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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

"The people who generally have their financial shit together don't usually realize when it's pay day."

Seems like a pretty specious argument. If you pay bills, then you know when bills are due and you know when payday is. That's finance in a nutshell - managing your AR and your AP.

"Do you live within biking distance from work? No? Then move closer to work."

I live in one of the better school districts in the area and pay a premium to do so. Why would I move from a better school district to a worse one?

I realize that this is Hacker News, and that many people here are younger than I am (and I'm young myself), but this person is trying to give advice about something he may not be quite old enough to understand yet.

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If you pay bills, then you know when bills are due

USAism because you're still using checks and other old money tech.

In the modern world: My rent, insurance, electricity, heating, phone, mastercard, newspapers, etc are payed automatically every month. Whenever I get a bill, it contains a 'subscription id' which I enter in my online bank, and all following bills are then sent as an electronic invoice to my bank which then automatically performs the requred transfer of money on the due date. I don't even see those bills unless I want to spend time looking at it. I don't receive those bills in the paper mail. Everything is online.

Same with my wage. It just goes into my account after taxes are automatically payed. I don't need to do any work to pay my taxes.

Thus, I don't need to know when it's pay day unless I use too much money.

I pay one bill each month with a check, because it's actually easier (car loan from some crazy remote credit union) than using ACH. The rest are electronic, but they still need to be approved before fund transmission.

"Do you live within biking distance from work? No? Then move closer to work." is dubious advice. If you have to pay 2x what you pay now to live closer to work, are you saving enough by not having a longer commute? Better advice is "Use common sense with where you live and work."

The vast majority of the American public underprices their commute. "Common sense" would be incorrect. If people actually put together the price of commuting and compared it to the cost of rent closer in, more people would live in urban areas. It'd be even more lopsided if roads and pollution were priced correctly and schools were purchased separately from housing.

"The people who generally have their financial shit together don't usually realize when it's pay day." isn't a specious argument. You would have enough to pay your bills whether or not you got paid for a multiple of months.An emergency fund that covers 6 months of expenses is the first step to having your financial shit in order.If you can manage that it gets easier.

They only time I notice I got paid is when I make a ATM withdrawal and see the balance go up.

That issue isn't age-correlated. I'm over 40 and never had kids, but there are 25-year-olds who are concerned about teacher quality (and during the grades it matters most).

There is an age-correlation , people over 40 are statistically more likely to have kids than 25 year olds.

Another thing to take into account is that a lot of jobs tend to be concentrated in specific in particular locations. This means that property closer to these locations tends to become more expensive which may wipe out a lot of the savings made by an easier commute.

I've always known when bill day is, but in the last years I have never thought about which weeks pay day falls on except for one bad month when property tax and first+last at daycare happened during the same week.

I'm 34, married, one son.

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