Fixed expenses: the costs your monthly list leaves out

Take a household that owns its flat, with ₹85,000 of take-home pay credited on the 1st, one child in school and one car. The figures are illustrative; the method works on any year of statements.

The monthly items are easy to name. A ₹25 lakh home loan over 240 months at an illustrative 8.5 percent costs ₹21,696 a month. A ₹3.2 lakh car loan over 48 months at an illustrative 9.25 percent costs ₹8,001. Then a ₹4,000 SIP, ₹3,000 to the house help, ₹2,200 for the school van, ₹849 for a family mobile plan, ₹649 for broadband and ₹129 for a music plan. That is the list most people would write, and it totals ₹40,524.

What it misses falls into two groups. The first is everything with a fixed price and an irregular month: society maintenance billed each quarter, property tax, a family health premium, a term insurance premium, car insurance, three school term fees plus annual charges, and three subscriptions renewed once a year. Together ₹1,53,598 a year, or ₹12,800 a month. The second is the bills that arrive every month in a different amount: electricity, piped gas and fuel for the daily drive, ₹7,580 in an average month.

The yearly items go missing for a simple reason. Each is paid from a bonus, from savings or on a card, so each feels like a one-off, and each year it is a fresh surprise even though nothing about it was unknown.

Most advice splits spending into needs and wants. For planning, a better split is by how well you can predict the amount, because that decides how you plan for it. Three tests settle almost every line on a statement.

Fixed: could you write down the rupee amount, and the month it falls due, a year ahead? If the only thing that changes it is a contract, a plan or an agreed arrangement, it is fixed. That covers EMIs, premiums, school fees, maintenance, subscriptions, the SIP and the house help, whether billed monthly or yearly.

Semi-fixed: will it certainly arrive every cycle, but you cannot name the figure until the bill does? Usage or season moves it: electricity, piped gas, metered water, fuel for a fixed commute. Plan these with an average and a high, never the last bill.

Variable: would it be zero next month if you decided so? Eating out, shopping, travel and most small UPI payments pass this test.

Three lines trip people up. The credit card bill is not an expense at all but a container: the subscriptions charged to the card are fixed and belong on the list by name, while the swipes are variable. The SIP is fixed by choice, and it stays on the list because the money is gone on the day whatever you call it. Fuel is semi-fixed for someone who drives to work and variable for someone who drives at weekends.

Here is the monthly part in full, with the column most lists leave out: when each item ends or can next change. A list without it treats every line as permanent, and two of these are not.

The two EMIs are ₹29,697, 34.9 percent of take-home, and they are the least movable lines on the page: they change only with a prepayment, a refinance or the last instalment. The car loan has 18 months left in this example. When it ends, ₹8,001 a month, 9.4 percent of take-home, stops leaving. Until then it still owes ₹1,44,018 of EMIs.

The small lines are where a list goes stale. The mobile plan, broadband and music plan are ₹1,627 a month, ₹19,524 a year, and each can change price at its next cycle without anyone signing anything new. The order these leave the account after payday is the subject of the where-does-my-salary-go page; this page is about the total.

List every debit from the last twelve months that repeats, but not monthly, and divide each by twelve. School is the biggest: three term fees of ₹21,000 and ₹8,500 of annual charges, ₹71,500 a year and 46.6 percent of all the periodic items. Insurance, across health, term and car, is ₹46,000 a year, ₹3,833 a month. Maintenance and property tax are ₹31,800, ₹2,650 a month. The three yearly subscriptions are only ₹4,298, ₹358 a month, which is exactly why they are the ones forgotten.

The monthly figure, ₹12,800, is 15.1 percent of take-home. It is a planning number, not a payment. Suppose April carries the annual school charges, the first term fee, the first quarter's maintenance and the property tax: ₹40,600 in one month, ₹27,800 more than the monthly share. April's committed outflow then reaches ₹88,704, 104.4 percent of take-home, while a month with no periodic item commits only ₹48,104, 56.6 percent. Both are the same household with the same income. Mapping every month of the year is the predict-next-month-bills page's work.

The practical fix is a standing transfer of the monthly share, ₹12,800, into a separate account on payday, from which the lumps are paid. The quiet months then stop looking rich.

Semi-fixed bills need two numbers. Electricity here averages ₹2,300 and has ranged from ₹1,600 to ₹3,400 over the year. Piped gas averages ₹780, between ₹690 and ₹880. Fuel for the daily drive averages ₹4,500, between ₹3,800 and ₹5,600. The average month is ₹7,580 and the high case ₹9,880: a swing of ₹2,300 that the plan has to hold room for.

Put the three parts together. On an average month the household has committed ₹60,904, 71.7 percent of take-home, and has ₹24,096 left, 28.3 percent, or ₹803 a day over 30 days. In the high case, with every semi-fixed bill at its peak, committed reaches ₹63,204, 74.4 percent, and the daily figure falls to ₹727.

There is no universal right share. The useful check is whether the daily figure covers what the household genuinely spends on ordinary days. If it does not, the answer sits in the committed lines, not in groceries. Those lines move at different speeds: the EMIs only with a prepayment, refinance or the last instalment; the periodic items only at renewal; the semi-fixed bills with usage. Knowing which is which tells you when each can be changed, and the renewal date is usually the nearest one.

Take the largest periodic item. Suppose the school raises fees by an illustrative 10 percent for the new academic year. ₹71,500 becomes ₹78,650: ₹7,150 more over the year, ₹596 a month. Measured against the ₹24,096 left for variable spending, that is 2.5 percent, which sounds small and is easy to absorb once.

It does not stay once. A fee that rises by 10 percent at three renewals in a row goes from ₹71,500 to ₹95,166, 33.1 percent higher, and over those three years the household pays ₹45,831 more than the original fee would have cost. The list, if nobody updated it, still says ₹71,500 throughout.

Rises rarely come alone. If in the same year the health premium rises 15 percent at renewal, maintenance is revised up 8 percent, and the broadband plan moves from ₹649 to ₹749, a 15.4 percent rise, the four together add ₹13,918 a year, ₹1,160 a month, 4.8 percent of the money left for choices. None of these percentages is a market average; your own renewal notices are the only figures that count.

The point is not that prices rise. It is that a fixed expenses list records the price on the day it was made, and every renewal quietly makes it wrong.

Pull twelve months of statements for every account and card the household pays from, including the one that only pays insurance.

Go through the debits and keep anything that repeats at any interval: the same payee, a similar amount, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly. For each, record five things: the item, the amount last paid, how often it repeats, the month it next falls due, and the date it ends or can change. Then spread the periodic ones across twelve months, give each semi-fixed bill an average and a high, and add the three parts.

A spreadsheet is enough to start. Its weakness is that it is right on the day it is made and decays from there: a new mandate appears, a premium renews higher, a loan ends and nobody deletes the row. So the list needs a review at three moments: when any renewal notice arrives, when a loan closes, and once a year against fresh statements.

When is it not worth the effort? If the household rents, has few periodic items and its committed share leaves plenty, a monthly list is close enough. It earns its keep where yearly items are large, or where the daily figure left over is tight.

The work on this page is finding every cost that repeats, at any interval, and seeing next month's committed total before it arrives. Unyfy does that from your own transactions, read from bank and card transaction emails and, on Android, transactional SMS, with no manual entry.

On Pro, the Fixed Expenses screen predicts what the coming month is already committed to: the EMIs, SIPs, rent, premiums, bills, subscriptions and card bill it has seen leave your accounts, with what is paid and what is left so far this month, so the committed total is in front of you before the month begins rather than rebuilt from statements.

Its Subscriptions list shows each recurring subscription with its amount and Due or Paid status. Open one and you see how often it is paid, the usual payment days, how many past payments matched and the past months' payments, so you can compare this month's amount with the ones before it.

It never asks for your bank password or UPI PIN, and every payment is one you authorise. You cancel a plan with the provider, and a mandate in the UPI app that set it up. Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.