Tune in as we chat with Sherry Shih, a 3rd-year veterinary student at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. We discuss her detailed approach to saving money while in veterinary school. You can find a link to her referred blog post below, along with additional helpful information on how to Borrow Better while in veterinary school.
In this episode we mention the following links:
Saving Money in Veterinary School blog post: https://vinfoundation.org/saving-money-in-veterinary-school-living-expenses/
Borrow Better: https://vinfoundation.org/resources/borrow-better-veterinary-school-loan-debt/
You may learn more about the VIN Foundation, on the website, or join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Jordan Benshea: Welcome to the Veterinary Pulse podcast. My name is Jordan Benshea. I’m the Executive Director of the VIN Foundation. Veterinary Pulse is the heartbeat of the profession. Join us as we talk with veterinary colleagues about critical topics, from student debt to mental health, and share stories. Stories connect us as humans, as animals, as a veterinary community. This podcast is made possible through individual donors like yourself, and our technology partnership with VIN, the Veterinary Information Network. Thank you for being here.
Meet Sherry Shih: A Third-Year Veterinary Student
Jordan Benshea: This episode, we’re having a discussion with Sherry Shih, a third-year veterinary student at UC Davis. Sherry shares with us her detailed approach to saving money while in veterinary school. Be sure to check the Episode Notes for a link to her blog post. Thanks for listening. Hi, Sherry! Thanks so much for being with us today.
Sherry Shih: Thanks so much for having me.
Jordan Benshea: How were you first introduced to the VIN Foundation?
Sherry Shih: I was introduced through VIN itself with the summer internship or what we are calling a VINternship that VIN did for veterinary students this summer. I knew about VIN since I was a first-year vet student, but I wasn’t introduced to VIN Foundation until this past summer and know the difference about them now.
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, we’ve mentioned this on a couple different episodes, but VIN did a great job this summer with helping students whose plans have gotten sort of derailed due to COVID and the pandemic and created a lot of internships for a bunch of VIN students and the VIN Foundation has been fortunate to work with a few different students. So, it’s been really exciting getting that hands-on experience. Sherry was one of those students. We’ve been thrilled to work with you as well.
Sherry’s Journey to Veterinary School
Jordan Benshea: When did you first realize you wanted to be a veterinarian? Was there an aha moment? Was it gradual? How did it come to be for you?
Sherry Shih: There wasn’t really an aha moment, per se. It’s always something I’ve been interested since very young, elementary school, maybe. I didn’t really know what it actually entails until high school when I was starting to think about my career choices to apply to a relevant college. I tried to shadow at a few vet clinics but was rejected because I was not 18. So, I ended up doing more adoption and nonprofit agencies, such as cats in need that is often in PetSmart and talking to people to see what the educational requirements and time it would take, cost it would be, and what kind of colleges I would apply to to get there. After some research and looking into other careers, I decided I should make a decision since I would need to prep for any sort of vocational school so early on, essentially in high school that it seems inefficient to me to not have a plan since that would take more time down the road. So, I went with what I was most interested in out of all my other career options. And vet it is!
Money-Saving Tips for Veterinary Students
Jordan Benshea: You recently wrote a blog post for the VIN Foundation website about saving money while in veterinary school. Have you always been inclined to focus on saving?
Sherry Shih: Yes, I have, actually. My mom is very into saving, repurposing things, and thrifting and I grew up around that environment of how could I get what I want without spending too much for it. Like creative things, like making things yourself, or knowing where to shop, comparing prices, counting your price down to the numbers count. Like if five rolls of toilet paper are $10 I would count how much it is for each roll of toilet paper when comparing which one to buy.
Jordan Benshea: That’s a very good tip actually, that I learned from somebody when you can do it. Also, when you’re shopping on Amazon or when you’re in the grocery store, a lot of people don’t even know that in that tag right there where the price is that it will sometimes tell you the price per unit.
Sherry Shih: Yeah, Amazon, I think, has been doing it for a while. I really like it because I don’t need to do the math myself.
Jordan Benshea: So, it makes it easier for you to save. Did finances play a role in your veterinary school application process?
Sherry Shih: It did. I know going to a public school is going to be the cheapest, but Davis was also the hardest school to get into. So, I tried very hard to make myself competitive in order to go to the cheapest school it would be for me. I did, of course, consider private schools and out of state, though my first choice has always been Davis. Both because it’s a great school, and it is going to be the cheapest for me.
Jordan Benshea: Were you a California resident when you applied?
Sherry Shih: Yes.
Managing Living Expenses and Budgeting
Jordan Benshea: Would you mind sharing with us a few of your tips and how you go about managing your living expenses while being in veterinary school?
Sherry Shih: Yeah, I think probably the main thing is to know what you’re spending on, because that’s kind of the starting point. Before you can even start saving is to know where your money is going. I like to keep a chart of everything I spent money on in a month. Just an Excel sheet. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. I don’t really use any external apps either. I just write down everything I spent money on, what it’s for, and how much it is. I analyze my own spending patterns over time to see where I could potentially save on. For me, the biggest category is food, which can often be the highest expense for students, and I guess everyone, after rent. I like to food prep, and I like to cook all my own food because eating out is expensive. I think frozen food tastes horrible and cooking yourself really is a lot cheaper than both of the other two options. So, I like to plan out my meals, go grocery shopping, and shop for only the things that I have planned for. I also plan for desserts and drinks and other indulgent food when I plan my meals, and then cook all of it. Then I don’t have to worry about it for a week.
Jordan Benshea: One thing that you mentioned in your blog post, I thought was a very good idea. They always say don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry, because you’re going to buy things that you probably shouldn’t be buying. One thing that you mentioned in your blog post, which I think speaks to that and sets yourself up for success with that, is to buy things that you know you’re going to want to snack on. So, if it’s chocolate or something else that you know that you might want to indulge in, it might stop you from going out to purchase that later and having an impulse snack buy.
Sherry Shih: Yeah, I started doing that because I used to not include snacks into my meal plans, and I would end up being very hungry after school and buying things. When I did my calculations at the end of month, it came out to be almost as much as my groceries itself! So, I was like okay, I need a different solution for this.
Jordan Benshea: Just your ‘for the moment’ snack purchases?
Sherry Shih: Yeah. Like a boba drink would be $5 and a slice of cake is almost $5, too. My groceries, without ingredients for snacking, comes out to like 20 to $25 every week or two weeks. So, just 4 drinks of boba would exceed that. So, okay, I need to increase my total grocery budget, but decrease the amount of ‘spur of the moment’ snacking, and that would lead to a total lower cost for my food spending.
Jordan Benshea: Wow, that’s really impressive. We will definitely link to the blog post in our Episode Notes. Can you give us an example of what a week of food might look like for you? I mean, somebody hearing you say you spend 20 to $25 a week on food, their mouth might hit the floor because that could easily be one meal for somebody eating out.
Sherry Shih: Yes. In the blog posts, I do have a chart of one week of my meals that was two weeks ago when I wrote this. For breakfast, I would have hash browns, eggs, bacon, almond milk. I don’t tend to drink coffee. Not much of a coffee person, but I do drink a lot of boba. For lunch, I had a black bean and cheese salad, and I ate the leftovers of the previous two meals for dinner. My snack for the day was a mango smoothie, which is actually the highest cost of all the ingredients for that day. Black beans are about $1 a can. You can make an entire salad that will last me at least two days. Potatoes are very cheap, too, it’s like five pounds for $3. Eggs $1 and a half for 12. Almond milk, depending on where you shop, can be between one to $3. The mango that I used for the mango smoothie was $7 for the entire bag, which I know will make multiple smoothies but that was still the big spending for that meal. I just make a ridiculous amount of this. I use like the entire five pounds of potatoes, and then I eat the same thing for the next two days. Though I did prepare chips and dip and a restaurant very soda as my snack for the next two days. On Thursday, because I started on Monday, I made pancakes and fresh strawberry syrup [I boiled the strawberries in sugar for the syrup], a Green Goddess salad, bacon wrapped asparagus from the leftover bacon, easy-over eggs and more pancakes, which I ate for the next two days. The last thing for that week is a Japanese curry, which I make from the concentrates chunks that I buy from Amazon. Japanese curry will typically last me almost an entire week, so I have not cooked in a while. For snacks, I had boba. I buy the dry boba from Amazon. It was about $7, and it made me definitely more than seven cups. So, boba comes out to be about $1 per cup. All my ingredients for all of this that lasts me about two weeks comes out to about $30 because there are cans that I bought in the same trip that I didn’t use in the two-week prep that I have here.
Jordan Benshea: Do you find that there are times when you know due to your schedule, something shifts, something changes, and you don’t have a meal planned? Do you find that just because you’ve planned everything out, you always have something with you and therefore you don’t fall into that ‘I need to buy something to go trap’?
Sherry Shih: Yeah, I don’t tend to fall into that situation since I tend to meal prep on weekends and in the middle of the week. If I know I’m going to be busy that week, I might prep more on the weekends, and not have any prepping during the middle of the week. Sometimes if it’s lecture heavy, I don’t go to class. I listened to it while I prep my meals at home.
Jordan Benshea: Are you as careful with other categories of living expenses as you are with food? Are there some areas in which you find yourself not as disciplined in?
Sherry Shih: I would say my worst category is transportation. I know biking would lower my transportation costs by quite a bit because I would not need to pay for a parking permit, gas, or car maintenance. But it’s very difficult for me to get to class on time even with a car, and with a bike I’d never get there sometimes. I either walk outside and give up and don’t go to class, or I actually get to class and I fall asleep because I’m so tired from biking to class.
Jordan Benshea: I thought that was supposed to give you energy, not make you more tired.
Sherry Shih: I’m just very bad at biking. The car ride is about six minutes, and it takes me at least 30 minutes to get there and I would still need to lock up the bike, walk into class, and I’m just very tired.
Jordan Benshea: Transportation is one area. How about the areas in the other categories that you focus on, that you try to save money on?
Sherry Shih: The next category that I focus on would be entertainment, which is basically everything that’s not a necessity that I buy. So, like clothes because I don’t actually need more clothes, I just would like more, or clothes for my cat, collars for her, cute carriers, games, and gaming consoles. Things like that, because it becomes the next biggest spending if I don’t track it carefully. I like to make sure I only spend things for fun that I make during that month as an income. I like to have a part time job while I’m in vet school. I try very hard to keep my extravagant spendings within my income for that month, so I don’t actually have a deficit from spending on things that I don’t need to.
Jordan Benshea: So, you look at it as any additional income, your part time job income, is the income that you use for this entertainment category.
Sherry Shih: Yes. If I have leftovers from my budget because I was able to save quite a bit that month, I also add that into my entertainment budget. So basically, I set a budget for myself every month and if I exceed that, I need to spend less, and I will need to pay it with my income from the next month. But if I’m below it, then that extra money goes into my ‘for fun’ budget.
Jordan Benshea: Do you have veterinary school student loans?
Sherry Shih: I do not actually.
Jordan Benshea: Okay, so that’s a big factor there that you don’t have to think about.
Sherry Shih: Yes.
Jordan Benshea: Got it. Okay.
Impact of COVID-19 on Spending Habits
Jordan Benshea: So how has COVID impacted your spending habits?
Sherry Shih: It has not really impacted me. I need to drive places a lot less now, so it’s actually helping my gas budget by not requiring me to go to class. Food wise, I buy enough groceries to last me two weeks normally anyway. So, the stay-at-home order and the discouraging to buy groceries very often doesn’t really impact me either. I would say probably the biggest impact is I buy a lot more things online, and I sometimes fall into a trap of buying things I don’t necessarily need online because it’s just like an online shopping spree on Amazon, which is not great for my budget.
Jordan Benshea: Are you able to continue your part time job during COVID?
Sherry Shih: I used to, well before COVID, I normally do pet sitting and house sitting which I’m not able to do mostly because people don’t need pet and house sitting as much. My regular clients haven’t really needed me to walk their dogs either. I am continuing my job with VIN, so that is currently my income.
Jordan Benshea: It seems that saving for you is almost a bit of a hobby. Would you say that that’s the case?
Sherry Shih: I think so, yeah, actually. It’s not the saving part that’s the fun part. It’s the being able to buy whatever I want part that is the fun part. I don’t mind putting in the work to be able to buy very extraneous things like a wax seal that I recently bought because I want to write letters to my friends. It’s completely extraneous, and I would need to buy the wax for the wax seal because you can’t use candle wax apparently. Things like that, that it’s nice to have, it’s completely unnecessary, but I can afford it because I put in the effort to save that money.
Jordan Benshea: You’ve mentioned that you have this fun budget from your job, and then that goes to these extraneous things. Do you try to save a certain amount per year or is it on a month-by-month basis it just goes in and out and you deal with that per month?
Sherry Shih: I do set aside a small part of my income per month as savings and as an emergency fund for if my cat has an emergency or I have an emergency. That stays in my savings. I do that on a monthly basis and end up with a goal for the end of the year. If there’s something that is more expensive that I know I want to buy, then I would start setting aside money monthly for it a few months before depending on what the cost is. An example would be I wanted to move to a one bedroom and not have housemates, because my cat is a tripod, and she is very terrified of any and every dog there could be in the same house. So, I know that I would very much like to move to a bigger place. I calculated how much more that would cost and I started setting aside money for it last year in order to afford the higher rent starting this year.
Jordan Benshea: So, are you now in a one bedroom?
Sherry Shih: Yes, I am.
Jordan Benshea: Congratulations!
Sherry Shih: Thank you! My cat appreciates it very much.
Jordan Benshea: That’s a wonderful example of how it almost seems that you make almost a little game of how you can save so that you can save to then afford the things that you want to have in your life that otherwise wouldn’t be able to and that you’re willing to sacrifice some things that others might not be able to, like some people might not like leftovers. I’m the same way as you. I don’t mind eating the same thing multiple days in a row. I get creative and do a meal for that night and I just make a batch of stuff. I’m fine doing that, so I can understand that. I do know that there are people that are not okay eating leftovers, or prefer not to, or are fine with the frozen meals, everybody has their preference, but I think it’s awesome how you’ve created this game of how you can take something from one area and put it into a different category and how it can benefit you for your preference.
Sherry Shih: Yes, and I think that’s really what drives me to save and really think about all the costs of that I pay month.
Jordan Benshea: A lot of people think that that’s an exercise that they go through with student loans. While you don’t have student loans, you’re still being extremely careful and cautious with the money that you have, so that it allows you to go further. What advice would you give to other veterinary students who are struggling to stay within a budget? Veterinary school is challenging, it’s stressful, and there’s a lot of moving parts. Sometimes it can be hard to make sure that is on point when you’re trying to manage and schedule everything else. Would you have any tips or suggestions
Sherry Shih: I would say be nice to yourself and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t meet your budget. Budgeting takes practice. It takes time. I think if people try to change too many things at once and maybe set a very ambitious budget for themselves to begin with, it can become very frustrating and makes it very hard for you to meet that budget you set for yourself. So, if you’re not used to budgeting then I think just starting with knowing how much you’re spending and then set a budget for yourself that’s just a little bit below what your current spending is and then start thinking about where you can take that money from before having a, okay, this is what I’m going to live on, and I can’t exceed it ever. It will be very hard to change your lifestyle that abruptly to be able to meet a budget that is very different from what you currently have.
Jordan Benshea: So maybe starting with one of the two categories that you mentioned in the blog post, such as transportation or food. Starting with one of those and making little shifts, and bit by bit seeing if you’re able to adjust from there.
Sherry Shih: Yeah, definitely start with one or two that you think you are able to accomplish and try it out, see if it works. If it does great, you can try out a different thing. If not, then think of a different idea that you want to try and see if that works. It comes down to a lot of trial and error, I think, so don’t be afraid to experiment, but also don’t beat yourself up if it doesn’t work.
Balancing Veterinary School and Personal Life
Jordan Benshea: We’ve talked a lot about your saving tendencies, using it, and how it’s a hobby for you. In terms of veterinary school, what are some of your favorite aspects of veterinary school? You’re a third year now. We’re in this sort of unprecedented time. How are you finding joy in the midst of this veterinary school year? What areas of veterinary school are you enjoying?
Sherry Shih: I think I can see that now as a third year, but I like to see my goals slowly become realized. When first starting veterinary school, I’m like, oh, there’s so much information. I don’t know if I’ll be able to learn all this in four years. It’s quite overwhelming and stressful sometimes wondering if I’ll be able to do it. But starting third year and comparing what I knew two years ago to now I can definitely say that I know a lot more now than I did then and appreciate that I have gotten somewhere. It’s nice, and that if I was able to do this in two years, then in another two years, I will hopefully be able to be an actual doctor. Another aspect I really like is the community and camaraderie that I have, everyone has with their class. This is such a high stress environment, but everyone in it is understanding and supportive. It’s just very nice to be around others that are supportive and understand what you’re going through.
Jordan Benshea: Wonderful.
Sherry’s Secret Talent and Hobbies
Jordan Benshea: One question I like to ask everybody, as we wind down each episode is, do you have a secret talent? If not a talent, something that you like, or enjoy doing that others might not know about you? I suppose we could say people might not know how much you enjoy saving money, but is there another talent besides that? Maybe that’s the one! Maybe we’ve just revealed this whole talent for you in a blog post and a podcast episode, but I’d love to hear if there’s a secret talent that you’d like to share.
Sherry Shih: I like to sew clothes a lot. I like to make Victorian inspired clothing that’s like very frilly, poofy, and because of that I am also really into cosplay. Which is you dress up as a cartoon or anime character, the whole wigs, makeup, costume, and going to conventions for that.
Jordan Benshea: Wow. That’s probably shifted a lot because of COVID. Are you still able to connect with that community?
Sherry Shih: Oh, definitely no conventions, and I don’t foresee any conventions for a while either. I’ve just been home and working on my costumes at like 300 miles an hour. I have enough costumes to wear a different one to four days of COM for like the next three years at this point.
Jordan Benshea: That would all be part of your entertainment budget, right?
Sherry Shih: Yes, definitely.
Jordan Benshea: So, we have pink outfits for the cat and then we have the cat in costume sewing.
Sherry Shih: Yes, I actually make quite a few of my cat’s outfits, too. That’s the same budget because I buy the same fabric and then make us matching outfits.
Jordan Benshea: That’s adorable.
Outro
Jordan Benshea: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Sherry. It’s always great to get insight on how people manage their finances. I think you’ve taken a really innovative approach and you’ve taken something that can be really stressful and scary and uncertain for a lot of people, and you’ve turned it into a fun game. You’ve inspired me to look at mine in different ways. I really appreciate you sharing your story. Thank you so much.
Sherry Shih: Thank you so much for having me. I hope this will be helpful for some people, and not just me rambling on here.
Jordan Benshea: I’m sure it’ll be helpful for others as well. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Veterinary Pulse. Please check the Episode Notes for additional information referenced in the podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow, subscribe, and share a review. We welcome feedback and hope you will tune in again. You can find out more about the VIN Foundation through our website, VINFoundation.org and our social media channels. Thank you for being here. Be well.
