Budgeting

This Higher Ed Career Coach Worked Her Way Out of Financial Ruin Caused by the Great Recession

November 4, 2019 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Beth Moser, a certified career coach specializing in higher education clients pursuing career change. Beth was All But Dissertation and pregnant with her first child when the Great Recession hit Phoenix and she was laid off from her museum job, so she and her husband lived on his graduate student stipend and the money she earned from odd jobs. Their home also lost enough value so as to go underwater, which tied them to Phoenix long-term while the value recovered. These events brought them to “financial ruin,” and they spent the next several years digging themselves out of that hole. Beth and her husband pursued several strategies to improve their finances over the coming years, including a career change for Beth, slashing household expenses, better financial management, and working with a financial advisor. Beth concludes with excellent money mindset advice for younger PhD trainees. You can find Beth at Academics at Work.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Beth: I don’t have a dime to save. What are you talking about? There’s no point. And now I’m like, now having seen the power of stashing away $5 here, $10 there over time. I’m like, huh, what actually could I have saved? What might have been?

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode 12, and today my guest is Beth Moser, a certified career coach and the founder of Academics at Work. Beth was ABD (all but dissertation), married to another grad student, and pregnant with their first child when the great recession hit Phoenix. She was laid off from her museum job at the same time their house went underwater, which brought them to what she calls “financial ruin.” Beth and her husband lived on his graduate student stipend and the money she earned from odd jobs while she reevaluated and eventually changed her career objectives. To climb out of that hole, they slashed their household expenses, implemented basic and advanced budgeting techniques, and worked with a financial advisor. Listen through the end of the episode to hear Beth’s excellent advice for PhD trainees regarding money mindset. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Beth Moser.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:26 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Beth Moser who has, well, quite a story for us, quite a financial story from her own personal life relating to her family and pursuing a PhD and having children and the great recession. So I’m really excited to dive into this story. Beth, would you please introduce yourself to us a little bit further? Tell us about your family and your career to date.

01:51 Beth: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. So my name is Beth Moser. I’m a certified career coach and I specialize in coaching higher ed clients who need career change. As part of that, I am a training manager who does professional development workshops for graduate colleges, for graduate students, postdocs and faculty on why they need to be incorporating this into their own lives and into their curricula. So I work in higher ed as well. I am married, I have a spouse who is an academic, and I have two children. But when this financial journey that we’re going to be talking about today started, I didn’t have children. So that was some time ago. And I live here in Tempe, Arizona.

What Led to Your “Financial Ruin”?

02:48 Emily: Yeah. Excellent. So let’s go back because what we’re going to be talking through here is kind of a perfect storm of events that brought you to–what you described to me when we talked for this episode–you described this to me as “financial ruin.” A sequence of events that brought you and your husband and your family to financial ruin in the midst of, you know, pursuing degrees and so forth. So, let’s find out what that was. What was the sequence of events here?

03:20 Beth: Sure. Yes, so some of this is unique to us and our circumstances and the timing. And some of it I think a lot of your listeners and readers can relate to. So, I went to get my PhD to go into what’s called an alternative academic or “alt-ac” career. I went to get my PhD so I could get a job in museums. And so, when I came out of working through my coursework and was in the midst of my dissertation, I landed a full-time job in the museum’s field, which was my ultimate goal. As you might surmise, it’s not a very well-paying field. Museums are of course, nonprofits. And so, when I started my first full-time job in 2006, I was making about $36,000 a year with no benefits. So, when I went to work full-time, my husband and I switched off.

04:25 Beth: He had wanted to get his PhD as well. So, since I had landed a full-time job and my career, he quit his full-time job to go start his PhD program. So, he got a stipend of making about $12,000 a year. So, total, I mean, for the two of us, for a single couple in their thirties, we were making about $48,000 a year in the Phoenix metropolitan area. So, not great, but not horrible either, especially when you’re considering we didn’t have children at that time when we moved here. For his PhD program, we bought a home because we thought, you know, well we can and that will keep our costs lower than rent. And so, we were fortunate in that respect, at least at the start. So, for the first three years of my full time career, I was not making more than about $36,000 a year.

05:26 Beth: But within three years with position increases and promotions, I eventually was making $50,000 a year plus benefits. I finally was making benefits, but that’s the first time. In my mid-thirties was the first time I started getting any employer retirement plan of any sort, including any employer match of any kind. So, I got started on saving for retirement relatively late into my career. Okay. So, in the midst of that I finally got pregnant. We had wanted to have children. I was three months pregnant when the recession had started hitting and I got laid off from the museum that I was working on. At that time, we spent four months surviving only on my husband’s graduate school stipend and me taking odd jobs here and there. You know, babysitting, working an office job for people for, you know, 12 bucks an hour, but nothing steady.

Aftereffects of the Great Recession in Pheonix, AZ

06:31 Beth: And then, when I was seven months pregnant, I finally landed a full-time benefits-eligible permanent job at a higher ed institution. But I only had two months of paychecks there before I gave birth and then had eight weeks of unpaid leave. So, during that summer in 2011, you know, we had already had three months of me not having an income. Of us surviving on my husband’s pretty paltry stipend, and then having the enormous cost of diapers and you know, cribs and strollers and car seats and all of that with no income on my part. So, in the midst of all of that, our lives were changing financially. They were changing personally. They were changing in ways big and small. In ways that were amazing and incredible, but also incredibly challenging as you can imagine. So, what finally led to what I call financial ruin is the aftereffects of the recession hit particularly hard here in the Phoenix area, and the home that we were living in lost over 50% of its value.

07:48 Beth: So we could not consider moving to downsize our living expenses because we were what’s called “underwater.” That meant that our home was worth far more than what we owed on it. And we did not qualify for state or federal programs to offset that or alleviate that to get out from under that because we were, and this is a great irony, too far underwater to qualify for that program to help us. So we found ourselves, you know, in the first year of our first child’s life, really relying on credit cards, unfortunately, relying on piecing together unemployment in odd jobs for several months, falling behind on monthly bills, and then finally starting to catch up once I was back at work full-time after parental leave. But it was really, really difficult to climb out of that over the next several years. So, that’s what I wanted to talk with you about today.

08:56 Emily: Yeah. Beth, thank you so much for that introduction. Oh man, it’s taken me back. I didn’t personally experience hardship during the great recession, but it’s taken me back to all the media coverage and everything because I was very involved in the personal finance, you know, sphere at that time. Just a terrible situation that so many people were in. You were not alone in being so far underwater, especially in your particular area. And wow, I’m really glad to have the opportunity to talk with you to get the second half that story. Right? Because we know that so many families were hit so hard by the recession. And of course with you personally, it ended up coinciding with, as you said, a wonderful time of life but also a particularly challenging time of life, especially financially challenging that is having your first child. So, I’m really glad to hear how you ended up climbing out of that because I think that’s the part of the story that we don’t hear so much. And especially how, you know, you did that as a person who was in higher ed, is working in higher ed and also your husband still pursuing his PhD at the time that we’re, you know, picking this up. Is that right?

09:57 Beth: Yes.

Strategies for Financial Recovery

09:58 Emily: Yeah. So, thank you so much for sharing that with us. So, okay. The strategies that you were using to climb out of the financial ruin and it’s taken, what, we’re going on eight years, it sounds like? Since this point you identify as like the low point?

10:12 Beth: Right.

Recovery Strategy #1/4: Increasing Income

10:13 Emily: So, it’s been quite a while. You’ve probably tried a lot of different things. So, we’re going to break down your strategies into three main categories and then kind of a catch-all. And so, the first one there is regarding increasing income. So, how did you do that? Aside from, as you just said, you landed a job. You actually weren’t out of work for too long, relatively, that’s not so bad. So, aside from that, again, a full-time job with full-time pay, what else were you two doing to increase your income?

10:41 Beth: So, when I was laid off from museums, I decided that that was the end of that career, unfortunately. I mean, that had been the goal of me going to graduate school. That had been the focus of my dissertation work. It was my passion. But when reality hits you, and especially when your life changes and your marriage becomes more of a priority or your partnership and having a family or children and other things outside of yourself that you have to consider financially, it just became really real that it was time for me to grow up, perhaps. I don’t really like to use that phrase, but to really get real with myself about what my financial needs were and what ours were in providing for, you know, a tiny child who was going to grow over the course of our lifetime. So, strategy number one was to accept and work through that difficult decision to close down one career and change directions.

Recovery Strategy #2/4: Decreasing Household Expenses

11:47 Beth: So, that helped me prioritize. I need something that pays at least a livable wage for myself and has great benefits including retirement plans and matching and of course, great health insurance in order to just, you know, close that chapter and move forward. So I targeted my job search exclusively to sectors and employers where my skills would transfer, but that was my priority. Finding employers that would pay a much better wage and that would provide those benefits. So, that was strategy number one in increasing my income: being really targeted with what sectors I was applying for and networking in and going after. The second strategy was to decrease our household expenses. Now, as I alluded to, we weren’t able to decrease our housing expenses. So, while our neighbors were scooping up the exact quality of homes at literally 50% of what we were paying for our mortgage monthly, we could not address that one. We tried to qualify for a program, a HARP program was what it was called and we didn’t. So, that was a fixed expense.

Did You Consider Taking the Foreclosure Hit?

13:11 Emily: I want to jump in there with a question because I do remember at the time a lot of people were walking away from their homes that were too far underwater, taking the foreclosure hit to their credit and just saying it’s too far gone. So you guys didn’t go that route. Did you think about it?

13:25 Beth: I did think about it and I consulted with others who had done it and people who had not done it. I decided not to do it because I held my credit score tightly at value. So I knew that we were going to come out of this someday (our financial circumstances). And I didn’t want to also have to tackle just a really horrible credit score because that can take years to repair as well.

13:52 Emily: Yeah, it sounded like it didn’t get to the point where you had to walk away. There may have been a point that it could have gone that direction, but because it sounded like you did an amazing job searching for and networking for the new job, it didn’t get to that point where it was a necessity.

14:07 Beth: Correct. Yes. And so, we sat down and we looked at what can we downsize on as far as our monthly expenses. So, we went down to sharing one vehicle. That way we didn’t have to carry insurance on the other car. We wouldn’t have gas expenses on the other car. We live within walking distance to grocery stores and coffee shops and so forth. So, we started walking to the grocery store decreasing mileage and usage of our vehicle and gas expenses. So, we would coordinate going to and from work together so that we had that only one vehicle expense. We used my husband’s vehicle because he did not have to pay for parking at his work, but I did at mine. So, he would drop me off, drive off to his job, park for free. He would come back and get me at the end of the day.

15:09 Beth: And then we really cut down on all like entertainment expenses. We got really lean and mean about it. So we dropped streaming services of all types. We didn’t even have the Netflix DVD service, which existed back in that day still. We didn’t do any movie rentals. We wouldn’t go out to movies. We cut down on eating out. And I mean, like by cut down, I mean, we did not do it. So, we got really disciplined about what expenses are necessary and which ones would be nice to have again in the future, but that we can’t afford right now. We made huge use of our libraries. We would rent DVDs and movies and streaming there all the time. But it just meant that we did not have the luxury of having, you know, just flip on the TV and whatever’s on tonight is what we’re going to be able to watch.

Decreasing Expenses while Starting a Family

16:05 Emily: How did this effort in decreasing expenses play with you having a baby for the first time? Because I think there’s an idea in our culture that babies need a lot of stuff and you have to provide a level of care for children. I don’t know. So, how were you handling applying the decreasing expenses mindset to your first baby?

16:30 Beth: So, one of the things that we did was I sat down with women friends of mine who had recently had babies and said, okay, you know, you go to the baby websites and you go to the stores and they give you this like, you know, flip book of all the things you need. Okay. What are the absolute essentials that I must have? And so for instance, people were saying, okay, yes, they’re going to tell you you need a pack and play. But really here’s my bassinet. My baby doesn’t even fit in it anymore. Use it for the first three months. And then when she needs to grow into a crib, we can go, you know, get you a crib at Target or whatever. You don’t need, you know, this, that or the other. You don’t need toys yet. She’s too little.

17:19 Beth: So it really helped me focus in on like: these are the absolute bare bones essentials that you need to have a baby. And just having, you know, that critical mindset about what we consume. Right? And I mean, if you think about it from the “this is a first-world problem” perspective. Like thinking about, okay, well families who live in tiny apartments in giant cities around the world or in smaller, more humble circumstances, they don’t need these things for their babies and their babies grow up healthy and beautiful too. So, just really being critical about the buying, what we could borrow from friends. Using secondhand stores for buying baby onesies and that sort of thing. And then luckily I was able to nurse so I didn’t have the expense of formula. I say, luckily I was able to, because there’s also this cultural presumption that, “just nurse and you’ll be fine.” But that is not always an expense that can be eliminated. I know many women who have been either physically unable to nurse or their baby can’t nurse and formula is no joke. It is really expensive. So, I do recognize that that was something we lucked out on.

18:38 Emily: Yeah. Thanks for those comments. I want to jump in here with some comments of my own as I have two children that are fairly young. So, it’s a recent thing for me. The first is, this is kind of weird, but my husband and I watched the documentary, which was available on Netflix, maybe it still is called “Babies.” It’s like a no-narration documentary just following these four babies in different countries through their first years of life. And so, it’s a really fun, funny kind of documentary. But what we took away from that is babies thrive in all kinds of different situations. Like, they’re good, they’re gonna develop, no matter if you have this, you know, doodad or this gadget or you do this thing this way or that way. You know, babies are very adaptable and, you know, robust and so it’s going to be fine.

Any Other Strategies to Decrease Expenses?

19:23 Emily: You know, no matter what you choose, it’s going to be okay. So, we enjoyed that and I’d recommend that to someone who is looking forward to becoming a parent. I really liked what you did in talking with multiple, other new mothers or recent mothers or recent parents to get their perspectives on what you actually need. I say multiple because babies are also very individual. And so, what was essential to one parent might not have been essential to another parent, might not be essential to you. And so it’s great to get an idea of from several different people. “Okay, that one person said that one thing was essential, but I didn’t hear that from, you know, so and so and so and so. So maybe I’ll hold off on that.” And I just think the idea of, as you said, like babies don’t need all the stuff from their first two years of life upon their birth. Right? You can acquire these things slowly as you determine that they actually make sense for you. So, it doesn’t have to be a buying binge like right at the beginning. So, Please continue on. Were there any other ways that you decreased your expenses during that period?

20:23 Beth: I mean that was the main thing, the main categories. We couldn’t, you know, decrease utilities or we couldn’t drop Wi-Fi. So those were the main things, like any entertainment sort of things. And then the other thing, you touched upon this earlier, are these like cultural messages that we receive as new parents. And one of the big ones especially that I see is like date night and how important it is to remain committed to your partner. Yes, that is of course important. But for the first six months of your baby’s life, you are so tired that even if someone had come and offered us date night, we would have been like, where’s the closest place where we can go take a nap? You know, so that was not something that we had any interest in spending money on anyway. But we really didn’t use a sitter. We didn’t go out for that sort of thing, honestly, for the first year at all. I mean for like birthday dinner out or something like that, we had a friend watch the baby. We would trade off and say like, “Hey, the baby’s very calm during mornings, so let’s go out and have a leisurely brunch together and bring the baby.” Right? Like you don’t have to buy into this messaging about how much children have to cost.

21:46 Emily: Yeah. Great, great point.

Commercial

21:51 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/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.

Recovery Strategy #3/4: Sticking to a Budget

23:06 Emily: Okay, so the third kind of category that we want to talk about is financial strategies or financial management. So what, aside from increasing income and decreasing expenses, could you do with your finances to help you through this period?

23:19 Beth: Okay. So, one of the things that we did was, and this is not going to be eye-opening to you, but it really was to us, was to finally follow the adulting advice of creating and sticking to a budget. I know how insane that sounds for people in their thirties to finally like “adult up” and sit down with an Excel spreadsheet and say okay, how much is Wi-Fi, how much is our utilities, how much is our car insurance, how much is our mortgage? But we started looking at that and sticking to it. So, that was first and foremost was getting real about these are our expenses.

24:07 Beth: Burying your head in the sand and pretending like, “Oh, you mean I have to pay my cell phone bill every month?” That’s not a viable strategy. So, actually facing the reality and the facts was another strategy that really helped us. You know, I think as academics in particular, you get a lot of messaging and a lot of training in your self-worth and therefore perhaps your, you know, financial value being wrapped up in your job title and what you tell people you do. But you cannot ignore the financial realities of what you have to provide for yourself and your family. And I don’t think there’s enough about that in graduate school for any of us. And I think for those of us who aren’t in graduate school in MBA programs or accounting or finance, like it’s just, you know, sort of back of the mind consideration. And so we finally decided to get real about that.

25:12 Emily: Yup. Classic advice, but always perennially good. And I kind of feel like, I guess I feel like some people can get away without budgeting if they make a lot of money or if they have very, very, very, very, very simple lives and simple desires. But 97% of the population I feel like would benefit from keeping a regular budget. So, it sounded like it took you a little bit longer to get there, but when the need was high enough, you did and you found it to be a useful tool.

Maintaining Your Budget for Continued Savings

25:44 Beth: Yes. And so, one of the ways we use that tool was even as we started to catch up on the backlog of expenses that we had been tacking onto credit cards out of necessity. So, we started to tackle debt. But then as my income rose over several years–because I stayed in this full-time role, I found a new career, I was doing good work, so I was getting promotions and increases over time–we maintained our budget. So, we could use that extra income not to like restore all the streaming services, and sign back up for the premium whatever, and start doing date night once a month, but to focus on getting rid of that debt and then start to tack away even tiny amounts for savings.

26:35 Emily: Yeah, you really had a large hole that you had to dig yourselves out of first before you could even consider increasing things on the lifestyle side. And again this is not, I mean, none of this was like your fault, right? Like this is all just what happened like nationally and in your housing market in particular that caused this. And I’m sure that, you know, it took so many years of sacrifice to do this and it must be frustrating that like you were kind of just generally a victim of what was going on, like more generally. So anyway, it must have been frustrating and difficult, but I really admire that you stuck at it and you stuck with it for so many years to ultimately get ahead.

The Benefits of a Financial Manager

27:14 Beth: Yeah. And so, one thing we did was we decided to add on one strategic expense and it was a huge expense to us at the time, but we met with a financial manager two times. So, I can’t quote this for sure, but I believe each session–I know each session was an hour–but I believe it was $150 an hour. And that was a huge add on for us at the time. But the knowledge and the toolkit that we came away with like has paid off in spades for years to come. So one of the things she did was she took our budget and she tried to convince us–and the first session, it was a little hard for us to hear this–that we did have spare room in our budget to start saving. And we were like, no, we really don’t.

28:10 Beth: But she actually did the math and she did some forecasting with us and she showed us that if you make your savings automatic and you start putting that away before you can even see it in your checking account so it’s not there for you to spend or consider spending, then you can honestly start to build up savings. And so she taught us about, we used a tool called Capital One 360. It’s an online bank and within that particular bank it’s free to set up an account and you can set up as many accounts as you need. So we set one up, for instance, for future child activities, like day camps during the summer or sports lessons or whatever. We set up one for travel with, I mean, we weren’t traveling at the time, but we were like, “Hey, maybe we’re going to want to take a big beach vacation, a weekend trip to San Diego one of these days.”

29:10 Beth: So we set up these little goal buckets in Capital One. And I’m telling you, like five bucks out of that paycheck and 10 bucks out of this paycheck, and what seems like a coffee here or a lunch there. Really small amounts. We were so skeptical that this strategy was going to work, but she had seen it work before and she had the expertise to back it up. So we said, we’ll give it a shot. And I have been continuously blown away by this, and I still use it to this day. So, within our first year of trying this, even with our really modest higher ed incomes–and my husband had finished his graduate school programming at that time but was on the job market, which as we know is problematic. So he was adjuncting only so we were not living large.

30:04 Beth: We were not high on the hog. We had climbed out of this debt and so forth, but we were not like, you know, going on extravagant vacations or anything like that–but in the first year we were able to save about $5,000. And then the second year, $10,000 on top of that. So, it completely blew me away that like five bucks here, 10 bucks there. Oh, I have a few extra dollars left over from grocery shopping. Okay. Tuck that away. We’re actually going to go put that in the ATM and transfer it over to the Capital One 360 funds and then we’re not going to touch those funds. They’re there for those goals. Just leave it and forget it. And they’re not making huge interest. Right? Like we are not talking about anything more than the interest rate you’d get at your bank or credit union. So, it’s not like this is some investment strategy. It’s literally just set it and forget it but don’t touch it. So that was a huge eye-opener for us.

Financial Advising Tip #1: Targeted Savings Accounts

31:08 Emily: I really love that you brought up this strategy because it’s one of my favorite ones. Especially for, you know, grad students and postdocs, people with lower cashflows, but I talk about this very, very frequently. I call it targeted savings accounts. Other people call it sinking funds. I’m not sure what term your advisor used, but it’s exactly what you described. Putting away a small savings rate with every single pay period. And then pulling the money back out when you have those, you know, a reason for it. If you want to take a trip or maybe you have car repairs or whatever the buckets are that you’ve set up. I also have seen this work in my own life and other people’s lives. And it is amazing that there’s actually a difference between saving in theory and saving in reality.

31:51 Emily: Like you might tell yourself, “I never have money, you know, I never have $5, $10 leftover at the end of the month. How could I possibly be saving anything?” Or like, “Oh yeah, I’m saving but my savings are just sitting in my checking account and oops, I actually kind of spend them from time to time without thinking about it.” It’s amazing what a difference it makes to actually sequester the money away from your general cashflow. And I really love that you particularly use Capital One 360. My husband and I currently bank with Ally, which has the same kind of structure, but I used to bank with Capital One 360 and it was totally great and you know, no big reason for the change, but I also set up targeted savings funds there. So, if anyone’s looking to implement this strategy, using an online bank like Capital One 360 or Ally is a really good choice because some of the larger brick and mortar banks might charge you fees for having accounts open or maybe they’ll charge you a fee if your balance drops below a certain amount.

32:45 Emily: And when we’re talking about these accounts, the balance might be $5. That’s all that might be in there at one point or another when you’re starting out or if you’ve just depleted it. So, it’s really important to have an account that has no minimums, and Ally and Capital One 360 both offer those kinds of accounts. So, really good tip to check those out. In particular, if you like this strategy, and I’ll link in the show notes some more writing I’ve done about this strategy. But thank you so much for describing it Beth.

Financial Advising Tip #2: Use Cash for Day-to-Day Expenses

33:09 Beth: Yeah, I mean it’s been huge for us. So, the other strategy that our financial advisor had us use was to use cash for all of our day-to-day expenses. And I’m not talking about the complicated, here’s the envelope for groceries and here’s the envelope for eating out and like figure all of that. No, just take a lump sum of cash out of each paycheck. And it sounds like a lot, like maybe it’s $400, maybe it’s $800. That, you would have to consult with somebody on, but use it for all your groceries, your cleaning supplies, your coffee shop runs, your lunches out, the beer happy hour after work, whatever it is. And the reason for that is, for whatever psychological reason, whatever behavioral economists call this, you really do think twice about that purchase when you’re using cash, much more than you would with your debit card. So, it has been incredibly powerful and honestly, I get a charge now at the end of every two-week pay cycle where I’m like, “Haha, I still have 40 bucks left over, and I’m actually going to shove that into my Capital One 360, because I actually do want to do like a trip to Denver next year and go have some amazing food and beer. And that’s going to be way more fun for me than using this 40 bucks to go out to lunch a couple of times this week.”

34:39 Emily: What I really love is with your leftover money that you saved it. You weren’t like, “Oh, leftover money. Yeah, great. I’m going to blow it. Like it’s already been accounted for.” You’re like, “No, I’m actually weighing like should I use it for this purpose in the here and now or should I use it for this purpose? Maybe it’s a longer term thing that I’m saving for.” And sounds like much of the time you said, “Nope, I have this other goal, I know exactly where this money is going to go, it’s going to give me more pleasure, more satisfaction to put it over here. Even though it’s, you know, saving in the meantime but it’s saving to spend in the short term.” So, I really love that you actually followed through on that because that’s the part that a lot of people don’t do is the last final step of actually saving the money that they have available to save.

Recovery Strategy #4/4: Research Your Resources

35:18 Beth: Yup. And the final strategy, which I’ll just touch on briefly, is it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of discipline, and that can get tiring over time, but it pays off. So for instance, in 2013 when we had our second child, okay, childcare expenses are about to skyrocket. Like you wouldn’t believe. Well, okay, so let’s take the time and do a lot of research and homework and find a childcare share situation. So for that, we were able to find a place that during the academic year we had part-time childcare and we could take summers off but still hold our place for the next academic year. So that way during summers when my husband was adjuncting only online courses, he would watch the children at no childcare expense to us. So, it’s really hard to find that sort of circumstance, but you might have something equivalent in your life that it’s going be hard to find, but it’s going to be worth the effort to find.

Were There Any Other Strategies You Used?

36:23 Emily: Yeah, it just shows the creativity and the resource in terms of the time you were willing to put into researching certain things is not easy, as you said. But when you can apply those things, you can come up with financially pretty frugal solutions that still work for you. Okay. Were there any other strategies you want to get to that you were using during the period of those years?

Curate Social Media Exposure, Find Your Support System

36:47 Beth: I think a lot of it was trying as much as possible to curate what we looked at and saw. So like staying off of some social media sites where everybody’s flaunting their amazing vacations and you’re like, “Oh, I’m missing out on that.” Or you know, I started reading a blog for instance, about a woman who decided to see how much she could save by bringing her lunch to work every single day for an entire year. So just seeking out where you could that support system, whether it’s virtual or in real life, being really mindful about not going to those after-work happy hours where you know, “Okay, sure. One beer. Well, now I’m hungry, I’m also going to get an appetizer.” So really just being mindful about surrounding yourself with the support system you need to stay on track.

37:45 Emily: Yeah, and I think within an academic setting, I would imagine you can find those other people. Those frugal friends, the classmates who are living on the same kind of income that you are. I’m sure you can find other people who are living above their means in some way or another. So it’s not necessarily everyone in that setting, but you can definitely find that support system. And I did, I know during graduate school because I happened to be very open about talking about money. Other people who were open to talking about money realized that about me and we became friends around that common interest, I would say. So they exist. You might have to sniff them out, but the support systems do exist. Okay. Beth, I think we’ve gotten through the strategies you used to recover from the financial ruin on as you’ve been doing over those several years and since then. So, is there any advice that you would give your past self? You know, anything that you wish you had considered or wish you could have done differently during that time? Given that again, a lot of these forces were completely out of your control.

Final Financial Advice to Oneself

38:49 Beth: Yes. Yeah. So yes, I have two really key takeaways that I wish my younger self would have known. The first one is I wish I had had the ability to more critically consider my future financial needs when it came to choosing a career. So my initial career I was dead set on working in museums and even knowing the realities of the job market and the pay and, you know, how long it takes to get a livable wage in that industry with benefits. I still chose to do it. And it’s not that I regret that at all. It was an amazing experience. But if I could have somehow talked myself into considering like, “Hey, you probably do want to get married someday, you probably do want children. It may be that you’re going to have changes in your life that shift around your personal priorities and some of those are going to cost a lot of money.” I wish that I could have taken that into consideration when making my career choice more deliberately and not tossed finances to the wind as if like, “Well, you know, we’ll figure out how to make it work with whatever this industry pays.”

40:07 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like you were forced to do that, right? When you were laid off from your museum job and you totally did this reevaluation and had gotten to your new career path. That was when it had happened, but maybe you could’ve done that a little bit earlier. And if you go to the show notes, I’ll link from this episode a whole other discussion I had in season three, I believe it was episode six with Scott Kennedy. And we talked again about that same subject of how the reality of “he wanted to have a family, have children” and how did that affect his career decisions in terms of which career paths will pay enough to support a family versus others. Because there are plenty of things you can do because you have a great passion for it that might support a single person but probably not a family. So in that episode, he also grappled with the tough thing of closing a door to a career path that was very attractive to him and turning to something that was also attractive but going to pay quite a bit better. So thank you for that point. What was the other one you wanted to make?

Learn to Critically Examine Your Self-Talk

41:10 Beth: So the second is I would tell my younger self to really hear what you tell yourself and that are truths and beliefs that you have about your money. Because they may not turn out to be true at all. That is the case in my instance. So now, you know, knowing how much I’ve been able to save by this sort of, I forget the term that you use, but this automatic savings out of my paycheck into these Capital One 360 accounts. I wish I had tried that a long time ago. Because I’m sure–in fact I know–I was telling myself in my twenties and before all of this happened, like “I don’t have a dime to save. What are you talking about? There’s no point.” And now I’m like, now having seen the power of stashing away $5 here, $10 there over time, I’m like, “huh, what actually could I have saved? What might have been?” So I really wish I had been able to critically examine that self-talk.

42:17 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for making that point. And I think it’s a really common one among graduate students or PhD trainees in general. You know, “I’m meant to be living close to the bone during these years. I’m not meant to be paying off debt. I’m not meant to be saving. I’m not meant to be investing.” That’s a story that academia tells us. Is it actually true? For some people it is. They definitely don’t make enough money to do anything else. Other people, it is possible. So it’s more of a matter of what are your priorities. So thank you so much for bringing that up. And as we wrap up here Beth, could you tell us a little bit more about your business and how people can find you?

Beth’s Website: Academics at Work

42:52 Beth: Yeah, thanks, Emily. So I’m a career coach. You can find me at academicsatwork.com. I have a blog there where I share all kinds of tips about changing careers or making the one that you’re working at now thriving in that to advance and what you need to think through in terms of networking, your resume, your cover letter and career-changing. And aligning your career with your needs, which change over time. So that’s where you can find me. You can also reach me at [email protected]. And I really, really appreciate your blog, Emily. I have started nerding out about paying more attention to my finances as a result of this, you know, climbing out of this hole that I had. And so that’s how I found your blog. And I just think it’s such an incredible tool that everyone should know about and be using. So I’m so glad you’re doing this podcast. You’ve got the blog. And I really appreciate you having me today.

43:52 Emily: Aw, thank you so much for saying that Beth. And I’m really glad that we got to hear your origin story, kind of view yourself as your first client in terms of a career coach and how that worked out for you. It’s clear that you made that transition very well and rather quickly, finding another job within only three months. So I’m excited to see more about what you do for other people now that that’s your business. So again, thank you so much for joining me and it was really a pleasure to talk with you.

44:17 Beth: Thank you so much!

Outtro

44:19 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.

How Far Will My New Stipend or Salary Go?

May 6, 2019 by Emily

Virtually every PhD will experience this at one point (if not multiple points): You’re looking at an offer letter, whether for grad school, a postdoc, or a Real Job and you’re not sure what to think about the stipend or salary. Because you’ll have to move to a new city to accept the position, you don’t have any context for understanding if it is reasonable or generous or stingy. Your personal finances as well as the local cost of living play heavily into the determination you have to make. Will you be able to survive (or thrive – or neither) on this salary? How far will your new stipend or salary go toward paying your living expenses and getting ahead financially?

This isn’t at all a trivial question, especially for:

Graduate students and postdocs who unfortunately can’t assume they will be paid enough to live comfortably.
PhDs who are responsible for the well-being of others, e.g., spouse and/or children.
International scholars who are prohibited by their visas from working to earn extra money.

You can attempt to answer this question with little or much research, depending on how invested you are in the outcome and what your initial inquiries turn up.

Further reading:

Find Answers on the Internet

You can find a first-pass, non-personalized answer to “How far will my new stipend or salary go?” at any time over the internet.

Stipend and Salary Databases for PhDs-in-Training

If your offer is for a graduate program, go to PhDStipends.com and search for stipend entries for your university and other universities in your city, if any. Not only will this data tell you what other graduate students are being paid so you can compare your stipend offer, some of the entries contain subjective comments on how possible it is to live on that stipend. The stipends will also be normalized to the local living wage for the county the university is in (the LW Ratio) – more on that in a moment.

Similarly, if your offer is for a postdoc, use postdocsalaries.com.

The Living Wage

For graduate students and possibly postdocs, a well-researched, insightful database is the Living Wage Calculator. For each county in the US, this resource shows you the minimum your necessities will cost (on average) based on your family size. It calculates the “living wage” needed to support one adult, two adults, adults with children, etc. and breaks it down into its constituent categories: food, child care, medical, housing, transportation, other expenses, and taxes.

As graduate students are likely to be paid close to a living wage (perhaps above or below by up to 50%), this database will give you a starting point on what you can expect to spend in your various necessary budget categories. Postdocs who are paid close to the living wage can also utilize this resource. Higher earners and homeowners will not find the calculations as relevant.

Cost of Living Calculators

If you know what you spend on your expenses in your current city, you can use a cost of living comparison calculator to translate that amount of money into an amount of money in your new city based on the differences in the cost of living.

Some of the prominent cost of living comparison calculators are provided by:

These cost of living comparisons also break down into sub-categories of spending such as housing, utilities, food, transportation, etc. However, be warned that the housing data come from a mix of renters and owners, so you may find you own housing costs differ dramatically from the expected increase or decrease.

Find Answers from Your Peers

I think the best way to get an accurate answer to “How far will my new stipend or salary go?” is to survey people currently living on it in your new city, i.e., your future peers and co-workers.

This is trickier for PhDs starting Real Jobs because of the (damaging but firm) culture in most workplaces of not disclosing your salary. However, graduate students and postdocs are usually paid on a set schedule, so you can assume that someone already in the position you have accepted (e.g., within your same department or funded by the same source) does have the same or a similar salary to yours.

Simply ask an open-ended question such as “Are you able to make ends meet on the stipend?” or “Do you live more or less comfortably on the salary?” and see what it elicits. Be sure to ask several different people because you one person’s perspective may not be representative.

Find Individualized Answers through Research

If you are willing to dig into some financial weeds, the ultimate way to obtain an individualized answer to “How far will my new stipend or salary go?” is to draft a budget.

After all, your finances are unique, and looking to average data or asking a few peers will not directly speak to your specific obligations, lifestyle, and preferences.

If you already track your spending and keep a budget, you can use that as a starting point, or you can download a fresh template. There are plenty of templates available online, and I’ve also created one specifically for this purpose, which is available below.

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Some line items on your budget will need major overhauls due to your career and geographic transition:

Tax: If you’re changing salary and/or state (or making changes to your household), your income tax bill will need to adjust. Some early-career PhDs might also start or stop paying FICA tax or be excused from paying state income tax depending on the exact type of paycheck they will receive in the new position. My favorite calculator for estimating income and FICA taxes is from Smart Asset.
Employee/student benefits: With a change in university and/or employer comes different benefits that you may or may not have to pay for out of pocket. If the amount of money you are responsible for paying is not clearly delineated in your offer letter, it is worth inquiring about as you draft your budget. Examples of these types of payments are premiums (and copays/coinsurance) for your health, vision, and dental insurance; life and/or disability insurance premiums; and tuition and/or fees.
Student loans: If you are entering graduate school and have decided to defer your student loans, you’ll need to update your minimum required student loan payments to $0. Conversely, if you are exiting deferment for a postdoc or Real Job, you’ll need to know how much your payments will be. Your loan servicer should be able to tell you your minimum payments. If you have federal loans and are considering an income-driven repayment program, you can use the Repayment Estimator from studentloans.gov to compare your payments under different plans.
Living expenses: Obviously, if you are changing cities, many of your living expenses will shift. But the ‘major overhaul’ here is if you need to add or subtract whole budget categories, such car ownership, daycare, and travel to visit family, a partner, and/or friends.

As for your living expenses, you can use one or more of the methods detailed in the first two sections of this article to start putting numbers into each budget category. Some living expenses may stay more or less constant even when you change cities (e.g., cell phone bill, cost of electronics) while others will be subject to the cost of living (e.g., housing, utilities, food).

The most important budget categories to get right from a distance are your large, fixed expenses, e.g., housing, transportation (if you own a car), and childcare. The Living Wage calculator and the cost of living comparisons can help here, but it’s going to be even better for you to do your own research and determine your individualized expenses.

The two best ways to research your housing and childcare costs from a distance (and jump-start your housing search) are to ask your peers what they pay and monitor prices online for at least several weeks before you commit to your expense. (Knowing when to sign a lease/pay a deposit is part of familiarizing yourself with a market!)

Drafting a budget will help you decide how much you can afford to spend on these large fixed expenses, so it will be most beneficial to start drafting this budget before you commit to any expenses. Your ability to reach financial goals in your first year in your new position will likely hinge on getting these large, fixed expenses set at an appropriate level, so it’s worth quite a bit of time and research. Variable expenses can be changed more or less on a dime and small expenses aren’t so impactful, so it (literally) pays to focus your effort on the large fixed expenses.

If you would like some additional help with drafting your new budget at a distance, please purchase my previously recorded webinar ($24.99) below. The 30-minute “Draft Your Budget from a Distance” webinar also includes the budget template spreadsheet described above.

The objective of the webinar is to help you draft a complete budget for your new position (in a new city) so that you can set your large, fixed expenses at a reasonable level for your income and determine in advance what financial goals you might set for the next phase in your career.

The final answer to “How far will my new stipend or salary go?” will only come once you’re living in your new city. But you can start getting approximations on that answer immediately from online sources and your future peers. These initial answers may prompt you to create a more detailed draft budget before you move if it looks like you will experience a financial challenge or reaching financial goals is important to you. This budget will help you determine how much you can afford to spend on the expenses that are generally fixed prior to or upon your move. It will also help you decide how much money you can put toward your financial goals during your next position.

Working Hard and Playing Hard as a Grad Student in NYC

November 26, 2018 by Emily

On this episode, Emily interviews Nicholas Giangreco, a bioinformatics graduate student at the Columbia University Medical Center. Nick’s expenses in Manhattan are relatively high – such as spending over 50% of his net income on rent – but his stipend still allows him to spend on his priorities and still save money consistently. Nick lived very frugally while he was paying off his student loans prior to grad school, and now applies his thoughtful budgeting skills to enjoying life in Manhattan without breaking the bank or detracting from his research.

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

1:15 Q1: Please Introduce Yourself

Nick Giangreco is a bioinformatics graduate research assistant at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He started his program in August 2016. His post-taxes pay is approximately $1,300 biweekly.

2:58 Q2: What are your five largest expenses each month?

Nick’s top expense categories are rent, health, transportation, and food. His miscellaneous and entertainment expenses are considerably low. He uses a spreadsheet to monitor his spending.

3:38 #1 Expense: Rent

Nick lives in a studio apartment located on-campus and managed by the university. He pays $1,200 for his studio, which is lower than nearby off campus studio apartments that are $1,500 to $1,600 rent. Nick recognizes that he could find housing options near campus for less than $1,200 monthly rent. He mentions his friends who share four bedroom apartments and each pay $600 for their room. Finding a place in New York City is challenging. If you don’t find somewhere on Craig’s List, you may need a broker and to pay the broker fee.

Nick says the majority of graduate students live on-campus. To accommodate the demand for on-campus housing, the university has three tiers of priority consideration for housing applicants. The first priority tier is international students, the second tier is students from outside the New York – New Jersey – Connecticut Tri-State area, and the third tier is students from within the Tri-State area.

According to Nick, living on-campus makes graduate student life easier. Nick has a 15 minute walk to work, and he avoids commuting on the subway. The university gives current residents the first priority to renew leases. Nick plans to renew his lease for his on-campus apartment.

11:38 #2 Expense: Health

Nick spends a few hundred dollars per month for pilates sessions. He sees a personal pilates trainer in the West Village and pays $100 per session. He goes to physical therapy and rehabilitation at the hospital at Columbia. The copay is $20, which adds up since he has an appointment every week.

Nick’s health insurance does not cover his pilates session, but he likes his personal trainer and gets value out of the sessions. He first tried going to pilates classes at the university’s gym for no charge, but he was dissatisfied with the generalized approach of group classes. He wanted something personalized for his needs, so it is his priority to budget for pilates classes.

14:23 #3 Expense: Transportation

Nick estimates that he spends $200 to $300 per month on transportation and travel, or as little as $100 in a month if he doesn’t leave New York City. He puts $20 on his subway card and adds as needed. Additionally, he takes taxis and Ubers to get around Manhattan. Though taking a taxi to the JFK airport can be expensive ($70), the subway takes two hours. He uses Amtrak to go to his hometown, but those tickets add up. He also looks for cheap tickets from Megabus.

18:55 #4 Expense: Food

Nick spends less than $200 per week on food. In his studio apartment, he has a kitchenette which has a stove but no oven. He doesn’t buy groceries that require baking. He buys non-perishables and items that keep well. Some of his go-to items are sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and popcorn. He takes out $20 per week in cash for use at the food trucks, which only accept cash. He buys gyros for $5 and coffee for $1 from the food trucks. He goes to restaurants or diners once or twice a week.

Nick looks for free food from graduate school events. He is part of a Slack group for graduate students in the department, where people share information about free food. He eats food at seminars, lectures when alumni are invited, and club events.

Nick’s kitchenette does change how he approaches his food budget. When he lived in Washington, DC, he lived in a house with a kitchen. He used to batch cook on the weekend and set aside portions of leftovers for the week. He would host friends for meals. In New York City, he doesn’t have room to host anyone and can’t cook very much. He microwaves sweet potatoes and makes rice and beans on the stove. He keeps leftovers from events. He doesn’t plan his food for the whole week, instead he plans by the day. Nick thinks he could plan better, but right now he needs to focus on his PhD work so he needs the convenience.

30:35 Low Entertainment Expenses

Nick says there is a lot to do in New York City. He doesn’t spend much money on entertainment because he does a few cheap activities. He goes to clubs and university events. He sees plays for $10 on the Columbia Medical Center campus. He saw Spongebob the Musical for $30. Though Nick has friends who go out for drinks every day, Nick doesn’t buy much alcohol.

33:30 Q3: What are you currently doing to further your financial goals?

Nick recently paid off all his student loans. Before starting his PhD, Nick lived in DC for two years. He lived a very frugal lifestyle, and took two and a half years to pay off his student loans. Now, Nick is working on his rainy day fund so he can create a financial cushion in his budget. He spends about $2,300 per month of his $2,600 monthly income, so he puts the rest to savings.

Nick keeps a budget in google sheets to log his expenses. He wants to become conscious of his spending habits. He is looking into passive investing approaches and learning about retirement. Columbia Medical Center provides graduate students the option to invest with Vanguard. Though there is no matching offer, he determine an amount to withhold out of his biweekly check. He called the financial office and asked explicitly about this retirement program applicability to graduate students, and he is considering it.

Nick tries to save $100 to $200 per month for his rainy day fund, and wants to increase this to $300 to $500 per month.

39:14 Q4: What don’t you spend money on that might surprise people?

Nick doesn’t spend much money on entertainment or alcohol. He takes it seriously that he is in New York City for graduate school, so he prioritizes his studies and his work. He doesn’t go to Brooklyn or the East Side, instead he goes to Central Park for free and finds cheap shows at comedy clubs. He uses the subway because this transit option is $20 to $30 less than taxis and Ubers. He will listen to podcasts while he’s on the subway.

43:07 Q5: What are you happy with in your spending and what would you like to change?

Nick is happy with his food spending and his entertainment spending. He has a social life and indulges in brunch with friends on the weekends. He wishes he could save more on rent, but he doesn’t want the responsibilities that come with living in a house. Landlord, roommates, and housing infrastructure problems add extra stress that he doesn’t want to deal with. He wants to concentrate on graduate school, and his studio apartment helps him focus. He also appreciates the security in his building, the community and the convenience. He lives on-campus and one block away from the subway. Ultimately, the convenience of the location is worth the high rent.

46:42 Q6: What is your best advice for someone new to your city who is budget-conscious?

Nick recommends living on-campus. He thinks the Columbia Medical Center bioinformatics graduate program pays well. He says the initial payment for first years is nearly $20,000 as a lump sum, which needs to be budgeted carefully. The Columbia Marketplace Facebook group is useful to find free and cheap items. The Grad Talk list-serve helps you find out about free and cheap items as well.

Nick says to enjoy yourself without going crazy, and to be mindful. Anyone considering New York City for a PhD program should know that grad school can be intense, New York City can be intense, but this is a time to work really hard while making good friends and good memories. Nick coordinates a Meetup group and leads an NYC chapter of an international organization. New York gives you access to broader networks and opportunities.

51:38 How do you budget your biweekly pay? How does it compare to other pay structures?

Nick used to work at the National Institute of Health in DC, where he monthly check. The biweekly pay does not change how he budgets, instead he enters his income twice a month into a spreadsheet instead of once a month. He had enough cushion money in his account to manage expenses, and knows that he will get another paycheck in two weeks. His spreadsheet helps him keep track.

55:41 Q7: Would you like to make any other comments on what it takes to get by where you live on what you earn?

Nick says it’s a great time to be a graduate student in New York City. So many people like to visit New York City, so it’s great for spontaneous reunions with friends. It’s easy to get out of the city if you want. New York City offers many opportunities, and you’ll interact with people from multiple universities, companies, and form a broad network.

57:48 Conclusion

Solve Your Irregular Expenses Problem with Targeted Savings Accounts

November 5, 2018 by Emily

Imagine this: A spending opportunity arises (your friend’s destination wedding, a non-functioning car or computer, a conference, a tax bill) and as much as you scrimp that month and the next you just can’t cover the expense with cash. I ran into this problem during graduate school and found a workable solution: targeted savings accounts (or sinking funds). When I present this solution during my personal finance seminars, I find that it really excites the PhD students and postdocs in the audience because large irregular expenses are such a common problem with this population.

What Are Irregular Expenses?

Irregular expenses are expenses that occur infrequently. Typically their frequency is once per year or a few times per year; they definitely do not occur every budgeting period (month).

When you have a small irregular expense that can be easily absorbed by your ‘Miscellaneous’ budget line item or within the normal fluctuations of your monthly spending, they don’t pose a problem.

The irregular expenses that call for a solution are large ones that your typical monthly cash flow cannot absorb in stride.

For example, if you have a Miscellaneous line item in your budget of $25 and could find another $25 of wiggle room by cutting back if necessary, one irregular expense of up to $50 in a month does not on its own call for an involved solution. However, if you had an irregular expense of $500, how could you pay for it without wrecking your budget?

Certain categories of expenses tend to occur irregularly and in large amount, though the exact list of irregular expenses in your life is individual. Common irregular expense categories are:

Car (maintenance, repairs, parking permit, registration, taxes)
Clothing
Electronics
Entertainment
Household purchases
Insurance premiums (health, dental, vision, car, renter’s, life, disability)
Gifts
Medical copays, deductibles, and insurance
Moving
Personal care
Research and conference expenses
Taxes
Travel
Tuition and fees

Join the Mailing List to Receive Your Free Targeted Savings Worksheet

The one-page worksheet guides you in brainstorming and categorizing your irregular expenses, including three questions to ask yourself and a list of common irregular expense categories.

Why Are Irregular Expenses a Problem for PhDs?

Paying for irregular expenses becomes an issue for anyone with low discretionary cash flow; that is, anyone whose necessary expenses closely approach their total available income. Due to their limited incomes, graduate students and postdocs often have low discretionary cash flow, especially when their pay is not sufficiently indexed to the local cost of living.

That PhD trainees are strapped for cash is not news to anyone, but the irregular expense problem is exacerbated for graduate students due to the academic calendar.

There’s no rule that only one irregular expense is allowed to occur each month to permit maximum cash flow absorption. When it rains, it pours. Irregular expenses due to your university tend to cluster at the start of the academic year or perhaps the start of each term. For example, at the start of the academic year you might owe to your university lump sum payments for some tuition and/or fees, part or all of your health insurance premium, and your parking permit.

Graduate students and postdocs receiving fellowship stipends/salaries typically have an additional irregular expense: quarterly estimated tax payments. Instead of having income tax withheld from their paychecks, they receive their full gross income as their take-home pay and are expected to make quarterly estimated tax payments (or pay once per year in some cases). These payments are due four times per year, though not on the regular schedule of once every three months.

The Baseline Solution: Saving

There are several ways to handle irregular expenses: putting them on a credit card to pay off over time, cutting back in other areas of your spending to accommodate them, forgoing them, and saving for them in advance. Of those options, saving in advance is the most financially sound. Planning and saving ahead allows you to balance the irregular expenses with your regular expenditures and avoids paying interest.

For some people, setting aside an amount of money every month for whatever irregular expenses may arise could work, but again probably best for people with larger amounts of discretionary cash flow. For those on tighter budgets, like many PhDs in training, to plan ahead and optimize your use of money, you probably need a more specific plan. This is where targeted savings account come into play.

The Detailed Solution: Targeted Savings Accounts

The use of targeted savings accounts is essentially a method of detailed budgeting that extends to the year rather than just the month (or whatever shorter budgeting period you use). A year is a good amount of time over which to try to predict the irregular expenses in your life.

A targeted savings account is: 1) a savings account (or, alternatively, a designated fraction of a larger general savings account) and 2) targeted for one particular irregular expense or category of irregular expenses.

Every month, you automatically transfer a set amount of money from your checking account to your targeted savings account. Then, in the month when an irregular expense hits, you transfer the amount of money it cost back to your checking account to cover it.

You determine the saving rate you need into your targeted savings account by projecting the expenses you expect to occur in that category in the coming year and then dividing the total by 12 (or fewer months if the expense is closely upcoming).

For example, if you typically spend $600 on clothing, shoes, and accessories over the course of a year, your savings rate will be $50/month into an account dedicate for that purpose. All you need to do on the spending side is to not overbuy the available balance in your account in any given month. A targeted savings account lends itself well to this type of expense only if your shopping occurs less frequently than monthly and you spend a large (for your budget) amount of money each time, e.g., you shop once per year or seasonally.

The tricky thing to get right with targeted savings accounts is to accurately project all the expenses that qualify as problematic irregular expenses in your life. You need to figure out the expense, the amount, and the timing so you can categorize the expense and calculate the savings rate.

However, the savings that is transferred into your targeted savings account is not created out of thin air. If you were struggling with paying for irregular expenses prior to implementing this system, that struggle is not going to be immediately alleviated.

Delineating your irregular expenses in this way helps with planning and budgeting, but it isn’t magic. It simply enables you to predict your expenses well and decide whether to allocate money to them (in advance) or your other priorities. This helps you more optimally use your money because you can give your plan forethought instead of making reactionary decisions following an irregular expense occurrence. But because it doesn’t create money out of thin air, you still have to make sacrifices in your spending to get the budget to balance.

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The one-page worksheet guides you in brainstorming and categorizing your irregular expenses, including three questions to ask yourself and a list of common irregular expense categories.

How to Get Started with Targeted Savings Accounts

When you first implement targeted savings accounts, you have a choice between an immediate or gradual (likely over a year) implementation. However, in either case you are going to have to cut your regular spending a little deeper than is typical to find some extra cash in the first few months.

Slow Method

The gradual approach to targeted savings is to set up and fund your various accounts over a year as the irregular expenses pop up.

If in your first month an irregular expense arises, pay for it fully out of cash flow as you would have done previously. Then, determine how frequently and in what amount that expense will recur and calculate an appropriate savings rate to fully fund it over the course of the next year.

For example, it is common to pay car insurance premiums once every six months. When that expense arises, you would pay for the insurance from cash flow, and then in the subsequent six months save one-sixth of the cost of the insurance each month into a dedicated account (“Cars,” “Insurance,” or “Car Insurance,” depending on what you want to combine it with). The next time you need to pay car insurance, pull the money from the targeted savings account, and then continue with your savings plan.

If you follow this method for every problematic irregular expense throughout the year, by the end of the year you’ll have a fully funded and functioning set of targeted savings accounts.

The challenge with this method is to keep fully paying for irregular expenses in their first occurrence throughout the year when more and more of your cash flow has been redirected to targeted savings accounts for future irregular expenses. Until you build up the entire year’s targeted savings, you’ll be making deeper cuts to your regular spending. But the gradual method allows you to find those ways to cut back slowly over time.

Fast Method

To get your targeted savings plan in place right away, you have to do much more up-front thinking.

Instead of waiting for irregular expenses to pop up over the course of a year as in the slow method, in the fast method you attempt to predict all of them for the year up front. Using tracked spending data from the previous year is very helpful in this stage, so if you are new to tracking spending or new to your city the fast method may not be a good fit.

For each expense, you need to predict as best as possible when and in what amount(s) it will occur. If it’s a discretionary expense with no fixed timing (e.g., clothes shopping), you can simply use the amount of spending you expect to do over the course of a year.

To calculate your savings rates with the fast method, you must take into account that you don’t have a year to save up what you need to in each category, so some of your savings rates might be quite high to fully fund an expense that is not too far in the future.

For example, for Travel, you may have a pattern of traveling at certain times of the year such as holidays, school breaks, or over the summer. You may need to save at a higher rate to fully fund one of those trips if it is only a few months away. The rate will be able to drop some once the proximal event has been paid for.

Because you have to front-load so much of your savings, using this method requires you to have the ability and willingness to make deep cuts to your spending in the first month you implement it.

Conclusion

Targeted savings accounts are at base a way of extrapolating your budgeting over a year instead of just a month to account for your irregular expenses. By turning large, irregular expenses into small, fixed expenses, you can easily write them into your budget and weigh them against your regular monthly expenses. Often, a monthly expense will become less appealing with directly compared with a contribution to an irregular expense, e.g., you become motivated to limit yourself to one drink per outing because you can see the money going to savings for a concert. Early-career PhDs will do well to adopt a system of targeted savings accounts as irregular expenses are a common and difficult problem.

Even in NYC, This Graduate Student Maintains a Super Frugal Lifestyle

September 24, 2018 by Emily

In this episode, Emily interviews Athena Pierquet, a rising second-year graduate student at New York University in English. In her first year as a PhD student, Athena lived on her $28,000 per year fellowship and save all of her smaller income sources, but her finances are facing a new challenge as she transitions out of subsidized university housing. Despite living in Manhattan, Athena maintains a very frugal lifestyle, minimizing her spending on groceries, transportation, entertainment, and recreation.

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0:00 Introduction

1:15 Q1: Please Introduce Yourself

Athena is a rising second year PhD student in the Department of English at New York University. She lives in the Manhattan neighborhood Stuyvesant, or Stuy Town. Her overall income was $38,000 from several university sources. Most of her income comes from the MacCracken Fellowship, provided for all NYU PhD students, which was $27,526 this past year. She received a housing stipend of $5,500. Several scholarships and grants made up $4,000 of her income, and short term research contracts made up $1,000 to $2,000.

2:20 How is your income reported for taxes?

For taxes, Athena has to self report the MacCracken Fellowship and her other scholarships to the federal government. The university provides her a 1098-T form for taxes. Her short term research contracts are reported on W-2, but these are a minor part of her income.

4:08 Q2: What are your five largest expenses each month?

Athena’s five largest expenses are rent, food, books and supplies, incidentals, and going out for fun.

4:28 #1 Expense: Rent

Athena pays $1,100 per month for rent. This cost includes all utilities, except for internet. She shares a two-bedroom apartment in Stuy Town with another first year NYU PhD student. The market rate for her apartment is $3,500 per month, but since the apartment is in a university housing complex, the cost is subsidized by the university. However, university housing is only available to first year PhD students, so Athena is searching for new housing in Manhattan.

For her new housing search, Athena’s budget is $1,200 to $1,300 for a room in a three or four bedroom apartment. NYU will continue to provide a housing stipend of $5,500 during her second year, but in subsequent years the housing stipend will be replaced with income from teaching classes. In general, her income does not increase to cover the new housing costs.

Athena saved much of her income from her first year in anticipation of her move into the cut throat Manhattan housing market. To get an apartment in Manhattan, she needs $3,000 to $5,000 available. Securing an apartment requires payment deposits for first month’s rent and last month’s rent.

9:57 #2 Expense: Food

Athena’s food budget is $100 per week. This category broadly covers anything she purchases to eat. She includes groceries, coffee shops, restaurants, and take-out in her weekly food budget. She plans out her meals and makes grocery shopping a priority. She makes almost all of her food at home and describes some of her meals, such as fully loaded oatmeal and hearty, entree salads. Athena eats at restaurants only two or three times each semester. She has several frugal tips for going to restaurants in Manhattan and getting free food from NYU events.

20:30 #3 Expense: Books and Course Supplies

Athena’s spending on books and course supplies is about $300 per semester. Her expenses for books and course supplies are considered non-taxable income. As a literature student, she needs many books for her work. She estimates that if she bought every book she needed or wanted, she would be spending thousands of dollars. She frequently borrows from the library, gets used books, and finds resources online. Nonetheless, this was tricky to budget for because of different needs for different courses.

24:29 #4 Expense: Incidentals

Athena budgeted for unexpected expenses, which she describes as the impulsive book purchase, miscellaneous fees, and spontaneous entertainment. Since she set her budget week by week, she intentionally put $45 each week for incidentals. Typically, she only had one or two unexpected expenses each month. The miscellaneous category is a place to lose money if you’re not careful, in Athena’s opinion.

27:29 Problems budgeting for taxes while on a fellowship

Athena later learned that the $45 per week that she budgeted for incidentals was really what she needed for taxes. When Athena began first year of graduate school, she didn’t know how much to set aside for taxes. NYU does not withhold taxes for U.S. citizens in their PhD programs, so it was Athena’s responsibility to estimate how much she might owe in taxes and plan for tax season. This is a challenge faced by many PhD students receiving fellowship funding.

Further reading: The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

30:47 #5 Expense: Going Out for Fun

Athena budgeted $20 per week for going out, and spent $280 over one semester on happy hours and other social events. She went to bars with friends about once or twice a month for happy hour, where she would socialize for two or three hours. In her budget, Athena distinguishes drinks at a bar or restaurant from purchasing a bottle of wine or six pack from the store. She notes that at NYU, she has plenty of opportunities to enjoy free drinks and free food at events sponsored by the institution.

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34:36 Q3: What are you currently doing to further your financial goals?

Athena tries her best to live within her means. She only lives off of the MacCracken fellowship, about $28,000, which is her only guaranteed income source for 5 years. She puts her other fluctuating funding sources into savings and does not create her budget from it. Athena has a healthy cash savings account, and every now and then she moves it into an investment account with Vanguard for retirement and index funds that could be used for major purchases in 20 to 40 years. She needs her cash savings for her new apartment, new furniture, and irregular expenses.

38:19 Q4: What don’t you spend money on that might surprise people?

Athena doesn’t spend money on transportation. If it’s less than an hour walk, she will walk to the distance. The $2.75 to take the subway or bus is better spend on coffee, in her opinion. She won’t take cabs or ride share unless she absolutely has to.

She makes use of public spaces with internet access and working spaces, like the New York Public Library. Some people pay memberships to writers’ rooms and co-working spaces, or even a desk at home, but Athena has a list of go-to public spaces to work remotely.

Additionally, Athena doesn’t have a gym membership, and she won’t go to exercise classes. She avoids shopping and costly activities. Though she’s surrounded by high income earners in Manhattan, she reminds herself that she has more important priorities than the high expense lifestyle.

43:56 Q5: What are you happy with in your spending and what would you like to change?

Athena would like to change how she tracks her cash spending. Since some places are cash only, and some only take cards, Athena finds it tricky to document all of her expenditures.

She’s happy with how little she spends on exercise activities. Athena is a long distance runner, so she makes use of the long trails and paths throughout New York City. She has a deeply discounted New York Roadrunners membership, and recommends that others look into student discounts.

47:36 Q6: What is your best financial advice for a new PhD student at NYU who is budget-conscious?

First, Athena says that budgeting and spending conservatively is absolutely a must. Many daily necessities, like laundry and groceries, are more expensive than you might expect.

Second, she says do not buy in bulk! Buying only what you need will save money in the long term, as well as save space in small apartments.

51:17 Find out your summer funding situation

Athena recommends being aware of how you will be funded through the summer. In some cases, you will receive payments for only the nine months of the academic year. Some refer to the first summer after graduate school as the “summer of poverty,” so think about this when you get your offer letter. You may need to save during the academic year to get through the summer, or find summer work. Make plans at the beginning of the academic year.

Further reading: How to Financially Navigate an Summer

52:49 Q7: Would you like to make any other comments on what it takes to get by where you live on what you earn?

Athena says you need to be honest about your financial situation. Seeing wealth around you in NYC does not mean you need to spend like that too, or emulate what you see people doing around you. Athena takes the initiative to suggest more frugal activities, like going to coffee or happy hour instead of more costly brunches and dinners.

Athena does an end of the semester assessment of her budget that she finds highly valuable. She evaluates how she spent her money and considers how she can do better the next semester. It can be difficult to anticipate how expensive things will be ahead of time, so she has gone through a process to try things out and reassess her expenses.

58:00 Conclusion

This Grad Student in DC Prioritizes Living Alone and Investing in Mental Health

August 27, 2018 by Emily

In this episode, Emily interviews Christina Padilla, a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in human development and public policy earning $38,000 per year. Christina shares her top five expenses as a DC resident: rent, groceries, eating and drinking out, regular monthly expenses (i.e., phone, internet), and the copay for her therapist. They discuss Christina’s tips on leveling up her housing, meal planning, living car-free, and finding frugal fun in the city.

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0:00 Introduction

1:18 Q1: Please Introduce Yourself

Christina Padilla is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is in the psychology department, and specifically in the human development and public policy program. Her research focuses on early childhood, parenting, and early education.

Christina completed her undergraduate studies in Baltimore before taking a 2-year research position at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the D.C. area, and then stayed for graduate school.

3:11 Q2: What are the top expenses that you have, either in a typical month or in the last month?

Christina’s top five expenses per month are rent, groceries, eating and drinking out, other regularly occurring monthly expenses like phone and internet access, and a copay for therapy, which she started in the fall.

4:15 Expense #1: Rent

Her first year at the NIH, Christina lived in Maryland because it was closer to her lab and her rent was only $600-$700 plus utilities, but she hated being so far outside the city. In her second year at the NIH, she moved to a group house and paid $800 a month. However, it was a very old house and required Christina to have four roommates. She lived there for three years, including her first two years of graduate school, and then decided it was worth it to live by herself. She had saved money to be able to live in a studio.

Now, Christina is budgeting with an income of $38,000 for the fall 2017 through the summer; after that, her funding situation is uncertain. She allocates $2,700 per month, and of that, rent is $1,350. For a place in D.C., that is not very expensive. Christina lives alone in a rent-controlled studio apartment in a very desirable area outside of Dupont Circle.

Transportation was once one of Christina’s top expenses, and she would spend $150 a month to get to and from campus. She does not own a car: all the costs were for public transportation. At present, she is able to walk to campus, and now spends about $40 every other month on Metro costs. Georgetown also has a free shuttle between the area she lives and the university campus.

9:13 Is the building that you’re living in popular with students?

Another graduate student living in the building recommended it to Christina when she moved out, but Christina took a different unit because the cost was significantly less due to rent control factors. A number of other Georgetown students do live in the building; there are quite a lot of young people and quite a lot of long-term residents, but very few people in between.

11:43 Expense #2: Groceries

Christina spends about $200 per month on groceries on average. Unless she is going to a social event, she tries to cook all of her meals at home instead of ordering out. Christina has a small kitchen, which it is in a separate room from the rest of the apartment. She does not have a dishwasher or garbage disposal, but all other major appliances are included.

13:11 Have you always tried to cook at home, or is that something you decided to do along the way?

Cooking dinner at home is a habit Christina has always had; eating out was only for special occasions, rather than a casual habit. Even when she was at the NIH, she would cook every day. Her savings enabled her to take a lengthy trip to Europe before starting graduate school—Christina and another woman compared their spending and found that a major factor in Christina’s savings for the trip was that she was not ordering out, and the other woman was ordering food almost every day.

16:17 Do you have any comments on how you keep food costs down in a high cost of living area?

Christina also allocates $200 per month for eating out, but her ability to stay within both budgets was enhanced when she started meal planning. Planning meals for a week and only buying what’s necessary for that week has helped her stay within her budget. Christina enjoys cooking, and so cooking food and freezing it is both relaxing and budget-friendly.

On Sundays, Christina will make breakfast and lunch for at least Monday through Wednesday, and cook again on Wednesdays. Previously, she would try to prepare meals one day ahead of time but would often find that she was too tired or busy to do so, and ended up having to cook in the morning or buy meals. By planning meals ahead and cooking in bulk, Christina saves herself money and time.

19:13 Expense #3: Eating and Drinking Out

Christina sometimes feels that $200 per month for eating and drinking out may be high, but acknowledges that D.C. is an expensive city to eat in—one brunch could cost $50 or $60. Brunch and happy hours are both popular in the city, and the costs of each can add up. The $200 also includes going out for celebrations and other social events. Christina avoids going out to eat unless it is with other people so that it stays a treat instead of becoming an expensive habit.

21:21 Expense #4: Other Regular Monthly Expenses

Other regular monthly expenses make up the fourth largest category for Christina, which amount to about $100 per month. She pays $35 each month for her phone, $43 for internet access, $13 for dental insurance, and $5 for Spotify, which is cheaper with a student membership. The cell phone price is for the cost of the actual phone; the one thing Christina’s parents still pay for is Verizon service.

22:12 Expense #5: Therapy Co-Pays

In the fall, Christina was having a difficult time with her dissertation. The $200 per month she now spends on co-pays were originally going into savings and have transitioned into payment for counseling. Christina mentions that all graduate students need support but sometimes struggle with talking about it or feeling justified in seeking out help, and enjoys talking about counseling to help de-stigmatize it. She considers it an investment in herself and getting through graduate school in one piece.

23:24 Will you be finishing grad school soon?

Christina has an external fellowship for $30,000 for two years, and her department gave her an extra $8,000 to match everyone else’s stipends. She will continue to receive the $30,000 stipend but does not know whether her department will award the $8,000 again. She hopes to finish in January of 2019. She may drop her counseling sessions to once or twice a month instead of each week.

25:33 Q3: What financial goals are you working on?

In addition to the five categories and other spending, Christina saves at least $200 per month. $100 goes into a mutual fund with Schwab and $100 goes into a Roth IRA that she set up last year.

Christina does not get a very good interest rate on her savings account and chose to invest in a mutual fund because of an episode of the John Oliver Show “Last Week Tonight,” from which she learned it would be a good option for her savings goals. She has not decided whether to use it for a mid-life expense or for long-term savings, such as a down payment on a house or for retirement.

28:03 Q4: What don’t you spend that much money on that might surprise people?

People are often surprised by how little Christina goes out to eat. Many people in graduate school tend to order in a lot for convenience. However, many people bring lunch to campus, so Christina regularly eats lunch with other people in her lab, and bringing food has not been an isolating experience.

29:24 Q5: What are you happy with in your current spending and what would you like to change?

Christina is overall happy that she is staying afloat and able to save money even though she lives in an expensive city. Many of her friends have “real” jobs where they make more money, and it is hard to compare herself to them, but she is pleased with being able to save at all. She tries to think positively about being paid to get a degree and be happy that a stipend is available, that tuition is covered, and that she has no student loan debt.

31:43 What advice would you have for someone who is starting in their first year at Georgetown?

Christina’s number one piece of advice is to be honest and reflective with yourself about your priorities in terms of housing. It’s not always possible to live in a luxury building in a great location without roommates and have low rent. There are housing options for all priorities, but you have to be honest about what you want and to be ready to make sacrifices in terms of money, location, or roommates. A lot of people live outside D.C. in Virginia or in Maryland, but many of those areas have become as expensive as D.C., so comparing prices is important.

Georgetown does not offer much graduate student housing, and what’s available is about equally expensive as other housing options if not more. Georgetown does provide shuttles, however, because the campus is not connected to the Metro line.

35:30 Any closing thoughts or other comments about living in D.C. on $38,000 per year?

D.C. has a lot of free activities, especially in the summer. There are many free outdoor concerts, and all of the D.C. museums and monuments are free to visit.

No matter where you live, setting a budget and sticking to it is immensely helpful. Christina uses the free version an app called Good Budget, which allows you to create spending categories and record your transactions. The app will show a green bar decreasing as you spend throughout the month. Christina found that Mint was not helpful for her in curbing her spending and now uses Good Budget instead.

Trying to keep up with people who have “real” jobs and salaries is impossible, but it is possible to politely take charge of social situations. For example, Christina recommends offering to choose the restaurant where friends will gather and selecting a lower-cost option. Other people may not recognize that their budget constraints might be looser than a graduate student’s.

Christina opts for casually steering events with friends towards more affordable activities, and will occasionally decline to go to things if they are too expensive. She has found that most people are fairly sensitive to graduate student budgets and have no problem with less expensive activities and options.