Unanticipated Expenses Posted on November 21, 2007 Alan F. Schatzberg (bio) recommends being mindful of an assortment of potential costs.

If somebody’s 100% time on grants at some point a benefit payout will occur and that benefit payout can’t go back to the old grants, so it goes to the last grant so you can be stuck. I think the young investigator or any investigator needs to keep that in mind. You keep it in mind by trying to have some degree of contingency funds from other sources that can be helped. You may hit on your grant as a potential cost even if the grant isn’t over and may be okay to do depending on your university and your budgeting authority.

But, I think the issue is that there are unanticipated expenses that come up regardless and one needs to start to think about unanticipated expenses. I mean this is just another unanticipated expense, but another unanticipated expense is the slow recruitment. You’re paying costs, your fixed cost in the study, you’re not recruiting. Well, if you start the finished to get the money or the funds, particularly if it has some external funding source, you have an unanticipated cost. You have a cost over. So, in general I think one has to kind — in the planning figure that there are gonna be unanticipated costs. That’s just the way they are. And so, it’s important for faculty, young faculty to start to think about how they might handle it. Now, they may handle it by trying to raise money from philanthropy. They may try and handle it by raising some foundation money or other monies that they could use. They may handle it by talking to their department chair or the division chief as to helping out. And so, hopefully, they work out some way of dealing with it, but you can have unanticipated costs and retirement payout, vacation payouts, at the termination of people’s careers is one that people don’t think about.

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