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.