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This Grad Student’s Finances and Mental Health Were Stuck in a Negative Feedback Loop

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Haley Sanderson, a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan. Haley was dramatically underpaid during graduate school and discouraged from working on the side. While many of her peers lived hand to mouth, Haley’s situation was made more dire by her at-the-time undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder. Haley entered a negative feedback loop in which her finances, mental health, and physical health deteriorated together. Emily and Haley discuss what her program could have done to ameliorate this negative spiral and why it’s vital to sufficiently financially support PhD trainees. Haley concludes with her very practical financial advice for anyone at a career transition point.

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Teaser

00:00 Haley: My suggestion would be, if somebody’s in my situation, to go get the help you need and get the financial help that you need, even if it means taking out loans. Because it’s much better to have the financial debt than the mental health debt.

Introduction

00:22 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. This is Season 12, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Haley Sanderson, a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan. Haley was dramatically underpaid during graduate school and discouraged from working on the side. While many of her peers lived hand to mouth, Haley’s situation was made more dire by her at-the-time undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder. Haley entered a negative feedback loop in which her finances, mental health, and physical health deteriorated together. We discuss what Haley’s program could have done to ameliorate this negative spiral and why it’s vital to sufficiently financially support PhD trainees. Haley concludes with her very practical financial advice for anyone at a career transition point.

01:44 Emily: I have set a super audacious goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. It’s actually a bit difficult for me to even speak it out loud! My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the U.S. who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I am passionate about this topic because surprise tax bills, high tax bills, and fines are an almost completely preventable source of financial strife for my community, and all that’s needed is a bit of education delivered at the right time. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Most of you have heard me talk about it before, and some of you have taken it. The perfect time to give PhD trainees access to this workshop is when they start or switch onto non-W-2 income, which often happens near the start of the academic year, i.e., the near future.

03:08 Emily: If you share my passion—or maybe it’s more of a frustration for you—and know that your university is not already providing sufficient training in this area, would you please recommend that your graduate school, postdoc office, graduate student association, or department sponsor my workshop for those interested in taking it? You might want to take it yourself, or perhaps you just want to save the entering cohort the time and energy it took you to figure this all out on your own. To make this recommendation, simply email the potential sponsor with the reason you are recommending the workshop and this link: PFforPhDs.com/sponsorqetax/. If you’re comfortable with it, you can Cc me [email protected], and I can pick up the conversation. Thanks for participating with me in trying to reach this goal! I know it will prevent a lot of people in our community from experiencing tax-related financial emergencies next spring.

You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e4/.

Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Haley Sanderson.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

04:33 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Haley Sanderson, who is a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan, and she is coming on the podcast to talk about a really sensitive topic, which is living on a very low graduate student stipend while dealing with mental illness. So, Haley, I’m really pleased that you volunteered to be on the podcast to talk about this important topic. So, would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

04:58 Haley: Hi, I’m Haley. I have a PhD in environmental studies where I specialize in environmental microbiology and biotechnology. I finished my PhD in five years defending and graduating in fall 2018, since then I’ve completed postdocs with the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Dalhousie University, and I’m now a postdoc in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. And I’m currently applying for more full-time permanent gigs <laugh>.

05:37 Emily: Well, best of luck with that. Okay. So we’re going to go back to your grad school years, and most of my listeners are going to be in the U.S. So, could you please explain, give some context for how you are funded during your PhD?

Funding During the PhD

05:53 Haley: So, during my PhD, I started as a master’s student, so I actually started on a much lower stipend of about $14K Canadian. So, to get that money, I had to TA for about two semesters every year and then do a research assistantship in the summer. I was a master’s student for a year, and then I bumped up to be a PhD. I ended up getting three provincial scholarships in Ontario that bumped my stipend up to $25K, which is only a little bit higher than the base stipend for a PhD student. So, with that stipend, we actually have to pay tuition out of it. So, not all of it gets to go to living. You also have to pay your tuition out of the money that they give you. So, the actual amount that I lived off of was much smaller than the stipend that I got <laugh>.

07:14 Emily: Yeah. Well, let us know, do you remember the numbers on that? Like after paying the tuition, what amount were you living off of? And then give us some context for, like, how does that compare to the local cost of living?

07:26 Haley: I don’t know the exact numbers, but tuition was about $2,000 a semester, I would say, for about $6,000 a year. So, when I was on my original master’s stipend, I only had maybe $8K <laugh>, which is a little <laugh> insane. I had a lot more to live off of once I was in the PhD program. So, when I was a master’s student, I actually had to work, but there were some problems with the department not wanting me to work and kind of threatening to take away the stipend that was paying like my tuition and my rent.

Challenges to Supplementing the Stipend

08:09 Emily: Yeah. I mean, the numbers that you’re throwing out there sound incredibly low. It’s not surprising at all to me that you would, you know, seek other sources of income. Was that something that your peers were doing as well? Was the department also like threatening other peers who were working, or how were they making ends meet?

08:27 Haley: A lot of the other people in my department had like side gigs that they’d only do every once in a while. A lot of people hid if they had part-time jobs. Unfortunately, I worked close to the university and some of them saw me working, so that didn’t work out too well <laugh>.

08:48 Emily: How was that resolved? Did you have to give up the side job?

08:53 Haley: Some of the admins helped me apply to the provincial scholarships. And once I got the provincial scholarships, I was kind of told to get rid of the part-time job.

09:03 Emily: And would you say that when you had that higher $25K minus, okay, let’s say $19K per year stipend during the latter part of your PhD, was that enough to survive, or did you feel like you would’ve worked more if you were allowed to?

09:18 Haley: I probably would’ve worked more, but I think I would’ve had trouble doing that with the mental illness, because there were a lot of things that that impacted. Like my eating, my sleeping, my social life were also impacted by finances, and moreso by the mental health problems.

Mental Health Impact on Money Mindset

09:41 Emily: Yeah. Let’s talk about that more now. So, you had an undiagnosed slash untreated mental health condition at that time. So, how was that affecting how you handled your finances?

09:54 Haley: So, I have a psychotic disorder that causes me to have delusions and hallucinations that are usually really disparaging and kind of controlling. So, let’s say, for instance, when I got accepted into the master’s program, my mom made a comment that my brothers paid for their second degrees. And that kind of morphed in my mind to my parents won’t help me at all, so don’t ask them. Even when I tried to apply for like student loans, I kind of got it in my head that I would never be able to pay them back. So, it was kind of like a brick wall to actually apply for that. There were other things in my life, like I couldn’t eat certain foods because I thought I’d get really sick and stuff like that. So, it was essentially that I couldn’t really do anything to help my situation because my brain would tell me, like, you can’t actually do this.

10:58 Emily: Wow. Yeah. I had not like, thought about that or realized that was a potential, you know, symptom that some people could be experiencing. So, thank you for sharing that. I do a lot of like, how do we find workarounds on this podcast? Or like breaking through like your money mindset stuff. But like when you’re dealing with a serious mental health condition, that’s simply not an option without higher-level treatment, right? Which you eventually got, and we’ll get to that. And so, how then also did having such a low income during graduate school affect your ability to get diagnosed or treated?

11:33 Haley: I started to have psychotic episodes during my third year of my undergrad. And at that time, I went to go see a doctor and that doctor gave me antidepressants, which there was a co-pay for. And he wrongly sent me home without doing any more assessment and essentially told me, you might be developing schizophrenia, we’ll see <laugh>, which is not the best thing <laugh>. So, I was already on a very small budget when I was in undergrad. My parents paid for like my tuition and my rent. So, I was never in a situation where I would be homeless, but I was still in a situation where I didn’t have that much money. If I were in that situation now where I’m on my antipsychotic and my antidepressant, the antidepressant is maybe a couple dollars a month, but if I didn’t have benefits my antipsychotic would be over $200 a month.

12:43 Haley: So, part of the reasons why I stopped taking the medication at that point was, one, that it caused pretty severe hallucinations, more than I had before I got on the medication, because it was the wrong one. And the other thing was that I didn’t necessarily want to pay for it <laugh> because it was making me feel worse. So, I was kind of in denial that I needed them when I was in grad school, because I could no longer tell if I was feeling well, or if I was sick. Everything just kind of melded together. So, in terms of the impact of having a really low budget in grad school, I couldn’t eat properly. I maybe spent $30 a week on food, and I pretty much ate the same things all the time. Like rice, lentils, beans, and apples.

13:48 Haley: I was so worried about things that I also didn’t sleep. And by that I would mean I would be in the lab for maybe 16 hours a day and I’d go home and sleep for four to six hours. And one of the big things about controlling psychosis is that you need to get enough sleep. So now, I actually need close to eight to 10 hours on average. So, that was a pretty big impact. And it certainly didn’t help the delusions that I couldn’t get financial help <laugh>. It was kind of like a feedback loop.

14:27 Emily: I was just going to say that sounds exactly like a negative spiral, right? Like you are having tight money issues, so you forgo the medicinal and also other forms of self-care that maybe were somewhat available to you. And then your mind is also telling you that you can’t access or don’t deserve those things. And then it loops around again. So yeah, that sounds horrible.

Financial Stress and Sacrifices on a Low Stipend

14:56 Emily: You just mentioned living off of a really small, like food budget, for example. So, were there other things that you didn’t spend on that you forwent spending on to make that really low stipend work?

15:10 Haley: I didn’t go out very often and kind of avoided any social situation where I might have to pay for stuff. Particularly in my first two years. After my first two years, I moved somewhere with a better cost of living. I kind of filled my time only with work because I couldn’t really afford to have hobbies <laugh>. At one point when I decided to move in my second, third year, I had to give up a cat that was kind of my emotional <laugh> animal at that time, because I couldn’t move them across the country to where I was working. I didn’t go home for Christmas, and I barely saw my family because I really couldn’t afford to go on a bus or go on a plane. I didn’t take a vacation throughout my entire PhD. I didn’t date anyone during my entire PhD. And I avoided buying anything other than food. So, I would wear clothes until they like physically fell apart. Same with shoes. I’d wait until I really, really had to. So, I essentially forgo like anything that would be making me kind of happier <laugh>. So, it really wasn’t ideal.

16:39 Emily: Yeah. I realized that I kind of phrased that question as like, “Oh, what are the great strategies you used?” Not that I meant it that way, but this is not at all a laudable list, right? This is all a list of things that caused you to become even more unhealthy. And again, in that spiral that we were just talking about, and to not be able to break out of it. Like having an injection of some extra money, I mean, it would also help if your mind were, you know, allowing you to spend on these things, but having some extra money would’ve helped your general mental health, but also specifically your condition so much. It’s so obvious that that would be the case. I’m just like hearing a picture of you like drowning during graduate school. Financially, mentally. And I’m wondering about the people around you, like your advisor or other people in your department. Like, was there anything that they could have done? I’m asking this in a way of like, what can other people listening to this, take away if they see a peer or someone in their program that is to say, maybe they’re a faculty member or someone else who has a bit of power in the situation too. Like what, what should they have been doing or what could they have done to help you out of this spiral?

What Could Have Helped?

17:59 Haley: In some ways, there wasn’t really much people could do. In terms of what the department did, they tried to help me get scholarships, which did make the situation a lot better. There is an opportunity to do like graduate assistant work that I did for two summers. That was really helpful. Maybe having like emergency funds that are easy to apply to would be very useful too. But a lot of the time, I didn’t think that my, I couldn’t tell that my situation wasn’t normal <laugh> because a lot of my peers had similar problems. Probably not to the same mental extent, but in terms of money, it was pretty common. And maybe just increasing the stipend would make a big difference. I checked the department’s website and it looks like the PhD stipend has increased, but the master’s stipend is still quite low. But that would be what I would think of when I think of what the department could do to help people.

19:09 Emily: Absolutely. I think pay graduate students more. Pay graduate students enough that they don’t experience the things that you mentioned, like not being able to go home and visit your family members, never going out socially if there was, you know, a possibility you might spend money. In addition to just being like the compassionate thing to do for students who are under your charge, as well as, especially if you’re not going to allow them to work or whatever, they’re not developing. You were not developing as a scholar in the way you could have. You could have blossomed even more, had you been sufficiently financially supported. Same goes for your peers too. So, it’s just really, it’s very hard for me <Laugh>, I’m sure for the listeners as well, to hear how much you were struggling and how big of a difference, you know, a few more thousand dollars a year from your department would’ve made, and what exactly is tying their hands to make that not happen? If their goal is to develop scholars and PhDs, they could do that even better by financially supporting them better. That’s how I view it.

20:12 Haley: Yeah.

Commercial

20:15 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I have set a big goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the US who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Now, some universities, institutes, or funding agencies already offer such a training, and they have no need to work with me. But others won’t allow their employees to touch the topic of taxes with a 10-foot pole, and that’s where working with me can really benefit everyone. Would you please send me an email and tell me which camp your university falls into—or if it’s somewhere in between? You can reach me at [email protected]. Furthermore, let me know if you want to take Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients for free or think that the cohort coming in this fall should, and I’ll reply with how you can help make that happen. I look forward to hearing from you! Now back to our interview.

Ending the Negative Spiral

21:56 Emily: So, how did you ultimately end this spiral that you were in? Did you get on medication? Did you see different doctors? Was it a matter of graduating? Like what happened?

22:06) Haley: Graduating was actually the worst thing that happened <laugh>. So, I had to pay for my ticket to do my defense because I was living in Alberta at the time and I had to come back to Ontario, and that actually completely depleted my bank account. If I hadn’t gotten a job pretty much right away, I would not have had a place to stay and I wouldn’t have been able to go home at all. I ended up going through an even bigger spiral where I entered like acute psychosis. Like the CRA is after me <laugh> kind of psychosis or people are actively following you and you’re hearing complete conversations and more disparaging comments and so on. I essentially kept working for almost six months with acute psychosis. And then I finally hit a point where I couldn’t do it anymore and I realized that there was something incredibly wrong.

23:21 Haley: So, I ended up going to the doctor who tried to put me on an antipsychotic, but I essentially spiraled further when I got onto the antipsychotic because it was essentially too late to be putting me on it in an outpatient location. So, I ended up having to go to the ER twice. The first time there wasn’t a psychiatrist. So, they sent me home. The second time, I was essentially really dehydrated, only weighing 80 pounds and completely out of reality <laugh> essentially. So, the psychiatrist put me into inpatient care and I stayed there for a month where they put me on medication and I essentially slept because I was burnt out from work and the PhD. So, it’s taken probably two and a half years to get on the right medication and recover fully from that.

24:23 Haley: Starting a postdoc that actually pays me enough to live has been pretty helpful <laugh> in that because I’ve been able to start eating more healthy. I’m not as worried. And I have the psychosis under control between medication and therapy. So, I’m sleeping a normal amount. I’m eating a normal amount. I’m exercising because I can afford to go to the gym and like go to spin class and stuff like that. One of the weird things is I actually got out of the grad school with absolutely no debt because I couldn’t actually apply for the loans. Like my head would not let me apply for them. So, I ended up getting out with absolutely no debt, but also absolutely no money <laugh>. So, I was really lucky that I was offered a job right away. After I was hospitalized, I had to take three months off. So, I actually lost the job that I had gotten and I had to find another job, which I had to move across the country for. And then after that job, I had to move across the country again, which has always been kind of a financial burden, but that’s just kind of how my job goes <laugh>. But I’m doing much, much better than I was doing in grad school and have a lot of things more under control.

Paying Off the Mental Health Debt

25:57 Emily: I am so glad to hear that you’re in a much better place right now. Although it does seem to me that it’s taken a long, long time to get there. I mean, you mentioned that you came out of graduate school with no financial debt, but you had a debt to yourself of another kind, right? Of having not taken care of yourself and had been on the medication and doing the sleeping and the eating and all that stuff. So like, you still had to come out of that depth of the, you know, of care that you needed to get back up to the point you’re at now, the stable and healthy point.

26:32 Haley: I would say that I would’ve rathered have the financial debt than the mental debt. So like, my suggestion would be if somebody’s in my situation to go get the help you need and get the financial help that you need, even if it means taking out loans. Because it’s much better to have the financial debt than the mental health debt.

26:57 Emily: I totally agree. And I’m really glad to hear you say that. I don’t want to criticize other people either in their financial situations, but when you’re in a unique time of life, like being a graduate student and it is ideally time-limited and you’ll move on to having a better-paying job later on, it can, in some situations make sense to take out debt and some people feel so debt-averse that they, and I’m not saying you did this because you had this mental health condition, but they put themselves into debts of these other kinds. They’re not eating properly. Maybe they are not living in a safe situation. Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing them, but they do as a graduate student, at least in the U.S., have the option of taking out debt and alleviating some of that.

27:43 Emily: And so, I just want them to think about that as a legitimate option and not something that’s completely off-limits to them to help this short-term cash crisis that they’re in during graduate school. Again, the responsibility for that as we were talking about earlier falls much more on the programs underpaying people. That’s on them, rather than the people who are being underpaid. But that is a way out of a very difficult short-term situation. And like you said, you would’ve rather had a bit of money to pay off than having these years and years that it’s taken you to recover from the state that you were in by the end of graduate school.

Save Money and Study the Financial Side of Grad School

28:20 Emily: Do you have any other advice for prospective graduate students who are walking into programs like you did your master’s, your PhD program, who are potentially being radically underpaid compared to the local cost of living?

28:37 Haley: I would mostly work for a while and save money before you go to grad school. I wasn’t in a situation where I thought I could do that, but if I could do it again, I probably would’ve started working right away and then decided if I wanted to do grad school after I’ve made a little bit of money <laugh>. Make sure that whatever program that you want to go into does have a fair stipend. I didn’t even think of that when I joined grad school, but that should have been a much bigger consideration than what it was for me because I’m first-generation. I didn’t think that they would give me a stipend that I couldn’t live off of <laugh>.

29:17 Emily: Misplaced trust.

29:19 Haley: Yeah <laugh>. I would maybe do a little more digging on the financial side before starting grad school.

29:27 Emily: Yeah. I think those are great suggestions for someone considering graduate school. Definitely look into the stipends versus the local cost of living. I have a website that helps with that. At least if you’re in the U.S., which is called PhDstipends.com. So you can see what other graduate students actually report as being their income, not what the programs tell you they’re paying. Those might be two different things until you get the offer letter, at least. So you can kind of do some pre-research on the programs that you’re planning on applying to, to see if they’re paying a living wage or not. And like you said, I think a lot more people should be considering working for a decently-paying job for a year or two or three before they start graduate school to build up some kind of financial safety net so that they don’t have to do things like you were just mentioning, the cost of moving multiple times across the country.

30:13 Emily: That’s very significant. And if you end up paying for that, let’s say with like credit cards, because you don’t have the savings or cash to do it, then you’re kind of starting graduate school like already knocked back, already knocked onto your back foot, like financially, because you’re now having to pay down credit card debt in addition to living on this very, very small stipend. So instead, if you can have that savings, so, so helpful to just kind of get out ahead of these issues. So, that’s great advice for prospective graduate students. And thank you for giving that.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

30:43 Emily: I do end my interviews with a standard question that I ask all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve talked about in the course of the interview, or it could be something completely new.

30:55 Haley: If you’re a postdoc, I’d start saving and get a retirement fund and maybe a rainy day fund. Because postdocs are fairly short for most people, and you’re probably going to have to move again and things come up. So, it’s good to start saving once you can start saving after grad school. And kind of the same advice for looking at a postdoc. Make sure the salary is enough to live comfortably on before you agree to do it. It’s not a nice thing to accept a salary and then get to the city and realize that you can’t really live there <laugh>. And maybe try to negotiate your salary if you can.

31:45 Emily: All wonderful advice. I’m recalling actually, when my husband got a postdoc offer in Boston, we were living in Durham, North Carolina at the time. So kind of moderate cost of living to high cost of living. And we calculated it after accounting for the cost of living change between those two cities. He was actually being offered effectively less money than he had made as a graduate student with that postdoc position in Boston. And he did try to negotiate and he got them to increase the offer very, very slightly. And ultimately did not take that offer and finances were, you know, a part of that decision. And so, I totally agree with you, especially if you have not yet lived in a city, whether it’s for grad school, for postdoc, anything else. You need to really investigate what the cost of living is because you just don’t know until you actually live there. And by the time you accept an offer and move, it’s too late <laugh>. You need to do as much as you can in advance. So, Haley, thank you so much for being willing to give this interview. I think it was a really important conversation that the listeners are going to benefit so much from. So, so glad to hear you doing well. And thanks again for volunteering!

32:50 Haley: Thanks for having me!

Outtro

32:58 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? I have 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 Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

Financial Advice for Newly Hired Academics and PhDs

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Inga Timmerman, an associate professor of finance and financial planning at Cal State Northridge and financial planner specializing in academics. Emily and Inga discuss in depth the financial transition from graduate school/postdoc to faculty member (or into anther type of post-PhD job), from maximizing benefits to optimizing taxes to budgeting for a new city. Inga shares excellent tactical advice and mindset shifts for someone experiencing a large income increase. She advises everyone to work with a financial planner and ballparks how much it will cost to get the right type and amount of advice for that stage.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Image for S12E3 Financial Advice for Newly Hired Academics and PhDs

Teaser

00:00 Inga: The best time to address those is before you get your first paycheck. Because somehow once you start getting money, that money disappears. And we used to live on so little money in the PhD, and somehow we survived. And now we make 3, 4, 5 times as much, and we still don’t have enough. So, you do have to make a few decisions.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, 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. This is Season 12, Episode 3, and today my guest is Dr. Inga Timmerman, an associate professor of finance and financial planning at Cal State Northridge and financial planner specializing in academics. Inga and I discuss in depth the financial transition from graduate school/postdoc to faculty member (or into another type of post-PhD job), from maximizing benefits to optimizing taxes to budgeting for a new city. Inga shares excellent tactical advice and mindset shifts for someone experiencing a large income increase. She advises everyone to work with a financial planner and ballparks for us how much it will cost to get the right type and amount of advice for that stage.

01:42 Emily: As a listener to this podcast, I’m guessing that you listen to other podcasts as well, perhaps even other podcasts targeted to graduate students and PhDs. I’m a big podcast listener as well, and I’d love to hear your recommendations in that category. You can reach me over email, [email protected], or on Twitter, @PFforPhDs. In fact, if you would like to hear me interviewed on another podcast or another podcaster interviewed on my podcast, please set up an email or Twitter introduction for us! Thank you! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e3/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Inga Timmerman.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:37 Emily: I am so excited to share today’s interview with you. We have on the podcast today, Dr. Inga Timmerman. She is an associate professor of finance and financial planning at Cal State Northridge, and she is also a financial planner. And she has a PhD herself, so she’s like triply qualified to be on the podcast. So, Inga, it’s such a delight to have you! Would you please give the audience a little bit more background about yourself, your education, your career?

03:01 Inga: Very happy to be here, Emily. Thanks for having me here! So, I had a real job out of college at 22. I used to work 80, 90 hour weeks and discovered pretty fast that a career in corporate finance and investment banking is not really what I want to do in life long-term. I did for about five years. And then the school where I did my undergrad called me and said, “Hey, would you like to teach for us? Do you have an MBA?” Like, yeah, I do. “Okay. Come and teach a few classes.” And I really, really liked it, but I realized that to really make a living out of being a professor, I needed to get a PhD. So, when I was 27, I quit my job. I looked at all the PhD programs I got into, and it was 2008 financial crisis, 2009, everybody under the sun was going to get a PhD.

03:46 Inga: So, there’s a lot of competition. And I decided to go to the school that would get me out the fastest, because I was like, every year I’m not working, I’m losing like a whole bunch of money, so we’ve got to get out of here. So, I went to Florida Atlantic University in South Florida in Boca Raton, and I did my PhD there. And afterwards, my first placement was as an assistant professor at Oregon State University. My husband was working in Los Angeles at the time. The commute was too much. So, two years later, I moved as an assistant professor to Cal State Northridge, which is in the Los Angeles county. And I’ve been there since. So, it’s been about seven, eight years.

04:22 Emily: Wow. We’ve already learned a lot just from that background story. So many good financial insights that you just shared. Incredible! And tell me a little bit more about the being a financial planner side of things, not just being a professor.

04:34 Inga: So, about when I moved to Cal State Northridge, I was hired to do financial planning. It’s a very long story on the side about how finance and financial planning fight and what’s going on there. Not worth it now, but I ended up teaching in the finance department, financial planning. And one of the things I always wanted to do is practice financial planning. So, I decided to open my own firm back in 2016, and I’ve been running it for the last five, six years, and I specialize in financial planning for academics. So, a lot of my clients are current academic academics.

Financial Profile of Academic Clients

05:05 Emily: So perfect. And the reason that we met was that another podcast interviewee, Dr. Leslie Wang, you’re her financial planner, and she recommended that you also come on the podcast. So, I don’t know if that episode’s going to air before or after this one, but check that one out as well. So, that is how Inga and I were referred to one another. So, this is really, really exciting. I’m so pleased to learn that you, you know, specialize in academics. I say PhDs here a lot on the podcast, that that’s kind of my specialty area. So, when you’re working with academics, is there like a rough, like financial profile that you have discerned from the people who come to you, maybe versus like the average person who would seek out financial planning? Like how are academics and PhDs financially different?

05:48 Inga: Well, there are two different types of academics who will come to me. The ones who are about to graduate and are getting their first job. For some of them, they’re going from like $20,000 to $150,000. It’s a huge jump in income. And they’re like, what am I going to do with all this money? What do I do? So, that’s really a good point to come. The other ones are people who’ve been around for a while and they accumulate enough assets. So, they have a lot of complicated situations to solve and they’re just coming, “Okay, tell me, am I okay to retire? Am I okay here? What am I doing? So, those are the two big buckets, and you do want to go to somebody who actually understands your lifestyle and what’s going on. Because when you go from assistant to associate, there’ll be a bunch of money coming in.

06:26 Inga: There’ll be some decisions to be made. When you first get your job, a lot of the systems are still on the dual pension versus 403(b) type, and you have to make the decision. And once you miss it, there’s no going back in most cases. So, there are a few very specific things associated with academics. I think it’s important to find somebody who actually knows those. The second part of it is that I’m always willing to provide you all kinds of advice you didn’t ask me about outside finances. Like you should move to a different place because your life would be better and cheaper if you do that. So, I think it just, it’s easier for me to work with people just like me, which happens to be somebody who is in their forties, has a few kids, and just trying to go through the financial academic life path.

07:11 Emily: I love that you mentioned, in particular, those two sort of time points when it really makes sense to seek out financial planning. That like, I’m about to start my high-earning career and want to make sure I’m set up to go forward in the right way. But also you get to see people and the decisions they’ve made, right? And the accumulation of those decisions by that point. So, I’m sure that your younger clients are benefiting from you working with your older clients as well to sort of steer them in the right way.

Money Mindset During Academic Career Transition

07:37 Emily: So, you mentioned you yourself have been through like this massive income decrease to go to graduate school and then a massive, I hope, income increase coming out of graduate school, and that that’s something you advise, you know, PhDs and people entering academia as, you know, with a full-time job on. So like, when you’re looking at people in that transition from graduate student or postdoc into like a professorship, have you seen any like money mindset issues, commonly, in those people that you’d like to tell our audience more about like what they are and maybe how to address them?

08:08 Inga: There are a few things that come to mind immediately, and the best time to address those are before you get your first paycheck. Because somehow once you start getting money, that money disappears. And we used to live on so little money in the PhD, and somehow we survived and now we make 3, 4, 5 times as much, and we still don’t have enough. So, you do have to make a few decisions. And I think the one most important decision you can make is sit down and do a budget before you show up to work. You know how much you’re going to be making, you know, approximately, what’s going to happen. So, figure out how much money is left after all the bills are going to be paid and where that money is going to go. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the YNAB budgeting software, because they always tell you that every dollar has a job.

08:51 Inga: Like there should be no floating money there. Everything should be allocated before you start. If you do a really good budget and you stick to it, you should have a very comfortable lifestyle. All the decisions will be just fine. And if you do this for 25 years, you will be okay. That’s really the one big thing that I tell people. The other one that is really worth mentioning is the housing situation. We go into these jobs, not knowing are we going to get tenure? Are we not going to get tenure? What’s going to happen? Am I going to like it? And it really should be more about, is this a good cash flow house to buy or not, regardless what happens to me? If I go, like, when I went to Oregon, I didn’t know if I was going to be there for a long time.

09:30 Inga: I realized really fast I won’t, but I still bought a house because I knew that the duplex can rent for an extra thousand dollars over my mortgage. So even if I leave, it’s a good financial decision. When you show up in Los Angeles and the condo is a million dollars, not so much. So you really have to think about, is this a decision good for my long-term financial implications? Or am I just buying a house because now I have to buy a house, I moved somewhere else? Those are two big things that I would definitely consider before starting the job.

Personal Factors in Real Estate Decision-Making

09:58 Emily: I’d like to stay on this like real estate question a little bit more, because I’ve become much more interested in real estate since I bought my first house at the age of like, how old am I, at the age of 35, last year in the hype of the market craziness. We bought in a high cost of living area. So like, I’ve kind of been through this recently and it makes me very interested in this. So like, what I really like about what you said is that I read this book in the last year called First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete [Playbook] to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes. And in there they have this really interesting sort of way of approaching the decision about real estate, which is what you just mentioned is what are my exit strategies of this house or whatever kind of property?

10:35 Emily: And do they make financial sense? So like, yes, I’m going to live in this house. It’s going to be my primary residence. Or maybe we can even talk about house hacking, you know, but it’s probably going to be your primary residence. But when you are exiting this house, whether that’s you sell it or you keep it as a rental or that’s <laugh>, I guess that’s it, you know, you go to another area of the country or whatever, like, is it going to be an okay financial decision too, at that point? Does it still make sense? So, that’s a little bit like what you were saying, right? And I think that added element to what you were just saying is that, when you’re looking at your first like appointment and you’re going to be there for you don’t know how long. It could be a few years, it could be a lot of years. At what point, I guess if you decide that you do want to stay, like not for you, you left that first position relatively rapidly, but if you do want to stay like, “Oh yeah, I can see myself having my full career here.” Does it make sense to buy then? Even if like the cash flow is not going to be good?

11:29 Inga: Ooh. So, this goes outside of money and now into our personal things we have going on in our heads. Some people are totally fine being renters. And in some markets like a San Francisco, Los Angeles market, it is perfectly fine to be a tenant for the whole life. You can always go and buy another vacation home, an investment property somewhere else. You don’t have to just have one place. But other people cannot sleep at night when they know that I’m throwing money away into the wind and it’s rent. So for those people, it’s not really about the cash flow, but about, can I sleep at night? And it is okay, totally okay, to make decisions that are not based on dollars, as long as you are aware what you’re getting into. I personally tried to avoid that because like I was like, “Oh, I just wasted some money. I can just take that cash and I can put it, invest it and don’t do anything and make 9% somewhere else.” But if you’re going to buy a house and you really want this house, because that’s your dream, it is totally okay to buy it. Even if it doesn’t make sense.

12:28 Emily: Yeah. I definitely think you’re describing me with the house purchase that I just mentioned. I’m always saying like, this is more of a lifestyle decision than like a financial decision. Like yeah, it’s okay financially, but really it’s because I want like stability in my life. Like I want to know I have this house, I’m going to be living here. I know what school my kids are going to go to, that whole thing. So yeah, it’s much more of like a peace of mind and stability thing for me.

12:48 Inga: I mean, to give you a perspective, I have three houses now in three different places. The latest one I bought last week. So, you know, at the height of the height, because it made sense.

Spend Time on Your Benefits

12:59 Emily: Yeah. Congratulations on your new acquisition! Okay. Any other like mindset stuff you want to talk about in this, you know, transition into the first post-PhD full-time job?

13:11 Inga: Spend some time on your benefits, because when you go to a university job, it usually comes with a really good package. And some people tell me, yeah, I’ve made my choice in 30 minutes. 30 minutes? I spent 70 hours on my benefits, like trying to understand them, to see how to optimize them, what you can get to pay less in taxes. And if you are not really sure how to do it, find somebody who will do it for you for 500 bucks. Pay somebody two hours of work and do it because you’re going to make so much more money if you take advantage of what’s offered to you.

13:39 Emily: Can you give us a couple examples of some of those benefits that people might not be aware of?

13:43 Inga: Like even the choice of having a dependent care spending account, healthcare spending account. So, if you have kids and they go to daycare, you have some expenses for them. Like it should be a no-brainer. We are going to max out the $5,000 because we are going to probably save a third of that in taxes. But people are like, well, I don’t really have the cash to pay for it. You’re still paying for daycare. You just have to pay less if you do it through the dependent care spending account.

14:07 Emily: Yeah. Good example. And that applies for everybody, even outside of academia, if they have that kind of benefit through their work.

Financial Goals: Kids’ Education and Retirement

14:13 Emily: Okay. So, again, talking about this like point you’re like launching your career post-PhD. What are some financial goals that people at that stage might want to be considering? We already talked about real estate. We don’t have to go over that. What are some other financial goals?

14:26 Inga: Kids and kids’ education, if you have kids. And a lot of it comes with where they go to college, where they go to school, that’s also a decision that needs to be made. I would say that’s less important than your retirement. Retirement should go on top of that. And retirement is really a big decision because if you do it right and you do it from the very beginning, you’ll just have to work so much less when you’re 65 years old. What you can save at 35 to 45 is like saving 30 years later down the line. So, please make sure you’re not just saving a little bit, but trying to figure out how to max out that 403(b) or how to take advantage of your pension, how to make the optimal decision for that. That’s another one. And then the third one actually comes before you even get a job as you’re deciding. In some cases, obviously, you have one offer and a job is better than no job. But if you have a few different offers to decide, or if later in life you’re going to move to a different place, it’s not just about the base pay. There is so much more to think about in terms of where you live, the state income taxes, what else you can negotiate. That makes a huge difference in the financial package.

Maxing Out the 403(b)

15:32 Emily: I want to stay on the retirement goal for a second. Do you often end up saying to your clients, try to max out that 403(b)? Like, is that something that comes out of your mouth?

15:43 Inga: Yep. That is like the number one thing. There are a few exceptions. In some cases, obviously the emergency fund in general will come before, but with a few exceptions where people are not, they have other things going on where the 403(b) is irrelevant, I cannot think of a better thing both for taxes and retirement than maxing it out.

16:01 Emily: I was also thinking about like that goal of maxing out. So like for a personal example, when my husband and I first finished our PhDs and like our incomes are starting to increase, but they’re not like I don’t know as high as they are now, for example, multiple years later. We at first were not, even though we were like really good retirement savers, we were not trying to max out because we had like this real estate purchase goal and we had, you know, other things going on. And so we sort of set like a percentage of our income. It was 20% that we wanted to save. And then after we ended up buying our house, which I’ve already mentioned so many times, then we were like, okay, this is our year. We can finally max out. We can finally like all, you know, pull out all the stops, like try to max out as much as we can. So for us, we were trying to balance a few different goals, but yeah, so maxing out didn’t happen immediately. It was a few years down the line for us.

16:46 Inga: And you know, that’s very typical because once you want the house and you have kids, there’s a lot of competing priorities. So, not in every case, you’re going to max out. But even if you started at 5% this year and every year you go up by 1%, eventually max it out. Worst case when you become an associate professor, well, now you have this huge chunk of money coming in you don’t really need most likely, that can go to the maximization. And if you’re a professor, you actually potentially could have a double maximization between the 403(b) and the 457. So you could just go wild in there, if you had nothing better to do with the money and put in $40,000 aside.

17:21 Emily: Yeah. The amount that you can stash away when you have both a 403(b) and a 457 is like really a startling amount of money. It’s very impressive you can manage to do all of that.

Commercial

17:32 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as 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 2022-2023 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker 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/speaking/ 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.

Choosing Where to Live

18:55 Emily: So, the third kind of decision that you mentioned is if you had, you know, competing offers, ideal scenario and you get to choose where to live. I end up talking about this a lot at like the grad student level with like, okay, you need to make sure that your stipend is going to actually like pay for your life in X, Y, Z city that you’ve never lived in before. Like how do you kind of assess that? So, are there any, like, what are the considerations for someone at that stage in deciding where to live? And I want to also like throw in something you told me before the interview, which is that you do not live in California, you have moved elsewhere and are working remotely. So like, what are the things that go into that decision when we’re talking about geographic arbitrage?

19:30 Inga: The two big things are cost of living, buying, or renting a place and the state income tax. So, it really comes down to that. So for example, when COVID hit and everything went online, I move from Los Angeles to Florida, and I’m still here commuting to LA once a week to teach my class because the price of the tickets and what I need to do is still so much lower than the cost of living I’m giving up. And some of the income being shielded from the California state income tax, which is very expensive. So as you’re making these two decisions, think about $1 in Los Angeles is like having $2 in Florida, and nobody’s going to double your salary to go to Los Angeles. So you really have to think about that and decide, “Okay. If I really don’t care that much about a specific location and I have a Boise, Idaho, and some North Carolina, like which one makes more financial sense when it comes to buying a house or renting plus the state income tax?”

20:22 Emily: Yeah, that’s really, really good to think about. We touched on this a little bit in a previous interview with Dr. Amanda back in, I don’t know, season one or season two. Listeners can look that up if they’re interested, but she said kind of the same thing. Like she was looking at multiple different academic offers and saying, “Wow, you know, they’re not adjusted that much based on the cost of living.” It made a lot more sense. She wanted to live in the Midwest anyway. So that made a lot of sense for her to like, accept that kind of offer, both lifestyle and financial decision in that case. So yeah, that’s really interesting to hear that your offers might not be too different. And it’s the same thing actually with grad students’ stipends. Like, yes, they generally will hopefully pay more in high cost of living areas, but it’s not as much as it would be to make up the real difference between those low cost of living and high cost of living areas.

Financial Tactics Beyond Budgeting

21:03 Emily: Let’s get down to a little bit more tactical stuff. What are some financial like tactics that you end up recommending to your clients? We already talked about budgeting a little bit. Is there anything that goes beyond that?

21:15 Inga: Tax planning is normally a big deal, but it comes later in life when you’re making more money. When you’re making 60, $70,000, let’s just say like immediately as a postdoc, tax planning is really not going to save you that much money. Once you’re making $200,000, you have two people making the same. It is a big deal. So you do want to figure out what is the least amount of tax I want to pay, whether it be from retirement, from where you live, from how you shield some of the benefits, it’s worth the consideration. And really making the decision, if you decide to go the 403(b), or one of those investment type accounts, 457, 401(k), you really have to make sure the investments you have make sense. Because sometimes you have multiple choices. Let’s say you have a 403(b), and now you have options between Fidelity and lawyer and somebody else, make the best decision based on the investment choices, and then make sure your portfolio building actually makes sense.

22:09 Inga: And it’s so crazy how nobody gives you this training. The only people you end up talking to are the reps from these companies, and their sole purpose is to get you into their hands. So, they’re not going to tell you, “Oh yeah, Fidelity is better than Vanguard,” or whatever it happens to be. You have to make the decision because I think at one point the calculation is like a $600,000 calculation if you max out your 403(b) for the next 40 years. It’s a huge difference what funds you choose, how you invest. And that is also a good place to probably look for some help if you don’t have the skills and knowledge.

22:43 Emily: I think some of my listeners, you know, they’ve probably heard me talking about like a Roth IRA ad nauseum, because a Roth IRA is like, kind of, well, the IRA is like the only game of town, pretty much for graduate students. And the Roth makes so much sense when they’re that young. But as you mentioned, you know, tax optimization and tax planning, as your income starts to increase, I’m learning that it makes a lot more sense of course, to use like traditional versions of these accounts in many cases. What I’m literally working with right now with my financial planner is on asset location. So, like what’s going to be in the traditional accounts, what’s going to be in the Roth accounts, what’s going to be in the taxable brokerage. She’s figuring all that stuff out for us because it can get pretty complicated at that point.

23:21 Inga: And in the end, you have to have all three. You have to have some rough money, you have to have some traditional, and some of the brokerage, if you want to, when you are old, try to take money out to make the most sense of it. So, I’m a big fan of the Roth IRA. If you can do it and you’re not maxed out and you have, yeah. Do it. But putting $6,000 in a Roth is not going to be enough for retirement. You’ll have to do more than that. And even at work, you have an option between a Roth versus traditional 403(b) for example, how do you make the choice? It needs to be thought through because that’s a huge implication down the line.

General Rules of Thumb

23:52 Emily: So, let’s assume that somebody listening is not going to work with you or another type of financial planner at this crucial point that we’re talking about when they’re deciding on their benefits. Can you give them any other like, pointers about how to make these decisions that are general rules of thumb or that most people would be able to apply?

24:08 Inga: Okay. So the first decision, if you have a pension versus a 403(b) type account, because a lot of the systems do, if you see yourself staying in the system and investing and being there for the long-term, take the pension. It’s normally a better deal. If you think this is a two-to-five year deal, take the 403(b), it comes down to that. And if you’re not sure, take the pension because you can always convert the money later on and take it with you. For the 403(b) type accounts, investment accounts, a Roth versus traditional. I mean, I have rules of thumb. Again, disclosure, they don’t always work, but if you are making less than $80,000, the Roth is the way to go. You are not getting killed by taxes. Most likely you’re going to end up with more taxes down the road. So, take the Roth.

24:50 Inga: Over $120K, and that’s for single, so double it for married, maybe traditional makes more sense depending how much you itemize, how much deductions you have. And between $80K and $120K is a very gray area. Once you are at the point where you make $250K plus, and you have plenty of money and you’re thinking, “Well, now I need to have a 403(b) and a 457. Then you can do a little bit of both. But in the beginning, if you’re making the typical 150 salary for a lot of the majors, the traditional 403(b) usually makes more sense.

25:23 Emily: Yes. Thank you so much for that general landscape of, you know, how one’s financial life may play out in this respect. Are there any financial challenges or financial opportunities that academics have that are not commonly discussed in personal finance circles? Like the wider personal finance community or financial planning community?

Financial Benefits of Job Changes

25:46 Inga: I think the job change is a little stickier or harder to change. Like a lot of the clients I work with who are not academics to them like, “Oh yeah, somebody offered me $15 more. I’m taking a new job. I’m jumping ship” because there’s always that kind of mentality. Academics don’t really think about money as much as they should. And I understand that some of them really never been exposed, who had never thought about this. And they may have a PhD that has nothing to do with money. But at the end of the day, I feel like it’s extremely important to think about this, because no matter what you do in life, you still have got to do all these things. You still have to buy a house. You still have to optimize your money. So, think about potentially changing your job, even though you might have tenure, even though life seems okay, can you make your situation better if you are to go somewhere else? Or if you got to go on the job market again? You’ll never get as much money as you do when you go in the job market again and again. Like your current job may offer you a match once or twice, may give you some more money, but the only real way to jump in pay once you’re full professor is to go somewhere else. So think about leaving or getting a new job, even though you’ve been here for maybe 15, 20 years.

26:57 Emily: Wow. I didn’t realize that academia was so I guess, similar to the private sector in that respect, in that you need to change employers to really make massive salary jumps. I have heard of the tactic of like getting another offer and then negotiating your current one with your hopeful intention is to stay. But it sounds like what you just said is that that, mm, it might work a little bit, but not as much.

27:19 Inga: Yeah. And I have clients who do that very successfully. Like somebody brought two different offers in the last five years and they matched the offer, but now they told her we’re done here. A third offer is not going to get matched and she can get so much more in the open market. So, depending where you are and how happy. And then again, if you are super happy and your life is awesome, who cares about the money? If you want to stay where you stay, you do not have to do it. But if you are okay with moving and thinking about money a little bit more, then there is nothing wrong giving up your tenure and starting somewhere else.

Finding a Financial Planner

27:50 Emily: Since we’ve been mentioning so much in this interview talking about like financial planners, sometimes people come to me with like, what is the type of financial planner or financial advisor I should seek out? And we’ve also talked about like the timing of seeking out that kind of advice. Can you give maybe people who are like finishing up grad school soon or finishing up their postdoc soon, some sort of reference point on like, how much is it going to cost them to work with someone like you like to make a comprehensive plan? Or how does the pricing work? Because I’m sure when they haven’t started that, you know, they haven’t gotten that first paycheck from the new job, they’re still counting their pennies. And this may be a concern and a barrier for them to working with someone at a crucial point in their career.

28:29 Inga: And so, this should not be a barrier. Find somebody who wants to help you, and then you can pay them a little bit later. There’s always arrangements to be made. So I would not stop myself for looking for one. There are different types of plans. Some planners charge even hourly, some do this quick start or focused plans. Like I do those, we focus on two, three big areas and I charge $1,500 for them. So, it’s a limited engagement for two, three months to get you through the most important things. A full financial plan will probably cost you between two and $5,000. I charge $300 a month for 12 months. So it’s a one year engagement. So we get through everything, but I’ve seen prices it’s typical between two and $5,000. I don’t know if it’s worth it for you to have a full financial plan to start with.

29:13 Inga: If you’ve been a PhD student and now you just have a few questions about the work benefits, a focused plan is probably the way to go. And those will range between $500 and $2,000, depending on who you go to. When you’re looking for a planner, XYPN is my favorite place to go because everybody there is a CFP, and everybody’s fee-only. And there’s a lot of debate about fiduciaries. No, not everybody’s a fiduciary who tells who they are. So fee-only is my requirement, which means that only the clients can pay you. Nobody else can pay you. And the CFP with probably five years of experience. Otherwise, these problems are pretty typical unless you have something very specialized that needs to be discussed, almost everybody there can help you.

29:57 Emily: I’m really glad you mentioned that. So, I just independently, you know, Inga and I did not plan this, but I also went through XY Planning Network to find my planner.

30:04 Inga: Oh, really?

30:05 Emily: Yes, absolutely. Because I know that everybody in the Network is a CFP. My planner, I made sure that she’s not being compensated by anybody else. You know, we have the, you know, fee model where like we paid upfront a little bit for like an accelerated plan. And then we also have like a monthly subscription. So it’s sort of a combo of those two to work together for one year. So like, yes. So I totally like cosign what Inga just said. And this is a great place to find someone who is willing to work with you and is going to be competent to do so. What I like about the XY planning network is that you can search for all kinds of different, like special scenarios that you might be encountering.

30:36 Emily: So, I really wanted someone who was going to help me specifically on tax planning and tax advising as like our main like focus. So that’s what I kind of look for. And also people who are familiar with like self-employment and all that stuff, because that’s what I am. But if you had other things going on in your life, you know, you’re an academic or you’re in the military or you’re receiving an inheritance or whatever, there’s a lot of different, you know, types of people who specialize in different things. You can easily find them through the search tools in that network, which I really like.

31:00 Inga: And they have over a thousand advisors now. So I mean, you can find advisors who like the color purple. I mean there are so many possibilities, and they’re all virtual. So you don’t need to have somebody local. It is really the best place to find somebody who’s unbiased and a CFP.

How to Connect with Inga

31:14 Emily: Love it. Inga, if listeners want to follow up you, learn more about you and your work, where’s the best place for them to go?

31:21 Inga: Probably on my website, attainablewealthfp.com. And I’m not taking any new clients for the next six months at least. But if you have questions, like you went to XYPN and narrowed it down to two people and you don’t know who to choose, I’ll be very happy to provide someone unsolicited advice from what I know. So, feel free to reach out. If you have questions, maybe I can just send you like a copy of a book. I teach personal finance, so I have a very short book I wrote for the students. I can just send you a copy and try to help in any way possible.

Best Financial Advice for Current Graduate Students

31:49 Emily: Oh, that’s a wonderful offer. Thank you, Inga. That’s very generous. Okay. We’re going to end with the question that I ask all of my interviewees, which is what is your best financial advice for current graduate students? So we’re thinking a little bit earlier than the population we’ve been talking about up to this point. It could be something that we’ve mentioned already in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

32:09 Inga: I want to say get a financial plan at this point, but that’s a given. So, the other thing is get a budget. If you do not have a tight rein on your budget when you’re making 20,000, it’s only going to get worse once you make $120K. So, sit down and figure out how you can get a budget and have a percent go into savings, no matter how little you make right now.

32:31 Emily: I love that advice. I say this a lot about kind of graduate students in that phase of life, like you’re sort of building up your muscles in terms of like your financial practices, the money management, the, you know, the knowledge that you have and you’re really going to apply them. And it’s going to make a big difference once you have that big paycheck coming in. But right now is the time to like practice so that as you said, you don’t get to the big paycheck and say, “Whoa, all the money disappeared. <Laugh>. What do I do about that?” So, I love that advice. Well, Inga, it’s been wonderful to talk with you. Thank you so much for volunteering to come onto the podcast. And I’m really glad to have met you.

33:04 Inga: Same here.

Outtro

33:11 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? I have 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 Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

The Gardener and Rose Approach for Childfree PhD Couples

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jay Zigmont, who holds both a PhD in Adult Education and Certified Financial Planner designation. Jay has focused his financial planning practice, Live Learn Plan, on the childfree community, and his book, Portraits of Childfree Wealth, will be published on June 1, 2022. Emily and Jay discuss the stories and interview excerpts from the book and Jay’s observations about the relationship between being childfree and finances. Jay holds up the model of the Gardener and Rose as a potentially useful one for dual-PhD couples, which is what he and his wife practice.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Jay: And I was amazed that people would share this. I mean, to be frank, people would rather talk about their sex life than their finances. But people were sharing it all, and it’s just amazing to see.

Introduction

00:15 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season 12, episode one, and today my guest is Dr. Jay Zigmont, who holds both a PhD in Adult Education and the Certified Financial Planner designation. Jay has focused his financial planning practice, Live Learn Plan, on the childfree community, and his book, Portraits of Childfree Wealth will be published on June 1st, 2022. We discuss the stories and interview excerpts from Jay’s book and his observations about the relationship between being childfree and finances. Jay holds up the model of the gardener and rose as a potentially useful one for dual PhD couples, which is what he and his wife practice.

01:10 Emily: If you’ve been getting value from this podcast, would you please do me a favor? This is a perfect time of year to recommend me and my work to an appropriate host or sponsor at your university or Alma mater. In case you didn’t know, I offer numerous personal finance seminars and workshops on topics like taxes, investing, budgeting, and debt repayment, all tailored for graduate students, postdocs, and/or prospective graduate students. If you think that you and your peers would benefit from my teaching, please recommend me to your graduate school graduate student association or post office. These recommendations help me get my foot in the door with new clients or remind past clients of the need for this material. If you choose to recommend me over email, please Cc me, [email protected] so that I can pick up the conversation. It’s only possible for me to create free-to-you content like this podcast if I have paying clients for my speaking engagements and prerecorded workshops. Thank you in advance for recommending me. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:29 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jay Zigmont. He is a CFP whose practice is called Live Learn Plan. And he’s also a PhD. His PhD is in Adult Learning from Yukon, and we’re going to be talking today about his kind of specialty within his financial planning practice, which is in childfree people. So, that’s kind of the topic, and specifically how like his career has progressed and how he and his wife together have progressed in their careers and trade offs in their childfree life. So, Jay, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for volunteering! And would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

03:06 Jay: Absolutely. Emily. So what I do for my day job is I help people understand their dreams and figure out their life and financial planning. I specifically work with childfree folks, which is a interesting area, because in finances it’s completely ignored. There’s no mention in the entire certified financial planning training of being childfree. So I try to bring a little bit of my own life and my research into the practice.

03:30 Emily: Yeah, that’s really, I just think it’s really exciting to learn people’s niches and like why they chose them. Obviously, I have a very specific niche in my like financial education stuff. So, that’s awesome that you’re kind of overlapping your own life choices with what you focus on in your profession. So, it’s a little bit of an unusual path, right? To get a PhD and then get a CFP later on. That’s a certified financial planner by the way, for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym. So, can you tell us how your career took that path?

04:00 Jay: Yeah, so I spent a lot of time in healthcare and academia and you know, everybody listening, there are probably some people who have done both those careers. And it’s always good, bad, and ugly. And across that time, the thing that was common was I was doing coaching. So, whether it’s executive coaching, career coaching, life coaching, academic coaching, whatever it is. And the reality is people are more willing to pay for financial coaching than they are for some of the other. And as soon as you do that, you need to start working on a CFP, become an investment advisor, all the other ones to cross the T’s dot the I’s. And what I’ve found is that I can combine life coaching or life planning with financial coaching and financial planning, because I don’t know if you can separate your life and your finances, but at least that’s the way I look at it, they’re all together.

04:45 Emily: I have the exact same viewpoint. It’s one of the things that has always like excited me about personal finance is that it is so intertwined with just your life holistically. It’s impossible to separate. And I think you really can like get to know people really well, what their values are, what excites them through how they are using their money or how they would like to use their money in the future. So, I totally agree. That’s really, really fun.

05:08 Jay: So, I’m also advice-only. So, I’m an advice-only CFP. I don’t do investment management for people. So, my work is around teaching people to do it themselves. So, that matches where I come from. But it’s also, frankly, different in the financial world, because I’m not charging an AUM fee or anything like that. I meet with people on a regular basis. I actually meet with them monthly and we work through their life finances and it just helps people grow.

05:31 Emily: I totally agree. This is a really new, like exciting model within financial planning. I don’t know if the listeners will be familiar with the AUM or assets-under-management model, but that’s where you hear like a, you know, an advisor’s charging you 1% or some other fee similar to that, to do all your investment management for you, but your model is completely different. And a lot of, I think younger planners are moving towards this fee-only model where, like you said, you’re paying kind of for someone’s time and expertise, but it’s a teaching relationship. It’s a coaching and guiding relationship. I’m working with a financial advisor as well who’s a CFP who works under that same model of a subscription model instead of this like AUM model. So yeah, I really, I love that.

Portraits of Childfree Wealth

06:10 Emily: So, in preparing for this interview, you sent me a book. Can you tell us about the book and the study that you did that leads into it?

06:20 Jay: Yeah. So, I actually started off with a different plan than my book. And, you know, when you dive into research, you have this idea of what you’re gonna look at and then it goes somewhere else. And I’m a qualitative researcher by nature. So, I really wanted to look at the question of what is it like to be childfree, and how does that impact your life and your finances and your wealth? And I’d done a bunch, you know, got a bunch of surveys, got a bunch of data, started going through it. But I was doing these interviews with these people, and these amazing stories came out of what their life was like. And I said, okay, I have to kind of pause some of the analytical work I’m doing and just share these life stories because they don’t exist. You know, and the childfree, they’re about 11% of the U.S over 55 are childfree. And a recent study in Michigan found that 27% of adults are childfree, but there’s no stories about kind of like, well, what does that mean? How does that work? What is that life like? And I was like, how is it possible that such a large group, I mean, we’re talking millions and millions of people, don’t have something, and in the financial literature it’s completely ignored? So, I’m sharing the stories, and hopefully people can go, “Oh, that’s me,” or, “Wow, I didn’t realize that was a way of life.”

07:28 Emily: Can you say the name of your book and when it’s coming out?

07:31 Jay: So Portraits of Childfree Wealth comes out June 1st.

07:35 Emily: Okay. So, I read this in preparation for the interview, and what I found fascinating is that it feels very honest. It feels very unfiltered, especially about a topic like finances, which is so sensitive. And a lot of people are not willing to speak openly about it. So, it is really exciting that you could, you know, compile these interviews and really share, like you just said, like exactly what life is like for these, you know, selected people that you included in the book. So, it was really a fascinating read. Disheartening at times, honestly, but also very encouraging at times. Because obviously different people have different kinds of stories.

08:10 Jay: So, you’re right on it. And I think one of the most shocking things to people is, being childfree doesn’t mean you’re rich. There are people in there literally talking about living on an air mattress. You know, I’m like, the way I look at it is, you know, if they had a kid they’d drown, you know, they just barely keep, and I was amazed that people would share this. I mean, to be frank, people would rather talk about their sex life than their finances, but people were sharing it all. And it’s just amazing to see.

08:37 Emily: Yeah, and I don’t know if this is one of maybe the threads that you pulled out of this set of interviews, but definitely in a number of them, finances were not necessarily like a motivation for making a choice to be childfree, but it helped a lot on that front. Like you said, some of people interviewed would not, I think, be able to financially support a child without some additional like outside assistance, the way they were earning and living like at the moment. And so, it seems like a practical choice as well.

09:10 Jay: Yeah. And I think, so because we’re talking to researchers, this is always a fun one. There’s a relationship, I’m being technical on that, between growing up in poverty or poor and choosing childfree. I don’t have enough data to look at correlation/causation, but there is something there, you know? I didn’t come up with it. I don’t have the money. And then I’ve made that choice. And I think that’s one of those that we’re going to have to dive deeper in to understand, but there are also people that have chosen, well, I’m not having kids because of climate or medical issues or all different reasons. So, I mean, they’re just as varied as the people themselves.

FIRE versus FILE

09:47 Emily: Yeah. And I’m sure this is probably typically a multivariate decision, right? It’s not just one overriding reason for making the choice to be childfree, but it’s, it’s a few things that all kind of come together. Besides the relationship between growing up in poverty and choosing to be childfree, what were some other like key observations or other relationships that you saw?

10:06 Jay: So, I think some of the interesting ones, I was surprised the amount of childfree folks that say they don’t really want to retire. So, there’s a lot of work right now on the FIRE movement, Financial Independence, Retire Early. And there are a couple people that are FIREd and some people like inadvertently FIREd and all that. But most people are going, I’d rather do what I call FILE, Financial Independence, Live Early. It’s kind of dimmed the work. You know, Ryan shares his story in the book of, he works 25 hours a week, never on Fridays, never before 10:00 AM. And like he could take his laptop and go to Palm Springs and do work from anywhere. And that’s really interesting because I think that might be a unique thing to the childfree community that you can get up and go and have that mobile life. But it’s also, if your goal is not retirement, it completely changes your financial plan.

10:54 Emily: I really like that you had that acronym that you explained a few times throughout the book, the FILE. And it reminded me of some of these other like flavors of FIRE, like barista FIRE and Coast FI and all of those. Yeah, super interesting.

11:09 Jay: Some of the people in the FIRE community will argue with me and say, well, Choose FI or Slow FI, the same as FILE. And I go, well, here’s the question? The question is, are you retiring at the end? And what you hear is a lot of FIRE people go, “No, I don’t really want to retire.” Well then you’re not FIRE-ing. You are doing something else. And I think the point I was trying to work through is if I’m not retiring, then my financial plan shouldn’t reflect retiring. And people go, well, what does that change? Well, it changes a lot of your assumptions, and it changes what are your goals, and how does that fit?

11:41 Emily: Yeah. That’s a really exciting concept. Were there any other observations or relationships that you’d like to pull out from the study?

The Gardener and the Rose

11:48 Jay: Yeah, I think the other one I mentioned in there comes out of me and my wife to an extent is this concept of the gardener and the rose. So, my wife and I were both PhDs, and anyone that has a family with two PhDs, you know how hard it is to get a career with two PhDs. Does that make sense, Emily?

12:04 Emily: I know it very well. My husband has a PhD, too.

12:07 Jay: Yeah. So, we get this trailing spouse thing, and it just, it’s a nightmare. My personal belief is it’s almost impossible to get two careers at exactly the same level at exactly the same time for two PhDs. It is possible, but I mean, it’s like you won the lotto. And what I heard from the childfree folks was people were looking at, Hmm, what are the options? And what my wife and I did is we look at it as the gardener or the rose. Somebody’s the rose growing, and somebody’s the gardener providing the support. And I have to clear, you know, that is not gendered roles or anything like that. It’s just expectations, because somebody has to provide support, and somebody has to grow. And my wife and I, we actually have made a conscious effort that we’re going take turns, you know, and that allows the rose to kind of grow and do its own thing.

12:54 Jay: And what you heard is people in this book saying, “Well, you know, we have two incomes. We don’t need both. One of us is not happy.” And I’m like, “So, quit.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” I’m like, “Well, take turns growing and you can work this gardener and the rose approach. And I’ve got people in there that one’s creating his own video games and he’s doing indie game design and they’re living in an RV. He’s the rose right now, and his wife works in healthcare. It’s this thing that can happen where you can take these turns. Does that make any sense?

13:24 Emily: It absolutely makes sense to me. And as I was reflecting on this concept, I was trying to sort of apply it to like my relationship with my husband and how our careers have progressed. It doesn’t fit, I think, quite as cleanly for us as it does for you and your wife. But I see elements of it at different times and in different ways.

Commercial

13:43 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the Community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! Now back to the interview.

Taking Turns

14:49 Emily: The examples in the book, as far as I remember of gardener and rose, were like the one that you decided of like, well, one person’s going to like take a break from earning or like earn less than they maybe could because the other person is financially able to provide. But from what I can tell for you and your wife, that’s not the case. You’re both working, you both have income, but it’s more about whose career is driving some other decisions in your life. Is that right? How does that work?

15:12 Jay: Yeah, so my wife is in the academic path. And as everybody here knows, when you get the right tenure track position, you just go <laugh>. So, we actually recently moved 1200 miles for her career, and you’re right. It’s not about income, but it’s about that support. So, if somebody’s going to be on that tenure-track path, there’s a whole lot of other stuff that needs to get taken care of. I mean literally like the gardening and the house and the landscaping and the, whatever it is and paying the bills and whatever it is. It’s not about money, but it’s about that support that you need to do that. Because if my wife had to stop and do all that while she was on this tenure-track fun, it would hurt her career. So, we take those turns. Now, mind you, my turn as a rose, I’ve told her 15 years I’m retiring completely and we’re going to get in a boat and travel the world. That’s it. And that’s what I want to do. And she knows that, but that puts a limit, frankly, on her career. But also, it’s a fairness of taking turns.

16:14 Emily: Do you think that the turn-taking aspect is like essential to the concept of gardener and rose? Or is it okay for a couple to choose permanent roles as one or the other?

16:24 Jay: Yeah. So, it’s a rough question. I believe that if people pick one role or the other, it’s way too easy for someone to be neglected or not appreciated or have concerns, let’s call it that. What I think happens is, there are some great stories in there of people that have tried to do the type of gardener and rose without the swap, but then the person that’s in the rose position feels guilty. You know? Well, I’m taking advantage of, well, no, if we know we each have our own turns, I can be selfish for my turn. You can be selfish for yours, and that’s okay. I think if one person decides, “Hey, I want to be this role forever,” and that’s their conscious choice, maybe. But especially when you’re talking about like two PhDs, that’s hard, you know? Fortunately, I can do my finance work from anywhere, but there are other career options I could follow if I was being the rose. So, I think there’s just a balancing act. Does that make sense to you?

17:24 Emily: It does. And I’m actually thinking back to, I’m not going to be able to like cite research on this, but it’s something that I think I read maybe during our premarital counseling that my husband and I went through about how it was maybe about like life satisfaction or something with, we’ll just say married couples, where they had an agreement about whose role was whose. Like maybe there was a working spouse and a non-working spouse. As long as they both were in agreement about what their roles should be, they had a pretty decent level of happiness, even if their circumstances caused them to be flipped. So, let’s say, you know, more traditional, let’s say the husband’s supposed to be the one working, let’s say the wife’s supposed to be the one taking care of the home. Well, the husband becomes disabled, and the wife is the one who has to go into the workforce. Couples who were in agreement about like what their roles should be were happier, even if they couldn’t actually live out those roles, but just having the agreement between them was satisfactory to them. So, it reminds me a little bit about this. Like how do you negotiate, you know, who should be the gardener and who should be the rose at any given time. As long as you’re in agreement, I feel like it’s going to help, even if maybe life circumstances end up playing out a little bit differently.

18:31 Jay: Yeah. And I think there’s some of that that nature does to it. You know, like just your life, your career, there are times in your career. There’s a great example, somebody in the book who just needed to take a 90-day sabbatical, just needed to like get her brain back, you know? And we’re seeing some of this with the great resignation where people aren’t really quitting jobs forever. They’re like, I just need to stop and do something else. And that might be just for a period of time. And I think you’re right. It is the clarity on the roles. But I think with childfree couples, one of the challenges is you have the time, money, and the wealth, the freedom to do what you want. And that actually can cause a little bit of analysis paralysis routine of having too many choices. So, by taking these turns in the roles, you go, “Okay, you’re the rose. Follow your dream. I’ll do like the day in, day out work and vice versa.” And it’s almost like it’s just a little anchor between the two of you. And it also gives people to think through that chance, like you’re talking on the marital counseling of, well, what are our roles? What do we want to do? And a lot of couples have never had that discussion. It’s just implied. And that can cause issues.

19:35 Emily: Yeah. I mean, I’m just trying to think about like two people trying to be the rose at the same time. And if you both want to be the rose, then you’re both also going to have to be the gardener in some ways. There’s going to have to be some kind of negotiation and agreement there. It’s a little bit more clean if it’s like, okay, clearly one person’s a rose, one person’s a gardener. But maybe there are ways you can work out, you know, different aspects of your life or something like that where it could play out a little bit where both of you sort of get to feel like the rose, maybe. This is maybe a little bit how I was applying it to the course that my husband and I have had with our careers. Because, like you and your wife, we moved in 2015 for my husband’s job.

20:15 Emily: So, his first like post-PhD job in industry. We moved across the country. And I was okay with that. I was starting my business. And so I was like, you know, I had a location freedom within my job, but I wasn’t making nearly as much money as I could have had I taken a traditional job after my PhD. And so, in a way, you could interpret that as he’s the rose, because we’re moving for his job. Our location where we’re living is determined by his work. I also see it as my husband was providing financially for both of us, to a large degree, so that I could grow my business, which has flourished over time. And so, I see it like kind of both ways in different ways, right? Location on the one hand, and actual like finances on the other hand. So yeah, I just, there are different ways, I think, that you could imply this framework, but I think it works.

Outsourcing the Gardener

21:03 Jay: Yeah. And I think the gardening roles can be a whole bunch of things. And frankly, if you make enough money, you can pay somebody to do all the gardening roles. Literally. I mean, you can pay somebody to do all that. And then you can have two roses. But as long as location doesn’t mess with it. Some people do look at it as the financial support and the other. But if we go back in time, and I hate to say these old gender roles, but the idea was somebody was doing their primary job and somebody was providing support at home. And I don’t think we realized how much work it is to provide support at home, with or without kids, there’s just a lot of stuff. You know, we need a new roof on our house. Well, that’s a giant project, you know? So, you’ve got to have somebody with the flexibility to do that. Or, you have to be able to pay somebody to manage these projects for you. And I think that’s overlooked because if we’re both at the top of our careers, then we’re going home and have to figure how to mow the lawn. Like, our brain just explodes. Money is not important. What money gets you is important. So, if you’re just working to make the dollars, and it’s not making your life better, change something,

22:16 Emily: I’m feeling this like so strongly right now because my husband and I purchased our first home, which is like a single-family like house a year ago. And so, we went from like apartment living as renters to this managing an entire house situation. And it is a lot of work. I was not quite prepared for this. So yeah, and we’re trying to figure out ways, like how much should we be outsourcing? How much should we keep, you know, us to do the work. But it is a lot, a lot, a lot of work that it takes to run a household. Yeah. And I definitely did not appreciate this a few years ago back when I was still a renter.

22:51 Jay: Let me give you a number on that one. I’ll actually give you the answer on what you should outsource. The question is what do you make per hour, and would you rather work an hour than do the work? So my wife and I, we have somebody come in to help clean. I’ll work an extra hour of work and not have to clean the toilets. I mean, that’s the math behind it. If you enjoy mowing the lawn, do it. If you don’t, <laugh> figure out your hourly and, you know, pick up an extra, you know, class or whatever it is to cover that.

Communication is Key

23:18 Emily: Yeah, this is like airing my dirty laundry on the podcast, but like literally my husband and I are talking about this right now with respect to a house cleaner. I am very confident that we both made more per hour, and that a house cleaner could do a better job and faster than we could do it. But he still has this like, idea that like, you should do it yourself or something. We’re working on that. That’s something we have to agree on together. So yeah, we’re sort of in negotiations about that right now. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this like gardener and rose concept?

23:51 Jay: I think the big thing is communication. I mean, that’s the bottom line of all of it. And I think, when it comes to finances, unfortunately, even couples don’t talk about it, you know? And here’s what I’ve found, with my clients, I talk about this type of concept all the time. The person who needs to be the rose, the person who’s burnt out of their career or whatever, the other spouse is perfectly fine with. It’s the rose that has trouble taking it, you know? Of saying, okay, I will step down or I will change, or I will do whatever. The other person always supports it. So, I think it’s that communication. And I think the other part of it is, what I’m seeing at least in the great resignation world is it’s not about money. It’s changing jobs for either meaning or, you know, whatever that feeling is for the soul, not about the dollars and cents. Hey, I want to make more in my career.

LifeScriptTM Deviation

24:46 Emily: Kind of tying into that. One of the big patterns that I saw reading through the stories in your book was this concept that childfree people, and the people are sort of speaking about their own experience, they have this sense that they can make changes in their lives without maybe considering how it would affect a child or maybe other people in their lives. And that they, in theory, have like a freedom to do that. Did you have that observation as well? But what I also observed is that they weren’t always acting on it. They thought they had the freedom, but they weren’t using it.

25:22 Jay: So, I have this moment frequently and it was in the book and also with just everyday people. And I look at their numbers, I go, “You’re fine. You can do that. You can make that.” And then you get this look in their face, like, “No, no I can’t.” And I’m like, “I’m looking at it financially, you can.” And there’s like this tension. And it happens with people that could cut back on work or retire or change their careers. And I think, you know, I just had a good conversation with somebody that’s this concept of like the middle class work ethic or the Protestant work ethic, which is kind of what you’re talking about with your husband, where I’ve got do this. No, you don’t. Like, so for childfree folks, our goal is not to pass generational wealth. It’s to pay for our bills on the way out. So, adding more zeros to a bank account doesn’t help. So, there’s a point where you’re like, well, I want to go on that, you know, trip of a lifetime or whatever. Well, then do it. And people are like, “Oh, I can’t. I still got…” I’m like, why? And I think it’s just this cultural component. It’s why your husband won’t let somebody else clean the toilets.

26:28 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. That Protestant work ethic thing <laugh> how people are brought up. And I guess what we see in the book is like people, you used the term LifeScriptTM in the book. And how people who have made a conscious choice to be childfree have deviated from the LifeScriptTM. But it sounds like even though they’ve made that step, some of them are still being held back by this like cultural conditioning around making radical changes or really experiencing the freedom that they have earned through their finances and through their career.

27:02 Jay: Absolutely. So, the LifeScriptTM goes this way. You go to school, high school, you graduate, you go to college, by the way, most people don’t even like pick where they go to college. Their parents put something on them. So, that’s part of the script. You go to college, you get a job, you get married, you have kids, you get old, you retire. That’s kind of like the standard script. So, childfree people threw out the middle of it. Like, nah, I’m not doing the kids. And also, interestingly enough, 32.1% of childless people, this is per census, will never get married. So, they even threw away the married part. So, they threw that all out. Cool. Throw away the part about job and career and like, it just locks up because, well then what do I do? And they’re like, well, I don’t like where I live.

27:50 Jay: Well, then move. And they’re like, well, but you know? So, another great example is people go, well, I have to buy a house. You don’t. If you’re childfree and you’re going to move every two years, there’s no reason to buy a house. But then people go, well, but how do I, you know, make money without a house? That’s fine. We can do reeds. We can do some other stuff with it, but it’s just like this, it locks them in. And I have to spend a lot of time going well, there are other options and working it step by step.

28:18 Emily: This is just that observation you just made is why I’m so pleased that you chose this as your niche, because some of those elements you just said, you know, the FIRE movement is kind of working on people’s psychology around this, but I love that you have that further spin on it of focusing just on the childfree community. Because they, as you said, you know, at the beginning they have different financial lives than other people who do have children. And they deserve to be served specifically with their finances. And so, I’m so glad that you chose that as your niche and connected that personal element of your life to your professional life. I’m just so excited for your business. Tell us where people can find the book and where they can contact you if they’d like to learn more?

29:02 Jay: Sure. Portraits of Childfree Wealth is sold everywhere books are sold. If you want to go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, whatever works for you. And I can be found at childfreewealth.com.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

29:13 Emily: Well, Jay, thank you so much for giving this interview. I conclude all my interviews by asking what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on already in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

29:27 Jay: Let me give you something that’s a life advice, if that’s okay. One of our colleagues taught us this and I wish others knew it. He said him and his wife both were MDs, had made a deal that they don’t have to go to each other’s corporate events. You know, the Christmas events, all that. So, my wife and I early on adopted this and we don’t go to each other’s events, because frankly, we don’t know anybody. And it’s been the best thing for our life because we don’t have to have that awkward conversation and the other. And people go, well, that’s not financial. No, it’s a life thing. You know, I don’t need to have that convo. And by the way, it’s easy to explain to people go, yep, we have this deal. This is how we do it. We have separate careers. And it works. And it sounds silly, but if you try it, you’ll like it.

30:12 Emily: Okay. Very interesting. Well thank you, Jay, for this fascinating interview. Thank you so much for coming on!

30:17 Jay: Happy to be here!

Outtro

30:24 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? I have 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 Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How Grad School Rewired This Student’s Brain for Financial Success

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In this episode, Emily interviews Elise Glickert, a fifth-year PhD student in organic chemistry at the University at Buffalo. Elise got married in the summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. Between their student loans and car loan, Elise and her husband were in about $85,000 of debt. With two irregular incomes, they quickly realized they had to change something to do more than just get by with their finances, and they implemented a zero-based budget. Elise compares long-term debt repayment with the process of completing a PhD—both require a long-term mindset, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. Elise and her husband are now debt-free, planning their next steps with their finances, and expecting a baby.

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Teaser

00:00 Elise: Even with that, I think that was helpful. Just even for both of us to see, “Man, like, it is kind of cool how, like, you know, you can increase income just by like approaching or working towards something from a different angle.” And again, I think just like when you’re working on research projects, right? Sometimes you need like a different angle or different thought process to kind of come in and be like, “Oh, cool. Actually, I could approach this problem, look to solve this problem from this angle, instead of just this way.”

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. This is Season 11, Episode 9, and today my guest is Elise Glickert, a fifth-year PhD student in organic chemistry at the University at Buffalo. Elise got married in the summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. Between their student loans and car loan, Elise and her husband were in about $85,000 of debt. With two irregular incomes, they quickly realized they had to change something to do more than just get by with their finances, and they implemented a zero-based budget. Elise compares long-term debt repayment with the process of completing a PhD—both require a long-term mindset, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. Elise and her husband are now debt-free, planning their next steps with their finances, and expecting a baby.

01:30 Emily: Speaking of the transition from undergrad into grad school or the working world into grad school, I am giving away an incredible resource for rising graduate students later this week! The resource is a live webinar on the financial actions that people who will matriculate into graduate school in the coming months need to take right now. It’s really, really practical. We are covering why and how to right-size your housing and transportation expenses, budget and save up for your start-up costs, and investigate your paychecks prior to receiving the first one. I’m really looking forward to sharing this material with you and hearing your questions and concerns. If you are headed to graduate school in the fall, you can register for the webinar at PFforPhDs.com/rising/. If you’re already in or past graduate school but wish someone had sat you down to warn you about the financial pitfalls in your path to the PhD, please share the registration page with the rising graduate students in your life. Again, the URL to register for the free, live webinar on Thursday, April 28, 2022 is PFforPhDs.com/rising/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Elise Glickert.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:59 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Elise Glickert. She is a fifth-year PhD student at the University of Buffalo, and we are going to discuss her financial journey, along with her husband, from when she started grad school to this year, when she’s nearly done. And it has been quite a journey. So, I’m very excited to talk about Elise. Elise, will you please introduce yourself a little bit for there for the audience?

03:20 Elise: Yeah, so what’s up everyone? Yeah, just like Emily was saying I’m Elise and a fifth-year PhD student at University of Buffalo. I do organic chemistry research. So that’s kind of what I’m working on right now, synthesizing different compounds. And then primarily as well, the hope is with that to ultimately go on maybe into like academia, do some teaching or some like business type stuff. Especially like I tutor now, we’ll probably talk a little bit more about that with like kind of like side businesses and side hustles as well and stuff, so, yeah, it’s exciting.

Finances at the Beginning of Grad School

03:57 Emily: Okay. Sounds great! Let me know, let’s kind of take it back to the beginning of graduate school. I understand you got married right around that time as well.

04:05 Elise: Yes. Yeah.

04:06 Emily: So, what was going on with your finances and also, you know, your understanding of finances or your outlook on finances at that time?

04:13 Elise: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so my husband and I, we got married in May of 2017, and we actually got married the day after we graduated, which I will say made finals week very, very stressful. Very, very stressful. Yeah. And so, you know, because it’s like you still have all your tests and everything and then also double-checking, like, Hey, is the DJ good? Is the catering, all this stuff. But it was also a lot of fun because we went to a small college in Ohio, and so it was cool getting to you know, just like kind of have like a final like celebration per se with all of our friends and everything. So that was really awesome. And then after that, we actually headed out to Buffalo. One of the reasons I even chose Buffalo or UB was because at the time when we had started talking about like getting married and stuff I didn’t really care where we lived at all.

05:03 Elise: My family’s originally from Jacksonville, Florida, and my husband has a lot of family in New York. We had some friends in like this New York area as well. And so yeah, so UB was one of the places I applied to that accepted me. And then, yeah, basically after that got married, graduated honeymooned, and then headed out to Buffalo and I started doing some TAing during the summer, and then my husband was also working in retail at like a DICK’s Sporting Goods. So, yeah, so that’s kind of how we started with that. And then in regards to finances, I will say we are complete polar opposites. I’m a huge spender. One of the like embarrassing stories I share is so like my senior year, so entering my senior year of college, I had this goal. I have no idea why, it’s not even really that great of a goal, honestly, to just like blow a thousand dollars in a day. And I was a college student.

05:54 Elise: I didn’t, I mean, it was bad. But anyway, so I did that, and then I hadn’t actually read my like student bill correctly, so I didn’t even have enough money. So I blew the thousand, and then like three days later went into the admissions office and was like, “Hey, like I, is there any way I can get more money? Like I don’t have.” It was so bad. So very, very, yeah, very irresponsible, I would say, was more of my mindset. And then my husband is the complete opposite. Absolutely hates spending money whatsoever. So yes. Yeah. That’s kind of like, again, my financial background there. Yeah, I would say definitely no financial literacy whatsoever. It was just kind of like, yeah, you know, as long as the bank account’s not zero, enjoy spending.

Combined Debts and Incomes

06:38 Emily: Got it. And what about your like net worth or your combined net worth at that time? Did you all have debts? Did you have assets coming out of college?

06:46 Elise: Yeah. Yeah. So we both had student loans coming out of college. And so I had around like $30,000 or so, and then my husband had around like $46,000. My loans then went in deferment. But for his, right, we were then like six months later began making those payments. And then we also in like the fall, so like fall of 2017, we then also financed a car. And with that again, I will say I’m more so kind led this as a spender, but again, something I would recommend not doing. I remember we both walked into the dealership and I like told the dealer who was there, like the salesman. I was like, “Hey, yeah. So, you know, we’re looking for a car, our budget is $15,000, but we can go up if needed.” So again, not the best, really just not the best lines to use there. So as I said, yeah, I was super yeah, not super intentional with money or anything, so yeah.

07:46 Emily: Okay. Let me know about your incomes as well at that point. So like, what was your stipend when you started grad school? And what was your husband earning?

07:53 Elise: Yes. Yes. So for me, it started out around like basically $26,000 a year, like $26,300. And usually, that would be split up into like $23,000 the full like semester, both semesters, and then $3000 during the summer. So, like $3,200 during the summer.

08:13 Emily: Interesting. So you would have to prepare a little, I mean, in theory, you could prepare a little bit through savings to supplement over the summer, but I’m not thinking that was something that you were trying to do at that point.

08:25 Elise: No, definitely not. Yes. I remember even when we saw this you know, you’re like talking with other grad students, you see the forms and stuff. And yeah, I remember where both of us, as I said, since we were kind of more like opposite-minded, there kind of started to be very much a “Man, something’s going to need to change. Otherwise, this is going to be kind of disastrous.” Right? And even, I know like one of the things that can be like one of the leading causes of divorce, right, is like financial issues. And we didn’t want to have that. So, yeah. Definitely again, that kind of was what even really started, I would say especially for both of us, a passion for finance was kind of realizing, “Man, we are going to, just like what you’re saying, we’re going to have to start planning.”

09:08 Elise: Because like my income’s a little bit irregular. And then as I said, at the time he was working at DICK’s and so that was I think that like first semester or whatnot, that summer again making like $15,000 or whatnot. Or like 12 to $15,000. And then again, that was kind of irregular because he was working at DICK’s part-time and then also had like an internship as well. So, it again was like part-time. So not, yeah, we weren’t bringing in a ton of money. I think those first six months’ gross was maybe like $25,000 or so. And again it was all irregular, always irregular paychecks.

Money Mindset and Strategies in Grad School

09:52 Emily: Yeah. So let’s kind of talk through, you know, we have a good picture of the start. So let’s talk through like how those next few years went, and what you were learning. And maybe what strategies or mindsets you started to use along the way. Because you know, we’ll get to what the current picture is, and it’s a lot rosier than, you know, what the start was. So like let’s talk about that evolution.

10:13 Elise: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say the big thing for us was kind of a desire to make sure we were on the same page. Because I will say, when we did first get married, there weren’t I guess like a lot of like financial stressors per se, it was just, everything was very disorganized. But we weren’t having like I will say we were sort of blessed. We didn’t have like any huge thing that kind of like came up where it was like, oh no, it was just, it was like, man, we are, you know, we’re little just organized and stuff, but Hey, you know, it’s good, life’s good. Like you know, I’m doing school he’s working. And then again, I would say is more so because our paychecks were so irregular, it was kind of like a “Man, we’re going to need to be a little bit more intentional with this.”

11:00 Elise: And so that was when I started doing a little bit more research into just personal finances of like, “Hey, you know, how should we like set up a budget?” You know, what’s the best way to do that. And we ended up finding like a zero base budgeting type method. And so with doing that, it’s kind of where you’re like setting up, Hey, at the beginning of the month, this is how much we’re going to spend, which was really helpful for us, especially because of, again, that irregularity. We were then able to be like, okay, well this is for sure, you know, like our expenses. And then you know, even though the incomes are irregular, this is how we can use this excess. And then we also decided that it was like, “Hey, let’s also look to start having some financial goals together.”

11:48 Elise: I would say we both do love setting goals and achieving them together. So it was also a lot of fun kind of setting like one of them was, “Hey, let’s become debt-free.” So again, let’s be intentional with that zero-based budgeting of how can we pay off our debt? And then also like, you know, getting savings account set up, stuff like that. So I would say, but the big start with that shift was really kind of like those again, how irregular the incomes were and kind of almost seeing, “Man, if we’re not intentional about this, sure, it’s fine now. But like five years down the road, this would be just disastrous, right?” It would not, because again, if anything comes up, like it’s going to be really, really bad because we’re just not keeping track of everything thing well.

Debt Repayment Goal

12:34 Emily: I’d love to talk more about the debt repayment goal. And so, you mentioned that you both had student loans, but yours were in deferment. And you had the car loan. And so, did you use any particular like methodology? Or like how did you decide what to tackle first or how much to pay? How did all that work?

12:55 Elise: Yeah, so I will say one of the big things. So we really liked Ramsey Solutions. That was again, when I was doing like the basic Google search, right, for personal finance. I mean one of the top things that came out, and they talk about doing like the debt snowball method, paying off just smallest debt. And it was fun to feel like all of those wins with things. And then, this is interesting because like I would say at the same time as all this is happening, right? I’m also like progressing in my program as a grad student, and it was interesting, I guess kind of the similarities of, I really liked the focus that like they kind of talked about of like delaying gratification. And obviously, I mean that’s a hundred percent grad school, right?

13:40 Elise: You’re constantly delaying gratification. So, I guess as my brain was already being rewired to some degree of going from, I would say like my senior year where it’s just way more you know, kind of like, “Hey, whatever feels good right now. Like let’s just do it” to a “Man, okay. Let’s put you know, kind of submit to a process.” You know, get that like I’m delaying a pleasure, right? And then again, that intentionality. I would say that was kind of the big methodologies, but I’m not going to lie. I don’t actually know if I wasn’t in grad school, like at the same time as we were doing this, that might have been honestly a little bit, maybe too much of a rewiring all at once. But it was cool because you know, at the same time I’m running experiments and I’m learning, “Hey, this is what happens when this doesn’t work.”

14:25 Elise: Then I have to come back in, you know, or “Man, this is going to be like a five to six-year journey.” You know, like my brain’s already getting used to longer journeys than just, “Oh man, I can’t like pay off all the debt in like three months. So what’s the point, you know? So it’s just interesting all the similarities there that I would say really helped both of us, especially as we were going about achieving those goals. But the big one was yeah, just paying off smallest to largest and kind of, for us, it was realizing, “Hey, this is not going to be something that we finish in a year.” But again, it’s like grad school also, right? It isn’t something that you finish in a year. So, it was difficult, but at the same time, I don’t know, like obtaining a PhD is difficult. So I think it was nice to have like those similarities.

15:14 Emily: I love that you brought up this point because this is actually something that I bring up at the beginning of one of my seminars, which is The Graduate Student and Postdoc’s Guide to Personal Finance. And so, what I say because I know that people who attend these seminars are not necessarily, you know, like you are now like, are a super podcast listener would be like, oh, I’m super interested in personal finance. Like yeah, I’m going to really dive in. You know, they may just be like casually like, oh, I probably should learn something about money. So I’m going to show up at the seminar. So what I do to kind of like frame this is like say, you as a graduate student or postdoc, you have already made the decision to commit to this, you know, as you said, five-ish year, at least maybe 10 years, training period to set yourself up for this wonderful successful career at, you know, the start of that.

15:57 Emily: And you making the decision to do that gives you certain like personality, characteristics, like going through it, like you were saying like forward-thinking, planning ahead, committing to a process. And that, I say, if you take this sort of the personality you’re developing by being a graduate student, by being a postdoc and you translate it over to the financial side of your life, you are going to be successful. Because it does take long-term thinking. It does take delayed gratification. It does, you have to think about it as an investment in your future, whether it’s debt repayment, saving, investing, whatever it is, it’s all setting you up for an easier time in the future than you’re necessarily having right now. So, I really love that you, you know, clearly saw yourself going through this process as well. Brilliant.

Student Loans and Savings

16:39 Emily: Well, I want to ask though about, you know, regarding the debt snowball, which is a great method to use, how did you treat your student loans in there? Because they were in deferment. So, they’re a little bit different than the other types of debt.

16:49 Elise: Yes. A hundred percent. So I will say with that I should say, I guess maybe like a caveat should be, we use like a debt snowball hybrid <laugh> because yeah. So, because with the deferment, right? You did have the 0% interest and yeah, basically, the way we did it was, which, I mean, we just kind of thought of all of our debts as together, I will say. But I guess if you technically split them up, we paid off like my husband’s loans first that were broken off into the like, you know, $3000, $1000, $2,000 chunks. And then did the car, and then did like the student loans that I had. But technically the student loans that I had were higher than like our car.

17:35 Emily: So, sort of a combined avalanche snowball method. Because of the 0% due to the subsidy and deferment and so forth.

17:42 Elise: Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yes.

17:44 Emily: Gotcha. And you mentioned also earlier savings. So, how were you thinking about cash savings versus this big debt payoff goal? Like how much cash did you decide to keep on hand and for what purposes? How did you think through that?

17:57 Elise: Yes. So I will say we did use where for us, we kept it a thousand dollars. I will say though, also we did keep our expenses very, very low. And we were like pretty much every month, again, once we started being intentional and doing that zero-based budget, we had usually like $2000, $3000 a month or again, depending on the year. And as I said, our incomes were irregular. But yeah, we had the $2,000, $3,000 a month where like, if something did come up, we would just take like a pause on the debt payment. But we always had with like an emergency fund of, as I said, a thousand dollars. Again, just in case like because when we were looking at kind of like our lives, it was like, “Hey, you know, the like worst thing that could happen would not exceed really like a thousand dollars, honestly.”

18:53 Elise: Because the biggest thing for us would’ve just been the car repairs, and we actually only had, and still have, one car. So, it also kind of worked out that way. And yeah, most of our expenses I will say, and even now, are like under $2,000 a month. So it also makes it again a little bit easier to with that intentionality of okay, cool. Well, you know, I always have this amount of cash flow. And we did have later on like in our marriage, whatnot and in our journey where technically, I will say, which is bad on my part, like I have actually totaled like two cars. So, when that happened, like we did have to press pause on it and we then like saving up money. And so instead of it just going to the debt again, like $2000 or again, depending on how the income varied, it would go into savings or towards yeah getting a car.

19:51 Emily: I also skated through graduate school with a thousand dollars in a designated emergency fund savings account. Because I mean the way that you described it was also sort of similar for my husband, me, like we were renters, we only had one car, not a whole lot of financial responsibilities at that time of life. Now I did have other savings in other, like I’m really big into targeted savings accounts. I had other cash in other places that were like designated for car repairs or like other purposes. So, it wasn’t like that was our only cash on hand, but I like what you said, because you know, you had the thousand dollars in savings, but every month, if something came up, you had a thousand, $2,000, you could devote to that new thing that popped up because you were so, you were cash flowing so much debt, you know, above the minimum payments every single month. So I definitely, I don’t know how much I’d recommend it, but I definitely see how you could, you know, get by with that. Were there any other like strategies or mindsets or anything that you wanted to share from, you know, that time in graduate school?

Intentionality

20:49 Elise: Yeah. I think honestly the big thing is just kind of what we’ve been talking about. Just like the intentionality. Like, I don’t know, even, I feel like just kind of when you’re choosing a lifestyle. Again, that’s another thing that I think for us going straight from like college to grad school and everything we didn’t do a lot of like the lifestyle creep. And I will say a lot of that maybe I should probably should credit as well to like my husband, because as I said, he’s way more like frugal than I am, but it is really nice, I will say. And again, this is kind of similar thinking to like grad school, it’s like once you’re in a process, it kind of becomes the norm, you know, and you don’t even think about it. So even for both us, like when people are like, “Oh man, you guys don’t,” you know, there would be times where people would say like, “You don’t have two cars?” And it’s like, well, you know, yeah, we have one, but actually we’re like good <laugh>, you know, but it becomes the norm.

21:37 Elise: Or same with when I’m talking about like grad school to people, right? And you know, sometimes you get the whole like, “Wait, you mean you don’t just work like a nine to five in grad school?” And it’s like, no, no, but it’s like, that’s the norm for me. You know what I mean? So again, once you’re in these, I think it’s just the same with personal finance. Like you really do get to set and determine, to some degree, you know, “Hey, this is the lifestyle I’m going to have.” And, I would also say with that, it also becomes harder if you like set a norm that’s maybe a little bit higher that you can’t maintain. Because then you, again, you have to like almost rewire your brain, which is one of the huge benefits, again as I was saying, I think of like being in the PhD program and also the personal finance journey. Because there are just so many similarities that can really, really assist you.

22:24 Emily: I agree.

Commercial

22:27 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The Community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my recent set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Basically, the community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! Now back to the interview.

Supplementing Your Stipend

23:33 Emily: You mentioned earlier that you were tutoring. Like what was your, how did you supplement your stipend? I guess I’ll put it that way, during grad school.

23:41 Elise: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Yes. So I will say, yeah, so for us, again, as we were kind of on like our debt repayment journey. You know, there kind of starts as you’re like going, going, going, it’s like, “Man, like what, are there any other things I can do to like speed up the process?” Again, similar with like grad school, right? Sometimes you might have weeks where it’s like, “Man, I actually, yeah, I’m going to put in more time. Or okay, I’m going to not do this because I want to, you know, I’m so close. I just man, just got to push through.” And so that was kind of how that started. And then I was looking for different like side businesses or side hustles and things to do. And during the pandemic, actually we did a little bit of like DoorDash, you know, just because you’re like in your car and just dropping off.

24:22 Elise: I mean, it was great, you know. You just pick up the food, drop off the food, and then like wave to the person from your car or whatnot. So super safe and everything. And so doing that, it was kind of like, “Oh this is cool. Like we can supplement income, you know, doing this.” And then also, as I said, our incomes have always been very irregular. And my husband, after working in the retail then went into more of like sales, which was still making around like a 30, 35 or again, depending, because it’s very irregular. But even with that, I think that was helpful. Just even for both of us to see, “Man, like it is kind of cool how like, you know, you can increase income just by like approaching or working towards something from a different angle.”

25:06 Elise: And again, I think just like when you’re working on research projects, right? Sometimes you need like a different angle or a different thought process to kind of come in and be like, “Oh cool. Actually I could approach this problem, look to solve this problem from this angle instead of just this way.” And then with that, so then it was like, man, I’m doing all this stuff with organic chemistry. And so, what would be a good like side hustle I could do that’s more related to organic chemistry? Because obviously DoorDash is not really related to organic chemistry at all. And I had always tutored like a little bit, but it was more so like I would help out like you know, like tutor some like high schoolers at like church or whatnot. Or there’d be someone who would recommend like, “Hey, can you help this student?” I’d be like, “Yeah, sure.” But I use a platform called Wyzant.

Wyzant Tutoring Income

25:50 Elise: And so I started doing that last year actually. And it was awesome. It was I think really, really cool just because I loved it, because I loved being able to teach. I love being able to talk and like communicate with students and explain concepts. And it was great too, because it’s like an online platform, and I feel like you know, obviously everyone has different like opinions and stuff about online learning, but I think a lot of people have really gotten used to it as well. And so it’s also really cool. Because this platform’s just great. And the students like they’re great, you know, it’s just awesome. Being able to like teach and communicate again that one-on-one. Yeah, so it’s just been really, really awesome and it’s been great too. Because then I get to do like organic chemistry on the side, which is also what I’m doing in lab. So I think that’s been really awesome.

26:35 Emily: Another tie-in with what I teach in many different venues, which is if you can somehow employ the specialty that you’re developing in graduate school in some other arena, you’re probably going to get paid like at a better rate than, well, one staying inside academia, like, you know, maybe tutoring at your university, and also, or just trying something totally different that doesn’t use that skillset, like you were saying with DoorDash.

27:00 Elise: A hundred percent.

27:00 Emily: Can I ask what your like pay rate or how much you’re earning like monthly is from Wyzant?

27:05 Elise: Yes. Yes. So in general, which, I will say I started it last year in June, so it wasn’t actually a huge part honestly, even of like our like debt-free journey per se. But yeah, I make on average around like a thousand to 1200 a month from it. And then I charge with it like $50 an hour for the tutoring. And usually it’s like at the college level. And then there’s a couple of students in high school that I tutor as well. But yeah, it’s awesome because again and just like what you were saying, and even like some of like the articles and things that you have posted as well, right? It’s also nice because, to some degree, right? Especially like you’re becoming like an expert, you know, in a field.

27:53 Elise: And so, it’s very, very helpful for me honestly just continuing to man, make sure I’m really communicating well. And then also it is great when, you know, they can both kind of coincide. Because like I do, you know, organic chemistry at work and I can come home in the evenings, you know, for like a couple hours or so, or during the weekends for a couple hours. And yeah, it’s really, really nice. And then, I will say, it does slow down a little bit like in January and then December as well. Just because, you know, not as many students are taking classes and stuff during those times, but yeah. So far it’s been really, really great. And I’ve really been yeah, enjoying just the one-on-one tutoring and mentoring with students.

Current Financial Situation

28:35 Emily: Yeah. That’s a great pay rate. That’s a great addition to your budget. I mean, you know, you’re on the order of magnitude of like a grad student paycheck. I mean, you’re not quite there, but it’s the same, you know, you’re in the neighborhood. So, that’s awesome. Give us an update then on how, like what your finances are like right now. You know, we went over at the beginning of graduate school, you know, the various debts that you had. What do your finances look like now? We’re recording this in January, 2022.

29:00 Elise: Yes. Yes. So now yeah, we’re a hundred percent debt-free. So got rid of all of that, the $85,500. And as I said, that was a process, right? The 47 months paying that off. But again, like grad school’s a process too. So, you know, I think that’s one of the cool things about processes is like all the stuff you can learn about yourself in them. And then right now we’re working on increasing just like our emergency fund. So, as we were talking about like a thousand, you know, it’s fine for like, in my opinion, it’s fine for a starter emergency fund. Really, I would not recommend, you know, spending the rest of your life with a $1,000 emergency fund and especially you know, we have a baby coming, so that’s really, that of course changes things where it’s like, yeah, a thousand dollars isn’t, you know, we don’t want to have that for like 20 years.

29:47 Elise: But yeah, so we’re looking to increase that right now to, which more would be like four to six months for us, which is like $10,000, just to have that nice and set up. And that should be set up in like early March or whatnot is when we should have that. And then right now, after that, we’re also looking to, we’re going to start investing, so we’re going to max out two Roth IRAs. So just kind of again, which that’s a way longer process, you know, but just getting that money saved up for retirement. And I think for that, we’ll probably I’ll be using Fidelity and then my husband as well, who set his up either with Fidelity or maybe Vanguard, because he works for Geico now. And so with that, I think they have Vanguard.

30:39 Elise: So yeah, we’ll see with that. And then, I mean I suppose we’re not a hundred percent sure what like the next five years will look like for us. And so we’re also in the process of we’ll look to get something, once our daughter’s born, we’ll look to get something set up for her for college or just future educational goals. We’re thinking of it’ll probably just be we’ll just set up a 529. And New York has some nice like tax benefits when you set up a 529. And then yeah, and then it will be like saving up for a house. Right now, our goal is to buy a house in cash, because again, with the current lifestyle that we have, as I said, it’s less than $2,000, but we are very content with that. Obviously, when our daughter’s born, you know, that will increase. That will increase a little bit.

31:28 Elise: But yeah, we think we can probably cash flow, because again, my husband’s income continues to go up and my income, hopefully, you know, will also go up beyond the graduate stipend cash flow, hopefully around like 30,000 so a year and we’re hoping to then buy, I don’t know, maybe like a condo or townhouse or single family. Again, depending what, you know, where we go for like maybe $120,000 or something like that. So we’ll see. Yeah, but that right now is kind of the plan with everything. And right now the biggest focus is just yeah, getting that savings increase from a thousand to the, or like I think right now it’s like $1,800 to $10,000. And then yeah, getting those Roth IRAs maxed out.

32:13 Emily: I really like it actually when, this point that you’ve volunteered to do this interview, at this point of we just became debt-free, and now we are ready to start these next steps. I love it that we’re talking at this point. Because whenever you have someone like you, who’s gone through this very intense, very intentional debt repayment journey, you get all of your, you know, systems and processes and mindsets, everything’s set up. So your cash flowing above your, you know, your expenses a thousand, $2,000, $3,000 a month. And it’s all been going towards this debt. And now you get to the point where you get to switch it, and it’s like this massive, you know, amount of cash flow. Like I think of it as like a huge like fire hose like you now get to direct to other goals. And I love that you have this like order. Okay, first is the emergency fund, Roth IRAs, 529, you know, you have your priorities set out. So, absolutely love that. It’s very apparent, you know, these last years have been preparing you for this state. I also want to add that I went through, again, the exact same process when we were pregnant with our first child, that I was looking at that thousand dollars emergency fund going, “Not going to cut it anymore.”

Preparing for Baby’s Arrival

33:15 Emily: And I think our goal was also something like 10 or $15,000 as that next thing to do, like before the baby comes. Which turned out to be very useful. I actually wanted to talk a little bit more about that. Are there any other, you know, you just mentioned sort of long-term financial plans and of course getting the emergency fund together, but are there any other specific financial preparations that you’ve been making or thinking through for your baby’s arrival? Like, I don’t know, like health insurance or childcare like these other, maybe leave? What other sort of major financial things are you working through right now?

33:46 Elise: Yes, yes. No, that’s a great question. So, I will say in regards to like preparing for our daughter and everything, the big thing was I got to have a fun time. Well actually, yeah, both my husband Kyle and I, but kind of doing stuff where, yeah, like reading those actual like health insurance statements. Not going to lie, when I first got to UB, they gave me the handbook and I was like, “Okay, cool, thank you.” And then did not even glance at it. And so, but just, you know, making sure that we know like, Hey, this is like our deductible, this is the amount we will be expected to pay. And it’s actually kind of cool. I will say I have been very blessed, like the lab I’m in, there’s actually like three other students who have also had kids as well.

34:27 Elise: And so for them, it’s also nice because you know, we all technically have the same insurance, and so yeah. And UB I will say does have pretty good health insurance as well. So it’s nice. So we’re of course planning for that where it’s like, okay, cool. We should you know, that’ll cost us like $200 and then, you know, you have all the visits as well, which we again, since we do the zero-base budgeting, we just budget for like, okay, this month, you know, it’s going to be this much for these visits. And then everything else in regards to just like kind of preparing for like stuff and everything, that has more so come from just kind of like asking other people in our lives and also just like other grad students, “Hey, like how much, you know, do you find yourself like spending for diapers?”

35:13 Elise: And I will say also there is a lot of information that is online as well. So it’s kind of like using a mix of like the online plus, like what, you know, our friends are actually just telling us that, “Hey, this is how much I spend for this.” Which has also been super, super helpful. Or like, “Hey, you need this, you know, this is the cost of this.” And just like adding all of that up, like, you know, car seat yeah, cribs, stuff like that. So that’s good. I would say that’s been kind of how we’ve been primarily preparing financially for that. In regards to leave, I’ll have three months of maternity leave that I’ll be taking. And then I have, yeah, kind of like a fellowship that goes through that. And then, so that’s kind of something like, again, me and my boss talked about like maybe a month and a half ago or so, just about, “Hey, this is kind of like the expectations there.”

36:04 Emily: So that’s paid, just to be clear?

36:06 Elise: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

36:08 Emily: Fantastic!

36:09 Elise: Yes. Yes. So I would say that is, that is a nice thing again about like you know, every state’s different, but like New York does have that paid family leave. And then my husband as well is going to be taking, because as I said, yeah, he’s working for Geico now. So they do paternity family leave or like paid family leave as well. For him, his is a month though, is what, yeah, right now we’re planning on for him. And then, yeah, so that’s kind of, I would say those are the big, like financial preparations we’re doing. But again it is something that, especially, I don’t know when we first like kind of found out, I just like Googled like how to prepare for a baby. And it’s amazing how like just many articles and all this stuff that comes up, and it’s all so different again, based on the insurances, which I’m sure even, you know, right? Like there’s, so there’s just so many different variables. So I think it’s very helpful, at least for us, it’s been very helpful, like talking with other people, talking with peers, talking people from church, talking with people from our places of employment. Yeah. And just like to get that information.

37:08 Emily: I agree. I think those, especially your labmates. Same insurance, same advisor.

37:12 Elise: Exactly. Yeah.

Childcare Decision-Making

37:13 Emily: Been through it recently. Like that’s going to be the absolute best resource. Yeah, definitely. And I asked about childcare earlier, so do you have a plan yet for after your leave ends what’s going to go on?

37:25 Elise: Yes. Okay. So I will say so for that plan, we will. Yeah. We’ll kind of see, because right now, again I don’t think, so we don’t have like anything against daycare or anything like that. Like I think, and UB’s daycare actually is supposed to be like fantastic again, like two of my coworkers use it and they’ve been very, very pleased. For us though right now, so since with every, and again, we don’t know everything will happen with the pandemic, but so my husband, technically he does work from home right now. And then for me, I’m man, I’m just not a hundred percent sure if I would just, you know, maybe just have a weird schedule as opposed to like putting our daughter in daycare because one of the things my boss, obviously he wants us to make sure like we’re getting our research and everything done, but with organic chemistry, there’s a lot of stuff where like you set up a reaction for like six hours or you set up a reaction for four hours, you know, and then you’re like doing some writing stuff and like research stuff.

38:22 Elise: And so for me, yeah, I’m not, I think right now the plan is kind of where it would just be I would just kind of have a schedule set up of like, I’m just going to be in lab at weird hours, like from eight to noon and then maybe come back from like eight to 10 or you know, just weird scattered hours. But we’ll see, that could also, you know, we could also start that and then a week in if I’m like, “This is terrible.” And it’s like, okay, well she’s going to go to daycare. So, it’ll kind of depend too, I think that’s another thing with even talking with people in regards to pregnancy, it affects every woman differently. And so yeah, as much as I love to be planner, sadly, I can’t plan out exactly, “This is how I’m going to feel a hundred percent.” So yeah. But right now the plan is just, I would just have kind of weird hours and just stagger things. And again with that, at least right now, it doesn’t sound all that bad because again, it’ll take a lot of intentionality, you know, I would have to like schedule things out, but yeah, I think it would be fine, but we’ll see. We will see what happens.

39:21 Emily: I will recommend for you in case you haven’t listened to it or any other interested listeners, the interview I did back in season one with Dr. Heather. Because she talked about when she had her first child at the end of graduate school, similar timing to you, how she and her husband set up a overlapping “we’re providing our own childcare” schedule. I think he was teaching actually, he had like a visiting professorship, something like that. So like you said, there was some work that could be done from home. There was some work that had to be in person for both of them, but they just kind of worked out the schedule so that.

39:51 Elise: I like that. Yeah.

39:52 Emily: You know, they could each be with their child. I will say that since then, I believe all their children are in all the daycare and all the preschool, like as much as possible after they got out of this grad student phase. But that’s what they did for kind of the finishing up of grad school, like period. Yeah, so that’s a really, really interesting interview if that’s kind of your like philosophy and the approach that you want to take. And it’s actually a little bit similar to what my husband and I wanted to do as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

40:14 Emily: So, awesome! Well, Elise, this has been such a delight to chat with you. Congratulations on becoming debt-free! Congratulations on the pregnancy! I’m so excited to kind of see where, you know, where your new financial next phase of your journey takes you. Because like I said, you, you have all these goals and you’re really ready, right, to tackle them. So it’s awesome. I would like to ask you the question that I end all my interviews with, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on during the interview or it can be something completely different.

40:45 Elise: Yes, yes. So I would say, yeah, the biggest one I always recommend is just to do a zero-based budget. Again, you can also budget, right, where you just kind of look at the end of the month. But I just think, especially even honestly more so when you’re working on like a stipend, just get into the habit. Because again, you’re already learning how to be intentional anyway. So just go ahead and get into the habit of with finances as well, “Hey, this is how much I’m going to spend” you know, in each of these categories. Or, you know, whatever stuff you have set up, or this is much I want to save. You know, in our case it was like paying off debt and then building up savings and investing stuff. But again, whatever your financial goals are like, it’s just so much, I feel like, yeah, just so much easier and so much more helpful when you just zero-base budget it. And it also just like again with grad school, as you like are disciplined and are intentional, your confidence grows, you know?

41:42 Elise: And so I think that’s another thing too, where it’s awesome to, you know, be confident as you’re like doing experiments and stuff, but also confident in the way you’re handling your money. And when you’re able to create a plan and then, you know, like it doesn’t have to be perfect, but then able to like achieve some of the things within that plan. It’s just awesome. Yeah. To then be able to grow that confidence. So for sure.

42:05 Emily: Great advice. Well, thank you so much, Elise, for joining me for this interview!

42:09 Elise: Yes. Thank you, Emily. Thank you so much for having me on.

Outtro

42:17 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? I have 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/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with a email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 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 Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

How to Advocate for Financial Policy Change on Your Campus

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Tyler Hallmark, a recent PhD in Higher Education and Student Affairs and a low-income, first-generation college student. Emily and Tyler and discuss the why, what, and how of advocating for improving university policies that relate to finances and benefits. They cover the timing of fellowship disbursements and assistantship paychecks vs. fee due dates, emergency aid funds, reimbursements, prohibitions on outside work, and more. If you want to raise an issue that they skipped, please leave a comment in the show notes, email them, or start a conversation on social media.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

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Teaser

00:00 Tyler: You don’t have to wait for a union to form. You could be the one that is forming it. I did this often informally, you know, I never thought to call us a union, but I would just share my experiences vulnerably with my peers. And they would share theirs with me. And we would come together and we would go approach the chair of our department or, you know, someone that does have power in our school and say, Hey, we’re having this issue. There are multiple of us. Is there anything we could do?

Introduction

00:32 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 11, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Tyler Hallmark, a recent PhD in Higher Education and Student Affairs and a low-income, first-generation college student. Tyler and I discuss the why, what, and how of advocating for improving university policies that relate to finances and benefits. We cover the timing of fellowship disbursements and assistantship paychecks vs. fee due dates, emergency aid funds, reimbursements, prohibitions on outside work, and more. Tyler is quite knowledgeable and experienced in advocacy and shares his story with us vulnerably. I’m confident that our discussion of policies and hearing about Tyler’s approach to advocacy at the end will help enhance your own advocacy efforts on your campus. If you want to raise an issue that we skipped, please leave a comment in the show notes, email us, or start a conversation on social media.

01:42 Emily: April 18th is fast approaching, so in case you haven’t started working on your tax return yet, I wanted to point you to my #1 most popular free downloadable. It’s my tax cheat sheet for graduate students who are U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and residents for tax purposes. You can find it at PFforPhDs.com/student-tax-sheet/. The cheat sheet briefly explains my framework for the categories of higher education income, the three higher education tax benefits that might be available to you, and why students who were age 23 or younger at the end of 2021 need to be extra cautious. Better yet, once you sign up for my mailing list to download the cheat sheet, you’ll receive a free email course explaining in-depth all these concepts and more. Again, you can download the cheat sheet from PFforPhDs.com/student-tax-sheet/. Please share that link with your peers as well! Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Tyler Hallmark.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:59 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Tyler Hallmark. I first met Tyler actually on an episode of Dear Grad Student. We were both featured by Alana on episode 27. And we talked about kind of, you know, high-level issues related to being a graduate student, advocacy topics. And I just really enjoyed that conversation so much, I wanted to invite Tyler on this podcast to dive even more deeply into that topic. So, Tyler, it’s absolutely a delight to speak with you again. And would you please introduce yourself to the audience?

03:27 Tyler: Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Tyler Hallmark and my pronouns are he/him. I am presently working as a program associate in the higher education program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation here in New York City. Before I came here, I was actually finishing my PhD at the Ohio State University in higher education and student affairs. And so, a lot of my background while I was there was focusing on low-income students, first-generation students, students of color, and their journey through higher education and how we can really make the systems more equitable and more supportive for students like myself that has gone through this as someone who is from a low-income household, who was the first in their family to go to college and who is also Cherokee. And so, you know, I’ve written a lot about my experiences. I’ve written for Diverse, I’ve written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, these different outlets, really, sharing some of the backgrounds, some the challenges I faced, and trying to really shift policy, shift practices, on our college campuses for students like myself.

The Importance of Advocacy in Higher Ed

04:36 Emily: Yeah. And we’re partially basing this interview off an article that Tyler sent me in advance, so we’ll link that from the show notes if you want to get even more of his perspective on these issues. So, you know, beyond just what you explained about your own background and about your work with first-gen and low-income students, students of color, and so forth. Are there any other reasons why you think it’s important to advocate for yourself or other graduate students in higher ed?

05:00 Tyler: Well, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s always important as I was going through, I think, you know, students from backgrounds like myself already have so many barriers to face going to college, having to, you know, learn the whole admissions process, having to learn how to, you know, really make it, how to learn study habits. I didn’t really know have good study habits until I just kind of, you know, picked them up as I was going through college. And so, you know, with all those barriers already in mind, there are so many barriers that are just unnecessary that we’re facing as we’re going through college and, you know, it’s really making a big impact on whether we even complete the degrees we set out to and reach the goals we have for ourselves. So, I always try to share my own experiences and be vulnerable with people, not only just to hopefully shift the policy or practice to make it easier on my college journey, but because I know there are so many students coming after me, and I know if I don’t speak up now, then no one’s going to speak up for me. So, that’s what ultimately got me into doing this kind of work.

06:00 Emily: And I think I’ll add to that as well, like of course it’s a necessary and beautiful goal to make higher education more accessible to more people. Everyone benefits from that. But I was also thinking about this idea of like, we do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done. Or like, I had this experience in my PhD program, so that means that you’re going to have to put up with this too, and how like damaging that is and how unnecessary it is. And so, you know, as we have gone through the, you know, decades of graduate students, like we’ve learned some things that maybe don’t need to be the way they are. And I think part of the purpose of me doing this episode is to try to, you know, with your perspective as well, share what policies maybe are being tried out at some places that could be tried at other places.

Earlier Distribution of Financial Aid

06:43 Emily: Like maybe there aren’t as many barriers to changing these policies, as you know, you might assume. So that’s kind of the impetus behind the conversation. So, let’s talk specifically about what are some of these policies that you think, that I think could be changed, should be changed, that we see kind of in many places across higher education. So, I have a list in front of me and we’re just going to bang, bang, bang, go through this list. Again, partially based on this article that you wrote. So, first of all, one of the things we talked about on the Dear Grad Student podcast was earlier distribution of financial aid. Can you tell me more about that issue and how it can change?

07:17 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So, as you’ll see in the article that you mentioned, I talk about my experience. As a grad student, I would go into the financial aid office, and one semester, I was going to miss my rent. I didn’t have any money, and they were not going to release the funds until two weeks after classes had started, well after my rent was due. And I went into a financial aid counselor and I was like, Hey, is there any way I can get my financial aid easier? My scholarship had already sent the money to my institution, but my institution just wasn’t releasing it to my bank account until after classes started. And the financial aid advisor basically just said, well, I don’t know why you don’t have money saved up. I don’t know why you are in this predicament. You should just learn to manage your money better.

08:03 Tyler: And I was really taken aback because I didn’t have any money to manage. So you’re just really expecting me to already have the savings account and all this kind of stuff. And I didn’t have any of that. And so, what I’ve been pushing for is for institutions to really release the financial aid before the semester starts. You know, I can’t afford to wait to move until, you know, after classes start. So, you know, federal guidelines say you can release it 10 to 14 days before classes start, even loans, federal loans and that kind of stuff. And so, I’m really pushing for an earlier financial aid distribution on that regard, or in the cases that institutions can’t move the whole distribution up, at least allowing students to take an advance on financial aid. And some institutions, like my first institution I attended, actually let me take out up to $1,500, which was enough to cover me for one month of rent. However, a later institution I attended would only let me have like a $400 advance, which wasn’t nearly enough to make my rent.

09:06 Emily: It’s a little bit rich, right? Coming from this financial aid officer, whoever you’re talking to to be like, “Um, yeah, we’re going to hold your money hostage for like an extra month here. But like it’s really on you. This is your problem.” As you said, the federal guidelines allow that earlier distribution. So like why wouldn’t the universities, as you said, at least release part of it? And specifically maybe for your situation or how this works in general, when you’re talking about financial aid, I think you’re speaking about a scholarship, right? So like awarded income that, you know, had been sent to the university for you, and it was just basically giving you access to that money earlier.

Detrimental Effects of Lack of Early Access to Your Own Funding

09:40 Tyler: And a lot of this falls back to also institutions doing enrollment checks. So, you know, it’s mandated that professors and faculty report attendance to their classes. And so the financial aid office will often wait until they get those attendance records before they let students have any money to make sure they’re showing up. But I think that’s a detriment because especially, I’m in grad school. I know I often showed up to class and I didn’t have my books on the first day of class. And I had a professor saying, you’re a PhD student. How do you not have your books already? You should have learned this, you know, years ago. And I’d say, well, I’m a PhD student, but I’m still poor. I still can’t afford, you know, to get my books before classes start, unless they give me my financial aid.

10:26 Emily: Yeah. I think this is so relatable to anybody who’s been through that transition to graduate school. I mean, at least they can imagine like the difficulties in that. Like, I think back to my own move to graduate school, and like, oh wow. Now I realize how fortunate that was. Because for example, I didn’t have to move very far. Like I didn’t have to buy a plane ticket. I already had a car. So like, it was just like, okay, I’m going to pack up my possessions and go. And actually the apartment that I got into did like a student, like thing where you didn’t have to put down a deposit. So it was like all kind of set up to be like, okay. And I did have little bit of savings from the previous job that I had. So it was like, looking back on that it’s like, it went okay for me, but I can so easily see how it could be really, really difficult if you don’t have some of the things that I just mentioned already in place or like more challenges there.

11:10 Emily: Another sort of way to get at this problem is for PhD programs, in particular, to provide something like an extra bit of money, a moving bonus, a top-up fellowship, something that is specifically sort of earmarked to help students move to that institution. Because as we know, probably most great majority of PhD students are moving some distance to get to their new programs. Now, I’ve seen, like I’ve had heard reports of people telling me that their offers included this kind of thing, $500, a thousand dollars. We talked about this, for example, in the episode with George Walters-Marrah, which I’ll link to in the show notes. It was a $500 moving bonus that helped him decide between his number one and number two choice of PhD programs. Like that was kind of the final clincher was getting that offer. But I understand that you have talked about this with many people before as well, and you’ve been hearing some different things.

12:02 Tyler: Yeah. So first off, I will say I’m a big advocate for applying moving bonuses for students, especially those grad students trying to move to college that often have to go across state lines to find a graduate program that matches their needs. They have to leave home. So, a big advocate for that. And I’ve been talking about that a lot, you know, you’ll see me post about it on Twitter and those kinds of things and my own experiences showing up to college and going $5,000 in debt because I had to move across the country. But then I also had a lot of responses from, you know, deans and administration that read my work and they’ll say, Hey, we looked into doing this moving bonus thing, but it’s just not feasible. Like it’s not possible for us, we’re facing different, you know, barriers to policy that just won’t let us distribute those kinds of bonuses to students. And so I’m not, you know, super familiar with what policies are in place and if those are federal or state or how that’s working there. But I do know some institutions run into trouble when they do try to look into that.

13:02 Emily: Yeah. So this is a little bit of an open question. And maybe it does vary by state. Maybe it varies, you know, public versus private institutions. But I am glad that people, at least administrators, are at least looking into it, at least making the effort. But in places where it is possible, it is a great, great, great, incentive to help with that, as we were just talking about, that early financial crunch that everyone’s going through just to get to school. So thanks for sharing that. I hope that they keep kind of chipping away at whatever these barriers are that they’re seeing.

Benefits of Pro-Rating

13:31 Emily: Okay, another issue that I’ve had people actually on the podcast mention to me before is about the student fees that often have to be paid like really soon before the start of the semester, that can happen, or very soon into the semester. And I know for me, for example, one of the fees that I paid, it wasn’t even necessarily a required one, but I mentioned I have a car, so I paid like a parking permit fee once per year. So I paid that, you know, in one lump sum, it actually changed like how I even budget to like, be able to handle that kind of once per year expense. But I heard from some other people at other institutions that their fees and things like parking permits were prorated like per paycheck. And I thought that was such a smart idea to like spread out that payment throughout the year. Is this an issue you’ve thought about all?

14:16 Tyler: You know, I really like the idea of pro-rating. I think you run into trouble with that when you look at scholarships because you have to pay in a lump sum then. You know, when I was on my PhD, I relied on scholarships and fellowships less so than an actual job and paycheck. So I didn’t face that directly. I will say some of the things I faced, and I would often ask for, and a lot of students don’t know to even go ask for this, was these places that often require fees upfront, you can often ask for them to push that fee back. So for instance, when I would enroll for my fall courses, they would say, well, a certain amount of fees are due in May before, you know, three months away. And I was able to always petition for that and they would say, okay, we can wait until your scholarship comes in in August or September and pay it then. And so just institutions could make that more clear that students can actually ask for that. And on the student side, you should just know that that’s often an option. I’ve done that at multiple institutions so far in that regard.

15:20 Emily: Yeah. I think the basic point here is just like, let’s time the payment of fees along with when the student actually has money to pay. So if it is a monthly or whatever, kind of paycheck, let’s pay the fees with every paycheck instead of, you know, upfront all at once. Or if you’re receiving these like larger scholarship or fellowship distributions, yeah, as you just said, like let’s coincide the date of the fee needing to be paid with that disbursement because that’s when the money is available. So logical. Love it. Thank you so much for, you know, pointing out that you’ve been successful in having that exception made for you.

Emergency Aid Funds

15:52 Emily: Let’s talk about emergency aid funds now, and I’ve actually heard this in two forms, both grants and loans. I don’t know which one you have been talking about the most. But there are sometimes emergency funds available to graduate students. So, can you tell me a little bit more about this issue?

16:08 Tyler: Yeah. So, we see a lot of this coming up, especially over the pandemic. I see a lot of federal funding that is going to institutions during this time. Institutions are then turning that into an emergency aid fund. Of course, I’ve seen a wide variety of funds. Like you mentioned, there’s a loan and the actual grant money that you can just keep and not have to pay back. But also there are some that require different amounts of paperwork in different red tape to even receive. So, you know, some will actually require, and they won’t process it for a week, whereas some will process it within two days in a senior student account and those kinds of things. So, the thing I mainly advocate for is to even have these funds set up, but also have them as easy as possible for students to access.

16:55 Tyler: And the final note I will say is that too often institutions gear these towards undergraduates only. And they don’t even write that. I had one institution where I was struggling and I was going to apply for this emergency grant funding. I actually had a financial aid counselor tell me to apply for it. And after I applied, they emailed me back and said, well, you’re a graduate student. This is for undergraduates only. And even the financial aid counselor wasn’t aware that it was for graduate students only. So, making that clear around those and really targeting it towards all students on your campus and not only certain populations.

17:28 Emily: Definitely. I attended a conference in 2019, the Higher Education Financial Wellness Association’s annual conference. And I remember these like emergency aid, you know, grant and loans programs being a big topic of conversation at that time. More and more universities were implementing them. And so I think, you know, the suggestion here is just yes, more please, and also to more populations of students, please. And Hey, also postdocs. Don’t want to leave out the postdocs here. They have financial stress as well.

17:54 Tyler: Totally. Especially when you think about that it’s often these graduate students and postdocs that are more likely to have families. So they’re more likely to run into these kinds of emergency situations in different regards.

Food Pantries and Subsidized Housing

18:06 Emily: Similarly, another topic of conversation that I heard at that conference was about food pantries and food banks being set up at universities and how they were implementing those programs. Can you tell me about your experience and advocacy around these?

18:19 Tyler: Yeah, certainly. Again, this goes back to having a wide variety of what these food banks look like. The one thing I really advocate for these is really having them in a place where students hang out. You know, when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, we actually had this great intercultural center where students would just come and study, hang out with their friends, have movie nights. And there was a food pantry that was just open. There wasn’t anyone that you had to sign in and get the food. You could just walk in and take the food as you needed it. And you know, a lot of students that are often facing this food insecurity, um, are often, you know, afraid of the shame that comes with it. Afraid of someone seeing that they need help. And so having these, just being open and easy to access for students, I think that’s the best way to really go about setting up a food pantry instead of hiding it, you know, in a basement on campus or somewhere that students don’t even know where to look.

19:09 Emily: Yeah. Or putting up any like red tape or anything like that. I mean, of course they want to know how much it’s being used. But you could just do an inventory to figure that out. Great, great. Another issue that I wanted to raise is something that I’ve talked about in many of my other podcast episodes, which is offering subsidized housing in high cost-of-living areas. This happens sometimes, although we’ve had sort of questions about it on the podcast, whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be. And I’ll link to some of those previous episodes in the show notes, but then also subsidized childcare. And this is something that’s come up in two of my episodes, specifically with grad student parents. Are there any comments that you’d like to make around these issues of being able to subsidize, you know, these big, big expenses for students who need it the most?

19:56 Tyler: Yeah. The one thing I’ll add here is just when we’re thinking about housing on campuses, I know one of my grad schools, the reason I even chose it was because they actually offered a form of graduate student living that was free. I mean, I had to work for the university in their housing department, but they offered me housing. And that just made it all the more possible for me to live it in an expensive city. And so, I think even thinking about jobs and where we could provide, you know, if students do want to take on that extra job, mine was like a 15 to 20-hour job a week and I was able to get free housing for it. So it paid off for me. And that really helped me afford my master’s degree.

20:36 Emily: Absolutely. That’s something that we’ve talked about, really featured, that kind of strategy of serving as a resident advisor in two previous episodes, one with Adrian Gallo and one with Dr. Erika Moore Taylor. So check out those episodes in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. And it is a job, I know, you know because you did it, but it’s absolutely a job. It’s absolutely a part-time job. So we can’t trivialize that, but it can be very, very valuable, you know, to your bottom line, as a graduate student. I guess the other point that I want to make about these, you know, subsidized, um, resources is that they’re always too scarce. And so I think when you’re making a decision about where to attend graduate school and having, you know, the possibility of being in subsidized housing or the possibility of obtaining subsidized childcare is something that you need to have to make the finances work in that particular place.

21:21 Emily: You, you have to be so in-depth about what is the process of getting into this? How long can I have access to it for? So, for example, just recently, it was season 11 episode one, published an interview with Maya Gosztyla who was living in subsidized graduate housing at UCSD. And because she had started it, I think a couple of years ago, she had this like locked-in rent, but rent was being increased for like new people coming onto leases massively. It was like a, I don’t know, a 60% increase or something huge like that. And so, you know, these things can happen. So like you just have to really kind of understand the way the winds are blowing on campuses in terms of how much is being put behind these resources. And if you need it, you need to make sure you’re going to have access to it.

22:07 Emily: I know that childcare is always, always too scarce. I do recommend the episode I did with Lauri Lutes, if you already have a child or are planning on having a child going into graduate school. She was very intentional about choosing which graduate program would be the most supportive to her in her childcare needs and ended up at Oregon State University in terms of what she had to choose among. And they did things like for example, have free childcare, like sort of like afterschool care on campus, up to like four hours a day, completely free for students. So having it on campus and having it as like that part-time flexible option in addition to full-time, you know, daycare or something, that was vital for her, like making her finances in graduate school work.

Commercial

22:53 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! Taxes are weirdly, unexpectedly difficult for funded grad students and fellowship recipients at any level of PhD training. Your university might send you strange tax forms or no tax forms at all. They might not withhold income tax from your paychecks, even though you owe it. It’s a mess. I’ve created a ton of free resources to assist you with understanding and preparing your 2021 tax return, which are available at PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I hope you will check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the material or have a question for me, please join one of my tax workshops, which are linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I offer one workshop on preparing your annual tax return for graduate students and one workshop on calculating your quarterly estimated tax for fellowship and training grant recipients.

23:57 Emily: There are two remaining live Q&A calls for the annual tax return workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), which are scheduled for Monday, April 4th and Sunday, April 10th. For fellowship and training grant recipients, please be aware that the deadline to make your quarter 1 2022 payment, if applicable, is April 18th, the same day as your 2021 tax return is due. The 2022 quarter one live Q&A call for my estimated tax workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients, is scheduled for Thursday, April 14th. It would be my pleasure to help you save time and potentially money this tax season. So don’t hesitate to reach out. Now back to our interview.

Reimbursement Timelines

24:47 Emily: Another issue you brought up in your article was something that every grad student complains about, which is reimbursements after you, you know, outlay funds for conferences or for equipment or travel or other things. Talk to me about that reimbursement timeline issue.

25:02 Tyler: Yeah, definitely. So I think, you know, there’s this dangerous assumption we have probably in society broadly, but especially I’ve seen it in higher education is that students have the money to pay for things up front and rely on a reimbursement that can come sometimes months later, months down the line. And I think that’s really particularly concerning when we think about this professional development and how important professional development is. And even though we’re setting aside funds for students, we often expect them to pay for the conference, the hotel, the travel, everything up front, and then rely on this reimbursement that can often have a lot of red tape that, you know, students can often not be sure if they’re even going to get it back. Or even when they apply for reimbursement funds, they might not hear back until a week before the conference when flights and hotels are already super expensive. So having reimbursement not only, perhaps think about giving that money upfront, having to pay an advanced setup, but also thinking about when we approve students for it and how fast we can approve for that, that they’re going to certainly get these kinds of funds going forward. I think those are some things to really think about here.

26:14 Emily: Yeah. Pay in advance would be ideal. And if not, get that reimbursement back to them as quickly as possible. Even before the event occurs, like you said, the timing of buying flights and so forth, like you can buy these things months in advance. The conference registration fees also can be really high paid months in advance. So like, can we just reimburse them right when they have the expense, you know, one, two weeks later or do we actually really have to wait until after the event occurs? Hopefully not. And like you said, you know, there is the assumption in these systems that students have access to cash, which as we know is usually not the case. And most graduate students, I would say, put these kinds of expenses on credit cards. And then even if the reimbursement does come through, we all hope it does, then they have those months of interest that they’ve paid on, you know, hundreds over a thousand dollars worth of these kinds of expenses. And so that’s like a lot of financial damage that happens in response to this, you know, kind of system. So totally agree with you. I know everyone’s on board with that topic, right? How do we improve this reimbursement system or eliminate it?

27:13 Tyler: Absolutely. One thing I’ll also add there is, we’re assuming all students have access to credit, but I’ve actually had many students, you know, going through my career that were perhaps international students that had just gotten over here and they didn’t have an American credit line, you know, and that kind of access. So they didn’t even have a credit card to put this money on. They really had to dig into their bank account if they ever wanted to participate in these kinds of things.

Prohibitions on Outside Work as a Grad Student

27:37 Emily: Such a good point. Also my assumption. Access to cash, also assuming access to credit. Great, great point. Thank you. Another issue that I wanted to throw in here is about prohibitions against outside work as a graduate student. And tell me about your experience. I think you at least went to a couple different institutions for graduate school. Did they have any explicit prohibitions against outside work?

27:58 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. It was actually my first year in my PhD. I received a fellowship, and in that fellowship contract, they explicitly stated that I couldn’t take any jobs. That the whole purpose of the fellowship was to fund me so that I, you know, could focus on my studies. And while I understood that it was well-intentioned, still, I had a lot of time. First year was actually the least busy year of my PhD. So that was the one year I did want to have an extra job and try to pay off some of the debt I had, pay off those moving expenses that we mentioned, and really set myself up so I could focus more on my studies in my second, third, etc. years down the road. But that first year, because I had a fellowship, they actually made me sign a contract that I wouldn’t take any other job, whether that was with the institution or outside of it.

28:47 Emily: And I totally understand your impetus for like wanting to clear up, you know, past debts. And as you said, set yourself up for having a good, you know, subsequent second, third, and fourth years. Did you feel like that fellowship was sufficient had you not had those goals? Like if it were just paying for living expenses? Or was it like already outrageous that they were thinking that was enough?

29:08 Tyler: Actually, the fellowship is like the, at that institution, is like the one thing that pays well. So, it was actually enough for me to live on. It was fine there. But to set myself up to pay these rents before, you know, the semester begins and set myself up for those kinds of money management they expect from me and the financial aid office, it wasn’t enough for that. It was just enough to cover me on a monthly basis.

29:33 Emily: It is, I think at a minimum, a great idea for a fellowship to sufficiently support a graduate student. But as we were just talking about assumptions, the assumption there is that every graduate student has the same financial needs and the same financial responsibilities. You had a different situation maybe than one of your peers and you wanted to have that outside income. My kind of stance on this is, the university should stay out of your time, the business of your time, aside from, you know, what you are devoting to your studies. So if that’s going to be whatever you decide it is, but as long as the student is making sufficient progress towards the degree, I don’t think that university, whatever, anyone in your department, your advisor should have any restrictions on what you do with the rest of your time. After all, we were just talking about people at different life situations, for example, you know, people can be parents or caregivers for other, you know, people. Maybe you have a really time-consuming hobby that you engage with.

30:27 Emily: All of that is fine. Why would someone else not be able to work during their free time as you were just talking about that wasn’t taken up with progressing towards their degree? Let students manage their own time, and if it includes making money, that’s okay. As long as they’re doing what they need to do, you know, for the PhD, kind of my opinion on that. I’m not a fan of these outside work prohibitions, especially when they’re really, really broad, like saying you can’t have any outside source of work or income versus saying something like you can’t have a job where it interferes with the hours you’re expected to be in lab. That kind of thing makes sense. Like they don’t want you being pulled away from your primary responsibilities to head to your W2 job somewhere else. But to say that you can’t have like a freelance, you know, thing on the side, that’s totally up to your own time and discretion. It just does not make logical sense to me.

31:16 Tyler: Absolutely. One thing I’ll add here also is thinking about that just because you’re telling students they can’t get jobs and be compensated for their time, that often can lead to detrimental effects in the way that a faculty member might say, oh, Hey, you have this fellowship, and it won’t let you have any other jobs. So you can do this research for me on the side, right? And it puts these weird power dynamics in place that faculty can take advantage of you. I never had that, but I will say I have seen peers struggle with that, that they’re on this fellowship year until faculty see them as someone they can add to their research team because they have extra hours now, and now they’re not being compensated for that research, but they’re still being expected to put work in. And so, those are some things we should really think about in these prohibitions.

Time to Pay Higher Stipends?

32:05 Emily: Yeah. The general problem of unpaid labor in academia coming down to a fellowship recipient. Absolutely. And the final kind of point that I wanted to bring up is just the very, very simple financial solution of pay higher stipends pay, bigger fellowships, just pay people more. Would you like to add anything on this issue as a general solution? Just give a higher stipend.

32:32 Tyler: Yeah, no, I completely agree with it. I think it’s wild that we have, you know, careers in the real world that will raise your salary annually, or supposedly, to keep up with living wages, but grad students are still getting the same stipend they did 10 years ago. And so, I absolutely agree with increasing it appropriately and really taking those things into account.

32:59 Emily: Yeah, I’m especially thinking about this issue right now in a time of, you know, high inflation and wondering, now we’ve experienced rather low inflation for the last, you know, more than 10 years now. And so having no increase in stipend or a small increase in stipend that may have been manageable. But now programs really need to be proactive about responding to these increases in inflation by offering larger annual cost of living adjustments and increases. And I’m just afraid that it’s going to take some of them like three years of studying the issue before they finally like raise the stipend for goodness sakes. And similarly, I’ve seen this issue too with fees increasing. So like sometimes state universities, they can’t increase their tuition. You know, there are certain caps on how fast they can increase it, but there are much fewer restrictions on how fast they can increase fees.

33:47 Emily: And so, fees on graduate students can increase rapidly without there being increases in the stipend to actually pay for those fees. And so that’s something I want, and obviously program administrators to keep that in mind, just like, what are you even charging your students that’s going to come out of their own pocket? And can you then add to what’s going into their pocket to make up for that because if you have this static stipend for five years and the fees increase every single year, you may not know going into graduate school that that could be a possibility, but it has happened.

34:14 Tyler: Absolutely. That’s a great point. One more thing I would like to add is, thinking about how we structure financial aid advisors and having those cater to students. You know, we mentioned the point earlier about really understanding that students have different financial needs and we should be catering these setups towards them. And one of the ways we could do that is really assigning one financial aid advisor to a student. So that one financial aid advisor gets to know you over four years, gets to know your needs. And they’re able to really cater these kinds of policies and adjustments as necessary. I have had that at some institutions. You know, my first institution, I had a really great relationship with my first financial aid advisor. You know, they knew me on a first-name basis. However, later on, I went to an institution that treated me more like a customer. That I would just come in and whoever was at the desk would serve me that day. And they often didn’t have any clue about my needs. They didn’t know how my scholarship worked and how it was, you know, structured, et cetera. And it always led to confusion and made life a lot more difficult for me. And so, that’s one solution I often put out there is for institutions to really think of students as students, as human beings, and not just customers that they can just, you know, serve with a one-stop-shop.

How Do We Advocate?

35:33 Emily: I love that point. Thank you so much for adding that. It makes total sense because once you get to know the students more intimately, and you’re not having those, like I’m meeting you for the first time conversations over and over and over again. As you said, they can better understand your needs, and then they can better advocate for you when they’re talking about policy changes within their own like offices or whatever. And speaking of advocacy, we talked at the beginning of the episode about, you know, why it’s important to advocate on these, you know, financial and benefits-related matters. We talked about what you, you know, the listener could advocate for at their own institutions. By the way, if the listener, if you listeners have other issues you want to raise, please tag us on Twitter or add a comment to the show notes for the episode, anything like that, email us, that would be great. But to conclude this, how do we actually go about advocating? What are the actions that someone could take to, you know, try to enact change on one of these issues?

36:27 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think there are a lot of ways to go about this, and you’ve got to really find what fits you. One thing that I often do is I write, I write about my issues. I tell my story, and every story I tell, I try to end it with, you know, asking myself the question, what would make this experience better? You know, you can read the story to the article that we linked earlier. I really just wrote writing to get my frustration out about this financial aid advisor, and then telling me to manage my money better. I started writing about that frustration, and then I turned the question on myself and I said, what would’ve made that situation better so I can really think of recommendations for other people? And publishing them in these kinds of outlets that higher education practitioners read, that’s one way to do it.

37:09 Tyler: Another way would just be going through your own institutional systems, setting up meetings, you know, when you really run into something, meet with your department chair on the reimbursements. Meet with the head of your financial aid department and say, Hey, why is the system set up like this? It’s really causing a barrier for me. Having those kinds of conversations with people on your campus, I think, you know, and maybe it’s a big assumption, but I like to assume that people always have your best intention in mind. And I like to assume that people who are working on these college campuses are trying to help students and trying to listen to you. Just sometimes they might not be aware of that. And so, bringing those issues up to people that are in a position to make change is one way to go about that.

37:52 Emily: And I think, you know, back when we had that conversation on Dear Grad Student, I was listening to you, you know, share this approach of sharing your own story, vulnerably, like opening up to an administrator and saying, okay, this is the policy that’s in place, and this is the effect that it’s having on me personally. And is there something we can do to alleviate this situation? I thought that was a wonderful way to go about it. And it’s actually a theme I’ve heard over and over again as I’ve talked with graduate students about negotiation, for example, there’s, you know, an early point in this, which is like negotiating your offer letter before you even become a student at that institution. That’s a great time for negotiation. But the way that I heard that students were going about this was by sharing vulnerably how they anticipated the stipend and benefits offered by an institution, how they anticipated that would affect their personal finances and their lives and their stress level and their ability to devote, you know, time to their studies and all that kind of thing.

38:45 Emily: And it just is like, it’s not like a hard nose like you have to give me more, you have to fix this. It’s like, Hey, I’m having an issue here. Like what can be done? Like what creatives solutions can we come to that are going to help with this? And as you said, you know, that can happen not just at that early point before you become a student, but over time you can develop relationships and go back to these people over and over again. And they can really learn again how these policies are affecting you. So, I love that suggestion and your approach to it.

Unionization Movements and Collective Bargaining

39:11 Emily: One other topic I wanted to bring up was about unions and unionization movements, or not even like, necessarily like official unions, but just I’ll call it collective bargaining. So like getting together with other people, let’s say in your department, even if you’re not represented by a union and saying to the administrators, Hey, 50% of us are having a problem with this policy. Like what can we do about it? Same kind of conversation, but coming from a group rather from an individual. Do you have any thoughts on these, you know, unionization movements or how this can be a part of advocacy?

39:42 Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. I think the big thing to say here is like, you don’t have to wait for a union to form. You could be the one that is forming it. I did this often informally, you know, I never thought to call us the union, but I would just share my experiences vulnerably with my peers and they would share theirs with me. And we’d have these conversations back and forth in private until we finally, you know, just, oh, you know what, I’m having the same issue. And we’d come together and we would go approach the chair of our department or, you know, someone that does have power in our school and say, Hey, we’re having this issue. There’s multiple of us. Is there anything we could do? And that’s how I often would position any kind of argument or, you know, any kind of advocacy that I would take to someone else. I would say other students are having it, too. This is a problem that we should really, that warrants addressing. So, yes.

40:35 Emily: That’s a perfect example. I’m so glad that, I mean, just as you said, like if a union is in place, go through that channel. If a unionization movement is in place, you know, join up with that and make your issues like heard to that larger group as well. Even if not, as you said, you don’t have to wait for it, you can go as a group and express your, you know, desire for something to change. So, love that so much.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

40:55 Emily: Tyler, it’s been great speaking with you again. Wonderful to have you on the podcast and have all of your insights here. I’m really glad you agreed to do this episode, and I want to ask you the standard 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 we’ve touched on in the course of this interview, or it could be something completely new.

41:15 Tyler: Yeah. Well, the big advice I’ve been telling people, even people starting at my current position at my, you know, Foundation has been asking for, you know, some moving expenses and a signing bonus. You know, for instance, not all jobs will let you negotiate the salary. You know, my position wouldn’t actually let me negotiate the salary. But my way of negotiating was saying, Hey, I’m a low-income student coming out of a PhD program. I could really use a moving stipend and, you know, it was, again, going back to this whole being vulnerable. I could do that in my career as well. And, you know, they really wanted me, they understood my situation and all these things I’d advocated and wrote on. They knew my experiences. And they were able to provide me a moving expense. So that was one thing. The second thing I will say is, just making sure you really understand and read deeply on your benefits when you do sign, you know, what’s it mean to start a retirement fund? Those are things important to think about when you’re starting a new job and to pay in as much as you can, when you’re still young. As much as you can afford, you know, as someone who might have loans or whatever it might be to pay off.

42:20 Emily: Love that advice. I love being able to speak with people who are already past the grad school experience and can give us a view from the other side in the world of proper full-time employee stuff. So, that’s great.

42:32 Tyler: The grass is greener over here. I promise that.

42:35 Emily: Yeah. Good to hear. Good to hear. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s been great to talk with you again!

42:40 Tyler: Yeah. It’s been great talking with you. Thank you for having me!

Outtro

42:48 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? I have 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/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 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.

This Veteran Receives External Funding for Her PhD Program

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In this episode, Emily interviews Emily Knitter, a PhD student in counseling psychology at the University at Buffalo and US Army veteran. After being medically discharged from the military, Emily funded her undergraduate degree with the GI Bill and subsequently received five years of PhD funding through the Vocational Rehabilitation program. This external source of funding has given her a greater degree of autonomy in her research and enables her to serve as a spokesperson for advocacy efforts in her department. Emily also gives her insights into the mental load of home ownership and being a landlord based on her experience of owning two homes.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

This Veteran Receives External Funding for Her PhD Program

Teaser

00:00 Emily K: It’s five years. Like it’s such a long piece of our lives, that the thought of kind of putting everything else that you want to accomplish in life, in addition to this degree, on hold, just that feels like an opportunity cost to me.

Introduction

00:22 Emily R: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is Season 11, Episode 6, and today my guest is Emily Knitter, a PhD student in counseling psychology at the University at Buffalo and U.S. Army veteran. After being medically discharged from the military, Emily funded her undergraduate degree with the GI Bill and subsequently received five years of PhD funding through the Vocational Rehabilitation program. This external source of funding has given her a greater degree of autonomy in her research and enables her to serve as a spokesperson for advocacy efforts in her department. Emily also gives her insights into the mental load of home ownership and being a landlord based on her experience of owning two homes. If I may say so myself, this would be a great time to join the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community for a monthly price of $29.

01:25 Emily R: With Tax Day coming up on April 18th, several of the included resources are quite timely, such as: 1. How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!) and/or How to Complete Your Postdoc Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), which help PhD trainees prepare their 2021 tax returns with respect to their higher education income and expenses. 2. Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients, which helps people who aren’t having income tax withheld from their paychecks figure out their estimated tax payments. 3. Open Your First IRA, which walks you through the seven boxes you have to check to confidently open, fund, and invest your first retirement account and provides in-depth resources to support you. The deadline to open and fund a 2021 IRA is Tax Day, but you won’t want to wait quite that long.

02:19 Emily R: You’ll have access to numerous evergreen resources, such as my Wealthy PhD webinars on financial goals, investing, debt repayment, and cash flow. Your membership also includes invitations to monthly live calls with me and other Community members; you’re welcome to bring your own questions and topics of interest to these calls for discussion. Our next live call is on Wednesday, March 16, 2022. You can learn more about and join the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Emily Knitter.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:04 Emily R: I have joining me on the podcast today Emily Knitter. She is a third-year PhD student in counseling psychology at the University at Buffalo, and she is a veteran. And so her path to the PhD program that she’s in is a little bit different from most of the people that I interview and her funding course has been different. So I’m really excited to talk to her about that. So Emily, welcome to the program. And will you please tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself?

03:27 Emily K: Thank you. Very honored to be here. Especially since we both have great names. So yeah, like you mentioned, I was in the Army. I served as a journalist for five years. I joined straight out of high school. I was medically retired and thought I was going to go kind of down that same path, but I knew that journalism didn’t pay really well in the real world, quote unquote. So I decided to go to school for marketing. So I rolled out of school. I did one year in a marketing program down in Georgia, despised it, dropped out. And then I ended up getting a job opportunity and I moved to New York. And so I worked for a year at a YMCA doing membership management, insurance billing, a lot of office work and also despised every single minute of that. But, you know, learning kind of what pieces I liked, what pieces I didn’t.

04:21 Emily K: And at the same time I started going to therapy myself. And so, because I was in the military, I had access to therapy through the VA at no cost, which was huge at the time. And that was life-changing for me personally and professionally. It really kind of helped me start solidifying who I wanted to be and who I thought I was, which was something that I had lost when I left the military. I really didn’t feel like I identified as being a soldier with every fiber of my being while I was in, you know, I just kind of thought I was Emily who happened to wear a uniform. But then once I lost that uniform, it was like I was completely lost. And working with her, she really helped me kind of start to understand myself better, understand maybe where I would want to go with my life and the influence that she had on me combined with kind of really realizing that I liked helping solve problems at the Y and I liked helping people with that.

05:32 Emily K: You know, I started thinking maybe I should go back. I didn’t have an undergrad at all, besides my one year in marketing at the time, that maybe psychology would be a cool path to go down. And, you know, I figured if I could make a third of the difference in somebody else’s life the way that she helped me, that that would be a worthwhile way to kind of invest my life and my time. And so with not a broken heart at all, I put in my notice at the Y, and I went back. I did my undergraduate at St. Bonaventure University, which is down in Olean, New York. A really, really cool private university down there. And so I spent three years, graduated there, and then I rolled right into the PhD program that I’m in now. So that’s kind of my brief background there.

Funding Undergrad: GI Bill

06:23 Emily R: And can you tell us how you funded the undergraduate degree? Because I understand your status as a veteran played into that.

06:30 Emily K: Yes, absolutely. So I used the GI Bill, which is a program that anyone who served at least 90 days of active duty in the military qualifies for. There are a couple exceptions to beyond that, but that’s kind of the standard is basically anyone who served, made it through basic training, qualifies for this. And so it gives you 36 months of benefits where it pays all your tuition, it pays all of your fees, you get a living stipend, and you also get money for books and supplies. So it’s really an incredible program. And so I used the year of it in the marketing program. And then, so that one, I was in state in Georgia, so I didn’t have any problems there. And when I moved to New York, I had residency because I’d been there for a year. So I applied, but St. Bonaventure is private.

07:26 Emily K: And so, there was an additional program for there because the GI Bill only covers public in-state tuition and fees. And so anything above and beyond that, in theory, you would have to take on. But St. Bonaventure there’s a program that schools can buy into called the yellow ribbon program, which they end up splitting the difference with the VA of whatever is above and beyond their cap for the state. So because they were yellow ribbon program, I was able to attend this program completely at no cost to me, with the living stipend, which, you know, really was quite a luxury. Because it’s not a school I would’ve gone to if I was accruing debt at all, but it was a really, really great experience for me. And the class sizes, I mean we were usually like one to eight, one to 12 for the ratio.

08:18 Emily K: So it was just a really, really great experience. But a big thing that I’ve noticed in my experience is like how much the culture of the school really makes a difference. You know, because that was a big reason why I stopped in my marketing program is because they didn’t have any veteran support and I didn’t really feel like they cared whether I was there or not. And so like when I left, I don’t think they noticed, whereas at this school they were very responsive and it made a big difference in my experience of the program and also kind of set the bar for what I looked for when I was looking for my PhD programs.

Transition to Grad School

09:04 Emily R: So let’s talk about your transition to graduate school. We’ve already heard the motivation from your work with a counselor previously, and we’ve also heard that, you know, you’re a bit selective about the institutions that you want to apply to you because you want to be supported. How did you end up in the particular program that you did? And then we’ll talk about how you’re funding it.

09:22 Emily K: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So the big thing actually while I was in undergrad is I met my now ex-husband at the time, but he had roots in this area. And so one of the big things that I was looking for on top of making sure it was going to be a right culture fit, because I had experienced what that doesn’t feel like in the past, was I was relatively landlocked. And so, I was entertaining the possibility of doing both master’s degrees and PhD programs. I’m kind of a like shoot for the stars and see where it lands type of person. And so this particular program that I’m in now, the counseling psychology track, was the one that stood out above and beyond everything else as what I was looking for. They seemed receptive. I was able to set up some informational interviews with some of the faculty, even before applying.

10:18 Emily K: They were getting back with me, they seemed interested. For all those reasons, this was actually the only PhD program I applied to. Like I put all my eggs in this basket and I was like, if I don’t get accepted here, the deadlines for the master’s programs were later on. So I knew I could kind of fall back and apply somewhere with that. But the big thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to make sure that I had the capability to do therapy, that I was going to be able to work with veterans afterwards on a one-to-one level, as well as doing research. So, my program is actually in the department of education, it’s not in the department of psychology, but because at the University of Buffalo, the psychology department is exclusively research focused. So if you’re getting the clinical psychology degree, you’re not doing direct intervention work.

Vocational Rehabilitation

11:13 Emily K: And so that was really important to me. And also, just the personality of the professors that I’d met and kind of the vibe I’d gotten from the program really felt like it was going to be a better fit for me. So that’s why I chose them. And then as you mentioned, so my funding, while I was an undergrad, I got really involved with the SVA, which is the Student Veterans of America club on campus. And so I’m talking to other veterans and I’m kind of, you know, getting to know like what they’re doing. And one of them who was also medically retired asked me if I had heard of this Voc Rehab program, which is the Vocational Rehabilitation and Education I think is the full title for it. And I thought that you could only use one or the other with the Voc Rehab or the GI Bill.

12:07 Emily K: And so I said, no, like I’m using the GI Bill. You know, I don’t qualify for that. And he goes, no, I use the GI Bill, too. And then I switched over. He’s like, you should at least apply and just see what they say. And it was a pretty simple online application. So I was just like, doesn’t hurt anything. And the requirements for it, which it’s a little different than anybody who served, who qualifies for the GI bill. So the Voc Rehab, you do have to have a disability rating of at least 10%, which on the spectrum is a pretty minimal bar to entry there. And so they agreed, let me come in for an interview, and then they do a face-to-face evaluation is really what they call it. And it’s looking at what jobs you’re trained or skills that you have currently, and where you would like to be.

12:59 Emily K: And one thing that I really appreciate about the program is it’s not just getting you a job, it’s making sure that you’re going to be fulfilled in what you’re doing. So even if in theory, you know, because I had the journalism background, I could have gotten a job doing something with that. But I knew that really wasn’t what I wanted to do. And so, because of the disability that I had, I can’t do something really, really physical. And so, we were able to kind of navigate that, and I got qualified to be in the program. And another thing that I really appreciate about the program is they’re very flexible, I would say. Like there are the requirements that are listed on the website as like, okay, it’s, it’s two years of funding, it’s dot dot, dot, dot dot. You have to do this, you have to be this, you can’t be out for longer than this time, but basically there’s an asterisk next to every single thing on the website that’s like, but it depends.

14:00 Emily K: And so again, with the whole shooting for the stars thing, once I got accepted into the program, my counselor who I was assigned to said, well, do some research, figure out, you know, look at salaries, talk to people, you know, really figure out what you feel like is going to not just get you a job that’s going to put you where you want to be, but you’re also going to feel content doing it. So again, I came to her on the day that I was supposed to kind of propose my path and I said, clearly I’ll be most fulfilled with a PhD, you know? And for whatever reason, again, stars aligned. And she said, okay. And so I got a waiver that instead of the two years, they covered an entire five-year program. So that was May of 2018. And that was the single best Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten in my life. I walked out of there crying, like unable to believe that that was the reality, like I felt so fortunate.

Timing with PhD Application

15:12 Emily R: So how did the timing of applying for the Voc Rehab program dovetail with your application to the PhD program? Like, were you already admitted to the program or were you then going to apply after getting the Voc Rehab, you know, funding?

15:25 Emily K: I got accepted to Voc Rehab first, and then I applied to the program. And so, and that’s what she said. She’s like, well, you know, this is all well and good that we will fund you. She’s like, but now you have to get accepted. And so, that’s where, because between the program, the Voc Rehab requirements, and then being landlocked because of my personal life, it was very much all my eggs in this basket, you know, and that’s why I had the backup plan of the master’s. Because I was like even getting a master’s funded is incredible. And I can still be a therapist and I can still counsel with the master’s. And if I were going to have to pay it out of pocket, that’s what I would’ve done was go the master’s route just for the opportunity costs, but between the two. But it’s all paid for, and I’m graduating completely debt-free. So, I couldn’t say no.

How Are Your Peers Funded?

16:23 Emily R: Yeah. So, as you said, that’s an incredible gift to be not just admitted to the program, but given, you know, 250% of the funding that you kind of were asking for initially, or thought you would get. So tell me a little bit about how your peers are funded. Because, I’m not really sure. You’ve said, you know, in the school of education, counseling psychology, so like, are your peers doing assistantships? Are they in fellowships? Are they paying out of pocket? How are they funding their program?

16:50 Emily K: Yes. So, I’m 100% the atypical weird one. You know, everybody else in my cohort is for the most part, either in an RA or a TA position. And it’s been a blessing in a number of ways because unfortunately, and I’m not sure if this is kind of the case across all of academia right now or just in my program, but most of my cohort members who came in with funding, it was promised for a year or two years. But then they were told it would be really easy to find other TA positions, other RA positions, you know, and it wouldn’t be a problem. And half of my cohort right now has unfortunately had to switch to actually taking on student loans because they just don’t have positions available. And so, it’s been so stressful for them. And it’s been kind of a different, I want to say like, a different bag than what they were sold originally.

17:52 Emily K: But it’s tough to watch, and it makes me even more thankful being in the position that I am in because it’s very secure. You know, if I take longer than five years to finish the program, then it’s on me. But as long as I stay in the timeline, then at least that is really, really consistent. I’m not worried about it. Grad school is stressful enough that I’m very thankful that it’s not also adding that burden on. And it’s been interesting, too, that because my funding is not coming from with in the program, and I don’t really have a, beyond being accepted in the program, I have an advisor who’s helping me with my research, but it’s almost more of a consultation role because I’m not doing any RA work for her or anything like that, that I have, I want to say, a lot more autonomy in a way than everybody else. You know, because there’s nothing in a contract that says I can’t work part-time, you know, and, you know, I’m not committed to doing 20 hours of whatever it is for a professor, you know, or grading, anything like that.

19:04 Emily K: And it’s been a blessing, especially because I’m coming into the program as a non-traditional student, you know, being older. My ex and I, we bought a house, you know, I had full life bills. And although it does provide a housing stipend, you know, it would be enough if I wanted to live the starving grad school life. But I’m thankful to be able, because I don’t have to work for the program, so I do have a part-time job as well. And so the supplement between that income with the stipend I get through my funding, you know, I’m able to kind of live my life a bit more comfortably than a typical grad student. And I think that that’s, I mean I’m busy, we’re all crazy busy, and it’s navigating 150 hours of work and you know, not that much time in a week. But there have definitely been points during the program, not related to funding, where I’ve taken the lead with my cohort advocating for different things, because I think there’s less of a power dynamic in my situation than there is in some of those. So it’s easier for me to kind of say, Hey, we would actually really like this or this isn’t, you know, working deadlines, timelines, different policies that they’re implementing. And so, I’m thankful that because of my funding situation, I am able to kind of stand much more confidently in myself throughout the program.

20:46 Emily R: So, I’m so glad that you’re like articulating this this way because I think this is actually much more widely applicable than just for your particular “I’m funded, you know, because of my veteran status,” like kind of situation. So because what I’m hearing is one, your peers are unfortunately experiencing this, you know, drying up of available assistantships. I’m assuming this is due to COVID, right? We’re recording this in January, 2022. So that sounds about the right timing?

21:10 Emily K: Correct. Yes. That’s the story we’re getting.

Autonomy and Advocacy

21:14 Emily R: Yeah. So because they were not, now, it’s interesting because when I talk with prospective graduate students, I don’t put a lot of emphasis on whether or not funding is guaranteed for five years or whether it’s like pretty much every one has funding for five years. It’s not explicitly guaranteed, but like the pattern is that we get people funded. It sounds like in this, you know, program, there’s been a big difference between those two, right? The expected path was not what turned out to happen. And because there was not a guarantee, you know, in writing whatever, your classmates were kind of left out to dry. Now, the advantage that you have because you know, the way that your funding, because it’s coming from a total third-party source, it sounds very much like having an external fellowship, which gives you, as you were saying, a lot more autonomy.

21:56 Emily R: You’re not beholden to like, you know, the grants or whatever that your advisor’s working on to have to do that particular kind of work. You can choose the work that you want to do. It’s more of probably more of a collegial relationship than like a, you know, boss underling kind of relationship with your advisor. And so I think that this just goes to emphasize the utility of having that kind of funding going into a graduate program. Yours is a little bit of a different source than most other people might have it, but I think the benefits are very similar. And I love that you’re, you know, you said you’re using this position of having a little bit more independence to advocate, to be the spokesperson, right? To kind of advocate on behalf of everyone. Because as you said, the power dynamics are a little bit different for your peers than for you. So, I’m really pleased with everything you’ve said, and it just sounds like yeah, that the benefits you’re articulating are also available to people with external fellowships, usually.

22:45 Emily K: 100%. Yeah. And that would be like, if you have the possibility to have any sort of external funding, that from my experience alone, I can’t speak for anything else, it seems very much the way to go.

Commercial

23:00 Emily R: Emily here for a brief interlude! Taxes are weirdly, unexpectedly difficult for funded grad students and fellowship recipients at any level of PhD training. Your university might send you strange tax forms or no tax forms at all. They might not withhold income tax from your paychecks, even though you owe it. It’s a mess. I’ve created a ton of free resources to assist you with understanding and preparing your 2021 tax return, which are available at PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I hope you will check them out to ease much of the stress of tax season. If you want to go deeper with the material or have a question for me, please join one of my tax workshops, which are linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. I offer one workshop on preparing your annual tax return for graduate students and one workshop on calculating your quarterly estimated tax for fellowship and training grant recipients. The next live Q&A call for the annual tax return workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is this coming Sunday, March 20th. It would be my pleasure to help you save you time and potentially money this tax season, so don’t hesitate to reach out. Now back to our interview.

Post-PhD Career Path: Working with Veterans

24:27 Emily R: So, yeah, I’m really glad to hear about sort of your experiential difference in your program because of this funding. Do you see this having an effect on your career later? I think you mentioned earlier that, you know, you either currently work with veterans or want to work with veterans, what do you see your future career path with this PhD?

24:45 Emily K: Yeah, that kind of has always been my bigger picture is wanting to give back to the veteran community. Especially because, you know, I could not have known making almost a slight impulse decision at 17 years old to join the military, all that I would’ve gained from it, you know. It’s really been the best dumb decision that teenage me ever made. But there’s also such a small percentage of veterans who have higher education degrees. And so being able to, you know, in the same way that right now I’m able to kind of help out and advocate for my other cohort members is being able to take that and advocate for the community by, you know, having that lived experience, but also having the legitimacy, I guess that comes from having a PhD. And through all of my pivoting to get to this point, you know, the first three years really after I got out of the military were tough, and I didn’t realize that everybody else kind of also struggled with the transition because I wasn’t talking to other veterans at that time.

26:09 Emily K: And I thought that I was the only one who was failing, you know, especially after I’d done quite well in the military. I got promoted really quickly. You know, I’m really good at kind of knowing what the expectations are and meeting them which does translate really well, I think into the PhD program too. So yeah, it’s very much my hope to continue working with veterans, particularly as they’re transitioning out, you know, and it’s figuring out the why of what they want to do, and who they are, and kind of what does that path look like for them, independently. And so I think, like I said, you know, being a veteran is definitely going to help with that path. But you know, even now, and I think if life takes me in a different direction than kind of what I’m expecting right now is, you know, on a very pragmatic level, there are hiring preferences in a lot of organizations for individuals that have a veteran’s status, especially in the VA, which is where I’m hoping to go.

27:08 Emily K: But most places there are kind of incentive programs for that. I’m not sure if the way in which I was funded per se will make a difference afterwards. But I think what we were talking about before with, you know, when you have that external funding and you’re able to kind of be more collegial with people and kind of work on, okay, how do I navigate this situation? How do I advocate here? How do I make change? I think I’m going to be going into the job market maybe with a little bit more confidence than I would have otherwise where like, okay, now I know what I’m bringing to the table. It’s not thank you for offering something to me. It’s like, this is what I’m providing. Okay. How can this be an equal relationship for both of us? So I think that more than I’ve maybe even thought before, until we’ve had this conversation, is definitely going to help, kind of, regardless of what that picture might look for me after I’m done.

Homeownership Eperience

28:09 Emily R: Beautiful. It’s very exciting! So, I want circle back to, you know, you mentioned earlier homeownership, and real estate is one of my favorite topics right now, especially for graduate students. So, I think that your path to homeownership is probably different and informed by your experience in the military. I just know sort of, I guess my stereotype impression is like people in the military sort of buy houses much more readily than people not do because of the easier funding mechanism through, you know the VA, just cultural differences, right? So, can you tell us briefly your experience with homeownership, and then how you think like someone, for instance, in your program, what would be the circumstances that would make homeownership a good idea for another PhD student, given your kind of different perspective on it?

29:03 Emily K: Sure, absolutely. Yeah. And you know, again, going back to all of the amazing things that have helped out from little teenage Emily’s decision to join the military is, so I do qualify for VA home loans which are amazing, because it’s a 0% down payment. And the whole process is pretty simple. And like you said, there is, I didn’t own a house while I was in the military, but many of my friends did, and it’s, you know, not a thing at all to kind of buy when you’re stationed here, you move a couple years later, you sell it, you rent it. You know, it’s very, very common to own a home. So there’s not, I didn’t have a big story built up in my head, I guess, of this being like a really major, big deal that I need to put five years of effort into before I do it.

29:54 Emily K: For better or for worse, frankly. You know, I think I now am much more intentional with kind of my financial journey than I was back then because, I think it’s getting better from what I’ve heard, but the military covers everything. And so you have this very strong sense of security. So you don’t have to think about your finances as much because it’s not not going to be there. And so now, you know, I’ve really kind of taken myself on a journey, and I’m much more intentional about the decisions I’m making and how I’m spending my money now. But I am thankful for that, I guess, lack of stigma of buying a house that I did see there. Because when I first moved to New York and I was working the job at the Y, the one reason I love the Buffalo, New York area is the cost of living is super low.

30:47 Emily K: And so, the year that I was there, it was substantially cheaper to buy than it was to rent. And because I didn’t need to have the down payment saved up, it was really accessible to just make that happen. And so, I bought a little renovated hunting cabin. It was 800 square feet. It was beautiful. I loved it. When I was working at the Y for that year, and it was only 20 minutes from St. Bonaventure. So it just worked out really perfectly to kind of transfer during my undergrad. And so, I lived there my entire undergrad degree time. And then when I met my ex-husband, I moved in with him and we rented it out for a year. And for me, because the financial component of it was actually not super impactful. Like, the mortgage was very affordable because it was so small. Repairs were affordable, too, when they happened.

Emotional Labor of Landlording

31:50 Emily K: And it was just, it was perfect when I lived there myself. But when I moved into the city and we rented the house out for a year, although the tenants were amazing, nothing happened terribly wrong with the house during that year, but that was also my first year of grad school. And I found I was just constantly worried when the shoe was going to drop. And when I was going to get a phone call that, you know, the roof had blown off, who knows. I don’t know, anxiety, that was my fear. And so, after that year, even though nothing happened, but it just, it added so much emotional labor that I was now needing to invest in grad school and everything else I was doing with my life, it just wasn’t worth it for me. You know, I’ve very much decided, you know, I have no desire to be a landlord in my life.

32:44 Emily K: And so I was able to sell it. I owned it for five years. So, it worked out as far as all of that. I didn’t make a lot of money off of it because I hadn’t put any money down. And the housing market had been kind of steady that whole time. But I didn’t lose any money. And so it really was kind of a wash for me in a positive way. So I loved the ownership, and then we purchased a second house, right as the program was starting. And it was great because we were dual income, you know, he’s been in the trades for 15 years, so he’s very, very successful there. He had roots there. We had planned on remaining in the area forever. So it wasn’t a matter of being concerned about, okay, what if I move for internship?

33:35 Emily K: You know, it doesn’t make sense to buy if it’s only a couple of years like that. And so it really was nice. I actually surprisingly got a lot of pushback from my program when I mentioned that we were house-hunting, just like, well, do you have time for that right now? Like how is that going to fit in with a PhD program? You know, like that’s, you know, people just seeming in awe, I guess, that we were going to buy a house, even though we owned two houses at that time. So I think there’s, at least in my experience, there’s kind of a stigma that when you’re in your program, you should not even consider anything outside of the program. It’s the blood, the sweat, the tears, and that is your life, and everything else just kind of should be on hold until you’re done.

Letting Go of Limiting Beliefs

34:29 Emily K: And I think that maybe it’s coming in from kind of later in life starting this program, maybe it’s just my personality. I don’t know, but it’s five years. Like it’s such a long piece of our lives that the thought of kind of putting everything else that you want to accomplish in life, in addition to this degree, on hold, that feels like an opportunity cost to me. You know, and that feels, there’s always going to be something that’s going to keep you, you know, make you feel like it’s not the right time to do something. And so if you can responsibly, you know, financially do it, I think it’s just all managing your priorities. And so, it worked out really great for us. We have since separated, and I will say now though, I rent an apartment and talking about the, you know, emotional labor of owning.

35:26 Emily K: It’s great. I don’t want to be a landlord. Renting right now, all my utilities are included. I get to come home. I don’t have to worry about house chores. Like, I mean, beyond cleaning, but repairs, anything maintenance, I don’t have to worry about any of that. My landlord lives next door. We have a great relationship, and it’s taken a lot of weight off my shoulders. And you know, I’m spending actually more money renting than I was when I owned on kind of a month-to-month level. But I think it’s just what you value, and what you want your life to look like. And then, you know, making sure that you are intentional about the financial side of it too, but not having that be the only piece of the puzzle, if you will.

36:17 Emily R: What I really liked about that, your perspective on this is, that it takes into account your personal preference on whether or not owning and like doing the maintenance and upkeep and blah, blah, all that other stuff, whether that is going to be exciting and fun for you or whether it’s going to be like a burden and you don’t want to have it on your mind. And I think, of course the financial component is part of it, but when you’re in a, you know, lower cost of living area and your stipend is sufficient, or you have a dual income or whatever, that owning is a financial option at all, then you get to get to that question of, do I think this will enhance my life, especially emotionally during this program? Or do I think it’s going to detract from what I have going on? It sounds like, you know, your peers or the faculty, whoever you’re hearing messaging from, they had the perspective that this is going to detract from your life and it’s going to detract from your effort in the program, whatever. But I think it very much comes down to your personality. And you’ve enjoyed it both ways, and you’ve experienced it both ways. So yeah. I just think it comes down to yeah. What your preferences are and not so much, of course the financial question is there, but the preferences matter as well.

37:20 Emily K: Yeah. And I think it’s really kind of leaning into that what do you really want versus what do you feel like you should do? You know, and I think that it’s easy to get in that trap of like, okay, right now I should be bleeding for this program, or I should be doing X or Y or Z. But then really taking a step back and being like, oh wait, is that, where am I getting that belief from?

37:48 Emily R: Perfect. Absolutely. In terms of like money mindset, and you would know a lot more about this than I do, but that’s one of those limiting beliefs, right? Like I can only do one thing well during this five-year period of my life. It has to be my program. I can’t, you know, have relationships. I can’t be working on my own physical and mental health. I can’t be a homeowner. I can’t work on my finances, all limiting beliefs. Don’t have to be true for you. You get to decide, as long as you’re, you know, cognizant of what’s going on in your own mind. So, love that.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

38:18 Emily R: Let’s wrap up with the final question that I ask all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve touched on during the interview, or it could be something completely different.

38:30 Emily K: Yeah, so when I was thinking about this question, and I was thinking about it, obviously, because I’m still a student, so, you know, advice for other students per se. And the two things that came up, one is really kind of what we just wrapped up in right now is, you know, don’t be afraid to own your journey. And that it doesn’t have to be the stereotype you think it should be for being a grad student. You know, it’s making sure you’re asking questions. It’s recognizing that you are also like competent and capable, and you’re here for a reason. And so, realizing that we’re also bringing something to the table and like it’s okay to advocate for yourself. And that can be for, you know, financial things. It can be for anything that you might need. But I know, you know, even it’s shifted for me, even though we’ve talked about how much autonomy I have in my program, compared to some of my peers, it has been a slow shift over the last three years to kind of like feel comfortable being my own advocate in that way.

39:38 Emily K: Financial advice, like just flat out, I would say have a budget. Like I use the You Need a Budget software online. I’ve been using that for the last couple of years, and that has entirely changed my life is just being able to kind of give your every single dollar that you have a job. And make sure that it’s not just, yeah, just budgeting alone, knowing what you’re actually spending. And then, because you can use that once you have that knowledge, to then start deciding, okay, what do I value and how do I want to make this money work for me in whatever capability that I have at that time? And I think the other thing financial that, I don’t know, maybe, I think it’s because I’ve had to kind of go through teaching myself finances the last couple years and that I think about it a lot.

40:30 Emily K: I talk about it a decent amount, and it’s still taboo in most kind of societal circles. Just like, don’t be afraid to talk about it. Like, almost every single person that I meet, all of my advisors, all my supervisors and my practicum students, like I know how much they’re making, I know what their benefits are. Like, just because if you ask, people usually will tell you. And I’ve been using it to get more of a gauge of like, okay, what does this really look like if I were to pursue this position, you know, in this type of career, because there’s so much we can do with our degree? So having that knowledge of, okay, I kind of know how lifestyle-wise I want to live. And so, figuring out, you know, time, all the different components, but also is this going to fund how I want to be moving forward?

41:27 Emily K: And so, having that knowledge has made me feel much more confident in being able to eliminate some paths, and also kind of lean more into thinking about some paths. And all of my friends in my cohort look at me like I have two heads when I say I ask people about their finances. So that would be definitely my advice is, you know, like ask questions, do your own research. Don’t just always take at face value you know what maybe you feel like is the right answer with that.

42:04 Emily R: Yeah. Well, thank you so much! Thank you so much for giving this interview. I really love to have this like different perspective for anyone else who is considering a career in the military, has come outt of the military. Maybe, like you, it’s just through chatting with people that you find out about this fantastic, you know, funding source for graduate school. Thank you so much for giving this interview!

42:21 Emily K: Thank you so much!

Outtro

42:29 Emily R: 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? I have 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/. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are 3 ways you can help it grow: 1. Subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. 2. Share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list-serv, or as a link from your website. 3. Recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and increasing cash flow. I also license pre-recorded workshops on taxes. 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 Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.