Making SOS-TIPS happen

Budget

One of the most common questions in the MSCA Facebook pages (e.g.: 1, 2) is how much the salary will be. Valid question. But future-fellows should also be asking: "How much will I be able to spend on my research?" This is incredibly important in both writing and implementing your proposal. This whole section of the blog is dedicated to letting you know exactly what my budget looks like. Again, I disclose this in hopes of helping others. If you just want to know the bottom line, then...scroll down to the bottom line.
So, let’s begin with the super-impressive budget you see in the call, but already with the specifics of completing a MSCA GF IF in the USA and the Netherlands (country coefficients may differ vastly):

This gives me a total of 253,052.16 EUR for the three years (36 months). This is referred to as the “external budget” by the lovely, patient financial officer I am in contact with at Maastricht University (UM). Just to make things interesting, here is a simplified version of the external budget that shows you the percentage each category within the budget has in relation to the total amount. This inevitably shows an ideal proportion of things: the living allowance and mobility allowance are the researcher’s salary, fellows are free to spend it as they choose, and together they amount to 79.36% of the total budget. Research, Training and Network costs (RTN) are 11.38% of the total.

Now, as I’ve mentioned in earlier blog entries, the EU enters a contractual relationship with the EU Host, in my case aforementioned university (UM). Due to the fact that you, as a researcher, will be in the employ of a university, the Host incurs costs. These costs are covered by an “overhead”, referred to above as “Management and Indirect Costs”; this is already in the budget, the EU has practically built the overhead in. Within the external budget, this amounts to 23,400 EUR for the three years. At UM, the overhead costs are determined as 16% of the total budget; they call this a “faculty tax”. Basically, all three expressions (management, overhead, faculty tax) refer to the same thing: costs that a university incurs in order to accommodate you. In my case, the 16% faculty tax actually comes to a higher amount than that which is built into the external budget; it is 40,488.34 EUR. I seem to remember my home university in Hungary always asking for 12% overhead, so I guess 16% is a bit high, but not unheard of…also, I have no idea how much other universities in Western Europe ask for…I’ll just leave it at this; there is no way around it anyhow. Quick lesson here: you may want to take this into consideration when you plan your research project.
Okay, we can now move on to the “internal budget”, which is even more specific to my case. After deducing the 40,488.34 EUR from the budget total, we get 212,563.82 EUR. This will be, for all intents and purposes, our new total budget for the three years. The financial officer broke it down for me quite simply:

These amount to our total 212,563.81 EUR. You may notice right away how the money left to actually spend on the research is incredibly low. And keep in mind, these are all gross amounts; actually, they are all gross gross amounts, so-called “super-gross wages”, containing the employer’s social and health contributions, as well as mine. In order to proceed, let me be specific about what is contained in my MU contract:

Thus, now we have a way to calculate the specific gross amount I will get throughout the grant as salary. We have 3,353 EUR times the 36 months (120,708 EUR), and we have two bonuses, which will be given once a year for three years (total: 804.72 + 834.87). So, if we add these three components of the salary together, we get 122,347.59 EUR. This is my gross total salary for the three years, but as the financial officer disclosed, the internal budget for my salary is 212,563.81 EUR (i.e.: the super-gross wage). Hence, if I want to know what the employer contributions are, I will have to subtract my gross salary from the super-gross wage, and if I do that, I get: 90,216.22 EUR. Since I have already received my first month’s salary, I know the net amount as well, which will also tell me my social contribution (health stuff will come later, see below). My salary was 2496.24 EUR net for the first month, so for the 36 months, that is:

Again, just for clarity, I’ve added percentages to see the proportion of employer/employee contributions to the super-gross wage, as well as the relationship of the gross and net wage to the super-gross wage. The table is pretty self-explanatory, but something that is not included is the relationship between my gross and net salary: I get 73.45% of my gross salary (which is 42.27% of my super-gross wage).
Now, we haven’t gone into health insurance yet. In the Netherlands, the employee applies for and pays health insurance autonomously; it comes out of your net salary. It is mandatory, even in the months that you are not residing in the EU. I am enrolled in the university plan with the preferred provider (which contract issues a 6.48 EUR discount / month to UM employees). Every month, I pay 123.12 EUR (4,432.32 total for 36 months).
Okay, time to summarize things and juxtapose my reality to the super-impressive budget we started out with. For Research, Training and Network costs (RTN) I am using the same proportion of super-gross-to-gross and gross-to-net as I see in my salary (but I’m just guessing here).

So, what’s the bottom line? I get a salary of 2,496.24 EUR / month and I have a total of 1045.71 EUR to spend on my three-year-long research.
But wait, this is still not the bottom line. Because I am living in the US, I need to enroll in the health insurance plan of the US Host university in order to fulfill my J1 visa requirements. This is mandatory and the rate for “scholars years 26 and above”: 2,664 USD. When taking this on a monthly basis, it comes down to 222 USD, which I will be paying for two years, so that is a total of 5,328 USD. Why don’t we deduce that from my total net salary and then look at what I make again? Assuming today’s conversion rate, it is 4,511.08 EUR, so my total net salary now becomes 85,353.56 EUR, which is 2,370.93 EUR per month. Deducing the Dutch health insurance, too, my final monthly net salary (after deducing US and Dutch mandatory health insurance)  is: 2,247.81 EUR (2,643.50 USD). This, to my standards at least, is a good salary, even if I’m currently paying about 1000 USD in rent. But the grand total of 1045.71 EUR which can be spent on the project I promised to undertake is…to put it diplomatically: bleak.
Ironically, due to the fact that I had been expecting a much larger budget, I had bought my flight ticket to the US through MU from my RTN costs. My return ticket was 670.64 EUR. I had inadvertently spent 64% of my total budget for research before I had even begun my project. Oops. If I’d want to get reimbursed for the visa fees that I had to pay to get my J1 visa (380 USD / 321.84 EUR), I’d almost be at my limit (992.48 EUR). Now I’m thinking, good thing I didn't promise to develop software for and conduct research with eye-tracking hardware, which has prices starting at 2740 EUR per pair of glasses, because then I'd be in big trouble. Oh, wait! I did promise that! So, where do we go from here? Learn the lessons and look at options. Main lesson below, other lessons elsewhere.

Looking back, if I were to give myself one incredibly important piece of advice for writing the proposal, it would be:

This is only relevant to those applicants whose EU Host is in the Netherlands. Dutch authorities have given foreigners an opportunity to, if certain conditions are met, receive 30% of their salary as tax-free allowance. This is a great thing. The university/employer applies for it, you are instructed to provide documents and sign things, but you don't have to do anything autonomously. The tax ruling (more here) only takes effect from next month onward, so I don't actually know how much of an increase this means in funds. Well, I could calculate, but I'm not going to; I'll just wait and see.

Ok, so, having received my October salary, I can now see the final figures and they are very similar, even with the tax ruling. Together with the latter, the salary comes to 2923.49 net, the research costs of course don't change. I won't redo the calculations above because it seems like a waste of time. I will no doubt be investing money into the project from my own salary. As I have learned from various Facebook posts and replies, others actually get similar salaries but retain the RTN costs, around 15-19 thousand. I'm not really sure what is going on, but I've accepted the situation and am moving on. I can't remember a time in my life when I spent so much energy on thinking about money. I've had enough for a while.

These are just a couple of items, just so you know what to expect (not everything may be applicable for you and costs may differ significantly), and yes, many of these can come out of your RTN costs if you have enough in that "bucket" (sorry, keeping everything in its original currency):

Visa fee 160 USD, SEVIS fee 220 USD
Travel to US: plane ticket 670.64 EUR, bus ticket 57 USD
Baggage overweight charge (at airport): 118 EUR
PCR test: 42 EUR
Phone unlock: 14 EUR
Phone and data plan: 170 USD (10 mo.)
First month of US and NL health insurance (above)
First month rent, renter's insurance, utilities, internet (this is ca. 1100 USD for me)
Stuff for semi-furnished apartment: ca. 600 USD total (e.g.: vacuum, mattress, bedding, pot, pan, cutlery, shower curtain, towel, coffee maker)

Warning: if you don't get your first salary in time, you are paying for these out-of-pocket.

I've been a bit bad about updating budget-related information, but following a peak in distress around Sept-Oct, we applied for a SWOL grant (local grant for Dutch universities) and got it! This will supplement our project exactly where we need it: material costs. I am so fortunate and so happy! We can now pay for e.g., software development, eye-tracking hardware, conference fees...wonderful!