Annual and irregular bills have a way of catching us off guard. It’s not that we didn’t know they’d arrive; it’s just that they’re out of our usual monthly rhythm.

Let’s say you want to make an ambitious plan to save up for some larger expense. It’s demoralizing when out of the blue comes a huge bill that you didn’t account for. Even if you do clear it with money from another area, it feels like you’re constantly putting out financial fires.

The good news is that irregular expenses are highly predictable. In fact, for most families these bills are about as predictable as the seasons. The major reason for their surprise is that we operate on a monthly budget, and it’s not intuitive for us to break down larger expenses any other way. What you need is a plan and the discipline to stick with it. That’s exactly what the rest of this article covers.

1. Create a comprehensive list of annual bills. You can’t plan for these expenses if you don’t know what they are. Look up all your bills from the past couple of years and make a list of the ones that don’t recur monthly. These are typically subscriptions or large bills that come due on a seasonal (such as a large heating bill) or annual (such as car insurance) basis.

2. Get a rough estimate for irregular bills. Not all bills fall cleanly into a predictable frequency. You might have a large bill come due every couple of years, or a medical bill that can’t be pegged down to a particular time of the year. It’s helpful to decide how many years into the past you want to look back and then add up the totals for these bills. Divide the total by the number of months in your lookback period to get a rough monthly average.

3. Make a plan to “pay” those bills every month. This is the key insight that can cut down on financial surprises. You don’t have to wait until a bill comes due to think about paying it. For those annual or irregular expenses, take your monthly average from the previous steps and set that amount aside each month into savings.

4. Set up a budget with your expected annual bills. It’s not enough to set aside money into savings; you need to know what that money is for. Create a budget with all of your lumpsum or irregular bills and track exactly how much you are saving for each one. This way there are no surprises when the bill comes due. Having a plan for these bills helps you to avoid raiding your savings for some unexpected emergency and leaving yourself high and dry.

5. Pay attention to the timing of your expenses. Be strategic about when bills are due. Some bills give you the option to pay monthly or yearly. Ideally, you would spread your annual expenses throughout the year so that you aren’t getting hit with a bunch of them at once. This takes some planning, but could smooth out the seasonality of your cash flow.

6. Keep your emergency fund separate. It’s important to keep the money you are saving for your annual bills separate from your emergency fund. One strategy is to keep your emergency fund easy to reach and hold the money for annual bills in its own savings account, so it is there when the bill comes due.

7. Check in periodically to make sure you’re on track. It’s not enough to create a plan once and hope that it’s good for the future. The size and timing of your irregular expenses are likely to fluctuate, and your budget should reflect those changes. In fact, you’ll likely see plenty of variance within the year, which is why it’s so important to smooth out those costs by budgeting for them monthly and adjusting your budget accordingly.

If you’re tired of being surprised by large bills popping up, consider keeping a list of your irregular expenses and saving for them each month. You can start tracking those bills already this month, or if you want to be extra clear from the start, review your charges from the past several years. This one-time effort could save you a lot of headaches in the future.