Daily Dose of English 76
Payday
Daily Dose of English 76
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about payday. Payday, which actually it is what it says on the tin. It's exactly what the name implies or says, the day that you get paid, payday. Because there's some interesting things that happen around payday and it's not the same in every country. So I thought it might make some sense to talk about here. And maybe we'll talk a little bit about just getting paid in general in the US and that whole stuff. So let's get into it. Payday is the day that your boss pays you or your company or however you get paid. That's the day that you would call payday. And a lot of companies work a little bit differently depending on how often they pay or how much they pay. There's a bunch of different things that happen with payday. The most common is bi-weekly, no, bi-monthly, sorry. Bi-monthly is twice a month, bi-weekly would be every twice per week. So bi-monthly pay is very common, so every two weeks, and people will typically get paid on the 15th of the month and the 30th of the month, so twice per month, and those are the times you get paid. It is possible for things to be a little bit different depending on when you started or if your company has a slightly different schedule, maybe they pay on the 1st and the 16th or something like that, right? There could be different times of the month, but it's usually based on the month and not necessarily on the week, right? So you don't get paid every second Sunday, for example, it's based on the month. And that's called bimonthly pay. And then occasionally some companies will pay monthly. They'll just pay once a month. I've never worked for a company that does that, so I don't actually know if it's more common on the 30th or the 15th or when people get paid. But I would guess the end of the month is typically when it happens. And there's a bunch of different pay structures, but those are the two most common. Some jobs will pay weekly, where you get your money every week, typically at the end of every week. And if you're doing sort of small, odd jobs, or like a summer gig or something like that, you might get paid daily. So we'll start there as an example. When I worked like some summer jobs when I was in high school or whatever, I would typically get paid at the end of every day because if they're bringing in some help for a single week or a couple of different days, it just makes the most sense to pay at the end of the day so that you don't have to wait around and you don't have to process thing and like if somebody doesn't show up another day, but there's so many things going on, it's easiest to just pay who's there every single day. I actually worked for a, how do I explain this? It was a dinner, like a sort of a fancy dinner thing where this, a woman, she would host these dinners on farms, on local farms in Oregon. And she would bring in us, all the ingredients would, or most of the ingredients would come from that farm. And there would be a special restaurant or team of cooks that would cook the meal for that night. And she would charge per person, right? You'd charge by the plate, you might hear. And then that money would cover the expenses, so however much it cost to run the dinner. And then she would give the rest to farmers and really try to support the local farms. And so things like that, it's best to hire usually younger people who will work a little bit cheaper and they are fine working for a single week because there's not that many adults that want to come out and help on two or three days of the week in a random farm somewhere, serve dinner and then never show up again. And so there was a bunch of us young, young, youngins, young kids, youngish, right? I think it was probably like 16 or 17. I don't really remember how old I was. But we would get paid at the end of every day because sometimes you would only work Monday, Tuesday, and then never again, or maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or you'd work just one night, right? There's so many different configurations. And so daily pay made sense for that. Weekly pay is typically for jobs where people typically need the money. I said that we're typically a bunch. And so jobs that they usually pay less and so they pay more often, which is not great for the worker, but that's kind of the sad reality of things. But a lot of people do appreciate it because if they have lots of things that they have to spend money on, rent, food, electricity, right, those things are important and so getting paid more often can be the difference for them. And then getting paid every two weeks, that's actually how I get paid nowadays is twice a month, 15th and 30th of the month. That's pretty common. Like I said, I think that's the most common. That's also how I got paid at a couple of other jobs that I had. And then, yeah, like I said, I haven't been paid monthly, but that's also possible. Some people don't even technically have a payday, depending on maybe if you're a contractor or you work on commission. A contractor is somebody that works temporarily, so part-time. They only do specific things and then they leave. So if you hire somebody to, I don't know, organize your bookshelf, where they'd be sort of a contractor. Except for think about that as a company rather than you hiring a person to do that. And then what was the other word I said? Contractor or, oh, commission. If you work on commission, that means that you make a percentage, a commission on whatever you sell or whatever you do. Typically it's selling. So for example, let's say you sell mattresses or cars, used cars, there we go, cars, that's a common one. Let's say that you're a car salesman. You don't necessarily have an amount of money that you earn every month, maybe. Instead, every car you sell, the owner of the business gives you 15%, 5%, whatever it is, some percentage of that sale. So if you sell a 150. That's a really cheap car and I think a fairly low commission, but I think you get the idea. That's another way that you might get paid and typically that will have to hit a certain amount and then they'll pay you. So they'll only pay out after $500 earned or something like that. There are a ton of other pay structures but I also really quickly want to go into a little bit about how paychecks work in the US because there's some interesting things there. So when you get your paycheck, which is that amount of money that your employer owes you, there is an amount that is withheld for taxes. And this is very, very common. I believe it's required and every paycheck has to have taxes withheld by your employer. And what happens is depending on what state you live in, how much you earn, and how much your federal sort of, and like I guess the country you live in, is you will have to put aside a small amount of your, an amount of your paycheck. It can actually get fairly large depending on what state you're from. And then later on in the year, when you pay taxes, you will essentially look at how much you should owe the government. And then if you owe less than the amount that you set aside, you get the rest back, which is called the tax return. And then if you owe more, you would have to pay some amount in taxes. And this is why most people hate doing taxes in the US, not because it's bad, but because it's really annoying and difficult. That's a whole different conversation. But what happens is a lot of people that don't work for themselves end up getting money back, a tax return, which ends up being a good thing for them. You get a little bit of extra money from doing your taxes. However, if you are self-employed or you didn't pay enough for whatever reason, you can end up paying more taxes, which sucks. It sucks to have to pay a bunch of money at once to the government because you're just like, oh, I am now $900 poorer or whatever. I have $900 less to spend or something like that. And so that's a very common thing. Other things can be withheld in your paycheck. For example, if you are contributing to a, what we call a 401k or a Roth IRA, which are various fancy bank accounts for retirement. So when you retire, you might have some money saved up. Some companies will do a, like a match plan. So for example, let's say your company gives you a one-to-one match, and every paycheck you save 50 to your retirement account. This is fairly common for long-term careers, so people that work at a company for 20, 30, 40 years. The company is trying to ensure that they retire well. Um, and build loyalty with the, with the employee. The other thing that might happen is if the employee wants to buy stock in the company, that is, I don't know if that exactly happens on the paycheck, but that's a fairly common offering from a company to give, to sell employees a stock of part of the company. Like they own a small amount of the company at a fairly good rate instead of income. And so they would probably get that at a similar way, but yeah. Anyways, I'm gonna end it there. We're almost at 11 minutes for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe you learned a word or two. And in the comments, I wanna hear what you or your country does for paydays and paychecks. I'll see you tomorrow, bye.
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