How I am fighting inflation

Regular readers of my blog will be used to me complaining about inflationary increases to my regular expenditure whether it be utility bills, cost of petrol or the rising price of food. I devised a tight budget at the start of the year based on my spending during the previous year so I need to find cost savings equivalent to any price rises (i.e. inflation). So what have I done so far?

Energy Bills

Firstly I checked whether I was with the cheapest electricity provider  on the energyhelpline.com website (where you can also compare gas providers if you have one). I had to enter details of which provider I was with, which of their tariffs I was signed up for and how much my current annual bills were before it instantly searched the market to find me the cheapest deal. It turned out that I was with the cheapest provider but not on their cheapest tariff, so all it took was a quick 5 minute call to switch my tariff. The savings from switching tariff are probably not going to be enough to completely offset the rising power prices this year, so I have also reduced the amount of time my heating is on and turned the thermostat down a little bit to cut my bills further. Hopefully this will be enough to keep my electricity bills at the same level as last year.

Telephone & Broadband

BT recently announced that from the 1st April they are changing their call tariffs, with ‘change’ being the word they opted for instead of ‘increase’ in their press releases. There is going to be a massive 1900% increase in the price of evening calls if you are on the cheapest tariff, so I am going to have to make sure I use my free minutes on my mobile rather than pay those higher call charges. They are also putting up the price of my line rental by 75p a month, but as I wrote here by opting to switch to paperless billing I will actually be reducing my total phone bill by £5.50 per year.

Next up was to check whether I could reduce the cost of my broadband by searching for cheaper providers on thinkbroadband.com.  There were plenty of options that looked like they would save me a lot of money, upto £120 per year in some cases. But I am what they term a ‘heavy user’, which apparently has nothing to do with my weight but rather the amount I use my broadband connection. This meant that many of the cheaper deals would not be suitable for me as my usage would either be restricted or in some cases I would simply be charged far more for the additional usage over their restriction limits. As I am not willing to reduce my PS3 or TV downloads, and my work just wont get done without an internet connection my choice of cheaper providers is limited to just one provider. They were then ruled out on the basis of having terrible reviews. So for now I am sticking with my current broadband provider who has not yet announced any price increases.

Council Tax & TV Licence

My council tax will be going up by £51.67 per year (a 4.7% rise) from April and the price of a TV licence is also rising by £4 (a 3% increase). I have grouped these two together as unfortunately there is no option of shopping around to find the cheapest tax, so the only alternative is not to pay (which is against the law so not really an option). Following the advice from Martin Lewis on MoneySavingExpert.com I checked my council tax band against my neighbours and found that we are all the same band so no chance of getting that reduced. Beyond that there is nothing more I can do.

Food

I believe that food shopping is the front line in the battle against inflation this year. Last year I spent £2,273 on food and with the rate of annual food product inflation at 8.4% I can expect this to rise by £182 this year (Source: Office for National Statistics). The other costs that I have written about so far are largely outside of my control but each week I choose what food items to purchase so this is an area where I can fight inflation every week.

Resisting the urge to travel by tank in future to the supermarket my weapon of choice has been mysupermarket.co.uk. As I wrote in this post this comparison site allows me to save money on my regular online food shop by selecting the cheapest supermarket based on my basket of goods. It also ensures I don’t miss out on any special offers and that I never pay more than I have to.  

I have also managed to avoid having to pay a single delivery charge this year by always searching tescovouchercodes.blogspot.com and hotdealsuk.com to find a money off voucher at least equivalent to the delivery charge.

The final assault on the cost of food shopping is going to be the emptying of my freezer over the next couple of weeks. Having sorted through everything in the freezer there is approximately 4 weeks worth of food in there which is worth about £176 (based on my average food spend of £44 per week last year). As I wrote in this recent post reducing the level of food inventory that I hold will free up an estimated £100 of cash. Also it will allow me to switch the fridge/freezer off for 4 weeks whilst I am not at home saving me a further £9.80 on my electricity bill (based on 3 units per day, approx 35p per day at current rates).