Actively working to keep the cost of your monthly bills down is one of the best ways to save money and avoid debt. Paying a little more than you need to for things like your broadband, electricity, insurance, rent and other unavoidable expenses soon mounts up. Before you know it, you do not have enough money to put aside as savings. Fortunately, keeping these monthly expenses as low as possible is not that difficult, or time-consuming.
Shop around to find the cheapest services and utilities
If you want to keep spending to a minimum with cheap broadband, insurance, fuel and electricity all you need to do is to go online and use a price comparison website. The owners of these sites maintain a database of what each provider has to offer, along with how much their service, policy, or product costs.
Set reminders of when contracts are due to renew
All you need to do is to take time to look and compare what is on offer before you renew your contracts. Ideally, about 5 weeks before you are due to renew your broadband, insurance policies, gas, or electricity contract you want to be out there finding out what is available. Setting up reminders in your diary is an easy way to make sure that you do this.
Consider your options to make informed decisions
Doing it that early gives you time to sit down, do the research and digest all of the information. The last thing you want to do is to make a snap decision. Often time-pressured decisions are the ones that lead to your wasting money or ending up with a sub-standard service or product.
Ask for a discount
Once you understand what is available and what the costs are, you can reduce the price further, by asking for a discount. It is surprising how many firms are prepared to do that to keep a customer or attract a new one.
Don´t be afraid of negotiating with big businesses. Having done the research, you now know as much as they do about how much the service or utility they are providing costs. Negotiating is a skill, which you can easily learn and excel at. You can find out how to successfully negotiate utility and services discounts by reading this.
Check out what other customers say
At some stage in this process, it is a good idea to find out what others are saying about the service that the firm you are thinking of signing up with. After all, there is no point in getting a cheap deal if the service you receive is bad.
Review sites are usually a good source of information. But you need to be on the lookout for fake reviews. This article will help you to easily spot them. Enabling you to recognise those companies that genuinely do offer good value for money.
Read the contract before you sign
Before you sign up, double-check the level of service or coverage that you will be getting. For example, if you are signing up for superfast broadband make sure that it is not going to be slowed down at times (throttled) or has a data cap. If these things do exist in the contract you will want to be sure that the thresholds are high enough for you to still be able to do what you want, when you want.
This is a tedious job, but it need not be as time-consuming as you think. This article explains how to quickly read any set of terms and conditions, while still gleaning the information you need.
Doing this is particularly important if you have negotiated an additional discount. You want to be sure that you are not being sold a reduced service. Most firms are pretty honest. But a few will pretend they are giving you a discount, when, in fact, they are selling you a cheaper product.
Reward yourself for your hard work
Working to save money takes quite a bit of effort and sometimes we can forget why we are doing it. Giving yourself a little reward for a job well done helps you to remember why. You could for example take a small percentage of the money you have saved by shopping around, put it aside and use it to treat yourself to a nice meal out or a day trip.
There is no doubt that shopping around to get the best deal on your utilities, insurance policies and other services you cannot live without is a good idea. For any household, those bills represent a significant percentage of their outgoings. So, targeting them brings the biggest big rewards.
