How an Academic Librarian Does Money

Dave (not his real name) is a 40-year-old academic librarian in a small university town on the East Coast.

So, Dave, tell us a bit about your finances.

Okay. My current finances are actually kind of new and unfamiliar to me, since I started a new job a few months ago.

I’m making $65,000 a year; my employer puts another 11 percent of that into my TIAA-CREF account.

Between student loans and one credit card, I’ve got $30,000 in debt; $35,000 in my retirement account; and about $5,000 in the bank.

I don’t have any debt from undergrad or library school — the student debt that I’m now paying down is the result of a poorly planned and underfunded return to graduate school in my early 30s. I’m currently pouring $200 a month into that debt, and it’s not shrinking much at all; but thanks to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, whatever’s left ought to vanish five years from now.

My main expense right now is ridiculously high rent — $1,650 per month.

Anything else in particular I ought to share?

No, this should work! So is this new job a significant salary increase? Are you looking to manage a larger amount of money than you are used to handling?

It’s a big change, yes — a year ago I was making $15K less, and worried about being chronically underpaid. Now I’m living in a proportionally more expensive area, though, so I’m worried about being underpaid relative to where I’m at.

A $15K salary bump sounds great, and maybe a little unusual? Is that typical in your industry?

For my field, I’m doing pretty well! If I’d stayed in my last job I would have been guaranteed annual raises in the range of 2 percent. So relative to inflation, I’d have been falling behind — I think that’s pretty typical for library jobs.

Generally speaking, the only way to get a significant raise in my field is to move into management, and most people who want to be librarians don’t want to manage anybody.

Once I decided that I was willing to be some kind of manager, the field suddenly looked really different to me.

Did you move specifically for the new position, or were you already planning to relocate?

I was looking to relocate, and I wanted a different job. My field is pretty specific and I wouldn’t have been qualified for very many other jobs in my area, anyway.

There are a lot of sub-specialties in library work; there are only a few thousand people in the country in my field.

Oh, very cool!

So I imagine a reasonable amount of planning went into your career choice. Were you aware of librarian salaries and work opportunities when you started out? Did that factor into your choice of career at all?

Those are really good questions!

I absolutely stumbled into being a librarian. I had an hourly job in the campus library when I was an undergrad.

I discovered that my university had a library school — before that I didn’t know that you had to get a specific degree to be a librarian.

My school’s program was the only one I applied to. I finished the degree in two years, and the second year I had two part-time assistantship positions that covered my tuition. I learned a lot more in those jobs than I did in my classes, and by the end of the program I had experience and references.

Then I sent out fifty applications for jobs all over the country. I got two phone interviews and one job offer, and I took the job. That meant moving across the country for a 3/4-time job with no benefits in a town I’d never seen before.

Ha, that sounds like an academic gig!

It wasn’t! That job was at a county historical society. It was a two-year grant-funded job, so I knew it was going to run out pretty quickly.

But it was in a college town. I got to know librarians at the nearby university, and since I was only working four days a week at the historical society, I got an internship at the university library for one day a week. The internship paid better than my real job did.

When there were six months left on my grant-funded position, I applied for a job at the university, and got it.

There was a lot of contingency involved at every step, here! I understood that things could have gone very differently — I was pretty sure I’d always be able to get a job if I wanted to, but I couldn’t ever be sure to get a job anywhere in particular.

I feel like that’s definitely the case for your career, but it’s also the case for many careers in general.

That’s true — definitely it’s the case for anyone who wants to be a professor.

If I wanted to get a job in a very specific place I’d probably have to spend a couple of years developing connections in that place. But when I was just out of grad school that wouldn’t have been an option.

So back to money: how has your relationship to money changed over the course of your life and career? Have you always been a “saver” or a “spender” or a “planner,” or has your relationship to money shifted as your finances have shifted?

Well, the reason I volunteered for this interview is that my sister did one of these interviews a while back, and I was really interested to see the difference between how she does money and how I do. [Ed: Dave is referring to How a Microbiology Lab Tech Who Enjoys Saving and Hates Spending Does Money.]

I don’t want to have to worry about money and I think I went looking for a stable middle-class profession. I want to know that my retirement is taking care of itself.

My saving pattern is basically this: there’s a certain dollar threshold where, if my bank account goes over a certain number, I’m going to spend about half of it on something. Usually something responsible!

The number used to be around $3,000 — if I had that much in the bank, I’d buy a new computer or a new suit.

Last month I realized I had $10K in the bank, and I immediately paid back $3,000 that I had borrowed from my parents to help with my most recent move.

After that, usually I’ll have an austerity period. This month: no meals in restaurants, no unnecessary purchases.

Whereas your sister said — and I quote — “I don’t really spend much on ‘fun.’” Is she the more frugal of the two of you?

I think so, but maybe not by a huge margin — at least comparing the numbers.

She’s got maybe twice the savings I do, and she owns a house, but things seem pretty comparable between our situations. We’re both living in college towns although we’re non-academics, and we’ve both ricocheted all around the country.

I think we learned different lessons from the example set by our family, but we ended up with the same basic behavior.

Can you elaborate on those different lessons? I remember your sister talking about putting her childhood bank balances on a sheet of paper on the wall, to watch them grow.

Right — I never did that! I spent my allowance on Star Wars action figures and comic books. Money in the bank wasn’t doing me any good, unless I could save up to buy a more expensive toy.

On the other hand, I always had to work. My first job, outside of chores at home, was when I was 14. Where I grew up, 14-year-olds can do agricultural labor. My first job was detasseling corn.

We had detasseling in our town too! I never did it; I taught piano lessons instead.

Did your parents require you to work?

Require isn’t necessarily the word, although “strongly encourage” might be.

That’s about what my situation was, too. I was allowed to quit a job if I hated it, but I had to get another one.

So through high school I washed dishes at a restaurant, mopped floors at the mall, etc. I took the library job in college because I didn’t want to go back to Burger King.

I washed dishes too! I also worked retail. Yay teenage jobs!

Anyway — I got to keep the money I made, and I always found a way to spend it.

What do you think you do well financially, and what do you wish you could do better?

I’m good at budgeting in the short term — I am never going to be broke and I’m going to be saving money from year to year.

But I don’t have a grand plan, and I don’t have a sense of what the rest of my financial life’s going to look like. Everything between here and retirement is terribly vague, with the exception of work, which I assume will be pretty much the same as it is now, with increasing responsibilities.

Realistically, I expect some big change to happen, but I can’t predict what it will be.

The windfall dream!

Well—

Do you know the Henry James story “The Beast in the Jungle”?

Only by googling it right now.

I can sum it up really quickly — it’s worth reading even if you know what happens.

It’s about a man who’s convinced that something big is going to happen to him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he knows it’s huge and terrible. And he puts everything off because he figures that some cataclysm will occur, and there’s no point in planning things out when they’ll all be washed away anyhow.

At the end of the story, after years of waiting for the disaster, he realizes that this was the disaster; he waited too long instead of doing anything.

In your metaphor, is the disaster saving too much money, or not enough, or…?

I think the disaster is that money and security might be the wrong things to be focusing on.

Life, then, and the present moment.

Pretty much.

Last question: what advice do you have for Billfold readers? (Besides to read the Henry James story!)

If you’re thinking about library school, get some practical library experience; don’t worry about your grades; and don’t go into serious debt in order to be qualified for a low-paying career.

There’s an old Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown asks Lucy for the secret of life, and Lucy tells him that the secret of life is this:

When you get up in the middle of the night to have a drink of water, rinse out the glass first, because there might be a bug in the glass.

Sorry if my advice is similarly anticlimactic!

It is great advice! Also why I sleep with a sealed aluminum water bottle by my bed.

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