I have two pensions. My State pension is paid weekly, and my NHS pension is paid at the end of the month.
My wife’s State pension is paid every four weeks, and her NHS pension is paid in the middle of the month.
All this makes it hard to keep track. It’s fortunate that our income exceeds our expenditure.
Getting paid monthly gives you belated access to your money compared to biweekly or semi monthly because you have to wait 2 weeks longer to get possession.
I worked at a place that had temp workers (paid weekly) who couldn’t afford to hire on full time for higher pay because we only paid monthly, and they didn’t have a cushion to get them through the month.
I’ve experienced every scheme from weekly pay to monthly, and everything in between. The monthly was easy for me because I didn’t have to constantly check my balance - I always knew exactly where I stood. The first paycheck was rough because I started the week before payday in a long month so it was nearly six weeks before I saw a paycheck. But once I eked my way through that I was fine.
To my surprise I actually disliked the constant drip-feed of weekly pay. It was just a nightmare trying to keep my balance straight. I had to sit down and do the math every weekend. And that was back when writing checks sometimes meant 3-4 days until they processed, and the same with making deposits. It was nuts.
Bi-weekly felt like getting a bonus a couple of times per year, and that’s how I budgeted it. The extra checks either went to necessary large purchases or savings.
Huh. We just had an adjusted paycheck (down) in that one year, so we had the same annual salary. That was annoying, but they did pay the annual salary they had promised me.
I don’t know if it came yesterday or will come in 6 days. When it was semi-monthly, it was like clockwork on the 15th and last days of the month.
Huh, I’m generally more aware of what day of the week it is than what day of the month it is.
Anyway, on the payment side, bimonthly probably makes for sense for salaried workers, and biweekly for hourly ones. On the spending side, which is more convenient depends on whether you have more stress around monthly payments, like rent, or weekly expenses, like food. 
Probably true for most folks. Especially those who have a typical weekday job with weekends off. Or at least the same workdays every week even if not the most common M-F.
But if today is e.g. Wed, should I expect to be paid on Friday in 2 days, or on Friday in 9 days? It’s the on-again-off-again cadence of bi-weekly pay that leads to not knowing whether payday is soon or just happened.
And of course all this matters far more the closer your income is to your outgo, and the less assets you have. Your typical upper middle class person living well within their means only needs a rather vague notion of what money is coming in and and going out when. It all adds up to a wash to small gain over 30ish days and other than that “close enough good enough” is all they need think of it.
Obviously a heck of a lot of Americans live very much paycheck to paycheck, almost regardless of the size of their W2. For them, getting confused on a random Wed about whether payday is 2 days in the future or was 5 days in the past can lead to a very unpleasant next week.
I’m tickled punk you’re using fortnight here. I can’t help but picture you as a salaried employee at an 18th century printer or something. That’s awesome.
I’ve only had bi-weekly or weekly pay with my employers. The weekly pay came from temp agencies and bi-weekly from my more stable employment stints. I prefer bi-weekly but I think I could live with monthly as well.
In most countries’ English dialects fortnight and fortnightly are perfectly common terms. Not in the US though.
It took me a while after I immigrated to realize that Americans didn’t know what that meant. We still get expats from UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, that use fortnightly to describe the frequency of meetings before realizing that Americans don’t use it. The last time it happened in our office was just a few weeks ago, by an Irish colleague here on a year long traineeship, a youngish person.
Yeah. It’s not at all weird that I use ‘fortnight’. What’s weird is that Americans don’t.
Bi-weekly could mean twice a week, or every two weeks. Fortnightly eliminates the ambiguity.
My last job was still like that. Upstairs, staff paid monthly, Downstairs, on the factory floor, workers paid fortnightly.
Management would have liked to move to monthly for all workers, but … In the lunch room, a small amount of free fruit, because even paid fortnightly, some of the factory workers weren’t always in control of finances enough to pay for food at the end of the fortnight. And there had been scurvy.
I wish the university I work at would switch us - but that would have to be a switch made at all the public universities in the state so there’s probably politics I’m not aware of. I’m faculty as a librarian at MPOW and we’re paid monthly on the last day of the month.
My job before this was also faculty, tenure-track equivalent, and paid monthly. I know the one before that - my first librarian job -was professional staff and paid 2x a month, on the 15th and last day. Pre-library jobs were all every other week.
Interesting. I’m also at a public university (Ball State in Indiana), and as far as I know, our change was made independently of others in the state. They did say, at the time of the change, that several other universities “have recently been moving” to a biweekly schedule, but I didn’t get the sense that there was any requirement that we all do so. Just that they had decided it was preferable.
I must say, in reply to Mighty_Mouse, that I’m a little surprised to hear about how many Americans don’t know what “fortnight” means. Not doubting you, but it does surprise me. I would have thought that even though it’s not a word that we use regularly, most of us at least understand what it means. Sort of like how when we hear the word “lorry,” most of us know it refers to what we call a “truck.” But it may be that I’m being too optimistic about my countrymen’s level of knowledge.
When I was paid fortnightly, in cash, that was for hours worked. There was never a “third week with no cheque” That would have lead to a riot and walkout, but it never would have made it into award conditions anyway.
Later on, (different job), I was employed on a nominal annual salary, paid fortnightly, but even that was actually paid on (nominal) hours worked: on leap years, I got paid an extra day. At the end of the tax year, they totalled up what they had actually paid me, and reported that to the tax office. If that was a little over, or a little under, my nominal annual salary, it was what it was. They could cut or demand extra hours, but they couldn’t not pay because there were “too many paydays in the year”.
I wouldn’t expect to get paid extra for leap years if I was getting paid monthly for a true annual salary: I’d get paid the same for both 28 day and 31 day months. But on a fortnightly direct-deposit, the pay came in every fortnight, and the annual wage was whatever the number of pay days came out at.
Actually it could not. But plenty of English speakers of whatever flavor don’t know what the words mean and are forced to guess. And yes could guess wrongly.
But bi-whatever means every two whatevers. Without exception. While semi-whatever means twice per whatever (or equivalently once per half-whatever). Without exception.
Yes, as I said in my comment:
Wow! How recently was this?
I once heard of the units for velocity being “furlongs per fortnight”.
The scurvy would have been in the 1990’s, but the fruit lasted into the 2010’s. And by then the company was no longer adding new hires.
I don’t think scurvy is eliminated from modern society. One of the residential colleges here (at Latrobe University) also always free fruit available on the counter for decades, and that scurvy was just because “college food”. They only became aware of the problem because Latrobe University had, at the time, a free dental service for students.
My husband & I both got paid biweekly for years. Then, at one job, he was switched to weekly. Believe it or not, it sent me into a tailspin.
You’d think Latrobe students would get plenty of Vitamin C in the form of banana splits.
(Yes, I know…)