conversation: User (clayburn88): "I wanted to share a little technique that we have been using that helps us with paying for our monthly bills.\n\nWhen we were living a little more paycheck to paycheck, we were having trouble with our monthly bills given our biweekly incomes. Our bills were not evenly spread out through the month. This caused our accounts to look pretty good when we got paid during the middle of the month, but pretty bad when we got paid around the first. We would have to worry not only about the cost of these bills, but when they were going to be paid as well.\n\nWhat I did was set up another checking account with our bank to pay all of these bills. I seeded this account with $1000 of savings to prevent overdrafts due to timing. Then I calculated the biweekly cost of each of these bills. For varying bills like utilities, I used a conservative average, just to be safe. To find the biweekly cost given the monthly cost, you can multiple the monthly cost by 12 and divide by 26. Adding all of these together, I was able to determine the total biweekly cost of these bills. From there, I set up a biweekly automatic transfer for this amount from my direct deposit account to my new bill pay account. Alternatively, some companies will split a direct depost to multiple accounts, but the transfer is easier for me to change if some bill changes.\n\nThis made things much easier on us. We were able to stop worry about a few bills coming up together and really focus on fixing other budget categories. I am more able to check our main checking account to see how we are doing without worrying when some bill is going to autopay. This is probably common sense for many of you, but it really helped our budget click."
  Self: "That is brilliant! I was struggling with this as well till I stopped doing monthly budget and now budget per paycheck. I wish when learning about budgets that they would show others ways than monthly. "
  