For the last year and a half, I’ve been working for a company that you can invoice whenever you want.

I could invoice after every event I work, if I wanted to.

That seems a bit crazy, but I do invoice weekly.

Which is the most often I’ve ever been paid. (I mean… weekly income after the 30 days till the invoice pays out period).

And I find it’s turned me into a little less of a hoarder.

At least, I think there’s a cause and effect here.

Because money kind of constantly feels like it’s flowing in, even though the amounts can vary wildly, it just feels like there’s more of it.

Of course, as my accounting classes taught me, the time value of money rule works best with weekly paychecks, which gets the cash in your hand quicker. The time value of money is that dollar today is always better than a dollar in the future (because you could theoretically invest it and turn it into more than a dollar of value).

My first big job was working on cruise ships and there I got paid once a month.

I had to make sure that paycheck lasted until the next one.

(Not even taking into account the time between contracts when there would be no paychecks).

It constantly kept me in a slightly more frugal mindset because once the money was gone – it was gone for a long time.

(Reason 8,000 that working on cruise ships is a good money move. Maybe not a good sanity move or a good move for your liver, but you can really make some frugal choices out at sea.)

I’d have to pay my rent, utilities, and credit card payment and suddenly I was looking down the barrel of 30 more days with just a few bucks left over. On the plus side, a lot of life is free or cheap as a crew member, on the negative side… there never seemed to be much leftover, especially in the first year when I was paying astronomical San Francisco rent for an apartment I barely got to see and a ton of credit card debt from my last few months of college.

It did also teach me though that if I wanted any hope of saving – I would have to adopt the pay myself first principle. I’d pay my rent (in the years I didn’t just live with my parents) and debts, and then I put aside as much as I could reasonably do into retirement and emergency savings. Once it was gone, it was just… gone. And I had to make do.

As far as budgeting, I’ve often found budgeting the easiest to do in a steady twice a month paycheck world, because I could work it out to paycheck one being rent and utilities and paycheck two being food, savings and fun.

This could also be because biweekly (or even bimonthly) paychecks usually mean I have pretty steady income, making budgeting innately much easier than the freelance life.

I’ve also seen some posts where people point out that if you have the choice between bimonthly and biweekly, go with biweekly and on those few times a month you get 3 paychecks, you can use that for extra savings or investing goals.

What kind of pay schedule have you been on in the past? Which one did you like the best?