Where Does It Go? – UK Money Blog £

According to research carried out for Guardian money, if your household is a high consumer of electricity it could save £300 a year on bills if you switch to Economy 7 electric tariff.

Economy 7 became popular in the 60s and 70s when consumers were encouraged to use a cut price tariff at night to use excess electricity generated by coal and nuclear power stations that have to be kept running at night even when demand is low.

It has fallen out of favour recently, mainly being used by flats with night storage heaters that charge up during off-peak hours – typically from midnight to 7am. This time could be used by appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers or bread makers.

Suplliers maintained that if you use 20% of your energy needs during the off-peak times, you would make a saving. However, TheEnergyShop.com foudn that figure is closer to 40%

It takes habits to change – switching on your washing machine as you go to bed for example, but some households swear by it. Some maintain it also means a lower carbon footprint.

Do your sums before hand though – I had Economy 7 in my old flat for the night storage heaters, but found no significant saving due to the daytime charges being typically higher than normal, to offset the cheaper night rate.

There are various online planners these days, here are a few of them.

The Snowball Calculator I’ve mentioned before, a great way to organise your debts and it really works.

Various Flash graphs to see how your money grows or falls in the future, including pensions.

Quick Salary Calculator to work out your take home pay after taxes and NI

Budget Calculator from the FSA to see how much you are spending. See more of their tools here.

How much was money worth in 1850? Compare prices now and then with this olde £ calculator

A few travel related money saving sites….

Why pay for hotels when some kind soul will let you sleep on the sofa?

See how much money you’ll get in the exchange rate markets with XE.com

Calculate the ethics of going at all, with this carbon footprint calculator.

A few mortgage specific ones now….

Lots of shoddy mortgage calculators online which try and sell you a mortgage when you’re just after information – the Guardian’s mortgage calculator sticks to the facts.

Is it worth buying a house or investing the money instead? This calculator tries to help you decide.

How much is that student loan going to cost you? Try out the Student Loan debt guide.

Savings and investments

A quick way to see how much money you get back out of certain investments is found here.

These investment calculators let you work out you work out how much money you’ll get back in more breakdown detail. You can select monthly, annual, or a single premium.

Tags: budgettips, travel, online, finance, planners, uk

I moved into my new house, and had to go through the ordeal of arranging a phone line with broadband.  Telecommunication companies have to be the worst public services I’ve ever faced – BT, Tiscali and Wanadoo have all raised my blood pressure on several occasions. (Check out some of these BT complaints)

Today I resigned myself to being passed around from call centre to call centre as they tried to sort out my issue – I had been charged £120 more than I expected in my latest phone bill for a very unspecific “one off charge”.  I swear blind I remember the BT engineer when I spoke to him had said I shouldn’t be charged at all for connection.

After explaining this three times to various call centre staff, my exasperation was rewarded with a £60 credit on my bill. The connection issue according to the final TSR had stopped being policy several months ago. Nice for them to tell me; my first warning of connection charge at all was the bill.  When I explained I had been passed around by four call centre staff before finally speaking to him, and “my mate in Truro worked for BT and said I’d get it for free” he gave me the discount to save me lodging a complaint.

Moral?  Always communicate with companies – remember they want your money but the staff are human beings.  I tried to not be a prick when talking to the call centre staff, and just firmly and calmly pointed out my grievances each time I spoke with a member of staff, lodging complaints as soon as my expected level of service wasn’t reached. 

Tags: BT, complaints, discount, budget tips

Last month I spoke of going onto pay-as-you-go on my mobile to try and cut expenses, they offered me an £18 a month contract which despite hard work from the TSR at the call centre I said no to. Pleads included “This offer is only going until next week!”

Well today I was phoned up by another salesman from 3 (My mobile phone provider) asking for me – nowadays I always answer “Is this Robert Brown?” with “Who’s speaking?”, and I was about to launch into a murder scene interrogation…..

…but as I was lining it up with grunts and obscure mutterings (I doubt I could of pulled it off with the Tom Mabe style) the guy at 3 offered me £10 a month for life for 500 minutes anytime/any network. 

This works out over £300 a year less than what I was paying for up till this month, with 100 minutes more text/calls.

Just goes to show how desperate companies are to fix you into a contract – no doubt the iPhone is taking away a lot of business so they get me locked in for another 18 months, hell they even threw in a new phone (Nokia 6500 Slide), which I read a few reviews of and it breaks a lot, but I could always sell it on ebay.  I’m pretty happy today since I would have probably used about £10 a month in top-ups.

Anyway, a good lesson for me: never accept the first thing they offer you.  Just by saying “no” I’ve saved probably £100 a year.

Carrying on with budgeting help, I came across this method named “Snowballing” which offers psychological methods to pay off debts.  If you have several debts, such as loans, credit cards and overdrafts you can use this method by paying the minimum fees on each, then using any remaining cash to tackle them one debt at a time.  You can choose to tackle the debt with the lowest balance (psychologically nice) or highest interest (mathematically best)

There is a Snowball Calculator around that can help you work out how much to save I think I’ll check it out.

Tags: budgeting, calculator, tools