#changeyourbills and Start Saving Money

Contact Numbers UK have asked me to see if I can save my bills in their #changeyourbills challenge. As you will know, if you’re a regular reader, I’m always looking for ways to save money and having already made some big savings this year on our bills. So, I was curious if I could make any further savings.

Firstly, I took some time to take a look our monthly outgoings. I had already made some great savings on our utility bills and was pretty happy with the amount I have been paying since I re-negotiated with my providers. Instead, I decided to focus on our internet, phone and mobile providers as these had been on my hit list for a while.

For our internet and phone we were previously paying nearly £65 with BT. This did include BT sport as well. In all honesty, I did not realise we paid that much for this service and whilst we rely heavily on the internet, I was sure that this was way too expensive. So I began to shop around. I had heard good things about Sky’s internet service and as we’re already a customer with them, I decided to drop them a call. We managed to get line rental and internet for a new monthly price of £27. That’s a saving of £38. We have dropped the BT Sport, but we weren’t getting that much use out of it to justify paying extra for it anyway.

Next, I moved onto looking at my mobile phone contract. At the time my phone wasn’t due for an upgrade for 28 days, but my phone had annoyingly broke! So I decided to give my provider a call and see if I could do anything early before my contract was up for an upgrade. I was initially told that it would cost me £80 to upgrade early, but having no phone for the rest of the month wasn’t an option so I reluctantly agreed. I was then put through to their upgrade team at EE and got chatting to a lovely lady (who’s name I can’t remember, unfortunately). I told her my needs for a phone and that I was looking at the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Now, my monthly bill would have gone down tremendously if I had gone for an alternative phone – but I need my phone for blogging, social media work and was really taken by the camera of the S7 Edge. I’m a sucker for gadgets. Having said that I did manage to save money. Because I had got chatting to this lady, she waived my £80 upgrade fee, she also boasted my data allowance (to 10GB per month) for a one-off £10 fee. My monthly repayments have also dropped by £5, which I know isn’t loads but I’m certainly getting more for my money so I can’t complain.

See THIS post for more details.

I have managed to save myself £42 per month on top of the £166 per month savings I made during the spring, which means I’m now saving £208 per month, that’s £2,504 per year! Make sure you take a look at my post “How I managed to save 2k per year on my bills” for more information.

Have you made any big savings this year? What would your top tips be?