Friday 28 December 2007

Why your Wealth will Leap Ahead in 2008

A lot of our major expenses are fixed annual amounts, such as life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, council rates etc. Not so many are accrued daily - the main daily expenses being petrol, food, electricity and water usage. So, since 2008 is a leap year, and Feb 29th is a Friday, most reader's will benefit from an extra day's wage without having an extra day's expenses in 2008. Sweet. If you manage to make Feb 29 a "no spend day" you'll get to keep most of this extra 0.4% wage for 2008 - consider it a "one off" bonus and try to add it to your savings rather than just fritter it away. After all, it only comes every four years.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

2 comments:

GAZZA said...

Really? Personally, I get paid monthly, and I get the same amount each month regardless of whether the month has 28, 29, 30, or 31 days in it. I would have thought most salaried workers were the same; obviously for contract positions, you're correct, but does that comprise most of your readers?

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

We get paid fortnightly, and previously at this job and my previous employer were paid every four weeks (which is often called "monthly" pay). As this works out as a set rate per day (whether 10 or 20 work-days in the pay period), the extra day WILL increase total pay earned in 2008 by 1 day's worth. However, most people won't notice as it just means your first pay in 2009 will be one day earlier that it otherwise would have been if 2008 wasn't a leap year. So you'd have to deliberately put aside this 'extra' day's pay from you normal pay packet. I'm just pointing this out as a logical reason to save an extra 1 day's worth of pay next year.

If you are on an annual salary package AND you get paid exactly 1/12th of this on, say, the 1st of each month, then the leap year won't have any effect on your total pay for 2008. I'm not sure if most of my readers are on 2- or 4- week pay cycles or not.