Timing Your Social Security Checks

This article isn’t talking about the age you choose to begin receiving Social Security benefits. Instead, it says that the time of the month the payments arrive often determines how well off a retiree is. Apparently, many recipients spend a lot of their checks when they come in. If the checks arrive about the time their major bills arrive, they use the benefits to pay the bills. But if the checks arrive a couple of weeks or more before the big bills arrive, they’re likely to spend a chunk of the benefits and be unable to pay the bills for the month.

“If a household has a couple of thousand dollars just in emergency funds, this would more than cover this variation in timing across different months,” Baugh said.

Many households have nowhere to go because they have already maxed out their credit cards and have limited resources for cash.

That makes borrowing through payday loans more prevalent, even for some high-income households, according to Baugh. Payday loans are short term, high interest rate loans.