French budgeting: How getting paid once a month and shirking credit cards helped me manage my family finances.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Indeed, the numbers in the U.S. are almost inverse to those in France: Only 10 percent of all employees are paid once a month in the U.S. Logic, or at least my own experience managing our family’s expenses over the years, would tell me that getting paid once a month would make it much harder to manage our money. That’s not the case in the U.S., where Americans owe about $1.2 trillion in credit card debt, according to a recent study by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. That’s not always the case when I use my American credit cards. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I’m trying to keep that momentum going by limiting my use of credit cards and trying hard to spend the money that is coming in as we receive it.