September is the month when we should think seriously about the cost of heating and lighting our homes as nights draw in and the days are cooler. There is yet another strong prompt in the form of a 12% increase in energy bills for 11 million households from October 1. The price cap on standard variable tariffs is going up to an average £1,277 from October 1. Ofgem allows this increase because the energy companies have persuaded the regulator that wholesale prices have risen massively, even though many of the companies we pay for our gas and electricity buy their […]
Category: Energy
Prices are rising fast but official index misleads
Inflation is rising fast, but the Government and the supermarkets would have us believe that prices are not soaring above earnings. Experts tell us we are mistaken when we think our weekly shop is more expensive. Today we are told that prices in the newly configured inflation basket have increased by 2.3% year on year. That is according to the official consumer price index invented a few years ago and according to the new CPIH index that includes the economists’ take on the cost of owning a home unveiled today was also exactly the same as the CPI, which does […]
The poor and old will still pay too much
The poor, the old and the vulnerable should beware. Good intentions could cost them dearly. The government through the energy regulator is capping the price of gas and electricity paid for through prepayment meters. They also want to solve the housing problem by “persuading” the elderly to leave their family homes and move to special retirement properties or warden-assisted flats. Costs are more than better off customers pay First of all Ofgem reckons that the 4million households with prepayment meters should save around £80 a year from April . This long awaited measure recommended by the Competition and Markets Authority […]
Energy bills rise 28%
Just as the cold weather is arriving the cost of my household energy bills are increasing by a whopping 28% and there is more to come. I am not alone. Anyone who has been on a fixed price tariff that is coming to an end will find their costs are increasing similarly. And the companies are getting away with it without any adverse publicity because they are not putting up their standard tariffs yet. Their fixed rate tariffs are under the radar, although they have been used by the energy companies to demonstrate that they are not making much profit […]
Don’t be fooled by energy companies
Don’t be fooled by the apparent generosity of the energy companies that have frozen the price of gas and electricity until at least the end of the winter. Their marketing people are earning their money with their full page advertisements published on the coldest days so far of this winter telling us that they are not putting prices up. What the ads did not tell us is that the companies bought their gas electricity in the wholesale markets when prices were much cheaper. And they are only freezing their already very expensive standard variable rates. They are not however freezing […]
Energy bills unfair to all
The chancellor announced in his Autumn Statement that the domestic energy bills are to be looked in to by the Government to make sure they are fair to all. It cannot come a day too soon….and no doubt it will not be soon at all. The company’s tell us that they are making minuscule profits on our energy bills because they have historically used the cheapest tariffs for their calculations. They could then say their profits were only 4% on a typical customer. But if they used the standard variable rate it would be much higher. And all this was […]
The poor need help to get better deals
I met the personification of the spirit of Money Fight Club when I was a fellow panelist at the Money Advice Service’s Financial Capability Week at the QEII centre this week. Vanessa Simao is a trainee with the Young Women’s Trust in London and an outreacher in Barking and Dagenham so she knows that to help clients in her work she has to share her own experiences as a single parent. She knows what it is like to take a loan to provide food or heating and then to get behind and agree to consolidate the loans into one payment […]
Why energy companies leave me cold
Lit the stove last night. Winter is coming fast. So what do the energy companies do? They set us up to fail when we try to get the best deal on our gas and electricity tariffs over the winter months. Until April energy companies could not exclude existing customers from cheap new deals. Ofgem had ruled in 2014 that new tariffs should be offered to everyone. Since then they have been working on new chart-topping tariffs that will not be available for all. From November the regulator will no longer make sure that the market is fair. If the companies […]
Being human
Behavioural economics – no, don’t yawn yet While the rest of us get on with paying the bills and going to work, economists are slugging it out in grand intellectual style. What are they arguing about? Well, little old us, of course. At the centre of the fisticuffs is a big debate about whether we can be totally logical when it comes to money – weigh up the facts at hand and make coolly rationale decisions – or whether we are bound by our emotions and the merry dance they lead us across our personal financial landscape. Economic nudging This […]
Blue Monday – good news about the most financially depressing day of the year
Blue Monday is coming up and so named because December’s pay cheque is often paid a day or two earlier and then January is a five week month, with many of us not seeing another pay cheque reach our bank account for another couple of weeks. When we worked out which day was Blue Monday we felt it fell on January 26. But the growing concensus is that it will actually fall on Monday, January 19. Sheeesh! You wouldn’t think people would be so keen to get there sooner, would yah? Why so blue, Monday? Credit card bills have landed […]