Life seems determined to teach me a lesson this year: take a closer look at your bills!
I’m sure that like me, you’ve heard that it’s a good idea to shop around for insurance, energy providers, home loans, pretty much any bill you can think of.
But … life gets busy, the bills come in and although never welcome, they’re not too bad, so you just pay them, and get on with things.
I think the middle aged demographic is probably most at risk of this. Before you know it, two, five, ten or more years have passed since you stopped to take a closer look at your bills and accounts.
The tragedy is that companies take advantage of our complacency, and instead of rewarding loyal customers, hike the prices up! So we don’t even realise that we could actually save a fortune, just by making a couple of phone calls.
I wrote about our frustrations with our bank, a couple of months ago – about the bonus saver account that actually wasn’t – and all because we hadn’t read the fine print on a statement in 2008 …
Some Good News from the Bank
We ended up taking our complaint to the finance and banking ombudsman, even though we didn’t hold out much hope. Little ol’ us against the big nasty bank? Not a chance!
We were pleasantly surprised when the bank actually contacted us and agreed to pay the hundreds of dollars in interest we were owed.
And it would never have happened if we hadn’t examined our accounts more thoroughly, when we were doing our tax returns. That was when we realised the interest we’d been paid was nowhere near what we had expected.
Take a Closer Look at Your Insurance Bills
If you’ve been with the same insurance companies or bill providers for a while, here are a couple of stories that should get you on the phone to them, pronto … determined to stop throwing your money away!
We wanted to cancel our extras health insurance as we just didn’t feel we were getting value for money.
However when we called, the company complimented us on being such good customers for 15 years, and then offered us a better deal. Would you believe: the same cover at LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE we’d been paying?!
It really does pay to take a closer look at your bills!
My question is: Why weren’t we rewarded with cheaper premiums for being long term customers BEFORE? Why do they only pull the rabbit out of the hat just as we are leaving?!
At the beginning of the year, the hubster decided to sort out all our house and car insurances and moved them to one provider.
Guess what – when we tried to cancel the cover on one of our cars – the same thing happened! They offered us a better deal – LESS THAN HALF THE PREMIUM we’d been paying. Disgraceful!
Next Bills to Go Under the Microscope!
And now, it’s time to take a closer look at our gas and electricity bills, to see if we can save money on these too …
The moral of my story?
Even if you have no intention of cancelling policies or switching bill providers – THEY don’t know that. Flick them an email or give them a call saying that you want to cancel, and just watch them offer you a better deal!
When was the last time you took a closer look at your bills?
Linking up with Kylie Purtell for IBOT.
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