This assignment is for when you are inputting your income and your expenses, but mostly your expenses in the input data tab. Now, because as you know, sometimes your bills are not necessarily the same every month, and especially when you're talking about your electric bill, and your gas bill and maybe even your phone bill. And there are other bills that tend to change from month to month, depending upon the time of time of year. Now, usually, you have maybe six months where your bills are going to be pretty consistent. And then the following six months, they'll be consistent for that time period. So I have done I've created a sheet where you can actually calculate your budgeted amounts for all of these bills that fluctuate from month to month.

Let's say for example, your gas bill and your electric bill, because your gas and electric bill change each month, the best way to come up with an estimated budget amount To use an average amount. So an average can be calculated by adding the amounts you paid, say for the last six months. In this case, I'm using a six month calendar, the amount that you paid in the last six months and then dividing that total by six, the total amount that you get after you've divided all of the six months by six is what you're going to use for your budgeted expense figure. So what you need to do is gather up all of your variable bills for the last six months. So that would be your electric bill, gas bills, all the bills that fluctuate, gather all of those up, and then you want to plug each amount under the month column.

Okay, you want to plug them under the month column. And then you're going to use the total amount in column I, which is over here as your budgeted number in the input tab of your spreadsheet. Also, another thing is you may want to adjust the amount that you budget For your gas and electric bill based on the season, or even better, you can actually you can actually set up a budgeted billing plan with your utility company. So what you would do, you would just take whatever the dollar amount is, and you plug it into this a month one that takes $100 month to let's say, 200 a month, three 300. I'm just giving examples here, month for 400 a month, five 500 a month, six 600. As you can see, the average of all of these amounts is 350.

So this is the amount that you are going to use as your budgeted amount.