————————————————————————————————————————
Welcome to My Personal Finance Journey! If you are new here, please read the “About” or “First-Time Visitor” pages to find out more about us. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for visiting! Keep on learning!
————————————————————————————————————————
The following post is by MPFJ staff writer Travis. Travis is a customer blogger for CareOne Debt Relief Services, and also appears weekly at Enemy of Debt. Travis candidly shares his personal journey to pay off $109,000 of credit card debt and the tips he’s learned along the way. As a father and husband, he provides a unique perspective on balancing debt, finances, and family.
Regularly scheduled budget talks, looking over recent bills posted to our checking account over breakfast, and planning our spending have become almost daily activities as my wife and I have made tremendous strides in getting a grip on our finances. We thought we were getting the hang of it, and had all our bases covered, until we encountered something we hadn’t thought of.
The Third Weekend.
The Third Weekend is a phenomenon that happens to us once every three months. As a software engineer, I get paid bi-monthly. As this is a our main source of income, it drives our entire budget and spending plan. Since each pay period is about two weeks in length, each budget cycle includes two grocery shopping trips and two weekends. The problem is that each cycle is really half the month, which is slightly longer than two weeks. This results in a pay period every three months that has an extra weekend.
This throws our entire budgeting scheme out the window since the weekend is where we do the majority of our social and entertainment spending. Each budget cycle has the same amount of funds available for entertainment, but when this phenomenon occurs, we have this third weekend to deal with.
The last time this calendar phenomenon occurred was the second half of September. During our budget discussion for that pay period, we launched a brainstorming session to come up with solutions.
1.) Be Hermits: We could simply budget zero funds and treat it like the apocalypse by holding up inside our house and shunning the outside world for the weekend. Give me NFL football, the Internet, and a bag of chips and I’d be 100% fine with this. This idea, however, did not go over well with my lovely wife as she is much more of a “have to be around people” person. It’s also just not realistic.
2.) Spread the available funds for the pay period between all three weekends: This is the easiest solution to implement, but does significantly impact available funds for three consecutive weekends.
3.) Spread projected available funds throughout the entire month: This solution has less impact on a single weekend in the month, but still reduces each weekend’s available funds in that month my a significant amount.
4.) Treat “The Third Weekend” as an irregular expense and save for it: We would determine how much we would need to remove from each weekend’s discretionary amount to have (roughly) the same amount each weekend, including “The Third Weekend.”
Vonnie and I concluded that #4 was the best idea, as it gives us the most amount of time to plan and prepare for it. It also provides consistency in the amount of funds we have available for each weekend. The most important thing when dealing with known irregular expenses or budget anomalies is to determine to the best of your ability when they will occur, and plan for them.
Do you experience “The Third Weekend” or some other odd budget phenomenon? If so, how do you handle it?
***Photo courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net
