Heck, banks won't even let you have the money immediately when it is on the weekend or a holiday.

There are real costs to processing payroll more often, even though checks are not printed as often.

Regular employees already benefit from legislation on this point (which often covers both minimum frequency and maximum delay from end of pay period or termination to delivering pay.) [0] So, with regular employees, it's just a matter of tweaking regs to better fit current conditions.

With gig economy contractors, the situation is less simple.

[0] A description of the CA state rules: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/FAQ_Paydays.htm

There is likely a cost with that, even if the bank allows the frequency change for free. Most banks are starting to provide APIs, but many still charge fees for large volumes of ACH formatted files for example. The costs in making sure things are tied out (ie, all amounts match to the penny) seem pretty high.

Every payroll cycle is difficult because you have things like [benefit|FSA|ESPP] deductions, and the occasional bonus earning or 0-dollar mandatory RSU vesting (to account for taxes paid).

The benefit for a daily payment is pretty low compared to the costs.

Agreed. I can't imagine having to balance my checking account with a daily transaction. It would be much harder to catch an error or a one-off when you didn't get paid too. Is my mortgage going to start deducting daily too? Both those things seem insane.

Also you are limited to 6 ACH transactions a month to a savings or money market account.

You're limited to 6 withdrawals, you can make as many deposits as you want.

Could you elaborate on why it seems high? What you're describing is computations on distributed systems, and I'd be surprised if it's computation or communication that is the bottleneck for handling ACH transactions.

Behringer is starting from the supposition the employer wouldnt. And thus it would cause unrest.

The only saving grace of going through that was that team productivity tanked so badly that the company ended up losing progress toward the milestone and payed out of that contract. After that experience dev estimates carried more weight and the company was more cautious about tight deadlines.

I am not affiliated with this company, just like their idea a lot for all the reasons mentioned in your post. Obviously they have to make money and presumably take some cut or added fee for providing the service of getting you paid before your employer does it, but at least they shorten the time between work done and getting paid.

We're talking about a lucrative industry that exists around extracting money from the poorest people. And most of it has to do with them waiting to be paid for work they've already done.

Is it really though?

If someone is really in this poor of a financial situation, I'd bet that it could actually be worse to receive money day by day. This gives them access to use it prior to when larger bills are typically due: the start or end of the month.

That is, if you get paid on the 31st, you'll have that full paycheck available to pay your loan, mortgage/rent, car, phone service, and so on on that day or within the next few days. Then you have the rest leftover to blow.

Day by day payments involve control and making sure you are setting aside enough.

Have you ever noticed how excited people in this situation are for "payday", since they're able to go buy stuff? Now, every day is payday with the associated temptations.

If you get $300 on the 1st or you get $10 a day you'll have the same amount on the 30th. If that amount is less than your monthly expenses you're in trouble and payday loans start to look attractive.

A lot of people in the seedier parts of time are working jobs that don't pay a livable wage, and a lot of people are also spending more than what they should be. Sometimes irresponsibly, sometimes out of necessity (see: the boot theory of economics).

Paying irresponsible people more often will exacerbate their problems.

Paying poor people more often won't make them not poor any more.

However, for many of America's working class they are < 1 paycheck from bankruptcy. I speculate that for many of them getting the "liquidity" of getting paid daily would stop some of them from missing payments.

But then I came to the realization that real life doesn't work that way, even looking at my (lack of) savings through the years. That is because life is full of stress, and throwing money at the causes of stress is sometimes the only way to reduce that stress. For example, having a teenager that has a drug issue, if you don't have the extra money then you deal with it, but if you do have extra you can spend it on therapy which may help thereby reducing stress.

And the various stress items really don't go away until you are bringing in about 70K or so a year -- at that point you can finally afford to pay off various debts, build an emergency fund, drive a reliable car, and live in a slightly better neighborhood.

If you get a $1500 paycheck every 15 days, as opposed to a $3000 paycheck every 30 days, then you earn 15 days of interest on $1500 that you would not otherwise earn. At Ally bank, that could be 1.85% in savings accounts. This two-paycheck cycle would repeat 12 times a year, so for half the year you earn interest you would not otherwise earn, totaling to roughly (compounding negligible) 1500*.0185/2= $14.

If you assumed you could get 9% in the stock market, the time value would be $68.

.. per year. Or $1.16/mo or under .04%. Although that's not literally nothing, it's awfully close. Oh, and that's before income tax.

> If you assumed you could get 9% in the stock market, the time value would be $68.

Although that assumption may be a bit of a stretch, something a typical consumer might be far more likely to encounter (and need not apply income tax adjustments to) is consumer loan payments.

A 20% revolving balance paid 15 days early results in $12.50 monthly, which can pay for a streaming subscription.