Oh I have at least $50 to $100 left over each fortnight after paying all of the bills. DF can have the same, less or more, depending on whether he gets extra work and whether a big bill arrives. With the other bills, we are on time, and have no current debt at all.

What I am thinking, is if we pay all of the bigger bills on the credit card (electricity, water and phone), and can also can get the odd larger purchase, and pay all the regular bills from our bank accounts. So the rent, internet, health fund, pay TV (for the next few months then contract ends) are the same value each regular time to pay. Whereas the phone, electricity, water fluctuate and don't come on the same date each time. These are the bills we're not really able to predict. I'd pay with these with the credit card and as soon as we both get paid, we pay it right back.

Sometimes we have to pay a bill or make a purchase in between paydays.

I'll talk to FIL about it too, perhaps with the few bigger purchases he could buy, and I will set up a payment plan with my internet banking and pay him back asap.
I don't understand why the bills would come at different times? All companies have some patterns to their billing. They might bill after 4 weeks or every 90 days, rather than on the 3rd of each month or the 3rd of every third month, for example, or they might have a set credit limit, such as never letting you owe more than $100 in any billing period, but there WILL be a predictability to their nature, because they have to have a system to operate - an arbitrary or random billing period would be totally chaotic and make their internal financial systems a nightmare.

It is always hard to set up a budget system as i described because say you are saving for the electricity bill, you have to find the money to pay the current bill AS WELL as saving for the one after. However once you're saving ahead of time you never get caught out again, and if you put it on a credit card you haven't ACTUALLY paid it, you've just put it off.

You can predict your electricity bill amount by reading your meter every day, week or month (depending on how stable your use is) and using the info off the last bill (it will tell you how to turn the units on the bill into kiloWatt hours and how much those hours cost you in real terms, and how much VAT or other tax you might have to pay) work out the cost of the next bill. You can also use your readings to reduce your useage (and see how much it's reduced). Same with water if it's metered. With the phone we just keep track of our calls in the sense that we have free evening and weekend calls for the first hour, so we limit calls as much as possible to free times, time ourselves and after an hour hang up and redial.

Either way it is only going to cost MORE to pay bills with a credit card because you aren't actually paying them, you're just swapping the person you owe and not in a good way.

We save 170GBP/month for gas and electricity. In the winter the bill usually costs every penny of that, in the summer nothing like it - in the summer we have extra cash to spend or save. I would suggest you work out the maximum each bill will cost and save that much and treat anything you don't spend as a bonus. I used to always save 30GBP/month for my phone and it was NEVER more than 60GBP/quarter but it was very handy having the extra cash the day after i'd paid the bill every quarter, like a great prize for being sensible

If FIL has money you would be far better to borrow from him and work out a re-payment system and set up a standing order to do so than get a CC to do it. FIL will not charge you compound interest!

Bx