money story

This Grad Student Took Control of Her Finances to Shift Her Income Sources

April 15, 2024 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily interviews Fern Wolburg Martinez, a 4th-year PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Portland State University. Fern shares the pros and cons of the various income sources she’s used for her graduate work: a teaching assistantship, a fellowship, student loans, side jobs, and social safety net programs. When Fern was offered a fellowship, she realized she would no longer be eligible to take out student loans and had to decline it. Fern subsequently worked on her spending and budgeting to put herself in a position to accept the fellowship and increase her income later on. Finally, Fern and Emily discuss how you can employ a researcher’s skills and mindset in the personal finance arena.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This Grad Student Took Control of Her Finances to Shift Her Income Sources

Teaser

Fern (00:00): No idea where my money was going, how much money I was spending, and how, what my stable fixed expenses looked like every month. And then finally what my advisor offered the fellowship and she’s like, Hey, you should go on this fellowship. I was like, oh, I don’t know. I can’t do student loans. I have to look into it, so maybe I can afford it, but I’m not sure. So this is where the scientist mindset came in. It’s like, okay, I need objective data to look at my situation and make an informed decision.

Introduction

Emily (00:36): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:05): This is Season 17, Episode 8, and today my guest is Fern Wolburg Martinez, a 4th-year PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Portland State. Fern shares the pros and cons of the various income sources she’s used for her graduate work: a teaching assistantship, a fellowship, student loans, side jobs, and social safety net programs. When Fern was offered a fellowship, she realized she would no longer be eligible to take out student loans and had to decline it. Fern subsequently worked on her spending and budgeting to put herself in a position to accept the fellowship and increase her income later on. Finally, Fern and I discuss how you can employ a researcher’s skills and mindset in the personal finance arena.

Emily (01:51): If you’re listening to this episode on the day it drops, you know that it is Tax Day! I hope that you have already submitted your 2023 tax return, paid your 2023 tax bill, and made your 2024 quarter 1 estimated tax payment for your fellowship, if required. However, there have been many years in which I was still working on any or all of those elements right up to and even past the deadline. If you’re in that position and need additional resources on taxes tailored to the graduate student, postdoc, or postbac experience, join one of my asynchronous tax workshops to immediately access my best teaching on these topics. Go to PFforPhDs.com/tax/ and scroll to the bottom of the page to learn more about the tax return preparation workshop and the estimated tax workshop. Best of luck to you in these final hours of tax season! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s17e8/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Fern Wolburg Martinez.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:10): I am delighted how joining me on the podcast today, Fern Wolburg Martinez. She’s a current graduate student at Portland State in industrial organizational psychology. And we are going to talk about how Fern has funded her graduate program, both, you know, through the graduate program, through side hustles. Um, we’re also gonna talk about budgeting and just really get into the numbers today of like what a current graduate student is, um, is making and spending. So, Fern, I’m so delighted to have you on. Thank you so much for volunteering to come on and be open about this subject. And would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

Fern (03:41): Yeah, thank you, Emily. So, like you mentioned, I’m Fernanda, I go by Fern and I am currently in my fourth year of my graduate program preparing for my comprehensive exams. And my expertise is on occupational health psychology. Specifically, I explore how sexual harassment and customer sexual harassment affects the wellbeing of employees.

PhD Program Funding and Stipend Advocacy Efforts

Emily (04:03): Okay, thank you so much. Can you tell us about how your program has been funded to date?

Fern (04:09): Yeah, so the nice thing about my program is just a master’s to PhD program and it’s fully funded if you get accepted. So they cover tuition, everything. And it was an interesting trajectory because we had a stipend that was very low. It was like after taxes, it was about a thousand a month. And then the students really advocated for more because that’s barely covers rent in Portland. Portland’s a pretty expensive city. And then they raised the stipend by almost like 200%. So after taxes, it ended up being like $2,000. Um, and that’s just for the graduate teaching assistantships. And we also have a, an amazing funding program from the National Institute of Health, which is under the CDC, which is an OHP or occupational health psychology type of training where they give a fellowship to up to three to four students per year. And you can have it for two years. And that’s what I’m currently on, and that one is not taxed. And it’s about like 2,400 a month.

Emily (05:14): Okay. I wanna hear more about this advocacy process. It doesn’t sound like, was there an official union going on or was it just like, Nope, we’re all just talking together and saying you have to pay us more. This is unsustainable.

Fern (05:25): Yeah, so I cannot take full credit for that. Not even partial credit because I have to say it’s when I started the program, it’s kind of like, oh, I’m so excited to have a PhD and join this program and I don’t care how much money it is. And then I face the realities of actually having to live on that stipend and take out student loans. And the stress comes with that because grad student loans are different from undergrad student loans with the interest and the plus loans. Um, so I was just dealing with it and I was like, this is fine. This is the way it is. And stressfully. And, but thankfully I was, uh, I started during covid, so I was still living at home in Arizona at this time, so I could still save on rent, but it was still nothing. Right. Um, and it’s not until the cohort after me that the program really focused on diversifying our population of students.

Fern (06:14): And these students from different backgrounds were all about fighting for themselves and for the collective wellbeing. And they were like, this is not a livable stipend and if you wanna be a diverse and competitive program, you need to do something about it. So they really insisted with the faculty. And we do have a union, but the union, you know, the students can barely afford to pay for the rent. So like, nevermind paying for a union due. Right. Um, so they didn’t go through the union. It was more like the psychology department students from that specific cohort just really advocated with the faculty. And then the faculty were also really amazing at being receptive about it and talking to the dean about it. And I’m not sure how they moved the funds around, but they were able to increase the stipend for everybody.

Emily (07:00): Wow. Love to hear that success story especially.

Fern (07:03): Yeah. Shout out to them.

Emily (07:04): I mean, the union as like approach is certainly powerful, but it’s, but it’s slow and it’s, um, it’s onerous. And so this sounds like kind of a quicker if if the faculty and so forth, everybody is, um, amenable to it. This is kind of like a quicker route. So I’m so glad to hear that story of how that cohort after you, um, helped themselves and everybody else by just talking about this. And it’s, I mean, a thousand dollars a month is just ridiculous for an amount of stipend to try to live on that. Okay. So it sounds like you had been on a teaching assistantship at first, is that right? For at least a couple years,

Fern (07:36): Yes, for the first three years.

Emily (07:38): Okay. So for three years on a teaching assistantship, now you’re on this fellowship through the federal funding kind of route. Can you tell us, um, in terms of your experience as a graduate student, what the advantages or the pros and cons were for each of these different, um, types of funding?

Fern (07:54): Yeah, so the teaching assistantship, it’s like a regular W2 job. So you, your taxes are taken out, you don’t have to worry about that. You get the same money at the same time every month. It’s less money though. So it’s about, oh my God, what’s the difference? Like $500 less, probably more in comparison to the fellowship. Um, but the good, the biggest pro about that, besides the fact that they give you the W2 and the taxes, is that you can take out student loans with that. So with having the teaching assistantship, I was also able to qualify for loans and then like my teaching assistantship would pay for rent and some credit card bills or whatever else I had to pay. And then I would use the student loans to pay for, like, if I wanted to visit my family, if I have to travel to conferences, if I have to buy food, if I want to go eat up food with my friends, everything else was covered by the loans.

Fern (08:51): And then the pro of the fellowship is the time flexibility, because I’m just doing research. I don’t have to do a teaching assistantship. And sometimes, uh, just working with professors and instructors can be a great experience and sometimes not such a great experience, and you never know who you’re gonna get and if it’s gonna be a more stressful term in comparison to the previous one. So having the time flexibility to do research on my own time and work on my own projects and get paid for that is amazing. It’s also more money, but the cons is, it’s, um, it’s weirdly coded this grant, I think there’s only like three universities in the, in the United States that have this type of fellowship. And it’s coded so that it counts the tuition reimbursement as part of the fellowship that we receive. So it counts as salary. So we no longer qualify for loans because we’re making too much money.

Fern (09:44): So beyond our monthly stipend, that tuition money was also, it also looked like from the tax perspective, from the, uh, government’s perspective, that that money goes to us instead of it going to the university for tuition. So I no longer qualify for student loans at the moment. So that’s why I waited my three years until I was at a place where I had like, I could afford rent and I had paid off all my debt so that I could actually take out this fellowship and not have to rely on student loans, which was always my goal to only take out loans for two to three years, and then not for the last two years of my program.

Emily (10:17): I see. So it sounds like you actually had a degree of agency over when you had one position versus another, so you could kind of coordinate that with your personal finances. Um, I haven’t heard of that before. I, I guess I’m more accustomed to people like sort of being, um, the timing of fellowships happening just based on like your timing in your program or something like that, or like when you happen to win it. Um, but that sounds really, really smart that you worked on your personal finances while you had access to those loans. Um, before switching over, I’m a little surprised to hear that you don’t have access to loans anymore, but I don’t know.

Fern (10:50): Yeah.

Emily (10:50): I don’t know all the details about it, so.

Fern (10:52): It’s so weird.

Emily (10:52): I’m sure you’ve been through the technical specifications.

Fern (10:54): Yeah, it was, it was a whole thing because I actually got it offered my second year and I said, yeah, I’ll take it. And then I found out, they didn’t let me know it was miscommunication. I found out that I couldn’t qualify for loans anymore and I had to tell my advisor like, Hey, I, I didn’t know about this and I can no longer afford anything if I can’t take a loan. So they had to switch me back to being a TA ship. So after that I was like, okay, next time I, if I do switch back to a fellowship, I wanna be more conscious and in a good place where I can actually take advantage of that.

Emily (11:24): Hmm. Yeah, I think the generalizable like, you know, lesson here for the audience is just to be really, um, heavily consider how these different types of funding are going to affect your personal finances. Whether it’s, you know, the tax implications, whether it’s the student loan implications, whether it’s the increasing amount of take home income, decreased amount of take home income, and just as, as best you’re able to, like you did, um, exert, you know, agency in this process and or prepare on the personal finance side for the changes that are upcoming so that you’re not caught. I mean, what would you have done, like if you had to, had to accept this fellowship? Couldn’t afford everything, couldn’t take out student loans? Well, we’re gonna talk more about how you’ve like, um, made the budget balance. Um, in a moment. But yeah, it would’ve been a harder financial position for sure.

Fern (12:08): Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s very important for people who are in grad school and are considering one versus the other to look into, like you said, taxes, student loans, and just asking all the questions to their advisor regarding these things. I think that, uh, supervisor support is very important if you have a supervisor who’s transparent about the process and helping you to the best of their capabilities on everything that entails going into a fellowship versus having a regular, uh, teaching assistantship, um, with all that stuff.

Side Jobs During the PhD Program

Emily (12:38): Yeah. Um, did you also have a side job at any point during these four years?

Fern (12:45): Yeah, I worked my first two years and, you know, as I was like in college I had two jobs and I was going to the gym at five in the morning and it’s like, yeah. But I was also 18, 20 years old. It’s very different, uh, than going to grad school. Grad school is a different beast. So I had a job for the first two years I was working in the restaurant industry, which is what inspired my thesis topic. And it was really stressful because, you know, I don’t know if you remember what your first two years were like, but it would take me four hours to read like a 20 page article because the content is so dense and so difficult and so different from just a textbook. So I was spending my time with the four hours, uh, classes per week and two classes, uh, for every week.

Fern (13:33): And then also on top of that, reading the articles. And then on the weekends I was working. So I was just exhausted all the time. I was burnt out. It, yeah. I wasn’t great for my health, so I decided on my second year to quit. And then on my third year, again, before I moved to Portland, I decided to get a job to be able to afford to move to Portland. So I started working back in the restaurant industry. So a lot of respect for restaurant employees because that industry’s always there when we need it, but it’s definitely a sacrifice. The quality of my work and the quality of my health did decline, but it’s also a trade off of then I can have more money that is not, that I don’t have to give back to the government.

Emily (14:16): Hmm. Yeah, I mean, because you were, you had the stipend, you had the student loan, um, kind of bridge coming in and you had the side work. You really had to find that balance among all three of those things in which funding source is most appropriate and how much energy would you have to use and so forth. So, um, that’s really tricky. And since you’ve switched over to the fellowship, it sounds like you haven’t been working on the side, right? With the higher income?

Fern (14:40): No, I did hold a, so this was another opportunity that just came to me and follow my lab. This student recently graduated and her and I just had a really good working relationship and worked on a lot of projects together. So she really liked my work ethic, so she recommended me to do a summer internship that she had to turn down and that worked great for me. So I was doing analysis for the university factor analysis where they wanted to reduce the items in a course evaluation scale. And that was awesome because I was able to make a couple extra, like 2000 that month or that summer. Uh, so opportunities like that arise as I progress through the program and I become more skilled. Like now I’m at the point that with my master’s I can get an internship and that’s a lot more money than any part-time job can give me. Right. Um, so opportunities come and go. And also it’s just every year is different and just have to adapt and find ways to make the finances work.

Using SNAP (Food Stamps) During the PhD Program

Emily (15:35): Yeah, I like that you pointed that out. Like as you progress in your program, you become more skilled, you become more knowledgeable, there are different opportunities that come up for you. I’m like, you, you’ve probably heard me say on the podcast before, but I’m like a big advocate of people, um, being paid a high hourly rate as much as they can. And that probably means employing your unique skills that you’re developing inside of academia, maybe inside of academia, maybe outside of academia. So in addition to the stipend from the assistantship and the fellowship in addition to the student loans for some time, in addition to the side work, I understand that you also relied on government programs for a period of time. Can you tell us more about the types of programs that you accessed and what they did for you?

Fern (16:14): Yes. So I need to give credit again to the cohort that came after me because I was like, oh, I’m just stuck in this. And some people mentioned food stamps, but I went into the snap and SNAP is, I don’t know what it stands for, but it’s the Food Stamps Assistance program. And they said that graduate students didn’t qualify and I didn’t look further into it. I was like, okay, I just don’t qualify. Undergrads do, but graduates don’t for whatever reason. And then the cohort after me said, yeah, you do qualify. I’m on it. And I had never been on food stamps before and I also had this perception that food stamps was for people that were very low income and really needed it and were like below the poverty level. And I was, I’m a grad student so I can still rely on my parents if I need to.

Fern (16:56): So I just didn’t see myself in that realm. But if anything, once they told me that they were on it and I could apply for it, and I applied and I got it and I got an extra $200 a month to be able to pay for groceries, it was great. And it just gave me a lot of independence and freedom and just a lot of relief for my expenses because sometimes if I have to pay for conferences and I have to pay my bills and everything else, then I would just buy less food. And with the food stamps it’s like, oh, now I can afford it. And also relying on the food pantry at my university. And a lot of us got on food stamps. And what’s also great about this program is that at, at least in Portland, they’re very supportive of the arts.

Fern (17:38): So if you show your EBT card, which is how you pay for the food stamps, I a lot, I thought it was actual stamps, it’s not actual stamps. It’s like they give you like a little debit card and they refill it every month with X amount of dollars that they give you every month. And like it never expires until you no longer qualify for the program. But if you show your EBT card, then you can also get $5 entries to like museums and opera concerts and ballet concerts. So it’s great also for that experience if you also can’t afford hobbies and to get out there and have um, things to do, it also brings that option on the table.

Emily (18:12): Um, so I wanna follow up on two pieces to that for the first is the mindset. Um, this is not for people like me. But you mentioned you were making a thousand dollars a month. Yeah. Like that’s not a lot of money in an expensive city. Yeah. As you mentioned. So like, I, I’m glad that you brought up like the fluctuating expenses too, because you might think in a given month, I don’t have any problems paying for food this month. So I don’t need this program. But then the next month you have an unexpected expense that comes up. And like you said, the food is like the variable thing that can get sacrificed that month and it’s just not a position that you want to be in. It’s better to be precautionary, take all the benefits that you’re eligible for, um, use them to the fullest extent, and then have more reserves to be able to build up for those unexpected, um, expenses that might come up. So I’m really glad that you mentioned this and that and that you did take advantage. I want to learn more about, okay. You initially read grad students weren’t eligible, then you found out that you were, what, what changed? What was the difference?

Fern (19:07): I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I just, I just applied. I told them how much I made and they said yes. I, I don’t know if it’s one of those things where it’s like, we’re gonna look the other way. Um, it’s just graduate students are in this unique position where we’re students, but we’re employees and the taxes are different. And like, I’m not poor, but I’m below the poverty line, but I have an iPhone. So it’s really weird mindset and like thing to get into. And also this, like, I don’t wanna take resources from the people that really need it, but also I qualify for these resources. So it’s this like weird situation that I had to just get over and be like, just apply if they say no, no. Which eventually they did say no once I got my fellowship and I now I make too much money for them.

Fern (19:55): Um, but yeah, I think it’s important that if there’s resources out there, if it’s food stamps and this and that, I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m gonna be on food stamps. And I was like, no, this is great. I love ’em. I can go to $5 Chinese gardens and explore. It’s something that otherwise I wouldn’t be able to afford because it’s too expensive and I can afford food, which is great, and I don’t have to stress out about buying that. And it’s nice because it’s an allocated amount of money that’s specific for groceries. I cannot go and spend it on anything else. So yeah, I, I don’t know what was different in the application process. The website says that I shouldn’t have qualified, but I did qualify. So worked out for me.

Emily (20:34): I like that approach of just like, make them tell you no. Just, just apply, just push if they say no. Okay. You weren’t any worse off than you were beforehand, but hey, they said yes. And like again, credit to that cohort behind you for like experimenting with this and just pushing for it and helping everybody by, you know, sharing what they found out.

Fern (20:54): Yeah, definitely. They’re, they helped change my mindset and they’re helping change the program for the better.

Using Medicaid for Health Insurance During the PhD Program

Emily (21:00): I love it. Okay. So were there any other public benefits that you’ve been taking advantage of?

Fern (21:05): Yeah, the, I can’t remember the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, but I’m on that and that’s for health insurance. Portland State University has mandatory health insurance, so this is crazy. One thing that I don’t like about my university is that if you don’t have health insurance, they automatically enroll you in the university’s health insurance, which is very expensive. It’s like 300 a month. And that’s a little ridiculous to me because if you can’t afford to have health insurance, then they get you on their expensive health insurance. And yeah, it’s, it’s weird. I appreciate the aspect of wanting to keep the overall community healthy, but at the same time as employees wouldn’t qualify for health insurance from the university whereas other universities do. So I, uh, decided to apply for the, uh, Obamacare and again, I qualified for that and I have it and it’s in Oregon. It’s actually great. It’s a, it’s completely free for me and I have a really great doctors and a really good network of doctors. I was able to go to the dentist after like five years of not being able to afford it. So another great benefit to use.

Emily (22:12): Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s so common. All universities require that their students have health insurance. Um, it’s unfortunate. It sounds like their internal option is, is unaffordable, like you said for the students, but, um, it’s so great. Obviously this is a very state by state thing, but great that Oregon has a robust exchange and with your income and everything you were able to qualify at that, um, it sounds like zero premium, right? Yeah. So that’s immediate. Yeah. And another great thing to look into.

Fern (22:38): Yeah. And it’s like above a percentage of the poverty level. So you can be, I think 200% above the poverty level and still qualify in Oregon, but it varies by state.

Commercial

Emily (22:49): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Changes to Budgeting Throughout Graduate School

Emily (23:41): Now you mentioned to me that the way you budget has changed throughout graduate school. We’ve already seen some hints of that in the changing of the funding and the different, you know, sources of income and so forth. But can you tell us about how you used to budget and then how you budget now?

Fern (23:55): Yeah, so the simple storyline is that I didn’t budget. I was just have my money and spend it and not know where it went. And I would get my, uh, student loans and I would put half of them ’cause I get them per term. So every three months. Um, so I would put half of them on my savings accounts. That was not a high yield savings account, so they was just sitting there doing nothing. And then I would just keep the rest of my, uh, checking accounts and just hope that the number didn’t get to, to zero. So try to keep it as high as possible, but no idea where my money was going, how much money I was spending, and how what my stable fixed expenses looked like every month. And then finally what my advisor offered the fellowship and she’s like, Hey, you should go on this fellowship.

Fern (24:42): I was like, oh, I don’t know. I can’t do student loans. I have to look into it. And at the time I had moved in with my partner and I was like, well, my rent is about to be cheaper. My, I have, I’m on food stamps, so my groceries about to be cheaper, so maybe I can afford it, but I’m not sure. So this is where the scientists mindset came in. It’s like, okay, I need objective data to look at my situation and make an informed decision. So that’s when I had a breakdown for what I first did is track my expenses for a month. And that’s when I realized like, oh, I go to the grocery, like I buy little snacks here and there way too much and I’m spending too much at the bars and why am I buying shoes that I can’t afford?

Fern (25:19): And that was like a wake up call for me. So then I decided to look at my fixed expenses and see what that looks like and see if I had any money left over for me to have a decent living because again, I couldn’t take out student loans and I didn’t wanna take on an extra job to protect my wellbeing and my mental health. So if my remaining balance after all my fixed expenses was something like a hundred, that’s just not realistic. That’s just not enough. Especially right now with inflation, everything’s very expensive. So if there was an emergency, anything, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. So it’s like, okay, first thing I need to do is set up my emergency savings. And then I started learning about finances and I was like, okay, I need a high yield savings account so that the money that I have extra is not just sitting there. It’s actually like accumulating interest. And I started doing that and now I know exactly how much I spend on what each month. I know how much I have left over each month. And it’s, yeah, it’s a really good feeling.

Emily (26:16): I’m, I’m so glad to hear about that positive kind of transformation. Um, it sounds like your income source is changing is what really prompted you. You knew you weren’t gonna have that cushion of the student loans, so like you had to get more granular about what was going on in your finances.

Fern (26:30): I’ve always been pretty good at not spending and saving, but now I wanna take it to the next step and make my money work for me. So investing in a a retirement account and knowing what I’m spending on and being more essential with like my buckets of money of like skincare makes me really happy. So I wanna spend more on that and I don’t wanna eat out as much, so I’m cooking a lot more now. So I wanna be a lot smarter with my money beyond just saving and not spending.

Using a Researcher Mindset With Personal Finances

Emily (26:56): Now you mentioned earlier kind of taking, um, the, the researcher’s approach actually looking at the data, um, to figure out where your spending was going and what you would, you really started budgeting, like what were you going to be able to afford? Were you going to be able afford to switch onto this fellowship given the new rent, given all the other changes that were going on? Um, are there any other ways that you’ve employed this like researcher mindset within your personal finances? Aside from setting up the budget?

Fern (27:21): I mean beyond finding you and your account. You know, ’cause my, my friend Morgan always says this to me every time I’m like, oh, I need to do something really hard. And she’s like, you’re getting a PhD, you can do anything. It’s like, you’re right. Like I know how to investigate, I know how to learn. I need to start doing that. So I remember I wanted to get more broad skill sets with data analysis and I was like, well, Excel is always required, so I’m gonna learn how to use Excel. So I’m gonna use a nice spreadsheet as an excuse to learn Excel. And my excuse to do that is gonna be by budgeting. So I have this like really fancy spreadsheet that has formulas that are connected through different tabs and different cells. And I really learned how to use Excel for my advantage and use, uh, data visualization to look like my most expense categories.

Fern (28:09): And I have different percentages for everything. And it’s, yeah. And with that is just learning how to use Excel. So looking at tutorials and then actually doing the work, which is a lot of what we have to do as PhDs when our advisors don’t know how to use something in SPSS and no one else knows how to do it. And you just have to learn how to use an SPSS macro yourself. Um, and then learning the lingo. So like, okay, if I wanna go beyond saving and uh, start investing, what does that look like and what does that mean? And where does it start looking at the experts? Kind of like when you’re doing a lit review and you just have no idea what the topic is about. So you have to read a bunch of articles until you get an like a, an an understanding of what that topic is.

Fern (28:53): It’s the same skill sets can be applied to budgeting and knowing where your money goes and then just implementing that behavioral change. Whenever we write our research articles, and at least in psychology, we always try to make practical recommendations of what organizations can do with the research findings that we have. It’s like, okay, how can we expect other people to follow these behaviors that we’re suggesting to do if we can’t follow the own behaviors that we are learning from budgeting and all these other behavioral things. ’cause also saving money and spending money is very psychological, right? So just the same skills that we learn on research can be applied to anything in particular right now talking about budgeting.

Emily (29:37): I love it. I love the way you articulated that and that mindset and kind of going back to the beginning of what you said, like where your friend Morgan has been telling you. Um, I totally agree and I never like felt so, um, accomplished or like expansive in my person as I did like right after I defended, like I literally felt like I was like on top of a mountain. Like I can do, I finished the, like I finished my dissertation, I defended it, it’s done. I literally can do anything I put my mind to. And even though personal finances are challenging in psychological ways and logistical ways and all that, um, like you said, when you take, I mean all, everyone who gets into a PhD program is so capable and so talented and so smart. And like if you just decide to apply what you card kind of already innately can do in these other areas of your life to your personal finances, like you’re going to be successful. It’s just a matter of time. Yeah. It’s a matter of time and a matter of increasing that income eventually when you get out of graduate school. So eventually. Um, I just love that approach.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (30:32): Well Fern, would you like to wrap up now by telling us your best financial advice for another early career of PhD? And it could be something that we’ve touched on already in the interview or it could be something completely new.

Fern (30:43): Advice. Oh my God, I don’t know if I have any advice. I just feel like advice is so like personal individualized, but I have like a thought that just occurred to me both with what you were saying is that a lot of new PhDs have this huge, especially underrepresented PhDs, you know, women, women of color or people from like low socioeconomic backgrounds whose parents never went, uh, to college or immigrants. It’s, there’s this huge imposter syndrome that we start with. There’s like, oh, I’m not supposed to be here. And now looking back, I think if like the Fern first year Fern saw met with the Fern right now, fourth year Fern, she would be like, oh my God, that girl is so smart and I’ll just never be like her. And like, you know, that is me. So I think it’s really important to understand that it imposter syndrome is just your social comparison of where you think you need to get and where you are.

Fern (31:38): And it’s all about learning. The only way to get over that imposter syndrome is to actually do and increase our self-efficacy and our belief that we can do these things. So just it, and that can apply to anything, right? With budgeting, it’s like, it’s not this imposter syndrome of like, I have to have X amount of money in order to be successful. It’s like you just have to learn how to budget and learn those skills and just do it. And then once you feel confident about it, that imposter syndrome will just eventually dissipate and just pass on that knowledge to people who are just getting started.

Emily (32:09): And that ties in back so well with what we were talking about with like the social programs that you learned about from like your peers and everything. Just not counting yourself out as like, oh, I’m not the type of person who should be doing this at this stage. Yes you are. These programs are designed for you at this current stage. You’re not gonna use them forever. It’s gonna be a temporary thing, but it’s really gonna help you get your feet under you, you know, and you only needed to be on them for, you know, two, three years and now you have this fantastic fellowship and like things are so different in your finances now, just, just after the passage of a little bit of time and a little bit of change of income sources. So again, I’m so glad that you share these, these tips and these insights with the audience. Um, thank you so much for volunteering to come on and being so transparent and I really think people got a ton outta this interview, so thank you.

Fern (32:50): I hope so. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Outtro

Emily (33:03): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

This PhD’s Path to FIRE Has Evolved with Lifestyle Design and Having Children

March 18, 2024 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Amanda, a prior podcast guest who is on the path to FIRE. Since our last interview, Amanda and her husband moved to the Twin Cities and had two children. Amanda recounts the exciting start to her FIRE journey when she was a postdoc and contrasts it with the boring middle of pursuing FIRE now with long-term jobs and a growing family. Amanda and Emily discuss the extra expenses that come with children—and those that don’t have to—and how emergencies and other expensive projects mean that the progress made toward FIRE is different each and every year. Amanda and Emily conclude that pursuing FIRE really is more about the journey than the destination and all the benefits you experience along the way.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This PhD's Path to FIRE Has Evolved with Lifestyle Design and Having Children

Teaser

Amanda (00:00): Know that your life has phases and make the most of the phases you’re in. You know, I think as as I started learning about finances, I felt so eager to be in some of the phases that I saw other people. And I felt so frustrated being at the beginning or not having the kind of income or options that I wanted. And, you know, as I’ve been on this path for a while, I’m just learning that every phase of life has, uh, some really beautiful benefits and great things you can do. And then there’s things you aren’t working on. And it’s okay to not be accomplishing every goal, uh, all at the same time.

Introduction

Emily (00:46): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:15): This is Season 17, Episode 6, and today my guest is Dr. Amanda, a prior podcast guest who is on the path to FIRE. Since our last interview, Amanda and her husband moved to the Twin Cities and had two children. Amanda recounts the exciting start to her FIRE journey when she was a postdoc and contrasts it with the boring middle of pursuing FIRE now with long-term jobs and a growing family. Amanda and I discuss the extra expenses that come with children—and those that don’t have to—and how emergencies and other expensive projects mean that the progress made toward FIRE is different each and every year. Amanda and I conclude that pursuing FIRE really is more about the journey than the destination and all the benefits you experience along the way.

Emily (02:04): The tax year 2023 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s17e6/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Amanda.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:13): I am delighted to have back on the podcast today, Dr. Amanda. She joined us in two previous episodes, season one episode 11, and season five episode 15. So we’ve seen a couple of snapshots of Amanda’s, uh, financial journey so far that she’s been, um, so generous to share with us. And we’re gonna get another update today after a few years. So there’s been a lot of changes. Amanda is on the path to FI or fire, financial independence and early retirement. And so we’re gonna talk a lot about what that looks like for a PhD today. So Amanda, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It’s a pleasure to see you again. And will you please introduce yourself a little further for the listeners?

Amanda (03:50): Sure. Happy to be with you again, Emily. Uh, I am Dr. Amanda. I am currently an assistant professor in education. Uh, something kind of unique about my current position is I work fully remote, so I live in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota and I work for a university that’s out of state. But my students are EDD students, so they’re doctoral students in education, they’re teachers, school administrators, principals, they have full-time jobs, so they’re doing most of their program online. So I go to campus when they have their on-campus residency type stuff. But otherwise we’re all online and it works great for me. I love teaching online. I do a lot of dissertation support over Zoom. Um, so me sitting with headphones in a setting like this is, uh, kind of how I spend my days and I really like it.

Emily (04:42): And if you wanna hear more about that, the second episode I referenced season five, episode 15 is where Amanda talked about her job search and how she strategically moved to the Midwest, et cetera, for at least partially financial reasons. So I’m sure we’re gonna hear more about that too. Um, anything else you’d like to share with us?

Amanda (04:57): Uh, I have two young kids, which I believe last time I was on the show I, I don’t even think I had either of my kids. So I’ve got a one and a 4-year-old now. And, um, one of the things I really like about my remote position is it’s flexible. It allows me to spend a lot of time with them, uh, and be there for them. So that’s really great. My daughter goes to a nature preschool now in our neighborhood, which we just absolutely love. And then my son is, he spends most of his days with his grandmas.

Emily (05:28): And that was, as I recall, one of your reasons for moving there, right? Your proximity to family.

Amanda (05:32): Yes. So my situation was I had my, uh, husband and I had moved from Los Angeles where I was a postdoc at USC and he was a technical director in the USC games division. And then I took a position, uh, way across the country in Ohio and we get to Ohio and we move there and my job’s going great, I really like it, but he’s not finding the right thing. And then the perfect job for him, he designs educational games and Twin Cities public television, uh, PBS and the Twin Cities post this job where they’re looking for somebody to lead their digital and games content for, uh, it was a new show at the time. Now it’s Hero Elementary for anyone who has littles who watch Hero Elementary.

Emily (06:16): My kids love that show.

Amanda (06:17): Yeah. And we love it too. And it was just the perfect job. So that also happened to be 10 minutes away from where my family was living, and we knew we were kind of wanting to start a family, so it was like, you have to apply. And then my university was great, like things were going well, and they said, do you wanna try something remote? And this was pre pandemic, so it was a little experimental at the time. Now I feel like this is not an unusual scenario, it was at the time, but it’s worked really well. Um, so we’ve been doing that a lot of years and it just continues to work. Great.

Emily (06:50): I love this lifestyle design. Um, I’ve been listening to a lot of Cal Newport recently. Are you familiar with him? Yes. Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve read a few of his books. I’ve been listening to his podcast and he’s all about this like, I can’t remember the acronym, but it’s basically lifestyle centric career design, something like that. Um, but basically doing exactly what you’ve just, um, exemplified is getting enough career capital, in your case, the PhD, the professorship, um, to be able to leverage it to get the lifestyle you want at the point in your life when you need it, which for you was, you know, this opportunity for your husband and the, and the kids coming and all of that. So like, ugh, I wish he did interviews ’cause you would be a great interview for his podcast, but I don’t think he does that sort of thing.

Amanda (07:26): I mean, it is scary. Like when we were doing it, I remember thinking like, I agonized for weeks over trying to figure out how to ask if I could go to remote. But thinking I’m a first year professor, I was even just a few months in really, because this all happened within really right after we moved, um, we moved to Ohio in late July, August, and over Thanksgiving I helped my husband move to the Twin Cities ’cause he was starting there. So he was only there a few months, but I remember thinking like, I don’t have this capital, we can’t do this. How am I gonna ask? And then they brought it up and I remember feeling so relieved and thinking I probably could have asked, but I think sometimes as grad students, we, I know at least I felt like there was a way you’re supposed to do things.

Amanda (08:12): Like we were trained in sort of the R1 research world where it was like, you are going for a tenure track job. That is what you are going to do. You’ll move anywhere, do whatever it takes you to, you know, and especially as a couple, like you gotta find that dual hire. And I spent my whole time as a postdoc feeling like, I don’t know if this is what I want. And just, it probably took me a few years of listening to a lot of financial podcasts and lifestyle podcasts to really get comfortable with saying, what if we don’t do that? What if we did something different? What if we, this is crazy, try to live where we wanna live, which for us, you know, is the Midwest where family is, and we actually really like it here. We like the seasons. It’s not for everyone. The winters can be brutal, but, um, it took a while to get to feeling like we could make those choices.

The Beginning of Amanda’s FIRE Journey

Emily (09:03): Yeah, I see what you’re saying, because you might not think right, getting out of grad school, getting outta your postdoc that you have any career capital at that point. But honestly, if they made the investment of hiring you as a faculty member, like yeah, it’s a big investment for them too. So, and you were just ahead of the curve, right? Because everyone’s doing the remote like thing now, so it’s all worked out. I’m so glad to hear that. Let’s get into the topic for today. We’re gonna talk about your journey to fire and how the moment you’re in this, what they call the boring middle phase. So I want you to back up a little bit and describe to us what the beginning of the journey to fire looked like when it was exciting and no longer boring like it is now. Um, and we did get some of this in that first interview that you did back in season one, episode 11 about how you read Ramit Sethi book and started making some changes and so forth. So we got a little bit of that story, but describe to us a little bit more completely what, what you think of as the exciting beginning to the fire journey.

Amanda (09:54): Yeah, I guess I would say it kind of started for us when we moved to Los Angeles after finishing grad school because that was the first time we had, uh, jobs that weren’t assistantships. So we, we had a little bit of money and we very intentionally decided to, um, try to then hit, uh, you know, some of those higher savings rates we were reading about. So when we got, we lived in a really nice, uh, condo in la but it was small. It was only about 700 square feet. And we, um, our biggest expense then besides rent was doggy daycare because we’d been talking about adopting a, a pup, uh, all through grad school. And it was like, no, no, no, we’re doing this, we’re doing this now. Um, so we were paying for doggy daycare, but otherwise we just like to be outside.

Amanda (10:41): We did our own cooking and so we were really intentional about trying to keep our costs down and then hitting our student loans really aggressively. And we were, we were in school far enough back where we did have those like 7% interest rates that you’re seeing now. And so it was enough where we were looking at that going, we’d really like to pay these off. And so, um, you know, that was just something we really focused on is not, um, not blowing up our lifestyle too much when we were starting to make it was postdoc money. It wasn’t crazy money, but it was more than we were, more than we had when we were grad students.

Emily (11:15): Yeah, I think that’s one of those important messages about those career transition points, right? I mean, you, you hear the live like a student thing, but for people with PhDs, it’s like, you were living like a student for a really long time, but please, please, please just hold on, do a, a couple of lifestyle upgrades like you got the dog, but like, don’t go crazy with it when you’re still only making postdoc salaries or after that because you can really make some good traction against your financial goals. And especially if you’re feeling behind by that point. Um, you being immersed in the personal finance like community, you probably did feel behind, I would imagine, even though like objectively speaking, you weren’t . Um, but like having those kinds of influences, you were probably really eager to get started with the savings goals and the, and the student loan repayment and all that stuff, and that you Oh yeah, you can really make good progress on that when you’re keeping your lifestyle low.

Amanda (11:57): I remember looking at those compound interest, uh, charts and thinking, what have we done with our twenties ? Oh my gosh, we’ve been in school, we haven’t made any money, you know, now we’re 30 and we’re just starting. Oh, we messed it all up. And it took me a while to go, okay, you know what? It is okay, 30 is not that old. But I, I do think that sometimes that can happen to those of us in academia who do spend a long time in school and you know, oftentimes people have a lot in loans too, so it can feel like, um, it can feel like you’re starting from behind. We actually, um, we have this little lifestyle. We just run this little Etsy shop. Um, it’s tiny. It doesn’t make a lot of money, it’s just a lot of fun. We have a laser printer and we make game tokens and wood coasters, but we named it 30 below zero because at 30 years old our net worth was below zero. And it was just a reminder for us of where we’re starting. And so it’s the name of our Etsy shop. It’s just kind of funny, but we did, we felt behind.

Emily (12:58): So you were talking about that exciting beginning of, okay, we finally have some salaries, , where we can make, you know, some progress toward these goals and a simple lifestyle. I mean, Los Angeles is expensive, the rent and so forth. But you said other than that, in the doggy daycare, you kept things pretty reasonable. Um, was anything else sort of, um, exciting or different about that phase of your fire journey?

Amanda (13:19): Yeah, I would say we did something kind of different with our wedding. Uh, you know, that that was a good example of us seeing what do we value? Let’s not do what everyone else is doing. What do we wanna do? So we were living in San Pedro at the time, which is right, just a few miles from Catalina Island, and we could see Catalina Island when we would go on hikes with our dogs. You know, you’re looking off at the coastline and there’s the island. So we decided to get married on Catalina Island, but we just did this small immediate family. So we flew our parents and siblings out and that’s it. We had this tiny little ceremony, super charming on Catalina Island. We all, we booked them all, uh, rooms in the same hotel and we just spent a couple days hanging out there on the island, hiking, eating out. Um, but we never did a big thing with DJs and catering and that just, it didn’t feel like what we wanted at the time. And so that was an example of us just saying, okay, what do, who are we and what do we wanna do? What are our values? And how do we live this FI thing while also being true to who we think we are?

Emily (14:25): Hmm. Yeah. I can see how that does fall into the exciting beginning part of the journey because you’re taking this new step with your relationship, um, you’re, you know, combining things maybe in a way you didn’t before and thinking about your values and how you really want your life to look through this period of transition. And so that, that is an exciting time of really being able to think through and set some new patterns and and so forth and, and do something a little bit counter-cultural, like what you’re saying. Um, yeah. Anything else you wanna add about that period?

Amanda (14:52): Uh, no, not a whole lot. We just, we continued to do that. Um, when I started the faculty job, we, you know, I think a lot of people when they start a faculty job, especially I think in the Midwest, in a place where houses are affordable, it’s like, well, I have to have a house. But we just, in the first year we’re like, we don’t know this place yet. We’re getting to know this area. So we rented a modest apartment. We, um, this was a, a fairly rural area, so we were getting our groceries at Walmart, which was kind of new to us, but like doing our own cooking. And then when my husband took the job in the Twin Cities, he actually lived with my parents for a short time until I moved there. ’cause for a while we were in different states. Um, but we, at that time, we had a really aggressive savings rate because I was living by myself doing yoga with Adrian and walking the dog free entertainment, playing video games and cooking at home. He was doing the same thing, new job, living with my parents. So, um, at that time it was just kind of exciting to watch those student loan balances go down and feel like we’ve, we’ve got this, we can actually do the things we’ve been reading about doing.

Retirement Accounts and Student Loans

Emily (15:57): Yeah, that is very exciting. Okay, so you’re watching the student loan balances decline, you were also saving for retirement. Is that, is that true? Can you tell me like the mix of accounts that you were working with? Yeah,

Amanda (16:05): Yeah. Um, USC was kind of unique because, uh, my husband was working as an employee of USC and I was a postdoc, so he had access to their retirement savings and a match. And I didn’t as a postdoc, I don’t know if that’s changed since then. Uh, so we were, um, LA the la he was paying into his 401k and as soon as we actually, even as grad students, we were trying to max out our Roth IRAs or at least contribute to those. So we really did start right away when we were reading about this stuff as like, all right, let’s a Roth, we can do a Roth, you know, it’s not that much money or let’s just do what we can. Um, and so it was just starting to add to that. Then we added, um, when I started as a faculty member, I eventually got access to a 403B at my institution. So yes, we are definitely investing for retirement and trying to get that going while also getting the student loans paid off.

Emily (16:59): Now I’m curious because we’ve been talking mostly about the pre pandemic time period, but did you make any different decisions with the student loans when the administrative forbearance came into play?

Amanda (17:09): We had them paid off by then, actually. So, um, yeah, we went real aggressive real fast. Neither of us had, we both worked through college and grad school, so neither of us had, um, the sort of terrifying balances that you hear about some people starting with, which is good because, uh, you know, we are, we’re in tech, but we’re in ed tech education, so we also, um, you know, weren’t gonna be making the kind of crazy money that you kind of need to make to pay off those six figure, uh, loan payments. So it really didn’t take us more than a couple years to get those paid down. So I believe by the time the pandemic hit, we had already paid off our loans.

Emily (17:49): Okay. So student loans eliminated starting, or, you know, continuing and accelerating their retirement savings. And did a house purchase come into play at some point there?

Amanda (17:57): Yes, we bought a house at the very end of 2018. Um, our daughter was born in June of 2019, so kind of right around the time I moved from Ohio to the Twin Cities area, we bought a house, um, in the neighborhood where my parents live.

Current Finances, Lifestyle, and Non-Traditional Housing Decisions

Emily (18:14): Lovely. You mentioned your daughter born in 2019, and then your son’s about three years younger. Um, so let’s, let’s fill out the lifestyle now in terms of what your finances look like. What, what your lifestyle looks like. Um, now that you’ve got the job set and the kids are present or on the way, like what does this phase of fire look like?

Amanda (18:34): It’s slower and more boring. Uh, you know, if I’m being honest, um, we did, uh, upgrade the house and part of that is because my husband’s mom lives with us, she helps us with childcare. So we wanted to have a nice space for us. And what we did, this is, uh, kind of non, another non-traditional thing we did, we swapped houses with my parents, so they lived right in the neighborhood, but they were, uh, you know, they’re kind of thinking about retiring, they’re looking to downsize. ’cause they were still in kind of the home they’d raised, uh, my sister and I in. And so they had more space than they wanted and we were, uh, as we were thinking about having a second child, we were like, ah, this, we could do this. It’s gonna be tight. We could finish the basement and create these rooms. And it just sort of worked for, um, my parents were happy to buy the house that we had bought, which is a little bit smaller, but in the same neighborhood. And we bought, uh, the house that I grew up in or I moved when I was a kid, but, you know, somewhat grew up in, uh, you know, from my parents. And so it is a bigger house. Um, you know, there are, you know, it’s a, the expenses are a little higher for sure, but, um, yeah,

Emily (19:46): How, I don’t know. I just, I’m so tickled whenever I hear about families that are able to do these kinds of things for one another. There are some people in my husband’s family who have done something similar with their, um, children and it’s just, it’s so, it’s so lovely that you get to have that proximity and you get to live this more, a more communal lifestyle than is really, you know, typical for most, um, Americans. So it’s great to hear. Um, anything else? What, what’s going on now with the, the boring middle? You’re adding kids, you’re adding expenses related to the kids.

Amanda (20:13): Yeah, we pay for preschool now. Uh, we’re trying to contribute a bit to 529s and, you know, everything’s just a little bit more expensive, you know, this, this bigger house costs a little bit more. Um, we’re in Minnesota, the heating and cooling costs, especially the heating costs are, you know, they, they add up for sure. Um, I’ve become a little bit more into health and nutrition since having kids, and so I definitely buy bougie or groceries, , you know, we, uh, just quality of food, you know, we don’t eat out a lot lot. We really do cook at home, but, um, definitely we spend a lot more on groceries than we were spending a few years ago, but that’s, it’s an intentional lifestyle choice. Um, you know, for us, we are pursuing fire, and we can talk about this a little bit, but there isn’t a point at which we feel like we need to reach it. It isn’t like, oh, we really want to be completely fire by 2035 and, you know, um, it’s just sort of a direction that we’re heading rather than a very specifically defined goal.

Emily (21:20): I’ve, I’ve noticed with our family too, you know, we, we have kind of a, you know, a, a similar trajectory. We have two children, we own a house now. Um, we’re compared to when we were renting, even when we had the two kids, we were still renting for some time when we were living in Seattle. Um, an 850 square foot apartment with the four people. Oh. And then the pandemic started , so that was fun. Um, so like the housing cost for instance was a massive upgrade to go from that apartment to like the house that we purchased, but that’s because it’s a lot bigger. There’s just a ton more to like maintain. There’s a lot more considerations you have as a homeowner than as a renter. When you look at these like estimates that are occasionally put out, I guess, that are done yearly of like the cost of raising a child, you know, birth to age 18, a really, really big, big chunk of that estimated expense, which is like $200,000 or something.

Emily (22:06): A really big chunk of that is the housing expense , because you have to find room for this extra human that’s in your family or more than one human that’s in your family now. So that’s, I think, you know, you can, you can decide to be like frugal in a lot of ways if you want to, when you have children, like maybe you, um, you know, make other arrangements for childcare. You don’t spend as much in that area, but the housing is like, maybe it doesn’t come when they’re a baby, but eventually you’re gonna have to have a bigger space to accommodate those extra people. Um, so that’s been, not, not exactly surprising, but just like it has a really big effect. Like we for instance, don’t make, aren’t making nearly as much progress with our savings as we may have expected with the nice salaries that we have now because just, yeah, a lot of our expenses are a lot higher than it was for just two adults.

Amanda (22:47): Yeah. And my husband was just showing me this graph of uh, a graph mapping what people are spending on housing. So median rent and mortgage payments with uh, US household incomes and oh, that’s it. It’s a depressing graphic to look at. I mean the real reality is, is even if you’re doing everything right, uh, it’s, especially depending on where you live, housing is going to be a really substantial part of what you’re making. It’s fairly unavoidable. And like you said, when you have kids that space is just kind of non-negotiable. I mean, you know, there are a handful of families you hear, oh, you know, we have five kids and we still live in whatever square feet. And you know what, some people make that work, but I think for the vast majority of people you do kind of elect to say, ah, you know, maybe we won’t be saving as much as we would in a really ideal world, but this space helps us live a life that, you know, is calm and happy and feels right to us in the time.

The FIRE Journey with Children and Car Buying Decisions

Emily (23:49): What are the other ways that adding these children to your family has affected your fire journey?

Amanda (23:54): We still try to, um, you know, look for wins where we can. So, um, you know, I said we spend a lot more on grocery than we used to. ’cause I just really care about the quality of food. We don’t care that much about cars. I work remotely. My husband works part-time remotely thanks to the pandemic. So he went from having a job where he was in the office five days a week to now he’s only needs to be in the office a couple days a week. So we have two kids, but we only have one car. And right now, while our kids are little and they aren’t in a lot of activities, that works great for us. So we have a, um, completely paid off car. We paid off our car. That was another thing you asked about pandemic expenses in 2020, we made the last payment on our car.

Amanda (24:37): So now we don’t have a car payment and we’re not looking, uh, to upgrade. Like we didn’t feel the need to get a big SUV as soon as we had kids. And I know that’s something that a lot of Americans, it feels like a very American thing to do. Like we’re having a kid, we need an SUV, we are really happy with our economical hybrid and we’re still happy with it. So that’s one way we’ve tried to control our expenses. Like I look at what’s happened with the cost of cars in the past few years and uh, they look a lot like rent and mortgage payments. Look not that long ago, .

Emily (25:10): Yeah. I want to underline this strategy as well. It’s, it’s something that, that I’ve noticed too really common that you upgrade a lot of things. Some people upgrade a lot of things pretty much immediately when they, they know a child is on the way or once the child arrives, whether that’s the bigger car or the newer car or the bigger housing arrangement. Even if a baby is very, very small and you don’t necessarily need that right away. Um, although eventually of course you do. And some other thing, other like lifestyle upgrade as well, like same for us. Like we actually have, our car is a 2003, we’ve been, my husband’s owned it that entire time, so it’s over, you know, it’s 20 years old now, it’s a sedan. Um, and yeah, I think we were maybe thinking about switching out the car before the pandemic and then like you said, because of what’s happening with prices, we were like, whoa, let’s put the brakes on that.

Emily (25:54): Like, we don’t wanna engage in this market right now. Yeah, now my kids are five and seven and they’re getting to that stage where you said they have more activities, they have more stuff going on. We’re thinking maybe we do either need a larger primary car or perhaps a secondary car. I think what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna keep the 20-year-old car as a secondary car, right? Add, yeah, just add another, um, maybe bigger, maybe the same size of car. We actually just invested in solar panels, so we’re probably gonna get an electric car for that next, um, step. But it’s like we, we put it off, right? We put it off until this stage when it’s like, okay, it’s really, really seeming like it’s necessary at this point. And I mean, I cannot tell you like how much savings that is over the years. It’s probably multi thousands of dollars each year, if not like, perhaps $10,000 in that first year. And just delaying that expense every time. You can delay a big expense, you can stretch out the time that you use, you know that item over, you get more and more value and you’re able to direct your money elsewhere.

Amanda (26:48): I think there’s a choose Fi episode where they look at driving a car for, it’s not even a crazy amount of time. It’s like 10 or 15 years for the car, but not upgrading as soon as you’ve paid it off and just continuing to drive it. And they look at that over an adult lifetime, just that one decision. And I think ultimately they get at a million dollars or close to a million dollars just in the savings of not constantly having a car payment or driving the most expensive vehicle you could possibly afford.

Emily (27:18): It’s absolutely a huge difference. And like you said, lifestyle makes a big difference here. ’cause like my husband and I both work from home that we walk the kids to school, like we don’t really need, we don’t really drive except for like going to errands and driving the kids to their activities sometimes. So it’s not even, yeah, it’s just, we don’t put that many miles on the car, I guess is what I’m saying. Now sometimes it’s convenient to have two, but we’ve been doing a lot of biking recently. We’ve been doing some Ubering when we do need the second car and that feels expensive in the moment, but when you think about it over the long term, it’s so much less expensive than owning a second car that you rarely use.

Commercial

Emily (27:52): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Emergency Fund

Emily (28:42): Now you mentioned, um, in our, uh, pre-interview communications that you are at the moment very grateful for your emergency fund. So can you tell us more about why that is?

Amanda (28:53): 2023 has demanded a lot from our emergency fund. Uh, literally on January 1st, I was driving the kids home from Target and our car broke down and it turned out it needed pretty much the most expensive possible repair for that car. And it’s a hybrid, so it ended up being about $6,000, which is it. We had kept up the maintenance. They had just told us a few months before that this car was in great shape. Uh, we were not anticipating any car expenses, there was nothing we’d been deferred. So it was a real surprise to us. Uh, but given what had happened, as we just talked about to the cost of cars over the pandemic, we were looking at it and going $6,000 doesn’t even get us that far to a comparable similar vehicle. And so we decided to do that repair and uh, you know, luckily we had the emergency fund, so we were able to, uh, pay for that.

Amanda (29:51): Uh, fast forward just a few months later in the summer, uh, we found out our dog needed a pretty substantial surgery. And again, we’d, we’d worked hard after spending down some of that emergency fund to build it up, uh, you know, even over those few short months. And it’s just, we felt so good being able to not have to consider whether we can afford that surgery. Um, you know, and just, and not needing to worry about financing, but knowing we could focus on, yes, let’s do this procedure. Let’s get her the care she needs, let’s get her feeling better. And so that was just phenomenal for us. And you know, that was a good reminder. I am very happy to live below my means so that when things like this happen and things are going to happen like this in life, we just don’t need to worry about it.

Amanda (30:39): It’s, yes, we have this money, we’ll pay for this surgery. Um, and so that was just, um, really, we were very grateful to have the money to not have to worry about the cost of that and to just be able to pay for it in one fell swoop. And then, uh, just last month we decided to do an installation project. So we had new installation put in an erratic, we did a, a home energy audit in the summer and found out that we have about five inches of attic installation and they recommend 15 here in Minnesota. So, uh, you know, given the severity of our winters, we were like, yep, we’d better do this right away. Let’s get that insulation taken care of. So that wasn’t an emergency, but again, just having savings and having the fact that there’s a good chunk of money every month that we just put away for stuff that we know will come up later has just been so fantastic for us this year.

Emily (31:35): Yeah, that, that really speaks to the, um, utility and the stress relief that comes with having margin in your life. That’s financial margin, that’s time margin, that’s energy margin. Not everybody has that. It’s, it’s difficult to, to intentionally get your life to the level where you have margin in those areas, but when you do and then those things come up, you’re so, so grateful that you did that advance, you know, work and, and design and so forth to, to have that happen. Um, I like to say regarding emergency funds, that an emergency fund is what stands between something bad happening in your life and something bad happening in your life and there being significant financial consequences for it. Um, like your dog’s, um, surgery for instance. For instance, um, so like you, if you hadn’t had the money, you, you may have had that really tough decision about what do you yes.

Emily (32:22): Do you lose this, this pet and do you lose this Yeah. Member of your household. Um, but you didn’t have to agonize over that because you had the money. So it just provides so much, so much peace. And I lived for a long time with very scant emergency fund because I was in grad school and I was focused on other things, but like I, we have much larger one now and it, it does afford a lot of peace of mind, especially with the extra responsibilities that come with the home ownership and the car ownership and the kids and all the stuff that we’ve been talking about. So it definitely needs to sort of scale with your lifestyle.

Amanda (32:52): Yes, it does. We definitely have more set aside and uh, more things come up for sure. But yeah, I personally am happy to slow down on things like vacations or uh, you know, we just talked about cars, you know, if we had another car that’s money that probably wouldn’t be in that emergency fund. And just for me, I sleep so much better at night knowing that money is there for whatever is going to come up where we’re going to need it. And you know, I know not everyone, um, comes to that same conclusion. Um, and I think that post pandemic, there’s been a lot of this, um, you know, YOLO mentality and I totally understand that, that people are wanting to prioritize experiences, but I just have to say personally, I’ve landed on, I’m much happier with, um, some money just being there and waiting for what we need it for.

Emily (33:48): And the thing is like the expenses of the emergencies, whatever they’re gonna happen, whether you’re prepared for them or not. And so putting in that earlier effort at whatever stage you’re able to, to build it up then buys you the peace of mind indefinitely going forward as long as you can maintain the fund because again, the emergencies are gonna happen, but it’s whether or not it’s how you feel about it and how you can approach it, that is making all the difference. And again, it doesn’t have to be like a continual sacrifice for decades to maintain that emergency fund. ‘Cause again, once you build it up, all you have to do is pay for those emergencies. You would’ve paid for them anyway somehow. So I’m curious about that actually, because you said something like you worked hard to build the emergency fund back up after the first, you know, depletion of the fund for the car expense. So I’m just wondering like how you did that. Was it changes in your spending? Was it reducing your savings rate in other areas? Was it working additionally? How did you do that?

Amanda (34:37): Yeah, it was largely, um, cutting back a little bit on the percentage we’re putting away for retirement. Um, you know, there was a point during the pandemic where we maxed all those accounts out and that felt really great. This is not a year where we’re maxing out Roth HSA and 401k, 4 0 3 bs. Um, I would love to have another year like that. Um, but this isn’t that year and that’s okay. Um, you know, ultimately we just decided, and, and we didn’t stop contributions. We just kind of cut, cut back a little bit on that percentage to get the emergency fund back up to where we felt comfortable with it.

Emily (35:18): Uh, once again, I see a parallel in our stories here because we maxed out our available retirement contribution room for the first time ever in 2021. So that was like 2 401Ks, my employer side of my 401k and two Roth IRAs. We did it again in 22. In 2023. This is not happening again, . Um, because as I mentioned, we had the solar panels which we’re paying for upfront, like we’re not financing them. So we had to pull that money partially from savings and partially from cashflow to be able to do that. And so that alone, plus I just mentioned we may have a car purchase in our future, like yeah, uh, we’re still doing like one 401k, we’ll still do the two IRAs, but how much we contribute to that second 401k is not too clear at this point in the year. We’re recording this in, um, October, 2023, by the way. So, but that hap that’s, that’s how life is. I mean, it’s not all like perfect numbers on a spreadsheet, like perfect numbers in your financial plans, same thing happens every single year, right? You have to adapt in some ways. And now that we’ve had that taste of like what maxing out felt like those couple of times, I’m pretty sure we’ll get back to it at some point.

Amanda (36:18): It feels good, right?

Emily (36:19): Just not 2023

Amanda (36:20): Mm-Hmm, Well, congrats on the solar panels. That’s a bucket list project for us. And, uh, you know, to be able to pay for it without financing, it is not something that many people can say. So congrats to you.

Emily (36:31): Yeah, and that was, uh, it, it’s not all thanks to us, it’s partially some leftover parental gifts from when we bought the house. We got some gifts, we didn’t spend all of it on the down payment that is now being redirected to a literal investment in the house. But here in southern California, like our electricity bill is really outta control. So like the solar panels clearly are an ROI within just a few years. So it’s a, it it is literally an investment as well as, um, just like something we want to do.

Amanda (36:56): Yeah, I I was just hearing that, that the ROI is very good in California with your high energy costs, pg and e and um, and abundant sunshine in southern California.

The Future of Amanda’s FIRE Journey

Emily (37:06): Yeah. And I can only imagine it’s gonna get worse in terms of energy costs. So it’s, it’s again, looking long-term planning kind of thing. Um, so yeah, we’re excited about that. Okay, so we’re talking about the boring middle of five. We got the kids, we got the kids’ expenses, you know, you’re doing your best you can on your 401Ks, you know, managing with life’s, you know, circumstances that are thrown your way. What is the future of your fire journey? Or maybe like you mentioned earlier that you’re not looking for like a specific super soon end point. You’re very happy with your lifestyle in many ways. So like why do you still identify with pursuing fire and what do you think might change when you get to that official where financially independent point?

Amanda (37:45): Yeah, we don’t have a specific destination, but what we are pursuing is options and flexibility. We just know for us, uh, that someday, you know, thing things happen with life and with jobs and with health. So one day, maybe one of us, we’re both happy with our jobs right now, someday, maybe one of us is in a toxic work environment. Maybe, uh, something happens with our health or the health of one of our kids, or maybe one of our kids develops some really interesting crazy hobby that, uh, you know, might require some kind of specialty training or some travel or something like that. We don’t know. But, um, we want to be able to say yes to things that life will throw at us in the future. And so for us, this FI journey isn’t about we want to move to Portugal or Thailand in 2035. It’s, we want to be able to say yes to opportunities and to never have to stay in a situation that that isn’t good for us. We always want the option to be able to make changes so that we can, uh, just live a happy, supportive life that’s good for us and good for our kids.

Emily (39:03): I, I feel like the fire movement broadly over the past few years has moved in the direction of what you’re describing. It, it, you know, 10 years ago it maybe felt much more, um, boxed in , right? Like, this is my savings rate and I have X many years until I get to this point and I’m quitting my job. And that whole attitude, and as more and more people attempted that journey, they realized that maybe the journey couldn’t look exactly like that, or maybe they didn’t even want the end point that they had imagined like earlier. Um, so many people I think are attracted to fire because they’re unhappy with their job in some way. And if you do the work of getting into a job that supports your lifestyle, as we were talking about earlier, then there’s not such a strong impetus to get out, you know, ASAP.

Emily (39:45): But like you said, that things can change with your job and with your health. And so I think it’s so smart to not, and this is what we’re doing too, like not count on I’m gonna work till I’m 72, I’m gonna work till I’m 65, and my finances depend on my ability and the market’s ability to keep providing me with work opportunities until that point. Um, and I don’t know, our, our listeners right now are probably somewhat younger than we are, but I’m 38 and I’m, I’m not exactly, I’m not tired, I’m not slowing down, but I can see in the future that I don’t necessarily want to live this way for many, many, many more decades. And that, you know, going, seeing what our parents have been going through health wise and other people around us, like, you can’t, you can’t count on that necessarily. So, like you said, just to give yourself options earlier and earlier is, is a great gift.

Amanda (40:27): Yeah, that’s exactly how we feel. And I do think you’re right, the FI community has sort of shifted in that direction, and I always struggled with this idea of what’s your fi number and your FI date, because it, there were just so many assumptions about, uh, a consistency of your spending. Um, you know, something that I’ve learned over the past few years, I mean, what my expenses looked like as a grad student were nothing like what they looked like as a postdoc or anything like what they looked like right before we had kids. You know, now we have kids, we support our kids. Um, my mother-in-law lives with us, like life changes every year. And so I don’t know what my expenses are going to be in a few years, and that’s okay. But I do know that having built up a net worth isn’t something I’m likely to look back and go, wow, I really wish I hadn’t done that.

Amanda (41:17): So, um, yeah, we’ve never been able to pin down exactly what, um, you know, specific, um, I’ve never calculated a fi date or a fi number because there’s just too many assumptions in there that I’ve never felt comfortable saying. I know what those assumptions are, but we know that life will provide us with interesting opportunities. My husband and I are both lifelong learners. You know, we’re in education, we love to learn new things. I can’t rule out that one of us might wanna do a complete career pivot, go back to grad school or something someday. If, if that’s something one of us wants to do, I hope we’ll be able to do it.

Emily (41:52): Exactly, exactly. Similarly with us, like I’ve never calculated, well, I’m, I don’t, I don’t call myself like on the fi journey, but I’ve also never calculated a fi date or a FI number because like, frankly, my husband and I bought the house we currently live in and we are not planning on living here. Once our kids are out like well outta the house, we’re gonna downsize, and who knows what that’s going to look like. So like, even when you draw closer and closer, um, to achieving that, you know, what you think might be the net worth goal of, you know, achieving fire, um, you can still make big changes and, and you may need to, and especially with the, the family unit that keeps evolving with time. Um, like you said, there’s just, every year is different. And so yeah, we may be on the journey , um, for a while. There’s not really like an end point necessarily. And so many people, again, in the fire community who maybe they did leave their jobs, they find that they’re still earning money in just other interesting ways. And so it’s like, well, you didn’t even need to reach that number necessarily. You just needed to reach, uh, coast Five, for example, or some other point where you felt comfortable changing your work situation.

Amanda (42:51): Yeah, I think it’s a very rare person in the fire community that someone retires and stops earning money, at least from what I hear in the books and the podcasts. No one knows that person. They aren’t really out there. So yeah, people find things to do. Oftentimes that comes with some kind of an income or, you know, financial incentive. Um, but again, to have the ability to pursue that, to take a risk on building a business or go back to school to learn a new skill, whatever it is, um, we just wanna be able to say yes to it in the time that it feels right.

Emily (43:25): I love it. I love the vision, I love the description of your lifestyle. Sounds lovely to me. But, you know, , we found many common commonalities between us during this episode. The listener may, uh, not want a lifestyle that looks anything like either one of ours, but the whole point here is just that you can use your finances to help you achieve that lifestyle, whatever it is that you, um, most desire it to be by having that margin, having that savings rate and the things that we’ve talked about so far. Thank you so much, Amanda. And is there anything else that you’d like to add before we conclude the interview?

Amanda (43:55): No, just thank you for your time. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to you to catch up a little bit on your story as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (44:02): Absolutely. And let’s, let’s end with the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another PhD? And that can be something that we’ve touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

Amanda (44:14): Yeah, I would say this is something that we’ve touched on a bit. Um, know that your life has phases and make the most of the phases you’re in. You know, I think as, as I started learning about finances, I felt so eager to be in some of the phases that I saw other people, and I felt so frustrated being at the beginning or not having the kind of income or options that I wanted. And, you know, as I’ve been on this path for a while, but still have a long way to go, at least to that, you know, completely financial in independent space, um, I’m just learning that every phase of life has, uh, some really beautiful benefits and great things you can do. And then there’s things you aren’t working on and it’s okay to not be accomplishing every goal, uh, all at the same time.

Emily (45:02): Hmm, absolutely. And that, um, extension of our discussion reminds me of, uh, the book Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. Have you read it? Oh my gosh.

Amanda (45:09): I have not, but it seems like everyone in the community has, so it’s most definitely on my reading list because I’ve, I’ve yet to hear someone say it hasn’t transformed their thinking and just changed how they’re approaching, uh, their life and their values.

Emily (45:24): It absolutely did for me as well. I would say that was like my book of 2022 that like changed my thinking. Um, and this isn’t necessarily about specifically tying financial goals to different life stages, but just tying things you want to do to different life stages. And it really made me think differently about the opportunities that were available to me when I was in graduate school, for example, um, or out of graduate school, but before having children and what, uh, regrets I have from those times. But also what I’m glad that I took advantage of because I could see that, you know, opportunities close as you move through different phases of life. And so it’s just, um, I don’t, it wasn’t like a sad book for me, but just really helping me think about how to maximize the stage that I’m in now and thinking about what can be put off until later stages of life in terms of, um, accomplishing them, whether that’s with your finances or in other areas. So I do highly recommend that book, um, to every reader. It may make you feel better actually about the, the stage that you’re in if you’re still in graduate school or something like that. So thank you for the thought. Thank you for the opportunity to plug one of my favorite books. Um, and Amanda, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

Amanda (46:25): Thank you, Emily.

Outtro

Emily (46:35): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

How This PhD Student and Her Higher-Earning Partner Manage Joint and Separate Finances

February 19, 2024 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Tram Pham, a 3rd-year PhD student in economics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Tram describes the financial aspect of her relationship with her boyfriend, Markus, from discussing money on their first date to how they structure their joint and separate accounts now that they live together. Even though Tram is the lower earner, she came into the relationship with savings and has guided Markus into starting to save for joint goals, such as emergencies, vacations, and gifts. She knows that her future in academia is likely to require flexibility, so she saves for the unknown. Tram and Markus have learned how to moderate one another’s natural saver/spender tendencies so that they both plan for their finances and live in the moment.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How This PhD Student and Her Higher-Earning Partner Manage Joint and Separate Finances

Teaser

00:00 Tram: I try and always try to make our saving plans fun and interesting because for me, from the beginning, I’m more just focusing on saving, saving, saving, even though I don’t know what I’m saving for. And Markus is like focusing on living, living, living, just living at the moment. So right now we are trying at least to balance those things. Hey, I save, but also I don’t forget to live. And those savings will be spent on the things that I love to do or make my life more meaningful.

Introduction

00:36 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

01:04 Emily: This is Season 17, Episode 4, and today my guest is Tram Pham, a 3rd-year PhD student in economics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Tram describes the financial aspect of her relationship with her boyfriend, Markus, from discussing money on their first date to how they structure their joint and separate accounts now that they live together. Even though Tram is the lower earner, she came into the relationship with savings and has guided Markus into starting to save for joint goals, such as emergencies, vacations, and gifts. She knows that her future in academia is likely to require flexibility, so she saves for the unknown. Tram and Markus have learned how to moderate one another’s natural saver/spender tendencies so that they both plan for their finances and live in the moment.

01:51 Emily: The tax year 2023 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor this workshop for you and your peers? You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Thank you so, so much for doing so! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s17e4/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Tram Pham.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:16 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Tram Pham. She is a therapist. third year PhD student at Uppsala University in Sweden, uh, in economics. And we are going to talk today about finances in a relationship. And this is going to be exciting because Tram and her partner do something very different than what I do and what I’ve covered on the podcast in the past. So I like this new perspective. So Tram, would you please introduce yourself a little bit further?

03:39 Tram: Thank you so much, Emily, for having me. Uh, I am Tram Pham, a PhD student. I am a student in economics at Uppsala University in Sweden, yeah, very far away. Uh, and, uh, I am doing research in labor and health economics. I am originally from Vietnam. Uh, as you said, currently I am staying with my boyfriend partner in Stockholm in Sweden.

04:05 Emily: Excellent. Um, and your partner’s name is Markus, is that right?

04:08 Tram: Yeah. So he is a Swedish, yeah.

04:11 Emily: All right. And what does Markus do for his profession?

04:15 Tram: So he is a machine learning engineer. And he is, uh, yeah, so he just had his master finish it two, three years ago. And now he’s working in a real job.

04:28 Emily: Gotcha. But he spent some time in academia, so he understands. Well, we’ll get into it, right? So how did you two first meet?

04:35 Tram: So, yeah, so we was introduced to each other through our mutual friend.

Early Financial Conversations With Your Partner

04:42 Emily: Awesome. And so when you started dating, when you first got together, how soon did conversations around finances or conversations around lifestyle, how did that start?

04:53 Tram: So, uh, I am very conscious in finance and I have been reading a lot of books and also practicing finance independence for a long time. So I think that finance is a really important topic for me. So I brought it up in the first date. Yes. So the first day meeting Markus, I was asking him about his view about finance, how he is practicing, uh, with his own money. Of course, it’s not very in detail, but like just a brief perspective to see whether he also considered that finance is important or not. And in the second date, we asked more question about, Hey, what do you like to do in your life? And, uh, what do you think that finance can help you to achieve that? And how have you planned out and things like that? So yeah, very early in the dating process.

05:47 Emily: Okay. I’m, I’m really curious about this now. Um, because the way you phrase that it sounded very interviewee, but is that how it, is that how it felt for him or for you in the moment? Or was it more like casual, like I’m going to ask a little subtle question about finances and, you know, 30 minutes later, maybe another little question, or was it really like, no, we need to be on the same page right now?

06:09 Tram: Yeah. So now that you mentioned that, I think for me, it came out really naturally because I like talking about personal finance with my friends and things, but yes, with Markus, it’s felt like an interview, like I came in as a teacher or someone interviewing him about his perspective about finance. So from the beginning, he was a bit hesitant, of course. And also he was like, yes, but then I. I think that I explained it to him that, yes, I’m not coming here trying to like interview you or something, just that because I am more serious about relationship. I don’t want to play around. I’m coming and searching for a partner and commitment and things. And I think finance is important for a relationship. That’s why I’m asking these questions. So yeah, I think after my explanation, he became a little bit more open, but of course also not like, in very details, as I wished it could be, so.

07:11 Emily: And in these early conversations, what kind of answers were you getting? Like, were you seeing that he was kind of on the same page as you, although maybe a little bit more reticent to share? Or was it like, oh, no, I’m actually detecting some differences in practices or differences in values?

07:26 Tram: Yes. So. I think that Markus know what is fire movement, what is a financial independence movement, but also in general, he and me, even, even though I am super interested in personal finance, but I don’t consider money as the most important part in my life. I just want to have the freedom and the opportunity to choose whenever I want to have. So I think for that, Markus and I was really on the same page. Like we think that yes, money is important because it allows us to, to live the life we want. And, but also in the just first few days, I could not ask in very detail about, Hey, how much you earn? Or like, what is your expenses? What is your saving? And that kind of thing. Just that On the surface, yes, it’s, it’s very similar. Hmm.

08:18 Emily: So, I haven’t been in the dating pool for a very long time, um, but what I remember reading in terms of like advice for talking about finances was to share first, like to share your, if you want to take that step with the person you’re dating, like, okay, we’re going to talk about our income or our debt or whatever. Like. You reveal first and you set the model and the tone. Is that what you did? Were you more sort of leading the way in the openness?

08:42 Tram: Yeah, so the thing about Sweden is that I think that the gap between different incomes is not a lot. It’s not very much, right? And also kind of like pay and things like is kind of very transparent and also our mutual friend is also a very close friend to Markus and she and her husband also are doing PhD. So I think that Markus kind of has some sense about the salary range that I am in. So yes, I didn’t specifically say how much I earn, but I, I expect all I could hypothesize that he knew kind of not exact, uh, amount, but kind of the range. Yes. But for me, I had zero, zero clue about how much he’s earning.

The Interplay Between Relationship, Financial, and Career Goals

09:28 Emily: So you mentioned earlier that Markus had a master’s you’re in your PhD program. And that one of your values, shared values was freedom, being able to do what you want to do, having money be a tool along that path. I’m wondering how you think about your being in a PhD program at this time, and maybe what your future career plans are and how that interplays with like the fire pursuit. And then the next layer on top of that, of course, is how Markus would feel about you being currently in academia or maybe in the future. So can you talk more about how you think about that with your finances and your career and the relationship and all that stuff?

10:05 Tram: Um, so I think that I, I really love doing research. I love my job and everything like that. But I am also aware that I, I cannot earn a lot of money or like become a millionaire just being a researcher. So, uh, since my childhood, I, my parents had taught me to save money and that kind of thing a lot. So like, I am always a saver. Yeah, regardless of how much I earn, I usually try to save at least 10 percent or even sometimes more than 50%. And also because the prospect of PhD, especially after PhD, if we want to get a good job. we have to be willing to move. So all of these also went into my consideration that, hey, I need to save money because I don’t know where I would end up to be. And also, how about the cost of moving? And, uh, how about later if I want to have babies? If I move so much, I would not receive the social benefit and that kind of thing. So for me, saving is important. And I have always been practicing that. Uh, at the same time, I think that like, Sweden has a really good social assistance, uh, security and that kind of thing. So, usually, like, okay, so I am generalizing here, but I think at least with Markus and my friends, they don’t, they don’t save a lot. Because they don’t think that it’s necessary to save even. Because, uh, after the salary, a large, uh, a large part of your salary already go for the tax and which will be paid for your pension and unemployment insurance later. So at least in term of Markus, before meeting me, he had zero saving because he didn’t think that it’s important. Yes. He think that money is important, but maybe now he’s young and also in the tech sector, he’s earning a lot. So, uh, why should I save? I, I can do that later or something like that. So yes, so when we, uh, entered relationship, I already had some amount of saving, even though my salary is always much lower than Markus and he with large salary, but, uh, yes, he, he didn’t have any saving at that time. And. As I said, I was really very transparent and honest from the beginning, so I also brought up these topics with him from the first few days. Hey, I have to move a lot. Of course, I would love to stay in Sweden, but, uh, I’m not sure whether I have that option. After my PhD,and also, yes, my salary would generally be lower than yours in, in good times. I mean, assuming that he still has a job because yes, in fact, the turnover is also very high. Uh, he understand that. I think that’s the thing that I like so much about Markus also, really very open and also trying to learn things. So yes, because of that, even though he aware of all of these things, but he know that, as long as we are more suitable in our values, and we want to build a family together. It doesn’t matter. So, yeah.

13:20 Emily: Okay. Yeah. So you’re preparing for the possibility of moving out of Sweden, um, depending on where the job opportunities are. And yeah, like that is, that is a really different, um, perspective, I think for people who are, you know, like your, your peers, maybe who are Swedish, like who are used to having that social safety net. I mean, if you moved to the U. S., it’s going to be all on you. Um, right. So that’s just so interesting to think about, like, depending on that, but making that assumption that you’re always going to be living in that country and it’s always going to have the same kinds of benefits. And you’re introducing this, like, well, Maybe I won’t always live here and why not prepare for that like sort of uncertain or like the possibility of a change in the future. And I just think it’s so interesting as you’ve been talking how you’re the lower earning, uh, partner, but you have quite a bit of financial acumen. Um, and least maybe not now, but maybe when you started the relationship more so than Markus did. It depends, of course, on the things that we’ve been talking about, like whether or not it’s necessary to save or to what degree, depending on where you live and so forth. Um, but yeah, I just think it’s interesting, you know, you’re, you’re coming in with savings with the lower income and he doesn’t have that even with the higher income.

Combining Finances With Your Partner

14:27 Emily: So let’s fast forward a little bit. You two live together now, right? And you have some, some degree of joint finances. Can you talk about that process of sort of, uh, joining up more financially?

14:38 Tram: Mm hmm. So, yes, I think as you already mentioned, at the moment we have shared economy. So, um, how it happened is that when we was considering whether to move in or not, Uh, I talk with a lot of my friends about finance and how they are doing with their partner, whether they share economy or whether they separate it. So I think that most of my Swedish friends that I talk with, they have a separate, uh, economy. But most of the Asian friends that I talk with, they have shared economies. So I could hear a lot of pros and cons also about different perspectives. And personally, I think that I also prefer the joint economy. And then I discussed that with Markus, and I discussed why I think it’s a good thing. And because I think that we are living in one household, so it’s better to join. We also will be able to check and see what each other are doing. And if we have a shared, uh, goal of buying an apartment or later moving somewhere, all of these will need to be shared. So I think it will be much also transparent and honest. It’s, it’s, it’s good. And yes, as I said, from the beginning, Markus is really, really open and supportive. He just say, yeah, let’s test it out. I don’t know how it will be, but, uh, let, let’s try it. And if, uh, it doesn’t, um. If it’s not suitable for us, then we can adjust or even change to another method. So yeah, so far we have been practicing joint, uh, account, and I think that we are doing quite well on that.

16:22 Emily: So I love that, uh, openness to experimentation. So that’s, yeah, it’s a great attitude. So you have, it sounds like. A joint account, is that right? Is it like joint checking, joint savings?

16:35 Tram: For example, my salary will go directly to my separate account, and Markus’ salary will go to his separate account, but then we already calculated like a per month how much we need as a fixed expenses, like for the bills and for the groceries for the saving. So I think 90 percent of our joint salary will go to the joint account. So we have like 10 percent left. That means that 5 percent for me and 5 percent for him. So that we can just spend as our individual allowance, like if we want to buy gift for each other, or if we want to hang out with friends, so we don’t have to ask for each other, uh, opinions or something like that. So the 90 percent will be shared between saving, and yes, I can explain that later, but the saving and the bills, the grocery, and also another account called play account, like something that we can use together when we hang out together. And for us, we eat out every week once just so that, uh, yes, it’s, it’s also helps us to understand why money is important and also like. Yeah. Energize us.

17:57 Emily: Okay. So what I’m hearing is that, um, your incomes start separate, but then almost all of them become combined, um, into this joint, joint checking and joint savings model. Um, so the separate, what you keep separate is very, a small percentage of your overall income. Um, and I think the, the listeners will like be curious about this because you mentioned that Markus has a higher salary than you do. How you both, I understand mechanically how it’s working, but how you both are like feeling about it or how he feels about it. Right. Because he’s. Subsidizing, you know, your lifestyle to a degree. So, like, have you had conversations about that?

18:32 Tram: Yeah, yeah. So, uh, I think, yes, because that was also my concern from the beginning. Hey, I am having a much lower salary. Would it be fair for you also to, to give the majority of your salary? And so far, I would say that, let’s say, if our joint account is 100%, then I am contributing around 35 ish percent, and his one is 65%. Uh, yes, Markus agrees with that, of course, but also because he entered into the relationship with a small loan, also from his student loan. So he thinks that it would be fair for him to put more in the joint account because from that we also take out some part to pay for his private loan.

19:20 Emily: I see. Okay.

Commercial

19:24 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Savings Goals and Using Sinking Funds

20:16 Emily: So you mentioned that you have like a few different savings goals going on right now. Can you talk about how you are, like what you’re working towards and also how you are, um, maintaining finances within your relationship, not just how it’s structured, but how you are having conversations and communication around that.

20:33 Tram: Yes. So, I think for the saving goals, the biggest, uh, saving goals right now is, uh, the coming trip to the U. S. Next year, hopefully for my exchange. So for this, uh, we estimated that, hey, we would need around 10,000 USD. I mean, because I already received the scholarship for that, um, uh, exchange, but. 10,000 would be an extra thing in case things happen or also help us to visit other states because we will stay there only for six months. So we would want to utilize the time there as much as possible and also to help us to purchase the flight tickets and insurance, that kind of thing. So for that, Every month, so far, we, uh, try to save around 2,000. So whatever we do, it doesn’t matter. Whenever the money come in, we immediately take out 2,000 for the, for the saving account. So I think, uh, that goal will be completed next month or so, and then we will try to move in other long term savings, such as, like, wedding expenses or apartment expenses. And another, uh, smaller, smaller saving goals would be, like, uh, gifts, such as, like, Christmas is coming. And I think for Swedish people and also in my family, we have a tradition of giving each other gifts. So we are so like each month so far, we add in that around 100 or 200 USD so that we will have some, some amount to buy gifts for our loved one. Another one is a vacation. We also add in, um, yeah, I think 100 or 100 ish around every month, hopefully that next year or the year after that we can afford our trip to Japan. So, yeah, so those are the common and biggest saving account so far. And oh yes, and we also have emergency fund, if you also can count that as saving. Uh, yes, so we have around 500 or so. Uh, yes. Going for the emergency fund. Actually, so far, sometimes we would take out some money from the emergency in case we spend so much money in cooking or eating outside. But we are trying to stick to that as much as we can.

23:00 Emily: I like that you’re, so the way that, the way that I talk about this is, is sinking funds or targeted savings funds. Um, and I like that so much of your saving is for like. Fun, exciting things that you get to do together, because I think that’s a really good introduction to saving for someone who maybe hasn’t practiced it or is less familiar with it. It’s like, it’s really just like planning. Like, do you want to have a December when you’re stressed because you have to buy all the gifts at once and you have no savings for it? Or would you rather build up gradually over time and be more generous because you’ve already planned for it? Like. It’s such a positive, you know, thing.

Plans for a Potential Visiting Fellowship at Harvard

23:36 Emily: Um, I want to hear more about your exchange in the U.S. Um, I’m so excited you’re going to be spending six months and you want to travel and so forth. Like, are you going to a particular university? Is it, you know, for research purposes? Just tell us more about, um, the sort of official, like, career wise reason that you’re doing the trip and then also what you plan to do for fun.

23:53 Tram: Uh, yes. So, uh, hopefully again, it also depends so much on the situation, but I will have a visiting fellow position at Harvard in Boston for six months. I’m still, I already applied and I got a scholarship from Sweden, but I still need to, uh, um, get the offer. Again, they have the possibility to reject still from Harvard. But if everything goes well, I will be there from January to June, like the spring semester. And most of the time, yes, I will be doing research in Boston area. And Markus also is going with me. So that, that will, that, that is a plus. Uh, but beside that, we also plan to visit California where my own sister is staying with her husband. And I also do have other friends there. Markus and me also plan to go to Texas where we can try out the real Texas food. We watch so much YouTube videos about that and maybe Mexico. So, yeah. Those are the plans so far, and I think, as you said, I try and we try to make our saving plans fun and interesting because for me, from the beginning, I’m more just focusing on saving, saving, saving, even though I don’t know what I’m saving for, and Markus is like focusing on living, living, living, just living at the moment, so right now we are trying at least to balance those things, hey, I save, but also I don’t forget to live, and those saving will be spent on the things that I love to do or make my life more meaningful.

25:35 Emily: Yeah, I love that approach. Um, it actually reminds me, I, I reread Die With Zero recently by Bill Perkins. Have you read it?

25:41 Tram: Oh, not yet. Okay.

25:43 Emily: Well, this is definitely a recommendation to you, um, because it just reminds me that like all the saving that we do, whether it’s for retirement or whatever, like pretty much all of it is for your own spending in the future. And hopefully to have a great lifestyle that you really enjoy in the future, uh, maybe some of it is leave a legacy, right? For other people, but probably primarily for most people who are not super high earners, it’s like to provide for yourself in the future. Um, but it’s not all about the future. Um, it’s also about living in the present. So it’s really nice that you do have that balance, but it sounds like it’s not really causing a lot of conflict, right? It’s like a, a healthy, um, I’m going to, you know, moderate you and you’re going to moderate me in terms of your like, you know, um, natural preferences. So I really like that. I’m so excited. I hope you get to do that exchange and that you get to do the traveling that you want to. I’m curious, is Markus going to continue working during those six months or is he taking like a leave of absence?

26:37 Tram: So I think that’s a blessing. thing also because his company allow him to work online during that period of time. I think that is also a thing that I like so much, uh, about his job. I mean, the flexibility to work from home or online sometimes, of course, you cannot check like that for two years or three years, but, uh. If you can explain the reason and if you still can maintain the quality of your job, you have that possibility. So yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s good that we can be there together.

27:12 Emily: And that’s like a really kind of fire thing, right? Of like having the financial flexibility to work somewhere else if you want to for a while to set up your job so you have that flexibility. Like. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Communication Practices for Maintaining Finances in Your Relationship

27:22 Emily: Okay. I asked you a way too complicated question earlier. The second part of that was, um, what are your like practices around communication and finances, uh, for like maintenance purposes today?

27:32 Tram: Hmm. Okay. So I think I, I must say that the foundation of everything is that we already kind of agree with each other that we will be very transparent and honest with each other from the first, from, from everything. And from the first few days, we already had that kind of condition. So, um, yes, even though finance topic is kind of really sensitive, but, uh, we bring it up whenever we think that, Hey, for example, if I look at the joint account and I see like. Markus spend 20 or 50. So usually when we spend something, we try to write out, like when we transfer the money, we try to write out the reason why we’re spending that money. But sometimes the Markus would forget. I usually don’t. Uh, so I would say, Hey, I’m looking at the money today, it seemed like you are spending 50 somewhere. Uh, did you have something fun to do or did you eat something nice or something like that? So we would bring it up to each other and ask to know, Hey, where are the money is going? Because for me, I would be very frustrated if I don’t know where the number is going. And at the end of the month, I’m like, Hey, why are we? In short of money, why, what is going on? Like, should we readjust the budgeting things or things like that? And another thing is that every month when the salary comes, we will sit down and we call that like finance days. So we will try to discuss, Hey, this month we have spent this much on this, this, this, it seemed like we eat a lot. Or it seems like we spend a lot on buying clothes or something like that. Should we adjust something? And, uh, so far, I think it goes super well for us and, uh, to have, um, so usually what we do is we have some fun things to do. When we discuss finance, usually we could eat out in a restaurant and when we were waiting for the food to come, we would starting discussing finance or like we say, okay, first we sit here, we discuss finance and after that we can go for sauna or like a beer or something like that. So we try to incorporate some fun activities again to go in so that, like, especially for me, it’s already become a habit. But also I agree that from the beginning, Markus would find it a bit difficult and also, hey, why every time about money, money, money. So to reduce that frustration, we try to incorporate things that we would like to do and also talk about the topics, constantly discuss with each other, being transparent and honest. I think that helps so much. Another thing we also have been practicing is that we try to celebrate our wins, even though sometimes it’s super small. So for example, last week or so, I received a small scholarship. So we also went out to eat, even though every week we already go out and eat, and in the same week Markus could sell his computer, the one he doesn’t need to, need to use anymore. So we also celebrate that. So actually last week we went out and eat three times. Uh, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s good. It give us some motivation that, hey, we, we really enjoy life and, uh, we have the meaning and we like to do things together.

31:00 Emily: And I, I’m sensing that that is coming from Markus’s side, right? Like if you, like when you weren’t with him, when you were single, if you had a financial win, were you celebrating that or were you just like, great, it goes on my savings?

31:11 Tram: I do not think so. I just like, Oh, you did great. That’s all I would do. But yeah, yes, like literally celebrate and go out and buy something nice for ourselves. I think I’m also learning so much from Markus. Yeah.

31:25 Emily: And it just creates that again, like the positive cycle, right? Of like, we did something positive and we get an immediate, like nice reward to it and it encourages you to keep going. And yeah, I think that’s just beautiful. So what I was hearing about for your communications was that you have at the top of the month, you have like a planning period. Um, and then you have maybe just light check ins throughout to make sure you’re sort of, Oh, was this part of the plan? We need to adjust the plan. Um, But I like that balance. So it’s not all like reactive. It’s not all like, Oh no, we overspent. How did this happen? Blame, blame, blame. You know, it’s, it’s more like, okay, we’re, we’re getting on the same page and then we’re just going to sort of check in and make sure that everything’s going fine. And then you have that reset for the next month where you plan again, but it’s also not just planning. It’s not just like, okay, this is what we’re going to do. And we have no idea whether it happened or not. Right. You have to do like both those sides of process. So I like that you’re doing that together. Um, yeah, it reminds me, my husband and I were both pretty involved with our finances when we were both in graduate school, but I would say in the years since then, he’s kind of let me like do what I want. And like, I will ask him questions like, Hmm, okay. You spent 75 at Home Depot. What, what was that? And he’ll be, oh, remember I bought this thing. Okay. Okay. As long as we’re not like spending for spending sake at Home Depot, now that we’re homeowners, that’s the kind of problems we have. Um, okay. Well, this has been such a fun conversation and I’m so glad that you shared these elements of your relationship with us. It sounds so fun as we’ve been talking about.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:49 Emily: As we wrap up here, would you please share with us your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview or it could be something completely new.

33:00 Tram: So I think I would say that, yes, maybe learn to save, even though the PhD salary is not that high, but I think that, uh, saving give us the freedom and the liberation, literally to choose and also in the future. We don’t know what will happen. But at the same time, I think this I’m also learning like saving, but also do not forget to live, like try to do something fun, even though it’s just a small thing, but also make you feel like, oh, the money I’m earning really bring the meaning. So by that you can keep going in a long time instead of like, drop out in the middle of, of the journey.

33:42 Emily: yeah. Great point. Very well said. Thank you so much for coming on Tram, and it was lovely to to meet you and thanks for volunteering.

33:49 Tram: Thank you so much for having me.

Outtro

33:57 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2023 Edition

December 18, 2023 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

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

Links mentioned in the Episode

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

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2023 Edition

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

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

Dr. Emily Roberts

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

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

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

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

Dr. Jill Hoffman

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

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

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

Dr. Samantha McDonald

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

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

Lucy Bryan from Polygence

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

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

Commercial

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

Dr. Sean Bittner

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

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

Dr. Nelson Zounlome

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

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

Maya Gosztyla

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

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

Dr. Jeanelle Horcasitas

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

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

Dr. Leslie Wang

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

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

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

Outtro

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

This Grad Student-Parent Relied on University and State Benefits During a Tough Financial Period

December 4, 2023 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman about her experience as a graduate student-parent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura started her PhD when her daughter was an infant, so she was very intentional about choosing a PhD program that offered strong health insurance and a childcare subsidy. However, with a $9k/year stipend as the only income for a family of three, Laura’s family relied on the social safety net for a couple of years until both she and her husband increased their incomes. Laura shares the financial mindset she relied on to get through that tough period of time. Laura and Emily also discuss how the shifting political winds in Wisconsin in the early 2010s detrimentally affected the power of the grad student union at UW-Madison. Today, Laura works as a staff member at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and is making up for lost time in funding her retirement and her daughter’s college education.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This Grad Student-Parent Relied on University and State Benefits During a Tough Financial Period

Teaser

Laura (00:00): I also think it’s important to keep in mind you know, if you’re, if you’re feeling sort of weird about getting those benefits, that government benefits aren’t just you know, for people who are poor or struggling I get government benefits all the time. I get my mortgage interest deducted, right? I get my student loan interest deducted. Those are government benefits. And no, trust me, every rich person is getting every government benefit that they can. So you get your government benefits too. You earned them and you’re eligible for them.

Introduction

Emily (01:07): This is Season 16, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman. We’re discussing Laura’s experience as a graduate student-parent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura started her PhD when her daughter was an infant, so she was very intentional about choosing a PhD program that offered strong health insurance and a childcare subsidy. However, with a $9k/year stipend as the only income for a family of three, Laura’s family relied on the social safety net for a couple of years until both she and her husband increased their incomes. Laura shares the financial mindset she relied on to get through that tough period of time. Laura and I also discuss how the shifting political winds in Wisconsin in the early 2010s detrimentally affected the power of the grad student union at UW-Madison. Today, Laura works as a staff member at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and is making up for lost time in funding her retirement and her daughter’s college education. I’ve recently joined several different social media platforms, particularly for posting short videos. I’m using the next few months as an experimental period, after which I’ll focus only on the platforms where I’ve gained the most traction. So please give me a follow and engage with me there! You can find me on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn at either PFforPhDs or Personal Finance for PhDs. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s16e7/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:53): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Laura Ferrell Wartman. She is the current assistant director for academic programs at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, but we’re actually gonna be mostly talking about her experience as a PhD student at the University of Madison. So Laura, thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself a little further for the audience?

Laura (03:16): I did my PhD in interdisciplinary Theater studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I was a graduate student there from 2011 to 2017. And some of the really formative things about my time there was that I actually arrived to to grad school with a newborn. And so I think that’s probably gonna shape a lot of what we discuss today.

Financial Mindset During Childhood and Early Adulthood

Emily (03:42): Yeah, so a grad student parent and a unique kind of angle on this. Certainly for our conversation, the finances of that are very interesting as we’ll see as we go through. I should mention that Laura and I met at the Graduate Career Consortium annual meeting, and so it’s always a great time when I get to meet people face to face. And just from the first very few interactions that we had in the room that we were in together, I knew that Laura had to come on the podcast. So I’m really glad that , we made this happen. Okay. So let’s go back even before you started graduate school, actually. So let’s talk about like how you grew up and how, what, what your financial mindset was like during your childhood, your early adulthood, maybe through college and post-college leading up to this time when you were in graduate school.

Laura (04:26): Yeah. so growing up I grew up in a very high income area. I’m from Princeton, New Jersey. But due to a lot of specific factors within my family there was a real trend of scarcity in my childhood. And so I really grew up thinking that money was something that was very elusive. Something that was sort of to be afraid of and something where there was just never a sense that there was enough of it. And so I think that that is something that has really impacted the way that I view personal finance, and especially the way that I view my career because I know that stability and predictability is something that is very, very important to me. And that is sometimes at odds with working in academia, especially if you are not on the tenure track. And so that it very much impacted like the way that I viewed how I was going into my career.

Finances After College

Emily (05:30): So coming out of college, I understand you, you worked for some years right before you started graduate school. Is that correct? So talk to me about like your finances during that time and that decision to go pursue your PhD, especially as it relates to these, the mindsets and, you know, everything that was going on with you financially.

Laura (05:47): Yeah. Again, I think the, the time that I had spent working was very much related to both the sort of you know, desire for that stability but also my desire to continue the research work that I had started in my undergrad. So I, I really started to explore Irish theater and particularly Irish theater of this particular contemporary period when I was an undergrad. And I knew that I wanted to continue doing that. My sister had gotten a PhD. And so that really helped me to kind of see the possibility and see, you know, the, the things that I could do with a PhD. And so I knew that I wanted to, to pursue that. But first I was gonna need to get a master’s degree and a master’s degree in theater, just the, the ROI, the return on investment there is terrible, right? Um and so I got a job at the University of Arizona. I was an admin assistant and that paid for my master’s degree. So that was like, that was like fully a financial decision in terms of where I was gonna go for my master’s degree. And I do not in any way regret that. You know, I came out of that, I paid $25 a semester in tuition. I would highly recommend it to anybody who is looking to get a degree that maybe they don’t feel like they can you know, get that ROI in. But, so that was I was working in higher ed administration essentially, and really like working my way up the ladder while I was doing that master’s degree in theater. And that set me up really, really excellently in terms of you know, when I went into my PhD, I knew the possibilities in higher ed for somebody who has a PhD in anything. Um you know, there really is a benefit in higher education to just having a PhD. And I have noticed a big difference in terms of my career options after my PhD as opposed to before at the same institute. Being a full-time student and a full-time employee is really difficult. It definitely had a lot of financial benefits. I got married during that time and my husband was able to get a, a master’s degree paid as well. And so, you know, there were a lot of benefits to it, but it was I certainly don’t wanna sugarcoat it because it was very, very difficult.

Emily (08:04): So, because you had this long-term plan of getting the PhD, using the job, using the master’s as a stepping stone to get there, I understand during that time you were also saving up, right? And so you went into the PhD with some savings. Can you talk about how you did that or why as well?

Laura (08:19): That was around 2008, 2009. Both my husband and I were very lucky not to have lost our income during the financial crisis. I actually went on to write my dissertation about the financial crisis. You know, our, our income was middling. But we had very few large financial responsibilities. We had our rent, which was moderate. We had no current payments. We didn’t have children at that point. We, we just are frugal people. And so it was you know, we had a goal of, you know, putting money aside, not even really for any particular goal. I think for me, just having that savings, again, coming back to this idea of you know, that rug could be pulled out from under you at any point. So having, you know, liquid cash savings is something that just makes me feel better. So we had a a cash savings of about $30,000 by the time my daughter was born. And that was just from, you know, the jobs we were working.

PhD Admissions and Pregnancy

Emily (09:24): Okay. So let’s talk about the admission season. You mentioned that you had at least, you know, a couple offers, one unfunded, this one from Madison that you ended up taking because you knew at that time that your daughter was on the way. How did that play into your decision of where to attend? Like what factors were you looking at?

Laura (09:44): Yeah, so so being pregnant during admission season was very interesting. I did not do any visits because I didn’t want anyone to see that I was pregnant. Discrimination against pregnant people is a very real thing. And I was really concerned that I would be you know, deprioritized if they knew that I had a child on the way. So it was important to me to know you know, what the, the funding situation and what the daycare situation was in any area that we were planning to, to move. Madison happened to be the best overlap of those things. Daycare is extremely expensive in Madison. It was actually when we were looking in Manhattan because I had applied at a couple schools in New York. The, the daycare costs were essentially the same between Madison and and Manhattan. But the University of Wisconsin has a really comprehensive student parent support, well, system of networks really. And so that was what enabled me to get a PhD in a very real way. And so I think it wasn’t necessarily the top thing that I was looking at, but it was, it ended up being the most influential part of my graduate experience.

Emily (11:11): Wow. was this something that, I guess, I don’t know specifically like the timing of everything, but is this something that you were looking at at the time that you were choosing which schools to apply to? Or was it only by the time, okay, I’ve already applied to these sets of schools, now I know my daughter’s on the way and I need to, you know, evaluate how they’re doing on this front as well?

Laura (11:31): It was a little bit of both. There’s, you know, my, my specialty was Irish theater. There’s not, you know, a ton of schools where that’s going to be a strong focus. And admittedly, some of the schools that I applied to, it wasn’t a strong focus. It just was going to be a better you know, personal situation. But I think that there was a real you know, there, there’s sort of that cliche of like, you know, there’s never, there’s never the right time to have kids, and I think that’s very true. But for us it was like, well, we wanna, we know we wanna have a kid. I know I wanna get a PhD. I, I just think that these things can probably be true at the same time. You know, I was 30 going into my PhD which I’m, I, I’m, you know, really glad that I chose that point in my life to, to have my daughter. But I think, you know, it’s a, I think if people sometimes will try to time it out in ways that I think are never really gonna be, gonna be perfect. And so for me it was a, yeah, it was just kind of saying like, well, I want these two things in my life, and they’re just gonna have to, I’m gonna have to figure it out. And we did .

PhD Program Offer

Emily (12:47): Okay. So what else were you looking at in terms of the factors? We talked about the childcare subsidy, but like, what was your stipend offer, for example, and was that in line with what you were seeing at other institutions? I understand you looked carefully at the health insurance, so let’s talk about more like those other factors as well.

Laura (13:03): Yeah. so my stipend offer so I did, I did end up getting an offer of, of support from UW. This was in 2011. It was only $9,000 a year which is, I mean, it doesn’t approach a living wage. And again, I think that there are a number of different factors that go into that. I think, you know, part of it is that you know, in, in a lot of fields they have established minimums for you know, research assistants, graduates assistants and things like that. In, in theater that in the arts in general, that absolutely does not exist. And for state universities, that is also a difficulty. But yes my offer was $9,000 a year. The that did not include coverage of my fees. So I was still paying about a thousand dollars a year in fees. I was still paying, you know, reasonable but relatively market rate, rent to student housing on campus. So most of my money kind of ended up going back to the university. I, I did have really excellent health insurance though, which is again, to be attributed to the work of the union. Graduate students received the same health insurance as staff members and I didn’t know at the time how important that was going to become, but I was, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness my second year, and probably I would’ve had to leave grad school if my health insurance hadn’t been so good. So it was, it was very, really, really important, to, to have that health insurance.

Finances in Grad School With a New Baby and a Low Income

Emily (14:55): I wanna hear more about how you actually made the finances work, like, especially in this first year of graduate school. Okay. Like, you’ve got the new baby, you’re at a new place, you’re in student housing, like you’re not making very much money. You’ve got your husband to support as well, or, you know, your husband is factoring into this as well. So like, how did that go , especially like starting in that first year?

Laura (15:15): Yeah, it was, it was really tricky. My husband was looking for work but it was, it was really difficult to find. His background had been as an elementary school teacher and he had, he had done some work as like a paralegal. His, his main sort of goal and skillset was in horticulture. And that is what he does full-time now. But at the time, and in Madison it was really difficult to find those jobs. And so he, we also had this child, this infant who needed daycare, and infant daycare is just, I mean, my God, it is so expensive. So he was thinking, well, you know, I have this education background. Lemme see if I can just get a job working at a daycare and maybe that’ll be that’ll subsidize. Eleanor’s Care didn’t really work that way. He did get a job working in daycare. But essentially the money he made just, again, it went right back to the place where he was working because it was so expensive. And so there was no, there really wasn’t a benefit to, to that work. And he, he was able to sort of cobble together a couple of things, you know, sort of, sort of like temp work for that year. But for the most part, he was a stay at home dad. And so he was taking care of our daughter, and again, we were just using that like 25, $30,000 that we had in savings. So yeah, I would say we were living off of, I don’t know, like 35, 36,000 a year for that first year.

Emily (16:52): But not of income, right? Because that’s savings supplementing, yeah.

Laura (16:55): Yeah, yeah. So really it was like, yeah, that was, you know, like a few thousand bucks that I got from my TA work. And then just pulling it straight from savings. So in, in the next, you know, couple years when I was able to I got a a second job within the department working for the theater company of the department. My as my stipend went up a bit I got like a halftime TA instead of a third time ta. So I was able to get my income by the end up to, I think like 18, 19,000 per year, which felt it, it felt like so much money at the time, . And by that point, my husband had started working for the grounds department at UW Madison. And so you know, he was bringing in more money, but not, you know, a ton. Um and so we were, we were making it work, but there was, there was nothing going to retirement. There was nothing going to savings, there was nothing going to my daughter’s college fund, things like that. So we were we were definitely paycheck to paycheck but again, I didn’t have to take those loans for living. And I, I didn’t have to take out student loans to, to survive during that six year period, which is really, really helping now in terms of making up for those, those lost years of, of wealth building.

Emily (18:17): Yeah, let’s talk about that more in a second.

Commercial

Emily (18:21): Emily here for a brief interlude! I’m hard at work behind the scenes updating my suite of tax return preparation workshops for tax year 2023. These pre-recorded educational workshops explain how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2023 tax season starting in January 2024, I’m offering four versions of this workshop, one each for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the end users, graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs, can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor one of my tax preparation workshops for you and your peers? I’d love to receive a warm introduction to a potential sponsor this fall so we can hit the ground running in January serving those early bird filers. You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Now back to our interview.

Using Government Benefits: Food Stamps, WIC, and Child Care Subsidies

Laura (20:12): Yeah, so because our income was so low we were eligible for, well, because our income was so low, and because we had an infant and I was within, you know, a a couple years of, of having given birth. We were eligible for a few different mechanisms. We were eligible for food stamps, we were eligible for WIC, which is stands for like Women and Infant and Children Support. And we were eligible for childcare subsidy from the state government. And so we did take advantage of each of those. We received, I wanna say like four or $500 a month in food stamps, which, you know, so that paid for like, all of our food, and that was so, so vital to us being able to, to, to make it work. WIC provided for for Formula I was unable to breastfeed after the first, you know, like couple of weeks. And so we, we had to have formula. But formula again is incredibly expensive. It provided for, you know, certain amounts and certain types of food. It was you know, more kind of staples, whereas food stamps is a lot you know, had kind of cast a wider net. And then for our daycare, once Eleanor ended up going to daycare, we were able to supplement UWs contribution with the state support. And so from there we were able to get our month, and that still didn’t cover everything for daycare, but we were able to get our monthly payment down to something reasonable.

Emily (21:55): And how long did you end up using those benefits for? Like as your, your income is increasing as your daughter’s getting older, like did those phase out over time?

Laura (22:04): Yeah, absolutely. We were on food stamps and wic for about a year. And actually that makes us essentially like the standard user of government benefits. The standard user of government benefits is white, and they were on it for about a year. And so I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about people who are relying on certain types of government benefits. But, but in truth, they mostly look like me. And it was something that we used in the short term until we were able to get our income to the point where we could pay for those things on our own. I think we used the state benefits for daycare for like two years.

Emily (22:47): Can you talk a little bit more about how, I guess maybe the decision or your like, willingness to access those benefits stemmed from your money mindset more generally in your experiences in your earlier parts of life?

Laura (23:03): Yeah, absolutely. So there were a number of things that allowed, allowed me to, to access those benefits and sort of allowed me to access them in a way that I felt confident about doing. I think it’s really important, first and foremost to say that I am white. And so, you know, being white and, you know, middle class essentially there was a lot less stigma about me using those benefits. And so I think that that is, is a barrier for a lot of people. I also had a working car and that is not nothing. So the ability for me to apply for those benefits to go pick up my WIC checks, because the WIC is like actual physical large checks, which are really embarrassing to use at the grocery store. And I had to go and get them but I didn’t have to use a bus in the, you know, Wisconsin winters. Um I had a flexible schedule. I was a grad student, right? I didn’t have to like tell my boss, Hey, I need to leave to get my, my food stamps. So there was a lot of privilege that went into being able to do that readily, easily, which is not to say it was an easy process. It was still a, you know, more of red tape and paperwork. But, but I made it work. And I think too that, you know, my, my feeling really was like, well, you know, I’ve you know, I’ve worked since I was 15. I’ve paid into this system. I, you know, if I’m eligible for these benefits, then I’m gonna take these benefits. And, and I still think that more people should have that mindset, right? Like, if you are a grad student right now listening to this and you are eligible for food stamps, go get food stamps. Like if you are eligible for food stamps, it means that you are at a level where you have a need, and this is just providing you with food. Like food, please go and do that. I also think it’s important to keep in mind you know, if you’re, if you’re feeling sort of weird about getting those benefits that government benefits aren’t just you know, for people who are poor or struggling I get government benefits all the time. I get my mortgage interest deducted, right? I get my student loan interest deducted. There’s all kinds of benefits that I get from, you know, having like, like a Roth IRA, right? I get tax advantages. Those are government benefits. And no, trust me, every rich person is getting every government benefit that they can. So you get your government benefits too. You earned them and you’re eligible for them. And so that was kind of the mindset that I, that I brought into that. And it, I’m not saying that it was always easy, you know, like I said, with food stamps or with EBT as they call it now, you get a card that looks just like a credit card and you, and you pay with that. And, and to me it’s a very dignified system when you’re actually using them. Whereas wic it’s like, I, I never had an instance of using the WIC checks where the cashier didn’t roll their eyes, didn’t sigh, didn’t sort of like give me a like, oh, great, now I gotta deal with these. And that is a real deterrent. Like, it was, it was embarrassing. And that is so unacceptable. So, so I think that there are ways that probably the government could make this a little easier, but they maybe aren’t inclined to. But yeah, I think that that was all wrapped up in, you know, again, feeling like, well, I’m a middle class white woman, I’m still going to use these.

Emily (26:44): Well, I do appreciate you talking about this like so openly. It’s something that graduate students are sometimes not aware that they can access these kinds of benefits, or in some places they actually might not be able to, even if their right income would put them at the right level because of their student status or because of the type of income that they have. So it’s certainly a state by state thing. But I really appreciate you speaking about how, like, how you thought about this at the time and how you felt like, yep, I need this, it’s a benefit. I’m gonna take it. Let’s do this even if it’s a little bit embarrassing. Because I do think that, like, like you said, you were only on it temporarily and it really helped you to move past the, the temporary income crunch that you all were in. I mean, you’re moving to a new place, you have a brand new baby, like yeah, a lot of people need help at that time of life, and you happen to access, you know, this these various social safety net aspects for that help. So anyway, thank you so much for talking about this. I really appreciate that.

Grad Student Union at UW Madison

Emily (27:38): So you’ve already mentioned a couple of times the union, the grad student union at UW Madison and how it had negotiated for the great healthcare and like this parental benefits and all this stuff. Could you talk more about your experience with the union during the time that you were a graduate student and also how the overall political climate in Wisconsin at that time, kind of the interaction between those two?

Laura (28:01): Yes. So I, I think I’m gonna do that sort of in reverse because the political climate in Wisconsin sort of heavily influenced my experience with the union. So the year before I started at UW Madison, Wisconsin had gone through a major change with Scott Walker was the new governor. And he had grand designs on leadership of the GOP think we can all recall his presidential campaign. And so one of those was to remake the labor landscape in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has historically been a a very strong labor stronghold. You know, really part of that rust belt that was, was, you know, built and facilitated by unions in a, in a, in a lot of ways. And so new legislation in Wisconsin the year prior to my arriving essentially stipulated that unions had to disband and remake themselves and that there couldn’t be a requirement for dues and things like that. And so this was you know, anybody who’s done any sort of you know, organizational work with people understands that if you have to disband your membership and, and re-up, that is a ton of work. And that’s, you’re not, you’re never gonna get everyone back. And that, of course, was the point. So there were major protests of which graduate students at UW Madison were a really important part. But it meant that by the time I arrived, the union was really trying to reconstitute itself, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for how much work that was and, and the fact that they, you know, are still an ongoing institution within uw. So they deserve a lot of credit for that. But it did change the, you know, the leadership, it changed the the makeup of the union and it changed the resources of the union. Uh so the, the union was not what it, what it had been. And the university was thankfully, you know, still honoring the commitments that they had made to the union prior to that 2011 legislation. But it did change things. Unfortunately and, you know, it’s, it’s tragic that, you know, that was, that was the, the planned outcome and it worked. But it did mean that the, the union had less power. It had less people to do the important work and I believe it had fewer actually full-time staff members which, which really made a difference. And so my, my sort of experience with it was like the, it just didn’t have the legs that it used to. But I will say that you know, having any sort of union as a graduate student can be a powerful thing. There was one instance in which I you know, I had a TA job and I was being told that it was a requirement that I work beyond my contract. And I, it was really great to be able to say like, okay, well I, like, since I’m a union member, I actually can’t. So let me just go to the union and talk to them about this request. And lo and behold I no longer had to work beyond the confines of my contract.

Emily (31:44): What I’m taking from this is that you can’t be complacent about the benefits that are offered by your university and, and if there’s a union by the union, what the union has negotiated for, because like what I’m learning kind of as I talk to people in different states and people at different stages of the unionization like process is that like, like what you experienced in Wisconsin, like things can shift politically at the state level or at the national level, and that can really shift what happens at the university level and with unions or the formation of unions. And so it’s not something you can sort of take for granted. And you’re always gonna have to be responding to those like shifting wins, I guess . And so I, so I’m learning that like, just because there is a union doesn’t mean the union is safe forever, right? You have to keep advocating for yourself and keep organizing.

Laura (32:33): And I think that that is also true for universities. And I think that part of what frustrated me sometimes about our union and, and sometimes frustrates me in in general in terms of like, you know, the way that grad students can sometimes approach their relationship to their university is that there is a sense that the university has the resources to do everything it wants to do and just won’t. And that could not be further from the truth. This is something where, you know, having worked in higher education for my entire career universities are so much more hamstrung by a lack of resources by legislatures that are not supportive or maybe di you know, directly hostile and hamstrung by the need to consistently be getting federal grants. That it’s, it’s so much more complex of a, a situation than I think a lot of grad students that I worked with at UW wanted to acknowledge that this was not us against the university universities in general you know, the people who are in them, they are not here to get rich because we’re never gonna get rich working for a state university.

Emily (33:47): Mm-Hmm. And I think, I mean, your point is, especially I think well made for public universities that have to deal with these state level like issues again and their funding, but of course, all universities are dealing with the grant funding that you mentioned from the federal government and whether it’s there and in what amount and, and so forth. So thank you so much for pointing out. Like it’s not, it’s really not, especially I would say the individuals like at the lower levels working within universities, they’re not the enemies of the students. They’re not trying to work against the students. Like, we’re just all trying to survive within the system. Okay.

Impact of Financial Experiences in Grad School on Current Financial Life

Emily (34:20): In what way has your financial experience as a graduate student continued to affect your financial life to today? Like you mentioned earlier that you did not have any room in your budget for like retirement savings, for example, and so by the time you got out of graduate school, I’m doing some quick math. I think you were 36, so you can talk about that or any other ways that, that, that experience has still had like a financial effect on your life at the present.

Laura (34:44): So yeah, the, the, the period during which I was not able to be saving for retirement or saving for my daughter’s college education that so far has been the most impactful aspect of my finances. Again, I didn’t have to to take on those loans. And so you know, that my, my, my student loan payment has not really gone up. But the, I think it’s important for anybody who is in a PhD or considering doing a PhD to understand the opportunity cost that, you know, taking that time out of your life when you’re in your, you know, twenties or thirties, that is gonna be the most impactful period in which you can be saving for retirement because of compound interest. So the more that you can put away when you’re young, the less you’ll have to put away when you are older. Um and so, you know, know now that I am 42 and you’re right, I was in graduate school from 30 to 36. I am having to put more away towards retirement, and I probably will just have a smaller retirement nest egg. I am again, lucky to be in a university where in a state where I am in a pension system. So this is pretty rare to have a defined benefit pension. But the, the pension is not what it used to be. The pension will cover maybe 50% of my expenses in retirement which is great. I’m certainly not complaining. But it does mean that like I still have to, beyond the amount I put into the pension system, I have to be putting cash away into a Roth IRA. And that’s tricky because at this point I am I am saving for my own retirement. We’re saving for my husband’s retirement we’re saving for my daughter’s college education. So my daughter’s college education is also a strong determinant of where I work because the university I work for that is our local state university offers 75% tuition discount to the children of staff members. So that’s our college plan , right? Which is kind of rough. Like I, I was always kind of taught that like, you know, I had a lot of options for college and for my daughter that is not the case. And I think, you know, for, for Gen Z in general they’re much more savvy than us elder millennials are about these things at their age. But but it still means that like, okay, you know, the, the college savings that I do are aligned with the idea that 75% of her tuition will be, will be covered. Um and that again, is not you know, that was a, a very specific choice that I have made you know, to to to, to remain at a, you know, at a university where that is gonna be one of the benefits. So, you know, that’s also something where, that’s a decision that I made based on the financial situation I was in in grad school. At the same time you know, having the PhD has increased my, my earning potential greatly. And so even though you know, I am at a state university where I can just expect that the, you know, compensation is going to be lower than in the private sector I still am able to to make the kind of salary that allows me to, to save for all those things at once. But you know, there’s still you know compromises to be made. And that, you know, frugality that that my husband and I have always really, really had, has, has come in handy because I think it also can be very tempting, particularly for students who are coming right out of graduate school to have a lot of like lifestyle creep. And, you know, your, your paycheck gets bigger and so you’re spending more money. And I think the, the, the more that you can avoid that, the better.

Emily (38:42): Yeah, you really have to have that awareness right from that first paycheck they receive, you know, post PhD, post postdoc, that there’s a lot more on your to-do list financially that there probably wasn’t graduate school if you weren’t able to get to all those items like retirement and, and college savings and so forth. But I think your story sounds like pretty like par for the course, right? Like the PhD increased your earning potential, but you lost the, to a degree, the time value of money for the time that you spent during the PhD. And so there has to be, there’s the trade off, right? But then again, I’m sure you’re in a career that you find very fulfilling, and so there’s also that aspect of it. Yeah. Okay.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (39:22): So Laura, as we wrap up, I’m gonna ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD that could be for a current graduate student, a prospective graduate student, like we’ve mostly talked about, it could be someone more at your current career stage, however you would like to take that,

Laura (39:40): You know, addressing PhD students and particularly PhD students who are going on the job market or are close to graduation. I really want to encourage you to keep in mind that you have a lot of options. I think that there are PhDs who will take a truly suboptimal offers like adjuncting that they do because they don’t feel that they have any options. And the truth is that with a PhD, even if, even if your job is not specifically in your field, my current job is not in the field of Irish theater. But you have options. And please don’t let academia make you feel as though you have a responsibility to, to take these sort of really terrible adjunct offers because that helps perpetuate the adjuncting system, frankly. And you have the ability to, to to have the same sort of self-worth the same sort of you know, fulfillment, even the same publication opportunities in some, in some cases without having to to stay in that subsistence situation. So just really, really understand your own earning power because no matter what field you are in, if you have a PhD, you have pretty significant earning power.

Emily (41:11): Hmm. And even pivoting outside of academia, like within academia, you feel like you’re a dime a dozen because literally your university is graduating like whatever, hundreds of PhDs each year and probably several even from your own discipline. And so you feel like, like you’re nothing. Some people might feel like they’re nothing special. But if you take your training and those translatable skills into another context, you will likely find that you actually have a lot to bring to that other context and that you can be paid very nicely for it. So thank you so much for that, the kind of like shot of confidence to those people who are in that at that point in their careers. So Laura, it’s been absolutely wonderful to have you on the podcast. I’m so glad I ran into you at GCC and thank you so much for agreeing to give this interview.

Laura (41:56): Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate It.

Outtro

42:04 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

This Grad Student’s Podcast Expands Beyond Her Dissertation Topic

November 6, 2023 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Alexandria Miller, and 5th-year PhD student in Africana Studies at Brown University. In 2021, Alexandria started a podcast, Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture, to further her vision for educational equity. Alexandria participated in a business incubator program at Brown and joined a Caribbean podcast network, and she’s now considering how to transition to podcast into a business, perhaps in the ed tech space. Alexandria and Emily discuss how Alexandria manages her schedule as a grad student and podcaster and whether she is open about her side pursuit within her program.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture
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This Grad Student's Podcast Expands Beyond Her Dissertation Topic

Teaser

Alexandria M (00:00): At first, it started as a podcast in terms of just being a niche interest of mine in a way to bridge conversations with peers and, you know, others who I think are enthusiast of history and maybe are of Caribbean heritage like myself. But I, as time progressed and you know, I’ve been seeing how it’s grown over the last two years, I’ve really started to think about other ways to really make it a side business in itself and not just a hobby.

Introduction

Emily (00:31): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:03): This is Season 16, Episode 5, and today my guest is Alexandria Miller, a 5th-year PhD student in Africana Studies at Brown University. In 2021, Alexandria started a podcast, Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture, to further her vision for educational equity. Alexandria participated in a business incubator program at Brown and joined a Caribbean podcast network, and she’s now considering how to transition the podcast into a business, perhaps in the ed tech space. Alexandria and I discuss how she manages her schedule as a grad student and podcaster and whether she is open about her side pursuit within her program. As I record this introduction, I have just returned from FinCon 2023, which is a conference for financial content creators. It was in New Orleans, and I had a wonderful time and learned a ton! I don’t want to overpromise, but I am hoping to make some changes in the content creation and dissemination aspect of my business, so you can expect some changes like website updates and increased social media content. I’m even toying with the idea of writing a book, which is super scary to say out loud. If you aren’t already on my mailing list, it would be so so helpful to me if you would join so you can hear about all this new and updated content as I’m rolling it out. I would really appreciate the support. As a podcast listener, a great way to get on the mailing list is to go to PFforPhDs.com/advice/ and enter your name and email there. You’ll receive access to a document that contains short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast to my final question regarding my guests’ best financial advice. The document is updated with each new episode release. Again, that was PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Thank you so much! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s16e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alexandria Miller.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:24): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Alexandria Miller. She is a fifth year PhD student in Africana studies at Brown, and we’re going to talk about her side business. Really exciting. So Alexandria, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

Alexandria M (03:41): Definitely. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Roberts. It’s a pleasure to share with you, especially having been a listener of your podcast for such a while now. So as you said, I am a fifth year PhD candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown. I did my undergraduate work at Duke University in history in African and African-American Studies, so similar fields nonetheless. And in addition to my work as a PhD candidate and all the things that comes with being a PhD candidate, of course, I also founded Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean History and Culture in 2021. So a little bit over two years now, which is a podcast and educational platform just to expand the knowledge and awareness of the Caribbean and its history and popular culture.

Focus of Graduate Work and Podcasting Side Business

Emily (04:27): Absolutely. And so I wanna know how much overlap there is between like the work you’re doing as grad student, like the subject of your dissertation and what you’re doing with this side business. So can you explain any like similarities or differences between those two?

Alexandria M (04:40): For sure. They are not really similar. To put it simply obviously I am a historian and so my PhD is looking at Jamaican women’s history in the 20th century to contemporary times, but Strictly Facts is just, you know, more expansive in a sense. It covers Caribbean history across the region as well as the diaspora. And so not necessarily pinpointed to my specific project in terms of my dissertation, but definitely there have been crossover conversations in various episodes and things to that nature.

Emily (05:16): But it would be safe to say, is it safe to say that your, your passion or whatever inspired you to choose this as your, you know, undergraduate and graduate field of study is also what is fueling the, the side work, is that right?

Alexandria M (05:29): Definitely. I think I have always loved history and have always been looking for ways to see myself reflected in the history that I was alerting. And I think that in large part inspired my path towards the PhD in becoming a historian. It wasn’t till while in the PhD and especially after some years of work that I’ve done in terms of educational equity and accessibility, that I started also thinking of different ways outside of the classroom potentially to expand accessibility and educational equity. And you know, at first it started as a podcast in terms of just being a niche interest of mine in a way to bridge conversations with peers and, you know, others who I think are enthusiast of history and maybe are of Caribbean heritage like myself. But I, as time progressed and you know, I been seeing how it’s grown over the last two years, I’ve really started to think about other ways to really make it a side business in itself and not just a hobby.

Emily (06:30): And I think this is such an, a natural thing that happens with academics, I would say, especially the faculty level, right? But you’re getting a head start in that by doing it at the grad student level, right? Just the taking their subject matter or something broader than their subject matter and pivoting to a different audience outside that academic sphere. So yeah, I think you’re right in good company a lot of academics do this.

Alexandria M (06:53): I do, I would say so I’ve seen several who, you know, have even pivoted outside of academia into social entrepreneurship and things to that nature. I’m still sort of on the fence in terms of where I’d go because I definitely do love teaching and I am sort of looking forward to figuring out what that shift will look like once I finally finished the dissertation. Of course.

Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture Podcast

Emily (07:15): Absolutely. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with us about why you started Strictly Facts?

Alexandria M (07:20): Definitely. I think, you know, as a first generation Jamaican American, there have been several ways that I’ve envisioned just, you know, learning about my heritage and where my family comes from that I think has paralleled amongst and across people from other parts of the region. I have a great network of peers and colleagues who are either from the Caribbean or of Caribbean heritage, and we’ve had several conversations across, you know, not only figuring out ways that our histories have been linked but also there are things that, you know, based off things like national and geographic boundaries, the fact that migration, particularly to the global North, is so high for, for people from the Caribbean. There are just several ways that I think learning of Caribbean history and about Caribbean history could be expanded for those from Caribbean Heritage or from the region. And so that was another impetus for me to start Strictly Facts to really expand these conversations and unify all of the community together a little bit more.

Emily (08:26): And can you tell me more about the, the format of the podcast at least? Like is it an interview-based show? Is it solo episodes?

Alexandria M (08:34): It’s a mix of both, depending on probably how busy I am that week. So I definitely have solo episodes where I share a little bit about a topic and offer listeners, you know, additional resources and books and things for listeners to learn more. But I also have interview style episodes where different experts, enthusiasts of history, people have even came and shared, you know, sort of individual or more familial stories and takes on parts of, you know, how their families or even themselves have been part of Caribbean history. So it is really a fun thing in a sense, which is probably why it started more so as a hobby initially, but I’m definitely looking forward to expanding out Strictly Facts a little bit more beyond its podcast in the years to come.

Emily (09:24): Yeah. So going off that subject a little bit more, tell us about, I guess, the structure that Strictly Facts has taken to this point. What, what steps have you taken with it, and then what might you do in the future going forward?

Alexandria M (09:37): Yeah, so as I said, it was more so of a little bit of a hobby in a sense. And so that just meant, you know, me recording episodes and scheduling things scheduling episodes to record with guests. Since then though, of course I have been looking forward to expanding it out. And so I’ve, I am part of the Caribbean podcast directory, which has been a great resource in terms of just, you know, building the podcast community in a sense, helping me get a little bit more familiar with what that community looks like outside of, you know, getting out of my academic bubble sometimes. But also, you know, whether that be crossover episodes with other podcasters, et cetera. And really just growing my listenership. I have also, in terms of more so like the business angle of things, I was a part of Brown’s Breakthrough Lab or B Lab, which is an entrepreneurship incubator. And that really helped me to shift my framing a little bit of how I thought of Strictly Facts in terms of really considering things like consumers and, you know, where do I wanna take it and sort of the business aim, right? Am I looking towards being a solely content based business? What other ways I am hoping to expand out Strictly Facts. So that has definitely been a great help in terms of shifting towards some of my future aims. Of course though, I always say that I have two babies in a sense, finishing grad school and the dissertation and Strictly Facts. So, trying to graduate is on, is the major goal at the time, but I am looking forward to building out other things in terms of content, you know, educational products, ed tech devices and things to that nature in the future.

Brown’s Breakthrough Lab: Entrepreneurship Incubator

Emily (11:25): Wow, okay. I, I would love to hear a little bit more about this like incubator. ‘Cause this is one of those resources that’s uniquely available when you have a position, especially as a student inside of academia that would be very difficult to come by in the, in the rest of the world, right? So like, I don’t know, like what were the other students or other people who were participating in that program? What kinds of businesses were they, were they similar to yours? Were they different from yours that were involved in the incubator?

Alexandria M (11:54): I think in a large part it’s was a little bit over a year now . But it, in a large way, I think there were a lot of people who were definitely in the medical tech space creating apps for medical benefits and devices and things of that nature. So I definitely felt like I was a smaller portion of the incubator who took a sort of different focus in my terms of in, or my definition of entrepreneurship. I don’t think I even really realized it until I started sort of falling into this category that I do definitely have family members who are entrepreneurs who have their own businesses you know, primarily small businesses and what that has meant for our family and the growth and development of our family. And so I have, I used a lot of what I learned both from the incubator and as well from, you know, my own family’s perspective, family member’s perspectives to help figure out where I hope to go in the future.

Emily (12:56): Well, I think it’s just so intriguing that you mentioned like ed tech or like just the, the, I think like the productization like paths that you might be able to take from here. It just by happenstance, literally yesterday I started listening to a, a new podcast and a new to me podcast called Billion Dollar Creator and it’s co-hosted by Nathan something or other who’s the founder of ConvertKit with the email management software, which actually I use. And Rachel Rogers, who’s the founder of Hello seven, the author of the book, we Should All Be Millionaires. And so they’re talking about similar things like once you have sort of an, an area that you have that you’re getting attention in that people are coming to you for information or entertainment or whatever it is, like how can you start to pivot that and not just get paid for having people’s eyeballs on you, but get paid for something that you create from that, like a product or a service or something. And how can you then scale that to a billion dollars? So it’s very aspirational kind of podcast, but I just love that you’re, you know, that you have the opportunity to do this program and that you have these family members and just that you have these examples and influences around you that could help you think like really widely about, okay, this started as a podcast, but where else can we go from here? That’s really exciting.

Alexandria M (14:10): Thank you. Yes, definitely

Commercial

14:15 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! I’m hard at work behind the scenes updating my suite of tax return preparation workshops for tax year 2023. These pre-recorded educational workshops explain how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2023 tax season starting in January 2024, I’m offering four versions of this workshop, one each for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the end users, graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs, can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor one of my tax preparation workshops for you and your peers? I’d love to receive a warm introduction to a potential sponsor this fall so we can hit the ground running in January serving those early bird filers. You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Now back to our interview.

Podcast Visibility

Emily (15:58): Okay, so you have this fabulous podcast and it’s part of a network and you’re going on other peoples podcast and you’re inviting guests on and so forth, and it’s related to your academic pursuits. So like do people in your program, like either the faculty or the other students, like, do they know what you’re up to? Do they know about this business?

Alexandria M (16:19): They definitely do. I’ve you know, I’ve had faculty members on this show. I’ve had peers on the show. I think my cohort and many of the other students who I’m close with, whether they’re in my program or outside of Brown even have been really supportive of my show, whether that’s, you know, sharing episodes on social media telling me that, you know, oh, I read this great book, have you <laugh> considered having this person on the show, et cetera. And so it, and it is a public podcast, right? It’s across all podcast platforms will soon to be on YouTube as well. So that’s many of the other things I’m working on right now. And so yeah, it is aware, I, you know, people are aware of what I’m doing. I don’t know if they have considered it in a sense, right? I think everybody’s really busy and has, you know, their own their own projects, many other students, but it is definitely a public show and everybody knows what’s going on.

Emily (17:18): How about your advisor or your committee? Have you had any like, direct conversations with them about the podcast?

Alexandria M (17:25): Maybe not necessarily a direct conversation, but it is a public show again, and so I do think many people are still aware of Strictly Facts and, you know, the incubator was through Brown, so there are several things that, you know, if you are interested on wanting to know more, it is all out there. Yeah,

Emily (17:43): I guess I’m just thinking about, you know, some graduate students who have a side hustle want to keep it quiet and don’t want their advisor or their committee or whatever to know about it. So I, I guess maybe for you, would it be safe to say that they’re probably aware and if they had concerns they would’ve raised them by now? Like about how you’re spending your time, for example?

Alexandria M (18:02): I would say so. I, I would think so at least. And it hasn’t been raised yet, so that seems to be a good note. But again, I think the fact that it is sort of in line with my work as an educator, as a scholar also helping me build out my network in terms of my scholarship and where my work will go post graduation is I think also a major plus for the work that I’m doing in this avenue.

Emily (18:32): Absolutely. It seems to be like augmenting your career in this area rather than like detracting from it in any way. Definitely

Time Management

Emily (18:38): Yeah. Well that sounds great. Let’s talk about time management then, because you know, you, you said kind of earlier, oh, it, the podcast is so fun, it’s like a hobby, excuse me. I know that podcasting is an incredible amount of work, plus if you’re not even just thinking about the podcast, but things that like extend beyond that. So please tell us like how, how, how much time are you spending on this? How are you balancing your time? How are you, I don’t know, even like project management stuff, like how, how are you handling all this?

Alexandria M (19:07): Yeah, I mean, I am really big on organization and doing things, you know, well in advance. And so I, I think back to even March, which was like Women’s History Month, or it was Women’s History Month, right? I had that episode scheduled like months in advance and, you know, maybe the listeners wouldn’t know that it was recorded in January or whenever it was. But those things planning has been a big part of the way that I continue to make Strictly Facts and stay on top of all of my other graduate work. So whether that is using, you know, social media manager management services like Buffer or, you know, some of the other similar ones to schedule post when things are going live and all of those things have really helped me. And it, you know, as you said, it does take quite a bit of time to time, make the show, edit it, schedule, coordinate with guests and all of those things, but there are a lot of resources out there that have made the coordination and the planning of it a lot more simple.

Emily (20:12): And I, I know with graduate students, this is certainly the case with me. I was allowing my grad school work to bleed over into all the time and also would allow personal things to bleed into grad school time. It was very like fluid back and forth. I’m much more strict with myself now <laugh> now that I’m like a business owner and a parent. And so I’m wondering for you, like, do you have any like hours that you keep for either grad school stuff or podcasting stuff, or are they separate? Do you allow them to overlap?

Alexandria M (20:42): That’s a great question that I probably should be a little bit more strict and diligent on. I try to, eh, I would, I wouldn’t necessarily say I have hours particularly for either of them. Sometimes it’s, you know, as things arise, I definitely, being that I’m amidst dissertating right now, that is the main focus at the heart of everything right now. But again you know, if it is a Wednesday and we publish episodes every other Wednesday for Strictly Facts, then you know, there has to be some time devoted ahead of Wednesday. But otherwise I, they do probably bleed a little bit, which is always, you know, not necessarily the best organization. But, you know, self-care is important and I think I’ve created a decent balance, at least at the moment of taking care of myself, maintaining this business and grad school as well.

Emily (21:36): And I think it’s very dependent on like the culture that you’re in, right? The culture of academia is a lot of flipping back and forth and transitioning and letting those boundaries kind of slide. And I’ve just found like as now like a full-time business owner that I need to be more strict with myself because again, it’s, it’s very similar to a dissertation. Like the work will balloon to fill any space that you allow it to. So you have to just draw some boundaries and keep it contained. So is the podcast currently monetized in any way?

Podcast Monetization and Ed Tech

Alexandria M (22:03): Not particularly. It’s not being monetized. I have definitely had certain offers, but I’ve wanted to ensure that they really align with my mission and focus at the moment. And I think partially the reason why I’ve reiterated a few times that it started as a hobby was, is because of that it’s not currently being monetized, but definitely again, I do hope to see it balloon into a really, you know, profitable business hopefully in the near future. And so yeah, at the moment it can be seen as more of a hobby or something I’m doing in terms of mere content creation. But again business ownership is something that I think is important to me. Financial literacy and independence is also important to me as well.

Emily (22:50): Well, you always have to lay the groundwork, right? Like it, it depends on the type of business, but I think for the type of business that you’re building, it makes sense that there’s going to be a period of, and especially if you’re selective right, of no revenue or low revenue while you’re figuring out what you want everything to look like. So what do you think the next step will be like? Will it be ads on the podcast? Will it be like, what, what is your next thought in the monetization process?

Alexandria M (23:16): Yeah. I have definitely been open to ads. They just, you know, I want them to be the right one and not necessarily something random just for kicks or anything. I do definitely want them to be in line with the Caribbean education history, things to that nature, but also really hoping again to venture into the ed tech space. So whether that is creating some more of those like digital products you know, I have three nephews and a niece who are always learning and, you know, I’m always engaging with them probably in a sense to give back to sort of like my inner child and having reflected on the ways that I hoped, you know, I hoped to learn or wish I had learned at the time when I was their age. And so I’ve definitely seen what products they’ve have, you know, what my brother and sister have bought for them in terms of their learning and figuring out ways to also input and ensure that the diversity, the Caribbean region itself is also a part of that.

Emily (24:21): Hmm. Can you give us any, ’cause like my mind meant immediately went to like books, right? Even children’s books or, or a book for adults, like, which would be a natural outworking of many people’s dissertations. What like what kind of other ideas are you thinking there in terms of like, yeah, books for kids.

Alexandria M (24:39): I mean, there are books, there are flashcards. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> you know, whether they’re like little alphabet things that has big for one of my, or two of my nephews right now who are two. And so there are things like that. But I’ve also thought of different ways to engage sort of like digital humanities in a sense, but from more so like a children’s perspective, right? So whether that is, you know, apps that are, you know, teaching a different facts about the region and things of that nature. There are, I think a lot of ways that I have toyed with expanding it in the future. But we’re, I’m still, you know, sort of at that idea phase at the moment.

Emily (25:22): Yeah. And like you said, right now the dissertation is project number one, right? To get that to the finish line <laugh>. Okay. Are there any other future plans that you’d like to share with us before we sign off?

Alexandria M (25:35): Not necessarily future plans in the, you know, in a hard line to find way, but there are always Strictly Facts episodes more than 60 to date. So feel free if you’ve never heard of Strictly Facts and want to check out what I’m doing there. We publish episodes every other Wednesday, again, across all podcast platforms, be that Spotify, apple podcast, you know, Google podcast, iHeartRadio, the list could go on. So feel free to check me out there and follow me on all social media platforms at Strictly Facts Pod. And yeah, feel free to let me know if you have any questions or even wanna be a guest on the show as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (26:16): I love it Alexandria. Thank you so much for coming on. But before we leave, I have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best piece of financial advice for another grad student or early career PhD? And that can be something that we’ve touched on already in the interview or it could be something completely new.

Alexandria M (26:34): Hmm, definitely. I think one for me that has been really imperative on both journeys, whether that is grad school or you know, as a budding business owner is applying for grants and that could be, you know, maybe fellowships or things of that nature from the academic side, but also, you know, business grants, startup grants, et cetera. It has been really helpful for one, in helping me define my projects in either sense, right? Being able to explain what I’m doing, what my passions are, what the goals are of either side, whether that be dissertating or Strictly Facts. And you know, if it comes through, getting a grant or a fellowship is definitely really helpful in terms of just building out your project and however that is, and also creating a little bit of freedom, right? I think one thing for me from the academic side is, you know, potentially like not having the TA for a semester or a year even has really helped me dive into my dissertation, focus on my research and writing and helping me get it finished a lot sooner than maybe possibly if I didn’t have that freedom. And so I think grants are really helpful on either way, right? Whether that is, again, just applying and helping you narrow your focus or, you know, then at the tail end if you are successful helping you branch out and dive into your work.

Emily (27:58): Absolutely. So well put. Well, Alexandria, thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast. It was wonderful to meet you, to hear about your podcast and all the best for the growth opportunities in the future.

Alexandria M (28:08): Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for having me.

Outtro

Emily (28:16): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.