Leslie:
Today, I am absolutely 100 percent thrilled to welcome Dr. Inga Timmerman onto Your Words Unleashed podcast. So let me tell you a bit about her. Inga Timmerman, PhD, CFP, is an assistant professor of finance and a certified financial planner. She offers financial planning and investment management services specifically tailored for mid-career academics navigating job changes or transitioning out of academia.
Inga bridges both academia and practice. She’s a former president of the Academy of Financial Services and currently serves on the boards of the Journals of Financial Services Review and Financial Planning Review. As a practitioner, she focuses on comprehensive financial planning for her fellow academics.
So, first I want to address the elephant in the room, which is, why have I invited a financial planner onto a podcast that is mostly focused on writing? The answer is that I believe that academics need more financial literacy and often don’t know where to go for solid advice. And I’ve seen a lot of people take a really head-in-the-sand approach to topics like money and loans and income and retirement savings.
And all of these topics are so hard to talk about when jobs are scarce and those scarce jobs typically don’t pay very well too. So Inga actually understands the world of higher education from the inside. So I wanted her to be the first guest of 2025 to help give some insight into what academics should pay attention to when it comes to their finances.
Let me tell you how Inga and I know each other. She has actually been my own personal financial planner since I think 2014. So about a decade. And when we first met, I was 35, earning not a great wage, and in a very high cost-of-living area. I had no savings and I had no retirement funds. And I was scared to death that I had sacrificed my financial well-being for my career.
And after reviewing my details, Inga told me that even if I never received a pay raise, I would still have enough to retire on comfortably. And that took an indescribably huge amount of weight off my shoulders. And since that time, Inga has guided me through the financial implications of getting married, joining a two-income household, having a baby, buying a house, and she helped me transition out of the academy to run my own business.
So, I can’t recommend her enough, and I know she has a lot to share, so let’s get to it. Welcome, Inga!
Inga:
Hi, Leslie.
Leslie:
First, I always like to ask, can you tell listeners a bit about your path through academia, and then also how you decided to become a financial planner?
Inga:
I was not planning to be a professor. That was very far from my path. I graduated my undergrad many years ago. Got a job in finance, was working 80 hours a week, just like any other finance person does, and thought “this is life.” And then out of the blue, the university where I did my undergrad called me and asked me, “Would you like to teach some classes for us?” I’m like, “Sure, I’ll try it out.”
Why not? And they actually hired me as a 25-year-old full-time instructor. I think it was just a combination of being desperate for somebody really fast. They knew me, I had an MBA at the time already, so let’s get it done. And I tried it for two years and I loved it. I loved being a professor teaching. It was a small liberal arts college, so it was very teaching-focused.
I did not know anything about research at the time. Did it for about two years and realized if I’m going to be serious about this, I need to have a PhD. So at 27, I left my two jobs– I was working both as a professor and in finance– and went to get my PhD. None of this was in financial planning, it was hardcore mathematical finance.
And then I graduated and I realized that here I’m 30 years old, I can do all kinds of fancy finance, and my husband, who had nothing to do with finance, had to explain to me how to get my credit score about seven, eight years ago. So I was like, you know, “we’re all finance professors, but we don’t know much about personal finance.”
So I started looking into it more and wanted to make a career out of it. I got my first job very targeted in academia that combined personal finance and research. I was hired at Oregon State to run their CFP program. As a result of it, I got my own CFP. After about two years in that job, I realized this is not the type of job I want to have in academia.
I want to go to a school that emphasizes less research and more teaching. Plus, I didn’t like to live in Oregon either. So I got myself another job at Cal State Northridge, where it was a perfect combination of CFP and academic. This was also around the time I decided to open my own practice.
I tried to get hired. I went to a few different places to get hired and they’re like, “nah, you should open your own practice.” Like, okay. So I decided to do it and since I’ve been doing this for about 10 years now. And you and I met pretty early on in my practice.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think probably so because we actually, I remember we met in person at a coffee shop in Santa Monica. Yeah, and you actually helped me through my whole thing in person. I’m like, that was a different time.
Inga:
And I was there for seven years, in the Cal State System, was there for seven years as an assistant professor. I became an associate professor and now a chair, and then I realized how much I don’t want to live in Los Angeles.
My family was all in Florida, so during COVID, I decided to move to Florida. I commuted to LA for another year or two. That got old pretty fast. And when a job opened up in Jacksonville, Florida, I took it even though it meant giving up tenure, an endowed professor started from scratch like a brand new assistant professor on the tenure track.
Leslie:
So, how do you balance the two jobs that you have? You also have kids, so how do you kind of figure out what time goes to teaching and research, what time goes to your business, and that sort of thing?
Inga:
I’m a big fan of productivity. I’m a big fan of Cal Newport time blocking. So my life is driven by the calendar. And I really hope nothing happens to mess up my calendar. Like nobody gets sick and has to stay home. But it happens all the time. You have to adjust. I work very much in seasons, so I don’t teach much. I only teach two classes per semester and most of it is online or hybrid. So I have very limited engagement with students in person, which gives me more flexibility when I do both jobs.
When we have final exams, I don’t do client work for about two weeks. When I don’t teach in the summer, I do a lot of client work. So it’s very much up and down depending on how the academic schedule drives the year.
On the weekly schedule though, I have very much determined time blocks, what’s for what. So in the morning, you’ll find me from 9 to 11 doing research. From 12 to 4, I do client work. Tuesday afternoons, I teach. And this is pretty much the schedule I follow every semester, except when we have some changes in the teaching schedule. But overall, this is how I do it. Very time-determined blocks for specific activities.
Leslie:
Okay. So, I really want to explore― I mean, you’ve done so much probably work with the psychology of academics around finances and money, right? And this topic of money mindset comes up a lot, but not a lot with academics.
So first of all, can you talk about what a money mindset is and what do you think are the most common ways that academics tend to think about money?
Inga:
There are a few different mindsets. You can also think about them as money scripts. It’s a different concept, but very similar to it. And it’s a psychology of money. It’s how we view money. Some of it comes from our childhoods, how we were raised, how we saw money. Others come from our current job. But it is the way to look at money and deal with money.
And there are a few different ones, about five major mindsets.
Like, for example, scarcity mindset, where you always feel like there’s not enough money to go around. You don’t have enough no matter how much money you make. The hurrying, frugality-driven type of decisions. Some academics live here. I’ve seen quite a few of them living in this mentality, especially because they don’t see where the next raise is going to come from. You get two potential raises and then what? That’s it. So how am I going to live and retire on, let’s say, 85, 000 a year? So I’ve seen quite a lot of that.
You also have the fear of money mindset that I see as well. And this comes like “money is evil. Academia is good. I’m here to make the world a better place. And money is irrelevant.” And a lot of what I do with academics is try to convince them that this is just a paycheck. And although this work really matters, it should not be driving your decisions to the detriment of your wellbeing – financial and personal wellbeing.
And I think the best mindset you can get to, I’ll skip a few that I don’t see much, but the best one I see is a balanced one. It’s called a balanced mindset, and it’s a healthy relationship with money. You see it as a tool to make your life better. You don’t let money drive your decisions, but at the same time, you don’t see money as evil. And I really hope to get as many people as possible to this healthy mindset. It’s okay to make more money. Making money is good for you. It’s a tool.
Leslie:
I mean, I feel like I’ve experienced all of those in my career as an academic. And I think that the scarcity mindset for me and for many people really sets in in grad school, where you have no money. What you do have is time. Right? And so I remember getting a stipend for like $8,000 at the beginning of a semester. And it’s like, make this stretch for the next four and a half months.
Inga:
And it is like all at once?
Leslie:
All lump sum! But talk about scarcity. Cause by the end of that time, you’re like, how am I going to survive? What are actually some strategies used to help people move out of those more negative mindsets and towards a more balanced one?
Inga:
Starting from conversations that – they’re not about money, because if you bring money upfront, a lot of people get intimidated and they’re just not used to talking about it. I forget that sometimes because I’m just so used to always talking about money and going to random people and asking them how much money they make and solving their problems, even though they don’t need me to solve them, that I forget how guarded people are about their money.
And clients always remind me, like, “I don’t know how much my friends make.” Like, “you never ask them?” Like, “no.” So, starting these conversations and normalizing, ‘”t’s okay to talk about money” is very important. Not judging people is also very important. We all make different amounts of money. We all spend it on different things and that is totally okay.
Starting from money is neutral. Tell me about money and being curious is a really good place to just start the conversation. Another thing that helps―and I cannot do much about it, but I can encourage people to do something about it― is to try to get friends who are not like you. If all you see is academics and that’s all the mindset you get, it is very hard to go beyond that.
So hanging out with people who are very different from you is a really good way to see money in a different way as well.
Leslie:
I think that’s so smart. You know, it sounds like a lot of it is coaching actually, because one of the first principles of coaching is curiosity. Right? So curiosity opens the door to being able to see new possibilities.
And money is just one of those topics that I think can shut people down. Because like you said, there are so many messages we’ve gotten from childhood, growing up, from grad school, from academia. And so this idea that academics can kind of pit money or capitalism versus the academy, intellectual work, research, teaching, helping, when it’s a binary like that, how do you help shift them out of that?
Inga:
I don’t do much of it because I feel like most of the clients who get to me already got to a point where they realize money is important and that is why they call me. However, I have seen a few situations, a few clients that took us quite a long time to get from exactly what you’re describing.
How do we shift that mentality? And we always start with, tell me about what your perfect life would be. Maybe not perfect – a good life would be. Let’s see where we are right now and how we can get there. I don’t do life coaching. I focus on the money aspect, but it’s all linked. You cannot talk about your life without talking about your money.
So starting with, “tell me what would you like to be, what happiness would be and let’s see how we get you there” inadvertently leads to, “okay, I am okay talking about money. I’m okay making more money.” And people start slowly getting away from this idea that if we make money, we’re kind of betraying the academy.
We are really not. I tell people all the time, I got into this profession because being a finance professor is the best pay for the amount of work I do. I’m here for the money. And really, people get shocked, like, “you’re not here for research or for students?” Of course, I am. This is part of my job. I enjoy it. But at the end of the day, you are here to get a paycheck and you need to make sure you get paid for your work because you are providing a lot of worth in what you do. So if you don’t charge for it, there will be plenty of people who just take it away from you for free. You need to figure out how to start charging for it.
And eventually, it becomes, “okay, I am worth this much. I need to get paid for it. And if I don’t, I either find something else to do.” Like consulting, coaching on the side, or I get out of academia altogether.
Leslie:
Yeah. And I think your openness towards earning more goes up over time as well. So if I think about myself as a coach, when I first started, I was charging $20, $30 a session. Because I was like, why would anyone hire me? I would do this for free. I’m getting trained. I don’t have the qualifications yet. All the way to now where it’s much, much, much more than that.
And it keeps going up as I get more clients, but also the confidence and sort of like, this is what I’m bringing to the table, that I believe that what I have to offer is worth it, is not as much of a possibility in academia.
Inga:
And you had the expertise as well. I mean, in the end, we can all figure it out. I could go and figure out how to publish a paper, for example, but it’ll take so much of my time and effort that I’d much rather go to somebody who can do this in two, three hours and tell me where I need to go. You have years of building that expertise. What you’re getting paid for is all these years of making somebody else’s life easier.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that is a great way of thinking about it. And you too, right? Yeah.
Inga:
Yes, yeah, you can go and Google all your financial problems. You’ll get a thousand answers. It’s like what I really am here for is to tell you what to do.
Leslie:
I love it. And I love being told what to do by folks like financial planners because you got to take the options away when it’s a field that you are not familiar with and potentially not comfortable in.
Inga:
And in financial planning, it’s hard because there is not one correct answer. There are some really dumb things people do, and we just need to protect us from doing those.
But outside of that, there is no one correct path of which decision is going to make you better off. And somebody can evaluate all these options and maybe give you two or three options, tell you “if you do this, this is what’s going to happen.” But in the end, you choose one thing and you go with it and just make your life a little bit better today than it was yesterday.
Leslie:
Yeah, absolutely. Like 5 percent more.
So I’m curious what you think academics need to consider at different points in their careers when it comes to their finances. And you can choose to talk about whatever groups you want, but like, what are the things we should be paying attention to at different stages?
Inga:
Maybe I’ll break it down by where you are, like, brand new professors, mid-career, towards the end, because what you focus on should be quite different.
So, for somebody who is either in grad school about to finish or new PhDs, it’s important to consider that first job. And assuming that you could get a job in the field, that there are jobs, it’s okay to take the better job to give yourself options later on even though you don’t think this is going to be a forever job.
I’m not a big fan of tenure. I’m very vocal about it because people get stuck in this tenure idea. It is just a job, so you can always move to the next job, but if you go into a job thinking “I’ll be here forever,” you may be cutting of options down the road. My first job I took, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be here forever, but taking this higher-up job would give me options later on in life.
So if you’re a brand new PhD, it’s okay to take a job that gives you flexibility later in life than just taking the one job you think is for right now and forever, because most likely you’re going to move.
Leslie:
But how do people assess that?
Inga:
Get some help. Get a coach. Get somebody else who’s done this before because it’s really hard for you to see it.
It’s also there are pressures. Your advisor is most likely going to push for the best academic job for you. You may get lucky in an advisor who is more open-minded to what makes you happy, but most advisors care about where you’re going to get placed, even though this is not the job that you want to take.
So getting exposure from people who may not even be in your field, or who can be in your field but are further along in life and have done this kind of transition, and now like, in 10 years, it really doesn’t matter. But if you go to this job, you could move later on to a better location, to a better life, to a different type of post.
So considering that first job, not just getting a job, but what are all your options is very important. It would be fantastic if you knew early on what you’re after and go for that. For example, if you know that you do not need to be at an R1, this is not the type of life you want to live, it’s okay to say, “I don’t want to go there.”
I want to go to a different type of school. Regardless of who tells you what and that you can do better, your better is whatever you want your life to be. If you don’t know what your life is about or you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s much harder to make those decisions.
So if you have the resources, or at least some kind of help to get a coach early on, a life coach, more than a career coach to figure out what you want, it’s really worth the money because then you’ll have a better path long term.
And then just in the idea of getting a job, it’s hard and in some fields is very, very hard to get a job. So positioning yourself as the best person at this top-tier school is really better off financially, or it’s easier for you to get a job than just being average at a better place. Let me try to explain this better. Being an average student from an A school may still get you less positions and jobs than being a star student from a B school. Because then the type of things you do while you’re on your PhD leads you to better options overall.
I mean, at this point, you’re probably in a program. It’s not like you can choose, but if you’re really deciding, even before you get your PhD, it’s important to realize what kind of grad school do I want to be in.
And then the same goes for the first assistant professor job. And then once you get the job and you go from making $20,000 in the stipend to actually making money, don’t adjust your lifestyle overnight. If you can live for another year like you’re poor and just accumulate some savings, pay off the credit cards, do whatever you need to get yourself positioned for longer success, it is worth it.
And then you can start spending that money as well. Getting a financial plan at this pivotal place where you go from having a stipend or being a postdoc to an actual job is very important because you will have an increase in pay. And if you don’t figure out what to do with this pay, it will disappear. And you don’t want to do that.
As you’re moving on from mid-career, at this point, you really have to ask yourself, “is this job for me?” The best you have to offer are your skills. Like, this is it. Your potential to earn income is how you’re going to be better off in life. You can save a little bit, you can optimize your investments, but your biggest resource is how much money you can actually produce with the skills you got.
So you look at your life at, let’s say, 35 or 40 and ask yourself, “is this what I want to do?” And if not, let’s change. Can I go for a better life somewhere else? Better life may mean a much cheaper place to live in than I was before. Professionally, may not make a huge difference, you’ll be happy at either, but if you can go from Los Angeles to, I don’t know, making up some city in Alabama that’s much cheaper, your life may be much better. So try to optimize for living as you get older.
And then saving for retirement between 30 and 50 is so important. Once you go to 50, you got to catch up a lot. So if you’re 40 and you’re saving for retirement then optimizing retirement is what I would focus on.
And finally, as you’re getting closer to retirement, at this point is about, okay, do I have the correct types of accounts? How am I going to draw this money out once I retire? It’s more about how to optimize what you got instead of saving.
Leslie:
Yeah. So I would guess that a lot of people who are coming to you are like 30s, 40s, 50s?
Inga:
Probably 40s, 50s at this point, yeah.
Leslie:
Okay. And so if people are starting to save money for retirement, are there specific things that you advise or is it very just case by case?
Inga:
It’s case by case, but there are still some rules to guide you. When you retire, you want to make sure you have three different types of money. And that’s pre-tax, like your 403B types account at work, or traditional IRAs. You have some ROTH money, whether that’s coming from a ROTH IRA or from your work plan, and you want to have some brokerage taxable money.
So what’s important is setting yourself up on all those three things instead of just saving everything in your pre-tax 403B. And then when you retire, you have a whole pot of money that’s pre-tax and now taxes are your problem. So trying to save in all different three buckets is very important as you’re starting to save.
Now how much goes into each of them will depend on your income, what’s happening, what else you have pension-wise, but trying to get all three is a pretty good rule of thumb for you to follow.
Leslie:
Okay, that’s super useful. And I know you’ve told me that a lot of folks are coming to you now who are looking to transition out of academia or they’re considering transitioning out.
So for people who are preparing for a career change, what should they be thinking about or what steps should they be taking when it comes to their finances?
Inga:
Please don’t leave until you have a plan! That is the most important thing because I’ve seen people who are just fed up with their jobs and they hate their dean and they’re like, “life will be better if I just leave.” And that is not necessarily true. It is very, very stressful to try to make a living, especially when you’re used to a very consistent paycheck. So before you leave, you really need to have a plan of where is this money going to come from, and more importantly, how much you need. You’d be surprised how many people have no idea what they need to earn per month to be able to pay their bills.
So, the first step would be to figure out what are your expenses you absolutely have to cover if you leave your job. This will depend on do you have a spouse who is working? Do you have to replace your own income? But figure out what is that number that I have to make from my new business, my new job to be able to quit academia, because that will dictate what you do next.
If you come up with $12,000 and you have no good idea how that’s going to happen, it is probably a very bad idea to quit right now. If your spouse takes care of all the bills and you can afford to have the room to open a business and not make any income and still be okay, then it’s a very different conversation. But don’t get stressed out because you now have no money to pay bills. It is worse than whatever dean you have right now.
Then once you have that base, I know what I need. Let’s make a plan of how I’m going to make that happen. Whether that is saving up front, maybe you stay in your job for another year, maybe you stay, take a sabbatical, maybe you figure out how to just drag this job on for a little bit longer just to accumulate savings, and more importantly, if you can run this side thing along with your job, assuming you’re going to your own business or doing something that’s not just a different W2 job, it will give you a very good idea if you can actually succeed at it.
If you do it for 12 months and you still have no clients, probably not a good idea to quit. Okay, we need another plan for it. If you’ve done it for six months like you did, and you’re like, “okay, I can make a living out of this. This is really good, like I enjoy it,” then it’s totally okay to say, “I’m done with academia.”
Leslie:
But I think you’ll also recall that I took years to leave.
Inga:
Yeah, and that’s the best way to do it. Like, you’re comfortable, you know how to do it.
Leslie:
I wanted to leave. But there was a lot of fear around leaving. And even once I had created a business within the safety of a tenured position, which is such a privileged place to be that I know most people don’t have, but I did.
And I was still not ready to go. So I think that’s what I try to tell people too is “You may never feel 100 percent ready to leave also.” You may have the best-laid plans. Because I think I had a really good plan, right? I thought a lot about it and I pressure-tested every aspect of it and I still felt like, I don’t know where, like, I gotta take a leap.
There’s a risk involved. So how do you help people address the risk?
Inga:
Doing it for a while like you did is a really good thing. Because they actually trust themselves. I know I can do it. I’ve done it for a while. So it’s totally okay to go. Some people are very risk-averse. They’re like, “what if I don’t succeed?” And then we have to have a plan C. So if this idea of yours doesn’t succeed, what is the exit strategy? Let’s say you do it for a year or two and you’re like, “no, this is not for me.” You may even be successful, but you hate it. And you want to get out. What happens next? Two options you have here. Either you go back into academia and then how easy is it going for you to go there?
That’s one option. Or you go and get another job doing something else somewhere else. And that second part is very important and very different depending on what kind of academic you are right now. The advice I would give to somebody who has a PhD in economics or finance is very different from somebody who has a theory PhD.
Because if you have an economic PhD, I can find you a job tomorrow, doing something completely unrelated for some company. If you have something very narrow that does not really translate into money making, we need to figure out before you actually quit, if you can get back in, or you can find another job.
And if the answer is probably not, maybe we will not be quitting. Maybe really reconsider that.
Leslie:
So other than not having a plan, are there any other common mistakes you feel like people could avoid if they thought things through? When they quit or like when they leave? Yeah, or things just to keep in mind.
Inga:
Think about what is going to happen to all your retirement plans. So what I’ve seen people do is quit like one year before they vest. Don’t do that. Oh, yeah. Okay, like if your vesting schedule is 10 years or 9 years in, please stay for an extra year and put up with it. Because even though it’s not that much money in retirement, it’s an option to get back in. So if you, let’s say, in 20 years you decide to join the system again, you’re looking at a very different type of retirement. So know where you stand. If you’re vested and you can leave and just leave your money behind.
Once you leave academia, consolidate all your resources into one place. I’ve had a recent client, a brand new client, and she told me, “I know I have a 403B in my previous job. I have no idea where it is, how to find it, or how much it is.” It was like $250,000 by the time I found it. She’s like, “I just don’t know.” So make sure when you leave jobs, if you transition, you consolidate all this. Whether you move it to your new work plan, or if you don’t have a work plan, move it to a traditional Roth IRA, whatever you got.
Just keep track of these types of things. And then we were talking about expenses, but having a really solid budget, even before you leave, just in regular life, is so important, even if you don’t have to track your expenses, because it’s really hard to save, to do better in life, to allocate your resources efficiently if you don’t have a budget.
Leslie:
Right, right. And I would also add for like me moving into self-employment, even though I earn, I would say, far more than I did in the academy, I don’t have the benefits that came from that.
Inga:
That’s a great point. Like where’s the health insurance going to come from? Have you thought through that? Can you get on your spouse’s plan? If not, are you going to be able to pay for it? If you have some medical issues. Are you willing to pay $2,000 a month to be able to get a plan on the exchange? So thinking for the benefits is important, whether it’s medical or retirement.
Leslie:
Yeah, absolutely. So this has given, hopefully, people a lot to chew on and really think about, and I’m sure that at least some of them are going to want to talk to you.
So how can listeners connect with you?
Inga:
The best place is to go to my website. It’s attainablewealthfp.com (for financial planning). And you can schedule a call, you can look at some resources. That’s the best place to connect with me and find all my information. You can also email me at inga@nullattainablewealthfp.com.
In addition to this, I’m currently putting together a podcast that’s going to be called “Academics and Their Money.” That’s probably going to go live end of January, beginning of February, and it’s going to be focused only on money as it relates to academics or transitioning academics. So hopefully we’ll be able to talk much more about these types of topics, and I can convince every academic that making money is a good thing.
Leslie:
It’s freedom. It just opens things up for you. So thank you, Inga, again, for number one, for being my financial planner and helping me so much in my life, number two, giving your time and insights and wisdom,and experience to my listeners. Also, just to mention, Inga is also on LinkedIn, so you can connect with her there, and again, her website is attainablewealthfp.com.
Set up a free consult with her. I’m not exaggerating when I say that working with her is one of the very best decisions that I have ever made. So thanks again, Inga.
Inga:
Thank you.
