Saving money, me...

Fed up of spiralling living costs and with the latest piss take being from British Gas who merrily informed me that my energy bill would be increased by 50% next year, I finally got around to doing what this bloke has been telling me to do for the last twelve months and shop around for better deals.

So I tried a price comparison service for home insurance first as NatWest had just tried to get me to renew my annual policy, £540 for House and contents insurance. Stuck all the details through the online comparison service and it came up with Budget Insurance at £183, bugger me, that's what I call a saving.

I rang Budget because I deal with them for the car insurances too and we sorted it all out on the phone, even got some free hospital insurance thrown in as well, although why I want to insure a hospital is unclear.

So time to do the gas and electric. I have a dual fuel account with British Gas, never changed it because quite frankly I've never been arsed to do so in the past. Just after christmas though I changed a bank account and when I rang BGas to change the monthly direct debit they tried to set it up for £91 a month instead of £46, and that was just for the gas supply.

I questioned their sanity as to how and why I should ever use that much gas in my lifetime and just before I got to the point where I tell them to piss off and do one, they agreed to set the direct debit to £61 a month for the gas "and see how it goes", after all, they pointed out, we have a price increase imminent.

Stuffed the gas and electric consumption figures into the online price comparison service and the first suprise that it came back with was that my current costs were going to rise by 46% this year with BGas but that if I signed a five year fixed price deal with BGas then this years price would "only" increase by 53%, yes thats right, it would cost me more this year to fix the price for five years, now what sort of idiots do they have as customers ? Idiots like me obviously.

The software informed me in an almost smug-like manner that if I switched to London Energy then I would end up paying £80 less than I currently do, thats a saving of almost £800 a year on what I will be paying if I stick with BGas, are you keeping up with me here ?

I've never heard of London Energy but they are owned by the French national energy company EDF, it all means nothing to me but as long as they send enough electricity and gas down the wires and pipes, and don't get the wires and pipes mixed up, and charge me a third less than BGas were going to do, then they'll do for me, I signed up with them.

I was on a roll now, I have an Egg credit card, theres a zero balance on it and I never use it. I also have a NatWest credit card, theres a balance on it left over from last years holiday at 15%apr, deary me. Egg called me one evening last week and I let them waffle on a bit then hung up the phone, but I remembered somethign about an "anniversary deal" where they would offer 0% on balance transfers, logged onto the Egg account and sure enough, theres a 0% deal until august on balance transfers - so the NatWest card now has the zero balance and Egg are making nothing out of me until august.

There must be more stuff I can save on, I'd already swapped the mortgage in January to a better deal and I've cashed in all the endowment policies that were making naff-all on the stock exchange and invested them in my own company and am paying myself 8%pa, its probably illegal but they'll have to spot it first.

*****************************************************************************************

Which reminds me,

About once a month I get a phone call from a stockbroker in Manhattan, or at least thats where he says he's from, and he tries to sell me stock in various american companies despite the fact that every month I tell him that I'm not interested and every month he asks if I'll be adding to my portfolio in the next few months to which I tell him that I haven't got a fekking portfolio and have no intention of investing any money, if I had any money, in any company that I can't touch, feel and see, especially if the person selling me that stock is a complete stranger who freely admits to being at least one ocean width away from my wallet.

And this week I got another call from another broker, this time in London. For no apparent reason I let him waffle on instead of just putting the phone down and it appears that he works for a large and highly regarded investment company who specialise in metal investments using something called "leverage". I hadn't a fekkin clue what "leverage" was so gave him my email address for him to send me a brochure.

His brochure arrived and very impressive it looks, still haven't a clue what "leverage" is apart from the process by which they manage to "lever" huge sums of money out of my bank account for what seems like incredible risk, basically they buy large globs of tin, copper, aluminium, or whatever other metal takes their fancy this month, using your money, and then sometime later they sell it again - and you have to hope that they buy it cheap and sell it expensive and not the other way around.

Call me simple but I think that that just about sums up the whole of the worlds trading exchanges, you give your money to someone else and hope that he is not a crook or an idiot or worse still and idiot crook, and if he isn't then he might make you some profit, after he's taken his own much larger profit of course, and after he's told you that its fekk-all to do with him if he fails to give you any part of your original investment back.

And don't forget of course that the "stuff" that they are apparently buying with your money is never actually seen or handled by them, it may even not exist for all they care, as long as they can convince someone else that it exists somewhere in the world, and convince them to pay more for it than they did, then the jobs done.

I think I'd rather give my money to Tarzans chimpanzee, Cheetah, and ask him to visit various bookmakers in town and place random bets on random horses throughout the course of the day - I bet Cheetah would come home with more money than I sent him out with and better still, his cut would be three bananas.