Most people will read this and think, well duh, I do that all the time.  But others of you, like me, will have been putting off negotiating or cancelling contracts for ages.  We weren’t putting it off because we were afraid of calling, rather it was on our list of things to do and we kept not doing it. We have no excuse, we should have done these two things ages ago!

It’s one of those things you do and realise you could have been saving LOADS of money for ages, so why didn’t we do it sooner?  Life.  Busy.  Kids.  Running a business.  It just always got put on the back burner or mentioned and then forgotten about.  It’s silly really as we have just been wasting our hard earned money for no good reason.

When we took out Virgin almost four years ago I’m sure our payments were like £25 a month.  Maybe not that low, but they felt that low.  Maybe they were.  We have the broadband, TV and phone package.  We only really need the broadband.  We don’t have a house phone and we rarely watch live TV.

Every year, though it feels like every few months, they put our bill up.  It had gone up to £50 a month!  For TV we don’t watch and a phoneline we don’t have.   They do provide the best broadband speeds though and we’d had a nightmare with Sky previously, so we weren’t keen to change provider, but wanted a better deal.

We had NEVER rang up to negotiate a discount.  I then found out another blogger was paying £8 less a month for the same package as us!

So we rang up, finally, and within all of two minutes our bill had been reduced to £36 a month for 18 months.  Even their representative was like ‘crikey, you haven’t had a discount since 2015, let me see what I can do’.

So that’s £168 saved a year on our Virgin broadband (and TV/phone package).

After hanging up we asked ourselves what we really use our TV for and if we really needed to be paying £147 for a TV licence we barely use.  We record a couple of things off the TV, but realised we could quite happily live without these, especially for the cost.  We have already signed up to Netflix last year and are still very happy working our way through their programmes.  We just don’t need to be paying £147 per year for watching one or two TV shows a week that we can live without.

So we signed into our account online, filled out the cancellation forms and voila.  Well, we had to pop them in the post, but within 5 minutes or so we had saved ourselves another £147 per year.  Plus we’ll get a 6 month refund as we’d paid for our TV licence in advance.

In around 5 minutes we had saved ourselves £315 over the next 12 months.

Perfect.

Unless you are an avid TV fan, then see if you really need it.  You only need a licence if you watch or record live TV or use the BBC catch up services like BBC iPlayer.  If not, you could save some money every year.

And if you are sick of getting increased bills for your broadband?  Call them up and negotiate.  We didn’t even have to argue and ended up saving more than we thought we could.

Next are our energy bills which I’m ashamed to admit we have never ever compared!  I’ll be blogging about those if we find a great deal.