In this post, I write about items and services that I avoided spending money on during my PhD. Of course, sometimes I had to spend money on some of these things! But I wanted to put together a post about some small and big changes that I made once I started my PhD to save money where I could. I have continued with almost all these habits following my PhD and continue to save money using these strategies today. So if you are interested in saving some money, regardless of your stage in your PhD programme or if you are even a student at all, read on!
This post is much longer than the average post that you will find on this blog because I wanted to give the most comprehensive overview possible of this part of my life. For this reason, feel free to skim or do keyword searches to learn about the savings that might be most relevant to you.
Before we begin, a quick but important note: As is the case with all my content that covers topics related to money, this post does not constitute professional financial advice. I do not have any formal qualifications in finance or tax or money advising; this content is based on my own experiences and aims to inspire and empower readers to do as much research as they can about their region and/or country to improve their own financial situation. Always seek advice from licensed professionals for matters related to tax, investing, new financial products, etc.
Many PhD students have a limited budget for daily essentials and discretionary spending. Even if the amount of money that you have at your disposal each month seems low, here are some things that I did to make my money go much further. As far as possible, I’ve tried to provide accurate figures to show just how much making a few changes saved me during the course of my PhD. This is a long post so feel free to bookmark it so that you can come back to it at a later date, or to read it in smaller chunks!
Daily Items
When you are balancing several commitments, it can be easy to turn to products and services that are convenient, such as meal delivering services, grabbing coffee and water on the go, and shopping in your nearest store for essentials or joining your nearest gym.
However, if you have a degree of flexibility in your schedule and enough time to integrate some small daily and weekly habits into your routine, you can save a lot of money on your daily spends.
In this section, I calculate how much I saved by consciously avoiding spending money on certain things during my PhD. You can take these behaviours, or any other behaviours that you may like to change and work out how much you might be able to save with reference to your own situation and habits.
I’ve given examples from both my time in the US and the time I spent working on my PhD remotely in the UK where applicable, and have drawn each example from a time where there were no pandemic-related restrictions on movement or in-person activities (I was a PhD student from 2017 to 2023 so had almost two years of adapting my work patterns to changing COVID-19 restrictions in the UK, which affected my spending further).
Water
Buying a disposable bottle of water every day or every week can certainly add up. A couple of weeks after I arrived in Michigan in 2017, I bought a 500ml water bottle from Swell for $29.99. Once I had this bottle, I rarely, if ever, needed to buy a disposable bottle on campus or elsewhere. U-M had plenty of water fountains and refilling stations, so I never found it difficult to top up my bottle if I needed to.
Had I bought a bottle of water on campus every day, I would have paid between $1.50 an $3.50 ($7.50-$17.50 per week), depending on whether I bought it from a vending machine, café, store, or restaurant.
Assuming that I spent 30 full weeks on campus per year over the Fall and Winter semesters, I would have spent between $225 and $525 per academic year, just on water! Even if I had only bought one bottle per week and used it a few times before discarding it, I still would have spent between $45 and $105!
I continued to use the same bottle in the UK, although even if I had had to buy a new one when I moved back in 2020, it still would have saved me a lot of money in the long run. Although I spent a lot of time working from home as I wrote my dissertation, I would still spend between three and four days per week outside the house over the final year of my PhD, to use libraries, get a change of scenery, and for leisure.
Let’s work on the basis of 100 days spent outside the house over the span of my two final semesters. I spent most of my time in Central London, so let’s base this on prices at the places where I went to most frequently in London: the British Library, supermarkets, and coffee shops. In supermarkets, individual bottles can cost as little as 80p, with this price rising to £3 in some coffee shops. If I had bought one per day, I could have spent between £80 and £300. Had I bought one per week, £24 to £90 would have been the price range I would have been working with.
As it happens, I can count on one hand the time that I ended up buying a plastic bottle of water during my PhD, so buying my Swell bottle right at the start definitely paid off!
Tea
I love tea and usually consume up to five cups per day, including English Breakfast Tea and several varieties of herbal tea. However, I also resent paying many times the true cost of a tea bag, hot water, cup, and milk, for the pleasure of a good cup of tea.
I will preface this section by saying that if I choose to sit and work in a coffee shop, which usually happens once or twice a week, I buy a hand-crafted drink such as a latte or hot chocolate. If you only drink tea or another kind of drink and want to spend a couple of hours working in a café, you are also paying for your use of the space and amenities such as Wi-Fi and toilets, so the money is covering more than just the simple cup of tea. The same goes if you’re meeting a friend to socialise. When it’s just me needing my tea fix on the go, though, I really resent paying over the odds for a tea bag and boiling water, so I try to avoid it at all costs, unless I’m travelling or delayed or cold or feel unwell while out and have no other option.
In Ann Arbor, I found that tea prices were between $1.75 and $3.25. If we assume that I’m going to have my morning and evening tea at home and buy three during my working day, that would total between $26.25 and $48.75 per week, or a massive $787.50 to $1,462.50 per academic year.
I worked out that each tea bag I bought from the grocery store average out to cost me $0.05 and the amount of milk I would add averaged to about $0.10, if we consider that I don’t add milk to herbal tea. Sometimes I would make tea into a mug in my department to drink in my office and I also bought a 330ml Hydroflask for $35 to transport tea that I made at home. Making five cups of tea each day myself cost just $0.75 per day for the ingredients and therefore $112.50 for all working days of the semesters.
Even accounting for the initial outlay for the flask, this was a big saving, especially when we remember that my calculation for buying tea out was based on three cups during the working day and not my daily total of five.
Having dropped my Hydroflask while standing in a queue once I was back in London, breaking the lid, I bought a Stanley Flask for £35, including delivery. Once again, this purchase paid dividends: although I would only have one tea break per day while out in the city, the cost of making the tea at home came to just £0.10 for the teabag and milk, compared to an average of £2.20 in chain coffee shops and slightly more in independent cafes. I was therefore saving over £2 per day, a saving of at least £200 over my final year.
Snacks with inflated prices
Snacks are another category where expenses can add up quickly. I would usually need a snack break mid-afternoon, so I learnt to prepare for this in advance by packing items from home to avoid expensive pastries, fruit pots, biscuits, and snack bars.
As a rough guide, I found that if I bought multipacks of snack bars such as Cliff Bars and Trek Bars, I would usually get each bar for a third of the cost of what it would be in a café or a vending machine or as an individual bar in checkout queue in a pharmacy or supermarket in both the US and the UK.
I could buy a whole packet of biscuits for between $2 and $4, and £0.40 and £1.80 respectively, so I would do that and pack two or three biscuits in my bag before I left the house, instead of buying a sweet snack from a café or vending machine for more than the price of an entire packet of biscuits.
In terms of pastries and other snacks that are more difficult to buy in bulk and that are usually best if bought fresh, I learnt to treat myself to these occasionally when I would have time to sit and enjoy them or to mark certain occasions, to make sure that I got my money’s worth and could properly enjoy them.
Disposable period products
When I arrived in Michigan, I was already a committed Mooncup user, so that was what I used for the first three years of my PhD. I never bought any period products in the US, although a quick glance at Walgreens tells me that a pack of pads can range from $5 up to $17, and a pack of tampons from $7 to $13. Using reusable protection therefore saved me between $10 and $30 per month.
Back in the UK, I invested in various pairs of period pants to use alongside my Mooncup. I spent about £100 on five different pairs in 2020 and the same again in 2023 as my initial pairs began to wear out. Looking at Superdrug’s website, I would have spent between £4 and £7 per month on average for the products that meet my needs, therefore between £144 and £252 over a three-year-period. Being able to make this initial outlay therefore saved me a lot of money in the long run!
Bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel
When I discovered gruum in 2021, my only regret was that I had not known about it before. Now, I spend £8 twice a year on a shampoo bar, £8 once a year on a conditioner bar, and £35 every eight months on 1kg of body bar offcuts; I can get all my shower products for a year for just £41.50 and an added bonus is that they are all zero-waste products. They are also much easier to transport when you travel because they are not subject to airport liquid restrictions and will not explode randomly in your bag, soaking your clothes and other items.
Before, I would use a bottle of shampoo every couple of months at £6 a time, conditioner every four months at the same price, and shower gel every month at £4. In total, I was spending around £102 a year, so for me, making the switch to gruum was worth it; I;ve saved over £200 since I started!
Keep in mind that I have sensitive skin and often struggle to find reasonably priced products in shops that don’t cause me to itch to the point of bleeding, therefore before I started using gruum, I had to be extra careful about what I bought. If you do not have these restrictions, you may find cheaper alternatives in stores and online; find what works best for you and your budget.
Multiple subscriptions
It can be so easy to rack up multiple subscriptions to apps and online services these days, especially if you forget to cancel free trials you might have signed up for. £8 or $10 a month might not seem like a lot, but it quickly adds up if you purchase multiple subscriptions.
There’s nothing wrong with having subscriptions if you can afford them and actually use them. For example, Amazon Prime can be a very good deal if you use it to watch multiple films and TV shows, get regular deliveries, and use some of the other services included in the package. However, if you only use something occasionally, it can often work out cheaper to cancel it and just pay for a service each time you need it.
While I was in Michigan, I had a subscription to the app HeadSpace. I cancelled it once I returned to the UK because I was no longer using it.
In the UK, I limited myself to one or two subscriptions at a time and made sure I was using the services. If I wasn’t, I cancelled it. For example, once I stopped enjoying my recipe boxes from Simply Cook, I got a Prime Subscription, which I found myself using multiple times a week. Taking this approach meant that I avoided multiple small deductions from my bank account each month for things that I may not have been using.
You should also check if your university or other programmes you are part of offer access to subscription services such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office, or even to things like meditation apps and streaming services. You never know until you look, and having these services covered for you could save you a lot of money.
Peak travel prices and full-price tickets (when possible and when it made sense)
Sometimes, you have to be in a certain place at a certain time, whether that’s for teaching, the start of the semester, a family commitment, a long-awaited appointment, or any other reasons. In those cases, you may not have a lot of say over how and when you travel, so you might have to buy expensive bus passes, flights, train tickets, petrol…
Transport costs can be a big part of your budget so it’s always worth looking into how much you are spending and if there are ways you can make it cheaper. When I was in Michigan, I spent very little on local transport, other than the occasional Uber or Lyft, because all of the campus and city buses are free of charge for University of Michigan students and staff. If your university offers free or subsidised transport options, take them up where necessary.
Note: I don’t have a driving licence therefore owning or renting a car wasn’t an option for me; I don’t have any advice about how to reduce transport costs in those areas. Car costs can form a large part of a US-based student’s monthly budget so if you need or want to own a car during your time in graduate school, be sure to research the potential costs of doing so and investigate how to make it cheaper. If, like me, you can’t or don’t want to drive, try to choose a university in a location where there is public transport, and you can walk to some or most places.
Back in the UK, and as things opened up again following the pandemic lockdowns, I had commuting costs to access libraries and other resources in Central London from my hometown. Fortunately, I didn’t need to arrive in the city centre at a set time, so I took advantage of off-peak and super-off-peak fares, depending on my schedule that day.
As a general rule, with the train operator Southeastern, if a train arrives in London before a certain time, you need to buy a peak ticket; if it arrives within the next time window, off-peak; and anything after that or on the weekend will be super off-peak. In my case, buying an off-peak return trip from my hometown to the city centre set me back roughly £12; if I went for a super-off-peak morning train, it was only £10. The peak tickets were £20, so I would only buy those if I had a super early appointment or meeting that I couldn’t rearrange. I typically did this journey twice a week for two full calendar years when we factor in the lockdowns and weeks where I was away or stayed at home because of seasonal closures or I didn’t need any in-person resources or services, so by buying off-peak tickets instead of peak, I saved around £1,664 in total.
I should also note that throughout this time, I used a 26-30 Railcard, which grants holders one third off train tickets within the UK. Had I not had this card, I would have spent approximately an extra £1,248 on the same journeys. If you are not eligible for the 16-25 or 26-30 railcard due to your age, students of any age can nevertheless apply for the 16-25 railcard, so all full-time students in the UK should be able to access these discounts for just £30 for a whole year.
The train from my hometown does not terminate at a station that is next to the British Library and the other spaces I used regularly. Where possible, I walked to these places instead of taking the tube. It was a great opportunity to incorporate walking and fresh air into my daily routine without even trying, and to stop for coffee and people watch on the way. It typically took me about half an hour to get from the station to wherever I needed to go, which, once you factor in walking down to the platform, waiting, and walking out of the station at the other end, is not actually much longer than even some of the shorter tube journeys. With my railcard linked to my Oyster, an off-peak tube journey costs £1.65, so by only taking the tube a couple of times per month instead of multiple times per day, I saved between £19.80 and £39.60 per month, depending on my schedule, therefore £237.60 to £475.20 over the two-year period.
Workouts I could do at home
One thing I did spend money on during my PhD were circus classes and, while I was in Michigan, an unlimited yoga pass. I’m planning a future post about working out what you need and want to prioritise during your PhD from a financial perspective, in which I’ll talk more about this decision to spend money regularly on fairly expensive exercise classes.
However, I also wanted to do other types of workouts, but I didn’t necessarily want to spend a lot of money on them or have time to go out to class in a physical location every time I exercised. Additionally, during the lockdowns, it wasn’t possible to attend in-person classes; that was when I became used to completing online workouts in my own space.
Finding various YouTube videos that worked well for my experience level and needs meant that when in-person classes started again, I continued to do my stretching, cardio, and dance workouts from home, whereas before, I might have only done these activities in a studio class.
If I calculate what I would have paid had I done the equivalent classes at a studio local to me over the final two years of my PhD, I would easily have spent around £30 per week, therefore around £2,880 over two years if we account for four weeks of closures and missed classes per year.
Buying lunch out regularly
As an undergraduate, I had become used to eating most of my meals in a dining hall with multiple other students three times a day. I actually had access to free lunches and dinners during the second and third year of my PhD, which I’ll get to in a later blog post, so this subsection focuses on my first year in Michigan and my final two years in the UK, during which I was responsible for my own food and there weren’t any lockdown restrictions governing how much time I could spend outside the house.
Eating out on or near campus in Ann Arbor could easily run to at least $10, before you even think about the tax and the tip. I therefore bought lunch out only once per week.
I would usually get a free meal at an event or talk on campus at least once a week and on the other days, I would bring my own food from home. I was lucky that my department had a space with a microwave and a fridge, so I would often heat up portions of stew, curry, or pasta that I had made at home to sustain me throughout the day.
I designed my grocery lists with a $2.50 per portion budget in mind; for example, if I was making six portions of spaghetti Bolognese, the total cost for the ingredients would be around $15.
With this in mind, I would spend a maximum of $7.50 per week for three lunches which, combined with a free lunch, meant that I saved at least $32.50 per week by restricting myself to only buying lunch out once. Over the 30 weeks of the academic year, my savings totalled approximately $975.
Back in the UK, I got out of the habit of eating out during the lockdowns. Once things started to open up again, I started to seriously think about life beyond my PhD and preparing financially. Realising that spending £6-£12 per day on lunch out might be fun but also an ineffective use of money when I wasn’t meeting people to eat with most days or spending that much time enjoying the food, I started buying Sainsbury’s meal deals and making use of the Costa machine to get my morning latte, saving the main and snack for lunch.
Spending £3.50 twice a week felt like a good return on investment because I would enjoy the latte during my morning coffee break and not have to worry about making food before I left home to take the train. And £7 per week, or £728 over two whole years, seemed like a much better deal than between £1,248 and £2,496 plus extra for lattes.
Academic Costs
This section details some of the main costs during a PhD that are more closely related to academic and professional development. I talk about how I reduced and, in some cases, eliminated my spending in these areas.
Books and Articles
I was fortunate to have access to fantastic physical and online resources from Michigan which meant that I rarely needed to buy books or access to articles for seminars, other than primary texts which can often be bought cheaply, new or used. For all of my graduate seminars, the articles were made available on Canvas well in advance of us needing to read them.
Michigan also offered some great services such as Interlibrary Loan, where you could request a book from another university library in the US if Michigan did not have it, and the possibility of requesting a scanned portion of a book or an article if you were unable to access the resource in person. I spent less than $100 on books and resources for studying over my whole degree; definitely see what your university offers, both on campus and in terms of services that allow you to access additional materials, before spending money.
Writing my dissertation away from campus in the UK was also a very frugal experience where books were concerned. I had access to the British Library whenever it was open so I made use of my time there to access all the books and resources that I needed. I didn’t spend any money at all on books during my dissertation stage.
As much tech as I wanted
I love trying new tech products. However, I used the same laptop that I had had since the start of my MA in 2016 until it stopped working properly in 2021. When I bought my replacement laptop, I had been saving a small amount of money each month towards it for a couple of years in anticipation of the large one-off payment. I may have wanted a Macbook Pro or to upgrade my laptop more regularly, but my Macbook Air reliably did and does everything I need to at this stage in my professional and personal life and throughout my PhD, so there was no need to pay 20-50% more for a laptop or to buy one more frequently, even if I might have wanted to.
The same went and goes for phones. I took an unlocked iPhone 6 to the US in 2017, using a basic prepaid SIM from T-Mobile throughout my time there, paying around $12 a month for a small number of calls and texts and purchasing data packs only when I needed them, for example if I was travelling or the WiFi in our house broke. This saved me at least $50 per month, if not more, for the average phone contract.
In the UK, I continued to use the iPhone 6 with a pay-as-you-go SIM from EE, adding just £10 per month for enough calls, texts, and data to meet my needs. I simply transferred this SIM to an iPhone 8 when using the 6 was no longer tenable.
Again, I might want a fancier phone with a higher spec, but I also don’t want to pay at least £50 per month for a contract, or to worry about dropping the latest model and spending a lot on repairs or replacement.
In total, then, I saved at least $1,140 while in the US and £1,680 in the UK just on phone costs.
I also quite like the idea of an iPad, multiple external monitors, all the software packages and subscriptions I could want, and more, but I don’t want to spend a lot of money on these things at this life stage when I have multiple workarounds, nor would I want to receive them as gifts in place of other things that I need and want.
Of course, some disciplines and classes may require you to have access to certain kinds of tech that you do not already have. If that’s the case, look for grants and scholarships to help you cover these costs, or other affordable ways of accessing what you need such as loaner schemes on campus.
And if tech is your main interest or priority, there is nothing wrong with spending more on it than in other areas of your life, provided that you can afford it.
Attending multiple conferences
I only attended two in-person conferences during my PhD and a handful of virtual events. In each case, I applied for grants and fellowships to cover the full cost of my attendance and in one case, I volunteered as an event assistant, which covered the cost of my registration fee and food. I didn’t attend any other conferences for various reasons, therefore I spent a grand total of $0 and £0 on conference attendance during my PhD.
You should attend conferences if you want to and if they will be useful for your career trajectory. However, weigh up the cost benefit before doing so…I could easily have spent a lot more by attending more conferences, or spending money differently at the ones I did end up going to.
If you are interested in pursuing an academic career, conferences can be a great way to meet new people and to get some feedback on your ideas. Presenting at a conference can also help you to develop your public speaking skills and to explain your research to a wider audience. And of course, travelling to a new city or even country can be a fun way to connect with friends and colleagues and an opportunity to visit new places.
However, conference attendance can quickly become very expensive, once you factor in registration fees, membership fees, accommodation, food, travel, insurance, and incidental costs. Many institutions, departments, and organisations offer grants or scholarships to PhD students to help them attend conferences. If such opportunities are available to you and you want to travel, take them! However, be aware that there may be additional costs and that the award might not cover everything.
In short, you need to invest in your professional development during your PhD, but there are many ways of doing so and, as my conference experience shows, it quite literally pays to work out which ones are worth spending time and money on for you personally.
Expensive transatlantic flights
In this final, shorter section, I address one of the major costs of being an international student: travelling to and from the country where you are completing your PhD and the country/countries that you consider home.
As an international student, I had the unenviable expense of long-haul flights home once or twice per year for three years… Fortunately, there is a direct flight operated by Delta Airlines between London Heathrow and Detroit Metropolitan, the closest international airport to the University of Michigan. Taking this flight at the end of the summer to arrive in Michigan for the Fall semester and departing mid-May following the Winter Semester unfortunately meant that I was flying at times when prices were higher than average. My initial return trip for my first year came in at about $900/£750, which wasn’t bad, considering that I stayed in the US for nine months without a break for the cost of this ticket.
However, in spite of the length of my stay in Michigan making this airfare seem worthwhile, from then on, I always looked to save money where possible. Barring the extremely expensive flight I took back to the UK at the last minute in March 2020, which thankfully got reimbursed by the University’s emergency funding opportunities, I ended up never paying more than $500 or £350 for each of the four roundtrip flights between London and Detroit that I booked across my second and third years. Through a combination of flying with Air Canada via Toronto and taking the occasional Delta flight subsidised heavily by the SkyMiles I had accumulated, I managed to consistently reduce the price I was paying for my flights. I saved around $1,800 or £1,400 over the second and third years of my programme just by spending a bit of time on SkyScanner and maximising my reward points.
I was fortunate to be flying out of and into a large airport with many options (Heathrow) and to have a passport that allowed me to make the most of longer layovers in countries such as Canada without applying for a visa. Not everyone has access to a local airport with multiple longhaul flight options on the routes that they need to take to get to their PhD programme, or other conditions that allow them to book flights at less expensive times with stopovers. However, it’s still worth shopping around and seeing if you can find cheaper routes and times that work with your schedule, or building up SkyMiles or whatever loyalty points your chosen airline uses to get some discounts.
Final thoughts
Well, there you have it! If I add up the savings that I discuss in this article and if we keep in mind that I didn’t cover every year of my PhD in every category nor provide calculations under each subheading because in some cases, it wasn’t possible, I find the results amazing.
In this post, I have spoken about $6,662.50* of total savings on expenses that I made while in the US and a further £9,320 on expenses in the UK!
*I included the savings on flights only once in the USD amount, in spite of giving the amounts in both currencies in the original paragraph.
Bearing in mind that these calculations are not exhaustive and I also regularly save additional money on these same products and services as well as in other areas of my life with cash back, discounts, sign up offers, vouchers, and more, I am still super pleased with all the savings that I’ve documented here.
Whether you need to stretch a budget further or you are looking for some ways to save money, I hope that this post has given you some ideas and motivation. Comment below any further ways that you’ve saved money during your PhD!
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