How are you going to have every bill due on the 7th?
Start with the processing centers and post office having to do a month’s work in one week and then have nothing (or drastically less) to do the other three weeks.
Then there are bills that are not on a fixed schedule - gas, food, clothes, books, etc.
If you’re bad at budgeting then instead of running out of money for these items 4 days before your next paycheck, you’d be running out of money for these items 10 days before your next paycheck.
You’d get a lot of support from the payday loan people for a plan like this.
Horrible idea. A bad solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. People can either manage their finances, or they can’t. Either way, there is no reason to pass a law requiring such nonsense, much less expend a single taxpayer dollar to enforce it.
If (some) people could budget even weekly paychecks properly, there wouldn’t be such a plethora of payday loanshark places. I could handle it OK, but I can imagine there still would be months where the last few days would be sucky.
Is this true? All my jobs have been pair weekly (blue collar or not) or monthly.
You can change the due date on most of your bills upon request. Credit card bills, car loans, house payments, power bill. You don’t have to pay all your bills at the first of the month. People don’t pay all their bills with the first pay check and then blow the second one that month. They aren’t “improperly” spending the “middle” pay check as you seem to believe. We just change due dates to match cash flow, at least I do.
Many places that pay by the month allow a draw of a certain amount half way through, effectively making the payment bi-weekly anyway.
Set aside what the OP’s idea will do to/for the individual, what do you think the overall effect on the economy would be if everyone got paid at the same time? I know people in the restuarant business that notice a real drop in business toward the end of the month. Pensioners, retirees and others on monthly payments run out of money or at least tighten up their spending toward the end of the month. Grocery stores and all other retail outlets will be forced into the same boom and bust monthly cycle.
It just seems intuitive to me that a more regular flow of money would be more desirable than creating peaks and valleys of spending.
This idea just seems like an oh-so-well-meaning attempt to control the behavior of others. For their own good, of course.
Wow. Talk about babysitting…
Well, hurrah for you. You are a paragon of fiscal responsibility.
Unfortunately, I have had to deal with MANY people who are not. They lack fiscal discipline, is their main problem, and slowly snoball their way into financial ruin. My thought was that by forcibly syncing up paychecks to bills via a once-a-month (obviously pie in the sky plan, more thought experiment) it would help these people handle their money issues.
I put “imporperly” in quotes for precisely that reason - not that they’re spending the money on something that I deem unworthy, rather that they’re spending that money on things without properly accounting for bills that will arise in the near future.
I would agree that weekly paychecks are better, unfortunately businesses don’t like them much. I was just thinking that, given that restriction, perhaps monthly paychecks would be better off than bi-weekly?
I mean, clearly I am wrong in that thought as many have pointed out. It was just a thought though.
Do you have a problem with social security? That’s the epitome of babysitting.
No, babysitters are shit out of luck, except for the first weekend of the month when everyone tries to go out for a movie on the same night, then babysitters can name their own price.
My biggest problem with this is simply that it’s my money, and I like having it as close to when I earned it as possible. I get paid bi-weekly, and I plan for 2 pay-checks a month, and I understand why very large company like the one I work for isn’t willing to do weekly checks. But back in college and high school, I got paid weekly, and it was even better. Hell, if I could, I’d want to get paid daily.
Consider that the company having that money longer is essentially an interest-free loan from their employees. I’d rather have that money sooner, even if all I’m going to do is stick it in a low-yield savings account for a week or two until my bills are due. Its my money, it should be working for me.
Even worse, consider a situation where you are out of work for some time, as many people are right now, and they finally find a job, but get hired right around paydate from this law. Now this person is working, but he has to wait 4-5 weeks to get paid, rather than 2-3 weeks, and in that extra time, bills are adding up, interest is getting charged, and it just screws him even more. At the very least, such a proposed law probably needs exceptions for new hires.
And, of course, I still don’t see how it forces people to budget better. People either can budget, or they can’t. If anything, getting a larger sum of money at a time encourages people to spend it frivilously. Rather than spending time and money trying to fix this problem so inelegantly, I’d rather that time and money be spent on educating people how to budget appropriately.
I’ve worked at a company that did monthly paychecks.
For a 2 income household, it worked well. My SO was paid bi-weekly, and his paychecks covered lots of the day to day bills that come up. My once a month check went mostly to paying rent.
But for my single co-workers, once a month sucked. The first 3 months or so on the job were very painful. “Dear landlord - please allow 4-6 weeks handling time before my first paycheck comes in.”
And as others have mentioned, it would totally screw over those of us who are paid bi-weekly, but budget as if we get paid semi-monthly.
Hell, I’d like to go the other way, and have my biweekly paycheck divided into 20,160 equal parts that would be deposited into my account at 1-minute intervals around the clock, essentially letting my income arrive like a steady fluid flow, rather than in big lumps.
You really think that people who get behind with bills spread throughout the month and two paychecks are going to be right on top of bills all together and one paycheck? Don’t you think that the stack of bills might overwhelm them, and instead of choosing which to pay they pay none?
I also agree with jonesj2205 that this would screw up those who send bills and receive payments, and also the postal system, which would get flooded with bills and payments in a short time period. As a former letter carrier I object to this idea. Not everyone does paperless billing and on-line payments yet.
When I worked for AT&T we got paid once a month - but we got two advances on our salary during the month, so it was effectively every 10 days. But all raises went to the end of the month check unless you redid your paperwork. Dumbest idea I ever saw.
Until now.
I don’t have any problem with being paid bi-weekly. I’m not and never was living paycheck to paycheck so I don’t have to “balance” my checkbook.
But I wouldn’t mind forcing bill due dates to be the same day every month. As it is I have to pay my bills at least bi-weekly, usually every week, because each one of my bills is due on a different day of the month. But I’m not arsed enough about the inconvenience to propose legislation. Just a bit of envy for those who are lucky enough to be able to do bills once a month.
I agree with everyone else, that budgeting failures are based more on the person doing the budgeting rather than when they actually get the money. I’m wondering if there is any evidence at all that not paying bills is such a big problem or that if it is a problem, it’s one that can be solved by timing paydays. Surely most people who don’t pay bills with any regularity are doing so because their income/expenditure gap is too tight, and when they have an unexpected bill come up, something else gets dropped instead.
But, if you want to make a over-reaching, ham handed solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist, why not just let the billing parties charge their monthly bills to the employers? If the only goal is making sure people pay their bills on time, why not just cut out the ‘supposed’ failure point? Mandatory monthly paychecks sounds like a loan shark’s, excuse me, a payday lender’s, wet dream.
In an economically ideal state for the employees, they should just have the money they earn each day direct deposited into their account as they leave the office. Better to earn interest in my account rather than my employers, I already did those hours of work.
Why do those of us who know how to take care of our money have to get fucked because some people can’t? You know what? YOU’LL NEVER FIX IT LIKE THIS. The only way to fix a societal ill like this is education. Start giving out free finance classes, and economics classes. I know everybody on the Dope thinks you should automatically know how to balance a checkbook and budget (it’s easy!) and stuff like that. You’ll still get people screwing up, but it will help.
I would like to see a cite for that last statement. Because if it’s not correct, then you are attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
What a staggeringly stupid, ill-conceived idea. It is a fine illustration of why the economically illiterate statist wing of the Left constantly fails.
Having seen monthly pay systems in SSAf with some Cos, the effect I saw was that the indisciplined among the labourers tended to piss away a larger amount of money quickly (on illegal booze), becoming prey later to loan-sharks to survive the month. God knows their families suffered.
Anamika is quite right as to solution.
I got paid monthly at my last job. It sucked for the first few weeks, since I had to go nearly a month without getting paid, but after that, I loved it; I’d pay all of my bills on the first or second of each month and forget about it until next payday. The funds were available in my checking account via direct deposit at 11PM the last day of the month, no matter what day it was.
I get paid semi-monthly now, and so I sit down to pay bills twice as often. Further complicating things is that the direct deposit goes through on the penultimate business evening of the pay period - meaning that if the 15th falls on a Monday, the funds are available the previous Friday night. This can make planning for small-but-inconsequential purchases a pain, and I have to set reminders to myself to pay certain bills on certain days.
I absolutely hated being paid bi-weekly, and I don’t understand why anybody would prefer that system. It’s more work all around - from both a corporate payroll and a personal budgeting perspective.
We’re talking, what, five or seven monthly bills, which tend to be low weight items, that will generally be dropped at the box or a post office, and auto-sorted/delivered to the creditors, which tend to be large operations with their own in-house auto-sorting systems? And we’re only talking about those households that haven’t accepted the glorious future and gone paperless?
Frankly, I’m not seeing the logistical problem for USPS. If they can handle April the 15th, they should be handle Whatever the 1st.