Beyond the PhD: March 2021 – Spoiler: I bought a house!

Well I’ve got a fairly big bit of news to share this month: I bought a house with my partner!

A year ago when I was finishing up my PhD I certainly didn’t expect to be buying a property any time soon. So in this post along with my usual updates I’ll share a bit about how and why I decided to buy a house now: especially considering I only have a few months left on my current postdoc contract!

For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.

How I spent my time in February

With the house purchase I actually took my first bit of leave (besides Christmas) since starting my job back in September. I have loads of annual leave left and ought to get on with taking more of it!

---

Academic work

Publications

PhD Paper

About a month ago I submitted a revised manuscript (minor corrections) to the journal and haven’t yet had a response. Considering we waiting at least three months for the initial reviewer feedback, we may be waiting a while longer. I’m relatively confident that we addressed all the concerns adequately but you never know exactly how the revised manuscript will be received by reviewers!

I appreciate that figuring out how best to reply to reviewer comments can be tricky but I was lucky to learn from some successful academics during my PhD. Therefore I ought to get on with writing the post about making manuscript revisions as part of the publishing series: Writing an academic journal paper!

March task: write and publish The peer review process and making manuscript revisions post

Postdoc Paper

Towards the end of February I started properly writing up my first paper for my current (and first) postdoc which I started in September. Although in reality it isn’t that complicated, I get really bored of writing. On top of that I find that preparing data and making figures can take ages! There is still some more research to be conducted but we have a pretty clear plan for what needs doing.

I do though sometimes find myself being pretty unproductive which I’ll address in the following postdoc section. Even so, by the end of March I certainly hope to have a decently presentably draft.

Postdoc

Generally things are going well in my work. We hit a few brick walls with a certain part of the project, one of them was solved with some searching online but the other is still bugging me. Overall we’re ahead of where we expected to be with the project but that doesn’t mean that my brain wants to accept that not everything can be solved during the six or seven month duration.

Working remotely I suffer from pretty regular spells where I lack motivation. Certainly more so than working in a shared office I find myself wasting time and procrastinating, although I do appreciate not having to commute when working from home!

A few ways I address a lack of motivation:

1. Cut myself some slack. It’s okay to not always be a research powerhouse all of the time, especially at the moment. I’m still working on setting proper boundaries for working hours, things get blurry working from home!
2. Take breaks. If you need a break from your work, take one! It doesn’t make sense to sit longingly at your computer being unproductive if a short break away from your desk could help.
3. Weekly supervisor meetings. I do think that weekly meetings with a supervisor are really useful to ensure that each week you create at least a little bit of progress. This is true both for short term contracts like my current one but also for a PhD to keep you on the straight and narrow.

---

House purchase

Three months ago my girlfriend and I weren’t even seriously considering buying and yet now we’re homeowners!

I don’t want to de-rail this post too much so here is just a quick summary:

Timeline

• Offer accepted: 17th December 2020
• Formal mortgage officially agreed: 15th January 2021
• Exchanged contracts: 19th February 2021*
• Completed (ie got keys) 22nd February 2021

*Even on the morning of the exchange day we weren’t sure whether or not it was going ahead that day, crazy.

Why we bought

• Living with my girlfriend’s family, with no end in sight, was wearing us (me!) down. I do completely appreciate that this was useful in helping build up savings more quickly though!
• Although we wanted our own space we were keen to avoid moving out and spending savings on renting.
• Generally property prices keep climbing. I hate the unsolved housing crisis, and the divides it creates, here in the UK so to be clear I wasn’t motivated to buy to make money (for that I suggest investing!) but I was keen to avoid having to pay extra £££ in the future if prices continue going higher.
• We had wanted to go travelling but the virus (and it’s various emerging strains) remain prolific and I suspect this will continue to be the case for a long time. Even if I could get vaccinated today, I wouldn’t expect to be able to responsibly go travelling abroad extensively still for a very long time.
• We have a fair bit of savings and could pay off the mortgage pretty quickly if we wanted to overpay.
• We liked the house, thought it was a good price, and wanted to be able to live in it!

How we bought

In short:

• Both of us had spent a considerable amount of time building up considerable savings. It was helped a bit by living cheaply since March last year with my girlfriend’s family but in actual fact we’d have been on track with our previous savings rate back in London.
  Last year I put together a bit of a financial summary for 2019 which you can read here: My personal finances report for 2019. None of our deposit was gifted or lent to us by family/friends which we’re both pretty proud about.
  Even if buying a property isn’t on your mind, I still think everyone should be aiming to save money: Financial freedom: Why saving money could help you find a career you love.
• Buying a house as a postdoc without a stable permanent job is tough. Having a partner in a stable permanent job was a big help for me, I’m not sure I’d have got a mortgage on my own!

You’re on a short term postdoc contract, what are you playing at?

Yep, my current contract finishes at the end of April. So you’re completely right that it does sound a bit crazy. Here are the main reasons why I still feel relatively comfortable getting a (30 year!) mortgage right now:

1. I still have savings. If for whatever reason I couldn’t work, I had a pretty long runway before running out of cash.
2. If I carry on in academia, when would ever be a good time to buy?
3. Mortgage rates are very low, making the repayments low and it was nice to be able to lock them in for five years.
4. Since my job didn’t hold much weight with the bank, we got offered a smaller mortgage (meaning we had to stump up more of a deposit) but the upside is that the loan to value % is lower than for most first time buyers. All this means that the mortgage payments are manageable. In actual fact we estimate that all the bills and mortgage will cost less than the rent for our room in a shared house in London!
5. I’m confident that I can either get another job after this one, or make enough money from other sources if it came down to it.

How it’s gone so far

We’re loving having our own space! Besides a short period just before my PhD, I’ve always shared a house with lots of people people so this is really nice. So far we’ve not made many changes but there are quite a few small projects I’m looking forward to working on. There is lots still to buy too!

Interested in reading more about our house purchase? Let me know. I’m happy sharing useful info (hence this website!) which get help others but I also recognise that most people didn’t come here to read about real estate!

---

The Savvy Scientist website

New posts

Last month I set myself the goal of lining up potential PhD Profile guests. I’m pleased to say that I finally got my act together and have one profile published and more on the way.

Four new posts went live in February:

• Beyond the PhD: February 2021
• Overcoming Academic Challenges and Failure During a PhD
• Is a PhD Worth It? Should I Do a PhD?
• PhD Profiles: Melissa, PhD Student in Coral Science at University of New South Wales, Australia

As always, let me know if you want to see specific content!

Website traffic

In February this website received 5165 users (-8% compared to January, though the month is also shorter!) and 6880 page views (-3%).

As ever I probably ought to build up some more connections and engage more on social media. As an introvert it’s not really in my nature to be public but I want to help more people so perhaps it is worth doing?!

---

Learning new skills

Languages

My Spanish and Mandarin are both improving though I do think learning on Duolingo is a pretty artificial way to learn a language. Really I ought to try having some proper conversations to learn quickly, but I’m also in no rush and am doing it for fun using Duolingo.

I find spending time on Duolingo a really nice break from work and will often do 5-10 minutes as a break throughout the day. It’s free to sign up and suggest giving it a go! Sign up for free here and if you’re interested my profile is here.

Chin-ups

February goal: Do chin-ups twice a week.

I failed miserably at this goal, and didn’t go once in February! Though to be fair, it was less out of lack of motivation and more to do with lockdown conditions.

The good news about having my own place is that it’ll now be possible to get equipment so I can exercise at home! Watch this space.

Courses

Despite having a day job, I really believe in doing courses outside of work to learn new skills which could be fun and/or useful in the future. Almost all the courses I do are free, so you could easily give them a go yourself without spending any money!

Human-Centred Design Course

In January I enrolled with my partner on this free course. It took a back seat in February with all the house stuff going on so in March we want to get back up to speed.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming

Despite working on machine learning using Python as my day job, I wanted to take this course on Udemy because I’ve heard great things (and I could probably still do with learning a thing or two). As of the end of February I’ve only done the first few intro sections and hope to finish it by the end of March.

I signed up when it was free, which happens frequently, otherwise there is the book which accompanies the course which is also available for free – though I’m sure buying the book is also appreciated!

Code Your First Game: Arcade Classic in JavaScript on Canvas

This one, again available on Udemy, is super short and only takes a few hours. I’d never done any coding like this (or tried Java) and enjoyed it a lot. Recommended!

---

Time off

Media I’ve consumed

Books

• The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman. Weeiiiird, but entertaining.

• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming – Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold. Available as a pdf here which you can put on a kindle. I have long been fascinated by lucid dreaming and have made several attempts to become proficient. This is the first time I’ve invested serious time into reading about it and now more than ever I want to get good at it. TLDR: Begin by recalling your dreams, look for “dream signs” then look out for these clues in dreams.

• Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Michael Nielsen. This really should probably appear in one of the earlier sections since it relates to my day job. For anyone interested in deep learning, this is the best text-based intro that I’ve digested so far.

Videos

Simply a realtime video of Earth from the International Space Station, beautiful:

Articles

• Meet the 19-Year-Old From Kazakhstan Who Remixed ‘Roses’ Into a Hit – NY Times. Pretty remarkable story, one positive of the internet is that it opens the playing field to more of these types of scenarios.
• They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them – NY Times again, if you face the pay wall try using a private browser. Interesting though not surprising that this data is available.

---

Monthly finances

Income

• Postdoc +£1951.96
• Prolific +£8.60. As usual I only spent about 10 minutes throughout the month doing Prolific studies and actually do them more for fun than to make money. Even so, this included making £6.50 in about 4 minutes which was nice!
• Affiliates +£34.16 I consciously don’t spam this website with ads and only a few posts even include affiliate links but have started to make a bit of money from the matched betting services I like. More details on the full matched betting guide.

Savings

As I alluded to in previous months, in preparation for the house purchase I had to rapidly free up a lot of my savings. Thankfully most of this was done by the start of February, though we had a bit of stress trying to withdraw one of my Lifetime ISAs. Effectively you’ll allowed to have multiple Lifetime ISAs as long as you don’t pay into them in the same tax year, but it’s not that common to have several.

The first one got approved by HMRC quickly, but when the second LISA provider tried to request the transfer HMRC blocked it because the details didn’t match. Turned out it was down to a small difference in how the address had been reported. You’d hope that these systems would be well designed… In hindsight it would have saved a lot of stress (and time) to have combined them into one account before buying the property.

I still strongly recommend that any young people who want to get on the property ladder consider opening a Lifetime ISA. You get a 25% bonus gets added for any money you put in (up to £4000 a year) each tax year. Meaning you can get up to £1000 a year, for free. I used several years worth of these for my house purchase! Do become familiar with the small print though. You can start by opening one with just £1. Moneysavingexpert.com explains it all here.

Outgoings

• House purchase: minus a lot of £££
• Possessions for the new house: minus some more £££!

Having spent years building up savings it’s weird to have “spent” much of it in such a short period!

I like to be environmentally friendly (and frugal) so we’re making an effort to furnish the place with as much second hand belongings as is feasible given the pandemic. If you’re interested in house stuff let me know otherwise I’ll keep these sections pretty light going forwards!

---

February Summary

I spent far longer on boring admin stuff related to the house purchase than I hoped to, but at least that’s out the way now!

It was really nice to take a bit of time off from work without feeling guilty, and would like to remember to take time off regularly going forwards. There is often not a good time to take leave, but even so we must remember to take a break every so often, especially at the moment.

March Plan

I’m looking forward to enjoying having my own space and eventually want to get back on track with the idea of making videos. Before that though I have lots to do around the house and ought to update my CV to shortly begin searching for jobs again!

---

Subscribe here to get notified about new content: