Fixed bills: the ones that don't move
Okay. You've got your legal pad going, you've got real numbers instead of guessed-at ones, and you've rounded the way I told you. Now we're going to start actually filling in the page, and we start with the boring part on purpose.
The boring part is fixed bills. These are the ones that show up every single month for the same amount, or close enough to it, and you don't get a vote. Rent or the mortgage. Car payment. Insurance, if it's not paid all at once. Any loan payment. Internet, mostly, unless you're one of those households that changes providers every six months chasing a promo rate, which, fine, but for budget purposes just use whatever it actually was last month.
I put these at the top of the page every time, above groceries, above everything else, because they're the ones with the least mercy in them. Miss a grocery week and you eat weird 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 comes on a set schedule for a set amount. Don't round these the fun direction. Remember what I said — 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 aren't monthly. Car insurance might bill you every six months. Write down what it costs for the year and divide by twelve, and put that monthly number on your page even though the real charge doesn't hit every month. Otherwise you'll feel rich for five months and then get walloped in month six, and that's not a budget, that's a trap you built yourself.
What counts as fixed and what doesn't
Here's where people trip up. Utilities feel fixed because they show up every month, but they move around, sometimes a lot, and that's not the same thing. Your power bill in July when the air conditioner's 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 the 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 little gift instead of a surprise the other direction.
That's actually 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 just started over rather than try to adjust the old numbers, because the old numbers were built for a different house and would've been lying to me the whole time without meaning to. New address, new legal pad page. I didn't trust myself to just tweak the old one and get it right, and I was correct 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 added, whatever — your whole plan is off before you've even started spending on groceries. Round up a little on every fixed bill. Nobody's ever gotten 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 the 1st and your rent's due the 3rd, that's a different plan than paycheck 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 and different days. That's the whole point of writing 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. If you're not sure whether something's fixed or if it wanders around month to month, bring it and we'll sort it out together.