Being paid every second, an experiment

General Chat
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Hellooo wizards of the forum. I come to ask ye a question, do you know of any projects which do something like this:

  • Takes your salary and moves it all to a pot
  • Every second (maybe minute?) of the day it moves $SALARY / (60 * 24 * 7 * 4) into your current account

Basically, instead of being paid at the end of the month all in one lump sum it simulates paying you every second / minute of work you do, sort of a “get paid as you go” scheme.

It’s more of a social experiment, I watched In Time and wondered what the social aspects of being paid secondly were :thinking: and whether anyone had used the Monzo API to do this already :smiley: (it may also may a good youtube video if I can be bothered… I can just see me now, standing in the Starbucks queue waiting for my money to tick high enough so I can afford a coffee)

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Are you setting someone up to do this then have their account suspended for overloading Monzo’s systems? :thinking:

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Are you trying to DOS Monzo!? :joy:

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Good question, I’m not sure to be honest. I am currently making an MVP :sweat_smile: I think once a minute is ok, whether or not the system flags me as “dodgy” is another thing…

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My original idea was to change the pot images rapidly to display a movie in-app, however there is no public API for this so it’s not fun :frowning: (I am bored and looking for things to mess around with)

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Does it have to be Monzo related? You sound like you’d make a good pen tester. That’ll quench your boredom! There are some services online that’ll let you have at it without causing any harm or breaking anything! :blush:

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You could do with with IFTTT and the sheets export.

I think it would be a very good way of making you understand what you spend vs what you earn.

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If you can dilute my DD’s/SO’s/Scheduled payments to be taken every hour too (BillFlex™️), then I’ll have a go!

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There is a company that does something similar.

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I need most of my salary at the beginning of the month to pay my bills off.

The trickle that remains I guess could come in every second. But then I need another £25 of it immediately to do my weekly food shop (fridge always empty by payday!).

I think I’d end up in my overdraft a lot

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I remember Jonas suggesting that we should build this functionality natively into Monzo back in 2016!

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I have never thought about salary in those kind of terms before. And now I’ve just worked out I earn just under 9p every minute. Ugh.

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Is that good or bad? I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my minute salary.

Pre or post tax?

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Well, it’s good of course; I earn more than the average salary. But that figure is before tax.

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It’s a hell of a lot more than I earn atm :sweat_smile:. Assuming it’s been worked out on a 24/7 basis

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I am sort of a pentester! I am a security engineer :smiley:

If you can dilute my DD’s/SO’s/Scheduled payments to be taken every hour too (BillFlex™️), then I’ll have a go!

Yes with Monzo plus, I could make a bills pots and the money ticks into them then with a virtual card you can pay for it :smiley:

I remember Jonas suggesting that we should build this functionality natively into Monzo back in 2016!

Great minds think alike! Although I can’t imagine how much strain this would put on the platform if everyone did it :grimacing:

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Oh see I was just working out my per minute when working amount! That’s why I was confused.

I’m apparently at 9.4p roughly on average a minute if it’s my entire life

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I assume that’s how it would work, rather than only putting in during your working hours.

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Didn’t the original pulse graph have something like that? A line to 0 starting at when you paid… unless I’m misremembering.

Spending though is lumpy. Most of my bills go out at the beginning of the month with a few spread around because they couldn’t change date. Discretionary spending would tend to happen at weekends, and my spending monday-friday may well be zero (probably isn’t but it’s a lot lower).

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To be honest I think this would be a fairly trivial thing to achieve. The hardest part would be getting the code for working with the api and there are a few pre built packages for this (disclaimer I made one for my own use in python)

The downsides as someone has already mentioned is that people tend to budget based on when they get paid. I for example have almost all of my direct debits come out in the first few days of the month.

Ot would probably be better to so the following

  1. set up direct debits to come out of a bills pot
  2. remainder of balance to be paid into a different pot
  3. remainder to be divided by how many minutes you work a month
  4. corn job running every x amount of time to move money from out to current account

To stop hammering Monzo maybe 4 should be once an hour.

Also another caveat is that not all bills are direct debits so there would need to accountability for the non direct debit bills and for money to cover those to be available.

Another option would be for the money in step 4 to be moved to a pot that has a virtual card associated with it. This virtual card to be used for spending it that has the downside of not being cash readily available.

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