The Christmas feasting is over and we've all but lost the cricket test match so it's a good time to get back to real life and start organising. In the past week Hanno has put in some time going through our ongoing insurance bills. A bit of research on the internet and a couple of phone calls and he's cut $164 from the home and contents and $124 from the car insurance. It can be a boring task but if someone asked you if you would like to earn $288 in 30 minutes, you'd jump at the chance.
The week before Christmas, Hanno transferred our electricity account to Alinta and now we get a 28% discount on every bill that is paid on time and 54 cents per kilowatt-hour, an increase of 10 cents, on our solar feed-in tariff. A few months ago I renegotiated our internet and phones and now we pay $50 less per month but get more data and services. That took me about 15 minutes work on the phone. This is easy budgeting.
By taking an hour or so to go through your accounts and contacting your service providers and their competition, you can negotiate decreased payments or, at the very least, the same payment but much better service. If you don't do this you'll pay increasing bills every year so it's worth the time it takes and now is the perfect time to do it.