How do you do it? budget and bills?

[~me~]

ETA DH has a spreadsheet for every month

Yep same here Olive Lol! And it is my job to plug in the bills when they arrive.
We put a certain amount away every fortnight into a 'bills' account. This has been worked out by DH with the spreadsheet what we pay each year. So when a bill comes in, there is money already there to cover it. This includes:

Gas/Elec
Phones (all incl mobile)
Internet
Swimming for DS's
Car and motorbike services
Rego
Insurance on house and car
and any other bills we regularly pay.

It saves surprise large bills as DH has calculated over a year what we spend.
Works great.

[Hansie]

This is the first year I have done this but it has worked for us and we could never save before. So far it's working like a dream

At the beginning of the year I looked at all of our expenses that come out quarterly/ yearly, added them up for each provider for the year and increased them all by 15% divided that by 52 weeks. we then started paying that figure into a spare account that we have. We are lucky that most of our big bills insurances, rego etc start coming out from the June so I had 6 mths to build it up. .

I have a table on one side of my budget with a formula and each time a new bill comes in I add it onto the paid side and it comes up with how much I have left for that particular provider/bill.

For the things that come out monthly PHI & Phone/Internet & mobiles I have come out of another account that has all the direct debit stuff and then our normal account is for food/mortgage & $50per week each for us to spend as we want. We take out the food money and spending money we have budgeted for in one lump and don't spend anything else in the account.

Hope this helps

[Olive]

Yep same here Olive Lol! And it is my job to plug in the bills when they arrive.
We put a certain amount away every fortnight into a 'bills' account. This has been worked out by DH with the spreadsheet what we pay each year. So when a bill comes in, there is money already there to cover it. This includes:

Gas/Elec
Phones (all incl mobile)
Internet
Swimming for DS's
Car and motorbike services
Rego
Insurance on house and car
and any other bills we regularly pay.

It saves surprise large bills as DH has calculated over a year what we spend.
Works great.

lol heather you sure our hubands arnt related!