PhD with a Real Job

How You and Your Higher-Earning Partner Manage Your Money Affects Relationship Satisfaction

September 28, 2026 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Emily Garbinsky, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell who studies how couples behave with their money. Emily first reviews the common models for structuring money within couples and the surprising effect the choice has on relationship satisfaction. Emily and Emily then discuss income disparities, such as those between a PhD trainee and a higher-earning partner, and how power dynamics can affect how couples choose to split expenses. Finally, Emily shares her thoughts about how to adapt when an income disparity shrinks or even flips and the unique career challenge facing academics and their partners.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How You and Your Higher-Earning Partner Manage Your Money Affects Relationship Satisfaction

Teaser

Emily G (00:00): Based on the science that’s out there, I don’t think we can make a claim that joint finances lead to objectively better financial decisions, but we do know that it helps to get couples on the same page, so it at least helps with more transparency and can help them achieve their goals.

Introduction

Emily (00:18): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:50): This is Season 25, Episode 3, and today my guest is Dr. Emily Garbinsky, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell who studies how couples behave with their money. Emily first reviews the common models for structuring money within couples and the surprising effect the choice has on relationship satisfaction. Emily and I then discuss income disparities, such as those between a PhD trainee and a higher-earning partner, and how power dynamics can affect how couples choose to split expenses. Finally, Emily shares her thoughts about how to adapt when an income disparity shrinks or even flips and the unique career challenge facing academics and their partners.

Emily (01:34): This fall, I’m presenting four virtual seminars on personal finance topics for prospective and current funded graduate students in the US. The first two are practice rounds for presentations I’m giving at ABRCMS in November, titled The Grad Student Financial Checkup and Will the Stipend Be Enough?. The second two are chapter topics from my book, titled Increase Your Income Inside or Outside of Academia and The Most Effective Frugal Strategies for Grad Students. I invite you to participate in these seminars for free in exchange for your feedback on the material. The seminars will be on four consecutive Fridays between October 23rd and November 13, 2026. I’m unlikely to ever offer this content again in this format, so grab your spot now! Go to PFforPhDs.com/FreeSeminars/ to register. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s25e3/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Emily Garbinsky.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily R (02:47): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Emily Garbinski, who is an associate professor of marketing at Cornell in the SC Johnson College of Business. I actually heard Emily on an episode of So Money, which is one of my favorite podcasts. It was published back in February of 2026, if you wanna go back and listen to that episode. Farnoosh Torabi is the host of that podcast. It’s an excellent episode and it just got me thinking about how we could leverage Emily’s expertise for the topics that I and you care about as funded graduate students and postdocs and early career PhDs. And specifically, we’re gonna be talking about couples and money and how couples handle finances. And specifically, we’re gonna get down to when there are income disparities, as you might be experiencing in your own relationship if you’re in one, and even what happens when those income disparities flip polarity. So we’ll get to that by the end of the interview. Emily, I’m so excited that you agreed to join me on the podcast. Would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

Emily G (03:45): Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be on the show. So as mentioned, my name’s Emily Garbinski. I’m an associate professor of marketing at Cornell. Just some background on me. So I did my undergraduate education, Carnegie Mellon University, and I got a bachelor’s in decision science. From there, I moved to west coast best coast and spent five years getting my PhD in marketing from Stanford. My first academic job was at the University of Notre Dame. I spent six years on the faculty there, and then I moved to Cornell, and I’ve been here for five years.

From Decision Science to How Couples Manage Their Finances

Emily R (04:22): Excellent. Thank you so much for elaborating there. Just based on what you’ve mentioned so far, decision science and marketing, I’m not hearing personal finance, I’m not hearing relationships in that yet. Like how did you specifically come to this research topic? And what exactly is your research topic?

Emily G (04:37): Yes. So when I was working on my PhD, at that time I was really interested in consumer financial decision making. And so I was really focusing on questions like how can we help people save more money for the future and how can we make sure that people are prepared for retirement? And to my surprise, a lot of work in the space focused on individual decision making, right? So how can we help individuals make better choices with their own money? But as we all know, our relationship partners play a really big role in the extent to which we decide to spend versus save our money. And I kind of noticed that there was this, this gap in the literature. There wasn’t a ton of people doing research in this space. And so I started working on one project, looking at how couples manage finances and just realized that it was my favorite project that I was working on and then another project followed and another. And now I would say it’s my primary focus and where I feel like my biggest contributions have been in personal finance literature.

Three Models for Structuring Your Financial Accounts as a Couple

Emily R (05:45): Very exciting and one of the reasons I’m so excited to have you on the show today. So when I was first becoming interested in personal finance, and this might have been back around 2010, something like that, I remember reading a few papers on how couples structured their money and the papers were probably even older than that. And I remember there being like three basic models, and you can tell me if there’s any updates to this, of fully joint finances, we pool everything together, fully separate, nothing is pooled whatsoever, and a hybrid model, a yours, mine and ours model where there’s some joint, some pooling, and some separation. And at the time that I was reading about that, again, probably 15 plus years ago, it was very much the most common model to have a complete pooling. And so I’m wondering what are the updates on this? Are those the models that are still being used? And specifically for my audience, which is likely Gen Z or younger millennials, how are young couples today structuring their finances on a population level?

Emily G (06:45): Sure. I’ll answer this sort of in two parts. With your first part about sort of account structure, you’re absolutely right that this is a three-part model, pool everything, have a partial pooling approach, keep everything separate. And so this is also where I started when I began investigating how couples manage finances. So the first question I had is like, how should we be pooling our finances, if at all? And perhaps most importantly, are there consequences to how you pool your finances with your partner? And so I’ve looked at this from, I would say two different angles. And so the first angle or the first question that I wanted to tackle is how does the decision to pool or not affect how you decide to spend your money or the types of things that you’re spending your money on? As you can imagine, since I’m in marketing, I was very interested in consumption related consequences. And so what my co-author and I found is that when you spend money from a joint bank account, you experience a much higher need to be able to justify how you spend that money to your partner. And because we experience a higher need to justify, we’re more likely to buy products that we consider to be responsible or utilitarian, and we’re much less likely to buy products that are associated with sort of happiness or what we call hedonic products. And so we see this very consistently over and over again, that people are purchasing or leaning towards purchasing different types of things depending on the account from which they’re spending from. And so that sort of led me to this question of how does account pooling affect how satisfied you are with your relationship overall? And so something that both I found and another wonderful co-author, Jenny Olson, has an amazing paper where she actually randomly assigns newlywed couples to either merge their finances or keep all of their finances completely separate. And she followed them over a two-year period and found that over the course of the two years, couples that had their finances completely pooled experienced much higher satisfaction in their relationship than couples that kept everything completely separate.

Emily R (09:10): That is fascinating. And how rarely do you get to do an experiment like that where you actually get to assign people randomly to groups? Amazing. I’m curious, were there any follow-on questions about not only relationship satisfaction, but maybe life satisfaction overall or perhaps net worth growth? Like how did it actually not just affect their feelings, but their, yeah, their wealth?

Emily G (09:33): So it’s very difficult actually to look at objective net worth differences just because there’s so many different factors that would affect that over time. But if you think about something like life satisfaction, we know, for example, that relationship satisfaction is a really big part of. And so I would imagine we would see increases in life satisfaction through one satisfaction with their relationship. But I think based on the science that’s out there, I don’t think we can make a claim that joint finances lead to objectively better financial decisions, but we do know that it helps to get couples on the same page, so it at least helps with more transparency and can help them achieve their goals.

Emily R (10:18): I guess I just had that question because when you were phrasing it of buying more utilitarian type products from a joint account and not so much the hedonic products or services, I was just thinking that like some people need that accountability to meet their financial goals, for example, and so that actually might result in more savings or higher net worth. But maybe by buying fewer of those hedonic products, they might not have as much life satisfaction. Maybe they do it, but they’re not happy about it, even if they’re happy in their relationship. But I understand it’s very difficult to study those kinds of things and you answered the questions that you’re able to.

Emily G (10:54): My intuition is actually the same as yours. I thought we were gonna find opposite. <laugh> So I though people that are buying these products associated with happiness and using separate accounts might actually be happier and even more satisfied in their relationship because they feel like they’re purchasing whatever they want. But it actually seems that overall, a greater input into our relationship satisfaction is just feeling like we’re a team, right? So these hedonic products can increase short-term happiness, but if we think more about long-term happiness and life satisfaction is very much a proxy for long-term happiness, it seems that we see the flip such that joint accounts lead to greater relationship satisfaction and potentially life satisfaction.

Emily R (11:38): Yeah. And I just wanted to note, I think you said for that particular study, this was married couples, newly married couples. So they had already made that decision. They’d come to that point of that legal commitment, right? And so we’re not necessarily talking. We don’t know if we would see the same results for a, a couple at a different stage in their relationship.

Emily G (11:55): Yes. The study that was done looked specifically at newlyweds.

To Pool or Not to Pool? How Life Events Influence Shared Finances

Emily R (11:59): Yes. And then I guess to take it back to, that was a study done relatively recently, presumably on newlyweds. Do we know overall statistics about how younger couples are choosing to pool or not pool?

Emily G (12:11): Yes. So younger couples are actually much more likely to keep their money separate and they decide to merge when there’s some sort of big life event that necessitates. And so when I say big life event, this could of course be getting married as, as was done in the study, but it could also be something like just deciding to move in together and thinking about how you’re going to pay for your joint rent in your new apartment or your new place together. And so when that happens, what we see is that these couples tend to engage in this partial pooling practice where they’ll open, for example, a joint account where they can put money for their rent, for their groceries, for any shared expenses that they have together.

Emily R (12:56): And you just said that younger couples are much more likely to keep their money separate. Are you saying that’s relative to older generations or absolutely they are keeping things separate, perhaps with some exceptions of these life events? And then if those life events occur, what’s kind of the balance between people who stay fully separate and who do partial pooling or full pooling?

Emily G (13:17): Yeah. So this is relative to older couples that tend to be more likely to be married. And so once you marry, this is when people start to just merge more of their finances over time. But we are starting to see some shifts because couples are putting marriage off later and later, and so people are coming into a marriage with more assets than they had before compared to couples that were getting married young where it kind of made sense just to pool everything together when you had less.

Emily R (13:47): And I wonder, is the arrival of children one of those big life events that pushes couples more towards pooling?

Emily G (13:54): Absolutely.

Commercial

Emily (13:57): 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, budgeting, or designing your financial life, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer live workshops, asynchronous online courses, and cohort-based programs on these topics, and I’m now booking for the 2026-2027 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. 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.

Advice for Couples With Significant Income Disparities

Emily R (15:26): Now I wanna think specifically about a situation that a lot of PhD trainees may be in, which is that they are in a relationship, but there is a significant income disparity. Maybe a grad student partnered with someone who has a full-time permanent job, same thing for postdocs. What does the research show or what advice would you have for a person, the lower earning person in that situation? Are there any best practices that you’ve uncovered?

Emily G (15:52): Yeah, so I can tell you first what I see in the data, and then I can talk a little bit about just some insights or some advice that I have from it. So with one of my PhD students, she’s specifically interested in heterosexual couples with an income disparity. And so one of the things that we’re looking at together is how do couples that have an income disparity choose to split shared expenses? And so as you can imagine, there are two common ways in which couples can split shared expenses. So they can either pay for something proportionally to income, which means that the higher earner would pay more because they make more, or they can split something equally, right? Split it right down the middle, fifty fifty split. And so one of the things that we find over and over again in our data is that the way in which couples choose to split shared expenses seems to be driven by the gender of the higher earner. And so what we find is that when the higher earner is the man, couples are much more likely to split proportionally the income. But when the higher earner is the woman, couples are much more likely to split equally. And so the question, of course, that we’re asking ourselves is, okay, why? Why do we see this over and over again? And it seems to come down to the idea of power and financial decision-making power. And so what seems to be happening is in relationships with income discrepancies, the higher earner sort of by default has more financial decision-making power, right? They are earning more of the money, and so they kind of feel like if there’s a shared expense, they should have more say because they’re bringing in more money to the relationship. And so what we see is that because men on average just tend to be more agentic, they really struggle with this idea of having their power be reduced. And so they’re trying to reclaim some of their decision-making power by offering to pay their fair share, which some would argue would be the fifty fifty split.

Emily G (18:06): But women, on the other hand, because women are much more communal, they don’t really mind as much if they have less decision-making power. And so they’re perfectly happy to just let the man pay for more and go with the proportional split if the man earns more. What does this mean for couples with income discrepancies? What, what advice would I give? I think what I would say is that just to be cognizant of the fact that if you are splitting a shared expense in which the higher earner does tend to have more weight, I think it’s important to realize that the shared expense is gonna be used by both of you. And so I think even if you are the lower earning PhD student, you should feel free to speak up and voice your preference, right? It’s your apartment too. It’s your car too. It’s your vacation too. And there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t have as much of a say in something that you are in fact contributing your own money to help, right?

Emily R (19:02): So I like that extension of your observation about this because you’re not really coming down on, “Oh, it’s better to do fifty fifty. It’s better to do proportional split.” You’re just saying, “These are the tendencies that people have. Let’s take a step back from that and understand the motivations.” And if you just use your voice as the lower earning person, you could be in either situation and you’re still trying to be heard equitably in your relationship. So that’s an amazing observation. Thank you.

Emily G (19:29): Yes. We don’t have, from the data, a clear finding of, “Oh, couples should split this way or they should split this way.” But what we do know is that people are upset if they feel like they don’t have a voice and they feel like they’re not being heard. And so this is a case where, I guess it’s different from what we found with the joint account data where it’s very clear pooling finances increases relationship satisfaction. Here, it’s just we see these descriptive differences between couples and we’re trying to wonder or ask ourselves why this is happening. And what we do know from decades of research at this point on power is that when people feel powerless, that’s a really aversive state. And so making sure that people feel power in their relationship is gonna be really important. And oftentimes we link power to money, and that doesn’t always necessarily have to be the way it’s done or handled in the relationship.

Emily R (20:23): And I guess I’ll also note for listeners wondering about this, the, the practice of pooling, like if you’re listening and saying, “Oh, I want greater relationship satisfaction, maybe I’ll bring up pooling with my partner.” The pooling can be fifty fifty. It can be proportional income. You can do it either way. That’s. Or somewhere in between. It’s not prescriptive in that way you can still pool in either one of those scenarios.

Emily G (20:43): Yes. And I think another thing that’s important for me to communicate is the fact that what does pooling do? It essentially increases transparency and it forces couples to get on the same page and have conversations about where they are with their finances. And this is something that you can do even without pooling, right? Pooling is just one way to facilitate that, but there’s a lot of apps and a lot of tools out there like Monarch, for example, or Honey Do is another app that’s specifically made for couples that can increase financial transparency and help you get on the same page. So if you’re someone that’s not fully comfortable with the idea of merging accounts or opening a joint bank account with your partner, you can still achieve higher financial transparency or financial intimacy just by being open about your financial status.

The Complexities of Academic Life: Major Income Changes and Relocation

Emily R (21:38): Yeah. Thank you for adding that. That’s another great observation. Um, okay. Let’s think about a further evolution of the scenario we just talked about, which is we have a couple with income disparity, one person is in PhD training, maybe one person’s in that full permanent job, and then things switch. The PhD comes out of training, they receive a massive income increase. Woo-hoo, everybody’s so excited about that. But then what changes in their relationship and the power dynamics that you were just talking about? Has this been studied at all? And again, are there best practices around this?

Emily G (22:10): Yes. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn’t been studied specifically in the literature, but I am happy to talk about what I think would happen and also just give some anecdotal observations. And what we know is that change is hard, and it’s also really difficult to prioritize two careers equally. And so I think what happens in a lot of couples is that people just naturally tend to prioritize the career of the person who makes more. And so if there is some sort of flip in the relationship, it’s gonna be quite difficult for the person who was once the breadwinner and no longer is to maybe take a back seat. And I think PhDs in particular, and especially PhDs that go into academia, have a really difficult time because not only might the breadwinner within the relationship flip, but oftentimes we don’t have a lot of say in where we have a job or where we have to move. And I think it’s really hard for the partner that has to suddenly pick up and relocate and move potentially to a location where they don’t wanna move, but it might be the only academic job that their partner got. And so this is really, really complicated relationship dynamics.

Emily G (23:28): And so I’ve seen this go both ways. I’ve seen examples where couples thrive and they have a partner that says, “You go out and you get the best academic job you can get and I’ll make it work.” I’ve also seen couples where they’ve fallen apart because the partner doesn’t wanna move where the spouse got a job. And so now they’re doing long distance because the other spouse just didn’t wanna make it work or couldn’t, or to some extent couldn’t make it work. Maybe it wasn’t their fault. And so one thing that I think is really important for PhDs in particular is just to be super open with your partner about your career trajectory, your career plans. If your partner’s not able to accommodate a move to anywhere in the country, I think targeted job searches are really important. One thing that drives me crazy in both jobs I’ve had in Ithaca at Cornell and in South Bend at the University of Notre Dame is you interview people and you get excited and you make them an offer and then they say, “Oh, my spouse can’t move here.” When it’s like, I feel like you should have had that conversation before you applied to the job about would it even be realistic for them to pick up and move here? And so I think sort of the general theme of all of this is just that conversations around your job and your career plans are also financial conversations. I don’t know if we always think of them that way, but salary and salary transparency in your career goals and your hopes for the future are all things that you should be talking about. And yeah, so I think just being open and honest about the fact that you might not have a say in where you move and it’s just a very different career and lifestyle, I think is something that is really important for your partner to be aware of.

Emily R (25:19): Yes, I totally agree. And I’m thinking now even about specifically because you mentioned an academic, a PhD who’s continuing on in academia, that may not result in being the higher earning partner. The person who was earning more before may still be the breadwinner in that relationship, and then you really have more power dynamics to deal with if it, we have to move for this job, but it’s not gonna even increase my salary as much as yours is. That is really tough. And obviously within academia, we- There’s a lot of ink spilled about the two-body problem and so forth. And so we have ways of handling that if it’s two academic partners, but not so much if it’s one person in academia and one person not, and certainly not if it’s two people outside of the academic system who are trying to navigate this. So I totally agree. Really?

Emily G (26:02): Yeah. The two-body problem is real. And there, once again, there’s no right answer, right? You can’t say, “Oh, you should clearly do this or you should clearly do that.” Each couple has to have the conversation and figure it out for themselves. And I think the conversation also needs to be ongoing, because I also know instances where maybe a spouse agreed to one thing, and then they move and they start their respective jobs, and then they realize that it’s just not working for them. And I think, once again, just being open and honest about these things is really important.

Emily R (26:31): Yeah. I’m so glad you brought up the particular difficulties of having a career in academia, or we might say overall, just a very specialized career where there might be very limited number of places that you could live in the US or around the world to do your particular unique niche thing that you do. Absolutely.

Emily G (26:48): And I’ve mentioned this a few times, but really excited to be on this podcast for PhDs because it always blows my mind to how people outside of academia don’t really realize, for example, that if you are denied tenure, you have to move. And just having gone through the tenure process recently and telling people like, “Oh, I hope I get it. I hope I get to stay.” And they’re like, “What do you mean?” <laugh> And yeah, these are things that I think are very idiosyncratic to our careers.

Emily R (27:16): And I know I was just mentioning geographical limitations, but academics are spread out, let’s say, across the US. You might land in a town that doesn’t have an industry that’s compatible with your partner’s career track. And thankfully, there is so much more opportunity for remote work now. My husband and I both work remotely and are very happy about that, but not every job is- lends itself to that kind of arrangement. Emily, this has been so insightful. Thank you so much for coming on sharing your research and what you’ve learned from the literature and the studies that you’ve done about couples and money and this income disparity. So fascinating.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily R (27:50): I want to wrap up with the final question that I ask of all my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for an early career PhD? And this can be something we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it can be something completely new.

Emily G (28:02): Okay, great. So I think my best advice is if I think back to my early career as a PhD, and we’re talking about sort of these, these income disparities and these changes in income, I just remember thinking basically overnight, you go from getting used to making a relatively small amount of money for five to six years, and then you wake up the next day and you’re doing much better, right? You get your first job out of the PhD and you’re making a lot more money. And I, I remember feeling like I could just buy whatever I wanted. Like I had so much money now, and it was so much more than, than I had been used to. What we know from the literature is that when income goes up, spending also tends to go up as well. And this is a finding that’s referred to as lifestyle creep.

Emily G (28:53): And so I think my best advice would be to think about maybe some ways to avoid lifestyle creep, and your spending doesn’t have to go up in everything. And so one of the things that I like to do is think about what types of things bring me the most joy, and then I increase my spending on those things. But then other things, I held my spending constant, and I still spend similarly to when I was a PhD student. And so if you think about, for example, other books that are out there, like Cassie Mogilner’s book on Happier Hour teaches us to think about what things help you find the most joy, or Ramit Sethi’s book on Money for Couples and finding your rich life, right? What is your rich life? And so I think that when you get these big boosts to your income, I guess my advice would be to increase spending on things that bring you the most joy, but it’s okay not to splurge on other things.

Emily R (29:54): Absolutely. The way that I phrase that when I teach on this topic, and it’ such an important one for being mindful in those career transition points is that, yeah, we should avoid lifestyle creep or lifestyle inflation, but you absolutely should indulge in intentional lifestyle increases in those areas that matter most to you, as you were saying. And as a follow-on, let’s be real careful about those fixed expenses, okay? Let’s be careful about the housing that we commit to, the car that we commit to, because those are a little harder to change once you’ve made that initial decision and you might have been riding high and not realizing, “Oh, there’s a lot of taxes I have to pay, and oh, there’s a lot of other increases.” So love that advice, very relevant for this audience. Thank you so much. Emily, again, this is a wonderful interview. Thank you very much for coming on.

Emily G (30:39): Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.

Outro

Emily (30:44): 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? We have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to view transcripts or videos of each episode? We 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. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

How This PhD Solopreneur Manages Her Time and Money

May 18, 2026 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Leslie Wang, the professor-turned-solopreneur behind Your Words Unleashed and repeat podcast guest. Leslie works as a developmental editor and career coach primarily for academics. Leslie and Emily discuss in detail how Leslie manages her time and money, balancing the appointments and payment schedules of approximately three dozen clients throughout the year. Leslie has molded her business to fit the life she wants to live, including frequent travel and personal and familial pursuits.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How This PhD Solopreneur Manages Her Time and Money, Money Story with Dr. Leslie Wang

Teaser

Leslie (00:00): You know, maybe moving away from the idea that the work needs to be its own reward, or that, you know, money and meaningful work are somehow detached from each other. I think that they’re very much can be part of the same thing. And it’s not a zero sum game. And I think I’m a really good example of that is that I feel like I earn very well using the skills that I learned in the academy.

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 (01:02): This is Season 23, Episode 10, and today my guest is Dr. Leslie Wang, the professor-turned-solopreneur behind Your Words Unleashed and repeat podcast guest. Leslie works as a developmental editor and career coach primarily for academics. Leslie and I discuss in detail how Leslie manages her time and money, balancing the appointments and payment schedules of approximately three dozen clients throughout the year. Leslie has molded her business to fit the life she wants to live, including frequent travel and personal and familial pursuits.

Emily (01:34): This time of year, mid-April to mid-June, is my reflection and planning season. I consider what types of financial education I want to offer my university clients in the upcoming academic year, and there may be a big shake-up in store for this one. When I pilot new workshops and programs, I typically offer them to my mailing list subscribers for free or at a steep discount so that I can work out the kinks and receive feedback. If you would like to be the first to know about these opportunities, please join my mailing list through PFforPhDs.com/advice/. As a bonus, you’ll receive a document that catalogs all of the financial advice given by my podcast guests at the end of our interviews. By the way, this is the last episode of Season 23 of this podcast, and I’ll be back in mid-June with the start of Season 24. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s23e10/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Leslie Wang of Your Words Unleashed.

Summary of Dr. Wang’s First Podcast Episode and Recent Updates

Emily (02:50): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Leslie Wang, of Your Words Unleashed. Leslie is actually a repeat guest on the podcast. She was on way back in season 11, episode 10, released almost exactly four years ago from when we’re recording this May 2022 to May 2026. And so I’m just really excited to hear all the updates that we have. So Leslie, can you kind of take us back to, you know, maybe a summary of where you were at that point, what we talked about in that episode, and then tell us what’s happened since then.

Leslie (03:21): Sure. So when I first appeared on this podcast, and thank you so much for having me back, I was still a faculty member, so I was a tenured professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. Um, maybe just like a little bit of background about me. I got my PhD, uh, from UC Berkeley in 2010. And then I did all the things. I had a two year postdoc. I had two different tenure track positions, um, and I wrote two, sole authored scholarly books, a lot of articles. And around the time I went up for tenure, I was really burnt out and I was looking for answers to the question of, is academia still for me? And I decided to train as a life coach the same year that I went up for tenure. And that was in 2019. Um, I had a baby a few weeks before COVID hit, and then I was on parental leave and sabbatical all during lockdown.

Leslie (04:20): And so during that time it, I think a lot of people were just really soul searching. And I was definitely doing that. And I realized that like I did not want to stay in the academy forever. And so that’s when I started building my business. Your Words Unleashed and it also has a podcast to the same name. And so all of that was happening when I was still a faculty member. Um, so I think when I talked to you, if it was like early 2022, I knew I was gonna leave. I had no idea when, and then three months later I decided to leave <laugh>. It was like that. So basically, I, I still remember all it was, um, was I got an email from the chair of my department asking what my course preferences were for the fall. And at that point I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. And I’m like, I have to resign. I have to resign. So I did. And basically, you know, my contract went through I think August 31st, 2022. So I ended up just fully leaving. At that point I did have a full fledged business and I had launched it early 2022. Now it’s 2026, so I’m moving into the fifth year. Um, and so, you know, basically I am a full-time writing coach. I help people, uh, demystify the scholarly book writing process and create a practice that really centers their own values, um, and helps them, you know, express themselves using a more authentic voice and trying to get away from a lot of the sort of jargon, um, and insular nature of a lot of academic writing. Um, and I also do a lot of career coaching as well for mostly tenured faculty members that are looking for like a renewed sense of purpose.

Leslie (06:13): And I think right now, as we all know, it’s very hard times in higher education. And so I kind of do a mixture of both. I’d say maybe like two thirds of my clients are long-term writing coaching clients for, for whom I do a lot of developmental editing as well, and that’s most of my time. And then maybe about one third are career coaching clients. Um, and so I’m happy to talk about any aspect of, you know, launching my business, going full time into solo entrepreneurship. Um, but I would say the difference is that like now I’m very happy with where I am. Like I’m really satisfied with, um, I think balance is a tough word, but like the alignment I think that I’ve been able to create between my career and my life that I did not have in any way, shape or form in academia. And I probably didn’t have the first few years of my business as well.

Structuring Time and Staying Accountable as a Solopreneur

Emily (07:07): Yeah. Well I wanna hear more about that now. Um, I’m always curious when I get to speak with, um, especially people who, like we were just talking about, have a lot of agency over their own, you know, um, calendar and over the kind of work that they do, whether that’s inside of academia or outside. I’m always curious to hear about, um, how people hand handle their time and how people handle their money. And there’s sometimes so many parallels between those two. So let’s start with the first one. Like, can you tell me what, um, an average work week looks like for you? How you structure your time, how you maybe keep yourself accountable to the work that you need to do?

Leslie (07:42): Yeah, totally. Um, and it, it, it’s an interesting thing to reflect on ’cause it’s changed a lot since I first started my business. And I think a lot of business owners are gonna say this, but the first couple of years you were just working your ass off like you are, there’s not a lot of limits. And I think also coming from academia where there’s definitely no limits or boundaries with work I was, I was overworking and I was aware of it, but I wasn’t in control of it. So now moving into year five of my business, I am in control of it after having experimented a lot with like, what is the right amount for me, um, when factoring in the other things in my life that I wanna be devoting time to. So, you know, I would say my weeks vary quite a bit, but I typically have about five to seven, hour long, um, client sessions per week.

Leslie (08:35): And like I said, about two thirds of my clients are there for writing, coaching and developmental editing. And for each of those sessions I need to take anywhere from two to four or even five sometimes hours outside of that meeting to review the work, give feedback and that sort of thing. Um, and then the other sessions are with career coaching clients who I don’t need to prepare very much for. Um, and so that means I really need to space out my, my writing coaching clients to not have more than about three in a week, otherwise I just can’t keep up. And this is definitely a trial and error thing and I’ve come to realize that like summertime is not a relaxing time for me for the most part because academics are on, they’re producing a lot of material they wanna meet more frequently. Um, so I’ve become much more rigid around like how many clients I will take on at a particular time.

Leslie (09:33): Um, and then thinking about like how do I sort of structure people so I’m not overloaded in a week? Because, you know, after you work with someone for a while, you realize how much time it’s gonna take you to look at their work versus another person’s work. And then I have to factor that all in. Um, and so yeah, and then I normally have maybe like one half hour free coaching consult per week. And again, I, I stretch those out as well ’cause I don’t, I also don’t want people to have to wait too long after our consult to work with me. ’cause some people will have like a six month waiting period and you’re probably gonna lose those clients <laugh>. Right. So trying to kind of think about people’s time and um, and my own time. Um, but really like I just use Google Calendar to organize my time.

Leslie (10:28): I, I think I’m a much more visual person. I color code everything. So all of my client sessions are in green, dark green. Um, my consults are in light green, exercise is light blue, you know, other kinds of, you know, health appointments are purple. Like I’m always trying to, I’m always looking at it, um, and trying to figure out like what needs to be moved around. But yeah, for the most part it’s um, I think knowing now like what kind of life do I wanna lead? Like what does that actually look like on a daily basis? How much time do those things take? Say like, I want to, you know, be able to cook dinner four times a week. That takes a lot of time and that obviously takes away from other things that I can do. But if that’s a priority, then I need to think about my clients and how to move things around so I can fit it all in.

Emily (11:23): Let me ask about your Google calendar. Um, so you mentioned in that some things about like appointments, um, or even like an appointment with yourself, like to exercise. Uh, do you then look at open space and see, okay, that’s when I can do my prep or that’s when I can do the other work for my business? Or do you actually block out times of like, okay, this is when this type of behind the scenes work is going to happen, this is when this type of behind the scenes work is gonna happen. How do you, how do you um, plan for those kinds of work blocks?

Leslie (11:54): You know, I’m not quite as, um, probably detailed as some folks where they, they will block out the entire day because I like to have immense flexibility with my time. But I would say the first three hours of my workday, so about like 8:15 to like 11:15 or so is I’m a hundred percent on which means I’m probably gonna do the hardest work during that time. So if there’s um, you know, developmental editing, especially challenging editing I need to do, that’s gonna happen during that time. Um, and then coaching is probably gonna happen after that. So I have blocks that I, I give like specifically for coaching, it’s either gonna be between, I’d say 10:00 AM and noon or between 2 and 3:30. And that’s like, those are the blocks and I just kind of have it mentally in my head unless they like live in another continent or something.

Leslie (12:54): And then oftentimes we have to move things around. Um, but I had made a decision a couple of years ago that my clients need to work with my schedule because I had been doing a lot of like trying to coach people in Australia and it, so it was like 7:00 PM my time and I was exhausted and I had a baby and I was like, what am I doing? Um, and so I just started putting in more boundaries around my time and I’m like, if they wanna work with me, they will figure out a way to do that. And that’s, um, I will work with them within the range that I can work with them, but I’m no longer going outside of that. Right. And I think people also don’t know how many clients any one person has. And so I have around 35 clients at any one time and they’re going at different paces. Some of them are like on parental leave and I’m not gonna see them for six months. Others are meeting like very regularly every month for years. Um, and so it’s this dance, it’s like a constant, um, consideration of like, how’s, how are all these moving parts working together? Whereas I’m the only constant, so I gotta be, yeah, I gotta make sure that I can show up for all the, all the people and their needs without feeling overstretched. And that takes years to figure out, I think.

Emily (14:19): Yes. And especially ’cause like you said at the beginning of a business, you just wanna say yes to everybody and everything. And the boundaries you do, you don’t realize how much it’s going to affect you to not have good boundaries until you’re a little more busy and you’re a little more established and you have your work rhythms down and so forth. Um, you mentioned earlier that summer is a really busy time. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed any other seasonality to your work and whether you sort of lean into it and you go with it. Yeah, summer’s busy. I work longer hours in the summer or whether you try to like make it more regular throughout the year.

Leslie (14:51): That’s a really good question. I’ve tried to observe annually, but I do think it’s hard to tell under the Trump administration and like all the cuts that are happening in higher ed, um, it’s taken away regularity maybe. But if I had to, I think I, I definitely have a big drop off in, you know, people wanting to meet or even new clients probably in September and then towards the end of the year, because I did notice last September I had a couple weeks where it felt very spacious <laugh> and then it all ramped up back again. Um, maybe like, you know, beginnings of semesters can be a little slower end of semesters for sure are slower. There’s a lot of rescheduling in April, May. Um, but at this point I feel like it’s busy. It’s just busy most of the time.

Emily (15:48): I’m thinking about this from my own schedule as well. You know, you mentioned traveling and we’re, we’re in May now and I’m thinking about my summer schedule and I go to a couple conferences. So those are unusual weeks. I also have vacation scheduled and I also am thinking about how do I move around these blocks of work that I need to do to avoid these weeks when I have these other special, you know, things happening. And so, um, that’s very interesting that you’ve sort of built that into, for me it happens in the summer, but like you’ve built it into the, the rhythm of your business that you do a lot of traveling and you manage to not work during those weeks, which is pretty incredible. How far out do you have to plan that to like, make sure you’re not scheduling client meetings or whatever during that time?

Leslie (16:25): Well, it depends on how long I’m away. So if it’s only like a week, it’s usually doesn’t disrupt anyone. Um, but then in the summer we always go to Europe for like two and a half weeks. And that period of time, if you add on the jet lag afterwards, like I have like three weeks where I don’t really work. So that is much harder. And that’s why I’ve stopped taking on so many clients in the summer. Like I won’t start for the most part, start new clients then ’cause I have to fit everybody else in. Um, and I just treat those like, uh, compressed periods of time. But I would say I don’t not work at all. I I have to take it back. I don’t, I do some work on vacation, but it’s always like, um, I’ll have people send me their, their papers to read and I’ll, I’ll read those in like, you know, when I got 45 minutes there and you know, on the plane for example, great time actually to be doing this work. Um, I still do emails, like I don’t check out completely, but I’ve never been someone who did, you know, some people like to like not touch anything regarding their work when they, when they’re on vacation. I like to keep my mind still in it a little bit. Like I might be editing a podcast episode or like putting things up on my website. And I think that’s more of a personal preference ’cause I actually enjoy it when it’s, it’s feels like more of a choice almost. Like I’m getting ahead a little bit when I’m doing it on vacation and it’s very small amounts.

Emily (17:55): Yeah. So you’re getting some like pleasure or satisfaction out of that as well. So it’s not like taking away from vacation. It’s like, it feels good to do a little work. I I do the same thing. I had a week long vacation, like sort of over winter break this last year and I was really debating with myself like, do I finally leave my laptop at home? Do I finally like really disconnect? Um, and I ended up taking it with me, but I, I felt like it added to the experience, not like, took away from it. ’cause it was like, yeah, planes are like, oh, we have to wait in our hotel room until this activity starts. Well the kids are watching TV and I’m gonna do a little, you know, this other work. Um, so anyway, it worked out for me.

Commercial

Emily (18:32): 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. This is a perfect time to book me for a workshop at the end of the current fiscal year or at the beginning of the upcoming 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 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.

Behind the Scenes of a Solopreneur’s Business Finances

Emily (19:57): Okay. We’ve, we’ve talked a lot about time, which I love to discuss, but again, the other parallel kind of is money. So I’m very curious about how you operate your business finances.

Leslie (20:09): I mean, I have to say I have kept my business extremely simple. So to the point where, you know, my financial planner and CPA are like, you need more expenses, <laugh>, because I don’t employ anyone except a podcast editor. Um, I have a coworking space so that I’m not completely isolated at home. I have some various sorts of scheduling tools, zoom and that kind of thing. You know, my podcast recording, um, platform costs money. But you know, in terms of like keeping track of everything, I, I do have, you know, a credit card that’s, uh, a business card that I try to put everything onto just so when it comes tax time, it’s very clear what I spent things on. Um, you know, I keep things organized bank account wise too. So I have a Capital One account that is just dedicated to retirement contributions that get pulled out weekly, um, into a Roth IRA. I also have an account dedicated just to estimated quarterly tax payments. And so at the end of each quarter I pull from there. So I’m, I’m constantly sort of shuffling money around. Um, and I would say, you know, I’m constantly also updating these financial spreadsheets that I have and one is for me where I keep track of all of my monthly income. And the other one is with my financial planner where we’re, we’re looking at that kind of together. I put in my total monthly income in there. I also use it to keep track of my, um, all of my expenses and also keep track of my, uh, estimated quarterly tax payments. So basically, you know, I had worked out, and this is why I think having a financial planner is amazing, especially if you’re going to be moving into owning your own business. I wouldn’t have known like what percentage of my income should I be putting into retirement right now? Um, how much should I be paying for taxes? Like all of that. I think having guidance like CPA as well right is, is extremely important just in giving this peace of mind that you’re doing, you’re just like, you’re doing the right things. Um, and you’re not gonna be um, surprised, you know, April 15th kind of thing. So in general, that’s how I manage my finances. I don’t know if you have like more specific questions about money.

Emily (22:36): Yeah. So I think you mentioned a lot of great stuff there and I think because you’re working with a financial planner, probably the first thing was you do have a separate checking account, right? As well as credit card.

Leslie (22:47): Actually I don’t, I experimented with having a business checking account and it turned out that I just wasn’t using it. So I do keep it all together.

Emily (22:58): Okay, so the revenue for your business comes into your personal account or accounts. But you keep all the expenses on a credit card so they’re easy to track, right? Because, and you’re also tracking it aside from just it being on the credit card, it sounds like you’re also doing regular, uh, bookkeeping. And then you have these other, it sounds like savings accounts where you set aside, you sort of what I do, I call it a system of self withholding. Um, so you’re putting aside the, the money that will eventually make it over to the quarterly estimated tax payments that’s gonna go to a separate account. You have another account or you pull aside the future retirement account contributions that eventually get over there. Um, okay, interesting. Well, as long as your financial planner is okay with it, like obviously it gets like the stamp of approval, but obviously keeping, having everything going to one credit card is very organized and that’s probably, um, a sufficient level of organization to, you know, comply with like the IRS regulations and so forth.

Emily (23:52): So that actually takes away one of my future questions, which was do you pay yourself like a salary or what, but if all the revenue is coming into your own personal account, then it’s already there. But then sort of maybe the corollary to that is, is your business’s profit, let’s say, you know, the revenue minus the expenses, minus the taxes, minus the retirement, is that very regular because you have these like long-term relationships with clients? Um, or does it vary quite a bit month to month and then you kind of have to deal with that on the personal side?

Leslie (24:25): Yeah, I mean I think that it varies month to month, but annually it’s very stable, right? So from the beginning I was, yeah, from the first year I launched my business, I earned over six figures. It has stayed that way and it’ll go up when I take on more clients. And then I made a very conscientious decision to not overwork. So then it’s come down, but it still sort of hovers around the same place. And because of that, it’s easier for me to estimate how much I need each month because my own expenses don’t change a whole lot. Um, but that, you know, like I am primarily paid by academic institutions, they have their own timelines. Sometimes it takes a very long time to get paid depending on the bureaucracy and what’s going on there. Like, there have been some campuses where I’ve been waiting for nine months and there’s literally, it’s somewhere in the system. Others pay me before we start. And so that’s, that’s what I’m dependent on is kind of, you know, do I know how they’re gonna be paying me? Do I know when they’re gonna be paying me? Um, and then having enough to get me through the months where it’s, it’s just gonna be lower because I just put in a bunch of invoices and things take at least 30 days, maybe 30 to 60 days. So yeah, that’s, it’s something that I have gotten used to over time, but it get, it’s just, I would say it’s fairly disconcerting at the beginning because you’re like, it feels like you’re not earning any money, but then you look at the end of the year and you’re like, oh, the totals are the same or the totals are even higher.

Emily (26:09): So my business also has a great degree of seasonality. Like, um, high season is like just following tax season, right? When I send out all the invoices for the tax education that I did, and then the money rolls in as you said, over the next, you know, one, one to two months usually sometimes longer. Um, and anyway, so there’s sort of these very lumpy times of year where I get a lot of revenue for the business and there’s other times a year when almost nothing is coming in. Um, but I still have expenses to pay. So that to me is like something I don’t want to have touch my personal finances. So that’s why I keep like a separate business checking account. All the revenue goes there, all the expenses come out of there. Um, and then I pay myself a salary from that account, which as you said, over over time, you know, you kind of figure out okay, what the annual is gonna be and then the salary is kind of based, you know, a little bit lower than that in case of some fluctuations and so forth. Um, but anyway, I don’t want that to touch my, the personal finances side of things ’cause I don’t wanna see like months where I’m making negative money <laugh> in like my personal account, you know? Um, it sounds like you don’t have maybe quite as much variation. Um, I as I do.

Leslie (27:12): I don’t think so. I don’t, I, yeah, I don’t think so because I do have a year-round business. I don’t think, um, I don’t work tremendously less, I would say, except for those holiday periods, uh, which are built in. So, so that’s why it was a little hard to answer the question about seasons, because I think in some ways I’ve stopped having seasons.

Emily (27:34): And I guess you, you sort of started to answer this before, but like, how are your clients paying you? You said some pay after the fact, some pay upfront. Are these lump sums? Are these monthly retainers? Like what’s the kind of schedule of client payments?

Leslie (27:49): Yeah, and that’s a really great question and it also depends on the institution. So, you know, I’d say 90% of my clients are using institutional funds and I’ve noticed like small liberal arts colleges tend to just pay a lump sum before you start. There doesn’t seem to be as much bureaucracy involved. Some of these bigger R1s, um, they will pay as you go. And so then I just decide like how many invoices will I send? So for, I, I typically take people on for eight sessions. That takes around at least eight months. Um, so usually I’ll, I’ll invoice maybe every two or every three depending on how quickly they’re, they’re moving through. I really don’t wanna do it every single time. It’s just, it’s, it’s just more work on everybody’s part honestly. Um, but I’ve lately, uh, there’s been some schools that have asked me to invoice every time. It’s just easier for them for their own financial reasons to do that. So, um, and then the folks who pay out of pocket, we just decide what works for them. So if they’re doing a six session career coaching with me, they might pay every two, um, they might pay half at once. And so it becomes very individualized.

Emily (29:09): I can see why you end up just looking at this on an annual basis and it’s like so many different frequencies and contracts and lump sums and yeah.

Leslie (29:16): And it’s also like they might be paying through a credit card link. They might be paying through PayPal, they might be sending me a paper check, they might be sending a wire, you know, I’m working with someone in Hong Kong and it’s like a telegraph transfer, which I had never even heard of before. So it’s a constellation <laugh> of ways that I get paid. And that is a good, you know, five, at least 5% of my time I would say is, is put towards figuring out how to get paid, making sure I get paid and do, you know, dealing with the money.

Emily (29:53): I have also had to set up systems around this because I realized earlier on, like, oh wait, did I receive that check? I’d have to go back into my bank account and figure out, oh wait, this anonymous, you know, payment ended up, you know, from this institution and now I have much better systems around like receiving, noting, you know, sending a thank you, like all the things that go along with that. And I noticed at one point, this was a couple tax seasons ago, that I was like psychologically somehow like procrastinating sending out the invoices. Like for all the work that I had already, this is the work already delivered right <laugh> from that tax season. And I was like, why am I procrastinating this? This is so weird. It’s like an undeserving thing or something like that. So now I’ve just have that, I just have my assistant do that. Like she does all the, not all, but a lot of the invoicing goes through her because like I just wouldn’t do it in a timely manner. And she doesn’t have the like baggage <laugh> around sending invoices that I do apparently. So, yeah.

Leslie (30:46): Interesting.

Emily (30:46): It’s, it’s been a learning process.

Leslie (30:48): I, I, for sure, I have to always, uh, like I on that spreadsheet for myself where I keep track of payments, I also have to keep track of did this come through Stripe? Did it come through PayPal? Was it a paper check? Was it a wire? You know, I have to know that because for taxes, you know, and I didn’t know that initially. So it’s like over time. And then I also, one spreadsheet I didn’t mention that I use constantly is I have a client sessions spreadsheet where I can see, and I have it all mapped out with months, you know, when did they start? How many sessions did they sign up for, how many did they have left? And I’m constantly also color coding that around who still needs to pay. Um, I have another color code for who has two or fewer sessions left because then I can know when is someone gonna finish so I can, uh, confidently take on another client without overtaxing myself. So it’s another thing that I, it’s like almost like checks and balances, um, around time, around finances, around like, yeah, did I get paid from them yet? Or like, what’s, what did they decide? Were they gonna do three payments? Like I have to know all of that stuff, but I don’t avoid, I like, I I find that interesting for some reason. <laugh>,

Emily (32:08): Yeah. I’m glad you like, kind of brought it back to like this overlap of time and money and tracking and scheduling and like all that stuff. ’cause there are so many like parallels between the two. So thank you so much for answering those questions. I’m always just so curious how other people operate and um, I would imagine for people who are inside bigger institutions, like, um, universities, this would be fresh information. Like they can see what it looks like on the other side, like dealing with money. No, we have people to do that. Well, no, you have to hire ’em or you have to do it yourself.

Leslie (32:34): I mean, I did not know that when I was a faculty member, right? I knew very little about how to run a business and, um, and the good thing is that it’s a set of skills <laugh>, and you can learn it and you will learn it over time. You have to, if you wanna be successful and sustainable.

Advice for PhDs Interested in Self-Employment

Emily (32:52): Let’s talk now then about how you would advise another PhD, maybe particularly a faculty member who’s interested in self-employment. And I may have even asked you this question in our first interview, um, but I’m curious to see if the answer has changed. Like how would you advise someone and maybe you, you do part through part of your career coaching, sometimes this question comes your way. What’s like one really solid piece of advice you can give to someone who’s curious about self-employment?

Leslie (33:17): Well, maybe following up on what we’ve been talking about is there’s a really big difference between having a really good idea for a business or even doing work really well and running a business, right? So like for example, like in my coach certification program, there were a couple folks that were incredible coaches. I mean, they were so like innately talented at it, but they did not have the skills to turn it into a business. And I don’t know if they really wanted to either, but you could see how like there’s skills for the work and then there’s skills of running a business. And I think, you know, listening to this podcast and other business podcasts is really, really helpful in shedding some light on the areas where you probably need to grow. Um, I would say also to really think about what you’re bringing to the table that is different from everybody else who is doing similar kinds of work.

Leslie (34:27): For the field of developmental editing that I’m in or even writing coaching, there’s a huge amount of people that have come into this area in the past few years, which makes a lot of sense. You know, if there’s an exodus from the academy, this is a very transferrable skill. It’s very aligned with how people were trained. So it’s not like this mega leap. At the same time, if you don’t, if people like people like clients or like the, the world out there doesn’t know how you think or how you, how are you approaching this that’s different from the 75 other people you just saw on LinkedIn. There’s really no reason for them to be interested. And so I think that comes down to this word that I think a lot of academics are scared of. And I was too when I was an academic, which is called Marketing <laugh>, um, which is really just about creating connections with other people.

Leslie (35:24): And I think allowing them to get to know you in certain kinds of ways that give them insight into whether or not they wanna be in your orbit. Not necessarily whether or not they wanna hire you, but whether they think you’re a compelling human being and they wanna be in your realm because you really don’t know, uh, how people are gonna hear about you, right? So maybe they wouldn’t hire you, but they would be aware of the things that you’re doing and the things that you’re saying online, um, and really like what you’re doing and refer you to somebody in their department. I think that kind of thing happens all the time. But that comes down to getting more comfortable with visibility. And so I think self-promotion can be a very tricky thing for many academics. I have podcast episodes on this, like how hard it is for I think most academics to put themselves out there because it often feels egotistical or it feels like you’re bragging or like why are you drawing all this attention to yourself?

Leslie (36:30): And I really had to shift that mindset to get comfortable. And this is like incrementally over time with putting myself out there again and again and again and taking small risks and with, you know, sharing my opinions, sharing my experiences, sharing my reflections, also sharing about my work. But it was the whole sort of spectrum of things that I think is why I now have like a pretty good platform on LinkedIn. I’m not usually even talking very much about coaching. Um, I’m talking about, you know, what I think about academia or, you know, sharing my own experiences of leaving. Um, so I think what it comes down to is if people can think about self-promotion as more of like sharing, you’re sharing your story, you’re sharing your insights, it’s more relational and you’re actually creating relationships with other people, then that can be something that really helps your business. Because in the end, like we, we need each other. We, we need people to know about us and you need to know about other people doing stuff too. Like we, it’s an ecosystem, right? And so part of that is I think, uh, allowing yourself in very small ways to be seen.

Emily (37:52): I, I found what you said so inspirational, you know, for me to use in my own business. I like that reframing. But it also strikes me that successful academics also do this. I mean, we might call it, we probably wouldn’t call it marketing, right? Inside academia, but I mean, I have had like for instance, Dr. Gertrude Nonterah on the podcast to talk about personal branding. Like not even personal, it could be just professional branding, like of yourself as an academic and the type of research you do, the networking that you do like at all. It’s applicable there as well. It just may not be a skill that the types of people who are attracted academia are, um, naturally many of them are not naturally inclined, but in either setting it’s a very useful thing to learn.

Leslie (38:28): Totally.

Dr. Wang’s Contact Information

Emily (38:29): Well, Leslie, this interview has been so delightful and, and I’m glad that people can get to know you through, you know, this platform and this interview. Um, if people want to, you know, connect with you, maybe potentially be, become a client or just wanna be in your orbit as you were talking about, where can they find you?

Leslie (38:44): My website is yourwordsunleashed.com. My podcast has the same name. Um, people can always reach out by email as well. Uh, my email is [email protected]. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m all over LinkedIn <laugh>, so connect with me on there.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (38:59): Perfect. Um, and then we’ll wrap up with the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And this can be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it can be something completely new

Leslie (39:11): In kind of thinking about it now. And what I really had to do to go from academic to successful business owner is like, it’s really about financial literacy. It’s like learning the things, right? And I think that many, I have known many academics who take an approach of like more head in the sand when it comes to finances because, um, partly it’s that like academics don’t make a lot of money. You have a delayed, um, there’s a delayed period of time, I guess, uh, before which you do earn, start earning a salary hopefully, um, in the academy. And I don’t know, there can be just some fear I think around like, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. And then I think the other thing is in the academy there’s this idea that the work is its own reward. So finances are secondary. You are lucky to have a job, especially if you get a tenure track position where there’s so few these days. You know, I recently posted something on LinkedIn or someone, I reposted something where this man was saying he just got a tenure track job offer of 57K in 2026, you know, and I was like, my very first offer was 54K in 2011. Like, what is happening here? So, you know, maybe moving away from the idea that the work needs to be its own reward or that, you know, money and meaningful work are somehow detached from each other. I think that they’re very much can be part of the same thing and it’s not a zero sum game. And I think I’m a really good example of that is that I feel like I earn very well using the skills that I learned in the academy. Um, I understand what’s transferable about it, but I have much more breadth now and I’m able to align that with a life that feels meaningful too. So maybe part of it is like I would first start by thinking about what kind of life would feel really good to you and how does work fit into that versus what’s the work I want and how do I fit my life around that? And I know that’s a very privileged thing to say, but I also think it’s something, it’s a really good thought exercise for all academics to do. There can be more alignment.

Emily (41:42): Well, I think that’s a beautiful place to end it. Leslie, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Leslie (41:48): Thank you for having me. This was super fun.

Outro

Emily (42:01): 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.

Holding a Financial Standard While on the Faculty Job Market

April 20, 2026 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Dillon Pruett, an assistant professor in the School of Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University. This is the second part of a two-part interview in which we discuss Dillon’s turbulent faculty job search and transition to a faculty position. A higher income doesn’t completely ameliorate all financial challenges, but the future is looking bright. Dillon’s candor during this conversation is laudable, and his experiences are likely to be both relatable and a cautionary tale for prospective and new faculty members.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Holding a Financial Standard While on the Faculty Job Market

Teaser

Dillon (00:00): I was, my jaw dropped. I was like, are you kidding me? Like that is, that’s really, really crazy.

Introduction

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

Emily (00:48): This is Season 23, Episode 8, and today my guest is Dr. Dillon Pruett, an assistant professor in the School of Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University. This is the second part of a two-part interview. In the first part, Dillon and I covered his financial journey through his PhD and postdoc at Vanderbilt University. In this second part, we discuss Dillon’s turbulent faculty job search and transition to a faculty position. A higher income doesn’t completely ameliorate all financial challenges, but the future is looking bright. Dillon’s candor during this conversation is laudable, and his experiences are likely to be both relatable and a cautionary tale for prospective and new faculty members.

Emily (01:33): For Season 24 of this podcast, I plan to publish a series of Budget Breakdown episodes. These interviews follow a template in which the interviewee shares their income, current financial goals, and five largest expenses. I’m looking for four grad students to provide these interviews, so this is your official invitation to volunteer. I love that on this podcast I get to feature PhDs and PhDs-to-be who are almost exclusively regular people and learn and share their real-life stories and strategies. If you would like to break down your budget, please go to PFforPhDs.com/podcastvolunteer/ and fill out the quick form, and I’ll be in touch over email. I look forward to interviewing you for this summer series! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s23e8/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Dillon Pruett.

Dr. Pruett’s Finances During the Postdoc Years

Emily (02:43): Okay. Let’s talk more about your postdoc then. I understand you did your postdoc at Vanderbilt as well, and it sounds like you didn’t move right. Were you staying in the same condo during that phase?

Dillon (02:52): Yes. Um, so that was a really great transition because I ended up doing a postdoc with a professor who I had collaborated with during my PhD. And so, um, she was also on my PhD committee. So when my dissertation defense was delayed a little bit, um, she knew exactly why. She knew exactly when it was scheduled for. There was no issue of having to contact another university and get my offer extended or have to change, you know, my moving date or any of, of that. So that, that was really, really great. Um, I noticed, so I, um, was on a TL1, which is a clinical and translational science fellowship. Um, and so, uh, that came with a stipend, I think it was about $56,000. Um, and that also came with, um, paid insurance. And so, um, that was, that was a huge boost in the amount that I was, it was more than double what I had previously.

Dillon (03:58): And so it pretty much ameliorated all of the issues I had with like counting the dollars to the end of the month. I was like, well, shoot, like this is this, this is great. I feel like a normal human being that can, you know, get a burrito and not have to be concerned that that’s gonna impact me down, down the road. Um, so that, that was, um, really huge just for, to feel like I could take a breath of fresh air. Um, even on my, my postdoc, there were some discrepancies within, um, the department and, um, I felt like I was comfortable with what I was getting, but again, knowing that other people were getting significantly more, um, was like, oh man, like it makes me feel like I am, I’m less than. So I had a very niche focus for, you know, my PhD and for my postdoc, um, postdocs that had a, a more heavily quantitative focus that could work on multiple projects. Um, were getting maybe like $90,000 a year. Um, and I think the justification was that that was more or less the going rate for the type of skills that were required for that role if those people were having the open market. And so that was, that was that. Um, so it would’ve been great to be getting, you know, almost twice as much as I was getting, but I was really grateful to be getting so much more than my PhD that it seemed like, you know what, again, just kind of focusing on myself, not letting myself worry about that. Um, and I think that my, my, uh, postdoc mentor advocated kind of on my behalf, but was essentially kinda shot down. I was like, no, we’re, that salary could not apply to me for what I was doing. Um, so no, um, no, ill feelings towards that. It’s more the issues, the larger system than my individual situation.

Emily (06:19): Yeah, I totally understand that. And people do make different amounts of money That’s true in different fields. They’re paid differently. Um, it just strikes me that like you were, they had you anchored at that grad student stipend level that unchanging grad student stipend level, so that yeah, when you double your compensation, like you feel great about it. Um, and I understand, you know, you, you were trying to, again, keep your eyes on your own paper, but like yeah, that does sting to have another person who had the same ti- kind of title as you, right. With such huge disparity. Okay. How many years were you in your postdoc and what was the financial transition, if any, that you were able to make during that period of time?

Tenure Track Faculty Salaries at R1 Institutions: $63,000 to $100,000+

Dillon (07:02): Yeah, I started my postdoc, um, in 2022, and then I, um, was applying for jobs fairly quickly, faster than I, um, anticipated with in 2023. Um, and that was because I’d had some, um, department search chairs that specifically reached out and said, Hey, you should apply for this. And I didn’t really quite feel ready for that, but I was like, okay, I mean, if you’re telling me, I guess I’ll at least put my name in the hat. Um, and once I had done like two or three applications, um, it was relatively trivial to just apply for, you know, seven or eight more. Um, and so I had a couple of on-campus interviews. Um, they were all places that I was at least interested in perhaps working at. Um, but one of the offers was for I think initially like $63,000 a year. And this is, uh, uh, an R1 school in the southeast.

Dillon (08:14): And I was, my jaw dropped. I was like, are you kidding me? Like that is, that’s really, really crazy. Um, I had a competing offer from another R1in the southeast, um, for I think 74. And I went back to the first school and said, Hey, you know, are you willing to match it? And they were sort of like, we can go up to 72, but we, we can’t match it. So I said, okay, that’s, that’s not gonna work for me. Um, for the other school that was at 74, um, I still felt like that was way low and I had a lot of debate because I’m like, well, look, this is a tenure track position at an R1 school. I felt like I could have success there. It would be limiting in what type of research I could pursue, but I felt like the bar was such that I could clear it and be a success.

Dillon (09:14): And so that, that gave me a, a big reason to pause. Um, at the same point in time, I did an on-campus interview for another R1 in the southeast that I knew would be over a hundred thousand per year. And so I was like, okay, that would also be a better place for me to do my research. Um, and I just feel like that would be the best fit. Um, it was a really weird situation where after I had my on-campus interview, I followed up and, you know, wanted to ask where they were in their search process and heard nothing and reached out again saying, Hey, I have other offers. Just wanted to know where you’re at again, nothing. So, um, I was pressured from the other school to say, Hey, like, are you gonna take this or not? And I basically just said, no.

Dillon (10:12): I said, you know, I am still waiting to hear back. And I just felt that 74,000 was, was very low. Um, still ended up being ghosted by the third place. Um, did not have a rejection email, not, and automated one, not anything else. It was just radio silence. So, um, that was really weird. Um, and I reached out to other professors at Vanderbilt. Uh, they were more senior to just be like, Hey, like, this seems odd, is this normal? And they were like, no, that’s not, but they, you know, kind of did their best to assure me that it was unlikely directly related to something inherent to me and more that they didn’t have their kind of department in order. And this is a reflection of that, and that if that is the way that things are going, then maybe that’s not a great spot to come in as an assistant professor.

Dillon (11:14): Um, so I ended up sort of doing a lot of interviews and getting very close, but kind of walked away from things and felt a little, um, unnerved by it all. I was like, okay, I, I had this position that would’ve been okay, really didn’t pay that well. I said, no, should I have accepted it? And then this other place that just didn’t even get back to me. Um, so then the following, uh, year, uh, I came back and did I think one or two apps kind of early and then did an on-campus interview, um, a little bit earlier in the season and was offered that and decided to take it, um, at Florida State. And I didn’t know it at the time, but the, um, o- offer was for $88,000 per year, um, on a nine month, um, contra- or salary or however that’s, that’s phrased.

Dillon (12:17): Um, and I was told that the starting salary was not negotiable for essentially like, uh, it’s set by the union. And I was a little bit surprised by that because I know that a lot of, a lot of state schools have faculty unions, but I didn’t quite understand how that played such, um, a large role in the salary negotiate sal- salary negotiation, because I really felt that that was like the most common negotiation point that you could have.

Deciding on a Tenure Track Faculty Position

Dillon (12:54): And so I was just sort of like, oh, that’s, that’s it. Um, okay, well, um, I guess this is my next big choice is do I take this or, or not. And I felt that Florida State was a place that I could, um, have success, have support. Um, I was in a good peer group. Um, it felt like things are gonna start getting very sticky very quickly with higher ed, and so it felt like I really should not wait on this, and this seems like a good spot. And so, um, that’s kind of how that all, all of that unfolded.

Emily (13:33): I’m trying to get to the timeline. We’re talking about fall 2024. Is that when you were extended the offer? Is that right?

Dillon (13:40): So I would’ve interviewed in December of 2024, and then I received an offer in, I think it was January of 2025.

Emily (13:48): Yeah. Sticky. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Sure. <laugh> uh, prescient. Good job. <laugh> securing something at that stage

Dillon (13:57): And kind of just layered on top of that. I was very sick for my interview week, week weekend. Um, I had a conference right beforehand and I had started to get sick and I was like, oh, all right. Maybe if I just take like one or two, like two days of rest where I am just trying to sleep and take meds, I’ll kind of get through it. Um, ended up getting worse and I had a fever, I was coughing consistently, I couldn’t sleep. I had lost my voice and I was like, I can’t call the day before I’m supposed to leave, or the day of I’m supposed to leave and just cancel this. Um, and so I was like, well, maybe by the time I get there I’ll be over the hump and I’ll be recovered. And so it was magical thinking. Um, and no, I was very sick.

Dillon (14:52): I went through like literally a bag of cough drops per day. Um, I had to have water with me the whole time near the end of my job talk, you know, I had this coughing spell that I had to take like a minute or two and a minute. A minute or two doesn’t sound like a long time, but when you’re coughing for a minute or two straight, um, it was, it was probably the toughest like academic thing that I’ve ever had to do, um, is you’re supposed to be on the whole time you’re supposed to be at, at your best and you’re conversational and answering these personal questions and research questions. And, um, I just got through it all and just said, okay, I guess this is, this is what I have to do. Um, I try to take this mindset that I’m like, imagine you’re like special forces in the military. There’s no option to not do it. You’re just gonna do it. And it ended up that it worked out.

Emily (15:53): What I’m actually taking from that story of, you know, these two rounds of applications and your interview process and all that is like, um, that you kind of had, I don’t know if I wanna say it’s an abundance mindset, but at least like not a scarcity mindset. Like you really talked yourself through, you know, declining the offers that you had because you were kind of like, they aren’t sufficient, it’s not gonna be a good fit. And I think a lot of people would say, I have a bird in hand, right? Like, I have it, I have to take the offer because these tenure track positions are so hard to come by. Um, yet you held out even, you know, it didn’t work out the first year, but working out the second year, despite the adversity and the interview and all of that, just like, yeah, you had a, a standard that you, um, held the job that you wanted to accept too. And so I just want people to get that message of like, it’s not all scarcity. Okay. I know there’s scarcity in academia, but not always, not for everyone. Um, there can be times when these things work out.

Dillon (16:58): Yeah. And you know, I’m very grateful that it didn’t work out because, you know, this is such a tough place to be, you know? And so, um, it’s tough to explain that to your family or your parents because they’re like, oh, okay, well you’re doing a PhD, so that means you’re gonna be a professor. And it’s like, well, first of all, it’s if you want to do it, and there’s a whole range of places and spaces that you can go with that, but also it is not any kind of guarantee. And like if, if you’re in your PhD, you, you, you kind of know that, but to explain to your parents that are like, I don’t know, um, as, as much as they love you and as much as they think you’re great, you can be really great and it can still be really, really tough. And so, um, that’s why I felt such anxiety from having said no to these places because I’m like, am I gonna be kicking myself, you know, a year or three down the road when I’m like, if I just had done that? Um, and so it, it did work out and I’m grateful for it.

Emily (18:05): I think you also, and maybe this is true, but you should have been taking some clues from okay, I was invited to apply like only a year into my postdoc. Like maybe I have a strong profile, like maybe I’m a competitive candidate here. Even though it didn’t work out in year one, it did, you know, subsequently. Um, the other thing about the parents, I think, or maybe outside people, like having that expectation of like, oh yeah, PhD means professors. Like when you actually like grab that ring and you’re like, I got it <laugh>, I’m accepting an offer. They’re like, of course, of course that’s what was going to happen. You’re like, no, you have no idea. Like what I went through to get to this point. <laugh>.

Dillon (18:41): Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Emily (18:43): Okay. Well, is there anything that you’d like to share with us about your current position and the financial aspects of it? I mean, I kind of think you left a little open loop there with like, does the union actually determine faculty salaries? Like what have you discovered in your time since you accepted or since you started?

Dillon (18:59): Um, it’s still an open question. Um, so I know that that is not university wide. Um, it might have been that there was a specific pay line that was given to the school from the college that either there was a maximum or just a set amount. And that was just that. Um, there’s also some very interesting, uh, issues where I have a startup, but I cannot use my startup to pay students or to pay staff. And that’s kind of wild in the basic science space because like when you are just starting your lab, you, you get postdocs, you get, uh, research staff you like, that’s how you build up your lab and you do the work that you need to do. Um, and so it’s just a little bit odd that, um, that’s the restriction that, you know, I’m, I’m working through. Um, so

Emily (20:05): My understanding that until you get a grant, you can’t hire anyone. Is that right?

Dillon (20:10): Essentially. Yeah. Um, there are undergraduate and masters students who, um, can do sort of like, uh, i, I don’t know the exact term, but sort of like a, a research experience where they can work in your lab for a certain number of hours per week. Um, that’s not guaranteed. You have to, you know, there’s only so many students that that that can go around. Um, I’ve also learned that for as much as I have, you know, kind of complained about my PhD experience, um, it is a lot bleaker in other places. And so, um, you know, even with my department now, I’m like, oh, I don’t know that I would bring in a student unless I had a grant because there are so many issues. Um, they kind of, they extend in in multiple ways. Um, yeah, I want elaborate on, on, on that more, but, um, you know, I’m having to kind of transition from thinking about, okay, what were my experiences to now? What would I want, um, a student to experience as, as my student

Emily (21:29): That’s very positive. <laugh> in terms of an outcome of your experience to yeah, be thinking about it. ‘Cause you know, with some, again, I mentioned distance earlier, the distance of time, some people do forget or start to romanticize, um, their own financial experiences during graduate school, um, when it benefits them to do so in terms of who are they gonna hire and how much are they gonna pay them and are they gonna negotiate and all these things. So I appreciate that, you know, you’re still close to the experience, but that you’re taking that mindset and saying, okay, maybe better not to hire anyone under these circumstances until I can provide for them in a way that you think is fair and sufficient to, you know, further their development. Of course, the research that you want them to do for your lab.

Dillon (22:11): Yeah, I think that communication sciences and disorders is a very interesting field because it can be situated in a lot of different places within a university. It can be in the College of Arts and Sciences, it can be in a college of education, uh, at Vanderbilt it was kind of, uh, part of the medical program and biomedical sciences. Um, and so each of those different placements kind of impacts the expectations and the ability for your students to get funded in ways that I think would be appropriate.

Emily (22:48): Yeah. So it’s definitely something to consider when you’re doing interdisciplinary work. Right.

Commercial

Emily (22:56): 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. This is a perfect time to book me for a workshop at the end of the current fiscal year or at the beginning of the upcoming 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 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.

Financial Challenges as a Tenure Track Faculty Member

Emily (24:21): Okay. Give us a picture of your finances. Now we know your salary. Where is it taking you? What are you doing in your financial life now that you have this position?

Dillon (24:32): Yeah. Um, it still feels very unsettled, um, because I just moved in August, um, I moved from the condo that I lived in Nashville to a house that I’m renting with my wife. Um, there were a lot of expenses with the move. Um, Florida State provided a sign-on bonus, but not, but that was, uh, it, it was, it took several, uh, weeks for that to be dispersed. So I had to put a lot of moving expenses on a credit card. Um, it took a while for our condo to sell, and so there was a short period of time where we were doing a mortgage plus rent, um, which was really tough. And then my wife, um, had to move jobs and so there was, um, you know, about four weeks where she wasn’t working. She’s just now working towards her first, uh, full paycheck. And so the, the coffers have have kind of been, been drained.

Dillon (25:37): And so, um, I feel like, you know, give it another six months and we might be in a better place, but it still feels very kind of unsettled. Um, and so even though I’ve, you know, gotten a, a pay raise, it really doesn’t feel like it, it almost feels like, um, like a step backwards as far as, um, just the amount of money that’s, that’s been laid out. Um, additionally, I am, um, paid for nine month salary, um, which previously was 12, right? And so, um, there’s a, uh, institutional grant that you can apply for that helps supplement your summer salary for your first year, but it doesn’t fully replace it. Um, and so I’m gonna have to just be basically saving money through the months in order to pay my own salary in the summer. Um, so that feels a little, a little scary.

Dillon (26:43): Um, hopefully, you know, I can supplement that with grants down the road, but that’s gonna take, you know, at at least a year or more to, to do. So, um, I am hoping to, um, buy a house in like May or June, so that will be another kind of like big major purchase. Um, and a again, a lot of money associated with, with that. So, um, and I’m ba- what I’ve, what I did is I kind of put the money from the condo into a, uh, like money market account. Um, and so I, I can’t and won’t touch that up until that point. Um, and so, um, yeah, it, it, it’s, it’s good to be starting fresh, but also there’s some aspects of it that, um, just take a while to sort out.

Emily (27:39): I’m really glad to have this message on the podcast as well of like a higher salary is not a panacea. Like, it’s, it’s helpful, definitely better than not being paid as much, but like, as you progress in your life and your career and your finances, also kind of the stakes get raised. Like we’re talking about home ownership, right? So like selling a condo and like buying a house. So like we’re trying to do an upgrade here, you know? Um, and so the expenses get raised too, and things like moving, uh, interruptions in pay because of career transitions, like all these things are normal things that happen. So it’s like, yeah, you have the higher salary, but like you said, it doesn’t quite feel much easier yet. And hopefully once you know, things settle down from the transition, the moves and all that, like, hopefully you will start to feel better about it.

Emily (28:26): But like, yeah, it can take some time for sure. Um, so it’s not an immediate fix necessarily. The postdoc salary probably felt better, right? ’cause you didn’t move, you probably didn’t have an interruption, um, in your paychecks or anything. And so it was just like, oh, immediately there’s more money. That’s great, right? But when you factor in these other things that happen at these different career stages would involve moving different cost of living different places. Yeah, it can, yeah, challenging, but I’m very hopeful for you and your wife and your future and these changes that you’re going to make and yeah, that you’ll figure out <laugh> the summer salary and the grants and subsequent years, and maybe this year will be the hardest year, right? Financially getting all this stuff sorted out. Um, is there anything else that you’d like to share about this stage and your finances or money mindset during this stage?

Dillon (29:12): I don’t think so. I think that, um, I kind of came into both my PhD and my faculty job with reasonable expectations, and I’m really grateful for getting to pursue this, you know, line of research that is meaningful to me that I feel like I’m making an im- an impact. Um, there’s certainly days or times that I’m like, man, I have so many interests and I chose this really niche thing that not a lot of people can relate to. Um, and that feels, you know, tough. But then there are times when I feel like, man, if I’m not doing this, I don’t know who else would be, or, um, I can help someone down the road that, um, if I wasn’t doing it, um, I’m not sure we would have that, that knowledge. Um, so even, even throughout my PhD, I had a roommate who was like, oh, you should, you should, you know, just go and work for Google and like their speech sciences that does voice recognition stuff and you’ll get paid way more and you’ll have a better life and blah, blah, blah.

Dillon (30:30): And, uh, I was kind of offended by that. I was like, yes, I probably could do that, but that would completely abandon this, you know, sort of dream and this motivation that made me do this in the first place. You know, I wasn’t working towards just a degree because it sounded cool, or that was just the next logical step. Like this was something that I literally planned out from my freshman year in college. Um, and so it was sort of like, you know, pursue that or go out in flames trying. Um, and I think that because my motivation was so personal, it made it easier to push through some of the hard times where, um, people that maybe lacked that a little bit, you start to look around because you’re like, well, what’s, what’s the why? And I think that that is important. It’s no wrong or right answer, but I think it, you’re going to be in situations where you confront that to varying de- degrees and, um, I’m just glad that, you know, mine has, has worked out the way that, that it has.

Emily (31:37): People are allowed to make different decisions around this, right? Like, yeah, you have this personal motivation, as you said, you’ve had a long-term plan, you’ve been executing, and this is at least the first stage of the culmination of that. Um, and certainly try it out. And if you decide it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, then you can make a pivot at some other point. That’s totally fine. Um, yeah, but I, I’m also struck by like mission-driven people also need to be paid well enough to sustain what they’re doing. So I hope that is the case for you now that you’re in this, um, this level of your career. Um, so Dillon, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you and hearing your story, and I think there’s so many great nuggets that listeners can have gotten from this interview depending on what stage they’re at.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (32:23): Um, I wanna conclude with the question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it can be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it can be something completely new.

Dillon (32:35): I, I sometimes struggle with that because everybody’s different and what worked for me isn’t necessarily gonna work for everybody else. Um, but something that I got in the habit of that was a huge help was just tracking my spending and knowing, learning to know exactly what I could afford. Um, and that allowed me to make some choices that were trade offs, but at least I, I sort of knew the dollar amounts and how that would impact me. So, um, yeah, I, I think that because I was on this fixed amount for so long, I had kinda my core expenses that were paid for or that I could pay for, and then it was sort of, how do I play with the margins of that and what’s that going to go towards? Um, my, my wife went to law school and took out a lot of loans and she had a very different experience where she had such massive loans that she was like, oh, what’s a hundred dollars here or a hundred dollars there, it doesn’t really matter.

Dillon (33:45): And so she didn’t have that sort of fear of God into tracking her spending because she didn’t really have to. Um, but if you don’t do that in your PhD, you can kind of quickly accumulate things that will hurt you down the road. Um, so it’s not fun, but I could kind of, after a few years, I could kind of be like, oh, alright, I have approximately, you know, $400 to appropriate this month. Where’s that gonna go and how am I gonna do it? Um, and if I know there’s something, you know, five months down the road that I’m gonna do, I can try to segment as little as I could to put towards that. Um, controversial take here is that I feel like I leveraged credit cards very well. Um, I was not a crazy points guy, but I definitely took advantage of a lot of, um, signup offers.

Dillon (34:49): I was very good about paying off my credit cards, um, for the, for the most part unless there was like a 0% APR card that I basically took out specifically for that reason. Um, and so that gave me a little bit more money. It gave me a little more flexibility, having a zero interest essentially loan. Um, and then that also did help build my credit through time. So I have a credit history that’s lengthy and positive and, you know, they’re fairly good amount of it. In fact, I was always shocked that these credit cards were granted to me for, you know, $10,000 and I’m like, I can barely afford my groceries at the end of the month and you’re just giving me 10 grand. Like, that’s crazy. But if you do it right, you can, you can make that work. Um, again, that was a super intentional and thoughtful process that I did, and you can have that go sideways really, really quickly. Um, so it’s not exactly advice for everyone, but if you can kind of thread the needle, there are good things that can come.

Emily (36:05): Well, I think the second, I don’t wanna call it advice, but the second suggestion or, you know, modeling what you did follows very well from the first you have to master and understand your own spending and develop some intuition around that before you go into, um, playing with fire a little bit, <laugh>, which is, you know, the, the credit card games and so forth you can play because the temptation with credit cards, you know, using plastic in general and then doubly, so if there’s like a benefit, you know, points or sign up bonuses or whatever, there really is a little pull there to spend more than you would if you were using other forms of payment. And so, but if you have that knowledge and intuition and the budget or whatever it is that you’re doing to kind of keep your spending in line and on track, then you can do that successfully, which it sounds like you did.

Emily (36:51): Um, so I’m very glad to hear that that worked out for you. The Points game is not, uh, controversial on this podcast, so it’s something that we’ve talked about with other graduate students and I do think it’s one of the ways that people can find a little bit more wiggle room in their spending, uh, when they’re living on a low stipend like you were. Um, so Dillon, again, it’s been such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for sharing all this, uh, with us, especially these sort of behind the scenes things and emotional things that were going on with you through these unpleasant, you know, sometimes unpleasant things that happened. Um, I just think it’s a really honest window into the graduate student experience, the PhD experience, so thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Dillon (37:28): Yeah, glad that I can share.

Outro

Emily (37:44): 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.

Tax-Advantaged Retirement Account Options in Higher Ed and K-12

February 23, 2026 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Daren Card, a computational biochemist working in industry. Daren and his wife moved to Arlington, TX for his PhD and then Boston, MA for his postdoc, and she held K-12 teaching positions in both cities. He shares their financial journey, from managing their student loan debt through opening and funding IRAs. Daren and Emily discuss the tax-advantaged retirement account options available, such as 403(b)s, 457s, and 401(k)s, and how to spot red flags in your employer-sponsored plans.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Tax-Advantaged Retirement Account Options in Higher Ed and K-12

Teaser

Daren (00:00): This was one of these fellowship programs that’s actually channeled through me. So I sort of administered my own award, which is a bit unique, uh, in this way. And, and there’s some upsides to that. But some of the downsides are you don’t get sort of the, the, the financial benefits of, of being attached to a large university.

Introduction

Emily (00:26): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (00:54): This is Season 23, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Daren Card, a computational biochemist working in industry. Daren and his wife moved to Arlington, TX for his PhD and then Boston, MA for his postdoc, and she held K-12 teaching positions in both cities. He shares their financial journey, from managing their student loan debt through opening and funding IRAs. Daren and I discuss the tax-advantaged retirement account options available, such as 403(b)s, 457s, and 401(k)s, and how to spot red flags in your employer-sponsored plans.

Emily (01:30):The tax year 2025 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor this workshop for you and your peers? You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Thank you so, so much for doing so! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s23e4/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Daren Card.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:06): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Daren Card, who currently works in industry at Colossal Biosciences as a computational biologist. But we are gonna be taking it back to his grad school days and his postdoc days to talk about his financial journey. And Daren, because this story involves both you and your wife and your kind of joint projects and finances, please introduce yourself and your wife and we’ll get started.

Daren (03:30): Yeah, so, so my name’s Daren as, as you’ve heard, uh, my, my wife’s name is Rachel. Yeah, we’ve, uh, we’re both originally from sort of rural western New York, uh, south of the Buffalo, New York area. And we actually met in high school at the very end of high school. We both shared a, a high school job at Burger King, ironically, a fast food job. And, um, yeah, got to know each other there. Started dating at the very end of high school, and we’ve been together ever since as, as partners in life. So we’re approaching now, uh, 10 years of marriage, uh, next year and 20 years of being together. So it’s been quite a ride. Um, we both sort of navigated through the community college system and the SUNY system in the, in the state University of New York. Um, both were interested in biology, generally speaking. My wife wanted to pursue more veterinary science. I became interested in conservation. Ultimately, uh, I got more interested in the research bug, like a lot of folks do. Um, and that brought us both down to Arlington, Texas, where I did a PhD at that point in time, uh, focused on evolutionary genomics, uh, sort of trying to link the, uh, the, the genes that we have in our, our cells to the actual physical traits that we see, uh, in organisms in, in nature. Um, Rachel worked for a few years in a veterinary field. Um, we ended up getting married in, in 2016, about 10 years ago now, and a week later, actually, Rachel got a new job as a, as a high school teacher, and she’s been doing that since, and she really enjoys that work. So I finished my PhD in 2018 and was fortunate enough to get a, a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, so shout out to NSF and the US government for funding folks like me and the work that we do. Um, and that brought me up to Boston area where I did a five year postdoc at Harvard University. And, uh, that ended about two years ago. And since then, I, I worked a couple years at the Broad Institute as a computational biologist, mostly focused on cancer genomics. And recently, just this summer I moved over, uh, to a computational biologist position at Colossal Biosciences, which is a bit more in my traditional area. So.

Emily (05:20): Wonderful. Thank you. Such, that was a very succinct overview. Let’s rewind a little bit through that process, because I wanna know what your finances, um, and I don’t know at what point you considered those are finances, yours, mine, whatever your situation was. Um, with your now wife, going back to the start of graduate school, what were your finances like? Like did you have assets? Did you have debts at that point? Maybe student loan debt. Um, did you know anything about money <laugh>? Um, and then what was the stipend like when you started grad school?

Daren (05:46): For, for me, you know, both my wife and I came out of, I guess sort of lower to middle class, uh, sort of backgrounds. We were in more of a rural area, so, you know, just didn’t quite have some of the access that you get in sort of urban areas to a lot of, of the, the benefits of, of sort of population density, I guess you could say. So, um, so because of that, you know, we, we both came out of bachelor’s degrees, uh, in that time period with, with basically zero assets, right? And we had to fund our way through, uh, through our undergraduate degrees using debt, unfortunately from, from, uh, student loan debt in the form of government debt, or in some cases private debt as well. So, so yeah, the, the, uh, the, the numerator of the equation here, I guess is zero in the form of assets.

Daren (06:24): Uh, the, the debt that we had, I had in the order of about 60 or so from memory, uh, k worth of debt from my undergrad, uh, education at a state, uh, university. Um, my wife had a bit more, she was about 75K or so, I think. Um, and yeah, as far as sort of knowledge and and mindset at that point in time, you know, minimal knowledge, I guess, you know, we’re both entering adulthood. We, we did share our, our, our finances largely by that point when we moved on to Texas together. Um, which, uh, had a lot of benefits, I would say. Um, and, uh, and yeah, but I’ve just always been sort of a nerd about various things I like to learn. And, and, and for whatever reason, I got the personal finance bug, uh, a couple years into graduate school, you know, um, and, uh, and yeah, just spent a lot of time perusing the internet, basically teaching myself about all this stuff.

Daren (07:10): You know, it’s all out there in some form, right? It’s tax code, um, uh, it’s not the most easiest thing to read, but usually people distill it down for you. And, and I took advantage of that in that time. So, uh, as a grad student, my stipend over my, uh, six years at UT Arlington was on the order of 30K A year, I would say. I was, uh, I was funded at, on a, a teaching assistant line, so I, I taught the whole time, including on the summers. Um, and my spouse, uh, was fortunate to have a bit more income. She sort of hovered around 50 to 60K through that time period. Um, and overall, and I, I do want to point this out, you know, I should have said it before, but I, I, I do think it’s really important to emphasize this. This is a partnership with my wife. Um, she takes as much credit for these successes as I do. I might be the one standing here talking with a PhD. Uh, she’s not an academic. She’s, she, uh, doesn’t have a PhD, but, uh, but I’ve been very fortunate in that this way, and I think it’s important to point that out. And not take too much credit here because my wife had a big role in this. And, and I think it’s also an important caveat too, um, because, uh, some things are just, you know, simply easier when you have two forms of income and you can split costs. And, and not all PhD students are gonna be able to have that advantage like I had over that time period. So, uh, that was a bit unique to me, I guess.

Turning Personal Finance Knowledge into Action

Emily (08:23): Yeah, very important context for us to have. Thank you for like, explaining that and caveating that. And, uh, yes. Wonderful. So you’ve mentioned that you, you know, kind of <laugh> developed this interest in personal finance, decided to kind of nerd out, learn about it in, you know, that time period when you were in graduate school. And so did you actually start applying that knowledge, um, like what were you doing with your finances during that period of time in graduate school and then also with your postdoc?

Daren (08:49): Yeah, yeah. So we, we, yeah, we did I think, start applying that pretty quickly. My wife has, has always been a, a saver <laugh>, you know, I, I guess I am too by, by nature for whatever reason. Uh, you know, I think we’ve had relatives that sort of knocked into our head early on, you know, given their limited means in many cases that, you know, you gotta think long term and, and, and not wait. Um, so we started pretty early, you know, by our mid, mid twenties I guess I would say. We were starting to contribute to, uh, IRAs. Um, I, um, is, is, is a great way of starting, uh, in this world. Um, you know, it’s flexible. Uh, it doesn’t have the highest contribution limits, but for our income at the time, it was perfectly sufficient, right? So, uh, you’re able to just to open that account yourself, right online, uh, at a, at a many different options out there to, to use that.

Daren (09:33): Um, I think at the time I used, uh, Betterment, uh, just for a, a, a bit of a reference. And my, my wife had started up a Vanguard account, uh, at that time. So, so that’s what we did the first few years during, uh, my, my PhD, um, when my wife switched over to a teaching job, she was able to access a, the state pension system, um, being a K 12 teacher. So she was, uh, starting to contribute in that way as well, on top of the IRAs. Um, and, and that’s basically the status quo up through, uh, 2018 or so when I left my PhD and, and, and wrapped that up. Um, when we moved to Massachusetts, you know, my wife obviously continued with the pension system, being a K 12 teacher. Uh, she’s also able to take advantage of what is called a 457 plan, which we can talk a bit more about here if you’d like, um, at one of her former school districts, uh, that she taught at before.

Daren (10:19): And, uh, and then, um, basically, uh, in my peer in my position as a postdoc, I was, I was funded by and an NSF Fellowship, so I think we made some contributions still to IRAs, but I didn’t really have access to like a 401k or a 403B. This was one of these fellowship programs that’s actually channeled through me. So I sort of administered my own award, which is a bit unique, uh, in this way. And, and there’s some upsides to that, but some of the downsides are, you don’t get sort of the, the, the financial benefits of, of being attached to a large university. Um, so, so yeah, I had to sort of sacrifice that for a few years, which was a, a little tough, I guess, but it wasn’t the end of the world. And, uh, and my last year I actually moved on to a more of a proper internal position and was able to contribute to a 401k for the last year, my postdoc. And then since, uh, in my positions, I’ve been contributing to a 401k, uh, as well. So, so yeah, that’s basically the journey through grad school to- till about now really.

Tax-Advantaged Retirement Account Options

Emily (11:13): Let’s dive into the tax advantage retirement accounts. ’cause I know you and I both really excited to talk about those. So, um, you’ve kind of mentioned already some of the different accounts you and your wife have had access to over the years. Um, just tell us more about what you learned about those accounts over time, what you think is important for the audience to understand.

Daren (11:31): Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the, the one big tip is, you know, don’t overthink it. Just, just pick one and, and go with it. <laugh>. That would be my sort of big tip here. Um, but yeah, we can spend a second sort of talking about some of the, the differences between these different accounts. So, so there’s a, uh, an IRA, so an individual retirement account, I believe is the acronym, right? Um, uh, so this is sort of the, the, the, I guess the beginner, uh, account, I think for most people. So it’s, anyone is eligible for it. Um, generally speaking, um, it’s flexible. You can open it up yourself. It doesn’t have to come through an employer. Um, the contribution limits are lower, that’s one of the downsides. I think they’re on the order of 7,000 now or so,

Emily (12:07): 7,000 in 2025. It’s gonna go up in 2026. Yeah, 7500, I think.

Daren (12:12): Yep. So, so that’s, uh, the, the, the option that we took advantage of in the beginning, you know, that was perfectly sufficient for our, our, our, uh, our situation. And honestly, it’d probably be perfectly sufficient for most grad students. I would, I suspect out there, uh, in, in the US at least. So, um, you know, when we moved beyond grad school, we started to think more and more about other things, and mostly that was because we actually became eligible for other sorts of retirement accounts. I didn’t have access to that sort of a thing as a graduate student, given my appointment at the university, uh, my wife, uh, became eligible for a, a pension system, but, um, but not really a, a 401k, right? Um, um, but yeah, when we sort of moved into graduate school and moved up here to Massachusetts, then we started to think about things like, uh, the, the very famous 401k, right, which comes typically from, uh, normal employment out in at businesses and things like that.

Daren (12:58): And then you have a very similar plan called a 403B, which is usually reserved for nonprofit sectors. Um, so universities typically have this type of, of plan. So these are sort of your quintessential retirement plans. They come through the employer. Occasionally you’ll get an employee, employee match, uh, not, not usually at a, at a a a college. I’m, I suspect, or at least for grad students and, and postdocs, maybe for faculty. Um, uh, but out in the sort of private industry and things like that, you can get nice employer matches that, uh, will sort of help to top up your contributions a bit. Um, so we’ve been taking advantage of that a lot since, uh, coming into sort of the postdoc and beyond phase of, of our, uh, of our lives. Um, and, uh, those contribution limits, I think on the order of about 24,000 right now, so much more substantial.

Daren (13:39): And then with the, with the additional contributions from an employer, you know, that’s sort of a hundred percent return right away, which can be pretty nice on at least a subset of your contributions. Um, so definitely take advantage of that for sure. And then, uh, a last account, I’ll, I’ll talk about, I mentioned it earlier, is a, uh, is a 457, uh, plan. Uh, this is another, these are all IRS tax codes. Uh, basically is, is people probably know. And, uh, honestly, I think this is maybe the best of the, the group in my opinion. There’s, uh, it’s basically the same as a 401k or 4013B as far as contribution limits and the way it’s administered and things like that. Uh, but one nice thing about it is, uh, and again, I should say it’s, it’s really reserved much more for I think, state level or local level, um, uh, government sorts of positions and, and things like that. So it’s a bit more restricted. You’re not gonna see this at a, at a company or something like that. Um,

Emily (14:28): Nonprofits can also have them sometimes. Um, but I do see it more often with like state university systems or something like that,

Daren (14:36): Right. Or local municipalities and things like that. Yeah. So, uh, but yeah, the, the real nice advantage of this is when you leave employment, there’s some, you know, I don’t remember the exact details now, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, but there’s some nice, um, there’s some sort of nice liquidation options. You know, usually with these accounts, you’re sort of locked out of them for, for good reason, don’t touch ’em. That’s the idea, right? Um, and, uh, so yeah, when you do have to touch them, like if you have an emergency or something, you take, you take a penalty, um, and you, you do typically with a 457 as well. But one of the sort of, uh, caveats of the way that they wrote the tax code here is that when you leave the service that provides that 457, uh, it is eligible, you know, all these things are eligible to get rolled over, but the 457 is a bit unique in that you can actually liquidate that money, you know, you have to follow certain procedures and, uh, and sort of tap into it in a way that you can’t with these other traditional, um, retirement plans.

Daren (15:28): So, uh, so that’s a nice one. We’ve took, taken advantage of that on top of my wife’s pension here in Massachusetts. Her previous district had, uh, access to a a 457 plan through the state of Massachusetts that’s administered at the state level to keep the cost low. It’s called a smart plan here. Um, and, uh, yeah, we’ve been able to take advantage of that a little bit as well.

Emily (15:47): So I’ve heard about the 457, I mean, in my work, it’s like, okay, you know, 457, 403B kind of similar sort of arrangements, but in the FIRE community, the financial independence retire early community, it’s kind of held up as this, like, hey, you can, if you separate from service, as you said, you can access this money earlier in ways that you don’t have to pull the tricks that you need to do with your IRAs and the 401k and all those other types of accounts. So it’s kind of held out in that community in particular as a really great plan to use, if that is your goal of stopping work before age 59 and a half, and, you know, trying to access some money earlier. So, um, I did a previous interview interview with Dr. Corwin Olson that people might wanna reference, um, talking about early retirement in the FIRE community, uh, for PhDs and people who work, again, in, in sectors where these kind of, um, accounts are permitted and offered. So that might be something for listeners to check out, um, as well. But it sounds like you, if you’ve tapped that 457 have not done so for funding your lifestyle in retirement, but maybe for other investment opportunities. Is that right?

Daren (16:51): Yeah, you know, and I, I sort of, you know, definitely in grad school and, and stuff, you know, who knows where life will take me, right? But, but I wouldn’t mind retiring early <laugh>, you know, I sort of look at, uh, personal freedom and the ability to sort of control your time is, is one of the ultimate forms of freedom that you can have in, in, in this world, and subscribe to the idea that that that is something to strive for. And, and, and that has been part of our, our, my, my collective goal with my wife is to, to somehow facilitate, you know, early retirement and it’ll be an open question, you know, how early it can be for us, uh, or if we’re even successful. But, um, but yeah, the 457 at least allows the opportunity to be able to draw down that money before you hit the age.

Daren (17:29): The age is where you’re typically eligible to do so under more traditional plans without a penalty. So, so yeah, if you do wanna retire early, that’s where the 457 can really shine. Otherwise, you know, if you’re gonna start, if you’re gonna retire at a traditional sort of 62 or, or 59 and a half, I guess technically is the earliest you can do, um, you know, it, it really doesn’t make much of a difference which of these you sort of go with. Um, so, so yeah, we’re in the weeds here a little bit, but, but these are I think, some useful, uh, tidbits of information that might be helpful to folks.

Emily (17:57): Yeah, I think I wanna go back to how you started this section, which is like, the main thing is just pick one plan <laugh>, and then like stick with it. So like, it always depends on what’s offered to you. So if nothing’s offered to you because you’re a graduate student, then you’re gonna go with an ira, probably a Roth IRA given your income at the time. Um, if you work in the private sector, okay, it’s probably gonna be a 401k if you work in, you know, universities or other types of nonprofits, government, yeah. Maybe then we’re talking about the 403B, maybe with the 457 as well, and then you have a bit of a choice, which one do I wanna prioritize? Or if you’re really mad about personal finance, you might do both.

Daren (18:29): That is a good advantage of the two. You can do both, uh, the 403B and the 457.

Emily (18:33): Yes. That, that is like, yeah. And most people who have these types of jobs don’t earn enough money to be able to do both. But if you’re a PhD and you’re well compensated and you have to be, happen to be in an industry that does offer both of these things, maybe you’re that unicorn where you actually could, you know, contribute to both. But the point is like, what is being offered to you, it’s probably not gonna be this whole suite of options unless like you two, you have a married couple who works in different industries with different types of opportunities and also maybe shifts over time. Um, what’s available to you? I’ll throw in as well self-employed person. I have a solo 401k, so like throw those options and advantages in there as well. If you have any kind of self-employment side hustle, you can open a solo 401k. So anyway, just to complicate things further, basically yeah, there’s even more. It’s out there. Yeah, it’s like an IRA like you said, is almost always available. There are technically some eligibility things about your income, but most graduate students and postdocs will qualify. Yeah, so there’s the IRA and then it kind of depends on your work after that,

Daren (19:30): Basically. Yeah, that’s a good take home. I think there, and, and yeah, there’s even more out there as, as you’re sort of alluding to, and, and there’s even more, you know, the, I think the other side of this, uh, the coin here that this sort of comes into this conversation that I think is maybe worth, uh, talking about as well is, you know, this is just a sort of the, the tax code, the vehicle in which you’re sort of investing, but, um, but there’s also what you’re investing your money in. And that can be just as important as the, the tax advantages and things like that is, well, you know, am I investing in something that’s gonna see a good return? Uh, am I ensuring that that return isn’t being eaten up by needless fees and, and things of that nature? And, uh, and honestly, I, I would say the, the 401k, 403B, that, that’s a bit easier to understand. It’s, it’s the, that aspect of things, the, you know, what you wanna put your money into, what things you might want to avoid. You know, when the salesman sort of comes calling and says, we have the best plan for you. Um, I think that’s where people get into more trouble, um, and where it takes a lot more effort to, to sort of understand what’s in front of you and, and what might be best for your, your personal situation.

Commercial

Emily (20:32): 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.

Fees Associated With 403(b) and 457 Accounts

Emily (21:23): Well, going off of that, uh, comment about a salesperson, um, I wanna say that listeners might be aware, and you’re prob- most likely aware, um, that 403Bs and 457s have a bad reputation of being fee laden, uh, very expensive types of, um, vehicles in which to put your investments. And also the investments that you might be steered toward by people helping you with this might not be actually optimal for the decades of investing that are ahead of you. I think this reputation more comes from K through 12, those kinds of educators versus the higher ed, um, group that I’m normally talking to. But since your wife is in that former category, let’s talk about this a little bit more. And also, there’s sexism in this because women are, you know, dominating the K through 12 educational space, whereas men are dominating the higher education space. This is one of the ways that sexism ends up influencing our investments and our finances overall. But that’s me getting on a soapbox. Let’s let you get on your soapbox <laugh>.

Daren (22:21): Sure, yeah, yeah, please. This is, this is great. Um, yeah, you know, as you say this, this pertains more to the K 12 level. You know, some of this maybe propagates up to, to post-secondary levels and, and it’s something to be aware of, certainly. Um, but, but yeah, at the K 12 level, you know, again, we have 403Bs, 457, so on and so forth. Uh, but as I said before, beyond that, you’ve gotta pick, you know, what you wanna invest your money in, and there’s lots of things out there that you can invest your money in. Um, what I tend to personally invest my money in is, is, is what they call, uh, uh, low cost index funds. So these are, uh, basically funds that are indexed to the, the overall stock market, so like the s and p 500, right? So they basically try to, uh, select a mixture of investments that are out there that match the performance of what the overall market is doing with the idea that it’s diversified.

Daren (23:07): And it’s, and, and it might not give you the best return every year, but it’s at least gonna give you, uh, a reasonable return and, and be somewhat protected against, uh, big downsides or big down swings, uh, that you can have, uh, in, in certain situations. So, so yeah, that, that’s, that’s what I tend to invest my money in is, is sort of a low cost index fund. Um, and, uh, the big reason for that is, is the, the low cost. You know, so there’s the money coming in from the stock market, right? So you can go out and you can look at what that is. You know, the people keep track of that all the time, right? Uh, the downside is, you know, the, in some cases that folks aren’t maybe as clear as they can be about, um, the, the cost associated with these sorts of things.

Daren (23:46): Um, so with a low cost index fund, you know, this is something offered by like a company like Vanguard. They sort of pioneered this kind of thing. The idea is, you know, we keep the, the fees as low as possible, you know, it, it’s sort of a bit automatic. It’s, it’s sort of easy to manage because it is an index fund and therefore we can offer it with very low fees. Um, and therefore your most of your money is going into your pocket, and it’s not coming into the pocket of, of, say, Vanguard or whoever is administering these funds. Obviously, there’s some cost, right? These things aren’t free, but it’s, it is actually very, very low cost. Uh, typically speaking, uh, on the other side of the coin, unfortunately, are, are what I would say are sort of predatory practices, especially at the K 12 level, given the, the sort of abundance of K 12 educators that are out there, uh, uh, the, you know, across diverse communities and so on and so forth.

Daren (24:33): Unfortunately, you know, there’s, there’s folks that, that, that sort of, I would say, sort of prey upon this <laugh> in some way. You know, they, they’ll, uh, you know, they’ll, they’ll maybe put out something sort of similar to an index fund as far as its performance, but they’ll, uh, they’ll sort of riddle it with, with high fees. Um, and you may not think much about, you know, a 1% fee, no big deal, right? Um, but, but in the long run, it really adds up. Um, you gotta think about compound interest in, in it can help you, but it can also hurt you when it’s working against you, right? So, uh, you know, you can go out and do, look at some calculators online that will sort of show you over a 20, 30, 40 year time period, even a 1% fee. You know, if you were to knock that down to a, you know, by to a 10th of that, you know, a 0.1% fee, which is more akin to what you would pay, uh, at a low con-, low cost index fund, um, you know that the extra money that you would accrue over that time period is, is substantial. It’s, it, it almost knocks you over when you look at it.

Emily (25:26): It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, typically.

Daren (25:29): So, so yeah, you know, it really is unfortunate. You know, my, my wife, uh, is in a district now. They actually, the district in which we, we reside, um, where they do have a pension system, and that’s what most teachers contribute to. And, and, uh, and then it, it just doesn’t feel like folks have really thought much more about everything else. Um, but, but there are certainly gonna be people that want to contribute to additional savings accounts. And at least at my, my, my wife’s school district, uh, uh, you know, all the plans that we’ve seen are either quite opaque. You have to sort of call people and, and get them on the phone and, and try to get the details. You know, there’s not like a nice sort of prospectus laid out of, of what you can invest in and, and what the costs are and all this sort of stuff, which alone is sort of annoying when, when folks are busy and have lives to live, right?

Daren (26:09): Um, but then on top of that, you know, when you sort of do dig in, you find that a lot of them are, uh, uh, these varieties that do have high costs associated with ’em that really can detract from the, from the, uh, the, the, the whole opportunity, I would say. So, uh, so yeah, it’s, it’s just unfortunate, at least in the case of my wife’s district that the, that the folks haven’t put more thought into that, I would say. Um, and the other sort of downside here is, is across Massachusetts, most folks have access to the state level 457 plan called the smart Plan locally. Uh, but for whatever reason, my wife’s district currently, uh, hasn’t adopted that plan. Um, which is a, a major downside, I would say as, as well. Um, and I, and I get this at some ex- to some extent, you know, most teachers will contribute only to a pension plan, never think about anything else, but not all teachers.

Daren (26:53): Um, you know, and, uh, and it really is a, it’s a missed opportunity, I would say, and it points out some, some, I I would say big problems in how sort of K 12 administrators and school districts in general, which are usually tied to local municipalities. Um, you know, even in cases with very strong sort of local union support, which is definitely the case up here in Massachusetts. Um, you know, uh, you know, still allow these things to happen. Um, you know, and, and especially in this day and age where we’re sort of facing these major teaching shortages, um, really this could be such a simple way, in a cheap way for a local school district to, to improve compensation for teachers in a way that that makes a difference, um, and, and, and not really add to their bottom line in a major way.

Daren (27:34): Um, so I would consider it really a very big missed opportunity in, in, and quite a shame. Um, and hopefully, you know, by, by pointing these things out, uh, and advocating for ourselves collectively, uh, we can improve these situations. But, but there’s definitely an uphill climb, um, in this way. And again, this mostly pertains to K 12. Some of this might trickle up to, to the post-secondary level. But, you know, I think the take home at the end of the day is, is, um, you, you really can’t rely on anyone else. Uh, you know, not to say you can’t trust people ’cause you can, but you really gotta do your homework. Um, uh, you know, you gotta make sure that the advice you’re getting is correct. You gotta make sure that it’s actually in your best interest and it’s not just a generic form of advice.

Researching Retirement Account Options Before Investing

Daren (28:13): And, uh, and that’s where sort of being a researcher I think can really be an advantage, right? So, you know, this is tailored towards PhDs and PhDs are professional researchers, so, uh, I guarantee you, if, if you can get a PhD, you can, you can learn the, the basics of this stuff and, and, and, and really help yourself out, I think in, in the long run. So, and it’s becoming better and better. I, I think, uh, there are advocacy, advocacy efforts sort of starting up in this way. A couple I can sort of point to is one’s called 403Bwise.org. Again, this is mostly k12, but they’ve sort of taken up this cause and have a, a podcast as well as a lot of information online and as well as school district, uh, report cards, uh, a lot of which are Fs and and Ds nationwide, unfortunately, uh, because of the, the, the, the, uh, the plans that are offered at most school districts.

Daren (28:59): Um, and another place that, uh, that is probably more useful, I think beyond the K 12 system is the state of California has a nice database of a lot of the, the, the, the, basically the retirement options that are available to K 12 educators in that state. And, uh, a lot of these generalize across other sectors and, and other non-profit, at least situations too. So if you’re looking for a, a, I would say maybe the best place to compare these sorts of plans, uh, in a, in a relatively unbiased manner, it’s not perfect. Um, I would say it’s the, the state of California, I can’t recall the name of the database right now, but, uh, but maybe go look that up. Um, and, uh, maybe you could put it in show notes or something like that. Um, that would maybe be the place I would suggest where folks, uh, can get more of a one-to-one comparison between these funds and really maybe get at the true details that sometimes can be hidden from you when you actually, uh, uh, go and talk to, uh, the folks at the banks and the financial institutes that offer these sorts of things.

Emily (29:52): Yeah, thank you for mentioning those resources. And kind of like you were saying in that like it’s really, um, important to investigate what’s available to you, get into the details, and then talk with your peers, right? Because whether it’s part of union or whether it’s just just talking to your colleagues, um, it’s very helpful to just get that information out there and things do and can change over time. If enough people ask, why is it that we’re not offering a 457 like every other district in the state or whatever, whatever the case is, then maybe that will eventually change. I wanna give you a small example and a big example of similar, uh, themes that I’ve run across. Um, the small example is I was actually, I had a, a series of speaking engagements recently for a university client. And so I was looking into their retirement account options for their postdocs, and I noticed that they, uh, you know, they had a 403B and a 457, uh, great.

Emily (30:39): And they had three providers, two you’ve heard of and one you maybe haven’t before. And they had a really nice table. Like you said, sometimes this information is hard to come across, but they had a really nice table laying out all of your investment options. There weren’t that many, there were maybe 10 or 12 across these three different providers and what the expense ratios are. And so I’m looking at this table going, good, good, good. We got some Vanguard funds, we got some Fidelity funds, everything’s low cost. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Oh, they’re really clearly delineating. What are the passive funds and what are the active funds? This is a very easy chart, at least for me to read since I have some familiarity. But then I looked right up at the top and saw there was a record keeping fee for each one of these different providers, which is just another add-on to the expense ratio.

Emily (31:19): And that the two you’ve heard of had very, very low record keeping fees and the one you hadn’t heard of, even though it offered the same investments as the other two, had a much higher, probably three to four times higher, uh, record keeping fee. And so I was looking at that like, oh, that one little number on this chart changed everything in terms of what I would choose if I were an employee at that institution. And I can’t give anybody financial advice, but when I ended up talking with the postdocs, I said, look at these numbers. Bigger numbers are not to your advantage, <laugh>, what should you conclude if you see these three numbers, two of which are much lower than the other. So again, just a call for like looking into the documents and having an awareness of how important fees are and really that they don’t buy you an advantage.

Emily (31:59): That’s kind of how we think that that money works. You’re gonna buy something that’s more expensive and it’s gonna be better, not the case. So it turns out in investing, um, statistically speaking, okay, so that’s a small example. The bigger example is, um, from my husband’s um, uh, biotech company that he’s worked for since he finished his postdoc, um, which has a startup. And so it’s gone through some growth over the years. Um, and they used to offer a 401k plan, um, through I’ll name and shame Edward Jones with American Funds. That was very high expense ratios. And we looked at that and we’re like, okay, we’re gonna use every other vehicle we have before we get around to this 401k, because there was not a match offered. So there’s really no advantage of using it unless we needed the contribution room, which eventually we did.

Emily (32:45): So eventually we started making some small contributions that as we were maxing out everything else available to us. Um, but over the years, again, the company grew and eventually their benefits changed, and now they have a fantastic 401k provider who has low costs and low fee options. And it’s just such a relief now that we’re using it more, we’re like, oh, this is great. Like, it’s actually not <laugh>, it’s actually to our advantage to use this 401k instead of trying to have to avoid it. Um, so things do change over time, but that, but my point is it happens in the private sector as well. You still have to be careful about, um, those expense ratios about who the providers are, about the investments that you choose. Do they offer those low cost, um, index funds or is it all actively managed stuff? So it’s not hard, you know, spend a couple of hours reading about this, read The Simple Path to Wealth, you will get it, you’re a PhD, you’re can be very capable in this area. And really, as we were saying earlier, this is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you over your investing lifetime. So it is worth a little bit of time upfront.

Daren (33:41): Yep. Yeah, don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Achieving a Positive Net Worth

Emily (33:43): Is there anything else that you would like to share about your financial journey, the investment component of your journey, maybe at, you know, coming outta your postdoc or any other stage you’d like to share with us?

Daren (33:54): Yeah, maybe I’ll, I’ll conclude with, um, with a bit of an update on sort of where I am now. You know, like I said before, I’m a couple years out of a, of, out of a postdoc and, and yeah, we, we definitely have picked up momentum, uh, over the course of the postdoc and especially these last couple years moving into sort of my, my big boy job, so, so to speak, right. Um, and, uh, and, and yeah, so I, I’m happy to report and it, it’s a big source of pride, I think for me and my wife that we, we did do a little bit of math recently, you know, looking at, you know, our, our, our, our student loans, which haven’t really moved much, but, but that’ll change soon. Um, and, uh, as well as, you know, the, the money that we have accrued across these various sort of investment vehicles as well as sort of personal savings and, and, and, and other things that we haven’t even gotten into today.

Daren (34:35): And, uh, and I can say that we, we have a positive net worth, which I think is an a major accomplishment. We have, you know, in, in the, you know, having collectively over a hundred thousand dollars worth of student loan debt. So, um, so yeah, you know, you know, I’m now sort of approaching 40 <laugh> to age myself. Um, so I’m not super old, but, uh, I’m not as young anymore. But, you know, like we started, I guess around 25, so we’re, we’re, I’m going on 13, 14 years now. Um, so, so it’s, it’s time. It’s not no time, but it’s not a lot of time either. Um, you know, and, and like I said, we, we came in with basically no savings in the beginning.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Daren (35:10): So, you know, I, I think, uh, the, the biggest advice I can give to people is, is just, just start now. Start start as early as you can. Um, the, the big thing there is just the compound interest. It’s, it’s your your best friend here. Um, you know, look for those low fee things so that, uh, there, there aren’t fees compounding on top of your compounding interest <laugh>. Um, and, uh, and yeah, the other big thing like we’ve been saying right along is, is is do your research, you know, tap into your professional skills as a PhD and, uh, and, uh, you know, I think in doing so, you can set yourself up for a, a more comfortable retirement and perhaps a bit less stress along the way. And, uh, and I think, you know, due to Emily and other folks that are out there, there, there are an increasing number of, uh, sort of resources and information that’s available. You know, when I started sort of nerding out on this 12 years ago, it was fewer and further between, but, but you know, there is a bit more of a cottage industry now of folks trying to advise folks on the best way in which to think about these things, or at least provide all the options so that people can make more informed decisions.

Daren (36:08): So on top of this, I think, uh, another good source I’ve seen that I haven’t shouted out already is, uh, I think there’s like white coat investing or something. There’s a, a [white coat investor], MDs basically, which is a pretty good proxy for PhDs in many respects and have a lot of the same, uh, you know, career stages and, and, and affiliations and things like that. So if I could fi, if I could point you to anything that’s sort of most relevant besides Emily’s things tailored to PhDs, it might be sort of the white coat investment, uh, side of things. Um, they do a pretty good job, outlining a lot of this stuff.

Emily (36:36): Yeah, I agree. They’re a great resource, especially the more your profile looks like that of their typical audience member, which is like you having student loan debt, having significant student loan debt, and then also having a good salary, which I’m sure you do now on the other side of the educational journey. Um, the more you look like that profile, the more that community is gonna benefit you. And of course, if you get really into investing, then they’re gonna benefit you as well. ’cause they talk a lot about that. Um, amazing. I love that advice. Um, thank you so much for, um, sharing that with us and for sharing your story and your insights. And I just echo like everything you said about yeah, doing your research and starting early, of course, it’s difficult during your PhD to get compound interest working on your side, but we are in PhD training for a long time. I mean, you had six years in your PhD, five years in a postdoc had you not gotten started, you know, with the investing side of things. Like not a late start exactly, but it would’ve been later <laugh>, right? And that time is really on your side. So thank you so much for sharing this with us today.

Daren (37:34): Well, well thank you Yeah. For providing a forum to, to sort of share my story. Uh, it’s, it’s been a, a wild ride in some respects, but it’s been enjoyable. I’ve, I’ve learned a lot and it’s great to sort of be able to impart that onto other folks, um, you know, to help them avoid maybe some pitfalls that are certainly out there and, and to, to hopefully, you know, to, to, to help them to maximize their personal finances. Uh, both now and, and well into the future.

Outro

Emily (38:08): 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.

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2025 Edition

December 15, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

Emily published the first episode of this podcast in July 2018. This is the 246rd episode, and over the last six and a half years, the podcast has featured over 300 unique voices in addition to her own. For our last episode in 2025, we are catching up with the guests from Seasons 15 through 17, and a few from earlier seasons as well. The guests were invited to submit short audio clips to update us on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of their interview, as well as to provide their best financial advice if that has changed since that initial interview.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Catching Up with Prior Guests: 2025 Edition

Introduction

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

Emily (00:28): This is Season 22, Episode 9, and today I am featuring several past guests! I published the first episode of this podcast in July 2018. This is the 246th episode, and over the last seven and a half years, the podcast has featured over 300 unique voices in addition to my own. For our last episode in 2025, we are catching up with the guests from Seasons 15 through 17, and a few from earlier seasons as well. I invited them to submit short audio clips to update us on how their lives and careers have evolved since the time of our interview, as well as to provide their best financial advice if that has changed since our initial interview. The audio clips in this episode are ordered by when the original episode was published, most recent to least recent. If you’d like to circle back and listen to any of the previous interviews, you can do so in your podcatcher app or at my website, PFforPhDs.com/podcast. To keep up with future episodes, please hit subscribe on that podcatcher and/or join my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice. You’ll hear an update from me first, followed by the rest of the guests. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s22e9/. Happy listening, happy holidays, and happy new year! See you in 2026!

Dr. Emily Roberts

Emily (02:05): Hi! This is Emily Roberts from Personal Finance for PhDs. I am of course the host of this podcast and you hear from me in every episode! As in previous years, I’ll give you a personal update and then a business update. Personally, I’ve had a great year but perhaps a quieter year and more home-focused than 2024. For example, my family took two vacations this year, one to the Grand Canyon over spring break and one staycation in San Diego over the summer, and the staycation was honestly awesome. I definitely want to do more of that going forward. My husband and I also oversaw some home renovations due to water damage that seemed to go on forever but have thankfully finished now, and we’re really enjoying the remodeled aspects of our home. My daughters are in fourth and second grade, and these are such fun ages. They have lots of activities of course, but I’m really enjoying the ones we can participate in together as a family, like Girl Scouts, tennis, and baking. For myself individually, I’m a three times per week regular at Orange Theory Fitness and loving how I’m feeling. But my reading stats are down! I’ve only finished 37 books so far this year. Another 2025 highlight was attending my brother’s wedding—you know Sam from our prior podcast interviews—I was a bridesmaid, my husband was a groomsman, and my daughters were junior bridesmaids. To sum up, I can honestly say that I’m very happy and satisfied with my personal life right now.

Emily (03:34): As for Personal Finance for PhDs the business, as someone who works adjacent to academia obviously I have been following the political landscape and experiencing some secondhand ups and downs. Starting in March, I was really concerned with the viability of my business. Thankfully, I was somewhat reassured by my interactions with past and prospective university clients at the conferences I attended over the summer and even more reassured once speaking engagements started lining up for the fall semester. Some of my previous clients were unable to hire me this year but others did and I worked with a few new clients as well. Overall, my business made approximately the same amount of money in 2025 as in 2024, so I will take that as a win. This year, I also gave myself a non-revenue-generating project to occupy my time. Over the summer, I took a course to write a book proposal, which I submitted to a few university presses in the fall. As of the moment I’m recording this, my proposal is under peer review at two presses, and the reviews that have come back so far have been very supportive of publication. I’m hoping to receive at least one advance contract offer in the next month or two. I’ve started writing the book, which is great, but I don’t think I’ll really feel underway with that until I know who will publish it, so that’s coming soon. The subject of the book, as you might imagine, is personal finance for stipend-receiving PhD students. I’ve been sharing updates on the book and the publication process on my YouTube channel, Personal Finance for PhDs, so check that out if you want to follow along.
Thanks for listening to my update! If you want to get in touch, you can visit my website at PFforPhDs.com or email me at [email protected].

Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer

Laura (05:23): I’m Laura Portwood-Stacer and I appeared on season 17, episode five titled, Can You Earn Money From Publishing a Scholarly Book? I’m a developmental editor and publishing advisor for scholars who want to publish books. My editorial business is called Manuscript Works and my 2021 book, The Book Proposal Book has helped thousands of scholarly authors navigate the book publishing process. My big news for 2025 is that I had a new book come out also in Princeton University Press’s Skills for Scholars series, just like The Book Proposal Book was. My new book is called Make Your Manuscript Work, and it walks readers through the process of preparing a manuscript for a book or any kind of scholarly text to ensure that it’s publishable. One of the big lessons in my new book is that in order to evaluate whether your manuscript is working, you need to get clear on what your mission is, meaning what are your goals in trying to get published in the first place?

Laura (06:18): On my previous podcast episode with Emily, we talked about earning money as one possible goal someone might have when publishing a scholarly book. On that episode, I pointed out that the financial rewards associated with publishing a scholarly book often do not come from the publishing contract itself, but if your book lands successfully with your dream publisher and reaches your intended audiences effectively, then you can often leverage your book publication into other income generating opportunities. In my new book, Make Your Manuscript Work, I encourage writers to think about those opportunities upfront before getting too far into the revision process. What do you want your book to do and who do you need to reach in order to accomplish that? Having clear answers to those questions can make the revision process so much more straightforward and ensure that all the time and labor you pour into writing your book will actually have tangible outcomes on the other side of publication.

Laura (07:14): I’ll use my own new book as an example. Although my publisher paid me a decent advance payment for my new book writing, it actually represented a loss of money for me because of the opportunity costs. Every hour I spent writing the book was an hour I couldn’t spend working with a client or creating a course or workshop that would earn me revenue. My editing and advising business took a 20% income hit in 2024 because so much of my time went into finishing my book. Yet in 2025, I was able to leverage the work I’d done on the new book into a new online course, the manuscript development workshop where I offer hands-on guidance to writers who are working toward publishing a scholarly book or article. By leveraging the new book into a new course, I was able to get my 2025 income back to the level I wanted it to be, and I hope the book publication will continue to introduce me to new writers who may want to work with me in the future because I knew that’s what I wanted my new book to do. I wrote it very intentionally as a practical and accessible guide that teaches my way of working on manuscripts. My book will help thousands of scholarly writers who will never work with me personally and at the same time, the book works as a calling card for my courses and services. If you’d like to write a book, I encourage you to think of it in similarly practical terms. Writing a book will likely cost you something in the short term, but the long-term payoffs can be even greater than the costs if you write and publish your manuscript effectively. To learn more about both of my books for scholarly writers and to see how they can help you achieve your own publishing goals, you can check out my website at manuscriptworks.com/book.

Dr. Ana Romero Morales

Ana (08:58): Hello everyone, I am Ana Romero Morales and I’m the founder of Brewing Dinero. I apologize as I am getting over being sick. I was on the personal finance for PhD’s podcast season 14, episode three on the podcast, I spoke about my financial and graduate experiences as a DACA recipient, resources for undocumented graduate students and ethical boundaries to consider between personal finance and mental health. Since being on the podcast, I had my first baby, moved from the Midwest to the west coast, and I’m actually uh, soon to have another baby girl. The transition to the west coast has been easy and hard in different ways. Of course, having to adjust to a higher cost of living, but also enjoying being close to family and watching my daughter be loved by her aunts, grandparents and extended family. As parents now we’ve had to adjust our financial goals and take on additional expenses that comes with raising little human beings along with the move.

Ana (10:07): I started a new job as a child psychologist while continuing to facilitate workshops for first gen college students and working with my clients that are in my six month coaching program. 2025 has been quite a year in terms of politics and its impact on undocumented communities. It is a scary time to be undocumented or a DACA recipient trying to pursue graduate schools when laws are being implemented to limit one’s access, especially in some states over others. I wish I could say something to make it all better, but the fear is real. If you know, you know. What I can say is continue to reach out to commu, to your community for support. If you are in graduate school, talk to your department about ways to support your ability to finish your degree, and if you’re thinking about graduate school or looking for other resources, remember that there are still organizations out there providing access to grants and scholarships that don’t require US citizenship.

Madeline Hebert

Madeline (11:17): Hi, my name is Madeline Hebert. I interviewed for this podcast back around June of 2023, which aired as season 16 episode one. During it we spoke about how I budgeted for the arrival of my first child as a second year PhD student. Since then, we’re actually expecting our second and the way we’re budgeting for this one is based a lot on what I learned from my experiences from having the first. I think that the one thing I wish someone had told me that I know now and is my advice for early career PhDs is that you really can and need to do what’s best for you in your situation with your personal goals and values, and this advice holds true beyond financial choices, as I’ve found it also applies to decisions related to your dissertation and career exploration. For me, it’s appeared in realizing that even though we could buy a home, it wasn’t best for us.

Madeline (12:09): On the flip side, we found that it actually benefits us more to have our second and I remain in graduate school as opposed to going for a full-time job and leaving even if just for a year. I think that some people have always known or abided by this advice, but I for one have always wanted to know what’s the right or best or most efficient choice, and I’ve just come to accept that it really does look different for each person, and so as much as it may be daunting, it really does benefit you to know your options and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or a complex Excel sheet or multiple savings accounts as you might hear if you look back on my episode, it just needs to work for you and if it’s not working for you or even if it used to but no longer does, then it’s okay to pause and revisit your options. I think accepting this sooner would’ve saved me a lot of financial anxiety, stress, and time spent looking at my banking accounts, so that’s my best advice for early career PhDs. Now you can find me on the University of Connecticut’s graduate student page or on Twitter/X @SRIQResearch.

Commercial

Emily (13:18): 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.

Dr. Brenda Olmos

Brenda (14:36): Hi Emily. It’s good to connect with you again. This is Brenda Olmos or Dr. Olmos, if you will, and I was on season 13, episode two in September of 2022. At that time, I had started my third and final year of my PhD program and I defended my dissertation in July of 2023 Since the episode I got married, moved in with my husband, started a job in industry in March of 2024 and started maxing out my retirement accounts again. I knew at the end of my PhD that I did not want to pursue a tenure track academic career right away, partially because a postdoc or an academic salary were much less than my salary prior to my PhD and partially because I knew my research would be difficult to fund. It was based on healthcare discrimination and minoritized groups. I am now the administrator of education and development for advanced practice providers in a large health system in central Texas, and I really enjoy my work.

Brenda (15:33): I am the first person in this role, so I have been able to mold the position to my strengths and I build orientation curriculum for new clinicians, plan and lead skills workshops, and soon we’ll be starting two specialty clinical fellowships for nurse practitioners and physician associates. I feel this job utilizes my strengths and it pays more than I made when I was a nurse practitioner prior to my PhD, so I’m happy with where I landed post PhD. I still consider an academic career maybe in my future, but maybe more in administration than in research. My best financial advice for an early career PhD is to get out of debt as soon as possible. In my episode, I had talked about how I didn’t take on any debt for my PhD since it was funded, and I would also say start investing again asap. I am back on track now to retire at age 50 if I choose, but I do see myself working until 60 or beyond since I do enjoy my work and I finally feel like it’s sustainable. If I were starting my PhD again today, I would probably spend a lot less than I did so I could invest a bit more in that time, but the spending got me through the hard time, so I don’t really have any regrets. I don’t have a brand or a website, but I can be found on LinkedIn with my name Brenda Olmos and on Instagram as AlmostBrenda, A-L-M-O-S-T. Brenda, thanks for including me in this and have a great holiday season.

Dr. Samantha McDonald

Samantha (17:00): Hi there. This is Samantha McDonald. I was on season eight episode three and the title of my episode was Knowing Your Worth in an Environment that Devalues Your Work. Um, I think a lot has changed in the most recent update since I graduated from UCI. I ended up working at Meta the tech giant for a few years, um, continuing the same sort of savings pathway and knowing my worth and how much I was in the tech world, but I actually decided to leave Silicon Valley and spend almost three years unemployed <laugh> intentionally so on a what my partner and I call a sea sabbatical, SEA, living on our sailboat and sailing around the Pacific Ocean for a few years, which was amazing. And then after spending some time away from work and employment, I just recently came back into employment as a lecturer and professional track faculty at the University of Maryland in the School of Information.

Samantha (18:11): So my life kept taking a 180 from a tech giant to unemployment, uh, and sabbatical to being back in academia. Um, I don’t have any change, I think in advice for financial advice. I think a lot of what I said stays the same of knowing your worth in a place that oftentimes feels like you’re competing for the pennies and the scraps with how much people are undervalued as graduate students. I don’t think that has changed. I do think that the new generation coming in, uh, especially when I talk to undergrads, are much better at knowing their worth than I think previous generations. So I think that’s the biggest change where I think a lot of my advice is becoming more and more obvious for the next generation, but I still feel like it’s a struggle for people to understand how to value themselves in graduate school in a place where there is a lot of struggle financially, um, happening.

Samantha (19:11): So I don’t know if that has particularly changed, but um, yeah, everything is going great. Um, being back in academia has definitely been a crazy shift, but one that I’m happy to be in and I am definitely still on the path of financial independence and one of the beauties of how much I was able to save in graduate school and my time just for a few years in tech, it was I was able to financially afford taking a few years off while I’m still young and have adventures and do all these things before you either become too old or too dependent on other living beings, whether it be children or grandparents or parents to do those things. So everyone told us when we bought a boat, go small, go now. And that’s exactly what we did when we were young and we’re, we have no regrets of doing that.

Dr. Echo Rivera

Echo (20:06): Hello, this is Dr. Echo Rivera from season four, episode 19. I help PhD students end death by PowerPoint and create more visually engaging talks and lectures. Well, so much has changed in the last six years, and I first want to acknowledge that the future might feel really bleak for PhD students and academia in general. It’s been a really bad year, but keep going. You can still do this. You can get through this and you will find a way, and my best financial advice for every PhD student right now is to make sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. What I mean by that is to make sure you aren’t hyper-focusing on just one specialized skill branch out and be multi-skilled because those are the people getting hired, keeping their jobs and getting promoted. Even now, for example, PhDs who can run advanced stats or use R or whatever are kind of a dime a dozen now because every student is told to prioritize those types of technical skills.

Echo (21:23): Just about every PhD student is told to focus on pubs above everything else, et cetera. So that’s what I mean, like consider the advice you are being given about what to prioritize and assume that every other PhD student in the world was told to do the same thing. Now, I don’t say that to make you depressed, like don’t get depressed about it. Use that to your advantage. Think about the thing you’ve been told to deprioritize too, because chances are every other PhD student has been told the same thing, which means if you can shine at that thing, that thing that no one else is good at, then you are going to shine as the competitive must hire. And guess what meets that criteria? Engaging, effective, powerful presentation skills. Every grad student is told to deprioritize that, put it on the back burner. Don’t worry about it.

Echo (22:27): Few other grad students are developing these skills. So do you see what that means? If you are the one who can do both, run advanced stats and visually explain it in a way that everybody loves, that’s the competitive must hire. Do not wait until your job talk to take that seriously. Do not wait for your postdoc to take that seriously. It will be too late. Trust me, I’m the one that gets the panicked, heartbreaking emails and I’m the one who sees what those draft job talk presentations look like. I cannot stress this enough. Please, you need to start now, but I promise we can make it fun and empowering. Come over and check me out on YouTube. Search my name, Echo Rivera. The channel is called More Than PowerPoint, and visit my website echorivera.com for free training. I’ve got lots of resources to help you. I will make you a communication star. I got your back. Let’s do this. Okay, have a good day. Bye everyone.

Outro

Emily (23:45): 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.

This PhD Minimized Student Loan Debt While on an Unstable Career Path

November 3, 2025 by Jill Hoffman 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Hannah Percival, an instructor at Houston City College who holds a PhD in music theory. Hannah shares how she financially made it through graduate school on a small stipend, including how she minimized student loan debt, side hustled, and kept her expenses low. She also tells the stories of landing her first and—more importantly—second post-PhD jobs and gives great advice for job seekers.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This PhD Minimized Student Loan Debt While on an Unstable Career Path

Teaser

Hannah (00:00): In general, I have found that if a department will be supportive of you, um, emotionally, they will also support you financially. And if they are going to just treat you as a cog in the machine, that will also show up in the money. So it’s okay to advocate for yourself to receive that.

Introduction

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

Emily (00:57): This is Season 22, Episode 6, and today my guest is Dr. Hannah Percival, an instructor at Houston City College who holds a PhD in music theory. Hannah shares how she financially made it through graduate school on a small stipend, including how she minimized student loan debt, side hustled, and kept her expenses low. She also tells the stories of landing her first and—more importantly—second post-PhD jobs and gives great advice for job seekers.

Emily (01:28): If you want to bring one of my live tax workshops to your university next tax season, get in touch with me ASAP! Between now and the end of the year, I’m populating my calendar, especially early February, with in person and remote speaking engagements. My workshops are typically hosted by graduate schools, postdoc offices, and graduate student associations, and sometimes individual departments. Whether you are in a position to make those arrangements or simply want to recommend me, you can get the ball rolling by emailing me at [email protected]. My tax workshops, both live and pre-recorded, are my most popular offering each year because taxes are such a widespread pain point for graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s22e6/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Hannah Percival.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:40): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Hannah Percival, who is a full-time music professor and the program director for music at Houston City College. And we are gonna be talking all about making grad school work on a tiny budget <laugh>. So Hannah, I know we’re gonna get a lot of insight outta this interview. Thank you so much for volunteering to come on, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for our audience?

Hannah (03:02): Yes. Hi everyone. I am Hannah Percival and I have received my doctorate in fine arts in music theory and I also have a graduate, uh, certificate in piano pedagogy from Texas Tech University.

Emily (03:15): And what have you done since then? Give us a preview.

Hannah (03:19): So now I am the, uh, program coordinator at Houston City College and I’m a full-time instructor at Houston Community College. And currently this is my dream job. I love the students that I get to work with and I feel like a lot of the choices I made in grad school have prepared me super well for this position.

Minimizing Student Debt During Undergrad and Grad School

Emily (03:38): Hmm. Okay. Let’s see if we can circle back to that a little bit later. When, um, you approached me about giving this interview, you said that it was really important to you that you minimize the amount of student debt you need to take out during your PhD. So can you tell us more about what’s like normal in your program and why that approach was important to you?

Hannah (03:55): Yeah, definitely. Um, so I had a lot of emotional support and, um, encouragement from my family, but I didn’t have any financial support. Um, and so through my undergraduate degrees, minimizing debt was also important. Um, I commuted an hour and a half each way. Well, I went to community college first, um, which is one reason I have such a big passion for working at community colleges. Um, but then I commuted an hour and a half each way. Um, in order to keep working at my piano studio, I had at my parents’ house, um, for my bachelor’s degree. So I came out of the bachelor’s degree, I think that was debt free. There may have been a small, I think I took a small temporary loan for, I went on a study abroad to France for a summer and then paid that off. And so then I had a similar mindset with my master’s degree where my master’s degree is in a different field, it’s in counseling. Um, and I did the research track because I felt like it would really inform my teaching. And so that was also scholarship based because, um, as my salary as a worship leader was paid as a scholarship for this school. So minimizing debt was already really important to me. And then when I was reading up about what grad school is like, um, I saw how I was very aware of how few jobs there were <laugh>. And so even though I knew I really wanted to go to get a PhD and have that experience, I wanted to make sure that I did it in a way that wasn’t going to overly burden me in the future if I didn’t get an academic job. Um, and I think, although I probably couldn’t have articulated that at this, that this at that time, I think stability is really important to me. Even though I chose a career that’s in fine arts and in education in higher ed, um, stability is really important to me. And I think a large reason that became even more true for me during my PhD was because I had a lot of mental health and physical health issues and I realized that those can be expensive in America. And so I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t, that I was setting myself up for success even with those extenuating circumstances.

Emily (06:19): Hmm, that makes a lot of sense to me and I’m so glad that you, I mean you’re obviously very intentional throughout your entire, you know, academic journey there. I’m wondering if, um, in your field, is it typical for people to take out student loan debt and even in the program that you attended, was it typical for your classmates to be taking out debt?

Hannah (06:38): I would say it ranges a little bit. I know that when I was looking at my career options and loans in general, my parents suggested that I sort of think about what my, i-, what would be a range of salary for what I, the career I would do and to take out no less, uh, take to not take out more than a year’s salary just as a benchmark. And I think a lot of music musicians know that the fields are not very well paying. They used to always tell us don’t go into music for the money. But I also think that musicians tend to feel very, um, dedicated and driven towards having a successful career. And so sometimes we tend to get tied up in the like prestige of needing to go to a very big university or study with a specific professor or have a specific level of instrument. And so that can also influence what you’re paying for as a musician. And I think music is an interesting cross section, especially in America where it can be a tool for people like me that felt like music was the best way to improve their life career goals. And also it’s often a very privileged, um, subset of people that are able to have those private lessons. Um, so I always hear the horror stories of people that, you know, went like a hundred thousand dollars in debt for a bassoon career and then didn’t get it into the symphony. Um, and of course those are the horror stories, but those are still real people that made difficult choices and didn’t receive the, uh, payment out that they had invested into it. So I would say there’s definitely a sub. There’s both definitely people who were more conservative about it. Um, and those were the people I gravitated towards in grad school. But there’s also definitely the pressure to don’t worry about money. You need to worry about making the best art that you can.

Emily (08:38): It’s so interesting that we’re having this conversation right now ’cause like, okay, we’re recording this in September, 2025 and you know, the, the advice that your parents give you, you know, don’t let your student loan debt exceed more than one year of your expected salary. Pretty standard. It makes a lot of sense. It’s been given for a long time. Now we’re looking at, um, you know, with the passage of the one big beautiful bill act, these overall lifetime federal student loan limits of a hundred thousand dollars for most people, and then $200,000 for certain high paid, you know, career track graduate degrees. And so I I’m imagining your track is more on that a hundred k side of things. Um, and even your example just now was that would be a, that would be a lot to take out for like this a type of career where you didn’t make it to the upper echelon of, you know, what the possibilities were. So I think this is a, a subject that’s on a lot of people’s minds at the moment and how this new, um, you know, the new rules from the federal government are going to impact borrowing for graduate degrees. Is it going to bring down the cost of programs or is it going to push more people to the private loan market or a combination of, of the two? Um, so anyway, no answers there just yet, but it makes total sense to me like why your approach to this was the way it was. And so, uh, I guess I’ll ask, did you end your PhD with no student loan debt or, you know, one year’s expected salary or like how, how did you actually finish up with respect to the student loans?

Hannah (09:59): I was looking it up right before this podcast and I couldn’t find the exact number, but I know it was no more than 13,000. Um, and I paid that off as I went. Um, I didn’t accrue that until the very end of my degree. Um, so that was right when the pandemic hit <laugh> and I had health issues at the same time, so I took out the loans for that. Um, and also something that um, I think is important is that when you receive a TA ship, you really need to look at all of the details of it and you need to know it super well and not rely on the institution or the professors to remind you of those things. And so I was aware of some of the things like I wouldn’t get paid until October so that like moving costs would be expensive, um, or not paid out until later. And I was aware of a lot of those things, but there was also in the fine print of if, you know, if your degree goes more than four years, the TA ship does not last more than four years. But nobody mentioned anything to me about that. So I was already proactive about that and had been asking around and my um, advisor realized, oh yeah, that’s a problem. And was able to find funds to keep me on as a, um, lab assistant for our research lab. But that was tricky and could have been a lot worse if I hadn’t been more proactive about that.

Emily (11:30): Wonderful advice makes, oh my gosh, I, I know there are people in the audience who really need to hear that just now. And even what you said about, um, oh, I ended up accruing, you know, most of that debt it sounds like in one year because there was a confluence effect. Okay. Pandemic, nobody expected that. And then also personal stuff coming up at the same time. And that’s actually just like on the point that I was just making about these federal loan limits, like it makes a lot of sense to have your, your plan, your like plan a for how you’re gonna fund graduate school, not to be, to be maxing out all of the loans and for everything to be going perfectly with your TAship or whatever it is to last the entire time. Because like in the course of a PhD is a long period of time and some curve balls are gonna be thrown your way. And so you need to have a little bit of room to pivot. So like you had given yourself that room by like not taking out student lending or taking it out and repaying it, you know, gradually earlier in your degree so that by the time you finished, even though you had this final curve ball <laugh>, um, you know, the overall total was really quite minimal.

Hannah (12:28): Yes. And I received a generous, um, fellowship where I, I mean it was a TA ship as well as a scholarship, so it paid all of my tuition and then fees and then I had some for living expenses. Um, so I was able to use that for the first four years and, but already I think by year three or four I had started taking on some extra side gigs and then, um, that was really helpful to utilize those when my funding, um, became less steady. And I think that one reason, I mean I, I think it took me seven years to six or seven years to finish, but um, part of that was because I was working and aut- also I chose to get an extra graduate certificate because I felt like that would really help my job chances both in academia and um, just in the professional music world. And it really did. So even though I ended up taking out some at the end, I had that flexibility because I hadn’t been using them that whole time. And it was one of the direct unsubsidized loans. And so that was very helpful because during the pandemic all of the interest was paused. So I was able to pay that off within six months, I think a year or six months. So that was very nice.

Strategically Choosing a PhD Program

Emily (13:47): Well you just brought up increasing your income and so I wanna hear more about how you did that because you described like the funding package that you received, um, but then also you were doing other kinds of side work. So let’s talk about that. But as we’re doing it, I would love for you to share also, um, because you just said it took six or seven years to finish post masters and I’m wondering if any of that, you know, extended timeline on the PhD was because you were working and what really the interplay is there between like, okay, I need more money to live, but I also need to get to graduation. So like, let’s talk about both of those things.

Hannah (14:20): Yes, definitely. Um, I think, so first of all, I think one of the best things I did was I was very strategic in choosing my graduate degree program. I saw that the funding packages for PhDs were much larger than those for master’s degrees, which makes sense. And my bachelor’s degree was in music theory and it had prepared me exceptionally well to be, to go straight into a PhD in music theory. But on paper I had a master’s degree in a very different field. So a lot of schools were not open to that, but some were very open to that. And so I had four schools that I was extremely interested in that were fine with, um, PhD students who’d had a bachelor’s degree in music but not a master’s. And they were specifically also focusing on music cognition, which was a way for me to use them, use the psychology counseling alongside with my music, um, theory. And actually I think it was my eventual advisor who helped me phrase it this way in an email of like, I think I was phrasing as a liability. And he was like, no, this is great because you have a different perspective and that can make you really unique and valuable. So, um, I had two offers. I really appreciate the fact that I invested in myself and in my future enough to pay out of pocket to go and visit both campuses. It led to some really candid conversations with students, um, and faculty at both of the institutions. And one of them, the, the institution I didn’t go to did not end up offering me that much money, but also they told me that they would try to get me in front of a classroom once before I graduated, whereas Texas Tech said that I would be an instructor on record for one or two classes every semester and I felt like that would make such a huge difference in my resume and it did actually on the job market quite a bit. And so that was really important to me. So the first thing I would do is if you have a unique situation like I do or did where you’re wanting to go into a PhD in a field that’s not directly after a master’s in your field, I would encourage you to still look at doing a PhD because any courses that you need to make up are usually going to be part of that PhD program anyway. Depends on each institution of course. But at mine it was very similar, just that the dissertation took longer at the PhD level, I would say that my degree progress was, uh, faster than a lot of my contemporaries. Um, now that I’m thinking about it, it was, let’s see, I started in 2015 and then graduated in 2021. So yeah, six years. But a, a lot of that last year and a half was because of the pandemic. My research is researching how people bond together socially over music and that hit right as COVID hit <laugh>. So my research got really changed.

Emily (17:22): I love taking it back to that selection process, um, for graduate school and that yes, you included the financial components in in the decision, but also your career progression based on your career goals. It wasn’t, you mentioned earlier about like program prestige for example, that’s important, that’s a factor, but there are other very important things as well. And so I’m really glad that you brought up those other points about like, well, is this, is this program actually gonna get me what I want in terms of the job that I wanna have after this? Like, um, it’s easy to forget that when you have all these other things that are maybe more like in your face about who do I wanna work with or like these kinds of things. So I’m really glad you brought us back there.

Increasing Your Income During Grad School With Side Jobs

Emily (17:58): So you were funded for, you know, to some degree throughout it sounds like, but then when did you bring in like outside work and how much of an impact I guess did that make on your, um, your ability to live comfortably as a graduate student?

Hannah (18:11): Yeah, so um, I think it was about year two. Yeah, I think it was about year two I started doing some extra gigs. Um, and I’ve always had multiple jobs my whole life. I think that’s just part of being a musician. So that was always sort of my plan. Um, the, the two that really were the biggest income generators and also the best for my resume were that I worked at the graduate writing center. So I got to help students, um, at any graduate program at our college, work on job documents and work on their uh, projects. And it was very interesting because get to talk to all these people from different fields and uh, I also got the opportunity to practice teaching writing, which I feel like is a really important skill within music research that’s not often taught. And then I was a, um, teaching artist for the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra. So I would go into classrooms in public schools and teach, um, music for second graders about their science curriculum or about their um, political science curriculum. So that was very fun. Both of those were very fluid as far as I could schedule them when I needed to around my classes and my TAship. That was very helpful and would have been very difficult to do a different, um, a different type of work that wasn’t more flexible. Um, I also did two like tutoring accompanying piano lessons. Those were sort of like the black market or like kind of just did it without on my own gig work. Um, and then during the off times, um, sort of an inverse where Lubbock is very isolated and so at Christmas time if I stayed in Lubbock I could make a lot of money as a pet sitter and doing gigs by playing music at Christmas. But for the first two years in the summer it the, all of the college students tend to leave. And so my little bubble really, really would collapse economically. And so I actually went back home to live with my parents for two summers so I could work at a local bookstore and then actually pay for my rent during those months. After a few years then I was able to do some more of the writing at uh, working at the writing center during the summer and working with um, Lubbock Symphony during the summer. But my first two years I actually went back home first.

Emily (20:36): I love all these ideas, all these creative ideas and some of them of course are unique to you and the skills that you were developing, you know, during graduate school and some of them are things that probably other people could do as well. Well, um, I like that you had that like observation about the town emptying out at certain times of year and how that affected you. And certainly if you live in a college town then uh, you have to take into account those cycles. Um, so interesting. Okay. Is there anything else you wanna add about increasing income or side? Actually I do have one more follow up question. Um, you mentioned the writing center job and that it was, um, you could schedule it around your, you know, the volume of work that you had going on elsewhere. That’s really cool. ’cause I would’ve thought that a writing center job would be sort of like an assistantship, like a regular certain number of hours per week. So can you explain to me how that job was different than like your TA type position?

Hannah (21:28): It was a certain number of hours per week, but because we were working with um, graduate students, a lot of graduate students preferred evening hours and so I was able to schedule most of my writing sessions or you know, client sessions in the evenings. And I think for a while we may have even done Saturdays online, I can’t remember, but I remember that they weren’t just during the nine to five, so that was very helpful.

Emily (21:55): I see. And I love jobs like, well I’m using the word job a little bit loosely, but work that graduate students can pursue that they can schedule around what works for them because your primary focus is getting through that dissertation and doing the research that you need to do. And so yeah, there are certain times when your source of income is gonna have to take, you know, a back seat and you still want it to be there for you and you’re ready to, you know, have a different schedule, put more hours into it. So that’s very, very helpful when you can find that kind of work.

Hannah (22:25): And I found it actually very, um, motivating for finishing my degree because everyone was working with graduate students who were trying to work through their own dissertations and a lot of the, about 50% of the staff were grad current graduate students. And so it was also encouraging to be in a group of people who were currently writing and going through that process. Um, while there were a lot of people doing things like music musicology, um, or music performance, there weren’t that many people who were doing a music PhD when I was. And so I sort of had to build my own little cohort and doing the writing center really helped. And it was also nice to do it in a group that’s not your own field. Sometimes it’s, it’s nice to connect with graduate students that are not just with your same professor and same classes but still have similar experiences that they’re going through.

Emily (23:19): Absolutely. This is an important part of like side work that often goes overlooked, which is the networking. Like it can, in your case it helped you find people who can motivate you to get to your finish line in terms of your PhD or you know, there’s other purposes in other settings of course. Anything else you wanted to add about the income side of the equation?

Applying for Small Scholarships and Career Planning

Hannah (23:36): I encourage people to apply for small scholarships that seem really relevant to what they need for the same reasons you just mentioned. Um, you know, it’s free money <laugh>, which is awesome. Um, and you also build those networks that are super helpful for in that moment, getting to know people that are interested in your field and also it adds to your resume. It’s another thing you can put on it, uh, that helps you gain more scholarships. So I know some people, um, in the past used, like I had an advisor in undergrad encourage me not to apply for small scholarships because it wasn’t worth the time. But I have found them very helpful.

Emily (24:15): I’m so glad that you added that. Yeah, I mean applying for scholarships too is one of, I’m, I’m really surprised that your undergrad advisor said that because I feel like the attitude generally is like you’re gonna be preparing a lot of materials for a lot of different purposes anyway. And so like yes of course you have to tailor and you have to be selective, but I don’t know that the time burden is that much and winning it really can help you, not only monetarily but also in all these other factors that we were just talking about. So like, yeah, I’m glad you kind of <laugh> moved on past that advice and said, okay, I’m gonna go in a different direction.

Hannah (24:48): I think that it’s also really important when you’re in the bubble of grad school to be thinking about multiple different careers you could use, um, postgraduate school and part of that is looking to see what are the most, where will my skills be most used? So also what you love and also what you’re good at. But I think sometimes in music we often prioritize what we love or what we want to do, but I think there’s a lot of benefit in also seeing what will be the most required of me in a field. So I realized that all music, all bachelor’s degrees in the US um, tend to require four semesters of music theory, four semesters of sight singing and ear training, and four semesters of class piano. And so I felt like focusing on those were really great, um, job security and so I pursued some extra the, the extra certificate and I have found that to be extremely helpful. ’cause those are sort of the like bread and butter of the degree plans and then if you have extras that you can add on, that’s great, but being able to fill in where it’s most, um, there’s a significant need for those courses can be really helpful.

Emily (26:09): Yeah, I mean kind of what we were talking about earlier about like, oh plan a, like plan A might not work out and it’s helpful to have some skills that are going to apply. So you have a plan B and a plan C and so forth. Um, very, very smart.

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Emily (26:22): 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.

Housing and Transportation Choices That Kept Expenses Low

Emily (27:40): Let’s talk about the expenses side of the equation. The other half of like making it work financially as a graduate student. So were there any like, um, either really valuable or like really creative, um, things that you did to um, keep a lid on your expenses during graduate school?

Hannah (27:56): Yes, I was also lucky in that Lubbock is a very low cost of living area. Um, and I know that that’s not always true. That’s definitely something I also took into account before moving. Um, but one thing I did, I took a lot of searching but I found a really cute, um, duplex or more like a quadruplex but little apartment that was within walking distance. It was a long walking distance but walking distance. So I didn’t, ’cause I didn’t have a car for the first three years, which is another reason why I didn’t really have any jobs until side jobs until year two or three. So I couldn’t really leave anywhere that wasn’t campus. Um, so that really kind of limited things and I thought it would limit my social life, but I’m also kind of introverted anyway and I found people that were willing to like pick me up to go to a board game night and things. So I, I didn’t find it to be a huge sacrifice unless it was a, a windstorm then that was rough.

Emily (28:57): Okay. So is the sort of frugal tactic there the place where you lived or is it the living in such a place that you didn’t need to own a car?

Hannah (29:05): I think a combination. So if I had lived in a town that had really good public transportation, then that would also save me a lot of money. Um, Lubbock is not known for being a walking town, so I was lucky in that I was able to find a place close to campus that was reasonably priced. So I think it was a combination of realizing that Lubbock did not have good public transportation and I wasn’t going to have a car. So making sure that some of like the money that I would’ve paid for a car went more towards the um, rent. So I think that my rent was 750 a month, which was really nice.

Emily (29:50): Hmm. And you said something like it was a difficult search process. Like can you give us any tips what you think might be applicable for other graduate students? Because I, I’ve heard this kind of over and over on the podcast is like I really had to put in legwork, but I found a deal.

Hannah (30:06): Yes. My mom and I drove down to Lubbock and we talked with a, uh, realtor, well actually we talked with two or three realtors and we went and looked at several different properties, um, that were all within walking distance of the college and two of the like realtors we talked with, it just wasn’t a good fit. And the, the location one place we looked at the ceiling like I would not have been able to stand up in the apartment for my entire, you know, college degree <laugh>. Um, and so we were supposed to go back to uh, back home but we still hadn’t found a place to live so we ended up staying an extra day and continuing to look at other um, properties and we finally found one that was nice and um, but it took a lot of searching. So I think knowing what your like, um, most important things are, which mine was walking distance to school, I was good and I ended up spending a little more than I wanted but it was, oh and I wanted it to be safe. So, but then that also meant I had to compromise on other things. Like the laundromat was in the, um, the laundry was in the garage and um, I don’t think there was no central heating and things like that. So.

Emily (31:27): I see. Well can I ask then about, it sounds like at some point you acquired a car and what the sort of trade off was there because you also mentioned well that enabled me to do different kinds of work.

Hannah (31:39): Yeah, so again, lucky, I was lucky in that um, through an inheritance my parents were able to buy me a used car and so the car um, helped me go and do more gigs. And so that was really nice because it was able, you know, I didn’t have to pay for the car payment. So that was a big blessing and it helped me to be able to go do more gigs throughout Lubbock.

Emily (32:03): But you have to pay for insurance, you have to pay for gas. You have to pay for registration. So like there are, aside from just definitely the cost of the car itself, there’s other like expenses. But it sounds like it was worthwhile, right?

Hannah (32:14): Yes, yes. Yeah, it was for me.

Emily (32:16): Alright. What other frugal tactics did you use?

Using Free or Low-Cost Campus Resources

Hannah (32:19): I tried to use as many of the campus resources as possible. Um, so we had a food bank and um, I was able to use counseling services there and um, at one point I used medical services on campus and then I realized that our student health insurance, I mean the insurance that I got through being a TA was good enough that I could go outside of campus and receive a little bit cheaper and better care. Um, but always looked for all of the free food options and go to all of the different like talks that had free food.

Emily (32:53): Can I ask about the food bank usage? Because I know some students have certain feelings about accessing basic needs like that, but like how did you think about that?

Hannah (33:03): I ended up not using it as much as I could have because I, I don’t know why, honestly, I think I had this idea of like, well I’m good enough, somebody else can use it.

Emily (33:14): So you had certain feelings about it too.

Hannah (33:15): Yeah. But if everybody feels that way, um, but I know it was just really helpful for my mental health to know that it was there if I needed it.

Emily (33:23): This is actually something that came up, um, in an interview that I’ve not published yet, but that will be coming out before, before this current interview is coming out. And that’s about actually looking, we were talking earlier about the selection of graduate school, um, taking into account the student services that are provided at the different options that you have in particular basic needs. And we were talking earlier about plan A for, you know, your funding during graduate school. Hey, it’s really great to know if there are basic needs services available on campus, even if you don’t plan on using them. Like you said, just knowing it’s there as a backup option can be really, really helpful and comforting. And so, you know, if you hit some, some skids that like, okay, like that’s there for me, I’m not going to be food insecure.

Hannah (34:04): Yes, yes, definitely. I um, I think my biggest expense with the medical bills, um, so that was a frustrating thing, but it was really nice that we did have good health insurance, um, through being a ta. Um, yeah, I really wanted a kitty, but I waited because I was like, what if the kitty has health problems and I can’t take them to the vet? And then that ended up being um, a good thing. I adopted a kitty, um, during the pandemic. I couldn’t wait any longer. Um, but then um, he ended up having some pretty severe diabetes complications, but by then I had already had a stable job and things. But I’m proud of younger Hannah for not getting a cat then even though I wanted it because I think it was, it did end up being much more expensive than I expected.

Emily (34:58): Yeah, you were prescient in that way actually. And yeah, I mean if you’re struggling just to provide for yourself, then yeah, you definitely have to think twice about adding anyone to your household in that sense. Was there anything for other people who really want to be pet owners <laugh> while they’re in graduate school, uh, but maybe think the same as you, it’s, it’s not the right time financially. Like were there ways that you could get some of the same benefits of having a pet that um, that you know, before you actually could adopt one

Hannah (35:26): Highly recommend being a pet sitter <laugh> because yes, you get all of those cuddles and you get paid for it.

Emily (35:33): Yes. Um, I just put this in the sample chapter for my book that I’m writing, which is like, uh, about increasing income and saying how like baby pet and house sitting, hey, like if you get some personal joy out of those like scenarios and you get paid for it, like double benefit.

Hannah (35:49): Yes.

Transitioning From Grad School to Full-Time Employment

Emily (35:51): Let’s talk then about when you transition out of graduate school and we’re applying for full-time positions. Um, do you have any other advice for people who are in like a similar stage or leading up to that stage?

Hannah (36:03): Yes. One is more generic that I think people hear a lot, but I think is still important. At the graduate writing center I learned a lot about helping to really tailor your documents to the job ad and to um, also for funding if you’re applying for a specific type of grant or funding. And I found that extremely useful not only for um, you know, getting an interview but also for understanding is this a job that I want? Is this the type of opportunity that would be good for me? Am I good match for this? Um, but I will also say that even when you tailor everything and you work really hard on your applications, it’s still very confusing. And having now been on some job searches, it’s also very confusing. Like the whole process is confusing for the applicants I think because you don’t get a lot of feedback on what you did wrong or right. Um, and there’s a lot of luck involved of like, are you the specific candidate that that person needs at that specific time and they may have needs that they haven’t been able to like, um, advertise exactly. So I think being kind to yourself during the job hunt is very important because there’s a lot of luck involved unfortunately. Um, and I applied to hundreds, um, over many years. I got about 10 initial interviews, um, and I only got, well, I guess I only got one on campus interview, so there weren’t very many on campus interviews. Um, but I really felt like it was still important for me to do that process and to continue trying for that. During that time I was continuing to work at the graduate writing center and I taught piano lessons, um, but I started rewarding myself with, um, every rejection letter I would get, whether it’s for a, a funding opportunity or a job, I would buy myself office supplies. So I had so many fancy pens for a while.

Emily (38:14): Yeah, I mean at least when you were receiving that bad news, you can say, oh but I get to buy something really pretty from my desk. That’s nice. Um, so it sounds to me like that you finished graduate school, you were doing this sort of part-time work, um, while you were continuing to apply for full-time positions. Is that right? Okay. And I think your advice is very good, very spot on. But like, is there anything more that you can say about that perseverance, because that’s a lot of applications that you had to submit.

Hannah (38:44): Yes, it was, I, I wanna acknowledge that I did get married during that time and it was to someone that had savings and had a steady job and that was really wonderful. It was also really important to me that I have the career that I had worked so long for. So I, um, could have certainly built up my piano studio and done taken on more writing clients, but I really wanted to try to be the co- a college professor since I had worked for that for so long. So I got an opportunity to teach at a school and it was teaching all the things I wanted to during the interview, it seemed like it was going to be a great fit where I could really help students and it was in a small environment. So we moved and thankfully my husband’s job is remote so he was able to move with me. Um, but I got there and I had already had some health issues and I let them know before I came that I was going to need a sub for the first two weeks. So before I accepted the job, I let them know and they were okay with that. Um, but then when I got there, they hadn’t gotten any subs for me and then they were upset that I hadn’t been more dedicated to my students even though I was on bed rest for my surgery. And so it quickly became very toxic and it got to the point where after about eight weeks in that job, I found myself very jealous of people in the grocery store, like workers in the grocery store because I was like, they’re able to do their job and go home and be done and they don’t have to worry about am I harming this student’s future? Am I helping the student take on so much college debt knowing that they’re not going to be successful in this program? So I reached out to my PhD advisor and he was very encouraging saying that, you know, I was more important than the job title and that if I ended up leaving and doing my plan B or C or D that was more important than letting the job and the toxicity of that job wreck my mental health to irreparable spot. So while I was teaching full-time at that institution, it was $24,000 a year for full-time, which is not enough to survive on. So I was also adjuncting for Houston Community College at the time, um, online. And everyone I knew who was at that level working had to do two jobs at once. Um, whether it was teaching at more than one institution or some other kind of job. And that actually gave me, um, the job that I have now. So it was a really good learning experience to realize that I can be good at this job and I can love it and I can still be at the wrong spot. So to realize that sometimes you can have your dream job and it’s not the right environment and to be willing to walk away from that is hard, but sometimes it can lead you into more healthy positions. Um, and the position I’m in now, I feel very supported. My colleagues are wonderful. I still get to help support students and I feel like I am being supported for the long haul. So I just want to encourage people that if your your dream job turns out not to be your dream job, that’s okay.

Emily (42:24): I’m taking two things from that story and I’m so glad that it took the turn <laugh> that it did. Um, the, the first is that the long protracted search for the first job did not have to be repeated, right? It was much more ready that you got the second job, um, even though the first one took so long to land.

Hannah (42:42): Although, although I did do, um, I was applying to even more jobs with the full-time in order to get out of that position.

Emily (42:49): Yeah, that makes sense. But it didn’t take the length of time that.

Hannah (42:51): Correct.

Emily (42:52): You know, the first one took, um, and the second one was that opportunities came from working. So.

Hannah (42:57): Yes, absolutely

Emily (42:58): Just, just doing anything that’s, you know, related. I mean as related as it can be of course to the career that you ultimately want, but like just doing any kind of work in that field is going to be helpful to you in some manner. And it, I hear this story over and over again of like the part-time work I did or, you know, it led to that full-time job. It happens over and over, it makes sense. People wanna hire known quantities of course. So I just wanna point that out as well as like keep working <laugh>, uh, even side work, uh, in addition to the full-time job. If, if you’re not, if the full-time job is not everything that you know it cracked up to be, then keep creating opportunities for yourself through working and of course continuing to apply as you did. So I find that very encouraging. Um, anything else you wanna share with our audience? You know, advice for getting that first job or the second job post PhD?

Hannah (43:51): It’s okay to want stable income and I think that that’s not always talked about in music. I, it’s we’re told to follow our passion and I’m lucky in that I did find the job that I wanted all along and um, you know, it’s got a really nice bow on the story, but I also know a lot of people that have happier lives outside of academia that are, have the space now to do things that they’ve wanted to do in their artistic field. Um, but in general I have found that if a department will be supportive of you, um, emotionally, they will also support you financially. And if they are going to just treat you as a cog in the machine, that will also show up in the money. So it’s okay to advocate for yourself, um, to receive that. And so when I went over to this full-time position, um, I ended up making three times the amount of money for like half the work. And so I also encourage people, um, to consider highly consider, um, working at a community college. Um, especially if you have a passion for teaching. It doesn’t have the prestige as some other places. Um, and some places have a little bit of a stigma because you often are not paid to research, you’re not, your research is not the important part, but there’s a lot of funding available. And so a lot of the professors that have the most lucrative jobs I know tend to work full-time at community colleges.

Emily (45:26): I actually have, um, a neighbor where I live who has a PhD and teaches at a local community college. And I, I believe it has the same kind of tenure system. Obviously it’s not based on the same things that it would be at an R one institution, but there’s still a great deal of job security that can be attained through this route. Which as you said earlier, is one of your high like values. Hannah, thank you so much for this interview. It’s been, it’s been very encouraging and yes, I’m so glad that you volunteered to give it.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (45:55): Would you please share with us your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already or it could be something completely new.

Hannah (46:03): Yes. I was brainstorming how to phrase this with my husband ’cause it was this big complicated thing and he said, um, don’t get academia tunnel vision. And I loved that phrasing because in academia we tend to have these ideas. If you do this and then you do this, and if that doesn’t work, you just keep trying. And that if, if you have to move your family to a place they don’t want to be, you do it or you take the place that has the best prestige. And I have found that it is good and healthy to prioritize your own mental personal stability. And sorry, I messed that up, <laugh>, that it’s good to prioritize your own mental health and physical health and stability. You get to choose how you work for academia and you get to choose if academia is placing you into a position that is untenable, it’s okay to do plan B or plan C.

Emily (47:06): I love the phrasing that your husband came up with. I love your phrasing that you had just there. You choose how you work for academia. Like this is a two-way street ultimately. And we’ve seen so much with, um, I, I mean this is going on for decades now but the quit lit like people make, you know, they think that academia is the be all end all and then realize that it’s not and they end up leaving for, you know, greener pastures and so forth. And just great advice. I want people to go back, listen to that little segment over again because it’s so, so true and we all need to hear it more. So thank you very much. Um, and thank you again for volunteering to give this interview.

Hannah (47:40): Thank you so much and I appreciate all of your work Emily, your, um, work on, um, the tax preparation was so helpful, especially because understanding how taxes work for things that are both stipend but then also a paycheck are very like very confusing. So I really, really appreciate you and so does my tax returns.

Emily (48:00): Okay. Thank you so much for saying that.

Outro

Emily (48:12): 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?

From Decision Science to How Couples Manage Their Finances

Three Models for Structuring Your Financial Accounts as a Couple

To Pool or Not to Pool? How Life Events Influence Shared Finances

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Advice for Couples With Significant Income Disparities

The Complexities of Academic Life: Major Income Changes and Relocation

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Summary of Dr. Wang’s First Podcast Episode and Recent Updates

Structuring Time and Staying Accountable as a Solopreneur

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Behind the Scenes of a Solopreneur’s Business Finances

Advice for PhDs Interested in Self-Employment

Dr. Wang’s Contact Information

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Dr. Pruett’s Finances During the Postdoc Years

Tenure Track Faculty Salaries at R1 Institutions: $63,000 to $100,000+

Deciding on a Tenure Track Faculty Position

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Financial Challenges as a Tenure Track Faculty Member

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Turning Personal Finance Knowledge into Action

Tax-Advantaged Retirement Account Options

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Fees Associated With 403(b) and 457 Accounts

Researching Retirement Account Options Before Investing

Achieving a Positive Net Worth

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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Dr. Emily Roberts

Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer

Dr. Ana Romero Morales

Madeline Hebert

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Dr. Brenda Olmos

Dr. Samantha McDonald

Dr. Echo Rivera

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Minimizing Student Debt During Undergrad and Grad School

Strategically Choosing a PhD Program

Increasing Your Income During Grad School With Side Jobs

Applying for Small Scholarships and Career Planning

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Housing and Transportation Choices That Kept Expenses Low

Using Free or Low-Cost Campus Resources

Transitioning From Grad School to Full-Time Employment

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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