Here in the US at my professional job I get paid twice a month, which seems to be pretty standard.
Back in South Africa for the same job I was paid once a month, which seemed pretty standard there (in fact, i hadn’t heard of anyone in a professional job being paid differently). I am not sure what the issue is, it is the same amount of money either way. The only potential problem is if you have no common sense and blow it all on vodka in the first few days, but I’m not like that!
Just to toss in another range of factors: as a teacher, I am salaried and get paid 11 times a year. Some will get paid 12 times, some 10…depends on your school district and how they set up their payroll. You learn to adjust. You save during the year so you have money in the months you don’t get paid. But my gross income doesn’t include my health benefits, which are excellent, retirement contributions by my employer, which are also excellent, and things like that.
Nearly All rents (except flop houses) in the US are monthly, as are nearly all mortgages, although there are some where you pay twice a month. Here in the northeast US you have to budget for heating bills, which are sent whenever the truck comes to fill your tank with fuel oil. You can go for 6 months in winter without a fill up then get a $300 or more bill each month for the winter.
The American answer to this appears to be the credit card. Unless you are already maxed out, which many Americans are. 
Usually there’s two or three weeks of grace period between the day the bill is issued and the day the bill is due, so I can just pay them all at the same time regardless of actual due date. If not, in many cases the bill-issuing company will be happy to reschedule your billing cycle to whatever part of the month suits your pay cycle. I’ve moved my credit card due date several times as I went through different pay schemes.
JRB
I’ll be happy to trade all my $US for your Euros one-for-one! When people talk about how much they make, it’s annual gross or sometimes it gross hourly rate. To talk about net wouldn’t make a lot of sense since there are too many things that can be taken out of your check, some of it gone forever and some of it still yours (like 401k, flex benefits, deferred comp).
That sounds like living paycheck to paycheck to me. Not living paycheck to paycheck means having money on hand to cover at least a month or two’s expenses. And in that case, it really doesn’t matter what day of the month you’re payed on.
My wife is a public school teacher, and she’s paid every four weeks: 13 paychecks per year. I’ve never seen this scheme anywhere else.
Since she has several months off during the year, she also has the option of only being paid during the time that she’s working (bigger checks, of course, to add up to the same annual pay). This would be attractive, I assume, to someone who found other work during the school breaks.
Until recently I was postdoc’ing at a research university, and got paid on the last day of each month. Graduate students at that same school get paid (RA or TA stipends) on the first of each month. I just started a “professional” job, and we get paid on the 10th and 26th of each month.
It’s not really that hard to budget for these circumstances. All we do is have a slightly generous estimate for each of our bills, and put enough money into a separate bank account to cover them. Odd 2 monthly and 3 monthly bills are all taken care of.
If money is tight and you are concerned about your power bill, then have a look at your bill to see how much you are charged per unit, then monitor your power useage by checking the meter every week or so. That way you don’t have any surprises and if a big power bill is coming you will have had some time to prepare for it.
This sort of thing may vary from industry to industry, and from sector to sector (public vs private). I’ve never worked at a company where everyone didn’t get paid on the same schedule. There was never a difference between managers and line employees. In my case, I’ve had jobs where I was paid semi-monthly, biweekly, and weekly.
I think monthly checks are rare in the private sector. But when I was a TA in grad school, I was paid monthly, which makes it seem like it might be more common in the public sector.
To the OP, if someone says they “bring home” $xxxx then they’re usually talking about their net.
The first part has been answered. The second part: I am currently paid every two weeks. Before that I was paid twice a month.
The bigger problem is that since both my fiancee and I are employed on a casual basis, our income varies from week to week. When we have a good week (as we did this week), and know next week is going to be bad (as next week is- I only have 8 hours and my request to transfer to a different department with more work was met with a “Yes Please! We need your help!” from the department I want transfer to, and a “Too busy to train you mumble mumble “Other department stealing our staff” mumble mumble and we can’t guarantee as many hours next week” from the department I currently work in), then we make sure there’s more than enough set aside to cover bills and food and so on for the next week or so… it all evens out over the course of a month, but it doesn’t leave much for luxuries, I can tell you.
If I knew that every week/fortnight/month I would get a certain amount of cash- and it would always be at least that amount, and never any less, I could probably budget with no problems and be happy- well, happier than I am now.
Alas, in the six years I’ve been in Australia I’ve never even come close to a permament full-time job, but that’s for a different thread as well- lest I turn this thread into “Why Martini Enfield never has any money and is miserable as a result”… 
Oh, and when it comes to unpredictable bills like the power bill - often you can set up a plan with the power company so you pay the same amount every month, and at the end of the year you may have a credit or a debit that they just add into next year’s payment. I’ve just switched to that, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be paying a flat $200 a month.
I get paid biweekly. In the past I’ve worked one job where I was paid twice a month, but never weekly or monthly.
For the record, my employer pays hourly employees weekly and exempt employers semi-monthly (2X per month).
I wish! I only bring home $xxx.
Yeah, that makes things a bit more difficult.
I found this switch, which occured last time I changed jobs, to be huge.
In both instances, I budget 2 paychecks per month. However, when paid every two weeks, during two months out of the year, you get a month with 3 paychecks, or as I liked to call it, “free money”, i.e. incoming cash not budgeted. Surprisingly, my home and/or my car seem to know which months are “free money” months and break down.
104 times a year would be semi-weekly. Biweekly unambiguously means every two weeks.
Despite assertions here to the contrary, it is inaccurate to say categorically that managers et. al. usually get paid monthly in the US (or Canada, for that matter). As others have noted, pay periods vary by company, and it is incredibly rare for different levels of salaried employees to be paid at different intervals within the same company. Most places I’ve worked have semi-monthly or biweekly paydays, but some (including my current company) pay monthly.
Well, there is an ambiguity in the usage of “bi-”, especially with “bi-monthly”. It doesn’t matter so much with bi-weekly, because it’s not all that common for events to take place twice each week. However, I just find it odd that there’s a perfectly good English word for the concept, “fortnightly”, which is hardly ever used in the US.
Seems fairly simple to me. biweekly is 26 times a year (sometimes 27). If you wanted to get paid 104 times a year, you would be paid semi-weekly. I get paid twice a month, or semi-monthly.
Just to add a bit of the Canadian perspective here, usually you can tell by context if someone is talking about their gross of net wage. If someone says “I make X a year” that’s almost always gross. If someone says “I take home X a month/every two weeks” that’s usually net. In Canada, depending on how high your wage is, I’d say that take home is anywhere between 92% (part-time minimum wage) and 55% (top bracket)
And it’s interesting to see how many places have monthly pay periods. In my province, it’s actually the law to pay at least semimonthy. Biweekly is pretty standard and semi-monthly is more common in smaller companies. Weekly seems to be fairly rare, I’ve seen more people paid daily than weekly. Never seen a company that paid people at different times, except for one where the owner got paid semi-yearly instead of biweekly.
There is no ambiguity with respect to “bi-monthly” except as people use it incorrectly. If you’re paid twice a month, it’s semi-monthly, not bi-monthly.
And, lest you think I’m just being North American-centric, I was born and started school in the UK; I’m just pointing out that it’s incorrect to suggest that biweekly or bimonthly are at all ambiguous.