[ellenmelon]

I hope this helps:

When I was first married and had absolutely no idea how to budget my gf took a steno pad and made one page for every month. Then she set some boundaries for the categories based on the past 3 months bills. Where we could we put the bills on income averaging, like the electric bill which varies a lot, we could ask the company to average and so get the same bill each month and then once a year they made an adjustment based on the previous year. The periodic bills like insurance twice a year and taxes a couple times a year she totalled the yearly cost and then divided by twelve. That was the amount I had to be sure to NOT spend in the months with a surplus but instead be sure to put that much aside plus 10% for surprise changes. It helped me because at that time our income was varying from month to month.

The hardest part still are the surprise expenses. Our communications/electronics bills for long distance, local and regional landline, cell phone, computer, television cable, etc comes to almost $300 a month!!!!!