Saving for infrequent regular bills

This week, the annual bill for my partner's life insurance policy arrived. Of course I should have been expecting it, and I knew in a vague way that it was due around the end of the year. But do I have $400 easily to hand, and another $300 to pay the premium on my policy next month? No. Not really.

So what am I going to do about it? For a long time I've liked the idea of budgeting with the 60% solution that is very popular among MSN Money columnists. With this system, you keep your regular committed expenses to 60% of your gross. The other 40% is divided as follows:

10% to retirement
10% to long-term savings
10% to short-term savings (i.e., infrequent bills, car repairs, etc)
10% allocated as 'fun money'

Now, I don't really think I'd be able to keep all my committed expenses, including taxes, to under 60% of my gross. And I don't think I can afford to spend a whopping 10% on fun stuff. But maybe, just maybe, this formula could be usefully adjusted to meet my needs.

I envision something like this:

75% committed expenses
15% retirement
10% short-term savings

Over time, of course, I'd like to be able to shift these numbers so that I could actually put some money in to long-term savings. I have a few wild fantasies I'd like to indulge, and only some serious long-term savings is going to get me there.

But when I tried to talk my distinguished colleague (AKA my spouse) into rearranging our finances to fit this mold, he didn't like the idea. To him, the important thing is spending less money with the ultimate goal of having to work less. He is happy to talk about cutting expenses, but he doesn't really care what pots various funds get put into.

Well, with the arrival of this year's life insurance bill, I said, enough! What if we give ourselves a break this once and pay the $400 bill out of the E fund. Then we divide this and all other regular but infrequent expenses by 12, and put an amount into a special account monthly to enable us to cover these bills when they come up. He liked the idea! Woohoo!

Here are the bills I'm planning to pay this way:
Partner's life insurance: $400, due in November
My life insurance: $300, due in January
Car insurance: $375, due in March
Car insurance: $375 again, due in October

Okay, that's all fine and good. That comes out to $1450. We'll call it $1500 in case the car insurance goes up. That's $125/month.

My partner also wants to include Xmas gifts in this, tho. That one I'll have to think about. That would mean I would actually have to stick to a budget.

But I'm going to go ahead and set up a monthly autodeposit to my ING account for $125 and we'll take it from there.