Fixed bills: the ones that don't move
You've got your legal pad going, you've got real numbers instead of guessed-at ones, and you've rounded the way I asked. Now we start actually filling in the page, and we begin with the boring part on purpose.
The boring part is fixed bills. These are the ones that turn up every single month for the same amount, or close enough to it, and you don't get a vote. Rent or the mortgage. The car payment. Insurance, if it isn't paid all at once. Any loan payment. Internet, mostly — unless you're one of those households that switches providers every six months chasing a promo rate, which is fine, but for budgeting purposes just use whatever it actually was last month.
I put these at the top of the page every time, above groceries, above everything, because they're the ones with the least mercy in them. Miss a grocery week and you eat a little strangely for a few days. Miss a mortgage payment and it's a whole different conversation, with a whole different level of person calling you. Fixed bills get first pick of the money. Always.
How to actually list them
Get your statements out, or log into whatever you need to log into, and write down every bill that arrives on a set schedule for a set amount. Don't round these the fun direction. Remember what I told you — income you round down, bills you round up. If your car payment is $287.42, you write $290. If it's ever going to be wrong, you want it wrong in your favor, not the bank's.
Some of these won't be monthly. Car insurance might bill you every six months. Write down what it costs for the year, divide by twelve, and put that monthly number on your page even though the actual charge doesn't hit every month. Otherwise you'll feel rich for five months and then get walloped in the sixth — and that's not a budget, that's a trap you built for yourself.
What counts as fixed and what doesn't
This is where people trip up, so let me flag it before it catches you. Utilities feel fixed because they show up every month, but they move around — sometimes quite a lot — and that's not the same thing. Your power bill in July, when the air conditioner is fighting the whole outdoors, is not your power bill in April. Water's the same — more in summer if you've got a lawn, and around here you're also dealing with softener salt, because the water's hard enough to leave spots on every glass in your cupboard and crust up your fixtures if you don't stay on top of it. I put utilities in their own category, not the fixed one, and I budget for the higher months, so the lower months feel like a small gift instead of a surprise in the other direction.
That, in fact, is the whole reason I redid our budget from the studs when Rodney and I moved to American Fork last year. Our old place had different everything — different water, no softener at all, a totally different power setup. I sat down with the first few months of bills here and simply started over, rather than trying to adjust the old numbers, because the old numbers were built for a different house and would have been quietly lying to me the whole way through. New address, new legal pad page. I didn't trust myself to just tweak the old one and get it right — and I was right not to trust myself, because the water bill alone was a different animal than what we'd had before.
The one opinion I want to plant here
Round your bills up. I know I keep saying it, but this is the lesson where it matters most, because fixed bills are the ones you build everything else around. If you write down the real number to the penny and the bill happens to come in four dollars higher one month — a rate went up, a fee got tacked on, whatever it is — your whole plan is off before you've even started spending on groceries. Round up a little on every fixed bill. Nobody has ever been hurt overestimating what the mortgage costs.
Writing them down
On your legal pad, make a column. List every fixed bill, its rounded-up amount, and the day of the month it's due. That due date matters more than people think — if your paycheck lands on the 1st and your rent's due the 3rd, that's a different plan than paycheck on the 15th and rent due the 3rd. Add the column up. That total is the first real number in your whole budget, and it's the number everything else has to fit around.
Don't panic if the total feels big. It usually is bigger than people expect once they see it all in one place, instead of scattered across different bills on different days. That's the whole reason we write it down — you can't fix what you haven't looked at straight on.
Before next time
Get your fixed-bill total written down and added up, rounded up on every line, before we meet again. And if you're not sure whether something is fixed or whether it wanders month to month, bring it along — we'll sort it out together.