Skip the Marriage, Build the Village

Other People's Pockets

Host Maya Lau interviews Heather, a mid-career history professor in Baltimore, about the financial realities of single motherhood. Heather d

Key takeaways

• Heather earns approximately $88,000 annually but manages a mortgage between $430,000 and $450,000.
• The household is supported by roughly $40,000 in annual income from Heather's mother's piano teaching business.
• Heather previously worked as a content developer at JSTOR, earning around $56,000 per year during her dissertation period.
• She utilizes community-based support, such as a pandemic 'pod' of families, to assist with childcare for her twins.
• Heather has actively advocated for Baltimore City Schools, helping to secure grants for air conditioning installation in her children's school.

Main topics

• Academic career precarity
• Single motherhood by choice
• Multi-generational living

Notable quotes

Having a PhD shouldn't mean financial struggle. Or at least, that wasn't how it was a generation ago.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how intentional community buil

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) I do have a romantic partner that I see occasionally. And I call it my arrangement. I have no desire to marry at this point. I have my children. I have my career. I have my house. I am a free woman for all intents and purposes. I have no desire to be in a marriage. So my vision for... partnership is truly companionship. I don't actually think of it in terms of a financial support or future financial possibilities. Speaker 1 (0:43) Today, I'm bringing you an interview with someone I'm calling Heather. She was actually one of the amazing listeners who responded to my listener survey. And she wrote something that intrigued me so much, which you'll hear about in a minute. And she included her email as part of her response. For this interview, she wanted to talk to me anonymously so that she could be really open about her financial situation and not risk anything when it comes to her job. Heather lives and works in Baltimore with her twin 10-year-olds and with her mother. She's a mid-career professor of history and a community advocate and organizer around public education. If you're a regular listener of Other People's Pockets, or even if this is your first listen, please fill out the listener survey. It really helps to shape the future of this show. The responses are completely anonymous and it's totally optional if you do want to include your contact info. Find the link to the survey in the show notes or at mayalau.com. That's M-A-Y-A-L-A-U dot com. Find me on Instagram at itsmayamoney and find links to all of my socials at mayalau.com. If you would like to sponsor this show, please reach out at other people's pockets at gmail.com. And if you've never given this show a rating or review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you may be listening, please do so. It really helps me to grow this show. I'm Maya Lau, and this is Other People's Pockets, the show where I ask people how much money they make and how their finances work so that the questions we all have about money can be a little bit less of a mystery. And now here's my interview with Heather. Speaker 3 (2:28) Well, Speaker 1 (2:29) thanks for joining me today. Speaker 3 (2:30) Thank you for having me. I'm Speaker 1 (2:32) excited to talk to you. Speaker 3 (2:34) I'm excited to be here. I Speaker 1 (2:37) reached out to you because you filled out this survey that I put out. And the thing that you wrote was really intriguing to me. You wrote, I'm a professor mid-career, and I'm really struggling to make ends meet as a single mom of twins. I constantly wonder why this is so. having a PhD shouldn't mean financial struggle, or at least that wasn't how it was a generation ago. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what your path has been to being a mid-career professor, mom of twins? Speaker 3 (3:13) Yes. It took me a bit longer than usual in terms of getting the PhD. I was in my mid-30s when I received the PhD. It was shortly after the 2007 crash or what do you call it? Recession? Recession, yes. And the landscape in academia had changed quite a bit in that short period of time. So coming into being a professor was at a really sort of time of scarcity and not necessarily the way the field was presented or at least what it promised when I started my process of getting the PhD with the hope of becoming a professor. Speaker 3 (4:02) So, yeah, I'm mid-career now, meaning that I now have tenure, which is one of the ways in which we get promoted in academia. And that also brings with it some job security, but not necessarily financial security. And so there's a bit of a mismatch in my mind in terms of where I thought I would be in my late 40s. Now I'm 50. Speaker 3 (4:30) I also started my family late. What is late? I was 39 when I had my twin boys and did it as a single mom by choice. Part of that was also dictated or constrained by my career process and getting the PhD and all the things that you sacrifice on the way to getting the PhD. There are a lot of academics who... put off having a family because of the rigorous nature of the process and the precarity, financial precarity that comes with being a graduate student. So all of that played into my decision to have my children when I did. And now sort of that raising, you know, two children on my own on a single salary has been a real struggle. Speaker 1 (5:26) What do you teach exactly? And was there any conversation in your studies about what that would mean for what kind of income you could have? Speaker 3 (5:38) I teach history. So I'm Speaker 1 (5:40) a Speaker 3 (5:40) historian. When I was being trained, they really don't prepare you for the career in terms of what to expect in terms of earnings. They really just teach you how to research, teach you how to write, maybe a little bit of that. And then they send you off to be the professor that you signed up to be. Part of what was... changing at that time that I was sort of coming out of graduate school was the fact that people in my position as graduate students either chose to stay a graduate student and do nothing else, and some of us chose to work. I was the latter. And that's partially why it took me longer, because I just, I refused to live like a Speaker 1 (6:32) rat. Speaker 3 (6:33) You know, just kind of scrounging around. Wait, Speaker 1 (6:36) what do you mean it took you longer? You took fewer classes so you could also work? Speaker 3 (7:02) Living in New York City at the time on somewhere around $20,000 stipend was just untenable for me. I was in my late 20s, early 30s at the time, and it just didn't make sense to me. I had done my dissertation fieldwork in Nigeria and in England, so I got some grant money for that. But even that wasn't enough to sort of say, oh, I'm okay financially. Speaker 1 (7:31) What was your side job while you were writing your dissertation? How much money did you make at it? Speaker 3 (7:36) I worked, I started off as a summer intern and then like flipped it into a full-time job at JSTOR, which is an academic publishing sort of online publishing company. Then they work with academic journals. So I became a kind of editor, content, what they call content developer. And so working with publishers to sign on their titles. And it was a full-time job. And I made somewhere around, I would say, by the time I left, I was making $56,000 with that. And it was enough to be okay in the city, but that was literally the income, my only income. My graduate funding had dried up by the time I was writing the dissertation. And my professors may have... frowned upon me, but I was like, what else do you want me to do? I am not going to go into massive debt. I already had debt from being an undergraduate student. And it just didn't make sense to me to just sit there and pretend that I wasn't living. Speaker 1 (8:45) I'm curious if you actually said that to them, like, look, this is my situation. What do you... recommend for someone like me? What do you expect someone like me to do? I Speaker 3 (8:58) did. I actually did have that conversation. I ended up switching my advisor to another advisor who was a little bit more practical and allowing of me having this job. And the expectation was that I was supposed to get grants and fellowships. And one of the quirks in my path was that My then advisor had dropped the ball in supporting my applications. So I was off cycle in getting institutional funding and I was only getting external funds, which is interesting. I mean, I was competitive enough to get a Fulbright, for example, but not competing with. other graduate students at the institution for monies that were available to us then. So that complicated my situation. And I was very strategic about, you know, not allowing that to be my only path. I had sort of a plan B and a plan C in place. How much do you make now? I make around $88,000 for myself. I live with my mother. rely on her income to supplement my income. But for myself, I make $88,000. And this is after working for eight years at my institution. Speaker 1 (10:19) What city do you live in? Baltimore. Okay. For anyone who doesn't know Baltimore, what would it be like if you were living on 88K a year as a single mom of twins and you didn't have your mom? Like, what would that look like in Baltimore in terms of what kind of place you could afford and stuff like that? Speaker 3 (10:40) Yeah. I mean, I have a modest home in a fairly stable community with enough space to... house my mom's piano studio. If I were to not have my mom's income, I would probably live in a smaller house, probably a two or three bedroom sort of row home, which is very common here in Baltimore, far less land and in a different neighborhood. And then I would also not have a lot of the sort of extra expenses that we enjoy. Certain subscriptions, we would lose that and live fairly more frugally than we do now. And you wouldn't have the built-in child care that you have. Yes, absolutely. And that would be extremely painful prior to now. My children are now 10, so they're becoming a little bit more independent. But paying for things like Summer camps and things like that would be very, very difficult, if not impossible. Can you say how Speaker 1 (11:47) much your mom brings in? Speaker 3 (11:50) To my income, what we take from her business to support the household is somewhere around $40,000. A year? A year. And then we reserve some to kind of keep the business running. Speaker 1 (12:06) What does that look like in terms of your... conversations with your mom around money and even the initial conversation of, hey, do you want to live with us? What does that look like? I think that probably looks very different in every family. Speaker 3 (12:23) I'm extremely lucky. My mother raised us first when I was young, when we were babies in Nigeria. And so she in many ways, became an African mom, if I can say so. She's from Minnesota. So when I decided to have my children, I was really only planning to have a child, which is what I could afford at the time, and had set up my life in such a way that I could do that. I had savings. When we found out that I was having twins, my mom immediately said, I'm coming. And she did come and then she stayed. And I was very happy for her to stay and help me with these children. She was very excited about the prospect of me going forward and having children when I did, even though I wasn't partnered at the time. I'm her first child. She just very much wanted that for me. And so in terms of the conversations we have about money, we've kind of been. Speaker