Cutting your household bills

Save yourself a fortune

Which? Money editor, Martyn Hocking, shows you how you can save money and cut your household expenditure.

Save from your sofa

Between 2003 and 2006, household gas bills almost doubled while electricity bills rose by 58% - making energy bills one of your biggest household spends. 

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to see if you could get a cheaper deal. Our free energy comparison service Switch with Which? should be your first port of call. Indeed the average saving made by consumers using the service between July 2006 and June 2007 was £200.

Pay by direct debit too. Providers tend to reward customers doing this with a quarterly discount of around £5.

If you're already on the best available energy tariff then the next step is to reduce the amount of energy you use. According to The Energy Saving Trust, fuel bills for a semi-detached house can fall by £150 a year if you fit a new boiler. Install a Best Buy and reap the benefits this Winter.

Opting for low-energy light bulbs and making sure you switch the lights off when you leave a room will also save you a packet - Which? testing shows that swapping your old 60w bulb for a £2 low-energy Best Buy could save you around £6 per bulb per year.

Use a water meter

The water meter calculator from the Consumer Council for Water will help you work out whether you’d be better off switching to one. It's estimated that doing so reduces the average person’s water use by around 20%. 

This could translate to a £61 a year saving for a low water-using Bristolian couple living in a three-bedroomed terraced house. 

Don't make a meal of your mortgage

For most of us, our mortgage payment is our biggest monthly outgoing so it’s vital to make sure that you are getting the best deal. Lenders offer a variety of discounted fixed and variable rates for a number of years before shifting customers on to their more expensive standard variable rates. If you’re on your lender’s standard rate and are not tied into a deal, use our mortgage calculator to find a better one.

When we checked prices in December 2007,  we found that someone owing £100,000 on Halifax’s standard variable rate of 7.75% with a monthly payment of £1,200 could save £85 a month by switching to a Stroud & Swindon mortgage fixed at 6.09%. But always remember to compare fees as well as interest rates when picking your new deal.

Speak to the council

Your council tax band depends on your home’s 1991 value, however the valuation process was largely done by estate agents making estimates while driving past houses, and the bands haven’t been revalued since. 

If you think you’re in the wrong band, you can apply to have your home rebanded. Based on average 2006 prices, getting your house rebanded from E to D would save £282 a year.

To make the case, you’ll need to calculate your home’s 1991 value and show that you were put in the wrong band. If you succeed, you’ll pay less in future – and can get a rebate on money you’ve overpaid in the past. However only around 1 in 20 appeals is successful - meaning that you could end up having your band increased and not decreased. 

Buy a bundle

Many telephone and internet providers now offer several services bundled together at a discount price. As a result, you may well find that paying a single fee for your line rental and broadband service can be cheaper than paying for them separately. 

You don't have to stick with BT for your line rental, and if you use the internet you make free landline calls over Skype. Switching from a BT landline and the Best Buy Zen Internet broadband supplier to a TalkTalk line rental/ broadband bundle would save just over £13 a month. Be careful though, there can be hidden costs and restrictions so be clear what you’re getting.

Save as you go

If you don't use your phone that much and aren't sucked in by gimmicks, moving to a cheap pay-as-you-go tariff can shave hundreds off your annual bill.

A Tesco Value or Fresh One-Rate deal will cost you just 15p a minute to make a call. This means you’d have to make over two hours of calls each month on one of these tariffs before you go anywhere near to spending the £20 minimum charged by most monthly contracts. 

Shop around for insurance

Insurance deals change all the time so don't assume last year's value-for-money policy will still be a winner when it comes to renewing it. Indeed many insurers entice customers with a good introductory deal, only to raise premiums after one year. 

Always get alternative quotes from Which? Best Buy insurers before you renew and explore online deals as they can be up to 10% less - this applies across the board from home insurance to pet insurance and car insurance.

Tackle your travel

If you use the train regularly, buying a network railcard (eg. a senior railcard for over-60s) can save you hundreds. For an initial spend of £24 you will get a third off the price of most rail fares. 

Alternatively, if you make the same journey regularly (even just twice a week), you may be able to save by buying a season ticket.

Get into gear

The first five miles of any car journey are by far the most inefficient. Driving short distances (say, to the corner shop or takeaway), turning off the engine, turning it back on again and then driving back is unnecessarily wasteful. Indeed, driving your Best Buy BMW 3 series 320i on a two-mile round trip to the shops costs just under 28p a trip - meaning that if you make this journey twice a week on average, you’d save £29 a year by walking instead.

You should also embrace 'eco driving' to make your motoring more fuel efficient. The trick with this is to ensure you're changing gear before you hit 2,500rpm. Anticipating road conditions and avoiding sharp acceleration and heavy braking will also help. The Energy Saving Trust estimates that a typical driver could save up to £120 a year in petrol or diesel simply by driving more efficiently.

Waste not want not

UK households throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food every year – around a third of what we buy – according to research by the government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP). If we stopped throwing away food that is still edible - half of this amount - each household could save £400 on average each year.

You can cut shopping bills by being less impulsive - a simple shopping list helped one Which? member cut his weekly food spend from £100 to £70 just by planning ahead.

Another way to shave money off your shopping bills is to shop at a cheaper store. A Which? survey in February 2008 saw Aldi and Lidl beat the big four supermarkets for overall customer satisfaction, and when we compared the cost of a typical basket of 18 weekly grocery items, Aldi was £2.20 cheaper than Asda – an annual saving of £114.