Welcome back to the podcast series about paychecks. Today, I’m diving into the intricacies of managing household finances when you and your partner have different pay schedules.
Regardless of when you and your partner get paid, having a solid budget is vital to alleviating financial anxiety. It provides a clear roadmap for managing expenses and savings goals. Learn how I recommend finding consistency in multiple pay cycles and leveraging routine to make smart money decisions.
The key to financial harmony is communication and collaboration. So, tune in and take the first step towards aligning your finances with your partner.
Stay tuned for insights on these topics:
- [01:54] Importance of a budget/spending plan
- [04:04] Find similarities in your pay days
- [08:55] Money management goal
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to manage joint finances when you and your partner on different pay cycles.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this conversation on Aligning Finances: How To Budget As A Couple With Different Paydays, check out my episode on How Financial Coaching Transformed Amy and Jennifer’s Joint Finances!
Transcript for “Aligning Finances: How To Budget As A Couple With Different Paydays”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So we’ve been doing a paycheck series and today I actually want to talk to you about if you are in a marriage, a partnership or you share joint finances, specifically talking about joint finances with your partner and you are trying to figure out like Keina, how do we get on the same page because we’re paid at different times. So sometimes I work with couples and they’re like, well Keina, we’re both paid biweekly, but one of us is paid on the seventh and the 20th and the other one’s paid on the 15th and the 30th. Or Keina, I’m paid every other Friday and my partner is paid on the 15th and the 30th. Or I had a couple that I worked with where the wife was actually an entrepreneur so she had the ability to pay herself whenever and then her husband got paid twice a month.
And so when paychecks feel like they come in at a lot of different times, it can make managing your household finances seem really difficult. You’re like, well I don’t know. We get four paychecks or we get five paychecks and how do we create a plan? And so my answer for you is going to be about creating consistency based on how you and your partner get paid. I always teach my clients to look at their pay dates and I do this work for them initially, but like we find similarities when they’re actually going to be paid at the same time. So before I get into that, I’m going to back up just a little bit and I want to let you know that regardless of how you and your partner are paid, the most essential part of this is to make sure that you and your partner have a budget.
You don’t need to say like, well we can’t budget because we’re not paid at the same time. Actually creating a budget is going to make you getting paid at different times easier. If you have a partner that’s like, okay, my partner is 1099 and then I have a consistent W2 role or whatever that looks like, you having the budget in front of you is going to allow you to have peace of mind about what causes you anxiety when you think about combining finances with your partner or you think about managing your finances with your partner and you’re not going to feel all over the place about like, okay, but we don’t get paid until this date, or we don’t get paid until this date, you’re going to actually create a level of consistency that allows you to just be able to like have a sigh of relief because you’re not going to be worried about like when’s the next paycheck going to hit.
So with that, get all of your expenses in one place. If you haven’t done so already, like download my spending plan and put all of your expenses in one place. Don’t worry about when am I being paid, when is my partner being paid? I just want you to be able to get everything out in one place where it’s not just your bills, like you know how to pay your mortgage, you know how to pay your gas and your electric, but I want the kids’ sporting fees in there. I want summer camps in there. I want clothes in there. I want your hair appointments in there. I want those hidden bills to be also in your plan and for you to have all of that laid out really nicely. Because once you get all that laid out, then we can actually start talking about what money movement needs to happen on certain dates.
So if you don’t have all your numbers laid out, you need to just pause this episode and be like, Keina, I have to come back to it because I don’t have all my numbers laid out. So I’m trusting you to be really honest about whether or not you have your numbers laid out. So that’s first. The second thing, which I already started to allude to is I want you to actually find similarities in your payday. The easiest way that I do this is I actually create, generally just create a tab in my client spreadsheet and I will put whatever person’s name or partner A and then I’ll have partner B and I will list out partner A paychecks for the next six months. So if partner A is telling me that they get paid every other Friday, I’m going to go through, if we’re in the month of June, I’d be like, okay, they’re going to get paid on the seventh, they’re going to get paid on the 21st, then they’re going to get paid on July 12th and they’re going to get paid on July 26th.
And so I would lay all of those numbers out for like the next six months. And then if partner B came in and they get paid on the first and the 15th, I’m going to go through and I’m going to lay those numbers in, okay the first and the 15th, the first and the 15th, the first and the 15th. And I’ll make sure that I’m lining it up because I know that partner B only gets paid twice a month. It happens on the first and the 15th, but I know that partner A, sometimes they get paid three times a month and that happens like at least twice a year. But I lay it out because it allows me to see patterns. And I will tell you that is my secret weapon as a financial coach is I’m always looking for patterns about what’s happening. Patterns help me make decisions whether I’m looking at spending habits or I’m looking at paydays.
So the pattern that I’m looking for here is like partner A and when does partner B, when do their paychecks align in a similar way and it may not be by date, but in the example that I was giving you where if partner A is paid every other Friday and then partner B is paid on the first and the 15th, I’m actually most likely going to allow partner A’s paycheck to drive, like when we make money decisions for that couple. And what I mean by that is that I know that partner A gets paid on the first, and generally speaking, partner B’s paycheck may not come in until that following Friday. So because of their paycheck being the later paycheck, that’s the paycheck that I’m going to use to make decisions off of. And then if I was using the same example, I know partner A, their next paycheck is going to be on the 21st and Partner B’s paycheck is going to be on the 15th.
So I’m going to use the 21st to make decisions. So as I’m thinking about helping this couple, and as you’re thinking about making a plan for yourself. I am going to be making like budgeting decisions based off of the 7th and the 21st for the month of June. And it’s going to switch a little bit for the month of July. But what will happen is this couple will start to have a rhythm where they start to basically look at their money in two week increments. That’s what I’m setting up for them, is that every two weeks is like that’s when the cadence of basically as a couple, we can feel like we’re being paid twice a month. And that’s when we, like I said are going through and making decisions. When the couple has the third paycheck, generally with the pattern, like we’re still looking at our expenses on a biweekly basis, but by allowing you and your partner like looking for that similarity of when your paychecks actually line up, it’s going to be a place for you to feel like, oh, okay, we actually have like all of the money in our account to start actually making decisions about when we want to put our bills on auto pay, when we want to automate our savings, when we want to make sure that we’re paying more towards our debt.
So that’s why I’m using partner A’s paycheck date, which is the later of the cycle because it’s going to help you drive decisions about when you want to automate your savings or when you want to automate an extra debt payment because you are going to make sure that, if person A gets paid $3,000 and then person B gets paid $3,000 per paycheck, then in your bank account you essentially are going to make sure that you guys have been paid the $6,000, which is what you’re going to be budgeting until you’re paid another $6,000 later on in the month. And so the goal is to allow you to have, like I said this level of consistency. So you are able to make decisions as a couple and feel like, oh, well, we have to wait until I want to take the conversation of we need to wait until you get paid before we can, spend money.
Basically all you’re doing as a couple is saying like, we actually only look at our money or l make bigger decisions about transferring money twice a month. Because when you actually build a budget and you start to follow the budget, what’s going to happen is there are always going to be money in your account. So that’s not going to be in question. We are just talking about what desire to actually move money and to make things feel easier for you and your partner. And if you’re like, Keina, I have no idea what you just said, which may be true because it is definitely a different way of thinking. And all the couples that I work with that I show them like, hey, this is whose paycheck date we’re going to use to drive money conversations in your household.
I think it literally blows their mind because they just start to manage money differently and they no longer worry. Honestly they just don’t worry about being paid because they know that like that’s not their focus. You shouldn’t even be worried about the pay dates. What you need to be worried about is how you and your partner actually want to spend money. How do you and your partner want to manage a joint account, a joint bills account, a joint savings account, or a joint spending account? And so those are the conversations that we’re actually having. The pay date isn’t actually the big driver in terms of how you want to spend money. The big driver is you and your partner sitting down and saying, here’s how much money we bring in on a monthly basis and here’s how we’re choosing to spend it on a monthly basis.
So thank you for tuning in to this short and sweet episode. And if it resonated with you and you are like, oh my goodness, this makes so much sense, share it with someone who they could benefit from this. And if you’re thinking like, Keina, I want to take this work deeper, like what you’re saying makes sense, but I need some help getting this in place. Me and my partner need support. Go to my website and apply to work with me. And I work with couples. I love working with couples because I love seeing two people get on the same page about how they want to spend their money. I actually talked to a client today who I call her the CFO of her household and she was like, my husband and I, since working with you Keina, we are able to talk about money in a way that we’re not looking at each other and wondering where the money went.
We’re actually literally sitting down and talking about the things that are important to us. She’s like, we just got some landscaping done and I paid for it in cash and that just felt good and we’re saving money for the first time in our lives and I just never knew that I could be here. So for me, working with couples is the best because I know that money is also one of those things that is stressful in a relationship and one of the number one reasons that marriages can also fail. And so it is my great joy and pleasure to be able to help two people get on the same page and to actually start having money conversations. So if that’s you, like I said, go ahead and go to Wealthovernow.com. You can book a call to work with me and I look forward to talking to you next week. Have a good one.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
