Life Skills: Finance - Reducing your costs

A big part of managing you finances is about being clever with what you spend. Below are some tips and tricks to help you prioritise. One way is to sort your bills from priority and non-priority bills, for more on how to do that check out our guide here. Knowing your bills is half the battle, the other is keeping them within manageable amounts. 

How do you make your bills cheaper or easier to manage? 

Energy providers and meters
Everyone has heard that you can compare energy providers and that monthly tariff deals can save you hundreds of pounds each year, but what if you are on a prepaid meter more commonly known as a top-up meter? These types of meters are well known to cost more for the same amount of energy compared to a monthly tariff, but many people often feel like there is nothing they can do if they get a home with a pre-payment meter. Well here's a funny thing according to Citizen's Advice you can legally change your meter even if you are in a rented accommodation. For more information and any potential conditions check out more from Citizen's Advice here

If you are looking for advice around changing your meter here check out this information from Home Energy Scotland.

If you are happy with your meter then it's just a simple case of comparing the tariff, and there are many different comparison websites to help you. 

General tips to lower your bills

• Comparison websites: most comparison websites generate either a quote or tell you how much you will be paying monthly for a variety of bills you want to compare everything from, your gas and electric bill, home/car insurance, life insurance, pet insurance, broadband, and telephone, store cards. This can be useful if you think you might be paying too much, and there are often good joining offers or attached benefits for changing. Be careful and read all conditions if you do switch any suppliers. Which? has a good guide to using comparison website here
• Credit cards and loan payments: for comparing credit cards and loans, it can be easier to use a credit score app to compare offers as it sorts through what you are eligible for without performing a credit check. For more information please refer to our page on credit scores.
• Online subscriptions: when it comes to online subscriptions it can be easy to accumulate and forget about the occassional payments. If you are struggling to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of or if you are thinking of canceling everything please check out our tool on our bill organisation page.
• Alternative ways of buying household items: some people use hire to buy schemes, while these are a way to be able to buy some household goods in a more manageable way they often come with a large interest rate also known as an APR% and you may find yourself paying a lot more than the item was worth so it is always a good idea to see if you can get a second-hand item. Understand more about interest here. 

Other ways to reduce costs
There is a nearly infinite amount of ways to try to reduce costs so here are some ideas:

• Bulk buying – if you've tried bulk buying in the past you might have run into some problems, for example it being more expensive up front or bulk items requiring space. A simple solution to this would be to share a bulk buy with either family or friends, that way it's still a bit cheaper and doesn’t take up too much space.
• Weekly food plan – food planning can sound restrictive at first but you may be surprised that for a normal week of shopping you might have a lot of the staple ingredients in the house already. Meal planning is a great way of injecting some flexibility. For instance, say you planned on chicken / vegan curry for Tuesday but you get to Tuesday morning and decide you don’t want curry you want to try something new, well as long as you have bought in staple ingredients we will be producing a page on staple ingredients at a later date. You can change the plan up with minimal effort and then it doesn’t feel so restrictive.
• Reducing waste - another way to reduce costs is by having less food waste, for instance when you are making a meal do you do leftovers? Or maybe throw away offcuts of food? Did you know you could use offcuts to make a multitude of different meals from stocks, snacks, or even in some cases you didn’t even need to have offcuts? Well for ideas on how to reduce food waste and in doing so reduce food costss check out our food waste section here 

Finaly these are just some ideas for ways to start reducing your costs but there are hundreds of dedicated websites to saving students money and reducing their costs. so here are a few pages that we have found with some great ideas on how to start cutting down your costs:

• Student living costs
• Money Saving Expert tips for students
• Money Advice Service - how to minimise costs of studying
• If you are looking at switching bills - check out Uswitch

Financial Services:

Money Advice Service

National Debtline

Citizens Advice Service

StepChange Debt Charity