PhD with a Real Job

Money Is a Good Enough Reason to Leave Academia

October 20, 2025 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford, the founder of the peer support network Recovering Academics. Gabrielle left her tenure-track position after discovering she was vastly underpaid with almost no room for salary growth even after promotion. Gabrielle shares the common financial questions and mindsets that she sees within the Recovering Academics community, such as not understanding what different careers pay and feeling guilty for needing to earn more money. Gabrielle and Emily discuss how graduate students and postdocs can improve their money mindsets prior to pursuing academic or non-academic positions post-training.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Money Is a Good Enough Reason to Leave Academia

Teaser

Gabrielle (00:00): That was kind of my mindset going from grad school to postdoc to faculty position. Each one paid more than the last. And so that faculty role that didn’t pay enough for me to really live on was the most I’d made up to that point. And it didn’t occur to me for a ridiculously long time. That didn’t mean it was a good salary just because it was more than my postdoc.

Introduction

Emily (00:34): 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 22, Episode 5, and today my guest is Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford, the founder of the peer support network Recovering Academics. Gabrielle left her tenure-track position after discovering she was vastly underpaid with almost no room for salary growth even after promotion. Gabrielle shares the common financial questions and mindsets that she sees within the Recovering Academics community, such as not understanding what different careers pay and feeling guilty for needing to earn more money. Gabrielle and I discuss how graduate students and postdocs can improve their money mindsets prior to pursuing academic or non-academic positions post-training.

Emily (01:44): I’m delighted to share that I will join the Recovering Academics weekly call on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 for a 60-minute Q&A call. If that group is a good fit for you and you’d like to join in time for that Q&A, get in touch with Gabrielle via LinkedIn or [email protected]. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast and want to see it continue, would you please help spread the word? Take a minute to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, text a recent episode that you enjoyed to a friend, or give it a shout-out on social media. Any of those actions helps me to grow Personal Finance for PhDs and continue finding amazing guests for the interviews. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s22e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:49): I’m delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford, who is the co-founder of Next Draft LLC, and the founder of the Peer Support Group, Recovering Academics. And Gabrielle is a former academic, and we’re gonna be talking a lot about that journey as well as the journeys that she’s observed among others. And Gabrielle and I met actually at the graduate career consortium annual meeting that happened last June. We’re recording this interview in September 2025, and we were both sponsors of the conference. And so of course, I love to meet the other sponsors and get to know how they support the academic community as well. And so we decided this was worth a whole podcast interview. So Gabrielle, welcome to the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself further for the audience?

Gabrielle (03:32): Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It is a pleasure to be here and chat with you. Um, so I am, uh, as you said, co-founder of Next Draft LLC. My background is in social psychology, graduated with my PhD in 2015, and I went straight into academia, so I was a postdoc for a year and then, uh, on the tenure track at a liberal arts college for six years after that. And I ended up transitioning out of, uh, my academic position and moving into the world of program evaluation and applied policy research. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years now.

Emily (04:12): Tell us more about the decision to leave your tenure track job, because I understand that finances played a heavy role in that.

Gabrielle (04:20): They definitely did. So I think one of the things that kind of caught me up around finances is nobody ever really talked to me about what normal people earn <laugh>. Um, I have a lot of friends who work in the tech industry, work for Google, Microsoft, Facebook, who make just massive amounts of money, and I didn’t wanna work in big tech. And so I thought, well, I’m just never gonna earn a salary like that, and what I’m earning is normal. And I earned 56,000 as a tenure track professor with PhD, and nobody really pointed out the discrepancy between that and what PhDs were earning outside of academia and outside of tech. And there were kind of two financial nails in the coffin to my decision to leave. One was, uh, the APA, the American Psychological Association published salary data, and they published the mean salary for people with a bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in psychology, and a PhD in psychology. And I was right there at the average salary for a bachelor’s. And then I found out that a colleague who had been my department chair was tenured, had been there for more than a decade, was making 60,000. Um, and I just saw this future of, man, I’m gonna be here for my whole career and I’m gonna be lucky if by the time I retire I hit 70,000 a year. And it just wasn’t feasible. I have a family, I have a child, and, um, childcare costs, school costs, uh, everything’s pretty expensive and just not doable on a salary like that.

Feeling Financially Dissatisfied in Academia

Emily (06:12): Now, it would be one thing if you saw that you were under earning compared to what you could potentially earn elsewhere, but you were okay with it, right? The finances still worked in your own personal life. We’re not saying everybody needs to make as much money as they possibly can in their field, but as you were getting to at the end of your answer, like it was not personally satisfying to you to stay at that level and you could see the future. Like it wasn’t gonna, you know, sometimes professors can expect decent leaps up in salary as they go through the, the, you know, professor process with their promotions, but that apparently was not the case for you. So can you tell me a little bit more about like the financial maybe dissatisfaction that you had? Not just the comparison, but for yourself?

Gabrielle (06:54): Yeah, definitely. I think that we hear a lot in academia about, you know, we’re not being, we’re not in it for the money, right? It’s not about the money. And so I think there was sort of a internal unwillingness to look at that for a long time and feeling like almost guilty for considering money. Like it shouldn’t be a career consideration. I am here, I am able to do this amazing job that so many people want, and I’m unhappy with it for a material reason, which felt, um, felt like it wasn’t okay to admit. And, um, but that just bumped up against financial reality, right? Of, of trying to pay childcare costs. And I don’t live, I am, I’m in Minnesota, I’m in the Twin Cities. It’s not a super high cost of living, but it’s also not a super low cost of living. Um, and I need to be able to make ends meet. I need to be able to meet the needs of my family. And when I started really thinking about it, it was clear to me that, you know, it was like, money can’t buy happiness, right? But there’s like, but it can <laugh> be a really big factor. It can pay for, it can be the difference between, you know, your car breaks down and it’s a huge crisis for the family for months and causes a massive amount of stress. Or you go to the mechanic and you get car fixed and you move on with your life and it’s okay and you can afford what you need to afford to make your life work. So I think that that was kind of eye-opening when I kinda gave myself permission to start really thinking about it and, and opening up that question of, well, what do I actually need? And how can I get that?

Recovering Academics Peer Support Group

Emily (08:50): Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that more detail in your perspective on this, because I’m sure it’s really valuable for you to say, I was in this mindset, this is what we are told in academia, and I had to really reexamine that. Um, and that gets me to like, let’s talk more about this peer support group of recovering academics ’cause it sure, like this conversation that we’re having right now is one of many types of conversations you have in that group. So can you tell us more about recovering academics?

Gabrielle (09:18): Sure. So when I was looking to leave my position, there were several of us from my university who were job hunting at the same time, and we kinda ended up finding each other. And, uh, we started meeting every week. And it just started out as, you know, our little internal group within our university supporting each other through the job application process, talking about the challenges. And through that it became clear that there were a lot of people in the same position we were of, we, we landed the coveted tenure track jobs. Some of us had tenure and, um, for a variety of reasons that just wasn’t, it didn’t fit with what we needed in our lives anymore. And so I put a call out on LinkedIn just trying to reach out and see if there were other folks in that same position. A bunch of people responded. We held a Zoom meeting with maybe a dozen people that first time. Um, another member of the group dubbed us recovering academics and the name stuck. And, um, what we did is built a Slack community and, uh, we meet weekly on Zoom, and we have done so now for more than three years. And the group grows almost weekly. Uh, word of mouth, generally, we don’t have, uh, a website for the group. We are a very private group because leaving academia can be a really sensitive process for a lot of people. And we don’t want, we don’t want anyone to feel unsafe seeking out help and support. Um, originally the goal was to kind of bring together people leaving tenure track or tenured roles, and almost immediately we expanded beyond that. So we have people leaving from every career stage you can think of from every type of institution. Uh, we have academic staff including, um, like student affairs staff, uh, academic librarians. Um, it’s a really wide variety of people. It’s cross disciplinary. Uh, there are people from nursing, engineering, chemistry, English, um, media studies, ethnomusicology, psychology. We’re kind of across the board. And a big value of the group is breaking through a lot of the isolation that happens when people think about leaving academia and providing a safe place for people to ask questions and to bring up things like salary and, um, and financial struggles and all of this, um, all of the issues around money that get wrapped up in this process,

Emily (12:03): I can so see the value of that kind of group. Um, I don’t, I don’t wanna call academia a cult, but like <laugh>, you’re, you’re like, not, okay, I’m reading a book right now. <laugh>, it’s science fiction. It’s a dystopian, you know, but like, if you speak out like you, if you even question their like society, you’re immediately killed like death penalty now. Okay. Academia is not that extreme, but there are consequences for you to be very open about potentially leaving in a way that other kinds of industries are not that way. Um, and so I, I’m definitely hearing like that value of privacy and being able to ask those questions in that setting that you. Could not ask in your workplace, or you might not even be able to ask among your peers at other institutions because what if you decide to stay and they knew you had doubts. You know, like, um, so I, I see that now given that this is so, such a, um, a closely held group and you don’t have a website. How do people find out how to join? Because I’m sure somebody listening is like, I need this in my life right now, <laugh>.

Gabrielle (13:04): Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so despite being a very, very private group, we have over 480 members now. So people find us, um, generally people find us either through me on LinkedIn, people are more than welcome to message me or connect with me on LinkedIn. Um, and then I will share information about the group. And I do also wanna be clear that this is a free group that no one pays to attend this. Money’s not a part of that picture. Um, because I couldn’t afford <laugh> coaching resources when I was leaving. And I know a lot of us are in the same boat if we’re leaving for financial reasons or if that’s a contributing factor, then we probably can’t spend thousands on a coaching program, even if that would be amazing and valuable. Um, so this isn’t a substitute for coaching, but it’s definitely, it’s sort of crowdsourced, um, coaching in a way. Um, so people can reach out to me directly. Um, there are other group members, uh, we get a lot of referrals from other group members as well. Um, but for folks who might not be connected or know that they are connected with members, I’m probably the easiest, um, place to look. And we are hopefully soon gonna set up a, a webpage attached to my business webpage, just so I have a place to direct people more easily.

Common Limiting Beliefs Among Recovering Academics

Emily (14:29): Yeah, that sounds good. So I would like to hear more about, you know, in you sharing your personal story about the decisions leave academia, you brought up, you know, um, the salary comparisons between what you could make with your degree inside versus outside of academia. Um, you brought up like, oh, we’re not supposed to be in this for the money. Um, but I’m wondering if there are any other like, common questions or limiting beliefs or mindsets that you’ve noticed, uh, within the recovering academics community beyond those ones that you’ve already brought up.

Gabrielle (15:02): Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah, I think, um, I mean, I think the first thing that strikes me in just hearing how people talk about money in the group is just, um, for such a highly educated group of individuals, we are kind of astoundingly ignorant <laugh> when it comes to financial issues. Um, people don’t have a good sense of what salaries look like and you know, what other people make with the skills that they have. So they have no idea what they should be looking for. They don’t know how to ask for the appropriate salary. They don’t know anything about salary negotiation or anything like that. Um, and one place that also carries over is there’s a lot of people who move into some form of, um, entrepreneurship, uh, or do some level of consulting. And so then there’s also this whole how do you value your skills and how much do you charge and what is appropriate.

Gabrielle (16:11): And then a third bucket is, um, for those of us who move out and do make more money in our new position, what the heck do we do with the additional income that we have and how do we manage that? And that is definitely something that has come up. People don’t know how, what kind of accounts their money should be in. They don’t really know how to manage that. They don’t know how to, um, they’ve never really been able to think about, what if I was able to put this much money into retirement, should I, how do I do that? Do I pay down my debt first? Do I do that? Like, we don’t really know, um, how to, how to manage, um, because it’s a good problem to have. Right? But, um, but definitely still an issue. And I think a lot of us probably are not making the best financial decisions because we just are a little, uh, a little bit at sea with having those decisions to make.

Emily (17:09): Yeah, I can see not only, ’cause I’ve thought before about like the catch up that PhDs at some point when their income does increase, I mean, hopefully it does at some point increase a lot <laugh>, um, what they can do in terms of their financial goals to like, ’cause a lot of ’em feel like they’re behind, whether they leave academia when they’re 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever, a lot of people feel that they’re behind. Now whether that’s true or not depends on who you’re comparing yourself to, but, um, they feel behind. And so I have thought about like, what are those, if, if there’s any special considerations that group should have, um, once, you know, exiting academia. But what you brought up that I think is really interesting is not only is there kind of a, an actual dollars and cents monetary catch up, but there can also be a little bit of a catch up needed just in education around like norms. And like what your goals should be. Um, I I’m even thinking about like benefits, like benefits inside academia can be really different. They actually should be pretty generous in some ways, and they could be quite different when you’re looking at positions in industry or in other sectors. And so just knowing that like, oh, my employer is no longer gonna pay for this, or like, I don’t have a pension, or, you know, these other kinds of questions might come up too. And making that kind of industry shift as well. So, uh, you’re making me wish that I didn’t just specialize in graduate students, postdocs, <laugh>, because I can see that the questions can continue in, in certain environments for a long time afterwards.

Gabrielle (18:35): They definitely can. And I also think that the more advanced someone is in their career, um, the more awkward they feel about asking the questions, they feel like they should know, I’m 45 years old, I’m leaving this career that I’ve been in for decades, and I should know how retirement works. I should know how I should be investing my money. I should know what kind of savings account I need. And so people are embarrassed to, to ask these questions.

Emily (19:07): One of the reasons that I do specialize in the way that I do, um, is because I think that the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs, as you were saying earlier, like coaching is expensive. At the career coaching option. Yes. You might spend thousands of dollars on, if you’re working with an individual or you could buy a course that’ll be, you know, less expensive. Um, what I perceive is that, like, I specialize where I do because, um, these people have no ability to do anything, a course a coach, anything. But the good thing is that once you get that higher salary, like once you can actually make the transition, whether that’s within academia or, or leaving academia. Um, you do have the money once a transition is made to hire professionals. But it can still be intimidating psychologically, like what you just said. Like, okay, I could afford to hire professional, but like, are they gonna help me with my, like, really basic questions that I feel embarrassed to even ask? So I can see why that would be a barrier as well.

Gabrielle (20:06): Yeah. And not even necessarily knowing what kind of professional you need. There are a lot of different, um, a lot of different players in the financial industry. And so it’s, do I need a financial advisor? Do I, how much money do I need to have to make it make sense? To hire someone who’s like to manage things versus just consult with somebody on a one-off basis, um, versus just hire somebody to do taxes. There, there’s a lot of, um, options and, and it’s not always clear what makes sense to invest in.

Emily (20:41): Hmm. And since we’re in this environment right now, I’ll just go ahead. And let people know all the options that you just said are available. So like, you don’t need a million dollars, you don’t need half a million dollars to hand off to an investment advisor to manage for you. Yes, you could do that if you had that kind of money. But as you said, there are so many more people in the last like 10 years offering more of a fee for service model. Um, that’s more about paying someone for their time rather than paying someone to manage investments for you. So you can pay someone for a package. Like it might even be as low as a thousand dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars, um, for okay, you create a plan for me and like it’s on me, the client to execute it. Like that’s not the advisor’s responsibility ’cause they’re just working with you for a limited period of time. But they can answer those questions. And I, I actually, my perception of the industry is that people who have that model of like, you’re just paying for their time, you know, you might work together once, twice or maybe over the course of a year, there’s different models, they’re much more willing to answer those kinds of, like, I feel like I should know this already, but can you just tell me like, what is a 401k like, you know, um. How much should I be, you know, prioritizing my retirement versus my kids’ college? You know, tho- those kinds of questions are, they’re much more open to that than someone who’s strictly focused on managing investments. They might not answer a question for you, like, should I pay off my mortgage faster? You know, they, that might be outside their sort of area of operation, but people who you’re just paying for their time should use that time, however you the client want to use it, if that makes sense. So I think whatever sense, yeah, whatever your level of wealth, whatever your income, you should be able to find someone at that level to help you. Um. But again, it’s getting over the, can I even reach out for help <laugh> part of it?

Commercial

Emily (22:28): 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 2025. These educational workshops explain how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2025 tax season starting in January 2026, I’m offering live and pre-recorded workshops for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they host one or more of these 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 hosting 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.

The Problem With Academia’s “Not in It for the Money” Mindset

Emily (23:46): Do you have anything else you wanna add to, you know, the common like questions or, or like mindsets that you’ve seen within the group, you know, relating to finances?

Gabrielle (23:55): Yeah, I mean, I do wanna mention again that the, that mindset of we don’t, um, we’re not in it for the money because that is transitioning out of academia involves like a lot of psychological transitions, a lot of identity shifts. And that is a really central one. And it’s just so difficult for people. And the number of people who, when they introduce themselves, we have an intro channel on our slack, and their written introduction of themselves includes essentially some sort of apology for pay being part of their decision making process to, to us, to other people who are in the same boat. Like there’s nobody from the outside looking at this and there’s still this, this, um, guilt that they had to consider something as ordinary as money <laugh> in their, in their, you know, making decisions about their life. So that shows up on a very regular basis of just this feeling of like, there, there needs to be some higher calling reason why I’m changing careers. I can’t just say, you know what, this isn’t enough money for my family to live on and I need to earn more <laugh>. So we try to reassure people that’s enough. If you need that, you need that.

Emily (25:19): Absolutely. What an indictment of academia, right? That they’ve, we’ve been brainwashed by the culture of these institutions that I mean, it’s a racket, honestly, <laugh> like make people grateful for the job that they have so that the pay doesn’t matter, even if the pay is so low that they can’t reasonably afford to live in the city where the institution is located, you know? Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. I’m so glad that you all are, are doing that work, um, in that moment for those people. Like yeah, it can be enough. And not to say that you can’t find mission driven work elsewhere that is still reasonably compensated. Like just Absolutely. It’s because of that, that tie to like the tenure track because they say it’s a one way street and you know, all that kind of stuff. And it’s not true. Like yeah, it’s true sometimes, but like, it doesn’t have to be true for everybody. Anyway. Okay. Thank you so much for bringing that up again. ’cause it is so important. So like same message going out to my audience. Like, I mean, okay. They’re probably already listening to this podcast. They probably understand that money is a factor <laugh> in like living a good life. Um, and if it gets, if the pay is low enough, it might be the only factor telling you. Like, it’s, it’s time to move on from this position or this type of work. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Developing a Healthy Relationship With Your Salary

Emily (26:36): So let’s pull back a little bit from like the people that you usually work with of these, you know, academics or people who work in academia, um, considering a transition out, pull it back to my more typical audience of prospective graduate students, current graduate students, postdocs, people who are still, um, in the academic system, and maybe they’ll stay long term or maybe they won’t. But they’re earlier in their careers. So how can this audience of people start to work on their money mindset so they can have a healthy relationship with their careers and with their earnings wherever they end up? What are your thoughts about that?

Gabrielle (27:13): Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great question. And what I encourage grad students to do is start doing informational interviews as early on as they can. So talk to people in careers they think they might be interested in, talk to alumni of their program who’ve either are in academia or aren’t. Um, either way, I, I have no skin in the game of whether people stay in academia or leave. I want people to pursue careers that are a good fit for them. And that could be either. Um, so talk to people and ask about money. People are, are generally have the idea that it’s taboo to talk about much more than the reality is that it’s a taboo. People generally are okay answering money, answering money questions, and you don’t have to say like, how much do you make? Um, what I asked people when I was doing informational interviews was, um, how, how, what’s a typical salary for this kind of role? Or, you know, here’s the experience that I have, what’s a reasonable starting salary for me to aim for? Um, so it’s not like you have to come out and just be like, what’d you earn last year? Um, which might feel awkward to ask a stranger. So I would say talking to people and getting kind of just a baseline idea of what, uh, of what people make. And then we tend to approach if, if people are aiming for an academic career, they tend to approach it with this mindset of not what do I need in order to thrive in my life and have all of my needs met, but, um, like, what can I stand to put up with in order to win this prize of having a tenure track position? So I encourage people to start from thinking about their needs and their values. So for example, if somebody values their family and it’s important to them to be near family, where does family live? How much money do you need to earn to live near family? Then that is a filter in your job search process, A baseline filter. You’re not gonna look at jobs that earn less than that because you can’t meet your need of living near your family if you don’t earn at least that amount. Um, so yeah, so I encourage people to, to start not from this sort of almost this end point of what job do I wanna end up in, but what do I want my life to look like? And finances is a big part of that because you need to earn enough to live where you wanna live and to have everything in your life that you want to have in your life travel’s important. You need to think about, well, how much do I need to budget for that? How much am I gonna need to earn to be able to budget that?

Emily (30:06): Yeah, it’s been a minute since I brought up Cal Newport on the podcast. I know I’ve done that a lot in the past, but he has this term that he uses, I believe it’s lifestyle centric career design. And so that’s kind of the, what you just mentioned is like the start of lifestyle centered career design. And I think that even someone who has just finished their PhD, Cal Newport uses a term called career capital. The more career capital you’ve built up, the more you can design your career to fit the lifestyle that you desire. But even someone who’s just finished their PhD has a degree of career capital. It’s not as much as they’ll have five or 10 years later, but they have some <laugh>, um and so that’s a perfect starting point for doing exactly the exercise you just mentioned of like, let’s just baseline, what do I need geographically? Maybe not necessarily a specific geography, but like type of place that I want to live. Um, you can think about your lifestyle too in there. Actually I did an interview, it was published, um, I put it out at the beginning of season, um, 22 of the podcast with, um, Dr. Kate Sleeth from EduKatedSTEM. And we talked about figuring out a minimum salary number in a certain location, kind of what you were just talking about. But one of the elements we added there that I wanna bring to this conversation is don’t just take like your current postdoc salary or you know, wherever, whatever stage you’re at, and then like translate that to a different city. Really think about what you need to add on to that salary to make your life, um, enjoyable. And so of course you’ll have some extra responsibilities of taxes and maybe your student loan payments. Those will be added on as like a baseline. But beyond that, do you wanna take some vacations? Do you wanna buy a home? Do you want to just spend more on entertainment than you have been the last, you know, x many years, um so really think about like intentionally what you want to add into your life when you’re thinking about those minimum requirements of the next job. And I also wanna go back to your first point about informational interviewing, which I think is so powerful. And actually, even if you were staying in academia, I feel like you should still do informational interviews because your one observation at your one institution or your one pi or whatever is not, you know, everything that happens in academia. And I had this, um, I did a very short term fellowship after I finished my PhD in science policy. And it was very intentional. Like it gave us work experience, but there was also a set aside time for like professional development, like a certain number of hours per week we were supposed to spend on that. And part of that professional development was we had to a, conduct a minimum number of inter- informational interviews like it, you know, with other people in science policy. And it was so valuable. And I wasn’t even asking that much about salary and these kinds of things that you’re talking about. Which are very important. But it gave me a much better idea that, oh, actually I didn’t want to stay in science policy and I wanted to pursue this business that I was, you know, starting at that point personal finance for a PhDs. And so it’s such a valuable process and it, and going through that policy fellowship gave me permission to do it. It was like, oh, it’s a requirement. I can just tell people like, I’m doing this fellowship and it’s a requirement that I interview you, you know, or at least that ask, I ask you for an interview. Um, and so it gives you like that permission. So I just wanna tell everyone listening like, you’re required, you’re required to conduct five, 10 informational interviews in these career fields that you want to go into. I think it’s absolutely necessary before you start applying for jobs.

Gabrielle (33:19): Yeah, I completely agree. And my experience has been particularly in reaching out to PhDs that they, at worst, they’re too busy to talk, they’re never offended that you’ve reached out. They’re usually very happy to give their time and, and meet with you. So I think people are very nervous about reaching out to strangers, but folks who’ve left academia are really looking for ways to give back and are generally on board <laugh> with meeting with grad students, postdocs, other faculty looking to transition. There’s a lot of, um, generosity in the community. And I also wanted to come back to one thing that you said, which is one of, I think people overlook the importance of learning what you don’t want to do. Um, and that is incredibly valuable with, with, um, internship experiences, with informational interviews, trying things and finding out it’s not a good fit is fantastic. You’ve, you’ve ruled out a whole area, you don’t have to think about that. Um, you’re narrowing in on what, what you do want. I tend to conduct any job search kind of, I never know what fields exist out there and I don’t wanna accidentally rule things out that might be a good fit. So I tend to rule out the things I know I don’t wanna do and look at whatever is left <laugh>.

Emily (34:40): You know, you just brought up I think another strategy for, um, you know, improving your money mindset even while you’re inside academia, which is going beyond that informational interviewing and going to internship, which you just mentioned. Or any type, any type of work experience. It could be paid work, it could be volunteer work, but anything that exposes you to other workplaces and other missions and other environments and other people like so valuable while you’re a graduate student or postdoc in helping you clarify, as you were saying, what you do, what you don’t want to do going forward. And again, if you’re asking those financially pointed questions like you mentioned, what, what would you suggest as a starting salary? You know, I should ask for a starting salary for, you know, this type of work, um, that can break you out. Because one of the big, big issues with PhDs is that we’ve, we’ve the process of getting that education and the training takes so long that we become anchored at this like stipend or like this postdoc salary, like level of income. And so you’re going into that next position like, oh, well if I just make like a little more, that would be great. Instead of like, I need to realistically understand what this market pays and what I, I can ask for keeping in mind what we talked about earlier about like discovering your own minimum requirements as well and what, what fields are gonna fit with that and what fields maybe aren’t, you know?

Gabrielle (35:57): Yeah, absolutely. That was kind of my mindset going from grad school to postdoc to faculty position. Each one paid more than the last. And so that faculty role that didn’t pay enough for me to really live on was the most I’d made up to that point. And it didn’t occur to me for a ridiculously long time. That <laugh> that didn’t mean it was a good salary just because it was more than my postdoc.

Emily (36:25): I know it’s because we forget, like when you enter graduate school again, it might, it might be your first job, you know, your first full-time position. And like, you again, become anchored at those levels. And unless you’re talking to your peers, you know, maybe who you went to college with who didn’t take that track, unless you’re talking with them, you may forget that you’re vastly underpaid as a graduate student. Yeah. Pretty well underpaid as a postdoc as well. And then depending on what you go into afterwards, still could be underpaid even as a full-time big girl job, you know, academic <laugh>, um, for sure.

Emily (36:56): Okay. Any other strategies that you can think of to, you know, for those trainees just to be working on their money mindsets?

Gabrielle (37:03): I mean, I think any, any kind of opportunity to educate yourself on what we were talking about earlier of like what people don’t know, right? Of the basics of just what, how do retirement accounts work, <laugh>, where should I prioritize my savings? How do you approach paying down debt? Just any kind of education that they can gain around that. It’s easy to write that off because you’re stuck in this low salary stipend situation. And, um, it’s like, well, that doesn’t apply to me. I, I barely have money for groceries, much less investing, but it is still, you won’t always be there. And so the more kind of prep you can do ahead of time, so you’re not very confused when you do eventually make more money, um, I think is really valuable.

Emily (37:53): I totally agree. And like also you just advertised for my podcast, so like, hello listener, if this is your first time listening to this podcast, like please subscribe, keep here because we talk about all this stuff and like you just said, like maybe it’s not actionable right now, but it could be in just next year, three years from now. And you wanna be prepared for that. But I would say don’t, just don’t just listen to my podcast. Maybe if you’re interested in this topic, find a few other, uh, long distance mentors so to speak, you know, gurus or educators that you can listen to. Maybe it’s some other podcasts or maybe it’s, you know, YouTube creators or books that you wanna read. Like there’s so much excellent financial education material out there. Um, yeah. None of it’s tailored for, you know, graduate students, students in postdocs except for mine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it and learn from lots of different people. So like, create like a panel in your mind, maybe there’s like five different people who you wanna listen to, to learn from about this topic because as you said, it will become relevant and actionable like before you know it.

Gabrielle (38:51): Yes.

The Recovering Academics Community and Next Draft LLC

Emily (38:52): Wrapping up here, um, you mentioned how um, people can get access to the recovering academics community. Which is through you on LinkedIn. So great place to look for you. Any other places that people can go to follow up with you about anything we’ve talked about today?

Gabrielle (39:06): The group has a, an email address so folks can reach out to me that way too. It’s [email protected]. So anyone can send an email that way. And, um, and I will get back to you with more information on the group. Um, and once we do have websites set up, I can share that with you if you wanna, um, add the link with the description of this, of this episode or anything.

Emily (39:32): Do you wanna tell us more about Next Draft LLC?

Gabrielle (39:35): Sure. Yeah. So one of the things that came out of Recovering Academics was, uh, you know, years of working with a lot of people leaving mid-career who were, uh, essentially having career existential crises and had no idea what else they could do and we’re, you know, mid forties associate professors who were panicking. So part of the idea for next draft, um, came from the idea of, of stepping in earlier in the pipeline. Again, we don’t, we aren’t pushing people to leave academia or to stay. The idea is to provide grad students with the tools that they need to make informed values-based decisions about the career paths that they want to explore so that they can, uh, it kind of building on what we were talking about before, right? Make sure that they are making decisions that keep their actual needs in mind and their deal breakers in mind, and that they’re not just, um, pursuing an academic role at all costs because it’s the only thing that they know that they can do. And this is especially relevant for folks in the humanities and social sciences where the connections between academia, uh, their academic research and industry are, um, not always as clear. So, uh, we do workshops and so our, uh, website is nextdraftllc.com. Um, we do, uh, workshops that individuals can sign up for to work on, um, various aspects of the job search process. We also work with universities to offer those workshops. And we are planning in January to launch a small group mentoring program where people can, uh, get support and thinking through their job search process from somebody who, uh, from their same discipline who has kind of been through the transition themselves. And the mentors that we’re working with have all worked in faculty roles and in non-academic roles. I can kind of speak to both and support grad students who are thinking about whether or not to make that transition.

Emily (41:44): Incredible. Okay. Nextdraftllc.com. Is that right?

Gabrielle (41:47): That’s right.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (41:48): Beautiful. Okay. Last question that I end on with all of my guests. Um, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on already in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

Gabrielle (42:01): I think we’ve touched on, I think really open communication around money is, is key of just learning about what, what are people earning, what is a reasonable salary? So you have some sense of, of reality to counter that feeling of being stuck in the stipend that you’re making or that mindset of, um, we’re not in it for the money. Um, so I want people to really open up the sources of information that they’re learning from and give themselves permission to think about money and that it is okay to think about we, for better or worse, live in a capitalist society where we all have to earn money to pay our bills, um, and get all of the other things that we actually want in our lives. So it’s okay to think about that and it’s okay for it to be a key piece of decision making. And there’s nothing, you haven’t done anything wrong as an academic to be keeping money in mind.

Emily (43:08): So well said. Thank you Gabrielle, so much for this wonderful interview.

Gabrielle (43:12): Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Outro

Emily (43:24): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

How to Negotiate Your Salary Post-PhD

September 8, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Kate Sleeth, the founder of EduKatedSTEM, on salary negotiation for PhDs. They discuss why everyone should negotiate salary and why Kate regrets not negotiating in her first position in academia. Kate teaches how someone should calculate their minimum salary number before going into a negotiation, including the free tools to use. They wrap up with Kate’s best single tip regarding the negotiation process and her best financial advice, both of which are straightforward to implement.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

Kate (00:00): The negotiation begins when you apply. I don’t think a lot of people realize that, but there is always going to be a question, how much are you currently making? And how much do you hope to receive should you receive, you know, get this job. And so you need to know a number or something to put in that as you apply for the role. So you actually need to do your homework before you hit submit on the application.

Introduction

Emily (00:33): 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 22, Episode 2, and today my guest is Dr. Kate Sleeth, the founder of EduKatedSTEM. Our conversation revolves around salary negotiation for PhDs. We discuss why everyone should negotiate salary and why Kate regrets not negotiating in her first position in academia. Kate teaches how someone should calculate their minimum salary number before going into a negotiation, including the free tools to use. We wrap up with Kate’s best single tip regarding the negotiation process and her best financial advice, both of which are straightforward to implement.

Emily (01:42): Let’s talk fellowship taxes for a minute here. These action items are for you if you recently switched or will soon switch onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac; you are a US citizen, resident, or resident for tax purposes; and you are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on page 8 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe in 2025 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is September 15, 2025. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at time tax, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives.

Emily (03:07): If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes 1.75 hours of video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. The next Q&A call is on Friday, September 12, 2025. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PF for PhDs dot com slash Q E tax. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s22e2/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Kate Sleeth of EduKatedSTEM.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (04:12): I am delighted to have on the podcast today Dr. Kate Sleeth, the founder of EduKatedSTEM. And Kate and I actually met last spring, we’re recording this interview in August, 2025, but we met at the National Postdoctoral Association annual meeting in March, 2025. And I went to Kate’s talk on negotiation, and I knew immediately that she had to come on the podcast and share a number of her insights with you. Now, I wanna give you a warning that Kate and I could talk for hours about our subject today, which is negotiation of salaries. Um, but we’re not going to, because this is a brief podcast episode. So if you want more from Kate, she gives workshops. She can work with you as an individual. She has follow-up resources, so I’m gonna have her point to all that stuff later. So we’re just giving you a teaser into this topic today. So Kate, again, welcome to the podcast. Would you please give us some more background about your career and what EduKatedSTEM is?

Kate (05:07): Thanks, Emily. Thank you for having me. Uh, so I, uh, was a scientist. I was a biochemist. I have a PhD. Uh, my thesis was on, uh, DNA repair mechanisms, and I did three postdocs. So I’m a very experienced postdoc person, and, um, I have experience in both the UK and America. I moved to LA to do my third and final postdoc, and then I moved into a graduate school administration. So I went from a lower administrator all the way through to being the Associate Dean of Administration and student Development. And it was over that time that I got interested in giving, um, webinars, seminars, things like that on a variety of topics. Negotiation being the one that everybody is always excited about. Um, and EduKatedSTEM is an offshoot of that, that I thought I could help more people. So I have a YouTube channel where I put up advice on various things. Again, I have a series on negotiation up there, um, and I go in, as you said, I give, I give, um, talks at conferences and, uh, also, uh, universities, things like that. So I will be, uh, talking at SACNAS if everyone’s coming to SACNAS later in the year. Oddly enough, I’m not talking about negotiation at that one. Um, but I, uh, will be talking if people are at that meeting.

How Negotiation Became a Passion for Dr. Kate Sleeth

Emily (06:27): Beautiful. Thank you so much. And, um, let’s get more of like your sort of personal story into how this became a passion point for you when you first started teaching more and more about negotiation.

Kate (06:40): So negotiation is something that everybody needs to learn how to do, right? We all wanna make more money or have, um, better things to do with our job, whether that’s more days off or, um, the ability to work remotely at times, uh, and other things, you have to ask that during the negotiation if you hope to receive them. And so, whilst I was a postdoc and whilst I was a lower administrator, I saw a lot of people talk about negotiation. And it was always lots of acronyms and it was very theory based and they didn’t really tell you, this is how you do it. These are the tools that you use and this is how you structure it. And I thought, well, there has to be an easier way, a more straightforward way of explaining how to do the negotiation. So I read a few books around the topic.

Kate (07:30): I saw some, um, presentations that I thought did a little bit more than the average. You know, this is the BATNA, these are the acronyms. And I was like, no, I’m gonna make my own. And it’s completely tailored. What you saw, um, in the spring at the NPA was tailored to a postdoc audience, um, in the city that we were in. And so whenever I come to an institution, whether that’s over a webinar or in person, I talk about that location. So all of the examples I use are for either, depending on the audience, a postdoc, graduate student, whatever, at that location. And then I talk about jobs that they might want to go to, cities that they might want to move to. And it’s all relevant, all of the searches that I’ve done within the past week. So the information I’m showing is absolutely relevant at the time that I’m showing it.

Kate (08:23): Um, and realistically, I did not do well at my first negotiation. Obviously as a postdoc, you don’t negotiate, really, there isn’t a lot you can do. When I moved into the role as an administrator, I was on a visa and they said that they were going to support my green card application and ’cause of the expense of that they were gonna to reduce my salary because they would be paying for my green card. And that affected every single salary negotiation after that because obviously the lower you come in, um, the, the higher the increases you need to be to kind of bring you back to where you should be. Um, and in the end, they didn’t pay for my green card <laugh>. So learn from that, um, and negotiate appropriately because I could have said, no, I, I understand you’re gonna be paying for my green card, but I ought to be being paid a higher amount even with that because that definitely impacted every single salary negotiation and, um, promotion that I ever received.

Why Is Negotiation Important?

Emily (09:28): And your leading directly into where I wanted to go with this next part of the conversation, which is why should people negotiate? You’ve just given us one reason is that, that at least as long as you stay with the same organization, that level that you come in, go in on, is going to inform every single salary you receive at that organization for the rest of your time there. So that’s one reason. Let’s start off as high as <laugh> we reasonably can here, but what are some other reasons or motivations for negotiation?

Kate (09:57): Um, so obviously, yes, you obviously want more money. More money is always lovely, um, but it’s going to help people who come into your role after you leave because they always look at the previous person’s history. And if you negotiate a higher salary, the person after you will hopefully also get the highest salary. So if it’s hard for you to think, I need to negotiate from me personally, be altruistic and think about the people who are following you afterwards, you’re gonna have help them kind of give them a leg up.

Emily (10:30): I really loved when I heard you point that out. It wasn’t a a, a phrasing or an angle on that that I had quite heard of or thought about before. But I realized that, so I, when I speak about negotiation, which is not that often ’cause it’s not really my area of expertise, I do it more in the grad student realm because as you said, postdocs, it’s not that usual to negotiate graduate students. It’s even more unusual, yet some people do it. And this is one of the reasons why I think that people should at least try is because you’re communicating, you’re signaling to that person on the other side of the table from you. It is important that I, and people in my position are compensated appropriately. So please consider increasing my stipend. But really that bleeds over into your peers and the people who follow you. It just, you signaling that this is an important area that you value, that you, you know, you wanna be paid reasonably well. So I really love that point. Think about the person following you in the position after you, yeah, the budget for that position is gonna be expanded if you’re successful in your negotiation.

Kate (11:25): Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah, it’s a key thing. And also it makes you feel more appreciated because if you don’t negotiate and you come in thinking that you’ve got a great salary and there’s other people who have maybe even the same title and role and position as you, and you find out they’re, I dunno, anywhere between five and 20,000 more than you, you’re not going to feel appreciated. And you know, the company didn’t do anything wrong. They obviously want to bring you in as cheaply as possible because they want to save money. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s, it’s the reality of the situation. And so they are trying to negotiate you down. You want to try and negotiate your worth and show them the skills that you, you’re bringing to the table and therefore you earn hopefully more money. Um, but if you don’t do that at the beginning and you find out that other people are earning potentially significantly more than you, you’re not gonna feel appreciated. You may start looking for a different role somewhere else.

Emily (12:28): And that’s one of the reasons why actually like you, the job candidate, um, and also the employer, that’s actually an area where you two are aligned. You both want you to be happy in that role. And compensation is part of that because turnover is so expensive for companies. And so it’s really in their best interest to keep you happy with your compensation so that you have longevity there. Are there any other, uh, reasons for negotiation that you’d like to add?

Kate (12:54): So the other reason to negotiate is it’s just good practice. And it’s something that I talk about in my presentation. You negotiate all the time. It’s just not necessarily for a salary or for benefits. So even if you’re talking with someone about your plans for this evening, what restaurant you want to go to, what movie you want to see, you are negotiating hopefully to get what you want. And so it will definitely help. And you need to practice before you go in to get comfortable with the idea of asking for more money. And you’re not going to say that you are entitled to to more money or you deserve more money. You’re gonna be very polite about it and deferential, but you will make sure that the person that you’re talking to understands that you would appreciate to receive more money or benefits or whatever.

Kate (13:44): It’s, and you have to remember a lot of the time, the person that you’re negotiating with doesn’t necessarily have the power to make those decisions. So if you upset them, they are not going to go back to the person who does have the power and advocate on your behalf to get you more of whatever it is that you want. So it’s good practice, it will help you in everyday life if you can kind of keep cool and measured and just ask for what you want. Um, and I, I think even if you are talking about a part-time job, you know, you can always say, I was hoping for a little bit more money or however you want to phrase it, and you may, you may get it, you never know.

Emily (14:24): I think this is such an important point about you want, probably the person that needs to say that you’re negotiating with still has a chain of command. They have to run this up. And so you want them on your side, you wanna understand what their motivations are and you know, realize what you have in common and how it’s important that you can work together to get what you want, a higher salary or their benefits or whatever it’s going to be. But yeah, you want them to be your champion. So of course you have to do this in a very, um, socially aware kind of way. Um, so wonderful tip.

Emily (14:56): Um, the next thing that I wanna talk about, I, I’m skipping over something. Okay, so what was great about the talk of yours that I saw at NPA is that you were discussing how to understand, um, you know, typical compensation for various different types of jobs in different areas of the country. So like the salary research aspect of this. And this is a very important component of the negotiation process because um, you have to know what the positions typically pay, why you might be making more or less than what is average and and so forth. So it’s very important to understand the market and when you go into a negotiation, your basis for negotiation is what you’re bringing to the role.

Commercial

Emily (15:38): Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, budgeting, investing, and goal-setting, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2025-2026 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutes enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Identifying Your Personal Minimum Salary Number

Emily (16:57): However, there is a back part of this calculation. That’s what we’re going to talk about in the interview next, which is how much do I as a job candidate actually want and need to make irrespective of what the job type pays you as a person have a number that you would like to make and you know, hopefully that job will typically pay you more than that personal number that you need, but you at least need to know the number because when you go into that negotiation process, you need to know what number we are not gonna go below. For sure. So in your talk you discuss the salary research that is so important. We’re skipping over it right now. We’re not doing it in this interview. Where we’re gonna focus on instead is that personal part of it, understanding what your number is. So can you tell us more about how you teach people that part of the process? How do they come up with their own personal minimum salary number?

Kate (17:48): So a lot of the time it’s on your budget. So I always encourage the first thing you do before you apply for a job, before you have a major life change. So a marriage, a divorce, getting a pet, getting um, uh, you know, having children. Make sure you know how much money you need to survive. So I have a budget, you can go in and download it and um, I want you to be brutal, brutally honest about what you spend, because I’ve done this with undergrads and they are potentially spending their parents’ cash. So they are less realistic about how much money they would like to earn. Like I’ve done this and they’ve come out and said I need to make a starting salary of at least $150,000 because I can’t give up <laugh> um, you know, my food delivery costs, I go out multiple times a week and all of these other things. And I’m just looking at them thinking, wow, as an, as a recent undergraduate with your, with your degree, you are hoping to make 150,000. Like you need a decent reality check. So go through, you know, your rent and all of those things know exactly how much you need to survive and that is the number that you cannot possibly go beneath because if you don’t make that, you can’t pay all of your bills, you can’t pay back any debt that you might have, that is absolutely the lowest that you can go. But you might not decide that that is the lowest that you are willing to take. So during your, um, your research and whenever you apply for a job, you are gonna do some research. There are many different websites that you can use. My personal favorite, um, tends to be salary.com, but there are others out there.

Kate (19:41): I’ll just mention some. Um, you have Indeed, obviously you have salary.com, which is what I use all the time. Salary Expert, Payscale, MyPlan.com. And then if you are thinking about moving location, you then need to do a cost of living comparison. And again, lots of those websites also have it. Salary.com has it. That’s what I use. And what you do is you put in where you are currently living, the salary that the job might have where you’re currently living and then you know, I’m thinking about moving to insert city and it will literally come back and, and it will tell you, you know, the city that you’re considering moving to is either more or less expensive than where you’re, so if it’s more expensive, it will tell you you need to make this much money in order to maintain the standard of life that you’ve currently got.

Kate (20:35): And obviously if you’re going to somewhere that is cheaper, then you’ll have a better standard of living. But that is definitely something to consider because I live in Los Angeles and if you, you move to LA you can definitely get sticker shock because everything here is so much more expensive. I think there’s only San Francisco and New York that are definitely more expensive to live in. Uh, but there’s some cities that are also somewhat close. But I always use moving to LA as my example because everyone is always like, Ooh, yes, you know, you can have the job, but usually the the increase in salary may or may not be equivalent to what you need to maintain your standard of living if you move here. And that’s just something that you need to consider because if you are taking a promotion, if you’re moving somewhere you hope you have more money, you have a better quality of life, that you can have more savings.

Emily (21:34): Absolutely. You always have to put those numbers in the context of the local cost of living. I totally agree. Um, and I actually wanted to expand a little bit more on what you just said about well maybe you actually want to increase your lifestyle <laugh> as you move along in your career. And I especially think about this in the transitions from, you know, graduate student to postdoc, from postdoc to having a proper permanent post PhD job maybe as you receive promotions later on. Um, because I think where you started was absolutely correct. Let’s take what we’re currently spending, you know, multiply that by that by some factor, you know, depending on where you’re moving, that’s a minimum. Well, okay, but who wants to live that grad student lifestyle forever and ever? Probably no one. And I do think it’s appropriate as you make more money to increase your lifestyle, not mindlessly inflate your lifestyle, but add in some specific things that are really important to you. Like you mentioned, you know, family formation, maybe you wanna buy a home. These things are expensive and you may want them later in your life. So I would say when you’re building that budget, you know, start where you are, but then also add in those line items or those increases for what you want in your next stage of life. Um, and one other small point there is your tax burden will change as you move along in your career. Specifically as a graduate student, you’re not paying social security and medicare tax. You will be paying those later on if you have a proper W2 job. Um, your student loans may go from being in deferment to being in repayment and you have to factor that into, so there are some expenses that just naturally come in when you change stages. So I just wanted to point that out too, like take that minimum number, but why don’t we add on to that minimum number too <laugh>.

Kate (23:11): So there’s another free tool that you can use, which is called PaycheckCity.com. And I would encourage you to go and look at it and you can put in how much the salary that you are going to hopefully be making is. And it will tell you these are the taxes that will be coming out. You can literally change the state that you are in and you can say whether you’ve got family or not. And it will tell you what your final take home pay is going to be, which is something that I don’t think a lot of people realize. I know that the first time I got taxed I was like, ooh, ooh, I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. Um, but it’s something that, that has to be paid. So I always say go to salary.com and do your, um, the salary that you want, the cost of living comparison, and then head over to PaycheckCity and figure out exactly what your take home pay is gonna be.

Emily (24:06): Yes, <laugh>. Exactly. I moved, um, post-graduate school, moved to Washington State, which is a zero income tax state, and then to California, which I have not found to be overly burdensome, but is a higher income tax state. So very, very worth, you know, those considerations as you’re moving to different locales. Um, excellent, excellent. Thank you so much for pointing to those tools. I think those are gonna be super helpful for our audience who you know is in these various stages. Um, okay, we’re gonna get back to negotiation now. I want you to give us just one tip about the negotiation process. ’cause I know you could give a whole presentation on this, but let’s just leave our listeners with one concrete takeaway.

Negotiation Begins Before You Submit Your Application

Kate (24:46): So I think you need to realize that the negotiation begins when you apply. I don’t think a lot of people realize that, but there is always going to be a question, how much are you currently making and how much do you hope to receive should you receive, you know, get this job. And so you need to know a number or something to put in that as you apply for the role. So you actually need to do your homework before you hit submit on the application. And I don’t think a lot of people know that. I always advise that if you can write something in that, then you write something like salary commensurate to my skills. Uh, but most HR people don’t like that because you’re not giving them a number and some application systems actually force you to insert a number. And so I always say you could always insert a range if you can do that, but you need to know what that range is. So I can do these searches very, very quickly and I always think if it takes 10, 15 minutes of your time to then make a knowledgeable application at the beginning and it will then help you potentially earn, I don’t know, five, 10, $20,000 more, how much is that 10 minutes worth to you? Because it’s necessary if you’re going to be successful at the negotiation.

Emily (26:05): Very good point. And that research has to happen at some point in the process anyway. You’re just getting a jump on it when you do the application part. And I totally think for those different, um, suggestions, like if you can enter text <laugh>, enter text, if you can enter a range, enter a range, well if they force you into a number, you know, it has to be in the range that they’re thinking to, right? So it’s gotta be in there. So that’s an excellent tip. And I know from, I guess my study of negotiation overall is like, um, nobody wants to throw out their first number <laugh>, so they’re kind of forcing you to do it. So any way you can get out of it, get out of it, but if you have to do it, you need to know what’s reasonable. So thank you so much. Um, where can people follow up with you, learn more from you book you, where can they find you and follow up resources?

Connect with Dr. Kate Sleeth

Kate (26:48): So I have a website which is EduKatedSTEM.com, and it’s with a K EduKatedSTEM. Um, I’m on YouTube under the same handle. I’m on Instagram, um, blue sky, Twitter, all of those good things. If you want to specifically get the things that I do for negotiation, um, I’m happy to come in and obviously present at your location, but if you are kind of stuck and like, oh my gosh, I’m about to negotiate, I just need some help right now, obviously I will advise you in person, but you can go and download my budget template, my negotiation, um, little kind of worksheets, which I think is is very short. I’ve taken, you know, many books and I’ve smashed it down. And so I think it’s 15 pages of just the highlights that you absolutely need. And there’s also a video of me giving the presentation that I give, um, and that’s available for a whole $5 on Patreon. So pretty darn cheap. Um, if you, if you want that,

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (27:53): Hmm. If you actually applied, uh, 1% of what you learned, you would, um, make that over in orders of magnitude, I’m sure. Um, excellent. Kate, thank you so much. And I’m gonna ask you the question that I ask of all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for an early career PhD? And that can be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it could be something completely new.

Kate (28:16): So I’m going to give you, um, the advice that my husband will appreciate <laugh>, because when I met him, I was a postdoc and a financial advisor. So his first question was, how much money are you saving? And I chuckled and said, I’m a postdoc living in LA clearly not a lot if at all. And he was horrified. And so he started getting me to put just a little way a a little sum every paycheck. And then if I got a pay increase, once I started moving into, uh, the administrative roles, every time I got a pay increase, a portion of that went into savings. So I did get a little bit more spending money, but not the whole lot. And that made it much easier. And within a very short period of time, my savings had bloomed. Uh, so not only was I putting into my, um, 401, is it called a 401k, right? That’s what you call it in America. Um, so I hadn’t been doing that and he was utterly horrified. And so I started putting money in my 401, and then in addition I also started putting money into savings. And it just, it just helps. It’s, it, what’s the, I can’t think what the word is, compounds it. The, the amount compounds so you get more money. So the earlier you start, the more money you have at the end. And I can’t believe that that is the advice, advice that I’m giving because he would be so happy <laugh>. But it’s, it’s a really important thing. And as a postdoc, I just didn’t think I earned enough money to do that. And he just sat me down and was like, at some point, you’re gonna be old and you are going to need money. Thank you honey. Very blunt. Um, and so yes, it kind of hurts the first few months and then you get used to it and then it’s really hard not to touch that money because you’re like, Ooh, I really want that thing and I’ve got the cash right here. Um, but you are thinking about your future self and your future self. Well, thank you. When you’re older and you have a cushion.

Emily (30:20): Absolutely. I mean, it’s excellent advice and I, I like hearing it from you as like, I mean, obviously you’re teaching negotiation, but not as a natural personal finance person, right? Like, you learn this from the person who became your husband and you implemented it in a time when you didn’t think you could. And I think that’s so common before we start saving in an intentional way. We always think it’s impossible. I thought the same thing. So, but it’s like, well, like he said, at some point you just have to do it because your future self needs this money. So just get started and like you said, in a small way and as you progress through your career, as we’ve been talking about, you negotiate for more, you put part of that raise, you know, increase your savings rate, part of is spend on lifestyle. Perfect. Perfect. Everybody’s happy. So I love that advice. Kate, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure to meet you at NPA and I’m so glad we got to record this, uh, conversation from my audience.

Kate (31:09): Thank you for having me, Emily.

Outro

Emily (31:21): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

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

June 16, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 2 Comments

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does It Mean to Live on Time Financially?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Keep up with your tax obligations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude.

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

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

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

Now back to our interview.

Why Attempt to Live on Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Start Living on Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outro

Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode!

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Reduce Financial Anxiety as a Limited-Income PhD

June 2, 2025 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily presents five suggestions for reducing financial anxiety that you could use alongside your general anxiety management strategies. These five suggestions are designed to be used by graduate students, postdocs, and PhDs who are in objectively stressful financial situations. They include choosing just one financial goal, taking a small step, creating a recurring appointment, thinking through the worst case scenario, and talking with others.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How to Reduce Financial Anxiety as a Limited-Income PhD

Introduction

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

This is Season 21, Episode 1, and today is a solo episode from me with five suggestions for reducing financial anxiety that you could use alongside your general anxiety management strategies. These five suggestions are designed to be used by graduate students, postdocs, and PhDs who are in objectively stressful financial situations. They include choosing just one financial goal, taking a small step, creating a recurring appointment, thinking through the worst case scenario, and talking with others.

I recently created a new workshop, the topic of which dovetails pretty nicely with this episode. The title is Create Your Financial Emergency Response Plan. As the name implies, during the workshop, I guide you through creating a plan for handling the type of financial emergency you’re most likely to encounter at the moment, which is the loss of your primary income. The idea is to really think through the resources that you would rely on if your grant gets cancelled, your funding runs out, you’re laid off, or you can’t land a job as quickly as you expected. Then, you’ll decide what steps you can take in the immediate future to bolster your plan’s likelihood of success. I piloted this workshop with subscribers to my mailing list, and it was very well received. I’m offering this workshop in two formats. The first is as a live workshop for university clients, so if you’d like to learn more about that you can go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/. I would really appreciate you recommending the workshop to an appropriate host at your institution. The second is as a pre-recorded workshop for individuals. You can read more details about this option and purchase it via PFforPhDs.com/financialemergency/.

If you perceive that there’s a reasonable chance that you might lose of your primary income in the next year or so, I hope that you will find a way to take this workshop, either via your institution or individually, so that you can create your plan and experience a bit of relief from the financial anxiety and stress that our academic and research community is currently experiencing. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s21e1/. Without further ado, here’s my solo episode on reducing financial anxiety.

Disclaimer

I have to get this out of the way up front: I’m not a psychologist or anything similar—my PhD is in engineering—so the strategies I’m sharing with you today don’t necessarily have a medical or clinical basis or backing. Also I personally am not a generally anxious person and I’ve never sought treatment for anxiety or anything like that. I have experienced financial anxiety and financial stress at times, particularly when I was in graduate school, because money is obviously important to me and objectively that was a financially challenging time, and I did become too preoccupied with it for a while. However, I’m more so coming to this topic from my position as a financial educator, someone who is thoughtful about finances, reads and listens widely, and talks with people. And I have noticed that many people in our PhD community experience some degree of financial anxiety as well as financial stress.

What Is Financial Anxiety?

One conversation in particular inspired this episode. This past spring, I gave away a bunch of one-on-one money coaching sessions as part of my Giveaway Spring initiative. One of those coachees, a graduate student, came to me with the chief question, “How do I reduce my financial anxiety?” The person shared that they also experience climate anxiety and had found a body of suggestions for reducing it that were helpful, and so were looking for something similar in the financial realm.

I thought this was a fantastic question, but I wasn’t very well-prepared to answer it during that coaching session. I did make a couple of suggestions and gave a podcast recommendation, but promised to look into the topic further. This podcast episode is my follow-up for that coachee and all of you.

Let’s start off with a definition of financial anxiety, because it is distinct from stress, and I want to at least try to not conflate the two.

I pulled this definition of anxiety from the American Psychological Association’s website: “Anxiety is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure. Anxiety is not the same as fear, but they are often used interchangeably. Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat, whereas fear is an appropriate, present-oriented, and short-lived response to a clearly identifiable and specific threat” (https://www.apa.org/topics/anxiety).

Furthermore, I pulled this summary of financial anxiety from an article from Healthline: “Money anxiety, in basic terms, happens when you worry about your income or fear something bad could happen with your finances. To put it another way, it’s an emotional response to your financial situation… A few signs your anxiety around money is becoming a more serious concern are aches and pains, avoidance, analysis paralysis, no work-life balance, rigidity, rumination, and trouble sleeping” (https://www.healthline.com/health/anxiety/money-anxiety#signs).

If you are experiencing financial anxiety, you should put into practice general anxiety-reducing advice to the extent of your ability, things like getting enough sleep, eating well, exercise, meditation and mindfulness, etc. You should also consider therapy, if that is accessible to you, such as through your university. In this episode, I’m going to focus on ideas for reducing anxiety long-term that are more specific to your finances. These strategies are ones that I pointed to during that coaching session and that I teach in my workshops. I’m going to avoid strategies that will primarily reduce your financial stress, like earning more or spending less, to focus more on the anxiety reduction. Of course, not all these strategies may work for you since anxiety is caused by and manifests differently in everyone.

Suggestion #1: Choose Just One Financial Goal to Work on at a Time

Here’s something I like to say in my financial goals workshop: There are a lot of good things you could be doing with your money. When you’re living on a limited grad student stipend or postdoc salary, you can’t work on all of them at once. You have to pick and choose the most optimal single goal. When you focus all of your available savings rate on just one goal at a time, you make relatively quick progress, which helps you to stay motivated and even get creative about how you might reach your goal even faster. When you split your available savings rate across multiple goals, you make slow or even imperceptible progress toward all of them, which can be very demotivating, and you’re more likely to abandon your plan.

How I think this principle can help with anxiety is that you give yourself permission to set aside all of your potential priorities save for the single one you’ve decided to work toward in the present. Instead of spinning your wheels in your mind telling yourself that you should be addressing every single aspect of your financial life or potential financial life, you can feel calm and settled that you are working toward the one most important thing you should be doing at the moment. The rest can wait until later.

In my workshops, I teach a financial framework that guides you in selecting that singular goal that’s most appropriate for you at any given time. I get a lot of questions like should I repay my student loans while they’re in deferment or start to invest? Should I save up cash or pay down my credit card debt? The framework answers those questions. If you can accept that it’s best to work on just one goal at a time and have confidence that you’ve chosen the most optimal goal to work toward, hopefully your mind can rest easier that you’re doing everything you need to right now and that those other goals will be addressed when the time is right.

While I can’t present my whole financial framework in this podcast episode, I will get you started on it: Step 1 is to create a starter emergency fund in a separate, named, high-yield savings account. Previously, in normal times, I suggested a starter emergency fund size of $1,000 to two months of expenses. Since academia and research are currently under attack in the US, I’ve revised the target size for the starter emergency fund to three months of expenses.

The good thing about having a target for this goal is that there is a defined end point. I have actually seen a tendency to over-save among some PhD trainees, and that is potentially financial anxiety manifesting itself. Having an emergency fund is vital, but there are other great financial goals to work toward as well, namely steps 2 through 8 of my framework, so it’s important to move on once you’ve fulfilled the first step. Excess savings are not actually serving any practical function for most people most of the time.

Suggestion #2: Take Just One Small Step

Related to that first suggestion of picking just a single goal, even a goal can be too overwhelming sometimes. For example, Step 2 of my framework is to pay off all high-priority debt, which includes credit card debt, IRS debt, and high interest rate debt. That’s a lot! So you really have to break it down further to make it manageable; it’s still far too intimidating as a group of debts.

Pick just one of these various debts that you want to work on first. Let’s say it’s a credit card balance. Break it down even further. What’s the one very first smallest step you can take to start to clear this debt? Maybe you could set up autopay on that card for more than the minimum, unsave the card from your online shopping portals and wallets, or eliminate one recurring expense so you can shift the money over to repaying the debt. Maybe you need to simply log in to the account and look at the balance if you’ve been avoiding that! Choose something readily accomplishable in just a few minutes.

Taking that very first small step might help to alleviate some anxiety because you are starting to take appropriate action. Again, you don’t have to do everything all at once, and in fact trying to tackle everything simultaneously can be counterproductive. Don’t beat yourself up about not going from A to Z immediately. It’s better to take one small step and then another than to stay stuck at the starting line.

Commercial

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

Suggestion #3: Create a Recurring Appointment with Your Finances

My next suggestion is one that I came up with spontaneously during the coaching session that I mentioned, and it’s a variation on a commonly recommended tactic. The idea is to create a recurring appointment to address your finances, perhaps 30 to 60 minutes 2 to 4 times per month. In a couple, this is often referred to as a money date, but I think it would work very well for a person managing financial anxiety, whether single or coupled, and that’s how I’ll speak about it now.

During your money appointment, you should run through a few potential action items.

1) What do I need to decide regarding my finances? This is your time to think through and possibly research decisions you need to make. Maybe you want to open a new type of account and you’ll use this time to review your options. Maybe you have an upcoming spending opportunity and you need to figure out whether it’s possible and how you’ll pay for it. Updating your budget is a type of decision as well.

2) What do I need to do regarding my finances? This might involve carrying out a decision you just made or made previously. It probably involves minor recurrings tasks, like recording your net worth, updating your tracked expenses and comparing them to your budget, or manually paying a bill.

3) What do I need to learn regarding my finances? I think that you should make financial education a regular part of your life, and you might devote a portion of each appointment to it. Perhaps you can read a book in installments, listen to a podcast episode, or catch up on a financial creator’s social media content. This learning could be targeted to a certain topic you want to bone up on or be general.

4) What do I need to celebrate regarding my finances? Take some time to acknowledge when you’ve accomplished a goal or reached a milestone. Your celebration might just be an internal “good job!” during your appointment, or you could commit to a more visible celebration, like treating yourself or sharing your good news with a family member or friend.

What this strategy, when practiced regularly, could do for your anxiety is two-fold:

First, you will do things within your finances. Because of the regular attention you’re giving your financial decisions and tasks, your to-do list will get whittled down and you will make positive strides. It can help you get out of the procrastination-perfectionism cycle that is so common among PhDs. After a while, you start to trust yourself that you are appropriately handling your money—because you are! This can reduce anxiety in some cases.

Second, with this meeting, you have created a time container for your financial energy, whether that’s positive energy or negative. When you start to experience more acute financial anxiety, part of how you can alleviate it is to tell yourself that you will think about and/or deal with the matter during your next appointment. You can even keep a running agenda so items don’t slip through the cracks. You might also want to limit your consumption of financial content, like this podcast, to this appointment window only. This can help you calm your mind outside of those meeting times so you aren’t ruminating 24/7 about financial matters. You have already marked on your calendar when you’re going to address it so you can have confidence that it will be addressed at the appropriate time.

One final tip: Occasionally, you may need to call or chat with a financial institution during business hours. So, while your regular appointment time does not need to be during business hours, it might be helpful to identify a secondary time that falls within that window that you can use for that purpose when necessary.

Suggestion #4: Think Through the Worst Case Scenario

During another recent coaching session, not specifically related to financial anxiety, the coachee shared with me that they had an impulse to hold on to grant money they received and not spend it on research. Their reasoning was that they could keep the money in reserve for future research expenses in case they never won another grant. However, they had already told me during the session that in the past spending grant money on research expenses produced results that, as you would expect, made their subsequent grant applications stronger.

So I asked that coachee, “Well, let’s say that your worst-case scenario came to pass and you never won another grant. What would happen? Would you still be able to finish your PhD?” We talked through that for a few minutes, and the coachee realized that they had ways to pivot if they didn’t get any more grants and that the proper course of action would be to spend the already received grant money instead of holding onto it.

The coachee had been held up by this decision about what to do with the grant money for some time before we met. Yet all that really needed to happen was to face the dragon, so to speak. Once they looked the dragon of not winning another grant full in the face, they realized that it wasn’t so scary and was in fact manageable.

Other scary potential scenarios that might cause anxiety could be funding being cut off or running out, a soft job market in your chosen field, rising cost of living, or a personal or familial emergency.

Now, realizing that the scenario is manageable is not always going to be the outcome when you decide to address the source of your financial anxiety or stress. However, I think often it is the case that you’ll feel better having fully faced the possible worst case scenario rather than trying not to think about it.

I saw this with the pilot version of Create Your Financial Emergency Response Plan. I asked participants to self-report their financial anxiety on a scale of 1 to 5 at the beginning and end of the workshop, and they reported a 1-point reduction over that span of time. What we did, in part, was face up to the possibility that the participants could lose their primary incomes and created a plan for what resources to draw upon if that happened. The participants left the workshop with a few next steps to carry out or research to increase the chance of their plan successfully helping them navigate a loss of income.

Suggestion #5: Talk with Other People about Money

The last option I’ll put forward for reducing your financial anxiety is to talk with other people about money generally or your financial anxiety in particular. It can really help to know that you’re not alone in your struggles, stress, and anxiety. In fact, these coachees that I’ve been mentioning were taking this exact step when they signed up for a session with me, and several of them spontaneously expressed at the end of our time how much it had helped them emotionally just to talk and hear from me.

Of course, financial coaching isn’t the only way you can accomplish this. You can broach the topic with a friend or family member. Polling shows that financial stress and anxiety are very common among Americans generally, and I have to imagine it’s only increased in our current financially uncertain times. It may help to speak with someone who knows more intimately what’s going on right now in academia and research, like a friend who’s also a peer. I certainly found it easier to talk about money with my fellow grad students back when I was in that stage of life because I knew all of our incomes were within a tight range so we could all relate to one another.

If even speaking with a friend is too much, going back to the small step suggestion, perhaps consume some public financial content. Not if it worsens your anxiety of course, but if you find it helpful. You already know about this podcast. Another podcast that might help is called Money Feels, and I would suggest in particular the early episodes, where they speak often about money trauma. Again, you might find that particular podcast helpful or super not helpful, but there are lots of financial content creators out there on every platform for you to choose among.

That’s it from me for this episode! I hope that if you are experiencing financial anxiety that you will try out one of these suggestions alongside your other general management strategies. If you do, please let me know how it goes!

Outro

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

Are PhDs in a Financial Emergency?

April 7, 2025 by Jill Hoffman

In this episode, Emily shares her thoughts on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency. It’s possible that you are facing a financial emergency because you’ve been laid off or your grants have been terminated or interrupted or there’s some risk of that happening in the future. In this episode, Emily explores 1) what she learned from attending the National Postdoctoral Association’s Annual Conference in March, 2) what steps she recommends that you take in your personal finances and your career if you are in a financial emergency, and 3) what she’s giving away this spring to help you in this turbulent time.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Introduction

This is Season 20, Episode 7, and today you’re getting my thoughts on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency. It’s possible that you are facing a financial emergency because you’ve been laid off or your grants have been terminated or interrupted or there’s some risk of that happening in the future. In this episode, I’m going to share with you 1) what I learned from attending the National Postdoctoral Association’s Annual Conference in March, 2) what steps I recommend that you take in your personal finances and your career if you are in a financial emergency, and 3) what I’m giving away this spring to help you as best I can.

The tax year 2024 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/s20e7/. Without further ado, here’s my episode on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency.

I attended the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference in March, and it was quite valuable for me to get to speak with postdocs and postdoc office personnel about what’s happening on their university campuses and with their jobs. Everything has been so chaotic this spring in terms of the actions of the new administration and the responses from the judicial and legislative branches, it’s really hard to keep up with. Thankfully, some of the presenters pivoted their planned sessions to address what’s been happening and academia’s response, and the conference helped me to clarify a few of my thoughts, which I’ll share with you in this episode. Part 1 is what I took away from the NPA conference. Part 2 is what you can do in your personal finances to best weather the present storm, and I’m going to include specific advice for different stages of PhD training and employment. Part 3 is what I’m giving to you over the next couple of months and why and how you can access everything.

Part 1: My Take-Aways from the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference

This was my first time attending NPA, and I attended as a sponsor, and I thought it was a wonderful conference. I attend conferences both for networking with potential clients and my own professional development, and in this case the timing was really good for me to get a sense of how universities are responding to the funding cuts and so forth. Because this conference was focused on postdocs, I didn’t hear much specifically about graduate education, but I’m sure I will learn more when I attend other similar conferences later this year. At this conference, I especially appreciated the talks from Tom Kibis from the NPA and Nicholas Dirks from the New York Academy of Sciences, the session co-led by Meagan Heirwegh from Caltech, Sofie Kleppner from Stanford, Julia Parrish from the University of Washington, and Zoe Fonseca-Kelly from Harvard, and my conversation with Alberto Roca of Diverse Scholar, as they most directly addressed the current situation.

My overall take-away from the conference is that everyone is bracing for a tough time economically. The tough time has already started but will get worse in the next fiscal year, which typically starts in July, if we continue on the track we’re on. Some universities have instituted hiring freezes, which may or may not extend to postdocs and graduate students. I’m sure we’ve all seen reports of graduate programs rescinding offers and just generally admitting fewer graduate students than has been typical in recent years. Positions that are funded by soft money, which means external grants and contracts, are most at risk of being eliminated.

Tom Kimbis, the CEO of the NPA, referred to the results of a survey of NPA members conducted in February; the survey results and an op-ed by Tom are linked in the show notes. The headline numbers from that survey are that 43% of postdocs say their job or position is threatened and 35% say that their research is delayed or otherwise in jeopardy.

The overall climate of the conference was of great concern for the postdoc workforce, particularly international postdocs. If we don’t see major pushback from Congress or via the judiciary, there will be a lot fewer postdoc positions available next year. Again, we’ve already seen the reduction in PhD program offers, and this is honestly the responsible step for PIs to take as they face uncertainty regarding their grants. So the postdoc itself as a training step is in jeopardy. And, broadening beyond this specific conference, the research enterprise as a whole in the US is under threat.

A lot of current postdocs will need to find new positions in the near future. Again, the highest level of concern is for international postdocs if temporary visas are harder to come by and fewer jobs are available overall. Will those positions be in academia or the federal government? We all know how few people were being hired as tenure-track faculty members before this attack on research, and that market is only going to get tighter, and I think hiring for non-tenure track academic and governmental jobs is also going to be quite limited. Understandably, institutions feel most responsible for their current employees and probably won’t want to extend themselves too much in hiring.

I don’t mean to give the impression that the conference attendees were throwing up their hands in defeat. There was plenty of talk about what people generally and postdocs offices specifically can do to meet the moment, and I heard some creative ideas about how to keep people on payroll to at least give them more time to find another job.

However, from what I heard, most of the discussion was around helping PhDs prepare for and land jobs in “industry.” What I didn’t hear enough discussion about was the likely upcoming recession and how that is already affecting hiring in the private sector. While the pain might be less acute in the private sector in comparison with government and academia, again, if we continue on this route, there will be an overall contraction in the labor market. PhDs typically have a very low unemployment rate, but I am definitely skeptical of industry’s ability to provide jobs to a glut of PhDs exiting the federal government and academia in the coming months. Some private companies are already conducting layoffs, even when not directly or substantially funded by the federal government. Of course, this will be worse in some sectors and not so bad in others, and I expect the most pain will be felt by PhDs in areas of research that are more dependent on funding from the federal government.

So the conclusion is: A lot of PhDs are going to lose their jobs, whether that’s called a layoff or a firing or a contract not being renewed. I suspect the unemployment rate or at least underemployment rate among PhDs is going to go higher than we’ve seen in recent recessions because academia is being targeted, and that PhDs are going to land in jobs that are different from their previous career aspirations. Many PhDs on temporary visas will have to exit the country, even if they would like to stay, because they can’t find an appropriate position fast enough when their current one ends. I’m not much one for prognostication and it really pains me to report such a grim outlook, but that is how I see it.

Part 2: Financial Steps You Should Take Right Now

I want everyone who works in academia or research to consider that they may now or soon be in a financial emergency and to take appropriate steps. Since the main threat at the moment is loss of income, rather than being underpaid or experiencing rapidly rising expenses, the steps are to serve both your finances and your career.

First, I’ll share some steps I think everyone should take, and then I’ll share some stage-specific suggestions. To begin with, please assess your finances holistically. What are your assets: bank account balances, investments, property, etc.? What are your liabilities: credit card debt, buy now pay later debt, student loans, a car loan, a mortgage, medical debt, IRS debt, etc.? What is your current income? What are your current expenses? Specifically, I want you to focus on one type of asset and one type of debt. What I’m sharing next is an abbreviated form of the financial framework that I teach in my live workshops.

The asset is your emergency fund. The best practice is to have a separate, named high-yield savings account for your emergency fund so that you can be super clear about the money available to you in the case of an emergency vs. the money available to spend on a monthly basis on regular expenses or annual basis on irregular expenses. Based on your current expenses, for how many months could your emergency fund support you if you were to lose your primary income? If your answer is that you don’t have an emergency fund or it’s smaller than three months of expenses, please make it your top financial priority to build the fund to that level. This is a slightly larger recommendation than I have made in the past specifically because of the unique threat we are under. You should consider yourself to be in a financial emergency until you reach this goal—more on this in a bit.

The debt is credit card debt. The best practice is to carry no balances on your credit cards, and in fact to use your credit cards as if they are debit cards, only making a purchase if you could pay for it right then with the money already in your bank account. If you could not immediately pay off all your credit cards and switch to using only debit cards, you are in credit card debt—even if you never pay interest. Following the creation of your 3-month emergency fund, your next financial goal should be to clear this credit card debt. However, I recommend that you keep the credit cards open as long as they don’t have an annual fee; you may need these lines of credit in the future if you do lose your income or incur a large, unexpected expense such as a move. Holding debt of this kind also puts you in a financial emergency.

If you’re a little further along in your financial journey, I want you to increase your emergency fund size to six months of expenses. That would be if you have no credit card or other high-interest debt, have other savings for near-term expenses, and have started investing. If all those elements are in place, you’re not in a financial emergency, but you should put some extra financial effort into building your emergency fund to six months of expenses. Once you’ve achieved that goal, you’re in a very strong financial position and don’t have to be quite so intense about keeping a high savings rate.

The next step is to assess your job security and career security. If you haven’t yet, this is the time to talk with your advisor or boss about the source or sources of your paycheck and the group, office, or company’s overall funding. You may learn that the source of your income is entirely or largely independent of federal funding, such as from a private foundation or tuition. You may learn that the source of your income is federal, but there are currently no concerns about its continuity. Or you may learn that the source of your funding is federal and is tenuous. We’ve already seen many grants cancelled or temporarily paused, and so you would probably know if you were in that group because you’ve either already lost your job or you’ve been switched to some kind of emergency or temporary funding. Or perhaps your advisor is currently funded but not optimistic about securing more grants due to the shifted funding priorities of the new administration. In those latter cases, assuming your emergency fund meets the levels I just outlined, throw your efforts into preparing for a job or career transition.

Now let’s get to some practical steps. We’ll do the financial first and then the career. If you’ve self-diagnosed that you’re in a financial emergency or have a financial goal that you should strenuously work toward, how should you do so? Let’s look first at expenses. Normally, when I teach about reducing expenses, I do so with a focus on long-term sustainability, so I talk a lot about right-sizing housing and transportation and other large, fixed expenses. Right now, I’m not so concerned about sustainability, because you have a short-term, highly urgent goal of increasing your emergency fund or paying off high-priority debt. That means slashing your discretionary expenses, essentially engaging in a limited-term fast from anything you can possibly spare.

The question you should ask yourself is: If I had no income right now, would I spend money on this? If the answer is no, don’t spend on it and put all the money you can free up toward your financial goal. I suggest that you stop spending entirely or as close as you can get on discretionary expenses such as restaurants, takeout, and delivery; entertainment; going out; travel; and shopping aside from the bare minimum. The exceptions are for expenses for your job search or career pivot, such as expenses related to interviewing or professional development. Delay every expense that you can delay, even what you might consider necessary expenses. Take a hard look at your subscriptions and cancel everything that you would cancel if you didn’t have an income. You can always restart them when you’ve reached your goal.

For me personally, it would be really hard, but if I didn’t have a fully funded emergency fund right now, I would cancel my gym membership, take my kids out of their pay-by-the-month extracurricular activities, cancel all our streaming services including Amazon Prime, skip my next haircut, and put off some much-desired-but-not-strictly-urgent home repairs.

You can also try to increase your income to reach your urgent financial goals. Normally, when teaching on increasing income, I say to focus on income-generating activities that also advance your career goals. That’s still great work if you can get it, but with our top-of-mind objective of adding to your emergency fund or paying off debt, you can pursue other types of work as well. Whatever gives you the best pay rate-to-time or pay rate-to-energy ratio is worthwhile. In fact, diversifying your income sources so that you are less directly or indirectly dependent on the federal government is a great idea in the short term.

Finally, I suggest planning where you would turn should you lose your income and deplete your emergency fund. If you would turn to debt, think through what is the least toxic type of debt available to you. Credit cards are an easy option, which is why I want you to pay them down but not close them, but as they come at such a high interest rate, they might not be your best option. If you have good credit, you might be able to get another type of loan like a personal loan or a home equity line of credit, but it’s going to be more difficult if you wait until after you’ve lost your income. If things got really dire, would it be possible for you to move in with a family member or friend until you get back on your feet?

Turning our focus back to your job or career, I suggest devoting serious time to professional development, and that goes whether you perceive your job to be at risk or not. Of course, the more unstable your job or career is, the more important it is to engage with this. If you don’t know already, you need to figure out, as I heard one person at NPA put it, your career plans B, C, and D and start setting yourself up to pursue them. If you are affiliated with a university, this means patronizing professional development events and the career center. Check if there are recordings of past events that you can catch up on as a full suite of topics is probably covered over the course of 12 to 24 months.

Networking is vital right now, and again that goes whether you anticipate a near-term job search or not. Yes, use LinkedIn and attend local meet-ups, but also make an effort to connect individually with people you know from past degrees or past jobs. It’s always great to catch up with an old friend or colleague, and it doesn’t have to be like “Can you offer me a job?” Just ask what they’re up to and if their industry has been impacted by the new policies. Then if you do need to come around again with a serious request, it won’t be so out of the blue.

By the way, when you’re networking, keep two things in mind: 1) What can you offer the person you’re speaking with? It could be continued friendship or information or access to your own network. 2) By keeping up with your network, you might very well be able to help a friend or colleague. So do this not just for yourself, but to help the people you know find great-fit jobs and careers. We should all increase our networking activities right now, not just if we have an urgent need.

So far I’ve only mentioned networking with peers and colleagues, but don’t forget that people outside of your profession can be part of your network and prove very helpful, especially if you are considering changing industries. To that end, speak openly about your career aspirations and industry concerns with people you know socially. In fact, it will be a great boon to your mental health if you lean into in person social groups and gatherings in this difficult time. Remember that you are much more than just a researcher; you are a well-rounded human being with unique hobbies, interests, beliefs, etc.

Commercial

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.

Financial Advice for Each Stage of Your Academic Career

We’ve spoken in general terms to this point about assessing your finances and your career stability and some steps you can take to prepare for a loss of income. Nothing I’ve said so far is extreme, and you will improve your finances and career by following the advice, even if you never lose your income. Now let’s delve into some stage-specific advice for those who have lost their income or whose income is at higher risk. We’ll start with people earlier in the PhD career track and move to later.

A) Prospective graduate students: If you’re still interested in graduate school after all this, more power to you. Go ahead and apply next fall or whenever is appropriate for you. But please apply for jobs as well in case admission or funding doesn’t work out. Seriously consider whether a master’s or PhD is more appropriate for your career goals and whether it might be worth paying for a master’s, even if your original plan was to pursue a funded PhD. I can’t yet tell how the landscape will shift between those two types of graduate programs. It might be worth taking a couple of years to work before you head back to graduate school; you will have more clarity about your career goals and what academia can offer you and will also be in a stronger financial position to start graduate school if you use your income intentionally. When you apply to graduate school, please apply widely for fellowships. Consider programs abroad as well as in the US. Also, listen to my advice for rising and current graduate students.

B) Rising graduate students: Some of you have gotten a really raw deal, and I’m sorry. The fact that this attack went down literally during admissions season was the worst possible timing for you. If you’re still headed to graduate school, take a really critical eye to the stability of your funding, and do your best to build financial and career security if you do perceive your funding to be tenuous. More on that next in the section for current graduate students. Also, as you start graduate school, do your best to keep your large, fixed expenses like housing and transportation as low as is comfortable for you so that you can maintain a savings rate. Your emergency fund, etc. could become a lifeline if things go south.

C) Current graduate students: If your funding does not seem to be secure, layer in financial and career stability in other ways. 1) Apply widely for funding opportunities, focusing outside the federal government. 2) Establish at least one side stream of income, if that’s legally and morally permissible for you. Ideally, this would be from a career-advancing activity. 3) Treat every year of graduate school like it might be your last, because it very well might be if your funding evaporates. What I mean by this is that you should have at least one big accomplishment to point to within the last 12 months that will translate well to your resume. That could be completing practical classes, mastering skills, finishing your master’s degree, publishing or patenting, etc. You should also be ready on very short notice to conduct a job search, so stay up-to-date on your professional development, career exploration, and networking. This especially goes for international graduate students, who have a very small window of time available to find another position before they would have to leave the country. 4) Submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. I certainly hope it doesn’t come to this, but if a small student loan will bridge you to the end of your degree which itself would vastly improve your job prospects, it may be worthwhile. 5) Do your research now on the social supports that would be available to you if you did lose your funding or have to leave grad school abruptly. For example, does your department, school, or university offer any kind of bridge employment or funding? Do graduate students qualify for unemployment in your state, and if so under what circumstances? Does your university offer emergency loans or grants to graduate students? Are there programs through your city that would help you pay for rent or groceries if you lost your income?

D) Current postdocs: Much of the same advice for graduate students applies for you as well, although thankfully you have the security of your finished PhD. Take those steps to shore up your financial and career resources, especially if you are an international postdoc. You should also check into whether you would qualify for unemployment in your state should your position end; don’t assume you will, especially if you are a non-employee.

E) PhDs in government, academia, and nonprofits: You know your situation best, but stay frosty. Like everyone else, you should understand how your position is funded to ascertain its potential instability and be ready to transition out at any time. If you haven’t already, I suggest starting the process of separating your personal identity from that of your job. These can become especially intertwined for tenured or tenure-track faculty. If you do have to separate, it will probably be super painful. I suggest listening to the new podcast Academics and Their Money by former podcast guest, Dr. Inga Timmerman.

F) PhDs in the private sector: Your job is probably the most secure of any that we’ve discussed so far, which is not at all the case in normal times. You will be everyone’s best friend right now if you devote some of your time to networking, doubly so if your company is hiring. It may benefit you in the future, but it will almost certainly benefit your friends and peers.

I have a couple of concluding thoughts, and for these I need to thank the most recent episode of the new podcast Optimist Economy, titled Is This a Recession or Not?, and the financial independence movement.

First thought: During a recession, if you manage to keep your job and assuming you didn’t expect to retire super soon, you are going to be financially fine. You might have some anxiety, and perhaps I’ve fed into that today, but you will come through it in good shape. The pain of recessions is felt mostly by people who lose their jobs, and typically, it’s not so much the losing of the job that’s the worst, it’s the time it takes to get another job, which is lengthened during recessions. That’s why I’ve focused so much time today speaking about how you can prepare yourself for the loss of your income. It’s a low-probability but high-risk event.

However, we have the added wrinkle in the PhD community of being super specialized in our research or skills and perhaps even the sector in which we expect to perform that research or use those skills. For PhDs in academia and government and nonprofit research settings especially, losing your job is so much more than a temporary disruption in income. It’s a rupture of your identity because of how much of yourself you had to put into breaking into that career path. In another time, you might have been able to get a similar job, but that just might not be the case right now if your whole field is contracting. Losing your job might feel like the end of your career. It’s not, it doesn’t have to be, but if you feel that way, it’s going to take some serious inner work to decouple your career from your identity and move on. In this, we can take some inspiration from the financial independence movement. Many early retirees have modeled this process of finding yourself outside of your career. It will look different for someone who is still working, but it is a good example.

Second thought: One of the scariest aspects of losing your job in the good old U S of A is that you likely lose your health insurance as well. That part of it is almost as horrible as losing your income, especially if you are chronically ill or have dependents. There are solutions, however, and again these have been well explored by the financial independence community. It may help you alleviate some anxiety to think through what you would do specifically about health insurance if you were to lose your position.

You might be able to hop onto your spouse or partner’s insurance or your parent’s insurance, depending on your specific eligibility and the cost of doing so. Some insurance plans offer a program known as COBRA, in which you can continue with your same coverage for up to 18 months after you lose your job. Your workplace likely offers COBRA, but your student health insurance plan probably doesn’t qualify. If you are eligible for COBRA, you have up to 60 days to enroll in the program and it covers you retroactively, so you could wait up to 60 days to see if you actually need insurance before starting to pay any premiums. The premiums are going to feel high because you have to pay the portion that your employer was paying previously in addition to the portion you paid before. Another good option is to purchase a health insurance plan through the ACA marketplace in your state. This is the fallback plan for most early retirees who stay in the US, and it is a good one, especially since you likely will just be on the plan in the short term. Finally, another type of plan that’s popular with early retirees is a health care sharing ministry, which is not proper health insurance but serves some of the same functions as health insurance. People like it because it’s less expensive than proper health insurance. I will leave it to you to look into further and decide whether this is a viable or preferable option for you should you lose your job.

Part 3: What I’m Offering You for Free

A few weeks ago, I was feeling really despondent and powerless in the face of all these terrible changes, so I decided to embark on what I’m calling Giveaway Spring. I finished all my scheduled speaking engagements by the end of February, so I have an unusual amount of free time between now and the end of the academic year, and I’ve decided to give away a lot of it.

If you aren’t already on my mailing list and you want to sign up for any of these giveaways, please register through PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/. You’ll receive an email with all the current giveaways being offered, and I’ll update my mailing list periodically as I add items. I’m planning on expanding the content I’ve shared in this episode into a full webinar, for example, and I’ll give a pilot of that webinar away to a limited number of people on my mailing list after I put it together.

Here are some of the items on offer as part of Giveaway Spring:

1) I’m offering free 60-minute Q&A calls to cross-institutional groups. This would be perfect for a professional society or interest group that has a lot of PhDs and PhDs-to-be. You don’t even have to be on my list to schedule one of those, just email me at [email protected].

2) I’m offering free 30-minute coaching sessions, four per week between now and early June. These are going fast so once you get the link, keep checking back as availability opens up on a rolling basis.

3) I’ve collected all my best free templates and downloadables into one easy folder.

4) I’m hosting a free AMA with Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator specializing in graduate students and PhDs, on April 8, 2025. You can register via PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/.

5) I’m giving away other people’s books! The first giveaway is for The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond by Ilana Horwitz. I will keep cycling through my favorite personal finance and academia books throughout the spring. You can sign up for the book giveaway directly at PFforPhDs.com/BookGiveaway/.

6) I’m sharing free opportunities hosted by other groups or people as I find out about them. For example, Princeton’s GradFUTURES conference from a couple of weeks ago went out to my list, and right now via PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/ you can sign up for an upcoming free webinar from AccessLex titled “Navigating Recent Updates to Student Loan Repayment and Forgiveness.” If you are hosting or know of free events or resources that are related to PhD personal finance or careers that you think I should pass along, please notify me—I would be happy to do so!

Again, the link to find out about all the current giveaways is PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/. I would really appreciate you sharing that link with your peers. I’m trying to get two things out of these efforts: 1) goodwill within our community and 2) new mailing list subscribers. So you can really help me out with both of those goals by sharing PFforPhDs.com/Giveaway/ or any of the other links I’ve mentioned in this section.

I would be very happy to hear your reactions to the content of this episode if you would like to share them with me. Perhaps you’re hearing different messaging from your university or employer or you think I missed a good piece of advice. Please share any comments with me at [email protected]. Good luck this spring, this year, and this four years. I’m rooting for you.

Outro

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

March 10, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 2 Comments

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ilana Horwitz, a professor at Tulane University and the author of the newly released book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. Ilana explains how a grad student or academic can be an entrepreneurial scholar and why it is so beneficial in an environment of uncertainty and limited resources. Ilana and Emily discuss the necessity for grad students to become the CEOs of their own educations and careers. Finally, they explore in more detail ideas from the chapter on how to leverage resources, both human and monetary.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

Purchase Dr. Ilana Horwitz’s book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond, use the code IMH20 to receive a discount!

Teaser

Ilana (00:00): It helps you sort of to have an identity outside of academia to have sort of self-worth in yourself, right? To understand that you are a person that isn’t just bound up with your academic identity. Because if, again, the academic job market doesn’t work out, the crisis that one has about their sense of self-worth is like maybe a little bit less, knowing that you have value in some other capacity.

Introduction

Emily (01:03): This is Season 20, Episode 5, and today my guest is Dr. Ilana Horwitz, a professor at Tulane University and the author of the newly released book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. Ilana explains how a grad student or academic can be an entrepreneurial scholar and why it is so beneficial in an environment of uncertainty and limited resources. Ilana and I discuss the necessity for grad students to become the CEOs of their own educations and careers. Finally, we explore in more detail ideas from the chapter on how to leverage resources, both human and monetary.

Emily (01:44): The tax year 2024 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/s20e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ilana Horwitz.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:56): I am delighted to have a return guest on the podcast today, Dr. Ilana Horwitz, who’s a professor at Tulane University, and the author of the new newly released book titled The Entrepreneurial Scholar and Ilana’s previous episode on the podcast was season 16, episode four, and we get a lot more of like her personal story about being a parent in graduate school and like all the resources she marshaled to, you know, financially get through that period. But it’s interesting, she and I were just looking back at our email exchanges. We first got connected back, you know, over a year about two years ago, um, because she was starting to write this book and wanted to, you know, give for, wanted me to give a short interview for it. And I ended up interviewing her and that came out quite a while ago. But now the book that she’s been working on for so long is finally out. And so that’s our subject for today, the Entrepreneurial scholar. So Ilana, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Will you please give a brief introduction for the audience?

Ilana (03:50): Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Emily. It’s great to be back. Um, as you mentioned, yes, I am trained as a sociologist of religion and education. I am in the Jewish studies and sociology department at Tulane University. I’ve been here, um, for four years, and before that I spent a decade at Stanford as a grad student and as a postdoc.

What Is An Entrepreneurial Scholar?

Emily (04:10): Excellent. I wanna jump right in to like, what, what is this book about? Because it’s not about, as I, you know, maybe thought just by reading the title, it’s not about academics or PhDs who want to become entrepreneurs. We have a slightly different spin on that. So can you tell us the working definitions you have for like an entrepreneur and also an entrepreneurial scholar from the book?

Ilana (04:31): Absolutely, yes. So this is a little bit of a different definition of what entrepreneurship means. When I say entrepreneurship and when I talk about entrepreneurial scholarship, I’m specifically talking about the ability to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. What I don’t mean by entrepreneurship is, uh, I’m not talking about trying to take a neoliberal approach to academia, uh, that advocates for the corporatization of the academy. I am not talking about applying market models to universities, and I’m also not talking about the kinds of sort of, um, business oriented research firms. And as you mentioned, I’m also not talking about necessarily starting some sort of, um, venture on the side, which is like what most people of think of when I say entrepreneurial, uh, thinking. And so again, being an entrepreneurial scholar means being a- able to generate ideas, right? That is the product that is like the currency with which we work. Being able to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. That is what entrepreneurs do. And it’s actually also what scholars do when we are at, um, when we are sort of working within the constraints of what academia is.

Emily (05:51): And one of the things that I found really interesting about your book is that, and this is actually what how you ended up quoting me, like within the subject matter, um, is that going, we’re not just talking about like academics like you, like who have, you know, career professors and that kind of thing. We’re going all the way back to basically the grad student stage and how this mindset can be helpful in, in fact is necessary even from that point of making that transition from undergrad to graduate student. And you just mentioned, um, you know, ideas are the product that we work with within academia. And so I just wanted you to expound on this a little bit more. Like what is this transition that a person has to go through from being a, an excellent undergraduate <laugh> to being a successful graduate student? And why do so many people kind of get stuck or mired along the way and don’t make that transition successfully?

Ilana (06:40): Yeah, absolutely. The main mindset shift that I think people need to make is being able to shift from being a consumer of information to a producer of knowledge. And I really didn’t understand this. I think when I started my PhD program and it was at my orientation that, um, a professor said, right to all the incoming students, like, your job is no longer to consume information, it is to produce knowledge. And what that meant for me as this like realization that my entire life I have been evaluated on the basis of like my ability to consume information and regurgitate it back to the teacher, right? That’s what we generally do in K 12. That’s mostly what we do in college, right? And I was actually never very good at this. Um, which is, I ultimately, I think what ended helped me love graduate school. Um, but when I realized that graduate school is about being able to, um, is, is really about this production of knowledge, meaning that you are now like playing detective and it is up to you what is the problem in the world that you wanna pursue.

Ilana (07:45): And it is up to you how you wanna pursue it and when you wanna pursue it and what resources you wanna pursue it. Like you have so much agency in the process and your grades no longer matter. And for me, that was really liberating. But for a lot of people that’s really debilitating. And the reason it is debilitating is because people who often end up in PhD programs are people who are so good at school and meaning that they were so good at navigating the, what I call the or sociologists of education called the hidden curriculum of school. Like the rules and the routines and regulations, right? They’re like pros at this and they’re like, oh, I’m so good at school that I should go pro. And going pro means going to a PhD program, right? You are a career sort of, uh, student career students, um, aren’t necessarily great at having the mindset to sort of think outside the confines of what is expected of you.

Ilana (08:35): And so when grad school starts and you have a bunch of, you know, requirements, it’s okay, but then the script falls away. And then that is when I think panic, uh, sets in for a lot of people. ’cause it’s like, wait, now there are no rules and there are no routines and there are no regulations, like, what am I supposed to do? And then they, there’s this resentment of like, why isn’t my advisor telling me what, what to do? And like, why isn’t it super clear? And so the ability to like, instead of feeling that moment as debilitating, but instead of, uh, embracing it and embracing that autonomy, I think is like the big mindset shift that needs to happen.

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Education

Emily (09:08): I totally agree. And I, I see, you know, in retrospect how I kind of f- faltered in that myself during graduate school. And it was, it was difficult and you just used the term like script. I think that’s a really, really good way of putting this, like, as you said, you can master how it is to be good at school, you know, all the way up through the end of undergrad and be successful in that. And then once you reach graduate school, you have to really forge your own path. And it’s not totally cl- it’s not just, you know, x, y, z and then you get a degree. It’s a completely like unique experience. And the term that you use in the book, which I really loved is, um, becoming the CEO of your own education. And one of the reasons why I liked this is because it made me think about your education is not just what you do in graduate school, it’s a holistic picture of everything that goes into who you are professionally. And that could be experiences that you have through your classes and through your research and with your advisor and with your colleagues, but it could include a whole lot more than that. And you had a lot of examples in the book of people, um, seeking out experiences that, um, you know, using this mindset of being an entrepreneurial scholar that ultimately led them to the creation that they, you know, were in, were in graduate school or in their careers and to do so. I just really liked that like, framing of it. Did you wanna say anything more about that, that phrasing or how you view it?

Ilana (10:30): Yeah, that’s such a great question because right, my PhD is from a school of education, so I also, uh, think of education as a much more holistic endeavor. And when I think about your P- one’s PhD journey, and if I reflect on my own right, it’s so much more than what I learned in my classes. Um, and so for example, in the book I talk about this experience that I created for myself where I realized at one moment, maybe around my fourth year that I really needed teaching experience, um, as a Stanford, a PhD student in my program. Like I didn’t have to teach, I only had to be a research assistant. And I was like, how do I create an opportunity for myself to go teach? I ended up going to teach at a community college. And so when I think about my own education, I learned so much from that experience of being a community college, um, professor, both from the students in the class who were very different than most of the people I spent time with. They were like working adults mo- mostly first gen, low income, um, students of color. And so not only did I learn from them, but I also learned what it means to sort of educate a different population and what it means to sort of talk about sociological concepts to people who generally don’t come from elite backgrounds. And, um, and so all of that right, was part of my education. Uh, and my education also when I think about my PhD was about navigating things like gender expectations in the academy and like being, um, a sort of, uh, in a household, um, where I had to navigate gender dynamics, um, as everyone mostly has to. Um, and it was about doing a bunch of side hustles, uh, so that I could learn like, what does it mean to do, you know, statistics like act- for ac- an actual client as opposed to doing it for a class. Um, so yes, education is this like much more holistic experience, um, as you mentioned,

Emily (12:22): And now this is a little bit of a sidebar, but it’s kind of a soapbox that I get onto from time to time on the podcast, which is I really think it’s shortsighted of graduate programs to, um, disallow their students. And maybe this was not your experience, but it is in some places to disallow their students from taking outside work opportunities, very much like the ones you just mentioned, adjuncting, you know, side hustling using their skills that they’ve learning graduate school. Um, I get it that they want them to stay focused on finishing their dissertations. Um, but it’s, as I just said, it’s very shortsighted because many of these kinds of side hustles can be, um, augmenting as we were just talking about being the CEO of your own education and making you a better prepared professional once you get to the end of graduate school. So, um, yeah, little <laugh> just a little sidebar there, but I don’t know if you have any comments about, about that and how faculty might in some places view these kind of side endeavors.

Ilana (13:16): Yeah, I think it’s tricky, right? Because I, as you said, like I understand from the faculty’s perspective that they want students to be really focused because once you have some sort of job, especially if it’s like a full-time job, it’s really hard to stay focused on your research. But, um, I also feel very strongly and uh, and I did this myself, that when you take those outside opportunities, you are both, um, building your skillset, developing a network that’s really important. And also like, just being really realistic about the fact that most people who start a PhD program are not gonna end up in a a professor position, right? A very, very tiny percentage of people will end up in the, uh, being able to get a tenure track position or even a non-tenure track position. So it’s just like to, to navigate the uncertainty of academia means being really realistic with what the prospects are and to buffer yourself against that, uh, sort of crisis that is gonna come when you realize you can’t get a job. It’s really helpful to know that you have other options. Um, in my case, um, the School of Education, look, it didn’t have, I think there was a policy and some professors sort of instituted the policy more than others. I will say that, um, there was certainly not enthusiasm for me pursuing this, uh, teaching position at a community college, but I made the case, um, of why it was beneficial. And so it was allowed. And then I, and then there was a bunch of stuff that I did without telling anybody, and it was totally fine because I’m very good at being the CEO of my own education and I sort of knew what I could manage and what was valuable, like what, when I thought about it from a cost benefit ratio, like how much time am I spending on something versus the value I get out of it? And I have no regrets about pursuing anything, um, outside of academia and in the book, there are several examples of people who I interviewed, um, of how transformative those opportunities were. Because one is, it helps you sort of to have an identity outside of academia to have sort of self-worth in yourself, right? To understand that you are a person that isn’t just bound up with your academic identity. Because if, again, the academic job market doesn’t work out, the crisis that one has about their sense of self-worth is like maybe a little bit less knowing that you have value in some other, um, sort of capacity. And some, um, there have been some like amazing opportunities that people got because, you know, one person who I interviewed, Tamara worked for Kamala Harris, uh, on Fridays, and that led to a bunch of other opportunities. And particularly like if you’ve never worked outside of an academic setting, like if you are a person who’s pretty much going straight through from undergrad to your PhD, it’s really important to work in the outside world to understand sort of like the real, how the world, real world functions and not just be in like the academic bubble.

Emily (16:13): Absolutely. I, I totally agree everything you just said. Um, and I guess maybe a, a a corollary, like a, another interpretation of CEO of your own education is CEO of your own career, because you don’t know for sure that you are gonna end up in academia. And it makes sense, as you were just saying, to have, um, built an image of yourself that’s bigger than just an academic in case that career path, if it’s one you’re even going for, um, doesn’t work out. And you can still be an entrepreneurial scholar in graduate school and pivot to something else outside of it. But, um, the point that I wanted to make is that being the CEO of your own career maybe includes some career development experiences that you wouldn’t, you aren’t automatically being pushed into as a graduate student, but that are available to you probably from the graduate school and the career center and so forth. And just being able to like, spend some time exploring those professional development, um, resources and career ideas can, can really help you whenever you are making that next transition point,

Ilana (17:07): Right? And I talk in the book about like, you cannot predict the future, but you can help create it. And that’s, uh, I think an important lesson because all these things that you’re doing can help create your future, um, and it helps sort of offset that uncertainty that we as grad students, uh, sort of have to live with on a, on a day-to-day basis.

Emily (17:29): Yeah, and I, I really love that you talked in the book about uncertainty and about limited resources and oh my gosh, how timely is this? We’re recording this in February, 2025, and as of now there’s been these executive orders. We don’t know in academia how this is all gonna shake out whether there’s gonna be a massive funding decrease, um, you know, know layoffs. We don’t know. We’re in a period of uncertainty. And so how, I mean, it’s, it’s horrible timing in a sense, but it’s good timing for your book to like sort of land in this moment where in academia there’s probably a lot of questions going around about what, what resources do I have? What’s the value that I can bring here? What is my career path going to look like? And so, well, for that reason, if not any other, maybe it’s time to, you know, pick up this book.

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Emily (18:15): 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.

Leveraging Available Resources as an Academic

Emily (19:07): And since we were just talking about scarce resources, um, I was really compelled by the, the book is basically five, five big ideas, five big chapters, and I was really compelled by the fourth one, which is around leveraging the resources available to you as a graduate student or as an academic. And so can you just expound a little bit more about what kinds of resources, um, might be available to a graduate student or an academic that could, you know, help them as an entrepreneurial scholar?

Ilana (19:33): Yeah, absolutely. So I actually start off the book with this idea of that being, um, thinking entrepreneurially means asking yourself, given who I am, what I know, and who I know, what kind of opportunities could I create for myself? And so here we are thinking about sort of, um, like the intellectual capital that you have, the human capital that you have, and the social capital that you have, right? Who do you know, what do you know? And who are you, um, to start thinking about how you can leverage all of that. So let me talk about this. First of all, this idea of like who, you know, in academia and particularly in the humanities, um, we tend to sort of think of, um, this very, this like lone scholar sitting in a library doing work very independently. And I really wanna disrupt this idea even in the humanities, because even if you’re writing a monograph, I wanna put forth the idea that scholarship is a community sport. Even if you end up writing alone, why is it a community sport? I want people to sort of imagine that the academic landscape is this vast network where each node is a person and each link is a potential collaboration or a shared idea, or even like just a mutual support system, um, because nobody should be doing this alone. And I remember even like as a grad student, I’m in the social sciences, so there isn’t a fair amount of collaboration, but the sort of reticence that some of my colleagues had to ask each other for help to seek out help from, um, more senior people was, was astonishing to me because I came from working in startups and in management consulting where it was very, very common to just ask for help or ask for other people for ideas. So when I say that I want people to think of scholarship as a community sport, what, what that means in practice is like thinking about your network and relationships that you have, not just like, how do you in an icky way try to extract value from that, right? That’s an icky like, um, and I think incorrect version of what it means to network. Instead, I want people to think about networking as the opportunity to actually help other people, right? Not extracting value, but actually putting yourself out there so that your idea and someone else’s idea or sort of your problem and the problem that someone else is experiencing, um, can have sort of mutually beneficial, um, solutions, right? That you in, in partnership with other people can problem solve together, right? And so for example, um, at one point in when I was a sort of latter stage grad student, I was working on a paper, um, and I got really stuck on it. Um, and a new postdoc came to Stanford and I, we were having lunch and I started telling him about this paper. Um, and then I realized that like what I was missing was like a whole framing around gender.

Ilana (22:26): He happened to be a gender scholar, and I realized like it would be really beneficial if he came and joined as an author on this paper. Um, and it was this very, very mutually beneficial decision and collaboration that by the way, has a, actually ended up, that paper ended landed in the top sociology journal. And I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that alone. And since then, he and I have collaborated on several other, uh, other things. Um, but it wasn’t like I was like, oh, this, this person is coming and I wanna just extract value, um, by having lunch with ’em and like seeing what I can sort of get out of that person. Like I knew that this would be a me- mutually beneficial relationship. Um, and so there are many ways to think about how can you identify people in your network, but also develop relationships with people who are outside of your network, um, by thinking about like, where might you have complimentary skills with other people? Um, how might you be able to offer value to somebody else’s project? Right? And so not just thinking about your own career advancement, but thinking about like, how can we do more with what we have, um, by, by collaborating, right? If like, I think of, uh, I think therefore I am instead, like, I think therefore I collaborate.

Emily (23:38): Hmm. Yeah. As you were talking about that, I was just thinking like, yes, this is such a human endeavor. Like it’s human to have relationships with other people and build things together. And I like what you said there because under, under the topic of like leveraging resources, really what you’re saying is think of yourself as a resource that you can offer to other people, and then they mutually can offer their resource of themselves in this case back to you. So it’s, it’s, it’s quite mutual. So I love that. Um, any other sort of categories of, of ways people can leverage resources?

Ilana (24:11): So when people hear the terms leverage resources, they immediately think of money, right? And sort of funding. And so I would do wanna touch upon that and what does it mean to sort of think entrepreneurially about funding? Um, in the book I give examples of people who, uh, have been very successful at getting different fellowships. And there are different ways to think about how to be strategic in those. Like do you go for a bunch of sort of small, low, uh, uh, sort of low bar, uh, grants where it doesn’t take very much to apply to them? Like maybe you can repurpose something and then you just apply to a bunch of really small things. Or do you invest several months into putting together something that has, uh, bigger, bigger reward, right? You always wanna be thinking in all of academic life, you wanna diversify your risk, uh, sort of risk benefit portfolio. And funding is one of those things. Um, I’ll give an example of something that happened to me recently because a lot of thinking entrepreneurially is like taking advantage of opportunities that you didn’t necessarily expect. And so recently, um, Tulane had, uh, somebody from the Russell Sage Foundation come and give a talk about, you know, their funding streams. And I went, and in that talk I realized, I was like, oh, I don’t have anything relevant for this, because they’re looking for really early, more early stage projects than anything that I have. Um, I sort of wrote it off, you know, like I didn’t even take the opportunity to meet with a program officer. And then about a month later I had kind of like a crisis in one of my projects that resulted in me pulling out of the project for a variety of reasons. Um, and I, I was having this like sort of moment of both, like panic, but also seeing opportunity emerge from this breakup where I was like, oh my gosh, like this gives me an opportunity to actually do a totally different study. Uh, and I was like, oh gosh, but that’s like really early stage. Where would I get funding? And I was like, wait a minute. I was like, I just sat through one of those RSF things. So right away I contacted the person at Tulane who had set up that program officer to come and I said, I all of a sudden have an idea, is it too late to meet with them? And she said, let me get in touch. So I met with a program officer, I learned so much, I told them what my idea was, and through that conversation I learned about like some stuff that, about their grants that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out just based off of their website. Like it turns out that there was a stream of funding that wasn’t gonna continue and it would be very beneficial for me to apply to, to this particular stream of funding. So I did, and I submitted, um, a letter of intent, um, which is their first stage. And I actually made it through to the, to the proposal stage. So I should hear back in a couple of weeks about whether I got it or not. But I at least feel very good that I made it through the LOI stage. And again, the like, key takeaway is I didn’t, you know, the sort of, I put myself out there, I went to the session, I didn’t think anything would come of it. And then when I had this like moment of, of crisis and I, and I saw opportunity, I was like, oh, wait a minute, I can connect the dots here. So, so thinking about like, um, expansively about funding and resources, um, and just like sometimes going to stuff that you may think doesn’t have any benefit for you, you never know when there will be, um, a payoff.

Emily (27:24): Hmm. And I’ll speak as a business owner, I actually don’t identify with the term entrepreneur for my particular type of business, but as a business owner, I have to think about the revenue streams in my business. And I have, I might have predictions about which revenue streams are gonna work out to what capacity, but it’s really beneficial, as you were just saying, to have, um, ideas maybe on the back burner, <laugh> of other revenue streams, other fellowships, other grants you could apply to. And so if you have the capacity, like in your example that you just gave, if you suddenly have the capacity to be applying for things or putting effort into an area that you weren’t before, then you say, oh, I, I have some background in this. I know how to turn this on in a, in a quicker way than just, you know, starting completely like cold. I really love that example. Anything else you wanna add? Um, I, I, just for the podcast listeners, especially if you’re a longtime podcast listener, chapter four of this book is really special because Ilana included, um, my podcast, like interviews as some of the resources and also interviewed some other people that I’ve had on the podcast before. So like, it was like seeing some old friends in this chapter, which was really exciting. And also, of course also pulled in some other interviews that I found really, um, great. So I thought you actually summed this up really well in the, you know, concluding notes for that chapter where you said, remember, every funding opportunity is also a chance to expand your community and collaborate with others who share your vision and actually ties really well both of those points, um, together. So thank you so much. Anything else you wanna add in about this leveraging resources topic?

Ilana (28:48): I’ll add one more thing, and this is sort of the, this idea of connecting with people so that you can expand your knowledge of what is possible in the world. And what I mean by that is there are things like that I remember as a doctoral student that I was like, there’s no way that I can do this because I have no mental map and I have no schema in my head for how to make this possible. So for example, um, at towards the end of grad, grad school, I was like, I wanna write a book. I had written a multiple multi paper dissertation, but I wanted to write a book, but I have no mental model of how you go about writing a book when you are a PhD student. And it seemed like out of the realm of possibility. And nowhere in my graduate program did anyone ever train me to think about this. Um, and I had a friend who as a grad student was able to, uh, not a friend, he wasn’t even at my institution, but, but it was someone who I had met along the way. Uh, and I knew that he had been able to secure not one, but sort of two offers from prestigious public, uh, book presses, um, for an advanced contract. And I was like, wait, that’s a thing. I didn’t know that was possible. And once I knew it was a thing and he helped me understand how it became a thing and walked me through all the steps that he went through and even shared his proposal, I had this like ability to think beyond what I could think about earlier. I was like, oh, if he could do it, maybe I could do it too, and here’s what it could look like. And I followed some of the similar steps, um, and it became possible. Um, so I think we, we don’t think of collaborating, um, as sort of an opportunity to think beyond ourselves, but that’s what it does for me. It gives me the, the poss- that that sort of opportunity to imagine possibilities that I thought were off the table.

The Origin Story of The Entrepreneurial Scholar Book

Emily (30:37): Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. So this is your second book and you use this book as an example in, I believe it’s the fifth chapter of, um, a an entrepreneurial scholarship activity, right? Of publishing a book. So, um, can you just tell us really briefly how the book, um, came about?

Ilana (30:56): Yeah, the book came about, um, from something I totally didn’t expect and out of a sort of a story of failure, which I think is like a very defining, uh, feature of entrepreneurship. When I was a graduate student at the very end of grad school, I was a sixth year, you know, I wasn’t even taking classes, but because I was in this mindset of like, I wanna get everything I can out of Stanford while I’m here and while it’s free, um, I decided to, I was auditing a bunch of classes. I was auditing classes on like how to be a good public speaker and improv. And one of the classes I audited was how to Write for the Public. And it was taught by Sam Weinberg, a professor, um, at the School of Education. And our final assignment was to write an op-ed, right? Not surprisingly, and mostly everyone in the class took this opportunity to write an op-ed about their research. And at the time I was about to graduate and I was reflecting sort of deeply about how my own PhD journey, um, went. Um, and so I took this opportunity to write, um, an op-ed that like, basically I submitted to a couple places and it failed. It did not get published. And it was really frustrating. And Sam, who, um, who I really, really have to give a lot of credit to, he was like, you, you shouldn’t give up on this idea. There’s something there, there. And even if you sort of put it down for a little while, you have to promise me that one day you will pick it back up because I see it, it has a future. Like he, he believed in it. Um, and so for two years, Emily, I kid you not two years, this thing just like sat on my computer. And so about a week before I started my job at Tulane, I was already in my new office and I was about to go home for the day and I was like, you know what? I was, was like, I have childcare. Nothing is gonna like blow up at home if I just like stay in the office for two more hours and I’m gonna pick up that op-ed and I’m gonna dust it off, you know, and see what I can do with it. ’cause I promised Sam that I would. And, and I did, and I, I sort of spoke from a place of what I knew, like I leaned into this startup and, um, consulting experience that I had and I wrote this op-ed that was, or I revised it I think with the title Why PhD students Should Think Like Entrepreneurs. And I submitted and then I thought about, okay, I have this, where can I submit it to? At that point, I already had published once in Inside Higher Ed, so I submitted it to them, right? That was like the, the, the, the most obvious choice. I already had a personal connection there. And within two hours they wrote me back and I, and they were like, yeah, this is great, we will take it. And I was like, oh, that was easy. Okay. And then a few weeks later it came out and, you know, I got a, a couple of nice emails from, um, faculty and some from therapists who said how much this resonated for them and working with grad students. And then I got the most unexpected email. It was from, uh, the editor at Princeton University Press, Peter, and he was like, this is great. Do you wanna flesh this out into a book? And I was like, I’m sorry, come again, <laugh>, uh, you want me to write a book on this topic? And so that, that is the, the sort of birth story of this book. Um, and so it really came out of something very unexpected and to, to write this book, I went out and I interviewed about, um, 45 people who hold either different positions in academia or who have left academia or who are entrepreneurs. So this book really required me to think about like, who am I? What do I know and who do I know to make it happen? So in that way, it is very much like a story of an entrepreneurial, uh, endeavor.

Emily (34:30): Absolutely. I can see that so clearly. I’m so glad that you brought that up so that I could ask you this question about how the book came to be. Um, and so interesting that there was that two year just time period, and I dunno what it was, I don’t know if it was the rewriting that you did or how things had changed in your perspective in two years, or how the world had changed in the two years, but somehow the idea clearly hit <laugh> the second time around. Um, and that’s, that’s fantastic. Where can people find the book?

Ilana (34:57): The people can find the book at Princeton University Press, and I think in your show notes, uh, I can share a, uh, discount code, um, that people can use. People can also find it on Amazon as well as learn more about it on my website, www.IlanaHorwitz, that’s I-L-A-N-A-H-O-R-W-I-T-Z.com. Uh, and I encourage people to reach out to me, uh, if they wanna learn more about it.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (35:27): All right, and since you said that you love dispensing advice, we have one more opportunity for you to do so, which is with the standard question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it could be something completely new.

Ilana (35:44): My best advice is to pursue a side hustle if possible. And I recognize that it is not possible for everyone, especially international students, students who are parents. Um, I get that this is something that isn’t available to everybody, but if you have the opportunity and sometimes the pay might be so bad, like my first side hustle, I made $12 an hour and it was absolutely worth it because I gained so many skills from the experience. But don’t just think about it from a financial perspective, think about all the other different ways that it could benefit you. Um, and the money that you get on the side is also a really nice perk.

Emily (36:26): Very good. Uh, thanks for tying all those themes together. Well, Ilana, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you again.

Ilana (36:34): Thanks Emily.

Outtro

Emily (36:45): Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

PhD with a Real Job

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Feeling Financially Dissatisfied in Academia

Recovering Academics Peer Support Group

Common Limiting Beliefs Among Recovering Academics

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The Problem With Academia’s “Not in It for the Money” Mindset

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Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

How Negotiation Became a Passion for Dr. Kate Sleeth

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Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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What Does It Mean to Live on Time Financially?

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

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3) Keep up with your tax obligations.

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What Is Financial Anxiety?

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Suggestion #2: Take Just One Small Step

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Suggestion #5: Talk with Other People about Money

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Part 1: My Take-Aways from the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Conference

Part 2: Financial Steps You Should Take Right Now

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Financial Advice for Each Stage of Your Academic Career

Part 3: What I’m Offering You for Free

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What Is An Entrepreneurial Scholar?

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Education

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Leveraging Available Resources as an Academic

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Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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