An unemployed grad student...

[Posteritatis]

1. Highly competent grad students often get quite a bit of funding in their doctoral programs

I have several friends with PhDs who paid somewhere between a fraction and none of their class expenses over the course of their programs through scholarships or departmental funding rather than loans, and who got additional money on the side at points through TAing or the like. I wasn't exactly living the high life during my MA, but my experience was broadly similar - I watched my expenses closely and finished the degree with about as much in my bank account as I had when I started. (A big chunk of that was probably not owning a car, but still.)

Someone in a doctoral program having some discretionary money from some point in the past, or from occasionally doing stuff on campus, is one of those things that just can't surprise me, especially if the student is as capable as everyone was saying this guy was. He was apparently on top of things during his undergraduate work as well, so that leaves me doubly unsurprised if he didn't actually have to pay much of anything for his doctoral work.