For the last year and a half I have been recording all our monthly bills at the beginning of each month in order to ensure that we put aside enough money to pay them. This year I am aiming to try and reduce our monthly bills. I have decided to list them on my blog for records sake and so that I may review any progress I make with them over this coming year.

Rent: 977.45 EUR
Gas and Electric: 148.08 EUR
Health insurance: 203.00 EUR
Telephone: 15.00 EUR
My cellphone: 19.50 EUR
BH's cellphone: 22.50 EUR
Personal property insurance: 13.00 EUR
Groceries: 200 EUR
Student loan payment: 63.11 EUR
Internet: 30 EUR
Train card for BH: 163.00 EUR
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Total monthly bills: 1854.64 EUR
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Rent should go up as of July 2008 due to an annual increment in line with inflation ( last year the rent went up an additional 13 EURs). As we pay an extremely good rent for our appartment, especially considering the area where we live, I do not see this changing much until we decide to buy.

Gas and electricity will start including water this year as well, however the water part will only be paid once a year and should be about 200 EUR. ( I will need to set up a monthly savings fund for this one). The gas and electricity bill I expect to go down by about 40 - 50 EURS this year, once we send in our actual meter readings for last year(finger's crossed).

Health insurance is going down in 2008 to 196.00 EUR per month. This includes both me and my BH. I have not adjusted the bill yet, as it is automatically deducted from my pay check every month and I will only know for certain how much it is then.

This year both of our cell phone contracts are finished. I want to keep my current phone, which I brought under the contract, and just start using pre-paid cards, as I barely use the phone except in emergencies. However, my BH does use his phone ALOT to call his family back home, so I expect we will either re-new his contract of if we find a better one deal, go for that.

I intend to upgrade my internet and I have not done this in 3 years!!! My BH recently found out that we could upgrade our account free of charge to a faster connection, but pay less per month. 23 EURs instead of 30 EURs. So once I have some time this week I am going in to upgrade our contract as it is in my name.

Well that's all the things I have thought of so far. Let's see how we're doing in a couple of months with these babies!