Good morning Dinks. Think about your monthly budget. We’ll come back to it in a minute. After the passing of Fast and Furious star Paul Walker I decided to re-watch all the movies in one sitting, that’s six all together. There is one movie; I think it’s the first one, where Vin Diesel says “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” For those of you who haven’t seen the Fast and Furious movies, they are about street racers who race quarter miles for money and pink slips. On a little side note I really love the second movie, but the fifth and sixth are also amazing.
This quote got me thinking…how do I live my life? I guess I would say that I live my life two weeks at a time. I know that some people budget on a monthly basis, but not in my house. My boyfriend Nick and I live on a biweekly budget. We are lucky that our pay cycles are exactly the same so every two weeks we get two payroll deposits into our bank account. This makes our biweekly budget very easy to manage.
4 really good reasons why I don’t use a monthly budget
1. Micro is always easier than macro managing. A monthly budget is just too long term to manage money. I like to see things in the smaller picture when it comes to money. Actually I live in the short term in my life in general. I am not a long term goals kind of girl. I check my bank account daily and I divide my biweekly budget in half to control my weekly spending.
2. We budget with our pay checks. It easy to manage your expenses when they coincide with your income. I love this about our biweekly budget. We buy our groceries weekly, we pay our rent biweekly and we take out personal spending cash biweekly. We control our money with our pay frequency and it works out perfectly.
3. More payments helps save on interest. Making biweekly payments on our credit cards helps pay off the balance faster which helps us save money on interest charges. We don’t usually carry a balance on our credit cards, but if we do making biweekly payments instead of monthly payments helps us save on interest charges. Making biweekly payments also keeps us on top of our bills; our payments are never late because we pay them every two weeks.
4. It’s easier to make smaller bill payments. This is a mistake I used to make all the time when I was living in debt. I would try to pay all my monthly bills in one lump sum payment and it emptied my bank account. Then I would end up using my credit again to live until my next paycheck because I spent all my money on paying bills. I don’t make this money management mistake any more. Now I pay my bills twice a month. I take all my bills, split them in half and make biweekly payments. My bills are still paid on time and I am not broke three days after I get paid.
Photo by MarioP
My wife and I do something similar…except is more of a true bi-monthly cycle than 2 weeks as I get paid on the 15th and the 31st (or as close to those dates as possible). We do review our budget on a weekly basis within those bi-monthly periods though.
I budget more on the macro sense because I’m more interested in the big picture of how much I’m spending and where, rather than actually managing every dollar in and out. If you’re looking to keep close track of your spending, syncing your budget with your pay cycle is a really great idea.
It’s always interesting to see different perspectives. We budget on a monthly basis. We used to get paid on alternate weeks from each other so we fell into the habit and haven’t changed it, now that we are paid on the same cycle. We pay off our credit cards as we go (usually at the end of each week). Now that we are making accelerated biweekly mortgage payments though, we may need to review our budgeting technique.
I tend to do the same thing.
@Brock – I absolutely agree that micro managing money makes life a lot easier. I worked at a place where I was paid on the 1st and 15th and it still worked out OK.
@First Million – Syncing with our pay is a great way to keep track of everything. Are you using a budget software to manage the ins and outs or doing it manually?
@Daisy – It’s really about whatever works. When we were younger we tried a monthly budget but it was hard to manage money over a long period of time. Now we micro manage and we watch each other’s spending so we don’t fall back into old bad habits.
@James – It’s working out for us. Glad to see other couples are doing it too.
Pingback:I wish I had a financial advisor as a kid | DINKS Finance