Did you also think hourly pay resulted in a payment every hour?
There was a time during which it was not unheard of for annual salaries to be disbursed once yearly.
Saved the management a Brink’s visit, it did. And did you get wacky things like $2 bills and 50 cent pieces in the envelope?
Apparently, they carried letters of credit, seemed to be like traveler’s checks.
This. I’m becoming involved in legal proceedings to recover three weeks’ pay from an employer who is doing badly. My current employer is much more responsible, but I’ll be a little more circumspect in the future working at start-ups.
I had assumed the two week pay cycle was pretty standard. While starting a job under such circumstances can be tough, I cant imagine being so desperate as to need that paycheck one week sooner (and one week lighter!). I guess I’ve always kept the habit of being one paycheck ahead of my expenses.
My rent is always due the same time every month; therefore at the very least I need to make sure I have the rent before anything else comes along.
I think the better you are able to budget your expenses, the less critical weekly paychecks become.
Unemployed people are generally paid their benefits weekly, probably related to the weekly reporting requirements.
I take it that you’ve never been jobless for a long period. No matter how good you are at budgeting, if you’re out of work for a year and a half (not unheard of) and have long since exhausted your unemployment benefits (and thus are draining or have drained your savings), having to work for three or four weeks before getting that first paycheck is a bitch.
I try to keep one paycheck ahead too, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes your car breaks down. Sometimes your washing machine shits itself, you’ve got to buy a new one, and you’re back at square one. I was once unemployed, and my benefits from the state were $140 a week. I lived on ramen and oatmeal and beans and cornbread most weeks. My utilities were turned off, and though luckily I was able to go pay it that morning with an emergency credit card, not everybody has an emergency credit card. I don’t anymore, because my credit is in the shitter since I couldn’t make any payments until I had found a job. Which I did, and my new employer pays me every week. But. They held my first three paychecks while they were running background checks and drug tests on me. Meanwhile, my unemployment benefits had ended three weeks earlier. I lived on $140 for three weeks before getting paid again. By the third week I was eating white rice I had boiled with a little salt, oatmeal with a little salt, and drinking tap water. You must be very lucky if you can’t imagine needing your paycheck one week sooner, but people live like this all the time. Sure, bad budgeting plays a role sometimes, but it’s not fair to just say that if you’re good at budgeting it’ll be okay. Sometimes there just isn’t enough money and it’s all you can do to keep your head above the water for another week.
Now, suppose you’re a single dad working a miserable construction job. You get paid at the first of the month. You buy groceries and gas so you can get the kids to school and yourself to work, and you pay the sitter, and that’s your whole check. You can’t just not buy groceries, obviously. Kids got to be watched, you’ve got to have gas to get to work. But the final notice for your utilities came and the cutoff day is on the 9th, and you don’t get paid again until the 15th. You’re going to be in the dark for a week, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it. That’s what it is to live paycheck to paycheck. And those are the kind of people who need to be paid weekly.
Living in a non-Euro Zone European country with a currency that isn’t exactly taken everywhere you go abroad, I can tell you that a lot of people do still do that. Exchange at Forex on the way out and then change what little you have left when you come back. I’m going to Italy later this month for a company Kick-Off and I guarantee that half the people will have exchanged Kronor for Euros before they leave.
Letters of Credit used to be the only way to go if you were visiting a foreign country. They were issued by your bank, and they had to be presented to a bank at your destination; that bank would note, on the face of the original letter of credit, the amount you had drawn, the date you withdrew it, an official stamp or seal from the bank dispersing the money and a ton of signatures to authorize the dispersal of funds. I don’t remember if the disbursed funds were in US dollars or the currency of the country you were visiting. I don’t believe the Letter of Credit could be presented to an individual store or company, unless your name was well known and you were making a significant purchase. I remember seeing three of the things at a company I used to work for, many long years ago. They were a sort of pain, according to what I was told. I don’t know if they are still used or not.
By the way, my experience was in a time when credit cards were unheard of; I don’t know if travelers checks were available back then or not. Too many years have come and gone.