financial advice

The Importance of Financial Student Services to Graduate Students on Stipends

October 6, 2025 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Zach Taylor, a repeat podcast guest with extensive expertise in financial wellness in higher education. Zach explains why financial peer mentoring programs have become so popular at colleges and universities and why peers are not always the appropriate people to provide this service. Zach and Emily discuss why colleges and universities provide financial wellness support and how it’s beneficial to both students and institutions. Finally, Zach shares how grad/prof students, and particularly those who are non-traditional and/or experiencing financial insecurity, can access university and community resources.

Links mentioned in the Episode

The Importance of Financial Student Services to Graduate Students on Stipends

Teaser

ZW (00:00): They’re realizing that a basic needs covered student finishes on time, they’re engaged, they network, they pursue those pre-professional career opportunities so they get a job after graduation. It is in these students’ best interests, therefore should be in the institution’s best interest.

Introduction

Emily (00:28): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:56): This is Season 22, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Zach Taylor, a repeat podcast guest with extensive expertise in financial wellness in higher education. Zach explains why financial peer mentoring programs have become so popular at colleges and universities and why peers are not always the appropriate people to provide this service. Zach and I discuss why colleges and universities provide financial wellness support and how it’s beneficial to both students and institutions. Finally, Zach shares how graduate and professional students, and particularly those who are non-traditional and/or experiencing financial insecurity, can access university and community resources.

Emily (01:40): You’re probably listening to this podcast because you’re interested in improving your own practice of personal finance, and you want to learn the best PhD-specific strategies. Well, you don’t have to listen through the entire episode archive to do so. Instead, go to PFforPhDs.com/advice/ and enter your name and email there. You’ll receive a document that contains short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast to my final question regarding my guests’ best financial advice. The document is updated with each new episode release. Plus, you’ll be subscribed to my mailing list to receive all the latest updates there. Again, that URL was PFforPhDs.com/advice/. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s22e4/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Zach Taylor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:44): I am delighted to have on the podcast today a repeat guest, Dr. Zach Taylor. He was actually first on the podcast all the way back in season five, episodes 10 and 11, and it’s been such a pleasure to know Zach over the past more than five years, six plus years. I think now we’re both part of this, um, higher education financial wellness alliance community. So very concerned about, um, financial wellness in higher education. I’m there to kind of remind people, Hey, like you have graduate students on your campus too. Um, Zach does that as well because he has a PhD and in our prior episode we talked a lot about Zach’s background, childhood, um, his choice of where to attend graduate school, um, how to make that work financially, which was really challenging, high cost of living city, and lots of detail there about Zach’s background. So Zach, I would love for you to catch us up on what’s been going on for you professionally, um, personally as well, if you want in the last, you know, five plus years since our previous interview.

ZW (03:43): Absolutely. Yeah. I mean since, uh, 2020 nothing has changed, right? So I’m the exact same person doing the exact same thing, of course not. Um, yeah, so I, you know, after the, shortly after the interview came out, I graduated and earned my PhD, finished up that work, began working for a guarantee agency in doing communications consulting for minority serving institutions in the south. And uh, shortly afterwards took a tenure track position at the University of Southern Mississippi as an assistant professor of educational research and did a lot of financial wellness and financial education stuff as part of that position. And very recently I took a role that I think is really well suited to my personal background in childhood. And some of the things you talked about with me last time I chatted with you is I just started as the inaugural Director of Research and Strategic initiatives for John Burton, advocates for Youth.

ZW (04:43): So we are a nonprofit in California focused on improving the lives of foster youth and homeless youth through policy advocacy research, some direct service, making sure that every single little pot of money and every single opportunity is afforded to foster youth and homeless youth. And as a lot of folks know, California is really the epicenter for a lot of very inclusive policies, as may have been very well publicized by a certain governor of California very recently. But also there’s lots of inequity here. There are many, many foster youth. California is one of the leading, uh, states in the country, unfortunately in number of foster youth, homeless youth. And so it’s really a pleasure to be part of this organization and feel like I’m really nerding out for good <laugh> and serving other people. Um, so really happy to be back and to get caught up. And lots has changed, I’m sure for your listenership as well. But really happy to be here and chat with you again.

Peer Financial Mentoring Programs

Emily (05:44): Yes, that sounds so delightful. Oh, amazing. So we decided to focus our interview today around peer financial mentoring, which is something. We’ve never covered on the podcast before, <laugh>. So I’m really excited about this because it’s only something that I learned about through my attendance annually of the higher education financial wellness summit. Um, I noticed that a lot of financial wellness and financial education programs in schools across the country had these peer mentoring programs, but my kind of impression about it was that it’s mostly used by undergrads, mostly for undergrads. And so I’m aware of it, but I don’t necessarily talk about it that much or pay attention to it. But I think that this conversation may change my ideas about that. So can you tell me like what these programs are and like why they’re so popular?

ZW (06:30): Yes, and so over the past 20 years, higher education funding models and what is funding and formula and where the money comes from has drastically changed. And you really are seeing a rise in student employment and student employment opportunities. A lot of folks who listen to this podcast may have been federal, federal work study students way back in the day, right? Emily, you’re included in that. So that was at least the initial kind of foray into very kinda wide student employment in higher ed. But it’s kind of got this coinciding parallel development where there’s a high impact practice and very engaging successful practice of immersing students in a campus community, employing them at their school, making sure that they’re developing professional connections with their peers and with professionals who admissions financial aid, recreational sports, all sorts of stuff. But the parallel development has been this slow winnowing and cutting away of state appropriations to higher education where institutions are a little less likely now to pay somebody full-time with a bachelor’s or master’s degree to do something on campus.

ZW (07:47): And that re-envisioning on that position really has been relegated and delegated to student employees. So you’re seeing a lot of times now, especially on very large four year campuses, students doing the work that used to be done by a full-time credential, bachelor’s degree holding employee. That has been a very big shift, and especially I can speak much more to financial aid offices. It never used to be the case where a student’s financial aid paperwork was being processed by a peer, especially a peer before they graduated because of the fi-, you know, the financial security and sensitivity that information. But colleges, universities, community colleges are not in the financial point and space to be able to start saying, students can and cannot do this work. We need students to kind of do a lot of the work administratively that we do. And so that has naturally just trickled into mentoring programs and specifically peer mentoring programs of all different shapes and sizes.

ZW (08:47): I remember when I was an undergraduate, I went to an institution that I knew only really had one mentoring program. It was a summer bridge program. It was for first generation and low income students that eventually fed into Trio, the federal Trio program for low income and kind of marginalized that promise students now go to a typical college or university. It’s much more prominent the four year schools and the community colleges. But there’s peer mentoring for academic major, for extracurricular activities, for uh, for, for sports, for um, uh, social clubs and affinity groups. There are so many different types of mentoring programs because colleges and universities and institutions saw benefit of connecting peers to peers, but it’s also outta that financial necessity. So as everything in some ways kind of happens first at the undergrad level, as the financial pressures are hitting graduate schools, professional schools, law schools, medical schools, they’ll, they’re also seeing, Hey, wait a minute, a lot of these folks have a lot to offer their peers. Let’s start creating peer-to-peer mentoring programs.

ZW (09:54): And so now there are dozens of these peer-to-peer, specifically financial mentoring programs embedded in medical schools and in law schools where somebody, it’s very common tale. You might have a double major whose, uh, anatomy, physiology and business and they eventually wanna become a doctor. They go to med school, they’ve got that little bit of business background. They learned about taxation, about personal accounting, personal finance, and they’re pretty well suited and know a little bit more about money management than peers do. Who becomes a peer mentor of people who can be late twenties, thirties, forties. We know the graduate school population is very age diverse, but if you have a subject matter expertise and knowledge, you can mentor a peer across age and across difference. You’re seeing a lot more of that at the graduate school level. So that is kind of the trajectory of where peer mentoring has come from. Used to be very kind of strictly kind of social and academic. And now it’s really apparent in the financial wellness community and it’s trickled up to graduate schools now.

Emily (11:01): That’s fascinating. I was not aware that that pattern was also within like those professional schools. And it, it does make a lot of sense to me, especially if we, and I, I think this is true at a lot of . At any rate, if we saw the genesis of that from the financial aid offices, because there’s a lot of student loan counseling and so forth, very important area that would apply very well within the professional schools as well. A little bit different among funding graduate students, but still there’s a great need for it, even if the subject that you might talk about is like slightly different. So thank you so much for telling us like that, like history about it. But is this a universal good? Does everybody get exactly what they’re looking for out of a peer mentoring program? Or are there some like downsides to administering the help in this way?

Downsides of Peer Financial Mentoring Programs

ZW (11:43): Yeah, so one, if you are a peer mentor, that inherently implies that you are not a professional in the space, right? You’re a very well-educated, maybe well-intentioned peer, but you do not know everything for everybody. And there has been many documented cases at the graduate and undergraduate level where a peer gives some sort of financial advice. And we see in these kind of areas of taboo topics of areas that peers shouldn’t talk with peers about things like specific investments, gambling, betting, you know, things like that where it’s, it’s you should really be talking to a licensed professional at a financial institution about this kind of stuff. I go real professional about this. So one is a little bit of danger is when you unleash the peers who knows what information they unleash, whether it’s pre-professional, professional or otherwise, sometimes the information can be misleading or wrong or sometimes very kind of financially dangerous. So there’s also that point.

ZW (12:43): There’s also, especially at the graduate school level you just mentioned, you know, with those students that may have very different financial circumstances and maybe, maybe you are a fully funded student and, and maybe you don’t have, uh, the, the loan debt to navigate, but some students who raise their hand and want peer mentoring have such dire, specific timely needs that might be so tied to basic needs to a medical bill that has to be paid. That a a rent check has to clear that it’s so important that their issue is solved in a timely manner, otherwise they’re really at risk of of stopping out, dropping out or worse. And at that point then, do you want to put that person in that crisis situation in that very traumatic moment in front of a peer who may not be prepared to deliver trauma informed care? Are they professional enough? Do they have the resources necessary to really delegate services to someone who is in a crisis moment, is in a traumatic moment? And so we’ve seen a little bit more of this, especially at the graduate school level of students who are not fully funded. And this is particularly the case in, in medical schools where some of the medical school debt, we, we know hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?

ZW (14:14): So someone’s approaching graduation and I was talking with a colleague about this at a major public flagship in the Midwest as a medical school student. They were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and they were coming with a very dire problem related to credit card debt. They started racking up the student loan debt. That number became scary for them. So they started racking up the credit card debt and they came to a peer financial mentoring session with a peer to talk about how to consolidate $80,000 of credit card debt across six or seven different cards. And they were looking at still graduating with, you know, a little over a quarter a million dollars of student loan debt. Now that gravity, the weight of that problem and the issue and all of the very long-term ramifications it has, that’s where is this the best way to serve graduate students is by connecting with a peer? Especially when you know the earning potential of someone coming out of some graduate programs, especially in the harder sciences and law, you know, you know how to manage your money, invest well, you can be out of debt in five to 10 to 15 years very easily and beyond the track to upper middle class or or or higher lifestyle.

ZW (15:32): It becomes a little bit more of a problem with graduate students who are in the social sciences and the humanities, right? So thinking like your English PhD, it might be a very, you know, stereotypical example. What do you do with a PhD in English kind of thing? A la Avenue Q, right? What do you do with a degree in English? And at the certain point, do you wanna have somebody who is potentially racking up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt going to graduate school knowing that the earning potential of that student is much, much lower? Does a peer understand that career trajectory? It’s a very different series of tips and, and advice and counseling you give someone when the entry point into the labor market is, is gonna inherently be much, much lower, at least initially than somebody who’s majoring in a STEM field or a financial field or a law or a legal field. So you can see how you start sketching out a few of the scenarios that I’ve talked to folks about and you can really kind of begin to question great intention, great idea to connect peers with peers, especially at the graduate school level. ’cause you may be, you know, graduate schools might have more adult experience, they’d be a little bit more knowledgeable on the flip side, adults can have even more dire, even more emergency type financial situations. Do you wanna put a peer in that spot? I don’t know if it’s best practice, but schools are doing it.

Emily (16:57): Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve made some of the same like observations like, wow, this financial situation or issue that you’ve come to me with and I don’t really even do coaching. Um, this is just people who communicate with me. It’s like, this is so above my pay grade <laugh>. Like, you need, you need debt counseling or you need a bankruptcy consideration or you know, there’s, it really can escalate in the financial realm. And so I’m wondering now have you seen programs, do they have a way for peers to escalate cases? Like, hey, you really need to talk to the staff member who is my supervisor because this is now beyond the realm of my training or life experience.

ZW (17:39): Yeah, so this is a, this is much better developed from what I can tell at the undergraduate level. But here’s the undergraduate version and we can kind of transpose to graduate level is there’s got to be that trusted adult who is the trainer of these students to know, here’s the clear dividing line. If someone in your mentoring session crosses this line, here’s where you go with this issue. Many stories we’ve heard at the undergraduate level where we are triaging with a case worker or a social worker on the issue that you’re having, we are gonna connect you to a financial institution. We’re gonna connect you to someone in legal at our institution. ’cause we think this is actually potentially a crime that you may be discussing, committing related to your finances. So it could be very serious, very, very quickly.

Costs of Hiring Professional Financial Advisors for University Students

ZW (18:25): At the graduate level. Here is what I’m hearing is kind of a little bit of the problem is that typically a financial counselor, like a really professional credential person, fill in the blank about their hourly rate. I mean typically, and this is kind of what colleges and universities that I’ve work with have kind of found is if they wanted to hire and vend this out as a third party, if they wanted to have somebody kind of full-time to be a personal financial counselor for graduate students, something along 250 to $300 an hour times the number of graduate students you have times the number of hours they may work a week, it very quickly becomes very unaffordable. And then you think to yourself, okay, well how many segregated and unsegregated fees are part of this program? And there’s this whole kind of rhetoric around tacking on schools, tacking on fees for every single bit and it becomes less understandable for graduate students who are enrolling about what their financial aid may and may not cover. And what am I responsible for now and I’m not gonna get paid for the first two months of my assistantship. How do I cover these fees that are due in the first day of classes? Things like that. So schools are a little bit hesitant at the sticker shock of how much it does cost to hire professional financial advisors to work as part of kind of a, a graduate program.

ZW (19:48): And so that’s one issue that I, I think over time, especially with financial value transparency, which is a, a really current hot button issue in financial aid as well as gainful employment colleges and universities, especially at the graduate level where the student loan debt or some programs is. So high institutions need to report the indebtedness, the loan default rates, all sorts of things to the federal government for, you know, kind of basic accountability measures. As those accountability measures are even more scrutinized in the coming years, I think those graduate programs are eventually gonna come around to maybe this is a worthwhile expense, maybe if it, if it helps out with our default rate, if it helps our students be able to better manage their student loans so we don’t have this level of indebtedness upon graduation.

ZW (20:45): Is it selfish? Yes. Because the schools want their metrics to shine, they wanna maintain accreditation. I think down the road colleges will make the investment, but I think we’re just at the cusp right now of the, of the kind of mass accountability for graduate school programs. And one thing I wanted to add on is University of Chicago was a, is a very prominent example of this. Right now they are freezing admission into many graduate programs because of the cost and the indebtedness and the way that it’s really impacting some of those accountability measures. Now one solution is freezing the admission of those programs. The other solution might be though these pure financial mentoring groups and these professional financial counselors that could be embedded in graduate programs to do a little better job mitigating the impact of how expensive graduate school can be.

Emily (21:41): Yeah. As you were speaking, I started thinking, is it the responsibility of these universities to help <laugh> the students with their finances? I mean that’s something that goes to the core of what my business is, right? And what we do in our, you know, HEFWA community. But as you were just saying, the argument is there, it’s because the schools already have a vested interest in how these students’ finances turn out because of the federal loan programs. So a little bit less relevant for the PhDs, but I think it bleeds over into that area as well. Um, and I’m curious what you think about the changes that have now occurred with the one big beautiful bill act and the lifetime and annual limits on student loan, um, acquisition. At least that’ll be phased in over the next few years. Um, is that what you were speaking to in like this, you know, increased era of accountability?

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act & Graduate Student Loan Borrowing

ZW (22:27): Absolutely. There’s gonna be breaks that are pumped <laugh> on graduate student loan borrowing. There’s just going to be, and and that is why initially there’s kind of these two things happening at once. As the federal government looks at graduate programs and looks at the indebtedness of some graduates, how much they’re actually earning, how many times they’re defaulting on student loans or missing payments or requesting forbearance, whatever the case is, there’s this rise of the private student loan industry that is really going to come after graduate students. And it’s timely that you asked about this because I was talking with a financial institution that shall not be named two weeks ago and they were looking at the readability and comprehensiveness of their loan packages and offerings to graduate students because everyone is getting ready in the financial industry to swoop in and take over where the federal government has said basically, we’re gonna wipe our hands a little bit of this and kind of get out of this industry.

ZW (23:29): So one piece of advice I think that’s really, really, really critical for people pursuing graduate school is first and foremost you get that full ride and you really understand what that full ride pays for always the best deal, right? Don’t pay that stuff back, don’t take out loans that is the best, but if you’re really passionate, you wanna do it, you can’t get the full ride funding. You are going to have to learn to navigate a bit of the private loan sector and it’s gonna look very, very different than the federal student loan portfolio. And that’s one thing that, and ideally I know it’s gonna be on your radar and college and universities are gonna have to provide the education to prospective graduate students to say, your parents, your friends who might have gone to graduate school 10, 15 years ago, you’re playing different ballgame. Here are their financial options available to you. Here’s the best information we can give you right now as chaotic as some federal policy making may be right now, this is as it stands today and y’all make the best choice you can. And so I think there’s gonna be a whole nother layer of knowledge that prospective graduate students will need to understand the next couple years to make it affordable, get the best deal they can and not get taken advantage of by the private loan industry, which we know can be very predatory in nature.

Emily (24:57): Yeah, so many changes and so scary. But you know what? Student loans have been scary for people even through the federal system. And so that was, that was a broken system in need of reform as well. So we’re trying something new here and everybody’s just trying to shift and do the best that they can.

ZW (25:11): Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s actually a little bit of the, the silver lining if you can find one in the big beautiful bill is that the borrowing is going to be throttled and it’s going to inherently force people to make decisions that may not be best for their immediate educational aspirations, but are probably going to protect them financially a little bit more in the long run. Which is, it is great for, for graduate school folks because you know, so many graduate degrees are so specialized and a lot of times you, you really can’t land that dream job that is exactly what your specialty was, right? So you find yourself working in kind of disparate fields and leveraging the soft skills and other kind of competencies that you developed through graduate studies in any field, which makes people crazy employable as it is. But you’re always kind of repurposing yourself for different kinds of work in, in some ways that really does force for good or bad people to make very reasoned planned decisions on degrees and career field. People will think twice about taking out that big loan for a degree in a very niche field. And that is probably, probably good for people. It’s probably gonna be a positive for the indebtedness that folks graduated with and a better opportunity for broadly colleges and universities to do a better job of preparing students for careers and saying, you’re entering this field, you’ve made this decision, you are better aware of the career opportunities. And I think colleges and universities, especially graduate programs, will be better equipped to provide support, I think. I think it’s over. Could be, could be seen as a good thing.

Emily (27:11): Yeah, I’m just thinking that the other community that I’m part of is the graduate career consortium. So that is people who work in career and professional development for PhD students and master’s students. And I know that like there are professionals who work in that field and they also do peer mentoring as you mentioned earlier. There’s peer mentoring on resumes and interview prep and all that kind of stuff. So the model is there as well. And as you were saying, that’s becoming even more like it was already important. It’s even more important at every stage because sometimes the best financial intervention that a PhD can get is before they commit to any program, right? And making sure that the PhD is the right choice, the field is the right choice, the school is the right choice, the price point is the right choice. Um, and if not, you know, getting outta that or negotiating for a better offer or whatever needs to happen to, to put them on a more financially healthy path before the sunk costs, you know, come into play and all that sort of stuff.

ZW (28:02): Yes, absolutely.

Commercial

Emily (28:06): Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, budgeting, investing, and goal-setting, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2025-2026 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutes enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Accessing Peer Mentoring and Other Financial Services at Your University

Emily (29:25): If graduate students and professional students today want to access peer mentoring in the financial realm, um, at their universities, how can they do so?

ZW (29:34): Arguably I would have incorporated this in my graduate school search when I was looking, this is one thing that if current me could advise past me, here’s what I would’ve changed. I did not necessarily look into many student support services as part of my degree program. I was really kind of looking at can I make it work cost of living wise? Can I get a scholarship? Can I easily transport myself to and from campus? I mean that was really making sure financially that I could do it. Finances are super important, but there’s all the other services that come as part of a degree program that students really should understand because in the quote unquote compensation package of a graduate school admission letter, you’re also all of a sudden getting access to all these support services you just talked about career, career counseling offices and, and career advice.

ZW (30:32): Every arguably reputable university out there, every graduate program has somebody in career services to help you navigate. They have, they have, they have that covered. What they don’t have as covered as well is this financial wellness piece. So what I would’ve done is I would’ve dug much more into student services and said, if I need- have a-, if I have a question about my taxes at your university in this program, who can I go to? Who can I go to if I have an issue affording something emergency aid, um, I need finances to travel for this conference. If I wanna make sure to have a, an unpaid internship opportunity as part of my degree program, who do I talk to for that? I did none of that. I did none of that. And that was a big mistake. <laugh>. So I would say to all your listeners, anyone pursuing graduate school is, you gotta think about that admissions letter as a compensation package.

ZW (31:30): And there are lots of other fringe benefits of that compensation and it’s all these kind of auxiliary career services and ask, you know, do I have access to a a preferred credit union that can give me a really good savings account rate or, or a free checking whatever the case is. Do I have access to a financial counselor so I can actually help plan my, my my, either my indebtedness or my my budget to make sure that I can make things work. Asking those questions about personal finance that may help you make your decision. And that if future me, you know, current me could go back and talk to past me, it would be asking all those programs, can you help me find somebody to help me with my money to help me with personal finance? That would have really swayed my decision I think.

Emily (32:17): I think in the regular employment world they would call it like an employee assistance program. Employee assistance program. Yes. So just like all the sort of package of like support services that are available in that case to full-time employees. But yes, you’re exactly right in higher ed, a version of that exists for undergraduate, graduate professional students. Everybody. And I also did not consider this at all when I was selecting a graduate institution, but something I’ve been really, um, I guess impressed by my observation through the HEFWA community is the rise of basic needs support. And so I would maybe hold that up as like the top one, like you mentioned emergency assistance, um, loans or grants, that kind of thing. Like are there places where I can turn if I am having trouble and I can’t make rent this month or like I can go to a food bank and I’m able to get something that’s gonna, you know, tide me over till my next paycheck comes. Like I don’t love that people have to access that stuff, obviously it’s just better that people are paid reasonably well enough. But even if people are paid decently, there’s always gonna be those scenarios that come up, you know, from time to time for a graduate student, even in otherwise well-managed, you know, and sufficient financial life. So just having something there to help them bridge the gap is really, really helpful.

ZW (33:27): A hundred percent. And I was just talking to someone about this the other day with a basic need center in California where it was, if you don’t have Maslow’s hierarchy covered, the learning is so impossible. Not impossible, but it made so much more difficult. And I remember learning in eighth grade health class about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and every now and again, you know, my day-to-day work and when I was a graduate student for sure, it’s like why am I not focused right now? Oh I’m hungry, I’m hungry, right? I need a glass of water. Like the basic, basic needs type stuff, right? So I, I think you’re totally hitting the nail on the head where you gotta really think about yourself, but all of your needs, having all of your needs covered going into a graduate program where at least the best you can and you know, more and more so colleges and universities have really embraced this kind of basic needs movement in some ways where, I never remember as an undergraduate or even a grad student at UT getting an email hearing about a coat closet, career center, basic needs center, uh, helping college students apply for uh, SNAP benefits and, and and tax assistance for income taxes.

ZW (34:42): Never. Now, I wouldn’t say ubiquitous, but a lot more graduate programs are rolling that into services because they’re realizing that a basic needs covered, student finishes on time, they’re engaged, they network, they pursue those pre-professional career opportunities so they get a job after graduation. It is in these students’ best, therefore it should be in the institution’s best interest. And now we’re finally maybe putting student first, whereas it’s for the best interest of the student, then it’s the best interest of the institution and not the other way around. Where does it benefit the institution? Great, then the student gets the fringe benefit. We’re finally, I think maybe flipping that around. That’s a good thing.

Emily (35:27): Hmm. And yeah, I’m glad we sort of landed on basic needs and you know, you mentioned e- even like hunger. So I live in California as well and at the moment anyway, we have this universal breakfast and lunch program in, in public schools. So every single student does not matter what the resources of your family are financially or ability to fill out paperwork or whatever. Everybody has access to free, free breakfast and free lunch through their school. So that’s incredible. And I know that you mentioned earlier that you work with um, certain populations that are more vulnerable through your job now. And so let’s say that we have someone in the audience who’s a graduate student who came out of the foster system or was formerly homeless or, or maybe even currently is experiencing housing insecurity. Um, or maybe we have a student parent, another type of non-traditional student. Um, how can those people access, you know, these kinds of resources we’ve been talking about in particular their institutions?

ZW (36:20): Yeah, so there is typically a community liaison, social work type person at colleges and universities that their part of their portfolio of work is making sure that every single government benefit, every single community uh, amenity is connected to the university in some point. Going back to your comment about is it an institution’s role to provide this financial information? Like it’s going back to the idea of in loco parentis, how much should the institution be the parent for the student? Well there is a limit of that. The institution can only do so much, but at every institution there is someone or a team of people whose job is to be connected to public benefits, to community resources. But there is the hurdle with students of all ages, but it’s especially graduate students when you really maybe might feel that more of that uh, uh, imposter phenomenon creeping in is do I wanna raise my hand for help? Do I wanna be seen as someone who needs a government benefit or who needs a, some sort of commuter pass for low income people? Like do I wanna be associated with that group? I grew up saying I’ll take everything I can, I cannot provide it myself. I’m at my wit’s end, gimme all of it ’cause I am at wit’s end. However, a lot of people don’t feel that way. A lot of people are just on the fringes and feel like, you know what, buck up, you know, very bootstraps mentality. But it’s about raising your hand and being willing to say to yourself, I wanna be successful. I believe in myself. That might mean sucking up a little bit of pride and seeking out a benefit associated with X population and you just go for it and you find that person on campus. The other part that was really beneficial about my time at UT is that I only explicitly used public transit.

ZW (38:17): And public transit tends to run by the library, by the DMV, by banks, by by social services offices broadly. That’s where bus routes tend to run. It’s you know, connecting people to the governmental infrastructure in this country. Typically I would really encourage graduate students if you have committed to someplace and you know more or less the city that you’re gonna be in, get there as early as you can. Ride public transit and get to know where the social services are because you may think that your university, your institution is your community. You have access to resources so far beyond that community that you gotta know the city and know the location first almost. ’cause a lot of times the university may not have the infrastructure you need but right down the road or like county social services, they’ve got your back a hundred percent and of you know, unfortunately a lot of graduate students because they you know, come in being so low income, you qualify for all tons of stuff that you did not think you’d qualify for.

ZW (39:25): I was talking to a graduate student the other week did not know they did not have to be paying for their cell phone the past three years. There is a program for that for low income students just like you and graduate students are included. Just because you’re in graduate school does not mean you’re exempt from being able to access all these social services. So it’s a couple of hurdles of being willing to raise your hand and say you need help. Two, doing your own kind of navigation of knowing where services are and then three, having that mindset of just because I’m a super smart person who got into a grad program and I’m going to this prestigious school does not preclude me from these government benefits that I do qualify for.

Emily (40:07): Such a great point. And I, I learned actually, I think it was from someone else I met at HEFWA who was a podcast guest a couple of years ago, that most people in the United States who access the social safety net do so on a very temporary basis. It really is for most people acting as um, okay, your situation has changed and you need some help right now, but in the future you’re gonna be making a lot more money. This is very true for graduate students and contributing again, back to society and that social safety net. So like take it like take the help you need the help by definition you have qualified for these programs, take the help, it’s not gonna be forever and you need it right now and it’s really gonna benefit you right now.

ZW (40:44): Hundred percent. It is, it’s such a myth in the US about welfare. There’s such, so many myths that go around. It’s like statistically so many people are on it, like you said, for such a transient period. It’s really just a bandaid to something better. And there is though, you know, being admitted to grad school, you know, you feel like you’re in a competitive environment, you can’t show weakness. You know, you can’t be seen as needing anything. I’m self-sufficient, I’m strong. It’s a total mindset change to say actually I do need this benefit. And then recognizing too that the rest of your life you’re not gonna need it. It’s just to get you through to something better and don’t all that kind of like cultural zeitgeist and that, you know, mythology of welfare and people living off of welfare for their entire lives just not true.

Emily (41:37): Yeah, and I remember actually a previous podcast guest as well, um, at Portland State, she learned from her peers to apply for SNAP benefits. Like they were like as a group, like teaching one another how to apply. And the thing is that like you might perceive that some other people, and maybe this is even true for some people, they might look at you twice for having access this kind of benefit. But a lot of your other peers are gonna be like, how can I get that too? Like, can you tell me? ’cause I don’t wanna pay for my own cell phone. Like, that would be great.

ZW (42:03): I love that. I, and the thing is though, here, here we come in full, full circle, that is a form of peer mentoring. Is it not? It is people working together. Sometimes you feel a little more empowered if a friend will do it with you. So if you’re gonna, if you feel the need to raise your hand for a benefit that you may feel a little bit ashamed of, taken advantage of, have a find a friend, make a friend, raise those hands together, it’ll de-stigmatize a lot of what you feel like you might be doing. And then you get the benefit and you feel like all of a sudden, wow, I’m a little better prepared to be successful and putting myself in the best position. It’s all about just invest in your, in yourself as financial wellness as part of your professional development. It’s just being open to this, wanting to improve yourself and, and taking the resources and seeking them out that, that you deserve to have.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (42:55): Well I think you landed that plane beautifully, Zach, so we will end the interview there. I’m just gonna move on to our very last question that I ask of all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be something that relates to, you know, something we’ve talked about today or it could be something entirely different

ZW (43:13): To build on something we talked about today is when you’ve done your research about the affordability of the area and you really have honed in on where you’re going to go, think about that offer of admission as a package and you put it brilliantly. It’s kind of like this, this employer wellness package, right? I mean there’s other benefits that you get in addition to just the teaching and learning, right? You get access to student services, you’re, you’re put into a community where there are probably likely other county level, city level governmental resources that you can access. So when you’re admitted, you’re not only admitted to the institution, but you’re admitted to all these other services, you’re automatically qualified for so many other things. Do your homework, seek ’em out and don’t be ashamed to raise your hand and say, I need a little bit of help.

Emily (44:11): Love it. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Zach, and giving us this wonderful insight.

ZW (44:15): Thank you. All the best, Emily, you’re doing important stuff. Keep doing it.

Emily (44:18): Thank you so much

Outro

Emily (44:29): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Campus Resources to Improve Your Finances

July 28, 2025 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily shares the microinterviews she recorded at three conferences this year. The conference attendees, all of whom either work at universities or have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What resource on your campus could graduate students and postdocs access to benefit their finances?” You’ll hear the responses in order from the attendees of the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference, the Graduate Career Consortium Annual Meeting, and the Higher Education Financial Wellness Summit. You should be able to detect the transitions among the conferences as there are strong themes within each set. As a bonus, listen for a two-time contributor! While these are all real examples from individual universities, you can search for, inquire about, or request similar resources on your campus.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Campus Resources to Improve Your Finances

Teaser

Tharangi F (00:00): Our Gamecock Community Shop, which is our basic needs school supply closet. It does food meals, it does clothing, um, basic needs of any type, like hygiene, and I think that really does help our graduate student population and they’re actively using it.

Introduction

Emily (00:24): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:53): This is Season 21, Episode 5, and today I’m sharing the microinterviews I recorded at three conferences this year. The conference attendees, all of whom either work at universities or have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What resource on your campus could graduate students and postdocs access to benefit their finances?” You’ll hear the responses in order from the attendees of the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference, the Graduate Career Consortium Annual Meeting, and the Higher Education Financial Wellness Summit. I think you’ll be able to detect the transitions among the conferences as there are strong themes within each set. As a bonus, listen for a two-time contributor! While these are all real examples from individual universities, you can search for, inquire about, or request similar resources on your campus.

Emily (01:52): At the start of every academic year, fellowship recipients need to know that if they are not having income tax withheld from their paychecks, they should start self-withholding and possibly make a payment by September 15th. Otherwise, they are in for a nasty surprise when they file their tax returns next spring. If your university is not providing adequate messaging and resources regarding estimated tax, would you please recommend me as a workshop facilitator? I offer both live and asynchronous versions of a workshop that guides US citizens and residents in filling out the Estimated Tax Worksheet in IRS Form 1040-ES and managing their money to seamlessly meet their tax obligations. These workshops are typically considered professional development or personal wellness. I would very much appreciate you cc’ing me when you recommend me so I can follow up with additional information for the potential host. Thank you very much! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s21e5/. Without further ado, here’s my compilation episode on financially beneficial resources for graduate students and postdocs.

Harvard Medical School: Credit Union, Financial Advising, & EAP

Jim G (03:22): I am Jim Gould, director for Postdoc Affairs at Harvard Medical School, and a resource our postdocs could use to help with their finances are, are a couple that we have a, a credit union at Harvard that they could use for banking and, and credit cards and savings, as well as, uh, a retirement benefits like TIAA CREF offers financial advising. We also have an employee assistance program that our postdocs and many of our, um, employees could actually use for finances and many other things.

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation: EAP

Joel S (03:48): My name is Joel Solís. I’m with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation with our HR team as an HR associate. And I think one of the resources that is highly beneficial to everyone at our foundation is our employee assistance program. Where basically the employee has the ability to contact, um, uh, free, uh, assistance when it comes to health, uh, uh, mental health or even financial, um, awareness or legal assistance. Um, it’s basically six free counseling sessions that occur every year, and it’s not only open to them, but also to their families. Um, and like I said, it’s something that renews every year.

George Washington University: 401K/403B Retirement Match & TIAA CREF/Fidelity Partnerships

Ruchi G (04:26): My name is Ruchi Gupta and I work with George Washington University, and I think we have the benefit of having the 401k and 40- 403B, um, with my university and the university matches 1.5 times of that. So that’s a good benefit. Uh, and the university invests have the partnership with the fidelity and the TIAA, and you can either choose or they choose on your behalf. They help you with that. Uh, and not many people are aware of that, and they kind of lose on that benefit. So I think it’s a good idea to be aware and take advantage of the resources available to you.

Penn State: TIAA CREF Consultant

Jennifer N (05:03): Jennifer Nicholas, director of Postdoctoral Affairs at Penn State, and my answer is the TIAA CREF consultant because postdocs could benefit from more mindful planning of how they would save for retirement at this stage of life, and they can often use those services for free, um, because those services are available to those who work at Penn State.

University of Michigan: TIAA CREF/Fidelity Wealth Managers

Mark M (05:27): Hi, I’m Mark Moldwin, the director of the Office of Postdoc Affairs at University of Michigan. And the resource I would recommend is that they would contact, uh, either TIAA, CREF or Fidelity, the two financial service providers for their 403B. Uh, so they would have a, uh, wealth manager help set up, uh, their goals for investing in retirement and get them thinking about, um, how valuable it is to start early.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Communication Lab & Teaching + Learning Lab

Alex Y (06:01): My name is Alex Yen. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I am the program director for postdoc Career Advising and Professional Development at MIT, so Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So in terms of resources on my campus that I always encourage my postdocs to know more about and use are services outside of my own office that really emphasize written and verbal communication, which are skills that they can take with them even after they leave MIT. For us, that’s the communication lab. That’s their writing and communication center. That’s the Teaching + Learning Lab. And I encourage postdocs to go and see where can I learn how to improve that grant application I’m putting in? How do I refine the data and the graphs that I’m putting on slides? Is there some type of teaching certificate that postdocs can, um, can get? So that’s what I encourage. Go find those other resources beyond just your career resource center and also your office of Postdoc Services.

University of Michigan Medical School: Therapists

Michele S (07:05): Hi, Michele Swanson, director of Postdoc Office at University of Michigan Medical School. I’m very proud that our Office of Graduate Postdoctoral Studies now has two licensed therapists, counselors, um, who are available to meet with our pred docs and our postdocs for up to six sessions at no cost confidential to describe any kind of personal or work related challenge. And then they can introduce them to resources in the community if they, if longer term, uh, relationship is important.

University of Michigan: Centralized Shared Services

Kaylee S (07:35): My name is Kaylee Steen. I work at the University of Michigan. I’m the Associate Director of Professional Development and Trainee Support, and I would say one of our resources on campus is our centralized shared services. So if you have expenses and you need reimbursement, it’s all a one stop shop to submit a ticket to make sure you get all your money back.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Welcome Session

Bettina (07:54): I’m Bettina, I’m a postdoc at MIT, at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, and, um, I happen to be a current president of the PDA and, um, resources on campus. I think looking back into three years of being in a postdoc at MIT I think the resources are there. It’s just that the point in time when you have the bandwidth to access them is way too late because we have the community at MIT is incredibly international, and when you change countries, con- continents, social spheres in starting a postdoc, it’s just too much to adjust to to spend. Any thoughts on your 401k and now looking back? I wish I had the bandwidth back then because I, I’m aware now at I lost money, but also I’m aware now that I’m out in a year, so it’s not even worth putting in the effort anymore, which is unfortunate. What I’m recommending everyone I meet now being a new postdoc is take the welcome session when you, when you arrive, and then take them again six months in because the info out there, it’s just a matter of how much you can digest at a time.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 401K and Reimbursement Resources

Expery O (09:04): My name is Expery Omollo. I’m a postdoc fellow at MIT. There are a few things that, uh, a few resources on campus that can benefit postdocs at MIT. One of them is the benefits, uh, and to be specific, the 401k, I feel like it’s very useful for postdocs to be educated on the power of compounding interest. Um, I feel like most people tend to wait until they get a real job before they start investing, and in that time, they’re wasting five years is enough to, let’s say, make a few thousand dollars that they didn’t know about. Um, so that’ll be one thing. Another thing is, um, there are other aspects of saving money when it comes to transit. For example, MIT has a free, uh, transit across Boston to use the public transit system. Uh, if you use your bike to go to campus every day, you can get reimbursed. Um, if you, the MIT health, if you go to the gym, you can apply to get reimbursement from the health provider as well. And most people don’t know this, but this is a free 150 to $300. Um, and another thing is they do have a pension. But it’s very hidden and there’s a lot of, uh, it’s so hard to find that information. But MIT offers it. I think there’s a, you have to be at MIT for limited for some time before you can apply for it. But it’s somewhere there. I saw it recently. And, um, maybe as Bettina was saying, having all of this information during orientation may be the solution and maybe reiterating it over time through email or, you know, in other postdoc meetings, just mentioning it so that people can know about all of it.

Medical University of South Carolina: Library Rental System

Lyndsay Y (11:04): Hi, I’m Lyndsay Young. I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical University of South Carolina. And I think a resource that, um, our postdocs need to know about is actually our library rental system. So you can rent laptops, speakers, uh, projectors, screens, anything technology-wise from our library that for a certain amount of time it’s for free and you can utilize that for your own personal benefit, for your events, for anything really that is that you wanna do. So I think it’s a really underutilized resource that our people should be more knowledgeable about.

Argonne National Lab: HR Resources

Evelyna W (11:38): Hi, uh, my name is Evelyna Wang . I’m a postdoc at Argonne National Lab, and our HR department actually provides a lot of good resources about personal financing and benefits that are available to postdocs. However, I think postdocs need to access and attend some of these seminars and really gain the information that’s being shared with them.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies: Financial Advisors

B. Bea R (12:01): Morning, my name is B. Bea Rajsombath from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and I think our postdocs need to take advantage of the onsite financial advisors to schedule one-on-one appointments, so they have access to, to that in understanding how to invest their portfolio.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 401K App

Alex Y (12:19): Hello everyone. My name is Alex Yen pronouns, she, her and I am the Career Advising and Professional Development Program Director at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So the resource that I really like, and I do think this is a resource many, many postdocs I work with postdocs have, is if you have a, if you have a 401k with your university, you should download whatever app that is associated with. So for MIT, that’s fidelity, and there you can actually plan out and do projections of what would it look like, say if you put aside the certain amount of money and they can project, what will that look like to get to your retirement goal? So look at that. It’s nice graphs, it’s nice numbers and data, and I really, really like this resource for helping you understand why it might be helpful for you to put money into a 401k

Fidelity Student Programs

Emily (13:19): Emily here. Adding on Fidelity actually has amazing financial education resources around investing. They have a special program for college students, but it’s rolled out at certain campuses, and I’m guessing it’s also available to graduate students. Not sure about the postdoc side of things, but please check that out if you have access to it.

Villanova: Lifelong Career Resources and Services

Casey H (13:37): Hi, my name’s Casey Hilferty. I’m Associate Director for Career Management at Villanova University. Um, one thing that we would love to remind our grad students of is that we offer lifelong career resources and services, um, including lifelong career appointments. So they don’t need to contract a career coach. If they ever need one, they can always return back to Villanova.

University of Texas at Arlington: Fellowships, Grants, and I-Engage Mentoring Program

Leah C (14:01): My name’s Leah Collum. I’m the program manager for graduate student Academic and professional development at the University of Texas at Arlington. And on our campus, we have several resources that graduate students should be aware of. We have, uh, dissertation fellowships, we have travel grants, we have writing group grants. We have the I-Engage mentoring program, which offers a stipend and all kinds of other internal funding opportunities, um, that graduate students should be aware of, and they can find them all on our website, which is uta.edu/gradschool.

UNC Chapel Hill: Impact Internship Program

Patrick B (14:36): My name’s Patrick Brandt, and I’m the director of Career Development and Science Outreach at UNC Chapel Hill. So one of the programs that I run is called the Impact Internship Program, and it’s a short term internship, uh, local to the RTP or to the triangle area of North Carolina. And it gives the UNC grad students a chance to be able to do an internship and gain some, um, some hands-on skill, uh, development so that they can be more competitive as a candidate, uh, for whatever career they’re interested in.

Georgia Tech: Campus Closet

Megan E (15:09): My name’s Megan Elrath and I’m a online Career Services manager at Georgia Tech. And a resource on our campus that grad students or postdocs should know about that would help their finances is our campus closet, where students can access professional attire for interviewing, um, presentations, maybe even to defend their dissertations or proposals so that they can have that professional look and feel confident when they go into those high pressure settings.

Commercial

Emily (15:35): Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2025-2026 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, medical school, postdoc office, or postdoc association? My workshops are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Orientations, postdoc appreciation week, or close to the start of the academic year would be a perfect time for tax education or general personal finance content. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

George Washington University: Alumni Network

Autumn A (17:12): My name is Autumn Anthony and I serve as the Assistant Director of Graduate Postdoc Affairs at George Washington University. And one way that we’ve been investing in financial success and career development for our students is within the presidential fellowship, um, which I have the privilege of directing, and it’s a small group, so hopefully in the future we can expand this out to more students. But we’ve been tapping into our alumni network and finding those individuals who have established careers, um, in managing your financial portfolio. And we’ve been able to set up some really great, um, mini seminars and workshops where these folks will come and, and present on how to make the most of your finances and set yourself up for success. And it’s been low cost so far. So that’s something that, um, I would recommend people tapping into their alumni network.

UT Southwestern: Internships

Leah B (18:06): My name is Leah Banks and I’m the director of Graduate career, uh, development at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. Uh, and a resource that I feel would be really helpful for grad students and post-docs, um, is, um, having the opportunity to do internships. And so we recently were able to change the policy in which would allow for them to do research internships. Um, before that they were only able to do consulting venture capital type internships, but this allows for them to really build out their toolkit to tap into those resources outside of UT Southwestern to, um, be more exposed to, um, technical type internships that could really help them to be more, um, marketable when they, you know, leave grad school and their postdocs.

University of Michigan: Career Services and Clothes Closet

Maggie G (18:59): My name is Maggie Gardner. I’m the Senior program manager for STEM Professional Development in the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Generally speaking, resources that I believe grad students and postdocs should take advantage of while they’re at Michigan that would help them financially are broadly our career services, but more specifically taking advantage of cv, resume, cover letter review, interview preparation, negotiation workshops. All of these are available to them free of charge while they’re at the University of Michigan. And these are services that they’ll have to pay for, um, if they choose to, to seek them out outside of the university. Um, so these are long-term very beneficial to their financial wellbeing. Um, we also have a clothes closet at the University Career Center that graduate students can take advantage of. Uh, they’re allowed to pick out, I think, two items per semester for interviews or networking events, whatever it is that need, they need professional attire for. Uh, we also have a, um, a food pantry that students are eligible or able to take advantage of. Um, they can stop by every day, every week, whatever it is they need, you know, when they need just a little bit of extra help to, to get by and to, to sustain themselves.

University of Buffalo: Internship Equity Fund

Gina B (20:25): Hi, this is Gina Bellavia, graduate career design consultant at the University of Buffalo. And one thing that would help graduate students improve their finances that we offer is our internship equity fund. So if you were to get an internship that was unpaid, uh, and with either a government agency or a nonprofit organization, you could apply to be paid through through this fund. And usually we have it available each semester and then in the summer as well.

Vanderbilt: Beyond the Lab Podcast

Aubrie S (20:53): Hi, my name is Aubrie Stricker. I am a part of the Vanderbilt Biomedical Career Development Office. And the resource that I think our campus provides for our students is the Beyond the Lab podcast, where it provides informational interviews to give our trainees insights as to how the, uh, alumni got to the positions that they’re in and along the way, they share their career advice, including the financial advice they may have to help the trainees get to where they want to be.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Campus Web Store

Derek A (21:19): I’m Derek Attig, Assistant Dean for Career and Professional Development in the graduate college at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. And a resource on our campus that I, I think grad students and postdocs could take advantage of that could improve their finances is the campus web store, which has a wide variety of free or, uh, reduce costs software, uh, to, you know, support your work, help you develop new skills, right? And often people don’t know it’s there.

Boston University: PF for PhDs Podcast and Campus Workshops

Béné (21:50): Hi everyone. My name is Béné. I am the Director of Professional Development at Boston University in the Graduate School of Medical Sciences. And I think a resource that has been very inspiring for me is your podcast, Emily, because you’ve been able to actually meet with postdocs who having the same financial constraints as what I had as a postdoc were still able to really think their finances through, we’re able to decide, okay, this is how much I want to invest, this is how much I want to learn about investing. Um, and they’ve stuck with our goals and they were able to actually achieve things that they wouldn’t have without having done so. So I’m looking forward to having you on my campus to talk with our students and helping them really take a step back and make set important financial and budgeting goals.

University of Minnesota: Student Legal Services

Amelia C (22:34): Hi, my name’s Amelia Casas. I’m a one-stop counselor at the University of Minnesota. And one resource to look for on your campus is student Legal Services for help with any sort of renters disputes, immigration, things like that. It’s like having a personal lawyer on retainer for the cost of your tuition and fees.

UC Berkeley: Center for Financial Wellness

Anne X (22:59): Hi, my name is Anne Xiong. I manage the Center for Financial Wellness at UC Berkeley. Um, so the resources I want to introduce to our grad students are actually the Center for Financial Wellness. I encourage all grad students at uc, Berkeley to advantage of this free service. Go to our website, we have online resources, and then we have our peer coaching and workshops.

UNC Chapel Hill: Carolina Cupboard and Bus Passes

Sara L (23:23): My name is Sara Lorenzen. I’m the Assistant Director of Financial Wellbeing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Um, and a resource on our campus, um, that I think a lot of students don’t know about is we have a food pantry network, um, called the Carolina Cupboard, um, which is four food pantries on campus that are available, but also, um, UNC students get and employees get a free bus pass through our bus system. And the Chapel Hill Bus system is free to everyone in Chapel Hill. So I think people don’t utilize that nearly enough to save money.

University of South Carolina: Gamecock Community Shop

Tharangi F (23:59): Hi, my name is Tharangi Fernando. I’m the peer consultant manager for the Student Success Center at the University of South Carolina. Our Gamecock community shop, which is our basic needs, um, like school supply closet, it does food meals, it does clothing, um, basic needs of any type like hygiene, and I think that really does help our graduate student population and they’re actively using it.

University of Chicago: Webinars

Emmy (24:21): I’m Emmy, I’m the Communications Manager at the Office of Bursar at the University of Chicago. Our main resource that would definitely be a benefit to our grad students and postdocs would be our webinars. Um, we offer a webinar series for new students, including grad students, and over the course of the year, we offer a ton of webinars that educate on financial wellness in general, but also just the services that our office provides.

University of Utah: International Student and Scholar Services

Katie D (24:46): Hi, my name is Katie DeSau. I am the case manager for the International Student and Scholar Services on the University of Utah campus. Um, my job is to connect students to campus services and the resources that we have for grad students and postdocs, especially international students, would be the International Student and Scholar Services or the IS office. And you can come talk to me about any problem that you have, uh, financial or otherwise, and I can help coordinate contact with, uh, campus resources, especially Financial Wellness Center, where they have options for credit counseling, one-on-one counseling, budgeting, and also finding other financial resources for you. Um, you can also come to me to get connected to the basic needs, uh, collective. Um, they’re all about basic needs. We also have a Feed you pantry. Um, so there are resources that you’re already paying for in your student fees, so please come see us and get help.

New York University: Stern Graduate Financial Aid Office Website

Tina B (25:45): Tina Bird, I’m the Assistant Director of the Stern Graduate Financial Aid Office at NYU. Um, and, uh, some of the great resources that we have is our website. Um, we have a lot of information on our website about, uh, external scholarship sources, um, teaching our graduate fellowships, um, and, you know, veteran assistance. Uh, so yeah, our, our website is specifically designed to help out our students.

University of Missouri: VITA Program

Alex E (26:11): My name is Alex Embree and I’m the interim manager at the Office for Financial Success at the University of Missouri in many communities and on many campuses, uh, there will be a VITA IRS tax resource where students can receive free tax preparation in addition to some tax education, so they can learn about how their, uh, assistantships or how their other funding sources are taxed and can make more, um, knowledgeable decisions about how they’re preparing for their tax burden, um, or how they’re saving for that, how they’re, um, establishing their financial security around their funding sources. And I’ll just add these VITA clinics are for both citizens, residents, and non-residents, depending on the certifications of the people involved. So don’t think it’s not for you if you’re an international student.

UNC Charlotte: Niner Finances

Nicole B (26:57): Hi, I am Nicole Benford. I’m the director of Niner Finances at UNC Charlotte. And to answer the question, what resource on your campus could grad students or postdocs access to improve their finances? I would say that’s my office. Uh, we offer workshops, presentations, and one-on-one coaching, and we also have self-study material on our website at NinerFinances.charlotte.edu. Um, but we are happy to help.

Oregon State University: Student Legal Services

Rebekah H (27:23): Hi, uh, I’m Rebekah Hahn and I’m a graduate assistant at the Oregon State University Basic Needs Center. We have a student legal services team, um, and they’re able to provide free legal services on a variety of issues. Um, I actually completed my divorce, transferred a house, and, uh, made new advanced directives with them all at no cost. And legal services are extremely expensive, so I think that all schools should have something like this.

University of Tennessee Knoxville: Financial Wellness Coaches

Philippa S (27:53): Hi, I’m Philippa Satterwhite. I am the coordinator, uh, for the Center of Financial Wellness at the University of Tennessee. Knoxville. And my answer to be, to make an appointment with, uh, our financial wellness coaches, a one-on-one appointment. Every student can make one. It’s free where we can sit down and help you think of through like your cost, but balancing of budget, thinking about life after grad school, thinking about, uh, you know, the job search. So all those things that we do at a one-on-one counseling, you can make as many appointments as you want. As many if few or as many, um, you’re there to help.

Washington University in St. Louis: Emergency Assistance Fund, Grad School Prep Funds, and iGrad

Andrea S-D (28:24): Hi there, I’m Andrea Stewart-Douglas, director of Financial Wellbeing at Washington University in St. Louis. The resources on my campus to help graduate students, um, we actually have a fund that provides emergency assistance to graduate students. Um, we also have funding available to undergraduate students who are looking to go on to graduate school. So we support their studies for things like the mcat, the lsat, the GRE. We will provide funding to help them purchase their study materials, to cover their test exams, to even cover their fees, um, as they’re applying. We’re also supporting them by providing them with funding. If they do a visit, if they are interviewing at the school and need to travel to that college or university will provide the funding to purchase their plane ticket, cover their hotel fees. We also, um, have a online platform called iGrad, and that’s available to not only graduate undergraduate students, but our graduate students as well. And so we’re encouraging all graduate students to check that platform out. It has tons of great information, uh, for budgeting, uh, planning for retirement, if they’re interested in buying a home. Um, there’s great information on that. So it’s a really, really, uh, robust resource, uh, articles, um, courses, videos, um, pretty much every way of uh, or mode of, um, learning is available on that platform. So, um, we’re also available in our office to provide one-on-one support if students want to come in and just talk about their situation, maybe sit down with us to do a little goal setting. And we’re gonna do our best to provide whatever support we can. And if we can’t do this internally, we have places people that we can connect them to outside of the university as well.

UNC Chapel Hill: Carolina Financial Wellbeing Center

Gilbert R (30:23): My name is Gilbert Rogers. I’m the Director of Financial Wellbeing at UNC Chapel Hill. One resource that I’ll highlight is the Carolina Financial Wellbeing Center. We are a fairly new resource to campus where graduate and professional students, uh, can come and ask questions about personal finance. We can get them connected to outside of the community resources that can help them increase their overall financial knowledge or, uh, get help with, uh, specific situations that graduate students need support with.

University of Oregon: Financial Literacy Workshops

Tennille W (30:52): So my name’s Tennille Wait. I’m the assistant director at the Financial Wellness Center at the University of Oregon. Um, the resources that we have for grad students, uh, recently what we’ve had happen is one of our grad students reached out, uh, to find financial literacy information. So they got hooked up with me. Um, from that we have put together a whole series, or I should say a three part series of workshops for specifically for grad students, um, kind of based around financial literacy, budgeting, um, learning how to make, what their financial aid they’re receiving work for what they’re doing. Um, there’s gonna be a tax component on making sure that they understand any tax implications with the funding that they’re receiving. Um, and then we are also working with, um, you know, other, other campus partners to just make sure that, uh, if they have travel expenses and things like that, how to make sure that all of those things, um, how they impact their financial aid, but then also how to budget for those and make sure that it’s fitting into their financial plan.

Outro

Emily (32:09): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

How to Live on Time to Maintain Margin in Your Financial Life

June 16, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 2 Comments

In this episode, Emily explains how to live on time with your finances. Living on time means maintaining financial margin in your life to be able to absorb unexpected occurrences in your income or spending. When you’re behind in your finances, your income is going out the door right after you receive it, you have balances on your credit cards that you can’t pay off until your next paycheck comes, and/or you are unprepared for the next manual tax payment that is required of you. This may be true even if you’re not experiencing financial consequences such as interest payments on debt. The good news is that it’s very simple, though not necessarily easy, to transition to living on time once you know what it means.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

How to Live on Time to Maintain Margin in Your Financial Life

Introduction

Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance.

This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

This is Season 21, Episode 2, and today is a solo episode from me on how to live on time with your finances. Living on time means maintaining financial margin in your life to be able to absorb unexpected occurrences in your income or spending. When you’re behind in your finances, your income is going out the door right after you receive it, you have balances on your credit cards that you can’t pay off until your next paycheck comes, and/or you are unprepared for the next manual tax payment that is required of you. This may be true even if you’re not experiencing financial consequences such as interest payments on debt. The good news is that it’s very simple, though not necessarily easy, to transition to living on time once you know what it means.

I am delighted to announce that I am now offering one-on-one financial coaching! If you are a PhD or PhD-to-be in the US, I would be happy to serve as your financial coach. I can help you prioritize your financial goals, brainstorm and refine ideas for reducing spending, manage your side hustle income, start investing, prepare for tax season, set up a functional budget, evaluate a stipend or salary offer against your expected living expenses, and much more. What I can’t do is give you individualized investment or tax advice, but beyond that, it’s really open. As of now this coaching is structured as one-time appointments, so there’s no big commitment and you can book just one session or multiple at whatever interval makes sense to you. You can view my rates and book a free 15-minute initial call at PFforPhDs.com/coaching/. During that call, you’ll introduce yourself and your financial questions to me, I’ll let you know if we’re a good fit for a coaching relationship, and we’ll decide how you can best prepare for our first session together.

You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s21e2/.

Without further ado, here’s my solo episode on living on time.

Living on time is a concept I touch on in some of my financial education workshops, but I don’t always have time to expound and explain it completely, and it can be confusing. I decided to create this episode to go into detail about what I mean by it and how to enact it in your financial life. Also, this isn’t a concept that I really see other financial educators cover in depth so I can’t refer you to a book or similar resource. It’s not that mysterious or anything, as you’ll see, it’s probably more that the educators don’t have lower-income people front of mind for their teaching.

What Does It Mean to Live on Time Financially?

The basic concept here is that you shouldn’t unintentionally obligate your future income to pay for your current or past expenses. Basically, I’m encouraging you to not slide unknowingly into debt, although the debt I’m cautioning you about doesn’t always look like you might expect. I’ll share in a moment the three main ways this can easily happen.

The reason that I bring this up is that funded graduate students and others who live paycheck-to-paycheck, either habitually or occasionally, are particularly susceptible to not living on time and experiencing related consequences, such as overdraft fees, credit card interest, and financial stress.

What I’m going to suggest to you is a new way to be aware of your cash flow, i.e., your income coming in and your expenses going out, and that you exercise discipline to align with this concept of living on time. If you aren’t currently living on time, you are living with little or no margin in your financial life. When your financial life is going okay, do your best to live on time and create margin, so that the margin is there for you to access when your financial life is not going okay. In a way, this is an extension of the common financial advice to build an emergency fund.

Two more notes before we dive into what it means to live on time:

First, debt is a financial tool that is available to you. It’s not immoral or wrong to take out debt or be in debt. Debt is to various degrees financially damaging, so you should certainly carefully consider the type and amount of debt you take out. So when I said earlier that you shouldn’t unintentionally obligate your future income to pay for your current or past expenses, I’m not speaking about debt that you have intentionally taken out, such as student loans, a car loan, a mortgage, etc. In fact, I would rather you have a little more well-considered debt than to habitually live behind.

Second, I’m not at all shaming you for not living on time, if in the course of this episode you discover that you aren’t. I would venture that the vast majority of Americans do not practice what I’m about to outline. There are frequent instances in my own life when I’m not living on time and am eating into margin that I created in the past. That’s okay, that’s what it’s there for, but when you emerge from that tougher period, you should try to get back to living on time. Going back to the analogy of an emergency fund, your emergency fund is available for you to use, and after you spend some of it down, you should work gradually to build it back up so that it’s there for you the next time you need it.

Okay, enough beating around the bush, let’s get down to what I define as living on time financially.

1) All your income from one month goes to funding the next month’s spending.

In my view, monthly budgeting cycles make the most sense because so many of your bills are due once per month, including, virtually always, your largest bill, your rent or mortgage payment. A month is also long enough to average out most of your more frequent consumption-based expenses like groceries, car gas, eating out, etc. So if we are going to use a monthly cycle for our expenses, I also suggest that you create a monthly cycle for your income. Specifically, all the income that you bring in the course of a month funds the next month’s expenses. All of the income you receive in June should go toward funding your July expenses. That means that on July 1st, you should have sitting in your checking account all of your income from June, plus any buffer amount of money that you might like to keep in your checking account. That June income will be spent down over the course of July. All of the income you receive in July should be preserved for your August expenses.

If you are paid a monthly or bimonthly salary, this is a really simple and natural cycle to adopt. Things get a little more interesting when you are paid biweekly, weekly, or at some other cadence or have an income that varies with number of hours worked or amount of work accomplished. In those cases, the amount of money you take in over the course of a month will change, perhaps every month. I’ve seen people adopt really complex and confusing systems for handling their bills when their paycheck dates and amounts move around from month to month. They do this because they are using their income as soon as it comes in to pay expenses. In my view, it’s much simpler to wait. Collect all the income in the course of a month, know how much it is, and then use it in the subsequent month. You can even plan a unique monthly budget for every month if this happens a lot, but it’s all going to be based on money already received, not money you expect to receive.

If you are paid less frequently than monthly, which happens with some fellowships, your version of living on time does not include all income in one month funding the next month’s expenses because you don’t have income in every month. Tune back in later in this podcast season for a whole episode devoted to managing your unique income frequency.

In fact, the more of a time buffer you can create between when you receive your income and when you start spending it, the better, up to a point. When I was in graduate school, depending on my funding source, I was paid either on the 25th of the month or the last day of the month. I didn’t have much of a buffer because I was turning around and starting to pay expenses from that income within a day or a few days. After I finished grad school, I set up my business to pay my salary on the 15th of each month so that I could let that money rest, so to speak, for about two weeks before I started spending it in the subsequent month. My husband is currently paid bimonthly on the 15th and last day of the month. We’ve backed up our time buffer even a little further so that we let those paychecks rest for between half a month and a full month before we start to spend them, meaning that the money we will spend in July was received on May 31st and June 15th.

2) Use credit as debit and don’t slide into buy now pay later.

We’ve discussed living on time with respect to your income, and now I want to turn to living on time with respect to your expenses. The biggest danger in this area is the use of debt to delay actually paying for your expenses. This, too, can make budgeting much messier than it has to be.

The principle here is to use credit cards, if you choose to use them at all, as if they were debit cards. That means that every time you make a charge on a credit card, you already have the money to pay for that purchase in your checking account. You could pay the expense in cash, with debit, or with credit.

It’s all too easy with credit cards to push forward actually paying for the purchases you make for a few weeks or over a month. The same goes for buy now pay later schemes like Affirm and Afterpay.

To go back to our example from the last section, the money that you receive in June funds July’s expenses. Those July expenses can be put on a credit card, but you should be able to pay off the credit card in July with that June money. In fact, if you haven’t paid much attention to this before, I suggest that you pay your credit cards off completely at the end of each month to make sure you aren’t carrying any charges forward.

Getting behind with credit cards looks like making charges in July that you actually pay for in August or even September. If you combine it with using your income as soon as you receive it, you might be using August or even September income to pay for charges you made in July. That’s what I mean about unintentionally obligating your future income. You’re behind. And you didn’t even mean to be.

3) Keep up with your tax obligations.

This point only applies to people who are not having income tax automatically withheld from their paychecks, such as grad students, postdocs, and postbacs paid by fellowships or training grants who are US citizens, permanent residents, and residents for tax purposes.

Automatic income tax withholding by employers is very convenient for the individual. A more or less appropriate fraction of each paycheck is set aside and sent to the IRS and your state tax agency on your behalf to pay your annual income tax obligation. You never receive the money in your paychecks.

However, if you are not having income tax automatically withheld from your paychecks, that doesn’t mean you don’t owe the income tax. You will have to pay it at some point, whether it’s when you file your annual tax return or throughout the year via estimated tax payments.

For these individuals, I recommend setting up what I call a system of self-withholding, which means that from each paycheck, you automatically transfer the amount of money you expect to pay in income tax to a savings account dedicated to sequestering this money from the money available to you to spend. When it comes time to pay the IRS and your state tax agency, you pull the payment from this particular savings account, which has been pre-funded with the amount due.

Therefore, this is one more component of ‘living on time.’ If you don’t set aside the money for these tax payments, and perhaps spend it or allow it to leave your bank account for some other purpose, you will be caught out when the payment comes due and need to set up a payment plan with the IRS if you can’t pay—once again, sliding unintentionally into debt.

Living on time means preparing for your income tax bill with every paycheck that you receive, just like when you had an employer doing it for you.

I actually didn’t plan it this way, but it turns out that the day this episode drops, Monday, June 16, 2025, is the estimated tax payment deadline for quarter 2. And that is strange because June is the sixth month of the year, not the seventh. You would think that each quarter, for estimated tax purposes, would be three months long, with the payment due date coming midway through the following month, but you would not be correct. For whatever reason, the payments are due in mid-April, mid-June, mid-September, and mid-January, implying quarter lengths of three, two, three, and four months. Oh, but you still owe one-fourth of your calculated annual obligation on each due date. So to live on time, not only should you save a fraction of each paycheck for your future tax obligations, but you need to make sure that you save extra in quarter 2 or prior quarters to meet that early deadline.

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude.

Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2025-2026 academic year.

If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, medical school, postdoc office, or postdoc association? My workshops are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Orientations, postdoc appreciation week, or close to the start of the academic year would be a perfect time for tax education or general personal finance content. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process.

I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation!

Now back to our interview.

Why Attempt to Live on Time

So why should you endeavor to live on time the way I have defined it, even if you don’t always live up to the ideal?

Think about what could happen if you don’t live on time—if you spend your paycheck the day after it comes in and put charges on a credit card that you aren’t able to pay off for a month or two?

First, the income side. If anything goes awry with your income and you don’t receive a paycheck when you expected it in the amount that you expected, immediately you’re overdue on bills or unable to buy gas or food without accessing debt. If you get sick and miss work and either don’t have paid sick leave or you run out, your next paycheck will be smaller than usual or nonexistent. If you depend on side hustle income, but it dries up suddenly, you may find yourself in a bind. If you are on fellowship, your university might play fast and loose with your paycheck date as they don’t have the same legal obligation to stick to a schedule that they would if you were employed. I’ve seen this happen over multiple years to fellows in the University of California system, for example, who expected a stipend disbursement on September 1, but it didn’t come until over a week later. And earlier this spring, the paychecks of NSF postdoc fellows arrived late because of interference by the Trump administration. Of course, none of that is the fault of the individual, but they are the ones to suffer the consequences of a late paycheck, so it’s best to be proactive to build in some margin. When you live on time, a paycheck coming late or in a smaller amount than anticipated is still a problem, but you’ve bought yourself some time to figure out how to pivot.

Second, the expenses side. If you’re spending money you don’t already have in your bank account on a regular basis, what happens when an unexpected expense arises or an expense is larger than you anticipated? You have no margin to absorb these expenses on a temporary basis so that you can figure out your next move. Maybe you’ll put the expense on a credit card, but that tips you into carrying credit card debt instead of managing to pay it off by the due date to avoid interest accruing. If you maintain margin on your credit cards through the habit of living on time, breaking that habit once in a while by making a charge you can’t pay for immediately gives you a handful of weeks to adjust your spending in other areas so that you can ideally pay it off by the due date.

You can see from these examples that it’s not a terrible thing to eat into this margin when you need to to buy yourself time. But if you never maintain the margin in the first place, sliding unintentionally into a type of debt, it can’t serve its purpose when you hit a speedbump in life.

Of course, if you do have an emergency fund, you could access it to handle a small or missed paycheck or an unexpectedly high expense. I just consider the emergency fund to be the backup layer to the margin that’s created by living on time.

In fact, I think you should get on time with your finances even before starting to build your official, separate emergency fund.

How to Start Living on Time

If you are not currently living on time in the most ideal sense, how do you start moving in that direction? The answer is perhaps disappointingly simple. You have to spend less than you earn—even more so than what you’ve been doing to this point.

The ultimate outcome I want for you is to start each month with zero balance on your credit cards and a checking account balance equal to all of your income from the prior month. You can also add a buffer of $500 or $1,000 if you feel more comfortable with that, and I would recommend that if you are operating off of a once-per-month paycheck that arrives late in the month.

As a variation on this, you don’t actually need to clear the balance off of your credit cards at the end of each month as long as you have enough in checking to cover the balances on top of your prior month’s income and you have all the cards on autopay. However, that means your target checking account balance will vary every month.

How do you get from where you are to your target checking account balance and zero balance credit cards? You have to save money. I suggest first trying to do so inside of your checking account because that is where the money ultimately needs to go. You basically need to see your checking account balance gradually increase month over month until you reach your target. But that process can be difficult to track with money cycling in and out all the time, so alternatively you can save money in a separate savings account until you reach your goal and then transfer it into checking and pay off your credit cards in one fell swoop. I would only recommend this method if you’re not accruing interest on credit card debt. After you reach your target checking account balance, all you have to do is maintain the correct balance. Or, if you use the margin for one reason or another, restore it as soon as you’re able to by, you guessed it, saving money.

How do you save money? It’s not really the topic of this episode, but your choices are essentially to earn more, spend less, or redirect your existing savings rate. Your mileage will definitely vary on which of those options is most accessible.

If you are currently saving money for a different goal, I would suggest pausing progress on that goal until you’re living on time. The exception would be if your goal is to repay high interest rate debt, in which case that can take precedence. Whatever goal you’re working toward would get disrupted anyway if you had a loss of income or an unexpected expense.

If this is a goal that can be accomplished in the short term, the most immediate way to increase your savings rate is likely to spend less, so try some temporary fasts from discretionary spending such as eating out, alcohol, and entertainment and re-evaluate your small, fixed expenses like subscriptions.

If this is a longer-term goal, you can try to increase your income through side hustling, if that’s permissible, by winning a fellowship or grant, or negotiating. I also recommend re-evaluating your large, fixed expenses such as housing and transportation and creating new habits to reduce your grocery spending.

In closing, I want to emphasize that living on time is an ideal, and I don’t expect you and you shouldn’t expect yourself to live up to it 100% of the time. However, if you make it a general practice to reserve all of your income from one month to fund the next month’s spending, use your credit cards as if they were debit cards, and keep up with your tax obligations, you will have financial margin in your life to absorb the smaller shocks that you might experience like a late paycheck or unexpected expense. To get to living on time, you just have to save money so that your checking account balance grows to your target level at the start of each month.

Outro

Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode!

I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/.

Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/.

See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps!

Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual.

The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC.

Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

What You Should Know about Money Early in Your PhD Career

July 29, 2024 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily shares the microinterviews she recorded at two higher education conferences this summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What do you wish you had known about money earlier in your career?” Listen through the episode for insights into the financial steps for which, should you take them now, your future self will thank you.

Links mentioned in the Episode

What You Should Know about Money Early in Your PhD Career

Teaser

Lyndsi B (00:00): You don’t have to make one decision and have it be the right decision for the rest of your life. Like you can make changes at any point along the way and you are allowed to fail and like you can recover from failure.

Introduction

Emily (00:20): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:50): This is Season 18, Episode 5, and today I’m sharing the microinterviews I recorded at two higher education conferences this summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What do you wish you had known about money earlier in your career?” Listen through the episode for insights into the financial steps for which, should you take them now, your future self will thank you.

Emily (01:20): The two conferences I attended were the Graduate Career Consortium Annual Meeting or GCC and the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance Summit or HEFWA. GCC is primarily attended by university staff members working with PhD students and postdocs in career and professional development. HEFWA is attended by university staff members working in financial wellness across undergraduate and graduate populations. These two conferences were excellent networking opportunities for me on top of the built-in professional development. However, there are plenty of universities who were not represented at these conferences. Would you please consider recommending my financial education seminars and workshops at your university? My most popularly requested events for the upcoming academic year are Your Financial Orientation to Graduate School, How to Prevent a Large, Unexpected Tax Bill on Your Fellowship Income, Expert-Level Budgeting for Graduate Students and Postdocs, and Demystifying Taxes for Graduate Students. Please direct an appropriate potential host within your graduate school, postdoc office, grad student association, etc. to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ where they can learn more. Thank you in advance! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s18e5/. Without further ado, here are the microinterviews recorded at GCC and HEFWA.

What Do You Wish You Had Known About Money Earlier In Your Career?

Amy (03:03): Hi, I am Amy from Princeton and when I was in graduate school I wish I had learned more about investing and saving for retirement and sort of how all that works early in your career to benefit you later.

Sharon F (03:18): Hi, my name is Sharon Fleshman. I’m a senior associate director at Career Services at University of Pennsylvania. I think coming out of undergrad I basically took the salary, I was pitched <laugh> and that was it. So I wish I knew the implications of a starting salary across the years.

Evan W (03:34): My name is Evan Walsh. I’m a career advisor at Harvard Medical School. I really wish I knew that it only takes a little bit each week to put towards something. So every week I put money away into a travel fund. Each week I put money away towards retirement. Each money I put a little bit away towards just miscellaneous fees that I may incur and it’s all within my master budget that I now wish I would’ve known earlier that I like to do and that’s really helped me sort of save for trips and things for my future, things that I wanna prioritize, how I utilize my money. So I wish I knew earlier that your money is yours to spend the way that you want to.

Laura S (04:11): Hi, my name is Laura Stark and I work for Harvard University. I got my PhD many, many years ago and I wish that I had known that I should start saving for retirement even as a graduate student.

Briana M (04:26): I’m Briana Mohan, I am a program manager at MD Anderson Cancer Center. A lot of times we feel, I have felt that money is tied to worth and my value as a professional and there actually is no correlation at all so far as I can see. So I think that decoupling those two things so that then it’s a little bit more feasible to work with money and money questions and speak about them and grapple with them and not have it so tied to how much I’m valued or how much I am worth, I wish I would’ve known that earlier.

Alla M (05:03): So my name is Alla Mirzoyan and I’m from Florida International University and I wish I had known about credit in the United States and not to sign up for credit cards without really understanding the implications. I was an international student so I knew very little about how credit works, but I know better now.

Gina B (05:25): I’m Gina Bellavia from the University at Buffalo and what I wish I’d known about money earlier in my career is, well, particularly because I got a PhD but then I went a non-traditional route. I didn’t go into academia, so I guess it would’ve been good for me to know going that route that I might have to kind of go down in pay to, to then start a new trajectory and then work my way up again, which I guess it makes sense if you think about it, but I didn’t really think about it that way. So it’s taken a little longer to to build up I think by taking that less traditional route, but, but I’ve also had greater career satisfaction.

Manali G (06:03): I’m Manali Ghosh. I’m a senior academic recruiter at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and I wish I had known sooner to invest in stocks like s and p 500 earlier in my career.

Ivonne V P (06:16): My name is Ivonne Vidal Pizarro. I’m at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I’m the research consultant in the graduate school supporting postdocs and I wish that I’d known that if I could save more money when I was younger, I’d have more in my 401k now.

David C-B (06:30): Hi, David Cota-Buckhout. I am the assistant director of Alumni Engagement and Career Support at the University of Rochester’s Graduate Education Postdoctoral affairs office. I wish I knew that I should have paid off my private student loans earlier so that way the compounded interest wouldn’t have backed me with so much debt. And just recently I was able to get rid of those student loans and then free up over $13,000 of interest that I can now put towards other things.

Katie H (07:07): I’m Katie Homar from University of Pittsburgh and what I wish I knew about money earlier in my career was the importance of researching salaries and negotiation.

Alex Y (07:18): Hi, this is Alex Yen, a second year postdoc at Boston University’s professional development and postdoctoral affairs office. The thing I wish I had known about money earlier in my career, and I think especially in graduate school, is that open a high yield savings account as soon as you can and put just a little bit of money, even if it’s 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month. Just having that and knowing that it can, it’s a long term sort of savings space that will continue to accrue interest, will make you feel less anxious and look forward to a time when you can save more

Dan O-B (07:56): Dan Olson-Bang, Syracuse University. If I had known this, I would’ve been grateful. Uh, don’t take out loans during your PhD.

Ryan U (08:05): My name is Ryan Udan. I’m director of the office for postdocs at UTM, the Anderson Cancer Center. As a long time trainee that did not make a lot of money, who navigated into a career path that I was ultimately happy in, it did take too long of a time to get to that career path that for me, I wish I knew about other career options that I would’ve been happy with earlier that paid better and earlier. So now I have a better understanding of all the other diverse career options that are available to people, not just for people with their PhDs, but for other types of professional degree programs that would’ve gotten me to a space where I was happy with my job and that I was making a lot of money more quickly. For example, I didn’t know about optometry field, I didn’t know about radiological careers and you know, the flexibility you have for, uh, uh, obtaining jobs more easily and, and many different places from small towns to big cities. And again, immediately after you get sometimes an associate’s degree, that stuff for me was a black box when I was training.

Giovanna G-M (09:14): Hi, my name is Giovanna Guerrero-Medina and I’m director of Diversity programs at the Yale School of Medicine and the Wu Tsai Institute. One thing I would’ve liked to know about money earlier in my career has to do with how much life costs and how there are gonna be times in your life when you will need to have extra cash because of health emergencies. Because you have to take care of family members who are sick. You have an emergency trip that you have to plan and so it’s important to have a, a fund or a a some money that is liquid that you can use in an emergency at some point in, in my life after my graduate school, my family had some emergencies and I also had some healthcare costs and it was really important for me to have that extra cash that I had saved and separated.

Bill M (10:15): Bill Mahoney. I’m the Associate Dean of graduate student postdoc affairs at the University of Washington. I’m also faculty in the School of medicine and I wish I understood a little bit better that making career decisions based on the next paycheck, the most money, it’s only part of the decision. You have to make it on what you love doing, the people you’re gonna support. And if you choose to stay in higher ed, you’re probably gonna not make as much money, but you’re gonna have a bigger impact on training the next generation of scientists and students to go on and do bigger and better things in uh, and improve the world.

Meredith O (10:44): Meredith Okenquist, Director of Career Management Villanova University. What I wish I knew more about was retirement planning at the very onset of my career and investing the full maximum percentage for my 401k.

Kirsten R (10:59): My name is Kirsten Ronald. I am the program manager of advanced degree career management at UT Austin. I wish I had known that you don’t need to go back to school to make a massive career change and I also wish someone had talked with me about the ROI of going back to school before I did it.

Colleen G (11:13): My name is Colleen Gleeson and I work at the University of Texas at Austin as an associate director for advanced degree employer integration. One thing I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is thinking about careers and jobs and salary packages and benefits in a way that like evaluates in the total compensation package and how invaluable it is to have employer paid health insurance and to have things like pay time off and something that forces you to invest in a retirement account or a pension to make you think about the future.

Marlene B (11:51): So my name is, uh, Marlene Brito, Dr. Marlene Brito and I’m the associate director of DEI at NYU Career Development Center. And what I wish I had known before I started a PhD was that you self-fund a lot of your activities as a doctorate student, especially if you’re a professional who’s going to school part-time, but sometimes even as a full-time student. So like save money for conferences, save money for research expenses because all of that cost thousands of dollars.

Melissa K (12:21): Melissa King, University of Mississippi, the best advice I ever received about money was when my husband and I married 13 years ago and my mother-in-law told us it doesn’t matter how much money you make if you spend all of it right? So knowing how to spend and how to save is by far the best piece of advice. It doesn’t matter if you make six figures if you’re, you’re spending all of it, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Lee T (12:46): Hi, my name is Lee Tacliad. I’m a manager of alumni and employer engagement at Scripps Research and what I wish I knew about money earlier was the magical effect of compound interest.

MaKenna C (13:00): Hi, I’m MaKenna Cealie. I am a graduate student at the University of Rochester. What do I wish I had known about money earlier in my career. So I had some great advice about learning to save and invest, but I think sometimes I took that too far. So I think it would also be important to kinda spend your money too as sometimes and enjoy your life. I read this great book Die With Zero and I think that was very helpful for me.

Dan E (13:26): Hi there. My name’s Dan Emmans. I am senior coordinator for student development and engagement at Harvard Medical School. Early on, get into the habit of putting 20% away and you’ll never go wrong.

Tamar G-C (13:36): Hi, I am Tamar Gaffin-Cahn. I’m the assistant director for graduate students at the Career Development Center at Emerson College. And one thing I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is put money away. Invest really early on, even if it’s just 20 bucks a month, invest early ’cause it will grow. I would also say to diversify where you’re investing and there are lots of opportunities of how to invest in uh, that’s connected to your values as well. So there are opportunities to invest in green energy, invest in programs that are good for the environment and good technology and things like that so it your money isn’t going to corporations that do harm to this world.

Bryan M (14:12): Hi, my name is Bryan McGrath. I do employer engagement over at Harvard Medical School. What do I wish? I had known about money earlier in my career that credit cards accrue interests and you should be paying more than the minimum each time.

Linda L (14:24): My name is Linda Louie. I work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and I wish that earlier in my career I had known that retirement was a thing you needed to plan for <laugh>.

Jessica R (14:35): My name’s Jessica Roman, I’m the Assistant director of Graduate career Services at Stony Brook University and something I wish I would’ve known about money earlier in my career is how private loans and their interest works because I thought it was like public loans where you have the same principal and then I graduated and I got the bill and it was very shocking and I’m still paying that off, so I wish I would’ve known how that works so I would’ve made payments while in college.

Breanna G (15:06): My name’s Breanna Gallagher and I am a career coordinator at Oklahoma State University and what I wish I would’ve known about money earlier in my career is literally just the lingo of all of the money talk, being able to understand my benefits, being able to understand 401ks and medical insurance and being able to just understand what I was reading and signing, especially in a really tight window when you’re required to do your benefits in like 24 hours.

Aimzhan I (15:39): My name is, Aimzhan Iztayeva. I work as a program associate at the graduate School of the University of Minnesota. What I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is how investment works and also how taxes work with regard to money that you gain through investment.

Natalie C (15:56): My name is Natalie Chernets, I’m director of postdoctoral affairs and professional development at Drexel University. What I wish I knew about money early on is that higher education doesn’t necessarily mean more money in your salary, especially if you are an immigrant coming from another country. There are other barriers you have to think through to earn that salary.

Rowena W (16:14): Hi, I’m Dr. Rowena Winkler. I work for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County or UMBC in their career center as the assistant director for graduate student career development. So what I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is, especially as a graduate student, I, I’m an immigrant child, so my parents came here from the Philippines and I didn’t really know good personal finance and money management practices. I wish I had taken out loans or looked for more scholarships because as a graduate student in particular, I went into a lot of credit card debt just trying to finance my way through school. And so I wish I had known more about personal finance resources or funding options as a graduate student.

Mearah Q-B (16:56): My name is Mearah Quinn-Brauner. I work at Northwestern University. I wish I had known that sometimes it’s a good idea to spend money in order to have more money later in your life. When I was in graduate school, my mom tried to convince me to buy a house and I thought that that was insane. It was a crazy idea given how much money I had at the time, but it would’ve been worth figuring out so that I would have a house in Philadelphia now.

Diane S (17:24): Hi, my name is Diane Safer. I’m the director of career and Professional Development at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where I work with PhDs and postdocs. I wish I would’ve taken the advice that I give to my students and postdocs right now and really negotiated for higher salaries and higher starting salaries right when I got the job because you can never really make it up once you’ve started a job and you’ve lost all your negotiating power once you’re in.

Mallory F-L (17:49): Hi, my name’s Mallory Fix-Lopez. I’m with Language ConnectED. I wish I would’ve known to charge for my work earlier in my career. I’ve done a lot of work for free <laugh>.

Emily S (17:59): So my name is Emily Sferra. I am the coordinator for career and Professional Development at the University of Michigan Medical School. If given the option to contribute to a retirement account you should contribute to a retirement account.

David B (18:19): Hi, I’m David Blancha. I’m a program manager at the OCPD at University of San Francisco. The thing that I wish I had known about money earlier, especially when I was a graduate student, is that when I was doing all of the math on my finances and what I might like need to live while I was in graduate school, all of those numbers would be wrong. Eight years later when I graduated I had no, I, no sense of adjusting for inflation or markets changing or anything like that. So I assumed the math I had done to live in a one bedroom apartment <laugh> in New York in 2015 is what I was going to need in 2022 and that’s absolutely not, not right. <laugh>.

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Emily (19:09): Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2024-2025 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Orientations or very close to the start of the academic year would be a perfect time for tax education or general personal finance content. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

What Do You Wish You Had Known About Money Earlier In Your Career?

Alexis B (20:37): My name’s Alexis Boyer. I’m assistant director of Graduate student career services at MIT. And I wish I had known the difference between a 1099 and a W2 and I wish that I had known that the skills that I was developing were worthy of being paid.

RC S (20:54): RC Stabile, uh, Vanderbilt University, director of trainee engagement and wellbeing. I wish I knew about investing, putting money in target date index funds and I wish I knew about high yield savings accounts earlier.

John M (21:10): Hi, my name’s John Miles. I’m the Chief Executive officer of Inkpath, uh, the professional development platform. I wish earlier that I had known that by spending my time working on Shakespeare and taking a very academic direction that I wasn’t counting myself out of decent salaries later on that I should be confident that time will reward you and, uh, you can indulge those academic perspectives, uh, without feeling like you are narrowing down your options for the future.

Zarna P (21:42): Hi, I’m Zarna Pala. I am the assistant director of the Biological Sciences graduate program at the University of Maryland. And I wish I knew, uh, more about investment and investing money in the right direction or any sort of like small investments which I, which I could have started early on, uh, as a graduate student, as a postdoc fellow, that would’ve been really helpful.

Anne-Charlotte M (22:08): Hi, I’m Anne-Charlotte Mecklenburg. I am the postdoctoral associate for academic support at the University of Maryland College Park. And I think something that I wish that I knew about money earlier in my career was just all of the different ways of like saving money and organizing money that I would need later in my career as a graduate student it was kind of like, okay, I have a stipend and it covers all my living expenses and I can’t really do anything else with it, so I just spend it until I don’t have it anymore. And now that I’m sort of moving into more of a mid-career moment, it’s like, oh, I have a retirement account through my university and I don’t really know how that works. All that kind of stuff that I feel like in other careers people kind of learn that kind of stuff closer to right af out of college. It’s something that now feels like a little bit delayed for me and now I feel like I’m a little bit behind. So something I wish I was thinking about before I needed it so that I’d be ready when I did need it.

Amy A (23:00): I’m Amy Aines and I’m with Championing Science. What I would’ve loved to have known more about is how to invest. I think I was conservative and I was okay with a 401k with someone else thinking about it, but it would’ve been nice to know for myself what that was about and how I could take advantage of the opportunity.

Gina D (23:18): Gina Delgado, director of doctoral and post-doctoral life design and what I wish I’d known earlier about money in general is not just knowing about money but not being afraid of being broke because I’m not afraid of being broke.

Beka L (23:32): This is Beka Layton. I am the director of professional development at UNC Chapel Hill and thinking back to when I was a graduate student, I think benefits life insurance 401ks and kind of how to balance life expenses with long-term goals and budgeting. I think that whole like black box of like, I don’t know any of those things was mystifying to me. So things I learned by accident along the way and wish I knew then.

Aurora W (24:02): I’m Aurora Washington. I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And something that I wish I knew about finance when I was a graduate student is how to budget a little bit better and to manage my expectations because I’m a postdoc, postdoc don’t get paid well and so I wish I knew a little bit more about benefits in negotiating in Texas.

Sam R (24:29): Hi, um, this is Sam Ramosevac, I’m director, um, at the office of Postdoctoral and Mentor trainee program at Emory University. Uh, I wish I actually negotiated my salary and I think it’s really important at least to attempt to negotiate and get more money for the level of experience you have and you know, just at least to try.

Ian K (24:57): I’m Ian Krout. I am a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. For me, being a postdoc, I went on a training grant and realized that I was losing some benefits that I had gotten as being an employee at the university. And so I actually began to ask questions to both my PI and the postdoctoral office about if this needed to be the case and if there was any way to get benefits and advocating for myself was enough to get those benefits brought back through a workaround at the university, which was really positive for my experience and helped me to still be able to save for retirement and not pay into my health insurance myself.

Jessica T (25:35): My name is Jessica Taylor. I’m a research fellow at ACLS and I wish I had known when I was a graduate student that you’re supposed to tip in hotels.

Natalia (25:44): My name is Natalia, I work for the University of Pittsburgh as a career advisor. Yeah, and I wish I, I had known that money would be able to buy me freedom of choice.

Autumn A (25:55): Well, my name is Autumn Anthony. I manage the office for graduate student assistantships and fellowships at GW. I think it would’ve been really important for me to realize earlier that if you are looking to make more money, then you have to go to the organizations that actually have more money <laugh> and that when you are committed to the work that you’re doing and working hard and looking for opportunities to succeed in your work, just because of your commitment and just because of your hard work doesn’t mean you’re going to make more money. So you have to go where the money is.

Jessica V (26:33): My name is Jessica Vélez. I am the membership engagement and early career programs manager for the Genetic Society of America. And I definitely wish I had known that I do actually make more money than I think I do. And by creating a budget, that’s how I learned that I made more money than I thought I did and I signed up for a budgeting app at some point in my graduate career. Because of that, when I finished my PhD, I wasn’t able to immediately get a job, but I had enough money saved up from the budgeting I had done on a graduate school stipend to survive for two or three months without having to worry about unemployment because you can’t apply for unemployment as a graduate student <laugh>. So that was extremely beneficial and I’m glad that I finally learned that, but I wish I had learned that earlier for sure.

Melissa B (27:20): This is Melissa Bostrom. I’m assistant Dean for Graduate Student Professional Development at Duke University and I wish I would’ve known that investing for retirement didn’t have to be perfect. It didn’t have to be the best. I just had to get started with a small amount on a regular basis.

Chris S (27:35): Okay, my name is Chris Smith. I manage the Office of Postdoc Affairs at Virginia Tech. The importance of investing in special retirement vehicles, whether that be a Roth IRA or traditional IRA that have different benefits in terms of tax purposes, whether you pay them now or later. And it might be real benefit when you’re in your lower paying years to be in investing in or Roth where you’re paying the taxes now and then when you eventually retire, you don’t know taxes on that and all the compounding that happens over those 30 plus years of your career.

Jason H (28:06): I’m Jason Heustis, assistant Dean for Student Development Evaluation at Harvard Medical School. I’d say one of the things that would’ve been helpful to know in graduate school, similar decisions you’d make when you start getting a real paycheck, things like allocations for insurances, the different types of saving options, that type of thing would’ve been helpful for me to know earlier, right? Or to be prepared for those decisions so that I can do as much research at the time. That would’ve been helpful.

Anne X (28:30): Hi, my name is Anne Xiong. I’m from UC Berkeley Center for Financial Wellness. I wish I know that no matter how much money you have, you can start investing early.

Kelli W (28:41): I’m Kelli Wright from Wayne State University. I’m the financial wellness advisor there. I’ve been there since March of 2023. I’m an accounting background, so I’m really excited about this space and what I wish I would’ve known is the importance of saving, creating that healthy habit, of saving even $10 a month just where I would be at financially if I would’ve known that.

Charah C (29:07): Yes, my name is Charah Coleman. I work for University of California Merced, and I am the Financial Wellness Center program manager on that campus. I would say the time value of money. I don’t have any regrets with how I spent my money in my undergrad or even early grad school, but I wish I really would’ve invested earlier and given myself a leg up a lot earlier. Now I definitely have to invest a lot more aggressively and I have to cut a lot more expenses now than when I was starting off in my career. I, I definitely think having that awareness of the time value of money being aggressive at the front end, I think would’ve behoove me a lot better.

Beth H (29:49): Beth Hunsaker, MS. Uh, associate Director, financial Wellness Center, university of Utah. After my graduate work, I did take some time off to have kids and although that was a wonderful chapter of my life, I really wish I would’ve taken time to keep my network strong, to keep working on my skills because when it was time to come back for my career, which has to do with money, it was a little harder for that on ramping. And I think that there is a way to balance and do both, and I wish I would’ve focused a little more on that.

Roland K (30:27): Roland Keller Jr associate director of financial aid at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. One thing that I wish I would’ve known about a little sooner is the importance of credit. Credit is very important. It literally is life or death. So I would’ve wished I would’ve been more educated about credit

Darrel S (30:45): Darrel Stufflebeam, uh, a doctor in education from KU and I’m the new assistant director for Jayhawk Finances at ku. Uh, I wish I’d have known about the importance of starting early and compound interest and I did not have a financial background and my parents didn’t really have advice. So if I would’ve started a little earlier then I’d be much happier now, but I’m just spreading the word as part of my current job.

Khalilah L (31:12): My name is Dr. Khalilah Lauderdale. I am the Associate Athletic Director for student services at the University of Southern California. And earlier in my career, I wish I had known, um, concerning money more about how to buy a home. I was very green in our process and very reliant on my realtor resources, so that would’ve been helpful.

Nafisah G-B (31:35): My name is Nafisah Graham-Brown. I am a program administrator of a financial coaching program at SUNY WCC, that’s Westchester Community College. What I wish I had known about money earlier in my career was the value of retirement savings. Uh, unfortunately I was in a job where we were discouraged from taking part in the pension and retirement program mainly because the people that were talking to us also didn’t have much information or knowledge. So I guess the value of it wasn’t seen by most of us. And I guess the lesson is make sure you’re getting your information from someone who knows.

Aly B (32:13): My name is Aly Blakeney. I am an instructor of economics at Phillips Academy Andover. What I wish I had known about money earlier was honestly how important it is to talk with any significant other. If you have like a very serious prospect with them to talk with them and be like, Hey, where are we at in terms of money and debt? I think that will cause stress quicker than anything. And setting yourself up for future means also taking care of your financial wellness via your emotional intimacy wellness as well.

Tony F (32:45): My name is Tony Froelich. I am the financial literacy coordinator at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. What I wish I’d known earlier in my career about money is the power of investing in yourself. I always thought of saving as taking what was left after the month and that was my savings. So whether that was $10 or negative $50, pulling outta my savings account, but learning the lesson of taking that savings out of my paycheck first and putting that away and then spending the rest has been life changing.

Zach T (33:19): Yes, Zach Taylor, assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, and what I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is saving it earlier in my career would facilitate a lot more time and that as I’ve gotten older, time is money and I’m now realizing how much more time money can buy you. And that has become so important as my parents have aged and as I have continued in my career where I feel like I have enough money now, but I don’t have the time, but if I had more money, I know I would have more time. So I think the relationship between time and money is what I wish I had known earlier in my career.

Lyndsi B (34:04): I am Lyndsi Burcham. I am the financial Wellness Program manager at the University of Pennsylvania. I think what I wish I had known about money earlier in my career isn’t even necessarily about money. It’s the fact that like you don’t have to make one decision and have it be the right decision for the rest of your life. Like you can make changes at any point along the way. And I think a lot of times when we’re having conversations about money with students, they’re so caught up in the fact that they have to do the right thing first. And oftentimes there is no right thing. And even if there is a right thing, it’s gonna change depending on your life circumstances. There’s a lot I could say about tactical information about like what is a credit score versus a credit report and, and knowing those kinds of things, but like the psychological component of it, which is you are allowed to fail and like you can recover from failure. I, I don’t think we talk about that enough and instead we instill fear in students that they have to do things the best way.

Peter B (34:59): Hi, I am Peter Bye. I am a doctor of music student at Indiana University and what I wish I had known about money earlier in my career is that sometimes it works out well and sometimes it doesn’t work out well and you kind of gotta roll with the punches and make adjustments constantly. It’s never something you figure out. You can’t solve it unless you’re like super rich, but you can make changes and slowly affect your, your situation hopefully in a positive way. Uh, so you kind of just have to roll with the punches until you hopefully get to the place you wanna get to.

Outtro

Emily (35:41): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2023 Edition

December 18, 2023 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

Emily published the first episode of this podcast in July 2018. This is the 200th episode, and over the last five and a half years, the podcast has featured 252 unique voices in addition to Emily’s. This last episode of 2023 catches up with the guests from Seasons 1 through 11. The guests were invited to submit short audio updates on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of their interview. They also included their best financial advice for an early-career PhD if their answer has changed since the initial interview.

Links mentioned in the Episode

PF for PhDs Podcast Hub
PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List
The Personal Finance for PhDs Website
Emily’s E-mail Address
Dr. Jill Hoffman (from Toddler on the Tenure Track): Season 3, Episode 4
Dr. Samantha McDonald: Season 8, Episode 3
Lucy Bryan (from Polygence): Season 10, Episode 3
Dr. Sean Bittner (from The Life Science Coach): Season 6, Episode 12; Season 10, Episode 14
Dr. Nelson Zounlome (from Liberate the Block): Season 10, Episode 16
Maya Gosztyla: Season 2, Episode 4; Season; Season 11, Episode 1
Dr. Jeanelle Horcasitas: Season 11, Episode 3
Dr. Leslie Wang (from Your Words Unleashed): Season 11, Episode 10

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2023 Edition

Teaser

00:00 Samantha: And I talked a lot about saving and budgeting the last time I was on the show, and I still think that’s a really important skill for everyone to have, but I’ve also learned since then that it’s equally important, if not more so, to advocate for yourself and make sure you’re actually getting the pay that you deserve and that you need to live in the city where you’re going to grad school.

Introduction

00:17 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

00:52 Emily: This is Season 16, Episode 8, and today I am featuring many guest voices! I published the first episode of this podcast in July 2018. This is the 200th episode, and over the last five and a half years, the podcast has featured 252 unique voices in addition to my own. For our last episode in 2023, I thought it would be fun to catch up with the guests from Seasons 9 through 11, and a few from earlier seasons as well. I invited them to submit short audio clips to update us on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of our interview, as well as to provide their best financial advice if that has changed since our initial interview. We have some very big and very exciting updates this year, and I’m confident you are going to appreciate the perspectives that these guests bring. The audio clips in this episode are ordered by when the original episode was published. If you’d like to circle back and listen to any of the previous interviews, you can do so in your podcatcher app or at my website, PFforPhDs.com/podcast. To keep up with future episodes, please hit subscribe on that podcatcher and/or join my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice. You’ll hear an update from me first, followed by the rest of the guests. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s16e8/. Happy listening, happy holidays, and happy new year! See you in 2024!

Dr. Emily Roberts

02:31 Emily: Hi! This is Emily Roberts from Personal Finance for PhDs. I am of course the host of this podcast and you hear from me in every episode! 2023 started off really rough with the hospitalization of both of my husband’s parents and ultimately the death of his father. For months we were barely holding things together logistically with our household and their household and really leaned on our extended family and local friends. Honestly, I couldn’t get everything done in a timely manner with Personal Finance for PhDs during that tax season, which is my busiest time of year. Thank goodness I had three wonderful people working with me who stepped forward to keep the lights on while I took time away to be with my loved ones.

03:18 Emily: It was a slow climb out of that period but this past summer and fall were really wonderful for me and my family. Now that my younger child is in kindergarten and more independent, we have a really good household rhythm. I read every day, and my family often plays games together. I’m leading two Girl Scouts troops, one for each daughter, which is kind of crazy but enjoyable. We have a wonderful local community. Life is very sweet. Oh, and I started using Asana for my household and personal life, like I do for my business, and it’s been amazing for staying on top of everything without feeling overwhelmed.

03:55 Emily: On the financial side, I stopped making any efforts to budget or actively track our expenses at the start of the year. Our savings rate took a big hit, partially because of inattention, partially because Personal Finance for PhDs made less money in 2023 than 2022, and partially because we paid for a roof replacement and solar panels installation. I finally got back to active expense tracking and planning with our finances a couple of months ago. It feels great to get back to our positive habits now that we have the capacity, and thankfully the wheels didn’t completely fall off because we had pretty good systems in place. If you want to download the manual expense tracker I created for my and your use, go to PFforPhDs.com/tracker/.

04:44 Emily: I am hoping for a better year for Personal Finance for PhDs in 2024 than I had in 2023. If you’re a fan of this podcast and the financial education I provide, I would very very much appreciate you recommending me to a professional development-type person at your university or alma mater. Thanks for listening to my update! If you want to get in touch, you can visit my website at PFforPhDs.com or email me at [email protected].

Dr. Jill Hoffman

05:13 Jill: Hi, I’m Jill Hoffman from Toddler on the Tenure Track. I was on Season 3, Episode 4 in 2019, and then I was also on a Catching Up with Prior Guests episode at the end of 2020, which was Season 7, Episode 16. In the last update, I shared that my family and I were contemplating a move back to the East Coast from Oregon. We were expecting a baby and I was an assistant professor. Since that time, we have moved back to the East Coast, back to my home state of Virginia. The baby we were expecting is now two and a half years old, and I quit my job as an assistant professor right before I was supposed to go up for tenure. So lots of big changes.

05:56 Jill: In my original episode, I talked about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and student loan debt, as well as me working while my husband was a stay at home parent. And now my husband and I have switched. I’m staying at home and he’s working full time. And because I’m no longer working, I’m not actively working towards loan forgiveness. I actually have, I think about 13 months left, so not that much time at all in the grand scheme of things, but we chose to push pause on that path for now. In total, we have about 73, 000 in student loans left, which is about 10,000 less than where we were at at the time of my original podcast episode. We’re just paying the minimum right now, and that’s our plan with the new save plan. Financially, it doesn’t make sense to try and aggressively pay them down at this point. While being a stay at home parent is my main focus, I’ve also sought out some additional professional opportunities just to use my brain in a different way during the week.

06:54 Jill: I’m actually working in a virtual assistant role with Emily, supporting both her financial education workshops, as well as the podcast. And then I’ve been doing a little bit of coaching for early career academics. And I have a small Etsy shop with some digital products. So I’m dipping my toes in a number of different things and I’m really loving all of it. My plan is to slowly expand the virtual assistant and coaching work, especially once my youngest gets to kindergarten in a few years. As far as best financial advice for early career PhDs, what was helpful for me, and it is still really helpful for me, is knowing exactly what money is coming in and what money is going out. So tracking on a regular basis in a spreadsheet or with an app, I just use a spreadsheet. Just some way to show you where your money, money is going is so helpful. You can find me online at my website, ToddlerOnTheTenureTrack.com.

Dr. Samantha McDonald

07:47 Samantha: Hi, my name is Samantha McDonald. I have a PhD in informatics from the University of California, Irvine, and I joined Emily on the podcast in season eight, episode three, back in 2021. My episode was about knowing your worth and discussing what it was like to make the most money as a graduate student in my department when so many of my peers were struggling with less. I think my trajectory after grad school has been quite different than most. Immediately after graduating, I took a few months off to go backpacking, work on a farm in New Mexico, and travel with my family, just to do things that I just really wanted to do on my bucket list. Then I started my first real job in industry, working as a user experience researcher at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, and I worked there for almost two years aggressively saving, in a similar way to FIRE. The reason why I was aggressively saving during my first real job is really twofold. One, I wanted to keep my standard of living low to not become trapped having to work. I saw quite a few friends and colleagues start doing that right out of their PhDs. And second, my partner Michael and I were preparing ourselves for a multi year seabattical on our sailboat. Michael actually has his own episode that is in season 14, episode nine. Both of us were in graduate school almost until our thirties. As much as it sounded nice to go straight into a full job after school, we, we really wanted to use this time in our lives to take risks and do things we probably couldn’t do once we settled down, you know, like buy a house, have kids and, you know, you need to have full time jobs often to support those higher expenses.

09:23 Samantha: So now here we are eight months later. We’re still enjoying our time off. We sailed from California to Mexico and back, and now we’re gearing up to sail back to Mexico post hurricane season and potentially cross to spend some time sailing in French Polynesia. Um, based on my experience my best advice for early career PhDs is really to live below your means and don’t accumulate debt or high expenses too early. I know it can be easy to feel like you should treat yourself after so much time with low income, but I saw a lot of my friends now feel lost at a job they don’t want, but they can’t leave because they’ve already increased their expenses with cars and house and activities and hobbies and things that, that don’t necessarily make them happy and fulfilled in that same way. My partner and I have a little bit more extreme case of saving up and living way below our means on a little sailboat. Um, but I think everyone has their own passions and, you know, life is short and you need to explore those things. And luckily people with PhDs, uh, will, you’ll never have a hard time finding a job. So as scary as it is to sort of take time off, for me and Michael, it was the way that we wanted to go. And we’re definitely not regretting it. Eventually we’ll have to go back and get jobs, but we are treating money at this point like a commodity for happiness. And right now this is what makes us happy. Thank you so much for having me again. And, uh, if anyone has any questions or wants to contact me, they’re more than welcome to my email is [email protected]. It’s spelled like Sam, Mick five, seven, seven, three. Thanks.

Lucy Bryan from Polygence

10:58 Lucy: Hi, this is Lucy from Polygence. I’m Polygence’s mentor success manager, and I’m so excited to update you all on both Polygence and our mentoring model after my colleagues Jen and Steven spoke on these topics with you all in season 10 on episode 3. One update from us is that we’ve standardized mentor rates to be based on degree level rather than field as an effort to be really transparent with mentors about their pay rate and what they can expect upon degree completion. For instance, if they’re receiving their M. A. or PhD. We now have over 3, 000 mentors in our mentor pool, both graduate students and industry experts. Another exciting update is that we’ve already grown so much from that Season 10 episode, as we now have over 3, 000 mentors in our mentor pool, both graduate students and industry experts. We just looked at a breakdown of how many projects our mentors worked on in 2023 and it ranges from 1 to 15 per mentor. So it’s great to see the flexibility of this role, as each mentor can select projects and the number of concurrent students that work best for their workload. It’s also exciting for us to keep growing and to know that over 3,600 Polygence projects have been completed, which is really a testament to the work of the mentors and also speaks to how excited many high school students are about research and getting to decide what they learn and spend their time exploring.

12:21 Lucy: If you’d like to learn more about Polygence or the mentor role, you can contact me, Lucy, at [email protected], spelled P O L Y G E N C E. org. Definitely check out our website, polygence.org, where you can see many of our amazing current mentors too.

Commercial

12:44 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! I’m hard at work behind the scenes updating my suite of tax return preparation workshops for tax year 2023. These pre-recorded educational workshops explain how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2023 tax season starting in January 2024, I’m offering four versions of this workshop, one each for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the end users, graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs, can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor one of my tax preparation workshops for you and your peers? I’d love to receive a warm introduction to a potential sponsor this fall so we can hit the ground running in January serving those early bird filers. You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Now back to our interview.

Dr. Sean Bittner

14:29 Sean: Hello, this is Sean Bittner. And I was a guest on personal finance for PhDs for season six, episode 12 in 2020 and season 10, episode 14 in 2021, as well as the 2022 catch up episode. Apologies for the audio. I am taking full advantage of health insurance before the end of the year and had a much needed nasal surgery done recently. Since my last job update, quite a lot has happened personally and professionally, my wife and I both took new jobs. She’s now in consulting and accepted a board seat for the local nonprofit and I now work in technology transfer, joined a new coaching company and just completed my 5th semester as a leadership educator. This year, we traveled to Japan, Italy, and 3 national parks. And as I record this, we’re currently on baby watch as our daughter is expected early in the new year and could arrive any day. For an update on my advice, my only update this time around is there’s truly never a good time for making big life decisions.

15:30 Sean: Everyone that listens to this podcast is smart and intelligent and a planner in one way or the other, but the last few years have really shown me that there’s always risks and rewards and never a perfect way to time something, especially something big. Uh, so I want to just encourage people, uh, fear of the unknown is certainly natural, uh, but, but there will always be reasons to not do something. If you want to keep in touch with me, you can find me on the site formerly known as Twitter for as long as it exists @lifescic oach or on Instagram at Sean without an H. As well as on LinkedIn, I’m again, taking new coaching clients this year, which I’m really excited about as well. So if you’re interested in exploring leadership and career potential, please send me a note. I’d be happy to meet with you. Thanks for listening.

Dr. Nelson Zounlome

16:20 Nelson: This is Dr. Nelson Zounlome, founder and CEO of Liberate the Block. I appeared in season 10, episode 16, um, and since then I’ve had a few changes and updates. So, um, after, uh, that year I left my tenure track faculty position and started working on LTB full time. Um, we’ve been able to expand a little bit. So, um, just recently we actually, uh, published our second book I Thrive: An International Students Guide to Thriving in the US and then we have an upcoming book Lift As You Climb: The Black Book of Academic Encouragement. And then lastly, have been able to publish our asynchronous course, developing a graduate school thrive mindset. So since leaving academia, I’ve been able to, again, focus more on the business, completed some business accelerators to better, you know, just learn business skills, networking, different things like that. I’ve also been able to continue to do some research, particularly just among BIPOC students and other folks in, in higher ed. Also, as a psychologist, I’ve been able to do a little, uh, therapy as well, and so that’s been really cool to have kind of a balance of all my skill sets in my, uh, in my time after academia.

17:46 Nelson: My best advice for folks, again, is really just to start early, not waiting until after your PhD to think about finances, to think about your, um, the life that you want to live, you know, and so the best advice I really have is to take the time to think about your values, who you want to be, um, think about the type of life you want to live, right? The type of work life synergy you want to have, um, being able to cultivate that now. And so I referenced, um, different resources in my life. Episode such as the millionaire next door the automatic millionaire two additional resources that I wanted to highlight were Um, we should all be millionaires by Rachel Rogers a really good book on Just mindset, but also practical ways in which you can start to really Um excel right in in your life. Um, and then the other one is get good with money, uh, 10 simple steps to becoming financially whole by Tiffany Aliche. And so this is a really great, easy guide to just figuring out how to, again, start investing, um, talks about insurance and, and, and different things like that. Um, and so feel free to, to check out my episode, season 10, episode 16, for a bit more information, and I wish you all well on your PhD journey and, uh, getting financially whole.

Maya Gosztyla

19:10 Maya: My name is Maya Gosztyla, and I’m a fifth year PhD candidate in biomedical sciences at the University of California, San Diego. I previously appeared in Season 2, Episode 4 of the show, back when I was a post bacc fellow at the NIH, and I appeared again in Season 11, Episode 1, when I was in my third year of grad school. The biggest thing that’s changed since I last appeared on the show was that student researchers at my university formed a union, and we organized the largest labor strike in the history of U. S. higher education, with 48, 000 of us walking off the job for a total of six weeks. And as a result, we were able to negotiate our very first contract, which included By far the largest pay raises in the history of my program, in addition to other benefits like paid time off, protections from workplace abuse, appointment security guarantees, and a whole bunch more.

20:07 Maya: And so now I have a lot more financial security thanks to our increased pay, and it’s just been a major improvement for my quality of life overall. And I talked a lot about saving and budgeting the last time I was on the show, and I still think that’s a really important skill for everyone to have, but I’ve also learned since then that it’s equally important, if not more so, to advocate for yourself and make sure you’re actually getting the pay that you deserve and that you need to live in the city where you’re going to grad school. And I’ve noticed that grad students at a lot of other universities have been recently unionizing as well, so I’m really excited to see how this changes the financial landscape of graduate school across the country moving forward.

Dr. Jeanelle Horcasitas

20:43 Jeanelle: Hi everyone, this is Jeanelle Orcasitas. I had the pleasure of speaking with Emily in Season 11, Episode 3. where I talked about the multiple jobs I worked during graduate school to pay off debt. Since then, I’ve had a couple of life updates that I’d like to share with you all. The first update is that I sold and bought a new home with my husband, which was really great because we had built up a lot of equity at the time. However, we had to take on a higher interest rate because they had just increased it. We also learned there’s a lot of extra costs that are involved when you’re both Selling and buying a new home and always read the fine print, especially when it comes to liens. We actually had to pay several thousand dollars on a lien we weren’t aware of in order to sell our home. So there was a lot of lessons learned we, we gained in our second round of home buying. The second update I wanted to share is that earlier this year, I experienced a layoff. And at the time it was very shocking and it felt like the rug was pulled from underneath me. But I was really thankful that my husband and I had prepared and we had a six month emergency fund built up. And I was fortunate enough to receive a severance package. And so even though this was an extremely stressful and uncertain time for me, I was really grateful that we could stick to a budget, adjust it as needed for costs that we had a savings in place that could really extend me for a long time as I embarked on the job search.

22:31 Jeanelle: But connecting back to all of the multiple jobs in graduate schools that I had, I wanted to give a key piece of advice, which is always stay connected with folks in your network. You never know when you’re going to need to ask for help. And during this time, I reached out to many of those people I had worked with, and this really helped me land interviews and eventually jobs. This was also a time that made me think deeply about what I wanted from a career. And so I actually transitioned out of tech and went into the dental insurance industry. So I would say after a really odd year of some ups and downs with buying and selling a home and losing a job and then getting a job again. Um, ultimately I’ve learned that the power of saving and just having that emergency fund because you never know when you’re going to need it and when it’s going to come and it will just make you feel significantly lighter and taking on the stress of whatever you’re going through. Thank you.

Dr. Leslie Wang

23:40 Leslie: This is Leslie Wang, writing coach and the founder of my company, Your Words Unleashed, where I help scholars write and publish books that matter. I was featured on season 11, episode 10 of this podcast called This Prof is Taking Deliberate Steps Towards Self Employment. The episode dropped in May, 2022, and I’ve had a lot of exciting changes in my life and career since then. In our episode, Emily and I talked about how I was planning to leave the Academy in a couple of years, once the business became sustainable. But by the time the episode was published, I had actually already turned in my resignation. I had reached a point where I no longer wanted to pretend that I was still committed to academia. And I had also experienced a lot of success in my business, and I wanted to see what I could do with it full time. And I also realized that I was never going to feel 100 percent ready to give up a totally secure position. So I turned in my resignation in April of 2022. And if this gives you any indication of the kind of institution I was at, the Dean’s office never even responded to my resignation email, except to ask my department chair to ask me to return all of my electronics.

24:58 Leslie: I spent the summer of 2022 mentally adjusting to leaving academia, which was very sad for me, even though I had been planning for it for four years. But ultimately it was the best thing I could have done. I’ve been full time in my business since August, 2022, and my business has grown a lot. I started my own podcast called Your Words Unleashed, where I give writing tips and publishing advice, and I’ve done more than 40 episodes and gained a loyal listenership. But for more than the first year, I was really overworking. I was burning out and realized I had taken some bad habits from academia into my non academic work life. So this fall, I got really serious about limiting the number of clients I take on. And I also raised my rates so that I can actually live the kind of life that I want. And because I know people are always interested in the financials, I will share that in each of the first two years of my business, I have surpassed six figures. Which is much more than I made as a professor. At the same time, this does not come with any health or retirement benefits. I would not have been able to make this kind of transition without my husband, who put me and our child on his health insurance. But overall, I’m incredibly happy to be at this point in my life and career. I work only 25 to 30 hours per week and never at night or on weekends. In terms of advice that I have for early career PhDs, I know that a lot of folks are looking to leave higher ed, And you might be struggling and burnt out and you need to leave right away.

26:33 Leslie: But if you do have a steady income from a position, I would advise you to keep it while you’re looking for your next big step. The best thing I could have done was to build my business within the security of my academic job. It gave me the ability to experiment and make mistakes and take risks without risking at all. But if you’re really unhappy, like I was, make sure to set a final deadline so that security doesn’t impede you from taking a chance on yourself. So if you want to connect with me or find out more about what I do, you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Leslie Wang, or go to my website at www.yourwordsunleashed.com. You can listen to my podcast from there or join my list serve. I send out weekly writing tips and strategies for living a more satisfying life. So thanks again, Emily, for having me on and happy holidays to you all.

Outtro

27:29 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Financial Advice from PhD Career Development and Financial Wellness Professionals

August 28, 2023 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily shares the microinterviews she recorded at two higher education conferences this past summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What piece of financial advice are you glad you followed or do you wish you had followed as a grad student or postdoc?” Listen through the episode for excellent financial strategies that have stood the test of time for the interviewees.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Financial Advice from PhD Career Development and Financial Wellness Professionals

Teaser

00:00 Beth H: So thinking back to grad school, the things I’m glad that I did is is really just stick to the fundamentals of looking at what my income was and make sure I was budgeting it, saving. I was investing in my Roth IRA and now 20 years later, has made all the difference. Even the $50 a month I found back then is setting me up for financial success now.

Introduction

00:30 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

01:01 Emily: This is Season 15, Episode 6, and today I’m sharing the microinterviews I recorded at two higher education conferences this past summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What piece of financial advice are you glad you followed or do you wish you had followed as a grad student or postdoc?” Listen through the episode for excellent financial strategies that have stood the test of time for these interviewees.

01:36 Emily: The two conferences I attended were the Graduate Career Consortium Annual Meeting or GCC and the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance Summit or HEFWA Summit. GCC is primarily attended by university staff members working with PhD students and postdocs in career and professional development. The HEFWA Summit is attended by university staff members working in financial wellness and financial aid across undergraduate and graduate populations. These two conferences were excellent networking opportunities for me on top of the built-in professional development. However, there are plenty of universities who were not represented at these conferences. Would you please consider recommending my financial education seminars and workshops at your university? My most popularly requested events for the upcoming academic year are How to Survive and Thrive Financially in Graduate School or Your Postdoc, How to Not Hate Your Fellowship During Tax Season, and Up-Level Your Cash Flow as a Graduate Student or Postdoc. Please direct an appropriate potential host within your graduate school, postdoc office, grad student association, etc. to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ where they can learn more. Thank you in advance!

03:00 Emily: You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s15e6/. Without further ado, here are the microinterviews recorded at GCC and the HEFWA Summit.

What piece of financial advice are you glad you followed or do you wish you had followed as a grad student or postdoc?

Tax Implications: Kaylee Steen, University of Michigan Medical School

03:19 Kaylee S: My name is Kaylee Steen. I work at the University of Michigan Medical School. The piece of advice that I would have financial advice for postdocs would be that if you are on a training grant, you need to be aware of the tax implications and the fact that they they’re not going to withhold your your paycheck for tax purposes. And so that will change or make your W-2 non-existent. And that can be really complicated. So make sure that you talk with your training grant administrator about the implications for taxes and any other kind of financial implications.

Value as a Student: Stevie Eberle, Stanford University School of Medicine

03:57 Stevie E: Stevie Eberle, executive director and assistant dean of BioSci Careers at Stanford University School of Medicine. During graduate school and postdoc training, I really wish I had understood my value that as a student I actually had value and I had the right to say no or to ask for more. That being said, as soon as I learned my value, I, I ran with it. And I have taken every opportunity to actually ask for more or to reject offers that don’t offer either enough or anything to. Examples were recently with an event that I was planning where it was a DEI related event and they were going they wanted me to do this for free. It was a 300 person event and I said no until they offered me something and I ended up getting a very nice package out of it. Another example was when I was I wanted a promotion and everybody around me had this and I had had the same title except for me. And everybody was making a certain amount of money except for me. And I had all the data and they were not listening to me and they told me, You love it here. Let’s face it, you’re not leaving. And I said, Oh, that is not true. I love it here if I’m being paid equitably. So I found something else. And then they were surprised. And then I miraculously got a promotion and more money. So what I was saying is I wish I’d known, but as soon as I knew I ran with it.

Retirement Savings: Alicia Roy, Gladstone Institutes

05:39 Alicia R: My name is Alicia Roy. I work at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco and I received a piece of advice that came from a cohort member’s parent telling them to open a Roth IRA immediately, which I had also heard from my parent. But hearing it from multiple places really helps. And the two of us did it together. We sat down with our laptops next to each other and we’re like, How? How does this work? Where do we go? And I think that really helped me actually open that account and actually make that happen for me. And I’m really glad that I did that along, for now. Now is actually a pretty long time ago. At the time I was like, Is it already too late? And I now have colleagues. I’m in my mid thirties and I have colleagues who still haven’t opened one and I’ve had one for over five years now and that already makes me feel a lot better about the future.

Financial Habits: Melissa Bostrom, Duke University

06:32 Melissa B: My name is Melissa Bostrom, and I’m the assistant dean for graduate student professional development at Duke University. What piece of financial advice am I glad I followed during graduate school? Well, I really kept myself to a budget and really watched my expenses and made sure that I saved money for surprise expenses, emergency expenses like car repairs and also conference presentation opportunities. And I feel like those and a little bit of buffer in my budget really helped me take advantage of opportunities when they arose. And some of them are very positive and others car repairs not so positive.

Housing: Yasmine Farley, UC San Diego

07:10 Yasmine F: So hello, my name is Yasmine Farley. I am a senior associate director at UC San Diego. And the piece of financial advice that I guess I’m glad I followed or wish I would have followed while I was in grad school. When it comes to I’m glad I followed was being flexible in my housing arrangements and making sure that I was getting the cheapest option. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I first moved for my Ph.D. program. And so then being willing to chat around with colleagues, classmates and move in with one and then looking for others each year really helped to cut costs for me. And what I wish I had followed during grad school is to not take out as many loans. I had a full ride. However, I took out loans so that I could live and pay for rent and food and gas. But I wish I would have taken out the bare minimum so that I wouldn’t be saddled with all the debt that I have now.

Socializing: Anonymous #1

08:18 Anonymous #1: One piece of financial advice for graduate school and actually for life, but that I developed with my spouse when he was doing his Ph.D. Was that be very thoughtful about who you are socializing with and what kind of approaches to finances they have, what kind of class background do they have, and genuinely try to find people who are spending less money than you, you know, for their socializing, for their life and hang out with them and get to be friends with them, use them as models for how to budget and save money and most of all, not spend money. So stay away. Stay away from the free spenders or the or the loose spenders and stick with the people who spend very little to not at all, especially around socializing.

Retirement Savings: Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann, Humanities without Walls Consortium

09:20 Maggie NH: Hi, Emily. My name is Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann. I’m the associate director of Career diversity for the Humanities Without Walls Consortium. Which is a grant for a Mellon funded, grant funded project at space at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But I am located at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I think what I wish I had done while I was a grad student was to continue to think about my investments after leaving a career that I left, that I had spent about six years in before starting graduate school. So as I shared with you earlier, I used to work in wealth management for Financial Advisor based at what was then an affiliate of MetLife and no longer exists. And I worked in that role during the Great Recession from about how I was in that role from about 2005 to 2011 when I started graduate school. And right like I was completely in that world thinking about investments, watching people have to make really challenging decisions just to save their homes. Right. Seeing people pull out money from their 401k plans before they hit hit the age that you’re supposed to raise when you can start drawing contributions from your 401K. And they did that in order to continue to make their mortgage payments. Right? So I was I was there and watched people go through those decisions to save themselves and their families, or at least to protect themselves and their families after in some cases losing their jobs for up to two years, which was not an uncommon phenomenon during the recession. But then I started grad school and right like every little bit of money that I made through my stipend and my assistantship I had to use to meet my material needs, as opposed to continuing to think about how do I put a little bit of that into savings or how do I put a little bit of that into my existing 401K or what I now have A 403b plan since I work in higher ed. So I wish I had continued to do that because now I’m kind of faced with all three. I’ve got about 25 years before retirement and I don’t know that my investment savings are going to be where I need them to be when I retire in my mid to late sixties. Right? And so that’s I think the advice I would give to students or even faculty who might be listening to your podcasts. You have to be thinking about what, how much income are you going to need to draw from your retirement accounts when you get to 65, especially for our generations who might see cutbacks in things like Medicare or Social Security, how much money are you going to need to live when you’re retired and you might not? Right. So I think that’s that’s what I wish I had done.

Retirement Savings: Delaney Dann, Scripps Research Institute

11:58 Delaney D: Hi, my name is Dr. Delaney Dann, I work at the Scripps Research Institute. My piece of financial advice is as much as possible. Maxed out your Roth IRA during grad school and your postdoc.

Retirement Savings: Eric Vaughn, University of Rochester

12:13 Eric V: Hi, this is Eric Vaughn from the University of Rochester. My piece of financial advice would be start investing early so you can retire earlier.

Financial Habits: Penny Baga, Vanderbilt University

12:25 Penny B: Hi there. My name is Penny Baga from Vanderbilt University, and I encourage everybody to spend less than what they make.

Funding/Income: Elizabeth Harrington Lambert, Vanderbilt University

12:34 Elizabeth HL: So I’m Elizabeth Harrington Lambert from Vanderbilt University. And I think the absolute best piece of advice that I can give you is apply for funding before you need it. And don’t apply for 20 awards, but apply for three or four. Give yourself a plan B, a plan C and a plan D.

Funding/Income: Jessy Ayestas, University of Kansas

12:53 Jessy Ayestas: So, hello, I’m Jessy Ayestas. I am awards and outreach coordinator at the University of Kansas and also Fulbright scholar. So my piece of advice for any anybody thinking of attending grad school would be to consider applying for fellowships for scholarships, for grants. That will definitely facilitate at least the first years of your graduate education. And if the support that you receive is for a timeframe that is smaller than the time that you will be in grad school, then definitely try and think about the options that you will have and what opportunities may be available at your institution to continue being funded until you complete your program.

Financial Habits: Lindsey Cauthen, Baylor College of Medicine

13:35 Lindsey C: Lindsey Cauthen. Baylor College of Medicine. And I’m the head of career development. So I think the piece of financial advice that I’m glad I followed was really thinking about exactly how you spend your money each month and being very, very intentional about the way that you spend it and accountable. Right. So when I was in grad school, I had my own place and I was able to go on vacation and I was able to manage my money well, and that was because honestly, I had parents that taught me how to do so. So I had the proverbial envelope system and everything had a place. I think what I also did was I bought life insurance back in that time. That was really, really good life insurance. And I’m so glad I did that. And I did a little bit of investing and I didn’t have any debt coming out of undergrad. So that made a huge difference. And I didn’t come out of grad school with any debt either. So that’s made a big difference at this point.

Funding/Income: Colleen Gleeson, University of Texas at Austin

14:41 Colleen G: I’m Colleen Gleeson. I am the assistant director for advanced Degree Employer Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin So when I did my master’s program, I didn’t really get any funding, and I just thought that was the end of that. But now, having worked with worked with master students on the other side, I’ve seen how current master students have asked, researched and just pushed to actually to get more funding and to advocate for themselves and to identify additional funding resources. So I wish that someone had told me to be more persistent because there is there are funds out there. You just have to you just have to put the time and the research into it.

Funding/Income: Derek Attig, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

15:22 Derek A: I’m Derek Attig I work in the Graduate college at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And as a graduate student, I’m really glad that I saw that opportunity is to get income. Even small amounts of income from a variety of places, because it gave me a lot of skills as also as well as just consistent, reliable money coming in.

Retirement Savings: Peter Myers, Washington University in Saint Louis

15:47 Peter M: My name is Peter Myers. I’m at Washington University in Saint Louis. The piece of advice that I’m glad I took as a postdoc is to put everything I can into a Roth IRA.

Employment: Kelly Graham, New York University

16:01 Kelly G: Hi, my name is Kelly Graham and I am from New York University. One of the best pieces of financial advice that I ever got and that I followed was that to go work at the university that you want to get your degree from because then you can go for free. Most universities offer tuition remission, so identify the university I wanted to go to. I got a full time job. I went to school for free and I built my resume at the same time.

Funding/Income: Erin Brown, UCLA

16:29 Erin B: Hi. So I’m Erin Brown. I am the associate director of Graduate Career Services at UCLA. And I guess the piece of financial advice that I wish that I had followed when I went to graduate school is I should have done my research and I should have applied for every extramural grant or fellowship that I could have found. I think it would have made my life so much easier after graduate school. I think that what I did was I used my savings to finance graduate school, and that money would have been really helpful when I left graduate school because I feel like I ate up all of the savings that I had while I was in grad school.

Funding/Income: Baron Haber, UC Santa Barbara

17:11 Baron H: my name is Baron Haber I’m the assistant director of Professional Development for Graduate Division at University of California, Santa Barbara. So one piece of financial advice that I wish I would have followed during graduate school better is I wish I would have had a calendar that was alerting me to deadlines for fellowships and other extramural funding opportunities. Like I always found out about them like two days before the deadline and then, like, talk myself out of trying to throw together an application. So I think I could have taken more advantage of applying for those opportunities if I had been more organized and kind of like known to be anticipating these things. And also that if I would have just had like standard statements prepared for those sorts of things a little bit earlier on in my career by the time I figured out I should be doing those things, I was like beyond the university requirements for that. So

Funding/Income: Shawn Warner, UC Santa Barbara

18:06 Shawn W: My name is Shawn Warner. I’m the director of Professional development for the Graduate Division at UC Santa Barbara. And one piece of advice I’m very glad I followed was when I was considering applying to grad school, I talked with someone who was about to finish their grad program, and they said, Do not do a study program unless you are paid to do so. And so I was unfortunately applying to grad school in 2009 during the recession, and I applied lots of places and I only got a financial funding offer from one. Thankfully, that was my number one pick and that’s where I went and I’m very glad I followed that piece of advice.

Financial Habits: Katy Peplin, Thrive PhD

18:50 Katy P: Hi, I’m Katy Peplin from Thrive PHD. You can find me at thrive dash PhD dot com. I work with graduate students all around the world on being a scholar and a human and the piece of financial advice that I am so glad that I followed during grad school was. Pay attention to your finances. I know so many people got sort of caught unawares by tax bills that they didn’t have, like living expenses that they weren’t prepared to handle. And I was really grateful that I kept an eye on. My budget is activating and nerve wracking as that could be sometimes when I was low on summer funding and always took extra jobs to make sure that I felt as secure as I could because I knew I wouldn’t be able to study if I was panicked about where I was going to eat next week

Financial Habits: Roshni, Johns Hopkins University

19:36 Roshni: Roshni from Johns Hopkins University. And I’m answering the question what piece of financial advice did I wish I had followed during grad school or post-doc? And that would be to not be afraid about talking about money. Culturally, it’s not the norm from where I grew up. And so if I knew to get over some of the intimidation around money, I may have made more empowered and more informed decisions.

Commercial

20:04 Emily: These action items are for you if you recently switched or will soon switch onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac and are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on page 8 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe in 2023 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is September 15, 2023. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at time tax, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives. If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes 1.75 hours of video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PF for PhDs dot com slash Q E tax. Now back to our interview.

Retirement Savings: Sonali Majumdar, Princeton University

22:11 Sonali M: Hi, everyone. I am Sonali Majumdar at the Graduate Career Consortium Annual meeting. I’m Assistant Dean for Professional Development at Princeton University. And I just wanted to say in terms of, like, what I wish I had done as a graduate student and postdoc in terms of financial decisions, I wish I had created a Roth IRA and started my investment portfolio early. That’s the best way to. It. Also incentivizes and motivates you to save and invest, and I wish I had done that sooner. So that’s my little advice.

Financial Literacy: Diane Safer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

22:48 Diane S: So, hi, I’m Diane Safer, the director of career professional development for graduate students and postdocs at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And I think the idea of just welcoming new post-docs and graduate students to the idea of financial literacy right from the start so that they understand, considering especially that postdocs are international and don’t know about saving for retirement and how to live on a paycheck, that’s not a lot in New York

Housing: Kathryn Sawyer Vidrine, University of Notre Dame

23:16 Kathryn SV: I’m Kathryn Sawyer Vidrine from Notre Dame, and I wish that when I was starting graduate school in South Bend that I had just gone and bought a house instead of dithering about it because I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick around.

Housing: Tom Meyers, University of Notre Dame

23:32 Tom M: So my name is Tom Meyers. I’m also from the University of Notre Dame. And to Kathryn’s point, one thing I do with graduate students now is when I get incoming graduate students, I tell them, you can rent an apartment that’s a studio for 1100 dollars a month across campus, or you can drive five miles and pay a mortgage of 858.77 every month.

Retirement Savings: Karin Lawton-Dunn, Iowa State University

23:51 Karin L-D: Hi, I am Karin Lawton-Dunn at Iowa State University. And this question is, what piece of financial advice do are you glad to follow during your graduate program? And that was a long time ago for me. But I did have a I did work three years professionally before. And my colleague, we came back to grad school and she cashed out her 401K and I left mine in and I’m getting closer and closer to retirement and I’m very thankful I left that in. So I do not cash out 401Ks.

Retirement Savings: Megan Brock

24:22 Megan B: Okay, so I’m Dr. Megan Brock, and I think that I wish I would have I would to really look into the retirement plans that people offer you, because as a new grad moving into the field. I’m in the state of Georgia, you pick a program and you’re in it. There’s no switching up. The only way that you leave is if you leave the system. So where everybody else has something that they can if they want to purchase a home, they could pull out there for a1k or whatever type of retirement plan. Well, I’m a teacher retirement system and then I’m, you know, my pension, so to speak, is invested for ten years. All my friends can go out, purchase a home and have that saved up because that’s like kind of and of course, it’s for retirement. But, you know, a house is an investment, right? I can’t do that. I didn’t think about it. I was like, Oh, it’s easy to click the button and now you’re in. And now there’s no way that I can kind of help myself. The first generation, everything first, you know, the first person in my family to be able to do this is like, I can’t I can’t leverage that kind of like professional benefit of having retirement savings accounts. I didn’t select that option. So, yeah, I would say like, you know, just ask people about their options. The pros and cons, pause, don’t feel rushed. Because it will seem like you have to fill your paperwork out by a certain deadline, but you can always ask for those types of extensions. You can always ask to meet with, like whoever the H.R. officer is. You can always ask for that, you know, more time to get it sort of position for whatever school system that you’re going to be with. And so that’s my biggest like, dang, I wish I would have known that other that other than like living within my means. But like, the biggest thing is like, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And it we have to be prepared to be the people who can honestly retire at 50 and 60, like enjoy the rest of our life if we plan accordingly and not just like pick something that’s the easiest option. So that’s my piece of advice.

Retirement Savings: Christine Krieger, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

26:13 Christine K: Hi, I’m Christine Krieger. I’m with the training office, with NIDDK and my question is, what piece of financial advice are you glad you followed or do you wish you had followed during graduate school or as opposed to. So the advice I wish I had followed was that you are always welcome to follow your dreams. Just open a Roth. From the very beginning.

Funding/Income: Katie Homar

26:40 Katie H: So I’m Katie Homar, and my advice is take advantage of small travel grants from student organizations and campus offices to travel to conferences and grow your professional network.

Financial Habits: Mabel Perez-Oquendo, MD Anderson

26:52 Mabel P-K: Hi. My name is Mabel Perez-Oquendo. I am a current admin public fellow at MD Anderson. So one piece of advice that I wish I knew when I was doing my graduate school is to have saving accounts. And this is because, like, unexpected things happens. And also we want to have some like personal work life balance and we want to like travel and we want to take vacations. But if we don’t have that saving account, how we can accomplish that goal. So I wish that someone told me, Hey, you shall save part of your salary to go out and have fun and travel when you feel overwhelmed. So that is my piece of advice.

Negotiation: Hecmarie Meléndez-Fernández, West Virginia University

27:35 Hecmarie M-F: Hi, my name is Hecmarie Meléndez-Fernández, and I’m a recent Ph.D. grad at West Virginia University. And the one piece of financial advice I wish I had followed was to negotiate your benefits package for your job. There’s always room for negotiation. So.

Housing: Amanda Figuera, University of Washington Tacoma

27:55 Amanda F: My name is Amanda Figuera. I’m the senior director of Student Transitions and Success at the University of Washington Tacoma. And during graduate school we got creative with housing arrangements, and so I shared a one bedroom condo with a roommate who was doing lab work. And so we had like a hoteling bedroom almost in the living room. And that was one way that we were able to afford the cost of living in Seattle.

Employment: Mallorie Smith, Mississippi State University

28:19 Mallorie S: My name is Mallorie Smith. I’m the financial wellness program coordinator at Mississippi State University. And one piece of financial advice that I’m glad I followed as a grad student was that I sought out employment with my school that I wanted to attend first. And because of that, I got free classes two free classes this semester, and I was able to get my MBA that way. And now I’m about to get my Ph.D. in the same way for free. So all I’m paying for is textbooks, and I know where to find that cheap.

Moving: Helen Colby, Indiana University

28:49 Helen C: Hey, I am Helen Colby. I’m an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University School of Business, and I am the chair of the Heck for Research Committee. And the piece of financial advice that I didn’t get in grad school that I wish I had gotten was to plan for that post-graduation move because I was in grad school in New Jersey and I got a postdoc in Los Angeles. And I realized about three months before I actually started the job that I was going to have to pay to move all my stuff across the country and put a down payment and pay first month’s rent and live for a month because I got paid monthly as a postdoc. But I didn’t get my first paycheck until I had been working for a month. And I was already a little strapped because I was in grad school and my husband’s in law school, I wouldn’t have any money. And then to move, that was very complicated. So we worked it out by being broke and side hustles and the one credit card we had that had a $1,000 limit on it. But if I had thought about having to move as opposed to just this is great, I’m going to have a better job that pays more. Not a lot more, but more. I would have planned for that better and at the very least spread my side hustling across more.

Financial Habits: Matt Hertenstein, DePaul University

30:04 Matt H: Hi, my name is Matt Hertenstein, a college professor at DePaul University, received my Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 2002 the piece of advice that I wish I had followed in graduate school would be. Even then, I had a little bit to save, and I wish I had done a little bit better job at putting that away into a retirement account and started the snowball. Then rather than waiting a little bit

Debt: Eric Monday, University of Kentucky

30:35 Eric M: Eric Monday Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration at the University of Kentucky. I think the financial advice that’s most helpful when I think back to my grad experience is a professor told me do not take on an extreme amount of debt. You know, figure out a way, even if it takes you a little bit longer, don’t take on a lot of debt. So that’s the advice that helped me the most.

Debt: Byron Kerr, Texas State University

31:01 Byron T: Hi, I’m Dr. Byron Kerr with Financial aid and scholarships at Texas State University, and I received my Ph.D. from Florida State University in Tallahassee working on my Ph.D. I had developed a lot of debt over the years, like a credit card debt, and to get out from underneath that, I reached out to a nonprofit credit agency that helped negotiate with the credit card companies to help me get that debt that paid off.

Financial Habits: Anna Sheufelt, Duke University

31:23 Anna S: My name is Anna Sheufelt. I work at Duke University, overseeing the educational programing and outreach for the Office of Student Loans and Personal Finance. The piece of financial advice that I wish I would have followed when I was in graduate school, I would be to spend less and save more. It sounds pretty simple take to managing money, but I really wish I would have built up that financial foundation because once I increase my knowledge of other things I could be doing with my money, I would have been in a position to just act. And I sort of had to continue with that foundation of, Nope, I have to save first because I didn’t do a good enough job when I was in my master’s program.

Financial Assistance Programs: Gilbert, University of Texas at Austin

32:04 Gilbert: My name is Gilbert. Financial advice I wish I would have followed was maybe just looking more into assistance programs or basic needs programs here in the city of Austin, especially coming from an area that where the cost of living was pretty low. And we went to a city that has one of the highest cost of links in the nation. I wish I would have looked more into like rental assistance programs, and Austin has a couple of them that will help people with low income cover partial or full rental cost and also just any assistance with regards to just basic needs like food and Internet subsidies. That would have helped me focus more on my graduate program. Also, it’s in Edwards and working at U.T. and not have to worry about budgeting too much and sacrificing like someone’s and some needs to continue going to grad school and living here in Austin.

Financial Literacy: Anne Xiong, UC Berkeley

33:02 Anne X: So, yeah, my name is Anne Xiong. I am the program manager for Financial Wellness Program at U.C. Berkeley. Answering this question, it is what piece of finish or otherwise are you glad you followed or do you wish you had followed during grad school? So yeah, there’s a reason is kind of related to the reason why I’m very passionate about financial wellness education because I didn’t have any. So I wish I had have someone that taught me more about money management so I can start to pay more attention to manage my finances. When I was in college, in grad school, I just felt like if I had someone provide me with more guidance, I probably will and was less staff and more resources. And then when I started my first job, I probably will just have a better start. So. Yeah.

Mindset: Kirby Williams, Advantage Publications

33:59 Kirby W: So I’m Kirby Williams, and I am the owner of Advantage Publications. We do financial education, Learning Materials. So I, I didn’t realize until just now why my father always said that if you would pay for high school in college and we would have no loans and that wasn’t very important to him. But that if we want to wanted to go to grad school, that that would be on us to pay for. And I think he really wanted us to see the return on our investment. But, you know, it’s a whole different feeling when you have to pay the bills for it. And he didn’t want us to stress about that for college, which is a wonderful gift that he gave us. You know, you didn’t have to stress about that. Um, but at some point you have to grow up and you do stress about it, and you should stress about it because it’s your career and it’s your life. And if you’re not going for something that gives you joy, then all the career and, you know, stress and the money, stress and the time is wasted.

Financial Habits: Becky Sparks, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

35:02 Becky S: My name is Becky Sparks. I’m with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and my advice that I wish I had followed is to save as much as you can while you’re in grad school. I know that’s a very difficult thing to try to do, but your future self will thank you and take it from me who did not take that advice. You will definitely be glad that you did Absolutely

Funding/Income: Robert

35:27 Robert: Yeah. So my name is Robert. I had a lot of helpful advice from people in my department and also people at the university who were able to direct me to different ways to apply for different fellowships and other kinds of opportunities to help me pursue my research in ways that I didn’t really know where there. So that was looking beyond the department, looking for other opportunities for external scholarships, external fellowships, and then finding those two and finally get me to complete my research in the end with that funding.

Student Loans: Sara, Baylor University

36:00 Sara: Hi, I’m Sara. I am at Baylor University. And then my big piece of advice that I followed after leaving my graduate program and currently is I utilize public service student loan forgiveness. And I think a lot of grad students who are either going into academia or the government or any type of nonprofit or education work often don’t know that they can really lower that Student loan monthly repayment if they go down an income driven repayment plan and then utilize. Public service student loan forgiveness. So definitely check that out as we’re going into student loan repayment.

Financial Habits and Retirement Savings: Beth Hunsaker, University of Utah

36:47 Beth H: My name is Beth Hunsaker with the University of Utah’s Financial Wellness Center. I’m the associate director, So thinking back to grad school, the things I’m glad that I did is is really just stick to the fundamentals of looking at what my income was and make sure I was budgeting it, saving. I was investing in my Roth IRA and now 20 years later, has made all the difference. Even the $50 a month I found back then is setting me up for financial success now.

Tax Implications: Ben Raines, Ohio State University

37:19 Ben R: So Ben Raines Program Coordinator for financial education and a student life at Ohio State University. So I was lucky to have a graduate tuition stipend as part of my one at the university. And I’m glad that I went through and thought about how much $25,000 taxable income would affect my income over the course of a year. And while that was unpleasant, I was at least prepared to have my take home income go down $800 a month for six months of the year.

Funding/Income: Michael Dedmon, National Endowment for Financial Education

37:47 Michael D: My name is Michael Dedmon. I’m the research director at the National Endowment for Financial Education and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Syracuse University. Graduate students approach the Ph.D. journey and get a different range of support from their institution, depending on sort of where it’s ranked, the kind of resources they have, and then where they hope to place their graduate students. I know that for me, I was a teaching at a pretty teaching heavy department where almost all of the financial support was really, really tied to doing that teaching. I wish that I would have realized earlier on the importance of seeking out external sources of funding, and I wish that I would have advocated more for myself. I wish they would have advocated more for fellow graduate students with the graduate school and with my department to provide those resources because of how critical they are, because it’s very difficult to do your work, to finish your degree, and to produce the knowledge that the university wants if you don’t get that additional support. But also the process of achieving and getting that support is really critical. And so I think the universities like the country over, especially the ones that are outside of the top ten that don’t have right, those kinds of resources need to think better about how to support graduate students in getting resources to specifically support their research.

Employment: Gilbert Rogers, University of Oregon

39:01 Gilbert R: My name is Gilbert Rogers, Senior assistant director of financial Wellness at the University of Oregon. So the piece of advice I wish I would have followed during grad school or during my doctoral studies was to seek out an employer that would pay for that. I didn’t know I would land in higher education. I was currently still working in corporate finance, and that’s where I first kind of caught wind of all the loans and loan debt. So I didn’t have zero debt until my doctoral degree. So that’s a piece of advice I work out.

Outtro

39:37 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. 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 by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.