The first of the month is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it brings a paycheck, but, on the other, it means bills are due. At my apartment here in Vladimir, the bills start showing up in our little mailbox in the stairwell after the fifteenth of the month, and they need to be paid before about the tenth of the next month. Russia is mostly a cash economy, and I have never seen bank checks used, so most people pay their bills in cash at post offices or at utility offices (I think online paying is becoming more common). Fortunately, our landlady takes care of the actual paying of the bills, freeing us from having to stand in lines of grumpy old women at the post office.

We get bills for water (hot and cold--there are different meters for those), gas (no meter), electricity (I think our meter is broken), heating (we have no control over that one), and building and grounds maintenance (given the condition of our building, I'm not exactly sure what we are paying for). The biggest bill is for heating, which is calculated by the area of the apartment. Our 54-square-meter apartment costs 1,694 rubles a month to heat (about $50). Building maintenance is the next-biggest item, at around $40, and then it's hot water and electricity at about $10 each. The gas, which we only use for the stove, is figured not by usage but by the number of people registered to the apartment--in our case, that's four (I guess those four people are our landlady and her family). The price for gas? Fifty two rubles per person (ya that's $1.62). I'd say I can afford that. 

My dad always spreads out all the bills and paperwork on the kitchen table, pours himself a cup of coffee (or a few), and gets down to paying bills every month. This is my homage to him (alas, that is tea with lemon--I was doing this around midnight last night):