If your pay structure has ever made you feel stressed, behind, or like your money should be working better than it is, you’re not alone. A lot of people think the problem is how often they get paid, but that usually is not the real issue.
In this episode, I explain why your payday does not matter as much as you think it does and why the real issue is often the timeline you are using to think about your money.
When you are managing your money in a seven to fourteen day cycle, every deposit can feel urgent and every bill date can feel bigger than it actually is. I walk through how this keeps you stuck in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle thinking, why paying bills is not the same as having a plan, and what it looks like to build a financial system around what your money needs to do over the next 12 months.
This shift helps you stop reacting to deposits, create more predictability with your money, and manage your finances with more intention.
What I cover in this episode…
[00:00] Why your payday literally does not matter as much as the time horizon you use to think about your money
[02:00] Why managing money in a seven to fourteen day cycle keeps you stuck in paycheck to paycheck thinking
[05:00] Why this is often a systems problem, not an income problem
[07:30] Why paying bills is not the same as having a financial plan
[10:00] How a budget helps you keep more of what you have and build a structure that supports you
Tune into this episode of Money Files as I share why your payday does not define your wealth, how short-term money thinking keeps you stuck, and what it looks like to build a financial system that supports the way you actually get paid.
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 hearing about how to stop reacting to payday and start building a financial system that supports you, check out episode 79: The Power of Creating A Financial System You Trust.
Transcript for “How to Stop Letting Your Pay Schedule Control Your Money”
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 today we’re talking about something that might sound practical, but it’s a little psychological. And it’s the fact that your payday doesn’t matter. I don’t care if you got paid once a year, quarterly, monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, or if you got paid every single day. Your payday literally doesn’t matter. The only thing that changes between these structures is the dopamine hit that you get. When you get paid more frequently, you get more little hits of dopamine. And when you get paid less frequently, you feel more pressure, even though the math is still the same.
If someone came to me today and was like, hey, Keina, I’m going to give you $120,000 and this is your pay for the year, I wouldn’t panic. I literally, I wouldn’t panic. I’d be like, okay, I have $120,000 for the next 12 months. And I would break that down to say, that means that I have $10,000 a month to spend. Like that’s my paycheck. I would be taking ownership of the payday versus allowing the payday to put me into a spiral. And so I would maybe decide to pay myself $5,000 twice a month. I might decide to pay myself, every other week and just thinking about the structure that would support me. But mentally I know I make $10,000 a month and that’s it.
So when people tell me they’re scared to move from like a weekly pay structure to maybe a twice a month structure, or they don’t want to go from twice a month to once a month, that tells me that they’re managing their money in a 7 to 14 day cycle. That they have what I call paycheck to paycheck thinking. And you can live in this paycheck to paycheck thinking, regardless of whether or not you make $40,000 or $400,000 a year. It’s not about the income. It’s about the time horizon and how you’re thinking about it. So if you zoom out and you think in 12 months, then your pay structure can stop being scary. It can stop crippling you.
So let’s just say that you are paid quarterly and you make about $25,000 per quarter. Instead of thinking, I don’t get paid again for three months, we would want to shift our thinking to that’s about $8,333 a month that I get to spend. I need to make sure that I separate that $8,333 into bills, savings, and spending. I need to make sure that I do this with the same three categories. And the real issue that happens is that when you get paid in a lump sum, or you get paid in these different cycles, is you pay what feels urgent.
And then you pay, you go and buy what you’ve been wanting to buy, with what you feel like has been on pause. And you feel good about your accounts because you have a certain amount of money. But also your behavior tends to drain the money that’s making you feel good. And you’re not asking yourself about what’s coming up in 90 days, what’s coming up six months from now, what’s coming up even next January, even though that’s 10 months away or nine months away. Because if you’re only thinking about today, your pay structure will always control you. It’s not about making more money.
It’s about owning your pay structure. So if you’re thinking about the year, then you’re going to control the pay structure. It doesn’t actually matter how often you get paid. What matters is what does this money need to do for me over the next 12 months? What does it need to do for the summer? What does it need to do for the fall? What does it need to do for the winter, the spring, the birthdays, the travel, the holidays, the renewals that are coming up in terms of insurance, or even Costco and BJ’s, like what does my money need to do for me? And those are the things that don’t necessarily appear in your list of bills that you keep writing down. So if you build your financial system around the year, then you are able to stop reacting to the deposits that you get. And that’s when you stop living in this paycheck to paycheck cycle thinking. So I’m going to say that again. That’s when you can stop living in that paycheck to paycheck cycle thinking because it really is a thought process.
And sometimes you may actually be in a paycheck to paycheck cycle. But for a lot of my clients who are high income earners, they’re making six figures, they’re making multiple six figures. is they actually have a thinking problem. And they have what I call high earner syndrome, which is in another podcast that I talked about. And so if we don’t actually address the high earner syndrome and how you’re thinking about your money and your pay structure, then we’ll never ever be able to out earn that. And you have evidence of that in your own life. You’re making more than you ever have before, but it doesn’t feel like it. And it doesn’t feel like it because of how you think about your money.
So if you’re in this space where the pay structure is stressing you out, know that you have a system problem. You don’t actually have a money problem. You have a systems problem. I don’t care. I can hear you right now. You’re like, Keina, but you don’t understand. I have a whole bunch of bills due at the beginning of the month. And I have a whole bunch of bills that they like follow. No, you have a system problem because my clients, when they work with me, we put all their bills on auto pay. And then they stopped talking about the first of the month and how all of their bills fall at once. That is not a money problem. It is a system problem. And it’s how you’re thinking about your money right now.
You have to be able to zoom out and you need to know and intimately know what do I need to be able to live off of from one month to the next? And that number does not necessarily equate with the amount of money that you make per month. Those aren’t synonymous things. Because right now what you’re doing is you are paying your bills and then you’re spending what’s left over. You’re paying your bills. You’re spending what’s left over. You save if you can. And so that thinking drains your account and it makes it feel like that nothing can feel predictable. And so we actually have to change the way that you think because your payday doesn’t matter.
Your bill dates don’t matter. How you think about your money is the number one thing you have to shift. And in order to shift how you think about your money, you actually have to have a financial system that accounts for more than just your bills. You’ve heard me probably say this before, like just paying your bills. We were taught to do that because even thinking about maybe what you witnessed as a child and you probably heard your parents, or if you were raised by your grandparents, people were focused on making sure that you could pay your bills. It makes total sense.
Then when you’re in your early twenties, you still want to focus on paying your bills. You may not be making that much money. You want to focus on making sure that you don’t get evicted from your house. Like that is a safety net for you. And then what happens is you transition from making just enough to making more than enough. And so you think like, I no longer need a structure for how I manage my money. I’m going to pay my bills and then I am going to spend the rest. I got to spend it on gas. I got to spend it on groceries. If I can pay for a trip here and there, I’m going to do that.
But you don’t actually have a plan. I think as a high income earner, you need a plan for your money now more than ever, because we don’t want you to have nothing to show for your money. I don’t want you to not be able to build wealth because you never took the time to actually look at how much you were making. How terrible will it be if you look at the end of the year and you’re like, dang, I made $500,000 this year with my bonuses and everything and I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t want that empty feeling for you and the way that you don’t have that empty feeling is to actually lean into a budget.
Your budget isn’t restrictive. Your budget is this tool that helps you keep more of what you have. Like that’s what you want. I have a client that we’ve been working together for about 10 months and we were just reflecting in one of our last coaching calls that when she was working with me, she’s like Keina, I was getting down to like a couple hundred dollars and in the negative when I first met you and I was looking at her budget on our last call and the number that she had at that time was that she had $26,000 in her bank account and she was like, never in my life have I had that much money and she makes five figures a month.
That’s what she nets. But this was even prior to her payday. She’s like never before. And what has shifted for her is that we’re not thinking about her payday anymore. Paydays don’t matter. Doesn’t matter. We are thinking about the structure and we put a system into place so that she is able to think about what does my money need to do for me throughout the year. So if you come to me and you tell me, but Keina, here’s my, I don’t care. I don’t care if you get paid every other day, we can make a structure around how you’re paid to help you have more peace of mind, to help you pay off debt, to help you consistently save money, to help you consistently invest.
So if you found yourself thinking about your paydates or when bills are due, this is a calling for you. Apply to work with me. Stop trying to figure it out. Stop trying to rearrange dates or find another job that pays you in a different way. That’s not the thing that you need. You actually need a system that is the very thing that is going to support you. So you can go to my show notes and apply to work with me there, or you can go to wealthovernow.com/appointment. Either way, I look forward to talking to you. And I look forward to chatting with you again next week and have a great week.
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.
