How to budget when you get paid weekly
Treat each of the 52 cheques as a deposit toward bills rather than as money to live on, because one week of pay is usually smaller than the bill it has to cover. Rent of $1,450 is $17,400 a year, which is $334.62 held back weekly. Four months in every year contain five paydays instead of four, and those fifth ones are where the room is.
One week of pay is smaller than most bills
This is the schedule where the mismatch is hardest to ignore. Nothing large can be paid out of the cheque sitting in front of you, so every big obligation depends on money you decided not to touch in earlier weeks.
That makes holding back the whole skill. Spending down to zero each week feels sustainable for three weeks and then meets a bill that four weeks were supposed to build.
What a weekly share looks like
Multiply a bill by twelve and divide by 52. Rent at $1,450 becomes $334.62 held every week. A $128 insurance premium becomes $29.54. A $60 phone bill becomes $13.85.
Those are small enough to disappear if they stay in a current account, which is the argument for keeping them somewhere they are visibly claimed — an envelope, a pot, a separate balance. The number matters less than whether it is still there in week four.
Four months a year have five paydays
Fifty-two weeks across twelve months is 4.33 paydays a month, so eight months give you four and four months give you five. Which months those are moves every year with the calendar.
If bills are funded weekly, the fifth cheque in those months is unclaimed by construction. Nothing has to be decided in advance for it to appear; it appears because the year has four more weeks in it than twelve times four.
Weekly pay and monthly thinking
The instinct is to convert weekly pay into a monthly figure and budget that. It multiplies badly: weekly pay times four understates the year by four cheques, and times 4.33 produces a number that never actually arrives on any date.
Working in weeks the whole way through avoids both. The cheque is weekly, the share held back is weekly, and what is left is what this week has to work with.
Written by Larder, makers of an envelope budgeting app for iPhone. Last reviewed .