Agreed with iris lily. I've never really felt I had "extra" money coming in. Money comes into my checking account at various times and in various amounts (my paycheck comes biweekly, my wife's paycheck comes on the opposite weeks, I get some stock vesting at the end of each month, my wife gets some quarterly bonuses, etc.). I have bills paid out of that account at various times in various amounts. When the checking account balance goes above a certain amount I invest the surplus. I might notice more of a difference if the incoming amounts were really close to the outgoing amounts, but I've always had a pretty high savings rate.
Yeah, our annual expenses are pretty lumpy (property taxes and HO insurance in January, school taxes and oil prebuy in October, car insurance and Xmas in December, etc). When DH was a teacher and I was SAHM, there was no income for 10 or 11 weeks of summer vacation - he got 21 paychecks per year, no choice. So income was uneven, too. I learned to budget on an annual basis.
Now that I think about it, I learned to do that back in college - more time for earning over the summer, but had to last all year to cover monthly rent and personal expenses in addition to semester college costs.
I read this some time ago: people who think of their money and financial life in monthly installments tend to have less money than those who think of it as an annual picture.
I am annoyed when financial advisors (most recently, our health insurance broker) talked in terms of monthly amounts. I hate that, I want it annualized ( so ok! It is simple enough to go x12) but
I still dont like it.
We dont work to regularize our expenses, in other words we have expenses that are uneven, like you. Our real estate tax bills are paid in December and that doubles our average monthly outlay. Our income taxes before FIRE sometimes equalled 2 or 3 times an average monthly expenses.
We dont participate in "budget billing" for utilities and in spring and fall our utility bills are low, while in summer and winter they are high.
That is all fine., we reserve cash to pay expenses when they are due.
Savvy money guys here could argue that no one should keep cash of any sizable amount laying around to pay large forseeable expenses because excess cash should always be invested. And that is a good point, I agree, I am just not that much into that tight a control of loose money.
I know two people who carefully plan their expenditures according to how much they can afford in a monthly pay,emt. Not surprisingly, those two people have low net worth in relation to their income. In their minds they are "responsible" with money, but I see how much they could have if they actually sat back to view their in and out resources in the bigger picture, annually.