How much do you cut on calories ? And he is a legit seller , don ' t worry . <| sep |> In reality , if you end up wasting money then maybe you didn ' t really need it . no matter how good grant reviewers are , they aren ' t going to always be able to allot out perfect increments of money . There ' s always going to be random amounts of excess funds . Consider it change . it happens whether or not a lab , needs , it . As an example , consider a homeless man buying a burger at mcdonalds and a banker at a high end restaurant . In both situations , the bills won ' t be perfect round even numbers . Both , regardless of how much money they needed or had , will end up with nearly meaningless amounts of coins . a quarter , for example , is basically as useless to the banker as the hobo . especially if that quarter had an expiration date . a hobo might want to save his quarters to get something meaningful , but if you forced him to use his quarter within 5 minutes , he ' d just be forced to throw it away or buy a stick of gum . Buying lab equipment with tail funds is the equivalent of buying a stick of bubble gum with a quarter . The reality is that sometimes , the , change , leftover on an expiring grant is too small to do anything meaningful with except buy lab equipment . 500 dollars , for instance , won ' t get you the postdoc or technician that you need . But it can be used to buy a random machine that is prone to breaking . Or a few new pipettes . It ' s the equivalent of using an extra quarter . That left over quarter isn ' t indicative of anything profound . it happens whether or not the grant amount of worth the science it funded .