Budgeting Tip: Equalizing your Monthly Utility Payments

The Monthly Budget (A.K.A., your Financial Blueprint)

We help our clients how to get out of debt and succeed with money. We feel it’s an important part of helping clients through the Utah divorce.

And the first step to getting your financial house in order to get out of debt is by creating a monthly budget.

Think of a monthly budget as your get-out-of-debt blueprint. If you don’t follow a blueprint when you’re building a house, you won’t know what the finished product will look like.

Same concept here: if you don’t have a basic money blueprint (monthly budget), you won’t know what your financial house will look like in the end.

Equalizing your Monthly Utility Payments

One of the keys to a successful budget is equalizing your payments from month to month.

What I mean is you want your payments on certain things (e.g., groceries, gas for the car, clothes) to be the same every month.

If things are the same, it’s much easier to budget. For example, if your food budget for the month fluctuates between $300 and $700, then you’ll have a difficult time budgeting correctly, not only for that thing, but for all the other things you have to budget. It’s much easier to set food at $450 per month and leave it there.

Now, you can’t always equalize monthly payments, but when you can, you should.

One of the easiest things to equalize is your utility bills.

Utility companies have programs that allow you to choose an equal monthly payment throughout the year. So, while your electric bill used to be high in June and July (when you use the AC) and December and January (when you don’t), you can equalize it across the months.

All you have to do is call your utility companies and ask to be put on the “equal payment plan” (that’s what Rocky Mountain Power calls it). It only take a couple minutes to switch over.

Once you’re on, you’ll know exactly what your monthly payment will be for the rest of the year, and your budgeting will be that much easier.