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Learn from This Professor’s Nightmarish Home Ownership Journey

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Kevin Jennings, a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. Kevin and his wife bought a home in Savannah shortly after he started his position, and the house has proven to be a money pit. Kevin catalogues all that has gone wrong with the house, what he wishes he would have known as a first-time home buyer, and the lessons he’s learned the hard way. He also gives excellent insight into the academic job market for someone already on the tenure track and how his status as a homeowner has affected his career prospects.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Further Resources

Teaser

00:00 Kevin: The one thing I might’ve done differently is look for a house with fewer of these incidental costs, right? So if I wasn’t so close to the water, I wouldn’t have to do the flood insurance. If I wasn’t outside the city limits, I wouldn’t have to pay for the extra fire and protection stuff like that. I wish I would have known about those things in order to judge where to buy and which house to buy.

Intro

00:31 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 six, episode seven, and today my guest is Dr. Kevin Jennings, a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. Kevin and his wife bought a home in Savannah shortly after he started his position. And the house has proven to be a money pit. Kevin catalogs all that has gone wrong with the house, what he wishes he would have known as a first-time home buyer, and the lessons he’s learned the hard way. You won’t want to miss Kevin’s insight into how his choice to purchase this home has affected his mindset toward his academic career. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Kevin Jennings.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Kevin Jennings, and he is going to talk to us about, well, a bit of a money pit that he is currently invested in. So, we’re going to hear tons more about that. Kevin, will you please introduce yourself to the audience?

01:37 Kevin: Yeah. Hi, I’m Dr. Kevin Jennings. I’m from Austin, Texas, and I went to Texas State University–Go Bobcats! Meow–and got a PhD in Criminal Justice in 2014. I was then hired at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, and I moved there immediately after graduating for a tenure track job, which I realize how lucky I am to land a tenure track job just out of getting my PhD. And I mostly focus on cyber crime and digital forensics. So I do a lot of work with law enforcement, but also work with computer science people and tech people to kind of find evidence on digital storage devices.

02:27 Emily: What an exciting topic. We’ll hear more about that at the end of the episode, where people can learn more. So, you moved to Savannah for this position. You said that was four years ago. Is that right?

02:40 Kevin: Five years ago.

Homeownership Journey

02:41 Emily: Five years ago. Okay. And you decided when you moved there shortly after that you were going to buy a home. Can you tell us more about how you did that shortly out of graduate school and why?

02:54 Kevin: So, we moved here in 2014 and rented a house. Unfortunately, in 2015, my grandfather passed away and he was the last of my four grandparents. And he left my parents and his three siblings a fairly decent amount of money. And my parents decided to share some of that with me and my sister. So, we got this decent size chunk of money. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it was enough for a down payment on a house. And my wife and I, having so recently started our actual career jobs, feeling like we were more adulty than we really were, decided to use that as a down payment on a house. So, we shopped around the city of Savannah. We, we were leaning towards finding either a fixer-upper that we could get for cheap and put money into, or kind of a duplex or house that had something we could rent out.

04:00 Kevin: Our real estate agent showed us this house in the neighborhood we were currently living in, which is great, less than 10 minutes from campus, really nice houses. And it was neither of those things, but we both fell in love with it. It’s kind of a two and a half story, four bedroom, two bath, huge backyard, and where the backyard ends, there’s a tidal creek right behind it. It’s just swamp and woods. And it was just beautiful. And we just kind of both fell in love with it. So, even though it wasn’t what we were looking for, we decided that this was the house we really wanted.

Making the Down Payment

04:40 Emily: And with that down payment money you were able to do the purchase?

04:44 Kevin: We were able to afford the down payment, which was I believe 10% of the total purchase cost, which was listed at $160,000. And we were super, super good negotiators and talked them down to 159. So, we put, again, I want to say it was 10% down. And we got this house and we were so excited, but we sat through kind of the lecture from the bank on, “Here’s your mortgage payment and here’s what that’s going to consist of.” And we were really shocked at how little of our actual mortgage payment goes into the principal amount of the loan. I mean, so I have my latest house bill here and my monthly payment is $1,142. Of that $1,142, $233 goes to the principal, which, I mean, that’s what, 20% maybe? So, we were kind of shocked by that. And we were looking at the other kind of things that, that had to go and pay for.

Expected vs. Unexpected Costs

06:05 Kevin: And there was the stuff we were expecting, obviously interest is going to be a big deal. The interest on ours is $460 a month. So, we knew that was going to be a big deal. Taxes, of course we expected. Coming from Texas, the taxes were actually slightly lower than we thought they were going to be. Because Georgia has an income tax rather than relying on property taxes the way Texas does. But then the other things that got added in there are the stuff that really kind of shocked us. First off, because we had that beautiful tidal creek in our backyard, we were required to get flood insurance, which most homeowners insurance doesn’t cover floods. And since Savannah is a low-lying coastal city, plus we’re right up against that tidal creek, we were required by law to get flood insurance. The other thing we didn’t expect was private mortgage insurance. It’s like $200 a month for this private mortgage insurance, essentially because we’re first-time homeowners. And that will go away when we’ve paid the mortgage down to 80% of the level of the value of the house. But since we only put 10% down, getting from 90% of the value to 80% of the value is going to take years.

07:31 Kevin: And we’ve been paying for four years and we’re still, I don’t want to say nowhere close, but not nearly as close as we’d like to be to that 80% level that will allow us to take away that private mortgage insurance. So, that’s $200 a month we’re paying for essentially not having enough money. So, just all those things combined to create a mortgage payment that we really kind of weren’t expecting. Homeowners insurance, flood insurance, private mortgage insurance, all that stuff really adds so much to the monthly fee, which really hurts in the long run.

Mortgage Structure

08:11 Emily: Yeah. I just want to jump in and make a couple of comments for the listener in case they’re not that familiar with the structure of mortgages. You mentioned a couple shocking figures, like the amount of your monthly payment that actually goes towards principal is 200 some dollars. Whereas the amount that goes towards interest is 400 some, and people may not realize this, but mortgages are on an amortization schedule where the great majority of your payment in the first year goes towards interest. Very little goes towards principal. And that shifts over the course of the loan. So, in year 30, if it’s a 30 year mortgage, you’re paying a vast majority towards principal and very little towards interest and ultimately pay off the loan. So, it’s really like when you start over with new mortgages, maybe every five years or something if you move, that amortization schedule, you’re kind of always playing around in the paying mostly interest, very little in principal, part of the amortization schedule.

09:02 Emily: And that’s why it is so difficult, like in your case, to get from 10% equity up to 20%, so you can remove that private mortgage insurance. Because mostly what you’re paying, as you said, is towards interest. Plus, all these other things you had to add onto the mortgage. So, it’s really kind of, you know, people talk about the differences between the advantages of renting versus buying. But the thing is that in your case, and many others, when you have so much of your monthly mortgage payment that goes towards anything other than the principal, that’s almost like paying rent. It’s just money that’s out the door every single month that’s not really building your own net worth, your own equity in the house. It’s just stuff that has to go out the door to keep you in that house. And so I wanted to know, when you were sitting through this explanation from your bank–which actually it’s kind of cool that they gave you the explanation, honestly, like they were doing a little bit there to help educate you–how far along in the process were you, and were you ready to like run out the door or was that no longer an option?

Mortgage: A Little Extra Goes a Long Way

09:59 Kevin: It was no longer an option. But I was so ecstatic over finally owning a home that it didn’t quite hit me, what exactly it meant until I had made a couple of payments. The other thing was, it wasn’t until I think a year after we bought the house, my wife decided to go back to school. So, she helped put me through grad school. And then a year after I graduated and moved here and got this job, she decided to go back to school to become a nurse. Because what she did before, there’s really no job market for here in this part of the country. So, while she was still kind of working a semi-decent job before she went back to school, we were paying extra towards the principal every month, which I had been told was a very, very good idea. Because anything extra you can put in, especially at the beginning of a mortgage, really knocks down the long-term cost of the mortgage.

11:17 Kevin: So, we were able to put an extra, I can’t remember exactly how much, extra 50 or $60 a month towards the mortgage for the first year, maybe two years, that we were in the house. With her back in school, we really had to tighten our belts. We were not able to do that, but now she’s graduated. Just started her new job yesterday, in fact, and I’m really excited to be able to kind of go back to doing that. Putting even just a little bit extra towards that mortgage, I think, will help a lot.

Unforeseen Costs of Home Improvement

11:50 Emily: Yeah. Like you said, you get a lot of bang for your buck when you start paying down that mortgage at the beginning a little bit faster, at least until the point where you can get rid of PMI. I mean, that’s like a really big goal when you have a mortgage. To not be paying insurance on the behalf of the bank to insure against you, to not have to pay that makes a huge difference. Yeah. So, at least to get to that point. That would be amazing. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that your house has kind of turned into a little bit of a money pit, right? So, it’s not only the structure of the mortgage payment that you were learning as you got into the house, that, “Hey, not that much of this money is actually going towards principal.” But in fact, you’ve incurred a lot of other expenses that you did not really realize or factor in when you first got into the house. So, can you outline what those are, please?

12:38 Kevin: Absolutely. So, we were buying this house and we realized we wanted to do a bunch of stuff to it. So, right off the bat, as soon as we bought it, we knew we wanted to take out all the carpet because we hate carpet. And we wanted to replace a lot of the lighting fixtures because the house was built in kind of the mid-nineties. And it had those kind of classic, like little glass globe, things that were super cheap and in every house back then. So, we knew we wanted to replace those. We knew we wanted to paint a bunch of stuff. And that was when my wife and I kind of both realized that we don’t have those skills. We were both very nerdy in high school and college and we never got those, those kind of woodworking and electrician and, you know, I can barely use a screwdriver.

What You Pay is What You Get

13:29 Kevin: So, those skills are something that I really wish I would have had before I decided to buy a house. So, we rip out the carpet, and two big problems presented themselves. One, there were places where the floor was uneven and the carpet kind of hid that. But two, the stairs that we had hoped to just kind of refinish, were just kind of ugly two by fours that they had nailed down. So for the floors, we hired someone to come in and put in some vinyl flooring, which was, I was shocked at how much vinyl flooring costs. But you know, it’s still cheaper than hardwood. The stairs we replaced ourselves and the flooring was not installed properly. We just kind of found somebody on Craigslist or something and brought them in. And that was a really bad idea.

14:34 Kevin: If you’re going to hire someone to come in and work on your house, don’t go for the kind of cheap fly by night operation. Definitely, definitely try to find someone you trust or a company that has, you know, you can go on Yelp and find their reviews. Stuff like that. Then there were little expenses, like we had to replace the mailbox paint, because we wanted to paint a bunch of stuff. But yeah, when we first moved into the house, those were kind of these big expenses that we kind of sort of planned for. We had saved some money to the side that we weren’t putting into the down payment just for those improvements. But we went, I don’t want to say wildly over budget, but fairly over budget on that process.

Hurricanes and Fences and Air (Conditioning) – Oh, My!

15:30 Emily: So, you’re saying there were certain things that when you bought the house, you knew, okay, you hate carpets, you’re going to tear all those out. There were certain things that were obvious upon purchase you knew you were going to take care of, and you had prepared to some degree to do that with savings. What’s next? Were there other things that have come up in the years since then?

15:49 Kevin: So, we are in a coastal city and when we moved here we were told, “Don’t worry about hurricanes. Hurricanes never hit Savannah because we’re kind of tucked into the coast.” And then of course, since we’ve moved into the house, we’ve had two hurricanes. So, our fence, when we first moved in–and for a long time we had dogs. We are, are now dogless, unfortunately, rest in peace–but one of the reasons we liked this house is because it had a fence and a big area for the dogs to play in. But one of the hurricanes that came through kind of finished it off and knocked it down, or at least a large section of it down. So, we got our entire fence replaced which was thousands of dollars we weren’t planning on spending.

16:40 Kevin: And even though we had essentially hurricane insurance, the deductible on that is like almost $5,000, I want to say. So, it really wasn’t financially viable to use the insurance to fix that fence issue. The second problem is that the upper half of the second floor was an add-on. When they originally built the house, it was just the first floor and the main part of the second floor, the upper part was all attic space. The second owners of the house finished out that attic space and turned it into a fourth bedroom. What we didn’t know when we bought the house, and what the home inspection didn’t show, is that when they finished out that area, they had to move the indoor air conditioning unit. When they did that, instead of redoing the drain line, the way they should have, they just ran a new line from where it used to be to where it is now.

AC Repair Fiasco

17:50 Kevin: So, essentially, the drain line for the air conditioner goes from one part of the house, across the house to where the air conditioner used to be, down under the flooring of the attic, then back across the house to where the air conditioner is now to actually drain out of the house. We had no idea that had been done that way. So, we had all these problems with the air conditioner. Finally, we call in a good repair company and they come in and take a look at it. And they’re like, yeah, the drain lines are all bad. But also this air conditioner system is designed and built for a house of the old size. With the addition, you’ve added so many square feet that you really should move up, and it’s getting towards the end of its like 20-year life or whatever it was anyway.

18:45 Kevin: So, if we’re going to do all this work, it’d be a lot better in the long run to just replace the entire system. So, we said, “Okay.” So, we got a new indoor unit, a new outdoor unit. Ended up needing to rerun all of the ducts because when they had done the addition, they had messed up the duct work, new thermostats, whole nine yards. I think we spent $13,000 on essentially a $15,000 system. Then it started having problems and wouldn’t work. And we spent the next year replacing parts and getting service. And finally, finally, after a year they just replaced a huge chunk of the outdoor unit, all these things, but it took them a year in the South Georgia heat with no air conditioning before they finally figured out kind of what was wrong and how it was messing up. But essentially, we ended up with, as part of the replacements, they gave us improvements. So, essentially we got a $17,000 air conditioning system for $13,000. But that’s still $13,000 we hadn’t budgeted for, we hadn’t planned on. So, I think we got a six-year loan, interest-free, luckily, and that’s $230, $240 a month that we weren’t planning on. Which, right when my wife was in the middle of nursing school, was a very difficult financial burden to kind of take on unexpectedly.

20:31 Emily: Yeah. I was just going to ask how you actually did pay for that. I’m thinking about your mortgage payment and that whole system costs about what a year of housing cost for you. That’s I mean, a huge expense. So, glad to hear that you got some decent financing, it’s not going to cost you any extra in interest, but what a saga. And especially to live for a year without proper air conditioning, as you were describing. Are those the big things that you’ve had to lay out for the house?

21:00 Kevin: Those are kind of the big things.

Commercial

21:05 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early-career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics, or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers, even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

Rule of Thumb for Annual Home Expenses

22:03 Emily: There’s a rule of thumb–and you might laugh at this, but maybe you’ve heard it before–there’s a rule of thumb that you should expect to spend on average on your home 1% of the value of the house per year. So, like average 1% of the value of the house per year on home maintenance repairs and so forth. Sounds like you probably have blown that out of the water every year you’ve lived there, right?

22:25 Kevin: Yeah. Oh yeah. So, the downside is we now have our garage doors, we have two garage doors, that need to be replaced because it’s Savannah, Georgia. Everything is wet here, constantly. I mean, it’s just moisture, moisture, moisture. It’s ridiculous. So, our garage doors are rotting out and we need to replace those. Our deck, for similar reasons. It’s not bad, but we’re anticipating that we’re going to need to replace it in the next couple of years. So, there’s more thousands of dollars of stuff that we’re kind of dreading and preparing for. The other things that have really shocked me are things like–we’re technically outside of the city limits, right? So, we have to pay for fire and EMS services directly. Instead of it being paid for through our city or County taxes, we have to pay, I want to say, it’s just under $300 a year to the fire and EMS service to come out. We have to pay for termite inspection yearly, or termite service yearly, which is hundreds of dollars a year. So, all these things have really combined. We didn’t think about it. Going from an apartment to a house you expect, you know, okay, rent, mortgage. There are going to be taxes and interest and principal. But then it seems like there are all these other fees and taxes and payments for things that you would never expect, having spent your entire life, or at least entire adult life, in apartments and renting places. It’s incredible.

Lessons Learned: Do It Right the First Time, Due Diligence

24:29 Emily: Yeah. I think a couple of the lessons that I’m hearing from this, that maybe the listener can apply. Two things. One is do the work right the first time.

24:38 Kevin: Yes.

24:39 Emily: Invest in quality from the beginning, and hopefully you won’t have problems or the replacement costs or whatever won’t come up so soon. Part of that was decisions that you’ve made, part of that was the previous homeowners’ decisions, but pay for it to be done right the first time. And the second one is–maybe, I don’t know, it sounds like you did what any reasonable person would do in terms of buying the home in that you lived in that neighborhood for a year prior to buying and you think you know where everything is, you know where are the schools, whatever you’re considering in your home-buying purchase. Just by living nearby, you’ve learned a lot of those things. But it sounds like you didn’t investigate–and why would you have?–the fact that these services were being billed directly instead of through the tax system, or all these other line items. Or, you know, maybe if you’d understood more about flood insurance, you would’ve told your real estate agent, “No, I’m not interested in anything next to a creek or whatever.”

25:37 Emily: I mean, those are not things you’re going to naturally pick up just by living somewhere. You’re learning this the very hard way. And so, I’m really pleased to be able to share your story with the listeners. Just say like, there are probably going to be more expensive than you think there will be. So, just plan for the unexpected, right? And prepare for that. But maybe do a little bit more due diligence to try to figure out what the peculiarities are of this city that you’re choosing to buy in. Like you were saying, well, people told you hurricanes never hit Savannah. Turns out, at least for the recent years, that hasn’t been the case. But I don’t know, I think you did what any reasonable person would do, so I’m not criticizing you. But I’m just really glad to hear this for anyone else who’s coming up on a home-buying purchase to do a little bit more to figure out what all these little nuanced expenses are going to be.

Do Not Skimp on Home Inspection

26:24 Kevin: Absolutely. The other thing I want to point out is home inspections. Do not skimp on the home inspection. We had a fairly decent one, but they missed a lot of these things where if they’d have been just a little bit more paying attention, a little bit more thorough, we would have known about these things in the contract negotiation process, not a year or two years or three years later. So, do not skimp out on the home inspection.

26:57 Emily: Yeah, definitely. So, I live in Seattle, so in the market here, at least in recent years, it’s been a sellers market, right? And a lot of people, as part of the bid that they enter, they waive inspections. It’s just something that no one wants to hold up the process, but even if you have to go that route based on what’s standard in the market, still do the inspection. Even if you don’t have it as part of the contingency or whatever, still do it so you know all these things upfront, like you were saying.

How Does Being an Academic Affect Homeownership?

27:28 Emily: So, I’m curious about how your position as a faculty member, as an academic, has played into these homeownership decisions or your ability to handle these things, I guess. So, it sounds like you got this tenure track position. Despite a little bit of upheaval with your university, you’ve maintained that and you bought a home where you got your tenure track position, probably what anyone would try to do, if possible soon after. So, yeah. How does being an academic affect this whole homeownership situation?

28:03 Kevin: When I was in grad school, I kind of bought into the belief that if you can find a really nice, good tenure track job you can stay at that university for a long time. Decades, if not your entire career. At the university I went to and the department I was in, there were a lot of professors that had been there for 20, 30 years. So, I was kind of expecting that kind of experience. So, when I moved here and was ready to buy the house, I was very much in this mindset of, “My family will be at this university working here for a long, long, long time.” So, in the University system of Georgia, you have an option between a pension system or a 401k.

29:01 Kevin: And if you’re going to be there longer than 10 years, the pension system is really the better option. So, that’s what I chose because I thought, “Oh, I’ll be here at least 10 years, no big deal. I’ll buy a house. I’ll be here at least the five or six years that it takes to really get enough equity in a home to make a profit when moving.” But I’ve come to kind of find out and realize that job-hopping and transferring positions is almost, or just as important in academia, as it is in private industry. Growing up in Austin, there were a lot of tech people. And tech people were all talking about, “Oh, you’ve got to move jobs every five years or every however many years.” And I thought academia was kind of exempt from that. And it comes to find out, it really isn’t. It’s depressing when you’ve been working at the same university for four or five years and they make new hires, straight out of grad school, hired at well more than you’re making. So, I wish I was able to move or at least have the possibility of moving. I wouldn’t necessarily want to leave. I love my job. I like living here. I like the university I’m at, but being so tied financially, through both the house and the pension, to this one job in this one place is something that even if I am going to stay here for the next 10 or 20 years, it’s still distressing. And it makes me feel like I don’t have options. It makes me feel like I’m stuck. Even if I want to be here, that’s still kind of a bad feeling, you know?

The Golden Handcuffs

30:55 Emily: Yeah. I definitely understand that. You know, sometimes people refer to the benefits or something that a job gives you as golden handcuffs. So, it’s like you feel, you feel tied to your job because you don’t want to lose the great compensation or the benefits, whatever. The pension is a little bit like that for you, but the house is on the other side of that. That’s not so much golden handcuffs as it is kind of an anchor. Until you get this equity up to a certain point, it’s going to be very–I mean, it’s not impossible–but you may take a loss, you may have to bring money to the table. Something, if you were to try to move without having a lot of years under your belt, paying this mortgage and getting the equity up there.

Would You Have Done Anything Differently?

31:36 Emily: So, I definitely understand what you’re saying. And I think it’s really great insight for other people who are looking to enter the job market that we think a lot of times as getting that tenure track position as like, “I’ve made it, this is it. That’s all I needed to do, and I’m going to be set for the rest of my career because I landed that one position.” And what you’re saying is, “Hey, that’s good for the first few years, but don’t think that you’re never going to apply for another job to advance in the way you want to.” That you might not have to move around, as you said, like what happens in the private sector. So, I’m really glad for that insight as well. And just, I don’t know, would you have done anything differently? I mean, knowing this. Now that you know this about your job and your feelings about it, would you still have purchased the house? Because it still kind of seems like the thing to do, right?

32:26 Kevin: Yeah, it does. It depends on what the alternative is. If the alternative was, you know, renting, I don’t think I would have. The one thing I might’ve done differently is look for a house with fewer of these incidental costs, right? So, if I wasn’t so close to the water, I wouldn’t have to do the flood insurance. If I wasn’t outside the city limits, I wouldn’t have to pay for the extra fire and protection stuff like that. I wish I would have known about those things in order to judge where to buy and which house to buy. Right? Does that make sense? So, it’s not that I regret buying a house. It’s that I regret not understanding exactly what the cost of buying this particular house are.

Best Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

33:13 Emily: Right, right. Yeah. Thanks for your insight into that. So, two questions as we wrap up here. The first is what is your best piece of advice for another early-career PhD? It could be related to the conversation we’ve been having, could be something else. What is that?

33:28 Kevin: Start putting money away as fast as you can. Start saving. It can be a 401k, it can be putting extra money towards just a stock trading account. Also, speaking of stock trading accounts, I found the Fidelity, I think it’s a bank, but it has a stock trading app thing. And they have a credit card where you get 2% cash back from every purchase that goes straight into the stock trading account. So, I put all my purchases on that and pay it off in full every month. So, I never pay a dime in interest, but I still get 2% into this longterm savings account. And then once I build up enough money from that I can purchase a stock or an exchange-traded fund or something like that. And then I never touch that. That’s all just socked away money. That’s essentially free money. As long as you’re paying off that card every month, that’s essentially free money. So, definitely do something like that. It can be a travel card that gives you miles on an airline. But make sure it’s paid off in full every month.

Where Can People Find You?

34:50 Emily: And second question, last one here, is where can people find you?

34:55 Kevin: So, I’m on Twitter with the username @CyberCrimeDoc, and I’m on YouTube with the channel name, Arresting Developments. And I actually do have a group I just started not too long ago called Americans for Election Reform. It’s a big political focused on elections and election security and making sure all Americans vote and all votes count. And that is on Facebook and Twitter.

35:29 Emily: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Kevin, and for telling us this very easy to learn from story.

35:35 Kevin: Absolutely. Thank you so much having me. I really appreciate it.

Outtro

35:38 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Postdoc Has a System for Debt Repayment That You Can Follow as Well

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Suba Narasimhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. Suba and her husband each brought debt into their marriage, and once they both had full incomes, they decided to tackle it together. Suba presents a step-by-step plan for anyone at the start of a debt repayment journey. Emily and Suba discuss in detail how to handle credit card debt, including whether to pay credit cards off with student loans or 0% interest promotional credit cards. Suba doesn’t follow the debt snowball or debt avalanche methods exactly, but rather has mixed the two for a custom solution. Suba emphasizes the importance of being kind to yourself while repaying debt and adopting a nonjudgmental attitude toward your and your partner’s debt.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Suba: You have to think about this as part of your life. And if you have the ability to preplan and save some money, have a little bit of savings, and also just assume that maybe you’ll have to take on more loan debt. How much could you afford given whatever your loan burden is now?

Introduction

00:26 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 six, episode five, and today my guest is Dr. Suba Narasimhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. Despite maintaining a debt-free status until midway through her PhD, Suba eventually took on both student loans and credit card debt due to financial emergencies and adverse situations. When she started her postdoc position, Suba and her husband decided to tackle their debt head-on, even though it was very daunting and anxiety-producing. Suba presents a step-by-step plan for anyone who wants to eliminate their debt and shares her own decisions throughout. Listen through the episode to hear her encouraging words on maintaining a positive, nonjudgmental attitude during debt repayment. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Suba Narasimhan.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Suba Narasimhan. Suba will be telling us about her debt repayment journey, which I’m so excited to dive into that topic with her. So, Suba, say “Hi” to the audience, please.

01:35 Suba: Hi! Hi, Emily. Thank you for having me.

01:38 Emily: Thanks so much for volunteering to come on. I actually wanted to tell the audience how we met, which was a couple years ago. So, I gave a seminar at UCLA and Suba came up to me afterwards and she said, “I’m so interested in what you do. I kind of want to do what you do. Can we talk further about this?” And we did. We went and we had lunch, and we had this wonderful conversation. In fact, Suba is the one who encouraged me to start this podcast. So, if you’re a fan of the podcast, you can thank Suba for encouraging me at that point when I was really still considering whether it was something I wanted to go for. So, anyway, I just want to say that if you, an audience member, ever see me at your university or at a conference or if you hear that I’m coming, please come up and introduce yourself and identify yourself as a podcast listener or a mailing list subscriber or whatever you are and I would love to talk to you. If I have time in my schedule, I will hang out with you one on one if it’s at all possible. I love to meet people who are in my audience and consuming my content. I want to hear your insights. So, we’re getting Suba’s insights today. I’m really excited about that. So, Suba, will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

02:48 Suba: Absolutely. And I have to say, Emily’s a great lunch mate, so you all should totally do what she asked you to and come up and chat with her about finance. So, I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, and it’s a really enjoyable experience. I am actually originally from the South and wanted to return to the South. And so that’s kind of how I ended up at Emory. I am in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education. So, that’s a School of Public Health Department. Yeah, it’s a great job.

Where Did You Do Undergrad?

03:31 Emily: Wonderful. And where did you do your undergrad? So, I know PhD at UCLA, and you’re at Emory now for your postdoc. Where was undergrad?

03:37 Suba: So, for my degree, you tend to do a master’s as well before you go on to your PhD. And so I did both my undergrad and my master’s at UNC Chapel Hill. Go Heels! I know, Emily, your rival school.

03:55 Emily: I was going to say, I think we were in the Triangle at the same time for at least a few years. But yes, I will allow that on my podcast. I’m a generous host. Okay. So, let’s talk about your debt repayment journey, which starts with a debt accumulation journey. So, tell us about that phase of your life.

Debt Accumulation Journey

04:12 Suba: So, I was really, honestly, I was very fortunate. I was really good with money for a long time and I was lucky to have had financial help from my parents during college and to have gotten both through my master’s and most of my PhD without accumulating any type of debt, consumer or student loan debt. And it was around the third year of my schooling in LA where I had a ton of unforeseen circumstances happen. So, I had some family illnesses. I had a lot of different difficult experiences happen and it was an emotionally trying time. And then it also became kind of a desperate time in terms of money. And even though I was working quite a bit, I just wasn’t totally making ends meet. And I think that that’s a very common experience for PhDs and can be one way that you really get into using credit cards or using student loans as a way to kind of just live your life. And being a PhD student is also a time in your life where you have to take a break from what might be a better-paying job to finish your degree. And I wasn’t one of these people, but I also think that there are a lot of people out there that probably are also very reliant on just their stipends to make ends meet. So, I think this is a pretty common situation to happen.

Importance of an Emergency Fund

05:44 Emily: We’re going to talk through how you’re remedying that situation. But just for anyone who hasn’t yet come upon that emergency situation in their life, if there’s any way that you can create some margin right now, some cash savings to help you kind of buffer through something like that, please, please take the opportunity to do so. So you don’t have to have this extreme reaction once an emergency does occur. And like you said, the thing about emergencies is that they’re rarely just financial, right? Something else has gone really poorly in some other area of life. Maybe it’s a huge emotional problem or a health problem or something like that. And so not only are you dealing with like logistics and emotions and just your routines being thrown off and your relationships, then you also have this financial component. So, at least what you can try to do for yourself, if at all possible, is to make the financial component of the emergency less of a thing so you can focus your energy on all these other areas of your life that need it at that time as well. So, that’s my soapbox. Okay.

Your PhD is Part of Your Life Journey

06:43 Suba: No, no, that’s a good soap box because one other thing I was going to say is I counsel a lot of students who are trying to enter PhD programs. And one of the pieces of advice I give them is something that I was given before I started my PhD. And that’s to think of your PhD journey or your PhD work as part of your whole life. And so, to also think about your finances at that time. So, one thing that was positive in this was that I had calculated out how much student loans I could take and feel a little bit less burden. So, the consumer debt I took on was unforeseen, but the student loan debt I had already pre-calculated what I thought was the maximum I could do in terms of payments if I got what I would consider just being a postdoc, honestly, in terms of finances is one of the lower-paying jobs that you can take because you’re usually on an NIH salary scale. So, that’s also my soapbox. You have to think about this as part of your life. And if you have the ability to preplan and save some money, have a little bit of savings, and also just assume that maybe you’ll have to take on more loan debt. How much could you afford given whatever your loan burden is now?

08:13 Emily: Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that because I think that if graduate students are not accustomed to taking out student loans, like maybe they haven’t done it since undergrad or they didn’t even do it in undergrad they might not think of turning to student loans in the case of some emergency expenses popping up. But it sounds like you did, like you took on some credit card debt, but then you also were using student loans to get you through this situation. So, can you talk about some of the advantages and also the disadvantages of choosing to use student loans versus just accumulating more credit card debt?

Student Loans vs. Credit Card Debt

08:47 Suba: Absolutely. I mean, one is that your interest rates–it’s always better to ask your university what type of emergency loan protections they have, which all universities do have that. And you can go to the scholarships and financial aid department and ask them about these short-term loan borrowing programs. And they are a lot more straightforward and they’re a lot more willing to work with you than a credit card company, which is a for-profit company, would be. So, I would say, that’s important. And the positive thing about student loans is that there are certain things, if you’re taking out federal loans, that you have access to which is the counseling components and the grace periods. And you can, eventually, if you do have student loans from undergrad or your master’s or some other type, you can roll them together and refinance them, and going through that is relatively painless.

09:54 Suba: And this is not necessarily something you can do with credit card debt. Right? What I would caution people against is if the student loans that you have to take out are private student loans, that then again gets you into this territory of consumer debt. So, I would really think about the terms and conditions of any private student loans that you might have to take out because they are often better than credit cards, but they still come with a lot of stipulations and issues. The problem with taking out a student loan is, unlike credit card debt, if there is something in the future where you have to declare bankruptcy, which could happen–happens to people for all kinds of reasons–you can’t discharge that debt at this point. And you also have to be really cautious if you’re thinking about maybe doing a public student forgiveness program. Sorry, public, what do you call it again?

10:52 Emily: Public service loan forgiveness.

Know the Terms and Conditions

10:54 Suba: Yeah. Which a lot of people in the medical sciences do. You hear a lot about people in medical and nursing programs, and there are a lot of people who are going to go into a nonprofit sector that think about that and it’s still a really viable option. It’s just you have to know the terms and conditions of that program going in so you can’t add to your debt burden without planning for how you might want to pay them off.

11:20 Emily: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with what you’re saying. I mean, when we’re thinking about credit cards versus student loans, federal student loans or private student loans, usually you’re looking at a lower interest rate for the student loans versus the credit cards. So, that’s attractive. But as you said, there’s a real danger point, which is if you ever get to the point where you are thinking about declining bankruptcy, you can’t get rid of those student loans. So, it’s a gamble, either way you go for it. But I really liked your suggestion of trying to access your university’s emergency loan system, which I don’t know about all, but I know that many universities do have that. And it’s certainly spreading, it’s a popular program that’s coming to more and more places.

Emergency Loans on Short Notice

12:00 Suba: And what I was going to say is you can also get those loans in very short periods of time. That’s why they’re considered emergency loans. So, if you know that there’s something that’s really looming on the horizon and even it’s maybe something that might happen to you next week, that could be something you can talk to a counselor about. And I think universities are really trying to be more sensitive about the fact that students, especially PhD students, are going through, you know, life challenges.

12:32 Emily: Yeah. And the thing about student loans is that they do take some time to apply for and acquire. So, it’s not a quick solution, but it might be something that you can set up if you know that you’re going to be holding debt for a longer period of time. I mean, not having to make payments on it, being in deferment while you’re still a graduate student is a really great benefit if it’s just not something that you are able to pay off in the moment. But of course, then you’re not paying it off. Right? So, the interest is accumulating. So, pluses and minuses there. It sounded like you ended up with a combination, then, of student loans and credit card debt.

Life Happens, Cost-of-Living Matters

13:02 Suba: I did, yeah. And one of the issues was, I was going through a lot of stuff and I just didn’t calculate how much I was spending. And I was having to deal with pretty significant emergencies that kind of made me have to travel and things like that. And so, that was how kind of this situation ended up happening. And then I also had some life circumstance changes that were great. Like I moved in with a partner. But you know, even that, any transition, honestly, is tied to money. And I’m living in Los Angeles. Another really big issue that might not be salient for people who live in maybe smaller places or less expensive places, is that the cost of living and especially the cost of rent goes up really quickly and sometimes without a lot of notice.

14:01 Suba: So, I also had to figure out my living situation and move apartments. So, I had a lot of things that really had nothing to do with my school life, which was going fine. And also, I did have a lot of financial help from school and from my fellowships and things like that. I was a fully-funded student. So, these are all, I think in an attempt not to scare anybody, but more to say we’ve got to think about the shocks and the issues that might come up and maybe prepare for them a little bit.

Inflection Point: Debt Talks

14:39 Emily: Totally, totally agree. So, thanks for going through that part of your story. At some point, you were no longer accumulating debt. In fact, you decided to turn it around and start paying that debt down. So, can you talk about the inflection point?

14:52 Suba: Right. And I think that was fairly recent. So, about a year ago, which coincided with me graduating from my PhD program, I also got married, which was great. And then I moved down here to start my postdoctoral fellowship. And my now husband also had a full-time job. And so, we said we think we want to start this next chapter of our lives. And one of the issues that we had sort of minimally talked about during our time together but hadn’t really deeply delved into was putting our finances together. And so, in having that conversation, we sort of said, “Hey, I think it’s time that we start to think really deeply and then have a clear plan about what we’re going to do and get rid of the debt that we are both carrying.”

15:46 Emily: Can you talk about how you went through that and how you tackled it, maybe for one of your peers listening here who is also facing a mountain of debt, a lot of different types of debt and doesn’t quite know how to start?

Tackling Debt Conversations

15:58 Suba: Yeah. I think the first step is to have a conversation and it’s usually one person says something like, “I’m totally scared about this debt, or I have so much debt and I don’t know what we’re going to do.” So, again, we opened up our finances to each other and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve decided to share a life together. What’s the most important thing that you want to do in the next five years? Like, what is the most important thing you feel like you want to spend money on? And why do you think, you know, getting rid of that debt would help?”

16:32 Suba: And so, having that discussion really made it sort of a positive and nonjudgmental environment to start having these conversations about money, which can be really anxiety-producing. And so, for me, making up these spreadsheets and having a plan and stuff was really energizing. I was like, “Okay, I am solving an issue.” For my husband, it was super anxiety-producing. It just created this feeling of like, “I don’t make enough money. I don’t know what to do.” You know? And so, also stopping at certain parts of this process. It may take, you know, more than one conversation to get to this point. And saying, “Okay, you know, the whole goal of this is not to stigmatize either one of us for bringing what we brought into the relationship, right?”

Dreaming, Not Blaming, Together

17:20 Emily: I like that – I just want to jump in and say, I really like that you started that conversation and are framing it around–I’m going to phrase it differently than you did–around dreaming together, right? Because as you just said, it puts this whole thing in a positive light. It’s not, “Oh, you know, sniping at each other, blaming each other for, you know, what’s happened in the past.” It’s, “No, like we’re standing together, we’re looking to the future. What do we want our bright future to look like? Let’s agree on that. And, okay. What are the steps we have to take to get to that point? Now, let’s tackle it.” But as you said, for some people it can feel like such a big thing to be working on. So challenging, like for your husband that it sounds like he wanted to shy away from it. Right? Whereas you wanted to charge toward it.

18:04 Suba: Yeah, it took different conversations to get to a point where–you know, and the honest truth is, he had less debt than I did. And so, the way I was feeling was, you know, a lot of blame and kind of shame. Or like, why, how did I bring this into our home, you know, kind of thing? And I think that that is a pretty common feeling for a lot of people. I don’t know anybody who’s had this conversation that hasn’t felt all kinds of feelings about it, you know? And so, I think from those big picture conversations you can also kind of talk about priorities. So, maybe one of you likes to travel more than the other. And so, setting up this idea of, “Okay, we’re going to decide that we want to take this many vacations a year or maybe we want to go to this many friends’ weddings a year, that’s important to us. We want to go home for Christmas or for New Year’s or things like that.” You know, like these are kinds of things that flow out of those conversations. What’s important to you, what’s your priority?

Allocating Money Toward Retirement

19:15 Suba: And we disagree on lots of things about spending money. It’s just we’ve allotted the parts of the money that we agree on so that we have this freedom, you know. So, one interesting thing about us is actually we don’t have a joint bank account. We still have separate bank accounts, and we’ve discussed maybe, but we have a joint savings account. And so, we’ve discussed how we allot money into our joint savings. And then we’ve also even talked about how we are going to allocate money towards our retirements because we look at those as shared money. And then after we’ve paid the bulk of our bills or whatever, the leftover that we haven’t allocated is our own money to spend the way that we feel. So, I think it’s also a balance between getting yourselves on the same page, making a shared priority list and plan, but then also saying, “Well, I don’t need to know and account for every dime that you’re spending. If you like to spend money on X thing and I don’t understand it, that’s okay. I don’t need to.” So, it’s not about controlling the other person, either.

Commercial

20:34 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15-minute call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time. I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now, back to our interview.

Cataloging Debts

21:21 Emily: Okay, so first step was, “Let’s look at the picture. Okay. Let’s dig our heads out of the sand and look at what is the debt.” Okay. So, what did you do after that point?

21:30 Suba: Absolutely. We cataloged all the debts and the cataloging of this plan. So, essentially, we did create a full spreadsheet at this point of all of the debts, the interest rates, and what types of debt they were. So, was it student loans or consumer debts? And then when interest rates would either change or when they would kick in. And in terms of the consumer debt, one thing that I did was I called the credit card companies and I tried to get my interest rates lowered and be as nice as possible. And it did work for a few of them, actually, honestly. So, don’t be afraid to ask. The worst that can happen is that they say no and you can ask to be kicked up to people who have a little bit more power than maybe the receptionist that you talked to on the phone. And if you do it in a kind way, it works out. And then I also looked at the balance transfer offers that some of my credit cards had. And I would not say, like, open another credit card to do this. I would say, if you already have existing cards, many of them have balance transfer offers and they do charge a fee. So, weigh that fee against the amount that you save in interest by paying it off in the 0% period.

Strategically Using 0% Financing

22:54 Emily: I’m going to ask you a little bit further about this because I’ve never gone through this process myself. So, I want to know a little bit better. So, what you’re talking about is, you have an existing account open, and that account, you know, you see that they’re offering a 0% financing deal, 0% period. And so, what you’re doing then is you’re using that financing to pay off a different credit card balance, right? So, you’re sort of transferring the balance over to the other card that you had open that had that 0% offer. And then the offer is, “Okay, we’re not going to charge you interest for a given period of time.” Usually, it’s like 12 months or 18 months or something like that. What was it in your case?

23:28 Suba: It was 18 months. I only did the ones that were 18 or 22 months. So, the longest period. But you have to do this very strategically. What you don’t ever want to do is to be using these as another crutch so that you can kind of just not pay things off. So, I would then strategically plan to pay per month this amount off a few months before the end of the period. And so, that also gets to my next point. Part of after cataloging your debts, you have to catalog also the salaries that are coming in and the expenses. So, you have to see what your margin of expenses to your income is so that you can make a reasonable plan for your debt payoff.

Making the Minimum Credit Card Payments

24:23 Suba: You shouldn’t use any of these strategies in terms of your credit cards until you figure out, “Can I at least make the minimum payments on my credit cards? And then now I want to make more of a payment on either my credit card or my student loan.” If you’re having trouble making the minimum payments, I would absolutely say call your credit card companies and tell them, “Hey, I’m having a lot of trouble making my minimum payments.” Credit card companies want your money, and it’s better off that you don’t miss your payments because that can affect your entire credit history really negatively. So, these are, these are kind of things you have to do in tandem with one another. You have to catalog your debts and the times in which your debts need to be paid off. But then you also will have to catalog your expenses versus your income to see what’s a comfortable and reasonable amount for you to put towards paying off your debt every month. So, just to say, you had asked me before if I used a debt snowball versus debt avalanche. I think we are a little bit of a combination.

Debt Snowball vs. Debt Avalanche

25:35 Emily: Let’s pause and define that for the listeners who don’t know. I’ll just say, so in the debt snowball and the debt avalanche methods, which are these two very popular methods for repaying debt, repaying multiple debts, you usually pay the minimums on everything and then you make a list of your top priority to your lowest priority debts. And with all the remaining money you have to throw towards debt, you throw it at your top priority. This is in both systems. In the debt snowball method, the top priority is the debt with the lowest balance. And in the debt avalanche method, the top priority is the debt with the highest interest rate.

26:11 Emily: So, debt snowball, you move from smallest balance to largest balance, paying each one off in full. And then moving on to the next one. Debt avalanche method, paying the highest interest rate first. And then once you pay that one-off, completely moving on to the one with the next highest interest rate. The debt snowball method, the sort of reasoning behind it is that it’s very psychologically motivating to be able to cross that small debt, that first small debt off your list and you know, feel like you’re making a lot of progress and move on to the next one. Versus the debt avalanche method is mathematically the most optimal way to go about things. If you were to throw the exact same amount of money into both methods, the debt avalanche method would get you out of debt the fastest. So, go ahead and explain, between those two extreme models, what you actually did.

26:53 Suba: So, I’m still in the process of this. So, I also don’t want to say, “Look at me, I’m debt-free, and I could give you all this advice.” No, we’re still in the process of this and it’s been really fruitful for us. But we started off with the debt avalanche method. So, we wanted to pay off these highest interest debts first and within the reason of the amount of debt pay off that we could do per month. Right? And then when we would get to a certain threshold, so maybe it was a thousand dollars or $500, we would pay off that card or that debt in full. And that gave us, on some months, that would give you just like an extra boost. You know, it just makes you feel good to see that zero balance. And when you pay off a piece of a student loan, they send you a congratulations email. So, that doesn’t hurt too badly, either.

Prioritizing Interest Rates

27:46 Emily: So, I want to clarify because some listeners may have this question. So, if you have at least one, maybe multiple credit cards where you’re currently in a zero interest rate promotional period, does that become a low priority for you or is that still a high priority because the eventual interest rate is going to most likely be quite high? Can you talk a little bit about that?

28:09 Suba: So, I prioritize by the time that the interest rate would change and turn into the higher debt rates. So, say it was January 1st, I would make a plan where I would subtract two months from that, so November, and then I would calculate how much per month I would need to pay on that card to pay it off in full by that November. So, it doesn’t necessarily become a low priority or a higher priority. For some debts, you can’t change the interest rate, right? So, any of those debts would be the debts I would pay off the soonest if I can, or pay off the largest amount. I also thought a lot about how much debt I was carrying per card.

28:57 Suba: So, in one situation, I essentially didn’t have that many credit cards, right? So, one of my cards was more than 30% utilized, which is a lot, and that’s not very good for your credit score, either. So, my goal was to get that less, like lower than 30%. So, I prioritize basically based on the highest debt, and then when the interest rate would change from 0% to whatever it was. And it’s also really important, I don’t want any of your listeners to like go willy nilly and start moving their money around to 0% interest credit cards. That’s a strategy to be used when you need extra time and you have to really make a very clear plan that’s very reasonable to get that done and see what the fee is versus how much benefit you get. So, the fees always range from either 2% to like a minimum of a certain amount of dollars. So, you have to see what that is for each of your, you know, things. And I would definitely call credit card companies first and see if you can lower the interest rate before you change anything.

Automating Debt Payments

30:21 Emily: Okay. What’s your next thing that you did, or your tip for someone else facing this challenge?

30:27 Suba: So, I think, you know, I talked about how you should catalog your expenses towards your income and then figure out what’s a percentage of your paycheck per month that you’re going to put to your debt. And then you want to automate that. So, you basically want to be making a specific payment. And you can either do that, if it’s on your credit card, you can put the payment to a specific date or if it’s to your student loan servicer you can make sure that the check for your student loan comes out of your bank account at the same time.

31:02 Suba: So, you want your income to come in and then that money to go out almost immediately. So, you almost don’t see it, right? So, the reason I say, you know, and this isn’t like news, you know. Automating your finances helps so much because it lowers the stress of you having to keep track of it. But it also tricks you a little bit, psychologically. You never see that money after your paycheck comes in. So, you don’t feel like you have it, right? It’s already gone. It’s already been pledged to something. So, I think that helps.

31:39 Emily: I totally, totally agree. I’m a huge fan of automating, paying yourself first. Absolutely. Go ahead.

Paying Yourself First

31:42 Suba: Yeah. And, you know, there’s been a little bit of discussion sometimes too towards this idea of paying yourself first, right? And I think a lot about that. When you’re starting your first jobs after your PhD and even, you know, some postdocs and fellowships allow you to pay into their retirement system. If there’s a way you can think about putting some level of money per month into retirement, even if it’s just $50 a month or something like that. And that’s something that doesn’t seem astronomical. That’s also an important part of this calculation. And I think there’s a lot of debate on whether you should go whole hog and pay off your debt first and then think about your retirement. And people have all kinds of philosophies. I’m, you know, a moderate. And so, I think you have to live your life. So, you want to try to take advantage of the systems, the positive systems, that you have at the same time. So, my husband and I also looked at our retirement plans and factored in how much money we could put pretax and then put post-tax, if that was possible, into Roth IRAs. So, we thought about that in this whole system as well.

32:58 Emily: Absolutely. We are focusing on talking about debt right now, but once you get certain interest rates of debt eliminated, once those rates, you know, anything you have remaining is sort of in, as you were kind of just saying, a more moderate range, maybe six, seven, 8% or less. That’s the kind of time where you can start saying, “Okay, maybe we should do some retirement savings, not just the debt repayment.” But, to emphasize, if we’re talking about credit card debt, get rid of that credit card debt. Okay, go for that first.

Plan for the Future

33:25 Suba: That should be number one. Absolutely. And I think the next thing that we did then is to think about possible future changes and issues that could come up. So, you know, changes could be things like, “Well we have to prepare for making sure we go visit our family during the holidays or that we have to buy Christmas presents or things like that.” So, kind of trying to figure out what are the issues that we have had in the past that we didn’t prepare for? How can we prepare for them now? So that, you know, that’s an ongoing conversation that’s part of this.

34:08 Emily: I think that’s a really important thing to bring up, especially again for grad students and postdocs who don’t have large amounts of cash flow going through their bank accounts. Because there are going to be months where you have some larger expenses. So, to be able to save up that cash, to handle that at that time, that’s going to prevent you from, again, turning back to the credit card. So, it’s still kind of about debt repayment or debt avoidance to have that cash saved up, again for people who couldn’t easily absorb one of those large expenses in your monthly cash flow.

Small Changes, Big Differences

34:40 Suba: Absolutely. And even if it’s just, you know, a small amount that you put away every month. Again, we’re not having to think about these things in huge dollar amounts. I think sometimes what gets people a little bit down or can be very frustrating is this idea that these have to be very large amounts to make a difference. They don’t. Even if you have a buffer of a hundred dollars and you don’t put that hundred dollars on a high-interest credit card, that’s better. That’s why people have emergency funds. And so, it’s going to take a little bit of preplanning and it’s going to take some time, too. And even if you don’t have much of a buffer and that’s not something you’re able to do, that’s about the situation as well. So, that’s okay as well. It’s just you plan, you say, “Okay, when these credit cards are paid off or when the student loan is paid off, then that money that I’ve allocated towards the credit cards and student loans will now go to another priority.”

35:50 Emily: Exactly. And this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation where we were talking about looking forward into the future. You know, “What does my life, what do I want my life to look like this year, in the next five years, whatever it is?” Part of that is planning, “Okay, I’m going to be doing this type of traveling.” Guess what? Holiday gift-giving season comes up every single year at the same time. We know it’s there. So, yeah, just looking even ahead a few months or a year and just figuring out, “Okay, what are these life things that are going to happen?” They have to be part of the plan as well.

Positive Rewards (Treat Yo’ Self)

36:19 Suba: And part of this too is, just as you prepare for these issues that might come up, you’ve also got to give yourself positive small rewards. And so, what my husband and I did was we thought about things that we could give ourselves as a reward that didn’t involve us spending money. So, maybe once we got to a certain place, we went to like a new park in a city. And you can also prepare in your budget if there are things that cost money, like you want to buy a coffee every morning, you know, you put that into your budget. That’s your small reward for living life as a human being. I think my whole debt payoff philosophy is that you’ve still got to live your life, you know, in the most enjoyable way that you can.

37:12 Suba: Yeah. And another thing is, you can have a potluck with people without telling them the reason why. You know, like that’s another thing. Sometimes you can create a celebration and you don’t necessarily have to tell them, “Well, it’s because I paid 5% of my consumer debt off.” Right? Like that’s still a way to mark something positive and create a positive memory. And you know, things like that, they don’t cost a lot. And so, that also helped keep us motivated. So, we would say, “Okay, well we will save this treat until we get to this point.” And we tried to vary the different kinds of things that we would do.

Business Meeting Times

37:59 Suba: And one of the last things is we created kind of a business meeting time. So, I think one of the issues that happens when you start to get into this mindset of paying off debt or tracking things is that you think about it a lot. And especially if you’re somebody like me who really likes spreadsheets, you’ll be looking at it on your computer all the time and thinking about ways you could optimize. That’s not the best, I think, way to go about it because it can also become negative. You can start to look at the numbers and feel like things are not really moving that much. So, we would create a business meeting time when we would talk about these money-related issues or debt payoff issues. And then the rest of the time we would try not to bring it up. So, having that protected time to talk about it also meant that your entire relationship isn’t really consumed by it. And then also your own thinking throughout the day when you’re working and things are happening, you’re not thinking about it all the time.

39:10 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I’ve heard the strategy of having a business meeting with your spouse or whatever. And I’ve also definitely heard the strategy of compartmentalizing difficult subjects into, as you said, a time on the calendar. Like you know it’s designated that you’re going to think about it or you’re going to talk about it at that time. It helps it from bleeding into all the rest of your life. So, I really like your combination of those two ideas.

Make it a Positive Environment

39:31 Suba: Yeah. I think when it can kind of create anxiety and worry, and if anyone is prone to anxiety or worry, it could just like snowball into a lot. And you want to treat that time to be a time when other things are not as stressful. So, if you know, maybe like it’s after your kids have gone to bed or it’s on a Sunday because you know like on Sundays you don’t have as much to do, and you want to make that situation as positive as possible. So, sometimes we would like open a beer and sit down or something like that. Just like, make it a positive environment and start off the discussion in a positive way as best you can because these topics are difficult. And every month you may not see progress, right? So, there are things that happen. That’s the other thing. You may have all of these great plans in place and then one month you have to cut down a little bit on paying debt because you have another expense, you know? And so, those are kind of the times when you can have these conversations.

40:43 Emily: Definitely. Again, I love that you’re bringing up any way you can to put kind of a more positive spin on what is fundamentally a really hard situation to be in.

Be Kind to Yourself and Others

40:53 Suba: I guess in the last tip I would say, and I think I’ve said this throughout, is you have to be extremely kind to yourself. I think debt is incredibly stigmatizing. And I feel like I’m somebody who follows a lot of financial blogs and a lot of financial people online. And I think one of the things is we cannot be mean to ourselves or other people about their choices around money. Everybody’s choices are really, really different, and it’s very normal. Especially in this day and age when when people’s jobs are changing so much and maybe they’ve had different circumstances that the only real way to be empowered is to first normalize the fact that this is something that is part of your life. It’s something that happened to you because of a certain set of circumstances, but it’s not something that you can’t control. It’s not something that you eventually can’t get over, you know? And the only real way to be like, I think, empowered is to let go of some of the stigma, especially towards ourselves. We can be really unkind towards ourselves when we make, you know, choices that we don’t think are the best. We should be able to talk about these things a little bit more. And get advice from one another about how to tackle some of these things, even though our situations aren’t the same.

Best Advice for Early-Career PhDs

42:16 Emily: Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with this interview. And so, Suba, thank you so much for putting yourself out there. So, I like to end with this one question for all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? It could be related to the conversation we’ve had today, it could be something totally else.

42:34 Suba: I think my best advice is probably two things. One is try to plan, preplan, for changes in your life as much as you can, as best you can. And then the other is it’s never too late to start improving your finances. It doesn’t matter if you are $10,000 in debt, $200 in debt or a hundred thousand dollars in debt. You know, just figure out what your priorities are and see if you can align your priorities with what you want your financial life to look like in the future.

43:08 Emily: Yeah. I don’t want anyone to feel discouraged about debt numbers. I mean even you can look back through the archives, this podcast and I’ve had several interviews with people who are paying off six figures worth of debt successfully. So, it can be done. It does take work, it takes a positive attitude, Suba as you were just saying, it takes organization. But you know what, grad students and PhDs, we have some of those qualities in spades. So, this is definitely something that is tackleable for our community. And again, thank you so much for talking about this topic today on the podcast.

43:40 Suba: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Outtro

43:43 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

 

The Necessity of Both Economic Justice Advocacy and Personal Financial Responsibility

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the University of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union, and viewed a higher income as the solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt and in the process reformed his practice financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and Emily discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices.

Links Mentioned

grad student union

Teaser

00:00 Ian: It was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which was sort of embarrassing to say 29 or 30 year old.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode four, and today my guest is Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the university of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union and viewed a higher income as a solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt. And in the process reformed his financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and I discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice, and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ian Gutierrez.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Ian Gutierrez, and Ian and I first connected actually when I was looking for guests for my “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise” episode that came out season five, episode two. That was the one that was a compilation episode, with a lot of people and had a couple of guests talking about unions. Ian and I connected and we had such a great conversation that I was like, “Can we just have a whole episode, just your own interview instead of trying to cram all you have to say into just this little tiny spot. So that’s how this episode came about. So Ian, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

02:01 Ian: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. This is very exciting for me. My name is Ian Gutierrez. I have a BFA from New York University in recorded music, which was actually my first love. And then I got my Master’s degree in psychology from the New School, prior to becoming a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, where I was enrolled from 2012 to 2018 when I defended my dissertation. So I now hold a PhD in clinical psychology from UConn. Shortly following the completion of my clinical training at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I was very briefly a postdoctoral fellow at the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. And I am currently a research psychologist with Tech Works LLC in the Washington DC area, where I conduct psychological research on mental health and resilience in support of our nation’s service members.

The Intricacies of Unionization for Graduate Employees

03:03 Emily: It sounds like a fascinating career path, something that would be great to explore at another time, but we’re actually going to go back to your graduate school days at UConn. And of course you were involved at that time with the union. Can you talk a little bit about what the climate was UConn at that time and why you got involved with the union movement?

Impetus for the Union

03:22 Ian: Sure, absolutely. I would actually say, first and foremost that it was one of the best parts of my graduate school experience was being involved with the graduate student unionizing effort. I often tell people that the experience that I had negotiating our first contract after we unionized was one of the best classes I ever took in graduate school. I first got involved with the unionizing effort in 2013. I was serving on our university’s graduate student government, and at the time the university was moving, or attempting to move graduate students over from a state-based employee health insurance plan into a student health insurance plan. Some people call it a SHIP. And bottom line was that we were getting worse health coverage for a higher price. Within the graduate student government we tried to advocate as best we could, but parallel to that, a number of other students thought that maybe unionizing was the way to go.

04:37 Ian: Now, personally, I grew up in a union family. All of my parents are union members in the theater business, actually. So that naturally struck me as the far more effective way to go about advocating for what we needed. I joined the organizing committee for our nascent union at the time and we, after interviewing a number of international unions, where you talk to the Communication Workers of America, Service Employees International Union, AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, we ultimately decided to organized with the United Auto Workers, which had had a lot of success in the area, unionizing graduate students, for instance, just up the road at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. So we organized our union in 2013 we ran a membership drive, a card counting campaign, to get legal recognition for our union, and that it was a very successful campaign. Very exciting. The state of Connecticut recognized our union in April of 2014, and from that point we moved into the bargaining process with the university administration. At that point, ran to be one of the six members of the bargaining committee, and then over the course of the following year from starting about August of 2014, up until June of 2015, we met with the university administration, I don’t remember exactly, a dozen times, maybe more, as we negotiated our first contract. We were fortunate enough to successfully negotiate our first contract with the union in 2015.

Issues at Play in Union Negotiations

06:29 Emily: Thank you so much for giving that context. I’m wondering when you, when you went into negotiate that first contract, was it mainly the health insurance issue that you all were focusing on, or were there some other issues that also came into play?

06:42 Ian: When we went into negotiating our contract with the administration, of course health insurance was a major issue for graduate students. Of course, it wasn’t the only one. I think actually the university was quite surprised by the litany of issues that we brought up and the many things that we wanted to negotiate over. Healthcare, in the end, turned out to be a remarkably, I won’t go so far as to say easy, but there was a very equitable solution that we were able to come to. In this particular case, the state of Connecticut had what they called the Connecticut Partnership Plan, where the state would work with local governments to work out affordable health care plans for local employees, and so that provided a very nice rubric that could be applied to graduate employees at the university.

07:39 Ian: But that was again, not the only issue that we covered. I think the biggest issues that really came up for us were fee waivers, and then a lot of the rights and protections for the union itself. One of the major differences from being a graduate employee who’s not unionized to being graduate employee who is unionized is that there’s a clear grievance procedure, which in my opinion is actually one of the strongest components, one of the most important components of being unionized as an employee anywhere, is that there’s some kind of legal recourse when something comes up in the workplace, and there’s very clear rules about who to go to, who to raise the issue with, and how the difference can be resolved.

08:34 Ian: But second to that, of course money talks, right? Fee waivers for us was, I very clearly remember, was sort of the last issue that we negotiated over it at some great length and turned out to be the hardest thing for us to come to an agreement on. We ended up coming to a resolution where, what the university called it’s infrastructure fee, which was a $460 per year fee, ended up being waived for graduate assistants. And then the university provided GAs with a hundred dollar credit every year, that ramped up by a few dollars over the course of the contract, to help offset the cost of fees. So those were some of the major issues that came up. I think that barely scratches the surface and certainly we could talk for a long time about the, the 30 to 40 provisions in the contract, but healthcare, tuition and fees, and a grievance procedure where, I think, some of the biggest issues that we really cared about.

09:45 Emily: Yeah, I think all of those are also really common ones to come up in these negotiations across many universities. And I really appreciate your point about the grievance procedure being one of the most important components because it is like the wild west out there in academia. I mean, there’s all these power structures and imbalances and just lack of clarity, and so that actually sounds really great that you would have that in place after that point. Something I wanted to ask you about is from your position at the bargaining table, how did you come to understand that the university, or at least that university, that administration, the people who you were talking with, how did you understand that they viewed graduate students and especially around their financial issues?

Grad Students vs. the Administration

10:27 Ian: Yeah, really interesting question. That to me was one of the more shocking components of the experience. You know, university administrators talk a lot about how important students are to the university, and will say things about how the student body is the lifeblood of the university and the reason that it exists, of course, and there’s a whole political rhetoric around the way in which administrators talk about students. And I think a lot of that comes primarily from their dealings, especially with undergrad, what the undergraduate population, where things are a little bit cleaner. Undergraduates are the public consumers of the education that the university is providing. And they also make up the majority of the student body at almost almost any university.

11:20 Ian: With graduate students, it’s a little bit more complicated because on the one hand graduate students are students. We are receiving an education, but in our roles as research assistants, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, generally, we’re also employees. So things get a lot murkier there and they’re very comfortable talking about us as students. They’re much less comfortable talking about us as employees and at the bargaining table where we’re really presenting fully and in that context only as employees, a lot of that kumbaya rhetoric about us being students really falls away remarkably quickly.

12:03 Ian: At the same time there’s a lot of nostalgia that comes up for a lot of these administrators because most of them, not all of them, but most of them, were graduate students at one point, too, but a lot of their touchstones to what the graduate student experience was like, is what it was like in the sixties, seventies, the eighties, the nineties. And they were looking at a much different financial picture then, than graduate students are looking at now. Not only that, but the demographic of graduate students has in many cases shifted pretty dramatically as well. So it’s not like you’re getting…I mean, who’s ever heard, nowadays of somebody getting out of school through PhD at the age of 24 or 25. Impossible? No, but pretty rare. A lot of folks are getting their PhDs, I know at least in clinical psychology, the average age is about 31. So we’re talking about folks who might already have kids, maybe elderly parents to care for, potentially. Possibly chronic health problems.

13:08 Ian: We’re looking at a much different, a much more complicated picture of who we are, and for the administrators to come to the table and understand who we are, I think was a leap for them, in as much, to be perfectly frank as it was for us to understand the complicated financial picture that the university has to deal with. And I want to be clear in saying that, well certainly there are many acrimonious relationships between graduate employees and administrators at many institutions. I actually came away from the process being more proud of being a graduate of the University of Connecticut, because I think that, while we didn’t always see eye to eye, the administration was really fair in their dealings with us, and I think that we returned that to them in kind. It was certainly a learning experience for us, and I like to think of what’s a learning experience for them as well.

14:11 Emily: So fascinating. Thank you so much for adding that. And I am glad to hear that it wasn’t totally an adversarial relationship there at the table. I actually thought you might’ve been going in a little bit of a different direction when you mentioned the shifting demographics of current graduate students versus maybe some decades ago. Because I’m thinking about more like first generation students getting to graduate school and earning their PhDs. Also people who don’t necessarily come from families that can provide them financial support in the case of an emergency or just on an ongoing basis. I don’t know the stats on this, but I would assume that’s more common now than it was some decades ago, as you know, diversified who’s earning a PhD, which is a great thing, but it certainly comes with different sets of issues and problems then maybe people who got their PhDs some decades ago were facing

14:59 Ian: Just to jump in on that point, I think it’s also really important and one of the other really key components of what makes me proud to have been a part of that union too, was the union’s strong focus on diversity and representation. I understand full well that as a white man, receiving a PhD at a university that I come to the table with a lot of privilege and a voice that some other people might not have. But one of the things that really struck me in the way that our union organized is that the people who in my personal view really made it happen were the student employees of color, and the women who were in our organizing campaign. And it was really actually two women in particular who really made our union possible, and in many ways, to the extent that I was a part of it, I think I sort of rode on their coattails. And when we were negotiating at the table, equal protection policies for our students who might have green cards, or students of color, making sure that there was bathroom access for the trans community at the university — all of these things were a very large component of what our union was about. And I’m very proud of that.

Commercial

16:35 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Personal Finances in Grad School in Relation to Unionization

17:21 Emily: Okay, so you’re in graduate school, you’re at the bargaining table, you’re working for better benefits, better processes, higher stipends, fee waivers and so forth. That’s one aspect of personal finance, right? What income is coming in, what your benefits are and so forth. What was going on with you? How were you handling the money that you actually received at that time?

17:43 Ian: Oh man. I would say that despite my heavy involvement in the union, I would mostly describe my practice for personal finance in graduate school as primarily relying on some degree of magical thinking. I didn’t really have a theory of the case regarding my personal finances really in any sense. I had a big picture sense that “more money, good, less money, bad,” but I never had any kind of robust plan on how I was going to move away from debt and towards wealth. I think the implicit thought process that I had was, well, I’m a graduate student and I’m poor and I’m in debt now, and somehow it all kind of come out in the wash after I get my degree and get a real job.

18:40 Emily: I think that’s super common. That sentiment is everywhere in graduate training.

18:47 Ian: And for me, even thinking about personal finances, a component of my life was…I engaged in a lot of avoidance around my own money management. And I think, as I have read into more financial guidance, you know, your Dave Ramsey or your Suze Orman’s or whoever — where do they start? They always start with, in a budget you want to first take a look at how much money you think you have coming in every month. Well, personally, speaking personally about my family background, my family worked in theater and even though you might be a part of a union, how much money you’re making in a month, you don’t know how much money you’re necessarily making in the next week or two weeks. You don’t know when your paycheck is coming and when it comes, you don’t necessarily have the best idea of how large it’s going to be. I never really had a financial budget education from my family background. But then sort of even more strikingly, I never had it in high school. I never had it in college. I never had it in graduate school. I just never had it, which, for being a pretty well educated person, still kind of leaves me. floored. Talking about money, it was almost like talking about sex. It was like everywhere and defining the culture, but you couldn’t actually get a grasp on what was going on.

20:34 Emily: That’s a great analogy.

20:34 Ian: Really striking. I think it really is because money is so personal and it’s such a component of who we are that we all have a lot of the feelings — good, bad, otherwise — around what it says about who we are and our understanding of what our life is and where our lives are going. Long story short, I just really engaged in a lot of avoidance around it, and I also think that part of the way that my own income from graduate school was structured led me into some poor practices as well. For one example, I received half of my income from a GA stipend that I received every two weeks, like a paycheck, but then the other part of my income I received from a fellowship check, which came in these two big checks every year. What it sort of led me to believe was that, well, as an adult, twice a year, you’re just going to received this huge windfall, so I can just spend up a lot of money on a credit card, and, well, no big deal because I’m going to get this big windfall every August and every January. Come to find out, at the end of this golden brick road, that’s actually not what happens in the course of typical adult living. Suddenly, after graduate school, I had this student debt and the cavalry’s not charging over the hill anymore.

22:18 Emily: That’s so interesting. I haven’t interviewed anyone before who’s spoken about the pay frequency, which I mean what you described as maybe a little bit unusual, but there’s plenty of people who deal with a couple of times per year, big checks coming in, or maybe just a pay frequency that they were unfamiliar with, like monthly instead of biweekly, or just any kind of shift. It’s interesting just to hear how that impacted actually the way that you handled your money. Of course there are many budgeting techniques to deal with this and that’s a conversation with me for another time. But I’m really curious now to hear about what actually caused you to change these attitudes in this behavior. Was it getting out of graduate school and realizing that you had a steady paycheck and it wasn’t ever going to be these windfalls? What was your motivation to start exploring the subject area?

23:05 Ian: Well, the one thing that I did decide, and this is a little bit particular to the way that graduate education is structured in clinical psychology, is that if you’re pursuing a doctorate in clinical or counseling or school psychology, you have to complete a year long internship. Most people move for this year long internship and the internship pays a stipend that is roughly similar to what you would get paid as a graduate assistant, depending on locale. It’s anywhere from $20 to $30 grand a year. When I made this move, I knew that I wasn’t going to be enrolled in enough course credits to access loans and I can either fork up a bunch of money to take on six credit hours or whatever it was, so that I could have access to student loans, or I could not sign up for those credit hours and not be eligible for loans.

24:03 Ian: I chose to not sign up for the credit hours and not be eligible for loans. I sort of took the cold turkey approach to student loans. And it was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident, because now I wasn’t receiving my windfall fellowship twice a year and I had cut myself off from student loans and a lot of my credit card balances were fairly high. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which is sort of embarrassing to say as a 29 or 30 year old, but that’s part of the reason I’m here on the podcast saying it, is because I know that my assumption in life is that if it’s affecting me, it’s probably affecting someone else. I can only imagine that there is a silent, I don’t know that it’s a majority, but a silent plurality, of current or former graduate students out there who have also suddenly realized at the ripe age of 30, that they know nothing about financial planning, have been behaving, you know, somewhat irresponsibly, and now they’re in a bad situation.

25:26 Ian: I never really took myself as someone who lived wildly outside of my means. I bought and paid off and used car and sure, my wife and I would go out dinner from time to time, but I wasn’t living the high life by any stretch of the imagination. And yet still, after all of that, I realized that I just didn’t have any scheme for how I was going to manage any of this. To keep on with the language of addiction, and there’s certainly many parallels to be drawn between credit cards and addiction, to be sure, I had sort of hit a rock bottom, where I suddenly realized that I need to come up with a plan, not only so I can pay this stuff off, but so that I can build and save for the future.

26:20 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think you’re absolutely right that many people are waking up at some time or another to realize that in the same way that you did. So first of all, average American kind of thing, a lot of people don’t live within their means or they do in some aspects of their budgeting and they don’t in other. Like they are racking up credit card debt and then occasionally will pay it down, and there’s this cycle there. That’s pretty common. But I think that the graduate student experience sort of exacerbates that mentality. I think academia tells us that well, while you’re a graduate student, even to some extent while you’re a postdoc, you’re excused from the general financial responsibility that you might feel at another stage or at another time in life because well, you know that your pay is going to be low and so what expectations can you really have of yourself when your pay is so low. That’s one aspect of it. The other one is, as you mentioned, the access to student loans, which I think that if people aren’t necessarily using them, they may kind of forget that they do have access to them all the way through graduate school really. But it is there as a backstop, as a good decision or as a bad decision to take it out. You really are given an out all through graduate school that you don’t have to live within your means, unless you choose to, because the culture is telling you you don’t have to do, you have student loans there if you need to take them out. It kind of just contributes to that overall problems. I definitely don’t think you are at all alone.

27:46 Emily: I really think about myself going into graduate school. I very intentionally told myself I’m going to live within my means. And I actually thought about it that way at that time, for various reasons. But that was partially because I had a break between undergrad and grad school, where I had to live within my means. I didn’t have access to student loans, and so it was like, okay, I’m just going to carry forward into my graduate degree with what I learned when I was out of school. But if you don’t have the same attitudes that I do or didn’t have exposure to the same stuff, or you went continuously from college to graduate school, you may not have had the wherewithal to even think about it that way.

Personal Finances After Grad School

28:22 Emily: Okay, you’re getting into your internship year, you don’t have access to the loans, you have the high credit card balances, you’re realizing you actually have to live within the paycheck — what did you do? How did the story evolve?

28:36 Ian: Well, let’s see. I would say that I didn’t start by coping with it in a very…I mean, despite my training in clinical psychology, I want to say that I dealt with it like in a very logical or sensible way. I think mostly I felt terrified, and then anxious, and then afraid, and then hopeless, and then angry, and I cycled through all of this stuff. That was my first reaction, and of course none of that was really particularly helpful. Eventually, I took out a Dave Ramsey book from the library. And I would say that I have mixed feelings about his guidance. I certainly have mixed feelings about prosperity gospel, for sure. But I think the basics, like the super, super basics of what he, or I mean really anyone — him, or Suze Orman, Gaby Dunn — any of these folks out out there, is that the 101 clearly gets you on the right path of figuring out how much money you have coming in every month, determining your expenses, and figuring out what you need to do to balance that equation. There were some other components that I found particularly helpful, where my feeling was, I had heard about this thing called debt snowballing with credit cards and I knew that I wanted to do that, but reading, at least based on Dave Ramsey’s recommendation, that if your finances are really a hotness, which that’s me, the first thing you want to do is save $1000. Save enough money so you have some kind of stop gap if car breaks or unexpected medical bill or what have you.

30:41 Ian: I think that’s what really got me started with it, but I do also want to say that what also got me started with it was after graduate school, having an income that gave me enough hope that I could pay down some of these debts, which I think brings me sort of full circle to a point of balance in my own way of thinking about finances, where I personally believe that true financial responsibility is not just about managing your own finances, but also advocating for greater economic justice. That they’re not separate. Blaming all of your financial problems on the world and the way it is, is not the healthiest way to look at things. Viewing your finances as a personal responsibility that you, yourself need to carry like Atlas to the end of time, come hell or high water, no matter what else is going on out in the world, I also don’t think it’s particularly healthy.

31:52 Ian: There needs to be a balance where we can say to ourselves that the world can be a cruel and unfair place. We have to do whatever it is that we can to live a financially healthy life now, while advocating and fighting for a better future for ourselves and for our children. Even in sort of tying it back to my time in the graduate students union, if I have two legacies that that I left at university of Connecticut, one is my dissertation, which is going to metaphorically collect dust on a server, because the likelihood that anybody will read it except for figuring out how to format own dissertation is pretty low. But the legacy of knowing that we have left, that I and all of the other students who worked together, hand-in-hand, to create a union so that future students could have a more prosperous future while they were in graduate school, that’s something that I can really look back on with pride. I think coming to that sort of healthy balance for me is where I’m currently at in my own thinking about financial health.

33:15 Emily: Yeah, thank you so much for that articulation, that was absolutely fascinating. And I think I also am going on a similar journey to come to the same place, but starting from the opposite side of, okay, just keep your head down, focus on your own business, and not necessarily look up at the wider picture as much. I’m sort of emerging from that viewpoint. Thanks to a lot of these interviews that I’m doing through the podcast, it’s been really a big growth experience for me.

33:45 Emily: What I wanted to ask you about though is in coming to that healthy place of being able to do both of these things, what you think about the idea of the necessity of having your own personal finances in the best shape that they can be in as enabling you to go out and do that good work in the world and advocate for others. I won’t say it’s impossible to do the latter without the former, but I think if you come from an area of personal strength, that it just further enables you to do that work. What do you think about that?

34:17 Ian: I like that idea. I think it resonates with this idea that to help others you need to help yourself, like on the airplane where you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help somebody who’s sitting next to you. I think that that can be true. I don’t think that one needs to preceed the other, however. I think that it’s important that we have a broader conversation, both within higher education, but within society as a whole, about the relationship between economic justice and the economic structures that we’re embedded in, and our own personal financial health. I think, actually, that unions could be a really nice and really good nexus at which students can find that, because at least to me, if a university administrator who’s making $200,000, $300,000 a year comes and lectures me about financial responsibility, my response is not going to be, Thank you, I appreciate that. As a graduate student, my response to that would be, go take a hike, to put it politely.

35:46 Ian: However, I think if unions can sell this idea that a stronger union, a more just economic society is one in which its advocates and its members and its stakeholders are able to responsibly manage their own finances, I think that’s really important. While, at the same time recognizing that there are some situations in which financial responsibility is not itself always the primary problem for someone who’s having financial difficulties. A few examples that come to mind are if you have a child or a loved one or yourself who has had a severe medical emergency and suddenly you have a six figure bill put on your doorstep, the problem there is our healthcare system, and not necessarily how you’ve managed your own money. Of course you still have to come up with a solution and that’s important, but let’s not lose sight of the big picture.

36:59 Ian: I think it’s also important that we recognize the impact that mental health can have on a person’s finances. While I was in graduate school, one of the things that I studied was gambling disorder, for instance. The processes that underly gambling disorders, I mean, I’m sure there are graduate students out there who have issues with gambling, but sort of more broadly just than gambling, if you think about shopping addiction, any kind of mental health problem that might lead to episodes of irresponsible financial behavior. Bipolar disorder would be another one that would fall very neatly in that category. We have to make enough room within our economic justice advocacy to recognize that there are people for whom their financial problems are not primarily caused by a lack of what you might call personal responsibility. I think we can come at it from both directions, but part of getting folks who are able to be financially responsible, to be financially responsible is to have the right vehicle for learning about that, that says the world can be a terrible and unfair place, but in light of that, in recognition of that, let’s help give you the skills to thrive to the best of your ability, financially, in spite of that adversity.

Best Financial Advice for Graduate Students and PhDs

38:27 Emily: I’m so glad you put that in the larger context. I’m really glad that we took the time for that. So as we wrap up the interview, what is your best financial advice for maybe a graduate student or another early career PhD, perhaps something that you’ve learned, post this transformation after you’ve reformed your own practice of personal finance?

38:50 Ian: Sure. I would say that I have three small pieces of advice. The first is keep track of everything that you spend. And this is just personally, I think if you keep track of every little thing you spend, you really understand where your money is going, and it starts to sort of become like a fun game of saving money, where you can go “Oh, well, you know, I could spend, you know, $4 at Starbucks or I could buy a bag of beans and make a cup of coffee at home for 25 cents.” That’s sort of my simple suggestion.

39:29 Ian: Number two is forgive yourself and it’s never too soon to start. Again, sort of having worked in the world of recovery, it’s never too soon to start. Whether you’re 22 and just thinking about graduate school or whether you had gone back to graduate school and you’re 37 and you have two or three kids and you’ve never really seriously considered how to build wealth, it’s never too soon to start.

40:07 Ian: And then number three, my final point would be make economic justice advocacy a core component of your own financial responsibility. Really own the idea in your heart, that taking care of others is taking care of yourself, and taking care of yourself is taking care of others. And in that spirit, hopefully, all of us can create a more economically just life for graduate students in higher education and more broadly, in society at large.

40:45 Emily: Thank you so much Ian. I’m so glad to learn from you and to have your perspective here on the podcast. So thank you so much for giving this interview.

40:53 Ian: Thank you so much. If you would like to, you can follow me on Twitter at @ianagutierrez and it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

Outtro

41:02 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Entrepreneur Advocates for Universal Basic Income (Part 2)

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and co-host of the Basic Income Podcast. Jim defines universal basic income and outlines how it would alleviate poverty and other social ills, including results from research and real-life experiments with basic income. He describes the possible avenues by which universal basic income could be funded and whether it would replace our existing social safety nets. Jim and Emily speculate about how universal basic income might affect higher education funding, including PhD stipends and postdoc salaries, and PhD trainees themselves.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

PhD universal basic income

Teaser

00:00 Jim: You could basically think of this as universal basic fellowships for PhD students because I think that the dynamics that come with it very, very closely would match what it would be if you were getting a fellowship of the same size.

Introduction

00:18 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 six, episode two, and today my guest is Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and cohost of The Basic Income Podcast. In this second half of our interview, Jim articulates what basic income is and how it would alleviate poverty in the United States, including results from recent research and experimentation. He describes the possible avenues by which it could be funded and whether it would replace our existing social safety nets. We speculate about how basic income might affect higher education, including PhD stipends and postdoc salaries. Without further ado, here’s the second part of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:06 Emily: We’re back now with part two of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh. In part one, he told us all about how he started a business a few years after graduate school, which ultimately allowed him a great deal of time freedom. So, his business pays for his lifestyle, but he only works at this point about five hours a week on the business. And that has allowed him to pivot to his advocacy work around universal basic income, which is what we’re going to be hearing a lot more about today. So, Jim, thank you so much for continuing this interview with me. And we want to start off with a basic question about universal basic income because frankly, I probably would not have really heard about this except that you and I are Facebook friends. And also, we’re recording this in September, 2019 and Andrew Yang is a candidate for the democratic nomination for president. So, between those two things, I’ve kind of heard a little bit about basic income, but I would love to hear a lot more about what it actually is from you.

01:59 Jim: Sure. Well, so, just to start with the definition. A universal basic income is a policy that would provide every single person in the country with unconditional cash payments regularly–most people talk about once a month–that’s actually enough to cover basic needs. And the idea of it is that, if you were to enact this, you eradicate absolute poverty. You’re ensuring that everyone does have enough money to cover the fundamentals. And so, in some ways it’s very, very simple because it’s just giving people some cash. But in other ways, we’re potentially talking about something very radical because we would for the first time be saying, we are fully abolishing absolute poverty. We’re saying that absolutely no one in the country should be poor and that we’re going to structure our systems with that in mind. And so the ramifications of that are pretty profound as far as what does it mean for work? What does it mean for health? What does it mean for people’s general lifestyle if you’re actually establishing that fundamental financial security floor?

Benefits of Universal Basic Income (UBI)

03:12 Emily: Okay, so let’s first take the benefits–the upsides of this–and let’s leave aside, for the moment, the practicalities of it, but just to talk about the vision for what this society might be like. So, what are the benefits that people might experience maybe who are currently in poverty but would be lifted out of that through UBI? You started to talk about this a little bit at the end of the last episode. So, there’s actually been research done in this area and there’s been some experimentation. So, can you talk a little about what we know already about how this might change things for people?

03:43 Jim: Yeah, so I think there are the obvious things that we know when people are poor, they can’t afford food or at least healthy food. They may be having trouble finding somewhere to live. They may not be able to take care of themselves. So, if you’re actually ensuring that everyone is up above the poverty line through just regular cash transfers, those are all things that are addressed, first order of facts. But I think beyond that, that’s where things start to get quite interesting because we have seen more and more evidence around how poverty and financial insecurity, if not causing, are at least are greatly contributing to a lot of other issues that we’re dealing with today. And so, people when they are approaching any aspect of their life, they can either be in an abundance mentality where they think, “Okay, I have enough. I can think bigger picture.” Or a scarcity mentality where they feel constrained, which basically gives people tunnel vision that they’re only thinking about what’s right in front of them.

Abundance Mindset, Higher IQ

04:51 Jim: And that difference has huge impacts on what happens to people. So, first off, there have been studies just looking at general intelligence, and there is a substantial shift in people’s IQ level between those two different headspaces. I think it’s around one standard deviation, so about 10 IQ points, smarter when you’re in an abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. So, you’re making better decisions. Second, as I said, when you get that tunnel vision and so it means you’re just thinking about what’s right in front of you, it basically prevents you from longterm planning. You can’t be thinking about, “What is my life going to be even a year, much less, five, 10 years down the road?” if you’re worried about, Oh, how am I going to put food on the table tonight or tomorrow? And so, it allows people and encourages people to plan better, to make better longterm decisions which has big impacts around choices on education, choices around what sort of work they pursue, and ultimately, where they do end up in five, 10 years down the road.

Scarcity Mindset Damages Mental and Physical Health

05:58 Jim: And so, beyond just being able to afford health treatments, there’s also a lot of evidence that when you’re in a scarcity mindset, when you’re in poverty, it’s extremely damaging for mental health. And also for physical health, the stress has an impact on that as well. Crime–strong, strong correlation based on people’s financial security as to whether they’re more or less likely to commit crimes. And so there’s all of these second and third order implications around how things would look in our society if we weren’t to have this absolute poverty. That’s seems incredibly promising. And so, that’s why, again, our typical approach as a society is to, when something’s going wrong, to treat the symptoms of it. And this, instead, is really saying, “Let’s actually try to take a step back, deal with some of the underlying causes, and see how much easier that makes dealing with all the rest of this stuff.”

UBI and Job Flexibility

07:00 Emily: Okay. Sounds amazing. It sounds very, very compelling. I’m wondering a little bit more about what the vision for what this society may look like, should we bring it about. You talked earlier about jobs. And so, is the idea that not as many people would need to work? There wouldn’t necessarily be as many people in jobs? Or is the idea that you would have just more freedom and flexibility around when you want to work and when you went to have further training? How does this relate to the jobs, I guess is what I’m asking?

07:28 Jim: I think much more the latter. So, the idea is not that this is something that’s going to replace jobs wholesale. I think it does allow you to pursue a more general definition of work, I would say. And so, in the sense that “job” right now means a fairly specific thing in those conversations about more like a nine to five, like ongoing, consistent workplace. This does give you additional flexibility to think a bit differently about what is the right form of work for you to be doing. So, whether that’s part-time, whether that’s taking some time to get more of an education in the area that ultimately is going to allow you to do something that you feel better about and maybe much more productive for society. Whether it’s going to give you the flexibility if you want to do some sort of family care or staying home with children or elderly folks.

UBI Facilitates Entrepreneurship

08:25 Jim: Another one is entrepreneurship. If you’re considering starting a company or doing something that, in its early stages, may not be giving you a steady paycheck–having more flexibility around that as well. So, it opens up all these doors that most folks, I would say, don’t really have access to at this point in time. As far as overall impact on how much people are working, there have actually been a number of studies on this. And what it suggests is the results vary. That there are certain situations where, when you give people regular, unconditional cash, they work more. It seems like, either through stimulating the local economy and creating jobs or by giving people that flexibility, they end up doing more work. So, Alaska for the last 40 years has actually had a universal income provided by oil in the state. And recent studies have found that the overall work rate hasn’t changed, but you see a lot more people engaging in part-time work than you have in the past. Or, certain groups, studies have found there is a decrease in work, quite consistently actually across studies. The ones where that’s only really stood out is parents with young children and teenagers, basically. And interviewing folks involved in that, it seems like the former is spending more time staying home with kids, the latter spending more time at school. So, again, it’s not captured as work in how we measure it today, but it actually is work and potentially much more pro-social work than they might otherwise be engaged in.

10:06 Emily: So, this is really reminding me of–so I have not read this book. The book is Your Money or Your Life by Vicky Robin, I want to say. And she has a coauthor. Anyway, I heard a podcast interview with her within the last few weeks and she was talking about how in our current society, like you’re saying, there’s a lot of work that is not inside a job, right? There’s a lot of work that people do in our society to further it. A lot of women do this kind of work and it’s not valued in terms of a paycheck from a job, right? That doesn’t mean it’s not contributing to society. And so, I don’t remember if they specifically talked about basic income on that podcast, but this is a way to sort of reframe what counts as work and what counts as doing something valuable with your time.

UBI and Social Safety Nets

10:51 Emily: Yeah. Okay. So, I think I’m getting you here. I have another question: would this replace the social safety nets that we have currently and expand them, I guess you could say?

11:03 Jim: So, there are mixed opinions on this amongst people who advocate for basic income. I’m actually in the camp saying that this should not initially be treated as a replacement for any social programs. And I think the reasons are: one, is that I think there is widespread recognition across the political spectrum that our social safety net is not working as well as we would like it to. You get very different opinions as to what would allow it to work as well as we would like it to. But no one is satisfied with where it’s at. I think a lot of people have talked about, “Let’s provide basic income and then just cut much, if not all, of other social programs because this will eradicate absolute poverty. Why do we need to worry about anything else?” And there are actually, I would say, a lot of edge cases here where it’s people who are dealing with some specific challenge for which cash on its own is not going to quickly solve it. It will help a lot in many situations. But I think there is the risk that if you say, “All right, we’ll get rid of this other stuff and just give you cash,” you’ve basically taken a problem that requires multiple parts to solve and just replaced one part with another. And, in some cases, maybe they keep people worse off because of that.

Targeted Interventions Beyond UBI 

12:25 Emily: Can you be more specific about what is being provided to people now that’s not money?

12:29 Jim: Yeah. So, I think disability being a good one where disabilities can look very different for different sorts of people. And in some cases, the support you would need to actually be able to live with disabilities requires much more than what a basic income would provide. And so, that’s a case where, if someone were to say, “We’re going to wipe everything off the books and just give you that,” a lot of people in that situation are going to be left far worse off. I think there are specific issues around addiction, in some situations, housing assistance where there is obviously there are areas where housing is far, far more expensive. And so, to think that a national UBI would actually be enough for people in the Bay Area to be able to get by, it’s not realistic. And so, that’s a situation where a targeted intervention beyond the UBI is going to be important.

13:22 Jim: And then I think there are other ones where it may be some general challenge where someone’s falling out of the workforce or coming back from deployment abroad where, again, making sure that they have enough cash is important, but there are additional services that come beyond that that also much better set them up to succeed than the cash on its own. And so, I think that that’s a key thing here is to recognize both how transformative and valuable UBI could be, but also that it’s not a panacea. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s something that will need an ecosystem of additional supports if we actually want to have an effective safety net. And so, I don’t think the safety net that we have right now is doing that well enough, and we need to be rethinking that. But I think that there’s a danger when people say, “UBI instead of that,” that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and end up in a situation where people may be much worse off than they are today.

Regional Cost of Living Considerations

14:25 Emily: Yeah. I think because this is, I don’t necessarily want to say it’s a new idea. I mean, you said Alaska has been doing something like this for 40 years, but it’s gained maybe national attention only in recent years. So, this is still an idea that’s being worked out. And at the policy level, if viable, we don’t know exactly what the ultimate solution would look like. And presumably, it would change over decades and generations anyway. So, I’m glad you brought up the cost of living question. Because the U.S. is very diverse in terms of cost of living. Is the ultimate idea still that people would get the same amount of money no matter where they live? Maybe with some additional help, like you were just saying, for certain people in certain areas?

Psychological Implications

15:05 Jim: So yeah, a key part of it is–and I don’t think I said in my original definition, but the idea is–this would be the same amount to everyone. And there are a couple reasons for that. One is logistical that it becomes much easier to manage if it’s the same for everyone. But the other is more psychological. One of the reasons for taking a universal approach is to try to eliminate stigma associated with receiving support, which in our modern age, we all see how much stigma is associated with receiving various forms of welfare. And that, if it’s something that everyone in society is getting, you’re able to get around that. Because why is it wrong for the homeless person on the street to get the check every month if I’m also getting my check every month?

Regional Supplements

15:52 Jim: And so, that’s another reason to have the equal, universal amount. But as you say, what that means is that in particularly different regions across the country, you’re going to see big differences as far as the implications of that. So, there certainly are parts of the country where if you were giving everyone a thousand dollars a month, you can survive without too much difficulty. If you’re in the Bay Area or other places, that does not get you very far. And so, that’s an area where you do need to have something beyond that. There’s been some discussion around regional supplements where you might be able to top up a equal federal amount with something that goes up more for more expensive areas. But I think beyond that, yeah, there may be other targeted interventions that are important.

UBI Increases Mobility

16:46 Jim: I think one question that comes up that we don’t really have a good answer to but people wonder about is, if you’re providing the basic income to everyone, it is going to increase people’s mobility. And so, if you currently feel tied to a certain geography for economic reasons, which may be very expensive, whether that gives you the option to relocate to somewhere that is less expensive. And then that gets very complicated because it goes into community ties and family and things like that where there may be other factors beyond just the economics of it. But it’s something that would be different if we did this and so, potentially, that at least partially would help to mitigate some of those challenges.

Commercial

17:35 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

The Basic Income Podcast

18:34 Emily: I feel like I could continue asking you questions about this for quite a long time. It’s a good thing you have a podcast where other people can learn more about this. What is the name of your podcast?

18:45 Jim: Our name is a bit on the nose. We are The Basic Income Podcast. We’ve been introducing weekly episodes for about three years now and exploring both UBI specifically, but also, how it relates and connects to all sorts of other areas.

How to Fund UBI in the U.S.

19:00 Emily: Okay. So, I’m going to hold off on the questions that are still swirling in my head and just say, listeners, if you’re excited about this idea, or skeptical of it, or whatever, go ahead and check out the podcast and I’m sure there are other resources that you refer to from there where people can continue to learn even more. So, one more question around the vision of this, which is should we all, or enough of us in the United States, decide this is a good idea, what actually does it look like to fund this? Maybe post-transition, if there is a transition.

Enact Changes to the Tax Code

19:32 Jim: Yeah, so that’s another area where people have very different opinions around. Because, I mean, if we’re looking at it on its face saying, “All right, everyone in the country gets a thousand dollars a month,” that’s about $4 trillion, which is the size of our current governmental spending, which seems insane. But there are various caveats, I would say, that make it much more achievable than it may seem at a glance. My preferred approach to financing is first to recognize that, if you’re going to enact universal basic income, it means you need to make some significant differences in the tax code. And specifically, as a starting point, I think income tax. At its core, the goal of UBI is to provide people with financial security. And so, what that means is that, knowing you’re always going to get your check every month is important because who knows what may happen to you. And having it always there gives you that security.

20:31 Jim: But, if you’re earning a good paycheck, there’s no reason why you should be coming out net ahead, necessarily. And so, to basically update our income tax brackets such that, once people make above a certain point, their UBI is effectively being taxed away. So, maybe that’s four times the poverty level. So, if you as an individual are earning more than 50 or $60,000 a year, basically, you’d be getting your check every month and then you’d be paying a bit more in taxes to cover that expense. If you do it that way and look at what’s eventually the net cost, it drops to somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion dollars a year, which is still a lot, but a lot less than the four trillion we started with.

Shift Tax Programs and Brackets

21:18 Jim: And so, then there are different ideas as to how do you pay for that. That’s much more in line with other somewhat ambitious governmental programs. You can couple together some combination of a carbon tax, the financial transaction tax, a wealth tax. And sort of talking more about that, Elizabeth Warren wrote it up in her campaign where you’re able to raise that amount of money to cover that difference. And also, I think potentially looking at adding a few tax brackets at the top of the income level. If we were to go back to the taxation we had pre-Reagan, that would be bringing in a substantial amount there. So, with those things combined, you can relatively easily actually be able to cover the cost.

UBI and Graduate Training

22:02 Emily: Okay. Very, very interesting. So, I wanted to pivot a little bit to tie this really into more of our PhD audience because we haven’t brought that up so far really. I mean, you mentioned earlier that you know, having a basic income could afford people the flexibility to do more training. Of course, PhDs have a lot of that. Have you given any thought, or has there been any discussion around this, how basic income–I’m sure it’s been discussed at the undergraduate level, how that would affect people pursuing college degrees? You can speak about that a little bit if you like, but I am curious about what you think about how it might affect PhD training in the United States. And specifically, you know, you brought up earlier the scarcity mindset and how that prevented people from thinking longterm and it caused an effective IQ drop.

22:45 Emily: And in season four of this podcast, I published a two-part interview with Dr. Lucie Bland and she talked about her scarcity mindset that she developed during her PhD because she was living in poverty during her PhD. She was funded at a very low level. She lives in a very expensive city, and it’s something that a lot of people can relate to during their graduate training. Although you wouldn’t necessarily think about graduate students, a relatively privileged bunch, I would expect, necessarily being beneficiaries of basic income. But maybe during that training period, they are. So, can you just speak a little bit about that?

UBI and Financial Security

23:18 Jim: Well, I would actually just add on to that. What we’re seeing in the Bay Area right now is not only at the graduate student level, but actually the assistant professor level, in some places, that people are homeless. They can’t afford to live here. So, they’re living out of their cars. Yeah, I mean I think that it’s giving you that layer of financial security, which should help with that. I think, not just because it’s some extra money, but because it would be extra money not tied your employment education situation. And obviously this is not everyone, hopefully a small minority, but if you’re having some bad power dynamics with your professor and feeling like you don’t want to be working with him or her but are not able to step away because of finances you’re receiving from there, it gives you kind of that out knowing that, regardless of what you decide there, you have that income coming in otherwise.

Parallel: UBI and Fellowship Income

24:15 Emily: So, there’s actually a slight parallel there, actually with fellowship income, right? And you did your PhD outside of the state, so, maybe it’s a little bit different there. But here with fellowship income, you know, it’s an award that you receive as an individual. It’s based on your own merits. And so, it’s not necessarily tied to you staying in one person’s lab. And so, I again, I publish an interview in season four where someone was able to switch labs, did not have a good relationship with their first advisor, was able to switch labs partially because she received an NSF graduate research fellowship. And so, similar situation, right? If, you know you can go a few months and transition without a paycheck coming from your advisor, it gives you more freedom there to really seek out the situation that is going to support you best as a developing researcher. So, yeah. Excellent point there. Please continue.

24:59 Jim: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I think you just nailed it. You could basically think of this as universal basic fellowships for PhD students because I think that, yeah, I think the dynamics that come with it very, very closely with match what it would be if you were getting a fellowship of the same size. I mean obviously with the added flexibility that you could leave a PhD program and still have it. But as far as the context within graduate school, I think that that’s basically what it would be.

25:27 Emily: Just to explore that a little bit further. Because I do think it’s a good analogy. So, one of the great things about fellowship income is that it gives you more freedom in your research, right? So, if you’re not beholden to working on a specific grant for your advisor, like you often are in STEM fields if you have a research assistantship. The fellowship allows you more intellectual flexibility and pursuing projects that are more in line with your own goals. It allows you to pursue collaborations. It’s just a greater degree of freedom. Now, some advisors exact more or less control when they do have people on a grant for research assistantships. That’s sort of up to their discretion. But yeah, the flexibility there in terms of your intellectual pursuits would then translate in terms of UBI into your general career pursuits, life pursuits. It would just be a much broader funding of that.

26:14 Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think I could imagine there would also be kind of a trade-off on that versus greater financial security. Because one of the questions would be, if everyone were getting a basic income, would you still have PhD student stipends and outside fellowships at a similar level? If you would, okay, everyone’s going to be much more economically stable.

Final Thoughts on UBI and Academia

26:40 Emily: You said earlier as like a touch point that, in your vision of this, around 50 or $60,000 of income, that’s when the UBI would kind of phase out. And for the graduate student level, graduate students don’t reach that point. A lot of postdocs don’t reach that point. So, in some sense, if nothing changed on the grant side of things, then it would boost your income. But yes, the question is whether people would still be funded to the same degree given that they have that baseline. So, if the idea right now in academia is we give people just enough money to live on so they don’t have to have other jobs that distract from their PhD research, well then maybe they would just decrease that funding. So, yeah. Any other thoughts around that? I’m sure this has not been very fully explored because it’s a very niche interest.

27:24 Jim: Well, no, I think that this is a specific example of something that is much broader, which is basically, if we were to have UBI, what does that do to wages? And the theory is that it depends a lot on what type of work you’re talking about and how much there is the internal versus external motivation around doing that work. Because if someone’s only doing the work because they’re getting paid to do it, UBI actually has the potential to then increase wages because it basically gives them more leverage to say, “Oh, well I don’t actually like this work. I’m going to go pursue other options.” And a company might then have to say, “Oh, well instead of $8 an hour, we’re going to pay you $15 an hour.” On the flip side, if it’s something that people just want to be doing for other reasons, like perhaps going to graduate school since not too many people go to graduate school to get rich, then there’s the opposite potential where, if someone is basically willing to do it, assuming that they won’t be starving, then universities may say, “Okay, well you’re UBI now instead of giving you $18,000 a year, we’re going to give you six.

28:43 Jim: So, I mean, it’s a whole other topic, but I would say that that’s where unions might come in handy. But yeah, I think it’s one of those areas that it’s very, very difficult to answer and know exactly what will happen until we actually do it. So, we can hypothesize around it. But yeah, that’s an open question.

Value of Teaching and Shifting Landscape in Education

29:07 Emily: Yeah, I guess I’m also thinking about sort of we’re having larger debates and angst in academia around the value of teaching, right? Because there’s this huge adjunct workforce that is, you know, severely underpaid. They don’t have job security and yet such a huge percentage of the classes that undergraduates and graduate students take are being taught by people who are not full-time employees of the institution that they work for or institutions. And it’s just such a difficult area right now. I can definitely see how UBI would help people in that situation, right? Because they are also experiencing poverty or near poverty-like situations, many of them. But, yeah. I mean, we’re in a transition point for education broadly. Like, if we’re moving to massive online courses and so forth, maybe if your teachers are needed. I don’t know. There are just a lot of transition here. I guess when we’re talking about maybe some kinds of jobs disappearing or transitioning, teaching at the higher education level, is one of those jobs that is sort of in transition in the workforces. And so, yeah. UBI is just kind of another element to kind of throw into the mix here that we don’t really know how it’s going to play out entirely.

30:13 Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right. And this applies less, I would say. I would expect it to still apply to some degree, but on the flip side, as far as what is the responsibility of the teacher versus the student? I think, certainly at the elementary and high school level, there’s ample evidence that financial stability of the family that the students are coming from makes a big difference as far as how well they’re able to learn. And so, that’s, I would say, another wrinkle that gets thrown in here as well, where if you are ensuring that everyone who is in the class is in more of an abundance mindset, what implications does that have to what is the most effective way of educating?

Tell Us More About Your Podcast

30:55 Emily: Such an interesting topic, Jim. I think that people will definitely want to follow up with you and learn more about this. Maybe have more discussions with you around what does the potential of UBI look like in affecting higher education and graduate students and postdocs and trainees. Again, tell us a little bit more about what you do. We have the name of it, but what do you do on your podcast?

31:14 Jim: Yeah, so we cover a lot of different areas. Most of the episodes, I think like yours, feature or are centered around a guest interview on some topic. And so, we’ve covered everything from, yeah what does UBI do with the disability community, to what’s happening in Canada with UBI to digging in on some of the modern control pilots that are being done in the U.S. and abroad to what is the connection between UBI and housing? And so, it really covers a lot of different areas, but generally we bring on an expert, we chat with them, and then we talk through what are the ramifications of what they said. And so, really try to dig in a little bit on many different areas.

UBI and Healthcare, Education

32:03 Emily: So, actually one follow-up question that goes maybe more back to our earlier conversation with what does this vision look like? Does the implementation of UBI come with it or depend on a revolution within healthcare and also in higher education? You know, paying for higher education.

32:21 Jim: Yeah. So, I would say healthcare comes up a lot. And in my view, UBI can only truly be successful if we actually have truly universal healthcare because it basically counts on the assumption that you can somewhat reasonably project what is the cost of living for people across the country. In our current system. If you don’t actually have universal coverage, that is impossible. I mean we see all the time, all these cases of people having insane bills for services. And as long as that continues to happen, there’s no way to actually guarantee universal financial security. And so, I see those two things as very, very complementary and part of a whole package that we should be fighting for. And education, perhaps not quite as closely coupled, but I think if we’re talking about what is beyond just financial security, what is really setting people up for longterm success, it seems obvious that we want to make that as accessible as possible. And so, a model where everyone in society has access to higher education is certainly the way to go.

Best Financial Advice for Another PhD

33:29 Emily: Gotcha. Okay. Standard question as we wrap up here that I ask all of my guests which is what is your best financial advice for another PhD? And that could be related to something that we’ve talked about in these two episodes, or it could be something entirely new.

33:44 Jim: I mean, I think it’s just like figuring out your sustainability. So, I mean, thinking about where you’ll be going with your PhD and what is your cost of living then, but just trying to set yourself up so that you’re not heading towards a cliff somewhere, which yeah, I feel like it would look very, very different depending on your specifics.

34:06 Emily: Yeah, definitely. It’s something I talk about a lot for people who are sort of in transition, right, out of graduate school, out of the postdoc into other positions, especially when they’re moving. Make sure you understand the cost of living. As you brought up earlier, you know, in San Francisco, make sure you understand the cost of living that you’re getting into and that the salary that you’ve been offered is is appropriate for that area and negotiate if that is not your initial offer. So, thank you so much for that advice. Jim, this has been a fascinating conversation, really just the tip of the iceberg on this topic, and so thank you so much for joining me.

34:38 Jim: Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation as well.

Outtro

34:40 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

The Financial and Career Opportunities Available to National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows

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In this episode, Emily interviews Kelsey Wood, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow who now teaches others how to write competitive applications for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). They discuss the decisions that new fellows have to make regarding when to start receiving the funding and the internship opportunities available. Kelsey also issues a warning regarding paying quarterly estimated tax and gives great insights from her course for GRFP applicants. At the end of the interview, Kelsey shares her best financial advice for current graduate students and postdocs.

Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Further Reading:

NSF GRFP finances

Teaser

00:00 Kelsey: I think that a lot of times the graduate groups or the administration will attempt to get as much free labor out of graduate students as they can, but there is actually a lot of money there to pay people, so I think a lot of times grad students need to be proactive in asking for money for things like leading workshops or teaching classes, TA-ing, et cetera.

Introduction

00:26 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 five, episode 16, and today my guest is Kelsey Wood, a graduate student at UC Davis and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. We discuss the decisions that new NSF fellows have to make regarding when to start receiving the funding and the internship opportunities available. Kelsey also issues a warning regarding paying quarterly estimated tax. Throughout the interview, she shares her insights into how to best manage your finances as a fellowship recipient. Kelsey now teaches others how to write competitive GRFP applications, and she details some excellent strategies from the online course she developed. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Kelsey Wood.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am so delighted to be joined on the podcast today by Kelsey Wood. She is currently a graduate student at UC Davis, and she is also a former NSF GRFP fellow. And she’s going to be talking to us about that program and also the advice that she gives people in her course regarding applying successfully for the application. So, Kelsey, I’m so glad to have you. Welcome! Will you please tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

01:39 Kelsey: Sure. Thanks for having me on. I am a PhD student about to graduate in integrated genetics and genomics at UC Davis and I currently am studying plant pathogen interactions. I got my bachelor’s in biology from Reed College where I studied animal behavior and then I happened to get a job in the biotechnology industry working on potato disease resistance. And I really liked my time in industry, but I found that I was frustrated that I couldn’t pursue my own independent research questions. So, I realized I needed to go to graduate school.

02:14 Kelsey: And so, I applied for the NSF GRFP during my first year. Mostly due to peer pressure from a senior grad student who was a GRFP fellow, and he actually gave a workshop on the fellowship where he basically convinced everyone to apply. And I’m glad I did because I actually got it. And then after I received the fellowship, I decided take over that workshop and also encourage other people to apply and give them tips on how they can actually get it. So, I’ve offered a variation of that workshop for the last five years, and I did an online version last year. I held some free webinars that were attended by over 200 people all across the U.S., and then I also offered an intensive workshop with additional webinars, one-on-one and personalized editing services. Participants said that was really helpful in preparing their applications. And actually, out of the 10 people who submitted in the workshop, three of them got it this year and one honorable mention. So, I’m really proud of them and happy that I kind of helped people to get it.

Kelsey’s NSF GFRP Workshop Updates

03:18 Emily: That’s incredible. Oh my gosh. I would have loved to participate in something like that when I was early on in graduate school. Tell people right up front where can they go to find more information about that course?

03:27 Kelsey: Right now, the best place to probably get updates on what I’m going to be offering it–and I’ll also be posting a lot of the materials–is my Twitter. It’s @klsywd (Kelsey Wood), but without any vowels. So, K L S Y W D.

03:42 Emily: So, it sounds like you were a fellow between your second and fourth years of graduate school. Is that right?

03:49 Kelsey: Let’s see. I started the fellowship–it would have been in June, 2014–the summer before my second year. Yeah.

Major Decision Points for NSF GRFP Recipients

03:58 Emily: Okay. And so, what are the decisions? Okay, so let’s say we’re speaking to one of the people who has just found out that they received the GRF. Amazing, congratulations! But they’re faced with a few decisions either right away or during the course of their tenure. So, can you talk through–kind of give them a little preview, what are those decisions that they need to make, and what are some things they should consider as they’re making them?

When To Start Receiving the Stipend

04:23 Kelsey: Sure. So, I mean the first one is when to start receiving the fellowship stipend. So, you’re technically a fellow for five years, but you’re only receiving the stipend for three of those years and then the other two years you’re on tenure–you’re either on tenure or on reserve. Anyways, you only get paid for three years and then the other two years you just you have additional benefits that you can receive from the fellowship, but you’re not paid any longer. And you can start that at any time. What you really want to consider is potentially what other funding sources you might be encountering during graduate school. For example, there are a number of fellowships that you can get after you’ve passed your qualifying exams, which usually happen second or third year. So, if you think you’re going to be applying and getting those fellowships, it can be really good just to start the GRFP right away.

Consider Timing (and Adequate Payment) for TAships

05:14 Kelsey: And then the other fellowship will take over once your GRFP funding runs out. Some really lucky people got multiple fellowships, actually, right at the beginning. Somebody I knew got the GRFP and the Ford fellowship this year, actually. So, they need to decide which ones, what order to get those because you can’t get them both at the same time. But that’s a pretty lucky problem to have. I would say that. And then the other thing is, some people have to do TAships in order to satisfy a degree requirement. And you can’t do a 50% TAship while you’re doing the GRFP. That’s not allowed. So, you might want to maybe get that out of the way first so you can pass your qualifying exams and have that TA under the thing. What I did is I actually TA-ed for free. But in retrospect, I don’t know if I would make that same decision again because it was a lot of work, and I don’t know. I’ve kind of changed my feelings on just doing things like volunteering and for free because there actually is–I think that a lot of times the graduate groups or the administration will attempt to get as much free labor out of graduate students as they can. But there is actually a lot of money there to pay people. So, I think a lot of times grad students need to be proactive in asking for money for things like leading workshops or teaching classes, TA-ing, et cetera. So, that’s what I found. I started asking for stipends for my workshop and I got them. I started asking for stipends for TA-ing grad level classes. They weren’t offering them before, and I started to get them. So, I think in retrospect I maybe would have tried to get paid for a TAship to meet my degree requirements and then taking the GRFP.

07:09 Emily: It is kind of strange that universities have different policies around who gets paid for doing what exactly, because TA-ing–sort of similar to your situation, but–in the department that I was in, in graduate school, we had what they called, a graduation requirement to TA for two semesters, and it was not tied to our stipend. So, we were all being paid in some manner, either research assistantship or on fellowship or something, but we just had to do this TA work on top of it during a couple of semesters. So, that was the way they structured it. It wasn’t tied to our income. But in other places, of course there are some people who are TAs and that’s their stipend and that’s their funding and that’s the source of it. But then there is even another option that I’ve heard of which is essentially sort of being hired as an adjunct, as a graduate student. So, it doesn’t have to do with your base stipend. That could still come from a fellowship or research assistantship or whatever else. But if you take on an additional class as a TA or even as the lead instructor, you could be paid like an adjunct would be paid. So, different places do things different ways.

Check with Your Advisor About Research Grant Cycles

08:11 Emily: But I think to your original point about deciding, “Okay, when do you want to be paid for these three years when you’re in those three years of having the GRF?” You said that you should think about, “Are you going to be applying for different kinds of fellowships post-quals or post-prelims? Are you going to need this TA thing?” You could potentially get it out of the way first and have your funding come from there, initially. I would also want to throw in there, maybe ask your advisor about research grants, and are they at the end of a grant cycle, the beginning of a grant cycle? Because that could also play into it. You don’t want to take the fellowship when your PI has tons of money and then, you know, three years later, maybe there is no funding there for you. So, that’s a potential risk too. So, it’s just kind of being open about what are all these financial factors within your department, within your group, that could play into this.

09:03 Kelsey: Yeah. And actually, that’s a really good point. Because for a lot of people, getting the GRFP actually influences what lab they can join because you’re coming in with your own funding. So, you might be able to join a lab that you wouldn’t have been able to join otherwise. And in that case, you’d probably want to start using your funding right away. And then, you know, you can essentially help your PI get other grants that will take over once the funding runs out. So, that’s a big benefit.

Are You Listed as a Dependent on Your Parents’ Tax Return?

09:33 Emily: I wanted to add one more point. It’s tax season right now. So, I’m thinking a lot about taxes. And so, this weird thing happens with fellowship funding when you’re under the age of 24. I don’t know how old you were when you first started, were you under 24?

09:48 Kelsey: No, I don’t think so.

09:49 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Because you had had at least one year of work experience. But if you’re starting when you’re 22 or 23, anytime that you have fellowship income in a year when you’re age 23 or younger, some weird stuff can happen with your tax return. Namely, your parents might be able to have more of a claim on you as a potential dependent on their tax return, which is not good for you if it turns out that way. And secondly, you might be hit with this weird high tax called the “Kiddie Tax.”

10:16 Emily: And so, I don’t want to go into all that right now, but if you go to my website, pfforphds.com/tax, there are articles there about both of these issues. But my point is just when you have fellowship income and you’re under the age of 24, sometimes it can have these weird effects of making you pay a lot more in tax than you would normally if you were over the age of 24. So, to me that’s just another factor that I want to throw in there of, “Hey, if you’re under the age of 24, maybe consider delaying a year until you actually turn 24, and then take the fellowship if your alternative is having a research assistantship instead, which is W2 income, which is treated somewhat differently tax-wise. So, more details about that if you want to talk with me about it or read about it more, but I’ll just throw that in there for those of you on the younger side.

25% TAships Possible During GRFP

11:00 Kelsey: That’s a really good point. Oh, and I actually thought of one more thing regarding TAships, which I think a lot of people don’t know–or I didn’t realize at first–is that it usually is possible to get a 25% TAship while getting the GRFP. So, that might be an option if that will satisfy your degree requirement. And the other benefit is that you actually get paid on top of the GRFP additional money for the 25% TAship, and that’s allowed within the GRFP rules. So, it’s just something to consider. I did that for one quarter, and it was really nice.

Financial and Career Opportunities for GRFP Recipients

11:34 Emily: Yeah, I love hearing all of these different ideas. Okay. So again, speaking with a new fellowship recipient, what are some of the financial and career opportunities that come along with receiving the fellowship?

11:46 Kelsey: Well, probably the biggest one is just the fact that the stipend is a lot higher than most standard stipends offered for grad students. And so, that makes a really big difference to be able to afford cost of living, which has really gone up in a lot of places, especially in California. I’m sure other places as well. And then another benefit for your career is that winning one fellowship usually leads to winning additional fellowships and awards. And I think one reason for this is that the reviewers look at your CV and they’re like impressed that you have the GRFP so they are more likely to give you these other awards. And then the other reason is that I think that just the practice of writing the fellowship in grants, you become better and better at it. And so you’re able to write more convincing applications.

12:35 Kelsey: So, for me personally, after I got the GRFP, I won research funds from UC Davis. I got like three or four travel awards for conferences. I got the USDA predoctoral fellowship. And then I also applied for a Dean’s award for mentorship and got that. And I’m pretty sure the GRFP helped me a lot in that. And also writing these and teaching classes on fellowship writing probably helped me also become a lot more convincing. So, that’s a huge benefit for your career.

Get the Snowball Rolling, Start Early

13:05 Emily: I’ll actually add in there that I think it makes a ton of sense, like what you’re doing with your course, or the students in your course, it makes a ton of sense to focus and put so much effort into these really early funding applications like before you enter graduate school in your first, maybe second year of graduate school. You don’t have to say, “Okay, this is going to be my bar for every application I’ll ever do.” But as you said, if you can get that snowball rolling of receiving awards right away in the start, it does make the rest of it easier and is very impressive. It’s a wonderful fellowship to win. So, I’ll just say, go take Kelsey’s course. Or somebody else’s. Just get these resources and make sure that you are putting as much effort as you possibly can into these early applications. And like you said, the skill of writing the application itself, that is something that carries over into the future. So, yeah, when you have your time before you’re deep into your research and you’re still doing your classes or whatever, make time for this. Make it almost like a course in your schedule in that semester that you’re applying. Because it really is worthwhile to put in the effort.

14:08 Kelsey: Yeah. And a lot of people don’t want to apply, for example, because they just don’t think they’re going to get it, for various reasons. And I encourage them just to do it anyways as an exercise. And usually by the end of it, I always ask my students during the course evaluation if they thought that the class was worth it, even if they don’t get the fellowship. And like 95% of them say yes, just because it’s the skill, it’s writing about your research. A lot of times if you’re actually writing about your real research, you can use that GRFP application in other grants or your qualifying exams, which is really useful. So yeah, definitely a good skill to get and to get early. And then if you get it, like you said, it’s just a snowball effect.

Internship and International Travel Opportunities

14:54 Kelsey: I was going to mention just the internship and the international travel opportunities that GRFP fellows are able to apply for. So, I didn’t actually apply to either of these, but I have known people who have done the Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide, the GROW program, and that just allows you to do like three to six months research abroad. You identify a host in another country and then you apply for it. And I heard it has around like a 50% acceptance rate, and they fully fund your travel and living expenses abroad. So, it’s just a nice way to kind of get some international experience, maybe learn a new technique, or use some instrumentation that’s not available at your home lab. And it’s just another fellowship you can add to your CV.

15:49 Emily: I’m also thinking that that’s just an incredible thing to be able to talk about in future job interviews, or whatever. Just having a different kind of experience that broke up graduate school a little bit. Expanding your network, you know, seeing things from another perspective. It’s in the name, right? It’s a real growth opportunity.

Even Without the GRFP, Talk to Your PI About Collaborations

16:08 Kelsey: And I mean, something to consider too is even if you don’t have the GRFP, if your PI does have enough funding, this is something you could probably set up on your own basically doing research in a collaborator’s lab internationally or in the U.S. So, I think it’s something to consider just to diversify the experience that you get and you can talk to your PI about it and it might be something they go for.

16:34 Emily: Yeah. I know actually one of my labmates while I was in graduate school did the Whitaker Fellowship. I don’t know how subject matter-specific that is, but he was able to spend nine months in East Asia. And yeah, I think it was a great experience.

16:48 Kelsey: Yeah. The NSF has another one too that I think is open to all, not just GRFP fellows, that’s just a travel abroad or research abroad fellowship. There are other ones out there too. So, it’s definitely something to look out for and apply for.

17:03 Emily: Okay. So, that was the GROW fellowship, but there’s another internship program, right?

17:07 Kelsey: Yeah. So, there’s the GRIP program. So, it’s the Graduate Research Internship Program, and that one you do research at a federal agency. I don’t know all the ones, but I know like you can do research in the Smithsonian for example, any of the agencies, basically the governmental agencies.

17:28 Emily: That also sounds like an incredible career opportunity.

17:32 Kelsey: Especially if you want to go into government research. You know, I think that nowadays more and more graduate students are realizing that the academic path of being a professor–there are so few opportunities for that and so many graduate students trying to get those, that a lot of people are considering alternative career paths like industry or government jobs. I had a lot of people who took my class who really wanted their end goal to be to work for a governmental agency and do research in that respect. And actually the NSF really encourages that for GRP applicants. So, I tell people, if that’s their career goal, to write about that in their application.

Timing of Internship Programs During Fellowship

18:16 Emily: Just to add on to that, I think having outside work experience before you actually finish your PhD is incredible for finding whatever your next job is. Even if you decide to stay within academia. Again, it gives you multiple perspectives, broader network. But a question I have about the internship programs, is that something that you have to do during your funded years or is that something you can still do on the remaining two years?

18:39 Kelsey: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, both the international program–the GROW program–and the internship program can be done while you’re on reserve. So, while you’re not receiving the stipend. So, it has to be done within the five-year period of when you first start the fellowship. But yeah, that’s really one of the benefits. And I think the GROW is really something you’d probably want to do towards the end of your graduate career–probably both programs–because one, it’s additional funding? So, maybe your GRFP funding has run out and now you can get some more funding for your travel and living expenses.

Design a Custom Internship

19:16 Kelsey: And then the other thing is that you really are probably better able to identify a lab or a governmental agency that would be a right fit for your research at that point. And actually something else regarding internships is, you know, there was a program at UC Davis that’s like the biotechnology program. It’s like a degree, an “emphasis,” and they require that you do an internship as part of the emphasis. But one thing I realized is, even if you’re not in a program like that or even if you’re not a GRFP fellow, you can a lot of times arrange an internship in industry towards the end of your graduate career. Potentially, the company will fund you to do that, too. And it can be a really good chance to explore these career opportunities.

20:07 Kelsey: A lot of times, if you end up doing a good job, the company will be really excited to hire you and it kind of lets you trial industry or trial a company and maybe contribute something else to your research, too. So, I just have realized that a lot of times you can kind of design your own programs. Obviously, you want your advisor to be on board with this, but a lot of times, especially if you can get funding from the company, then they’re going to be very happy about that and they also want to see you grow in your career. So, I think that’s something that people should consider. Even if you’re not a fellow or even if you don’t have an official program, you can kind of craft your own internships during graduate school.

20:51 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s one of the most powerful things you can do for your career, prior to finishing your PhD, while you know you have something to go back to after the summer ends, or whatever. I actually did a science policy fellowship that was three months, the Christine Mirzayan policy fellowship. It’s at the National Academies. And I did it after I finished my PhD. I applied basically around the same time that I was defending, but it’s open to current graduate students as well. In retrospect, sort of like you, I wish I had done it while I was still in my program and I think it would have informed some of the decisions that I made as I was finishing up. So, internships, great for everyone. I know not everyone thinks that internships are for them. I’m from an engineering field, so it’s sort of more normal to think about doing an internship. And of course in computer science or similar fields like that. But I think it’s expanding and it should expand more to other disciplines where it hasn’t been a traditional part of the PhD path.

Commercial

21:50 Emily: Hey social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15-minute call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time. I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now, back to our interview.

Financial Advice for Fellowship Recipients

22:36 Emily: So, let’s broaden this line of questioning a little bit. Not just for people who have just received the NSF GRFP, but people who have received it in previous years who are still receiving that higher stipend. And maybe other people who’ve received outside fellowships that also have some stipend augmentation based on that. What’s your financial advice for people who have received one of these lucrative outside fellowships?

File Estimated Quarterly Taxes (NOT Yearly)

23:00 Kelsey: Yeah, so I think the biggest pieces of advice I have are regarding taxes and savings. And so, the thing you should do immediately is start to file your taxes quarterly instead of yearly. And you can estimate how much taxes you’re going to have to pay quarterly so you can start to save up. My personal sob story is that I did not do this the first year and I ended up filing my taxes and I owed about $5,000, which I didn’t have saved up. So, I ended up having to do a payment plan with the IRS which charges interest, actually quite a bit of interest. So, I ended up having to pay way more in taxes than I would have if I had just started filing quarterly. So, do that right away. I know taxes are not fun, but it’s actually not too hard to calculate if you’re only getting the stipend income, and that’s way better than having to owe it.

23:56 Emily: Actually, let me pause there because this is one of my big areas, right? It’s tax for fellowship recipients. So, was that $5,000 just the IRS or was that split between California and federal?

24:08 Kelsey: Oh, yeah, it was California and federal, split.

24:10 Emily: Okay. That’s within the more reasonable realm. Okay. Yeah, definitely. I mean I’ve actually had, I think, two other people interviewed on the podcast who have also set up payment plans with the IRS based on this exact same situation. So, this is not at all uncommon, and it’s one of my big areas of focus is to get this information in front of new fellowship recipients. No longer is income tax–this is the case at almost all universities–no longer is income tax going to be automatically taken out of your paychecks. It’s something you now have to take responsibility for, like you were just saying.

Personal Finance for PhDs Tax Center

24:43 Emily: So, most likely you are going to be required to pay quarterly estimated tax. And I have a ton of materials about this. Again, if you go to pfforphds.com/tax there’s an article there. And in particular, I have actually a workshop for people in just this exact situation. If you go to pfforphds.com/qetax for quarterly estimated tax, it will forward you to my most recent workshop. And probably similar to yours, Kelsey, I have prerecorded videos for that, and I also do live Q&A calls to help people with questions as they come up through tax season. So, just because of when we’re recording this though, I want to add in that part of the response to the coronavirus crisis actually has been to delay the first, like the Q1 payment for 2020. So, just like with your annual tax return, right now, this year in 2020, it’s no longer April 15th, but rather it’s July 15th.

25:34 Emily: So, for those fellows out there, you have a little bit extra time to figure out what’s going on in 2020 regarding your quarterly estimated tax and making those payments. So, the first payment as of this recording is actually due [July] 15th, which is the quarter two payment. But yeah, totally a common story, like you were just saying, Kelsey, is just to not realize the change that had gone on with your income tax and catching up with it when you actually file your annual return and realizing, “Gosh, now I have all this money that I owe to the IRS.” So, how did that payment plan go for you? Like was the increase in stipend more manageable, or what were your tips around saving I guess?

Start Saving Immediately

26:11 Kelsey: Yeah, so I think I’m still paying off some of my taxes monthly for that. So, anyway, just do it ahead of time and you won’t have to worry about it. And then in terms of saving, the other thing is that, because the GRFP stipend is a lot higher than the normal grad student stipend, you can kind of get used to a certain style of living. Like you’re able to go out to eat more or buy more expensive groceries. And then as soon as the stipend stops, it can be kind of a shock. So, what I’d advise doing is actually just start saving almost immediately. And I use automatic monthly withdrawals to a mutual fund. And the benefit there is I don’t see the money. Like it’s just automatic.

27:02 Kelsey: The savings are out of sight, out of mind. And then when I actually really need it I can go and be like, “Okay, here’s how much I have.” And I’ve done that a few times. I used that to fund a vacation to Europe. And so I advise just like setting something up right away and make sure you can’t see the money. Save up for when the GRFP ends, and also just because you have all this extra money that you wouldn’t be getting otherwise, so you might as well save part of it and not just spend it all.

27:33 Emily: Yeah, I definitely echo what you’re saying. And I think especially where you’re living, it’s a high cost of living area. It’s probably already challenging to live just on that GRFP stipend and it’s certainly less than we’d be making if you were having a regular job. But, think about your peers who are somehow probably managing to survive, hopefully without debt, on that lower stipend level and see if you can maybe keep your fixed expenses, like your housing, your transportation, at that lower level, so that if your income does drop after the fellowship ends, you don’t have to move or you don’t have to sell your car. Or you can adjust the groceries and adjust the restaurant spending. And it’s much easier and more palatable than having to go through those more major upheavals. So, I totally agree with what you’re saying.

Stipend Negotiations and Bonuses for Fellowship Recipients

28:19 Emily: So, something I know that some fellowship recipients do–and it sounds like maybe you didn’t or maybe it wasn’t possible for you–is that once they know that they’re receiving the fellowship, they actually negotiate to have their stipend stay at that fellowship level. Even after it ends, instead of going back down to the baseline level. Or, alternatively, sometimes programs give out one-time bonuses to fellowship winners. Have you heard about that or have any experience in that area?

28:47 Kelsey: It’s something I thought about asking my PI, because after the fellowship ended, I was struggling a little bit, financially. I ended up doing the 25% TAship to recover that income. But I do think that, I mean it’s really going to depend on your PI and their sources of funding, but it is something that is possible, potentially.

29:15 Emily: Yeah. I think it’s kind of a “no harm in asking” situation. And actually, if you happen to receive this fellowship when you’re not yet committed to a program, so prior to starting your first year of graduate school, that is something I would take to every program that you’re heavily, heavily considering, saying, “Okay, I got this fellowship. Can you augment, can you extend the guarantee?” Like what more negotiation room is there now that you’re bringing in all this money for them, right?

29:46 Kelsey: I mean, exactly. You’re bringing in just about a hundred thousand in your stipend dollars alone, not to mention tuition and fees. So, it is pretty lucrative. It’s lucrative for a program and a lab to want to accept you because you’re coming in with all this money and you just asking like, “Oh hey, can I get an extra $5,000 a year?” When you’re bringing in $100,000, it’s really still a pretty good deal for them. So, I definitely encourage people to do it. I’d love to hear if anyone is successful at this.

Details on Kelsey’s NSF GRFP Course

30:17 Emily: Yeah, I always want to hear negotiation stories. Absolutely. Email or tweet me those. So, let’s hear more about your course and the content that you create there. You said the best place to find out more about that is your Twitter, could you repeat your handle?

30:34 Kelsey: Sure. It’s @ K L S Y W D (@klsywd). So, it’s my name without any vowels. It’s pronounced Kelsey Wood.

30:41 Emily: So, tell us a little bit more about the structure of the course. I know you’ve mentioned this a little bit upfront, but last year for example, you ran it between what month and what month and you know, what goes on in that time period?

30:53 Kelsey: Yeah, so one of my biggest pieces of advice for the GRFP is to start it early. So, it’s due in like October now. And if you’re on the quarter system, like UC Davis, classes start at the end of September. So, it’s basically due during the first month of classes and it’s also your first month of grad school. So, you’re either just starting in a lab or doing rotations, and that month is just crazy. So, if you don’t start the fellowship early, it’s going to be really hard to do it all and do it well. So, my course actually starts in August, so then you have kind of a full month to start to think about stuff, outline it.

31:35 Kelsey: And then you have September to really refine it before classes start. And then we do all the final drafting and editing in October. So yeah, my course is a three-month thing. And that’s one of the benefits of doing it online. I wasn’t able to start in August at UC Davis because not everyone had come to Davis yet because it was still summer. So, doing it online, I was able to get people just at least starting to think about it and getting ideas rolling. And so, what I do is I had four different webinars on different topics. So, I covered the two NSF criteria, which are intellectual merit and broader impacts. Basically like a full 45-minute webinar on both of those topics. And I think that’s really important because especially the broader impacts one is really confusing to a lot of people.

Focus on Broader Impacts, Know Your Audience

32:27 Kelsey: It’s something that you pretty much probably have never heard of until the NSF fellowship. And it’s a really important part of that fellowship, too. So, I really emphasize the importance of that. And also, it’s really important that you get broader impacts experience before you apply. And if you’re starting the application early or even people who are listening to this, thinking about applying for next year, should basically right now find some activity that you can do that you can write about in your broader impacts section. So, volunteering, outreach, teaching, et cetera. Because if you don’t have any experience, you’re not going to get it. And then I also do a webinar on writing tips. The biggest one that I’ve learned in all my years of writing is probably just like really knowing your audience and writing for them.

33:21 Kelsey: So, you really want to just imagine who’s reading it and who they want to fund, and you really want to just be that person that they want to fund. I help people do that in their essays. Something else that’s really interesting, and it actually might be a regional difference, is in the way that you want to sell yourself in these essays. So, a lot of people are really understated or humble, and I’m like, “No, you have got to really come off like a rock star and show off all the awesome things that you’ve done.” And apparently, somebody told me that that’s actually frowned upon in the UK or in Europe to do that in your grants.

34:10 Kelsey: But in the U.S., at least, it seems to be more popular or more of a winning technique. And so, the other part of the course is that I read people’s essays and give them a ton of tips and just help them write it and rewrite it to just have a better chance of getting the fellowship. And I also set up peer editing groups, too. And I do think that that’s something you want to do, if you take a class or not. Just find somebody who, especially who’s experienced with the NSF, and have them read your proposal and give you feedback. So, for example, when I applied, I was really lucky to have a former NSF reviewer read my application and give me feedback. And he pretty much destroyed my initial draft. It was red everywhere and he’s like, “Get to the point. Be more concise. This is too vague.” And so, I kind of have internalized his feedback and I use that now when I’m editing people’s essays.

35:13 Emily: Yeah, that sounds incredible. Thanks so much for telling us about the course. And were there any other tips you wanted to add in? I know you just gave several already, but any others?

35:23 Kelsey: I guess the last one would also just be to read a lot of example essays, too, for inspiration. And there are a lot out there. I have my own personal collection. I actually have quite a few in my personal collection that I share with people in the course. And then the ones that are okay to share publicly, I’ll probably be posting on my Twitter or on my website once I get that up.

Best Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

35:46 Emily: Yeah, that sounds great. Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for joining me for the interview today. And final question that I ask of all my guests is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?

35:59 Kelsey: Well, I think the number one is to apply for fellowships and you know, cast a wide net and apply for anything that you’re eligible for, pretty much. I think it’s totally worth it. I have a quote that’s from that previous grad student who helped with the NSF workshop, which is, “You win 0% of the fellowships you don’t apply for.” So, I think it’s worth it. You can do it. And I guess the other thing is that I think it is important to consider the cost of living and the stipend amount when you are choosing a graduate school. I don’t know. This wasn’t really made apparent to me. And you know, you’re just like, “Oh no, you just choose the best school or the best lab.” But there is kind of a range in stipends across the U.S. and cost of living. So, I think it’s something to really consider because your finances are a part of your happiness in grad school. So, apply for fellowships, and consider that.

36:58 Emily: Totally, totally concur. Absolutely. Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for joining me today and telling us more about these decisions that come up for GRFP recipients and your own experience and about this fabulous course. Thank you.

37:10 Kelsey: Yeah. Thank you.

Outtro

37:12 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This PhD Student Buys Her Time Back by Living Car-Free

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alina Christenbury, a first-year PhD student in computer science at the University of Delaware. Alina doesn’t own a car, preferring to bicycle for her daily commute to her university and around town as much as possible. She relies on her roommate, sister, and other friends for occasional rides to the grocery store, bus stop, or hometown, but also uses ridesharing apps and dreams of owning a portable bicycle. While living car-free certainly helps keep Alina’s expenses down, the reasons for and benefits of her commitment to a cycling lifestyle go far beyond money. This is a great episode for anyone interested in living car-free.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

grad student car-free

Teaser

00:00 Alina: I think, financially, it’s generally a really good idea to have your priorities figured out. Like I’ve decided personally for me right now that cars are not important at all. And that lets me focus on things that are more important and dedicate my time and energy and resources to the ones that do matter.

Intro

00:25 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 five, episode 14, and today my guest is Alina Christenbury, a first-year PhD student in computer science at the University of Delaware. Alina is committed to cycling and does not own a car, which frees up a great amount of her income and time to be used for other purposes. We discuss how the location of your home and your city’s infrastructure can support or not support a cycling lifestyle as well as how Alina handles transporting groceries and traveling outside of her city. At the end of the episode, we touch on how Alina’s cycling lifestyle supports her values of frugality, time freedom, and sustainability. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alina Christenbury.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:16 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Alina Christenbury, and she is going to be talking to us about a commitment to cycling, which is a topic that I’ve been searching to find someone to talk about. So, I’m so glad that Alina and I found one another. On Twitter, in fact. I’m really excited about this. So, Alina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And will you please tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

01:37 Alina: Yeah! Thanks for having me and everything. So, I just finished up my undergrad degree at the University of Delaware in computer science, and I just started my PhD in spatial computing–well, technically computer science, but the study area is spacial computing–in June. So, that’s very recent.

02:00 Emily: Yeah, I should say we’re recording this in August, 2019.

02:04 Alina: Yes.

02:05 Emily: So, you have just, in the past few months, it sounds like, transitioned out of undergrad and into a PhD program.

Transitioning from Undergrad Into Grad School

02:09 Alina: Yeah. I wasn’t really planning on doing this, but then circumstances kind of arose where it seemed like it was a good idea for me. Particularly, they hired this professor who started a human-computer interaction lab at the university. So, that’s very related to my interests, and I kind of immediately latched onto her. She’s cool, and I’m working in her lab. I’ve been working in her lab for the past year now, since she was hired, essentially. So, yeah, it’s going pretty well, I think. For the lack of planning that it had, it’s turned out really well.

02:49 Emily: That’s really good to hear. It is a pretty easy way to get into a PhD is to just work with someone in an undergrad who you’re really clicking with and they just say, “Yeah, just come into my program, just come into my lab. I’ll accept you. I’ll make it happen. You don’t even need to apply, or you know, submit your GREs or whatever has to happen.” But yeah, it’s a great, stress-free way to go about it. So, you must like the University of Delaware to want to stay there longer, right?

03:14 Alina: It’s a good place. I started going here because it was in-state and because tuition costs are crazy and I’m not trying to incur a lifetime of debt. So, that’s kind of why I ended up going here initially. But I’ve kind of grown to really like the bikeability of the place, which is definitely really a contributing factor into how I’m going to examine life situations for the rest of my life. And I’ve gotten a lot of friends and kind of buried myself in a community here. So, yeah, I like it so far.

Personal History with Biking and Driving

03:53 Emily: Great. I’m so glad you brought up bikeability and the environment that you’re in right now because of course, that’s the topic that we have for today. So, tell us what is your personal history with biking and also car ownership? Have you always been a cyclist? Have you ever owned a car? That kind of thing.

04:12 Alina: So, in high school, I started driving. I used to live in southern Delaware, which is like an hour and a half south from where I am now. And you have to drive there because it’s just so spread out and very rural. And then when I moved to Newark, I pretty much immediately got a bike because it’s a lot closer and it’s actually viable for someone to bike here on a regular basis without too much hassle. So, I started in undergrad, like 2015 I want to say. And I’ve been biking pretty much daily ever since. Just commuting and going to classes, living life. I still do take infrequent car trips particularly for grocery shopping and visiting family downstate because they’re far away and I don’t want to take three days to go see my family, just getting there. So, yeah.

05:02 Emily: Yeah. We’ll get into kind of all those challenges in a moment. But first, I kind of wanted to ask you. So, okay, you’ve just transitioned out of undergrad. Are you living off-campus? Or were you living on campus for part of undergrad? Or what’s been the living situation versus where you work?

Commuting to/from Campus in Grad School

05:21 Alina: So, I live off-campus but very close. It’s maybe a six-minute bike ride from The Green, which is the central area for the University, pretty much. It’s maybe a 20-minute walk or so. Some people bike, some people drive. There are a lot of commuting options. I’ve pretty much always lived just off of campus within a 10-minute bike ride max, which has definitely helped a lot. So, yeah, the one time I stayed in dorms, even then it was on the northern part of campus, which is farther from the base hub of it. So, even when I was living on campus, it was kind of off-campus and still far enough away to make biking seem much more appealing than just walking everywhere.

06:12 Emily: That’s good to hear that you have been able to situate yourself so close to campus. And maybe you don’t know yet because you’ve been a graduate student for a short amount of time, but do a lot of graduate students live that close to campus or do some people live farther away?

06:28 Alina: The few whose houses I’ve been to are pretty close. There’s this one guy, Kent, who lives about the same distance as me, and I’m actually living with another grad student in another department in the same house and he’s as far away from campus as me. So, I’m not totally sure how common it is across the total grad student population, but I’m not the only person doing this.

06:53 Emily: Yeah. There are at least some opportunities to live that close to campus.

06:57 Alina: Yeah.

Bikeability of Newark, Delaware

06:57 Emily: So, tell me a little bit more about the city and how it’s set up to support cycling or not.

07:06 Alina: So, it’s very much a college town. The University really defines a lot of how Newark operates. So, during the summer it’s very, very quiet because all of the students are just gone. But beyond that, infrastructure-wise, there are a handful of bike lanes. Campus itself is very bikeable so you can pretty easily weave in between different university buildings and everything to get around, which is helpful. They’re actually redoing some of the main streets over the summer while a lot of the students are gone, which should make it even easier in the future. But yeah, so it’s set up pretty well to just be a person on a bike, which is not something you can say about every place.

07:48 Emily: Yeah. So, specifically, when you say it’s set up pretty well, can you describe exactly what you mean by that? Like, are there dedicated bike lanes? How do the drivers behave?

08:02 Alina: Dedicated bike lanes is the big one. Drivers aren’t too aggressive. I mean, it’s a small city, so there’s not hyper crazy traffic like somewhere in like New York. Yeah, I don’t think there are any protected bike lanes. There are some bike trails though that kind of snake in circles around. And then there are like some different park-ish areas that it goes through too. So, that definitely helps a lot too, I think.

Comparison to Dedicated Bike Lanes in Seattle, WA

08:33 Emily: Yeah. So, I’m at home in my apartment in Seattle right now, I’m looking out the windows onto a rather major street from my neighborhood that we live off of. And in the last couple of years that street has switched from having, I would say not actual–I guess there are bike lanes, right. But they’re not protected. So, on either side of the road, right. One going north, one going South. It switched to having a totally separate bike lane in parallel with the road that essentially takes up about as much room as a car lane. But there was, not physical barriers, but some space between the bike lane pair and the car lane pair. And my husband cycles to work along this road. And so, I think it’s really been helpful in giving me peace of mind knowing that he’s not so close to cars, you know?

09:18 Alina: Yeah.

09:18 Emily: But it sounds like there aren’t necessarily dedicated bike lanes like that, but there is designated space on either side of a lane of traffic for bikes.

09:25 Alina: Yeah, it’s more like where the shoulder would be is a bike lane and then maybe a shoulder beyond that. I do love how some cities are doing the dedicated bike lanes thing. And I wish we had more of that, but it’s hard to say how it’s going to shape out, I guess.

09:41 Emily: Yeah, there’s actually–not super close to where we live, but along the same road and bike path at a little bit of a more major intersection–the bike lane even has its own traffic light now, which I feel like is so European or something. Like, wow, the bike lane has its own traffic light and a time when they’re allowed to go and the cars aren’t allowed to go. In Seattle, there are a lot of people who commute not by single car. A lot of people cycle here. So yeah, the infrastructure is really being set up to support that. So, it’s really nice.

When Driving is a Necessity

10:11 Emily: Okay. So, we talked about Newark a bit. So, you brought up earlier that you do use cars infrequently for some certain special situations. So, when you do have a challenge, what are the kinds of things that you can’t or don’t at this point accomplish on your bike? And then what do you do to accomplish them?

#1 Grocery Shopping

10:30 Alina: So, the most frequent is probably grocery shopping, which I can kind of do, but I’m only within range of the more expensive grocery stores and the cheaper ones are a little farther away. Usually, I’ll go like grocery shopping with one of my roommates and we’ll just pick up a bunch of stuff for the week and then bring it home, everything. But sometimes for single one-off bits where I need food for just tonight, I’ll just bike to one of the stores and get like two things.

10:56 Emily: Is the main challenge more the distance or is it more transporting the groceries?

11:02 Alina: It’s more distance. For transportation, if it’s like only a couple items, I generally have a basket on the back of my bike that can handle small amounts. Not a whole truckload or anything of groceries, but enough for like two people for a week. And yeah, some of the other grocery stores are just, again, farther away and it’s like an hour-long bike ride to get there and then back would be another hour. It’s not necessarily as feasible.

11:35 Emily: You know, I saw a really funny thing the other day. I was just at Costco a couple of nights ago because I’m a Costco shopper. I actually saw someone in Costco in cycling type clothing and he had one of these little trailers that usually goes behind a bike that I see children sitting in but it was filled up with his Costco bulk food. It’s like, wow–and he also had his dog, like, you are dedicated to your craft, sir.

12:03 Alina: Part of me wants to try that one day. But I have not gotten around to it.

12:08 Emily: Yeah, I’ve never seen that before, but it happened just this week. Yeah. So, okay. So, you covered grocery shopping, but you also mentioned when you go visit your hometown because of your parents in that situation.

#2 Visiting Family

12:20 Alina: Yeah. So, my parents and six younger sisters all live in Millsboro, which is a little bit of a drive. So, maybe every couple months I’ll go down there for a weekend and hang out, you know, missing them and everything. So, it works pretty well. My sister coincidentally lives right across the street. So, she’s very close and we’ll generally drive down together for a couple of days.

12:50 Emily: So, if I’m hearing this correctly, your sister lives where you do and has a car?

12:56 Alina: Yes.

12:56 Emily: And so, you will both go back and visit at the same time. And that’s how you get there. Have you ever traveled without your sister?

Community Reliance When Car-Free 

13:04 Alina: Yeah. So, sometimes she’ll drop me off at the bus station and stuff, or I’ll just borrow her car. So, those are kind of some of the workarounds there. Sometimes I’ll take trips up to see friends in New York for a weekend or two and they’ll just drop me off at the bus station in Wilmington and I’ll just take a Greyhound, which I don’t know if I’d recommend. The Greyhound is okay. It’s very cheap but a time.

13:32 Emily: So, I had one year when I lived car-free when I was living just outside of DC. I was working at the NIH and I had a postbac there and I lived car-free. But, like you, I did some things borrowing other people’s cars or asking for rides from other people. So, the grocery situation, right? Going with a roommate. My now-husband, then-boyfriend, when he would drive his car to visit me there in Maryland, I’d be like, “Okay, well, you’re coming for the weekend. Awesome. We’re going to go to the grocery store as part of this trip. So I could mooch off you with the car situation.” So, I’m very familiar with this solution of, “Well, you end up relying on your community a little bit.” Which is not a bad thing. But I wonder, so in the 10 plus years since I did that one year living car-free, ridesharing has become a total thing. So, do you use Uber or Lyft or anything like that to any degree?

14:32 Alina: Not on a daily basis. I have occasionally used it to get to bus stations and airports and stuff. Just when the timing hasn’t worked out for other people. But generally, I try to go with friends and just make a whole thing out of it. So, yeah. I’ve mostly used it when navigating other cities when in conferences and stuff. But I kind of really want to get a folding bike so I can just take it with me and do that instead of relying on Uber and Lyft and those kinds of ride-sharing services.

Portability of Folding Bikes

15:06 Emily: Yeah, I saw a folding bike actually for sale a couple of days ago. I don’t know if I’d seen one in person before. It was very impressively small, but it looked kind of heavy. I don’t know. I didn’t try picking it up. How portable are they, really?

15:19 Alina: I mean it depends, right? There are ones that will fold to the size of maybe, I don’t know a good comparison for this, like a large dog, I guess? And then others that’ll be a lot smaller and just very light. There are a lot of variants within that whole arena. But I think if I can get one that is small enough that I could just carry it on a plane or a train or something, I think that’ll deal with a lot of those niche edge cases when traveling in other places. So, yeah.

15:53 Emily: Yeah, I would think that if you’re able to bike to a public transit hub and then take your bike with you, if it’s going to be a longer trip, that can definitely solve a lot of those issues.

Commercial

16:08 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us, and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns, from free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax. That’s P F F O R P H D S.com/T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Benefits to Living Car-Free

17:12 Emily: What benefits have you experienced by this commitment to living car-free?

17:17 Alina: So, it gets me outside, which is really nice. It’s one of those things where I am not naturally very motivated to exercise without a real reason. And transportation is a real reason that gets me consistently sort of working out, but just moving and doing something with my body. I only really recently started going to the gym regularly with some friends and that was mostly for social reasons and not necessarily for fitness. So, it kind of built-in this exercise regimen without me necessarily having to think about it and plan for it and everything, which is I think is really helpful. So, yeah.

17:58 Emily: Yeah. So, you get outside. You get your body moving. This is a personal finance show, let’s talk about the numbers. Let’s start with how much money you are spending. So, where did you get this bike from? And how much does the maintenance cost?

18:14 Alina: So, the bike I got at a local bike shop. I think it was around $500, and then another maybe $200 and little add-ons like the rack and some bike bags and stuff. And then maybe once or twice a year, I’ll take it back over there for maintenance. But initially, when I got it, I got a maintenance plan. So, even when I do get it maintained, the labor’s free and I only have to pay for parts. So, I maybe get my brake pads replaced once every year or two years, or so. And then stuff like with tires blowing out or whatever is also pretty infrequent. So, it’s really not a lot. I’d say like a hundred in maintenance a year. And I’m not paying for insurance. I’m not paying for gas. I’m not paying for the “car” bike itself. So, yeah. I haven’t really looked into buying a car, so I don’t totally know what the numbers would look like if I were doing that instead. But I think the financial savings are pretty substantial just based on the frequency of use alone.

19:19 Emily: Yeah. I mean, I can tell you as a car owner, cars are a lot more expensive. Even a very, very cheap car–several times as expensive as a bike as well. And really, the gas costs, the insurance, as you mentioned.

19:33 Alina: It all adds up over time.

19:35 Emily: Yeah. And the maintenance, too, on a car is like–if you haven’t planned for it, if you haven’t saved for it, budgeted for it–it can be a real shock. I mean $500, a thousand dollars, multi-thousand dollars easily for maintenance. And you’re just not going to get to that scale with a new bike. You’re just going to buy a new bike if things got to that degree of a problem. Yeah. So, I’m sure it helps with the budgeting and everything. So, yeah. Have there been any downsides to this commitment? Aside from the slight challenges that we’ve already discussed. Like I don’t know, maybe weather? Anything like that?

Downsides to Biking Commitment: Weather and Community Reliance

20:10 Alina: I was going to say, the weather is probably the biggest one. I definitely have to limit how I dress in certain ways during certain seasons in order to accommodate this. It’s pretty hard for me to wear longer dresses and skirts and stuff because it can just get caught up with the gears and everything. And then I definitely have to layer well, particularly in cold and rainy weather. Otherwise, my entire body just gets soaked, which is not great. I don’t recommend it. But yeah, that’s probably the biggest one, honestly. And then again, the community reliance is a little bit annoying sometimes. But we have backups for that, like Uber and Lyft, so it’s not as much of a hurdle as it would be otherwise. Yeah, those are the two biggest downsides, I think.

21:05 Emily: Yeah, it definitely sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff given the amount of money that you are not spending. And I can just say, again, my husband cycles to work. We live in Seattle. It rains–not heavily, but quite frequently–here. And so, he’s biking in the rain a lot and like you said, he had to buy some special clothing that’s water-resistant, waterproof. But after that, he’s pretty okay. Like, it’s alright, he just takes off that layer when he gets to work and puts it back on when he leaves again.

Peer Perceptions About Not Owning a Car

21:34 Emily: So, what do your peers think about you not having a car? Is this an unusual thing?

21:44 Alina: I don’t think it’s totally unusual for this age range and location. I’ve definitely convinced some of them to try this more because I really like this, I just talk about it a lot. So, I’ve kind of seen a handful of my friends pick up their own bikes over time, which is always like, “You’re doing it! Good job, I’m proud of you.” So, I mean, they’re generally supportive, I think. So, yeah.

22:13 Emily: It’s clear from your enthusiasm in this conversation that you are a biking evangelist, right? You want to spread the good word about biking.

22:23 Alina: Yeah! It’s so much cheaper! There are so many benefits!

Additional Bike Benefit: Sustainability

22:28 Emily: Well, another benefit that you haven’t brought up yet is sustainability and energy usage. So, can you talk a little bit about that?

22:34 Alina: Yeah. So, the only thing it really costs is human energy. And even that is beneficial because it’s cheaper than a gym membership, for one, but it doesn’t pollute the air, which is a perk. And it’s very location-dependent, but if you can get past that, it doesn’t damage anything.

23:09 Emily: Yeah. I have observed that there are many, many overlaps between frugality and living a more sustainable or a smaller carbon footprint kind of life. This is one of the big areas, right? If you drive less, if you can drive less to the degree that you don’t even need to own a car, then you’re really shrinking your carbon footprint as well as not having those line items in your budget that are pretty big ones.

23:38 Emily: I mean after housing, transportation, and food are like the next two big expenses for Americans. And so, if you can pretty much eliminate one of those three big ones by using a bike instead–as we said, it’s a very small outlay of cash to buy the bike and the maintenance is very, very low–it has an incredible impact on your finances, but you can also feel good about the impact on the Earth, right?

24:05 Alina: It doesn’t use as many resources as a car, that’s just fact.

24:08 Emily: Right. And many, many of us Americans, we have calories to expend, I’ll put it that way. There’s plenty that we’re already eating that if we decided to burn it off through biking, that’s a great use. As you said, instead of maybe going to the gym. Like maybe just building this exercise into your general lifestyle and then not having to seek it out on extra time and extra kind of dedicated way that again, costs more money as you were just saying. I understand that you are, well, I don’t know what you’d like to call yourself. Some people say FIRE walkers, right? What’s the term that you like? You are pursuing FIRE, which is financial independence and early retirement, and I understand that this cycling lifestyle plays into that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

FIRE: Financial Independence and Early Retirement

24:56 Alina: I mean, I don’t really like titles. I’m just a person trying to live in what I think is the best way that I know of so far. But the FIRE movement is really inspiring and I think really had an influence on how I look at priorities in life and what really, really matters. And cars, I’ve decided really don’t matter for me and I’m willing to work around that in other ways to work on other things. I think freeing up most of my time is really important just so I can work on things that aren’t necessarily going to be paid. So, I wouldn’t necessarily say volunteering, but community organizing is really important to me. Game design is really important, and there are all kinds of other things that are more deserving of my attention than cars. So, this helps free up the most time for that, I think.

25:57 Emily: Mhm. So, you’re really thinking about and being inspired by the FIRE movement, not only in having more control and autonomy over your finances but also over your time?

26:06 Alina: Yeah, I mean I view it as buying my time back, really. This is a really big motivation for looking into it and kind of following a lot of the tenets, I guess. So, it’s one of those things where I don’t think the ultimate purpose of humanity is to work and accumulate capital, right? There’s so much else to do, but you have to have the time and autonomy to do that. And if you don’t have that, then you turn it into this negative cycle of just always working for someone else and never really fulfilling what you really want to do with your time.

More Details About the FIRE Movement

26:43 Emily: Mhm. Yeah, so we haven’t really defined this that well in this episode, but if people want to hear more about FIRE, financial independence and early retirement, I did a two-part interview with someone else pursuing FIRE, Dr. Gov Worker, that was published in season three of the podcast. So, you can go check that out. But basically what we’re talking about is lowering your expenses, raising your income, saving a whole lot of money so that you can, as you were just saying, buy back your time. Maybe you want to leave your job, eventually. That would be more like what we call retirement. Maybe you want to do that particularly early, early retirement, or maybe you just want to have the ability to be able to have more control over what your job is. Like have more negotiation ability around what your job is because you have the ability to walk away.

27:29 Alina: Being able to say, “No,” matters so much because if you feel like you can’t say, “No,” to bad opportunities and bad decisions, then you don’t really have a lot of power over your life. And then it just gets really depressing, which is where policies like universal basic income can be really empowering to kind of fix that issue for the general person across everywhere instead of specific niches that are trying to do it themselves.

28:03 Emily: Yeah. This is so interesting. I would love to talk about this topic further, but we said we were going to keep this episode about cycling, so that’s I think we’re we’ll leave it. So, there’s definitely a lot to follow up on if other people are interested in being inspired by the FIRE movement, as you were. Can you give a couple of recommendations for where you learned about this or maybe people to follow in the movement that you like?

Personal Finance Subreddit and Mr. Money Mustache

28:27 Alina: So, the only real interaction I had was the personal finance subreddit. They have a very extensive FAQ and Wiki, and it goes into a lot of different detail about different strategies for managing your finances and potentially reaching early retirement. Mr. Money Mustache is also the really big figure people probably should already know about him by now. He’s been around. And then I actually took a personal finance class in high school because I was like, “I need to be prepared for this. It’s an inevitability of adult life.” So, those are the majority of my influences here.

29:06 Emily: Yeah, that’s great to know. I also really enjoy the personal finance subreddit. Mr. Money Mustache–you have to have a certain taste for his material. I’ll say that. You either love him or not so much, but he’s a great person to have at least a little bit of exposure to, as you said, because he’s such an influential figure in the FIRE movement broadly. The thing is, his definition of frugality, definition of what living a rich life is on a low amount of money is very compatible and consistent with the graduate student experience. So, if you are looking for ways that you can be inspired to spend less money–maybe because you don’t have money to spend–Mr. Money Mustache is a great person to look to and he is, not surprisingly, a huge cycling advocate as you are. Yeah. So, if you’ve been intrigued by what Alina’s had to say, as a next step, go to Mr. Money Mustache’s blog and read more about cycling because he will definitely motivate you.

30:09 Alina: Oh my gosh. Yeah, he’s crazier about it than me.

Best Finance Advice for an Early-Career PhD

30:12 Emily: Yes, he’s very committed. So, last question here as we wrap up. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?

30:21 Alina: So, I think, financially, it’s generally a really good idea to have your priorities figured out. I’ve decided personally for me right now that cars are not important at all. And that lets me focus on things that are more important and dedicate my time and energy and resources to the ones that do matter. And if you don’t necessarily have that straightened out, it can be kind of difficult to budget and figure out what you really want. And finance is just another element of that.

30:53 Emily: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. I mean getting your priorities straight, figuring out what’s most important to you is super foundational and helpful in personal finance, but it’s really something that you need to know in every area of your life. Especially as a graduate student or a postdoc and early-career PhD, you’re making a lot of decisions around your career. And so, I think, unfortunately, sometimes because of the bleak job prospects at the faculty level, we can get a little like, not very confident or down on ourselves about our employment prospects and can kind of be like, “Oh, just take whatever comes my way. Anyone who wants to get me a job, like I’m going to take that job.” And having thought through a little bit more, what are your priorities when it comes to your career? What are your priorities when it comes to your personal life? How can your career support your personal life? That can help you be a little more selective around the job choice and as you were saying, be able to walk away or design the job that you want to, if you also have your personal finances in order. That gives more power on your side of the table rather than your employer side of the table. So, Alina, it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you about this and I’m so excited for you starting your grad student journey. And yeah, thanks for coming on the podcast.

32:05 Alina: Yeah. You can find me on the internet at alinac.me and @AlinaWithAFace on Twitter.

32:11 Emily: All right. Thank you so much.

Outtro

32:14 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.