How I have cut our household expenses
Over recent months, if not years, it’s no secret that we have all been facing various increases in our bills from the weekly grocery shop up to those hefty mortgage payments.
As much as we would all love to cut our costs as much as possible, sometimes it just might not be possible. That is what we have been told, and what I often believed so I made it my mission to recently look at the household expenses that have slowly climbed upwards recently.
This was the list of costs that I wanted to cut, and my initial notes:
Rent - cannot reduce as in line with market value
Council tax - cashback?
Energy - switch suppliers?
Water - cashback?
Groceries - cashback / rewards points?
Subscriptions - cut what we don’t use + cashback?
So I took these initial scribbles and got to work, here’s how I got on:
Current Account Juggling
I had a Santader 123 Lite account from taking advantage of a switching offer last year that I had been using for various things, but realised I wasn’t using it to its full potential as cashback is available on a large variety of costs.
As such, I looked at which direct debits were being taken from our NatWest Reward account and decided to transfer some to Santander to reap the cashback rewards, the amounts I was able to move will only provide small amounts of savings each month but it all adds up!
I moved our council tax and broadband direct debits to net 1% cashback on these, 2% on our energy payments, and a whopping 3% back on our water payments. This account does carry a £2 monthly fee, but even after this it should net me £3.50 profit per month just for moving some items around.
I also made sure that I left enough direct debits in the NatWest account so that we received the £5 monthly bonus in there, which net of their £2 fee is £3 per month profit, meaning that those two banks are paying us £78 per year just to pay our recurring bills!
Switching Energy Suppliers
We moved house back in the Summer and were lumped with Eon Next which combined with a different set-up of this house resulted in a ~£50 monthly saving on our energy costs immediately, but after crunching the numbers I realised that we would be able to get our costs even lower if we tried.
With Eon Next we were paying ~£105 per month on average, and when I popped our figures into Octopus Energy* I noticed that we could get the same deal for just ~£95 per month on their Flex plan which was an immediate £10 saving without looking further.
However, once you have signed up you are able to join the Octopus Tracker plan which cut the costs even further again. Now with the heating on (Winter is officially here!) it’s looking like we will be spending no more than £75 per month based on current usage, which would represent £300+ in annual savings just for moving to Octopus.
Of course, I went another step further and used a referral link which bagged us another £50 in free credit when switching to Octopus Energy - if you fancy switching to them, check out their rates and feel free to use my Octopus Energy referral link here* to get a free £50 credit - thank you in advance!
Grocery Cashback
I used to be a lot hotter on making sure that we were earning as much in cashback as possible on our grocery spending, but I noticed that I had slipped lately and not been doing as much as I possibly could have been.
When it comes to groceries, everyone tends to shop somewhere differently and until recently we had been shopping at Aldi but have had a number of issues with the quality of the meat that have turned us away from doing our full shop there recently.
Instead, we have started doing our shopping as a mix between M&S and Asda for two reasons.
Using JamDoughnut you can buy gift cards for most major supermarkets and receive cashback on these purchases at some pretty good rates (Asda currently 3.25% and M&S currently 5.5%) which you can get further cashback on if you exchange for another voucher in the app.
So we have started ensuring that we are taking advantage of these great cashback deals as the rates are really valuable and make prices even more competitive when factored in.
The inclusion of the ASDA spin to win games has also resulted in some brilliant cashback earned on every spend which makes our money go further.
If you haven’t heard of JamDoughnut, I’d highly recommend having a look as it’s a great way to save on your spending, from groceries to meals out, there are LOTS of different brands on there you can get cashback through!