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This PhD Lecturer Found Her Perfect Side Hustle and Teaches Others to Do the Same

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Toyin Alli, a lecturer at the University of Georgia and founder of The Academic Society. Through her own blogging journey during grad school, Toyin found her passion for helping other graduate students excel in their programs. Two areas of particular need she notices were in productivity/accountability and side hustling. Toyin now teaches graduate students how to find their own perfect side hustles and gives several examples of side hustles that are well-suited for PhDs.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Learn to Side Hustle

Teaser

00:00 Toyin: And how you don’t need to be an expert. You only need to be an expert about where you are. One of my favorite quotes from someone was what’s duh to you is mind blowing to your audience.

Introduction

00:15 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Emily Roberts. This is season three, episode twelve and today my guest is Dr. Toyin Alli, a lecturer at the University of Georgia and founder of The Academic Society. Through The Academic Society, Toyin creates for other graduate students, the community and accountability structure that helped her succeed during her PhD in particular around productivity and side hustling. Toyin explains what kinds of side hustles are best suited for grad students and gives examples of highly accessible side hustles that early career PhDs can excel at. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Toyin Alli.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:02 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Toyin Alli and she is a side hustler, in fact, a side hustler who has now launched her own business, part of which is about helping other grad students, early career PhDs with their side hustles. Toyin, thank you so much for joining me today and will you please introduce yourself.

01:22 Toyin: Thank you so much for having me. I am Toyin Alli. I am from Mississippi and I’ve always loved math. I went to grad school to get my PhD in math. I went to the University of Alabama and I actually had an amazing experience at the University of Alabama in the math department. It was a very nurturing and supportive community. While I was in grad school, I started blogging towards the end and then over summer after I graduated, I put in a lot of effort into my blog and then I started my career. I’m a lecturer at the University of Georgia in the math department and I started The Academic Society to help grad students with all the things that I excelled at in grad school, as well as the things that I learned in grad school because I realized people weren’t really talking to grad students very much. I’m so happy to be here to talk to you all about what The Academic Society is about and my journey to get here.

The Grad School Exerience

02:26 Emily: When we talked before this call, you said something to me along the lines of “I kicked butt during graduate school” and that was such a completely different thing to say, righ?. That’s not the narrative that I usually hear, the self-conception that I hear from PhDs who are out of graduate school. It’s not the one that I have, certainly. So I just thought that was so refreshing to hear from you. And I assume that you bring that attitude of “I am competent and are too” to what you do with this work with graduate students. Is that accurate?

03:06 Toyin: Definitely. And I will say grad school was hard. I mean I got my PhD in math. It was not easy at all, but the experience was actually enjoyable. Not that I would want to do it again, but I actually had some great takeaways from grad school. I made some great friends and I realized that my department was very supportive. I think part of it was that I came in with a bunch of women, which is pretty rare in the math department and we all had the same fellowship. It was for underrepresented groups in your field. There were at least maybe a seven women who started with me in my grad program and we worked together. Just the whole community of my department was very nurturing and supportive, even if the program was very difficult. I will say, early on I realized that grad school was different from undergrad and my time was not structured anymore. I knew I needed to have structure, it’s a part of my personality, so I imposed my own structure on my grad school experience. I made a schedule every single semester, even if it was different and somehow setting up my organization helped me to be more productive in grad school and get stuff done. My advisor really advised me well and just a great experience. I just want every grad student to feel that way, even though I know they don’t, to just to have some sense of joy in grad school, which is pretty rare.

04:45 Emily: That definitely makes sense to me. We’re skipping ahead a little bit to talking more about your business, but I can see how you can help other graduate students learn those skills that you developed during grad school and that you found really helpful and around having a community because maybe they don’t have that built in community of like this great cohort that they’re coming in with. But hey, the internet, we can find that kind of thing online now.

Blogging as a Side Hustle

05:08 Emily: Okay, let’s not skip ahead too far. Let’s go back to your days in graduate school when you were blogging and I know you blogged about different subjects at different times. You were sort of casting around. Something that you told me before that I really identified with was that you had, I believe leading up to graduate school, lost all of your hobbies. You were so singularly focused on academics. I had that experience too. My hobby was sleeping. I told people that. I mean, I needed sleep, that was true. So tell me about these things that you were trying out as you were trying to find some things to do with your time.

05:40 Toyin: I was doing an interview or something and someone asked me, “What are your hobbies and what do you like to do?” And this was when I was well into graduate school and I said, “I don’t know. I was just a grad student. That’s what I do.” And I remember thinking that when I was younger, I had all of these things that loved to do. I was so into fashion. I loved beauty stuff. I loved hair, I loved different fandoms. I was super into movies and TV stuff. I don’t know, I just felt like I had more interests before I started grad school. And I was like, “Well, why should grad school change who I am that much? I need to have something outside of grad school.”

06:23 Toyin: I discovered blogging on Pinterest and I thought it sounded cool. I should try and start a blog. I didn’t really know what to talk about, so I just talked about my experiences in grad school and I kind of brought in the fashion element, writing about what I would wear to teach my classes, what I would meal prep for the week for school, how I organize my desk in my office and things like that. I really found a passion surrounding organization, productivity, as well as style and fashion and stuff like that.

06:56 Emily: Was that one single blog that you then talked about these different things? Or did you have different iterations of these side hustles/blogs?

07:07 Toyin: That was one blog. It was called Your Unfading Beauty. Me and my friends always joked because when you read it, it looks like “you run fading beauty” and it was just supposed to be about me. It was just one blog where I talked about all of these things. And then after grad school, I took a course on how to run a fashion blog. The thing that the person said was that the fashion or style niche is very oversaturated so you have to bring in something extra or be super niche and talk about one thing in fashion. I asked myself, “What am I uniquely kind of qualified to talk about and what am I interested in?” Here I was, a grad student, I had never really had a job before and it was the summer after I graduated starting my job as a lecturer. I didn’t know anything about personal finance but as a mathematician whose research area actually had to do with financial and economic policy. I found I was kind of qualified to talk about finance. My blog was fashion and finance for newly minted professionals. I talked about what I discovered regarding how to learn about personal finance because I never learned it before. I transitioned from talking about everything to talking about style and finance and how to manage a budget and things like that when you’re new to a career. Later on that got draining and then that’s when I started The Academic Society.

08:43 Emily: You really found like a crossover point that probably very few other people were looking at. Of course I love it and I would read that blog. Let’s step back a little bit because we are talking about side hustling during this episode. Did you monetize any of those blogs, before we get to the academic society, your current website?

09:01 Toyin: Just barely. I did a lot of affiliate marketing where you have a link to something that you like and that your audience may like and when your audience clicks your link to purchase, you may get a commission for that thing. I did Amazon Affiliates and I also did Shopstyle Collective, I think that’s what it’s called, for the fashion thing. I could like link to the different outfits that I wore and get a commission. I would not say that was very lucrative, but that’s where I started. That’s also what I did with my fashion and finance blog. Then I realized for affiliate marketing to be really, really profitable, you have to have a huge audience. You had to have a lot of people to click on these things.  I really wanted to find something that I didn’t have to have a huge audience for. What I’ve learned since then is having your own products or service-based business is really helpful and you don’t have to have a huge audience to be profitable from things like that.

Other Side Hustle Experiences During Grad School

10:19 Emily: That’s setting us up really nicely for the next phase, but before we get there, did you have any other side hustles during graduate school, maybe unrelated to the blogging stuff?

10:30 Toyin: Actually, no. Math departments are very much a service department. Almost every major comes through our department, so we need a lot of people to teach.  Grad students taught, so along with my graduate teaching assistantship, I would teach two classes and I had a stipend from that. Math grad students are actually pretty well paid so I didn’t think that I needed the extra income. I didn’t really have to do any side hustling and I didn’t other than my affiliates.

Conceptualizing The Academic Society

11:05 Emily: Okay, so you’ve had these couple different blogs, you’re talking about fashion and stuff, but then you had this realization affiliate marketing wasn’t the best fit for you. I know that’s a really tough field to get into, so you were looking more into service-based businesses, creating your own products. How did you hit upon The Academic Society, your current business?

11:25 Toyin: I discovered the world of online course making and I took a course on making a course. The instructor of that course, Mariah Coz, she’s really big in the course-making industry, said typically the people you teach are where you were six months to two years ago. At that point I was trying to monetize my fashion and finance blog and I was going to create a course related to that. Then, when she said that, I asked myself, “Where was I? I was actually in grad school applying for jobs.” I actually got offered three positions really early and I thought, “Oh, I did a great job applying for jobs. That’s where I was. Maybe I can help grad students apply for academic jobs.” My first course was how to build an amazing application packet to apply for jobs. I said to myself, “This is not fashion and finance, but I’m interested in this. Maybe I like to help grad students and I actually did amazing in grad school, maybe I should help grad student.” Thus, The Academic Society was born.

12:39 Emily: I love that tip of looking to your recent past because I think a lot of people get scared off of creating courses or even blogging and putting their knowledge and perspective out there because they think “I’m not an expert,”  but as you just said, you don’t really have to be, it all depends on where your audience is. If you can find an audience that you’re just a few steps ahead of, that’s going to work out really well. Kind of like teaching a course. You don’t need to necessarily be miles and miles ahead of your students, you just have to be a few chapters ahead in some cases

Commercial

13:15 Emily: This summer I’m putting forth extra support for PhDs undergoing career transitions – into grad school, a post doc or a real job. If you’re moving onto the next stage in your career or thinking about it, please visit PFforPhDs.com/next to check out my articles, webinars and coaching program. Allow me to come alongside you during this transition to ensure that you set yourself up for financial success.

Monitizing A Blog Through Courses

13:44 Emily: That’s how you discovered who you wanted to serve through The Academic Society. Now your business is a little bit more developed. What are the different income streams and what are the different ways that you make money through The Academic Society?

14:01 Toyin: Before I do answer that, I do want to go back really quickly to what you said about like teaching and how you don’t need to be an expert. You only need to be an expert about where you are. One of my favorite quotes from someone is “What’s duh to you is mind blowing to your audience.” Even when you’re teaching, I’m always only two days ahead of my students.

14:22 Toyin: The Academic Society was pretty tough to monetize. Luckily I have a job where I don’t have to have the extra income because I realize trying to sell to grad students is really difficult because grad students don’t make a lot of money and I wouldn’t feel right charging a lot for my products and services to grad students because I know the struggle is real as a grad student. I had some pretty cheap things. I learned from the course model of business. I started with courses. I had my job application crash course, as it is known as now. I also had the grad school toolkit where I taught graduate students how to use Trello to organize their life and grad school experience. They were very cheap products, but I ended up making them free and using them to build my audience. I decided to not be instantly profitable in The Academic Society because I was so passionate about helping grad students. I decided the profitability will come later. I think it’s really important to help grad students. I just decided to make all my content free at first until I built my audience. Now, my email list is over 600 and is big enough. I know exactly what I can help my grad students with and I can create things that they really, really want.

15:55 Toyin: Last winter I was saying, “okay, what do my people really need?” I have a Facebook group for Grad students and upon entry I asked them what do they struggle most with grad school? All of them say time management, productivity and motivation. What can I offer them that will help them with this? That’s when I came up with my program, The Productivity Accelerator and it’s a two week program. I called it a productivity program, but it’s really more accountability. When students join that program, I pair them up with another grad student to be accountability partners because in my business, I actually do have an accountability partner who also owns a business. I’ve grown so much just from being in that partnership. I think this will be helpful for grad students and I remember when I was in grad school, I had all of those women that I could work with, they were my accountability partners. Other grad student need accountability; I can give them accountability partners and then we can work together. I decided virtual coworking sessions will be part of the program and we would do Pomodoro method, where we work for 25 minutes, take a break for five, work for 25 minutes, take a break for five. That’s The Productivity Accelerator. You join the program, you get partnered up, I do a couple of group coaching sessions, and we just work every day in the afternoon and at night. I also have grad students who facilitate the coworking session so it’s not just me, you really get to know the other grad students in the program. Even I was the most productive I’ve ever been in The Productivity Accelerator. I am currently running a free mini course to help grad students and academics start their own side hustle. When they finish the mini course, they have the option to join my program, Side Hustle Summer School, which is a little course on how to take your side hustle idea to market. Now I’m currently writing a book, #GRADBOSS: A Grad School Survival Guide, and I will have a book as part of monetizing The Academic Society as well.

[* This is an affiliate link. Thank you for supporting PF for PhDs!]

18:03 Emily: That is so fun and I love that you listen to your audience and were trying to really tap into what they were telling you that you needed. I love that idea of having the, the productivity, especially the accountability. Even within personal finance, accountability – people don’t want it, but it’s so effective, if you can get it in a good way. So, yeah, that sounds really fun.

Different Types of Side Hustles for Grad Students

18:28 Emily: Let’s talk more about Side Hustle Summer School and side hustling in general. Aside from blogging, you were not a side hustler during your grad degree, you didn’t have a need for it, but if someone either does have a need or just once extra income or something to do, what are some ideas for how they can side hustle during grad school?

18:49 Toyin: I definitely think a decision needs to be made if they want to be instantly profitable or have a slow build and become profitable later. What I did with my business was a slow burn. It took two years to become profitable. That was because I was passionate about what I was doing and I was okay with waiting, I had a job. But I would say if you want to be profitable immediately you should have a service-based business where you provide something for someone else or you do something for someone else and you only need one client to make money instantly. You don’t need a big audience and it’s probably someone you know that can be your first client. I actually wrote a blog post called “Nine Cheap and Easy Side Hustles for Grad Students and Academics”.

19:35 Toyin: It doesn’t have to cost money to start a side hustle. You don’t need a website. You just need to let people know what you’re doing. You probably just need like an email address and a PayPal account. Something that grad students and academics can do is tutoring. By being in grad school, you are an expert in your field, especially to undergraduates or high school students, so you can tutor them. Something that’s really interesting is being a virtual assistant. I know you have a virtual assistant and you can help someone else who owns a business by doing a little task for them or being a social media manager. If you’re great at social media and you know what kinds of posts perform on different social media platforms, you can help a business who doesn’t know or doesn’t have time to invest in learning all about that. Especially old brick and mortar businesses, they don’t really know how social media works, so you can help them.

20:33 Emily: I want to jump in and say my virtual assistant is actually a grad student. Hey Jewel! I went to my own email list when I was looking for someone to help me with my podcast editing and a lot of grad students responded and ended up working with Jewel and it’s been amazing for me and I think it’s been good for her too.

20:53 Toyin: That’s so awesome. I think it’s really awesome to work with someone who has a business because you can learn from them and figure out what you might want to do for a side hustle or business and become an entrepreneur yourself, just from that experience. There are multiple ways, especially living in a college town. If you’re in grad school, you’re probably in a college town, so your professors are maybe going on sabbatical or leaving for the summer, going on conferences. They may need someone to house sit or pet sit or nanny their children. There just so many creative things that you may not think about that you are uniquely qualified to do as a side hustle and providing a service for someone else.

21:37 Emily: Thanks so much for pointing out. The way to make money right away – this month, this week – is to go for something service-based and I think that is really accessible for a lot of grad students. The examples that you mentioned were great. It’s just important to realize that developing passive income streams, which is some of the kind of things that we’ve been talking about, like developing courses or something like that – the “make money while you sleep” billing that you sometimes see in online business – that can be a great route, but it’s not immediate. It takes a long time, as you were just saying in your own journey, to build that audience that you need before you can get to that point. So, that’s not “pay your rent” money, that’s “I want to have a long-term vision and I enjoy this thing and if it makes money later on, that’s amazing”, that’s that approach over there.

Advice for Starting Your Own Side Hustle

22:30 Emily: What advice do you have for a current grad student or an early career PhD who wants to develop a side hustle? What advice do you have for them for figuring out what is going to work best for them?

22:43 Toyin: I like to start with three things: coming up with an idea based on your why, like what you want to do; figuring out who you can help; and also knowing your financial goals. I think those are the top three things you need to be able to come up with a great idea that will work for you. In my mini course that people take before Side Hustle Summer School, I always ask them, what are the things that you are good at? And also, to go out to their friends and family and ask them what do they come to you for? It may surprise you. I actually did this exercise and asked my friends and family, “what do you think I’m good at, what have you come to me for it?” and I was blown away at their answers. They were very kind and they pointed out some things I actually never thought about.

23:32 Toyin:  Figuring out what you’re good at, figuring out if that thing that you’re good at can help someone else, and then figuring out, okay, who would actually want this thing that I could offer and who could actually afford the thing that I could offer? And figuring out how to price it based on how much you actually need to make. It determines how elaborate and high level your product will be. You can make something that could be pretty cheap or you can build up the client experience to make it more expensive to fit your needs as well. But yeah, figuring out what you’re good at and how you can help someone I think is the best way.

24:14 Emily: I think, as we were kind of talking about earlier, grad school can take a toll on your mental health. This imposter syndrome, obviously is totally widespread. I just want to say, grad students, you are good at something. Definitely. Even if it’s primarily academically related, like you have found with your own business. You are good at something. You can offer things to someone else. If you go through these exercises that Toyin is talking about, if you take her mini course, etc., you will be able to discover something in this area that will be an effective side hustle for you. Toyin, please tell us where people can go if they want to jump into this mini course, maybe even prior to taking Side Hustle Summer School?

24:59 Toyin: I have a mini course that has a five lessons. You can do it in five days and it takes you from getting your idea to coming up with a way to monetize it. If you want to just go to my website, it’s theacademicsociety.com and you can go to theacademicsociety.com/side-hustle-cheatsheet, you will get a cheat sheet full of all of the logistics of starting a side hustle as well as the workbook for all of the lessons in the mini course and you’ll be invited to the Facebook group where the mini course is hosted. You can find all of this at theacademicsociety.com.

25:43 Emily: We will also add all of those links into the show notes as well as you know, I’ve already done several podcasts episodes on people who have side hustled during graduate school or after psi or after graduate school, so we’ll add links to those previous episodes as well so you can get even more ideas for what to do next. Toyin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for lending your expertise in this area.

26:06 Toyin: Thank you so much for having me! I really enjoyed this.

Outtro

26:10 Emily: Listeners, I’m so glad you joined us for today’s episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for a PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, a survey, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. See you in the next episode! The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive, and it’s shared under cc by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Jewel Lipps.

How to Make Money without Working: Credit Card Rewards and 529s

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In this episode, Emily interviews Seonwoo Lee, a PhD student in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. Seonwoo has mastered two methods to earn extra money without “working.” Emily and Seonwoo discuss in detail their experiences with garnering credit card rewards and give both beginner and advanced tips. Seonwoo also explains a 529 hack he discovered to reduce his state tax bill that is applicable in as many as 30 states. They also briefly touch on several other methods to make money without working that are readily accessible for early-career PhDs.

Links mentioned in episode

make money without working

0:00 Introduction

1:14 Please Introduce Yourself

Seonwoo Lee is a PhD student in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. He did his undergraduate at Cornell. He pursued a number of ways to make money without actually having a second job.

1:48 Why have you tried to make money without working?

Seonwoo says that if you do it right, you can make more money per hour than working a traditional job. He says it gives you more flexibility, since you can do as much or as little as you want.

There is some effort involved in pursuing these strategies, but it’s not as much time you would put into working if you had a second job. Additionally, some people are prevented from officially working in other capacities, either by the terms of their contract or by their student visa. The strategies they’ll talk about are probably available to any PhD student or postdoc.

3:07 What are the two topics that we’ll go into detail discussing? What are some other strategies?

Seonwoo will discuss credit card rewards as well as banking sign up bonuses. Second, he’ll talk about the 529 trick to save money on your state taxes.

Emily mentions other ways to make money without working.

  1. Emily has sold items when she’s moved as part of a downsizing process. She has sold items on craigslist.
  2. Another option is Ebates *. Here, you make purchases through the Ebates platform and you are selling your information in exchange for money.
  3. Emily presents short term investing in taxable accounts as an option to make money without working. She and her husband paid off student loans through mid-term investing.
  4. Other options are receipt apps like Ibotta, where you upload your receipts and you sell your information to get cash back.
  5. Also, there is the strategy of “car wrapping,” which is wrapping your car in an advertisement and you receive money based on how much you drive. Emily recommends listening to the How to Money podcast for more information on car wrapping.

* This is a referral link. If you sign up and spend $25 through Ebates, you’ll receive a $10 bonus to your account and I’ll receive a referral fee. Thank you for supporting Personal Finance for PhDs!

7:19 How do the credit card rewards and sign up bonuses work?

Seonwoo begins with the caveat that if you can’t manage credit cards responsibly, you should not pursue credit card rewards in any form. If you pay any interest at all when you do this, you are likely not going to reap the benefits of rewards. Emily adds that you already need a good or excellent credit score to pursue these strategies. If you carry a balance on your credit card, this strategy is not for you. Emily says make sure you are using your credit card like a debit card, and if you are you can consider this strategy.

Further reading: Perfect Use of a Credit Card

Seonwoo says that plenty of credit cards offer sign up bonuses. These require you to spend between $500 and $4,000 within the first three months of signing. The bonuses will vary from credit card points to straight cash. The offers will range from $100 to $500 in cash or 30,000 to 100,000 points. Seonwoo says there are ways to meet these minimum spending requirements without spending more than you normally would.

Emily talks about fitting these credit cards into your normal spending. She signed up for a credit card with a minimum spending requirement of $3,000 over three months. She had to put everything she was purchasing on that one card. She picked a time of year when she had to pay for car insurance and flights. She timed signing up for the credit card with when she knew she had above average expenses. Reaching the minimum spend requirements is a hurdle for people with lower income.

Seonwoo says you can see if you can pay your rent with a credit card. He says the fee may be 3%. If that is the only thing stopping you from pursuing a sign up bonus, do the math to see if the rewards are worth it. You can see if you can put tuition or fee charges on the credit card. You can see if you can pay your bills months ahead of time. He says you can buy grocery gift cards to get the charge on the credit card, but then you can spend that gift card over a longer period of time.

Emily says that someone new to this can try it with existing spending, then they can try manipulating their spending.

13:00 Is cash back or points more valuable to a graduate student?

Seonwoo says that cash back is much easier to start with and understand. There are only so many cash sign up bonuses. If you like to optimize things, credit card rewards will be more valuable if you use the rewards for travel.

Emily says that there are cards with a regular cash back rate, like 1-2% back on spending. She says that is a good way to start. Then the next level would be switching to actively pursuing credit card rewards. To make rewards lucrative, you have to be able to redeem them. She explains that in Durham, North Carolina, she couldn’t be loyal to any one airline. But in Seattle, Washington, she makes use of the Alaska Airlines credit card and its reward system.

16:18 What are the pros and cons of the annual fee situation?

Seonwoo says a lot of cards that have sign up bonuses waive the annual fee in the first year. Seonwoo’s strategy is that he signs up for the card, meets the minimum spend requirement, and by month 11 he has decided he won’t pay the annual fee and he will close the card. He says some cards are worth the annual fee, but he wouldn’t recommend keeping the annual fee card to people with lower income.

Seonwoo says that if you cancel within 30 days of being charged the fee, you can often get a refund. Ideally, set up a spreadsheet and reminders to track your credit cards.

18:54 How much money have you made using this strategy?

In his best year for strictly cash, Seonwoo has made about $2,200 to $2,500 from sign up bonuses. He says he has more credit cards and points than he knows what to do with. Most of his rewards have been in credit card points.

Emily says when she was in graduate school and pursuing cash sign up bonuses, she and her husband together made about $1,000. This can alleviate budgetary stress.

20:38 Anything else you want to add on this topic?

Seonwoo brings up how this affects your credit score. In general, when you apply for a credit card, there is a small hit because you have an inquiry on your report. He emphasizes that the point of your credit score is to help you get low interest rate loans or good rewards credit cards. If you’re not applying for a loan in the near future, you can use the credit score for new credit cards. He applied for cards until he started getting denied. He waited a few months, then tried again and got approved. He says people stress out a bit too much about their credit score. He says people should recognize the point of the credit score.

Emily points out that there are positive affects of having several credit cards. She also mentions some cases where you need to keep your credit score high, like when you apply for a new residence or take out a mortgage.

Further reading: How to Establish Credit in the US

24:24 How do banking sign up bonuses work?

Seonwoo says that the main difference is that instead of requiring you to spend money, banking sign up bonuses require you to already have money. You sign up for a new checking account, get a couple of direct deposits in there and keep it open for at least six months, and sometimes make some transactions. You can get between $100 or $350 for signing up for that account. Some have fees, but the bank may waive the fee for students or on other terms.

Emily mentions minimum balances, and Seonwoo clarifies that high balances requirements are usually for savings accounts. Checking accounts have minimum balance between $1500 and $3000, and the percent return is 10% to 20% in six months. This is a good option for your emergency fund.

Seonwoo recommends the blog Doctor of Credit, who has several blogs on these topics.

28:54 What is a 529? What are the benefits of it?

Seonwoo explains that there are two types of 529 plans. One is a prepaid tuition plan, which he is not talking about. The other type is an investment plan. At both the state and federal level, it is not taxed when you withdraw it for education expenses. Emily compares this to an IRA, where you are not taxed on the growth of the money if you use it for retirement. Seonwoo calls it a Roth IRA for education.

Seonwoo says 30 states and the District of Columbia offer a state income tax deduction for contributing to your 529 plan. Most states require that you have a plan with that state, but they don’t require a net contribution for the year. He says you can contribute the money to get a deduction, then pull it out to pay for your expenses.

Emily says cost of living expenses can be considered qualified education expenses for the 529 plan. She explains that you can put money into a 529, then take it out to pay rent, and then you get a state tax deduction or credit. Seonwoo says even if your living expenses are $0, you can still do this. The amount is set by the university’s financial aid office room and board estimate of the cost of attendance.

Seonwoo explains his specific example at Georgia Tech. The financial aid office lists the cost of attendance estimate for room and board as more than $10,000. In Georgia, a single taxpayer can deduct up to $2,000 of a 529 contribution. His marginal tax rate is 6%, so a deduction of $2,000 saves him $120 per year in state taxes. So, he contributes $2,000 to the 529 plan and leaves it in there for 10 days, then he takes it out. This is all it takes to get the tax deduction.

36:37 Where can we go for more resources?

Seonwoo says he learned about this by going through his state tax return to look for deductions. On his blog, he has a college tag and he has a post about the 529. The site Saving for College is a good resource for 529 plans.

Emily says this is a strategy that you need to investigate for your own state. Seonwoo mentions that there are other education credits and deductions available, but you can’t double count expenses. This 529 trick makes use of the living expenses, because this is unique to this tax benefit.

Seonwoo recommends printing to PDF the page from the financial aid office that documents the cost of attendance. This is documentation to keep if you’re audited.

40:50 Final Comments

This episode is about ways to alleviate budgetary stress by leveraging your assets and optimizing your usage of financial accounts.

41:17 Conclusion

How to Successfully Plan for Retirement Before and After Obtaining Your PhD

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Brandon Renfro, a finance professor and financial advisor. Brandon shares the tortuous path that led him to his current faculty position at East Texas Baptist University and side business in retirement advising. They discuss the long-term financial effects of doing a PhD – both positive and negative – and how to have a successful retirement even if you can’t save (much) during your PhD training.

Links mentioned in episode

PhD plan for retirement

0:00 Introduction

1:05 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Brandon Renfro has a PhD in Finance. He is both an academic and a practitioner. He advises retirement advising for individuals. He does financial planning while being a tenure track professor.

2:02 What was your career trajectory?

Brandon says that he “walked backwards” or stumbled into his PhD. As an undergraduate, he planned to go to law school. He was advised to major in business in preparation for law school. He took an American enterprise course and saw a presentation about the time value of money in the retirement planning context. This presentation inspired him, so he majored in finance and loved it. He went to law school but says he crashed and burned. He was in the military and had GI bill benefits. He decided to use his GI bill benefits for an Master of Business Administration (MBA). He asked his MBA advisor about adjunct teaching. He had to have 18 graduate hours in the discipline to teach a course. He discovered he loved teaching. He decided he wanted to teach full time. He feels fortunate that he got a tenure track position at a liberal arts college in Louisiana, where he worked for three semesters. Now he is in his third semester at East Texas Baptist.

Emily points out that Brandon tried stuff and saw what stuck. Brandon agrees that this is important to explain to students today. He says many students set a goal and stick to it no matter what, even if the path isn’t right for them. He says there is a time when you should recognize if you don’t love what you’re doing and you should try something different. Brandon says he would tell his 18 year old self to major in finance, but at the time it didn’t occur to him.

Emily asks how Brandon handled the sunk costs of going to law school. Brandon clarifies that he didn’t meet the GPA requirements to continue law school but he wasn’t sad about it. He says he was miserable in law school. He had taken out loans to pay for the year in law school. He says it was $20,000 that he spent to learn that he didn’t want to be an attorney. He says if he looks at it like it’s money he spent to learn that he loves being a finance professor, it was worth it.

7:47 Given that a person has decided to do a PhD and maybe a postdoc, what are the effects of their financial outlook?

Emily starts by explaining that graduate students, postdocs, and early career PhDs have a lot of anxiety around saving for retirement. Most of these people are in their 20s or 30s and they know they are supposed to be investing for retirement. But planning for retirement feels overwhelming in the context of their competing financial demands, like student loan payments or saving for a house down payment, coupled with their suppressed income for an extended period of time.

Brandon says that if you put off starting a career to do a PhD, this will make saving and preparing for retirement a little more challenging. These are foregone years of savings. However, academics have the ability to work past typical retirement age. As a professor, you can work longer and save money for retirement for more years, even if you start work and start saving a little later in life. Emily clarifies that PhDs can add years on the back end, instead of on the front end, to the total years that they can work to save for retirement. PhDs can do this because their work is fairly intellectual, and hopefully they get better with time. It’s less daunting to add years at the end in these career paths than others. Brandon says it’s (physically) easier to talk about what you know than it is to work on a factory floor, and you can prolong the years you do this kind of work. Even as PhDs reach retirement age, they have options to be an instructor, lecturer, adjunct, or consultant. You can work less than a full time load, and still capitalize on your years of experience.

Brandon says even while you’re working in your 30s or 40s, you have the ability to leverage expertise outside the classroom. Even if you are working a full time tenure track position, you have a lot of knowledge that you can leverage in industry, even while you’re teaching. Emily shares that when she was an engineering PhD student at Duke University, she saw plenty of professors had consulting businesses or wrote books. In academia, there are many ways to step outside your primary role and leverage your expertise. Emily says that there are plenty of opportunities to have side hustles all through your career. She is part of a community of self employed PhDs, and many people’s self employed job is on the side of their full time job. Brandon believes there is a lot of potential for academics to be self employed. He says even if you were the lowest ranked student in the lowest ranked PhD program, you still have knowledge and you are already part of a select group. Emily says any PhD can find a market where their skills are valuable. They give examples of formatting and copy-editing and tutoring.

17:13 How can someone handle the income jump after the suppressed income period of being a trainee in a PhD or postdoc?

Brandon says in one phrase, avoid “lifestyle creep.” When you suddenly go from an undergraduate or PhD student lifestyle based on lower income to receiving a full time income, you need to be mindful to not immediately start living at the new income. He says you don’t need to be extremely frugal, but use a moderate amount of your new income to build your emergency savings, pay down consumer debt, and pay down student loans in order to be much better off in the long run.

Emily shares the standard personal finance advice to commit a large percentage of your raise to your financial goals. Either all of the raise or as much of the raise as you can, put it towards goals instead of your consumption spending. She says it applies even more when you have a large income jump. Most of it should be used to accelerate financial goals. When Emily and her husband finished their PhD programs, they applied this concept to their new “real jobs” income. They had several financial goals that they focused on and avoided lifestyle creep.

Brandon shares his story about buying a house. He was unsure where he would get his tenure track position, but he wanted to build equity without committing his family to a large mortgage payment. He bought a small rent house before they bought a house to live in. Emily brings up that some people rent their properties as they move, in contrast to how Brandon purchased the property purely as a rental property.

23:40 Grad students and some postdocs don’t pay into the social security system. What are the long term effects of missing out on these years of contributions?

Brandon explains that social security benefits are based on 35 years of covered earnings. Essentially, it’s an average of your highest 35 years of earnings. If you’re starting to contribute later, do the math. If you’re in your early 30s, you may be in your late 60s before you have 35 years of covered earnings. The issue is that your benefit will be calculated with some zeros in the 35 year average, which skews down your average. When you’re on the back end of your career, this may influence your decision to work for a few more years to replace some of the years where you contributed zero dollars to social security.

26:59 What steps can someone who’s in or recently been in PhD training do to mitigate negative effects of lower income and not contributing to retirement?

Brandon brings up the psychological benefit of being used to living on a small income. He says to continue to live like that for a couple of years so that you can build yourself a financial cushion and start saving for retirement. He says eventually the feeling goes away and you get used to the new level of income. Psychologically, it’s harder to start saving for financial goals later.

Emily says that this is classic personal finance advice. Sometimes the lifestyles of PhD students are lower than those of college students. She says it’s difficult to deflate lifestyle. You might see the higher paycheck from your first real job, then you lock yourself into higher housing costs or buy a new car. It’s difficult to take a step back, but it’s much easier to keep a similar lifestyle and put the new income to your financial goals and slowly work up your lifestyle.

30:16 If a person starts saving during graduate school, what kind of effect can that have on retirement?

Brandon explains the first presentation that he saw on the effect of compound interest. If you started when you were 18 years old and you saved just $2,000 per year in a retirement account, you would have a million dollars for retirement if you simply earned the average market return. He says the same is still true if you start at 30 or 32, but there are a few less years for compounding to take effect.

Emily says that even during graduate school, saving a couple hundred dollars a month is accessible. It’s not a thousand dollars every month that you need to save. The earlier you take these steps, the more and more impact it can make. It really does make a difference to take these steps earlier.

Brandon adds that at least, don’t make negative steps. Buying a cheaper car or cheaper clothes can go a long way. Emily says that the professional students, like law students, were living a higher lifestyle even though they were living on loans. She says the smallest amount of debt that you have to take on during training will make it easier for you in a few years.

35:50 What do you do for clients?

Brandon can help with anything within realm of retirement planning. He can help someone starting out. He can help graduate students and postdocs sort through their different options for retirement plans. He can help with decisions about how to invest within retirement plans. Brandon encourages you to take retirement very seriously and to think very hard about putting off retirement. He says it’s really hard to make a strong case against contributing to a plan with an employer match. He says employer match is essentially free money. Emily says an employer match is a 50% or 100% return on investment.

Emily clarifies that someone looking at different options can ask Brandon for help considering which option to prioritize. Brandon can help overcome “analysis paralysis.” Brandon says something is almost always better than nothing, and you need to just do something. He encourages you to envision your retirement and what your financial goal looks like.

40:03 Final Comments

Brandon’s contact information is at brandonrenfro.com. If anyone has a question about something that he hasn’t published an article about on his website, send him an email and he will write about it!

41:15 Conclusion