Insurances and Rates

While we were overseas travelling, mum and dad paid our rates upfront for us for the whole year, when we got our tax return we gave them the money back. This has got me thinking about doing it this way from now on. We are about to move back into our house at the end of the month (we are staying with mum and dad at the moment as we have tenants still in our house). Im thinking about just paying our home and contents insurance and car insurance up front for the whole year so it is something less to think about throughout the year, no more pesky direct debits every month as well!

Private health cover may be a different matter as we are currently paying $2600 a year on a corportate rate with MBF :o Perhaps we will pay this quarterly.

Just curious about whether you pay your rates and insurance up front for the whole year or pay them off monthly?
Which way do you find is easier to budget?

xxx

We pay rates, car, house and contents insurance up front for 12 months. Health insurance, life insurance and income protection insurance are paid monthly. While it really hurts when you pay the big bills up front, there are so many things that are standard monthly expenses anyway that I found if we paid everything monthly we would never get a "good" month IYKWIM.

Insurance always up front - costs so much more to do it monthly! Same with road tax.

Things that don't cost more we usually do monthly - TV license, council tax... um, that's about it. Health is monthly too as that works out cheaper (comes out of DH's wage pre-tax).

We pay school fees up front - thats our biggest expense at the moment, and we get a discount for paying it that way.
Other things we pay quarterly, monthly or fortnightly, depending.

With the bills that don't cost more for the monthly option, I would leave them as monthly. The money is better off sitting in your bank account earning interest than in the creditor's account!

we also pay rates, house and contents insurance and car insureance upfront, we pay health insurance monthly