or $3,000 for mutual funds; ETF price for ETFs (~$50+)
Fidelity	$0 to open, but perhaps more to buy	$2,500
Charles Schwab	$1,000, possibly waived with ongoing contribution	$1,000 or none with $100/mo ongoing contribution
T. Rowe Price	$1,000	$2,500
TD Ameritrade	none	none

If you don’t have enough existing savings to open an investment account (at your brokerage firm of choice), you should just continue to gradually build up their savings balance until it reaches the minimum or the minimum decreases. You can do so either in cash-equivalents (a checking or savings account) or at another less desirable brokerage firm with no minimum or a lower minimum that you can meet.