Author Topic: 3 paycheck November  (Read 7142 times)

strider3700

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3 paycheck November
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:30:50 PM »
Now that we're both working again the goal for my wife and I has been to save $2000 per month which is roughly 40%   I just realized that this November I will receive 3 paychecks and my wife will receive 3 paychecks.      A typical payperiod works out to $2500 after tax so the November monthly total is $7500.    40% of that would be 3000.  Instead I'm hoping to save $4000 or 53%. 

It sounds to me like a really large amount saved, but the overall percentage is not that high.   Either way I find that posting things like this tends to force me to do it.  So we'll see.    So far this month $1281 has already been moved to savings. 

Jack

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #1 on: November 06, 2012, 05:55:07 PM »
For a "throw down the gauntlet" post, I'm kind of disappointed... I expected the challenge to be to save 100% of the 3rd paycheck (above and beyond your normal saving), at least.

strider3700

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2012, 07:09:32 PM »
I know.  I'm just having trouble with the numbers.  if I save 4500 that's 60%.  it should be doable.  It however is more then we made in an entire month before taxes just 5 months ago and that's just throwing me for a loop.  Something in my mind just says we can't really save that much and I don't know why.   I have noticed the slushfund account where everything gets deposited before being moved off to savings/investments in nice round numbers has been slowly climbing. 

$1500 in mortgage and property taxes,
$780 in preschool and daycare
$50 in electric
$80 for internet/phone
$40 for water/sewage/garbage.

that should still leave 1550 for food, clothing, gas, gifts, and misc around the house  which is $350 more then I normally budget and we never use the full budget amount.   So even with christmas I should be fine.     

Ok lets try for something way more drastic.  5000 in savings or 66% in the month before christmas.  I jut can't imagine that being possible.



Melissa

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #3 on: November 06, 2012, 07:41:55 PM »
November is a 3 paycheck month for my husband as well.  Even with the holidays coming up we plan on saving 100% of the 3rd paycheck (and that paycheck if larger than usual, due to not having to have items pulled out-insurance, parking, and such)

Jack

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2012, 10:00:55 PM »
My wife found work a little over a month ago too (and about 6 months before that, we had both been out of work). We saved something like 70% in October, and I plan to do better this month. The key for me is to just pretend that we're still unemployed.

(Of course, that's easy for me to say; I spend on housing what you do on daycare.)

happy

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #5 on: November 07, 2012, 02:51:34 AM »
Well,  I've just had 3 pay check October: I just love those months twice a year when I get 3 pay checks!
A big proportion of my saving is going towards paying off my mortgage. The gain for me is that I make fortnightly repayments, but the bank charges me interest monthly. So I get an extra fortnight of repayments and the proportion of saving for the mortgage went up from 38% to 43% on my quick calculations.

I don't save the whole extra paycheck because my  expenses  are not based on a monthly schedule eg food/ petrol etc are paid out weekly. I guess there would be different months where there are 5 Thursdays (the day I take out money for these things), so these would be bad months because I am taking out 5 lots of cash not 4. Others are billed  3 monthly (utilities) or annually. I have very few expenses billed monthly.  Additionally my budget program operates on a fortnightly schedule, so I know how much money I have left over after expenses  every fortnight. if I wish I can calculate expenses monthly, but I don't do the accounting that way. If I wanted to save the whole paycheck I would need to reschedule my budget to base all the figures on 24 payments/year not 26. Can't see the point: the annual savings rate is what it is.

If I wanted to challenge myself with comparing savings rate per month, I would actually look at savings rate per fortnight. But I don't do this because of the fluctuations since I have large expenses eg council rates that come in once a year and so the weekly or monthly figure is meaningless to me. Not sure how it is in US, but here we get discounts if we pay rates and insurance annually compared to monthly.

Secret Stache

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #6 on: November 07, 2012, 06:36:03 AM »
Both my wife and I get paid monthly so nothing really changes for us.  There are those people that complain about it because you have to manage your money to make it a daunting 30 days *wahhh wahhh* but I love it because we can do all of our transactions at once and immediately see our savings rate.

smalllife

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #7 on: November 07, 2012, 06:47:58 AM »
Do you budget bi-weekly?  I'm also confused why this isn't going 100% to savings.

November is a five pay check month for me, but because I budget with four every month it's like getting a bonus.

kdms

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #8 on: November 07, 2012, 07:24:52 AM »
I suspect some of the confusion is coming from the fact that everyone has a different time period for budgeting.  For us, my DH gets paid weekly, but I'm biweekly.  We budget on a weekly basis because the mortgage comes out on a weekly schedule.  We can't 100% save the money from 'extra' pay periods because if we did the mortgage wouldn't get paid and groceries wouldn't be bought (as an example :)).  Ergo, though there's two months a year where I get an 'extra' paycheck, it can't go completely to savings because those 'extra' two paychecks really aren't extra....they just happen to arrive before the first day of a calendar month, and because we don't have two bills going out on the same day in any given month, it really doesn't matter to us.  We just save in smaller increments, on a weekly basis.

I think if you budget on a monthly basis (where a month consists of four weeks), and pay your bills on a monthly basis, it would be entirely possible and a very good idea to treat the third (or fifth) paycheck as a bonus, but any other time period or bill payment schedule, it's just a different deposit date.  Not to say one couldn't save the entire thing with planning!  After all, you get paid for your 52 weeks a year.... 

just my two cents!  :D

BlueBeard

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #9 on: November 07, 2012, 08:17:26 AM »
Love the 3 check months.  We don't include the $$ in our budgets, so we save 100% of them.

ruthiegirl

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #10 on: November 07, 2012, 09:24:49 AM »
When we have these 3 paycheck periods, I take my normal budgeted amount for food and gas and then shuttle the rest to savings.  Our budget is laid out biweekly.  Sometimes there is a bill that needs to get paid that won't wait for the next check, but it is usually not much. 


And yes, it is a colossal chunk of money to send and I always feel weird abut it. 

Not weird, just not normal.  Sending cash to savings right before Black Friday?!?  Impossible!

Mustachian is becoming my new normal. 

strider3700

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #11 on: November 07, 2012, 10:14:08 AM »
Yes the budget scheduling is part of the issue with my math that I didn't think about last night.   

Mortgage actually comes out weekly  but I did the math so in this case it's $1500 in november

preschool is monthly but daycare is days used and we don't go full time.  Once again I've done the math to get the $780

Electric is actually billed by monthly.  So although I'll use roughly $50 in november  I'll be billed for October and November.  At the moment we're on track for that bill to be $96.05 but with a cold snap coming in $100 for the two months is still a reasonable estimate.       So although my budget is correct I'll need to make sure that I have that extra $50 in the account and not sucked away to savings as leftover money.

Internet phone is monthly

water/sewer/garbage  is actually every 4 months.  Once again I've done the math to come up with $40.   That bill shouldn't arrive until January If I remember correctly.

Now here's where a big mistake came in my math.   Food/gas/clothes/household is budgeted bi weekly, with cash coming out on payday.    I missed an entire pay check when adding this up.  I normally take $600 every 2 weeks to cover all of this.   So I missed $600 that I can't skip. 

so really after bills I have $3250 left over making the original 4k goal an actual challenge.   I don't actually get an extra paycheck  I just get my early december grocery money at the very end of november....


 

noob515

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #12 on: November 07, 2012, 11:48:00 AM »
It's a 3 paycheck November for both my husband and I.  But then obviously the first December paycheck isn't until Dec.13th, so I'll have to take a look and see how the bill due dates fall.  The plan is to put at LEAST one of our entire 3rd paychecks towards our debt.  (we are in the "paying down debt before saving for FI" camp, unfortunately). 

Jack

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #13 on: November 07, 2012, 11:55:50 AM »
Are all you folks managing your accounts so tightly that you don't have a few weeks/a month of buffer? Otherwise, I don't understand why it matters whether the paycheck comes on the 1st or the 14th (as long as it comes twice a month).

The plan is to put at LEAST one of our entire 3rd paychecks towards our debt.  (we are in the "paying down debt before saving for FI" camp, unfortunately).

Don't think of it as paying down debt, think of it as investing with a guaranteed return! (I'm currently making 9%, for instance...)

strider3700

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #14 on: November 07, 2012, 12:02:04 PM »
No I actually have to keep $5000 in my checking account just to stop it from costing me a monthly fee (I'd change but my mortgage comes from this account)   I'm entirely ignoring that money as much as possible,  I'm just trying to work out how much of incoming can go to saving and how much is effectively accounted for before I even make it.   

I'd count debt payments as savings as well.  I don't bother to break the principal amount out of my mortgage payments  but do treat extra payments as savings  in my numbers.  Right now my goal is to accumulate cash. 

AJ

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #15 on: November 07, 2012, 05:12:05 PM »
Are all you folks managing your accounts so tightly that you don't have a few weeks/a month of buffer? Otherwise, I don't understand why it matters whether the paycheck comes on the 1st or the 14th (as long as it comes twice a month).

Yep, we budget that tightly :) In fact, I keep a cheat sheet of which days of the month my auto bills come out and only leave enough in checking for those bills that will pull before my next paycheck, plus as small a buffer as I can stomach. Everything else gets dumped into savings, and when that hits a threshold, investments. If my checking had an overdraft LOC attached (like every other bank I've had except my current one), I wouldn't leave any buffer at all. No reason to leave extra funds sitting there earning nothing.

But then, I work on a computer with internet access all day. I check all my accounts compulsively at least once a weekday. If I checked them less often, I would keep a looser reign on it.

kdms

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #16 on: November 08, 2012, 06:58:04 AM »
Are all you folks managing your accounts so tightly that you don't have a few weeks/a month of buffer? Otherwise, I don't understand why it matters whether the paycheck comes on the 1st or the 14th (as long as it comes twice a month).

Yep, we budget that tightly :) In fact, I keep a cheat sheet of which days of the month my auto bills come out and only leave enough in checking for those bills that will pull before my next paycheck, plus as small a buffer as I can stomach. Everything else gets dumped into savings, and when that hits a threshold, investments. If my checking had an overdraft LOC attached (like every other bank I've had except my current one), I wouldn't leave any buffer at all. No reason to leave extra funds sitting there earning nothing.

But then, I work on a computer with internet access all day. I check all my accounts compulsively at least once a weekday. If I checked them less often, I would keep a looser reign on it.

+1

This is exactly how I manage it as well.  Sometimes I think I keep a closer eye on my spreadsheet than I do on my two-year old.  ;)

noob515

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #17 on: November 08, 2012, 02:17:46 PM »
[quot]
Don't think of it as paying down debt, think of it as investing with a guaranteed return! (I'm currently making 9%, for instance...)
[/quote]

Good idea!  I'll have to figure the % out.  I'm sure it's hefty.

And I don't budget as tightly as everyone else.  I am a few weeks ahead on my bills, at least mentally.  I.e., I've already written that amount out in my checkbook, but the auto draft won't happen for another couple of weeks.  So logging into my bank's website to monitor the balance is pointless, because that money is already allotted for some sort of future payment.  (and since my savings are set to auto draft, I consider that a "payment", just to the Bank of Me).

strider3700

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #18 on: December 01, 2012, 11:24:28 AM »
I feel it's important to share our successes and our failures here. 
I didn't achieve the goal.
My savings in November was $1811

Here's why.  First off my wife didn't get 3 paychecks in November.   I did but it turns out we're now getting paid on alternating weeks.  SHe got 2. 
The other issue was $2633 of credit card debt showed up from October.

This actually worked out great. My wife loved my spreadsheet showing, savings rate and balances, mortgage payoff date and roughly when we can retire.  When the CC's showed up I adjusted the savings rate and all of those dates moved back a few decades.   It was the black and white the numbers don't lie  punch to the face for my wife and she instantly insisted on switching back to a cash based jar system for our living expenses.  which so far has been easy to stay within the budget.  The jar is empty, you don't get to buy anything.

There was a bit of good news though,  my wife's paycheck is now $800 higher then previous.  I was floored when I saw it. 
So anyways  thanks to the increase in income, and the new strict budget, the CC bills for november that will show up just before christmas should be very low.  Just a bit left over from the old way of spending, and Gas (it's a huge pain to not pay at the pump here)   That means her entire paycheck arriving in 4 days can go to savings, giving me roughly $3700 in savings in 1 month and 5 days.

Theoretically we should be able to maintain this savings rate indefinitely.   Of course December my office is closed and I'll be missing 1 paycheck just to screw up my figuring out of normal.   
« Last Edit: December 01, 2012, 12:05:11 PM by strider3700 »

happy

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Re: 3 paycheck November
« Reply #19 on: December 01, 2012, 02:43:20 PM »
Well, at least you'll get a 3 paycheck month 4 times a year instead of 2!