People still need to eat, and buy clothes and gas and a dozen other things that don’t conveniently show up the first of the month. That first week, do you go out to dinner, or is a lavish expense like that going to put you in the hole the last week? Planning out your spending 30 days in advance is a lot harder than planning it out 14 or 7 days in advance.
this is basically my thought. having to plan and forecast, for those who find it harder to do so naturally, and who don’t earn very much (I think this is the big issue that may have gone overlooked - my focus was more on people living paycheck-to-paycheck instead of those who live comfortably on their pay) creates another opportunity to miss a bill or miscalculate how much money you’ll have leftover at a certain point, etc.
as for those workers who go and piss their paycheck away once they get it, i’d also think the inherent discipline in paying your bills, and only having the means to do so once every 30 days, soon after you get paid would alleviate this.
but thanks, everyone else, for thinking i’m next up for a spot in the looney bin.
no, but to me, that’s what makes it easier. you get your pay. you pay your recurring, known bills, you have whatever’s left over. then you plan accordingly for the next 4 weeks.
Most of the comments address the relative merits of bi-weekly vs. monthly paychecks.
But the OP isn’t simply proposing that the second is better than the first - if that were the debate, the title would be “Switching to monthly paychecks - good idea?” Instead, he’s suggesting this should be enacted by law - do this or go to jail.
Is it not obvious that forcing something like on an unwilling public is inherently a bad idea? And thus requires overwhelming evidence that failure to do so has dire consequences?
Whence the enthusiasm for cramming half-baked ideas down everyone’s throat? Surely we can agree that there’s a host of things - some of them obviously good, like brushing your teeth - that should not be mandated by law.
No, i’m not. I’m setting the conditions - assuming that the regime exits - for the sake of answering your first question.
I disagree that it’s the epitome of babysitting, I think timing people’s paychecks by law is the epitome of babysitting.
Social Security certainly babysits somewhat, but there’s more to it than that, not least being the greater good of helping people put something away for the future so the government isn’t faced with millions of seniors who have NOT done any saving OR paid into a government-mandated saving program, but who end up a burden on the government anyway because we don’t like to leave seniors to starve.
isn’t that exactly what a babysitter does, but with children? i meant the feeding them lest they starve bit, not paying into a retirement fund.
I don’t follow this with what you said earlier. Please clarify your point.
Yes or no. Do you think seniors should be left to starve if they don’t have money for food?
Should they be left in the cold if they don’t have money for shelter?
Please answer these questions yes or no.
But these people have an established problem planning ahead. You’re making the issue more abstract (30 days away) vs immediate (next week). Regardless, the idea is silly on the face of it, not something worthy of consideration.
Heck, I’m reminded of the farm labourers in Of Mice and Men who’d get paid $50 a month, with the implication that many of them went into town that weekend and blew all or most of of it. Lenny and George, though, were saving up to buy a little place where they could live offa the fat of the land.
I think the payday loan places would love it. People would live high for a week or two after getting paid then have to borrow to make it to payday. I you are bad at budgeting getting more money less often would seem to make things worse.
Ekers, Cpomeroy
That’s exactly the behaviour I have witnessed in southern Africa under similar payment schemes.
I prefer getting paid once a month. It’s not like I “budget”:rolleyes:, but this way there are fewer and identical lines on each month’s bank statement. Nice and orderly. One credit for salary, then debits for two bills, rent, ATM, and each credit card. Easy to see if anything is amiss.
Stupid people are stupid. They’ll overspend regardless. I’m always amazed at the folks who make more than me yet haven’t managed to save a dime.
As for the law thing, I think that would be overly intrusive.
It’s only going work on some people who can’t budget well, yet would actually pay all their bills at the beginning of the month, and carefully manage the remainder of the paycheck for the rest of the month. I don’t know anybody like that. I do know people who would waste all of the money at the beginning of the month instead of having to waste it over 2-3 weeks depending on how they get paid. I do know people who will let the money sit in the bank or in their pocket while bills still go unpaid.
It would be better for companies and the government to encourage direct payment methods because the rest of us pay for everybody else when someone defaults. Instead we encourage payday loans so they can default on much larger amounts, and discourage public electronic money so that someone can take a percentage of every dollar we earn if we actually want to use it for something.
Over the years I’ve worked and been paid under fortnightly, bi-monthly, and monthly systems, and other that the somewhat painful transition once onto a monthly system from a shorter one it all seems much of a muchness to me.
That said, making mortgage payments weekly or fortnightly would reduce the total interest paid overall would it not? (It does in my case, but it would depend on how the on-going debt / interest was calculated…)
At the same time the only monthly bills I pay manually are the credit card (used as much as possible an then paid off in full every month) and a bus-pass. Everything else is set up as direct debit/credit… and I cannot recall the last time I wrote a cheque rather than using electronic / internet banking.
Off-topic – For some reason the combination of your username (and its similarity / connection in my tangled brain with the name “Watkyn Bassett”) along with the way the topic was phrased about"outlawing" bi-weekly paychecks brought to mind a scene from Jeeves and Wooster with the world-be dictator Roderick Spode holding forth on how when he ruled the UK there would be an “immediate ban on the import of all foreign root vegetables” and the “compulsory, scientific measurement of all adult male knees”. 
Free mouseketeer checking in (I have my ears on and everything).
Sometimes the world doesn’t work out the way you want it to. But that’s OK–when adults choose to enter into transactions with other adults where no undue force is involved, sometimes they reach different results than you would’ve reached if you were entering into the same transaction.
So, a bunch of people have decided that they will pay (or get paid) twice instead of once a month. They seem happy with the arrangement. There’s no undue force involved. Therefore, this seems like an excellent opportunity for you to STFU and GTFO.
(By the way, I used to be paid twice a month, and now a I get paid once a month. I haven’t noticed any change in my life because of it. However, I get paid a lot more than the typical person that liberals think need taking care of, so I guess I’m off your radar screen.)
Okay.
It’s ridiculous.
If people are paid biweekly, they’ll budget biweekly. If they’re paid monthly, they’ll budget monthly.
If people are bad with their money they will continue to be bad with it no matter what the pay period is.
I’m paid biweekly and much prefer it that way. I’m not a self-described Richie Rich like some people claim to be, and have to budget my money, but I see no advantage whatsoever to being paid monthly instead of biweekly and I do not for an instant believe it would help anyone.
I get paid monthly. It’s not bad, you learn to live with it. When I was first digging my way out of debt and budgeting every penny, the drawback was that if something unexpected came along, I was SOL, because everything was predicated on that one monthly check.
I am confused as anyone on Rumor_Watkins thinking on this but let’s play along. I don’t think the issue was ever really one of getting paid on any particular cycle but that is what he gravitated to for reasons unknown to everyone but him. I think this is one of those fallacies that leads people to latch onto a solution without looking at the real problem in detail (if any). You see this in real life all the time. People move towards a proposed solution, try to force it to work, and forget what they were trying to solve in the first place.
In this case, I think the imagined issue was that some people have trouble with budgeting but have no other problems that go along with that. The proposed solution of paying once a month and presumably billing for everything once a month might take care of that problem. That solution is FUBAR almost unanimously for reasons that are instantly obvious.
Let’s say that you really did want to prevent anyone from getting into obligations that they cannot afford which is a larger goal but not mentioned in the OP. A good way to do that would to pay people daily and bill them for everything including services, house payments, and car payments daily. If you can’t pay, things get shut off until you can pay. We have the technology to do it. All payments and debits would be electronically made and everything you spent that day would be taken from it same day including cable, phone, and everything else. Implemented properly, no one will be in over their head anymore and will start each day fresh. Who’s with me? Granted, it is a stupid idea but at least it would have some strong benefits to individuals.