Personal Finance for PhDs

Live a financially balanced life - no Real Job required

postdoc

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

by Leave a Comment

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does It Mean to Live on Time Financially?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Keep up with your tax obligations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude.

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

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

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

Now back to our interview.

Why Attempt to Live on Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Start Living on Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outro

Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode!

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Reduce Financial Anxiety as a Limited-Income PhD

by Leave a Comment

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

Links mentioned in the Episode

How to Reduce Financial Anxiety as a Limited-Income PhD

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

What Is Financial Anxiety?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggestion #2: Take Just One Small Step

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

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

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

Commercial

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

Suggestion #3: Create a Recurring Appointment with Your Finances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggestion #4: Think Through the Worst Case Scenario

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggestion #5: Talk with Other People about Money

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

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

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

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

Outro

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

Are PhDs in a Financial Emergency?

by

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

Links mentioned in the Episode

Are PhDs in a Financial Emergency?

Introduction

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

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

The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e7/. Without further ado, here’s my episode on whether PhDs are in a financial emergency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: Financial Steps You Should Take Right Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

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

Financial Advice for Each Stage of Your Academic Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3: What I’m Offering You for Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outro

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

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

by 2 Comments

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

Links mentioned in the Episode

How and Why to Become an Entrepreneurial Scholar

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

Teaser

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

Introduction

Emily (00:34): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

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

Emily (01:44): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. I do license these workshops to universities, but in the case that yours declines your request for sponsorship, you can purchase the appropriate version as an individual. Go to PFforPhDs.com/taxreturnworkshop/ to read more details and purchase the workshop. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ilana Horwitz.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

What Is An Entrepreneurial Scholar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

Emily (18:15): Emily here for a brief interlude! Tax season is in full swing, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac, is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my free tax resources, many of which I have updated for this tax year. On that page you will find podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs and PhDs-to-be. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with. Again, you can find all of these free resources linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. Now back to the interview.

Leveraging Available Resources as an Academic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origin Story of The Entrepreneurial Scholar Book

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

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

Ilana (36:34): Thanks Emily.

Outtro

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

How Academics Can Apply Self-Compassion to Their Money and Time

by Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Danielle De La Mare, a career wellness coach and facilitator and the person behind Self-Compassionate Professor. Danielle recounts how she reached a crisis point in her career and personal life that led her to quit her tenured professorship. This crisis included a financial component due to her avoidant money mindset. Danielle describes how she is healing in the area of finances, especially in relationship with her husband, using self-compassionate practices. Danielle and Emily draw parallels between time management and money management to keep both in balance and sustainable. Danielle ends the interview by teaching two quick self-compassion practices that you can apply immediately to your financial life.

Links mentioned in the Episode

How Academics Can Apply Self-Compassion to Their Money and Time

Teaser

Danielle (00:00): So the healing was really about like me finally just like, ah, turning into the reality that I had to develop a relationship with money and it was really scary.

Introduction

Emily (00:21): 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 (00:49): This is Season 20, Episode 4, and today my guest is Dr. Danielle De La Mare, a career wellness coach and facilitator and the person behind Self-Compassionate Professor. Danielle recounts how she reached a crisis point in her career and personal life that led her to quit her tenured professorship. This crisis included a financial component due to her avoidant money mindset. Danielle describes how she is healing in the area of finances, especially in relationship with her husband, using self-compassionate practices. Danielle and I draw parallels between time management and money management to keep both in balance and sustainable. Danielle ends the interview by teaching two quick self-compassion practices that you can apply immediately to your financial life.

Emily (01:35): The tax year 2024 version of my tax return preparation workshop, How to Complete Your PhD Trainee Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), is now available! This pre-recorded educational workshop explains how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. Whether you are a graduate student, postdoc, or postbac, domestic or international, there is a version of this workshop designed just for you. 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/s20e4/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Danielle De La Mare of Self-Compassionate Professor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (03:12): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Danielle De La Mare of Self-Compassionate Professor. And we, uh, this podcast interview came to be from an unusual path, which is that we both work with Dr. Jill Hoffman, who you heard from, uh, last season in an interview. So Jill thought it was a great idea to get me and Danielle together and we agreed. So we’re doing this interview now and I’m really excited we’re going to talk about the intersections of money with other aspects of life management, and Danielle has a lot of unique perspective on this. So, uh, Danielle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

Danielle (03:51): Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. Um, yeah, uh, I’m Danielle De La Mare and I have been what I call a career wellness coach to mostly mid-career academics, um, for the last several years, since 2019. And, um, sometimes I have early career academics, sometimes I have postdocs, sometimes I have later career academics that I work with full professors. Um, but basically these are people who have hit a wall in their career. They’re not feeling alive in their career. They’re not feeling joy, they’re not feeling well. Um, and basically I have a group, um, program that that sort of works them through that. Now I myself earned tenure in 2018 and then quit my job right after that <laugh>. So the way, um, I engaged with academia myself was very hard on my body. I was very overwhelmed all the time. I was very stressed all the time. I hit burnout. I had small illnesses all the time. And then I had really big major like life-threatening kinds of illnesses as well. Um, two of those actually. So I ended up leaving academia and I started doing this career wellness coaching work, um, diving into it, trying to learn about how to be well in my career and what <laugh> what I found is that those toxic work habits I, um, used in academia I just brought with me to this new job. Um, and, uh, the reason I left academia so quickly is ’cause my husband got a job. Um, he, he was an academic at my same institution and he got a job, um, across the country. So I ended up leaving and I was so happy to leave and thought I can start this new gig and do it all differently. And then I ended up doing the same thing. So, um, yeah, I guess that’s it. The, the core of my work is about self-compassion, like making decisions about your career, taking action in your career from a place of self-compassion. And I guess that’s me in a nutshell.

Emily (06:16): Yeah. Okay. I’m so glad to, I’m, I’m excited to hear more about this story. So like when you were coming up on those maybe the last few years, um, as an academic, um, give us kind of what was going on with you getting up to that crisis point. Um, you’ve mentioned health crises already, but maybe also about your time management, maybe also about your career progression, maybe also your money, like even more holistically. Let’s hear more about that.

Danielle (06:43): Yeah, 100%. Um, so yeah, physical body was giving out. Um, and I think had I been somebody who was a planner, like I never planned anything like weekly planning monthly. I never did any of it. Um, that would’ve definitely helped with my overwhelm. Um, my overwhelm definitely contributed to my, some of my health crises for sure. Um, so I was essentially just focusing only on my work, doing my work, and that was it. I was trying to shut out my life other than that in every way. Um, you know, I was a professor and that was my identity and this is what I did. And, um, I wanted to prove to the people around me that that’s, that I could do a good job and that I would do it well. So I would shut my door <laugh> when I got into the office. Um, and I could hear my colleagues banter outside the door and I wouldn’t communicate with them. I wouldn’t hang out with them. I could hear them and I would kind of have this longing of like, oh, it’d be nice to go hang out with them, but I can’t. I’ve gotta work. Um, I remember, you know, doing everything I could to, to push my daughter off on, um, my mom like, can you take care of Mar she needs, uh, she needs you today ’cause I have to work. Um, I didn’t look at, you know, I didn’t look at my weeks. As I said, I didn’t look at my months, I never looked at my money, I didn’t look at anything. The only thing that mattered was my work, and it’s because I had this core, core belief that I was incompetent and I was bad and I was wrong. And it was this impo-, these imposter feelings. And because of those, I shut everything else out and not shockingly got sick.

Navigating Money, Career, and Relationships

Emily (08:39): Wow. Wow. I can so see how your brand became what it is, <laugh> identifying that as the core issue inside you, your psychology, um, that was kind of like fueling all of this. Um, was there ever going to be an end point or with that like core belief that you were incompetent, had you not left your job, would you just have continued, as you said, shutting out everything else in your life to only focus on the work?

Danielle (09:07): Well, I think I did do that. Um, I, I continued to shut out everything to focus on the work even after I left. Um, I, I remember having an argument with my husband right after he accepted this job across the country. And, um, I was like, I’m fine leaving. This job sucks. It’s not for me, dah, dah, dah, dah. I don’t feel well, this is well after I had hit burnout. And so it, you know, my feelings were very different then. And I was like, let’s go, let’s get outta here. And he’s like, okay, I get that you want to start sort of this entrepreneurial work and I just need to know like, where are we money wise? Like when are we gonna call it quits? Like we can give it a shot, we can move, I can take over, you know, paying for things and doing, you know, supporting us, but then I need to know when you’re gonna, when is sort of the breaking point when we’re not gonna be able to do it anymore. Um, and I remember just getting really angry, like, this is my purpose in life. I’m pretty sure that we can manage it. We can figure this out. I can’t believe you want a number. What is this number thing? And I, I remember getting really, really angry with him and, and he was really angry with me. Like I, he wanted some clarity, he wanted some sense that, you know, we go into this. He, he knew like when the end point was he needed that. And I, I was like, um hmm. It’s like I was offended by it. Like, no, this is my real work. This is the work I’m meant to be. How could you, you know, question that kind of thing. Um, and so I kind of shrugged him off and he kind of let me, and he wasn’t happy about it and he carried a lot of sort of resentment about it. And we got here and I’m in Denver now where he got the job and I ended up taking another faculty job to appease him. But then I got sick. I got really, really, really, really, really sick life, threateningly sick and ended up having to quit six months later. And so it was this, like, it was the body <laugh> was, was communicating things to me. My husband wanted some clarity about money. I didn’t know how to plan my time out in a way that would like actually balance out my life. Um, I was just sort of fully focused on my career and my, my new job, or I guess I should say my new career, my new, what I felt was like my calling, my, my dharma, my purpose. Um, and I was very, very, very imbalanced. And so we got here and started arranging our new life and things just got more and more stressful actually. And I guess a big part of that stress was lack of money because I had to quit that job six months in and then I had to try to build a business and I refused to talk about money with my husband and <laugh>, like all this stuff was happening.

Emily (12:22): Was he more clued in about the money than you were, or were you both kind of flying like in the dark?

Danielle (12:27): So this is kind of how I think of it. I think of our relationship to money as like attachment style. If you’re securely attached, you, you communicate with like your partner and your friends and the people around you in this way that, that, that is productive and loving and truthful and those kinds of things. Well, we have that same relationship to money <laugh>. Um, and if you don’t have a secure attachment style for me, I tend to be avoidant. Um, I will avoid human relationships. I will avoid, um, relationship to money. I will avoid relationship to time. And he, my husband falls sort of on the other end of the spectrum and he is, um, he’s anxious about everything and he tries to push things into being, and it should work like this and it, and he gets really rigid about it. And so I would say that neither of us had a secure relationship to money. Um, and in fact we were talking about money in completely different ways, and each of our ways were like totally unhealthy, <laugh> totally, totally unhealthy, totally toxic. Um, yeah. And actually as I, as I recall this time, like I can feel this sort of pain in my body and the heaviness and the sadness. It was a hard time.

Healing and Building a Relationship with Money

Emily (13:51): Yeah. And I, I think we’re gonna keep the conversation fairly focused around money today and it, and its relationship with these other things, but clearly this was going on for you in multiple areas of your life, right? It’s not just money, it’s not just career, it’s, it’s well beyond that. So you’re speaking about this time in the past tense. So let’s talk about like, emerging from that or, or shifting it or healing from it or however you like, conceptualize that. So like, what’s been the shift from like that point in time to now

Danielle (14:19): Turning into the reality that I need to have conversations with my husband about finances, um, which was really scary to me. I, when we first started, we, we have these weekly meetings every Tuesday, although we haven’t had them for a few weeks, and it’s making me nervous. Um, but I would, I would get shaky, um, when we would sit down to talk about it and he would get angry and they were very stressful. And it was this like turning into like what’s authentically happening right now as we talk about money, when we, what, Like, I, uh, just like I said to you just now, like, I can feel this in my body as I’m talking about it. Like, I started saying that to him, like, I can feel the shakiness showing up in my body and I can feel like a sense that I wanna run away really fast from this and I don’t wanna have this conversation. Um, and so being really honest, and then when I was doing that, he started telling me how he would feel and often we’d have similar reactions like he wanted to run too. Um, so the healing was really about like me finally just like, ah, turning into the reality that I had to develop a relationship with money. I had to develop a relationship with all of these things, with my husband, with <laugh>, you know, with time. Um, and it was really scary. And, um, it, and, and if I compare that to where we are now, I would say that there’s still definitely work to be done in terms of my own relationship to money, but also my relationship to my husband, um, when it relates to money. ’cause that is like the hot point for us and has been for the 20 years that we’ve been married, like it always has been. Um, and so we continue to do the work. I can see when he kind of pulls out and it’s like, ah, I gotta go to a meeting and I can’t meet for our time. And then I feel like comfortable with that, like, yeah, yeah, please go and I don’t have to worry about it or deal with it kind of thing. Um, and so it’s very easy, easy for us to fall into that avoidant place where we don’t talk about it and we don’t think about it. And like I said, for the last few weeks we haven’t been doing it and I’m like, I gotta get back on it. I gotta step back in. This is probably why I’m on the podcast right now, so that I can like force myself to do that. You know what I mean? Like, I’m thinking about like divine intervention or something. I would say that so much of it has been about just holding myself in these difficult moments. I mean, just in the same way when I talk to my husband about money, I get nervous and scared and shaky. Uh, the same thing happens when I look at my, my money. Um, when I look at the actual numbers and I’m, and I’m tracking. And when I’m doing that every single day, which I’ve been doing, um, I really have to take a self-compassion break. I have to like hold my chest. I have to tell myself I’m not alone. I have to tell myself that everything is okay. I have to tell myself that I am competent and I can do this money thing. Like there’s, there’s some real stuff that I need to do to get in, get in a really good, secure relationship with money. Um, and I’m doing it, but it’s a process and I think that’s what I really wanna impart to people. It’s not just you look at the numbers and then you know, you quit avoiding and you transition and voila you’re there. It’s not like that. It, there is some healing work and some time. And to know that I think is really important.

Emily (18:02): I’m very actually impressed that you and your husband have both been able to like, identify that you want to avoid and that you want to run away and so forth. And yet have held yourselves to maybe not the weekly standard, but like a standard of meeting periodically and engaging with the subject and doing the work. Um, as you were saying, like physically to get to that point where you can have those conversations. I’m wondering in the time that it’s been since you have been intentionally engaging with one another around the subject of money, um, what positive things you’ve been able to accomplish, like what keeps you coming back to the table even though it has been so difficult?

Danielle (18:39): I feel closer to him when I can hear the way he’s thinking about things and the way he’s framing sort of our money story. And, um, and, and he actually says to me, thank you. When I tell him, you know, what, where I am and how I’m feeling, um, like he’s, he’s really valuing hearing me and I can feel just this, like, I can feel a real tenderness that he has for me when I talk to him about my fears and when I talk to him about why this is so difficult for me. Um, and that, that is, um, that is absolutely the thing that keeps us coming back, right? Like, wow, wow. To feel that sense of tenderness and, and care for each other when, when money for the 20 years we’ve been married, um, has always been, um, just fraught with pain and, uh, disdain and contempt and um, and so knowing that it’s hard but coming back feels really, really good. It feels like courageous. Like, I can do this and um, and I can and I can love fiercely and I can see he can do the same thing. Uh, so yeah, that’s what comes up for me when you ask that.

Emily (20:13): Hmm. That’s, that’s incredible. And it, it speaks also I think greatly to, um, your marriage, your partnership. Um, I think of there’s various aspects of our lives that we can share with our partners. Not everybody shares money and you’re not even necessarily talking about the dollars and cents, you’re talking about sharing the feelings and the fears and the dreams and so forth. And that’s, that’s really, that’s really precious and it can bring people closer together the way that sharing other aspects of your life can as well. This is just kind of one of those examples. I’m really glad to hear, hear that. That’s really lovely. Is there anything else you wanna talk about from kind of that first question, which is like, coming to crisis point and how you came out of that?

Dharma and Connecting to your Purpose

Danielle (20:58): I think this idea of dharma, I’m a huge Stephen Cope fan. Stephen Cope talks about dharma. He’s a yogi and a psychotherapist. And he had his own like mid-career crisis as a, as a therapist in Boston years and years ago. And, um, during this time when I was in my tenure track job and I was feeling all the stress and all the pain and my husband said to me, you like carry anxiety with you at all times. Um, I would have like these Sunday mornings, um, when I had an infant at home, I would go to the coffee shop and just read Stephen Cope, um, his work. And he had a book, what was it? I’m trying to see it on my shelf. Uh, I think it’s, I think it’s called Yoga and the Search for True Self or something like that. Anyway, in it, I, when I was reading it at the coffee shop on those mornings when I was always anxious and I’d have this from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM ’cause I had a baby at home, 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM on Sunday mornings, was this like, ah, I can just kinda slip into this place where it feels like somebody understands me and the crisis I’m going through. And this is the person that also talks about purpose and dharma from a, from a sort of yogic philosophy, from particularly he, he, he talks about the Bhagavad Gita, which is um, which is this, this scripture that helps us to understand purpose. Uh, and so that was the thing I think that got me it, one, it was the thing that caused some arguments ’cause my husband didn’t get it and he was like, I don’t like this. Um, like, we can’t have a conversation about money because you’re so, like, this is my purpose. This is what I do, this is what I want. Uh, he thought it was so lofty and ridiculous, so it caused that kind of problem. But what it did for me is it the idea of having a dharma, the idea of having a purpose and then just like putting to work the health of my body, time, money, all of those things in alignment with that sense of purpose. That was the thing that kept me moving because those things bore me otherwise, like, oh my gosh, time, money, it’s boring, it’s dumb, I hate it, but if I have like a real why about why I do it, like this is why I do it, it for me it was dharma. Knowing that I’m doing it because I know there are other faculty out there who are having a hard time and I wanna be able to be there for them and I wanna be able to to, to heal, to help heal with them. 

Commercial

Emily (23:57): 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.

Connections Between Time and Money: Prioritizing Wellness in Both Areas

Emily (24:48): I would love to talk a little bit more about some of the things that you just mentioned. We’ve touched on this a couple times, the time management, the planning, the weekly plans and so forth. And I want to kind of draw a comparison between managing your time and managing your money and see how well, you know, strategies from one can transfer to the other and maybe in some cases where they break down and these things are very different and can’t be thought of in a similar way. Um, so tell me like, you know, having gone from someone who, who wasn’t doing the management of time and now presumably you’re much better at it because. You want it to be part, you know, enabling you to do what you’re here to do. Um, tell me a little bit about like your practice of time management or how you teach other people about it. And let’s just start talking through those analogies with money.

Danielle (25:35): I do weekly planning in my program that I have for faculty. And every Friday we get together and we talk about our career wellness or we, I have them meditate on their career wellness destination, this is where I wanna be. So like, let’s step into that, that let’s feel into that, what is that? And then now let’s set an intention for the week that supports that. Um, so, uh, I would say that as a person, I, I do things, uh hmm. I have to act on things before they sort of integrate. Um, so I had to do the weekly planning with my people for a long time, for probably at least a year before I was really getting good at it sort of myself. Um, and I, that same thing with my dissertation. When I wrote my dissertation, I had to be in the field. I did ethnographic research, I had to be in the field before I could really write my methods section. Like I’m just not the kind of person who can like, you know, put it out there, make a plan, and then, and then move forward with it. Like, I have to act on it, I have to feel it, it has to be part of me kind of thing. So I think that that’s the one thing, like just developing a relationship with the plan every week. And that’s the thing I say to them every time we come together, the purpose of weekly planning is to develop a relationship with our weak so that we can self compassionately protect ourselves, our future selves protect, you know, um, our, our needs and our wants kind of thing. So, so it’s this like, here’s our why, this is why we’re coming together, right? Here’s the, here’s the big why, the career wellness destination, here’s the little why, this is why we’re doing it this week. And um, and doing that with them every week, week after week after week after week really allowed me to integrate that into me and to, um, and to my own practice and develop my own relationship with, um, with time. Because before that it was like I would read what somebody said about time management and what somebody else said about time management, but until I like made it my own, I really couldn’t do it well. Um, so there’s always space for them to, to do it their way as well. It’s not just about me, but I do always want to remind us all of the why before we do the planning.

Emily (28:11): Yeah. So what I’m curious about in trying to draw an analogy with, we’ll say budget planning, right, is the analogous, analogous, um, area there, and it probably wouldn’t happen on a weekly basis. It might be more of like a monthly or quarterly kind of thing if we’re talking about money. But what I’m wondering about is when you and the people you work with are creating these plans, um, what’s the, I mean, you, you said, you know, we have to keep in mind our overall goal, career wellness goal, but then within that, are you emphasizing like accomplishing something this week or rather putting in time for something this week that will like move your career forward versus just keeping your head above water and getting the grading and, you know, all this stuff that doesn’t really move the needle? Like is that more like what you’re talking about, like making sure you make space for overall progress or is it more about, um, scheduling in time for, um, self-care or, or like, or all of that? Or like how do you think about maybe the different components of the week that should be present?

Danielle (29:16): Yes. The, the bigger picture is we’re trying to be more well in our careers. And so with that, we’re always scheduling in rest. You know, you spend three hours a week with each of your classes, well, there needs to be three hours of rest time for you, space that you get to do whatever you need to do to feel more connected to yourself. You know, body, mind, spirit. Um, so there’s that piece, but then there’s also the piece of like, let’s figure out what our priorities are. Um, this week I have all of these things on my list for work, but what’s actually priority and how can we, Martha Beck talks about, and I always use this, she talks about the three Bs, right? How can we, like, if you look at something and you don’t wanna do it and you have this weird relationship to it, like, oh, I really don’t wanna work on this thing this week. How can you one, bag it, how can you two, barter it? Like, and she says barter it is just sort of like give it to somebody else, right? Um, and three, how can you, um, better it? Like I’m gonna, I don’t wanna grade, but I’m gonna sit in this chair that I love and listen to music that I love while I grade. So, so, uh, and then I had, I had a client once say, and then we should do botch it, so do it imperfectly, right? And um, so, so we go through that like what is the list? What are your list of to-dos? Now let’s just get rid of ever-, let’s get rid of all the things we can get rid of. Let’s delay the things we can delay. Let’s, uh, let’s commit to doing things imperfectly, that kind of thing. And so now we’re gonna find our priorities for the week. Now we’re gonna find, um, like I said, our time that we’re gonna do rest. Now we’re gonna find time that we need to take care of our ourselves. Like, are you scheduling lunch every day? You should have a lunch every day. And that is not something faculty ever think about, right? Like, oh, I haven’t eaten for 12 hours. <laugh>. Like, that is common. That is very common. So those kinds of things. And just staying in relationship to the week and knowing that that weekly relationship is gonna contribute to the larger goal of career wellness.

Emily (31:33): I just love this advice on its own. I mean, if this were a time management podcast, we would just talk about it because I, I love that stuff. Um, but I’m still trying to draw these like analogies with money. Um, and I’m thinking about how when we’re planning a budget we have to plan for, and the typical term, which you actually mentioned earlier is like needs and wants and also saving. And I feel like the saving is more like the rest actually that you were just speaking about because it’s, um, it’s shoring up your ability to roll with punches in the future. It’s shoring up your own health, um, both in the long term and in the short term. And so that to me is like, it’s something that you can neglect on a weekly basis, monthly basis, maybe even for a year, maybe even for a few years. But it will come back with a vengeance if you never ever address it. Um, and it’s so much better to build it in cyclically like on a weekly basis like you’re talking about. So that to me is like a saving, kind of like saving, um, building in your own, again, ability to kind of continue to live your life with all the like, you know, the, the punches that you know, life is gonna throw your way. Um, and then also like thinking about the needs and the wants and the priorities. Um, like you were saying about okay, there’s maybe a list of tasks that need to happen. There may be a list of things that you want to spend money on in the course of a month, let’s say. And some of those are more important than others. Some of them can be delayed, some of them can be frugalized, <laugh>, some of them with a little bit of, you know, creativity. You might be able to use something for free or lower cost. Um, some things may just need to be deferred into the future. And so that’s kind of the analogy I would draw there of like, but with money, and probably with your time you have some big rocks that are just standard, right? Like you gotta pay your housing costs every single month. You have to spend a certain amount of money on food every single month. There’s gonna be some staples going on. But similarly in, in your time management, there are probably staples depending on what your job actually is and what your life consists of. There are some things you gotta do, um, every single day. Yeah. Do you have any comments on, on that?

Danielle (33:41): I love the way you just broke that down. Um, and, and drew an alignment to, uh, money. And I will say that money is something I’m still building a relationship with, and so I don’t think I can speak about it in the way I just spoke about time, right? And so, and I think that’s really important to say, like, it’s really important to be really honest about that. Like every day I sit down and I do something that helps me to feel inspired with money, right? Like have a little mantra or I tell myself this is why I’m doing this. And then I look at my, and then I look at my tracking and just like developing that relationship that isn’t a scared, shaky relationship, um, feels like the only thing I can do right now. And so having this sort of big eagle view of my money at the moment is really hard. But having that, that, and I eagle view versus mouse view, I’m again drawing from Martha Beck, mouse view is this like, you know, the the little daily thing I can do to stay in relationship and to develop a deeper relationship, that’s all I’m doing right now. And so talking about it, um, in big lofty terms with somebody who’s an expert on this feels pretty intimidating. ’cause it’s just not where I am yet. Um, and I, and I want people out there who really are hearing this and being like, oh my god, I can relate to that and I’m scared and I wanna get away from it. And, and hearing all the financial terms and all of, and hearing people who are really good at it talk about it all the time, that is scary. And it makes me wanna shut down. I want those people to hear me say that it takes time. And I know I just said it, but I wanna say it again.

Emily (35:37): Thank you so much for pointing that out because part of the purpose of this podcast is, um, and the listeners, hopefully regular listeners will know this, but you may not, is that I interview regular people. Like yeah, they may be regular people who are willing to talk about money, which is not everybody in the population, but I don’t interview other experts almost ever because I think it’s much more relatable, useful, actionable to hear from people who are more similar to the listener rather than more similar, like to me who’s like devoted my career to this, right? So like we already have one of me on the podcast. We don’t necessarily need two <laugh>, at least not every episode.

Danielle (36:08): Totally.

Using Automation and Routines to Support Wellness

Emily (36:09): So that’s kind of my like, uh, approach there. So I’m really, really glad that you said that. And I actually, I’m gonna think more about this mouse view versus eagle view <laugh>, uh, terminology that you just pointed out. And like, yeah, what can be done to draw the connections between the two? Like if you have an eagle view, how do you develop mouse? Uh, I don’t know, habits or actions? And if you only have mouse views and habits and actions, like how do you get up to the eagle view as well? Um, one thing I wanted to ask you about, again, in this analogy between like money and time management is I really love automation in the area of money, and I’m wondering how much automation comes into your view of time management. And by automation I could mean something as simple as like, well actually something you just said reminded me of, uh, Kendra Adachi of the Lazy Genius. Are you familiar with this brand?

Danielle (36:55): No.

Emily (36:56): Okay. So what you said earlier that reminded me of her is that, uh, she’s very intentional to schedule her lunch because she realized that she was not taking lunch like ever and that it was ineffective overall for her wellbeing and also for her work to not be taking lunch breaks anyway. One of her so-called lazy genius principles is decide once, and that’s a form of automation. It’s not necessarily carrying things out automatically, but it’s okay, I only had to think about this one time. This decision is gonna last for a while and I can just carry out that decision without revisiting it every single time it comes up. So that’s kind of a form of automation. Um, so yeah, I’m wondering what you think about that in, in the area of, of time management.

Danielle (37:35): Hmm. The thing that is really automation for me is when I sit down to do weekly planning, I have questions for inner wisdom. Because when you look at your week and you’re like, ah, I don’t know how this is gonna work and I still need to, to contact this person and figure this logistic out and blah, blah, blah, all these things are happening, right? And you don’t always know the answers to everything. You don’t always, um, know how to exactly plan. How am I going to find the capacity to get such and such done this week? Um, that might be an inner wisdom question or whatever it is, but if you just have those questions listed and then they’re not like taking up space in your brain and they’re not like, uh, and you’re not ruminating on it and you’re not getting, um, like scared about that. And then after you know what your questions are, you take space to go listen to what the answers are. So I’m gonna, now that I’ve done my weekly planning, I’m gonna gonna schedule some time this weekend to just go for a walk and really jus- like I look at my questions before I go for my walk, and then I’m really just gonna let the answers come to me as they need to, right? Um, and trusting that they will, and they will, they will, I mean sometimes they’ll say, don’t do this yet. Like pause and, you know, postpone this until next month or something. They might not have an answer in that way, but at least you have some kind of an answer.

Emily (39:02): The automation is the listing of the questions. And then scheduling reflection time again because you mentioned earlier like not, not wanting it to take over all of your brain space to ruminate on these questions. Like you’re just gonna give it a dedicated time where you’re like, I know from doing this process many times if I just have these questions working in my subconscious during this time, a few answers will arise

Danielle (39:25): 100%.

Emily (39:26): I’m actually also thinking about in terms of automations like routines. So have you developed, for example, a morning routine or a sitting down to work routine or an evening routine or anything like that? Or do you like those or do you recommend them?

Danielle (39:39): I do. I love the getting up in the morning and doing what I’ve been calling a trust practice, um, which is just kind of like, um, feeling into gratitude or feeling into a celebration of yourself or anything that’s gonna make you feel good. And I call ’em trust practices because they allow you to trust the moment they allow you to trust your journey. Um, and if you don’t do them, you often will feel distrust and like you can’t do the things you want to do in your life. Like you’re not gonna be able to make it happen. Um, so I would say one, some kind of a trust practice and usually for me, um, I am thinking about things I’m grateful for and I’m thinking about ways I’m really proud of myself and in the evening I’m always doing right before bed. I’m always just taking a second to really feel into my career wellness destination. Just like, this is what I really want and this is how it feels to have that. Um, and I do that just because, um, you know, those people who, who talk a lot like in the spiritual world, right? And manifestation world, they talk about that. And um, and how if you do that just before bed, you know, it sort of sets your psyche up for, for the next day to do things that are in alignment with that. I also love Cal Newport’s shutting it down thing at the end of the workday. Oh my gosh, I feel so much better when I do that, that kind of like, okay, I need to get this done, this done and this done first thing tomorrow. And then these are the things that I need to think through for the rest of the week. Like, and then now I’m gonna check the box because I have his like calendar. I’m gonna check the box that says shut down. I did the shutdown and I am done. And I’ve noticed that I don’t look at my phone as much. Um, when I do that, I just feel better and the whole day because I’m just intentional about how I spend my time.

Emily (41:41): I also have used Cal Newport’s, um, time block, time block planner, which has that shutdown, uh, checkbox in it. And I don’t always use it, but when, as you said, when I do, I certainly feel like a difference. And I’m actually trying to draw another analogy with money here. And this would again, probably happen on like a monthly or yearly basis instead of on a daily basis. But like knowing when you can call something good enough and done and that you don’t need to devote the additional hours that day. Analogously, I’ve done enough with my money this month. I’ve hit my minimum goals. It’s okay if I haven’t used every single last dollar optimally or whatever. Like, it’s okay to have some flexibility and to set your goals realistically, <laugh> like, I mean, Cal wouldn’t want you to schedule, you know, 12 hours of work into a six hour day. That’s not feasible at all. And so similarly, like you need to rightsize your money goals according to the means that you have at that time so that you’re not in this like dissatisfied feeling all the time. Like you have to get to a peaceful conclusion <laugh> at least some of the time with your time and your money. So yeah, that’s just another analogy I was thinking of there. I wonder if you could leave us with maybe one or two self-compassion strategies. You’ve actually already brought up a couple in the course of the interview, but maybe like one or two more that you haven’t brought up yet that we could use across different areas of life wellness or management, including money.

Self-Compassion Practices for Academics

Danielle (43:06): Yeah. So the first one I brought up was a self-compassion break. And this is, uh, from Kristin Neff and Chris Germer’s work in mindful self-compassion. And essentially it is when you know, notice you’re nervous, and it might be while you’re planning, it might be like while you’re planning your week, it might be while you are working through your budget, it might be something else. Um, maybe it’s, maybe it’s even your body, right? Like, I don’t want to exercise right now. And everything in me is like, eh, I don’t wanna exercise. And so a self-compassion break would be to just feel those feelings. Oh yeah, this is what it feels like in my body to feel terrible about this, whatever it is, the anxiety, the stress, the anger, whatever. And then you place your hands either over your chest or somewhere else, that is, that feels very supportive, right? You could like cup your face or um, you could hug yourself, whatever it is, but you’re finding a way. And I really like wrapping a blanket around myself, like really just feeling the warmth of the blanket and letting and, and doing it tightly so you can really feel it tightly. But that that sort of nervous system thing where you’re really giving your nervous system some soothing, um, and then you’re just gonna lean into your own hands or into the blanket and let all the feelings you’re feeling be there while it holds you or while your hands hold you. And then you just remind yourself, I am not alone in this. This is life and life is hard. And, um, everybody’s on their own journey and everybody deals with hardships kind of thing. Um, the other thing is you wanna soothe yourself with words. If you can find something that feels really good to you, so you know, this too shall pass, or I’m doing this for a reason, I’m doing this because I want to, you know, for me it would be to fulfill my dharma, whatever it is. Um, so just you’re, you’re holding yourself with your hands, you’re holding yourself with your words and you’re reminding yourself you’re not alone. Those are the big self-compassion, um, pieces to a self-compassion break. Um, so that’s one way.

Danielle (45:24): The other way is just pausing. I, I think pausing is huge. Like, I’m moving through my day and I’m starting to get stressed and this is happening and I’m triggered. I just went to a faculty meeting <laugh> and I’m triggered because faculty meetings are, I don’t know why they seem to be like triggering 80% of the time, but you walk out of there and, um, for many of us, we just keep, continue on with our day and um, instead pause, right? And I could do this too, especially when I, as I’m developing this relationship with money and I’m trying to heal my relationship with money,

Connecting with Dr. Danielle De La Mare

Emily (46:00): Thank you so much for explaining how to be more self-compassionate in these, you know, times when we might need a little bit of extra. And certainly I know there are people in the audience who are gonna be feeling this with respect to money and will appreciate those strategies, um, when it comes to opening up their bank account or meeting with their partner or whatever, whatever is, um, causing those that trigger to come up. So thank you so much for that. And if someone is listening and they realize that they’re kind of in the, the audience of people that you serve, um, can you tell us just a tiny bit more about how they can find you, how they can learn more about your work and what it looks like to work with you?

Danielle (46:35): Yeah, thank you. Uh, selfcompassionateprofessor.com. You can go there and you can come to one of our monthly coffee chats, um, where we just make space for career wellness. So we spend an hour every month, anybody who shows up and we talk about anything you wanna talk about, whether it’s like toxic workplace, feeling like you, you know, are burned out, whatever it is, you come, you chat. It’s, it’s free, it’s an hour every month. Sign up selfcompassionateprofessor.com, just click on Coffee chats. And then I also have Self-Compassionate Professor, the podcast, um, for people who, who are interested in, in that as well.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (47:14): Excellent. Thank you so much. And let’s end with the, uh, question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that can be something that we have touched on already in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

Danielle (47:29): It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have it all figured out. All you have to do is be in relationship to your money. That’s all you have to do.

Emily (47:42): Could not have phrased it better myself. Thank you so much, Danielle, it was absolutely a pleasure to speak with you.

Danielle (47:46): Yay, you too.

Outtro

Emily (47:58): 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.

Sustainably Moving in the Right Direction in Your Finances (with Dr. Kate Henry)

by

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Kate Henry, a productivity coach for academics. Kate was a workaholic who equated her work with her worth until her declining health forced her to stop overworking. Now, she coaches grad students and academics in how they can achieve career success in a sustainable manner. Together, Kate and Emily explore several overlapping concepts and strategies between productivity and financial management. We also learn from Kate what it takes to start a service-based business in terms of finances, scheduling, and mindsets.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Sustainably Moving in the Right Direction in Your Finances (with Dr. Kate Henry)

Teaser

Kate (00:00): For productivity, often I hear folks who are like, I’m going to write my dissertation every day. I’m going to go to the gym three times every week, or I’m going to do like X all the time. And then when they don’t do that, there’s this feeling of failure, this feeling of like, oh, why should I even try? I am not never going to get where I want to get. So in a a productivity lens, we would think of like you’re trending in the direction that you would want to go.

Introduction

Emily (00:35): 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 (01:04): This is Season 20, Episode 1, and today my guest is Dr. Kate Henry, a productivity coach for academics. Kate was a workaholic who equated her work with her worth until her declining health forced her to stop overworking. Now, she coaches grad students and academics in how they can achieve career success in a sustainable manner. Together, Kate and I explore several overlapping concepts and strategies between productivity and financial management. We also learn from Kate what it takes to start a service-based business in terms of finances, scheduling, and mindsets. By the way, I forgot to plug in my external mic during this interview, so the audio quality on my end is pretty poor. I apologize for that, and please listen anyway, as I believe the content of this interview is definitely worth it.

Emily (01:56): These action items are for you if you switched onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac last fall and are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on page 8 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe for 2024 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is this Wednesday, January 15, 2025. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at tax time, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives.

Emily (03:08): If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes 1.75 hours of video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. This quarter’s Q&A call is today, Monday, January 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PF for PhDs dot com slash Q E tax. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s20e1/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Kate Henry.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (04:13): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Kate Henry, who’s a productivity coach for academics, and I’m really excited to speak with her and find some overlaps between productivity and time management. And Kate, I’m just so delighted to have you on, and will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the listeners?

Kate (04:29): Yes, thank you for having me on. I’m so excited. Um, so again, I’m Dr. Kate Henry, and I am a productivity coach who works with academics, so graduate students, postdocs, professors, and I approach my work with a lens of sustainability, a lens of wellbeing, slow living, and really making productivity more accessible, which we need in the world of academia.

Emily (04:56): And I already see the same keywords that pop up in finances as well. So that’s awesome. Give us a little bit more like background about, you know, yourself, your finances, your financial mindset through, you know, when you were growing up and then like into graduate school

Financial Mindset From Childhood Through Grad School

Kate (05:10): Of course. Absolutely. So growing up, I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania and I grew up really modeled for me was a, like a working class bootstrapping mentality, working hard and working all day was very valued and, you know, tied to worth and respect for an individual. And so I was, I did that, I worked very hard. I started working as a teenager. I actually moved out of my parents’ house when I was a senior in high school and began working and sustaining myself then. And I really carried this, um, sort of attaching my worth to my work and my output and worked very hard, had multiple jobs in college and in graduate school. So I was very intent on doing things perfectly and needed multiple jobs to sustain myself in graduate school in addition to my stipend. So I certainly, you know, um, tied my worth to my productivity and the output and really approached work with a feeling of financial scarcity, which I think had been, it’s something that I picked up as a child and then also, you know, living on my own as a senior in high school and then in college. So that certainly influenced me, you know, across decades. And I was, I’m sure that many folks can relate to this who are listening, but working multiple jobs, really trying to bring in income in addition to a graduate stipend was pretty stressful as well.

Emily (06:40): Yeah, it’s something that I do like to encourage side hustling when it’s necessary. Uh, but I’m always like trying to tell people about that time, money, energy trade off on it. Like at some points certain types of jobs are not worth it and maybe you can find something with, you know, fewer hours but higher pay rate and, but they’re all hard trade offs because it’s just, it’s a difficult time of life where you’re strained in a lot of different, you know, areas. And so this mindset of tying your worth to your work and the hustling and everything, how did that ultimately impact your health?

Kate (07:14): Well, not well <laugh> as you might expect and as many people experience, and actually I’m a productivity researcher and I publish about that. Many folks in the productivity scholarship world often come to study productivity because they have some sort of physical, mental, you know, like breakdown and hit a wall with their physical or mental health. And for me, in 2017 when I was in my PhD program, I actually developed, you know, pretty severe lower back pain and issues with fatigue and chronic illness that wouldn’t get diagnosed for three years. So I was forced to stop working as much as I had because I truly could not sit at a desk for long and I had to attend so many appointments to try to find a diagnosis or to find a way to relieve that pain that I was experiencing. So I had to halt the overwork that I was doing at that point. And in order to find a new way to still be productive, I turned to external support. So I turned to podcasts, I turned to books, self-help books, time management books, and that eventually led me to start researching productivity, which led me to where I am now in my job. But initially having to find a different way to truly be an academic and work at my desk is what forced me to acknowledge that I was a workaholic. This was not sustainable. Um, like my body stopped me from doing that overwork that I was doing.

Dr. Kate Henry’s Business Origin Story

Emily (08:45): Thank you so much for sharing that. And I know it’s gonna be relatable again to a lot of the listeners and maybe not at this point in their lives, maybe they’re still in graduate school and their youth is holding up or something, but like at some point if you work like that, you’re gonna hit some kind of wall. And so how did like all these events coming together and this mindset and everything lead to you starting your business? Can you tell us that story?

Kate (09:06): Yes, I love to tell this story. So I started researching just personally looking at productivity and time management and self-help, uh, you know, podcasts and books as I said in 2017 and found that I was really, really into it and I was doing these little experiments on my own. And at the start of 2018, I was like, I want to explore this even further. So I set a goal for myself that if I could blog every single week, trying out a new tool, practicing it, writing it up, creating how-tos for others and blog every week for a year, then I could consider shifting my career path and going into productivity coaching. And it went super well. I did it for a year and then I decided to do it for a second year. So that was two years straight of weekly blogging about this, which both increased my knowledge of what I was doing and also just helped me to share a lot of free resources for folks. So folks started to get to know me and during that time I started practicing doing some productivity coaching while I was still in graduate school. So by the time I graduated in 2020, I already was prepared to start my business. I knew I was going to officially do that. I had made the decision to not go on the job market because I wanted to start the business and I already had all of this really great content there. So I started planning for my business around two years before I actually finished the PhD. But I also knew I wanted to finish the PhD. I liked my topic, I had a great advisor. Um, but it was this really nice playground, I guess to start to develop a mailing list and start to develop clients and for folks to get to know who I was as a productivity scholar,

Emily (10:50): I love how intentional that was <laugh>. Um, and it’s, it’s actually advice that I took like from the personal finance space, like if you’re planning on starting a business, like give yourself runway, right? So like you gave yourself runway both in the sense of you’re doing those early steps that are not gonna immediately, you know, see monetary ROI but are building you up to be able to offer that, you know, in the future. Um, at the same time on the financial side, we would say like, okay, you’re saving, you know, you’re, you’re getting ready for like potential, not having as much income once you, you know, commit to the business maybe. And again, I find parallels with my story, although you were much more intentional. So I was doing the same thing of, you know, blogging and so forth about personal finance and figuring out that people needed more education on this topic that was, you know, specific to my peer group of graduate students and postdocs. Um, yet, you know, there wasn’t anyone doing it. And so I was kind of like stepping into that vacuum, but I didn’t actually plan to start a business until it was like upon me that I was starting a business. So I didn’t give myself the same intentional kinds of runway that you did, which is amazing. So for the listeners, if you’re thinking about starting a business or even honestly like doing any kind of alt ac career, like this is the stuff you start in graduate school years ahead of time to lay that groundwork, to do the internships, to do the networking, to get the experiences because you know, chances are you’re not gonna get those things automatically in the course of your time in graduate school. So, and I also love it because I think you used the word like experiment. You were experimenting with the productivity, you know, tips and so forth, but you’re also experimenting with can I become a business owner and can I be committed in this area? And it’s that same thing for anyone coming up on a career change, like go ahead and experiment if you’re not sure what you wanna do, do you know, low stakes, little, um, experiments, different things as you go along, and then it’ll help you make those decisions as well as get you ready for that next step. So I just love <laugh> that how intentional you were about that. Um, we’re gonna get back to like what your full fledged business, like what you’re up to now in a couple of minutes. And before we get there, I kind of wanna, you know, riff for a bit here on like these parallels between productivity and finances and what, you know, what a person who’s maybe more competent in one sphere can draw into the other one and back and forth and, and those things. So let’s see, let’s just go through a couple different items, like what productivity principles can we apply to our finances so that we can give them the right amount of time and attention and they’re not <laugh> taking over our life?

Parallels Between Productivity and Personal Finances

Kate (13:15): Yes, certainly I am really excited about this question. So I really approach productivity through the lens of how can we make it accessible, how can we personalize it for each person? And in that way, I think about what I would call personal resources. So this is our time, our energy, our focus, also our physical health, our mental health, our mood, how we’re doing, and really approaching our productivity in a way that goes with the flow of that. So for example, are there certain times of day or certain days of the month where it would make more sense for you to schedule time to work on a particular productivity task? Like for me, I block off the last day of the month and the first day of the month to do my accounting and do my, you know, things like that. So that’s a way I approach that. But I think in terms of checking in with your personal resources and coming up with a plan that’s not going to overtax those or cause additional stress works for productivity. So I imagine that it might also work for like certain types of financial practices that would be potentially stressful or really need more time or energy or effort. So that’s one thing that, yeah,

Emily (14:25): Uh, what that is making me think of is actually sort of using that tip as as you just, you just gave an example in the financial realm. Like I know that this is a good time of the month to be working on my bookkeeping and accounting. So that could literally be in other areas of your finances too. Like especially if you’re partnered up like having that weekly, biweekly, monthly, whatever it is, like money date with your partner or if you’re not partnered up by yourself, that’s okay to do like a general check-in. Um, I would also say figuring out, like you were kind of just saying like what is sort of easy and natural for you within the financial realm and what is gonna require you to set aside some time and put some more intention behind it. Like I’ll say for example, at this point in my life, it’s like very habitual for me to like check in on my expenses, my spending, you know, keep on track, keep on top of those transactions. What’s been new for me recently is having to do a little bit more hands-on management of my investments because I opened a new type of account and I don’t quite know everything about that company and how their website works and what I can automate. So I need to, I literally did this today I need to like set aside some time just like do some actions and also learn how to automate those things in the future. And it’s not something that’s top of mind, so I have to like put it in my schedule just to make sure it gets done because I can’t leave those things, you know, un uh, untended to forever and ever.

Kate (15:43): Yes, of course. Absolutely. I, I feel that, and that also makes me think of something else that, you know, for me when I think of like ways that things may align with our approach to productivity and finances and personal finances is like outsourcing and having folks who can help you or automation programs that can help with that to sort of lighten that load. Of course, like different types of outsourcing are going to cost different things and they’re an investment. But that’s something certainly in terms of like, what can you streamline or like, are there folks you can go to who can provide you with information that will ultimately save you time and not needing to self-teach how to do it? That also comes to my mind and that’s something I’ve done before working with, you know, hiring professionals to help me learn how to do x, y or Z or like having an accountant do my taxes instead of even trying to do it myself. Right. Like, so that comes to mind in terms of outsourcing, which I imagine is super like also happens in financial world too.

Emily (16:43): Absolutely. And I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m not gonna remember all of these, uh, points to this like acronym, but with any sort of task that comes across your plate, you can either like do it, delegate it, discard it, like there, you know, a limited set of things that can happen like for something that comes to you and within your finances. Like you gotta be careful because there are certain things that you should not delegate. Like you do really need to be intimately connected in some areas of your finances, but others, like you said, preparing the tax return, you can totally delegate that to someone else. You should take a look at it once it’s done, make sure it seems okay. But the actual process is totally fine to delegate and on a budget, you know, that’s using free tax software, that’s using very low cost tax software that can be totally adequate as long as you’re, you know, comfortable with the interface and so forth. Um, I, a lot of people feel differently about this, but I just mentioned, you know, tracking finances, tracking transactions, I like to do that manually, but I also have a tool that helps me with it. So like I use Empower, which is kinda like a dashboard. It like brings all my uh, different accounts together into one place. So I have one place that I log in and sort of check on everything and some people might even be more hands off and they don’t need to even log in that often or check that often. I like to be a little more hands on, but that’s kind of like a personal choice as to how, what’s gonna work best for you in terms of ultimately making decisions about your money. ’cause that’s what it kind of comes back to is what decisions are you gonna make and are you prepared with the information that you need to make those decisions well and that amount of information’s gonna be different for different people.

Kate (18:07): Yes, absolutely. I mean I still, I, I use QuickBooks but I also have my like tried and true Excel file that I’ve been using for like eight years that I update individually. Right. So I think there’s like different ways that I can do that in like a low tech way and also like a high tech like legit way. Um, and that works well for me ’cause I get to feel like I have, you know, I’m really engaged and I know what, what my numbers are and things like that.

Emily (18:33): Yeah, and this also goes back to our previous point about like that finding that rhythm of if you are gonna do something like manual tracking, manual updates like once a week, once a month, whatever it is, like schedule it and, and find the best time because you know, maybe late at night <laugh>, like when you’re sleep deprived, it’s not the best time to be looking uh, at your accounts. Like you need to find for your, uh, chronotype or whatnot when you’re most, um, open <laugh> to looking your finances and making decisions about that. So what is another idea that you had about some crossover here?

Kate (19:01): Another idea I had about this was thinking of like trending in the right direction. So for productivity, often I hear folks who are like, I’m going to write my dissertation every day. I’m going to go to the gym three times every week, or I’m going to do like X all the time. And then when they don’t do that, there’s this feeling of failure, this feeling of like, oh, why should I even try? I am not never going to get where I want to get. So in a a productivity lens, we would think of like, you’re trending in the direction that you would want to go. So even if you don’t do something every day, you’re still, you know, developing a habit, you’re still chipping away at it. Some is better than none. And that’s something that I like certainly see being a successful way that folks can reframe their approach to their productivity and, you know, feel better about making progress even if it’s not some idealized magical way that you know, where every, all the planets align and you always have energy and nothing goes wrong, right? So trending in a the right direction you want to go is something that I think probably has a crossover as well with finances.

Emily (20:07): Oh my goodness, very, very good point. Um, sort of like what you’re just saying, like I think the phrase I’ve heard from other people in the space is like, start where you are. Okay, let’s take a, let’s assess where we are and take a small step as you were just saying, in the direction that you wanna go. But if you are gonna like do a whole schedule makeover or a whole budget makeover and think that you’re gonna be an entirely different person being able to adhere to this new plan, uh, it’s just not realistic. And especially if that causes you to feel discouraged and go back to you know, where you started from or even like regress from that point, like that is not helpful <laugh>. So let’s take like one thing at a time and move in the right direction Absolutely. Within your finances that could be like, oh my gosh, you know, you realize you’re, you’re kind of overspending and maybe you’re going into debt or you’d, you’d rather save more or whatever and you know you’re gonna be frugal in every single area of your life you possibly can. And um, it’s just, it’s just not realistic. It’s not gonna happen. So let’s, like this was actually some fun experiments I did back when I was blogging. Let’s take like one frugal tip at a time, try it out, uh, I would say maybe for 30 days and just see what kind of time and energy did you put into it? What kind of money was actually saved for, or you know, reduction in spending from it and weigh those against each other. Was it worth it or not? And then I like that to find period of time because you have that natural reevaluation point and you can really say, okay, I’m, I’m not just gonna automatically continue this forever, I’m gonna make sure that it’s actually working in my life. And then you can eventually layer on the ones that work for you, but give it time and give it space, you know, for it to become a habit. I’ll actually tell you within, ’cause you mentioned, you know, going to the gym three times a week, uh, I am gonna the gym three times a week and I was not doing that a year ago when I joined this gym and I, I gave myself some space, like I gave myself some time to figure out if it was the right place for me, if I really enjoyed it, how could I fit into my schedule. And gradually over the course of the year, I’ve gotten up to that frequency and that might seem like a long time, but uh, I’m really happy with it now and I’m okay that it took that time because I, I got to the point that I wanted to be with it, you know?

Kate (22:09): Yes. That’s a congratulations. That’s amazing. And it like if it took a year, that’s fine. That’s like the perfect amount of time for it. That makes me think too as well, like something for productivity and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts of how this works in the finance world, but like something like developing a new habit, going to the gym or let’s say for productivity like writing or you know, like applying for jobs or whatever it might be, setting up the external accountability, whether that’s through coworking or body doubling. So I was thinking like, oh maybe you have a gym buddy or you tell your partner, I’m gonna go to the gym. So then your partner can say, Hey did you go, that’s like such a helpful thing in productivity worlds so you can have more, um, more potential to show up and do the thing because you have that external accountability. Is that something, are there like ways that like in the finance world there’s like coworking or like scheduled things that cut- with others, like I’m curious to hear what you think.

Emily (23:04): I would love it if that were a thing and I’m not very connected to social media right now so it’s possible there are things like that going on that I’m not aware of. But no, I do think there’s, you know, that taboo around talking around about finances is in play here. And so if people find accountability partners in this area, I’m suspecting they’re gonna be like their spouse, their sibling, their best friend. Like it’s gonna be someone very close or like a mentor, you know, someone very close to them already. I don’t necessarily think this is something you’re gonna find a casual acquaintance who’s willing to do this with you <laugh>.

Kate (23:37): Yeah.

Emily (23:37): But I’m just thinking that there are probably some like sub areas like doing things that help with your finances, but the focus isn’t on finances, it’s on the doing of the other thing. So I’m thinking of meal prep for example. That is something that you could probably find a community that’s supporting you in that maybe do even doing some body doubling, you know, body doubling like Sunday prep day or whatever they call it. Um, and that’s gonna have a major impact on your finances, but you don’t have to approach it with like, yeah, that’s the reason I’m doing this and let’s talk about how much money we’re, you know, not spending on other things. It’s more just like let’s do this action together and whatever positive effects it has are sort of outside of that. So I could definitely see that happening. But yeah, it’s probably, if you’re talking money, it’s probably gonna be with someone really, really close to you.

Kate (24:18): Yeah, And I probably with productivity as well, like there are like platforms where you could like do coworking with like a random person who you’re paired with like from all over the world, right? But also often things happen with folks who you know, um, but yeah. Okay, cool. Body doubling effective for productivity can be effective in ways for finance as well.

Emily (24:39): Yeah, if you can find the right pers-, the right person, yeah. To be part- with it.

Commercial

Emily (24:45): 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.

Spoon Theory and Personal Finances

Kate (25:38): Now one thing, another thing that I thought of is, I mentioned personal resources earlier. So we were thinking around like everyone has their individual experience with their time and their energy and their focus. I’m also really invested in my approach to productivity working with folks who have chronic health conditions or chronic illness, chronic fatigue, long covid. And I’m thinking there around this term called spoon theory, which for folks who haven’t heard of this, um, this was coined by Christine Miserandino and the concept is that you, if you do live with a chronic health condition, you have a limited amount of energy to expend each day. So she used the metaphor of spoons saying like, you only have a certain amount of spoons that you can exchange. She said that ’cause she was out to dinner with her friend. So spoons were readily available, but really with spoon theory we’re thinking that you have a limited amount of energy units you can expend. It changes day to day. If you’re having a chronic health flare, you might have three spoons and you have to decide does one go towards a shower, one goes towards work and one goes towards, I don’t know, like warming up leftovers to eat right? And like some days you might have 10 and the concept here is that it’s a way to um, communicate with others like others who are close to you around your ability to do certain things, but also as a way that you can think of what is truly going to be accessible to you. So in in the productivity realm, I often encourage folks to think about like what is the type of day that you are having? Is this a very high focus day or is this a day where you have a migraine? How might you approach your product different productivity differently to make it more accessible? So you will like first and foremost take care of yourself but also you know, progress on your productivity in a way that feels actionable and achievable. So spoon theory can be a helpful thing when we’re thinking around what do I act-? What can I actually do for my to-do list today that’s going to be accessible and help me to move forward on my goals. So I’m curious like what comes to your mind when you think around like having to adjust your approach to, you know, your finances dependent on like if you, your health is shifting or you have much lower energy or you’re sick or things like that.

Emily (27:50): Hmm. Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say decide what are the real essentials within your financial life and what is an extra. So like I mentioned earlier, I love manual tracking. That’s an extra, I don’t need to do that at this point. It’s something I enjoy doing to a degree, but it’s not absolutely something that needs to happen. Now do my credit cards need to get paid off every month? Yeah. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that needs to happen <laugh>. So, but what I would do is I would automate as much as possible something like a credit card payment. It’s on auto. I’m never gonna forget or fail to follow through on that. So like I think it would be about like setting yourself up for those periods that you know are coming when you’re going to have fewer spoons and understanding like what is absolute baseline things that have to happen and automating as many of those things as possible and also having a really realistic sense of how much time or energy certain actions take. So like, um, I actually had a period in my life it was around, um, two years ago when I couldn’t do my manual tracking for a long period of time. I had, it was a sandwich generation situation that ultimately resulted in a death in the family and it was a difficult time and that was something that I could drop. Okay. I’d love to hear a little bit more about like your personal finance, your personal story and how finishing graduate school and becoming a business owner has actually affected your personal finances.

The Impact of Grad School and Business Ownership on Finances

Kate (29:17): Yes, totally. So I feel like I am lucky. Like I, my dad before he retired, um, ran his own autobody mechanic shop. So he was self-employed and I had this model of someone being successfully self-employed from when I was literally born. So that, like when I started a business, I of course didn’t know like everything that I would need to do do, but I at least knew like, yes, this is an accessible thing, this is something I could do and I can try. And I felt really proud to do that. And I also, when I started my business, reached out to folks, like hired a business coach to be like, what do I need to, what do I even need to know how to do? Do I need a business bank account? I really didn’t have the literacy for what you needed to do. So I learned like what’s a sole proprietor? Do I want an LLC? Just really was a beginner to learn that sort of stuff. Um, and I also was a little stressed to immediately, you know, like after my six month grace period to go into paying student loans and I have a lot of student loans. I did undergrad and then I did 10 years of graduate school, two master’s and a PhD. So that was also a real shift for me after having been in grad school for forever and not having had to pay student loans. Um, which I’ll say something about later when I share a tip. But, so my experience in my business was I need to learn like what are the things I need to know how to do to start a business and how do I navigate shifting to pay student loans? And um, also, you know, how do I sort of grow my income when I’m a bit of a newbie? So I, the first couple of years of my business I had part-time jobs as well. I worked as a tutor, I worked as a writing consultant and I did these things so that I could earn income while I was developing my books. So my personal finance experience when I started a business was that when I had been setting things up intentionally just to launch the business and to have the website and things like that, um, I still needed to be procuring that external income for a few years before I could shift to just fully earning income from my business. So that was a shift in my experience with personal finance as well. And I think from the outside perhaps people didn’t know that from the outside folks might just be like, wow, Kate’s thriving as a coach and realistically like I was working part-time as well to sustain that. So that certainly affected my personal finances behind the scene while I was developed starting to develop my business.

Emily (31:52): Yeah, I’m so glad you share that. That’s an excellent example of the runway that I was talking about earlier. So you gave yourself runway before launching the business if it, you know, in in the new way of like taking in revenue and so forth. And then you also had runway after that of like, okay, revenue’s coming up over here, but while it’s coming up I still need <laugh> some income coming in from another source. And I did the exact same thing. I worked like freelance, you know, part-time for several years after I started my business and eventually I got to drop it and that’s great. But like I was glad that it was, you know, there for me when I needed it. How have you been doing with um, I guess, you know, keeping your health in mind and of course the subject matter that you like coach in, but how do you apply that to yourself in your business?

Building a Business and Prioritizing Well-Being

Kate (32:34): Certainly. I was actually just talking to my own business coach the other day about this and we were talking about the metaphor of like, I’m sure you’ve heard of this, everyone’s heard of this, but like you have your jar with the largest rocks in the bottom and you put those in first so the pebbles can fall in the sand. And like thinking around like it’s really important for me to like approach my business where the first thing I’m thinking about is my own health. So when am I available to book coaching client calls? Like how many calls can I book in a day? What days do I need to have off in case I have to have doctor’s appointments? And really approaching my business with that stuff has to be the, that has to happen first or else I’m not going to be able to show up for my business. Um, so that’s something I certainly think about and I limit the amount of clients that I can work with and I also regularly schedule to take time off. Like if I know that there’s gonna be a busy season and I’m gonna need long weekends or need to take, you know, a whole week off or something like that, scheduling that in which I’m able to do because I have a service-based, you know, business. Um, so I’m certainly approaching it in that way. And also, you know, many of my clients, almost all of my clients have some sort of similar experience. Either they’re working parents or they’re working full-time and going to grad school or they also have a chronic health condition. So I set up my business in a way that, you know, can make things accessible to them as well. Like, so I’m thinking about that in terms of my availability.

Emily (34:02): I think one of the issues I know that I dealt with, I’ve talked with other academic business owners about this, um, that I dealt with, especially like in the first few years of my business coming out of graduate school was, um, setting pricing. Because you might think if you’ve never run your own business that you can bill 40 hours a week and just whatever you wanna make, divide it by 40 and 50 weeks a year and whatever it is and that’s gonna be your rate and it’s just so not that way <laugh>. Um, and so if you’re willing to, would you like to talk a little bit about like how you make that balance with your time but also make those pricing decisions, you know, again, keeping your clients in mind?

Kate (34:41): Yes, certainly. I’m, so this is like an excellent question. I’m so glad you asked this. I love talking about this stuff. So as a business owner, like once I started my business, I like it totally changed my mind in terms of like the folks that I work with where I’m like, oh, these people are really only making like 60% of what I, they’re billing me ’cause they have taxes, they have overhead, right? So that’s a little side note where I’m like often thinking about that now. So when I approach coaching, right, like I’m thinking of my pricing not just for the hour that or the two hours or whatever the thing is, but also like what is the extra labor that goes into this? So I think something I do that not all coaches do is I create really elaborate detailed notes for my clients and that’s something that’s going to take me up to an hour to do. So when I’m like scheduling out my day and making myself available to clients, I also have to know like that’s an extra hour where I’m gonna be looking at a screen and how many hours a day can I truly look at a screen? And so I’m thinking about like what I would call this like behind the scenes labor or this invisible labor that we might not think about when we are doing something like just scheduling for a one hour call. So I’m thinking about that in terms of how I approach my prices. Certainly that’s one thing that comes to my mind. I’m curious if there, there are other things that come to your mind as well.

Emily (35:59): Well I was just thinking that it probably was a great thing to have your parent as a business owner and being able to see how much work goes into running business aside from just the time you put into specifically the service that you’re performing if it’s a service-based business. Um, do you have any comments around like specifically like graduate students or people coming out of academia or generally being anchored at like sort of undervaluing themselves in this thing, in this, you know, um, consideration of how much to charge because it’s something that can come up for everyone at some point. Like whatever type of job you take, whether it’s in academia or later, like you’re gonna have to value your time and yourself and your skills in some manner and like, it’s just so difficult when you’ve been underpaid for a decade or more. <laugh>.

Charging For Your Services as a Business Owner

Kate (36:46): Oh my gosh, certainly. And I also think this as well, like when folks are starting a business, I know at least for me, when I started my business, my coaching calls were like $30 to $60 sliding scale an hour, right? And they’ve certainly increased since then over the years. So that’s something I think as well that like when folks are starting out, if the it is like, yes, you wanna get testimonials or you wanna build your books or you wanna get recc- yeah the recommendations or network like having a lower rate, you know, but then shifting to raise that and like I’ve raised my rates every year that I’ve been in my business. Um, certainly thinking about that and valuing that labor. And also I know for me, like there are truly, and this is one of the reasons I started a business, I cannot have a 40 hour a week full-time job because of my chronic health conditions. So I truly only have x number of hours a week that I can put towards my business and I need to make x amount of money in order to thrive. So like that affects my what I’m charging and like that affects my rates as well. Um, and that’s also something I think about in terms of sliding scale as well, like offering sliding scale. When I do that, knowing for me like what, like how many sliding scale spots I might have available or like what is the lower level that I can do in a way that’s not going to overtax me as well. Um, so that is something that I have in mind and like I encourage folks to, to think about as well, like how they can meet their enough number, how they can meet a number that can help them to thrive.

Emily (38:16): Yeah, it’s interesting like, because both of us are service-based business owners and we’re also have to apply our area of practice to our own lives and businesses like we think about a little bit differently. ’cause I don’t think as much about how many hours per week I work, I think more about how much money am I making <laugh>, you know, because, and I have that like bias, right? Because of my subject matter. So that’s really interesting. Let’s take a minute here and just have you tell the listeners a little bit more about your, your business, what you actually do with clients and how they can get in touch with you.

Contact Dr. Kate Henry, Productivity Coach

Kate (38:47): Yeah, of course. So I’m a productivity coach, I work with academics and my main offering is a six month productivity coaching offer. I call it, um, success and accountability coaching. And I actually created it because it’s what I wanted when I was doing my dissertation. I couldn’t find anyone doing it. And it’s a really hands-on coaching approach where we meet every other week, I take really detailed coaching session notes and share them with you and then we’re in conversation between calls. So it really helps to break down the goals, the projects that you’re working on. And I work with folks on dissertations promotion and tenure materials, book proposals, book manuscripts, things like that. So I only work with a, as this fits with our conversation today, I can only work with a small handful of folks at a time because of the time and energy and effort I put into that. So you can learn more about success and accountability coaching on my website, it’s katehenry.com, easy to remember. And I also have a free newsletter and a ton of free resources because I spent those two years blocking and I have that at katehenry.substack.com.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (39:54): Well that is so great to hear and it’s just lovely to hear your approach to everything. Let’s end with the question that I ask all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it can be something that we touched on early in the interview, I think you gave us a teaser or it can be something completely new.

Kate (40:12): Yes. So I’m thinking with this, like what I wish I had known when I was starting my PhD. That’s what I, I thought of with this was like, I wish that- I did not have financial literacy and I did not understand how things worked. I did not understand credit cards, I did not understand student loans. I did not understand how to buy a car. And um, I really do like now me wishes that back then me had like even gone to this, the financial aid office on campus and been like, can you under-, can you explain to me how student loans work? Like I wish I had known that I could have paid my student loan interest while I was still in graduate school and like things that would have really shifted that experience for me that I’m dealing with now with paying off loans. Um, so that’s something that comes to my mind is really just like, how can you access other folks who can help to inform you of things that will set you up for success, whether that is with loans or whether that’s with retirement or interest or how those things work. Um, and yeah, I feel like that all-, that’s what I did when I finished my PhD and I started my business as well, reaching out to folks and sort of, um, going towards experts who could help me to streamline and teach me things that I didn’t know on my own.

Emily (41:26): And this is not a criticism of you because I think this is absolutely natural what you did, but when you were in graduate school, those on campus resources were free for you. They were included in the whole package that was going on. And if you had asked those questions to financial aid or financial wellness or whatever it’s called on your campus, maybe you could have taken some different steps and maybe you could have, you know, learned more along the way and not have to have paid the higher price that comes, you know, in your thirties, et cetera. Uh, once you have the, the big job and, and so forth for, you know, similar kinds of advice or education or content, right? So like it’s like with compound interest, like that early investment just keeps compounding and growing and uh, if you don’t do it early, then you gotta do more later, right? So I am really glad you shared that. Again, not a criticism because I think it’s pretty much what everybody does <laugh>, but, uh, I will say that I have had the opportunity to meet many, many people who work, um, in financial aid offices in similar kinds of roles where they help students with their finances and they are lovely. Everyone I’ve met has been wonderful and approachable and just eager, eager, eager to help. Um, even in areas that seem a little bit off of maybe what they normally do. So like you could walk into financial aid and ask a question that’s not precisely about financial aid and they, they’ll either help you or they’ll point you in a direction where you can get help from someone else. Um, and you know, the more you ask those questions, the more these people on campuses realize that graduate students and postdocs need this kind of support as well, which of course is the drum that I’ve been banging for many years now. So it’s all helpful to our community just to get more attention on making those early educational investments that turn into financial investments, um, you know, early, early on in our career. So thank you so much for, um, that advice and it’s been wonderful to speak with you and I’m really looking forward to listeners getting to hear this.

Kate (43:16): Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on.

Outtro

Emily (43:31): 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.