The text arrived at 7.12am on Friday 9 January, while I was still in bed. Matt's phone contract had ended, it said, and here, helpfully, was a list of shiny new handsets he could have for a few pounds more a month. He read it out in his teacher voice and then said, "So it's paid off, and it still says £27."
That evening I did what I always do and opened a spreadsheet. I went down the January statements for the joint account and our own accounts with a highlighter, picking out every payment that repeated each month and wasn't the mortgage, council tax, energy or water. There were nineteen. Most were fine. Six or seven were worth a proper look.
Phones
Matt's contract was £27 a month and mine was £18, and mine had run out in November. I'd been paying £18 for two months for a handset that was already ours, which is the part that still annoys me. Neither provider had lowered the price on its own, and nobody had written to say we could.
We both moved to SIM-only deals on Saturday 17 January: Matt at £10 a month and me at £8. We kept our handsets and our numbers. Ofcom has a free text-to-switch service that moves your number and cancels the old contract for you, and I used it, but read Ofcom's own page rather than my version. The new SIMs arrived in a letter on Tuesday 20 January, and the swap took about four minutes, most of which was spent finding the paperclip.
Streaming
We had two streaming services. One had been signed up to for a single series back in October and had been quietly costing £10.99 a month ever since. Nobody had watched it since the finale. That one went on Sunday 18 January, with a button that was much easier to find than the sign-up one.
The other we use, mostly for the football and the odd weekend film, so we moved it to the cheaper plan with adverts at £5.99. The adverts are fine. Matt says he now has a list of things he doesn't want to buy.
The licence
The TV licence is the one subscription we haven't cut, and we won't. We watch live TV, the news and the football, and you need a licence for that. It came up for renewal on Tuesday 17 February and went from £169.50 to £174.50, up £5. It comes to £14.54 a month, so it's one of those bills that's smaller than it feels. If you're not sure whether you need one, TV Licensing's own pages are the place to check.
What it adds up to
- Matt's phone: £27 down to £10, saving £17 a month.
- My phone: £18 down to £8, saving £10.
- The cancelled streaming service: £10.99.
- The other service on the adverts plan: £5.99 now.
The first three come to £37.99, so call it £38 a month, or £455.88 across a year. Over a year that's roughly half of one mortgage payment. The fourth line is not in the total, and that is my mistake: I changed the plan without screenshotting the old price, and the price had crept up in the autumn, so I can't say with a straight face what the saving was. If I did it again I'd photograph the page before touching anything.
What stayed: broadband, which is on contract, Pickle's insurance at £11.40, and a £1.99 photo storage plan that holds eight years of pictures and which I look at every month and keep. The question I asked of each line was whether we'd notice if it stopped on Monday. For four of them the answer was no. For the licence the answer was a stern letter.
