Effective Hamiltonians are usually constructed by using canonical transformations or projection techniques. In contrast to this, we present a method for systems with arbitrary Hilbert space based on the introduction of cumulants. Cumulants guarantee size consistency, a property that is not always evident in other treatments. As a non-trivial example of use the derived method is applied to the strong-coupling limit of the half-filled Hubbard model on a general lattice in arbitrary spatial dimension for which the fourth-order expansion in t/U of the effective Hamiltonian is derived.