“I got paid today! So let’s go through my payday routine as a 26-year-old PICU nurse living in Atlanta who is just getting into her personal finances.”
So begins a TikTok video by Michaelyn Wright detailing her “#paydayroutine,” a breakdown, to the dollar, of how she plans to allocate her twice-a-month paycheck.
Ms. Wright is a pediatric intensive care nurse who earns $96,000 per year. Her video is among thousands under that hashtag on TikTok and Instagram, sharing how much users earn and exactly where each dollar goes, from groceries and bills to savings accounts and taxes.
How it’s pronounced
/pā-dā rü-tēn/
It’s part of the social media trend toward greater transparency around finances, but it pushes the needle further by modeling ways to budget.
“Breaking down a budget on a specific salary helps viewers set realistic expectations for their money,” said Ang Richard, 25, a career coach who works with a mostly Gen Z clientele.
Hannah Williams, 28, helped popularize the related #paytransparency hashtag in 2022 with TikTok videos in which she asked random people to share how much they made in their jobs.
In her very first video on pay transparency, she discussed the salaries she had earned at every job she ever had. The video, born of frustration at finding out that she had been paid less than her peers as a contractor for the U.S. military, immediately garnered over a million views.
“That video going viral really opened my eyes to this being something people want to talk about,” said Ms. Williams, who has since founded the company Salary Transparent Street to promote pay transparency. “Like this conversation is now open. The taboo of talking about finances is starting to lift.”
Employees of most workplaces in the United States have a right to discuss pay with co-workers. But for a long time, doing so was considered inappropriate, and discouraged.
The trend toward greater sharing of information around money, said Eric Simonson, founder and chief executive of the financial advisory Abundo Wealth, can be traced to millennials who entered the work force during the Great Recession, when the economy was on shaky ground. Gen Z, those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, took the trend even further, opening up about money to millions of people on social media.
“Older generations didn’t have the economic pressures that young folks face,” Mr. Simonson said. “They had a pension that could provide potentially a secure retirement, home values were a lot cheaper, and incomes were higher relative to housing prices and living costs.”
Ms. Wright, the pediatric nurse, said she had become more interested in her finances after hearing her peers talk about high-yield savings accounts and Roth individual retirement accounts. But it was the personal finance TikTok videos on her algorithm that gave her the tools to make smarter financial choices, she said.
“When I started seeing a lot more pop up on my page, they were so motivating for me to figure out what I was doing with my money now that I’d been a nurse for a while and I was making big-girl money,” she said.
Ms. Richard, the career coach, said she saw #paydayroutine and other financial transparency trends as largely positive developments.
“We’re seeing working professionals getting more comfortable discussing their compensation, advocating for pay transparency in job descriptions, and making discussions around money less taboo and secretive,” she said.
Kristen Bayrakdarian is a news assistant for the Business desk.
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