Budgeting is not always easy as you have many careers and jobs out there that pay based on the hours you work, and sometimes those hours can vary. It is not set in stone, and sometimes work is more steady than other times.

However, using some simple guidelines to keep your finances in order can be very helpful regardless of the variations in your income.

There are a few ways a person can look at a variable income. There will be the high end of the paychecks and the low end of the paycheck amounts.

It could be that the job you have to work with is a job that is seasonal. This would be where the paychecks are great and steady during nine months of the year and then for three months of the year are half of what the regular paychecks were.

In another situation, the paychecks you get on a regular basis is high one week, and low another week. This would make it so that the variables are more dramatic and need to be watched a little more quickly.

Another option is a situation like a couple months out of the year your family makes an extra $1000 dollars due to a seasonal job, like a tax preparation agent, and then for the rest of the year you would not have that income.

Whatever the case may be that caused the variation in your budget; there are ways to create a consistent budget to meet the income and expense needs.

The first think you want to do, is to find out what the expense structure is you are working with. This would be taking the main expenses that are needed for basic survival

This would be:

Rent/mortgage
Utilities
Food

Then you will need to decide what expenses are important for the life style you live.

This would be:

Insurance
Car payment and expenses
Medical expenses
Other debts and expenses
Retirement and savings

Now you will need to total all of this up. Prioritize the importance of each of these expenses. With this information you will know what money you will need to meet your expenses. This is how you start to set a debt to income ratio.

Now we can look at the income that you have to work with to meet those debts.

For the paychecks that vary weekly or bi weekly:

First take the lowest check you would have on a regular pay period. This is the amount you are relatively sure will be consistent. So this would be in the instance that if you make $500 each week, but on some weeks you make $550 or $600, you would know that you would likely meet the $500 even in the situation that you have no extra work.

You will want to set your budget around this lower amount. If there is income left over from the deviation in income, you will be able to set this into savings, for repairs, emergencies, retirement and vacations.

For the paychecks that vary during the year:

In this situation you will want to do the same as with the variable with the weekly plan, however you will want to look at budgeting the money out for planning partial cover of the lower monthly incomes with the higher monthly incomes.

Here is an example. From May to September your family will bring in consistently $4500 per month, in the months of October to April your family will bring in on average $2000 per month. With this knowledge in mind you can use the extra money from the $4500 per month and set it aside to cover the other months.

Here is the equation to look at this.

5-months times $4500 equaling $22,500 and 7 months at $2000 equaling $14,000 then you combine that number for a total of $36,500 and then divide that by the 12-month time frame totaling $3041. That is the amount of money that you would be able to plan a budget around. On the months there are more, you will want to put the money in a high as you can, yielding savings account.

Next you will always want to plan your budget around a lower amount just in case there is a longer time frame that would be the lower amount.

Now with both of these options you can stay within the amount of money you plan, and have money aside for emergencies and unexpected repairs.

The final part of creating the best budget for your family is to remember to include fun money. With out budgeting to include your family fun, it is hard to know what you are spending your time working for.