<p>
Each department sets its own stipends, and biomedical sciences stipends are heavily subsidized by NIH training grants. The NIH will pay (IIRC) $20,000 a year per grad student, so the programs are only kicking in a minor part of the stipend.</p>
<p>
Wow, I would really not suggest that.</p>
<p>Taxes don't get taken out of my stipend, so I pay estimated taxes (IRS Form 1040-ES) every quarter. This is, like, the law.</p>
<p>It may be ... the law but millions of Americans violate it intentionally or unintentionally. If you get caught and it was discovered that you did so unintentionally you owe the outstanding balance, interest and a small fine (for me it was about 150.00). If you failed to declare your income and they decide it was intentional, they can choose to nail you with fines or any number of other penalties. In the situation of grad school stipends, you can bet that the availability of tax information from the university hr dept will constitute intentional failure to declare income and you would be hit pretty hard for your actions. I suggest you just pay the three or four grand a year and not risk it.</p>
<p>so the government giveth and taketh away. why not just give us less to begin with (or more)?</p>
<p>if they gave you less, the drop in income would outweigh what you'd be saving on the tax of the original stipend. and do you really expect them to give you more than 30K a year so you can nullify the taxes? a lot of people make 30K a year and they don't get a tax exemption, so why should it be different for a grad student?</p>
<p>humanities students get $20,000 before tax, if they're lucky, and people are complaining about paying $3000 on a $30,000 stipend?</p>
<p>and i'd love to just not pay my taxes, but i'm an international student and i don't want them to kick me out of the country when they find out. i just hope i don't have to pay income tax to my home country as well.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Wow, I would really not suggest that.</p>
<p>Taxes don't get taken out of my stipend, so I pay estimated taxes (IRS Form 1040-ES) every quarter. This is, like, the law.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree. It's never a good idea to break the law; it's an especially bad idea to blatantly not pay your taxes.</p>
<p>Just pay the taxes out of your paychecks. It's painless. You get what you get and don't have to worry about owing any taxes at the end. If anything, the government may end up owing you money!</p>
<p>
[quote]
i'm an international student and i don't want them to kick me out of the country when they find out. i just hope i don't have to pay income tax to my home country as well.
[/quote]
If your country has a tax treaty with the United States, you'll have to pay taxes to one or the other, but not both; generally, you will pay US taxes on US income and foreign taxes on foreign income. (The international postdocs in my lab just went to an international tax info session. :))</p>
<p>Whoa. What everyone is saying is a <em>lot</em> of money, from "where I'm from."
You will be fine...better than fine...</p>
<p>However,I will be employed on a T32 training grant when I start this fall into a non-biomedical PhD program...and I just learned that it IS taxable income. It's $20,500 stipend...but I'm not sure if the taxes are "automatically" taken out, or if i have to do it myself.
Either way, I'm sure my husband will insist that we pay them correctly. and you should to..</p>
<p>I think you BioMed students will be fine when some Psych PhDs are getting half the amount in stipends from the same schools and surviving. Might have to take some extraneous loans, but it beats the kind of debt coming out of professional school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Biomedical PhDs are actually quite spoiled as far as grad students go -- my stipend is about 50% greater than the stipends of many of the engineering students I know who live in the same (expensive) city I do.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, wow, I was wondering about that, Mollie. :) The CS PhD students in the programs that I'm looking at for my MS degree (you know what they are, both of them are in the city that we both live in) generally get stipends of $15-20K.</p>
<p>mollie,</p>
<p>i don't think canada has a tax treaty with the US. which is why i'm worried. but i guess i'll sort it out soon enough.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm paying them off anyway, and I'll be done paying by the time I finish my PhD, so I'm effectively getting an interest-free loan for my undergraduate education.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm doing something similar, except instead of paying off the loans now while I'm in school, I'm taking the money and putting it into CDs/higher interest online savings accounts until I graduate. Right before I finish here I'll take it all out and pay them down in one lump sum before they go into repayment. That way I'll get free loans, plus I get to keep the interest on the money!</p>
<p>You must have locked in your student loan interest rates before I did. The interest rates I get on my CD's are microscopic compared to the interest rates on my student loans. My wife and I have a combined student loan debt of about 60 or 70K and my plans have been to make slow steady progress until the day I have enough equity in a home that I can knock out the remainder of the student loan with a home equity loan.</p>
<p>
That will depend on your school. Some schools automatically withhold money from your stipend, and others don't. At those which don't, you can sometimes request that money be withheld. </p>
<p>I don't have money withheld, I just pay my quarterly estimated taxes and don't generally owe money or get a refund on April 15. I like it that way -- why give the government an interest-free loan when I could keep it in my high-yield savings account? But others might prefer the convenience of withholding.</p>
<p>
For sure. A course 16 friend of mine was getting $18k two years ago. Now, that's the kind of money on which I can't imagine surviving in Boston. I guess technically my husband and I survived on $14k per my first year, but we were living in MIT grad student housing with free internet, cable, electricity, and heat.</p>
<p>
Yup, they do -- one of the aforementioned postdocs is Canadian. She said she has to pay Canadian taxes on her Canadian income (a few investments, plus the money she made in 2008 before she moved to the US) and US taxes on her US income.</p>
<p> [quote=RacinReaver] That way I'll get free loans, plus I get to keep the interest on the money!
It's tricky, and I love it.</p>
<p>that is a great idea, molliebatmit, I will have to look into that....thanks for the tip!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My strategy won’t work once I’m out of school and the government stops paying interest, but until then I’m getting a few hundred bucks a year. Well…I was until interest rates dropped like a rock. :(</p>
<p>Ah, you have subsidized loans. I understand now. That is a good idea, i wonder what they take into account for the fafsa- will it be my and my wife’s income for this year? Will it be our expected income for next year? They wouldn’t honestly expect me to know anything about my parents income, would they? Somebody had mentioned 8500 in subsidized federal loans…is this based on anything?</p>
<p>Did you have disbursement fees? Aren’t they usually 3%? How did they determine your unmet financial need with tuition remission and a stipend?</p>
<p>@Strangelight.
You will be in for a nice ride. Confused our CPA even though I warned them and had them prepare DS’s previous tax year so that they would know his finances for the upcoming returns. DS has a fairly complicated return.</p>
<p>The following year, DS took the prepared return and figured out how to do the current year return. I’ve had some tax training and I found that no-way did I understand Canada’s system. Americans can complain, but our forms are so simple and straight forward.</p>
<p>Hint: If you have always received a refund. You do not need to do quarterlys. Once you start owing, then you May start doing quarterly’s. If the amount that you owe is small, the decision is pretty much your call. If the amount is fairly large, then you should think about doing quarterly’s. Your follow up question: If you find that it is difficult to pay the amount you owe,then you should do quarterlys.</p>
<p>yeah, i know the tax system here is a bit mental. i’ve always just sent my returns off to my family’s CPA. his daughter goes to grad school in the states and i think he said that canada doesn’t tax a canadian student’s stipend earned in the US, but they used to until fairly recently. that would’ve been on top of the US income tax paid on the stipend.</p>
<p>i don’t plan on earning any canadian income in my first year, so hopefully it’ll be straight forward and i’ll keep getting those quarterly gov’t cheques for $56. it’s gonna be a nightmare… ugh.</p>