How to Organize Utility Expenses

Video Transcript

"I am going to present a topic on budget. Again with the help of Expert Village, I hopefully will be able to help people and assist people in terms of developing a budget. In this clip we will talk about utilities and how that impacts the budget. Utilities are one of the things on a monthly basis that you are paying. That could be the water, electric, trash, telephone, gas and sewer. In most instances, you may have to break down the water maybe on a quarterly basis you might have to look at that over a year and divide that by 12 to get that on a monthly basis. The electric is normally paid on a monthly basis for most folks so that should be easily and readily available as well as the trash may also be a quarterly assessment so you might have to divide that out either by 3 or 12 depending on how it gets billed. Your telephone again, that is something that you need to include in the budget. I put it under utilities because that is a recurring expense and also gas. It could be natural gas or fuel oil to heat your home. That needs to be put in the budget as well. So utilities will cover anything that maintains the home in terms of making sure that it is heated, making sure that the water is on and making sure that the sewage is treated so that would be under utilities. That is normally the second biggest impact to your budget. Just to give you some general numbers on a monthly basis, you may see a water at $50 per month, you may see electric at $100 per month, you may see a trash bill at about $25 and you may see a telephone at about $50 a month. Again, these will impact your budget depending on how much you use them. One of the biggest variables is the telephone. That is something that you can basically control. A lot of the other utilities are fixed and you really can't do much. So as we look at the budget and we develop the budget, we will kind of look at things that we have control over and things that we can adjust when we look at our cash flow. There will be some items that hopefully we might be able to reduce. The gas is another big component that normally we can't do much on a monthly basis to control. So again, utilities are probably the second biggest business expense item that is going to tack the budget and again, you want to make sure you have a detailed budget on most things to see how those expenses go for you on a monthly basis. "