Do I have to work a certain amount of hours in order to get paid monthly?
"Frequency of paychecks is up to the company. Many pay monthly. Some pay twice a month, or every other week. I haven't heard of any paying more frequently unless they were tiny ""mom and pop"" businesses or grunt-labor/fast-food minimum-wage jobs. Cutting the checks more often is more expensive for the company. And frequency of pay is  one of the things you agreed to in the paperwork you signed when you were hired."
Personally, I have a little checkbook program that I use to keep track of my spending and balance. Like you -- and I presume like most people -- I have certain recurring bills: the mortgage, insurance payments, car payment, etc. I simply enter these into the checkbook program about a month before the bill is due. Then I can run a transaction list that shows the date, amount, and remaining balance after each transaction. So if I want to know how much money I really have available to spend, I just look for the last transaction before my next payday, and see what the balance will be on that day. Personally, I always keep a certain amount of pad in my account so if I made a mistake and entered an incorrect amount for a check, or forgot to enter one completely, I don't overdraw the account. (I like to keep $1000 in such padding but that's way more than really necessary, it's very rare that I make a mistake of more than $100.) In my case, I don't enter electric bills or heating bills because I don't know the amount until I get the bill, and the amounts fall well within my padding, and for just two bills I can factor them in in my head. BTW I wrote this program myself but I'm sure there are similar products on the market. I used to use a spreadsheet and that worked pretty well. (Mainly I wrote the program because I have a tiny side business that I have to keep tax records for even though it makes almost no money.) You could in principle do it on paper, but the catch to that is that when you write payments on your paper ledger in advance of actually writing the check, you will often be writing down payments out of order, and so it becomes difficult to see what your balance is or was or will be on any given date. But a computer system can easily accept transactions out of order and then sort them and re-do the balance calculations in a fraction of a second. I do not meet your qualifications but this is what I would do: 1)  Save an amount that can replace your bike and accessories if it is stolen.  Don't touch it for anything but that. 2)  Compute an average monthly cost for maintenance items, double that for a couple of months until you have the account built up, then budget that amount every month. If your bike/headlight/front tire, get stolen or broken beyond repair, take it out of the first account.  Then your savings priority should be to rebuild that account.  I would be a bit alarmed if you have to keep hitting this account for legitimate reasons. When a tire goes flat, or other normal wear and tear item occurs, take it out of the second account.  This account should fluctuate regularly, and it is normal.  During certain months you may want to increase this amount (more glass on the street because of outdoor events means more flat tires). The same kind of thing holds true for a car. Putting numbers to some figures would help. I think the most alarming thing about your post is that a theft is somewhat ordinary.  Yikes! The general concept is that your money will grow at an accelerating rate because you start getting interest paid on your returns in addition to the original investment.  As a simple example, assume you invest $100 and get 10% interest per year paid annually.   -At the end of the first year you have your $100 + $10 interest for a total of $110. -So you start the second year with $110 and so 10% would be $11 for a total of $121. -The third year you start with $121 so 10% would be $12.10 for a total of $133.10 See how the amount it goes up each year increases? If we were talking a higher initial amount or a larger number of years that can really add up. That is essence is compound interest. Most of the complicated looking formulas you see out there for compound interest are just shortcuts so you don't have to iteratively go through the above exercise a bunch of times to find out how much you would have after some number of years. This formula tells you how much you would have(A) after a certain number of years(t)  at a given interest rate(r) assuming they pay interest n times per year, for example you would use 12 for n if it paid interest monthly instead of yearly. P represents the  amount you started out with.   If you keep investing monthly (as shown in your example) instead of just depositing it and letting it sit, you have to use a more complicated formula. Finance people refer to this as calculating the future value of an annuity.  That formula looks like this: A = PMT [((1 + r)N - 1) / r] x (1+r)  A : Is the amount you would have at the end of the time period.   N : The number of compounding periods (months if you get interest calculated monthly)   PMT : The total amount you are putting in each period (N)    r: Just like before, the interest rate you are getting paid. Be sure to adjust this to a monthly number if N represents months (divide APR by 12)* *Most interest rates are quoted as APR, which is the annualized interest rate not counting compounding. Don't confuse this with APY, which has compounding built into it and is not appropriate for use in this formula. Inserting your example: r (monthly interest rate) = 15% APR / 12 = .0125 n = 30 years * 12 months/year = 360 months   A = $150 x [((1 + .0125)360 - 1) / .0125] x (1+.0125) A = $1,051,473.09 (rounded) "For 401(k) and regular IRA, you pay income tax on withdrawals from the account. At a certain age, there is a ""required minimum distribution"". This is an amount you must withdraw from the account or you face penalties. I've also read about, but am not familiar with, mechanisms by which you can retire early and start taking withdrawals before the regular official retirement age. (These may or may not be legit, I didn't do any research on it.) A Roth IRA, which is not ""tax deferred"" and thus not technically covered by your question, there is no tax on withdrawals (assuming you are at retirement age) and no required minimum distribution. Something to watch out for on your accounts are fees that they charge for withdrawals. I was in a 401(k) once that had a $50 fee per-withdrawal. A monthly check from this account would eat your money! I paid the fee once, when I rolled it into an account at a brokerage after leaving the company." I've heard from friends in high paying companies that the norm is under 4 hours: you can upgrade yourself. Above 4 hours: business. Sounds reasonable to me.  Usually people that fly business aren't flying one or two times a year. They're doing it a couple of days per week. And these people are usually in high demand. If someone doesn't offer this as the norm, they can probably get a job someplace that does. They likely have an intern (job title) pay-scale that maxes out somewhere below $30/hr in order to meet the FLSA (that exempt vs non-exempt stuff you were seeing). As a PhD student, you could probably negotiate up into the ~$25/hr range, but from a benefits standpoint, they might not be able to pay you $35/hr without making you an exempt, full-time employee. It depends on how much your time is worth. Those interest rates from that amount of money will not generate anything convenient. And the effort you make to fulfill the requirements can possibly turn into an overhead cost to getting that $34 a month. For instance, lets say you make $20/hour but you spent an hour trying to figure out how their billpay works. Suddenly not worth it. And if that interest rate is only granted up to $10k, then the compounding effects will be nullified because they won't even grant that same interest rate once the money starts to grow. Hope that helps. Welcome to finance.  Be someone's bitch for 40 years and there is a 1/2,000,000 chance you'll get your turn one day as you stand next to all your coworkers with your hands out.  The finance (and accounting) industry relies on underpaid grunts working 10 hours of overtime every week with no extra pay.