News Tristan on 06 Jun 2008 05:46 pm
How Can I Bring Down My Monthly Outgoings Part 2
Please see part 1 of this article for part 1…obvious really :-)
I got as far as reducing the cost of TV, so I’ll now continue, starting with telephone costs. There seem to be a plethora of suppliers in this area. I don’t think it’s an easy area to compare who has the cheapest offering, because it’s not straightforward anymore.
It used to be that you had BT for your calls and internet, Sky or cable for your TV and that was about it. Now, you can get these services bundled, they all have a package which includes TV, Internet and Calls for £xxx a month. How do you choose which is best for you?
It’s not simply a decision that you can make on price, as there are differences in the packages offered. For instance, Virgin seem to have set their stall out to offer the fastest broadband ever, at the expense of some of the better channels that you can get on Sky.
BT offer TV, Broadband and Free evening and weekend calls, and a backup service so you don’t lose all your important files.
Sky have a bundled package that offers TV, Broadband and Free evening and weekend calls.
There are other providers, who seem to offer different levels of broadband speed. You can do some good comparisons on www.uswitch.com, just click on the TV, Internet, Phone Bundles link.
Whatever package you choose, firstly, make sure you are comparing (as much as is possible) apples with apples, and secondly make sure you’re not going to have to incur any extra expenses on installation, which may erode any cost savings you have made by switching.
Mobile phones are an extra expense each month that most people could go without. It was only really 10 years or so that they became so commonplace, but we all managed without them before, so why is there such a need for them now? Most people spend a fortune on their phone bills each month. My sister in law was telling me that she was spending £60 a month on a pay as you go. That’s clearly a waste of money, she could have saved about £30 a month by having it on a contract.
The best contracts seem to be the ones that offer unlimited text bundles and 100’s of cross network minutes for about £30. I’m pretty sure all the network’s will offer a contract similar to that, just pick the one that will provide you with more than enough minutes for the usage you have. If you’re not a big texter, trade off unlimited or a large amount of texts for a larger number of minutes.
Once you’ve got a good package, the trick to not spending lots of money on your mobile is to stick within the “free” minutes/texts - clearly they’re not free, they’re “pre-paid”, so if you can stick the cost of your contract into your monthly budget as a fixed cost, it makes it much easier to budget for other monthly outgoings if you know that your mobile will be, for example, £20 a month, every month.
So far, I’m pretty sure there is no comparison website for Council Tax bills, that’s because you can’t live in Bristol and pay for rates charged in Nottingham. So as for your council tax bill, there’s no way to reduce the cost of it, unless you happen to be living by yourself and not claiming the 25% reduction that you get for being a sole occupant. There is also a disability reduction scheme, which is available if someone in the household is significantly and permanently disabled. And finally, there is also council tax benefit for low income households, it’s means tested and only available if your household has savings of less than £16,000.
There are a number of different websites that can be used to compare different car insurance providers and policies. What I’ve noticed when discussing this topic with friends and clients is that some people take the attitude that they may as well bend the truth to get the cheapest quote. I find this a bit strange really. Why say your car is parked in the garage overnight to get £50 off the quote and run the risk that if it’s stolen, the insurance company would not pay out as you wouldn’t be able to prove that the car was stolen from your garage? It doesn’t make sense. It may save you a few quid in the short run, but if the car was ever stolen, the price of having insurance that was not willing to pay out would be much greater than the savings made initially. Always check that you have all the details correct, be honest with the insurance company about where you keep the car and compare the market for the cheapest like for like quote.
To save money on food sometimes requires you to swallow your pride. I know it did with me. I used to always shop at Sainsbury’s, and did so because I felt it was a better quality of food and I had something of a brand loyalty toward Sainsbury’s.
I used to pay about £70-£80 a week for my weeekly shop. It’s quite a lot for two adults and two guinea pigs (they don’t eat much). But I kept on seeing the price of a shop getting more and more expensive and coming away with less stuff… So I made a conscious decision to reduce how much I spent on my weekly shop. First thing I did was to start looking at what we were buying and seeing if we could make some adjustments to what we bought.
First savings I found that were really easy to do were things like dishwasher tablets, washing powder and fabric conditioner. We used to buy Finish dishwasher tablets, Fairy washing powder and Lenor fabric conditioner. I now buy it all from the supermarket, and it costs about 1/3 of what it used to cost. Even little things like the salt that goes in your dishwasher and the rinse aid, you can save about £2 by choosing the supermarket’s own brand rather than Finish. It’s not like you can really notice a difference, can you?
The next area I looked at making savings was with things like squash, we used to buy Robinsons squash, we now buy the supermarkets own version and it’s about £1.50 cheaper per bottle, which is a significant saving considering we get through a couple of bottles in a week.
The supermarket’s own brands are nearly always the cheapest in the shop, and in many cases the difference in quality is negligible, so why not save that money? On occasion, when there is a multibuy offer on for the premium brand of a certain product, we will buy it. Most notably is when the supermarket has a 3 for 2 offer on Tropicana fresh orange, otherwise, it’s the supermarket’s own brand. Suffice to say, I now spend about £40-£50 a week on the shopping, which equates to about £100 or so saving over the course of a month.
To save money on petrol, the best thing to do is - stop driving your car - the price of petrol seems to rise on a daily basis. It seems only two weeks ago that I filled up my car at 108.9p a litre, last wekend, I filled it up for 115.9p a litre.
There is a really good website for comparing which filling station has the cheapest petrol in your area, www.petrolprices.com, you can sign up for an account and have them email you over the prices of the cheapest petrol stations in your area, and using Google maps, they even give you a helpful map of where the locations are.
I hope that has been helpful, it’s only really my thoughts on how I’ve approached saving money on monthly outgoings. There are probably more things you could do to save if you wanted to be really nit-picky, you could not watch TV, not use a mobile phone, turn the heating off on the 1st of March, not to be turned back on again until December 1st, however I’ve tried to keep it fairly realistic. I’d welcome any comments/feedback and your ideas for saving money on your monthly bills.
