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This all sounds great until you realize that you need time to run up to this, or a modicum of savings in order to make it happen.

Your numbers are optimistic at best. My bills vary and they’re more than 70% of my income (roughly).

It’s more efficient to deposit my money into a bill payment account, then take out what I can spend from that.

Guess what I already do?

Guess how much “spend” I have, per week, that needs to cover all of my gas, food, and everything else? I’m not even saving a dollar, and my available money per week is around $200.

That seems great until you realize that I’m Canadian and it’s Canadian dollars, and $200 CAD is around $150 USD.

I’m employed, full time, in a specialized field, and I can spend $100 USD a week on food because I need the extra $50 for incidentals and gas.

I don’t need a budget. I have a budget. I need a raise.

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Zannsolo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Ask for a raise. One thing that might help you stretch your money a bit further is utilizing a food pantry or food bank. Not sure if they are as common in Canada.

I was only off by $30 in my scenario compared to your situation. Having multiple accounts and using direct deposit to help divide your budget upfront just makes it easier.

Money isn’t a concern for me at this point in my life, but earlier in my career when my ex-gf had a significant amount of credit card debt doing our budget this way really helped and got her to be debt free.

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- MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I need savings because all my bills land in the same week-and-a-half timespan.
  
  So there needs to be all of the money in the account before that happens.
  
  I know, it’ll balance itself out in the long term, but the weeks I don’t have bills to pay are usually the weeks that I need to refill the pantry, and end up spending more than I have allocated for that week so that I can eat.
  
  I need to accumulate the base amount to pay all my bills when they come due, before I can really get started.
  
  I know it seems really simple, once all my bills are done for the month, start then! Except there’s probably incidentals, like the food that I mentioned, that need to be purchased, that I just can’t afford on the $100 available for me that week. So I take what’s needed, and then I’m behind again. The cycle continues.
  
  I had a very good system for this when I was getting paid twice a month. I took the ~400 or 450 or whatever (again CAD) from each paycheck, and I split my bills so that, by cost, they were roughly split between before-the-15th and after-the-15th pay periods. I’d get paid, take my share, let the bank do the rest, and when I get a notification for a bill I need to pay by hand, from my calendar app, I go and pay it in full.
  
  Then I ended up with weekly pay and suddenly, I’m paying 130%+ of a weeks income to pay my bills on the same week.
  
  It fucked me up man. I’m still pretty wrecked by it and it’s been like this for more than a year.
  
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  - Zannsolo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You should def hit up a food pantry, saving some money on food for a bit will help you rebalance your finances. Not sure if you don’t make much or live in a really high cost of living area but another thing to look into is the Canadian version of food stamps if they have it. There’s no shame in getting help!
    
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