Invest In You

how-practicing-gratitude-has-given-me-patience-about-money

In this post, I explain how making a daily list of things I’m thankful for has given me a welcome infusion of patience about my financial goals. I encourage everyone to try it.

The winter holidays are coming! You guys, I get so excited about the cooking, the baking, and most of all, the time I’ll get to spend with my family. I can’t wait! Except this is a post about patience, so I guess I’ll have to. Ugh! Come now, holidays!

Tis the Season for Gratitude

In November, many personal finance bloggers will offer great advice about how to cut out some of the costs of hosting parties and entertaining families. There will also be many blog posts about how to stop sabotaging your finances with your hyper-consumerist holiday spending.

Today I want to talk about a different holiday theme: being thankful. This post is about how purposefully practicing daily gratitude has given me the ability to be more patient about my financial goals. And if you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that patience isn’t really a personal virtue for me.

Gratitude as a Practice

So let’s stop dallying and get to the story of how I started practicing gratitude. Because yes, it’s something I’ve started practicing. I spend time on it. On purpose. The majority of us are not natural wellsprings of gratitude. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be grateful. We just need to be deliberate and purposeful about it. Here’s how I got started.

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frugal-phd-conquering-your-financial-fear-of-missing-out

This post is about conquering your financial FOSO, or Fear of Starting Out. Many of us struggle to start out or make progress on our financial goals because we feel like we’re already behind, or do not trust that we will be able to make the progress we need to accomplish our goals. Here, I discuss ideas for setting a realistic financial goal. Then I offer six ideas for freeing up the money you need to succeed. Stop letting fear drive your financial behavior and let’s get started!

If you’re like most Americans, you know you should have more money in savings to cover emergencies. You should also increase the amount of money you’re putting away for retirement. And you will. Next month. Probably. Or next year. But yeah, you totally will. Either after you get that raise or when your partner starts their new job. Sometime anyway, you’ll definitely get to it.

Does this sound like you? I promise, I’m not judging. Saving is hard! I’ve been there. In some ways I’m still there. But I’m working on it and I’m starting to see results from my efforts. And you can too. Let’s start by admitting though that even starting to work on your finances is actually really hard for many of us. Building smart habits around saving and investing is not easy. If it were, most of us would already be doing it.

One of the issues is that a lot of us experience what I call Financial FOSO, or Fear of Starting Out. When you read online about people with a whole year of expenses saved up, it’s hard to feel good about the itty bitty amount you have in your own emergency fund. Additionally, when you hear a co-worker (who might be even younger than you) talk about how they have a million dollars in their retirement account and will soon be able to retire early, it’s natural to react by feeling bad about what’s in your own 401(k) or IRA. When other people are just so far ahead, it’s easy to conclude, what’s the point? It’s impossible for me to get to where that person is anyway. So why even try?

Here’s why.

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investing-in-experiences-is-better-than-buying-stuff

In this post, I talk about why investing in experiences is better than buying stuff. I also share some of the rules I practice to avoid overloading my home with clothes and gadgets I don’t use.

Experiences Make Us Happy.  Stuff Doesn’t.

Research has consistently shown that we’re happier when we put our dollars toward having amazing life experiences as opposed to using them to accumulate more stuff. For some people, this can seem counter-intuitive. Why spend your money on an experience that doesn’t leave you with a tangible thing you can keep? It turns out that we’re fueled by happy memories. Rarely does someone get to the end of their life with regrets about the time they spent with their family and friends, or the incredible adventures had as they traveled and explored the world. You will, however, find people with regrets about the big boat they bought for their cabin, which they only made time to drive to twice last summer.

It has often been the tendency of American families to buy a bigger home once they start to have children. Those larger houses have more rooms, which many people then fill with toys, gadgets, and other things that bring temporary joy, but soon get demoted to the basement storage room. Many people even pay for extra space in storage units over a period of years, just to store things that they are likely never to use again.

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find-a-fulfilling-non-academic-side-hustle

In this last post in the Make Money in Grad School series, I outline a different kind of option for making money in grad school—doing something totally and completely unrelated to grad school. Something that enriches your life and makes you happy.

So far in the series we’ve covered several approaches for funding yourself through grad school:

1.) Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants
2.) Research and Teaching Assistant Positions
3.) Applying Your Academic Skills to Tutoring and Freelancing

Each of these can be great for leveraging your existing abilities and past accomplishments, as well as building experience and investing in new skills. And there are many professional and financial benefits to using a combination of these approaches. Don’t let fear of failure or rejection prevent you from pursuing a great opportunity. Whether it’s going for a fellowship to fund your dream research project or applying for a teaching assistant position that will give you experience with a class you’d have a blast with, you have little to lose and a lot to gain by pursuing new opportunities.

Before I wrap up this series, there’s one more option for making money in grad school, and I think it’s important enough to warrant its own post.

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invest-in-your-financial-life-even-in-graduate-school

This post describes my belief that all young people—even graduate students and early career academics—can put smart financial strategies into place to improve their well-being now and in the future.

As a graduate student, you commit to making a sustained, but smart investment in your future well-being. At the very least, it probably started out that way, right? Whether you have set off in pursuit of one of those treasured tenure lines in the ivory tower, are seeking a lucrative job in industry, or simply want to pursue a deep passion for a particular topic, you likely committed to graduate school with an investment mindset. The time you are taking to get your degree(s) is a worthwhile investment and the future payoffs will be great enough to justify putting off your financial planning.

But as the months drag on and your pockets remain habitually empty, you may start to experience doubts. Your friends might be purchasing houses for themselves or as investment properties. Your younger siblings and relatives are investing in their 401(k)s. And you feel increasingly frustrated by your paltry stipend and lean budget.

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