Personal Finance for PhDs

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Budgeting

This PhD Student’s Intricate Budgeting System Uses Cash Symbolically

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alicia Jones, a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the creator of the YouTube channel Alicia Does Adulting. Alicia explains in detail her intricate budgeting system, which involves creating a zero-based budget every two weeks, allocating cold hard cash into envelopes, contributing to her debt avalanche, and funding her targeted savings accounts. She uses this budget to keep her intimately connected with her spending decisions and accountable to her financial goals. Alicia and her husband have paid off $70,000 of debt in the past year and a half and now have a positive net worth.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Alicia: I try to turn whatever I can into a game. And finance has become a game for me. I do the little colored charts. I want to see exactly how much money I can put towards savings or debt each month and that continues to motivate me.

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 seven, episode six. And today my guest is Alicia Jones, a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the creator of the YouTube channel, Alicia Does Adulting. Alicia explains, in detail, her intricate budgeting system, which involves creating a zero based budget every two weeks, allocating cold, hard cash into envelopes, contributing to her debt, avalanche and funding her targeted savings accounts. She uses this budget to keep her intimately connected with her spending decisions and accountable to her financial goals. So far Alicia, and her husband has paid off $70,000 of debt in a year and a half and now have a positive net worth.

01:12 Emily: You’ll hear an exciting new addition to the interview today, which is a couple of questions contributed live by members of the Personal Finance for PhDs community. Going forward, members of the community are invited to attend my podcast recording sessions and ask their own questions of my guests. If you would like to participate in the interviews as well, all you have to do is join the community at pfforphds.community. If you’d like to check out my schedule of upcoming podcast recording sessions, you can find that pfforphds.com/podcast. Joining the community is an excellent way to support the podcast. Plus, you’ll receive myriad other benefits. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alicia Jones from Alicia Does Adulting.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:58 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Alicia Jones from Alicia Does Adulting, which is the name of her YouTube channel. And Alicia has really fantastic story to tell us, but really primarily, she’s here to teach us her budgeting system, which is quite intricate. And I highly recommend that you go check out her YouTube channel. It’s actually really fascinating. You’ll be hearing more about it as we go forward. Ao Alicia, please introduce yourself a little bit further for our audience.

02:26 Alicia: Well, thank you so much for having me. This is super exciting. My name is Alicia. I’m a third year doctoral student and I go to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaige. I am studying kinesiology. I actually got my masters from U of I in kinesiology as well. And my research interests are kind of varied. I’ve not had the most traditional grad student experience. I am running on average three studies at once, just because of the way my program is. Overall, my research is how behavioral changes impact the overall wellbeing of people with and without disabilities. I also work in MS work. I work in breast cancer work. I kind of do a little bit of everything, but it’s nice being in kinesiology because you get to wear leggings to class sometimes. If you’re looking for a major or concentration, highly recommend exercise science for that.

03:20 Emily: All right. That’s really fun. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And along the way of your grad school journey, or maybe before, I don’t know, you developed an interest in personal finance, and in particular, you started your YouTube channel, Alicia Does Adulting. The channel name is quite general, but I think that you mostly talk about personal finance stuff, is that right?

03:39 Alicia: Yeah. The way that I introduced the channel is that I’m attempting to get my life together and I’m focusing on finances first. Eventually I would like to fully adult with all the aspects of adulting, but I’m not there yet. I’m still working on the money part.

03:55 Emily: Yeah. Well, the money part is going to, it takes a lifetime to work all this stuff out.

Alicia’s Budgeting System

The Basics

03:59 Emily: Really excited to get to the topic of our conversation today, which is on your budgeting system, which of course, when I saw your YouTube videos, I was absolutely fascinated by this. Please, I know it’s going to take a little while to explain, but just kind of walk us through all the different elements that you use for your budgeting.

04:14 Alicia: Definitely. I will start off with, I’m not saying that this budgeting system is for everyone. Everyone has their own way of making this work for them. I actually originally started doing a monthly budget and it failed horribly and I started playing around with it from there. The way that I will describe my budgeting system is that it is a zero-based, paycheck-to-paycheck budget.

04:41 Alicia: What does that mean? Zero-based means that I take any remaining penny after my bills, expenses, free spending money, any of that, and it gets given a specific job. So before the pandemic, that was pretty much exclusively going towards debt. When the pandemic hit, I switched my goals and I wanted to save some money, so it all went there. So I have $0 left after my paychecks are all cleared. I do keep a little bit of money in my checking account just because math is not always my friend and sometimes I forget something. I leave about a hundred dollars cushion. So you don’t have to worry about overdraft fees this way.

05:23 Alicia: Then I do paycheck to paycheck. Between my husband and I, we have anywhere between four and eight or nine jobs at once. The paycheck to paycheck system worked well for me because every other Friday we each had a steady income coming in on those days. All of the bills that come up during that pay period, I take care of all of that during that paycheck. Then if I’m saving up for something, I can kind of devote that. It comes down to a lot of planning and a little bit of strategy, I guess.

05:56 Emily: Yeah. Let me make sure understand exactly what’s going on here, because this is definitely different from how I budget and probably how most people do it, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. When you say that you have the zero based budget, is what you mean that when you receive your pay or at least every second Friday, when you’re settling up, you are at that point, allocating all of the money for the upcoming two weeks, is that right?

06:20 Alicia: I do it within the week. Anything that was due on that Friday, I account it starting there up until the next Thursday. Whenever the bill is hit, for the most part, I tend to pay my bills about two weeks in advance, just because I’d never want to miss it. That just tends to be my system, but if you look at a true paycheck to paycheck, it would be within that Friday to the following Thursday.

Dealing with Variable Expenses

06:46 Emily: Okay. And then I understand that the bills that have come in, that’s a fixed amount, you know what it is. What about money that’s sort of up to you, like your grocery spending or some discretionary money. Are you allocating a maximum that you’re going to put towards that? Or how do you handle variable expenses?

07:05 Alicia: This is where my system probably gets more complicated to people, but it’s what works for me. I use a cash envelope system on top of it. For groceries, for example, for our household, every paycheck, I set aside $300 for household, so groceries and whatever else might come about, but then I put everything on credit cards. If you watch my channel, you’ll see I will do an expense tracker where I go through every single penny that I spent, then I actually will take the money out of the cash envelopes. The reason why I like this system is I am a chronic spender. I actually managed to get myself into $15,000 of debt in my early twenties and I never want to be in credit card debt like that again. This is kind of like a checks and balance system. If I didn’t have that check for me personally, if I say I’m only spending $50 on clothing, and then I find a $75 outfit that I really want, in my brain, I still want credit card. I want to put it on a credit card. I want it now, that kind of thing.

Alicia: What I can do with my system is, “okay, I bought the $75 outfit, I have to make a sacrifice somewhere else because I don’t have any flexibility.” That $25 could come out of my household to make up the difference, but then I can’t spend all of my money on household. It kind of becomes a checks and balance system. And for me, I’m flexible with it. Some people, with the envelope system, it’s very much like when you hit the end of your envelope, you cannot spend any more. And I just give myself a little bit more leeway. Things come up, or sometimes you just need to de-stress a little bit and maybe you go out and have a drink with a friend or something. As long as I’m making sacrifices and none of it stays on my credit card, then I’m happy with it.

09:01 Emily: So the cash aspect is actually a stand in for just, this is the limit. The important part is not literally that you’re using cash because ultimately when you make the purchases, you are not using cash, you are using credit cards. But the cash is just sort of a visual and physical reminder that, okay, that’s the end of the envelope, you’ve reached the end, now you must reallocate if you need to go beyond that. I definitely like this aspect of it because I am not that strict with my budget anymore. I used to be quite strict in a similar way, like, okay, I overspent here, I’ll have to transfer from somewhere else now. I sort of let it go, but I definitely find it attractive to, at the end of the day, make sure everything’s added up to zero to account for the entire paycheck.

How Alicia Keeps Her System Flexible

09:43 Emily: Okay, we’ve talked about it being a paycheck to paycheck budget, a zero based budget. You’re allocating every single dollar that’s coming in. We talked about the cash envelopes. Are there any other elements to your budget that you’d like to share?

09:56 Alicia: I think the big thing for me, and it’s one of the things that I think some people don’t understand if you’ve watched the channel for a little bit. It’s strict and slightly complicated, but it also allows for a lot of flexibility, and that was something that was really important to me. Everyone that’s listening to this is either in grad school or wants to go to grad school or has experienced grad school and we know how stressful it is. And I try to add as little extra stressors to my life as I can, but I have a bunch of student loan debt that I really want to pay off. I have a bunch of financial goals, like I’m working towards technically retiring early. I want to have that kind of cushion in my bank account. So I want to start working towards those goals, but I also just don’t want to stress myself any more. It is a little bit time consuming, which is why I’ll say it’s probably not for everyone, but it is something to potentially give it a try. It’s been really fun on the YouTube channel in particular, because I get to hear people trying my system and it was never really meant for other people to try it, it’s just what worked for me, so it’s been really cool to hear success stories about how it works. If you’re interested in it, definitely give it a shot.

11:11 Emily: There was one more thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is, I believe that you also use sinking funds or, I use the term targeted savings accounts for that. Is that the same as your envelopes or is that a separate sort of variation on that?

11:25 Alicia: It’s very similar, but I leave my sinking funds online because they’re usually bigger purchases and I just don’t want to have that cash on me, personally. I put all of my sinking funds into one checking account and then I have an online tracker for everything. It’s a similar kind of grace system of, I actually have three sinking funds that are negative right now, and it’s because I’ve borrowed from other places. We do an annual trip to Canada, but we didn’t this year because the borders were closed. So I have some money set aside in that account that I can borrow from. I do highly recommend sinking funds or targeted savings. They have been a massive game changer for me because that was one of the ways that when I originally started to budget without much guidance, those types of things like needing new tires, I logically knew that those that was going to happen, but I never planned for it. And then the month would come and it would be a disaster and it would go on a credit card and then I’d carry on. And that’s how I got $15,000 of credit card debt.

12:31 Emily: Yeah. Can you actually, for the listener, explain a little bit further what a sinking fund or a targeted savings account is, and actually give a few maybe examples or your list of which ones you have named.

12:41 Alicia: Definitely. Sinking funds and targeted savings accounts are things that you’re saving up for that you know will eventually happen. For me and my family, we celebrate Christmas. Christmas happens same time every single year, and I know approximately how much I want to spend. So instead of in December pulling $600 out of my budget, every single month, I put $50 into a Christmas sinking fund account. I have some for the Canada trip that I mentioned, which is usually about a $2,000 expense, so I save a couple hundred dollars every single month, so it doesn’t feel super overwhelming to me.

13:19 Alicia: I actually did some research into sinking funds because they were such a game changer and I’m a grad student nerd, so I wanted to know what the literature said, and it’s actually a concept of being able to allocate money with a name. I don’t know if any listener or if you might have this experience, but I’ve actually always been a semi-decent saver. I always had money and usually several thousand dollars, at least in my savings account, but then my tires would blow up and I would need new ones and I’d put it on a credit card because to me in my brain that wasn’t an emergency. I shouldn’t take that out of my emergency savings. That money always has to be there. So by allocating this little bit of money that just sits to the side that has a name, it makes the rational jump of, “Oh, I need new tires. I have a car maintenance fund. It comes from the car maintenance.” That is probably one thing I will keep the rest of my life, no matter what. It is a massive game changer for me.

14:19 Emily: Yeah. I absolutely love sinking funds and targeted savings accounts as well. I started using them in grad school as well, when, similar to you, I had some expenses come up and in our case we didn’t go into credit card debt, but we just had to say no to a bunch of stuff that we didn’t want to say no to. And it kind of helped us realize, okay, well we do need to do some advanced planning for these sort of large expenses that come up every so often. So I started using them in grad school as well. And I did have a year when I didn’t use them, which was the year from when we left Durham, where we were living during graduate school and moved to Seattle. And so for that first year in Seattle, everything was an upheaval and we had no idea, it was a lot harder to predict your expenses once you moved to new place, et cetera, et cetera. But after that year, I was like, “Nope, I’m tired of living this way. I need to go back to having the targeted savings accounts in place.” So they’re back in place and still in play, which has been wonderful. Of course, 2020 has thrown things off quite a bit. Like you didn’t end up using your Canada trip money and certainly we’ve had spending opportunities that we anticipated that didn’t happen, so there’s definitely been some reallocation, but you kind of have to roll with it.

Using a Combination of Cash and Credit

15:25 Emily: Actually we have a question that just came in from one of my Personal Finance for PhD community members. I invite my community members to listen in on my podcast recordings. So if you are listening to this podcast and you want to be in on these recording sessions and ask your own questions, I invite you to join the community. You can find it at pfforphds.community. The question that just came in is: why or how did you decide to use both cash and a credit card and not just cash? What do you do with the cash since you’re not actually spending it? And this is exactly the question that I was gonna ask too, so please go ahead.

16:00 Alicia: Yeah. This is one of the biggest questions that I get. The big reason why I didn’t want to use just cash is because I’m on campus very late at night. And so I didn’t feel comfortable. I have a very relatively safe campus, but I just didn’t want to have any extra money on me that I didn’t need to have. I’m also not a purse or bag carrier, so I have just like a little wallet that has my keys. So having the credit cards was more convenient for me and some places on my campus actually don’t take cash, they only take cards. So the few times I’d like go to pay for something. I would have had to put it on a card anyway. But there are a few benefits for me personally, at least I guess, not just me, but you do get a little bit of extra security. If something goes wrong, if it’s a payment that you didn’t actually make or something like that, there’s security systems built into credit cards, which is beneficial. I have a little bit of extra leeway. If something massive happens, so for a real life example, last night, I had to take my cat to an emergency vet and that is $2,000 and that was not in the budget. That will go on a credit card, which now gives me 30 days to pay it off before any interest hits. That’s a nice benefit. And you also get cash back. Eventually I do want to get into travel hacking, but right now I just use the cash back to help pay off random bills that come up that I wasn’t expecting or kind of like treat yourself things. And on average, I make about a hundred dollars a month on my cash back credit cards, so I’ll take that.

17:42 Emily: Yeah, that definitely helps with the budget as well, to give you a little bit more wiggle room. And then the other part of that question was, so you literally have cash in your home, and it just gets recycled paycheck to paycheck period? What exactly is happening with that cash?

17:56 Alicia: It kind of depends. Before COVID, I was very good at taking that money, putting it into the deposit envelope and taking it right back to the bank. Since I’ve been limiting my trips, it has been getting recycled. So the people at my bank know me very well and they know I have very specific denominations that I asked for. They were very used to me doing it, but it is just kind of like a cycle of cash. So I end my week on a Thursday and usually on Friday is when I will go through all of my expenses and pull out all the cash. If it’s convenient for me to go to the bank, that money just goes back and then goes directly to credit cards. If not, since COVID that money kind of just sits there, and then the next time I need to take out cash, I just don’t take it. So the cash that got left in the bank account that never came out, goes towards the credit cards.

Commercial

18:49 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at pfforphds.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, which I add to every month. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, book club and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success. Now back to the interview.

Debt Repayment Under Alicia’s Budgeting System

19:53 Emily: You mentioned earlier that you’re working on student loan debt repayments, some other debt repayment — how does your debt repayment process figure into the budget?

20:02 Alicia: That’s one of the reasons why I like the zero based budget. I do a debt avalanche. I target one debt at a time and I specifically targeted the highest interest debt to save the most amount of money that I could in interest. I have an allotted amount of all of the previous debt that I’ve paid off. Each month $1,600 actually goes towards debt pretty much no matter what. Maybe in a massive emergency I wouldn’t, but I pretty much do that every month. Then whatever excess money I have goes towards debt. I pay all of my bills, I do all of my cash envelopes and sinking funds, and then every other penny gets thrown towards debt.

20:47 Emily: I see.

20:48 Alicia: It becomes a big part of my budget.

20:50 Emily: Just to clarify, I think when you said all the debt you’ve paid off in the past, what you’re talking about is the minimum payments of each one of the debts that you’ve made in the past that have now been cleared. You’re still quote unquote making that minimum payment. You’re just making it to the next debt and you you’re in your list, the top debt in your list. So it used to be that you had minimum payments of $1,600 and now some portion of that is you just throwing additional money at your current top loan, is that right?

21:18 Alicia: Yep. And so the way it ended up working with the debt avalanche method in particular, pretty much all of my big minimum payments were first. I did, after about five months of starting budgeting, get a $20,000 medical bill, so I put that onto a credit card and I had one year to pay that off and I made the decision to have that as part of my minimum payments and my debt snowball too. It got a lot bigger because of that.

21:44 Emily: Yeah. Wow. I’m so glad to have these examples of real life coming at you. Not that it’s pleasant or happy, but just as instructive as it is for the listeners to learn how you’re dealing with that, because I’m sure a lot of them have had similar experiences or are having similar experiences.

22:00 Emily: One comment about that debt repayment method — I think I made this name up, so I don’t know if anyone else uses it, but I call what you just explained saving first and last. In the personal finance community, we talk a lot about pay yourself first. So as soon as you get paid, you do your debt snowball, you put money towards that, all of your financial goals, you put money there, then you spend whatever remains. But I also used your system of, okay, I have my financial goals, that’s happening right after I get paid, and then whatever money I have left over because I came in under budget in X, Y, Z categories, that also gets saved or thrown into a debt snowball or debt avalanche process. I call that saving first and last because saving last is like not a good idea, but saving first and last to me that was like motivational to come in under budget in these various categories so I would have more money to throw towards the financial goals. Does that work same for you?

22:54 Alicia: Yeah. And I don’t know if you’ve read any of like the gamify literature, but that’s kind of what I do with everything is I try to turn whatever I can into a game. And finance has become a game for me. I do the little color charts. I want to see exactly how much money I can put towards savings or debt each month. And that continues to motivate me. I hadn’t thought about that it was first and last, but it definitely is.

Why This Budgeting Method Works For Alicia

23:19 Emily: Yeah. So you mentioned earlier, your system is complex, it’s intricate. That may not be for everyone, but why have you made it so complex to yourself? Why do you think that this is working well for you?

23:32 Alicia: I think a big part of it is that I am very numbers driven and I wanted to take this journey to learn as much as I could about myself and about my finances, particularly since I’m the spender of my family. I wanted to know every little piece of data and I don’t really show it too much on the channel, but I do run the numbers for myself. I like to see exactly how much I’ve increased in household spending from this time, this year versus last time. It’s complicated, but part of it just feels like I’m learning lessons every single week. And particularly with using cash and credit, I’m having to constantly remind myself that you can have certain things, but you have to make sacrifices. You don’t just get the easy win all the time. You have to balance it out.

24:24 Emily: Yeah. When I talk with people about budgeting, sometimes I talk about the merits of using an app versus like maybe creating your own spreadsheet, or at least doing manual tracking in some manner, even if it is in an app or something. And what I say about that is that, doing these things manually keeps you very intimate with your numbers. It keeps you very closely connected to facing up to the decisions that you’re making and reconciling them. It sounds like that’s why you’re doing that. In terms of recommending the system to anyone else, who do you think the system would work well for?

24:56 Alicia: It has to be someone that’s pretty motivated, I think, because it does take more time than just tracking it within an app. But I think this is someone who, if you’re very motivated by learning, I think that’s probably the biggest thing. I’m constantly diving back into my own spending habits and I really like self help type things. I love working on self-improvement and that’s, I think why I was really drawn to this method of constantly having to learn and adapt and that to me is exciting.

25:30 Emily: Yeah, that sounds wonderful. What motivates you to stick with this now intricate and somewhat time consuming system?

25:40 Alicia: Honestly, one of the biggest thing is accountability. One of the reasons why I first started this channel is I’ve found that the more that I talk about things that I experienced in my life, the more people I find to have experienced similar things, or can relate and give advice. I started talking about money with my friends and family. I started talking about it on my YouTube channel, and if you follow it, you see just about everything that I spend and do and whatnot. Unless I forget something, you see it. Knowing that that’s always there, that my friends are now tracking my progress in some ways, on the times that I’ve just really wanted to go and do something, maybe not super crazy, but a little bit frivolous I don’t because I know someone’s holding me accountable to it. And unfortunately I’m not the type of person that can just hold myself accountable. Having other people has really, really helped me in this journey.

26:39 Emily: Yeah. I’ll say another vote for that as well. My current website, my home on the web is pfforphds.com but during graduate school, I was actually blogging for under a different website, which was evolvingpf.com, Evolving Personal Finance. And I similarly, not as frequently as you, but I would do at least monthly reports of this was everything I spent and this was a very popular thing to do on the internet at that time. And I’m sure it’s still maybe on YouTube as well. And it was really, really great accountability for us, helping us to stick to our goals. We use that during the time that we were in graduate school when we really had a tight budget and we had high, lofty goals for our money. It seems less necessary in my life now, post PhD, so I’ve kind of moved on from it, but it was a really, really useful tool for that time. And just actually to mention the community again, this is something that any listener can do through the PFforPhDs Community, if you choose to use it that way. It can be great for accountability, and you’re welcome to report all your spending inside that community as well, if you want. It’ll be private. It won’t be open for everyone to see, but you will have the other community members there to at least in theory, hold you accountable.

How Alicia Uses Her Budgeting Method for Achieving Financial Goals

27:48 Emily: I was also thinking about your debt repayment journey, and now you said earlier that you’ve also started saving up more since the pandemic. Maybe your priorities are a little bit different. Can you talk about using this budgeting system and how you’re motivated to use it towards your financial goals?

28:03 Alicia: Yeah. So I started this journey with $120,000 of debt and actually just this month, I’m under the $50,000 mark, so we’re making some pretty good progress. But it comes back to the idea of kind of gamifying everything. I turn as much as I can of my life into a game to keep it fun and interesting. Each month being able to see my savings account get higher, and then you get additional interest, which is also a nice little boost because it feels like free money. And then seeing my interest amounts go down when I pay off debt or just seeing the numbers go down. Each and every month I track that I track both of those and then I also track my net worth. And so each of those has become a game to me, and again, I try to not have too much stress in my life, so if my net worth goes down, I don’t beat myself up over it. I know it’s part of the journey. When the pandemic hit, I was working really hard to pay off all of my debt by May of 2021 beause that’s when I turned 30 and I wanted to be debt free by 30. That didn’t happen and that’s not going to happen because pandemic, but now I’ve been able to see my investments grow a little bit. I’ve been able to see my savings grow. Having constant check-ins, or at least regular check-ins really helps keep me motivated.

29:21 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for telling us about that. How do you think being a PhD student interacts with this journey? I know you’re married, so presumably your husband is not a graduate student as well. Do you think that being a PhD student plays into your budgeting or your financial goals at all?

29:39 Alicia: I think in some ways. I think possibly the reason why it’s so complicated is because I do like data as much as I do, and I like being able to see those numbers. Tracking absolutely every single thing, maybe a PhD thing, but I think also being a PhD student and looking at things from more of a logical point of view has also really helped me. Being able to sit down and like logically look at the debt versus how much money I could have in retirement has really helped me on the journey. It’s helped me take some of the emotions out of finance when finance is a very emotional thing. It can be your entire life. I think that’s kind of where the PhD-ness comes out

30:23 Emily: More of like the personality of a PhD student or PhD. Will you please recommend a video or two, if people want to check out your channel, Alicia Does Adulting. So you count cash on your channel, which I had never watched a video of before, but now that I’ve seen on your channel, wow it’s actually pretty riveting. Would you recommend a video or two for people to kind of get an intro to you?

30:46 Alicia: It sounds really odd when you tell people the first time I’m a former bank teller, so the sound of cash is very soothing to me. That’s how I actually found personal finance YouTube, was cash counting. Any of the “budget with me”, you can see in detail how I do my budgets and then see the cash counting, which is very fun. I actually have a video coming out this next week, which is really exciting, so before October 1st and it’s the science of cyclical savings. I’ve kind of evolved my channel a little bit into at least two educational videos per month-ish, when I can.I dug into financial literature and I started to find different savings strategies, investment strategies. Different things that my population for the most part is not PhD students they’re not going to go to academic literature, so I kind of break it down into more lay terms for people, because I genuinely just want everyone to have a good financial standing and for it to not be stressful for them. That will be out next week and I’m really excited to talk about that, and how you can save 80% each month more than if you didn’t have a plan.

31:59 Emily: Oh, wow. Yeah. I’ll definitely watch that video and will, and get from the show notes as well beause it should be out by the time this episode comes out. That sounds fabulous.

Questions from the Personal Finance for PhDs Community

32:06 Emily: I want to take a pause here and invite any members of the Personal Finance for PhDs Community who have a question at this point. This is your opportunity to follow up with Alicia and maybe get some more specifics for your situation.

32:18 Emily: Okay, so we do have one question that came in from a community member. Would you say that using cash is symbolic for you more than anything?

32:27 Alicia: I think symbolic is a really good word for it. I just need one extra thing of accountability and I’m the type of person if I hand over $20 that actually wasn’t as painful for me as having to budget it at the end, so using just cash envelopes, didn’t really work for me in that sense, but physically going through and having to pull money out of my personal spending for an unexpected thing is very symbolic and just kind of helps visualize that process for me.

33:00 Emily: Yeah. I really liked that aspect of it as well. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I actually didn’t really catch on to that just from watching a few of your videos, that the cash was really being recycled, at this point, not before, but at this point.

Best Financial Advice for an Early Career PhD

33:10 Emily: We’ll wrap up with our final question, Alicia, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD?

33:17 Alicia: My biggest advice is it’s never too early to start and it is never too late to start. Every little bit that I’ve done along the way has helped. Every step you take really does help you and if you have never really thought about looking at your finances, today’s the day to start because you never know when one of these unexpected massive things are going to hit. Since I started my journey, I’ve had a lot of massive financial things happen and because I understood my money and I understood where I was at, I could face $20,000 of medical debt with relative calmness, which I can guarantee you, Alicia from five years ago would have been a sobbing mess over all of it and I was actually pretty calm. My biggest advice is just start. Even if it’s small, even if it’s $5, it really does add up.

34:13 Emily: Yeah, I totally totally agree. And actually just to give people some scope, you said you’ve paid off, I think it’s over $70,000 worth of debt right now. Over what time period did you do that?

34:22 Alicia: It’s been about a year and a half.

34:25 Emily: Oh wow!

34:26 Alicia: Yeah! Our first year was really good and then everything kind of hit the fan. This year has not been great, but we actually went from a negative $56,000 net worth and we’re now in the positives. We’re about to hit $10,000, which might not sound like a big net worth to a lot of people, but it was a big deal for me to be positive.

34:46 Emily: Yeah. You’re now at a $10,000-aire, right? Every order of magnitude we can celebrate. Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation, Alicia, and thank you so much for joining me and sharing your experience and your wisdom with my listeners.

35:00 Alicia: Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been super fun!

Outtro

35:04 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

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

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

Links Mentioned

budgeting for travel on a grad student stipend

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translating Life Values to Your Budget

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

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

Retirement Savings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiential Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tithing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living and Dying By Your Budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25:44 Emily: Yeah, exactly.

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

Frugal Tips for Experiential Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Budgeting Pays Off: Sean’s Trip to Hawaii

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Advice for Early Career PhDs

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

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

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

41:39 Emily: Pet-sitting.

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

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

43:51 Sean: Yup, definitely.

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

44:22 Sean: Right, definitely.

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

44:29 Sean: Absolutely.

Where to Find Sean Online

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

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

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

Links Mentioned

grad student breakup

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further

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

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

Getting Engaged, Starting Grad School and Moving to LA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07:01 Emily: No kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Ramifications of Breaking of The Engagement

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

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

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

Commercial

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

Making Budget Adjustments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Life after the Break-up

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

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

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

20:36 Tina: Yeah.

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

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

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

Navigating the Emotional Aspect of the Break-up

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

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Other PhDs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

How to Financially Manage a Once-Per-Term Fellowship Paycheck

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In some PhD programs, graduate students on fellowship are paid only once per semester or trimester, between 2 and 4 times per year. This pay frequency engenders unique challenges and opportunities for those PhD students. The less frequent your pay, the more dire the consequences can be if you don’t manage it satisfactorily. This article will walk you through all the areas of financial management that you need to consider when you only receive one fellowship paycheck every three to six months.

financially manage once per semester trimester fellowship

The Good News

Fellowship (and training grant) income is different from most income. I call it “awarded income” as it is technically not given in exchange for work. On the other hand, “employee income” is what you receive for work, such as research (a research assistantship) or teaching (a teaching assistantship).

Some universities use these terms differently, but at the end of the day the way to differentiate them is by what tax form you do or do not receive at tax time. Employee income is reported on a Form W-2, and awarded income is not.

In a typical employer-employee relationship, the employee works and then receives their pay after the pay period has ended, whether that is weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly.

Because fellowship income is awarded and does not have to follow a period of work, it can be awarded at any time.

Since your fellowship income is awarded once per term, the good news is that you’re receiving that income up front, in a sense. You receive the income near the start of the multi-month period that it is intended to fund, which I’ll call the budgeting period in this post.

That’s the good news: You receive your income at the start of your budgeting period in a sense, instead of at the end of a pay period. That makes the transition onto fellowship income much easier since you do receive a lump sum up front. However, the corollary is that coming off of this type of income can be very difficult—more on that later.

When Exactly Will Your Paychecks Arrive?

As soon as you find out that you are switching to a once-per-term pay frequency, you should inquire about the date on or by which you can expect to receive your paycheck and whether you have to do anything to trigger its payout.

Often, the answer will be vague, for instance a range of a couple weeks or even a month. If it is specific, ask if fellowship pay has ever been doled out late—this is a good question to ask the administration as well as your fellow PhD students.

Then, no matter the information you are given, build into your plans that the pay might come at the end of the stated range or some time after the stated date.

I have heard horror stories from graduate students whose once-per-term fellowship income arrived weeks later than the date they were told, and sometimes that the student had to request a “refund” from the Bursar’s office before it was paid (of which they were not informed in advance).

It’s quite unlikely that an employer would issue their employee’s paychecks late. But again, this is awarded income, so the same rules are necessarily in place.

When it comes to your paycheck dates, play “offense” by being proactive about finding out the above information and taking any steps you are supposed to, but also play “defense” by reserving within your own finances the ability to pay for your expenses for an extra few weeks or month in case your next paycheck does arrive after you expected it to.

In What Amount(s) Will the Paychecks Be?

When you found out that you won your fellowship, you were certainly told its value, i.e., how much money you would be paid over the course of a year.

However, your fellowship award might not be distributed to you evenly throughout the year. If nothing else, it’s common for the summer term to be paid at a lower (even zero!) or higher level than the academic year.

Another consideration is whether you are responsible for paying any fees or similar out of your pocket. In the case of fellowship income, those fees might be automatically deducted from your award before it is distributed to you, which can be jarring if you are not expecting it.

Income Tax

With this type of once-per-term fellowship income chances are good that your university/institute is not withholding income tax on your behalf. (If it is, you can disregard this section!)

If no income tax is withheld from your fellowship paychecks, you have two important money management tasks to accomplish:

  1. Calculate and set aside the right amount of money to pay your eventual income tax bills.
  2. Determine if you are required to pay quarterly estimated tax.

Basically, in step 1, you’re estimating the amount of tax you’ll have to pay, and in step 2, you’re figuring out when you have to pay it (quarterly or yearly).

The best way to accomplish both with respect to your federal tax (you may also be responsible for paying state tax!) is to fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on p. 8 of Form 1040-ES. If that seems intimidating to you at all, please check out my resources to assist you and provide workarounds:

Step 1: Estimate Your Tax Bill

Sign up below to receive by email a spreadsheet that helps you with estimating your federal tax due for the year and how much you should save from each of your paychecks. You’ll receive follow-up emails explaining more about how taxes work for fellowships and then be subscribed to my mailing list!

Step 2: Determine If You Must Pay Quarterly Estimated Tax

It’s very common for fellowship recipients, if they are on fellowship for a full calendar year, to be required to pay quarterly estimated tax. Basically, instead of your employer (if you had one) sending the IRS a slice of each of your paychecks automatically, you receive your full pay and have to make manual payments to the IRS.

The Estimated Tax Worksheet on p. 8 of Form 1040-ES will definitively tell you if you are required to pay your estimated tax quarterly or if you can pay your full bill when you file your annual tax return.

If this is daunting to you, I recommend that you sign up for my workshop, which assists fellows in exactly your situation. It walks you through how to fill out every single line of the Estimated Tax Worksheet and covers several special scenarios that are common to PhD students, such as what to do when you switch on or off of fellowship midway through the calendar year. I even outline a shortcut method that allows you to skip filling out most of the form and still avoid being penalized by the IRS!

How to Manage Spending

The most common question I hear regarding once-per-semester or once-per-trimester fellowship income is, “How do I budget with this infrequent income?”

Yes, it is a good thing that this money is paid in a lump sum up front, but it does put a lot more responsibility on the graduate student than they may have bargained for.

Budgeting Regular Expenses

A robust budget is even more vital for a fellow in this situation than it is for a person receiving more frequent paychecks. While Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck might experience a few days of austerity when it turns out there is “more month than money,” in your case overspending could require weeks of austerity, which is rather infeasible.

What I mean by a budget in this case is to predict very well the expenses you will incur over the course of your budgeting period plus an extra few weeks or month.

Those expenses include all your regular and necessary fixed expenses (e.g., rent, fixed-rate utilities, insurance premiums, subscriptions) and variable expenses (e.g., groceries, utilities billed by usage). They also include what you project that your regular discretionary expenses will be (e.g., eating out, entertainment, shopping).

Budgeting Irregular Expenses

Irregular expenses are expenses that you incur once per year or a few times per year.

Examples of irregular expense categories are:

  • University bills, e.g., tuition, fees, health insurance premium, textbooks, parking permits
  • Insurance premiums paid yearly or every six months
  • Car maintenance/repairs
  • Travel
  • Electronics
  • Moving expenses
  • Household furnishings
  • Tax

Irregular expenses end to trip up graduate students for two reasons:

  1. The expenses tend to be large relative to a graduate student’s cash flow.
  2. Graduate students are often relatively new to budgeting and managing money, so they don’t have past experience to rely on to predict these expenses.

If a graduate student identifies this kind of expense as a budgeting issue, I recommend that they create a system of targeted savings accounts to help predict and save up in advance for the irregular expenses in their life.

You can read more about how to create this type of system in this podcast episode: How to Solve the Problem of Irregular Expenses.

Essentially, you create a unique savings account for each category of expenses and save regularly into that account, pulling money from it only when you incur a related expense.

The advantage that you have in receiving your income for several months up front is that you can also fund your targeted savings accounts up front, at least for the several-month period that your paycheck covers.

Account Structure

I really believe in setting up checking and savings accounts to serve your needs, not simply following the crowd—hence the system of targeted savings accounts I just reviewed.

While I imagine some people can keep all of their fellowship income in their checking account and draw it down over the course of the semester or trimester without running out of money or making sub-optimal financial decisions… I wouldn’t risk it!

Many graduate students I speak with who have once-per-term fellowship income use a separate savings account to hold the bulk of their paycheck and pay themselves a salary of sorts with a once-per-month automated transfer.

While this system simulates a monthly paycheck, it doesn’t take advantage of the unique property of receiving the large paycheck up front.

Instead, what I would do is set up several accounts (you might need to use two banks for this!):

  • One checking account for your monthly expenses that are fixed or only vary slightly with usage, e.g., rent, utilities, subscriptions. You should set up auto-drafts to pay these bills directly from this account.
  • One checking account for your variable and discretionary spending, e.g., groceries, eating out, entertainment, shopping. You can spend directly from this account and/or use it to pay your credit cards.
  • One savings account that holds the part of your fellowship paycheck that you will draw down.
  • Your set of targeted savings accounts.

Here is how I propose that you use this set of accounts:

  1. When you receive your fellowship paycheck, deposit it into your ‘monthly bills’ checking account.
  2. Calculate using your budget the amount of money you will spend on those necessary monthly expenses throughout your budgeting period; round up or leave some buffer. This amount will stay in this checking account, and all those monthly bills will be paid from this account.
  3. Transfer the rest of the income to the savings account for holding it over the budgeting period.
  4. Fund your targeted savings accounts according to your calculations for your irregular expenses.
  5. Above a certain buffer amount of money, divide the balance in your holding account by the number of weeks in your budgeting period. Set up an auto-transfer to move this amount of money from savings to your variable and discretionary spending checking account. That is the amount of money you can spend that week on the categories it covers.
  6. Pull money from your targeted savings accounts into your checking account as needed to cover your planned-for irregular expenses.
  7. Repeat every time you receive a fellowship paycheck.

While somewhat complex, the advantage of this system is that it helps you make spending decisions across three time frames: yearly (for the targeted savings), monthly (for the monthly bills), and weekly (for the variable and discretionary spending), which are otherwise difficult to synthesize.

Reaching Long-Term Financial Goals

In the budgeting exercise I outlined above, I did not include any line items for saving or repaying debt. While these steps are out of reach for graduate students who are paid only enough to survive (or not even that much), as a fellowship recipient, you might have more financial wherewithal.

If you are being paid above the local living wage or more than your peers who are not on fellowship, I encourage you to set a monetary financial goal so that you come out of graduate school with more money to your name than you went in with.

If you don’t yet have any emergency savings, make a ‘starter’ emergency fund your #1 goal! Open up yet another savings account and nickname it ‘Emergency Fund.’ Contribute money to it until you reach at least $1,000 and perhaps up to two months of expenses. When you are just getting started with savings, this Emergency Fund can double as your in-case-my-paycheck-is-late fund, but as you create more financial wherewithal, they should add on top of each other.

After that, your goal might be to increase your emergency fund to 3-6 months of expenses, pay off debt, or invest for retirement or other goals.

You can still accomplish these goals with infrequent fellowship income. As you catalog your expenses, write in a savings goal to your budget as well. You can put money from your paycheck toward this goal shortly after you receive it if you’re confident you won’t overspend the money you keep in cash. Alternatively, you can put the money toward your goal near the end of your budgeting period once you’re sure you won’t run out of funds! A combination of the two might be even better: contribute a minimum amount first and set aside another amount as a stretch goal that you can contribute once you near the end of the budgeting period.

Switching Off of Fellowship Income

Just as you looked into the dates of your expected paychecks when you switched onto infrequent fellowship income, you need to ask about the frequency and pay dates of the assistantship or other type of income that you are switching onto when your fellowship ends.

Again, you can expect to be paid at the end of or after the pay period rather than at the beginning. That means you will have to pay for your living expenses for an extra couple of weeks or a month off of your fellowship income before your assistantship income arrives.

For example, if your fellowship was for an academic year and summer, September through August, and you switched onto assistantship pay at the start of the following September, it would be typical for your first assistantship paycheck to come at the end of September or beginning of October. That’s 13 months of living expenses that your fellowship needs to fund, not 12.

Our Lives and Finances Under Social Distancing: A Self-Employed PhD and a Grad Student

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In this episode, Emily and Lourdes discuss their lives and finances during the coronavirus pandemic. Emily is balancing running her business with caring for her two small children (while her husband also works full-time), and Lourdes is adjusting to working on her PhD remotely and virtually never interacting with other people face-to-face.

If you would like to work (remotely!) with Emily in any of the following ways, please email her:

Lourdes’s previous budget breakdown podcast episode: This NDSEG Fellow Prioritizes Housing and Saving for Mid- and Long-Term Goals

How This Graduate Student Financially Manages Daycare Costs, Debt Repayment, Saving, and Side Hustling

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In this episode, Emily interviews Aubrey Jones, a PhD candidate in social work who lives in Tennessee. Aubrey is married and has a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, which means childcare is their household’s largest expense. They discuss how Aubrey’s family found a great deal on their housing and how to minimize food waste with littles. Aubrey and her husband both have variable incomes, which play into their savings and debt repayment strategy; Aubrey’s main side hustle is a very popular and accessible one for graduate students. Aubrey and her husband have set their debt repayment and savings goals so that they can buy a home about a year after moving for Aubrey’s first post-PhD job.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

grad student daycare cost

Teaser

00:00 Aubrey: You’ll find the money for things that you prioritize, and I think that’s so true. In the past, we didn’t necessarily prioritize our savings, and so it was hard to find money for that. And now suddenly, we’re prioritizing it and prioritizing extra payments, and it’s because we figured out where we can cut and what we don’t need to do.

Intro

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 four, episode 18, and today my guest for this budget breakdown episode is Aubrey Jones, a PhD candidate in social work who lives in Tennessee. Aubrey is married and has two small children, which means childcare is their household’s largest expense. We discuss how their family found a great deal on their housing and how to minimize food waste with littles. Aubrey and her husband both have variable incomes which play into their savings and debt repayment strategy, and Aubrey’s main side hustle is a very popular and accessible one for graduate students. Aubrey and her husband have set their debt repayment and savings goals so they can buy a home about a year after moving for Aubrey’s first post-PhD job. Don’t miss Aubrey’s spot-on financial advice at the end of the episode. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Aubrey Jones.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:25 Emily: I am delighted to welcome to the podcast today Aubrey Jones who is going to be doing a budget breakdown episode for us and she’s got some really interesting elements in here. So, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Aubrey, will you please introduce yourself, your career, and your family?

01:43 Aubrey: Sure. So, My name’s Aubrey Jones, and I have a husband, Josh. And then we have two little kids. We’ve got a three-year-old and a one-year-old, Madison and Simon. And basically, I started the PhD program with a seven-month-old, and when I finished my PhD program, I will have a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And I am getting my PhD in hopes to become a research professor, hopefully in R1, in the near future.

02:17 Emily: And what is your field?

02:18 Aubrey: My field is social work.

02:22 Emily: It sounded like you’re about a year away from finishing, hopefully?

02:27 Aubrey: Yes, I am a year away from finishing. I was able to take an extra year because I was awarded an extra GRA position for the fourth year. So, I was able to do that, which was nice.

Aubrey’s Household Income

02:41 Emily: All right, well we are actually in a very similar spot. My two children are the same ages, roughly, as your two. So, I’m sure many of your expenses will sound very similar to me. So, please tell me about your household income, your income as a doctoral student, and other sources of income in your household.

02:58 Aubrey: Sure. So, as a doctoral student, I received a stipend throughout my entire program, and it’s fluctuated from year to year, but it’s on average about $15,000 a year. And then it’s covered my health insurance also. And then my husband works in a job in which sometimes he will get additional money. So he’s a recruiter and he works on a draw system, and once he’s caught up, then any additional money that he gets goes straight to him. So, our household income fluctuates as well. So, usually anywhere from about $55,000 on the low end to $75,000 on the high end is where we fluctuate. And then, I recently just started teaching with VIPKid. I had been hearing about it, I have friends who’ve done it, and I finally jumped in to do it just to supplement some costs in our household because the hours are so flexible. And then as a doctoral student, I’ve also just picked up other side work with professors who had funding and were able to pay me to do stuff like that during the summer or in addition to get the extra experience and also the extra income.

04:18 Emily: So, the $15K stipend that you mentioned, is that just during the academic year or is that 12 months?

04:26 Aubrey: It is 12 months. So, you’re required to do about 10 hours of graduate research assistantship work, and then they break it out throughout the year as your payments.

04:40 Emily: Okay. So the additional work you’ve taken on within your academic role or to the side of it–you said during the summer, but that’s not because you’re not being paid during the summer–it’s just because you have some different time allocations or something?

04:52 Aubrey: Yes, correct.

Side Hustle: What is VIPKid?

04:54 Emily: Gotcha. So, I want to hear a little bit more about VIPKid because, similarly to you, I have been hearing that name a lot and I don’t know how new it is, but it feels new to me. So, can you say–maybe for someone else who’s interested in this kind of side hustle–what you’re doing exactly and what kind of the advantages are that you see?

05:13 Aubrey: Sure. So, I really love it. I actually just started this month, and there’s a fluctuation in pay. It ranges from $14 an hour to, I believe, $22 an hour. And the way that they do it is you teach a 25-minute class to kids in China and you’re teaching them English. So, you don’t have to know any Chinese. You just have to take some TESOL certificates that the company actually offers you for free and go through some mock interviews so they can see that you’re using props in your classroom that you’re using, it’s shortened TPR [Total Physical Response], but basically they want to see lots of hand gestures and pointing at your mouth and telling the kids, you know, listen. So, the 25-minute class is what you teach, and they pay you by 25 minutes. So, most people start out at about $8 per 25-minute class.

06:25 Aubrey: And then, assuming you get another class, that’s where it turns into that hourly pay of $14 to $22. But essentially you teach a 25-minute class, you get half of that $14 to $22 an hour. And you open up the schedule and you choose when you’re available. So, they tell you what the peak times are and you’re running on Beijing time. So, for people who are in Eastern Standard Time, I almost think that they’ve got it the best because the peak times are between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM and then in the evenings on Friday and Saturdays from about 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM. You can teach all through the night, and I know some people do. I do not. So, I teach in the mornings from about 6:00 to 7:00 AM. Mostly because my kids are still sleeping, and sometimes I get the full time booked. Sometimes I don’t.

07:26 Aubrey: So, like I said, this is my first month doing it and I’ve made–well it’s not even the whole month yet. So just in the month of July, I’ll make about at least a hundred dollars, assuming I get no others classes booked.

VIPKid: Teaching English to Kids in China

07:40 Emily: I was a little bit confused about this. So, you said that you’re teaching in English. Are you teaching English or what is the subject matter that you’re teaching?

07:50 Aubrey: Yeah. So, the goal of VIPKid, the reason that parents in China sign their kids up for it is to help their kids learn how to be more comfortable talking to native English speakers. So, you are teaching English, but the whole class is also in English. And so, by proxy, you’re having a conversation in English, you’re trying to teach them certain things in English, and so you might be teaching them different vocabulary words that day.

08:18 Aubrey: So, this week I was teaching a kid “stamp,” so I had an envelope and I had some stamps and we talked about the word stamp and you say “stamp” and you make them repeat it twice so that they’re learning the word and then they’re learning in context. I teach primarily older kids who are already fluent in English. So, it’s more of making them comfortable having that conversation as opposed to teaching them new things. Now, some people teach younger kids–like three, four years old. So, they really are teaching them English words and what that means. And so, they might say “happy, sad” and have them repeat it back. So, it just depends. But VIPKid already has the lessons prepared for you. So, you go through it with the student and the older kids read most of it. The goal is to have them talking about 75% of the time.

09:14 Emily: Gotcha. And I think I’m picking up that this is a one-on-one interaction?

VIPKid versus Qkids

09:18 Aubrey: It is a one-on-one interaction. Yes. And there’s another company called Qkids which is similar, and they do anywhere from one to four kids in the classroom. And they actually schedule for you. Whereas VIPKid, the parents choose you as a teacher. So, it’s a lot more competitive to make a savvy profile that parents want to choose you.

09:44 Emily: I see. Well yeah, I can definitely see why this is an attractive, exploding side hustle. At any rate, as of July, 2019. So, thanks for telling us about your experience with that. Do you like doing this so far? Do you imagine continuing? And how many hours are you devoting to it per week?

10:04 Aubrey: Okay. Yeah, so I do, I really like it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s different than anything I’ve done in the past, and I will definitely keep doing it for the foreseeable future. Right now, the summer months are kind of slow so I’ve been able to just open up more slots knowing that I wasn’t going to see as many kids. But in the future, primarily in the fall, I will be finishing my dissertation so I won’t be devoting nearly as much time to it. But after I’m done dissertating, probably five to 10 hours a week.

10:41 Emily: I’m really glad that you brought this up because I can see how, for someone who wants a side hustle, this is a really, really accessible one. It sounds like you’re able to get started pretty fast too.

10:52 Aubrey: Yeah, it took me about two weeks to go through the whole process.

10:57 Emily: Yeah. Excellent. Okay, so let’s dive into the budget breakdown, right? So, we’re going to talk through your top five expenses. And I don’t remember if you mentioned, but where do you live?

11:09 Aubrey: We live in Tennessee.

Budget Breakdown: Top Expense = Daycare

11:11 Emily: Okay, great. So, top expense.

11:15 Aubrey: Our top expense is daycare.

11:18 Emily: Ah, new and different because usually this is rent, but I am not surprised that daycare is at the top of your list with two children. So, how much are you spending?

11:27 Aubrey: Yes. So, daycare is about $1,000 a month for both kids to be in daycare full-time. And so, our youngest kid was not in daycare the whole time. He actually just started going to daycare more recently. And that’s because, as a graduate student, I was really lucky to have such a flexible schedule where he could essentially just home with me. I wasn’t taking classes, I was working on my dissertation, and when I had to work on my dissertation or do extra work for my GRA position, I was able to do so in the evenings or on the weekends when my husband was home. But now that I’m in the final stretch of my dissertation, I need the distractions out of the house so that I can work all the time. So again, that’s new. When it was just our daughter, it was closer to like $600 a month, I want to say, for her. So, obviously not greater than our rent at that point.

12:27 Emily: Yeah. I’ve had a similar approach. I am the primary caregiver for our children and so we mix in childcare maybe as needed and it kind of fluctuates. It really changes a lot with how old your children are and kind of what type of kids they are. Whether or not they give you time that you can be doing other things or whether they require a lot of hands-on attention, and that changes with age. So yeah, I definitely feel you on what you were trying to do in the past and also your decision to put them both in daycare full-time now. Is there anything else, any other comments you want to make on that daycare expense?

13:05 Aubrey: So another way that we reduced the cost of daycare too was our daughter was in daycare full-time when we first started, and I was a full-time student. And then once my classes started slowing down and they were online, I was able to transition her to a “Mother’s Day Out” program, which is just a part-time daycare, essentially. And so that drastically reduced our cost. It was like $80 a week to have her in that three days a week and they fed her and everything. So that was great. And then in the summers we’re able to take them both out and just pay about half the cost to keep their spots if we need to or if we want to so they can go part-time and full-time in the summer for a reduced rate, essentially.

Does Your University Aid with Childcare Expenses?

13:58 Emily: And does your university help at all with childcare expenses?

14:03 Aubrey: They do not. I will say that my professors and department have been incredibly supportive of me having kids and just understanding that. There was one time I had to bring my daughter to class with me because there was like a nasty flu outbreak happening at her school and I wasn’t about to let her get it, let alone really let myself get it. So, one of my professors let me bring her, and I was so thankful. And she just hung out and loved it. So they’re like emotionally supportive of that. But financially, no.

14:44 Emily: Yeah. They help you to a degree, but not as much as maybe we would like. Okay. Number one expense: childcare. What’s that second expense?

Budget Breakdown: 2nd Expense = Rent

14:55 Aubrey: Rent. So, we pay just a little over $907 a month, so I rounded it up to $908. And we actually pay below market value for where we live. We have a two-bedroom condo, we’ve got a garage, we’ve got a backyard, two bath. And I think our neighbors rent for about $1200 a month. When we first moved here, we actually only paid $875 a month and we were living across the street. And then our landlords decided to sell. And so we already knew the neighborhood. We really loved the neighborhood. This might sound silly, but we knew our mailman and to us, that was just so great. Like, we really know this place. And we had some friends who lived across the street and they happened to be moving out and going somewhere else. And we told them, “Hey, our landlords are selling, can we rent from you because we know you’re not ready to sell yet?” And they said, “Yeah, sure you can just cover our mortgage and our HOA fees.” And so that’s how it bumped up to $908, but still below market value for this area. So we’ve been really fortunate in that.

16:17 Emily: That is an amazing deal. I have to say, not the best financial decision for them, but really great for you.

16:27 Aubrey: Yeah.

16:28 Emily: Yeah. And of course, you know, I actually talked about this with another episode I did in season three. I interviewed a landlord who was renting to people he knew from his program. You know, they were his roommates at first. Then when he moved out it was people he had known from that graduate program, and he just talked about what like peace of mind it gave him to know his tenants and trust them. And so, yeah. Maybe they’re giving you a good deal on this rent, but they probably also have a lot less stress.

16:58 Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And some of it too, like we do have to take care of some things on our own just because they weren’t really prepared to be landlords. So, like we have to pay to have someone come out and fix our dishwasher, which isn’t a big deal to us, but there are just a couple of trade-offs to it. But again, it’s better than having to go out and move all of our stuff and pay. I mean, that would be a large amount of money to increase that we just weren’t prepared for or ready for.

17:34 Emily: Yeah. Well, yeah, it sounds like a really good situation that you’re in. And I guess the tip that may be applicable to other people is get to know some homeowners who are ahead of you. Yeah. I actually also rented a private residence from a former graduate student who was then in a postdoc somewhere else when I was in graduate school, I did not know her personally so I don’t think we got any rental discount, but yeah, you know it happens. People buy, and then they move on.

Commercial

18:03 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series as you make changes over the longterm. You can find out more at pfforphds.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part-coaching, part-course, and part-community. You can find out more and join the waitlist for the next time I open the program at pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

Budget Breakdown: 3rd Expense = Food

19:18 Emily: Okay. So, really good deal on rent. Excellent job on that. What’s that third expense?

19:23 Aubrey: This would be food. So, we are not super great at keeping our food costs down. That ranges anywhere from $800 to $1,000 dollars a month right now. And $1,000 is pretty rare. But, I was going through prepping for this and I felt like, “Well, let’s be honest, we’ve hit $1,000 before.” So, it doesn’t normally happen. We keep it closer to $800, and we’re pretty strict on that. So, we are feeding two kids. Our one-year-old, I swear, is just a garbage disposal. He just consumes everything and anything right now. And I was nursing him for about eight months, and then his appetite exploded. So, we switched him over to formula. So, we’re weaning off formula. So, that should start decreasing.

20:22 Aubrey: And then it also has a lot of our household stuff too, like diapers and pull-ups. We potty trained our oldest before our second was born because there was no way we were paying for two kids in diapers, and that was the best thing we ever did. She took to it really easily. I’m a little nervous the second time around that it may not go quite as well. And then we keep tons and tons of fresh produce in the house. But other ways that I do try to reduce the cost, things that we’ve been thinking about a lot more lately, especially once we started keeping track of our expenses, is food waste. And so that always seemed to really obvious to me. I would hear people talk about that and I would think, well, I don’t waste food. What are you talking about?

Strategies to Avoid Food Waste with Littles

21:09 Aubrey: And now I’m so much more cognizant of it. And my three-year-old will take two bites of something and say, “I’m done.” And in the past I used to think, “Okay, whatever.” And I would just toss it. And now, “What are you doing?” So, I just put it in the fridge and when she gets hungry later I put it back out on the table and say, “You can finish this if you’re that hungry.” And most of the time she doesn’t want to finish it because she’s not actually hungry. She’s just fishing around to see what I’ll give her. And then we’re really big on right now food exposure and trying to make sure that they’re constantly being exposed to vegetables. So, I’ve been buying a lot of frozen vegetables, which is really helping, so I’m not wasting the fresh vegetables. But I’m still able to make sure that they’re at least, even if they’re not eating it, they’re seeing it on their plate. So, that’s how we’ve decreased it. We don’t eat out. We cook almost all of our meals at home. My husband gets to eat out a little more for work. But yeah, I don’t see it going down much more, to be honest.

22:23 Emily: Yeah. I have to say, there’s again a lot of similarities in spending patterns between the two of us in this area because our one-year-old is also like eating everything in sight right now. She’s going through some kind of crazy growth spurt, which is actually great because that means that food that other people don’t want to finish, we can give to her, and she’ll finish it. So, that’s working out well. I also do the same thing. If my three-year-old doesn’t finish something, I may pack it back into the fridge because, like you, when it was just me and my husband, I was like, “Yeah, we don’t really waste that much food. Like we’re pretty on top of food consumption. But then you have a child who throws food on the floor, and like there’s a lot more waste that happens. So, we try to reduce it where we’re able to.

23:05 Aubrey: Yes, exactly.

23:05 Emily: And yeah, same thing about formula, which I hope is not a forever expense for us, but it’s pretty expensive in the meantime. So, yeah. Thank you for that insight. Oh, and the diaper situation. Yes. We also potty trained before our second was born so that we would not have two in diapers at the same time. Although we cloth diaper. So, for us it was more about not having to buy more cloth diapers to add to the stash. Right? Which is kind of the most expensive part of that whole process. So, yeah. All right. Thank you for your insight into that category. So what is your fourth largest expense?

Budget Breakdown: 4th Expense = Car Debt

23:39 Aubrey: So, that would be my husband’s car payment, which is $300 a month. And then we usually throw extra money at that. And that is one of the fewer pieces of debt that we have. And we plan to have that paid off by the end of the year, actually. Because he does do recruiting and he sometimes gets those bonus paychecks, we have just been able to throw that at debt. So, like last month we were able to throw an extra $1,000 at his car that wasn’t in the budget. So, that is always really nice. But we actually just had to get him a car because he had a 2000 Subaru and it finally just died while he was driving one day with our three-year-old. And so, it was time for him to get a car.

24:33 Emily: So, you’ve really taken that drive-it-into-the-ground advice to heart. You know, mostly when I talk to people about cars or I think about cars, it’s like we think about that long period, the almost two-decade period when you’re driving that single car. I don’t know when he bought it exactly, but the many years. And people are a little nervous about the endpoint. So, can you talk to me about when it broke down with your three-year-old in the car and how you handled that? It seems that it was okay, right?

24:59 Aubrey: It was a traumatizing week for her because my car, which is actually only three years old, broke down two days before, and she was in the car and we had to call my classmate to come pick us up. And then she was driving with dad and they were actually stopping to get her a treat because she had been such a good big sister. So, they stopped at Starbucks and they were in the drive-through and it just died in the drive-through line. And he had to push it. And so, twice in one week, this poor kid was in a car that broke down. So, that was a little traumatic. And she still talks about it. And this was three months ago, maybe. So, he had to get out and just push it by himself. And she did this cute little reenactment of him doing it. And I had to come pick them up, so I had to get the baby woken up from his nap and then go get them. And his car sat at Starbucks for three days until we could get a tow truck out there. And our insurance luckily covers the tow truck expenses. And so, he tried to put it on Facebook Marketplace to see if anyone was good at fixing cars or needed parts, and he didn’t get any bites. And so finally he just went to I think like an impound lot or something. But yeah, we had one car for like a month, so I was driving him to work and that’s across town. And so we had to really navigate our schedules. And then I tried to convince him to just have one car because we were making it work, but he wasn’t going for it. So, that’s how we ended up with a car payment.

26:51 Emily: Yeah, thanks for that story because we are also currently driving a car into the ground. And I do think about when that final end-point is going to be and what exactly is going to happen. But usually it’s okay. It’s a little difficult in the short-term, but it’s kind of worth it, right? To keep a car for a long time.

27:09 Aubrey: Absolutely.

27:10 Emily: So, what is the fifth expense on your list?

Budget Breakdown: 5th Expense = Husband’s Student Loan

27:12 Aubrey: That fifth one is my husband’s student loan. And that is $219 a month. And that should hopefully be paid off by the end of the year also.

27:22 Emily: Yeah. Let’s talk about that next and sort of under the category of financial goals. So, you’ve mentioned two types of debt so far. And so, what is your strategy with repaying debt?

27:35 Aubrey: Yes. So, the car and his student loan and my student loans are the only debt that we have. And so, right now, his student loan is bigger than his car payment. So, the car is our first thing that we’re trying to prioritize. So, any of the VIPKid money that I get is going to the car. Basically, we’re doing that snowball [method].

28:00 Emily: Yeah, I think it’s that snowball method. I was just going to say, you live in Tennessee, so this is Dave Country. [Do you follow Dave Ramsey?]

28:07 Aubrey: It is Dave Country. I don’t, but I do follow a lot of debt-free, financial independence people who have done Dave Ramsey. So, that’s where I’ve picked up some of our ideas and stuff. So, we’re really just attacking that car payment, putting anything extra that he gets to it. We’ve got a lot of financial goals, and this is why we’re not exactly Dave Ramsey because we’re also trying to save for a house at the same time. And so, our goal is to be debt-free from car payments and his student loans by the time we’re ready to purchase a house. And then my student loans are just kind of this whole other thing that right now we’re just unfortunately avoiding because I’m still in school. And we’ve limited using any student loans while I’ve been in my program except for one year when the baby was born and we just wanted to have that extra cushion just in case we knew that he would probably go to daycare. And we just weren’t sure, because my husband’s income fluctuates so much, if we’d be able to afford it every month or not.

29:18 Aubrey: So, the months that he gets a bonus check, we pay daycare out-of-pocket. And we pay most of daycare out-of-pocket and then supplement with those student loans. And then everything else goes to debt that’s not covering daycare. And then like I said, the VIPKid or any babysitting that I do or like I adjunct sometimes also, so that money goes straight to the car. So yeah, that’s our goal. Again, we think we’ll have that tackled by the end of this year just with where his business is at.

Importance of Prioritizing Your Financial Goals

29:52 Emily: I really love the strategy that you’re using. And I’ll make it explicit again. So, you’ve decided what your priorities are–car, husband student loan, your student loan–and you’re making whatever minimum payments are necessary on those and throwing all your money that you come up within a given month to that top-priority debt. That includes side hustle money. And this is very “Dave” like to have this clear prioritization and to throw everything you can at your top priority. And the reason that it works really well–and then I’m really glad you’re using this–is because it does keep you motivated to earn extra money in whatever ways you can fit into your schedule. As opposed to just like, “Oh, I think I should be side hustling in general. My budget could use some more padding.”

30:43 Emily: It’s much better to tie it to a specific goal. In your case, it’s debt repayment. And so, it really keeps your motivation high for pushing yourself because it is hard to be a parent and be in a PhD program and have the work associated with that. So, you’re doing a lot obviously, but it’s clear that you know exactly why, right? And you know, it’s a limited-term thing. As Dave says, “Live like no one else. So later you can live like no one else.” Which means, live like no one else right now. You’re hustling. You’re throwing everything you can at the debt. And then later, living like no one else is when you are wealthy and comfortable and the picture is rosy. So, it’s like a short-term period of sacrifice to really turbocharge and get ahead. I wanted to ask about your house downpayment goal. So, am I right in assuming that you guys will be moving wherever you get a job?

31:37 Aubrey: Yes, we will be moving wherever I get a job. So, our goal is to hopefully purchase a house about a year after. Just so we can get a feel for that area first before just showing up and buying a house and then realizing we chose the worst area to be. So, we do have money in our budget dedicated to savings. Which was something that we hadn’t always done. We used to kind of just, “Oh, okay, we have $10 left over this month, let’s put that in savings.” Where now we dedicate at least $200 goes to savings every month. So, that is obviously for emergencies or for this house if we can. And then, once his car and student loan get paid off, then the rest of his paychecks and stuff will start going to that down payment. And again, we hope that we’ll have probably $10,000 to $15,000 by the time we’re ready to move, is kind of our goal.

32:38 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really good. I think you’re really, again, on the right track by planning on renting for a year, wherever you move to. Because I totally agree. It’s really difficult to make such an important decision like where you’re going to live, especially in your case. You guys already have kids, so you know your kids are going to be in school, and like there’s just a lot of considerations there–to take that time to really get to know the area. And of course, continue to save up more money, for the down payment or whatever, before jumping into that purchase. So, final question here. What is your best financial advice for one of your peers? Maybe another parent in a graduate program?

Best Financial Advice for One of Your Peers?

33:17 Aubrey: Yeah, so I think my best advice would be to just remember why you’re doing it. Because we have tried many times to live like this and it’s always just become, “Ah, whatever we don’t want to.” And now we’re very motivated, I think, because of our children. Like we want to give them a house and like a nice life. So that’s my “why” of why we’re doing it. Why am I waking up at 5:00 AM to teach kids in Beijing English? It’s so that we can have this hopefully financial independence and teach our kids what to do with money. And then my husband has a good saying that he’s told his friends who are just starting out having kids and they’re freaking out about not being able to afford things. And he tells them, “You’ll find the money for things that you prioritize.” And I think that’s so true. In the past, we didn’t necessarily prioritize our savings and so it was hard to find money for that. And now suddenly we’re prioritizing it, and we’re prioritizing extra payments. And it’s because we figured out where we can cut and what we don’t need to do.

34:35 Emily: I think you are so exactly right with those comments, and they’re so insightful. I totally agree that you have to establish the “why” for why you care about personal finance at all, why you should care about your own finances. And then, once you know the “why,” that tells you your priorities, right? Top, second, et cetera. So like, it does make it so much easier when you know clearly what your motivation is, I think. Yeah. You and your husband–I think you guys are doing great. Really. Like, yeah, it sounds really good. I mean, I’m so glad you’re on a clear plan and there’s like a timeline on it, and yeah. It seems like it’ll all coalesce within the next one to two years with, you know. Hopefully, you’ll have the job you want and be in an okay place to live. Not much choice on that necessarily, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it, and the debt will be done, and you’ll be taking out a mortgage, and that’ll be a whole other ball game, and yeah. Sounds delightful, actually.

35:29 Aubrey: Yeah. And I will say, we’re very fortunate with his job that allows him to get bonuses and stuff that lets us pay things off, which is why it’s kind of variable and all over the place. But it wouldn’t be possible without his job, so we’re super thankful for that.

35:48 Emily: Yeah, of course. Well, best of luck to you and your family. And thank you so much for joining me today.

35:54 Aubrey: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Outtro

35:56 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, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. 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.