My use case probably isnāt a typical one but hereās how I manage my moneyā¦
I get paid on the 25th of each month but like my budgets running on calendar months.
So, on payday (25th) I salary sort the whole thing into my āSorting Potā.
Then on the 1st I have scheduled withdrawals that make their way from it into my bills pot, savings pots, my joint account, and into my personal account to use as general spending money.
I do this for a couple of reasons
My partner gets paid on the last day of the month so is used to budgeting around calendar months, so itās just easier to sync up with that, especially when we are running a joint account together.
If my circumstances change and I start getting paid on a different day (or days) of the month, my budgeting wonāt. Iād just keep dumping it all in the āSorting Potā.
It all works fine at the moment but it does mean having two scheduled transfers each time I want money to leave the Sorting Pot and then land in a different pot. It would just be nicer to have one scheduled transfer for the likes of that.
I get paid on 21st, so my personal budget period runs from 21st to 20th. When I get paid, I transfer my part of the joint account money and keep it in the holding pot, then after my partner has been paid, I organise the pots so that weāre ready for the joint account period to start on the 1st.
Itās only really an extra week for the first month you do it, after that you will only ever have a month between āfakeā pay days with a full monthās worth of pay to get you through it.
So to get started you either have to spend very little during that initial extra week, or try to save up a bit of a buffer to get you through it.
I have a similar issue; I need to smooth my income because it jumps around, whereas bills donāt - theyāre monthly. It would be nice if Monzo built this in to a native feature to be honest. You could even combine it with the rainy day fund in a way - you pay into a ābufferā which includes several monthsā salary.
Back in 2018 I wrote a post about an idea that I think is quite related to this; youād have 4 pots - discretionary, mandatory (i.e. bills), savings, and a buffer pot. The idea being that you assign your income to each, and rather than immediately transferring money to savings before you know if youād need it and then have to transfer it back out, instead youād deposit that in the buffer pot. If you went a bit over, you can pull from there. And only on your next pay cycle when you know for sure you can save it would you indeed save it. This way you can create more of a fortress around your savings pot(s), to discourage yourself from ever dipping in. Because as soon as you start dipping you can become numb to that action, and theyāre not really savings anymore but more of a slush fund.
