Stretch that Stipend

Your Most Important Budget Line Item in Graduate School and Why You Need to Re-Evaluate It

March 15, 2017 by Emily

The largest line item in nearly every graduate student’s budget is housing. Whether you own your home or rent, whether you live on campus or off, whether you live in an apartment/condo, townhouse, or single family home, unless someone is subsidizing it, you are almost certainly spending the biggest chunk of your income on your abode.

If your rent is $400 per month and you spend five years pursuing your PhD, over the course of your studies you will spend $24,000 on rent. If your rent is $1,000 per month and you spend six years pursuing your PhD, you will spend $72,000. These are staggering numbers, especially when you compare them to your annual stipend. Your decision of where and with whom to live is almost certainly the most financially impactful budget decision you will make during graduate school.

Housing is a very tricky expense category to budget. There is no argument that you need somewhere to lay your head. A certain fraction of your housing spending is simply a baseline that covers a necessity. (That is, unless you can get really creative, such as by living in a van.) But you can’t write off your entire housing expense as a “need,” especially if you then let yourself off the hook from evaluating its cost carefully. A fraction of your housing spending is “want” as well. Perhaps you are paying a bit more for a desirable location, an amenity, extra square footage, updated features, a parking spot, or solitude. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to upgrade from a Spartan home, but you must be honest with yourself about what aspects of your housing you could dispense with if push came to shove.

What makes housing even more special in terms of your budget is that it is a fixed expense. Once you settle on where you’ll live, your housing costs are locked in for the term of your contract. It’s difficult to change your housing costs because that involves moving or adding/subtracting a roommate. That means that you can lock in a high rate – or a low rate. Fixed expenses represent excellent opportunities for cost reduction. If you are looking for a simple, long-lasting way to reduce your spending, target a fixed expense. You have to make the decision to reduce it and put in the effort one time to carry out your decision, but after that you have the lower rate set every single month in perpetuity. And what better fixed expense to target for reduction than your largest one, housing?

The most remarkable aspect of your housing decision is that you typically have to make its first iteration before matriculating into your graduate program. If you are moving to a new city, you have to search for and secure your housing with next to no knowledge of the rental market, possibly sight unseen or after one scouting trip. Therefore, your first dwelling in graduate school may not be the most optimal for you financially. Although you should ask for advice from older graduate students when you make that initial housing decision, nothing is as informative as actually living in your city for a few months or a year.

If you haven’t yet moved once within your grad school city, take the opportunity right now to re-evaluate your current living situation. You likely have a totally new perspective on the decision compared to the last time you made it. Even if you have moved once with an intimate knowledge of the local housing market, your financial goals and budget evolve with time; perhaps you are different now and you require a new housing arrangement. It takes some patience and commitment to decide to move and then wait several months to follow through, but a significant enough reduction in housing expense makes the process worthwhile.

[The decision to purchase a home while in graduate school has an enormous financial impact. There is a great amount of financial risk associated with buying a home (both upside and downside). Buying a home is more expensive in the short term while renting is more expensive in the long term. The problem is that no one can predict whether your time in graduate school is short-term or long-term. The housing market could boom or bust during your tenure at your university. You might end up with a home that needs a lot of costly repairs. You could arrange for renters who essentially pay your mortgage for you, or end up with a landlord’s nightmare. You have to make careful calculations and considerations, but there is always a gamble involved. If you are already a homeowner, there are still a few ways for you to reduce your housing costs, such as selling and moving, taking on a roommate, or refinancing your mortgage.]

Have you re-evaluated your housing costs since you moved to graduate school? If you were able to reduce your spending on housing, what would you do with your extra cash flow?

The Best Kind of Frugality for a Busy Grad Student

March 8, 2017 by Emily

When you live on a stipend, frugality is a way of life. You know you can’t live a freewheeling lifestyle on your grad student income, at least not without racking up massive debt. But the approach you take to frugality has an enormous effect on how restrictive you perceive your lifestyle to be and how much time you spend on spending less. When you have a dissertation to write, you don’t want to be spending hours each week scrimping and saving. Effective frugality for a grad student has to be automatic.

The best kind of frugality minimizes spending on what’s least important to you so that you can divert your money to what’s most important to you – without you compromising the time you’re suppose to devote to your studies. And practicing frugality doesn’t mean that you will feel deprived or be living paycheck-to-paycheck. You can use frugality to give yourself a leg up on wealth creation, even during grad school.

What is the best kind of frugality?

First, we recognize that the best kind of frugality is unique to each individual. Frugality is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, there are popular approaches and strategies, but you still get to pick and choose which practices you will adopt. If spending money in a certain category enables you to live your values – and cutting back in that area would impede that – keep spending there. Move your search on to another category for potential cuts. Of course, the reality of living on a stipend may force you to revisit your valued category, but it should be last on the list for cutbacks.

Second, the best, most effective frugality preferentially targets your largest expenses. Third, once you do the work to reduce those expenses one time, your frugality keeps the expenses low in perpetuity, either because they are fixed expenses or because the frugal practice has become habit (ideally, an effortless habit).

Think of frugality as an 80/20 problem. You can get 80% of your total reduction in spending from 20% of your expenses, if those expenses are the largest ones in your budget. You can eliminate 10 small expenses that won’t add up to as much as one partial cut to a large expense.

Target your largest expenses first

When you’re searching for places to cut back in your spending, start at the top. Using your budget, any past spending data you have, or your memory, rank your expense categories from largest to smallest. Your largest categories likely include rent/mortgage, transportation, and groceries, and other possibilities are eating out/alcohol, entertainment, travel, utilities, childcare, and shopping.

Once you have your ranked list, process each spending category from largest to smallest, brainstorming ways you could reduce your spending in that area. Use resources like our Frugal Practices or frugality websites to target each spending category. Seriously evaluate if you can implement one of your ideas in each category.

Sometimes the prospect of reducing your spending on a very large expense is quite daunting. You may have contracts in place that limit your ability to change the expense for up to a year. Often, reducing a large expense will take quite a bit of work. People tend to be very psychologically resistant to change as well. But you have to focus on how much your quality of life can be improved in other areas by taking those steps.

There may be quite a delay from the day that you decide to reduce your spending on a large expense to the day that you accomplish it. Deciding to reduce this kind of expense isn’t as immediately rewarding as implementing a frugal strategy that you can benefit from immediately. But don’t let that deter you from planning and following through on your idea. While you wait out the contract or research the decision, keep track every month of how much money will be freed up by the change and imagine what you could be doing with it.

Reduce your fixed expenses

The best kind of frugality happens in the background of your life without you having to pay any attention to it whatsoever. When you reduce a large fixed expense, you practice that frugality without even noticing it. (The corollary is that fixed spending is easy to let inflate, as well, since it’s not an active decision.) If it was difficult to reduce that expense in the first place, like getting out of a contract, it’s pretty difficult to reverse the measure, too.

This is unlike any strategy that takes willpower or time to enact. In a tough or busy moment, you could easily forgo that strategy and return to your higher-spending ways. Reducing a fixed expense locks in that lower rate, at least for a period.

Make a habit of reducing your variable expenses

Some of your larger expense that are ripe for reduction are variable expenses, so you lose the benefit of locking in the lower rate like with a fixed expense, but they are still worth pursuing when you’re looking to reduce your spending.

The key to reducing a variable expense is to make your frugal strategy a habit. After establishing the strategy, you should automatically follow it unconsciously and without having to use willpower. Until you reach that point, you should use whatever prompting strategies work for you to remind you to follow the strategy. It won’t feel natural at first, but keep at it.

However, if you continue to chafe against the habit after weeks or months of trying it out, it’s probably not for you. Don’t use your limited time and energy forcing a frugal strategy that refuses to become a habit or takes up too much time or energy.

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Experiment

The best traits to cultivate with respect to your frugality are creativity and daring. Especially with respect to your variable expenses, ask yourself what you really have to lose by trying something new. If possible, give each frugal strategy a one-month trial. That should be enough time to get over your resistance to change, evaluate the strategy, and possibly create a new habit. If it doesn’t work out – and if you get really creative, not everything will – you can go back to your old ways. Of course, if a strategy requires becoming locked in or an up-front cost, do you research before leaping.

A PhD is a long haul in grad school. If you adopt the attitude toward frugality outlined above, think how many different frugal strategies you can try out over the years. Even if you only made habits of 20% of them, that could impact your spending enormously. One of the great benefits of living on a stipend is figuring out what is important for you to spend on and what isn’t. If you maintain the comfortable but low lifestyle you fine-tune in grad school after you start earning more from your real jobs – probably with a few judicious upgrades! – you can start making huge strides in increasing your net worth.

What fixed expenses have you reduced during grad school? What frugal strategy did you try out that eventually became a habit?

What Grad Students Can Learn from the FIRE Community

February 20, 2017 by Emily

At first blush, graduate students and the FIRE community don’t have much in common. FIRE stands for Financial Independence/Retiring Early; it is a movement to retire or reach financial independence (working becomes optional) very early in life, often by age 30 or 40. FIRE aspirants usually have high-paying jobs that they wish to stay in for only a handful of years, whereas graduate students are taking a large (theoretical) pay cut to acquire training that will set them up for long, productive, not necessarily high-paying careers.

Further Reading: Early Retirement Isn’t for Us

However, I think there is a great deal that graduate students can learn from the FIRE community (and vice versa), financially and otherwise, even if they do not have the same goals.

1) They have a clear vision of what their future will hold.

FIRE people regularly fantasize about what they will do in retirement/upon reaching financial independence. They do so in detail. They have a plan for where they will live and travel, how they will fill their days, what skills they will use or learn, who they will spend time with, and how they will serve their communities. This detailed picture steels them for the sacrifices they are making in the present and motivates them to reach their goal on schedule.

Unfortunately, it’s fairly common for graduate students to apply because graduate school is the next step in their educational progression or because they haven’t been exposed to careers outside academia. Even those who matriculate with a career in mind (usually research and/or teaching) decide against pursuing it in the course of their training. This lack or loss of career focus usually results in students languishing during their training or wasting effort on projects or skill acquisition that won’t serve them later on – not to mention the time not spent on appropriate networking. The clearer the career goal, both for students pursuing academia and those pursuing alternative careers, the more effective the student’s training can be.

2) They have a roadmap to their goal and obsessively track their progress.

Another lesson along the same lines is that FIRE people have a detailed plan for how and when they will reach financial independence. They know exactly how much more money they need to earn, into what vehicles they will save and invest, and how they are going to maintain their lifestyles in the meantime. They track their financial progress on detailed graphs and spreadsheets.

Grad students do create, from time to time, plans for their research progress, but then the plan always seem to go awry or get delayed. That is the nature of research. But the more closely a grad student can stick to a detailed plan, checking off experiments or sources one by one, the better off she will be in terms of keeping her motivation and productivity high. There should be an increasingly clear picture of what the end point will be as time goes by.

3) They work their tails off.

FIRE people tend to be super hard workers. They often have demanding primary jobs, on top of which they might add one or more side income streams to get to financial independence even faster. FIRE bloggers additionally document their experience online.

There is no doubt that grad students can work hard, but many fall into a pattern of working in fits and starts, such as in advance of deadlines. The uncertainty of the progression through grad school exacerbates this tendency. It’s very difficult to push yourself to work hard when you’re not sure where the hard work is leading (see points above).

4) They are uber frugal.

When I jonined the financial blogging community and started reading about other people trying out frugal strategies and challenging themselves to no-spend weeks and months, I wasn’t very impressed. That version of frugality was just my normal life living on a stipend!

But FIRE people really know what they are doing when it comes to frugality – they are an extreme breed. The bar for frugality was set early on by Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme (a PhD scientist!), who lived in an RV for a time. While not many FIRE people go that far, they have become masters of lifestyle cost minimization in a variety of creative ways. Grad students looking for ways to cut their lifestyles further can take some pointers from other FIRE bloggers like Mr. Money Mustache and the Frugalwoods.

5) They save like mad.

There is no doubt that FIRE people understand the power of compound interest. They have taken it completely to heart. They are mad for investing and building up a large portfolio quickly so they can utilize the 4% rule to fund their lifestyles in perpetuity. Certainly many graduate students understand the power of compound interest as well. But some grad students I talk with just haven’t gotten around to starting to invest yet. Some think it’s not really worth getting started because they could only invest a small sum or a small stream. But the fantastic thing about compound interest is that, given enough time and a decent rate of return, it can turn even small sums into staggering ones. A FIRE person knows that putting away an extra $10, 50, 200 or whatever amount really does make an impact. Your savings rate is the most important factor in determining your ultimate portfolio balance, not the rate of return that you get on your investments.

Further reading: The 4% Rule and the Search for a Safe Withdrawal Rate; How Important Is Your Rate of Return?; Starting Down the Road to Financial Independence? Don’t Obsess Over Investment Returns, but You MUST Obsess Over This.

Graduate students really have stepped off the beaten path when it comes to education and career, even though it doesn’t feel like it inside academia. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to take a look at other unusual but highly successful communities to adopt their best practices. Grad students would certainly benefit from taking a few pages out of the FIRE community’s book, even if their objective is not financial independence and early retirement.

Budgeting Methods

January 22, 2017 by Emily

Your budget and budgeting method will be unique to you as an individual. You need to find a method that serves the purposes you set for it without being too onerous for you to follow. Below are a few common ways to budget – you can mix and match as best suits you.

Line Item Budget

The line item budget is probably what you think of when you hear the term “budget.” You start with your net income each month and create a line item for each goal or expense that includes the category and amount. The expenses included are your fixed and variable expenses that occur every budgeting period. This type of budget will be the same every month, only evolving as your expenses change with time, so it works best for people who have very regular income and expenses.

Your objective is to spend exactly (fixed expenses) or less than (variable expenses) the amount of money allocated in each of your line items. Be sure to keep a line item for miscellaneous/unanticipated expenses as well; expenses always pop up that don’t exactly fall into one of your categories. This budget resets between each budgeting period, so you’ll need a plan for what to do with your excess money when you come in under budget or your deficit when you come in over budget.

If you want to keep a monthly line item budget, Mint is a great tool to help you track your spending and match it against the line items in your budget.

One of the pitfalls to line item budgeting for a graduate student is the periodic occurrence of large irregular expenses that overwhelm your miscellaneous line item. One solution to this issue is to use targeted savings accounts.

Unbudgeting

The unbudgeting method is about as simple as a budget can get. From your net income, you set up a savings rate for one or more of your goals and let the rest of your money be unstructured. The only tricky part is to keep from overspending your remaining money in each pay period. In this method of budgeting, you can be confident that you are meeting your goals, yet you don’t feel restricted. This kind of budgeting is great for people who want to work regularly toward goals but don’t want to feel limited in how they spend their money each month.

You don’t really need budgeting software to unbudget, but it is helpful to track your expenses manually or automatically so you know when to stop spending.

Further Reading: 4 Easy Money Management Solutions for Anti-Budgeters

Unique Budget Every Month

If you want to be more exact and directive about your budgeting, you can create a unique zero-based budget every month (aka the Dave Ramsey Method). Every month (or every pay period), you calculate your unique income and project your unique expenses. You give every single dollar an assignment for the month and make sure that it is carried out. This is on the intensive side for budgeting because it requires scrutiny of the coming month and must be completed fresh every month. This budgeting method is great for people who have irregular income, are intensely repaying debt or saving, or have relatively large discretionary income month to month.

Dave Ramsey’s budgeting software that follows this method is Every Dollar.

Envelope Method

The envelope method is a longer-term spin on the line item budget. You divide up your net income into envelopes (categories) for all your fixed, variable, and irregular expenses, then spend down those envelopes. With this system, the budget doesn’t have to reset after every month, but you can continue to accumulate money in your envelopes until it is needed. You can also smooth your spending in your regular budget categories over a few months. For example, you could stock your freezer and pantry in one month of high grocery spending, then eat it down over a few months of lower grocery spending as you build up cash for the next stockpiling month. This budgeting method works well for people whose expenses are not very regular.

One example of software that uses the envelope method is Mvelopes.

Targeted Savings Accounts for Irregular Expenses

January 22, 2017 by Emily

Irregular expenses – expenses that occur only once or a few times per year – are the bane of the grad student budget. As stipends are so limited, it is rare to find a graduate student whose money management system hasn’t been stressed by an irregular expense. Examples of irregular expenses common to grad students are quarterly or yearly tax payments, university fees or research-related expenses, travel, insurance premiums, repair/maintenance costs, shopping (electronics, clothes, home, etc.), entertainment, and gifts.

The best way to handle irregular expenses is to save for them in advance. First, you’ll have the cash on hand when the irregular expense occurs, eliminating the need to scramble to find additional cash flow that month or to carry a balance on a credit card. Second, anticipating your irregular expenses forces you to budget over the course of a year instead of just a month, which means you can better weigh your spending options against one another instead of making last-second calls on what to purchase and what to forgo.

A system of targeted savings accounts organizes your savings for irregular expenses. From each paycheck, you save a small amount of money into each targeted savings account, which are designated according to their expense category. Then, when an irregular expense occurs, you pay for it using the money that has built up in the targeted savings account.

Would you like a one-page worksheet that helps you brainstorm your irregular expenses? It includes the three questions to ask yourself to map out your upcoming year and a list of the most common irregular expense categories. Sign up below to receive your worksheet!

Further Reading: Weather Irregular Expenses on Your Grad Student Stipend with Targeted Savings Accounts (a Personal Finance for PhDs Guide); A Simple Trick to Save More Money (It Isn’t Automating); Are These Budget Busters Derailing Your Spending Plan?

A Low Income Is a Blessing in Disguise

November 7, 2016 by Emily

Believe it or not, the time you spend in graduate school earning a stipend – the very challenge that can make this period so infuriating – might very well become, in retrospect, one of most valuable times in your financial life. The value will not primarily be in the money you earn but rather the financial lessons you learn through the struggle.

(I am not calling an insufficient income – an income that doesn’t pay your basic expenses – a blessing in disguise. While it may teach you some valuable lessons, the bad certainly outweighs the good when you can’t buy food or clothing or you are racking up debt. In this post I am referring to low but sufficient stipends that are more or less living wages.)

In some cases, grad school can be a monetarily fruitful time, such as if you use your stipend to increase your net worth. But even without setting intentional financial goals, every grad student who is challenged by her stipend will learn financial lessons. These hard-won skills can be carried forward into your post-grad school life to benefit you immensely – whether or not you experience a big jump in income.

1) Budgeting

Every grad student with a low income develops a budget mindset, whether it is explicit or implicit. There is no out-earning poor spending decisions in grad school as there might be with a higher professional income. Many grad students become quite skillful with creating and sticking to an official budget, which is a wonderful habit. Even those grad students who don’t have written-down budgets naturally learn the limits of their income and how to stay within them.

2) Frugality

Living well on a stipend almost certainly involves a degree of frugality, whether or not the student knows that’s what he’s practicing. Frugality doesn’t have to look like extreme couponing or hypermiling or living in a van or any one particular strategy. It can be as simple as employing a couple easy tricks in one area to facilitate spending in another. Your limited stipend gives you the motivation to explore what frugal tactics work well for you and the time to make them habits. You won’t lose those habits when you move on to your first post-grad school job; you can choose which ones to continue with and which to conclude.

3) Discover the Fine Line Between Wants and Needs

Budget-ers usually think of needs as food, housing, transportation, utilities, clothing, etc. But those of us living on limited stipends discover that each of those types of expenditures likely involves both “need” and “want” components, i.e., some of your spending fulfills the basic need and some of it exceeds it. When you’re looking for ways to cut your spending, you become start putting expenses previously thought of as necessities on the chopping block. This is really tough to do at first, but just being aware of spending areas that you don’t truly need is immensely helpful if you ever return to a time when you have to cut back, such as during an emergency.

4) Combat Lifestyle Inflation

I think that “live like a grad student” is much better advice than “live like a college student.” I’m sure I’m not the only person to experience lifestyle deflation during graduate school. Many of our peers who went straight from college to a real job put themselves immediately on a treadmill of lifestyle inflation: every year as their income increases, their living expenses increase commensurately, so that their potential for growing their wealth or putting their money into their values is squandered or hampered. Those of us who are spending many years living on a (likely static) stipend experience a solidly deflated or non-inflating lifestyle. It’s difficult to live through, but intimately discovering this deflated lifestyle is incredibly powerful once your income increases post-graduate school. You will have an internal check against mindlessly inflate your lifestyle year after year. If you continue with your deflated lifestyle to any degree when your income is higher, you can make quick progress in building your wealth.

Further reading: Is “Live Like a College Student” Good Advice?; Earning More Does Not Cure All

The theme among all these advantages is that they confer lessons and skills over a period of time that is long enough to deeply learn but not indefinite. Of course, if your income remains low, you’ll need to keep using them. If your income jumps post-graduation and you employ the skills, however, you can gain much more satisfaction from your money than someone who doesn’t have the skills. You have the option of keeping your baseline expenses low while using the rest of your money in ways that are of high value to you.