Organising weekly vs monthly bills

M

mo3art

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I've been considering opening a separate bank account to allow me to pay my bills at the same rate each week.

I reckon that if I transfer all my household bills dd to this other bank account - stuff like Gas, ESB, Assurances, SSIAs, etc, and pay by SO each week €150 into the account they will be covered.

It's just that my other half gets paid by the week & I get paid by the month. My monthly salary covers mortgage, car loan, childcare and savings. His weekly salary is meant to cover everything else (in theory). But, because the bills all come out at different times of the month it's very hard to budget.

Both of the current accounts would be kept in credit & in both our names. Any thoughts.

Sorry, I know it looks a bit jumbled. I'm just trying to make sure we have the same amount being paid out every week. What do y'all think?

mo3art
 
I think the first thing you need to do is work out a bugget and you can organise how much you are spending and where it is going. Then you could start to think about another bank a/c, remember that this will generally incur more charges.

Good luck!
 
Seperate bill account

I had the same issue, although not caused by varying arrival times of money, just plain old bad budgetting. I was frquently letting bills roll over as my cash management skills were zero.

Around 6 years ago, I added up all the ESB, gas, phone bills for a year; divided by 12 and came up with a monthly amount. I opened a new current account and put in a float of £400 and started a monthly SO into the account. I moved the bills to DD. Pretty soon I addded Sky, TV license, home insurance, motor insurance, mobiles etc to this account. In the six years I never once did not have funds in the bank to cover bills. At this stage I put a bit more into the account each month than at first though, seeing as I kept adding bills. Generally the balance swells a bit in the summer and dips in the winter as the heating, ESB and phone bills seem to higher when it is cold, but I never mess with it.

Sure, there are some additional fees, but I pay fees of €6 - €7 per quarter for the peace of mind and the ability to just forget about my bills. Money well spent IMHO.

Hardly rocket science, but the best money move I ever made :)
 
Re: Seperate bill account

Thanks McGlough.

That's sort of what i was thinking about. The bills are always paid on time, mind you, but it's the cash flow that bugs me.

I've reconsidered a bit and decided to re-arrange all of the direct debits out of our account. Everything is on a monthly easy-pay system anyway, and change the date that they come out on so the same amount needs to be in the account every week.

Then we budget our spending money and costs for the week, everything else gets transferred into savings.

It's so ridiculous, I work in accounts for a living but I'm often clueless about my own ;-)

Mo
 
Re: Seperate bill account

>>It's so ridiculous, I work in accounts for a living but I'm often clueless about my own ;-)

Hopefully your creditors get paid on time ;-)
 
Re: Seperate bill account

I picked up a brochure in AIB this week on a Budget service they offered. My advice would be stear well clear. Basically you add up your bills for the year and they loan you that amount once a year. Then you repay the loan with 12 equal monthly payments.

In other words it's a loan. You pay interest.
As far as I could see you could end up having the cost of your car tax or insurance borrowed and attracting interest charges for months before you actually need to spend it.

The best approach is to do what the previous posters have done and work out your expenses and put something aside each month to meet them. Don't succumb to the Banks desire to sell you yet another Debt product.

If the bank really wanted to set up a useful budgeting service they'd allow you to open an account with very low charges that you could make regular lodgements to and which DD's could be set up against. You would only pay interest if the account went overdrawn, which would indicate that your monthly payments weren't high enough.

In other words.....A current account.

-Rd
 
Re: Seperate bill account

In terms of advice on budgeting it's hard to beat the relatively objective information here:
 
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