Bi-weekly payment option
Your question is unclear about whether you are moving from bi-weekly payments or to bi-weekly payments. Let's calculate each case. Bi-weekly pay means you will be paid every two weeks. The amount for each payment will be your annual salary divided by 26, possibly with a small decrease (around 0.3%) to account for the fact that years are slightly longer than 52 weeks (i.e. there are slightly more than 26 two-week periods in a year), and possibly an even smaller adjustment to take account of the fact that some years are a day longer than that. You will be paid literally every 14 days (with some adjustments if a payday falls on a holiday) If you are going to be paid twice a month, then each payment will be your annual salary divided by 24. Typically you are paid on the same days of each month - for example the 1st and the fifteenth, or the last business day before those. Biweekly pay for salaried employees is typically calculated as Annual-salary / 26. Twice a month pay for salaried employees is typically calculated as Annual-salary / 24. If you were getting paid twice a month and now are getting paid every other week, your paycheck will be roughly ( Twice-a-month-paycheck-amount * 24 / 26 ).  If you were paid $1000 twice a month, you'll be paid $923 every other week.   $1000 * 24 = $24K and $923 * 26 = $24K.   You will get paid every other week regardless of month boundaries on a biweekly pay cycle. One point that I don't see covered in the other answers yet: How does this affect the months that have 5 weeks. Do we actually lose two weeks a year? I get paid every two weeks, and pay day is always a Friday.  Some months, I get paid 3 times - which is always great.  If you live within your means, it's like an extra paycheck.  All other months, I get paid two times.  How many months a year do I get paid 3 times? 2.  It will always be two, because there are 12 months.  If you get paid twice a month, that's 24 pay checks, which is 2 shy of 26 pay checks - what we would expect if we were paid every two weeks.  That means those 2 extra pay checks need to fall somewhere, and they will be on the months where your pay day is hit 5 times.  For example, in 2014, there are 4 months with 5 Fridays: Jan May Aug Oct  I got paid the second Friday of January, so I only got 2 checks in January.  I will be paid on the first Friday of May, which means I will get 3 checks in May.  My other triple-check month this year is October, so of course I am only going to be paid twice in August.
You can split payments, and nobody judges you because most prepaid cards are actually gift cards.  They just think you have generous friends.   When you use Visa/MC at a vendor, they get dinged around 2-3% plus 35 cents flat-rate.  So when you ask them to charge 77 cents to the card, you're essentially asking they give half of it to Visa/MC.  Which is unfair.  A charity won't turn it down, but it's wasted.  So how do you solve this problem?  If you see a small merchant using Square or PayPal Here, their merchant agreements charge a flat rate (2.75% and 2.70% respectively) with no flat rate per transaction.  If you see they are on PayPal/Square, go for it.   Obviously PayPal itself doesn't have that problem, because they have a really, really good deal with Visa and Mastercard.  So feel free to buy yourself credit on your PayPal account with these residual values.   Amazon probably has a similar deal.   You are getting these small amounts because you aim to pay a $22.69 bill with a card that has $25 on it.  Reasonable, but it causes this.   Flip it around: pay a $22.69 bill with a card that has $20 on it, consume the $20 value, and pay the $2.69 in cash.  You may need to tell the cashier exactly the amount to charge (e.g. $20.00) especially if it is a Visa/MC card.  It will certainly go faster if you do.  The cashier may be able to pull up the balance, but it's an extra procedure, and an inexperienced cashier may struggle with it / have to call the manager etc. - not worth it in my book. "littleadv's first comment - check the note - is really the answer. But your issue is twofold -  Every mortgage I've had (over 10 in my lifetime) allows early principal payments. The extra principal can only be applied at the same time as the regular payment. Think of it this way - only at that moment is there no interest owed. If a week later you try to pay toward only principal, the system will not handle it. Pretty simple - extra principal with the payment due. In fact, any mortgage I've had that offered a monthly bill or coupon book will have that very line ""extra principal."" By coincidence, I just did this for a mortgage on my rental. I make these payments through my bank's billpay service. I noted the extra principal in the 'notes' section of the virtual check. But again, the note will explicitly state if there's an issue with prepayments of principal. The larger issue is that your friend wishes to treat the mortgage like a bi-weekly. The bank expects the full amount as a payment and likely, has no obligation to accept anything less than the full amount. Given my first comment above here is the plan for your friend to do 99% of what she wishes: Tell her, there's nothing magic about bi-weekly, it's a budget-clever way to send the money, but over a year, it's simply paying 108% of the normal payment. If she wants to burn the mortgage faster, tell her to add what she wishes every month, even $10, it all adds up.  Final note - There are two schools of thought to either extreme, (a) pay the mortgage off as fast as you can, no debt is the goal and (b) the mortgage is the lowest rate you'll ever have on borrowed money, pay it as slow as you can, and invest any extra money. I accept and respect both views. For your friend, and first group, I'm compelled to add - Be sure to deposit to your retirement account's matched funds to gain the entire match. $1 can pay toward your 6% mortgage or be doubled on deposit to $2 in your 401(k), if available. And pay off all high interest debt first. This should stand to reason, but I've seen people keep their 18% card debt while prepaying their mortgage." I don't believe Saturday is a business day either. When I deposit a check at a bank's drive-in after 4pm Friday, the receipt tells me it will credit as if I deposited on Monday.  If a business' computer doesn't adjust their billing to have a weekday due date, they are supposed to accept the payment on the next business day, else, as you discovered, a Sunday due date is really the prior Friday. In which case they may be running afoul of the rules that require X number of days from the time they mail a bill to the time it's due.  The flip side to all of this, is to pick and choose your battles in life. Just pay the bill 2 days early. The interest on a few hundred dollars is a few cents per week. You save that by not using a stamp, just charge it on their site on the Friday. Keep in mind, you can be right, but their computer still dings you. So you call and spend your valuable time when ever the due date is over a weekend, getting an agent to reverse the late fee. The cost of 'right' is wasting ten minutes, which is worth far more than just avoiding the issue altogether.  But - if you are in the US (you didn't give your country), we have regulations for everything. HR 627, aka The CARD act of 2009, offers - ‘‘(2) WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY DUE DATES.—If the payment due date for a   credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan is a day on   which the creditor does not receive or accept payments by mail   (including weekends and holidays), the creditor may not treat a   payment received on the next business day as late for any purpose.’’. So, if you really want to pursue this, you have the power of our illustrious congress on your side. "So your whole approach, and the attempt to scale this is flawed.  You will alienate roomates, provoke arguments, and make everyone's life more difficult.  There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities.  For instance: ""Why should I have to pay for Joe to go buy the expensive organic milk when I'm fine with the cheap stuff?"" ""I planned on being here for 20 days, but was gone that long weekend, recalculate everything please."" ""I already paid for this month, but now you're asking for more because James wanted to recalculate for a long weekend?"" The right way to do this is to set up loose, reasonable agreement among the participants and treat that as a contract, but with some flexibility/mercy on small dollar amount items. For instance: There are 5 of us, so everyone provides food (and shops/cooks) one night a week.  We're solo on Friday and Saturday (people eat out more then anyway), and everyone puts in $10/week (or whatever) for breakfast cereal, snacks, etc.  If you can't be here on your night, work out to trade with someone.  If you miss out on a meal... oh well. As long as people feel like they have a say in the discussion generating this and it's not dictated to them, then most of the time this is far superior.  If people need this level of detail, then perhaps those people should live alone or move in with Sheldon Cooper from ""The Big Bang Theory""." "Especially for people just starting out, without much reserve, the biggest concern is the rhythm of their expenses and income. If you're paid every two weeks, but your rent, car loan, and other ""big rocks"" are due once a month, then there are two paycheques a year that no-one has a claim on. Depending on your spending style, these can go into savings (yay!) or be spent on the spot and ""wasted"" (boo!).  Of course, you can get your mortgage set to every two weeks, and typically the bank will do that at the ""half your monthly payment"" level. If you're paid every two weeks, you won't feel any pain from this, but are making extra payments every year and getting out of the mortgage faster. The time-value-of-money part has a small impact. The emotional part and fooling yourself into saving, or paying things off faster, has a bigger one." Short answer: No. Some of those 'automatic' payments you've agreed to (presumably by signing a PAD form) are initiated in batch by the company whom you're buying from (phone company, cable company etc). So no, the bank has no indication from one day to the next what is coming through.  And the request goes from say, your cable company to THEIR merchant bank to YOUR bank. Typically you have a monthly bill date which is fixed, and they should have terms established when it is due.  If a payment comes back NSF they can retry once - but only for the same amount and I believe it is 14 days from the initial payment attempt.  It makes it predictable, and you'd figure banks would clue in and start to predict for you when things may come out - but strictly speaking your bank doesn't know when or how much. "There is no formula that can be applied to most variations of the problem you pose.  The reason is that there is no simple, fixed relationship between the two time periods involved: the time interval for successive payments, and the time period for successive interest compounding. Suppose you have daily compounding and you want to make weekly payments (A case that can be handled).  Say the quoted rate is  4.2% per year, compounded daily Then the rate per day is 4.2/365, or 0.0115068 % So, in one week, a debt would grow through seven compoundings.  A debt of $1 would grow to 1 * (1+.000225068)^7, or 1.000805754 So, the equivalent interest rate for weekly compounding is 0.0805754% Now you have weekly compounding, and weekly payments, so the standard annuity formulas apply. The problem lies in that number ""7"", the number of days in a week.  But if you were trying to handle daily / monthly, or weekly / quarterly, what value would you use? In such cases, the most practical method is to convert any compounding rate to a daily compounding rate, and use a spreadsheet to handle the irregularly spaced payments." I would recommend pre-paid debit cards. Every quarter a fixed amount of money is loaded onto the card (or a new card is issued). This prevents any large-scale fraud from occurring. They need to spread the work for all customers over the whole month, and they don't work on weekends. Combine the two, and the rule becomes clear - if months have minimum of N working days, 1/N of all customers gets set on each day. You seem to be on day 5: If the month starts with a Monday, the fifth working day is the 5. (Friday); if there is a Sat or Sun in between, it will be the 6th, and if there is both a Sat and a Sun in there, it will be the 7th. However, the statement itself is not very important at all. It is just the day where they print it on paper (or even only on a PDF). You can see your bank account activity every day 24/7 by checking online, and nothing keeps you from printing it on every 1st of the month if you want (or every day, or whenever you prefer). Yes, by paying double the amount each month you would have in effect paid the loan off in less than half the time. For $13000 at 3% over 60 months your monthly repayments would be $233.59. If you double your monthly repayments to $467.18 you would end up paying the loan off by the end of the 29th months, more than halving your loan term, as long as there are no penalties for paying the loan off early. Ask them to send a SWIFT payment [aka International Wire]. You would need to give them your bank details, essentially Bank Account, Bank Name & Address, SWIFT BIC, etc. Almost all Public Sector Bank and all leading Private scetor banks are members of SWIFT and can give you a the SWIFT BIC. If you are not sure about other party, it would be wise to open a new account and give the details of this account rather than your normal account. Using the standard loan formula with 21% APR nominal, compounded weekly. Calculate an adjusted loan start value by adding 31 - 7 = 24 extra days of daily interest (by converting the nominal compounded weekly rate to a daily rate). For details see Converting between compounding frequencies Applying the standard formula r (pv)/(1 - (1 + r)^-n) = 189.80 So every weekly payment will be 189.80 Alternatively Directly arriving at the same result by using the loan formula described here,  The extension x is 31 - 7 = 24 daily fractions of an average week (where 7 daily fractions of an average week equal one average week). As before, the weekly payment will be 189.80 Both methods are effectively the same calculation. "It is called ""Credit card installments"" or ""Equal pay installments"", and I am not aware of them being widely used in the USA. While in other countries they are supported by banks directly (right?), in US you may find this option only in some big stores like home improvement stores, car dealerships, cell phone operators (so that you can buy a new phone) etc. Some stores allow 0% financing for, say, 12 months which is not exactly the same as installments but close, if you have discipline to pay $250 each month and not wait for 12 months to end. Splitting the big payment in parts means that the seller gets money in parts as well, and it adds risks of customer default, introduces debt collection possibility etc. That's why it's usually up to the merchants to support it - bank does not care in this case, from the bank point of view the store just charges the same card another $250 every month. In other countries banks support this option directly, I think, taking over or dividing the risk with the merchants. This has not happened in US. There is a company SplitIt which automates installments if stores want to support it but again, it means stores need to agree to it. Here is a simple article describing how credit cards work: https://www.usbank.com/credit-cards/how-credit-cards-work.html In general, if you move to US, you are unlikely to be able to get a regular credit card because you will not have any ""credit history"" which is a system designed to track each customer ability to get & pay off debt. The easiest way to build the history - request ""secured credit card"", which means you have to give the bank money up front and then they will give you a credit card with a credit limit equal to that amount. It's like a ""practice credit card"". You use it for 6-12 months and the bank will report your usage to credit bureaus, establishing your ""credit score"". After that you should be able to get your money back and convert your secured card into a regular credit card. Credit history can be also built by paying rent and utilities but that requires companies who collect money to report the payments to credit bureaus and very few do that. As anything else in US, there are some businesses which help to solve this problem for extra money." Many banks here have some kind of service that will do this for you. For example, Wells Fargo has 'Bill Pay On Line'. You can use this to make regular payments - for your rent or mortgage, car payment, utilities and so on. You can also go on line and pay any company or person. If they don't have the facilities to accept electronic payment, the bank will actually mail them a check.  See https://www.wellsfargo.com/online-banking/bill-pay/ and https://www.wellsfargo.com/wfonline/tour/olb/high_flash?deep_link=2 Bank of America has something similar, but this forum won't let me post more than two links.  Go to google and search the name of the bank with 'send payments' or 'pay on line'. Tax regulations vary from country to country - some permitting more deductions, some less - but here are a few guidelines. As regards the home-office: As regards the deductions: Think of it like this: in order to have space for a home-office you needed a bigger home.  That leads to increased rates, heating, insurance and so on.  Many tax regulators recognise that these are genuine expenses.  The alternative is to rent a separate office and incur greater expenses, leading to increased deductions and less overall tax paid (which won't finance the deficit). The usual test for deductions is: was the expense legitimately incurred in the pursuit of revenue?  The flexibility permitted will vary by tax authority but you can frequently deduct more than you expected.