Energy bills - the increases.

[Workingman]

The pre-pay card I have is free - no charges except for ATM withdrawals, and I never use it for that.

Agree about the DD thing and the amount of credit people build up over the summer, many hundreds of £s. One million customers with £200 in credit is a tidy sum, hence my tactic. Water is on my card as well.

It might take an hour or so to set these things up but once they are done they are done. Your weekly / fortnightly / monthly amounts are always the same so it makes it easy to budget. The balance on the card goes up and down as bills get paid so the bills always get paid.

[Suff]

Yes more research on the pre pay card helps. I have a virtual one. The benefit with that is you can, quite literally, create a single use card and ditch it then create a new one. I don't use it much, but it is useful.

Now you have virtual prepaid debit cards. Mine is a virtual credit card.

Quite a lot of info here.

[TheOstrich]

EonNext (as they now call it) do give you the ability to change your monthly direct debit through their website whenever you want. So I have stepped up our monthly electricity DD to £45 a month now, which should be the maximum we will be charged for a "winter" bill. Our electricity account with them is more or less neutral.

I can do the same with the gas, but at the moment I have a hefty credit balance with them after overpaying through the summer months. I could reduce the monthly DD, but I've left it at £52 because you never know how hard the winter's going to be. It seems to be running at around £65 a month at the moment, so once we've got beyond March, I should have scope to reduce the monthly payment massively as our summer gas consumption is virtually nil.

I do wonder about some of these BBC news reports though. Tonight they highlighted a special needs guy living on his own but he has a young relative staying with him a few days a week. His combined gas and electric bill was £1,980 per annum and the complaint was he couldn't get a better deal anywhere else. OK, but £1980 a year - seriously? For just 2 folk in a flat? Is that estimate for real, or are the energy companies hugely overquoting. Any which way, I'd love to analyse his usage ....

[Workingman]

I do wonder about some of these BBC news reports though. Tonight they highlighted a special needs guy living on his own but he has a young relative staying with him a few days a week. His combined gas and electric bill was £1,980 per annum and the complaint was he couldn't get a better deal anywhere else. OK, but £1980 a year - seriously? For just 2 folk in a flat? Is that estimate for real, or are the energy companies hugely overquoting. Any which way, I'd love to analyse his usage ....

This is what the Rowntree and Resolution foundations have been doing, picking out a worst case and making it out to be the norm.

What surprises me, esp regarding what Suff and I have been saying, is that none of these things are being promoted. Go to the comparison sites for the "best deals" and all you get are comparisons of the ones being promoted by the suppliers and they are very much in the favour of the supplier. It's as if they get a payment for every one they get to rope in and change....

There are lots of ways of managing energy bills if you are a bit canny. You do not have to wear three layers of thermals and have seven blankets on the bed.