Whilst
trying to being frugal it pays to keep a constant eye on your bills.
We
made a tremendous saving on electricity last winter by using primarily the wood burner, closely followed by microwaving bean bags to keep warm. We lived in the front room (no hardship as that is where
we spend most of our time anyway). Even allowing for the cost of logs it was cheaper than using the oil fired central heating. I have now found a slightly
cheaper source and we will be stocking up soon. Doing this enabled us to knock quite a bit off our monthly electricity payment plus we still have 1/4 of a tank of oil left - normally unheard of!
We
have now gone on a water meter and reckon that will knock anywhere
between £200 - £250 off our annual bill.
Now
for the crunch. We recently received our telephone bill (paperless to
save more money). They want to put up our monthly direct debit –
again. Here is one area where we feel we have been stung and are
going to sort it out.
Our telephone provider charges you £3.85 per
month extra for paying by direct debit and nothing for paying annually. On the other hand our
electricity company actually gives you a 5% discount for paying by
direct debit!
We
are on a free weekend call plan (which no longer exists apparently)
and unlimited broadband. Well, we only got that when DS. was at home
and wanted to play games online – so that can go.
We
will be phoning them up today and seeing if we can pay off our entire
bill. Then we will stop direct debit payments and change to paying
the bill when it arrives. After that we will hope to change from
unlimited broadband to 40GB a month (should be fine as we can't
stream video/film etc and rarely download music).
Also, this new tariff will enable us to have up to 1 hours worth of free weekend and evening calls. If we can do all of
that we should save a good amount per month and it will be well worth
it.
Once this bill is sorted out, we will have saved as much as we can without swapping companies constantly (which we don't want to do).
Ah, nearly forgot, the RAC renewal came. We have been members for quite a while without needing to call them out. We found the bill outrageous so thanks to Mrs. Moneypenny from Superscrimpers, we challenged them. They said as a gesture of goodwill and for this year only, they will charge us around half the normal amount if we pay up front.
So we did. Come next year if they try to put it back up we will go elsewhere.
Are
you regularly checking your bills to make sure something unexpected
hasn't crept in. Have you changed your usage of things and need to
adjust the payments/contract accordingly?
We're trying hard to reduce our fuel bills. Unfortunately the actual amount of usage went up last winter, so I'm looking at encouraging short showers, (2 teenage girls) draught proofing and reducing the amount of time the central heating is on in winter. I will be looking out for tips!
ReplyDeleteCutting down our central heating really helped but we did have the wood burner. We have just bought our winter oil and doubt much will be used before then. Next purchase will be logs then hopefully, that should be it.
ReplyDelete