January 15th, 2024 paycheck

Created:

This one felt weird.

I’m writing a book called Time: Mastering the Mundane. This isn’t a shameless and pointless plug, I promise. The book is about self-management, primarily using things like reminders and to-do lists (what I call The Crucible and Forge). Regarding paychecks, I have two reminders (see, it was relevant to the topic), but I should change it.

One reminder is to publish these articles. I publish one of these around the 15th and 28th of each month. This mirrors the cadence of someone getting paid twice a month, which is standard in The United States but could vary. I’ve worked jobs where I was paid weekly and one where I was paid monthly.

The other reminder is set on the schedule of when I get paid, which is me telling myself to pay my bills. My previous employer paid me every two weeks. The oddity, because time is a social construct and calendars even more so, is that being paid every two weeks means there are some months where I’d get paid twice before publishing another article.

Right now, I don’t have the cadence of an employer. There are a lot of possible terms to describe what I’m experiencing right now:

So, in the spirit of making shit up, I’ve decided to call what I’m experiencing The Great Depickling, or just, The Depickling.

If you don’t know how pickling works, you take something, put it into a brine solution, and leave it there for various lengths of time. Over time, whatever you put in there becomes “pickled.” Many use the term “pickle” to refer to a “pickled cucumber.” Technically, without the modifier, we don’t know what type of pickle it is because it could be just about anything. Pickled eggs, pickled okra, and so on. (It’s also a preservative; pickled cucumbers can remain on a shelf longer than fresh.)

Anyway, back on topic.

While whatever you pickle (we’ll go with cucumber) is in the brine, a chemical reaction occurs, and the cucumber becomes “pickled.”

I heard this recently from George Dinwiddie as an analogy for employment. The ominous part of the story is the observation that the cucumber tends to take on the qualities of the brine more than the brine takes on the qualities of the cucumber.

George told a story where he knew he needed to leave an employer when they were going to suggest something and thought, “That’ll never work here.”

That’s what it is to become pickled by the client or employer.

The cadence of paychecks and its impact on the perception of time seems intriguing and something I’d like to keep. Further, I’d like to maintain our cadence for these articles. The question is: How?

Two weeks seems long enough that there’s enough change in my process, numbers, and thoughts to make the time to write about it. But that’s different from our cadence for these articles because tracking time is silly.

There are 26 2-week periods in a year. There are only 24 firsts and fifteenths in a year.

All right, I’m gonna stop thinking about the details and take some action.

I’m going to split up the “Pay bills” reminder:

  1. credit cards and
  2. rent.

Most of my underlying bills are automatic against a credit card. So, the “Pay bills” reminder is mainly a “Pay credit cards” reminder.

The rent is odd because it only comes out at the beginning of the month. Meaning every two weeks, when the paycheck was received, I’d need to verify whether it was the “rent paycheck” or not—that’s not as full of an explanation as I could have, but this is getting longwinded enough. So, by having 2 reminders, I don’t need to take on the cognitive load of remembering to verify if this is a “rent paycheck” or not.

I’ll set the “Pay credit cards” reminder to Fridays. This will be a fixed reminder, meaning it should pop up again on Friday, even if I slip a few days. I’ll set the “Pay rent” reminder to the last Friday of each month.

I was already not being charged interest on credit card purchases because I’d pay the balance owed every two weeks instead of once a month, which does run the risk of interest accruing. Paying weekly reduces this risk even more. Having both set to be on Fridays means they will still be together, but I can offload the brain power to the Apple Reminders app.

I also have a reminder to invoice my roommate, in this context, Becca, for some split bills for which I pay the total charge. It’s set to be sent on the 27th of each month because calendars are stupid, and only some months have a 29th, 30th, or 31st. I’ll shift this to the last Friday of each month because she usually doesn’t pay me back until she gets paid—on the first. This will be another fixed recurring action. So, no matter when I send her the “invoice,” and when she pays it, it’ll always be the last Friday of the month.

I have fixed recurring events related to reconciling accounts that go off when each institution releases new statements because humans haven’t standardized on that, which makes sense. After all, we haven’t standardized it. I’m sure there’s a negative impact I’m not considering here, but still. These won’t change.

These changes should keep me from being pickled by an employer or client because mentally, the flow and the center of that flow will be less time-, employer-, and paycheck-bound.

I’m also going to modify these articles to biweekly on Fridays. This way there are always 24 articles per year, and all financial-related things happen around the same day of the week.

If you’d like to read about this hypothesis, please feel free; otherwise, I’m already impressed you stuck around this long.

The flow

Section titled The flow

All revenue received goes into an “Income Account” (see Profit First). I use a spreadsheet to do some “napkin planning” on how the balance of the Income Account should be redistributed. I use Wave to do the actual planning. Then, I go to the related apps to execute that plan.

When employed, sending money from non-W2 work or transferring from the “Investment Pass-Through Account” will go to the Income account. Reread the previous paragraph.

I want to avoid selling investments, but it’s nice that the flow can be the same except for the initial two transfers.

The flow from the Income Account is always to transfer money to the tax account first. I usually don’t need to pay anything extra in taxes, but when fully “work-optional,” that’s something I’ll need to take care of myself.