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Paycheck Checkup

Six questions on your pay stub, withholding, benefits and match. Find the pay you've already earned but aren't getting.

Six questions, about two minutes. No score kept.

01How often do you read your pay stub, line by line?
02When did you last fill out a W-4?

The W-4 is the form that tells payroll how much federal income tax to hold back from each check.

03Do you know every benefit your job offers, and which ones you're enrolled in?
04If your job offers a retirement match, are you putting in enough to get all of it?

A match is money your employer adds to your retirement account when you put some in yourself.

05When you work overtime or extra shifts, do you check that they were paid right?
06When your paycheck lands, does any of it go straight to savings before you see it?

This is a checkup to help you think: educational coaching, not personalized legal, tax, insurance or investment advice. Your answers stay on this device. If you save a result, we keep the result and the items it flagged, not your individual answers.

Most people check one number on payday: what landed in the account. Everything between your pay rate and that number (taxes, insurance, retirement, the benefits you signed up for and the ones you didn't) goes by unread. This checkup asks six questions about the parts of a paycheck where mistakes and missed benefits can quietly cost you money.

You get a plain read on where you stand and, for anything that came up short, the one move that fixes it. Most of the fixes are a form, a question to payroll, or ten minutes with a pay stub.

Common questions

  • Why is my take-home so much smaller than my pay?

    Between your pay and what lands in your account come federal and usually state income tax, Social Security and Medicare, and whatever you signed up for: health insurance, retirement, maybe union dues. The Paycheck & Take-Home Pay calculator shows the split, and your pay stub shows your own.

  • Is a big tax refund a good thing?

    It's your own money coming back late. A big refund means more was held back from each check than you owed. Some people like it as forced savings. If you'd rather have that money through the year, a new W-4 moves it back into your paychecks.

  • Does MoneyBricks see my pay stub?

    No. Your answers stay on your device. If you're on Core or above and choose to save your result, we keep the result and the items it flagged, not your individual answers. This is educational coaching, not personalized tax or legal advice; for your own withholding, the IRS estimator and your payroll team have the specifics.

Go deeper

The quiz tells you where to look. The Job & Career Brick teaches you what to do about it, in plain English. And if you’re not sure where to start, the free BrickScore Assessment checks your whole foundation in about 5 minutes.

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