Managing your personal finances doesn’t have to be confusing or complex. It first starts with understanding your money beliefs, observing your spending habits, and tracking what’s important to you.

In this post, I’ll share my personal finance journey during my 9-5 job, transitioning my finances to grad school, and creating my new financial plan for grad school.

Common Cents

Growing up, my family taught me how to live frugally and save money. Throughout my life, whenever I got money, it went straight into my piggy bank or my savings account. I didn’t know what else to do with it.

I knew investing existed, but it sounded risky. Put my money somewhere that I couldn’t see it and somehow make MORE back? Sounded suspicious. Mutual fund, 401K, expense ratio? All these terms confused and intimidated me. I never bothered to learn it because it seemed too daunting.

When I got my first job, I realized that it was time to get my head out of the sand. I was making a salary now, and I wanted to start building financial stability for my future self. To do so, I needed to change my perspective and my habits.

My Personal Finance Journey

I started learning more about personal finance from The Financial Diet, Broke Millennial, and other online content. Eventually, I found Ramit Sethi’s book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. These and other resources motivated me to finally understand the basics of personal finance and change my habits.

Emergency fund? I accumulated enough to cover 6 months of expenses.

Mutual fund, 401K, expense ratio? I set up my accounts at work to automate my saving and investing for my future. Inspired by Tori Dunlap from Her First 100K, I set a financial goal and surpassed it way before I expected. (I was fortunate to have a full-time job with benefits, which made all of this easier for me).

Eventually I realized that there was a limit to how much I could budget and save and still enjoy my life, especially once I started grad school. That’s when I decided to start my side hustle with my web design business.

Since starting my side hustle in Sept 2019, I’ve created over $15K in revenue.  That’s why it’s important for us to find ways to earn more money using whatever skills and experience we already have. (BTW – I help scientists and academics build their websites and become more confident in sharing their work online, including their non-bench science (scicomm, science policy/advocacy, STEM mentoring, etc) and entrepreneurial work. Learn more at brittanytrinh.com/services)

I felt like I had a pretty good handle on my personal finances, until recently. In July 2021, I quit my job so I could move across the country and pursue a chemistry PhD at UW-Madison.

Less Money, More Problems

Between July 2021-mid September 2021, I didn’t have any income, so I was living off a fund set aside for the PhD transition. I noticed that my spending habits were still the same as when I had my 9-5 job. This was not going to work for my new salary as a grad student.

Grad students do not get paid much – I’m paid about 28K per year at UW-Madison, which is considered quite good, given the cost of living here. This is a little less than half of what I was paid in my first job. Although I don’t regret making this decision, the salary cut required me to start being more aware of my spending habits.

At first, I wanted to create a budget right away, but I noticed that I was struggling with the financial transition. Instead of forcing myself to restrict so quickly, I decided to give myself from August 2021-December 2021 to observe my spending habits and naturally ease into my new salary before creating a budget and a plan.

Tracking

Many personal finance enthusiasts advocate for tracking your finances, sometimes in super fine details. I thought it was the right thing to do, so I followed their lead.

In 2020, I created a super complex dashboard with many sheets, graphs, and pivot tables, incorporating multiple concepts from what I learned about personal finance. Even though it had all the features, I DREADED using it. I made it so detailed that adding in every expense was so tedious – I tracked categories, subcategory, payment type, etc.

Over time, I got really obsessed with numbers and what it meant about me and my success and worth. When I realized what was happening, I stopped using it entirely – totally defeating the point of a personal finance tracker.

In 2021, I didn’t use ANY finance tracker because I hated what happened to me in 2020 when I did. (Note: I’m fortunate that I lived at home from Nov 2020-Jul 2021 and had a full-time job, so that helped me be OK without a budget/tracking finances).

But now, I’m ready to get a clearer view of my personal finances so that I can get back to making my money work for me.

The Personal Finance Tracker

Recently I made a new personal finance tracker so I could track and visualize numbers that matter to me. This time though, I would do it with the numbers that I actually CARE about. I stopped feeling pressured to incorporate everything that PF experts said.

In my new personal finance tracker, I focused on where I was spending the most money and how over or under budget I was per month overall. I chose these methods because I want to make sure I’m allocating my expenses properly. For example, I want to avoid spending too much buying food by going out. I also wanted to make sure that my budget OVERALL matches how I ACTUALLY spend, without getting too in the weeds of over/under per category. (I found that looking at budget per category made me feel bad about myself.)

With this tracker, I want to see if I can start investing an additional $200/month or more, either through budgeting my stipend better AND earning more through my business. In Sethi’s IWT, $200/month over 5 years can become $15K. Start investing for your future, even if it’s $10/week (this can become $3K in 5 years! See pg. 103 of Sethi’s IWT 2nd ed.)

I want to share this 2022 Personal Finance Tracker with other PhD students, so that we can get a clearer picture of their finances in 2022! You can view it and download it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b_XAdnwx-s6TSHcBwiNazlUYE4mQAcKFQ-aIY3nEIW4/view

There’s a video tutorial within the spreadsheet to show you how to use it.

Another tip: Set up text notifications for when you purchase something over $0.01. Then you will know when you did or did not purchase something. If you did not, then you can call to dispute the charge. (I used to manually input these until my friends shared the CSV tip with me!)

If you’re still hesitant about getting organized about your personal finances, here are some things that may help you:

1. Understand your personal money beliefs. Look up “invisible money scripts” from Ramit Sethi to see some of what your current money beliefs are.
2. Observe your spending for the next month. How did it feel when you spent on certain areas of your life?
3. Think about what you value and how you can use your money towards what you value (also look into Ramit Sethi’s “your rich life” concept).

I hope that you enjoyed reading about my personal finance journey. If you’d like to chat more about what I’ve shared, feel free to send me an email at hello@brittanytrinh.com or send me a message on Twitter and Instagram @brttnytrnh.