Paychecks

[Dragon Lady]

I've got this big, elaborate spreadsheet to do my budgeting in. I put a lot of work into it and it does almost exactly what I want it to do. It's beautiful and has served me well for over a year. Well, Yellow's company is being transferred to a new parent company. For the most part it's actually rather beneficial, I think. One thing, though, is driving me batty. His paychecks will switch from bi-weekly to semi-monthly. Which means everything in my spreadsheet that was based on paychecks (the paychecks themselves, tithing, personal money, savings, mortgage, etc.) now has to be changed. I have to switch from 14-day paychecks that are beautiful and always land on a Friday to figuring out formulas that say something like, "Put this amount in If this is the last day of the month or the 15th. Unless, of course, those days land on a Saturday or Sunday. Then put it on the Friday before instead." That's assuming that they pay the Friday before instead of the Monday after. Which I don't know. The first part of the formula I figured out and finally got it all tweaked. And then I remembered that some of those pay days will fall on a weekend, and now what do I do?

I'm really bugged about this. Probably more than I should be. But this spreadsheet has become a baby to me. And now I have to hack it all apart to something much uglier. [sigh]

[Marduk]

It seems the simplest thing to do is to do your budget monthly instead of weekly. That way you simply count two paychecks and you're good to go.

[Dragon Lady]

I do my budget neither monthly nor weekly. But… paycheckly. But every row is a day. So it still has to be figured out. And it's just … annoying. Luckily Yellow is amazing and with his mad programming skillz got the hardest ones to work. (I did all the other ones… with just a smidgeon of guidance from him.)

It does not change the fact that I'm still annoyed that all of my pay periods will be different lengths, meaning my paychecks will be different sizes and I'll have to fit different amounts of spending into them.

Basically, it's just making me change the way I've thought about money and budgeting for most of my money-making life.