Does anyone else hate payday?

[cjt110]

I know it sounds random but I hate it. It gives me anxiety and makes me feel like it's a bloody military manouvere. Moving money to different accounts for things. Remembering if I have used my DD card in the last few days to account for it. Budgeting for the month ahead. And I always fall on my arse a few days before payday.

How do you all manage? I used to be great with finances but then it's all just gone a bit shit.

I taught the kids to budget when they were very young.
On holiday I used to put, say €1000 on the table and say that's our money for the holiday. We need €50 for the taxi back to the airport. They would watch me put that away. I would say'right Jordan, you want to go rock climbing , that's €100. They'd watch me put that to one side. We would carry on and they'd be told, ok,that's our plans and that's what we have left. We only have €150 left for food, ice creams , drinks etc.
They learned not to ask for everything they laid there eyes on!

There was no need to mention my debit and credit card to bail out if an emergency occurred!

I found YNAB too complicated too.

I use a simple spreadsheet. It is dead simple:

A. a total for the income each month
B. a list of my planned monthly outgoings (fuel, power, mobiles, mortgage, TV licence, estimated food bill) and a total of these
C. a list of what I've actually spent that month, which I keep alongside list B.

I can then very easily keep track of exactly where I am by calculating

D. A total for 'bills still to pay' (B-C). and
E. Money left over once all bills are paid (A-C-D).

This sounds complicated, but it's actually unbelievably easy. It's literally a checklist every month. Once you're on top of the basics, you know where you are and can build in complexity e.g. savings each month.

Monzo you can just take out cash from the an atm as usual, and it shows up on the app as a cash withdrawal.

Awesome. Thanks Carjacker. have done the top up and they're sending my card. EEEK!

I use calendarbudget.com/home/ It's completely free to use and there are videos on the site to watch before signing up. It's great because you can see exactly what is in your account every day of the month (provided you update it)

For things like weekly shopping that I budget a set amount for, I put in an entry of eg £80 Projected food shop. For DD's etc you just add them to your account on repeat so they show up every month. You can also reconcile your bank accounts with it by downloading your transactions & applying them too. Once you've done the hard work of inputting your DD's etc it runs itself while you only need to put in your debit card spends, either daily, weekly or whatever suits you.

Have a look and see what you think, it sounds more complicated than it actually is, the videos give a good overview I think.

I'm going to hate payday from next month when I go down to SMP only, but not as much as I'll hate having no payday from January!

It took me a few days to get to grips with YNAB but I was determined to sort myself out and it came so highly recommended. I was up and running with the basics in no time. I input my balance, set up my categories and divid up my cash. You tailor it to your needs, so I had great fun thinking of names for categories, you can call stuff 'Chuffin council tax' and 'Rip off energy costs', it's yours to have fun with, no one else will see it.

As time went on I moved cash around and added, changed and removed categories. Even after a year I'm still playing with it, after laying out £250 for my last pair of glasses I now have a category in 'Budgeting for the future and beyond' for 'Specs' and I add £10 a month so I'm effectively saving for my next pair. I have a set budget for clothes and for beauty stuff and these two are where I've learned that delayed gratification feels so much better than spending hand over fist then not having enough left for things I actually need.

It does look alien at first and it does look complicated but I soon got used to it, and I'm scared of excel. If I can do it anyone can xx

See. This is why I get all anxious and het up.

I take my salary deduct bills and spends and the remainder goes into the joint account. I then move X amount into my bill account. I've just moved 40 into an account for petrol and 50 into my savings. Signed up to a Monza card which needs a £100 top up. And paid a nursery bill of 180.

Explain this fucker to me.

My balance says 367.05 is current. Available is 64.30. It's taken me ages to figure out that I have calculated everything correctly and I haven't "lost" money anywhere.

It does sound complicated cjt. I understand why you feel stressed, I really do! Is the amount you pay on bills pretty standard? Could you set up a transfer for the same amount each month into one account, and just use that? Obviously, this wouldn't work if the amount varied a lot.

I don't know if your bank is the same as mind, but when there is a difference between current and available, it seems to mean that I've already spent the difference, but it's not showing up yet on my statement?

guilty100 Yes it is the same amount each month, give or take but I like the act of actually knowing I have moved it.

See, I don't get that - why not put in a monthly transfer for the day after payday? You still know you've moved it, as you can see it exiting one account and arriving in the other but all you have to do is to log in to check! It would save you time and hassle. Then you only need to pay unusual and irregular invoices and to check the state of your balance. It's much less anxiety-inducing to have it all ticking away like clockwork.

guilty I suppose you are right. Would this be a standing order then?

I suppose I could set one up for things like fuel and savings too?

Well, for me, what worked was automating everything I could. Then I could devote my time to monitoring and checking spend against my spreadsheet. It gave me a much better sense of where I was in the monthly "money cycle" as I could spend my time figuring that out instead of entering numbers and using that stupid card reader machine!

I think if you pay really close attention to your finances for a few months, it kind of gets into a rhythm and you sort of know where you are/should be each week thereafter without needing to check so rigorously. I step up my attentiveness when anything unusual is going on - at the moment I'm having building work done so haemorrhaging cash and checking the account a lot more regularly!

And yes, a standing order I guess? In my bank, it's all under a "move money" tab these days!

I will await my monza card coming. As it stands, I do not need anything. We (my DM and I) may go to ikea at the weekend and I may pay for lunch but am not buying any items.

Is it humanly possible to go to Ikea and not buy any items? I think that might be like one of those truths of physics that is hypothetically but not actually possible...

guilty100 Time will only tell.... We are only going because my Mum wants a rug. I don't want/need anything. Ikea is only 15 minutes up the road from me so we often visit.

I hate payday because as soon as the money is in my account it's gone! Also I get paid every four weeks, so my actual pay day is not a set date (or the last Friday of the month for example) but rolls depending on how long the month is. This means I can't set up DDs/SOs for the day after pay day as that date changes every month and I just have to keep on top of all my money every month ... so instead I have a very simple system - I have 3 accounts:

1. "Paying in" account - any money coming in from work and tax credits, to birthday money and cashback from my health plan

2. "Paying out" account - any money going out for bills, direct debits and standing orders. Council tax, phone, internet, water, gas, electric, credit card, car payments, DDs activities etc. I never use the card for this account as it is not for general spending and I only access it to put money in and then a couple of times throughout the month to make sure everything has been paid and there's been no unauthorised payments/problems.

3. Savings

As soon as I get paid I transfer over a set amount to my bills account, with a bit extra (usually just £20 ish) just in case there's a problem with a payment to act as a buffer. Every 4/5 months if that "bit extra" hasn't been needed, it gets transferred to the savings account.

Then a set amount goes to savings on payday and then at the end of the month if I have any money left over after general spending which rarely happens on my salary then I will add to it just before the next pay day.

Anything left over is for food and general spends - I split the money into 4 and then that's the budget for that week ... since I have shared custody of DD with her dad I make sure that the budget for those two weeks is higher than the weeks it's just me. That's mostly to account for the weekly shop increasing with food etc for DD but also because I'm more likely to have more expenses during DDs weeks from things like dropping her off at swimming class and then sitting with a coffee in the cafe for the hour rather than driving home or sitting out in my car. In weeks without DD I rarely hang out in leisure centre cafes so I don't need to budget for it.

Some seem to have very complicated systems. I don't notice when it's pay day. DH and I both get paid on 28th of each month. All standing orders and direct debits for bills, savings, transfer of each of our personal cash happen on the 1st of the month. Neither of us use cash very much; everything is by debit card, usually contactless or online for things like the weekly shop, cleaner, petrol etc

I honestly think Direct Debits and Contactless have a lot to answer for. far to easy to spend money without realising it - in my case anyway.

I'm surprised by some of the complicated systems too.

I'm not even sure when OH gets paid.. Maybe the 26 or the 1st, I don't really know. My income comes in dribs and drabs over the month, from Amazon and Paypal.
We have a Santander 123 current account, so keep quite a bit of savings in there because the interest rate is good.

Get a monzo card. I have one and it helps me - you load your allowance onto it and don’t touch the main account.

Some seem to have very complicated systems. I don't notice when it's pay day.

I would love to be able to live like that but some of us live pay check to paycheck and need to budget accordingly ... I'd love to just spend and know there's probably money in the account but I can't.

Also some of us have a rolling pay day but set direct debit dates so we have to make sure there is always enough money in the account to pay the bills whether we get paid on the 1st of the month or the 15th. For example all of my bills are set to be paid on or around the 15th of every month ... this month I was paid on the 15th, in July it was the 21st and in March we got paid twice because of the date the pay days fell on ... some months it will look like I have barely enough money for the bills on pay day, other months it looks like I have twice as much as I need ... it just depends on when the money comes in relative to when it goes out and ensuring there isn't a short fall.

Totally agree to the comment above. We live to a budget and have very high childcare costs. 25% of our budget goes on childcare. Another 40% goes on housing costs as we are paying down our mortgage and fixing things in our home. Our food bill is almost 20% of our budget because where we live food is super expensive, even at Aldi. Yes we save a lot. We need to because of the higher costs of living abroad.

When I commented that some seem to have very complicated systems and I don't notice when it's pay day, this doesn't mean I totally spend without thinking what funds are in the bank but that almost everything is automated. Salaries get paid in each month and then the standing orders and direct debits take place. There is very little paid for with cash and expenditure is pretty much the same each month.

I looked back at what we spend on the online shop - we're lazy and don't meal plan but both DH and I add things to the shop if we think of things we need/want but the amount is within £20 the same each month and that includes freezer food, cat stuff, wine and beer, cleaning products, dried goods and tins, toiletries and a good selection of fresh food (top ups are done by whoever remembers on their way home from work as I refuse to food shop at the weekend).